💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › murray-bookchin-thoughts-on-libertarian-municipalism.gm… captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:36:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Thoughts on Libertarian Municipalism Author: Murray Bookchin Date: January 2000 Language: en Topics: libertarian municipalism, Dual Power Source: http://social-ecology.org/wp/1999/08/thoughts-on-libertarian-municipalism/
Age, chronic illnesses, and the summer heat oblige me to remain at
home—hence I am very sorry that I cannot participate in your conference
on libertarian municipalism. I would like, however—thanks to Janet
Biehl, who will read these remarks—to welcome you to Vermont and to wish
you well during the course of your discussions over the next three days.
Some issues have recently arisen in discussions of libertarian
municipalism, and I would like to offer my views on them. One of the
most important involves the distinction that should be drawn between
libertarian municipalism and communitarianism, a distinction that is
often lost in discussions of politics.
By communitarianism, I refer to movements and ideologies that seek to
transform society by creating so-called alternative economic and living
situations such as food cooperatives, health centers, schools, printing
workshops, community centers, neighborhood farms, “squats,”
unconventional lifestyles, and the like. Allowing for the works of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the notable spokespersons of communitarianism
have been Martin Buber, Harry Boyte, and Colin Ward, among many others.
The word communitarian is often interchangeable with the word
cooperative, a form of production and exchange that is attractive
because the work is not only amiably collective but worker-controlled or
worker-managed.
At most, communitarianism seeks to gently edge social development away
from privately owned enterprises—banks, corporations, supermarkets,
factories, and industrial systems of agriculture—and the lifeways to
which they give rise, into collectively owned enterprises and values. It
does not seek to create a power center that will overthrow capitalism;
it seeks rather to outbid it, outprice it, or outlast it, often by
presenting a moral obstacle to the greed and evil that many find in a
bourgeois economy. It is not a politics but a practice, whose
constituency is often a relatively small group of people who choose to
buy from or work in a particular cooperative enterprise.
Citing Proudhon as one of the fathers of communitarianism dates the
inception of this ideology and practice back about 150 years, to an age
when most workers were craftspersons and most food cultivators were
peasants. During the intervening years, many cooperatives have been
formed with the most far-reaching hopes and idealistic intentions—only
to fail, stagnate, or turn into profit-oriented enterprises. In order to
survive in the capitalist marketplace and withstand the competition of
larger, more predatory, profit-oriented enterprises, they have normally
been obliged to adapt to it.
Where cooperatives have been able to maintain themselves against
capitalist competition, they tend to become introverted, basically
centered on their internal problems and collective interests; and to the
extent that they link together, they do so in order to focus on ways and
means to stay alive or expand as enterprises. Above all, they rarely, if
ever, become centers of popular power—partly because they are not
concerned with addressing issues of power as such, and partly too
because they have no way of mobilizing people around visions of how
society should be controlled.
While working and/or living in cooperatives may be desirable in order to
imbue individuals with collectivist values and concerns, they do not
provide the institutional means for acquiring collective power.
Underpinning their social ideas—before these ideas fade into dim
memory—is the hope that they can somehow elbow capitalism out, without
having to confront capitalist enterprises and the capitalist state. Time
tends to increase these parochial tendencies, making cooperatives more
introverted, more parochial, more like collective capitalists than
social collectivists, and ultimately more capitalistic than socialistic
in their practices and interests.
Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is decidedly a confrontational
form of face-to-face democratic, antistatist politics. Looking outward
to the entire municipality and beyond, it is decidedly concerned with
the all-important question of power, and it poses the questions: Where
shall power exist? By what part of society shall it be exercised?
Above all, it asks, what institutions can make the exercise of
nonstatist power possible and effective? I once read a Spanish anarchist
slogan that declared: “Make war on institutions, not on people.” I find
this slogan disturbing because it implies that ideally people can
somehow become “autonomous” from institutional obligations, and that
institutions as such are straitjackets that prevent them from
discovering their “true selves” and engaging in self-determination.
