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Title: The Next Revolution
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 2015
Language: en
Topics: social ecology, libertarian municipalism, Direct Democracy, assemblies, civilization, anti-nationalism, democratic confederalism
Source: https://libcom.org/library/next-revolution-popular-assemblies-promise-direct-democracy

Murray Bookchin

The Next Revolution

Foreword By Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Left,” a meaningful term ever since the French Revolution, took on

wider significance with the rise of socialism, anarchism, and communism.

The Russian revolution installed a government entirely leftist in

conception; leftist and rightist movements tore Spain apart; democratic

parties in Europe and North America arrayed themselves between the two

poles; liberal cartoonists portrayed the opposition as a fat plutocrat

with a cigar, while reactionaries in the United States demonized “commie

leftists” from the 1930s through the Cold War. The left/right

opposition, though often an oversimplification, for two centuries was

broadly useful as a description and a reminder of dynamic balance.

In the twenty-first century we go on using the terms, but what is left

of the Left?

The failure of state communism, the quiet entrenchment of a degree of

socialism in democratic governments, and the relentless rightward

movement of politics driven by corporate capitalism have made much

progressive thinking seem antiquated, or redundant, or illusory. The

Left is marginalized in its thought, fragmented in its goals,

unconfident of its ability to unite. In America particularly, the drift

to the right has been so strong that mere liberalism is now the

terrorist bogey that anarchism or socialism used to be, and

reactionaries are called “moderates.”

So, in a country that has all but shut its left eye and is trying to use

only its right hand, where does an ambidextrous, binocular Old Rad like

Murray Bookchin fit?

I think he’ll find his readers. A lot of people are seeking consistent,

constructive thinking on which to base action—a frustrating search.

Theoretical approaches that seem promising turn out, like the

Libertarian Party, to be Ayn Rand in drag; immediate and effective

solutions to a problem turn out, like the Occupy movement, to lack

structure and stamina for the long run. Young people, people this

society blatantly short-changes and betrays, are looking for

intelligent, realistic, long-term thinking: not another ranting

ideology, but a practical working hypothesis, a methodology of how to

regain control of where we’re going.

Achieving that control will require a revolution as powerful, as deeply

affecting society as a whole, as the force it wants to harness.

Murray Bookchin was an expert in nonviolent revolution. He thought about

radical social changes, planned and unplanned, and how best to prepare

for them, all his life. This book carries his thinking on past his own

life into the threatening future we face.

Impatient, idealistic readers may find him uncomfortably tough-minded.

He’s unwilling to leap over reality to dreams of happy endings,

unsympathetic to mere transgression pretending to be political action:

“A ‘politics’ of disorder or ‘creative chaos,’ or a naïve practice of

‘taking over the streets’ (usually little more than a street festival),

regresses participants to the behavior of a juvenile herd.” That applies

more to the Summer of Love, certainly, than to the Occupy movement, yet

it is a permanently cogent warning. But Bookchin is no grim puritan. I

first read him as an anarchist, probably the most eloquent and

thoughtful one of his generation, and in moving away from anarchism he

hasn’t lost his sense of the joy of freedom. He doesn’t want to see that

joy, that freedom, come crashing down, yet again, among the ruins of its

own euphoric irresponsibility. What all political and social thinking

has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible

degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism:

the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to

convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from

it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every

wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort,

casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth;

and, taking with ever- increasing speed and greed, we now return little

but what is sterile or poisoned.

Yet we can’t stop the process. A capitalist economy, by definition,

lives by growth; as he observes: “For capitalism to desist from its

mindless expansion would be for it to commit social suicide.” We have,

essentially, chosen cancer as the model of our social system.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with

ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives

can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on

the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will

establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone,

irrespective of his or her status.

Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of

grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in this book represent the

culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an

egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical

approach for how to build it. He critiques the failures of past

movements for social change, resurrects the promise of direct democracy

and, in the last essay in this book, sketches his hope of how we might

turn the environmental crisis into a moment of true choice—a chance to

transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a

chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system.

Reading it, I was moved and grateful, as I have so often been in reading

Murray Bookchin. He was a true son of the Enlightenment in his respect

for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest,

uncompromising search for a realistic hope.

Introduction

The world today confronts not one, but a series of interlocking

crises—economic, political, social, and ecological. The new millennium

has been marked by a growing gap between rich and poor that has reached

unprecedented levels of disparity, consigning an entire generation to

diminished expectations and dismal prospects. Socially, the trajectory

of the new century has been equally bleak, particularly in the

developing world, where sectarian violence in the name of religion,

tribalism, and nationalism has turned entire regions into insufferable

battle zones. Meanwhile, the environmental crisis has worsened at a pace

that has exceeded even the most pessimistic forecasts. Global warming,

rising sea levels, pollution of the air, soil, and oceans, and the

destruction of massive tracts of rain forest have accelerated at such

alarming rates that the environmental catastrophe that was expected to

reach grave proportions sometime in the next century has instead become

the pressing, urgent concern of this generation.

Yet, in the face of these ever-worsening crises, the perverse logic of

neoliberal capitalism is so entrenched that, despite its spectacular

collapse in 2008, the only thinkable response has been more

neoliberalism: an ever-increasing deference to corporate and financial

elites, which posits privatization, slashing services, and giving free

reign to the market as the only way out. The result has been a

predictable rise in disenfranchisement politically and an electoral

politics devoid of substantive debate and choice—an exercise in

showmanship—whether in Argentina, Italy, Germany, or the United States.

Still, while political and economic elites insist “there is no

alternative” and cynically double down on the status quo of austerity,

activists around the world have challenged this conventional wisdom with

a new politics, demanding a more expansive form of democracy. From New

York and Cairo to Istanbul and Rio, movements like Occupy Wall Street

and the Spanish indignados have pried open new space with an exciting

politics that defies existing categories, attacking both capitalist

inequality and ossified “representative” democracies. The voices and

demands are diverse, but at their root is a direct challenge to the

current political ethos in which the economic and social policies of

elected governments—left, right, or center—have blurred into an

indistinguishable consensus of tinkering around the edges and

unquestioning obeisance to global market capitalism. These movements

have ignited widespread excitement, attracting millions of participants

around the world to massive rallies, and have kindled once again the

hope that from the streets will arise the flame of a revolutionary new

social movement.

Despite inspired moments of resistance, the radical democracy forged in

squares from Zuccotti to Taksim has still not congealed into a viable

political alternative. The excitement and solidarity on the ground has

yet to coalesce into a political praxis capable of eliminating the

current array of repressive forces and replacing it with a visionary,

egalitarian—and importantly, achievable—new society. Murray Bookchin

directly addresses this need, offering a transformative vision and new

political strategy for a truly free society—a project that he called

“Communalism.”

A prolific author, essayist and activist, Bookchin devoted his life to

developing a new kind of left politics that speaks to both movement

concerns and the diverse social problems they confront. Communalism

moves beyond critique to offer a reconstructive vision of a

fundamentally different society—directly democratic, anticapitalist,

ecological, and opposed to all forms of domination—that actualizes

freedom in popular assemblies bound together in confederation. Rescuing

the revolutionary project from the taint of authoritarianism and the

supposed “end of history,” Communalism advances a bold politics that

moves from resistance to social transformation.

Bookchin’s use of the term Communalism signifies his arrival, after six

decades as an activist and theorist, at a philosophy of social change

that was shaped by a lifetime on the left. Born in 1921, he became

radicalized at the age of nine, when he joined the Young Pioneers, the

Communist youth organization in New York City. He became a Trotskyist in

the late thirties and, beginning in 1948, spent a decade in the

libertarian socialist Contemporary Issues group, which had abandoned

orthodox Marxist ideology. In the late 1950s, he began to elaborate the

importance of environmental degradation as a symptom of deeply

entrenched social problems. Bookchin’s book on the subject, Our

Synthetic Environment, appeared six months before Rachel Carson’s Silent

Spring, while his seminal 1964 pamphlet Ecology and Revolutionary

Thought introduced the concept of ecology as a political category to the

New Left. That essay’s groundbreaking synthesis of anarchism, ecology,

and decentralization was the first to equate the grow-or-die logic of

capitalism with the ecological destruction of the planet and presented a

profound new understanding of capitalism’s impact on the environment as

well as social relations. His 1968 essay “Post-Scarcity Anarchism”

reformulated anarchist theory for a new era, providing a coherent

framework for the reorganization of society along ecological-anarchistic

lines. As Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was imploding into

Marxist sectarianism at its final convention in 1969, Bookchin was

distributing his pamphlet Listen Marxist!, which criticized the

retrogressive return to dogmatic Marxism by various factions of SDS. He

advocated for an alternative anarchist politics of direct democracy and

decentralization, ideas that were buried in the rubble of the crumbling

organization but which resonated with those movements that would later

become dominant on the left. His essays from this period, originally

published in the magazine Anarchos by a New York City group that

Bookchin cofounded in the mid-1960s, were collected in the 1971

anthology Post- Scarcity Anarchism, a book that exerted a profound

influence on the New Left and became a classic articulation of

twentieth-century anarchism.

Authoring twenty-three works of history, political theory, philosophy,

and urban studies, Bookchin drew on a rich intellectual tradition that

ranged from Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx to Karl Polanyi, Hans Jonas, and

Lewis Mumford. In his major work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), he

elaborated the historical, anthropological, and social roots of

hierarchy and domination and their implications for our relationship to

the natural world in an expansive theory that he called “social

ecology.” He challenged and influenced every major figure of the period,

from Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy

Debord.

In 1974, Bookchin cofounded the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), a

unique educational project in Vermont offering classes in political

theory, radical history, and practical ecological initiatives like

organic agriculture and solar energy. He was an important influence on

the overlapping tendencies of nonviolent direct action, peace, radical

feminism, and ecology that comprised the new social movements of the

late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on his own activist background as,

variously, a young street agitator, autoworker shop steward, and civil

rights organizer for CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), he played a

leadership role in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance and in the

formation of the Left Green Network. In her book Political Protest and

Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s,

Barbara Epstein credits Bookchin with introducing the concept of

affinity groups and popularizing the European Critical Theory of Theodor

Adorno and Max Horkheimer. His ideas of face-to-face participatory

democracy, general assemblies, and confederation were adopted as the

basic modes of organization and decision-making by much of the

antinuclear movement worldwide and later by the alterglobalization

movement, which employed them to ensure democracy in their organization

and decision-making processes. Bookchin also met and corresponded with

German Green leaders and was a key voice in the Realo/Fundi debate over

whether the Greens should remain a movement or become a conventional

party. His work had a global reach and was widely translated and

reprinted throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bookchin was a central interlocutor for critical

theorists like Cornelius Castoriadis and a frequent contributor to the

influential journal Telos. He engaged in lively debates with prominent

ecological thinkers like Arne Ness and David Foreman. Meanwhile, the

Institute for Social Ecology played an important role in the

alterglobalization movement that emerged in Seattle in 1999, becoming a

space for activist reflection while advocating direct democracy and

anticapitalism in contrast to the reformist, anticorporate discourse of

many NGOs, and launched a variety of left libertarian and ecological

initiatives. But by the mid-1990s, problematic tendencies within some

strains of anarchism toward primitivism, lifestyle politics, and

aversion to organization led Bookchin first to try to reclaim a social

anarchism before eventually breaking with the tradition entirely.

Reflecting on a lifetime of experience on the left, Bookchin spent the

last fifteen years before his death in 2006 working on a comprehensive

four-volume study of revolutionary history called The Third Revolution,

in which he offered astute conclusions about the failure of

revolutionary movements—from peasant uprisings to modern

insurrections—to effect lasting social change. These insights informed a

new political perspective, one he hoped could avoid the pitfalls of the

past and lead to a new, emancipatory praxis—Communalism.

It was during this period that Bookchin published many of the essays

contained in this collection, formally elaborating the concept of

Communalism and its concrete political dimension, libertarian

municipalism. Communalist politics suggests a way out of the familiar

deadlock between the anarchist and Marxist traditions, offering a

missing third pole in the recent debate between Simon Critchley and

Slavoj Žižek. Rejecting both the modesty of Critchley’s purely defensive

politics of resistance as well as Žižek’s obsession with the seizure of

oppressive state power, Bookchin instead returns to the recurrent

formation arising in nearly every revolutionary upsurge: popular

assemblies. From the quartiers of the Paris Commune to the general

assemblies of Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere, these self-organized

democratic councils run like a red thread through history up to the

present. Yet revolutionaries of all stripes have largely overlooked the

broader potential of these popular institutions. Subjected to

centralized party discipline by Marxists and viewed with suspicion by

anarchists, these institutions of popular power, which Hannah Arendt

called the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition, are the

foundation of Bookchin’s political project. Communalism develops this

recurring historical form into the basis for a comprehensive libertarian

socialist vision of direct democracy.

One of Bookchin’s early formulations of libertarian municipalism

appeared in 1987, when he wrote The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline

of Citizenship (republished later as From Urbanization to Cities), a

follow-up to his earlier book The Limits of the City (1971), in which he

traced the history of the urban megalopolis and argued for

decentralization. In the later volume, Bookchin revisited the history of

the city to explain the importance of an empowered citizenry as the

fundamental basis for creating free communities. He distinguished

“statecraft,” in which individuals have a diminished influence in

political affairs because of the limits of representational government,

from “politics,” in which citizens have direct, participatory control

over their governments and communities. The ideas contained in this

book, in which Bookchin returns to the Greek polis to flesh out notions

of face-to-face participatory democracy, general assemblies, and

confederation, offer a prefigurative strategy in which a new society is

created in the shell of the old. This concept of direct democracy has

played a growing role in the libertarian leftism of activists today and

has become the fundamental organizational principle of Occupy Wall

Street, even if many of its adherents were unaware of its origins. As

David Harvey observed in his book Rebel Cities, “Bookchin’s proposal is

by far the most sophisticated radical proposal to deal with the creation

and collective use of the commons across a wide variety of scales.”

The nine essays here offer an excellent overview of Bookchin’s political

philosophy and the most mature formulation of his thinking with respect

to the forms of organization necessary to develop a countervailing force

to the coercive power of the nation-state. Each was originally written

as a stand-alone work; in collecting them for this volume we have edited

the essays where necessary to avoid excessive repetition and preserve

clarity. Taken together, they challenge us to accomplish the changes

necessary to save our planet and achieve real human freedom, and offer a

concrete program by which to accomplish this sweeping social

transformation. The writings in this collection serve as both an

introduction and culmination to the work of one of the most original

thinkers of the twentieth century.

In the opening essay, “The Communalist Project,” Bookchin situates

Communalism vis-à-vis other left ideologies, arguing that the world has

changed significantly from the times that birthed anarchism and Marxism;

he contends that these older ideologies are no longer capable of

addressing the new and highly generalized problems posed by the modern

world, from global warming to postindustrialization. The second essay,

“The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society,” elucidates the

core insight of Bookchin’s social ecology—that the ecological and social

crises are intertwined, indeed, that our domination of nature is a

projection of domination of human by human in society. Rejecting

ecological arguments that blame individual choices, technology, or

population growth, Bookchin argues that the ecological crisis is caused

by an irrational social system governed by the cancerous logic of

capitalism, driven by its competitive grow-or-die imperative and its

endless production directed not toward meeting human needs but

accumulating profit. Arguing against the extremes of an authoritarian

state or totally autonomous self-sufficiency, Bookchin offers

Communalism as an emancipatory alternative capable of saving ourselves

and nature at the same time.

The three middle essays, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century,” “The

Meaning of Confederalism,” and “Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of

Direct Democracy,” describe in detail different aspects of libertarian

municipalism. The first outlines how confederated assemblies can assert

popular control over the economy in order to abolish it as a separate

social realm, directing it to human needs rather than profit. “The

Meaning of Confederalism” further elaborates on these themes and

addresses specific objections to the concept of confederal direct

democracy. It answers common questions such as, Is confederation

feasible in a globalized world? How would local assemblies address

bigger problems in a democratic manner? Would local communities

cooperate or compete with each other, or could localism devolve to

parochialism? “Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy”

traces the familiar historical trajectory from movements into

parties—social democratic, socialist, and Green alike—which have

consistently failed to change the world but instead are changed by it.

By contrast, libertarian municipalism changes not only the content but

also the form of politics, transforming politics from its current lowly

status as what reviled politicians do to us into a new paradigm in which

politics is something we, as fully engaged citizens, do for ourselves,

thus reclaiming democratic control over our own lives and communities.

Exploring the unique liberatory potential of the city and the citizen

throughout history, “Cities: The Unfolding of Reason in History”

examines the degradation of the concept of “citizen”—from that of a free

individual empowered to participate and make collective decisions to a

mere constituent and taxpayer. Bookchin seeks to rescue the

Enlightenment notion of a progressive, but not teleological, concept of

History wherein reason guides human action toward the eradication of

toil and oppression; or put positively, freedom.

The essays “Nationalism and the ‘National Question’ ” and “Anarchism and

Power in the Spanish Revolution” elucidate a libertarian perspective on

questions of power, cultural identity, and political sovereignty. In the

former, Bookchin places nationalism in the larger historical context of

humanity’s social evolution, with the aim of transcending it, suggesting

instead a libertarian and cosmopolitan ethics of complementarity in

which cultural differences serve to enhance human unity. In “Anarchism

and Power in the Spanish Revolution” he confronts the question of power,

describing how anarchists throughout history have seen power as an

essentially negative evil that must be destroyed. Bookchin contends that

power will always exist, but that the question revolutionaries face is

whether it will rest in the hands of elites or be given an emancipatory

institutional form.

The concluding, previously unpublished, essay “The Future of the Left”

assesses the fate of the revolutionary project during the twentieth

century, examining the Marxist and anarchist traditions. Bookchin argues

that Marxism remains trapped by a limited focus on economy and is deeply

marred by its legacy of authoritarian statism. Anarchism, by contrast,

retains a problematic individualism that valorizes abstract and liberal

notions of “autonomy” over a more expansive notion of freedom, ducking

thorny questions about collective power, social institutions, and

political strategy. Communalism resolves this tension by giving freedom

concrete institutional form in confederated popular assemblies. The

essay concludes with a passionate defense of the Enlightenment and a

reminder that its legacy of discerning the “is” from the “ought” still

constitutes the very core of the Left: critique directed toward

unlocking the potentiality of universal human freedom.

Today, few deny the grim reality of overlapping political, economic, and

ecological crises that currently confront the world. Yet, despite

inspiring moments of popular outrage and mobilization, no viable

alternative social vision has emerged; hypercompetition, austerity, and

ecological degradation march on, opposed yet also unstopped. The present

exhaustion of conventional politics calls for bold new ideas that speak

to the radically democratic aspirations at the core of contemporary

global movements. Bookchin’s Communalism circumvents the stalemate

between the state and the street—the familiar oscillation between

empowering but ephemeral street protest and entering the very state

institutions designed to uphold the present order. He expands our

horizons from endlessly opposing the venality of politicians and

corporate power to a new organization of society, which redefines

politics from a detested thing done to us to something we do ourselves,

together, giving substance to the term “freedom” by allowing us to take

control of our lives. Bookchin offers a vision of what such a truly free

society might look like, and a road map capable of transporting us

there. Therefore, we offer this book with the hope that the ideas do not

lie dormant on the page, but inspire thought and action that enables us

to move from resistance to social transformation.

Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor

The Communalist Project

Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or

the most reactionary—or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal

mediocrity—will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement

and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical,

organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the

past two centuries of the revolutionary era. The direction we select,

from among several intersecting roads of human development, may well

determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as

this irrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological

weapons, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire human

enterprise may come to a devastating end. Given the exquisitely

elaborate technical plans that the military-industrial complex has

devised, the self-extermination of the human species must be included in

the futuristic scenarios that, at the turn of the millennium, the mass

media are projecting—the end of a human future as such.

Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize that we also

live in an era when human creativity, technology, and imagination have

the capability to produce extraordinary material achievements and to

endow us with societies that allow for a degree of freedom that far and

away exceeds the most dramatic and emancipatory visions projected by

social theorists such as Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and

Peter Kropotkin.

Many thinkers of the postmodern age have obtusely singled out science

and technology as the principal threats to human well-being, yet few

disciplines have imparted to humanity such a stupendous knowledge of the

innermost secrets of matter and life, or provided our species better

with the ability to alter every important feature of reality and to

improve the well-being of human and nonhuman life forms. We are thus in

a position either to follow a path toward a grim “end of history,” in

which a banal succession of vacuous events replaces genuine progress, or

to move on to a path toward the true making of history, in which

humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in a

position to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the

catastrophic nuclear oblivion of history itself, and history’s rational

fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in an aesthetically

crafted environment.

Precisely at a time when we, as a species, are capable of producing the

means for amazing objective advances and improvements in the human

condition and in the nonhuman natural world—advances that could make for

a free and rational society—we stand almost naked morally before the

onslaught of social forces that may very well lead to our physical

immolation. Prognoses about the future are understandably very fragile

and are easily distrusted. Pessimism has become widespread, as

capitalist social relations become more deeply entrenched in the human

mind than ever before and as culture regresses appallingly, almost to a

vanishing point.

Having brought history to a point where nearly everything is possible,

at least of a material nature—and having left behind a past that was

permeated ideologically by mystical and religious elements produced by

the human imagination—we are faced with a new challenge, one that has

never before confronted humanity. We must consciously create our own

world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but

according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that

uniquely belong to our own species.

What factors should be decisive going forward? Of great significance is

the immense accumulation of social and political experience that is

available to activists today, a storehouse of knowledge that, properly

conceived, could be used to avoid the terrible errors that our

predecessors made and to spare humanity the terrible plagues of failed

revolutions in the past. Also, of indispensable importance is the

potential for a new theoretical springboard that has been created by the

history of ideas, one that provides the means to catapult an emerging

radical movement beyond existing social conditions into a future that

fosters humanity’s emancipation.

But we must also be fully aware of the scope of the problems that we

face. We must understand with complete clarity where we stand in the

development of the prevailing capitalist order, and we have to grasp

emergent social problems and address them in the program of a new

movement. Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to

appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system

of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit

pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a

highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that

whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die.

Hence, “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of

capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains

permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions

that arise from its basic social relations.

Although capitalism became a dominant society only in the past few

centuries, it long existed on the periphery of earlier societies: in a

largely commercial form, structured around trade between cities and

empires; in a craft form throughout the European Middle Ages; in a

hugely industrial form in our own time; and if we are to believe recent

seers, in an informational form in the coming period. It has created not

only new technologies but also a great variety of economic and social

structures, such as the small shop, the factory, the huge mill, and the

industrial and commercial complex. Certainly the capitalism of the

Industrial Revolution has not completely disappeared, any more than the

isolated peasant family and small craftsman of a still earlier period

have been consigned to complete oblivion.

Much of the past is always incorporated into the present; as Marx

insistently warned, there is no “pure capitalism,” and none of the

earlier forms of capitalism fade away until radically new social

relations are established and become overwhelmingly dominant. But today,

capitalism, even as it coexists with and utilizes precapitalist

institutions for its own ends, now reaches into the suburbs and the

countryside with its shopping malls and newly styled factories. Indeed,

it is by no means inconceivable that one day it will reach beyond our

planet. In any case, it has produced not only new commodities to create

and feed new wants but new social and cultural issues, which in turn

have given rise to new supporters and antagonists of the existing

system. The famous first part of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto,

in which they celebrate capitalism’s wonders, would have to be

periodically rewritten to keep pace with the achievements—as well as the

horrors—produced by the bourgeoisie’s development.

One of the most striking features of capitalism today is that in the

Western world the highly simplified two-class structure—the bourgeoisie

and the proletariat—that Marx and Engels predicted would become dominant

under “mature” capitalism has undergone a process of reconfiguration.

The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means

disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it

possessed in the past.

Contrary to Marx’s expectations, the industrial working class is now

dwindling in numbers and is steadily losing its traditional identity as

a class, which by no means excludes it from a potentially broader and

perhaps more extensive conflict of society as a whole against capitalist

social relations. Present-day culture, social relations, cityscapes,

modes of production, agriculture, and transportation have remade the

traditional proletarian into a largely petty bourgeois stratum whose

mentality is marked by its own utopianism of “consumption for the sake

of consumption.” We can foresee a time when the proletarian, whatever

the color of his or her collar or place on the assembly line, will be

completely replaced by automated and even miniaturized means of

production that are operated by a few white-coated manipulators of

machines and by computers.

Seen as a whole, the social condition that capitalism has produced today

stands very much at odds with the simplistic class prognoses advanced by

Marx and by the revolutionary French syndicalists. After the Second

World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating

broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went

beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and

working conditions: notably, environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic,

and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its

threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter

the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global

scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life

basic to grassroots politics.

Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced an issue as class, as

witness the extent to which many social analyses have singled out

managers, bureaucrats, scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly

dominant groups. New and elaborate gradations of status and interests

count today to an extent that they did not in the recent past; they blur

the conflict between wage labor and capital that was once so central,

clearly defined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists. Class

categories are now intermingled with hierarchical categories based on

race, gender, sexual preference, and certainly national or regional

differences. Status differentiations, characteristic of hierarchy, tend

to converge with class differentiations, and a more all-inclusive

capitalistic world is emerging in which ethnic, national, and gender

differences often surpass the importance of class differences in the

public eye.

At the same time, capitalism has produced a new, perhaps paramount

contradiction: the clash between an economy based on unending growth and

the desiccation of the natural environment. This issue and its vast

ramifications can no more be minimized, let alone dismissed, than the

need of human beings for food or air. At present, the most promising

struggles in the West, where socialism was born, seem to be waged less

around income and working conditions than around nuclear power,

pollution, deforestation, urban blight, education, health care,

community life, and the oppression of people in underdeveloped

countries—as witness the (albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges,

in which blue- and white- collar “workers” march in the same ranks with

middle-class humanitarians and are motivated by common social concerns.

Proletarian combatants become indistinguishable from middle-class ones.

Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combative militancy, now march behind

“bread and puppet” theater performers, often with a considerable measure

of shared playfulness. Members of the working and middle classes now

wear many different social hats, so to speak, challenging capitalism

obliquely as well as directly on cultural as well as economic grounds.

Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction we are to follow, the fact

that capitalism, if it is not checked, will in the future—and not

necessarily the very distant future—differ appreciably from the system

we know today. Capitalist development can be expected to vastly alter

the social horizon in the years ahead.

Can we suppose that factories, offices, cities, residential areas,

industry, commerce, and agriculture, let alone moral values, aesthetics,

media, popular desires, and the like will not change immensely before

the twenty-first century is out? In the past century, capitalism, above

all else, has broadened social issues— indeed, the historical social

question of how a humanity, divided by classes and exploitation, will

create a society based on equality, the development of authentic

harmony, and freedom—to include those whose resolution was barely

foreseen by the liberatory social theorists in the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Our age, with its endless array of “bottom lines”

and “investment choices,” now threatens to turn society itself into a

vast and exploitative marketplace.

Given the changes that we are witnessing and those that are still taking

form, social radicals can no longer oppose the predatory (as well as

immensely creative) capitalist system by using the ideologies and

methods that were born in the first Industrial Revolution, when a

factory proletarian seemed to be the principal antagonist of a textile

plant owner. Nor can we use ideologies that were spawned by conflicts

that an impoverished peasantry used to oppose feudal and semifeudal

landowners. None of the professedly anticapitalist ideologies of the

past—Marxism, anarchism, syndicalism, and more generic forms of

socialism— retain the same relevance that they had at an earlier stage

of capitalist development and in an earlier period of technological

advance. Nor can any of them hope to encompass the multitude of new

issues, opportunities, problems, and interests that capitalism has

repeatedly created over time.

Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherent effort to produce a

systematic form of socialism, emphasizing the material as well as the

subjective historical preconditions of a new society. We owe much to

Marx’s attempt to provide us with a coherent and stimulating analysis of

the commodity and commodity relations, to an activist philosophy, a

systematic social theory, an objectively grounded or “scientific”

concept of historical development, and a flexible political strategy.

Marxist political ideas were eminently relevant to the needs of a

terribly disoriented proletariat and to the particular oppressions that

the industrial bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the 1840s,

somewhat later in France, Italy, and Germany, and very presciently in

Russia in the last decade of Marx’s life. Until the rise of the populist

movement in Russia (most famously, the Narodnaya Volya), Marx expected

the emerging proletariat to become the great majority of the population

in Europe and North America, and to inevitably engage in revolutionary

class war as a result of capitalist exploitation and immiseration.

And especially between 1917 and 1939, long after Marx’s death, Europe

was indeed beleaguered by a mounting class war that reached the point of

outright workers’ insurrections. In 1917, owing to an extraordinary

confluence of circumstances—particularly with the outbreak of the First

World War, which rendered several quasi-feudal European social systems

terribly unstable—Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use (but greatly

altered) Marx’s writings in order to take power in an economically

backward empire, whose size spanned eleven time zones across Europe and

Asia.

But for the most part, as we have seen, Marxism’s economic insights

belonged to an era of emerging factory capitalism in the nineteenth

century. Brilliant as a theory of the material preconditions for

socialism, it did not address the ecological, civic, and subjective

forces or the efficient causes that could impel humanity into a movement

for revolutionary social change. On the contrary, for nearly a century,

Marxism stagnated theoretically. Its theorists were often puzzled by

developments that had passed it by and, since the 1960s, have

mechanically appended environmentalist and feminist ideas to its

formulaic ouvrierist outlook.

By the same token, anarchism represents, even in its authentic form, a

highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered

lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action.

In fact, anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of

liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a

celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos

of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual

over or even against society and the personalistic absence of

responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation

of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological

peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass

social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a

fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group

mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.

Anarchism has often been confused with revolutionary syndicalism, a

highly structured and well-developed mass form of libertarian trade

unionism that, unlike anarchism, was long committed to democratic

procedures, to discipline in action, and to organized, long-range

revolutionary practice to eliminate capitalism. Its affinity with

anarchism stems from its strong libertarian bias, but bitter antagonisms

between anarchists and syndicalists have a long history in nearly every

country in Western Europe and North America, as witness the tensions

between the Spanish CNT and the anarchist groups associated with Tierra

y Libertad early in the twentieth century, between the revolutionary

syndicalist and anarchist groups in Russia during the 1917 revolution,

and between the IWW in the United States and Sweden, to cite the more

illustrative cases in the history of the libertarian labor movement.

Revolutionary syndicalism’s destiny has been tied in varying degrees to

a pathology called ouvrierisme, or “workerism,” and whatever philosophy,

theory of history, or political economy it possesses has been borrowed,

often piecemeal and indirectly, from Marx. Indeed, Georges Sorel and

many other professed revolutionary syndicalists in the early twentieth

century expressly regarded themselves as Marxists and even more

expressly eschewed anarchism. Moreover, revolutionary syndicalism lacks

a strategy for social change beyond the general strike; revolutionary

uprisings such as the famous October and November general strikes in

Russia during 1905 proved to be stirring but ultimately ineffectual.

Indeed, as invaluable as the general strike may be as a prelude to

direct confrontation with the state, they decidedly do not have the

mystical capacity that revolutionary syndicalists assigned to them as

means for social change. Their limitations are striking evidence that,

as episodic forms of direct action, general strikes are not equatable

with revolution nor even with profound social changes, which presuppose

a mass movement and require years of gestation and a clear sense of

direction. Indeed, revolutionary syndicalism exudes a typical ouvrierist

anti-intellectualism that disdains attempts to formulate a purposive

revolutionary direction and has a reverence for proletarian

“spontaneity,” which, at times, has led it into highly self-destructive

situations. Lacking the means for an analysis of their situation, the

Spanish syndicalists (and anarchists) revealed only a minimal capacity

to understand the situation in which they found themselves after their

victory over Franco’s forces in the summer of 1936 and no capacity to

take “the next step” to institutionalize a workers and peasants’ form of

government.

What these observations add up to is that Marxists, revolutionary

syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a fallacious

understanding of politics, which should be conceived as the civic arena

and the institutions by which people democratically and directly manage

their community affairs. Indeed, the Left has repeatedly mistaken

statecraft for politics by its persistent failure to understand that the

two are not only radically different but exist in radical tension—in

fact, opposition—to each other. As I have written elsewhere,

historically, politics did not emerge from the state—an apparatus whose

professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the

exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of a privileged class.

Rather, politics, almost by definition, is the active engagement of free

citizens in the handling of their municipal affairs and in their defense

of its freedom. One can almost say that politics is the “embodiment” of

what the French revolutionaries of the 1790s called civicisme. Quite

properly, in fact, the word politics itself contains the Greek word for

“city” or polis, and its use in classical Athens, together with

democracy, connoted the direct governing of the city by its citizens.

Centuries of civic degradation, marked particularly by the formation of

classes, were necessary to produce the state and its corrosive

absorption of the political realm.

A defining feature of the Left is precisely the Marxist, anarchist, and

revolutionary syndicalist belief that no distinction exists, in

principle, between the political realm and the statist realm. By

emphasizing the nation-state—including a “workers’ state”—as the locus

of economic as well as political power, Marx (as well as libertarians)

notoriously failed to demonstrate how workers could fully and directly

control such a state without the mediation of an empowered bureaucracy

and essentially statist (or equivalently, in the case of libertarians,

governmental) institutions. As a result, the Marxists unavoidably saw

the political realm, which it designated a workers’ state, as a

repressive entity, ostensibly based on the interests of a single class:

the proletariat.

Revolutionary syndicalism, for its part, emphasized factory control by

workers’ committees and confederal economic councils as the locus of

social authority, thereby simply bypassing any popular institutions that

existed outside the economy. Oddly, this was economic determinism with a

vengeance, which, tested by the experiences of the Spanish revolution of

1936, proved completely ineffectual. A vast domain of real governmental

power, from military affairs to the administration of justice, fell to

the Stalinists and the liberals of Spain, who used their authority to

subvert the libertarian movement and with it, the revolutionary

achievements of the syndicalist workers in July 1936, or what was dourly

called by one novelist “The Brief Summer of Spanish Anarchism.”

As for anarchism, Bakunin expressed the typical view of its adherents in

1871 when he wrote that the new social order could be created “only

through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or

antipolitical social power of the working class in city and country,”

thereby rejecting with characteristic inconsistency the very municipal

politics that he sanctioned in Italy around the same year. Accordingly,

anarchists have long regarded every government as a state and condemned

it—a view that is a recipe for the elimination of any organized social

life whatever. While the state is the instrument by which an oppressive

and exploitative class regulates and coercively controls the behavior of

an exploited class by a ruling class, a government—or better still, a

polity—is an ensemble of institutions designed to deal with the problems

of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner. Every

institutionalized association that constitutes a system for handling

public affairs—with or without the presence of a state—is necessarily a

government. By contrast, every state, although necessarily a form of

government, is a force for class repression and control.

Annoying as it must seem to Marxists and anarchists alike, the cry for a

constitution, for a responsible and a responsive government, and even

for law or nomos has been clearly articulated—and committed to print!—by

the oppressed for centuries against the capricious rule exercised by

monarchs, nobles, and bureaucrats. The libertarian opposition to law,

not to speak of government as such, has been as silly as the image of a

snake swallowing its tail. What remains in the end is nothing but a

retinal afterimage that has no existential reality.

The issues raised in the preceding pages are of more than academic

interest. As we enter the twenty-first century, social radicals need a

socialism—libertarian and revolutionary—that is neither an extension of

the peasant-craft “associationism” that lies at the core of anarchism

nor the proletarianism that lies at the core of revolutionary

syndicalism and Marxism. However fashionable the traditional ideologies

(particularly anarchism) may be among young people today, a truly

progressive socialism that is informed by libertarian as well as Marxian

ideas but transcends these older ideologies must provide intellectual

leadership.

For political radicals today to simply resuscitate Marxism, anarchism,

or revolutionary syndicalism and endow them with ideological immortality

would be obstructive to the development of a relevant radical movement.

A new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook is needed, one that is

capable of systematically addressing the generalized issues that may

potentially bring most of society into opposition to an ever-evolving

and changing capitalist system.

The clash between a predatory society based on indefinite expansion and

nonhuman nature has given rise to an ensemble of ideas that has emerged

as the explication of the present social crisis and meaningful radical

change. Social ecology, a coherent vision of social development that

intertwines the mutual impact of hierarchy and class on the civilizing

of humanity, has for decades argued that we must reorder social

relations so that humanity can live in a protective balance with the

natural world.

Contrary to the simplistic ideology of “eco-anarchism,” social ecology

maintains that an ecologically oriented society can be progressive

rather than regressive, placing a strong emphasis not on primitivism,

austerity, and denial but on material pleasure and ease. If a society is

to be capable of making life not only vastly enjoyable for its members

but also leisurely enough that they can engage in the intellectual and

cultural self-cultivation that is necessary for creating civilization

and a vibrant political life, it must not denigrate technics and science

but bring them into accord with visions of human happiness and leisure.

Social ecology is an ecology not of hunger and material deprivation but

of plenty; it seeks the creation of a rational society in which waste,

indeed excess, will be controlled by a new system of values; and when or

if shortages arise as a result of irrational behavior, popular

assemblies will establish rational standards of consumption by

democratic processes. In short, social ecology favors management, plans,

and regulations formulated democratically by popular assemblies, not

freewheeling forms of behavior that have their origin in individual

eccentricities.

It is my contention that Communalism is the overarching political

category most suitable to encompass the fully thought-out and systematic

views of social ecology, including libertarian municipalism and

dialectical naturalism. As an ideology, Communalism draws on the best of

the older Left ideologies—Marxism and anarchism, more properly the

libertarian socialist tradition—while offering a wider and more relevant

scope for our time. From Marxism, it draws the basic project of

formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism that

integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Avowedly

dialectical, it attempts to infuse theory with practice. From anarchism,

it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well as its

recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only

by a libertarian socialist society.

The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical,

historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for

the twenty- first century has not been an offhanded one. The word

originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the

French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of

Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a

nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican

nation-state. Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the

individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor

does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as

embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its

principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main

historical agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the

future to a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal is

clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition:

Communalism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the

English Language, is “a theory or system of government in which

virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a

federation.”

Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest,

most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic potential of

the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse. It

conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at least, as a

transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of

social evolution. The city is the domain where the archaic blood-tie

that was once limited to the unification of families and tribes, to the

exclusion of outsiders, was—juridically, at least—dissolved. It became

the domain where hierarchies based on parochial and sociobiological

attributes of kinship, gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced

by a free society based on a shared common humanity. Potentially, it

remains the domain where the once- feared stranger can be fully absorbed

into the community—initially as a protected resident of a common

territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged in making policy

decisions in the public arena. It is above all the domain where

institutions and values have their roots not in zoology but in civil

human activity.

