#title The Murray Bookchin Reader
#author Edited by Janet Biehl
#LISTtitle Murray Bookchin Reader
#SORTauthors Murray Bookchin, Janet Biehl
#SORTtopics Murray Bookchin, ecology, human ecology, social ecology, communalism, libertarian municipalism, municipalism, post-scarcity, post-anarchism, post-marxism, dialectics
#date 1999
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-09-24
We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold with them. An outlook that ceases to look for what is new and potential in the name of “realism” has already lost contact with the present, for the present is always conditioned by the future. True development is cumulative, not sequential; it is growth, not succession. The new always embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more adequately as the parts of a greater whole.
Murray Bookchin, “On Spontaneity and Organization,” 1971
*** Acknowledgments
The idea for this reader initially came from David Goodway, who, one
sunny afternoon in May 1992, sat down with Bookchin, Gideon
Kossoff, and myself in an attic in Keighley, West Yorkshire, to draft a
table of contents. Although the present book bears only the faintest
resemblance to the one we sketched that afternoon, its origins do lie
in this meeting. Goodway has my warm thanks for setting the wheels
in motion.
I am immensely grateful to Dimitri Roussopoulos for his permission
to reprint from works issued by his press, Black Rose Books; and to
Ramsey Kanaan for his permission to use the materials published under
the auspices of A.K. Press. Heartfelt thanks as well to Steve Cook and
Jane Greenwood of Cassell for their support for this project. Peter
Zegers commented helpfully on the manuscript.
My greatest debt, however, is to Murray Bookchin himself, my
companion, who encouraged me to take on this project. Rereading his
writings, for this book, has reminded me yet again that it is a privilege
to be associated with him.
** Introduction
In the aftermath of the cold war, in a world that glorifies markets and
commodities, it sometimes seems difficult to remember that generations
of people once fought to create a very different kind of world. To many,
the aspirations of this grand tradition of socialism often seem archaic
today, or utopian in the pejorative sense, the stuff of idle dreams; others,
more dismissive, consider socialism to be an inherently coercive system,
one whose consignment to the past is well-deserved.
Yet for a century preceding World War I, and for nearly a half century
thereafter, various kinds of socialism — statist and libertarian; economistic
and moral; industrial and communalistic — constituted a powerful
mass movement for the transformation of a competitive society into a
cooperative one — and for the creation of a generous and humane system
in which emancipated human beings could fulfill their creative and
rational potentialities. People are ends in their own right, the socialist
tradition asserted, not means for one another’s use; and they are
substantive beings, with considered opinions and deep feelings, not
mass-produced things with artificially induced notions and wants.
People can and should throw away the economic shackles that bind
them, socialists argued, cast off the fictions and unrealities that mystify
them, and plan and construct, deliberately and consciously, a truly
enlightened and emancipated society based on freedom and
cooperation, reason and solidarity. Material aims would be secondary
to ethical concerns, people would have rich, spontaneous social
relationships with one another, and they would actively and responsibly
participate in making all decisions about their lives, rather than subject
themselves to external authoritarian control.
After 1917 a general enthusiasm for the stunning accomplishment
of the Bolshevik Revolution pervaded almost all sectors of the
international left, so much so that the humanistic ideals of socialism
came to be attached to the Communist movement. In the 1930s young
American intellectuals growing up under Depression conditions,
especially in the vibrant radical political culture of New York City, cut
their teeth on the version of socialism that the Communist movement
taught them. Their minds brimming with revolutionary strategies and
Marxian dialectics, their hopes and passions spurred by lifeendangering
battles against a capitalist system that seemed on the brink
of collapse, they marshaled all their abilities to achieve the century-old
socialist ideal.
Tragically, international Communism defiled that ideal. It committed
monstrous abuses in the name of socialism, and when these abuses
became too much to bear — the show trials of 1936–8, the betrayal of
the Spanish Revolution, and the Hitler–Stalin pact — hopes that the
Communist movement could usher in a socialist world were
shipwrecked. Many radicals, reeling from these blows, withdrew into
private life; others accommodated themselves to the capitalist system
in varying degrees, even to the point of supporting the United States in
the cold war. Still others, who did remain on the left politically, turned
their attention to more limited arenas: aesthetics, or “new class” theory,
or Frankfurt School sociology. Meanwhile, outside the academy, what
remained of the Marxian left persisted in small groups, defying the
prevailing “consensus” in favor of capitalism and accommodation.
Among the young intellectuals who had emerged from the 1930s
Communist movement, relatively few responded to its failure by
attempting to keep the centuries-old revolutionary tradition alive, by
advancing a libertarian alternative to Marxism, one better suited to
pursue a humane socialist society in the postwar era. It is a distinction
of Murray Bookchin that in these years of disillusion, disenchantment,
and retreat, he attempted to create just such an alternative.
Born in January 1921 in New York City to Russian Jewish
immigrants, Bookchin was raised under the very shadow of the Russian
Revolution, partaking of the excitement that it aroused among his
immigrant and working-class neighbors. At the same time, from his
earliest years, he imbibed libertarian ideas from his maternal grandmother,
who had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a
quasi-anarchistic populist movement, in czarist Russia. In the early
1930s, as the United States plunged deeper into the Depression, he
entered the Communist movement’s youth organizations, speaking at
streetcorner meetings, participating in rent strikes, and helping to
organize the unemployed, even as an adolescent, eventually running
the educational program for his branch of the Young Communist
League. After breaking with Stalinism — initially, in 1935, because of
its class-collaborationist policies (the so-called Popular Front), then
conclusively in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War — he turned to
Trotskyism and later to libertarian socialism, joining a group
surrounding the exiled German Trotskyist Josef Weber in the mid — 1940s; his earliest works were published in this group’s periodical,
Contemporary Issues.
In the meantime, Bookchin was deeply involved in trade union
organizing in northern New Jersey, where he worked for years as a
foundryman and an autoworker. (Due to his family’s poverty, he went
to work in heavy industry directly after high school.) In whatever
factory he worked, he engaged in union activities as a member of the
burgeoning and intensely militant Congress of Industrial Organizations,
particularly the United Automobile Workers.
During the 1930s, Marxian precepts had seemed to explain
conclusively the Great Depression and the turbulent labor insurgency
that arose during the decade, seeming to challenge the very foundations
of the capitalist system. But Marxist prognoses about the 1940s were
glaringly unfulfilled. These predictions had it that World War II, like
World War I, would end in proletarian revolutions among the
belligerent countries. But the proletariat, far from making a revolution
in any Western country under the banner of internationalism, fought
out the war under the banner of nationalism. Even the German working
class abandoned the class consciousness of its earlier socialist history
and fought on behalf of Hitler to the very end. Far from collapsing,
capitalism emerged from the war unscathed and strengthened, with
more stability than ever before.
The Soviet Union, for its part, was clearly far from a socialist society,
let alone a communist one. Far from playing a revolutionary role during
the war, it was actively involved in suppressing revolutionary movements
in its own national interests. Finally, American industrial
workers, far from challenging the capitalist system, were becoming
assimilated into it. When a major General Motors strike in 1946 ended
with his co-workers placidly accepting company pension plans and
unemployment benefits, Bookchin’s disillusionment with the workers’
movement as a uniquely revolutionary force was complete, and his
years as a union activist came to an end. The revolutionary tradition,
he concluded, would have to dispense with the notion of proletarian
hegemony as the compelling force for basic social change. With the
consolidation of capitalism on a massive international scale, the idea
that conflict between wage labor and capital would bring capitalism
to an end had to be called into serious question.
To his credit, Bookchin, faced with these dispiriting conditions,
nonetheless refused to relinquish his commitment to revolution. Rather,
the revolutionary tradition, he felt, had to explore new possibilities for
creating a free cooperative society and reclaim nonauthoritarian
socialism in a new form. Anarchism, whose history had long
intertwined with that of Marxian socialism, argued that people could
manage their own affairs without benefit of a state, and that the object
of revolution should be not the seizure of state power but its dissolution.
In 1950s America, in the aftermath of the McCarthy period, the left
generally — especially the anarchist movement — was small, fragmented,
and seemingly on the wane. Yet anarchism’s libertarian ideals — “a
stateless, decentralized society, based on the communal ownership of
the means of production”[1] — seemed to be the basis, in Bookchin’s mind,
for a viable revolutionary alternative in the postwar era.
Moving decisively toward this left-libertarian tradition in the middle
of the decade, Bookchin tried to free anarchism of its more dated
nineteenth-century aspects and recast its honorable principles in
contemporary terms. “The future of the anarchist movement will
depend upon its ability to apply basic libertarian principles to new
historical situations,” he wrote in 1964 .
... Life itself compels the anarchist to concern himself increasingly with
the quality of urban life, with the reorganization of society along
humanistic lines, with the subcultures created by new, often indefinable
strata — students, unemployables, an immense bohemia of intellectuals,
and above all a youth which began to gain social awareness with the
peace movement and civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.[2]
Even as he embraced the anarchist tradition, however, Bookchin never
entirely abandoned Marx’s basic ideas. In effect, he drew on the best
of both Marxism and anarchism to synthesize a coherent hybrid
political philosophy of freedom and cooperation, one that drew on
both intellectual rigor and cultural sensibility, analysis and
reconstruction. He would call this synthesis social ecology.
Even as Bookchin was moving toward an anarchist outlook, the
American economy of the early 1950s was undergoing enormous
expansion, with unprecedented economic advances that catapulted even
industrial workers into the booming middle class. It was not only
military spending that propelled this growth: with government support,
science and industry had combined to spawn a wide array of new
technologies, suitable for civilian as well as military use. These new
technologies, so it was said, seemed poised to cure all social ills of the
time, if not engineer an entirely new civilization.
Automobiles, fast becoming a standard consumer item, were
promising mobility, suburbs, and jobs — giving plausibility, in the eyes
of many Americans, to the slogan, “What’s good for GM is good for
America.” Nuclear power, it was avowed, would meet US energy needs
more or less for free; indeed, Lewis Strauss, the former Wall Street
investment banker who first chaired the Atomic Energy Commission,
predicted that electricity from nuclear power plants would become “too
cheap to meter.” Miracle grains would feed humanity, and new pharmaceuticals
would control formerly intractable diseases. Petrochemicals
and petrochemical products — including plastics, food additives,
detergents, solvents, and abrasives — would make life comfortable and
provide labor-saving convenience for everyone. As for pesticides, as
environmental historian Robert Gottlieb observes, they were “being
touted as a kind of miracle product, supported by advertising campaigns
(‘Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry’), by government
policies designed to increase agricultural productivity, and a media
celebration of the wonders of the new technology.” Most of the
American public welcomed these new technologies, seeming to agree
with the director of the US Geological Survey, Thomas Nolan, that the
new technological resources were “inexhaustible.”[3]
It was just at this moment of collective anticipation that Bookchin
audaciously suggested that an ecological crisis lay on the horizon.
“Within recent years,” he wrote in a long 1952 essay, “the rise of little
known and even unknown infectious diseases, the increase of
degenerative illnesses and finally the high incidence of cancer suggests
some connection between the growing use of chemicals in food and
human diseases.”[4] The chemicals being used in food additives, he
insisted in “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” could well be
carcinogenic. The new economic and technological boom, despite all
its rosy promises, could also have harmful environmental consequences.
Little environmentalist writing existed in the United States in these
years, apart from neo-Malthusian tracts that issued dire warnings about
overpopulation, like Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and
William Vogt’s The Road to Survival (both published in 1948).
Although a conservation movement existed, it worked primarily for
the preservation of wilderness areas in national parks and showed little
interest in social or political analysis. The existing literature on chemical
pollution, for its part, was silent on the driving role that modern
capitalism was playing in the development and application of chemicals.
So it was that before most Americans even realized that an
environmental crisis was in the offing, Bookchin was telling them it
was. Even more striking, he was already probing its sources. “The
principal motives for chemicals,” he warned, and the “demands
imposed upon [farm] land” are “shaped neither by the needs of the
public nor by the limits of nature, but by the exigencies of profit and
competition.”[5] The use of carcinogenic chemicals was rooted in a profitoriented
society; “profit-minded businessmen” have produced
“ecological disturbances ... throughout the American countryside. For
decades, lumber companies and railroads were permitted a free hand
in destroying valuable forest lands and wildlife.”[6] Bookchin had not
only rooted environmental dislocations in modern capitalism — he had
found a new limit to capitalist expansion, one that held the potential
to supersede the misery of the working class as a source of fundamental
social change: environmental destruction.
Amid the McCarthyite intolerance of all social radicalism in 1952,
it required considerable courage to write and publish a radical social
analysis of environmental problems. Yet not only did Bookchin write
such an analysis, he advanced, albeit in rudimentary terms, an anarchist
solution to the problems he explored, calling for the decentralization
of society to countervail the looming ecological crisis, in passages that
presage the marriage of anarchism and ecology that he would expound
more fully twelve years later:
In decentralization exists a real possibility for developing the best
traditions of social life and for solving agricultural and nutritional
difficulties that have thus far been delivered to chemistry. Most of the
food problems of the world would be solved today by well-balanced
and rounded communities, intelligently urbanized, well-equipped with
industry and with easy access to the land.... The problem has become
a social problem — an issue concerning the misuse of industry as a
whole.[7]
For almost half a century, this assertion of the social causes of
ecological problems, and the insistence on their solution by a revolutionary
decentralization of society have remained consistent in
Bookchin’s writings. He elaborated these ideas further in Our Synthetic Environment, a pioneering 1962 work that was published five months
before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; unlike Carson’s book, Our Synthetic Environment did not limit its focus to pesticides. A comprehensive
overview of ecological degradation, it addressed not only the
connections between food additives and cancer but the impact of X-radiation,
radionuclides from fallout, and the stresses of urban life,
giving a social elaboration of what in those days was called “human
ecology.”[8]
The freer political atmosphere of the 1960s allowed Bookchin to
express more clearly his revolutionary perspective. His 1964 essay
“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first manifesto of radical
ecology, overtly called for revolutionary change as a solution to the
ecological crisis. It advanced a conjunction of anarchism and ecology
to create an ecological society that would be humane and free,
libertarian and decentralized, mutualistic and cooperative.
In its range and depth, Bookchin’s dialectical synthesis of anarchism
and ecology, which he called social ecology, had no equal in the postwar
international Left. The first major effort to fuse ecological awareness
with the need for fundamental social change, and to link a philosophy
of nature with a philosophy of social revolution, it remains the most
important such effort to this day.
Social ecology, drawing on multiple domains of knowledge, traces
the roots of the ecological crisis to dislocations in society. As Bookchin
put it in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”: “The imbalances man
has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has
produced in the social world.”[9] This inextricable relation between
society and ecology remains a pillar of social ecology.
But social ecology has not only a critical dimension but a
reconstructive one as well. Since the causes of the ecological crisis are
social in nature, we can avert the present danger of ecological disaster
only by fundamentally transforming the present society into a rational
and ecological one. In this same 1964 article, in “Toward a Liberatory
Technology” (written the following year), and in many subsequent
works, Bookchin described his version of the truly libertarian socialist
society. It would be a decentralized and mutualistic one, free of
hierarchy and domination. Town and country would no longer be
opposed to each other but would instead be integrated. Social life would
be scaled to human dimensions. Politics would be directly democratic
at the community level, so that citizens can manage their own social
and political affairs on a face-to-face basis, forming confederations to
address larger-scale problems. Economic life would be cooperative and
communal, and technology would eliminate onerous and tedious labor.
Bookchin would elaborate and refine many aspects of this societyand
the means to achieve it — over subsequent decades. But its earliest
outlines were sketched as early as 1962 and developed in 1964 and
1965. Here Bookchin also proposed that an ecological society could
make use of solar and wind power as sources of energy, replacing fossil
fuels. At that time renewable energy sources — solar and wind powerwere
subjects of some research and experimentation, but they had
essentially been abandoned as practical alternatives to fossil and nuclear
fuels; nor did the existing environmental literature pay much attention
to them. Not only did Bookchin show their relevance to the solution
of ecological problems, he stood alone in demonstrating their integral
importance to the creation of an ecological society:
To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and
petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind, and tidal energy can reach us mainly
in small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new devices
seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of
electricity.... To use solar, wind, and tidal power effectively, the
megalopolis must be decentralized. A new type of community, carefully
tailored to the characteristics and resources of a region, must replace
the sprawling urban belts that are emerging today.[10]
These renewable sources of energy, in effect, had far-reaching
anarchistic as well as ecological implications.
The list of Bookchin’s innovations in ecological politics does not stop
here. To take another example — warnings of a greenhouse effect were
hardly common in the early 1960s, yet Bookchin issued just such a
warning in 1964:
It can be argued on very sound theoretical grounds that this growing
blanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting heat radiated from the earth,
will lead to rising atmospheric temperatures, a more violent circulation
of air, more destructive storm patterns, and eventually a melting of the
polar ice caps (possibly in two or three centuries), rising sea levels, and
the inundation of vast land areas.[11]
Bookchin underestimated only the time frame — and it is testimony to
the enormity of the ecological problem that the damage that he
anticipated would take centuries to develop has actually developed in
only a matter of decades.
Bookchin spent much of the 1960s criss-crossing the United States
and Canada, indefatigably educating the counterculture and New Left
about ecology and its revolutionary significance. The first Earth Day in
1970, followed by the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972,
signaled the arrival of ecology as a popular issue. But in the following
years a less radical, more technocratic approach to ecological issues
came to the fore, one that, in Bookchin’s view, represented mere environmental
tinkering: instead of proposing to transform society as a whole,
it looked for technological solutions to specific environmental problems.
Calling this approach reformistic rather than revolutionary, Bookchin
labeled it “environmentalism,” in contradistinction to his more radical
“ecology.” Although some histories of the ecological and environmental
movements now assert that Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was
the first to distinguish between environmentalism and ecology (in a
paper on deep ecology, presented as a lecture in 1972[12]), Bookchin made
this distinction in November 1971, in “Spontaneity and Organization,”
anchoring it, as always, in a social and political matrix:
I speak, here, of ecology, not environmentalism. Environmentalism deals
with the serviceability of the human habitat, a passive habitat that people
use, in short, an assemblage of things called “natural resources” and
“urban resources.” Taken by themselves, environmental issues require
the use of no greater wisdom than the instrumentalist modes of thought
and methods that are used by city planners, engineers, physicians,
lawyers — and socialists.
Ecology, by contrast, ... is an outlook that interprets all
interdependencies (social and psychological as well as natural)
nonhierarchically. Ecology denies that nature can be interpreted from
a hierarchical viewpoint. Moreover, it affirms that diversity and
spontaneous development are ends in themselves, to be respected in
their own right. Formulated in terms of ecology’s “ecosystem approach,”
this means that each form of life has a unique place in the balance of
nature and its removal from the ecosystem could imperil the stability
of the whole.[13]
Bookchin’s core political program remained far too radical to gain
general social acceptance in those decades. But many of his remarkably
prescient insights have by now become commonplaces, not only in
ecological thought but in mainstream popular culture, while their
originating source has been forgotten or obscured. By advancing these
ideas when he did, Bookchin exercised a strong and steady influence
on the international development of radical ecological thought.
As significant as Bookchin’s prescient insights are, they are only part
of what is actually a large theoretical corpus. Over the course of five
decades, the ideas of social ecology have grown steadily in richness.
Encompassing anthropology and history, politics and social criticism,
philosophy and natural science, Bookchin’s works evoke the grand
tradition of nineteenth-century generalists, who could write knowledgeably
on a multiplicity of subjects — a tradition that is, lamentably,
fast disappearing in the present age of scholarly specialization and
postmodernist fragmentation.
Drawing on anthropology and history, Bookchin explored the
libertarian and democratic traditions that could contribute to the
creation of an ecological and rational society. A “legacy of freedom,”
he believes, has run like an undercurrent within Western civilization
and in other parts of the world, with certain social virtues and practices
that are relevant to the socialist ideal. In its nascent form this legacy
appears in the “organic society” of prehistoric Europe, with a constellation
of relatively egalitarian social relations. These societies were
destroyed by the rise of hierarchy and domination and ultimately by
the emergence of states and the capitalist system.
Hierarchy and domination, it should be noted, are key concepts in
Bookchin’s political work, for although in his view the ecological crisis
has stemmed proximately from a capitalist economy, its ultimate roots
lie in social hierarchies. The ideology of dominating the natural world,
he has long maintained, is an anthropomorphic projection of human
social domination onto the natural world. It could only have stemmed
historically from the domination of human by human, and not the other
way around. During the late 1960s and 1970s Bookchin’s anthropological,
historical, and political explorations of the “legacy of
freedom” and the “legacy of domination,” as he called it, percolated
through radical social movements — not only the ecology movement
but the feminist, communitarian, and anarchist movements as well.
The concept of hierarchy in particular, assimilated by the counterculture
into conventional wisdom, has become essential to radical thought due
largely to Bookchin’s insistence on its nature and importance in many
lectures in the late 1960s.
Bookchin’s ideas have retained an underlying continuity over the
decades, and it is precisely by upholding his original principles that he
has maintained his stalwart opposition to the existing capitalist and
hierarchical system. As could be expected of any writer engaged in
concrete political activity, his ideas have also changed over time; yet they
have done so not to effect a compromise with the existing social order
but to sustain a revolutionary position in response to regressive
developments both in the larger society and within social movements for
change. Often he has initiated intramural debates by objecting to
tendencies that he considered out of place in a revolutionary movement,
due to their opportunism, their accommodation to the system, or their
quietism; his frequently polemical style stems from an earnest attempt to
preserve the revolutionary impulse in movements that hold potential for
radical social transformation. To his credit, he raised such objections even
when the tendencies to which he objected were the more popular ones
and when acquiescence would have enhanced his own popularity. Still,
even as the key concepts of social ecology remain fundamentally
unchanged since the 1960s, the many debates in which he has been
engaged have primarily defined and sharpened them. If anything, his ideas
have become more sophisticated over time as a result of these debates.
It is typical of Bookchin that his ideas should become honed as a
result of practical movement experience. Despite his large body of
theoretical writing, he is no mere armchair theorist. Throughout his
life he has consistently maintained an active political practice: his union
and protest activities in the Depression decade, his libertarian activities
of the 1950s and 1960s, his mobilization of opposition to a nuclear
power plant proposed for Queens in 1964, his civil rights activities, his
participation in endless demonstrations and actions in the 1960s against
the Vietnam war and in support of ecology and anarchism, his 1970s
involvement in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, his efforts to preserve
and expand democracy in his adopted state of Vermont, and finally his
influence, in the 1980s, on the development of Green movements in
the United States and abroad, trying — often unsuccessfully — to keep
them on a radical course. Only in his eighth decade have physical
infirmities — especially a nearly crippling arthritis — obliged him to
withdraw from organized political activity.
Yet withdrawal from active political work has not meant that
Bookchin has put down his pen. On the contrary, in an era of reaction,
he continues to denounce tendencies that compromise the radicalism
of the ecological and anarchist movements, be it a mystical “deep
ecology” or an individualistic “lifestyle anarchism,” both of which he
sees as personalistic and irrationalistic departures from the social,
rational, and democratic eco-anarchism and socialism he has
championed for decades. With the emergence of ecological-political
tendencies that embraced irrationalism, he emphasized that an
ecological society would neither renounce nor denigrate reason, science,
and technology. So crucial is this point that he today prefers the phrase
“rational society” to other labels for a free society, since a rational
society would necessarily be one that is ecological. His commitment to
longstanding socialist ideals, informed by Marx as well as by social
anarchist thinkers, remains firm: for Murray Bookchin, the socialist
utopia is still, as he once said, “the only reality that makes any sense.”
To all his writing, Bookchin brings a passionate hatred of the capitalist
social order, expressed in the cadences of six decades of radical oratory.
He brings the grim hatred of the grueling toil that he experienced in
factories, and the acerbic intensity of one who has looked down the
barrel of a gun during 1930s labor protests. At the same time he brings
the originality and creativity of a thinker who is largely self-taught,
and the love of coherence of one who studied dialectics with Marxists
as a youth. He brings to it, in this age of diminished expectations, the
outrage of one who consistently chooses morality over realpolitik, and
he serves as the lacerating conscience of those who once held revolutionary
sentiments but have since abandoned them.
A thorough understanding of his project would require a reading of
his most important books. Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) contains
the two pivotal mid-1960s essays mentioned in this introduction, which
encapsulate so many ideas that he later developed more fully and that,
in their uncompromising intensity, remain fresh to this day. The Ecology of Freedom (1982) is an anthropological and historical account not
only of the rise of hierarchy and domination but of the “legacy of
freedom,” including the cultural, psychological, and epistemological
components of both. Although The Ecology of Freedom has been
heralded in some quarters as Bookchin’s magnum opus, it has been
followed by several books of at least equal importance. The Philosophy of Social Ecology, especially its revised edition (1995), is a collection
of five philosophical essays on dialectical naturalism, the nature
philosophy that underpins his political and social thought; he himself
regards it as his most important work to date. Remaking Society ( 1989)
is a summary overview of his ideas, with emphasis on their anarchist
roots. From Urbanization to Cities (which has previously appeared
under the titles Urbanization without Cities and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship) is a wide-ranging exposition of
libertarian municipalism, Bookchin’s political program, giving much
attention to popular democratic institutional forms in European and
American history. Re-enchanting Humanity (1995) is his defense of the
Enlightenment against a variety of antihumanistic and irrationalistic
trends in popular culture today. Finally, his three-volume The Third Revolution (of which the first volume is already in print at the time of
writing) traces the history of popular movements within EuroAmerican
revolutions, beginning with the peasant revolts of the
fourteenth century and closing with the Spanish Revolution of 1936–7.
The present Reader brings together selections from Bookchin’s major
writings, organized thematically. Even as I have tried to show the
development of his ideas over time, I have emphasized those works
that have stood the test of time and that are most in accordance with
his views today, at the expense of works that, generated in the heat of
polemic, sometimes verged on one-sidedness. All of the selections are
excerpted from larger works, and all have been pruned in some way,
be it to achieve conciseness, to eliminate repetition among the selections
in this book, or to produce a thematic balance among them. I have very
lightly edited a few of the selections, but only where the need for it was
distracting. Regrettably, but necessarily for reasons of space, I have had
to cut all textual footnotes, retaining only those that cite a specific
source. Except for these notes, I have indicated all cuts in the text with
ellipsis points. I have provided the sources for all the selections in the
listing that appears before this introduction.
Janet Biehl
[1] Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” 1964; as reprinted
in Anarchy 69, val. 6 (1966), p. 18. The section “Observations on Classical
Anarchism” appeared in the original essay, as it was published in Comment in
1964 and in Anarchy in 1966, but it was cut from the reprinting in PostScarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971; Montreal: Black
Rose Books, 1977).
[2] Ibid., pp. 18, 21.
[3] Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press,
1993), p. 83; Nolan is quoted on p. 37.
[4] Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), “The Problem of Chemicals in
Food,” Contemporary Issues, val. 3, no. 12 (June-August 1952), p. 235.
[5] Ibid., pp. 206, 211.
[6] Ibid., p. 209.
[7] Ibid., p. 240.
[8] Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), Our Synthetic Environment
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). For a comparison with Silent Spring, see
Yaakov Garb, “Change and Continuity in Environmental World-View,” in
Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, edited by David Macauley
(New York: Guilford, 1996), pp. 246–7.
[9] “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 62.
[10] Ibid., p. 74–5.
[11] “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as it appeared in Anarchy, p. 5. Some
of the words from this passage were cut when the essay was republished in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism; see p. 60 of that book.
[12] Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,”
Inquiry, val. 16 (1973), pp. 95–100.
[13] Murray Bookchin, “Spontaneity and Organization,” lecture delivered at Telos
conference, Buffalo, NY, 1971; published in Anarchos, no. 4 (1973) and in
Liberation (March 1972); republished in Toward an Ecological Society
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), where this quotation is on pp. 270–1.
** Chapter 1: An Ecological Society
*** Introduction
Bookchin’s interest in ecology arose primarily from his boyhood
curiosity about natural phenomena, from his studies of biology in
high school. and from his love of green spaces in the environs of
his native New York City, as well as from his dismay at their
diminution with the buildup of urban streets and buildings.
Yet another source of inspiration for his thinking about ecology
were the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In scattered
passages the two progenitors of Marxian socialism had alluded
provocatively to a conflicted relationship between town and
country. “The greatest division of material and mental labour,” they
wrote, “is the separation of town and country. The antagonism
between town and country begins with the transition from
barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation,
and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present
day.”[14] Engels, writing alone, lamented the spread of industrial
capitalist towns into the countryside. “The present poisoning of the
air, water and land can be put to an end only by the fusion” of town
and country:
and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now
languishing in the towns.... The abolition of the separation
between town and country is ... not utopian, even in so far as it
presupposes the most equal distribution possible of large-scale
industry over the whole country. It is true that in the huge towns
civilisation has bequeathed us a heritage to rid ourselves of which
will take much time and trouble. But this heritage must and will
be got rid of, however protracted the process may be.[15]
Such unsystematic but suggestive statements, reinforced by
discussions in the Contemporary Issues group, gave Bookchin a
rough framework for interpreting the environmental changes that
he was observing. He began to explore the origins of this cleavage
between town and country, between human society and the natural
world, and he speculated about how it could be annulled — that is,
how town and country could be reintegrated.
It is significant that from his earliest writings on environmental
issues, Bookchin did not interpret the ecological crisis as the
consequence of a rift between pristine natural world and human
culture as such, or as a basic antithesis that could be overcome only
by exalting wilderness over civilization. Rather, from the outset he
thought in terms of attaining a reconciliation between human and
nonhuman nature in a particular kind of society, in which
“rounded” human communities would be sensitively embedded in
nonhuman nature. This integrative approach contrasts markedly
with the romantic nature-worship of later mystical ecologies that
would reject civilization with a militancy that sometimes passes over
into antihumanism and misanthropy. From their standpoint the very
notion of an “ecological society” would be a contradiction in terms:
the antidote to ecological crisis is, for them, the veneration of
nature, understood as wilderness. Bookchin’s integrative approach,
by contrast, has been fundamental to his thought from the outset.
A legacy of Enlightenment humanism, which he early absorbed
from Marxian socialism, it compelled him to look for ecological
solutions that would enhance human creativity, not deny it.
The society capable of performing such an integration, Bookchin
argued, would be not a strictly Marxist one, focused primarily on
economic facts, but an anarchist one, decentralized and mutualistic,
nonhierarchical and cooperative. Over the decades he would flesh
out this concept more fully, with a social-political program as well
as a nature philosophy. Yet even his earliest writings express its
major points: its ecological humanism, its technological infrastructure,
and especially its ethical outlook, based on principles
beneficial to both the social and natural worlds, like unity in
diversity and complementarity, differentiation, and development.
And he has consistently held to the idea that achieving the
integration of human and nonhuman nature requires, as a
precondition, changing human social relations — creating a society
of freedom and cooperation.
*** Decentralization
(from Our Synthetic Environment, 1962)
Without having read any books or articles on human ecology, millions
of Americans have sensed the overall deterioration of modern urban
life. They have turned to the suburbs and “exurbs” as a refuge from
the burdens of the metropolitan milieu. From all accounts of suburban
life, many of these burdens have followed them into the countryside.
Suburbanites have not adapted to the land; they have merely adapted
a metropolitan manner of life to semirural surroundings. The
metropolis remains the axis around which their lives turn. It is the
source of their livelihood, their food staples, and in large part their
tensions. The suburbs have branched away from the city, but they still
belong to the metropolitan tree.
It would be wise, however, to stop ridiculing the exodus to the
suburbs and to try to understand what lies behind this phenomenon.
The modern city has reached its limits. Megalopolitan life is breaking
down — psychically, economically, and biologically. Millions of people
have acknowledged this breakdown by “voting with their feet”: they
have picked up their belongings and left. If they have not been able to
sever their connections with the metropolis, at least they have tried. As
a social symptom, the effort is significant. The reconciliation of man
with the natural world is no longer merely desirable; it has become a
necessity. It is a compelling need that is sending millions of people into
the countryside. The need has created a new interest in camping,
handicrafts, and horticulture. In ever-increasing numbers, Americans
are acquiring a passionate interest in their national parks and forests,
in their rural landscape, and in their small-town agrarian heritage.
Despite its many shortcomings, this trend reflects a basically sound
orientation. The average American is making an attempt, however
confusedly, to reduce his environment to a human scale. He is trying
to recreate a world that he can cope with as an individual, a world that
he correctly identifies with the freedom, gentler rhythms, and quietude
of rural surroundings. His attempts at gardening, landscaping, carpentry,
home maintenance, and other so-called suburban “vices” reflect
a need to function within an intelligible, manipulable, and individually
creative sphere of human activity. The suburbanite, like the camper,
senses that he is working with basic, abiding things that have slipped
from his control in the metropolitan world — shelter, the handiwork
that enters into daily life, vegetation, and the land. He is fortunate, to
be sure, if these activities do not descend to the level of caricature.
Nevertheless, they are important, not only because they reflect basic
needs of man but because they also reflect basic needs of the things
with which he is working. The human scale is also the natural scale.
The soil, the land, the living things on which man depends for his
nutriment and recreation are direly in need of individual care.
For one thing, proper maintenance of the soil not only depends upon
advances in our knowledge of soil chemistry and soil fertility; it also
requires a more personalized approach to agriculture. Thus far, the
trend has been the other way; agriculture has become depersonalized
and overindustrialized. Modern farming is suffering from gigantism.
The average agricultural unit is getting so big that the finer aspects of
soil performance and soil needs are being overlooked. If differences in
the quality and performance of various kinds of soil are to receive more
attention, American farming must be reduced to a more human scale.
It will become necessary to bring agriculture within the scope of the
individual, so that the farmer and the soil can develop together, each
responding as fully as possible to the needs of the other.
The same is true for the management of livestock. Today food animals
are being manipulated like a lifeless industrial resource. Normally, large
numbers of animals are collected in the smallest possible area and are
allowed only as much movement as is necessary for mere survival. Our
meat animals have been placed on a diet composed for the most part of
medicated feed high in carbohydrates. Before they are slaughtered, these
obese, rapidly matured creatures seldom spend more than six months
on the range and six months on farms, where they are kept on
concentrated rations and gain about two pounds daily. Our dairy herds
are handled like machines; our poultry flocks, like hothouse tomatoes.
The need to restore the time-honored intimacy between man and his
livestock is just as pronounced as the need to bring agriculture within
the horizon of the individual farmer. Although modern technology has
enlarged the elements that enter into the agricultural situation, giving
each man a wider area of sovereignty and control, machines have not
lessened the importance of personal familiarity with the land, its
vegetation, and the living things it supports. Unless principles of good
land use permit otherwise, a farm should not become smaller or larger
than the individual farmer can command. If it is smaller, agriculture will
become inefficient; if larger, it will become depersonalized.
With the decline in the quality of urban life, on the one hand, and
the growing imbalance in agriculture, on the other, our times are
beginning to witness a remarkable confluence of human interests with
the needs of the natural world. Men of the nineteenth century assumed
a posture of defiance toward the forests, plains, and mountains. Their
applause was reserved for the engineer, the technician, the inventor, at
times even the robber baron, and the railroader, who seemed to offer
the promise of a more abundant material life. Today we are filled with
a vague nostalgia for the past. To a large degree this nostalgia reflects
the insecurity and uncertainty of our times, in contrast with the echoes
of a more optimistic and perhaps more tranquil era. But it also reflects
a deep sense of loss, a longing for the free, unblemished land that lay
before the eyes of the frontiersman and early settler. We are seeking
out the mountains they tried to avoid and we are trying to recover
fragments of the forests they removed. Our nostalgia springs neither
from a greater sensitivity nor from the wilder depths of human instinct.
It springs from a growing need to restore the normal, balanced, and
manageable rhythms of human life — that is, an environment that meets
our requirements as individuals and biological beings.
Modern man can never return to the primitive life he so often idealizes,
but the point is that he doesn’t have to. The use of farm machinery as
such does not conflict with sound agricultural practices; nor are industry
and an urbanized community incompatible with a more agrarian, more
natural environment. Ironically, advances in technology itself have
largely overcome the industrial problems that once justified the huge
concentratioAs of people and facilities in a few urban areas.
Automobiles, aircraft, electric power, and electronic devices have
eliminated nearly all the problems of transportation, communication,
and social isolation that burdened man in past eras. We can now
communicate with one another over a distance of thousands of miles in
a matter of seconds, and we can travel to the most remote areas of the
world in a few hours. The obstacles created by space and time are
essentially gone. Similarly, size need no longer be a problem.
Technologists have developed remarkable small-scale alternatives to
many of the giant facilities that still dominate modern industry. The
smoky steel town, for example, is an anachronism. Excellent steel can
be made and rolled with installations that occupy about two or three
city blocks. Many of the latest machines are highly versatile and
compact. They lend themselves to a large variety of manufacturing and
finishing operations. Today the more modern plant, with its clean, quiet,
versatile, and largely automated facilities, contrasts sharply with the
huge, ugly, congested factories inherited from an earlier era.
Thus, almost without realizing it, we have been preparing the
material conditions for a new type of human community — one that
constitutes neither a complete return to the past nor a suburban
accommodation to the present. It is no longer fanciful to think of man’s
future environment in terms of a decentralized, moderate-sized city that
combines industry with agriculture, not only in the same civic entity
but in the occupational activities of the same individual. The “urbanized
farmer” or the “agrarianized townsman” need not be a contradiction
in terms. This way of life was achieved for a time by the Greek polis,
by early Republican Rome, and by the Renaissance commune. The
urban centers that became the well-springs of Western civilization were
not strictly cities in the modern sense of the term. Rather, they brought
agriculture together with urban life, synthesizing both into a rounded
human, cultural, and social development.
Whether modern man manages to reach this point or travels only
part of the way, some kind of decentralization will be necessary to
achieve a lasting equilibrium between society and nature. Urban
decentralization underlies any hope of achieving ecological control of
pest infestations in agriculture. Only a community well integrated with
the resources of the surrounding region can promote agricultural and
biological diversity. With careful planning, man could use plants and
animals not only as a source of food but also, by pitting one species of
life against another, as a means of controlling pests, thus eliminating
much of his need for chemical methods. What is equally important, a
decentralized community holds the greatest promise for conserving
natural resources, particularly as it would promote the use of local
sources of energy. Instead of relying primarily on concentrated sources
of fuel in distant regions of the continent, the community could make
maximum use of its own energy resources, such as wind power, solar
energy, and hydroelectric power. These sources of energy, so often
overlooked because of an almost exclusive reliance on a national
division of labor, would help greatly to conserve the remaining supply
of high-grade petroleum and coal. They would almost certainly
postpone, if not eliminate, the need for turning to radioactive substances
and nuclear reactors as major sources of industrial energy. With more
time at his disposal for intensive research, man might learn either to
employ solar energy and wind power as the principal sources of energy
or to eliminate the hazard of radioactive contamination from nuclear
reactors.
It is true, of course, that our life lines would become more complex
and, from a technological point of view, less “efficient.” There would
be many duplications of effort. Instead of being concentrated in two
or three areas of the country, steel plants would be spread out, with
many communities employing small-scale facilities to meet regional or
local needs. But the word efficiency, like the word pest, is relative.
Although duplication of facilities would be somewhat costly, many
local mineral sources that are not used today because they are too
widely scattered or too small for the purposes of large-scale production
would become economical for the purposes of a smaller community.
Thus, in the long run, a more localized or regional form of industrial
activity is likely to promote a more efficient use of resources than our
prevailing methods of production.
It is also true that we will never entirely eliminate the need for a
national and international division of labor in agriculture and industry.
The Midwest will always remain our best source of grains; the East
and Far West, the best sources of lumber and certain field crops. Our
petroleum, high-grade coal, and certain minerals will still have to be
supplied, in large part, by a few regions of the country. But there is no
reason why we cannot reduce the burden that our national division of
labor currently places on these areas by spreading the agricultural and
industrial loads over wider areas of the country. This seems to be the
only approach to the task of creating a long-range balance between
man and the natural world and of remaking man’s synthetic
environment in a form that will promote human health and fitness.
An emphasis on agriculture and urban regionalism is somewhat
disconcerting to the average city dweller. It conjures up an image of
cultural isolation and social stagnation, of a journey backward in
history to the agrarian societies of the medieval and ancient worlds.
Actually, the urban dweller today is more isolated in the big city than
his ancestors were in the countryside. The city man in the modern
metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomization, and
spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history.
Today man’s alienation from man is almost absolute. His standards of
cooperation, mutual aid, simple human hospitality, and decency have
suffered an appalling erosion in the urban milieu. Man’s civic
institutions have become cold, impersonal agencies for the manipulation
of his destiny, and his culture has increasingly accommodated itself to
the least common denominator of intelligence and taste. He has nothing
to lose even by a backward glance; indeed, in this way he is likely to
place his present-day world and its limitations in a clearer perspective.
But why should an emphasis on agriculture and urban regionalism
be regarded as an attempt to return to the past? Can we not develop
our environment more selectively, more subtly, and more rationally
than we have thus far, combining the best of the past and present and
bringing forth a new synthesis of man and nature, nation and region,
town and country? Life would indeed cease to be an adventure if we
merely elaborated the present by extending urban sprawl and by
extending civic life until it completely escapes from the control of its
individual elements. To continue along these lines would serve not to
promote social evolution but rather to “fatten” the social organism to
a point where it could no longer move. Our purpose should be to make
individual life a more rounded experience, and this we can hope to
accomplish at the present stage of our development only by restoring
the complexity of man’s environment and by reducing the community
to a human scale.
Is there any evidence that reason will prevail in the management of
our affairs? It is difficult to give a direct answer. Certainly we are
beginning to look for qualitative improvements in many aspects of life;
we are getting weary and resentful of the shoddiness in goods and
services. We are gaining a new appreciation of the land and its
problems, and a greater realization of the social promise offered by a
more manageable human community. More and more is being written
about our synthetic environment, and the criticism is more pointed
than it has been in almost half a century. Perhaps we can still hope, as
Mumford did more than two decades ago in the closing lines of The Culture of Cities:
We have much to unbuild, and much more to build: but the foundations
are ready: the machines are set in place and the tools are bright and
keen: the architects, the engineers, and the workmen are assembled.
None of us may live to see the complete building, and perhaps in the
nature of things the building can never be completed: but some of us
will see the flag or the fir tree that the workers will plant aloft in ancient
ritual when they capt the topmost story.
*** Anarchism and Ecology
(from “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” 1964)
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a
precondition for the practice of ecological principles. To sum up the
critical message of ecology: If we diminish variety in the natural world,
we debase its unity and wholeness; we destroy the forces making for
natural harmony and for a lasting equilibrium; and, what is even more
significant, we introduce an absolute retrogression in the development
of the natural world that may eventually render the environment unfit
for advanced forms of life. To sum up the reconstructive message of
ecology: If we wish to advance the unity and stability of the natural
world, if we wish to harmonize it, we must conserve and promote
variety. To be sure, mere variety for its own sake is a vacuous goal. In
nature, variety emerges spontaneously. The capacities of a new species
are tested by the rigors of climate, by its ability to deal with predators,
and by its capacity to establish and enlarge its niche. Yet the species that succeeds in enlarging its niche in the environment also enlarges the ecological situation as a whole. To borrow E. A. Gutkind’s phrase,
it “expands the environment,” both for itself and for the species with
which it enters into a balanced relationship.[16]
How do these concepts apply to social theory? To many readers, I
suppose, it should suffice to say that, inasmuch as man is part of nature,
an expanding natural environment enlarges the basis for social
development. But the answer to the question goes much deeper than
many ecologists and libertarians suspect. Again, allow me to return to
the ecological principle of wholeness and balance as a product of
diversity. Keeping this principle in mind, the first step toward an answer
is provided by a passage in Herbert Read’s “The Philosophy of
Anarchism.” In presenting his “measure of progress,” Read observes:
“Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life will be limited,
dull, and mechanical. If the individual is a unit on his own, with space
and potentiality for separate action, then he may be more subject to
accident or chance, but at least he can expand and express himself. He
can develop — develop in the only real meaning of the word — develop
in consciousness of strength, vitality, and joy.”[17]
Read’s thought, unfortunately, is not fully developed, but it provides
an interesting point of departure. What first strikes us is that both the
ecologist and the anarchist place a strong emphasis on spontaneity. The
ecologist, insofar as he is more than a technician, tends to reject the
notion of “power over nature.” He speaks instead of “steering” his
way through an ecological situation, of managing rather than recreating
an ecosystem. The anarchist, in turn, speaks in terms of social
spontaneity, of releasing the potentialities of society and humanity, of
giving free and unfettered rein to the creativity of people. Each in its
own way regards authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the
creative potential of a natural and social situation. Their object is not
to rule a domain, but to release it. They regard insight, reason, and
knowledge as a means for fulfilling the potentialities of a situation, as
facilitating the working out of the logic of a situation, not as replacing
its potentialities with preconceived notions or distorting their
development with dogmas.
Returning to Read’s words, what strikes us is that like the ecologist,
the anarchist views differentiation as a measure of progress. The ecologist
uses the term biotic pyramid in speaking of biological advances;
the anarchist, the word individuation to denote social advances. If we
go beyond Read, we will observe that, to both the ecologist and the
anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved by growing differentiation.
An expanding whole is created by the diversification and enrichment of its parts.
Just as the ecologist seeks to expand the range of an ecosystem and
promote a free interplay between species, so the anarchist seeks to
expand the range of social experience and remove all fetters from its
development. Anarchism is not only a stateless society but a
harmonized society that exposes man to the stimuli provided by both
agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to
unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal
solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and
worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the
elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid
society, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeed as
sharply opposed. They appear as dualities because of the very logistics
of present-day society — the separation of town and country, the
specialization of labor, the atomization of man — and it would be
preposterous to believe that these dualities could be resolved without
a general idea of the physical structure of an anarchist society. We can
gain some idea of what such a society would be like by reading William
Morris’s News From Nowhere and the writings of Peter Kropotkin.
But these works provide us with mere glimpses. They do not take into
account the post-World War II developments of technology and the
contributions made by the development of ecology. This is not the
place to embark on a discussion of “utopian writing,” but certain
guidelines can be presented. And in presenting these guidelines, I am
eager to emphasize not only the more obvious ecological premises that
support them but also the humanistic ones.
An anarchist society should be a decentralized society, not only to
establish a lasting basis for the harmonization of man and nature but also to add new dimensions to the harmonization of man and man.
The Greeks, we are often reminded, would have been horrified by a
city whose size and population precluded face-to-face, familiar
relationships among citizens. Today there is plainly a need to reduce
the dimensions of the human community — partly to solve our pollution
and transportation problems, partly also to create real communities.
In a sense, we must humanize humanity. Electronic devices such as
telephones, telegraphs, radios, and television receivers should be used
as little as possible to mediate the relations between people. In making
collective decisions — the ancient Athenian ecclesia was, in some ways,
a model for making social decisions — all members of the community
should have an opportunity to acquire in full the measure of anyone
who addresses the assembly. They should be in a position to absorb
his attitudes, study his expressions, and weigh his motives as well as
his ideas in a direct personal encounter and through face-to-face
discussion.
Our small communities should be economically balanced and well
rounded, partly so that they can make full use of local raw materials
and energy resources, partly also to enlarge the agricultural and
industrial stimuli to which individuals are exposed. The member of a
community who has a predilection for engineering, for instance, should
be encouraged to steep his hands in humus; the man of ideas should
be encouraged to employ his musculature; the “inborn” farmer should
gain a familiarity with the workings of a rolling mill. To separate the
engineer from the soil, the thinker from the spade, and the farmer from
the industrial plant promotes a degree of vocational overspecialization
that leads to a dangerous measure of social control by specialists. What
is equally important, professional and vocational specialization prevents
society from achieving a vital goal: the humanization of nature by the
technician and the naturalization of society by the biologist.
I submit that an anarchist community would approximate a clearly
definable ecosystem — it would be diversified, balanced, and
harmonious. It is arguable whether such an ecosystem would acquire
the configuration of an urban entity with a distinct center, such as we
find in the Greek polis, or the medieval commune, or whether, as
Gutkind proposes, society would consist of widely dispersed
communities without a distinct center. In any case, the ecological scale
for any of these communities would be determined by the smallest
ecosystem capable of supporting a population of moderate size.
A relatively self-sufficient community, visibly dependent on its
environment for the means of life, would gain a new respect for the
organic interrelationships that sustain it. In the long run, the attempt
to approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, prove more efficient
than the exaggerated national division of labor that prevails today.
Although there would doubtless be many duplications of small
industrial facilities from community to community, the familiarity of
each group with its local environment and its ecological roots would
make for a more intelligent and more loving use of its environment. I
submit that, far from producing provincialism, relative self-sufficiency
would create a new matrix for individual and communal developmenta
oneness with the surroundings that would vitalize the community.
The rotation of civic, vocational, and professional responsibilities
would stimulate the senses in the being of the individual, creating and
rounding out new dimensions in self-development. In a complete society
we could hope to create complete men; in a rounded society, rounded
men. In the Western world, the Athenians, for all their shortcomings
and limitations, were the first to give us a notion of this completeness.
“The polis was made for the amateur,” H.D.F. Kitto tells us. “Its ideal
was that every citizen (more or less, according as the polis was
democratic or oligarchic) should play his part in all of its many
activities — an ideal that is recognizably descended from the generous
Homeric conception of arete as an all-round excellence and an allround
activity. It implies a respect for the wholeness or the oneness of
life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt
for efficiency — or rather a much higher ideal of efficiency; an efficiency
which exists not in one department of life, but in life itself.” [18] An
anarchist society, although it would surely aspire to more, could hardly
hope to achieve less than this state of mind.
If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice, social life
would yield a sensitive development of human and natural diversity,
falling together into a well-balanced, harmonious whole. Ranging from
community through region to entire continents, we would see a colorful
differentiation of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its
unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide
spectrum of economic, cultural, and behavioral stimuli. Falling within
our purview would be an exciting, often dramatic variety of communal
forms — here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to
semiarid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to
forested areas. We would witness a creative interplay between individual
and group, community and environment, humanity and nature. Freed
from an oppressive routine, from paralyzing repressions and insecurities,
from the burdens of toil and false needs, from the trammels of authority
and irrational compulsion, individuals would finally, for the first time
in history, be in a position to realize their potentialities as members of
the human community and the natural world.
*** The New Technology and the Human Scale
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
To the degree that material production is decentralized and localized,
the primacy of the community is asserted over national institutions. In
these circumstances the popular assembly of the local community,
convened in a face-to-face democracy, would take over the full management
of social life. The question is whether a future society would be
organized around technology, or whether technology is now sufficiently
malleable that it can be organized around society. To answer this question
we must further examine certain features of the new technology....
[Since 1945, computer technology has undergone a startling
miniaturization, from vacuum tubes to microcircuits. Where computers
were once enormous, advanced IPlits now occupy the size of an office
desk.] Paralleling the miniaturization of computer components is the
remarkable sophistication of more traditional forms of technology.
Ever-smaller machines are beginning to replace large ones. Continuous
hot-strip steel rolling mills, which are among the largest and costliest
facilities in modern industry, ... are geared to a national division of
labor, to highly concentrated sources of raw materials (generally located
a great distance from the complex), and to large national and international
markets. Even if the complex were totally automated, its
operating and management needs would far transcend the capabilities
of a small, decentralized community. The type of administration it
requires tends to foster centralized social forms.
Fortunately, we now have a number of alternatives — more efficient
alternatives in many respects — to the modern steel complex.... A
future steel complex based on electric furnaces, continuous casting, a
planetary mill, and a small continuous cold-reducing mill would require
only a fraction of the acreage occupied by a conventional installation.
It would be fully capable of meeting the steel needs of several moderate-sized
communities with low quantities of fuel. This complex would not
have to meet the needs of a national market. On the contrary, it is suited
only for meeting the steel requirements of small and moderate-sized
communities and industrially undeveloped countries.... The very scale
of our hypothetical steel complex constitutes one of its most attractive
features. Also, the steel it produces is more durable, so the community’s
rate of replenishing its steel products would be appreciably reduced.
Since the smaller complex requires ore, fuel, and reducing agents in
relatively small quantities, many communities could rely on local
resources for their raw materials, thereby conserving the more concentrated resources of centrally located sources of supply, strengthening
the independence of the community itself vis-a-vis the traditional
centralized economy and reducing the expense of transportation. What
would at first glance seem to be a costly, inefficient duplication of effort
would prove, in the long run, to be more efficient as well as socially
more desirable than a few centralized complexes.
The new technology has produced not only miniaturized electronic
components and smaller production facilities but highly versatile,
multipurpose machines. For more than a century, the trend in machine
design moved increasingly toward technological specialization and
single-purpose devices, underpinning the intensive division of labor
required by the factory system. Industrial operations were subordinated
entirely to the product. In time, this narrow pragmatic approach has
“led industry far from the rational line of development in production
machinery,” observe Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown.
It has led to increasingly uneconomic specialization.... Specialization
of machines in terms of end product requires that the machine be thrown
away when the product is no longer needed. Yet the work the production
machine does can be reduced to a set of basic functions — forming,
holding, cutting, and so on — and these functions, if correctly analyzed,
can be packaged and applied to operate on a part as needed.[19]
... A small or moderate-sized community using multipurpose machines
could satisfy many of its limited industrial needs without being
burdened with underused industrial facilities. There would be less loss
in scrapping tools and less need for single-purpose plants. The
community’s economy would be more compact and versatile, more
rounded and self-contained, than anything we find in the communities
of industrially advanced countries. The effort that goes into retooling
machines for new products would be enormously reduced. Finally,
multipurpose machines with a wide operational range are relatively
easy to automate. The changes required to use these machines in a
cybernated industrial facility would generally be in circuitry and
programming rather than in machine form and structure....
I do not claim that all of man’s economic activities can be completely
decentralized, but the majority can surely be scaled to human and
communitarian dimensions. This much is certain: we can shift the center
of economic power from national to local scale and from centralized
bureaucratic forms to local, popular assemblies. This shift would be a
revolutionary change of vast proportions, for it would create powerful
economic foundations for the sovereignty and autonomy of the local
community.
*** Ecological Technology
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of
cities have brought man’s alienation from nature to the breaking point.
Western man finds himself confined to a largely synthetic urban
environment, far removed physically from the land, and his relationship
to the natural world is mediated entirely by machines. He lacks
familiarity with how most of his goods are produced, and his foods
bear only the faintest resemblance to the animals and plants from which
they were derived. Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu (almost
institutional in form and appearance), modern man is denied even a
spectator’s role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy
his material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It
would be unfair, perhaps, to say that he is disrespectful toward the
natural environment; the fact is, he scarcely knows what ecology means
or what his environment requires to remain in balance.
The balance between man and nature must be restored. Unless we
establish some kind of equilibrium between man and the natural world,
the viability of the human species will be placed in grave jeopardy. The
new technology can be used ecologically to reawaken man’s sense of
dependence upon the environment; by reintroducing the natural world
into the human experience, we can contribute to the achievement of
human wholeness.
The classical utopians fully realized that the first step toward
wholeness must be to remove the contradiction between town and
country. “It is impossible,” wrote Fourier nearly a century and a half
ago, “to organize a regular and well balanced association without
bringing into play the labors of the field, or at least gardens, orchards,
flocks and herds, poultry yards, and a great variety of species, animal
and vegetable.” Shocked by the social effects of the Industrial
Revolution, Fourier added: “They are ignorant of this principle in
England, where they experiment with artisans, with manufacturing
labor alone, which cannot by itself suffice to sustain social union.”
To argue that the modern urban dweller should once again enjoy
“the labors of the field” may well seem like gallows humor. A
restoration of the peasant agriculture that was prevalent in Fourier’s
day is neither possible nor desirable. Charles Gide is surely correct
when he observes that agricultural labor “is not necessarily more
attractive than industrial labor; to till the earth has always been
regarded ... as the type of painful toil, of toil which is done with ‘the
sweat of one’s brow.”’ [20] ... If our vision were to extend no further than
land management, the only alternative to peasant agriculture would
seem to be highly specialized and centralized farming, its techniques
paralleling the methods used in present-day industry. Far from achieving
a balance between town and country, we would be faced with a
synthetic environment that had totally assimilated the natural world.
If the land and community are to be reintegrated physically, and if
the community is to exist in an agricultural matrix that renders man’s
dependence upon nature explicit, the problem is how to achieve this
transformation without imposing “painful toil” on the community.
How, in short, can husbandry, ecological forms of food cultivation,
and farming on a human scale be practiced and, at the same time, toil
be eliminated?
Some of the most promising technological advances in agriculture
made since World War II are as suitable for small-scale ecological forms
of land management as they are for the immense, industrial-type
commercial units that have become prevalent over the past few decades.
The augermatic feeding of livestock illustrates a cardinal principle of
rational farm mechanization — the deployment of conventional
machines and devices in a way that virtually eliminates arduous farm
labor. By linking a battery of silos with augers, different nutrients can
be mixed and transported to feed pens merely by pushing some buttons
and pulling a few switches. A job that may once have required the labor
of five or six men working half a day with pitchforks and buckets can
now be performed by one man in a few minutes. This type of
mechanization is intrinsically neutral: it can be used to feed immense
herds or just a few hundred head of cattle; the silos may contain natural
feed or synthetic, harmonized nutrients; the feeder can be employed
on relatively small farms with mixed livestock, or on large beef-raising
ranches, or on dairy farms of all sizes. In short, augermatic feeding can
be placed in the service either of the most abusive kind of commercial
exploitation, or of the most sensitive applications of ecological
principles. This holds true for most of the farm machines that have
been designed (in many cases, simply redesigned to achieve greater
versatility) in recent years....
Let us pause at this point to envision how our free community might
be integrated with its natural environment. The community has been
established after a careful study was made of its natural ecology — its
air and water resources, its climate, its geological formations, its raw
materials, its soils, and its natural flora and fauna. Land management
by the community is guided entirely by ecological principles, so that
an equilibrium is maintained between the environment and its human
inhabitants. Industrially rounded, the community forms a distinct unit
within a natural matrix; it is socially and aesthetically in balance with
the area it occupies.
Agriculture is highly mechanized in the community, but as mixed as
possible with respect to crops, livestock, and timber. Variety of flora
and fauna is promoted as a means of controlling pest infestations and
enhancing scenic beauty. Large-scale farming is practiced only where
it does not conflict with the ecology of the region. Owing to the
generally mixed character of food cultivation, agriculture is pursued
by small farming units, each demarcated from the others by tree belts,
shrubs, pastures, and meadows. In rolling, hilly, or mountainous
country, land with sharp gradients is covered by timber to prevent
erosion and conserve water. The soil on each acre is studied carefully
and committed only to those crops for which it is most suited. Every
effort is made to blend town and country without sacrificing the
distinctive contribution that each has to offer to the human experience.
The ecological region forms the living social, cultural, and biotic
boundaries of the community or of the several communities that share
its resources. Each community contains many vegetable and flower
gardens, attractive arbors, park land, even streams and ponds that
support fish and aquatic birds. The countryside, from which food and
raw materials are acquired, not only constitutes the immediate environs
of the community, accessible to all by foot, but invades the community.
Although town and country retain their identity and the uniqueness of
each is highly prized and fostered, nature appears everywhere in the
town, while the town seems to have caressed and left a gentle human
imprint on nature....
There is a kind of industrial archaeology that reveals in many areas
evidence of a once-burgeoning economic activity long abandoned by
our precapitalist predecessors. In the Hudson Valley, the Rhine Valley,
the Appalachians, and the Pyrenees are relics of mines and once highly
developed metallurgical crafts, the fragmentary remains of local
industries, and the outlines of long-deserted farms — all vestiges of
flourishing communities based on local raw materials and resources.
These communities declined because the products they once furnished
were elbowed out by the large-scale national industries based on mass
production techniques and concentrated sources of raw materials. Their
old infrastructure is often still available as a resource for use by each
locality; “valueless” in a highly urbanized society, it is eminently suitable
for use by decentralized communities, and it awaits the application of
industrial techniques adapted for small-scale quality production. If we
were to take a careful inventory of the resources available in many
depopulated regions of the world, the possibility that communities
could satisfy many of their material needs locally would likely be much
greater than we suspect....
It is not that we lack energy per se, but we are only just beginning
to learn how to use energy sources that are available in almost limitless
quantity. The gross radiant energy striking the earth’s surface from the
sun is estimated to be more than three thousand times the annual energy
consumed by mankind today. Although a portion of this energy is
converted into wind or used for photosynthesis by vegetation, a
staggering quantity is available for human use. The problem is how to
collect it to satisfy a portion of our energy needs. If solar energy could
be collected for house heating, for example, twenty to thirty percent
of the conventional energy resources we normally employ could be
redirected to other purposes. If we could collect solar energy for most
or all of our cooking, water heating, smelting, and power production,
we would have relatively little need for fossil fuels. Solar devices have
been designed for nearly all of these functions. We can heat houses,
cook food, boil water, melt metals, and produce electricity with devices
that use the sun’s energy exclusively, but we can’t do it efficiently in
every latitude of the earth, and we are still confronted with a number
of technical problems that can be solved only by crash research
programs....
The ocean’s tides are still another untapped resource to which we
could turn for electric power. We could trap the ocean’s waters at high
tide in a natural basis — say, a bay or the mouth of a river — and release
them through turbines at low tide. A number of places exist where the
tides are high enough to produce electric power in large quantities....
We could use temperature differences in the sea or in the earth to
generate electric power in sizable quantities. A temperature differential
as high as seventeen degrees centigrade is not uncommon in the surface
layers of tropical waters; along coastal areas of Siberia, winter differences
of thirty degrees exist between water below the ice crust and the air. The
interior of the earth becomes progressively warmer as we descend,
providing selective temperature differentials with respect to the surface.
Heat pumps could be used to avail ourselves of these differentials....
If we could acquire electricity or direct heat from solar energy, wind
power, or temperature differentials, the heating system of a home or
factory would be completely self-sustaining; it would not drain valuable
hydrocarbon resources or require external sources of supply.
Winds could also be used to provide electric power in many areas of
the world. About one-fortieth of the solar energy reaching the earth’s
surface is converted into wind. Although much of this goes into the
making of the jet stream, a great deal of wind energy is available a few
hundred feet above the ground. A United Nations report, using
monetary terms to gauge the feasibility of wind power, finds that
efficient wind plants in many areas could produce electricity at an
overall cost of five mills per kilowatt-hour, a figure that approximates
the price of commercially generated electric power....
There should be no illusions about the possibilities of extracting trace
minerals from rocks, of solar and wind power, and the use of heat
pumps [as alternative sources of energy and raw materials]. Except
perhaps for tidal power and the extraction of raw materials from the
sea, these sources cannot supply man with the bulky quantities of raw
materials and large blocks of energy needed to sustain densely
concentrated populations and highly centralized industries. Solar
devices, wind turbines, and heat pumps will produce relatively small
quantities of power. Used locally and in conjunction with each other,
they could probably meet all the power needs of small communities,
but we cannot foresee a time when they will be able to furnish electricity
in the quantities currently used by cities the size of New York, London,
and Paris.
Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage
from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind, and the earth are
experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and
reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man
developed his sense of dependence on — and respect for — the natural
environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check.
