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Title: Toward an Ecological Society
Date: 1980
Source: Retrieved on 2017-12-20 from [[https://archive.org/details/TowardAnEcologicalSociety/][archive.org]].
Authors: Murray Bookchin
Topics: Social ecology, Communalism, Ecology, Libertarian municipalism, Human ecology, Black rose books
Published: 2020-05-21 00:00:00Z

Dedication

For Debbie, my daughter

Introduction

These essays have been collated for a special purpose: to

recover the very *idea* of a radical critique of social life.

At the outset it should be clear that this is no abstract or

insignificant task. Perhaps at no time in modern history has

radical thought been in such grave peril of losing its very identity

as a consistent critique of the existing social order and a coherent

project for social reconstruction. Unless we are prepared to

retreat to the sectarian politics of a by-gone era, it must be bluntly

asserted *that hardly any authentic revolutionary opposition*

• exists in North America and Europe*. Worse, the mere notion of

what a revolutionary opposition consists of has itself become

blurred and diluted to the point of sheer opaqueness. If the ghosts

of Gerrard Winstanley, Jacques Danton, Gracchus Babeuf,

Mikhail Bakunin, Louise Michel — yes, even Marx, Luxemburg,

and Lenin — occasionally haunt us, they have become so spectral

and inchoate that we can no longer see or hear them, even as

voices of social conscience.

What we now call “radical” is an odious mockery of three

centuries of revolutionary opposition, social agitation, intellectual

enlightenment, and popular insurgency. Radical politics in our

time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling

booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car-bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative

politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies, and finally, the

knee-bent, humble pleas for small reforms — in short, the mere

shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent

conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary

project in history. Not that petitions, slogans, rallies, and the

tedious work of public education have no place in these projects.

But we do not have to hypostasize adventuristic escapades to

recognize the loss of a balanced revolutionary stance, one that

has enough sense of time and place to evoke the appropriate

means to achieve appropriate goals. My point is that the very

goals of contemporary radicalism have all the features of a

middle-aged bourgeois opportunism — of “trade-offs” for small

gains, of respectability for “mass” but meaningless constituencies, of a degenerative retreat into the politics of the lesser

evil” that itself generates a world of narrowing choices, finally of a

sclerotic ossification of social ideas, organizational habits, and

utopistic visions.

What is most terrifying about present-day radicalism is that

the piercing cry for “audacity” — «<em>L’audace! L’audace! encore

l’audace!</em>» — that Danton voiced in 1793 on the hightide of the

French Revolution would simply be *puzzling* to self-styled

radicals who demurely carry attache cases of memoranda and

grant requests into their conference rooms, suitcases of their

books into their lecture halls, and bull horns to their rallies. The

era of the “managerial radical” (to use Andrew Kopkind s

damning phrase) has pushed radicalism itself into the shadows of

history. What we encounter today is the universal bureaucratization and technocratization of radicalism as such not merely

in the triumph of organizational bureaucracies and centralized

leaderships but in the very outlook, vision, and ideas of its most

articulate acolytes. The “managerial radical” is the practitioner of

organizational technique, of efficient manipulation, of mass

mobilization *as goals in themselves*. Technique has become the

substitute for social idealism.

Radical theory, in turn, fares even worse as the ideology for

this historic turn in radical politics. Where socialism and even

anarchism have not been reduced to dogmatic echoes of the last

century, they have become disciplines within the academy, where

they serve to garnish “managerial radicalism” with theoretical

exotica. Much that now passes for “radical” theory are either

footnotes to the history of ideas or intellectual obscurantism that

supports the pragmatic obscurantism of the political marketplace. The term “marketplace” should not be taken as a

metaphor. The colonization of society by a bourgeois sensibility — a result of the colonization of society by the market is

now complete. For the market has absorbed not only every

aspect of production, consumption, community life, and family

ties into the buyer-seller nexus; it has permeated the opposition

to capitalism with bourgeois cunning, compromise, and careerism. It has done this by restating the very meaning of

opposition to conform with the system’s own parameters of

critique and discourse.

In any case it is not “anti-intellectual” or “anti-theoretical” to

slap academic snobbery in the face by demanding that radical

theory at least provide some guide to radical practice. But it is

surely tedious punditry to so completely divorce theory from

practice that it ceases to have anything but professional relevance to intellectual careerists — the academy’s counterpart of

the political careerists in today’s “radical” movements.

----

If my remarks seem overly contentious, it is because I am

deeply concerned with the integrity of new, inherently radical

issues that have emerged in recent years — issues that potentially

at least have more far-reaching emancipatory implications than

the radical ones of the past. I refer to ecology, feminism, and

community control — a group of problems that reaches beyond

the largely economistic conflicts of the movements of the last

generation. These new problems raise expansive notions of

freedom and an emancipatory moral sensibility, not merely of

justice and material exploitation. What is at stake, today,

particularly in the movements and tendencies that have formed

around ecology, feminism, and community control is the extent

to which they can be fully actualized as liberatory forces.

These movements and tendencies are now faced with a crisis

that threatens to warp their emancipatory logic into aborted,

subservient, and conventional ideologies of the status quo. Their

destiny may well be determined by our ability to unearth that

emancipatory logic, to reveal its revolutionary content, and to

explore the new meaning it can give to the word “freedom.”

Should we fail in this momentous endeavour, the colonization of

society by a deeply sedimented bourgeois sensibility will be

complete — perhaps so complete that it is doubtful if a revolutionary opposition will emerge again in the present century.

The traditional locus of modern radicalism — the workers

movement — is dead. My essays on socialism and Marxism in this

book elucidate in detail the inherent limits and mystified premises

on which it rested historically. The ecology, feminist, and

community movements that have emerged in the 1970s have

demonstrably shattered the silence that socialism has left in its

wake. They are vital, rebellious, and richly promising, but the

conflicts that face these new movements have been grossly

miscast. The central conflict confronting the ecology, feminist,

and community movements is not merely with those who wish to

despoil the environment or those who foster sexism or those who

oppose community control. The despoilers, sexists, and municipal bureaucrats wear their identities on their sleeves. They can

be singled out, disputed, and removed from their positions of

authority. The central conflict confronting the ecology, feminist,

and community movements lies *within* the movements themselves. Here, the problem they face is the need to discover the

sweeping implications of the issues they raise: the achievement of

a totally new, non-hierarchical society in which the domination of

nature by man, of woman by man, and of society by the state is

completely abolished — technologically, institutionally, culturally,

and in the very rationality and sensibilities of the individual.

The socialist movement never raised these issues clearly in the

century that it flourished between 1840 and 1940. Its primary

concerns were economic and turned on the abolition of wage

labour and capital, of economic classes and material exploitation.

That these concerns remain with us to this day need hardly be

emphasized and their resolution must be achieved if freedom is to

have any substantive meaning. But there can be a decidedly

classless, even a non-exploitative society in the *economic* sense

that still preserves hierarchical rule and domination in the *social*

sense — whether they take the form of — the patriarchal family,

domination by age and ethnic groups, bureaucratic institutions,

ideological manipulation, or a pyramidal division of labour. The

successive layers of the hierarchical pyramid may confer no

material privileges whatever on those who command and no

material renunciation by those who obey; indeed, the ideological

tradition of domination that associates “order” with hierarchy,

the psychic privileges that confer prestige on status, the historical

inertia that carries the traditional forms and sensibilities of the

past into the present and future — all of these may preserve

hierarchy even after classes have been abolished. Yet classless or

not, society would be riddled by domination and, with domination, a general condition of command and obedience, of

unfreedom and humiliation, and perhaps most decisively, an

abortion of each individual’s potentiality for consciousness,

reason, selfhood, creativity, and the right to assert full control

over her or his daily life.[1]

[1] It remains supremely ironical that, in the history of elitism and vanguardism that

runs through millenia of social theory, hierarchy did not confer material privileges

on the rulers of ideal societies but austerity and renunciation of the material world.

Plato’s “guardians” are notably denied the sensuous pleasures of life. Their

training is demanding, their responsibilities awesome, their needs severely

restricted, their possessions communal and limited. The Church was to make the

same austere demands on the clerical elite in society, however much these were

honored in the breach. Even in modern times the early Bolsheviks were expected

to live harsh, self-abnegating lives — more confining and materially impoverished

than their proletarian followers. The ideal of hiearchy was based on a concept of

service, not on privilege. That such a notion remained an ideal does not alter the

extra-material goals it raised and the surprising extent to which these goals were

retained throughout its history.

The ecology, feminist, and community movements implicitly

challenge this warped destiny. Ecology raises, the issue that the

very notion of man’s domination of nature stems from man’s

domination of man. Feminism reaches even further and reveals

that the domination of man by man actually originates in the

domination of woman by man. Community movements implicitly

assert that in order to replace social domination by self-management, a new type of civic self — the free, self-governing

citizen — must be restored and gathered into new institutional

forms such as popular assemblies to challenge the all-pervasive

state apparatus. Followed through to their logical conclusion, all

of these movements challenge not only class formations but

hierarchies, not only material exploitation but domination in

everyform. Although hierarchical structures reach into the most

intimate aspects of social and personal life, the supraclass

problems they raise nowhere falls within the limited orbit of the

socialist and labour movements. Hence, if we are to complete the

logic of the ecology, feminist, and community movements, we

must extend our very notion of freedom beyond any concept we

have held of this notion in the past.

But will these new movements be permitted to follow the logic

of their premises, to complete them in a consistent and coherent

fashion?

It is around this crucial issue that we encounter two major

obstacles: the attempt by socialists to reduce these expansive

concepts of freedom to economistic categories and the attempt

by the “managerial radicals” to compromise them. Of the two, the

socialist view tends to be the most deceptive. Slogans like

•“pollution is profitable,” “wages for housewives,” and “fight the

slumlords” involve a subtle denaturing of the more sweeping

revolutionary demands for an ecological society, the abolition of

domination, and the restoration of community control. The real

“slime of history,” to reinterpret Sartre’s phrase, is the muck of

the past that is flung upon the present to re-sculpture it into forms —

that accord with an archaic vision of social reality. A “socialist”

ecology, a “socialist” feminism, and a “socialist” community

movement — with its red flags, clenched fists, and sectarian

verbiage — are not only contradictions in terms; they infest the

newly formed, living movements of the future with the maggots of

cadavers from the past and must be opposed unrelentingly.

A special onus must be borne by ideologists who perpetuate

the infestation and even conceal it with theoretical cosmetics.

One thinks, here, of the Andre Gorzs and Herbert Marcuses who

not only worship at the mausoleum of socialism but promote it as

a viable habitat for the living. What uniquely distinguishes their

ideological obscurantism from that of the socialist sectarians is

their repeated attempts to reformulate both sides of the issue: the

old socialist categories and the new libertarian ones. The result /

that inevitably follows is that the logic of each is warped and its

inherent opposition to the other is blurred. Marcuse, by wedding

Freud to Marx and anarchism to socialism in the sixties, muddled

the meaning of all the partners in these forced alliances. What

emerged from works like *Eros and Civilization* and *One-Dimensional Man* was a mass of half-truths and gross inconsistencies. Characteristically, in Marcuse’s latest works, it was

Marx who triumphed over Freud, socialism that triumphed over

anarchism — and Eurocommunism that triumphed over everything.

What is at least theoretical probing in Marcuse is facilely

reduced to pop culture in Gorz — with even more telling practical

consequences. His *Strategy for Labour*, by miscasting students

and intellectuals as a “new proletariat,” deflected the growing

insight of sixties’ radicals from *cultural* movements into classical

economistic ones, thereby producing massive confusion in the

American student movement of the time. More than any single

journalistic work, this book brought Marxism into the Students

for a Democratic Society, producing the ideological chaos that

eventually destroyed it.

Much the same danger now faces the ecology movement if

Gorz’s treatment of the subject exercises any appreciable

influence. His recent *Ecology and Freedom* (retitled *Ecology as Politics*) is essentially the *New Strategy for Labour* writ in

ecological verbiage. It perpetuates all the incompatibilities of a

mythic “libertarian socialism” that sprinkles anarchist concepts

of decentralized organization with Social Democratic concepts of

mass political parties and, more offensively, “radical ecology”

with the opportunistic politics of conventional environmentalism.

Thus Jerry Brown, governor of California, sits side-by-side with

Ho Chi Minh, Fritz Schumacher, and Buddha as evidence of “*les neo-anarchistes*” in the American ecology movement. Imperturbably, Gorz degrades each new concept raised by ecological

theory and the practice of authentically radical tendencies in the

ecological movement into his own current variant of Marxian

socialism.

Neither Marx nor ecology emerge untainted from this crude

eclecticism. Clarity of thought, coherence of views, and, above

all, the full logic of one’s radical premises are blunted by an

ideological dilettantism that leaves every concept unfinished,

every personality miscast, and every practice compromised — be

it direct action or electoral action, decentralization or centralization, a Jerry Brown or a Ho Chi Minh. The melding of all

these contradictory views becomes insufferable not because

ecology is distorted into Marxism, for the evidence of distortion

would be clear on first inspection to any knowledgeable reader.

Rather, it lies in the fact that one can recognize neither Marxism

• nor* ecology and the problems they raise because *both* are equally

distorted in order to reconcile utterly alien premises that lead to

completely conflicting conclusions. We must either choose

between ecology, with its naturalism, its anarchistic logic of

decentralization, its emphasis on humanly scaled alternate

technologies, and its non-hierarchical institutions, or socialism,

with its typically Marxian anti-naturalism, its political logic of

centralization, its emphasis on high technology, and its bureaucratic institutions. Gorz gives us neither alternative in the name

of both and perpetuates a confusion that has already produced an

internal crisis in every American and European ecology

movement.

I have singled out Gorz primarily because of his recent interest

in ecological issues. What I have said about his hybridization of

ideas could apply equally to Juliet MitchelPs treatment of feminist

issues or David Harvey’s treatment of urban community issues.

These names, in fact, are mere metaphors for a large number of

socialist ideologists who have made eclecticism fashionable as a

substitute for probing theoretical exploration. The issues that

divide ecology, feminist, and community movements are basically

similar. Feminism is reduced to a matter of class oppression,

community issues to a matter of economic oppression. Beyond

these categories — certainly true as far as they go — the intellectual horizon of the socialist eclectics tends to become opaque.

Broader problems of freedom, hierarchy, domination, citizenship, and self-activity seem misty, ineffable, at times even

“‘incomprehensible,” beside the “nuts-and-bolts” issues of political economy. Orchestrated by an all-pervasive tendency toward

economic reductionism, *homo collectivicus* is consistently reduced to *homo economicus* and Brecht’s notorious maxim,

Feed the face, then give the moral,” becomes a strategy for

political immorality and socialist apologetics. As I have tried to

show in my essays on Marx, this may be “hard” sociology, based

on the “material facts of life,” but it is bourgeois to the core.

----

No less disquieting than the socialists who have been tracking

the ecology, feminist, and community movements are the

technocrats from within who have been trying to degrade them

for opportunistic ends. Here, ignorance is fetishized over knowledge and action over theory in the name of acquiring large

constituencies, practical results, and, of course, personal power.

If the Gorzs, Mitchells, and Harveys distort the premises and

logic of the issues that concern them, the “managerial radical”

ignores them when possible or conceals them when necessary.

Technique tends to take the place of principles; journalism, the

place of education; spectacles, the place of serious action;

floating constituencies that can be mobilized and demobilized,

(he place of lasting organizations; elites, the place of grass-roots

and. autonomous movements. This is the stock-in-trade of the

social engineer, not the committed idealist. It is self-serving and

Sterile, when it is not simply odious and treacherous.

What makes it possible for this new class of managers to

appear radical? Partly, it is the result of a lack of theoretical

insight by their own followers. The “managerial radical” capitalizes on a chronic American syndrome: the pragmatic hypostasization of action, of quick results and immediate success. Fast

food is not the only attribute of the American spirit; its ideological

counterpart is fast politics, indeed, fast radicalism. The sixties

were plagued by feverish turns in ideological fads and cultural

fashions that swept through the New Left and the counterculture

with.dazzling rapidity. Movements leap-frogged over entire eras

of historical experience and theoretical development with an

arrogant indifference for the labours of the past, abandoning

anarchism for Marxism, machismo militancy for feminism, communal living for privatism, sexual promiscuity for monogamy,

rock music for disco, only to revert again to new libertarian fads,

sado-masochism, singles bars, punk rock in criss-crossing

patterns that more closely resemble the scrawl of an infant than

the decipherable messages of maturing individuals. That young

men and women can write marketable, often salacious “biographies at the age of thirty or less is not surprising; there is

detail aplenty to entertain the reader — but nothing of significance

lo communicate.

What counts is the extent to which appearance can so easily

replace reality in the American mind. Rebellion, too, can become

mere theater when it lacks the substance of knowledge, theory,

and wisdom. Indeed, the myth that “doing” is more important

than “thinking,” that “constructive action” is more important

than rational critique — these are actually mystified forms of

theory, critique, and rationalism. The traditional American

maxim that “philosophy is bunk” has always been a philosophical

judgement in its own right, a statement of empirical philosophy as

against speculative, of sensuous knowledge as against intel-

tectual. The gruff attack upon theory and reason does not annul

intellectual activity. “Common sense” is merely “sense” that is

common, that is, untutored, uninformed, and riddled by acquired

biases. It merely replaces the presuppositions of self-conscious

wisdom by the presuppositions of unconscious prejudice. In

either case, presuppositions are always being made and thereby

involve theory, philosophy, and mentality in one form or another.

The “managerial radical” capitalizes upon this anti-theoretical

syndrome, particularly on its myth of fast success. Immediacy of

reward, a psychologically formative technique, fosters the infantile demand for immediate gratification and the infantilism of the

manager’s constituency. Radicalism thus ceases to be a body of

theory and informed practice; it becomes the fastest route to the

most immediate goals. The notion that basic social change may

require the labours and dedication of a lifetime — a notion so

basic to revolutionary idealism — has no place in this technocratic

constellation. Radicalism thus becomes methodology rather than

morality, fast success rather than patient struggle, a series of

manic responses rather than lasting commitment. A superficial

“extremism,” which the “managerial radical” often orchestrates

with the hidden cooperation of the very authorities she or, he

professes to oppose, turns out to be merely another device to

bring an alienated constituency into complicity with its own

oppressors.

The ecology movement, even more than the feminist and

community movements, thrives in this highly charged, often

contrived ambience of opposition. “Anti-nuke” groups and

alliances rise and fall at a metabolic rate that excludes serious

reflection on their methods and goals. To “Stop Nukes” has far-

reaching social implications that go beyond the problems of

adequate energy resources and radioactive pollution. The demand poses such questions as *how* should we try to “Stop

Nukes” — by direct action or political action? How should we

• organize* to “Stop Nukes” — by decentralized forms of autonomous affinity groups or national mobilizations and perhaps

centralized parties? What will *replace* nukes — huge high technology solar installations managed by conventional power utilities

or simple, often hand-crafted popular technologies that can be

constructed and managed by a moderate-sized community?

These questions alone, not to speak of innumerable issues that

range around notions of’ the communal ownership and management of society’s resources, non-hierarchical structures of

social organization, and changes in human sensibility, reach far

beyond the more limited issue of nuclear power. “No Nukes” is

not enough — at least if we wish to remove the deep-seated social

forces that produced nuclear power in the first place.

“Managerial radicalism” fosters a preoccupation with method

rather than an exploration of goals. It is noteworthy that

surprisingly few leaders of the anti-nuke movement have tried to

educate their followers (assuming they are themselves informed)

as to the implications of a serious opposition to nuclear power.

They have provided no theoretical transition from the construction and operation of nuclear power plants to the social forces

that promote them. The goal tends to remain fixed: “No Nukes!”

Their principal concerns have been with the “strategies” and

“tactics” that will achieve this end: a mobilization of docile

constituencies that can be assembled and conveniently disassembled at nuclear reactor sites, in demonstrations, and more

recently, at polling booths.

“Managerial radicalism” exhibits no real concern over the

nature of these constituencies or their qualities as educated,

socially committed, and active personalities. “Mass actions”

outweigh **self**-action; numbers outweigh ideals; quantity outweighs quality. The concept of direct action, a concept that was

meant to develop active personalities who as individuals and

individuated communities *could take the social realm directly*

• into their own hands* — an authentic public guided by ethical

considerations rather than legislative edicts — is odiously degraded into a mere matter of “tactics” rather than self-activity,

self-development, and self-management. Affinity groups, an

anarchist notion of organization that was meant to provide the

intimate, human-scaled, decentralized forms to foster the new

selves and sensibilities for a truly free society, are seen merely as

“task forces” that quickly assemble and disperse to perform very

limited and concrete actions. “Managerial radicalism,” in short, is

primarily concerned with managing rather than radicalizing. And

in the process of cultivating the manipulation of its mass

following, it grossly denatures every libertarian concept of our

times, often at a historic cost that yields a repellent careerism

within its self-appointed elite and cynicism within its naive

following.

----

The essays, articles, and papers that comprise this volume

have been selected precisely for their critical thrust in the hope

that we may yet recast the ecological, community, and theoretical issues of our time in a revolutionary direction. My omission

of discussions on feminism and the feminist movement is merely a

personal recognition that the best critiques and reconstructive

notions in this area have already come from women, as indeed the

best scholarship in anthropology and social theory. The works

which follow were written entirely during the seventies and,

almost without exception, are free of the proclivities of socialists

and “managerial radicals” to follow trendy issues. If certain

concepts and terms in this book now seem familiar, it is often

because they were picked up later by elements in the Left who

found one or another sizable constituency to exploit for their own

dogmatic ends. Thus these writings can justifiably claim to “lead”

intellectually: certainly, they do not follow — nor do they adapt

new problems to shopworn causes.

That my writings in ecology urbanism, and technics have not

always been celebrated by my colleagues on the Left can, in my

view, be attributed to one reason: my commitment to anarchism.

I hold this commitment with pride, for if nothing else it has been an

invisible moral boundary that has kept me from oozing over to

neo-Marxism, academicism, and ultimately reformism. I have not

tried to mix contradictions and incompatibilities in order to gain

the approval of my peers. A revolutionary ethical opposition has

seemed to me to be a much better destiny than the social

acceptance of those eminently practical “radicals” who basicaly

despise the “masses” and in time grow to despise themselves.

Hence the reader will find no convenient “uncertainties,” no

recipies for “success,” no shifts of focus to suit a new “lesser evil”

around which to embrace an even worse evil in the long run.

A second observation I would like to make is that this collection

does not stand in any contradiction to my earlier sixties collection

of essays, *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*. On the contrary, it largely

elaborates problems in the first volume within the changing

context of the seventies. The counterculture, in my view, is not

“dead”; it was aborted by many factors and, if anything, awaits a

richer, more perceptive, and more conscious development. The

ideals it raised of communal living, openness of relations, love,

sexual freedom, sensuousness of dress and manner are the

abiding goals of utopian thought at its best. To dismiss the sixties

as a “phase” is to dismiss utopianism as a “dream” — to deny the

relevance of a Charles Fourier and a William Morris to our

times — and to restrict the concept of a revolutionary movement

to an apparatus, denying its significance as a culture. Such

rejections of goals and traditions would be nothing less than an

acquiesence to the status quo. What is remarkable about the

sixties counterculture is not that it has been aborted; this could

have been anticipated in the absence of a theoretical armamentarium suitable to its needs. What is remarkable is that the

counterculture of the sixties emerged at all in the face of a middle-

aged, smug, and middle-class environment or that it survived in

different ways despite the hucksters who preyed upon it, be they

the media-oriented canaille who became its “spokesmen” and

clowns and the leeches of the dogmatic Left who parasitized it.

• Post-Scarcity Anarchism* tried to explain the emergence of

this astonishing cultural phenomenon — so alien to the adults of

the Eisenhower era — and to offer it a perspective. That my

essays advanced ecological, technological, organizational, and

theoretical perspectives that are still viable today attests to the

relevance of the book as a whole.

The term “post-scarcity,” however, has encountered curious

difficulties that require some discussion. “Scarcity” is not a

mystical or absolute condition, a floating sense of “need” that is

autonomous in its own right. It is a relative term whose meaning

has changed with the emergence of new needs and wants.

Marshall Sahlins has emphasized that technically primitive

hunting bands lack the modern body of needs that center around

sophisticated energy sources, dwellings, vehicles, entertainment,

and the steady diet of food that Euro-Americans take for granted.

Their“tool kit” is, in fact, so utterly primitive and their needs so

limited that they lack a sense of “scarcity” that riddles our own

comparatively opulent society. In this sense, they are seemingly

“post-scarcity” communities or, to be more accurate, “nonscarcity” communities.

This line of reasoning is often convincing enough to suggest

that a modern society based on “voluntary simplicity” — to use a

new trendy term — might also become a “post-scarcity” society if

it imposed “limits to growth” and “voluntary limits” on needs.

Indeed, the implication of Sahlins’s views have been used with

telling effect to demand a more austere, labour-intensive, relatively self-sufficient society — presumably one whose needs

were in fact so limited that our seeming energy problems and raw

materials shortages would be removed. Anthropology has been

placed again in the service of the status quo — mot to remove

material want but to validate it.

What this line of reasoning ignores is the considerable losses a

drastic reduction of needs would create — losses in intellectual,

cultural, and psychological complexity and ultimately a wealth of

selfhood and personality. However much a hunting band may be

in equipoise with its primitive tool-kit and its limited needs, it

remains primitive and limited nevertheless. Even if one assumes

that the “noble savage” is not a myth, it is a condition of

“savagery” as well as nobility — one that is rooted’ in the

limitations of the blood tie rather than citizenship, tribal parochialism rather than *humanitas*, a sexual division of labour rather

than a professional one, revenge rather than justice, in short

custom rather than reason and biological inflexibility instead of

social malleability. It lies within human potentialities to be more

than a “noble savage,” a product of natural history alone. To

leave humanity’s latent capacity for actualizing the fullness of

reason, creativity, freedom, personality and a sophisticated

culture only partially or one-sidedly fulfilled is to deny the rich

dialectic of the human condition in its full state of realization and

even of nature as life rendered self-conscious.

Hence even were a “non-scarcity” society to exist, humanity

would still suffer the same privation of form and development that

exists in a “scarcity” society. “Post-scarcity” does not denote an

affluence that would stifle the fulfillment of the human condition;

indeed, an abundance of needs that can be fulfilled is more likely

to perpetuate unfreedom than the “non-scarcity” condition of a

hunting band. “Post-scarcity” denotes a free society that can

• reject* false, dehumanizing needs *precisely because it can be*
• substantially free of need itself*. It can decide to adopt a simpler

way of material life because there is enough available for everyone

to accept or reject. That it can even make such a decision reflects

a high degree of social freedom in itself, a new system of social

relations and values that renders libertarian social judgements

possible. Gauged merely by our current agricultural and industrial output, North Americans and Europeans clearly have the

• material* means for making such a judgement; gauged by our

social relations , on the other hand, we lack the freedom, values,

and sensibility to do so. Hence our affluent society — all myths of

depleted or shrinking resources notwithstanding to the contrary — is as gripped by scarcity as our medieval ancestors

centuries earlier. A “post-scarcity” society, in effect, would have

to be a libertarian communist society that possessed enough

material resources to limit growth and needs as a matter of

choice, not as a matter of need — for if its limits were determined by needs that emerge from scarcity, it would still be limited

by need and scarcity whether resources were in short supply or

not. The *need* to diminish need would materially provide the

basis, if not the cause, of hierarchy and domination based on

privilege.

Marx hypostasized the problem of needs as the “realm of

necessity,” a concept that reaches back to Aristotle, and thereby

absolutized it in a way that obscured the historical formation of

needs. How needs are formed — this, in contrast to the acceptance of needs as they exist — represents a complex problem

which I shall not attempt to explore here. It suffices to point out

that the formation of the “realm of necessity,” with the harsh split

between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom,” is

not a natural fact that has always been with our species or must

always exist with it into the future. The “realm of necessity” is a

distinctly historical phenomenon. In my view it emerged when

primitive communities ceased to view nature as a co-existent

phenomenon to be accepted or revered and, to use Marx’s

simplistic metaphors, had to “wrestle with nature” as an “other”

ultimately to be “dominated.” Once early humanity’s mutual

reciprocity with the natural world dissolved into antagonism and

its oneness into duality, the process of recovering a new level of

reciprocity and oneness doubtless includes the scars of millenia-

long struggles to master the “forces” of nature. I share the

Hegelian view that humanity had to be expelled from the Garden

of Eden to attain the fullness of its humanness. But I emphatically deny that this exile necessarily taints utopia with the blood

and toil of history; that the “realm of necessity” must always be

the “basis” or precondition for the “realm of freedom.” It remains

Fourier’s lasting contribution that the “realm of necessity” can be

colonized by the “realm of freedom,” the realm of toil by the realm

of work, the realm of technics by the realm of play, fantasy, and

imagination.

In any case, the “realm of necessity” can never be viewed as a

• passive* “basis”; it must always infiltrate and malform the “realm

of freedom” until Fourier’s ideal becomes a conscious reality.

Marx’s tragic fate can be resolved into the fact that, integral to his

entire theoretical edifice, he colonizes the “realm of freedom” by

the “realm of necessity as its basis.” The full weight of this

theoretical approach, with its consequent reduction of social

relations to economic relations, of creative to “unalienated

labour,” of society to “associated producers,” of individuality to

embodied “needs,” and of freedom to the “shortening of the

working day” has yet to be grasped in all its regressive content.

----

The opening essays in this compilation are united by the

emphasis I place on the synthesizing role of ecology’ — a term I

sharply distinguish in my very first essay from “environmentalism.” I claim that, having divided humanity from nature many

millennia ago, we must now return to a new unity between the

social and the natural that preserves the gains achieved by

social and natural history. Thus the *real* history of humanity

(which Marx contrasted to the irrational “prehistory” prior to a

communistic future) must be wedded to natural history. Perhaps

these are no longer the brave words they seemed to be when I

advanced them sixteen years ago in “Ecology and Revolutionary

Thought,” but their implications have not been fully developed by

the so-called “radical” movement today. The separation of

humanity from nature, its sweeping social trajectory into a history

that produced a rich wealth of mind, personality, technical

insight, culture, and self-reflective thought, marks the potential

for mind in nature itself, the latent spirit in substance that comes

to consciousness in a humanity that melds with the natural world.

The time has come to integrate an ecological natural philosophy

with an ecological social philosophy based on freedom and consciousness, a goal that has haunted western philosophy from the

pre-Socratics onward.

Doubtless, the practical implications of this goal are paramount. If we are to survive ecological catastrophe, we must

decentralize, restore bioregional forms of production and food

cultivation, diversify our technologies, scale them to human

dimensions, and establish face-to-face forms of democracy. On

this score, I agree with innumerable environmentalists such as

Barry Commoner who argue, perhaps a bit belatedly, for

decentralization and “appropriate” technologies on grounds of

pragmatism and efficiency. But my concerns go much further. I

am occupied with the value of alternate technologies not only

because they are more efficient and rest on renewable resources;

I am even more concerned with their capacity to restore

humanity’s contact with soil, plant and animal life, sun and wind,

in short, with fostering a new sensibility toward the biosphere. I

am equally concerned with the individual’s capacity to understand the operations of these new technologies so that personality itself can be enriched by a new sense of self-assurance and

autonomy over the material aspects of life. Hence my emphasis

on simpler forms — more “passive’ 5 forms, to use the vernacular

of alternate technology — of solar collectors, wind machines,

organic gardens and the like. By the same token, I am occupied

with decentralization not only because it renders these technologies more feasible and more adaptable to the bio-regions in

which they are employed; I am even more concerned with

decentralization as a means of restoring power to local communities and to the individual, to give genuine meaning to the

libertarian vision of freedom as a system of direct democracy.

Small, in my view, is not merely “beautiful”; it is also ecological,

humanistic, and above all, emancipatory.

Thus, the ages-old desideratum of the “good life” converges in

ecology (as I would define the term) with the thrust of historical

development. The French students of 1968 inscribed the slogan

“Be practical, do the impossible” on the walls of Paris; to this

slogan, I have added, “If we do not do the impossible, we will be

faced with the unthinkable.” Utopia, which was once a mere

dream in the preindustrial world, increasingly became a possibility with the development of modern technology. Today, I would

insist it has become a necessity — that is, if we are to survive the

ravages of a totally irrational society that threatens to undermine

the fundaments of life on this planet.

But above all, my emphasis on achieving a new totality between

humanity and nature is part of a larger endeavour to transcend all

the divisions on which hierarchy has been reared for centuries —

the division between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of

freedom,” between work and play, town and country, mind and

body, between the sexes, age groups, ethnic groups and

nationalities. Hence, the holistic outlook that pervades this book,

a distinctly ecological, indeed, dialectical outlook, leads to an

examination of community problems in their urban form, to

Marxism, and to the problems of self-management. That I have

compiled my articles not only on ecology and the ecology

movement, but on city planning, the urban future, Marxism,

should be seen as a meaningful and logical sequence. The modern

urban crisis largely reflects the divisions that capitalism has

produced between society and nature. “Scientific socialism,” in

turn, reflects these divisions ideologically in Marx’s own dualism

between “necessity” and “freedom.” My essays on spontaneity

and organization essentially deal with ecological “politics” within

the revolutionary paradigms and organizational issues formulated by the past century of radical practice.

Finally, this book as a whole is guided by its emphasis on

hierarchy and domination as the authentic “social question” of

human development, — this as distinguished from the economists question of class and the exploitation of labour. The

irreducible “problem areas” of society lie not only in the conflict

between wage labour and capital in the factory; they lie in the

conflicts between age-groups and sexes within the family,

hierarchical modes of instruction in the schools, the bureaucratic usurpation of power within the city, and ethnic divisions

within society. Ultimately, they stem from a hierarchical sensibility of command and obedience that begins with the family and

merely reaches its most visible social form in the factory,

bureaucracy and military. I cannot emphasize too strongly that

these problems emerged long before capitalism. Bourgeois

society ironically concealed these problems for centuries by

giving them an economistic form. Marx was to fall victim to this

historic subterfuge by ignoring the subsurface modes of obedience and command that lie in the family, school, bureaucracy,

and age structure, or more precisely, by identifying the “social

problem” with class relations at the expense of a searching

investigation into the hierarchical relations that produced class

forms in the first place. Indeed, Marxism may well be the ideology

of capitalism *par excellence* precisely because the essentials of its

critique have focused on capitalist production without challenging the underlying cultural sensibilities that sustain it. My

insistence that every revolutionary movement must be a cultural

one as well as a social one is not simply the product of an

exaggerated aversion for mass culture; it has deeper roots in my

conviction that the revolutionary project remains incomplete if it

fails to reach into the problems of hierarchy and domination as

such — in short, if it fails to seek the substitution of an ecological

sensibility for a hierarchical one.

Accordingly, this book is marked by a host of contrasts that

ordinarily remain unstated or blurred in the radical and environmental literature I have encountered. It contrasts ecology with

environmentalism, hierarchy with class, domination with exploitation, a people’s technology with an “appropriate” technology,

self-management with “economic democracy,” cultural movements with economistic parties, direct democracy with representative democracy, utopia with futurism. I have not tried to

develop all of these contrasts in these introductory remarks. The

reader must turn to the book for a clearer elucidation of them. Let

me merely voice one caveat. I nowhere claim that a hierarchical

analysis of society involves a denial of a class analysis and its

significance. Obviously the former includes the latter. I am certain

that this caveat will be magnificently ignored by socialists and

syndicalist-oriented libertarians alike. Let it merely be stated so

that the reader has been alerted to “criticisms” that more often

involves bias rather than analysis.

----

To return to my opening remarks, this book is primarily

intended to give voice to a revolutionary idea of social change,

particularly in terms of the problems that have emerged with the

decline of the traditional workers’ movement. Owing to the

growing sense of powerlessness that freezes us into adaptive

strategies for survival, an all-pervasive pragmatic mentality now

invades our thinking. We live in a society of “trade-offs” which are

rooted in a pseudo-ethics of “benefits versus risks.” An “ethics”

of “trade-offs” involves a choice between lesser evils that

increasingly carries us to the brink of the worst evils conceivable.

Such, in fact, was the destiny of the German Left, which chose

right-wing Social Democrats rather than conservative center

parties, only to be faced with reactionaries who opposed fascists,

finally to choose a Hindenburg against a Hitler who then

proceeded to make Hitler chancellor of the Reich. Our modern

“ethics” of “trade-offs” and lesser evils, an “ethics” rooted in

adaptation, pragmatism, and careerism stands in historic contrast to the ethics of pre-capitalist society. Even to such

conservative thinkers as Plato and Aristotle, politics — a realm

that could never be disassociated from ethics — denoted the

achievement of virtue in the form of justice and the good life.

Hence, authentic politics stood opposed to evil and called for its

complete negation by the good. There are no “trade-offs” in

Plato’s *Republic* or in Aristotle’s *Politics*. The ultimate goals of

these works are to assure the success of virtue over evil of

reason over superstition and custom.

Modern politics, by contrast, has decisively separated itself

from this tradition. Not only have we disassociated politics from

ethics, dealing with the former strictly as a pragmatic body of

techniques and the latter as a corpus of relativistic values based

on personal taste and opinions; we have even turned the

pragmatic techniques of politics into a choice between lesser

evils, of trade-offs,” that thereby replace virtue by evil as the

essence of political norms.[2]

Politics has now become a world of evil rather than virtue of

injustice rather than justice, a world that is mediated by “lesser”

versus “greater” transgressions of “the good,” “the right,” and

“the just.” We no longer speak of what is “right” or “good” or

“just” *as such* but what is iess or more evil in terms of the

benefits we derive, or more properly, the privations and

dangers to which we are exposed. Only the general ignorance of

culture that is slowly gathering like a darkening cloud over the

present society has made it difficult for social theorists to

understand the decisive nature of this shift in the historical norms

of humanity. This shift is utterly subversive of any significant

reconstruction of the body politic as an agent for achieving the

historic goal of the good life, not merely as a practical ideal but as

an ethical and spiritual one.

To reverse this denomination of politics by a leprous series

o trade-offs, to provide an ethical holism rooted in the objective

values that emerge from ecology and anarchism, is fundamental

to this book. For this objective to be lost to the reader is to ignore

the very meaning of the essays in this compilation. It is on this

classical ethics that all else rests in the pages that follow.

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August 1979

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[2] Even so intractable a bourgeois as Bentham based his ethics on a definition of

good, however philistine and quantitative its norms. The transmutation of the utilitatian credo of good as the greatest happines for the greatest number into the

modern credo of “benefits versus risks” marks a degradation even in the sphere of

bourgeois morality that has no precedent in the cultural history of western sociey.

The Power to Create, The Power to Destroy

The power of this society to destroy has reached a scale

unprecedented in the history of humanity — and this power is

being used, almost systematically, to work an insensate havoc

upon the entire world of life and its material bases.

In nearly every region, air is being befouled, waterways

polluted, soil washed away, the land desiccated, and wildlife

destroyed. Coastal areas and even the depths of the sea are not

immune to widespread pollution. More significantly in the long

run, basic biological cycles such as the carbon cycle and nitrogen

cycle, upon which all living things (including humans) depend for

the maintenance and renewal of life, are being distorted to the

point of irreversible damage. The proliferation of nuclear reactors

in the United States and throughout the world — some 1000 by

the year 2000 if the powers-that-be have their, way — have

exposed countless millions of people to some of the most

carcinogenic and mutagenic agents known to life. The terrifying

menace to the very integrity of life may be with us for hundreds of

thousands of years. To these radioactive wastes we should add

long-lived pesticides, lead residues, and thousands of toxic or

potentially toxic chemicals in food, water, and air; the expansion

of cities into vast urban belts, with dense concentrations of

populations comparable in size to entire nations; the rising din of

background noise; the stresses created by congestion, mass

living, and mass manipulation; the immense accumulations of

garbage, refuse, sewage, and industrial wastes; the congestion of

highways and city streets with vehicular traffic; the profligate

destruction of precious raw materials; the scarring of the earth

by real estate speculators, mining and lumbering barons, and

highway construction bureaucrats. This ecological list of lethal

insults to the biosphere has wreaked a degree of damage in a

single generation that exceeds the damage inflicted by thousands

of years of human habitation on this planet. If this tempo of

destruction is borne in mind, it is terrifying to speculate about

what lies ahead in the generation to come.

The essence of the ecological crisis in our time is that this

society — more than any other in the past — is literally undoing

the work of organic evolution. It is a truism to say that humanity is

part of the fabric of life. It is perhaps more important at this late

stage to emphasize that humanity depends critically upon the

complexity and variety of life, that human well-being and survival

rest upon a long evolution of organisms into increasingly complex

and interdependent forms. The development of life into a

complex web, the elaboration of primal animals and plants into

highly varied forms, has been the precondition for the evolution

and survival of humanity and nature.

The Roots of the Ecological Crisis

If the past generation has witnessed a despoilation of the planet

that exceeds all the damage inflicted by earlier generations, little

more that a generation may remain before the destruction of the

environment becomes irreversible. For this reason, we must look

at the roots of the ecological crisis with ruthless honesty. Time is

running out and the remaining decades of the twentieth century

may well be the last opportunity we will have to restore the

balance between humanity and nature.

Do the roots of the ecological crisis lie in the development of

technology? Technology has become a convenient target for

bypassing the deep-seated social conditions that make machines

and technical processes harmful.

How convenient it is to forget that technology has served not

only to subvert the environment but also to improve it. The

Neolithic Revolution which produced the most harmonious

period between nature and post-paleolithic humanity was above

all a technological revolution. It was this period that brought to

humanity the arts of agriculture, weaving, pottery, the domestication of animals, the discovery of the wheel, and many other key

advances. True there are techniques and technological attitudes

that are entirely destructive of the balance between humanity and

nature. Our responsibilities are to separate the promise of

technology — its creative potential — from the capacity of technology to destroy. Indeed, there is no such word as “Technology”

that presides over all social conditions and relations; there are

different technologies and attitudes toward technology, some of

which are indispensable to restoring the balance, others of which

have contributed profoundly to its destruction. What humanity

needs is not a wholesale discarding of advanced technologies, but

a sifting, indeed a further development of technology along

ecological principles that will contribute to a new harmonization

of society and the natural world.

Do the roots of the ecological crisis lie in population growth?

This thesis is the most disquieiting, and in many ways the most

sinister, to be advanced by ecology action movements in the

United States. Here, an effect called “population growth,” juggled

around on the basis of superficial statistics and projections, is

turned into a *cause*. A problem of secondary proportions at the

present time is given primacy, thus obscuring the fundamental

reasons for the ecological crisis. True, if present economic,

political and social conditions prevail, humanity will in time

overpopulate the planet and by sheer weight of numbers turn into

a pest in its own global habitat. There is something obscene,

however, about the fact that an effect, “population growth,” is

being, given primacy in the ecological crisis by a nation which has

little more than seven percent of the world’s population, wastefully devours more than fifty percent of the world’s resources, and

is currently engaged in the depopulation of an Oriental people

that has lived for centuries in sensitive balance with its environment.

We must pause to look more carefully into the population

problem, touted so widely by the white races of North America

and Europe — races that have wantonly exploited the peoples of

Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific. The exploited

have delicately advised their exploiters that, what they need are

not contraceptive devices, armed “liberators,” and Prof. Paul R.

Ehrlich to resolve their population problems; rather, what they

need is a fair return on the immense resources that were

plundered from their lands by North America and Europe. To

balance these accounts is more of a pressing need at the present

time than to balance birth rates and death rates. The peoples of

Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific can justly point

out that their American “advisors” have shown the world how to

despoil a virgin continent in less than a century and have added

the words “built-in obsolescence” to the vocabulary of humanity.

This much is clear: when large labour reserves were needed

during the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century to

man factories and depress wages, population growth was greeted

enthusiastically by the new industrial bourgeoisie. And the

growth of population occurred despite the fact that, owing to long

working hours and grossly overcrowded cities, tuberculosis,

cholera, and other diseases were pandemic in Europe and the

United States. If birth rates exceeded death rates at this time, it

was not because advances in medical care and sanitation had

produced any dramatic decline in human mortality; rather, the

excess of birth rates over death rates can be explained by the

destruction of pre-industrial family farms, village institutions,

mutual aid, and stable, traditional patterns of life at the hands of

capitalist “enterprise.” The decline in social morale ushered in by

the horrors of the factory system, the degradation of traditional

agrarian peoples into grossly exploited proletarians and urban

dwellers, produced a concomittantly irresponsible attitude toward the family and the begetting of children. Sexuality became a

refuge from a life of toil on the same order as the consumption of

cheap gin; the new proletariat reproduced children, many of

whom were never destined to survive into adulthood, as mindlessly as it drifted into alcoholism. Much the same process

occurred when the villages of Asia, Africa, and Latin America

were sacrificed on the holy altar of imperialism.

Today, the bourgeoisie “sees” things differently. The roseate

years of “free enterprise” and “free labour” are waning before an

era of monopoly, cartels, state-controlled economies, institutionalized forms of labour mobilization (trade unions), and

automatic or cybernetic machinery. Large reserves of unemployed labour are no longer needed to meet the needs of

capital expansion, and wages are largely negotiated rather than

left to the free play of the labour market. From a need, idle labour

reserves have now turned into a threat to the stability of a

managed bourgeois economy. The logic of this new “perspective”

found its most terrifying expression in German fascism. To the

Nazis, Europe was already “overpopulated” in the thirties and the

“population problem” was “solved” in the gas chambers of

Auschwitz. The same logic is implicit in many of the neo-

Malthusian arguments that masquerade as ecology today. Let

there be no mistake about this conclusion.

Sooner or later the mindless proliferation of human beings will

have to be arrested, but population control will either be initiated

by “social controls” (authoritarian or racist methods and eventually by systematic genocide) or by a libertarian, ecologically

oriented society (a society that develops a new balance with

nature out of a reverence for life). Modern society stands before

these mutually exclusive alternatives and a choice must be made

without dissimulation. Ecology action is fundamentally social

action. Either we will go directly to the social roots of the

ecological crisis or we will be deceived into an era of totalitarianism.

Finally, do the roots of the ecological crisis lie in the mindless

consumption of goods by Americans and by peoples of European

origin generally? Here a half-truth is used to create a whole lie.

Like the “population issue,” “affluence” and the inability of a

“grow-or-die” economy to impose limits to growth is used to

anchor the ecological problem in the ordinary and powerless

peoples of the world. A notion of “original sin” is created that

deflects the causes of the ecological problem to the bedroom,

where people reproduce, or to the dinner table, where they eat,

or to the vehicles, home furnishings and clothing that in large part

have become indispensable to’ordinary living — indeed, mere

survival of the average person as seen in the context of the present society.

Can we blame working people for using cars when the logistics

of American society were deliberately structured by General

Motors and the energy industry around highways ? Can we blame

middle-class people for purchasing suburban homes when cities

were permitted to deteriorate and real-estate hucksters merchandised an “American Dream” of subdivisions, ranch-type

dwellings, and a two-car garage? Can we blame blacks, Hispanic

peoples, and other minority groups for reaching out to own

television sets, appliances, and clothing when all the basic

material means of life were denied to them for generations?

The all-engulfing inflation engineered by the energy industry,

multinational corporations, banks, and agribusiness has already

made a mockery of the meaning of “limits to growth” and

“voluntary simplicity.”’ The savings accounts, earnings, and

credit of working, middle-class and minority peoples have already

reached *their* “limits” and “simplicity” of living is no longer a

choice — it has become a necessity. What has grown in size and

complexity beyond all decency have been the incredible profits,

the interlocking directorates and the corporate structure in the

United States and throughout the world. Viewed in terms of this

structure, we can no longer speak of “limits to growth,”

“voluntary simplicty,” and “conservation,” but rather in terms of

unlimited expansion, unlimited accumulation of capital and

wealth, and unlimited waste of raw materials for useless, even

toxic, commodities and of a formidable, ever-growing arsenal of

weaponry.