Looking beyond these historical functions, the municipality constitutes

the only domain for an association based on the free exchange of ideas

and a creative endeavor to bring the capacities of consciousness to the

service of freedom. It is the domain where a mere animalistic adaptation

to an existing and pregiven environment can be radically supplanted by

proactive, rational intervention into the world—indeed, a world yet to

be made and molded by reason—with a view toward ending the

environmental, social, and political insults to which humanity and the

biosphere have been subjected by classes and hierarchies. Freed of

domination as well as material exploitation—indeed, re-created as a

rational arena for human creativity in all spheres of life—the

municipality becomes the ethical space for the good life. Communalism is

thus no contrived product of mere fancy: it expresses an abiding concept

and practice of political life, formed by a dialectic of social

development and reason.

As an explicitly political body of ideas, Communalism seeks to recover

and advance the development of the city in a form that accords with its

greatest potentialities and historical traditions. This is not to say

that Communalism accepts the municipality as it is today. Quite to the

contrary, the modern municipality is infused with many statist features

and often functions as an agent of the bourgeois nation-state. Today,

when the nation-state still seems supreme, the rights that modern

municipalities possess cannot be dismissed as the epiphenomena of more

basic economic relations. Indeed, to a great degree, they are the

hard-won gains of commoners, who long defended them against assaults by

ruling classes over the course of history—even against the bourgeoisie

itself.

The concrete political dimension of Communalism is known as libertarian

municipalism. In its libertarian municipalist program, Communalism

resolutely seeks to eliminate statist municipal structures and replace

them with the institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks to

radically restructure cities’ governing institutions into popular

democratic assemblies based on neighborhoods, towns, and villages. In

these popular assemblies, citizens—including the middle classes as well

as the working classes—deal with community affairs on a face-to-face

basis, making policy decisions in a direct democracy and giving reality

to the ideal of a humanistic, rational society.

Minimally, if we are to have the kind of free social life to which we

aspire, democracy should be our form of a shared political life. To

address problems and issues that transcend the boundaries of a single

municipality, in turn, the democratized municipalities should join

together to form a broader confederation.

These assemblies and confederations, by their very existence, could then

challenge the legitimacy of the state and statist forms of power. They

could expressly be aimed at replacing state power and statecraft with

popular power and a socially rational transformative politics. And they

would become arenas where class conflicts could be played out and where

classes could be eliminated.

Libertarian municipalists do not delude themselves that the state will

view with equanimity their attempts to replace professionalized power

with popular power.

They harbor no illusions that the ruling classes will indifferently

allow a Communalist movement to demand rights that infringe on the

state’s sovereignty over towns and cities. Historically, regions,

localities, and above all towns and cities have desperately struggled to

reclaim their local sovereignty from the state (albeit not always for

high-minded purposes). Communalists’ attempt to restore the powers of

towns and cities and to knit them together into confederations can be

expected to evoke increasing resistance from national institutions. That

the new popular-assemblyist municipal confederations will embody a dual

power against the state that becomes a source of growing political

tension is obvious. Either a Communalist movement will be radicalized by

this tension and will resolutely face all its consequences or it will

surely sink into a morass of compromises that absorb it back into the

social order that it once sought to change. How the movement meets this

challenge is a clear measure of its seriousness in seeking to change the

existing political system and the social consciousness it develops as a

source of public education and leadership.

Communalism constitutes a critique of hierarchical and capitalist

society as a whole. It seeks to alter not only the political life of

society but also its economic life. On this score, its aim is not to

nationalize the economy or retain private ownership of the means of

production but to municipalize the economy. It seeks to integrate the

means of production into the existential life of the municipality such

that every productive enterprise falls under the purview of the local

assembly, which decides how it will function to meet the interests of

the community as a whole. The separation between life and work, so

prevalent in the modern capitalist economy, must be overcome so that

citizens’ desires and needs, the artful challenges of creation in the

course of production, and role of production in fashioning thought and

self-definition are not lost. “Humanity makes itself,” to cite the title

of V. Gordon Childe’s book on the urban revolution at the end of the

Neolithic age and the rise of cities, and it does so not only

intellectually and aesthetically but by expanding human needs as well as

the productive methods for satisfying them. We discover ourselves—our

potentialities and their actualization —through creative and useful work

that not only transforms the natural world but leads to our

self-formation and self-definition.

We must also avoid the parochialism and ultimately the desires for

proprietorship that have afflicted so many self-managed enterprises,

such as the “collectives” in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. Not

enough has been written about the drift among many “socialistic”

self-managed enterprises, even under the red and red-and-black flags,

respectively, of revolutionary Russia and revolutionary Spain, toward

forms of collective capitalism that ultimately led many of these

concerns to compete with one another for raw materials and markets.

Most importantly, in Communalist political life, workers of different

occupations would take their seats in popular assemblies not as workers—

printers, plumbers, foundry workers, and the like, with special

occupational interests to advance—but as citizens, whose overriding

concern should be the general interest of the society in which they

live. Citizens should be freed of their particularistic identity as

workers, specialists, and individuals concerned primarily with their own

particularistic interests. Municipal life should become a school for the

formation of citizens, both by absorbing new citizens and by educating

the young, while the assemblies themselves should function not only as

permanent decision-making institutions but as arenas for educating the

people in handling complex civic and regional affairs.

In a Communalist way of life, conventional economics, with its focus on

prices and scarce resources, would be replaced by ethics, with its

concern for human needs and the good life. Human solidarity—or philia,

as the Greeks called it— would replace material gain and egotism.

Municipal assemblies would become not only vital arenas for civic life

and decision-making but centers where the shadowy world of economic

logistics, properly coordinated production, and civic operations would

be demystified and opened to the scrutiny and participation of the

citizenry as a whole. The emergence of the new citizen would mark a

transcendence of the particularistic class being of traditional

socialism and the formation of the “new man,” which the Russian

revolutionaries hoped they could eventually achieve. Humanity would now

be able to rise to the universal state of consciousness and rationality

that the great utopians of the nineteenth century and the Marxists hoped

their efforts would create, opening the way to humanity’s fulfillment as

a species that embodies reason rather than material interest and that

affords material postscarcity rather than an austere harmony enforced by

a morality of scarcity and material deprivation.

Classical Athenian democracy of the fifth century BCE, the source of the

Western democratic tradition, was based on face-to-face decision-making

in communal assemblies of the people and confederations of those

municipal assemblies. For more than two millennia, the political

writings of Aristotle recurrently served to heighten our awareness of

the city as the arena for the fulfillment of human potentialities for

reason, self-consciousness, and the good life. Appropriately, Aristotle

traced the emergence of the polis from the family or oikos, that is, the

realm of necessity, where human beings satisfied their basically

animalistic needs and where authority rested with the eldest male. But

the association of several families, he observed, “aim[ed] at something

more than the supply of daily needs”; this aim initiated the earliest

political formation, the village. Aristotle famously described man (by

which he meant the adult Greek male) as a “political animal” (politikon

zoon), who presided over family members not only to meet their material

needs but as the material precondition for his participation in

political life, in which discourse and reason replaced mindless deeds,

custom, and violence. Thus, “when several villages are united in a

single complete community (koinonan), large enough to be nearly or quite

self- sufficing,” he continued, “the polis comes into existence,

originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for

the sake of a good life.”

For Aristotle, and we may assume also for the ancient Athenians, the

municipality’s proper functions were thus not strictly instrumental or

even economic. As the locale of human consociation, the municipality,

and the social and political arrangements that people living there

constructed, was humanity’s telos, the arena par excellence where human

beings, over the course of history, could actualize their potentiality

for reason, self-consciousness, and creativity.

Thus, for the ancient Athenians, politics denoted not only the handling

of the practical affairs of a polity but civic activities that were

charged with moral obligation to one’s community. All citizens of a city

were expected to participate in civic activities as ethical beings.

Examples of municipal democracy were not limited to ancient Athens.

Quite to the contrary, long before class differentiations gave rise to

the state, many relatively secular towns produced the earliest

institutional structures of local democracy. Assemblies of the people

may have existed in ancient Sumer at the very beginning of the so-called

“urban revolution” some seven or eight thousand years ago. They clearly

appeared among the Greeks, and until the defeat of the Gracchus

brothers, they were popular centers of power in republican Rome. They

were nearly ubiquitous in the medieval towns of Europe and even in

Russia, notably in Novgorod and Pskov, which, for a time, were among the

most democratic cities in the Slavic world. The assembly, it should be

emphasized, began to approximate its truly modern form in the

neighborhood Parisian sections of 1793, when they became the authentic

motive forces of the Great Revolution and conscious agents for the

making of a new body politic. That they were never given the

consideration they deserve in the literature on democracy, particularly

democratic Marxist tendencies and revolutionary syndicalists, is

dramatic evidence of the flaws that existed in the revolutionary

tradition.

These democratic municipal institutions normally existed in combative

tension with grasping monarchs, feudal lords, wealthy families, and

freebooting invaders until they were crushed, frequently in bloody

struggles. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that every great

revolution in modern history had a civic dimension that has been

smothered in radical histories by an emphasis on class antagonisms,

however important these antagonisms have been. Thus, it is unthinkable

that the English Revolution of the 1640s can be understood without

singling out London as its terrain; or, by the same token, any

discussions of the various French Revolutions without focusing on Paris,

or the Russian Revolutions without dwelling on Petrograd, or the Spanish

Revolution of 1936 without citing Barcelona as its most advanced social

center. This centrality of the city is not a mere geographic fact; it

is, above all, a profoundly political one, which involved the ways in

which revolutionary masses aggregated and debated, the civic traditions

that nourished them, and the environment that fostered their

revolutionary views.

Libertarian municipalism is an integral part of the Communalist

framework, indeed its praxis, just as Communalism as a systematic body

of revolutionary thought is meaningless without libertarian

municipalism. The differences between Communalism and authentic or

“pure” anarchism, let alone Marxism, are much too great to be spanned by

a prefix such as anarcho-, social, neo-, or even libertarian.

Any attempt to reduce Communalism to a mere variant of anarchism would

be to deny the integrity of both ideas; indeed, to ignore their

conflicting concepts of democracy, organization, elections, government,

and the like. Gustave Lefrançais, the Paris Communard who may have

coined this political term, adamantly declared that he was “a

Communalist, not an anarchist.”

Above all, Communalism is engaged with the problem of power. In marked

contrast to the various kinds of communitarian enterprises favored by

many self- designated anarchists, such as “people’s” garages, print

shops, food co-ops, and backyard gardens, adherents of Communalism

mobilize themselves to electorally engage in a potentially important

center of power—the municipal council—and try to compel it to create

legislatively potent neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies, it

should be emphasized, would make every effort to delegitimate and depose

the statist organs that currently control their villages, towns, or

cities and thereafter act as the real engines in the exercise of power.

Once a number of municipalities are democratized along Communalist

lines, they would methodically confederate into municipal leagues and

challenge the role of the nation-state and, through popular assemblies

and confederal councils, try to acquire control over economic and

political life.

Finally, Communalism, in contrast to anarchism, decidedly calls for

decision- making by majority voting as the only equitable way for a

large number of people to make decisions. Authentic anarchists claim

that this principle—the “rule” of the minority by the majority—is

authoritarian and propose instead to make decisions by consensus.

Consensus, in which single individuals can veto majority decisions,

threatens to abolish society as such. A free society is not one in which

its members, like Homer’s lotus-eaters, live in a state of bliss without

memory, temptation, or knowledge. Like it or not, humanity has eaten of

the fruit of knowledge, and its memories are laden with history and

experience. In a lived mode of freedom—contrary to mere café chatter—the

rights of minorities to express their dissenting views will always be

protected as fully as the rights of majorities. Any abridgements of

those rights would be instantly corrected by the community—hopefully

gently, but if unavoidable, forcefully—lest social life collapse into

sheer chaos. Indeed, the views of a minority would be treasured as a

potential source of new insights and nascent truths that, if abridged,

would deny society the sources of creativity and developmental

advances—for new ideas generally emerge from inspired minorities that

gradually gain the centrality they deserve at a given time and

place—until, again, they too are challenged as the conventional wisdom

of a period that is beginning to pass away and requires new (minority)

views to replace frozen orthodoxies.

It remains to ask, How are we to achieve this rational society? One

anarchist writer would have it that the good society (or a true

“natural” disposition of affairs, including a “natural man”) exists

beneath the oppressive burdens of civilization like fertile soil beneath

the snow. It follows from this mentality that all we are obliged to do

to achieve the good society is to somehow eliminate the snow, which is

to say capitalism, nation-states, churches, conventional schools, and

other almost endless types of institutions that perversely embody

domination in one form or another. Presumably, an anarchist society—once

state, governmental, and cultural institutions are merely removed—would

emerge intact, ready to function and thrive as a free society. Such a

“society,” if one can even call it such, would not require that we

proactively create it; we would simply let the snow above it melt away.

The process of rationally creating a free Communalist society, alas,

will require substantially more thought and work than embracing a

mystified concept of aboriginal innocence and bliss.

A Communalist society should rest, above all, on the efforts of a new

radical organization to change the world—one that has a new political

vocabulary to explain its goals, and a new program and theoretical

framework to make those goals coherent. It would, above all, require

dedicated individuals who are willing to take on the responsibilities of

education and leadership. Unless words are not to become completely

mystified and obscure a reality that exists before our very eyes, it

should minimally be acknowledged that leadership always exists and does

not disappear because it is clouded by euphemisms such as “militants”

or, as in Spain, “influential militants.” It must also be acknowledged

that many individuals in earlier groups, like the CNT, were not just

“influential militants” but outright leaders, whose views were given

more consideration—and deservedly so!—than those of others because they

were based on more experience, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as the

psychological traits that were needed to provide effective guidance. A

serious libertarian approach to leadership would indeed acknowledge the

reality and crucial importance of leaders—all the more to establish the

greatly needed formal structures and regulations that can effectively

control and modify the activities of leaders and recall them when the

membership decides their respect is being misused or when leadership

becomes an exercise in the abuse of power.

A libertarian municipalist movement should function, not with the

adherence of flippant and tentative members, but with people who have

been schooled in the movement’s ideas, procedures, and activities. They

should, in effect, demonstrate a serious commitment to their

organization—an organization whose structure is laid out explicitly in a

formal constitution and appropriate bylaws. Without a democratically

formulated and approved institutional framework whose members and

leaders can be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of

responsibility cease to exist. Indeed, it is precisely when a membership

is no longer responsible to its constitutional and regulatory provisions

that authoritarianism develops and eventually leads to the movement’s

immolation.

Freedom from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear,

concise, and detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions that power

and leadership are forms of “rule” or by libertarian metaphors that

conceal their reality. It has been precisely when an organization fails

to articulate these regulatory details that the conditions emerge for

its degeneration and decay.

Ironically, no stratum has been more insistent in demanding its freedom

to exercise its will against regulation than chiefs, monarchs, nobles,

and the bourgeoisie; similarly, even well-meaning anarchists have seen

individual autonomy as the true expression of freedom from the

“artificialities” of civilization. In the realm of true freedom, that

is, freedom that has been actualized as the result of consciousness,

knowledge, and necessity, to know what we can and cannot do is more

cleanly honest and true to reality than to avert the responsibility of

knowing the limits of the lived world. As Marx observed more than a

century and a half ago, “Men make their own history, but they do not

make it just as they please.”

The need for the international Left to advance courageously beyond a

Marxist, anarchist, syndicalist, or vague socialist framework toward a

Communalist framework is particularly compelling today. Rarely in the

history of leftist political ideas have ideologies been so wildly and

irresponsibly muddled; rarely has ideology itself been so disparaged;

rarely has the cry for “Unity!” on any terms been heard with such

desperation. To be sure, the various tendencies that oppose capitalism

should indeed unite around efforts to discredit and ultimately efface

the market system. To such ends, unity is an invaluable desideratum: a

united front of the entire Left is needed in order to counter the

entrenched system —indeed, culture—of commodity production and exchange,

and to defend the residual rights that the masses have won in earlier

struggles against oppressive governments and social systems.

The urgency of this need, however, does not require movement

participants to abandon mutual criticism or to stifle their criticism of

the authoritarian traits present in anticapitalist organization. Least

of all does it require them to compromise the integrity and identity of

their various programs. The vast majority of participants in today’s

movement are inexperienced young radicals who have come of age in an era

of postmodernist relativism. As a consequence, the movement is marked by

a chilling eclecticism, in which tentative opinions are chaotically

mismarried to ideals that should rest on soundly objective premises.

In a milieu where the clear expression of ideas is not valued and terms

are inappropriately used, and where argumentation is disparaged as

“aggressive” and worse, “divisive,” it becomes difficult to formulate

ideas in the crucible of debate. Ideas grow and mature best, in fact,

not in the silence and controlled humidity of an ideological nursery but

in the tumult of dispute and mutual criticism.

Following revolutionary socialist practices of the past, Communalists

would try to formulate a minimum program that calls for the satisfaction

of immediate concerns, such as improved wages and shelter or adequate

park space and transportation. This minimum program would aim to satisfy

the most elemental needs of the people, to improve their access to the

resources that make daily life tolerable. The maximum program, by

contrast, would present an image of what human life could be like under

libertarian socialism, at least as far as such a society is foreseeable

in a world that is continually changing under the impact of seemingly

unending industrial revolutions.

Even more, however, Communalists would see their program and practice as

a process. Indeed, a transitional program in which each new demand

provides the springboard for escalating demands that lead toward more

radical and eventually revolutionary demands. One of the most striking

examples of a transitional demand was the programmatic call in the late

nineteenth century by the Second International for a popular militia to

replace a professional army. In still other cases, revolutionary

socialists demanded that railroads be publically owned (or, as

revolutionary syndicalists might have demanded, be controlled by

railroad workers) rather than privately owned and operated. None of

these demands were in themselves revolutionary, but they opened

pathways, politically, to revolutionary forms of ownership and

operation, which, in turn, could be escalated to achieve the movement’s

maximum program. Others might criticize such step-by-step endeavors as

“reformist,” but Communalists do not contend that a Communalist society

can be legislated into existence. What these demands try to achieve, in

the short term, are new rules of engagement between the people and

capital—rules that are all the more needed at a time when “direct

action” is being confused with protests of mere events whose agenda is

set entirely by the ruling classes.

On the whole, Communalism is trying to rescue a realm of public action

and discourse that is either disappearing or that is being reduced to

often-meaningless engagements with the police, or to street theater

that, however artfully, reduces serious issues to simplistic

performances that have no instructive influence. By contrast,

Communalists try to build lasting organizations and institutions that

can play a socially transformative role in the real world.

Significantly, Communalists do not hesitate to run candidates in

municipal elections who, if elected, would use what real power their

offices confer to legislate popular assemblies into existence. These

assemblies, in turn, would have the power ultimately to create effective

forms of town-meeting government. Inasmuch as the emergence of the

city—and city councils—long preceded the emergence of class society,

councils based on popular assemblies are not inherently statist organs,

and to participate seriously in municipal elections countervails

reformist socialist attempts to elect statist delegates by offering the

historical libertarian vision of municipal confederations as a

practical, combative, and politically credible popular alternative to

state power. Indeed, Communalist candidacies, which explicitly denounce

parliamentary candidacies as opportunist, keep alive the debate over how

libertarian socialism can be achieved—a debate that has been languishing

for years.

There should be no self-deception about the opportunities that exist as

a means of transforming our irrational society into a rational one. Our

choices on how to transform the existing society are still on the table

of history and are faced with immense problems. But unless present and

future generations are beaten into complete submission by a culture

based on queasy calculation as well as by police with tear gas and water

cannons, we cannot desist from fighting for what freedoms we have and

try to expand them into a free society wherever the opportunity to do so

emerges. At any rate, we now know, in the light of all the weaponry and

means of ecological destruction that are at hand, that the need for

radical change cannot be indefinitely deferred. What is clear is that

human beings are much too intelligent not to have a rational society;

the most serious question we face is whether they are rational enough to

achieve one.

November 2002

The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society

In addressing the sources of our present ecological and social problems,

perhaps the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is

that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of

human by human. The primary implication of this most basic message is a

call for a politics and even an economics that offer a democratic

alternative to the nation-state and the market society. Here I offer a

broad sketch of these issues to lay the groundwork for the changes

necessary in moving toward a free and ecological society.

First, the most fundamental route to a resolution of our ecological

problems is social in character. That is to say, if we are faced with

the prospect of outright ecological catastrophe, toward which so many

knowledgeable people and institutions claim we are headed today, it is

because the historic domination of human by human has been extended

outward from society into the natural world.

Until domination as such is removed from social life and replaced by a

truly communitarian, egalitarian, and sharing society, powerful

ideological, technological, and systemic forces will be used by the

existing society to degrade the environment, indeed the entire

biosphere. Hence, more than ever today, it is imperative that we develop

the consciousness and the movement to remove domination from society,

indeed from our everyday lives—in relationships between the young and

the elderly, between women and men, in educational institutions and

workplaces, and in our attitude toward the natural world. To permit the

poison of domination—and a domineering sensibility—to persist is, at

this time, to ignore the most basic roots of our ecological as well as

social problems and their sources, which can be traced back to the very

inception of our civilization.

Second, and more specifically, the modern market society that we call

capitalism and its alter ego, “state socialism,” have brought all the

historic problems of domination to a head. The consequences of this

“grow or die” market economy must inexorably lead to the destruction of

the natural basis for complex life forms, including humanity. It is all

too common these days, however, to single out either population growth

or technology, or both, to blame for the ecological dislocations that

beset us. But we cannot single out either of these as “causes” of

problems whose most deep-seated roots actually lie in the market

economy.

Attempts to focus on these alleged “causes” are scandalously deceptive

and shift our focus away from the social issues we must resolve.

In the American experience, people only a generation or two removed from

my own slashed their way through the vast forests of the West, nearly

exterminated millions of bison, plowed fertile grasslands, and laid

waste to a vast part of a continent—all using only hand axes, simple

plows, horse-drawn vehicles, and simple hand tools. It required no

technological revolution to create the present devastation of what had

once been a vast and fecund region capable, with rational management, of

sustaining both human and nonhuman life. What brought so much ruin to

the land was not the technological implements that those earlier

generations of Americans used but the insane drive of entrepreneurs to

succeed in the bitter struggle of the marketplace, to expand and devour

the riches of their competitors lest they be devoured in turn by their

rivals. In my own lifetime, millions of small American farmers were

driven from their homes not only by natural disasters but by huge

agricultural corporations that turned so much of the landscape into a

vast industrial system for cultivating food.

Not only has a society based on endless, wasteful growth devastated

entire regions, indeed a continent, with only a simple technology, the

ecological crisis it has produced is systemic—and not a matter of

misinformation, spiritual insensitivity, or lack of moral integrity. The

present social illness lies not only in the outlook that pervades the

present society; it lies above all in the very structure and law of life

in the system itself, in its imperative, which no entrepreneur or

corporation can ignore without facing destruction: growth, more growth,

and still more growth. Blaming technology for the ecological crisis

serves, however unintentionally, to blind us to the ways technology

could in fact play a creative role in a rational, ecological society. In

such a society, the intelligent use of a sophisticated technology would

be direly needed to restore the vast ecological damage that has already

been inflicted on the biosphere, much of which will not repair itself

without creative human intervention.

Along with technology, population is commonly singled out for blame as

an alleged “cause” of the ecological crisis. But population is by no

means the overwhelming threat that some disciples of Malthus in today’s

ecology movements would have us believe. People do not reproduce like

the fruit flies that are so often cited as examples of mindless

reproductive growth. They are products of culture, as well as biological

nature. Given decent living standards, reasonably educated families

often have fewer children in order to improve the quality of their

lives. Given education, moreover, and a consciousness of gender

oppression, women no longer allow themselves to be reduced to mere

reproductive factories.

Instead, they stake out claims as humans with all the rights to

meaningful and creative lives. Ironically, technology has played a major

role in eliminating the domestic drudgery that for centuries culturally

stupefied women and reduced them to mere servants of men and men’s

desire to have children—preferably sons, to be sure. In any case, even

if population were to decline for an unspecified reason, the large

corporations would try to get people to buy more and still more to

render economic expansion possible. Failing to attain a large enough

domestic consumers market in which to expand, corporate minds would turn

to international markets— or to that most lucrative of all markets, the

military.

Finally, well-meaning people who regard New Age moralism,

psychotherapeutic approaches, or personal lifestyle changes as the key

to resolving the present ecological crisis are destined to be tragically

disappointed.

No matter how much this society paints itself green or orates on the

need for an ecological outlook, the way society literally breathes

cannot be undone unless it undergoes profound structural changes:

namely, by replacing competition with cooperation, and profit-seeking

with relationships based on sharing and mutual concern. Given the

present market economy, a corporation or entrepreneur who tried to

produce goods in accordance with even a minimally decent ecological

outlook would rapidly be devoured by a rival in a marketplace whose

selective process of competition rewards the most villainous at the

expense of the most virtuous. After all, “business is business,” as the

maxim has it. And business allows no room for people who are restrained

by conscience or moral qualms, as the many scandals in the “business

community” attest. Attempting to win the “business community” to an

ecological sensibility, let alone to ecologically beneficial practices,

would be like asking predatory sharks to live on grass or “persuading”

lions to lovingly lie down beside lambs.

The fact is that we are confronted by a thoroughly irrational social

system, not simply by predatory individuals who can be won over to

ecological ideas by moral arguments, psychotherapy, or even the

challenges of a troubled public to their products and behavior. It is

less that these entrepreneurs control the present system of savage

competition and endless growth than it is that the present system of

savage competition and growth controls them. The stagnation of New Age

ideology today in the United States attests to its tragic failure to

“improve” a social system that must be completely replaced if we are to

resolve our ecological crisis. One can only commend the individuals who

by virtue of their consumption habits, recycling activities, and appeals

for a new sensibility undertake public activities to stop ecological

degradation. Each surely does his or her part. But it will require a

much greater effort—an organized, clearly conscious, and forward-

looking political movement—to meet the basic challenges posed by our

aggressively anti-ecological society.

Yes, we as individuals should change our lifestyles as much as possible,

but it is the utmost shortsightedness to believe that that is all, or

even primarily, what we have to do. We need to restructure the entire

society, even as we engage in lifestyle changes and single-issue

struggles against pollution, nuclear power plants, the excessive use of

fossil fuels, the destruction of soil, and so forth. We must have a

coherent analysis of the deep-seated hierarchical relationships and

systems of domination, as well as of class relationships and economic

exploitation that degrade people as well as the environment. Here, we

must move beyond the insights provided by the Marxists, syndicalists,

and even many liberal economists who for years reduced most social

antagonisms and problems to class analysis. Class struggle and economic

exploitation still exist, and Marxist class analysis reveals inequities

about the present social order that are intolerable.

But the Marxian and liberal belief that capitalism has played a

“revolutionary role” in destroying traditional communities and that

technological advances seeking to “conquer” nature are a precondition

for freedom rings terribly hollow today when many of these very advances

are being used to make the most formidable weapons and means of

surveillance the world has ever seen. Nor could the Marxian socialists

of the 1930s have anticipated how successfully capitalism would use its

technological prowess to co-opt the working class and even diminish its

numbers in relationship to the rest of the population.

Yes, class struggles still exist, but they occur farther and farther

below the threshold of class war. Workers, as I can attest from my own

experience as a foundryman and as an autoworker for General Motors, do

not regard themselves as mindless adjuncts to machines or as factory

dwellers or even as “instruments of history,” as Marxists might put it.

They regard themselves as living human beings: as fathers and mothers,

as sons and daughters, as people with dreams and visions, as members of

communities—not only of trade unions. Living in towns and cities, their

eminently human aspirations go well beyond their “historic role” as

class agents of “history.” They suffer from the pollution of their

communities as well as from their factories, and they are as concerned

about the welfare of their children, companions, neighbors, and

communities as they are about their jobs and wage scales.

The overly economistic focus of traditional socialism and syndicalism

has in recent years caused these movements to lag behind emerging

ecological issues and visions—as they lagged, I may add, behind feminist

concerns, cultural issues, and urban issues, all of which often cut

across class lines to include middle-class people, intellectuals, small

proprietors, and even some bourgeois. Their failure to confront

hierarchy—not only class and domination, not only economic

exploitation—has often alienated women from socialism and syndicalism to

the extent that they awakened to the ages-old reality that they have

been oppressed irrespective of their class status. Similarly, broad

community concerns like pollution afflict people as such, whatever the

class to which they belong.

Disasters like the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine justly

panicked everyone exposed to radiation from the plant, not simply

workers and peasants. Indeed, even if we were to achieve a classless

society free of economic exploitation, would we readily achieve a

rational society? Would women, young people, the infirm, the elderly,

people of color, various oppressed ethnic groups— the list is, in fact,

enormous—be free of domination? The answer is a categorical no—a fact to

which women can certainly attest, even within the socialist and

syndicalist movements themselves. Without eliminating the ancient

hierarchical and domineering structures from which classes and the state

actually emerged, we would have made only a part of the changes needed

to achieve a rational society.

There would still be a historic toxicant in a socialist or syndicalist

society— hierarchy—that would continually erode its highest ideals,

namely, the achievement of a truly free and ecological society.

Perhaps the most disquieting feature of many radical groups today,

particularly socialists who may accept the foregoing observation, is

their commitment to at least a minimal state that would coordinate and

administer a classless and egalitarian society—a nonhierarchical one, no

less! One hears this argument from Andre Gorz and many others who,

presumably because of the “complexities” of modern society, cannot

conceive of the administration of economic affairs without some kind of

coercive mechanism, albeit one with a “human face.”

This logistical and in some cases frankly authoritarian view of the

human condition (as expressed in the writings of Arne Naess, the father

of Deep Ecology) reminds one of a dog chasing its tail. Simply because

the “tail” is there —a metaphor for economic “complexity” or market

systems of distribution—does not mean that the metaphorical “dog” must

chase it in circles that lead nowhere.

The “tail” we have to worry about can be rationally simplified by

reducing or eliminating commercial bureaucracies, needless reliance on

goods from abroad that can be produced by recycling at home, and the

underutilization of local resources that are now ignored because they

are not “competitively” priced: in short, eliminating the vast

paraphernalia of goods and services that may be indispensable to

profit-making and competition but not to the rational distribution of

goods in a cooperative society. The painful reality is that most excuses

in radical theory for preserving a “minimal state” stem from the myopic

visions of ecosocialists who can accept the present system of production

and exchange as it is to one degree or another—not as it should be in a

moral economy. So conceived, production and distribution seem more

formidable—with their bureaucratic machinery, irrational division of

labor, and “global” nature—than they actually need be. It would take no

great wisdom or array of computers to show with even a grain of

imagination how the present “global” system of production and

distribution can be simplified and still provide a decent standard of

living for everyone. Indeed, it took only some five years to rebuild a

ruined Germany after the Second World War, far longer than it would

require thinking people today to remove the statist and bureaucratic

apparatus for administering the global distribution of goods and

resources.

What is even more disquieting is the naïve belief that a “minimal state”

could indeed remain “minimal.” If history has shown anything, it is that

the state, far from being only an instrument of a ruling elite, becomes

an organism in its own right that grows as unrelentingly as a cancer.

Anarchism, in this respect, has exhibited a prescience that discloses

the terrifying weakness of the traditional socialist commitment to a

state—proletarian, social democratic, or “minimal.” To create a state is

to institutionalize power in the form of a machine that exists apart

from the people. It is to professionalize rule and policymaking, to

create a distinct interest (be it of bureaucrats, deputies, commissars,

legislators, the military, the police, ad nauseam) that, however weak or

however well intentioned it may be at first, eventually takes on a

corruptive power of its own. When, over the course of history, have

states—however “minimal”—ever dissolved themselves or constrained their

own growth into massive malignancies? When have they ever remained

“minimal”?

The deterioration of the German Greens—the so-called “nonparty party”

that, after its acquisition of a place in the Bundestag, has now become

a crude political machine—is dramatic evidence that power corrupts with

a vengeance. The idealists who helped found the organization and sought

to use the Bundestag merely as a “platform” for their radical message

have by now either left it in disgust or have themselves become rather

unsavory examples of wanton political careerism. One would have to be

utterly naïve or simply blind to the lessons of history to ignore the

fact that the state, “minimal” or not, absorbs and ultimately digests

even its most well-meaning critics once they enter it. It is not that

statists use the state to abolish it or “minimalize” its effects; it is,

rather, the state that corrupts even the most idealistic antistatists

who flirt with it.

Finally, the most disturbing feature of statism—even “minimal

statism”—is that it completely undermines a politics based on

confederalism. One of the most unfortunate features of traditional

socialist history, Marxian and otherwise, is that it emerged in an era

of nation-state building. The Jacobin model of a centralized

revolutionary state was accepted almost uncritically by

nineteenth-century socialists and became an integral part of the

revolutionary tradition—a tradition, I may add, that mistakenly

associated itself with the nationalistic emphasis of the French

Revolution, as seen in the “Marseillaise” and in its adulation of la

patrie.

Marx’s view that the French revolution was basically a model for

formulating a revolutionary strategy—he mistakenly claimed that its

Jacobin form was the most “classical” of the “bourgeois” revolutions—has

had a disastrous effect upon the revolutionary tradition. Lenin adapted

this vision so completely that the Bolsheviks were rightly considered

the “Jacobins” of the Russian socialist movement, and of course, Stalin

used techniques such as purges, show trials, and brute force with lethal

effects for the socialist project as a whole.

The notion that human freedom can be achieved, much less perpetuated,

through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic—a contradiction in

terms. Attempts to justify the existence of a cancerous phenomenon like

the state and the use of statist measures or “statecraft”—so often

mistakenly called “politics,” which is actually the self-management of

the polis—exclude a radically different form of social management,

namely, confederalism. In fact, for centuries, democratic forms of

confederalism, in which municipalities were coordinated by mandated and

recallable deputies who were always under public scrutiny, have competed

with statist forms and constituted a challenging alternative to

centralization, bureaucratization, and the professionalization of power

in the hands of elite bodies. Let me emphasize that confederalism should

not be confused with federalism, which is simply a continuation of

nation-states in a network of agreements that preserve the prerogatives

of policymaking with little if any citizen involvement. Federalism is

simply the state writ large, indeed, the further centralization of

already centralized states, as in the United States’ federal republic,

the European Community, and the recently formed Commonwealth of

Independent States—all collections of huge continental super-states that

even further remove whatever control people have over nation-states.

A confederalist alternative would be based on a network of policymaking

popular assemblies with recallable deputies to local and regional

confederal councils—councils whose sole function, I must emphasize,

would be to adjudicate differences and undertake strictly administrative

tasks. One could scarcely advance such a prospect by making use of a

state formation of any kind, however minimal. Indeed, to juggle statist

and confederal perspectives in a verbal game by distinguishing “minimal”

from “maximal” is to confuse the basis for a new politics structured

around participatory democracy. Among Greens in the United States, there

have already been tendencies that absurdly call for “decentralization”

and “grassroots democracy” while seeking to run candidates for state and

national offices, that is, for statist institutions, one of whose

essential functions is to confine, restrict, and essentially suppress

local democratic institutions and initiatives. Indeed, as I have

emphasized in other books and essays, when libertarians of all kinds,

but particularly anarchists and ecosocialists, engage in confederal

municipalist politics and run for municipal public office, they are not

merely seeking to remake cities, towns, and villages on the basis of

fully democratic confederal networks, they are running against the state

and parliamentary offices. Hence, to call for a “minimal state,” even as

a coordinative institution, as Andre Gorz and others have done, is to

obscure and countervail any effort to replace the nation-state with a

confederation of municipalities.

It is to the credit of early anarchism and, more recently, to the

eco-anarchism that lies at the core of social ecology, that it firmly

rejects the traditional socialist orientation toward state power and

recognizes the corruptive role of participating in parliamentary

elections. What is regrettable is that this rejection, so clearly

corroborated by the corruption of statist socialists, Greens, and

members of other professed radical movements, was not sufficiently

nuanced to distinguish activity on the municipal level (which even

Mikhail Bakunin regarded as valid) as the basis of politics in the

Hellenic sense: that is to say, to distinguish electoral activity on the

local level from electoral activity on the provincial and national

levels, which really constitute statecraft.

Social ecology, whatever its other value or failings, represents a

coherent interpretation of the enormous ecological and social problems

we face today. Its philosophy, social theory, and political practice

form a vital alternative to the ideological stagnation and tragic

failure of the present socialist, syndicalist, and radical projects that

were so much in vogue even as recently as the 1960s. As to

“alternatives” that offer us New Age or mystical ecological solutions,

what could be more naïve than to believe that a society whose very

metabolism is based on growth, production for its own sake, hierarchy,

classes, domination, and exploitation could be changed simply by moral

suasion, individual action, or a primitivism that essentially views

technology as a curse and that focuses variously on demographic growth

and personal modes of consumption as primary issues?

We must get to the heart of the crisis we face and develop a popular

politics that will eschew statism at one extreme and New Age privatism

at the other. If this goal is dismissed as utopian, I am obliged to

question what many radicals today would call “realism.”

January 1992

A Politics for the Twenty-First Century

It would be helpful to place libertarian municipalism in a broad

historical perspective, all the more to understand its revolutionary

character in human affairs generally as well as its place in the

repertoire of antistatist practices. The commune, the town or city, or

more broadly, the municipality, is not merely a “space” created by a

given density of human habitations. In terms of its history as a

civilizing tendency in humanity’s development, the municipality is

integrally part of the sweeping process whereby human beings began to

dissolve biologically conditioned social relations based on real or

fictitious blood ties, with their primordial hostility to “strangers,”

and slowly replace them by largely social and rational institutions,

rights, and duties that increasingly encompassed all residents of an

urban space, irrespective of consanguinity and biological facts. The

town, city, municipality, or commune (the equivalent word, in Latin

countries, for “municipality”) was the emerging civic substitute, based

on residence and social interests, for the tribal blood group, which had

been based on myths of a common ancestry. The municipality, however

slowly and incompletely, formed the necessary condition for human

association based on rational discourse, material interest, and a

secular culture, irrespective of and often in conflict with ancestral

roots and blood ties. Indeed, the fact that people can gather in local

assemblies, discuss and share creatively in the exchange of ideas

without any hostility or suspicion, despite disparate ethnic,

linguistic, and national backgrounds, is a grand historic achievement of

civilization, one that is the work of centuries involving a painful

discarding of primordial definitions of ancestry and the replacement of

these archaic definitions by reason, knowledge, and a growing sense of

our status as members of a common humanity.

In great part, this humanizing development was the work of the

municipality— the increasingly free space in which people, as people,

began to see each other realistically, steadily unfettered by archaic

notions of biological ties, tribal affiliations, and a mystical,

tradition-laden, and parochial identity. I do not contend that this

process of civilization, a term that derives from the Latin word for

city and citizenship, has been completely achieved. Far from it: without

the existence of a rational society, the municipality can easily become

a megalopolis, in which community, however secular, is replaced by

atomization and an inhuman social scale beyond the comprehension of its

citizens—indeed, the space for class, racial, religious, and other

irrational conflicts.

