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Title: Remaking Society Subtitle: Pathways to a Green Future Date: 1990 Source: [[https://libcom.org/library/remaking-society-pathways-green-future][libcom.org]] and [[https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/59cf58159ff37c0dbe0068e6][aaarg]] Authors: Murray Bookchin Topics: green anarchism, revolution, history, society, social policy, social ecology, libertarian municipalism, hierarchy, radicalism, Freedom, human ecology, social structure Published: 2019-07-30 14:25:43Z
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**For Art and Libera Bartell,**
**who have fought for freedom all their lives.**
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This book could not have been written without the suggestions, encouragement, and assistance of several dear friends. I owe my deepest debts to Dimitri Roussopoulos of Black Rose Books and to Rosella Di Leo and Amadeo Bertolo of Eleutheria Books who literally suggested that it be written and supervised its writing over the past two years. Abiding thanks are also due my dear friend and comrade Karl-Ludwig Schibel for our long and rich intellectual association. Important contributions to this project were also made by Janet Biehl, Beatrice Bookchin, Debby Bookchin, and Joseph Bookchin; by friends in the Burlington Greens who are much too numerous to name; and my colleagues at the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainsfield, Vermont, most particularly Dan Chodorkoff. Finally, I would like to thanks Steve Chase of South End Press for his personal interest and assistance in preparing the U.S. edition of *Remaking Society* for publication.
I had long thought of writing a compact book that would dearly
summarize my views on “remaking society” from an ecological view”
point. It seemed to me (as it did to many of my friends) that a need
existed to bring the ideas I have developed over several large books
into a work of some two hundred pages; one that would not be too
demanding for intelligent readers who are interested in social ecology.
But what finally made me decide to write this book was a rather
chilling incident. Early in June, 1987, I was privileged to be a feature
speaker in a six-day National Gathering of American Greens in Amherst, Massachusetts. The event received a surprising amount of national press coverage — and rightly so. About two thousand people from at least forty-two states came to Amherst to debate the theoretical and
practical problems of a Green movement in the United States. This was
the biggest gathering of independent American radicals in many years.
Largely anti-capitalist and activist, these Greens were deeply involved
in their neighbourhoods, communities, and workplaces. They reflected
a wide spectrum of radicalism in America — giving expression to its
promise and its problems, its hopes and limitations.
The gathering was marked by over a dozen plenary sessions of five
hundred to a thousand people and by an astonishing number of
workshops on issues as exotic as ecological ethics and as timely as
feminism, racism, imperialism, and economic democracy; indeed, almost every practical social problem that could be of interest to the
rapidly growing Green movement in America. There were heated
disputes over electoral versus non-electoral politics, independent versus coalition politics, revolutionary versus reformist politics, and, in
short, all the debates that have echoed over the years in major radical
gatherings.
But something fairly new surfaced in these debates. A number of
tendencies, indeed, ways of thinking, appeared that may seem uniquely
American, but which I think have already emerged or will emerge in
Green movements, and perhaps radical movements generally, outside
the United States.
I can best describe at least one of these tendencies by giving an
account of the incident that troubled me. It occurred in an after-dinner
small of our meeting place to discuss the events of the day. A young, tall,
rather robust man from California began to talk in a vague way about
the need to “obey” the “laws of nature,” to “humbly subjugate ourselves” (if I recall his words correctly) “to nature’s commands.” Rhetorical
as his words seemed at first utterance, I began to find his increasingly
strident monologue very disturbing.
His use of words like “obey,” “laws of nature,” “subjugate ” and
commands” reminded me of the very same language I have heard from
anti-ecological people who believe that nature must “obey” *our* commands and *its* “laws” must be used to “subjugate” the natural world
itself. Whether I was thinking of the young California Green who was
bombarding me with his seemingly “ecological” verbiage, or of modern
acolytes of the cold deities of science who believe that “man” must
ruthlessly control nature in “his” own interest, it was clear to me that
these two seemingly opposed views had a basic thing in common. They
jointly shared the vocabulary of domination and subjugation. Just as
my California Green believes that human beings should be dominated
by nature, so the acolytes of scientism believe that nature should be
dominated by “man.”
My California Green, in effect, had merely reversed this unsavoury
relationship between human beings and nature by turning people into
objects of domination, just as his scientistic opponents (usually big
industrialists, financiers, and entrepreneurs in our modern corporate
society) turn the world of life, including human beings, into objects of
domination. The fact that humanity, together with nature, were being
locked into a common destiny based on domination by a hierarchical
mentality and society, seemed to elude my California Green with his
simplistic message of “surrendering” to nature and its “laws.”
Already deeply disturbed by the fact that a self-professed Green
could think so much like his ecological opponents, I decided to ask him
a blunt question: “What do you think is the cause of the present
ecological crisis?” His answer was very emphatic: “Human beings! *People* are responsible for the ecological crisis!”
“Do you mean that people such as blacks, women, and the oppressed
are causing ecological imbalances — not corporations, agribusiness,
ruling elites, and the State?” I asked with complete astonishment.
“Yes, people!” he answered even more heatedly. “*Everyone!* They
overpopulate the earth, they pollute the planet, they devour its resources, they are greedy. That’s why corporations exist — to give people the things they want.”
I suspect our discussion would have become explosive if my California Green had not been distracted by a nearby game of volley-ball and leaped up to join it.
I could not forget this conversation. Indeed, it haunts me to the
present day because of the extent, as I have since learned, to which it
reflects the thinking of many environmentalists, some of whom would
militantly call themselves “radicals.”
The most striking feature of such a way of thinking is not only that
it closely parallels the way of thinking that is found in the corporate
world. What is more serious is that it serves to deflect our attention from
the role society plays in producing ecological breakdown. If “people”
as a *species* are responsible for environmental dislocations, these
dislocations cease to be the result of *social* dislocations. A mythic
“Humanity” is created — irrespective of whether we are talking about
oppressed ethnic minorities, women. Third World people, or people in
the First World — in which everyone is brought into complicity with
powerful corporate elites in producing environmental dislocations. In
this way, the social roots of ecological problems are shrewdly obscured.
A new kind of biological “original sin” is created in which a vague
group of animals called “Humanity” is turned into a destructive force
that threatens the survival of the living world.
Reduced to a mere species, human beings can now be treated as a
simple zoological phenomenon subject to the “biological laws” that
presumably determine the “struggle for existence” in the the natural
world. If there is a famine, for example, it can be “explained” by simple
biological notions like a “shortage of food,” presumably caused by
“excess population,” If there is a war, it can be explained by the
“stresses” produced by “overcrowding” or the need for “living space.”
In a like manner, we can dismiss or explain away hunger, misery,
or illness as “natural checks” that are imposed on human beings to
retain the “balance of nature.” We can comfortably forget that much of
the poverty and hunger that afflicts the world has its origin in the
corporate exploitation of human beings and nature — in agribusiness
and social oppression. Human beings, you see, are merely a species like
rabbits, lemmings, and the like, who are inexorably subject to relentless
“natural laws.” [1]
If one views the human condition this way, such that all life-forms
are “biocentrically” interchangeable despite their unique qualities,
people, too, become interchangeable with locusts or, for that matter,
viruses — as has been seriously suggested in a debate by advocates of
this viewpoint — and are equally expendable in the interplay of
so-called natural laws.
The young Californian who presented these views expressed only
the crudest notions that make up this growing ideology. He may very
well have been one of those people I have recently encountered in the
United States who believes that African children — presumably like
other “animals” — should be permitted to starve because they are
“overpopulating” the continent and burdening the biological “carrying
capacity” of their respective countries. Or, what is equally vicious, that
the AIDS epidemic should be welcomed as a means of reducing
“excessive” population. Or, more chauvinistically, that “immigrants”
to the United States from Latin America (often Indians whose ancestors
came to the Americas thousands of years ago) should be kept out
because they threaten “our” resources.
Presented in so crude and racist a form, with the use of words like
“our” to designate an America whose resources are actually owned by
a handful of giant corporations, this viewpoint is likely to be repugnant
to most Americans. Nevertheless, as simple-minded, purely zoological
answers to highly complex social questions, the viewpoint lends to gain
a growing following, particularly among the more macho,
authoritarian, and reactionary types who have always used “nature” and
“natural laws” as substitutes for a study of real social issues and
concerns.
The temptation to equate human beings who live in complex, highly
institutionalized, and bitterly divided societies with ordinary animals,
is finding its voice in seemingly sophisticated arguments that often
parade under the guise of “radical” ecological philosophies. The resurgence of a new Malthusianism that contends that growth rates in
population tend to exceed growth rates in food production is die most
sinister ideological development of all.
The myth that population increases in places like the Sudan, for
example, result in famine (not the notorious fact that the Sudanese could
easily feed themselves if they were not forced by the American-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund to grow cotton instead of grains) typically represents the kind of arguments that are
gaining popularity among many environmentalists, “Nature,” we are
arrogantly told by privileged Euro-Americans who parade as “natural
law” theorists, “must be permitted to take its course” — as though the
profits of corporations, banks, and agribusiness have anything to do
with the “course” of nature.
What renders this new “biocentrism,” with its antihumanistic image
of human beings as interchangeable with rodents or ants, so insidious
is that it now forms the premise of a growing movement called “deep
ecology.”[2] “Deep ecology” was spawned among well-to-do people
who have been raised on a spiritual diet of Eastern cults mixed with
Hollywood and Disneyland fantasies. The American mind is formless
enough without burdening it with “biocentric” myths of a Buddhist and
Taoist belief in a universal “oneness” so cosmic that human beings with
ail their distinctiveness dissolve into an all-encompassing form of
biocentric equality.” Reduced to merely one life-form among many,
the poor and the impoverished either become fair game for outright
extermination if they are socially expendable, or they become objects
of brutal exploitation if they can be used to aggrandize the corporate
world. Accordingly, terms like “oneness” and a “biocentric
democracy” go hand-in-hand with a pious formula for human oppression, misery, and even extermination.
Finally, ecological thinking is not enriched by recklessly blending
such disparate religions as Buddhism and Taoism with Christianity,
much less philosophers like the Jewish thinker Spinoza with a Nazi
apologist like Heidegger. To declare, as Ame Naess, the pontiff of
“deep ecology,” has done, that the “basic principles of the deep ecology
movement lie in religion or philosophy,” is to make a conclusion
notable for its absence of reference to social theory.[3]
There is enough in this mix of “biocentrism”, antihumanism,
mysticism, and religion with its “natural law” ethos to feed extremely
reactionary and atavistic tendencies, all well-meaning references in
deep ecology about “decentralization” and “nonhierarchy” aside. This
raises the question of still another exotic tendency that is percolating
through the ecology movements. I refer to the paradoxical need for a
new theistic ecological “spirituality.” That the word “spirituality” may
often mean a decent, indeed, a wholesome sensitivity to nature and its
subtle interconnections, is a very substantial reason to guard ourselves
against its degeneration into an atavistic, simple-minded form of nature
religion peopled by gods, goddesses, and eventually a new hierarchy
of priests and priestesses. Mystical versions of feminism, as well as the
ecology movement as a whole, alas, have sometimes proved themselves
to be all too vulnerable to this tendency. The clear-sighted *naturalism*
to which ecology so vividly lends itself is now in danger of being
supplanted by a **super**natural outlook that is inherently alien to nature’s
own fecundity and self-creativity.
May we not reasonably ask why the natural world has to be peopled
with earth gods and goddesses when natural evolution exhibits a
marvelous power of its own to generate such a rich and wondrous
variety of living beings? Is this alone not enough to Fill the human mind
with admiration and respect? Is it not the crudest form of
“anthropocentrism” (to use a word for the projection of the human into
the natural that evokes so much disdain in ecology movements) to
introduce deified forms created by the human imagination into the
natural world in the name of ecological “spirituality”?
To worship or revere *any* being, natural or supernatural, will always
be a form of self-subjugation and servitude that ultimately yields social
domination, be it in the name of nature, society, gender, or religion.
More than one civilization was riddled by “nature deities” that were
cynically used by ruling elites to support the most rigid, oppressive, and
dehumanizing of social hierarchies. The moment human beings fall to
their knees before *any* thing that is “higher” than themselves, hierarchy
will have made its first triumph over freedom, and human backs will
be exposed to all the burdens that can be inflicted on them by social
domination.
I have raised some of the problems posed by the misanthropic,
antihuman tendencies in the ecology movement not to defame the
movement as a whole. Quite to the contrary: my purpose in surveying
these tendencies is to peel away the fungus that has accumulated around
the movement and look at the promising fruit ecology can yield for the
future. The reason why this book has been written is to show as clearly
as possible that ecology alone, firmly rooted in *social* criticism and a
vision of *social* reconstruction, can provide us with the means for
remaking society in a way that will benefit nature *and* humanity.
However, we cannot achieve such a criticism and vision by swinging
mindlessly from one extreme that advocates the complete “domination
of nature” by “man” to another, rather confused “biocentric” or antihumanist extreme that essentially reduces humanity to a parasitic
swarm of mosquitoes in a mystified swamp called “Nature,” We must
remove ourselves from an ideological catapult that periodically flings
us from fad to fad and absurdity to absurdity.
It is tempting to return to the radicalism of the past where assured
dogmas were socially inspirational and had the aura of romantic rebellion around them. Having been raised in that era of a half-century ago,
I find it emotionally congenial — but intellectually very inadequate.
Traditional radical theory is now in debris. Much that passes for
socialism and communism, today, acts as a crucial support for the
prevailing market society. Archaic slogans like the “nationalization of
property” and a “planned economy” reinforce the growing centralization and rationalization of the corporate economy and the State. Marx’s
almost reverential attitude toward technological innovation and growth
threatens to express the most malignant goals of a technocratic ideology
and a technocratic bureaucracy. Even the strategic political goals of
orthodox radicalism, with its vision of the proletariat as a hegemonic
class, are fading away with the displacement of industrial workers by
automation. No great movements are gathering under the banner of the
red flag — only the ghostly rebels of the past who perished in the failed
insurrections of a bygone era and the leaders who guided them into a
historic limbo.
By the same token, liberal environmentalism has become a balm for
soothing the bad consciences of rapacious industrialists who engage in
a tasteless ballet with environmental lobbyists, lawyers, and public
officials. For this crew, nature is essentially a collection of natural
resources. Their environmental ballets have the goal of soothing consciences according to an ethics of lesser evils, not an ethics of the
greater good and virtue. Typically, a huge forest is usually “traded off”
for a small stand of trees and a large stretch of wetlands for a small,
presumably “improved” wildlife sanctuary.
In the meantime, the overall deterioration of the environment occurs
at a madcap pace. Basic planetary cycles, like the ratio of atmospheric
gases and the factors which determine it, are undermined, increasing
the proportion of carbon dioxide to oxygen in the air. Ecologically
fragile rain forests, that have been on earth for sixty million years or
more and whose role in maintaining the integrity of the air we breathe
is indeterminable, are recklessly removed. Chemical pollutants like
chlorofluoro-carbons threaten to thin out and open vast holes in the
ozone layer that protects all complex life-forms from the sun’s harmful
ultra-violet radiation. These are the major insults that are being inflicted
on the planet. They do not include the daily diet of chemical pollutants,
acid rain, harmful food additives, and agricultural poisons that may be changing
the whole spectrum of diseases that claim human and
non-human life today.
The control of these potentially disastrous alterations of the earth’s
ecological balance has virtually collapsed before the “compromises”
and “trade-offs” engineered by liberal enviornmentalists. Indeed, what
renders the liberal approach so hopelessly ineffectual is the fact that it
takes the present social order for granted, like the air we breathe and
the water we drink. All of these “compromises” and “trade-offs” rest
on the paralysing belief that a market society, privately owned property,
and the present-day bureaucratic nation-state cannot be changed in any
basic sense. Thus, it is the prevailing order that sets the terms of any
“compromise” or “trade-off,” just like the rules of a chess game and the
grid of a chess board determine in advance what the players can do —
not the dictates of reason and morality.
To “play by the rules” of the environmental game means that the
natural world, including oppressed people, always loses something
piece by piece until everything is lost in the end. As long as liberal
environmentalism is structured around the social status quo, property
rights always prevail over public rights and power always prevails over
powerlessness. Be it a forest, wetlands, or good agricultural soil, a
“developer” who owns any of these “resources” usually sets the terms
on which every negotiation occurs and ultimately succeeds in achieving
the triumph of wealth over ecological consideration.
Finally, liberal environmentalism suffers from a consistent refusal
to see that a capitalistic society based on competition and growth for
its own sake must ultimately devour the natural world, just like an
untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host. Personal intentions,
be they good or bad, have little to do with this unrelenting process. An
economy that is structured around the maxim, “Grow or Die,” must
*necessarily* pit itself against the natural world and leave ecological ruin
in its wake as it works its way through the biosphere. I need hardly add
that the growth-oriented, bureaucratic, and highly stratified “socialist”
world offers no alternatives to the failure of liberalism. Totalitarian
countries are equally culpable in the plundering of the planet. The most
important difference between them and their Western counterparts is
that a “planned economy” renders their efforts more systematic. Any
opposition — be it liberal or radical — is more easily silenced by the
institutions of a police state.
The narrowing choices that seem to confront us — notably, an
unfeeling misanthropic kind of “ecologism” and a queasy liberal environmentalism — require that we look for another way. Is the only
response to liberal environmentalism and its diet of failures a “deep
ecology” that mystifies “wild” nature and wildlife, important as
remaining areas of pristine nature may be? Are we obliged to choose
between lobbying, “compromises,” and “trade-offs” and a
“biocentric,” antihumanist mentality that tends to reduce humanity to
nothing more than a mere animal species and the human mind to blight
on the natural world? Is the only response to a technology gone wild a
return to a hunting and gathering way of life in which chipped flints are
our principal materials for acting on the natural world? And is the only
response to the logic of modern science and engineering a celebration
of irrationality, instinct, and religiosity?
Admittedly, I have simplified the alternatives. But I have done so
only to reveal their logic and implications. For one thing, I do not wish
to deny that even liberal environmentalism and the value of an instinctive sensibility have their roles in resisting a powerful technology that
has been placed in the service of mindless growth, accumulation, and
consumption. A stand against the construction of a nuclear reactor, a
new highway, an effort to clear-cut a mountainside, or a new condo
development that threatens to deface an urban landscape — all represent important acts, however limited, to prevent further environmental
deterioration. Land, wildlife, scenic natural beauty, and ecological
variety that is preserved from the bulldozer and profit-oriented
predators, are important enclaves of nature and aesthetics that must be
preserved wherever we can do so. It requires no great theoretical or
ideological wisdom to recognize that almost everything of wonder and
beauty, from a statuesque tree to a burrowing mammal, has its place in
the world and its function in the biosphere.
However, to carry these compelling facts to a point where humanity
is seen either as a blight on nature or the “lord of creation” leads to a
very sinister result. Both views serve to pit humanity against nature,
whether as “blight” or as “lord.” Humanity (insofar as this word denotes
a species rather than highly divided social beings who live in sharp
conflict with each other as oppressed and oppressor) is plucked out of
the evolution of life and placed on a shelf like an inanimate object.
Isolated from the world of life with either curses or praises, it is then
dispatched back into a primal world of the distant past or catapulted up
to the stars, regaled with space suits and exotic weapons. Neither of
these images touches upon an all-important fact: human beings exist in
various *societies*, all of which are profoundly relevant to our ecological
problems. As social beings, humans have developed ways of relating
to each other through *institutions* that, more than any single factor,
determine how they deal with the natural world.
I submit that we must go beyond the superficial layer of ideas created
by “biocentricity,” “antihumanism, Malthusianism, and “deep ecology” at one extreme, and the belief in growth, competition, human “supremacy,” and social power at the other extreme. We must look at
the *social* factors that have created both of these extremes in their many
different forms and answer key questions about the human condition if
we are to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature.
What, after all, *is* human society when we try to view it from an
ecological perspective? A “curse?” An unmitigated “blessing?” A
device for coping with material needs? Or day I say a *product* of
natural evolution as well as culture that not only meets a wide variety
of human needs, but, potentially at least, can play a major role in
fostering the evolution of life on the planet?
What factors have produced ecologically harmful human societies?
And what factors could yield ecologically beneficial human societies?
Is a well-developed technology necessarily anti-ecological or can it
be used to enhance the biosphere and habitats of life?
What can we learn from history that will answer these questions and
advance our thinking beyond the bumper-sticker slogans that we encounter among the misanthropic and liberal environmentalists alike?
Indeed, how should we think out these questions? By means of
conventional logic? Intuition? Divine inspiration? Or, perhaps, by
developmental ways of thinking that are called “dialectical?”
Lastly, but by no means finally, what kind of social reconstruction
do we need to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature —
assuming, to be sure, that society should not be dismissed and everyone
rush off to claim his or her mountain peak in the High Sierras or
Adirondaks? By what political, social, and economic means will such
a reconstruction be achieved? And by what ethical principles will it be
guided?
These are, at best, preliminary questions. There are many others that
we will have to consider before our discussion comes to its end I
hesitate to go further, here, because I have a deep aversion to a mere
laundry list of ideas, half-thought-out statements, flow diagrams, and
bumper-sticker slogans that are so much in vogue these days. When my
young man from California shouted the words “human beings” at me,
he did his best *not* to think and he sets an intellectually crude example
of mindlessness to others whose minds have been shaped by Hollywood, Disneyland, and television.
Hence, more than ever, we desperately need coherence. I do not
mean dogma. Rather, I mean a real *structure* of ideas that places
philosophy, anthropology, history, ethics, a new rationality, and
utopian visions in the service of freedom — freedom, let me add, for
*natural* development as well as human. This is a structure which we
shall have to build in the pages that follow, not simply to collect in
pell-mell fashion into a mere rubbish heap of ideas. The unfinished
thought is as dangerous as the totally finished dogma. Both yield an
uncreative vision of reality that can be bent and twisted in every
possible direction; hence the extremely contradictory notions that exist
in works on “deep ecology.”
This book was written to address the questions I have raised in the
hope that we can formulate the coherent framework to which I have
already alluded and develop a practice of which we are in dire need. It
has been initiated by an incident, by an encounter with real life — not
by reclusive academic reflections and private vagaries.
If the ecology movement which I helped to pioneer some thirty years
ago folds its tents for the mountains or turns to Washington for
influence, the loss will be irreparable. Ecological thinking, today, can
provide the most important synthesis of ideas we have seen since the
Enlightenment, two centuries ago. It can open vistas for a practice that
can effectively change the entire social landscape of our time. The
stylistic militancy readers encounter in this book stems from a troubled
sense of urgency. It is vitally incumbent upon us not to let an ecological
way of thinking and the movement it can produce degenerate and go
the way of traditional radicalism — into the lost mazes of an irrecoverable history.
The problems which many people face today in “defining” themselves,
in knowing “who they are” — problems that feed a vast psychotherapy
industry — are by no means personal ones. These problems exist not
only for private individuals; they exist for modern society as a whole.
Socially, we live in desperate uncertainty about how people relate to
each other. We suffer not only as individuals from alienation and
confusion over our identities and goals; our entire society, conceived
as a single entity, seems unclear about its own nature and sense of
direction. If earlier societies tried to foster a belief in the virtues of
cooperation and care, thereby giving an ethical meaning to social life,
modern society fosters a belief in the virtues of competition and
egotism, thereby divesting human association of all meaning — except,
perhaps, as an instrument for gain and mindless consumption.
We tend to believe that men and women of earlier times were guided
by firm beliefs and hopes — values that defined them as human beings
and gave purpose to their social lives. We speak of the Middle Ages as
an “Age of Faith” or the Enlightenment as an “Age of Reason.” Even
the pre-World War II era and the years that followed it seem like an
alluring time of innocence and hope, despite the Great Depression and
the terrible conflicts that stained it. As an elderly character in a recent,
rather sophisticated, espionage movie put it: what he missed about his
younger years during World War II were their “clarity” — a sense of
purpose and idealism that guided his behaviour.
That “clarity,” today, is gone. It has been replaced by ambiguity.
The certainty that technology and science would improve the human
condition is mocked by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, by massive hunger in the Third World, and by poverty in the First World. The
fervent belief that liberty would triumph over tyranny is belied by the
growing centralization of states everywhere and by the disempowerment of people by bureaucracies, police forces, and sophisticated
surveillance techniques — in our “democracies” no less than in visibly
authoritarian countries. The hope that we would form “one world,” a
vast community of disparate ethnic groups that would share their
resources to improve life everywhere, has been shattered by a rising
tide of nationalism, racism, and an unfeeling parochialism that fosters
indifference to the plight of millions.
We believe that our values are worse than those held by people of
only two or three generations ago. The present generation seems more
self-centred, privatized, and mean-spirited by comparison with earlier
ones. It lacks the support systems provided by the extended family,
community, and a commitment to mutual aid. The encounter of the
individual with society seems to occur through cold bureaucratic agencies rather than warm, caring people.
This lack of social identity and meaning is all the more stark in the
face of the mounting problems that confront us. War is a chronic
condition of our time; economic uncertainty, an all-pervasive presence;
human solidarity, a vaporous myth. Not least of the problems we
encounter are nightmares of an ecological apocalypse—a catastrophic
breakdown of the systems that maintain the stability of the planet. We
live under the constant threat that the world of life will be irrevocably
undermined by a society gone mad in its need to grow—replacing the
organic by the inorganic, soil by concrete, forest by barren earth, and
the diversity of life-forms by simplified ecosystems; in short, a turning
back of the evolutionary clock to an earlier, more inorganic, mineralized world that was incapable of supporting complex life-forms of any
kind, including the human species.
Ambiguity about our fate, meaning, and purpose thus raises a rather
startling question: is society itself a curse, a blight on life generally?
Are we any better for this new phenomenon called “civilization” that
seems to be on the point of destroying the natural world produced over
millions of years of organic evolution?
An entire literature has emerged which has gained the attention of
millions of readers: a literature that fosters a new pessimism toward
civilization as such. This literature pits technology against a presumably “virginal” organic nature; cities against countryside; countryside
against “wilderness”; science against a “reverence” for life; reason
against the “innocence” of intuition; and, indeed, humanity against the
entire biosphere.
We show signs of losing faith in all our uniquely human abilities
our ability to live in peace with each other, our ability to care for our
fellow beings and other life-forms. This pessimism is fed daily by
sociobiologists who locate our failings in our genes, by antihumanists
who deplore our “antinatural” sensibilities, and by “biocentrists” who
downgrade our rational qualities with notions that we are no different
in our “intrinsic worth” than ants. In short, we arc witnessing a
widespread assault against the ability of reason, science, and technology to improve the world for ourselves and life generally.
The historic theme that civilization must inevitably be pitted against
nature, indeed, that it is corruptive of human nature, has re-surfaced in
our midst from the days that reach back to Rousseau — this, precisely
at a time when our need for a truly human and ecological civilization
has never been greater if we are to rescue our planet and ourselves.
Civilization, with its hallmarks of reason and technics, is viewed
increasingly as a new blight. Even more basically, society as a
phenomenon in its own right is being questioned so much so that its
role as integral to the formation of humanity is seen as something
harmfully “unnatural” and inherently destructive.
Humanity, in effect, is being defamed by human beings themselves,
ironically, as an accursed form of life that all but destroys the world of
life and threatens its integrity. To the confusion that we have about our
own muddled time and our personal identities, we now have the added
confusion that the human condition is seen as a form of chaos produced
by our proclivity for wanton destruction and our ability to exercise this
proclivity all the more effectively because we possess reason, science,
and technology.
Admittedly, few antihumanists, “biocentrists,” and misanthropes,
who theorize about the human condition, are prepared to follow the
logic of their premises to such an absurd point. What is vitally important
about this medley of moods and unfinished ideas is that the various
forms, institutions, and relationships that make up what we should call
“society” are largely ignored. Instead, just as we use vague words like
“humanity” or zoological terms like *homo sapiens* that conceal vast
differences, often bitter antagonisms, that exist between privileged
whites and people of colour, men and women, rich and poor, oppressor
and oppressed; so do we, by the same token, use vague words like
“society” or “civilization” that conceal vast differences between free,
nonhierarchical, class, and stateless societies on the one hand, and
others that arc, in varying degrees, hierarchical, class-ridden, statist,
and authoritarian. Zoology, in effect, replaces socially oriented ecology, Sweeping “natural laws” based on population swings among
animals replace conflicting economic and social interests among
people.
Simply to pit “society” against “nature,” “humanity” against the
“biosphere,” and “reason,” “technology,” and “science” against less
developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural
world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and
divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their
solutions.
Ancient Egypt, for example, had a significantly different attitude
toward nature than ancient Babylonia. Egypt assumed a reverential
attitude toward a host of essentially animistic nature deities, many of
which were physically part human and part animal, while Babylonians
created a pantheon of very human political deities. But Egypt was no
less hierarchical than Babylonia in its treatment of people and was
equally, if not more, oppressive in its view of human individuality.
Certain hunting peoples may have been as destructive of wildlife,
despite their strong animistic beliefs, as urban cultures which staked
out an over-arching claim to reason. When these many differences are
simply swallowed up together with a vast variety of social forms by a
word called “society” we do severe violence to thought and even
simple intelligence. Society *per se* becomes something “unnatural”
“Reason,” “technology,” and “science” become things that are
“destructive” without any regard to the social factors that condition
their use. Human attempts to alter the environment are seen as threats
— as though our “species” can do little or nothing to improve the planet
for life generally.
Of course, we are not any less animals than other mammals, but we
are more than herds that browse on the African plains. The way in which
we are more — namely, the *kinds* of societies that we form and how
we are divided against each other into hierarchies and classes —
profoundly affects our behaviour and our effects on the natural world.
Finally, by so radically separating humanity and society from nature
or naively reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can no longer
see how human nature is *derived* from nonhuman nature and social
evolution from natural evolution. Humanity becomes estranged or
alienated not only from itself in our “age of alienation,” but from the
natural world in which it has always been rooted as a complex and
thinking life-form.
Accordingly, we are fed a steady diet of reproaches by liberal and
misanthropic environmentalists alike about how “we” as a species are
responsible for the breakdown of the environment. One does not have
to go to enclaves of mystics and gurus in San Francisco to find this
species-centred, asocial view of ecological problems and their sources.
New York City will do just as well. I shall not easily forget an
“environmental” presentation staged by the New York Museum of
Natural History in the seventies in which the public was exposed to a
long series of exhibits, each depicting examples of pollution and
ecological disruption. The exhibit which closed the presentation carried
a startling sign, “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth” and it consisted simply of a huge mirror which reflected back the human viewer
who stood before it, I clearly recall a black child standing before the
mirror while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which
this arrogant exhibit tried to convey. There were no exhibits of corporate boards or directors planning to deforest a mountainside or
government officials acting in collusion with them. The exhibit
primarily conveyed one, basically misanthropic, message: people *as such*, not a rapacious society and its wealthy beneficiaries, are responsible for environmental dislocations — the poor no less than the
personally wealthy, people of colour no less than privileged whites,
women no less than men, the oppressed no less than the oppressor. A
mythical human “species” had replaced classes; individuals had
replaced hierarchies; personal tastes (many of which are shaped by a
predatory media) had replaced social relationships; and the disempowered who live meagre, isolated lives had replaced giant corporations, self-serving bureaucracies, and the violent paraphernalia of the
State.
Leaving aside such outrageous “environmental” exhibitions that
mirror privileged and underprivileged people in the same frame, it
seems appropriate at this point to raise a highly relevant need: the need
to bring society back into the ecological picture. More than ever, strong
emphases must be placed on the fact that *nearly all ecological problems
are social problems*, not simply or primarily the result of religious,
spiritual or political ideologies. That these ideologies may foster an
anti-ecological outlook in people of all strata hardly requires emphasis.
But rather than simply taking their ideologies at face value, it is crucial
for us to ask from whence these ideologies develop.
Quite frequently, economic needs may compel people to act against
their best impulses, even strongly felt natural values. Lumberjacks who
— employed to clear-cut a magnificent forest normally have no
“hatred” of trees. They have little or no choice but to cut trees just as
stockyard workers have little or no choice but to slaughter domestic
animals. Every community or occupation has its fair share of destructive and sadistic individuals, to be sure, including misanthropic environmentalists who would like to see humanity exterminated. But
among the vast majority of people, this kind of work, including such
onerous tasks as mining, are not freely chosen occupations. They stem
from need and, above all, they are the product of social arrangements
over which ordinary people have no control.
To understand present-day problems — ecological as well as
economic and political — we must examine their social causes and
remedy them through social methods. “Deep,” “spiritual,” anti-humanist, and misanthropic ecologies gravely mislead us when they
refocus our attention on social symptoms rather than social causes. If
our obligation is to look at changes in social relationships in order to
understand our most significant ecological changes, these ecologies
steer us away from society to “spiritual” “cultural” or vaguely defined
“traditional” sources. The Bible did not create European antinaturalism; it served to justify an antinaturalism that already existed on
the continent from pagan times, despite the animistic traits of pre-Christian religions. Christianity’s antinaturaiistic influence became
especially marked with the emergence of capitalism. Society must not
only be brought into the ecological picture to understand why people
tend to choose competing sensibilities — some, strongly naturalistic;
others, strongly antinaturaiistic — but we must probe more deeply into
society itself. We must search out the *relationship of society to nature*,
the *reasons* why it can destroy the natural world, and, alternatively, the
reasons why it has and still can *enhance*, *foster*, and *richly contribute*
to natural evolution.
Insofar as we can speak of “society” in any abstract and general
sense — and let us remember that every society is highly unique and
different from others in the long perspective of history — we are
obliged to examine what we can best call “socialization,” not merely
“society.” Society is a given arrangement of relationships which we
often take for granted and view in a very fixed way. To many people
today, it would seem that a market society based on trade and competition has existed “forever,” although we may be vaguely mindful that
there were pre-market societies based on gifts and cooperation.
Socialization, on the other hand, is a *process*, just as individual living
is a process. Historically, the *process* of socializing people can be
viewed as a sort of social infancy that involves a painful rearing of
humanity to social maturity.
When we begin to consider socialization from an in-depth viewpoint, what strikes us is that society itself in its most primal form stems
very much *from* nature. Every social evolution, in fact, is virtually an
extension of natural evolution into a distinctly human realm. As the
Roman orator and philosopher, Cicero, declared some two thousand
years ago: “...by the use of our hands, we bring into being within the
realm of Nature, a second nature for ourselves.” Cicero’s observation,
to be sure, is very incomplete: the primeval, presumably untouched
“realm of Nature” or “first nature,” as it has been called, is reworked
in whole or part in to “second nature” not only by the “use of our hands.”
Thought, language, and complex, very important biological changes
also play a crucial and, at times, a decisive role in developing a “second
nature” within “first nature.”
I use the term “reworking” advisedly to focus on the fact that
“second nature” is not simply a phenomenon that develops outside of
“first nature” — hence the special value that should be attached to
Cicero’s use of the expression “*within* the realm of Nature...” To
emphasize that “second nature” or, more precisely, society (to use this
word in its broadest possible sense) emerges from *within* primeval “first
nature” is to re-establish the fact that social life always has a naturalistic
dimension, however much society is pitted against nature in our thinking. *Social* ecology clearly expresses the fact that society is not a sudden
“eruption” in the world. Social life does not necessarily face nature as
a combatant in an unrelenting war. The emergence of society is a
The human socialization process from which society emerges—be
it in the form of families, bands, tribes, or more complex types of human
intercourse — has its source in parental relationships, particularly
mother and child bonding. The biological mother, to be sure, can be
replaced in this process by many surrogates, including fathers, relatives, or, for that matter, alt members of a community. It is when *social* parents and *social* siblings — that is, the human community that
surrounds the young — begin to participate in a system of care, that is
ordinarily undertaken by biological parents, that society begins to truly
come into its own.
Society thereupon advances beyond a mere reproductive group
toward institutionalized human relationships, and from a relatively
formless animal community into a clearly structured social *order*. But
at the very inception of society, it seems more than likely that human
beings were socialized into “second nature” by means of deeply ingrained blood ties, specifically maternal ties. We shall see that in time
the structures or institutions that mark the advance of humanity from a
mere animal community into an authentic society began to undergo
far-reaching changes and these changes become issues of paramount
importance in social ecology. For better or worse, societies develop
around status groups, hierarchies, classes, and state formations. But
reproduction and family care remain the abiding biological bases for
every form of social life as well as the originating factor in the
socialization of the young and the formation of a society. As Robert
Briffault observed in the early half of this century, the “one known
factor which establishes a profound distinction between the constitution of the most rudimentary human group and all other animal groups
[is the] association of mothers and offspring which is the sole form of
true social solidarity among animals. Throughout the class of mammals, there is a continuous increase in the duration of that association,
which is the consequence of the prolongation of die period of infantile
dependence” [4] a prolongation which Briffault correlates with increases
in the period of feud gestation and advances in intelligence.
The biological dimension that Briffault adds to what we call society
and socialization cannot be stressed too strongly. It is a decisive
presence, not only in the origins of society over ages of animal evolution, but in the daily recreation of society in our everyday lives. The
appearance of a newly born infant and the highly extended care it
receives for many years reminds us that it is not only a human being
that is being reproduced, but society itself. By comparison with the
young of other species, children develop slowly and over a long period
of time. Living in close association with parents, siblings, kin groups,
and an ever-widening community of people, they retain a plasticity of
mind that makes for creative individuals and ever-formative social
groups. Although nonhuman animals may approximate human forms
of association in many ways, they do not create a “second nature” that
embodies a cultural tradition, nor do they possess a complex language,
elaborate conceptual powers, or an impressive capacity to restructure
their environment purposefully according to their own needs.
A chimpanzee, for example, remains an infant for only three years
and a juvenile for seven. By the age of ten, it is a full-grown adult.
Children, by contrast, are regarded as infants for approximately six
years and juveniles for fourteen. A chimpanzee, in short, grows mentally and physically in about half the time required by a human being,
and its capacity to learn or, at least to think, is already fixed by
comparison with a human being, whose mental abilities may expand
for decades. By the same token, chimpanzee associations are often
idiosyncratic and fairly limited. Human associations, on the other hand,
are basically stable, highly institutionalized, and they are marked by a
degree of solidarity, indeed, by a degree of creativity, that has no equal
in nonhuman species as far as we know.
This prolonged degree of human mental plasticity, dependency, and
social creativity yields two results that are of decisive importance. First,
early human association must have fostered a strong predisposition for
of anthropological evidence suggests that participation, mutual aid,
solidarity, and empathy were the social virtues early human groups
emphasized within their communities. The idea that people are dependent upon each each other for the good life, indeed, for survival, followed
from the prolonged dependence of the young upon adults. Independence, not to mention competition, would have seemed utterly
alien, if not bizarre, to a creature reared over many years in a largely
dependent condition. Care for others would have been seen as the
perfectly natural outcome of a highly acculturated being that was, in
turn, clearly in need of extended care. Our modern version of individualism, more precisely, of egotism, would have cut across the
grain of early solidarity and mutual aid — traits, I may add, without
which such a physically fragile animal like a human being could hardly
have survived as an adult, much less as a child.
Second, human interdependence must have assumed a highly structured form. There is no evidence that human beings normally relate to
each other through the fairly loose systems of bonding we find among
our closest primate cousins. That human social bonds can be dissolved
or de-institutionalized in periods of radical change or cultural breakdown is too obvious to argue here. But during relatively stable conditions, human society was never the “horde” that anthropologists of the
last century presupposed as a basis for rudimentary social life. On the
contrary, the evidence we have at hand points to the fact that all humans,
perhaps even our distant hominid ancestors, lived in some kind of
structured family groups, and, later, in bands, tribes, villages, and other
forms. In short they bonded together (as they still do), not only
emotionally and morally, but also structurally in contrived, clearly
definable, and fairly permanent institutions.
Nonhuman animals may form loose communities and even take
collective protective postures to defend their young from predators. But
such communities can hardly be called structured except in a broad,
often ephemeral sense. Humans, by contrast, create highly formal
communities that tend to become increasingly structured over the
course of time. In effect, they form not only communities, but a new
phenomenon called *societies*.
If we fail to distinguish animal communities from human societies,
we risk the danger of ignoring the unique features that distinguish
human social life from animal communities — notably, the ability of
society to *change* for better or worse and the factors that produce these
changes. By reducing a complex society to a mere community, we can
easily ignore how societies differed from each other over the course of
history. We can also fail to understand how they elaborated simple
differences in status into Firmly established hierarchies, or hierarchies,
into economic classes. Indeed, we risk the possibility of totally
misunderstanding the very meaning of terms like “hierarchy” as highly
organized systems of command and obedience — these, as distinguished from personal, individual, and often short-lived differences in
status that may, in all too many cases, involve no acts of compulsion.
We tend, in effect, to confuse the strictly institutional creations of
human will, purpose, conflicting interests, and traditions, with community life in its most Fixed forms, as though we were dealing with
inherent, seemingly unalterable, features of society rather than fabricated structures that can be modified, improved, worsened—or simply
abandoned. The trick of every ruling elite from the beginnings of
history to modern times has been to identify its own socially created
hierarchical systems of domination with community life *as such*, with
the result being that human-made institutions acquire divine or biological sanction.
A given society and its institutions thus tend to become reified into
permanent and unchangeable entities that acquire a mysterious life of
their own apart from nature — namely, the products of a seemingly
fixed “human nature” that is the result of genetic programming at the
very inception of social life. Alternatively, a given society and its
institutions may be dissolved into nature as merely another form of
animal community with its “alpha males,” “guardians,” “leaders,” and
“horde”-like forms of existence. When annoying issues like war and
social conflict are raised, they are ascribed to the activity of “genes”
that presumably give rise to war and even “greed.”
In either case, be it the notion of an abstract society that exists apart
from nature or an equally abstract natural community that is indistinguishable from nature, a dualism appears that sharply separates society
nature. These apparent! y contrasting, but closely related, notions are all
the more seductive because they are so simplistic. Although they are
often presented by their more sophisticated supporters in a fairly
nuanced form, such notions are easily reduced to bumper-sticker
slogans that are frozen into hard, popular dogmas.
The approach to society and nature advanced by social ecology may
seem more intellectually demanding, but it avoids the simplicities of
dualism and the crudities of reductionism. Social ecology tries to show
how nature slowly *phases* into society without ignoring the differences
between society and nature on the one hand, as well as the extent to
which they merge with each other on the other. The everyday socialization of the young by the family is no less rooted in biology than the
everyday care of the old by the medical establishment is rooted in the
hard facts of society. By the same token, we never cease to be mammals
who still have primal natural urges, but we institutionalize these urges
and their satisfaction in a wide variety of social forms. Hence, the social
and the natural continually permeate each other in the most ordinary
activities of daily life without losing their identity in a shared process
of interaction, indeed, of interactivity.
Obvious as this may seem at first in such day-to-day problems as
caretaking, social ecology raises questions that have far-reaching importance for the different ways society and nature have interacted over
time and the problems these interactions have produced. How did a
divisive, indeed, seemingly combative, relationship between humanity
and nature emerge? What were the institutional forms and ideologies
that rendered this conflict possible? Given the growth of human needs
and technology, was such a conflict really unavoidable? And can it be
overcome in a future, ecologically oriented society?
How does a rational, ecologically oriented society fit into the processes of natural evolution? Even more broadly, is there any reason to
believe that the human mind — itself a product of natural evolution as
well as culture — represents a decisive highpoint in natural development, notably, in the long development of subjectivity from the sensitivity and self-maintenance of the simplest life-forms to the
remarkable intellectuality and self-consciousness of the most complex?
In asking these highly provocative questions, I am not trying to
justify a strutting arrogance toward nonhuman life-forms. Clearly, we
must bring humanity’s uniqueness as a species, marked by rich conceptual, social, imaginative, and constructive attributes, into synchronicity
with nature’s fecundity, diversity, and creativity. I have argued that this
synchronicity will not be achieved by opposing nature to society,
nonhuman to human life-forms, natural fecundity to technology, or a
natural subjectivity to the human mind. Indeed, an important result that
emerges from a discussion of the interrelationship of nature to society
is the fact that human intellectuality, although distinct, also has a
far-reaching natural basis. Our brains and nervous systems did not
suddenly spring into existence without a long antecedent natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our
extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels—can be
traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia
of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and
the cerebral cortex of a primate.
