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| author | Jeffrey <jeffrey@theanarchistlibrary.org> | 2019-08-27 10:28:58 +0000 |
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| committer | Jeffrey <jeffrey@theanarchistlibrary.org> | 2019-08-27 10:28:58 +0000 |
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| tree | 4794ab202f6386b215d102f38f74d23cb6c55243 /m/mb/murray-bookchin-the-forms-of-freedom.muse | |
| parent | 41ab09e728317110dba323400d8aaa6e3c5acd1b (diff) | |
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diff --git a/m/mb/murray-bookchin-the-forms-of-freedom.muse b/m/mb/murray-bookchin-the-forms-of-freedom.muse new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9580461 --- /dev/null +++ b/m/mb/murray-bookchin-the-forms-of-freedom.muse @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +<p>Freedom has its forms. However personalized, indi-viduated or dadaesque may be the attack upon prevailinginstitutions, a liberatory revolution always poses the ques-tion of what social forms will replace existing ones. At onepoint or another, a revolutionary people must deal withhow it will manage the land and the factories from whichit acquires the means of life. It must deal with the mannerin which it will arrive at decisions that affect the commu-nity as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to betaken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the prob-lems and forms of social management. It must open topublic discussion the problems that are involved in a crea-tive development of liberatory social forms. Althoughthere is no theory of liberation that can replace experi-ence, there is sufficient historial experience, and a suffi-cient theoretical formulation of the issues involved, toindicate what social forms are consistent with the fullestrealization of personal and social freedom.</p> + +<p>What social forms will replace existing ones depends onwhat relations free people decide to establish betweenthemselves. Every personal relationship has a social dimen-sion; every social relationship has a deeply personal side toit. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their relationship toeach other are mystified and difficult to see clearly. Theinstitutions created by hierarchical society, especially thestate institutions, produce the illusion that social relationsexist in a universe of their own, in specialized political orbureaucratic compartments. In reality, there exists nostrictly "impersonal" political or social dimension; all thesocial institutions of the past and present depend on therelations between people in daily life, especially in those aspects of daily life which are necessary for survival—theproduction and distribution of the means of life, the rear-ing of the young, the maintenance and reproduction oflife. The liberation of man—not in some vague "historical,"moral, or philosophical sense, but in the intimate details ofday-to-day life—is a profoundly social act and raises theproblem of social forms as modes of relations betweenindividuals.</p> + +<p>The relationship between the social and the individualrequires special emphasis in our own time, for never beforehave personal relations become so impersonal and neverbefore have social relations become so asocial. Bourgeoissociety has brought all relations between people to thehighest point of abstraction by divesting them of theirhuman content and dealing with them as objects. Theobject—the commodity—takes on roles that formerlybelonged to the community; exchange relationships(actualized in most cases as money relationships) supplantnearly all other modes of human relationships. In thisrespect, the bourgeois commodity system becomes the his-torical culmination of all societies, precapitalist as well ascapitalist, in which human relationships are mediatedrather than direct or face-to-face.</p> + +<h2>THE MEDIATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONS</h2> + +<p>To place this development in clearer perspective, let usbriefly look back in time and establish what the mediationof social relations has come to mean.</p> + +<p>The earliest social "specialists" who interposed them-selves between people—the priests and tribal chiefs whopermanently mediated their relations—established theformal conditions for hierarchy and exploitation. Theseformal conditions were consolidated and deepened bytechnological advances—advances which provided onlyenough material surplus for the few to live at the expenseof the many. The tribal assembly, in which all members of the community had decided and directly managed theircommon affairs, dissolved into chieftainship, and the com-munity dissolved into social classes.</p> + +<p>Despite the increasing investiture of social control in ahandful of men and even one man, the fact remains thatmen in precapitalist societies mediated the relations ofother people—council supplanting assembly, and chieftain-ship supplanted council. In bourgeois society, on the otherhand, the mediation of social relations by men isreplaced by the mediation of social relations by things, bycommodities. Having brought social mediation to thehighest point of impersonality, commodity society turnsattention to mediation as such; it brings into question allforms of social organization based on indirect representa-tion, on the management of public affairs by the few, onthe distinctive existence of concepts and practices such as"election," "legislation," "administration."</p> + +<p>The most striking evidence of this social refocusing arethe demands voiced almost intuitively by increasingnumbers of American youth for tribalism and community.These demands are "regressive" only in the sense that theygo back temporally to pre-hierarchical forms of freedom.They are profoundly progressive in the sense that they goback structurally to non-hierarchical forms of freedom.