But both historically and contemporaneously, citification forms the

necessary condition—albeit by no means fully actualized—for the

realization of humanity’s potentiality to become fully human, rational,

and collectivistic, thereby shedding divisions based on presumed blood

affiliations and differences, mindless custom, fearful imaginaries, and

a nonrational, often intuitional, notion of rights and duties.

Hence, the municipality is the potential arena for realizing the great

goal of transforming parochialized human beings into truly universal

human beings, a genuine humanitas, divested of the darker brutish

attributes of the primordial world. The municipality in which all human

beings can be citizens, irrespective of their ethnic background and

ideological convictions, constitutes the true arena of a libertarian

communist society. Metaphorically speaking, it is not only a desideratum

for rational human beings, without which a free society is impossible,

it is also the future of a rational humanity, the indispensable space

for actualizing humanity’s potentialities for freedom and

self-consciousness.

I do not presume to claim that a confederation of libertarian

municipalities—a Commune of communes—has ever existed in the past. Yet,

no matter how frequently I disclaim the existence of any historical

“models” and “paradigms” for libertarian municipalities, my critics

still try to saddle me with the many social defects of Athens,

revolutionary New England towns, and the like, as somehow an integral

part of my “ideals.” I privilege no single city or group of cities—be

they classical Athens, the free cities of the medieval world, the town

meetings of the American Revolution, the sections of the Great French

Revolution, or the anarchosyndicalist collectives that emerged in the

Spanish Revolution—as the full actualization, still less the

comprehensive “models” or “paradigms,” of the libertarian municipalist

vision.

Yet significant features—despite various, often unavoidable distortions—

existed among all of these municipalities and the federations that they

formed.

Their value for us lies in the fact that we can learn from all of them

about the ways in which they practiced the democratic precepts by which

they were guided. And we can incorporate the best of their institutions

for our own and future times, study their defects, and gain inspiration

from the fact that they did exist and functioned with varying degrees of

success for generations, if not centuries.

At present, I think it is important to recognize that when we advance a

politics of libertarian municipalism, we are not engaged in discussing a

mere tactic or strategy for creating a public sphere. Rather, we are

trying to create a new political culture that is not only consistent

with anarchist communist goals but that includes real efforts to

actualize these goals, fully cognizant of all the difficulties that face

us and the revolutionary implications that they hold for us in the years

ahead.

Let me note here that the “neighborhood” is not merely the place where

people make their homes, rear their children, and purchase many of their

goods. Under a more political coloration, so to speak, a neighborhood

may well include those vital spaces where people congregate to discuss

political as well as social issues.

Indeed, it is the extent to which public issues are openly discussed in

a city or town that truly defines the neighborhood as an important

political and power space.

By this, I do not mean only an assembly, where citizens discuss and gird

themselves to fight for specific policies; I also mean the neighborhood

as the center of a town, where citizens may gather as a large group to

share their views and give public expression to their policies. This was

the function of the Athenian agora, for example, and the town squares in

the Middle Ages. The spaces for political life may be multiple, but they

are generally highly specific and definable, not random or ad hoc.

Such essentially political neighborhoods have often appeared in times of

unrest, when sizable numbers of individuals spontaneously occupy spaces

for discussion, as in the Hellenic agora. I recall them during my own

youth in New York City, in Union Square and Crotona Park, where hundreds

and possibly thousands of men and women appeared weekly to informally

discuss the issues of the day. Hyde Park in London constituted such a

civic space, as did the Palais-Royal in Paris, which was the breeding

ground of the Great French Revolution and the Revolution of 1830.

And during the early days of the 1848 revolution in Paris, scores

(possibly hundreds) of neighborhood assembly halls existed as clubs and

forums and potentially formed the basis for a restoration of the older

neighborhood sections of 1793. The best estimates indicate that club

membership did not exceed 70,000 out of a total population of about a

million residents. Yet, had this club movement been coordinated by an

active and politically coherent revolutionary organization, it could

have become a formidable, possibly a successful force, during the weeks

of crisis that led to the June insurrection of the Parisian workers.

There is no reason, in principle, why such spaces and the people who

regularly occupy them cannot become citizens’ assemblies as well.

Indeed, like certain sections in the Great French Revolution, they may

well take a leading role in sparking a revolution and pushing it forward

to its logical conclusion.

A problem exists in anarchist communist theory: it fails to acknowledge

that a political sphere, distinguishable from the state and potentially

libertarian in its possibilities, must be acknowledged and its

potentialities for a truly libertarian politics explored. We cannot

content ourselves with simplistically dividing civilization into a

workaday world of everyday life that is properly social, as I call it,

in which we reproduce the conditions of our individual existence at

work, in the home, and among our friends, and, of course, the state,

which reduces us at best to docile observers of the activities of

professionals who administer our civic and national affairs. Between

these two worlds is still another world, the realm of the political,

where our ancestors in the past, at various times and places

historically, exercised varying, sometimes complete control over the

commune and the confederation to which it belonged.

It is a lacuna in anarchist communist theory that the political was

conflated with the state, thereby effacing a major distinction between a

political sphere in which people in varying degrees exercised power,

often through direct assemblies, over their civic environment, and the

state, in which people had no direct control, often no control at all,

over that environment.

If politics is denatured to mean little more than statecraft and the

manipulation of people by their so-called “representatives,” then a

condition that has acquired varying forms of expression in the classical

Athenian assembly, popular medieval civic assemblies, town meetings, and

the revolutionary sectional assemblies of Paris, is conveniently erased

and the multitudinous institutions for managing a municipality become

reducible to the behavior of cynical parliamentarians or worse. It is a

gross simplification of historical development and the world in which we

live to see the political simply as the practice of statecraft. Just as

the tribe emerged long before the city, so the city emerged long before

the state— indeed, often in opposition to it. Mesopotamian cities,

appearing in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers some six

thousand years ago, are believed to have been managed by popular

assemblies long before they were forced by intercity conflicts to

establish state-like institutions and ultimately despotic imperial

institutions. It was in these early cities that politics, that is,

popular ways of managing the city, were born and may very well have

thrived.

The state followed later and elaborated itself institutionally, often in

bitter opposition to tendencies that tried to restore popular control

over civic affairs.

Nor can we afford to ignore the fact that the same conflict also emerged

in early Athens and probably other Greek poleis long before the

development of the state reached a relatively high degree of completion.

One can see the recurrence of similar conflicts in the struggle of the

Gracchi brothers and popular assemblies in Rome against the elitist

Senate and, repeatedly, in the medieval cities, long before the rise of

late medieval aristocracies and the Baroque monarchies of the fifteenth

and sixteenth centuries. Kropotkin did not write nonsense when he

pointed to the free cities of Europe, marked not by the existence of

states but by their absence.

Indeed, let us also acknowledge that the state itself underwent a

process of development and differentiation, at times developing no

further than a loose, almost minimal system of coercion, at other times

extending further into an ever- growing apparatus, and finally, in this

century in particular, acquiring totalitarian control over every aspect

of human existence—an apparatus that was only too familiar thousands of

years ago in Asia and even in Indian America in pre- Columbian times.

The classical Athenian state was only partially statist; it constituted

a fraternity, often riven by class conflicts, of select citizens who

collectively oppressed slaves, women, and even foreign residents. The

medieval state was often a much looser state formation than, say, the

Roman imperial state, and at various times in history (one thinks of the

comuñeros in Spain during the sixteenth century and the sections in

France during the eighteenth), the state almost completely collapsed and

direct democracies based on communalist political principles played a

hegemonic role in social affairs.

Libertarian municipalism is concerned with the political sphere,

including aspects of basic civic importance, such as the economic. It

does not draw strict impenetrable barriers between the two to the point

where they are implacably set against each other. Libertarian

municipalism calls for the municipalization of the economy and, where

material interests between communities overlap, the confederalization of

the economy.

Nor are libertarian municipalists indifferent to the many cultural

factors that must play a role in the formation of true citizens, indeed,

rounded human beings.

But at the same time, let us not reduce every cultural desideratum to

the social sphere—to create the myth that the municipality can be

reduced to a family—and ignore its overlap with the political. The

distinctions between them will only be lost in that poststructural

homogenization of everything, making their unique identities almost

completely meaningless and potentially, in fact, totalitarian.

Thus, the libertarian municipalist arena may be a school for educating

its youth and its mature citizens; but what makes it particularly

significant, especially at this time, is that it is a sphere of power

relations that must be crystallized against capitalism, the marketplace,

the forces for ecological destruction, and the state.

Indeed, without a movement that keeps this need completely in mind,

libertarian municipalism can easily degenerate in this age of academic

specialization into another subject in a classroom curriculum.

Finally, libertarian municipalism rests its politics today on the

historically preemptive role of the city in relation to the state, and

above all on the fact that civic institutions still exist, however

distorted they may appear or however captive to the state they may be,

institutions that can be enlarged, radicalized, and eventually aimed at

the elimination of the state. The city council, however feeble its

powers may be, still exists as the remnant of the communes with which it

was identified in the past, especially in the Great French Revolution

and the Paris Commune of 1871. The possibility of re-creating a

sectional democracy still remains, assuming either a legal or extralegal

form. We must bear in mind that the French revolutionary sections did

not have any prior tradition on which to rest their claims to

legitimacy—indeed, they actually emerged from the elitist assemblies or

districts of 1789, which the monarchy had created to elect the Parisian

deputies to the Estates General—except that they refused to disband

after they completed their electoral role and remained as watchdogs over

the behavior of the Estates in Versailles.

We, too, are faced with the task of restructuring and expanding the

civic democratic institutions that still exist, however vestigial their

forms and powers may be; of attempting to base them on old or new

popular assemblies—and, to be quite categorical, of creating new legal

or, most emphatically, extralegal popular democratic institutions where

vestiges of civic democracy do not exist. In doing so, we are direly in

need of a movement—indeed, a responsible, well-structured, and

programmatically coherent organization—that can provide the educational

resources, means of mobilization, and vital ideas for achieving our

libertarian communist and municipalist goals.

Our program should be flexible in the special sense that it poses

minimum demands that we seek to achieve at once, given the political

sophistication of the community in which we function. But such demands

would easily degenerate into reformism if they did not escalate into a

body of transitional demands that would ultimately lead to our maximum

demands for a libertarian communist society.

Nor can we give up our seemingly utopian vision that the great

metropolitan areas can be structurally decentralized. Cities on the

scale of New York, London, and Paris, not to speak of Mexico City,

Buenos Aires, Bombay, and the like, must ultimately be parceled into

smaller cities and decentralized to a point where they are once again

humanly scaled communities, not huge and incomprehensible urban belts.

Libertarian municipalism takes its immediate point of departure from the

existing facts of urban life, many of which are beyond the comprehension

of its residents. But it always strives to physically as well as

politically fragment the great cities until it achieves the great

anarchist communist and even Marxian goal of scaling all cities to human

dimensions.

Perhaps the most common criticism that both Marxists and anarchists have

presented is the claim that modern cities are too huge to be organized

around workable popular assemblies. Some critics assume that if we are

to have true democracy, everyone from age zero to one hundred,

irrespective of health, mental condition, or disposition, must be

included in a popular assembly—and that an assembly must be as small as

an “affinity group.” But in large world cities, these critics suggest,

which have several million residents, we would require many thousands of

assemblies in order to achieve true democracy. In such cities, such a

multiplicity of small assemblies, they argue, would be just too

cumbersome and unworkable.

But a large urban population is itself no obstacle to libertarian

municipalism. Indeed, based on this kind of calculation—which would

count all residents as participating citizens—the forty-eight Parisian

sections of 1793 would have been completely dysfunctional, in view of

the fact that revolutionary Paris had a total of 500,000 to 600,000

people. If every man, woman, and child, indeed, ever had attended

sectional assemblies, and each assembly had had no more than forty

people, my arithmetic tells me that about 15,000 assemblies would have

been needed to accommodate all the people of revolutionary Paris. Under

such circumstances, one wonders how the French Revolution could ever

have occurred.

A popular democracy, to begin with, is not premised on the idea that

everyone can, will, or even want to attend popular assemblies. Nor

should anyone who professes to be an anarchist make participation

compulsory, coercing everyone into doing so. Even more significantly, it

has rarely happened—indeed, it has never happened, in my knowledge of

revolutionary history—that the great majority of people in a particular

place, still less everyone, engages in revolution. In the face of

insurrection in a revolutionary situation, while unknown militants,

aided by a fairly small number of supporters, rise up and overthrow the

established order, most people tend to be observers.

Having reviewed carefully the course of almost every major revolution in

the Euro-American world, I can say with some knowledge that even in a

completely successful revolution, it was always a minority of the people

who attended meetings of assemblies that made significant decisions

about the fate of their society. The very differentiated political and

social consciousness, interests, education, and backgrounds among masses

in a capitalist society guarantee that people will be drawn into

revolutions in waves, if at all. The foremost, most militant wave, at

first, is numerically surprisingly small; it is followed by seeming

bystanders who, if an uprising seems to be capable of success, merge

with the first wave, and only after the uprising is likely to be

successful do the politically less developed waves, in varying degrees,

follow it. Even after an uprising is successful, it takes time for a

substantial majority of the people to fully participate in the

revolutionary process, commonly as crowds in demonstrations, more rarely

as participants in revolutionary institutions.

In the English Revolution of the 1640s, for example, it was primarily

the Puritan army that raised the most democratic issues, with the

support of the Levellers, who formed a very small fraction of the

civilian population. The American Revolution was notoriously supported,

albeit by no means actively, by only one-third of the colonial

population; the Great French Revolution found its principal support in

Paris and was carried forward by forty-eight sections, most of which

were rooted in assemblies that were poorly attended, except at times

when momentous decisions aroused the most revolutionary neighborhoods.

Indeed, what decided the fate of most revolutions was less the amount of

support their militants received than the degree of resistance they

encountered.

What brought Louis XVI and his family back to Paris from Versailles in

October 1789 was certainly not all the women of Paris—indeed, only a few

thousand made the famous march to Versailles—but the king’s own

inability to mobilize a sufficiently large and reliable force to resist

them. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 in Petrograd, for many

historians the “model” of a mass spontaneous revolution (and an uprising

far more nuanced than most accounts suggest), succeeded because not even

the tsar’s personal guard, let alone such formerly reliable supports of

the autocracy as the Cossacks, was prepared to defend the monarchy.

Indeed, in revolutionary Barcelona in 1936, the resistance to Franco’s

forces was initiated by only a few thousand anarchosyndicalists with the

aid of the Assault Guards, whose discipline, weaponry, and training were

indispensable factors in pinning down and ultimately defeating the

regular army’s uprising.

It is such constellations of forces, in fact, that explain how

revolutions actually succeed. They do not triumph because “everyone,” or

even a majority of the population, actively participates in overthrowing

an oppressive regime, but because the armed forces of the old order and

the population at-large are no longer willing to defend it against a

militant and resolute minority.

Nor is it likely, however desirable it may be, that after a successful

insurrection, the great majority of the people or even the oppressed

will personally participate in revolutionizing society. Following the

success of a revolution, the majority of people tend to withdraw into

the localities in which they live, however large or small, where the

problems of everyday life have their most visible impact on the masses.

These localities may be residential and/or occupational neighborhoods in

large cities, the environs of villages and hamlets, or even at some

distance from the center of a city or region, fairly dispersed

localities in which people live and work.

No—I do not think the large size of modern cities constitutes an

insuperable obstacle to the formation of a neighborhood assembly

movement. The doors of the neighborhood assemblies should always be open

to whoever lives in the neighborhood. Politically less aware individuals

may choose not to attend their neighborhood assembly, and they should

not be obliged to attend. The assemblies, regardless of their size, will

have problems enough without having to deal with indifferent bystanders

and passersby. What counts is that the doors of the assemblies remain

open for all who wish to attend and participate, for therein lies the

true democratic nature of neighborhood assemblies.

Another criticism against libertarian municipalism is that a large

crowd, such as numerous citizens at an assembly meeting, may be

manipulated by a forceful speaker or faction. This criticism could be

directed against any democratic institution, be it a large assembly, a

small committee, an ad hoc conference or meeting, or even an “affinity”

group. The size of the group is not a factor here— some very abusive

tyrannies appear in very small groups, where one or two intimidating

figures can completely dominate everyone else.

What the critics might well ask—but seldom do—is how we are to prevent

persuasive individuals from making demagogic attempts to control any

popular assembly, regardless of size. In my view, the only obstacle to

such attempts is the existence of an organized body of

revolutionaries—yes, even a faction—that is committed to seeking truth,

exercising rationality, and advancing an ethics of public

responsibility. Such an organization will be needed, in my view, not

only before and during a revolution but also after one, when the

constructive problem of creating stable, enduring, and educational

democratic institutions becomes the order of the day.

Such an organization will be particularly needed during the period of

social reconstruction when attempts are made to put libertarian

municipalism into practice. We cannot expect that, because we propose

the establishment of neighborhood assemblies, we will always—or perhaps

even often—be the majority in the very institutions that we have

significantly helped to establish. We must always be prepared, in fact,

to be in the minority, until such time as circumstances and social

instability make our overall messages plausible to assembly majorities.

Indeed, wherever we establish a popular assembly, with or without legal

legitimacy, it will eventually be invaded by competing class interests.

Libertarian municipalism, I should emphasize here, is not an attempt to

overlook or evade the reality of class conflict; on the contrary, it

attempts, among other things, to give due recognition to the class

struggle’s civic dimension. Modern conflicts between classes have never

been confined simply to the factory or workplace; they have also taken a

distinctly urban form, as in “Revolutionary Paris,” “Red Petrograd,” and

“Anarchosyndicalist Barcelona.” As any study of the great revolutions

vividly reveals, the battle between classes has always been a battle not

only between different economic strata in society but also within and

between neighborhoods.

Moreover, the neighborhood, town, and village also generates searing

issues that cut across class lines: between working people (the

traditional industrial proletariat, which is now dwindling in numbers in

Europe and the United States and is fighting a rearguard battle with

capital), middle-class strata (which lack any consciousness of

themselves as working people), the vast army of government employees, a

huge professional and technical stratum that is not likely to regard

itself as a proletariat, and an underclass that is essentially

demoralized and helpless.

We cannot ignore the compelling fact that capitalism has changed since

the end of the Second World War; that it has transformed the very social

fiber of the great majority of people, both attitudinally and

occupationally, in Western Europe and the United States; that it will

wreak even further changes in the decades that lie ahead, with dazzling

rapidity, especially as automation is further developed and as new

resources, techniques, and products replace those that seem so dominant

today.

No revolutionary movement can ignore the problems that capitalism is

likely to generate in the years that lie ahead, especially in terms of

capital’s profound effects on both society and the environment. The

futility of syndicalism today lies in the fact that it is still trying

to address the problems generated by the old industrial revolution and

in the context of the social setting that gave these problems meaning in

the first half of the twentieth century. If we have historically

exhausted the syndicalist alternative, it is because the industrial

proletariat is everywhere destined, by virtue of technological

innovation, to become a small minority of the population. It will not do

to try to theoretically fabricate a “proletariat” out of clerical,

service, and professional “workers” who, in many if not most cases, will

not acquire the class consciousness that identified and gave a

historical standing to the authentic proletarian.

But these strata, often among the most exploited and oppressed, can be

enlisted to support our anarchist communist ideals on the basis of the

larger environment in which they live and the larger issues of their

sovereignty in a world that is racing out of control: namely, their

neighborhoods, cities, and towns, and the expansion of their democratic

rights as free citizens in a world that has reduced them to mere

electoral constituents. They can be mobilized to support our anarchist

communist ideals because they feel their power to control their own

lives is diminishing in the face of centralized state and corporate

power. Needless to say, I am not denying that working people have grim

economic problems that may pit them against capital, but their

quasi-middle-class outlook if not status diminishes their ability to see

the ills of capitalism exclusively as an economic system.

Today, we live in an era of permanent industrial revolution in which

people tend to respond to the extreme rapidity and vast scope of change

with a mysticism that expresses their disempowerment and a privatism

that expresses their inability to contend with change. Indeed,

capitalism, far from being “advanced,” still less “moribund,” continues

to mature and extend its scope. What it will look like a half century or

a century from now is open to the boldest of speculations.

Hence, more than ever, any revolutionary libertarian communist movement

must, in my view, recognize the importance of the municipality as the

locus of new, indeed, often transclass problems that cannot simply be

reduced to the struggle between wage labor and capital. Real problems of

environmental deterioration affect everyone in a community; real

problems of social and economic inequities affect everyone in a

community; real problems of health, education, sanitary conditions, and

the nightmare, as Paul Goodman put it, of “growing up absurd” plague

everyone in a community—problems that are even more serious today than

they were in the alienated 1960s decade. These transclass issues can

bring people together with workers of all kinds in a common effort to

seek their self-empowerment, an issue that cannot be resolved into the

conflict of wage labor against capital alone.

Nor are workers mere “agents” of history, as vulgar Marxists (and

implicitly, syndicalists) would have us believe. Workers live in cities,

towns, and villages— not only as class beings but as civic beings. They

are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, and

no less than their ecological counterparts among the petty bourgeoisie,

they are concerned with environmental issues. As parents and young

people, they are concerned with the problems of acquiring an education,

entering a profession, and the like. They are deeply disturbed by the

decay of urban infrastructures, the diminution of inexpensive housing,

and issues of urban safety and aesthetics. Their horizon extends far

beyond the realm of the factory or even the office to the residential

urban world in which they and their families live. After I had spent

years working in factories, I was not surprised to find that I could

reach workers, middle-class people, and even relatively affluent

individuals more easily by discussing issues relating to their lived

environments —their neighborhoods and cities—rather than to their

workplaces.

Today, in particular, the globalization of capital raises the question

of how localities can keep productive resources within their own

confines without impairing the opportunities of peoples in the so-called

“Third World” or South to freely develop technologically according to

their own needs. This conundrum cannot be resolved by legislation and

economic reforms. Capitalism is a compulsively expansive system. A

modern market economy dictates that an enterprise must grow or die, and

nothing will prevent capitalism from industrializing—more accurately,

expanding—endlessly over the entire face of the planet whenever it is

prepared to do so. Only the complete reconstruction of society and the

economy can end the dilemmas that globalization raises—the exploitation

of workers and the enhancement of corporate power to the point of

threatening the stability, indeed the very safety, of the planet.

Here again, I would contend that only a grassroots economic policy,

based on a libertarian municipalist agenda and movement, can offer a

major alternative—and it is precisely an alternative that many people

seek today—capable of arresting the impact of globalization. For the

problem of globalization, there is no global solution. Global capital,

precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its

roots, specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at

the base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who,

mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s

sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional

economic alternatives to its industrial operations. Developing this

resistance would involve subsidizing municipally controlled industries

and retail outlets, and taking recourse in regional resources that

capital does not find it profitable to use. A municipalized economy,

slow as it may be in the making, will be a moral economy, one

that—concerned primarily with the quality of its products and their

production at the lowest possible cost— can hope to ultimately subvert a

corporate economy, whose success is measured entirely by its profits

rather than by the quality of its commodities.

Let me stress that when I speak of a moral economy, I am not advocating

a communitarian or cooperative economy in which small profiteers,

however well- meaning their intentions may be, simply become little

“self-managed” capitalists in their own right. In my own community, I

have seen a self-styled “moral” enterprise, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream,

grow in typical capitalist fashion from a small, presumably “caring,”

and intimate enterprise into a global corporation, intent on making

profit and fostering the myth that “capitalism can be good.”

Cooperatives that profess to be moral in their intentions have yet to

make any headway in replacing big capitalist concerns or even in

surviving without themselves becoming capitalistic in their methods and

profit-oriented in their goals.

The Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers—as opposed to

a genuinely socialistic or libertarian communistic endeavor—can slowly

eat away at capitalism should finally be dispelled. Sadly, these

generally failed illusions are still promoted by liberals, anarchists,

and academics alike. Either municipalized enterprises controlled by

citizens’ assemblies will try to take over the economy, or capitalism

will prevail in this sphere of life with a forcefulness that no mere

rhetoric can diminish.

Capitalist society has effects not only on economic and social relations

but on ideas and intellectual traditions as well, indeed, on all of

history, fragmenting them until knowledge, discourse, and even reality

become blurred, divested of any distinctions, specificity, and

articulation. The culture that promotes this celebration of diffuseness

and fragmentation—a culture that is epidemic in American colleges and

universities—goes under the name of poststructuralism or, more commonly,

postmodernism. Given its corrosive precepts, the postmodernist worldview

is able to level or homogenize everything that is unique or distinctive,

dissolving it into a lowest common denominator of ideas.

Consider, for example, the obscurantist term “earth citizenship,” which

dissolves the very complex notion of “citizenship,” with its

presuppositions of paideia, that is, the lifelong education of the

citizen for the practice of civic self- management, into a diffuse

category, by extending (and cheapening) the notion of citizenship to

include animals, plants, rocks, mountains, the planet, indeed the very

cosmos itself. With a purely metaphorical label for all relationships as

an “earth community,” the historical and contemporary uniqueness of the

city disappears. It presumably preempts every other community because of

its wider scope and breadth. Such metaphors ultimately flatten

everything, in effect, into a universal “Oneness” that, in the name of

“ecological wisdom,” denies definition to vital concepts and realities

by the very ubiquity of the “One.”

If the word “citizen” applies to every existing thing, and if the word

“community” embraces all relationships in this seemingly “green” world,

then nothing, in fact, is a citizen or a community. Just as the logical

category “Being” is rendered as mere existence, Being can only be

regarded as interchangeable with “Nothing.” So, too, “citizen” and

“community” become a universal passport to vacuity, not to uniquely

civic conditions that have been forming and differentiating

dialectically for thousands of years through the ancient, medieval, and

modern worlds. To reduce them to an abstract “community” is to

ultimately negate their wealth of evolutionary forms and particularly

their differentiation as sophisticated aspects of human freedom.

Libertarian municipalism must be conceived as a process, a patient

practice that will have only limited success at the present time, and

even then only in select areas that can at best provide examples of the

possibilities it could hold if and when adopted on a large scale. We

will not create a libertarian municipalist society overnight, and in

this era of counterrevolution, we must be prepared to endure more

failures than successes. Patience and commitment are traits that

revolutionaries of the past cultivated assiduously; alas, today, in our

fast consumerist society, the demand for immediate gratification, for

fast food and fast living, inculcates a demand for fast politics. What

should count for us is whether libertarian municipalism is a means for

achieving the rational culmination of human development, not whether it

is suitable as a quick fix for present social problems.

We must learn to be flexible without allowing our basic principles to be

replaced by a postmodernist quagmire of ad hoc, ever-changeable

opinions. For example, if we have no choice but to use electronic means,

such as to establish popular participation in relatively large citizens’

assemblies, then so be it. But we should, I would argue, do so only when

it is unavoidable and for only as long as it is necessary. By the same

token, if certain measures involve a degree of centralization, then we

should adopt them—without sacrificing, let me insist, the right to

immediate recall. But here, too, we should endure such organizational

measures for only as long as they are necessary and no longer. Our basic

principles in such cases must always be our guide: we remain committed

to a direct face-to-face democracy and a well-coordinated, confederal,

but decentralized society.

Nor should we fetishize consensus over democracy in our decision-making

processes. Consensus, as I have argued, is practicable with very small

groups in which people know each other intimately. But in larger groups,

it becomes tyrannical because it allows a small minority to decide the

practice of large or even sizable majority; and it fosters homogeneity

and stagnation in ideas and policies. Minorities and their factions are

the indispensable yeast for maturing new ideas—and nearly all new ideas

start out as the views of minorities. In a libertarian group, the “rule”

of the majority over a minority is a myth; no one expects a minority to

give up its unpopular beliefs or to yield its right to argue its

views—but the minority must have patience and allow a majority decision

to be put into practice. This experience and the discussion it generates

should be the most decisive element in impelling a group or assembly to

reconsider its decision and adopt the minority’s viewpoint, spurring on

the further innovation of practices and ideas as other minorities

emerge. Consensus decision-making can easily produce intellectual and

practical stagnation if it essentially compels a majority to forgo a

specific policy in order to please a minority.

I will not enter into my distinction between policy decisions and their

enactment in practice by those qualified to administer them. I will only

note that if the U.S. Congress—a gathering, for the most part, of

lawyers—can make basic policy decisions on the reconstruction of the

American infrastructure, on war and peace, on education and foreign

policy, etc., without having full knowledge of all aspects of these

fields, leaving the administration of their decisions to others, then I

fail to understand why a citizens’ assembly cannot make policy decisions

on usually more modest issues and leave their administration, under

close supervision, to experts in the fields involved.

Among the other issues that we must at some point consider are the place

of law or nomos in a libertarian municipalist society, as well as

constitutions that lay down important principles of right or justice and

freedom. Are we to vest the perpetuation of our guiding principles

simply in blind custom, or in the good nature of our fellow humans—which

allows for a great deal of arbitrariness? For centuries, oppressed

peoples demanded written founding constitutional provisions to protect

them from the arbitrary oppression of the nobility. With the emergence

of a libertarian communist society, this problem does not disappear. For

us, I believe, the question can never be whether law and constitutions

are inherently anti-anarchistic, but whether they are rational, mutable,

secular, and restrictive only in the sense that they prohibit the abuse

of power. We must, I believe, free ourselves of the fetishes born of

remote polemics with authoritarians, fetishes that have pushed many

anarchist communists into unreflective one-sided positions that are more

like dogmas than reasoned theoretical ideas.

Admittedly, the present time is not one that is favorable for the spread

of anticapitalist, social anarchist ideas and movements. Unless we are

to let the capitalist cancer spread over the entire planet, however,

even absorbing the natural world into the world economy, anarchist

communists must develop a theory and practice that provides them with an

entry into the public sphere—a theory and practice, I should emphasize,

that is consistent with the goal of a rational, libertarian communist

society.

Finally, we must assert the historic right of speculative reason,

resting on the real potentialities of human beings as we know them from

the past as well as the present, to project itself beyond the immediate

environment in which we live, indeed, to claim that the present

irrational society is not the actual—or “real”— that is worthy of the

human condition. Despite its prevalence—and, to many people, its

permanence—it is untrue to the project of fulfilling humanity’s

potentiality for freedom and self-consciousness, and hence it is unreal

in the sense that it is a betrayal of the claims of humanity’s greatest

qualities, the capacity for reason and innovation.

By the same token, that broad school of ideas that we call “anarchism”

is faced with a parting of the ways between social anarchists, who wish

to focus their efforts on the revolutionary elimination of hierarchical

and class society, and individualist anarchists, who see social change

only in terms of their personal self-expression and the replacement of

serious ideas with mystical fantasies.

I personally do not believe that anarchism can become a public movement

unless it formulates a politics that opens it to social intervention,

that brings it into the public sphere as an organized movement that can

grow, think rationally, mobilize people, and actively seek to change the

world. The social democrats have offered us parliamentary reforms as a

practice, and the results they hav produced have been debilitating—most

notably, a radical decline in public life and a disastrous growth in

consumerist self-indulgence and privatism. Although the Stalinists as

architects of the totalitarian state have mostly passed from the public

scene, a few persist as parasites on whatever radical movement may

emerge among oppressed peoples. And fascism, in its various mutations,

has attempted to fill the void created by disempowerment and a lack of

human scale in politics as well as community, with tragic results.

As anarchist communists, we must ask ourselves what mode of entry into

the public sphere is consistent with our vision of empowerment. If our

ideal is the Commune of communes, then I submit that the only means of

entry and social fulfillment is a Communalist politics with a

libertarian municipalist praxis; that is, a movement and program that

finally emerges on the local political scene as the uncompromising

advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development

of a municipalized economy. I know of no other alternative to

capitulation to the existing society.

Libertarian municipalism is not a new version of reformism in the vein

of Paul Brousse’s “possibilism” of the 1890s. Rather, it is an explicit

attempt to update the traditional social anarchist ideal of the

Federation of communes or “Commune of communes,” namely, the confederal

linking of libertarian communist municipalities, in the form of directly

democratic popular assemblies as well as the collective control or

“ownership” of socially important property. Libertarian municipalism in

no way compromises with parliamentarism, reformist attempts to “improve”

capitalism or the perpetuation of private property. Limited exclusively

to the municipality as the locus for political activity, as

distinguished from provincial and state governments, not to speak of

national and supranational governments, libertarian municipalism is

revolutionary to the core, in the very important sense that it seeks to

exacerbate the latent and often very real tension between the

municipality and the state, and to enlarge the democratic institutions

of the commune that still remain, at the expense of statist

institutions. It counterposes the confederation to the nation-state, and

libertarian communism to existing systems of private and nationalized

property.

Where most anarchist communists in the past have regarded the Federation

of communes as an ideal to be achieved after an insurrection,

libertarian municipalists, I contend, regard the federation or

confederation of communes as a political practice that can be developed,

at least partly, prior to an outright revolutionary confrontation with

the state—a confrontation which, in my view, cannot be avoided and, if

anything, should be encouraged by increasing the tension between the

state and federations of municipalities. In fact, libertarian

municipalism is a communalist practice for creating a revolutionary

culture and for bringing revolutionary change into complete conformity

with the goals of anarchist communism.

In the last case, it unifies practice and ideal into a single and

coherent means- and-ends approach for initiating a libertarian communist

society, without any disjunction between the strategy for achieving such

a society and the society itself. Nor does libertarian municipalism

cultivate the illusion that the state and bourgeoisie will allow such a

continuum to find fulfillment without open struggle, as some advocates

of so-called “confederal municipalism” and “localist politics” have

argued.

I have no doubt that libertarian municipalism, if it meets with a

measure of success, will face many obstacles and the possibility of

being co-opted or of degenerating into a form of “sewer anarchism,” that

it will face not only a civic realm of ideological discord but internal

discord within its own organizational framework, that it opens a broad

field of political conflict, with all its risks and uncertainties. At a

time when social life has been trivialized beyond description, when

accommodation to capitalist values and lifeways has reached

unprecedented levels, when anarchism and socialism are seen as the “lost

causes” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one can only

hope that such discord becomes a genuine public reality. At no time has

mediocrity been more triumphant than it is today, and at no time has

indifference to social and political issues been as widespread as it is

today.

I do not believe that social change can be achieved without taking

risks, allowing for uncertainties, and recognizing the possibility of

failure. If we are to have any effect on the fossilization of public

life—to the extent that the present period is marked in any sense by a

genuine public life—history too must move with us. On this score, I am

much too old to make worthwhile predictions about how the course of

events will unfold, except to say that the present, whether for good or

ill, will hardly be recognizable to the generation that will come of age

fifty years from now, so rapidly are things likely to change in the

coming century.

But where change exists, so too do possibilities. The times cannot

remain as they are, any more than the world can be frozen into

immobility. What we can hope to do is to preserve the thread of

rationality that distinguishes true civilization from barbarism—and

barbarism would indeed be the outcome of a world that is permitted to

tumble into a future without rational activity or guidance.

August 1998

The Meaning of Confederalism

Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for

face-to- face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a

“complex society.”

Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too

concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level.

And our economy is too “global,” presumably, to unravel the intricacies

of production and commerce. In our present transnational, often highly

centralized social system, it is better to enhance representation in the

state, to increase the efficiency of bureaucratic institutions, we are

advised, than to advance utopian “localist” schemes of popular control

over political and economic life.

After all, such arguments often run, centralists are all really

“localists” in the sense that they believe in “more power to the

people”—or at least, to their representatives. And surely a good

representative is always eager to know the wishes of his or her

“constituents” (to use another of those arrogant substitutes for

“citizens”).

But face-to-face democracy? Forget the dream that in our “complex”

modern world we can have any democratic alternative to the nation-state!

Many pragmatic people, including socialists, often dismiss arguments for

that kind of “localism” as otherworldly—with good-natured condescension

at best and outright derision at worst. Indeed, some years back, in

1972, I was challenged in the periodical Root and Branch by Jeremy

Brecher, a democratic socialist, to explain how the decentralist views I

expressed in my 1969 essay “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” would prevent, say,

Troy, New York, from dumping its untreated wastes into the Hudson River,

from which downstream cities like Perth Amboy draw their drinking water.

On the surface of things, arguments like Brecher’s for centralized

government seem rather compelling. A structure that is “democratic,” to

be sure, but still largely top-down, is assumed as necessary to prevent

one locality from afflicting another ecologically. But conventional

economic and political arguments against decentralization, ranging from

the fate of Perth Amboy’s drinking water to our alleged “addiction” to

petroleum, rest on a number of very problematical assumptions. Most

disturbingly, they rest on an unconscious acceptance of the economic

status quo.

DECENTRALISM AND SELF-SUSTAINABILITY

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the

acid that corrodes all visionary thinking (as witness the recent

tendency of radicals to espouse “market socialism” rather than deal with

the failings of the market economy as well as state socialism).

Doubtless, we will have to import coffee for those people who need a

morning fix at the breakfast table or exotic metals for people who want

their wares to be more lasting than the junk produced by a consciously

engineered throwaway economy. But aside from the utter irrationality of

crowding tens of millions of people into congested, indeed, suffocating

urban belts, must the present-day extravagant international division of

labor necessarily exist in order to satisfy human needs? Or has it been

created to provide extravagant profits for multinational corporations?

Are we to ignore the ecological consequences of plundering the Third

World of its resources, insanely interlocking modern economic life with

petroleum-rich areas whose ultimate products include air pollutants and

petroleum-derived carcinogens? To ignore the fact that our “global

economy” is the result of burgeoning industrial bureaucracies and a

competitive grow-or-die market economy is profoundly myopic.

It is hardly necessary to explore the sound ecological reasons for

achieving a certain measure of self-sustainability. Most environmentally

oriented people are aware that a massive national and international

division of labor is extremely wasteful in the literal sense of that

term. Not only does an excessive division of labor make for

overorganization in the form of huge bureaucracies and tremendous

expenditures of resources in transporting materials over great

distances, it reduces the possibilities of effectively recycling wastes,

avoiding pollution that may have its source in highly concentrated

industrial and population centers, and making sound use of local or

regional raw materials.

On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that relatively

self-sustaining communities in which crafts, agriculture, and industries

serve definable networks of confederally organized communities enrich

the opportunities and stimuli to which individuals are exposed and make

for more rounded personalities with a rich sense of selfhood and

competence. The Greek ideal of the rounded citizen in a rounded

environment—one that reappeared in Charles Fourier’s utopian works —was

long cherished by the anarchists and socialists of the last century.

The opportunity of the individual to devote his or her productive

activity to many different tasks over an attenuated work week (or in

Fourier’s ideal society, over a given day) was seen as a vital factor in

overcoming the division between manual and intellectual activity, in

transcending status differences that this major division of work

created, and in enhancing the wealth of experiences that came with a

free movement from industry through crafts to food cultivation. Hence,

self- sustainability made for a richer self, one strengthened by

variegated experiences, competencies, and assurances. Alas, this vision

was lost by leftists and many environmentalists in the second half of

the twentieth century, with their shift toward a pragmatic liberalism

and the radical movement’s tragic ignorance of its own visionary past.