Here, too, in the most intimate of our human attributes, we are no
less products of natural evolution than we are of social evolution. As
human beings we incorporate within ourselves aeons of organic differentiation and elaboration. Like all complex life-forms, we are not
only part of natural evolution; we are also its heirs and the products of
natural fecundity.
In trying to show how society slowly grows out of nature, however,
social ecology is also obliged to show how society, too, undergoes
differentiation and elaboration. In doing so, social ecology must examine those junctures in social evolution where splits occurred which
slowly brought society into opposition to the natural world, and explain
how this opposition emerged from its inception in prehistoric times to
our own era. Indeed, if the human species is a life-form that can
consciously and richly enhance the natural world, rather than simply
damage it, it is important for social ecology to reveal the factors that
have rendered many human beings into parasites on the world of life
rather than active partners in organic evolution. This project must be
undertaken not in a haphazard way, but with a serious attempt to render
natural and social development coherent in terms of each other, and
relevant to our times and the construction of an ecological society.
Perhaps one of social ecology’s most important contributions to the
current ecological discussion is the view that the basic problems which
pit society against nature emerge form *within* social development itself
—not *between* society and nature. That is to say, the divisions between
society and nature have their deepest roots in divisions within the social
realm, namely, deep-seated conflicts between human and human that
are often obscured by our broad use of the word “humanity.”
This crucial view cuts across the grain of nearly all current ecological thinking and even social theorizing. One of the most fixed notions
that present-day ecological thinking shares with liberalism, Marxism,
and conservatism is the historic belief that the “domination of nature
requires the domination of human by human. This is most obvious in
social theory. Nearly all of our contemporary social ideologies have
placed the notion of human domination at the centre of their theorizing.
It remains one of the most widely accepted notions, from classical times
to the present, that human freedom from the “domination of man by
nature” entails the domination of human by human as the earliest means
of production and the use of human beings as instruments for harnessing the natural world. Hence, in order to harness the natural world, it
has been argued for ages, it is necessary to harness human beings as
well, in the form of slaves, serfs, and workers.
That this instrumental notion pervades the ideology of nearly all
ruling elites and has provided both liberal and conservative movements
with a justification for their accommodation to the status quo, requires
little, if any, elaboration. The myth of a “stingy” nature has always been
used to justify the “stinginess” of exploiters in their harsh treatment of
the exploited — and it has provided the excuse for the political
opportunism of liberal, as well as conservative, causes. To “work within
the system” has always implied an acceptance of domination as a way
of “organizing” social life and, in the best of cases, a way of freeing
humans from their presumed domination by nature.
What is perhaps less known, however, is that Marx, loo, justified the
emergence of class society and the State as stepping stones toward the
domination of nature and, presumably, the liberation of humanity. It
was on the strength of this historical vision that Marx formulated his
materialist conception of history and his belief in the need for class
society as a stepping stone in the historic road to communism.
Ironically, much that now passes for antihumanistic, mystical ecology involves exactly the same kind of thinking — but in an inverted
form. Like their instrumental opponents, these ecologists, too, assume
that humanity is dominated by nature, be it in the form of “natural laws”
or an ineffable “earth wisdom” that must guide human behaviour. But
while their instrumental opponents argue the need to achieve nature’s
“surrender” to a “conquering” active-aggressive humanity, antihumanist and mystical ecologists argue the case for achieving
humanity’s passive-receptive “surrender” to an “all-conquering” nature. However much the two views may differ in their verbiage and
pieties, *domination* remains the underlying notion of both: a natural
world conceived as a taskmaster — either to be controlled or obeyed.
Social ecology springs this trap dramatically by re-examining the
entire concept of domination, be it in nature and society or in the form
of “natural law” and “social law.” What we normally call domination
in nature is a human projection of highly organized systems of *social*
command and obedience onto highly idiosyncratic, individual, and
asymmetrical forms of often mildly coercive behaviour in animal
communities. Put simply, animals do not “dominate” each other in the
same way that a human elite dominates, and often exploits, an oppressed social group. Nor do they “rule” through institutional forms of
systematic violence as social elites do. Among apes, for example, there
is little or no coercion, but only erratic forms of dominant behaviour.
Gibbons and orangutans are notable for their peaceable behaviour
toward members of their own kind. Gorillas are often equally pacific,
although one can single out “high status,” mature, and physically strong
males among “lower status,” younger and physically weaker ones. The
“alpha males” celebrated among chimpanzees do not occupy very fixed
“status” positions within what are fairly fluid groups. Any status that
they do achieve may be due to very diverse causes.
One can merrily skip from one animal species to another, to be sure,
falling back on very different, asymmetrical reasons for searching out
“high” versus “low status” individuals. The procedure becomes rather
silly, however, when words like “status” are used so flexibly that they
are allowed to include mere differences in group behaviour and functions, rather than coercive actions.
The same is true for the word “hierarchy.” Both in its origins and its
strict meaning, this term is highly social, not zoological. A Greek term,
initially used to denote different levels of deities and, later, of clergy
(characteristically, Hicrapolis was an ancient Phrygian city in Asia
Minor that was a centre for mother goddess worship), the word has been
mindlessly expanded to encompass everything from beehive relationships to the erosive effects of running water in which a stream is seen
to wear down and “dominate” its bedrock. Caring female elephants are
called “matriarchs” and attentive male apes who exhibit a great deal of
courage in defense of their community, while acquiring very few
“privileges,” are often designated as “patriarchs.” The absence of an
organized system of rule — so common in hierarchical human communities and subject to radical institutional changes, including popular
revolutions — is largely ignored.
Again, the different functions that the presumed animal hierarchies
are said to perform, that is, the asymmetrical causes that place one
individual in an “alpha status” and others in a lesser one, is understated
where it is noted at all. One might, with much the same aplomb, place
all tall sequoias in a “superior” status over smaller ones, or, more
annoyingly, regard them as an “elite” in a mixed forest hierarchy over
“submissive” oaks, which, to complicate matters, are more advanced
on the evolutionary’ scale. The tendency to mechanically project social
categories onto the natural world is as preposterous as an attempt to
project biological concepts onto geology. Minerals do not reproduce
the way life-forms do. Stalagmites and stalactites in caves certainly do
increase in size over time. But in no sense do they grow in a manner
that even remotely corresponds to growth in living beings. To take
superficial resemblances, often achieved in alien ways, and group them
into shared identities, is like speaking of the “metabolism” of rocks and
the “morality” of genes.
This raises the issue of repeated attempts to read ethical, as well as
social, traits into a natural world that is only *potentially* ethical insofar
as it forms a basis for an objective social ethics. Yes, coercion does
exist in nature; so does pain and suffering. However, *cruelty* does not.
Animal intention and will are too limited to produce an ethics of good
and evil or kindness and cruelty. Evidence of inferential and conceptual
thought is very limited among animals, except for primates, cetaceans,
elephants, and possibly a few other mammals. Even among the most
intelligent animals, the limits to thought are immense in comparison
with the extraordinary capacities of socialized human beings. Admittedly, we are substantially less than human today in view of our still
unknown potential to be creative, caring, and rational. Our prevailing
society serves to inhibit, rather than realize, our human potential. We
still lack the imagination to know how much our finest human traits
could expand with an ethical, ecological, and rational dispensation of
human affairs.
By contrast, the known nonhuman world seems to have reached
visibly fixed limits in its capacity to survive environmental changes. If
mere *adaptation* to environmental changes is seen as the criterion for
evolutionary success (as many biologists believe), then insects would
have to be placed on a higher plane of development than any mammalian life-form. However, they would be no more capable of making
so lofty an intellectual evaluation of themselves than a queen bee
would be even remotely aware of her “regal” status — a status, I may
add, that only humans (who have suffered the social domination of
stupid, inept, and cruel kings and queens) would be able to impute to a
largely mindless insect.
None of these remarks are meant to metaphysically oppose nature
to society or society to nature. On the contrary, they are meant to argue
that what unites society with nature in a graded evolutionary continuum
is the remarkable extent to which human beings, living in a rational,
ecologically oriented society, could *embody* the *creativity* of nature
this, as distinguished from a purely *adaptive* criterion of evolutionary
success. The great achievements of human thought, art, science, and
technology serve not only to monumentalize culture, *they serve also to monumentalize natural evolution itself*. They provide heroic evidence
that the human species is a warm-blooded, excitingly versatile, and
keenly intelligent life-form not a cold-blooded, genetically
programmed, and mindless insect — that expresses *nature’s* greatest
powers of creativity.
Life-forms that create and consciously alter their environment,
hopefully in ways that make it more rational and ecological, represent
a vast and indefinite extension of nature into fascinating, perhaps
unbounded, lines of evolution which no branch of insects could ever
achieve—notably, the evolution of a fully *self-conscious nature*. If this
be humanism — more precisely, ecological humanism — the current
crop of antihumanists and misanthropes are welcome to make the most
of it.
Nature, in turn, is not a scenic view we admire through a picture
window — a view that is frozen into a landscape or a static panorama.
Such “landscape” images of nature may be spiritually elevating but they
are ecologically deceptive. Fixed in time and place, this imagery makes
it easy for us to forget that nature is not a static vision of the natural
world but the long, indeed cumulative, *history* of natural development.
This history involves the evolution of the inorganic, as well as the
organic, realms of phenomena. Wherever we stand in an open field,
forest, or on a mountain top, our feet rest on ages of development, be
they geological strata, fossils of long-extinct life-forms, the decaying
remains of the newly dead, or the quiet stirring of newly emerging life.
Nature is not a “person,” a “caring Mother,” or, in the crude materialist
language of the last century, “matter and motion.” Nor is it a mere
“process” that involves repetitive cycles like seasonal changes and the
building-up and breaking-down process of metabolic activity — some
“process philosophies” to the contrary notwithstanding. Rather, natural
history is a *cumulative* evolution toward ever more varied, differentiated, and complex forms and relationships.
This *evolutionary* development of increasingly variegated entities,
most notably, of life-forms, is also an evolutionary development which
contains exciting, latent possibilities. With variety, differentiation, and
complexity, nature, in the course of its own unfolding, opens new
directions for still further development along alternative lines of natural
evolution. To the degree that animals become complex, self-aware, and
increasingly intelligent, they begin to make those elementary choices
that influence their own evolution. They are less and less the passive
objects of “natural selection” and more and more the active subjects of
their own development.
A brown hare that mutates into a white one and sees a snow-covered
terrain in which to camouflage itself is *acting* on behalf of its own
survival, not simply “adapting” in order to survive. It is not merely
being “selected” by its environment; it is selecting its own environment
and making a *choice* that expresses a small measure of subjectivity and
judgement.
The greater the variety of habitats that emerge in the evolutionary
process, the more a given life-form, particularly a neurologicatly complex one, is likely to play an active and judgemental role in preserving
itself. To the extent that natural evolution fol lows this path of neurological development, it gives rise to life-forms that exercise an ever-wider
latitude of choice and a nascent form of freedom in developing themselves.
Given this conception of nature as the cumulative history of more
differentiated levels of material organization (especially of life-forms)
and of increasing subjectivity, social ecology establishes a basis for a
meaningful understanding of humanity and society’s place in natural
evolution. Natural history is not a “catch-as-catch-can” phenomenon.
It is marked by tendency, by direction, and, as far as human beings are
concerned, by conscious purpose. Human beings and the social worlds
they create can open a remarkably expansive horizon for development
of the natural world — a horizon marked by consciousness, reflection,
and an unprecedented freedom of choice and capacity for conscious
creativity. The factors that reduce many life-forms to largely adaptive
roles in changing environments are replaced by a capacity for consciously adapting environments to existing and new life-forms.
Adaptation, in effect, increasingly gives way to creativity and the
seemingly ruthless action of “natural law” to greater freedom. What
earlier generations called “blind nature” to denote nature’s lack of any
moral direction, turns into “free nature,” a nature that slowly finds a
voice and the means to relieve the needless tribulations of life for all
species in a highly conscious humanity and an ecological society. The
“Noah Principle” of preserving every existing life-form simply for its
own sake—a principle advanced by the antihumanist, David Ehrenfeld
— has little meaning without the presupposition, at the very least, of
the existence of a “Noah” — that is, a conscious life-form called
humanity that might well rescue life-forms that nature itself would
extinguish in ice ages, land desiccation, or cosmic collisions with
asteroids.[5] Grizzly bears, wolves, pumas, and the like, are not safer
from extinction because they are exclusively in the “caring” hands of
a putative “Mother Nature.” If there is any truth to the theory that the
great Mesozoic reptiles were extinguished by climatic changes that
presumably followed the collision of an asteroid with the earth, the
survival of existing mammals might well be just as precarious in the
face of an equally meaningless natural catastrophe unless there is a
conscious, ecologically oriented life-form that has the technological
means to rescue them.
The issue, then, is not whether social evolution stands opposed to
natural evolution. The issue is *how* social evolution can be situated in
natural evolution and *why* it has been thrown — needlessly, as I will
argue — against natural evolution to the detriment of life as a whole.
The capacity to be rational and free does not assure us that this capacity
will be realized. If social evolution is seen as the potentiality for
expanding die horizon of natural evolution along unprecedented creative lines, and human beings arc seen as the potentiality for nature to
become self-conscious and free, the issue we face is *why* these potentialities have been warped and *how* they can be realized.
It is part of social ecology’s commitment to natural evolution that
these potentialities arc indeed real and that they can be fulfilled. This
commitment stands flatly at odds with a “scenic” image of nature as a
static view to awe mountain men or a romantic view for conjuring up
mystical images of a personified deity that is so much in vogue today.
The splits between natural and social evolution, nonhuman and human
life, an intractable “stingy” nature and a grasping, devouring humanity,
have all been specious and misleading when they are seen as inevitabilities. No less specious and misleading have been reductionist
attempts to absorb social into natural evolution, to collapse culture into
nature in an orgy of irrationalism, theism, and mysticism, to equate the
human with mere animality, or to impose a contrived “natural law” on
an obedient human society.
Whatever has turned human beings into “aliens” in nature are social
changes that have made many human beings “aliens” in their own social
world: the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, and
of men by men. Today, as for many centuries in the past, there are still
oppressive human beings who literally own society and others who are
owned by it Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity
that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own
benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will
have their roots in social problems.
Up to now, I have tried to show that humanity and the human capacity
to think are products of natural evolution, not “aliens” in the natural
world. Indeed, every intuition tells us that human beings and their
consciousness are results of an evolutionary tendency toward increasing differentiation, complexity, and subjectivity. Like most sound
intuitions, this one has its basis in fact: the palaeontological evidence
for this tendency. The simplest unicellular fossils of the distant past and
the most complex mammalian remains of recent times all testify to the
reality of a remarkable biological drama. This drama is the story of a
nature rendered more and more aware of itself, a nature that slowly
acquires new powers of subjectivity, and one that gives rise to a
remarkable primate life-form, called human beings, that have the power
to choose, alter, and reconstruct their environment — and raise the
moral issue of what *ought* to be, not merely live unquestioningly with
what *is*.
Nature, as I have argued, is not a frozen scene that we observe from
a picture window or a mountain top. Defined more broadly and richly
than a slogan on a bumper-sticker, nature *is* the very history of its
evolutionary differentiation. If we think of nature as a development, we
discern the presence of this tendency toward self-consciousness and,
ultimately, toward freedom. Discussions about whether the presence of
this tendency is evidence of a predetermined “goal,” a “guiding hand,”
or a “God” are simply irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. The
fact is that such a tendency can be shown to exist in the fossil record,
in the elaboration of existing life-forms from previous ones, and in the
existence of humanity itself.
Moreover, to ask what humanity’s “place” in nature may be is to
implicitly acknowledge that the human species has evolved as a life-form that is organized to *make* a place for itself in the natural world,
not simply to *adapt* to nature. The human species and its enormous
powers to alter the environment were not invented by a group of
ideologues called “humanists” who decided that nature was “made” to
serve humanity and its needs. Humanity’s powers have emerged out of
aeons of evolutionary development and out of centuries of cultural
development. The question of this species’ “place” in nature is no longer a
zoological problem, a problem of locating humanity in the overall evolution
of life, as it was in Darwin’s time. The problem of the “descent of man,”
to use the title of Darwin’s great work, is as accepted by thinking people today
as are the enormous powers our species possesses.
To ask what humanity’s “place” in nature may be has now become
a moral and social question — and one that no other animal can ask of
itself, as much as many antihumanists would like to dissolve humanity
into a mere species in a “biospheric democracy.” And for humans to
ask what their “place” in nature may be is to ask whether humanity’s
powers will be brought to the *service* of future evolutionary development or whether they will be used to *destroy* the biosphere. The extent
to which humanity’s powers will be brought to or against the service
for future evolutionary development has very much to do with the kind
of society or “second nature” human beings will establish: whether
society will be a domineering, hierarchical, and exploitative one, or
whether it will be a free, egalitarian, and ecologically oriented one. To
sidestep the social basis of our ecological problems, to obscure it with
primitivistic cobwebs spun by self-indulgent mystics and anti-rationalists, is to literally turn back the clock of ecological thinking to
an atavistic level of trite sentiment that can by used for utterly reactionary purposes.
But if society is so basic to an understanding of our ecological
problems, it, too, cannot be viewed as a frozen scenic view that we
observe from the rarefied heights of an academic tower, the balcony of
a governmental building, or the windows of a room for a corporate
board of directors. Society, too, has emerged out of nature, as I have
tried to show in my account of human socialization and the everyday
reproduction of that socializing process up to the present day. To regard
society as “alien” to nature reinforces the dualism between the social
and the natural so prevalent in modern thinking. Indeed, such an
antihumanistic view serves to clear the field for exactly all the anti-ecological forces that pit society against nature and reduce the natural
world to mere natural resources.
By the same token, to dissolve society into nature by rooting social
problems in genetic, instinctive, irrational, and mystical factors is to
clear the field for exactly all those primitivistic
racist, misanthropic, and sexist tendencies, be they among women or
among men.
Far from being a frozen scene, one that makes it easy for reactionary
elements to identify the existing society with society *as such*, — just
as the oppressed and their oppressors are grouped into a single species
called *homo sapiens* and are held equally responsible for our present
ecological crisis — society *is* the history of social development with its
many different social forms and possibilities. Culturally, we are all the
repositories of social history, just as our bodies are the repositories of
natural history. We carry with us, often unconsciously, a vast body of
beliefs, habits, attitudes, and sentiments that foster highly regressive
views toward nature as well as toward each other.
We have fixed images, often inexplicable to ourselves, of a static
“human nature,” as well as a nonhuman nature, that subtly shape a
multitude of our attitudes toward members of the two sexes, the young,
the elderly, family bonds, kinship loyalties, and political authority, not
to mention different ethnic, vocational, and social groups. Archaic
images of hierarchy still shape our views of the most elementary
differences between people and between all living beings. Our mental
arrangement of the most simple differences among phenomena into
hierarchical orders, say, of “one-to-ten “ have been formed by socially
ancestral distinctions that go back to a time that is too remote for us to
remember.
These hierarchical distinctions have been developed over the course
of history, often from harmless differences in mere status, into full-blown hierarchies of harsh command and abject obedience. To know
our present and to shape our future calls for a meaningful and coherent
understanding of the past — a past which always shapes us in varying
degrees, and which profoundly influences our views of humanity and
nature.
To gain a clear understanding of how the past bears upon the present,
I must briefly examine a basic view in social ecology, one that has now
percolated into current environmental thinking. I refer to social
ecology’s insight that all our notions of dominating nature stem from
the very real domination of human by human. This statement, with its
use of the word “stem,” must be examined in terms of its intent Not
only is it a historical statement of the human condition, but it is also a
challenge to our contemporary condition which has far-reaching implications for social change. As a historical statement it declares, in no
uncertain terms, that the domination of human by human *preceded* the
notion of dominating nature. Indeed, human domination of human gave
rise to the very *idea* of dominating nature.
In emphasizing that human domination precedes the notion of
dominating nature, I have carefully avoided the use of a slippery verb
that is very much in use today: namely, that the domination of nature
“involves” the domination of human by human. I find the use of this
verb particularly repellent because it confuses the order in which
domination emerged in the world and, hence, the extent to which it must
be eliminated if we are to achieve a free society. Men did not think of
dominating nature until they had already begun to dominate the young,
women, and, eventually, each other. And it is not until we eliminate
domination in all its forms, as we shall see, that we will really create a
rational, ecological society.
However much the writings of liberals and Marx convey the belief
that attempts to dominate nature “led” to the domination of human by
human, no such “project” ever existed in the annals of what we call
“history.” At no time in the history of humanity did the oppressed of
any period joyfully accede to their oppression in a starry-eyed belief
that their misery would ultimately confer a state of blissful freedom
from the “domination of nature” to their descendants in some future
era.
To take issue, as social ecology does, with words like “involve” or
“led” is not a form of medieval casuistry. On the contrary, the way these
words are used raises issues of radical differences in the interpretation
of history and the problems that lie before us.
Domination of human by human did not arise because people
created a socially oppressive “mechanism” — be it Marx’s class
structures or Lewis Mumford’s human-constructed “mega-machine”
in order to “free” themselves from the “domination by nature.” It is
exactly this very queasy idea that gave rise to the myth that the
domination of nature “requires,” “presupposes,” or “involves” the
domination of human by human.
Implied in this basically reactionary myth is the notion that forms
of domination, like classes and the State, have their sources in economic
conditions and needs; indeed, that freedom can only be attained after
the “domination of nature” has been achieved, with the resulting
establishment of a classless society. Hierarchy somehow seems to
disappear here in a shuffle of vague ideas or it is subsumed under the
goal of abolishing classes, as though a classless society were necessarily one that is free of hierarchy. If we are to accept Engel’s view, and to
some degree Marx’s, in fact, hierarchy in some form is “unavoidable”
in an industrial society and even under communism. There is a surprising agreement between liberals, conservatives, and many socialists, as
I have already noted, that hierarchy is unavoidable for the very existence of social life, and is an infrastructure for its organization and stability.
In contending that the notion of dominating nature *stems* from the
domination of human by human, social ecology radically reverses the
equation of human oppression and broadens its scope enormously. It
tries to search into institutionalized systems of coercion, command, and
obedience that preceded the emergence of economic classes, and that
are not necessarily economically motivated at all. The “social question”
of inequality and oppression that has plagued us for centuries is thereby
extended by social ecology well beyond economic forms of exploitation into cultural forms of domination that exist in the family, between
generations and sexes, among ethnic groups, in institutions of political,
economic, and social management, and very significantly, in the way
we experience reality as a whole, including nature and nonhuman
life-forms.
In short, social ecology raises the issue of command and obedience
in personal, social, historical, and reconstructive terms on a scale that
encompasses, but goes far beyond, the more restricted economic interpretations of the “social question” that are prevalent today. Social
ecology extends, as we shall see, the “social question” beyond the
limited realm of justice into the unbounded realm of freedom; beyond
a domineering rationality, science, and technology into libertarian
ones; and beyond visions of social reform into those of radical social
reconstruction.
We, of this era, are still victims of our own recent history. Modern
capitalism, the most unique, as well as the most pernicious, social order
to emerge in the course of human history, identifies human progress
with bitter competition and rivalry; social status with the rapacious and
limitless accumulation of wealth; the most personal values with greed
and selfishness; the production of commodities, of goods explicitly
made for sale and profit, as the motive force of nearly every economic
and artistic endeavour; and profit and enrichment as the reason for the
existence of social life.
No society known to history has made these factors so central to its
existence or, worse, identified them with “human nature” as such.
Every vice that, in earlier times, was seen as the apotheosis of evil has
been turned into a “virtue” by capitalist society.
So deeply ingrained are these bourgeois attributes of our everyday
lives and ways of thinking that we find it difficult to understand how
much precapitalist societies held to the very opposite images of human
values, however much they may have been honoured in the breach. It
is hard for the modern mind to appreciate that precapitalist societies
identified social excellence with cooperation rather than competition
disaccumulation rather than accumulation; public service rather that
private interest; the giving of gifts rather than the sale of commodities,
and care and mutual aid rather than profit and rivalry.
These values were identified with an uncorrupted human nature. Ii
many respects, they are still a part of a caring socialization process it
our own lives that tends to foster interdependence, not an aggressive
self-serving “independence” we call “rugged individualism.” To understand from whence we came socially and how we came to be where
we are, it is necessary to peel away our present system of values and
examine, however summarily, a body of ideas that provide a clearer
picture of a more organic, indeed, an ecological society that emerged
from the natural world.
This organic, basically preliterate or “tribal,” society was strikingly
nondomineering — not only in its institutionalized structure but in its
very language. If the linguistic analyses of anthropologists like the late
Dorothy Lee are sound, Indian communities like the Wintu of the
Pacific Coast lacked transitive verbs like “to have,” “to take,” and “to
own” which denote power over individuals and objects. Rather, a
mother “went” with her child into the shade, a chief “stood” with his
people, and, more commonly, people “lived with” objects rather than
“possessed” them.
However much these communities may have differed from each
other in many social respects, we hear in their language, and detect in
their behavioural traits, attitudes that go back to a shared body of
beliefs, values, and basic lifeways. As Paul Radin, one of Americas
most gifted anthropologists, observed, there was a basic sense of
respect between individuals and a concern over their material needs
that Radin called the principle of the “irreducible minimum.” Everyone
was entitled to the means of life, irrespective of his or her productive
contribution. The right to live went unquestioned so that concepts like
“equality” had no meaning if only because the “inequalities” that afflict
us all — from the burdens of age to the incapacities of ill-health — had
to be compensated for by the community.
Early notions of formal “equality,” in which we are all “equally”
free to starve or die of neglect, had yet to replace the *substantive*
equality in which those less able to be fully productive were nevertheless reasonably well provided for. Equality thus existed, as Dorothy Lee
tells us, “in the very nature of things, as a by-product of the democratic
structure of the culture itself, not as a principle to be supplied”[6] There
was no need in these organic societies to “achieve” equality, for what
existed was an absolute respect for man, for all individuals apart from
any personal traits.
This broad appraisal by Lee was to be echoed by Radin, who for
decades had lived among the Winnebago Indians and enjoyed their full
confidence:
If I were asked to state briefly and succinctly what are the
outstanding features of aboriginal civilization, I, for one,
would have no hesitation in answering that there are three: the
respect for the individual, irrespective of age or sex; the
amazing degree of social and political integration achieved by
them; and the existence of a personal security which
transcends all governmental forms and all tribal and group
interests and conflicts. [7]
The respect for the individual, which Radin lists first as an aboriginal
attribute, deserves to be emphasized, today, in an era that rejects the
collective as destructive of individuality on the one hand, and, yet, in
an orgy of pure egotism, has actually destroyed all the ego boundaries
of free-floating, isolated, and atomized individuals on the other hand.
A strong collectivity may be even more supportive of the individual,
as close studies of certain aboriginal societies reveal, than a “free
market” society with emphasis on an egoistic, but impoverished, self.
No less striking than the substantive equality achieved by many
organic societies was the extent to which their sense of communal
harmony was also projected onto the natural world as a whole. In the
absence of any hierarchical social structures, the aboriginal vision of
nature was also strikingly nonhierarchical. Accounts of many
aboriginal ceremonies among hunting and horticultural communities
leave us with the strong impression that the participant saw themselves
as part of a larger world of life. Dances seemed to resemble simulations
of nature, particularly animals, rather than human attempts to coerce
nature, be it game or forces like rainfall.
Magic, which the last century called the “primitive man’s science,”
apparently had a twofold aspect to it. One of these aspects seems to
have been recognizably “coercive” in the sense that a given ritual was
expected to necessarily produce a given effect. This kind of magic,
presumably, had its own form of hard “causality,” not unlike what we
would expect to find in chemistry.
However, as I have suggested elsewhere, there were rituals —
especially group rituals — that may have preceded in time the more
familiar, cause-effect magical activities; rituals that were not coercive,
but rather *persuasive*. Wildlife was seen in a complementary relationship of “give-and-take” in which game gave of itself to the hunter as a
participant in the broad orbit of life — an orbit based on propitiation,
respect, and mutual need. Humanity was no less a part than animals in
this complementary orbit in which human and nonhuman were seen to
give of themselves to each other according to mutual need rather than
“trade-offs.” [8]
This high sense of complementarity in rituals apparently reflected
an active sense of social equality that viewed personal differences as
parts of a larger natural whole rather than a pyramid-structured hierarchy of being. The attempt of organic society to place human beings in
the same community on a par with each other, to see in each an
interactive partner with others, yielded a highly egalitarian notion of
difference as such.
Which is not to say that aboriginal people regarded themselves as
“equal” to nonhuman creatures. In fact, they were acutely aware of the
inequalities that existed in nature and society, inequalities created by
differences in physical prowess, age, intelligence, genetic attributes,
infirmities, and the like. Tribal peoples tried to compensate for these
inequalities within their own groups, hence the emergence of an “irreducible minimum,” as Radin called it, that gave every member of the
community access to the means of life, irrespective of his or her abilities
or contribution to the common fund. Often, special “privileges were
allowed to individuals who were burdened by infirmities to equalize
their situations with respect to more endowed members of the community.
But in no sense did aboriginal people equate themselves with
animals. They did not act or think “biocentrically,” “eco-centrically”
(to use words that have recently come into vogue), or, for that matter,
“anthropocentrically” in dealing with nonhuman life-forms. It would
be more accurate to say that they had no sense of “centricity” as such,
except toward their own communities. The belief held by a tribe that it
was “The People,” as distinguished from outsiders or other communities, was a parochial weakness of tribal societies as a whole and
generally made for fear of strangers, wars, and a self-enclosed mentality
that the emergence of cities began to overcome. Indeed, until territorial
ways of living that appear with cities began to replace loyalties based
on blood ties, the notion of a common humanity was vague indeed, and
tribalism remained very restrictive in its view of outsiders and
strangers.
In this inner world of substantive equality, land and those “resources” our present society denotes as “property ” were available to
everyone in the community for use, at least to the extent that they were
needed. But in principle, such “resources” could not be “possessed” in
any personal sense, much less “owned” as property. Thus, in addition
to the principles of the “irreducible minimum,” substantive equality,
the arts of persuasion, and a conception of differentiation as complementarity, organic preliterate societies seem to have been guided by
a commitment to *usufruct*. Things were available to individuals and
families of a community because they were needed, not because they
were owned or created by the labour of a possessor.
The substantive equality of organic preliterate communities was not
only the product of institutional structures and ancestral custom. It
entered into the very sensibility of the individual: the way he or she
perceived differences, other human beings, nonhuman life, material
objects, land and forests, indeed, the natural world as a whole. Nature
and society, which are so sharply divided against each other in our
society and or sensibilities, were thereby slowly graded into each other
as a shared continuum of interaction and everyday experience.
Needless to say, neither humanity “mastered” nature nor did nature
“master” humanity. Quite to the contrary: nature was seen as a fecund
source of life, well-being, indeed, a providential parent of humanity,
not a “stingy” or “withholding” taskmaster that had to be coerced into
yielding the means of life and its hidden “secrets” to a Faustian man.
An image of nature as “stingy” would have produced “stingy” communities and self-seeking human participants.
This nature was anything but the relatively lifeless phenomenon it
has become in our era — the object of laboratory research and the
“matter” of technical manipulation. It consisted of wildlife that, in the
aboriginal mind, was structured along kinship lines like human clans;
forests, that were seen as a caring haven; and cosmic forces, like winds,
torrential rainfall, a blazing sun, and a benign moon. Nature literally
permeated the community not only as a providential environment, but
as the blood flow of the kinship tie that united human to human and
generation to generation.
The loyalty of kin to each other in the form of the blood oath — an
oath that combined an expression of duty to one’s relatives with
vengeance for their offenders — became the organic source of communal continuity. Fictitious as this source would eventually become,
especially in more recent times when the word “kin” has become a
tenuous surrogate for authentic kinship ties, there is little reason to
doubt its viability as a means for establishing one’s place in early human
communities. It was one’s affiliations by blood, be it because of a
shared ancestry or shared offspring, that determined whether an individual was an accepted part of a group, who he or she could marry,
the responsibility he or she had to others, as well as the responsibility
he or she had to him or her — indeed, the whole array of rights and
duties that a community’s members had in relation to each other.
It was on the basis of this biological fact of blood ties that nature
penetrated the most basic institutions of preliterate society. The continuity of the blood tie was literally a means of *defining* social association and even self-identity. Whether one belonged to a given group or
not, and who one was, in relation to others, was determined, at least
juridically, by one’s blood affiliations.
But still another biological fact defined one as a member of a
community: whether one was a male or female. Unlike the kinship tie,
which was to be slowly thinned out as distinctly nonbiological institutions like the State were gradually to encroach on the claims of
genealogy and paternity, the sexual structuring of society has remained
with us to this day, however much it has been modified by social
development.
Lastly, a third biological fact defined one as a member of a group,
namely, one’s age. As we shall see, the earliest truly social examples
of status based on biological differences were essentially the age-groups to which one belonged and the ceremonies that legitimated
one’s age-status. Kinship established the basic fact that one shared a
common ancestry with members of a given community. It defined one’s
rights and responsibilities to others of the same bloodline—rights and
responsibilities that might involve who one could marry of a particular
genealogical group, who was to be aided and supported in the normal
demands of life, and who one could turn to for aid in difficulties of any
kind. The bloodline literally gave definition to an individual and a
group, much as skin forms the boundary that distinguishes one person
from another.
Sexual differences, also biological in origin, defined the kind of
work one did in the community and the role of a parent in rearing the
young. Women essentially gathered and prepared food; men hunted
animals and assumed a protective role for the community as a whole.
These basically different tasks also gave rise to sororal and fraternal
cultures in which women developed associations, whether informal or
structured, and engaged in ceremonies and revered deities that were
dissimilar from those of men, who had a culture very much of their
own.
But none of these gender differences—not to mention genealogical
ones — initially conferred a commanding position on one member of
a sexual group or an obedient one on another. Women exercised full
control over the domestic world: the home, family hearth, and the
preparation of the most immediate means of life such as skins and food.
Often, a woman built her own shelter and tended to her own garden as
society advanced toward a horticultural economy.
Men, in turn, dealt with what we might call “civil” affairs — the
administration of the nascent, barely developed “political” affairs of
the Community such as relations between bands, clans, tribes, and
intercommunal hostilities. Later, as we shall see, these “civil” affairs
became highly elaborate as population movements brought communities into conflict with each other. Warrior fraternities began to
emerge within early societies that ultimately specialized in hunting men
as well as animals.
What is reasonably clear is that in early phases of social development, woman’s and man’s cultures complemented each other and
conjointly fostered social stability as well as provided the means of life
for the community as a whole. The two cultures were not in conflict
with each other. Indeed, it is doubtful that an early human community
could have survived if gender-oriented cultures initially tried to exercise any commanding position, much less an antagonistic one, over the
other. The stability of the community required a respectful balance
between potentially hostile elements if the community was to survive
in a fairly precarious environment.
Today, it is largely because “civil” or, if you like, “political” affairs
are so important in our own society that we read back into the preliterate
world a “commanding” role among men in their monopoly of “civil”
affairs. We easily forget that early human communities were really
domestic societies, structured mainly around the work of women, and
were often strongly oriented in reality, as well as mythology, toward
woman’s world.
Age groups, however, have more ambiguous social implications.
Physically, the old people of a community were the most infirm,
dependent, and often the most vulnerable members of the group in
periods of difficulty. It was they who were expected to give up their
lives in times of want that threatened the existence of a community.
Hence, they were its most insecure members — psychologically as well
as physically.
At the same time, the old people of a community were the living
repositories of its lore, traditions, knowledge, and collective experience. In a world that had no written language, they were the
custodians of its identity and history. In the tension between extreme
personal vulnerability on the one hand and the embodiment of the
community’s traditions on the other hand, they may have been more
disposed to enhance their status, to surround it with a quasi-religious
aura and a social power, as it were, that rendered them more secure with
the loss of their physical power.
The logical beginnings of hierarchy, as well as a good deal of
anthropological data at our disposal, suggest that hierarchy stems from
the ascendancy of the elders, who seem to have initiated the earliest
institutionalized systems of command and obedience. This system of
rule by the elders, benign as it may have been initially, has been
designated as a “gerontocracy” and it often included old women as well
as old men. We detect evidence of its basic, probably primary, role in
virtually all existing societies up to recent times—be it as councils of
elders that were adapted to clan, tribal, urban and state forms, or, for
that matter, in such striking cultural features as ancestor-worship and
an etiquette of deference to older people in many different kinds of
societies.
The rise of growing male power in society did not necessarily
remove old women from high-status positions in this earliest of all
hierarchies. Biblical figures like Sara had a distinctly authoritative and
commanding voice in public as well as domestic affairs, even in the
patriarchal and polygamous family of Hebrew bedouins. In reality, Sara
is not an atypical figure in explicitly patriarchal families; indeed, in
many traditional societies, once a woman aged beyond the child-bearing years of her life, she often acquired the status of what has been
called a “matriarch” who enjoyed enormous influence within the community at large, at times even exceeding that of older males.
But even an early gerontocracy has a somewhat egalitarian dimension. If one lives long enough, one may eventually become an “elder”
in an honorific sense, or, for that matter, a domineering “patriarch” and
even a “matriarch.” Hierarchy in this early form seems to be less
structurally rigid because of a kind of biological “upward mobility.” Its
existence is still consistent with the egalitarian spirit of early communal
societies.
The situation changes, however, when the biological facts that
initially underpin early communal life become increasingly social —
that is to say, when society comes increasingly into its own and
transforms the form and content of relationships within and between
social groups. It is important to emphasize that the biological facts that
enter into the blood relationship, gender differences, and age-groups
do not simply disappear once society begins to acquire its own self-generative forces of development. Nature is deeply interwoven with
many of these social changes. But the natural dimension of society is
modified, complicated, and altered by the socialization of the biological
facts that exist in social life at all times.
Consider one of the major shifts in early societies that was to
profoundly influence social evolution: the growing authority of men
over women. By no means is it clear that the hierarchical supremacy of
males was the first or necessarily the most inflexible system of hierarchy to corrode the egalitarian structures of early human society. Gerontocracy probably preceded “patricentricity,” the orientation of society
toward male values, or (in its most exaggerated form) “patriarchal”
hierarchies. Indeed, what often passes for Biblical types of patriarchy
are patricentric modifications of gerontocracy in which *all* younger
members of the family — male as well as female — are under the
complete rule of the oldest male and often his oldest female consort,
the so-called matriarch.
That males are born into a special status in relationship to females
becomes an obvious social fact. But it also rests on biological facts that
are reworked for distinct social ends. Males are physically larger, more muscular, and normally possessed of great hemoglobin, within the same ethnic group, than females. I am obliged to add that they produce
significantly greater quantities of testosterone than females — an
androgen that not only stimulates the synthesis of protein and produces
a greater musculature, but also fosters behavioural traits that we associate with a high degree of physical dynamism. To deny these
evolutionary adaptations, which provide males with greater athleticism
in the hunting of game and, later, of people, by invoking individual
exceptions to these male traits is to simply overlook important biological facts.
None of these factors and traits need yield the subordination of
females to males. Nor is it likely that they did so. Certainly, male
domination served no function when woman’s role was so central to
the stability of the early human community. Attempts to institutionalize
the subordination of women, given their own rich cultural domain and
their decisive role in maintaining the community, would have been
utterly destructive to intragroup harmony. Indeed, the very idea of
domination, not to mention hierarchy, had yet to emerge in early human
communities that were socialized into the values of the irreducible
minimum, complementarity, substantive equality, and usufruct. These
values were not simply a moral credo; they were part of an all-encompassing sensibility that embraced the nonhuman as well as the
human world.
Yet we know that men began to dominate women and began to give
primacy to their “civil” over woman’s “domestic” culture. That this
occurred in a very shadowy and uncertain fashion is a problem that has
not received the careful attention it deserves. The two cultures—male
and female — retained a considerable distance from each other well
into history, even as the male seemed to move to the social forefront in
nearly every field of endeavour. There is a sense in which male “civil”
affairs simply upstaged female “domestic” affairs without fully supplanting them. We have many ceremonies in tribal societies in which
women seem to bestow powers on men that the men do not really have,
such as ceremonial re-enactments of the ability to give birth.
But as “civil” society became more problematic because of invaders,
intercommunal strife, and finally, systematic warfare, the male world
became more assertive and agonistic — traits that are likely to make
male anthropologists give the “civil” sphere greater prominence in their
literature, especially if they have no meaningful contact with the
women of a preliterate community. That women often mocked male
bellicosity and lived full lives of their own in very close personal
relationships, seems to wane to the footnote level in most accounts by
male anthropologists. The “men’s hut” stood actively opposed to the
woman’s home, where the everyday domain of child-rearing, food
preparation, and an intensely familial social life remained almost
unnoticed by male anthropologists, although it was psychologically
pivotal to the sullen men of a community. Indeed, sororal life retained
an amazing vitality and exuberance long after the emergence of urban
societies. Women’s talk, however, was deprecated as “gossip” and their
work was called “menial” even in Euro-American societies.
Ironically, the degradation of women, itself always variable and
often inconsistent, appears when males form hierarchies among themselves, as Janet Biehl has so ably shown in her splendid work on
hierarchy. [9] With increasing intercommunal conflicts, systematic warfare, and institutionalized violence, “civil” problems became chronic.
They demanded greater resources, the mobilization of men, and they
placed demands on woman’s domain for material resources.
Out of the skin of the most able hunter emerged a new kind of
creature: the “big man,” who was also a “great warrior.” Slowly, every
domain of preliterate society was reoriented toward maintaining his
heightened “civil” functions. The blood oath, based on kinship loyalties, was gradually replaced by oaths of fealty by his soldierly “companions” who were drawn from clans other than his own, indeed, from
solitary strangers, thereby cutting across traditional bloodlines and their
sanctity. “Lesser men” appeared who were obliged to craft his weapons,
provide for his sustenance, build and adorn his dwellings, and finally,
erect his fortifications and monumentalize his achievements with impressive palaces and burial sites.
Even woman’s world, with its secretive underpinnings, was
reshaped, to a lesser or greater degree, in order to support him with
young soldiers or able serfs, clothing to adorn him, concubines to
indulge his pleasures, and, with the growth of female aristocracies,
heroes and heirs to bear his name into the future. All the servile plaudits
to his great stature, that are commonly seen as signs of feminine
weakness, emerged, throwing into sharp contrast and prominence a
cultural ensemble based on masculine strength.
Servility to male chiefs, warriors, and kings was not simply a
condition imposed by warriors on women. Side by side with the servile
woman is the unchanging image of the servile man, whose back
provides a footrest for arrogant monarchs and demeaning capitalists.
The humiliation of man by man began early on in the “men’s hut,” when
cowering boys lived on a diet of mockery for their inexperience at the
hands of adult males; and “small men” lived on a diet of disdain for
their limited accomplishments by comparison with those of “big men.”
Hierarchy, which first rears its head tentatively with gerontocracies,
did not suddenly explode into prehistory. It expanded its place slowly,
cautiously, and often unnoticeably, by an almost metabolic form of
growth when “big men” began to dominate “small men,” when warriors
and their “companions” began to gradually dominate their followers,
when chiefs began to dominate the community, and finally, when
nobles began to dominate peasants and serfs.
By the same token, the “civil” sphere of the male began to slowly
encroach upon the “domestic” sphere of the female. By degrees, it
placed the female world increasingly in the service of the male, without
destroying it. The sororal world, far from disappearing, took on a
hidden form, indeed, a confidential form, that women shared with each
other behind the backs of men, as they confronted new “civil” relationships created by males.
Hence, in gender relationships as well as in intramale relationships,
there was no sudden leap from the sexual egalitarianism of early
preliterate societies to male “priority.” Indeed, it would be quite impossible, as Biehl has pointed out, to divorce the domination of woman by
man from the domination of man by man. The two always interacted
dialectically to reinforce each other with attitudes of command and
obedience that gradually permeated society as a whole, even producing
hierarchies of a more unstable nature among women. At the bottom of
every social ladder always stood the resident outsider — male or female
— and the assortment of war captives who, with economic changes,
became a very sizeable population of slaves.