If we are to find the roots of the present ecological crisis, we

must turn not to technics, demographics, growth, and a diseased

affluence alone; we must turn to the underlying institutional,

moral, and spiritual changes in human society that produced

hierarchy and domination — not only in bourgeois, feudal and

ancient society, nor in class societies generally, but at the very

dawn of civilization.

Ecology and Society

The basic conception that humanity must dominate and

exploit nature stems from the domination and exploitation of man

by man. Indeed, this conception goes back earlier to a time when

men began to dominate and exploit women in the patriarchal

family. From that point onward, human beings were increasingly

regarded as mere resources, as objects instead of subjects. The

hierarchies, classes, propertied forms, and statist institutions that

emerged with social domination were carried over conceptually

into humanity’s relationship with nature. Nature too became

increasingly regarded as a mere resource, an object, a raw

material to be exploited as ruthlessly as slaves on a latifundium.

This “worldview” permeated not only the official culture of

hierarchical society; it became the way in which slaves, serfs,

industrial workers and women of all social classes began to view

themselves. As embodied in the “work ethic,” in a morality based

on denial and renunciation, in a mode of behaviour based on the

sublimination of erotic desires, and in other worldly outlooks

(be they European or Asian), the slaves, serfs, workers, and

female half of humanity were taught to police themselves, to

fashion their own chains, to close the doors on their own prison

cells.

If the “worldview” of hierarchical society is beginning to wane t

today, this is mainly because the enormous productivity of

modern technology has opened a new vision: the possibility of

material abundance, an end to scarcity, and an era of free time

(so-called “leisure time”) with minimal toil.

By “material abundance” we do not mean the wasteful,

mindless “affluence” based on false needs, the ubtle coercion of

advertising, and the substitution of mere objects — commodities — for genuine human relations, self-reflection, and selfdevelopment. We refer to a sufficiency in food, shelter, clothing

and basic comforts of life with a minimum of toil that will permit

everyone in society — not a specialized elite — to directly manage

social affairs.

Society is becoming permeated by a tension between “what is”

and “what-could-be,” a tension exacerbated by the irrational,

inhuman exploitation and destruction of the earth and its

inhabitants. The greatest impediment that obstructs a resolution

of this tension is the extent to which hierarchical society still

fashions our outlook and actions. It is easier to take refuge in

critiques of technology and population growth; to deal with an

archaic, destructive social system on its own terms and within its

own framework. Almost from birth, we have been socialized by

the family, religious institutions, schools, and by the work process

itself into accepting hierarchy, renunciation, and state systems as

the premises on which all thinking must rest. Without shedding

these premises, all discussions of ecological balance must remain

palliative and self-defeating.

By virtue of its unique cultural baggage, modern society —

our profit-oriented bourgeois society — tends to exacerbate

humanity’sconflict with nature in a morecritical fashion than preindustrial societies of the past. In bourgeois society, humans are

not only turned into objects; they are turned into commodities;

into objects explicitly designed for sale on the market place.

Competition between human beings, qua commodities, becomes

an end in itself, together with the production of utterly useless

goods. Quality is turned into quantity individual culture into mass

culture, personal communication into mass communication. The

natural environment is turned into a gigantic factory, the city into

an immense market place; everything from a Redwood forest to a

woman’s body has “a price.” Everything is reduced to dollars-

and-cents, be it a hallowed cathedral or individual honour.

Technology ceases to be an extension of humanity; humanity

becomes an extension of technology. The machine does not

expand the power of the worker; the worker expands the power

of the machine, indeed, she or he becomes a mere part of the

machine.

It is surprising, then, that this exploitative, degrading, quantified society pits humanity against itself and against nature on a

more awesome scale than any other in the past?

Yes, we need change, but change so fundamental and far-

reaching that even the concept of revolution and freedom must

be expanded beyond all earlier horizons. No longer is it enough to

speak of new techniques for conserving and fostering the natural

environment; we must deal with the earth communally, as a

human collectivity, without those trammels of private property

that have distorted humanity’s vision of life and nature since the

break-up of tribal society. We must eliminate not only bourgeois

hierarchy, but hierarchy as such; not only the patriarchal family,

but *all* modes of sexual and parental domination; not only the

bourgeois class and propertied system, but *all* social classes and

property. Humanity must come into possession of itself, individually and collectively, so that all human beings attain control of

their everyday lives. Our cities must be decentralized into

communities, or ecocommunities, exquisitely and artfully tailored to the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which they are

located. Our technologies must be readapted and advanced into

ecotechnologies, exquisitely and artfully adapted to make use of

local energy sources and materials, with minimal or no pollution

of the environment. We must recover a new .sense of our needs —

needs that foster a healthful life and express our individual

proclivities, not “needs” dictated by the mass media. We must

restore the human scale in our environment and in our social

relations, replacing mediated by direct personal relations in the

management of society. Finally, all modes of domination — social

or personal — must be banished from our conceptions of ourselves, our communities, and nature. The administration of

humans must be replaced by the administration of things. The

revolution we seek must encompass not only political institutions and economic relations, but consciousness, life style,

erotic desires, and our interpretation of the meaning of life.

What is in the balance, here, is the age-long spirit and systems

of domination and repression that have not only pitted human

against human, but humanity against nature. The conflict between humanity and nature is an extension of the conflict

between human and human. Unless the ecology movement

encompasses the problem of domination in all its aspects, it will

contribute *nothing* toward eliminating the root causes of the

ecological crisis of our time. If the ecology movement stops at

mere reforms in pollution and conservation control — at mere

“environmentalism” — without dealing radically with the need for

an expanded concept of revolution, it will merely serve as a safety

valve for the existing system of natural and human exploitation.

Goals

In some respects the ecology movement today is waging a

delaying action against the rampant destruction of the environment. In other respects its most conscious elements are

involved in a creative movement to totally revolutionize the social

relations of humans to each other and of humanity to nature.

Although they closely interpenetrate, the two efforts should be

distinguished from each other. Ecology Action East[3] supports

every effort to conserve the environment: to eliminate nuclear

power plants and weapons, to preserve clean air and water, to

limit the use of pesticides and food additives, to reduce vehicular

traffic in streets and on highways, to make cities more wholesome

physically, to prevent radioactive wastes from seeping into the

environment, to guard and expand wilderness areas and domains

for wildlife, to defend animal species from human depredation.

[3] This organisation no longer exists and this revised essay is dated 1979.

But Ecology Action East does not deceive itself that such

delaying actions constitute a definitive solution to the fundamental conflict that exists between the present social order and

the natural world. Nor can such delaying actions arrest the

overwhelming momentum of the existing society for destruction.

This social order plays games with us. It grants long-delayed,

piecemeal and woefully inadequate reforms to deflect our

energies and attention from larger acts of destruction. In a sense,

we are “offered” a patch of Redwood forest in exchange for the

Cascades, a nuclear power site in exchange for a neutron bomb.

Viewed in a larger perspective, this attempt to reduce ecology to

a barter relationship does not rescue anything; it is a cheap

• modus operandi* for trading away the greater part of the planet for

a few islands of wilderness, for pocket parks in a devastated world

of concrete. It is the sick strategy of “benefits-versus-risks” of

“trade-offs” that has reduced ethics to the pursuit of “lesser evils”

rather than greater good.

Ecology Action East has two primary aims: one is to increase in

the revolutionary movement the awareness that the most

destructive and pressing consequences of our alienating, exploitative society is the ecological crisis, and that any truly revolutionary society must be built upon ecological precepts; the other

is to create, in the minds of the millions of Americans who are

concerned with the destruction of our environment, the consciousness that the principles of ecology, carried to their logical

end, demand radical changes in our society and our way of

looking at the world.

Ecology Action East takes its stand with the life-style revolution that, at its best, seeks an expanded consciousness of

experience and human freedom. We seek the liberation of

women, of children, of gay people, of black people and colonial

peoples, and of working people in all occupations as part of a

growing social struggle against the age-old traditions and institutions of domination — traditions and institutions that have so

destructively shaped humanity’s attitude toward the natural

world. We support libertarian communities and struggles for

freedom wherever they arise; we take our stand with every effort

to promote the spontaneous self-development of the young; we

oppose every attempt to repress human sexuality, to deny

humanity the eroticization of experience in all its forms. We join in

all endeavours to foster a joyous artfulness in life and work: the

promotion of crafts and quality production, the design of new

ecocommunities and ecotechnologies, the right to experience on

a daily basis the beauty of the natural world, the open, unmediated, sensuous pleasure that humans can give to each other,

the growing reverence for the world of life.

In short, we hope for a revolution which will produce politically independent communities whose boundaries and populations will be defined by a new ecological consciousness;

communities whose inhabitants will determine for themselves

within the framework of this new consciousness the nature and

level of their technologies, the forms taken by their social

structures, world views, life styles, expressive arts, and all the

other aspects of their daily lives.

But we do not delude ourselves that this life-oriented world can

be fully developed or even partially achieved in a death-oriented

society. American soeiety, as it is constituted today, is riddled

with racism and sits astride the entire world, not only as a

consumer of its wealth and resources, but as an obstacle to all

attempts at self-determination at home and abroad. Its inherent

aims are production for the sake of production, the preservation of hierarchy and toil on a world scale, mass manipulation and control by centralized, state institutions. This kind of

society is unalterably counterposed to a life-oriented world. If the

ecology movement does not direct its main efforts toward a

revolution in all areas of life — social as well as natural, political as

well as personal, economic as well as cultural, then the movement will gradually become safety valve of the established

order.

It is our hope that groups like our own will spring up throughout

the country, organized like ourselves on a humanistic, libertarian

basis, engaged in mutual action and a spirit of cooperation based

on mutual aid. It is our hope that they will try to foster a new

ecological attitude not only toward nature but also toward

humans: a conception of spontaneous, variegated relations

within groups and between groups, within society and between

individuals.

We hope that ecology groups will eschew all appeals to the

“heads of government” and to international or national state

institutions, the very criminal’s and political bodies that have

materially contributed to the ecological crisis of our time. We

believe the appeals must be made to the people and to their

capacity for *direct action* that can get them to take control of their

own lives and destinies. For only in this way can a society emerge

without hierarchy and domination, a society in which each

individual is the master of his of her own fate.

The great splits which divided human from human, humanity

from nature, individual from society, town from country, mental

from physical activity, reason from emotion, and generation from

generation must now be transcended. The fulfillment of the age-

old quest for survival and material security in a world of scarcity

was once regarded as the precondition for freedom and a fully

human life. To live we had to survive. As Brecht put it: “First feed

the face, then give the moral.”

The situation has now begun to change. The ecological crisis of

our time has increasingly reversed this traditional maxim. Today,

if we are to survive, we must begin to live. Our solutions must be

commensurable with the scope of the problem, or else nature will

take a terrifying revenge on humanity.

Education and Organization

Today, all ecological movements stand at a crossroad. They

are faced with basically conflicting alternatives of policy and

process — whether to work within the existing institutions or to

use direct action, whether to form centralistic, bureaucratic, and

conventional forms of organization or affinity groups. These

problems have reached their most acute form in the great antinuke alliances like Clamshell, Shad, Abalone, Catfish, to cite only

a few. And it is the destiny of these alliances that now concerns us

most profoundly.

The Meaning of Direct Action and Affinity Groups

At their inception, the marvelous genius of the anti-nuke

alliances is that they intuitively sensed the need to break away

from the “system” , that they began to function outside it and

• directly* enter into social life, pushing aside the prevailing

institutions, its bureaucrats, “experts,” and leaders, and thereby

pave the way for *extra-legal*, *moral*, and *personal* action. To a

large extent, to be sure, they adopted direct action because

earlier attempts to stop nuclear power plants by operating within

the “system” had failed. Endless months or years of litigation,

hearings, the adoption of local ordinances, petition and letterwriting campaigns to congressmen and the like — all, had essentially failed to stop the construction of nukes. Clamshell, the

earliest of the great regional alliances, was literally born from the

futility of trying to prevent the construction of the Seabrook nuke

by “working within the system.” Its very *identity* as an alliance

was literally defined by the need to directly occupy the Seabrook

site, to invoke moral principles over statutory laws. For any of the

alliances to ever surrender their commitment to direct action for

working within the system” is to destroy their personality as

socially innovative movements. It is to dissolve back into the

hopeless morass of “mass organizations” that seek respectability

rather than change.

What is even more important about direct action is that it forms

a decisive step toward recovering the personal power over social

life that the centralized, over-bearing bureaucracies have usurped from the people. By action *directly*, we not only gain a sense

that we can control the course of social events again; we recover

a new sense of selfhood and personality without which a truly

free’society, based on self-activity and self-management, is utterly

impossible. We often speak of self-management and self-activity

as our ideals for a future society without recognizing often

enough that it is not only the “management” and “activity” that

has to be democratized; it is also the “self” of each individual — as

a unique, creative, and competent being — that has to be fully

developed. Mass society, the real basis for hierarchy, domination,

command and obedience, like class society, is the spawning

ground for a society of homogenized spectators whose lives are

guided by elites, “stars,” and “vanguards,” be they in the

bureaucratic society of the United States or the totalitarian

societies of the socialist world. A truly free society does not deny

selfhood but rather supports it, liberates it, and actualizes it in the

belief that everyone is competent to manage society, not merely

an “elect” of experts and self-styled men of genius. Direct action

is merely the free town meeting writ large. It is the means whereby

each individual awakens to the hidden powers within herself and

himself, to a new sense of self-confidence and self-competence; it

is the means whereby individuals take control of society directly,

without “representatives” who tend to usurp not only the power

but the very personality of a passive, spectatorial “electorate”

who live in the shadows of an “elect.” Direct action, in short, is not

a “tactic” that can be adopted or discarded in terms of its

“effectiveness” or “popularity”; it is a moral principle, an ideal,

indeed, a sensibility. It should imbue every aspect of our lives and

behaviour and outlook.

Similarly, the affinity group — a term devised by the Spanish

Anarchists (FAI) in the 1920’s — is not merely a “task force” that

can be flippantly collected and disbanded for short-lived occupations. It is a permanent, intimate, decentralized *community* of a

dozen or so sisters and brothers, a family or commune as it were,

who are drawn together not only by common actions and goals,

but by a need to develop new libertarian social relations between

themselves, to mutually educate each other, share each others’

problems, and develop new, non-sexist, non-hierarchical ties as

well as activities. The affinity group should form the real cellular

tissue from which the alliance evolves, the very protoplasm that

turns it into an organic being. In contrast to the party-type of

organization, with its centralized, bureaucratic skeleton to which

all parts of the structure are mechanically appended in a system

of command and obedience, the affinity group is linked together

by proliferation and combination in its authentic locality as a truly

ecological entity. It always remains part of its local community,

sensitive to its needs and unique requirements, yet it can

coordinate locally and regionally into clusters and coordinating

committees whose *delegates* (as distinguished from “representatives”) can always be recalled, rotated, and strictly mandated to

reflect the views of the various groups in every detail. Thus, within

the affinity groups structure of an alliance, power actually

diminishes rather than increases at each ascending level of

coordination, this in sharp contrast to party-type or “league” —

type or chapter-type of organization so rooted in the existing

systems of representation” and politics. Thus, the affinity group

like direct action, is not merely an organizational device, a “task

force a tool” for implementing nuke occupations; it too is

based on a moral principle, an ideal, and a sensibility that goes

beyond the issue of nuclear power to that of spiritual power, new

humanly scaled, decentralized, ecological forms of human asso-

ciation as well as human action.

Between Two Choices

With the Three-Mile-Island meltdown this year and even

earlier, ,n the summer of 1978, when the Seabrook occupation

was arbitrarily turned into a star-studded “legal” festival by the

Clamshell eadership, there has been growing evidence in many

alhances of attempts to convert the anti-nuke movement as a

whole into a political and media event. It is doubtful if many ofthe

self-styfed “founders” of Clamshell clearly understood the idea

at direct action and affinity groups were more than mere

“tactics” and task forces.” Doubtless the terms sounded

attractive — so they were widely used. By the same token, many

of the Clamshell “founders” viewed “No Nukes!” as an effective

rallying point for mass, media-oriented actions, for large spectacles in which people with basically conflicting social views could

unite whether they believed in “free enterprise” or no property

for huge audiences before which they could display their

oratorical talents and abilities. To go beyond “No Nukes!” —

even as an educational responsibility — was taboo. At various

alliance conferences and congresses, even at local clusters in

which Coordinating Committee “regional travellers” (so reminiscent of the old SDS “regional travellers” of the sixties)

surfaced, thoughtful anti-nuke activists were urged to keep the

anti-nuke issue “clear” They were called upon to limit their

educational activities to the growing public interest in nuclear

reactors, not to develop a richer, more searching public consciousness of the social roots of nuclear power. In trying to find a

low common denominator that would “mobilize” virtually everyone, the new “anti-nuke establishment” really educated no one It

was Three-Mile-Island that did much of the education, and often

public understanding of the issue goes no further than problems

of technology rather than problems of society. Respectability was

stressed over principles, popularity over dissidence, mass

mobilizations in Washington and Battery Park over occupations

and more insidiously, politics over direct action.

Yes, the fact is that there is now an “anti-nuclear establishment that resembles in many structural, manipulatory, tactical,

and perhaps even financial respects the very nuclear establishment it professes to oppose. It is not a very holy alliance, this

career-oriented, star-studded, and politically ambitious establishment that often stands in harsh opposition or contradiction to the

libertarian principles of major alliances like Clamshell, Shad

Abalone, and Catfish. Its elite membership has been recruited in

some cases from the self-styled “founders” of the libertarian

alliances themselves. Others, like Tom Hayden, the Cockburn-Ridgeway axis, PIRG luminaries, and Barry Commoner openly

shunned the alliances or their equivalent — Hayden and

Cockburn-Ridgeway, by denouncing all environmental groups at

one time or another as white, middle-class, self-indulgent movements; Commoner, by disdainfully refusing to even take cognizance of Clamshell’s requests for verbal support of its 1977

Seabrook occupation, that is, until the occupation received

massive press reportage. Today, this new flower in the anti-nuke

bouquet is the prize orator of recent anti-nuke rallies and,

according to some reports, a potential presidential candidate for

the recently concocted “Citizen’s Party.” The Tom and Jerry

side-show from California, as the Washington rally revealed

seems to have a distinct political odour of its own.

Finally, MUSE and similar “fund-raising” groups, reportedly

orchestrated in part by Messrs. Sam Lovejoy and Harvey

Wasserman, have added the tint of grass-roots activism to what is

a jet-set organization. The drift toward mass constituencies

personal careerism, political power, party-type structures bureaucratic manipulation-in short, toward “effective” means for

operating within the system with the excuse that the anti-nuke

movement can use the system against itself — is now unmistakable. The huge crowd that assembled at Battery Park to hear

the anti-nuke establishment and its rock starts were passive

people, often depersonalized and homogenized like any

television audience. This may have well been the case for many

people who attended the Washington mobilization. The

anti-nuclear establishment has brought to what was once a

consistently populist and libertarian movement an alien taste for

politics, high-finance (where possible), mass followings, public

“spokesmen,” and institutional recognition.

The danger of this elitist alliance to the non-hierarchical

alliance that have emerged throughout the United States is a

grave one. Were the anti-nuclear establishment easily defined with a clear identity of its own, it could easily be resisted. But this

establishment emerges in our very midst — as one of us. By dissolving

many real and far-reaching differences that should be explored and resolved with the simplistic slogan, “No Nukes!”;

by staking out claims as “stars” with media-appeal, or “power

brokers” with financial appeal, or “legislators” with political

appeal, or “scientists” with technical appeal or “just plain folks”

who helped found the alliances, the anti-nuclear establishment

incubates in our midst like pathogenic spores that periodically

break out in acute illnesses. To speak bluntly, it cultivates our

worst vices. It appeals to our desire for “effectiveness” and our

hope of achieving “mass support” without revealing the immoral, in fact, demoralizing implications of the methods it employs. It conceals the fact that its methods are borrowed from the very social structures, indeed, the very advertising agencies, that reduce people to “masses,” media-orchestrated spectators, “groupies” of the “stars” who seem larger than life becayse their appetites for power are often larger than their egos.

We have emphasized the problems created by the anti-nuclear establishment not from any desire for divisiveness or any sense of personal malice. There is a deeper sense of tragedy that runs through my remarks rather than anger. A few members of this establishment are doubtless naive; others are frankly opportunists whose careers and ambitions by far outweigh their commitment to a humanistic, ecological society. My emphasis stems basically from a need not only to acknowledge that serious

differences exist within the anti-nuclear movement and should

not be concealed by specious demands for “unity”; my main

concern is that we recover and advance *our own identity* in the

years that lie ahead — our commitment to direct action, to affinity

groups, decentralization, regionalism, and libertarian forms of

coordination.

The future of the anti-nuke movement, particularly of its great

alliances, depends not only upon what we reject but what we

accept — and the *reasons* why we accept certain principles,

organizational forms, and methods. If we limit ourselves to “No

Nukes! is enough,” we will remain simplistic, naive, and tragically

innocent whom careerists can cynically and shrewdly manipulate. If we see direct action and affinity groups merely as

“tactics” or “task forces,” we will foreclose any real contact with

those millions of restive Americans who are looking for an

alternative to a system that denies them any power over their

lives. If our alternate energy fairs extol solar or wind energy as

such without warning people that huge, space-age solar collectors and wind mills are on the drawing boards of power utilities

and multi-national corporations, we will help the powers-that-be

meter the sun and the wind in much the same way that Con

Edison meters electrical energy. We should educate people not

simply into an alternate, “appropriate” (for what?), or “soft”

technology. We should raise the vision of a **people**’s technology — the passive, simple, decentralized solar, wind, and food-producing technologies that the individual can understand,

control, maintain, and even build.

By the same token, to call for “decentralization” and to plead

for “voluntary simplicity” are completely meaningless if their

functions are simply logistical or conservation-oriented. We can

easily have a “decentralized” society that is little more than a huge

suburbia, managed by the same political bureaucrats, fed by the

same agribusiness plantations and shopping malls, policed by the

same Kojaks, united by the same corporate directors, interlaced

by the same highways, and sedated by the same mass-media that

manages our existing centralized society. To demand “decentralization” without self-management in which every person

freely participates in decision-making processes in every aspect

of life and all the material means of life are communally owned,

produced, and shared according to need is pure obscurantism.

To delude Americans into the belief that a mere change in design

necessarily yields a real change in social life and spiritual

sensibility is sheer hypocrisy. To leave questions like “who owns

what” and “who runs what” unanswered while celebrating the

virtues or beauties of “smallness” verges on demagoguery.

Decentralization and human scale, yes! — but in a society whose

property, produce, and environment are shared communally and

managed in a non-hierarchical manner.

To call for “voluntary simplicity,” yes! — but only when the

means of life are really simple and available to all. Gloria

Vanderbilt jeans and fringed suede jackets do not “voluntary

simplicity” make. The Stanford Research Institute’s plea for

“voluntary simplicity” and “limits to growth” as the fastest growth

industry on fhe commercial horizon parallels Exxon’s and Mobil’s

claims to energy conservation. That a multi-million dollar “think-

tank” for big business advances “voluntary simplicity” as a new

growth industry for future capital investment; that agribusiness

may well turn to organic food cultivation to meet the growing

market for “natural foods”; that the Club of Rome can advance a

gospel of “limits to growth” reveal how utterly superficial these

demands can become when they do not challenge the basic

corporate, property, bureaucratic, and profit-oriented social

structure at its most fundamental level of ownership and control.

The most effective steps we can take at our congresses and

conferences to assure a meaningful future for the anti-nuke

movement is to unrelentingly foster the development of affinity

groups as the bases of our alliances and direct action as the bases

of our activities. Direct action does not merely mean nuclear site

occupations; it means learning how to manage every aspect of

our lives from producing to organizing, from educating to

printing. The New England town meetings, during their more

revolutionary periods around the 1760’s, were near-models of

direct action as carried into the social world. So, too, for direct

action — of which our affinity groups and congresses can be

models no less than Seabrook or Shoreham or Rocky Flats.

Direct action, however, decidedly does not mean reducing

oneself to a passive spectator of a “star’s” performance, whether

it be at a speakers rostrum, a rock band’s stage, or on the portico

of the State House in Sacramento or the White House in

Washington.

On the other hand, if we are afraid to remain in a minority by

speaking out openly and honestly — even at the risk of being

“ineffective” or insolvent for a time — we deserve the fate that

awaits us — respectability at the price of surrender, “influence” at

the price of demoralization, power at the price of cynicism,

“success” at the expense of corruption. The choice lies in either

direction and there is no “in-between” terrain on which to

compromise. In any case, for once, the choice we make will be the

future we will create.

<right>

Revised:

November, 1979

</right>

Toward an Ecological Society

The problem of environmental degradation seems to be

falling into a curious focus. Despite massive public support for

environmentalist measures-as witness the positive public response in recent state referendums on such issues — we are

being warned about a backlash against “extremists” who are

raising radical demands for arresting environmental degra-

dat’on. Much of this “backlash” seems to be generated by

industry and by the White House, where Mr. Nixon complacently

assures us that “America is well on the way to winning the war

against environmental degradation; well on the way to making

our peace with nature.” This rhetoric is suspiciously familiar;

presumably we are beginning to see the “light” at the end of the

environmental tunnel. In any case, advertising compaigns by the

petroleum, automobile, lumber, and chemical industries are

urging Americans to be more “reasonable” about environmental

movements, to “sensibly” balance “benefits” against “losses,”

to scale down norms for cleaner air and water that have already

been adopted by the Environmental Protection Administration,

to show “patience” and “understanding” for the ostensibly

formidable technical problems that confront our friendly neighborhood industrial oligopolies and utilities.

I will not try, here, to discuss the scandalous distortions that

enter into propaganda of this kind. Many of you are already

familiar with the recent study by a committee of the National

Academy of Sciences that accuses the automobile industry of

concentrating (in the words of a *New York Times* report) on the

“most expensive, least satisfactory means” of meeting the 1975

Federal exhaust emission standards. As to the pious rhetoric

from the White House, Mr. Nixon’s efforts to make “peace” with

nature seem to be several cuts below his efforts to produce peace

in Indonesia. As the *Times* opines editorially, Mr. Nixon’s

statement is totally at variance with the facts... The air over the

nation s cities is getting only marginally cleaner, if at all. Every

major river system in the country is badly polluted. Great

portions of the Atlantic Ocean are in danger of becoming a dead

sea. Plastics, detergents, chemicals and metals are putting an

insupportable burden on the biosphere. The land itself is being

eroded, blighted, poisoned, raped.”

Far from adhering to the claim that many environmentalist

demands are too “radical,” I would argue that they are not radical

enough. Confronted by a society that is not only polluting the

planet on a scale unprecedented in history, but undermining its

most fundamental biogeochemical cycles, I would argue that

environmentalists have not posed the strategic problems of

establishing a new and lasting equilibrium with nature. Is it

enough to stop a nuclear plant here or a highway there? Have we

somehow missed the essential fact that environmental degradation stems from much deeper sources than the blunders or ill-intentions of industry and government? That to sermonize

endlessly about the possibility of environmental apocalypse —

whether as a result of pollution, industrial expansion, or population growth — inadvertently drops a veil over a more fundamental crisis in the human condition, one that is not exclusively

technological or ethical but profoundly social? Rather than deal

again with the scale of our environmental crisis, or engage in the

easy denunciation that “pollution is profitable,” or argue that

some abstract “we” is responsible for producing too many

children or a given industry for producing too many commodities,

I would like to ask if the environmental crisis does not have its

roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the

changes that are needed to create a new equilibrium between the

natural world and the social do not require a fundamental, indeed

revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines.

I would like to emphasize the words “ecological lines.” In trying

to deal with the problems of an ecological society, the term

“environmentalism” fails us. “Environmentalism” tends increasingly to reflect an instrumentalist sensibility in which nature is

viewed merely as a passive habitat, an agglomeration of external

objects and forces, that must be made more serviceable for

human use irrespective of what these uses may be. Environmentalism,” in effect, deals with “natural resources,” urban

resources,” even “human resources.” Mr. Nixon, I would suppose, is an “environmentalist” of sorts insofar as the “peace” he

would establish with nature consists of acquiring the “know-how”

for plundering the natural world with minimal disruption of the

habitat. “Environmentalism” does not bring into question the

underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate

nature; rather, it seeks to facilitate that domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination. The very notion of domination itself is not brought into

question.

Ecology, I would claim, advances a broader conception of

nature and of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. To

my thinking, it sees the balance and integrity of the biosphere as

an end in itself. Natural diversity is to be cultivate not only

because the more diversified the components that make up an

ecosystem, the more stable the ecosystem, but diversity is

desirable for its own sake, a value to be cherished as part of a

spiritized notion of the living universe. Ecologists have already

pointed out that the more simplified an ecosystem — as in arctic

and desert biomes or in monocultural forms of food cultivation —

the more fragile the ecosystem and more prone it is to instability,

pest infestations, and possible catastrophes. The typically holistic

concept of “unity in diversity,” so common in the more reflective

ecological writings, could be taken from Hegel’s works, an

intellectual convergence that I do not regard as accidental and

that deserves serious exploration by contemporary neo-Hegelians. Ecology, furthermore, advances the view that humanity

must show a conscious respect for the spontaneity of the natural

world, a world that is much too complex and variegated to be

reduced to simple Galilean physico-mechanical properties. Some

systems ecologists notwithstanding, I would hold with Charles

Elton’s view that “The world’s future has to be managed, but this

management would not be like a game of chess... (but) more like

steering a boat.” The natural world must be allowed the

considerable leeway of a spontaneous development — informed,

to be sure, by human consciousness and management as nature

rendered self-conscious and self-active — to unfold and actualize

its wealth of potentialities. Finally, ecology recognizes no hierarchy on the level of the ecosystem. There are no “kings of the

beasts” and no “lowly ants.” These notions are the projections of

our own social attitudes and relationships on the natural world.

Virtually all that lives as part of the floral and faunal variety of an

ecosystem plays its coequal role in maintaining the balance and

integrity of the whole.

These concepts, brought together in a totality that could be

expressed as unity in diversity, spontaneity, and complementarity, comprise not only a judgement that derives from an artful

science” or “scientific art” (as I have described ecology elsewhere); they also constitute an overall sensibility that we are

slowly recovering from a distant archaic world and placing it in a

new social context. The notion that man is destined to dominate

nature stems from the domination of man by man — and perhaps

even earlier, by the domination of woman by man and the

domination of the young by the old. The hierarchical mentality

that arranges experience itself — in all its forms — along hierarchically pyramidal lines is a mode of perception and conceptualization into which we have been socialized by hierarchical

society. This mentality tends to be tenuous or completely absent

in non-hierarchical communities. So-called “ primitive” societies.

that are based on a simple sexual division of labour, that lack

states and hierarchical institutions, do not experience reality as

we do through a filter that categorizes phenomena in terms of

“superior” and “inferior” or “above” and “below.” In the absence

of inequality, these truly organic communities do not even have a

word for equality. As Dorothy Lee observes in her superb

discussion of the “primitive” mind, “equality exists in the very

nature of things, as a byproduct of the democratic structure of

the culture itself, not as a principle to be applied. In such societies,

there is no attempt to .achieve the goal of equality, and in fact

there is no concept of equality. Often, there is no linguistic

mechanism whatever for comparison. What we find is an

absolute respect for man, for all individuals irrespective of age

and sex.”

The absence of coercive and domineering values in these

cultures is perhaps best illustrated by the syntax of the Wintu

Indians of California, a people Lee apparently studied at first

hand. Terms commonly expressive of coercion in modern

languages, she notes, are so arranged by the Wintu that they

denote cooperative behavior. A Wintu mother, for example, does

not “take” her baby into the shade; she “goes” with it into the

shade. A chief does not “rule” his people; he “stands” with them.

In any case, he is never more than their advisor and lacks

coercive power to enforce his views. The Wintu “never say, and

in fact they cannot say, as we do, ‘I have a sister,’ or a ‘son,’ or

husband Lee observes. “**To live with** is the usual way in which

they express what we call possession, and they use this term for

everything they respect, so that a man will be said to live with his

bow and arrows.”

“To live with” — the phrase implies not only a deep sense of

mutual respect and a high valuation of individual voluntarism; it

also implies a profound sense of oneness between the individual

and the group. The sense of unity within the group, in turn,

extends by projection to the relationship of the community with

the natural world. Psychologically, people in organic communities must believe that they exercise a greater influence on

natural forces than is afforded by their relatively simple technology, an illusion they acquire by group rituals and magical

procedures. Elaborate as these rituals and procedures may be,

however, humanity’s sense of dependence on the natural world,

indeed, on its immediate environment, never entirely disappears.

If this sense of dependence may generate abject fear or an equally

abject reverence, there is also a point in the development of

organic society where it may generate a sense of symbiosis, more

properly, of mutualistic interdependence and cooperation, that

tends to transcend raw feelings of terror and awe. Here, humans

not only propitiate powerful forces or try to manipulate them;

their ceremonials help (as they see it) in a creative sense: to

multiply food animals, to bring changes in season and weather, to

promote the fertility of crops. The organic community always has

a natural dimension to it, but now the community is conceived to

be part of the balance of nature — a forest community or a soil

community — in short, a truly ecological community or

• eco-community* peculiar to its ecosystem, with an active sense of

participation in the overall environment and the cycles of nature.

This outlook becomes evident enough when we turn to

accounts of ceremonials among peoples in organic communities. Many ceremonials and rituals are characterized not only

by social functions, such as initiation rites, but also by ecological

functions. Among the Hopi, for example, the major agricultural

ceremonies have the role of summoning forth the cycles of the

cosmic order, of actualizing the solstices and the different stages

in the-growth of maize from germination to maturation. Although

the order of the solstices and the stages in the growth of maize are

known to be predetermined, human ceremonial involvement is

integrally part of that predetermination. In contrast to stricly

magical procedures, Hopi ceremonies assign a participatory

rather than a manipulatory function to humans. People play a

mutualistic role in natural cycles: they facilitate the workings of

the cosmic order. Their ceremonies are part of a complex web of

life which extends from the germination of maize to the arrival of

the solstices. “Every aspect of nature, plants and rocks and

animals, colors and cardinal directions and numbers and sex

distinctions, the dead and the living, all have a cooperative share

in the maintenance of the universal order,” Lee observes.

“Eventually, the effort of each individual, human or not, goes into

this huge whole. And here, too, it — is every aspect of a person

which counts. The entire being of the Hopi individual affects the

balance of nature; and as each individual develops his inner

potential, so he enhances his participation, so does the entire

universe become invigorated.”

It is not difficult to see that this harmonized view of nature

follows from the harmonized relations within the early human

community. Just as medieval theology structured the Christian

heaven on feudal lines, so people of all ages have projected their

social structure onto the natural world. To the Algonkians of the

Norht American forests, the beaver lived in clans and lodges of

their own, wisely cooperating to promote the well-being of the

community. Animals, too, had their “magic,” their totem ancestors, and were invigorated by the Manitou, whose spirit

nourished the entire cosmos. Accordingly, animals had to be

conciliated or else they might refuse to provide humans with skins

and meat. The cooperative spirit that formed a precondition for

the survival of the organic community thus entered completely

into the outlook of preliterate people toward nature and the

interplay between the natural world and the social.

The break-up of these unified organic communities, based on a

sexual division of labour and kinship ties, into hierarchical and

finally class societies gradually subverted the unity of society with

the natural world. The division of clans and tribes into gerontocracies in which the old began to dominate the young; the

emergence of the patriarchal family in which women were

brought into universal subjugation to men; still further, the crystallization of hierarchies based on social status into economic

classes based on systematic material exploitation; the emergence of the city, followed by the increasing supremacy of town

over country and territorial over kinship ties; and finally, the

emergence of the state, of a professional military, bureaucratic,

and political apparatus exercising coercive supremacy over the

remaining vestiges of community life — all of these divisions and

contradictions that eventually fragmented and pulverized the

archaic world yielded a resocialization of the human experimental

apparatus along hierarchical lines. This resocialization served not

only to divide the community internally, but brought dominated

classes into complicity with their own domination, women into

complicity with their own servitude. Indeed, the very psyche of

the individual was divided against itself by establishing the

supremacy of mind over body, of hierarchical rationality over

sensuous experience. To the degree that the human subject

became the object of social and finally self-manipulation according to hierarchical norms, so nature became objectified,

despiritized, and reduced to a metaphysical entity in many

respects no less contrived conceptually by a physico-mechanical

notion of external reality than the animistic notions that prevailed

in archaic society. Time does not permit me to deal in any detail

with the erosion of archaic humanity’s relationship with the

natural world. But perhaps a few observations are appropriate.

The heritage of the past enters cumulatively into the present as

lurking problems which our own era has never resolved. I refer

not only to the trammels of bourgeois society, which bind us with

compelling immediacy, but also those formed by millenia of

hierarchical society that bind the family in patriarchy, age groups

in gerontocracies, and the psyche in the contorted postures of

renunciation and self-abasement.

Even before the emergence of bourgeois society, Hellenistic

rationalism validates the status of women as virtual chattels and

Hebrew morality places in Abraham’s hands the power to kill

Isaac. The reduction of humans to objects, whether as slaves,

woman, or children, finds its precise parallel in Noah’s power to

name the beasts and dominate them, to place the world of life in

the servitude of man. Thus from the two mainstreams of western

civilization, Hellenism and Judaism, the Promethean powers of

the male are collected into an ideology of repressive rationality

and hierarchical morality. Woman “became the embodiment of

the biological function, the image of nature,” observe Horkheimer and Adorno, “the subjugation of which constituted that

civilization’s title to fame. For millenia men dreamed of acquiring

absolute mastery over nature, of converting the cosmos into one

immense hunting-ground. It was to this that the idea of man was

geared in a male-dominated society. This was the significance of

reason, his proudest boast. Woman was weaker and smaller.

Between her and man there was a difference she could not

bridge — a difference imposed by nature, the most humiliating

that can exist in a male-dominated society. Where the mastery of

nature is the true goal, biological, inferiority remains a glaring

stigma, the weakness imprinted by nature as a key stimulus to

aggression.” It is not accidental that Horkheimer and Adorno

group these remarks under the title of “Man and Animals,” for

they provide a basic insight not only into man’s relationship with

woman, but man’s relationship in hierarchical society with the

natural world as a whole.

The notion of justice, as distinguished from the ideal of

freedom, collects all of these values into a rule of equivalence that

denies the entire content of archaic equality. In organic society,

all human beings have a right to the means of life, irrespective of

what they contribute to the social fund of labour. Paul Radin calls

this the rule of the “irreductible minimum.” Archaic equality,

here, recognizes the fact of inequality — the dependence of the

weak upon the strong, of the infirm upon the healthy, of the young

and old upon the mature. True freedom, in effect, is an equality of

unequals that does not deny the right to life of those whose

powers are failing or less developed than others. Ironically, in this

materially undeveloped economy, humanity acknowledges the

right of all to the scarce means of life even more emphatically —

and in the spirit of tribal mutualism that makes all kin responsible for each other, more generously — than in a materially

developing economy that yields growing surpluses and a concomitant scramble for privileges.

But this true freedom of an equality of unequals is degraded on

its own terms. As material surpluses increase, they create the

very social classes that glean from the labour of the many the

privileges of the few. The gift which once symbolized an alliance

between men akin to the blood tie is slowly turned into a means

of barter and finally into a commodity, the germ of the modern

bourgeois bargain. Justice emerges from the corpse of freedom

to guard the exchange relationship — whether of goods or

morality — as the exact principle of equality in all things. Now the

weak are “equal” to the strong, the poor to the wealthy, the infirm

to the healthy in all ways but their weakness, poverty, and

infirmity. In essence, justice replaces freedom’s norm of an

equality of unequals with an inequality of equals. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe: “Before, the fetishes were subject to

the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself has become a

fetish. The blindfold over Justitia’s eyes does not only mean that

there should be no assault upon justice, but that justice does not

originate in freedom.”

Bourgeois society merely brings the rule of equivalence to its

logical and historic extreme. All men are equal as buyers and

sellers — all are sovereign egos on the free market place. The

corporate ties that once united humanity into bands, clans,

tribes, the fraternity of the *polis*, and the vocational community of

the guild, are totally dissolved. Monadic man replaces collective

man; the exchange relationship replaces the kinship, fraternal, or

vocational ties of the past. What unites humanity in the bourgeois

market place is competition: the universal antagonism of each

against all. Graduated to the level of competing capitals, of

grasping and warring bourgeois enterprises, the market place

dictates the ruthless maxim: “Grow or die” — he who does not

expand his capital and devour his competitor will be devoured. In

this constellation of ever-regressive asocial relationships, where

even personality itself is reduced to an exchangeable object,

society is ruled by production for the sake of production.

Equivalence asserts itself as exchange value; through the mediation of money, every artistic work, indeed every moral qualm,

is degraded to an exchangeable quantum. Gold or its paper

symbol makes it possible to exchange the most treasured

cathedral for so many match sticks. The manufacturer of shoe

laces can transmute his wares into a Rembrandt painting,

beggaring the talents of the most powerful alchemist.

In this quantitative domain of equivalences, where society is

ruled by production for the sake of production and growth is the

only antidote to death, the natural world is reduced to natural

resources — the domain of wanton exploitation *par excellence*.

Capitalism not only validates precapitalist notions of the domination of nature by man; it turns the plunder of nature into

society’s law of life. To quibble with this kind of system about its

values, to try to frighten it with visions about the consequences of

growth is to quarrel with its very metabolism. One might more

easily persuade a green plant to desist from photosynthesis than

to ask the bourgeois economy to desist from capital accumulation. There is no one to talk to. Accumulation is determined

not by the good or bad intentions of the individual bourgeois, but

by the commodity relationship itself, by what Marx so aptly called

the cellular unit of the bourgeois economy. It is not the perversity

of the bourgeois that creates production for the sake of

production, but the very market nexus over which he presides

and to which he succumbs. To appeal to his human interests over

his economic ones is to ignore the brute fact that his very

authority is a function of his material being. He can only deny his

economic interests by denying his own social reality, indeed, by

denying that very authority which victimizes his humanity. It

requires a grotesque self-deception, or worse, an act of ideological social deception, to foster the belief that this society can

undo its very law of life in response to ethical arguments or

intellectual persuasion.

Yet the even harsher fact must be faced that this system has to

be undone and replaced by a society that will restore the balance

between human society and nature — an ecological society that

must first begin by removing the blindfold from Justitia’s eyes and

replacing the inequality of equals by the equality of unequals. In

other writings, I have called such an ecological society anarcho-

communism; in my forthcoming book it is described as “eco-

topia.” You are welcome to call it what you will. But my remarks

up to now will mean nothing if we fail to recognize that the attempt

to dominate nature stems from the domination of human by

human; that to harmonize our relationship with the natural world

presupposes the harmonization of the social world. Beyond the

bare bones of a scientific discipline, natural ecology will have no

meaning for us if we do not develop a social ecology that will be

relevant to our time.

The alternatives we face in a society ruled by production for the

sake of production are very stark indeed. More so than any

society in the past, modern capitalism hastrought the development of technical forces to their highest point, to a point, in

fact, where we could finally eliminate toil as the basic condition of

life for the great majority of humanity and abolish the ages-old

curse of material scarcity and insecurity as the underlying feature

of society. We live today on the threshold of a post-scarcitv

society in which the equality of unequals need no longer be the

primordial rule of a small group ot collective kin, but the universal

condition of humanity as a whole, of the individual whose social

affiliations are determined by free choice and personal affinities

rather than the archaic blood oath. The Promethean personality,

the patriarchical family, private property, repressive reason, the

territorial city, and the state have done their historic work in

ruthlessly mobilizing the labour of humanity, developing the

productive forces, and transforming the world. Voday, they are

totally irrational as institutions and modes of consciousness —

the so-called “necessary evils” in Bakunin’s words that have

turned into absolute evils. The ecological crisis of our time is

testimony to the fact that the means of production developed by

hierarchical society and particularly by capitalism have become

too powerful to exist as means of domination.

On the other hand, if the present society persists indefinitely to

do its work, the ecological problems we face are even more

formidable than those which we gather under the rubric of

“pollution.” A society based on production. for the sake of

production is inherently anti-ecological and its consequences are

a devoured natural world, one whose organic complexity has

been degraded by technology into the inorganic stuff that flows

from the end of the assembly line; literally, the simple matter that

formed the metaphysical presuppositions of classical physics. As

the cities continue to grow cancerously over the land, as complex

materials are turned into simple materials, as diversity disappears

in the maw of a synthetic environment composed of glass, bricks,

mortar, metals, and machines, the complex food chains on which

we depend for the health of our soil, for the integrity of our oceans

and atmosphere, and for the physiological viability of our beings

will become ever more simple. Literally, the system in its endless

devouring of nature will reduce the entire biosphere to the fragile

simplicity of our desert and arctic biomes. We will be reversing

the process of organic evolution which has differentiated flora

and fauna into increasingly complex forms and relationships,

thereby creating a simpler and less stable world of life. The

consequences of this appalling regression are predictable enough

in the long run — the biosphere will become so fragile that it will

eventually collapse from the standpoint of human survival needs

and remove the organic preconditions for human life. That this

will eventuate from a society based on production for the sake of

production is, in my view, merely a matter of time, although when

it will occur is impossible to predict.

We must create an ecological society — not merely because

such a society is desirable but because it is direly necessary. We

must begin to live in order to survive. Such a society involves a

fundamental reversal of all the trends that mark the historic

development of capitalist technology and bourgeois society — the

minute specialization of machines and labour, the concentration

of resources and people in gigantic industrial enterprises and

urban entities, the stratification and bureaucratization of life, the

divorce of town from country, the objectification of nature and

human beings. In my view, this sweeping reversal means that we

must begin to decentralize our cities and establish entirely new

ecocommunities that are artistically molded to the ecosystems in

which they are located. I am arguing, here, that decentralization

means not the wanton scattering of population over the countryside in small isolated households or countercultural communes,

vital as the latter may be, but rather that we must retain the urban

tradition in the Hellenic meaning of the term, as a city which is

comprehensible and manageable to those who inhabit it, a new

• polis*, if you will, scaled to human dimension which, in Aristotle’s

famous dictum, can be comprehended by everyone in a single

view.

Such an ecocommunity, I will argue, would heal the split

between town and country, indeed, between mind and body by

fusing intellectual with physical work, industry with agriculture in

a rotation or diversification of vocational tasks. An ecocommunity would be supported by a new kind of technology — or

ecotechnology — one composed of flexible, versatile machinery

whose productive applications would emphasize durability and

quality, not built-in obsolesence, and insensate quantitative

output of shoddy goods, and a rapid circulation of expendable

commodities. Let me emphasize, here, that I am not advocating

that we abandon technology and return to paleolithic foodgathering. Quite to the contrary, I insist that our existing

technology is not sophisticated enough by comparison with the

smaller-scaled, more versatile ecotechnology that could be

developed and to a large extent is already available in pilot form or

on drawing boards. Such an ecotechnology would use the

inexhaustible’energy capacities of nature — the sun and wind, the

tides and waterways, the temperature differentials of the earth

and the abundance of hydrogen around us as fuels — to provide

the ecocommunity with non-polluting materials or wastes that

could be easily recycled. Indeed, decentralization would make it

possible to avoid the concentrated solid waste problems created

by our giant cities, wastes which can only be burned or dumped in

massive quantities into our seas.

I would hope that ecocommunities and ecotechnologies,

scaled to human dimensions, would open a new era in face-to-face relationships and direct democracy, providing the free time

that would make it possible in Hellenic fashion for people to

manage the affairs of society without the mediation of bureaucracies and professional political functionaries. The splits opened

by hierarchical society ages ago would now be healed and

transcended. The antagonistic division between sexes and age-

groups, town and country, administration and community, mind

and body would be reconciled and harmonized in a more

humanistic and ecological synthesis. Out of this transcendence

would emerge a new relationship between humanity and the

natural world in which society itself would be conceived as an

ecosystem based on unity in diversity, spontaneity, and non-hierarchical relationships. Once again we would seek to achieve

in our own minds the respiritization of the natural world —

not, to be sure, by abjectly returning to the myths of the archaic

era, but by seeing in human consciousness a natural world

rendered self-conscious and self-active, informed by a non-

repressive rationality that seeks to foster the diversity and

complexity of life. Out of this non-Promethean orientation would

emerge a new sensibility, one that would yield in Marx’s words the

humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity.