We should not, I believe, lose sight of what it means to live an

ecological way of life, not merely follow sound ecological practices.

The multitude of handbooks that teach us how to conserve, invest, eat,

and buy in an “ecologically responsible” manner are a travesty of the

more basic need to reflect on what it means to think—yes, to reason—and

to live ecologically in the full meaning of the term. Thus, I would hold

that to garden organically is more than a good form of husbandry and a

good source of nutrients; it is above all a way to place oneself

directly in the food web by personally cultivating the very substances

one consumes to live and by returning to one’s environment what one

elicits from it.

Food thus becomes more than a form of material nutrient. The soil one

tills, the living things one cultivates and consumes, the compost one

prepares all unite in an ecological continuum to feed the spirit as well

as the body, sharpening one’s sensitivity to the nonhuman and human

world around us. I am often amused by zealous “spiritualists,” many of

whom are either passive viewers of seemingly “natural” landscapes or

devotees of rituals, magic, and pagan deities (or all of these) who fail

to realize that one of the most eminently human activities, namely, food

cultivation, can do more to foster an ecological sensibility (and

spirituality, if you please) than all the incantations and mantras

devised in the name of ecological spiritualism.

Such monumental changes as the dissolution of the nation-state and its

substitution by a participatory democracy, then, do not occur in a

psychological vacuum where the political structure alone is changed. I

argued against Jeremy Brecher that in a society that was radically

veering toward decentralistic, participatory democracy, guided by

communitarian and ecological principles, it is only reasonable to

suppose that people would not choose such an irresponsible social

dispensation as would allow the waters of the Hudson to be so polluted.

Decentralism, a face-to-face participatory democracy, and a localist

emphasis on community values should be viewed as all of one piece—they

most assuredly have been so in the vision I have been advocating for

more than thirty years. This “one piece” involves not only a new

politics but a new political culture that embraces new ways of thinking

and feeling, and new human interrelationships, including the ways we

experience the natural world. Words like “politics” and “citizenship”

would be redefined by the rich meanings they acquired in the past, and

enlarged for the present.

It is not very difficult to show, item by item, how the international

division of labor can be greatly attenuated by using local and regional

resources, implementing ecotechnologies, rescaling human consumption

along rational (indeed, healthful) lines, and emphasizing quality

production that provides lasting (instead of throwaway) means of life.

It is unfortunate that the very considerable inventory of these

possibilities, which I partly assembled and evaluated in my 1965 essay

“Toward a Liberatory Technology,” suffers from the burden of having been

written too long ago to be accessible to the present generation of

ecologically oriented people. Indeed, in that essay, I also argued for

regional integration and the need to interlink resources among

ecocommunities; for decentralized communities are inevitably

interdependent upon one another.

PROBLEMS OF DECENTRALISM

If many pragmatic people are blind to the importance of decentralism,

many in the ecology movement tend to ignore very real problems with

“localism”—problems that are no less troubling than the problems raised

by a globalism that fosters a total interlocking of economic and

political life on a worldwide basis. Without such holistic cultural and

political changes, notions of decentralism that emphasize localist

isolation and a degree of self-sufficiency may lead to cultural

parochialism and chauvinism. Parochialism can lead to problems that are

as serious as a “global” mentality that overlooks the uniqueness of

cultures, the peculiarities of ecosystems and ecoregions, and the need

for a humanly scaled community life that makes a participatory democracy

possible. This is no minor issue today, in an ecology movement that

tends to swing toward very well- meaning but rather naïve extremes. I

cannot repeat too emphatically that we must find a way of sharing the

world with other humans and with nonhuman forms of life, a view that is

often difficult to attain in overly “self-sufficient” communities.

Much as I respect the intentions of those who advocate local

self-reliance and self-sustainability, these concepts can be highly

misleading. I can certainly agree with the assertion, for example, that

if a community can produce the things it needs, it should probably do

so. But self-sustaining communities cannot produce all the things they

need—unless it involves a return to a backbreaking way of village life

that historically often prematurely aged its men and women with hard

work and allowed them very little time for political life beyond the

immediate confines of the community itself.

I regret to say that there are people in the ecology movement who do, in

fact, advocate a return to a highly labor-intensive economy, not to

speak of Stone Age deities. Clearly, we must give the ideals of

localism, decentralism, and self- sustainability greater and fuller

meaning.

Today, we can produce the basic means of life—and a good deal more—in an

ecological society that is focused on the production of high-quality

useful goods.

Yet still others in the ecology movement too often end up advocating a

kind of “cooperative” capitalism, in which one community functions like

a single entrepreneur, with a sense of proprietorship toward its

resources. Such a system of cooperatives once again marks the beginnings

of a market system of distribution as cooperatives become entangled in

the web of “bourgeois rights,” that is, in contracts and bookkeeping

that focus on the exact amounts a community will receive in “exchange”

for what it delivers to others. This deterioration occurred among some

of the worker-controlled enterprises that functioned like capitalistic

enterprises in Barcelona after the workers expropriated them in July

1936—a practice that the anarchosyndicalist CNT fought early in the

Spanish Revolution.

It is a troubling fact that neither decentralization nor

self-sufficiency in itself is necessarily democratic. Plato’s ideal city

in the Republic was, indeed, designed to be self-sufficient, but its

self-sufficiency was meant to maintain a warrior as well as a

philosophical elite. Indeed, its capacity to preserve its

self-sufficiency depended upon its ability, like Sparta, to resist the

seemingly “corruptive” influence of outside cultures. Similarly,

decentralization in itself provides no assurance that we will have an

ecological society. A decentralized society can easily coexist with

extremely rigid hierarchies. A striking example is European and Oriental

feudalism, a social order in which princely, ducal, and baronial

hierarchies were based on highly decentralized communities. With all due

respect to Fritz Schumacher, small is not necessarily beautiful.

Nor does it follow that humanly scaled communities and “appropriate

technologies” in themselves constitute guarantees against domineering

societies.

In fact, for centuries, humanity lived in villages and small towns,

often with tightly organized social ties and even communistic forms of

property. But these provided the material basis for highly despotic

imperial states. Considered on economic and property terms, they might

earn a high place in the “no-growth” outlook of economists like Herman

Daly, but they were the hard bricks that were used to build the most

awesome despotisms in India and China. What these self-sufficient,

decentralized communities feared almost as much as the armies that

ravaged them were the imperial tax-gatherers that plundered them.

If we extol such communities because of the extent to which they were

decentralized, self-sufficient, or small, or employed “appropriate

technologies,” we would be obliged to ignore the extent to which they

were also culturally stagnant and easily dominated by exogenous elites.

Their seemingly organic but tradition-bound division of labor may very

well have formed the bases for highly oppressive and degrading caste

systems in different parts of the world—caste systems that plague the

social life of India to this very day.

At the risk of seeming contrary, I feel obliged to emphasize that

decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, and even confederation,

each taken singly, do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a

rational ecological society. In fact, all of them have at one time or

another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even despotic

regimes. To be sure, without the institutional structures that cluster

around our use of these terms and without taking them in combination

with each other, we cannot hope to achieve a free ecologically oriented

society.

CONFEDERALISM AND INTERDEPENDENCE

Decentralism and self-sustainability must involve a much broader

principle of social organization than mere localism. Together with

decentralization, approximations to self-sufficiency, humanly scaled

communities, ecotechnologies, and the like, there is a compelling need

for democratic and truly communitarian forms of interdependence—in

short, for libertarian forms of confederalism.

I have detailed at length in many articles and books (particularly From

Urbanization to Cities) the history of confederal structures from

ancient and medieval to modern confederations such as the Comuñeros in

the early sixteenth century through the Parisian sectional movement of

1793 and more recent attempts at confederation, particularly by the

Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. Today, what often

leads to serious misunderstandings among decentralists is their failure

in all too many cases to see the need for confederation, which at least

tends to counteract the tendency of decentralized communities to drift

toward exclusivity and parochialism. If we lack a clear understanding of

what confederalism means—indeed, the fact that it forms a key principle

and gives fuller meaning to decentralism—a libertarian municipalist

agenda can easily become vacuous at best or be used for highly parochial

ends at worst.

What, then, is confederalism? It is above all a network of

administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from

popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages,

towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these

confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible

to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and

administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves.

Their function is thus a purely administrative and practical one, not a

policymaking one like the function of representatives in republican

systems of government.

A confederalist view involves a clear distinction between policymaking

and the coordination and execution of adopted policies. Policymaking is

exclusively the right of popular community assemblies based on the

practices of participatory democracy. Administration and coordination

are the responsibility of confederal councils, which become the means

for interlinking villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities into

confederal networks. Power thus flows from the bottom up instead of from

the top down, and in confederations, the flow of power from the bottom

up diminishes with the scope of the federal council ranging

territorially from localities to regions and from regions to

ever-broader territorial areas.

A crucial element in giving reality to confederalism is the

interdependence of communities for an authentic mutualism based on

shared resources, production, and policymaking. If one community is not

obliged to count on another or others generally to satisfy important

material needs and realize common political goals in such a way that it

is interlinked to a greater whole, exclusivity and parochialism are

genuine possibilities. Only insofar as we recognize that confederation

must be conceived as an extension of a form of participatory

administration—by means of confederal networks—can decentralization and

localism prevent the communities that compose larger bodies of

association from withdrawing into themselves at the expense of wider

areas of human consociation.

Confederalism is thus a way of perpetuating the interdependence that

should exist among communities and regions; indeed, it is a way of

democratizing that interdependence without surrendering the principle of

local control. While a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency is

desirable for every locality and region, confederalism is a means for

avoiding local parochialism on the one hand and an extravagant national

and global division of labor on the other. In short, it is a way in

which a community can retain its identity and roundedness while

participating in a sharing way with the larger whole that makes up a

balanced ecological society.

Confederalism as a principle of social organization reaches its fullest

development when the economy itself is confederalized by placing local

farms, factories, and other needed enterprises in local municipal hands;

that is, when a community, however large or small, begins to manage its

own economic resources in an interlinked network with other communities.

To force a choice between either self-sufficiency on the one hand or a

market system of exchange on the other is a simplistic and unnecessary

dichotomy. I would like to think that a confederal ecological society

would be a sharing one—one based on the pleasure that is felt in

distributing among communities according to their needs, not one in

which “cooperative” capitalistic communities mire themselves in the quid

pro quo of exchange relationships.

Impossible? Unless we are to believe that nationalized property (which

reinforces the political power of the centralized state with economic

power) or a private market economy (whose law of “grow or die” threatens

to undermine the ecological stability of the entire planet) is more

workable, I fail to see what viable alternative we have to the

confederated municipalization of the economy.

At any rate, for once, it will no longer be privileged state bureaucrats

or grasping bourgeois entrepreneurs—or even “collective” capitalists in

so-called “workers- controlled enterprises”—all with their special

interests to promote, who are faced with a community’s problems, but

citizens, irrespective of their occupations or workplaces. For once, it

will be necessary to transcend the traditional special interests of

work, workplace, status, and property relations, and create a general

interest based on shared community problems.

Confederation is thus the ensemble of decentralization, localism, self-

sufficiency, interdependence—and more. This more is the indispensable

moral education and character building—what the Greeks called

paideia—that makes for rational active citizenship in a participatory

democracy, unlike the passive constituents and consumers that we have

today. In the end, there is no substitute for a conscious reconstruction

of our relationship to each other and the natural world.

To argue that the remaking of society and our relationship with the

natural world can be achieved merely by decentralization or localism or

self- sustainability leaves us with an incomplete collection of

solutions. Whatever we omit among these presuppositions for a society

based on confederated municipalities would leave a yawning hole in the

entire social fabric we hope to create. That hole would grow and

eventually destroy the fabric itself, just as a market economy,

conjoined with “socialism,” “anarchism,” or whatever concept one has of

the good society, would eventually dominate the society as a whole.

Nor can we omit the distinction between policymaking and administration,

for once policymaking slips from the hands of the people, it is devoured

by its delegates, who quickly become bureaucrats.

Confederalism, in effect, must be conceived as a whole: a consciously

formed body of interdependencies that unites participatory democracy in

municipalities with a scrupulously supervised system of coordination. It

involves the dialectical development of independence and dependence into

a more richly articulated form of interdependence, just as the

individual in a free society grows from dependence in childhood to

independence in youth, only to sublate the two into a conscious form of

interdependence between individuals and between the individual and

society.

Confederalism is thus a fluid and ever-developing kind of social

metabolism in which the identity of an ecological society is preserved

through its differences and by virtue of its potential for ever-greater

differentiation. Confederalism, in fact, does not mark a closure of

social history (as the “end of history” ideologists of recent years

would have us believe about liberal capitalism) but rather the point of

departure for a new ecosocial history marked by a participatory

evolution within society and between society and the natural world.

CONFEDERATION AS DUAL POWER

Above all, I have tried to show in my previous writings how

confederation on a municipal basis has existed in sharp tension with the

centralized state generally and the nation-state of recent times.

Confederalism, I have tried to emphasize, is not simply a unique

societal, particularly civic, or municipal, form of administration. It

is a vibrant tradition in the affairs of humanity, one that has a

centuries-long history behind it. For generations, confederations tried

to countervail a nearly equally long historical tendency toward

centralization and the creation of the nation-state.

If the two—confederalism and statism—are not seen as being in tension

with each other, a tension in which the nation-state has used a variety

of intermediaries like provincial governments in Canada and state

governments in the United States to create the illusion of “local

control,” then the concept of confederation loses all meaning.

Provincial autonomy in Canada and states’ rights in the United States

are no more confederal than “soviets” or councils were the medium for

popular control that existed in tension with Stalin’s totalitarian

state. The Russian soviets were taken over by the Bolsheviks, who

supplanted them with their party within a year or two of the October

Revolution. To weaken the role of confederal municipalities as a

countervailing power to the nation-state by opportunistically running

“confederalist” candidates for state government—or, more nightmarishly,

for governorship in seemingly democratic states (as some U.S. Greens

have proposed)—is to blur the importance of the need for tension between

confederations and nation-states; indeed, they obscure the fact that the

two cannot coexist over the long term.

In describing confederalism—as a structure for decentralization,

participatory democracy, and localism—and as a potentiality for an

ever-greater differentiation along new lines of development, I would

like to emphasize that this same concept of wholeness that applies to

the interdependencies between municipalities also applies to the

municipality itself. The municipality, as I have pointed out in earlier

writings, is the most immediate political arena of the individual—the

world that is literally a doorstep beyond the privacy of the family and

the intimacy of personal friendships. In that primary political arena,

where politics should be conceived in the Hellenic sense of literally

managing the polis or community, the individual can be transformed from

a mere person into an active citizen—from a private being into a public

being. Given this crucial arena that renders citizens able to

participate directly in the future of society, we are dealing with a

level of human interaction that is more basic (apart from the family

itself) than any level that is expressed in representative forms of

governance where collective power is literally transmuted into power

embodied by one or a few individuals. The municipality is thus the most

authentic arena of public life, however much it may have been distorted

over the course of history.

By contrast, delegated or authoritarian levels of “politics” presuppose

the abdication of municipal and citizen power to one degree or another.

The municipality must always be understood as this truly authentic

public world. To compare even executive positions, like a mayor with a

governor, in representative realms of power is to grossly misunderstand

the basic political nature of civic life itself, all its malformations

notwithstanding. Thus, for Greens to contend in a purely formal and

analytical manner—as modern logic instructs that terms like “executive”

make the two positions interchangeable—is to totally remove the notion

of executive power from its context, to reify it, to make it into a

lifeless category because of the external trappings we attach to the

word. If the city is to be seen as a whole, and its potentialities for

creating a participatory democracy are to be fully recognized, then

provincial and state governments in Canada and the United States must be

seen as small republics organized entirely around representation at best

and oligarchical rule at worst. They provide the channels of expression

for the nation-state—and constitute obstacles to the development of a

genuine public realm.

To run a Green for a mayor on a libertarian municipalist program, in

short, is qualitatively different from running a provincial or state

governor on a presumably libertarian muncipalist program. It amounts to

decontextualizing the institutions that exist in a municipality, in a

province or state, and in the nation-state itself, thereby placing all

three of these executive positions under a purely formal rubric.

One might with equal imprecision say that because human beings and

dinosaurs both have spinal cords, that they belong to the same species

or even to the same genus. In each such case, an institution—be it a

mayoral, councillor, or selectperson—must be seen in a municipal context

as a whole, just as a president, prime minister, congressperson, or

member of parliament, in turn, must be seen in the state context as a

whole. From this standpoint, for Greens to run mayors is fundamentally

different from running for provincial and state offices. One can go into

endless detailed reasons why the powers of a mayor are far more

controlled and under closer public purview than those of state and

provincial office-holders.

To ignore this fact is to abandon any sense of contextuality and the

environment in which issues like policy, administration, participation,

and representation must be placed. Simply, a city hall in a town or city

is not a capital in a province, state, or nation-state.

Unquestionably, there are now cities that are so large that they verge

on being quasi-republics in their own right. One thinks, for example, of

such megalopolitan areas as New York City and Los Angeles. In such

cases, the minimal program of a Green movement can demand that

confederations be established within the urban area—namely, among

neighborhoods or definable districts—not only among the urban areas

themselves. In a very real sense, these highly populated, sprawling, and

oversized entities must ultimately be broken down institutionally into

municipalities that are scaled to human dimensions and that lend

themselves to participatory democracy. These entities are not yet fully

formed state powers, either institutionally or in reality, such as we

find even in sparsely populated American states. The mayor is not yet a

governor, with the enormous coercive powers that a governor has, nor is

the city council a parliament or statehouse that can literally legislate

the death penalty into existence, such as is occurring in the United

States today.

In cities that are transforming themselves into quasi-states, there is

still a good deal of leeway in which politics can be conducted along

libertarian lines.

Already, the executive branches of these urban entities constitute a

highly precarious ground, burdened by enormous bureaucracies, police

powers, tax powers, and juridical systems that raise serious problems

for a libertarian municipal approach. We must always ask ourselves in

all frankness what form the concrete situation takes. Where city

councils and mayoral offices in large cities provide an arena for

battling the concentration of power in an increasingly strong state or

provincial executive, and even worse, in regional jurisdictions that may

cut across many such cities (Los Angeles is a notable example), to run

candidates for the city council may be the only recourse we have for

arresting the development of increasingly authoritarian state

institutions and helping to restore an institutionally decentralized

democracy.

It will no doubt take a long time to physically decentralize an urban

entity such as New York City into authentic municipalities and

ultimately communes. Such an effort is part of the maximum program of a

Green movement. But there is no reason why an urban entity of such a

huge magnitude cannot be slowly decentralized institutionally. The

distinction between physical decentralization and institutional

decentralization must always be kept in mind. Time and again, excellent

proposals have been advanced by radicals and even city planners to

localize democracy in such huge urban entities and give greater power to

the people, only to be cynically shot down by centralists who invoke

physical impediments to such an endeavor.

To make institutional decentralization congruent with the physical

breakup of such a large entity confuses the arguments of advocates for

decentralization. There is a certain treachery on the part of

centralists in making these two very distinct lines of development

identical or entangling them with each other. Libertarian municipalists

must always keep the distinction between institutional and physical

decentralization clearly in mind and recognize that the former is

entirely achievable even while the latter may take years to attain.

November 1990

Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy

Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social

reconstruction—I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology

groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed—is

their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits

established by the status quo.

Politics today primarily means duels between top-down bureaucratic

parties for electoral office that offer vacuous programs for “social

justice” to attract a nondescript “electorate.” Once in office, their

programs usually turn into a bouquet of “compromises.” In this respect,

many Green parties in Europe have been only marginally different from

conventional parliamentary parties. Nor have socialist parties, with all

their various labels, exhibited any basic differences from their

capitalist counterparts. To be sure, the indifference of the Euro-

American public—its “apoliticism”—is understandably depressing. Given

their low expectations, when people do vote, they normally turn to

established parties if only because, as centers of power, they can

produce results, of sorts, in practical matters. If one bothers to vote,

most people reason, why waste a vote on a new marginal organization that

has all the characteristics of the major ones and will, if it succeeds,

eventually become corrupted? Witness the German Greens, whose internal

and public life increasingly approximates that of traditional parties.

That this “political process” has lingered on with almost no basic

alteration for decades now is due in great part to the inertia of the

process itself. Time wears expectations thin, and hopes are often

reduced to habits as one disappointment is followed by another. Talk of

a “new politics,” of upsetting tradition, which is as old as politics

itself, is becoming unconvincing. For decades, at least, the changes

that have occurred in radical politics are largely changes in rhetoric

rather than structure. The German Greens are only the most recent of a

succession of “nonparty parties” (to use their original way of

describing their organization) that have turned from an attempt to

practice grassroots politics—ironically, in the Bundestag, of all

places!—into a typical parliamentary party. The Social Democratic Party

in Germany, the Labor Party in Britain, the New Democratic Party in

Canada, the Socialist Party in France, and others, despite their

original emancipatory visions, barely qualify today as even liberal

parties in which a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a Harry Truman would have

found a comfortable home.

Whatever social ideals these parties may have had generations ago has

been eclipsed by the pragmatics of gaining, holding, and extending their

power in their respective parliamentary and ministerial bodies.

It is precisely such parliamentary and ministerial objectives that we

call “politics” today. To the modern political imagination, “politics”

is a body of techniques for holding power in representative

bodies—notably the legislative and executive arenas—not a moral calling

based on rationality, community, and freedom.

Libertarian municipalism represents a serious, indeed a historically

fundamental project to render politics ethical in character and

grassroots in organization. It is structurally and morally different

from other grassroots efforts, not merely rhetorically different. It

seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic

citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism

and its mystification of the “party” mechanism as a means for public

representation. In these respects, libertarian municipalism is not

merely a “political strategy.” It is an effort to work from latent or

incipient democratic possibilities toward a radically new configuration

of society itself—a communal society oriented toward meeting human

needs, responding to ecological imperatives, and developing a new ethics

based on sharing and cooperation. That it involves a consistently

independent form of politics is a truism. More important, it involves a

redefinition of politics, a return to the word’s original Greek meaning

as the management of the community, or polis, by means of direct

face-to-face assemblies of the people in the formulation of public

policy and based on an ethics of complementarity and solidarity.

In this respect, libertarian municipalism is not one of many pluralistic

techniques that is intended to achieve a vague and undefined social

goal.

Democratic to its core and nonhierarchical in its structure, it is a

kind of human destiny, not merely one of an assortment of political

tools or strategies that can be adopted and discarded with the aim of

achieving power. Libertarian municipalism, in effect, seeks to define

the institutional contours of a new society even as it advances the

practical message of a radically new politics for our day.

Here, means and ends meet in a rational unity. The word politics now

expresses direct popular control of society by its citizens through

achieving and sustaining a true democracy in municipal assemblies—this,

as distinguished from republican systems of representation that preempt

the right of the citizen to formulate community and regional policies.

Such politics is radically distinct from statecraft and the state—a

professional body composed of bureaucrats, police, military,

legislators, and the like that exists as a coercive apparatus, clearly

distinct from and above the people. The libertarian municipalist

approach distinguishes statecraft—which we usually characterize as

“politics” today—and politics as it once existed in precapitalist

democratic communities.

Moreover, libertarian municipalism also involves a clear delineation of

the social realm—as well as the political realm—in the strict meaning of

the term social: notably, the arena in which we live our private lives

and engage in production. As such, the social realm is to be

distinguished from both the political and the statist realms. Enormous

harm has been caused by the interchangeable use of these terms—social,

political, and the state. Indeed, the tendency has been to identify them

with one another in our thinking and in the reality of everyday life.

But the state is a completely alien formation, a thorn in the side of

human development, an exogenous entity that has incessantly encroached

on the social and political realms. In fact, the state has often been an

end in itself, as witness the rise of Asian empires, ancient imperial

Rome, and the totalitarian state of modern times. More than this, it has

steadily invaded the political domain, which, for all its past

shortcomings, had empowered communities, social groupings, and

individuals.

Such invasions have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, the conflict between

the state on the one hand and the political and social realms on the

other has been an ongoing subterranean civil war for centuries. It has

often broken out into the open —in modern times in the conflict of the

Castilian cities (Comuñeros) against the Spanish monarchy in the 1520s,

in the struggle of the Parisian sections against the centralist Jacobin

Convention of 1793, and in endless other clashes both before and after

these encounters.

Today, with the increasing centralization and concentration of power in

the nation-state, a “new politics”—one that is genuinely new—must be

structured institutionally around the restoration of power by

municipalities. This is not only necessary but possible even in such

gigantic urban areas as New York City, Montreal, London, and Paris. Such

urban agglomerations are not, strictly speaking, cities or

municipalities in the traditional sense of those terms, despite being

designated as such by sociologists. It is only if we think that they are

cities that we become mystified by problems of size and logistics. Even

before we confront the ecological imperative of physical

decentralization (a necessity anticipated by Friedrich Engels and Peter

Kropotkin alike), we need feel no problems about decentralizing them

institutionally. When François Mitterand tried to decentralize Paris

with local city halls some years ago, his reasons were strictly

tactical—he wanted to weaken the authority of the capital’s right-wing

mayor. Nonetheless, he failed not because restructuring the large

metropolis was impossible but because the majority of affluent Parisians

supported the mayor.

Clearly, institutional changes do not occur in a social vacuum. Nor do

they guarantee that a decentralized municipality, even if it is

structurally democratic, will necessarily be humane, rational, and

ecological in dealing with public affairs. Libertarian municipalism is

premised on the struggle to achieve a rational and ecological society, a

struggle that depends on education and organization.

From the beginning, it presupposes a genuinely democratic desire by

people to arrest the growing powers of the nation-state and reclaim them

for their community and region. Unless there is a movement—hopefully an

effective Left Green movement—to foster these aims, decentralization can

lead to local parochialism as easily as it can lead to ecological,

humanist communities.

But when have basic social changes ever been without risk? The case that

Marx’s commitment to a centralized state and planned economy would

inevitably yield bureaucratic totalitarianism could have been better

made than the case that decentralized libertarian municipalities will

inevitably be authoritarian and have exclusionary and parochial traits.

Economic interdependence is a fact of life today, and capitalism itself

has made parochial autarchies a chimera. While municipalities and

regions can seek to attain a considerable measure of self- sufficiency,

we have long since left the era when it was still possible for self-

sufficient communities to indulge their prejudices.

Equally important is the need for confederation—the networking of

communities with one another through recallable deputies mandated by

municipal citizens’ assemblies and whose sole functions are coordinative

and administrative. Confederation has a long history of its own that

dates back to antiquity, which surfaced as a major alternative to the

nation-state. From the American Revolution, through the French

Revolution and the Spanish Revolution, confederalism has challenged

state centralism. Nor has it disappeared in our own time, when the

breakup of existing twentieth-century empires raises the issue of

enforced state centralism or the relatively autonomous nation.

Libertarian municipalism adds a radically democratic dimension to the

contemporary discussions of confederation (as, for example, in the

former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) by calling for confederations not

of nation-states but of municipalities and of the neighborhoods of giant

megalopolitan areas as well as towns and villages.

In the case of libertarian municipalism, parochialism can thus be

checked not only by the compelling realities of economic interdependence

but by the commitment of municipal minorities to defer to the majority

wishes of participating communities. Do these interdependencies and

majority decisions guarantee us that a majority decision will be a

correct one? Certainly not; but our chances for a rational and

ecological society are much better in this approach than in those that

ride on centralized entities and bureaucratic apparatuses. I cannot help

but marvel that no municipal network has emerged among the German

Greens, who have hundreds of representatives in city councils around

Germany but who carry on a local politics that is largely conventional

and self-enclosed within particular towns and cities.

Many arguments against libertarian municipalism—even with its strong

confederal emphasis—derive from a failure to understand its distinction

between policymaking and administration. This distinction is fundamental

to libertarian municipalism and must always be kept in mind. Policy is

made by a community or neighborhood assembly of free citizens;

administration is performed by confederal councils composed of mandated,

recallable deputies of wards, towns, and villages. If particular

communities or neighborhoods (or a minority grouping of them) choose to

go their own way to a point where human rights are violated or where

ecological mayhem is permitted, the majority in a local or regional

confederation has every right to prevent such malfeasances through its

confederal council. This is not a denial of democracy but the assertion

of a shared agreement by all to recognize civil rights and maintain the

ecological integrity of a region. These rights and needs are not

asserted so much by a confederal council as by the majority of the

popular assemblies conceived as one large community that expresses its

wishes through confederal deputies. Thus, policymaking still remains

local, but its administration is vested in the confederal network as a

whole. In effect, the confederation is a Community of communities, based

on distinct human rights and ecological imperatives.

If libertarian municipalism is not to be totally warped of its form and

divested of its meaning, it is a desideratum that must be fought for. It

speaks to a time (hopefully, one that will yet come) when disempowered

people actively seek empowerment. Existing in growing tension with the

nation-state, it is a process as well as a struggle to be fulfilled, not

a bequest granted by the summits of the state. It is a dual power that

contests the legitimacy of existing state power. Such a movement can be

expected to begin slowly, perhaps sporadically, in communities that

initially may demand only the moral authority to alter the structure of

society before enough interlinked confederations exist to demand the

outright institutional power to replace the state. The growing tension

created by the emergence of municipal confederations represents a

confrontation between the state and the political realms. This

confrontation can be resolved only after libertarian municipalism forms

the new politics of a popular movement and ultimately captures the

imagination of millions.

Certain points, however, should be obvious. The people who initially

enter into the duel between confederalism and statism will not be the

same human beings as those who eventually achieve libertarian

municipalism. The movement that tries to educate them and the struggles

that give libertarian municipalist principles reality will turn them

into active citizens rather than passive “constituents.” No one who

participates in a struggle for social restructuring emerges from that

struggle with the prejudices, habits, and sensibilities with which he or

she entered it. Hopefully, such prejudices, like parochialism, will

increasingly be replaced by a generous sense of cooperation and a caring

sense of interdependence.

It remains to emphasize that libertarian municipalism is not merely an

evocation of traditional antistatist notions of politics. Just as it

redefines politics to include face-to-face municipal democracies

graduated to confederal levels, so it includes a municipalist and

confederal approach to economics. Minimally, a libertarian municipalist

economics calls for the municipalization of the economy, not its

centralization into state-owned “nationalized” enterprises on the one

hand or its reduction to “worker-controlled” forms of collectivistic

capitalism on the other.

Trade-union-directed “worker-controlled” enterprises, that is,

syndicalism, has had its day. This should be evident to anyone who

examines the bureaucracies that even revolutionary trade unions spawned

during the Spanish Civil War of 1936.

Today, corporate capitalism is increasingly eager to bring workers into

complicity with their own exploitation by means of “workplace

democracy.” Nor was the revolution in Spain and in other countries

spared the existence of competition among worker-controlled enterprises

for raw materials, markets, and profits.

Even more recently, many Israeli kibbutzim have been failures as

examples of nonexploitative, need-oriented enterprises, despite the high

ideals with which they were initially founded.

Libertarian municipalism proposes a radically different form of

economy—one that is neither nationalized nor collectivized according to

syndicalist precepts. It proposes that land and enterprises be placed

increasingly in the custody of the community—more precisely, the custody

of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal

councils. How work should be planned, what technologies should be used,

how goods should be distributed are questions that can only be resolved

in practice. The maxim “from each according to his or her ability, to

each according to his or her needs” would seem a bedrock guide for an

economically rational society, provided that goods are of the highest

durability and quality, that needs are guided by rational and ecological

standards, and that the ancient notions of limit and balance replace the

bourgeois marketplace imperative of “grow or die.”

In such a municipal economy—confederal, interdependent, and rational by

ecological, not simply technological, standards—we would expect that the

special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals,

managers, and the like would be melded into a general interest in which

people see themselves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of their

community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational

concerns. Here, citizenship would come into its own, and rational as

well as ecological interpretations of the public good would supplant

class and hierarchical interests.

This is the moral basis of a moral economy for moral communities. But of

overarching importance is the general social interest that potentially

underpins all moral communities, an interest that must ultimately cut

across class, gender, ethnic, and status lines if humanity is to

continue to exist as a viable species. In our times, this common

interest is posed by ecological catastrophe. Capitalism’s grow-or-die

imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of

interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist

with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can

be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological

society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or

her status.

Will this ecological society be authoritarian, or possibly even

totalitarian, a hierarchical dispensation that is implicit in the image

of the planet as a “spaceship”? Or will it be democratic? If history is

any guide, the development of a democratic ecological society, as

distinguished from a command ecological society, must follow its own

logic. One cannot resolve this historical dilemma without getting to its

roots. Without a searching analysis of our ecological problems and their

social sources, the pernicious institutions that we have now will lead

to increased centralization and further ecological catastrophe. In a

democratic ecological society, those roots are literally the

“grassroots” that libertarian municipalism seeks to foster.

For those who rightly call for a new technology, new sources of energy,

new means of transportation, and new ecological lifeways, can a new

society be anything less than a Community of communities based on

confederation rather than statism? We already live in a world in which

the economy is overglobalized, overcentralized, and overbureaucratized.

Much that can be done locally and regionally is now being done—largely

for profit, military needs, and imperial appetites—on a global scale

with a seeming complexity that can actually be easily diminished.

If this seems too “utopian” for our time, then so must the present flood

of literature that asks for radically sweeping shifts in energy

policies, far-reaching reductions in air and water pollution, and the

formulation of worldwide plans to arrest global warming and the

destruction of the ozone layer. Is it too muh to take such demands one

step further and call for institutional and economic changes that are no

less drastic and that, in fact, are deeply sedimented in the noblest

democratic political traditions of both America and, indeed, the world?

Nor are we obliged to expect these changes to occur immediately. The

Left long worked with minimum and maximum programs for change, in which

immediate steps that can be taken now were linked by transitional

advances and intermediate areas that would eventually yield ultimate

goals. Minimal steps that can be taken now include initiating Left Green

municipalist movements that propose popular neighborhood and town

assemblies—even if they have only moral functions at first—and electing

town and city councillors that advance the cause of these assemblies and

other popular institutions. These minimal steps can progressively lead

to the formation of confederal bodies and the increasing legitimation of

truly democratic bodies. Civic banks to fund municipal enterprises and

land purchases, the fostering of new ecologically oriented enterprises

owned by the community, and the creation of grassroots networks in many

fields of endeavor and the public weal—all these can be developed at a

pace appropriate to changes being made in political life.

That capital will likely “migrate” from communities and confederations

that are moving toward libertarian municipalism is a problem faced by

every community, every nation, whose political life has become

radicalized. Capital, in fact, normally “migrates” to areas where it can

acquire high profits, irrespective of political considerations.

Overwhelmed by fears of capital flight, a good case could be established

for not rocking the political boat at any time. More to the point,

municipally owned farms and enterprises could provide new ecologically

valuable and health-nourishing products to a public becoming

increasingly aware of the low-quality goods and staples being foisted on

it now.

Libertarian municipalism is a politics that can excite the public

imagination, appropriate for a movement direly in need of a sense of

direction and purpose.

Libertarian municipalism offers ideas, ways, and means not only to undo

the present social order but to remake it drastically, expanding its

residual democratic traditions into a rational and ecological society.

Thus, libertarian municipalism is not merely an effort simply to take

over city councils to construct a more environmentally friendly city

government. Such an approach, in effect, views the civic structures that

exist now and essentially (all rhetoric to the contrary aside) takes

them as they exist. Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is an effort

to transform and democratize city governments, to root them in popular

assemblies, to knit them together along confederal lines, to appropriate

a regional economy along confederal and municipal lines.

In fact, libertarian municipalism gains its life and its integrity

precisely from the dialectical tension it proposes between the

nation-state and the municipal confederation. Its “law of life,” to use

an old Marxian term, consists precisely in its struggle with the state.

The tension between municipal confederations and the state must be clear

and uncompromising. Since these confederations would exist primarily in

opposition to statecraft, they cannot be compromised by state,

provincial, or national elections, much less achieved by these means.

Libertarian municipalism is formed by its struggle with the state,

strengthened by this struggle, indeed, defined by this struggle.

Divested of this dialectical tension with the state, libertarian

municipalism becomes little more than “sewer socialism.”

Many comrades who are prepared to one day do battle with the cosmic

forces of capitalism find that libertarian municipalism is too thorny,

irrelevant, or vague and opt instead for what is basically a form of

political particularism. Such radicals may choose to brush libertarian

municipalism aside as “a ludicrous tactic,” but it never ceases to amaze

me that revolutionaries who are committed to the “overthrow” of

capitalism find it too difficult to function politically, including

electorally, in their own neighborhoods for a new politics based on a

genuine democracy. If they cannot provide a transformative politics for

their own neighborhood—a relatively modest task—or diligently work at

doing so with the constancy that used to mark the left movements of the

past, I find it very hard to believe that they will ever do much harm to

the present social system. Indeed, by creating cultural centers, parks,

and good housing, they may well be improving the system by giving

capitalism a human face without diminishing its underlying “unfreedom”

as a hierarchical and class society.

A range of struggles for “identity” has often fractured rising radical

movements since SDS in the 1960s, ranging from foreign to domestic

nationalisms. Because these identity struggles are so popular today,

some critics of libertarian municipalism invoke “public opinion” against

it. But when has it been the task of revolutionaries to surrender to

public opinion—not even the public opinion of the oppressed, whose views

can often be very reactionary? Truth has its own life, regardless of

whether the oppressed masses perceive or agree on what is true.

Nor is it elitist to invoke truth, in contradiction to even radical

public opinion, when that opinion essentially seeks a march backward

into the politics of particularism and even racism. We must challenge

the existing society on behalf of our shared common humanity, not on the

basis of gender, race, age, and the like. Critics of libertarian

municipalism dispute even the very possibility of a “general interest.”

If the face-to-face democracy advocated by libertarian municipalism and

the need to extend the premises of democracy beyond mere justice to

complete freedom do not suffice as a general interest, it would seem to

me that the need to repair our relationship with the natural world is

certainly a general interest that is beyond dispute—and it remains the

general interest advanced by social ecology. It may be possible to

co-opt many dissatisfied elements in the present society, but nature is

not co-optable. Indeed, the only politics that remains for the Left is

one based on the premise that there is a “general interest” in

democratizing society and preserving the planet. Now that traditional

forces such as the workers’ movement have ebbed from the historical

scene, it can be said with almost complete certainty that without a

politics akin to libertarian municipalism, the Left will have no

politics whatever. A dialectical view of the relationship of

confederalism to the nation-state; an understanding of the narrowness,

introverted character, and parochialism of identity movements; and a

recognition that the workers’ movement is essentially dead—all

illustrate that if a new politics is going to develop today, it must be

unflinchingly public, in contrast to the alternative café “politics”

advanced by many radicals today. It must be electoral on a municipal

basis, confederal in its vision, and revolutionary in its character.