The transition from a largely “domestic” to a largely “civil” society
was also conditioned by many less noticeable, but very important,
factors. Long before domination became rigorously institutionalized,
gerontocracy had already created a state of mind that was structured
around the power of elders to command and the obligation of the young
to obey. This state of mind went far beyond the indispensable care and
attention required for the instruction of children and youths in the arts
of survival. In many preliterate communities, elders acquired major
decision-making powers that dealt with marriage, group ceremonies,
decisions about war, and intracommunal squabbles between persons
and clans. This state of mind, or, if you like, conditioning, was a
troubling presence that presaged even greater troubles as hierarchy
generally extended itself over society.
But hierarchy even in early societies was still further reinforced by
shamans and, later, by shamanistic guilds that gained prestige and
privileges by virtue of their very uncertain monopoly over magical
practices. Be they “primitive man’s science” or not, the arts of the
shaman were naive at best and fraudulent at worst — and more often
the latter than the former, present-day culls, covens, and pop-literature
on the subject to the contrary notwithstanding. Repeated failures by
shamans in their use of magical techniques could be fatal, not only to
a troubled community or a sick person. Their failure could be dangerous
to the shaman as well, who might just as well be speared as exiled in
disgrace.
Hence, as Paul Radin notes in his excellent discussion of West
African shamans, shamanisdc guilds always sought influential allies
who could buffer them from popular anger and incredulity. Such allies
were often elders who felt insecure as a result of their own failing
powers or rising chiefs who were in need of ideological legitimation
from the spirit world. [10]
Still another refinement of hierarchy was the transition from the “big
man’s” status — whose prestige depended as much on his distribution
of gifts as it did upon his prowess as a hunter — to the status of a
hereditary chief. Here, we witness the remarkable transmutation of a
“big man,” who must actively earn public admiration with impressive
actions of all kinds, into a wise chiefly advisor, who commands respect
without any prerogative of power, and finally, into a quasi-monarchical
figure who evokes fear, be it because of his considerable entourage of
armed “companions,” his status as a demi-god with supernatural
powers of his own, or both.
This graded development of a “big man” into an outright autocrat
was leavened by basic alterations in the kinship bond and its importance. The kinship bond is surprisingly egalitarian when it is not twisted
out of shape. It evokes a simple sense of loyalty, responsibility, mutual
respect, and mutual aid. It rests on the *moral* strength of a shared sense
of ancestry, on the belief that we are all “brothers” and “sisters,”
however fictitious these ancestral ties may become in reality — not on
the basis of material interest, power, fear, or coercion.
The “big man,” chief, and finally, the autocrat undermines this
essentially egalitarian bond. He may do so by asserting the supremacy
of his own kin group over other ones, in which case an entire clan may
acquire a royal or dynastic status in relations to other clans in the
community. Or he may bypass his own kinspeople entirely and adopt
“companions,” be they warriors, retainers, and the like, who are drawn
into his fold exclusively on the basis of their own prowess and fealty
without any regard to blood affiliations.
This is a highly corrosive process. A new kind of “person” is created
again: a person who is neither a member of the “big man’s” kin group
or. for that matter, a member of the community. Like the mercenaries
of the Renaissance or even classical antiquity, he is a “companion,”
with other companions like himself, who collects into a military “company” that has no social loyalties or traditions.
Such “companies” can easily be set against the community or reared
above it into a coercive monarchy and aristocracy. Gilgamesh in the
famous Sumerian epic adopted Enkidu, a total stranger, as his “companion,” thereby challenging the integrity of the entire kinship system
as a form of social cement and undermining its complex network of
commitments that were so essential to the egalitarian values of
preliterate society.
What I would like to emphasize is how much hierarchical differentiation simply reworked existing relationships in early society into a
system of status long before the strictly economic relationship we call
“classes” emerged Age status merged with changes in gender status;
“domestic” society was placed in the service of “civil” society;
shamanistic guilds networked with gerontocracies and warrior groups;
and warrior groups reworked kinship ties, ultimately reducing tribal
blood communities to territorial communities based on residence rather
than blood ties and composed of peasants, serfs, and slaves.
Our present era is the heir to this vast reworking of differentiation
of humanity — not only along class lines but, much earlier in time, into
hierarchies in which class systems were incubated. These hierarchies
still form the fertile ground in our own time for the existence of hidden
oppressions by age groups, of women by men, and of men by men —
indeed, a vast landscape of domination that also gives rise in great part
to largely exploitative economic systems based on classes.
Only later was this immense system of social domination extended
into the notion of dominating nature by “humanity.” No ecological
society, however communal or benign in its ideals, can ever remove
the “goal” of dominating the natural world until it has radically
eliminated the domination of human by human, or, in essence, the entire
hierarchical structure within society in which the very notion of
domination rests. Such an ecological society must reach into the overlaid muck of hierarchy—a muck that oozes out from fissures in family
relationships that exist between generations and genders, churches and
schools, friendships and lovers, exploiters and exploited, and hierarchical sensibilities toward the entire world of life.
To recover and go beyond the nonhierarchical world that once
formed human society and its values of the irreducible minimum,
complementarity, and usufruct, is an agenda that belongs to the closing
portions of this book. It suffices, here, to bear in mind that social
ecology has made the understanding of hierarchy — its rise, scope, and
impact — the centrepiece of its message of a liberating, rational, and
ecological society. Any agenda that contains less than these imperatives
is obscure at best and grossly misleading at worst.
At the risk of repetition, let me emphasize that the word hierarchy
should be viewed strictly as a *social* term. To extend this term to cover
all forms of coercion is to permanently root consciously organized and
institutionalized systems of command and obedience in nature and give
it an aura of eternality that is comparable only to the genetic programming of a “social” insect. We have more to learn from the fate of our
own royal figures in human history that from the behaviour of “queen
bees” in beehives.
Figures like Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia, for
example, did not become autocrats because they had genetically
programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen minds.
They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously
stupid men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who
lived in times of revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was
virtually absolute until it was curtailed by revolution.
What gave them the enormous power they enjoyed? Their power
can only be explained by the rise of humanly contrived and supportive
institutions like bureaucracies, armies, police, legal codes and
judiciaries that consciously favoured absolutism, and a far-flung, and
largely servile. Church that itself was structured along highly hierarchical lines— in short, a vast, deeply entrenched institutional apparatus
that had been in the making for centuries and was overthrown in
revolutionary upheavals in a matter of weeks. Apart from genetically
programmed insects, we have absolutely no equivalent of such hierarchies in the nonhuman world. Remove the word “hierarchy” from its
social context in human life and we create the utmost confusion in
trying to understand its origins in our midst and the means for removing
it — a social capacity, I may add, that we alone, as human beings,
possess.
By the same token, the word “domination” should be viewed strictly
as a *social* term if we are not to lose sight of its various institutionalized
forms — forms that are unique to human beings. Animals certainly do
coerce each other, usually as individuals, occasionally even as small
“gangs” that presumably demand access to seeming “privileges,” (a
word which can also be stretched beyond all recognition if we examine
“privilege” comparatively, as it exists from one species to another.)
But not only is this “domineering” behaviour associated with one or
a few individual animals; it is highly tentative, often episodic, informal,
and among apes in particular, highly diffuse. The “privileges” our
closest animal relatives claim are very different from one species to
another, even one group to another. Lasting institutions like armies,
police, and even criminal groups, do not exist in the animal world.
Where they seem to exist, as among “soldiers” in insects like ants, they
are examples of genetically programmed behaviour, not socially contrived institutions open to radical change by rebellion.
It is tempting to ask *why* such coercive social institutions, indeed,
status systems and hierarchies, arose among human beings in the first
place, not only *how* they arose. In other words, what were the *causes*
that gave rise to institutionalized dominance and submission apart from
descriptions of their emergence and development?
Status, as I have already pointed out, appeared between age-groups,
albeit in an initially benign form. Hence, a psycho-social setting of
deference to the elderly was already present in early society even before
older generations began to claim very real privileges from younger
ones. I’ve cited the infirmities and insecurities aging produces in the
elderly and their capacity to bring their greater experience and
knowledge to the service of their increasing status.
Their gerontocracies present no real mystery as a source of status-**consciousness**. That age-hierarchies would appear is often merely a
matter of time: the socialization process with its need for careful
instruction, growing knowledge, and an increasing reservoir of experience virtually guarantees that elders would earn a justifiable degree
of respect and, in precarious situations, seek a certain amount of power.
The most challenging form of social status, however, is probably the
power that “big men” I gained and concentrated, initially in their own
persons, later in their increasingly institutionalized “companies” Here,
we encounter a very subtle and complex dialectic. “Big men” were
notable, as we have seen, for their generosity, not only for their prowess.
Their ceremonial distribution of gifts to people — a system for the
redistribution of wealth that acquired highly neurotic traits in the
potlatch ceremonies of the Northwest Indians, where bitter contests
between “big men” led to an orgiastic “disaccumulation” of everything
they owned in order to “accumulate” prestige within the community —
may have had very benign origins. To be generous and giving was a
social etiquette that promoted the unity, and contributed to the very
survival, of the early human community.
Given time and the likely susceptibility of men to seek communal
approval, a susceptibility that was rooted in their sense of “manliness”
and the community’s respect for their physical prowess, it is likely that
“bigness” meant little more than generosity and a high regard for skill
and courage. These would have been attributes that *any* preliterate
community would have prized in a male, just as women had many
different skills that were deeply valued. This kind of “bigness,” as
potlatch ceremonies suggest, could have easily become reified as an
end in itself. Or, as in certain communities like the Hopi, by contrast,
it could be seen as socially disruptive because of its strident individuality, and thus, it was sharply curtailed. Accordingly, when
Euro-American “educators” of the Hopi tried to teach Hopi children to
play competitive sports, they had immense difficulties in getting the
children to keep scores. Hopi custom discouraged rivalry and selfassertiveness as harmful to community solidarity.
Everywhere along the way, in effect, conflicting alternatives confronted each community as potential hierarchies began to appear, first,
as gerontocracies, later, as individual “big men” and warrior groups.
Such potential hierarchies could have been developed very much on
their own momentum, initially with very little divisive effects on the
community, or they could have been sharply curtailed even after they
began to appear. There is evidence to show that such opposing tendencies appeared in many different preliterate communities, either advancing into full-blown hierarchies or being arrested at various levels of development, when they were not simply pushed back to a more
egalitarian condition.
In fact, custom, socialization, and basic precepts like the irreducible
minimum, complementarity, and usufruct, might very well have tended
to favour the *curtailment* of hierarchy rather than its cultivation. This
is evident in the large number of human communities that existed well
into Euro-American history with little or no hierarchical institutions.
Only a surprisingly small part of humanity developed societies that
were structured overwhelmingly around hierarchies, classes, and the
State. Perhaps a majority avoided in varying degrees this dark path of
social development or, at least, entered onto it to a limited extent.
But one fact should be clearly noted: a community that does develop
along hierarchical, class, and statist lines has a profound impact upon
all the communities around it that continue to follow an egalitarian
direction. A warrior community led by an aggressive chiefdom compels
highly pacific neighbouring communities to create their own military
formations and chiefs if they are to survive. An entire region may thus
be drastically changed —culturally, morally, and institutionally —
merely as a result of aggressive hierarchies in a single community.
We can trace this clearly by studying one community’s grave sites
in the Andes which was initially free of weapons and distinctive
status-oriented ornaments, only to find that these sites began to exhibit
warrior and prestige artifacts at a later level of development. Actually,
this change could be attributed to the emergence of a neighbouring
community that had embarked upon an aggressive, warrior-oriented
social development earlier in time, thereby profoundly affecting the
internal life of more peaceful communities which surrounded it. So it
may have been in many parts of the world, each one in isolation from
the others.
No less striking is the evidence we find of changes in American
Indian societies from highly centralized, war-like, and quasi-statist
“empires” to decentralized, fairly pacific, and relatively nonhierarchical communities. In their centralistic and militaristic phases, these
“empires” apparently became so top-heavy, exploitative, and exhausting to the communities they controlled that they either collapsed under
their own weight or were simply overthrown by local rebellions. The
Indian mound-builders of the American midwest or the Mayans of
Mexico may very well have embarked on a vigorous militaristic expansion, only to disappear when they could no longer sustain themselves
or retain the obedience of subject populations. This historic see-saw of
communal institutions between centralization and decentralization,
warrior and peaceful communities, expansive and contractive societies,
all appeared in the West as well until the rise of the nation-state in
Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In so far as women were reduced to the spectators of the intracommunity changes that gave rise to hierarchy, they were not significant
participants in its development. Victimized as they were, they shared
with the lower strata of male hierarchies an oppression and degradation
that all ruling elites inflicted on their underlings. Men not only
degraded, oppressed, and often used women as objects; they also
oppressed and killed other men in an orgy of slaughtering and cruelty.
The early kingdoms of the Near East were reluctant to keep male
prisoners of war because they were regarded as potentially too rebellious, so they were normally put to death rather than enslaved. When
male slaves began to appear in large numbers, they were often exploited
ruthlessly and were treated, especially in mines and large-scale agriculture, with appalling ruthlessness, Male physical strength became a
liability, not an asset, when it was used for exploitative purposes.
The causes of hierarchy, then, are not a mystery. They are quite
comprehensible when we dig into their roots in the more mundane
aspects of daily life such as the family, the rearing of young people, the
segmentation of society in to age-groups, the expectations that are
placed on the individual as a male or female in the everyday domestic
or “civil” worlds, and in the most personal aspects of acculturation as
well as community ceremonies. And hierarchy will not disappear until
we change these roots of daily life radically, not only economically,
with the removal of class society.
Not only did hierarchies precede classes, but, as Biehl has shown,
male domination over other males generally preceded the domination
of women. Women became the degraded bystanders of a male-oriented
civilization that reared itself up beside woman’s own culture, corroded
it, and established systematic ways of manipulating it When men tried
to absorb woman’s culture, they warped it and subordinated it — but
they succeeded in only a limited degree. Sororal relationships, affections, and lifeways continued behind the backs of men and often outside
the range of their vision in the secret alcoves of history, as it were.
Men, in turn, were often the objects of ridicule to women, even in
cultures that were overbearingly patriarchal. Nor did women always
aspire to participate in a “civil” society that was even more brutal to
men than to domestic animals. Let us not forget that it was not oxen
that dragged huge blocks of stone up the ramparts of the great pyramids
of ancient Egypt, but usually male serfs and slaves, who were regarded
as more expendable than cattle.
The institutionalized apex of male civilization was the State. Here,
again, we find a tricky dialectic which, if we ignore its subtleties, can
lead us into very simplistic discussions of state formation in which state
institutions suddenly erupt into history, fully grown and overtly coercive. Indeed, such eruptions of states, from seemingly “democratic” to
highly “authoritarian” institutions, are more of a modern than a
premodern phenomenon, notably the sudden substitution of republican
by totalitarian states. Except in periods of invasions, when alien aristocracies were rapidly imposed on relatively egalitarian communities,
rapid changes in state institutions were a comparative rarity. Unless we
consider how the State began to emerge, how far it developed, and how
stable it was, we encounter many difficulties even in defining the State,
much less in exploring the forms it took in different societies.
Minimally, the State is a professional system of social coercion —
not merely a system of social administration as it is still naively
regarded by the public and by many political theorists. The word
“professional” should be emphasized as much as the word “coercion.”
Coercion exists in nature, in personal relationships, in stateless, non-hierarchical communities. If coercion alone were used to define a State,
we would despairingly have to reduce it to a natural phenomenon —
which it surely is not It is only when coercion is *institutionalized* into
a professional, systematic, and organized form of social control — that
is, when people are plucked out of their everyday lives in a community
and expected not only to “administer” it but to do so with the backing
of a monopoly of violence — that we can properly speak of a State.
There may be varying approximations of a State, notably incipient,
quasi, or partial states. Indeed, to ignore these gradations of coercion,
professionalization, and institutionalization toward fully developed
states is to overlook the fact that statehood, as we know it today, is the
product of a long and complex development. Quasi, semi, and even
fully developed States have often been very unstable and have often
haemorrhaged power over years that resulted in what essentially became stateless societies. Hence, we have the swings, historically, from
highly centralized empires to feudal manorial societies and even fairly
democratic “city-states,” often with swings back again to empires and
nation-states, be they autocratic or republican in form. The simplistic
notions that states merely come into existence like a new-born baby,
omit the all-important gestation process of state development and have
resulted in a great deal of political confusion to this very day. We still
live with confused notions of statecraft, politics, and society, each of
which is deeply in need of careful distinction from the other.
Each State is not necessarily an institutionalized system of violence
in the interests of a specific ruling class, as Marxism would have us
believe. There are many examples of States that *were* the “ruling class”
and whose own interests existed quite apart from—even in antagonism
to _ privileged, presumably “ruling” classes in a given society. The
ancient world bears witness to distinctly capitalistic classes, often
highly privileged and exploitative, that were bilked by the State,
circumscribed by it and ultimately devoured by it — which is in part
why a capitalist society never emerged out of the ancient world. Nor
did the Stale “represent” other class interests, such as landed nobles,
merchants, craftsmen, and the like. The Ptolemaic State in Hellenistic
Egypt was an interest in its own right and “represented” no other interest
than its own. The same is true of the Aztec and the Inca States until they
were replaced by Spanish invaders. Under the Emperor Domitian, the
Roman State became the principal “interest” in the empire, superseding
the interests of even the landed aristocracy which held such primacy in
Mediterranean society.
I shall have a good deal to say about the State when I distinguish
statecraft from politics and the authentically political from the social.
For the present, we must glance at state-**like** formations that eventually
produced different kinds of States.
A chieftainship, surrounded by a “company” of supportive warriors
such as the Aztec State, is still an incipient type of state formation. The
seemingly absolute monarch was selected from a royal clan by a council
of clan elders, was carefully tested for his qualifications, and could be
removed if he proved to be inadequate to meet his responsibilities. Like
the highly militaristic Spartan State, chieftains or kings were still
circumscribed by tribal traditions that had been reworked to produce
the centralization of power.
Near-Eastern States, like the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian,
were virtually extended households of individual monarchs. They
formed a remarkable amalgam of a “domestic” society with a territorial
one: an “empire” was seen primarily as the land attached to the king’s
palace, not a strictly territorial administrative unit. Pharaohs, kings, and
emperors nominally held the land (often co-jointly with the priesthood)
in the trust of the deities, who were either embodied in the monarch or
were represented by him. The empires of Asian and North African kings
were “households” and the population was seen as “servants of the
palace ” not as citizens in any Western sense of the term.
These “states,” in effect, were not simply engines of exploitation or
control in the interests of a privileged “class.” They were resplendent
households with vast bureaucracies and aristocratic entourages
were self-serving and self-perpetuating slates. Administration was
as the task of maintaining a very costly household with monuments to
its power that taxed and virtually undermined tire entire economy. In
Egypt’s Old Kingdom, possibly as much effort went into building
pyramids, temples, palaces, and manors as was devoted to the maintenance of the Nile valley’s all-important irrigation system. The Egyptian State was very real but it “represented” nothing other than itself.
Conceived as a “household” and a sacred terrain in which the Pharaoh
embodied a deity, the State was almost congruent with society itself. It
was, in effect, a huge *social* State in which the differentiation of politics
out of society was really minimal. The State did not exist above society
or apart from it; the two were essentially one — an extended social
household, not an assortment of independent coercive institutions.
The Greek *polis* of the classical era does not offer us any more a
complete picture of the State than we encounter in the Near East. Athens
may be regarded as the apogee of class *politics* as distinguished from
the private world of the household based on family life, work,
friendships, and material needs which we can properly call *social*, or
the administration of armies, bureaucrats, judicial systems, police, and
the like, which we can properly call *statecraft*. Placed within the context
of this threefold distinction — social, political, and statist — the
Athenian *polis* is very difficult to define. The State, more properly the
<em>quasi</em>-state created by the Athenians in the Periklean Age, possessed
highly tribalistic attributes that directly involved the participation of a
sizeable male citizenry in seemingly statist activities. These Athenians
had invented *politics* — the direct administration of public affairs by a
community as a whole.
Admittedly, this political community or “public domain,” as it has
been called, existed within a wider domain of disenfranchised alien
residents, women of all classes, and slaves. These large disenfranchised
populations provided the material means for many Athenian male
citizens to convene in popular assemblies, function as mass juries in
trials, and collectively administer the affairs of the community. Politics
here, had begun to differentiate itself from the social domain of the
family and work.
But was this *polis* really a State? That the Athenians of the classical
era used coercion against slaves, women, aliens, and rival *poleis* is
clearly evident Within the eastern Mediterranean, Athenian influence
became increasingly imperial as the city forced other *poleis* to join the
Athenian-controlled Delian League and taxed them, using these funds
to maintain the Athenian citizenry and aggrandize the *polis*. Women,
of upper and well-to-do strata, were often confined to their homes and
obliged to maintain a domestic establishment for their husbands’ public
life.
It does not absolve the limitations of the Athenian democracy to say
that women were degraded throughout much of the Mediterranean
world, perhaps even more so in Athens than other regions. Nor does it
absolve it to say that Athenians were generally less severe in their
treatment of slaves than Romans. But, by the same token, we cannot
ignore the fact that classical Athens was historically unique, indeed
unprecedented, in much of human history, because of the democratic
forms it created, the extent to which they worked, and its faith in the
competence of its citizens to manage public affairs. These institutions
were forms of a direct democracy, as we shall see, and reflected a public
aversion to bureaucracy that made them structurally the most
democratic in the career of human political life. The Athenian State, in
effect, was not a fully developed phenomenon.
Indeed, I cannot stress too strongly that Athens, like so many
“city-states,” would have normally developed toward an oligarchy if
we explore the way in which so many autonomous cities eventually
became increasingly authoritarian and internally stratified. This was
the case with Rome, the late medieval Italian city-states, the German
city federations, and New England townships of America. One can go
on endlessly and cite decentralized, seemingly free and independent
cities that eventually turned from fairly democratic communities into
aristocracies.
What is remarkable about Athens is that the apparently “normal”
trend toward oligarchy was consciously reversed by the radical changes
introduced by Solon, Kleisthenes, and Perikles in the *polis’s* entire
institutional structure. Aristocratic institutions were steadily weakened
and consciously abolished or reduced to mere ceremonial bodies, while
democratic ones were granted increasing power and eventually
embraced the entire male citizenry, irrespective of properly ownership
and wealth. The army was turned into a militia of foot-soldiers whose
power began to exceed, by far, that of the aristocratic cavalry. Thus all
the negative features of the Athenian democracy, so common to the
Mediterranean and the era as a whole, must be seen in the context of a
revolutionary reversal of the normal trend toward oligarchy in most
city-states.
It is easy to deprecate this democracy because it rested on a large
slave population and degraded the status of women. But to do this with
lofty arrogance from a distance of more than two thousand years, with
a hindsight that is enriched by endless social debate, is to lift oneself
up by one’s bootstraps from the rich wealth of historical facts. Indeed,
it is to ignore those rare moments of democratic creativity that appeared
in the West and have nourished rich utopian and libertarian traditions.
Indeed, we do not encounter the State as a fully professional and
distinctive apparatus rooted in class interest until we see the emergence
of modern nations in Europe. The nation-state, as we know it today,
finally divests politics of all its seemingly traditional features: direct
democracy, citizen participation in the affairs of governmental life, and
a sensitive responsiveness to the communal welfare. The word
“democracy” itself undergoes degradation. It becomes “representative”
rather than face-to-face; highly centralized rather than freely confederal
between relatively independent communities, and divested of its
grassroots institutions.
Educated, knowledgeable citizens become reduced to mere taxpayers who exchange money for “services,” and education surrenders
its civic orientation to a curriculum designed to train the young for
financially rewarding skills. We have yet to see how far this appalling
trend will go in a world that is being taken over by mechanical robots,
computers that can so easily be used for surveillance, and genetic
engineers who have very limited moral scruples.
Hence, it is of enormous importance that we know how we arrived
at a condition where our preening “control” of nature has actually
rendered us more servile to domineering society than at any time in the
past By the same token, it is immensely important to know precisely
those human achievements in history, however faulty, that reveal how
freedom can be institutionalized — and, hopefully, expanded beyond
any horizon we can find in the past.
There is no way that we can return to the naive egalitarianism of the
preliterate world or to the democratic *polis* of classical antiquity;
should we want to do so. Atavism, primitivism, and attempts to
ture a distant world with drums, rattles, contrived rituals, and — whose repetition and fantasies bring a supernatural presence into our
midst — however much this may be denied or affirmed as innocent or
“immanent” — deflect us from the need for rational discussion, a
searching investigation of community, and a searing critique of the
present social system. Ecology is based on the wondrous qualities,
fecundity, and creativity of natural evolution, all of which warrant our
deepest emotional, aesthetic, and, yes, intellectual appreciation not
on anthropomorphically projected deities, be they “immanent” or
“transcendental.” Nothing is gained by going beyond a naturalistic,
truly ecological, framework and indulging mystical fantasies that are
regressive psychologically and atavistic historically.
Nor will ecological creativity be served by dropping on all fours and
baying at the moon like coyotes or wolves. Human beings, no less a
product of natural evolution than other mammals, have definitively
entered the social world. By their very own biologically rooted mental
power, they are literally *constituted* by evolution to intervene into the
biosphere. Tainted as the biosphere may be by present social conditions, their presence in the world of life marks a crucial change in
evolution’s direction from one that is largely adaptive to one that is, at
least, potentially creative and moral. In great part, their human nature
is formed socially — by prolonged dependence, social interdependence, increasing rationality, and the use of technical devices and their
willful application. All of these human attributes are mutually biological and social, the latter forming one of natural evolution’s greatest
achievements.
Hierarchies, classes, and states warp the creative powers of
humanity. They decide whether humanity’s ecological creativity will
be placed in the service of life or in the service of power and privilege.
Whether humanity will be irrevocably separated from die world of life
by hierarchical society, or brought together with life by an ecological
society depends on our understanding of the origins, development, and,
above all, the scope of hierarchy — the extent to which it penetrates
our daily lives, divides us into age group against age group, gender
against gender, man against man, and yields the absorption of the social
and political into the all-pervasive State. The conflicts within a divided
humanity, structured around domination, inevitably lead to conflicts
with nature. The ecological crisis with its embattled division between
humanity and nature stems, above all, from divisions between human
and human.
Our times exploit these divisions in a very cunning way: they *mystify*
them. Divisions are seen not as social but personal. Real conflicts
between people are mollified, even concealed, by appeals to a social
“harmony” that has no reality in society. Like the atavistic ritual with
its barely concealed appeal to the spirit world and its theistic
“spiritualism,” the encounter group has become a privatized arena for
learning how to “conciliate” — this, while storms of conflict rage
around us and threaten to annihilate us. That this use of “encounter”
groups and theistic “spirituality” to mollify and despiritualize has come
so much into vogue from its breeding ground in the American sunbelt
is no accident It occurs when a veritable campaign, under the name of
“post-modernism” is going on to discard the past, to dilute our
knowledge of history, to mystify the origins of our problems, to foster
dememorization and the loss of our most enlightened ideals.
Hence, never before has it been more necessary to recover the past,
to deepen our knowledge of history, to demystify the origins of our
problems, to regain our memory of forms of freedom and advances that
were made in liberating humanity of its superstitions, irrationalities,
and, above all, a loss of faith in humanity’s potentialities. If we are to
re-enter the continuum of natural evolution and play a creative role in
it, we must re-enter the continuum of social evolution and play a
creative role there as well.
There will be no “re-enchantment” of nature or of the world until
we achieve a “re-enchantment” of humanity and the potentialities of
human reason.
I have tried to show how far we must go and how deeply we must enter
into the most everyday aspects of our lives in order to root out the notion
of dominating nature.
In so doing, I have tried to emphasize the extent to which the
domination of human by human precedes the notion of dominating
nature, indeed, even precedes the emergence of classes and the State. I
have asked — and tried to answer — how hierarchies emerged, why
they emerged, and the way they became increasingly differentiated into
initially temporary and, later, firmly based status groups, and, finally,
classes and the State.
My purpose has been to let these trends unfold from their own inner
logic and examine all their nuanced forms along the way. The reader
has been persistently reminded that humanity and its social origins are
no less a product of natural evolution than other mammals and their
communities; indeed, that human beings can express a conscious
creativity in nature’s evolutionary development and can enlarge it —
not arrest or reverse it.
Whether humanity will play such a role, I have contended, depends
upon the kind of society that emerges and the sensibility society fosters.
It is now important to examine those turning points in history which
could have led people to either achieve a rational, ecological society,
or an irrational, anti-ecological one.
Perhaps the earliest change in social development that veered
society in a direction that became seriously harmful, both to humanity
and the natural world, was the hierarchical growth of male’s civil
domain — namely, the rise of male gerontocracies, warrior groups,
aristocratic elites, and the State. To reduce these highly complex
developments to “patriarchy,” as many writers are prone to do, is as
naive as it is simplistic. “Men” — a generic word that is as vague as
the word “humanity” and ignores the oppression of men by men as well
as of women by men — did not simply “take over” society. Nor did the
male’s civil society simply subvert woman’s domestic world through
invasions by patriarchal Indo-European and Semitic pastoralists, important as these invasions may have been in the subjugation of many
early horticultural societies. The emphasis of certain eco-feminists,
mystics, and Christian or pagan acolytes on this “take-over” and
“invasions” theory simply creates another unresolved mystery: how did
dramatic changes, like the emergence of patriarchy, occur in the pastoral societies that did the invading? We have evidence that the rise of
the male civil domain with its concern for intertribal affairs and warfare
gained ascendancy slowly and that some pastoral communities were
oriented toward women in such strategic areas as descent and the
inheritance of property, however much these communities were led by
bellicose warriors.
In many cases, the male’s civil domain developed slowly and
probably gained importance with increases in neighbouring populations. Men were, in fact, needed to protect the community as a whole
— including its women — from other marauding men. Warfare may
have even emerged or developed among seemingly “pacific” and
matricentric horticultural communities which tried to expel more pristine hunting, and gathering peoples from woodlands that later were
turned into farm lands. Let us be quite frank about this: matricentric or
pacific as early farming communities may have been, they probably
were very warlike in the eyes of the hunters they managed to displace — that is, those hunting peoples and cultures that were by no means predisposed to abandon their free-ranging ways and take up food
cultivation. The statements of the great Indian orators, the words of
Wovoka, the Paiute Indian messiah of the late nineteenth-century Ghost
Dance, on plow agriculture, are still evocative of this mentality: “Shall
I plunge a blade into the breast of my mother, the Earth?”
But there can be little doubt that the slow shift from rule by the
elderly, later the oldest male or patriarch, the change from the influence
of animistic shamans to deity worshipping priesthoods, and the rise of
warrior groups that finally culminated in supreme monarchs all
formed a major turning point in history toward domination, classes, and
the emergence of the State. There is the possibility that matricentric
communities of villagers might have shaped a pathway of an entirely
different character for humanity as a whole. Based on gardening, simple
tools, usufruct, the irreducible minimum, complementarity, and so-called feminine values of care and nurture (which, in any case, have
been with us in the socialization of their children up to recent times),
society might have taken a relatively benign turn in history. The
concern that mothers normally share with their young might have been
generalized into a concern that people could have shared with each
other. Technical development based on limited wants could have
continued very slowly into increasingly more sophisticated social
forms and cultural life could have been elaborated with considerable
sensitivity.
Whether unavoidable or not, the fact remains that this fork in the
road of early history was to be marked by a turn to patriarchal, priestly,
monarchical, and statist lines, not along matricentric and nonhierarchical lines. Warrior values of combat, class domination, and state rule
were to form the basic infrastructure of all “civilized development
no less in Asia than in Europe and no less in large areas of the New
World, like Mexico and the Andes, than in the Old World.
The wistful attempts by many people in the ecology and feminist
movements to return, in one way or another, to a presumably untroubled
Neolithic village world are understandable in the face of
“civilization’s” more nightmarish results. But their imagery of this
distant world and their growing hatred of civilization *as such* leaves
room for considerable doubt.
Certainly, it is not likely that pristine hunting and gathering communities had more love for equally pristine gardening societies than a
Wovoka, whether or not they shared a belief in the same Mother
Goddess. Nor is it likely that, with growing population, gardening
societies could have retained the tender sentiments celebrated by the
more atavistic feminists of our day. Patricentric pastoralists and sea
invaders may have telescoped a development that might have been
more benign, to be sure, but it would have been one that was difficult
to avoid. If “civilization” was conceived in “original sin ” it was
probably a “sin” or evil that pitted food cultivators against hunters (both
of whom may have been matricentric and animistic) and, much later,
pastoralists against food cultivators.
In any case, there was a great deal in tribal and village society — be
it composed of hunters or food cultivators — that needed remedying.
First of all, tribal and village societies are notoriously parochial, A
shared descent, be it fictional or real, leads to an exclusion of the
stranger — except, perhaps, when canons of hospitality are invoked.
Although the rules of exogamy and the imperatives of trade tend to
foster alliances between the “insider” and “outsider” of a tribal and
village community, an “outsider” can be killed summarily by an
“insider.” Rules of retribution for theft, assault, and murder apply
exclusively to the “insider” and his or her relatives, not to any authority
that exists apart from the common descent group.
Tribal and village societies, in effect, are very closed societies —
closed to outsiders unless they are needed for their skills, to repopulate
the community after costly wars and lethal epidemics, or as a result of
marriage. And they are closed societies not only to outsiders, but often
to cultural and technological innovations. While many cultural traits
may spread slowly from one tribal and village community to another,
such communities tend to be highly conservative in their view of basic
innovations. For better or worse, traditional lifeways tend to become
deeply entrenched with the passing of time. Unless they are developed
locally, new technologies tend to be resisted — for understandable
reasons, to be sure, if one bears in mind the socially disruptive effects
they may have on time-honoured customs and institutions. But the
harsh fact is that this conservatism makes a tribal and village community highly vulnerable to control, indeed, to eradication by other
communities that have more effective technological devices.
A second troubling feature of tribal and village societies is their
cultural limitations. These are not societies that are likely to develop
complex systems of writing, hence the terms “nonliterate and
“preliterate” that are used by many anthropologists to designate them.
Today, when irrationalism, mysticism, and primitivism have become
rather fashionable among affluent middle-class people (ironically,
through written works), the inability of nonliterate people to maintain
a recorded history and culture, or to communicate through pictographs,
is regarded as a pristine blessing. That the absence of alphabetic
writing, in fact, not only severely limited the scope of the cultural
landscape of early times but even fostered hierarchy, is easily overlooked. Knowledge of lore, ancestral ties, rituals, and survival techniques became the special preserve of the elderly who, through
experience, rote learning, or both, were strategically positioned to
manipulate younger people.
Gerontocracy, in my view the earliest form of hierarchy, became
possible because young people had to consult their elders for
knowledge. No scrolls or books were available to replace the wisdom
inscribed on the brains of older people. Elders used their monopoly
of knowledge with telling effect to establish the earliest form of
rule in prehistory. Patriarchy itself owes a good deal of power to the
knowledge which the eldest male of a clan commanded by virtue of the
experience conferred upon him by age. Writing could easily have
democratized social experience and culture — a fact shrewdly known
to ruling elites and especially to priesthoods, who retained stringent
control over literacy and confined a knowledge of writing to clerks
or clerics.
A large literature has emerged, today, that mystifies primitivism. It
is important to remind thinking people that humanity was not born into
a Hobbesian world of a war of “all against all”; that the two sexes were
once complementary to each other culturally as well as economically;
that disaccumulation, gift-giving, the irreducible’minimum, and substantive equality formed the basic norms of early organic societies; that
humanity lived in a harmonious relationship with nature because it
lived in a condition of internal social harmony within the same community. However, we cannot ignore that this innocent world, vulnerable to internal tendencies toward hierarchy as well as invaders who
placed them in subjugation to warrior elites, had major flaws that kept
humans from the full realization of their potentialities.
The idea of a shared *humanitas*, that could bring people of ethnically, even tribally, diverse backgrounds together in the common project
of building a fully cooperative society for all to enjoy, did not exist.
Tribal confederations certainly formed over time, often to mitigate
bloody intertribal warfare and for expansionist purposes to displace
“other” people of their land. The Iroquois Confederacy is perhaps one
of the most celebrated examples of intertribal cooperation based on
strong democratic traditions. But it was a Confederacy that was entirely
focused on its own interests, for all its merits. Indeed, it earned the bitter
hatred of the other Indian peoples like the Hurons and the Illinois,
whose lands it invaded and whose communities it ravaged.
After the shift from a matricentric to a patricentric warrior pathway
of development, the next major turning point we encounter historically
is the emergence and development of the city. The city was to form an
entirely new social arena — a *territorial* arena in which one’s place of
residence and economic interests steadily replaced one’s ancestral
affinities based on blood ties.
The radical nature of this shift and its impact on history are difficult
to appreciate today. Urbanity is so much a part of modern social life
that it is simply taken for granted. Moreover, so much emphasis has
been placed on the extent to which the city accelerated cultural development (writing, art, religion, philosophy, and science) and the impetus
it gave to economic development (technology, classes, and the division
of labour between crafts and agriculture) that we often fail to stress the
new kinds of *human* association urbanity produced.
Perhaps for the first time, so far as we can judge, human beings were
able to interact with each other with relatively little regard for their
ancestral and blood ties. The notion that people were basically alike,
irrespective of their tribal and village ancestry, began to gain ascendancy over their ethnic differences. The city increasingly replaced the
group, by the *social* fact of residence and economic interests. People
were not simply *born* into a distinct social condition; in varying degrees
they could begin to *choose* and *change* their social condition. Social
institutions and the development of a purely human ecumene came to
the foreground of society and gradually edged the folk community into
the background of social life. Kinship retreated more and more into the
private realm of family affairs, and fading clan-type relations began to
shrink into the narrower extended family of immediate relatives rather
than a far-flung system of clan “cousins.”
What is vastly important about the new social dispensation created
by the city was the fact that the stranger or “outsider” could now find
a secure place in a large community of human beings. Initially, this new
place did not confer equality on the “outsider.” Despite its avowed
openness to resident aliens, Periklean Athens, for example, rarely gave
them citizenship and the right to plead their court cases, except through
the voices of Athenian citizens. But early cities did provide strangers
with increased protection from abuse by the “insider.” In many cases
of newly emerging cities, a compromise was struck between tribal
values based on blood ties and social values based on the realities of
residence in which the “outsider” acquired basic rights that tribal
society rarely conferred, while restricting citizenship to the “insider”
and giving him a wider latitude of civil rights.
Even more than hospitality, then, the city offered the “outsider” *de facto* or *de jure* justice — but it did so in the form of protection provided
by a monarch and, in later years, by written law codes. Minimally, both
the “outsider” and the “insider” were now seen as human beings with
a shared body of rights, not simply as mutually exclusive in their
humanity and needs. With the rise and development of the city, the
germinal idea that *all* people were in a certain sense *one* people, came
to fruition and achieved a new historic universality.
I do not wish to suggest that this enormous step in developing the
idea of a common *humanitas* occurred overnight or that it was not
accompanied by some very questionable changes in the human condition, as we shall see shortly. Perhaps the most liberal cities like the
Greek *poleis*, particularly democratic Athens, ceased to confer citizenship on resident aliens, as I have noted, in Perikles’s time. Solon, a
century or so earlier, had indeed freely and openly granted citizenship
to all foreigners who brought skills needed by Athens from abroad.
Perikles, the most democratic of the Athenian leaders, regrettably
abandoned Solon’s liberality and made citizenship a privilege for men
of proven Athenian ancestry.
Tribalistic beliefs and institutions also permeated early cities. They
lingered on in the form of highly archaic religious views: the deification
of ancestors, followed by tribal chiefs who eventually become divine
monarchs; patriarchal authority in domestic life; and feudal aristocracies that were inherited from village societies of the late Neolithic
and Bronze Ages. On the other hand, in Athens and Rome, the tribal
and village assembly form of decision-making was not only retained
but revitalized and, in Athens at least, given supreme authority during
the Periklean era.
The city existed in tension with these beliefs and institutions. It
continually tried to rework traditional religions into civic ones that
fostered loyalty to the city. The power of the nobility was steadily
eroded and that of the patriarch to command the lives of his sons was
repeatedly challenged in order to bring young men into the service
civic institutions, such as the bureaucracy and the army.
This tension never completely disappeared. Indeed, it formed
on-going drama of civic politics for nearly three thousand years and
surfaced in such violent conflicts as the attempts by medieval towns to
subdue overbearing territorial nobles and bishops. Cities sought
bring rationality, a measure of impartial justice, a cosmopolitan culture
and greater individuality to a world that was permeated by mysticism
arbitrary power, parochialism, and the subordination of the individual
to the command of aristocratic and religious elites.
Legally, at least, the city did not attain civic maturity until the
Emperor Caracalla in the third century CE proclaimed all free men in
the Roman Empire citizens of Rome. Caracalla’s motives may be justly
regarded with suspicion: he was patently interested in expanding the
empire’s tax base to meet rising imperial costs. But even as a legal
gesture, this act created a worldly sense that all human beings, even
slaves, belonged to the same species — that men and women were one,
irrespective of their ethnic background, wealth, occupations, or station
in life. The notion of a vast human ecumene had received legitimation
on a scale that was unknown in the past, except in philosophy and
certain religions — Judaism, no less than Christianity.
Caracalla’s edict, to be sure, did not dissolve the parochial barriers
that still divided differing ethnic groups, towns, and villages. Inland,
near the frontiers of the Empire and beyond, these differences were as
strong as they had been for millennia. But the edict, later reinforced by
Christianity’s vision of a unified world under the rule of a single
creator-deity and a commitment to individual free will, set a new
standard for human affinity that could only have emerged with the city
and its increasingly cosmopolitan, rationalistic, and individualistic
values. It is not accidental that Augustine’s most famous tract in defense
of Christianity was called the *City of God* and that the Christian fathers
were to look as longingly toward the city of Jerusalem as did the Jews.
The sweeping social dispensation initiated by the city was not
achieved without the loss of many profoundly important attributes of
tribal and early village life. The communal ownership of land and of
so-called natural resources gave way to private ownership. Classes,
those categories based on the ownership and management of these
“resources,” crystallized out of more traditional status hierarchies into
economic ones, so that slaves stood opposed to masters, plebians to
patricians, serfs to lords, and, later, proletarians to capitalists.
Nor did earlier and more basic hierarchies structured around status
groups like gerontocracies, patriarchies, chiefdoms, and, in time,
bureaucracies, disappear. As largely status groups, they formed the
hidden bases for more visible and stormy class relationships. Indeed,
status groups were simply taken for granted as a “natural” state of
affairs so that the young, women, the sons, and the common masses of
people began to enter unthinkingly into complicity with their own
elites. Hierarchy, in effect, became embedded in the human unconscious
while classes, whose legitimacy was more easy to challenge because
of the visibility of exploitation, came to the
foreground of an embattled and bitterly divided humanity.
Viewed from its negative side, then, the city consolidated
privatization of property in one form or another: class structures,
quasi-statist or fully developed statist institutions. A tension between
advances achieved by the emergence of the city and the loss of certain
archaic but deeply cherished values, including usufruct, complementarity, and the principle of the irreducible minimum, raised a puzzling
issue in human development that could properly be called the “social
question.” This phrase, once so popular among radical theorists,
referred to the fact that “civilization,” despite its many far-reaching
advances, has never been fully rational and free of exploitation. To use
this phrase more expansively, here, and with a more ethical meaning,
one might say that all of humanity’s extraordinary gains under
“civilization” have always been tainted by the “evil” of hierarchy.