</p> + +<p>By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand forcouncil forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt de-scribes as "the revolutionary heritage") does not breakcompletely with the terrain of hierarchical society.Workers' councils originate as class councils. Unless oneassumes that workers are driven by their interests asworkers to revolutionary measures against hierarchicalsociety (an assumption I flatly deny), then these councilscan be used just as much to perpetuate class society as todestroy it. We shall see, in fact, that the council form contains many structural limitations which favor the de-velopment of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to saythat most advocates of workers' councils tend to conceiveof people primarily as economic entities, either as workersor nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness ofthe self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcatedbeing, the product of a social development that dividesman from man and each man from himself.</p> + +<p>Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected bydemands for workers' management of production and theshortening of the work week, for these demands leave thenature of the work process and the quality of the worker'sfree time completely untouched. If workers' councils andworkers' management of production do not transform thework into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous ex-perience, and the workplace into a community, then theyremain merely formal structures, in fact, class structures.They perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as aproduct of bourgeois social conditions. Indeed, no move-ment that raises the demand for workers' councils can beregarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweep-ing transformations in the environment of the work place.</p> + +<p>Finally, council organizations are forms of mediatedrelationships rather than face-to-face relationships. Unlessthese mediated relationships are limited by direct relation-ships, leaving policy decisions to the latter and mereadministration to the former, the councils tend to becomefocuses of power. Indeed, unless the councils are finallyassimilated by a popular assembly, and factories are inte-grated into new types of community, both the councilsand the factories perpetuate the alienation between manand man and between man and work. Fundamentally, thedegree of freedom in a society can be gauged by the kindof relationships that unite the people in it. If these rela-tionships are open, unalienated and creative, the societywill be free. If structures exist that inhibit open relationships, either by coercion or mediation, then freedom willnot exist, whether there is workers' management of pro-duction or not. For all the workers will manage will beproduction—the preconditions of life, not the conditionsof life. No mode of social organization can be isolatedfrom the social conditions it is organizing. Both councilsand assemblies have furthered the interests of hierarchicalsociety as well as those of revolution. To assume that theforms of freedom can be treated merely as forms would beas absurd as to assume that legal concepts can be treatedmerely as questions of jurisprudence. The form and con-tent of freedom, like law and society, are mutually deter-mined. By the same token, there are forms of organizationthat promote and forms that vitiate the goal of freedom,and social conditions favor sometimes the one and some-times the other. To one degree or another, these formseither alter the individual who uses them or inhibit hisfurther development.</p> + +<p>This article does not dispute the need for workers'councils—more properly, factory committees—as a revolu-tionary means of appropriating the bourgeois economy.On the contrary, experience has shown repeatedly that thefactory committee is vitally important as an initial form ofeconomic administration. But no revolution can settle forcouncils and committees as its final, or even its exemplary,mode of social organization, any more than "workers'management of production" can be regarded as a finalmode of economic administration. Neither of these tworelationships is broad enough to revolutionize work, freetime, needs, and the structure of society as a whole. In thisarticle I take the revolutionary aspect of the council andcommittee forms for granted; my purpose is to examinethe conservative traits in them which vitiate the revolu-tionary project.</p> + +<p>It has always been fashionable to look for models of social institutions in the so-called "proletarian" revolutions ofthe past hundred years. The Paris Commune of 1871, theRussian Soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Spanish revolu-tionary syndicates of the 1930s, and the Hungarian coun-cils of 1956 have all been raked over for examples offuture social organization. What, it is worth asking, dothese models of organization have in common? The answeris, very little, other than their limitations as mediatedforms. Spain, as we shall see, provides a welcome excep-tion: the others were either too short-lived or simply toodistorted to supply us with more than the material formyths.</p> + +<p>The Paris Commune may be revered for many differentreasons—for its intoxicating sense of libidinal release, forits radical populism, for its deeply revolutionary impact onthe oppressed, or for its defiant heroism in defeat. But theCommune itself, viewed as a structural entity, was littlemore than a popular municipal council. More democraticand plebeian than other such bodies, the council wasnevertheless structured along parliamentary lines. It waselected by "citizens," grouped according to geographicconstituencies. In combining legislation with administra-tion, the Commune was hardly more advanced than themunicipal bodies in the U.S. today.</p> + +<p>Fortunately, revolutionary Paris largely ignored theCommune after it was installed. The insurrection, theactual management of the city's affairs, and finally thefighting against the Versaillese, were undertaken mainly bythe popular clubs, the neighborhood vigilance committees,and the battalions of the National Guard. Had the ParisCommune (the Municipal Council) survived, it is extremelydoubtful that it could have avoided conflict with theseloosely formed street and militia formations. Indeed, bythe end of April, some six weeks after the insurrection, theCommune constituted an "all-powerful" Committee ofPublic Safety, a body redolent with memories of the Jacobin dictatorship and the Terror, which suppressed notonly the right in the Great Revolution of a century earlier,but also the left. In any case, history left the Commune amere three weeks of life, two of which were consumed inthe death throes of barricade fighting against Thiers andthe Versaillese.