The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed
obscured nature’s role in human experience — hiding the sun with a pall
of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the
earth with sprawling cities. Man’s dependence on the natural world
became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the
subject matter of textbooks, monographs, and lectures. True, this
theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (although partial ones
at best) into the natural world, but its one-sidedness robbed us of all
sensuous dependence on, and all visible contact and unity with nature.
In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became
alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally
inanimate, totally synthetic — a purely inorganic physical milieu that
promoted the deanimization of man and his thought.
To bring the sun, the wind, the earth, indeed the world of life back
into technology, into the means of human survival, would be a
revolutionary renewal of man’s ties to nature. To restore this dependence
in a way that evoked a sense of regional uniqueness in each
community — a sense not only of generalized dependence but of
dependence on a specific region with distinct qualities of its own —
would give this renewal a truly ecological character. A real ecological
system would emerge, a delicately interlaced pattern of local resources,
honored by continual study and artful modification. With a true sense
of regionalism every resource would find its place in a natural, stable
balance, an organic unity of social, technological, and natural
elements. Art would assimilate technology by becoming social art, the
art of the community as a whole. The free community would be able
to rescale the tempo of life, the work patterns of man, its architecture,
and its systems of transportation and communication to human
dimensions. The electric car, quiet, slow-moving, and clean, would
become the preferred mode of urban transportation, replacing the
noisy, filthy, high-speed automobile. Monorails would link community
to community, reducing the number of highways that scar the
countryside. Crafts would regain their honored position as
supplements to mass manufacture; they would become a form of
domestic, day-to-day artistry. A high standard of excellence, I believe,
would replace the strictly quantitative criteria of production that
prevail today; a respect for the durability of goods and the conservation
of raw materials would replace the shabby, huckster-oriented
criteria that result in built-in obsolescence and an insensate consumer
society. The community would become a beautifully molded arena of
life, a vitalizing source of culture, and a deeply personal, evernourishing
source of human solidarity.
*** Social Ecology
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
In almost every period since the Renaissance, a very close link has
existed between radical advances in the natural sciences and upheavals
in social thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
emerging sciences of astronomy and mechanics, with their liberating
visions of a heliocentric world and the unity of local and cosmic motion,
found their social counterparts in equally critical and rational social
ideologies that challenged religious bigotry and political absolutism.
The Enlightenment brought a new appreciation of sensory perception
and the claims of human reason to divine a world that had been the
ideological monopoly of the clergy. Later, anthropology and evolutionary
biology demolished traditional static notions of the human enterprise,
along with its myths of original creating and history as a
theological calling. By enlarging the map and revealing the earthly
dynamics of social history, these sciences reinforced the new doctrines
of socialism, with its ideal of human progress, that followed the French
Revolution.
In view of the enormous dislocations that now confront us, our own
era needs a more sweeping and insightful body of knowledge — scientific
as well as social — to deal with our problems. Without renouncing the
gains of earlier scientific and social theories, we must develop a more
rounded critical analysis of our relationship with the natural world.
We must seek the foundations for a more reconstructive approach to
the grave problems posed by the apparent contradictions between
nature and society. We can no longer afford to remain captive to the
tendency of the more traditional sciences to dissect phenomena and
examine their fragments. We must combine them, relate them, and see
them in their totality as well as their specificity.
In response to these needs, we have formulated a discipline unique
to our age: social ecology. The more well-known term ecology was
coined by Ernst Haeckel a century ago to denote the investigation of
the interrelationships between animals, plants, and their inorganic
environment. Since Haeckel’s day, the term has been expanded to
include ecologies of cities, of health, and of the mind. This proliferation
of a word into widely disparate areas may seem particularly desirable
to an age that fervently seeks some kind of intellectual coherence and
unity of perception. But it can also prove to be extremely treacherous.
Like such newly arrived words as holism, decentralization, and
dialectics, the term ecology runs the peril of merely hanging in the air
without any roots, context, or texture. Often it is used as a metaphor,
an alluring catchword, that loses the potentially compelling internal
logic of its premises.
Accordingly, the radical thrust of these words is easily neutralized.
Holism evaporates into a mystical sigh, a rhetorical expression for
ecological fellowship and community that ends with such in-group
greetings and salutations as “holistically yours.” What was once a
serious philosophical stance has been reduced to environmentalist
kitsch. Decentralization commonly means logistical alternatives to
gigantism, not the human scale that would make an intimate and direct
democracy possible. Ecology fares even worse. All too often it becomes
a metaphor, like the word dialectics, for any kind of integration and
development.
Perhaps even more troubling, the word in recent years has been
identified with a very crude form of natural engineering that might well
be called environmentalism. ... To distinguish ecology from
environmentalism and from abstract, often obfuscatory definitions of
the term, I must return to its original usage and explore its direct
relevance to society. Put quite simply, ecology deals with the dynamic
balance of nature, with the interdependence of living and nonliving
things. Since nature also includes human beings, the science must
include humanity’s role in the natural world — specifically, the character,
form, and structure of humanity’s relationship with other species and
with the inorganic substrate of the biotic environment. From a critical
viewpoint, ecology opens to a wide purview the vast disequilibrium
that has emerged from humanity’s split with the natural world. One of
nature’s unique species, homo sapiens, has slowly and painstakingly
developed from the natural world into a unique social world of its own.
As both worlds interact with each other through highly complex phases
of evolution, it has become as important to speak of a social ecology
as to speak of a natural ecology.
Let me emphasize that to ignore these phases of human evolutionwhich
have yielded a succession of hierarchies, classes, cities, and finally
states — is to make a mockery of the term social ecology. Unfortunately,
the discipline has been beleaguered by adherents who try to collapse
all the phases of natural and human development into a universal
“oneness” (not wholeness) — a yawning “night in which all cows are
black,” to borrow one of Hegel’s caustic phrases. If nothing else, our
common use of the word species to denote the wealth of life around
us should alert us to the fact of specificity, of particularity — the rich
abundance of differentiated beings and things that enter into the very
subject-matter of natural ecology. To explore these differentiae, to
examine the phases and interfaces that enter into their making and into
humanity’s long development from animality to society — a development
latent with problems and possibilities — is to make social ecology one
of the most powerful disciplines from which to draw our critique of
the present social order.
But social ecology provides more than a critique of the split between
humanity and nature; it also poses the need to heal it. Indeed, it poses
the need to radically transcend them. As E. A. Gutkind pointed out,
“the goal of Social Ecology is wholeness, and not mere adding together
of innumerable details collected at random and interpreted subjectively
and insufficiently.” The science deals with social and natural relationships
in communities or “ecosystems.” In conceiving them holisticallythat
is to say, in terms of their mutual interdependence — social ecology
seeks to unravel the forms and patterns of interrelationships that give
intelligibility to a community, be it natural or social. Holism, here, is
the result of a conscious effort to discern how the particulars of a
community are arranged, how its “geometry” (as the ancient Greeks
might have put it) makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.
Hence, the wholeness to which Gutkind refers is not to be mistaken
for a spectral oneness that yields cosmic dissolution in a structureless
nirvana; it is a richly articulated structure with a history and internal
logic of its own.
History, in fact, is as important as form or structure. To a large
extent, the history of a phenomenon is the phenomenon itself. We are,
in a real sense, everything that existed before us, and in turn, we can
eventually become vastly more than what we are. Surprisingly, very
little in the evolution of life-forms has been lost in natural and social
evolution — indeed in our very bodies, as our embryonic development
attests. Evolution lies within us (as well as around us) as parts of the
very nature of our beings.
For the present, it suffices to say that wholeness is not a bleak
undifferentiated “universality” that involves the reduction of a
phenomenon to what it has in common with everything else. Nor is it
a celestial, omnipresent “energy” that replaces the vast material differentiae
of which the natural and social realms are composed. To the
contrary, wholeness comprises the variegated structures, the articulations,
and the mediations that impart to the whole a rich variety of
forms and thereby add unique qualitative properties to what a strictly
analytical mind often reduces to “innumerable” and “random” details.
Terms like wholeness, totality, and even community have perilous
nuances for a generation that has known fascism and other totalitarian
ideologies. The words evoke images of a “wholeness” achieved through
homogenization, standardization, and a repressive coordination of
human beings. These fears are reinforced by a “wholeness” that seems
to provide an inexorable finality to the course of human history — one
that implies a suprahuman, narrowly teleological concept of social law
and that denies the ability of human will and individual choice to shape
the course of social events. Such notions of social law and teleology
have been used to achieve a ruthless subjugation of the individual to
suprahuman forces beyond human control. Our century has been
afflicted by a plethora of totalitarian ideologies that, placing human
beings in the service of history, have denied them a place in the service
of their own humanity.
Actually, such a totalitarian concept of “wholeness” stands sharply
at odds with what ecologists denote by the term. Ecological wholeness
is not an immutable homogeneity but rather the very opposite — a
dynamic unity of diversity. In nature, balance and harmony are
achieved by ever-changing differentiation, by ever-expanding diversity.
Ecological stability, in effect, is a function not of simplicity and
homogeneity but of complexity and variety. The capacity of an
ecosystem to retain its integrity depends not on the uniformity of the
environment but on its diversity.
A striking example of this tenet can be drawn from experiences with
ecological strategies for cultivating food. Farmers have repeatedly met
with disastrous results because of the conventional emphasis on singlecrop
approaches to agriculture — or monoculture, to use a widely
accepted term for those endless wheat and corn fields that extend to
the horizon in many parts of the world. Without the mixed crops that
normally provide both the countervailing forces and mutualistic support
that come with mixed populations of plants and animals, the entire
agricultural situation in an area has been known to collapse. Benign
insects become pests because their natural controls, including birds and
small mammals, have been removed. The soil, lacking earthworms,
nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and green manure in sufficient quantities, is
reduced to mere sand — a mineral medium for absorbing enormous
quantities of inorganic nitrogen salts, which were originally supplied
more cyclically and timed more appropriately for crop growth in the
ecosystem. In reckless disregard for the complexity of nature and for
the subtle requirements of plant and animal life, the agricultural
situation is crudely simplified; its needs must now be satisfied by highly
soluble synthetic fertilizers that percolate into drinking water and by
dangerous pesticides that remain as residues in food. A high standard
of food cultivation that was once achieved by a diversity of crops and
animals, one that was free of lasting toxic agents and probably more
healthful nutritionally, is now barely approximated by single crops
whose main supports are toxic chemicals and highly simple nutrients.
If the thrust of natural evolution has been toward increasing
complexity, and if the colonization of the planet by life has been made
possible only as a result of biotic variety, a prudent rescaling of man’s
hubris should call for caution in disturbing natural processes. That
living things, emerging ages ago from their primal aquatic habitat to
colonize the most inhospitable areas of the earth, have created the rich
biosphere that now covers it has been possible only because of life’s
incredible mutability and the enormous legacy of life-forms inherited
from its long development. Many of these life-forms, even the most
primal and simplest, have never disappeared — however much they have
been modified by evolution. The simple algal forms that marked the
beginnings of plant life and the simple invertebrates that marked the
beginnings of animal life still exist in large numbers. They comprise
the preconditions for the existence of the more complex organic beings
to which they provide sustenance, the sources of decomposition, and
even atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide. Although they may
antedate the “higher” plants and mammals by over a billion years, they
interrelate with their more complex descendants in often unravelable
ecosystems.
To assume that science commands this vast nexus of organic and
inorganic interrelationships in all its details is worse than arrogance:
it is sheer stupidity. If unity in diversity forms one of the cardinal tenets
of ecology, the wealth of biota that exists in a single acre of soil leads
us to still another basic ecological tenet: the need to allow for a high
degree of natural spontaneity. The compelling dictum “respect for
nature” has concrete implications. To assume that our knowledge of
this complex, richly textured, and perpetually changing natural
kaleidoscope of life-forms lends itself to a degree of “mastery” that
allows us free rein in manipulating the biosphere is sheer foolishness.
Thus, a considerable amount of leeway must be permitted for natural
spontaneity — for the diverse biological forces that yield a variegated
ecological situation. “Working with nature” requires that we foster the
biotic variety that emerges from a spontaneous development of natural
phenomena. I hardly mean that we must surrender ourselves to a
mystical “Nature” that is beyond all human comprehension and
intervention — a Nature that demands human awe and subservience.
Perhaps the most obvious conclusion we can draw from these ecological
tenets is Charles Elton’s sensitive observation: “The world’s future has
to be managed, but this management would not be just like a game of
chess — more like steering a boat.” What ecology, both natural and
social, can hope to teach us is how to find the current and understand
the direction of the stream.
[14] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1964 ), p. 64.
[15] Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring),
trans. Emile Burns (New York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. 323–4.
[16] E. A. Gutkind, The Expanding Environment (London: Freedom Press, rul.);
later incorporated into The Twilight of Cities (Glencoe, NY: Free Pre·;s, 1962),
pp. 55–144.
[17] Herbert Read, “The Philosophy of Anarchism,” in Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (1954; Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 37.
[18] H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks (Chicago: Aldine, 1951), p. 16.
[19] Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown, “Machines Without Men,” Fortune
(November 1946).
[20] Charles Gide, introduction to F.M.C. founer, Selections from the Works of Fourier (London: S. Sonnenschein and Co., 1901), p. 14.
** Chapter 2: Nature, First and Second
*** Introduction
Amid the technological enchantment of the 1950s, proponents of
organic farming, like Bookchin himself, had to defend organic
agricultural techniques against the scorn of federal agencies and
the chemical industry, both of which were busily making pesticides
into agricultural commonplaces. Unlike today, when the value
of organic farming is recognized, in those years its value had to be
fought for.
As part of that struggle to defend organic farming, Bookchin
borrowed the concept “unity in diversity” from the German idealist
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Recast as a principle of organic
agriculture, the concept suggested an alternative farming technique
that was able to rid crops of pests, without the use of carcinogenic
pesticides. Unlike the monocultures that demanded pesticide use,
a diversity of crops in one field could play off potential pests against
one another, leaving the crops themselves pest-free. And unlike
monocultures, which are susceptible to complete destruction with
one pest infestation, ecosystems that are highly diversified yield
optimal stability. “Unity in diversity” became a catchword for
stability, not only in organic agriculture but in ecosystems generally;
it entered the vocabulary of the ecology movement as a concept
underpinning the value of diverse species in an ecosystem.
Once organic agriculture gained a measure of acceptance,
however, Bookchin himself began to use the phrase “unity in
diversity” in a different sense, giving it a more dynamic interpretation.
While stability can strengthen an ecosystem, he maintained,
it cannot make for species variegation. Diversity plays an
important role in producing not only stability but change and
innovation. Indeed, without diversification natural evolution could
not occur. Today, Bookchin uses the phrase “unity in diversity” to
refer to the increasing differentiation that a self-formative
biosphere undergoes, within the natural continuum of evolutionary
processes.
This evolutionary emphasis is what markedly distinguishes
Bookchin’s philosophy of nature from that of other schools of
ecological-political thought today. Natural evolution, he has long
argued, encompasses not only a strictly biological realm (or “first
nature”) but also a social realm (or “second nature”).[21] Far from
being inherently antagonistic to each other, first and second nature
are actually two aspects of one continuum, Bookchin maintainsat
once separate from each other but also mutually imbricated in
a shared evolutionary process. Human beings and human society,
with their potentialities for self-consciousness and freedom, differ
in profound respects from first nature yet emerge from and
incorporate it in a graded development.
Perhaps of most interest to social ecology, the evolutionary
processes in first nature generate increasing complexity and subjectivity
in life-forms. Consciousness has evolved in a cumulative process,
from the simple reactivity of unicellular organisms, to the neurological
activity of mammals and reptiles, to a culmination in human
intellection. As life-forms attain higher levels of subjectivity, they
are able to exercise greater choice in selecting and even improving
their own ecological niches.
The dim, emergent subjectivity in first nature can make only
rudimentary “choices,” but in second nature human beings,
possessed of the highest level of subjectivity, are capable of actively
and consciously altering their environments, of shaping the societies
in which they live — and of creating the ecological society that
integrates town and country, or first and second nature, in what
Bookchin would later call “free nature.”
At first glance, the great significance Bookchin attaches to human
consciousness would seem to represent a sharp demarcation
between human and nonhuman nature in his thought, one that
sets human beings on an entirely different plane from the rest of
the natural world. And it is true that he considers humanity as a
radically new development in natural evolution, manifesting the
potentiality for self-consciouseness, freedom, and innovation. He
does regard human consciousness as qualitatively different from
that of other life-forms. But by his use of the categories of first and
second nature, he also emphasizes the rootedness of human beings
in nonhuman nature.
In the mid-1980s a tendency arose within the ecology movement
that denigrated the notion that human beings are in any way
superior or more advanced than other life-forms in the biosphere.
Blaming human-centered ness, or “anthropocentrism,” as the cause
of the ecological crisis, deep ecology — with its fundamental precept
of biocentrism — advanced a notion of “biospheric democracy,”
which saw human beings as having “intrinsic worth” equal to that
of any other species. Bookchin’s sharp criticism of this tendency is
rooted in two conflicting views of humanity’s relationship to the rest
of the natural world. Where biocentrism would reduce human
beings into “plain citizens” of the biosphere, morally interchangeable
with other life-forms, social ecology asserts that human beings
are unique in natural evolution. By virtue of their powers of thought
and communication, they have the ability to create and even the
responsibility to achieve a harmonious, indeed creative relationship
with the first nature.
The nineteenth-century philosopher Johann Fichte once
remarked that humanity is nature rendered self-conscious. Although
this view has sometimes been attributed to Bookchin as
well, he actually maintains that second nature has thus far fallen
short of realizing humanity’s potentiality for creating a liberatory
society and an integrative relationship with the nonhuman world.
“Where Fichte patently erred was in his assumption that a possibility
is a fact,” he wrote in The Ecology of Freedom.
We are no more nature rendered self-conscious than we are
humanity rendered self-conscious. Reason may give us the capacity
to play this role, but we and our society are still totally irrationalindeed,
we are cunningly dangerous to ourselves and all that lives
around us.[22]
He therefore modifies Fichte’s statement to argue that humanity is
potentially nature rendered self-conscious — that it would actualize
that potential only if it were to create an ecological society.
*** Images of First Nature
(from “What Is Social Ecology?” 1984)
More than any single notion in the history of religion and plparticipatory realm of interactive life-forms whose
most outstanding attributes are fecundity, creativity, and directiveness,
marked by a complementarity that renders the natural world the
grounding for an ethics of freedom rather than domination.
From an ecological standpoint, life-forms are related in an ecosystem
not by the “rivalries” and competitive attributes imputed to them by
Darwinian orthodoxy, but by the mutualistic attributes emphasized by
a growing number of contemporary ecologists — an image pioneered
by Peter Kropotkin. Indeed, social ecology challenges the very premises
of the “fitness” that enters into the Darwinian drama of evolutionary
development, with its fixation on survival rather than differentiation
and fecundity. As William Trager has emphasized in his insightful work
on symbiosis:
The conflict in nature between different kinds of organisms has been
popularly expressed in phrases like the “struggle for existence” and the
“survival of the fittest.” Yet few people have realized that mutual
cooperation between organisms — symbiosis — is just as important, and
that the “fittest” may be the one that helps another to survive.[23]
It is tempting to go beyond this pithy and highly illuminating
judgment to explore an ecological notion of natural evolution based
on the development of ecosystems, not merely individual species. This
is a concept of evolution as the dialectical development of evervariegated,
complex, and increasingly fecund contexts of plant-animal
communities, as distinguished from the traditional notion of biological
evolution based on the atomistic development of single life-forms, a
characteristically entrepreneurial concept of the isolated “individual,”
be it animal, plant, or bourgeois — a creature that fends for itself and
either survives or perishes in a marketplace “jungle.” As ecosystems
become more complex and open a greater variety of evolutionary
pathways, due to their own richness of diversity, increasingly flexible
species themselves, in mutualistic complexes as well as singly, introduce
a dim element of “choice” — by no means intersubjective or willful in
the human meaning of these terms.
Concomitantly, these ensembles of species alter the environment of
which they are part and exercise an increasingly active role in their own
evolution. Life, in this ecological conception of evolution, ceases to be
the passive tabula rasa on which eternal forces that we loosely call “the
environment” inscribe the destiny of a “species,” an atomistic term
that is meaningless outside the context of an ecosystem and other
species.
Life is active, interactive, procreative, relational, and contextual. It
is not a passive lump of “stuff,” a form of metabolic matter that awaits
the action of forces external to it and that is mechanically shaped by
them. Ever striving and always producing new life-forms, there is a
sense in which life is self-directive in its own evolutionary development,
not passively reactive to an inorganic or organic world that impinges
upon it from outside and determines its destiny in isolation from the
ecosystem that it constitutes and of which it is a part.
Our studies of “food webs” (a not quite satisfactory term for
describing the interactivity that occurs in an ecosystem or, more
properly, an ecological community) demonstrate that the complexity
of biotic interrelationships, their diversity, and their intricacy are crucial
in an ecosystem’s stability. In contrast to biotically complex temperate
zones, relatively simple desert and arctic ecosystems are very fragile
and break down easily with the loss or numerical decline of only a few
species. The thrust of biotic evolution over greater eras of organic
evolution has been toward the increasing diversification of species and
their interlocking into highly complex, basically mutualistic relationships,
without which the widespread colonization of the planet by life
would have been impossible.
Unity in diversity (a concept deeply rooted in the western
philosophical tradition) is not only the determinant of an ecosystem’s
stability; it is the source of an ecosystem’s fecundity, of its innovativeness,
of its evolutionary potential to create newer, still more
complex life-forms and biotic interrelationships, even in the most
inhospitable areas of the planet. Ecologists have not sufficiently stressed
the fact that a multiplicity of life-forms and organic interrelationships
in a biotic community opens new evolutionary pathways of
development, a greater variety of evolutionary interactions, variations,
and degrees of flexibility in the capacity to evolve, and is hence crucial
not only in the community’s stability but also in its innovativeness in
the natural history of life.
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly
mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
Society, in turn, attains its “truth,” its self-actualization, in the form
of richly articulated, mutualistic networks of people based on
community, roundedness of personality, diversity of stimuli and
activities, an increasing wealth of experience, and a variety of tasks.
Is this grading of ecosystem diversity into social diversity, based on
humanly scaled decentralized communities, merely analogical reasoning?
My answer would be that it is not a superficial analogy but a deepseated
continuity between nature and society that social ecology
recovers from traditional nature philosophy, without its archaic dross
of cosmic hierarchies, static absolutes, and cycles. In the case of social
ecology, it is not in the particulars of differentiation that plant-animal
communities are ecologically united with human communities; rather,
it is the logic of differentiation that makes it possible to relate the
mediations of nature and society into a continuum.
What makes unity in diversity in nature more than a suggestive
ecological metaphor for unity in diversity in society is the underlying
fact of wholeness. By wholeness I do not mean any finality of closure
in a development, any “totality” that leads to a terminal “reconciliation”
of all “Being” in a complete identity of subject and object or a
reality in which no further development is possible or meaningful.
Rather, I mean varying degrees of the actualization of potentialities,
the organic unfolding of the wealth of particularities that are latent in
the as-yet-undeveloped potentiality. This potentiality can be a newly
planted seed, a newly born infant, a newly formed community, a newly
emerging society. Given their radically different specificity, they are all
united by a processual reality, a shared “metabolism” of development,
a unified catalysis of growth as distinguished from mere “change” that
provides us with the most insightful way of understanding them that
we can possibly achieve.
Wholeness is literally the unity that finally gives order to the
particularity of each of these phenomena; it is what has emerged from
the process, what integrates the particularities into a unified form, what
renders the unity an operable reality and a “being” in the literal sense
of the term — an order as the actualized unity of its diversity from the
flowing and emergent process that yields its self-realization, the fixing
of its directiveness into a clearly contoured form, and the creation in
a dim sense of “self” that is identifiable with respect to “others” with
which it interacts. Wholeness is the relative completion of a phenomenon’s
potentiality, the fulfillment of latent possibility as such, all its
concrete manifestations aside, to become more than the realm of mere
possibility and attain the “truth” or fulfilled reality of possibility. To
think this way — in terms of potentiality, process, mediation, and
wholeness — is to reach into the most underlying nature of things, just
as to know the biography of a human being and the history of a society
is to know them in their authentic reality and depth.
The natural world is no less encompassed by this processual dialectic
and developmental ecology than the social, although in ways that do
not involve will, degrees of choice, values, ethical goals, and the like.
Life itself, as distinguished from the nonliving, however, emerges from
the inorganic latent with all the potentialities and particularities that
it has immanently produced from the logic of its own nascent forms of
self-organization. Obviously, so does society as distinguished from
biology, humanity as distinguished from animality, and individuality
as distinguished from humanity in the generic sense of the word. But
these distinctions are not absolutes. They are the unique and closely
interrelated phases of a shared continuum, of a process that is united
precisely by its own differentiations, just as the phases through which
an embryo develops are both distinct from and incorporated into its
complete gestation and its organic specificity.
This continuum is not simply a philosophical construct. It is an earthy
anthropological fact that lives with us daily as surely as it explains the
emergence of humanity out of mere animality. Individual socialization
is the highly nuanced “biography” of that development in everyday life
and in everyone, as surely as the anthropological socialization of our
species is part of its history. I refer to the biological basis of all human
socialization: the protracted infancy of the human child that renders
its cultural development possible, in contrast to the rapid growth of
nonhuman animals, a rate of growth that quickly forecloses their ability
to form a culture and develop sibling affinities of a lasting nature; the
instinctual drives that extend feelings of care, sharing, intimate
consociation, and finally love and a sense of responsibility for one’s
own kin into the institutional forms we call society; and the sexual
division of labor, age-ranking, and kin-relationships that, however
culturally conditioned and even mythic in some cases, formed and still
inform so much of social institutionalization today. These formative
elements of society rest on biological facts and, placed in the contextual
analysis I have argued for, require ecological analysis.
*** Participatory Evolution
(from “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” 1986, rev. 1994)
Ecologists generally treat diversity as a source of ecological stability,
in the belief that while the vulnerability to pests of a single crop treated
with pesticides can reach alarming proportions, a more diversified crop,
in which a number of plant and animal species interact, produces
natural checks on pest populations.
But the fact that biotic — and social — evolution has been marked
until recently by the development of ever more complex species and
ecocommunities raises an even more challenging issue. The diversity
of an ecocommunity may be a source of greater stability from an
agricultural standpoint; but from an evolutionary standpoint, it may
be an ever-expanding, albeit nascent source of freedom within nature,
a medium for providing varying degrees of choice, self-directiveness, and participation by life-forms in their own development.
I wish to propose that the evolution of living beings is no mere passive
process, the product of exclusively chance conjunctions between
random genetic changes and “selective” environmental “forces,” and
that the “origin of species” is no mere result of external influences that
determine the “fitness” of a life-form to survive as a result of random
factors in which life is simply an object of an indeterminable “selective”
process. The increase in diversity in the biosphere opens new evolutionary pathways, indeed, alternative evolutionary directions, in
which species play an active role in their own survival and change.
However nascent, choice is not totally absent from biotic evolution;
indeed, it increases as species become structurally, physiologically, and
above all neurologically more complex. As the ecological contexts
within which species evolve — the communities and interactions they
form — become more complex, they open new avenues for evolution
and a greater ability of life-forms to act self-selectively, forming the
bases for some kind of choice, favoring precisely those species that can
participate in ever-greater degrees in their own evolution, basically in
the direction of greater complexity. Indeed, species and the
ecocommunities in which they interact to create more complex forms
of evolutionary development are increasingly the very “forces” that
account for evolution as a whole.
“Participatory evolution,” as I call this view, is somewhat at odds
with the prevalent Darwinian or neo-Darwinian syntheses, in which
nonhuman life-forms are primarily “objects” of selective forces
exogenous to them. No less is it at odds with Henri Bergson’s “creative
evolution,” with its semimystical elan vital. Ecologists, like biologists,
have yet to come to terms with the notion that symbiosis (not only
“struggle”) and participation (not only “competition”) factor in the
evolution of species. The prevalent view of nature still stresses the
exclusively necessitarian character of the natural world. An immense
literature, both artistic and scientific, stresses the “cruelty” of a nature
that bears no witness to the suff~ring of life and that is “indifferent”
to cries of pain in the “struggle for existence.” “Cruel” nature, in this
imagery, offers no solace for extinction — merely an all-embracing
darkness of meaningless motion to which humanity can oppose only
the light of its culture and mind. Such formulations impart a
sophisticated ethical dimension to the natural world that is more
anthropomorphic than meaningful.
But even if the formulation is anthropomorphic, it bespeaks a
presence in natural evolution — subjectivity, and specifically human
consciousness — that cannot be ignored in formulating an evolutionary
theory. We may reasonably claim that human will and freedom, at least
as self-consciousness and self-reflection, have their own natural history
in potentialities of the natural world — in contrast to the view that they
are sui generis, the product of a rupture with the whole of development
so unprecedented and unique that it contradicts the gradedness of all
phenomena from the antecedent potentialities that lie behind and within
every processual “product.” Such claims are intended to underwrite
our efforts to deal with the natural world as we choose — indeed, as
Marx put it in the Grundrisse, to regard nature merely as “an object
for mankind, purely a matter of utility.”
The dim choices that animals exercise in their own evolution should
not be confused with the will and degree of intentionality that human
beings exhibit in their social lives. Nor is the nascent freedom that is
rendered possible by natural complexity comparable to the ability of
humans to make rational decisions. The differences between the two
are qualitative, however much they can be traced back to the evolution
of all animals....
Despite the monumental nature of his work, Darwin did not fully
organicize evolutionary theory. He brought a profound evolutionary
sensibility to the “origin of species,” but in the minds of his acolytes
species still stood somewhere between inorganic machines and
mechanically functioning organisms. No less significant are the
empirical origins of Darwin’s own work, which are deeply rooted in
the Lockean atomism that nourished nineteenth-century British science
as a whole. Allowing for the nuances that appear in all great books,
The Origin of Species accounts for the way in which individual species
originate, evolve, adapt, survive, change, or pay the penalty of
extinction as if they were fairly isolated from their environment. In
that account, any one species stands for the world of life as a whole,
in isolation from the life-forms that normally interact with it and with
which it is interdependent. Although predators depend upon their
prey, to be sure, Darwin portrays the strand from ancestor to
descendant in lofty isolation, such that early eohippus rises, step by
step, from its plebeian estate to attain the aristocratic grandeur of a
sleek racehorse. The paleontological diagramming of bones from
former “missing links” to the culminating beauty of Equus cabal/us
more closely resembles the adaptation of Robinson Crusoe from an
English seafarer to a self-sufficient island dweller than the reality of
a truly emerging being.
This reality is contextual in an ecological sense. The horse lived not
only among its predators and food but in creatively interactive
relationships with a great variety of plants and animals. It evolved not
alone but in ever-changing ecocommunities, such that the “rise” of
Equus cabal/us occurred conjointly with that of other herbivores that
shared and maintained their grasslands and even played a major role in
creating them. The string of bones that traces eohippus to Equus is
evidence of the succession of ecocommunities in which the ancestral
animal and its descendants interacted with other life-forms.
One could more properly modify The Origin of Species to read as
the evolution of ecocommunities as well as the evolution of species.
Indeed, placing the community in the foreground of evolution does not
deny the integrity of species, their capacity for variation, or their unique
lines of development. Species become vital participants in their own
evolution — active beings, not merely passive components — taking full
account of their nascent freedom in the natural process.
Nor are will and reason sui generis. They have their origins in the
growing choices conferred by complexity and in the alternative
pathways opened by the growth of complex ecocommunities and the
development of increasingly complex neurological systems — in short,
processes that are both internal and external to life-forms. To speak of
evolution in very broad terms tends to conceal the specific evolutionary
processes that make up the overall process.
Many anatomical lines of evolution have occurred: the evolution of
the various organs that freed life-forms from their aquatic milieu; of
eyes and ears, which sophisticated their awareness of the surrounding
environment; and of the nervous system, from nerve networks to brains.
Thus, mind too has its evolutionary history in the natural world, and
as the neurological capability of life-forms to function more actively
and flexibly increases, so too does life itself help create new evolutionary
directions that lead to enhanced self-awareness and self-activity.
Selfhood appears germinally in the communities that life-forms establish
as active agents in their own evolution, contrary to conventional
evolutionary theory.
*** Society as Second Nature
(from Remaking Society, 1989)
Society itself in its most primal form stems very much from nature. Every
social evolution, in fact, is virtually an extension of natural evolution
into a distinctly human realm. As the Roman orator and philosopher
Cicero declared some two thousand years ago: “by the use of our hands
we bring into being within the realm of Nature, a second nature for
ourselves.” Cicero’s observation, to be sure, is very incomplete: the
primeval, presumably untouched “realm of Nature” or “first nature,”
as it has been called, is reworked in whole or part into “second nature”
not only by the use of our hands. Thought, language, and complex, very
important biological changes also play a crucial and, at times, a decisive
role in developing a second nature within first nature.
I use the term reworking advisedly to focus on the fact that second
nature is not simply a phenomenon that develops outside of first
nature — hence the special value that should be attached to Cicero’s
expression “within the realm of Nature.” To emphasize that second
nature, or more precisely society {to use this word in its broadest
possible sense), emerges from within primeval first nature is to
reestablish the fact that social life always has a naturalistic dimension,
however much society is pitted against nature in our thinking. Social
ecology clearly expresses the fact that society is not a sudden eruption
into the world. Social life does not necessarily face nature as a
combatant in an unrelenting war. The emergence of society is a natural
fact that has its origins in the biology of human socialization.
The human socialization process from which society emerges — be it
in the form of families, bands, tribes, or more complex types of human
intercourse — has its source in parental relationships, particularly mother
and child bonding. The biological mother, to be sure, can be replaced
in this process by many surrogates, including fathers, relatives, or for
that matter, all members of a community. It is when social parents and
social siblings — that is, the human community that surrounds the
young — begin to participate in a system of care, that is ordinarily
undertaken by biological parents, that society begins to truly come into
its own.
Society thereupon advances beyond a mere reproductive group
toward institutionalized human relationships, and from a relatively
formless animal community into a clearly structured social order. But
at the very inception of society, it seems more than likely that human
beings were socialized into second nature by means of deeply ingrained
blood ties, specifically maternal ties.... Reproduction and family care
remain the abiding biological bases for every form of social life as well
as the originating factor in the socialization of the young and the
formation of a society. As Robert Briffault observed in the early half
of this century, the “one known factor which establishes a profound
distinction between the constitution of the most rudimentary human
group and all other animal gr.oups [is the] association of mothers and
offspring which is the sole form of true social solidarity among animals.
Throughout the class of mammals, there is a continuous increase in the
duration of that association, which is the consequence of the
prolongation of the period of infantile dependence,”[24] a prolongation
that Briffault correlates with increases in the period of fetal gestation
and advances in intelligence.
The biological dimension that Briffault adds to society and
socialization cannot be stressed too strongly. It is a decisive presence,
not only in the origins of society over ages of animal evolution, but in
the daily recreation of society in our everyday lives. The appearance of
a newly born infant and the highly extended care it receives for many
years reminds us that it is not only a human being that is being
reproduced, but society itself. By comparison with the young of other
species, children develop slowly and over a long period of time. Living
in close association with parents, siblings, kin groups, and an everwidening
community of people, they retain a plasticity of mind that
makes for creative individuals and ever-formative social groups.
Although nonhuman animals may approximate human forms of
association in many ways, they do not create a second nature that
embodies a cultural tradition; nor do they possess a complex language,
elaborate conceptual powers, or an impressive capacity to restructure
their environment purposefully according to their own needs.
A chimpanzee, for example, remains an infant for only three years
and a juvenile for seven. By the age of ten, it is a full-grown adult.
Children, by contrast, are regarded as infants for approximately six
years and juveniles for fourteen. A chimpanzee, in short, grows mentally
and physically in about half the time required by a human being, and
its capacity to learn, or at least to think, is already fixed by comparison
with a human being, whose mental abilities may expand for decades.
By the same token, chimpanzee associations are often idiosyncratic and
fairly limited. Human associations, on the other hand, are basically
stable, highly institutionalized, and marked by a degree of solidarity,
indeed by a degree of creativity, that has no equal in nonhuman species
as far as we know.
This prolonged degree of human mental plasticity, dependency, and
social creativity yields two results that are of decisive importance. First,
early human association must have fostered a strong predisposition for
interdependence among members of a group — not the “rugged
individualism” we associate with independence. The overwhelming
mass of anthropological evidence suggests that participation, mutual
aid, solidarity, and empathy were the social virtues early human groups
emphasized within their communities. The idea that people are
dependent upon each other for the good life, indeed for survival,
followed from the prolonged dependence of the young upon adults.
Independence, not to mention competition, would have seemed utterly
alien, if not bizarre, to a creature reared over many years in a largely
dependent condition. Care for others would have been seen as the
perfectly natural outcome of a highly acculturated being that was, in
turn, clearly in need of extended care. Our modern version of
individualism, more precisely of egotism, would have cut across the
grain of early solidarity and mutual aid — traits, I may add, without
which such a physically fragile animal as a human being could hardly
have survived as an adult, much less as a child.
Second, human interdependence must have assumed a highly
structured form. There is no evidence that human beings normally relate
to each other through the fairly loose systems of bonding found among
our closest primate cousins. That human social bonds can be dissolved
or deinstitutionalized in periods of radical change or cultural
breakdown is too obvious to argue here. But during relatively stable
conditions, human society was never the “horde” that anthropologists
of the last century presupposed as a basis for rudimentary social life.
On the contrary, the evidence points to the fact that all humans, perhaps
even our distant hominid ancestors, lived in some kind of structured
family groups, and later in bands, tribes, villages, and other forms. In
short, they bonded together (as they still do), not only emotionally and
morally but also structurally in contrived, clearly definable, and fairly
permanent institutions.
Nonhuman animals may form loose communities and even take
collective protective postures to defend their young from predators.
But such communities can hardly be called structured, except in a
broad, often ephemeral sense. Humans, by contrast, create highly
formal communities that tend to become increasingly structured over
the course of time. In effect, they form not only communities but a new
phenomenon called societies.
If we fail to distinguish animal communities from human societies,
we risk minimizing the unique features that distinguish human social
life from animal communities — notably, the ability of society to change
for better or worse and the factors that produce these changes. By the
same token, if we reduce a complex society to a mere community, we
risk ignoring how societies differed from each other over the course of
history, and understanding how simple differences in status were
elaborated into firmly established hierarchies, or hierarchies into
economic classes. Indeed, we risk misunderstanding the very meaning
of the term hierarchy, which actually refers to highly organized systems
of command and obedience — as distinguished from personal,
individual, and often short-lived differences in status that in many cases
involve no acts of compulsion. We tend, in effect, to confuse the strictly
institutional creations of human will, purpose, conflicting interests,
and traditions, with community life in its most fixed forms, as though
we were dealing with inherent, unalterable features of society rather
than fabricated structures that can be modified, improved, worsenedor
simply abandoned.
The trick of every ruling elite from the beginning of history to modern
times has been to identify its own socially created hierarchical systems
of domination with community life as such, with the result that human-made
institutions acquire divine or biological sanction. A given society
and its institutions thus tend to become reified into permanent and
unchangeable entities that acquire a mysterious life of their own apart
from nature — namely, the products of a seemingly fixed “human
nature” that is the result of genetic programming at the very inception
of social life. When annoying issues like war and social conflict are
raised, they are ascribed to the activity of genes....
Social ecology ... avoids the simplicities of dualism and the crudities
of reductionism by trying to show how nature slowly phases into
society, without ignoring the differences between society and nature
on the one hand, and the extent to which they merge with each other,
on the other. The everyday socialization of the young by the family is
no less rooted in biology than the everyday care of the old by the
medical establishment is rooted in the hard facts of society. By the same
token, we never cease to be mammals who still have primal natural
urges, but we institutionalize these urges and their satisfaction in a wide
variety of social forms. Hence the social and the natural continually
permeate each other in the most ordinary activities of daily life without
losing their identity in a shared process of interaction, indeed of
interactivity.
Obvious as this may seem at first in such day-to-day problems as
caretaking, social ecology raises questions that have far-reaching
importance for the different ways society and nature have interacted
over time and the problems these interactions have produced. How did
a divisive, indeed seemingly combative relationship between humanity
and nature emerge? What were the institutional forms and ideologies
that rendered this conflict possible? Given the growth of human needs
and technology, was such a conflict really unavoidable? And can it be
overcome in a future, ecologically-oriented society?
How would a rational, ecologically-oriented society fit into the
processes of natural evolution? Even more broadly, is there any reason
to believe that the human mind — itself a product of natural evolution
as well as culture — represents a decisive high point in natural
development, notably in the long development of subjectivity from the
sensitivity and self-maintenance of the simplest life-forms to the
remarkable intellectuality and self-consciousness of the most complex?
In asking these highly provocative questions, I am not trying to
justify a strutting arrogance toward nonhuman life-forms. Clearly, we
must bring humanity’s uniqueness as a species, marked by rich
conceptual, social, imaginative, and constructive attributes, into
synchronicity with nature’s fecundity, diversity, and creativity. This
synchronicity will not be achieved by opposing nature to society,
nonhuman to human life-forms, natural fecundity to technology, or a
natural subjectivity to the human mind. Indeed, an important result
that emerges from a discussion of the interrelationship of nature to
society is the fact that human intellectuality, although distinct, also
has a far-reaching natural basis. Our brains and nervous systems did
not suddenly spring into existence without a long antecedent natural
history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our
extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels — can
be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the
ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an
amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.
Here too, in the most intimate of our human attributes, we are no
less products of natural evolution than we are of social evolution. As
human beings we incorporate without ourselves aeons of organic
differentiation and elaboration. Like all complex life-forms, we are not
only part of natural evolution; we are also its heirs and the products
of natural fecundity.
In trying to show how society slowly grows out of nature, however,
social ecology is also obliged to show how society itself undergoes
differentiation and elaboration. In doing so, social ecology must
examine those junctures in social evolution where splits occurred that
slowly brought society into opposition to the natural world, and
explain how this opposition emerged from its inception in prehistoric
times to our own era. Indeed, if the human species is a life-form that
can consciously and richly enhance the natural world rather than
simply damage it, it is important for social ecology to reveal the factors
that have rendered many human beings into parasites on the world of
life rather than active partners in organic evolution. This project must
be undertaken not in a haphazard way, but with a serious attempt to
render natural and social development coherent in terms of each other,
and relevant to our times and the construction of an ecological
society....
What unites society with nature in a graded evolutionary continuum
is the remarkable extent to which human beings, living in a rational,
ecologically-oriented society, could embody the creativity of nature —
this, as distinguished from a purely adaptive criterion of evolutionary
success. The great achievements of human thought, art, science, and
technology serve not only to monumentalize culture, they serve to monumentalize natural evolution itself They provide heroic evidence
that the human species is a warm-blooded, excitingly versatile, and
keenly intelligent life-form — not a cold-blooded, genetically programmed,
and mindless insect — that expresses nature’s greatest powers of
creativity.
Life-forms that create and consciously alter their environment,
hopefully in ways that make it more rational and ecological, represent
a vast and indefinite extension of nature into fascinating, perhaps
unbounded lines of evolution that no branch of insects could ever
achieve — notably, the evolution of a fully self-conscious nature....
Natural history is a cumulative evolution toward ever more varied,
differentiated, and complex forms and relationships.
This evolutionary development of increasingly variegated entities,
most notably of life-forms, contains exciting, latent possibilities. With
variety, differentiation, and complexity, nature, in the course of its own
unfolding, opens new directions for still further development along
alternative lines of natural evolution. To the degree that animals become
complex, self-aware, and increasingly intelligent, they begin to make
those elementary choices that influence their own evolution. They are
less and less the passive objects of “natural selection” and more and
more the subjects of their own development.
A brown hare that mutates into a white one and sees a snow-covered
terrain in which to camouflage itself is acting on behalf of its own
survival, not simply adapting in order to survive. It is not merely being
“selected” by its environment; it is selecting its own environment and
making a choice that expresses a small measure of subjectivity and
judgment.
The greater the variety of habitats that emerge in the evolutionary
process, the more a given life-form, particularly a neurologically
complex one, is likely to play an active and judgmental role in
preserving itself. To the extent that natural evolution follows this path
of neurological development, it gives rise to life-forms that exercise an
ever-wider latitude of choice and a nascent form of freedom in
developing themselves.
Given this conception of nature as the cumulative history of more
differentiated levels of material organization (especially of life-forms)
and of increasing subjectivity, social ecology establishes a basis for a
meaningful understanding of humanity and society’s place in natural
evolution. Natural history is not a “catch as catch can” phenomenon.
It is marked by tendency, by direction, and as far as human beings are
concerned, by conscious purpose. Human beings and the social worlds
they create can open a remarkably expansive horizon for development
of the natural world — a horizon marked by consciousness, reflection,
and an unprecedented freedom of choice and capacity for conscious
creativity. The factors that reduce many life-forms to largely adaptive
roles in changing environments are replaced by a capacity for
consciously adapting environments to existing and new life-forms.
Adaptation, in effect, increasingly gives way to creativity, and the
seemingly ruthless action of “natural law” to greater freedom. What
earlier generations called “blind nature” to denote nature’s lack of
moral direction turns into free nature, a nature that slowly finds a voice
and the means to relieve the needless tribulations of life for all species
in a highly conscious humanity and an ecological society.... The issue,
then, is not whether social evolution stands opposed to natural evolution.
The issue is how social evolution can be situated in natural
evolution and why it has been thrown — needlessly — against natural
evolution to the detriment of life as a whole. Our capacity to be
rational and free does not assure us that this capacity will be realized.
If social evolution is the potentiality for expanding the horizon of
natural evolution along unprecedented creative lines, and human beings
are the potentiality for nature to become self-conscious and free, the
issue we face is why these potentialities have been warped and how
they can be realized.
It is part of social ecology’s commitment to natural evolution that
these potentialities are indeed real and that they can be fulfilled....
Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use
its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations,
scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for
that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots
in social problems.
*** On Biocentrism
(from Re-enchanting Humanity, 1995)
The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere
have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual
form of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization.
This basic intuition is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere
as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.[25]
This stunning doctrine literally defines deep ecology. “Deep” it is in
every sense — not only in the intuitions that the authors and their
acolytes hold, but in the many presuppositions they make.... On the
other hand, we may decide to agree with Robyn Eckersley, a champion
of biocentrism, that no such abilities are necessary, that the
“navigational skills of birds” are themselves on a par with the wideranging
intelligence of people.
Is there not something self-serving and arrogant in the (unverifiable)
claim that first nature is striving to achieve something that has presently
reached its most developed form in us — second nature? A more
impartial, biocentric approach would be simply to acknowledge that
our special capabilities (e.g., a highly developed consciousness, language
and tool-making capability) are simply one form of excellence alongside
the myriad others (e.g., the navigational skills of birds, the sonar
capability and playfulness of dolphins, and the intense sociality of ants)
rather than the form of excellence thrown up by evolution.[26]
Whether birds have “navigation skills” — which assumes conscious
agency in negotiating their migratory flights over vast distances with
clear geographical goals — or primarily tropistic reactions to changes
in daylight and possibly the earth’s magnetic fields of force, need not
occupy us here. What counts is that Eckersley’s state of mind, like that
of deep ecologists generally, essentially debases the intellectual powers
of people who, over previous centuries, consciously mapped the globe,
gave it mathematical coordinates, and invented magnetic compasses,
chronometers, radar, and other tools for navigation. They did so with
an intellectuality, flexibility, and with techniques that no bird can
emulate — that is, with amazing skillfulness, since skill involves more
than physical reactions to natural forces and stimuli.
When Eckersley places the largely tropistic reactions of birds on a
par with human thought, she diminishes the human mind and its
extraordinary abilities. One might as well say that plants have “skills”
that are on a par with human intellectuality because plants can engage
in photosynthesis, a complex series of biochemical reactions to
sunlight. Are such reactions really commensurate with the ability of
physicists to understand how solar fusion occurs and of biochemists
to understand how photosynthesis occurs? If so, then corals
“invented” techniques for producing islands and plants “invented”
techniques for reaching to the sun in heavily forested areas. In short,
placing human intellectual foresight, logical processes, and innovations
on a par with tropistic reactions to external stimuli is to create a
stupendous intellectual muddle, not to evoke the “deep” insights that
deep ecologists claim to bring to our understanding of humanity’s
interaction with the natural world.
Eckersley’s crude level of argumentation is no accident; Devall and
Sessions prepare us for it by approvingly citing Warwick Fox to the
effect that we can make “no firm ontological divide in the field of
existence: That there is no bifurcation in reality between the human
and the non-human realms ... to the extent that we perceive
boundaries, we fall short of deep ecological consciousness.”[27]
No one has quite told whales, I assume, about this new evolutionary
dispensation. Still less are grizzly bears, wolves, entire rainforest
ecosystems, mountains, rivers, “and so on” aware of their community
with human beings. Indeed, in this vast panoply of life-forms,
ecosystems, mineral matter, “and so on,” no creature seems to be
capable of knowing — irrespective of how they communicate with
members of their own kind — about the existence or absence of this
“firm ontological divide” except human beings. If, as Devall and
Sessions seem to believe, there is “no firm ontological divide” between
the human and nonhuman realms, it is unknown to every species in
the biosphere, let alone entities in the abiotic world — except our own.
In fact, the “ontological divide” between the nonhuman and the
human is very real. Human beings, to be sure, are primates, mammals,
and vertebrates. They cannot, as yet, get out of their animal skins. As
products of organic evolution, they are subject to the natural vicissitudes
that bring enjoyment, pain, and death to complex life-forms
generally. But it is a crucial fact that they alone know — indeed, can
know — that there is a phenomenon called evolution; they alone know
that death is a reality; they alone can even formulate such notions as
self-realization, biocentric equality, and a “self-in-Self”; they alone
can generalize about their existence — past, present, and future — and
produce complex technologies, create cities, communicate in a
complex syllabic form, “and so on”! To call these stupendous
attributes and achievements mere differences in degree between human
beings and nonhuman life-forms — and to equate human “consciousness”
with the “navigational skills” of migratory birds — is so preposterously
naive that one might expect such absurdities from
children, not professors.
What apparently worries deep ecologists about this “divide,” with
all its bifurcations and boundaries, is not so much that its existence is
obvious as that it is inconvenient. Beclouding their simplistic monism,
we may suppose, is a fear of the dualism of René Descartes, which they
feel obliged to dispel. Ironically, they seem incapable of coping with
this dualism without taking recourse to a Bambi-style anthropomorphism
that effectively transforms all nonhuman beings into
precisely what they profess to abhor — namely, anthropomorphisms. If
they cannot make human beings into nonhuman animals, they make
nonhuman animals into human beings. Accordingly, animals are said
to have “skills” in much the same sense that human beings do. The
earth has its own “wisdom,” wilderness is equated with “freedom,”
and all life-forms exhibit “moral” qualities that are entirely the product
of human intellectual, emotional, and social development.
Put bluntly: If human beings are “equal in intrinsic worth” to
nonhuman beings, then boundaries between human and nonhuman
are erased, and either human beings are merely one of a variety of
animals, or else nonhuman beings are human....
Having entangled the reader with extravagant claims for a set of
unsupported personal beliefs, Devall and Sessions proceed in the name
of an exclusively human “active deep questioning and meditative
process” to reduce readers to the status of “‘plain citizens’ of the biotic
community, not lord or master over all other species.”[28]
Devall and Sessions use words with multiple meanings to give the
most alienating interpretation to people. Whatever the democracy could
possibly mean in the animal world, human beings are not mere “plain
citizens” in a biospheric democracy. They are immensely superior to
any other animal species, although deep ecologists equate superiority
with being the “lord and master of all other species,” hence an
authoritarian concept. But superior may mean not only higher in rank,
status, and authority but “of great value, excellence; extraordinary,”
if my dictionary is correct. That superiority can simply mean “having
more knowledge, foresight, and wisdom” — attributes we might expect
to find in a teacher or even a Zen master — seems to disappear from
the highly selective deep ecological lexicon.
Deep ecology’s contradictory presuppositions, intuitions, anthropomorphisms,
and naive assertions leave us spinning like tops. We are
enjoined to engage in “deep questioning” in order to decide on
intuitive grounds that we are intrinsically no different in “worth” or
“value” from any “entity” in the “ecosphere.” Yet the “deep questioning”
so prized by Devall, Sessions, Naess, eta!., is something that no other life-form can do — brsides us. In the vastness of the ecosphere,
nothing apart from human beings is capable of even voicing the notion
of “biocentric egalitarianism,” much less understanding any notion
of “rights,” “intrinsic worth,” or “superiority” and “inferiority.” It
is the ultimate in anthropomorphism to impute a moral sense to
animals that lack the conceptual material of abstract thought provided
by language and the rich generalizations we form in our minds from
our vast repertoire of words.
Strictly speaking, if we were nothing but “plain citizens” in the
ecosphere, we should be as furiously anthropo-centric in our behavior,
just as a bear is Ursa-centric or a wolf Cano-centric. That is to say, as
“plain citizens” of the ecosphere — and nothing more — we should, like
every other animal, be occupied exclusively with our own survival,
comfort, and safety. As Richard Watson has so astutely noted: “If we
are to treat man as part of nature on egalitarian terms with other
species, then man’s behavior must be treated as morally neutral” — that
is, as amoral. In which case, Watson continues, “we should not think
there is something morally or ecosophically wrong with the human
species dispossessing and causing the extinction of other species.”[29]
Yet deep ecologists ask us precisely in the name of a biospheric
“citizenship” not to be occupied exclusively with our survival. Put
simply: Deep ecologists ask us to be “plain citizens” and at the same
time expect — even oblige — us to think and behave as very uncommon,
indeed quite extraordinary ones! In a perceptive article, critic Harold
Fromm states this contradiction with remarkable pithiness:
The “intrinsic worth” that biocentrists connect with animals, plants,
and minerals is projected by the desiring human psyche in the same way
that “the will of God” is projected by human vanity upon a silent
universe that never says anything.... The “biocentric” notion of
“intrinsic worth” is even more narcissistically “anthropocentric” than
ordinary self-interest because it hopes to achieve its ends by denying
that oneself is the puppeteer-ventriloquist behind the world one
perceives as valuable.[30]
As biocentrists, deep ecologists ask us to take the role of the invisible
puppeteer — pulling the strings and ignoring the fact that we are pulling
them.
[21] In his earlier writings Bookchin often refers to first nature simply as “nature,”
following convention. But because the meanings of the word nature are so
numerous and varied, in his more recent writings he no longer uses the word
unmodified.
[22] Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books,
1982), pp. 315–16.
[23] William Trager, Symbiosis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), p. vii.
[24] Robert Briffault, “The Evolution of the Human Species,” in The Making of Man, edited by V. F. Calverton (New York: Modern Library, 1931),
pp. 765–6.
[25] Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered
(Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), p. 67, emphases added.
[26] Robyn Eckersley, “Divining Evolution: The Ecological Ethics of Murray
Bookchin,” Environmental Ethics, vol. 11 (Summer 1989), p. 115.
[27] Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 66. Actually, this quotation from Fox
comes from a criticism of deep ecology in The Ecologist, val. 14, no. 5–6
(1984), pp. 194–200 and 201–4, which does not prevent Devall and Sessions
from bringing it to the service of deep ecology.
[28] Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 68.
[29] Richard Watson, “Eco-Ethics: Challenging the Underlying Dogmas of
Environmentalism,” Whole Earth Review (March 1985), pp. 5–13.
[30] Harold Fromm, “Ecology and Ideology,” Hudson Review (Spring 1992),
p. 30.
** Chapter 3: Organic Society
*** Introduction
In Bookchin’s view, society and culture must be understood by
examining not only what they are at present but their origins and
subsequent development over the course of history. Thus, to rescue
a tradition of freedom in support of his ecological society, he traces
a “legacy of freedom” that has run as an alternative libertarian
undercurrent through Western history. In his 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom he gave particular attention to what he calls “organic
society” — that is, the preliterate band and tribal cultures that
preceded recorded history in Europe and America and that persisted
far longer in other parts of the world. Insofar as a number of its
features hold relevance for the creation of an ecological society,
organic society is part of the “legacy of freedom.”
Perhaps the most important of these features is the relatively
egalitarian nature of individual organic societies in their earliest
phases. Initially such groups were internally free of social hierarchythat
is, institutionalized systems of rank based on status distinctions.
Lacking social hierarchies, organic societies also lacked domination,
or the subordination of one sector of the community to another.
Finally, lacking domination, the group also lacked concepts of
domination, not only of dominating people but of dominating first
nature.
As part of this egalitarianism, organic societies had strikingly
communistic principles of social organization. An organic community,
for example, would compensate for individual handicaps
and weaknesses rather than let such individuals fend for themselves,
fulfilling what Bookchin calls “the inequality of equals” or “complementarity.”
To all individuals in the community, it would provide
the means necessary to sustain life, regardless of their individual
contribution to it; it would guarantee what Bookchin, following
anthropologist Paul Radin, calls the “irreducible minimum.” And
all individuals in the community would have general access to the
community’s resources based on their need for them, rather than
limited access based on ownership or other exclusive rights, in what
Bookchin refers to as th~ principle of “usufruct.”
These three principles — complementarity, the irreducible
minimum, and usufruct — reflected a high level of cooperation and
mutual care within a community. (This description, it should be
emphasized, applies only to the internal life of a tribal community
and not to its relations with other communities; as Bookchin later
emphasized, tribal life in organic society was not only parochial but
was characterized by frequent intertribal wars.)
Bookchin also explored a number of religious aspects of the
internal life of organic societies in The Ecology of Freedom. While
writing these chapters in the 1970s, he was influenced by the New
Age anthropology that was fashionable at the time. In subsequent
years, however, this very anthropology contributed to developments
in ecological thought that he would reject as regressive.
Neopagan religions, for example, underwent a revival and became
popular in the late 1980s as a supposed antidote to an antiecological
worldview. Aboriginal peoples came to be romanticized
as models of ecological thinking, supposedly exemplifying lifeways
that are harmonious with first nature from which modern societies
could learn. Some parts of the ecology movement adopted as a
slogan, “Back to the Pleistocene!”
Bookchin later regretted the influence that this anthropology
had on The Ecology of Freedom, as he wrote in his introduction to
the second edition, published in 1991:
I examined organic society’s various religious beliefs, and
cosmologies: its naturalistic rituals, its mythic personalizations of
animals and animal spirits, its embodiment of fertility in a Mother
Goddess, and its overall animistic outlook. I believed that the
Enlightenment’s battle against superstition had been long since
won in American and European culture, and that no one would
mistake me for advocating a revival of animism or Goddess
worship. As much as I admired many features of organic cultures,
I never believed that we could or should introduce their na’ive
religious, mythic, or magical beliefs or their cosmologies into the
present-day ecology movement.[31]
Bookchin took particular exception, in this 1991 introduction, to
the notion that people in organic society are “ecological mentors”
for people today to follow. Although the world of preliterate
peoples was animistic, he pointed out, they could not have
consciously lived in harmony with “nature,” since they had no
concept of nature as such, as distinguished from culture or society.
Thus, they could have held no specific conscious attitudes toward
it — neither one of domin’ation or harmony. Moreover, despite their
belief in animistic spirits, they still had to kill animals in order to
obtain food, clothing, and shelter — and their approach in doing so
was primarily instrumental. Nor, finally, were they necessarily
restrained by concepts of limit and moderation, Bookchin observes;
on the contrary, they appear in numerous cases to have engaged
in overkill and hunted species to extinction needlessly.
Insofar as organic society lacked a concept of nature, it lacked a
consciousness, as well, of humanity’s role in natural evolution. To
have gained this self-consciousness has been a major advance in
human thinking. If in one sense the demise of organic society
represented a “fall from Eden” — the Eden of primitive egalitarianism
and complementarity — in another sense it was a major step
toward enlightenment. Once humanity gained self-consciousness
of itself and of first nature, becoming increasingly innovative and
creative, human beings could consciously choose the role they
would play in it and adopt those virtues and practices that
supported that role. They could begin to do so as a matter of
conscious ethical choice — not out of blindness or mystification.
Thus, in a dialectical progression, human society forsook a way
of life that was, in some ways, benign, but that lacked the
universality and consciousness necessary for men and women to
realize their latent human attributes. Indeed, this great sublation
of humanity beyond both organic society and a Janus-faced
civilization that has legacies of both freedom and domination, into
a rational, ecological society that preserves the liberatory aspects
of both, is the project of social ecology.
*** Usufruct, Complementarity, and the Irreducible Minimum
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
It is easy to see that organic society’s harmonized view of nature follows
directly 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
structures onto the natural world. To the Algonquians of the North
American forest, beavers lived in clans and lodges of their own, wisely
cooperating to promote the well-being of the community. Animals also
had their magic, their totem ancestors (the elder brother), 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 basis for the survival of the organic community was an
integral part of the outlook of preliterate people toward nature and the
interplay between the natural world and the social.
We have yet to find a language that adequately encompasses the
quality of this deeply embedded cooperative spirit. Expressions like
“love of nature” or “communism,” not to speak of the jargon favored
by contemporary sociology, are permeated by the problematical
relationships of our own society and mentality. Preliterate humans did
not have to “love” nature; they lived in a kinship relationship with it.
They would not distinguish between our “aesthetic” sense on this score,
and their own functional approach to the natural world, because
natural beauty is there to begin with — in the very cradle of the
individual’s experience. The poetic language that awakens such
admiration among whites who encounter the spokesmen for Indian
grievances is rarely “poetry” to the speaker; rather, it is an unconscious
eloquence that reflects the dignity of Indian life.
So too with other elements of organic society and its values:
cooperation is too primary to be adequately expressed in the language
of western society. From the outset of life, coercion in dealing with
children is so rare in most preliterate communities that western
observers are often astonished by the gentleness with which so-called
primitives deal with even the most intractable of their young. Yet in
preliterate communities the parents are not “permissive”; they simply
respect the personality of their children, much as they do that of the
adults. Until age hierarchies begin to emerge, the everyday behavior of
parents fosters an almost unbroken continuity in the lives of the young
between the years of childhood and adulthood....
The word property connotes an individual appropriation of goods,
a personal claim to tools, land, and other resources. In this loose sense,
property is fairly common in organic societies, even in groups that have
a very simple, undeveloped technology. By the same token, cooperative
work and the sharing of resources on a scale that could be called
communistic is also fairly common. On both the productive side of
economic life and the consumptive, appropriation of tools, weapons,
food, and even clothing may range widely — often idiosyncratically, in
western eyes — from the possessive and seemingly individualistic to the
most meticulous and often ritualistic parceling out of a harvest or a
hunt among members of a community.
But primary to both of these seemingly contrasting relationships is
the practice of usufruct, the freedom of individuals in a community to
appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact that they are using
them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used.
Function, in effect, replaces our hallowed concept of possession — not
merely as a loan or even “mutual aid,” but as an unconscious emphasis
on use itself, on need that is free of psychological entanglements with
proprietorship, work, and even reciprocity. The western identification
of individuality with ownership and personality with craft — the latter
laden with a metaphysics of selfhood as expressed in a crafted object
wrested by human powers from an intractable nature — has yet to
emerge from the notion of use itself and the guileless enjoyment of
needed things. Need, in effect, still orchestrates work to the point where
property of any kind, communal or otherwise, has yet to acquire
independence from the claims of satisfaction. A collective need subtly
orchestrates work, not personal need alone, for the collective claim is
implicit in the primacy of usufruct over proprietorship. Hence even the
work performed in one’s own dwelling has an underlying collective
dimension in the potential availability of its products to the entire
community.