Evil was not a word that Marx was wont to use when he tried to turn
the critique of capitalism into an “objective” science, freed of all moral
connotations. But it is to Michael Bakunin’s credit that “evil” was
indeed a condition to be reckoned with in his thinking and he quite
properly tried to show that many social changes, however “necessary”
or unavoidable they seemed in their own time, turned into an “evil” in
the overall drama of history. In his *Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism*, Bakunin observes: “And I do not hesitate to say that the
State is an evil but is a historically necessary evil, as necessary in the
past as its complete extinction will be necessary sooner or later, just as
necessary as primitive bestiality and theological divagations were
necessary to the past.”
Putting Bakunin’s reference to a “primitive bestiality” aside as a
prejudice that was understandable more than a century ago, his recognition that humanity developed as much through the medium of “evil”
as it did through the medium of “virtue,” touches upon the subtle
dialectic of “civilization” itself. Biblical precept did not curse humanity
in vain; there is an ancient recognition that certain evils could not easily
be avoided in humanity’s ascent out of animality. Human beings were
no more aware that they were creating hierarchy when they invested
authority in the elders than they were aware that they were creating
hierarchy when they invested authority in priesthoods. The ability to
reason out certain premises to their conclusion does not come too easily
in what is, after all, a largely unconscious primate whose capacity to
be rational is more of a potentiality than an actuality. In this respect,
preliterate people were no better equipped to deal with the development
of their social reality than those who have been tainted by the worst
aspects of “civilization.” The “social question” for us, today, exists
precisely in the fact that we raised ourselves into the light of freedom
with half-open eyes, burdened by dark atavisms, ancient hierarchies,
and deeply ingrained prejudices to which we may still regress, if the
present counter-Enlightenment of mysticism and antirationalism persists, and that may yet lead us to our ruin. We hold a proverbial knife
in our hands that easily could be used to cut both ways — for our
emancipation or our ruination.
“Civilization” has sharpened that knife into a razor’s edge, but it has
not provided us with a better guide to how we will use so dangerous an
instrument beyond the power conferred upon us by consciousness
itself.
A third turning point we encounter historically
is the emergence of the nation-state and capitalism
The two — the nation-state and capitalism — do not
necessarily go together. But capitalism succeeds so rapidly with the
rise of the nation-state that they are often seen as co-jointly developing phenomena.
In point of fact, nation-building goes back as far as the twelfth
century when Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France tried
to centralize monarchical power and acquire territories that were to
eventually form their respective nations. The nation was to slowly eat
away at all local power, ultimately pacifying parochial rivalries among
baronies and towns. The imperial patrimonies of the ancient world had
created immense states, but they were not lasting ones. Patched together
from completely different ethnic groups, these empires lived in strange
balance with archaic village communities that had hardly changed,
culturally and technologically, since Neolithic times.
The main function of this village society was to supply monarchs
with tribute and with corvee labour. Otherwise, they were usually left
alone. Hence, local life was subterranean, but intense. A great deal of
common land existed around these villages which were open to use by
all. There is evidence that even “private” land was regularly
redistributed to families according to their changing needs. Interference
from the top down was often minimal. The greatest dangers to this
stable village society came from invading armies and warring nobles.
Otherwise they were usually left to themselves, that is, when they were
not plundered by aristocrats and tax gatherers.
Justice, in this kind of society, was often arbitrary. The complaints
by the Greek farmer, Hesiod, about unfair, self-seeking local barons
echoes a long-standing grievance that seldom surfaces in the historical
literature we have at our disposal. The great law codes that were handed
down by the absolute monarch of Babylonia, Hammurabi, were not the
rule in the pre-Roman world. More often than not, avaricious nobles
made their own law” to suit their own needs. The peasant may have
sought the protection of nobles for himself and his community from
pillaging outsiders, but rarely justice. Empires were too big to manage
administratively, much less juridically. The Roman Empire was a major
exception to this rule, largely because it was mote of a coastal and fairly
urbanized entity rather than a vast inland area with very few cities.
European nations, by contrast, were formed out of continents that
history sculpted into increasingly manageable territories. Road systems, to be sure, were poor and communication was primitive. But as
strong kings emerged like Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of
France, royal justice and bureaucrats began to penetrate into once-remote areas and reach deeper into the everyday life of the people.
There is no question that the “king’s justice” was welcomed by commoners and his officials acted as a buffer between arrogant nobles and
the cowed masses. The early development of the nation-stale, in effect,
was marked by a genuine sense of promise and relief.
But the royal power was usually an interest in its own right, not a
moral agency for the redress of popular grievances, and it eventually
became as oppressive as the local nobles it displaced. Moreover, it was
not a pliant tool for achieving the ascendancy of the emerging bourgeoisie. The Stuart kings of England, who catapulted England into
revolution in the 1640s, viewed their nations as personal patrimonies
which both the powerful nobles and wealthy bourgeoisie threatened to
subvert.
The notion that the nation-state was “formed” by the bourgeoisie is
a myth that should be dispatched by now. In the first place, what we
call a “bourgeois” in the late Middle Ages was nothing like the
industrialist or industrial capitalist we know today. Apart from some
wealthy banking houses and commercial capitalists engaged in a far-ranging carrying trade, the nascent bourgeois was generally a master
craftsman who functioned within a highly restrictive guild system. He
seldom exploited a proletarian of the kind we encounter today.
Disparities in wealth, to be sure, eventually gave rise to craftsmen
who closed out apprentices and turned their guilds into privileged
societies for themselves and their sons. But this was not the rule. In
most of Europe, guilds fixed prices, determined the quality and quantity
of goods that were produced, and were open to apprentices who, in time,
could hope to be masters in their own right This system, which
carefully regulated growth, was hardly capitalistic. Work was done
mainly by hand in small shops where master sat side by side with
apprentice and attended to the needs of a limited, highly personalized
market.
By the late Middle Ages, the manorial economy with its elaborate
hierarchy and its land-based serfs was in dissolution, although by no
means did it disappear completely. Relatively independent farmers
began to appear who worked as owners of their land or as tenants of
absentee nobles. Looking over the broad landscape of Europe between
the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, one encounters a highly mixed
economy. Together with serfs, tenant farmers, and yeomen, there were
craftsmen, some well-to-do and others of modest means, who co-existed with capitalists, most of whom were engaged in commerce rather than industry.
Europe, in effect, was the centre of a highly mixed economy, not a
capitalistic one, and its technology, despite major advances throughout
the Middle Ages, was still based on handicrafts, not on industry. Even
mass production, such as the system organized in the huge arsenal of
Venice (which employed three thousand workers), involved artisans,
each of whom worked in a very traditional fashion in small alcoves and
shops.
It is important to stress these features of the world that directly
preceded the Industrial Revolution because they greatly conditioned
the social options that were open to Europe. Prior to the era of the Stuart
monarchy in England, the Bourbon in France, and the Hapsburg in
Spain, European towns enjoyed an extraordinary amount of autonomy.
Italian and German cities, in particular, although by no means exclusively, formed strong states in their own right, ranging in political
forms from simple democracies in their early years, to oligarchies in
later periods. They also formed confederations to struggle against local
lords, foreign invaders, and absolute monarchs. Civic life flourished in
these centuries — not only economically, but culturally. Citizens
generally owed their allegiances primarily to their cities and only
secondarily to their territorial lords and emerging nations.
The growth of power of the nation-state from the sixteenth century
onward became as much a source of conflict as it was a source of order
in controlling unruly nobles. Attempts by monarchs to impose royal
sovereignty on the towns and cities of the period produced an era of
near-insurrectionary attacks on representatives of the crown. Royal
records were destroyed, bureaucrats assaulted, and their offices
demolished. Although the person of the monarch was given the customary respect accorded to a head of state, his edicts were often ignored
and his officials were all but lynched. The Fronde, a series of conflicts
initiated by the French nobility and Parisian burghers against growing
royal power during the youth of Louis XIV, virtually demolished
absolutism and drove the young king out of Paris until the monarchy
reasserted its power.
Behind these upsurges in many parts of Europe we find a mounting
resistance to encroachments by the centralized nation-state on the
prerogatives of the towns and cities. This municipal upsurge reached
its height in the early sixteenth century when the cities of Castile rose
up against Charles II of Spain and tried to establish what was essentially
a municipal confederation. The struggle, which went on for more than
a year, ended in the defeat of the Castilian cities after a series of striking
victories on their part — and their defeat marked the economic and
cultural decline of Spain for nearly three centuries. To the extent that
the Spanish monarchy was in the vanguard of royal absolutism during
that century and played a major role in European politics, the uprising
of the cities — or *Comuneros*, as their partisans were called — created
the prospect of an alternative pathway to the continent’s development
toward nation-states: namely, a confederation of towns and cities.
Europe genuinely vacillated for a time between these two alternatives
and it was not until the late seventeenth century that the nation-state
gained ascendancy over a confederal pathway.
Nor did the idea of confederation ever die. It surfaced among
radicals in the English Revolution who were condemned by the followers of Cromwell as “Switzering anarchists.” It reappeared, again,
in confederations that radical farmers tried to establish in New England
in the aftermath of the American Revolution. And, again, in France in
radical sectional movements—the neighbourhood assemblies of Paris
and other French cities established during the Great Revolution — and,
finally, in the Paris Commune of 1871, which called for a “Commune
of communes” and the dissolution of the nation-state.
In the era that immediately preceded the formation of the nationstate, Europe stood poised at a fork in the historic road. Depending upon
the fortunes of the *Comuneros* and the *sans culottes* who packed the
Parisian sections of 1793, the future of the nation-state hung very much
in the balance. Had the continent moved in the direction of urban
confederations, its future would have taken a socially more benign
course, perhaps even a more revolutionary, democratic, and cooperative form than it was to acquire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
By the same token, it is quite unclear that an industrial capitalist
development of the kind that exists today was preordained by history.
That capitalism greatly accelerated technological development at a rate
that has no precedent in history hardly requires any detailed discussion.
And I shall have much to say about what this technological development did to humanity and nature — and what it *could* do in a truly
ecological society. But capitalism, like the nation-state, was neither an
unavoidable “necessity,” nor was it a “precondition” for the establishment of a cooperative or socialist democracy.
Indeed, important forces tended to inhibit its development and
ascendancy. As a bitterly competitive market system based on production for exchange and the accumulation of wealth, capitalism and a
capitalistic mentality, with its emphasis on individual egoism, stood
very much at odds with deeply ingrained traditions, customs, and even
the lived realities of precapitalist societies. All precapitalist societies
had placed a high premium on cooperation rather than competition,
however much this emphasis was commonly disregarded or, indeed,
used to mobilize collective labour forces in the service of elites and
monarchs. Nevertheless, competition as a way of life — as “healthy
competition” to use modern bourgeois parlance — was simply inconceivable. Agonistic male behaviour in ancient and medieval times, to
be sure, was not uncommon, but it was generally focused on public
service in one form or another—not on material self-aggrandizement.
The market system was essentially marginal to a precapitalist world,
particularly one that emphasized self-sufficiency. Where the market
achieved prominence, say, in medieval times, it was carefully regulated
by guilds and Christian precepts against the taking of interest and
excessive profiteering. Capitalism, to be sure, always existed — as
Marx observed, “in the interstices of an ancient world” and, one can
add, medieval world — but it largely failed to achieve a socially
dominant status. The early bourgeoisie, in fact, did not have overly
capitalistic aspirations; its ultimate goals were shaped by the aristocracy so that the capitalists of ancient and medieval times invested
their profits in land and tried to live like gentry after retiring from
business affairs.
Growth, too, was frowned upon as a serious violation of religious
and social taboos. The ideal of “limit ” the classical Greek belief in the
“golden mean,” never entirely lost its impact on the precapitalist world.
Indeed, from tribal limes well into historical times, virtue was defined
as a strong commitment by the individual to the community’s welfare
and prestige was earned by disposing of wealth in the form of gifts, not
by accumulating it.
Not surprisingly, the capitalist market and the capitalist spirit that
emphasized endless growth, accumulation, competition, and still more
growth and accumulation for competitive advantages in the market —
all encountered endless obstacles in precapitalist societies. The nascent
capitalists of the ancient world rarely rose to a status of more than
functionaries of imperial monarchs who needed merchants to acquire
rare and exotic commodities from faraway places. Their profits were
fixed and their social ambitions were curtailed.
The Roman emperors gave a greater leeway to the early bourgeoisie,
to be sure, but plundered it freely by means of taxation and episodic
expropriations. The medieval world in Europe gave the bourgeoisie a
substantially more freer hand, particularly in England, Flanders, and
northern Italy. But even in the more individualistic Christian world,
capitalists came up against entrenched guild systems that sharply
circumscribed the market and were usually mesmerized by aristocratic
values of high living that worked against the bourgeois virtues of
parsimony and material accumulation.
Indeed, in most of Europe, the bourgeoisie was seen as a contemptible underclass — demonic in its passion for wealth, parvenu in
its ambitions to belong to the nobility, culturally unsettling in its
proclivity for growth, and threatening in its fascination for technological innovation. Its supremacy in Renaissance Italy and Handers was
highly unstable. Free-spending *condotierri* like the Medici, who gained
control of major northern Italian cities, devoured the gains of trade in
lavish expenditures for palaces, civic monuments, and warfare. Changes in trade routes, such as the shift of commerce from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the years following the Turkish capture of
Constantinople (1453), ultimately doomed the Italian city-states to
occupy a secondary place in Europe. It was the historic breakthrough
of capitalism in England that gave this economy national, and finally
global, supremacy.
This breakthrough, too, was not an unavoidable fact of history, nor
was the form it took predetermined in any way by suprahuman social
forces. The English economy and state were perhaps the most loosely
constructed of any in Europe. The monarchy never achieved the absolutism attained by Louis XIV of France, nor was England a clearly definable nation
feudalism deeply entrenched in the realm, despite the current English
preoccupation with status. In so porous a society with so unstable a
history, the merchant and, later,the industrially oriented capitalist found
a greater degree of freedom for development there than elsewhere.
The English nobility, in turn, was largely a *nouveau elite* that had
been installed by the Tudor monarchs after the traditional Norman
nobility all but destroyed itself in the bloody Wars of the Roses in the
fifteenth century. The nobles, often of humble birth, were not averse to
turning a penny in trade. To raise substantial fortunes by selling wool
in the Handers textile industry, they wantonly enclosed the common
lands of the peasantry and turned them into sheep runs.
The spread of the capitalist “putting out” system, moreover, in which
so-called factors brought wool to family cottages, passing on unfinished yam to weavers and then to dyers, eventually led to the
concentration of all the cottagers in “factories,” where they were
obliged to work under harsh, exploitative, and highly disciplined conditions. In this way, the new industrial bourgeoisie circumvented the
traditional guild restrictions in the towns and brought a growing class
of dispossessed proletarians into its service. Each worker could now be
competitively played against others in a presumably “free” labour
market, driving down the wages and providing immense profits in the
new factory system that developed near England’s major urban centres.
In the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 — not to be confused
with the stormy English Revolution of the 1640s — the avaricious
English nobles and their bourgeois counterparts came to a political
compromise. The aristocracy was permitted to run the state, the monarchy was reduced to a mere symbol of interclass unity, and the bourgeoisie was granted a free hand in running the economy. Allowing for
quarrels between various ruling elites, the English capitalist class
enjoyed the virtually unrestrained right to plunder England and to move
its operations abroad to claim India, large parts of Africa, and commercially strategic strongholds in Asia.
Market economies had existed before capitalism. Indeed, they coexisted with fairly communal economies. There are periods in the
Middle Ages that bear witness to a fascinating balance between town
and country, crafts and agriculture, burghers and food cultivators, and
technological innovations and cultural constraints. This world was to
be idealized by romantic writers in the nineteenth century and by Peter
Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, who exhibited an acute sensitivity to
the various alternatives to capitalism offered by a cooperative society
and mentality at various periods in history.
The upsurge of English capitalism in the eighteenth century, and its
global outreach in the nineteenth century, altered such prospects radically. For the first time, competition was seen to be “healthy”; trade, as
“free”; accumulation, as evidence of “parsimony”; and egoism, as
evidence of a self-interest that worked like a “hidden hand” in the
service of the public good. Concepts of “health,” “freedom,” “parsimony,” and the “public good” were to subserve unlimited expansion
and wanton plunder — not only of nature, but of human beings. No
class of proletarians in England suffered less during the Industrial
Revolution than the huge bison herds that were exterminated on the
American plains. No human values and communities were warped any
less than the ecosystems of plants and animals that were despoiled in
the original forests of Africa and South America. To speak of
“humanity’s” depredation of nature makes a mockery of the unbridled
depredation of human by human as depicted in the tormented novels of
Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. Capitalism divided the human species
against itself as sharply and brutally as it divided society against nature.
Competition began to permeate every level of society, not only to
throw capitalist against capitalist for control of the marketplace. It
pitted buyer against seller, need against greed, and individual against
individual on the most elementary levels of human encounters. In the
marketplace, one individual faced another with a snarl, even as working
people, each seeking, as a matter of sheer survival, to get the better of
the other. No amount of moralizing and pietizing can alter the fact that
rivalry at the most molecular base of society is a bourgeois law of life,
in the literal sense of the word “life ” Accumulation to undermine, buy
out, or otherwise absorb or outwit a competitor *is a condition for existence in a capitalist economic order.*
That nature, too, is a victim of this competitive, accumulative, and
ever-expanding social fury, should be obvious if it were not for the fact
that there is a strong tendency to date this social trend’s origins back to
technology and industry as such. That modern technology *magnifies*
more fundamental economic factors, notably, growth as a law of life in
a competitive economy and the commodification of humanity and
nature, is an apparent fact. But technology and industry in themselves
do not turn every ecosystem, species, tract of soil, waterway, or, for
that matter, the oceans and the air, into mere natural resources. They
do not monetize and give a price-tag to everything that could be
exploited in the competitive struggle for survival and growth.[11] To
speak of “limits to growth” under a capitalistic market economy is as
meaningless as to speak of limits to warfare under a warrior society.
The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are
manipulative. Capitalism can no more be “persuaded” to limit growth
than a human being can be “persuaded” to stop breathing. Attempts to
“green” capitalism, to make it “ecological,” are doomed by the very
nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Indeed, the most basic precepts of ecology, such as the concern for
balance, a harmonious development toward greater differentiation, and
ultimately, the evolution of greater subjectivity and consciousness,
stand *radically* at odds with an economy that homogenizes society,
nature, and the individual, and that divides human against human and
society against nature with a ferocity that must ultimately tear down
the planet.
For generations, radical theorists opined about the “inner limits” of
the capitalist system, the “internal” mechanisms within its operations
as an economy, that would yield its self-destruction. Marx gained the
plaudits of endless writers for advancing the possibility that capitalism
would be destroyed and replaced by socialism because it would enter
a chronic crisis of diminishing profits, economic stagnation, and class
war with an ever-impoverished proletariat In the face of vast biogeochemical dislocations that have opened vast holes in the earth’s
ozone layer and increased the temperature of the planet by the “greenhouse effect,” these limits are now clearly ecological. Whatever may
be the destiny of capitalism as a system that has “internal limits”
economically, we can emphatically say that it has *external* limits
ecologically.
Indeed, capitalism completely incarnates Bakunin’s notion of “evil”
without the qualification that it is “socially necessary.” Beyond the
capitalist system there are no further “turning points in history.”
Capitalism marks the end of the road for a long social development in
which evil permeated the good and irrationality permeated the rational.
Capitalism, in effect, constitutes the point of *absolute negativity* for
society and the natural world. One cannot improve this social order,
reform it, or remake it on its own terms with an ecological prefix such
as “eco-capitalism.” The only choice one has is to destroy it, for it
embodies *every* social disease — from patriarchal values, class exploitation, and statism to avarice, militarism, and now, growth for the
sake of growth — that has afflicted “civilization” and tainted all its
great advances.
I have touched upon popular attempts to resist the immersion of society
into “evil,” namely, the resistance of the Spanish *Comuneros* and the
French *sans culottes* to the nation-state and, less directly, of craftsmen
and independent farmers to capitalism.
But the drift of patricentric, urban, and economic institutions in an
increasingly antihumanistic and anti-ecological direction was fought
by people on a very sweeping scale and with more explosive ideas than
I have indicated. Today, when we run the risk of losing all knowledge
of history and, particularly, of the revolutionary tradition and utopian
alternatives it offered, it is very important that we examine the libertarian movements that emerged at each of history’s turning points and
the ideas of freedom they advanced. Here, we shall find a remarkable
development of ideas that sought to countervail “civilization’s” immersion into evil. Indeed, we shall find progress in its truly authentic sense:
a widening of social struggles to encompass more and more fundamental issues and a sophistication of the concept of freedom itself.
From the outset, let me draw a very important distinction: namely,
between the ideals of freedom and the notions of justice. The two words
have been used so interchangeably that they have almost become
synonymous. Actually, justice differs profoundly from freedom, and it
is important that we clearly disengage one from the other. Historically,
they have given rise to very different kinds of struggles and they have
voiced radically different demands from systems of authority to this
very day. The distinction between mere reforms and fundamental
changes in society rests, in great part, on demands for justice and
demands for freedom, however much the two have been closely related
to each other in highly fluid social situations.
Justice is the demand for equity, for “fair play,” and a share in the
benefits of life that are commensurable with one’s contribution. In
Thomas Jefferson’s words, it is “equal and exact...” based on a respect
for the principle of equivalence. This fair, or equivalent, apportionment
of treatment one receives — socially, juridically, and materially — in
return for what one gives has traditionally been depicted by the balance
or scale Justitia, the Roman goddess, holds in one hand, the sword she
holds in the other, and the blindfold that covers her eyes. Taken
together, the accoutrements of Justitia testify to the quantification of an
equity which can be parcelled out and apportioned on both tables of the
scale; the power of violence that stands behind her judgement in the
form of her sword (under conditions of “civilization,” the sword was
to become the equivalent of the State); the “objectivity” of her views
as expressed by the blindfold.
Elaborate discussions of theories of justice, from Aristotle’s in the
ancient world to those of John Rawls in the modern, need not be
examined here. They involve explorations into natural law, contract,
reciprocity, and egoism — issues that are not of immediate concern to
our exploration. But the blindfold around Justitia’s eyes and the scale
she holds in her hands are symbols of a highly problematic relationship
that we cannot afford to ignore. In the presence of Justitia, all human
beings are presumably “equal.” They stand “naked” before Justitia, to
use a common word, bereft of social privilege, special rights, and status.
The famous “cry for Justice!” has a long and complex pedigree. From
the earliest days of systematic oppression and exploitation, people gave
Justitia a voice — blindfold or not — and made her the spokesperson
of the downtrodden against unfeeling inequity and violations of the
principle of equivalence.
Initially, Justitia was pitted against the tribal canon of blood vengeance, of unreasoning retribution for the harm inflicted on one’s kin. The
famous *lex talionis* — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a
life — was applied exclusively for losses inflicted on one’s relatives,
not to people in general. Rational as the demand for tribal equity may
seem in its command for equivalence of treatment, this principle was
parochial and restricted. No one stood up for the stranger who was
abused or killed — apart from his or her kin in a distant territory.
Punishment, in turn, was often very arbitrary. More than one life was
commonly claimed for crimes that existed only in the eyes of the
beholder, with the harsh result that blood feuds could go on for
generations, claiming entire communities and people who were patently innocent of infractions that had long faded from the memory of the combatants.
The highly debated meaning of Aeskylos’s *Orestaeia* — a dramatic
Greek trilogy in which tribal vengeance for the murder of a mother by
her son in retribution for the death she inflicted on his father — has
several different themes. Important among them was the higher sense
of obligation a son (as well as a daughter) had to a mother under a
system of so-called matriarchal law, in which women, rather than men,
presumably formed the socially recognized knots of kinship and ancestry
But no less important as a theme — and possible more so for classical Athenians,
who prized this trilogy justice out of an archaic world of crude, unreasoning vengeance into a
domain of rational and objective equity: to render justice “equal and exact.”
Which is not to say that justice had its origins in Greece. In the period
following the transition from tribal societies to feudal aristocracies and
absolute monarchies, the cry for justice — indeed, for written codes of
law that clearly spelled out penalties for crimes — became a major
demand of the oppressed. Equivalence in the form of justice “equal and
exact” was slowly shorn of its class biases, be it in the Hebrew
Deuteronomic Code or the reforms of Solon in Athens. Roman law, the
basis for much of modern Western jurisprudence, sophisticated early
popular gains enormously, acknowledging in the *jus naturale* and the
were rendered unequal by society. Even chattel slavery was acknowledged as a “contract” of sorts in which a slave, whose life could have
been claimed in warfare, was kept alive if he forfeited his body and
labour to the victor.
What is problematic about justice “equal and exact,” however, is
that all people are *not* equal naturally, despite the *formal* equality that
is conferred upon them in a “just” society. Some individuals are born
physically strong; others may be born weaker, by comparison. Still
others differ markedly from each other by virtue of health, age, infirmities, talent, intelligence, and the material means of life at their
disposal. These differences may be either trivial or highly important in
terms of the demands that are imposed upon them in everyday life.
Ironically, then, the notion of equality can be used subtly for dealing
with people on highly unequal terms: the same burdens are imposed on
very disparate individuals who have very different abilities to deal with
them. The rights they acquire, “equal and exact” as they may be,
become meaningless for those who cannot exercise them because of
physical or material liabilities. Justice thus becomes very unequal in
substance precisely because it is established in mere *form*. An *inequality of equals* may emerge from a society that deals with everyone
as juridically equal, that is, without regard for his or her physical and
mental condition.
So-called egalitarian tribal societies actually recognized that such
major inequalities did exist and tried to find *compensatory* mechanisms
to establish substantive equality. The principle of the irreducible minimum, for example, created a bedrock basis for overcoming economic
disparities that, in modern society, make many people who are formally
equal highly unequal in substance. Everyone, irrespective of his or her
status, capacities, or even willingness to contribute materially to the
community, was entitled to the basic means of life. These means could
not be denied to anyone who was a member of the community.
Whenever possible, special treatment was given to the infirm, the
elderly, and the weak to “equalize” their material position and to
minimize their feelings of dependency. There is evidence that such care
goes back to Neandethal communities some fifty thousand years ago.
Skeletal remains have been found of a mature man who was seriously
handicapped at birth and whose survival would not have been possible
without the special attention he received from his community. Certainly
on the level of economic life, the guiding maxim of justice — the
inequality of equals — had not yet fully emerged. Preliterate peoples
seem to have been guided by another maxim — the *equality of unequals*
— a maxim that forms the foundations for the ideal of freedom.
The attempt to equalize unavoidable inequalities, to compensate at
nearly every level of life for lacks produced by circumstances over
which one has no control — be it a physical impairment of any kind or
even a lack of rights because of shortcomings that may arise for a host
of inescapable factors — forms the point of departure for a free society.
I speak, here, not only of the obvious compensatory mechanisms that
come into play when an individual is ill or impaired. I speak of attitudes
as well; indeed, of an outlook that manifests itself in a sense of care,
responsibility, and a decent concern for human and nonhuman beings
whose suffering, plight, and difficulties can be lightened or removed
by our intervention. The concept of the equality of unequals may rest
on emotional determinants such as a sense of sympathy, community,
and a tradition that evokes a sense of solidarity; indeed, even an
aesthetic sense that finds beauty in nature and freedom in wilderness.
The basically libertarian notion that what often passes for justice “exact
and equal” is inadequate — indeed, that it may doom countless people
to underprivileged lives or worse, because of factors that can be
remedied by rational means — is the cornerstone of freedom conceived
as an ethics. To “freely” realize one’s potentialities and achieve fulfillment presupposes that these very potentialities *are* realizable because
society lives by an ethic of the equality of unequals.
Let me stress the word “ethic,” here. Preliterate communities lived
by the maxim of the equality of unequals as a matter of *custom* — as a
dim form of inherited tradition. Owing to their parochialism, moreover,
custom applied exclusively to members of the community, not to
“outsiders.” Viewed against the broad landscape of early society,
preliterate peoples were as vulnerable to onslaughts against their customs as they were to invasions by technically more sophisticated
communities. It was not very difficult to shatter customs like the
equality of unequals and to replace them with systems of privilege that
lacked even the notion of justice. Once customary freedoms had been
destroyed, the “cry for justice” came to the forefront — a poor but
necessary substitute for the unbridled power of nobles and kings. Moral
injunctions, later to be formulated into laws, began to confine their
power. Biblical prophets, particularly the anarchic Amos, cast not only
rhetorical thunderbolts against the privileged and the kings of Judah;
they also extended the boundaries of unthinking custom, based on
tradition, into the domain of *morality*.
No longer were the oppressed obliged to find the authority for the
redress of injustice in the dim mists of tradition. They could establish
moral codes, based on already existing systems of authority, to retain
the limited rights they claimed. But no serious attempt was made to
formulate these rights in rational terms, that is to say, to turn them into
a coherent ethics that lent itself to reason and discourse.
For many centuries, then, justice remained a moral concern which
took the form of quasi-religious, often outright supernatural, commandments rather than discursive judgements. “Equal and exact” meant
precision, not a reasoned case for right and wrong. Indeed, right and
wrong were said to be ordained from the heavens and treated more often
as “virtue” and “sin” than as “just” and “unjust.” We must turn mainly
to the Greeks and Romans — and as much to their philosophers as to
their jurists — to find reasoned debates in the secular language of the
real world around justice and, eventually, freedom.
It was among these thinkers that justice, conceived as a rational and
secular affair, was to take the form of an ethical problem. People began
to reason out the differences between just and unjust acts, not simply
adopt them as moral injunctions by a deity or inherit them as a
time-honoured custom. Freedom, in turn, began to emerge not only as
a wistful longing but as an ever-expansive body of ideas, sophisticated
by critique and by thoughtful projects to remake society. A new realm
of evolution was initiated which was not only natural and social but
also ethical and emancipatory. Ideals of freedom began to become part
of the evolution of the good society and, in our own time, of an
ecological society.
I have drawn a fairly sharp distinction between custom, morality,
and ethics because the ideals of freedom over the course of history were
to take very different forms when they began to advance from a
traditional to a prescriptive, and finally, to a rational outlook.
These distinctions are not merely matters of historical interest.
Today, justice has become more entangled with freedom than at any
time in the recent past, so that mere reforms are often unthinkingly
confused with radical social change. Attempts to achieve a just society
that involve little more than corrective alterations in a basically irrational society are becoming muddled with attempts to achieve a free
society that involve fundamental social reconstruction. Present-day
society, in effect, is not being remade; it is being *modified* by means of
cosmetic alterations rather than basic changes. Reforms in the name of
justice are being advanced, in effect, to *manage* a profound and growing
crisis rather than eliminate it.
No less troubling is the fact that reason, with its demands for
fundamental critique, analyses, and intellectual coherence, is being
subverted by “pop” moralizing, often of a blatantly religious character,
while mystical mythmaking is invading even moral interpretations of
freedom, evoking primitivistic and potentially reactionary images of
liberation. These atavistic tendencies are usually personally oriented
rather than socially oriented. Personal therapy is replacing politics
under the aegis of “self-liberation”; mythmaking is mingling with
religion to produce luxuriant growth of mystical exotica. All taken together,
are being thrown against rationality in the name of cosmic
“Oneness” — a “night,” to use Hegel’s expression, “in which all cows
are black.”
The regressive character of this development deserves careful
scrutiny. Early ideas of freedom were confined to a mythopoeic imagination. Their realization was doomed to failure largely because they
lived in dreamlike fantasies of a return to a “golden age” that was
beyond recovery, because of the extent to which even early humanity
was separated from a presumed state of pristine animality. It was only
in myths, such as Homer’s Island of the Lotus-eaters, that we fancifully
imagined a condition where nature completely prevails and animality
completely permeates the human community so that even memory is
effaced. The placidity of the Lotus-eaters, who have no will and no
sense of identity, divests them of any past or future in its timeless
immediacy and seemingly “natural” eternality. Odysseus’s seamen,
who are ordered to reconnoitre the island, are received “kindly” and
served “the honeyed fruit of the lotus,” which deprives them “of any
desire to return or send word” to their ship. Not only are they content
to stay” and allow themselves to be sedated; they become “forgetful of
home” and of themselves as individuated beings. Like modern-day
offspring of the therapeutic and mystical age, they have no “self” to
fulfill because they possess no “self” to be evoked.
This mythic fantasy of prehistory and of a lost harmony with nature
that is more vegetative than even animalistic, is a libel on human beings
as a whole — beings that possess intellect as well as physiological
functions and a sense of the “ought-to-be” as well as the “is,” That mind
and body have been wrongly thrown into sharp opposition to each other
by religion as well as philosophy does not remove the fact that they are
different from each other in very marked ways.
None of these remarks are meant to deny that humanity did live in
harmony with nature in varying degrees in the past. But that harmony
was never so *static*, so *timeless*, and so divested of *development* as it
corresponds to the world of the Lotus-eaters in all its variations in
different myths. Here, the utterly arbitrary character of myth, its lack
of any critical correction by reason, delivers us to complete falsehoods.
Viewed from a primitivistic viewpoint, “freedom” takes on the
treacherous form of an absence of desire, activity, and will
condition so purposeless that humanity ceases to be capable of reflecting upon itself rationally and thereby preventing emerging ruling elites
from completely dominating it. In such a mythic — and mystified
world, there would be no basis for being guarded against hierarchy or
for resisting it.
Nor is nature, however pristine and “wild,” so fixed in time, so
lacking in dynamism, and so eternal that it is little more than the scene
one seems to behold from the picture-window of a middle class summer
home. This basically *suburban* image of nature belies its fecundity,
its wealth of change, and its richness of development Nature is turbulently active, even if the Lotus-eaters are not. We shall see, in fact,
that ruling class ideology fosters such static and mindless visions of
paradise all the more to render freedom remote and desire incompatible
with its fulfillment. Indeed, the island of the Lotus-eaters is a regressive
myth of a return to infancy and passivity, when the newly born merely
responds to caresses, a full breast, and is lulled into a sedated receptivity
by an ever-attentive mother. The fact that the earliest word for
“freedom” is *amargi*, the Summerian expression for a “return to
mother” is ambiguous. It may well be as regressive as it is suggestive
of a belief that nature in the past was bountiful and freedom existed
only in the cradle of matricentric society.
That there was a freedom to be *won* by activity, will, and consciousness after society had gone beyond mere custom and that hope was
needed to achieve a new, rational, and ecological dispensation for
humanity and nature had yet to be discovered. Indeed, once the ties
between humanity and nature were severed, this became the harsh work
of history. To retreat back into myth, today, is to lay the basis for a
dangerous quietism that thrusts us beyond the threshold of history into
the dim,often imagined, and largely atavistic world of prehistory. Such
a retreat obliges us to forget history and the wealth of experience it has
to offer. Personality dissolves into a vegetative state that antedates
animal development and nature’s evolutionary thrust toward greater
sensibility and subjectivity. Thus, even “first nature” is libeled,
degraded, and denied its own rich dynamic in favour of a frozen and
static image of the natural world where the richly coloured evolution
of life is painted in washed-out pastels, bereft of form, activity, and
self-directiveness.
Such vegetative images of a “golden age” — and they are being
revived today, by mystics in American, English, and central European
ecology movements — did not simply spring from the oppressed in
history. It is true that, as tribal life gave way to “civilization” in the Near
East, Egypt, and Asia, a sense of loss and a wistful look backward to a
forsaken garden of Eden permeated the utopian dreams of the underclasses, People spoke longingly of an age when the lion and the lamb
lay side by side and nature provided a harmonized humanity with all
the means of life. The human condition was conceived in terms of a
golden era that was followed by a less paradisial silver one, finally
descending into an iron age that ushered in conflict, injustice, and
warfare — only to be repeated again into eternity like the seasons of
the year. There was very little conception of history in a truly developmental sense — merely degeneration, recovery, and continual repetition.
Let there be no mistake, however, that this imagery was advanced
only by the oppressed. The belief in a purely passive relationship with
nature and nonhuman beings more easily served the interests of ruling
elites in history than it did the ruled, however often it was evoked in
the day dreams of oppressed peoples. In the first place, these images
remained nothing more than day dreams — myths that functioned as
safety valves, for the very real discontents of the dominated, and
deflected active attempts to change the world into cathartic rituals and
sedated longings. Hoarded up by priests and priestesses, they were
served out as carefully choreographed dramas to the beat of drums and
the noise of flutes, enacting in controlled rituals the anger that might
have overflowed into action and basic social change. No society ever
returned to its “golden” past; indeed, the imagery of an inevitable cycle,
with its specious promise of an “eternal return,” reinforced the priestly
manipulation of passive congregants.
Even more ironically, the image of a lost “golden age” was used to
justify the tyranny of the “iron age.” Priest, priestess, and noble combined to explain the loss of a “golden age” as humanity’s penalty for a
fall from grace. Be it an Eve who induced Adam to eat the fruit of the
tree of knowledge or a Pandora who opened the box that contained the
ills that were to afflict humanity, paradise or the “golden age” was lost
— so it was claimed — because humanity or its surrogates violated its
covenant with supernatural power. Misery, in effect, had been brought
upon humanity by its own failings, or by hubris—not by the emergence
of hierarchy, property, the State, and ruling elites.
Indeed, rule it is various forms was needed to discipline an unruly
humanity that lacked the sense of obedience needed to maintain an
orderly world. Hence, we encounter a remarkable persistence of
retrospective myths of a “golden age” not only in the myths of the
oppressed but in the literature of their oppressors. That myth was
cannily used to justify the domination of women in the Pandora story
and the domination of men in the *Odyssey* (a truly aristocratic epic in
which the next island Odysseus encounters after leaving the Lotus-eaters is the island of the harshly patriarchal Cyclopes), reveals that the
drama is surprisingly gender-blind in its treatment of subjugation. Men
are no less victims of the various demonic beings who rule the islands
Odysseus encounters — each of which seems to be a mythic epoch —
than are women.
The gropings of Greek rationalism toward a sense of history — of
advances forward rather than returns backward — are far more radical
than images based on false notions of a cyclic and basically static
nature Thukidides’s history of the Greek people in the opening portions
of *The Peloponnesian War* is impeccably secular and naturalistic. No
myths burden this matter-of-fact account of the emergence of the *polis*
and the settlement of the Greek homeland. Centuries later, Diodorus
Siculus is distinctly realistic in his history of humanity’s evolution from
prehistory into history, a drama of changes that break the bonds of myth,
cycles, and parochialism. It is not even the Greeks alone who claim
Diodorus’s attention, but “the race of all human beings and their history
parts of the inhabited earth.”
Christianity, despite its ambivalences and its retreat from the
secularism of the Greek chroniclers, brought a sense of hi story, futurity,
and redemption to masses who were captive to cycles of eternal return.
That Christian fathers like Augustine invoked the Fall from innocence
in the Garden of Eden was only to be expected from a religion that
plainly adapted itself to authority and the Roman State. But its own
origins as a popular, even a rebellious Judaic movement, mired it in
inconsistency that left it open to radical as well as conservative interpretations. The Jewish religion, for all its transcendental and dualistic
visions of a creator god who is clearly separated from its creation,
removed the deity from social life as well as nature.
As H. and H.A. Frankfort have observed, social problems could now be fought out in
a largely *secular* domain. No longer were they completely entangled
with myth and divine claims to authority. In ancient empires, tyranny
had been immersed in the authority of divinity and the claims of
monarchs to divine sanction. Indeed, a “sacred cosmos” included a
“sacred society,” so that social oppression acquired the mystical properties of nature — a line of thought as Janet Biehl has pointed out,
that has been revived in present-day attempts to treat the natural world
as “sacred” and restore Goddess worship to eminence in a nonsocial,
myth-ridden form of “eco-feminism.”
The Church inherited this transcendental tradition, however much
it tried to modify it. Ernst Bloch was to observe that: “...for the first
time a *political* utopia appears in history [my emphasis]. In fact, it
produces history; history comes to be as *saving history in the direction of the kingdom*, as a single unbroken process extending from Adam to
Jesus on the basis of the Stoic unity of mankind and the Christian
salvation it is destined for,” [12] Utopia, in effect, became an earthbound
vision oriented toward the future rather than the past. Despite its
religious trapping, salvation could be achieved on earth with the return
of Jesus and the sorting out of the evil from the virtuous.
Indeed, the Hebrew scriptures are charged by an activism and a bias
for the oppressed that was virtually unknown to other religions of the
Near East. As the Frankforts point out, Egyptian texts which give an
account of the social upheaval that followed the collapse of the Old
Kingdom of pyramid builders “viewed the disturbance of the established order...with horror.” The power acquired by the oppressed is
evidence “of lamentation and distress... I show thee how the undermost is turned to uppermost” bemoans the chronicler. “The poor man will acquire riches.” By contrast, the Hebrew scriptures deal with social
revolt by the oppressed with exuliance. The birth of the prophet Samuel,
for example, is celebrated with the words: “The bows of the mighty
men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They
that were full have hired themselves out for bread; and they that were
hungry ceased.” The poor are raised “out of the dust” and beggars are
lifted “from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them
inherit the throne of glory...” [13]
Not only are the mentally numbing effects of myth shaken off, like
the lethargic after-effects of a powerful sedative; its fixity and conservatism are replaced by a sense of the dynamic and temporal that yields
increasingly expansive ideals of freedom. The Joachimites, one of the
most subversive tendencies in medieval Christianity, break away radically from the cloudy and calculated vagueness of official scriptural
history, and provocatively divide it into distinct *epochs* of human
liberation. Even more important than the great chiliastic popular movements, like half-crazed ascetics such as the Flaggelants and the Shepherds or *Pastoreaux*, who were to aimlessly attack the clergy and
Jews in their wanderings, were monks like Joachim of Floris who were
to lay the bases for more lasting libertarian tendencies. Writing in the
twelfth century, Joachim, a Cistercian abbot of Corazzo, a Calabrian
town in Italy, reworked the trinity, a largely mystical unity of the deity’s
triune nature, into a radical chronology. The Old Testament was said
to represent the era of the Father; the New, of the Son; and the Holy
Ghost was a “Third Kingdom,” yet to come, a world without masters
in which people would live in harmony, irrespective of their religious
beliefs, and a bountiful nature would supply the means of life for all.
From the fourteenth century in England to the sixteenth century in
Germany — including the Hussite wars in Bohemia, which produced
stormy communistic movements like the extreme Taborites—peasants
and artisans fought valiantly in chronic insurrections to retain their
communal, guild, and localist rights. Conservative as they seem in the
light of “modernity,” with its harsh urban, technological, and individualistic values, this centuries-long tide of unremitting conflict gave to freedom a *moral meaning* that it has lost in our own era of “scientific socialism” and narrow economistic analyses.
During the centuries that culminated in the Protestant Reformation,
religion became increasingly earth-bound and less supernatural than it
had been in the past, despite its abiding influence on peasant and artisan
movements. By the time of the English Revolution of the 1640s, the
democratic Levellers were largely secular in their outlook and derided
Cromwell’s opportunistic pieties. It was not Christianity as much as it
was a naturalistic pantheism (if a theism of any sort it could be called)
that influenced the thinking of communistic revolutionaries like Gerrard Winstanlcy, who led the small Digger movement in the English
civil wars of the 1650s.
Freedom, a relatively exotic word by comparison with the cry for
justice, had acquired a distinctly realistic content. Men and women
began to fight not only for freedom of religion but also for freedom
from religion. They began to fight not only against specific forms of
domination, but also against domination *as such* and for freedom to the
means of life in a communitarian society. Activism began to replace
the vegetative placidity of a wistful reverence of the past. Morality
began to efface custom; naturalism began to edge out supematuralism;
opposition to ecclesiastical hierarchy began to produce opposition to
civil hierarchy. A refreshing sense of development began to replace the
Fixity of mythopoesis, its repetitive rituals, and the atavistic grip of a
dark superstitious past on the present and future.
If there is a single fact which marks the expansion of the ideals of
freedom, it is the extent to which they were nourished by reason.
Contrary to popular histories of philosophy, religion, and morality,
rationalism had never been abandoned in the closing centuries of the
ancient world and in the Middle Ages. Despite the infestation of the
late Roman Empire by the Isis cult and ascetic religions from the East,
the Hellenic effort to give a rational interpretation of the world was not
only retained but it slowly became differentiated into new interpretations of what constituted reason.