Indeed, confederal libertarian municipalism is precisely the “Commune of

communes” for which anarchists have fought over the past two centuries.

Today, it is the “red button” that must be pushed if a radical movement

is to open the door to the public sphere. To leave that button untouched

and slip back into the worst habits of the post-1968 New Left, when the

notion of “power” was divested of utopian or imaginative qualities, is

to reduce radicalism to yet another subculture that will probably live

more on heroic memories than on the hopes of a rational future.

October 1991

Cities: The Unfolding of Reason in History

Libertarian municipalism constitutes the politics of social ecology, a

revolutionary effort in which freedom is given institutional form in

public assemblies that become decision-making bodies. It depends upon

libertarian leftists running candidates at the local municipal level,

calling for the division of municipalities into wards, where popular

assemblies can be created that bring people into full and direct

participation in political life. Having democratized themselves,

municipalities would confederate into a dual power to oppose the

nation-state and ultimately dispense with it and with the economic

forces that underpin statism as such. Libertarian municipalism is thus

both a historical goal and a concordant means to achieve the

revolutionary “Commune of communes.”

Libertarian municipalism is above all a politics that seeks to create a

vital democratic public sphere. In From Urbanization to Cities, as well

as other works, I have made careful but crucial distinctions between

three societal realms: the social, the political, and the state. What

people do in their homes, what friendships they form, the communal

lifestyles they practice, the way they make their living, their sexual

behavior, the cultural artifacts they consume, and the rapture and

ecstasy they experience on mountaintops—all these personal as well as

materially necessary activities belong to what I call the social sphere

of life.

Families, friends, and communal living arrangements are part of the

social realm.

Apart from matters of human rights, it is the business of no one to sit

in judgment of what consenting adults freely engage in sexually, the

hobbies they prefer, the kinds of friends they adopt, or the spiritual

practices they may choose to perform.

However much these aspects of life interact with one another, none of

these social aspects of human life properly belongs to the public

sphere, which I explicitly identify with politics in the Hellenic sense

of the term. In creating a new politics based on social ecology, we are

concerned with what people do in this public or political sphere.

Libertarian municipalism is not a substitute for the manifold dimensions

of cultural or even private life. Yet, once individuals leave the social

realm and enter the public sphere, it is precisely the municipality that

they must deal with directly.

Doubtless the municipality is usually the place where even a great deal

of social life is existentially lived—school, work, entertainment, and

simple pleasures like walking, bicycling, and disporting

themselves—which does not efface its distinctiveness as a unique sphere

of life. As a project for entering into the public sphere, libertarian

municipalism calls for a radical presence in a community that addresses

the question of who shall exercise power in a lived sense; indeed, it is

truly a political culture that seeks to reempower the individual and

sharpen his or her sensibility as a living citizen.

Today, the concept of citizenship has already undergone serious erosion

through the reduction of citizens to “constituents” of statist

jurisdictions, or to “taxpayers” who sustain statist institutions. To

further reduce citizenship to “personhood”—or to etherealize the concept

by speaking of an airy “earth citizenship”—is nothing short of

reactionary. It took long millennia for history to create the concept of

the citizen as a self-managing and competent agent in democratically

shaping a polity.

During the French Revolution, the term citoyen was used precisely to

efface the status-generated relegation of individuals to mere “subjects”

of the Bourbon kings.

Moreover, revolutionaries of the last century, from Marx to Bakunin,

referred to themselves as “citizens” long before the appellation

“comrade” replaced it. We must not lose sight of the fact that the

citizen culminates the transformation of ethnic tribal folk—societies

structured around biological facts like kinship, gender differences, and

age groups—into a secular, rational, and humane community. Indeed, much

of the National Socialist war against

“Jewish cosmopolitanism” was in fact an ethnically (völkisch)

nationalistic war against the Enlightenment ideal of the citoyen. For it

was precisely the depoliticized, indeed, animalized “loyal subject”

rather than the citizen that the Nazis incorporated into their racial

image of the German Volk, the abject, status-defined creature of

Hitler’s hierarchical Führerprinzip. Once citizenship becomes

contentless through the deflation of its existential political reality

or, equally treacherously, by the expansion of its historic development

into a “planetary” metaphor, we have come a long way toward accepting

the barbarism that the capitalist system is now fostering with certain

Heideggerian versions of ecology.

To those who level the complaint against libertarian municipalism that

the Greek polis was marred by “the exclusion of women, slaves, and

foreigners,” I would say that we must always remember that libertarian

municipalists are also libertarian communists, who obviously oppose

hierarchy, including patriarchy and chattel slavery. As it turns out, in

fact, the “Greek polis” is neither an ideal nor a model for anything,

except perhaps for Rousseau, who greatly admired Sparta. It is the

Athenian polis whose democratic institutions I often describe that has

the greatest significance for the democratic tradition. In the context

of libertarian municipalism, its significance is to provide us with

evidence that a people, for a time, could quite self-consciously

establish and maintain a direct democracy, despite the existence of

slavery, patriarchy, economic and class inequalities, agonistic

behavior, and even imperialism, all of which existed throughout the

ancient Mediterranean world. The fact is that we must look for what is

new and innovative in a historical period, even as we acknowledge

continuities with social structures that prevailed in the past.

In fact, short of the hazy Neolithic village traditions that Marija

Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, and William Irwin Thompson hypostatize, we will

have a hard time finding any tradition that was not patriarchal to one

degree or another. Rejecting all patriarchal societies as sources of

institutional study would mean that we must abandon not only the

Athenian polis but the free medieval communes and their confederations,

the Comuñero movement of sixteenth-century Spain, the revolutionary

Parisian sections of 1793, the Paris Commune of 1871, and even the

Spanish anarchist collectives of 1936-37. All of these institutional

developments, be it noted, were marred to one degree or another by

patriarchal values.

Libertarian municipalists are not ignorant of these very real historical

limitations; nor is libertarian municipalism based on any historical

“models.” No libertarian municipalist believes that society and cities

as they exist today can suddenly be transformed into a directly

democratic and rational society. The revolutionary transformation we

seek is one that requires education, the formation of a movement, and

the patience to cope with defeats. As I have emphasized again and again,

a libertarian municipalist practice begins, minimally, with an attempt

to enlarge local freedom at the expense of state power. And it does this

by example, by education, and by entering the public sphere (that is,

into local elections or extralegal assemblies), where ideas can be

raised among ordinary people that open the possibility of a lived

practice. In short, libertarian municipalism involves a vibrant politics

in the real world to change society and public consciousness alike. It

tries to forge a movement that will enter into open confrontation with

the state and the bourgeoisie, not cravenly sneak around them.

It is important to observe that this appeal to a new politics of

citizenship is not in any way meant to gloss over very real social

conflicts, nor is it an appeal to class neutrality. The fact is that

“the People” I invoke does not include Chase Manhattan Bank, General

Motors, or any class exploiters and economic bandits.

The “People” I am addressing are an oppressed humanity, all of whom

must—if they are to eliminate their oppressions—try to remove the shared

roots of oppression as such.

We cannot ignore class interests by completely absorbing them into

transclass ones. But in our time, particularization is being

overemphasized to the point where any shared struggle must now overcome

not only differences in class, gender, ethnicity, “and other issues,”

but nationalism, religious zealotry, and identity based on even minor

distinctions in status. The role of the revolutionary movement for over

two centuries has been to emphasize our shared humanity precisely

against ruling status groups and classes, which Marx, even in singling

out the proletariat as hegemonic, viewed as a “universal class.” Nor are

all “images” that people have of themselves as classes, genders, races,

nationalities, and cultural groups rational or humane, evidence of

consciousness or desirable from a radical viewpoint. In principle, there

is no reason why différance as such should not entangle and paralyze us

completely in our multifarious and self-enclosed “particularity,” in

postmodernist Derridean fashion. Indeed, today, when parochial

differences among the oppressed have been reduced to microscopic

divisions, it is all the more important for a revolutionary movement to

resolutely point out the common sources of oppression as such, and the

extent to which commodification has universalized them—particularly

global capitalism.

The deformations of the past were created largely by the famous “social

question,” notably by class exploitation, which in great measure could

have been remedied by technological advances. In short, they were

scarcity societies, albeit not that alone. A new social-ecological

sensibility has to be created, as do new values and relationships; this

will be done partly by overcoming economic need, however economic need

is construed. Little doubt should exist that a call for an end to

economic exploitation must be a central feature in any social ecology

program and movement, which are part of the Enlightenment tradition and

its revolutionary outcome.

The essence of dialectic is to always search out what is new in any

development: specifically, for the purposes of this discussion, the

emergence of a transclass people, such as oppressed women, people of

color, even the middle classes, as well as subcultures defined by sexual

preferences and lifestyles. To particularize distinctions (largely

created by the existing social order) to the point of reducing oppressed

people to seemingly “diverse persons”—indeed, to mere “personhood”—is to

feed into the current privatistic fads of our time and to remove all

possibility for collective social action and revolutionary change.

To examine what is really at issue in the questions of municipalism,

confederalism, and citizenship, as well as the distinction between the

social and the political, we must ground these notions in a historical

background where we can locate the meaning of the city (properly

conceived in distinction to the megalopolis), the citizen, and the

political sphere in the human condition.

Historical experience began to advance beyond a conception of mere

cyclical time, trapped in the stasis of eternal recurrence, into a

creative history insofar as intelligence and wisdom—more properly,

reason—began to inform human affairs.

Over the course of a hundred thousand years or so, Homo sapiens slowly

overcame the sluggishness of their more animalistic cousins the

Neanderthals and entered as an increasingly active agent into the

surrounding world, both to meet their more complex needs (material as

well as ideological), and to alter that environment by means of tools

and, yes, instrumental rationality. Life became longer, more secure,

increasingly acculturated aesthetically; and human communities, at

different levels of their development, tried to define and resolve the

problems of freedom and consciousness.

The necessary conditions for freedom and consciousness—or preconditions,

as socialists of all kinds recognized in the last century and a

half—involved technological advances that, in a rational society, could

emancipate people from the immediate, animalistic concerns of

self-maintenance, increase the realm of freedom from constrictions

imposed upon it by preoccupations with material necessity, and place

knowledge on a rational, systematic, and coherent basis to the extent

that this was possible. These conditions involved humanity’s self-

emancipation from the overpowering theistic creations of its own

imagination (creations often formulated by shamans and priests for their

own self-serving ends, as well as by apologists for hierarchy), notably,

mythopoesis, mysticism, antirationalism, and fears of demons and

deities, calculated to produce subservience and quietism in the face of

the social powers that be.

That the necessary and sufficient conditions for this emancipation have

never existed in a “one-to-one” relationship with each other has

provided the fuel for Cornelius Castoriadis’s essays on the omnipotence

of “social imaginaries,”

Theodor Adorno’s basic nihilism, and anarcho-chaotics who, in one way or

another, have debased Enlightenment ideals and classical forms of

socialism and anarchism. The discovery of the spear did not produce an

automatic shift from “matriarchy” to “patriarchy,” nor did the discovery

of the plow produce an automatic shift from “primitive communism” to

private property, as evolutionary anthropologists of the nineteenth

century supposed. Indeed, it cheapens any discussion of history and

social change to create “one-to-one” relations between technological and

cultural developments, a tragic feature of Friedrich Engels’s

simplification of his mentor’s ideas.

In fact, social evolution is very uneven and combined. No less

significantly, social evolution, like natural evolution, is profligate

in producing a vast diversity of social forms and cultures, which are

often incommensurable in their details. If our goal is to emphasize the

vast differences that separate one society from another rather than

identify the important thread of similarities that bring humanity to the

point of a highly creative development, “the Aztecs, Incas, Chinese,

Japanese, Mongols, Hindus, Persians, Arabs, Byzantines, and Western

Europeans, plus everything that could be enumerated from other cultures”

do not resemble each other, to cite the obligations Castoriadis places

on what he calls “a ‘rational dialectic’ of history” and, implicitly, on

reason itself. Indeed, it is unpardonable to carelessly fling these

civilizations together without regard for their place in time, their

social pedigrees, the extent to which they can be educed dialectically

from one another, or without an explanation of why as well as

descriptions of how they differ from each other. By focusing entirely on

the peculiarity of individual cultures, one reduces the development of

civilizations in an eductive sequence to the narrow nominalism that

Stephen Jay Gould applied to organic evolution, even to the point where

the “autonomy” so prized by Castoriadis can be dismissed as a purely

subjective “norm,” of no greater value in a postmodernist world of

interchangeable equivalences than authoritarian “norms” of hierarchy.

But if we explore very existential developments toward freedom from toil

and freedom from oppression in all its forms, we find that there is a

history to be told of rational advances, without presupposing

teleologies that predetermine that history and its tendencies. If we can

give material factors their due emphasis without reducing cultural

changes to strictly automatic responses to technological changes and,

without locating all highly variegated societies in a nearly mystical

sequence of “stages of development,” then we can speak intelligibly of

definite advances made by humanity out of animality; out of the timeless

“eternal recurrence” of relatively stagnant cultures; out of blood,

gender, and age relationships as the basis for social organization; and

out of the image of the “stranger,” who was not kin to other members of

a community, indeed, who was “inorganic,” to use Marx’s term, and hence

subject to arbitrary treatment beyond the reach of customary rights and

duties, defined as they were by tradition rather than reason.

Important as the development of agriculture, technology, and village

life were in moving toward this moment in human emancipation, the

emergence of the city was of the greatest importance in freeing people

from mere ethnic ties of solidarity, in bringing reason and secularity,

however rudimentarily, into human affairs. For it was only by this

evolution that segments of humanity could replace the tyranny of

mindless custom with a definable and rationally conditioned nomos, in

which the idea of justice could begin to replace tribalistic “blood

vengeance,” until later, when it was replaced by the idea of freedom. I

speak of the emergence of the city, because although the development of

the city has yet to be completed, its moments in history constitute a

discernable dialectic that opened an emancipatory realm within which

“strangers” and the “folk” could be reconstituted as citizens: secular

and fully rational beings who in varying degrees approximate humanity’s

potentiality to become free, rational, fully individuated, and rounded.

Moreover, the city has been the originating and authentic sphere of

politics in the Hellenic democratic sense of the term, and of

civilization, not, as I have emphasized again and again, of the state.

Which is not to say that city-states have not existed. But democracy,

conceived as a face-to-face realm of policymaking, entails a commitment

to the Enlightenment belief that all “ordinary” human beings are

potentially competent to collectively manage their political affairs—a

crucial concept in the thinking, all its limitations aside, of the

Athenian democratic tradition and, more radically, of those Parisian

sections of 1793 that gave equal voice to women as well as all men. At

such high points of political development, in which subsequent advances

often self-consciously built on and expanded more limited earlier ones,

the city became more than a unique arena for human life and politics,

while municipalism—civicism, which the French revolutionaries later

identified with “patriotism”—became more than an expression of love of

country.

Even when Jacobin demagogues gave it chauvinistic connotations,

“patriotism” in 1793 meant that the “national patrimony” was not the

“property of the King of France” but that France, in effect, now

belonged to all the people.

Over the long run, the city was conceived as the sociocultural destiny

of humanity, a place where, by late Roman times, there were no

“strangers” or ethnic “folk,” and by the French Revolution, no custom or

demonic irrationalities, but rather citoyens who lived in a free

terrain, organized themselves into discursive assemblies, and advanced

canons of secularity and fraternité, or more broadly, solidarity and

philia, hopefully guided by reason. Moreover, the French revolutionary

tradition was strongly confederalist until the dictatorial Jacobin

Republic came into being, wiping out the Parisian sections as well as

the ideal of a fête de la fédération. One must read Jules Michelet’s

account of the Great Revolution to learn the extent to which civicism

was identified with municipal liberty and fraternité with local

confederations, indeed a “republic” of confederations, between 1790 and

1793. One must explore the endeavors of Jean Varlet and the Évêché

militants of May 30-31, 1793, to understand how close the Revolution

came in the insurrection of June 2 to constructing the cherished

confederal Commune of communes that lingered in the historical memory of

the Parisian fédérés, as they designated themselves, in 1871.

Hence, let me stress that a libertarian municipalist politics is not a

mere strategy for human emancipation; it is a rigorous and ethical

concordance of means and ends (of instrumentalities, so to speak) with

historic goals, which implies a concept of history as more than mere

chronicles or a scattered archipelago of self- enclosed “social

imaginaries.”

The civitas, humanly scaled and democratically structured, is the

potential home of a universal humanitas. It is the initiating arena of

rational reflection, discursive decision-making, and secularity in human

affairs. It speaks to us from across the centuries in Pericles’

magnificent funeral oration and in the earthy, amazingly familiar and

eminently secular satires of Aristophanes, whose works demolish

Castoriadis’s emphasis on the mysterium and “closure” of the Athenian

polis to the modern mind. No one who reads the chronicles of Western

humanity can ignore the rational dialectic that underlies the

accumulation of mere events and that reveals an unfolding of the human

potentiality for universality, rationality, secularity, and freedom in

an eductive relationship that alone should be called History. This

history, to the extent that it has culminations at given moments of

development on which later civilizations built, is anchored in the

evolution of a secular public sphere, in politics, in the emergence of

the rational city—the city that is rational institutionally, creatively,

and communally. Nor can imagination be excluded from History, but it is

an imagination that must be elucidated by reason.

For nothing can be more dangerous to a society, indeed to the world

today, than the kind of unbridled imagination, unguided by reason, that

so easily lent itself to Nuremberg rallies, fascist demonstrations,

Stalinist idolatry, and death camps.

Instead of retreating to quietism, mysticism, and purely personalized

appeals for change, we must together explore the kinds of institutions

that would be required in a rational, ecological society, the kind of

politics we should appropriately practice, and the political movement

needed to achieve such a society. Social ecology and its

politics—libertarian municipalism—seeks to do just this: to

institutionalize freedom and guide us to a humane and ecological future

—one that will fulfill the unfilled promise of the city in history.

September 1995

Nationalism and the “National Question”

One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may

define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development

and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty.

For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily

as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the

heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the

anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to

become in the twentieth century.

This did not mean that the nineteenth-century Left favored imperialist

depredations in the colonial world. At the turn of this century, hardly

any serious radical thinker regarded the imperialist powers’ attempts to

quell movements for self-determination in colonial areas as a blessing.

The Left scoffed at and usually denounced the arrogant claims of

European powers to bring “progress” to the “barbarous” areas of the

world. Marx’s views of imperialism may have been equivocal, but he never

lacked a genuine aversion for the afflictions that native peoples

suffered at the hands of imperialists. Anarchists, in turn, were almost

invariably hostile to the European claim to be the beacon of

civilization for the world.

Yet if the Left universally scorned the civilizatory claims of

imperialists at the end of the last century, it generally regarded

nationalism as an arguable issue. The “national question,” to use the

traditional phrase in which such discussions were cast, was subject to

serious disputes, certainly as far as tactics were involved. But by

general agreement, leftists did not regard nationalism, culminating in

the creation of nation-states, as the ultimate dispensation of

humanity’s future in a collectivist or communist society. Indeed, the

single principle on which the Left of the pre-World War I and the

interwar periods agreed was a belief in the shared humanity of people

regardless of their membership in different cultural, ethnic, and gender

groups, and their complementary affinities in a free society as rational

human beings with the capacity for cooperation, a willingness to share

material resources, and a fervent sense of empathy. The

“Internationale,” the shared anthem of social democrats, socialists, and

anarchists alike up to and even after the Bolshevik revolution, ended

with the stirring cry, “The ‘Internationale’ shall be the human race.”

The Left singled out the international proletariat as the historic agent

for modern social change not by virtue of its specificity as a class or

its particularity as one component in a developing capitalist society,

but by virtue of its need to achieve universality in order to abolish

class society, that is, as the class driven by necessity to remove wage

slavery by abolishing enslavement as such. Capitalism had brought the

historic “social question” of human exploitation to its final and most

advanced form.

“Tis the final conflict!” rang out the Internationale, with a sense of

universalistic commitment, one that no revolutionary movement could

ignore without subverting the possibilities for passing from a

“prehistory” of barbarous class interest to a “true history” of a

totally emancipated humanity.

Minimally, this was the shared outlook of the prewar and interwar Left,

particularly of its various socialistic tendencies. The primacy the

anarchists have historically given to the abolition of the state, the

agency par excellence of hierarchical coercion, led directly to their

denigration of the nation-state and of nationalism generally, not only

because nationalism divides human beings territorially, culturally, and

economically, but because it follows in the wake of the modern state and

ideologically justifies it.

Of concern here is the internationalist tradition that played so

pronounced a role in the Left of the nineteenth century and the first

half of the twentieth, and its mutations into a highly problematical

“question,” particularly in Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin’s writings. This is

a “question” of no small importance. We have only to consider the utter

confusion that surrounds it today—as a savagely bigoted nationalism

subverts the internationalist tradition of the Left—to recognize its

importance. The rise of nationalisms that exploit racial, religious, and

traditional cultural differences between human beings, including even

the most trivial linguistic and quasi-tribalistic differences, not to

speak of differences in gender identity and sexual preference, marks a

decivilization of humanity.

What is particularly disturbing is that the Left has not always seen

nationalism as a regressive demand. The modern Left, such as it is

today, all too often uncritically embraces the slogan “national

liberation”—a slogan that has echoed through its ranks without regard

for the basic ideal voiced in the Internationale.

Calls for tribal “identity” shrilly accentuate a group’s particular

characteristics to garner constituencies, an effort that negates the

spirit of the Internationale and the traditional internationalism of the

Left. The very meaning of nationalism and the nature of its relationship

to statism raises issues for which the Left is bereft of ideas, apart

from appeals for “national liberation.”

If present-day leftists lose all viable memory of an earlier

internationalist Left —not to speak of humanity’s historical emergence

out of its animalistic background, its millennia-long development away

from such biological facts as ethnicity, gender, and age differences

toward truly social affinities based on citizenship, equality, and a

universalistic sense of a common humanity—the great role assigned to

reason by the Enlightenment may well be in grave doubt. Without a form

of human association that can resist and hopefully go beyond nationalism

in all its popular variants—whether it takes the form of a reconstituted

Left, a new politics, a social libertarianism, a reawakened humanism, an

ethics of complementarity—then anything that we can legitimately call

civilization, indeed, the human spirit itself, may well be extinguished

long before we are overwhelmed by the growing ecological crises, nuclear

war, or, more generally, a cultural barbarism comparable only to the

most destructive periods in history. In view of today’s growing

nationalism, then, few endeavors could be more important than to examine

the nature of nationalism and understand the so-called “national

question” as the Left in its various forms has interpreted it over the

years.

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The level of human development can be gauged in great part by the extent

to which people recognize their shared unity. Indeed, personal freedom

consists in great part of our ability to choose friends, partners,

associates, and affines without regard to their biological differences.

What makes us human, apart from our ability to reason on a high plane of

generalization, consociate into mutable social institutions, work

cooperatively, and develop a highly symbolic system of communication, is

a shared knowledge of our humanitas. Goethe’s memorable words, so

characteristic of the Enlightenment mind, still haunt as a criterion of

our humanity: “There is a degree of culture where national hatred

vanishes, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations and

feels the weal and woe of a neighboring people as if it happened to

one’s own.”

If Goethe established a standard of authentic humanity here—and surely

one can demand more of human beings than empathy for their “own

people”—early humanity was less than human by that standard. Although a

lunatic element in the ecology movement once called for a “return to a

Pleistocene spirituality,” they would in all probability have found that

“spirituality” very despiriting in reality.

In prehistoric eras, marked by band and tribal social organization,

human beings were, “spiritually” or otherwise, first and foremost

members of an immediate family, secondly, members of a band, and

ultimately, members of a tribe. What determined membership in anything

beyond one’s given family group was an extension of the kinship tie: the

people of a given tribe were socially linked to one another by real or

fictive blood relationships. This “blood oath,” as well as other

“biological facts” like gender and age, defined one’s rights,

obligations, and indeed one’s identity in the tribal society.

Moreover, many (perhaps most) band or tribal groups regarded only those

who shared the “blood oath” with themselves as human. Indeed, a tribe

often referred to itself as “the People,” a name that expressed its

exclusive claim to humanity.

Other people, who were outside the magic circle of the real or mythic

blood linkages of a tribe, were “strangers” and hence in some sense were

not human beings. The “blood oath” and the use of the name “the People”

to designate themselves often pitted a tribe against others who made the

same exclusive claim to be human and to be “the People,” even among

peoples who shared common linguistic and cultural traits.

Tribal societies, in fact, were extremely wary of anyone who was not one

of its own members. In many areas, before strangers could cross a

territorial boundary, they had to submissively and patiently await an

invitation from an elder or shaman of the tribe that claimed the

territory before proceeding. Without hospitality, which was generally

conceived as a quasi-religious virtue, any stranger risked life and limb

in a tribe’s territory, so that lodgings and food were usually preceded

by ritual acts of trust or goodwill. The modern handshake may itself

have originated as a symbolic expression that one’s right hand was free

of weapons.

Warfare was endemic among our prehistoric ancestors and in later native

communities, notwithstanding the high, almost cultic status enjoyed by

ostensibly peaceful “ecological aborigines” among white middle-class

Euro-Americans today. When foraging groups overhunted the game in their

accustomed territory, as often happened, they were usually more than

willing to invade the area of a neighboring group and claim its

resources for their own. Commonly, after the rise of warrior sodalities,

warfare acquired cultural as well as economic attributes, so victors no

longer merely defeated their real or chosen “enemies” but virtually

exterminated them, as witness the near-genocidal destruction of the

Huron Indians by their linguistically and culturally related Iroquois

cousins.

If the major empires of the ancient Middle East and Orient conquered,

pacified, and subjugated many different ethnic and cultural groups,

thereby making alien peoples into the abject subjects of despotic

monarchies, the most important single factor to erode aboriginal

parochialism was the emergence of the city. The rise of the ancient

city, whether democratic as at Athens or republican as in Rome, marked a

radically new social dispensation. In contrast to the family-oriented

and parochial folk who had constituted the tribal and village world,

Western cities were now structured increasingly around residential

propinquity and shared economic interests. A “second nature,” as Cicero

called it, of humanistic social and cultural ties began to replace the

older form of social organization based on the “first nature” of

biological and blood ties, in which individuals’ social roles and

obligations were anchored in their family, clan, gender, and the like,

rather than in associations of their own choice.

Etymologically, “politics” derives from the Greek politika, which

connotes an actively involved citizenry that formulates the policies of

a community or polis and, more often than not, routinely executes them

in the course of public service.

Although formal citizenship was required for participation in such

politics, poleis like democratic Athens celebrated their openness to

visitors, particularly to skilled craftsmen and knowledgeable merchants

of other ethnic communities. In his famous funeral oration, Pericles

declared, We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts

exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing,

although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality,

trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our

citizens; where, in education, from their very cradles by a painful

discipline seek after manliness [in Sparta], at Athens we live exactly

as we please and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate

danger.

In Periclean times, Athenian liberality, to be sure, was still limited

by a largely fictitious notion of the shared ancestry of its citizens,

although less than it had been previously. But it is hard to ignore the

fact that Plato’s dialectical masterpiece, The Republic, occurs as a

dialogue in the home of Cephalos, whose family were resident aliens in

the Piraeus, the port area of Athens where most foreigners lived.

Yet, in the dialogue itself, the interchange between citizen and alien

is uninhibited by any status considerations.

The Roman emperor Caracalla, in time, made all freemen in the Empire

“citizens” of Rome with equal juridical rights, thereby universalizing

human relationships despite differences in language, ethnicity,

tradition, and place of residence. Christianity, for all its failings,

nonetheless celebrated the equality of all people’s souls in the eyes of

the deity, a heavenly “egalitarianism” that, in combination with open

medieval cities, theoretically eliminated the last attributes of

ancestry, ethnicity, and tradition that divided human beings from each

other.

In practice, it goes without saying, these attributes still persisted,

and various peoples retained parochial allegiances to their villages,

localities, and even cities, countervailing the tenuous Roman and

particularly Christian ideals of a universal humanitas. The unified

medieval world was fragmented juridically into countless baronial and

aristocratic sovereignties that parochialized local popular commitments

to a given lord or place, often pitting culturally and ethnically

related peoples against each other in other areas. The Catholic Church

opposed these parochial sovereignties, not only for doctrinal reasons

but in order to be able to expand papal authority over Christendom as a

whole. As for secular power, wayward but strong monarchs like Henry II

of England tried to impose the “king’s peace” over large territorial

areas, subduing warring nobles with varying degrees of success. Thus did

pope and king work in tandem to diminish parochialism, even as they

dueled with each other for control over ever-larger areas of the feudal

world.

Yet authentic citizens were deeply involved in classical political

activity in many places in Europe during the Middle Ages. The burghers

of medieval town democracies were essentially master craftsmen. The

tasks of their guilds, or richly articulated vocational fraternities,

were no less moral than economic; indeed, they formed the structural

basis for a genuine moral economy. Guilds not only “policed” local

markets, fixing “fair prices” and assuring that the quality of their

members’ goods would be high, they participated in civic and religious

festivals as distinct entities with their own banners, helped finance

and construct public buildings, saw to the welfare of the families of

deceased members, collected money for charity, and participated as

militiamen in the defense of the community of which they were part.

Their cities, in the best of cases, conferred freedom on runaway serfs,

saw to the safety of travelers, and adamantly defended their civic

liberties. The eventual differentiation of the town populations into

wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless, and “nationalists” who

supported the monarchy against a predatory nobility all make up a

complex drama that cannot be discussed here.

At various times and places, some cities created forms of association

that were neither nations nor parochial baronies. These were intercity

confederations that lasted for centuries, such as the Hanseatic League;

cantonal confederations like that of Switzerland; and, more briefly,

attempts to achieve free city confederations like the Spanish Comuñeros

movement in the early sixteenth century. It was not until the

seventeenth century, particularly under Cromwell in England and Louis

XIV in France, that centralizers of one form or another finally began to

carve out lasting nations in Europe.

Nation-states, let me emphasize, are states, not only nations.

Establishing them means vesting power in a centralized, professional,

bureaucratic apparatus that exercises a social monopoly of organized

violence, notably in the form of its armies and police. The state

preempts the autonomy of localities and provinces by means of its

all-powerful executive and, in republican states, its legislature, whose

members are elected or appointed to represent a fixed number of

“constituents.” In nation-states, what used to be a citizen in a

self-managed locality vanishes into an anonymous aggregation of

individuals who pay a suitable amount of taxes and receive the state’s

“services.” “Politics” in the nation-state devolves into a body of

exchange relationships in which constituents generally try to get what

they pay for in a “political” marketplace of goods and services.

Nationalism as a form of tribalism writ large reinforces the state by

providing it with the loyalty of a people of shared linguistic, ethnic,

and cultural affinities, indeed, legitimizing the state by giving it a

basis of seemingly all-embracing biological and traditional

commonalities among the people. It was not the English people who

created an England but the English monarchs and centralizing rulers,

just as it was the French kings and their bureaucracies who forged the

French nation.

Indeed, until state-building began to acquire new vigor in the fifteenth

century, nation-states in Europe remained a novelty. Even when

centralized authority based minimally on a linguistic commonality began

to foster nationalism throughout Western Europe and the United States,

nationalism faced a very dubious destiny.

Confederalism remained a viable alternative to the nation-state well

into the latter half of the nineteenth century. As late as 1871, the

Paris Commune called upon all the communes of France to form a

confederal dual power in opposition to the newly created Third Republic.

Eventually, the nation-state won out in this complex conflict, and

statism was firmly linked to nationalism. By the beginning of the

twentieth century, the two were virtually indistinguishable from each

other.

NATIONALISM AND THE LEFT

Radical theorists and activists on the Left dealt in very different ways

with the host of historical and ethical problems that nationalism raised

with respect to efforts to build a communistic, cooperative society.

Historically, the earliest leftist attempts to explore nationalism as a

problem obstructing the advent of a free and just society came from

various anarchist theorists. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon seems never to have

questioned the ideal of human solidarity, although he never denied the

right of a people to cultural uniqueness and even to secede from any

kind of “social contract,” provided, to be sure, that no one else’s

rights were infringed upon. Although Proudhon detested slavery—he

sarcastically observed that the American South “with Bible in hand,

cultivates slavery,” while the American North “is already creating a

proletariat”—he formally conceded the right of the Confederacy to

withdraw from the Union during the Civil War of 1861-65.

More generally, Proudhon’s confederalist and mutualistic views led him

to oppose nationalist movements in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. His

antinationalist notions were somewhat diluted by his own Francophilism,

as the French socialist Jean Jaures later noted. Proudhon feared the

formation of strong nation-states on or near France’s borders. But he

was also a product, in his own way, of the Enlightenment. Writing in

1862, he declared, I will never put devotion to my country before the

rights of Man. If the French Government behaves unjustly to any people,

I am deeply grieved and protest in every way that I can. If France is

punished for the misdeeds of her leaders, I bow my head and say from the

depths of my soul, “Merito haec patimur”— We have deserved these ills.

Despite his Gallic chauvinism, the “rights of Man” remained foremost in

Proudhon’s mind.

“Do you think that it is French egoism, hatred of liberty, scorn for the

Poles and Italians that cause me to mock at and mistrust this

commonplace word nationality,” he wrote to Herzen, “which is being so

widely used and makes so many scoundrels and so many honest citizens

talk so much nonsense? For pity’s sake … do not take offense so easily.

If you do, I shall have to say to you what I have been saying for six

months about your friend Garibaldi: ‘Of great heart but no brain.’ ”

Mikhail Bakunin’s internationalism was as emphatic as Proudhon’s,

although his views were also marked by a certain ambiguity. “Only that

can be called a human principle which is universal and common to all

men,” he wrote in his internationalist vein;

“and nationality separates men, therefore it is not a principle.”

Indeed, “There is nothing more absurd and at the same time more harmful,

more deadly, for the people than to uphold the fictitious principle of

nationality as the ideal of all the people’s aspirations.” What counted

finally for Bakunin was that “Nationality is not a universal human

principle.” Still further, We should place human, universal justice

above all national interests. And we should once and for all time

abandon the false principle of nationality, invented of late by the

despots of France, Russia, and Prussia for the purpose of crushing the

sovereign principle of liberty.

Yet Bakunin also declared that nationality “is a historic, local fact,

which like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general

acceptance.” Not only that, but this is a “natural fact” that deserves

“respect.” It may have been his rhetorical proclivities that led him to

declare himself “always sincerely the patriot of all oppressed

fatherlands.” But he argued that the right of every nationality “to live

according to its own nature” must be respected, since this “right” is

“simply the corollary of the general principle of freedom.”

The subtlety of Bakunin’s observations should not be overlooked in the

midst of this seeming self-contradiction. He defined a general principle

that is human, one that is abridged or partially violated by asocial or

“biological” facts that for better or worse must be taken for granted.

To be a nationalist is to be less than human, but it is also inevitable

insofar as individuals are products of distinctive cultural traditions,

environments, and states of mind. Overshadowing the mere fact of

“nationality” is the higher universal principle in which people

recognize themselves as members of the same species and seek to foster

their commonalities rather than their “national” distinctiveness.

Such humanistic principles were to be taken very seriously by anarchists

generally and strikingly so by the largest anarchist movement of modern

times, the Spanish anarchists. From the early 1880s up to the bloody

civil war of 1936-39, the anarchist movement of Spain opposed not only

statism and nationalism but even regionalism in all its forms. Despite

its enormous Catalan following, the Spanish anarchists consistently

raised the higher human principle of social liberation over national

liberation and opposed nationalist tendencies within Spain that so often

divided Basques, Catalans, Andalusians, and Galicians from one another

and particularly from the Castilians, who enjoyed cultural supremacy

over the country’s minorities. Indeed, the word “Iberian” rather than

“Spanish,” which appears in the name Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI),

served to express not only a commitment to peninsular solidarity but an

indifference to regional and national distinctions between Spain and

Portugal. The Spanish anarchists cultivated Esperanto as a “universal”

human language more enthusiastically than any major radical tendency,

and “universal brotherhood” remained a lasting ideal of their movement,

as it has historically in most anarchist movements up to the present

day.

Prior to 1914, Marxists and the Second International generally held

similar convictions, despite the burgeoning of nineteenth-century

nationalism. In Marx and Engels’ view, the proletariat of the world had

no country; authentically unified as a class, it was destined to abolish

all forms of class society. The Communist Manifesto ends with the

ringing appeal: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” In the body of

the work (which Bakunin translated into Russian), the authors declared,

“In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries,

[Communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of

the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.” And further,

“The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what

they have not got.”

The support that Marx and Engels did lend to national liberation

struggles was essentially strategic, stemming primarily from their

geopolitical and economic concerns rather than from broad social

principle. They vigorously championed Polish independence from Russia,

for example, because they wanted to weaken the Russian empire, which in

their day was the supreme counterrevolutionary power on the European

continent. And they wanted to see a united Germany because a

centralized, powerful nation-state would provide it with what Engels, in

a letter to Karl Kautsky in 1882, called “the normal political

constitution of the European bourgeoisie.”

Yet the manifest similarities between the internationalist rhetoric of

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto and the internationalism of

the anarchist theorists and movements should not be permitted to conceal

the important differences between these two forms of

socialism—differences that were to play a major role in the debates that

separated them. The anarchists were in every sense ethical socialists

who upheld universal principles of the “brotherhood of man” and

“fraternity,” principles that Marx’s “scientific socialism” disdained as

mere “abstractions.” In later years, even when speaking broadly of

freedom and the oppressed, Marx and Engels considered the use of

seemingly “inexact” words like “workers” and “toilers” to be an implicit

rejection of socialism as a “science”; instead, they preferred what they

considered the more scientifically rigorous word proletariat, which

specifically referred to those who generate surplus value.

Indeed, in contrast to anarchist theorists like Proudhon, who considered

the spread of capitalism and the proletarianization of preindustrial

peasantry and craftspeople to be a disaster, Marx and Engels

enthusiastically welcomed these developments, as well as the formation

of large, centralized nation-states in which market economies could

flourish. They saw them not only as desiderata in fostering economic

development but, by promoting capitalism, as indispensable in creating

the preconditions for socialism. Despite their support for proletarian

internationalism, they derogated what they saw as “abstract”

denunciations of nationalism as such or scorned them as merely

“moralistic.” Although internationalism in the interests of class

solidarity remained a desideratum for Marx and Engels, their view

implicitly stood at odds with their commitment to capitalist economic

expansion with its need in the last century for centralized

nation-states. They held the nation-state to be good or bad insofar as

it advanced or inhibited the expansion of capital, the advance of the

“productive forces,” and the proletarianization of preindustrial

peoples. In principle, they looked askance at the nationalist sentiments

of Indians, Chinese, Africans, and the rest of the noncapitalist world,

whose precapitalist social forms might impede capitalist expansion.

Ireland, ironically, seems to have been an exception to this approach.