In counterposing environmentalism to ecology, I am not saying

that we should desist from opposing the construction of nuclear

power plant or highways and sit back passively to await the

coming of an ecological millenium. On the contrary, the existing

ground must be held on to fervently, everywhere along the way,

to rescue what we still have so that we can reconstitute society on

the least polluted and least damaged environment available to us.

But the stark alternatives of ecotopia or ecological devastation

must be kept in the foreground and a coherent theory must

always be advanced lest we offer alternatives that are as

meaningless as the prevailing society’s perspectives are barbarous. We cannot tell the “Third World,” for example, not to

industrialize when they are faced with harsh material denial and

poverty. With a coherent theory that reaches to the fundamentals of the social problem, however, we can offer to the

developing nations those technological and community models

we require for own society. Without a coherent theoretical

framework, we have very little to say except for tiring platitudes, episodic struggles, and pious hopes that the public can

with good reason ignore except insofar as its own narrow day-to-

day interests are concerned.

I suppose I could discuss these issues endlessly. Let me

conclude on a rather ruthless but honest observation. The unique

freedom that could await us results ironically or should I say,

dialectically — from the fact that our choices are woefully limited.

A century ago, Marx could validly argue that the alternatives to

socialism are barbarism. Harsh as the worst of these alternatives

may be, society could at least expect to recover from them.

Today the situation has become far more serious. The ecological

crisis of our time has graduated society’s alternatives to a more

decisive level of futuristic choices. Either we will create an

ecotopia based on ecological principles, or we will simply go

under as a species, in my view this is not apocalyptic ranting —

it is a scientific judgement that is validated daily by the very law of

life of the prevailing society.

<right>

March 1974

</right>

An open letter to the Ecological Movement

With the opening of the eighties, the ecology movement in

both the United States and Europe is faced with a serious crisis.

This crisis is literally one of its identity and goals, a crisis that

painfully challenges the movement’s capacity to fulfill its rich

promise of advancing alternatives to the domineering sensibility,

the hierarchical political and economic institutions, and the

manipulative strategies for social change that have produced the

catastrophic split between humanity and nature.

To speak bluntly: the coming decade may well determine

whether the ecology movement will be reduced to a decorative

appendage of an inherently diseased,anti-ecological society, a

society riddled by an unbridled need for control, domination and

exploitation of humanity and nature — or, hopefully, whether the

ecology movement will become the growing educational arena for

a new ecological society based on mutual aid, decentralized

communities, a people’s technology, and non-hierarchical, libertarian relations that will yield not only a new harmony between

human and human, but between humanity and nature.

Perhaps it may seem presumptuous for a single individual to

address himself to a sizable constituency of people who have

centered their activities around ecological concerns. But my

concern for the future of the ecology movement is not an

impersonal or ephemeral one. For nearly thirty years I have

written extensively on our growing ecological dislocations. These

writings have been reinforced by my activities against the growing

use of pesticides and food additives as early as 1952, the problem

of nuclear fallout that surfaced with the first hydrogen bomb test

in the Pacific in 1954, the radioactive pollution issue that emerged

with the Windscale nuclear reactor “incident” in 1956, and Con

Edison’s attempt to construct the world’s largest nuclear reactor

in the very heart of New York City in 1963. Since then, I have

been involved in anti-nuke alliances such as Clamshell and Shad,

not to speak of their predecessors Ecology Action East, whose

manifesto, *The Power to Destroy, The Power to Create,* I wrote

in 1969, and the Citizens Committee on Radiation Information,

which played a crucial role in stopping the Ravenswood reactor in

1963. Hence, I can hardly be described as an interloper or newcomer to the ecology movement. My remarks in this letter are the

product of a very extensive experience as well as my individual

concern for ideas that have claimed my attention for decades.

It is my conviction that my work and experience in all of these

areas would mean very little if they were limited merely to the

issues themselves, however important each one may be in its own

right. “No Nukes,” or for that matter, no food additives, no

agribusiness, or no nuclear bombs is simply not enough if our

horizon is limited to each one issue alone. Of equal importance is

the need to reveal the toxic social causes, values, and inhuman

relations that have created a planet which is already vastly

poisoned.

Ecology, in my view, has always meant *social* ecology: the

conviction that the very concept of dominating nature stems from

the domination of human by human, indeed, of women by men, of

the young by their elders, of one ethnic group by another, of

society by the state, of the individual by bureaucracy, as well as of

one economic class by another or a colonized people by a colonial

power. To my thinking, social ecology has to begin its quest for

freedom not only in the factory but also in the family, not only in

the economy but also in the psyche, not only in the material

conditions of life but also in the spiritual ones. Without changing

the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those

between men and women, adults and children, whites and other

ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is

considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a

socialistic “classless” and “nonexploitative” form. It would be

infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of

“people’s democracies,” “socialism” and the “public ownership” of “natural resources.” And as long as hierarchy persists, as

long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites,

the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and

inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.

The emergence of the women’s movement, even more so than

the counterculture, the “appropriate” technology crusade and

the anti-nuke alliances (I will omit the clean-up escapades of

“Earth Day”), points to the very heart of the hierarchical

domination that underpins our ecological crisis. Only insofar as a

counterculture, an alternate technology or anti-nuke movement

rests on the non-hierarchical sensibilities and structures that are

most evident in the truly radical tendencies in feminism can the

ecology movement realize its rich potential for basic changes in

our prevailing anti-ecological society and its values. Only insofar

as the ecology movement *consciously* cultivates an anti-hierarchical and a non-domineering sensibility, structure, and strategy

for social change can it retain its very *identity* as the voice for a

new balance between humanity and nature and its goal for a truly

ecological society.

This identity and this goal is now faced with serious erosion.

Ecology is now fashionable, indeed, faddish — and with this sleazy

popularity has emerged a new type of environmentalist hype.

From an outlook and movement that at least held the promise of

challenging hierarchy and domination have emerged a form of

• environmentalism* that is based more on tinkering with existing

institutions, social relations, technologies, and values than on

changing them. I use the word “environmentalism” to contrast it

with ecology, specifically with social ecology. Where social

ecology, in my view, seeks to eliminate the concept of the

domination of nature by humanity by eliminating the domination

of human by human, environmentalism reflects an “instrumentalist” or technical sensibility in which nature is viewed merely as a

passive habitat, an agglomeration of external objects and forces,

that must be made more “serviceable” for human use, irrespective of what these uses may be. Environmentalism, in fact, is

mqrely environmental engineering. It does not bring into question

the underlying notions of the present society, notably that man

must dominate nature. On the contrary, it seeks to facilitate that

domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards

caused by domination. The very notions of hierarchy and

domination are obscured by a technical emphasis on “alternative” power sources, structural designs for “conserving”

energy, “simple” lifestyles in the name of “limits to growth” that

now represent an enormous growth industry in its own right —

and, of course, a mushrooming of “ecology”-oriented candidates for political office and “ecology”-oriented parties that are

designed not only to engineer nature but also public opinion into

an accommodating relationship with the prevailing society.

Nathan Glazer’s “ecological” 24-square-mile solar satellite,

O’Neil’s “ecological” spaceships, and the DOE’s giant “ecological” windmills, to cite the more blatant examples of this

environmentalists mentality, are no more “ecological” than

nuclear power plants or agribusiness. If anything, their “ecological” pretensions are all the more dangerous because they are

more deceptive and disorienting to the general public. The hoopla

about a new “Earth Day” or future “Sun Days” or “Wind Days,”

like the pious rhetoric of fast-talking solar contractors and

patent — hungry “ecological” inventors, conceal the all-important

fact that solar energy, wind power, organic agriculture, holistic

health, and “voluntary simplicity” will alter very little in our

grotesque imbalance with nature if they leave the patriarchal

family, the multinational corporation, the bureaucratic and

centralized political structure, the property system, and the

prevailing technocratic rationality untouched. Solar power, wind

power, methane, and geothermal power are merely *power*

insofar as the devices for using them are needlessly complex,

bureaucratically controlled, corporately owned or institutionally

centralized. Admittedly, they are less dangerous to the physical

health of human beings than power derived from nuclear and

fossil fuels, but they are clearly dangerous to the spiritual, moral

and social health of humanity if they are treated merely as

techniques that do not involve new relations between people

and nature and within society itself. The designer, the bureaucrat,

the corporate executive, and the political careerist do not

introduce anything new or ecological in society or in our

sensibilities toward nature and people because they adopt “soft

energy .paths,” like all “technotwits” (to use Amory Lovins’

description of himself in a personal conversation with me), they

merely cushion or conceal the dangers to the biosphere and to

human life by placing ecological technologies in a straitjacket of

hierarchical values rather than by challenging the values and the

institutions they represent.

By the same token, even decentralization becomes meaningless if it denotes logistical advantages of supply and recycling

rather than human scale. If our goal in decentralizing society (or,

as the “ecology”-oriented politicians like to put it, striking a

“balance” between “decentralization” and “centralization”) is

intended to acquire “fresh food” or to’“recycle wastes” easily or

to reduce “transportation costs” or to foster “more” popular

control (not, be it noted, *complete* popular control) over social

life, decentralization too is divested of its rich ecological and

libertarian meaning as a network of free, naturally balanced

communities based on direct face-to-face democracy and fully

actualized selves who can really engage in the **self**-management

and **self**-activity so vital for the achievement of an ecological

society. Like alternate technology, decentralization is reduced to

a mere technical stratagem for concealing hierarchy and domination. The “ecological” vision of “municipal control of power,”

“nationalization of industry,” not to speak of vague terms like

“economic democracy,” may seemingly restrict utilities and

corporations, but leaves their overall control of society largely

unchallenged. Indeed, even a nationalized corporate structure

remains a bureaucratic and hierarchical one.

As an individual who has been deeply involved in ecological

issues for decades, I am trying to alert well-intentioned

ecologically oriented people to a profoundly serious problem in

our movement. To put my concerns in the most direct form

possible: I am disturbed by a widespread technocratic mentality

and political opportunism that threatens to replace social ecology

by a new form of social engineering. For a time it seemed that the

ecology movement might well fulfill its libertarian potential as a

movement for a non-hierarchical society. Reinforced by the most

advanced tendencies in the feminist, gay, community and socially

radical movements, it seemed that the ecology movement might

well begin to focus its efforts on changing the basic structure of

our anti-ecological society, not merely on providing more palatable techniques for perpetuating it or institutional cosmetics for

concealing its irremediable diseases. The rise of the anti-nuke

alliances based on a decentralized network of affinity groups, on a

directly democratic decision-making process, and on direct

action seemed to support this hope. The problem that faced the

movement seemed primarily one of self-education and public

education — the need to *fully* understand the meaning of the

affinity group structure as a lasting, family-type form, the full

implications of direct democracy, the concept of direct action as

more than a “strategy” but as a deeply rooted sensibility, an

outlook that expresses the fact that *everyone* had the right to

take *direct control* of society and of her or his everyday life.

Ironically, the opening of the eighties, so rich in its promise of

sweeping changes in values and consciousness, has also seen the

emergence of a new opportunism, one that threatens to reduce

the ecology movement to a mere cosmetic for the present

society. Many self-styled “founders” of the anti-nuke alliances

(one thinks here especially of the Clamshell Alliance) have

become what Andrew Kopkind has described as “managerial

radicals” — the manipulators of a political consensus that operates *within* the system in the very name of opposing it.

The “managerial radical” is not a very new phenomenon. Jerry

Brown, like the Kennedy dynasty, has practiced the art in the

political field for years. What is striking about the current crop is

the extent to which “managerial radicals” come from important

radical social movements of the sixties and, more significantly,

from the ecology movement of the seventies. The radicals and

idealists of the 1930s required decades to reach the middle-aged

cynicism needed for capitulation, and they had the honesty to

admit it in public. Former members of SDS and ecology action

groups capitulate in their late youth or early maturity — and write

their “embittered” biographies at 25,30, or 35 years of age, spiced

with rationalizations for their surrender to the status quo. Tom

Hayden hardly requires much criticism, as his arguments against

direct action at Seabrook last fall attest. Perhaps worse is the

emergence of Barry Commoner’s “Citizen’s Party,” of new

financial institutions like MUSE (Musicians United for Safe

Energy), and the “Voluntary Simplicity” celebration of a dual

society of swinging, jeans-clad, high-brow elitists from the middle

classes and the conventionally clad, consumer-oriented, lowbrow underdogs from the working classes, a dual society

generated by the corporate-financed “think tanks” of the

Stanford Research Institute.

In all of these cases, the radical implications of a decentralized society based on alternate technologies and closely knit

communities are shrewdly placed in the service of a technocratic

sensibility, of “managerial radicals,” and opportunistic careerists.

The grave danger here lies in the failure of many idealistic

individuals to deal with major social issues on their own terms —

to recognize the blatant incompatibilities of goals that remain in

deep-seated conflict with each other, goals that cannot possibly

coexist without delivering the ecology movement to its worst

enemies. More often than not, these enemies are its “leaders” and

“founders” who have tried to manipulate it to conform with the

very system and ideologies that block any social or ecological

reconciliation in the form of an ecological society.

The lure of “influence,” of “mainstream politics,” of “effectiveness” strikingly exemplifies the lack of coherence and consciousness that afflicts the ecology movement today. Affinity

groups, direct democracy, and direct action are not likely to be

palatable — or, for that matter, even comprehensible — to millions of people who live as soloists in discotheques and singles

bars. Tragically, these millions have surrendered their social

power, indeed, their very personalities, to politicians and bureaucrats who live in a nexus of obedience and command in which

they are normally expected to play subordinate roles.

• Yet this is precisely the immediate cause of the ecological crisis of our time* — a cause that has its historic roots in the market society

that engulfs us. To ask powerless people to regain power over

their lives is even more important than to add a complicated,

often incomprehensible, and costly solar collector to their

houses. Until they regain a new sense of power over their lives,

until they create their own system of self-management to oppose

the present system of hierarchical management, until they

develop new ecological values to replace current domineering

values — a process which solar collectors, wind machines, and

French-intensive gardens can *facilitate* but never replace —

nothing they change in society will yield a new balance with the

natural world.

Obviously, powerless people will not eagerly accept affinity

groups, direct democracy, and direct action in the normal course

of events. That they harbor basic impulses which make them very

susceptible to these forms and activities — a fact which always

surprises the “managerial radical” in periods of crisis and

confrontation — represents a potential that has yet to be fully

realized and furnished with intellectual coherence through painstaking education and repeated examples. It was precisely this

education and example that certain feminist and anti-nuke

groups began to provide. What is so incredibly regressive about

the technical thrust and electoral politics of environmental technocrats and “managerial radicals” today is that they recreate in

the name of “soft energy paths,” a specious “decentralization,”

and inherently hierarchical party-type structures the worst forms

and habits that foster passivity, obedience and vulnerability to the

mass media in the American public. The spectatorial politics

promoted by Brown, Hayden, Commoner, the Clamshell

“founders” like Wasserman and Lovejoy, together with recent

huge demonstrations in Washington and New York City breed

• masses*, *not citizens* — the manipulated objects of mass media

whether it is used by Exxon or by the CED (Campaign for

Economic Democracy), the Citizen’s Party, and MUSE.

Ecology is being used against an ecological sensibility, ecological forms of organization, and ecological practices to “win”

large constituencies, *not to educate them*. The fear of “isolation,”

of “futility,” of “ineffectiveness” yields a new kind of isolation,

futility and ineffectiveness, namely, a complete surrender of one’s

most basic ideals and goals. “Power” is gained at the cost of losing

the only power we really have that can change this insane

society — our moral integrity, our ideals, and our principles. This

may be a festive occasion for careerists who have used the

ecology issue to advance their stardom and personal fortunes; it

would become the obituary of a movement that has, latent within

itself, the ideals of a new world in which masses become

individuals and natural resources become nature, both to be

respected for their uniqueness and spirituality.

An ecologically oriented feminist movement is now emerging

and the contours of the libertarian anti-nuke alliances still exist.

The fusing of the two together with new movements that are likely

to emerge from the varied crises of our times may open one of the

most exciting and liberating decades of our century. Neither

sexism, ageism, ethnic oppression, the “energy crisis,” corporate

power, conventional medicine, bureaucratic manipulation, conscription, militarism, urban devastation or political centralism can

be separated from the ecological issue. All of these issues turn

around hierarchy and domination, the root conceptions of a

radical social ecology.

It is necessary, I believe, for everyone in the ecology movement

to make a crucial decision: will the eighties retain the visionary

concept of an ecological future based on a libertarian commitment to decentralization, alternative technology, and a libertarian practice based on affinity groups, direct democracy, and

direct action? Or will the decade be marked by a dismal retreat

into ideological obscurantism and a “mainstream politics” that

acquires “power” and “effectiveness” by following the very

“stream” it should seek to divert? Will it pursue fictitious “mass

constituencies” by imitating the very forms of mass manipulation,

mass media, and mass culture it is committed to oppose? These

two directions cannot be reconciled. Our use of “media,”

mobilizations, and actions must appeal to mind and to spirit, not

to conditioned reflexes and shock tactics that leave no room for

reason and humanity. In any case, the choice must be made now,

before the ecology movement becomes institutionalized into a

mere appendage of the very system whose structure and

methods it professes to oppose. It must be made consciously and

decisively — or the century itself, not only the decade, will be lost

to us forever.

<right>

February 1980

</right>

Energy, “Ecotechnocracy” and Ecology

With the launching of the “energy crisis,” a new mystique has

developed around the phrase “alternate energy.” In characteristic American fashion, this takes the form of ritualistic

purification: guilt over the extravagant use of irreplacable energy

resources, fear in response to the apocalyptic consequences of

“shortages,” repentance over the afflictions resulting from waste,

and the millenarian commitment to “new” techniques for achieving a stable energy system, i.e., “alternate energy.” The operational term here is “technique.” Whether one chooses to focus on

Gerald Ford’s plan to afflict America with some 200 nuclear

reactors by 1980 or Professor Heronemus’ plan to string the

northern Atlantic with giant wind generators, the phrase “alternate energy” runs the grave risk of being debased and its radical

content diffused of its serious social implications.

The trick is familiar enough. One intentionally confuses a mere

variation of the status quo with fundamentally opposing concepts of life style, technology, and community. Just, as the word

“state” was cunningly identified with society, “hierarchy” with

organization, “centralization” with planning — as though the

latter couldn’t exist without the former, indeed, as though both

words were synonymous — so projects that reflect a shrewd

reworking of established techniques and outlooks are prefixed by

the word “alternate.” With this one magical word, they acquire

the aura of the radically new, the different, the “revolutionary.”

The word c energy,” in turn, becomes the solvent by which richly

qualitative distinctions are reduced to the gray, undifferentiated

substrate for a crude psychic, physical and “ecological” cybernetics — the ebb and flow, the blockage and release of quantified

power. Accordingly, by dint of shrewd linguistic parasitism, the

old in a seemingly “new” form becomes little more than an

alternative to itself. Variety, qualitative difference and uniqueness, those precious traits of phenomena to which an authentic

ecological sensibility must always be a response, are rarefied into

a “cosmic” oneness, into a universal “night in which” (to borrow

the mocking language of a great German thinker) “all cows are

black.”

If energy becomes a device for interpreting reality on the

cosmic scale of the Chinese Qi or Reich’s orgone, we will then

have succumbed to a mechanism that is no less inadequate than

Newton’s image of the world as a clock. I use the word

“inadequate” advisedly: there is certainly truth in all of these

conceptions — Newton’s no less than the Chinese and Reich’s —

but it is a one-sided truth, not truth in its wholeness and

roundedness. If Newton’s image was essentially mechanical, a

vision of the world united in the ebb, flow and distribution of

energy is essentially thermodynamical. Both reduce quality to

quantity; both are “world views” in search of mathematical

equations; both tend toward a shallow scientism that regards

mere motion as development, changes as growth, and feedback

as dialectic. Acupuncture and psychology aside, in ecology the

Newton of this thermodynamics, or more properly, energetics, is

Howard Odum. In Odum’s work, systems-analysis reduces the

ecosystem to an analytic category for dealing with energy flow as

though life forms were mere reservoirs and conduits for calories,

not variegated organisms that exist as ends in themselves and in

vital developmental relationships with each other. Ironically, far

too many well-intentioned people who are rightly dissatisfied with

the linear thinking, the despiritizing formulas, and above all, the

mechanical materialism of traditional science have unknowingly

turned to,its opposite face — a mechanical spiritualism that subtly

betrays them with a different rhetoric to the very world view they

have rejected.

In terms of outlook, the results of flipping from one face of the

coin to the other — from mechanics to energetics — tend to

produce an ideological omelet, as formless and scattered as the

real article itself. Cosmic oneness achieved merely through

energetics easily decomposes into an obsessive preoccupation

with gadgetry. Here, the mechanical begins to subvert the

spiritual. One cannot live in a universal night all the time. Even if

the cows are black, there must be enough light to delineate them.

Among many “eco-freaks” — and I can think of no other term to

describe my sisters and brothers in the alternate technology

community — daylight often means neither a mellow dawn nor a

soft twilight but the harsh glare of high noon, when structural

detail and technical proficiency become ends in themselves.

Small domes graduate into big ones; horticulturists are lured by a

burgeoning market for pure foods into a questionable form of

organic agribusiness; solar collectors and wind generators

acquire a certain technical precosity that finds its armor in the

patent office. In itself, this development might even be valuable if

it were the “spin-off” of a flourishing social perspective, distinctly

critical of the entire social order, and formed by moral, spiritual,

and ecological values of a clearly revolutionary character. But as

long as energetics is the sole thread that unites outlook with

practice, the “eco-freak” often drops into an eco-technocratic

limbo in which means become ends and the end is simply

technical proficiency at best — or a sizeable income at worst.

What I am saying quite simply is that, lacking a solidity of social

ideas, an authentic ecological sensibility, a life-oriented outlook,

and moral integrity, scientism and frankly capitalism overtly

recolonize even the rhetorical ground which was claimed by

mechanical spiritualism. If the dream that guides the “eco-freak”

is held together by energetics, ecology with its broadly philosophical outlook that seeks the harmonization of humanity with

nature dissolves into “environmentalism” or what amounts to

mere environmental engineering, an organic approach dissolves

into systems analysis, and “alternate technology” becomes

technocratic manipulation.

The landscape of alternate technology is already marred by this

regressive drift, especially by mega-projects to “harness” the sun

and winds. By far the lion’s share of federal funds for solar energy

research is being funneled into projects that would occupy vast

areas of desert land. These projects are a mockery of “alternate

technology.” By virtue of their scale, they are classically traditional in terms of their gigantism and in the extent to which they

would exacerbate an already diseased, bureaucratically centralized, national division of labour — one which renders the

American continent dependent upon and vulnerable to a few

specialized areas of production. The oceans too have become

industrial real estate, not merely as a result of proposals for

floating nuclear reactors but also long strings of massive wind

generators. And as if these mega-projects were not enough,

Glaser’s suggestions for mile-square space platforms to capture

solar energy beyond the atmosphere and beam microwaves to

earthbound collectors would redecorate the sky with science-

fiction industrial installations. Doubtless, many of these megaproject designers are well-intentioned and high-minded in their

goals. But in terms of size, scale and ecological insight, their

thinking is hardly different from that of James Watt. Their

perspectives are the product of the traditional Industrial Revolution rather than a new ecological revolution, however sophisticated their designs may be.

Human beings, plants, animals, soil, and the inorganic substrate of an ecosystem form a community not merely because

they share or manifest a oneness in “cosmic energy,” but because

they are qualitatively *different* and thereby complement each

other in the wealth of their diversity. Without giving due and

sensitive recognition to the differences in life-forms, the unity of

an ecosystem would be one-dimensional, flattened out by its lack

of variety and the complexity of the food web which gives it

stability. The horrendous crime of the prevailing social order and

its industry is that it is undoing the complexity of the biosphere. It

is simplifying complex food webs by replacing the organic with the

inorganic — turning soil into sand, forests into lumber, and land

into concrete. In so simplifying the biosphere, this social order is

working against the thrust of animal and plant evolution over the

past billion years, a thrust which has been to colonize almost

every niche on the planet with variegated life-forms, each

uniquely, often exquisitely, adapted to fairly intractable material

conditions for life. Not only is “small beautiful,” to use E.F.

Schumacher’s expression, but so is diversity. Our planet finds its

unity in the diversity of species and in the richness, stability and

interdependence this diversity imparts to the totality of life, notin

the black-painted-on-black energetics of mechanical spiritualism.

“Alternate energy” is ecological insofar as it promotes this

diversity, partly by fostering an outlook that respects diversity,

partly by using diverse sources of energy that make us dependent

on variegated resources. The prevailing social order teaches us to

think in terms of “magic bullets,” whether they be chemotherapeutic “solutions” to all disease or the “one” source of energy that

will satisfy all our needs for power. Accordingly, the industrial

counterpart to antibiotics is nuclear energy, just as Paul Ehrlich’s

salvarsan, the “magic bullet” of the turn of the century, found its

counterpart in petroleum. A “magic bullet” simplifies all our

problems. It overlooks the differences between things by prescribing one solution for widely dissimilar problems. It fosters the

view that there is a common denominator to the variegated world

of phenomena — biological, social, or psychological — that can be

encompassed by a single formula or agent. A respect for diversity

is thus undermined by a Promethean view of the world as so

much “matter” and “energy” that can be “harnessed” to serve the

maw of agribusiness and industry. Nature becomes “natural

resources,” cities become “urban resources,” and eventually

even people become “human resources” — all irreducible “substances for exploitation and production. The language itself

reveals the sinister transformation of the organic into the

inorganic, the simplification of a richly diverse reality into uniform

“matter” to feed a society based on production for the sake of

production, growth for the sake of growth, and consumption for

the sake of consumption.

To make solar energy alone, or wind power alone, or methane

alone the exclusive “solution” to our energy problems would be

as regressive as adopting nuclear energy. Let us grant that solar

energy, for example, may prove to be environmentally far less

harmful and more efficient than conventional forms. But to view it

as the exclusive source of energy presupposes a mentality and

sensibility that leaves untouched the industrial apparatus and the

competitive, profit-oriented social relations that threaten the

viability of the biosphere. In all other spheres of life, growth would

still be pursued for its own sake, production for its own sake, and

consumption for its own sake, followed eventually by the

simplification of the planet to a point which would resemble a

more remote geological age in the evolution of the organic world.

Conceptually, the beauty of “alternate energy” has been not

merely its efficiency and its diminution of pollutants, but the

ecological *interaction* of solar collectors, wind generators, and

methane digesters with each other and with many other sources

of energy including wood, water — and yes, coal and petroleum

where necessary — to produce a new energy *pattern*, one that is

artistically tailored to the ecosystem in which it is located. Variety

would be recovered in the use of energy just as it would be in the

cultivation of the soil, not only because variety obviates the need

to use harmful “buffers,” but because it promotes an ecological

sensibility in all spheres of technology. Without variety and

diversity in technology as a whole, solar energy would merely be

a substitute for coal, oil, and uranium rather than function as a

stepping stone to an entirely new way of dealing with the natural

world and with each other as human beings.

What is no less important, “alternate energy” — if it is to form

the basis for a new *ecotechnology* — would have to be scaled to

human dimensions. Simply put, this means that corporate

gigantism with its immense, incomprehensible industrial installations would have to be replaced by small units which people

could comprehend and directly manage by themselves. No

longer would they require the intervention of industrial bureaucrats, political technocrats, and a species of “environmentalists” who seek merely to engineer “natural resources” to

suit the demands of an inherently irrational and anti-ecological

society. No longer would people be separated from the means

whereby they satisfy their material needs by a suprahuman

technology with its attendant “experts” and “managers”; they

would acquire a direct grasp of a comprehensible ectotechnology

and regain the power over everyday life in all its aspects which

they lost ages ago to ruling hierarchies in the political and

economic sphere.[4] Indeed, following from the attempt to achieve

a variegated energy pattern and an ecotechnology scaled to

human dimensions, they would be obliged to decentralize their

cities as well as their industrial apparatus into new ecocommunities — communities that would be based on direct face-to-face relations and mutual aid.

[4] At the risk of spicing these remarks with some politically debatable issues, I

would like to remind some of my libertarian Marxist friends — the sects we can

give up as hopeless — that even “workers’ control of production,” a very

fashionable slogan these days, would not be any sort of “control” at all if

technology were so centralized and suprahuman that workers could no longer

comprehend the nature of the technological apparatus other than their own

narrow sphere. For this reason alone, libertarian Marxists would be wise to

examine social ecology in a new light and emphasize the need to alter the

technology so that it is controllable, indeed, to alter work so that it is no longer

mind-stunting as well as physically exhausting toil. Victor Ferkiss, in his latest

book (*The Future of Technological Civilization*) has dubbed my views “eco-anarchism.” If “ecoanarchism” means the technical — not only the spiritual and

political — power of people to create an ecotechnology that is comprehensible to

them, one that they can really “control,” I accept the new label with eagerness.

One can well imagine what a new sense of humanness this

variety and human scale would yield — a new sense of self, of

individuality, and of community. Instruments of production

would cease to be instruments of domination and social antagonism: they would be transformed into instruments of liberation

and social harmonization. The means by which we acquire the

most fundamental necessities of life would cease to be an

awesome engineering mystery that invites legends of the unearthly to compensate for our lack of control over technology and

society. They would be restored to the everyday world of the

familiar, of the *oikos*, like the traditional tools of the craftsman.

Selfhood would be redefined in new dimensions of self-activity,

self-management, and self-realization because the technical

apparatus so essential to the perpetuation of life — and today, so

instrumental in its destruction — would form a comprehensible

arena in which people could directly manage society. The self

would find a new material and existential expression in productive as well as social activity.

Finally, the sun, wind, waters, and other presumably “inorganic” aspects of nature would enter our lives in new ways and

possibly result in what I called, nearly a decade ago, a “new

animism.” They would cease to be mere “resources,” forces to be

“harnessed” and “exploited,” and would become manifestations

of a larger natural totality, indeed, as respiritized nature, be it the

musical whirring of wind-generator blades or the shimmer of light

on solar-collector plates. Having heard these sounds and seen

these images with my own ears and eyes at installations reared in

Vermont at Goddard College and in Massachusetts at the

research station of New Alchemy Institute East, I have no

compunction in using esthetic metaphors to describe what might

ordinarily be dismissed as “noise” and “glare” in the vernacular of

conventional technology. If we cherish the flapping of sails on a

boat and the shimmer of sunlight on the sea, there is no reason

why we cannot cherish the flapping of sails on a wind rotor and

the reflection of sunlight on a solar collector. Our minds have shut

out these responses and denied them to our spirit because the

conventional sounds and imagery of technology are the ear-splitting clatter of an assembly line and the eye-searing flames of a

foundry. This is a form of self-denial with a vengeance. Having

seen both technological worlds, I may perhaps claim a certain

sensitivity to the difference and hope to transmit it to the reader.

If the current literature on alternate sources of energy is

conceived merely as an unconventional version of the

• Mechanical Engineering Handbook*, it will have failed completely to

achieve its purpose. Mere gadgetry for its own sake, or in what

philosophers call a “reified” form, exists everywhere and is to be

desperately shunned. To be sure, one must know one’s craft, no

less so in ecotechnology than in conventional technology. This is

the burden (if “burden” it be) of the sculptor as well as the mason,

of the painter as well as the carpenter. But in ecotechnology one

must deal with craftsmanship in a special way. Overjnflated into a

swollen balloon, it may well carry us away from the ground on

which we originally stood, from our sense of *oikos*, the ecological

terrain which initially shaped our interests and concerns. I have

seen this occur among my sisters and brothers in the ecological

movement only too often. Indeed, having received a considerable

training in electronics decades ago, I also know only too well how

insanely obsessed one can become with the unending, even

mindless, improvisation of circuit diagrams until one is as

enamored by drawing, say, the electronic trigger for a nuclear

bomb as for a television set. It is from people obsessed with reified

technology and science that the AEC recruits its weapons

engineers, the FBI its wire-tappers, the CIA its “counter-

insurgency” experts. Let us not deceive ourselves: “ecofreaks”

are no more immune to “the man” from Honeywell and NASA

than “electronic freaks” are to “the man” from General Electric

and the AEC — that is, until they have become ecotechnologists,

informed by a deeply spiritual and intellectual commitment to an

ecological society.

This means, in my view, that they are committed not merely to

an “efficient” alternate technology but to a deeply human

alternate technology — human in scale, in its liberatory goals, in

its community roots. This means, too, that they are committed to

diversity, to a sense of qualitative distinction, to energy and

technology as an artistically molded pattern, not as a “magic

bullet.” Finally, it means that they are ecologists, not “environmentalists, people who have an organic outlook, not an

engineering outlook. They are motivated by a more sweeping

drama than an appetite for mere gadgets and scientistic “curiosities. They can see the wound that opened up in society and in

the human spirit when the archaic community began to divide

internally into systems of hierarchy and domination — the elders

constituting themselves into a privileged gerontocracy in order to

dominate the young, the males forming privileged patriarchies in

order to dominate women, lastly male elites collecting into

economic ruling classes in order to exploit their fellow men. From

this drama of division, hierarchy, and domination emerged the

Promethean mentality, the archetypal myth that man could

dominate nature. Not only did it divide humanity from nature into

a cruel dualism that split town from country, but it divided the

human spirit itself, rearing thought above passion, mind above

body, intellect above sensuousness. When finally every group

he from clan to guild — dissolved into the market placejungle of

atomized buyers and sellers, each in mutual competition with the

other; when finally the sacred gift became the avaricious bargain,

the craze for domination became an end in itself. It brought us a

formidable body of scientific knowledge and a stupendously

powerful technology, one which, if properly reworked and

rescaled, could finally eliminate scarcity, want, and denial, or one

which could tear down the planet if used for profit, accumulation and mindless growth.

The authentic ecotechnologist knows that the wounds must be

healed. Indeed, these wounds are part of her or his body.

Ecotechnologies and ecocommunities are the mortar that will

serve not only to unite age groups, sexes, and town and country

with each other in a non-hierarchical society; they will also help to

close the splits in the human spirit and between humanity and

nature. Whether these splits were necessary or not to achieve the

striking advances in technology of the past millennia; whether we

had to lose the child-like innocence of tribal society in order to

acquire the mature innocence of a future society, ripened by the

painful wisdom of history — all of this is a matter of abstract

interest. What should count when confronted by a technical work

is that we are not beguiled from these immense themes — this

sweeping drama in which we split from blind nature only to return

again on a more advanced level as nature rendered self-conscious

in the form of creative, intelligent, and spiritually renewed beings.

To deal with alternate energy sources in a language that is alien to

social ecology, to reify the literature on the subject as a

compendium of gadgets — a mere encyclopedia of gimmicks —

would be worse than an error. It would be a form of betrayal — not

so much to those who have worked in this field as to oneself.

<right>

February 1975

</right>

The Concept of Ecotechnologies and Ecocommunities

The expression “human habitat” contains a paradox that

should be examined if it is not to lead us into a certain measure of

confusion. Clearly any man-made structure, indeed, any artifact

that figures in an environment is “human” and part of a “human

habitat.” Viewed in terms of this all-embracing definition, a

human habitat could include the scarring towers of New York

City’s World Trade Center and the low-slung town houses of

Boston’s Beacon Hill or the steel mills of Pittsburg and the artisan

shops of Williamsburg. What is man-made in a habitat is

“human,” strictly speaking, and many serious writers see ‘no

discordancies in juxtaposing towers and town houses or mills and

shops as components of a human habitat.

But this definition, while obviously secure in its technical

accuracy, is somewhat disquieting. It seems to preclude the basis

for judging whether certain man-made things are desirable or

not — and it has been used to achieve this exclusion with telling

effect. More than one horrendous urban design has been force-

fed to the public on the grounds that it is no less “human,”

technically speaking, than a Florentine neighborhood square,

and no pains have been spared to remind irate citizens that they

are exercising inexcusable “value judgements” in describing the

one as “inhuman” and the other as eminently “human.” Yet we

tend to resist the notion that the man-made origin of a thing

suffices to characterize it as “human.” We press the point that the

word “human” should have considerably more than a technical

meaning, that it should reflect deeply felt moral needs and ends.

This vexing paradox by no means confronts conventional

technologists and planners alone. Even the new, so-called

“countercultural” technologists and communitarians have confused technique with values or, more strictly speaking, the

dimensions of a structure with its ethical or “human” qualities. It

does not always improve our insight into this paradox to declare

that small is beautiful” or to decribe “small” technologies as

“soft,” “intermediate,” or “appropriate.” Such adjectives are

more neutral morally than E. F. Schumacher (who coined most of

these terms) would have us believe.[5] As a critic of Schumacher

has recently observed; if big is not good, small is not necessarily

beautiful.[6] Indeed, much that is small — such as a suburban

tract, a back-breaking plow, a tiring handloom, or the modest

office of a local real estate broker — may be downright repellent

and dehumanizing by any standards. Dimensions are no more

substitutes for values than the technical origins of a particular

thing, although they may certainly be a factor in launching an

individual on a particular ethical trajectory that rejects “big” for

one reason or “small” for another.

That social philosophers, researchers, and popular writers

who identify “small” with “human” have touched a nerve in a

sizable segment of the American public seems to be one of the

more obvisous facts of our times. Practical efforts to create a

human habitat based on comparatively small communities,

horticultural techniques of food cultivation, modest-sized complexes of solar-wind-methane energy installations, and craft

technologies are widespread today and derive directly from the

“countercultural” upsurge of the sixties. The constituency for

these alternate technologies and communities is, in fact, much

larger than the casual observor is likely to realize and its

underlying philosophy, even if largely intuitive, has a coherence

that has rarely been articulated in the conventional literature.

Nor can this movement be dismissed as episodic. Aside from

the likelihood that it will have an existential impact comparable to

the “counterculture” from which it derived, it has already

pioneered in new technologies, service organizations, and community forms that have a tangibility, a reconstructive character, and a justly earned public recognition that can scarcely be

compared with its almost formless and erratic antecedents of the

lastdecade. Far from being episodic, this new quest for a “human

habitat” articulates, even more than it fully recognizes, a well-

formed and far-reaching historic tradition. Classical Hellenic

thought initiated this tradition with its view of the *polis* as an

ethical community; later, anarchist theorists such as Peter

Kropotkin were to give it modernity with their concepts of face-

to-face democracy and popular self-administration.

“Human” as Human Scale

It is important to emphasize the Hellenic (and largely western)

origins of the new quest for a “human habitat” if only to place in

c earer perspective the mystical Asian ambience that surrounds

it. Despite the tendency of so many new technologists and

communitarians to slight science as spiritually desiccating, they

retain closer affinities to the western scientific outlook than they

are hkely to admit.[7] Quite often, in fact, the much-despised

mechanical materialism associated with Newtonian science is

simply replaced by an equally mechanical spiritualism that

satisfies neither the needs of the new technologists for systematic

research nor the needs of the new communitarians for a human-

oriented value system.[8]

At the risk of seeming heretical, I would like to suggest that the

Indian and Chinese philosophical works so much in vogue today

provide no satisfactory melding of the disciplined rationalism,

technical sophistication, social activism, and personalistic ethics

t at actually vitalize this quest. One must grossly misread Asian

literature to find the rational, technical, and ethical inspiration for

developing human-oriented technologies and communities.[9]

Despite the widely expressed need for a sense of unity with

nature that Asian philosophy is said to satisfy, the primacy this

philosophy gives to “cosmic” concerns over mundane social and

individual needs tends to conflict with the intense subjectivism of

its western acolytes, their activism, and the practical wisdom they

exercise in designing their technologies and communities.

If we , must anchor the new quest for a human habitat in

philosophical traditions of a pre-industrial era, it would seem that

Hellenic rather than Asian thought is more relevant, even if it

tends to receive scant attention. The fascinating Hellenic blend of

metaphysical speculation with empirical study, of qualitative with

quantitative science, and of natural with social phenomena is

rarely equalled by Asian thinkers and religious’teachers. We still

“talk Greek,” as it were, when we speak of “ecology,” “technology,” and “economics.” We also “think Greek” when we

impute^“good” or “evil,” “just” or “unjust,” “human” or “inhuman in short, an ethical dimension — to data that conventional science views as hard facts. Although modern science can

justly claim its origins in Hellenic philosophy, so too can the new

technologists and communitarians who seek a human habitat,

perhaps with even greater validity. For Greek “science,” if such it

can be called in the modern sense of the term, is rarely free of an

ethical stance toward reality and experience. To Plato and

Aristotle, the analysis of phenomena at all levels of reality is never

exhausted by the strictly descriptive query, “how.” Analysis must

include an acknowledgement of functional interrelationship,

indeed, of a metaphysical *telos*, which is expressed by the

intentional query, “why.”[10] Despite the high degree of secularism

and factual systematization that Greek thought (expecially in

Aristotle’s extant writings) introduced into the western intellectual tradition, its center was eminently ethical and its orientation was human and social.

“Human,” in Greek thought, means scaled to human dimensions, at least as far as social institutions and communities are

concerned. Although it has been observed that Plato in The Laws

computes the most satisfactory number of households in his

“best *polis*” on the basis of Pythagorean numerology, a close

study of that dialogue shows that his motives are strikingly

pragmatic. The number, 5040, enjoys the alluring advantage that

it contains the “largest number of consecutive divisors” and yet

comprises a number that suffices “for purposes of war and every

peacetime activity, all contracts and dealings, and for taxes and

grants.”[11] No figure could be so all-inclusive. In blending Pythagorean mysticism with pragmatic considerations, Plato affords

his contemporaries a bridge to span the gap between the archaic

world of the mythopoeic and the practical world of social

organization, a characteristic example of “cosmic” and social

parallelism that has proved so appealing to the new technologists

and communitarians of our own time.

Aristotle is more secular: he replaces Plato’s mysticism by

strictly ethical premises. But these very premises provide him

with his uniquely Hellenic stance — a moral conception of what

we (borrowing our social terminology from zoology) designate as

a “habitat.” In a widely quoted passage, Aristotle tells us that the

“best *polis*” must be one that “can be taken in at a single view.”[12]

His reasons for this scale, although rarely cited, form what is

perhaps one of the most compelling arguments in social theory

for decentralization. The population of a *polis* must suffice to

achieve not only the “good life” and “self-sufficiency” in a

“political community,” but must be limited to a size which renders

it possible for citizens to “know each other’s personal characters,

since where this does not happen to be the case the business of

electing officials and trying law suits is bound to go badly;

haphazard decision is unjust in both matters, and this must

obviously prevail in an excessively numerous community.”[13]

“Small” in Aristotle’s view, is human because it allows for

individual control over the affairs of the community and the

exercise of individual human powers in the social realm. A “big”

community may be more efficient for economic or military

purposes, but it would be “unjust.” Its citizens would be incapable

of making decisions of profound social importance and would

thereby fail to realize their distinctive human capacities for

rational social judgement.[14] Hence the *polis* must be large

enough to meet its material needs and achieve self-sufficiency,

but small enough to be taken in at one view. Only in such a *polis*

would human beings be able to realize their humanity, that is to

say, to actualize their potentialities for rational judgement.

The Hellenic interpretation of “human” as self-consciousness

and self-realization in the private sphere of life recurs throughout western thought from Descartes to the contemporary

existentialists. A highly individualistic subjectivism is the intellectual hallmark of philosophy in the modern era. The Hellenic

interpretation of “human” as self-activity and self-administration,

in the public sphere, however, is surprisingly rare. The Protestant

sects which were to gather together under the ample rubric of

Puritan Congregationalism seem to have articulated perhaps the

earliest modern attempts to establish the administrative autonomy of small decentralized groups as opposed to the centralized

hierarchies of the Catholic and Anglican clergy. In colonial

America, the Puritan congregation was to be extended from the

religious to the political sphere — if, indeed, Puritan ideology

established any distinction between the two — by vesting considerable civil authority in town meetings.[15] The theme is picked up

again by Rousseau in his critique of deputized power and

representative government. His praise of the Greek popular

assembly based on face-to-face democracy is all the more

remarkable if one bears in mind that it was written at a high-point

in the development of the centralized nation-state.[16] Finally, the

concept of a human habitat as a modern *polis* acquires its clearest

coherence and multidimensionality in the work of Peter Kropotkin, one of the major theorists of nineteenth-century anarchism

and a distinguished biogeographer in his own right.[17] In

• Fields, Factories and Workshops*, a classic that has exercised immense

direct and indirect influence since its publication as a series of

articles in the late 1880s, Kropotkin formulates the most impressive case for decentralized communities.[18] His concept of a

human habitat is based on an ecological integration of town and

countryside, a highly flexible technology and communications

system, a revival of artisanship as a productive form of “aesthetic

enjoyment,” and direct local democracy freed of the social ills,

notably slavery, patriarchialism, and class conflict, that subverted

Greek democracy.

The revival of interest in Kropotkin’s work, a revival that has

been nourished by *The New Ecologist* in England and by what

Victor Ferkiss describes as the “eco-anarchism” of many new

technologists and communitarians in the United States, could

well serve as a valuable point of departure for formulating an

ethical dimension to the word “human.” If our values are not to

be entirely arbitrary and relativistic, they must be rooted in

certain, objective criteria about humanity itself. What clearly

unites an Aristotle with a Kropotkin, despite a historic span of

more than two millenia, is their emphasis on self-consciousness

as the most distinctive of human attributes, notably, the capacity

of human beings to engage in self-reflection, rational action, and

foresee the consequences of their activities. Human action is not

merely any action by human beings, but action that fosters

reflexivity, rational practice, and foresight. Judging a habitat by

this criterion, we would be obliged to look beyond the mere

presence of human artifacts and inquire into whether or not the

habitat promotes distinctively human traits and potentialities.

Clearly a habitat that is largely incomprehensible to the

humans who inhabit it would be regarded as inhuman. Whether

by reason of its size, its centralization, or the exclusivity of its

decision-making process, it would deny the individual the opportunity to understand key social factors that affect his personal

destiny. Such a habitat, by closing to the individual a strategic

area for the formation of consciousness, would challenge the

integrity of consciousness itself. That this trend, so apparent in

the years following World War II, can evoke popular resistance is

suggested by the often violent social unrest, particularly among

American youth, of the 1960s. The official “habitat,” marked by a

formidable degree of centralization and bureaucratization, seems

to have generated, in reaction, the “subhabitats” or “subcultures” of the last decade from which so many of the new

technologists and communitarians were to emerge.

But the same trend toward gigantism and centralization can

produce a mind-numbing quiescence. An inhuman habitat tends

to produce a dehumanizing one — dehumanizing in the sense that

the degradation inflicted on the public sphere eventually invades

the private sphere. The individual who is denied the opportunity

to exercise self-administration in the public sphere suffers an

attrition not only of self-consciousness but also of self-hood. The

primacy of subjectivity, which philosophy since the Renaissance

placed above all other considerations in the western intellectual

tradition, is vitiated by the erosion of the ego. The shrivelling of

the public sphere is followed by the shrivelling of the private

sphere — that inviolable area which is presumably the last refuge

of the individual in an overly centralized and bureaucratized

society. The ego, increasingly desiccated by the aridity of the

social sphere, becomes fit material for mass culture, stereotyped

responses, and a preoccupation with trivia.[19]

A human habitat minimally presupposes human scale, that is to

say, a scale that lends itself to public comprehension, individual

participation, and face-to-face relationships. But a caveat must be

sounded: it is not enough to deal with such a habitat exclusively in

terms of its artifacts or their dimensions. Even the most delicately

wrought “garden cities” do not make a human habitat if the term

“human” is to mean more than pleasant vistas, comfortable

homes, and efficient logistics. The “big” literally dwarfs the ego,

but the “small” does not in itself elevate it. Beyond “big” or

“small” are the compelling problems of the “just” and “good” in

the Hellenic and libertarian sense of these terms: the “good life”

as a materially secure and reflexive one, the “good society” as an

ethical community based on justice, public participation, and

mutual concern. It is patently impossible to describe such a

habitat strictly in terms of its physical attributes, however

important they may be. Eventually, any such description must

include the political infrastructure, institutions, interpersonal

relations, and guiding values that justify the use of the word

“human.” In the absence of these political, institutional, psychological, and moral elements, the description becomes a mere

inventory of things and structures, an artifactual aggregate that

may secure the individual’s self-preservation and creature comforts, but explains nothing about the development of his selfhood

and moral outlook.