Indeed, we today live in a paralysing ignorance of the different kinds
of logic and rationalism that thinkers developed well into our own time.
The notion that there is only one kind of reason—a fairly static, formal,
and basically syllogistic logic of the kind assembled by Aristotle in his
developmental and organic kind of reason in his other writings. Formal
kinds of reason were modelled on mathematics, particularly geometry.
Organic, or shall we say, *dialectical* reason, on the other hand, stressed
phenomena from generalized, nascent, indeed seed-like, beginnings
into richly developed wholes rather than the schematic deduction of
fixed conclusions based on rigidly stated premises. In short, a richly
speculative, organic dialectic co-existed with the formal, commonsensical logic we use for matter-of-fact problems in everyday life.
Theology was, if anything, an attempt to rationally understand the
ways of the creator-deity in his interaction with his creation, particularly with humankind. In the “Age of Faith” or medieval world, both
systems of thought were used to explicate a good deal more than faith
to which, ironically, mysticism turned more readily, in its wistful
longing for a long-gone innocence, than clerical scholasticism. Francis
of Assisi felt deeply for the suffering of the poor and, more problematically, saw in-nonhuman life-forms a tribute primarily to the glory of a
creator-god. But the Franciscan order was very easily co-opted by the
Papacy and, in inquisitorial times, turned from persecuted into persecutor, including the persecution of its own Joachimite acolytes. Innocence, intuition, and atavistic longings — our modern mystics to
the contrary — are not strong barriers to manipulation. It was often keen
thinkers like Galileo who were silenced by house arrest and speculative
rationalists like Bruno who were burned at the stake by the Inquisition
rather than mystics like Francis or Meister Eckhart.
My point, however, is that reason is not cut from a single cloth. In
its dialectical form, reason imparts a sense of history, development, and
process to thinking, not ‘‘linear; I propositional, and syllogistic means
and analyses. Similarly, the early glimmerings of an organismic approach to the world, not a mechanistic one, also began to revive with
explorations into biology as well as physics. Evolution was already in
the air as early as the Fifteenth century, if we are to judge from Leonardo
da Vinci’s writings on the marine fossils that were found in inland
mountains, and his remarks that, in an ever-changing world, the Po river
will eventually “lay dry land in the Adriatic in the same way it has
already deposited a great part of Lombardy.” By the eighteenth century,
evolution was an accepted fact among the French *philosophes*, thanks
to the work of Maupertuis, Diderot, and Buffon.
The recovery of the body, the claims of the sensuous, the right to
physical pleasure — not merely a restful happiness — began to raise a
major challenge to ascetism, not simply of the kind advanced by official
Christianity, but also by its radical spiritualists. The belief, so widely
held by the poor, that the privileged should share with them in a
presumably god-given fund of misery and self-denial, was steadily
undermined by ordinary people themselves. The joys of the body and
the full satisfaction of material needs were increasingly seen in Renaissance times as a heavenly dispensation. Lusty utopias like the land of
Cockaygne, in which toil was unknown and roasted partridges dropped
into one’s lap, began to abound among the masses, often in marked
contrast to the monastic lifeways of denial preached by their mystical
leaders.
Unlike radical millenarians, or even Joachimites, the masses did not
place these utopias in some distant future or in the heavens above. They
existed geographically in the West, off the known maps of the Renaissance; and they were worlds to be discovered by *active* exploration, not
by the lazy play of one’s imagination. Indeed, it was not always the
rationalistic Christian scholastics who posed the most serious obstacles
to this naturalistic trend, but rather medieval mystics like Fra
Savonarola, the monkish voice of the oppressed, who burned the
artworks of Florence and preached a fiery gospel of self-denial.
By comparison with the rich differentiation of liberatory ideas and visions
that appeared as the “Age of Reason” approached, the movements
of the oppressed by the likes of Pastoreaux, Flaggelants, and even
the Joachimites seem faltering and wayward. Unscrambling the more
secular threads of Greek rationalism that had been entangled by Christian and Islamic theology, the Renaissance provided a voice for richly
speculative and critical ideas.
What is important is that the best of these ideas, whether they are
presented in systematic tracts, dialogues, or imaginary utopias, are
amazingly all-sided. They are not only rational (even dialectically so)
but sensuous; they advance a message of a new society in which
everything human is basically good and should be afforded full expression.
From a social viewpoint, they are *ecological* in the sense that they are
fully participatory: all aspects of experience play a complementary role
in making a richly differentiated whole. The human body is given
citizenship in these new eco-communities no less than the mind; the
organic, no less than the inorganic; passion, no less than reason; nature,
no less than society; women, no less than men. However time-bound
they may sometimes seem from the perspective of our own ideas of
modernity, no part of the human and natural landscape seems to escape
critical investigation and efforts at reconstruction. They penetrate not
only into social organization, culture, morality, technology, and political institutions, but into family relations, education, the status of
women, and the most mundane features of everyday life. Like the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment themselves, everything is brought
up before the bar of reason and is rejected or justified in terms of its
value to an emerging secularity and naturalism.
That thinkers can hardly hope to go much beyond their time should
not surprise us. We need a true generosity of spirit to appreciate the
expansiveness of their ideas — given the periods in which they lived.
It is one of the great truths of dialectical wisdom that all great ideas,
limited as they may seem to their own time and inadequate as they may
appear in ours, lose their relativity when they are viewed as part of an
ever-differentiating whole — just as a block of marble ceases to be a
piece of mere mineral matter when it is sculpted into a magnificent
structure. Seen within the larger whole of which it is a part, it can no
longer be viewed as a mere mineral, anymore than the atoms that make
up a living organism can be viewed as mere particles. With life emerges
metabolism, a phenomenon that never existed on the inorganic level,
and one that can never be imputed to an atom, much less to its
electromagnetic properties.
So the thinkers of the liberatory, indeed revolutionary, tradition must
be appreciated as much for what they add to our lime as they did to their
own if the abiding character of their work is to be grasped.
Thus, we can distinguish several great tendencies in the expanding
ideals of freedom: first, a commitment to the *existing* world, to *secular*
reality, not to one that exists in the heavens or lies off the map of the
known world. I am not saying, by this, that the radical theorists,
utopists, and ideologists of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the
early part of the last century conformed “realistically” to the world in
which they lived. On the contrary, they tried in the best of cases to see
far beyond it and they tried to rest their ideals on the best features of
the times in which they lived.
Which brings us to the second tendency they expressed: the need for
a *carefully structured* society that was free of the explosions produced
by unruly nobles in England and on the European continent. The
Renaissance, particularly the aristocracy of the age, had thrown society
into a condition of chronic warfare. Amidst the ruins left by the Wars
of the Roses in England and the religious wars in central Europe, no
humane society could be conceived of by radical social theorists and
utopists other than one that was totally stable and almost machine-like
in the cooperative symmetry of its operations. Long before Descartes
had made mechanism into a philosophical world view, explosive social
dislocations made it into a radical desideratum. That many utopists had
taken the well-regulated monastery as their model is radical in itself;
they could have easily opted for the centralized nation-states aborning
in their midst, as was to happen in the nineteenth century within the
socialist movement. If a “planned economy” was needed in their time,
partly to countervail the chaotic behaviour of the nobles, partly to
control the depredations of an emerging commercial bourgeoisie on the
peasantry and urban poor, the traditional and socially responsible rules
adopted by the monastery for the conduct of everyday life seemed more
ethical and humane than other alternatives. Only later, in the nineteenth
century, and to some degree earlier, would an orderly society and a
“planned economy” be identified with the centralized nation-state; this,
ironically, in the name of a value-free notion of “scientific socialism”
and attempts to achieve a “nationalized” economy.
A third tendency that contributed to the expanding ideals of freedom
in the radical thought of the Renaissance and, again, in the Enlightenment, was the high esteem that was placed on *work(. Not only did
Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Valentin Andreae, and Francis
Bacon, among others, impart an honoured role to the artisan and food
cultivator, but Denis Diderot brought their crafts and their contributions
to society into the pages of the French *Encyclopedia*, where they are
given almost unprecedented attention, and their skills are explored in
breath-taking detail. Kropotkin cites a medieval ordinance which
declares: “Everyone must be pleased with his work, and no one shall,
while doing nothing, appropriate for himself what others have produced
by application and work, because laws must be a shield for applications
and work.” [14] This constellation of traditions and ideas has no precedent
in antiquity and was to be honoured in the breach during the Industrial
Revolution. Indeed, deeply humane values permeated the mixed
economy of peasants, artisans, freeholders, and proletarians in the
centuries that immediately preceded the ascendancy of industrial
capitalism in England. Even limits to toil were imposed in this dim,
often little-understood era. As the late Marie-Louise Bemeri was to
observe in her searching work, *Journey Through Utopia*:
The Utopian idea of a short working day which to us, accustomed to think of the past in terms of the nineteenth century,
seems a very radical one, does not appear such an innovation,
if it is compared with an ordinance of Ferdinand the First
relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner’s
day at eight hours. And according to Thorold Rogers, in
fifteenth century England men worked forty-eight hours a
week.[15]
Lastly, among the tendencies that surface in this mixed society,
particularly during the Renaissance, is the high premium that is placed
on *community*. This was an era that was directly faced with the
disintegration of villages and towns by an ever-growing and atomizing
market place. The unruly bourgeois-**cum**-burgher had to be controlled.
He assailed not only the fragile bonds that held people together in a
shared communal interest, but he also threatened its guilds, religious
societies that cared for the poor and ill, its extended family ties, and its
high values of human solidarity. To the extent that everything came up
for grabs, from common land to kinship responsibilities, radical
theorists and utopists tightened their muscles — and their vision —
against the asocial behaviour of the new bourgeois and the money
oriented aristocrat.
We must not think too harshly, then, of Thomas More for trying to
retain strong family ties in his *Utopia* and holding fast to Catholic
orthodoxy in the face of a rambunctious monarch, Henry VIII, whose
“reformation” replaced the hat of the bishop of Rome with the crown
of an English king. More, like so many of his Renaissance contemporaries, leaned more toward a humanistic ecumene as expressed by
the principle of the papacy than the nationalism as expressed by a
parochial monarch. Indeed, More’s reservations about a monarchical
dispensation for his ideal society are expressed through Hythloday, the
narrator of *Utopia* who speaks for its author, in a very pointed comment;
“...most princes apply themselves to affairs of war than to the useful
arts of peace; and in these I neither have any knowledge, nor do I much
desire it; they are generally set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or
wrong, than on governing those they possess...”
Even more far-reaching than More’s ideal society is Valentin
Andreae’s “Christianopolisa severely moral community that places
stringent regulations on behaviour, albeit with a deeply humane attitude
toward human needs and suffering. “Christianopolis” is indeed a polis
— a humanly scaled city with clearly defined walls, not a nation-state.
But it is highly standardized in its dwellings and its almost mathematical division of functions, zones, and its balance between industry and
agriculture. None of these utopias are based on private property —
another monastic feature — and they distribute the means of life
according to need. Whether they are described as islands as in the case
of “Utopia” or communities as in the case of “Christianopolis,” they
are really cities, and they have ascetic qualities, however well their
populations live. These significantly prenational and precapitalistic
traits must not be overlooked; the monastic ideal of service, work,
sharing, and regimentation in the interests of a visible community good
pervade the radical thinking of the day, particularly among the utopists. They appear in Tommaso Campanella’s “City of the Sun,” in which
women enjoy an unusually high status, with its Platonistic eugenics and
the emphasis that is given to the natural sciences. The orderly, work-oriented, and literate world they offer is a tight meld between medieval
tradition and modern innovation. The social theorists and utopists of
the Renaissance were fascinated by the possibilities for human improvement opened by science, as evident in Francis Bacon’s sketchy
“New Atlantis” I which strongly emphasized the role of education in
remaking society.
These themes — particularly, enlightenment through learning, the
application of reason and order to human affairs, a keen fascination
with science and a high regard for work — were to extend into the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. By now, the nation-state had
clearly established itself and the city had ceased to be the basic unit for
radical innovation. With Montesquieu, who sets the tone for the century, political institutions began to supplant property concerns, family
relationships, and cultural issues. It is interesting to note that the
communistic programs advanced by the Abbe Mably and Morelly are
completely marginal to the work of the *philosophes*; indeed, to this day,
we do not even know Morelly’s first name and his influence was very
limited until we arrive at the closing years of the French Revolution,
when apparently his *Code of Nature* was read by Gracchus Babeuf, the
ill-fated leader of the “Conspiracy of Equals.”
The Enlightenment was more particularized than the Renaissance,
when entire disciplines were created by single individuals with a
flourish of a pen, and it was more oriented toward individual rights than
the preservation of community. Its engagement with ecclesiastical
‘authority and a hierarchically structured body politic made the
monastery an anachronism at best and anathema at worst. Indeed, more
psychological than rationalistic. Enlightenment thinkers were often
preoccupied with human nature, not only human reason. Both Diderot
and Rousseau, perhaps the era’s most important figures, were men of
“heart” as well as brilliant minds, and spontaneous passion played as
much a role in their works as reason.
From beneath the surface interchange of radical ideas between the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, several issues came into sharp
confrontation with each other. Could material well-being for people in
a time of profound economic distress be acquired only at the expense
of the individual’s subordination to a well-ordered society, based on
monastic discipline and, later, on state authority? Could equality in
material things be purchased by surrendering freedom to compulsory
economic plans? Did a full, sensuous, even playful, way of life endanger the need for all to work, a need that had nourished the ascetism
that afflicts so many utopias and radical ideas about society? Was
abundance for all possible in a time that had yet to prove it could meet
the most elementary needs of life? And to what extent could men, not
to mention women, create a lively, participatory political culture while
working eight or even less hours at demanding tasks to satisfy their
basic material needs? For all the moral admonitions that the ideals of
that extraordinary time advance, most of the visions they embody are
patently shaped by questions of this kind. It is simply impossible to
understand their possibilities and limitations without taking these questions into account.
But amidst the drift from city to nation, from monastery to state,
from ethics to politics, from communal property to private property,
and from an artisanal world to an industrial world, a fascinating
combination of visions emerged that often contained the best — and
the worst — of these sweeping social antinomies, I use the word
“antinomies” advisedly rather than “changes” because I am speaking
of seemingly contradictory *co-existents*, few of which fully supplanted
the earlier ones in the minds of nineteenth century radical thinkers.
Indeed, as we shall see, they have re-emerged again, today, as highly
modified demands in an entirely new synthesis of ideas under the rubric
of social ecology. It is true that paired each against the other, certain
radical theorists were to choose one over the other in many cases.
Marxism, for example, distinctly chose the nation over the city and the
State over the self-disciplined monastic commonwealth advanced particularly by Andreae, whose views often anticipate Robert Owen’s “industrial village.”
But other forms of radical thought were to emerge and develop a
synthesis for their own time — one of rapid industrialization and
urbanization — and give rise to a rich legacy of ideas that radicals can
no longer ignore. And the time has come to examine that legacy, free
from a biased sense of partisanship that stems more from petty factional
hatreds than serious reflection.
I refer to the libertarian utopias and the expressly anarchist ideas that
appeared in the nineteenth century: traditions that advanced ideals of
freedom that were as rational as they were ethical and as self-reflective
as they were passionate. One cannot simply ignore the compelling
analyses that were advanced by William Godwin’s *Enquiry Concerning Social Justice*, the corpus of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s writings, the
incisive critiques of Michael Bakunin, the reconstructive work of Peter
Kropotkin, particularly his far-reaching ecological insights, and the
utopian visions of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier without forfeiting
the rational and moral wealth of ideas that enter into their works from
centuries of liberatory struggles and hopes.
Nor can they be dealt with as visionary “precursors” — or worse,
ideological protagonists — of Karl Marx and “scientific socialism.”
One might with equal arrogance dismiss the naturalism of Aristotle for
the philosophical idealism of Hegel, or the historical work of
Thukidides for that of Charles Beard. At most, all of these thinkers
complement each other; at the very least, they illuminate important
problems where they do conflict, each spawned by a different social
condition in a drama of history that is *still* unfolding.
The course of human development has no more moved in clearly
defined and necessarily “progressive” stages than has the history of
human ideas. If we were to return to a more decentralized society, an
Aristotle and a Thukidides would be more relevant to our concerns
because of their stored wisdom of the Greek *poleis* is than a Hegel or
Beard, who were concerned with nation-states. We have yet to fully
assess the meaning of human history, the paths it should have followed,
and the ideas that are most appropriate in the remaking of society based
on reason and ecological principles.
The radical theorists and utopists following upon the French Revolution exhibited more expansive ideals of freedom than their predecessors
in the Enlightenment — and they were to sum up a sweeping body of
alternatives to the course followed by history; alternatives that were
naively ignored by their socialist successors.
Both of these legacies are of immense importance for modern
radicalism — the expansiveness of their ideals and the alternatives that
confronted humanity. The anarchist thinkers and libertarian utopists
were deeply sensitive to *choices* that could have been made in redirecting human society along rational and liberatory lines. They raised the
far-reaching questions of whether community and individuality could
be brought into harmony with each other; whether the nation was the
necessary, indeed the ethical, successor to the community or *commune*;
whether the State was the unavoidable successor to city and regional
confederations; whether the communal use of resources had to be
supplanted by private ownership; whether the artisanal production of
goods and small, humanly scaled, agricultural operations were destined
by “historical necessity” to be abandoned for giant assembly lines and
mechanized systems of agribusiness. Finally, they raised the question
of whether ethics had to give way to statecraft and what would be the
destiny of politics if it tried to adapt itself to centralized states.
They saw no contradictions between material well being and a
well-ordered society, between substantive equality and freedom, or
between sensuousness, play, and work. They envisioned a society
where abundance would be possible and a gender-blind political culture
would emerge as the working week, superfluous production, and excessive consumption diminished. These questions, anticipated nearly
two centuries ago and infused by the moral fervour of more than two
thousand years of heretical movements like the Joachimites, have
surfaced in the late twentieth century with a vengeance. Words like
“precursors” have become simply meaningless from the standpoint of
a crisis-ridden society like our own which must re-evaluate the *entire*
history of ideas and the alternatives opened by social history in the past.
What is immediately striking about their work is their acute sense of
the alternatives to the abuses of their day and to the abuses of our own.
We cannot ignore the differences that distinguish the anarchist
theorists and the libertarian utopists of the last century from those of a
more distant past Anarchic tendencies such as the primitive Christians,
the radical Gnostics, the medieval Brotherhood of Free Spirit, the
Joachimites, and the Anabaptists viewed freedom more as a result of a
supernaturalistic visitation than as the product of human activity. This
basically passive-receptive mentality, based on mystical underpinnings, is crucial. That certain premodern tendencies in the anarchic
tradition *did* act to change the world does not alter the fact that even
their very actions were seen as the expression of a theistic preordination, In their eyes, action stemmed from the transmutation of the deity’s
will into human will. It was the product of a social alchemy that was
possible because of a supernatural decision, not because of human
autonomy. The “philosopher’s stone” of change in this early approach
reposed in heaven, not on earth. Freedom had to “come,” as it were,
from agents that were suprahuman, be they a “second coming” of Christ
or the preachings of a new messiah. Generally, in accord with Gnostic
thinking, there were always elites like “psychics” who were free of evil
or leaders blessed with moral perfection. History, in effect, was as much
of a clock as it was a Joachimite chronicle: it ticked away a form of
metaphysical time until the sins of the world became so intolerable that
they activated the deity, who no longer forswore his creation as well as
the suffering of the poor, deprived, and oppressed.
The Renaissance, Enlightenment, and, above all, the nineteenth
century, radically altered this naive social dispensation. The “Age of
Revolutions,” if we are to properly characterize the period from the late
1770s to the mid-twentieth century, banished supernatural visitations
and a passive-receptive stance by the oppressed from its historical
agenda. The oppressed had to *act* if they wished to free themselves.
They had to make their own history willfully, an incisive concept which
Jean Jacques Rousseau, for all his failings, added to the history of
radical ideas and for which he deserves immortality. The oppressed had
to *reason*. There was no appeal to powers other than their own minds.
The combination of reason and will, of thought and action, of reflection
and intervention, changed the whole landscape of radicalism, divesting
it of its mythic, mystical, religious, and intuitive qualities — which,
regrettably, are beginning to return today in a disempowered and
psychologically therapized world.
The radicalism of the “Age of Revolutions,” however, went further.
The Joachimite treatment of history moves, not unlike the Marxist, to
the drumbeat of an inexorable “final days,” an end, even a Hegelian
absolute, where all that was had to be, in some sense, all that unfolded,
followed the guidance of a “hidden hand,” be it of God, Spirit and the
“cunning of reason” (to use Hegel’s language), or economic interest,
however concealed that interest may have been from those who were
influenced by it. There were no real alternatives to what was, is, or even
would be — as absurd debates about the “inevitability of socialism”
revealed a generation or two ago.
The emphasis of anarchist and libertarian utopists on *choice* in
history was to create a radically new point of departure from the
increasingly teleological visions of religious and later “scientific”
socialisms. In great part, this emphasis explains the attention the
nineteenth century anarchists and libertarian utopists were to place on
individual autonomy, the individual’s capacity to make choices based
on rational and ethical judgements. This view is markedly different
from the liberal tradition with which anarchic views of individuality
have been associated by their opponents, particularly by Marxists.
Liberalism offered the individual a modicum of “freedom,” to be sure,
but one that was constricted by the “invisible hand” of the competitive
marketplace, not by the capacity of free individuals to act according to
ethical considerations. The “free entrepreneur” on whom liberalism
modelled its image of individual autonomy was, in fact, completely
trapped in a market collectivity, however “emancipated” he seemed
from the overtly medieval world commune of guilds and religious
obligations. He was the plaything of a “higher law” of market interactions based on competing egos, each of whom cancelled out his egoistic
interests in the formation of a general social interest.
Anarchism and the libertarian utopists never cast the free individual
in this light. The individual had to be free to function as an *ethical* being,
according to anarchist theorists — not as a narrow egoist—in making
rational, hopefully disinterested, choices between rational and irrational alternatives in history. The Marxist canard that anarchism is a product
of liberal or bourgeois “individualism” has its roots in ideologies that
are bourgeois to their very core, such as those based on myths of an
“invisible hand” (liberalism), Spirit (Hegelianism), and economic
determinism (Marxism). The anarchist and libertarian utopist emphasis
on individual freedom meant the emancipation of history itself from an
ahistorical preordination and stressed the importance of ethics in influencing choice. The individual is, indeed, truly free and attains true
individuality when he or she is guided by a rational, humane, and
high-minded notion of the social and communal good.
Finally, anarchist visions of a new world, particularly libertarian
utopias, imply that society can always be remade. Indeed, utopia is, by
definition, the world as it *should* be according to the canons of reason
in contrast to the world as it is, according to the blind, unthinking
interaction of uncomprehending forces. The nineteenth-century anarchist tradition, less graphic and pictorial than the utopists who painted
a canvas of now and detailed images, reasoned out its theories in
accordance with human history, not theological, mystical, or
metaphysical history. The world had always made itself through the
agency of real flcsh-and-blood human beings, facing real choices at
turning points of history. And it could remake itself along proven
alternative lines that confronted people in the past.
Indeed, much of the anarchist tradition is not a “primitivistic”
yearning for the past, as Marxist historians like Hobsbawn would have
us believe, but a recognition of past possibilities that remain unfulfilled,
such as the far-rcaching importance of community, confederation,
self-management of the economy, and a new balance between
humanity and nature. Marx’s famous injunction that the dead should
bury the dead is meaningless, however well-intended it may be, when
the present tries to parody the past. Only the *living* can bury the dead
and they can do so on ly i f they understand what is dead and what is still
living; indeed, what is intensely vital in the body-strewn battlefields of
history.
Herein lies the power of William Godwin’s concern for individual
autonomy, for the ethical person whose mind is unfettered by the social
burdens of suprahuman forces and all forms of domination, including
deities as well as statesmen, the authority of custom as well as the
authority of the State. Herein, too, lies the power of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon’s concern for municipalism and confederalism as principles
of associations, indeed, as ways of life whose freedom is unfettered by
the nation-state as well as the pernicious role of property. Herein lies
Michael Bakunin’s hypostasization of popular spontaneity and the
transformative role of the revolutionary act, of the deed as an expression
of will that is unfettered by the constraints of compromise and parliamentary cretinism. Herein, finally, lies the power of Peter
Kropotkin’s ecological visions, his practical concern with human scale,
decentralization, and the harmonization of humanity with nature as
distinguished from the explosive growth of urbanization and centralization.
I shall have the opportunity to examine and restate the ideas of these
remarkable and little appreciated thinkers in the context of the problems
we face today and the need for an ecological society. For the present,
let me pause to examine the issue of emancipation of another kind —
the emancipation of the body in the form of a new sensuousness and of
the human spirit in the form of an ecological sensibility. These issues
rarely figure in most discussions of social renovation, although they
have a prominent place in utopian thinking.
A sense of sheer *joie de vivre*, of joy of living, is closely wedded to
the anarchic tradition, despite the arid patches of asceticism that surface
in its midst. Emma Goldman’s admonition — “If I can’t dance in your
revolution, I don’t want ill” — is typically anarchic in its disposition.
A colourful tradition exists that goes back centuries in time to artisan
and even certain peasant anarchists who demanded as much for the
emancipation of the senses as they did for their communities. The
Ophites in the backwash of antiquity reread the Biblical scriptures to
make knowledge the key to salvation; the snake and Eve, the agents of
freedom; the ecstatic release of the flesh, the medium for the full
expression of soul. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, an abiding movement over many different names in medieval Europe, rejected the
ecclesiastical reverence for self-denial and celebrated their version of
Christianity as a message of sheer libertinism as well as social liberation. In Rabelais’s “Abbey of Thelcme” narrative, the maxim, “Do As Thou Wilt!” removed all restraint from the members of its playful order,
who were free to rise, dine, love, and cultivate all the pleasures of the
flesh and the mind as they chose.
The technical limits of past eras, the fact that pleasure could rarely
be separated from parasitism in a demanding world of toil, made all of
these movements and utopias elitist. What the Brethren of the Free
Spirit stole from the rich, the rich, in turn, took from the poor. What the
members of the Abbey of Theleme enjoyed as a matter of right was
expropriated from the labour of builders, food cultivators, cooks, and
the grooms who served them. Nature was not bountiful, it was assumed,
except in a few usually favoured areas of the world. Emancipation of
the senses was often assumed by the poor and their revolutionary
prophets to be a ruling class privilege, although it was more widespread
in villages and towns than we have been led to believe. And even the
oppressed had their dreams of utopistic pleasures, of visions where
nature was indeed bountiful and rivers flowed with milk and honey.
But always this marvelous dispensation was the product of a being other
than themselves who bestowed the gift of plenty upon them in the form
of a “promised land” — be it deities or irascible demons rather than
technology and new, more equitable, arrangements of work and distribution.
The greatest Utopians of the nineteenth century represent a radical
change in this traditional mix of outlooks and, in this respeetthey invite
our attention. Robert Owen’s early “industrial villages,” which combined the most advanced technologies of the time with agriculture in
humanly scaled communities were structured around the technological
opportunities opened by the Industrial Revolution. Whether “first nature” is bountiful or not, it is dearly “second nature” or human society
that is economically productive. Humanity makes its own social utopia
rather than awaiting its messianic delivery from suprahuman beings.
And it does so through its own technical ingenuity, powers of
cooperation, and social imagination. A technological utopianism was
to develop a life of its own, to be sure, culminating in the present century
with H.G. Wells’s technocratically administered world, and guided by
Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” of centuries earlier, a sketchy scientistic utopia of the sixteenth century. William Morris’s utopia, on the
other hand, was more artisanal and wistfully medieval, albeit libertarian
to the core. His “News from Nowhere,” overthrows capitalism and
recreates the commune of the Middle Ages with its pride in craftsmanship, its human scale, and its cooperative values. Industry, by and large,
goes by the board, together with authority, and quality production
compensates for any gains provided by the mass manufacture of shoddy
goods.
Morris’s utopia, in this respect, is a romantic throwback to a world
that was gone forever, but not one that was lacking in lessons for his
time and ours. The quality of production and artistry of the artisan still
haunts us as a standard of excellence and a means of conserving goods
for generations in what is not a “throw-away” economy whose products
are transient and insult every canon of good taste. Morris’s values were
clearly ecological They advance a message of human scale, the integration of agriculture with crafts, the production of lasting, truly artistic works, and a nonhierarchical society.
The utopist who was to meld these seemingly opposing traditions —
sensuousness with mind, the production of lasting goods with
industry, the belief in a bountiful nature with human activity, play with
work — was neither a socialist nor an idle visionary, namely, Charles
Fourier, who turned (in his view) imagination into a science and
Newtonian models of an orderly world into a cosmological fantasy. It
is not important for the purposes of our discussion to explore Fourier’s
sense of mission and the depth of his social principles. He was not only
not a socialist; he was not an egalitarian. His works are riddled with
contradictions, hefty prejudices, and are a totally failed endeavour to
make his system of “passionate intercourse” into a mathematical system, and to enlist the support of the powerful and wealthy to establish
his ideal phalansteries — enormous palaces that could house the
minimum 1,620 people of suitable and complementary dispositions
who would make for emotionally balanced communities. Needless to
say, his phalanstery was to be as self-sufficient as possible with
workshops, farming land surrounding it, residences, educational
centres, and ballrooms, all linked by covered galleries to protect the
inhabitants from inclement weather and give them easy access to each
other.
What is significant about Fourier’s phalanstery is not its structural
principles, but the principles that guided its way of life, many of which
were formulated in opposition to the monotony of industrial work, the
puritanical values of the time, the burden of poverty that was inflicted
on the senses as well as the body. Accordingly, sexual freedom was to
wash out traditional familial inhibitions and philistine conventions.
God rules the universe by attraction and not by force. This was a novel
viewpoint, indeed, a socially rebellious one. Rule consists of self-satisfaction not of obedience to authority. The answer to industrial discipline is the daily rotation of work interspersed by personal delights
for body and mind, magnificent cuisine to satisfy the palate, a gallery
of highly imaginative suggestions for easing life, and the all-important
belief that irksome work could be turned into play by adding charm,
festivities, and the company of complementary passionate natures in
the form of co-workers. Fourier thereby tried to efface the demanding
“realm of necessity” which held everyone in yoke to toil, and replace
it with the artful “realm of freedom” which made even hard work a
pleasurable desideratum.
The “Harmonian World” Fourier envisioned, based on attraction
rather than coercion, became a social program — certainly for his
acolytes who were to give it a distinctly anarchic character after his
death. There was no contradiction in Fourier’s mind between human
artifice and natural fecundity, any more than there was between body
and mind, play and work, freedom and order, unity and diversity. As
yet, these were rebellious intuitions that a naturalistic version of dialectic has to work out, Fourier’s writings converge in time, if not in place,
with Robert Owen’s “industrial village” which realistically combined
factories and workshops with farms in fully integrated communities, a
vision that was to form the prototype for Kropotkin’s idea of a libertarian community.
Between the closing years of the French Revolution and the midnineteenth century, the ideals of freedom had acquired a solidly
naturalistic, technologically viable, and solidly material base. Here,
too, was a remarkable turning point in history when humanity, by
whatever action, might well have swerved from a path of market-oriented and profit-oriented expansion to one of community-oriented
and ecology-oriented harmony, a harmony between human and
non-human that could have been projected by virtue of a new sensibility
into a harmony between humanity and nature. More so than the latter
half of the nineteenth century, when society became engulfed by a
degree of industrial development that was totally remaking the natural
world, if not turning it in time into a synthetic one, the first half of the
century was filled with the promise of a new integration between
society and nature and a cooperative commonwealth that would have
satisfied the most generous impulses toward freedom. That this did not
occur was due in no small measure to the extent to which the bourgeois
spirit began to enfold the Euro-American mixed society of the past
century — and, no less significantly, even the revolutionary project of
remaking society that had found such rich expression in the Utopians,
the visionary socialists, and the anarchists who followed in the wake
of the French Revolution.
The revolutionary project had acquired a richly ethical heritage, a
commitment to reconciling the dualities of mind, body, and society that
pitted reason against sensuality, work against play, town against
country, and humanity against nature, Utopian and anarchist thought at
their best saw these contradictions clearly and tried to overcome them
with an ideal of freedom based on complementarity, the irreducible
minimum, and the equality of unequals. The contradictions were seen
as evidence of a society mired in “evil,” indeed, as a “civilization,” to
use Fourier’s word, that was turned against humanity and culture by
the irrational directions it had followed up to the time. Reason, in its
power to be employed speculatively beyond the existing state of affairs,
was becoming a crude rationalism, which was based on the efficient
exploitation of labour and natural resources. Science, in its searching
probe of reality and its underlying order, was turning into a cult of
scientism, which was little more than the instrumental engineering of
control over people and nature. Technology, with its promise of
ameliorating labour, was turning into a technocratic ensemble of means
for exploiting the human and nonhuman world.
The anarchist theorists and the libertarian utopists, despite their
understandable belief that reason, science, and technics could be creative forces for remaking society, voiced a collective protest against the
reduction of these forces to purely instrumental ends. They were
acutely aware, as we can now see retrospectively from the vantage point
of our own historical malaise, of the rapid transitions through which
the century was going. Their fiery demands for immediate change along
liberatory lines was permeated by a sense of anxiety that society as a
whole was faced with “embourgeoisment,” to use Bakunin’s word for
the remarkably anticipatory fears and the fatalism that gripped him in
the last years of his life.
Contrary to the philistine judgements of Gerald Brenan and
Hobsbawn, the anarchist emphases on “propaganda of the deed” were
not primitive acts of violence and mere catharsis in the face of public
passivity to the horrors of industrial capitalism. They were, in great part,
the product of a desperate insight into the fact that a historic moment
in social development was being lost, one whose loss would produce
immense obstacles in the future to the realization of the revolutionary
project. Imbued with ethical and visionary concepts, they rightly saw
their time as one that demanded immediate human emancipation, not
as one “stage” among many in the long history of humanity’s evolution
toward freedom with its endless “preconditions” and technological
“substructures.”
What did anarchist theorists and libertarian utopists did not see is
that ideals of freedom were themselves faced with “embourgeoisment.” No one, perhaps not even Marx himself who played so important a role
in this infection, could have anticipated that the attempt to make the
emancipatory project into a “science” under the rubric of “scientific
socialism” would have made it even more of a “dismal science” than
economics; indeed, that it would divest it of its ethical heart, its
visionary spirit, and its ecological substance. What is no less compelling, is thatMarx’s “scientific socialism” was to develop in tandem with
the bourgeoisie’s sinister undoing of the very objective as well as
ideological premises of the revolutionary project by justifying the
absorption of decentralized units into the centralized state, confederalist visions into chauvinistic nations, and humanly scaled technologies into all-devouring systems of mass production.
The ideals of freedom, tainted as they have been, still exist in our midst.
But rarely has the revolutionary project been more diluted by the
“embourgeoisment” that Bakunin feared toward the end of his life. Nor
have its terms been more ambiguous than they are today. Words like
“radicalism” and “leftism” have become murky and they are in grave
danger of being severely compromised. What passes for revolutionism,
radicalism, and leftism, today, would have been dismissed a generation
or two ago as reformism and political opportunism. Social thought has
moved so deeply into the bowels of the present society that self-styled
“leftists” — be they socialists, Marxists, or independent radicals of
various kinds — risk the possibility of being digested without even
knowing it. There is simply no conscious left of any significance in
many Euro-American countries. Indeed, there is not even a critically
independent radicalism, apart from small enclaves of revolutionary
theorists.
What is perhaps more serious in the long run is that the revolutionary
project risks the loss of its very identity, its capacity for self-definition,
its sense of direction. Not only do we witness a lack of revolutionary
insight today, but there is even an inability to define what is meant by
the words “revolutionary change” and the full meaning of terms like
“capitalism.” Bakunin’s troubled remark about the “embourgeoisment” of the working class can be matched by Marx’s fear that a day
might come when a future generation of workers would take capitalism
so much for granted that it would seem like a “natural” form of human
affairs, not a society limited to a specific period of history. To speak of
Euro-American society as “capitalist” often invites puzzlement at best
or specious contrast with the so-called socialist societies of countries
like Russia and China at worst. That the former is a corporate form of
capitalism while the latter is a bureaucratic form often seems incomprehensible to conventional wisdom.
It may well be, to be sure, that we still do not understand what
capitalism really is. Since the outbreak of the First World War, radicals
have described every period of capital ism as its “last stage,” even while
the system has grown, acquired international dimensions, and innovated technologies that were not foreseeable by science fiction a few
generations ago. Capitalism has also exhibited a degree of stability and
an ability to co-opt its opposition that would have thoroughly shaken
the elders of socialism and anarchism in the last century. Indeed, it may
well be that capitalism has not come *completely* into its own as the
absolute incarnation of social evil, to use Bakunin’s words — that is to
say, as a system of unrelenting social rivalry between people at all levels
of life and an economy based on competition and accumulation. But
this much is clear: it is a system that must *continually* expand until it
explodes all the bonds that tie society to nature — as growing holes in
the ozone layer and the increase in the greenhouse effect indicate. It is
literally the cancer of social life as such.
In this case, nature will take its “revenge.” This “revenge,” to be
sure, may assume the form of an uninhabitable planet for complex
life-forms like our own and our mammalian cousins. But given the
accelerating rate of technological innovation, including means for
plumbing the very secrets of matter and life in the form of nuclear
science and bioengineering, it is possible that the breakdown of natural
cycles will be dealt with by a completely synthetic substitute in which
huge industrial installations will supplant natural processes. It would
be utterly blind, today, to overlook such a possibility — and the
possibility too that future generations will be obliged to accept a
nightmarish totalitarian society structured around a completely technocratic administration of social and natural affairs on a global scale.
In that case the planet conceived as a self-regulating natural system
of checks and balances under the rubric of the “Gaia hypothesis,” would
be replaced by a partially or totally engineered technological system,
perhaps a “Daedalus hypothesis,” as it were, without the Greek notion
of limit and restraint.
But until such a grim prospect becomes a dear issue on the historical
agenda, we desperately need to recover the revolutionary project and
the new elements that have been added to it over the past half-century.
Nor can we be impeded by taunts that the very idea of a *revolutionary*
project is evidence of “sectarianism” or “radical dogmatism.” What
today calls itself “liberal” or “left-of-centre,” to use the prudent political verbiage of our time, is too debilitated intellectually to know what
constitutes “sectarianism” as distinguished from a searching analysis
of contemporary social and ecological problems.
We, in turn, must resolutely and independently re-examine the past
and present periods into which the revolutionary project can be sorted
out, such as the era of “proletarian socialism,” the “New Left,” and the
so-called Age of Ecology. We must explore the answers that have been
given in the recent past to the problems that have arisen today and the
ones that lie ahead. Until we engage in a critical examination of earlier
solutions, we will still be groping in the darkness of an unknown history
that has much to teach us. We will be burdened by a naivety and
ignorance that can completely mislead us into meaningless, futile, and
even frivolous directions.
To a great extent what sharply confronts us today is the fact that one
of the great revolutionary projects of the modern era is no longer viable
or meaningful in our present predicament. I refer in part to the Marxist
analyses of society — but, as we shall see, to proletarian socialism as
a whole, which extended far beyond Marxism into libertarian forms of
socialism and even certain utopian ideas. That “being determines
consciousness” or, put less philosophically, that material factors determine cultural life, is at once too simplistic to carry the enormous weight
it had in the latter half of the last century and the first half of the present
one, when *capitalism itself* shaped the mentality of Europe and America
along highly economistic lines.
A closer view of history shows that this largely bourgeois image of
reality, which Marxism turned into a seemingly “radical” ideology, is
limited to specific times in the past, however prevalent it may seem at
present It would have been impossible to understand why capitalism
did not become a dominant social order at various times in the ancient
world if inherited cultural traditions had not restrained and ultimately
undermined the capitalistic drives that were very much at work in the
past ages. One could go on with endless examples of the extent to which
“consciousness” seemed to determine “being” (if one wants to use such
“deterministic” language) by turning our eyes to the histories of Asia,
Africa, and Indian America, not to mention many European countries
early in modern times. On the broad level of the relationship of
consciousness to being — which still carries considerable weight with
Marxist academics even as all else in the theory lies in debris —
Marxism begs its own questions. Looking back from its entrenched
economistic and bourgeois viewpoint, it defines in bourgeois terms a
host of problems that have distinctly nonbourgeois and surprisingly
noneconomic bases. Even the failure of precapitalist societies to move
into capitalism, for example, is explained by a “lack” of technological
development, the poverty of science and, as often happens to be the
case in many of Marx’s less rigorous works like the *Grundrisse*, by the
very cultural factors that are supposed to be contingent on economic
factors.
Apart from the circular reasoning that characterizes so much of
Marxism, what is of more serious concern in trying to define the
revolutionary project for our time is the ideal of proletarian socialism
and the historical myths that have grown up around it. Revolutionary
projects have always been rooted in the special features of their period,
however much they have tried to universalize their ideas and speak for
humanity at all times. Peasant radicalism dates back almost to the
beginnings of settled village life. Dressed in a universal religious
morality, it always professed to speak for timeless values and hopes
centred on land and village forms. Figures like the Ukrainian anarchist,
Nestor Makhno in 1917–1921, and the Mexican populist, Emiliano
Zapata, around the same time period, voiced almost identical goals. By
the same token, artisanal radicalism surfaced throughout the Middle
Ages and reached its zenith in the *enrages* movement of the French
Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
was perhaps its most conscious spokesperson, although his
municipalist and confederalist ideas were more far-reaching in their
reconstructive implications than those of any particular class for which
he spoke.
Proletarian socialism, which still lingers on today in the ideals of
many independent socialists and syndicalists, has a more complex and
convoluted pedigree. It stems, in part, from the transformation of many
fairly self-sufficient craftsmen, by capitalism, into industrial workers
during the explosive years of the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, it
was influenced as a movement — all theories aside — by its rural and
small town origins, notably, by the proletarianization of peasants, who
were obliged to leave their villages and agrarian cultures. That they
brought these precapitalist cultures, with their naturalistic rhythms and
values, into industrial cities is a matter of crucial importance in explaining the character of their discontent and their militancy. The working
classes of traditional industrial capitalism, even as late as the 1920s and
1930s in America and Europe, were not “hereditary” proletarians.
American auto workers, for example, were recruited from the Appalachian mountains in the first half of the present century. Many
French, and especially Spanish, workers were recruited from villages
and small towns, when they were not simply craftspeople in large cities
like Paris. The same is true of the working classes that made the 1917
revolution in Russia. Marx, it is worth noting, to his lasting confusion,
generally viewed these highly volatile strata as *der alte scheisse* (literally, “the old shit”) and in no way counted on them to make the
revolutions that his followers were to celebrate after his death.
This agrarian background yielded a highly complex mosaic of
attitudes, values, and tensions between pre-industrial and industrial
cultures — all of which gave a fiery, almost millenarian, character to
men and women who, even though they worked with modern
machinery and lived in major, often highly literate, urban areas, were
guided by largely artisanal and peasant values. The magnificent anarchist workers who burned the money they found in the looted gunshops
of Barcelona during the hectic days of the July, 1936 uprising (as
Ronald Fraser reports), were people who acted from deep utopistic and
ethical impulses, not simply from the economic interests that capitalism
was to imbue in much of the working class as time passed by.[16] The
proletariat of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a
very special social breed. They were *delasee* in their thinking, spontaneous in the vital naturalism of their behaviour, angry over the loss
of their autonomy, and shaped in their values by a lost world of
craftsmanship, a love of land, and community solidarity.
Hence, there was the highly revolutionary spirit that surged up in
the workers’ movement from the June barricades of Paris in 1848, when
a largely artisanal working class raised the red flags of a “social
republic,” to the May barricades of Barcelona in 1937, where an even
more socially conscious working class raised the red and black flags of
anarcho-syndicalism.
What has so drastically changed in the decades that followed this
century-long movement, and the revolutionary project that was built
around it, is the social composition, political culture, heritage, and aims
of the present-day proletariat. The agrarian world and the cultural
tensions with the industrial world that fostered their revolutionary
fervour, have waned from history. So, loo, have the people, indeed the
very personalities, that embodied this background and these tensions.