Communal property, once property itself has become a category of
consciousness, already marks the first step toward private property,
just as reciprocity, once it too becomes a category of consciousness,
marks the first step toward exchange. Proudhon’s celebration of
“mutual aid” and contractual federalism, like Marx’s celebration of
communal property and planned production, mark no appreciable
advance over the primal principle of usufruct. Both thinkers were
captive to the notion of interest, to the rational satisfaction of egotism.
There may have been a period in humanity’s early development when
interest had not yet emerged to replace complementarity, the
disinterested willingness to pool needed things and needed services.
There was a time when Gontran de Poncins, wandering into the most
remote reaches of the Arctic, could still encounter “the pure, the true
Eskimos, the Eskimos who knew not how to lie” — and hence to
manipulate, to calculate, to project interest beyond social need. Here
community attained a completeness so exquisite and artless that needed
things and services fit together in a lovely mosaic with a haunting
personality of its own.
We should not disdain these almost utopian glimpses of humanity’s
potentialities, with their unsullied qualities for giving and collectivity.
Preliterate peoples that still lack an “I” with which to replace a “we”
are not (as Levy-Bruhl was to suggest) deficient in individuality as much
as they are rich in community. This is a greatness of wealth that can
yield a lofty disdain for objects. Cooperation, at this point, is more
than just a cement between members of the group; it is an organic
melding of identities that, without losing individual uniqueness, retains
and fosters the unity of consociation. Contract, forced into this
wholeness, serves merely to subvert it — turning an unthinking sense of
responsibility into a calculating nexus of aid and an unconscious sense
of collectivity into a preening sense of mutuality. As for reciprocity, so
often cited as the highest evocation of collectivity, it is more significant
in forming alliances between groups than in fostering internal solidarity
within them.
Usufruct, in short, differs qualitatively from the quid pro quo of
reciprocity, exchange, and mutual aid — all of which are trapped within
history’s demeaning account books with their “just” ratios and their
“honest” balance sheets. Caught in this limited sphere of calculation,
consociation is always tainted by the rationality of arithmetic. The
human spirit can never transcend a quantitative world of “fair dealings”
between canny egos whose ideology of interest barely conceals a meanspirited
proclivity for acquisition. To be sure, social forces were to
fracture the human collectivity by introducing contractual ties and
cultivating the ego’s most acquisitive impulses. Insofar as the guileless
peoples of organic societies held to the values of usufruct in an
unconscious manner, they remained terribly vulnerable to the lure, often
the harsh imposition, of an emerging contractual world. Rarely is
history notable for its capacity to select and preserve the most virtuous
traits of humanity. But there is still no reason why hope, reinforced by
consciousness and redolent with ancestral memories, may not linger
with us as an awareness of what humanity has been in the past and
what it can become in the future....
Freedom, an unstated reality in many preliterate cultures, was burdened
by constraints, but these constraints were closely related to the early
community’s material conditions of life. It is impossible to quarrel with
famine, with the need for coordinating the hunt of large game, with
seasonal requirements of food cultivation, and later with warfare. To
violate the Crow hunting regulations was to endanger every hunter and
possibly place the welfare of the entire community in jeopardy. If the
violations were serious enough, the violator would be beaten so severely
that he might very well not survive. The mild-mannered Eskimo would
grimly but collectively select an assassin to kill an unmanageable
individual who gravely threatened the well-being of the band. But the
virtually unbridled “individualism” so characteristic of power brokers
in modern society was simply unthinbble in preliterate societies. Were
it even conceivable, it would have been totally unacceptable to the
community. Constraint, normally guided by public opinion, custom,
and shame, was inevitable in the early social development of humanitynot
as a matter of will, authority, or the exercise of power, but because
it was unavoidable.
Personal freedom was thus clearly restricted from a modern
viewpoint. Choice, will, and individual proclivities could be exercised
or expressed within confines permitted by the environment.... But
organic society, despite the physical limitations it faced (from a modern
viewpoint), nevertheless functioned unconsciously with an implicit
commitment to freedom that social theorists were not to attain until
fairly recent times. Paul Radin’s concept of the irreducible minimum
rests on an unarticulated principle of freedom. To be assured of the
material means of life irrespective of one’s productive contribution to
the community implies that, wherever possible, society will compensate
for the infirmities of the ill, handicapped, and old, just as it will for the
limited powers of the very young and their dependency on adults. Even
though their productive powers are limited or failing, people will not
be denied the means of life that are available to individuals who are
well-endowed physically and mentally. Indeed, even individuals who
are perfectly capable of meeting all their material needs cannot be
denied access to the community’s common produce, although deliberate
shirkers in organic society are virtually unknown.
The principle of the irreducible minimum thus affirms the existence
of inequality within the group — inequality of physical and mental
powers, of skills and virtuosity, psyches and proclivities. It does so not
to ignore these inequalities or denigrate them, but on the contrary to
compensate for them. Equity here is the recognition of inequities that
are not the fault of anyone and that must be adjusted as a matter of
unspoken social responsibility. To assume that everyone is “equal” is
patently preposterous, if their “equality” is to lie in their strength,
intellect, training, experience, talent, disposition, and opportunities.
Such “equality” scoffs at reality and denies the commonality and
solidarity of the community by subverting its responsibilities to
compensate for differences between individuals. It is a heartless
“equality,” a mean-spirited one that is simply alien to the very nature
of organic society. As long as the means exist, they must be shared as
much as possible according to needs — and needs are unequal insofar
as they are gauged according to individual abilities and responsibilities.
Hence, organic society tends to operate unconsciously according to
the equality of unequals — that is, a freely given, unreflective form of
social behavior and distribution that compensates inequalities and does
not yield to the fictive claim, yet to be articulated, that everyone is
equal. Marx was to put this well when, in opposition to “bourgeois
right,” with its claim of the “equality of all,” he remarked that freedom
abandons the very notion of “right” as such and “inscribes on its
banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs.” Equality is inextricably tied to freedom as the recognition of
inequality and transcends necessity by establishing a culture and
distributive system based on compensation for the stigma of natural
“privilege.”
The subversion of organic society drastically undermined this
principle of authentic freedom. Compensation was restructured into
rewards, just as gifts were replaced by commodities. Cuneiform writing,
the basis of our alphabetic script, had its origins in the meticulous
records the temple clerks kept of products received and products
dispersed — in short, the precise accounting of goods, possibly even
when the land was “communally owned” and worked in Mesopotamia.
Only afterward were these ticks on clay tablets to become narrative
forms of script. The early cuneiform accounting records of the Near
East prefigure the moral literature of a less giving and more despotic
world in which the equality of unequals gave way to mere charity.
Thereafter “right” was to supplant freedom. No longer was it the
primary responsibility for society to care for its young, elderly, infirm,
or unfortunates; their care became a “private matter” for family and
friends — albeit very slowly and through various subtly shaded phases.
On the village level, to be sure, the old customs still lingered on in their
own shadowy world, but this world was not part of “civilization” —
merely an indispensable but concealed archaism.
*** Romanticizing Organic Society
(from “Twenty Years Later ... , “ 1991)
We are faced with the difficulty that few people seem to know how to
build or develop ideas anymore. They promiscuously collect intellectual
fragments here and there, like so many dismembered artifacts, drawing
upon basically contradictory views and traditions with complete
aplomb. Indeed, any serious attempt to rationally discuss the very
troubling issues of our time in a coherent manner is often treated as a
symptom of psychopathology rather than an earnest effort to make
sense of the ideological chaos so prevalent today. Ironically, in its own
quixotic way, postmodernism often inadvertently works with a
rationality of its own that is nonetheless opaque to itself, and it often
strives for the very coherence whose existence it denies to its critics.
The intellectual tendencies that celebrate incoherence, antirationalism,
and mysticism are not merely symptoms of a waning intellectuality
today. They literally justify and foster it. The massive shift by many
people away from serious concerns with the objective conditions of
life — such as institutional forms of domination, the use of technology
for exploitative purposes, and the everyday realities of human
suffering — toward an introverted subjectivism, with its overwhelming
focus on psychology and “hidden” motivations, the rise of the culture
industry, and the intellectual anxieties over collegiate issues like
academic careers and pedagogical eminence — all testify to a sense of
disempowerment in both social and personal life.
That the mystical ecologies are becoming popular today is not a mere
intellectual aberration, any more than the popularity of postmodernism.
To the contrary, their popularity expresses the inability of millions of
people to cope with a harsh and demoralizing reality, to control the
increasingly oppressive direction in which society is moving. Hence
myths, pagan deities, and “Pleistocene” and “Neolithic” belief-systems
together with their priests and priestesses provide a surrogate “reality”
into which the na’ive acolyte can escape. Indeed, when this preening
emphasis on the subjective is clothed in the mystical vapors and
inchoate vagaries of fevered imaginations, any recognition of reality is
dissolved by beliefs in the mythic. The rational is replaced by the
intuitional, and palpable social opponents are replaced by their
shadows, to be exorcised by rituals, incantations, and magical
gymnastics.
All of these practices are merely socially harmless surrogates for the
authentic problems of our time. Ghosts from a distant past, the
products of our ancestors’ own imaginations, in turn, are invoked as
objects of our reverence in the name of an “earth wisdom” that is
actually as ineffectual as we are in our everyday lives. The new
surrogate “reality” that is becoming a widespread feature in our time
percolates through the mass media and the publishing industry, which
are only too eager to nourish, even celebrate the proliferation of wiccan
covens, Goddess-worshipping congregations, assorted pantheistic and
animistic cults, “wilderness” devotees, and ecofeminist acolytes — to
which I can add a new “deep ecology” professoriat that is increasingly
prepared to feed a gullible public with “biocentric” pablum....
These ideologies, from postmodernism to ecofeminism, subtly
enchant the new human commodities with the mental fireworks,
amulets, charms, and brightly tinted garments that provide them with
a mystical patina to conceal their empty lives. Capitalism has nothing
whatever to fear from mystical and “biocentric” ecologies, or their
many high-priced artifacts. The bourgeoisie easily guffaws at these
absurdities and is only too eager to commodify them into new sources
of profit. Indeed, to state the issue bluntly, it is profit, power, and
economic expansion that primarily concerns the elites of the existing
social order, not the antics or even the protests of dissenters who duel
with ghosts instead of institutionalized centers of power, authority, and
wealth.
... It has become all too fashionable among many mystical ecologists
to condemn human intervention into first nature, except to meet the
minimal needs of life and survival. We are enjoined to “let nature take
its course,” to avoid any alteration of first nature except for what is
“necessary” — a word that often remains ill-defined — to keep human
beings alive and well. Such noninterventionist attitudes are commonly
imputed to prehistoric and aboriginal peoples, who presumably lived
in total “Oneness” with first nature and the wildlife around them.
Taking Aldo Leopold’s phrase “not man apart” to its most extreme
conclusion, mystical ecologists call for a complete integration to first
nature — by “returning to the Pleistocene,” as many “biocentrists”
demand....
These forebears of our species and our own ancestors lived in a
climatically turbulent era, marked by advances and retreats of glaciers,
wide swings in temperature, and a feast-or-famine diet. Their lives were
often very precarious, despite the periodic abundance of game. Nor
were they fully equipped with the means to deal with the natural
vicissitudes that white middle-class people today take so readily for
granted, such as the certainty of warmth in cold weather, adequate
shelter, and the ordinary creature comforts to which middle-class people
are wedded — leaving all luxuries and pleasures aside. They lacked a
written body of knowledge by which a complex tradition of ideas could
be handed down; the writing materials with which to express thoughts
and reflections that were more complex than those involved in meeting
the needs of everyday life; the libraries in which to meditate, research,
and gather the wisdom of past ages — in short, the vast array of
intellectual and spiritual materials to sensitize their outlook and
sensibilities.
It might seem more plausible for deep ecologists to call for a return
to the sensibility of these distant times, rather than an actual physical
return. But here too we are besieged by a barrage of unanswered
questions. We would want to know what kind of sensibility Pleistocene
and Paleolithic hunters had in their dealings with the multitude of
animals they encountered in the “Great Age of Mammals,” as the two
periods have been called. After all, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers
developed the stone-tipped spear, the all-important spear-thrower —
which made it possible to effectively pierce very tough hides and
muscles — and the bow and arrow, which could inflict mortal damage
over a sizable distance. The more sophisticated and lethal their hunting
kit, the greater an impact these humans must have had on the large
mammals of the late Pleistocene and the Paleolithic. If we are to return
to the sensibility of these epochs, we would want to know if they really
viewed the animals they killed “reverentially,” as so many mystical
ecologists claim, or if they had a more pragmatic attitude toward them,
using magic to propitiate a “bison spirit” or “bear spirit” in rituals
before and after kills. We would want to know if they really did feel
themselves to be absorbed into an all-encompassing “Oneness” with
the animals around them, or whether they had any sense of human
self-identity that involved feelings of “apartness” from those animals.
We would want to know if they really chose not to intervene in first
nature any more than was absolutely necessary, as mystical ecologists
believe, or if they significantly altered their surroundings. We would
want to know if they really did behave toward wildlife as “tender
carnivores” in pursuit of “sacred game,” as Paul Shepard’s evocative
book on hunter-gatherer sensibility is titled, or if they held a more
mundane attitude toward animals as means for satisfying their very
material as well as subjective needs.
Actually, we will never know with certainty the answers to these
questions of sensibility. The outlook that today’s mystical ecologists
cultivate toward the Pleistocene, the Paleolithic, and the Neolithic is
often highly romanticized and certainly does not correspond to many
things that we do know about those eras. If I am to examine the nature
of aboriginal sensibilities, I must do so as honestly as possible and
decide which characterizations probably apply better to our ancestors
of the distant past. This much is clear: much of the archaeological
evidence does not support the ecological-romantic view of early
peoples, however unpleasant the data may be. Researchers have argued
with good reason, for example, that effective human hunters in the
Pleistocene may have played a major role in killing off some, if not
most, of the great Pleistocene and Paleolithic mammals. Which is not
to deny that others have claimed that climatic changes, with important
ecological consequences in the Pleistocene and Paleolithic, are more
likely to have ended forever the lives of mammoths, mastodons, woolly
rhinoceroses, cave bears, and giant sloths, among others.... [Much]
evidence throws factual weight on the side of the “overkill,” as
distinguished from the primarily climatic approach, and supports the
view that early hunter-gatherers contributed to exterminating or may
have exterminated many Pleistocene animals.
After so much has been written by romantics of the last century and
mystical ecologists today about the “Oneness” that preliterate peoples
felt for the game they hunted, should we be shocked by this conclusion?
I believe not — unless we choose to simplify the complex dialectic
involved in what we regard as an “ecological sensibility.” Indeed, that
early hunters — whose “ecological sensibility” is so revered by mystical
ecologists — would try to satisfy their needs in any way they could
should not surprise us. In fact, these hunters were predatory
opportunists, no less than wolves or coyotes, precisely because they
were very much part of “Nature” (to invoke that much-abused word),
just as were all the life-forms around them. Early hunters did not live
in Disneyland, where sociable “mice” and gleeful “rabbits” jostle with
human visitors in a pseudo-animistic, cartoonlike world.
Another area in dispute is the extent to which preliterate peoples
altered the wild environments in which they lived. We know that early
hunters were clearly not devout conservers of the original forests, for
example. As Stephen]. Pyne emphasizes in his informative study Fire in America, “the virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; it was invented in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. For this condition Indian fire practices were largely
responsible.”[32] Hunter-gatherer foragers, in fact, used fire on a global
scale to create grasslands for herbivores. The great prairies of the
Midwest were literally created by Indian torches, which were
systematically applied, long before those lands were expropriated by
Europeans. Since humanity’s discovery of fire, few forests that we can
call “virgin” remain today, however large the girth or height of their
individual trees. Great forests of the eighteenth century were often
restorations of trees that had been cleared and reduced to parkland
and prairies in pre-Columbian times. The “forest primeval” that
Longfellow celebrated in his poetry was often made up of trees that
European settlers had permitted to come back after Indians had turned
the forests and the areas they occupied into parklands. That European
settlers permitted the trees to return in order to use them to build ships
and homes does not alter the fact that these forests were anything but
“primeval,” or that Indian communities were anything but reluctant
to “tamper” with “Nature.” ...
It is not my intention to defame aboriginal hunters or to place their
behavior on a par with that of lumber companies or the meat-packing
industry. No Paleo-Indian and Indian overkills and deforestation
compares even remotely to the terrifying ecological devastation and
the genocide practiced by Euro-American settlers on the New World
and its native people. The greed and exploitation that has destroyed
Indian cultures over the past five centuries can in no way be justified
morally or culturally. The interaction of European settlers and Native
Americans could have opened a new opportunity for a sensitive
integration of both cultures, but that opportunity was lost in an orgy
of bloodletting and plunder by European settlers, particularly land
speculators, railroaders, lumber barons, and capitalist entrepreneurs
generally.
But with all due regard to the many remarkable features of Native
American cultures, pre-Columbian hunters took a large toll in wildlife,
often showing few, if any, concerns for conservation. From such
overkills, game animals took years to regenerate. Nor was this
regeneration helped by their hunters’ fertility rituals, unless we are to
naively believe, like modern believers in magic, that they served to
increase animal fertility. “Thanks to their hunting prowess,” observes
Alston Chase in his superbly researched and well-written book, Playing God in Yellowstone, “the Indians of the Yellowstone region — the
Shoshone and their cousins, the Bannock and Lemhi — had eaten
themselves out of house and home. When Lewis and Clark first met
the Shoshone in 1805, they were starving. Their chief told the explorers
that they had ‘nothing but berries to eat.”‘[33] ...
Far from seeking to defame aboriginal peoples, I think we must
examine the rationale for their seeming “insensitivity” to animal life
and forests. Hunter-gatherers were not motivated by a desire for profit,
like competitive rivals in a capitalist marketplace whose behavior is
guided by the maxim “grow or die.” As I have emphasized, these
hunters were living beings like other life-forms, and as any life-form
would, they tried to survive by any means possible. At the same time,
the needs of these humans were greater and more complex than those
of other life-forms. As creatures endowed by natural evolution with
highly intelligent minds, they would not only have required animal and
vegetable food to meet their immediate needs; they would also have
wanted a secure supply of food once they knew how to preserve meat
and plants. Owing to their naturally endowed intelligence, they would
have wanted good clothing, even “luxuries” such as comfortable
bedding, sturdy skins for homes, plumage and carved bone amulets,
beadlike teeth for ornaments, magical artifacts, an assortment of tools
and medicines, and coloring matter for aesthetic purposes. That the
needs of these humans were greater and more complex than those of
other life-forms was due not to any perverse traits on their part but to
endowments that stemmed from their evolution as unique animals.
These wants, in short, shaped their behavior, as they would have for
any nonhuman being. And these wants were a product of an intelligence
that had been formed as a result of aeons of evolutionary development,
not any demonic or mysterious impulse that is vaguely “unnatural.”
Inasmuch as preliterate people were human, moreover, they were
capable of reasoning conceptually, of speaking fluently, and of feeling
abiding insecurities. Early humanity can hardly be faulted for behaving
more intelligently than bears, foxes, and wolves; natural evolution
endowed them with larger brains and a capacity for making tools and
weapons to enhance their powers of survival and for changing their
environment to abet their well-being. They had amazing memories,
and of extreme importance, they possessed vivid imaginations. They
decorated their weapons, painted animals and designs on rocks and
caves, engaged in analogical thinking, created myths, and felt passions
incomparably more compelling than any that are discernable in
animals.
Yet they were also truly part of “Nature.” In the late Pleistocene and
early Paleolithic, it was their very “closeness” to first nature, coupled
with their emerging second nature, that would have caused them to act
in ways that contradict our present-day romanticized notions of their
behavior. They were undergoing a major transition from the domain
of biological evolution to that of social evolution. As such, they could
variously exhibit utter indifference to the pain they inflicted on animals
and a strong affinity for them in their rituals — contradictory forms of
behavior that occurred almost simultaneously. In these respects, their
sensibility was shaped by animalistic as well as cultural needs, indeed
by their very “Oneness” with first nature. In turn, their sense of
“Oneness” with first nature was shaped by a mental repertoire that
could make for what we today would regard as cruelty as well as
empathy toward nonhuman life, depending upon the extent to which
they identified themselves with it and the kind of society they created,
which led to a sense of “apartness” from it — a thoroughly dialectical
tension in their outlook....
Looking back to the very beginnings of second nature, it should be
emphasized that humanity’s consciousness of first nature, as
distinguished from a consciousness of its specific, narrow ecological
niches, presupposes that it separate itself from a purely nichelike animal
existence. Human beings at some point had to at least begin to see first
nature generally as an “other” if their self-identity and self-consciousness
as human beings were to emerge. Without a sense of contrast
between the human and nonhuman, people are limited to the bedrock
existence of seeking mere survival, to a way of life so undifferentiated
from that of other living things that they know little more than the
unmediated confines of their limited ecological community. This way
of life is bereft of purpose, meaning, or orientation, apart from what
people create in their imagination. And it is a way of life that no human
being could endure except by ceasing to think.
Which is to say that, epistemologically at least, differentiation would
not exist and the evolution of a human psyche would never get under
way. In order for human beings to differentiate themselves in natural
evolution, there must be duality, such as dualities between self and
other and between the human and the nonhuman. Here, duality must
not be confused with dualism. Today, in fact, the danger that confronts
ecological thinking is less a matter of a dualistic sensibility — a dualism
that mystical ecologists have criticized to the point of pulverization —
than of reductionism, an intellectual dissolution of all difference into
an undefinable “Oneness” that excludes the possibility of creativity
and turns a concept like “interconnectedness” into the bonds of a
mental and emotional straitjacket. Without otherness, duality, and
differentiation, “interconnectedness” dissolves psychological and
personal heterogeneity into a “night in which all cows are black.”
Without “otherness,” duality, and differentiation, all heterogeneity of
life-forms would have been limited to a deadening homogeneity, and
organic evolution would not have occurred. In terms of natural history,
the biosphere would indeed still be a “Gaia” covered by Lynn
Margulis’s soup of prokaryotic cells.
Today, to follow a mystical path to “Oneness” is to sink back into
the timeless, ahistorical, misty island of the Lotus Eaters, who in
Homer’s Odyssey have no recollection of a past and no vision of a
future but vegetate in an unperturbable existence that consists of eating,
digesting, and defecating, like animals that live on a strictly day-byday
basis. This is a world that has no sense of “otherness,” no sense
of self, no sense of consciousness — indeed, no sensibility at all beyond
the mere maintenance of life, presumably in the bosom of an equally
vacuous “cosmic Self.” To understand early sensibilities and their
development, we must acknowledge that humanity had to break with
the purely animalistic sensibility — if sensibility it can be called at allthat
had confined it to a mere ecological niche, if it was to enter into
and know the larger world around it. Human beings had to regard first
nature as “other,” however much romantics of all sorts bemoan the
loss of a universal “Oneness” in a golden Pleistocene, Paleolithic, or
Neolithic past. Given their naturally endowed potentialities, humans
had to go beyond a realm of mere survival into one of creativity and
innovation, and satisfy their naturally endowed capacity to adapt
environments to meet their own needs.
The terrible psychological upheavals produced by the twentieth
century have made us truly wary of social history, of “otherness,” of
the dualities of separation from nonhuman nature. But “separation”
and “otherness” are human facts of life, if only because natural
evolution has produced a life-form — humanity — whose very specificity
is premised on a conscious sense of “separation” that can increasingly
distinguish human from nonhuman reality. “Otherness” must be
conceived of as a graded phenomenon, to be sure, one that may result
in any of several kinds of society. It may eventuate in very destructive
relationships characterized by opposition, domination, and antagonism,
as we know today — the results of which stain the social history that
lies behind us and possibly the precarious future that lies before us.
But “otherness” may also take the form of differentiation, of
articulation, of complementarity, as it did in the early history of humanity. As human beings began to emerge from first nature, possibly
in the Pleistocene and certainly in the Paleolithic, their relationship to
animals as “others” was largely complementary. Hunters know that
they are dealing with a nonhuman “other,” but animism may have been
a form of solicitation rather than coercion. Early animism imparted a
cooperative impulse to these cultures, despite the fact that animal spirits
had to be propitiated. Game, it was assumed, could then be lured to
“accept” the hunters’ spears and arrows, as Paleolithic cave paintings
suggest. Even the overkills of the late Pleistocene and early Paleolithic
may have arisen not from a sense of the “other” as an opponent or foe,
but from a na·ive ignorance of the ecological impact these overkills
would have on the great Pleistocene megafauna. In this respect, early
hunters merely combined the behavior of an ordinary animal predator
with that of an increasingly socialized, animistic human being....
I regard it as a form of ahistorical arrogance, so characteristic of
recent times, to look back at preliterate peoples’ behavior and cast it
in forms that suit modern standards of ecological morality, or respond
with pious disappointment to their cruelty or indifference to other living
beings. It is a form of modern ahistorical arrogance to expect that they
would not use their environments up to the hilt or change them as they
needed to. What we should properly ask, if we are not to sink into the
fatuities of romanticism and mysticism, is not whether humans should
intervene into nature — for nothing will stop them from trying to fulfill
their most basic “natural” potentialities — but how they should
intervene and toward what ends. These are really the profoundly ethical
questions that we must ask, and they can only be answered in a thinking
way — by unscrambling the virtues and vices of humanity’s social
development, by determining if evolution has any meaningful thrust
toward increased subjectivity and consciousness in the great
evolutionary parade of life-forms, and by bringing greater mind to bear
on the pivotal role of social development in all of these issues....
Natural evolution, given its marvelous creativity, its fecundity, its
growing subjectivity, and its capacity for innovation, deserves our
respect and love for its own attributes. We do not have to create
ideological artifacts like deities — female or male — or use magical arts
to appreciate first nature as a wondrous phenomenon — including such
wonders as the human mind and humanity’s capacity to act morally
and self-consciously. An appreciation and love of first nature should
properly stem from a clear-sighted and aesthetic naturalism, not from
a supernaturalism, with its projection of sovereign humanlike “beings”
into the biotic world and its canny use of terms like immanence and
“earth groundedness.” Indeed, whether we truly know and fully
appreciate first nature depends very much on having the intellectual
and emotional ability not to confuse ourselves as human beings with
coyotes, bears, or wolves, much less with insensate things like rocks,
or rivers, or even more absurdly, with the “cosmos.” ...
For early hunters themselves, their animistic sensibility was a mixed
blessing. Clearly, it featured a cooperative spirit in their relations to
animals as “others,” and it certainly alerted hunters to the attributes
of the animals they stalked. Nevertheless, however much preliterate
peoples’ animism includes a cooperative dimension, we know today
that insofar as it rests on a belief in spirits or a supernature, it clearly
rests on a false image of the natural world. Besides boxing them into
inflexible customs and traditions, animism involves an innocent belief
in magic that rendered aboriginal peoples very vulnerable to the
technology, particularly the weaponry, of Europeans who awed or, with
their bullets, bloodily disabused them of the spells with which their
shamans had “protected” them.
To believe that animism has any objective reality, as many mystical
ecologists suggest, is simply infantile, not unlike the behavior of a child
who angrily kicks a stool over when he or she falls. In view of what
we know today about first nature, animistic souls and magical methods
of reaching them have no more basis in objective reality than the visions
that many North American Indians traditionally induced in themselves
by fasting, self-torture, auto-suggestion, and similar techniques that
distort the human sensorium. In a preliterate community, inducing a
vision of a guardian spirit by warping one’s senses might enhance one’s
own sense of self-worth, courage, and bravado, thereby making one a
better hunter, but these visions tell us no more about the reality of first
nature than Castaneda’s tales about talking coyotes. Mythic knowledge
and the belief in magic, so important to animism, are a self-delusion —
one that is understandable as the beliefs of preliterate peoples, but
among modern people they are explicable only as evidence of the extent
to which they are removed from reality, indeed, the extent to which
they lack authentic “earth wisdom.”
[31] Murray Bookchin, “Twenty Years Later ... ,” introduction to the second
edition of The Ecology of Freedom (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991 ),
pp. xiv-xv.
[32] Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1982), p. 71.
[33] Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, 1987),
p. 104.
** Chapter 4: The Legacy of Domination
*** Introduction
According to Marx, “primitive egalitarianism” was destroyed by the
rise of social classes, in which those who own wealth and property
exploit the labor of those who do not. But from his observations
of contemporary history, Bookchin realized that class analysis in
itself does not explain the entirety of social oppression. The
elimination of class society could leave intact relations of subordination
and domination. Engels, in his essay “On Authority,”
wrote explicitly that he not only would preserve hierarchy in a
“classless” society but regarded it as indispensable in industrial
production.
In order to attain the broadest possible freedom in an ecological
society, Bookchin emphasized that it would be necessary to
eliminate not only social classes but social hierarchies as well. Thus,
where Marx had worked with categories of class and exploitation,
Bookchin developed broader categories of hierarchy and
domination — not to replace the Marxist categories, or to deny the
reality of class and exploitation, but to subsume them as particulars
within more generalized concepts. Hierarchy and domination, in
Bookchin’s view, historically provided the substrate of oppression
out of which class relations were formed.
In The Ecology of Freedom Bookchin shows how the rise of
hierarchy eroded the complementarity of relatively egalitarian
communities long before the appearance of property ownership.
Although social and material factors, including population growth
and physical force, were deeply involved in generating hierarchical
social relations, Bookchin emphasizes the role of changes in
consciousness as well. Incipient hierarchies gave rise to a hierarchical
sensibility that ranked people as superior or inferior by a given
standard and then used that ranking to justify the domination of
the latter by the former. Once thinking was reordered along these
lines, it would see hierarchy where in reality there was only
difference. Mere differences in ability, experience, and knowledge
would thereupon become acceptable rationales for domination.
Gradually hierarchical relations came to be elaborated along ever
more complex lines, giving rise to the patriarchal domination of
wives, sons, daughters, and dependants; the domination of whole
communities by shamanistic and priestly guilds; the domination of
one community by another; and later the domination of peoples
by elite rulers. Ultimately status distinctions phased into outright
class structures based on the exploitation of serfs, slaves, and the
industrial proletariat.
Once a hierarchical sensibility had been established in this way,
it could be projected out onto first nature, as people could begin
to think in terms of dominating the natural world. Indeed, the idea
of dominating first nature could not have existed unless human
beings already had gained it from their experience of social
domination.
Once the idea of dominating nature was formed, it became a
basic assumption of Western culture that the creation of wealth
depended upon it. Indeed, the supposed necessity of dominating
first nature became a rationale for the further domination of
human by human.
It remains one of the most widely accepted notions, from classical
times to the present, that human freedom from the “domination
of man by nature” entails the domination of human by human as
the earliest means of production and the use of human beings as
instruments for harnessing the natural world. Hence, in order to
harness the natural world, it has been argued for ages, it is
necessary to harness human beings as well, in the form of slaves,
serfs, and workers. That this instrumental notion pervades the
ideology of nearly all ruling elites and has provided both liberal
and conservative movements with a justification for their
accommodation to the status quo requires little if any elaboration.
The myth of a “stingy” nature has always been used to justify the
“stinginess” of exploiters in their harsh treatment of the
exploited.[34]
Ruling classes, in order to legitimate their rule, generally try to
expand the domain of what is accepted as biological or natural and
therefore inalterable, at the expense of what might otherwise be
thought of as social and therefore subject to human alteration.
Conversely, it is an emancipatory step to try to expand the realm
of what convention holds to be social at the expense of what it
defines as biological, precisely to open up possibilities for the
transformation of existing social relationships.
Bookchin’s contention that the domination of human by human
preceded the idea of dominating first nature falls into this second
category of ideas. Contrary to necessitarian myths, he argues that
human emancipation does not depend on the domination of first
nature; rather, a free society can as well be an ecological society.
Indeed, since the ecological crisis has its origins in social pathologies,
an ecological society can arise only after social hierarchy and
domination have been removed.
*** The Emergence of Hierarchy
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
Organic societies, even the most egalitarian, are not homogeneous social
groups. Each member of the community is defined by certain everyday
roles based on sex, age, and ancestral lineage. In early organic societies,
these roles do not seem to have been structured along hierarchical lines;
nor do they seem to have involved the domination of human by human.
Generally, they simply define the individual’s responsibilities to the
community: the raw materials, as it were, for a functional status in the
complex nexus of human relationships. Lineage determines who can
or cannot marry whom, and families related by marriage are often as
obligated to help each other as are kin directly related by blood ties.
Age confers the prestige of experience and wisdom. Finally, sexual
differences define the community’s basic division of labor.
Even before material surpluses began to increase significantly, the
roles each individual played began to change from egalitarian
relationships into elites based increasingly on systems of obedience and
command. To make this assertion raises a number of very provocative
questions. Who were these emerging elites? What was the basis of their
privileges in early society? How did they rework organic society’s forms
of community status — forms based on usufruct, a domestic economy,
reciprocity, and egalitarianism — into what were later to become class
and exploitative societies? These questions are not academic: they deal
with emotionally charged notions that lurk to this very day in the
unconscious apparatus of humanity, notably the influence of biological
facts, such as sex, age, and ancestry on social relationships. Unless these
notions are carefully examined and the truths separated from the
untruths, we are likely to carry an archaic legacy of domination into
whatever social future awaits us....
A careful survey of food-gathering and hunting communities reveals
that women enjoyed a higher degree of parity with men than we have
been commonly led to believe. Both sexes occupy a distinctly sovereign
role in their respective spheres, and their roles are much too
complementary economically to make the domination of women by
men the comfortable social norm that biased white observers served
up generations ago to allay the guilt-feelings of Victorian patriarchs.
In daily life, women withdraw into a sorority based on their domestic
and food-gathering activities and men into a fraternity of hunters. There
both sexes are completely autonomous. The sharply etched distinctions
between “home” and the “world” that exist in modern society do not
exist in organic communities. There home and world are so closely
wedded that a man, shut out from a family, is literally a nonsocial
being — a being who is nowhere. Although the male tends, even in many
egalitarian communities, to view himself as the “head” of the family,
his stance is largely temperamental and accords him no special or
domestic power. It is simply a form of boastfulness, for the hard facts
of life vitiate his pretenses daily. Woman’s food-gathering activities
usually provide most of the family’s food. She not only collects the food
but prepares it, makes the family’s clothing, and produces its containers,
such as baskets and coiled pottery. She is more in contact with the
young than the male and takes a more “commanding” role in their
development. If her husband is too overbearing, she can unceremoniously
put him out of the hut or simply return to her own family,
where she and her children are certain of being provided for, no matter
what her family thinks of her decision. As she ages, her experience
becomes a revered source of wisdom; she becomes a “matriarch” in
many cases, the head of the family in fact if not in form.
What women in preliterate communities distinctly do lack is the
male’s mobility. The human child’s protracted development and
dependency — a long period of mental plasticity that is vitally necessary
for elaborating a cultural continuum — restricts the mother’s capacity
to move about freely. The primal division of labor that assigned hunting
tasks to the male and domestic tasks to the female is based on a hard
biological reality: a woman, coupled to a noisy infant, can scarcely be
expected to practice the stealth and athleticism needed to hunt large
animals. By its very nature, the mother-child relationship limits her to
comparatively sedentary lifeways. Moreover, if woman is not weak in
terms of her capacity to do hard work, she is certainly the “weaker
sex” when pitted against armed, possibly hostile men from an alien
community. Women need their men not only as hunters but also as
guardians of the family and the group. Men become the community’s
guardians not by virtue of usurpation, but because they are better
equipped muscularly in a materially undeveloped culture to defend
their community against hostile marauders....
As bands began to increase in size and number, as they began to
differentiate into clans, tribes, and tribal federations and to make war
on one another, an ever larger social space emerged that was
increasingly occupied by men. Men tended to become the clan
headsmen or tribal chiefs and fill the councils of tribal federations. For
all of this was “men’s work,” like hunting and herding animals. They
had the mobility and physical prowess to defend their own
communities, attack hostile communities, and thereby administer an
extra biological, distinctly social sphere of life.
In communities where matrilineal descent carried considerable
cultural weight and woman’s horticultural activities formed the basis
of economic life, she assumed social roles very similar to those of the
man. Usually, she occupied these roles on the clan level, rarely on the
tribal one. Moreover, she almost invariably shared her social role with
males. In a matricentric society, these males were her brothers, not her
husband. What woman’s social eminence in matricentric communities
reveals, however, is that the male’s rising position in social affairs results
not from any conscious degradation of woman to a domestic
“unworldly” sphere. To the contrary, in the beginning at least, the male
did not have to “usurp” power from the female; indeed, social “power”
as such did not exist but had yet to be created. The social sphere and
the man’s position in it emerged naturally. The primordial balance that
assigned complementary economic functions to both sexes on the basis
of parity slowly tipped toward the male, favoring his social
preeminence....
The male, in a hunting community, is a specialist in violence. From
the earliest days of his childhood, he identifies with such “masculine”
traits as courage, strength, self-assertiveness, decisiveness, and athleticism
— traits necessary for the welfare of the community. The community,
in turn, will prize the male for these traits and foster them in him. If
he becomes a good hunter, he will be highly regarded by everyone; by
envious men and admiring women, by respectful children and emulative
youths. In a society preoccupied with the problem of survival and
obliged to share its resources, a good hunter is an asset to all.
Similarly, the female is a specialist in child-rearing and foodgathering.
Her responsibilities focus on nurture and sustenance. From
childhood she will be taught to identify with such “feminine” traits as
caring and tenderness, and she will be trained in comparatively
sedentary occupations. The community, in turn, will prize her for these
traits and foster them in her. If she cultivates these traits, she will be
highly regarded for her sense of responsibility to her family, her skill
and artfulness. In a matricentric society, these traits will be elevated
into social norms that could well be described as the temperament of
the community. We find this temperament today in many American
Indian and Asian villages that practice horticulture, even if the kinship
system is patrilineal. Similarly, in a patricentric society, “masculine”
traits will be elevated into the norms of a community temperament,
although they rarely coexist with matrilineal systems of kinship.
There is no intrinsic reason why a patricentric community, merely
because it has a “masculine” temperament, must be hierarchical or
reduce women to a subjugated position. The economic roles of the two
sexes are still complementary; without the support that each sex gives
to the other, the community will disintegrate. Moreover, both sexes still
enjoy complete autonomy in their respective spheres. In projecting our
own social attitudes into preliterate society, we often fail to realize how
far removed a primordial domestic community is from a modern
political society.... As long as the growing civil sphere is a pragmatic
extension of the male’s role in the division of labor, it is merely that
and no more. Even while the civil sphere is expanding, it is still rooted
in domestic life and, in this sense, enveloped by it; hence, the numinous
power that surrounds woman in the most patricentric of primordial
societies.
Only when social life itself undergoes hierarchical differentiation and
emerges as a separate terrain to be organized on its own terms do we
find a conflict between the domestic and civil spheres — one that extends
hierarchy into domestic life and results not only in the subjugation of
woman, but in her degradation. Then the distinctively “feminine” traits,
which primordial society prizes as a high survival asset, sink to the level
of social subordination. The woman’s nurturing capacities are degraded
into renunciation; her tenderness to obedience. Man’s “masculine”
traits are also transformed. His courage turns into aggressiveness; his
strength is used to dominate; his self-assertiveness is transformed into
egotism; his decisiveness into repressive reason. His athleticism is
directed increasingly to the arts of war and plunder.
Until these transformations occur, however, it is important to know
the raw materials from which hierarchical society will raise its moral
and social edifice. The violation of organic society is latent within
organic society itself. The primal unity of the early community, both
internally and with nature, is weakened merely by the elaboration of
the community’s social life — its ecological differentiation. Yet the
growing civil space occupied by the male is still enveloped in a natural
matrix of blood ties, family affinities, and work responsibilities based
on a sexual division of labor. Not until distinctly social interests emerge
that clash directly with its natural matrix and turn the weaknesses,
perhaps the growing tensions, of organic society into outright fractures,
will the unity between human and human, and between humanity and
nature, finally be broken. Then power will emerge, not simply as a
social fact, with all its differentiations, but as a concept — and so will
the concept of freedom.
To find what is perhaps the one primary group that, more than any
other in preliterate communities, transects kinship lines and the division
of labor — that in its own right forms the point of departure for a
separate social interest as distinguished from the complementary
relations that unite the community into a whole — we must turn to the
age group, particularly to the community’s elders. To be born, to be
young, to mature, and finally to grow old and idle is natural fact — as
much as it is to be a woman or a man, or to belong to a blood-lineage
group. But the older one becomes, the more one acquires distinct
interests that are not “natural.” These interests are uniquely social. The
later years of life are a period of diminishing physical powers; the
declining years, a period of outright dependency. The aging and the
aged develop interests that are tied neither to their sexual roles nor to
their lineage. They depend for their survival ultimately on the fact that
the community is social in the fullest sense of the term; that it will
provide for them not because they participate in the process of
production and reproduction, but because of the institutional roles they
can create for themselves in the social realm.
The sexes complement each other economically; the old and the
young do not. In preliterate communities, the old are vital repositories
of knowledge and wisdom, but this very function merely underscores
the fact that their capacities belong largely to the cultural and social
sphere. Hence, even more than the boasting self-assertive male who
may be slowly gaining a sense of social power, the aging and the aged
tend to be socially conscious as such — as a matter of survival. They
share a common interest independent of their sex and lineage. They
have the most to gain from the institutionalization of society and the
emergence of hierarchy, for it is within this realm and as a result of this
process that they can retain powers that are denied to them by physical
weakness and infirmity. Their need for social power, and for
hierarchical social power at that, is a function of their loss of biological
power. The social sphere is the only realm in which this power can be
created and concomitantly the only sphere that can cushion their
vulnerability to natural forces. Thus, they are the architects par excellence of social life, of social power, and of its institutionalization
along hierarchical lines.
The old can also perform many functions that relieve young adults
of certain responsibilities. Old women can care for the children and
undertake sedentary productive tasks that would otherwise be
performed by their daughters. Similarly, old men can make weapons
and teach their sons and grandsons to use them more effectively. But
these tasks, while they lighten the burdens of the young, do not make
the old indispensable to the community. And in a world that is often
harsh and insecure, a world ruled by natural necessity, the old are the
most dispensable members of the community. Under conditions where
food may be in short supply and the life of the community occasionally
endangered, they are the first to be disposed of. The anthropological
literature is replete with examples in which the old are killed and
expelled during periods of hunger, a practice that changes from the
episodic into the customary in the case of communities that normally
leave their aged members behind to perish whenever the group breaks
camp and moves to a different locale.
Thus, the lives of the old are always clouded by a sense of insecurity.
This sense is incremental to the insecurity that people of all ages may
feel in materially undeveloped communities. The ambiguity that
permeates the outlook of the primordial world toward nature — a
shifting outlook that mixes reverence or ecological adaptation with
fear — is accented among the aged with a measure of hatred, for
insofar as fear is concerned, they have more to fear from nature’s
vicissitudes than do the young. The nascent ambiguities of the aged
toward nature later give rise to western “civilization’s” mode of
repressive reason. This exploitative rationality pits civil society against
domestic society and launches social elites on a quest for domination
that, in a later historical context, transforms insecurity into egotism,
acquisitiveness, and a craze for rule — in short, the social principle
graduated by its own inner dialectic into the asocial principle. Here,
too, are the seeds for the hatred of eros and the body, a hatred, in
turn, that forms the archetypal matrix for willful aggression and the
Thanatic death wish.
Initially, the medium by which the old create a modicum of power
for themselves is through their control of the socialization process.
Fathers teach their sons the arts of getting food; mothers, their
daughters. The adults, in turn, consult their parents on virtually every
detail of life, from the workaday pragmatic to the ritual. In a preliterate
community, the most comprehensive compendium of knowledge is
inscribed on the brains of the elders. However much this knowledge is
proffered with concern and love, it is not always completely
disinterested; it is often permeated, even if unconsciously, by a certain
amount of cunning and self-interest. Not only is the young mind shaped
by the adults, as must necessarily be the case in all societies, but it is
shaped to respect the wisdom of the adults, if not their authority. The
harsh initiation ceremonies that many preliterate communities inflict
on adolescent boys may well have the purpose of using pain to “brand”
the elders’ wisdom on young minds, as a number of anthropologists
contend; but I would also suggest that it “brands” a sense of their
authority as well. The aged, who abhor natural necessity, become the
embodiment of social necessity: the dumb “cruelty” that the natural
world inflicts on them is transmitted by social catalysis into the
conscious cruelty they inflict on the young. Nature begins to take her
revenge on the earliest attempts of primordial society to control her.
But this is nature internalized, the nature in humanity itself. The attempt
to dominate external nature will come later, when humanity is
conceptually equipped to transfer its social antagonisms to the natural
world outside....
In fairness to primordial society, we must note that hierarchy founded
merely on age is not institutionalized hierarchy. Rather, it is hierarchy
in its most nascent form: hierarchy embedded in the matrix of equality.
For age is the fate of everyone who does not die prematurely. To the
extent that privileges accrue to the elders, everyone in the community
is heir to them. Inasmuch as these privileges vary with the fortunes of
the community, they are still too tenuous to be regarded as more than
compensations for the infirmities that elders must suffer with the aging
process. The primordial balance that accords parity to all members of
the community, women as well as men, is thereby perpetuated in the
privileges accorded to the old. In this sense they cannot be regarded
simply as privileges.
What is problematical in the future development of hierarchy is how
the elders tried to institutionalize their privileges and what they finally
achieved. Radin, in a perceptive if overly ruthless discussion of agelinked
hierarchy, notes that the elders in food-gathering communities
“almost always functioned as medicine-men of some kind or another”
and, with the development of clan-agricultural societies, acquired their
“main strength” from the “rituals and ritualistic societies which they
largely controlled.” Social power begins to crystallize as the fetishization
of magical power over certain forces of nature. In trying to deal with
this dialectical twist, we must refocus our perspective to include a
unique mode of social sensibility and experience, one that is strikingly
modern: the sensibility and experience of the elder cum shaman.
The shaman is a strategic figure in any discussion of social hierarchy
because he (and at times she, although males predominate in time)
solidifies the privileges of the elders — a general stratum in the
primordial community — into the particularized privileges of a special
segment of that stratum. He professionalizes power. He makes power
the privilege of an elect few, a group that only carefully chosen
apprentices can hope to enter, not the community as a whole. His vatic
personality essentially expresses the insecurity of the individual on the
scale of a social neurosis. If the male hunter is a specialist in violence,
and the woman food-gatherer a specialist in nurture, the shaman is a
specialist in fear. As magician and divinator combined in one, he
mediates between the suprahuman power of the environment and the
fears of the community. Weston La Barre observes that in contrast to
the priest, who “implores the Omnipotent,” the shaman is “psychologically
and socially the more primitive of the two.... External powers
invade and leave his body with practiced ease, so feeble are his ego
boundaries and so false his fantasies.” Perhaps more significant than
this distinction is the fact that the shaman is the incipient State
personified. As distinguished from other members of the primordial
community, who participate coequally in the affairs of social life, the
shaman and his associates are professionals in political manipulation.
They tend to subvert the innocence and amateurism that distinguishes
domestic society from political society. Shamans “banded informally
[together] even in the simplest food-gathering civilizations,” notes
Radin. “As soon as the clan political patterns emerged we find them
formally united together, either in one group or separately.” Bluntly
stated, the shamanistic groups to which Radin alludes were incipient
political institutions....
But the shaman’s position in primordial society is notoriously
insecure. Often highly remunerated for his magical services, he might
be vindictively attacked, perhaps assassinated outright, if his techniques
fail. Thus, he must always seek alliances and, more significantly, foster
the creation of mutually advantageous power centers for his protection
from the community at large. As a quasi-religious formulator, a
primitive cosmologist, he literally creates the ideological mythos that
crystallizes incipient power into actual power. He may do this in concert
with the elders, enhancing their authority over the young, or with the
younger but more prominent warriors, who tend to form military
societies of their own. From them, in turn, he receives the support he
so direly needs to cushion the ill effects that follow from his fallibility.
That he may compete with these powers and attempt to usurp their
authority is irrelevant at this period of development. The point is that
the shaman is the demiurge of political institutions and coalitions. He
not only validates the authority of the elders with a magico-political
aura, but in his need for political power, he tends to heighten the
“masculine” temperament of a patricentric community. He exaggerates
the aggressive and violent elements of that temperament, feeding it with
mystical sustenance and supernatural power.
Domination, hierarchy, and the subordination of woman to man now
begin to emerge. But it is difficult to delineate in this development the
emergence of organized economic classes and the systematic exploitation
of a dominated social stratum. The young, to be sure, are placed
under the rule of a clan or tribal gerontocracy; the elders, shamans,
and warrior chiefs, in turn, acquire distinct social privileges. But so
ingrained in society are the primordial rules of usufruct, complementarity,
and the irreducible minimum that the economy of this early world
proves to be surprisingly impervious to these sociopolitical changers.
“The majority of aboriginal tribes,” observes Radin, “possessed no
grouping of individuals based on true class distinctions.” He adds that
“slaves not a few of them had, but, while their lives were insecure
because they had no status, they were never systematically forced to
do menial work or regarded as an inferior and degraded class in our
sense of the term.” Men of wealth there were, too, in time, but as
Manning Nash observes, “in primitive and peasant economies leveling
mechanisms play a crucial role in inhibiting aggrandizement by
individuals or by special groups.” These leveling mechanisms assume
a variety of forms:
forced loans to relatives or co-residents; a large feast following economic
success; a rivalry of expenditures like the potlatch of the Northwest
Coast Indians in which large amounts of valuable goods were destroyed;
the ritual levies consequent on holding office in civil and religious
hierarchies in Meso-America; or the giveaways of horses and goods of
the Plains Indians. Most small-scale economies have a way of scrambling
wealth to inhibit reinvestment in technical advance, and this prevents
crystallization of class lines on an economic base.
In fact, independent wealth, the most precious of personal goals in
bourgeois society, tends to be highly suspect in preliterate societies.
Often it is taken as evidence that the wealthy individual is a sorcerer
who has acquired his riches by a sinister compact with demonic powers.
Wealth so acquired is “treasure,” bewitched power concretized, the
stuff from which mythology weaves its Faustian legends. The very
“independence” of this wealth — its freedom from direct social controlimplies
a breach with the most basic of all primordial rules: the mutual
obligations imposed by blood ties. The prevalence of the lineage system,
as distinguished from “civilization’s” territorial system, implies that,
even if hierarchy and differentials in status exist, the community consists
of kin; its wealth, as Patrick Malloy observes, must be “used to reinforce
or expand social relations,” not weaken or constrict them. Wealth
can be acquired only within the parameters of the lineage system, and
it effectively filters down to the community through the workings of
the “leveling system.” As Malloy astutely observes: the “richest man”
in the community will frequently “be the worst off because he has given
all of his material wealth away.” He has definite obligations “to provide
gifts when requested, take care of bride-wealth, and other important
functions critical to the survival of the community.”
Thus, nature still binds society to herself with the primal blood oath.
This oath validates not only kinship as the basic fact of primordial
social life but its complex network of rights and duties. Before hierarchy
and domination can be consolidated into social classes and economic
exploitation; before reciprocity can give way to the “free exchange” of
commodities; before usufruct can be replaced by private property, and
the “irreducible minimum” by toil as the norm for distributing the
means of life — before this immensely vast complex can be dissolved
and replaced by a class, exchange, and propertied one, the blood oath
with all its claims must be broken.
Hierarchy and domination remain captive to the blood oath until
an entirely new social terrain can be established to support class
relations and the systematic exploitation of human by human. We
must fix this preclass, indeed, preeconomic, period in social
development clearly in our minds because the vast ideological corpus
of “modernity” — capitalism, particularly in its Western form — has
been designed in large part to veil it from our vision. Even such
notions as primitive communism, matriarchy, and social equality, so
widely celebrated by radical anthropologists and theorists, play a
mystifying role in perpetuating this veil instead of removing it. Lurking
within the notion of primitive communism is the insidious concept of
a “stingy nature,” of a “natural scarcity” that dictates communal
relations — as though a communal sharing of things were exogenous
to humanity and must be imposed by survival needs to overcome the
“innate” human egoism that “modernity” so often identifies with
selfhood. Primitive communism also contains the concept of property,
however communal in character, that identifies selfhood with
ownership. Usufruct, as the transgression of proprietary claims in any
form, is concealed by property as a public institution. Indeed,
communal property is not so far removed conceptually and
institutionally from “public property,” “nationalized property,” or
“collectivized property” that the incubus of proprietorship can be
said to be removed completely from the sensibility and practices of a
communist society. Finally, “matriarchy,” the rule of society by women
instead of men, merely alters the nature of rule; it does not lead to its
abolition. “Matriarchy” merely changes the gender of domination
and thereby perpetuates domination as such.
“Natural scarcity,” property, and rule thus persist in the very name
of the critique of dass society, exploitation, private property, and the
acquisition of wealth. By veiling the primordial blood oath that
constrains the development of hierarchy and domination into class
society, economic exploitation, and property, the class critique merely
replaces the constraints of kinship with the constraints of economics
instead of transcending both to a higher realm of freedom. It
reconstitutes bourgeois right by leaving property unchallenged by
usufruct, rule unchallenged by nonhierarchical relationships, and
scarcity unchallenged by an abundance from which an ethical selectivity
of needs can be derived. The more critical substrate of usufruct,
reciprocity, and the irreducible minimum is papered over by a less fundamental critique: the critique of private property, of injustice in
the distribution of the means of life, and of an unfair return for labor.
Marx’s own critique of justice in his remarks on the Gotha Program
remains one of the most important contributions he made to radical
social theory, but its economistic limitations are evident in the tenor of
the work as a whole.
*** The Rise of the State
(from From Urbanization to Cities, 1987)
Contrary to rationalistic and contractual image of the state, state
institutions emerged slowly, uncertainly, and precariously out of a social
milieu that was distinctly nonstatist in character. In fact, the social and
organic sources of the state had to be meticulously reworked before
they could give rise to state institutions. The ancient temple corporation,
actually a religious legitimation of tribal collectivity and public control
of land, seems to have been the most likely source of the Near Eastern
state. This was a time when priests commonly became kings or, at least,
when the kingship often took on a priestly character. In either case the
temple and palace monumentalized as well as deified the tribal
community.
Despite the increasing secularization of the state, notably in Greece
and Rome, the state never completely lost its religious trappings and
its function as the custodian of the collectivistic community. This
attribute, whether as an ensemble of feudal nobles or a monarchy and
ultimately as an absolutist empire, remained with it well into recent
times. The traditional “head of state,” be he a lord or a king, always
remained the “father of his people,” whether by divine right or as a
divinity in his own right. Hence, prior to the rise of republican systems
of governance, the state always appeared not as a constituted
phenomenon but as a reworking of a very traditional, organic,
patriarchal, indeed tribalistic body of relationships in which power was
not simply conferred by the community, as in the case of elected
kingships, but inherited along lineage and blood lines in a manner
redolent of the ancient tribalist blood tie. The present always entails a
reworking of the past, a transmutation rather than a dissolution of
traditional forms to meet new needs and imperatives.
It is notable that the rise of the centralized nation-state in Europe
also followed this archaic and highly organic process of transmutation
of old into new. Indeed, until “the age of the democratic revolutions,”
to use the title of R. R. Palmer’s distinguished book, it was not through
the constitution of new states but the recovery of ancient rights that
king and community were thrown into civil war with each other, a
conflict that often took the shape of monarchy against municipality.
Both parties sought not to innovate new forms of governance but to
restore old ones from the past. Characteristically, the earliest form of
the European nation-state appears not as the emergence of a national
economy, significant as this development proved to be, but as the
increasing sovereignty of the kingly household itself — the monarchical
oikos — and the image of the “nation” as a kingly patrimony....
What makes the English state interesting is the challenge it raises to
simplistic theories of state formation and rule. I refer to its organic
roots and its evolution out of household offices. The English state was
born not out of an administrative body of autonomous departments
but rather out of the personal responsibilities of the king’s servants —
his immediate household coterie — often in opposition to the doubtful
loyalties of the king’s own feudal barons. Perhaps the foremost of these
royal servants was the king’s personal secretary, his chancellor, who
carried the royal seal and coordinated the emerging departments that
comprised the administrative portion of the royal court. In time the
chancellor became the pole around which an increasing number of
clerks, experts, and specialists in various governmental areas, and
overseers of what was to become a fairly complex executive authority,
collected to form the all-important English chancery. Almost every
aspect of monarchical rule fell within its purview, principally the king’s
exchequer, who saw to the collection of taxes and Henry Il’s
professional judiciary.
In fact, the English state was formed largely from the king’s bedroom,
dining table, men-in-waiting, and household clergy, not from
constituted principles of government that spoke in the interests of a
specific “ruling class.” Class theories of the “origins of the state” to
the contrary notwithstanding, the English state of the Middle Ages
began as the elaboration of a patrimony rather than as the institutionalization
of one class’s authority over that of another. The English
barons, who were to view the formation of this state with suspicion
and later with overt hostility, found it difficult to claim it as their own.
A continual tension existed — occasionally expressing itself in a violent
form — between the baronial infrastructure of English medieval society
and the monarchy, which formed the originating impulse of the
authentic, fairly complete state. In its patrimonial form, th::: English
state is no exception to the “origins of the state” generally; this mode
of state formation is very similar to the way in which the “barbarian”
chiefdoms of an earlier tribal society gradually extended their power
from networks furnished by their personal retainers and clans. The
journey from valet to prime minister, amusing as the juxtaposition may
seem, is closer to the truth of state formation than the more sociological
idea that the state emerged as an agency of class interest — whatever it
was to become later in history.
I have dwelt in some detail on the origins of the English state — in
time to be regarded as the prototype of the nation-state par excellencenot
because of its uniqueness but rather because of its continuity with
the ancient past. The organic growth of the English monarchy parallels
to a remarkable degree the rise of the oikos forms of statehood.
Historically, these forms go back to early Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, and
even Rome before the empire became heavily bureaucratized....
By the end of the twelfth century, France had already begun to catch
up with England by creating officiers du roi (officials of the king) who
shared power with the French barons in the traditional royal council.
By degrees, the French began to outpace their English rivals. FunCtionaries,
emerging from the royal household, acquired expanding administrative
roles so that the kingly servants were soon to be royal
bureaucrats rather than household administrators.... In time, the
immense French bureaucracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
in theory answerable only to the monarchy, acquired a life — indeed,
an outlook — of its own. The emergence of a bureaucratic sensibility,
permeating all levels of French society, can hardly be emphasized too
strongly. A new, almost ubiquitous “nobility of the robe,” ennobled
more as functionaries of the monarchy than by virtue of birth, began
to overshadow the hereditary “nobility of the sword.” In contrast to
so much of feudal Europe, the sons of the French middle classes began
to regard the royal bureaucracy rather than the clerical hierarchy as
the avenue toward upward mobility and power, a shift in perspective
that linked the French “bourgeoisie,” whatever that word meant some
two centuries ago, to the monarchy more tightly than historians of
“class conflict” would have us believe. The French Revolution,
conceived as the “classic bourgeois revolution” of emerging capitalism,
was to test this “class analysis” in the fiery crucible of insurrection,
with more dismal results than later, nineteenth-century historians
suspected....
What is most intriguing is that neither absolutism nor the rise of a
nation-state provides us with an adequate explanation for the rise of
a “national economy,” as Hannah Arendt suggests.... Although
European nation-states from the sixteenth century onward created the
arena for a national economy, they did not necessarily create the forces
that shaped it. Absolutism, which sculpted a sense of nationhood out
of feudal parochialism, played a very crucial role: it not only supplanted
localism with nationalism; it also stifled a highly decentralistic,
localistic, and spontaneous society, marked by a rich diversity of
cultural, economic and communal attributes, replacing it with
increasingly homogenized lifeways, bureaucratized institutions, and
centralized state forms. In some cases, this absolutist alternative favored
the later expansion of a market economy; in others, it led to state
parasitism and outright regression. In all cases, however, it turned
localist politics into nationalist statecraft, divesting citizenship of its
classical attributes and turning vital, empowered, and strongly etched
men and women into passive, disempowered, and obedient “subjects.”
This shift from a living people to deadened subjects did not occur
without furious resistance. A belief in autonomy, regional and local
identity, and citizen empowerment ran very high between the late
Middle Ages and fairly recent times. The battle to retain these distinctly
political qualities and rights was to be fought not in national political
parties or by professional statesmen; rather, it was conducted on the
level of village, town, neighborhood, and city life, where the ideals of
confederation were to be opposed to demands for a nation-state and
the values of decentralization were to be opposed to those of
centralization. What lay in the balance was not only the future of the
town and countryside but the development of political institutions as
opposed to state institutions — and an active citizenry as opposed to a
passive “constituency.”
*** The Rise of Capitalism
(from From Urbanization to Cities, 1987)
The market society that we call capitalism — a society that tends to
reduce all citizens to mere buyers and sellers and debases all the
ecologically varied social relationships produced by history to the
exchange of objects called commodities — did not “evolve” out of the
feudal era. It literally exploded into being in Europe, particularly
England, during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries,
although it had existed in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and with
growing significance in the mixed economy of the West from the
fourteenth century up to the seventeenth. It is still spreading around
the world — intensively in its traditional Euro-American center and
extensively in the non-European world. Its forms have varied from the
largely mercantile (its earliest kind) through the industrial (its more
recent eighteenth — and nineteenth-century forms) to the statist,
corporate, and multinational forms of our own time. It has slowly
penetrated from its special spheres, such as market arenas of exchange
and the production of commodities in cottages and later in factories,
into domestic life itself, such as the family and neighborhood. This is
a fairly recent “advance” that can be dated most strikingly from the
midpoint of the twentieth century. Its invasion of neighborhoods, indeed
of villages and small towns into the recesses of domestic or familial
relationships, has subverted the social bond itself and threatens to
totally undermine any sense of community and ecological balance and
diversity in social life.
Moreover, the newly gained dominance of the capitalist market
relationship over all other forms of production and consociation is a
major source of what I have denoted “urbanization” — the explosion
of the city itself into vast urban agglomerations that threaten the very
integrity of city life and citizenship. What makes the market society we
call capitalism unique, even by contrast to its early mercantile form, is
that it is an ever-expansive, accumulative, and in this respect cancerous
economic system whose “law of life” is to “grow or die.” Capitalism
in its characteristically modern and “dominant” form threatens not
only to undermine every “natural economy” (to use Marx’s own term),
be it small-scale agriculture, artisanship, or simple exchange
relationships; it threatens to undermine every dimension of “organic
society,” be it the kinship tie, communitarian forms of association,
systems of self-governance, and localist allegiances — the sense of home
and place. Owing to its metastatic invasion of every aspect of life by
means of monetization and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls
“commodification,” it threatens the integrity of the natural world —
soil, flora, fauna, and the complex economies that have made presentday
life-forms and relationships possible by turning everything
“natural” into an inorganic, essentially synthetic form.[35] Soil is being
turned into sand, variegated landscapes into level and simplified ones,
complex relationships into more primal forms such that the
evolutionary clock is being turned back to a biotically earlier time when
life was less varied in form and its range more limited in scope.