</p> + +<p>It does not malign the Paris Commune to divest it of"historical" burdens it never actually carried. The Com-mune was a festival of the streets, its partisans primarilyhandicraftsmen, itinerant intellectuals, the social debris ofa precapitalist era, and lumpens. To regard these strata as"proletarian" is to caricature the word to the point ofabsurdity. The industrial proletariat constituted a minorityof the Communards.</p> + +<p>The Commune was the last great rebellion of the Frenchsans-culottes, a class that lingered on in Paris for a centuryafter the Great Revolution. Ultimately, this highly mixedstratum was destroyed not by the guns of the Versaillesebut by the advance of industrialism.</p> + +<p>The Paris Commune of 1871 was largely a city council,established to coordinate municipal administration underconditions of revolutionary unrest. The Russian Soviets of 1905 were largely fighting organizations, established tocoordinate near-insurrectionary strikes in St. Petersburg.These councils were based almost entirely on factories andtrade unions: there was a delegate for every five hundredworkers (where individual factories and shops contained asmaller number, they were grouped together for votingpurposes), and additionally, delegates from trade unionsand political parties. The soviet mode of organization tookon its clearest and most stable form in St. Petersburg,where the soviet contained about four hundred delegatesat its high point, including representatives of the newlyorganized professional unions. The St. Petersburg sovietrapidly developed from a large strike committee into aparliament of all oppressed classes, broadening its repre-sentation, demands and responsibilities. Delegates wereadmitted from cities outside St. Petersburg, politicaldemands began to dominate economic ones, and links wereestablished with peasant organizations and their delegatesadmitted into the deliberations of the body. Inspired bySt. Petersburg, Soviets sprang up in all the major cities andtowns of Russia and developed into an incipient revolu-tionary power counterposed to all the governmental insti-tutions of the autocracy.</p> + +<p>The St. Petersburg soviet lasted less than two months.Most of its members were arrested in December 1905. To alarge extent, the soviet was deserted by the St. Petersburgproletariat, which never rose in armed insurrection andwhose strikes diminished in size and militancy as traderevived in the late autumn. Ironically, the last stratum toadvance beyond the early militancy of the soviet were theMoscow students, who rose in insurrection on December22 and during five days of brilliantly conceived urbanguerrilla warfare reduced local police and military forces tonear impotence. The students received very little aid fromthe workers in the city. Their street battles might havecontinued indefinitely, even in the face of massive proletarian apathy, had the czar's guard not been transported toMoscow by the railway workers on one of the few operat-ing lines to the city.</p> + +<p>The Soviets of 1917 were the true heirs of the Soviets of1905, and to distinguish the two from each other, as somewriters occasionally do, is spurious. Like their predecessorsof twelve years earlier, the 1917 Soviets were based largelyon factories, trade unions and party organizations, butthey were expanded to include delegates from army groupsand a sizeable number of stray radical intellectuals. TheSoviets of 1917 reveal all the limitations of "sovietism."Though the Soviets were invaluable as local fighting organi-zations, their national congresses proved to be increasinglyunrepresentative bodies. The congresses were organizedalong very hierarchical lines. Local Soviets in cities, townsand villages elected delegates to district and regionalbodies; these elected delegates to the actual nationwidecongresses. In larger cities, representation to the congresseswas less indirect, but it was indirect nonetheless—fromthe voter in a large city to the municipal soviet and fromthe municipal soviet to the congress. In either case thecongress was separated from the mass of voters by one ormore representative levels.</p> + +<p>The soviet congresses were scheduled to meet everythree months. This permitted far too long a time span toexist between sessions. The first congress, held in June1917, had some eight hundred delegates; later congresseswere even larger, numbering a thousand or more delegates.To "expedite" the work of the congresses and to providecontinuity of function between the tri-monthly sessions,the congresses elected an executive committee, fixed atnot more than two hundred in 1918 and expanded to amaximum of three hundred in 1920. This body was toremain more or less in permanent session, but it too wasregarded as unwieldy and most of its responsibilities afterthe October revolution were turned over to a small Council of People's Commissars. Having once acquired control ofthe Second Congress of Soviets (in October 1917), theBolsheviks found it easy to centralize power in the Councilof Commissars and later in the Political Bureau of theCommunist Party. Opposition groups in the Soviets eitherleft the Second Congress or were later expelled from allsoviet organs. The tri-monthly meetings of the congresseswere permitted to lapse: the completely Bolshevik Execu-tive Committee and Council of People's Commissars sim-ply did not summon them. Finally, the congresses wereheld only once a year. Similarly, the intervals between themeetings of district and regional Soviets grew increasinglylonger and even the meetings of the Executive Committee,created by the congresses as a body in permanent session,became increasingly infrequent until finally they were heldonly three times a year. The power of the local Sovietspassed into the hands of the Executive Committee, thepower of the Executive Committee passed into the handsof the Council of People's Commissars, and finally, thepower of the Council of People's Commissars passed intothe hands of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party.