The working class has now become completely industrialized, not
radicalized as socialists and anarcho-syndicalists so devoutly hoped. It
has no sense of contrast, no clash of traditions, and none of the
millenarian expectations of its antecedents. Not only has the mass
media commandeered it and defined its expectations (a convenient
explanation, if one wants to anchor everything in the power of modern
media), but the proletariat as a *class* has become the counterpart of the
bourgeoisie as a class, not its unyielding antagonist. To use the language that was spawned by proletarian socialism against its own myths,
the working class is simply an organ within the body of capitalism, not
the developing “embryo” of a future society, a concept that figured so
significantly in the revolutionary project of proletarian socialism.
We are simply witnesses not only to its failure as a “historical agent”
for revolutionary change, but to its completion as a product spawned
by capitalism with the development of capitalism itself. In its “pure”
form, the proletariat has never been a threat, as a class, to the capitalist
system. It was precisely the “impurities” of the proletariat, like the bits
of tin and zinc that turn copper into hardened bronze, that gave the
earlier proletariat its militancy and, at certain high points, its millenarian zeal.
We come, here, to a terribly flawed model of social change that Marx
introduced into the revolutionary project of the last hundred years —
one that was to be implicitly accepted by non-Marxist radicals as well.
This is the belief that a new society is born within the womb of the old
and eventually grows out of it like a robust child that commandeers or
destroys its parents.
Nothing in antiquity supported this “embryo” theory of revolution,
if it can be called that. European feudalism replaced ancient society on
the northern shores of the Mediterranean — and only there — because
feudal relationships were generally the form into which tribal relations
decompose almost everywhere when they are not reworked into absolute monarchies of the kind that appeared in the East. The great
European hinterland north of the Alps was rapidly losing its tribalistic
features when it encountered Roman society. Capitalism was not born
within the womb of the new European feudalism and there was no
inevitability about its birth, as we are led to believe by Marxist historians of the past or by Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein
in more recent times. I have tried to show elsewhere that Europe,
between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, was very mixed
socially and economically, offering many alternatives to capitalism and
the nation-state.[17] The myth of an “embryonic” development of
capitalism and the “inevitability” of its predominance was to wreak
havoc in the revolutionary project of proletarian socialism.
First, it was to create the myth that the proletariat was the analogue
of the bourgeoisie in modern times and presumably, like the medieval
bourgeoisie, was developing along revolutionary lines within
capitalism itself. That the proletariat never even had the economic
predominance assigned by Marx to the early bourgeoisie, indeed, that
it would have to seize economic as well as political power—all of this
created a can of theoretical worms that should have shown how absurd
the “embryo” theory was for the proletariat, even if the medieval
bourgeoisie enjoyed the power imputed to it. Precisely how the working
class could rise beyond its own narrow interests, in an economy to
which it was integrally wedded by its narrow demands for jobs, higher
wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions *within* the capitalist
system, remained an impenetrable mystery.
Marxian economics, for all its extraordinary insights into the commodity relationship and accumulation process, was a largely contrived
ideology to show that capitalism would drive the proletariat to revolt
through misery and chronic crises. The proletariat, it was presumed,
enjoyed an advantage over all precapitalist oppressed classes in that the
industrial system made for cooperation within the factory itself and that
time would make it the overwhelming population of the country as
capitalism itself expanded. That the factory system would, if anything,
utterly *domesticate* the proletariat through the deadening industrial
routine of the factory; that it would subdue the proletariat’s unruliness
by conditioning it to a managerial hierarchy and the rationalized
methods of production; that the proletariat would not be driven by sheer
desperation to revolution, but would be stratified against itself in the
course of which the well-paid and racially “superior” would be
resolutely pitted against the poorly paid and racially “inferior”; that
hopes of a chronic economic crisis would be dashed by shrewd techniques of crisis-management; that nationalism and even patriotic
chauvinism would prevail over international class solidarity; indeed,
that technological innovation would reduce the proletariat numerically
and bring it into collusion with its own exploitation through Japanese-type management approaches — all of this was not even faintly
understood as the logic of the capitalist development.
Second, Marx’s myth of an “embryonic” development was to mystify history and remove its essential element of spontaneity. Basically,
there could be only one course of development in such a theory, not
alternative ones. Choice played a very insignificant role in social
evolution. Capitalism, the nation-state, technological innovation, the
breakdown of all traditional ties that once fostered a sense of social
responsibility — all were seen not only as inevitable but desirable.
History, in effect, allowed for minimal human autonomy. “Men make
their own history...” wrote Marx — a rather obvious statement that
culture-oriented Marxists were to emphasize long after his death and
amidst growing contradictions between his theories and objective
reality. They often forgot to note, however, that Marx made his statement primarily to emphasize its closing phrase: “... they do not make
it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” [18]
The Marxian revolutionary project, but by no means the Marxian
alone, became saddled with an array of “stages,” “substages,” and still
further “substages” that rested on technological and political “preconditions.” In contrast to the anarchist policy of continually pressing
against the society in search of its weak-points and trying to open areas
that would make revolutionary change possible, Marxian theory was
structured around a strategy of “historical limits” and “stages of
development” The Industrial Revolution was welcomed as a technological “precondition” for socialism and Luddite tendencies were
denounced as “reactionary”; the nation-state was heralded as a crucial
step in the direction of a “proletarian dictatorship” and confederalist
demands were denounced as atavistic. Everywhere along the way,
centralization of the economy and the State were welcomed as advances in the direction of a “planned economy,” that is, of a highly
rationalized economy. Indeed, so strongly were Marxists, including
Engels personally, committed to these fatal views that the Marxist
Social Democrats of Germany were reluctant to pass anti-monopoly
legislation in the 1920s (to the lasting chagrin of the German petty
bourgeoisie, which soon turned to the Nazis for relief) because the
concentration of industry and commerce in fewer corporate hands was
seen as “historically progressive” in bringing the country closer to a
planned economy.
Third, the proletariat itself, already reduced to a fairly pliant instrument of production by capitalism, was treated as such by its Marxist
vanguard. Workers were seen primarily as economic beings and the
embodiment of economic interests. Efforts by radicals like Wilhelm
Reich to appeal to their sexuality or revolutionary artists like
Mayakovsky to appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities invited opprobrium by Marxist parties. Art and culture were treated largely as
conduits of propaganda to be placed in the service of workers’ organizations.
The Marxian revolutionary project was notable for its lack of interest
in urbanism and community. These issues were dismissed as “super-structural” and presumably had no bearing on “basic” economic concerns. Human beings and their wide range of interests as creative
people, parents, children, and neighbours were reconstituted artificially
into economic beings, so that the Marxian revolutionary project reinforced the very degradation, deculturalization, and depersonalization
of the workers produced by the factory system. The worker was at his
or her best as a good trade-unionist or a devoted party functionary, not
as a culturally sophisticated being with wide human and moral concerns.
Finally, this denaturing of human beings into vacuous class beings
led to a denaturing of nature itself. Not only were ecological issues alien
to the Marxian revolutionary project, but they were seen as insidiously
counterproductive in the literal sense of the word. They inhibited the
growth of industry and the mining of the natural world. Nature was
treated as “stingy,” “blind,” a cruel “realm of necessity,” and an
ensemble of “natural resources” that labour and technology had to
subdue, dominate, and rework. The great historical advance produced
by capitalism, which Marx welcomed as “necessary,” was its ruthless
capacity to destroy all restraints and limits on the ravaging of the natural
world. Hence we encounter encomiums by Marx to the new industrial
dispensation introduced by capital which, in his eyes, was “permanently revolutionary” because of its reduction of nature to “simply an
object” for human utility.[19]
Marx’s language and his views on the unbridled use of nature for
social ends does not reflect the so-called humanism or
anthropocentricity that is denigrated these days by so many Anglo-American environmentalists. Marx’s “humanism” actually rested on a
remarkably insidious reduction of *human beings* to objective forces of
“history,” their subjugation to a social lawfulness over which they had
no control. This is a mentality that is more disconcerting than the most
unfeeling form of “anthropocentrism.” Nature is turned into mere
“natural resources” because human beings are conceived as mere
“economic resources.” Marx’s view of human labour as the means by
which “man” discovers himself in conflict with nature has the sinister
implication that labour is the “essence” of humankind, a trait that set it
aside from all other human traits.
In this respect, Marx cut across the grain of the authentic humanist
tradition of the past, which singled out human beings because of their
consciousness, morality, aesthetic sensibilities, and empathy for all
living things. Even more troubling, if human beings in the Marxist
theory are merely “instruments of history,” the happiness and welfare
of the existing generation can be mortgaged to the emancipation of later
generations—an immortality that the Bolsheviks generally, and Stalin
in particular, were to use with deadly effect and on a frightful scale to
“build the future” on the corpses of the present.
The contribution proletarian socialism made to the revolutionary
project was minimal, at best, and largely economic in character, Marx s
critique of the bourgeois economy, while largely limited to his own
time, was masterful. It revealed the latent power of the commodity to
develop into an all-corrosive force in changing history and the subversive power of the market place to erase all traditional forms of social
life. It anticipated the accumulative power of capital to a point where
monopoly was seen as its outcome and automation as the logic of capitalistic technological innovation. Marx also saw that once
capitalism emerged, it produced a profound sense of scarcity that no
society before had generated in the human spirit Alienated humanity
lived in awe and fear of the very products of its own labour. Commodities had become fetishes which seemed to govern humanity through the fluctuations of the market place and their mysterious power
to decide crucial matters of economic survival. A free society could
only hope to come to terms with its own fears, material insecurities,
and artificially generated wants when technology had reached a level
development where a superfluity of goods would render scarcity meaningless —after which it could be hoped that, in a rational and ecological
society, human beings would develop meaningful wants that were not
distorted by the mystified economic world created by capitalism. That
this mystified world should become personalized, as it has in recent
years by various reborn religions — Christian or pagan — and by the
hypostasization of myth, shamanism, witchcraft, and other self-indulgent lures of the arcane, is evidence of the extent to which capitalism
has infested not only the economy but also private life.
It is important to make the need for a technology that can remove
modern fears of scarcity a part of the revolutionary project, that is, a
post-scarcity technology. But such a technology must be seen within
the context of a social development rather than as a “precondition” for
human emancipation under all conditions and in all eras. For all their
faults and shortcomings, precapitalist societies were structured around
certain powerful moral constraints. I have already cited a medieval
ordinance, singled out by Kropotkin, that “Everyone must be pleased
with his work. This was by no means a rarity. The notion that work
should be pleasant and that needs and wealth should not expand
indefinitely served to greatly condition popular notions of scarcity
itself. In fact, wealth was often seen as demonic and an excessive
indulgence of needs was regarded as morally debasing. To offer gifts,
to divest oneself of needless things, as we have seen, was hypostasized
over the accumulation of goods and the expansion of wants. Not that
the precapitalist societies consistently lacked an appetite for luxury
items and the good things of life—certainly not in imperial Rome. But
society quickly reacted against these “vices,” as they were seen, with
ascetism and paeans to self-denial.
Ironically, it was these very traditions that Marx was to deride in the
strongest language, praising capitalism for undermining “the inherited,
self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional ways of life” [20]
Production for its own sake — the typically capitalist disregard for all
quality goods and their utility for mere quantity and profit—was to be
matched by *consumption* for its own sake. This notion is comparatively
recent, to be sure. But it is very deeply entrenched today among broad
masses of people in the western world. Given the fetishization of
commodities and the identification of material security with affluence,
modern notions of consumption can no longer be modified significantly
by moral persuasion alone, important as such efforts may be. Present-day consumption patterns must be shown to be irrelevant, indeed
ridiculous, by virtue of the fact that technology can provide the good
life for all and that the very notion of the good life can now be redefined
along rational and ecological lines.
In any case, Marxism began to ebb as a revolutionary project when
capitalism restabilized itself after the Second World War without any
of the projected “proletarian revolutions” that were expected to end the
war and rescue society from the alternative of barbarism. Its decline
was still further accelerated by the transparent degeneration of Soviet
Russia into another nation-state, riddled by national chauvinism and
imperialistic ambitions. That Marxist studies have retreated into the
enclaves of academe is testimony to its death as a revolutionary
movement. It has become safe and toothless because it is so intrinsically
bourgeois in its overall orientation.
Capitalist countries, in turn, have nationalized large areas of their economies.
They “plan” production in one way or another and they
have buffered economic fluctuation with a large variety of reforms. The
working class has become a largely devitalized force for basic social
change, not to mention revolution. The red flag of Marxian socialism
is now draped over a coffin of myths that celebrate economic and
political centralization, industrial rationalization, a simplistic theory of
linear progress, and a basically anti-ecological stance, all in the name
of radicalism. But red flag or not, it still remains a coffin. The myths it
contains were to tragically deflect radical thought and practice from the
generous ideals of freedom that had preceded it in the early half of the
nineteenth century.
The revolutionary project did not die with the ebbing of Marxism,
to be sure, although vulgar Marxian ideas were to taint it for decades
after the thirties. By the late fifties and into the early sixties, an entirely
new constellation of ideas began to fall into place. The upsurge of the
civil rights movement in the United States created a social momentum
around the simple demand for ethnic equality, one that was in many
ways redolent of demands for equality that go back to the age of the
democratic revolutions in the eighteenth century and their sweeping
visions of a new human fraternity.
Martin Luther King’s speeches, for example, have a strikingly
millenarian quality about them that is almost precapitalist in character.
His words are openly utopistic and quasi-religious. They contain references to “dreams,” to ascents to the “mountain top like Moses, they appeal to an ethical fervour that surpasses a pica for special interests and parochial biases. They are voiced against a background of choral music that advances messages like “Freedom Now!” and “We Shall Overcome!”
The broadening of the idea of emancipation, indeed, its sanctification by a religious terminology and a prayer-like demeanour, replaced
the pseudo-science of Marxism. It was a pointedly ethical message of
spiritual redemption and a utopian vision of human solidarity that
transcended class, property, and economic interests. Ideals of freedom
were now being restated in the vernacular of the pre-Marxist revolutionary project — in language, that is, that would have been understandable to the day-dreaming Puritan radicals of the English
Revolution and perhaps even the radical yeomen of the American Revolution. By degrees, the movement became more and more secular. Peaceful protests orchestrated primarily by black ministers and
pacifists to bear witness to the infringement of basic human freedoms, gave way to angry encounters and violent resistance against the rambunctious use of authority.
Ordinary assemblies ended in riots until, from 1964 onward, almost every summer in the United States was climaxed by black ghetto uprisings of near-insurrectionary proportions.
The civil rights movement did not monopolize the egalitarian ideals
that emerged in the sixties. Preceded to a considerable extent by the
“antibomb” movement of the fifties, including the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in England and Women’s Strike for
Peace in the United States, several trends began to converge to produce
the New Left, a movement which sharply distinguished itself from the
Old Left in its aims, forms of organization, and strategies for social
change. The revolutionary project was being recovered — not in
continuity with proletarian socialism, but with **pre**-Marxist libertarian
ideals. Percolating into this project were the counterculture strains of
the “youth revolt” with its emphasis on new lifestyles, sexual freedom,
and a wide-ranging body of communal libertarian values. A richly
coloured horizon of social ideas, experiments, and relationships
emerged that glowed with extravagant hopes of radical change.
This glow did not come from ideology alone, to be sure. It was fueled
by sweeping technological, economic, and social transitions in Euro-American society. Between the end of the Second World War and the
early sixties, a good deal more than proletarian socialism had died in
the interim that separated the two periods. Other major features of the
Old Left were waning, such as the institutionalization of radicalism in
the form of hierarchical workers’ parties, the economic desperation that
marked the Great Depression decade, and an archaic technological
heritage based on massive industrial facilities and an oversized, labour-intensive factory system. The industrial plant of the Great Depression
years was not very technically innovative. The thirties may have been
a decade of earnest but grim hope; the sixties, by contrast, was a decade
of exuberant promise, even one that demanded the immediate gratification of its desires.
After World War II, capitalism, far from receding into the chronic
depression that preceded the war, had restabilized itself on stronger
foundations than it had ever known in history. It created a managed
economy based on military production, buoyed by dazzling technological advances in electronics, automation, nucleonics, and agribusiness.
Goods in vast quantities and varieties seemed to flow from an endless
horn of plenty. This was a wealth so massive, in fact, that sizeable
portions of the population could live on its mere leavings. It is difficult
from a distance of decades to realize what a buoyant sense of promise
infused the era.
This sense of promise was clearly materialistic. The
counterculture’s rejection of material things did not conflict with its
own consumption of stereos, records, television sets, “mind-expanding” pharmaceuticals, exotic clothing, and equally exotic foods. Early
liberal treatises like the “Triple Revolution” encouraged the highly
justified belief that technologically, in the Western world at least, we
had entered an era of greater freedom from toil. That society could be
adjusted to take full advantage of these material and social goodies was
hardly in doubt, provided, to be sure, that it could create a good life
structured around a new ethical viewpoint.
These expectations infused every stratum of society, including those
who were most deprived and underprivileged. The civil rights movement did not spring simply from the resentment that black people had
suffered during three centuries of oppression and discrimination. In the
sixties, it arose even more compellingly from popular expectations of
the better life enjoyed by the white middle classes and the belief that
there was more than enough to go around for all. The ethical message
of King and his lieutenants had deep roots in the tension between black
poverty and white affluence, a tension that made black oppression more
intolerable than it had been before.
By the same token, the radicalism of the New Left became more
encompassing and fundamental to the degree that the economic largess
that America enjoyed was so inequitably distributed and so irrationally
employed — particularly in military adventures abroad. The buoyancy
of the counterculture and its claims became increasingly utopian to the
degree that a comfortable life for all became more feasible. Young
people, the famous “drop-outs” of the sixties, made an ethical calling
of the fact that they could live well from the garbage pails of society
and with “a little help from one’s friends” to reword the lyrics of a
famous song by the Beatles.
I say this not to denigrate the New Left’s radicalism and the
counterculture’s utopianism. Rather, I seek to explain why they took
the extravagant forms they did—as well as why they were to fadeaway
when the crisis management” techniques of the system re-invented the
myth of scarcity and pulled in the reins of its welfare programs.
Nor do I claim that ethical ideals of freedom mechanically march in
step with material realities of poverty and abundance. The revolt of
peasants over five centuries of history and the utopian visions they
produced, of artisans over a similar span of time with similar vision, of
religious radicals tike the Anabaptists and Puritans, finally of rationalistic anarchists and libertarian Utopians — most of whom advanced ascetic massages in times that were technologically undeveloped — would be inexplicable in terms of this premise. These revolutionary
projects accepted parameters for freedom that were based on poverty,
not abundance. What commonly moved them to action were the hard
facts of the social transition from village to city, from city to nation-state, from artisanal forms of work to industrial toil, from mixed social
forms to capitalism—each a *worse* condition, psychologically as well
as materially, than its predecessor.
What moved the New Left to its own revolutionary project and the
counterculture to its version of unlicensed utopia were parameters for
freedom based on abundance — each period a potentially *better* condition than its predecessor. Indeed, for the first time, it seemed, society
could begin to forget about potentialities of technology to produce
material well-being for all and concentrate on the ethical well-being of
all.
Abundance, at least to the extent that it existed for the middle classes,
and a technology of an incalculable productivity fostered a radical
ethics of its own: the reasonable certainty that the abolition of oppression in any form — of the senses as well as of the body and mind —
could be achieved even on the *bourgeois* grounds of economic instrumentalism. What may very well account for the liberal tone of the
New Left’s early documents like the “Port Huron Statement was the
assumption that technology was so very productive that it could be used
to placate the wealthy and remove traditional fears of dispossession.
The wealthy could enjoy their wealth and, leaving questions of power
and social control aside, more than enough seemed to be at society’s
disposal to provide an affluent life for all. Capitalism and the State, in
effect, seemed to have lost their *raison d’etre*, their reason for being.
No longer need the means of life be distributed along hierarchical lines
because technology was rendering these means available for the asking.
Hence, toil ceased to be a historically explicable burden on the
masses. Sexual repression was no longer necessary to divert one s
libidinal energies into arduous labour. Conventions that stood in the
way of pleasure were insufferable under these new conditions, and need
could be replaced by desire as a truly human impulse. The “realm of
necessity,” in effect, could finally be replaced by the “realm of
freedom”_hence the vogue that Charles Fourier’s writings began to
enjoy at the time in many parts of the Western world.
In its initial phases, the New Left and the counterculture were
profoundly anarchistic and utopistic. Several popular concerns became
of focal importance in the projects that began to rise to the surface of
their collective consciousness. The first was richly democratic, appeals
were voiced for a face-to-face system of decision-making. The words
“participatory democracy” came very much into vogue as a description
of grassroots control over all aspects of life, not simply political ones.
Everyone was expected to be free to enter into the political sphere and
to deal with people in everyday life in a “democratic” manner. What
this meant, in effect, was that people were expected to be *transparent*
in all of their relationships and the ideas they held.
The New Left and, in no small degree, the emerging counterculture
that paralleled it, had a strong antiparliamentary ambience that often
verged on outright anarchism. Much has been written about the “fire in
the streets” that became part of the radical activities of the time.
However, there were also strong impulses toward an institutionalization of decision-making processes that went beyond the level of street
protests and the demonstrations that were so common during the
decade.
The principle American New Left organization. Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) and its German counterpart, the Socialists
Students Union (also SDS) were distinguished by the formality of their
many conferences and workshops. But few limitations were placed on
attendance — which left these organizations open to cynical invasions
of parasitic dogmatic radical sects. Many of their conferences and
workshops, apart from the fairly large ones, acquired an egalitarian
geometry of their own — the circle, in which there was no formal
chairperson or leader. Individuals yielded the forum to speakers merely
by designating their successors from among the raised hands of those
who wanted to voice their views.
This geometry and procedure was not simply an idle form of
organizational and democratic symbolism. The entire configuration
expressed an earnest belief in the ideal of face-to-face dialogue and a
spontaneous form of discussion. Leadership was grossly mistrusted to
a point where offices were often rotated and an entrenched officialdom
was frowned upon as a step toward authoritarian control. New Left
conferences contrasted dramatically with the highly formalized, often
carefully orchestrated gatherings that had marked conferences in the
workers’ movement a generation or two earlier. Indeed, democracy as
a radical form of decision-making was seen by proletarian socialism,
particularly in its Marxian form, as marginal to economic factors.
In a sense, the New Left, almost knowingly, was reviving traditions
that had been spawned by the democratic revolutions of two centuries
earlier. Precisely because the means of life seemed to be potentially
available to all in abundance, the New Left seemed to sense that
democracy and an ethical ideal of freedom was the direct pathway to
the very social egalitarianism that proletarian socialism had sought to
achieve by largely economic and party-oriented means. This was a
remarkable shift in orientation toward the role of ethics in an era when
all of humanity’s material problems could be solved in principle.
The pre-Marxist age of the democratic revolutions, in effect, had melded
with pre-Marxist forms of socialism and utopianism under the rubric
of a participatory democracy. Economics had now become truly political
and the political had begun to shed the patina of statecraft which
had surrounded it for a century — a change that had fundamentally
anarchic implications.
Secondly such a democratic disposition of social life was meaningless without
decentralization. Unless the institutional structure of
democratic life could be reduced to comprehensible, indeed a
graspable, human scale that all could understand, democracy could
hardly acquire a truly participatory form. New units of social intercourse had to be developed and new ways of relating to each other had
to be established. In short, the New Left began to grope toward new
forms of freedom. But it never developed these new forms beyond
conferences that were usually convened on college campuses.
In France, during the 1968 May-June uprising, there is some
evidence that neighbourhood assemblies were convened in several
Paris *arrondissements*. Neighbourhood projects were started half-heartedly in the United States, notably rent-strike groups and ghetto-oriented service collectives. But the idea of developing new kinds of
libertarian municipal forms as counterpower to the prevailing state
forms did not take root, except in Spain where the Madrid Citizens’
Movement clayed a major role in marshalling public sentiment against
the Franco regime. Thus, demands for decentralization remained an
important *inspirational* slogan. But they never took a tangible form off
the campus, where radical concerns centred on “student power.”
The counterculture offered its own version of decentralized structures in the form of communal lifestyles. The 1960s became the decade
subject have called them. In cities, no less than in the countryside,
communal establishments became very widespread. These establishments aimed not so much at the development of new politics than
at attempts to develop radically new ways of living that were counter
to the conventional ones that surrounded them. They were literally the
nuclei of a counter**culture**. These new lifeways involved the communalization of property, the practice of usufruct in dealing with the means of life, a sharing and rotation of work tasks, collective childcare by both sexes, radically new sexual mores, attempts to achieve a certain
measure of economic autonomy, and the creation of a new music,
poetry, and art that were meant to cut against the grain of received tastes
in aesthetics. The human body and its beautification, whatever one may
think of the standards that were developed, became part of attempts to
beautify the environment. Vehicles, rooms, the exteriors of buildings,
even the brick walls of apartment houses were decorated and covered
with murals.
The fact that entire neighbourhoods were largely composed of these
communes led to informal systems of inter-communal associations and
support systems, such as so-called tribal councils. The idea of
“tribalism,” which the counterculture borrowed rather faciley from
American Indian cultures, found its expression more in a vernacular of
“love” and the wide use of Indian customs, rituals, and especially
jewelry, than in the reality of lasting relationships and mutual aid.
Groups did arise which tried to live by these tribalistic, indeed, in some
cases, conscious anarchist principles, but they were comparatively rare.
Many young people who made up the counterculture were temporary exiles from middle-class suburbia, to which they were to return
after the sixties. But the values of many communal lifestyles were
abiding ideals that were to filler into the New Left, which established
its own collectives for specific tasks like the printing of literature, the
management of “free schools,” and even day-care centres. Anarchist
terms like “affinity groups,” the action and cellular units of the Spanish
anarchist movement, came very much into vogue. The Spanish anarchists developed these groups as personal forms of association in
opposition to anonymous Socialist Party branches based on residence
or places of employment, but the more anarchic elements in the New
Left mixed broader counterculture elements, like lifestyle, with action
in the affinity groups that they established.
Thirdly, the accumulation of property was viewed with derision. The
ability to successfully “liberate” food, clothing, books, and the like,
from department stores and shopping centres became a calling, as it
were, and a badge of honour. This mentality and practice became so
widespread that it even infected conventional middle-class people.
Shop-lifting reached epidemic proportions in the sixties. Property was
generally seen as something of a public resource that could be freely
used by the public at large or personally “expropriated.”
Aesthetic values and utopistic ideals that had been buried away in
the artistic as well as political manifestoes of the past underwent an
extraordinary revival. Museums were picketed as mausoleums of art,
whose works the picketers felt should be located in public places so
that they could be part of a living environment. Street theatre for the
public was conducted in the most improbable locations, such as the
sidewalks of business districts; rock bands conducted their concerts in
the streets or in public squares; parks were used as ceremonial areas,
or places for discussion, or simply open-air habitats for semi-nude
young people, who flagrantly smoked marijuana under the very noses
of the police.
Lastly, the imagination of western society became overheated with
insurrectionary images. A fatal belief began to develop within the New
Left that the entire world was on the verge of violent revolutionary
change. The war in Vietnam mobilized crowds in the hundreds of
thousands in Washington, New York, and other cities, followed by
comparable numbers in European cities as well — mobilizations of
people that had not been seen since the days of the Russian Revolution.
Black ghetto uprisings became commonplace, followed by bloody
encounters between troops as well as police that claimed scores of lives.
The assassination of public figures like Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy were only the most publicized of murders that claimed the
lives of civil rights’ activists, student protesters, and, in one horrendous
crime, black children at a church ceremony. These counter-actions
began to place left-wing individual terrorism on the agenda of certain
New Left tendencies.
The year 1968 saw the most spectacular upsurges of the student and
black movements. In France, during May and June, millions of workers
followed the students into a general strike that lasted for weeks. This
“near-revolution,” as it has recently been called, was echoed
throughout the world in various forms, albeit with minimal working
class support—indeed, with active hostility by American and German
workers, a fact that should have placed a fatal seal on the death of
proletarian socialism.
Despite another major upsurge in 1970 by students in the United
States, in which a general strike followed the American invasion of
Cambodia, the movement was more an imaginative projection of an
insurrection than the real thing. In France, workers eventually beat a
retreat under the commands of their parties and unions. The middle
classes were genuinely in conflict between the material benefits they
acquired from the established order and the moral appeal voiced by the
New Left, and even by their own children. Books by Theodore Roszak
and Charles Reich, which tried to explain the ethical message of the
New Left and particularly the counterculture to the older generation,
met with a surprisingly favourable reception. Perhaps millions of fairly
conventional people might have veered toward an actively sympathetic
attitude toward anti war demonstrators, even toward the New Left itself,
if its ideology had been advanced in the populist and libertarian forms
that were consistent with America’s own revolutionary heritage.
The late sixties, in fact, was a profoundly important period in
American history. Had there been a slower, more patient and more
graded development by the New Left and the counterculture, large
areas of popular consciousness could have been changed. The
“American Dream ” perhaps like the national “dreams” of other
countries, had deep-seated ideological roots, not only material ones.
Ideals of liberty, community, mutual aid, even of decentralized confederations, had been carried over to America by its radical Puritan
settlers with their congregational form of Protestantism that disallowed
any clerical hierarchy. These radicals preached a gospel of a primitive
Christian communalism rather than the “rugged individualism” (essentially, a western cowboy ideal of purely personal “anarchism” in which
the lonely “campfire” of the armed soloist is substituted for the family
hearth of the village yeomanry). Puritans had placed a high premium
on face-to-face popular assemblies or town meetings as instruments of
self-government rather than centralized government. Perhaps honoured
more in the breach than in consistent observance, this gospel still
exercised enormous influence on the American imagination, an influence that could have easily wedded the New Left and counterculture
ideas with an ethical democracy that many Americans would have
accepted.
It is one of the appalling facts of history that the New Left, far from
following this historic course, did the very opposite in the late sixties.
It separated itself from its anarchic and utopistic origins. What is worse,
it uncritically adopted Third World ideologies, inspired by Vietnamese,
Chinese, North Korean, and Cuban social models. These were introduced to a sickening extent by the sectarian Marxist debris that lingered
on from the thirties, not only in the U.S. but in Europe. The very
democracy of the New Left was used against it by Maoist-type
authoritarians in an attempt to “capture” SDS in America and Germany.
Guilt for a middle-class pedigree was the principle mechanism for
imbuing these movements with a subservient attitude to self-styled
working class and black groups; indeed, for adopting a rambunctious
ultra-revolutionary zealotry that totally marginalized the followers of
this trend and eventually demoralized them completely. The failure of
many anarchists in American and German SDS, as well as similar
movements elsewhere, to develop a well-organized movement within
the larger ones (particularly with the “ultra-revolutionary” braggadocio
and radical swaggering in the U.S.) played directly into the hands of
the more well-organized Maoist tendencies — with disastrous results
for the New Left as a whole.
But it was not a lack of ideology and organization alone that brought
the New Left and a rather wavering counterculture to an end. The
expanding, overheated economy of the sixties was steadily replaced by
the cooler, more wavering economy of the seventies. The accelerating
rate of economic growth was deliberately arrested and its direction was
partly reversed. Under Nixon in America and Thatcher in England, as
well as their counterparts in other European countries, a new political
and economic climate was created that replaced the ebullient post-scarcity mentality of the sixties with one of economic uncertainty.
The material insecurity of the seventies, and the political reaction
that followed the election of conservatives in America and Europe,
began to foster a personal retreat from the public sphere. Privatism,
careerism and self-interest increasingly gained ascendancy over the
desire for a public life, an ethics of care, and a commitment to change.
The New Left waned even more rapidly than it rose and the counter-culture became the industry for boutiques and pornographic forms of
sexual license. Indeed, the m ind-expanding “drug culture” of the sixties
gave way to the sedating “drug culture” of the seventies — one which
has created national crises in Euro-American society with the discovery
of new pharmaceuticals and their exotic combinations in more intense
“highs” and “lows.”
A perceptive account of the New Left and counterculture, with a full
knowledge of the facts that led to their origins, development, and decay,
has yet to be written. Much of the material that is now available to us
is marked more by sentimentality than serious analyses.
The radicalism of that era, however, has been sensed intuitively. The
New Left was never as educated as the Old, which it tried to succeed
more by an emphasis on activism than theoretical insight. Despite a
spate of high-minded and electrifying propaganda tracts, it produced
no perceptive intellectual accounts of the events which it had created
or of the real possibilities that it confronted. Unlike the Old Left which,
for all its failings, was part of a century-long historical tradition, indeed
an epoch, filled with analyses of cumulative experiences and critical
evaluations of their outcome, the New Left seems more like an isolated
island in history whose very existence is difficult to explain as part of
a larger historical era.
Given more to action than to reflection, the New Left seized upon
refurbished versions of the most vulgar Marxist dogmas to shore up its
guilt-ridden reverence of Third World movements, its own middle-class insecurities, and the hidden elitism of its more opportunistic,
media-oriented leaders who were proof that power ultimately docs
corrupt The more dedicated of the sixties radical youth went into
factories for brief spans of time to “win” a largely indifferent working
class, while others turned to “terrorism” — in some cases, a parody of
the real thing, in other cases, a costly tragedy that claimed the lives of
highly dedicated, if sadly misguided, young people.
Errors that had been repeated generation after generation over the
past century were thus being recycled again: a disregard for theory, an
emphasis on action that excluded all serious thought, a tendency to fall
back on shopworn dogmas when action is reified, and the resulting
certainty of defeat and demoralization. And this was precisely what
occurred as the sixties began to draw to a close.
But not everything is lost in a development. Proletarian socialism
had focused the attention of the revolutionary project on the *economic*
aspects of social change — the need to create the material conditions,
particularly under capitalism, for a forward-looking vision of human
liberation. It revived and fully explored the fact — long emphasized by
writers like Aristotle — that people had to be reasonably free from
material want to be able to function fully as citizens in the political
sphere. Freedom that lacked the material bases for people to act as self-managing and self-governing individuals or collectives was the purely
formal freedom of the inequality of equals, the realm of mere justice.
Proletarian socialism died partly because of its sobriety and lack of
imagination, but it also provided a necessary corrective to a purely
ethical emphasis by earlier radicals on political institutions and a
largely imaginative vision of the economic arrangements that were so
necessary for full popular participation in shaping society.
The New Left restored the anarchic and utopian visions of the
pre-Marxian revolutionary project and it greatly expanded them in
accordance with the new material possibilities created by technology
after the Second World War. To the need for solid economic underpinnings of a free society, the New Left and the counterculture added
certain Fourieresque qualities. They advanced the image of a sensuous
society, not only one that was well-fed; a society free from toil, not only
one that was free from economic exploitation; a substantive democracy,
not only a formal one; the release of pleasure, not only the satisfaction
of need.
Antihierarchical, decentralist, communalist, and sensuous values
were to still persist into the seventies, despite the ideological contortions of the decomposing New Left and its drift into an imaginative
world of insurrection, “days of rage,” and terrorism.
While it is true that many of the New Left’s activists were to find
their way into the very university system they despised in the sixties
and lead fairly convendonal lives, the movement also vastly broadened
the definition of freedom and the scope of the revolutionary project,
extending them beyond their traditional economic confines into vastly
cultural and political domains. No radical movement of any importance
in the future could ignore the ethical, aesthetic, and anti-authoritarian
legacy created by the New Left and the communalist experiments that
emerged in the counterculture, although the two tendencies were by no
means identical. But two questions now remained. What specific forms
should a future movement assume if it hoped to reach the people
generally? And what new possibilities and additional ideas lay before
it that would still further expand the ideals of freedom?
The answers to these questions began to emerge even while the New Left
and the new counterculture were very much alive and begun to centre
around two basically new issues: ecology and feminism.
Conservative movements, even environmental movements to correct specific pollution abuses, have a long history in English-speaking
countries, particularly in the United States and in central Europe, where
nature mysticism reaches back to the late Middle Ages. The emergence
of capitalism and the appalling damage it inflicted on the natural world
gave these movements a new sense of urgency. The recognition that
particular diseases like tuberculosis — the famous “White Plague” of
the nineteenth century — have their main origins in poor living and
working conditions became a major issue for socially conscious physicians
like Rudolph Virchow, a German liberal, who was deeply concerned with the
lack of proper sanitation among Berlin’s poor. Similar movements
arose in England and spread throughout most of the western world. A
relationship between the environment and health was thus seen as a
problem of paramount importance for well over a century.
For the most part, this relationship was seen in very practical terms.
The need for cleanliness, good food, airy living quarters, and healthful
working conditions were dealt with in rather narrow terms that posed
no challenge to the social order. Environmentalism was a *reform*
movement. It raised no broad problems beyond the humanitarian treatment of the poor and the working class. In time, and with piecemeal reforms, its supporters could expect that there would be no serious
conflict between a strictly environmental orientation and the capitalist
system.
Another environmental movement, basically American (albeit fairly
widespread in England and Germany), emerged from a mystical passion for wilderness. The various strains that entered into this movement
are too complex to unravel, here. American conservationists like John
Muir found in wilderness a spiritually reviving form of communion
with nonhuman life; one that presumably awakened deep-seated human
longings and instincts. This view goes back even further in time to
Rousseau’s idyllic passion for a solitary way of life amidst natural
surroundings. As a sensibility, it has always been marked by a good
deal of ambiguity. Wilderness, or what is left of it today, can give one
a sense of freedom, a heightened sense of nature’s fecundity, a love of
nonhuman life-forms, and a richer aesthetic outlook and appreciation
of the natural order.
But it also has a less innocent side. It can lead to a rejection of *human*
nature, an introverted denial of social intercourse, a needless opposition
between wilderness and civilization. Rousseau leaned toward this
viewpoint in the eighteenth century for very mixed reasons that need
not concern us in this discussion. That Voltaire called Rousseau an
“enemy of mankind” is not entirely an overstatement. The wilderness
enthusiast who retreats into remote mountain areas and shuns human
company has provided a bouquet of innumerable misanthropes over the
ages. For tribal peoples, such individual retreats, or “vision quests” are
ways of *returning* to their communities with greater wisdom; for the
misanthrope it is often a revolt *against* one’s own kind; indeed, a
disclaiming of natural evolution as it is embodied in human beings.
This pitting of a seemingly wild “first nature” against social “second
nature” reflects a blind and tortured inability to distinguish what is
irrational and anti-ecological in capitalist society from what *could* be
rational and ecological in a free society. Society is simply condemned
wholesale. Humanity, irrespective of its own internal conflicts between
oppressor and oppressed, is lumped together as a single “species” that
constitutes an accursed blight on a presumably pristine, “innocent,” and
“ethical” natural world.
Such views easily lend themselves to a crude biologism that offers
no way of fixing humanity and society in nature, or, more precisely, in
natural evolution. The fact that human beings, too, are products of
natural evolution and that society grows out of that evolutionary
process, incorporating in its own evolution the natural world as transmuted into social life, is generally given a subordinate place to a very
static image of nature. This simplistic type of imagery sees nature as a
mere piece of scenery of the kind we encounter in picture postcards.
There is very little naturalism in this view; rather, this view is largely
aesthetic rather than ecological The wilderness enthusiast is usually a
visitor or a vacationer to a world that, uplifting as it may be for a time,
is basically alien to their authentic social environment.
Such wilderness enthusiasts carry their social environment within themselves
whether they know it or not, no less than the fact that the knapsacks
they shoulder are often products of a highly industrialized society.
The need to go beyond these traditional trends in environmentalism
emerged in the early 1960s, when an attempt was made in 1964 by
anarchist writers to rework libertarian ideas along broadly ecological
lens. Without denying the need to stop the degradation of the environment from pollution, insensate deforestation, the construction of
nuclear reactors, and the like, a reformist approach with its focus on
single issues was abandoned for a revolutionary one, based on the need
to totally reconstruct society along ecological lines.
What is significant about this new approach, rooted in the writings
of Kropotkin, was the relationship it established between hierarchy and
the notion of dominating nature. Put simply: the very idea of dominating
nature, it was argued in this anarchistic interpretation, stemmed
from the domination of human by human. As I have pointed out earlier
in this book, this interpretation totally reversed the traditional liberal
and Marxist view that the domination of human by human stems from
a shared historical project to dominate nature by using human labour
to overcome a seemingly “stingy,” withholding, intractable natural
world whose “secrets” had to be unlocked and rendered available to all
in order to create a beneficent society.
No ideology, in fact, has done more to justify hierarchy and domination since Aristotle’s time than the myth that the domination of nature
presupposes the domination of “man by man.” Liberalism, Marxism,
and earlier ideologies had indissolubly linked the domination of nature
with human freedom. Ironically, the domination of human by human,
the rise of hierarchy, of classes, and the State, were seen as “preconditions” for their very elimination in the future.
The views advanced by anarchists were deliberately called *social*
ecology to emphasize that major ecological problems have their roots
in social problems — problems that go back to the very beginnings of
patricentric culture itself. The rise of capitalism, with a law of life based
on competition, capital accumulation, and limitless growth, brought
these problems — ecological and social — to an acute point; indeed,
one that was unprecedented in any prior epoch of human development.
Capitalist society, by recycling the organic world into an increasingly
inanimate, inorganic assemblage of commodities, was destined to
simplify the biosphere, thereby cutting across the grain of natural
evolution with its ages-long thrust toward differentiation and diversity.
To reverse this trend, capitalism had to be replaced by an ecological
society based on nonhierarchical relationships, decentralized communities, eco-technologics like solar power, organic agriculture, and
humanly scaled industries—in short, by face-to-face democratic forms
of settlement economically and structurally tailored to the ecosystems
in which they were located. These views were explored in such pioneering articles like “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964) and “Toward a Liberatory Technology” (1965), years before “Earth Day”
was proclaimed and an obscure word, “ecology,” began to enter into
everyday discourse.
What should be emphasized is that this literature anchored ecological problems for the first time in hierarchy, not simply in economic
classes; that a serious attempt was made to go beyond single-issue
environmental problems into deep-sealed ecological dislocations of a
monumental character; that the relationship of nature to society,
formerly seen as an inherently antagonistic one, was explored as part
of a long continuum in which society had phased out of nature through
a complex and cumulative evolutionary process.
It may have been asking too much of an increasingly Maoist New
Left and an increasingly commercialized counterculture, both with a
strong predilection for action and a deepening mistrust of theoretical
ideas, to absorb social ecology as a whole. The use of words like
“hierarchy,” a term rarely employed in New Left rhetoric, surfaced
widely in the radical discourse of the late sixties and began to assume
particular relevance for a new movement — notably, feminism. With
the notion that woman, as such, is a victim of a male-oriented “civilization” irrespective of her “class position” and economic status, the term
“hierarchy” became particularly relevant to early feminist analyses.
Social ecology was increasingly reworked by early radical feminist
writers into a critique of hierarchical forms, not simply class forms.
In a broad sense, social ecology and early feminism directly challenged the economistic emphasis Marxism had placed on social
analysis and reconstruction. It rendered the New Left’s anti-authoritarian outlook more explicit and more clearly definable by
singling out hierarchical domination, not simply anti-authoritarian
oppression. Woman’s degraded status as a gender and status-group was
rendered clearly visible against the background of her seeming
“equality” in a world guided by justice’s inequality of equals. At a time
when the New Left was decomposing into Marxist sects and the
counterculture was being transformed into a new form of boutique
retailing, social ecology and feminism were expanding ihe ideal of
freedom beyond any bounds that had been established in recent
memory. Hierarchy *as such* — be it in the form of ways of thinking,
basic human relationships, social relations, and society’s interaction
with nature—could now be disentangled from the traditional nexus of
class analyses that concealed it under a carpet of economic interpretations of society. History could now be examined in terms of general
interests such as freedom, solidarity, and empathy for one’s own kind;
indeed, the need to be an active part of the balance of nature.
These interests were no longer specific to a particular class, gender,
race, or nationality. They were *universal* interests that were shared by
humanity as a whole. Not that economic problems and class conflicts
could be ignored, but to confine oneself to them left a vast residue of
perverted sensibilities and relationships that had to be confronted and
corrected on a broader social horizon.