The effect of capitalism on the city has been nothing less than
catastrophic. The commonly used term “urban cancer” can be taken
literally to designate the extent to which the traditional urbs of the
ancient world has been dissolved into a primal, ever-spreading, and
destructive form that threatens to devour city and countryside alike.
Growth in the special form that singles out modern capitalism from all
earlier forms of economic life, including earlier forms of capitalism
itself, has affected what we persist in calling the “city” by leading to
the expansion of pavements, streets, houses, and industrial, commercial,
and retail structures over the entire landscape, just as a cancer spreads
over the body and invades its deepest recesses.
Cities, in turn, have begun to lose their form as distinctive cultural
and physical entities, as humanly scaled and manageable political
entities. Their functions have changed from ethical arenas with a
uniquely humane, civilized form of consociation, free of all blood ties
and family loyalties, into immense, overbearing, and anonymous
marketplaces. They are becoming centers primarily of mass production
and mass consumption, including culture as well as physically tangible
objects. Indeed, culture has become objectivized into commodities, as
have human relationships, which are increasingly being simplified and
mediated by objects. The simplification of social life and the biosphere
by a growth-oriented economy in which production and consumption
become ends in themselves is yielding the simplification of the human
psyche itself. The strong sense of individuation that marked the people
of the mixed society preceding capitalism is giving way to a receptive
consumer and taxpayer, a passive observer of life rather than an active
participant in it, lacking economic roots that support self-assertiveness
and community roots that foster participation in social life. Citizenship
itself, conceived as a function of character formation, and politics, as
part of paideia or the education of a social being, tend to wane into
personal indifference to social problems. The decline of the citizen,
more properly his or her dissolution into a being lost in a mass societythe
human counterpart of the mass-produced object — is furthered by
a burgeoning of structural gigantism that replaces the human scale and
by a growing bureaucracy that replaces all the organic sinews that held
precapitalist society together. The counselor is the humanistic
counterpart of the indifferent bureaucrat and the counseling chamber
is the structural counterpart of the governmental office.
Let it be said that this debasement of the ecological complexity of
the city, of its politics, citizens, even of the individuals who people its
streets and structures, is of very recent origin. It did not really begin in
a manorial society, with its barons and serfs, food cultivators, and
artisans, and all the “orders” we denote as feudal. Nor did it follow
from those grossly misnamed revolutions, the “bourgeois–democratic”
ones of England, America, and France, that ostensibly catapulted capital
into political control of a society it presumably “controlled”
economically during earlier generations. Rather, this development began
to appear with technical innovations that made possible both the mass
manufacture of cheap commodities and, what is crucially important,
their increasingly rapid transportation into the deepest recesses of
western Europe, inexpensive and highly competitive with the products
of local artisans who had serviced their localities for centuries. It need
hardly be emphasized that this development depended enormously for
its success on the opening of colonial markets abroad: the Americas,
Africa, and particularly Asia, the area where the English crown found
its richest jewel, notably India.
It was the extraordinary combination of technical advances with the
existence of a highly variegated society, relatively free of the cultural
constraints on trade that prevailed in antiquity, that gave economic
ascendancy to the capitalistic component of the mixed economy over
all its other components. Neither wealth from the Americas nor the
large monetary resources accumulated by port cities from long-distance
trade fully explains the rise of industrial capitalism — a form of
capitalism that more than any other penetrated into the very inner life
of Europe. Had the wealth acquired from the New World been a
decisive factor in creating industrial capitalism, Spain rather than
England should have become its center, for it was Spanish conquistadores
who initially plundered the Aztec and Inca empires and brought
their precious metals to Europe. The very wealth these “empires”
provided for the ascendant nation-state in Spain served to weaken town
life in the Iberian peninsula and provide the means for absolute
monarchs to embark on an archaic program of continental empire
building that eventually ruined Spanish cities and the countryside alike.
Nor did long-distance trade provide the most important sources for
capitalizing industrial development. Rather it fostered consumption
more than production, the dissolute lifeway that makes for a diet of
luxuries instead of the parsimonious habits that steer investment into
new means of production. Indeed, too much state centralization and
too much commerce, despite the wealth they initially generated,
ultimately led to excessive expenditures for territorial expansion and
high living by elite groups in all the orders of a courtly society. That
nation-building, increased centralization, or more properly, national
consolidation prepared the way for industrial capitalism by opening
more “hinterlands” to trade is patently clear. So, too, did the increases
in the population of dispossessed, propertyless hands, whether as a
result of land enclosures or normal demographic growth, hands that
were available for a factory system that had yet to appear on the
economic horizon. Europe, in effect, was more open than any part of
the world to the expansion of its capitalist component along industrial
lines. This was especially true of England.... What pushed the
capitalist component of this mixed economy into a nation that could
regard itself as the “workshop of the world” in the nineteenth century
was a series of inventions that made the factory system and the
distribution of its wares possible.
Nor need we be concerned with whether the needs of a “rising
bourgeoisie” produced the Industrial Revolution or the Industrial
Revolution gave rise to the “bourgeoisie,” which in any case was always
a presence in all the major cities of Europe. Factories, in fact, had begun
to appear in eighteenth — and even seventeenth-century England long
before an industrial technology had emerged. Whether the “bourgeoisie”
entered into the productive sphere rather than the commercial, it tried
to bring labor together and rationalize output even with tools; hence a
strictly technological interpretation of the rise of industrial capitalism
would be greatly misleading. My concern here is how industrial
capitalism managed to gain ascendancy over other forms of production,
including commercial capitalism, and alter all social relations that
encountered its power. Waterwheels had preceded the steam engine as
a prime mover, and worksheds organized around simple tools had
preceded mechanized factories. But without the inventions that
introduced the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, it is doubtful that industrial capitalism could have
impacted so powerfully on Europe and ultimately on the entire world....
Within a span of some two generations, England was transformed
on a scale unprecedented in the history of western Europe. Friedrich
Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, a period piece
based on personal observations in 1844, could justly call the changes
introduced by the new industrial inventions — principally in textiles,
metallurgy, and transportation — a historic change of unprecedented
proportion. The rapidity of the transformation is what makes these
changes so startling in a domain of human endeavor — technology — which
had developed over centuries at a slow, piecemeal pace. The
social and cultural ramifications of this technological revolution were
nothing less than monumental.
*** The Market Society
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
By the middle of the present century, large-scale market operations had
colonized every aspect of social and personal life. The buyer-seller
relationship — a relationship that lies at the very core of the marketbecame
the all-pervasive substitute for human relationships at the most
molecular level of social, indeed personal life. To “buy cheaply” and
“sell dearly” places the parties involved in the exchange process in an
inherently antagonistic posture: they are potential rivals for each other’s
goods. The commodity — as distinguished from the gift, which is meant
to create alliances, foster association, and consolidate sociality — leads
to rivalry, dissociation, and asociality.
Although philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel articulated their
concern for the dissociative role of a commerce and industry organized
for exchange, society itself had long buffered exchange with a social
etiquette — one that still lingers on in the vestigial face-to-face archaic
marketplace of the bazaar. Here one does not voice a demand for goods,
compare prices, and engage in the market’s universal duel called
bargaining. Rather, etiquette requires that the exchange process begin
gracefully and retain its communal dimension. It opens with the serving
of beverages, an exchange of news and gossip, some personal chit-chat,
and, in time, expressions of admiration for the wares at hand. One
leads to the exchange process tangentially. The bargain, if struck, is a
bond, a compact sealed by time-honored ethical imperatives.
The apparently noncommercial ambience of this exchange process
should not be viewed as mere canniness or hypocrisy. It reflects the
limits that precapitalist society imposed on exchange to avoid the latent
impersonality of trade, as well as its potential meanness of spirit, its
insatiable appetite for gain, its capacity to subvert all social limits to
private material interest, to dissolve all traditional standards of community
and consociation, to subordinate the needs of the body politic
to egoistic concerns.
But it was not only for these reasons that trade was viewed warily.
Precapitalist society may well have seen in the exchange of commodities
a return of the inorganic, of the substitution of things for living human
relationships. These objects could certainly be viewed symbolically as
tokens of consociation, alliance, and mutuality — which is precisely
what the gift was meant to represent. But divested of this symbolic
meaning, these mere things or commodities could acquire socially
corrosive traits. Left unchecked and unbuffered, they might well vitiate
all forms of human consociation and ultimately dissolve society itself.
The transition from gift to commodity, in effect, could yield the
disintegration of the community into a marketplace, the consanguineous
or ethical union between people into rivalry and aggressive
egotism.
That the triumph of the commodity over the gift was possible only
after vast changes in human social relationships has been superbly
explored in the closing portion of Capital. I need not summarize Marx’s
devastating narration and analysis of capitalist accumulation, its
“general law,” and particularly the sweeping dislocation of the English
peasantry from the fifteenth century onward. The gift itself virtually
disappeared as the objectification of association. It lingered on merely
as a by-product of ceremonial functions. The traditional etiquette that
buffered the exchange process was replaced by a completely impersonal,
predatory — and today, an increasingly electronic — process. Price came
first, quality came later; and the very things that were once symbols
rather than mere objects for use and exchange became fetishized,
together with the “needs” they were meant to satisfy. Suprahuman
forces now seemed to take command over the ego itself. Even selfinterest,
which Greek social theory viewed as the most serious threat
to the unity of the polis, seemed to be governed by a market system
that divested the subject of its very capacity to move freely through the
exchange process as an autonomous buyer and seller.
Ironically, modern industry, having derived from archaic systems of
commerce and retailing, has returned to its commercial origins with a
vengeful self-hatred marked by a demeaning rationalization of trade
itself. The shopping mall with its extravagant areas delivered over to
parked motor vehicles, its sparseness of sales personnel, its cooing
“muzak,” its dazzling array of shelved goods, its elaborate surveillance
system, its lack of all warmth and human intercourse, its cruelly
deceptive packaging, and its long checkout counters that indifferently
and impersonally record the exchange process — all speak to a
denaturing of consociation at levels of life that deeply affront every
human sensibility and the sacredness of the very goods that are meant
to support life itself.
What is crucially important here is that this world penetrates personal
as well as economic life. The shopping mall is the agora of modern
society, the civic center of a totally economic and inorganic world. It
works its way into every personal haven from capitalist relations and
imposes its centricity on every aspect of domestic life. The highways
that lead to its parking lots and its production centers devour
communities and neighborhoods; its massive command of retail trade
devours the family-owned store; the subdivisions that cluster around
it devour farmland; the motor vehicles that carry worshippers to its
temples are self-enclosed capsules that preclude all human contact. Not
only does the inorganic return to industry and the marketplace; it
calcifies and dehumanizes the most intimate relationships between
people in the presumably invulnerable world of the bedroom and
nursery. The massive dissolution of personal and social ties that comes
with the return of the inorganic transforms the extended family into
the nuclear family and finally delivers the individual over to the
purveyors of singles’ bars.
With the hollowing out of community by the market system, with
its loss of structure, articulation, and form, comes the concomitant
hollowing out of personality itself. Just as the spiritual and institutional
ties that linked human beings together into vibrant social relations are
eroded by the mass market, so the sinews that make for subjectivity,
character, and self-definition are divested of form and meaning. The
isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated
as the highest achievement of “modernity” turns out to be the mere
husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as
an ego was responsible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded
and complete community.
As the inorganic replaces the organic in nature, so the inorganic
replaces the organic in society and personality. The simplification of
the natural world has its uncanny parallel in the simplification of
society and subjectivity. The homogenization of ecosystems goes hand
in hand with the homogenization of the social environment and the
so-called individuals who people it. The intimate association of the
domination of human by human with the notion of the domination
of nature terminates not only in the notion of domination as such; its
most striking feature is the kind of prevailing nature — an inorganic
nature — that replaces the organic nature that humans once viewed so
reverently.
We can never disembed ourselves from nature — any more than we
can disembed ourselves from our own viscera. The technocratic
“utopia” of personalized automata remains a hollow myth. The
therapies that seek to adjust organic beings to inorganic conditions
merely produce lifeless, inorganic, and depersonalized automata. Hence
nature always affirms its existence as the matrix for social and personal
life, a matrix in which life is always embedded by definition. By
rationalizing and simplifying society and personality, we do not divest
it of its natural attributes; rather, we brutally destroy its organic
attributes. Thus nature never simply coexists with us; it is part of every
aspect of our structure and being. To turn back natural evolution from
more complex forms of organic beings to simpler ones, from the organic
to the inorganic, entails the turning back of society and social
development from more complex to simpler forms.
Dispelling the myth that our society is more complex than earlier
cultures requires short shrift; our complexity is strictly technical, not
cultural; our effluvium of “individuality” is more neurotic and
psychopathic, not more unique or more intricate. “Modernity” reached
its apogee between the decades preceding the French Revolution and
the 1840s, after which industrial capitalism fastened its grip on social
life. Its career, with a modest number of exceptions, has yielded a grim
denaturing of humanity and society. Since the middle of the present
century, even the vestiges of its greatness — apart from dramatic
explosions like the 1960s — have all but disappeared from virtually
every realm of experience.
What has largely replaced the sinews that held community and
personality together is an all-encompassing, coldly depersonalizing
bureaucracy. The agency and the bureaucrat have become the
substitutes for the family, the town and neighborhood, the personal
support structures of people in crisis, and the supernatural and mythic
figures that afforded power and tutelary surveillance over the destiny
of the individual. With no other structures to speak of but the
bureaucratic agency, society has not merely been riddled by bureaucracy;
it has all but become a bureaucracy in which everyone, as Camus
was wont to say, has been reduced to a functionary. Personality as such
has become congruent with the various documents, licenses, and
records that define one’s place in the world. More sacred than such
documents as passports, which are the archaic tokens of citizenship, a
motor vehicle license literally validates one’s identity, and a credit card
becomes the worldwide coinage of exchange.
The legacy of domination thus culminates in the growing together
of the State and society — and with it, a dissolution of the family,
community, mutual aid, and social commitment. Even a sense of one’s
personal destiny disappears into the bureaucrat’s office and filing
cabinet. History itself will be read in the microfilm records and
computer tapes of the agencies that now form the authentic institutions
of society. Psychological categories have indeed “become political
categories,” as Marcuse observed in the opening lines of his Eros and Civilization, but in a pedestrian form that exceeds his most doleful
visions. The Superego is no longer formed by the father or even by
domineering social institutions; it is formed by the faceless people who
preside over the records of birth and death, of religious affiliation and
educational pedigree, of “mental health” and psychological proclivities,
of vocational training and job acquisition, of marriage and divorce
certificates, of credit ratings and bank accounts; in short, of the endless
array of licenses, tests, contracts, grades, and personality traits that
define the status of the individual in society. Political categories have
replaced psychological categories in much the same sense that an
electrocardiograph has replaced the heart. Under state capitalism, even
economic categories become political categories. Domination fulfills
its destiny in the ubiquitous, all-pervasive State; its legacy reaches its
denouement in the dissolution, indeed the complete disintegration, of
a richly organic society into an inorganic one — a terrifying destiny that
the natural world shares with the social.
Reason, which was expected to dispel the dark historic forces to
which a presumably unknowing humanity had been captive, now
threatens to become one of these very forces in the form of
rationalization. It now enhances the efficiency of domination. The great
project of Western speculative thought — to render humanity selfconscious — stands before a huge abyss: a yawning chasm into which
the self and consciousness threaten to disappear.
[34] Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989),
p. 32.
[35] See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso Editions,
1983).
** Chapter 5: Scarcity and Post-Scarcity
*** Introduction
For all but the privileged few, history has been in great part a
chronicle of material scarcity — that is, an insufficiency of the goods
and services that people need and value — all too often as a result
of an unequal distribution of wealth. At best, people living under
conditions of material scarcity must spend an inordinate amount
of time working to produce the goods they need for material
survival, or else earn a livelihood. This necessity, Bookchin maintains,
reduces people to a quasi-animalistic existence; it prevents them
from fulfilling their potential for rationality and freedom and thus
from becoming fully human.
At the same time, material scarcity has also been an ideology as
well as a reality — in particular, ruling elites have used it as a
rationale for authoritarianism — both when scarcity is real, and when
it has been artificially induced for the benefit of the few. There are
not enough goods to meet the needs and desires of everyone, we
are told, because resources are scarce — that is, because nature is
“stingy.” As a result of this “stinginess,” an authority such as the
state, this ideology holds, is necessary in order to prevent people
from struggling against one another, in a war of all against all, to
obtain what they can; it is further necessary, they insisted, to
organize humanity’s domination of nonhuman nature, in order to
generate goods. Material scarcity, says Bookchin, thus
provided the historic rationale of the development of the
patriarchal family, private property, class domination, and the
state; it nourished the great divisions in hierarchical society that
pitted town against country, mind against sensuousness, work
against play, individual against society, and finally, the individual
against himself.[36]
Because of scarcity’s pernicious social and political consequences,
its elimination has been a longstanding vision in the socialist
tradition. The desire for technologies of production that would
reduce toil and create abundance dates back at least to Robert
Owen, who in 1818 announced glowingly that an “age of plenty”
for humankind was dawning, one in which “new scientific power
will soon render human labor of little avail in the creation of
wealth.”[37]
In the United States of the early 1960s, the postwar technological
revolution seemed to fulfill the dream of Owen and others like him.
Some New Left commentators, to be sure, took a less sanguine view,
warning that the new technologies of automation and cybernation
would have negative social consequences, such as unemployment.
According to a 1963 paper endorsed by Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS):
Automation has sharply reduced the demand for employment,
mass production industries, agriculture, and many trade and
service enterprises. During the fifties, for example, manufacturers
were able to increase productive output by 70 percent, with no
increase whatever in the number of manufacturing workers. Just
when the need for workers was being reduced, a radical increase
in the number of people needing jobs was taking place.... Thus
advancing technology and an exploding population create an
enormous employment problem.[38]
And Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio warned that one
of the “most crucial problems facing the United States today” was
the “problem of automation,” in which machines put people out
of work.[39]
Herbert Marcuse, for his part, felt that the “objective abundance”
of the 1960s would have ambiguous social consequences. On the
one hand, it would have the desirable consequence of making
possible the liberation of the libido; but it would also generate the
artificial satisfactions of consumerism and a new form of
imperialism.
But others in the socialist tradition followed Owen and welcomed
the advent of automation and cybernation, and the revolution in
production they created, as a crucial step in ending the age-old
problem of scarcity. Bookchin was one of them; in contrast to
Marcuse’s pessimism, he emphasized the possibilities of abundance,
not only for erotic liberation but for social and political revolution.
These technologies, he argued, held the potential, for the first time
in human history, to abolish scarcity and want on a worldwide basis
and usher in a life of plenty for all. In effect, he argued that they
were rendering material scarcity obsolete.
Significantly, by bringing about the end of material scarcity, he
argued, these technologies are depriving the ruling classes of a
critical rationale for their authority. Equally important, by enabling
humanity to pass to abundance, they are making possible a reduction
of onerous and tedious toil, thus providing people with the free time
they need in order to participate fully in political and social life.
Capitalism, Bookchin acknowledges, is perverting the use of
cybernation and automation, like all other technologies, for
oppressive rather than liberatory ends. But if they could be
appropriated for liberatory ends, the material abundance and
reduction in toil they generate could undergird a society of what
he calls “post-scarcity.” That is, they could constitute the technical
means for the creation of utopia.
“Post-scarcity,” as Bookchin uses the word, does not mean
material abundance alone; rather, the technological means for
utopia have to be set in the context of a society that is itself utopian:
an ecological, rational society.
The human relationships and psyches of the individual in a postscarcity
society must fully reflect the freedom, security, and selfexpression
that this abundance makes possible. Post-scarcity
society, in short, is the fulfillment of the social and cultural
potentialities latent in a technology of abundance.[40]
Bookchin’s ecological society would depend on at least two types
of technology: the ecological technologies of renewable energy,
and the productive technologies that would eliminate scarcity. The
judicious application of both would make possible a free society
without toil or material want, without hierarchy or domination,
and even without repression or guilt. In such a society people would
finally have the material base to fulfill their potentialities for
freedom and rationality as human beings.
*** Conditions of Freedom
(from “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” 1967)
All the successful revolutions of the past have been particularistic
revolutions of minority classes seeking to assert their specific interests
over those of society as a whole. The great bourgeois revolutions of
modern times offered an ideology of sweeping political reconstitution,
but in reality they merely certified the social dominance of the
bourgeoisie, giving formal political expression to the economic
ascendancy of capital. The lofty notions of the “nation,” the “free
citizen,” of “equality before the law,” concealed the mundane reality
of the centralized state, the atomized isolated man, the dominance of
bourgeois interest. Despite their sweeping ideological claims, the
particularistic revolutions replaced the rule of one class with that of
another, one system of exploitation with another, one system of toil
with another, and one system of psychological repression with another.
What is unique about our era is that the particularistic revolution
has now been subsumed by the possibility of the generalized
revolution — complete and totalistic. Bourgeois society, if it achieved
nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale
unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating
in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world
without class rule, exploitation, toil, or material want. The means now
exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of
guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given
over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is
now possible to conceive of man’s future experience in terms of a
coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind
and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and
community, man and nature, town and country, education and life,
work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded
in a qualitatively new realm of freedom. Just as the particularized
revolution produced a particularized, bifurcated society, so the
generalized revolution can produce an organically unified, many-sided
community. The great wound opened by propertied society in the form
of the “social question” can now be healed.
That freedom must be conceived of in human terms, not in animal
terms — in terms of life, not of survival — is clear enough. Men do not
remove their ties of bondage and become fully human merely by
divesting themselves of social domination and obtaining freedom in its
abstract form. They must also be free concretely: free from material
want, from toil, from the burden of devoting the greater part of their
time — indeed, the greater part of their lives — to the struggle with
necessity. To have seen these material preconditions for human freedom,
to have emphasized that freedom presupposes free time and the material
abundance for abolishing free time as a social privilege, is the great
contribution of Karl Marx to modern revolutionary theory.
By the same token, the preconditions for freedom must not be
mistaken for the conditions of freedom. The possibility of liberation
does not constitute its reality. Along with its positive aspects,
technological advance has a distinctly negative, socially regressive side.
If it is true that technological progress enlarges the historical potentiality
for freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control of technology
reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life.
Technology and the resources of abundance furnish capitalism with
the means for assimilating large sections of society to the established
system of hierarchy and authority. They provide the system with the
weaponry, the detecting devices, and the propaganda media for the
threat as well as the reality of massive repression. By their centralistic
nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic,
centralistic, and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In
short, they furnish the state with historically unprecedented means for
manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment of life — and for
perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation, and unfreedom....
**** The Redemptive Dialectic
Is there a redemptive dialectic that can guide the social development
in the direction of an anarchic society where people will attain full
control over their daily lives? Or does the social dialectic come to an
end with capitalism, its possibilities sealed off by the use of a highly
advanced technology for repressive and co-optative purposes?
We must learn here from the limits of Marxism, a project which,
understandably in a period of material scarcity, anchored the social
dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism in the economic realm.
Marx, it has been emphasized, examined the preconditions for
liberation, not the conditions of liberation. The Marxian critique is
rooted in the past, in the era of material want and relatively limited
technological development. Even its humanistic theory of alienation
turns primarily on the issue of work and man’s alienation from the
product of his labor. Today, however, capitalism is a parasite on the
future, a vampire that survives on the technology and resources of
freedom. The industrial capitalism of Marx’s time organized its
commodity relations around a prevailing system of material scarcity;
the state capitalism of our time organizes its commodity relations
around a prevailing system of material abundance. A century ago
scarcity had to be endured; today it has to be enforced — hence the
importance of the state in the present era. It is not that modern
capitalism has resolved its contradictions and annulled the social
dialectic but rather that the social dialectic and the contradictions of
capitalism have expanded from the economic to the hierarchical realms
of society, from the abstract “historic” domain to the concrete minutiae
of everyday experience, from the arena of survival to the arena of life.
The dialectic of bureaucratic state capitalism originates in the
contradiction between the repressive character of commodity society
and the enormous potential freedom opened by technological advance.
This contradiction also opposes the exploitative organization of society
to the natural world — a world that includes not only the natural
environment but also man’s “nature” — his Eros-derived impulses. The
contradiction between the exploitative organization of society and the
natural environment is beyond co-optation: the atmosphere, the
waterways, the soil, and the ecology required for human survival are
not redeemable by reforms, concessions, or modifications of strategic
policy. There is no technology that can reproduce atmospheric oxygen
in sufficient quantities to sustain life on this planet. There is no
substitute for the hydrological systems of the earth. There is no
technique for removing massive environmental pollution by radioactive
isotopes, pesticides, lead, and petroleum wastes. Nor is there the faintest
evidence that bourgeois society will relent at any time in the foreseeable
future in its disruption of vital ecological processes, in its exploitation
of natural resources, in its use of the atmosphere and waterways as
dumping areas for wastes, or in its cancerous mode of urbanization
and land use.
Even more immediate is the contradiction between the exploitative
organization of society and man’s Eros-derived impulses — a contradiction
that manifests itself as the banalization and impoverishment of
experience in a bureaucratically manipulated, impersonal mass society.
The Eros-derived impulses in man can be repressed and sublimated,
but they can never be eliminated. They are renewed with every birth
of a human being and with every generation of youth. It is not
surprising today that the young, more than any economic class or
stratum, articulate the life-impulses in humanity’s nature — the urgings
of desire, sensuousness, and the lure of the marvelous. Thus the
biological matrix, from which hierarchical society emerged ages ago,
reappears at a new level with the era that marks the end of hierarchy,
only now this matrix is saturated with social phenomena. Short of
manipulating humanity’s germ plasm, the life-impulses can be annulled
only with the annihilation of man himself.
The contradictions within bureaucratic state capitalism permeate all
the hierarchical forms developed and overdeveloped by bourgeois
society. The hierarchical forms that nurtured propertied society for ages
and promoted its development — the state, city, centralized economy,
bureaucracy, patriarchal family, and marketplace — have reached their
historic limits. They have exhausted their social functions as modes of
stabilization. It is not a question of whether these hierarchical forms
were ever “progressive” in the Marxian sense of the term.... Today
these forms constitute the target of all the revolutionary forces that are
generated by modern capitalism, and whether one sees their outcome
as nuclear catastrophe or ecological disaster, they now threaten the very survival of humanity.
With the development of hierarchical forms into a threat to the very
existence of humanity, the social dialectic, far from being annulled,
acquires a new dimension. It poses the “social question” in an entirely
new way. If man had to acquire the conditions of survival in order to
live (as Marx emphasized), now he must acquire the conditions of life
in order to survive. By this inversion of the relationship between survival
and life, revolution acquires a new sense of urgency. No longer are we
faced with Marx’s famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are
confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or
annihilation. The problems of necessity and survival have become
congruent with the problems of freedom and life.
*** The Problem of Want and Work
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
Virtually all the utopias, theories, :md revolutionary programs of the
early nineteenth century were heed with the problem of necessity — of
how to allocate labor and material goods at a relatively low level of
technological development. These problems permeated revolutionary
thought in a way comparable only to the impact of original sin on
Christian theology. The fact that men would have to devote a
substantial portion of their time to toil, for which they would get scant
return, formed a major premise of all socialist ideology — authoritarian
and libertarian, utopian and scientific, Marxist and anarchist. Implicit
in the Marxist notion of a planned economy was the fact, incontestably
clear in Marx’s own day, that socialism would still be burdened by
relatively scarce resources. Men would have to plan — in effect, to
restrict — the distribution of goods and would have to rationalize — in
effect, to intensify — the use of labor. Toil, under socialism, would be a
duty, a responsibility that every able-bodied individual would have to
undertake. Even Proudhon advanced this dour view. “Yes, life is a
struggle,” he wrote. “But this struggle is not between man and manit
is between man and Nature; and it is each one’s duty to share it.” [41]
This austere, almost biblical emphasis on struggle and duty reflects the
harsh quality of socialist thought during the Industrial Revolution.
The problem of want and work — an age-old problem perpetuated
by the early Industrial Revolution — produced the great divergence in
revolutionary ideas between socialism and anarchism. In the event of
a revolution, freedom would still be circumscribed by necessity: How
was this world of necessity to be “administered”? How could the
allocation of goods and duties be decided? Marx left this decision to
a state power — a transitional “proletarian” state power to be sure,
but nevertheless a coercive body, established above society. According
to Marx, the state would “wither away” as technology developed and
enlarged the domain of freedom, granting humanity material plenty
and the leisure to control its affairs directly. This strange calculus, in
which necessity and freedom were mediated by the state, differed very
little politically from the common run of bourgeois–democratic radical
opinion in the nineteenth century. The anarchist hope for the abolition
of the state, on the other hand, rested largely on a belief in the viability
of man’s social instincts. Bakunin, for example, thought custom would
compel individuals with antisocial proclivities to abide by collectivist
values and needs without obliging society to use coercion. Kropotkin,
who exercised more influence among anarchists in this area of
speculation, invoked man’s propensity for mutual aid — essentially a
social instinct — as the guarantor of solidarity in an anarchist
community (a concept that he derived from his study of natural and
social evolution).
The fact remains, however, that both the Marxist and the anarchist
answers to the problem of want and work were shot through with
ambiguity. The realm of necessity remained brutally present; it could
not be conjured away by mere theory and speculation. The Marxists
could hope to administer necessity by means of a state, and the
anarchists to deal with it through free communities, but given the
limited technological development of their time, in the last analysis
both schools depended on an act of faith to cope with the problem of
want and work. Anarchists could argue against Marxists that any
transitional state, however revolutionary its rhetoric and democratic
its structure, would be self-perpetuating; it would tend to become an
end in itself and to preserve the very material and social conditions it
had been created to remove. For such a state to “wither away” (that
is, to promote its own dissolution) would require leaders and bureaucrats
of superhuman moral qualities. The Marxists, in turn, could
invoke history against the anarchists, showing that custom and
mutualistic propensities have never been effective barriers to the
pressures of material need, or to the onslaught of property, or to the
development of exploitation and class domination. Accordingly, they
could dismiss anarchism as an ethical doctrine that revived the mystique
of “the natural man” and his inborn social virtues.
The problem of want and work — of the realm of necessity — was not
satisfactorily resolved by either doctrine in the last century. It is to the
lasting credit of anarchism that it uncompromisingly retained its high
ideal of freedom — the ideal of spontaneous organization, community
and the abolition of all authority — even though this ideal remained
only a vision of the future, of the time when technology would eliminate
the realm of necessity entirely. Marxism increasingly compromised its
ideal of freedom, painfully qualifying it with transitional stages and
political expediencies, until today it is an ideology of naked power,
pragmatic efficiency, and social centralization almost indistinguishable
from the ideologies of modern state capitalism....
In retrospect, it is astonishing how long the problem of want and
work cast its shadow over revolutionary theory. In a span of only nine
decades — between 1850 and 1940 — Western society created, passed
through, and evolved beyond two major epochs of technological
history — the paleotechnic age of coal and steel, and the neotechnic
age of electric power, synthetic chemicals, electricity, and internal
combustion engines. Ironically, both ages of technology seem to have
enhanced the importance of toil in society. As the number of industrial
workers increased in proportion to other social classes, labor — more
precisely toil — acquired an increasingly high status in revolutionary
thought. During this period, the propaganda of the socialists often
sounded like a paean to toil; not only was toil “ennobling,” but the
workers were extolled as the only useful individuals in the social fabric.
They were endowed with a supposedly superior instinctive ability that
made them the arbiters of philosophy, art, and social organization.
This puritanical work ethic of the left did not diminish with the
passage of time, and in fact it acquired a certain urgency in the 1930s.
Mass unemployment made jobs and the social organization of labor
the central themes of socialist propaganda in the 1930s. Instead of
focusing their message on the emancipation of man from toil, socialists
tended to depict socialism as a beehive of industrial activity, humming
with work for all. Communists pointed to Russia as the land where
every able-bodied individual was employed and where labor was
continually in demand. Surprising as it may seem today, little more
than a generation ago socialism was equated with a work-oriented
society, and liberty with the rna terial security provided by full
employment. The world of necessity had subtly invaded and corrupted
the ideal of freedom.
That the socialist notions of the last generation now seem anachronistic
is not due to any superior insights that prevail today. The last three
decades, particularly the late 1950s, mark a turning point in
technological development, a technological revolution that has negated
all the values, political schemes, and social perspectives held by
mankind throughout all previous recorded history. After thousands of
years of tortuous development, the countries of the Western world (and
potentially all countries) are now confronted by the possibility of a
materially abundant, even toilless era in which most of the means of
life can be provided by machines. A new technology has developed that
could largely replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom.
So obvious is this fact to millions of people in the United States and
Europe that it no longer requires elaborate explanations or theoretical
exegeses. This technological revolution and the prospects it holds for
society as a whole form the premises of radically new lifestyles among
today’s young people, a generation that is rapidly divesting itself of the
values and age-old work-oriented traditions of its elders. Even recent
demands for a guaranteed annual income faintly echo the new reality
that currently permeates the thinking of the young. Owing to the
development of a cybernetic technology, the notion of a toilless mode
of life has become an article of faith to an ever-increasing number of
young people.
*** Cybernation and Automation
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
For the first time in history, technology has become open-ended. The
potential for technological development, for providing machines as
substitutes for labor, is virtually unlimited. Technology has finally
passed from the realm of invention to that of design — from fortuitous
discoveries to systematic innovations.
The meaning of this qualitative advance was stated in a rather
freewheeling way by Vannevar Bush, the wartime director of the Office
of Scientific Research and Development, in 1955:
Suppose, fifty years ago, that someone had proposed making a device
which would cause an automobile to follow a white line down the
middle of the road, automatically and even if the driver fell asleep....
He would have been laughed at, and his idea would have been called
preposterous. So it would have been then. But suppose someone called
for such a device today, and was willing to pay for it, leaving aside the
question of whether it would actually be of any genuine use whatever.
Any number of concerns would stand ready to contract and build it.
No real invention would be required. There are thousands of young
men in the country to whom the design of such a device would be a
pleasure. They would simply take off the shelf some photocells,
thermionic tubes, servomechanisms, and relays, and if urged, they would
build what they call a breadboard model, and it would work. The point
is that the presence of a host of versatile, cheap, reliable gadgets, and
the presence of men who understand fully all their queer ways, has
rendered the building of automatic devices almost straightforward and
routine. It is no longer a question of whether they can be built, it is
rather a question of whether they are worth building.[42]
... Several developments have brought us to this open end, and a
number of practical applications have profoundly affected the role of
labor in industry and agriculture. Perhaps the most obvious has been
the increasing interpenetration of scientific abstraction, mathematics,
and analytic methods with the concrete, pragmatic, and rather mundane
tasks of industry. This order of relationships is relatively new.
Traditionally, speculation, generalization, and rational activity were
sharply divorced from technology. This chasm reflected the sharp split
between the leisured and the working classes in ancient and medieval
society. Aside from the inspired works of a few rare men, applied
science did not come into its own until the Renaissance, and it began
to flourish only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The men
who personify the application of science to technological innovation
are not the inventive tinkerers like Edison but the systematic
investigators with catholic interests, like Faraday, who added simultaneously to man’s knowledge of scientific principles and to engineering.
In our own day this synthesis, once the work of a single inspired genius,
is the work of anonymous teams....
[In another remarkable development,] the machine has evolved from
an extension of human muscles into an extension of the human nervous
system. In the past, tools and machines enhanced man’s muscular power
over raw materials and natural forces. Not even the mechanical devices
and engines developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
replaced human muscles — rather, they enlarged their effectiveness.
Although these machines increased output enormously, workers’
muscles and brain were still required to operate them, even for fairly
routine tasks. Technological advance could be calculated in strict terms
of labor productivity: One man using a given machine produced as
many commodities as five, ten, fifty, or a hundred had produced
without the machine....
The development of fully automatic machines for complex massmanufacturing
operations required that these machines have a builtin
ability to correct their own errors; sensory devices for replacing the
visual, auditory, and tactile senses of the worker; and finally, devices
that replace the worker’s judgment, skill, and memory. These three
principles presuppose the development of the technological means (the
effectors, if you will) for applying the sensory, control, and mindlike
devices in everyday industrial operations; further, they presuppose that
we can adapt existing machines or develop new ones for handling,
shaping, assembling, packaging, and transporting semifinished and
finished products....
With the advent of the computer we entered an entirely new
dimension of industrial control systems. The computer is capable of
performing all the routine tasks that burdened the mind of the worker
a generation ago.... By virtue of its speed, the computer can perform
highly sophisticated mathematical and logical operations ... It is
arguable whether computer “intelligence” is, or ever will be, creative
or innovative (although every few years bring sweeping changes in
computer technology), but there is no doubt that the digital computer
is capable of taking over all the onerous and distinctly uncreative mental
tasks of man in industry, science, engineering, information retrieval,
and transportation. Modern man, in effect, has produced an electronic
“mind” for coordinating, building, and evaluating most of his routine
industrial operations. Properly used within the sphere of competence
for which they are designed, computers are faster and more efficient
than man himself....
Even current systems are now already obsolete. “The next generation
of computing machines operates a thousand times as fast — at a pulse
rate of one in every three-tenths of a billionth of a second,” observes
Alice Mary Hilton. “Speeds of millionths and billionths of a second
are not really intelligible to our finite minds. But we can certainly
understand that the advance has been a thousand-fold within a year
or two. A thousand times as much information can be handled or the
same amount of information can be handled a thousand times as fast.
A job that takes more than sixteen hours can be done in a minute! And
without any human intervention! Such a system does not control merely
an assembly line but a complete manufacturing and industrial process!”[43]
The basic technological principles involved in cybernating can be
applied to virtually every area of mass manufacture — from metallurgy
to food processing, from electronics to toy-making, from prefabricated
bridges to prefabricated houses. Many phases of steel production, tool
and die making, electronic equipment manufacture, and industrial
chemical production are now partly or largely automated.... To be
sure, every industry has its own particular problems, and the application
of a toilless technology to a specific plant would doubtless reveal a
multitude of kinks that would require painstaking solutions.... But
there is practically no industry that cannot be fully automated if the
product, the plant, the manufacturing procedures, and the handling
methods are redesigned. In fact, the difficulty of describing how, where,
or when a given industry will be automated arises not from assessing
its unique problems but from considering the enormous leaps that occur
every few years in modern technology. Almost every account of applied
automation today must be regarded as provisional: as soon as one
describes a partially automated industry, technological advances make
the description obsolete.
There is one area of the economy, however, in which any technological
advance is worth describing — the area of work, of toil, that is
most brutalizing and degrading for man. If it is true, as Fourier said,
that the moral level of a society can be gauged by the way it treats
women, its sensitivity to human suffering can be gauged by the working
conditions it provides for people in raw materials industries, particularly
in mines and quarries. In the ancient world, mining was often a form
of penal servitude, reserved primarily for the most hardened criminals,
the most intractable slaves, and the most hated prisoners of war. The
mine is the day-to-day actualization of man’s image of hell; it is a
deadening, dismal, inorganic world that demands pure mindless toil.
Field and forest and stream and ocean are the environment of life; the
mine is the environment alone of ores, minerals, metals [writes Lewis
Mumford].... In hacking and digging the contents of the earth, the
miner has no eye for the forms of things; what he sees is sheer matter
and until he gets to his vein it is only an obstacle which he breaks
through stubbornly and sends up to the surface. If the miner sees shapes
on the walls of his cavern, as the candle flickers, they are only the
monstrous distortions of his pick or his arm: shapes of fear. Day has
been abolished and the rhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night
production first came into existence here. The miner must work
by artificial light even though the sun be shining outside; still further
down in the seams, he must work by artificial ventilation too: a triumph
of the “manufactured environment.”[44]
The abolition of mining as a human activity would symbolize, in
its own way, the triumph of a liberatory technology. That we can point
to this achievement already presages the freedom from toil implicit in
the technology of our time. The first major step in this direction was
the continuous miner, a giant cutting machine with nine-foot blades
that slices up eight tons of coal a minute from the coal face. It was
this machine, together with mobile loading machines, power drills,
and roof bolting, that reduced mine employment in areas like West
Virginia to about a third of 1948 levels, at the same time nearly
doubling individual output. Coal mines still require miners to place
and operate the machines. The most recent technological advances,
however, have replaced operators by radar sensing devices and
eliminate the miner completely.
Adding sensing devices to automatic machinery could easily remove
the worker from toil not only in mines but in agriculture. The wisdom
of industrializing and mechanizing agriculture is highly questionable,
but the fact remains that if society were to so choose, it could automate
large areas of industrial agriculture, ranging from cotton picking to
rice harvesting. Almost any machine, from a giant shovel in an openstrip
mine to a grain harvester in the Great Plains, could be operated
either by cybernated sensing devices or by remote control with television
cameras. The effort needed to operate these devices and machines at a
safe distance, in comfortable quarters, would be minimal, assuming
that a human operator were required at all.
It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally
organized economy could automatically manufacture small “packaged”
factories without human labor, when parts could be produced with so
little effort that most maintenance tasks would be simply to remove a
defective unit from a machine and replace it with another — a job no
more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would
make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a
highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely
toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and
loss, would eliminate the pain of want and toil — the penalty, inflicted
in the form of denial, suffering, and inhumanity, exacted by a society
based on scarcity and labor.
*** Technology for Life
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
In a future revolution, the most pressing task of technology will be to
produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil. The immediate
purpose of this task would be to open the social arena permanently to
the revolutionary people, to keep the revolution in permanence. Thus
far every social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin
could not be heard over the din of the workshop. Dreams of freedom
and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility for
producing the means of survival. In the brute facts of history, as long
as revolution meant continual sacrifice and denial for the people, the
reins of power fell into the hands of the political “professionals,” the
mediocrities of Thermidor. How well the liberal Girondins of the French
Convention understood this reality can be judged by their effort to
reduce the revolutionary fervor of the Parisian popular assemblies —
the great sections of 1793 — by decreeing that the meetings should close
“at ten in the evening,” or as Carlyle tells us, “before the working
people come from their jobs.”[45] The decree proved ineffective, but it
was well aimed. Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been
that sooner or later, their doors had to close “at ten in the evening.”
The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever! ...
The future liberated men will choose from a large variety of mutually
exclusive or combinable work styles, all of which will be based on
unforeseeable technological innovations. Or they may choose to
submerge the cybernated machine to a technological world, divorcing
it entirely from social life, the community, and creativity. All but hidden
from society, machines would work for man. Free communities would
stand at the end of a cybernated assembly line with baskets to cart the
goods home. Industry, like the autonomic nervous system, would work
on its own, subject to the repairs that our own bodies require in
occasional bouts of illness. The fracture separating man from machine
would not be healed. It would simply be ignored.
Ignoring technology, of course, is no solution. Man would be closing
off a vital human experience — the stimulus of productive activity, the
stimulus of the machine. Technology can in fact play a vital role in
forming the personality of man. Every art, as Lewis Mumford has
argued, has its technical side, requiring the self-mobilization of
spontaneity into expressed order and providing contact with the
objective world during the most ecstatic moments of experience.
A liberated society, I believe, would not want to negate technology,
precisely because it is liberated and can strike a balance. It may well
want to assimilate the machine to artistic craftsmanship. By this, I mean
the machine would remove the toil from the productive process, leaving
its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, would participate
in human creativity. There is no reason that automatic, cybernated
machinery cannot be used so that the finishing of products, especially
those destined for personal use, is left to the community. The machine
could absorb the toil involved in mining, smelting, transporting, and
shaping raw materials, leaving the final stages of artistry and
craftsmanship to the individual. Most of the stones that make up a
medieval cathedral were carefully squared and standardized to facilitate
their laying and bonding — a thankless, repetitive, and boring task that
modern machines could now do rapidly and effortlessly. Once the stone
blocks were set in place, the craftsmen made their appearance; toil was
replaced by creative human work. In a liberated community the
combination of industrial machines and the craftsman’s tools could
reach a degree of sophistication and of creative interdependence
unparalleled in any period in human history. William Morris’s vision
of a return to craftsmanship would be freed of its nostalgic nuances.
We could truly speak of a qualitatively new advance in technics — a
technology for life.
Having acquired a vitalizing respect for the natural environment and
its resources, the free decentralized community would give a new
interpretation to the word need. Marx’s “realm of necessity,” instead
of expanding indefinitely, would tend to contract; needs would be
humanized and scaled by a higher valuation of life and creativity.
Quality and artistry would supplant the current emphasis on quantity
and standardization; durability would replace the current emphasis on
expendability; an economy of cherished things, sanctified by a sense of
tradition and by a sense of wonder for the personality and artistry of
dead generations, would replace the mindless seasonal restyling of
commodities; innovations would be made with a sensitivity for the
natural inclinations of man as distinguished from the engineered
pollution of taste by the mass media. Conservation would replace waste
in all things. Freed of bureaucratic manipulation, men would rediscover
the beauty of a simpler, uncluttered material life. Clothing, diet,
furnishings, and homes would become more artistic, more personalized,
and more Spartan. Man would recover a sense of things that are for
man, as against the things that have been imposed upon man. The
repulsive ritual of bargaining and hoarding would be replaced by the
sensitive acts of making and giving. Things would cease to be the
crutches for impoverished egos and the mediators between aborted
personalities; they would become the products of rounded, creative
individuals and the gifts of integrated, developing selves.
A technology for life could play the vital role of integrating one
community with another. Rescaled to a revival of crafts and a new
conception of material needs, technology could also function as the
sinews of confederation. A national division of labor and industrial
centralization are dangerous because with them technology begins to
transcend the human scale; it becomes increasingly incomprehensible
and lends itself to bureaucratic manipulation. To the extent that control
is shifted away from the community in real terms (technologically and
economically), centralized institutions acquire real power over the lives
of men and threaten to become sources of coercion. A technology for
life must be based on the community; it must be tailored to the
community and the regional level. On this level, however, the sharing
of factories and resources could actually promote solidarity among
community groups; it could serve to confederate them on the basis not
only of common spiritual and cultural interests but also of common
material needs. Depending upon the resources and uniqueness of
regions, a rational, humanistic balance could be struck between autarky,
industrial confederation, and a national division of labor.
Is society so “complex” that an advanced industrial civilization
stands in contradiction to a decentralized technology for life? My
answer is a categorical no. Much of the social “complexity” of our
time originates in the paperwork, administration, manipulation, and
constant wastefulness of capitalist enterprise. The petty bourgeois
stands in awe of the bourgeois filing system — the rows of cabinets filled
with invoices, accounting books, insurance records, tax forms, and the
inevitable dossiers. He is spellbound by the “expertise” of industrial
managers, engineers, stylemongers, financial manipulators, and the
architects of market consent. He is mystified by the state — the police,
courts, jails, federal offices, secretariats, the whole stinking, sick body
of coercion, control, and domination. Modern society is indeed
incredibly complex, complex even beyond human comprehension, if
we grant its premises: property, “production for the sake of production,”
competition, capital accumulation, exploitation, finance,
centralization, coercion, bureaucracy, and the domination of man by
man. Linked to each of these premises are the institutions that actualize
it — offices, millions of “personnel” forms, immense tons of paper, desks,
typewriters, telephones, and of course rows upon rows of filing
cabinets. As in Kafka’s novels, these things are real but strangely
dreamlike, indefinable shadows on the social landscape. The economy
has a greater reality to it and is easily mastered by the mind and senses,
but it too is highly intricate — if we grant that buttons must be styled
in a thousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kind and
pattern to create the illusion of innovation and novelty, bathroom
cabinets filled to overflowing with a dazzling variety of pharmaceuticals
and lotions, and kitchens cluttered with endless imbecile appliances. If
we singled out from this odious garbage one or two goods of high
quality in the more useful categories, and if we eliminated the money
economy, the state power, the credit system, the paperwork, and the
police work required to hold society in an enforced state of want,
insecurity, and domination, society would become not only reasonably
human but fairly simple.
Behind a single yard of high-quality electric wiring, to be sure, lies
a copper mine, the machinery needed to operate it, a plant for
producing insulating material, a copper smelting and shaping complex,
and a transportation system for distributing the wiring — and behind
each of these complexes are other mines, plants, machine shops, and
so forth. Copper mines of a kind that can be exploited by existing
machinery are not to be found everywhere, although enough copper
and other useful metals can be recovered as scrap from the debris of
our present society to provide future generations with all they need.
But even if copper can be furnished only by a nationwide system of
distribution, in what sense would there still have to be a division of
labor in the current sense of the term? There need be none at all. First,
copper could be distributed, together with other goods, among free,
autonomous communities, between those that mine it and those that
require it. This distribution system need not require the mediation for
centralized bureaucratic institutions. Second, and perhaps more
significant, a community that lives in a region with ample copper
resources would not be a mere mining community. Copper mining
would be one of many economic activities in which it is engaged — a
part of a larger, rounded, organic economic arena. The same would
hold for communities whose climate is most suitable for growing
specialized foods or whose resources are rare and uniquely valuable
to society as a whole. Each community would approximate local or
regional autarky. It would seek to achieve wholeness, because
wholeness produces complete, rounded men who live in symbiotic
relationship with their environment. Even if a substantial portion of
the economy fell within the sphere of a national division of labor, the
overall economic weight of society would still rest with the community.
If there is no distortion of communities, there will be no sacrifice of
any portion of humanity to the interests of humanity as a whole.
A basic sense of decency, sympathy, and mutual aid lies at the core of
human behavior. Even in this lousy bourgeois society, we do not find it
unusual that adults rescue children from danger, even at the risk of
imperiling their own lives; we do not find it strange that miners risk
death to save their fellow workers in cave-ins, or that soldiers crawl
under heavy fire to carry wounded comrades to safety. What shocks us
are those occasions when aid is refused — when the cries of a girl being
stabbed are ignored in a middle-class neighborhood.
Yet there is nothing in this society that would seem to warrant a
molecule of human solidarity. What solidarity we do find exists despite
the society, against all its realities, as an unending struggle between the
innate decency of man and the innate indecency of society. Can we
imagine how men would behave if this decency could find full release,
if society earned the respect, even the love, of the individual? We are
still the offspring of a violent, blood-soaked, ignoble history — the end
products of man’s domination of man. We may never end this condition
of domination. The future may bring us and our shoddy civilization
down in a Wagnerian Gotterdammerung. How idiotic it would all be!
But we may also end the domination of man by man. We may finally
succeed in breaking the chain to the past and gain a humanistic
anarchist society. It would be the height of absurdity, indeed of
impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very
criteria we despise in our own time. Free men would not be greedy, one
liberated community would not try to dominate another because it had
a potential monopoly of copper, computer “experts” would not try to
enslave grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining tubercular
virgins would not be written. We can ask only one thing of the free
men and women of the future: to forgive us that it took so long to get
there and that it was such a hard pull. Like Brecht, we can ask that
they try not to think of us too harshly, that they give us their sympathy
and understand that we lived in the depths of a social hell.
But then, they will surely know what to think without our telling
them.
*** The Fetishization of Needs
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
Scarcity is not merely a functional phenomenon that can be described
primarily in terms of needs or wants. Obviously, without a sufficiency
in the means of life, life itself is impossible, and without a certain
excess in these means, life is degraded to a cruel struggle for survival,
irrespective of the level of needs. Leisure time, under these conditions,
is not free time that fosters intellectual advances beyond the magical,
artistic, and mythopoeic. To a large extent, the “time” of a community
on the edge of survival is “suffering time.” It is a time when hunger
is the all-encompassing fear that persistently lives with the community,
a time when the diminution of hunger is the community’s constant
preoccupation. Clearly, a balance must be struck between a sufficiency
of the means of life, a relative freedom of time to fulfill one’s abilities
on the most advanced levels of human achievement, and ultimately a
degree of self-consciousness, complementarity, and reciprocity that
can be called truly human in full recognition of humanity’s
potentialities. Not only the functional dictates of needs and wants but
also a concept of human beings as more than “thinking animals” (to
use Paul Shepard’s expression) must be introduced to define what we
mean by scarcity.
These distinctions raise a second and perhaps more complex problem:
scarcity can not only impair human survival but impede the
actualization of human potentialities. Hence scarcity can be defined in
terms of its biological impact and also its cultural consequences. There
is a point at which society begins to intervene in the formation of needs
to produce a very special type of scarcity: a socially induced scarcity
that expresses social contradictions. Such scarcity may occur even when
technical development seems to render material scarcity completely
unwarranted. Let me emphasize that I am not referring here to new or
more exotic wants that social development may turn into needs. A
society that has enlarged the cultural goals of human life may generate
material scarcity even when the technical conditions exist for achieving
outright superfluity in the means of life.
The issue of scarcity is not merely a matter of quantity or even of
kind; it can also be a socially contradictory hypostatization of need as
such. Just as capitalism leads to production for the sake of production,
so too it leads to consumption for the sake of consumption. The great
bourgeois maxim “grow or die” has its counterpart in “buy or die.”
And just as the production of commodities is no longer related to their
function as use-values, as objects of real utility, so wants are no longer
related to humanity’s sense of its real needs. Both commodities and
needs acquire a blind life of their own; they assume a fetishized form,
an irrational dimension, that seems to determine the destiny of the
people who produce and consume them. Marx’s famous notion of the
“fetishization of commodities” finds its parallel in a “fetishization of
needs.” Production and consumption, in effect, acquire suprahuman
qualities that are no longer related to technical development and the
subject’s rational control of the conditions of existence. They are
governed instead by an ubiquitous market, by a universal competition
not only between commodities but also between the creation of needs — a
competition that removes commodities and needs from rational
cognition and personal control.
Needs, in effect, become a force of production, not a subjective force.
They become blind in the same sense that the production of
commodities becomes blind. Orchestrated by forces that are external
to the subject, they exist beyond its control like the production of the
very commodities that are meant to satisfy them. This autonomy of
needs is developed at the expense of the autonomy of the subject. It
reveals a fatal flaw in subjectivity itself, in the autonomy and
spontaneity of the individual to control the conditions of his or her
own life.
To break the grip of the “fetishization of needs,” to dispel it, is to
recover freedom of choice, a project that is tied to the freedom of the
self to choose. The words freedom and choice must be emphasized:
they exist conjointly and are tied to the ideal of the autonomous
individual who is possible only in a free society. Although a hunter-gatherer
community may be free from the needs that beleaguer us, it
must still answer to very strict material imperatives. Such freedom as
it has is the product not of choice but of limited means of life. What
makes it “free” are the very limitations of its tool-kit, not an expansive
knowledge of the material world. In a truly free society, however, needs
would be formed by consciousness and by choice, not simply by
environment and tool-kits. The affluence of a free society would be
transformed from a wealth of things into a wealth of culture and
individual creativity. Hence want would depend not only on technological
development but also on the cultural context in which it is
formed. Nature’s “stinginess” and technology’s level of development
would be important, but only as secondary factors in defining scarcity
and need.
The problems of needs and scarcity, in short, must be seen as a
problem of selectivity — of choice. A world in which needs compete
with needs just as commodities compete with commodities is the
warped realm of a fetishized, limitless world of consumption. This
world of limitless needs has been developed by the immense
armamentarium of advertising, the mass media, and the grotesque
trivialization of daily life, with its steady disengagement of the
individual from any authentic contact with history. Although choice
presupposes a sufficiency in the means of life, it does not imply the
existence of a mindless abundance of goods that smothers the
individual’s capacity to select use-values rationally, to define his or her
needs according to qualitative, ecological, humanistic, indeed, philosophical
criteria. Rational choice presupposes not only a sufficiency in
the means of life with minimal labor to acquire them; it presupposes
above all a rational society.
Freedom from scarcity, or post-scarcity, must be seen in this light if
it is to have any liberatory meaning. The concept presupposes that
individuals have the material possibility of choosing what they need — not
only a sufficiency of available goods from which to choose but a
transformation of work, both qualitatively and quantitatively. But not one of these achievements is adequate to the idea of post-scarcity if the individual does not have the autonomy, moral insight, and wisdom to choose rationally. Consumerism and mere abundance are mindless.
Choice is vitiated by the association of needs with consumption for the
sake of consumption — with the use of advertising and the mass media
to render the acquisition of goods an imperative — to make “need” into
“necessity” devoid of rational judgment. What is ultimately at stake
for the individual whose needs are rational is the achievement of an
autonomous personality and selfhood. Just as work, to use Marx’s
concepts, defines the subject’s identity and provides it with a sense of
the ability to transform or alter reality, so needs too define the subject’s
rationality and provide it with a capacity to transform and alter the
nature of the goods produced by work. In both cases, the subject is
obliged to form judgments that reflect the extent to which it is rational
or irrational, free and autonomous or under the sway of forces beyond
its control. Post-scarcity presupposes the former; consumerism, the
latter. If the object of capitalism or socialism is to increase needs, the object of anarchism is to increase choice. However much the consumer
is deluded into the belief that he or she is choosing freely, the consumer
is heteronomous and under the sway of a contrived necessity; the free
subject, by contrast, is autonomous and spontaneously fulfills his or
her rationally conceived wants.
In summary, it is not in the diminution or expansion of needs that
the true history of needs is written. Rather, it is in the selection of needs
as a function of the free and spontaneous development of the subject
that needs become qualitative and rational. Needs are inseparable from
the subjectivity of the “needer” and the context in which his or her
personality is formed. The autonomy that is given to use-values in the
formation of needs leaves out the personal quality, human powers, and
intellectual coherence of their user. It is not industrial productivity that creates mutilated use-values but social irrationality that creates mutilated users.
Scarcity does not mean the same thing when applied to a “savage,”
peasant, slave, serf, artisan, or a proletarian, any more than it means
the same thing when it is applied to a chieftain, lord, master, noble,
guildmaster, or merchant. The material needs of a “savage,” peasant,
slave, serf, artisan, and proletarian are not so decisively different from
each other, but the most important differences that do arise derive from
the fact that their individual definitions of scarcity have changed
significantly as a result of differences between need structures. Often,
the needs of these oppressed classes are generated by their ruling-class
counterparts. The history of white bread in the anthropology of needs,
for example, is a metaphor for the extent to which tastes associated
with gentility — not with physical well-being and survival — are turned
into the needs of the lowly as compellingly, in the fetishism of needs,
as the very means of survival. Similarly, the ascetic rejection by the
lowly of their rulers’ needs has functioned as a compensating role in
imparting to the oppressed a lofty sense of moral and cultural
superiority over their betters. In both cases, the fetishism of needs has
impeded humanity in using its technics rationally and selecting its
needs consciously.
Our own skewed concepts of scarcity and needs are even more
compelling evidence of this fetishism. Until comparatively recent times,
needs retained some degree of contact with material reality and were
tempered by some degree of rationality. For all the cultural differences
that surrounded the concept of scarcity and needs in the past, their
fetishization was almost minimal in comparison with our own times.
But with the emergence of a complete market society, the ideal of both
limitless production and limitless needs became thoroughly mystified — no
less by socialist ideologues than by their bourgeois counterparts.
The restraints that Greek social theorists like Aristotle tried to place
on the market, however much they were honored in the breach, were
completely removed, and objects or use-values began to infiltrate the
lofty human goals that society had elaborated from the days of their
conception in the polis. The ideals of the past, in effect, had become
so thoroughly bewitched by things that they were soon to become
things rather than ideals. Honor, today, is more important as a credit
rating than as a sense of moral probity; personality is the sum of one’s
possessions and holdings rather than a sense of self-awareness and self-cultivation.
One could continue this list of contrasts indefinitely.
Having demolished all the ethical and moral limits that once kept it
in hand, the market society in turn has demolished almost every historic
relationship between nature, technics, and material well-being. No
longer is nature’s “stinginess” a factor in explaining scarcity, nor is
scarcity conceived as a function of technical development that explains
the creation or satisfaction of needs. Both the culture and the technics
of modern capitalism have united to produce crises not of scarcity but
of abundance or, at least, the expectation of abundance, all chit-chat
about “diminishing resources” aside. Western society may accept the
reality of economic crises, inflation, and unemployment, and popular
credulity has not rejected the myth of a “stingy” nature that is running
out of raw materials and energy resources. Abundance, all the more
because it is being denied for structural economic reasons rather than
natural ones, still orchestrates the popular culture of present-day society.
To mix solid Victorian metaphors with contemporary cnes: if “savages”
had to perform heroic technical feats to extricate themselves from the
“claw and fang” world of the jungle and arrive at a sense of their
humanity, then modern consumers in the market society will have to
perform equally heroic ethical feats to extricate themselves from the
shopping malls and recover their own sense of humanity.
To “disembed” themselves from the shopping mall, they may require
more powerful agents than ethics. They may well require a superfluity
of goods so immense in quantity that the prevailing fetishism of needs
will have to be dispelled on its own terms. Hence the ethical limits that
were so redolent with meaning from Hellenic times onward may be
inadequate today. We have arrived at a point in history’s account of
need where the very capacity to select needs, which freedom from
material scarcity was expected to create, has been subverted by a strictly
appetitive sensibility. Society may well have to be overindulged to
recover its capacity for selectivity. To lecture society about its
“insatiable” appetites, as our resource-conscious environmentalists are
wont to do, is precisely what the modern consumer is not prepared to
hear. And to impoverish society with contrived shortages, economic
dislocations, and material deprivation is certain to shift the mystification
of needs over to a more sinister social ethics, the mystification of
scarcity. This ethos — already crystallized into the “lifeboat ethic,”
“triage,” and a new bourgeois imagery of claw-and-fang called
survivalism — marks the first step toward ecofascism.
[36] Murray Bookchin, introduction to Post Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco:
Ramparts Press, 1971; reprinted by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977), p. 9.
[37] Owen quoted in G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. 1, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners, 1789–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 94.
[38] Students for a Democratic Society, “America and the New Era” (1963), in
Massimo Teodori, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (Indianapolis
and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 174.
[39] Mario Savio, “An End to History” (1964), in Teodori, ed., New Left, p. 159.
[40] Ibid., p. 11.
[41] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? (London: Bellamy Library, n.d.),
vol. 1, p. 135.
[42] Vannevar Bush quoted in US Congress, Joint Committee on the Economic
Report, Automation and Technological Change: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Economic Stabilization, 84th cong., 1st sess. (Washington:
US Government Printing Office, 19 55), p. 81.
[43] Alice Mary Hilton, “Cyberculture,” Fellowship for Reconciliation paper
(Berkeley, CA, 1964 ), p. 8.
[44] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Co., 1934), pp. 69–70.
[45] Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (New York: Modern Library, n.d.),
p. 593.
** Chapter 6: Marxism
*** Introduction
Although Marx’s writings had a great influence on Bookchin’s ideas,
it became clear to him early on that a degree of authoritarianism,
particularly an acceptance of domination, recurred in the Marxian
writings. Even in the 1940s he was cognizant that a centralized state
was essential to Marx’s views and to the new socialist dispensation
that he would create. Moreover, even as Marx and Engels attacked
class society, they had taught that hierarchical relationships were
indispensable to a socialist society, just as a factory needed
hierarchical relationships in order to operate.
In time, Bookchin realized that the ideological rationales for
material scarcity that were typical of bourgeois society had been
recapitulated in Marxist theory as well. Just as ruling elites had used
scarcity to justify their authority, Marxism insisted that the
domination of nonhuman nature not only made class society
historically inevitable but was a historical precondition for human
liberation.