Ecology and Environmentalism

The extent to which a designer accepts this multidimensional

notion of human scale generally tells us whether his work can be

regarded as qualitatively “new” or merely an extension of the

conventional technical wisdom into new fields of research.

A considerable amount of research is currently underway in

non-nuclear “alternate” sources of energy such as solar, wind,

and methane installations, in food cultivation, and in energysaving dwellings and communities. From a strictly artifactual

standpoint, this research is often difficult to distinguish. To cite a

few examples: it is not unusual to read accounts of the new

technology” that contain fast-and-loose comparisons between

the Meinel design for monumental “solar farms” and Steve Baer’s

small, delightfully playful solar-heated “drumwall”- house. One

finds William E. Heronemus’s scheme for stringing large windmill

installations across prairies and stretches of ocean juxtaposed

with Hans Meyer’s 12-foot-high wind generator. R. Buckminster

Fuller’s “Tetrahedral City,” a soaring pyramidal structure designed to accomodate a million residents may be found together

with a description of Moshe Safdie’s compact modular “Habitat,”

both of which are adduced as evidence of “organic” design and

structural growth.[20]

But can such sharply contrasting proposals and projects be

grouped together because they employ similar technical principles or profess adherence to an “organic” design concept? The

Meinel, Heronemus, and Fuller proposals differ not only in their

physical dimensions from the installations designed by Baer,

Meyer, and Safdie; they differ even more significantly in their

conceptualization of a human habitat, whether this difference is

explicitly stated, presupposed or, in Fuller’s case, grossly misstated. The habitats that would emerge from the Meinel,

Heronemus, and Fuller proposals would differ from a New York

City, a Chicago, or a Pittsburgh primarily by virtue of their

capacity to use inexhaustible resources such as solar and wind

power, and an inexhaustible form of “real estate,” notably the

upward reaches of space. None of these proposals involves any

appreciable structural modifications of existing habitats; none of

them is likely to arrest the trend toward urban gigantism, political

and economic centralization, bureaucratic manipulation, and the

ethic of brute self-interest. Perhaps the only significant claim they

can make is long-run efficiency in the use of key resources — a

claim that has been seriously challenged by friendly critics as well

as opponents.[21]

Such an approach might well be described as “environmental-

istic” if, by this term we mean a morally neutral but more efficient

technical administration of nature for concrete pragmatic ends.

Environmentalism can thus be regarded simply as a form of

natural engineering. The objectives of the environmentalist

presuppose no uniquely beneficient relationship between man

and nature that is implicit in so many statements of an “ecological ethic,” notably a respect for the biosphere, a conscious

effort to function within its parameters, and an attempt to achieve

harmony between society and the natural world. Indeed, it is

doubtful if words such as “nature” and “harmony” have any

meaning for the environmentalist. “Nature” would be regarded as

an inventory of “natural resources” and “harmony” as a poetic

metaphor for “adaptation.” Environmentalism advances the goal

of using these resources efficiently and prudently, with minimal

harm to public health and with due regard to the conservation of

raw materials for future generations.

Although Baer, Meyer, and Safdie are likely to agree with the

environmentalist emphasis on efficiency and prudence, they can

hardly be regarded as mere technicians. It is fair to assume from

their designs and sense of human scale that they are committed

to an ecological ethic, not merely involved in the concerns of

technical proficiency. Baer’s sense of outrage over the social

indifference of some of his colleagues, Meyer’s almost rhapsodic

commitment to a naturalistic sensibility, and Safdie’s organic and

communitarian vision, despite its puzzling eclecticism, reflect a

decentralistic concept of habitats, a fervent regard for human

beings as ends in themselves, and a holistic attitude toward

nature. In their quest for technologies and communities that will

serve to harmonize man with man and human society with

nature, they might well be called “social ecologists” rather than

designers, a term the late E.A. Gutkind coined a quarter of a

century ago in a masterful discussion on community.[22] Their

technologies and communities, in turn, could be described as

“ecotechnologies” and “ecocommunities,” terms that are meant

to impart an ecological ethic to conventional notions of technics

and urbanism.[23]

If Baer, Meyer, and Safdie seem to reflect a largely intuitive

commitment to social ecology, The New Alchemy Institute and

urban service groups such as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

exhibit a high degres of ideological sophistication. The assumption that John Todd, director of The New Alchemy

Institute, is guided by a “practical, how-to-do it approach” (as a

journalist recently reported in a major New York daily) is grossly

misleading.[24] The New Alchemy Institute, which Todd did so

much to establish, scores a major advance over many new

technologists by integrating ecotechnologies into functionally

interrelated systems that stand in marked contrast to the

mutually exclusive units one so often encounters at other

research installations. The Institute’s windmills, solar collectors,

aquacultural units and, very significantly, its extensive gardens —

all taken together — could be described as a highly unique

ecosystem. Todd, it is worth noting, explicitly acknowledges the

influence of Kropotkin and other libertarian thinkers on his

decentralistic and integrative outlook. He views his work as a

project to alter social consciousness and human sensibility as well

as technical practice.[25]

This emphasis on the integration of small-scale ecotechnologies acquires a distinct communitarian thrust in the work of the

Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The Institute, while occupied

with more modest installations than New Alchemy, promotes

rooftop gardens, solar energy units, waste recycling, and retrofitting projects in the very midst of Washington, D.C. Ecotechnologies are expressly viewed by the Institute’s members as a

means for achieving a new kind of urban community based on

popular control of the resources and institutions that-affect the

urban dweller’s life. They stress full public participation in local

governance and finance, neighborhood control of food and

energy resources, decentralization, and mutual aid. Accordingly,

technology is not the sole focus of the Institute but rather one of

many means for achieving active participation in community life.

Like New Alchemy, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has been

consciously influenced by Kropotkin and libertarian ideas. The

tendency to report the approach of The New Alchemy Institute

and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance as a “practical, how-to-do

it” one reflects the intractability of the conventional mind to

notions of a human habitat as an ethical community.[26] Even

when these notions are cast in a familiar ecological jargon, they

tend to be debased to technical “nuts-and-bolts” terms.

Ecotechnology, in fact, can scarcely be exemplified by a

statuesque solar collector or a dramatic wind generator reared in

splendid isolation from the ecosystem in which it is located. If the

word “ecotechnology” is to have more than a strictly technical meaning, it must be seen as the very ensemble itself,

functionally integrated with human communities as part of a

shared biosphere of people and nonhuman life forms. This

ensemble has the distinct goal of not only meeting human needs

in an ecologically sound manner — one which favours diversity

within an ecosystem — but of consciously promoting the integrity of the biosphere. The Promethean quest of using technology to “dominate nature” is replaced by the ecological ethic of

using technology to harmonize humanity’s relationship with

nature.

Human consciousness, in effect, is placed in the service of both

human needs and ecological diversity. Inasmuch as human

beings are themselves products of the natural world, human self-

consciousness could be described in philosophical terms as

nature rendered “self-conscious,” a natural world guided by

human rationality toward balanced or harmonious ecological as

well as social ends. This philosophical vision has a historical

pedigree in the western intellectual tradition. It reaches back to

Hellenic philosophy as the concept of a world nous, a concept

which, in Fichte’s stirring prose, envisions consciousness “no

longer as that stranger in Nature whose connection with

existence is so incomprehensible; it is native to it, and indeed one

of its necessary manifestation.”[27]

Ecocommunity, in turn, could scarcely be exemplified by any

urban aggregate or, for that matter, any rural houshold that

happens to acquire its resources from solar and wind installations. If the word “ecocommunity” is to have more than a strictly logistical and technical meaning, it must describe a decentralized community that allows for direct popular administration, the

efficient return of wastes to the countryside, the maximum use of

local resources — and yet it must be large enough to foster

cultural diversity and psychological uniqueness. The community,

like its technology, is itself the ensemble of its libertarian

institutions, humanly-scaled structures, the diverse productive

tasks that expose the individual to industrial, craft, and horticultural work, in short, the rounded community that the Hellenic

• polis* was meant to be in the eyes of its great democratic

statesmen. It is within such a decentralized community, sensitively tailored to its natural ecosystem, that we could hope to

develop a new sensibility toward the world of life and a new level

of self-consciousness, rational action, and foresight.

Just as we are warned by many scholars that merely structural

terms like “city-state” do not fully capture the meaning of a civic

fraternity like the *polis*, so morally neutral words like “intermediate technology” and “environment” do not capture the

meaning of ethically-charged concepts like “ecotechnology” and

“ecocommunity.” A blending of ecotechnologies and ecocom-

munities would more closely resemble a balanced, rationally-

guided ecosystem than a passive ensemble of physical surroundings with the “appropriate technology” to sustain it. Indeed,

until our estranged species with its increasing sense of alienation

toward any earthly surrroundings can achieve this balanced,

rationally guided ecosystem, it is doubtful if we can meaningfully describe any environment as a suitable habitat for people,

much less a truly human one.

<right>

December 1976

</right>

----

Reprinted with permission from *Habitat International* Pergamon Press, Ltd.

FOOTNOTES

[5] E.F. Schumacher, *Small is Beautiful* (Harper & Row, New York, 1974).

[6] To rephrase the title of Tony Mullaney’s two-part article, “If Big is Not Good,

Small is Not Beautiful,” *Peacework* (a New England publication of the

American Friends Service Committee), December 1975 (No. 37) and January

1976 (No. 38). Mullaney’s criticism is very trenchant but, unfortunately,

it overstates the case for centralism and planning in the Third World with

the result that it tends to veer over to the position of Marxian criticisms of

Schumacher.

[7] Murray Bookchin, “Energy, ‘Ecotechnocracy’ and Ecology,” Liberation,

Vol. 19, No. 2 (1975), pp. 29–33, and published elsewhere in this book.

[8] See Chogyam Trungpa, *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* (Shambhala

Berkeley, Ca., 1973).

[9] See C.K. Yang, “The Functional Relationship between Confucian Thought

and Chinese Religion,” in *Chinese Thought and Institutions* (edited by John

K. Fairbanks (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1957), pp. 270–71,

for the larger context of rationalism and Asian philosophy.

[10] R. G. Collingwood, *The Idea of Nature* (Oxford University Press, New York

1945), pp. 29–92.

[11] Plato, *The Laws*, V, 737e, 738a (Trevor J. Saunders translation).

[12] Aristotle, *The Politics*, VIII, 5, 1326b25 (B. Jowett translation).

[13] Aristotle, *The Politics*, VIII, 5, 1326bl5 (H. Racham translation in Loeb

Classical library). The latter translation has been selected, here, for its

greater accuracy.

[14] In Aristotle, this intimacy of association advances beyond mere institutional

relationships to. the level of friendship. “Political friendship is not an

agreement of opinion as it might occur between strangers, or an agreement

on scientific propositions,” observes Eric Vogelin; “it is an agreement

between citizens as to their interests, an agreement on policies and their

execution.” Eric Vogelin, *Plato and Aristotle* (Lousiane State University

Press, Baton Rouge, La., 1957), p. 321.

[15] See Summer Chilton Powell, *The Puritan Village* (Wesleyan University

Press, Middletown, Conn., 1963); Michael Zucherman, Peaceable Kingdoms

(Vintage Books, New York, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge,

• A New England Town* (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1970).

[16] J. J. Rousseau, *The Social Contract* (Modern Library, New York, 1950),

pp. 94–96. “In Greece, all that the people had to do, it did for itself; it was

constantly assembled in the public square,” Rousseau observes. “... the

moment a people allows itself to be represented,” he adds, “it is no longer

free: it no longer exists.”

[17] Kropotkin did not actually model his image of a decentralized society on the

Hellenic *polis*, but rather on the medieval communes. The author owes a

debt to the German radical theorist, the late Josef Weber, who used the

expression “the new or modern *polis*” in personal discussions that date

back to the 1950s.

[18] Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (Benjamin Blom Publishers, New York, 1968 reissue of 1913 edition). An abridged version,

updated by commentaries, has been prepared by Colin Ward and published by Harper & Row, New York, 1974.

[19] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, *The Dialectic of Enlightenment*

(Seabury Press, New York, 1972), pp. 151–52, 155, 166–67. The discussion

is masterful in its profundity and, considering the year in which it was

written (1944), its predictive insights.

[20] Aden and Marjorie Meinel, “A Briefing on Solar Power Farms,” presented

before the Task Force on Energy of the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics, Washington, D.C., 6 March 1972;

Steve Baer, Sunspots (Zomeworks Corp., Albuquerque, N. M., 1975), p. 97;

William E. Heronemus, “The United States Energy Crisis: Some Proposed

Gentle Solutions,” presented before a joint conference of The American

Society of Mechanical Engineers and The Institute of Electrical and Electronic

Engineers, West Springfield, Mass., 12 January 1972; R. Buckminister

Fuller: Tetrahedral City, 1966 in Justus Dahinden, *Urban Structures for the Future* (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1972), pp. 162–63; Moshe

Safdie, Beyond Habitat (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

[21] Wilson Clark, *Energy for Survival* (Anchor Books, New York, 1974),

pp. 412–16, 426–27.

[22] E. Al Gutkind, *Community and Environment* (Philosophical Library, New

York, 1954), p. 9. For a lengthy discussion of the distinction between

ecology and environementalism, see Murray Bookchin, “Toward an Ecological Society,” Philosophica, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1974), pp. 73–85. This paper,

originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Michigan in 1973, explores

the concept of “ecotechnology” and “ecocommunity,” terms which the

author coined in the 1960s and which have entered into the vernacular of

the new technologists in forms that have no relation to their original meaning.

The essay appears in this book.

[23] Ted Morgan, “Looking for: Epoch B,” *The New York Times Magazine*,

29 February 1976, p. 32.

[24] *Ibid*.

[25] John Todd (interview) in *What Do We Use For Lifeboats?* published as

part of a collection of interviews by Harper & Row, New York, 1976, p. 76.

[26] Conversations between the author and John Todd of The New Alchemy

Institute and Gil Friend of The Institute of Local Self-Reliance, 5 March 1976.

[27] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, *Lie Besiimmung des Menschen* (1800), translated

by R. M. Chisholm as *The Vocation of Man* (The Bobbs-Merrill Co., New

York, 1956), p. 20.

Self-Management and the New Technology

Self-management in all its rich and varied meanings has

always been closely wedded to technical developments — often

to an extent that has not received the explicit attention it

deserves. By emphasizing the association between the two, I do

not mean to advance a crude, reductionist theory of technological determinism. People are completely social beings. They

develop values, institutions, and cultural relationships that either

foster or inhibit the evolution of technics. It need hardly be

emphasized that basic technical inventions such as the steam

engine, so vital to capitalist, indeed to early industrial society were

known to the Hellenistic world more than two millenia ago. That

this major source of power was never used as more than a

plaything attests to the enormous hold of ancient values and

culture on the evolution of technics generally and specifically on

eras that were not assimilated to a market-oriented rationality.

But it would be equally crude and in its own way reductionist to deny the extent to which technics, once it is established

in one form or another, contributes to humanity’s definitions and

interpretations of self-management. This is evident today when

self-management is conceived primarily in economic terms such

as ‘workers’ control,” “industrial democracy,” “workers participation,” indeed, even as radical anarchosyndicalist demands for

“*economic* collectivization.

The fact that this unadorned economic interpretation of self-management has pre-empted other

interpretations of the term, notably forms reminiscent of the

municipal confederations of medieval society, the French revolutionary sections of 1793, and the Paris Commune, will be

discussed later. This much is clear: when we speak of “selfmanagement, today, we usually mean one or another form of

syndicalism. We mean an economic formation that involves the

way in which labour is organized, tools and machines deployed,

and material resources rationally allocated. In short, we mean

technics.

Once we bring technics into the situation, however, we open

the way to a number of paradoxes that cannot be dismissed by

bellicose rhetoric and moral platitudes. If the role of technics in

shaping society and thinking has often been overstated by writers

as disparate in their social views as Marshall MacLuhan and

Jacques Ellul, its influence in forming social institutions and

cultural attitudes cannot be dismissed. The highly economistic

meaning we so often impart of the term “self-management” is

itself damning evidence of the extent to which industrial society

“industrializes” the meaning to terms.[28] The words “self-management” become intellectually dissociated into their components and ideologically opposed to each other. “Management”

tends to pre-empt “self”; administration tends to assume sovereignty over individual autonomy. Owing to the influence of

technocratic values over thinking, self-hood — so crucial to the

meaning of libertarian management in all aspects of life — is

subtly displaced by the virtues of efficient administrative

strategies. Accordingly, “self-management” is increasingly promoted for functional rather than liberatory reasons, even by the

most committed syndicalists. We are urged to think that small is

beautiful” because it yields the conservation of “energy” rather

than a human scale that renders society comprehensible and

controllable by all. Self-activity and self-management are seen as

aspects of industrial logistics that resolve economic and technical

problems rather than moral and social ones. Thus the very

technocratic society that denies selfhood to humanity establishes

the terms of discourse for those who wish to replace it by a

libertarian one. It reaches into the sensibility of its most radical

opponents by establishing the parameters for their critique and

practice, in short, by “industrializing” syndicalism.

[28] Consider the degree to which cybernetics has entered into commonplace

linguistic usage, for example, as evidence of this development. We no longer ask

for an interlocutor’s “advice” but for his or her “feedback” and we no longer

engage in a “dialogue” but solicit an individual’s “input.” This sinister invasion of

the world of “logos,” in its wide-ranging meaning as speech and reason, by the

electronic terminology of modern technocracy represents not only the subversion

of human interaction at every level of social experience but of personality itself as

an organic and developmental phenomenon. LaMettrie’s

• Man a Machine* enters

his modern estate as a cybernetic system — not merely in his physical attributes

but in his very subjectivity.

No less paradoxical is the limited nature of “self-management”

itself when it leaves its technical premises unquestioned. Can we

comfortably assume that collectivized enterprises controlled by

workers have changed the social, cultural, and intellectual status

of workers to a decisive degree? Do factories, mines and large-

scale agricultural enterprises become domains of freedom because their operations are now managed — however anarchis-

tically — by workers’ collectives ? By eliminating economic exploitation have we actually eliminated social domination? By removing class rule have we removed hierarchical rule? To state

the issue bluntly: can present-day technics remain substantially

the way it is while the men and women who operate it are

expected to undergo significant transformation as human

beings?

Here, notions such as “workers’ control,” “industrial democracy,” and “workers’ participation” face the challenge of an

exploitative technics in its sharpest form. Perhaps no more

compelling argument has been advanced against syndicalist

notions of economic organization than the fact that modern

technology is intrinsically authoritarian. Such arguments, as we

shall see, come not merely from overtly bourgeois ideologists but

from seemingly “radical” ones as well. What underpins these

arguments from all parts of the political spectrum is a shared

assumption that technics is socially neutral. The functional view

that technics is merely the instrumental means for humanity’s

“metabolism” with nature is broadly accepted as given. That

factories are the loci of authority is reduced to a “natural fact” —

in short, a fact beyond the purview of ethics and social

consideration.

Tragically, when ethical views of technics are removed from

their historic and social context, the functional view tends to

prevail for precisely the same reason that the ethical view fails —

for both views assume that technology is always a matter of mere

design, a “given” that is either efficient or not. Only recently have

we begun to see a popular questioning of technics as merely

“given,” notably with respect to nuclear power installations. The

notion that even the “peaceful atom” is *intrinsically* a “demonic

atom” has become very widespread as a result of the Three-Mile-

Island meltdown at Harrisburg. What is perhaps most significant

about this nuclear “incident” is that critics of nuclear power have

focused public attention on new, ecologically sound, and implicitly more *humanistic* technologies that await development and

application. The distinction between “good” and “bad” technics — that is, an *ethical* evaluation of technical development —

has taken root on a scale that is unknown at any time in the past

since the early Industrial Revolution.

What I propose to emphasize, here, is the need for proponents of self-management to deal with technics in the same

• ethical* context that anti-nuclear groups deal with energy resources. I propose to ask if the factory, mine, and modern

agricultural enterprises can legitimately be regarded as an

acceptable arena for a libertarian concept of self-management —

and if not, what alternatives exist that can legitimate that concept

on a new ethical, social, and cultural level. This responsibility

becomes all the more crucial today because “self-management”

has increasingly been denatured to mean a mere technical

problem in industrial management, one that renders it palatable

to sophisticated sections of the bourgeoisie and to neo-Marxian

tendencies. “Workers’ control” may even become fashionable

management strategy as long as workers consent to remain

merely workers. Their “decisions” may be viewed as desirable —

indeed, “productive” — if they contribute to the technical rationalization of industrial operations, however “radical” the rhetoric

and colourful the institutions within which they “manage”

industry.

Yet if self-management remains no more than another form of

management of existing forms of technics; if toil is socialized or

collectivized rather than transmuted into meaningful self-expression — and if these feeble, indeed, insidious, modifications of

the material conditions of life are equated with “freedom” —

self-management becomes a hollow goal. Viewed from this

perspective, the very concept of self-management requires reexamination if freedom is itself to be rescued from the semantics

of technocracy. We would do well to examine some basic

conceptions of “self” and “management” — particularly in relation to technological development — before the two words are

recoupled again as a liberatory social ideal.

Selfhood has its authentic origins in the Hellenic notion of

• autonomia*, of “self-rule.” The word “rule” deserves emphasis.

That *autonomia* or “autonomy” has come, in our own time, to

mean merely “independence” is evidence of our gross simplification of terms that often had a rich ethical meaning in premarket eras. Greek “selfhood” was intimately associated with

rule, *social* rule, the capacity of the individual to directly

participate in governing society even before he could manage his

economic affairs. The very term “economics,” in fact, denoted

the management of the household — the oikos — rather than

society, a somewhat inferior, even if necessary, activity by

comparison with participation in the community or *polis*.

Selfhood, I would claim, was thus associated with individual claims *to power within society* rather than the management of

material life. To be sure, the ability to exercise power within

society — and thereby to be an *individual*, a “self” — presupposed

the leisure and material freedom afforded by a well-managed

household. But once this *oikos* was granted, “selfhood” presupposed considerably more, and these presuppositions are

tremendously significant for our own age, when the self has

become grossly powerless and individuality has become little

more than a euphemism for egotism.

To begin with, selfhood implied the recognition of individual

competence. Autonomia or “self-rule” would have been completely meaningless if the fraternity of selves that composed the

Hellenic *polis* (notably, the Athenian democracy) was not

constituted of men of strong character who could discharge the

formidable responsibilities of “rule.” The *polis*, in short, rested on

the premise that its citizens could be entrusted with “power”

because they possessed the personal capacity to use power in a

trustworthy fashion. The education of citizens into rule was

therefore an education into personal competence, intelligence,

moral probity, and social commitment. The *ecclesia* of Athens, a

popular assembly of the citizen body that met at least forty times

a year, was the testing ground of this education into self-rule; the

• agora*, the public square where Athenians transacted almost

every aspect of their affairs, was its authentic school. Selfhood, in

effect, originated first and foremost in a politics of personality, not

in processes of production.[29] It is almost meaningless etymologically to dissociate the word “self” from the capacity to

exercise control over social life, to “rule” in the Greek sense of

the term. Denied its characterological meaning — its connotations of personal fortitude and moral probity — selfhood dissolves into mere “egohood,” that hollow, often neurotic shell of

human personality that lies strewn amidst the wastes of bourgeois society like the debris of its industrial operations.

[29] It should be evident to the reader that I use the word “politics” in the Hellenic

meaning of the terms, as the administration of the *polis*, not in any electoral sense.

The administration of the *polis* was seen by the Athenians as a continual educative

process as well as a vital social activity in which each citizen was expected to

participate.

To divest selfhood of these personal traits is to be irresponsibly

footloose with any term to which the word “self” is appended.

“Self-activity,” to use another common expression, implies the

activation of these strong character traits in social processes. It,

too, rests on the demanding foundations of a politics of personality that is educative of the individual, formative of his or her

capacity to intervene and directly alter social events, and, carried

into action itself, to enter into a shared social practice. Without

the personal judgement, moral force, will, and sensibility to be

active in this *full* and *direct* sense of the term, such a self would

atrophy and its activity would be reduced to a relationship based

on obedience and command. Self-activity, in this sense, can only

be direct action. But direct action, like rule, can only be

understood as the predicates of a self that is engaged in the social

processes these terms denote. Self, the education toward

selfhood, and the exercise of selfhood — almost as a daily

gymnastic in the making of individuality — is an end in itself,, the

culmination of what we so flippantly call “self-actualization.

Anarchist organization and its policy of direct action is, by

definition, the educational instrument for achieving these time-

honoured goals. It is the *agora*, as it were, for a politics of

personality. The “affinity group” form, at its best, is a unique form

of consociation based on a mutual recognition of competence in

all its members or, at least, the need to attain competence. Where

such groups cease to educate toward this goal, they become

mere euphemisms. Worse, they “produce militants rather than

anarchists, subordinates rather than selves. Optimally, the

anarchist affinity group is an ethical union of free, morally strong

individuals who can directly participate in consensual rule

because they are competent and live in a mutual recognition of

each other’s competence. Only when they have attained this

condition and thereby sufficiently revolutionized *themselves* as

selves can they profess to be revolutionaries — to be the citizens

of a future libertarian society.

I have dwelt upon these aspects of the term “self” — and only

space prevents me from dealing with it in the detail it deserves —

because it has become the weakest link in the concept of “selfmanagement.” Until such selves are minimally attained, selfmanagement becomes a contradiction in terms. Self-management without the “self” that is expected to engage in this

“managing,” in fact, turns into its very opposite: hierarchy based

on obedience and command. The abolition of class rule in no way

challenges the existence of such hierarchical relations. They may

exist within the family between sex and age groups, among

disparate ethnic groups, within bureaucracies and in administrative social groups that profess to be executing the policies of

a libertarian organization or a libertarian society. There is no way

to immunize any social formation, even the most dedicated

anarchist groups, from hierarchical relations except through the

wisdom of “self-consciousness” that comes from the “self-

actualization” of the individual’s potentiality for selfhood. This

has been the message of western philosophy from Socrates to

Hegel. Its plea for wisdom and self-consciousness as the sole

guide to truth and insight remains even more compelling today

than it did in earlier, more articulated social eras.

Before turning to the challenge posed by technics in the

process of “self-formation,” it is important to remember that self-

rule — *autonomia* — historically precedes the modern notion of

“self-management.” Ironically, the fact that *autonomia* denotes

“independence” with its implications of a free-wheeling materialistic bourgeois ego rather than a socially involved individual is

significant. Self-rule applies to society as a whole, not merely to

the economy. Hellenic selfhood found its fullest expression in the

• polis* rather than the oikos , in the social community rather than

the technical. Once we cross the threshold of history, selfmanagement is the management of villages, neighbourhoods,

towns, and cities. The technical sphere of life is conspicuously

secondary to the social. In the two revolutions that open the

modern era of secular politics — the American and French —

self-management emerges in the libertarian town meetings that

swept from Boston to Charleston and the popular sections that

assembled in Parisian *quatiers*. The intensely *civic* nature of selfmanagement stands in marked contrast to its crassly *economic*

nature today. It would be redundant, given Kropotkins impressive work in this field, to explore earlier social periods for

evidence of this juxtaposition or enter into additional details. The

fact remains that self-management had a broader meaning in

libertarian practice than it has at the present time.

Here, technics must be assigned a greater role in producing

this change than it ordinarily receives. The tool-using artisan

nature of pre-capitalist societies always provided a material space

for a subterranean libertarian development, even when politically

centralized states had attained a considerable degree of growth.

Beneath the imperial institutions of European and Asian states lay

the clannic, village, and guild systems of consociation that neither

army nor tax farmer could effectively demolish. Both Marx and

Kropotkin include classic descriptions of this archaic social

network — an ancient, seemingly faceless world impervious to

change or destruction. The Hellenic *polis* and the Christian

congregation added the rich tints of individuality — of selfhood

and self-consciousness — to this tapestry until self-management

acquired the resplendent colours of a highly individuated world.

In the urban democracies of central Europe and Italy, as in the

• polis* of the Greek promontory, municipal self-management in

towns scaled to comprehensible human dimensions reached a

colourful, if brief, effloresence in the fullest sense of the term. The

norms of a socially committed individualism were established that

were to haunt the American and French revolutions centuries

later and define the most advanced concepts of self and

management into our own time.

There can be no return to these periods — either socially or

technically. Their limits are only too clear to excuse an atavistic

yearning for the past. But the social and technical forces that

were to destroy them are even more transitory than we tend to

believe. I will focus, here, on the technical dimension to the

exclusion of the institutional. Of the technical changes that

separate our own era from past ones, no single “device” was

more important than the least “mechanical” of all — the factory.

At the risk of casting all caution to the winds, I will aver that

neither Watt’s steam engine nor Bessemer’s steel furnace was

more significant than the simple process of rationalizing labour

into an industrial engine for the production of commodities.

Machinery, in the conventional sense of the term, heightened this

process vastly — but the systematic rationalization of labour to

serve labour in ever-specialized tasks totally demolished the

technical structure of self-managed societies and ultimately of

workmanship — the “selfhood” of the economic realm.

We must pause to weigh the meaning of these remarks.

Artisanship relies on skill and a surprisingly small toolkit. Skill, in

fact, is its real premise: training and long experience in a rich

variety of expressive, often artistic tasks; highly purposeful, often

intellectual activity; dexterity of fingers and coordination of body;

the challenge of a rich variety of stimuli and subtle expressions of

self. Its background is the work song, its spirituality the pleasure

of articulating in raw materials their own latent possibilities for

acquiring a pleasing and useful form. Not surprisingly, Plato’s

deity is literally a craftsman who imprints the forms on matter.

The presuppositions that support these artisan traits are obvious — a roundedness and fullness of personal virtuosity that is

ethical, spiritual, and esthetic as well as technical. True craftsmanship is loving work, not onerous toil. It arouses the senses,

not dulls them. It adds dignity to humanity, not demeans it. It

gives free range to the spirit, not aborts it. Within the technical

sphere it is the expression of selfhood *par excellence* — of

individuation, consciousness, and freedom. These words dance

throughout every account of well-crafted objects and artistic

works.

The factory worker lives merely on the memory of such traits.

The din of the factory drowns out every thought, not to speak of

any song; the division of labour denies the worker any relationship to the commodity; the rationalization of labour dulls his or

her senses and exhausts his or her body. There is no room

whatever for any of the artisan’s modes of expression — from

artistry to spirituality — other than an interaction with objects

that reduces the worker to a mere object. The distinction

between artisan and worker hardly requires elucidation. But two

significant facts stand out that turn the transformation from craft

to factory into a social and characterological disaster. The first

fact is the dehumanization of the worker into a mass being; the

second is the worker’s reduction into a hierarchical being.

There is a certain significance in the fact that this devolution of the artisan into a mere toiler was adduced by Marx and

Engels as evidence of the proletariat’s intrinsically revolutionary

traits. And it is precisely in this gross misjudgment of the

proletariat’s destiny that syndicalism often follows in the wake of

Marxism. Both ideologies share the notion that the factory is the

“school” of revolution (in the case of syndicalism, of social

reconstruction) rather than its undoing. Both share a common

commitment to the factory’s structural role as a source of social

mobilization.

For better or worse, Marx and Engels express these views

more clearly than syndicalist — and anarchosyndicalist — theorists. Conceived as a mass being or a class being, Marx’s

proletariat becomes a mere instrument of history. Its very

depersonalization into a category of political economy ironically frees it of every human trait but need, “urgent, no longer

disguisable, absolutely imperative *need*...” As pure “class” or

social “agent,” comparable to the pure, disenchanted social

world produced by capitalism, it has no *personal* will but only a

• historical* one. It is an instrument of history in the strictest sense

of the term. Thus, to Marx, “The question is not what this or that

proletarian, or even the whole proletariat considers as its aim.

The question is *what the proletariat is*, and what, consequent on

that being , it will be compelled to do.”

Here, being is separated from person, action from will, social

activity from selfhood. Indeed, it is the very divestiture of the

proletariat’s selfhood — its dehumanization — that gives it the

quality of a “universal” social agent, one that gives it almost

transcendental social qualities. My quotations, taken from

• The Holy Family* of the early 1840s, were to permeate Marx’s writings

for decades to follow. Without bearing them in mind during

readings of Marx in his later works, these works become

unintelligible — all rhetoric about the moral superiority of the

proletariat notwithstanding to the contrary.

Accordingly, it is not surprising to find that for Marx the factory

provides a virtually ecclesiastical arena for the schooling of this

social “agent.” Here, technics functions not only as a means for

humanity s metabolism with nature but for humanity’s metabolism with itself. Together with the centralization of industry

through competition and expropriation, “the mass of misery,

oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but

with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class

constantly increasing in numbers, and <em>trained, united and

organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of

production</em>,” declares Marx in the closing pages of volume one of

Capital. “The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the

mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it...

This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private

property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (My

emphasis — M.B.)

The importance of these famous lines by Marx lies in the

revolutionary function they assign to the factory, its role in

training, uniting, and organizing the proletariat “by the very

mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” The factory,

one might very well say, almost “fabricates” revolution with the

same impersonality that it “fabricates” commodities. But even

more significant is the fact that is “fabricates” the proletariat itself.

This specific view is intrinsic to syndicalism as well. Paradoxically,

the factory structure in both cases is not merely a technical

structure; it is also a social structure. Marx tends to disdain it

historically as a domain of necessity, one whose invasion into life

must ultimately be attenuated by the free-time required for

communism. Syndicalism hypostasizes this structure; it forms

the contours for a libertarian society. Both, however, underscore

its significance as a technical arena for social organization,

whether it be for the proletariat as a class or for society as a

whole.

We arrive at the troubling fact that this structure, far from

functioning as a force for social change, actually functions as a

force for social regression. Marxism and syndicalism alike, by

virtue of their commitment to the factory as a revolutionary social

arena, must recast self-management to mean the industrial

management of the self. For Marxism this poses no problem.

Selfhood can never exist within the factory walls. The factory

serves not only to mobilize and train the proletariat but to

dehumanize it. Freedom is to be found not within the factory but

rather outside it. For freedom “cannot consist of anything else

but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers,

regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under

their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some

blind power...” Marx observes in volume three of *Capital*. “But it

always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that

development of human power, which is its own end, the true

realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that

realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day

is its fundamental premise.”

Obviously, the factory conceived as a “realm of necessity”

requires no need for self-management. Indeed, it is the very

antithesis of a school for self-formation like the agora and the

Hellenic notion of education. For contemporary Marxists to ape

their syndicalist opponents by demanding “workers’ control” of

industry is a travesty of the very spirit of Marx’s concept of

freedom. It is to demean a great thinker in his own name on terms

that are completely alien to his ideas. Appropriately, Engels, in his

essay “On Authority,” draws Marx’s critique of anarchism to its

harshest conclusions precisely on the basis of factory operations.

Authority, conceived as “the imposition of the will of another

upon ours,” as “subordination,” is unavoidable in any industrial

society, including communism. It is a *natural* fact of modern

technics, as indispensable (in Engels’ view) as the factory itself.

Engels then proceeds to detail this view against the anarchists

with the philistine exactitude of the Victorian mind. Coordination of industrial operations presupposes subordination to

command; indeed, to the “despotism” of automatic machinery

and the “necessity of authority,... of *imperious* authority” to

managerial command. (My emphasis — M.B.) Engels never fails

us in our narrowest prejudices on this score. He deftly skips from

the commanding role of cotton-spinning machinery to the

“instantaneous and absolute obedience” required by the captain

of a ship. Coordination is dutifully confused with command,

organization with hierarchy, agreement with domination — indeed, “imperious” domination.

What is more interesting than the fallacies of Engels’ essay is its

insidious truths. The factory is, in fact, a realm of necessity —

not a realm of freedom. It is a school for hierarchy, for obedience

and command, not for a liberatory revolution. It reproduces the

servility of the proletariat and undermines its selfhood, its

capacity to transcend need. Accordingly, insofar as self-management, self-activity, and selfhood are the very essence of the

“realm of freedom,” they must be denied at the “material base” of

society while they are presumably affirmed in its “superstructure” — at least as long as the factory and the technics of capitalist

production are conceived *merely* as technics, as natural facts of

production.

On the other hand, viewed as a social arena, we must further

conceive that this dehumanized realm of necessity — riddled by

“imperious authority” — can somehow enlarge the class consciousness of a dehumanized working being into a universal

social consciousness; that this being, divested of all selfhood in its

daily life of toil can recover the social commitment and competence puresupposed by a sweeping social revolution and a truly

free society based on self-management in the broadest sense of

the term. Finally, we must conceive that this free society can

remove hierarchy in one realm while “imperiously” fostering it in

another, perhaps more basic one. Carried to its fullest logic, the

paradox assumes absurd proportions. Hierarchy, like overalls,

becomes a garment that one discards in the “realm of freedom”

only to don it again in the “realm of necessity.” Like a see saw,

freedom rises and falls at the point where we place our social

fulcrum — possibly at the center of the plank in one “stage” of

history, closer to one end or another at other “stages, but in any

event strictly measurable by the length of the “working day.”

Syndicalism shares this fatal paradox no less than Marxism.

Its redeeming virtue lies in its implicit awareness — virtually

explicit in the works of Charles Fourier — that technics must be

divested of its hierarchical and joyless character if society is to be

freed of these burdens. With syndicalism, however, this awareness is often warped by its acceptance of the factory as the

infrastructure of the new society within the old, as a model for

working class organization, and as a school for the humanization of the proletariat and its mobilization as a revolutionary

social force. Hence, technics raises a startling dilemma for

libertarian concepts of self-management. From what source are

workers — indeed, all dominated people such as women, young

and elderly people, ethnic groups, and cultural communities —

to acquire the subjectivity that fosters selfhood? What technologies can supplant the hierarchical mobilization of labour into

factories? And finally, what constitutes “management” that

involves the fostering of authentic competence, moral probity,

and wisdom ?

The answer to each of these questions would require a sizable

work in itself. In this article, I will confine myself in cursory fashion

to the second question: the new, potentially non-hierarchical

technologies that could supplant the factory as the technics for a

libertarian society — one which I identify with anarchocom-

munism.

Technics is no more a “natural fact” than our chemically

treated food crops and our synthetically fermented beverages.

Even Marx is obliged to treat it in a social context when he sees it

in term of its class functions. Far from being a “given,” it is

potentially the most malleable of humanity’s modes of “metabolizing” with nature. The institutions, values, and cultural shibboleths with which humans engage in a “metabolic” relationship

with the natural world are often less amenable to change than the

tools and machines that give them material tangibility. Their

“primacy” over social relations, technological determinists notwithstanding to the contrary, is mythic. They are immersed in a

social world of human intentions, needs, wills, and interactions.

The factory exhibits this social dimension with a vengeance. Its

appearance in the world was determined not by strictly mechanical factors but organic ones. It was a means for *rationalizing*

labour, not for *implementing* labour with tools. Once this fact is

fully weighed, the factory ceases to enjoy the autonomy it

acquires from Engels and his acolytes. It is a “realm of necessity”

only insofar as a need remains for its existence. But this need is

not strictly technical; to the contrary, it is largely social. The

factory is the realm of hierarchy and domination, not the

battleground of “man’s” conflict with nature. Once its functions

as an instrument of human domination are questioned, we can

reasonably ask how valid is the “need” for its perpetuation. By the

same token, money, weapons, and nuclear power plants are

instruments of a society gone mad. Once the insanity of society is

lifted, we can also ask how valid is the “need” for their

perpetuation. “Need” itself is a socially conditioned phenomenon — a fact not unknown to Marx by any means — that may be

intrinsically rational or irrational. The <em>“realm of necessity” thus

has highly elastic, perhaps ineffable boundaries; in fact, it is as

“necessary” socially as the vision one has of freedom. To

separate one from the other inexorably is sheer ideology, for it

may well be that freedom does not “base” itself on the “realm of

necessity” but really determines it.</em>

To Fourier, this conclusion was implicit in the best lines of his

writings. The two “realms” of necessity and freedom were

resynthesized into a higher level of societal behavior and values in

which joy, creativity, and pleasure were ends in themselves.

Freedom had subsumed necessity and joy has subsumed toil. But

such sweeping notions cannot be advanced abstractly. They

must be established concretely — or else the rich possibilities of

reality become elusive categories that deny the claims of

imagination. Hence the enormous power of utopian thinking at its

best: the ability to show almost visually what so often remains the

abstractions of competing ideologies. Consider concretely, indeed utopistically, the alternatives that may turn arduous work

into festive play: a harvest that is marked by dancing, feasting,

singing, and loving contrasted with the monotony of gang labour

or deadening mechanization. One form of harvesting reinforces

community; the other, isolation and a sense of oppression. The

same task performed esthetics may be a work of art; performed

under the lash of domination, it becomes an ignominious burden.

The identical task under conditions of freedom is an esthetic experience; under conditions of domination, it becomes

onerous toil. To assume that every arduous task must be a

tormenting one is a social judgement that is determined by the

social structure itself, not simply the technical conditions of

work. The employer who demands silence from his employees is,

in fact, an employer. The same work may be performed playfully,

creatively, imaginatively, even artistically in the absence of social

constraints that identify responsability with renunciation and

efficiency with sobriety.

Elsewhere, I have assessed and inventoried the technical

alternatives that are available to existing forms of technology.[30]

Since this assessment, there is much I would add and much I

would reject in the technical aspects of my account. Perhaps

more important than any details which can now be found in such

outstanding books like *Radical Technology* by British anarchists

are the principles I would want to emphasize here. A new

technology is emerging — a technology no less significant for the

future than the factory is for the present. Potentially, it lends itself

to a sifting of existing technics in terms of their ecological integrity

and their impact on human freedom. On its own terms, it can be a

highly decentralized technics that is human in scale, simple in

construction, and naturalistic in orientation. It can acquire its

energy from the sun and wind, from recycled wastes and

replenishable “resources” such as timber. It affords the possibility

of making food cultivation into a spiritually and materially

rewarding form of gardening. It is restorative of the environment

and, perhaps more significantly, of personal and communal

autonomy.

[30] See “Toward a Liberatory Technology” in my *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (Black

Rose Books, 1977)

This new technology may rightly be called a “people’s technology.” The French-intensive community gardens spontaneously opened by ghetto dwellers in gutted neighbourhoods of New

York, the hand-crafted solar panels that are gradually appearing

on the rooftops of tenements, the small windmills that have been

reared aloft beside them to generale electric power — all, taken

together, express new initiatives by ordinarily passive communities to reclaim control over the material conditions of their lives.

What counts is not whether a food cooperative can replace a

giant supermarket or a community garden the produce supplied

by agribusiness or a wind-powered generator the electricity

supplied by a smothering public utility. The cooperatives, gardens, and windmills are the technical *symbols* of a resurgence of

selfhood that is ordinarly denied to the ghetto “masses” and a

growing sense of competence that is ordinarily denied to a client

citizenry. The factory image of the city, even of citizenship, has

already gone so far in repressing the smallest sparks of public life

that technical and institutional alternatives may be able to go far

enough to restore a sense of self-management in its traditional

civic forms.

If one grants the silence that exists in factories today, the

most important voices for self-management in any popular sense

are heard from the neighbourhoods of municipalities (perhaps its

most traditional source), from feminist and ecological movements, from “masses” that have acquired a new stake in

personal, cultural, sexual, and civic autonomy. The new technology to which I have alluded has not initiated this development. If anything, it may well be the result of a new sensibility of

selfhood and competence that an overbearing technocratic

society has produced as a result of its own repressive excesses.

Solar and wind power and community gardens are vastly older

technical strategies than the factory. That they have been revived

as a people’s technology suggests a driving need to disengage

from a social system whose greatest weakness and strength is its

all-encompassing nature. But these alternative technics provide a

new, perhaps historic context for social change. They impart the

• tangible* possibility for a recovery of self-management with all the

rich nuances of the past, albeit without a return to the past. Their

concreteness makes them thoroughly utopian, even realistically

rather than visionary. Finally, as educative devices for community, they tend to create a politics of personality that compares

only with the anarchist “affinity group” as an educative arena.

Alternatives are today in conflict on a scale comparable only to

the breakdown of traditional society on the eve of the capitalist

era. The same new technology can also become a corporate

technology — the bases for solar power utilities, space satellites,

and an “organic” agribusiness comparable only to the highly

chemicalized one so prevalent today. The decentralized gardens,

solar panels, windmills, and recycling centers can be centralized,

industrialized, and structured along rationalized hierarchical

lines. Neither Marxism nor syndicalism can comprehend the

nature of these alternatives, much less their subtle implications.

Yet rarely has there been a greater need for theoretical insight

into the possibilities that lie before us, indeed, the historically new

directions which humanity may follow. In the absence of a

libertarian interpretation of these directions, of a libertarian

• consciousness* that articulates the logic of this new technical

framework, we may well witness the integration of a people s

technology into a managerial and technocratic society. In which

case, we will have been reduced like a Greek chorus to

lamentations and incantations to a fate that leaves the future

predetermined and cruelly destined to efface the entire human

experience. This may be a heroic posture — but it is also a futile

one.

<right>

June 1979

</right>

The Myth of City Planning

City planning today lives within the tension of an historic

contradiction: the idealization of urbanity as the *summum bonum* of social life and the crass realities of urban decay. In

theory, at least, the city is revered as the authentic domain of

culture, the strictly man-made social substance from which

humanity fashions the essential achievements of consociation. In

this tradition, the city is viewed as society distinguished from

nature, territory from kinship, rationality from custom and myth

the civic compact of individuals from the archaic group cemented

by the blood oath. Ideally conceived, the city is the arena for a

mode of human propinquity that is freed from the deadening grip

of custom, irrationality, the vicissitudes of natural contingency; in

sum, the social domain in which the sovereign citizen is free to

fashion her or his selfhood and personal destiny. Herein lies the

utopian content of urban theory; and in truth, from an historic

perspective, it would be difficult to dispute Max Horkheimer’s

assertion that the “fortunes of the individual have always been

bound up with the development of urban society. The city dweller

is the individual *par excellence*.”[31]

Yet contemporary urban reality presents an entirely different

picture. Today, urban history at its best grins scornfully at the

modern city, and its ideals, tarnished beyond recognition, lie

buried in the rubble of their own high precepts. No longer is the

city nature domesticated, the arena of unfettered human propinquity, the space for individuality and rationality. The modern city

reverts beyond even the archaic blood group to a herd territory of

alienated humanity and to all that is demonic in human society.

I he city in our time is the secular altar on which propinquity and

community are sacrificed to a lonely anonymity and privatized

atomization; its culture is the debased creature of commodity

production and the advertising agency, not the gathered wisdom

of the mind; and its claims to freedom and individuality are

mocked by the institutionalized manipulation of unknowing

masses among whom crass egotism is the last residue of the

selfhood that once formed the city’s most precious human goals.

Even the city’s form — or lack of form — bespeaks the dissolution of its civic integrity. To say with Marx that the modern city

urbanizes the land is testimony not so much to its dominance as

to its loss of identity. For the city, by the very nature of the case,

disappears when it becomes the whole, when it lacks the

specificity provided by differentiation and delineability of form.

Caught in the contradiction between ideal and real, city

planning emerges not merely as ideology but as myth. The myth

originates in the very term “city planning,” in the nomenclature

and pedigree which this seeming discipline appropriates for itself.

Juxtaposed to the megalopolis, to the formless urbanity that

sprawls across the land and devours it, the word “city” has

already become a euphemism, an erstwhile reality digested by

what Lewis Mumford so justly calls the “anti-city.” In dealing with

the putative as fact, city planning enthrones the shadow of the

real city in a futile effort to stake out a legacy to what is forever

gone. Even more basely, it subtly devalues this memory in the

very act of invoking it, for if the shadow must be presented as the

real, the real must be degraded. Accordingly, city planning

reduces all that is vital in the traditional city, including the ideal

itself, to a deadening caricature — the megalopolis as “city, the

non-city as the representation of its very antithesis. All the high

standards of urbanity, as these have been developed over the

centuries, are degraded to establish a false continuity between

past and present, to offer up the death of the city as the token of

its life.