</p> + +<p>That the Russian Soviets were incapable of providing theanatomy for a truly popular democracy is to be ascribednot only to their hierarchical structure, but also to theirlimited social roots. The insurgent military battalions,from which the Soviets drew their original striking power,were highly unstable, especially after the final collapse ofthe czarist armies. The newly formed Red Army was re-cruited, disciplined, centralized and tightly controlled bythe Bolsheviks. Except for partisan bands and naval forces,soviet military bodies remained politically inert through-out the civil war. The peasant villages turned inwardtoward their local concerns, and were apathetic aboutnational problems. This left the factories as the mostimportant political base of the Soviets. Here we encountera basic contradiction in class concepts of revolutionary power: proletarian socialism, precisely because it empha-sizes that power must be based exclusively on the factory,creates the conditions for a centralized, hierarchical poli-tical structure.</p> + +<p>However much its social position is strengthened by asystem of "self-management," the factory is not an auton-omous social organism. The amount of social control thefactory can exercise is fairly limited, for every factory ishighly dependent for its operation and its very existenceupon other factories and sources of raw materials. Iron-ically, the Soviets, by basing themselves primarily in thefactory and isolating the factory from its local environ-ment, shifted power from the community and the regionto the nation, and eventually from the base of society toits summit. The soviet system consisted of an elaborateskein of mediated social relationships, knitted alongnationwide class lines.</p> + +<p>Perhaps the only instance where a system of working-class self-management succeeded as a mode of class organi-zation was in Spain, where anarcho-syndicalism attracted alarge number of workers and peasants to its banner. TheSpanish anarcho-syndicalists consciously sought to limitthe tendency toward centralization. The CNT (Confede-racion Nacional del Trabajo), the large anarcho-syndicalistunion in Spain, created a dual organization with an electedcommittee system to act as a control on local bodies andnational congresses. The assemblies had the power torevoke their delegates to the council and countermandcouncil decisions. For all practical purposes the "higher"bodies of the CNT functioned as coordinating bodies. Letthere be no mistake about the effectiveness of this schemeof organization: it imparted to each member of the CNT aweighty sense of responsibility, a sense of direct,immediate and personal influence in the activities andpolicies of the union. This responsibility was exercisedwith a highmindedness that made the CNT the most militant as well as the largest revolutionary movement inEurope during the interwar decades.</p> + +<p>The Spanish Revolution of 1936 put the CNT system toa practical test, and it worked fairly well. In Barcelona,CNT workers seized the factories, transportation facilitiesand utilities, and managed them along anarcho-syndicalistlines. It remains a matter of record, attested to by visitorsof almost every political persuasion, that the city'seconomy operated with remarkable success andefficiency—despite the systematic sabotage practiced bythe bourgeois Republican government and the SpanishCommunist Party. The experiment finally collapsed inshambles when the central government's assault troopsoccupied Barcelona in May 1937, following an uprising ofthe proletariat.</p> + +<p>Despite their considerable influence, the Spanishanarchists had virtually no roots outside certain sections ofthe working class and peasantry. The movement waslimited primarily to industrial Catalonia, the coastalMediterranean areas, rural Aragon, and Andalusia. Whatdestroyed the experiment was its isolation within Spainitself and the overwhelming forces—Republican as well asfascist, and Stalinist as well as bourgeois—that weremobilized against it.</p> + +<p>It would be fruitless to examine in detail the councilmodes of organization that emerged in Germany in 1918,in the Asturias in 1934, and in Hungary in 1956. TheGerman councils were hopelessly perverted: the so-called"majority" (reformist) social democrats succeeded in gain-ing control of the newly formed councils and using themfor counterrevolutionary ends. In Hungary and Asturias the councils were quickly destroyed by counterrevolution,but there is no reason to believe that, had they developedfurther, they would have avoided the fate of the RussianSoviets. History shows that the Bolsheviks were not theonly ones to distort the council mode of operation. Evenin anarcho-syndicalist Spain there is evidence that by 1937the committee system of the CNT was beginning to clashwith the assembly system; whatever the outcome mighthave been, the whole experiment was ended by the assaultof the Communists and the Republican government againstBarcelona.</p> + +<p>The fact remains that council modes of organization arenot immune to centralization, manipulation and perver-sion. These councils are still particularistic, one-sided andmediated forms of social management. At best, they canbe the stepping stones to a decentralized society—at worst,they can easily be integrated into hierarchical forms ofsocial organization.</p> + +<h2>ASSEMBLY AND COMMUNITY</h2> + +<p>Let us turn to the popular assembly for an insight intounmediated forms of social relations. The assembly prob-ably formed the structural basis of early clan and tribalsociety until its functions were pre-empted by chiefs andcouncils. It appeared as the ecclesia in classical Athens;later, in a mixed and often perverted form, it reappeared inthe medieval and Renaissance towns of Europe. Finally, asthe "sections," assemblies emerged as the insurgent bodiesin Paris during the Great Revolution. The ecclesia and theParisian sections warrant the closest study. Both developedin the most complex cities of their time and both assumeda highly sophisticated form, often welding individuals ofdifferent social origins into a remarkable, albeit temporary,community of interests. It does not minimize their limita-tions to say that they developed methods of functioning sosuccessfully libertarian in character that even the most imaginative Utopias have failed to match in speculationwhat they achieved in practice.