Bookchin’s assertion that the idea of dominating nature first
arose within society overturned this rationale, common to
bourgeois and Marxist ideology alike. Where Marxists argued that
an emancipatory society could be created by eliminating class
society alone, Bookchin maintained that it was necessary to
eliminate hierarchy and domination as well. Where Marxists argued
that domination had arisen originally as a mode of organizing
human labor, Bookchin argued that domination originated in the
rankings of social hierarchy, which often had little to do with
material production. The socialist school that followed upon Marx’s
own death, Bookchin concluded, was thus tainted by the imperative
to dominate human beings and first nature alike. As Bookchin
summarized it himself, in connection with a criticism of Frankfurt
school theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer:
However much they opposed domination, neither Adorno nor
Horkheimer singled out hierarchy as an underlying problematic in
their writings. Indeed, their residual Marxian premises led to a
historical fatalism that saw any liberatory enterprise ... as
hopelessly tainted by the need to dominate nature and
consequently “man.” This position stands completely at odds with
my own view that the notion — and no more than an unrealizable
notion — of dominating nature stems from the domination of
human by human. This is not a semantic difference in accounting
for the origins of domination. Like Marx, the Frankfurt School saw
nature as a “domineering” force over humanity that human guileand
class rule — had to exorcise before a classless society was
possible. The Frankfurt School, no less than Marxism, placed the
onus for domination primarily on the demanding forces of nature.
My own writings radically reverse this very traditional view of
the relationship between society and nature. I argue that the idea
of dominating nature first arose within society as part of its
institutionalization into gerontocracies that placed the young in
varying degrees of servitude to the old and in patriarchies that
placed women in varying degrees of servitude to men — not in any
endeavor to “control” nature or natural forces. Various modes of
social institutionalization, not modes of organizing human labor
(so crucial to Marx}, were the first sources of domination, which
is not to deny Marx’s thesis that class society was economically
exploitative. Hence, domination can be definitively removed only
by resolving problematics that have their origins in hierarchy and
status, not in class and the technological control of nature alone.[46]
It is easy to conclude, from his various critiques, that Bookchin
rejected Marxism altogether and sought to annul it. Yet even in his
most bitter polemics against 1960s Marxists, he did not abandon
Marxism altogether. On the contrary, his lifelong trajectory has been
to preserve the dialectical approach of Marx in order to transcend
Marxism itself dialectically. Thus, in any study of his work, it is
important to identify the aspects of Marxism that he did and did
not reject. He rejected, of course, the necessity of hierarchy and
domination; the exclusivity of class analysis; the hegemonic role of
the proletariat; and the creation of a centralized socialist state. He
rejected, too, the repressive regimes that ruled in the name of
Marxism.
But he respected many other aspects of Marx’s work and
incorporated them into social ecology, such as its insights into
capitalist development, its theory of the commodity, and the notion
that complete freedom has material preconditions. Perhaps most
importantly, he respected the dialectical form of reasoning that
Marx had inherited from Hegel and that Bookchin himself inherited
from Marx. Bookchin considers all of these contributions to be
lasting and essential to the revolutionary tradition, regardless of
other limitations in the Marxist literature.
*** Marxism and Domination
(from The Ecology of Freedom and “Marxism as Bourgeois
Sociology,” 1982 and 1979)
The stream of human progress has been a divided one: The development
toward material security and social complexity has generated
contrapuntal forces that yield material insecurity and social conflict
unique to “civilization” as such. On the one side, without the agrarian
economy that the early Neolithic introduced, society would have been
mired indefinitely in a brute subsistence economy living chronically on
the edge of survival. Nature, so the social theorists of the past century
held, is normally “stingy,” an ungiving and deceptive “mother.” She
has favored humanity with her bounty only in a few remote areas of
the world. Rarely has she been the giving nurturer created in distant
times by mythopoeic thought. The “savage” of Victorian ethnography
must always struggle (or “wrestle,” to use Marx’s term) with her to
perpetuate life — which is ordinarily miserably and mercifully brief,
tolerable at times but never secure, and only marginally plentiful and
idyllic. Humanity’s emergence from the constrictive world of natural
scarcity has thus been perceived as a largely technical problem of
placing the ungiving forces of nature under social command, creating
and increasing surpluses, dividing labor (notably, separating crafts from
agriculture), and sustaining intellectually productive urban elites. Thus,
given the leisure time to think and administer society, these elites could
create science, enlarge the entire sphere of human knowledge, and
sophisticate human culture. As Proudhon plaintively declared, echoing
the prevailing spirit of the time: “Yes, life is a struggle. But the struggle
is not between man and man — it is between men and Nature; and it is
each one’s duty to share it.”
Marx assumed the same view toward the “burden of nature.” But
he placed considerable emphasis on human domination as an
unavoidable feature of humanity’s domination of the natural world.
Until the development of modern industry (both Marx and Engels
argued), the new surpluses produced by precapitalist technics may vary
quantitatively, but rarely are they sufficient to provide abundance and
leisure for more than a fortunate minority. Given the relatively low
level of preindustrial technics, enough surpluses can be produced to
sustain a privileged class of rulers, perhaps even a substantial one under
exceptionally favorable geographic and climatic conditions. But these
surpluses are not sufficient to free society as a whole from the pressures
of want, material insecurity, and toil. If such limited surpluses were
equitably divided among the multitudes who produce them, a social
condition would emerge in which “want is made general,” as Marx
observed, “and with want the struggle for necessities and all the old
shit would necessarily be reproduced.” An egalitarian division of the
surpluses would merely yield a society based on equality in poverty, an
equality that would simply perpetuate the latent conditions for the
restoration of class rule. Ultimately, the abolition of classes presupposes
the “development of the productive forces,” the advance of technology
to a point where everyone can be free from the burdens of want,
material insecurity, and toil. As long as surpluses are merely marginal,
social development occurs in a gray zone between a remote past in
which productivity is too low to support classes and a distant future
in which it is sufficiently high to abolish class rule.
Hence emerges the other side of humanity’s drama: the negative side
of its development, which conveys the real meaning of the “social
problem” as used by Marxian theorists. Technical progress exacts a
penalty for the benefits it ultimately confers on humanity. To resolve
the problem of natural scarcity, the development of technics entails the
reduction of humanity to a technical force. People become instruments
of production, just like the tools and machines they create. They, in
turn, are subject to the same forms of coordination, rationalization,
and control that society tries to impose on nature and inanimate
technical instruments. Labor is both the medium whereby humanity
forges its own self-formation and the object of social manipulation. It
involves not only the projection of human powers into free expression
and selfhood but their repression by the performance principle of toil
into obedience and self-renunciation. Self-repression and social
repression form the indispensable counterpoint to personal emancipation
and social emancipation....
Marxian theory sees “man” as the embodiment of two aspects of
material reality: first, as a producer who defines himself by labor;
second, 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 human beings 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 as a “definite mode of life,”
such that “men” are “what they produce and how they produce”
(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 might have seemed
to Marx himself, had he faced it in all its brute clarity....
Society, in turn, becomes a mode of labor 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 the ne,cessities and all the old shit would necessarily be reproduced”
(The German Ideology).
Finally, even when 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. 3)
The bourgeois conceptual framework reaches its apogee, here in images
of ... the unlimited expansion of needs that stands opposed to
“ideological” limits to need (that is, the Hellenic concepts of measure,
balance, and self-sufficiency), the rationalization of production and
labor 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
transcend its objectified status only 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 to 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....
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 sharply
challenged — 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 labor; 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....
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 human beings. 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.
*** Marxism and Leninism
(from “Listen, Marxist!” 1969)
**** The Myth of the Proletariat
For our age, Marx’s greatest contribution to revolutionary thought is
his dialectic of social development. Marx laid bare the great movement
from primitive communism through private property to communism
in its higher form — a communal society resting on a liberatory
technology. In this movement, according to Marx, man passes on from
the domination of man by nature, to the domination of man by man,
and finally to the domination of nature by man and from social
domination as such. Within this larger dialectic, Marx examines the
dialectic of capitalism itself — a social system that constitutes the last
historical “stage” in the domination of man by man. Here Marx not
only makes profound contributions to contemporary revolutionary
thought (particularly in his brilliant analysis of the commodity
relationship) but also exhibits those limitations of time and place that
play so confining a role in our own time.
The most serious of these limitations emerges from Marx’s attempt
to explain the transition from capitalism to socialism, from a class
society to a classless society. It is vitally important to emphasize that
this explanation was reasoned out almost entirely by analogy with the
transition of feudalism to capitalism — that is, from one class society to another class society, from one system of property to another.
Accordingly, Marx points out that just as the bourgeoisie developed
within feudalism as a result of the split between town and country
(more precisely, between crafts and agriculture), so the modern
proletariat developed within capitalism as a result of the advance of
industrial technology. Both classes, we are told, develop social interests
of their own — indeed, revolutionary social interests that throw them
against the old society in which they were spawned. If the bourgeoisie
gained control over economic life long before it overthrew feudal
society, the proletariat, in turn, gains its own revolutionary power by
the fact that it is “disciplined, united, organized” by the factory system.
In both cases, the development of the productive forces becomes
incompatible with the traditional system of social relations. “The
integument is burst asunder.” The old society is replaced by the new.
The critical question we face is this: Can we explain the transition
from a class society to a classless society by means of the same dialectic
that accounts for the transition from one class society to another? This
is not a textbook problem that involves the juggling of logical
abstractions, but a very real and concrete issue for our time. There are
profound differences between the development of the bourgeoisie under
feudalism and the development of the proletariat under capitalism,
which Marx either failed to anticipate or never faced clearly. The
bourgeoisie controlled economic life long before it took state power;
it had become the dominant class materially, culturally, and
ideologically before it asserted its dominance politically. The proletariat
does not control economic life. Despite its indispensable role in the
industrial process, the industrial working class is not even a majority
of the population, and its strategic economic position is being eroded
by cybernation and other technological advances. Hence it requires an
act of high consciousness for the proletariat to use its power to achieve
a social revolution. Until now, the achievement of this consciousness
has been blocked by the fact that the factory milieu is one of the most
well-entrenched arenas of the work ethic, of hierarchical systems of
management, of obedience to leaders, and in recent times of production
committed to superfluous commodities and armaments. The factory
serves not only to “discipline, unite, and organize” the workers but to
do so in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion. In the factory, capitalistic
production not only renews the social relations of capitalism with each
working day, as Marx observed, it also renews the psyche, values, and
ideology of capitalism.
Marx sensed this fact sufficiently to look for reasons more compelling
than the mere fact of exploitation or conflicts over wages and hours to
propel the proletariat into revolutionary action. In his general theory
of capitalist accumulation he tried to delineate the harsh, objective laws
that force the proletariat to assume a revolutionary role. Accordingly
he developed his famous theory of immiseration: Competition between
capitalists compels them to undercut each other’s prices, which in turn
leads to a continual reduction of wages and the absolute impoverishment
of the workers. The proletariat is compelled to revolt because
with the process of competition and the centralization of capital there
“grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation.”
But capitalism has not stood still since Marx’s day. Writing in the
middle years of the nineteenth century, Marx could not be expected to
have grasped the full consequences of his insights into the centralization
of capital and the development of technology. He could not be expected
to have foreseen that capitalism would develop not only from mercantilism
into the dominant industrial form of his day — from state-aided
trading monopolies into highly competitive industrial units — but
further, that with the centralization of capital, capitalism would return
to its mercantilist origins on a higher level of development and resume
the state-aided monopolistic form. The economy tends to merge with
the state and capitalism begins to “plan” its development instead of
leaving it exclusively to the interplay of competition and market forces.
To be sure, the system does not abolish the traditional class struggle
but manages to contain it, using its immense technological resources
to assimilate the most strategic sections of the working class.
Thus the full thrust of the immiseration theory is blunted, and in the
United States the traditional class struggle fails to develop into the class
war. It remains entirely within bourgeois dimensions. Marxism, in fact,
becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advanced forms of the
state capitalist movement — notably Russia. By an incredible irony of
history, Marxian “socialism” turns out to be in large part the very state
capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism.
The proletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary class within
the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of
bourgeois society....
A qualitatively new situation emerges when man is faced with a
transformation from a repressive class society, based on material
scarcity, into a liberatory classless society, based on material abundance.
From the decomposing traditional class structure a new human type is
created in ever-increasing numbers: the revolutionary. This revolutionary
begins to challenge not only the economic and political premises
of hierarchical society but hierarchy as such. He not only raises the
need for social revolution but also tries to live in a revolutionary manner
to the degree that this is possible in the existing society. He not only
attacks the forms created by the legacy of domination but also
improvises new forms of liberation that take their poetry from the
future.
This preparation for the future, this experimentation with liberatory
post-scarcity forms of social relations, may be illusory if the future
involves a substitution of one class society by another; it is
indispensable, however, if the future involves a classless society built
on the ruins of a class society. What then will be the “agent” of
revolutionary change? It will be literally the great majority of society,
drawn from all the different traditional classes and fused into a common
revolutionary force by the decomposition of the institutions, social
forms, values and lifestyles of the prevailing class structure. Typically
its most advanced elements are the youth — a generation that has known
no chronic economic crisis and that this becoming less and less oriented
toward the myth of material security so widespread among the
generation of the thirties.
If it is true that a social revolution cannot be achieved without the
active or passive support of the workers, it is no less true that it cannot
be achieved without the active or passive support of the farmers,
technicians and professionals. Above all, a social revolution cannot be
achieved without the support of the youth, from which the ruling class
recruits its armed forces. If the ruling class retains its armed might, the
revolution is lost no matter how many workers rally to its support.
This has been vividly demonstrated not only by Spain in the thirties
but by Hungary in the fifties and Czechoslovakia in the sixties. The
revolution of today — by its very nature, indeed, by its pursuit of wholeness — wins not only the soldier and the worker but the very generation from which soldiers, workers, technicians, farmers, scientists, professionals, and even bureaucrats have been recruited.
Discarding the tactical handbooks of the past, the revolution of the
future follows the path of least resistance, eating its way into the most
susceptible areas of the population irrespective of their “class position.”
It is nourished by all the contradictions in bourgeois society, not simply
by the contradictions of the 1860s and 1917. Hence it attracts all those
who feel the burdens of exploitation, poverty, racism, imperialism and,
yes, those whose lives are frustrated by consumerism, suburbia, the
mass media, the family, school, the supermarket, and the prevailing
system of repressed sexuality. Here the form of the revolution becomes
as total as its content — classless, propertyless, hierarchy less, and wholly
liberating....
**** The Myth of the Party
Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups, or cadres. They
occur as a result of deep-seated historical forces and contradictions
that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely
because the “masses” find the existing society intolerable (as Trotsky
argued) but also because of the tension between the actual and the
possible, between what-is and what-could-be. Abject misery alone does
not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless
demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain of the living like
a nightmare because it was largely the product of “intolerable
conditions,” of a devastating imperialistic war. Whatever dreams it had
were virtually destroyed by an even bloodier civil war, by famine, and
by treachery. What emerged from the revolution were the ruins not of
an old society but of whatever hopes existed to achieve a new one. The
Russian Revolution failed miserably; it replaced czarism with state
capitalism. The Bolsheviks were the tragic victims of their own ideology
and paid with their lives in great numbers during the purges of the 1930s.
To attempt to acquire any unique wisdom from this scarcity revolution
is ridiculous. What we can learn from the revolutions of the past is what
all revolutions have in common and their profound limitations compared
with the enormous possibilities that are now open to us.
The most striking feature of the past revolutions is that they began
spontaneously. Whether it be the French Revolution of 1798, the
revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia,
the overthrow of the czar in 1917, the Hungarian revolution of 1956,
or the French general strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally
the same: a period of ferment explodes spontaneously into a mass
upsurge. Whether the upsurge is successful depends on its resoluteness
and on whether the troops go over to the people.
The “glorious party,” when there is one, almost invariably lags
behind the events. In February 1917 the Petrograd organization of the
Bolsheviks opposed the calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the
revolution that was destined to overthrow the czar. Fortunately, the
workers ignored the Bolshevik “directives” and went on strike anyway.
In the events that followed, no one was more surprised by the
revolution than the “revolutionary” parties, including the Bolsheviks.
As the Bolshevik leader Kayurov recalled: “Absolutely no guiding
initiatives from the party were felt ... the Petrograd committee had
been arrested and the representative from the Central Committee,
Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming
day.” [47] Perhaps this was fortunate. Before the Petrograd committee was
arrested, its evaluation of the situation and its own role had been so
dismal that, had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful that
the revolution would have occurred when it did.
The same kind of story could be told of the upsurges that preceded
1917 and those that followed — to cite only the most recent, the student
uprising and general strike in France during May–June 1968. There is
a convenient tendency to forget that close to a dozen “tightly
centralized” Bolshevik-type organizations existed in Paris at this time.
It is rarely mentioned that virtually every one of these “vanguard”
groups disdained the student uprising up to May 7, when the street
fighting broke out in earnest. The Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste
Revolutionnaire was a notable exception — and it merely coasted along,
essentially following the initiatives of the March 22nd Movement. Up
to May 7, all the Maoist groups criticized the student uprising as
peripheral and unimportant; the Trotskyist Federation des Etudiants
Revolutionnaires regarded it as “adventuristic” and tried to get the
students to leave the barricades on May 10; the Communist Party, of
course, played a completely treacherous role. Far from leading the
popular movement, the Maoists and Trotskyists were its captives
throughout. Ironically, most of these Bolshevik groups used manipulative
techniques shamelessly in the Sorbonne student assembly in an
effort to “control” it, introducing a disruptive atmosphere that
demoralized the entire body. Finally, to complete the irony, all of these
Bolshevik groups were to babble about the need for “centralized
leadership” when the popular movement collapsed — a movement that
occurred despite their “directives” and often in opposition to them.
Revolutions and uprisings worthy of any note not only have an initial
phase that is magnificently anarchic but also tend spontaneously to create their own forms of revolutionary self-management. The Parisian
sections of 1793–4 were the most remarkable forms of self-management
to be created by any of the social revolutions in history. More familiar
in form were the councils or “soviets” that the Petrograd workers
established in 1905. Although less democratic than the sections, the
councils were to reappear in a number of later revolutions. Still another
form of revolutionary self-management was the factory committees that
the anarchists established in the Spanish Revolution of 1936. Finally,
the sections reappeared as student assemblies and action committees in
the May–June uprising and general strike in Paris in 1968.
At this point we must ask what role the “revolutionary” party plays
in all these developments. In the beginning, as we have seen, it tends
to have an inhibitory function, not a “vanguard” role. Where it
exercises influence, it tends to slow down the flow of events, not
“coordinate” the revolutionary forces. This is not accidental. The party
is structured along hierarchical lines that reflect the very society it professes to oppose. Despite its theoretical pretensions, it is a bourgeois
organism, a miniature state, with an apparatus and a cadre whose
function it is to seize power, not dissolve power. Rooted in the
prerevolutionary period, it assimilates all the forms, techniques, and
mentality of bureaucracy. Its membership is schooled in obedience and
in the preconceptions of a rigid dogma and is taught to revere the
leadership. The party’s leadership, in turn, is schooled in habits born
of command, authority, manipulation, and egomania. This situation is
worsened when the party participates in parliamentary elections. In
election campaigns, the vanguard party models itself completely on
existing bourgeois forms and even acquires the paraphernalia of the
electoral party. The situation assumes truly critical proportions when
the party acquires large presses, costly headquarters, and a large
inventory of centrally controlled periodicals and develops a paid
apparatus — in short, a bureaucracy with vested material interests.
As the party expands, the distance between the leadership and the
ranks invariably increases. Its leaders not only become personages, they
lose contact with the living situation below. The local groups, which
know their own immediate situation better than any remote leader, are
obliged to subordinate their insights to directives from above. The
leadership, lacking any direct knowledge of local problems, responds
sluggishly and prudently. Although it stakes out a claim to the larger
view, to greater theoretical competence, the competence of the leadership
tends to diminish as one ascends the hierarchy of command. The
more one approaches the level where the real decisions are made, the
more conservative is the nature of the decision-making process, the
more bureaucratic and extraneous are the factors that come into play,
the more considerations of prestige and retrenchment supplant
creativity, imagination, and a disinterested dedication to revolutionary
goals.
The party becomes less efficient from a revolutionary point of view
the more it seeks efficiency by means of hierarchy, cadres, and
centralization. Although everyone marches in step, the orders are
usually wrong, especially when events move rapidly and take unexpected
turns — as they do in all revolutions. The party is efficient in
only one respect — in molding society in its own hierarchical image if
the revolution is successful. It recreates bureaucracy, centralization,
and the state. It fosters the very social conditions that justify this kind
of society. Hence, instead of “withering away,” the state controlled by
the “glorious party” preserves the very conditions that “necessitate”
the existence of a state — and a party to guard it.
On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vulnerable in
periods of repression. The bourgeoisie has only to grab its leadership
to destroy virtually the entire movement. With its leaders in prison or
in hiding, the party becomes paralyzed; obedient membership has no
one to obey and tends to flounder. Demoralization sets in rapidly. The
party decomposes not only because of the repressive atmosphere but
also because of its poverty of inner resources.
The foregoing account is not a series of hypothetical inferences. It is
a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past centurythe
Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Trotskyist party of
Ceylon (the only mass party of its kind). To claim that these parties
failed to take their Marxian principles seriously merely conceals another
question: Why did this failure happen in the first place? The fact is,
these parties were co-opted into bourgeois society because they were
structured along bourgeois lines. The germ of treachery existed in them
from birth....
It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Bolsheviks tended to
centralize their party to the degree that they became isolated from the
working class. This relationship has rarely been investigated in latterday
Leninist circles, although Lenin was honest enough to admit it.
The story of the Russian Revolution is not merely the story of the
Bolshevik Party and its supporters. Beneath the veneer of official events
described by Soviet historians there was another, more basic
development — the spontaneous movement of the workers and revolutionary
peasants, which later clashed sharply with the bureaucratic
policies of the Bolsheviks. With the overthrow of the czar in February
1917, workers in virtually all the factories of Russia spontaneously
established factory committees, staking out an increasing claim on
industrial operations. In June 1917 an all-Russian conference of factory
committees was held in Petrograd that called for the “organization of
thorough control by labor over production and distribution.” The
demands of this conference are rarely mentioned in Leninist accounts
of the Russian Revolution, despite the fact that the conference aligned
itself with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, who describes the factory committees
as “the most direct and indubitable representation of the proletariat in
the whole country,” deals with them only peripherally in his massive
three-volume history of the revolution. Yet so important were these
spontaneous organisms of self-management that Lenin, despairing of
winning the soviets in the summer of 1917, was prepared to jettison
the slogan “All power to the soviets” for “All power to the factory
committees.” This demand would have catapulted the Bolsheviks into
an anarchosyndicalist position, although it is doubtful that they would
have remained there very long.
With the October Revolution, all the factory committees seized
control of the plants, ousting the bourgeoisie and completely taking
control of industry. In accepting the concept of workers’ control, Lenin’s
famous decree of November 14, 1917, merely acknowledged an
accomplished fact: the Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workers at this
early date. But they began to whittle down the power of the factory
committees. In January 1918, a scant two months after “decreeing”
workers’ control, Lenin began to advocate that the administration of
the factories be placed under trade union control. The story that the
Bolsheviks “patiently” experimented with workers’ control, only to
find it “inefficient” and “chaotic,” is a myth. Their “patience” did not
last more than a few weeks. Not only did Lenin oppose direct workers’
control within a matter of weeks after the November 14 decree, even
union control came to an end shortly after it had been established. By
the summer of 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed
under bourgeois forms of management. As Lenin put it, the “revolution
demands ... precisely in the interests of socialism that the masses
unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process.”[48]
Thereafter, workers’ control was denounced not only as “inefficient,”
“chaotic,” and “impractical” but also as “petty bourgeois”!
The Left Communist Osinsky bitterly attacked all of these spurious
claims and warned the party, “Socialism and socialist organization must
be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all;
something else will be set up — state capitalism.”[49] In the “interests of
socialism” the Bolshevik party elbowed the proletariat out of every
domain it had conquered by its own efforts and initiative. The party
did not coordinate the revolution or even lead it; it dominated it. First
workers’ control and later union control were replaced by an elaborate
hierarchy as monstrous as any structure that existed in prerevolutionary
times. In later years Osinsky’s prophecy became reality.
The problem of “who is to prevail” — the Bolsheviks or the Russian
“masses” — was by no means limited to the factories. The issue
reappeared in the countryside as well as in the cities. A sweeping
peasant war had buoyed up the movement of the workers. Contrary
to official Leninist accounts, the agrarian upsurge was by no means
limited to a redistribution of the land into private plots. In the Ukraine,
peasants influenced by the anarchist militias of Nestor Makhno and
guided by the communist maxim “From each according to his ability;
to each according to his needs,” established a multitude of rural
communes. Elsewhere, in the north and in Soviet Asia, several thousand
of these organisms were established, partly on the initiative of the Left
Social Revolutionaries and in large measure as a result of traditional
collectivist impulses that stemmed from the Russian village, the mir. It
matters little whether these communes were numerous or embraced
large numbers of peasants; the point is that they were authentic popular
organisms, the nuclei of a moral and social spirit that ranged far above
the dehumanizing values of bourgeois society.
The Bolsheviks frowned upon these organisms from the very
beginning and eventually condemned them. To Lenin, the preferred,
the more “socialist” form of agricultural enterprise was the state farman
agricultural factory in which the state owned the land and farming
equipment, appointing managers who hired peasants on a wage basis.
One sees in these attitudes toward workers’ control and agricultural
communes the essentially bourgeois spirit and mentality that permeated
the Bolshevik Party — a spirit and mentality that emanated not only
from its theories but from its corporate mode of organization. In
December 1918 Lenin launched an attack on the communes on the
pretext that peasants were being forced to enter them. Actually, little
if any coercion was used to organize these communistic forms of self-management.
As Robert G. Wesson, who studied the Soviet commune
in detail, concludes, “Those who went into communes must have done
so largely of their own volition.”[50] The communes were not suppressed,
but their growth was discouraged until Stalin merged the entire
development into the forced collectivization drives of the late 1920s
and early 1930s.
By 1920, the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves from the Russian
working class and peasantry. Taken together, the elimination of
workers’ control, the suppression of the Makhnovtsy, the restrictive
political atmosphere in the country, the inflated bureaucracy, and the
crushing material poverty inherited from the civil war years generated
a deep hostility toward Bolshevik rule. With the end of hostilities, a
movement surged up from the depths of Russian society for a “third
revolution” — not to restore the past, as the Bolsheviks claimed, but to
realize the very goals of freedom, economic as well as political, that
had rallied the masses around the Bolshevik program of 1917. The new
movement found its most conscious form in the Petrograd proletariat
and among the Kronstadt sailors. It also found expression in the party:
the growth of anticentralist and anarchosyndicalist tendencies among
the Bolsheviks reached a point where a bloc of oppositional groups,
oriented toward these issues, gained 124 seats at a Moscow provincial
conference, as against 154 for supporters of the Central Committee.
On March 2, 1921, the “red sailors” of Kronstadt rose in open
rebellion, raising the banner of a “Third Revolution of the Toilers.”
The Kronstadt program centered on demands for free elections to the
soviets, freedom of speech and press for the anarchists and the left
socialist parties, free trade unions, and the liberation of all prisoners
who belonged to socialist parties. The most shameless stories were
fabricated by the Bolsheviks to account for this uprising, acknowledged
in later years as brazen lies. The revolt was characterized as a “White
Guard plot” despite the fact that the great majority of Communist Party
members in Kronstadt joined the sailors — precisely as Communists — in
denouncing the party leaders as betrayers of the October Revolution.
As R. V. Daniels observes in his study of Bolshevik oppositional
movements, “Ordinary Communists were indeed so unreliable ... that
the government did not depend upon them either in the assault on
Kronstadt itself or in keeping order in Petrograd, where Kronstadt’s
hopes for support chiefly rested. The main body of troops employed
were Chekists and officer cadets from Red Army training schools. The
final assault on Kronstadt was led by the top officialdom of the
Communist Party — a large group of delegates to the Tenth Party
Congress was rushed from Moscow for this purpose.”[51] So weak was
the regime internally that the elite had to do its own dirty work....
We have discussed these events in detail because they lead to a
conclusion that the latest crop of Marxist-Leninists tend to avoid: the
Bolshevik party reached its maximum degree of centralization in Lenin’s
day not to achieve a revolution or suppress a White Guard counterrevolution, but to effect a counterrevolution of its own against the very social forces it professed to represent. Factions were prohibited and a
monolithic party created not to prevent a “capitalist restoration” but
to contain a mass movement of workers for soviet democracy and social
freedom. The Lenin of 1921 stood opposed to the Lenin of 1917.
Thereafter Lenin simply floundered. This man who above all had
sought to anchor the problems of his party in social contradictions
found himself literally playing an organizational numbers game in a
last-ditch attempt to arrest the very bureaucratization he had himself
created. There is nothing more pathetic and tragic than Lenin’s last
years. Paralyzed by a simplistic body of Marxist formulas, he could
think of no better countermeasures than organizational ones. He
proposes the formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection to
correct bureaucratic deformations in the party and state — and this body
falls under Stalin’s control and becomes highly bureaucratic in its own
right. Lenin then suggests that the size of the Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspection be reduced and that it be merged with the Control
Commission. He advocated enlarging the Central Committee. Thus it
rolls along: this body to be enlarged, that one to be merged with
another, still a third to be modified or abolished. The strange ballet of
organizational forms continues up to his very death, as though the
problem could be resolved by organizational means. As Moshe Lewin,
an obvious admirer of Lenin, admits, the Bolshevik leader “approached
the problem of government more like a chief executive of a strictly
‘elitist’ turn of mind. He did not apply methods of social analysis to
the government and was content to consider it purely in terms of
organizational methods.”[52]
If it is true that in the bourgeois revolutions the “phrase went beyond
the content,” in the Bolshevik revolution the forms replaced the content.
The soviets replaced the workers and their factory committees, the
party replaced the soviets, the Central Committee replaced the party,
and the Political Bureau replaced the Central Committee. In short,
means replaced ends. This incredible substitution of form for content
is one of the most characteristic traits of Marxism-Leninism. In France
during the May–June events, all the Bolshevik organizations were
prepared to destroy the Sorbonne student assembly in order to increase
their influence and membership. Their principal concern was not the
revolution or the authentic social forms created by the students but the
growth of their own parties.
Only one force could have arrested the growth of bureaucracy in
Russia: a social force. Had the Russian proletariat and peasantry
succeeded in increasing the domain of self-management through the
development of viable factory committees, rural communes, and free
soviets, the history of the country might have taken a dramatically
different turn. There can be no question that the failure of socialist
revolutions in Europe after the First World War led to the isolation of
the revolution in Russia. The material poverty of Russia, coupled with
the pressure of the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militated
against the development of a socialist or a consistently libertarian
society. But by no means was it ordained that Russia had to develop
along state capitalist lines; contrary to Lenin’s and Trotsky’s initial
expectations, the revolution was defeated by internal forces, not by
invasion of armies from abroad. Had the movement from below
restored the initial achievements of the revolution in 1917, a
multifaceted social structure might have developed, based on workers’
control of industry, on a freely developing peasant economy in
agriculture, and on a living interplay of ideas, programs, and political
movements. At the very least, Russia would not have been imprisoned
in totalitarian chains, and Stalinism would not have poisoned the world
revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascism and the Second
World War.
The development of the Bolshevik party, however, precluded this
development — Lenin’s or Trotsky’s “good intentions” notwithstanding.
By destroying the power of the factory committees in industry and by
crushing the Makhnovtsy, the Petrograd workers, and the Kronstadt
sailors, the Bolsheviks virtually guaranteed the triumph of the Russian
bureaucracy over Russian society. The centralized party — a completely
bourgeois institution — became the refuge of counterrevolution in its
most sinister form. This was covert counterrevolution that draped itself
in the red flag and the terminology of Marx. Ultimately, what the
Bolsheviks suppressed in 1921 was not an ideology or a White Guard
conspiracy but an elemental struggle of the Russian people to free
themselves of their shackles and take control of their own destiny. For
Russia, this meant the nightmare of Stalinist dictatorship; for the
generation of the 1930s, it meant the horror of fascism and the
treachery of the Communist parties in Europe and the United States.
**** The Two Traditions
It would be incredibly naive to suppose that Leninism was the product
of a single man. The disease lies much deeper, not only in the limitations
of Marxian theory but in the limits of the social era that produced
Marxism. If this is not clearly understood, we will remain as blind to
the dialectic of events today as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky were
in their own day. For us this blindness will be all the more reprehensible
because behind us lies a wealth of experience that these men lacked in
developing their theories.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were centralists — not only politically
but socially and economically. They never denied this fact, and their
writings are studded with glowing encomiums to political, organizational,
and economic centralization. As early as March 1850, in the
“Address of the Central Council to the Communist League,” they called
upon the workers to strive not only for “the single and indivisible
German republic, but also strive in it for the most decisive centralization
of power in the hands of the state authority.” Lest the demand be taken
lightly, it was repeated continually in the same paragraph, which
concludes: “As in France in 1793, so today in Germany the carrying
through of the strictest centralization is the task of the really
revolutionary party.”
The same theme reappeared continually in later years. With the
outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War, for example, Marx wrote to
Engels: “The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the
centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the
German working class.”[53]
Marx and Engels, however, were not centralists because they believed
in the virtues of centralism per se. Quite the contrary: Marxism and
anarchism have always agreed that a liberated communist society would
entail sweeping decentralization, the dissolution of bureaucracy, the
abolition of the state, and the breakup of the large cities. “Abolition
of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible,”
noted Engels in Anti-Dühring. “It has become a direct necessity ... the
present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put to an end only
by the fusion of town and country.” To Engels this would involve a
“uniform distribution of the population over the whole country” — in
short, the physical decentralization of the cities.[54]
The origins of Marxian centralism are in problems arising from the
formation of the national state. Until well into the latter half of the
nineteenth century, Germany and Italy were divided into a multitude
of independent duchies, principalities, and kingdoms. The consolidation
of these geographical units into unified nations, Marx and Engels
believed, was a sine qua non for the development of modern industry
and capitalism. Their praise of centralism was engendered not by any
centralistic mystique but by the events of the period in which they
lived — the development of technology, trade, a unified working class,
and the national state. Their concern on this score, in short, is with the
emergence of capitalism, with the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in
an era of unavoidable material scarcity. Marx’s approach to a
“proletarian revolution,” on the other hand, is markedly different. He
enthusiastically praised the Paris Commune as a “model to all the
industrial centers of France.” “This regime,” he wrote, “once established
in Paris and the secondary centers, the old centralized government
would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers” (emphasis added). The unity of the nation, to be sure,
would not disappear, and a central government would exist during the
transition to communism, but its functions would be limited.
Our object is not to bandy about quotations from Marx and Engels
but to emphasize how key tenets of Marxism — which are accepted so
uncritically today — were in fact the product of an era that has long
been transcended by the development of capitalism in the United States
and Western Europe. In his day Marx was occupied not only with
problems of the “proletarian revolution” but also with the problems
of the bourgeois revolution, particularly in Germany, Spain, Italy, and
Eastern Europe. He was dealing with problems of transition from
capitalism to socialism in capitalist countries that had not advanced
much beyond the coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution,
and with the problems of transition from feudalism to capitalism in
countries that had scarcely advanced much beyond handicrafts and the
guild system. To state these concerns broadly, Marx was occupied above
all with the preconditions of freedom (technological development,
national unification, material abundance) rather than with the
conditions of freedom (decentralization, the formation of communities,
the human scale, direct democracy). His theories were still anchored
in the realm of survival, not the realm of life.
Once this is grasped, it is possible to place Marx’s theoretical legacy
in meaningful perspective — to separate its rich contributions from its
historically limited, indeed paralyzing shackles on our own time. The
Marxian dialectic, the many seminal insights provided by historical
materialism, the superb critique of the commodity relationship, many
elements of the economic theories, the theory of alienation, and above
all the notion that freedom has material preconditions — these are lasting
contributions to revolutionary thought.
By the same token, Marx’s emphasis on the industrial proletariat as
the “agent” of revolutionary change, his “class analysis” in explaining
the transition from a class to a classless society, his concept of the
proletarian dictatorship, his emphasis on centralism, his theory of
capitalist development (which tends to jumble state capitalism with
socialism), his advocacy of political action through electoral parties —
these and many related concepts are false in the context of our time
and were misleading even in his own day. They emerged from the
limitations of his vision — more properly, from the limitations of his
time. They make sense only if one remembers that Marx regarded
capitalism as historically progressive, as an indispensable stage in the
development of socialism, and they have practical applicability only to
a time when Germany in particular was confronted by bourgeoisdemocratic
tasks and national unification. We are not trying to say that
Marx was correct in holding this approach, merely that the approach
makes sense when viewed in its time and place.
[46] Murray Bookchin, “Thinking Ecologically,” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology, seconded., rev. (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), p. 142, note 2.
[47] Quoted in Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1932), vol. 1, p. 144.
[48] V.I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” (April1918); in
Selected Works, vol. 7 (New York: International Publishers, 1943), p. 342.
[49] V. V. Osinsky, “On the Building of Socialism,” Kommunist, no. 2 (April
1918), quoted in R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 85–6.
[50] Robert G. Wesson, Soviet Communes (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1963 ), p. 110.
[51] Daniels, Conscience, p. 145.
[52] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York: Pantheon, 1958), p. 122.
[53] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (New York:
International Publishers, 1942), p. 292.
[54] Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring)
(New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 323.
** Chapter 7: Anarchism
*** Introduction
In the epilogue to his 1962 history of anarchism, George Woodcock
concluded that anarchism as a movement was all but dead. “During
the past forty years,” he wrote
the influence [the movement] once established has dwindled, by
defeat after defeat and by the slow draining of hope, almost to
nothing. Nor is there any reasonable likelihood of a renaissance
of anarchism as we have known it.... History suggests that
movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never
born again.[55]
Within only a few years of Woodcock’s interment of anarchism
in the cemetery of defunct social theories, Bookchin was breathing
life back into it. With the emergence of the ecological issue and
the new potentiality for post-scarcity in the postwar period,
anarchism ceased to be merely a utopian fantasy and seemed, on
the contrary, to be a logical consequence of developments in
European and American history.
Releasing anarchism from the grip of traditional but historically
superseded notions, Bookchin brought to the surface tendencies
in anarchism that had lain dormant or received insufficient
attention in previous generations, especially its relevance to
ecology and its emphasis on communalism and confederation.
Recasting it in terms of an opposition to hierarchy and
domination and melding it with the call for an ecological society,
Bookchin advanced his new anarchism within the 1960s’
counterculture as the only credible alternative to the destruction
of the planet.
In reaction to Marxist authoritarianism, Bookchin was looking for
revolutionary institutions that would be genuinely emancipatory:
for “forms of freedom” that would be popular, direct-democratic,
and decentralized, in contrast to the domineering centralism he
despised. The “legacy of freedom” that he traced through Western
history was in large part a search for these institutions: the
millenarian Christian sects and democratic communes of medieval
Europe, the town meetings of colonial New England, the sectional
assemblies of revolutionary Paris.
Anarchism’s appeal to Bookchin lay not only in its libertarian
principles but in the attention it had given to such institutions,
particularly the anarcho-syndicalist collectives of revolutionary
Spain. Consistently the anarchism to which he adhered was a
communalistic social anarchism, an anarcho-communism that
sought a condition of positive freedom for society as a whole, and
not the individualistic anarchism represented by the tendency of
Max Stirner that sought negative liberty for the isolated ego.
Thus Bookchin did not embrace anarchism in toto, any more than
he had rejected Marxism in toto. He had no patience for its
sometime glorifications of individual autonomy at the expense of
the community; or for its erstwhile distrust of organizations and
institutions as such; or for its tendencies to antinomianism, rejecting
all socially established morality; or for its propensities toward antiintellectualism.
On the contrary, he argued that it is precisely
through community and institutions — democratic and self-managed
— that individual freedom is possible; that a generally
accepted, even objectively grounded ethics is a necessary
component of that community; and that anarchism must become
a theoretically coherent body of ideas rather than content itself
with anti-intellectual adventurism.
Utopian anarchism appealed widely to alienated youth of the
1960s, leading to the very “renaissance” that Woodcock had
thought unlikely, a “renaissance” that continues, however
diminished in momentum, to this day. As historian Peter Marshall
affirms, “The thinker who has most renewed anarchist thought and
action since World War II is undoubtedly Murray Bookchin.”[56]
*** The Two Traditions: Anarchism
(from “Listen, Marxist!” 1969)
Just as the Russian Revolution included a subterranean movement of
the “masses” that conflicted with Bolshevism, so there is a subterranean
movement in history that conflicts with all systems of authority. This
movement has entered into our time under the name of anarchism,
although it has never been encompassed by a single ideology or body
of sacred texts. Anarchism is a libidinal movement of humanity against
coercion in any form, reaching back in time to the very emergence of
propertied society, class rule, and the state. From this period onward,
the oppressed have resisted all forms that sought to imprison the
spontaneous development of social order. Anarchism has surged to the
foreground of the social arena in periods of major transition from one
historical era to another. The declining ancient and feudal worlds
witnessed the upsurge of mass movements, in some cases wildly
Dionysian in character, that demanded an end to all systems of
authority, privilege, and coercion.
The anarchic movements of the past failed largely because material
scarcity, a function of the low level of technology, vitiated an organic
harmonization of human interests. Any society that could promise little
more materially than equality of poverty invariably engendered deepseated
tendencies to restore a new system of privilege. In the absence of
a technology that could appreciably reduce the working day, the need
to work vitiated social institutions based on self-management. The
Girondins of the French Revolution shrewdly recognized that they could
use the working day against revolutionary Paris. To exclude radical
elements from the sections, they tried to enact legislation that would
end all assembly meetings before ten p.m., the hour when Parisian
workers returned from their jobs. Indeed, it was not only the
manipulative techniques and the treachery of the “vanguard” organizations
that brought the anarchic phases of past revolutions to an end,
it was also the material limits of past eras. The “masses” were always
compelled to return to a lifetime of toil and were rarely free to establish
organs of self-management that could last beyond the revolution.
Anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, however, were by no
means wrong in criticizing Marx for his emphasis on centralism and
his elitist notions of organization. Was centralism absolutely necessary
for technological advances in the past? Was the nation-state indispensable
to the expansion of commerce? Did the workers’ movement benefit
from the emergence of highly centralized economic enterprises and the
“indivisible” state? We tend to accept these tenets of Marxism too
uncritically, largely because capitalism developed within a centralized
political arena. The anarchists of the last century warned that Marx’s
centralistic approach, insofar as it affected the events of the time, would
so strengthen the bourgeoisie and the state apparatus that the
overthrow of capitalism would be extremely difficult. The revolutionary
party, by duplicating these centralistic, hierarchical features, would
reproduce hierarchy and centralism in the postrevolutionary society.
Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta were not so naive as to believe
that anarchism could be established overnight. In imputing this notion
to Bakunin, Marx and Engels willfully distorted the Russian anarchist’s
views. Nor did the anarchists of the last century believe that the
abolition of the state involved “laying down arms” immediately after
the revolution, to use Marx’s obscurantist words, thoughtlessly repeated
by Lenin in State and Revolution. Indeed, much that passes for
“Marxism” in State and Revolution is pure anarchism — for example,
the substitution of revolutionary militias for professional armed bodies
and the substitution of organs of self-management for parliamentary
bodies. What is authentically Marxist in Lenin’s pamphlet is the
demand for “strict centralism,” the acceptance of a “new” bureaucracy,
and the identification of soviets with a state.
The anarchists of the last century were deeply preoccupied with the
question of achieving industrialization without crushing the
revolutionary spirit of the “masses” and rearing new obstacles to
emancipation. They feared that centralization would reinforce the
ability of the bourgeoisie to resist the revolution and instill in the
workers a sense of obedience. They tried to rescue all those precapitalist
communal forms (such as the Russian mir and the Spanish pueblo) that
might provide a springboard to a free society, in not only a structural
sense but also a spiritual one. Hence they emphasized the need for
decentralization even under capitalism. In contrast to the Marxian
parties, their organizations gave considerable attention to what they
called integral education — the development of the whole man — to
counteract the debasing and banalizing influence of bourgeois society.
The anarchists tried to live by the values of the future to the extent that
this was possible under capitalism. They believed in direct action to
foster the initiative of the “masses,” to preserve the spirit of revolt, to
encourage spontaneity. They tried to develop organizations based on
mutual aid and brotherhood, in which control would be exercised from
below upward, not downward from above.
We must pause here to examine the nature of anarchist organizational
forms in some detail, if only because the subject has been obscured by
an appalling amount of rubbish. Anarchists, or at least anarchocommunists,
accept the need for organization. It should be as absurd
to have to repeat this point as to argue over whether Marx accepted
the need for social revolution.
The real question is not organization versus nonorganization but
rather what kind of organization the anarcho-communists try to
establish. What the different kinds of anarcho-communist organizations
have in common is organic developments from below, not bodies
engineered into existence from above. They are social movements,
combining a creative revolutionary lifestyle with a creative revolutionary
theory, not political parties whose mode of life is indistinguishable from
the surrounding bourgeois environment and whose ideology is reduced
to rigid “tried and tested programs.” As much as is humanly possible,
they try to reflect the liberated society they seek to achieve, not slavishly
duplicate the prevailing system of hierarchy, class, and authority. They
are built around intimate groups of brothers and sisters — affinity
groups — whose ability to act in common is based on initiative, on
convictions freely arrived at, and on a deep personal involvement, not
on a bureaucratic apparatus fleshed out by a docile membership and
manipulated from above by a handful of all-knowing leaders.
The anarcho-communists do not deny the need for coordination
between groups, for discipline, for meticulous planning, and for unity
in action. But they believe that coordination, discipline, planning, and
unity in action must be achieved voluntarily, by means of a selfdiscipline
nourished by conviction and understanding, not by coercion
and a mindless, unquestioning obedience to orders from above. They
seek to achieve the effectiveness imputed to centralism by means of
voluntarism and insight, not by establishing a hierarchical, decentralized
structure. Depending upon needs or circumstances, affinity groups can
achieve this effectiveness through assemblies, action committees, and
local, regional, or national conferences. But they vigorously oppose the
establishment of an organizational structure that becomes an end in
itself, of committees that linger on after their practical tasks have been
completed, of a “leadership” that reduces the “revolutionary” to a
mindless robot.
These conclusions are not the result of flighty individualist impulses;
quite to the contrary, they emerge from an exacting study of past
revolutions, of the impact centralized parties have had on the
revolutionary process, and of the nature of social change in an era of
potential material abundance. Anarcho-communists seek to preserve and extend the anarchic phase that opens all the great social revolutions. Even more than Marxists, they recognize that revolutions
are produced by deep historical processes. No central committee
“makes” a social revolution; at best it can stage a coup d’etat, replacing
one hierarchy with another — or worse, arrest a revolutionary process
if it exercises any widespread influence. A central committee is an organ
for acquiring power, for recreating power, for gathering to itself what
the “masses” have achieved by their own revolutionary efforts. One
must be blind to all that has happened over the past two centuries not
to recognize these essential facts.
In the past, Marxists could make an intelligible (although invalid)
claim for the need for a centralized party, because the anarchic phase
of the revolution was nullified by material scarcity. Economically, the
“masses” were always compelled to return to a daily life of toil. The
revolution closed at ten o’clock, quite aside from the reactionary
intentions of the Girondins of 1793; it was arrested by the low level of
technology. Today even this excuse has been removed by the
development of a post-scarcity technology, notably in the United States
and Western Europe. A point has now been reached where the “masses”
can begin, almost overnight, to expand drastically the “realm of
freedom” in the Marxian sense — to acquire the leisure time needed to
achieve the highest degree of self-management.
What the May–June [1968] events in France demonstrated was the
need not for a Bolshevik-type party but for greater consciousness among
the “masses.” Paris demonstrated that an organization is needed to
propagate ideas systematically — and not ideas alone, but ideas that promote the concept of self-management. What the French “masses”
lacked was not a central committee or a Lenin to “organize” or “command”
them, but the conviction that they could have operated the
factories instead of merely occupying them. It is noteworthy that not a single Bolshevik-type party in France raised the demand for self-management.
That demand was raised only by the anarchists and
Situationists.
There is a need for revolutionary organization — but its function must
always be kept clearly in mind. Its first task is propaganda, to “patiently
explain,” as Lenin put it. In a revolutionary situation, the revolutionary
organization presents the most advanced demands: it is prepared at
every turn of events to formulate — in the most concrete fashion — the
immediate task that should be performed to advance the revolutionary
process. It provides the boldest elements in action and in the decision-making
organs of the revolution.
In what way, then, do anarcho-communist groups differ from the
Bolshevik type of party? Certainly not on such issues as the need for
organization, planning, coordination, or propaganda in all its forms
or on the need for a social program. Fundamentally, they differ from
the Bolshevik type of party in their belief that genuine revolutionaries
must function within the framework of the forms created by the revolution, not within the forms created by the party. What this means
is that their commitment is to the revolutionary organs of self-management,
not to the revolutionary organization; to the social forms,
not the political forms. Anarcho-communists seek to persuade the
factory committees, assemblies, or soviets to make themselves into
genuine organs of popular self-management, not to dominate them,
manipulate them, or hitch them to an all-knowing political party.
Anarcho-communists seek not to rear a state structure over these
popular revolutionary organs but, on the contrary, to dissolve all the
organizational forms developed in the prerevolutionary period
(including their own) into these genuine revolutionary organs.
These differences are decisive. Despite their rhetoric and slogans, the
Russian Bolsheviks never believed in the soviets; they regarded them
as instruments of the Bolshevik party ... By 1921, the soviets were
virtually dead, and all decisions were made by the Bolshevik Central
Committee and Political Bureau. Not only do anarcho-communists
seek to prevent Marxist parties from repeating this; they also wish to
prevent their own organization from playing a similar role. Accordingly,
they try to prevent bureaucracy, hierarchy, and elites from emerging in
their midst. No less important, they attempt to remake themselves; to
root out from their own personalities those authoritarian traits and
elitist propensities that are assimilated in hierarchical society almost
from birth. The concern of the anarchist movement with lifestyle is a
preoccupation not merely with its own integrity but with that of the
revolution itself.
In the midst of all the confusing ideological cross-currents of our
time, one question must always remain in the foreground: What the
hell are we trying to make a revolution for? To recreate hierarchy,
dangling a shadowy dream of future freedom before the eyes of
humanity? To promote further technological advance, to create an even
greater abundance of goods than exists today? To “get even” with the
bourgeoisie? ... To bring the Communist Party to power? Or the
Socialist Workers Party? To emancipate such abstractions as “the
proletariat,” “the people,” “history,” “society”?
Or is it finally to dissolve hierarchy, class rule, and coercion — to make it possible for each individual to gain control of his everyday life?
Is it to make each moment as marvelous as it could be and the life-span
of each individual an utterly fulfilling experience? ... We need hardly
argue the inane question of whether individual development can be
severed from social and communal development; obviously the two go
together. The basis for a whole human being is a rounded society; the
basis for a free human being is a free society.
These issues aside, we are still faced with the question that Marx
raised in 1850: when will we begin to take our poetry from the future
instead of the past? The dead must be permitted to bury the dead.
Marxism is dead because it was rooted in an era of material scarcity,
limited in its possibilities by material want. The most important social
message of Marxism is that freedom has material preconditions — we
must survive in order to live. With the development of a technology
that could not have been conceived by the wildest science fiction of
Marx’s day, the possibility of a post-scarcity society now lies before us.
All the institutions of propertied society — class rule, hierarchy, the
patriarchal family, bureaucracy, the city, the state — have been
exhausted. Today, decentralization is not only desirable as a means of
restoring the human scale, it is necessary to recreate a viable ecology,
to preserve life on this planet from destructive pollutants and soil
erosion, to preserve a breathable atmosphere and the balance of nature.
*** Anarchy and Libertarian Utopias
(from Remaking Society, 1990)
The radical theorists and utopists following upon the French Revolution
exhibited more expansive ideals of freedom than their predecessors in
the Enlightenment — and they were to sum up a sweeping body of
alternatives to the course followed by history; alternatives that were
na·ively ignored by their socialist successors.
Both of these legacies are of immense importance for modern
radicalism — the expansiveness of their ideals and the alternatives that
confronted humanity. The anarchist thinkers and libertarian utopists
were deeply sensitive to choices that could have been made in
redirecting human society along rational and liberatory lines. They
raised the far-reaching questions of whether community and
individuality could be brought into harmony with each other; whether
the nation was the necessary, indeed the ethical successor to the
community or commune; whether the State was the unavoidable
successor to city and regional confederations; whether the communal
use of resources had to be supplanted by private ownership; whether
the artisanal production of goods and small, humanly scaled
agricultural operations were destined by “historical necessity” to be
abandoned for giant assembly lines and mechanized systems of
agribusiness. Finally, they raised the question of whether ethics had to
give way to statecraft and what would be the destiny of politics if it
tried to adapt itself to centralized states.
They saw no contradictions between material well-being and a wellordered
society, between substantive equality and freedom, or between
sensuousness, play, and work. They envisioned a society where
abundance would be possible and a gender-blind political culture would
emerge as the work week, superfluous production, and excessive
consumption diminished. These questions, anticipated nearly two
centuries ago and infused with the moral fervor of more than two
thousand years of heretical movements like the Joachimites, have
surfaced in the late twentieth century with a vengeance. Words like
precursors have become simply meaningless from the standpoint of our
crisis-ridden society, which must reevaluate the entire history of ideas
and the alternatives opened by social history. What is immediately
striking about their work is their acute sense of the alternatives to
abuses.
We cannot ignore the differences that distinguish the anarchist
theorists and the libertarian utopists of the last century from those of
a more distant past. Anarchic tendencies such as the primitive
Christians, the radical Gnostics, the medieval Brotherhood of the Free
Spirit, the Joachimites, and the Anabaptists viewed freedom more as a
result of a supernaturalistic visitation than as the product of human
activity. This basically passive-receptive mentality, based on mystical
underpinnings, is crucial. That certain premodern tendencies in the
anarchic tradition did act to change the world does not alter the fact
that even their very actions were seen as the expression of a theistic
preordination. In their eyes, action stemmed from the transmutation
of the deity’s will into human will. It was the product of a social
alchemy that was possible because of a supernatural decision, not
because of human autonomy. The “philosopher’s stone” of change in
this early approach reposed in heaven, not on earth. Freedom had to
“come,” as it were, from agents that were suprahuman, be they Christ
in the “second coming” or a new messiah. Generally, in accord with
Gnostic thinking there were always elites like “psychics” who were
free of evil or leaders blessed with moral perfection. History, in effect,
was as much of a clock as it was a Joachimite chronicle, ticking away
metaphysical time until the sins of the world became so intolerable that
they activated the deity, who no longer forswore his creation as well
as the suffering of the poor, deprived, and oppressed.
The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and above all the nineteenth
century radically altered this na”ive social dispensation. The Age of
Revolutions, as we may properly characterize the period from the late
1770s to the mid-twentieth century, banished supernatural visitations
and a passive-receptive stance by the oppressed from its historical
agenda. The oppressed had to act if they wished to free themselves.
They had to make their own history willfully, an incisive concept that
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for all his failings, added to the history of
radical ideas and for which he deserves immortality. The oppressed had
to reason. There was no appeal to powers other than their own minds.
The combination of reason and will, of thought and action, of reflection
and intervention, changed the whole landscape of radicalism, divesting
it of its mythic, mystical, religious, and intuitive qualities (which,
regrettably, are beginning to return today in a disempowered and
psychotherapized world).
The radicalism of the Age of Revolutions, however, went further.
The Joachimite treatment of history moves, not unlike the Marxist, to
the drumbeat of an inexorable “final days,” an end, even a Hegelian
absolute, where all that was had to be, in some sense, all that unfolded
and followed the guidance of a “hidden hand,” be it of God, Spirit,
and the “cunning of reason” (to use Hegel’s language) or of economic
interest, however concealed that interest may have been from those
who were influenced by it. There were no real alternatives to what was,
is, or even would be — as absurd debates about the “inevitability of
socialism” revealed a generation or two ago.
The emphasis of anarchist and libertarian utopists on choice in
history created a radical new point of departure from the increasingly
teleological visions of religious and later “scientific” socialisms. In great
part, this emphasis explains the attention the nineteenth-century
anarchists and libertarian utopists placed on individual autonomy, the
individual’s capacity to make choices based on rational and ethical
judgments. This view is markedly different from the liberal tradition,
with which anarchist views of individuality have been associated by
their opponents, particularly by Marxists. Liberalism offered the
individual a modicum of “freedom,” to be sure, but one that was
constructed by the “invisible hand” of the competitive marketplace,
not by the capacity of free individuals to act according to ethical
considerations. The “free entrepreneur” on whom liberalism modeled
its image of individual autonomy was in fact completely trapped in a
market collectivity, however “emancipated” he seemed from the overtly
medieval world of guilds and religious obligations. He was the
plaything of a “higher law” of market interactions based on competing
egos, each of whom canceled out his egoistic interests in the formation
of a general social interest.
Anarchism and the libertarian utopists never cast the free individual
in this light. The individual had to be free to function as an ethical
being, according to anarchist theorists — not as a narrow egoist — in
making rational, hopefully disinterested choices between rational and
irrational alternatives in history. The Marxist canard that anarchism
is a product of liberal or bourgeois individualism has its roots in
ideologies that are bourgeois to their very core, such as those based on
myths of an “invisible hand” (liberalism), Spirit (Hegelianism), and
economic determinism (Marxism). The anarchist and libertarian utopist
emphasis on individual freedom meant the emancipation of history
itself from an ahistorical preordination and stressed the importance of
ethics in influencing choice. The individual is, indeed, truly free and
attains true individuality when he or she is guided by a rational,
humane, and high-minded notion of the social and communal good.
Finally, anarchist visions of a new world, particularly libertarian
utopias, imply that society can always be remade. Indeed, utopia is, by
definition, the world as it should be according to the canons of reason,
in contrast to the world as it is, according to the blind, unthinking
interaction of uncomprehending forces. The nineteenth-century
anarchist tradition, less graphic and pictorial than the utopists who
painted canvases of new and detailed images, reasoned out its theories
in accordance with human history, not theological, mystical, or
metaphysical history. The world had always made itself through the
agency of real flesh-and-blood human beings, facing real choices at
turning points of history. And it could remake itself along proven
alternative lines that confronted people in the past.
Indeed, much of the anarchist tradition is not a “primitivistic”
yearning for the past, as Marxist historians like Hobsbawm would have
us believe, but a recognition of past possibilities that remain unfulfilled,
such as the far-reaching importance of community, confederation, self-management
of the economy, and a new balance between humanity
and nature. Marx’s famous injunction that the dead should bury the
dead is meaningless, however well-intended it may be, when the present
tries to parody the past. Only the living can bury the dead, and only if
they understand what is dead and what is still living — indeed, what is
intensely vital in the body-strewn battlefields of history.
Herein lies the power of William Godwin’s concern for individual
autonomy, for the ethical person whose mind is unfettered by the social
burdens of suprahuman forces and all forms of domination, including
deities as well as statesmen, the authority of custom as well as the
authority of the State. Herein, too, lies the power of Proudhon’s concern
for municipalism and confederalism as principles of association, indeed,
as ways of life whose freedom is unfettered by the nation-state as well
as the pernicious role of property. Herein lies Bakunin’s hypostatization
of popular spontaneity and the transformative role of the revolutionary
act, of the deed as an expression of will that is unfettered by constraints
of compromise and parliamentary cretinism. Herein finally lies the
power of Kropotkin’s ecological visions and his practical concern with
human scale, decentralization, and the harmonization of humanity with
nature as distinguished from the explosive growth of urbanization and
centralization....
Let me pause to examine the issue of emancipation of another kindthe
emancipation of the body in the form of a new sensuousness and
of the human spirit in the form of an ecological sensibility. These issues
rarely figure in discussions of social renovation, although they have a
prominent place in utopian thinking.
A sense of sheer joie de vivre is closely wedded to the anarchic
tradition, despite the arid patches of asceticism that surface in its midst.
Emma Goldman’s admonition — “If I can’t dance in your revolution, I
don’t want it!” — is typically anarchic in its disposition. A colorful
tradition exists that dates back centuries to artisan and even certain
peasant anarchists who demanded as much for the emancipation of the
senses as they did for their communities. The Ophites, in the backwash
of antiquity, reread the biblical scriptures to make knowledge the key
to salvation; the snake and Eve, the agents of freedom; the ecstatic
release of the flesh, the medium for the full expression of the soul. The
Brethren of the Free Spirit, an abiding movement over many different
names in medieval Europe, rejected the ecclesiastical reverence for selfdenial
and celebrated their version of Christianity as a message of sheer
libertinism as well as social liberation. In Rabelais’s “Abbey of
Theleme” narrative, the maxim “Do as thou wilt!” removed all restraint
from the members of its playful order, who were free to rise, dine, love,
and cultivate all the pleasures of the flesh and the mind as they chose.
The technical limits of past eras, the fact that pleasure could rarely
be separated from parasitism in a demanding world of toil, made all
of these movements and utopias elitist. What the Brethren of the Free
Spirit stole from the rich, the rich in turn took from the poor. What the
members of the Abbey of Theleme enjoyed as a matter of right was
expropriated from the labor of builders, foods cultivators, cooks, and
the grooms who served them. Nature was not bountiful, it was
assumed, except in a few usually favored areas of the world.
Emancipation of the senses was often assumed by the poor and their
revolutionary prophets to be a ruling class privilege, although it was
more widespread in villages and towns than we have been led to believe.
And even the oppressed had their dreams of utopistic pleasures, of
visions where nature was indeed bountiful and rivers flowed with milk
and honey. But always this marvelous dispensation was the product of
a being other than themselves who bestowed the gift of plenty upon
them in the form of a “promised land” — be it a deity or an irascible
demon — rather than technology and new, more equitable arrangements
of work and distribution....
Between the closing years of the French Revolution and the midnineteenth
century, the ideals of freedom had acquired a solidly
naturalistic, technologically viable, and solidly material base. Here
was a remarkable turning point in history when humanity, by whatever
action, might well have swerved from a path of market-oriented and
profit-oriented expansion to one of community-oriented and ecologyoriented
harmony — a harmony between human and human that could
have been projected by virtue of a new sensibility into a harmony
between humanity and nature. If the latter half of the century engulfed
society in a degree of industrial development that would remake the
natural world into a synthetic one, the first half was filled with the
promise of a new integration between society and nature and a
cooperative commonwealth that would have satisfied the most
generous impulses toward freedom. That this did not occur was due
in no small measure to the bourgeois spirit that enfolded EuroAmerican
society — and no less significantly, to the revolutionary
project of remaking society that had found such rich expression in the
utopians, visionary socialists, and anarchists who followed in the wake
of the French Revolution.