The word “planning” merely compounds this grotesque act of

violation. To the modern mind, “planning” implies rationality, a

conceptual purposiveness that brings order to disorder, that

reorganizes chance and contingency into humanly meaningful

design. Behind the seeming rationality imparted to this word lies

an inherent social irrationality. Under capitalism, “planning” is

basically the conscious organization of scarcity amidst abundance, the attempt to impose a social nexus of want, denial, and

toil on a technological system that, potentially at least, could

remove all pf these dehumanizing conditions from social life.

Thus, “planning” emerges not only as the validation of the

given — as opposed to revolution — but as the rationalization of

the irrational. City planning does not escape from the contradictory nature of contemporary social planning as a whole. To the

contrary, it is the application of rational technique to urbanity

gone mad, the effort systematically to piece together a fragmentation that constitutes the very law of life of modern urbanity.

Reinforcing the myth that the megalopolis is a city is the myth that

planning can transcend its unquestioned social premises, that

technique is a value in itself apart from the ends to which it is

captive.

The critique of city planning can be true to itself only if it

becomes a totalistic process of demystification, if it reaches into

the social whole that yields the negation of the city. Its point of

departure cannot be the techniques which the planner tries to

place in the forefront of the discussion, a procedure which retains

the illusory notion that design can be a substitute for the basic

processes of social life. Critique must scrupulously examine the

hidden premises which urban design assimilates. Accordingly,

the megalopolis can no longer be examined in separation from the

larger context of social development and the emergence of its

urban ideals. To treat the city as an autonomous entity, apart

from the social conditions which produce it, is to participate in the

city planner’s typical reification of urbanity, to isolate and

objectify a habitat that is itself contingent and formed by other

factors. Behind the physical structure of the city lies the social

community its workaday life, values, culture, familial ties, class

relations, and personal bonds. To fail to consider how this hidden

dimension of urbanity forms the structure of the city is as

valueless, indeed misleading, as to ignore the role of the structure

in reinforcing or undermining the social community. As a design

isolate, the city is nothing but an archeological artifact; as the

expression of a social community, it could well sum up the totality

of a society’s life processes.

These seemingly obvious considerations require emphasis

because city planning is cursed by the nature of its origins: it

usually emerges as a distinct discipline when the city has already

become problematical. Before the city acquires a structural

consciousness of itself as the unique object of self-study, its

design and development are invariably functions of social processes other than urbanism. Not surprisingly, city planning wears

a mien of introspection rather than innovation, all its futuristic

pretensions aside. The problematically given predetermines the

elaboration of the planner’s techniques and designs. City planning, in effect, tries to “solve” problems, not remove them. It

thereby retains the status quo in its solutions even when it seems

most occupied in altering the urban structure, hence the

mystifying role its ideology plays in modern social life. Critique

must puncture this myth — not by denying the validity of design,

but by relating it critically and in a revolutionary fashion to the

social conditions of life.

Perhaps the first step in formulating a critique of city planning is

to recover some sense of the urban tradition at its best, a tradition

against which we can compare the thrust of contemporary

planning and urban development. Without some notion of what

was achieved by the city in the past, we tend to lose our

perspective toward the extent to which it has declined in the

present. This is not to say that any specific early city forms a

paradigm on which we must model our own urban future; merely,

that certain high standards were achieved and formulated that

are valuable in themselves and which we may usefully regard as

criteria for judging the direction that urban society has followed in

our own time. A “model city” that might have existed prior to the

modern city is a fiction, yet examples exist in the past that have an

imperishable value of their own, examples which comprise, by

their mere existence, a devastating critique of the degradation

that afflicts contemporary cities.

What obviously makes urban space unique is that it provides a

strictly human basis for association. Economic and social life

ceases to depend exclusively on a sexual division of labour and

kinship ties — the biological matrix of social life that segregates

the labour process according to brute physical capacities and

views the stranger as enemy — but rather is organized along

territorial lines that open the possibility for social life as a function

of self-worth and uniquely individual capacities, thereby establishing the basis for a community that is properly human and

social. This development was a long and complex process of

disengagement from specifically non-urban, indeed, highly biologically conditioned social organisms, a slow crystallization of

civil society out of the family, clan, and tribe based on blood ties

and a sexual division of labour. In this respect, the early cities with

which we are most familiar were not authentically urban entities.

Like Tenochtitlan in Indian Amercia, the city was essentially the

religious and administrative center of a clan and tribal society,

hierarchical, to be sure, and drifting toward bureaucratic modes

of civic management, but nevertheless anchored in archaic

naturalistic forms of social organization and based materially on a

rural economy with dominant strata whose primary social

interests were agrarian in character.

Looking toward the centers of our own civilization, this

essentially agrarian type of city persists as the prehistory of urban

society for thousands of years in the Near East and Asia. It

becomes increasingly elaborated into administrative hierarchies

and a more complex division of labour, without changing its

intrinsically rural character. The city may divest the clan of any

administrative function in civic management; it may collect

thousands of artisans, priests, bureaucrats, nobles, and soldiers

within its confines; indeed, it may resemble the modern city

structurally and in terms of its size and density of population. Yet

this kind of city belongs to urban prehistory in the sense that its

social wealth consists primarily of agricultural surpluses and its

rulers are defined by their roots in the countryside rather than the

town. Accordingly, its internal market is poorly developed and its

merchant class is a subordinated stratum in the service of

agrarian rulers. The countryside dominates the town just as

thousands of years later, in our own era, the town will dominate

the countryside. In their monumental architectural forms these

cities express the power of agrarian interests. Their civic

structure and social relations, reinforced by religious precepts

and tradition, imply the denial of individuality, indeed, the

incapacity of the individual to find self-expression in a psychological space of her or his own, apart from the suzerainty of the

supreme ruler. The ruler’s sole claim to personality as the

embodiment of the archaic communal conditions of life effaces

the right of personality to the obedient mass below. Hegel quite

appropriately describes the “gorgeous edifices” of this era as the

expressions of a world “in which we find all rational ordinances

and arrangements, but in such a way, that individuals remain as

mere accidents.” These ordinances and arrangements “revolve

round a centre, round the sovereign, who, as patriarch — not as

despot in the sense of the Roman Imperial Constitution — stands

at the head.” As Hegel goes on to note: “The glory of Oriental

conception is the One Individual as that substantial being to

which all belongs, so that no other individual has a separate

existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom.”[32]

Not until we arrive at the Hellenic *polis* do we find a mode of

civic life that acquires its own mainsprings of development and an

urban organism that acknowledges the individuality of all its

citizens, indeed, that promotes individuality without denying its

base in an integrated social community. I do not want to

romanticize or idealize the *polis*. The Hellenic city was reared in

no small measure on the harsh confinement of women to the

domestic sphere and its degradingly mundane chores. The

leisure that made it possible for the citizen to fully participate in

civic affairs depended partly upon slave labour. The *polis* was also

a class society even within the citizen body itself, which conferred

material benefits on the few that were largely denied to the many.

Moreover, it was the closed fraternity of the *demos*, of the

ancestral citizen, which, although guaranteeing safety and legal

protection to the stranger, denied him any role in the management of its political life.

Yet, after all these qualifications are noted — and they are

characteristic of the ancient world as a whole — we cannot help

but admire the extent to which Hellenic civic rationality contained, and in many ways surmounted, its own archaic roots.

That women were confined to the household, that the muscles

of slaves made it possible for the citizen to acquire the free time

for reflection and civic activity, that the stranger performed those

commercial functions which temporarily insulated the *demos*

from the debasing effects of trade and self-interest, are the

consequences not merely of an archaic tradition that reaches

back to tribal life, but perhaps more compellingly, of an undeveloped technological base and meagre agricultural resources.

Tradition, in fact, often becomes a thin rationalization for a real

poverty of material resources — and Greek thought reveals a

surprisingly secular candor about the relationship between the

two, as one can glean from a reading of Thucydides and Aristotle.

Yet, paradoxically, the very agricultural poverty of Greece made

the *polis* possible as a fairly independent urban entity. The poor

soil of the Hellenic promontory and the isolation fostered by its

rugged, mountainous terrain precluded the development of the

strong centralized agrarian power we encounter in the fertile

agriculturally rich river valleys of the Near East and Orient.’

Accordingly, to a degree virtually unknown up to the classical era

the *polis* could create and enlarge a uniquely urban space of its

own — not as a society in which the land dominated the city or the

city the land, but as an almost artistic equipoise of town and

country, and psychologically, a balance that reflected the outlook

of the yeoman farmer and urban citizen harmoniously united in a

single personality.

From these conditions of life, I believe, emerges the Hellenic

notion of *autarchia* which, apart from its popular economic

connotations of material self-sufficiency, implies for the Greek a

balance between mind and body, needs and resources, individual

and society. Neither collectivity nor subjectivity are uncon-

ditional; the Hellenic individual is, in microcosm, the society of

which he is a part. But this relationship implies no denial of

individual uniqueness; merely, that the wholeness and roundedness of the individual is a function of the *polis*, a civic entity that

includes not only the city proper but its rural environs. The

relationship, in effect, is reciprocal and mutually reinforcing To

speak of the priority of the community or the individual over each

other is to project our own sense of social alienation back to

Hellenic times, for the very essence of the *polis* is its integration of

the two. Greek individuality is an integrated constellation of the

personal and social, not a separation of the two components into

an antagonistic dualism. The *polis*, far from establishing a priority

over personality, is at once its constitutive material and the

laboratory for its elaboration. We grossly misread Hellenic

dualism when we permeate it with our own anxious sense of

apartness and polarity, for this dualism is always synthesized by

Hellenic culture, hence the enormous difficulties we encounter in

classifying Greek philosophy into “materialistic” and “idealistic”

schools of thought.

The integration of individual and society is clearly revealed by

the very structure of the *polis* itself and its theoretical conception of urbanism. The underlying theory of civic management is amateurism — the accessibility of virtually all organs of

power to the citizen, the conscious despecialization of municipal

agencies, the formulation of policy in face-to-face assemblies, and

the use of the lot in the selection of public officials. The civic

structure both affirms individuality and contains it. By the

unimpaired expression which this structure gives to the citizen, it

individuates him along social lines. Thus, life is to be lived not in

the home but in the *agora* — the municipal square and market

place — where matters of state become subjects of personal talk.

Ironically, the fact that politics becomes “gossip” does not

degrade politics but personalizes it and gives it a vitally existential

dimension. The remarkable power of Aristophanic mockery is its

capacity to interpret immense themes in the rough jargon of the

public square. This desanctification of great themes, their rough-

and-ready vernacularization, implies not a debasement of important ideas, but a largeness of mind in the community itself, an

acknowledgement of its capacity to discuss them and a conscious

despecialization of thought as the preserve of an elite. The agora,

in turn, prepares the way for the *ecclesia*, the assembly of all

citizens which convenes each tenth of the year. Here, in the open

hillside of the *pnyx*, the citizen body assembles to debate the

policies of the community. The practice of formulating policy in

the open reveals the essential commitment of the *polis* to public

purview and face-to-face relationships.

We find, here, a transcendence of the city that is not often

made in the historical literature on urban society. Until the

Hellenic era, the city had a typically magical or cosmological

orientation; structurally, in the layout of its streets and in the

symbolism of its architecture, it provided testimony to the

authority of natural forces and suprahuman powers. Tech-

nochtitlan is laid out according to a traditional orientation along

the cardinal points, an orientation we find not only throughout

Eastern cities but even in Rome. By contrast, the Hellenic mind

turned its civic outlook from nature and cosmology to man by

adding a vividly humanistic dimension to the largely religious

concepts of Eastern urbanism. Athens, like the free people who

nurtured it, was a spontaneous civic creation. The apparent

“anarchy” of the city’s residential quarters marks a sharp break

with an earlier urban outlook that placed nature and the cosmos

above human beings. Dwellings are located where they are simply

becauses the locations are places where *people* live — not

planned according to recipes contrived by a priesthood

Location is a function of life and sociability, of community and

intercourse freely and spontaneously expressed, not of magic or

religious cosmology. The Hellenic sense of space is completely

humanistic and communitarian; its pell-mell character suggests

that the Greeks found their civic fulfillment more in themselves

and m their interrelationships than in the privatized domain of

their dwellings and work places.

If territoriality is conceived merely as the historic solvent of

blood ties, then the Greek sense of space added a uniquely

positive dimension to this conception that transcends it A

territory defined by human propinquity and intercourse implies

the complete subordination of territoriality to the people who

occupy an area — the humanized space of a true community that

is internalized and acquires a subjective character, not merely a

geographic one. Thus, as Zimmern observes, wherever the

ancient Greeks came together there was a *polis*, that is, a free

community, and it mattered little where it was located. When the

• polis* finally passed into the shadows of history, it mattered little if

or where they came together: the *polis* was gone forever The

abstract externalized sense of territoriality that marks the

modern city, like the priority it gives to design over community is

in every sense an urban atavism. If the priests of pre-Hellenic

urbanism were architects who imposed a cosmological design on

the city, the architects of modern urbanism are priests whose

designs are crassly utilitarian. Both are architects of the mythic

insofar as they subserve the human essence of the city — its

communitarian dimension — to suprahuman or inhuman ends.

A *polis* so large that it transcended a scale comprehensible to

the citizen meant that it became merely territorial and vitiated its

goal as a community. Accordingly, Aristotle establishes the rule

that the *polis* should properly house “the largest number which

suffices for the purposes of life and can be taken in at a single

view.”[33] In sharp contrast to the modern metropolitan impulse to

unlimited growth — an impulse that Hegel would call a “bad

infinity” — the Hellenic impulse always emphasized limit, and the

• polis* was always limited by what the Greek could take in “at a

single view.” This high regard for limit, E. A. Gutkind observes,

“dominates Greek town planning to such a degree that, to give

only one example, Syracuse at the time of its greatest expansion

consisted of five different towns, each surrounded by its own wall.

Strabo called it Pentapolis.”[34]

Space limitations do not make it possible to discuss the reasons

why the *polis* declined except to remind the reader that it was a

class society and hence an inherently contradictory one. Eventually it fell victim to a growing Mediterranean commerce that

undermined its most precious civic values while precluding its

development along authentically bourgeois lines. The urban

values of the *polis* appear again, more than a millenium later, in

the medieval town — but only intuitively, without the clear

rationality that the Greeks brought to their social life. Like the

• polis*, the medieval town emerged in the space left for urban

development by a weak agrarian society, decentralized by

geography and by internal conflict. Again like the *polis*, the

medieval town and outlying countryside achieved a certain

balance that is reflected in the modest dimensions of the town

itself and its early democratic structure. Both were scaled to

human dimensions and could be taken in “at a single view. But

between the *polis* and the medieval town there are significant

differences that partly account for the diverging historical

developments they followed. The *polis* was not structured

civically around the family but rather around the *agora*, which

was more public square than market place. The medieval town

merged work with the family in a domestic economy that turned

the public square as much into a market place as an arena for

social intercourse. The intense political interests of the Greeks,

indeed, the fact that they were farmers as well as urban dwellers,

relegated commercial activity to a secondary place in their lives;

actually, the Greek tended to disdain commerce and left it in the

hands of resident non-citizens. The medieval burgher, by contrast, was mainly an artisan or merchant, and only incidentally a

food cultivator in the garden behind his home. His principal

interest focused on trade and not surprisingly he pioneered the

path toward capitalism and the bourgeois city.

Trade is the reduction and quantification of the world to

commodity equivalents, the leveller of quality, skill, and concrete

labour to numerical units that can be measured by time and

money, by clocks and gold. What sets this abstract quantified

world in motion is competition — the struggle for self-preservation on the market place. Capitalism, the domain of competition *par excellence*, has its fair share of violence, plunder,

piracy, and enslavement; but in the normal course of events its

mode of self-preservation is a quiet process of economic

cannibalization — the devouring of one capitalist by another and

the ever-greater centralization of capital in fewer hands. This

takes place as a ritual peculiar to the capitalist mode of

production notably, as production for the sake of production,

as growth for the sake of growth. The bourgeois maxim, “grow or

die, becomes capitalism s very law of life. The inevitable impact

of this unceasing expansion on the city can only be appreciated

fully in our own time by the limitless expansion of the modern

megalopolis, as the arena both for the endless production of

commodities and their sale. If the Greeks subordinated the

market place to the city, the emerging bourgeoisie subordinated

the city to the market place — indeed, it eventually turned the city

itself into a market place. This development marked not only the

end of the small, sharply contoured medieval town, but the

emergence of the sprawling capitalist megalopolis, a maw which

devours every viable element of urbanity. Precapitalist cities were

limited by the countryside, not only externally in the sense that

the growth of free cities inevitably came up against social,

cultural, and material barriers reared by entrenched agrarian

interests, but also internally, insofar as the city reflected the social

relations on the land. Except in the case of the late medieval cities,

exchange relations were never completely autonomous; to one

degree or another, they were placed in the service of the land. But

once exchange relations begin to dominate the land and finally

transform agrarian society, the city develops according to the

workings of a suprasocial law. Production for the sake of

production, translated into urban terms, means the growth of the

city for its own sake — without any intrinsic urban criteria or even

uman criteria to arrest that growth. Limit becomes the enemy of

growth; the human scale, the enemy of the commercial scale;

quality, the enemy of quantity; the synthesis of dualism, the

enemy of the buyer-seller dichotomy. Paradoxically, capitalism

yields an urbanized world without cities — a world of urban belts

that lack internal structure, definition, and civic uniqueness.

Bourgeois society, which abolishes urban limit and dissolves

urban form, acquires an historic dynamic that has very far-

reaching civic and psychic consequences. Competition tends to

transform the numerous small enterprises that marked the

inception of the industrial era into fewer and fewer highly

centralized corporate giants. All the elements of society begin to

change their dimensions. Civic and political gigantism parallel

industrial and commercial gigantism. The city acquires dimensions so far removed from the human scale and human control

that it ceases to appear as the shelter of individuality. Urban

space reaches not only outward over the land but upward into the

sky, blotting out the horizon as well as the countryside. The

faceless geometric architecture of soaring skyscrapers and

immense complexes of high-rise dwellings bespeaks a monu-

mentalism that reflects the authority not of superhuman persons

but of suprahuman bureaucratic institutions. No natural or

human forms adorn these structures, forms on which the

imagination can fasten in awe or defiance. Their cold geometry

and functional design instill a sense of powerlessness in the urban

dweller that precludes the presence of human meaning, for these

structures appear no longer as the works of man but of

institutions. They even tend to bear the names of the corporations that erected them. Before such gigantic, undefinable,

bureaucratic entities, the urban dweller feels psychically as well

as physically dwarfed. Unlike the monumental structures of the

Baroque city, whose ornamentation was evidence of personified

power, the institutional monumentalism of the megalopolis

becomes a source of bewilderment and disorientation. Confronted every day by this architectural nullity, the urban dweller

finds no monarch against whom she or he can rebel, no gods to

defy, no priests and courtiers to overthrow. There is nothing, in

fact, but an interminable bureaucratic nexus that traps the

individual in an impersonal skein of agencies and corporations.

These soaring geometric structures exude social power in its

most reified form: power for the sake of power, domination for

the sake of domination.

The urban ego, driven back from the social basis of individuality, must desperately learn to fend for itself. In this highly

privatized world of isolated monads, the great crowds that

surround the individual in the megalopolis lack any communitarian content. Louis Wirth, a generation ago, could remark

upon the superficiality of urban relationships, of acquaintanceships that “stand in a relationship of utility” to each other and the

disappearance of “the spontaneous self-expression, the morale,

and the sense of participation that comes with living in an

integrated society.”[35] The gay Parisian crowds in which Baudelaire loved to immerse himself a century earlier had become, by

Wirth’s time, the blase crowds whose spontaneity was carefully

regulated and whose contacts were coolly superficial. Spontaneity of intercourse had been replaced by a prudent courtesy. The

megalopolis carries this degradation to its most primal depths.

Cornered in a sense of isolation that is accentuated by the

massive, unknowing, impersonal crowds that surround the urban

dweller, the individual ceases to be gay or even blase, but fearful.

The egoistic, calculating mentality which the bourgeois market

normally generates in its isolated monads and by which it

corrodes the sense of community that marked precapitalist

urbanity is heightened by the megalopolis into a hostility that

verges on mutual terror.

The megalopolis, in effect, atavistically travels the full circle of

urban history back to the primitive community’s dread of the

stranger — but now, without the solidarity that the primitive

community afforded to its own kind. The freedom which urban

territoriality increasingly provided for the outsider, the individuality which the city eventually generated in all who inhabited

its environs, the right of the urban dweller to be taken on her or

his own merits apart from kinship ties and blood lineages, and

perhaps more fundamentally, the solidarity the city forged among

its citizens *qua* individuals into a purely social community unified

by propinquity and an urbanely rational heritage — all of this is

dissolved by the megalopolis into an alienating, crassly utilitarian, externalized mode of sociation in which everyone now reverts

to the status of the outsider, to the primal stranger as real or

potential foe. The barbarism of the past returns to settle over the

forest of skyscrapers and high-rise dwellings like a sickening

miasma. If the medieval town celebrated the fact that city air is

‘‘free air,” the bourgeois megalopolis chokes on a polluted air that

is poisoned not only by the toxicants of its industries, motor

vehicles, and energy installations, but by a darkening cloud of

hostility and fear. By virtue of a dialectical irony unique to itself,

the city at its “height” in the most urbanized of urban worlds

regenerates the mythic traditions of a humanity that has barely

advanced beyond animality, yet without the redeeming innocence that marked this primal age.

The tribalism of the past reappears in the megalopolis as

mocking caricature — as a ubiquitous process of ghettoiza-

tion. To the degree that dread replaces spontaneous intercourse and its degradation into courtesy, panic unites normally

alienated people of the same area and status in a hierarchy of

fears against those who are sequentially more different and more

removed from the familiar conditions of their lives. Tribalism

appears in the degenerated form of the urban enclave. The ghetto

is not merely the condition of the blacks and the poor who occupy

the central districts of the megalopolis: as the beleaguered

enclave of suburbia, exurbia, and the residential pockets of the

well-to-do-in the inner city, the ghetto becomes the condition of

everyone who is caught in the megalopolitan skein. The outward

radiation of modern urban society from its civic nuclei reads like a

spectrum of either increasingly deprived or seemingly privileged

ghettoes: the materially denied black and Puerto Rican ghettoes

in the central parts of the city (marbled, to be sure, by well-policed

enclaves of fearful whites); the materially more aflluent but

spiritually denied suburbanite fringe, united merely by its aversion for the city proper; and finally that pathetic caricature of all

privilege in bourgeois society, the beleagured exurbanite fringe,

inwardly paralyzed by a suspicion of invaders from the central

city and suburbs. Just as the bourgeois market place makes each

individual a stranger to another, so the bourgeois city estranges

these central and fringe areas from each other. The paradox of

the megalopolis is that it unites these areas internally not in the

felicitous heterogeneity of unity in diversity that marked the

medieval commune — a heterogeneity unified by mutual aid and a

common municipal tradition — but rather in the suspicions,

anxieties, and hatreds of the stranger from the “other” ghetto.

The city, once the refuge of the stranger from archaic parochialism, is now the primary source of estrangement. Ghetto

boundaries comprise the unseen internal walls within the city that

once, as real walls, secured the city and distinguished it from the

countryside. The bourgeois city assimilates archaic parochialism

as a permanent and festering urban condition. No longer are the

elements of the city cemented by mutual aid, a shared culture,

and a sense of community; rather, they are cemented by a social

dynamite that threatens to explode the urban tradition into its

very antithesis.

To these historic contradictions and tendencies, city planning

and its disciplinary cousin, urban sociology, oppose the platitudes

of analytical and technical accomodation. Leonard Reissman

does not speak for himself alone when he affirms that, while

“there have been recurrent crises” in urban history, “there is little

chance for a perfect solution...” The thrust of this thinking is

strictly ideological: the megalopolis is here to stay, and the sooner

we learn to live with it, the better. A dysutopian mentality

increasingly pervades contemporary city planning and urban

sociology, an outlook misleadingly formulated in terms of a

regression to rural parochialism or adjustment to an “urbanized

world.” Radical critique tends to be denigrated. Typically,

Reissman belabours “rural sociologists” for seeking “a rural idyll

or an urban utopia.” Such thinking, he scornfully adds, is “supercritical, with the result that “we continue to criticize the city

more often than we praise it, to magnify its faults more often than

we stress its advantages.” These remarks conclude with the

pragmatically triumphant note that “In any case, such discussions have hardly slowed the pace of urban growth.”[36]

Reissman is unique in that he examines the assumptions of

urban sociology. More often than not, these assumptions are

simply taken for granted. Urban sociology presupposes that the

city can be taken as a social isolate — often, quite apart from

other social factors that define it — and examined on its own

terms. Economics becomes “urban economics”; social relations,

urban relations , politics, urban politics”; and the city dweller,

an “urban man” in an “urbanized world.” “Urbanism,” in effect,

replaces capitalism as the legitimate object of social investigation. On this derivative level, urban sociology becomes descriptive rather than critical, analytical rather than censorious.

To the more vulgar urban sociologist, the problems of the

megalopolis are to be explained as the work of the self-seeking,

the greedy, and the indifferent. Even Reissman is not above this

level of discourse; “the economics of avarice, the politics of

ignorance,” we are told, “make the perfect city only a utopia.”[37]

These villainous traits are imputed not only to land speculators,

construction barons, government bureaucrats, landlords and

banking interests, but rather flippantly to the general public.

People, we are told, do not care enough about their urban

environment to do anything for it. An abstract “we” is distilled from the medley of conflicting social interests, a target of

insidious propaganda that demands concern, but denies the

power of action to those who are most concerned — the ordinary

urban dwellers who must endure the megalopolis not only as a

place of work but also as a way of life.

In city planning the counterpart of this abstract “we” is the

abstract design: the architectural sketch that will resolve the

gravest urban problems with the most sophisticated knowhow.” “One question about city planning,” observes Frank

Fisher, “must have come to the mind of anyone who has fingered

the magnificent volumes in which the proposals of planners are

generally presented. Why do those green spaces, those carefully

placed skyscrapers, those pleasant residential districts, and

equally pleasant factory and working areas, still remain dreams

for the most part? Why are our cities hardly any less ugly and

unpleasant than they were at the height of the 19th century’s

Industrial Revolution ?”[38] Fisher’s questions, quite humane in

themselves, are nevertheless loaded with presuppositions about

the nature of residence, work, the relationship of town to

country, and structural size that require critical examination

before “the magnificent volumes” can be compiled. For the

purposes of our discussion, however, the most important of these

presuppositions is that a rational city is primarily a product of

good designing — that “green spaces,” “pleasant residential districts,” “equally pleasant factory and working areas,” not to

speak of “carefully placed skyscrapers,” in themselves produce

human, rational, or even viable cities.

The priority that city planning assigns to structural design

represents a fairly recent development. Western notions of the

city, certainly as we know them from earlier visionaries of urban

reconstruction, were clearly linked to a larger, often sharply

critical, conception of the nature of society itself. Plato’s *Republic*

advances a notion of the *polis* not only in terms of what it *ought* to

be, but how class relations, education, social attitudes, modes of

administration, and ownership of property form its very essence

and determine its size and configuration. To the degree that

design factors enter into the dialogue, they are seen as a function

of social life. However unpalatable the hierarchical bias of the

dialogue may be, Plato follows a tradition that discusses the city

as the result of a distinctive social configuration, not as an

autonomous entity that can be isolated and reserved for analysis

and design on its own terms.

This tradition is perpetuated by Aristotle, More, Campanella,

Andreae, indeed, by virtually all the visionaries of the city well into

the early nineteenth century. A high point is reached in the

works of Fourier, who combines social critique and reconstruction in a strikingly revolutionary manner. In contrast even to

Owen, the English utopian, Fourier conceives of the phalanstery

not merely as a sober community of labour, but a shelter of

sensuous pleasure. A delightfully unguarded hedonism pervades

his notions of work, of the relationship between the sexes, of food

and adornment, even of the design of the phalanstery itself which

will provide “elegant communication with all parts of the building

and its dependencies.”[39] Here, Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme is

thorougly democratized. The right to “Do what thou wouldst,”

which forms the rule of the “Thelemite order,” ceases to be the

privilege of a Renaissance elite and becomes the prerogative of

society at large.

The notion that design dictates urban conditions of life

becomes dominant in an ambience of social protest, when cities

in Europe and America had undergone appalling decay under the

impact of the Industrial Revolution. Although the emergence of

the modern city planning movement is usually dated with the

publication in 1898of Ebenezer Howard’s *Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform* (later retitled *Garden Cities of Tomorrow*),

Howard’s efforts had been preceded by L’Enfant’s plan for the

city of Washington and, in the case of a more sinister enterprise,

by Haussman’s remodeling of Paris, an immense effort visibly

designed to deal effectively with the insurrections that had

plagued the French ruling classes. No less significantly, the

middle years of the century were marked by legislation and

regulations to cope with the disastrous hygienic conditions of the

time. Major cholera epidemics threatened not only the poorer

quarters of European and American cities but also the wealthy

ones, and these could be brought under control only by serious

efforts to improve urban sanitation and living conditions. Moreover, the 1840s reminded the European bourgeoisie that it had a

restive, increasingly class-conscious proletariat on its hands.

Accordingly, the middle part of the century opened a period of

bourgeois paternalism toward working-class dwellings, as witnessed by the construction of Louis Napoleon’s *cites ouurieres*,

state-subsidized “model villages” for English workers, and the

Krupp settlements in the Ruhr. On the whole, however, these

programs did not appreciably affect the established cities, nor did

they greatly alter the urban landscape of Europe and the United

States. As to the latter country, Mel Scott not unjustly observes

that as late as “that painful decade now ironically called the Gay

Nineties there were few urban Americans who would have

subscribed to the belief, or hope, that entire cities and metropolitan regions can be developed and renewed by a continuous process of decision-making based on long-range

planning.”[40]

Howard’s impact on this state of mind, both by means of his

book and his practical endeavours in creating the first “garden

city” of Letchworth, is almost legendary. “*Garden Cities of Tomorrow*,” Mumford rightly observes, “has done more than any

single book to guide the modern town planning movement and to

alter its objectives.”[41] id In many respects, it originated this

movement, for the idea that town planning should be a cause, an

ideal around which to mobilize popular interest, state resources,

and social opinion, must be ascribed more to Howard than to any

of his predecessors and successors. Yet Howard can also be

regarded as fathering, however unintentionally, the myth that

structural design is equatable with social rationality. Although

deeply influenced by Henry George and Peter Kropotkin,

Howard’s social ideals are repeatedly vitiated by the exigencies of

design and by a British proclivity for a compromising “realism.”

As F. J. Osborn, one of his closest associates, emphasizes,

Howard “was not a political theorist, not a dreamer, but an

inventor. The curious juxtaposition of these words and the

pragmatic, indeed technical bias it reveals tells us much about the

“garden city” movement as a whole. As Osborn explains: “The

inventor proceeds by first conceiving an idea of a possible new

product or instrument, next by evolving a design on paper with

patient thought for the adaptation of the structure to the

conditions it has to fulfill, and finally by experimentation with

models to test the design in practice.”[42]

This crudely Baconian mentality pervades modern city

planning. To Aristotle, the city was a way of life: its achievement was gauged not by its size, population, or logistical

efficiency, but by the extent to which it enabled its citizens “to live

temperately and liberally in the enjoyment of leisure.”[43] To Le

Corbusier, by contrast, the city is a “tool,” a logistical device.[44]

Even Frank Lloyd Wright once described the city as “the only

possible ideal machine...”[45] This mechanistic orientation has its

conceptual antecedents in the functionalist theories of the

bourgeois Enlightenment architects — figures such as Lodoli,

who provocatively expressed a greater admiration for the sewers

of Rome than the sacristy of St. Peter’s. Speculative thought

tends to be replaced by pragmatic realism, human values by

operationalism, ends by the hypostasization of means. With

Lodoli, as Alexander Tzonis observes, we see an end to the

period when “theories of architecture considered the design of a

building to be determined by a set of independent objectives,

whether the Vitruvian triad (‘Accomodation, Handsomeness and

Lastingness) or Perrault s dichotomy between ‘Positive’ and

‘Arbitrary’values.”[46]

Modern city planning is the stepchild of this degraded rationalism and functionalism. Inspired as Howard’s intentions may

be, he assigns to design the task of achieving goals that involve

sweeping revolutionary changes in the economic, social, and

cultural fabric of bourgeois society. Compared to the megalopolis, Howard’s garden city is attractive enough: a compact

urban entity of some thirty thousand people, scaled to human

dimensions, and surrounded by a green belt to limit growth and

provide open land for recreational and agricultural purposes.

Suitable areas of the green belt are to be occupied by farmers

(Howard limited this agricultural population to two thousand);

the larger urban population of thirty thousand is to engage in

manufacturing, commerce, and services. All land is to be held in

trust and leased to occupants on a rental basis. Howard spelled

out many design and fiscal details of this proposal, but he was

careful to emphasize at the very outset of his book that these

were “merely suggestive, and will probably be much departed

from.”[47]

But even the most generous modifications of Howard’s garden

city do not alter the fact that the project is a structural design —

and, as such, neither more nor less than what such a design can

perform. The design may provide the basis for greater human

contiguity, the structural instruments for community, and easy

communication with places of work, with shopping centers, and

with service enterprises. Nevertheless it leaves undefined the

nature of human contiguity, community, and the relationship

between the urban dweller and the rural environs. Most importantly, it leaves undefined the nature of work in garden city, the

control of the means of production, the problem of distributing

goods and services equitably, and it leaves unanalyzed the

conflicting social interests that collect around these issues.

Actually, Howard’s “invention” does provide an orientation

toward all of these problems — namely, a system of benevolent

capitalism that presumably avoids the “extremes” of “communism” and “individualism.”[48] Howard’s *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* is permeated by an underlying assumption that a

compromise can be struck between an inherently irrational social

reality and a moral ideology of high-minded conciliation.

Yet the offices, industrial factories, and shopping centers that

are intended to provide garden city with the means of life are

themselves battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. Within

these entities we find the sources of alienated labour, of income

differentials, and of disparities between work time and free time.

By itself, no structural design can reconcile the conflicting

interests and social differences that gather beneath the surface of

garden city. These interests and differences must be dealt with

largely on their own terms — by far-reaching changes in social and

economic relations. Which is not to say that a social resolution of

the problems created by the bourgeois factory, office, and

shopping center obviates the need for a structural design that will

promote community and a balance between town and country;

rather that one without the other is a truncated solution, and

hence, no solution at all.

Howard’s garden city, it is worth noting, falls far short of the

highly progressive criteria advanced by earlier utopias and

historical experiences in dealing with problems of social management and modes of work. In contrast to the Greek *polis*,

which administered its affairs on the basis of a face-to-face

democracy, Howard merely proposes a Central Council and a

departmental structure based on elections. Garden city has none

of the recall mechanisms that were established by the Paris

Commune of 1871. Unlike More’s Utopia, there is no proposal for

rotating agricultural and industrial work. In garden city, the mode

of social labour is decided simply by the needs of capital. Inasmuch as Howard’s economic horizon is not substantially broader

than that of any benevolent bourgeois of his day, notions of

industrial self-management are simply absent from his work.

The intrinsic limits of Howard’s garden city, indeed, of the

thirty-odd “new towns” that have been constructed in England

and those that are aborning in the United States, are that these

communities do not encompass anywhere near the full range and

possibilities of human experience. Neighborliness is mistaken for

organic social intercourse and mutual aid; well-manicured parks

for the harmonization of humanity with nature; the proximity of

work places for the development of a new meaning for work and

its integration with play; an eclectic mix of ranch-houses, slab-like

apartment buildings, and bachelor-type flats for spontaneous

architectural variety; shopping-mart plazas and a vast expanse of

lawn for the *agora*; lecture halls for cultural centers; hobby

classes for vocational variety; benevolent trusts or municipal

councils for self-administration. One can add endlessly to this list

of warped criteria that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the

high attainments of the urban tradition. Although people may

earn their income without leaving these communities — and a

substantial portion must travel for considerable distances to the

central city to do so — the nature of their work and the income-

differentials that group them into alien social classes are not a

matter of community concern. A crucial area of life is thus

removed from the community and delivered to a socio-economic

system that exists apart from it even as it exists within it. Indeed,

the appearance of community serves the ideological function of

concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social

life. Key elements of the self are formed outside the parameters of

the design by forces that stem from economic competition, class

antagonisms, social hierarchy and domination, and economic

exploitation. Although people are brought together to enjoy

certain conveniences and pleasantries, they remain as truncated

and culturally impoverished in garden cities and “new towns” as

they were in the megalopolis, with the difference that in the big

cities the stark reality of urban decay removes any veil of

appearances from the incompleteness and contradictions of

social life.

These internal contradictions have not been faced with candour by either the supporters or opponents of the garden city

concept. That the “new towns” of England, the United States,

and other countries modeled on the garden city design have not

awakened “the soft notes of brotherliness and goodwill” Howard

described as their essential goal; that they have not placed “in

strong hands implements of peace and construction, so that

implements of war and destruction may drop uselessly down” —

all of this is painfully obvious fact.[49] Nor has there been any

promise that they will remotely approximate such far-reaching

goals. In the best of cases, the new towns differ from the suburbs

by virtue of the ease with which people can reach their work

places and acquire services within the community. In the worst of

cases, these communities are little more than bedroom suburbs

of the big cities and add enormously to their congestion during

working hours.

Nor has reality been any kinder to the devotees of the

metropolis. The old cities keep growing even as the number of

“new towns” multiply, each urban form slowly encroaching on

the other and creating urban belts that threaten to undermine the

integrity of both. Jane Jacob’s spirited defense of traditional

neighborhood life partakes of all the illusions that mar Frederic J.

Osborn’s defense of Howard’s vision. Culturally, this neighborhood world if faced with extinction: the same forces that

truncate the inhabitant of the “new town” are delivering the small

shop over to the supermarket and the old tenement complex to

the aseptic high-rise superblock. Colourful enclaves of neighborhood culture will doubtless continue to exist as urban

showpieces — contemporary counterparts of the existing medieval and Renaissance towns that attract tourists to Europe for

visual respite from the urban monotony that is rapidly prevailing

in most cities of the world.

To the degreee that the urban dweller becomes disenchanted

with an undisguisedly functional design rationality, city planning

begins to flirt with a design exotica that rehabilitates this very

rationality in a mystified form. A pop ideology of urbanism — half

science fiction, half fraud — tends to defuse the urban dweller’s

frustration by evoking design elements that are unique only in the

nightmarish dimensions they add to prevailing modes of city

planning. In Buckminster Fuller, Paoli Soleri, Constantinos

Doxiades, Yona Friedman, Nicolas Schoffer, and a bouquet of

newly arrived Japanese designers, the system tries to recover its

social credibility with the shamanistic and occult. Fuller, to

examine the most prominent of these shamans, finds no inconsistency in trying to reconcile an appeal for individual spontaneity

with a suprahuman tetrahedronal structure that will house a

million people. Perhaps more absurdly, he tries to combine an

ecological perspective with an air-conditioned dome over

Manhattan Island.

Fuller, in fact, is an artist in advancing an outlook so “cosmic”

in its insensibility to qualitative distinctions that individuality and

community dissolve into mere digits in a computerized “world

game.” His inflated, oversized vision lacks not only human scale

but even natural scale. Yet once we strip away the “mega”-

verbiage he borrows from cybernetics, systems analysis, and the

aerospace industry, what remains of his thinking is a mechanistic

reductionism embodying the crudest features of the prevailing

functional rationality. “The environment,” we are told, “always

consists of energy — energy as matter, energy as radiation,

energy as gravity and energy as ‘events.’” An environment so

divested of qualitative distinctions beggars even the machine-like

Cartesian world of mere matter and motion. In this universe,

everything is interchangeable. Accordingly, Fuller adds:

“Housing is an energetic environment-controlling mechanism.

Thinking correctly of all housing as machinery (one is tempted to

ask, not as home or community? — M.B.) we begin to realize the

complete continuity of interrelationship of such technological

evolution as that of the home bedroom into the railway sleeping

car, into the automobile with seat-to-bed conversions, into the

filling-station toilets, which are accessories of the parlour-on

wheels; the trailer, the motels, hotels, and ocean liners.”[50]

Portability replaces community and mobility a sense of rootedness and place. The individual becomes a camper who belongs

everywhere — and nowhere. Perhaps more appropriately, Ful-

lerian social theory envisions the individual as an astronaut who

pilots the earth as a mechanical spaceship. Here, hypostasized

design leaves even the mundane world of conventional planning

for the interstellar space of Kubrick’s *2001*. This magic is

essentially cinematic — as synthetic as the film on which it

unfolds.

That Fuller’s work arouses popular interest can be explained

by default — that is, as a result of the vacuum left by the absence

of a searching radical theory of the city and community. Why, it

may be asked, did Fourier’s interpretations of community fail to

acquire relevance for so many of the generations that followed his

own? At what point — and for what reasons — did the generous

utopian visions that surfaced in the early nineteenth century lose

continuity with later periods that so desperately required their

elaboration and fulfillment? The rupture can be dated from the

ascendency of Marxism as a social movement. Largely under the

impetus of Marx’s class theory, the city ceased to be a matter of

serious concern to radical analysts and the notion of community a

goal in social reconstruction. Radicalism found an almost exclusive locus in the factory and proletariat. Just as bourgeois urban

sociology neglected the work place for the city, so radical social

theory neglected the city for the work place. That the two arenas

could have been integrated as a unified realm of critique and

reconstruction occurred to only a few radical theorists of the last

century, notably Kropotkin and William Morris.

Yet even the worker does not exist merely in a factory milieu

and her or his social experiences are not exhausted at the point of

production. The proletarian is not only a class being but also an

urban being. Capitalism generates a broad social crisis that often

makes workers more accessible to revolutionary visions as urban

dwellers — as victims of pollution, congestion, isolation, real

estate extortion, neighborhood decay, bad transportation, civic

manipulation, and the spiritually dehumanizing effects of megalo-

politan life — than as exploited producers of surplus value. Marx

and Engels were far less oblivious to this fact than the epigones

who were to speak in their names. In *The Housing Question*,

written in 1872, Engels creditably links his views with the most

vital concepts of Owen and Fourier; to resolve the housing

problem — and, one may add, the urban problem as a whole —

Engels argues that the big cities must be decentralized and the

antithesis between town and country overcome. The same theme

is taken up 13 years later in Engels’ highly influential work,

• Anti-Duhring*. With the vulgarization of Marxism and its transformation into a powerful political ideology, this tradition receded

into the background. The notion of “scientific socialism” fostered

a distinct bias against Marx’s utopian predecessors and the

communitarian visions that permeated their works. By the turn of

the century, urban problems ceased to be an issue of any real

significance in Marxist theory. Even the notion of decentralization was airily dismissed as a “utopian” absurdity.

Not until the late 1960s do we begin to see design emerge as a

function of an entirely new way of life. That this approach had its

isolated devotees in the long interim between Fourier’s day and

our own is evident enough from any reading of urban history. The

Sixties are unique, however, in that the concept of community

began to develop on a broad popular scale — indeed, a largely

generational scale — when young people in considerable numbers, disenchanted with the prevailing society, reoriented themselves toward reconstructive utopistic projects of their own. New

values were formulated that often involved a total break with the

commodity system as a whole and charted the way to new forms

of sociation.

The young people who began to formulate these new values

and forms of sociation — values and forms that have since been

grouped under the rubric of “the counterculture” — unquestionably comprised a privileged social stratum. For the most part,

they came from the affluent, white, middle-class suburbs and the

better universities of the United States, the enclaves and training

grounds of the new American technocracy. To adduce their

privileged status as evidence for the trifling nature of the

movement itself sidesteps a key question: why did privilege lead

to a rejection of the social and material values that had spawned

these very privileges in the first place? Why, in fact, didn’t these

young people, like so many before them in previous generations,

take up the basic values of their parents and expand the arena of

privilege they had inherited?

These questions reveal an historic change in the material

premises for the radical social movements in the advanced

capitalist countries. By the Sixties, the so-called “First World

had undergone unprecedented technological changes. Technology had advanced to a point where the values spawned by

material scarcity, particularly those values fostered by the

bourgeois era, no longer seemed morally or culturally relevant.

The work ethic, the moral authority imputed to material denial,

parsimony, and sensual renunciation, the high social valuation

placed on competition and “free enterprise,” the emphasis on

privatization and individuation based on egotism, seemed obsolete in the light of technological achievements that afforded

entirely contrary alternatives — freedom from a lifetime of toil and

a materially secure social disposition oriented toward community

and the full expression of individual human powers. The new

alternatives opened by technological advances made the cherished values of the past seem not only obsolete but odious. There

is no paradox in the fact that the weakest link in the old society

turned out to be that very stratum which enjoyed the real

privilege of rejecting false privilege.

Which is not to say that the technological context of the

counterculture was consciously grasped and elaborated into a

coherent perspective for society as a whole. Indeed, the outlook

of most middle-class dropout youth and students remained

largely intuitive and often fell easy prey to the faddism nurtured by

the established society. The erratic features of the new movement, its feverish and its quixotic oscillations, can be partly

explained by this lack of adequate consciousness. Often, young

people were easily victimized and crudely exploited by commercial interests that shrewdly pandered to the more superficial

aspects of the new culture. Large numbers of this dropout youth,

exultant in their newly discovered sense of liberation, lacked an

awareness of the harsh fact that complete freedom is impossible

in a prevailing system of unfreedom. Insofar as they hoped rapidly

to replace the dominant culture by their own merely on the

strength of example and moral suasion, they failed. But insofar as

they began to see themselves as the most advanced sector of a

larger movement to revolutionize society as a whole, their culture

has a compelling relevance as part of an historic enlightenment

that eventually may change every aspect of social life.

The most striking feature of this culture is the emphasis it

places on personal relations as the locus of abstract social ideals,

its attempt to translate freedom and love into existential realities

of everyday life. This personalistic yet socially involved approach

has yielded not only an increasingly explicit critique of doctrinaire

socialist theory, but also of design-oriented city planning. Much

has been written about the “retreat” of dropout youth to rural

communes. Far less has been written about the extent to which

ecologically minded young people began to subject city planning

to a devastating critique, often advancing alternative proposals to

dehumanizing urban “revitalization” and “rehabilitation” projects. Generally, these alternatives stemmed from a perspective

toward design that was radically different from that of conventional city planners. For the countercultural planners, the point of

departure for any design was not the extent to which the city

expedites traffic, communications, and economic activities.

Rather, they were primarily occupied with the relationship of

design to the fostering of personal intimacy, many-sided social

relationships, nonhierarchical modes of organization, communistic living arrangements, and material independence from the

market economy. Design, here, took its point of departure not

from abstract concepts of space and efficiency, but from an

explicit critique of the status quo and a conception, rooted in

developing life-styles, of the free human relationships that were to

replace it. The design elements of the plan followed from radically

new social alternatives that were already being practiced as

subcultures in many communities throughout the country. To

use an expression that was very much in the air: the attempt was

made to replace hierarchical space by liberated space.