No—this is grossly fallacious. Animals, to be sure, can live without
institutions (often because their behavior is imprinted in them
genetically), but human beings require institutions, however simple or
complex, to mold their societies. In a free society, these institutions
would be rationally constituted “forms of freedom” (as I called them
back in the 1960s) by which people would organize and express their own
powers collectively as well as personally.
Moreover, such a free society would have a constitution and laws,
formulated and adopted by directly democratic and discursive assemblies.
In the mid-19th century, while he was a member of the French Chamber of
Deputies, Proudhon refused to vote in favor of a draft Constitution that
was oriented toward the protection of property and the construction of a
State. While I approve of his negative vote, I thoroughly reject the
reasons he gave for it. “No!” he declared, “I did not vote against the
Constitution because it was good or bad, but because it was a
Constitution.” This frivolous behavior reduced him, intellectually as
well as politically, to the world of arbitrary power, against which
oppressed Greek peasants such as Hesiod had cried out in the eighth
century BCE, denouncing the “barons” who had all but enserfed and
exploited the Hellenic peasantry of the ancient world and demanding a
society based on laws, not on the whims of men.
Contrary to Proudhon and other anarchist theorists who have rejected
laws as such, constitutions and laws have long been demands of oppressed
people as instrumentalities for controlling, indeed eliminating, the
arbitrary power exercised by kings, tyrants, nobles, and dictators. To
ignore this historic fact and fall back on an “instinct for mutual aid”
as the basis for social organization, or “an instinct for revolution,”
or “an instinct for sharing” is to retreat from a much-desired civilized
world into the realm of animality, a social zoology that has no
application to humanity as a potentially innovative species that makes
and remakes both itself and the world.
Some libertarian municipalists have argued that before we seek political
power for our democratic ends, we must first “work over” a community by
participating in communitarian activities and establishing cooperatives
that will cement mutualistic ways of living throughout the community.
Only then, we are told, will a community be “ready” for a libertarian
municipalist effort. But do cooperatives really have mutualistic effects
on their communities?
Not necessarily—indeed, all too often, for those involved, forming and
maintaining a cooperative becomes an end in itself. When cooperatives do
manage to survive, their relations with other cooperatives become
strained—far from treating each other mutualistically, they turn their
faces against each other and even enter into mutual competition.
Moreover, a cooperative’s members often become an in-group in the very
community they had initially set out to educate—and they abdicate all
educational activities, having come to view the people in their
community solely as mere customers. Forced by capitalism to adopt
methods of capitalist organization, they hire managers and business
consultants of one kind or another—presumably in pursuit of
efficiency—with the result that, far from giving their community a
political education, they deceive it in their own interests, dressing up
their capitalist enterprise with the “virtuous” name cooperative instead
of openly calling themselves a company or corporation.
Libertarian municipalism tries in every way to avoid losing its identity
in the job of building, maintaining, and expanding cooperatives—and
thereby sinking into a communitarian morass. Rather, it seeks to recover
and to go beyond Aristotle’s definition of “man” as a zoon politikon, a
“political being.” In Aristotle’s Politics, “man,” or at least Greeks,
are meant to live in a polis (usually mistranslated as “city state”) or
a municipality. For Aristotle, this is one form of our actualization and
fulfillment as human beings. To use a religious term, human beings,
insofar as they realize their humanity, are destined to be polis– and
city-dwellers. Our teloi, which include a rationally and democratically
constituted system of laws—of duties as well as rights—include as well
this ability to be citizens, that is to say, to be educated in order to
be competent to assume all the obligations of self-government.
They must be capable intellectually as well as physically of performing
all the necessary functions in their community that today are undertaken
by the State—that apparatus of soldiers, police, bureaucrats,
legislative representatives and the like. The State justifies its
existence in great part not only on the indifference of its constituents
to public affairs but also—and significantly—on the alleged inability of
its constituents to manage public affairs. It claims to have a unique
competence, while considering its constituents to be incompetent
children who need competent “parents” to manage their affairs. Once
citizens are capable of self-management, however, the State can be
liquidated both institutionally and subjectively, replaced by free and
educated citizens in popular assemblies.