The revolutionary project had acquired a richly ethical heritage, a
commitment to reconciling the dualities of mind, body, and society that
pitted reason against sensuality, work against play, town against
country, and humanity against nature. Utopian and anarchist thought
at their best saw these contradictions clearly and tried to overcome
them with an ideal of freedom based on complementarity, the
irreducible minimum, and the equality of unequals. The contradictions
were seen as evidence of a society mired in “evil,” indeed as a
“civilization,” to use Fourier’s word, that was turned against humanity
and culture by the irrational direction it had followed up to that time.
Reason, in its power to be employed speculatively beyond the existing
state of affairs, was becoming a crude rationalism, based on the efficient
exploitation of labor and natural resources. Science, in its searching
probe of reality and its underlying order, was turning into a cult of
scientism, little more than the instrumental engineering of control over
people and nature. Technology, with its promise of ameliorating labor,
was turning into a technocratic ensemble of means for exploiting the
human and nonhuman world.
The anarchist theorists and the libertarian utopists, despite their
understandable belief that reason, science, and technics could be
creative forces for remaking society, voiced a collective protest against
the reduction of these forces to purely instrumental ends. They were
acutely aware, as we can now see retrospectively from the vantage point
of our own historical malaise, of the rapid transitions through which
the century was going. Their fiery demands for immediate change along
Iibera tory lines was permeated by a sense of anxiety that society as a
whole was faced with “embourgeoisement,” to use Bakunin’s word
expressing the remarkably anticipatory fears and the fatalism that
gripped him in the last years of his life.
Contrary to the philistine judgments of Gerald Brenan and Eric
Hobsbawm, anarchist emphases on “propaganda of the deed” were
not primitive acts of violence or mere catharsis in the face of public
passivity to the horrors of industrial capitalism. They were, in great
part, the product of a desperate insight into the fact that a historic
moment in social development was being lost, a loss that would
produce immense obstacles in the future to the realization of the
revolutionary project. Imbued with ethical and visionary concepts, they
rightly saw their time as one that demanded immediate human
emancipation, not as one “stage” in the long history of humanity’s
evolution toward freedom with its endless “preconditions” and
technological “substructures.”
What the anarchist theorists and libertarian utopists did not see is
that ideals of freedom were themselves faced with embourgeoisement.
No one, perhaps not even Marx himself, who played so important a
role in this infection, could have anticipated that the attempt to make
the emancipatory project into a science under the rubric of “scientific
socialism” would make it even more of a “dismal science” than
economics; indeed, that it would divest it of its ethical heart, its
visionary spirit, and its ecological substance. No less compelling, Marx’s
“scientific socialism” developed in tandem with the bourgeoisie’s
sinister undoing of the objective as well as the ideological premises of
the revolutionary project by justifying the absorption of decentralized
units into the centralized state, confederalist visions into chauvinistic
nations, and humanly scaled technologies into all-devouring systems
of mass production.
*** Cultures of Revolt
(from From Urbanization to Cities, 1987)
Growing industry, commerce, and “commodification” did not seep
completely into the neighborhood life of the new cities, nor did it totally
destroy the conditions for the regeneration of domestic life. The
buffeting that towns and cities of the nineteenth century took from
industrialization, however disastrous its initial effects on traditional
lifeways, did not destroy the inherently village-like subcultures of
workers and middle-class people who were only a generation or two
removed from a more rural culture. Like the ethnic groups that entered
the New World through New York City throughout much of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, displacement was followed
by resettlement and recommunalization, even in the most desperately
poor slums of the overpopulated cities of Europe and America. The
pub in the industrial cities of England, the café in France, and the beer
hall in Germany, no less than the various community centers around
which ethnic ghettos formed in New York and other American cities,
provided foci for a distinctly working-class culture, largely artisan in
its outlook, class-oriented in its politics, and knit together by mutual
self-help groups.
This recolonization of community life was greatly abetted by the
organized labor movement in all its different forms. Socialist clubs,
trade union centers, local cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and
educational groups created a public space that included classes in
reading, writing, literature, and history. The socialist clubs and union
centers provided libraries, periodicals, lectures, and discussion groups
to “elevate” worker consciousness as well as mobilize them for political
and economic ends. Picnics, athletic activities, and outdoor forays into
the countryside served to add a very intimate dimension to purely
educational projects. The casas del pueblo established by Spanish
socialists and the centros obreros established by the Spanish anarchists,
which existed up to the late 1930s, are reminders of the vigorous
development of community life even in the most depressed areas of
Europe — indeed of an “underground” culture that always paralleled
the received culture of the elite orders and classes.
There was always a plebeian cultural domain at the base of society,
even in the most dismal and squalid parts of ancient, medieval, and
modern cities, that was beyond the reach of the conventional culture
and the state apparatus. No economy or state had the technical means,
until very recently, to freely infiltrate this domain and dissolve it for
a lasting period of time. Left to itself, the “underground” world of the
oppressed remained a breeding ground for rebels and conspirators
against the prevailing authority. No less urban in character than
agrarian, it also remained a school for a grassroots politics that, by
definition, involved groups of ordinary people, even in sizable communities,
in a plebeian political sphere and often brought them into
outright rebellion. This “underground” school created new political
forms and new citizens to deal with changing social conditions. Even
after the great boulevards of Baron Haussmann ripped into the
plebeian quartiers of Paris, opening the city to artillery fire and cavalry
charges against barricades, the sizable neighborhood pockets left
behind retained an imperturbably rebellious vitality that finally
culminated in the Paris Commune. Few of Europe’s major cities were
spared crowd actions and uprisings in the nineteenth century, indeed
well into the first half of the twentieth. As industrial capitalism spread
out from England into western Europe and America, the initial
destabilization it produced as a result of urbanization and
mechanization was followed by a regeneration of popular culture
along new patterns that also included the integration of old ones. Just
as the French village was reproduced as quartiers in French cities, and
the Spanish pueblo as barrios in Spanish cities, so the Jewish shtetl,
the “Little ltalys,” and “Little Irelands” were reproduced in altered
form but with much of their cultural flavor, personal intimacies, and
traditional values in world cities such as New York. Even the industrial
cities replicated on a local basis the specific cultural origins of their
variegated populations and regions....
Every class culture was always a community culture, indeed a civic
culture — a fact that links the period of the Industrial Revolution and
its urban forms with precapitalist cultures of the past. This continuity
has been largely overlooked by contemporary socialists and sociologists.
While the factory and mill formed the first line of the class struggle in
the last century, a struggle that in no way should be confused with the
class war that is supposed to yield working-class insurrections, its lines
of supply reached back into the neighborhoods and towns where
workers lived and often mingled with middle-class people, farmers,
and intellectuals. Wage earners had human faces, not merely mystified
“proletarian” faces, and functioned no less as human beings than as
class beings. Accordingly, they were fathers and mothers, brothers and
sisters, sons and daughters, citizens and neighbors, not only factory
hands. Their concerns included issues such as war and peace, environmental
dislocations, educational opportunities, the beauty of their
surroundings as well as its ugliness, and in times of international
conflict, a heavy dose of jingoism and nationalism — indeed, a vast host
of problems and concerns that were broadly human, not only classoriented
and rooted in wages and working conditions.
This communal dimension of the industrial era is of tremendous
importance in understanding how class conflicts often spilled over
beyond economic issues into broadly social, even utopian concerns.
Indeed as long as the market did not dissolve the communal dimension
of industrialism, there was a richly fecund, highly diversified,
cooperative, and innovative domain of social and political life to which
the proletariat could retreat after working hours, a domain that retained
a vital continuity with precapitalist lifeways and values. This partly
municipal, partly domestic terrain formed a strong countervailing force
to the impact of an industrial economy and the nation-state. Here
workers mingled with a great variety of individuals, particularly
artisans, intellectuals, and farmers who brought their produce into the
towns. In a purely human fashion that revealed all the facets of their
personalities, they developed a sense of shared, active citizenship. This
communal or municipal citizenship kept political life alive even in highly
centralized and bureaucratized nation-states. It would be difficult to
understand not only the radical uprisings of the nineteenth century but
those of the twentieth — particularly the series of urban and agrarian
uprisings that culminated in the Spanish Civil War — without keeping
this communal dimension of the “class struggle” clearly in mind. Every
class movement from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries
was also a civic movement, a product of neighborhood, town, and
village consociation, not only of the factory, farm, and office. It was
not until a technology developed that could make deep, perhaps decisive
inroads into this “underground” municipal domain that politics and
citizenship were faced with the total “commodification” of society, the
supremacy of statecraft, and the subversion of the city’s ecological
diversity and creativity.
*** Spanish Anarchism: The Collectives
(from “Overview of the Spanish Libertarian Movement” and
“After Fifty Years,” 1974 and 1985)
However much the fortunes of Spanish anarchism varied from region
to region and from period to period, whatever revolutionary movement
existed in Spain during this sixty-year period [1875–1935] was
essentially anarchist. Even after the First World War, as anarchism
began to ebb before Marxian social-democratic and later Bolshevik
organizations, Spanish anarchism retained its enormous influence and
its revolutionary elan. Viewed from a radical standpoint, the history
of the Spanish labor movement remained libertarian and often served
to define the contours of the Marxist movements in Spain. “Generally
speaking, a small but well-organized group of Anarchists in a Socialist
area drove the Socialists to the Left,” observes Gerald Brenan, “whereas
in predominantly Anarchist areas, Socialists were outstandingly
reformist.”[57] It was not socialism but anarchism that determined the
metabolism of the Spanish labor movement — the great general strikes
that swept repeatedly over Spain, the recurring insurrections in
Barcelona and in the towns and villages of Andalusia, and the gun
battles between labor militants and employer-hired thugs in the
Mediterranean coastal cities.
It is essential to emphasize that Spanish anarchism was not merely
a program embedded in a dense theoretical matrix. It was a way of life:
partly the life of the Spanish people as it was lived in the closely knit
villages of the countryside and the intense neighborhood life of the
working-class barrios; partly, too, the theoretical articulation of that
life as projected by Bakunin’s concepts of decentralization, mutual aid,
and popular organs of self-management. [Inasmuch as Spain’s] long
tradition of agrarian collectivism ... was distinctly precapitalist,
Spanish Marxism regarded it as anachronistic, in fact as “historically
reactionary.” Spanish socialism built its agrarian program around the
Marxist tenet that the peasantry and its social forms could have no
lasting revolutionary value until they were “proletarianized” and
“industrialized.” Indeed, the sooner the village decayed, the better, and
the more rapidly the peasantry became a hereditary proletariat,
“disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process
of capitalist production itself” (Marx) — a distinctly hierarchical and
authoritarian “mechanism” — the more rapidly Spain would advance
to the tasks of socialism.
Spanish anarchism, by contrast, followed a decisively different
approach. It sought out the precapitalist collectivist traditions of the
village, nourished what was living and vital in them, evoked their
revolutionary potentialities as liberatory modes of mutual aid and self-management,
and deployed them to vitiate the obedience, hierarchical
mentality, and authoritarian outlook fostered by the factory system.
Ever mindful of the embourgeoisement of the proletariat ... , the
Spanish anarchists tried to use the precapitalist traditions of the
peasantry and working class against the assimilation of the workers’
outlook to an authoritarian industrial rationality. In this respect their
efforts were favored by the continuous fertilization of the Spanish
proletariat by rural workers, who renewed these traditions daily as
they migrated to the cities. The revolutionary elan of the Barcelona
proletariat — like that of the Petrograd and Parisian proletariats — was
due in no small measure to the fact that these workers never solidly
sedimented into a hereditary working class, totally removed from
precapitalist traditions, whether of the peasant or the craftsman. Along
the Mediterranean coastal cities of Spain, many workers retained a
living memory of a noncapitalist culture — one in which each moment
of life was not strictly regulated by the punch clock, the factory whistle,
the foreman, the machine, the highly regulated work day, or the
atomizing world of the large city. Spanish anarchism flourished within
a tension created by these antagonistic traditions and sensibilities.
Indeed, where a “Germanic proletariat” (to use another of Bakunin’s
cutting phrases) emerged in Spain, it drifted either toward the UGT or
toward the Catholic unions. Its political outlook, reformist when not
overtly conservative, often clashed with the more declasse working
class of Catalonia and the Mediterranean coast, leading to conflicting
tendencies within the Spanish proletariat as a whole.
Ultimately, in my view, the destiny of Spanish anarchism depended
upon its ability to create libertarian organizational forms that could
synthesize the precapitalist collectivist traditions of the village with an
industrial economy and a highly urbanized society. I speak here of no
mere programmatic “alliance” between the Spanish peasantry and
proletariat but, more organically, of new organizational forms and
sensibilities that imparted a revolutionary libertarian character to two
social classes that lived in conflicting cultures. That Spain required a
well-organized libertarian movement was hardly a matter of doubt
among the majority of Spanish anarchists. But would this movement
reflect a village society or a factory society? Where a conflict existed,
could the two be melded in the same movement without violating the
libertarian tenets of decentralization, mutual aid, and self-administration?
In the classical era of proletarian socialism, between 1848 and
1939, an era that stressed the hegemony of the industrial proletariat
in all social struggles, Spanish anarchism followed a historic trajectory
that revealed at once the limitations of the era itself and the creative
possibilities of anarchic forms of organization.
By comparison with the cities, the Spanish villages that were
committed to anarchism raised very few organizational problems.
Brenan’s emphasis on the braceros notwithstanding, the strength of
agrarian anarchism in the south and in the Levant lay in the mountain
villages, not among the rural proletariat that worked the great
plantations of Andalusia. In these relatively isolated villages, a fierce
sense of independence and personal dignity whetted the bitter social
hatreds engendered by poverty, creating the rural “patriarchs” of
anarchism whose entire families were devoted almost apostolically to
“the Idea.” For these sharply etched and rigorously ascetic individuals,
defiance of the State, the Church, and conventional authority in general
was almost a way of life. Knit together by the local press — and at
various times there were hundreds of anarchist periodicals in Spain —
they formed the sinews of agrarian anarchism from the 1870s onward
and, to a large extent, the conscience of Spanish anarchism throughout
its history.
Their agrarian collectives reflected to a remarkable extent the
organizational forms that the anarchists fostered among all the villages
under their influence before the 1936 revolution. The revolution in
rural communities essentially enlarged the old IWMA [International
Working Men’s Association] and later CNT [National Confederation
of Labor] nuclei, membership groups, or quite simply clans of closely
knit anarchist families into popular assemblies. These usually met
weekly and formulated the policy decisions of the community as a
whole. The assembly form comprised the organizational ideal of village
anarchism from the days of the first truly Bakuninist congress of the
Spanish IWMA in Cordoba in 1872, stressing the libertarian traditions
of Spanish village life. Where such popular assemblies were possible,
their decisions were executed by a committee elected from the assembly.
Apparently the right to recall committee members was taken for
granted, and they certainly enjoyed no privileges, emoluments, or
institutional power. Their influence was a function of their obvious
dedication and capabilities. It remained a cardinal principle of Spanish
anarchists never to pay their delegates, even when the CNT numbered
a million members.
Normally, the responsibilities of elected delegates had to be
discharged after working hours. Almost all the evenings of anarchist
militants were occupied with meetings of one sort or another. Whether
at assemblies or committees, they argued, debated, voted, and
administered, and when time afforded, they read and passionately
discussed “the Idea” to which they dedicated not only their leisure
hours but their very lives. For the greater part of the day, they were
working men and women, obrera consciente, who abjured smoking
and drinking, avoided brothels and the bloody bullring, purged their
talk of “foul” language, and by their probity, dignity, respect for
knowledge, and militancy tried to set a moral example for their entire
class. They never used the word god in daily conversation (salud was
preferred over adios) and avoided all official contact with clerical and
state authorities, indeed, to the point where they refused to legally
validate their lifelong “free unions” with marital documents and never
baptized or confirmed their children. One must know Catholic Spain
to realize how far-reaching were these self-imposed mores — and how
quixotically consistent some of them were with the puritanical
traditions of the country....
The prospect for libertarian organization in the cities and factories
could not depend upon the long tradition of village collectivism — the
strong sense of community — that existed in rural anarchist areas. For
within the factory itself — the realm of toil, hierarchy, industrial
discipline, and brute material necessity — “community” was more a
function of the bourgeois division of labor, with its exploitative, even
competitive connotations, than of humanistic cooperation, playfully
creative work, and mutual aid. Working-class solidarity depended less
upon a shared meaningful life nourished by self-fulfilling work than
on the common enemy — the boss — who exploded any illusion that
under capitalism the worker was more than an industrial resource, an
object to be coldly manipulated and ruthlessly exploited. If anarchism
can be partly regarded as a revolt of the individual against the industrial
system, the profound truth that lies at the heart of that revolt is that
the factory routine not only blunts the sensibility of the worker to the
rich feast of life; it degrades the worker’s image of his or her human
potentialities, of his or her capacities to take direct control of the means
for administering social life....
It is not surprising that the most communistic collectives in the
Spanish Revolution appeared in the countryside rather than in the cities,
among villagers who were still influenced by archaic collectivistic
traditions and were less ensnared in a market economy than their urban
cousins. The ascetic values that so greatly influenced these highly
communistic collectives often reflected the extreme poverty of the areas
in which they were rooted. Cooperation and mutual aid in such cases
formed the preconditions for survival of the community. Elsewhere, in
the more arid areas of Spain, the need for sharing water and
maintaining irrigation works was an added inducement to collective
farming. Here collectivization was also a technological necessity, but
one that even the republic did not interfere with. What makes these
rural collectives important is not only that many of them practiced
communism but that they functioned so effectively under a system of
popular self-management. This belies the notion held by so many
authoritarian Marxists that economic life must be scrupulously
“planned” by a highly centralized state power and the odious canard
that popular collectivization, as distinguished from statist nationalization,
necessarily pits collectivized enterprises against each other in
competition for profits and resources.
In the cities, however, collectivization of the factories, communications
systems, and transport facilities took a very different form. Initially
[at the beginning of the Spanish Revolution in July 1936] nearly the
entire economy in areas controlled by the CNT — FAI [the Iberian
Anarchist Federation] had been taken over by committees elected from
among the workers and were loosely coordinated by higher union
committees. As time went on, this system was increasingly tightened.
The higher committee began to preempt the initiative from the lower,
although their decisions still had to be ratified by the workers of the
facilities involved. The effect of this process was to tend to centralize
the economy of CNT — FAI areas in the hands of the union. The extent
to which this process unfolded varied greatly from industry to industry
and area to area, and with the limited knowledge we have at hand,
generalizations are very difficult to formulate. With the entry of the
CNT-FAI into the Catalan government in [the late summer of] 1936,
the process of centralization continued, and the union-controlled
facilities became wedded to the state. By early 1938 a political
bureaucracy had largely supplanted the authority of the workers’
committees in all Republican-held cities. Although workers’ control
existed in theory, it had virtually disappeared in fact....
The wave of collectivizations that swept over Spain in the summer
and autumn of 1936 has been described as “the greatest experiment in
workers’ self-management Western Europe has ever seen,” a revolution
more far-reaching than any that occurred in Russia during 1917–21
and the years before and after it.[58] In anarchist industrial areas like
Catalonia, an estimated three-quarters of the economy was placed
under workers’ control, as it was in anarchist rural areas like Aragon.
The figure tapers downward where the UGT shared power with the
CNT or else predominated: 50 percent in anarchist and socialist
València, and 30 percent in socialist and liberal Madrid. In the more
thoroughly anarchist areas, particularly among the agrarian collectives,
money was eliminated and the material means of life were allocated
strictly according to need rather than work, following the traditional
precepts of a libertarian communist society. As a recent BBC-Granada
television documentary puts it: “The ancient dream of a collective
society without profit or property was made reality in the villages of
Aragon.... All forms of production were owned by the community,
run by their workers.”[59]
The administrative apparatus of Republican Spain belonged almost
entirely to the unions and their political organizations. Police in many
cities were replaced with armed workers’ patrols. Militia units were
formed everywhere — in factories, on farms, and in socialist and
anarchist community centers and union halls, initially including women
as well as men. A vast network of local revolutionary committees
coordinated the feeding of the cities, the operations of the economy,
and the meting out of justice, indeed, almost every facet of Spanish life
from production to culture, bringing the whole of Spanish society in
the Republican zone into a well-organized and coherent whole. This
historically unprecedented appropriation of society by its most
oppressed sectors — including women, who were liberated from all the
constraints of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition
of abortion and divorce or a degraded status in the economy — was the
work of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry. It was a movement from
below that overwhelmed even the revolutionary organizations of the
oppressed, including the CNT-FAI.
*** Critique of Lifestyle Anarchism
(from “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism,” 1995)
Today’s reactionary social context greatly explains the emergence of a
phenomenon in Euro-American anarchism that cannot be ignored: the
spread of individualist anarchism. In a time when even respectable
forms of socialism are in pell-mell retreat from principles that might
in any way be construed as radical, issues of lifestyle are once again
supplanting social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism. In
the traditionally individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the
1990s are awash in self-styled anarchists who — their flamboyant radical
rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that
I will call lifestyle anarchism. Its preoccupations with the ego and its
uniqueness and its polymorphous concepts of resistance are steadily
eroding the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition. No less
than Marxism and other socialisms, anarchism can be profoundly
influenced by the bourgeois environment it professes to oppose, with
the result that the growing “inwardness” and narcissism of the yuppie
generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals. Ad hoc
adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the
antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical
incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational
commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely selforiented
enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction
has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades....
What stands out most compellingly in today’s lifestyle anarchism is
its appetite for immediacy rather than reflection, for a na·ive one-to-one
relationship between mind and reality. Not only does this immediacy
immunize libertarian thinking from demands for nuanced and mediated
reflection; it precludes rational analysis and, for that matter, rationality
itself. Consigning humanity to the nontemporal, nonspatial, and
nonhistorical — a “primal” notion of temporality based on the “eternal”
cycles of “Nature” — it thereby divests mind of its creative uniqueness
and its freedom to intervene into the natural world....
In the end, the individual ego becomes the supreme temple of reality,
excluding history and becoming, democracy and responsibility. Indeed,
lived contact with society as such is rendered tenuous by a narcissism
so all-embracing that it shrivels consociation to an infantilized ego that
is little more than a bundle of shrieking demands and claims for its
own satisfactions. Civilization merely obstructs the ecstatic selfrealization
of this ego’s desires, reified as the ultimate fulfillment of
emancipation, as though ecstasy and desire were not products of
cultivation and historical development but merely innate impulses that
appear ab novo in a desocialized world.
Like the petty-bourgeois Stirnerite ego, primitivist lifestyle anarchism
allows no room for social institutions, political organizations, and
radical programs, still less a public sphere, which [they] automatically
identify with statecraft. The sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent,
the discontinuous, and the intuitive supplant the consistent, purposive,
organized, and rational, indeed any sustained and focused activity apart
from publishing a “zine” or pamphlet — or burning a garbage can.
Imagination is counterposed to reason and desire to theoretical
coherence, as though the two were in radical contradiction to each
other. Goya’s admonition that imagination without reason produces
monsters is altered to leave the impression that imagination flourishes
on an unmediated experience with an unnuanced “oneness.” Thus is
social nature essentially dissolved into biological nature; innovative
humanity into adaptive animality; temporality into precivilizatory
eternality; history into an archaic cyclicity.
A bourgeois reality whose economic harshness grows starker and
crasser with every passing day is shrewdly mutated by lifestyle
anarchism into constellations of self-indulgence, inchoateness,
indiscipline, and incoherence. In the 1960s the Situationists, in the name
of a “theory of the spectacle,” in fact produced a reified spectacle of
the theory, but they at least offered organizational correctives, such as
workers’ councils, that gave their aestheticism some ballast. Lifestyle
anarchism, by assailing organization, programmatic commitment, and
serious social analysis, apes the worst aspects of Situationist
aestheticism without adhering to the project of building a movement.
As the detritus of the 1960s, it wanders aimlessly within the bounds of
the ego (renamed by John Zerzan the “bounds of nature”) and makes
a virtue of bohemian incoherence.
What is most troubling is that the self-indulgent aesthetic vagaries
of lifestyle anarchism significantly erode the socialist core of a leftlibertarian
ideology that once could claim social relevance and weight
precisely for its uncompromising commitment to emancipation — not
outside of history, in the realm of the subjective, but within history, in
the realm of the objective. The great cry of the First Internationalwhich
anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism retained after
Marx and his supporters abandoned it — was the demand: “No rights
without duties, no duties without rights.” For generations, this slogan
adorned the mastheads of what we must now retrospectively call social anarchist periodicals. Today, it stands radically at odds with the
basically egocentric demand for “desire armed,” and with Taoist
contemplation and Buddhist nirvanas. Where social anarchism called
upon people to rise in revolution and seek the reconstruction of society,
the irate petty bourgeois who populate the subcultural world of lifestyle
anarchism call for episodic rebellion and the satisfaction of their
“desiring machines,” to use the phraseology of Deleuze and Guattari.
The steady retreat from the historic commitment of classical
anarchism to social struggle (without which self-realization and the
fulfillment of desire in all its dimensions, not merely the instinctive,
cannot be achieved) is inevitably accompanied by a disastrous
mystification of experience and reality. The ego, identified almost
fetishistically as the locus of emancipation, turns out to be identical to
the “sovereign individual” of laissez-faire individualism. Detached from
its social moorings, it achieves not autonomy but the heteronomous
“selfhood” of petty-bourgeois enterprise.
Indeed, far from being free, the ego in its sovereign selfhood is bound
hand and foot to the seemingly anonymous laws of the marketplacethe
laws of competition and exploitation — which render the myth of
individual freedom into another fetish concealing the implacable laws
of capital accumulation. Lifestyle anarchism, in effect, turns out to be
an additional mystifying bourgeois deception. Its acolytes are no more
“autonomous” than the movements of the stock market, than price
fluctuations and the mundane facts of bourgeois commerce. All claims
to autonomy notwithstanding, this middle-class “rebel,” with or
without a brick in hand, is entirely captive to the subterranean market forces that occupy all the allegedly “free” terrains of modern social life, from food cooperatives to rural communes. Capitalism swirls
around us — not only materially but culturally. As Zerzan so memorably
put it to a puzzled interviewer who asked about the television set in
the home of this foe of technology: “Like all other people, I have to be
narcotized.”[60]
That lifestyle anarchism itself is a “narcotizing” self-deception can
best be seen in Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, where the ego’s
claim to “uniqueness” in the temple of the sacrosanct “self” far
outranks John Stuart Mill’s liberal pieties. Indeed, with Stirner, egoism
becomes a matter of epistemology. Cutting through the maze of
contradictions and woefully incomplete statements that fill The Ego and His Own, one finds Stirner’s “unique” ego to be a myth because
its roots lie in its seeming “other” — society itself. Indeed: “Truth cannot
step forward as you do,” Stirner addresses the egoist, “cannot move,
change, develop; truth awaits and recruits everything from you, and
itself is only through you; for it exists only — in your head.”[61] The
Stirnerite egoist, in effect, bids farewell to objective reality, to the
facticity of the social, and thereby to fundamental social change and
all ethical criteria and ideals beyond personal satisfaction amidst the
hidden demons of the bourgeois marketplace. This absence of
mediation subverts the very existence of the concrete, not to speak of
the authority of the Stirnerite ego itself — a claim so all-encompassing
as to exclude the social roots of the self and its formation in history.
Nietzsche, quite independently of Stirner, carried this view of truth
to its logical conclusion by erasing the facticity and reality of truth as
such: “What, then, is truth?” he asked. “A mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human
relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically.”[62] With more forthrightness than Stirner,
Nietzsche contended that facts are simply interpretations; indeed, he
asked, “is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the
interpretations?” Apparently not, for “even this is invention,
hypothesis.”[63] Following Nietzsche’s unrelenting logic, we are left with
a self that not only essentially creates its own reality but also must
justify its own existence as more than a mere interpretation. Such
egoism thus annihilates the ego itself, which vanishes into the mist of
Stirner’s own unstated premises.
Similarly divested of history, society, and facticity beyond its own
metaphors, lifestyle anarchism lives in an asocial domain in which the
ego, with its cryptic desires, must evaporate into logical abstractions.
But reducing the ego to intuitive immediacy — anchoring it in mere
animality, in the “bounds of nature,” or in “natural law” — would
amount to ignoring the fact that the ego is the product of an everformative
history, indeed, a history that, if it is to consist of more than
mere episodes, must avail itself of reason as a guide to standards of
progress and regress, necessity and freedom, good and evil, and — yes!civilization
and barbarism. Indeed, an anarchism that seeks to avoid
the shoals of sheer solipsism on the one hand and the loss of the “self”
as a mere “interpretation” on the other must become explicitly socialist
or collectivist. That is to say, it must be a social anarchism that seeks
freedom through structure and mutual responsibility, not through a
vaporous, nomadic ego that eschews the preconditions for social life.
Stated bluntly: Between the socialist pedigree of anarcho-syndicalism
and anarcho-communism (which have never denied the importance of
self-realization and the fulfillment of desire), and the basically liberal,
individualistic pedigree of lifestyle anarchism (which fosters social
ineffectuality, if not outright social negation), there exists a divide that
cannot be bridged unless we completely disregard the profoundly
different goals, methods, and underlying philosophy that distinguish
them. Stirner’s own project, in fact, emerged in a debate with the
socialism of Wilhelm Weitling and Moses Hess, where he invoked
egoism precisely to counterpose to socialism. “Personal insurrection
rather than general revolution was [Stirner’s] message,” James]. Martin
admiringly observes[64] — a counterposition that lives on today in lifestyle
anarchism and its yuppie filiations, as distinguished from social
anarchism with its roots in historicism, the social matrix of
individuality, and its commitment to a rational society.
The very incongruity of these essentially mixed messages, which
coexist on every page of the lifestyle “zines,” reflects the feverish voice
of the squirming petty bourgeois. If anarchism loses its socialist core
and collectivist goal, if it drifts off into aestheticism, ecstasy, and desire,
and, incongruously, into Taoist quietism and Buddhist self-effacement
as a substitute for a libertarian program, politics, and organization, it
will come to represent not social regeneration and a revolutionary vision
but social decay and a petulant egoistic rebellion. Worse, it will feed
the wave of mysticism that is already sweeping affluent members of
the generation now in their teens and twenties. Lifestyle anarchism’s
exaltation of ecstasy, certainly laudable in a radical social matrix but
here unabashedly intermingled with “sorcery,” is producing a dreamlike
absorption with spirits, ghosts, and Jungian archetypes rather than a
rational and dialectical awareness of the world....
A return to mere animality — or shall we call it “decivilization”? — is a return not to freedom but to instinct, to the domain of “authenticity”
that is guided more by genes than by brains. Nothing could be further
from the ideals of freedom spelled out in ever-expansive forms by the
great revolutions of the past. And nothing could be more unrelenting
in its sheer obedience to biochemical imperatives such as DNA or more
in contrast to the creativity, ethics, and mutuality opened by culture
and struggles for a rational civilization. There is no freedom in
“wildness” if, by sheer ferality, we mean the dictates of inborn
behavioral patterns that shape mere animality. To malign civilization
without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for self-conscious
freedom — a freedom conferred by reason as well as emotion, by insight
as well as desire, by prose as well as poetry — is to retreat back into the
shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellection
was only an evolutionary promise.
**** Toward a Democratic Communalism
My picture of lifestyle anarchism is far from complete; the personalistic
thrust of this ideological clay allows it to be molded in many forms
provided that words like imagination, sacred, intuitive, ecstasy, and
primal embellish its surface.
Social anarchism, in my view, is made of fundamentally different
stuff, heir to the Enlightenment tradition, with due regard to that
tradition’s limits and incompleteness. Depending upon how it defines
reason, social anarchism celebrates the thinking human mind without
in any way denying passion, ecstasy, imagination, play, and art. Yet
rather than reify them into hazy categories, it tries to incorporate them
into everyday life. It is committed to rationality while opposing the
rationalization of experience; to technology, while opposing the
“megamachine”; to social institutionalization, while opposing class
rule and hierarchy; to a genuine politics based on the confederal
coordination of municipalities or communes by the people in direct
face-to-face democracy, while opposing parliamentarism and the state.
This “Commune of communes,” to use a traditional slogan of earlier
revolutions, can be appropriately designated as Communalism.
Opponents of democracy as “rule” to the contrary notwithstanding,
it describes the democratic dimension of anarchism as a majoritarian
administration of the public sphere. Accordingly, Communalism seeks
freedom rather than autonomy in the sense that I have counterposed
them. It sharply breaks with the psycho-personal Stirnerite, liberal, and
bohemian ego as a self-contained sovereign by asserting that
individuality does not emerge ab novo, dressed at birth in “natural
rights,” but sees individualitY in great part as the ever-changing work
of historical and social development, a process of self-formation that
can be neither petrified by biologism nor arrested by temporally limited
dogmas.
The sovereign, self-sufficient “individual” has always been a
precarious basis upon which to anchor a left-libertarian outlook. As
Max Horkheimer once observed, “individuality is impaired when each
man decides to fend for himself.... The absolutely isolated individual
has always been an illusion. The most esteemed personal qualities, such
as independence, will to freedom, sympathy, and the sense of justice,
are social as well as individual virtues. The fully developed individual
is the consummation of a fully developed society.”[65]
If a left-libertarian vision of a future society is not to disappear in a
bohemian and lumpen demimonde, it must offer a resolution to social
problems, not flit arrogantly from slogan to slogan, shielding itself from
rationality with bad poetry and vulgar graphics. Democracy is not
antithetical to anarchism; nor are majority rule and nonconsensual
decisions incommensurable with a libertarian society.
That no society can exist without institutional structures is
transparently clear to anyone who has not been stupefied by Stirner
and his kind. By denying institutions and democracy, lifestyle anarchism
insulates itself from social reality, so that it can fume all the more
with futile rage, thereby remaining a subcultural caper for gullible
youth and bored consumers of black garments and ecstasy posters. To
argue that democracy and anarchism are incompatible because any
impediment to the wishes of even “a minority of one” constitutes a
violation of personal autonomy is to advocate not a free society but
L. Susan Brown’s “collection of individuals” — in short, a herd. No
longer would “imagination” come to “power.” Power, which always exists, will belong either to the collective in a face-to-face and clearly
institutionalized democracy, or to the egos of a few oligarchs who will
produce a “tyranny of structurelessness.” ...
In the United States and much of Europe, precisely at a time when
mass disillusionment with the state has reached unprecedented
proportions, anarchism is in retreat. Dissatisfaction with government
as such runs high on both sides of the Atlantic — and seldom in recent
memory has there been a more compelling popular sentiment for a new
politics, even a new social dispensation that can give to people a sense
of direction that allows for security and ethical meaning. If the failure
of anarchism to address this situation can be attributed to any single
source, the insularity of lifestyle anarchism and its individualistic
underpinnings must be singled out for aborting the entry of a potential
left-libertarian movement into an ever-contracting public sphere.
To its credit, anarcho-syndicalism in its heyday tried to engage in a
living practice and create an organized movement — so alien to lifestyle
anarchism — within the working class. Its major problems lay not in its
desire for structure and involvement, for program and social
mobilization, but in the waning of the working class as a revolutionary
subject, particularly after the Spanish Revolution. To say that anarchism
lacked a politics, however, conceived in its original Greek meaning as
the self-management of the community — the historic “Commune of
communes” — is to repudiate a historic and transformative practice that
seeks to radicalize the democracy inherent in any republic and to create
a municipalist confederal power to countervail the state.
The most creative feature of traditional anarchism is its commitment
to four basic tenets: a confederation of decentralized municipalities; an
unwavering opposition to statism; a belief in direct democracy; and a
vision of a libertarian communist society. The most important issue that
left-libertarianism — libertarian socialism no less than anarchism — faces
today is: What will it do with these four powerful tenets? How will we
give them social form and content? In what ways and by what means
will we render them relevant to our time and bring them to the service
of an organized popular movement for empowerment and freedom?
Anarchism must not be dissipated in self-indulgent behavior like
that of the primitivistic Adamites of the sixteenth century, who
“wandered through the woods naked, singing and dancing,” as
Kenneth Rexroth contemptuously observed, spending “their time in
a continuous sexual orgy” until they were hunted down and
exterminated — much to the relief of a disgusted peasantry, whose
lands they had plundered. It must not retreat into the primitivistic
demimonde of the John Zerzans and George Bradfords. I would be
the last to contend that anarchists should not live their anarchism as
much as possible on a day-to-day basis — personally as well as socially,
aesthetically as well as pragmatically. But they should not live an
anarchism that diminishes, indeed effaces the most important features
that have distinguished anarchism, as a movement, practice, and
program, from statist socialism. Anarchism today must resolutely
retain its character as a social movement — a programmatic as well as
activist social movement — a movement that melds its embattled vision
of a libertarian communist society with its forthright critique of
capitalism, unobscured by names like “industrial society.”
In short, social anarchism must resolutely affirm its differences with
lifestyle anarchism. If a social anarchist movement cannot translate its
fourfold tenets — municipal confederalism, opposition to statism, direct
democracy, and ultimately libertarian communism — into a lived
practice in a new public sphere; if these tenets languish like its memories
of past struggles in ceremonial pronouncements and meetings; worse
still, if they are subverted by the “libertarian” Ecstasy Industry and by
quietistic Asian theisms, then its revolutionary socialistic core will have
to be restored under a new name.
Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself
an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself
from lifestyle anarchists. Minimally, social anarchism is radically at
odds with anarchism focused on lifestyle, neo-Situationist paeans to
ecstasy, and the sovereignty of the ever-shriveling petty-bourgeois ego.
The two diverge completely in their defining principles — socialism or
individualism. Between a committed revolutionary body of ideas and
practice, on the one hand, and a vagrant yearning for privatistic ecstasy
and self-realization on the other, there can be no commonality. Mere
opposition to the state may well unite fascistic lumpens with Stirnerite
lumpens, a phenomenon that is not without its historical precedents.
[55] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1962), p. 468.
[56] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 602.
[57] Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1967), p. 273.
[58] BBC-Granada Ltd., The Spanish Civil War, a six-part documentary, especially
part 5, “Inside the Revolution.”
[59] Ibid.
[60] Quoted in The New York Times, May 7, 1995.
[61] Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, ed. James J. Martin, trans. Steven T.
Byington (New York: Libertarian Book Club, 1963), part 2, chap. 4, sec. C,
“My Self-Engagement,” p. 352, emphasis added.
[62] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873;
fragment), in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking Portable Library, 1959), pp. 46–7.
[63] Friedrich Nietzsche, fragment 481 (1883–8), The Will to Power, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 267.
[64] James J. Martin, editor’s introduction to Stirner, Ego and His Own, p. xviii.
[65] Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press,
1947), p. 135.
** Chapter 8: Libertarian Municipalism
*** Introduction
Bookchin’s anarchism shares with traditional anarchism an
opposition to the nation-state and a search for libertarian
alternatives, but it differs with traditional anarchism on the tangible
nature of the alternatives it embraces. Anarchism, in the main, looks
to nonpolitical arenas of society as the sites for constructing its
alternatives — variously the factory, the cooperative, even the
individual lifestyle. The typical ambition of anarchism is to create
not libertarian politics but libertarian social institutions; or as Martin
Buber once put it, “to substitute society for State to the greatest
degree possible, moreover a society that is ‘genuine’ and not a State
in disguise.”[66]
Such anarchism has traditionally rejected politics, considering
politics synonymous with the nation-state itself. Much of traditional
anarchism even rejects grassroots-democratic politics. George
Woodcock may be overstating the case when he writes:
No conception of anarchism is further from the truth than that
which regards it as an extreme form of democracy. Democracy
advocates the sovereignty of the people. Anarchism advocates the
sovereignty of the person.[67]
Still, his characterization is valid for wide sectors of anarchist
thought. By contrast, Bookchin looks precisely to politics as the
necessary realm for the creation of libertarian alternatives. But
politics, for him, is not the professional activity of those who hold
office in the nation-state. Rather, politics is direct democracy, the
popular self-management of the community by free citizens — a
politics he calls “the democratic dimension of anarchism.” It seeks
to create or recreate a vital public sphere based on cooperation and
community. Politics in this sense has flourished at earlier periods of
history — especially in ancient Athens, the medieval communes,
colonial New England, and revolutionary Paris. But in modern times
it has been eroded or even crushed by the nation-state in the service
of ruling elites.
Bookchin names this politics libertarian municipalism. Arguing
that the most immediate sphere for community self-management
is the urban neighborhood (or in rural areas, the town), he
advocates that those who would create revolutionary institutions
today should form popular assemblies in their municipalities. This
small, intimate scale of political life would allow people to become
active citizens and recreate the public sphere, democratically
making decisions on matters that affect their common life. They
would “municipalize” the economy, managing their community’s
economic life through their popular assemblies. Private property
would be abolished and goods would be distributed according to
need; post-scarcity technologies would minimize the time consumed
by labor, making possible broad political participation.
To address large-scale problems that affect an entire region, and
as an antidote to the problem of local parochialism, the democratized
popular assemblies of neighboring municipalities would
confederate themselves into larger networks. These confederations
would ultimately constitute a counterpower to the state, the
corporations, and the market, and they could expand at the expense
of those forces, ultimately mobilizing a confrontation with them.
Bookchin has been outlining this political program in various
works since 1972.1n the years that have passed since then, the need
for an emancipatory left that can combat a globalizing capitalism
and looming ecological destruction has become ever-more urgent.
libertarian municipalism may well represent the sought-after
alternative: a concrete revolutionary path to an ecological, rational
society. While efforts have been made in disparate locales to put
this political program into practice, it as yet lacks a movement
committed wholeheartedly to carrying it out. Whether that
movement will emerge remains to be seen.
*** The New Municipal Agenda
(from From Urbanization to Cities, 1987, revised 1995; with
interpolations from various essays)
Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of
politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only
because of the confusion that surrounds the two words.... Politics is
not statecraft, and citizens are not “constituents” or “taxpayers.”
Statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of
its monopoly of violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus
of society in the form of legal and ordinance-making bodies, and its
governance of society by means of professional legislators, armies,
police forces, and bureaucracies. Statecraft takes on a political patina
when so-called “political parties” attempt, in various power plays, to
occupy the offices that make state policy and execute it. This kind of
“politics” has an almost tedious typicality. A “political party” is
normally a structured hierarchy, fleshed out by a membership that
functions in a top-down manner. It is a miniature state, and in some
countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a party
actually constituted the state itself.
The Soviet and Nazi examples of the party qua state were the logical
extension of the party into the state. Indeed, every party has its roots
in the state, not in the citizenry. The conventional party is hitched to
the state like a garment to a mannikin. However varied the garment
and its design may be, it is not part of the body politic; it merely drapes
it. There is nothing authentically political about this phenomenon: it
is meant precisely to contain the body politic, to control it and to
manipulate it, not to express its will — or even permit it to develop a
will. In no sense is a conventional “political” party derivative of the
body politic or constituted by it. Leaving metaphors aside, “political”
parties are replications of the state when they are out of power and are
often synonymous with the state when they are in power. They are
formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus
they are as inorganic as the state itself — an excrescence of society that
has no real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of
faction, power, and mobilization.
Politics, by contrast, is an organic phenomenon. It is organic in the
very real sense that it is the activity of a public body — a community, if
you will — just as the process of flowering is an organic activity of a
plant. Politics, conceived as an activity, involves rational discourse,
public empowerment, the exercise of practical reason, and its realization
in a shared, indeed participatory, activity. It is the sphere of societal life
beyond the family and the personal needs of the individual that still
retains the intimacy, involvement, and sense of responsibility enjoyed
in private arenas of life. Groups may form to advance specific political
views and programs, but these views and programs are no better than
their capacity to answer to the needs of an active public body....
By contrast, political movements, in their authentic sense, emerge
out of the body politic itself, and although their programs are
formulated by theorists, they also emerge from the lived experiences
and traditions of the public itself. The populist movements that swept
out of agrarian America and tsarist Russia or the anarcho-syndicalist
and peasant movements of Spain and Mexico articulated deeply felt,
albeit often unconscious, public desires and needs. At their best, genuine
political movements bring to consciousness the subterranean aspirations
of discontented people and eventually turn this consciousness into
political cultures that give coherence to inchoate and formless public
desires....
The immediate goal of a libertarian municipalist agenda is not to
exercise sudden and massive control by representatives and their
bureaucratic agents over the existing economy; its immediate goal is
to reopen a public sphere in flat opposition to statism, one that allows
for maximum democracy in the literal sense of the term, and to create
in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people
generally. If this perspective can be initially achieved only by morally
empowered assemblies on a limited scale, at least it will be a form of
popular power that can, in time, expand locally and grow over wide
regions. That its future is unforeseeable does not alter the fact that its
development depends upon the growing consciousness of the people,
not upon the growing power of the state — and how that consciousness,
concretized in high democratic institutions, will develop may be an
open issue but it will surely be a political adventure.
... The recovery and development of politics must, I submit, take its
point of departure from the citizen and his or her immediate
environment beyond the familial and private arenas of life. There can
be no politics without community. And by community I mean a
municipal association of people reinforced by its own economic power,
its own institutionalization of the grass roots, and the confederal
support of nearby communities organized into a territorial network on
a local and regional scale. Parties that do not intertwine with these
grassroots forms of popular organization are not political in the
classical sense of the term. In fact, they are bureaucratic and antithetical
to the development of a participatory politics and participating citizens.
The authentic unit of political life, in effect, is the municipality, whether
as a whole, if it is humanly scaled, or in its various subdivisions, notably
the neighborhood....
A new political agenda can be a municipal agenda only if we are to
take our commitments to democracy seriously. Otherwise we will be
entangled with one or another variant of statecraft, a bureaucratic
structure that is demonstrably inimicable to a vibrant public life. The
living cell that forms the basic unit of political life is the municipality,
from which everything — such as citizenship, interdependence, confederation,
and freedom — emerges. There is no way to piece together
any politics unless we begin with its most elementary forms: the villages,
towns, neighborhoods, and cities in which people live on the most
intimate level of political interdependence beyond private life. It is on
this level that they can begin to gain a familiarity with the political
process, a process that involves a good deal more than voting and
information. It is on this level, too, that they can go beyond the private
insularity of family life — a life that is currently celebrated for its
inwardness and seclusion — and improvise those public institutions that
make for broad community participation and consociation.
In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute
themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and
create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civic life that has
continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here
to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings,
civic confederations, and the public arenas for discourse that go beyond
such episodic, single-issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as
they may be to redress social injustices. But protest alone is not enough;
indeed, it is usually defined by what protestors oppose, not by the social
changes they may wish to institute. To ignore the irreducible civic unit
of politics and democracy is to play chess without a chessboard, for it
is on this civic plane that the long-range endeavor of social renewal
must eventually be played out....
All statist objections aside, the problem of restoring municipal
assemblies seems formidable if it is cast in strictly structural and spatial
terms. New York City and London have no way of “assembling” if
they try to emulate ancient Athens, with its comparatively small citizen
body. Both cities, in fact, are no longer cities in the classical sense of
the term and hardly rate as municipalities even by nineteenth-century
standards of urbanism. Viewed in strictly macroscopic terms, they are
sprawling urban belts that suck up millions of people daily from
communities at a substantial distance from their commercial centers.
But they are also made up of neighborhoods — that is to say, of
smaller communities that have a certain measure of identity, whether
defined by a shared cultural heritage, economic interests, a commonality
of social views, or even an aesthetic tradition such as Greenwich Village
in New York or Camden Town in London. However much their
administration as logistical, sanitary, and commercial artifacts requires
a high degree of coordination by experts and their aides, they are
potentially open to political and, in time, physical decentralization.
Popular, even block assemblies can be formed irrespective of the size
of a city, provided its cultural components are identified and their
uniqueness fostered.
At the same time I should emphasize that the libertarian municipalist
(or equivalently, communalist) views I propound here are meant to be
a changing and formative perspective — a concept of politics and
citizenship to ultimately transform cities and urban megalopolises
ethically as well as spatially, and politically as well as economically.
Insofar as these views gain public acceptance, they can be expected not
only to enlarge their vision and embrace confederations of
neighborhoods but also to advance a goal of physically decentralizing
urban centers. To the extent that mere electoral “constituents” are
transformed by education and experience into active citizens, the issue
of humanly scaled communities can hardly be avoided as the “next
step” toward a stable and viable form of city life. It would be foolhardy
to try to predict in any detail a series of such “next steps” or the pace
at which they will occur. Suffice it to say that as a perspective,
libertarian municipalism is meant to be an ever-developing, creative,
and reconstructive agenda as well as an alternative to the centralized
nation-state and to an economy based on profit, competition, and
mindless growth.
Minimally then, attempts to initiate assemblies can begin with
populations that range anywhere from a modest residential neighborhood
to a dozen neighborhoods or more. They can be coordinated by
strictly mandated delegates who are rotatable, recallable, and above
all, rigorously instructed in written fcJrm to either support or oppose
whatever issue that appears on the agenda of local con federal councils
composed of delegates from several neighborhood assemblies.
There is no mystery involved in this form of organization. The
historical evidence for their efficacy and their continual reappearance
in times of rapid social change is considerable and persuasive. The
Parisian sections of 1793, despite the size of Paris (between 700,000
and a million) and the logistical difficulties of the era (a time when
nothing moved faster than a horse) functioned with a great deal of
success on their own, coordinated by sectional delegates in the Paris
Commune. They were notable not only for their effectiveness in dealing
with political issues based on a face-to-face democratic structure; they
also played a major role in provisioning the city, in preventing the
hoarding of food, and in suppressing speculation, supervising the
maximum for fixed prices, and carrying out many other complex
administrative tasks. Thus, from a minimal standpoint, no city need
be considered so large that popular assemblies cannot start, least of all
one that has definable neighborhoods that might interlink with each
other on ever-broader confederations.
The real difficulty is largely administrative: how to provide for the
material amenities of city life, support complex logistical and traffic
burdens, or maintain a sanitary environment. This issue is often
obscured by a serious confusion between the formulation of policy and
its administration. For a community to decide in a participatory manner
what specific course of action it should take in dealing with a technical
problem does not oblige all its citizens to execute that policy. The
decision to build a road, for example, does not mean that everyone
must know how to design and construct one. That is a job for engineers,
who can offer alternative designs — a very important political function
of experts, to be sure, but one whose soundness the people in assembly
can be free to decide. To design and construct a road is strictly an
administrative responsibility, albeit one that is always open to public
scrutiny.
If the distinction between policy making and administration is kept
clearly in mind, the role of popular assemblies and the people who
administer their decisions easily distinguishes logistical problems from
political ones, which are ordinarily entangled with each other in
discussions on decentralistic politics. Superficially, the assembly system
is “referendum” politics: it is based on a “social contract” to share
decision making with the population at large, and abide by the rule of
the majority in dealing with problems that confront a municipality, a
regional confederation of municipalities, or for that matter, a national
entity....
That a municipality can be as parochial as a tribe is fairly obvious —
and is no less true today than it has been in the past. Hence any
municipal movement that is not confederal — that is to say, that does
not enter into a network of mutual obligations to towns and cities in
its own region — can no more be regarded as a truly political entity in
any traditional sense than a neighborhood that does not work with
other neighborhoods in the city in which it is located. Confederation — based
on shared responsibilities, full accountability of confederal
delegates to their communities, the right to recall, and firmly mandated
representatives — forms an indispensable part of a new politics. To
demand that existing towns and cities replicate the nation-state on a
local level is to surrender any commitment to social change as such....
What is confederalism as conceived in the libertarian municipalist
framework, and as it would function in a free ecological society? It
would above all be a network of councils whose members or delegates
are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the
various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. These
confederal councils would become the means for interlinking villages,
towns, neighborhoods, and cities into confederal networks. Power thus
would flow from the bottom up instead of from the top down, and in
confederations the flow of power from the bottom up would diminish
with the scope of the federal council, ranging territorially from localities
to regions and from regions to ever-broader territorial areas.
The members of these confederal councils would be strictly
mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose
them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies
formulated by the assemblies themselves. The functions of the councils
would be purely administrative and practical, unlike representatives in
republican systems of government, who have policy-making powers.
Indeed, the confederation would make the same distinction that is made
on the municipal level, between policy-making and administration.
Policy-making would remain exclusively the right of the popular
community assemblies based on the practices of participatory
democracy. Administration — the coordination and execution of
adopted policies — would be the responsibility of the confederal
councils. Wherever policy-making slips from the hands of the people,
it is devoured by its delegates, who quickly become bureaucrats.
A crucial element in giving reality to confederalism is the interdependence
of communities for an authentic mutualism based on shared
resources, produce, and policy-making. While a reasonable measure of
self-sufficiency is desirable for each locality and region, confederalism
is a means for avoiding local parochialism on the one hand and an
extravagant national and global division of labor on the other. Unless
a community is obliged to count on others generally to satisfy important
material needs and realize common political goals, interlinking it to a
greater whole, exclusivity and parochialism become genuine
possibilities. Only insofar as confederation is an extension of
participatory administration — by means of confederal networks — can
decentralization and localism prevent the communities that compose
larger bodies of association from parochially withdrawing into
themselves at the expense of wider areas of human consociation.
Confederalism is thus a way of perpetuating interdependence among
communities and regions — indeed, it is a way of democratizing that
interdependence without surrendering the principle of local control.
Through confederation, a community can retain its identity and
roundedness while participating in a sharing way with the larger whole
that makes up a balanced ecological society....
Thus libertarian municipalism is not an effort simply to “take over”
city councils to construct a more “environmentally friendly” city
government. These adherents — or opponents — of libertarian municipalism,
in effect, look at the civic structures that exist before their eyes
now and essentially (all rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding) take
them as they exist. Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is an effort
to transform and democratize city governments, to root them in popular
assemblies, to knit them together along confederallines, to appropriate
a regional economy along confederal and municipal lines.
In fact, libertarian municipalism gains its life and its integrity precisely
from the dialectical tension it proposes between the nation-state and
the municipal confederation. Its “law of life,” to use an old Marxian
term, consists precisely in its struggle with the State. Then tension
between municipal confederations and the State must be clear and uncompromising. Since these confederations would exist primarily in
opposition to statecraft, they cannot be compromised by state,
provincial or national elections, much less achieved by these means.
Libertarian municipalism is formed by its struggle with the State,
strengthened by this struggle, indeed, defined by this struggle. Divested
of this dialectical tension with the State, of this duality of power that
must ultimately be actualized in a free “Commune of communes,”
libertarian municipalism becomes little more than sewer socialism.
Why is the assembly crucial to self-governance? Is it not enough to use
the referendum, as the Swiss do today, and resolve the problem of
democratic procedure in a simple and seemingly uncomplicated way?
Why can’t policy decisions be made electronically at home — as “Third
Wave” enthusiasts have suggested — by “autonomous” individuals, each
listening to debates and voting in the privacy of his or her home?
A number of vital issues, involving the nature of citizenship and the
recovery of an enhanced classical vision of politics, must be considered
in answering these questions. The “autonomous” individual qua
“voter” who, in liberal theory, forms the irreducible unit of the
referendum process is a fiction. Left to his or her own private destiny
in the name of “autonomy” and “independence,” the individual
becomes an isolated being whose very freedom is denuded of the living
social and political matrix from which his or her individuality acquires
its flesh and blood.... The notion of independence, which is often
confused with independent thinking and freedom, has been so marbled
by pure bourgeois egoism that we tend to forget that our individuality
depends heavily on community support systems and solidarity. It is not
by childishly subordinating ourselves to the community on the one
hand or by detaching ourselves from it on the other that we become
mature human beings. What distinguishes us as social beings, hopefully
with rational institutions, from solitary beings who lack any serious
affiliations, is our capacities for solidarity with one another, for
mutually enhancing our self-development and creativity and attaining
freedom within a socially creative and institutionally rich collectivity.
“Citizenship” apart from community can be as debasing to our
political selfhood as “citizenship” in a totalitarian state. In both cases,
we are thrust back to the condition of dependence that characterizes
infancy and childhood. We are rendered dangerously vulnerable to
manipulation, whether by powerful personalities in private life or by
the state and by corporations in economic life. In neither case do we
attain individuality or community. Both, in fact, are dissolved by
removing the communal ground on which genuine individuality
depends. Rather, it is interdependence within an institutionally rich and
rounded community — which no electronic media can produce — that
fleshes out the individual with the rationality, solidarity, sense of justice,
and ultimately the reality of freedom that makes for a creative and
concerned citizen.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the authentic elements of a rational and
free society are communal, not individual. Conceived in more
institutional terms, the municipality is not only the basis for a free
society; it is the irreducible ground for genuine individuality as well.
The significance of the municipality is all the greater because it
constitutes the discursive arena in which people can intellectually and
emotionally confront one another, indeed, experience one another
through dialogue, body language, personal intimacy, and face-to-face
modes of expression in the course of making collective decisions. I
speak, here, of the all-important process of communizing, of the
ongoing intercourse of many levels of life, that makes for solidarity,
not only the “neighborliness” so indispensable for truly organic
interpersonal relationships.
The referendum, conducted in the privacy of one’s voting booth or,
as some “Third Wave” enthusiasts would have it, in the electronic
isolation of one’s home, privatizes democracy and thereby subverts it.
Voting, like registering one’s preferences for a particular soap or
detergent in an opinion poll, is the total quantification of citizenship,
politics, individuality, and the very formation of ideas as a mutually
informative process. The mere vote reflects a preformulated “percentage”
of our perceptions and values, not their full expression. It is the
technical debasing of views into mere preferences, of ideals into mere
taste, of overall comprehension into quantification such that human
aspirations and beliefs can be reduced to numerical digits.
Finally, the “autonomous individual,” lacking any community
context, support systems, and organic intercourse, is disengaged from
the character-building process — the paideia — that the ancient Athenians
assigned to politics as one of its most important educational functions.
True citizenship and politics entail the ongoing formation of personality,
education, and a growing sense of public responsibility and commitment
that render communizing and an active body politic meaningful,
indeed that give it existential substance. It is not in the privacy of the
school, any more than in the privacy of the voting booth, that these
vital personal and political attributes are formed. They require a public
presence, embodied by vocal and thinking individuals, a responsive
and discursive public sphere, to achieve reality. “Patriotism,” as the
etymology of the word indicates, is the nation-state’s conception of the
citizen as a child, the obedient creature of the nation-state conceived
as a paterfamilias or stern father, who orchestrates belief and commands
devotion. To the extent that we are the “sons” and “daughters” of a
“fatherland,” we place ourselves in an infantile relationship to the state.
Solidarity or philia, by contrast, implies a sense of commitment. It
is created by knowledge, training, experience, and reason — in short,
by a political education developed during the course of political
participation. Ph ilia is the result of the educational and self-formative
process that paideia is meant to achieve. In the absence of a humanly
scaled, comprehensible, and institutionally accessible municipality, this
all-important function of politics and its embodiment in citizenship is
simply impossible to achieve. In the absence of philia or the means to
create it, we gauge “political involvement” by the “percentage” of
“voters” who “participate” in the “political process” — a degradation
of words that totally denatures their authentic meaning and eviscerates
their ethical content....
Be they large or small, the initial assemblies and the movement that
seeks to foster them in civic elections remain the only real school for
citizenship we have. There is no civic “curriculum” other than a living
and creative political realm that can give rise to people who take
management of public affairs seriously. What we must clearly do in an
era of commodification, rivalry, anomie, and egoism is to consciously
create a public sphere that will inculcate the values of humanism,
cooperation, community, and public service in the everyday practice
of civic life. Grassroots citizenship goes hand in hand with grassroots
politics.
The Athenian polis, for all its many shortcomings, offers us
remarkable examples of how a high sense of citizenship can be
reinforced not only by systematic education but by an etiquette of civic
behavior and an artistic culture that adorns ideals of civic service with
the realities of civic practice. Deference to opponents in debates, the
use of language to achieve consensus, ongoing public discussion in the
agora in which even the most prominent of the polis’s figures were
expected to debate public issues with the least known, the use of wealth
not only to meet personal needs but to adorn the polis itself (thus
placing a high premium on the disaccumulation rather than the
accumulation of wealth), a multitude of public festivals, dramas, and
satires largely centered on civic affairs and the need to foster civic
solidarity — all of these and many other aspects of Athens’s political
culture created the civic solidarity and responsibility that made for
actively involved citizens with a deep sense of civic mission.
For our part, we can do no less — and hopefully, in time, considerably
more. The development of citizenship must become an art, not merely
an education — and a creative art in the aesthetic sense that appeals to
the deeply human desire for self-expression in a meaningful political
community. It must be a personal art in which every citizen is fully
aware of the fact that his or her community entrusts its destiny to his
or her moral probity and rationality. If the ideological authority of state
power and statecraft today rests on the assumption that the “citizen”
is an incompetent being, the municipalist conception of citizenship rests
on precisely the opposite. Every citizen would be regarded as competent
to participate directly in the “affairs of state” — indeed, what is more
important, he or she would be encouraged to do so.
Every means would be provided, whether aesthetic or institutional,
to foster participation in full as an educative and ethical process that
turns the citizen’s latent competence into an actual reality. Social and
political life would be consciously orchestrated to foster a profound
sensitivity, indeed an active sense of concern for the adjudication of
differences without denying the need for vigorous dispute when it is
needed. Public service would be seen as a uniquely human attribute,
not a “gift” that a citizen confers on the community or an onerous task
that he or she must fulfill. Cooperation and civic responsibility would
become expressions of acts of sociability and phi/ia, not ordinances
that the citizen is expected to honor in the breach and evade where he
or she can do so.
Put bluntly and clearly, the municipality would become a theater in
which life in its most meaningful public form is the plot, a political
drama whose grandeur imparts nobility and grandeur to the citizenry
that forms the cast. By contrast, our modern cities have become in large
part agglomerations of bedroom apartments in which men and women
spiritually wither away and their personalities become trivialized by
the petty concerns of amusement, consumption, and small talk.
The last and one of the most intractable problems we face is economic.
Today, economic issues tend to center on “who owns what,” “who
owns more than whom,” and, above all, how disparities in wealth are
to be reconciled with a sense of civic commonality. Nearly all
municipalities have been fragmented by differences in economic status,
pitting poor, middle, and wealthy classes against each other often to
the ruin of municipal freedom itself, as the bloody history of Italy’s
medieval and Renaissance cities so clearly demonstrates.
These problems have not disappeared in recent times. Indeed, in
many cases they are as severe as they have ever been. But what is unique
about our own time — a fact so little understood by many liberals and
radicals in North America and Europe — is that entirely new transclass
issues have emerged that concern environment, growth, transportation,
cultural degradation, and the quality of urban life generally — issues
that have been produced by urbanization, not by citification. Cutting
across conflicting class interests are such transclass issues as the massive
dangers of thermonuclear war, growing state authoritarianism, and
ultimately global ecological breakdown. To an extent unparalleled in
American history, an enormous variety of citizens’ groups have brought
people of all class backgrounds into common projects around problems,
often very local in character, that concern the destiny and welfare of
their community as a whole.
Issues such as the siting of nuclear reactors or nuclear waste dumps,
the dangers of acid rain, and the presence of toxic dumps, to cite only
a few of the many problems that beleaguer innumerable American and
British municipalities, have united an astonishing variety of people into
movements with shared concerns that render a ritualistic class analysis
of their motives a matter of secondary importance. Carried still further,
the absorption of small communities by larger ones, of cities by urban
belts, and urban belts by “standard metropolitan statistical areas” or
conurbations has given rise to militant demands for communal integrity
and self-government, an issue that surmounts strictly class and
economic interests. The literature on the emergence of these transclass
movements, so secondary to internecine struggles within cities of earlier
times, is so immense that to merely list the sources would require a
sizable volume.