</p> + +<p>The Athenian ecclesia was probably rooted in the earlyassemblies of the Greek tribes. With the development ofproperty and social classes, it was replaced by a feudalsocial structure, lingering only in the social memory of thepeople. For a time, Athenian society seemed to be chartingthe disastrous course toward internal decay that Rome wasto follow several centuries later. A large class of heavilymortgaged peasants, a growing number of serf-likesharecroppers, and a large body of urban laborers andslaves were polarized against a small number of powerfulland magnates and a parvenu commercial middle class. Bythe sixth century B.C., all the conditions in Athens andAttica (the surrounding agricultural region) had ripenedfor a devastating social war.</p> + +<p>The course of Athenian history was reversed by thereforms of Solon. In a series of drastic measures, thepeasantry was restored to an economically viablecondition, the landowners were shorn of most of theirpower, the ecclesia was revived, and a reasonably equitablesystem of justice was established. The trend toward apopular democracy continued to unfold for nearly acentury and a half, until it achieved a form that has neverquite been equaled elsewhere. By Periclean times theAthenians had perfected their polis to a point where itrepresented a triumph of rationality within the materiallimitations of the ancient world.</p> + +<p>Structurally, the basis of the Athenian polis was theecclesia. Shortly after sunrise at each prytany (the tenthday of the year), thousands of male citizens from all overAttica began to gather on the Pnyx, a hill directly outsideAthens, for a meeting of the assembly. Here, in the openair, they leisurely disported themselves among groups offriends until the solemn intonation of prayers announcedthe opening of the meeting. The agenda, arranged under the three headings of "sacred," "profane" and "foreignaffairs," had been distributed days earlier with theannouncement of the assembly. Although the ecclesiacould not add or bring forward anything that the agendadid not contain, its subject matter could be rearranged atthe will of the assembly. No quorum was necessary, exceptfor proposed decrees affecting individual citizens.</p> + +<p>The ecclesia enjoyed complete sovereignty over all insti-tutions and offices in Athenian society. It decided ques-tions of war and peace, elected and removed generals,reviewed military campaigns, debated and voted upondomestic and foreign policy, redressed grievances, exam-ined and passed upon the operations of administrativeboards, and banished undesirable citizens. Roughly oneman out of six in the citizen body was occupied at anygiven time with the administration of the community'saffairs. Some fifteen hundred men, chosen mainly by lot,staffed the boards responsible for the collection of taxes,the management of shipping, food supply and public facili-ties, and the preparation of plans for public construction.The army, composed entirely of conscripts from eachof the ten tribes of Attica, was led by elected officers;Athens was policed by citizen-bowmen and Scythian stateslaves.</p> + +<p>The agenda of the ecclesia was prepared by a bodycalled the Council of 500. Lest the council gain anyauthority over the ecclesia, the Athenians carefullycircumscribed its composition and functions. Chosen bylot from rosters of citizens who, in turn, were electedannually by the tribes, the Council was divided into tensubcommittees, each of which was on duty for a tenth ofthe year. Every day a president was selected by lot fromamong the fifty members of the subcommittee that was onduty to the polis. During his twenty-four hours of office,the Council's president held the state seal and the keys tothe citadel and public archives and functioned as acting head of the country. Once he had been chosen, he couldnot occupy the position again.</p> + +<p>Each of the ten tribes annually elected six hundredcitizens to serve as "judges"—what we would calljurymen—in the Athenian courts. Every morning, theytrudged up to the temple of Theseus, where lots weredrawn for the trials of the day. Each court consisted of atleast 201 jurymen and the trials were fair by any historicalstandard of juridical practice.</p> + +<p>Taken as a whole, this was a remarkable system of socialmanagement; run almost entirely by amateurs, theAthenian polis reduced the formulation and administrationof public policy to a completely public affair. "Here is noprivileged class, no class of skilled politicians, nobureaucracy; no body of men, like the Roman Senate, whoalone understood the secrets of State, and were looked upto and trusted as the gathered wisdom of the wholecommunity," observes W. Warde Fowler. "At Athens therewas no disposition, and in fact no need, to trust theexperience of any one; each man entered intelligently intothe details of his own temporary duties, and dischargedthem, as far as we can tell, with industry and integrity." 26Overdrawn as this view may be for a class society thatrequired slaves and denied women any role in the polis, thefact remains that Fowler's account is essentially accurate.</p> + +<p>Indeed, the greatness of the achievement lies in the factthat Athens, despite the slave, patriarchal and class fea-tures it shared with classical society, as a whole developedinto a working democracy in the literal sense of the term.No less significant, and perhaps consoling for our owntime, is the fact that this achievement occurred when itseemed that the polis had charted a headlong coursetoward social decay. At its best, Athenian democracygreatly modified the more abusive and inhuman features ofancient society. The burdens of slavery were small by com-parison with other historical periods, except when slaves were employed in capitalist enterprises. Generally, slaveswere allowed to accumulate their own funds; on theyeoman farmsteads of Attica they generally worked underthe same conditions and shared the same food as theirmasters; in Athens, they were indistinguishable in dress,manner and bearing from citizens—a source of ironicalcomment by foreign visitors. In many crafts, slaves notonly worked side by side with freemen, but occupiedsupervisory positions over free workers as well as otherslaves.