If citizens are to be competent to replace the State, then education for
citizenship, or paideia, must be rigorous and involve the building of
character and ethical integrity as well as gaining knowledge. This is
even more the case when it comes to eliminating hierarchy. Rigorous
education and training, in turn, involve a systematic, carefully
planned, organized learning process. Citizens cannot be produced if the
education and training of the young occur in contexts where the
student—usually an inchoate self that has not yet been formed—is called
upon to “let everything hang out” in the name of “self-expression.” It
is precisely this concern for paideia that made Greek political
philosophy so great: it included educational ideas for the making of
competent citizens, who would not only think systematically but learn to
use weapons in their own defense and in defense of the democracy. The
Athenian democracy, let me note, was established when the aristocratic
cavalry was replaced by the hoplite footsoldier—the civic guard of the
fifth century BCE, which guaranteed the supremacy of the people over the
formerly supreme nobility.
In contrast to communitarianism, libertarian municipalism is concerned
with the problem of power, especially how ordinary people can acquire
it. By power, I do not refer to the psychological feeling of empowerment
that one may gain from attending an inspiring meeting or rally. Some
fashionable forms of “self-empowerment” are often little more than
emotional highs that could more or less be acquired by taking drugs
Rather, I mean the tangible power embodied in organized forms of freedom
that are rationally conceived and democratically constituted. In
contrast to those who would simply use the demand for power as a means
to make propaganda and theater, or who would refuse to accept power,
even if offered, if they could potentially use it to empower the people
in popular assemblies, libertarian municipalism seeks to attain
collective, communal power.
A libertarian municipalist polity would thus be a constituted
community—one that has rationally and democratically created its own
constitution and laws; whose citizens have been fashioned ethically and
intellectually by the character-building process of paideia; and which,
because of its competence, armed power, democratic institutions, and
discursive approach to issues and problems can not only replace the
State but perform the socially necessary roles in the community formerly
taken over by the State.
This is the political realm, the authentic world of politics, in which
we are obliged to form a movement to recover and develop before it is
effaced entirely by a Disneyland world. To dissolve this political realm
into communitarian institutions and activities is to overlook the very
need to reestablish this realm, indeed to play the reactionary role of
diffusing it into an night where all is black and indistinguishable.
The issue of dual power should also be clarified, as this phrase has
recently been gaining currency in libertarian circles as a “theory.” The
Marxists, more specifically Trotsky, had no “theory” of dual power. The
notion of a “dual power” was well rooted in Russian socialist politics
long before Trotsky devoted a chapter to the concept in his History of
the Russian Revolution, a chapter that occupies a mere nine pages, most
of which are descriptive. The word dvoevlasty (“dual power”) was used by
Russian revolutionaries of all kinds as early as February 1917, simply
to describe the dual arrangement in which the Petrograd Soviet and the
Provisional Government tried to govern Russia—an arrangement that had
come to an end by the October Revolution.
As a “theory,” however, “dual power” was more popular in Germany and
Austria immediately after the First World War, in 1918-19, when the
Raete or councils were in vogue among theorists such as Rudolf
Hilferding, Karl Kautsky, and Victor Adler. These Austro-German Marxists
thought of dual power as a permanent condition consisting of permanent
councils, through which workers could express their interests, together
with parliamentary state, through which the bourgeoisie could express
its interests. These Social Democrats divested “dual power” of its
revolutionary tension, and the term became a synonym for a two-part
government that could conceivably have existed indefinitely.
In libertarian municipalism, dual power is meant to be a strategy for
creating precisely those libertarian institutions of directly democratic
assemblies that would oppose and replace the State. It intends to create
a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the
nation-state—cannot coexist, and one must sooner or later displace the
other. Moreover, it is a confluence of the means to achieve a rational
society with the structure of that society, once it is achieved. The
diremption between means and ends is a problem that has always plagued
the revolutionary movement, but the concept of dual power as a means to
a revolutionary end and the formation of a rational society overcomes
the chasm between the method for gaining a new society and the
institutions that would structure it.