I have given this brief overview of an emerging general social interest
over old particularistic interests to demonstrate that a new politics
could easily come into being — indeed one that would be concerned not
only with restructuring the political landscape on a municipal level but
the economic landscape as well. The old debates between “private
property” and “nationalized property,” are becoming threadbare. Not
that these different kinds of ownership and the forms of exploitation
they imply have disappeared; rather, they are being increasingly
overshadowed by new realities and concerns. Private property, in the
traditional sense, with its case for perpetuating the citizen as an
economically self-sufficient and politically self-empowered individual,
is fading away. It is disappearing not because “creeping socialism” is
devouring “free enterprise” but because “creeping corporatism” is
devouring everyone — ironically, in the name of “free enterprise.” The
Greek ideal of the politically sovereign citizen who can make a rational
judgment in public affairs because he is free from material need or
clientage has been reduced to a mockery. The oligarchical character of
economic life threatens democracy, such as it is, not only on a national
level but also on a municipal level, where it still preserves a certain
degree of intimacy and leeway.
We come here to a breakthrough approach to a municipalist
economics that innovatively dissolves the mystical aura surrounding
corporatized property and nationalized property, indeed workplace
elitism and “workplace democracy.” I refer to the municipalization of property, as opposed to its corporatization or its nationalization....
Libertarian municipalism proposes that land and enterprises be placed
increasingly in the custody of the community — more precisely, the
custody of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal
councils.... In such a municipal economy — confederal, interdependent,
and rational by ecological, not simply technological, standards — we
would expect that the special interests that divide people today into
workers, professionals, managers, and the like would be melded into
a general interest in which people see themselves as citizens guided
strictly by the needs of their community and region rather than by
personal proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, citizenship would
come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of
the public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests.
As for the workplace, public democracy would be substituted for the
traditional images of productive management and operation,
“economic democracy,” and “economic collectivization.” Significantly,
“economic democracy” in the workplace is no longer incompatible
with a corporatized or nationalized economy. Quite to the contrary:
the effective use of “workers’ participation” in production, even the
outright handing over of industrial operations to the workers who
perform them, has become another form of time-studied, assembly-line
rationalization, another systematic abuse of labor, by bringing labor
itself into complicity with its own exploitation.
Many workers, in fact, would like to get away from their workplaces
and find more creative types of work, not simply participate in planning
their own misery. What “economic democracy” meant in its profoundest
sense was free, democratic access to the means of life, the guarantee
of freedom from material want — not simply the involvement of workers
in onerous productive activities that could better be turned over to
machines. It is a blatant bourgeois trick, in which many radicals
unknowingly participate, that “economic democracy” has been
reinterpreted to mean “employee ownership” or that “workplace
democracy” has come to mean workers’ “participation” in industrial
management rather than freedom from the tyranny of the factory,
rationalized labor, and planned production.
A municipal politics, based on communalist principles, scores a
significant advance over all of these conceptions by calling for the
municipalization of the economy — and its management by the
community as part of a politics of self-management. Syndicalist
demands for the “collectivization” of industry and “workers’ control”
of individual industrial units are based on contractual and exchange
relationships between all collectivized enterprises, thereby indirectly
reprivatizing the economy and opening it to traditional forms of private
property — even if each enterprise is collectively owned. By contrast,
libertarian municipalism literally politicizes the economy by dissolving
economic decision-making into the civic domain. Neither factory nor
land becomes a separate or potentially competitive unit within a
seemingly communal collective.
Nor do workers, farmers, technicians, engineers, professionals, and
the like perpetuate their vocational identities as separate interests that
exist apart from the citizen body in face-to-face assemblies. “Property”
is integrated into the municipality as the material component of a civic
framework, indeed as part of a larger whole that is controlled by the
citizen body in assembly as citizens — not as workers, farmers,
professionals, or any other vocationally oriented special-interest groups.
What is equally important, the famous “contradiction” or
“antagonism” between town and country, so crucial in social theory
and history, is transcended by the township, the traditional New
England jurisdiction, in which an urban entity is the nucleus of its
agricultural and village environs — not a domineering urban entity that
stands opposed to them. A township, in effect, is a small region within
still larger ones, such as the county and larger political jurisdictions.
So conceived, the municipalization of the economy should be
distinguished not only from corporatization but also from seemingly
more “radical” demands such as nationalization and collectivization.
Nationalization of the economy invariably has led to bureaucratic and
top-down economic control; collectivization, in turn, could easily lead
to a privatized economy in a collectivized form with the perpetuation
of class or caste identities. By contrast, municipalization would bring
the economy as a whole into the orbit of the public sphere, where
economic policy could be formulated by the entire community — notably
its citizens in face-to-face relationships working to achieve a general
interest that surmounts separate, vocationally defined specific interests.
The economy would cease to be merely an economy in the conventional
sense of the term, composed of capitalistic, nationalized, or “worker-controlled”
enterprises. It would become the economy of the polis or
the municipality. The municipality, more precisely, the citizen body in
face-to-face assembly, would absorb the economy into its public
business, divesting it of a separate identity that can become privatized
into a self-serving enterprise .
... The municipalization of the economy would not only absorb the
vocational differences that could militate against a publicly controlled
economy; it would also absorb the material means of life into
communal forms of distribution. “From each according to his ability
and to each according to his needs” — the famous demand of various
nineteenth-century socialisms — would be institutionalized as part of
the public sphere. This traditional maxim, which is meant to assure
that people will have access to the means of life irrespective of the work
they are capable of performing, would cease to be merely a precarious
credo: it would become a practice, a way of functioning politically —
one that is structurally built into the community as a way of existing
as a political entity.
Moreover, the enormous growth of the productive forces, rationally
and ecologically employed for social rather than private ends, has
rendered the age-old problem of material scarcity a moot issue.
Potentially, all the basic means for living in comfort and security are
available to the populations of the world, notwithstanding the dire —
and often fallacious — claims of present-day misanthropes and
antihumanists such as Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and regrettably,
advocates of “simple living,” who can barely be parted from their
computers even as they deride technological developments of almost
any kind. It is easily forgotten that only a few generations ago, famine
was no less a plague than deadly infectious diseases like the Black Death,
and that the life-span of most people at the turn of the last century in
the United States and Europe seldom reached fifty years of age.
No community can hope to achieve economic autarky, nor should
it try to do so. Economically, the wide range of resources that are
needed to make many of our widely used goods preclude self-enclosed
insularity and parochialism. Far from being a liability, this interdependence
among communities and regions can well be regarded as
an asset — culturally as well as politically. Interdependence among communities
is no less important than interdependence among individuals.
Divested of the cultural cross-fertilization that is often a product of
economic intercourse, the municipality tends to shrink into itself and
disappear into its own civic privatism. Shared needs and resources imply
the existence of sharing and, with sharing, communication, rejuvenation
by new ideas, and a wider social horizon that yields a wider sensibility
to new experiences.
The recent emphasis in environmental theory on “self-sufficiency,”
if it does not mean a greater degree of prudence in dealing with material
resources, is regressive. Localism should never be interpreted to mean
parochialism; nor should decentralism ever be interpreted to mean that
smallness is a virtue in itself. Small is not necessarily beautiful. The
concept of human scale, by far the more preferable expression for a
truly ecological policy, is meant to make it possible for people to
completely grasp their political environment, not to parochially bury
themselves in it to the exclusion of cultural stimuli from outside their
community’s boundaries.
Given these coordinates, it is possible to envision a new political
culture with a new revival of citizenship, popular civic institutions, a
new kind of economy, and a countervailing dual power, confederally
networked, that could arrest and hopefully reverse the growing
centralization of the state and corporate enterprises. Moreover, it is
also possible to envision an eminently practical point of departure for
going beyond the town and city as we have known them up to now
and for developing future forms of habitation as communities that seek
to achieve a new harmonization between people and between humanity
and the natural world. I have emphasized its practicality because it is
now clear that any attempt to tailor a human community to a natural
“ecosystem” in which it is located cuts completely against the grain of
centralized power, be it state or corporate. Centralized power invariably
reproduces itself in centralized forms at all levels of social, political,
and economic life. It not only is big; it thinks big. Indeed, this way of
being and thinking is a condition for its survival, not only its growth.
As for the technological bases for decentralized communities, we are
now witnessing a revolution that would have seemed hopelessly utopian
only a few decades ago. Until recently, smaller-scale ecotechnologies
were used mainly by individuals, and their efficiency barely compared
with that of conventional energy sources, such as fossil fuels and nuclear
power plants. This situation has changed dramatically in the past fifteen
to twenty years. In the United States, wind turbines have been developed
and are currently in use that generate electric power at a cost of 7 to
9 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 20 cents only a decade earlier.
This figure is very close to the 4 — to-6-cent cost of power plants fueled
by natural gas or coal. These comparisons, which can be expected to
improve in favor of wind power in the years to come, have fostered the
expansion of this nonfossil-fuel source throughout the entire world,
particularly in India, where there has been “a major wind boom” in
1994, according to the Worldwatch Institute.[68]
A similar “boom” seems to be in the making in a variety of solar
power devices. New solar collectors have been designed that increasingly
approximate the costs of conventional energy sources, particularly
in heating water for domestic uses. Photovoltaic cells, in which silicon
is used to convert solar energy into electrons, have been developed to a
point where “thousands of villagers in the developing world [are J using
photovoltaic cells to power lights, televisions, and water pumps, needs
that are otherwise met with kerosene lamps, lead-acid batteries, or diesel
engines.” In fact, more than 200,000 homes in Mexico, Indonesia, South
Africa, and some 2,000 in the Dominican Republic have been
“solarized,” probably with a good many more to come.[69] It can be said
with reasonable confidence that this increasingly sophisticated
technology will become one of the most important — if not the most
important — sources of electrical energy in the years to come, yet one
that is eminently suitable for humanly scaled communities.
To view technological advances as intrinsically harmful, particularly
nonpolluting sources of energy and automated machinery that can free
human beings of mindless toil in a rational society, is as shortsighted
as it is arrogant. Understandably, people today will not accept a diet
of pious moral platitudes that call for “simple means” that presumably
will give them “rich ends,” whatever these may be, especially if these
platitudes are delivered by well-paid academics and privileged EuroAmericans
who have no serious quarrel with the present social order
apart from whether it affords them access to “wilderness” theme parks.
For the majority of humanity, toil and needless shortages of food are
an everyday reality. To expect them to become active citizens in a vital
political, ecologically-oriented community while engaging in arduous
work for most of their lives, often on empty bellies, is an unfeeling
middle-class presumption. Unless they can enjoy a decent sufficiency
in the means of life and freedom from mindless, often involuntary toil,
it is the height of arrogance to degrade their humanity by calling them
“mouths,” as many demographers do, or “consumers,” as certain very
comfortable environmentalists do.
Indeed, it is the height of elitism and privilege to deny them the
opportunity and the means for choosing the kind of lifeways they want
to pursue. Nor have the well-to-do strata of Euro-American society
deprived themselves of that very freedom of choice — a choice, in fact,
that they take for granted as a matter of course. Without fostering
promising advances in technology that can free humanity as a whole
from its subservience to the present, irrational — and, let me emphasize,
anti-ecological — social order, we will almost certainly never achieve
the free society whose existence is a precondition for harmony between
human and human and between humanity and the natural world.
Which is not to say that we can ignore the need for a visionary ethical
ideal. Ironically, it has been the Right’s shrewd emphasis on ethics and
matters of spirit in an increasingly meaningless world that has given
it a considerable edge over the forces of progress. Nazism achieved
much of its success among the German people a half century ago not
because of any economic panaceas it offered but because of its mythic
ideal of nationhood, community, and moral regeneration. In recent
times, reactionary movements in America have won millions to their
cause on such values as the integrity of the family, religious belief, the
renewal of patriotism, and the right to life — a message, I may add,
that has been construed not only as a justification for anti-abortion
legislation but as a hypostatization of the individual’s sacredness,
unborn as well as born.
Characteristically, liberal and radical causes are still mired in
exclusively economistic and productivistic approaches to political issues.
Their moral message, once a heightened plea for social justice, has given
way increasingly to strictly material demands. Far more than the Right,
which practices egoism and class war against the poor even as it
emphasizes community virtues, the political middle ground and the
Left take up the eminently practical issue of bread on the table and
money in the bank but offer few values that are socially inspirational.
Having emphasized the need to resolve the problems of material
scarcity, it is equally necessary to emphasize the need to address the
moral emptiness that a market society produces among large numbers
of people today.
Morality and ethics, let me add, cannot be reduced to mere rhetoric
to match the claims of reactionaries but must be the felt spiritual
underpinnings of a new social outlook. They must be viewed not as a
patronizing sermon but as a living practice that people can incorporate
into their personal lives and their communities. The vacuity and
triviality of life today must be replaced precisely by radical ideals of
solidarity and freedom that sustain the human side of life as well as its
material side, or else the ideals by which a rational future should be
guided will disappear in the commodity-oriented world we call the
“marketplace of ideas.”
The most indecent aspect of this “marketplace” is that ideals tend
to become artifacts — mere commodities — that lack even the value of
the material things we need to sustain us. They become the ideological
ornaments to garnish an inherently antihuman and anti-ecological
society, one that threatens to undermine moral integrity as such and
the simple social amenities that foster human intercourse.
Thus a municipal agenda that is meant to countervail urbanization
and the nation-state must be more than a mere electoral platform, such
as we expect from conventional parties. It must also be a message,
comparable to the great manifestos advanced by various socialist
movements in the last century, which called for moral as well as
material and institutional reconstruction. Today’s electoral platforms,
whether “green” or “red,” radical or liberal, are generally shopping
lists of demands, precisely suited for that “marketplace of ideas” we
have misnamed “politics.”
Nor can a municipal agenda be a means for effacing serious
differences in outlook. The need for thinking out ideas and struggling
vigorously to give them coherence, which alone renders an agenda for
a new municipal politics intelligible, is often sacrificed to ideological
confusion in the name of achieving a specious “unity.” A cranky
pluralism is replacing an appreciation of focused thinking; a shallow
relativism is replacing a sense of continuity and meaningful values; a
confused eclecticism is replacing wholeness, clarity, and consistency.
Many promising movements for basic social change in the recent past
were plagued by a pluralism in which totally contradictory views were
never worked out or followed to their logical conclusions, a problem
that has grown even worse today due to the cultural illiteracy that
plagues contemporary society....
A serious political movement that seeks to advance a libertarian
municipalist agenda, in turn, must be patient — just as the Russian
populists of the last century (one of whom is cited in the dedication to
this book) were. The 1960s upsurge, with all its generous ideals, fell
apart because young radicals demanded immediate gratification and
sensational successes. The protracted efforts that are so direly needed
for building a serious movement — perhaps one whose goals cannot be
realized within a single lifetime — were woefully absent. Many of the
radicals of thirty years ago, burning with fervor for fundamental
change, have since withdrawn into the university system they once
denounced, the parliamentary positions they formerly disdained, and
the business enterprises they furiously attacked.
A libertarian municipalist movement, in particular, would not — and
should not — achieve sudden success and wide public accolades. The
present period of political malaise at best and outright reaction at worst
renders any sensational successes impossible. If such a libertarian
municipalist movement runs candidates for municipal councils with
demands for the institution of public assemblies, it will more likely lose
electoral races today rather than win even slight successes. Depending
upon the political climate at any given time or place, years may pass
before it wins even the most modest success.
In any very real sense, however, this protracted development is a
desideratum. With rapid success, many na”ive members of a municipal
electorate expect rapid changes — which no minority, however
substantial, can ever hope to achieve at once. For an unpredictable
amount of time, electoral activity will primarily be an educational
activity, an endeavor to enter the public sphere, however small and
contained it may be on the local level, and to educate and interact with
ever larger numbers of people.
Even where a measure of electoral success on the local level can be
achieved, the prospect of implementing a radically democratic policy
is likely to be obstructed by the opposition of the nation-state and the
weak position of municipalities in modern “democratic” nation-states.
Although it is highly doubtful that even civic authorities would allow
a neighborhood assembly to acquire the legal power to make civic
policy, still less state and national authorities, let me emphasize that
assemblies that have no legal power can exercise enormous moral
power. A popular assembly that sternly voices its views on many issues
can cause considerable disquiet among local authorities and generate
a widespread public reaction in its favor over a large region, indeed
even on a national scale.
An interesting case in point is the nuclear freeze resolution that was
adopted by more than a hundred town meetings in Vermont a decade
ago. Not only did this resolution resonate throughout the entire United
States, leading to ad hoc “town meetings” in regions of the country
that had never seen them, it affected national policy on this issue and
culminated in a demonstration of approximately a million people in
New York City. Yet none of the town meetings had the “legal”
authority to enforce a nuclear freeze, nor did the issue fall within the
purview of a typical New England town meeting’s agenda. Historically,
in fact, few civic projects that resemble libertarian municipalism began
with a view toward establishing a radical democracy of any sort.
The forty-eight Parisian sections of 1793 actually derived from the
sixty Parisian electoral districts of 1789. These districts were initially
established through a complicated process (deliberately designed to
exclude the poorer people of Paris) to choose the Parisian members of
the Third Estate when the king convoked the Estates General at
Versailles. Thereafter the districts, having chosen their deputies, were
expected to disband. In fact, the sixty districts refused to desist from
meeting regularly, despite their lack of legal status, and a year later
became an integral part of the city’s government. With the radicalization
of the French Revolution, the fearful city and national authorities tried
to weaken the power of the districts by reducing their number of fortyeight — hence, the mutation of the old districts into sections. Finally,
the sections opened their doors to everyone, some including women,
without any property or status qualifications. This most radical of civic
structures, which produced the most democratic assemblies theretofore
seen in history, thus slowly elbowed its way into authority, initially
without any legal authority whatever and in flat defiance of the nationstate.
For all their limitations, the Parisian sections remain an abiding
example of how a seemingly nonlegal assembly system can be
transformed into a network of revolutionary popular institutions
around which a new society can be structured....
What is of immense practical importance is that prestatist
institutions, traditions, and sentiments remain alive in varying degrees
throughout most of the world. Resistance to the encroachment of
oppressive states has been nourished by village, neighborhood, and
town community networks; witness such struggles in South Africa, the
Middle East, and Latin America. The tremors that are now shaking
Soviet Russia are due not solely to demands for greater freedom but to
movements for regional and local autonomy that challenge its very
existence as a centralized nation-state. To ignore the communal basis
of this movement would be as myopic as to ignore the latent instability
of every nation-state; worse would be to take the nation-state as it is
for granted and deal with it merely on its own terms. Indeed, whether
a state remains “more” of a state or “less” — no trifling matter to radical
theorists as disparate as Bakunin and Marx — depends heavily upon
the power of local, confederal, and community movements to
countervail it and hopefully to establish a dual power that will replace
it. The major role that the Madrid Citizens’ Movement played nearly
three decades ago in weakening the Franco regime would require a
major study to do it justice.
The problem of dealing with the growing power of nation-states and
of centralized corporations, property ownership, production, and the
like is precisely a question of power — that is to say, who shall have it
or who shall be denied any power at all. Michel Foucault has done our
age no service by making power an evil as such. Foucauldian
postmodernist views notwithstanding, the broad mass of people in the
world today lack what they need most — the power to challenge the
nation-state and arrest the centralization of economic resources, lest
future generations see all the gains of humanity dissipated and freedom
disappear from social discourse.
Minimally, if power is to be socially redistributed so that the
ordinary people who do the real work of the world can effectively
speak back to those who run social and economic affairs, a movement
is vitally needed to educate, mobilize, and, using the wisdom of
ordinary and extraordinary people alike, initiate local steps to regain
power in its most popular and democratic forms. Power of this kind
must be collected, if we are to take democracy seriously, in newly
developed institutions such as assemblies that allow for the direct
participation of citizens in public affairs. Without a movement to work
toward such a democratic end, including educators who are prepared,
in turn, to be educated, and intellectually sophisticated people who
can develop and popularize this project, efforts to challenge power as
it is now constituted will simply sputter out in escapades, riots,
adventures, and protests....
Power that is not retained by the people is power that is given over
to the state. Conversely, whatever power the people gain is power that
must be taken away from the state. There can be no institutional
vacuum where power exists: it is either invested in the people or it is
invested in the state. Where the two “share” power, this condition is
extremely precarious and often temporary. Sooner or later, the control
of society and its destiny will either shift toward the people and their
communities at its base or toward the professional practitioners of
statecraft at its summit. Only if the whole existing pyramidal social
structure is dismembered and radically democratized will the issue of
domination as such disappear and be completely replaced by
participation and the principle of complementarity.
Power, however, must be conceived as real, indeed solid and tangible,
not only as spiritual and psychological. To ignore the fact that power
is a muscular fact of life is to drift from the visionary into the ethereal
and mislead the public as to its crucial significance in affecting society’s
destiny.
What this means is that if power is to be regained by the people from
the state, the management of society must be deprofessionalized as
much as possible. That is to say, it must be simplified and rendered
transparent, indeed, clear, accessible, and manageable such that most
of its affairs can be run by ordinary citizens. This emphasis on
amateurism as distinguished from professionalism is not new. It formed
the basis of Athenian democratic practice for generations. Indeed, it
was so ably practiced that sortition rather than election formed the
basis of the polis’s democracy. It resurfaced repeatedly, for example, in
early medieval city charters and confederations, and in the great
democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century.
Power is also a solid and tangible fact to be reckoned with militarily,
notably in the ubiquitous truth that the power of the state or the people
eventually reposes in force. Whether the state has power ultimately
depends upon whether it exercises a monopoly of violence. By the same
token, whether the people have power ultimately depends upon whether
they are armed and create their own grassroots militia, to guard not
only themselves from criminals or invaders but their own power and
freedom from the ever-encroaching power of the state itself. Here, too,
the Athenian, British, and American yeomen knew only too well that
a professional military was a threat to liberty and the state was a vehicle
for disarming the people.
A true civicism that tries to create a genuine politics, an empowered
citizenry, and a municipalized economy would be a vulnerable project
indeed if it failed to replace the police and the professional army with
a popular militia — more specifically, a civic guard, composed of rotating
patrols for police purposes and well-trained citizen military contingents
for dealing with external dangers to freedom. Greek democracy would
never have survived the repeated assaults of the Greek aristocracy
without its militia of citizen hoplites, those foot soldiers who could
answer the call to arms with their own weapons and elected commanders.
The tragic history of the state’s ascendancy over free
municipalities, even the rise of oligarchy within free cities of the past,
is the story of armed professionals who commandeered power from
unarmed peoples or disarmed them presumably (as so many liberals
would have it today) from the “hazards” of domestic and neighborhood
“shootouts.” Typically, this is the cowboy or “gunslinger” image of
the “American Dream,” often cynically imposed on its more traditional
yeoman face.
Beyond the municipal agenda that I have presented thus far lies another,
more long-range, one: the vision of a political world in which the state
as such would finally be replaced completely by a confederal network
of municipal assemblies; all socially important forms of property would
be absorbed into a truly political economy in which municipalities,
interacting with each other economically as well as politically, would
resolve their material problems as citizens in open assemblies, not
simply as professionals, farmers, and blue — or white-collar workers;
and humanly scaled and physically decentralized municipalities.
Not only would people then be able to transform themselves from
occupational beings into communally-oriented citizens; they would
create a world in which all weapons could indeed be beaten into
plowshares. Ultimately, it would be possible for new networks of
communities to emerge that would be exquisitely tailored —
psychologically and spiritually as well as technologically, architecturally,
and structurally — to the natural environments in which they exist.
This agenda for a more distant future embodies the “ultimate” vision
have elaborated in greater detail in my previous writings. Its
achievement can no longer be seen as a sudden “revolution” that within
a brief span of time will replace the present society with a radically new
one. Actually, such revolutions never really happened in history. Even
the French Revolution, which radicals have long regarded as a paradigm
of sudden social change, was generations in making and did not come
to its definitive end until a century later, when the last of the sans
culottes were virtually exterminated on the barricades of the Paris
Commune of 1871.
Nor can we afford today the myth today that barricades are more
than a symbol. What links my minimal agenda to my ultimate one is
a process, an admittedly long development in which the existing
institutions and traditions of freedom are slowly enlarged and
expanded. For the present, we must try increasingly to democratize the
republic, a call that consists of preserving — and expanding — freedoms
we have earned centuries ago, together with the institutions that give
them reality. For the future it means that we must radicalize the
democracy we create, imparting an even more creative content to the
democratic institutions we have rescued and tried to develop.
Admittedly, at that later point we will have moved from a
countervailing position that tries to play our democratic institutions
against the state into a militant attempt to replace the state with
municipally based confederal structures. It is to be devoutly hoped that
by that time, too, the state power itself will have been hollowed out
institutionally by local or civic structures, indeed that its very legitimacy,
not to speak of its authority as a coercive force, will simply lead to its
collapse in any period of confrontation. If the great revolutions of the
past provide us with examples of how so major a shift is possible, it
would be well to remember that seemingly all-powerful monarchies
that the republics replaced two centuries ago were so denuded of power
that they crumbled rather than “fell,” much as a mummified corpse
turns to dust after it has been suddenly exposed to air.
Another future prospect also faces us, a chilling one, in which
urbanization so completely devours the city and the countryside that
community becomes an archaism; in which a market society filters into
the most private recesses of our lives as individuals and effaces all sense
of personality, let alone individuality; in which a state renders politics
and citizenship not only a mockery but a maw that absorbs the very
notion of freedom itself.
This prospect is still sufficiently removed from our most immediate
experience that its realization can be arrested by those countervailing
forces — that dual power — that I have outlined. Given the persistent
destructuring of the natural world as well as the social, more than
human freedom is in the balance. The rise of reactionary nationalisms
and proliferation of nuclear weapons are only two reminders that we
may be reaching a point of cosmic finality in our affairs on the planet.
Thus the recovery of a classical concept of politics and citizenship is
not only a precondition for a free society; it is also a precondition for
our survival as a species. Looming before us is the image of a completely
destructured and simplified natural world as well as a completely
destructured and simplified urban world — a natural and social world
so divested of its variety that we, like all other complex life-forms, will
be unable to exist as viable beings.
[66] Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 80.
[67] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
(Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1962, 1969), p. 33.
[68] Lester Brown et al., State of the World: 1995 (New York and London:
W. W. Norton and Co., 1995), pp. 60–70.
[69] Ibid., p. 67.
** Chapter 9: Dialectical Naturalism
*** Introduction
For much of the twentieth century relativism has plagued
philosophical thought, casting into ever-greater philosophical doubt
all claims to objective knowledge of reality. In the 1980s and 1990s
the rise of postmodernism and deconstruction have given academic
philosophy a further relativistic charge. Claims to objective knowledge
have now become deeply problematic — and the tendency is
growing, when competing claims to knowledge are debated, to
end merely with an agnostic shrug.
Despite such intellectual fashions, however, it is a staple of
political action in any era that it must have a philosophical
grounding in objective reality. Political action presupposes that a
group of people have a coherent understanding of their social
condition, a belief that it is necessary and possible to change those
surroundings, and the willingness to make a long-term commitment
to change them. A merely existential or personal justification, which
is all that relativistic philosophy provides, is inadequate, since it
leaves the political actor’s choices arbitrary and susceptible to
change from day to day; it provides no ethics as a foundation for
political action, since it finds the very concept of objective ethics
even more abhorrent than the concept of objective knowledge.
Like any political and social approach, Bookchin’s social ecology
requires a philosophical grounding. Having absorbed, via the
Marxist tradition, the humanism and rationalism of the Enlightenment,
Bookchin retains an active commitment to these foundation
stones of Western thought to construct not only his political
approach but his nature philosophy. His dialectical naturalism, as
he calls it, draws specifically on the dialectical tradition in Western
philosophy, whose most important sources are Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, Hegel’s science of logic, and Marx’s Capital.
As an adherent of the humanistic and rationalistic tradition,
Bookchin holds that it is indeed possible to gain objective
knowledge of first nature. As a participant in the dialectical
tradition, he maintains that first nature is a reality in the process
of becoming. Substance not only exists, contrary to today’s
agnostics; it is developing, indeed evolving. That first nature is
evolutionary makes it especially suitable for comprehension by
dialectical philosophy, which emphasizes processes of directional
change — that is, becoming — as opposed to being.
Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx saw reality as a developmental rather
than a static process, with tendencies in the direction of evergreater
differentiation, complexity, subjectivity, and wholeness.
Bookchin, in keeping with his own ecological approach, melded
evolutionary theory into their account, giving dialectical P.hilosophy
a naturalistic dimension and rejecting earlier recourses to objective
idealism (Hegel) and a crude materialism (Engels) in that tradition.
And in keeping with his social anarchistic approach, he explored
the libertarian dimensions of the tradition, rejecting the teleology
of earlier dialectical thinkers while retaining a concept of tendency
or directionality.
Like Hegel, Bookchin considers dialectics not only to give an
account of the objective world but to be a mode of understanding
that world. Thus, dialectical naturalism is not only an account of
causation; it is also a form of reasoning.
Much ecological thinking today, Bookchin maintains, partakes of
the relativism so characteristic of the twentieth century. It sees the
Western mechanistic worldview as a major cause of the ecological
crisis, and it considers reason to be endemic to mechanism. Indeed,
such thinkers argue, the Enlightenment humanistic tradition has
generally given priority to human interests over those of first
nature; its emphasis on reason is merely part and parcel of this
ecocidal anthropocentrism. They thus reject reason in favor of
intuitionism and mysticism as a mode of apprehending — or
obfuscating — reality.
Bookchin, by contrast, sees the Enlightenment itself as ecological
in the sense that it refocused human attention away from God and
the supernatural precisely onto first nature and naturalistic
concerns. To be sure, he admits, a type of reason — the instrumental
and analytical kind — has been a factor in ecological destruction as
well as promoting human misery, when it has been applied
inappropriately. This “conventional” reason — his shorthand name
for it — focuses on mechanical causality, the separation of fact and
value, and crude empiricism; it is best suited for apprehending
nonprocessual phenomena. But it has been applied outside its
province, to organic life-forms and especially to human society,
where it engenders a one-sided and static view of developmental
phenomena. Bookchin proposes that dialectical reasoning is a more
appropriate mode of engagement with the organic and social
worlds, since it emphasizes becoming rather than stasis and regards
causes, which may be elicited, or educed, as “emergent.”
Dialectical philosophy not only furnishes a form of “ecological
thinking”; it allows us to educe an objective ethic that can guide
us in the present ecological crisis — one that wi II provide an objective
ground for advancing an ethical socialism against the market
economy, and for creating a free society.
In his discussions of ecological ethics, Bookchin has been
criticized — by relativists, among others — for succumbing to the
“naturalistic fallacy” — that is, for making specious analogies
between first nature and second nature. He justifies the appropriateness
of diversity, cooperation, and mutuality for human
society, they argue, by adducing those very features in first nature.
By such reasoning, they argue, we could just as easily claim that
first nature is “red in tooth and claw” and use that fact to justify
social Darwinism in society.
But Bookchin is not suggesting that society should mimic first
nature, however benign certain aspects of it may be. Rather, he is
arguing that certain tendencies — an increase in subjectivity and
range of choice, for example — are objectively part of evolution and
as such should be promoted wherever possible by human beings.
He contends that the values that can be educed from what “should
be” follow rationally from these objective potentialities in natural
and social development, which exist as latent realities, not as
speculations or abstract values.
This tendency toward greater consciousness and choice
constitutes the potential by which the natural and social worlds
may become self-conscious and self-directive — in human reason
and rational action. The self-formative biosphere, including both
first and second nature, could potentially find its realization in a
“free nature.” Since this ecological and rational society has not yet
been attained, its potentiality exists as an ethical “should be”
against which we may judge the failings of present society; its
attainment would be the fulfillment of human emancipation.
*** Objectively Grounded Ethics
(from “Rethinking Ethics, Nature, and Society,” 1985)
If we desperately need an ethics that will join the ideal with the real and
give words like realism a richer, more rational meaning than they have,
then we are faced with a traditional dilemma. How can we objectively
validate ethical claims in an era of moral relativism, when good and
bad, right and wrong, virtue and evil, even the selection of strategies for
social change are completely subjectivized into matters of taste or
opinion? The overstated claim that what is good for a highly
personalized “me” may not be good for an equally personalized “you”
speaks to the growing amorality of our time. Accordingly, such a moral
relativism ... has acquired the sanctity of a constitutional precept in
our system of government. It has become the standard by which to
determine the criminality of behavior and the guiding principles of
diplomacy, religion, politics, and education, not to mention business
and personal affairs. The subjectivization of behavioral precepts reflects
the universal opportunism of the time; its emphasis is on operational
ways of life as distinguished from philosophical ones, especially on ways
to survive and function rather than on ideas imbued with meaning.
That moral relativism can deliver us to a totally noncritical view of
a world in which mere taste and fleeting opinion justify anything,
including nuclear immolation, has been stressed enough not to require
further elucidation. If mere opinion suffices to validate social behavior,
then the social order itself can be validated simply by public opinion
polls. Hence, whether capital punishment is “right” or “wrong” ceases
to be an ethical question about the sanctity of life. The issue becomes
a problem of juggling percentages, which may justify the slaughter of
homicidal felons during one year and their right to live during another.
Whether the figures of our polls go up or down can decide whether a
given number of people will be put to death or not. Carried to its logical
conclusion, this personalistic, operational view of morality can justify
a totalitarian society, which abolishes the very claims of the individual.
It was not from a sense of irony or perversity that visitors to Mussolini’s
Italy in the 1920s applauded a fascist regime because Italian trains
operated on time. The efficiency of a social system and mere matters
of personal convenience were identified with its claims to be the
embodiment of the public welfare.
To exorcise moral relativism, with its distasteful extensions into a
politics of lesser evils and a practice structured around risk-versus-benefit
calculations, is a vexing problem indeed. The converse of a radical moral
relativism is a radical moral absolutism, which can be as totalitarian in
its power to control as its relativistic opposite is democratic in its power
to relax. Both live in a curious intellectual symbiosis; the seeming
pluralism of a moral democracy has been known to encompass a fascistic
ethics as easily as an anarchic one — which raises the question of how
to keep a democracy from voting itself out of existence.
Suffice it to say that moral absolutism is neither better nor worse
than the concrete message it has to offer. An ethics grounded in ecology
can yield a salad of “natural laws” that are as tyrannical in their
conclusions as the chaos of moral relativism is precariously wayward.
To appeal from ecology to God is to leap from nature to supernature —
that
is, ironically, from the human subject as it exists in the real world
to the way it exists in the imagination. Religious precepts are the
products of priests and visionaries, not of an objective world from
which we can gain an ethical direction that is the commanding dictum
neither of “natural law” on the one hand nor of supernatural “law”
on the other. We have learned only too well that Hitler’s “blood and
soil” naturism, like Stalin’s cosmological “dialectics,” can be used as
viciously as notions of “natural law” (with all their Darwinian connotations
of “fitness to survive” and “natural selection”) to collect
millions of people in concentration camps, where they are worked to
death, incinerated, or both.
Indeed, the suspicion surrounding the choice of nature as a ground
for ethics is justified by a history of nature philosophies that gave
validity to oligarchy (Plato), slavery (Aristotle), hierarchy (Aquinas),
necessity (Spinoza), and domination (Marx), to single out the betterknown
thinkers of Western philosophy. Rarely indeed has nature itself
been seen as a nascent domain of freedom, selfhood, and consciousness.
Almost invariably, Western thinkers have dealt with the natural
world as a wilderness that has always been hostile to humanity or
controlled by “natural law,” a lawfulness unerring in its necessitarian
relationships.
It is here that social ecology fills a void in an objective ethics that is
neither absolutist nor relativist, authoritarian nor chaotic, necessitarian
nor arbitrary — with all the pitfalls for humanity that these paired
notions have yielded. Given social ecology’s emphasis on nature’s
fecundity, on its thrust toward increasing variety, on its limitless
capacity to differentiate life-forms and its development of richer, more
varied evolutionary pathways that steadily involve ever-more complex
species, our vision of the natural world begins to change. We no longer
need look upon it as a necessitarian, withholding, or stingy redoubt of
blind cruelty and harsh determinism. Although never a “realm of
freedom,” nature is not reducible to an equally fictitious “realm of
necessity,” as earlier philosophers, social thinkers, and scientists
claimed. The possibility of freedom and individuation is opened up by
the rudimentary forms of self-selection, perhaps even “choice,” if you
will, of the most nascent and barely formed kind that emerges from
the increasing complexity of species and their alternate pathways of
evolution. Here, without doing violence to the facts, we can begin to
point to a thrust in evolution that contains the potentialities of freedom
and individuation. Here, too, we can see certain premises for social
life — conceived, to be sure, as the institutionalization of the animal
community into a potentially rational, self-governing form of association — and, owing to the ever-greater complexity of the nervous system
and brain, for the emergence of reason itself.
This ensemble of ideas, I submit, provides us with the basis for an
ecological ethics that sees selfhood, reason, and freedom as emerging
from nature — not in sharp opposition to nature. Natural evolution
over time gives rise from within itself to a rich wealth of gradations
that open the way to social evolution — in short, two evolutionary
pathways in which one is parent to the other. The traditional dualism
in human thought that pitted humanity against animality, society
against nature, freedom against necessity, mind against body, and in
its most insidious hierarchical form, man against woman is transcended
by due recognition of the continuity between the two, but without a
reductionism or “oneness” that yields, in Hegel’s words, “a night in
which all cows are black.”[70] This transcendence is achieved historically,
not by arguing out the problem from within the trenches of biology
and society — as though each could be discussed and explored separately
from the other — and then constructing some kind of mechanical
apparatus to “bridge” the gap between these dualities. With the use of
an evolutionary approach to explain the evolution of humanity out of
animality, society out of nature, and mind out of body, we shed
sociobiology’s tyrannical “morality of the gene.” We also free ourselves
from antihumanism’s reductionist dissolution of human uniqueness
into a cosmic “community” in which ants are equatable with people,
from the infamous “lifeboat ethic” that denies the need to share the
means of life with others who are less privileged, from an overtly
National Socialist outlook that validates the authority of self-appointed
“supermen” to dominate “subhumans,” and from a Stalinist reduction
of human beings to the raw material of a “History” governed by the
inexorable “laws” of dialectical materialism.
Let me emphasize that social ecology, while viewing nature as a
ground for an ethics of freedom and individuation, does not see an
inexorable “lawfulness” at work that derives the human from the
nonhuman or society from nature. Social ecology is not only a
philosophy of process, it is also a philosophy of potentiality. Potentiality
involves a sensitivity to the latent possibilities that inhere in a given
constellation of phenomena, not a surrender to predetermined
inevitability. It is the capability “to be” that is not as yet in being, a
process in which the conditions for a specific line of development exist
but have yet to achieve fruition as a “whole” with all its wealth of
fullness, self-development, and uniqueness. Analogies more often tell
us what this approach to reality is than propositional elucidations: the
acorn, for example, which has the potentiality to become an oak tree
or the human embryo which has the potentiality to become a fully
mature and creative adult. This notion, in any case, is a message of
freedom, not of necessity; it speaks to an immanent striving for
realization, not to a predetermined certainty of completion. What is
potential in an acorn that yields an oak tree or in a human embryo that
yields a mature, creative adult is equivalent to what is potential in
nature that yields society and what is potential in society that yields
freedom, selfhood, and consciousness.
*** A Philosophical Naturalism
(from the introduction to The Philosophy of Social Ecology, 1990)
Today, even sensitive people in growing numbers feel betrayed by the
centuries-long glorification of reason, with its icy claims to efficiency,
objectivity, and freedom from ethical constraint — the form of reason
that has nourished particularly destructive technologies like nucleonics
and weaponry. This negative popular reaction is understandable. But
swerving away from a specific form of reason that is largely instrumental
and coldly analytical creates problems that are no less disturbing
than those questions from which we are seeking to escape.
In our aversion to an insensitive and unfeeling form of reason, we may
easily opt for a cloudy intuitionism and mysticism as an alternative.
Unlike instrumental and analytical reason, after all, a surrender to
emotion and mythic beliefs yields cooperative feelings of “interconnectedness”
with the natural world and perhaps even a caring attitude
toward it. But precisely because intuition and mystical beliefs are so
cloudy and arbitrary — which is to say, so un-reasoned — they may also
“connect” us with things we really shouldn’t be connected with at all — namely,
racism, sexism, and an abject subservience to charismatic leaders.
Indeed, following this intuitional alternative could potentially render
our ecological outlook very dangerous. Vital as the idea of “interconnectedness”
may be to our views, it has historically often been the basis
of myths and supernatural beliefs that became means for social control
and political manipulation. The first half of the twentieth century is in
great part the story of brutal movements like National Socialism that
fed on a popular antirationalism and anti-intellectualism, and a
personal sense of alienation, among other things. This movement
mobilized and homogenized millions of people with an antisocial,
perverted “ecologistic” ideology based on intuition, with an “interconnectedness”
of earth, folk, and “blood and soil” that was militaristic
and murderous rather than freely communitarian. Insulated from the
challenge of rational critique by its anti-intellectualism and mythic
nationalism, the National Socialist movement eventually turned much
of Europe into a cemetery. Yet ideologically, this fascist totalitarianism
had gained sustenance from the intuitional and mystical credo of the
Romantic movement of the century before — something no one could
have foreseen at the time.
Feeling, sentiment, and a moral outlook we surely need if instrumental
and analytical reason are not to divest us of our passion for
truth. But myths, mind-numbing rituals, and charismatic personalities
can also rob us of the critical faculties that thought provides.
Recently, a Green organization in Canada flippantly proclaimed that
it seeks “cooperation” as part of its “new paradigm” rather than
“confrontation,” which it considers part of the rejected “old
paradigm.” In a more radical era, confrontation was the stated purpose
of radical movements! The mythic and uncritical aspect of “interconnectedness”
that rejects confrontation seems to have reduced this
organization to the level of outright accommodation with the status
quo. Here, the need not only to confront the evils of our time but to
uncompromisingly oppose them has disappeared into a New Age
quagmire of unthinking “good vibes.” The “loving” path of
compromises along which such “good vibes” lead us can easily end
in sheer opportunism.
If our contemporary revolt against reason rests on the misguided
belief that the only alternative to our present reality is mysticism, it
also rests on the equally misguided belief that only one kind of reason
exists. In reacting against instrumental and analytical forms of reason,
which are usually identified with reason as such, we may well overlook
other forms of reason that are organic and yet retain critical qualities;
that are developmental and yet retain analytical insights; that are ethical
and yet retain contact with reality. The “value-free” rationalism that
we normally identify with the physical sciences and technology is in
fact not the only form of reason that Western philosophy has developed
over the centuries — I refer specifically to the great tradition of dialectical
reason that originated in Greece some twenty-five centuries ago and
reached its high point, but by no means its completion, in the logical
works of Hegel.
What dialectical thinkers from Heraclitus onward have had in
common, in varying degrees, is a view of reality as developmental — of
Being as an ever-unfolding Becoming. Ever since Plato created a dualism
between a supranatural world of ideal forms and a transient world of
imperfect sensible copies, the perplexing question of identity amid
change and change amid identity has haunted Western philosophy.
Instrumental and analytical forms of reason — what I will here
generically call conventional reason — rest on a fundamental principle,
the famous “principle of identity,” or A equals A, which means that
any given phenomenon can be only itself and cannot be other than
what it is, or what we immediately perceive it to be, at a given moment
in time. Without this principle, logical consistency in conventional
reason would be impossible.
Conventional reason is based on an analysis of phenomena as
precisely defined, and whose truth depends upon the internal
consistency and their practicality. It focuses on a thing or phenomenon
as fixed, with clear-cut boundaries that are immutable for analytical
purposes. We know an entity, in this widely accepted notion of reason,
when we can analyze it into its irreducible components and determine
how they work as a functioning whole, so that knowledge of the entity
will have operational applicability. When the boundaries that “define”
a developing thing change — as, for instance, when sand becomes soilthen
conventional reason treats sand as sand and soil as soil, much as
if they were independent of each other. The zone of interest in this kind
of rationality is a thing or phenomenon’s fixity, its independence, and
its basically mechanical interaction with similar or dissimilar things
and phenomena. The causality that conventional reason describes,
moreover, is a matter of kinetics: one billiard ball strikes another and
causes them both to move from one position to another — that is to say,
by means of efficient cause. The two billiard balls are not altered by
the blow but are merely repositioned on the billiards table.
But conventional reason cannot address the problem of change at
all. It views a mammal, for example, as a creature marked by a highly
fixed set of traits that distinguish it from everything that is not
mammalian. To “know” a mammal is to explore its structure, literally
to analyze it by dismembering it, to reduce it to its components, to
identify its organs and their functions, and to ascertain the way they
operate together to assure the mammal’s survival and reproduction.
Similarly, conventional reason views a human being in terms of
particular stages of the life-cycle: a person is an infant at one time, a
child at another, an adolescent at still another, a youth and finally an
adult. When we analyze an infant by means of conventional reason,
we do not explore what it is becoming in the process of developing into
an adult. Doubtless, when developmental psychologists and anatomists
study an individual life-cycle, few of them — however conventional their
rationality may be — ignore the fact that every infant is in the process
of becoming an adult and that the two stages in the life-cycle are in
various ways related to each other. But the principle of A equals A
remains a basic premise. Its logical framework is the authority of
consistency, and deductions almost mechanically follow from premises.
Conventional reason thus serves the practical function of describing a
given entity’s identity and telling us how that entity is organized to be
itself. But it cannot systematically explore processes of becoming, or
how a living entity is patterned as a potentiality to phase from one stage
of its development into another.
Dialectical reason, unlike conventional reason, acknowledges the
developmental nature of reality by asserting in one fashion or another
that A equals not only A but also not-A. The dialectical thinker who
examines the human life-cycle sees an infant as a self-maintaining
human identity while simultaneously developing into a child, from a
child into an adolescent, from an adolescent into a youth, and from a
youth into an adult. Dialectical reason grasps not only how an entity
is organized at a particular moment but how it is organized to go
beyond that level of development and become other than what it is,
even as it retains its identity. The contradictory nature of identity —
notably, that A equals both A and not-A — is an intrinsic feature of
identity itself. The unity of opposites is, in fact, a unity qua the emerging
“other,” what Hegel called “the identity of identity and nonidentity.”
The thinking of conventional reason today is exemplified — and
disastrously reinforced — by the “true or false” questions that make
up most standardized tests. One must darken a box to indicate that a
statement is either “true” or “false” — and do so quickly, with minimal
reflection. These tests, so commonplace today, allow for no nuanced
thought or awareness of transitions. That a phenomenon or statement
may well be both true and false — depending on its context and its
place in a process of becoming other than what it is — is excluded by
the logical premise on which these tests are based. This testing
procedure makes for bad mental habits among young people, who are
schooled to take such tests successfully, and whose careers and future
lifeways depend on their scores. But the process of thinking in the way
such tests demand compartmentalizes and essentially computerizes
otherwise rich minds, depriving young people of their native ability
to think organically and to understand the developmental nature of
the real world.
Another major presupposition of conventional reason — one that
follows from its concepts of identity and causality — is that history is a
layered series of separate phenomena, a mere succession of strata, each
independent of the ones that preceded and followed it. These strata
may be cemented together by phases, but these phases are themselves
analyzed into components and explored independently of each other.
Thus, Mesozoic rock strata are independent of Cenozoic, and each
stratum exists very much on its own, as do the ones that cement them
together. In human history, the medieval period is independent of the
modern, and the former is connected to the latter by a series of
independent segments, each relatively autonomous in relation to the
preceding and subsequent ones. From the standpoint of conventional
reason, it is not always clear how historical change occurred or what
meaning history has. Despite postmodernism and present-day historical
relativism, which examine history using conventional reason and
thereby ravage it, there was a time in the recent past when most
historians, influenced by theories of evolution and by Marxism,
regarded history as a developmental phenomenon and subsequent
periods as at least depending upon prior ones. It is this tradition that
dialectical reason upholds.
The intuitional approach to history is no improvement over that of
conventional reason — indeed, it does the opposite: it literally dissolves
historical development into an undifferentiated continuum and even
into a ubiquitous, all-embracing “One.” The mystical counterpart of
mechanico-materialistic stratification is the reductionism that says that
everything is “One” or “interconnected,” that all phenomena originated
from a pulse of primal energy, like the Victorian physicist who believed
that when he pounded his fist on a table, Sirius trembled, however
faintly. That the universe had an origin, whatever it was, does not
warrant the naive belief that the universe still “really” consists of
nothing but its originating source, any more than an adult human being
can be explained entirely by reference to his or her parents. This way
of thinking is not far removed from the kinetic cause-effect approach
of conventional reason. Nor does the “interconnectedness” of all life-forms
preclude the sharp distinctions between prey and predators, or
between instinctively guided life-forms and potentially rational ones.
Yet these countless differentiations reflect innumerable innovations in
evolutionary pathways, indeed different kinds of evolution — be they
inorganic, organic, or social. Instead of apprehending things and
phenomena as both differentiated and yet cumulatively related, the
mystical alternative to conventional reason tends to see them, to use
Hegel’s famous remark, as “a night in which all cows are black.”
Conventional reason, to be sure, has its useful side. Its internal
consistency of propositions, irrespective of content, plays an
indispensable role in mathematical thinking and mathematical sciences,
in engineering, and in the nuts-and-bolts activities of everyday life. It
is indispensable when building a bridge or a house; for such purposes,
there is no point in thinking along evolutionary or developmental lines.
If we used a logic based on anything but the principle of identity to
build a bridge or a house, a catastrophe would no doubt occur. The
physiological operations of our bodies, not to speak of the flight of
birds and the pumplike workings of a mammalian heart, depend in
great part upon principles we associate with conventional reason. To
understand or design a mechanical entity requires a form of reason that
is instrumental and an analysis of reality into its components and their
functioning. The truths of conventional reason, based on consistency,
are useful in these areas of life. Indeed, conventional reason has
contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of the universe.
For several centuries, in fact, conventional reason held out a promise
to dispel the dogmatic authority of the church, the arbitrary behavior
of absolute monarchs, and the frightening ghosts of superstition — and
indeed, it did a great deal to fulfill this promise. But to achieve the
consistency that constitutes its fundamental principle, conventional
reason removes ethics from its discourse and concerns. And as an
instrument for achieving certain ends, the moral character of those
ends, the values, ideals, beliefs, and theories people cherish, are
irrelevant to it, arbitrary matters of personal mood and taste. With its
message of identity and consistency as truth, conventional reason failed
us not because it is false as such but because it has staked out too broad
a claim for its own validity in explaining reality. It even redefines reality
to fit its claim, just as many mathematical physicists redefine reality as
that which can be formulated in mathematical terms. It should come
as no surprise, then, that in our highly rationalized industrial society,
conventional reason has come to seem repellent. Pervasive authority,
an impersonal technocracy, an unfeeling science and insensitive,
monolithic bureaucracies — the very existence of all these is imputed to
reason as such .
... Let us grant that the principles of identity, of efficient causality, and
of stratification do apply to a particular commonsensical reality that
is rendered intelligible by their use. But when we go beyond that
particular reality, we can no longer reduce the rich wealth of differentiation,
flux, development, organic causality, and developmental
reality to a vague “One” or to an equally vague notion of “interconnectedness.”
A very considerable literature dating back to the ancient
Greeks provides the basis of an organic form of reason and a
developmental interpretation of reality.
With a few notable exceptions, the Platonic dualism of identity and
change reverberated in one way or another throughout Western
philosophy until the nineteenth century, when Hegel’s logical works
largely resolved this paradox by systematically showing that identity,
or self-persistence, actually expresses itself through change as an evervariegated
unfolding of “unity in diversity,” to use his own words. The
grandeur of Hegel’s effort has no equal in the history of Western
philosophy. Like Aristotle before him, he had an “emergent”
interpretation of causality, of how the implicit becomes explicit through
the unfolding of its latent form and possibilities. On a vast scale over
the course of two sizable volumes, he assembled nearly all the categories
by which reason explains reality, and educed one from the other in an
intelligible and meaningful continuum that is graded into a richly
differentiated, increasingly comprehensive, or “adequate” whole, to
use some of his terms.
We may reject what Hegel called his “absolute idealism,” the transition
from his logic to his philosophy of nature, his teleological
culmination of the subjective and objective in a godlike “Absolute,”
and his idea of a cosmic Spirit (Geist). Hegel rarefied dialectical reason
into a cosmological system that verged on the theological by trying to
reconcile it with idealism, absolute knowledge, and a mystical unfolding
logos that he often designated “God.” Unfamiliar with ecology, Hegel
rejected natural evolution as a viable theory in favor of a static hierarchy
of Being. By the same token, Friedrich Engels intermingled dialectical
reason with natural “laws” that more closely resemble the premises of
nineteenth-century physics than a plastic metaphysics or an organismic
outlook, producing a crude dialectical materialism. Indeed, so
enamored was Engels of matter and motion as the irreducible
“attributes” of Being that a kineticism based on mere motion invaded
his dialectic of organic development.
To dismiss dialectical reason because of the failings of Hegel’s idealism
and Engels’s materialism, however, would be to lose sight of the
extraordinary coherence that dialectical reason can furnish and its
extraordinary applicability to ecology — particularly to an ecology rooted
in evolutionary development. Despite Hegel’s own prejudices against
organic evolution, what stands out amid the metaphysical and often
theological archaisms in his work is his overall education of logical
categories as the subjective anatomy of a developmental reality. What
is needed is to free this form of reason from both the quasi-mystical and
the narrowly scientistic worldviews that in the past have made it remote
from the living world; to separate it from Hegel’s empyrean, basically
antinaturalistic dialectical idealism and the wooden, often scientistic
dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxists. Shorn of both its idealism
and its materialism, dialectical reason may be rendered naturalistic and
ecological and conceived as a naturalistic form of thinking.
This dialectical naturalism offers an alternative to an ecology
movement that rightly distrusts conventional reason. It can bring
coherence to ecological thinking, and it can dispel arbitrary and antiintellectual
tendencies toward the sentimental, cloudy, and theistic at
best and the dangerously antirational, mystical, and potentially
reactionary at worst. As a way of reasoning about reality, dialectical
naturalism is organic enough to give a more liberatory meaning to
vague words like interconnectedness and holism without sacrificing
intellectuality. It can answer the questions I posed at the beginning of
this essay: what nature is, humanity’s place in nature, the thrust of
natural evolution, and society’s relationship with the natural world.
Equally important, dialectical naturalism adds an evolutionary
perspective to ecological thinking — despite Hegel’s rejection of natural
evolution and Engels’s recourse to the mechanistic evolutionary theories
of a century ago. Dialectical naturalism discerns evolutionary phenomena
fluidly and plastically, yet it does not divest evolution of rational
interpretation. Finally, a dialectic that has been “ecologized,” or given
a naturalistic core, and a truly developmental understanding of reality
could provide the basis for a living ecological ethics....
Minimally, we must assume that there is order in the world, an
assumption that even ordinary science must make if it is to exist.
Minimally, too, we must assume that there are growth and processes
that lead to differentiation, not merely the kind of motion that results
from push-pull, gravitational, electromagnetic, and similar forces. Finally,
minimally, we must assume that there is some kind of directionality
toward ever-greater differentiation or wholeness insofar as potentiality
is realized in its full actuality. We need not return to medieval teleological
notions of an unswerving predetermination in a hierarchy of Being to
accept this directionality; rather, we need only point to the fact that there
is a generally orderly development in the real world or, to use
philosophical terminology, a “logical” development when a development
succeeds in becoming what it is structured to become.
In Hegel’s logical works, as in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, dialectics is
more than a remarkable “method” for dealing with reality. Conceived
as the logical expression of a wide-ranging form of developmental
causality, logic, in Hegel’s work, joins hands with ontology. Dialectic
is simultaneously a way of reasoning and an account of the objective
world, with an ontological causality. As a form of reasoning, the most
basic categories in dialectic — even such vague categories as Being and
Nothing — are differentiated by their own inner logic into fuller, more
complex categories. Each category, in turn, is a potentiality that by
means of eductive thinking, directed toward an exploration of its latent
and implicit possibilities, yields logical expression in self-realization,
or what Hegel called “actuality” (Wirklichkeit).
Precisely because it is also a system of causality, dialectic is
ontological, objective, and therefore naturalistic, as well as a form of
reason. In ontological terms, dialectical causality is not merely motion,
force, or changes of form but things and phenomena in development.
Indeed, since all Being is Becoming, dialectical causality is the
differentiation of potentiality into actuality, in the course of which each
new actuality becomes the potentiality for further differentiation and
actualization. Dialectics explicates how processes occur not only in the
natural world but in the social.
How the implicit but relatively undifferentiated form latent with
possibility becomes a more differentiated form that is true to its
potential form is clarified in Hegel’s own words. “The plant, for
example, does not lose itself in mere indefinite change,” he writes. It
has a distinct directionality — in the case of conscious beings, purpose
as well. “From the germ much is produced when at first nothing was
to be seen, but the whole of what is brought forth, if not developed, is
yet hidden and ideally contained within itself.” It is worth noting, in
this passage, that what may be “brought forth” is not necessarily
developed: an acorn, for example, may become food for a squirrel or
wither on a concrete sidewalk, rather than develop into what it is
potentially constituted to become — notably, an oak tree. “The principle
of this projection into existence is that the germ cannot remain merely
implicit,” Hegel goes on to observe, “but is impelled towards
development, since it presents the contradiction of being only
implicit.”[71]
What we vaguely call the “immanent” factors that produce a self-unfolding
of a development, the Hegelian dialectic regards as the
contradictory nature of a being that is unfulfilled in the sense that it is
only implicit or incomplete. As mere potentiality, it has not “come to
itself,” so to speak. A thing or phenomenon in dialectical causality
remains unsettled, unstable, in tension — much as a fetus ripening
toward birth strains to be born because of the way it is constituted —
until it develops itself into what it “should be” in all its wholeness or
fullness. It cannot remain in endless tension or “contradiction” with
what it is organized to become without warping or undoing itself. It
must ripen into the fullness of its being.
Modern science has tried to describe nearly all phenomena in terms
of efficient cause or the kinetic impact of forces on a thing or
phenomenon, reacting against medieval conceptions of causality in
terms of final cause — notably, in terms of the existence of a deity who
impels development, if only by virtue of “His” own “perfection.”
Hegel’s notion of “imperfection” — more appropriately, of “inadequacy”
or of contradiction — as an impelling factor for development
partly went beyond both efficient and final notions of causality. I say
“partly” for a specific reason: the philosophical archaisms that run
through Hegel’s dialectic weaken his position from a naturalistic
viewpoint. From Plato’s time until the beginning of the modern world,
theological notions of perfection, infinity, and eternality permeated
philosophical thought. Plato’s “ideal forms” were the “perfect” and
the “eternal,” of which all existential things were copies. Aristotle’s
God, particularly as it was Christianized by the medieval Scholastics,
was the “perfect” One toward which all things strove, given their finite
“imperfection” and inherent limitations. In this way a supranatural
ideal defined the “imperfection” of natural phenomena and thereby
dynamized them in their striving toward “perfection.” There is an
element of this quasi-theological thinking in Hegel’s notion of
contradiction: the whole course of the dialectic culminates in the
“Absolute,” which is “perfect” in its fullness, wholeness, and unity.
Dialectical naturalism, on the contrary, conceives finiteness and
contradiction as distinctly natural in the sense that things and
phenomena are incomplete and unactualized in their development —
not “imperfect” in any idealistic or supranatural sense. Until they are
what they have been constituted to become, they exist in a dynamic
tension. A dialectical naturalist view thus has nothing to do with the
supposition that finite things or phenomena fail to approximate a
Platonic ideal or a Scholastic God. Rather, they are still in the process
of becoming or, more mundanely, developing. Dialectical naturalism
thus does not terminate in a Hegelian Absolute at the end of a cosmic
developmental path, but rather advances the vision of an ever-increasing
wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation and subjectivity.
Dialectical contradiction exists within the structure of a thing or
phenomenon by virtue of a formal arrangement that is incomplete,
inadequate, implicit, and unfulfilled in relation to what it “should be.”
A naturalistic framework does not limit us to efficient causality with
a mechanistic tilt. Nor need we have recourse to theistic “perfection”
to explain the almost magnetic eliciting of a development. Dialectical
causality is uniquely organic because it operates within a development — the
degree of form of a thing or phenomenon, the way in which that
form is organized, the tensions or “contradictions” to which its formal
ensemble gives rise, and its metabolic self-maintenance and self-development.
Perhaps the most suitable word for this kind of
development is growth — growth not by mere accretion but by a truly
immanent process of organic self-formation in a graded and increasingly
differentiated direction.
A distinctive continuum emerges from dialectical causality. Here
cause and effect are not merely coexisting phenomena or “correlations,”
to use a common positivist term; nor are they clearly distinct from each
other, such that a cause externally impacts upon a thing or phenomenon
to produce an effect mechanically. Dialectical causality is cumulative:
the implicit or “in itself” (an sich), to use Hegel’s terminology, is not
simply replaced or negated by its more developed explicit or “for itself”
(fur sich); rather, it is absorbed into and developed beyond the explicit
into a fuller, more differentiated, and more adequate form — the
Hegelian “in and for itself” (an und fur sich ). Insofar as the implicit is
fully actualized by becoming what it is constituted to be, the process
is truly rational, that is to say, it is fulfilled by virtue of its internal logic.
The continuum of a development is cumulative, containing the history
of its development.
Reality is not simply what we experience: there is a sense in which the
rational has its own reality. Thus, there are existing realities that are
irrational and unrealized realities that are rational. A society that fails
to actualize its potentialities for human happiness and progress is “real”
enough in the sense that it exists, but it is less than truly social. It is
incomplete and distorted insofar as it persists, and hence it is irrational.
It is less than what it should be socially, just as a generally defective
animal is less than what it should be biologically. Although it is “real”
in an existential sense, it is unfulfilled and hence “unreal” in terms of its potentialities.
Dialectical naturalism asks which is truly real — the incomplete,
aborted, irrational “what is,” or the complete, fully developed, rational
“what should be.” Reason, cast as dialectical causality as well as
dialectical logic, yields an unconventional understanding of reality. A
process that follows its immanent self-development to its logical
actuality is more properly “real” than a given “what is” that is aborted
or distorted and hence, in Hegelian terms, “untrue” to its possibilities.
Reason has the obligation to explore the potentialities that are latent
in any social development and educe its authentic actualization, its
fulfillment and “truth” through a new and more rational social
dispensation.
It would be philosophically frivolous to embrace the “what is” of a
thing or phenomenon as constituting its “reality” without considering
it in the light of the “what should be” that would logically emerge from
its potentialities. Nor do we ordinarily do so in practice. We rightly
evaluate an individual in terms of his or her known potentialities, and
we form understandable judgments about whether the individual has
truly “fulfilled” himself or herself. Indeed, in privacy, individuals make
such self-evaluations repeatedly, which may have important effects
upon their behavior, creativity, and self-esteem.