</p> + +<p>On balance, the image of Athens as a slave economywhich built its civilization and generous humanistic out-look on the backs of human chattels is false—"false in itsinterpretation of the past and in its confident pessimism asto the future, willfully false, above all, in its cynical esti-mate of human nature," observes Edward Zimmerman."Societies, like men, cannot live in compartments. Theycannot hope to achieve greatness by making amends intheir use of leisure for the lives they have brutalized inacquiring it. Art, literature, philosophy, and all other greatproducts of a nation's genius, are no mere delicate growthsof a sequestered hothouse culture; they must be sturdilyrooted, and find continual nourishment, in the broad com-mon soil of national life. That, if we are looking for les-sons, is one we might learn from ancient Greece."</p> + +<p>In Athens, the popular assembly emerged as the finalproduct of a sweeping social transition. In Paris, more thantwo millennia later, it emerged as the lever of social transi-tion itself, as a revolutionary form and an insurrectionaryforce. The Parisian sections of the early 1790s played thesame role as organs of struggle as the Soviets of 1905 and1917, with the decisive difference that relations within thesections were not mediated by a hierarchical structure.Sovereignty rested with the revolutionary assemblies them-selves, not above them.</p> + +<p>The Parisian sections emerged directly from the votingsystem established for elections to the Estates General. In1789 the monarchy had divided the capital into sixty elec-toral districts, each of which formed an assembly of so-called "active" or taxpaying citizens, the eligible voters ofthe city. These primary assemblies were expected to elect abody of electors which, in turn, was to choose the sixtyrepresentatives of the capital. After performing their elec-toral functions, the assemblies were required to disappear,but they remained on in defiance of the monarchy andconstituted themselves into permanent municipal bodies.By degrees they turned into neighborhood assemblies of all"active" citizens, varying in form, scope and power fromone district to another.</p> + +<p>The municipal law of May 1790 reorganized the sixtydistricts into forty-eight sections. The law was intended tocircumscribe the popular assemblies, but the sectionssimply ignored it. They continued to broaden their baseand extend their control over Paris. On July 30, 1792, theTheatre-Francais section swept aside the distinction be-tween "active" and "passive" citizens, inviting the poorestand most destitute of the sans-culottes to participate in theassembly. Other sections followed the Theatre-Francais,and from this period the sections became authentic popu-lar organs—indeed the very soul of the Great Revolution. Itwas the sections which constituted the new revolutionaryCommune of August 10, which organized the attack onthe Tuileries and finally eliminated the Bourbon mon-archy; it was the sections which decisively blocked theefforts of the Girondins to rouse the provinces against rev-olutionary Paris; it was the sections which, by ceaselessprodding, by their unending delegations and by armeddemonstrations, provided the revolution with its remark-able leftward momentum after 1791.</p> + +<p>The sections, however, were not merely fighting organi-zations; they represented genuine forms of self-management. At the high point of their development, they tookover the complete administration of the city. Individualsections policed their own neighborhoods, elected theirown judges, were responsible for the distribution of food,provided public aid to the poor, and contributed to themaintenance of the National Guard. With the declarationof war in April 1792 the sections took on the added tasksof enrolling volunteers for the revolutionary army and car-ing for their families, collecting donations for the wareffort, and equipping and provisioning entire battalions.During the period of the "maximum," when controls wereestablished over prices and wages to prevent a runawayinflation, the sections took responsibility for the mainte-nance of government-fixed prices. To provision Paris, thesections sent their representatives to the countryside tobuy and transport food and see to its distribution at fairprices.</p> + +<p>It must be borne in mind that this complex ofextremely important activities was undertaken not byprofessional bureaucrats but, for the most part, by ordi-nary shopkeepers and craftsmen. The bulk of the sectionalresponsibilities were discharged after working hours, dur-ing the free time of the section members. The popularassemblies of the sections usually met during the eveningsin neighborhood churches. Assemblies were ordinarilyopen to all the adults of the neighborhood. In periods ofemergency, assembly meetings were held daily; specialmeetings could be called at the request of fifty members.Most administrative responsibilities were discharged bycommittees, but the popular assemblies established all thepolicies of the sections, reviewed and passed upon thework of all the committees, and replaced officers at will.</p> + +<p>The forty-eight sections were coordinated through theParis Commune, the municipal council of the capital.When emergencies arose, sections often cooperated witheach other directly, through ad hoc delegates. This form of cooperation from below never crystalized into a perma-nent relationship. The Paris Commune of the Great Revo-lution never became an overbearing, ossified institution; itchanged with almost every important political emergency,and its stability, form and functions depended largelyupon the wishes of the sections. In the days preceding theuprising of August 10, 1792, for example, the sectionssimply suspended the old municipal council, confined Peti-on, the mayor of Paris, and, in the persons of their insur-rectionary commissioners, took over all the authority ofthe Commune and the command of the National Guard.Almost the same procedure was followed nine monthslater when the Girondin deputies were expelled from theConvention, with the difference that the Commune, andPache, the mayor of Paris, gave their consent (after somepersuasive "gestures") to the uprising of the radical sec-tions.