In terms that were more expansive than any that had been formulated
in the sixties or earlier, the revolutionary project could now be clearly
defined as the abolition of hierarchy, the reharmonization of humanity
with nature through the reharmonization of human with human, the
achievement of an ecological society structured on ecologically sound
technologies and face-to-face democratic communities. Feminism
made it possible to highlight the significance of hierarchy in a very
of social ecology, it rendered hierarchy concrete, visible, and poignantly real owing to the status of women in all classes, occupations, social
institutions, and familial relationships. As long as it revealed the
demeaned human condition that all people suffered, particularly
women, it demystified subtle forms of rule that existed in the nursery,
bedroom, kitchen, playground, and school—not only in the workplace
and the public sphere generally. Hence social ecology and feminism
logically intertwined with each other and complemented each other in
a shared process of demystification. They exposed a demonic incubus
that had perverted every advance of “civilization” with the poison of
hierarchy and domination. An agenda even larger than that advanced
by the early New Left and counterculture had been created by the
mid-sixties; one that required elaboration, educational activity, and
serious organization to reach people as a whole, not merely a particular
sector of the population.
This project could have been reinforced by issues that cut across all
traditional class lines and status groups: the subversion of vast natural
cycles, the growing pollution of the planet, massive urbanization, and
increases in environmentally induced diseases. A growing public began
to emerge that felt deeply implicated in environmental problems.
Questions of growth, profit, the future of the planet, assumed in their
no longer single issues or class issues but human and ecological issues.
That various elites and privileged classes still advanced their own
bourgeois interest could have served to highlight the extent to which
capitalism was *itself* becoming a special interest whose existence could
no longer be justified. It could be made clearly evident that capitalism
did not represent a universal historical force, much less a universal
human interest.
The close of the sixties and the opening of the seventies formed a
period filled with extraordinary alternatives. The revolutionary project
had come into its own. Ideals of freedom whose threads had been
broken by Marxism were once again picked up and advanced along
anarchic and utopian lines to encompass *universal* human interests —
the interests of society as a whole, not of the nation-stale, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat as particularistic social phenomena.
Could enough of a New Left and a counterculture be rescued from
the process of decomposition that followed 1968 to embrace the expanded revolutionary project opened by social ecology and feminism?
Could a radical sentiment and the energies of radicals generally be
mobilized on a scale and with the intellectuality that equaled the broad
revolutionary project advanced by these two tendencies?
Vague demands for participatory democracy, social justice, disarmament, and the like, had to be linked together into a coherent outlook
and program. They required a sense of direction that could be given
only by a deeper theoretical insight, a relevant program, and more
definable organizational forms than the New Left of the sixties could
generate, Rudi Dutschke’s appeal to German SDS for a “Long march
through the institutions,” which amounted to little more than adapting
to the institutions that exist without troubling to create new ones, led to
the loss of thousands within the institutions. They went in—and never
came out.
The door that can open the way to a New Left of the future, one that
embodies the experience of the thirties, sixties, and the decades that
have followed them, is still swinging to and fro on its hinges.
It has neither opened fully nor closed. Its swings depend partly upon
the hard realities of everyday social life — namely, whether the
economy is depressed or rising, the kind of political climate that exists
in various parts of the world, events in the Third World as well as the
First and Second, the fortunes of radical tendencies at home and abroad,
and the sweeping environmental changes that confront humanity in the
years that lie ahead.
Ecologically, humanity is faced with major climatic changes, rising
levels of pollution, and new, environmentally induced illnesses. Terrible human tragedies in the form of hunger, famine, and malnutrition
are claiming millions of lives annually. An incalculable number of
animal and plant species face extinction as a result of deforestation from
lumbering activities and acid rain. The global changes that are degrading the natural environment, and may eventually render it uninhabitable
for complex life-forms, have an almost geological massiveness, and
they may be occurring at a pace that verges on the catastrophic for many
plant and animal species.
One might have hoped that these planetary changes would have
catapulted the ecology movement into the foreground of social thought
and added new insights to the ideals of freedom. This has not been the
case. The ecology movement has divided into several questionable
tendencies that often directly contradict each other. Many people are
simply pragmatic environmentalists. Their efforts are focused on
single-issue reforms such as the control of toxic wastes, opposition to
the construction of nuclear reactors, restrictions on urban growth, and
the like. These are necessary struggles, to be sure, that can never be
disdained simply because they are limited and piecemeal. They serve
to slow down a headlong race to disasters like Chernobyl or Love Canal.
But they cannot supplant the need to get to the roots of environmental dislocations. Indeed, insofar as they are restricted merely to reforms,
they often create the dangerous illusion that the present social order is
capable of rectifying its own abuses. The denaturing of the environment
must always be seen as *inherent* to capitalism, the product of its very
law of life, as a system of limitless expansion and capital accumulation.
To ignore the anti-ecological core of the present social order — be it
in its Western corporate form or its Eastern bureaucratic fonn — is to
allay public concern about the depth of the crisis and lasting means to
resolve it.
Environmentalism, conceived as a piecemeal reform movement,
easily lends itself to the lure of statecraft, that is, to participation in
electoral, parliamentary, and party-oriented activities. It requires no
great change in consciousness to turn a lobby into a party or a petitioner
into a parliamentarian. Between a person who humbly solicits from
power and another who arrogantly exercises it, there exists a sinister
and degenerative symbiosis. Both share the same mentality that change
can be achieved only through the *exercise* of power, specifically,
through the power of a self-corrupting professionalized corps of legislators, bureaucrats, and military forces called the State. The appeal to
this power invariably legitimates and strengthens the State, with the
result that it actually disempowers the people. Power allows for no
vacuum in public life. Whatever power the State gains, it always does
so at the expense of popular power. Conversely, whatever power the
people gain, they always acquire at the expense of the State. To
legitimate State power, in effect, is to delegitimate popular power.
Ecology movements that enter into parliamentary activities not only
legitimate State power at the expense of popular power, but they are
obliged to function *within* the State, ultimately to become blood of its
blood and bone of its bone. They must “play the game ” which means
that they must shape their priorities according to predetermined rules
over which they have no control. This not only involves a given
constellation of relationships that emerges with participation in State
power; it becomes an ongoing *process* of degeneration, a steady
devolution of ideals, practices, and party structures. Each demand for
the “effective” exercise of parliamentary power raises the need for a
further retreat from presumably cherished standards of belief and
conduct.
If the State is a realm of “evil,” as Bakunin emphasized, the “art” of
statecraft is essentially a realm of lesser or greater evils, not a realm of
ethical right and wrong. Ethics itself is radically redefined from the
classical time-honoured study of good and evil into the more sinister
contemporary study of compromises between lesser and greater evils — in short, what I have elsewhere called an “ethics of evil.” {1} This basic
redefinition of ethics has had deadly consequences over the course of
recent history. Fascism made its way to power in Germany when Social
Democracy lived in a diet of choices between liberals and centrists;
later, centrists and conservatives; and, finally, between conservatives
and Nazis — a steady devolution in which a conservative President,
Marshall von Hindenberg, finally appointed the Nazi leader, Adolf
Hitler, to the position of Reich Chancellor. That the German working
class with its huge parties and its massive trade unions permitted this
appointment to occur without any ac t of resistance is an easily forgotten
and dismal event in history. Not only did this moral devolution occur
on the level of the State, but also on the level of German popular
movements themselves, in a cruel dialectic of political degeneration
and moral decomposition.
{1} See my forthcoming book. The Ethics of Evil (Montreal, 1990).
Environmental movements have not fared better in their relationship
to State power. They have bartered away entire forests for token
reserves of trees. Vast wilderness areas have been surrendered for
national parks. Huge stretches of coastal wetlands have been exchanged
for a few acres of pristine beaches. To the extent that environmentalists
have entered into national parliaments as Greens, they have generally
attained little more than public attention for their self-serving parliamentary deputies and achieved very little to arrest environmental
decay.
The Hesse coalition of the German Greens with a Social Democratic
government in the mid-1980s ended in ignominy. Not only did the
“realist wing” of the German Green party taint the movement’s finest
principles with compromises, it made the party more bureaucratic,
manipulative, and “professional” — in short, very much like the rivals
it once denounced.
Reformism and parliamentarism, at least, have a tangibility about
them that raises real questions of political theory and a sense of social
direction. The most recent tendency in the environmental movement,
however, is completely ghostly and vaporous. Bluntly put: it consists
of attempts to turn ecology into a religion by peopling the natural world
with gods, goddesses, woodsprites, and the like — all serviced by a
corps of financially astute gurus from India, their home-bred competitors, a variety of witches, and self-styled “wiccan anarchists,”
The American roots of this tendency, of course, should be emphasized. The United States is currently the most ill-read, ill-informed,
and, culturally, the most illiterate country in the Western world. The
sixties counterculture opened a rupture not only with the past, but with
all knowledge of the past, including its history, literature, art, and
music. The young people who arrogantly refused to “trust anyone over
thirty,” to use a popular slogan of the day, severed all (heir ties with the
best traditions of the past. In an era of junk food, the opening created
by this breach was filled by an appalling mixture of junk ideas. Patently
contradictory fantasies were congealed by drugs and rock music into a
squalid ooze of atheistic religions, natural supematuralisms, pri vatistic
politics, and even liberal reactionaries. If this pairing of completely
opposing terms seems irrational, the reader should bear in mind that the
amalgam was “made in America,” where everything is believed to be
possible and the absurd is normally the result.
That ecology, an eminently *naturalistic* outlook and discipline,
could be infested with supernatural rubbish, would seem explicable if
such nonsense were confined stricdy to its American borders. What is
astonishing, however, is that it has spread like a worldwide pollutant to
Europe, especially to England, Germany, and Scandinavia, Given time,
it will almost certainly invade the Mediterranean countries as well.
As a form of “cultural feminism,” this extension of a quasi-theological ecology to gender relationships already commands a growing,
indeed enormous, following in English and German-speaking
countries. The hope that ecology would enrich feminism has taken the
bizarre form of a theistic “eco-feminism,” structured around woman’s
uniquely “nurturing” role in the biosphere. Leaving aside this crassly
anthropomorphic extension of human behaviour to nature as a whole,
theistic “eco-feminists” have essentially reversed the eminent role
patriccntric cultures assign to men by simply inverting the same
relationship in woman’s favour. Women are privileged in nature just
as men are privileged in history, with the result that male chauvinism
is simply replaced by female chauvinism.
Accordingly, presumably “pacific” female goddesses are substituted for male warrior gods, as though trading one deity for another
is not an extension of religion and superstition into human affairs —
whether they are called “immanent,” “transcendental,” “paganistic,” or
“Judeo-Christian,” Female-oriented myths based on “nurture” are substituted for male-oriented myths based on military conquest, as though
myths are not inherently fictitious and arbitrary — whether they are
“naturalistic” or “supernaturalistic,” “earth-based,” or “heaven-based.”
The world, viewed as a complex biosphere that should invite wonder,
admiration, and foster an aesthetic as well as caring sensibility, is
re-envisioned as a basically female terrain, occupied by woodsprites,
witches, goddesses, and regaled by rituals and mystified by contrived
myths — an ensemble that is borne on a lucrative tidal wave of books,
artifacts, and bejeweled ornaments.
Political activity and social engagement in this theistic terrain tends
to shrivel from activism into quietism and from social organization into
privatistic encounter-groups. One has only to cover a personal problem
with the patina of gender — be it a failed love affair or a business
misfortune — and it is easily designated as “political” or a form of
gender victimization. The notion that the “personal is the political,” in
effect, is stretched to the frivolous point where political issues are cast
increasingly in a therapeutic vernacular, so that one’s “manner” of
presenting ideas is considered more important than their substance.
Form is increasingly replacing content and eloquence is increasingly
decried as “manipulative,” with the result that a deadening mediocrity
of form *and* content tends to become the rule in political discourse. The
moral outrage that once stirred the human spirit over the ages in the
thundering words of the Hebrew prophets is denounced as evidence of
“aggressiveness,” “dogmatism,” “divisiveness,” and “male behaviour.” What “counts,” today, is not what one says but *how* one says
it — even if statements are insultingly naive and vacuous. “Care” can
easily regress into naivety and “concern” into a childishness that makes
one’s politics more infantile than feminist.
None of this is to deny the feminist claim that woman has been the
pariah of a largely male history, a history that has never prevented males
from dominating, exploiting, torturing, and murdering each other on a
scale that beggars description. But to see woman as the protypical
victim of hierarchy and her oppression as the source of all hierarchy,
as some feminists claim, is to simplify the development of hierarchy in
a very reductive manner. The origins of a phenomenon do not exhaust
our understanding of the phenomenon any more than the origins of the
cosmos exhaust or understanding of its development from a compact
undifferentiated mass into extremely complex forms. Male hierarchies
are highly complex affairs. They embody subtle interactions between
men as fathers, brothers, sons, workers, and ethnic types, including their
cultural status and their individual proclivities. The caring father, who
often stands in a warm relationship with his daughter by comparison
with a competitive mother, should remind us that hierarchy is intricate
enough on the familial level to give us pause when we consider it on
the social level.
Nor does anthropology supply conclusive support for the status of
woman as the protypical victim of hierarchy. Elderly women, in fact,
enjoyed a high status together with elderly men in early hierarchical
gerontocracies. Nor were women the sole, or necessarily the most
oppressed, victims of patriarchy. Sons of patriarchs were often confronted with unendurable demands and dealt with far more harshly on
many occasions by their fathers than were their sisters or mothers.
Indeed, the power of patriarchs was often shared quite openly with their
eldest wives, as is evident in the commanding status of Sara in the
Hebrew scriptures.
Finally it is by no means clear that women do not form hierarchies
among themselves or that the abolition of male dominance will remove
hierarchy as such. Hierarchy embraces vast areas of social life, today,
such as bureaucracies, ethnic groups, nationalities, occupational classes, not to mention domestic life in all its aspects. It permeates the
human unconscious in ways that often have no direct or even indirect
relationship with women. It involves ways of looking at the natural
world that in no way relate to the putative assignment of a presumably
“instinctive” proclivity of women to be “caretakers” and “custodians”
of life as such—a piece of crude biologism that defames woman’s role
in the making of a very human-oriented culture and its artifacts like
pottery, woven cloth, and agriculture. In any case, many priestesses,
witches, and shamanesses seem to have stood — and still stand — in a
distinctly hierarchical relationship with their female congregants and
acolytes.
The antirational, theistic, even antisecular impulses that are surfacing in the ecology and feminist movements raise an issue of very
fundamental concern for our time. They are evidence of a sinister
<em>anti</em>-Enlightenment tendency that is sweeping through much of contemporary Western society.
In America and Europe, nearly all the high ideals of the Enlightenment are being currently impugned: its goals of a rational society, its
belief in progress, its high hopes for education, its demands for the
human use of technology and science, its commitment to reason, and
its ethical belief in humanity’s power to attain a materially and culturally viable world. Not only have dark atavisms replaced these goals
among certain tendencies within the ecology and feminist movements;
they have branched outward in the world at large in the form of a Yuppie
nihilism called postmodernism, in a mystification of wilderness as “true
reality” (to quote one vulgarian), in a sociobiology that festers with
racism, and in a crude neo-Malthusianism that lends itself to indifference to human suffering.
The eighteenth century Enlightenment, to be sure, had serious
limitations — limitations of which many of its foremost spokespersons
were fully aware. But the Enlightenment left society and the centuries
that followed it with heroic ideals and values. It brought the human
mind from heaven down to earth, from the realm of the supernatural to
the natural It fostered a clear-eyed secular view toward the dark mythic
world that festered in feudalism, religion, and royal despotism. It
challenged notions of political inequality, of aristocratic supremacy, of
clerical hierarchy — a challenge that ultimately laid the basis for much
of the antihierarchical sentiments of later generations.
Above all, the Enlightenment tried to formulate a general human
interest over feudal parochialism and to establish the idea of a shared
human nature that would rescue humanity as a whole from a folk-like,
tribalistic, and nationalistic particularism.
The abuse of these ideals by industrial capitalism through the
commodification and mechanization of the world does not negate these
ideals by one whit Indeed, the Enlightenment reconnoitred areas of
reason, science, and technology that are by no means reflected by the
present-day forms these achievements have taken. Reason, to thinkers
like Hegel, meant a dialectic of eductive development, a process that
is best expressed by organic growth, not simply the deductive inferences we find in geometry and other branches of mathematics. Science,
in the thinking of Leibnitz, centred on the the study of the qualitative
dimensions of phenomena, not simply on Cartesian models of a
machine-like mathematical world. Technology was studied by Diderot
primarily from an artisanal viewpoint, with a keen eye for craft skills
as well as mass production. Indeed, Fourier, the true heir of this
Enlightenment tradition, was to give technology a strongly ecological
bias and stress the crucial importance of natural processes in the
satisfaction of material needs.
That capitalism warped these goals, reducing reason to a harsh
industrial rationalism focused on efficiency rather than a high-minded
intellectuality; that it used science to quantify the world and dualize
thought and being; that it used technology to exploit nature, including
human nature — all of these distortions have their roots in society and
in ideologies that seek to dominate humanity as well as the natural
world.
The trends that denigrate reason, science, and technology, today, are
perhaps understandable reactions to the bourgeois distortions of the
Enlightenment’s goals. They are understandable, too, in terms of the
disempowerment that is felt by the individual in an era of ever-centralized and concentrated power in corporate and State hands, in the
anonymity produced by urbanization, mass production, and mass consumption, and in the fragile condition of a human ego that is beset by
incomprehensible and uncontrollable social forces.
But these trends, as understandable reactions, become profoundly
reactionary when the substitutes they offer involve a dissolution of the
general human interest advanced by the Enlightenment into gender
parochialism, the substitution of a tribalistic folkdom for an emphatic
humanism, and a “return to wilderness” for an ecological society.
They become crudely atavistic when they blame ecological dislocations on technics instead of the corporate and state institutions that
employ them. And they retreat into the mythic darkness of a tribalistic
past when they evoke a dread of the “outsider” — be it a male, an
immigrant, or the member of a different ethnic group — as a threat to
the integrity of the “insider’s” group.
That groups of people may have unique cultural identities—claims
that are justifiable as long as they are truly *cultural* and not “biological”
— is not in dispute, especially if we acknowledge that their strongest
commitment is to humanity as a whole in a free society, not to a special
portion of it. Ecology’s motifs of complementarity, mutualism, and
nonhierarchical relationships are completely dishonoured by evocations of a racial, gender-oriented, or national particularism. If the
Enlightenment left us any single legacy that we might prize above all
others, it is the belief that humanity in a *free* society must be conceived
as a unity, a “one” that is bathed in the light of reason and empathy.
Rarely in history have we been called upon to make a stronger stand
for this legacy than today, when the sludge of irrationality, mindless
growth, centralized power, ecological dislocation, and mystical retreats
into quietism threaten to overwhelm the human achievements of past
times. Rarely before have we been called upon not only to contain this
sludge but to push it back into the depths of a demonic history from
which it emerged.
I have tried to show that Western history has not been a unilinear
advance from one stage to another and from one “precondition” to
another in an untroubled ascent to ever-greater control over a “blind,”
“stingy,” and intractable “first nature.” Quite to the contrary: prehistory
may have allowed for alternatives before the emergence of patricentric
warrior societies—societies that might have seen a more benign social
development than the one that formed our own history.
Possible alternatives were opened in the “age of cities,” before the
nation-state foreclosed the opportunities opened by urban confederations with their humanly scaled communities, artisanal technologies,
and sensitive balance between town and country. As recently as two
centuries ago, in the “age of democratic revolutions,” the Western
world with its mixed precapitalist society and economy seemed poised
for an anarchic social dispensation.
Throughout, ever-expanding ideals of freedom based on the equality
of unequals paralleled the more ancient “cry for justice” with its
inequality of equals. To the extent that inherited custom was absorbed
by a commandeering morality and both became part of a rational ethics,
freedom began to develop a forward rather than a backward gaze and
turn from a mere longing for a “golden age” to a fervent hope for a
humanly created utopia.
The ideals of freedom became secular rather than heavenly, work-a-day rather than the fanciful bounty of nature or the largess of a
privileged class. They became sensuous as well as intellectually sophisticated. Scientific and technological advances placed material security
and the leisure time needed for a participatory democracy on the agenda
of a radically new revolutionary project. From antinomies, or seemingly contradictory co-existent$ of these advances, particularly in the
mixed economy that existed in Europe between the fourteenth and
eighteenth centuries, various choices were possible between city and
nation, commonwealth and state, artisanal production and mass
production.
Anarchism, which came fully into its own in the “age of revolutions,” stressed the importance of choice; Marxism stressed the inexorability of social laws. Anarchism remained sensitive to the
spontaneity of social development, a spontaneity, to be sure, informed
by consciousness and the need for a structured society. Marxism
anchored itself deeply in an “embryonic” theory of society, a “science”
based on “prerequisites” and “preconditions.” Tragically, Marxism
virtually silenced all earlier revolutionary voices for more than a
century and held history itself in the icy grip of a remarkably bourgeois
theory of development based on the domination of nature and the
centralization of power.
We have noted that capitalism has yet to fully define itself. No “last
stage” exists, as far as we can see, anymore than such a “stage,” which
was greeted with certainty by revolutionaries during the First World
War and the Second, emerged in their time. If capitalism has any limits,
they are neither internal, based on chronic crises, nor dependent upon
the proletariat’s pursuit of its particularistic interests. Proletarian
socialism, or the Old Left foundered on these myths and now lies in
debris.
The success of the revolutionary project must now rest on the
emergence of a general human interest that cuts across the particularistic interests of class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender. The New Left,
nourished by dazzling advances in the technologies of the post—Wortd
War II era and the gratification of the most trivial wants by unprecedented levels of production, thawed out the economistic grip of Marxism and returned the sixties, for a time, to the ethical, indeed sensuous, radicalism of the pre-Marxist era.
If a general interest can be reformulated today as a new libertarian
agenda, it must be based on the most obvious limits capitalism faces:
the ecological limits to growth imposed by the natural world. And if
that general interest can be embodied in a nonhierarchical demand, it is
the demand raised by women for a substantive equality of unequals — that is, the expansive ideal of freedom. The question we now face
whether the ecological and feminist movements can live up to this
storical challenge. That is whether these movements can be
broadened into a sweeping *social movement*; indeed, into a libertarian
New Left that will speak for a general human interest — or whether
they will shatter into the particularized interests that centre around
reformist parliamentarism, mysticism and theism in their various
forms, and gender chauvinism.
Finally, whatever may have been the prospect of achieving a free,
ecological society in the past, there is not the remotest chance that it
can be achieved today unless humanity is free to reject bourgeois
notions of abundance precisely because abundance is available to all.
We no longer live in a world that treasures gift-giving over accumulation and moral constraints that limit growth. Capitalism has warped the
values of that earlier world to a point where only the prospect of
abundance can eliminate insensate consumption and a sense of scarcity
that exists among all underprivileged people. No general human interest can emerge when the “haves” constitute a standing reproach to the
material denial of the “have-nots” and when those who are idle mock,
by their very existence, the lifetime of toil imposed on working classes.
Nor will a participatory democracy ever be achieved by society as a
whole as long as a public life is available only to those who have the
free time to participate in it.
Insofar as humanity could make decisive choices about the social
direction it should follow, its choices have been largely bad ones. The
result has been that humanity has generally been less than human.
Rarely has it fulfilled what it could be, given its potentialities for
thought, feeling, ethical judgements, and rational social arrangements.
The ideals of freedom are now in place, as I have noted, and they
can be described with reasonable clarity and coherence. We are confronted with the need not simply to improve society or alter it; we are
confronted with the need to *remake* it. The ecological crises we face
and the social conflicts that have torn us apart and have made our century the bloodiest in history, can be resolved only if we clearly
recognize that our problems go to the heart of a domineering *civilization*, not simply to a badly structured ensemble of social relations.
Our present civilization is nothing if it is not Janus-faced and riddled
with ambiguity. We cannot simply denounce it as male-oriented, exploitative, and domineering without recognizing that it also freed us, at
least in part, from the parochial bonds of tribalism and an abject
obedience to superstition, which ultimately made us vulnerable to
domination. By the same token, we cannot simply praise it for its
growing universality, the extent to which it fostered individual
autonomy, and the rational secularism it brought to human affairs
without recognizing that these achievements were generally purchased
at the cost of human enslavement, mass degradation, class rule, and the
establishment of the State. Only a dialectic that combines searching
critique with social creativity can disassemble the best materials from
our shattered world and bring them to the service of remaking a new
one.
I have stressed that our foremost need is to create a general human
interest that can unify humanity as a whole. Minimally, this interest
centres around the establishment of a harmonious balance with nature.
Our viability as a species depends upon our future relationship with the
natural world. This problem cannot be settled by the invention of new
technologies that will supplant natural processes without making
society more technocratic, more centralized, and ultimately completely
totalitarian. For technology to replace the natural cycles that determine
the ratio of atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen, to provide a substitute for the decomposing ozone layer that protects all life from lethal
solar radiation, to substitute hydroponic solutions for soil — all of this,
if it were possible, would require a highly disciplined system of social
management that is radically incompatible with democracy and political participation by the people.
Such an overwhelming, indeed global, reality raises questions about
the future of humanity on a scale that no historical period in die past
has ever been compelled to face. The message raised by an “ecological
technocracy,” if it can be called that, is for a degree of social coordination that beggars the most centralized despotisms of history. Even so,
it remains very unclear that such an ecological technocracy can be
achieved on scientific grounds, or that, in view of the delicate checks
and balances involved, whether technological substitutes for natural
processes can be so well adjusted that they will not be subject to
catastrophic misjudgements.
If the life processes of the planet and those of our species are not to
be administered by a totalitarian system, modern society must follow
certain basic ecological precepts. I have argued in this book that the
harmonizadon of nature cannot be achieved without the harmonization
of human with human. This means that our very notion of what
constitutes humanity must be clarified. If we remain merely conflicting
class beings, genders, ethnic beings, and nationalities, it is obvious that
any kind of harmony between human beings will be impossible. As
members of classes, genders, ethnic groups, and nationalities, we will
have narrowed our meaning of what it is to be human by means of
particularistic interests that explicitly set us against each other.
Although ecology advances a message of diversity, it does so as
conflict; it rests on differentiation, on the wholeness that is enhanced
by the variety of its constituents. Socially, this view is expressed in the
Greek ideal that the complete, many-sided person is the product of a
complete, many-sided society. Class, gender, ethnic, and national interests are fearfully similar in their reduction of a widely expansive
view of the world to a narrow one, of larger interests to smaller ones,
of complementarity to conflict. To preach a message of reconciliation
when class, gender, ethnic, and national interests are very real and
objectively grounded in major conflicts, would be absurd, to be sure.
Our Janus-faced civilization looks toward a long past that has seen mere
differences in age, sex, and kinship reworked into domineering hierarchies, hierarchies into classes, and classes into state structures. The
bases for conflicting interests in society must themselves be confronted
and resolved in a revolutionary manner. The earth can no longer be
owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by
technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they
must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less
that material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must
be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory. Until these
basic problems are resolved, there can be no development of a general
interest that will formulate a policy to resolve the growing ecological
crisis and the inadequacy of this society to deal with it.
The point I wish to make, however, is that no general interest of this
kind can be achieved by the particularistic means that marked earlier
revolutionary movements. The present ecological crisis is potentially
capable of mobilizing a degree of public support and involvement that
is more transclass and wider than any issue that humanity has faced in
the past And with the passing of time, this crisis will become starker
and more all-embracing than it is today. Its mystification by religious
ideologists and corporate hirelings threatens to place the very future of
the biosphere in the balance.
Nor can we ignore the recent history of the revolutionary project and
the advances it scored over earlier ones. Past revolutions were largely
struggles for justice, not for freedom. The ideals of liberty, equality,
and fraternity, so generously advanced by the French Revolution,
foundered on the faulty definition of the terms themselves. I will not
belabour the fact that the crassly particularistic interests of the bourgeoisie interpreted liberty to mean free trade; equality to mean the right
to contract labour; and fraternity to mean the obedience on an emerging
proletariat to capitalist supremacy. Hidden more deeply in this slogan
of classical republicanism was the fact that liberty meant little more
than the right of the ego to pursue its own self interest; equality, the
principle of justice; fraternity, taken literally, a male-centred society of
“brothers” however much some men exploited others.
Taken at face value, the slogans of the revolution never ascended to
the domain of freedom. On whatever level we examine the revolution,
it was a project to achieve an inequality of equals, not to achieve an
equality of unequals. The tragically aborted Spanish Revolution of
1936–1937 tried to go beyond this limited project but it was isolated.
Its most revolutionary elements — the anarchists — never gained the
popular support they needed in the country as a whole to realize their
richly emancipatory goals.
Capitalism has changed in the decades that followed the era of
proletarian socialism. Its impact on society and nature is perhaps more
devastating than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. The
modern revolutionary project, initiated by the New Left of the sixties,
with its call for a participatory democracy, has gone far beyond the level
of the classical revolutions and their particularistic aims. The idea of
“the People,” an illusory concept that informed the emergence of
democratic movements in the eighteenth century just as society was
beginning to differentiate itself into clearly definable classes, has now
taken on a new meaning with the steady decomposition of traditional
classes and with the emergence of transclass issues like ecology, feminism, and a sense of civic responsibility to neighbourhoods and
communities. Movements like the Greens in Germany, and possibly
other countries, or various citizens’ initiative movements in a growing
number of cities and towns are addressing larger human issues than
increased wages and class conflicts at the point of production. With the
rise of ecology, feminist, and citizens’ movements, new possibilities
exist for generalizing the ideals of freedom, for giving them a broadly
human and truly populist dimension.
To talk vaguely of “the People,” however, without examining the
relationship of the ordinary citizen to populist-type goals, raises the
danger of dealing with the kind of vague abstractions that characterized
Marxism for more than a century. Over and beyond the need to share
the earth, to distribute its fruits according to need, and to develop a
general human interest that goes beyond the particularistic ones of the
past, the revolutionary project must take its point of departure from a
fundamental libertarian precept; every normal human being is *competent* to manage the affairs of society and, more specifically, the
community in which he or she is a member.
This precept lays down a radical gauntlet to Jacobin abstractions like
“the People” and Marxist abstractions like “the Proletariat” by demanding that society must be existentially “peopled” by real, living beings
who are free to control their own destinies and that of their society. It
challenges parliamentarism as a surrogate for an authentic democracy
with Rousseau’s classical observation:
Sovereignty, for the same reason as it makes it inalienable,
cannot be represented. It lies essentially in the general will,
and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same,
or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of
the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives:
they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null
and void — is, in fact, not a law. The people of England
regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken: it is free only
during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they
are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. [21]
Whatever interpretation one may give to Rousseau’s “general will”
and other formulations he advances, the statement’s basic thrust forms
an imperishable and unnegotiable ideal of human freedom. It implies
that no substantive democracy is possible and no concept of self-administration is meaningful unless the people convene in open, face-to-face assemblies to formulate policies for society. No policy, in effect, is democratically legitimate unless it has been proposed, discussed, and
decided upon by the people directly — not through representatives or
surrogates of any kind. The *administration* of these policies can be left
to boards, commissions, or collectives of qualified, even elected, individuals who, under close public purview and with full accountability
to policy-making assemblies, may execute the popular mandate.
This distinction between policy and administration — one which
Marx failed to make in his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 —
is crucial. Popular assemblies are the minds of a free society; the
administrators of their policies are the hands. The former can always
recall the latter and end their operations, depending upon need, dissatisfaction and the like. The latter merely effects what the former decides
and remains totally dependent upon their will.
This crucial distinction makes the popular assembly’s existence a
largely functional issue in democratic procedures, not a structural one.
In principle, assemblies can function under any demographic and urban
conditions — on the block, neighbourhood, or town levels. They have
only to be coordinated by appropriately confederal sinews to become
forms of self-governance. Given modern logistical conditions, there
can be no emergency so great that assemblies cannot be rapidly convened to make important policy decisions by a majority vote and die
appropriate boards convened to execute these decisions—irrespective
of a community’s size or the complexity of its problems. Experts will
always be available to offer their solutions, hopefully competing ones
that will foster discussion, to the more specialized problems a community may face.
Nor can populations be so large or the number of assemblies so
numerous that they cannot be coordinated in a manner that perpetuates
their integrity as face-to-face policy-making bodies. Delegates to town,
city, and regional bodies, can be regarded simply as the walking
mandates of the local assemblies. Furthermore, we must disabuse
ourselves of the idea that consensus can always be attained in large
groups. A minority does not have the right to abort a decision of a
majority — be it within an assembly or between assemblies. If
Rousseau’s “general will” could, in fact, be transformed into a *generalized will* — that is to say, if it could be supposed that rational people
who have no interests apart from those of the community at large will
make shared rational decisions about transparently clear issues — it
may well be that consensus can be achieved.
But by no means is this goal even desirable. It is a hidden tyranny
based on unthinking custom, in fact, an atavistic throwback to times
when *public opinion* was as coercive as outright violence (which, at
least, existed in the open). A tyranny of consensus, like the famous
“tyranny of structurelessness,” demeans a free society. It tends to
subvert individuality in the name of community and dissent in the name
of solidarity. Neither true community nor solidarity are fostered when
the individual’s development is aborted by public disapproval and his
or her deviant ideas are “normalized” by the pressure of public opinion.
Underlying the development of self-managing, face-to-face assemblies are a number of ethical, even educational problems that enter
into developing competent individuals. The assembly reached its most
sophisticated form of development in the Athenian *polis*, where, contrary to current criticisms of the Hellenic city as “patriarchal,” most
ancients viewed it as a huge “mobocracy.” It retained this pejorative
reputation well into modern times. That radicals in the twentieth
century, who view it from the hindsight of more than two thousand
years, can denounce it as a “tyranny” that oppressed women, slaves,
and resident aliens, is not without a certain irony. Given the more
morbid abuses of the ancient world, which was drenched in patriarchy,
slavery, and despotism, the Athenian democracy stands out like a
beacon of light. The view that Western democracy can be dismissed
simply as a “male” tradition and that we should return to “tribal”
traditions, whatever these may be, is atavistic to the core. In the *polis*,
the Janus-faced nature of Western civilization — the East offers no
notable improvements upon it, I may add — actually exhibits its better
profile in the history of freedom.
All of this raises the question of what constitutes the ethical basis of
the assembly and its time-honoured standards of competence. The first
was the ideal of solidarity or friendship (*philia*), an ideal in which
loyalty to the community was given flesh and blood by intimate
relationships between its members. A lived, vital, and deeply felt
consociation existed among many members of the Athenian *polis*, in
the guilds of the medieval towns, and among an endless network of
small societies in the towns and cities of the precapitalist world. The
Greek symposium, in which knots of friends gathered to dine, drink,
and discuss, was matched in part by the rich neighbourhood cafe life
of French, Spanish, and Italian cities. The community was made up, in
a sense, of smaller “communes,” The counterculture of the sixties
turned this literally into communal forms of living. The ideal of a
Commune of communes was openly advanced in 1871 in the revolutionary proclamations of the Paris Commune during its brief lifespan.
Popular societies clustered around the Parisian sections of 1793 and
provided ways of associating that made the revolution an intimate
exercise in civic affinity.
Still another ethical ideal was the importance that was attached to
roundedness. The Greeks mistrusted specialists, despite Plato’s
favourable view of them, because excessive expertise seemed to involve a warping of one’s character around a particular interest or skill.
To know a little bit about everything and not too much about one thing
was evidence of a rounded person who, as need arose, could form an
intelligent view of an issue and advance a good case for his judgements.
This emphasis on amateurism, an emphasis that did not prevent the Greeks from founding Western philosophy, science, mathematics, and
drama, was to be an abiding ideal for centuries after the *polis* disappeared into history.
Roundedness also implied a measure of self-sufficiency. To be one’s
“own man” meant not only that one was competent but also independent. In earlier times, this rounded person was expected to be free
of a client position. A special interest might render an individual
vulnerable to and dependent upon the wishes of a master. The individual who could perform many different tasks, it was supposed,
could understand a wide array of problems. If he was independent
materially, say, like a farmer who owned the land he worked, and could
meet most of his needs by his own efforts and skills, he was presumably
capable of forming an objective judgement, free of undue influence by
the opinions of others. The Greeks believed in owning property not
because they were acquisitive; indeed, to give generously to one’s
friends and neighbours earned the highest esteem in Greek society. But
a modest piece of land that could provide the farmer and his family with
the basic means of life freed him from manipulation by landed aristocracies and merchants.
To give of one’s free time and services to the *polis* was seen as
another ideal that often led to agonistic efforts to gain public recognition, a Greek character trait that has been sharply reproached but often
grossly misunderstood. The zeal with which the Greeks served their
communities, in fact, was idealized as a form of civic dedication up to
our own time. Civic recognition often required considerable personal
sacrifices, and the zeal exhibited by leading Greeks stemmed from a
desire for social immortality. Indeed, to destroy a Greek city meant to
efface the memory and immortality of its more heroic figures as well
as to destroy the very identity of its inhabitants.
If civic zealotry threatened to upset the relatively delicate balances
of a class society that could easily plunge into insurrection, the Greeks
formulated an ideal of “limit” — the “golden mean” which meant
“nothing in excess”—that was to be carried deeply into Western ethics.
The notion of limit was to appear in medieval towns and cities and even
well into the Renaissance. Beneath the clamour that marked the Italian
city-states of the late Middle Ages, there were unstated rules of civic
behaviour that placed constraints on excessive zealotry and fractious
behaviour, despite the ultimate emergence of oligarchies and one-man
rule.
As M.I. Finley has pointed out, the Athenian *polis* — and, I would
contend, many democratic towns that followed it in time — essentially
established a system of civic etiquette that kept excessive ambition
under a measure of control. Medieval Italian cities, for example, created
remarkable checks and balances to prevent one interest in the city from
gaining too much ascendancy over another, a balance that the Greek
psychological attributes that many precapitalist cities, structured
around assemblies, actually translated into institutions in a system of
checks that fostered harmony, however tentative they may seem. Power
was often divided and subdivided so that countervailing forces existed
to prevent the ascendancy of any one institution, and the interests it
represented, from becoming excessively powerful.
Taken together, this ethical ensemble was personified in a new kind
of individual — a *citizen*. The citizen was neither a tribal person nor
the member of a kin group, although strong family relationships existed
in the precapitalist cities of the past and kinship ties played a major role
in political conflicts. But to be a citizen in the traditional sense, one had
to be more than a kinsman. The primary allegiances of the citizen were
to the *polis*, town, or city — at least, before the nation-state turned
citizenship into a parody of its original meaning.
Citizens, in turn, were created through training, a process of **character**-building that the Greeks called *paidaia*. which is not quite properly translated by the word “education.” One had to learn civic responsibility, to reason out one’s views with scrupulous care, to confront opposing arguments with clarity, and, hopefully, to advance tested principles that exhibited high ethical standards. Additionally, a citizen was expected to learn martial arts, to work together with fellow citizens in militia detachments; indeed, in many cases, to learn how to command properly during military engagements.
The citizen of a precapitalist democratic city, in short, was not the
“constituent” of a parliamentary representative, or a mere “taxpayer,”
to use modern civic jargon. He was, in the best of cases, a knowledgeable, civically dedicated, active, and, above all, *self-governing* being
who exercised considerable inner discipline and made the welfare of
his community — its general interest — his primary interest to the
exclusion of his own self-interest.
This constellation of ethical precepts formed a unified whole,
without which civic democracy and popular assemblies would not have
been possible. Rousseau’s remarkable statement that citizens make
cities, not merely buildings, cannot be restated often enough. Without
citizens, viewed in this classical sense, cities were mere clusters of
buildings which tended to degenerate into oligarchies or become absorbed into nation-states.
From the foregoing, it should be obvious that the assembly of the
people found its authentic home in the city — and in cities of a very
special kind. The Janus-faced character of Western civilization obliges
us to sift the unsavoury features of the city — the legitimation it gave
to the private ownership of property, classes, patricentricity, and the
State — from the great civilized advances it scored as a new terrain for
a universal *humanitas*. Today, at a time when anti-city biases have cast
the city in an ugly social light, it may be well to emphasize the major
advance the city scored in providing a shared domain for people of
different ethnic backgrounds, occupations, and status groups.
“Civilization,” a term that is derived from the Latin word for city, was
not simply a “slaughter bench,” to use Hegel’s dramatic phrase. It was
literally Janus-faced (as Hegel only too well appreciated) in its look
toward the prospect of a common humanity as well as in its look toward
barbarities that were to be justified in the name of progress and cultural
advances.
Participatory democracies and popular assemblies, to be sure,
originated in tribal and village communities. But they did not become
themselves until the city emerged. There is some evidence that they
existed as early as Sumerian times in the cities that appeared in
Mesopotamia. But it was the Greek *polis* and later medieval towns that
made these democracies and assemblies acutely aware of the fact that
they were a *way of life*, not simply a technique for managing society,
and that they should be constructed along *ethical* and *rational* lines
that met certain ideals of justice and the good life, not merely institutions sanctified by custom. Cities comprised a decisive step forward in
social life and, for all their limitations, gave us works like Plato’s
presence in the Western imagination for centuries.
The self-reflective nature of the city turned it into a remarkably
unique and creative human institution. To Aristotle, the city — more
properly, the *polis*, which was a highly self-conscious ethical entity —
had to conform to certain structural standards if it was to fulfill its
ethical functions. It had to be large enough so that its citizens could
meet most of their material needs, yet not so large that they were unable
to gain a familiarity with each other and make policy decisions in open,
face-to-face discourse. Structure and ethics, function and ideals of
freedom, were inseparable from each other. For all his faults, Aristotle
tried — as did so many of the Athenians among whom he lived — to
bring form into the service of content He opposed any separation of
the two, even in detailed discussions of city planning.
This approach became a cornerstone of the Western democratic
tradition. It may have existed in the minds of figures like the Gracchi
brothers in ancient Rome, Cola di Rienzi in medieval Rome, and
Etienne Marcel in the Paris of the fourteenth century; men who led the
urban masses in dramatic revolts to achieve city confederations and
establish civic democracies. It was raised by Spanish cities that revolted
against centralized rule in the sixteenth century and, again, in the
French Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. It exists in our own
time in New England town meetings, many of which still vigilantly
guard their localist rights.
The city, in effect, opened a new terrain for social management that
involves neither the use of state institutions — that is, statecraft—nor
a strictly private domain that involves one’s home, workplace, schools,
religious institutions, and circles of friends. Taken literally from the
Greek term in which it originates, the city created *politics*, a very unique
world in which citizens gather together to rationally discuss their problems
as a community and administer their affairs in a face-to-face manner.
Whether a municipality can be administered by all its citizens in a
single assembly or has to be subdivided into several confederally
related assemblies depends very much upon its size, hence Aristotle’s
injunction that a *polis* should not be so large that one could not hear a
cry for help from the city walls. Although assemblies can function as
networks on a block, neighbourhood, or town level, they fulfill traditional ideals of civic democracy when the cities in which they arc
located are decentralized. The anarchic vision of decentralized communities, united in free confederations or networks for coordinating the
communities of a region, reflects the traditional ideals of a participatory
democracy in a modern radical context.
Today, in the prevailing social condition that casts a dark shadow
over the future of the present era, we are losing sight of the very *idea*
of a city, of citizenship, and of politics as a domain of municipal
self-management. Cities are being confused with huge urban belts that
should properly be described as a seemingly unending process of
“urbanization ” Vast stretches of concrete and high-rise buildings are
engulfing the definable, humanly scaled entities we once called cities
and they are sweeping in the countryside as well.
By the same token, citizens are shrivelling to the status of
anonymous “constituents” of elected representatives. Their principal
function is to pay taxes, to do the onerous work-a-day job of maintaining the present society, to reproduce, and to decorously withdraw from
all political life — a domain that is reserved for the State and its
officialdom. Our warped discourse blurs the crucial distinctions between citification and urbanization, citizens and constituents, politics and statecraft.