A very important problem in libertarian municipalism is the question of
what kind of movement can play the educational and, yes, leadership role
required to produce these transformations. Those who denounce
libertarian municipalism as “statist” often favor instead, not only
creating cooperatives, but engaging in episodic actions, especially in
the form of demonstrations and street festivals. Even worse, some of
them prefer to engage in passing attacks on “authority” by breaking
windows or taunting police—and then go home to watch these escapades on
television—as if “liberty” and “autonomy” could be so achieved or
inspire the people.
We must at the outset dissociate ourselves from a silly cry that was
voiced by I. S. Bleikhman, the supreme personality of the Petrograd
Anarchist Communists, in July 1917. In those insurgent “July Days,” the
Kronstadt sailors together with the Petrograd garrison and most advanced
workers decided to “come out” with arms in hand to establish a soviet
government. To their appeal for organization, Bleihkman responded: “The
streets will organize you!” The streets, of course, “organized”
absolutely nothing and no one—and partly for lack of a real leadership,
the July insurrection was crushed in only a few days.
In the course of closely studying the history of past revolutions, the
most important problem I have encountered has been precisely the issue
of organization. The issue is crucial, not least because in a
revolutionary upheaval the nature of organization can spell the
difference between life and death. What has become very clear in my own
mind is that revolutionaries need to create a very proactive
organization—a vanguard, to use a term widely used until the New Left
poisoned it by associating it with the Bolsheviks—that itself has its
own rigorous paideia; that creates a responsible membership of informed
and dedicated citizens; that has a structure and a program; and that
creates its own institutions, based on a rational constitution.
Such an organization might well be regarded as a polis-in-the-making
that, while building a libertarian municipalist movement, can safeguard
its basic principles from cooptation (the usual fate of good ideas these
days), nourish their development, and apply them in complex and
difficult situations. Without a clearly definable organization, a
movement is likely to fall into the tyranny of structurelessness.
I would like to point out that if one’s basic principles are not firm
and clear, then one has no basic principles at all. One is simply
floating in the air with mere opinions and off-the-cuff notions rather
than clear ideas, thought-out views, and substantive theories
constructed on solid foundations. One may decide to change one’s basic
principles, to be sure, which itself presupposes that one had definable
principles to begin with. But the prevalence of undefined and unfixed
notions reflects the contemporary postmodern invertebrate mentality that
regards everything as relative; that rejects the existence of
fundamentals; that fosters formless, amoebic ideas; that condemns
structure as authoritarian or even totalitarian; and that regards
feelings are more important than careful thought.
Ideas are becoming cheap opinions, and principles are becoming ephemeral
slogans, which is all the more reason why we should affirm our ideas and
theories clearly. Not only for political reasons but also for cultural
ones, it is the responsibility of a libertarian municipal movement based
on Communalist principles to maintain the highest standards in its
writings, discussions, and activities.
Moreover, politics cannot be reduced to theater. Study and experience
have taught me that art does not redeem—and certainly does not produce
revolutions. Art is sensitizing, emotionally enriching, and creative—but
few schools of art, music, and the performing arts have impelled any
appreciable number of people to build barricades, let alone fight behind
them. Art may be an adjunct of the revolutionary movement, but it is not
an impetus. Hence my fear of popular theatrical efforts to “reclaim” the
streets—as though we ever had them!—with street festivals. And then
what? Nor can elections be reduced to mere theater or even to strategies
for engaging in propaganda, important as this may be. Unless we actually
run candidates in city council elections, we are not dealing with power.
And to live in fear that power might “corrupt” not only ignores the many
cases where it did not corrupt; it ignores the need to gain power.
Theater, street events, and other photogenic escapades merely play at
politics rather than engage in it.
A libertarian municipalist movement that is created by means of distinct
steps, with advanced ideas, education, and experience, has every right
to regard itself as a vanguard. Obviously, any other kind of movement
organization can make the same claim—no libertarian municipalist
organization can deny other organizations the right to call themselves
vanguards. But no major social change will ever occur without a
well-organized vanguard movement that is structured by a constitution
and places clear-cut requirements on the right of people to join it. I
for one have had enough of the old Clamshell Alliance-type
organizational practices that reduce membership to a revolving door in
which people enter and leave the organization after a single meeting—but
have full voting rights.