</p> + +<p>Having relied on the sections to fasten their hold on theConvention, the Jacobins began to rely on the Conventionto destroy the sections. In September 1793 the Conven-tion limited section assemblies to two a week; threemonths later the sections were deprived of the right toelect justices of the peace and divested of their role inorganizing relief work. The sweeping centralization ofFrance, which the Jacobins undertook between 1793 and1794, completed the destruction of the sections. The sec-tions were denied control over the police and their ad-ministrative responsibilities were placed in the hands ofsalaried bureaucrats. By January 1794 the vitality of the sections had been thoroughly sapped. As Michelet ob-serves: "The general assemblies of the sections were dead,and all their power had passed to their revolutionary com-mittees, which, themselves being no longer elected bodies,but simply groups of officials nominated by the authori-ties, had not much life in them either." The sections hadbeen subverted by the very revolutionary leaders they hadraised to power in the Convention. When the time camefor Robespierre, Saint-Just and Lebas to appeal to the sec-tions against the Convention, the majority did virtuallynothing in their behalf. Indeed, the revolutionary Gravil-liers section—the men who had so earnestly supportedJacques Roux and the enrages in 1793—vindictivelyplaced their arms at the service of the Thermidorians andmarched against the Robespierrists—the Jacobin leaders,who, a few months earlier, had driven Roux to suicide andguillotined the spokesmen of the left.</p> + +<h2>FROM "HERE" TO "THERE"</h2> + +<p>The factors which undermined the assemblies of clas-sical Athens and revolutionary Paris require very little dis-cussion. In both cases the assembly mode of organizationwas broken up not only from without, but also fromwithin—by the development of class antagonisms. Thereare no forms, however cleverly contrived, that can over-come the content of a given society. Lacking the materialresources, the technology and the level of economicdevelopment to overcome class antagonisms as such,Athens and Paris could achieve an approximation of theforms of freedom only temporarily—and only to deal withthe more serious threat of complete social decay. Athensheld on to the ecclesia for several centuries, mainly be-cause the polis still retained a living contact with tribalforms of organization; Paris developed its sectional modeof organization for a period of several years, largely be-cause the sans-culottes had been precipitously swept to the head of the revolution by a rare combination of fortunatecircumstances. Both the ecclesia and the sections were un-dermined by the very conditions they were intended tocheck—property, class antagonisms and exploitation—butwhich they were incapable of eliminating. What is remark-able about them is that they worked at all, considering theenormous problems they faced and the formidable ob-stacles they had to overcome.</p> + +<p>It must be borne in mind that Athens and Paris werelarge cities, not peasant villages; indeed, they were com-plex, highly sophisticated urban centers by the standardsof their time. Athens supported a population of more thana quarter of a million, Paris over seven hundred thousand.Both cities were engaged in worldwide trade; both wereburdened by complex logistical problems; both had a mul-titude of needs that could be satisfied only by a fairlyelaborate system of public administration. Although eachhad only a fraction of the population of present-day NewYork or London, their advantages on this score were morethan canceled out by their extremely crude systems ofcommunication and transportation, and by the need, inParis at least, for members of the assembly to devote thegreater part of the day to brute toil. Yet Paris, no less thanAthens, was administered by amateurs: by men who, forseveral years and in their spare time, saw to the administra-tion of a city in revolutionary ferment. The principalmeans by which they made their revolution, organized itsconquests, and finally sustained it against counterrevolu-tion at home and invasion abroad, was the neighborhoodpublic assembly. There is no evidence that these assembliesand the committees they produced were inefficient ortechnically incompetent. On the contrary, they awakeneda popular initiative, a resoluteness in action, and a sense ofrevolutionary purpose that no professional bureaucracy,however radical its pretensions, could ever hope to achieve.Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that Athens founded Western philosophy, mathematics, drama, historiographyand art, and that revolutionary Paris contributed morethan its share to the culture of the time and the politicalthought of the Western world. The arena for these achieve-ments was not the traditional state, structured around abureaucratic apparatus, but a system of unmediated rela-tions, a face-to-face democracy organized into public as-semblies.</p> + +<p>The sections provide us with a rough model of assemblyorganization in a large city and during a period of revolu-tionary transition from a centralized political state to apotentially decentralized society. The ecclesia provides uswith a rough model of assembly organization in a decen-tralized society. The word "model" is used deliberately.The ecclesia and the sections were lived experiences, nottheoretical visions. But precisely because of this theyvalidate in practice many anarchic theoretical speculationsthat have often been dismissed as "visionary" and "un-realistic."</p> + +<p>The goal of dissolving propertied society, class rule, cen-tralization and the state is as old as the historical emer-gence of property, classes and states. In the beginning, therebels could look backward to clans, tribes and federa-tions; it was still a time when the past was closer at handthan the future. Then the past receded completely fromman's vision and memory, except perhaps as a lingeringdream of the "golden age" or the "Garden of Eden."* Atthis point the very notion of liberation becomes specu-lative and theoretical, and like all strictly theoretical vi-sions its content was permeated with the social material ofthe present. Hence the fact that Utopia, from More toBellamy, is an image not of a hypothetical future, but of a present drawn to the logical conclusion of rationality—orabsurdity. Utopia has slaves, kings, princes, oligarchs, tech-nocrats, elites, suburbanites and a substantial petty bour-geoisie. Even on the left, it became customary to definethe goal of a propertyless, stateless society as a series ofapproximations, of stages in which the end in view wasattained by the use of the state. Mediated power enteredinto the vision of the future; worse, as the development ofRussia indicates, it was strengthened to the point wherethe state today is not merely the "executive committee"of a specific class but a human condition. Life itself hasbecome bureaucratized.