Marx, Engels, and the Marxist movement as a whole acknowledged the right

of the Irish to national liberation largely for sentimental reasons and

because it would produce problems for English imperialism, which

commanded a world market. In the main, until such time as a socialist

society could be achieved, Marxists considered the formation of large,

ever-more centralized nation-states in Europe to be “historically

progressive.”

Given their instrumental geopolitics, it should not be surprising that

as the years went by, Marx and Engels essentially supported Bismarck’s

attempts to unify Germany. Their express distaste for Bismarck’s methods

and for the landed gentry in whose interests he spoke should not be

taken too seriously. They would have welcomed Germany’s annexation of

Denmark, and they called for the incorporation of smaller European

nationalities like the Czechs and Slavs generally into a centralized

Austria-Hungary, as well as the unification of Italy into a

nation-state, in order to broaden the terrain of the market and the

sovereignty of capitalism on the European continent.

Nor is it surprising that Marx and Engels supported Bismarck’s armies in

the Franco-Prussian war of 1870—despite the opposition of their closest

adherents in the German Social Democratic party, Wilhelm Liebknecht and

August Bebel—at least up to the point when those armies crossed the

French frontier and surrounded Paris in 1871. Ironically, Marx and

Engels’ own arguments were to be invoked by the European Marxists who

diverged from their antiwar comrades to support their respective

national military efforts at the outbreak of the First World War. Prowar

German Social Democrats supported the Kaiser as a bulwark against

Russian “Asiatic” barbarism—seemingly in accordance with Marx and

Engels’ own views —while the French Socialists (as well as Kropotkin in

Britain and later in Russia) invoked the tradition of their country’s

Great Revolution in opposition to “Prussian militarism.”

Despite many widespread claims that Rosa Luxemburg was more anarchistic

than a committed Marxist, she actually vigorously opposed the

motivations of anarchic forms of socialism and was more of a doctrinaire

Marxist than is generally realized. Her opposition to Polish nationalism

and Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist Party (which demanded Polish national

independence) as well as her hostility toward nationalism generally,

admirable and courageous as it was, rested principally not on an

anarchistic belief in the “brotherhood of man” but on traditional

Marxist arguments, namely, an extension of Marx and Engels’ desire for

unified markets and centralized states at the expense of Eastern

European nationalities, albeit with a new twist.

By the turn of the century, new considerations had come to the

foreground that induced Luxemburg to modify her views. Like many social

democratic theorists at the time, Luxemburg shared the conviction that

capitalism had passed from a progressive into a largely reactionary

phase. No longer a historically progressive economic order, capitalism

was now reactionary because it had fulfilled its “historical” function

in advancing technology and presumably in producing a class-conscious or

even revolutionary proletariat. Lenin systematized this conclusion in

his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Thus, both Lenin

and Luxemburg logically denounced the First World War as imperialist and

broke with all socialists who supported the Entente and the Central

Powers, deriding them as “social patriots.” Where Lenin markedly

differed from Luxemburg (aside from the famous issue of his support for

a centralized party organization) was on how, from a strictly

“realistic” standpoint, the “national question” could be used against

capitalism in an era of imperialism.

To Lenin, the national struggles of economically undeveloped colonized

countries for liberation from the colonial powers, including Tsarist

Russia, were now inherently progressive insofar as they served to

undermine the power of capital.

That is to say, Lenin’s support for national liberation struggles was

essentially no less pragmatic than that of other Marxists, including

Luxemburg herself. For imperialist Russia, appropriately characterized

as a “prison of nations,” Lenin advocated the unconditional right of

non-Russian peoples to secede under any conditions and to form

nation-states of their own. On the other hand, he maintained that

non-Russian Social Democrats in Russia’s colonized countries would be

obliged to advocate some kind of federal union with the “mother country”

Russian Social Democrats succeeded in achieving a proletarian

revolution.

Hence, although Lenin and Luxemburg’s premises were very similar, the

two Marxists came to radically different conclusions about the “national

question” and the correct manner of resolving it. Lenin demanded the

right of Poland to establish a nation-state of its own, while Luxemburg

opposed it as economically unviable and regressive. Lenin shared Marx

and Engels’ support for Polish independence, albeit for very different

yet equally pragmatic reasons. He did not honor his own position on the

right to secession during the Russian Civil War, most flagrantly in his

manner of dealing with Georgia, a very distinct nation that had

supported the Mensheviks until the Soviet regime forced it to accept a

domestic variant of Bolshevism. Only in the last years of his life,

after a Georgian Communist party took command of the state, did Lenin

oppose Stalin’s attempt to subordinate the Georgian party to the

Russian—a preponderantly intraparty conflict that was of little concern

to the pro-Menshevik Georgian population. Lenin did not live long enough

to engage Stalin on this, and other, policies and organizational

practices.

TWO APPROACHES TO THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The Marxist and Marxist-Leninist discussions on the “national question”

after the First World War thus produced a highly convoluted legacy that

affected the policies not only of the Old Left of the 1920s and 1930s

but those of the New Left of the 1960s as well. What is important to

clarify here are the radically different premises from which anarchists

and Marxists viewed nationalism generally.

Anarchism in the main advanced humanistic, basically ethical reasons for

opposing the nation-states that fostered nationalism. Anarchists did so,

to be more specific, because national distinctions tended to lead to

state formation and to subvert the unity of humanity, to parochialize

society, and to foster cultural particularities rather than the

universality of the human condition. Marxism, as a “socialist science,”

eschewed such ethical “abstractions.”

In contrast to the anarchist opposition to the state and to

centralization, not only did Marxists support a centralized state, they

insisted on the “historically progressive” nature of capitalism and a

market economy, which required centralized nation-states as domestic

markets and as means for removing all internal barriers to commerce that

local and regional sovereignties had created.

Marxists generally regarded the national aspirations of oppressed

peoples as matters of political strategy that should be supported or

opposed for strictly pragmatic considerations, irrespective of any

broader ethical ones.

Thus, two distinct approaches to nationalism emerged within the Left.

The ethical antinationalism of anarchists championed the unity of

humanity, with due allowance for cultural distinctions but in flat

opposition to the formation of nation- states; the Marxists supported or

opposed the nationalistic demands of largely precapitalist cultures for

a variety of pragmatic and geopolitical reasons. This distinction is not

intended to be hard and fast; socialists in pre-World War I

Austria-Hungary were strongly multinational as a result of the many

different peoples who made up the prewar empire. They called for a

confederal relationship between the German-speaking rulers of the empire

and its largely Slavonic members, which approximated an anarchist view.

Whether they would have honored their own ideals in practice any better

than Lenin adhered to his own prescriptions once a “proletarian

revolution” actually succeeded we will never know. The original empire

had disappeared by 1918, and the ostensible libertarianism of

“Austro-Hungarian Marxism,” as it was called, became moot during the

interwar period. To their honor, in February 1934 in Vienna, Austrian

socialists, unlike any other movement apart from the Spaniards, resisted

protofascist developments in bloody street fighting; the movement never

regained its revolutionary élan after it was restored in 1945.

NATIONALISM AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The Left of the interwar period, the so-called “Old Left,” viewed the

fast- approaching war against Nazi Germany as a continuation of the

“Great War” of 1914-18. Anti-Stalinist Marxists predicted a short-lived

conflict that would terminate in proletarian revolutions even more

sweeping than those of the 1917- 21 period. Significantly, Trotsky

staked his adherence to orthodox Marxism itself on this calculation: if

the war did not end in this outcome, he proposed, nearly all the

premises of orthodox Marxism would have to be examined and perhaps

drastically revised. His death in 1940 precluded such a reevaluation on

his own part. When the war did not conclude in international proletarian

revolutions, Trotsky’s supporters were hardly willing to make the

sweeping reexamination that he had suggested.

Yet this reexamination was very much needed. Not only did the Second

World War fail to end in proletarian revolutions in Europe, it brought

an end to the entire era of revolutionary proletarian socialism and the

class-oriented internationalism that had emerged in June 1848, when the

Parisian working class raised barricades and red flags in support of a

“social republic.” Far from achieving any successful proletarian

revolutions after the Second World War, the European working class

failed to exhibit any semblance of internationalism during the conflict.

Unlike their fathers a generation earlier, no warring troops engaged in

fraternization; nor did the civilian populations exhibit any overt

hostility to their political and military leaders for their conduct of

the war, despite the massive destruction of cities by aerial bombers and

artillery. The German army fought desperately against the Allies in the

West and were prepared to defend Hitler’s bunker to the end.

Above all, an elevated awareness of class distinctions and conflicts in

Europe gave way to nationalism, partly in reaction to Germany’s

occupations of home territories, but also, and significantly, as a

result of the resurgence of a crude xenophobia that verged on outright

racism. What limited class-oriented movements did emerge for a while

after the war, notably in France, Italy, and Greece, were easily

manipulated by the Stalinists to serve Soviet interests in the Cold War.

Hence, although the Second World War lasted much longer than the first,

its outcome never rose to the political and social level of the 1917-21

period. In fact, world capitalism emerged from World War II stronger

than it had been at any time in its history, owing principally to the

state’s massive intervention in economic and social affairs.

STRUGGLES FOR “NATIONAL LIBERATION”

The failure of serious radical theorists to reexamine Marxist theory in

the light of these developments, as Trotsky had proposed, was followed

by the precipitate decline of the Old Left; the general recognition that

the proletariat was no longer a “hegemonic” class in overthrowing

capitalism; the absence of a “general crisis” of capitalism; and the

failure of the Soviet Union to play an internationalist role in postwar

events.

What came to the foreground instead were national liberation struggles

in “Third World” countries and sporadic anti-Soviet eruptions in Eastern

European countries, which were largely smothered by Stalinist

totalitarianism. The Left, in these instances, has often taken

nationalist struggles as general “anti-imperialist” attempts to achieve

“autonomy” from imperialism, and state formation as a legitimation of

this “autonomy,” even at the expense of a popular democracy in the

colonized world.

If Marx and Engels often supported national struggles for strategic

reasons, the Left in the twentieth century, both New and Old, has often

elevated such support for such struggles into a mindless article of

faith. The strategic “nationalisms” of Marxist-type movements largely

foreclosed inquiry into what kind of society a given “national

liberation” movement would likely produce, in a way that ethical

socialisms like anarchism in the last century did not. It was (or if

not, it should have been) a matter of the gravest concern for the Old

Left in the 1920s and 1930s to inquire into what type of society Mao

Tse-tung, to take a striking case in point, would establish in China if

he defeated the Kuomintang, while the New Left of the 1960s should have

inquired into what type of society Castro, to cite another important

case, would establish in Cuba after the expulsion of Batista.

But throughout this century, when Third World national liberation

movements in colonial countries have made conventional avowals of

socialism and then proceeded to establish highly centralized, often

brutally authoritarian states, the Left often greeted them as effective

struggles against imperialist enemies.

Advanced as national liberation, nationalism has often stopped short of

advancing major social changes and even ignored the need to do so.

Avowals of authoritarian forms of socialism have been used by national

liberation movements very much the way Stalin used socialist ideologies

to brutally consolidate his own dictatorship. Indeed, Marxism-Leninism

has proved a remarkably effective doctrine for mobilizing national

liberation struggles against imperialist powers and gaining the support

of leftist radicals abroad, who saw national liberation movements as

largely anti-imperialist struggles rather than observing their true

social content.

Thus, despite the populist and often even anarchistic tendencies that

gave rise to the European and American New Left, its essentially

international focus was directed increasingly toward an uncritical

support for national liberation struggles outside the Euro-American

sphere, without regard for where these struggles were leading and the

authoritarian nature of their leadership. As the 1960s progressed, this

incredibly confused movement in fact steadily shed the anarchistic and

universalistic ambience with which it had begun. After Mao’s practices

were elevated to an “ism” in the New Left, many young radicals adopted

“Maoism” unreservedly, with grim results for the New Left as a whole. By

1969, the New Left had largely been taken over by Maoists and admirers

of Fidel Castro. An utterly misleading book like Fanshen, which

uncritically applauded Maoist activities in the Chinese countryside, was

revered in the late 1960s, and many radical groups adopted what they

took to be Maoist organizational practices. So heavily focused was the

New Left’s attention on national liberation struggles in the Third World

that the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969 hardly produced

serious protest by young leftists, at least in the United States.

The 1960s also saw the emergence of yet another form of nationalism on

the Left. Increasingly ethnically chauvinistic groups began to appear

that ultimately inverted Euro-American claims of the alleged superiority

of the white race into an equally reactionary claim to the superiority

of nonwhites. Embracing the particularism into which racial politics had

degenerated instead of the potential universalism of a humanitas, the

New Left placed blacks, colonial peoples, and even totalitarian colonial

nations on the top of its theoretical pyramid, endowing them with a

commanding or “hegemonic” position in relation to whites, Euro-

Americans, and bourgeois-democratic nations. In the 1970s, this

particularistic strategy was adopted by certain feminists, who began to

extol the “superiority” of women over men, indeed, to affirm an

allegedly female mystical “power” and an allegedly female irrationalism

over the secular rationality and scientific inquiry that were presumably

the domain of all males. The term “white male” became a patently

derogatory expression that was applied ecumenically to all Euro-

American men, irrespective of whether they themselves were exploited and

dominated by ruling classes and hierarchies.

A highly parochial “identity politics” began to emerge, even to dominate

many New Leftists as new “micronationalisms.” Not only do certain

tendencies in such “identity” movements closely resemble those of very

traditional forms of oppression like patriarchy, but identity politics

also constitutes a regression from the libertarian and even general

Marxian message of the Internationale and a transcendence of all

“micronationalist” differentia in a truly humanistic communist society.

What passes for “radical consciousness” today is shifting increasingly

toward a biologically oriented emphasis on human differentiation like

gender and ethnicity, not an emphasis on the need to foster human

universality that was so pronounced among the anarchist writers of the

last century and in The Communist Manifesto.

TOWARD A NEW INTERNATIONALISM

How to assess this devolution in leftist thought and the problems it

raises today? I have tried to place nationalism in the larger historical

context of humanity’s social evolution, from the internal solidarity of

the tribe, to the increasing expansiveness of urban life and the

universalism advanced by the great monotheistic religions in the Middle

Ages, and finally to ideals of human affinity based on reason,

secularism, cooperation, and democracy in the nineteenth century. We can

say with certainty that any movement that aspires to something less than

these anarchist and libertarian socialist notions of the “brotherhood of

man,” certainly as expressed in the Internationale, falls short of the

highest ideals of the Left. Indeed, from the perspective of the end of

the twentieth century, we are obliged to ask for even more than what

nineteenth century internationalism demanded. We are obliged to

formulate an ethics of complementarity in which cultural differentia

mutualistically serve to enhance human unity itself, in short, that

constitute a new mosaic of vigorous cultures that enrich the human

condition and that foster its advance rather than fragment and decompose

it into new “nationalities” and an increasing number of nation-states.

No less significant is the need for a radical social outlook that

conjoins cultural variety and the ideal of a unified humanity with an

ethical concept of what a new society should be like—one that is

universalistic in its view of humanity, cooperative in its view of human

relationships on all levels of life, and egalitarian in its idea of

social relations. While internationalist in their class outlook, nearly

all Marxist attitudes toward the “national question” were instrumental:

they were guided by expediency and opportunism, and worse, they often

denigrated ideas of democracy, citizenship, and freedom as “abstract”

and, presumably, “unscientific” notions. Outstanding Marxists accepted

the nation-state with all its coercive power and centralistic traits, be

they Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, or Lenin. Nor did these Marxists view

confederalism as a desideratum. Luxemburg’s writings, for example,

simply take confederalism as it existed in her own time (particularly

the vicissitudes of Swiss cantonalism) as exhausting all the

possibilities of this political idea, without due regard for the

anarchist emphasis on the need for a profound social, political, and

economic democratization of the municipalities that are to confederate

with each other. With few exceptions, Marxists advanced no serious

critique of the nation-state and state centralization as such, an

omission that, all “collectivistic” achievements aside, would have

foredoomed their attempts to achieve a rational society if nothing else

had.

Cultural freedom and variety, let me emphasize, should not be confused

with nationalism. That specific peoples should be free to fully develop

their own cultural capacities is not merely a right but a desideratum.

The world will be a drab place indeed if a magnificent mosaic of

different cultures does not replace the largely deculturated and

homogenized world created by modern capitalism.

But by the same token, the world will be completely divided and peoples

will be chronically at odds with one another if their cultural

differences are parochialized and if seeming “cultural differences” are

rooted in biologistic notions of gender, racial, and physical

superiority. Historically, there is a sense in which the national

consolidation of peoples along territorial lines did produce a social

sphere that was broader than the narrow kinship basis for kinship

societies because it was obviously more open to strangers, just as

cities tended to foster broader human affinities than tribes. But

neither tribal affinities nor territorial boundaries constitute a

realization of humanity’s potential to achieve a full sense of

commonality with rich but harmonious cultural variations. Frontiers have

no place on the map of the planet, any more than they have a place on

the landscape of the mind.

A socialism that is not informed by this kind of ethical outlook, with a

due respect for cultural variety, cannot ignore the potential outcome of

a national liberation struggle as the Old and New Lefts alike so often

did. Nor can it support national liberation struggles for instrumental

purposes merely as a means of “weakening” imperialism. Certainly, such a

socialism cannot promote the proliferation of nation-states, much less

increase the number of divisive national entities. Ironically, the

success of many national liberation struggles has had the effect of

creating politically independent statist regimes that are nonetheless as

manipulable by the forces of international capitalism as were the old,

generally obtuse imperialist ones. More often than not, Third World

nations have not cast off their colonial shackles since the end of the

Second World War: they have merely become domesticated and rendered

highly vulnerable to the forces of international capitalism, with little

more than a facade of self-determination.

Moreover, they have often used their myths of “national sovereignty” to

nourish xenophobic ambitions to grab adjacent areas around them and

oppress their neighbors as brutally as imperialists in their own right,

such as Ghana’s oppression under Nkrumah of the Togo peoples in West

Africa or Milosevic’s attempt to “cleanse” Muslims from Bosnia. No less

regressive, such nationalisms evoke what is most sinister in a people’s

past: religious fundamentalism in all its forms, traditional hatreds of

“foreigners,” a “national unity” that overrides terrible internal social

and economic inequities, and most commonly, a total disregard for human

rights. The “nation” as a cultural entity is superseded by an

overpowering and oppressive state apparatus. Racism commonly goes hand

in hand with national liberation struggles, such as “ethnic cleansing”

and wars for territorial gain, as we see most poignantly today in the

Middle East, India, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. Nationalisms that

only a generation ago might have been regarded as national liberation

struggles are more clearly seen today, in the wake of the collapse of

the Soviet empire, as little more than social nightmares and

decivilizing blights.

Put bluntly, nationalisms are regressive atavisms that the Enlightenment

tried to overcome long ago. They introject the worst features of the

very empires from which oppressed peoples have tried to shake loose. Not

only do they typically reproduce state machines that are as oppressive

as the ones that colonial powers imposed on them, but they reinforce

those machines with cultural, religious, ethnic, and xenophobic traits

that are often used to foster regional and even domestic hatreds and

subimperialisms. No less important, in the absence of genuine popular

democracies, the sequelae of understandably anti-imperialist struggles

too often include the strengthening of imperialism itself, such that the

powers that have been seemingly dispossessed of their colonies can now

play the state of one former colony against that of another, as witness

the conflicts that ravage Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian

subcontinent. These are the areas, I may add, where nuclear wars will be

more likely to occur as the years go by than elsewhere in the world. The

development of an Islamic nuclear bomb to countervail an Israeli one or

of a Pakistani bomb to countervail an Indian one—all portend no good for

the South and its conflict with the North. Indeed, the tendency for

former colonies to actively seek alliances with their erstwhile

imperialist rulers is now a more typical feature of North-South

diplomacy than is any unity by the South against the North.

Nationalism has always been a disease that divided human from human

—“abstract” as traditional Marxists may consider this notion to be—and

it can never be viewed as anything more than a regression toward tribal

parochialism and the fuel for intercommunal warfare. Nor have the

national liberation struggles that have produced new states throughout

the Third World and in Eastern Europe impaired the expansion of

imperialism or eventuated in fully democratic states.

That the “liberated” peoples of the Stalinist empire are less oppressed

today than they were under Communist rule should not mislead us into

believing that they are also free from the xenophobia that nearly all

nation-states cultivate or from the cultural homogenization that

capitalism and its media produce.

No left libertarian, to be sure, can oppose the right of a subjugated

people to establish itself as an autonomous entity. But to oppose an

oppressor is not equivalent to calling for support for everything

formerly colonized nation-states do. Ethically speaking, one cannot

oppose a wrong when one party commits it then support another party who

commits the same wrong. The trite but pithy maxim “My enemy’s enemy is

not my friend” is particularly applicable to oppressed people who may be

manipulated by totalitarians, religious zealots, and “ethnic cleansers.”

Just as an authentic ethics must be reasoned out and premised on genuine

humanistic potentialities, so a libertarian socialism or anarchism must

retain its ethical integrity if the voice of reason is to be heard in

social affairs. In the 1960s, those who opposed American imperialism in

Southeast Asia and at the same time rejected giving any support for the

Communist regime in Hanoi, and those who opposed American intervention

in Cuba without supporting Castroist totalitarianism, stood on a higher

moral ground than the New Leftists who exercised their rebelliousness

against the United States predominantly by supporting national

liberation struggles without regard to the authoritarian and statist

goals of those struggles. Indeed, identified with the authoritarians

whom they actively supported, these New Leftists eventually grew

demoralized by the absence of an ethical basis in their liberatory

ideas. Today, in fact, liberatory struggles based on nationalism and

statism have borne the terrifying harvest of internecine bloodletting

throughout the world. Even in “liberated” states like East Germany,

nationalism has found brutal expression in the rise of fascist

movements, German nationalism, plans to restrict the immigration of

asylum seekers, violence against “foreigners” (including victims of

Nazism like gypsies), and the like.

Thus, the instrumental view of nationalism that Marxists originally

cultivated has left many “leftists” in a condition of moral bankruptcy.

Ethically, there are some social issues on which one must take a stand,

such as white and black racism, patriarchy and matriarchy, and

imperialism and Third World totalitarianism. An unswerving opposition to

racism, gender oppression, and domination as such must always be

paramount if an ethical socialism is to emerge from the ruins of

socialism itself. But we also live in a world in which issues sometimes

arise on which leftists cannot take any position at all—issues on which

to take a position is to operate within the alternatives advanced by a

basically irrational society and to choose the lesser of several

irrationalities or evils over other irrationalities or evils. It is not

a sign of political ineffectuality to reject such a choice altogether

and declare that to oppose one evil with a lesser one must eventually

lead to the support of the worst evil that emerges. German Social

Democracy, by abetting one “lesser evil” after another during the 1920s,

went from supporting liberals to conservatives to reactionaries who

finally brought Hitler to power. In an irrational society, conventional

wisdom and instrumentalism can produce only ever-greater irrationality,

using virtue as a patina to conceal basic contradictions both in its own

position and in society. “Like the processes of life, digestion and

breathing,” observed Bakunin, nationality “has no right to be concerned

with itself until that right is denied.” This was a perceptive enough

statement in its day. With the explosions of barbarous nationalism in

our own day and the snarling appetites of nationalists to create more

and more nation-states, it is clear that “nationality” is a social

pathology that must be cured if society is not to further deteriorate.

SEEKING AN ALTERNATIVE

If nationalism is regressive, what rational and humanistic alternative

to it can an ethical socialism offer? There is no place in a free

society for nation-states— either as nations or as states. However

strong may be the impulse of specific peoples for a collective identity,

reason and a concern for ethical behavior oblige us to recover the

universality of the city or town and a directly democratic political

culture, albeit on a higher plane than even the polis of Periclean

Athens.

Identity should properly be replaced by community—by a shared affinity

that is humanly scaled, nonhierarchical, libertarian, and open to all,

irrespective of an individual’s gender, ethnic traits, sexual identity,

talents, or personal proclivities.

Such community life can only be recovered by a new politics of

libertarian municipalism: the democratization of municipalities so that

they are self-managed by the people who inhabit them, and the formation

of a confederation of these municipalities to constitute a counter-power

to the nation-state.

The danger that democratized municipalities in a decentralized society

would result in economic and cultural parochialism is very real, and it

can only be precluded by a vigorous confederation of municipalities

based on their material interdependence. The “self-sufficiency” of

community life, even if it were possible today, would by no means

guarantee a genuine grassroots democracy.

The confederation of municipalities, as a medium for interaction,

collaboration, and mutual aid among its municipal components, provides

the sole alternative to the powerful nation-state on the one hand and

the parochial town or city on the other. Fully democratic, in which the

municipal deputies to confederal institutions would be subject to

recall, rotation, and unrelenting public review, the confederation would

constitute an extension of local liberties to the regional level,

allowing for a sensitive equilibrium between locality and region in

which the cultural variety of towns could flourish without turning

inward toward local exclusivity. Indeed, beneficial cultural traits

would also be shared within and between various confederations, along

with the interchange of goods and services that make up the material

means of life.

By the same token, “property” would be municipalized rather than

nationalized (which merely reinforces state power with economic power),

collectivized (which simply recasts private entrepreneurial rights in a

“collective” form), or privatized (which facilitates the reemergence of

a competitive market economy).

A municipalized economy would approximate a system of usufruct based

entirely on one’s needs and citizenship in a community rather than one’s

proprietary, vocational, or professional interests. Where a municipal

citizens’ assembly controls economic policy, no one individual controls,

much less “owns,” the means of production and of life. Where confederal

means of administering a region’s resources coordinate the economic

behavior of the whole, parochial interests would tend to give way to

larger human interests and economic considerations to more democratic

ones. The issues that municipalities and their confederations address

would cease to range around economic self-interest; they would focus on

democratic procedures and simple equity in meeting human needs. Let

there be no doubt that the technological resources that make it possible

for people to choose their own lifestyles and have the free time to

participate fully in a democratic politics are absolutely necessary for

the libertarian, confederally organized society that I have sketched

here. Even the best of ethical intentions are likely to yield to some

form of oligarchy, in which differential access to the means of life

will lead to elites who have more of the good things in life than other

citizens do. On this score, the asceticism that some leftists promote is

insidiously reactionary: not only does it ignore the freedom of people

to choose their own lifestyle—the only alternative in the existing

society to becoming a mindless consumer—but it subordinates human

freedom as such to an almost mystical notion of the dictates of

“Nature.” A free ecological society—as distinguished from one regulated

by an authoritarian ecological elite or by the “free market”— can only

be cast in terms of an ecologically confederal form of libertarian

municipalism. When at length free communes replace the nation and

confederal forms of organization replaces the state, humanity will have

rid itself of nationalism.

March 1993

Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution

Today, when anarchism has become le mot du jour in radical circles, the

differences between a society based on anarchy and one based on the

principles of social ecology should be clearly distinguished. Authentic

anarchism above all seeks the emancipation of individual personality

from all ethical, political, and social constraints. In so doing,

however, it fails to address the all-important and very concrete issue

of power, which confronts all revolutionaries in a period of social

upheaval. Rather than address how the people, organized into

confederated popular assemblies, might capture power and create a fully

developed libertarian society, anarchists conceive of power essentially

as a malignant evil that must be destroyed. Proudhon, for example, once

stated that he would divide and subdivide power until it, in effect,

ceased to exist. Proudhon may well have intended that government be

reduced to the minimum entity that could exercise authority over the

individual, but his statement perpetuates the illusion that power can

actually cease to exist, a notion as absurd as the idea that gravity can

be abolished.

The tragic consequences of this illusion, which has burdened anarchism

from its inception, can best be understood by examining a crucial event

in the Spanish Revolution of 1936. On July 21, the workers of Catalonia

and especially of its capital Barcelona defeated the forces of General

Francisco Franco and thereby gained complete control over one of Spain’s

largest and most industrialized provinces, including many important

cities along the Mediterranean coast and a considerable agrarian area.

Partly as the result of an indigenous libertarian tradition and partly

as a result of the influence exercised by Spain’s mass

revolutionary-syndicalist trade union, the CNT-FAI, the Catalan

proletariat proceeded to organize a huge network of defense,

neighborhood, supply, and transportation committees and assemblies.

Meanwhile, in the countryside, the more radical peasantry (a sizable

part of the agrarian population) took over and collectivized the land.

Catalonia and its population were protected against a possible

counterattack by a revolutionary militia, which, notwithstanding its

often archaic weapons, was sufficiently well armed to have defeated the

well-trained and well-supplied rebel army and police force. The workers

and peasants of Catalonia had, in effect, shattered the bourgeois state

machine and created a radically new government or polity in which they

themselves exercised direct control over public and economic affairs

through institutions of their own making.

Put in very blunt terms, they had taken power—not by simply changing the

names of existing oppressive institutions but by literally destroying

those old institutions and creating radically new ones whose form and

substance gave the masses the right to definitively determine the

operations of the economy and polity of their region.

Almost as a matter of course, militant members of the CNT gave their

union the authority to organize a revolutionary government and provide

it with political direction. Notwithstanding their reputation for

indiscipline, the majority of CNT members, or cenetistas, were

libertarian syndicalists rather than anarchists; they were strongly

committed to a well-structured, democratic, disciplined, and coordinated

organization. In July 1936, they acted not only with a due regard for

ideology but often on their own initiative to create their own

libertarian forms, such as neighborhood councils and assemblies, factory

assemblies, and a great variety of extremely loose committees, breaking

through any predetermined molds that had been imposed upon the

revolutionary movement by dogmatic ideologues.

On July 23, two days after the workers had defeated the local Francoist

uprising, a Catalan regional plenum of the CNT convened in Barcelona to

decide what to do with the polity the workers had placed in the union’s

hands. A few delegates from the militant Bajo de Llobregat region on the

outskirts of the city fervently demanded that the plenum declare

libertarian communism and the end of the old political and social order;

that is, the workers that the CNT professed to lead were offering to

give the plenum the power that they had already captured and the society

their militants had in fact begun to transform.

By accepting the power that was being offered to it, the plenum would

have been obliged to change the entire social order in a very

considerable and strategic area of Spain that was now under the CNT’s de

facto control. Even if it were no more permanent than the “Paris

Commune,” such a step would have produced a “Barcelona Commune” of even

more memorable dimensions.

But to the astonishment of many militants in the union, the plenum’s

members were reluctant to take this decisive measure. The Bajo de

Llobregat delegates and the CNT militant Juan García Olivier, to their

lasting credit, tried to get the plenum to claim the power it already

possessed, but the oratory of Federica Montseny and the arguments of

Diego Abad de Santillán (two CNT leaders) persuaded the plenum not to

undertake this move, denouncing it as a “Bolshevik seizure of power.”

The monumental nature of this error should be fully appreciated because

it reveals all that is internally contradictory about anarchist

ideology. By failing to distinguish between a polity and a state, the

CNT leaders (guided, for the most part, by the anarchistic Abad de

Santillán and Montseny) mistook a workers’ government for a capitalist

state, thereby rejecting political power in Catalonia at a time when it

was already in their hands. By refusing to exercise the power they had

already acquired, the plenum did not eliminate power as such; it merely

transferred it from its own hands to those of its most treacherous

“allies.” The ruling classes celebrated this fatal decision and slowly,

by the autumn of 1936, went on to refashion a workers’ government into a

“bourgeois democratic” state and open the door to an increasingly

authoritarian Stalinist regime.

The historic CNT plenum, it should be emphasized, did not simply reject

the power that the union’s own members had won at a considerable cost in

lives.

Turning its back on a crucial feature of social and political life, it

tried to supplant reality with a daydream, not only by rejecting the

political power that the workers had already placed in the CNT’s hands,

but by disavowing the very legitimacy of power and condemning power as

such—even in a libertarian, democratic form— as an unabated evil that

must be effaced. In no instance did the plenum or the CNT’s leadership

give the slightest evidence that it knew what to do “after the

revolution,” to use the title of Abad de Santillán’s utopian

disquisition. The CNT, in effect, had propagated revolutions and

theatrical uprisings for years; in the early 1930s, it had taken up arms

again and again without the least prospect of actually being able to

change Spanish society, but when at last it could finally have had a

significant impact on society, it stood around with a puzzled look,

orphaned by the very success of its working-class members in achieving

the goals embedded in its rhetoric. This was not a failure of nerve; it

was a failure of the CNT-FAI’s theoretical insight into the measures it

would have had to undertake to keep the power it actually had acquired,

indeed, that it feared to keep (and, within the logical framework of

anarchism, should never have taken) because it sought the abolition of

power, not simply its acquisition by the proletariat and peasantry.

If we are to learn anything from this crucial error by the CNT

leadership, it is that power cannot be abolished; it is always a feature

of social and political life.

Power that is not in the hands of the masses must inevitably fall into

the hands of their oppressors. There is no closet in which it can be

tucked away, no ritual that can make it evaporate, no realm to which it

can be dispatched—and no ideology that can make it disappear with moral

incantations. Radicals may try to ignore it, as the CNT leaders did in

July 1936, but it will remain hidden at every meeting, lie concealed in

public activities, and appear and reappear at every rally.

The truly pertinent issue that confronts anarchism is not whether power

will exist but whether it will rest in the hands of an elite or in the

hands of the people —and whether it will be given a form that

corresponds to the most advanced libertarian ideals or be placed in the

service of reaction. Rather than refuse the power offered to it by its

own members, the CNT plenum should have accepted it and legitimated and

approved the new institutions they had already created so that the

Spanish proletariat and peasantry could retain their power economically

and politically.

Instead, the tension between rhetorical claims and painful realities

finally became intolerable, and in May 1937, resolute CNT workers in

Barcelona were drawn into open battle with the bourgeois state in a

brief but bloody war within the civil war. In the end, the bourgeois

state suppressed the last major uprising of the syndicalist movement,

butchering hundreds if not thousands of CNT militants. How many were

killed will never be known, but we do know that the internally

contradictory ideology called anarchosyndicalism lost the greater part

of the following it had possessed in the summer of 1936.

Social revolutionaries, far from removing the problem of power from

their field of vision, must address the problem of how to give power a

concrete and emancipatory institutional form. To be silent on this

question, and to hide behind superannuated ideologies that are

irrelevant to our present-day overheated capitalist development, is

merely to play at revolution, even to mock the memory of the countless

militants who have given their all to achieve it.

November 2002

The Future of the Left

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Left envisioned itself as

having reached an extraordinary degree of conceptual sophistication and

organizational maturity. Generally, what was called leftism at that time

was socialist, influenced to varying degrees by the works of Karl Marx.

This was especially the case in Central Europe, but socialism was also

intermixed with populist ideas in Eastern Europe and with syndicalism in

France, Spain, and Latin America. In the United States, all of these

ideas were melded together, for example, in Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist

Party and in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

On the eve of World War I, leftist ideas and movements had become so

advanced that they seemed positioned to seriously challenge the

existence of capitalism, indeed, of class society as such. The words

from the “Internationale,” “Tis the final conflict,” acquired a new

concreteness and immediacy. Capitalism seemed faced with an insurgency

by the world’s exploited classes, particularly the industrial

proletariat. Indeed, given the scope of the Second International and the

growth of revolutionary movements in the West, capitalism appeared to be

facing an unprecedented, international social upheaval. Many

revolutionaries were convinced that a politically mature and

well-organized proletariat could finally take conscious control over

social life and evolution to satisfy, not the particularized elitist

interests of a propertied minority class, but the general interests of

the majority.

The “Great War,” as it was called, actually did end amid socialistic

revolutions. Russia established a “proletarian dictatorship,” premised

ostensibly on revolutionary Marxist principles. Germany, with the

largest and most ideologically advanced industrial proletariat in

Europe, went through three years of Marxist-influenced revolutionary

upheaval, while Bavaria, Hungary, and other places experienced

short-lived insurgencies. In Italy and Spain, the end of the war saw the

emergence of great strike movements and near-insurrections, although

they never reached a decisive revolutionary level. Even France seemed to

be teetering on revolution in 1917, when entire regiments at the Western

Front raised red flags and tried to make their way to Paris. Such

upheavals, which recurred into the 1930s, appeared to support Lenin’s

view that a “moribund” capitalism had finally entered into a period of

war and revolution, one that in the foreseeable future could end only

with the establishment of a socialist or communist society.

By this time, moreover, major intellectual innovators, from Diderot and

Rousseau through Hegel and Marx to an assortment of libertarian rebels,

had brought secular and radical ideologies to a point where, sorted into

a logical whole, they provided the framework for a truly coherent body

of ideas that gave a rational meaning to historical development,

combining a due recognition of humanity’s material needs with its hopes

for intellectual and social emancipation.

For the first time, it seemed, without recourse to divine or other

archaic nonhuman forms of intervention, humanity would finally be able

to draw upon its own advancing intellectuality, knowledge, virtues, and

unique capacity for innovation, to create a new world in which all the

conditions would exist to actualize its potentiality for freedom and

creativity. These eminently human goals, embodied in Marx’s great

theoretical synthesis of the ideas he had drawn from the Enlightenment

as well as new ideas he had developed on his own, could be initiated in

practice by the downtrodden themselves, who would be driven inexorably

by the contradictions of capitalist society into revolution and the

establishment of a rational society for humanity as a whole.

I should note that many of my own words—“inexorably,” “moribund,”

“decaying,” and “general interests”—are drawn from the literature of

early twentieth-century leftist theorists and movements. Yet, whatever

may be the limits of this literature and its writers—as we, in the new

millennium, are now privileged to see in retrospect—this sweeping

language was not the product of mere sloganeering; it was derived from

an integrated and coherent leftist outlook and culture that appeared on

the eve of the Great War. This outlook and culture formed what we can

properly call a classical body of universalist ideas, continually

enlarged by the generations that followed the French Revolution of 1789

to 1794. In the years that passed, this body of ideas was steadily

enlarged by experience and succeeded in mobilizing millions of people

into international movements for human emancipation and social

reconstruction.

Quite obviously, the Enlightenment goals and Lenin’s prognoses, with

their promise of successful socialist revolutions, were not to be

realized in the twentieth century. Indeed, what has occurred since the

midpoint of the twentieth century is a very different development: a

period of cultural and theoretical decadence so far as revolutionary

ideas and movements are concerned; a period of decomposition, in fact,

that has swept up nearly all the philosophical, cultural, ethical, and

social standards that the Enlightenment had produced. For many young

people who professed to hold a radical outlook in the 1960s and 1970s,

leftist theory has shriveled in scope and content to the level of

spectatorial aesthetics, often focused on the scattered works of people

like the indecisive critic Walter Benjamin, the postmodernist Jacques

Derrida, or the constipated structuralist Louis Althusser, as social

theory has retreated from the lusty debating forums of 1930s socialism

to the cloistered seminar rooms of contemporary universities.