And I have had enough of consensus decision-making, in which a minority
has the bizarre right to block the majority’s decisions, and that
themselves become an obstructive tyranny while claiming absurdly that
majority decision-making is “tyrannical.” I oppose the way movement
groups often have used consensus decision-making processes to manipulate
the membership. I’m sorry, but the streets will not “organize” us. Only
a serious, responsible, and structured movement can do that.
Important as it is to create links between libertarian municipalism and
oppositional movements, it would be a grave error to dissolve our
movement into theirs or surrendered our identity to them. I have no
compunction about declaring that we stand on a higher ground than
anything else of which I know that calls itself “oppositional.” Like the
word revolutionary, the word opposition has been steadily cheapened and
will continue to be devalued. The political spectrum has shifted
enormously from left to right—a shift that has affected the ecology
movement, feminism, self-styled liberation movements, and the labor
movement, as well as the bourgeoisie. .
Everywhere the Right is shifting into the darkness of outright reaction,
often with dangerous racist overtones. This shift has created a vacancy
in that vast space on the political spectrum where the Left should
legitimately be. Without a well-anchored Left, indeed, there is no
political spectrum at all—and it is my deepest fear that with the
widespread ignorance and rejection of history today is dumbing down
virtually all social and political standards. Anarchists affirm the
importance of the state; Marxists try to fit their theories into a
market economy; reformists sound like conservatives; and conservatives,
not to speak of reactionaries, find a home in Telos magazine—while
bizarre coalitions try to tailor their semifascistic notions to New Left
notions.
Some anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists have recently written
that I do not “believe” in the existence of classes—an accusation that
is almost too ridiculous to answer. I have no doubt that we live in a
class society; in fact, conflicts between classes would doubtless exist
in citizens’ assemblies as well. For this reason, libertarian
municipalism does not forsake the notion of class struggle but carries
it out not only in the factories but also into the civic or municipal
arena.
It does so, that is, as long as factories continue to exist and as long
as proletarians do not imagine that they are “middle class.” But I
learned many years ago, while working in a foundry and in an auto plant
owned by General Motors, that workers regard themselves as human beings
as well as class beings. They are fathers and mothers, sisters and
brothers, and sons and daughters who are deeply concerned with the
ordinary problems of life, such as the quality of their neighborhoods,
dwellings, sanitary facilities, recreation areas, schools, air, water,
and food—in short, all the problems that concern city and rural dwellers
quite apart from their class status. These general interests, while they
do not supplant class interests, can cut across class lines, especially
the lines that divide workers from a vast variety of middle-class
people.
Even during my years working in heavy industry, I found it easier to
reach workers on the basis of environmental and neighborhood issues than
on the basis of factory issues. During the 1960s, the transclass appeal
of certain issues became obvious to me, such as in my 1963 fight against
the Edison Company’s attempt to build a nuclear reactor in New York
City. Workers no less than middle-class people simply overwhelmed me
with questions and asked me to come to their community groups and
address them. This phenomenon continues today: in November 1999, it was
not only workers but middle-class people who marched against
globalization and the World Trade Organization in Seattle—a march that
consciously or unconsciously was aimed against the very core of modern
capitalism. Such transclass issues have been emerging for decades now.
Indeed, capitalism is slowly producing these generalized concerns in all
strata of society. The much-desired “general interests” that Marx and
socialists as well as anarchists hoped would unite most of humanity as a
whole against the bourgeoisie are very much on the horizon. If we do not
recognize these general interests and formulate them in a revolutionary
way, then I shall go to my grave concluding that existing anarchist
scenes, in all their silly mutations, are a complete failure, and that
the Marxists have done no better. If we are to face the new century with
a theory that keeps pace with—or tries to see beyond—new developments,
then we will have to draw on the best we can find in anarchism and
Marxism and go beyond them by developing a more comprehensive body of
ideas to guide us toward a rational future. For the body of ideas that I
would recommend, I have given the name Communalism.