</p> + +<div> +<p>In envisioning the complete dissolution of the existing society, we cannot get away from the question of power — be it power over our own lives, the "seizure of power," or the dissolution of power. In going from the present to the future, from "here" to "there," we must ask: what is power? Under what conditions is it dissolved? And what does its dissolution mean? How do the forms of freedom, the unmediated relations of social life, emerge from a statified society, a society in which the state of unfreedom is carried to the point of absurdity — to domination for its own sake?</p> + +<p>We begin with the historical fact that nearly all the major revolutionary upheavals began spontaneously: witness the three days of "disorder" that preceded the take-over of the Bastille in July 1789, the defense of the artillery in Montmartre that led to the Paris Commune of 1871, the famous "five days" of February 1917 in Petrograd, the uprising of Barcelona in July 1936, the takeover of Budapest and the expulsion of the Russian army in 1956. Nearly all the great revolutions came from below, from the molecular movement of the "masses," their progressive individuation and their explosion — an explosion which invariably took the authoritarian "revolutionists" completely by surprise.</p> + +<p>There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration. This implies the forging of a self (yes, literally a forging in the revolutionary process) and a mode of administration which the self can possess. If we define "power" as the power of man over man, power can only be destroyed by the very process in which man acquires power over his own life and in which he not only "discovers" himself but, more meaningfully, formulates his selfhood in all its social dimensions.</p> + +<p>Freedom, so conceived, cannot be "delivered" to the individual as the "end product" of a “revolution" — much less as a "revolution" achieved by social-philistines who are hypnotized by the trappings of authority and power. The assembly and community cannot be legislated or decreed into existence. To be sure, a revolutionary group can purposively and consciously seek to promote the creation of these forms; but if assembly and community are not allowed to emerge organically, if their growth is not instigated, developed and matured by the social processes at work, they will not be really popular forms. Assembly and community must arise from within the revolutionary process itself; indeed, the revolutionary process must be the formation of assembly and community, and with it, the destruction of power. Assembly and community must become "fighting words," not distant panaceas. They must be created as modes of struggle against the existing society, not as theoretical or programmatic abstractions.</p> + +<p>It is hardly possible to stress this point strongly enough. The future assemblies of people in the block, the neighborhood or the district — the revolutionary sections to come — will stand on a higher social level than all the present-day committees, syndicates, parties and clubs adorned by the most resounding "revolutionary" titles. They will be the living nuclei of Utopia in the decomposing body of bourgeois society. Meeting in auditoriums, theaters, courtyards, halls, parks and — like their forerunners, the sections of 1793 — in churches, they will be the arenas of demassification, for the very essence of the revolutionary process is people acting as individuals.</p> + +<p>At this point the assembly may be faced not only withthe power of the bourgeois state—the famous problem of"dual power"—but with the danger of the incipient state.Like the Paris sections, it will have to fight not onlyagainst the Convention, but also against the tendency tocreate mediated social forms.* The factory committees,which will almost certainly be the forms that will take overindustry, must be managed directly by workers' assembliesin the factories. By the same token, neighborhood commit-tees, councils and boards must be rooted completely inthe neighborhood assembly. They must be answerable atevery point to the assembly; they and their work must beunder continual review by the assembly; and finally, theirmembers must be subject to immediate recall by the as-sembly. The specific gravity of society, in short, must be shifted to its base—the armed people in permanent as-sembly.</p> + +<p>As long as the arena of the assembly is the modernbourgeois city, the revolution is faced with a recalcitrantenvironment. The bourgeois city, by its very nature andstructure, fosters centralization, massification and manipu-lation. Inorganic, gargantuan, and organized like a factory,the city tends to inhibit the development of an organic,rounded community. In its role as the universal solvent,the assembly must try to dissolve the city itself.</p> + +<p>We can envision young people renewing social life just asthey renew the human species. Leaving the city, they beginto found the nuclear ecological communities to whicholder people repair in increasing numbers. Large resourcepools are mobilized for their use; careful ecological surveysand suggestions are placed at their disposal by the mostcompetent and imaginative people available. The moderncity begins to shrivel, to contract and to disappear, as didits ancient progenitors millennia earlier. In the new,rounded ecological community, the assembly finds itsauthentic environment and true shelter. Form and contentnow correspond completely. The journey from "here" to"there," from sections to ecclesia, from cities to communi-ties, is completed. No longer is the factory a particularizedphenomenon; it now becomes an organic part of the com-munity. In this sense, it is no longer a factory. The dissolu-tion of the factory into the community completes the dis-solution of the last vestiges of propertied, of class, and,above all, of mediated society into the new polis. And nowthe real drama of human life can unfold, in all its beauty,harmony, creativity and joy.</p> +</div> + |