Among the many plans of this kind to be developed in the late

Sixties and early Seventies, perhaps the most impressive was

formulated in Berkeley by an ad hoc group from People’s

Architecture, the local Tenant’s Union, and members of the local

food cooperative. The plan shows a remarkably high degree of

radical social consciousness. It draws its inspiration from the

“People’s Park” episode in May 1969, when dropout youth,

students, and later ordinary citizens of Berkeley fought with

police for more than a week to retain a lovely park and

playground which they had spontaneously created out of a

neglected, garbage-strewn lot owned by the University of California. The park, eventually reclaimed by its university proprietors at the cost of a young man’s life, many severe injuries, and

massive arrests, is at this writing a parking lot and paved soccer

field. But the memory of the episode has waned slowly. To the

young Berkeley planners, “People’s Park was the beginning of the

Revolutionary Ecology Movement” — a movement, unfortunately, that has yet to live up to these high hopes. The thrust of the

plan, entitled Blueprint for a Communal Environment , is radically

countercultural. “The revolutionary culture,” declare the writers

,of the Blueprint, “gives us new communal, eco-viable ways of

organizing our lives, while people’s politics gives us the means to

resist the System.”[51] The Blueprint is a project not only for

reconstruction but also for struggle on a wide social terrain

against the established order.

This document of the Berkeley planners aims at more than the

structural redesigning of an existing communty; it avows and

explores a new way of life at the most elementary level of human

intercourse. The new way of life is communal and seeks as much

as possible to divorce itself from commodity relationships. The

goal of the design is “Communal ways of organizing our lives (to)

help to cut down on consumption, to provide for basic human

needs more efficiently, to resist the system, to support ourselves

and overcome the misery of atomized living.” The social and

private are thoroughly fused in this one sentence. Design gives

expression to a new life-style that stands opposed to the

repressive organization of society.[52]

Shelter is redesigned to “overcome the fragmentation of our

lives... to encourage communication and break down priva

tization.” The plan’s authors observe that with “women’s liberation, and a new communal morality, the nuclear family is

becoming obsolete.” Accordingly, floor plans are proposed which

allow for larger multi-purpose rooms which promote more interaction, ‘such as communal dining rooms, meeting spaces and

work areas.” Methods are suggested for creating roof openings

and converting exterior upper walls into communicating links

with neighboring houses as well as between rooms and upper

stories.[53]

“All land in Berkeley is treated as a marketable commodity”

observe the young planners. “Space is parcelled into neat

consumer packages. In between rows of land parcels are

transportation ‘corridors’ to keep people flowing from workplace to market.” The *Blueprint* proposes the dismantling of

backyard and sideyard fences to open land as interior parks and

gardens. Platform “bridgeways” between houses are suggested

to break down the strict division between indoor and outdoor

space. The purpose of these suggestions is not merely to restore

nature to the urban dweller’s world, but to open avenues of

intimate communication. The plan focuses not merely on public

plazas and parks, but the immediate neighborhoods in which

people live their daily lives. Indeed, with magnificent insouciance,

the plan tosses all considerations of private property to the winds

by suggesting that vacant lots be appropriated by neighborhoods

and turned into communal space.[54]

Half the streets of Berkeley, the plan notes, could easily be

closed off to stimulate collective transportation experiments and

reduce traffic congestion in residential areas. This would “free

• ten times* more land area for public use than we now have in park

acreage. Intersections could become parks, gardens, plazas, with

paving material recovered and used to make artificial hills.” The

plan recommends that Berkeley residents should walk or bicycle

to places whenever feasible. If motor vehicles must be used, they

should be pooled and maintained on a communal basis. People

should drive together to common destinations in order to reduce

the number of vehicles in use and to share the human experience of common travel. Community services will make a

“quantum leap,” observe the planners, when “small groups of

neighbors mobilize resources and energy in order to cement

fragmented neighborhoods back together and begin to take care

of business (from child care to education) on a local level and in an

integrated way.” In this connection, the *Blueprint* suggests that

men and women should rotate the use of their homes for childcare centers. First-aid skills and knowledge of more advanced

medical techniques should be mobilized on a neighborhood basis.

Finally, wastes should be collectively recycled to avoid pollution

and the destruction of recyclable resources.[55]

The *Blueprint* advances a refreshingly imaginative program for

ruralizing the city and fostering the material independence of its

inhabitants. It suggests communally worked backyard gardens

for the cultivation of organic food, even entering into the specifics

of composting, mulching, and the preparation of seedlings. It

proposes the establishment of a “People’s Market... which will

receive the organic products of rural communes and small

farmers, and distribute them to the neighborhood (food) conspiracies. Such a market place will have other uses craftspeople can sell their wares there.” The “People’s Market is

visualized as a “solid example of creative thinking about communal use of space. Its structure will be portable, and will be built in

such a way as to serve neighborhood kids as play equipment on

non-market days.”[56]

The Blueprint leaves no illusion that this ensemble of reconstructive ideas will “liberate” Berkeley or other communities. It

sees the realization of these concepts as the first steps toward

reorienting the individual self from a passive acceptance of

isolation and dependence on bureaucratic institutions to popular

initiatives that will recreate communal contacts and face-to-face

networks of mutual aid. Ultimately, society as a whole will have to

be reorganized by the great majority who are now forced into

hierarchical subservience to the few. Yet until these revolutionary changes are achieved, a new state of mind, nourished by

working community ties, must be fashioned so that people will be

able to fuse their deepest personal needs with broader social

ideals. Indeed, unless this fusion is achieved, these very ideals will

remain abstractions and will not be realized at all.

Many of the **Blueprint**’s structural suggestions are not new.

The idea of using roof openings to link houses is obviously

borrowed from Pueblo Indian villages, the urban gardens from

medieval communes and precapitalist towns generally, the

pedestrian streets and plazas from the Renaissance cities and

earlier urban forms. What makes the plan unique, however, is

that it derives its design concepts from radically new life-styles

that are antithetical to an increasingly bureaucratic society.

Doubtless, each of its design elements could be assimilated in

piecemeal fashion to conventional ways of life as has been the

case with so many radical ideas in the past. The plan is sensitive to

this possibility. From the outset, it adopts a revolutionary stance.

Its premise in advance of any design is a culture that is counter to

the prevailing one — one that emphasizes community rather than

isolation, the sharing of resources and skills rather than their

privatized possession, independence from rather than dependence on the bourgeois market place, loving relations and mutual

aid rather than egotism and competition. The *Blueprint* clearly

articulates the social preconditions for a free community that

other, ostensibly radical, plans leave unexamined. It is humanistic, not “iconoclastic”; it is radical, not “original.” And whether

or not the planners were fully conscious of their historic

antecedents, they were presenting a Hellenic vision of urban life.

The truly human city, to them, is a way of life (not a mere

“design”) that fosters the integration of individual with society, of

town with country, of personal needs with social ones without

denying the integrity of each.

The Sixties have passed — and with them many of the high

hopes raised by dropout youth and radical students. An insecure,

so-called “middle American” adult public, seeking respite from

challenges to traditional values, is trying to entrench itself in the

status quo, indeed, to evoke an “innocence” imputed to the past

that is apocryphal in any case. Where the counterculture has

managed to hold its own against overtly hostile forces, it has had

to contend with a political mode of dope-peddling in the form of

sectarian Marxism and “Third World” voyeurism. Here, archaic

ideologies and modes of organization assume the semblance of

“radicalism” and, like toxic germs, fester in the wounds opened

by public malaise and political repression.

Yet even this ebbing phase of what is surely a much larger

cultural and social development could be valuable as a sobering

period of maturation. A new world will not be gained merely by

strewing the pathway to the future with flowers. The largely

intuitive impulses that exploded with such naive enthusiasm in

the Sixties, only to become bitter, harsh, and dehumanizing in the

pseudo-radicalism that closed the decade, were never adequate

to the long-range historic project of developing a wider public

consciousness of the need for social change. By the late Sixties,

the counterculture ceased to speak to America with understanding and in relevant terms. Its politicization took the worst

form possible — arrogance and a senselessly violent rhetoric. Far

more than the flowers of the mid-Sixties, the angry clenched fists

of the late Sixties served to alarm and utterly alienate an

uncomprehending public.

Yet many of the demands raised by this movement of young

people are imperishable. No matter how far the movement may

recede from its earlier eminence, these demands must inevitably

be recovered and advanced if there is to be any social future. In

calling for a melding of the more abstract ideals of social liberation

with personal liberation, in seeking to form the nuclear libertarian

communistic relationships so necessary to the rearing of a truly

emancipated society, in trying to subvert the influence of the

commodity nexus on the individual self and its relationship with

other selves, in emphasizing the need for a spontaneous expression of sensuality and a humanistic sensibility, in challenging

hierarchy and domination in all its forms and manifestations, in

trying to synthesize new decentralized communities based on an

ecological balance with the natural world — in raising all of these

demands as a single ensemble, the counterculture gave a modern

expression to a long historic mainstream of human dreams and

aspirations. And however intuitively, it did so on the basis of the

historic challenge posed by technological advances unprecedented in history. These demands can never be fully submerged

by political repression; they have become the voice of an

increasingly self-conscious reason that is sedimented into the

very perspective of humanity toward its future. What were only

recently the hotly debated views of a small minority of the young

are almost unconsciously accepted by millions of people in all age

groups.

What strongly favours the growth of these demands is the

harsh fact that society is left with very few choices today. The city

has completed its historic evolution. Its dialectic from the village,

temple area, fortress, or administrative center, each dominated

by agrarian interests, to the megalopolis which completely

dominates the countryside, marks the absolute negation of the

city as we have known it in history. With the modern city, we can

no longer speak of a clearly defined urban entity with a collective

urban interest of its own. Just as each phase or “moment” of the

city in history is marked by its own internal limits, so the

megalopolis represents the limits of the city as such — of *civitas* as

distinguished from *communitas*. The political principle in the

form of the state dissolves all the elements of the social principle,

replacing community ties by bureaucratic ones. Personified

space dissolves into institutional space — and with the violent

ghettoization of the modern city, into what Oscar Newman

crassly describes as “defensible space.” The human scale is

enveloped by urban gigantism. This “anti-city,” neither urban nor

rural, affords no arena for the development of community or even

humanistic sociation. At most, the megalopolis is pieced together

by mutually hostile enclaves each of which is internally “united”

by its hostility to the stranger on the perimeter. At its worst, this

urban cancer is in physical, moral and logistical decay. It ceases

even to function on its own terms, as an efficient arena for the

production and marketing of commodities.

City planning validates the urban crisis by dealing with it as a

problem of logistics and design. The conventional planner’s

concern for efficient movement involves the reduction of human

beings to little more than commodities that circulate through the

capitalist economy as exchange values. The triumph of computer-simulation techniques in city planning reflects the degradation of the urban dweller from the status of “brother” in the

medieval commune to that of “citizen” in the traditional bourgeois city and ultimately to that of a mere digit in the megalopolis. If the traditional city emancipated human sociation from

blood ties, the megalopolis dissolves sociation as such and

reduces it to digital aggregation. City planning presents this

dissolution as ideology. In the dynamic design, people become

“population” and their relations mere movement guided by the

needs and constraints of the prevailing system.

We see, here, the profound difference between the sensibility

of the young Berkeley planners and their conventional counterparts. The Berkeley planners start from the premise that urbanity

does not emancipate human sociation from the blood tie merely

to deliver the individual to the alienated and privatized world of

the bourgeois market place. In the *Blueprint*, sociation is

recovered in the commune, in ties freely formed by human affinity

rather than ancestral lineage. Urbanity, in effect, is fulfilled as a

commune composed of communes. Conventional city planning,

by accepting the city as it is, prevents us from understanding what

humanized territory could be — namely, a new *polis* that would be

a commune made up of communes, of nuclear groups united by

choice and selective affinity, not simply by kinship and blood ties.

Accordingly, just as people become mere “population,” territo-

rialism becomes mere “space” through which people, vehicles,

and commodities flow. City planning becomes the mechanical

organization of space by design, not the ecological colonization of

territory by people. *Civitas* completely assimilates *communitas*;

the political principle, the social principle.

To restore urbanity as a humanized terrain for sociation, the

megalopolis must be ruthlessly dissolved and its place taken by

new decentralized ecocommunities, each carefully tailored to the

carrying capacity of the natural ecosystem in which it is located.

One might reasonably say that these ecocommunities will

possess the best features of the *polis* and medieval commune,

supported by rounded ecotechnologies that rescale the most

advanced elements of modern technology to local dimensions.

The equilibrium between town and country will be restored — not

as a sprawling suburb that mistakes a lawn or a woodlot for

“nature,” but as an interactive functional ecocommunity that

unites industry with agriculture, mental work with physical. No

longer a mere spectatorial object to be seen from a window or

during a stroll, nature will become an integral part of all aspects of

the human experience, from work to play. Only in this way can

the needs of the natural world become integrated with those of

the social to yield an authentic ecological consciousness that

transcends the instrumentalist “environmental” mentality of the

sanitary engineer.

Our place in the history of the city is unique. Precapitalist cities,

owing to an incomplete technological development that perpetuated material scarcity, either stagnated within their limits or

exploded destructively beyond them, only to fall back again to

their original dimensions or disappear entirely. Where the city

was not frozen (as in Asia and the Near East) by hereditary castes

and agrarian hierarchies, its unity was dissolved by the commodity system and market place. This was the fate of the *polis*.

Modern technology has now reached so advanced a level of

development that it permits humanity to reconstruct urban life

along lines that could foster a balanced, well-rounded, and

harmonious community of interests between human beings and

between humanity and the natural world. This ecocommunity

would be more than what we have always meant by a city; it

would be a social work of art, a community fashioned by human

creativity, reason, and ecological insight.

Alternatively, we are confronted by an urban development that

is almost certain to disintegrate into bureaucratic mobilization,

chronic social war, and a condition of permanent violence. If the

earliest hieroglyph of the city was a wall intersected by two roads,

the symbol of the megalopolis may well become a police badge on

which a gun is superimposed. In this kind of “city,” the revenge of

social irrationality will claim its toll in the form of an absolute

division of human from human. This is the very negation of

urbanity. Perhaps more significantly, the limits of the megalopolis

can be formulated as nothing less than the limits of society itself as

an instrument of hierarchy and domination. Left to its own

development, the megalopolis spells the doom not only of the city

as such but of human sociation. For in such an urban world,

technology, subserved to irrational and demonic forces, becomes

not the instrument of harmony and security, but the means for

systematically plundering the human spirit and the natural world.

<right>

May 1973

</right>

[31] Max Horkheimer, *The Eclipse of Reason* (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1947), p. 131.

[32] G.W.F. Hegel, *The Philosophy of History* (New York: Dover Publications,

1956), p. 105.

[33] Aristotle, “Politica” in *The Basic Works of Aristotle* (New York: Random

House, 1941), p. 1284, Book VII, 4:25.

[34] E.A. Gutkind, *The Twilight of Cities* (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe,

1962), p. 17.

[35] Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in

• Community, Life and Social Policy* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 120.

[36] Leonard Reissman, *The Urban Process* (New York: The Free Press of

Glencoe, 1964), p. 10.

[37] Ibid., p. 7.

[38] Frank Fisher, “Where City Planning Stands Today,” *Commentary*, January

1954, p. 75.

[39] Charles Fourier, *Selections* (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), p. 138.

[40] Mel Scott, *American City Planning* (Berkeley : University of California

Press, 1971), p. 1.

[41] Lewis Mumford, “The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning,” in Ebenezer

Howard, *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965),

p. 29.

[42] F.J. Osborn (preface), *Ibid*., p. 21.

[43] Aristotle, *op. cit*., p. 1284, Book VII, 5:32.

[44] Le Corbusier, *The City of Tomorrow* (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1971),

p, 1.

[45] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The City as Machine,” in *Metropolis: Values in

Conflict*, ed. C.E. Elias, Jr., et al (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth Publishing

Co., Inc., 1964), p. 94.

[46] Alexander Tzonis, *Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment* (Boston: i Press, Inc., 1972), p. 66.

[47] Ebenezer Howard, *op. cit.*, p. 51.

[48] *Ibid*., see especially pp. 90, 113–15.

[49] *Ibid*., p. 150.

[50] R. Buckminster Fuller, *Utopia or Oblivion* (New York: Bantam Books,

1969), p. 360.

[51] “Blueprint for a Communal Environment,” in *Sources*, ed. Theodore Roszak

(New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), p. 393.

[52] *Ibid*., p. 394.

[53] *Ibid*., p. 395.

[54] *Ibid*., pp. 399, 400.

[55] *Ibid*., pp. 411–12.

[56] *Ibid*., p. 405.

Toward a Vision of the Urban Future

“Without testament,” observed Hannah Arendt in *Between Past and Future*, “... without tradition — which selects and

names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where

the treasures are and what their worth is — there seems to be no

willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither

past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the

biological cycle of creatures in it.”[57]

If the city can be added to the lost treasures which Arendt

laments in her deeply sensitive essays, this loss is due in no small

measure to the modern stance of “contemporaneity,” a stance

which virtually denies an urban past in its deadening claim to

sempiternal change, to an eternality of problems that have

neither the retrospect of uniqueness nor the prospect of visionary

solutions. To the degree that the very word “city” is still applied to

the formless urban agglomerations that blot the human landscape, we live with the shallow myth that the problems of the civic

present are equatable with those of the civic past — and hence, in

a sinister sense, with the civic future. Accordingly, we know

neither past nor future but only a present that lacks even the self-

consciousness of its social preconditions, limitations, and historic

fragility.

Our very language betrays the limitations within which we

operate — more precisely, the preconceptions with which we

define the functions of the modern city and our “solutions” to its

problems. However operational it may be, the most unspoken

preconception that guides our view of the modern city is an

entirely entrepreneurial one. Indeed, all shabby moral platitudes

aside, we simply view the city as a business enterprise. Our

underlying urban problems are commonly described in fiscal

terms and often attributed to “poor management,” “financial

irresponsibility,” and “imbalanced budgets.” Judging from this

terminology, it would seem that a “good city” is a fiscally secure

city, and the job of civic institutions is to manage the city as a

“sound business.” Presumably, the “best city” is not only one that

balances its budget and is self-financing but even earns a sizable

profit.

To anyone who has even a glancing acquaintance with urban

history, this is a breathtaking notion of the city, indeed, a notion

that could arise only in the most unadorned and mediocre of

bourgeois epochs. Yet lacking a sense of both past and future, we

would do well to recall that the city has variously been seen as a

ceremonial center (the temple city), an administrative center (the

palace city), a civic fraternity (the *polis*), and a guild city (the

medieval commune). Heavenly or secular, it has always been

uniquely a social space, the terrain in which the suspect

“stranger” became transformed into the citizen — this, as distinguished from the biological parochialism of the clan and tribe with

its roots in blood ties, the sexual division of labour, and age

groups. As the Greeks so well knew, the “good city” represented

the triumph of society over biology, of reason over impulse, of

humanity over folkdom. That capitalism with its principle of

unlimited growth and its own economic emphasis on “sempiternal change” began to expand the medieval marketplace

beyond any comprehensible human scale is a problem that has

been more than adequately explored; but where this tendency

would take us was still conjectural.[58] The last century saw the city

defer to — and even model itself — on the factory.[59] The opening

years of the present century witnessed the conceptual

reduction of the city to a “machine,” a notion which was accepted

by such presumably disparate architects and planners as Le

Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. McLuhan brought us into the

multinational corporate world with his catchy phrase “the global

village,” and Doxiades presumably afforded us the “multidisciplinary” tools for making the multinational city seem like an

international one.[60]

If the schemes of Le Corbusier, Wright, McLuhan, and

Doxiades seem remote at present, if they have been pre-empted

by the bookkeeping of Abe Beame, the shift is not without its

irony. Beame plodded his way to the center of New York politics

as a comptroller, not as a social reformer or city planner. His

concept of community is probably exhausted by the New York

Democratic Party’s headquarters and backrooms. He lacks even

the Dickensian eccentricities of a Scrooge. Only his gray hair,

aging face, and diminutive stature rescue him from appearing as a

corporate technocrat. He is, oddly enough, a man of the

LaGuardia generation who, like the Abbe Sieyes of the French

Revolution, could claim a supreme credential for having lived in a

colourful, dramatic, and dynamic era: he managed to survive. By

virtue of his very appearance and professional background,

Beame personifies the transformation of New York’s urban

problems from those of social reform into those of fiscal

manipulation.

Lest this transformation be taken too much for granted, it has

implications that go far beyond any mere headlines. The change

means that our modern capitalist society has not only subverted

the city s historic role as a medium for socializing parochial fold

into worldly humans; it has completely degraded the city into a

mere business venture to be gauged by monetary rather than

social or cultural criteria. It has, in effect, added a vulgar

dimension to Arendt’s worst fears of “sempiternal change” by

removing the city from the history books and placing it in account

books. The city has become a problem not in social theory,

community, or psychology but in bookkeeping. It has ceased to

be a human creation and has become a commodity. Its achievement is to be judged not by architectural beauty, cultural

inspiration, and human association but by economic productivity, taxable resources, and fiscal success. The most startling

aspect of this development-long in the making when the city

was subordinated to the factory and to commerce — is that urban

theory must cease to pretend that its revered social and cultural

criteria apply to the modern city. Architecture, sociology

anthropology, planning, and cultural history tell us nothing about

the city as it exists today. Urban ideology is business ideology,

ts tools are not Doxiades’ ekistics but double-entry bookkeeping.

The extent to which we have removed the city from the history

books and placed it in the account books is evidenced not only by

the declining ining cities of the northeast but by the burgeoning cities of

the sunbelt. Success, here, is a quixotic form of failure — for the

historic urban trend of our day has not been toward cities but

rather a curious form of urbanization without cities. The

devolution of the sunbelt cities almost entirely into industrial and

commercial “mousetraps” (to quote a *Fortune* journalist) has

yielded a devastating form of “success.” Business has become a

cult; growth, a deity; money, a talisman. The mythic has

reappeared in its most mundane quantified form to create one of

the most dehumanizing ideologies in urban history. In the plastic,

unadorned subdivisions, high-rises, and slab office buildings of

Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, and Houston eastward to Tampa

and Miami, life and culture have been sacrificed to the most

robotized forms of mass production, mass merchandizing, and

mass culture. The faceless structures that sprawl across the

“southern rim” lack the seasoning of history, of authentic cultural

intercourse, of urban development and centering. The cities

themselves have moved, for the most part, by huge leaps, not by

evolution, and the propelling force of the leaps has been some

sort of “resource,” be it copper or petroleum, aerospace or

electronics, range empires or agribusiness. The “gold fever” has

never left the sunbelt; it has merely produced gold in different,

often more feverish ways. If the American empire found its

original colonies on the western frontier, the sunbelt cities have

been its traditional outposts and provided the nodal points for its

most aggressive domestic impulses.

Accordingly, these nodal points — now, sprawling Standard

Metropolitan Statistic Areas — are economically “relevant.”

They form the centers of the “new” industries spawned by World

War II, of intensively worked factory “farms,” of fuels for high-

technology, of shopping malls and retail emporiums. Big government, particulary the Federal government, occupies every niche

that has not been filled by big business and the two inevitably

interlink to form big bureaucracy. Municipal autonomy has rarely

been a strategic concept in the SMSA’s of the sunbelt. The earliest

cities were often cavalry fortresses, not the new “Jerusalems”

established by radical, often anarchistic religious and political

dissenters. Although the frontier nourished the myth of rugged

individualism, community, and vigilantism, its daily life and

tenacious greed nourished self-interest and privatism. Not surprisingly, regional administration tends to supplant municipal

administration, digesting not only neighborhoods but entire cities

in the entrails of huge administrative bureaucracies. Citizenship,

in turn, tends to be gauged more by the capacity to attract

investment, make money, and engage in big-spending than by

civic activism and social reform.

The northeastern cities are significantly different. New York,

whose urban agony has made it paradigmatic for the cities of the

entire region, was the most important point of entry for immigrants into the continent and their first point of contact with the

realities of the “American Dream.” The city achieved its elevated

status not merely as a major port and financial center, but as the

crucible in which the polyglot immigrants of Europe were melded

into a usable labour force. American business itself accorded the

city a special status, however resentfully and boorishly. Whether

by virtue of high investments, political privileges or, more

significantly, social reforms, the city had to be supported as the

demographic and cultural placenta to Europe. More cosmopolitan than any other city in the land, it formed a lifeline to the old

world with its material and intellectual riches. If a single part of the

United States was the American “melting pot,” it was New York

City, and if America needed a space to achieve a measure of

demographic and cultural homogeneity from which to draw

Europe’s labour and skills, it was through New York City.

The present “fiscal crisis” in New York means, quite frankly,

that the city has been abandoned. Its traditional function is no

longer necessary. Today, New York does not receive the bulk of

its immigrants from Europe but from within the United States and

its Hispanic “posessions.” At a time when technology requires

less muscle and more skill, New York has ceased to be an historic

port of entry for needed “human resources” and has become the

dumping ground for superfluous “human waste.” The Statue of

Liberty exhibits its backside to domestic refugees from religious

and political persecution. With its growing proportion of blacks,

Hispanics, and aged, the city has turned into an economic

anachronism and a political menace. Its “minorities,” who now

comprise residential majorities in many parts of the city, are seen

as impediments to a highly corporate, mechanized, and planned

economy. Like the “masterless men” who appeared all over

Europe during the decline of feudalism, these minorities have

become marginal people in an era of technocratic state capitalism. From the bad conscience of the system, the city rears itself

up as a spectre from the past that must be exorcised. Physically it must be set adrift, abandoned to its squalor, archaisms,

and leprous process of decay.

It is not a satisfactory argument to rake up the trite explanations, such as “fiscal mismanagement” and an “eroding tax

base,” that Washington has flung at New York to justify its

neglect of the city. One could reasonably ask if Washington itself

has a more sound fiscal or economic base than the cosmopolis to

the north. That Washington is largely a subsidized city, indeed

subsidized partly by the massive taxes it drains from New York,

suggests that the viability of any city in an era of oligopoly and

state controls can no longer be explained by the precepts of “free

enterprise” economics. Washington is artificially sustained because it is needed as a national administrative center. To the

degree that any city is a heavy recepient of direct or indirect

Federal funds, exorbitant revenues from oligopolistic practices,

or loot drained by leisured high-income counties from exploited

low-income ones, it is artificially sustained by the country as a

whole. Accordingly, Washington lives on tax revenues requisitioned on a national scale, the sunbelt cities on aeronautic, and

military subsidies, oil money, and real-estate hustles, the wealthy communities of southern California on riches plundered from

the poorer countries of the north and east, the Imperial Valley on

artifically inflated food prices by which New Yorkers, Bostonians, and Chicagoans are bled daily. That New York has been the

object of opprobrium rather than support at all levels of the

Federal government and the financial world is evidence not so

much of its “fiscal mismanagement” but its lack of economic

relevancy. Its eminence as a center of immigrant labour has

waned and the immigrants it currently receives are viewed as

despised social flotsam.

Perhaps no less significantly, the city has become politically

dangerous. One could easily visualize that New York, which once

provided the space for melding needed immigrant labour, could

again be favored as a space in which “dispensable” sectors of the

population could be dumped. It might seem plausible that, as

“friendly fascism” oozes over the social landscape, it might leave

oases in which the ethnically abused, the indigent, even the

eccentrics, might find a home in the interests of social pacification. The most sinister feature of the trend toward corporate

and state capitalism is that such oases are basically incompatible

with a totalitarian trend, even of the “friendly” variety. The sixties

have vividly demonstrated that “affluence” does not placate the

restless but awakens them. In the language of modern sociol-

ogese, improved material conditions arouse “high expectations”

and ultimately a rebellious ambience throughout the country.

Viewed from this standpoint, current attempts to subvert New

York City’s traditional reformistic policies are not without

political cunning. The centralized state’s growing police functions

and its increasing manipulation of the economy have been

followed by its growing control over local administrative authority. New York’s loss of municipal self-administration to the central

government could portend a far-reaching destruction of municipal institutions everywhere. Rearing up before us would be an

immense political behemoth that could engulf the last administrative structures of American towns and cities.

In the sunbelt cities, the emergence of such a behemoth

already has acquired considerable reality. The tremendous

weight that is given to economic expansion, to business operations, to governmentally fostered projects has served not only

to promote mindless urban expansion but an appalling degree of

civic passivity. The extent to which these cities have surrendered

to industrial, commercial, and governmental operations is comparable only to the squalid decay of cities during the Industrial

Revolution. The consequences of this surrender can be expressed as a form of municipal growth that occurs in inverse

proportion to civic attrition — civic in the sense that that city once

comprised a vital body politic. Homogeneity has effaced neighborhoods, regionalization has effaced municipalities, and immense enterprises, fed by the bequests of big government, have

effaced the existence of a socially active citizenry. The basic

concerns of the sunbelt cities are growth, not reform; the basic

concerns of its citizens are services, not social participation.

Politically, the residents of the sunbelt cities constitute a client

population, bereft of citizenship and social activism by the very

success of their economic growth. To the degree that meaningful

politics is practiced in these cities, it is bureaucratically orchestrated by business and government.

If the great Hellenic standards of urbanism have meaning any

longer for students of the city and its development, the disappearance of an active body politic, of an authentic, socially

involved citizenry is equivalent to the death of the city itself.

Greek social thought viewed the city as a public arena, a realm of

discourse and rational administration that presupposed a public

opinion, public institutions, and a public man. In the absence of

such a public, there was no *polis*, no citizens, no community. The

sunbelt cities have replaced public life by publicity, by a spectacular, typically American form of “dialogue” that involves the

promotion of political and economic entities. In the spectac-

ularized world of publicity, even the classical market of free

entrepreneurs is converted into oligopolistically managed

shopping malls, democratic political institutions into appointed

bureaucracies, and citizens into taxpayers. What remains of the

city is merely its high residential density, not its urbane populace.

If the municipal success of the sunbelt cities is marked by civic

failure, the municipal failures of the older cities have been marked

by a certain degree of civic success. Owing to the decline of

municipal services in the older cities of the northeast, a vacuum is

developing between the traditional institutions that managed the

city and the urban population itself. These institutions, in effect,

have been compelled to surrender a considerable degree of their

authority to the citizenry. Understaffed municipal agencies can

no longer pretend to adequately meet such basic needs as

sanitation, education, health, and public safety. An eerie municipal “no-man’s-land” is emerging between the institutional apparatus of the older cities and the people it professes to service. This

“no-man’s-land” — this urban vacuum, to be more precise — is

slowly being filled by the ordinary people themselves. Far more

striking than New York’s fiscal crisis is the public response it has

evoked. Libraries, schools, even hospitals and fire houses, have

been occupied by aroused citizens, a trend that is significant not

because amateurs can often exhibit a technical capacity to

replace the services of professionals but rather the high degree of

social activism that the crisis has aroused at a grass roots level.

From the seeming decline of the older cities, taxpayers are slowly

being transformed into citizens, privatized districts into authentic neighborhoods, and a passive populace into an active

public.

If would be naive to overstate this trend and view it as a

practical solution to the crises that beleaguer the northeastern cities. The awakening of public life in these cities will not end

the erosion of their economic and fiscal bases. If the destiny of the

American city is to be determined largely by its industrial and

commercial “growth potential,” this very criterion implies a

redefinition of the city as a business enterprise, not a social and

cultural space. So conceived, the city will have ceased to exist

precisely because of its strictly economic preconditions and its

standards of successful performance.

If the real historic basis of the city, on the other hand, is seen to

be an active body politic and a spirited public life, then New York

is more successful as an authentic municipality than Dallas or

Houston. The evidence for this reawakening of citizen activity

amidst urban decay is often compelling. For example, a convocation last year of block-association representatives by the

Citizens Committee for New York City and the Federation of

Citywide Block Associations, yielded 1,300 activists who, according to a *New York Times* report, “debated community with

the zest, and frequently the contentiousness, of an election-year

political convention.” The report notes that the “neighborhood

activists” were guided by the “conviction that civic betterment

starts on the block where on lives.” However oppressive the

problems discussed — “crime, sanitation, housing improvements, fund-raising, recycling, day care and ‘fighting City Hall’” —

the mood of the activists “was anything but grim. There was

almost an evangelical, upbeat spirit as block leaders told of ways

they had successfully dealt with safety problems or found new

techniques of raising money for tree planting.”

It matters little that the issues raised may often be trivial and

inconsequential. What is far more important than the agenda of

such forms is the extraparliamentary nature of the form itself and

the participatory features of the association. Convocations of

molecular civic groups like “block associations” that resemble a

“political convention” in a normal year mark a rupture with

institutionalized governmental processes. They comprise, in

Martin Buber’s sense, social structures as distinguished from

political ones. Power acquires a public, indeed a personal,

character which, to the bureaucrat, is a kind of social “vigilantism” and “anarchy” and to the participant is a “town

meeting.” The energy that buoys up the convocation, the anti-

hierarchical character that often marks its organization, and the

verve of its participants implies a renewed sense of power as

distinguished from the powerlessness that constitutes the social

malaise of our times.

The trivialities of the agenda should not blind us to the historic

importance of municipal reawakenings at this level of action. The

role of civic activism as means for far-reaching social change

dates back to the American and French revolutions, and formed

the basis for revolutionary change in the Paris Commune of 1871.

In revolutionary America, “the nature of city government came in

for heated discussion,” observes Merril Jensen in a fascinating

discussion of the period. Town meetings, whether legal or

informal, “had been a focal point of revolutionary activity.” The

antidemocratic reaction that set in after the American revolution was marked by efforts to do away with town meeting

governments that had spread well beyond New England to the

mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Attempts by conservative

elements were made to establish a “corporate form (of municipal

government) whereby the towns could be government by mayors

and councils” elected from urban wards. Judging from New

Jersey, the merchants “backed incorporation consistently in the

efforts to escape town meetings.” Such efforts were successful

not only in cities and towns of that state but also in Charleston,

New Haven, and eventually even Boston. Jensen, addressing

himself to the incorporated form of municipal government and

restricted suffrage that replaced the more democratic assembly

form of the revolutionaries of 1776 in Philadelphia, expresses a

judgement that could apply to all the successful efforts on behalf

of municipal incorporation following the revolution: “The counter-revolution in Philadelphia was complete.”

A decade later, the French revolutionaries faced much the

same problem when the *sans culottes* and *enrages* tried to affirm

the power of the Parisian local popular assemblies or “sections”

over the centralized Convention and Committee of Public Safety

controlled by Robespierrists. Ironically, the final victory of the

Convention over the sections was to cost Robespierre his life and

end the influence of the Jacobins over subsequent developments.

The municipal movement, indeed a rich classical heritage of the

city as community that had nourished the social outlook of

German idealism and later utopian socialist and anarchist

theories, dropped from sight with the emergence of Marxism and

its narrow “class analysis” of history. Yet it can hardly be ignored

that the Paris Commune of 1871, which provided Marxism and

anarchism with its earliest models of a liberated society, was

precisely a revolutionary municipal movement whose goal of a

“social republic” had been developed within a confederalist

framework of free municipalities or “communes.”

Although the older northeastern cities of the United States

hardly bear comparison with their own ancestral communities of

two centuries ago, much less revolutionary Paris, it would be

myopic to ignore certain fascinating similarities. The block

committees of New York City are not the town meetings of

Boston or the sections of Paris; they do not profess any historic

goals for the most part nor have they advanced any programmatic expression in support of major social change. But they

clearly score a new advance in the demands of their participants — primarily, a claim to governance in the administration of

their “blocks,” a proclivity for federation, and in the best of cases,

an emerging body politic. The city itself is riddled by tenants

associations, ad hoc committees and councils to achieve specific

neighborhood goals, a stable Neighborhood Housing Movement,

and broad-spectrum organizations that propound an ideology of

“neighborhood government.” These groups, often networks,

that advance a concept of decentralized self-management,

however intuitive their views, stand out in refreshing relief against

a decades-long history of municipal centralization and neighborhood erosion. Even demands of “municipal liberty” are

being heard in terms that are more suggestive of an earlier civic

radicalism than its proponents are prepared to admit.

In a number of instances, such “block” and neighborhood

organisations have gone beyond the proprieties of convocations,

fundraising, sanitation, public safety, and even demonstrations to

take over unused or abandoned property and stake out a moral

right to cooperative ownership. Apart from episodic occupations

of closed libraries, schools, and a “peoples” firehouse, the most

important of these occupations have been neglected or unhabitable buildings. One such action, now called the “East Eleventh

Street Movement” has achieved a national reputation. Initially,

the Movement was a Puerto Rican neighborhood organization,

one of several in the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, which formed

an alliance with some young radical intellectuals to rehabilitate an

abandoned tenement that had been gutted completely by fire.

The block itself, one of the worst in the Hispanic ghetto, had

become a hangout for drug addicts, car-strippers, muggers, and

arsonists. Unlike most buildings which are taken over by

squatters, 519 East 11 St. was a city-acquired ruin, a mere shell of

a structure that had been boarded up after it had been totally

destroyed by fire. This building was to be totally rebuilt by coopers, composed for the most part of Puerto Ricans and some

whites, by funds acquired from a city “program” that accepts

labour as equity for loans — the now famous “sweat equity

program.” The Movement’s attempts to acquire the building, to

fund it, to expand its activities to other abandoned structures

were to become a cause celebre that has since inspired similar

efforts both in the Lower Eastside and other ghetto areas. To a

certain degree, the building was taken over before “sweat equity”

negotiations with the city had been completed. The city was

patently reluctant to assist the co-opers and apparently yielded to

strong local pressure before supplying aid. The building itself was

not only rebuilt but also “retrofitted” with energy-saving devices,

insulation, solar panels for preheating water and a Jacobs wind

generator for some of its electric power. An account of the

conflicts between the “East Eleventh Street Movement,” the city

bureaucracy, and finally Consolidated Edision would comprise a

sizable article in itself. What is perhaps the most significant

feature of the project is its libertarian ambience. The project was

not only a fascinating structural enterprise; it was an extraordinary cooperative effort in every sense of the term.

Politically, the Movement was “fighting City Hall” — and it did so

with an awareness that it was promoting decentralized local

rights over big municipal as well as big State and Federal

government. Economically, it was fighting the financial establishment by advancing a concept of labour — “sweat equity” — over the usual capital and monetary premises of investment. Socially, it was fighting the pre-eminence which bureauracy has claimed over the community by intervening and often

disrupting the maddening regulatory machinery that has so often,

in itself, defeated almost every grass-roots movement for structural and neighborhood rehabilitation.

All of these conflicts were conducted with a minimal degree of

hierarchy and a strong emphasis on egalitarian organizational

forms. Participants were encouraged to voice their views and

freely assume responsability for the building itself and the group’s

conflicts with municipal agencies and utilities. This organizational

form has been preserved after the rebuilding of 519 East 11 Street

was completed and occupied. The entire block was — and, in

part, remains — involved in varying degreees with the group’s

activities and its efforts to reclaim other buildings in the area.

Many participants have acquired a heightened sense of social

awareness as a result of their own efforts to achieve a degree of

“municipal liberty,” if only for their own physical space and

nearby blocks. Activists who remain involved with the larger

aspects of the project — its explosive political, social, and economic implications — have a radical consciousness of their goals.

What began as a desperate effort of housing co-opers to rescue

their own homes, in effect, has become a social movement.

Such movements, in some cases involving “illegal” seizures of

abandoned buildings, are growing in number in New York and

other older cities. Although they have not always exhibited the

staying power and libertarian ambience of the “East Eleventh

Street Movement,” they must be seen in terms of the context

they have themselves created. “Municipal liberty” in the older

cities, to be sure, does not mean the “liberty, equality, and

fraternity” which the more radical Parisian sections tried to

foster; nor does it have the mobilizing and solidarizing qualities of

the more radical American town meetings. The projects than can

be related to this new civic trend — be they housing co-opers,

“sweat equity” programs, block committees, tenants groups,

neighborhood “alliances, or cooperative day-care, educational,

cultural, and even food projects — vary enormously in their

longevity, stability, social consciousness, and scope. In some

cases, they are blatently elitist and civically exclusionary. To a

large extent, they form a constellation of new subcultures that

have evolved from the broader countercultural movement of the

sixties, a constellation that has been greatly modified by ethnic

disparaties, urban disarray, a broad disengagement of municipal

government from its own constituency, an emerging “free space”

for popular, often libertarian, civic entities, and the civic bases for

a new body politic.

But a living trend they remain — and the most important trend

to emerge in American cities today. In contrast to the bureaucratically managed and municipally regimented sunbelt cities,

they represent a largely regional development. The very fact that

they have been fueled by urban decay conceals their significance

as the most significant trend in generations to reclaim the city as

the public space for an authentic citizenry. If they are not a

“vision” of the future, they may well be one of its harbingers.

Certainly they are one of the most exciting links American cities

have yet produced between the urban past and the urban

future — a new “treasure,” as Arendt might have put it, in the

development of human community and the human spirit.

A vision of the urban future — if it is to be conceived as a city

and not a sprawling agglomeration of man-made structures —

is haunted by the past. The assumption that we cannot “return”

to the past can become a trite excuse for ignorance of that very

past or an unconditional renunciation of what we can learn from

it. To the serious student of urban life, the most fascinating point

of departure for relating past to future is the Hellenic *polis*. That

we live in a world of nation-states and multinational corporations

is no excuse to continue do so. The urban future must be viewed

from a standpoint that may sharply contradict the immediate

future of our present SMSAs, a future that seems to consist of

more business, more structural as well as economic growth, and

more centralization, whether in the name of “regionalization” or

“federalism.” That future must be above all a new conception of

the “city of man” that fulfills our most advanced concepts of

humanity’s potentialities: freedom and self-consciousness, the

two terms that form the historic message of Western civilization.

Self-consciousness, at the very least, implies a new self: a self

that can be conscious. Consciousness, certainly in the fulness of

its truth, presupposes an environment in which the individual can

conceptually grasp the conditions that influence his or her life and

exercise control over them. Indeed, insofar as an individual lacks

these dual elements of consciousness, he or she is neither free

nor fully human in the self-actualized sense of the term. Denied

intellectual and institutional access to the economic resources

that sustain us, to the culture that nourishes our mental and spiritual growth, and to the social forms that frame our behaviour as

civilized beings, we are not only denied our freedom and our

ability to function rationally but our very selfhood. The great

cultural critics of society have voiced this conclusion for centuries. This conclusion has even more relevance today — an era

of social decay that seems almost cosmic in its scale — than at any

time in the past.

In terms of the city, such a conclusion means that a vision of the

urban future can be regarded as rational and humanly viable only

insofar as the city lends itself to individual comprehension —

notably, that it is an entity that can be understood by the

individual and modified by individual action. That the city whose

population “can be taken in at a single view” (Aristotle) — that is,

scaled physically and numerically to human dimensions — remained essential to the Hellenic ideal of the *polis* is merely

another way of saying that a city without a citizenry, an active

body politic, is not a city, indeed unworthy of anything but

barbarians. Human scale is a necessary condition for human

self-fulfillment and social fulfillment. A humanistic vision of the

future city must rest on the premise that the authentic “city of

man” is comprehensible to its citizens or else they will cease to be

citizens and public life itself will disappear. A vision of the urban

future is thus meaningless if it does not include from its very

outset the decentralization of the great SMSAs, the restoration of

city life as a comprehensible form of public life.

Still another vision of the future must include the recovery of

face-to-face form of civic management — a selfhood that is

formed by self-management in assemblies, committees, and

councils. We can never “outgrow” the Hellenic *ecclesia* or the

American town meeting without debasing the word “growth” to

mean mere change rather than development. The existence of an

authentic public presupposes the most direct system of communication we can possibly achieve, notably, face-to-face communication. Again, another of Aristotle’s caveats is appropriate

here: “... in order to decide questions of justice and in order to

distribute the offices according to merit it is necessary for the

citizens to know each other’s personal characters, since where

this does not happen to be the case, the business of electing

officials and trying law-suits is bound to go badly; haphazard

decision is unjust in both matters, and this must obviously prevail

in an excessively numerous community.” It need hardly be

emphasized that Aristotle would have been appalled as much by

the telecommunications of a “global village ” as he would have

been by the very concept of the world as a huge city or village.

Human scale thus means human contact, not economic, cultural,

and institutional comprehensibility alone. Not only should the

things, forms and organizations that make up a community be

comprehensible to the citizen, but the very individuals — their

“personal characters” — who form the citizen body. The terms

“citizen body,” in this sense, assume more than an institutional

concept; they take on a physical, existential, sensory, indeed

protoplasmic, quality.

Thus far, I have been careful to stress the conditions that

foster public life rather than the things that make for the “good

life” materially. Decentralization and human scale have been

emphasized as the bases for a new civic arena. Whether they are

more “efficient” systems of social organization or more “ecological” types of association, as some writers have argued, has not

been emphasized. That a city, landscaped into the countryside,

will promote a new land ethic and afford its citizens greater access

to nature — perhaps even restore the urbanized farmer so prized

by the Athenian *polis* and republican Rome — adds to the case for

physical environment. But ultimately it is the very need for a

reactivated citizenry that must be stressed over efficiency,

ecological awareness, and vocational roundedness. Without that

citizenry we now face the loss not only of our cities, but of

civilization itself.

Finally, the recovery of a body politic and a civic community

can scarcely be imagined without the commutarian sharing of the

means of life — the material as well as social communizing that

authentic community presupposes. In a technological world

where the means of production are too powerful to be deployed

any longer for means of domination, it is doubtful if society, much

less the city, can survive a privately owned economy riddled by

self-interest and an insatiable need for growth. More than the

“good life,” materially speaking, is involved in a communitarian

system of production and distribution; the very existence of a

coherent community interest is now at issue. Here, too, Hellenic

culture has much to teach us about the future. Private interest

can not be so dominant a motive in social relationships that it

subverts the public interest. If private property once formed

an underpinning of individualism in the corporatized cities of the

past such as the guild-directed medievel towns, today, in the “free

market” of giant oligopolies it has become the underpinning of

naked egotism, indeed, the institutionalized expression of asocial

behaviour of the most ruthless kind. If the city is to become a

public body of active citizens, it must extend the public interest to

the material as well as institutional and cultural elements of civic

life.

Here we can part company with the Hellenic outlook and view

the future as more than a recovery of the past. Modern

technology — “hard,” “soft,” “appropriate,” or as I would prefer

to call it, liberatory — has finally made it possible for us to

eliminate the fears which stalked Aristotle: “an overpopulous

• polis* / of / foreigners and metics / who / will readily acquire

the rights of citizens...” To these potential upstarts, one might

also add slaves and women. The leisure or schole — the freedom

from labour — that made it possible for Athenian citizens to

devote their time to public life is no longer a birthright conferred

by slavery on an ethnic elite but one conferred by technology on

humanity as a whole. That we may feel free to reject that

birthright for a “simpler,” “labour intensive” way of life is a historic

privilege that itself is conferred by the very existence of technology. Although a “global village” created by telecommunications would be an abominable negation of the city as a citizen

body, “global citizenship” in clearly defined cities would constitute its highest actualization — the civic socialization of parochial folk into a universal humanity.

This vision of the urban future must now stand as it is — vague,

perhaps, and broad but hopeful. Any additions or details would

be utopian in the worst sense of the word. They would form a

“blueprint” that seeks to design without discussion and impose

without consent. A libertarian vision should be a venture in

speculative participation. Half-finished ideas should be proferred

deliberately, not because finished ones are difficult to formulate

but rather because completeness to the point of details would

subvert dialogue — and it is dialogue itself that is essential to civic

relations, just as it is logos that forms the basis of society.

<right>

December 1978

</right>

[57] The ambiguity of the tendency is evident in the writings of Marx and Engels.

Despite Engels’s critical thrust in his well-known pamphlet “The Housing

Question,” he clearly shared Marx’s view that the bourgeois city marked a

distinct advance over rural “parochialism.”

[58] Notably organizations such as the Alliance for Neighborhood Government in

the United States and the Montreal Citizens Movement (MCM) in Canada,

The MCM, which already holds a considerable number of seats in Montreal’s

city council, has advanced the most radical program of all. “Nous devons

instaurer notre propre democratic afin de realiser notre plan de reorganisation de la societe,” it declares in its latest program. And further:

“Le conseil de quartier (which the MCM seeks to substitute for the existing

“districts electoraux”) ne devra done jamais devenir un autre palier de

gouvernement a I’interieur de la societe capitaliste” (Montreal Citizens

Movement, 1976).

[59] There is, in fact, no offical “sweat equity program” in New York City. The

“program” is the legal and funding nexus which youthful activists on the

East 11 Street project and “U-Hab,” a New York homesteading group,

created when early attempts were made to rebuild abandoned structures in the

city. For the most recent survey of “sweat equity” projects in New York, see

the Third Annual Progress Report of the Urban Homesteading Assistance

Board.