Our ideas of confederation should not remain stuck in anarchist writings
of the 19th century. In Proudhon’s writings on federalism, for example,
we find an extremely naive vision of a “federation of autonomous
communes” whose component members could choose, if they so wished, to
pull out of that federation and “go it on their own.” But such
“autonomy” is no longer possible, if it was even in Proudhon’s day. A
unilateral choice to leave the federation, after all, would undermine
the entire federation itself. We no longer live in an artisanal and
craft world. Imagine if the electrical complex in upstate New York
“autonomously” decided to pull out of a confederation with the Vermont
electrical complex because it was piqued by Vermont’s behavior.
Equally troubling would be a confederation based on the kind of
“voluntary agreements” that Kropotkin found and even celebrated in the
railroad lines—no less!—of his day. If the operating principles of
19th-century railroad lines are a good example of “voluntary
agreements,” then I would humbly suggest that those formulated by J.P.
Morgan and Co. are priceless. The “anarcho”-capitalists would doubtless
exult in this view, presented in Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, but
allow me to dissent from it.
A confederation should be regarded as a binding agreement, not one that
can be canceled for frivolous “voluntaristic” reasons. A municipality
should be able to withdraw from a confederation only after every citizen
of the confederation has had the opportunity to thoroughly explore the
municipality’s grievances and to decide by a majority vote of the entire
confederation that it can withdraw without undermining the entire
confederation itself.
Does libertarian municipalism have an economic theory? Yes, I should
emphasize, one that is very close to Marx’s critique of capitalism in
volume 1 of Capital. Too often, knee-jerk rejections of Marx’s brilliant
work routinely bring smiles of approval to the faces of his opponents. I
refuse to participate in such routines. However much I disagree with
many elements of Marxism, no other single analysis of capitalism even
remotely, at this late date, approximates that amazing work.
I do not see how a thoughtful libertarian municipalist theorist can
avoid studying and absorbing dialectics, or lack a rich philosophical
perspective on History, as distinguished from mere Chronicles. No single
theory can encompasses social phenomena that have yet to appear on the
existing social horizon, but what can provide us with foresight are
basic minimal principles—to which we strongly adhere until they are no
longer tenable.
Libertarian municipalism is also based on the proposition that we now
have the technology for a post-scarcity economy—one that can potentially
abolish mindless toil and possibly most of the work that enters into
industrial production today. In such a world, the communist ideal of
“from each according to ability, to each according to needs” would be
historically and technically feasible. Various fears that individual
“needs” might be expanded to accommodate greed can be removed by giving
the municipal assembly the right to determine whether certain identified
“needs” are excessive and whether their fulfillment could damage the
well-being of the entire economy.
The world is changing now at a pace that is absolutely stunning. If
capitalism does not destroy the biosphere, then in possibly thirty,
certainly fifty years the world that survives will be changed beyond our
imagination. Not only will the peasant world be gone, but so too will
much of the “nature” we often call “wild.” The automation of industry
will probably reach incredible proportions, and the earth’s features
will be vastly transformed. Whether these changes will produce an
ecological crisis, or whether science and technology can mitigate their
impact, however unsatisfactorily, I do not know, nor will I ever know,
as I am approaching the end of my own life.
This much, however, I do believe: if a libertarian municipalist movement
based on Communalist principles cannot establish a system of direct
democracy and confederation, then libertarian ideals of all kinds must
be significantly revised. But we cannot hope to establish any kind of
truly libertarian society without creating a public sphere, beginning
with a grassroots electoral politics based on the creation of popular
assemblies. In my view, this is the left libertarian movement’s last
stand. If you do not agree with me, so be it—but please, use a different
label for your ideas, leave the name “libertarian municipalism” alone,
and go your own way toward communitarian and cooperative enterprises, if
not Taoist monasteries and mystical seances. I would ask my critics not
to muddy up ideas that they don’t really like, while at the same time
claiming to support them.