Now that the twentieth century has come to a close, we are justified in

asking, Why has humanity’s emancipation failed to achieve fruition? Why,

in particular, has the proletariat failed to make its predicted

revolution? Indeed, why did the once-radical Social Democrats fail from

their very inception to achieve even a majority vote in centers such as

Germany? Why did they surrender so tamely to Hitler in 1933? The German

Communists, of course, were simply shunted aside after 1923, assuming

they could even be taken seriously in that year, except as contrived

targets for demagogic propagandistic purposes to frighten the middle

classes with the menace of social disorder.

How, moreover, did capitalism manage to free itself from the “chronic

economic crisis” in which it seemed hopelessly mired during the 1930s?

Why, especially after World War II, did it produce advances in technics

so dazzling that bourgeois society is now undergoing a permanent

“Industrial Revolution” whose results are difficult to foresee? Finally,

why did it come to pass that, following the profound economic and social

crises of the 1930s, capitalism emerged from a second world war as a

more stable and more socially entrenched order than it had ever been in

the past?

None of these events, so important in the predictive calculations of

revolutionary Marxists, have been adequately explained in a fundamental

and historical sense, notably the progressive role that Marx assigned to

capitalism in his “stages theory” of history.³⁴ Instead, for years,

Marxists largely expended their polemical energy in throwing epithets at

each other and at other labor movements for their “betrayals” without

asking why Marxism was so vulnerable to betrayal in the first place. In

more recent years, Marxists have tried to appropriate fragments of ideas

that belong to once-despised utopian ideologies, such as Fourierism

(Marcuse, to cite only one example) or to other ideologies, such as

syndicalism, anarchism, ecology, feminism, and communitarianism,

appropriating ill-fitting ideological tenets from one or the other to

refurbish their limited view of a changing bourgeois reality until what

passes for Marxism today is often a pastiche of fragments patched

together with planks from basically alien ideologies.

How, in short, did it come to pass that the classical era, marked by its

coherence and unity in revolutionary thought and practice, gave way to a

completely decadent era in which incoherence is celebrated, particularly

in the name of a postmodernism that equates chaotic nihilism with

freedom, self- expression, and creativity—not unlike the chaos of the

marketplace itself? We can answer these questions because we now enjoy

over a half-century of hindsight.

What the past fifty years have shown us is that the uniquely insurgent

period between 1917 and 1939 was not evidence of capitalist morbidity

and decline, as Lenin surmised. Rather, it was a period of social

transition. During those decades, the world was so torn by

circumstantially created tensions that Lenin’s view of capitalism as a

dying social order seemed indeed confirmed by reality.

What this classical prognosis and its supporting theoretical corpus did

not take into account were various alternative developments that faced

capitalism before the outbreak of the Great War and even during the

interwar period—alternatives that lay beneath the tumultuous surface of

the early twentieth century. The classical Left did not consider other

possible social trajectories that capitalism could have followed—and

eventually did follow—that would allow for its stabilization. It not

only failed to understand these new social trajectories but also failed

to foresee, even faintly, the emergence of new issues that extended

beyond the largely worker-oriented analysis of the classical Left.

For one thing, what makes so much of the classical revolutionary

prognoses formulated by prewar and wartime socialism seem paradoxical is

that the “moribund” period in which many classical leftists anchored

their hopes for revolution was still not even a period of “mature”

capitalism, let alone one of “dying” capitalism. The era before the

Great War was one in which mass production, republican systems of

government, and so-called “bourgeois- democratic” liberties were still

emerging from a chrysalis of precapitalist forms of craft production and

commerce, state structures ruled by royal families and courts, and

economies in which ennobled landlords such as the German Junkers,

British aristocrats, and Latin Grandees coexisted with a huge,

technically backward peasant population. Even where most great estates

were owned by bourgeois elements, as in Spain, their management of

agriculture was conducted lethargically, emulating the diffident

economic habits that characterized parasitic agrarian elites of a

precapitalist era. Capitalism, while it was the dominant economy of the

United States, Great Britain, Germany, more ambiguously France, and only

marginally in other European countries, was still subordinated

culturally and even structurally to elite strata, often based on

kinship, that were more feudal than bourgeois, and marked by the rentier

and militaristic values that distinguished a waning era.

In effect, even modern industry, while becoming central to the

development of major nation-states in the early twentieth century, was

still anchored in a craft- peasant social matrix. The ownership of land

and of small-scale workshops, often family managed, formed the

traditional features of social status in a very status- ridden world,

such as in England and Germany. It is hard to recall today how low the

real status of women was during the early 1900s; how degraded was the

status of propertyless, often mendicant workers; how eagerly even

substantial capitalists tried to marry into titled families; how feeble

were elementary civil liberties in a world that acknowledged the

validity of inherited privilege and the authority of monarchs; and how

embattled was the industrially regimented proletariat (often removed by

a generation or two from village life with its more natural life-ways)

in its efforts to merely organize reformist trade unions.

The Great War, a monstrous event that was as much, if not more, the

product of dynastic ambitions, military obtuseness, and the awesome

authority allowed to preening monarchs as it was of economic

imperialism, was not a “historical necessity.” An entangled Europe,

caught up in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s juvenile posturing and dizzying images

of German national grandeur, the blind spirit of French revanchisme

following the country’s loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871 to the

Wilhelmine Reich, and the naïve nationalism of the masses, whose class

internationalism was often more rhetorical than real—all led to a

horrible form of trench warfare that should have been unendurable to any

civilized people within a few months after it began, let alone for four

bloody years. The Deutsche Mark, the postwar German currency and

emblematic expression of German capitalism, managed to perform economic

prodigies that neither Wilhelm nor Hitler’s bayonets could hope to

perform during the last century—so different are the alternatives that

the postwar era finally revealed!

Yet, ironically, it was not the battlefront in the Great War that

generated the revolutions of 1917-18; it was the rear, where hunger

managed to do what the terrifying explosives, machine guns, tanks, and

poison gas at the front never quite succeeded in achieving—a revolution

over issues such as bread and peace (in precisely that order). It is

breathtaking to consider that, after three years of constant

bloodletting, mutilation, and incredible daily fear, the German strikes

of January 1918 that had the pungent odor of revolution actually

subsided, and the German workers remained patiently quiescent when

General Ludendorff’s spring and summer offensives of that year gained

substantial ground from French and British troops in the West to the

“greater glory” of the Reich. So much for the “revolutionary instincts”

of the people, which Bakunin was wont to celebrate. It speaks volumes

that, despite the horrors of the Great War, the masses went along with

the conflict until it was completely unendurable materially. Such is the

power of adaptation, tradition, and habit in everyday life.

Notwithstanding the Russian Revolution, the Great War came to an end

without overthrowing European capitalism, let alone world capitalism.

The war actually revealed that the classical tradition of socialism was

very limited and, in many respects, greatly in need of repair.

Understandably, Lenin and Trotsky tried to foreshorten historical

development and bring about the likelihood of socialism within their own

life spans, although this is less true of Luxemburg and particularly of

Marx, who was far more critical of Marxism than his acolytes.

Indeed, Marx was at pains to warn that it had taken centuries for

feudalism to die and for capitalism to emerge, hence, Marxists should

hardly expect that the bourgeoisie would be overthrown in a year, a

decade, or even a generation. Trotsky was far more sanguine than Lenin

in his conviction that capitalism was “moribund,” “decaying,” “rotting,”

and otherwise falling apart, and that the proletariat was growing

“stronger,” or “more class conscious,” or “organized”— but it matters

little today to dwell on his expectations and prognoses.

Nevertheless, the Great War, while not completely sweeping the

historical slate clean of the feudal detritus that contributed so

greatly to its outbreak, left the Western world in a cultural, moral,

and political stupor. An era was clearly ending, but it was not

capitalism that was faced with imminent oblivion. What was disappearing

was the traditional, time-worn status and class system of a feudal past,

yet without any fully developed form of capitalism to take its place.

With the Great Depression, British landlordism began to enter into hard,

even devastating times, but it had not completely disappeared during the

1930s. The Prussian Junkers were still in command of the German army at

the beginning of the 1930s and, thanks to von Hindenburg’s election as

president of the German state, still enjoyed many of the privileges of

an established elite early in the Hitler period.

But this once-haughty stratum was eventually faced with the challenge of

Hitler’s Gleichschaltung, the process of social leveling that finally

degraded the Prussian officer caste. In the end, it was the

Anglo-American and Russian armies that swept the Junkers away by seizing

their estates in the East and dissolving them as a socioeconomic entity.

France was fighting its last battles as a middle-class republic during

the mid-1930s, with Catholic reactionaries and the blooded young

fascists of the Croix de Feu, who aspired to an aristocratic Gallicism

led by rich and titled leaders.

Thus, the interwar decades were a stormy period of transition between a

declining quasi-feudal world, already shattered but not buried, and an

emerging bourgeois world, which, despite its vast economic power, had

still not penetrated into every pore of society and defined the basic

values of the century. In fact, the Great Depression showed that the

pedestrian maxim “money isn’t everything” is true when there is no money

to go around. Indeed, the Depression threw much of the world, especially

the United States, into a disorderly one that resembled its own hectic

populist era of the 1870s and 1880s, hence the flare-up of trade

unionism, violent strikes, great demonstrations, and “Red” agitation

that swept over the American and European continents in the 1930s.

In this socially hyperactive but indecisive period of social tensions

between the old and new, when the ruling classes as well as the

dominated masses lived in murderous antipathy toward each other, history

unlocked the door to revolutionary upheavals. Amid the uncertainty of a

tension-filled world, the fulfillment of Marx’s dream—a democratic

workers’ system of government—seemed achievable. As a result of the

strife that existed within that interwar period, it appeared that

capitalism had collapsed economically and a worldwide movement toward a

democratic, possibly libertarian socialist society was achievable. But

to create such a society required a highly conscious movement with an

able leadership and a clear-eyed sense of purpose.

Tragically, no such movement appeared. Grossly pragmatic bureaucrats

such as Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann, and pedestrian theorists

such as Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, assumed the deflated mantle

of the Socialist International and set its tone up until the rise of

German fascism. Shortly afterward, Stalin intervened in every

potentially revolutionary situation in Europe and poisoned it to serve

Russia’s (and his own) interests. The prestige of the Bolshevik

revolution, to which this tyrant contributed absolutely nothing and

which he defamed when he came to power, was still not sufficiently

sullied to allow the classical Left to create its own authentic

movements and expand its vision to accord with emerging social issues

that reflected changes in capitalism itself.

What must now be acknowledged is that between 1914 and 1945, capitalism

was enlarging its foundations with mass manufacture and new industries,

not digging its grave as Lenin and Trotsky had opined. Its status as a

dominant world economy and society still lay before it in 1917, not

behind it. And it would be sheer myopia not to see that capitalism is

still industrializing the world—agrarian as well as urban—which is

basically what the word “globalization” means.

Moreover, it is still eroding the particularisms that divide human

beings on the basis of nationalism, religion, and ethnicity. Most of the

“fundamentalisms” and “identity politics” erupting in the world today

are essentially reactions against the encroaching secularism and

universalism of a business-oriented, increasingly homogenizing

capitalist civilization that is slowly eating away at a deeply

religious, nationalistic, and ethnic heritage. The commodity is still

performing prodigies of social erosion in precapitalist cultures, be

they for good or bad, such as Marx and Engels described in the first

part of The Communist Manifesto.

Where sanity and reason do not guide human affairs, to be sure, the good

is nearly always polluted by the bad, and it is the function of any

serious revolutionary thinker to separate the two in the hope of

unearthing the rational tendency in a social development.

At the same time, capitalism is not only homogenizing old societies and

remaking them in its urbanized, commodity-oriented image; it is doing

the same to the planet and the biosphere in the name of “mastering” the

forces of the natural world. This is precisely the “historically

progressive” role that Marx and Engels assigned, in a celebratory

manner, to the capitalist mode of production. How “progressive” this

process of homogenization is, in fact, remains to be seen. For the

present, it behooves us to examine the failure of Marxism and anarchism

(arguably the two principal wings of the revolutionary tradition) to

deal with the transitional nature of the twentieth century.

In the post-World War II period, the weakest elements in Marx’s schema

of history, class struggle, capitalist development, and political

activity have been subjected to penetrating critical examination.³⁵ The

Marxian canon to the contrary, history, viewed as a whole, cannot be

reduced to economic factors as Marx tried to do in his key works,

although capitalism may well be mutating Homo sapiens into Homo

consumerans and fostering the tendency among masses of people to

experience reality as a huge market. Marx’s basic views may have

provided his acolytes with the necessary or preconditional causes for

social development— admittedly material or economic causes—but they

failed to explain the enormous role of the efficient causes; the

immediate causes, such as culture, politics, morality, juridical

practices, and the like (which Marx denoted as a “superstructural”) for

producing social change.

Indeed, what else besides “superstructural” (particularly moral,

religious, and political) factors can explain why the development of

capitalism, elements of which had always existed in varying degrees in

agrarian and craft economies, was arrested for thousands of years and

became a major economy in only one country, England, early in the

nineteenth century? Or why revolutions occur only under conditions of

complete social breakdown, that is, after a vast body of massively

influential superstructural belief systems (often accepted in their time

as eternal realities) are shattered. Marx was not oblivious to the

extent to which belief systems override bourgeois forces in

precapitalist societies, especially in his discussions on the

predominance of agrarian values over urban ones in his Grundrisse. Very

significantly, Marxists were riddled by conflicts over the status of

capitalism at various points in its development, especially during the

early twentieth century, when the bourgeoisie faced one of the stormiest

periods of its history precisely because capitalism had not fully shed

the trappings of feudalism and come “completely into its own,” so to

speak.

How, for example, was it possible for many Marxists to insist that

capitalism was in decline at a time when major technical innovations

like mass manufacture, radically new forms of transportation such as the

automobile, advances in electrical and electronic machines and goods,

and new chemical innovations were occurring in the decade directly

following the Great War? Had Marx not written, after all, that “No

social order ever perishes before all the productive forces [technology]

for which there is room in it have developed”?³⁶ Could this be said of

capitalism in 1914-18 and 1939-45? Indeed, will it ever be said of the

capitalist mode of production in the future? In asking these questions,

I am not trying to suggest that capitalism will never produce problems

that necessitate its overthrow or replacement. My purpose is, rather, to

suggest that the problems that may well turn most of humanity against

capitalism may not necessarily be strictly economic ones or rooted in

class issues.

Arguable as Marx’s productivist interpretation of social development and

its future may be, it becomes a very forced and artificial, even

contorted, explanation of history if it is not greatly modified by the

dialectic of ideas, that is, by political and social ideology, morality

and ethics, law, juridical standards, and the like.

Marxism has yet to forthrightly acknowledge that these different spheres

of life have their own dialectic, indeed, that they can unfold from

inner forces of their own and not simply result from a productivist

dialectic called the “materialist interpretation of history.” Moreover,

it has yet to emphasize that a dialectic of ethics or religion can

profoundly affect the dialectic of productive forces and production

relations. Is it possible, for example, to ignore the fact that

Christian theology led logically to a growing respect for individual

worth and finally to radical conceptions of social freedom—a dialectic

that in turn profoundly influenced social development by altering the

way human beings interacted with each other and with the material world?

By the time of the French Revolution, centuries of deeply entrenched

ideas on property, such as the enormous esteem that accompanied the

ownership of land, were intermingling and modifying seemingly objective

social forces, such as the growth of an increasingly capitalistic

market. As a result, the exalted image of the independent, often

self-sufficient peasant who began to emerge in the wake of the

Revolution with his small bit of property and his craft-oriented

village, actually inhibited capitalist economic development in France

well into the nineteenth century by closing off large parts of the

domestic market to commodities mass produced in the cities. The image of

the French Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution that fostered a

capitalist development at home is arguably more fictitious than real,

although in the long run, it created many preconditions for the rise of

the industrial bourgeoisie.

In short, by educing the dialectic of history along overwhelmingly

productivist lines, Marx easily deceived himself as well as his most

important followers, notably Lenin and Trotsky, about capitalism’s

morbidity by assuming that the bourgeoisie had finally prepared all the

economic preconditions for socialism and hence was ready to be replaced

by socialism. What he ignored was that many of the problems,

contradictions, and antagonisms he imputed almost exclusively to

capitalism were, in fact, the product of lingering feudal traits that

society had not shed; moreover, that the seemingly “superstructural”

institutions and values that had characterized precapitalist societies

played a major role in defining a seemingly predominant capitalist

society that was still aborning. On this score, the anarchists were

right when they called not so much for the economic improvement of the

proletariat as for its moral development as vital to the formation of a

free society—improvements Marxists largely brushed aside as issues that

fell within the domain of “private life.”

Marx and Marxism also fail us when they focus overwhelmingly on the

working class, even enhancing its social weight by presumably elevating

transparently petty bourgeois elements such as salaried white-collar

employees to proletarian status when industrial workers are evidently

declining numerically. Nor does the authentic proletariat, which assumed

an almost mystical class status in the heyday of Marxism, act as though

it is a uniquely hegemonic historical agent in the conflict with

capitalism as a system. Nothing proved to be more misleading in the

advanced industrial countries of the world than the myth that the

working class, when appealed to as an economic class, could see beyond

the immediate conditions of its given life-ways—the factory and

bourgeois forms of distribution (exchange).³⁷ It consistently adopted

reformist programs designed to gain higher wages, shorter working days,

longer vacations, and improved working conditions until thunderous

events drove it to revolutionary action, together, it should be added,

with nonproletarian strata. Virtually none of the classical socialist

movements, it is worth noting, appealed to the workers as people: as

parents, city dwellers, brothers and sisters, and individuals trying to

live decent lives in a decent environment for themselves and their

offspring.

Most conventional Marxist theorists to the contrary, the worker is first

of all a human being, not simply the embodiment of “social labor,”

definable in strictly class terms. The failure of classical socialism to

make a human and civic appeal to the worker—even to seriously consider

him or her as more than a class being— created a warped relationship

between socialist organizations and their alleged “constituency.”

Although classical Social Democracy, especially the German Social

Democrats, provided workers with a highly varied cultural life of their

own, from educational activities to sports clubs, the proletariat was

usually boxed into a world bounded by a concern for its most immediate

material interests. Even in the pre-World War II cultural centers of the

socialists, such as the casas del pueblo established by the Spanish

Socialists, it was fed primarily on discussions of its exploitation and

degradation by the capitalist system, which in any case, it experienced

daily in factories and workshops. The attempt to redefine the

proletariat and make it a majority of a national population lost all

credibility when capitalism began to create a huge “salariat” of office

employees, managers, salespeople, and an army of service, engineering,

advertising, media, and governmental personnel who saw themselves as a

new middle class, deeply invested in bourgeois property through stocks,

bonds, real estate, pensions, and the like, however minor these may seem

by comparison with the big bourgeoisie.

Finally, a very significant failing of Marxism when it came to building

a revolutionary movement was its commitment to the statist acquisition

and maintenance of parliamentary power. By the late 1870s, Marx and

Engels had developed into “Red Republicans,” notwithstanding Marx’s

encomiums to the Parisian Communards and their quasi-anarchist vision of

a confederal form of government. What is often ignored is that Marx

disclaimed these encomiums shortly before his death a decade later.

Doubtless, Marx’s vision of a republic was marked by more democratic

features than any that existed in Europe and America during his

lifetime. He would have favored the right to recall deputies at all

levels of the state, as well as minimal bureaucracy and a militia system

based on working-class recruits. But none of the institutions he

attributed to a socialist state were incompatible with those of a

“bourgeois-democratic” state. Not surprisingly, he believed that

socialism could be voted into power in England, the United States, and

the Netherlands, a list to which Engels years later added France.

In vowing that only insurrection and a complete restructuring of the

state were compatible with socialism, Lenin and Luxemburg, among others

(especially Trotsky), decidedly departed from Marx and Engels’s

political ideas in their late years. At least in trying to work within

republican institutions, the early Social Democrats were more

consistently Marxist than were their revolutionary critics.

They viewed the German Revolution of 1918-19 as an indispensable

preliminary to the creation of a republican system that would open a

peaceful but, more significant, institutionally sound road to socialism.

That workers’ councils such as the Russian soviets and German Räte were

more radically democratic also made them frightening as institutional

measures, more akin to anarchism and certainly Bolshevism than to a

parliament elected by universal suffrage. Although a younger Marx would

have found a state structured around councils more to his taste, there

is little to show in his later writings (apart from his flirtation with

the libertarian features of the Paris Commune) that he would have

“smashed the state,” to use Lenin’s terminology, to the point of

rejecting parliamentary government.

Does this mean that anarchist precepts, spawned nearly two centuries

ago, provide a substitute for Marxism?

After forty years of trying to work with this ideology, my own very

considered opinion is that such a hope, which I entertained as early as

the 1950s, is unrealizable. Nor do I feel that this is due only to the

failings of the so-called “new anarchism,” spawned in recent years by

young activists. The problems raised by anarchism belong to the days of

its birth, when writers like Proudhon celebrated its use as a new

alternative to the emerging capitalist social order. In reality,

anarchism has no coherent body of theory other than its commitment to an

ahistorical conception of “personal autonomy,” that is, to the

self-willing, asocial ego, divested of constraints, preconditions, or

limitations short of death itself.

Indeed, today, many anarchists celebrate this theoretical incoherence as

evidence of the highly libertarian nature of their outlook and its often

dizzying, if not contradictory, respect for diversity. It is primarily

by giving priority to an ideologically petrified notion of an

“autonomous individual” that anarchists justify their opposition not

only to the state but to any form of constraint, law, and often

organization and democratic decision-making based on majority voting.

All such constraints are dismissed in principle as forms of “coercion,”

“domination,” “government,” and even “tyranny”—often as though these

terms were coequal and interchangeable.

Nor do anarchist theorists take cognizance of the social and historical

conditions that limit or modify the ability to attain “Anarchy,” which

is often described as a highly personal affair or even an episodic or

“ecstatic” experience.

Followed to its logical conclusion, indeed to its most fundamental

premises, Anarchy is essentially a moral desideratum, a “way of life,”

as one anarchist put it to me, independent of time or place. Anarchy, we

are justified in concluding, emerges from the exercise of pure will.

Presumably, when enough wills converge to “adopt” Anarchy, it will

simply be like the soil that remains beneath melting snow, as one

British anarchist put it. This revelatory interpretation of how Anarchy

makes its appearance in the world lies at the core of the anarchist

vision.

Anarchy, it would appear, has always been “there,” as Isaac Puente, the

most important theorist of Spanish anarchism in the 1930s, put it, save

that it was concealed over the ages by a historically imposed layer of

institutions, entrenched experiences, and values that are typified by

the state, civilization, history, and morality. Somehow, it must merely

be restored from its unsullied past like a hidden geological stratum.

This summary easily explains the emphasis on primitivism and the notion

of “recovery” that one so often encounters in anarchist writing.

Recovery should be distinguished from the notions of discovery and

innovation that modern thinking and rationalism were obliged to

counterpose to the premodern belief that truth and virtue in all their

aspects were already in existence but concealed by an oppressive or

obfuscating historical development and culture. Anarchists could just as

easily use this formulation to justify social passivity rather than

protest.

One had only to let the “snow” (that is, the state and civilization)

melt away for Anarchy to be restored, a view that may well explain the

pacifism that is so widespread among anarchists throughout the world

today.

In recent years, some anarchists have singled out civilization,

technics, and rationality as the greatest failings of the human

condition and argue they must be replaced by a more primitive,

presumably “authentic” culture that eschews all the attainments of

history in order to restore humanity’s primal “harmony” with itself and

an almost mystical “Nature.” Insofar as anarchists currently espouse

this view, they have actually returned anarchism to its true home after

its centuries- long meanderings through the mazes of syndicalism and

other basically alien social causes. Proudhon’s wistful image of the

self-sufficient peasant farm or village, wisely presided over by an

all-knowing paterfamilias, is finally recovered; this, I would add, at a

time when the world is more interdependent and technologically

sophisticated than at any other in history.

Inasmuch as anarchism emphasizes primitivism as against acculturation,

recovery as against discovery, autarchy as against interdependence, and

naturism as against civilization—often rooting its conceptual apparatus

in a “natural,” conceivably “basic” ahistorical autonomous ego, freed of

the rationalism and theoretical burden of “civilization”—it in fact

stands in marked contrast to the real ego, which is always located in a

given temporal, technological, cultural, traditional, intellectual, and

political environment. Indeed, the anarchist version of the

stripped-down, indeed, vacuous, ego disturbingly resembles Homer’s

description of the lotus eater in the Odyssey, who, while eating the

lotus fruit, slips into an indolence of forgetfulness, atemporality, and

blissfulness that actually represents the very annihilation of

personality and selfhood.

Historically, this “autonomous ego” became the building block that

anarchists used to create various movement-type structures that often

gave it a highly social and revolutionary patina. Syndicalism, to cite

the most important case in point, became the architectural form in which

these blocks were most commonly arranged—not as a defining foundation

for an anarchist movement but as a highly unstable superstructure. When

workers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century became actively

involved in socialism, unionism, organization, democracy, and everyday

struggles for better living and working conditions, anarchism took on

the form of a radical trade unionism. This association was precarious at

best. Although both shared the same libertarian ambience, syndicalism

existed in sharp tension with the basic individualism that pure

anarchists prized, often above—and against—all organizational

institutions.

Both ideologies—Marxism and anarchism—emerged at times when industrial

societies were still in their infancy and nation-states were still in

the process of being formed. While Marx tried to conceptualize

small-scale, often well-educated Parisian craftsmen as “proletarians,”

Bakunin’s imagination was caught up with images of social bandits and

peasant jacqueries. Both men, to be sure, contributed valuable insights

to revolutionary theory, but they were revolutionaries who formulated

their ideas in a socially limited time. They could hardly be expected to

anticipate the problems that emerged during the hectic century that

followed their deaths. A major problem facing radical social thought and

action today is to determine what can be incorporated from their time

into a new, highly dynamic capitalist era that has long transcended the

old semifeudal world of independent peasants and craftsmen; a new era,

also, that has largely discarded the textile- metal-steam engine world

of the Industrial Revolution, with its burgeoning population of totally

dispossessed proletarian masses. Their place has been taken in great

part by technologies that can replace labor in nearly all spheres of

work and provide a degree of abundance in the means of life that the

most imaginative utopians of the nineteenth century could not have

anticipated.

But just as advances in an irrational society always taint the most

valuable of human achievements with evil, so too the Industrial

Revolution has produced new problems and potential crises that call for

new means to deal with them. These new means must go beyond mere protest

if they are not to suffer the fate of movements such as the Luddites,

who could offer little more than a return to the past by trying to

destroy the technical innovations of their era. Any assessment of the

revolutionary tradition immediately raises the question of the future of

the Left in a social environment that is not only beset by new problems

but demands new solutions. What approach can incorporate the best of the

revolutionary tradition— Marxism and anarchism—in ways and forms that

speak to the kind of problems that face the present? Indeed, in view of

the remarkable dynamism of the twentieth century and the likelihood that

changes in the new one will be even more sweeping, it now behooves us to

speculate about the analyses that will explain its forthcoming

development, the kind of crises it is likely to face, and the

institutions, methods, and movements that can hope to render society

rational and nourishing as an arena for human creativity. Above all, we

must think beyond the immediate present and its proximate past by trying

to anticipate problems that may lie at least a generation, if not

further, beyond a highly transitory present.

What remains very contemporary in Marx’s writings, even after a century

and a half, is the insight they bring to the nature of capitalist

development. Marx fully explored the competitive forces that inhere in

the buyer-seller exchange, a relationship that, under capitalism,

compels the bourgeoisie to continually expand its enterprises and

operations. Ever since the capitalist economy became prevalent over a

sizable area of the world, it has been guided by the competitive market

imperative of “grow or die,” leading to continual industrial expansion

and the consolidation of competing concerns into ever-larger,

quasi-monopolistic complexes. Would the process of capital concentration

culminate in a worldwide economy under the tutelage of a few or of a

single corporate entity, thereby terminating the process of accumulation

and bringing capitalism to an end? Or would capital expansion (that is,

globalization) so level market differentials that the exchange of

commodities as a source of accumulation becomes impossible?

These were serious topics of discussion during the heyday of classical

Marxism.

They remain conundrums today.

Today, we can say for certain that existing quasi-monopolistic complexes

furiously accelerate the rate at which society undergoes economic and

social change. Not only do firms expand at an ever-increasing pace,

either annihilating or absorbing their competitors, but the commodities

they produce and the resources they devour affect every corner of the

planet. Globalization is not unique to modern capitalist industry and

finance; the bourgeoisie has been eating its way into isolated and

seemingly self-contained cultures for centuries and, either directly or

indirectly, transforming them. What is unusual about present-day

globalization is the scale on which it is occurring and the far-reaching

impact it is having on cultures that once seemed to be insulated from

modern commodity production and trade and from nation-state sovereignty.

Now the presumably “quaint” traits of precapitalist peoples have been

turned into marketable items to titillate Western tourists who pay

exorbitant prices to enjoy a presumably “primitive” item or experience.

Marx and his followers considered this process of expanding

industrialization and market relations to be a progressive feature of

the capitalist “stage” of history, and they expected that it would

eventually eliminate all preexisting territorial, cultural, national,

and ethnic ties and replace them with class solidarity, thereby removing

obstacles to the development of revolutionary internationalism.

Commodification, Marx famously emphasized, turns everything solid into

air. It once eliminated the economic exclusivity of guilds and other

economic barriers to innovation, and it continues to corrode art,

crafts, familial ties, and all the bonds of human solidarity—indeed, all

the honored traditions that nourished the human spirit.

Marx saw the homogenizing effects of globalization as destructive

insofar as they dissolved the meaningful relationships and sentiments

that knitted society together; but his formulation was not only a

critique. He also saw these effects as progressive insofar as they

cleared away precapitalist and particularistic detritus.

Today, radicals emphasize that the worldwide invasion of the commodity

into society is overwhelmingly destructive. Capitalism (not simply

globalization and corporatization) not only turns everything solid into

air but replaces earlier traditions with distinctly bourgeois

attributes. Implicit in Marx’s remarks was the belief that globalized

capitalism would provide the future with a clean slate on which to

inscribe the outlines of a rational society. But as capitalism writes

its message of uniquely bourgeois values, it creates potentially

monstrous developments that may well undermine social life itself. It

supplants traditional ties of solidarity and community with an

all-pervasive greed, an appetite for wealth, a system of moral

accounting focused on “the bottom line,” and a heartless disregard for

the desperation of the poor, aged, and physically disabled.

Not that greed and heartlessness were absent from capitalism in the

past. But in an earlier time, the bourgeoisie was relatively marginal

and vulnerable to the patronizing outlook of the landed nobility;

preindustrial values more or less held capitalists in check. Then the

market economy rendered increasingly prevalent an unbridled capitalist

spirit of self-aggrandizement and unfeeling exploitation. Naked

bourgeois greed and heartlessness, illuminated by the vigilance of great

writers such as Balzac and Dickens, produced a wave of revulsion that

swept over the people exposed to it. In past epochs, the rich were

neither admired nor turned into embodiments of virtue. The honored

virtue of most of the precapitalist world, rather, was not

self-aggrandizement but self-sacrifice, not accumulating but giving,

however much these virtues were honored in the breach.

But today, capitalism has penetrated into all aspects of life. Greed, an

inordinate appetite for wealth, an accounting mentality, and a

disdainful view of poverty and infirmity have become a moral pathology.

Under these circumstances, bourgeois traits are the celebrated symbols

of the “beautiful people” and, more subtly, of yuppified baby boomers.

These values percolate into less fortunate strata of the population who,

depending upon their own resources, view the fortunate with envy, even

awe, and guiltily target themselves for their own lack of privilege and

status as “ne’er-do-wells.”

In this new embourgeoisement, the dispossessed harbor no class

antagonisms toward the “rich and beautiful” (a unique juxtaposition) but

rather esteem them. At present, poor and middle-class people are less

likely to view the bourgeoisie with hatred than with servile admiration;

they increasingly see the ability to make money and accrue wealth not as

indicative of a predatory disposition and the absence of moral scruples,

as was the case a few generations ago, but as evidence of innate

abilities and intelligence. Newsstands and bookstores are filled with a

massive literature celebrating the lifestyles, careers, personal

affairs, and riches of the new wealthy, who are held up as models of

achievement and success. That these “celebrities” of postmodernity

bubble up from obscurity is an added asset: it suggests that the

admiring but debt-burdened reader can also “make it” in a new bourgeois

world. Any obscure candidate can “become a millionaire”—or a

multimillionaire—merely by winning in a television game show or a

lottery. The myriad millions who envy and admire the bourgeoisie no

longer see its members as part of a “class”; they are rather a

“meritocracy,” who have become, as a result of luck and effort, winners

in the lottery of life. If Americans once widely believed that anyone

could become the president of the United States, the new belief holds

that anyone can become a millionaire or—who knows?—one of the ten

richest people in the world.

Capitalism, in turn, is increasingly assumed to be the natural state of

affairs toward which history has been converging for thousands of years.

Even as capitalism is achieving this splendor, we are witnessing a

degree of public ignorance, fatuity, and smugness unseen since the

inception of the modern world.

Like fast food and quick sex, ideas and experiences simply race through

the human mind, and far from being absorbed and used as building blocks

for generalizations, they quickly disappear to make room for still newer

and faster- moving ideas and experiences of an ever-more superficial or

degraded character.

Every few years, it would seem, a new generation initiates ostensibly

“new causes” that were exhausted only a decade or two earlier, thereby

casting into ideological oblivion invaluable lessons and knowledge that

are indispensable for a radical social practice. Each new generation has

a concomitantly arrogant notion that history began only when it was

born; hence, all experiences from the past, even the recent past, are to

be ignored. Thus, the struggle against globalization, which was fought

for decades under the rubric of anti-imperialism, has been reinvented

and renamed.

The problem of lost definition and specificity, of everything being

turned into “air,” and the disastrous loss of the memory of experiences

and lessons vital to establishing a Left tradition, confronts any

endeavor to create a revolutionary movement in the future. Theories and

concepts lose their dimensions, their mass, their traditions, and their

relevance, as a result of which they are adopted and dropped with

juvenile flippancy. The chauvinistic notion of “identity,” which is the

byproduct of class and hierarchical society, ideologically corrodes the

concept of “class,” prioritizing a largely psychological distinction at

the expense of a sociopolitical one. “Identity” becomes a highly

personal problem with which individuals must wrestle psychologically and

culturally rather than a root social problem that must be understood by

and resolved through a radical social approach.

Indeed, the bourgeoisie can easily remedy such a problem by promoting

ethnically discriminated employees to upper-level managers and by

promoting female lieutenants in the military into majors or generals.

Hence the amazing willingness that new enterprises and the media exhibit

in selecting blacks and women for high spots in their operations or

media presentations. Baby boomer capitalists such as Tom Peters, who

season their ideas of nonhierarchical practices in business

administration with dashingly anarchic traits, often regard race and

gender as archaisms. Colin Powell has shown that even with an African

American as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the American military

can be as deadly as it needs to be, and Oprah Winfrey has demonstrated

that what Americans read or buy needs have no bearing on the race or

gender of a television purveyor of those commodities.

The middle and working classes no longer think of the present society as

structured around classes. Current opinion holds that the rich are

deserving and the poor are not, while an incalculable number of people

linger between the categories. A huge section of public opinion in the

Western world tends to regard oppression and exploitation as residual

abuses, not inherent features of a specific social order. The prevailing

society is neither rationally analyzed nor forcefully challenged; it is

prudently psychoanalyzed and politely coaxed, as though social problems

emerge from erratic individual behavior. Although strident protests

explode from time to time, a growing gentility is watering down the

severity of social disputes and antagonisms, even among people who

profess leftist views.

What is absent in this type of sporadic and eruptive opposition is an

understanding of the causal continuities that only serious and, above

all, rational explorations can reveal. In the so-called “Seattle

rebellion” in late November and early December 1999 against the World

Trade Organization, what was at issue was not the substitution of “fair

trade” for “free trade,” but how modern society produces the wealth of

the world and distributes it. Although some militant demonstrators

attempted to invoke the “injustices” of capitalism (actually, capitalism

was not being peculiarly “unjust” any more than lethal bacilli are being

“unfair” when they produce illness and death), far fewer of the

demonstrators appeared to understand the logic of a market economy. It

has been reported that during anti-WTO demonstrations, little literature

was distributed that explained the basic reason for denouncing the WTO

and preventing its delegates from doing their business.

Indeed, the demonstration in Seattle, like the one in Washington, DC,

that followed it several months later, however well-meant, created the

illusion that acts of mere disruption, which became increasingly staged,

can do more than moderate the “excesses” of globalization. The

Washington demonstration, in fact, was so negotiated in character that

the police allowed the demonstrators to walk across a chalked line as a

mere symbol of illegality and then allowed themselves to be escorted

into buses as arrestees. Police spokesmen pleasantly agreed that the

young demonstrators were “decent” and “socially concerned kids” who

meant well, and WTO delegates tolerantly acknowledged that the

demonstrators drew their attention to troubling economic and

environmental problems that needed correction. Undoubtedly, the

authorities expect these “socially concerned kids” to eventually grow up

and become good citizens.

Rather than meaningful protests, the demonstrations were noteworthy

mainly because protest of any kind is such a rarity today. The limited

number of participants seemed to lack an in-depth understanding of what

the WTO represented. Even to protest “capitalism” is simply to voice an

opposition to an abstract noun, which in itself tells us nothing about

capitalist social relations, their dynamic, their transformation into

destructive social forces, the prerequisites for undoing them, and

finally the alternatives that exist to replace them. Few of the

demonstrators appeared to know the answers to these questions; thus,

they castigated corporations and multinationals as though these are not

the unavoidable outcomes of historic forces of capitalist production.

Would the dangers of globalization be removed from the world if the

corporations were scaled down in size? More fundamentally, could smaller

enterprises ever have been prevented from developing into industrial,

commercial, and financial giants that would not differ from modern

multinationals?

My point is less to advance criticisms than to question the extent to

which the Seattle and Washington demonstrators adequately understood the

problems they were dealing with. Indeed, what is a demonstration meant

to demonstrate? It must not only protest but also confront official

power with popular power, even in incipient form. Demonstrations are

mobilizations of sizable numbers of serious people who, in taking to the

streets, intend to let the authorities know that they earnestly oppose

certain actions by the powers-that-be. Reduced to such antics, they

become self-deflating forms of entertainment. As such, they constitute

no challenge to the authorities; indeed, where idiosyncratic behavior

replaces forceful opposition, they show the public that advocates of

their view are mere eccentrics who need not be taken seriously and whose

cause is trivial. Without the gravitas that commands respect—and, yes,

the discipline that reveals serious intentionality—demonstrations and

other such manifestations are worse than useless; they harm their cause

by trivializing it.

A politics of mere protest, lacking programmatic content, a proposed

alternative, and a movement to give people direction and continuity,

consists of little more than events, each of which has a beginning and

an end but little more.

The social order can live with an event or series of events and even

find this praiseworthy. Worse still, such a politics lives or dies

according to an agenda established by the social order it opposes.