[60] Milton Kotler (1975), for example, has emphasized the efficiency of decentralization and F.S. Schumacher (1973), its capacity to promote ecological

awareness. In the latter case, I must share some responsability for this

emphasis in as much as Dr. Schumacher, quoting me by earlier pseudonym,

Lewis Herber, accepts my assertion that “reconciliation of man with the

natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become necessary” (p. 107).

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New York: Bantam.

New York Times (1976). March 26.

SCHUMACHER, F.S. (1973). Small is beautiful. London: Blond and Briggs.

WRIGHT, F.L. (1964). “The city as a machine.” Pp. 91–94 in C.E. Elias, Jr. et al.

(eds.), Metropolis: Values in conflict, Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

</biblio>

----

“Toward a Vision of the Urban Future” by Murray Bookchin is reprinted from The

Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (URBAN AFFAIRS ANNUAL REVIEWS, Vol. 14)

David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins, Editors, copyright 1977 pp. 259–276 by

permission of the Publisher, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills/London)

Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology

Marx’s work, perhaps the most remarkable project to

demystify bourgeois social relations, has itself become the most

subtle mystification of capitalism in our era. I refer not to any

latent “positivism” in the Marxian corpus or to any retrospective recognition of its “historical limits.” A serious critique of

Marxism must begin with its innermost nature as the most

advanced product — indeed, the culmination — of the bourgeois

Enlightenment. It will no longer suffice to see Marx’s work as the

point of departure for a new social critique, to accept its

“method” as valid despite the limited content it yielded in its day,

to extol its goals as liberatory apart from its means, to view the

project as tainted by its dubious heirs or adherents.

Indeed, Marx’s “failure” to develop a radical critique of

capitalism and a revolutionary practice emerges not even as a

failure in the sense of an enterprise that remains inadequate to its

goals. Quite to the contrary. At its best, Marx’s work is an

inherent self-deception that inadvertently absorbs the most

questionable tenets of Enlightenment thought into its very

sensibility and remains surprisingly vulnerable to their bourgeois

implications. At its worst, it provides the most subtle apologia for

a new historic era that has witnessed the melding of the “free

market” with economic planning, private property with nationalized property, competition with the oligopolistic manipulation

of production and consumption, the economy with the state — in

short, the modern epoch of state capitalism. The surprising

congruence of Marx’s “scientific socialism” — a socialism which

reared the goals of economic rationalization, planned production,

and a “proletarian state” as essential elements of the revolutionary project — with the inherent development of capitalism

toward monopoly, political control, and a seemingly “welfare

state has already brought institutionalized Marxian tendencies

such as Social Democracy and Euro-Communism into open

complicity with the stabilization of a highly rationalized era of

capitalism. Indeed, by a slight shift of perspective, we can easily

use Marxian ideology to describe this state capitalist era as

“Socialist.”

Can such a shift of perspective be shrugged off as a “vulgarization” or “betrayal” of the Marxian project? Or does it comprise

the very realization of Marxism’s most fundamental assumptions — a logic that may have even been hidden to Marx himself?

When Lenin describes socialism as “nothing but state capitalist

monopoly made to benefit the whole people,” does he violate the

integrity of the Marxian project with his own “vulgarizations” ? Or

does he reveal underlying premises of Marxian theory that render

it historically into the most sophisticated ideology of advanced

capitalism? What is basically at stake in asking these questions is

whether there are shared assumptions between all Marxists that

provide real premises for Social-Democratic and Euro-Communist practice and Lenin’s futuristics. A theory that is so readily

“vulgarized,” “betrayed,” or, more sinisterly, institutionalized

into bureaucratic power forms by nearly all of its adherents may

well be one that lends itself to such “vulgarizations,” “betrayals,”

and bureaucratic forms as a *normal condition of its existence*.

What may seem to be “vulgarizations,” “betrayals,” and bureaucratic manifestations of its tenets in the heated light of doctrinal

disputes may prove to be the fulfillment of its tenets in the cold

light of historical development. In any case, all the historical roles,

today, seem to have been totally miscast. Rather than refurbishing Marxism so that it can catch up with the many advanced

phases of modern capitalism, it may well be that many advanced

phases of modern capitalism in the more traditional bourgeois

countries have yet to catch up with Marxism as the most

sophisticated *ideological* anticipation of the capitalist development.

Let there be no mistake that I am engaged in an academic play

of words. Reality exhibits even more compelling paradoxes than

theory. The Red Flag flies over a world of Socialist countries that

stand at mutual war with each other, while Marxian parties

outside their perimeter form indispensable props for an increasingly state capitalist world that, ironically enough, arbitrates

between — or aligns itself with — its contending Socialist neighbors. The proletariat, like its plebian counterpart in the ancient

world, shares actively in a system that sees its greatest threat

from a diffuse populace of intellectuals, urban dwellers, feminists,

gays, environmentalists — in short, a trans-class “people” that

still expresses the utopian ideals of democratic revolutions long

passed. To say that Marxism merely takes no account, today, of

this utterly unMarxian constellation is to be excessively generous

toward an ideology that has become the “revolutionary” persona

of state capitalist reaction. Marxism is exquisitely constructed to

• obscure* these new relationships, to distort their meaning, and,

where all else fails, to reduce them to its economistic categories.

The Socialist countries and movements, in turn, are no less

“socialist” for their “distortions” than for their professed

“achievements.” Indeed, their “distortions” acquire greater significance than their “achievements” because they reveal in

compelling fashion the ideological apparatus that serves to

mystify state capitalism. Hence, more than ever, it is necessary

that this apparatus be explored, its roots unearthed, its logic

revealed, and its spirit exorcised from the modern revolutionary

project. Once drawn into the clear light of critique, it will be seen

for what it truly is — not as “incomplete,” “vulgarized” or

“betrayed” but rather as the historic essence of counterrevolution, indeed, of counterrevolution that has more effectively

used every liberatory vision against liberation than any historic

ideology since Christianity.

Marxism and Domination

Marxism converges with Enlightenment bourgeois ideology at

a point where both seem to share a scientistic conception of

reality. What usually eludes many critics of Marx’s scientism,

however, is the *extent* to which “scientific socialism” objectifies

the revolutionary project and thereby necessarily divests it of all

ethical content and goals. Recent attempts by neo-Marxists to

infuse a psychological, cultural, and linguistic meaning into

Marxism challenge it on its own terms without candidly dealing

with its innermost nature. Whether consciously or not, they

share in the mystifying role of Marxism, however useful their

work may be in strictly theoretical terms. In fact, as to the matter

of scientific methodology, Marx can be read in many ways. His

famous comparison in the “Preface” to *Capital* of the physicist

who experimentally reproduces natural phenomena in their

“pure state” and his own choice of England as the “*locus classicus*” of industrial capitalism in his own day obviously reveals

a scientistic bias that is only reinforced by his claim that *Capital*

reveals the “natural laws” of “economic movement” in capitalism ; indeed, that the work treats “the economic formation of

society (not only capitalism — M.B.)... as a process of natural

history...” On the other hand, such formulations can be counterbalanced by the dialectical character of the *Grundrisse* and of

• Capital* itself, a dialectic that probes the internal transformations

of capitalist society from an organic and immanent standpoint

that hardly accords with the physicist’s conception of reality.

What decisively unites both the scientism of physics and the

Marxian dialectic, however, is the concept of “lawfulness” itself —

the preconception that social reality and its trajectory can be

explained in terms that remove human visions, cultural influences, and most significantly, ethical goals from the social

process. Indeed, Marxism elucidates the function of these

cultural, psychological, and ethical “forces” in terms that make

them contingent on “laws” which act behind human wills. Human

wills, by their mutual interaction and obstruction, “cancel” each

other out and leave the “economic factor” free to determine

human affairs. Or to use Engels’s monumental formulation, these

wills comprise “innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series

of parallograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the

historic event.” Hence, in the long run, “the economic ones are

ultimately decisive.” (Letter to J. Bloch) It is by no means clear

that Marx, who adduces the physicist’s laboratory as a paradigm, would have disagreed with Engels’s social geometry. In

any case, whether social “laws” are dialectical or not is beside the

point. The fact is that they constitute a consistently *objective*

basis for social development that is uniquely characteristic of the

Enlightenment’s approach to reality.

We must pause to weigh the full implications of this turn in what

could be called Marx’s “theory of knowledge.” Greek thought

also had a notion of law, but one that was guided more by a

concept of “destiny” or *Moira* than “necessity” in the modern

sense of the term. *Moira* embodied the concept of “necessity”

governed by meaning, by an ethically conditioned goal fixed by

“destiny.” The actual realization of “destiny” was governed by

justice or *Dike* which preserved the world order by keeping each

of the cosmic elements within their appointed bounds. The

mythic nature of this conception of “law” should not close our

eyes to its highly ethical content. “Necessity” was not merely

compulsion but *moral* compulsion that had *meaning* and *purpose*. Insofar as human knowledge has a right to assume that the

world is an orderly one — an assumption that modern science

shares with mythic cosmologies if only to make knowledge

possible — it has a right to assume that this order has intelligibility or meaning. It can be translated by human thought into a

purposive constellation of relations. From the implicit concept of

goal that is inherent in any notion of an orderly universe, Greek

philosophy could claim the right to speak of “justice” and “strife”

in the cosmic order, of “attraction” and “repulsion,” of “injustice”

and “retribution.” Given the eventual need for a nature philosophy that will guide us toward a deeper sense of ecological insight

into our warped relationship with the natural world, we are by no

means free of a less mythic need to restore this Hellenic

sensibility.

The Enlightenment, by divesting law of all ethical content,

produced an objective cosmos that had order without meaning.

Laplace, its greatest astronomer, removed not only god from his

description of the cosmos in his famous reply to Napoleon, but

also the classical ethos that guided the universe. But the

Elightenment left one arena open to this ethos — the social arena,

one in which order still had meaning and change still had purpose.

Enlightenment thought retained the ethical vision of a moral

humanity that could be educated to live in a moral society. This

vision, with its generous commitment to freedom, equality, and

rationality was to be the well-spring of utopian socialism and

anarchism in the century to follow.

Ironically, Marx completed Enlightenment thought by bringing

the Laplacian cosmos into society — not, to be sure, as a crude

mechanist but certainly as a scientist in harsh opposition to any

form of social utopianism. Far more significant than Marx’s belief

that he had rooted socialism in science is the fact that he had

rooted the “destiny” of society in science. Henceforth, “men”

were to be seen (to use Marx’s own words in the “Preface” to

• Capital*) as the “personification of economic categories, the

bearer of particular class interest,” not as individuals possessed

of volition and of ethical purpose. They were turned into the

objects of social law, a law as divested of moral meaning as Laplace’s cosmic law. Science had not merely become a means for

describing society but had become its fate.

What is significant in this subversion of the ethical content of

law — indeed, this subversion of dialectic — is the way in which

domination is elevated to the status of a natural fact. Domination is annexed to liberation as a precondition for social

emancipation. Marx, while he may have joined Hegel in a

commitment to consciousness and freedom as the realization of

humanity’s potentialities, has no *inherent* moral or spiritual

criterion for affirming this destiny. The entire theory is captive to

its own reduction of ethics to law, subjectivity to objectivity,

freedom to necessity. Domination now becomes admissible as a

“precondition” for liberation, capitalism as a “precondition” for

socialism, centralization as a “precondition” for decentralization,

the state as a “precondition” for communism. It would have been

enough to say that material and technical development are

preconditions for freedom, but Marx, as we shall see, says

considerably more and in ways that have sinister implications for

the realization of freedom. The constraints, which utopian

thought at its best placed on any transgression of the moral

boundaries of action are dismissed as “ideology.” Not that Marx

would have accepted a totalitarian society as anything but a

vicious affront to his outlook, but there are no *inherent* ethical

considerations in his theoretical apparatus to exclude domination from his social analysis. Within a Marxian framework,

such an exclusion would have to be the result of objective social

law — the process of “natural history” — and that law is morally

neutral. Hence, domination can be challenged not in terms of

an ethics that has an inherent claim to justice and freedom; it can

be challenged — or validated — only by objective laws that have a

validity of their own, that exist behind the backs of “men” and

beyond the reach of “ideology.” This flaw, which goes beyond the

question of Marx’s “scientism,” is a fatal one, for it opens the door

to domination as the hidden incubus of the Marxian project in all

its forms and later developments.

The Conquest of Nature

The impact of this flaw becomes evident once we examine the

premises of the Marxian project at their most basic level, for at

this level we find that domination literally “orders” the project and

gives it intelligibility. Far more important than Marx’s concept of

social development as the “history of class struggle” is his drama

of the extrication of humanity from animality into society, the

“disembeddedness” of humanity from the cyclic “eternality” of

nature into the linear temporality of history. To Marx, humanity is

socialized only to the degree that “men” acquire the technical

equipment and institutional structures to achieve the “conquest”

of nature, a “conquest” that involves the substitution of “universal” mankind for the parochial tribe, economic relations for

kinship relations, abstract labour for concrete labour, social

history for natural history. Herein lies the “revolutionary” role of

capitalism as a social era. “The bourgeois period of history has to

create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand the

universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of

mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand

the development of the productive powers of man and the

transformation of material production into a scientific domination

of natural agencies,” Marx writes in *The Future Results of British Rule in India* (July, 1853). “Bourgeois industry and commerce

create these material conditions of a new world in the same way

as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.

When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of

the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern

powers of production, and subjected them to the common

control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human

progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would

not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

The compelling nature of Marx’s formulations — their evolutionary schema, their use of geological analogies to explain

historical development, their crassly scientistic treatment of

social phenomena, their objectivization of human action as a

sphere beyond ethical evaluation and the exercise of human

will — are all the more striking because of the period in which the

lines were written (Marx’s *Grundrisse* “period”). They are also

striking because of the historic “mission” Marx imparted to

English rule in India: the “destruction” of ancient Indian lifeways

(“the annihilation of old Asiatic society”) and the “regeneration”

of India as a bourgeois nation (“the laying of the material

foundations of Western society in Asia”). Marx’s consistency in

all of these areas deserves respect, not a tasteless refurbishing of

classic ideas with eclectical exegesis and a theoretical adorning or

“updating” of Marx with patchwork conclusions that are borrowed from utterly alien bodies of ideas. Marx is more rigorous in

his notion of historic progress as the conquest of nature than his

later acolytes and, more recently, neo-Marxians. Nearly five

years later, in the *Grundrisse*, he was to depict the “great

civilizing influence of capital” in a manner that accords completely with his notion of the British “mission” in India: “the production

(by capital) of a stage of society compared with which all earlier

stages appear to be merely *local progress* and idolatry of nature.

Nature becomes for the first time simply an object for mankind,

purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognized as a power in

its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent

laws appears only as a strategem designed to subdue it to human

requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the

means of production. Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed

beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of

existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the

reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all

this, and permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles

that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion

of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and

exchange of natural and intellectual forces.”

These words could be drawn almost directly from D’Holbach’s

vision of nature as an “immense laboratory,” from D’Alembert’s

paeans to a new science that sweeps “everything before it... like a

river which has burst its dam,” from Diderot’s hypostasization of

technics in human progress, from Montesqieu’s approving image

of a ravished nature — an image that, judiciously mixed with

William Petty’s metaphor of nature as the “mother” and labour as

the “father” of all commodities, clearly reveal the Enlightenment

matrix of Marx’s outlook. As Ernst Cassirer was to conclude in

an assessment of the Enlightenment mind: “The whole eighteenth century is permeated by this conviction, namely, that in

the history of humanity the time had come to deprive nature of its

carefully guarded secrets, to leave it no longer in the dark to be

marveled at as an incomprehensible mystery but to bring it under

the bright light of reason and analyze it with all its fundamental

forces.” (*The Philosophy of the Enlightenment*)

The Enlightenment roots of Marxism aside, the notion that

nature is “object” to be used by “man” leads not only to the total

despiritization of nature but the total despiritization of “man.”

Indeed, to a greater extent than Marx was prepared to admit,

historic processes move as blindly as natural ones in the sense

that they lack consciousness. The social order develops under

the compulsion of laws that are as suprahuman as the natural

order. Marxian theory sees “man” as the embodiment of two

aspects of material reality: firstly, as a producer who defines

himself by labour; secondly, as a social being whose functions are

primarily economic. When Marx declares that “Men may be

distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or

anything else you like (but they) begin to distinguish themselves

from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of

subsistence,” (*The German Ideology*), he essentially deals with

humanity as a “force” in the productive process that differs from

other material “forces” only to the degree that “man” can

conceptualize productive operations that animals perform instinctively. It is difficult to realize how decisively this notion of

humanity breaks with the classical concept. To Aristotle, “men”

fulfilled their humanity to the degree that they could live in a *polis*

and achieve the “good life.” Hellenic thought as a whole

distinguished “men” from animals by virtue of their rational

capacities. If a “mode of production” is not simply to be regarded

as a means of survival but a “definite *mode of life*” such that

“men” are “what they produce and how they produce” (*The German Ideology*), humanity, in effect, can be regarded as an

instrument of production. The “domination of man by man” is

primarily a *technical* phenomenon rather than an *ethical* one.

Within this incredibly reductionist framework, whether it is valid

for “man” to dominate “man” is to be judged mainly in terms of

technical needs and possibilities, however distasteful such a

criterion may seem to Marx himself had he faced it in all its brute

clarity. Domination, too, as we shall see with Engels’ essay “On

Authority,” becomes a technical phenomenon that underpins the

realm of freedom.

Society, in turn, becomes a mode of labour that is to be judged

by its capacity to meet material needs. Class society remains

unavoidable as long as the “mode of production” fails to provide

the free time and material abundance for human emancipation.

Until the appropriate technical level is achieved, “man’s” evolutionary development remains incomplete. Indeed, popular

communistic visions of earlier eras are mere ideology because

“only want is made general” by premature attempts to achieve an

egalitarian society, “and with want the struggle for necessities and

all the old shit would necessarily be reproduced.” (*The German Ideology*).

Finally, even where technics reaches a relatively high level of

development, “the realm of freedom does not commence until

the point is passed where labour under the compulsion of

necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of

things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict

meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature,

in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and

reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all

forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With

his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because

his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production

increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this

field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized

man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with

nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of

being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish

their task with the least expenditure of energy and under

conditions most adequate to their human nature and most

worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it

begins that development of human power, which is its own end,

the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only

upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the

working day is its fundamental premise.” (*Capital*, Vol. Ill) The

bourgeois conceptual framework reaches its apogee, here in

images of the “savage who must wrestle with nature,” the

unlimited expansion of needs that stands opposed to “ideological” limits to need (i.e., the Hellenic concepts of measure,

balance, and self-sufficiency), the rationalization of production

and labour as desiderata in themselves of a strictly technical

nature, the sharp dichotomy between freedom and necessity,

and the conflict with nature as a condition of social life in all its

forms — class or classless, propertied or communistic.

Accordingly, socialism now moves within an orbit in which, to

use Max Horkheimer’s formulation, “Domination of nature

involves domination of man” — not only “the subjugation of

external nature, human and nonhuman” but human nature.

(*The Eclipse of Reason*) Following his split from the natural world,

“man” can hope for no redemption from class society and

exploitation until he, as a technical force among the technics

created by his own ingenuity, can transcend his objectification.

The precondition for this transcendence is quantitatively measurable : the “shortening of the working day is its fundamental

premise.” Until these preconditions are achieved, “man” remains

under the tyranny of social law, the compulsion of need and

survival. The proletariat, no less than any other class in history, is

captive to the impersonal processes of history. Indeed, as the

class that is most completely dehumanized by bourgeois conditions, it can only transcend its objectified status through “urgent,

no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need...” For Marx,

“The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the

whole proletariat at the moment, *considers* as its aim. The

question is *what the proletariat is*, and what, consequent on that

being, it will be compelled to do.” (*The Holy Family*) Its “being,”

here, is that of object and social law functions as *compulsion*, not

as “destiny.” The subjectivity of the proletariat remains a product

of its objectivity — ironically, a notion that finds a certain degree

of truth in the fact that any radical appeal merely to the objective

factors that enter into the forming of a “proletarian consciousness” or class consciousness strike back like a whiplash

against Socialism in the form of a working class that has “bought

into capitalism,” that seeks its share in the affluence provided by

the system. Thus where reaction is the real basis of action and

need is the basis of motivation, the bourgeois spirit becomes the

“world spirit” of Marxism.

The disenchantment of nature yields the disenchantment of

humanity. “Man” appears as a complex of interests and class

consciousness as the generalization of these interests to the level

of consciousness. To the degree that the classical view of self-

realization through the *polis* recedes before the Marxian view of

self-preservation through Socialism, the bourgeois spirit acquires

a degree of sophistication that makes its earlier spokesmen

(Hobbes, Locke) seem naive. The incubus of domination now

fully reveals its authoritarian logic. Just as necessity becomes the

basis of freedom, authority becomes the basis of rational

coordination. This notion, already implicit in Marx’s harsh

separation of the realms of necessity and freedom — a separation

Fourier was to sharply challenge — is made explicit in Engels’s

essay “On Authority.” To Engels, the factory is a natural fact of

technics, not a specifically bourgeois mode of rationalizing labour ; hence it will exist under communism as well as capitalism. It

will persist “independently of all social organization.” To coordinate a factory’s operations requires “imperious obedience,” in

which factory hands lack all “autonomy.” Class society or

classless, the realm of necessity is also a realm of command and

obedience, of ruler and ruled. In a fashion totally congruent with

all class ideologists from the inception of class society, Engels

weds Socialism to command and rule as a natural fact. Domination is reworked from a social attribute into a precondition for

self-preservation in a technically advanced society.

Hierarchy and Domination

To structure a revolutionary project around “social law” that

lacks ethical content, order that lacks meaning, a harsh opposition between “man” and nature, compulsion rather than consciousness — all of these, taken together with domination as a

precondition for freedom, debase the concept of freedom and

assimilate it to its opposite, coercion. Consciousness becomes

the recognition of its lack of autonomy just as freedom becomes

the recognition of necessity. A politics of “liberation” emerges

that reflects the development of advanced capitalist society into

nationalized production, planning, centralization, the rationalized control of nature — and the rationalized control of “men.” If

the proletariat cannot comprehend its own “destiny” by itself, a

party that speaks in its name becomes justified as the authentic expression of that consciousness, even if it stands opposed to

the proletariat itself. If capitalism is the historic means whereby

humanity achieves the conquest of nature, the techniques of

bourgeois industry need merely be reorganized to serve the goals

of Socialism. If ethics are merely ideology, Socialist goals are the

product of history rather than reflection and it is by criteria

mandated by history that we are to determine the problems of

ends and means, not by reason and disputation.

There seem to be fragments in Marx’s writings that could be

counterposed to this grim picture of Marxian Socialism. Marx’s

“Speech at the Anniversary of the *People’s Paper*” (April, 1856),

for example, describes the enslavement of “man” by “man” in the

attempt to master nature as an “infamy.” The “pure light of

science seems unable to shine but on a dark background of

ignorance” and our technical achievements “seem to result in

endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying

human life into a material force.” This moral evaluation recurs in

Marx’s writings more as explanations of historic development

than justifications that give it meaning. But Alfred Schmidt, who

quotes them at length in *Marx’s Concept of Nature*, neglects to

tell us that Marx often viewed such moral evaluations as evidence

of immature sentimentality. The “speech” mocks those who

“wail” over the misery that technical and scientific advances yield.

“On our part,” Marx declares, “we do not mistake the shape of

the shrewd spirit (one may justifiably translate “shrewd spirit” to

read “cunning of reason” — M.B.) that continues to mark all these

contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces

of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men —

and such are the working men.” The speech, in fact, ends with a

tribute to modern industry and particularly to the English

proletariat as the “first born sons of modern industry.”

Even if one views Marx’s ethical proclivities as authentic, they

are marginal to the core of his writings. The attempts to redeem

Marx and fragments of his writings from the logic of his thought

and work becomes ideological because it obfuscates a thorough

exploration of the meaning of Marxism as a practice and the

extent to which a “class analysis” can reveal the sources of

human oppression. We come, here, to a fundamental split within

Socialism as a whole: the limits of a class analysis, the ability of a

theory based on class relations and property relations to explain

history and the modern crisis.

Basic to anti-authoritarian Socialism — specifically, to Anarchist Communism — is the notion that hierarchy and domination

cannot be subsumed by class rule and economic exploitation,

indeed, that they are more fundamental to an understanding of

the modern revolutionary project. Before “man” began to exploit

“man,” he began to dominate woman; even earlier — if we are to

accept Paul Radin’s view — the old began to dominate the young

through a hierarchy of age-groups, gerontocracies, and ancestor-worship. Power of human over human long antedates *the very formation of classes and economic modes of social oppression*. If

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles,” this order of history is preceded by an earlier, more

fundamental conflict: social domination by gerontocracies, patriarchy, and even bureaucracy. To explore the emergence of

hierarchy and domination is obviously beyond the scope of this

work. I have dealt with it in considerable detail in my forthcoming

book, *The Ecology of Freedom*. Such an exploration would carry

us beyond political economy into the realm of the domestic

economy, the civil realm into the family realm, the class realm into

the sexual realm. It would provide us with an entirely new psychosocial set of foundations from which to read the nature of human

oppression and open an entirely new horizon from which to

gauge the true meaning of human freedom. We would certainly

have to shed the function Marx imparts to interest and technics

as social determinants — which is not to deny their role historically, but to search into the claims of non-economic factors such

as status, order, recognition, indeed, into rights and duties which

may even be materially burdensome to commanding strata of

society. This much is clear: it will no longer do to insist that a

classless society, freed of material exploitation, will necessarily be

a liberated society. There is nothing in the social future to suggest

that bureaucracy is incompatible with a classless society, the

domination of women, the young, ethnic groups or even professional strata.

These notions reveal the limits of Marx’s own work, his inability

to grasp a realm of history that is vital to understanding freedom

itself. So blind is Marx to authority as such that it becomes a mere

technical feature of production, a “natural fact” in “man’s”

metabolism with nature. Woman, too, becomes an exploited

being not because she is rendered docile by man (or “weak” to

use a term that Marx regarded as her most endearing trait) but

because her labour is enslaved to man. Children remain merely

“childish,” the expression of untamed and undisciplined “human

nature.” Nature, needless to say, remains mere object of utility,

its laws to be mastered and commanded in an enterprise of

conquest. There can be no Marxian theory of the family, of

feminism, or of ecology because Marx negates the issues they

raise or worse, transmutes them into economic ones. Hence,

attempts to formulate a Marxian feminism tend to degenerate

into “wages for housewives,” a Marxian psychology into a

Marcusan reading of Freud, and a Marxian ecology into “pollution is profitable.” Far from clarifying the issues that may help

define the revolutionary project, these efforts at hybridization

conceal them by making it difficult to see that “ruling class”

women are ruled by “ruling class” men, that Freud is merely the

alter ego of Marx, that ecological balance presupposes a new

sensibility and ethics that are not only different from Marxism but

in flat opposition to it.

Marx’s work is not only the most sophisticated ideology of

state capitalism but it impedes a truly revolutionary conception of

freedom. It alters our perception of social issues in such a way

that we cannot relevantly anchor the revolutionary project in

sexual relations, the family, community, education, and the

fostering of a truly revolutionary sensibility and ethics. At every

point in this enterprise, we are impeded by economistic categories that claim a more fundamental priority and thereby

invalidate the enterprise at its outset. Merely to amend these

economistic categories or to modify them is to acknowledge their

sovereignty over revolutionary consciousness in altered form,

not to question their relationship to more fundamental ones. It is

to build obscurantism into the enterprise from the outset of our

investigation. The development of a revolutionary project must

• begin* by shedding the Marxian categories from the very beginning, to fix on more basic categories created by hierarchical

society from its inception all the more to place the economic ones

in their proper context. It is no longer simply capitalism we wish to

demolish; it is an older and more archaic world that lives on in the

present one — the domination of human by human, the rationale

of hierarchy as such.

<right>

February, 1979

</right>

On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, and the Body Politic

The historic failure of proletarian socialism, particularly its

Marxian form, to provide a revolutionary theory and practice for

our time has been followed by a highly abstract form of socialist

theoretics that stands sharply at odds with the very notion of a

revolutionary project — notably, a theory that is meant to yield a

viable revolutionary practice.

If this judgment seems harsh, it hardly conveys the extent to

which this theoretics has become a considerable culture industry

in its own right. The retreat of socialism from the factory to the

academy — an astonishing phenomenon that cannot be justified

by viewing “knowledge” as a technical force in society — has

denied socialism the right to a decent internment by perpetuating

it as a professionalized ideology. An enfeebled theory, long

drained of its sweeping liberatory claims, socialism has been

turned from a social phenomenon into an academic discipline,

from a historic reality into a mere specimen of intellectual history

that is cultured exotically all the more to obscure the need for an

entirely new conception of theory and practice.

Indeed, to the degree that the academy itself has become

increasingly disengaged from society, it has used socialist theoretics to indulge its worst intellectual habits. The remains of a

once-insurgent movement have provided the intellectual nutrients for academic conceptual frameworks that are utterly alien

to it — a level of discourse, a range of perceptions, a terminology,

and a body of intellectual pretensions that mutually reinforce the

reduction of academic ideology to socialism and of socialism to

ideology. One must leave it to the conscience of the socialist academics to ask themselves if Marx’s account of social development

as a history of class struggle can be translated into a history of

“distorted communication,”{1} his critique of political economy into a specific “paradigm” of “intersubjectivity,” and his relations of

production into “symbolically mediated forms of social interaction.” An earlier generation of Marxian theorists, however

serious their shortcomings, would have banished the very term

“sociology” from the vocabulary of radical ideas, not to speak of

its desiccated categories and its odious pretensions to exactitude. Today, this vocabulary has been replaced by a more

ennervated one in which socially neutral terms and concepts,

denuded of the flesh and blood of experience, pirouette around

each other in an intellectual ballet that imparts to them an almost

dream-like transcendental quality. The most technically convoluted strategies for stating the obvious — Marx’s scientism, eco-

nomism, and his roots in the Enlightenment — are cultivated to

create a dichotomy between theoretics and reality that effectively immunizes concepts to the test of experience.

Partly in reaction to this trend, experience itself has been

hypostasized at the expense of theoretical coherence — to a

point, at times, when the refreshing immediacy of reality fosters a

reverence for raw facts of “perception,” indeed, for the authority of the episodic and anecdotal. It remains to be seen if

Habermas’s highly formalized theoretics can be given real social

substance by the research of his colleagues at Starnberg or if

various phenomenological and structural tendencies that have

been drifting through Marxism can bring socialism into a

meaningful confrontation with contemporary industrial capitalism. But in all of these cases, theoretical critique has been

notable for its absence of radical reconstruction. Neither the later

generation of “critical theorists” nor their opponents as reflected

by newer formalizations of Marxism have given substance to their

visions of freedom and practice. Shaped by academic templates

like speech situations, systems theory, *Verstehen*, and research

guided by the technical criteria of sociology, the harsh fact

remains that socialism has been converted from a once viable

social reality into the “idea” of socialism in much the same sense

that Collingwood dealt with the “idea” of nature. Theoretical

coherence has not been spared the revenge of a lack of

experience any more than experience has been spared the

revenge of a lack of theoretical coherence. Both have become

equally abstract in their one-sidedness and partiality.

What is most disturbing about the self-absorption of so many of

these theoretical and empirical tendencies — tendencies which

may be broadly designated as “neo-Marxian” — is the promiscuity with which they meld utterly antithetical radical goals and

traditions. Libertarian concepts and authoritarian ones, individualistic and collectivistic, economistic and cultural, scientistic

and ethical — all have been funded together into an ecumenical

radicalism” that lacks the consistency required by a serious

revolutionary practice. Classical Marxian tendencies, functioning

under the imperatives of organized political movements, were

compelled to press the logic of their premises to the point of a

combative social engagement with bourgeois reality. Neo-

Marxism enjoys the luxury of theoretical reveries in which

basically incompatible visions of freedom intermingle and become diffuse and obscure.

Let me state this problem concretely. Are the differences

between decentralization and centralization merely differences of

degree or of kind? Should we seek to strike some enigmatic

“balance” between them or are they fundamentally incompatible

with each other? Is direct democracy in a “mass society” (to use

Marcuse’s fascinating expression in his discussion of this issue)

impossible without the delegation of power to representatives or

must it literally be direct, face-to-face, of the kind that prevailed in

the Athenian *polis*, the French revolutionary sections of 1793,

and the New England town meetings? Can direct democracy be

equated with workers’ councils, soviets, the German *Rate*, an

equation that is made not only by neo-Marxists, council communists, but also many anarchosyndicalists? Or do these essentially executive forms stand at odds with the communes and

popular assemblies emphasized by anarcho-communists? Can

bureaucracy of any kind coexist with libertarian institutions or

are they inexorably opposed to each other?

Doubtless, these questions raise many problems of terminology that can easily obscure points of agreement between

seemingly contrasting views. To some neo-Marxists who see

centralization and decentralization merely as difference of degree, the word “centralization” may merely be an awkward way of

denoting means for *coordinating* the decisions made by decentralized bodies. Marx it is worth noting, greatly confused this

distinction when he praised the Paris Commune as a “working,

not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same

time.{2} In point of fact, the consolidation of “executive and

legislative” functions in a single body was regressive. It simply

identified the process of policy-making, a function that rightly

should belong to the people in assembly, with the technical

execution of these policies, a function that could be left to strictly

administrative bodies subject to rotation, recall, limitations of

tenure, wherever possible, selected by sortition. Accordingly, the

melding of policy formation with administration placed the

institutional emphasis of classical socialism on centralized bodies,

indeed, by an ironical twist of historical events, bestowing the

privilege of formulating policy on the “higher bodies 5 ’ of socialist hierarchies and their execution precisely on the more popular

“revolutionary committees” below.

Similarly, the concept of “representation” intermingled with

“direct democracy” serves to obscure the distinction between

popular institutions which should decide policy and the “representative” institutions which should merely execute them. In this

connection, Rousseau’s famous passage on the constitutive

nature of a “people” in *The Social Contract* applies even more to

the “mass society” of our times than the institutionally articulated one of his era. “Sovereignty, for the same reason that

makes it inalienable, cannot be represented” Rousseau declares;

“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 .” However problematical Rousseau’s concept of

“general will” may be, quite aside from his archaic concept of

“law,” the premises that underly it cannot be evaded: “... the

moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer

free: *it no longer exists*.”{3} (My emphasis — M.B.)

It is precisely in terms of a “general will” more libertarian and

individuated than any conceived by Rousseau that reveals the

workers’ councils, soviets, and the Rate to be socially one-sided

and potentially hierarchical. Councils may be popularly constituted, but they are not *constitutive* of a “public sphere.” As the

locus of the decision-making process in society, they absorb

within executive bodies the liberties that more appropriately

belong to a clearly delineable body politic and thereby subvert

institutions such as communes, cooperatives, and popular

assemblies that indeed constitute a people and express a popular

will. Councils, in effect, usurp the political subjectivity that should

be shared by all in social forms that express the individual’s claim

to social sovereignty. That Bolshevism recognized this possibility and later cynically exploited it is revealed by the emphasis

Lenin placed on the factory as the social basis of the soviets.

Here, indeed, a “proletarian public sphere,” to use Oscar Neckt’s

phrase, was acknowledged and hypostasized — not as a truly

democratic arena, but as the locus for a “proletarian public” that

could be strategically deployed against the great mass of

“unreliable” peasants whose villages comprised the authentic

“public sphere” of revolutionary Russia.

But the factory, far from being the strongest aspect of the

“proletarian public sphere” is, in fact, its most vulnerable.[61]

However much its social weight is reinforced by revolutionary

shop committees and the most democratic forms of selfmanagement, the factory is in no sense an autonomous social

organism. Quite to the contrary, it is a particularly dependent one

that can only function — indeed, exist — in conjunction with other

factories and sources of raw materials. The Bolsheviks were to

astutely use this very limitation of the factory to centralize the

“proletarian public sphere” to a point where they were to remove

the last vestigial remains of proletarian democracy: first, by

employing the soviets to isolate the factory from its place in the

local community; then, by shifting power from the community to

the nation in the form of national congresses of soviets. The use of

soviets to interlink the proletariat from factory to factory across

the entire breadth of Russia, literally amputating it as a social

stratum from any comprehensible roots in specific localities

where it could function effectively, served to hopelessly delimit its

powers and to rigorously centralize it. In the immense, national

congresses of soviets staged annually during the revolutionary

years, the Russian proletariat had lost all power over the soviets

even before the authority of the congresses had been completely

usurped by the Bolshevik party.{4}

[61] I say this provocatively because the myth still persists among council

communists, many neo-Marxists, and particularly anarchosyndicalists (who,

owing to the resurgence of the CNT in Spain, represent a very vocal constituency in the European libertarian Left) that “workers control” of the economy

is equivalent to worker’s control of society. All theoretical considerations aside,

the ease with which the CNT was out-maneuvered by the bourgeois state, despite

its massive control of the Catalan economy in 1936–37, should have dispelled such

simple economistic notions of power a generation ago.

Quite likely, the centralization of the proletariat could have

been achieved by the Bolsheviks in any case, without manipulating the soviet hierarchy. The very class nature of the

proletariat, its existence as a creature of a national division of

labour and its highly particularistic interests that rarely rise to the

level of a general interest, belie Marx’s claims for its universality

and its historic role as a revolutionary agent. These attributes,

which hindsight clearly reveals today, explain the failure of all

classical “proletarian revolutions” in the past. Neither the Paris

Commune, which was really fought out by the last remnants of

the traditional French *sans culottes*, nor the Spanish revolution,

which was fought out by workers with rural roots, are exceptions.

Indeed, Social Democracy and Leninism in all its varieties used

this particularistic interest with great effect against broader

revolutionary tendencies in society as witness Ebert’s shrewd

manipulation of the German *Rate*, Stalin’s infamous “Lenin

Levy,” and more recently, the commanding influence of European Communist and Socialist parties over the working class

today.

Space does not make it possible to deal with the hierarchical

nature of the factory structure and its impact on the formation of

proletarian consciousness. If labour is the “steeling school” of the

proletariat, as the young Marx was to emphasize, its locus, the

factory, is a “school” based on “imperious obedience,” as Engels

was to add in later years — indeed, a “school” marked by the

complete absence of “autonomy.”{5} I have explored this issue

elsewhere, in a work written more than a decade ago, and more

recently, in my forthcoming *Ecology of Freedom*, where I

question the existence of the factory as a natural fact of technics

that must persist “independently of all social organization”

(Engels).{6}

What is significant in all of these issues is the way they are

• integrated* by neo-Marxism into the very problematical premises

of classical Marxism, thereby neutralizing them as the bases for a

thoroughly new radical theory and practice. Perhaps the most

striking examples of these incongruities can be culled from

Marcuse’s sixties writings, a literature which juxtaposes traditional, shopworn interpretations of political reality with philosophical, esthetic, and psychoanalytic insights that, in themselves,

clearly pave new theoretical ground. These incongruities cannot

be dismissed as the blind-spots of an otherwise far-ranging mind. I

must reluctantly insist that they impugn the integrity of the larger

vision Marcuse was to advance, the extent to which it was fully

thought out, and the political conclusions that followed from it.

It is not trivial to ask why a work like *An Essay on Liberation* that contrasted the need for a “moral radicalism” with the

scientistic radicalism of Marxian orthodoxy; that called for a

“passing from Marx to Fourier” and “from realism to surrealism”;

that celebrated the “new sensibility” of the sixties counterculture for its sensuousness, playfulness, and the challenge it

posed to the “*esprit de serieux* in the socialist camp”; that singled

out the “aesthetic dimension” as “a sort of gauge for a free

society” — indeed, that with all of this buoyant utopianism, could

have casually included the observation that the “global dominion

of corporate capitalism... keeps the socialist orbit on the defensive, all too costly not only in terms of military expenditures but

also in the perpetuation of a repressive bureaucracy.” Or claim

that in Vietnam, Cuba, and China, “a revolution is being defended

and driven forward which struggles (!) to eschew the bureaucratic administration of socialism.” Or, still further, deals with the

“Third World” as an “external proletariat” and its insurgent

peasantry as a “rural proletariat” with the inevitable implication

(stated more explicitly by Marcuse during a lecture at New York

University a year earlier) that the apparent docility of the “internal

proletariat” of the Euro-American “orbit” did not negate Marx’s

traditional theory of class struggle when capitalism is viewd as a

global phenomenon.{7}

One cannot afford to merely grimace at such distasteful

Bolshevik apologetics for the “socialist orbit” as a society

“deformed” by a “repressive bureaucracy” because of capitalist

encirclement. Nor can one regard it as an expression of the geist

of the time that Marcuse, a man thoroughly schooled in the

history of the interwar Left, could mystify the Vietnamese,

Cuban, and Chinese “revolutions” as anti-bureaucratic — certainly not without deliberately ignoring the Bolshevik legacy

claimed by their leaders, the Stalinist structure of their parties,

and the specious nature of the “revolutions” themselves. For

nearly two generations, Marxists had debated the question of

whether “repressive bureaucracies” within the “socialist orbit”

(which certainly includes Vietnam, Cuba, and China) were

merely “deformations” produced by capitalist encirclement or

whether the “socialist orbit” itself constituted a historically new

typology that required critique in its own right. The schizophrenic

nature of Marcuse’s vision was to find its most striking expression

in *Counter-Revolution and Revolt* where, incredibly, the “mass”

Communist parties of Europe and their unions were placed on

the “Left of Social Democracy” and, as a result of this meaningless “constellation,” were described as “still a potentially revolutionary force.”{8} Such observations are not episodic errors in

judgement; they reflect a preformed social outlook that is more

basic than encomiums to “moral radicalism,” “Fourier,” “surrealism,” and the “aesthetic dimension” as “a sort of gauge for a free

society.”

Characteristically, when the chips are down, Marcuse like

many neo-Marxists, falls on the side of centralization, delegated

power, councils, and authority, as against decentralization, direct

democracy, popular assemblies, and spontaneity. Again, like his

melding of “moral radicalism” with Bolshevik apologetics, he

does not explore the conflicting logic of these concepts, but

mystifies them- with a libertarian rhetoric that conceals his

orthodox Marxist foundations. Occasionally, this rhetoric does

violence to historical fact. For one who has lived through the

Spanish Civil War era, for example, it is astonishing to read that

the “international brigades” — a force Stalinist movements crassly employed for counterrevolutionary as well as military purposes — symbolized the “union of young intellectuals and

workers.”{9} Not only was the formulation maladroit thirty years

after the war, but it grossly misled the ill-informed radical youth

who revered Marcuse as their elder statesman.[62] We are reaping

the harvest of such historical sloppiness, today, with an effluvium

of romantic eulogies to the Rosenbergs and the Stalinist hacks of

the 1930s — this, quite aside from a revival of Stalinism by young

sectarians who have been schooled in the writings of Ho, Mao,

and Fidel. Doubtless, to impute these trends to Marcuse’s

political sloppiness would be ridiculous. But that he contributed

even passingly to the making of such myths rather than their

ruthless demystification is not to be shrugged off as accidental

and raises even larger issues about the premises of neo-Marxism

as such.

[62] For my own part, I could cite many personal experiences where young people

who read this passage in Marcuse’s essay and viewed such repellent “documentaries” as *To Die in Madrid* had to be educated into the real facts about Spain,

not to speak of such myths as the “libertarian” proclivities of Maoism and theory

of an “external proletariat,” a position that was later to become the keystone of

Weatherman propaganda.

Accordingly, even as Marcuse exultantly praises the “rebels”

of May-June 1968 for using “direct action” to transform the

“indirect democracy of corporate capitalism into a direct democracy,” his libertarian fervor is increasingly dispelled by the

formulations which follow. “Direct action,” and more pointedly,

“direct democracy,” vaporize into “elections and representation

(that) no longer serve as institutions of domination.” This

hopelessly feckless formula is groomed with such traditionally

Marxian rhetoric as “genuinely free selection and election of

candidates, revocability at the discretion of constituencies, and

uncensored education and information.” Even Lenin in

• State and Revolution* dispensed more generous liberties that Marcuse.

What links Lenin and Marcuse in a common belief is their shared

view that “in a modern mass society,” to use Marcuse’s words,

“democracy, no matter in what form, is not conceivable without a

system of representation.” To reduce this formula to its molecular constituents, Marcuse cannot envision socialism without a

“mass society” anymore than Engels can envision socialism

without factories.{10}

Not surprisingly, Marcuse is more at home with the “seminal achievements of... the ‘councils’ (‘soviets,’ *Rate*) as organizations of self-determination, self-government (or rather preparation for self-government) in local popular assemblies.” That

• Rate* and “local popular assemblies” stand in historic contradiction to each other is not posed as an issue because the

contradiction lacks intelligibility if one thinks of a free society in

largely institutional or structural terms — which are the terms

with which Marcuse operates on a political level. If his Freudo-

Marxism reclaims the sovereignty of the ego, of play and the

“aesthetic dimension” in daily life, it lacks any viable life-line to his

notion of socialism as a “mass society.” This dualism that divides

Marcuse’s anarchism on the personal plane from his Marxian

pragmatics on the social must inevitably lead to the absorption of

the personal by the social, of the “black flag” (to use his own

metaphors) by the “red flag.”{11} When he advances the slogan,

“Spontaneity does not contradict authority,” is it necessary to

ask what he means by the word “authority.” Self-discipline,

education, and wisdom, as I have argued elsewhere in advancing

the notion of “informed spontaneity” — or obedience, submission, and surrogation of will? It is by no means clear that one can

infer from Marcuse’s Freudo-Marxism that the rights he acknowledges for the individual can be translated into social and

institutional terms. The two are loosely bonded precisely because

Marcuse sees no contradiction between his anarchism on the

personal level and his Marxism on the social. Theory may permit

this dichotomy to exist indefinitely as an exotic flower with a

prickly stem, hence the success neo-Marxism enjoys as an

academic project. Practice must bring the two into bitter

contradiction with each other once neo-Marxism removes itself

from the campus — and where it has done so, it exercises virtually

no influence.

It would be a grave error to view my remarks on Marcuse as a

critique of Marcuse as an *individual* thinker. Inasmuch as his

theoretics have dealt more directly with social problems than that

of any other neo-Marxist body of theory, they more clearly reveal

the limits of the neo-Marxian project. Habermas is veiled by a

formalism so abstract and a jargon so equivocal and dense that he

is almost beyond the reach of pointed criticism. Castoriadis has

abandoned Marxism completely. More importantly, the seeming

schizophrenia of Marcuse’s theoretics is not a personal trait but a

generic one. Owing to Marcuse’s own courage in venturing into

social issues that neo-Marxists usually avoid — direct democracy,

decentralization, representation, spontaneity, and liberatory

social structures — he clearly reveals the extent to which these

issues are intrinsically alien to Marxism as such, indeed to

socialism. To this list of issues, one may reasonably add ecology,

urbanism, and more fundamentally, hierarchy, domination, and a

liberatory rationality.

What neo-Marxists have not candidly faced is the extent to

which Marxism in *all* its forms is organically structured to

respond to social changes that lend themselves to analyses of

class relations, economic exploitation, industrial rationalization,

political institutions, and mass constituences. To the degree

social changes raise broader issues of hierarchy, domination,

ecological dislocations, liberatory technologies, social forms

based on face-to-face relations, and individual sovereignty, these

issues must be “hydrolyzed” (if I may be permitted to use a

biological analogy) into simpler, more “soluble” ingredients that

render them accessible to Marxian categories, indeed, to a

Marxian outlook. That such monumental social issues must be

degraded so that they can be absorbed by Marxism raises the

basic question of whether the theory can be perpetuated in its

wholeness or whether it should not be fragmented and its more

viable components absorbed into a much broader theory and

practice that will eschew the very use of terms like “Marxism” and

“socialism.”[63]

[63] I cannot help but note that Freudo-Marxism itself is an unstable hybridization of

subjective categories with the value-free “social science” Marx sought to bestow

on socialism. Women’s liberation, like ecology, urbanism, even “workers’ control”

and neighborhood sovereignty, must be grafted on to the Marxian corpus like

alien theoretical transplants. Alas, the sutures barely hold the grafts to the main

body. A veritable industry, maintained by a number of well-known “neo-Marxist”

hacks, has been established to provide the necessary cosmetics for the disfiguring

effects of this bizarre surgery. But behind it all, one invariably encounters the

same Marxian outlook with its fixation on the proletariat (“external” or “internal,”

“old” or “new”), on economic data and power constellations. Important as these

areas surely are, they are not the last word in social analyses and as mere subjects

of analyses do not provide the fundamental bases for theoretical reconstruction

and a new radical practice.