The city, as a humanly scaled, self-governing municipality freely
and confederally associated with other humanly scaled, self-governing
municipalities, is dissolving into huge urban belts. The citizen, as an
active formulator of policies, is being reduced to a passive taxpayer,
the mere recipient of public services provided by bureaucratic agencies.
Politics is being degraded into statecraft, an art practised by cynical,
professional manipulators of power.
The entire ensemble is managed like a business. It is regarded as
successful if it earns fiscal “surpluses” and provides needed services,
or, it is a failure if it is burdened by fiscal “deficits” and operates
inefficiently. The *ethical* content of city life as an arena for the inculcation of civic virtue, democratic ideals, and social responsibility is
simply erased and its place is taken by an entrepreneurial mentality that
emphasizes income, expenses, growth, and employment.
At the same time, power is thoroughly bureaucratized, centralized,
and concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The power that should
be claimed by the people is pre-empted by the State and by semi-monopolistic economic entities. Democracy, far from acquiring a participatory character, becomes purely formal in character. Indeed, the
New Left was an expression of a deeply felt desire for reempowerment
that has continued unabatedly since the sixties — a desire to regain
citizenship, to end the degradation of politics into statecraft: the need
to revive public life.
These issues still remain at the top of the present social agenda. The
rise of citizens initiative movements in Germany, of municipal movements in the United States, of attempts to revive civic ideals in various
European countries, including France’s recovery of words like
are evidence of popular attempts to achieve reempowerment over social
life. In many places, the State, with its extensive cutbacks of social
services, has left a vacuum that cities are obliged to Fill merely to remain
functional. Transportation, housing, and welfare needs are being met
more by localities than they have been in the past. Urban residents,
obliged to fend for themselves, are learning the arts of teamwork and
cooperation.
A gap, ideological as well as practical, is opening up between
nation-state, which is becoming more anonymous, bureaucratic,
remote, and the municipality, which is the one domain outside
personal life that the individual must deal with on a very direct basis.
We do not go to the nation-state to find suitable schools for our children
for jobs, culture, and decent places in which to live. Like it or not, the
ill the most immediate environment which we encounter and
which we are obliged to deal, beyond the sphere of family and
in order to satisfy our needs as social beings.
Potentially, the sense of disempowerment that has become the
popular malaise of our time could also become a source of dual power
in the great nation-states of the Western world. Conscious movements
have yet to arise that search for ways to get from a centralized, statist
“here” to a civically decentralized and confederal “there,” movements
that can raise the demand for communal confederation as a popular
alternative to the modern-day centralization of power. Unless we try
— vainly, I believe — to revive myths of proletarian insurrections, of
a feeble armed confrontation with the vast nuclear armamentarium of
the modern nation-state, we are obliged to seek out counter-**institutions** that stand opposed to the power of the nation-state.
Communes, cooperatives, and various vocational collectives, to be
sure, may be excellent schools for teaching people how to administer
self-managed enterprises. But they are usually marginal projects, often
very short-lived, and more useful as examples than as working institutions. No cooperative will ever replace a giant supermarket chain
merely by competing with it, however much good will it may earn, nor
will a Proudhonian “People’s Bank” replace a major Financial institution, however many supporters it may have.
We have other things we can learn from a Proudhon, who saw in the
municipality an important arena of popular activity. I do not hesitate to
use the word *politics*, here, if it is understood in its Hellenic meaning
as the management of the community or *polis* by popular assemblies,
not as statecraft and parliamentary activity. Every society contains
vestiges of the past—of earlier, often more libertarian institutions that
have been incorporated into present ones. The American Republic, for
example, still has elements of a democracy like the town meeting,
which Tocqueville described in his book, *Democracy in America*.
Italian cities still have vital neighbourhoods that can form a basis for
new community relationships. French towns still retain mainly humanly scaled features that can be organized into new political entities. Such
observations can be made about communities throughout the world —
communities whose solidarity opens the prospect of a new politics
based on libertarian municipalism — which eventually could become
a counterpower to the nation-state.
Let me emphasize that this approach presupposes that we are talking
about a *movement*, not isolated instances where people in a single
community assume control of their municipality and restructure it on
the basis of neighbourhood assemblies. It presupposes that a movement
will exist that alters one community after another and establishes a
system of confederal relationships between municipalities; one that
will form a regional power in its own right. How far we can take this
libertarian municipalist approach is impossible to judge without knowing in detail the lived traditions of a region, the civic resources it
possesses, and the problems it faces. Given this writer’s experience
with the issue of local control in the United States, this much can be
said: no demand, when it has been raised, has been met with greater
resistance by the State power. The nation-state knows, far better than
its opponents in radical movements, how destabilizing to its authority
demands for local control can be.
Yet the idea of libertarian municipalism has a pedigree that dates
back to the American and French revolutions and to the Paris Commune, in which confederalism was a viable proposal to large masses of
people. Dramatic as the changes have been since that time, there is no
reason in principle to doubt why libertarian municipalism cannot be
raised today, when squatters’ movements, neighbourhood organizations, and community welfare groups have risen and fallen — only to rise again as evidence of a chronic impulse that the nation-state has
never been able to exorcise.
Social ecology has added a unique, indeed urgent, dimension to the
need for a libertarian municipalist movement and the issues it faces.
The need to rescale communities to fit the natural carrying capacity of
the regions in which they are located and to create a new balance
between town and country — all traditional demands of the great
utopian and anarchist thinkers of the last century — have become
ecological imperatives today. Not only are they the seemingly utopian
visions of yester-year, the dreams and desiderata of lonely thinkers;
they have compelling necessities if we are to remain a viable species
and live in harmony with a complex natural world that is threatened
with destruction. Ecology, in effect, has essentially advanced the sharp
alternatives: either we will turn to seemingly “utopian” solutions based
on decentralization, a new equilibrium with nature, and the harmonization of social relations, or we face the very real subversion of the
material and natural basis for human life on the planet. {2}
{2} I cannot help but make an observation about the massive ignorance that exists in the American and European ecology movements with respect to the long pedigree of these ideals. Anarchism, which has been pilfered repeatedly and scandalously by “neo-Marxists” of ideas like workers’ control and decentralization, not to speak of the general strike — notions that Marx and Engels explicitly denigrated — are today common fare in self-styled “Marxist” movements. The same is true of Fourier, Owen, and particularly Kropotkin’s ideas, not to mention views advanced by anarchists in the early sixties. Yet barely a word of acknowledgement is made by the ill-informed wags who, particularly in the shelter of the academy, have recycled so many eco-anarchist ideas in the name of “deep ecology” and “eco-feminism.” Apparently, nothing exists in American and European thought until it has first been duly registered in an academic journal as a “paper” and, to be sure, by a professor or an aspiring one.
Urbanization threatens to efface not only the city but the
countryside. The famous contradiction between town and country
which figured so significantly in the history of social thought has now
become meaningless. This contradiction is now being effaced by the
spread of concrete over irredeemable areas of agricultural land and
historically unique agrarian communities. The homogenization of rural
cultures by the mass media, urban lifestyles, and an all-pervasive
consumerist mentality threatens to destroy not only regionally unique
and colourful lifeways; it is totally degrading the natural landscape.
What argibusiness has not already poisoned with its pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and heavy machines that compact the soil, acid rain and
socially induced climatic changes are destroying in the form of deforestation and aridity. The urbanization of the planet is simplifying complex
ecosystems, eliminating soil that was in the making for ages, reducing
wilderness to fragile “reserves,” and, whether directly or indirectly,
profoundly altering regional climatic zones for the worst.
The technology we have inherited from earlier industrial revolutions, the insensate use of private motor vehicles, the concentration of
massive industrial facilities near waterways, the massive use of fossil
and nuclear fuels, and an economic system whose law of life is growth
all are producing in only a few decades a degree of environmental
degradation that human habitation did not produce from its inception.
Nearly all our waterways are odious sewers. “Dead seas” have been
found in oceanic waters that extend over hundreds of miles in once
thriving aquatic areas. I do not have to elaborate on this dark litany of
widespread, possibly deadly, wounds that are being inflicted on every
part of the planet. It is only too well-known what is being done to our
atmosphere, to the ozone layer that protects life on the planet, even to
more remote areas of the globe like the Arctic and, more recently,
Antarctica, rain forests and, of course, temperate forests.
Our ultimate survival on the planet, not only our commitment to live
fully human lives and fulfill our more libertarian visions, dictates that we
re-assess our notions of urbanism and the relationship of cities to the
ecological substrate. It also dictates that we re-assess our technologies
and the goods they produce, indeed, our entire view toward nature.
We need smaller cities not only to realize cherished ideas of freedom
but also to meet the most elementary needs to live in some kind of
balance with nature. Giant cities, more precisely, sprawling urban belts,
not only make for cultural homogeneity, individual anonymity, and
centralized power, they place an impossible burden on local water
resources, the air we breathe, and all the natural features of the areas
which they occupy. Congestion, noise, and the stresses introduced by
modern urban living arc becoming increasingly intolerable, psychically
as well as physically. Cities which historically served to bring people
of diverse background together, and made for communal solidarity, are
now atomizing them. The city is the place in which to hide, as it were,
not to seek human propinquity. Fear tends to replace sociality, rudeness
eats away at solidarity, the herding of people into overcrowded dwellings, means of transportation, offices, and shopping centres subverts
their sense of individuality and fosters indifference to the overall human
condition.
Decentralization of large cities into humanly scaled communities is
neither a romantic mystification of a nature-loving soloist nor is it a
remote anarchic ideal. It has become *indispensable* to an ecologically
sound society. What is now at stake in these seemingly “utopian”
demands is a choice between a rapidly degrading environment and a
society that will live in balance with nature in a viable and on a
sustainable basis.
The same can be said for reconsidering the technological basis of
modern society. Production can no longer be seen as a source of profit
and the realization of one’s self-interest. The finished goods human
beings need to maintain their very lives as well as their cultural and
physical well-being, are more hallowed than the mystified fetishes that
have been used by various religions and superstitious cults to dazzle
them. Bread, if you please, is more “sacred” than a priestly benediction;
everyday clothing is more “holy” than clerical vestments; personal
dwellings are more spiritually meaningful than churches and temples;
the good life on earth is more sanctifying than the promised one in
heaven. The means of life must be taken for what they literally are:
than “theft” (to use Proudhon’s choice word for property); it is outright
homicide.
No one has a right to own property on which the lives of others
depend, — either morally, socially, or ecologically. Nor does anyone
have a right to design, employ, or impose privately owned technological equipment on society that damages human health and the health of the planet.
Here, ecology completely dovetails with society to yield a social
ecology that emphasizes the close interconnection between ecological
social problems. Technology — the kind society uses to maintain
human planetary life and the kind that undermines both — is one of the
social values and ecological values. At a time of sweeping ecological degradation, we can no longer retain techniques that wantonly damage human beings and the planet alike — and it is hard to think that damage can be inflicted on the one
without being inflicted on the other.
A major tragedy of our times is that we no longer look at technics
as an ethical relationship, Greek thought maintained that to produce an
object of high quality and artistry was a moral calling that involved a
special relationship between an artisan and the object he or she
produced. Indeed, to many tribal peoples, to craft a thing was to
actualize the raw material’s potentialities, to give soapstone, marble.
bronze, and other materials, a “voice,” as it were, an expression that
realized its latent capacity for form.
Capitalism eliminated this outlook completely. Indeed, it severed
the relationship of the producer to the consumer, eliminating any sense
of ethical responsibility of the former to the latter, leaving all other
ethical or moral responsibilities aside. If there was any moral dimension
to capitalist production, it was the claim that self interest was guided by
an “invisible hand” — the interplay of market forces — so that
production for profit and personal gain would ultimately serve the
“general good.”
But even this shabby apologia has all but disappeared today,
abated greed, another example of the ethics of evil, has replaced
any sense of the public good. A corporation is lauded simply because
it is less greedy than another — not because its operations are intrinsically
good. Although it is all too easy to blame on technics what is really the
result of bourgeois interest, technics, when divested of any moral constraints
can also become demonic under capitalism. A nuclear power plant, for example
is intrinsically evil; it can have no justification for existence. That increased nuclear reactors will eventually turn the entire planet into a huge nuclear bomb if enough Chernobyl accidents occur — and with more plants, they cease to be a matter of mere accident and become one of probability — is no longer doubted by any informed person today.
Growing ecological dislocations are making what were once conventional industrial operations equally problematic. Agribusiness, at
one time marginal to die family-type farm, has become so widespread
in recent decades that its pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are becoming global problems. Smoke-belching installations and the wanton use
of automobiles are changing the entire ecological balance of nature,
particularly the earth’s atmosphere, for the worse. If one surveys the
landscape of modern technology, it is not hard to see a profound need
to alter it enormously. Not only ecological interests, but human self-interest requires that we move toward ecological technologies and render
our technological interaction with nature creative rather than destructive.
Let me emphasize again that such a change cannot be made without
doing the same for our interaction with each other and formulating a
general interest that outweighs the particularized interests of hierarchy,
class, gender, ethnic backgrounds, and the Stale. The precondition for
a harmonious relationship with nature is social: a harmonious relationship between human and human. This involves the abolition of hierarchy in all its forms — psychological and cultural as well as social — and of classes, private property, and the State.
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The move from “here to there” will not be a sudden explosion of
change without a long period of intellectual and ethical preparation.
The world has to be educated as fully as possible if people are to change
their lives, not merely have it changed for them by self-anointed elites
who will eventually become self-seeking oligarchies. Sensibility,
ethics, ways of viewing reality, and selfhood have to be changed by
educational means, by a politics of reasoned discourse, experimentation, and the expectation of repeated failures from which we have to
learn, if humanity is to achieve the self-consciousness it needs to finally
engage in self-management.
No longer can radical movements afford to plunge unthinkingly into
action for its own sake. We have never been in greater need of
theoretical insight and study than we are today, when political illiteracy
has reached appalling proportions and action has become a fetish as an
end in itself. We are also in dire need of organization—not the nihilistic
chaos of self-indulgent egotists in which structure of any kind is decried
as “elitist” and “centralist,” Patience, the hard work of responsible
commitment in the day-to-day work of building a movement, is to be
prized over the theatrics of prima donnas who are always willing to
“die” on the barricades of a distant “revolution” but who are too
high-minded to engage in the humdrum tasks of spreading ideas and
maintaining an organization.
To move from “here to there” is a demanding *process*, not a dramatic
gesture. It will always be marked by uncertainties, failures, digressions,
and disputes before it finds its sense of direction. Nor is there any
certainty that basic social change will succeed in one’s lifetime.
Revolutionaries today must draw their inspiration from the high
idealists of the past like the great Russian and French revolutionaries
of the last century who had little hope that they would witness the great
upheavals that confronted later generations but to which they contributed the example of their lives, dedication, and convictions. Revolutionary commitment is not only a calling that seeks to change the world; it is also an inward imperative to save one’s own identity and individuality from a corruptive society that degrades one’s very personality with the lure of cheap emoluments and the promise of status in a totally meaningless world.
A new politics must be created that eschews the snares of parliamentarism and the immediate gratification of a media-contrived “forum,”
which is more self-aggrandizing than educational. Movements like the
German Greens are already filled with self-serving stars who are
undermining the integrity, ethical outlook, and elan of their more heroic
days. New programs and a new politics must be structured around the
immediate environment of the individual — his or her housing conditions, neighbourhood problems, transportation facilities, economic
conditions, pollution issues, and workplace conditions. Power must be
steadily shifted to neighbourhoods and municipalities in the form of
community centres, cooperatives, occupational centres, and ultimately,
citizens’ assemblies.
Success cannot be measured by the immediate and constant support
a movement of this kind gains. Only a relatively small number of people
will initially work with such a movement and only a relatively few are
likely to participate in neighbourhood assemblies and municipal confederations — except perhaps when very important issues emerge that
command wide public attention. Old ideas and methods which have
become routine in every day life die very slowly; new ones are likely
to grow very slowly. Citizen initiatives’ groups may spring up suddenly
with fervour and elan when a community is confronted with, say, the
siting of a nuclear power plant in its midst or the discovery of a toxic
dump in its environs. An ecologically oriented municipalist movement
must never delude itself that such mass activities are necessarily lasting
ones. They can fade away as quickly as they emerge. One can only hope
that they establish a tradition that can be invoked in the future and that
the popular education they provide has not been lost on the community
at large.
At the same time, truly committed members of such a movement
must advance with a vision of what society should be like in the long
run. They must go very far in their goals so that others increasingly go
far enough in their activities. Such a core of people must advance
historic solutions as well as immediately practical ones. The present
society makes all the rules of the game by which even the most
well-intentioned rebels play. If this all-important fact is not clearly
seen, morally debilitating compromises will, in fact, become the rule
that will lead to an ethics of evil based on lesser evils that eventually
yield the worst of evils. No radical movement, in effect, can lose sight
of its ultimate vision of an ecological society without losing, bit by bit,
all the constituents that give it its own identity.
This vision must be stated clearly so that it can never be compromised. The vagueness of socialist and Marxist ends has done irreparable damage in degrading these ends by the exigencies of a
“pragmatic” politics and by manipulative compromises — ultimately,
the surrender of a movement’s very reason for existing. A movement
must give a visual character to its ideals so that it enters into the
imagination of a new politics, not merely present its ideas in programmatic statements. Such attempts have been made with considerable
success in the past by groups like People’s Architecture, which took
the pains to replan entire neighbourhoods in Berkeley, California, and
visually demonstrate how they could become more habitable, communal, and aesthetically attractive.
Today, we have a magnificent repertoire of new ideas, plans, technological designs, and working data that can give us a graphic picture
of an ecological community and a participatory democracy. Valuable
as these materials may be in demonstrating that we can finally build
sustainable communities based on renewable resources, they should not
be seen simply as new systems of engineering society into a balanced
relationship with a given natural environment.
They also have far-reaching *ethical* implications that can only be
ignored by fostering an eco-technocratic mentality toward so-called
appropriate technologies, a term that is too ambiguous to be used in a
larger ecological context of ideas. That organic gardening can meet our
basic requirements for chemically untreated food, provide us with a
superior inventory of nutrients, and improve our soil rather than destroy
it are the conventional arguments for shifting from agribusiness to
ecological forms of food cultivation. But organic farming does much
more than this. It brings us *into* the cultivation of food, not merely its
consumption. We enter into the food chain itself that has its beginnings
in the soil, a chain of which we are a living component and play a
transformative role. It brings us closer to the natural world as a whole
from which we have been alienated. We grow part or all of our food
and use our bodies artfully to plant, weed, and harvest crops. We engage
in an ecological “ballet,” if you like, that greatly improves upon the
current fad for jogging on asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks. As one
occupation among many that the individual can practise in the course
of a day (to follow Fourier’s advice), organic gardening enriches the
diversity of our everyday lives, sharpens our natural sensibilities to
growth and decay, and attunes us to natural rhythms. Hence, organic
gardening, to take only one case in point, would be seen in an ecological
society as more than the solution to our nutritional problems. It would
become part of our entire being as socially, culturally, and biologically
aware beings.
The same is true if we engage in aqua-culture, particularly in
monitoring self-sustaining systems developed at the pioneering Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, where the very wastes of
herbivorous fish were recycled by aquatic plants to provide food for
the fish themselves, thus creating a fairly closed, self-sufficient ecological cycle in providing human communities with edible proteins. The
use of solar power, a technology that has reached an extraordinarily
high degree of sophistication and efficiency, can be regarded as
ecological not only because it is based on a renewable energy resource,
but also because it brings the sun, changing climatic conditions, indeed
the heavens, as it were, into our everyday lives in a very palpable way.
The same can be said for windpower, the presence of livestock in a
community, mixed farming, composting techniques that recycle a
community’s wastes into soil nutrients; indeed, an entire ecological
ensemble or pattern in which one component is used to interact with
others to produce a humanly modified ecosystem that meets human
needs while enriching the natural ecosystem as a whole. {3}
{3} These views were advanced decades ago, in the author’s essay, “Toward a liberatory Technology” and have since percolated into the ecology movement. Acknowledged or not, they have since become part of our contemporary conventional wisdom in a technocratic rather than an ecological and ethical form.
An ecological society, structured around a confederal Commune of
communes, each of which is shaped to conform with the ecosystem and
bioregion in which it located, would deploy this ensemble of technologies in an artistic way. It would make use of local resources, many
of which have been abandoned because of mass production techniques.
How would property and the control of property be dealt with in
such a society? Historically, modern radicalism has emphasized
nationalization of land and industry or workers’ control of these resources. A nationalized economy, as anarchists have been quick to point
out, presupposes the existence of the State. This single fact would be
enough to reject it outright. What is no less disquieting is that a
nationalized economy is the breeding ground for parasitic economic
bureaucracies that have left even the so-called socialist countries of the
East in an economic, crisis-ridden limbo. We no longer have to question
its operational validity on strictly theoretical grounds as a source of
statism, even totalitarianism. Its own acolytes have been abandoning
it, ironically, for a relatively “free-market” solution.
Workers’ control, long favoured by syndicalist tendencies in opposition to nationalized economies, has serious limitations of its own.
Except for Spain, where anarchist-influenced unions like the CNT
maintained a tight grip on any wayward enterprises that might easily
have turned into collective capitalist concerns, a collective enterprise
is not necessarily a commune — nor is it necessarily communistic in
its outlook. More than one workers’ controlled enterprise has functioned in a capitalistic manner, competing with like concerns for
resources, customers, privileges, and even profits. Publicly owned, or
workers’-controlled cooperatives all too often turn into oligarchic
corporations, a trend widely experienced in the United States and
Scandinavia. What singles out many of these enterprises is the fact that
they become a particularistic interest, more or less benign. But they are
no different in kind from capitalistic enterprises and are subjected to
the same social pressures by the market in which they must function.
This particularism tends increasingly to encroach on their higher ethical
goals — generally, in the name of “efficiency,” the need to “grow” if
they are to survive, and the overwhelming temptation to acquire larger
earnings.
Libertarian municipalism advances a holistic approach to an
ecologically oriented economy. Policies and concrete decisions that
deal with agriculture and industrial production would be made by
citizens in face-to-face assemblies—as *citizens*, not simply as workers,
farmers, or professionals who, in any case, would themselves be
involved in rotating productive activities, irrespective of their professional expertise. As citizens, they would function in such assemblies at
their highest level — their *human* level — rather than as socially
ghettoized beings. They would express their general human interests,
not their particular status interests.
Instead of nationalizing and collectivizing land, factories,
workshops, and distribution centres, an ecological community would
workshops would be controlled by the popular assemblies of free
communities, not by a nation-state or by worker-producers who might
very well develop a proprietary interest in them. Everyone, in a sense,
would function as a citizen, not as a self-interested ego, a class being,
or pan of a particularized “collective.” The classical ideal of the rational
citizen, engaged in a discursive, face-to-face relationship with other
members of his or her community, would acquire *economic* underpinnings as well as pervade every aspect of public life. Such an individual,
presumably free of a particularistic interest in a community where each
contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from
the common fund of produce what he or she needs, would give
citizenship a broad, indeed unprecedented, material solidity that goes
beyond the private ownership of property.
It is not too fanciful to suppose that an ecological society would
ultimately consist of moderately sized municipalities, each a commune
of smaller household communes or private dwellings that would be
delicately attuned to the natural ecosystem in which it is located. The
wisdom of living communally or individually is an issue that can only
be left to decisions made by future generations, individual by individual, just as it is made today.
Communal intimacy would be consciously fostered. No
municipality would be so far from another that it would not be within
reasonable walking distance from its neighbours. Transportation would
be organized around the collective use of vehicles, be they monorails,
railroads, bicycles, automobiles, and the like, not single drivers who
clutter huge highway systems with their largely empty vehicles.
Work would be rotated between town and country and between
everyday tasks. Fourier’s ideal of a highly variegated workday might
well be honoured in apportioning the working day into gardening, the
crafting of objects, reading, recitations, and a fair portion of time for
manufacturing installations. Land would be used ecologically such that
forests would grow in areas that are most suitable for aboreal flora and
widely mixed food plants in areas that are most suitable for crops.
Orchards and hedges would abound to provide niches for a wide
diversity of life-forms and thereby remove the need for pesticides
through a system of biological checks and balances. Still other areas
would be set aside, perhaps more extensively than they are today, for
wildlife. The physical use of the body would be fostered as part of a
diversified work process and greater athleticism. Solar and wind power
would be used extensively and wastes would be collected, composted,
and recycled. Production would emphasize quality over quantity:
homes, furnishings, utensil, and clothing would be made to last for
years, in some cases, for generations. The entire municipal pattern I
have described would be planned with a deep sensitivity for a given
region to preserve its natural features as much as possible with a
concern for nonhuman life-forms and the balance of nature.
Industrial installations, based on small, multipurpose machines, the
latest innovations in humanly scaled technologies, the production of
quality goods, and a minimal expenditure of energy, would be placed
within regions to serve as many communities as possible without the
mindless duplication of the same facilities and products that occurs in
a market economy.
Let me state flatly that a high premium would be placed on labour-saving devices — be they computers or automatic machinery — that
would free human beings from needless toil and give them unstructured
leisure time for their self-cultivation as individuals and citizens. The
recent emphasis of the ecology movement, particularly in the United
States, on labour-intensive technologies, presumably to “save” energy
by exhausting the working classes of society, is a scandalous, often
self-indulgent, middle-class affectation. The salad of academics, students, professionals, and their like, who have expressed these views are
often people who have never been obliged to do a day of onerous toil
in their lives in, say, a foundry or on an automobile assembly line. Their
own labour-intensive activities have generally been centred around
their “hobbies,” which may include jogging, sports, and elevating hikes
in national parks and forests. A few weeks during a hot summer in a
steel foundry would quickly disabuse them of the virtues of labour-intensive industries and technologies.
Between a here that is totally irrational, wasteful, based on giant
industrial and urban belts, a highly chemical agribusiness, centralized
and bureaucratic power, a staggering armaments economy, massive
pollution, and mindless labour on the one hand, and the ecological
society I have tried to describe on the other, lies an indefinable zone of
highly complex transitions, one that involves the development of a new
sensibility as well as new politics. There is no substitute for the role of
consciousness and the support of history to mediate this transition. No
nor should we desire one. What people cannot shape for themselves,
they will never control. It can be taken away from them as readily as it
is bestowed upon them.
Ultimately, every revolutionary project rests on the hope that the
people will develop a new consciousness if they are exposed to thoughtful ideas that patently meet their needs and if objective reality — be it
history, nature, or both—renders them susceptible to the need for basic
social change. Without the objective circumstances that favour a new
consciousness and the organized means to advance it publicly, there
will be no long-range change or even the measured steps needed to
achieve it. Every revolutionary project is, above all, an *educational* one.
The rest must come from the real world in which people live and the
changes that occur in it.
An educational process that does not retain contact with that real
world, its traditions as well as everyday realities, will perform only a
part of its task. Every people has its own libertarian background, to
repeat a claim I made earlier, and its own libertarian dreams, however
much they may be confused with media-generated propaganda and the images that distort them.
The “American Dream,” so much in fashion today, for example, has
anarchistic components as well as bourgeois ones and has taken many
different forms. One strand can be traced back to the revolutionary
Puritans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish a quasi-communistic
“New Jerusalem.” For all their failings, they produced coherent
basically egalitarian communities which governed themselves in directly democratic town-meetings. Another “American Dream” was shaped by the southwest cowboy culture in which the New England domestic hearth was replaced by the lonely campfire. Its heroes were fiercely individualistic gun-slingers that are celebrated in Sergio
Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns such as the movie, “The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly “ Still another that emerged at the turn of the
century was the impoverished immigrant “American Dream,” the myth
that American streets are “paved of gold,” in short, a dream of unlimited
material possibilities for betterment and the notion that “everything is
possible” in the United States.
I have adduced these quasi-utopian visions, each uniquely national
when one tries to ferret out a variety of “dreams” in European countries,
to emphasize that in one way or another, the revolutionary project must
make contact with these popular longings and find ways to rework them
into the contemporary ideals of freedom. Anarchism is not a product
of the labours of a genius who spent most of his life in the London
Museum and delivered a socialist “science” to the world of his tinier
Either it is a social product—sophisticated, to be sure, by able theorists,
but one that stems from the deepest, most generous, and liberty loving
aspirations of a people — or it is nothing. Such was the case with
Spanish anarchism between the 1880s and the late 1930s or Italian and
Russian anarchism before the rise of Mussolini and Stalin, when the
writings of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta gave theoretical expression to deeply felt aspirations of oppressed people. Wherever anarchism took root, it did so because it literally became a voice of freedom for a yearning people and spoke in their language — notably, their most cherished ideals, most fervent hopes, and in the idiom of their specific tongues. It is this deeply popular attribute, its rootedness in the social life of a people and their communities, that has made anarchist ideas profoundly ecological in nature and that has made anarchist theorists the authentic radical initiators of ecological ideas in our own day.
Anarchism and social ecology — that is, eco-anarchism — must
count on the probability that normal people have the untapped power
to reason on a level that does not differ from that of humanity’s most
brilliant individuals. Eco-anarchism must work with the supposition
that humanity as a whole is highly distinctive. It occupies a very unique
place in evolution, which, to be sure, does not justify the notion that it
should, much less can, “dominate” nature. What makes human beings
unique in contrast to all nonhuman forms of life is that they have
extraordinary powers of conceptual thought, verbal communication
structured around a formidable array of concepts, and sweeping powers
to alter the natural world in ways that could be utterly destructive or
magnificently creative.
Can we dismiss these remarkable powers as mere accidents or
incidents in the evolution of life, indeed, of nature as a whole? There
is no way to disprove Bertrand Russell’s famous lament that human
consciousness is the mere accidental product of unforeseeable circumstances, a short-lived spark of light in a black, meaningless, and
lifeless cosmos that emerged out of the nothingness of reality and must
eventually disappear into it without leaving a trace. Perhaps — but
every philosophical approach that raises the question of the “meaning”
of humanity must be derived from unprovable presuppositions. In the
last century, physics made the all-important presupposition that motion
is an “attribute” of matter and proceeded to erect a highly sophisticated
body of tenable ideas on this unprovable notion. The ability of these
presuppositions to clarify reality may well have been the best “proof”
physics needed to validate the role of presuppositions as such.
Modern ecology, specifically social ecology, is also in need of
presuppositions if it is to become a coherent outlook that tries to explain
humanity’s place in the natural world. A number of frivolous ecological
theories have emerged that essentially deny humanity any unique place
in nature, say, one that is different from the “intrinsic worth” of a snail.
This view, as I have observed, has a name — “biocentricity” — and it
advances the view that human beings are neither more nor less “worthy” than snails in the natural world (hence the myth of a “biocentric
democracy”). In the natural scheme of things the two are merely
“different.” That they are “different” is a rather trite fact, but one that
tells us nothing whatever about the *way* they are different and the
We are thus faced with an important question. What is humanity’s
place in nature? Looking back almost intuitively over the evolution of
the universe, we can see — *as no other animal can* — an overall
tendency of active, turbulent substance to develop from the simple to
the complex, from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively
heterogeneous, from the simple to the variegated and differentiated.
The most striking attribute of substance — a term I believe we require
to single out the dynamic and creative notion of a seemingly “dead,”
static “matter” — is a process of development. By development, I do
not mean a mere change of place or location; rather I refer to an
unfolding of the latent potentialities of a phenomenon, the actualization
of possibility and undeveloped form in the fullness of being. Within
substance at its most primal level is a germinal unfolding over varying
gradations of development in which each whole is a potentiality for a
more differentiated whole, of tendency toward ever-greater subjectivity and flexibility. I speak, here, not of a preordained teleology or a
predetermined end that marks the completion of an inexorable development. Rather, what I am trying to explore is an inherent striving or nisus
and tendency toward greater differentiation, complexity, increasing
subjectivity (which is not yet intellectuality until we encounter it in
human beings), and physical flexibility.
These are presuppositions, and basic ones. But apparently, at a
certain point, the tendency of the inorganic development toward complexity does reach a visible and clear threshold at which point life
emerges. The dividing line between the two domains consists of a
phenomenon called *metabolism*, in which proteins, formed from amino
acids, developed the property of *active* self-maintenance and, with it,a
vague sense of self-identity. Rocks and the running water that erodes
them are passive. Water simply erodes and dissolves the mineral
material in rocks.
By contrast, a mere amoeba is intensely active. It is literally occupied with being itself by maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between
the building-up and breaking-down process that determines its existence. It is not simply passive in its relationship to its environment: it is
an incipient self, an identifiable being, that is engaged in immanently
preserving its identity. Indeed, it exhibits a dim sense of self-directiveness, the germ of what eventually appears as purposiveness, will, and
intentionality when we examine more complex and more subjectively
developed life-forms at later periods of evolution.
The further differentiation of unicellular organisms like the amoeba
into multicellular ones like the sponge and eventually high complex
ones like mammals yields an ever-greater specialization of organs and
organ-systems. A point arrives in this process where we begin to clearly
witness the emergence of nerve networks, autonomic nervous systems,
layered brains, and finally, self-conscious beings over a long evolutionary process.
This is simply evidence of a trend in nature itself that reaches back
to the interactivity of atoms to form complex molecules, amino acids,
and proteins. Life acquires greater flexibility with warm-bloodedness,
a development that renders specific life-forms more adaptable to different climates. Species interact with each other and their environment,
moreover, to produce increasingly more diversified ecosystems, many
of which open new avenues for evolutionary development and greater
subjectivity that leads to elementary choices in following, even
developing, new evolutionary pathways. Life, at these levels of complexity, begins to play an increasingly active role in its own evolution.
It is not the mere passive object of “natural selection”; it participates
in its evolution so that we are obliged to change our terminology from
Darwin’s day and speak of “participatory evolution.”
If we survey the evolutionary unfolding of this ever-cumulative
process — in which life-forms reabsorb early developments into their
own development, be it early nerve networks that cover skin, nerve
ganglia that form our spinal cord, “reptile” brains and the like — we
can more than hypothesize that nature exhibits a tendency towards its
own self-directive evolution, a drift toward a more conscious development
in which *choice*, however dim, reveals that biotic evolution
contains a potential for freedom. To speak of nature simply as a “realm
of necessity” is to overlook its fecundity, trend toward diversity, matrix
as a development of subjectivity, self-identity, rudimentary choice, and
conscious intentionality, in short, a realm of potential freedom in which
life, at least, emerges from its long evolution as the basis for genuine
selfhood and self-directiveness. It is in the human species that we find
this development fully actualized, at least within the limits created by
social life and the application of reason to the conduct of human affairs.
Humanity, in effect, becomes the potential voice of a nature rendered
self-conscious and self-formative.
We can thus speak of prehuman nature as “first nature” in the sense
that selfhood, consciousness, and the bases for freedom are still too dim
and rudimentary to be regarded as fully self-directive. We may even
encounter many approximations of self-consciousness, primarily in the
primate world. But it is not until we reach humanity that this potentiality
acquires a new social or “second nature” that lends itself to full
realization: a product of evolution that has the fullness of mind, of
extraordinary communicative abilities, of conscious association, and
the ability to knowingly alter itself and the natural world. To deny these
extraordinary human attributes which manifest themselves in real life,
to submerge them in notions like a “biocentric democracy” that renders
human beings and snails “equal” in terms of their “intrinsic worth”
(whatever that phrase may mean) is simply frivolous.
Moreover — and very significantly—this “biocentric” approach is
meant to dilute the most characteristic trait of humankind: its capacity
to engage in purposeful *activity*. It denies humanity’s power to *change*
the world and, in great part, to change itself. Instead, disarmed by a
deadening gospel of passivity and receptivity, the trend of this
“biocentric” mode of thinking is largely adaptive and basically noncritical. One hears such quietistic tenets from Taoism and from Western
philosophies of “Being” that range from the static views of Parmeniedes up to, Martin Heidegger, whose outlook, in my view, can be
easily brought into conformity with the ideas of National Socialism, a
movement to which he belonged for more than a decade.
The great precepts of early radicals, from Robert Owen, Charles
Fourier, Michael Bakunin, and Karl Marx, among many others, to our
own time, placed a crucial emphasis on the belief that humanity must
be an *active* agent in the world. These precepts lie at the core of the
revolutionary project and the ideals of freedom. That various schools
of ecology have emerged that preach the need for a passive relationship
between humanity and nature; indeed, for an abject obedience of human
beings to the “laws of nature,” which presumably produce famines as
“checks on population,” may well earn ecology a reputation even worse
than that of economics. If economics once acquired a reputation as the
“dismal science,” ecology, in its more reactionary forms, may well
deserve the sobriquet of the “cruel science.”
Humanity, as I have noted, is still less than human. Given the present
competitive, divided, and unfeeling society, it has a long way to go in
order to fulfill its potentiality for reason, care, and sympathy. But that
potentiality expresses itself in countless ways that have no equal in
other life-forms and its actualization depends upon basic social changes
that have yet to be made. The most heinous crime of certain ecologists
in dealing with these social imperatives stems from the ease with which
they have dropped the human social condition from the very discourse
of their concerns. This treatment of people merely as a “species” brings
all human beings into complicity with their own degradation by elites,
classes, and the State, not only the degradation of nature by a grow-or-die society.
Viewed from the standpoint of what humanity *can* be, we have
reason to speak of a relationship between human and human and
between humanity and nature that will transcend the pristine “first
nature” from which a social “second nature” emerges and will open the
way to a radically new “free nature” in which an emancipated humanity
will become the voice, indeed the expression, of a natural evolution
rendered self-conscious, caring, and sympathetic to the pain, suffering,
and incoherent aspects of an evolution left to its own, often wayward,
unfolding. Nature, due to human rational intervention, will thence
acquire the intentionality, power of developing more complex lifeforms, and capacity to differentiate itself. We encounter at this point
the far-reaching questions of developing an ecological ethics. Human
intervention into the natural world is not a sick aberration of evolution.
Human beings can no more be separated from nature and their own
animality than lemmings can thrive without their skins. What makes
the human animal a product of natural evolution is not only its physical
primate characteristics; it is also the extent to which humanity actualizes a deep-seated nisus in evolution toward self-consciousness and
freedom. Herein lies the grounding for a truly objective ethics, conceived in terms of a philosophy of potentiality and actuality, not a
mechanical cause-and-effect relationship or the causal agnosticism of
Hume and his modern-day positivist followers.
exists no further than what we can perceive with our eyes and noses.
Conceived as formative, reality is always a process of actualization of
potentialities. It is no less “real” or “objective” in terms of what it *could*
be as well as what it is at any given moment.
Humanity, conceived from this dialectical notion of causality, is
more than it is today; it is also what it *could* be — and perhaps *will* be
tomorrow or generations from now. Insofar as we encounter a tendency,
even a potentiality, that could yield freedom and self-consciousness,
freedom and self-consciousness are no less real (or, in Hegel’s more
precise term, “actual”) in society than they are as potentialities in
nature.
What also makes the human animal a product of nature is not only
the voice it gives to nature, but the fact that it can intervene into nature
precisely as a *product* of natural evolution; indeed, that it has been
organized over aeons of organic development to do precisely that,
insofar as it has any place in the natural world. What is warped about
the human condition is not that people actively intervene in nature and
alter it, but that they intervene actively to destroy it because hum anity’s
even terminate it, as so many concerned ecologists have done, today,
is as naive as the behaviour of a child that furiously lucks the chair over
which it has stumbled.
Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society
free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that
places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution
— social and natural — fully self-conscious and as free as possible in
its ability to make evolution as rational as possible in meeting nonhuman and human needs. I am not advancing a view that approves of
“natural engineering.” The natural world, as I have stressed repeatedly
in earlier writings, is much too complex to be “controlled” by human
ingenuity, science, and technology. My own anarchist proclivities have
fostered in my thinking a love of spontaneity, be it in human behaviour
or in natural development. The imagination has a major place beside
the rational; the intuitive, aesthetic, and a sense of wonder for the
marvelous, belong as much to the human spirit as does the intellectual.
Natural evolution can not be denied its own spontaneity and fecundity
any more than can social evolution.
But we cannot reject the place of rationality in life and the extent to
which it is no less a product of natural development than it is of human
development We stand at a crossroads of conflicting pathways: either
we will surrender to a mindless irrationalism that mystifies social
evolution with myths, deities, and a crude particularism in the name of
gender or hidden elites — one that renders social evolution aimless,
with grim results for human and nonhuman life alike — or we will
regain the activism, that is denigrated today, and turn the world into an
ever-broader domain of freedom and rationality. This entails a new
form of rationality, a new technology, a new science, a new sensibility
and self — and, above all, a truly libertarian society.
[1] I have not penned this reference to viruses lightmindedly. The “unimpeachable right” of pathogenic viruses to exist is seriously discussed in David Ehrenfeld’s *The Arrogance of Humanism*. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 208–210.
[2] See Bill Devall and George Sessions, *Deep Ecology*, (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985) for a comprehensive book-length account of the views expressed by the “deep ecology” movement. Much of the language used by “deep ecologists” — such as “biocentric equality” — will be found in this work.
[3] *Ibid*., 225.
[4] Robert Briffault, “The Evolution of the Human Species” in *The Making of Man*, V.F. Calverton, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 765–766.
[5] David Ehremfeld, *op.cit.*,207
[6] Dorothy Lee, *Freedom and Culture* (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc, 1959), 42.
[7] Paul Radin, *The World of Primitive Man* (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 11.
[8] I’ve examined this important, and largely neglected, aspect of magic in my book, *The Ecology of Freedom*, (Palo Alto: Cheshrire Books, 1982). By no means do I think, however, that this noncoercieve form of magic has any meaning for our time. I cite it merely as an example of *how* nonhierarchical communities viewed the natural world, not as another technique that should be recovered for use by modern mystics and theists. Early hunters were wrong, of course. Game did not obligingly expose themselves to spears and arrows any more than they were “forced” by more coercive magical practices to become food in a Paleolithic diet. To try to restore these rituals today (and no one quite knows what forms they took) would be naive at best and cynical at worst. To the extent that ritual has any place in a free society, it should be new ones that foster a high regard for life and for human consociation — not descend into an atavism that is absurd and meaningless to the modern mind.
[9] Janet Biehl, “What is Social Ecofeminism?” in *Green Perspectives*, No. 11.
[10] Paul Radin, *op.cit.*, 212, 215.
[11] To substitute words like “industrial society” for capitalism can thus be highly misleading. “Industrial” capitalism actually preceded the Industrial Revolution. In Venice’s famous arsenal, a large labour force worked with very traditional tools, and in England’s early factories the labour force was structured around simple machines and techniques. What these factories did was to intensify the labour process, not introduce particularly startling technical innovations. The innovations came later. To speak of an “industrial society” without clear reference to the new social relations introduced by capitalism, namely wage and labour and a dispossessed proletariat, often willfully endows technology with mystical powers and a degree of autonomy that it does not really have. It also creates the highly misleading notion that society can live with a market economy that is “green,” “ecological,” or “moral,” even under the conditions of wage labour, exchange, competition, and the like. This misuse of language imputes to technology — much of which may be very useful socially and ecologically — what should really be directed against a very distinct body of social relationships, namely, capitalistic ones. One may gain greater “influence” with an unknowing public by using this expression, but often at the expense of miseducating people.
[12] Ernst Bloch, *Man on His Own* (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 128.
[13] H. and H.A. Frankfort, “The Emancipation of Thought From Myth,” in *Before Philosophy*, H. and H.A. Frankfort, *et.al.* (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951), 242–243. The passages from Egyptian chronicles appear in the pages above.
[14] Peter Kropotkin, *Mutual Aid* (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989). 195.
[15] Marie Louise Berneri, *Journey Through Utopia* (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, n.d.), 54.
[16] Ronald Fraser, *Blood of Spain* (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). 66.
[17] For a fairly complete discussion of this mixed precapitalist economy, see my book, *The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship* (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987).
[18] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleion,” *Collected Works*, Vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 103.
[19] Karl Marx, *Grundrisse* (New York: Random House, 1973), 109–110.
[20] *Ibid.*
[21] Jean Jacques Rousseau, *The Social Contract* (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 94.