Corporations proposed the WTO; they needed worldwide participation in

the Organization and, in their own way, generated the very opposition

that now denounces its lack of democracy and lack of humaneness. They

expected opposition, and only police amateurism in Seattle let it get

slightly out of hand. It ill-becomes such an opposition to then plan to

protest the nominating conventions of major political parties whose very

existence many demonstrators profess to oppose. Indeed, the

demonstrators, however well- meaning, legitimate the existence of the

parties by calling upon them to alter their policies on international

trade, as though they even have a justifiable place in a rational

society.

A politics of protest is not a politics at all. It occurs within

parameters set by the prevailing social system and merely responds to

remediable ills, often mere symptoms, instead of challenging the social

order as such. The masked anarchists who join in these events by

smashing windows use the clamor of shattered glass to glamorize limited

street protests with the semblance of violence and little more.

I have not made these critical remarks about the state of the Left today

in order to carp against people, activities, and events, or from any

generational or sectarian disdain. On the contrary, my criticisms stem

from a deep sympathy for people who are sensitive to injustices and

particularly for those striving to remedy them. Better to do something

to end the silence of popular acquiescence than simply to perpetuate the

complacency generated by a consumer-oriented society.

Nor have I presented my criticisms of Marxism and anarchism—the main

players in the classical Left—in order to try to astound a new

generation of activists with the grandeur of revolutionary history that

they somehow must match.

Again to the contrary, I have invoked the classical Left of yesteryear

not only to suggest what it has to teach us but also to note its own

limitations as the product of a different era and one that, for better

or worse, will never return. What the classical Left has to teach us is

that ideas must be systematic—coherent—if they are to be productive and

understandable to people who are seriously committed to basic social

change. Indeed, a future Left must show that the seemingly disparate

problems of the present society are connected and stem from a common

social pathology that must be removed as a totality. Moreover, no

attempts to change the existing society will ever prove to be

fundamental unless we understand how its problems are interconnected and

how their solutions can be educed from humanity’s potentialities for

freedom, rationality, and self-consciousness.

By coherence, I do not mean only a methodology or a system of thinking

that explores root causes, but rather that the very process of

attempting to link together the various social pathologies to underlying

factors and to resolve them in their totality is an ethical endeavor. To

declare that humanity has a potentiality for freedom, rationality, and

self-consciousness—and, significantly, that this potentiality is not

being realized today—leads inexorably to the demand that every society

justify its existence according to the extent to which it actualizes

these norms. Any endeavor to assess a society’s success in achieving

freedom, rationality, and self-consciousness makes an implicit judgment.

It raises the searing question of what a society “should be” within its

material and cultural limits. It constitutes the realizable ideal that

social development raises for all thinking people and that, up to now,

has kept alive movements for the fulfillment of freedom.

Without that ideal as a continual and activating presence, no lasting

movement for human liberation is possible—only sporadic protests that

themselves may mask the basic irrationality of an unfree society by

seeking to cosmetically remove its blemishes. By contrast, a constant

awareness that a given society’s irrationality is deep seated, that its

serious pathologies are not isolated problems that can be cured

piecemeal but must be solved by sweeping changes in the often hidden

sources of crisis and suffering—that awareness alone is what can hold a

movement together, give it continuity, preserve its message and

organization beyond a given generation, and expand its ability to deal

with new issues and developments.

Too often, ideas meant to yield a certain practice are instead

transported into the academy, as fare for “enriching” a curriculum and,

of course, generating jobs for the growing professoriat. Such has been

the unhappy fate of Marxism, which, once an embattled and creative body

of ideas, has now acquired academic respectability—to the extent that it

is even regarded as worthy of study. At the same time, the routine use

of the word “activist” raises problems that can be unintentionally

regressive. Can there be action without insight into the nature of

social ills and a theoretical understanding of the measures needed to

resolve them? Can the activist even act meaningfully and effectively

without drawing upon the rich body of experiences and ideas that have

grown over the years and that can show us the pitfalls that lie below

the surface, or the many strategies that have been tested by earlier

generations?

In what likely directions is capitalist society developing in the coming

century, and what are the most basic problems it is raising for

humanity? Is there any special sector, class, or group in society to

which we must appeal if we are to hope to create a revolutionary

movement? What kind of movement and institutions must we create that

will play a leading role in social change? Do we need any well-organized

movement at all, or will our hoped-for changes occur spontaneously,

emerging out of demonstrations around specific issues or street

festivals or communitarian enterprises such as co-ops, alternative

enterprises, and the like? Or do we have to build political entities,

and if so, what kind? What is the relationship of a revolutionary

movement to these new political entities? And how should power be

situated and institutionalized in a rational society? Finally, what

ethical considerations should guide us in our efforts?

Marxism failed to form an adequate picture of the worker as a many-sided

human being and indeed fetishized him or her to the point of absurdity.

It did not normally see workers as more than economic entities, but

rather endowed them with semimystical properties as revolutionary

agents, possessed of secret powers to understand their interests and a

unique sensitivity to radical possibilities in the existing society. To

read Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leon Trotsky, the syndicalist

propagandists, and even run-of-the-mill Social Democrats is to sense

that they held the socialist judgment of workers in awe and imbued them

with remarkable revolutionary powers. That workers could also become

fascists or reactionaries was inconceivable.

This mystification has not entirely been dispelled, but even so, we must

ask, which part of society can play a leading role in radical change

today? The fact is that the leveling role of Western capitalism and the

increasing development of social struggles along ever-vaguer lines has

opened up a vista much different from that which once hypnotized the

classical Left. The technological level of the Industrial Revolution was

highly labor intensive; the brutish exploitation of labor and the

simplification of the work process with its consequent destruction of

skills by a deadening division of labor made it possible for Marx and

other theorists to single out the proletariat as the principal victim of

capitalism and thus the principal engine of its demise.

Although many traditional factories are still with us, especially in the

Third World, in Europe and North America they are giving way to highly

skilled and differentiated systems of production. Many new strata can no

longer be regarded, except in the most elastic way, as “workers” in any

industrial sense. Such people are even becoming the majority of the

“working class,” while the industrial proletariat (contrary to Marx’s

expectations) is visibly becoming an ever-smaller minority of the

population. For the present, at least, these workers are well paid

(often receiving salaries rather than wages), consumer oriented in

tastes, and far removed from a working-class outlook and a disposition

to hold leftist social views.

Capitalism, in effect, is creating the bases for a populist

politics—hopefully a radical and ultimately revolutionary one—that is

focused on the broadening and expanding of professional opportunities,

the quality of life, and a more pleasant environment. Economically,

maturing capitalism can properly be descriptively divided into strata of

the wealthy, the well-off, the comfortable, and the poor. Industrial

wage workers in the West have more in common with salaried technicians

and professionals than with underpaid unskilled workers in the service

sector of fast-food restaurants and retail sales and the like, let alone

with the nearly lumpenized poor. In the absence of economic crises,

social disquiet may focus on fears of crime, shortcomings in public

services and education, the decline of traditional values, and the like.

More momentously, this populist outlook fears environmental degradation,

the disappearance of open spaces, and the growing congestion of

once-human-scaled communities—indeed, of community life in all its

aspects.

For more than a half-century, capitalism has managed not only to avoid a

chronic economic crisis of the kind Marx expected but also to control

crises that potentially had a highly explosive character. As a system,

capitalism is one of the most unstable economies in history and hence is

always unpredictable. But equally uncertain is the traditional radical

notion that it must slip with unfailing regularity into periodic crises

as well as chronic ones. The general population in Europe and the United

States has displayed a remarkable confidence in the operations of the

economy; more than 40 per cent of U.S. families have now invested in the

stock market and accept its huge swings without being swept up by panics

such as those that afflicted financial markets in the past. A strictly

class- oriented politics based on industrial workers has receded, and

the Left now faces the imperative to create a populist politics that

reaches out to “the people” as they are today, in anticipation that they

can now more easily be radicalized by issues that concern their

communities, their civil liberties, their overall environment, and the

integrity of their supplies of food, air, and water, not simply by a

focus on economic exploitation and wage issues. The importance of

economic issues cannot be overstated, but especially in periods of

relative well-being, a future Left will be successful only to the extent

that it addresses the public as a “people” rather than as a class, a

population whose disquiet has at least as much to do with freedoms,

quality of life, and future well-being as it does with economic crises

and material insecurity.

By the same token, a future Left can hope to exercise influence only if

it can mobilize people on issues that cut across class lines. From

Marx’s day until the 1930s, the principal victims of capitalist

exploitation appeared to be workers at the point of production. The

French Revolution, it was argued, allowed the peasantry to gain greater

control of the land, and the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth

century granted the lower middle classes a major place in all spheres of

French society. But they left one class unsatisfied: the emerging

industrial proletariat, which was subjected to harsh working conditions,

prevented from organizing, and suffered a declining standard of living.

Engels portrayed a working-class life based on the English proletariat

of 1844 at the height of the first Industrial Revolution; Marx argued

that the concentration of capital and the displacement of workers by

machines would create insufferable misery in the factories of England

and the continent. This anticapitalist vision was predicated on the

belief that the proletariat’s material conditions of life would worsen

steadily while its numbers would increase to a point where it became the

majority of the population.

By the late nineteenth century, however, these predictions were already

falling short, and by 1950 they were wholly discredited. What with the

sophistication of machinery, the appearance of electronics, the

spectacular increase in motor vehicle production, the rise of the

chemical industry, and the like, the proportion of industrial workers to

the population at-large was diminishing, not rising. Moreover, due in

large part to the struggles of legal trade unions to improve the living

conditions of the proletariat in particular, the conflict between

capital and labor was being significantly muted. Marxism, then, was

clearly boxed into the class relations of a historically limited period,

the era of the first Industrial Revolution.

Far from becoming proletarianized or declining to a minority of the

population as Marx had predicted, the middle class retained the

psychology and consciousness of people who could hope for an ever-higher

status. Propertyless as it may have been in reality and often cowed by

the real bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie was (and remains to a great

extent) convinced that it has a privileged place in the market economy

and entertains expectations that it can climb upward on the social

ladder of the capitalist system. If anything, the working class has made

sufficient gains that it expects its children, equipped with a better

education than their parents, to step upward in life. Millions of small

property owners invest in financial markets. Workers now describe

themselves as “middle class” or, with a nuance that heightens the

dignity of labor, as “working families.” Combative and exclusive

expressions like “workers,” “toilers,” and “laborers” that once

implicitly hinted at the existence of class struggle are now used with

increasing rarity or not at all.

The sharp lines that once distinguished a factory’s accounting office

from the proletariat are being blurred ideologically and eating away at

working-class consciousness. Notwithstanding Marx’s theory of history as

an account of class struggles, with its many truths, a class is no more

authentic than the consciousness with which it views reality. No worker

is truly a class being, however much he is exploited, when he views

social life in bourgeois terms. The bourgeoisie learned this fact quite

early when it exploited ethnic, religious, gender, and craft divisions

within the proletariat as a whole. Hence, the blue- or white-collar

worker is a class being according to how she thinks of herself, relates

to her boss, and holds expectations in life. A worker without a

combative class consciousness is no more an exploited proletarian, for

all practical purposes, than a policeman is an ordinary worker. Radical

intellectuals’ mystification of the worker has its origins in their

imputation that “consciousness follows being,” that is, when the worker

recognizes that he is exploited and that capitalism is his social enemy.

What does this mean for a future Left? Unless capitalism unexpectedly

collapses into a major chronic crisis (in which case, workers may well

turn to the fascism of a Le Pen in France or the reactionism of a

Buchanan in the U.S.), then the Left must focus on issues that are

interclass in nature, addressing the middle as well as the working

class. By the very logic of its grow-or-die imperative, capitalism may

well be producing ecological crises that gravely imperil the integrity

of life on this planet. The outputs of factories and the raw material

industries, the destructive agricultural practices, and the consumption

patterns in privileged parts of the world are simplifying the highly

complex ecological ties that emerged over millions of years of natural

evolution, reducing highly fertile areas to concrete landscapes, turning

usable water into an increasingly degraded resource, surrounding the

planet with a carbon dioxide layer that threatens to radically change

the climate, and opening dangerous holes in the ozone layer.

Rivers, lakes, and oceans are becoming garbage dumps for poisonous and

life- inhibiting wastes. Almost every tangible component of daily life,

from the food on the dinner table to substances used in the workplace,

is becoming polluted with known or potentially dangerous toxicants.

Cities are growing into vast, polluted, sprawling environments whose

populations are larger than those of many nation- states only a few

decades ago. The equatorial belt of tropical forests that surround the

planet’s land areas and large parts of the temperate zones are being

deforested and denuded of their complex life-forms.

Yet for capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it

to commit social suicide. By definition, capitalism is a competitive

economy that cannot cease to expand. The problems it may be creating for

humanity as a whole —problems that transcend class differences—can

easily become the bases for a vast critique if current environmentalists

are willing to raise their concerns to the level of a radical social

analysis and organize not simply around saving a select species or

around the vices of automobile manufacturers but around replacing the

existing irrational economy by a rational one. The fact that the nuclear

industry still exists must be seen not simply as an abuse or a matter of

stupidity, for example, but as an integral part of a greater whole: the

need for an industry in a competitive economy to grow and outcompete its

rivals. Similarly, the successes of the chemical industry in promoting

the use of toxicants in agriculture, and the growing output of the

automobile and petroleum industries—all must be seen as the results of

the inner workings of a deeply entrenched system. Not only workers but

the public must be educated in the reality that our emerging ecological

problems stem from our irrational society.

Issues such as gender discrimination, racism, and national chauvinism

must be recast not only as cultural and social regressions but as

evidence of the ills produced by hierarchy. A growing public awareness

must be fostered in order to recognize that oppression includes not only

exploitation but also domination, and that it is based not only on

economic causes but on cultural particularisms that divide people

according to sexual, ethnic, and similar traits. Where these issues come

to the foreground in the form of patent abuses, a conscious

revolutionary movement must expand their implications to show that

society as it exists is basically irrational and dangerous.

Such a revolutionary movement needs a distinctive body of tactics

designed to expand the scope of any issue, however reformist it may seem

at first glance, steadily radicalizing it and giving it a potentially

revolutionary thrust. It should make no agreement with liberals and the

bourgeoisie on retaining the existing order. If the solution to a

specific environmental problem seems fairly pragmatic, then the movement

must regard it as a step for widening a partly open door until it can

show that the entire ecological problem is systemic and expose it as

such to public view. Thus, a revolutionary movement should insist not

only on blocking the construction of a nuclear plant but on shutting

down all nuclear plants and replacing them with alternative energy

sources that enhance the environment. It should regard no limited gains

as conclusive but rather must clearly link a given demand to the need

for basic social change. The same strategy applies to the use of

chemicals in agriculture, current agricultural methods of growing food,

the manufacture of harmful means of transportation, the manufacture of

dangerous household products; indeed, every item whose production and

use debases the environment and degrades human values.

I have examined elsewhere the reasons why power cannot be ignored—a

problem that beleaguered the Spanish anarchists. But can we conceive of

a popular movement gaining power without an agency that can provide it

with guidance? A revolutionary Left that seeks to advance from protest

demonstrations to revolutionary demonstrations must resolutely confront

the problem of organization. I speak here not of ad hoc planning groups

but rather of the creation and maintenance of an organization that is

enduring, structured, and broadly programmatic. Such an organization

constitutes a definable entity and must be structured around lasting and

formal institutions to make it operational; it must contain a

responsible membership that firmly and knowledgeably adheres to its

ideals; and it must advance a sweeping program for social change that

can be translated into everyday practice. Although such an organization

may join a coalition (or united front, as the traditional Left called

it), it must not disappear into such a coalition or surrender its

independence, let alone its identity. It must retain its own name at all

times and be guided by its own statutes. The organization’s program must

be the product of a reasoned analysis of the fundamental problems that

face society, their historical sources and theoretical fundaments, and

the clearly visible goals that follow from the potentialities and

realities for social change.

One of the greatest problems that revolutionaries in the past faced,

from the English revolutionaries in the seventeenth century to the

Spanish in the twentieth, was their failure to create a resolute,

well-structured, and fully informed organization with which to counter

their reactionary opponents. Few uprisings expand beyond the limits of a

riot without the guidance of a knowledgeable leadership. The myth of the

purely spontaneous revolution can be dispatched by a careful study of

past uprisings (as I have attempted in my own work, the four- volume

history called The Third Revolution). Even in self-consciously

libertarian organizations, leadership always existed in the form of

“influential militants,” spirited men and women who constituted the

nuclei around which crowds transformed street protests into outright

insurrections. In his famous etching The Revolt, Daumier intuitively

focuses on a single individual, amid other rebels, who raises the cry

that brings the masses into motion. Even in seemingly “spontaneous

insurrections,” advanced militants, scattered throughout rebellious

crowds, spurred the uncertain masses on to further action. Contrary to

anarchistic myths, none of the soviets, councils, and committees that

arose in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918, and Spain in 1936 were formed

simply of their own accord.

Invariably, specific militants (a euphemism for leaders) took the

initiative in forming them and in guiding inexperienced masses toward

the adoption of a radical course of action.

Absorbed as they were with making concrete and immediate demands, few of

these councils and committees had a broad overview of the social

possibilities opened by the insurrections they initiated or a clear

understanding of the enemies they had temporarily defeated. By contrast,

the bourgeoisie and its statesmen knew only too well how to organize

themselves, thanks to their considerable experience as entrepreneurs,

political leaders, and military commanders. But the workers too often

lacked the knowledge and experience so vital to developing such a

perspective. It remains a tragic irony that insurrections not defeated

outright by superior military forces often froze into immobility once

they took power from their class enemies and rarely took the

organizational steps necessary to retain their power. Without a

theoretically trained and militant organization that had developed a

broad social vision of its tasks and could offer workers practical

programs for completing the revolution that they had initiated,

revolutions quickly fell apart for lack of further action. Their

supporters, zealous at the outset and for a brief period afterward, soon

floundered, became demoralized for want of a thoroughgoing program, lost

their élan, and then were crushed physically.

Nowhere was this destructive process more apparent than in the German

Revolution of 1918-19 and also to a great degree in the Spanish

Revolution of 1936-37; mainly because the mass anarchosyndicalist union,

the CNT, surrendered the power it had received from the Catalan workers

in July 1936 to the bourgeoisie.

A future Left must carefully study these tragic experiences and

determine how to resolve the problems of organization and power. Such an

organization cannot be a conventional party, seeking a comfortable place

in a parliamentary state, without losing its revolutionary élan. The

Bolshevik party, structured as a top-down organization that fetishized

centralization and internal party hierarchy, exemplifies how a party can

merely replicate a state to become a bureaucratic and authoritarian

entity.

If Marxists, when they found themselves in revolutionary situations,

could not conceive of any politics that abolished the state, then the

anarchists, and tragically the syndicalists who were deeply influenced

by them intellectually, were so fixated on avoiding the state that they

destroyed vital, self-governing revolutionary institutions. This is not

the place to discuss Spanish anarchism and its rather confused

anarchosyndicalist “farrago,” as Chris Ealham has so aptly called it,

but the CNT-FAI leadership seems to have lacked the slightest idea how

to achieve a libertarian communist revolution.³⁹ When power was actually

thrust into their trembling hands, they simply did not know what to do

with it.

Every revolution, indeed, even every attempt to achieve basic social

change, will always meet with resistance from elites in power. Every

effort to defend a revolution will require the amassing of

power—physical as well as institutional and administrative—which is to

say, the creation of a government. Anarchists may call for the abolition

of the state, but coercion of some kind will be necessary to prevent the

bourgeois state from returning in full force with unbridled terror. For

a libertarian organization to eschew, out of misplaced fear of creating

a “state,” taking power when it can do so with the support of the

revolutionary masses is confusion at best and a total failure of nerve

at worst. Perhaps the CNT-FAI actually lived in awe of the very state

apparatus whose existence it was committed to abolishing. Better that

such a movement gets out of the way than remain cloaked in a seemingly

“radical” camouflage that makes promises to the masses that it cannot

honor.

The history of the libertarian Left does suggest, however, a form of

organization that is consistent with attempts to create a left

libertarian society. In a confederation, seeming higher bodies play the

role of administering policy decisions that are made at the base of the

organization. In the end, nearly all policy decisions, especially basic

ones, are made at the base of the organization by its branches or

sections. Decisions made at the base move to the top and then back again

in modified form to the base until, by majority vote at the base, they

become policies whose implementation is undertaken by special or

standing committees.

No organizational model, however, should be fetishized to the point

where it flatly contradicts the imperatives of real life. Where events

require a measure of centralization, coordination at a confederal level

may have to be tightened to implement a policy or tactic, to the extent

that it is necessary and only for as long as it is necessary. A

confederation can allow necessary centralization on a temporary basis,

without yielding to a permanent centralized organization, only if its

membership is conscious and thoroughly informed to guard against the

abuses of centralization and only if the organization has structures in

place to recall leaders who seem to be abusing their powers. Otherwise,

we have no certainty that any libertarian practices will be honored. I

have seen people who for decades were committed to libertarian practices

and principles throw their ideals to the wind, and even drift into a

coarse nationalism, when events appealed more to their emotions than to

their minds. A libertarian organization must have in place precautions

such as the right to recall by the organization’s membership and the

right to demand a full accounting of a confederal body’s practices, but

the fact remains that there is no substitute for knowledge and

consciousness.

A communalist society would have to make decisions on how resources are

to be acquired, produced, allocated, and distributed. Such a society

must seek to prevent the restoration of capitalism and of old or new

systems of privilege. It must try to achieve a degree of administrative

coordination and regulation on a huge scale among communities, and

decision-making must be resolute if social life of any kind is not to

collapse completely.

These constraints are necessary to provide the greatest degree of

freedom possible, but they will not be imposed simply by “goodwill,”

“mutual aid,” “solidarity,” or even “custom,” and any notion that they

will rests more on a prayer than on human experience. Material want will

quickly erode any goodwill and solidarity that a successful revolution

might create among the libertarian victors; hence, the need for

postscarcity as a precondition for a communalist society. In the Spanish

Revolution of 1936-37, many of the new society’s collectives, all flying

the black-and-red flag of anarchosyndicalism, entered into blatant

competition with one another for raw materials, technicians, and even

markets and profits. The result was that they had to be “socialized” by

the CNT, that is, the trade union had to exert control to equalize the

distribution of goods and the availability of costly machinery, and

oblige “rich” collectives to share their wealth with poor ones. (Later

this authority was taken over by the Madrid nation-state for reasons of

its own.) Nor were all peasants eager to join collectives when they were

also afforded the opportunity to function as small property owners.

Still others left the collectives in sizable numbers when they found

themselves free to do so without fear. In other words, to establish a

viable communalist society, more than personal and moral commitments

will be needed —least of all, those extremely precarious variables that

are based on “human nature” and “instincts for mutual aid.”

The problem of achieving libertarian communism is one of the most

untheorized aspects of the libertarian repertoire. The communist maxim

“From each according to ability, to each according to need” presupposes

a sufficiency of goods and hence complex technological development. That

achievement involves a close agreement with Marx’s emphasis that

advances in the instruments of production are a precondition for

communism. The success of libertarian communism, then, depends

profoundly on the growth of the productive forces over many centuries

and on the increasing availability of the means of life.

History is filled with countless examples where natural scarcity or

limited resources obliged peoples to turn popular governments into

kingly states, captives into slaves, women into subjugated drudges, free

peasants into serfs, and the like.

No such development lacks excesses, and if kindly rulers did not turn

into brutal despots, it would have been miraculous. That we can sit in

judgment on these societies, their states, and their oppressive methods

is evidence that progress has occurred and, equally importantly, that

our circumstances differ profoundly from theirs. Where famine was once a

normal feature of life, we today are shocked when no effort is made to

feed the starving. But we are shocked only because we have already

developed the means to produce a sufficiency, disallowing indifference

to scarcity. In short, the circumstances have changed profoundly,

however unjust the distribution of the means of life may continue to be.

Indeed, that we can even say the distribution is unjust is a verdict

that only a society able to eliminate material scarcity—and create,

potentially, a postscarcity society— can make.

Thus, our expansive visions of freedom, today, have their preconditions:

minimally, technological advancement. Only generations that have not

experienced the Great Depression can ignore the preconditional bases for

our more generous ideologies. The classical Left, particularly thinkers

such as Marx, gave us much systematic thinking on history and

contemporary social affairs. But will we elect to follow a truly

libertarian use of the resources at our command and create a society

that is democratic, communistic, and communalistic, based on popular

assemblies, confederations, and sweeping civil liberties? Or will we

follow a course that is increasingly statist, centralized, and

authoritarian? Here, another “history” or dialectic comes into play—the

great traditions of freedom that were elaborated over time by unknown

revolutionaries and by libertarian thinkers such as Bakunin, Kropotkin,

and Malatesta. We are thus faced with two legacies that have unfolded in

tandem with each other: a material one and an ideological one.

Let us be frank and acknowledge that these legacies are not well known

or easily understood. But from them, we can weave an ethical approach to

social change that can give our endeavors definition and a possibility

of success. For one thing, we can declare that

“what should be”—humanity’s potentialities for freedom, rationality, and

self-consciousness—is to be actualized and guide our social lives. We

can affirm “what should be” on the basis of decidedly real material

possibilities and realizable ideological ones. Knowledge of “what should

be,” if reason is to guide our behavior, becomes the force driving us to

make social change and to produce a rational society. With our material

preconditions in place and with reason to guide us to the actualization

of our potentialities, we can begin to formulate the concrete steps that

a future Left will be obliged to take to achieve its ends. The material

preconditions are demonstrably at hand, and reason, fortified by a

knowledge of past endeavors to produce a relatively rational society,

provides the means to formulate the measures and the means, step by

step, to produce a new Left that is relevant for the foreseeable future.

Far from eschewing reason and theory, a future Left that is meaningful

must be solidly grounded in theory if it is to have any power to

understand the present in relationship to the past, and the future in

relationship to the present. A lack of philosophical equipment to

interpret events, past and present, will render its theoretical insights

fragmentary and bereft of contextuality and continuity. Nor will it be

able to show how specific events relate to a larger whole and link them

together in a broad perspective. It was this admirable intention, I

should note, that induced Marx to give his ideas a systematic and

unified form, not any personal disposition on his part for

“totalitarianism.” The world in which he lived had to be shown that

capital accumulation and the bourgeoisie’s unrelenting concentration of

industrial resources were not products of greed but vital necessities

for enterprises in a sharply competitive economy.

One can project an alternative to the present society only by advancing

rational alternatives to the existing order of things—alternatives that

are objectively and logically based on humanity’s potentialities for

freedom and innovation. In this respect, the ability of human beings to

project themselves beyond their given circumstances, to re-create their

world and their social relations, and to infuse innovation with ethical

judgments becomes the basis for actualizing a rational society.

This “what should be,” as educed by reason, stands on a higher plane of

truthfulness and wholeness than does the existential and pragmatic “what

is.”

Figuratively speaking, the contrast between the “what should be” and the

“what is,” as elaborated and challenged by mind as well as by

experience, lies at the heart of dialectic. Indeed, the “what should

be,” by sitting in judgment on the validity of the given, joins

dialectical development in the biosphere with dialectical development in

the social sphere. It provides the basis for determining whether a

society is rational and to what degree it has rational content. Absent

such a criterion, we have no basis for social ethics apart from the

egocentric, adventitious, anarchic, and highly subjective statement “I

choose!” A social ethics cannot remain suspended in the air without an

objective foundation, a comprehensive evolution from the primitive to

the increasingly sophisticated, and a coherent content that supports its

development.

Moreover, without an objective potentiality (that is, the implicit

reality that lends itself to rational eduction, in contrast to mere

daydreaming) that sits in “judgment” of existential reality as

distinguished from a rationally conceived reality, we have no way to

derive an ethics that goes beyond mere personal taste. What is to guide

us in understanding the nature of freedom? Why is freedom superior to

mere custom or habit? Why is a free society desirable and an enslaved

one not, apart from taste and opinion? No social ethics is even

possible, let alone desirable, without a processual conception of

behavior, from its primal roots in the realm of potentiality at the

inception of a human evolution, through that evolution itself, to the

level of the rational and discursive. Without criteria supplied by the

dialectically derived “ought,” the foundations for a revolutionary

movement dissolve into an anarchic vacuum of personal choice, the

muddled notion that “what is good for me constitutes the good and the

true—and that is that!”

As much as we are obliged to deal with the “what is”—with the

existential facts of life, including capitalism—it is the dialectically

derived “true,” as Hegel might put it, that must always remain our

guide, precisely because it defines a rational society. Abandon the

rational and we are reduced to the level of mere animality from which

the course of history and the great struggles of humanity for

emancipation have tended to free us. It is to break faith with History,

conceived as a rational development toward freedom and innovation, and

to diminish the defining standards of our humanity. If we often seem

adrift, it is not for lack of a compass and a map by which to guide

ourselves toward the actualization of our uniquely human and social

potentialities.

This leads us to another premise for acquiring social truth: the

importance of dialectical thinking as our compass. This logic

constitutes both the method and the substance of an eductive process of

reasoning and unfolding. Eduction is the procedure that immanently

elicits the implicit traits that lend themselves to rational

actualization, namely, freedom and innovation. A deep ecologist once

challenged me by asking why freedom should be more desirable than

unfreedom. I reply that freedom, as it develops objectively through

various phases of the ascent of life, from mere choice as a form of

self-maintenance to the re-creation of the environment by intellection

and innovation, can make for a world that is more habitable, humane, and

creative than anything achieved by the interplay of natural forces.

Indeed, to rephrase a famous axiom of Hegel’s, a point can be reached in

a free society where what is not free is not real (or actual).

Indeed, a task of dialectical thinking is to separate the rational from

the arbitrary, external, and adventitious in which it unfolds, an

endeavor that demands considerable intellectual courage as well as

insight. Thus, the conquests of Alexander the Great dovetail with the

rational movement of History, insofar as Alexander unified a decomposing

world made up of rotting city-states and parasitic monarchies and

transmitted Hellenic thought to it. But the explosion of Mongol horsemen

from the steppes of central Asia contributed no more to the rational

course of events than did, say, a decline in rainfall over North Africa

that turned a vast forested area into a grim, formidable desert.

Moreover, to speak of a Mongol invasion as evidence of a “potentiality

for evil” is to divest the rich philosophical term potentiality of its

creative content. Much better to use here the ideologically neutral term

capacity, which can be applied anywhere for any phenomenon—and to no

intelligible purpose whatever.

Remote as it may seem to some, dialectical thinking is, in my view,

indispensable for creating the map and formulating the agenda for a new

Left. The actualization of humanity’s potentiality for a rational

society—the “what should be” achieved by human development—occurs in the

fully democratic municipality, the municipality based on a face-to-face

democratic assembly composed of free citizens, for whom the word

politics means direct popular control over the community’s public

affairs by means of democratic institutions. Such a system of control

should occur within the framework of a duly constituted system of laws,

rationally derived by discourse, experience, historical knowledge, and

judgment.

The free municipality, in effect, is not only a sphere for deploying

political tactics but a product of reason. Here, means and ends are in

perfect congruence, without the troubling “transitions” that once gave

us a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that soon turned into a

dictatorship of the party.

Furthermore, the libertarian municipality, like any social artifact, is

constituted.

It is to be consciously created by the exercise of reason, not by

arbitrary “choices” that lack objective ethical criteria and therefore

may easily yield oppressive institutions and chaotic communities. The

municipality’s constitution and laws should define the duties as well as

the rights of the citizen, that is, they should explicitly clarify the

realm of necessity as well as the realm of freedom.

The life of the municipality is determined by laws, not arbitrarily “by

men.” Law, as such, is not necessarily oppressive: indeed, for thousands

of years the oppressed demanded laws, as nomos, to prevent arbitrary

rule and the “tyranny of structurelessness.” In the free municipality,

law must always be rationally, discursively, and openly derived and

subject to careful consideration. At the same time, we must continually

be aware of regulations and definitions that have harnessed humanity to

their oppressors.

As Rousseau saw, the municipality is not merely an agglomeration of

buildings but of free citizens. Combined with reason, order can yield

coherent institutions.

Lacking order and reason, we are left with a system of arbitrary rule,

with controls that are not accountable or answerable to the people—in

short, with tyranny. What constitutes a state is not the existence of

institutions but rather the existence of professional institutions, set

apart from the people, that are designed to dominate them for the

express purpose of securing their oppression in one form or another.

A revolutionary politics does not challenge the existence of

institutions as such but rather assesses whether a given institution is

emancipatory and rational or oppressive and irrational. The growing

proclivity in oppositional movements to transgress institutions and laws

merely because they exist is in fact reactionary and, in any case,

serves to divert public attention away from the need to create or

transform institutions into democratic, popular, and rational entities.

A “politics” of disorder or “creative chaos,” or a naïve practice of

“taking over the streets” (usually little more than a street festival),

regresses participants to the behavior of a juvenile herd; by replacing

the rational with the “primal” or “playful,” it abandons the

Enlightenment’s commitment to the civilized, the cultivated, and the

knowledgeable. Joyful as revolutions may sometimes also be, they are

primarily earnestly serious and even bloody; and if they are not

systematic and astutely led, they will invariably end in

counterrevolution and terror. The Communards of 1871 may have been

deliriously drunk when they “stormed the heavens” (as Marx put it), but

when they sobered up, they found that the walls surrounding Paris had

been breached by the counterrevolutionary Versaillais. After a week of

fighting, their resistance collapsed, and the Versaillais shot them

arbitrarily and in batches by the thousands. A politics that lacks

sufficient seriousness in its core behavior may make for wonderful

Anarchy but is disastrous revolutionism.

What specific political conclusions do these observations yield? What

political agenda do they support?

First, the “what should be” should preside over every tenet of a future

political agenda and movement. As important as a politics of protest may

be, it is no substitute for a politics of social innovation. Today,

Marxists and anarchists alike tend to behave defensively, merely

reacting to the existing social order and to the problems it creates.

Capitalism thus orchestrates the behavior of its intuitive opponents.

Moreover, it has learned to mute opposition by shrewdly making partial

concessions to protesters.

The municipality, as we have seen, is the authentic terrain for the

actualization of humanity’s social potentialities to be free and

innovative. Still, left to itself, even the most emancipated

municipality may become parochial, insular, and narrow. Confederalism

remains at once the operational means of rounding out deficits that any

municipality is likely to face when it introduces a libertarian

communist economy. Few, if any, municipalities are capable of meeting

their needs on their own. An attempt to achieve economic autarchy—and

the concomitant cultural parochialism that it so often yields in less

economically developed societies—would be socially undesirable. Nor does

the mere exchange of surplus products remove the commodity relationship;

the sharing of goods according to a truly libertarian view is far

different from an exchange of goods, which closely resembles market

exchanges. By what standard would the “value” of surplus commodities be

determined—by their congealed labor? The incipient bases for a

capitalist economy remained unrecognized, even in anarchist Catalonia,

among those who boasted of their communist convictions.

Still another distinction that must be drawn is that between

policymaking decisions and strictly administrative ones. Just as the

problems of distribution must not be permitted to drag a community into

capitalist mores and market practices, administrators must not be

allowed to make policy decisions, which properly belong to popular

assemblies. Such practices must be made, quite simply, illegal, that is,

the community must establish regulations, with punitive features,

forbidding committees and agencies to exercise rights that properly

belong to the assembled community. As insensitive as such measures may

seem to delicate libertarian sensibilities, they are justified by a

history in which hard-won rights were slowly eroded by elites who sought

privileges for themselves at the expense of the many. Postscarcity in

the availability of the means of life may serve to render any pursuit of

economic privilege a laughable anachronism. But, as hierarchical society

has shown, something more than economic privileges, such as the

enhancement of status and power, may be involved.

Human beings actualize their potentialities in free municipalities that

are rationally and discursively constituted and institutionalized in

free popular assemblies. Whatever politics abets this development is

historically progressive; any self-professed politics that diminishes

this development is reactionary and reinforces the existing social

order. Mere expressions of formless “community” that devolve into

“street festivals,” particularly when they become substitutes for a

libertarian municipalist politics (or, more disturbingly, a distortion

of them), feed the overall juvenilization that capitalism promotes

through its impetus to dumb down society on a massive scale.

During the interwar years, when proactive forces for revolutionary

change seemed to threaten the very existence of the social order, the

classical Left was focused on a distinct set of issues: the need for a

planned economy, the problems of a chronic economic crisis, the

imminence of a worldwide war, the advance of fascism, and the

challenging examples provided by the Russian Revolution.

Today, contemporary leftists are more focused on major ecological

dislocations, corporate gigantism, the influence of technology on daily

life, and the impact of the mass media. The classical Left looked at

deep-seated crises and the feasibility of revolutionary approaches to

create social change; the contemporary Left is more attentive to a

different set of abuses.

The capitalism under which we live today is far removed from the

capitalism that Marx knew and that revolutionaries of all kinds tried to

overthrow in the first half of the twentieth century. It has, indeed,

developed in great part along the lines Marx suggested in his closing

chapters of the first volume of Capital: as an economy whose very law of

life is accumulation, concentration, and expansion.

When it can no longer develop along these lines, it will cease to be

capitalism.

This follows from the very logic of commodity exchange, with its

expression in competition and technological innovation.

Marxist productivism and anarchist individualism have both led to blind

alleys, albeit widely divergent ones. Where Marxism tends to

overorganize people into parties, unions, and proletarian “armies”

guided by elitist leaders, anarchism eschews organization and leaders as

“vanguards” and celebrates revolutionism as an instinctive impulse

unguided by reason or theory. Where Marxism celebrates technological

advances, without placing them in a rational, ethical, and ecological

context, anarchism deprecates sophisticated technics as the demonic

parent of the “technocratic man,” who is lured to perdition by reason

and civilization.

Technophilia has been pitted against technophobia; analytical reason

against raw instinct; and a synthetic civilization against a presumably

primeval nature.

The future of the Left, in the last analysis, depends upon its ability

to accept what is valid in both Marxism and anarchism for the present

time and for the future that is coming into view. In an era of permanent

technological revolution, the validity of a theory and a movement will

depend profoundly on how clearly it can see what lies just ahead.

Radically new technologies, still difficult to imagine, will undoubtedly

be introduced that will have a transformative effect upon the entire

world. New power alignments may arise that produce a degree of social

disequilibrium that has not been seen for decades, accompanied by new

weapons of unspeakable homicidal and ecocidal effects, and a continuing

ecological crisis.

But no greater damage could afflict human consciousness than the loss of

the Enlightenment program: the advance of reason, knowledge, science,

ethics, and even technics, which must be modulated to find a progressive

place in a free and humane society. Without the attainments of the

Enlightenment, no libertarian revolutionary consciousness is possible.

In assessing the revolutionary tradition, a reasoned Left has to shake

off dead traditions that, as Marx warned, weigh on the heads of the

living, and commit itself to create a rational society and a rounded

civilization.

December 2002