Ultimately, a line will have to be drawn that, by definition,

excludes any project that can tip decentralization to the side of

centralization, direct democracy to the side of delegated power,

libertarian institutions to the side of bureaucracy, and spontaneity to the side of authority. Such a line, like a physical barrier,

must irrevocably separate a libertarian zone of theory and

practice from the hybridized socialisms that tend to denature it.

This zone must build its anti-authoritarian, utopian, and revolutionary commitments into the very recognition it has of itself, in

short, into the very way it defines itself. Given the intellectual

opportunism that marks our era, there is no way that a libertarian

zone can retain its integrity and *transparency* without describing

its parameters in terms that reveal every conceivable form of

treachery to its ideals, at which point it must cease to be what it

professes to be. I would hold that such a zone can only be

denoted by the term “anarcho-communism,” a term that denies

the validity of all claims of domination by definition. Accordingly,

to admit of domination is to cross the line that separates the

libertarian zone from the socialist. Whosoever eschews the term

in the name of a revolutionary project that is theoretically more

delectable and socially more popular remains unreliable in his or

her commitment to libertarian goals as such — goals that must

remain tentative insofar as they are not rooted in the fixidity of

consistently anti-authoritarian premises. Perhaps such a fixidity

of premises may be intellectually distasteful or socially impractical. These are legitimate questions that must be decided by discussion or personal conscience. But the very fixidity of premises

that define anarcho-communism as a consistently libertarian zone is the sole guarantee that a revolutionary project will not slither

back to forms of theory and practice that inherently lend

themselves to opportunistic compromises.

Traditions and personalities must not be permitted to stand in

the way of our self-understanding of the issues involved. One may

look askance at a Proudhon for his philistinism, at Bakunin for his

naievete, at Kropotkin for his didacticism, at Durruti for his

terrorism — and anarchist theoretics generally for its simplicity.

Even if each such assessment were true, which I do not believe to

be the case it would merely be episodic in the face of a social crisis

so massive and a social response so opportunistic that we can no

longer retain any revolutionary project without the most compelling moral imperatives. Existentially, our era allows for no

commitment that falls short of the anarcho-communist project

for liberation, certainly not without leading to the betrayal of

humanity’s potentiality for freedom.

In any case, neo-Marxism and “libertarian socialism” fail us in

the content they impart to a liberated society. To mingle direct

democracy with delegated power, to build a free society on the

concept of a “mass society,” to reduce hierarchy to class

relations and domination to economic exploitation reveal a gross

failure to understand the meaning of *society* — of human consociation — as a realm of freedom. With the politicization of

society by state institutions, the substitution of bureaucratic ties

for human relations, the homogenization of social forms and

personal relations, socialist theoretics too has lost its very sense

of society as more than a vague “public sphere” subject to

rational, albeit “humanistic,” controls. In this wasteland of social

forms, we are obliged to ask questions that would have been

taken for granted in an earlier era. What constitutes a human

community and a society based on self-management? What

constitutes that classical self-acting agent we denote by the term

“citizen”? To the extent that these questions are not adequately

answered, concepts like direct democracy and self-management

remain formal abstractions that can be hybridized and distorted

without regard to any abiding criteria of social freedom. Ultimately, the answers we give to these questions determine the

authenticity of our commitment to a free society.

We have used words like “modernity” and “industrial” society

to conceal a basic difference between capitalism and precapitalist societies, a difference that is highly relevant to the questions I

have raised above. In whatever ways precapitalist societies

differed from each other, they differed from capitalism in the fact

that they were basically *organic*, richly articulated in forms and

structures that were to be ultimately challenged and destroyed by

bourgeois market relations. Even where the eye moves beyond

the egalitarian world of the early human bands and clans,

underlying all the bureaucratic and political formations that were

to layer the surface of tribal, village, and guild-like societies were

the extended families, tribal relationships, village structures,

guilds, and even neighborhood associations that retained a

subterranean autonomy of their own. Marx was to address

himself to the tenacity of these “subpolitical” formations in his

observations on the “small and extremely ancient” communities

in India “that are based on the possession of land in common, on

the blending of agriculture and handicrafts and on an unalterable

division of labour, which serves as a fixed plan and basis for action

whenever a new community is started.”

The organic nature of these communities, which Marx was to

emphasize even more strongly in the *Grundrisse*, is described in

primarily economic terms, in economic categories that subtly

degrade the human content of their associative implications and

absorb them into the framework of historical economism that

vitiates Marxian anthropology. But their inner social power, their

vitality as human impulses toward sociation, seeps through

Marx’s remarks nevertheless. “The law that regulates the division

of labour in the community acts with the irresistibile authority of a

law of nature, while each individual craftsman, the smith, the

carpenter and so on, conducts in his workshop all the operations

of his handicraft in the traditional way, but independently, and

without recognizing any authority. The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when

accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with

the same name — this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of

the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking

contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic

states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure

of the fundamental economic elements of society remain untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of

politics.”{12}

One could wish for a discussion of this “riddle” in less

reductionist economic categories, although the entire passage,

taken word for word, is a fascinating guide to Marx’s methodology even when he moves beyond the sphere of bourgeois society.

Whether Marx had a “social philosophy” or not, his treatment of

history is intellectually unified by an economism that itself could

pass for a social philosophy. Kropotkin, whose associationist

sensibility is much stronger than Marx’s, points out that the early

medieval city “could hardly be named a State as regard its interior

organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the

present centralization of functions than of the present territorial

centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city

was usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven

sections radiating from a centre, each quarter or section roughly

corresponding to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in

it, but nevertheless containing inhabitants of different social

positions and occupations — nobles, merchants, artisans, or

even half-serfs; and each section or quarter constituted a quite

independent agglomeration. In Venice, each island was an

independent political community. It had its own organized trades,

its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and administration,

its own forum; the nomination of a doge by the city changed

nothing in the inner independence of the units. In Cologne, we see

the inhabitants divided into... neighborhood guilds, which dated

from the Franconian period,” each of which had its own judge,

jury, and local militia commander. Kropotlin quotes J.R. Green to

the effect that in London, before the Conquest, social life was

based on “a number of little groups scattered here and there over

the area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and

institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and only

drawing together into a municipal union.” “The mediaeval city

thus appears as a double federation,” Kropotkin concludes: “of

all householders united into small territorial unions — the street,

the parish, the section — and of individuals united by oaths into

guilds according to their professions; the former being a product

of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is a

subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.”[64]{13}

[64] The patronizing attitude of many Marxist theorists toward Kropotkin’s work in

this area and the cultivated oblivion they exhibit toward historical disputes that

were waged between Marxists and anarchists over such widely ranging issues as

the general strike and the importance of popular control of revolutionary

institutions is evidence of an odious “partyness” that must be directly confronted

wherever it exists. Are we to forget that Rose Luxemburg in the

• Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions* grossly misrepresented the anarchist emphasis

on the general strike after the 1905 revolution in Russia in order to make it

acceptable to Social Democracy? That Lenin was to engage in the same

misrepresentation on the issue of popular control in

• State and Revolution*? That

in recent years Marxist writers, who have adduced the factory as a “school” for

conditioning the proletariat into submission to union and party hierarchies have

yet to acknowledge the anarchist literature that originally pointed to this problem ?

Much the same can be said around such issues as ecology, utopianism, and even

gay and women’s liberation. As long as neo-Marxists stake out a claim to concepts

that are historically alien to their traditions in Marxism, they not only perpetuate

the mystification of radical history, but exhibit a moral probity that is hardly better

than that of the society they profess to oppose.

The most striking feature of the capitalist market is its ability to

unravel this highly textured social structure, to invade and divest

earlier social forms of their complexity of human relations. Even

as capitalism seems to amplify the autonomy and claims of the

individual, it does so by attenuating the content and structure of

society. As *Gemeinschaft* theorists like Buber have pointed out:

“When we examine the capitalist society which has given birth to

socialism, *as a society*, we see that it is a society inherently poor in

structure and growing visibly poorer every day. By the structure

of a society is to be understood its social content or community

content: a society can be called structurally rich to the extent that

it is build up of genuine societies, that is, local communes and

trade communes and their step by step association. What Gierke

says of the Co-operative Movement in the Middle Ages is true of

every structurally rich society: it is ‘marked by a tendency to

expand and extend the unions, to produce larger associations

over and above the smaller associations, confederations over and

above individual unions, all-embracing confederations over and

above particular confederations.’ At whatever point we examine

the structure of such a society we find the cell-tissue ‘Society’ everywhere, i.e. a living and life-giving collaboration, an

essentially autonomous consociation of human beings, shaping

and re-shaping itself from within. Society is naturally composed

not of disparate individuals but of associative units and the

associations between them.”

The capitalist economy and the centralized state “peculiar to

it” begin to hollow out this highly articulated social structure until

the modern “individualizing process” ends up as an atomizing

process, a process that divests the individual of the social

substance indispensable to individuality itself. Although the old

organic forms retain “their outer stability, for the most part,” they

become “hollow in sense and in spirit — a tissue of decay. Not

merely what we call the ‘masses” but the whole of society is in

essence amorphous, unarticulated, poor in structure. Neither do

those associations help which spring from the meeting of

economic or spiritual interests — the strongest of which is the

party: what there is of human intercourse in them is no longer a

living thing, and the compensations for the lost community-forms

we seek in them can be found in none. In the face of all this, which

makes ‘society’ a contradiction in terms, the ‘utopian’ socialists

have aspired more and more to a restructuring of society; not, as

the Marxist critic thinks, in any romantic attempt to revive the

stages of development that are over and done with, but rather in

alliance with the decentralized counter-tendencies which can be

perceived underlying all economic and social evolution, and in

alliance with something that is slowly evolving in the human soul:

the most intimate of all resistances — resistance to mass or

collective loneliness.”{14}

There are observations I have brought into Buber’s remarks —

partly directly, partly by selective quotation — that are not

properly integral to his outlook. Buber does not oppose state

forms as such, a difference that mars his admiration for Kropotkin — only state forms “peculiar” to capitalism. Nor does he

oppose a market economy as such — only a bourgeois one. His

discussion of “utopian” socialism is highly selective; it ignores

“utopian” socialists like Saint-Simon who stand on a level below

his own and others, like Fourier, who go far beyond him. Like a

good Proudhonian, he seems oblivious to the possibility that “all-

embracing confederations over and above particular confederations” could easily yield social hierarchies as domineering as

ruling classes. But his emphasis on the “cell tissue ‘Society’”

provides a much-needed correction of social theories that focus

primarily on the skeletal infrastructure of society, be it economic

or institutional. By denuding society of virtually all its molecular

substance, Marxian theory and modern sociology generally have

been able to formulate many broad principles of social development ; indeed, analyses of production relations, social relations,

and historical “stages” of society lend themselves to more

seductively elegant logical constructs than analyses of concrete,

often highly particularized local associations. But these generalizations, valuable as they may be, are all too often achieved by

defining social life in highly formalized and abstract terms. The

“laws” and categories derived by creating formal typologies are

often gained at the expense of insights that the molecular

structures provide and the challenging conclusions they imply.

Indeed, the attempt to cast society in essentially generic terms

can easily provide ideological support for the “hollowing out” of

associative units by capitalism and the state.[65] By rendering social

thought blind to the significance of these units — villages, neighborhoods, cooperatives, and the like — Marxian and bourgeois

sociology take for granted and even participate in the preemption of community by bureaucracy, associated individuals by

privatized egos, the society by the state.

[65] Historically, one of the most striking examples of this support must be placed

directly at the doorstep of Marx himself. For Marx to have described capital as a

“great civilizing influence” that not only reduces nature purely to an “object for

man (Menschen — “mankind” in the McLellan translation, “humankind” in the

Nicolaus!), purely as an object of utility,” but also as a force that drives beyond “all

traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and

reproductions of old ways of life” must now be viewed as more closely akin to this

ideological process than a form of naive nineteenth-century evolutionism.

(*Grundrise*, Random House, pg. 410; the Nicolaus translation has been corrected

to remove the fiction that Marx was a committed feminist in his terminology)

These remarks by Marx must not be dismissed as a mere theoretical matter.

Bitter conflicts within the Russian and Spanish revolutionary movements over

opponents and supporters of the more desirable features of village society were to

reflect conflicting attitudes toward Marx’s encomiums to the “historically

progressive” role of capitalism, particularly in its destruction of precapitalist

formations. Isaiah Berlin, in his excellent introduction to Franco Venturi’s

• Roots of Revolution* (Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), has discussed this cleavage

in the Russian revolutionary movements with great sympathy for the anarchistic

Populists. I have dealt with the same issue in the Spanish revolutionary movements in my *Spanish Anarchists* (Free Life Editions, 1977), a work that is also

available as a Harper & Row paperback.

To state the issue more broadly, the buyer-seller relationship of the market place, carried by the logic of the commodity

relationship to the point of a market society, literally simplifies social life to the level of the inorganic. I have pointed out

elsewhere that ecologically, the most significant problem we face

today is not merely environmental pollution but environmental

simplification,{15} Capitalism is literally undoing the work of

organic evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of

concrete, metal, and glass, by turning soil into sand, by overriding

and undermining highly complex ecosystems that yield local

differences in the natural world — in short, by replacing a

complex organic environment with a simplified inorganic one —

market society is literally disassembling a biosphere that has

supported humanity for countless millenia. In the course of

replacing the complex ecological relationships, on which all

complex living things depend, for more elementary ones, capitalism is restoring the biosphere to a stage where it will be able to

support only simpler forms of life. If his great reversal of the

evolutionary process continues, it is by no means fanciful to

suppose that the preconditions for more complex forms of life will

be irreparably destroyed and the earth will become incapable of

supporting humanity itself.

This process of simplification, however, is by no means

confined to ecology; it is also a social phenomenon, as sweeping

in its implications for human history as it is for natural history. If

the competitive nexus of market society, based on the maxim

“grow or die” must literally simplify the organic world, so too must

the reduction of all social relations to exchange relations literally

simplify the social world. Divested of any content but the brute

relationships of buying and selling, of homogenized, mass-

produced objects that are created and consumed for their own

sake, social form itself undergoes the attenuation of institutions

based on mutual aid, solidarity, vocational affiliations, creative

endeavour, even love and friendship. The “cell tissue ‘Society’” is

thus reduced to the monadic ego; the extended family to the

nuclear family and finally to disassociated sexual partners who

enjoy neither the responsabilities of commitment nor emotional

affinities but live in the vaccum of estranged intercourse and the

insecurities of passionless indifference.

Indeed, the logic of market society is the market *qua* society:

the emergence of objects, of commodities, as the materialization

of *all* social relationships.[66] No longer are we simply confronted

with the “fetishization” of commodities or the alienation of labour,

but rather with the erosion of consociation as such, the reduction

of people to the very isolated objects they produce and consume.

Capitalism, in dissolving virtually every viable form of community

association, installs the isolated ego as its nuclear social form, just

as clans, families, *polis* , guilds, and neighborhoods once comprised the nuclear social forms of precapitalist societv

[66] I have emphasized the word “all” because a market society is no longer a

market *economy*. The colonization of every aspect of life by capitalism —

personal as well as social, domestic as well as industrial, retail as well as

productive — is a relatively recent phenomenon that really came into its own after

World War II. Until the 1950s, the individual could still find a refuge from the

workaday world of the capitalist economy in the private world of home and

neighborhoods. Not until the postwar years did capitalism fully colonize the realm

of consumption; its prewar triumphs were largely limited to the realm of production.

Neighborhoods, structured around a viable domestic world, small retail shops,

and a dazzling variety of cultural societies, existed up to the early 1950s. The

dissolution of neighborhoods by suburbs, of retail shops by shopping malls, and

cultural societies by television, not to speak of domestic life by the nuclear family,

finally ended the neighborhood as a form of village life within the city. Capitalist

consumption, now triumphant, has ended even the most externalized notions of a

public space. ’ The nearest thing to such a “space” is literally the shopping mall,

where consumers engage in a ballet with commodities and adolescents wander

amidst deserted lobbies to meet for sexual assignations and, of course, smoke

marijuana.

Social regression on this scale imparts a new function to

bureaucracy. Under capitalism, today, bureaucratic institutions

are not merely systems of social control; they are literally

institutional substitutes for social form. They comprise the

skeletal framework of a society that, as Greek social thought

would have emphasized, edges on inherent disorder.{16} However much market society may advance productive forces, it

takes its historic revenge not only in the rationalization it inflicts

on society, but the destruction it inflicts on the highly articulated

social relations that once provided the springboard for a viable

social opposition. The most disturbing feature‘of modern’bureau-

cracy is not merely the coercion regimentation, and control it

imposes on society, but the extent to which it is literally

• constitutive* of modern society: the extent to which it validates

itself as the realm of “order” against the chaos of social

dissolution. Just as the ancient city — its temples, gardens,

political institutions, and well-cultivated environs — represented human order as against the ever-menacing encroachment of

natural “disorder,” so bureaucracy emerges as the structural

sinews and bones that sustain the dissolving, decaying flesh of

market society. Precapitalist societies have resisted or simply

side-stepped bureaucratic formations that were imposed upon

them with the highly articulated internal life they developed on

their own or inherited from the past. Capitality society becomes

• bureaucratized* to its very marrow precisely because the market

can never provide society with an internal life of its own.

This fact expresses both the possibilities of bureaucracy as a

social infrastructure and its historical limits. The very anonymity

of bureaucracy reveals the authority of the system over personality, of the social framework over its “personnel.” The ease with

which Stalinism reproduced itself structurally as a grotesque

persistence of bureaus amidst a chronic execution of bureaucrats

is testimony to a total depersonalization of social control today —

the appalling *asociality* that bourgeois society finally achieves in

its mythic “socialization” of humanity. Together with the “denaturing” of humanity, capitalism creates a synthetic society so

completely divested of organic attributes that its social relations

are literally mineralized into objects. The bureaucrat is truly

faceless because he or she has no protoplasmic existence; the

depraved notion that administrative decision-making can be

taken over by computers and public expression by electronic

media — a notion seriously considered as a step in the direction of

“direct democracy” by theoretically sophisticated radical groups

like the French Situationists, not only zany science-fiction

“Utopians” — increasingly renders the flesh-and-blood bureaucrat and citizen an anachronism. As in Platonic metaphysics, the

immediate world of perception becomes the imperfect, transient

“copy” of an *eidos* that transcends the uncertain and chaotic

materiality of life itself. If bureaucracy represents the culmination

of social order, capitalism totally belies the historic destiny Marx

imputed to it as the means for universalizing humanity and

providing it with the means for controlling its own destiny.

Bureaucracy, as a system perfected to the point of voiceless

depersonalization, now represents a *mute society* even more

divested of self-articulation than “mute nature.” In the structureless void to which capitalism has reduced society, the public

realm literally becomes a public *space*, public only in the sense

that it is occupied by interlinking bureaus. Flow diagrams and

systems theory become the language of corporate entities that,

lacking even the presence of the lusty “robber barons,” consist of

objects moving through depersonalized agencies. The homeostasis of these corporate entities depends not upon personal

judgements but the corrective power of deviations. Contemporary language unerringly calls this “feedback,” “input,” and

“output,” not discourse, dialogue or judgement.

There is a moral that must be drawn from this massive

regression to the inorganic: capitalism has not performed the

historic function of “disembedding” humanity from nature. Over

and beyond the haunting power of archaic tradition over the

present is an “embeddedness in nature” itself — a *Naturwuchsigkeit* — that found expression in the organic consociation of

human beings: initially, a consociation expressed in clannic ties, a

sexual division of labour, the eminence of the elders, and a

“nature idolatry” that slowly cemented human ties into ever-

expansive forms of association. Doubtless, these were primarily

biological facts, not social; organic, not synthetic. But the price

humanity has paid for its socialization — for the “denaturalization” of blood groups into territorial units, tribes into towns,

and the stranger into citizenship — has taken the form of

capitalism, a rapacious society that has carried through human

socialization by “tearing down all the barriers which hem in the

development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs,

the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and

exchange of natural and material forces. ”{17}

If it is true, as Jeremy Shapiro has argued, that for Marx

capitalism creates the conditions for removing human beings

from their “immersion” in archaic traditions and in nature by “(1)

setting abstract labour free as a force of production through the

process in which labour creates its own conditions, and (2)

freeing individuals from their identification with particular social

roles allotted to them by the social division of labour...,” it is no

less true that capitalism removes them from organic nature only

to “reembed” them in *inorganic* nature.{18} It removes them from a

“concrete labour” that knows nature in all its wealth of forms and

immerses them in an abstract labour that knows only abstract

matter; it removes them from their personal identification with a

social division of labour by divesting them of the very subjective

apparatus required for personality. Although capitalism may

seem to free labour as a force of production in the organic sphere,

it enslaves it to the inorganic, transporting it from the world of

living materiality to the world of dead materiality. Capitalism may

have freed humanity from the archaic “idolatry of nature,” but it

did so only by committing humanity to the modern idolatry of

quantity. In Marxism itself, it may well be that the present releases

the hold of the archaic past on itself, but the present holds the

past captive to fictive conceptions of history that divest human

consociation of all human attributes but “interest,” “productive

power,” domination, and the values of the bourgeois Enlightenment conceived as a project of rationalization and control.

If the “dialectic of history,” as Shapiro tells us, is to be “resolved

through completion of the self-transcendence of nature that

occurs when embeddedness in nature is overcome and human

beings bring the historical process under control,” then this

“control” must involve the re-absorption of nature into society as

a “retribalized” humanity in which the archaic solidarity based on

kinsEIpls replaced by free choice of association, shared concerns, and love.{19} Communes, cooperatives, and assemblies —

in fact, new *poleis* — must replace the poverty of social forms

created by the void we call “capitalism.” Let there be no mistake

about the fact that we are never “disembedded” from nature.

Indeed, it has never been a question of whether we were

“embedded” in nature or not, but rather the *kind* of nature we

have always been “embedded” in — organic or inorganic, eco-

ligical or physical, real or mythic, whole or one-sided, subjec-

tivized or “mindless.” Only the absence of a nature philosophy

that reveals the natural history of mind from the very inception of

the organic world to the present, a philosophy that can reveal the

changing gradations of a natural dialectic into a social, that can

relate the realm of “instrumental action” to “communicative,”

and ultimately human society with nature as the voice of a “mute

nature” resubjectivized by human consciousness — only by virtue of this lacuna in the interface between nature and society is it

possible to speak of “disembeddedness” in disregard of the

meaning of a truly organic society.

Today, any meaningful project for the reconstruction of a

revolutionary theory and practice must take its point of departure from three basic premises: the reconstitution of the “cell

tissue ‘Society’” in the *physical* sense of the term, as a body

politic, that is bereft of the institutions of delegated authority; the

abolition of domination in all its forms — not merely economic

exploitation; and the obvious precondition for the latter achievement, the abolition of hierarchy in all its forms — not merely social

classes. The reductionist attitude of Marxism that defines a body

politic in the ambiguous terms of a “public sphere,” of domination

in terms of economic exploitation, and hierarchy in terms of

economic classes, masks and dissolves the differences between

these concepts. That we could easily achieve a “public sphere”

that professes to be free of class rule and economic exploitation, yet is riddled by patriarchy, bureaucracy, and a system of

ruled and ruler based on professional, ethnic, and age differences,

is painfully evident if we are to judge from the experiences of the

“socialist orbit.” To speak to the needs of an organic society —

the formation of an authentic body politic and a socially active

citizenry — is to restore society as genuine “cell tissue.” Society,

in effect, must become a body politic in the literal sense that the

citizen must be *physically* in control of the social process, a living

presence in the formation and execution of social policy.

Rousseau is only too accurate in recognizing that a body

politic, divested of *embodiment* as a citizen assembly, is the

negation of a people. The term “people” has no meaning if it lacks

the institutional structure for exhibiting its physical presence and

imparting to that presence a decisive social meaning — if it cannot

assemble to debate, formulate, and decide the policies that shape

social life. To the degree that the formulation of these policies is

removed by mediated and delegated institutions, from the face-

to-face decision-making process of the people in assembly, to that

degree is the people subverted as the only authentic constitutive

force of social life and society, vested in the sovereignty of the

few, reduced to an abstraction, an unpeopled “public sphere” or a

mere “public space.” Underlying every enterprise for the dissolution of the body politic into the faceless sovereignty of delegated

authority is the hidden belief in an “elect” that is alone endowed

with the capacity to rule and command. Ultimately, this view

amounts to a denial of the human potentiality for self-management, to the spark within *every* individual to achieve the

powers of social wisdom that a privileged few claim for themselves. That circumstances, be they resolved into the denial of

education, free time, access to culture, and even an enlightened familial background, not to speak of material and occupational circumstances, have concealed this spark to the

“masses” themselves is no argument for the fact that social life,

particularly as it concerns the individual, could be otherwise.

Delegated authority, in effect, not only negates a people but the

claims of selfhood that are underlying to the notion of popular

self-management. As I have emphasized elsewhere, a society that

professes to be based on self-management is inconceivable

without self-activity.{20} Indeed, revolution can be defined as the

most advanced form of self-activity, as direct action raised to a

level where the land, the factories, indeed the very streets, are

directly taken over by the autonomous people. In the absence of

this level of activity, social consciousness remains mere *mass*

consciousness that can easily be manipulated by hierarchies.

Delegated authority vitiates the individuation of the “masses” into

self-conscious beings who can take direct, unmediated control of

society into their own hands. It denies not only the constitution of a “public sphere” into a body politic, but the individual

into a social agent — into a “citizen” in the Athenian sense of the

term.

We live today under the tyranny of a present that is often more

oppressive than the past, Sartre’s imagery of the “slime” of the

past notwithstanding to the contrary. Our social “models” for

freedom have been the Russian Revolution and the so-called

“revolutions” of the Third Word, of the councils, soviets, and

shop committees that are so seductive to many neo-Marxists as

forms of social administration. I would join M.I. Finley in seriously

asking if we should not try to recover the more fascinating

example of the Athenian *polis* which, despite its many shortcomings, provides more expansive *institutional* examples for a

liberated society than any we are familiar with today. That

Athenian democracy was based on a “sovereign Assembly...

open to every citizen” and convened at least forty times a year;

that it was consciously “amateurish” and antibureaucratic,

managed by a rotating council of 500 whose chairmen were

selected by lot for only a single day, a council itself constituted by sortition as well as election — these features together

with its astonishing court system, militia, and extensive use of the

lot hardly require elaboration.{21} Athenian amateurism rested on

a regard for selfhood that Platonistic readings of the *polis* tend to

de-emphasize. To the degree that the Hellenic democratic theory

found written expression, it may well have been in the concepts of

Protagoras that are handed down to us through the patently

biased dialogue of Plato’s. Free men possess *politike techne*, the

“art of political judgement,” as Finley translates the phrase, a

judgement that uniquely defines humanity as a cooperative

species, possessed of *philia* (shall we say “solidarity” rather than

the more conventional translation of the word as “friendship”?)

and dike (justice). But beyond these traits they possess a sense of

community that by *nature* destines them to live in a *polis*. These

traits of a free citizen, taken together, constitute a controlled

• selfhood*, what we call “self-control,” that renders community life

or *koinonia* possible. “Neither the sovereign Assembly, with its

unlimited right of participation, nor the popular jury-courts

(dicastery — M.B.) nor the selection of officials by lot nor

ostracism could have prevented either chaos on the one hand or

tyranny on the other had there not been self-control among

enough of the citizen-body to contain its behaviour within

bounds,” observes Finley. Moreover, this self-control was an

active form of selfhood, not the *apathia* or absence of feeling we

so often associate with contemporary citizenship within a

depersonalized formal system of “rights” and “duties.” “There

was a tradition (Aristotle, *Constitution of Athens*, 8.5) that in his

legislation early in the sixth century B.C. Solon passed the

following law, specifically aimed against apathy: ‘When there is

civil war in the city, anyone who does not take up arms on one

side or the other shall be deprived of civil rights and of all share in

the affairs of government.’ The authenticity of the law is doubtful,

but not the sentiment. Pericles expressed it, in the same Funeral

Oration in which he noted that poverty is no bar, by saying

(Thucydides, 2.40.3): ‘Any man may at the same time look after

his own affairs and those of the state... We consider anyone who

does not share in the life of the citizen not as minding his own

business but as useless.”{22}

It is ironical that we must turn to John Stuart Mill, rather than

his socialist contemporaries, for an insightful evaluation of how

direct participation in social life and the development of selfhood

mutually reinforce each other to form the civic virtues and

commitments of the citizen — that make active citizenship the

highest expression of selfhood. The defects of Athenian democracy notwithstanding, the practices of the dicastery and popular

assemblages, Mill was to observe, “raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which

there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or

modern.” The Athenian citizen was obliged “to weigh interests

not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another

rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles

and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common

good...” He accordingly found himself associated “in the same

work with minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas

and operations” which supplied “reason to his understanding and

stimulation to his feeling for the general interest.”{23}

Hannah Arendt was to formulate this educative process —

an integral feature of what the Greeks called paideia, the spiritual

• forming* of the individual — as an “enlarged mentality” that

renders authentic judgement possible.{24} The *polis* was not only

an end but a means that made political practice (“participation” is

a feeble terms) a mode of self-formation. At this level, a people not

merely arrives at a “general interest” but begins to transcend

“interest” as such. “Interest,” a term nourished by the bourgeois

enlightenment that surfaces throughout the Marxian literature as

“class interest” and in neo-Marxism as “knowledge interest,” is

replaced by the possibility of mutuality and consociation based on

the Hellenic concept of *philia* or, in the Christian tradition, by

• agape*.

The young Hegel, despite his scorn for a Christian equality that

saw the slave as “the brother of his owner,” was deeply rooted in

the millenarian ideal of a new human union and the Joachimite

vision of an era of fulfillment. In this trinitarian vision, love, as

embodied in the Holy Spirit, transcends the faith that marked the

era of the Son and the law that marked the era of the Father. For

the young Hegel, “True love, or love proper, exists only between

living beings *who are alike in power* and thus in one another’s

eyes living beings from every point of view” — and, by the same

token, to achieve this penultimate recognition of the “living

beings” who are loved, they must be alike in power. (My

emphasis — M.B.) Agape, as conceived in Hegel’s eschatological

vision, no longer knows the drive of “interest”; indeed, it

“deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character, and discovers

life itself without any further defect.” This is not a world in which

gray is painted on gray. “In love the separate does still remain, but

as something united and no longer as something separate; life (in

the subject) senses life (in the object).” Indeed, love supplants law

and one may justifiably ask if, in this era when all living beings are

alike in power, there is any need for mediation and the state.[67]{25}

[67] To my knowledge, this implicit anarchism in the young Hegel has been ignored

by neo-Marxists and its Joachimite roots examined only casually, if at all. The

considerable attention which has been given to labour and language in Hegel’s

early writings has often slighted their utopian dimension and has turned Hegel not

merely into a “precursor” of Marxism but also one of its victims.

Assemblage attains its fullness in a world where “interest”

yields to *philia* and *agape*, where judgement emerges from the

self-formative intercourse and spiritual education of an “enlarged

mentality.” Endowed with this mentality, “even when I shun all

company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I

am not simply together only with myself in the solitude of

philosophic though” Arendt observes; “I remain in this world of

mutual interdependence where I can make myself the representative of everyone else. To be sure, I can refuse to do this

and form an opinion that takes only my own interest, or the

interests of the group to which I belong, into account... But the

very quality of an opinion as of a judgement depends upon its

degree of impartiality.”{26} “Impartiality” must be taken literally if

Arendt’s point is to have meaning — as a condition that rises

above the “partial,” or one-sided, and the “partiality” of a

predetermined commitment. The emergence of a “general

interest” is, in effect, the abolition of the “partiality” of a self

rooted in “interest” and in a one-sided society.

It is a truism that “opinion” and judgement so formed have

material preconditions and a historical background that has

received sufficient emphasis not to require discussion here.

Arendt’s “enlarged mentality” must emerge from a terrain that is

materially incompatible with the formation of “class interest” and

its ideological expression as “class consciousness.” But once

these material preconditions are emphasized, we must add that a

“proletarian public sphere” is an anachronism because the

proletariat as a proletariat, as the fictive expression of a public

sphere, is an “interest” that opposes the universalization and

abolition of “interest” and the formation of a public. It is not

accidental that Marx follows in the wake of bourgeois reality by

denuding the proletariat of the social and personal forms without

which it cannot develop its public existence as part of a

universalized humanity. Marx’s writings “hollow out” the proletariat as ruthlessly as capitalism hollows out the “cell tissue

‘Society’.” Just as abstract labour confronts abstract matter, so

abstract classes confront each other in a conflict of “interests”

that exists beyond their will or even their clear comprehension.

That Marx conceives the proletariat as a category of political

economy — as the “owner” of labour power, the object of

exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and a creature of the factory

system — reflects and *ideologizes* its actual one-sided condition

under capitalism as a “productive force,” not as a *revolutionary*

force. Marx leaves us in no doubt about this conception. As the

class that is most completely dehumanized, the proletariat

transcends its dehumanized condition and comes to embody the

human totality “through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely

imperative *need*...” Accordingly: “The question is not what this

or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment

considers as its aim. The question is *what the proletariat is*, and

what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do.”{27}

(The emphasis throughout is Marx’s and provides a telling

commentary on his de-subjectivization of the proletariat.) I will

leave aside the rationale that this formula provides for an elitist

organization. For the present, it is important to note that Marx,

following the tradition of classical bourgeois political economy,

totally objectifies the proletariat and removes it as a true subject.

The revolt of the proletariat, even its humanization, ceases to be a

human phenomenon; rather, it becomes a function of inexorable

economic laws and “imperative need.” The essence of the

proletariat as proletariat is its non-humanity, its creature nature

as the product of “absolutely imperative need” — of brute

“interest.” Its subjectivity falls within the category of harsh

necessity, explicable in terms of economic law. The psychology of

the proletariat, in effect, is political economy.

The real proletariat resists this reduction of its subjectivity to

the product of need and lives increasingly within the realm of

• desire*, of the *possibility* to become other than it is. Concretely,

the worker resists the work ethic because it has become irrational

in view of the possibilities for a non-hierarchical society. The

worker, in this sense, transcends her or his creature nature and

increasingly becomes a subject, not an object; a non-proletarian,

not a proletarian. *Desire*, not merely need, *possibility*, not merely

necessity, enter into her or his self-formation and self-activity.

The worker begins to shed her or his status of workerness, her or

his existence as a mere class being, as an object of economic

forces, as mere “being,” and becomes increasingly available to

the development of an “enlarged mentality.”

As the *human* essence of the proletariat begins to replace its

factory essence, the worker can now be reached as easily outside

the factory as in it. Concretely, the worker’s aspect as a woman

or man, as a parent, as an urban dweller, as a youth or elderly

person, as a victim of environmental decay, as a dreamer (the list

is nearly endless), comes increasingly to the foreground. The

factory walls become permeable to the development of an

“enlarged mentality” to the degree that personal and broadly

social concerns **begin to compete with the worker’s “proletarian” concerns and values**. No “workers group” can become truly

revolutionary unless it deals with the individual worker’s human

aspirations, unless it helps to de-alienate the worker’s personal

milieu and begins to transcend the worker’s factory milieu. It is

indeed doubtful if, in the event of truly revolutionary change, that

workers will *want* to control production and bask in the glories of

an economy based on “worker’s control.” They will probably want

to alter production, indeed sever society’s technical commitment

to the factory as such. This kind of working class will become

revolutionary not *in spite* of itself but because of itself, literally as a

result of its awakening selfhood.[68]

[68] Most of my observations about the proletariat were made at the *Telos*

Conference on Organization at Buffalo, New York, in November, 1971, and were

developed in my article “On Spontaneity and Organization.” These observations

can be traced back to my “Listen, Marxist!” of April, 1969. They have since been

appropriated by many Neo-Marxists to add a legitimation precisely to a

“proletarian consciousness” an interest that my remarks were meant to

challenge. I adduce this type of distortion primarily to guard the reader against

“neo-Marxist” tendencies that attach basically alien ideas to the withering

conceptual framework of Marxism — not to say something new but to preserve

something old with ideological formal dehyde — to the detriment of any intellectual growth that the distinctions are designed to foster. This is mystification at its

worst, for it not only corrupts ideas but the very capacity of the mind to deal with

them. If Marx’s work can be rescued for our time, it will be by dealing with it as an

invaluable part of the development of ideas, not as pastiche that is legitimated as a

“method” or continually “updated” by concepts that come from an alien zone of

ideas.

For Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal; and so even

when men have no need of assistance from each other they

nonetheless desire to live together.” For although they share a

“common interest” in a good life, “they also come together and

maintain the political partnership (actually *politiken koinonian* —

M.B.) for the sake of life merely...”{28} For Marx, “Men can be

distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or

anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish

themselves from animals as soon as they begin to *produce* their

means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their

physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence

men are indirectly producing their actual material conditions.”{29}

Between these two definitions of “man” lie more than two

thousand years not only of human “progress” in mastery over

nature, but social regression in the denuding of society. The

degradation of *koinonia* into the division of labour and of *philia*

into class solidarity, finally of the self into an endless fount of

egotism and needs, is a historical *fact* that cannot be ignored. But

it is also an *ideology* that cannot be hypostasized and mystified as

“revolutionary.” To deal with capitalism alone as a myth of

“praxis” that incorporates precisely what should be exorcised

from “civilization” as a whole in Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer, and

frankly, Fourier’s meaning of the term, is a betrayal of the larger

revolutionary project that awaits the critique and practice of an

“enlarged mentality.” If we are not merely at the end of capitalism

but at the end of “civilization” as Fourier might have observed —

of hierarchy and domination — it is not enough to speak any

longer of class and exploitation but rather of *rank as such* at the

most molecular levels of human consociation. Critical theory,

too, was to challenge “civilization” as a sphere of domination and

a rationality of domination, but it did not deal with hierarchy, with

a sensibility that organizes *difference* into a sphere of command

and obedience. Hence, it too became victim to the hidden

hierarchical dimension that perpetuates domination, the proclivity to stand above the flux of life and ultimately the test of

experience. For the “emancipatory interest” to ferret out its

tradition of emancipation in the academy, to build its moral

imperatives within the boughs of its own intellectual Eden, is to

replace revolutionary history and its far-reaching lessons by

intellectual history with its diet of pale gruel. Not that theory has

no imperatives of its own, but rather that it cannot be defined as a

“praxis” that is guarded from life by ivy-covered walls.

It was the young Hegel, again, who most clearly formulated the

place of wisdom as *paideia*, specifically in the fruitful interchange

of teacher and taught rather than leader and led — a *paideia* that

informs the development of a revolutionary culture or “movement” as much as it does a revolutionary sensibility. That age,

experience, and personal talents may confer wisdom is no reason

that they should confer power. Hegel’s distinction between Jesus

and Socrates draws this point out unerringly on its authentic

social terrain. The Christian apostles were mere acolytes.

“Lacking any store of spiritual energy of their own,” Hegel

observes, “they had found the basis of their conviction about the

teachings of Jesus principally in their friendship with him and

dependence on him. They had not attained truth and freedom by

their own exertions; only by laborious learning had they acquired

a dim sense of them and certain formulas about them. Their

ambition was to keep this doctrine faithfully and to transmit it

faithfully to others without any addition, without letting it acquire

any variations in detail by working on it themselves.”

By contrast, Socrates’s friends from “their youth up... had

developed their powers in many directions. They had absorbed

that democratic spirit which gives an individual a greater measure

of independence and makes it impossible for any tolerably good

head to depend wholly and absolutely on one person. In their

state it was worth while to have a political interest, and an interest

of that kind can never be sacrificed. Most of them had already

been pupils of other philosophers and other teachers. They loved

Socrates because of his virtue and his philosophy, not virtue and

his philosophy because of him. Just as Socrates had fought for his

native land, had fulfilled all the duties of a free citizen as a brave

soldier in war and a just judge in peace, so too all his friends were

something more than mere inactive philosophers, than mere

pupils of Socrates.”{30}

The *polis*, with its emphasis on freedom and activity, stands

opposed to the congregation with its emphasis on reverence and

quietism. Hegel touches precisely on the differing social contexts

that produce pupils in Greece and disciples in Judea, teachers

and leaders, the democratic *koinonia* of the *polis* and the

hierarchical infrastructure of the Church. In the tension between

these two extremes, different senses of selfhood emerge: the

controlled self formed by the light of spirit, reason and solidarity

and the controlled self formed by the whip-lash of a rationalized

society, dogma, and fragmentation. In reality, there is no longer

room for an intermediate ground, whether in the revolutionary

movement or in society. The history of this century has been

poisoned by the endless “gains” and “mediations” that threaten

to become the bonfires of society itself — the “improvements”

that have been brought into the service of a domination so

ubiquitous that it brings the self into complicity with its own

enslavement. Nearly forty years ago, Horkheimer could have

written that “*The revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking*.”{31} Today these words seem tame.

The “revolutionary” movement — as the Left calls itself — *positively supports the situation it professes to attack*. The mass

party is the precondition for the existence of a mass society, the

political face of its institutional bureaucracy. The entire future of

the Left diverges on whether it seeks to recover a body politic —

the *koinonia* of a face-to-face citizenry — or whether, in the name

of the “pragmatic,” the “expedient,” and the appropriate “mediations” it will foster the ever-greater rationalization of the society

with the rhetoric of progress, planning, reform — and even

“revolution.”

Beyond the intramural disputes of the Left lie the larger social

issues of historic recovery and social advance. The municipal

tradition, however faint, persists in western society today as an

American tradition that may well speak to an American revolutionary movement with greater meaning than the European

emphasis on centralization. “The continued growth of the New

England town by division of the central nucleus into new cells,

having an independent life of their own, recalled the earlier

pattern of Greece,” Lewis Mumford has observed. “But the New

England towns added a new feature that has never been

sufficiently appreciated nor as widely copied as it deserved: the

township. The township is a political organization which encloses

a group of towns, villages, hamlets, along with the open country

area that surrounds them: it performs the functions of local

government, including the provision of schools and the care of

local roads, without accepting the long-established division

between town and country.”

Mumford’s lament that the failure of “both the Federal and the

State Constitutions” to incorporate the township as the basic unit

of American democracy “was one of the tragic oversights of postrevolutionary political development” is an understatement. The

“post-revolutionary political development” of the early republic

was largely counterrevolutionary and the township, particularly

its town meetings, were deliberately excluded precisely because

they gave “concrete organs” to an “abstract political system of

democracy...”{32} As Merril Jensen has pointed out in a fascinating

account of that very period, “the nature of city government came

in for heated discussion.” Town meetings, whether legal or

informal, “had been a focal point of revolutionary activity.” The

anti-democratic reaction that set in after the American Revolution was marked by efforts to do away with town meeting

governments that had spread well beyond New England to the

mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Attempts by conservative

elements were made to establish a “corporate form (of municipal

government) whereby the towns could be governed by mayors

and councils” elected from urban wards. Judging from New

Jersey, the merchants “backed incorporation consistently in the

efforts to escape town meetings.” Such efforts were successful

not only in cities and towns of that state but also in Charleston,

New Haven, and eventually even Boston. Jensen, addressing

himself to the incorporated form of municipal government and

restricted suffrage that replaced the more democratic assembly

form of the revolutionaries of 1776 in Philadelphia, expresses a

judgement that could apply to all the successful efforts in behalf of

municipal incorporation following the revolution: “The counterrevolution in Philadelphia was complete.”{33}

Here, then, lies a history and a liberatory tradition that awaits

full and conscious expression as a demand for human scale, local

popular control, decentralization, and face-to-face democracy

both within the revolutionary movement and within society. In

turning the notion of the “people” against its bourgeois utopian

origins, this liberatory tradition recovers and transcends a vision

for which the material premises were established by bourgeois

society itself. A new “revolutionary subject” exists in the social

vacuum left by society and the centralized power at its

summits.{34} The system turns everyone against it — be it the

conservationist or the small struggling entrepreneur, the worker

or the intellectual, women, blacks, aged, or the seemingly

privileged suburbanite. The denuding of the individual from

“brothers” and “sisters” into “citizens” and finally “taxpayers”

expresses the common lot of every individual who is burdened by

a terrifying sense of powerlessness that is so easily mistaken for

apathy. Bureaucracy can never blanket this open, unoccupied

social domain. This domain can eventually be filled by neighborhood assemblies, cooperatives, popular societies, and affinity

groups that are spawned by an endless array of social ills —

above all, *decentralized* groups that form a counterweight and a

radicalizing potential to the massive centralization and concentration of social power in an era of state capitalism.

Socialism, inspired by the imagery of the Robespierrist Committee of Public Safety, offers no promise of affecting (indeed, of

comprehending) this new social development, so congenial to the

American social tradition. The simplification of the “social

problem” into issues like the restoration of local power, the

increasing hatred of bureaucratic control, the silent resistance to

manipulation on the everyday level of life holds the only promise

of a new “revolutionary subject” on which resistance and

eventually revolution can be based. It is to these issues that

revolutionary theory must address itself, and it is to a reinstitutionalization of a conscious body politic that revolutionary

practice must direct its efforts.

<right>

April 1978

</right>

{1} See Albrecht Wellmer: “Communications and Emancipation: Reflections

on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory” in *On Critical Theory*, ed. John

O’Neill (Seabury Pres, 1976), p. 254.

{2} Karl Marx: “The Civil War in France,” *Selected Works*, Vol. II (Progress

Publishers, 1969), p. 220.

{3} Jean-Jacques Rousseau: *The Social Contract* (Everyman Edition, 1959),

pp. 94, 96. Rousseau’s influence on Hannah Arendt is almost as great as

Aristotle’s. Compare these remarks with Arendt’s in On Revolution (Viking

Press, 1965), pp. 239–40.

{4} See my *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (Black Rose Books, 1977), pp. 150–53.

{5} Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: *The Holy Family* (Progress Publishers,

1956), pp. 52–53; Frederick Engels: “On Authority” in Marx, Engels, Lenin:

• Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism* (International Publishers, 1972), p. 102.

{6} *Ibid*., p. 102.

{7} Herbert Marcuse: *An Essay on Liberation* (Beacon Press, 1969), pp. VII,

VIII, 22, 57, 64, 80,85.

{8} Herbert Marcuse: *Counter-Revolution and Revolt* (Beacon Press, 1972),

p. 41.

{9} Marcuse: *An Essay on Liberation*, op. cit., p. 14.

{10} Marcuse, *ibid*., p. 69 and fn. on same page.

{11} *Ibid*., p. VIII.

{12} Karl Marx: *Capital*, vol. I (Vintage, 1977), pp. 477–78, 479.

{13} Peter Kropotkin: *Mutual Aid* (Extending Horizons Books, 1955), pp. 179–80,

181.

{14} Martin Buber: *Paths in Utopia* (Beacon Press, 1958), op. 13–14.

{15} See *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*, op. cit., p. 65.

{16} Karl Marx: *Grundrisse* (Random House, 1973), p. 410.

{17} Jeremy J. Shapiro: “The Slime of History” in *On Critical Theory*, op. cit.,

pp. 147–48.

{18} *Ibid*., p. 149.

{19} *Ibid*.

{20} See my “On Spontaneity and Organization, *Liberation*, March, 1972,

pp. 6–7. (See pp. 249–274 below)

{21} M.I. Finley: *Democracy: Ancient and Modern* (Rutgers University Press,