The “what is,” conceived as the strictly existential, is a slippery
“reality.” Accepted empirically without qualification, it excludes the
past because, strictly speaking, the past no longer “is.” At the same
time, it yields a discontinuity with the future that — again, strictly
speaking — has yet to “exist.” What is more, the “what is,” conceived
in strictly empirical terms, excludes subjectivity — certainly conceptual
thought — from any role in the world but a spectatorial one, which may
or may not be a force in behavior.
In the logic of a strictly empirical philosophy, mind simply registers
or coordinates experience. “Reality” is a given temporal moment that
exists as an experienced segment of an assumed continuum. The “real”
is a frozen “here and now” to which we merely add an adventitious
past and presume a future in order to experience reality intelligibly.
The kind of radical empiricism advanced by David Hume replaced the
notion of Being as Becoming with the experience of a given moment
that renders thinking of the past as “unreal” as making inferences about
the future. This kind of “reality,” as Hume himself fully sensed, is
impossible to live with in everyday life; hence he was obliged to define
continuity, although he did so in terms of custom and habit, not in
terms of causality. Conceiving immediate empirical reality as the totality
of the “real” essentially banishes hindsight and foresight as little more
than mere conveniences. Indeed, a strictly empirical approach dissolves
the logical tissue that integrates the organic, cumulative continuity of
the past with the present and that of both with the future.
By contrast, in a naturalistic dialectic, both past and future are part
of a cumulative, logical, and objective continuum that includes the
present. Reason is not only a means for analyzing and interpreting
reality; it extends the boundaries of reality beyond the immediately
experienced present. Past, present, and future are a cumulatively graded
process that thought can truly interpret and render meaningful. We can
legitimately explore such a process in terms of whether its potentialities
have been realized, aborted, or warped.
In a naturalistic dialectic, the word reality thus acquires two distinctly
different meanings. There is the immediately present empirical
“reality” — or Realitat, to use Hegel’s language — that need not be the
fulfillment of a potentiality, and there is the dialectical “actuality” —
Wirklichkeit — that constitutes a complete fulfillment of a rational
process. Even though Wirklichkeit appears as a projection of thought
into a future that has yet to be existentially realized, the potentiality
from which that Wirklichkeit develops is as existential as the world we
sense in direct and immediate ordinary experience. For example, an
egg patently and empirically exists, even though the bird whose
potential it contains has yet to develop and reach maturity. Just so, the
given potentiality of any process exists and constitutes the basis for a
process that should be realized. Hence, the potentiality does exist
objectively, even in empirical terms. Wirklichkeit is what dialectical
naturalism infers from an objectively given potentiality; it is present,
if only implicitly, as an existential fact, and dialectical reason can
analyze and subject it to processual inferences. Even in the seemingly
most subjective projections of speculative reason, Wirklichkeit, the
“what should be,” is anchored in a continuum that emerges from an
objective potentiality, or “what is.”
Dialectical naturalism is thus integrally wedded to the objective
world — a world in which Being is Becoming. Let me emphasize that
dialectical naturalism not only grasps reality as an existentially
unfolding continuum, but it also forms an objective framework for
making ethical judgments. The “what should be” becomes an ethical
criterion for judging the truth or validity of an objective “what is.”
Thus ethics is not merely a matter of personal taste and values; it is
factually anchored in the world itself as an objective standard of selfrealization.
Whether a society is “good” or “bad,” moral or immoral,
for example, can be objectively determined by whether it has fulfilled
its potentialities for rationality and morality. Potentialities that are
themselves actualizations of a dialectical continuum present the
challenge of ethical self-fulfillment — not simply in the privacy of the
mind but in the reality of the processual world. Herein lies the only
meaningful basis for a truly ethical socialism or anarchism, one that is
more than a body of subjective preferences that rest on opinion and
taste....
If dialectical naturalism is to explain things or phenomena properly,
its ontology and premises must be understood as more than mere
motion and interconnection. A continuum is a more relevant premise
for dialectical reason than either motion or the interdependence of
phenomena. It was one of the failings of “dialectical materialism” that
it premised dialectic on the nineteenth century’s physics of matter and
motion, from which development somehow managed to emerge. It
would be just as limited to replace the entelechial processes involved
in differentiation and the realization of potentiality with
“interconnectedness.” A dialectic based merely on a notion of
“interconnectedness” would tend to be more descriptive than eductive;
it would not clearly explain how interdependencies lead to a graded
entelechial development — that is, to self-formation through the self-realization
of potentiality....
The continuum that dialectical reason investigates is a highly graded,
richly entelechial, logically eductive, and self-directive process of
unfolding toward ever-greater differentiation, wholeness, and adequacy,
insofar as each potentiality is fully actualized given a specific range of
development. External factors, internal rearrangements, accidents, even
gross irrationalities may distort or preclude a potential development.
But insofar as order does exist in reality and is not simply imposed
upon it by mind, reality has a rational dimension. More colloquially,
there is a “logic” in the development of phenomena, a general
directiveness that accounts for the fact that the inorganic did become
organic, as a result of its implicit capacity for organicity; and for the
fact that the organic did become more differentiated and metabolically
self-maintaining and self-aware, as a result of potentialities that made
for highly developed hormonal and nervous systems.
Stephen Jay Gould may luxuriate in the randomness — actually, the
fecundity — of nature, and poststructuralists may try to dissolve both
natural and social evolution into an aggregation of unrelated events,
but directiveness of organic evolution unremittingly surfaces in even
these rather chaotic collections of “brute facts.” Like it or not, human
beings, primates, mammals, vertebrates, and so forth back to the most
elementary protozoans are a sequential presence in the fossil record
itself, each emerging out of preceding life-forms. As Gould asserts, the
Burgess Shale of British Columbia attests to a large variety of fossils
that cannot be classified into a unilinear “chain of being.” But far from
challenging the existence of directionality in evolution toward greater
subjectivity, the Burgess Shale provides extraordinary evidence of the
fecundity of nature. Nature’s fecundity rests on the existence of chance,
indeed variety, as a precondition for complexity in organisms and
ecosystems and, by virtue of that fecundity, for the emergence of
humanity from potentialities that involve increasing subjectivity.
Our ontological and eductive premise for dialectical naturalism,
however, remains the graded continuum I have already described — and
the Burgess Shale notwithstanding, human beings are not only patently
here, but our evolution can be explained. Dialectical reason cuts across
the grain of conventional ways of thinking about the natural world
and mystical interpretations of it. Nature is not simply the landscape
we see from behind a picture window, in a moment disconnected from
those that preceded and will follow it; nor is it a vista from a lofty
mountain peak.... Nature is certainly all of these things — but it is
significantly more. Biological nature is above all the cumulative
evolution of ever-differentiating and increasingly complex life-forms
with a vibrant and interactive inorganic world. Following in a tradition
that goes back at least to Cicero, we can call this relatively unconscious
natural development “first nature.” It is first nature in the primal sense
of a fossil record that clearly leads to mammalian, primate, and human
life — not to mention its extraordinary fecundity of other life-forms —
and it is first nature that exhibits a high degree of orderly continuity
in the actualization of potentialities that made for more complex and
self-aware or subjective life-forms. Insofar as this continuity is
intelligible, it has meaning and rationality in terms of its results: the
elaboration of life-forms that can conceptualize, understand, and
communicate with each other in increasingly symbolic terms.
In their most differentiated and fully developed forms, these self-reflexive
and communicative capacities are conceptual thought and
language. The human species has these capacities to an extent that is
unprecedented in any existing life-form. Humanity’s awareness of itself,
its ability to generalize this awareness to the level of a highly systematic
understanding of its environment in the form of philosophy, science,
ethics, and aesthetics, and finally, its capacity to alter itself and its
environment systematically by means of knowledge and technology
place it beyond the realm of the subjectivity that exists in first nature.
By singling out humanity as a unique life-form that can consciously
change the entire realm of first nature, I do not claim that first nature
was “made” to be “exploited” by humanity, as those ecologists critical
of “anthropocentrism” sometimes charge. The idea of a made world
has its origin in theology, notably in the belief that a supernatural being
created the natural world and that evolution is infused with a theistic
principle, both in the service of human needs. By the same token,
humans cannot “exploit” nature, owing to a “commanding” place in
a supposed “hierarchy” of nature. Words like commanding, exploitation,
and hierarchy are actually social terms that describe how people
relate to each other; applied to the natural world, they are merely
anthropomorphic.
Far more relevant from the standpoint of dialectical naturalism is
the fact that humanity’s vast capacity to alter first nature is itself a
product of natural evolution — not of a deity or the embodiment of a
cosmic Spirit. From an evolutionary viewpoint, humanity has been
constituted to intervene actively, consciously, and purposively into first
nature with unparalleled effectiveness and to alter it on a planetary
scale. To denigrate this capacity is to deny the thrust of natural
evolution itself toward organic complexity and subjectivity — the
potentiality of first nature to actualize itself in self-conscious
intellectuality. One may choose to argue that this thrust was pre-determined with inexorable certainty as a result of a deity, or one may
contend that it was strictly fortuitous, or one may claim — as I wouldthat
there is a natural tendency toward greater complexity and
subjectivity in first nature, arising from the very interactivity of matter,
indeed a nisus toward self-consciousness. But what is decisive here is
the compelling fact that humanity’s natural capacity to consciously
intervene into and act upon first nature has given rise to a “second
nature,” a cultural, social, and political “nature” that today has all but
absorbed first nature.
There is no part of the world that has not been profoundly affected
by human activity — neither the remote fastnesses of Antarctica nor the
canyons of the ocean’s depths. Even wilderness areas require protection
from human intervention; much that is designated as wilderness today
has already been profoundly affected by human activity. Indeed,
wilderness can be said to exist primarily as a result of a human decision
to preserve it. Nearly all the nonhuman life-forms that exist today are,
like it or not, to some degree in human custody, and whether they are
preserved in their wild lifeways depends largely on human attitudes
and behavior.
That second nature is the outcome of evolution in first nature and
can thereby be designated as natural does not mean that second nature
is necessarily creative or even fully conscious of itself in any
evolutionary sense. Second nature is synonymous with society and
human internal nature, both of which are undergoing evolution for
better or worse. Although social evolution is grounded in, indeed phases
out of, organic evolution, it is also profoundly different from organic
evolution. Consciousness, will, alterable institutions, and the operation
of economic forces and technics may be deployed to enhance the
organic world or carry it to the point of destruction. Second nature as
it exists today is marked by monstrous attributes, notably hierarchy,
class, the state, private property, and a competitive market economy
that obliges economic rivals to grow at the expense of each other or
perish. This ethical judgement, I may note, has meaning only if we
assume that there is potentiality and self-directiveness in organic
evolution toward greater subjectivity, consciousness, self-reflexivity;
by inference, it is the responsibility of the most conscious of life-formshumanity — to be the “voice” of a mute nature and to act to intelligently
foster organic evolution.
If this tendency or nisus in organic evolution is denied, there is no
reason why the human species, like any other species, should not utilize
its capacities to serve its own needs or attain its own “self-realization”
at the expense of other life-forms that impede its interests and desires.
To denounce humanity for “exploiting” organic nature, “degrading”
it, “abusing” it, and behaving “anthropocentrically” is simply an
oblique way of acknowledging that second nature is the bearer of moral
responsibilities that do not exist in the realm of first nature. It is to
acknowledge that if all life-forms have an “intrinsic worth” that should
be respected, they have it only because human intellectual, moral, and
aesthetic abilities have attributed it to them — abilities that no other
life-form possesses. It is only human beings that can even formulate
the concept of “intrinsic worth” and endow it with ethical
responsibility. The “intrinsic worth” of human beings is thus patently
exceptional, indeed extraordinary.
It is essential to emphasize that second nature is, in fact, an
unfinished, indeed inadequate, development of nature as a whole. Hegel
viewed human history as a slaughterbench. Hierarchy, class, the state,
and the like are evidence — and, by no means, purely accidental
evidence — of the unfulfilled potentialities of nature to actualize itself
as a nature that is self-consciously creative. Humanity as it now exists is not nature rendered self-conscious. The future of the biosphere
depends overwhelmingly on whether second nature can be transcended
in a new system of social and organic conciliation, one that I would
call “free nature” — a nature that would diminish the pain and suffering
that exist in both first and second nature. Free nature, in effect, would
be a conscious and ethical nature, an ecological society that I have
explored in detail elsewhere.
*** Ecologizing the Dialectic
(from “Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach,” 1987)
It is eminently natural for humanity to create a second nature from its
evolution in “first nature.” By second nature, I mean the development
of uniquely human culture, with a wide variety of institutionalized
human communities, effective human technics, richly symbolic
languages, and carefully managed sources of nutriment.... The real
question, I submit, is not whether second nature parallels, opposes, or
blandly “participates” in an “egalitarian” first nature; rather, it is how
second nature is derived from first nature. More specifically, in what
ways did the highly graded and many-phased evolution from first
nature into second give rise to social institutions, forms of interactions
between people, and an interaction between first and second nature
that, in the best of cases, enriches both and yields a second nature that
has an evolutionary development of its own? The ecological crisis we
face today is very much a crisis in the emergence of society out of
biology, in the problems (the rise of hierarchy, domination, patriarchy,
classes, and the state) that unfolded with this development, and in the
liberatory pathways that provide an alternative to this warped history.
The fact that first and second nature exist and can never be dualized
into “parallels” or simplistically reduced to each other accounts, in
great part, for my phrase social ecology. Additionally, social ecology
has the special meaning that the ecological crisis that beleaguers us
stems from a social crisis, a crisis that the crude biologism of deep
ecology generally ignores. Still further, that the resolution of this social
crisis can only be achieved by reorganizing society along rational lines,
imbued with an ecological philosophy and sensibility....
An ecological dialectic would have to address the fact that Aristotle
and Hegel did not work with an evolutionary theory of nature but
rather saw the natural world more as a scala naturae, a ladder of
“being,” than as a flowing continuum. An ecological dialectic
introduces evolution into this tradition and replaces the notion of a
scala naturae with a richly mediated continuum. Both thinkers were
more profoundly influenced by Plato than their writings would seem
to indicate, with the result that in the case of Hegel, we move within
a realm of concepts more than history (however historical Hegel’s
dialectic invariably was). Hegel was strongly preoccupied with the
“idea” of nature rather than with its existential details, although he
honored this preoccupation in the breach. Finally, the overarching
teleology of the two philosophers tends to subordinate the contingency,
spontaneity, and creativity that mark natural phenomena. Hegel, with
his strong theological bent, terminated the unfolding of the world in
an “Absolute” that encompasses it in an identity of subject and object.
In an ecological dialectic, by contrast, there would be no terminality
that could culminate in a God or an Absolute. “Actuality,” to use
Hegel’s special term, is the almost momentary culmination of maturity,
so that the objectivity of the potential, which is crucial for an objective
ethics, is subordinated to its actualization....
Dialectic, let me emphasize, is not merely change, motion, or even
process, all banal imputations to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor
can it be subsumed under “process philosophy.” Dialectic is development,
not only change; it is derivation, not only motion; it is mediation,
not mere process; and it is cumulative, not only continuous. That it is
also change, motion, process, and a continuum tells us only part of its
true content. But denied its immanent self-directiveness and its
entelechial education of the potential into the actual, this “process
philosophy,” indeed this remarkable notion of causality, ceases to be
dialectic. Instead, it becomes a mere husk that our current flock of
“eco”-faddists can reduce to “kinetics,” “dynamics,” “fluctuations,”
and “feedback loops” — the same mechanistic verbiage with which
systems theory dresses itself up as a developmental philosophy.
As Hegel warned in the course of educing the complexity of the
dialectical process: knowledge has “no other object than to draw out
what is inward or implicit and thus to become objective.” But if
that which is implicit comes into existence, it certainly passes into
change, yet it remains one and the same. ... The plant, for example,
does not lose itself in mere indefinite change. From the germ much is
produced when at first nothing was to be seen; but the whole of what
is brought forth, if not developed, is yet hidden and ideally contained
within itself. The principle of this projection into existence is that the
germ cannot remain merely implicit, but is impelled toward
development, since it presents the contradiction of being only implicitly
and yet not desiring to be so.[72]
Thus dialectic is not wayward motion, the mere kinetics of change.
There is a rational “end in view” — not one that is preordained, to state
this point from an ecological viewpoint rather than a theological one,
but one that actualizes what is implicit in the potential. Every “if-then”
proposition is premised not on any if that springs into one’s head like
a gambler’s hunch; it posits a potentiality that has its ancestry in the
dialectical processes that preceded it....
In the organic world, the metabolic activity of the simplest life-forms
constitutes the sense of self-identity, however germinal, from which
nature acquires a rudimentary subjectivity. Not only does this
rudimentary subjectivity (which reductionism necessarily cannot
encompass) derive from the metabolic process of self-maintenance, a
process that defines any life-form as a unique whole; it extends itself
beyond self-maintenance to become a striving activity, not unlike the
development from the vegetative to the animative, that ultimately yields
mind, will, and the potentiality for freedom. Conceived dialectically,
organic evolution is, in a broad sense, subjective insofar as life-forms
begin to exercise choices in adapting to new environments — a
conception that stands much at odds with that clearly definable fixity
we blissfully call “clear thinking.” Systems theory enters into the
reductionist tableau in a sinister way: by dissolving the subjective
element in biological phenomena so that they can be treated as
mathematical symbols, systems theory permits evolutionary interaction,
subjective development, and even process itself, to be taken over by
“the system,” just as the individual, the family, and the community are
destructured into “the System” embodied by the economic corporation
and the state. Life ceases to have subjectivity and becomes a mechanism
in which the tendency of life-forms toward ever-greater elaboration is
replaced with “feedback loops,” and their evolutionary antecedents
with programmed “information.” A “systems view of life” literally
conceives of life as a system, not only as “fluctuations” and “cycles” — mechanistic
as these concepts are in themselves.
Despite the external selective factors with which Darwinians describe
evolution, the tendency of life toward a greater complexity of selfhood — a
tendency that yields increasing degrees of subjectivity — constitutes
the internal or immanent impulse of evolution toward growing self-awareness.
This evolutionary dialectic constitutes the essence of life as
a self-maintaining organism that bears the potential for the development
of self-conscious organisms. Dialectic, in effect, is not merely a
“logic” or a “method” that can be bounced around and “applied”
promiscuously to a content. It has no “handbook” other than reason itself to guide those who seek to develop a dialectical sensibility.
Dialectic can no more be applied to problems in engineering than can
Einstein’s general theory of relativity be applied to plumbing; these
problems can best be resolved by conventional forms of logic, common
sense, and the pragmatic knowledge acquired through experience.
Dialectic can only explicate a rationally developmental phenomenon,
just as systems theory can only explicate the workings of a fluctuating
and cyclical system. The kind of verification that validates or invalidates
the soundness of dialectical reasoning, in turn, must be developmental,
not relatively static or for that matter “fluctuating” kinds of
phenomena....
Freed of its theological trappings, dialectic explains, with a power
beyond that of any conventional logic, how the organic flow of first
into second nature is a reworking of biological into social reality. Each
phase or “moment,” pressed by its own internal logic into an
antithetical and ultimately a more transcendent form, emerges as a
more complex unity-in-diversity that encompasses its earlier moments
even as it goes beyond them. Despite the imagery of strife that
permeates the Hegelian version of this process, the ultimate point in
the Hegelian Aufhebung is reconciliation, not the nihilism of pure
negation. Moreover, norms — the actualization of the potential “is”
into the ethical “ought” — are anchored in the objective reality of
potentiality itself, not as it always “is,” to be sure, but as it “should
be,” such that speculation becomes a valid account of reality in its
truth. Hegel, I would argue, radically expanded the very concept of Being in philosophy and in the real world to encompass the potential and its actualization into the rational “what should be,” not only as
an existential “what is.”
Dialectical speculation, despite Hegel’s own view of the retrospective
function of philosophy, thus is projective in a sharply critical sense
(quite unlike “futurology,” which dissolves the future by making it a
mere extrapolation of the present). In its restless critique of reality we
can call dialectic a “negative philosophy” — in contrast, I should add,
to Adorno’s nihilism or “negative dialectics.” By the same token,
speculation is creative in that it ceaselessly contrasts the free, rational,
and moral actuality of “what could be,” which inheres in nature’s thrust
toward self-reflexivity, with the existential reality of “what is.”
Speculation can ask why (not only how) the real has become the
irrational — indeed, the inhuman and anti-ecological — precisely because
dialectic alone is capable of grounding an ecological ethics in the
potential, that is, in its objective possibilities for the realization of reason
and truth.
This objectivization of possibilities — of potentiality continuous with
its yet unrealized actualization — is the ground for a genuinely objective
ethics, as distinguished from an ethical relativism subject to the
waywardness of the opinion poll. An ecological dialectic, in effect,
opens the way to an ethics that is rooted in the objectivity of the
potential, not in the commandments of a deity or in the eternality of a
supramundane and transcendental “reality.” Hence, the “what should
be” is not only objective, it forms the objective critique of the given
reality....
**** Beyond First and Second Nature
We must try to bring the threads of our discussion together and examine
the important implications dialectic has for ecological thinking. A
“dialectical view of life” is a special form of process philosophy. Its
emphasis is not on change alone but on development. It is eductive
rather than merely deductive, mediated rather than merely processual,
and cumulative rather than merely continuous. Its objectivity begins
with the existence of the potential, not with the mere facticity of the
real; hence its ethics seeks the “what should be” as a realm of objective
possibilities. That “possibilities” are objective, albeit not in the sense
of a simplistic materialism, is dialectically justified by the perception
that potentiality and its latent possibilities form an existential
continuum that constitutes the authentic world of truth — the world of
the “what should be,” not simply the world of the “what is,” with all
its incompleteness and falsehood.
From a dialectical viewpoint, a change in a given level of biotic,
communal, or, for that matter, social organization consists not simply
of the appearance of a new, possibly more complex ensemble of
“feedback loops.” Rather, it consists of qualitatively new attributes,
interrelationships, and degrees of subjectivity that express and radically
condition the emergence of a new potentiality, opening a new realm of
possibility with its own unique tendency — not a greater or lesser
number of “fluctuations” and “rhythms.” Moreover, this new
potentiality is itself the result of other actualizations of potentialities
that, taken together historically and cumulatively, constitute a developmental
continuum — not a bullet “shot from a pistol” that explodes
into Being without a history of its own or a continuum of which it
is part.
Dialectical logic is an immanent logic of process — an ontological
logic, not only a logic of concepts, categories, and symbols. This logic
is emergent, in the sense that one speaks of the “logic of events.”
Considered in terms of its emphasis on differentiation, this logic is
provocatively concrete in its relationship to abstract generalization — shence
Hegel’s seemingly paradoxical expression “concrete universal.”
Dialectic thereby overcomes Plato’s dualistic separation of exemplary
ideas from the phenomenal world of imperfect “copies” — hence its
ethical thrust is literally structured, cumulatively as well as sequentially,
in the concrete. Emerging from this superb ensemble is a world that is
always ethically problematical but also an ethics that is always
objective, a recognition of selfhood and subjectivity that embodies
nonhuman and human nature, and a development from metabolic self-maintenance
to rational self-direction and innovation that locates the
origins of reason within nature, not in a supramundane domain apart
from nature. The social is thus wedded to the natural, and human
reason is wedded to nonhuman subjectivity through processes that are
richly mediated and graded in a shared continuum of development.
This ecological interpretation of dialectic not only overcomes dualism
but moves through differentiation away from reductionism.
Ecology cleanses the remarkable heritage of European organismic
thought of the hard teleological predeterminations it acquired from
Greek theology, the Platonistic denigration of physicality, and the
Christian preoccupation with human inwardness as “soul” and a
reverence for God. Only ecology can ventilate the dialectic as an
orientation toward the objective world by rendering it coextensive with
natural evolution, a possibility that arose in the last century with the
appearance of evolutionary theory.
As such, an ecological dialectic is not solely a way of thinking
organically; it can be a source of meaning to natural evolution — of
ethical meaning, not only rational meaning. To state this idea more
provocatively: we cannot hope to find humanity’s “place in nature”
without knowing how it emerged from nature, with all its problems
and possibilities. An ecological dialectic produces a creative paradox:
second nature in an ecological society would be the actualization of
first nature’s potentiality to achieve mind and truth. Human intellection
in an ecological society would thus “fold back” upon the evolutionary
continuum that exists in first nature. In this sense — and in this sense
alone — second nature would thus become first nature rendered self-reflexive,
a thinking nature that would know itself and could guide its
own evolution, not an unthinking nature that “sought its own balance”
through the “dynamics” of “fluctuations” and “feedback” that cause
needless pain, suffering, and death. Although thought, society, and
culture would retain their integrity, they would consciously express the
abiding tendency within first nature to press itself toward the level of
conscious self-directiveness.
In a very real sense, an ecological society would be a transcendence of both first nature and second nature into a new domain of a free nature, a nature that in a truly rational humanity reached the level of
conceptual thought — in short, a nature that would willfully and
thinkingly cope with conflict, contingency, waste, and compulsion. In
this new synthesis, where first and second nature are melded into a
free, rational, and ethical nature, neither first nor second would lose
its specificity and integrity. Humanity, far from diminishing the integrity
of nature, would add the dimension of freedom, reason, and ethics to
it and raise evolution to a level of self-reflexivity that has always been
latent in the emergence of the natural world....
If we understand that human beings are indeed moral agents because
natural evolution confers upon them a clear responsibility toward the
natural world, we cannot emphasize their unique attributes too strongly.
For it is this unique ability to think conceptually and feel a deep
empathy for the world of life that makes it possible for humanity to
reverse the devastation it has inflicted on the biosphere and create a
rational society. This implies not only that humanity, once it came into
its own as the actualization of its potentialities, could be a rational
expression of nature’s creativity and fecundity, but that human
intervention into natural processes could be as creative as natural
evolution itself.
This evolutionary and dialectical viewpoint, which derives the human
species from nature as the embodiment of nature’s own thrust toward
self-reflexivity, changes the entire argument around competing “rights”
between human and nonhuman life-forms into an exploration of the
ways in which human beings intervene into the biosphere. Whether
humanity recognizes that an ecological society would be the fulfillment
of a major tendency in natural evolution, or remains blind to its own
humanity as a moral and ecological agent in nature, becomes a social
problem that requires a social ecology. The self-effacing quietism and
“spirituality” so rampant today afflict a sizable, highly privileged sector
of Euro-American society — human types so consumed by a “love” of
nature and life that they may well ignore the needless but very real
suffering and pain that exist in nature and society alike.
[70] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie (New York:
Humanities Press, 1910), p. 79.
[71] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S.
Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), p. 22.
[72] Ibid. (emphasis added).
** Chapter 10: Reason and History
*** Introduction
The ecological society that Bookchin described in 1964 remains a
constant social ideal over three decades of his writing, projecting a
clear and steady image of an ecological society, integrating town
and country, individual and community, technology and ethics,
politics and economy. The communistic principles he attributed to
organic society in 1982 remain pillars of the society he has always
envisioned: interdependence must replace hierarchy, and freedom
must be defined not in opposition to first nature but as latent within
it. The “legacy of freedom” is one he cherishes even more fervently,
in the face of an ever-more powerful “legacy of domination.”
But other aspects of Bookchin’s work have undergone notable
change over the years, as do those of all thinkers who are engaged
in the public realm over a long period of time and who are alert to
changes that take place there. Chastened by the emergence of ecomysticism,
primitivism, and biocentrism in the ecology and anarchist
movements, Bookchin today is far less lavish in his praise of organic
society than he was in 1982. In the face of primitivistic rejections of
civilization as such, for example, he no longer puts the word
civilization in quotation marks; on the contrary, he capitalizes it. In
the face of general rejections of progress as such, he is careful to
define the kind of progress he endorses — namely, that which is
associated with cooperation and community and that represents a
heightening of ethical standards. He would no longer associate the
Promethean impulse with domination or the “conquest of nature,”
as he once did; now he regards it as a laudable metaphor for
aspirations to advance the human condition.
His view of imagination, too, has undergone a shift: where once
he extolled the cry “Imagination to power!” raised by the Parisian
students in 1968 as “a glowing vision of the estheticization of
personality and society,” now he warns that “in the absence of
rational objective standards of behavior, imagination may be as
demonic as it may be liberatory.” Indeed, where he once wrote of
an ecological society, he now writes more frequently of a rational
society, which in his view presupposes sound ecological practices,
without yielding to mysticism or other forms of supernaturalism.
“History, Civilization, and Progress,” written in 1994, is a critique
of current philosophical tendencies that condemn history, civilization,
and progress as inherently repressive. An ecological
humanism, Bookchin says today, would perform the difficult work
of disclosing what is rational in what is ordinarily called history,
civilization, and progress, and giving this rational core its due, rather
than merely repudiating history, civilization, and progress as such.
Moreover, he now gives an enlarged meaning to the “legacy of
freedom”: it means not only the particular events in the history of
libertarian alternatives, but the gradual if uneven unfolding of
potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation in
human society. In true dialectical fashion this legacy, far from
repudiating history, civilization, and progress, actively participates
in them. The richness of Bookchin’s late work is to create this new
synthesis, to show how emancipatory ideas infuse history despite
its bleakest and cruelest moments. The creation of an ecological
society must itself constitute an advance toward civilization and
progress, or it will not have been an endeavor worth making.
*** History, Civilization, and Progress
(from “History, Civilization, and Progress,” 1994)
Rarely have the concepts that literally define the best of Western
culture — its notions of a meaningful History, a universal Civilization,
and the possibility of Progress — been called so radically into question
as they are today. In recent decades, both in the United States and
abroad, the academy and a subculture of self-styled postmodernist
intellectuals have nourished an entirely new ensemble of cultural
conventions that stem from a corrosive social, political, and moral
relativism. This ensemble encompasses a crude nominalism, pluralism,
and skepticism, an extreme subjectivism, and even outright nihilism
and antihumanism in various combinations and permutations,
sometimes of a thoroughly misanthropic nature. This relativistic
ensemble is pitted against coherent thought as such and against the
“principle of hope” (to use Ernst Bloch’s expression) that marked
radical theory of the recent past. Such notions percolate from so-called
radical academics into the general public, where they take the form of
personalism, amoralism, and neoprimitivism....
History, I wish to contend, is the rational content and continuity of
events (with due regard for qualitative “leaps”) that are grounded in
humanity’s potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and
cooperation, in the self-formative development of increasingly
libertarian forms of consociation. It is the rational “infrastructure,” so
to speak, that coheres human actions and institutions over the past and
the present in the direction of an emancipatory society and emancipated
individual. That is to say, History is precisely what is rational in human
development. It is what is rational, moreover, in the dialectical sense
of the implicit that unfolds, expands, and begins in varying degrees
through increasing differentiation to actualize humanity’s very real
potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation.
It will immediately be objected that irrational events, unrelated to
this actualization, explode upon us at all times, in all eras and cultures.
But insofar as they defy rational interpretation, they remain precisely
events, not History, however consequential their effects may be on the
course of other events. Their impact may be very powerful, to be sure,
but they are not dialectically rooted in humanity’s potentialities for
freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation. They can be assembled
into Chronicles, the stuff out of which a Froissart constructed his largely
anecdotal “histories,” but not History in the sense I am describing.
Events may even “overtake History,” so to speak, and ultimately
submerge it in the irrational and the evil. But without an increasingly
self-reflexive History, which present-day relativism threatens to
extinguish, we would not even know that it had happened.
If we deny that humanity has these potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness,
and cooperation — conceived as one ensemble — then
along with many self-styled “socialists” and even former anarchists
like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, we may well conclude that “capitalism has
won,” as one disillusioned friend put it; that history has reached its
terminus in “bourgeois democracy” (however tentative this “terminus”
may actually be); and that rather than attempt to enlarge the realm of
the rational and the free, we would do best to ensconce ourselves in
the Ia p of capitalism and make it as comfortable a resting place as
possible for ourselves.
As a mere adaptation to what exists, to the “what is,” such behavior
is merely animalistic. Sociobiologists may even regard it as genetically
unavoidable. But my critics need not be sociobiologists to observe that
the historical record exhibits a great deal of adaptation and worse — of
irrationality and violence, of pleasure in the destruction of oneself and
others — and to question my assertion that History is the unfolding of
human potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation.
Indeed, humans have engaged in destruction and luxuriated in real and
imaginary cruelties toward one another that have produced hells on
earth. They have created the monstrosities of Hitler’s death camps and
Stalin’s gulags, not to speak of the mountains of skulls that Mongol
and Tartar invaders of Eurasia left behind in distant centuries. But this
record hardly supplants a dialectic of unfolding and maturing of
potentialities in social development, nor is the capacity of humans to
inflict cruelties on each other equivalent to their potentialities for
freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation.
Here, capacities and human potentialities must be distinguished from
each other. The human capacity for inflicting injury belongs to the
realm of natural history, to what humans share with animals in the
biological world, or first nature. First nature is the domain of survival,
of core feelings of pain and fear, and in that sense our behavior remains
animalistic, which is by no means altered with the emergence of social
or second nature. Unknowing animals merely try to survive and adapt
to one degree or another to the world in which they exist. By contrast,
humans are animals of a very special kind; they are knowing animals,
they have the intelligence to calculate and to devise, even in the service
of needs that they share with nonhuman life-forms. Human reason and
knowledge have commonly served aims of self-preservation and selfmaximization
by the use of a formal logic of expediency, a logic that
rulers have deployed for social control and the manipulation of society.
These methods have their roots in the animal realm of simple
means–ends choices to survive.
But humans also have the capacity to deliberately inflict pain and
fear, to use their reason for perverse passions, in order to coerce others
or merely for cruelty for its own sake. Only knowing animals, ironically
capable of intelligent innovation, with the Schadenfreude to enjoy
vicariously the torment of others, can inflict fear and pain in a coldly
calculated or even passionate manner. The Foucauldian hypostasization
of the body as the “terrain” of sado-masochistic pleasure can be easily
elaborated into a metaphysical justification of violence, depending, to
be sure, on what “pleases” a particular perpetrating ego.[73] In this sense,
human beings are too intelligent not to live in a rational society, not to
live within institutions formed by reason and ethics that restrict their
capacity for irrationality and violence.[74] Insofar as they do not, humans
remain dangerously wayward and unformed creatures with enormous
powers of destruction as well as creation.
Humanity may have a “potentiality for evil,” as one colleague has
argued. But that over the course of social development people have
exhibited an explosive capacity to perpetrate the most appallingly evil
acts does not mean that human potentiality is constituted to produce
evil and a nihilistic destructiveness. The capacity of certain Germans to
establish an Auschwitz, indeed the means and the goal to exterminate a
whole people in a terrifyingly industrial manner, was inherent neither in
Germany’s development nor in the development of industrial
rationalization as such. However anti-Semitic many Germans were over
the previous two centuries, Eastern Europeans were equally or even more
so; ironically, industrial development in Western Europe may have done
more to achieve Jewish juridical emancipation in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries than all the Christian pieties that marked preindustrial
life during the Middle Ages. Indeed, evil may have a “logic” — that is to
say, it may be explained. But most general accounts explain the evolution
of evil in terms of adventitious evil acts and events, if this can be regarded
as explanation at all. Hitler’s takeover of Germany, made possible more
by economic and political dislocations than by the racial views he
espoused, was precisely a terrible event that cannot be explained in terms
of any human potentiality for evil. The horror of Auschwitz lies almost
as much in its inexplicability, in its appallingly extraordinary character,
as in the monstrosities that the Nazis generally inflicted on European
Jews. It is in this sense that Auschwitz remains hauntingly inhuman and
that it has tragically produced an abiding mistrust by many people of
Civilization and Progress.
When explanations of evil are not merely narrations of events, they
explain evil in terms of instrumental or conventional logic. The
knowing animal, the human being, who is viciously harmful, does not
use the developmental reason of dialectic, the reason of ethical
reflection; nor a coherent reflective reason, grounded in a knowledge
of History and Civilization; nor even the knowing of an ambiguous,
arbitrary, self-generated “imaginary,” or a morality of personal taste
and pleasure. Rather, the knowing animal uses instrumental calculation
to serve evil ends, including the infliction of pain.
The very existence of irrationalism and evil in many social phenomena
today compels us to uphold a clear standard of the rational and the
good by which to judge the one against the other. A purely personalistic,
relativistic, or functional approach will hardly do for establishing ethical
standards — as many critiques of subjectivism and subjective reason have
shown. The personal tastes from which subjectivism and relativism
derive their ethical standards are as transient and fleeting as moods. Nor
will a nominalistic approach suffice: to reduce History to an
incomprehensible assortment of patterns or to inexplicable products of
the imagination is to deny social development all internal ethical
coherence. Indeed, an unsorted, ungraded, unmediated approach reduces
our understanding of History to a crude eclecticism rather than an
insightful coherence, to an overemphasis on differentiae (so easy to do,
these mindless days!) and on the idiosyncratic rather than on the
meaningful and the universal, more often attracting the commonsensical
individual to the psychoanalytic couch than helping him or her
reconstitute a left-libertarian social movement.
If our views of social development are to be structured around the
differences that distinguish one culture or period from another, we will
ignore underlying tendencies that, with extraordinary universality, have
greatly expanded the material and cultural conditions for freedom on
various levels of individual and social self-understanding. By grossly
emphasizing disjunctions, social isolates, unique configurations, and
chance events, we will reduce shared, clearly common social
developments to an archipelago of cultures, each essentially unrelated
to those that preceded and followed it. Yet many historical forces have
emerged, declined, and emerged again, despite the formidable obstacles
that often seemed to stand in their way. One does not have to explain
“everything” in “foundational” terms to recognize the existence of
abiding problems such as scarcity, exploitation, class rule, domination,
and hierarchy that have agonized oppressed peoples for thousands of
years. If critics were correct in dubbing dialectic a mystery for claiming
to encompass all phenomena by a few cosmic formulas, then they
would be obliged to regard human social development as a mystery if
they claimed that it lacks any continuity and unity — that is, the bases
for a philosophy of History. Without a notion of continuity in History,
how could we explain the extraordinary efflorescence of culture and
technique that Homo sapiens produced during the Magdalenian period,
some twenty or thirty thousand years ago? How could we explain the
clearly unrelated evolution of complex agricultural systems in at least
three separate parts of the world — the Middle East, Southeast Asia,
and Mesoamerica — that apparently had no contact with one another
and that were based on the cultivation of very different grains, notably
wheat, rice, and maize? How could we explain the great gathering of
social forces in which, after ten thousand years of arising, stagnating
and disappearing, cities finally gained control over the agrarian world
that had impeded their development, yielding the “urban revolution,”
as V. Gordon Childe called it, in zones of the world that could have
had no contact with one another?
Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia, most clearly, could not have had
any contact with each other since Paleolithic times, yet their agriculture,
towns and cities, literacy, and mathematics developed in ways that are
remarkably similar. Initially Paleolithic foragers, both cultures
ultimately produced highly urbanized cultures based on grain
cultivation, glyphs, accurate calendrics, and very elaborate pottery, to
cite only the most striking parallels. The wheel was known to
Mesoamericans, although they do not seem to have used it, probably
for want of appropriate draft animals, as well as the zero, despite the
absence of any communication with Eurasian societies. It requires an
astonishing disregard for the unity of Civilization on the part of
historical relativists to emphasize often minor differences, such as
clothing, some daily customs, and myths, at the expense of a remarkable
unity of consciousness and social development that the two cultures
exhibited on two separate continents after many millennia of isolation
from each other....
Caprice, accident, irrationality, and “imaginaries” certainly enter
into social development for better or worse. But they have no meaning
if there is no ethical standard by which to define the “other” of what
we are presupposing with our standard. Seemingly accidental or
eccentric factors must be raised to the level of social theory rather than
be shriveled to the level of nominalistic minutiae if we are to understand
them. Despite the accidents, failures, and other aberrations that can
alter the course of rational social and individual development, there is
a “legacy of freedom,” as I named a key chapter in my book The Ecology of Freedom, a tradition of increasing approximation of
humanity toward freedom and self-consciousness, in ideas and moral
values and the overall terrain of social life. Indeed, the existence of
History as a coherent unfolding of real emancipatory potentialities is
clearly verified by the existence of Civilization, the potentialities of
History embodied and partially actualized. It consists of the concrete
advances, material as well as cultural and psychological, that humanity
has made toward greater degrees of freedom, self-consciousness, and
cooperation, as well as rationality itself. To have transcended the
limitations of the kinship tie; to have gone beyond mere foraging into
agriculture and industry; to have replaced the parochial band or tribe
with the increasingly universal city; to have devised writing, produced
literature, and developed richer forms of expression than nonliterate
peoples could have ever imagined — all of these and many more
advances have provided the conditions for evolving increasingly
sophisticated notions of individuality and expanding notions of reason
that remain stunning achievements to this very day.
It is dialectical reason rather than conventional reason that
apprehends the development of this tradition. Indeed, dialectical logic
can hardly be treated coequally with eruptions of brutality, however
calculated they may be, since in no sense can episodic capacities be
equated with an unfolding potentiality. A dialectical understanding of
History apprehends differentiae in quality, logical continuity, and
maturation in historical development, as distinguished from the kinetics
of mere change or a simple directivity of “social dynamics.” Rarefying
projects for human liberation ... without relevance to the realities of
the overall human experience and the insights of speculative reason,
can cause us to overlook the existential impact of these developments
and the promise they hold for ever-greater freedom, self-consciousness,
and cooperation. We take these achievements all too easily for granted
without asking what kind of human beings we would be if they had
not occurred as a result of historical and cultural movements more
fundamental than eccentric factors. These achievements, let us
acknowledge quite clearly, are Civilization, indeed a civilizing
continuum that is nonetheless infused by terribly barbaric, indeed
animalistic features. The civilizing process has been ambiguous, as I
emphasized in my “Ambiguities of Freedom,”[75] but it has nonetheless
historically turned folk into citizens, while the process of environmental
adaptation that humans share with animals has been transformed into
a wide-ranging, strictly human process of innovation in distinctly
alterable environments. It is a process that reached its greatest
universality primarily in Europe, however much other parts of the
world have fed into the experience. Those of us who understandably
fear that the barrier between Civilization and chaos is fragile actually
presuppose the existence of Civilization, not simply of chaos, and the
existence of rational coherence, not simply of irrational incoherence.
Moreover, the dialectic of freedom has emerged again and again in
recurring struggles for freedom, ideological as well as physical, that
have abidingly expanded overall goals of freedom, self-consciousness,
and cooperation — as much in social evolution as a whole as within
specific temporal periods. The past is replete with instances in which
masses of people, however disparate their cultures, have tried to resolve
the same millennia-old problems in remarkably similar ways and with
remarkably similar views. The famous cry for equality that the English
peasants raised in their 1381 revolt — “When Adam delved and Eve
span, who was then the gentleman?” — is as meaningful for contemporary
revolts as it was six hundred years ago, in a world that presumably
had a far different “imaginary” from our own. The denial of a
rational universal History, of Civilization, of Progress, and of social
continuity renders any historical perspective impossible and hence any
revolutionary praxis meaningless except as a matter of personal, indeed
often very personal, taste.
Even as social movements attempt to attain what they might call a
rational society, in developing humanity’s potentialities for freedom,
self-consciousness, and cooperation, History may constitute itself as
an ever-developing whole. This whole, I should emphasize, must be
distinguished from a terminal Hegelian “Absolute,” just as demands
for coherence in a body of views must be distinguished from the
worship of such an Absolute and just as the capacity of speculative
reason to educe in a dialectically logical manner the very real
potentialities of humanity for freedom is neither teleological nor
absolutist, much less totalitarian. There is nothing teleological, mystical,
or absolutist about History. Wholeness is no teleological referent, whose
evolving components are merely parts of a predetermined Absolute.
Neither the rational unfolding of human potentialities nor their
actualization in an eternally given “Totality” is predestined.
Nor is the working out of our potentialities some vague sort of
suprahuman activity. Human beings are not the passive tools of a Spirit
(Geist) that works out its complete and final self-realization and selfconsciousness.
Rather, they are active agents, the authentic
“constituents” of History, who may or may not elaborate their
potentialities in social evolution. Aborted the revolutionary tradition
has been here, and discontinuous it has been there — and for all we
know it may ultimately be aborted for humanity as such. Whether an
“ultimate” rational society will even exist as a liberatory “end of
history” is beyond anyone’s predictive powers. We cannot say what
the scope of a rational, free, and cooperative society would be, let alone
presume to claim knowledge of its limits. Indeed, insofar as the
historical process effected by living human agents is likely to expand
our notions of the rational, the democratic, the free, and the
cooperative, it is undesirable to dogmatically assert that they have any
finality. History forms its own ideal of these notions at various times,
which in turn have been expanded and enriched.
Every society has the possibility of attaining a remarkable degree of
rationality, given the material, cultural, and intellectual conditions that
allow for it or, at least, are available to it. Within the limits of a slave,
patriarchal, warrior, and urban world, for example, the ancient
Athenian polis functioned more rationally than Sparta or other Greek
poleis. It is precisely the task of speculative reason to educe what should exist at any given period, based on the very real potentialities for the
expansion of these notions. To conclude that “the end of history” has
been attained in liberal capitalism would be to jettison the historical
legacy of these magnificent efforts to create a free society — efforts that
claimed countless lives in the great revolutions of the past. For my part,
I and probably many revolutionaries today want no place in such an
“end of history”; nor do I want to forget the great emancipatory
movements for popular freedom in all their many forms that occurred
over the ages.
History, Civilization, and Progress are the dialectically rational social
dispensations that form, even with all the impediments they face, a
dialectical legacy of freedom. The existence of this legacy of freedom
in no way denies the existence of a “legacy of domination,” which
remains within the realm of the irrational. Indeed, these “legacies”
intertwine with and condition each other. Human ideals, struggles, and
achievements of various approximations to freedom cannot be
separated from the cruelties and barbarities that have marked social
development over the centuries, often giving rise to new social
configurations whose development is highly unpredictable. But a crucial
historical problematic remains, to the extent that reason can foresee a
given development: Will it be freedom or domination that is nourished?
I submit that Progress is the advance — and as everyone presumably
hopes, the ascendancy — of freedom over domination, which clearly
cannot be conceptually frozen in an ahistorical eternity, given the
growing awareness of both hopes and oppressions that have come to
light in only a few recent generations. Progress also appears in the
overall improvement, however ambiguous, of humanity’s material
conditions of life, the emergence of a rational ethics, with enlightened
standards of sensibility and conduct, out of unreflexive custom and
theistic morality, and social institutions that foster continual self-development
and cooperation. However lacking our ethical claims in
relation to social practice may be, given all the barbarities of our time,
we now subject brutality to much harsher judgments than was done in
earlier times.
It is difficult to conceive of a rational ethics — as distinguished from
unthinking custom and mere commandments of morality, like the
Decalogue — without reasoned criteria of good and evil based on real
potentialities for freedom that speculative reason can educe beyond a given reality. The “sufficient conditions” for an ethics must be
explicated rationally, not simply affirmed in public opinion polls,
plebiscites, or an “intersubjective” consensus that fails to clarify what
constitutes “subjectivity” and “autonomy.” Admittedly, this is not easy
to do in a world that celebrates vaporous words, but it is necessary to
discover truth rather than work with notions that stem from the
conventional “wisdom” of our times. As Hegel insisted, even
commonplace moral maxims like “Love thy neighbor as thyself” raise
many problems, such as what we really mean by “love.”[76]
... Minimally, the actualization of humanity’s potentialities consists
in its attainment of a rational society. Such a society, of course, would
not appear ab novo. By its very nature it would require development,
maturation, or, more precisely, a History — a rational development that
may be fulfilled by the very fact that the society is potentially constituted
to be rational. If the self-realization of life in the nonhuman world is
survival or stability, the self-realization of humanity is the degree of
freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation, as well as rationality in
society. Reduced merely or primarily to scientific “natural law,”
objectivity is highly attenuated. It does not encompass potentiality and
the working of the dialectic in existential reality, let alone its presence
as a standard for gauging reality against actuality in the unfolding of
human phenomena....
Today, when subjectivism reigns supreme and the common response
even to significant events is to erase any meaning and coherence from
History, Civilization, and Progress, there is a desperate need for an
objectivity that is immensely broader than natural science and “natural
laws,” on the one hand, and an emphasis on the idiosyncratic,
“imaginary,” and adventitious, on the other. If vulgar Marxists used
“science” to turn the ethical claim that “socialism is necessary” into
the teleological assertion that “socialism is inevitable,” today’s “post-Marxist”
critics repeat a similar vulgarity by mordantly celebrating
incoherence in the realm of social theory. The claim of socialism’s
inevitability was crudely deterministic; the claim of its necessity was a
rational and ethical explication....
Dialectic, it should be emphasized, cannot be reduced merely to a
“method” on the grounds that such disparate dialectical thinkers as
Aristotle, John Scotus Eriugena, Hegel, and Marx comprehended
different realms of knowledge and reality in different ways and periods.
Humanity’s knowledge of dialectic has itself been a process, and
dialectical thinking has itself undergone development — a cumulative
development, not a so-called “paradigm shift” — just as scientists have
been obliged in the give-and-take or sublation of ideas to resolve onesided
insights into the nature of reality and its becoming.
Although the broader objectivity that dialectical reasoning educes
does not dictate that reason will prevail, it implies that it should prevail,
thereby melding ethics with human activity and creating the basis for
a truly objective ethical socialism or anarchism. As such, dialectic is
not simply an ontological causality; it is also an ethics — an aspect of
dialectical philosophy that has not been sufficiently emphasized.
Dialectical reason permits an ethics in history by upholding the rational
influence of “what should be” as against “what is.” History, qua the
dialectically rational, exercises a pressing claim, so to speak, on our
canons of behavior and our interpretation of events. Without this
liberatory legacy and a human practice that fosters its unfolding, we
have absolutely no basis for even judging what is creative or stagnant,
rational or irrational, or good or evil in any constellation of cultural
phenomena other than personal preference. Unlike science’s limited
objectivity, dialectical naturalism’s objectivity is ethical by its very nature, by virtue of the kind of society it identifies as rational, a society
that is the actualization of humanity’s potentialities. It sublates science’s
narrow objectivity to advance by rational inferences drawn from the
objective nature of human potentialities, a society that increasingly
actualizes those potentialities. And it does so on the basis of what
should be as the fulfillment of the rational, that is to say, on rational
knowledge of the good and a conceptual congruence between the good
and the socially rational that can be embodied in free institutions.
It is not that social development is dialectical because it is necessarily
rational, as a traditional Hegelian might suppose, but rather that where
social development is rational, it is dialectical or historical. In short,
we can educe from a uniquely human potentiality a rational development
that advances human self-realization in a free, self-conscious, and
cooperative society. Speculative reason here stakes out a claim to discern
the rational development (by no means immune to irrational
vicissitudes) of society as it should be — given human potentiality, as
we know it in real life, to evolve from a tribal folk to a democratic
citizenry, from mythopoesis to reason, from the submission of
personhood in a folklike collectivity to individuality in a rational
community — all as rational ends as well as existential realities.
Speculative reason should always be called upon to understand and
explain not only what has happened with respect to these problematics
but why they recur in varying degrees and how they can be resolved.
In a very real sense, the past fifteen or more years have been
remarkably ahistorical, albeit highly eventful, insofar as they have not
been marked by any lasting advance toward a rational society. Indeed,
if anything, they would seem to be tilting toward a regression,
ideologically and structurally, to barbarism, despite spectacular
advances in technology and science, whose outcome we cannot foresee.
There cannot be a dialectic, however, that deals “dialectically” with
the irrational, with regression into barbarism — that is to say, a strictly
negative dialectics. Both Adorno’s book of that name and Horkheimer
and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which traced the
“dialectical” descent of reason (in Hegel’s sense) into instrumentalism,
were little more than mixed farragoes of convoluted neo-Nietzschean
verbiage, often brilliant, colorful, and excitingly informative, but often
confused, rather dehumanizing and, to speak bluntly, irrational. A
“dialectic” that lacks any spirit of transcendence (Aufhebung) and
denies the “negation of the negation” is spurious at its very core....
Stated bluntly: No revolutionary movement can grow if its theorists
essentially deny Bloch’s “principle of hope,” which the movement so
needs for an inspired belief in the future; if it denies universal History
that affirms sweeping common problems that have besieged humanity
over the ages; if it denies the shared interests that give a movement the
basis for a common struggle in achieving a rational dispensation of
social affairs; if it denies a processual rationality and a growing idea
of the Good based on more than personalistic (or “intersubjective” and
“consensual”) grounds; if it denies the powerful civilizatory dimensions
of social development (ironically, dimensions that are in fact so useful
to contemporary nihilists in criticizing humanity’s failings); and if it
denies historical Progress. Yet in present-day theoretics, a series of
events replaces History, cultural relativism replaces Civilization, and a
basic pessimism replaces a belief in the possibility of Progress. What is
more sinister, mythopoesis replaces reason, and dystopia the prospect
of a rational society. What is at stake in all these displacements is an
intellectual and practical regression of appalling proportions — an
especially alarming development today, when theoretical clarity is of
the utmost necessity. What our times require is a social-analysis that
calls for a revolutionary and ultimately popular movement, not a
psycho-analysis that issues self-righteous disclaimers for “beautiful
souls,” ideologically dressed in cloaks of personal virtue.
Given the disparity between what rationally should be and what
currently exists, reason may not necessarily become embodied in a free
society. If and when the realm of freedom ever does reach its most
expansive form, to the extent that we can envision it, and if hierarchy,
classes, domination, and exploitation were ever abolished, we would
be obliged to enter that realm only as free beings, as truly rational,
ethical, and empathetic “knowing animals,” with the highest intellectual
insight and ethical probity, not as brutes coerced into it by grim necessity
and fear. The riddle of our times is whether today’s relativists would
have equipped us intellectually and ethically to cross into that most
expansive realm of freedom. We cannot merely be driven into greater
freedom by blind forces that we fail to understand, as Marxists implied,
still less by mere preferences that have no standing in anything more
than “imaginary,” “instincts,” or libidinal “desires.” The relativists of
our time could actually play a sinister role if they permitted the
“imaginative” to loosen our contact with the objective world. For in
the absence of rational objective standards of behavior, imagination may
be as demonic as it may be liberatory when such standards exist; hence
the need for informed spontaneity — and an informed imagination.
The exhilarating events of May–June 1968, with the cry “Imagination
to Power!” were followed a few years later by a surge in the
popularity of nihilistic postmodernism and poststructuralism in the
academy, an unsavory metaphysics of “desire,” and an apolitical call
for “imagination” nourished by a yearning for “self-realization.” More
than ever, I would insist, we must invert Nietzsche’s dictum “All facts
are interpretations” and demand that all interpretations be rooted in
objectivity. We must seek out broader interpretations of socialism than
those that cast socialist ideals as a science and strangled its movements
in authoritarian institutions. At a time when we teeter between
Civilization and barbarism, the current apostles of irrationality in all
their varied forms are the chthonic demons of a dark world who have
come to life not to explicate humanity’s problems but to effect a
dispiriting denial of the role of rationality in History and human affairs.
My disquiet today lies not in the absence of scientific “guarantees” that
a libertarian socialist society will appear — one that, at my age, it will
never be my privilege to see — but in whether it will even be fought for
in so decadent and desperate a period.
[73] See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1993).
[74] See Murray Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell, 1995).
[75] See Chapter 11 of Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (1982;
reprinted by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991).
[76] G.W.F. Hegel, “Reason as Lawgiver,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.
A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 252–6.
** List of Sources
1. An Ecological Society
Decentralization: Selected from Our Synthetic Environment, under the
pseudonym Lewis Herber (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp.
237–45. The British edition of this book was published by Jonathan
Cape (London, 1963 ); a revised paperback edition was published by
Harper Colophon Books, under the name Murray Bookchin (New
York, 1974).
Anarchism and Ecology: From “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,”
under the pseudonym Lewis Herber, Comment [NY] (1964). This essay
was republished in Anarchy [UK] 69, vol. 6 (1966); and in Murray
Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Books,
1971; London: Wildwood House, 1974; and Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1986). This selection comes from Post-Scarcity Anarchism, pp.
76–82.
The New Technology and the Human Scale: From “Towards a
Liberatory Technology,” in Comment [N.Y.] (1965). Republished in
Anarchy [UK] 78, vol. 7 (1967) and in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971,
1974, 1986), from which this selection comes, pp. 106–12. I have
removed most of the (often dated) technical material from this and the
following selection.
Ecological Technology: From ibid., pp. 113–30.
Social Ecology: From Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo
Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), pp. 20–5. Second edition published
by Black Rose Books (Montreal, 1991).
**2. Nature, First and Second**
Images of First Nature: From “What Is Social Ecology?” in Murray
Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,
1986; and Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987), pp. 52, 55–62. This
essay was originally a seminar lecture presented at the University of
Frankfurt (Germany) in 1984.
Participatory Evolution: From “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” in
Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, revised edition
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), pp. 77–81. This essay was
originally published in Alternatives, val. 13, no. 4 (November 1986);
it was heavily revised for the 1995 edition of The Philosophy of Social Ecology.
Society as Second Nature: From Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989;
Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 25–30, 35–9.
On Biocentrism: From Murray Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity
(London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 100–4.
**3. Organic Society**
Usufruct, Complementarity, and the Irreducible Minimum: From The Ecology of Freedom (1982), pp. 48–9, 50–2, and 143–5.
Romanticizing Organic Society: From “Twenty Years Later ... ,“the
introduction to the revised edition of The Ecology of Freedom ( 1991 ),
pp. xvii-xix, xxxviii, xxxix-xliv, xlv-xlvii, xlviii, il-li.
**4. The Legacy of Domination**
The Emergence of Hierarchy: From The Ecology of Freedom ( 1982),
pp. 74–87.
The Rise of the State: From Murray Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1987), pp. 138–46. Republished in Canada as Urbanization Without Cities by Black Rose Books (Montreal, 1992); and republished
with revisions as From Urbanization to Cities by Cassell (London,
1995). This selection is taken from pp. 129–36 of the latter edition.
The Rise of Capitalism: From Urbanization (1987 and 1992),
pp. 201–7; in the 1995 Cassell edition, pp. 181–6.
The Market Society: From The Ecology of Freedom (1982), pp. 135–9.
**5. Scarcity and Post-Scarcity**
Conditions of Freedom: From “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” (1967), in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), pp. 33–5, 37–40.
The Problem of Want and Work: From “Toward a Liberatory
Technology” (1965), in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), pp. 89–94.
Cybernation and Automation: From “Toward a Liberatory
Technology” (1965), in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), pp. 95–105.
Technology for Life: From “Toward a Liberatory Technology” (1965),
in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), pp. 130 — 9.
The Fetishization of Needs: From The Ecology of Freedom (1982),
pp. 67–72.
**6. Marxism**
Marxism and Domination: This selection combines excerpts from The Ecology of Freedom (1982), pp. 64–5, and from “Marxism as
Bourgeois Sociology” Comment [ns], vol. 1, no. 2 (Feb. 1979).
Republished in Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1980), pp. 203–6.
Marxism and Leninism: From “Listen, Marxist!” (1969), in PostScarcity Anarchism (1971), pp. 181–5, 198–208.
**7. Anarchism**
The Two Traditions — Anarchism: From “Listen, Marxist!” (1969), in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), pp. 208–20.
Anarchy and Libertarian Utopias: From Remaking Society (1989,
1990), pp. 117–22, 124–6.
Cultures of Revolt: From From Urbanization to Cities (1987), pp.
211–15; in the 1995 Cassell edition, pp. 189–92.
Spanish Anarchism — The Collectives: This selection combines excerpts
from “Overview of the Spanish Libertarian Movement” (1974) and
“After Fifty Years” (1985), both in Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain (Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press, 1995), pp. 9–14,26–7,
43–4. “Overview” was originally published as “Reflections on Spanish
Anarchism” in Our Generation, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1974); it was
republished (in part) as the introductory essay to Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution 1936–39 (New York: Free Life Editions, and Montreal:
Black Rose Books, both 1974). “After Fifty Years” was originally
published as “The Spanish Civil War, 1936,” in New Politics 1 (Spring
1986).
Critique of Lifestyle Anarchism: From “Social Anarchism versus
Lifestyle Anarchism,” in Murray Bookchin Social Anarchism versus Lifestyle Anarchism (Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press, 1995),
pp. 8–9,49–54,56–61.
8. Libertarian Municipalism
The New Municipal Agenda: This selection comes primarily from
Chapter 8 of Urbanization (1987, 1992, 1995), passim; with some
interpolations from “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced
Capitalism,” Green Perspectives, no. 18 (November 1989); “The
Meaning of Confederalism,” Green Perspectives, no. 20 (November
1990); and “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,” Green Perspectives, no. 24 (October 1991). On some occasions, such as while
writing Urbanization, Bookchin referred to his political ideas as
“confederal municipalism” rather than as “libertarian municipalism.”
In this selection, at his request, I have changed “confederal
municipalism” to his preferred “libertarian municipalism.”
9. Dialectical Naturalism
Objectively Grounded Ethics: From “Rethinking Ethics, Nature, and
Society” (written in 1985), in The Modern Crisis (1986), pp. 7–13.
A Philosophical Naturalism: From the introduction to The Philosophy of Social Ecology, revised edition (1995), pp. 3–11, 13–15, 16–24,
26–7, 28–33.
Ecologizing the Dialectic: From “Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical
Approach,” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology, revised edition
(1995), pp. 119, 120, 124, 125–6, 127–31, 133–6, 140–1. This article
was originally published in Our Generation, vol. 18, no. 2
(Spring-Summer 1987).
10. Reason and History
History, Civilization, and Progress: From “History, Civilization, and
Progress: Outline for a Criticism of Modern Relativism,” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology, revised edition (1995), pp. 147–8,
157–79. Originally published in Green Perspectives, no. 29 (March
1994).
*** Permissions
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to
reprint previously published material:
**A.K. Press:** “Overview of the Spanish Libertarian Movement,” in To Remember Spain (1995); “After Fifty Years,” in To Remember Spain
(1995); and “Social Anarchism versus Lifestyle Anarchism,” in Social Anarchism versus Lifestyle Anarchism (1995). Reprinted by permission
of A.K. Press.
**Black Rose Books:** “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” “PostScarcity
Anarchism,” “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” and “Listen,
Marxist!” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism ( 1986 rpt.); The Ecology of Freedom, second edition (1991 rpt.); “Twenty Years Later ... ,”
introduction to the revised edition of The Ecology of Freedom (1991);
“What Is Social Ecology?” and “Rethinking Ethics, Nature, and
Society,” in The Modern Crisis (1986); Remaking Society (1989);
“Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology,” in Toward an Ecological Society
(1980); “The New Municipal Agenda,” in Urbanization Against Cities
(1992 rpt.); “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” “A Philosophical
Naturalism,” “Thinking Ecologically,” and “History, Civilization, and
Progress,” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology, revised edition ( 1994 ).
Reprinted by permission of Black Rose Books.
**Cassell:** “Biocentrism” in Re-enchanting Humanity (1995); “The New
Municipal Agenda,” in From Urbanization to Cities, revised edition
(1995 rpt). Reprinted by permission of Cassell.
**New Society Publishers:** “What Is Social Ecology?” and “Rethinking
Ethics, Nature, and Society,” in The Modern Crisis (1986). Reprinted
by permission of New Society Publishers.
**South End Press:** Remaking Society (1990). Reprinted by permission
of South End Press.