#cover m-b-murray-bookchin-toward-an-ecological-society-2.png
#title Toward an Ecological Society
#author Murray Bookchin
#LISTtitle Toward an Ecological Society
#SORTauthors Murray Bookchin
#SORTtopics ecology, human ecology, social ecology, libertarian municipalism, communalism, Black Rose Books
#date 1980
#source Retrieved on 2017-12-20 from [[https://archive.org/details/TowardAnEcologicalSociety/][archive.org]].
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-05-21

*** Dedication

For Debbie, my daughter

** Introduction

These essays have been collated for a special purpose: to
recover the very *idea* of a radical critique of social life.

At the outset it should be clear that this is no abstract or
insignificant task. Perhaps at no time in modern history has
radical thought been in such grave peril of losing its very identity
as a consistent critique of the existing social order and a coherent
project for social reconstruction. Unless we are prepared to
retreat to the sectarian politics of a by-gone era, it must be bluntly
asserted *that hardly any authentic revolutionary opposition*
*exists in North America and Europe*. Worse, the mere notion of
what a revolutionary opposition consists of has itself become
blurred and diluted to the point of sheer opaqueness. If the ghosts
of Gerrard Winstanley, Jacques Danton, Gracchus Babeuf,
Mikhail Bakunin, Louise Michel — yes, even Marx, Luxemburg,
and Lenin — occasionally haunt us, they have become so spectral
and inchoate that we can no longer see or hear them, even as
voices of social conscience.

What we now call “radical” is an odious mockery of three
centuries of revolutionary opposition, social agitation, intellectual
enlightenment, and popular insurgency. Radical politics in our
time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling
booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car-bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative
politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies, and finally, the
knee-bent, humble pleas for small reforms — in short, the mere
shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent
conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary
project in history. Not that petitions, slogans, rallies, and the
tedious work of public education have no place in these projects.
But we do not have to hypostasize adventuristic escapades to
recognize the loss of a balanced revolutionary stance, one that
has enough sense of time and place to evoke the appropriate
means to achieve appropriate goals. My point is that the very
goals of contemporary radicalism have all the features of a
middle-aged bourgeois opportunism — of “trade-offs” for small
gains, of respectability for “mass” but meaningless constituencies, of a degenerative retreat into the politics of the lesser
evil” that itself generates a world of narrowing choices, finally of a
sclerotic ossification of social ideas, organizational habits, and
utopistic visions.

What is most terrifying about present-day radicalism is that
the piercing cry for “audacity” — «<em>L’audace! L’audace! encore
l’audace!</em>» — that Danton voiced in 1793 on the hightide of the
French Revolution would simply be *puzzling* to self-styled
radicals who demurely carry attache cases of memoranda and
grant requests into their conference rooms, suitcases of their
books into their lecture halls, and bull horns to their rallies. The
era of the “managerial radical” (to use Andrew Kopkind s
damning phrase) has pushed radicalism itself into the shadows of
history. What we encounter today is the universal bureaucratization and technocratization of radicalism as such not merely
in the triumph of organizational bureaucracies and centralized
leaderships but in the very outlook, vision, and ideas of its most
articulate acolytes. The “managerial radical” is the practitioner of
organizational technique, of efficient manipulation, of mass
mobilization *as goals in themselves*. Technique has become the
substitute for social idealism.

Radical theory, in turn, fares even worse as the ideology for
this historic turn in radical politics. Where socialism and even
anarchism have not been reduced to dogmatic echoes of the last
century, they have become disciplines within the academy, where
they serve to garnish “managerial radicalism” with theoretical
exotica. Much that now passes for “radical” theory are either
footnotes to the history of ideas or intellectual obscurantism that
supports the pragmatic obscurantism of the political marketplace. The term “marketplace” should not be taken as a
metaphor. The colonization of society by a bourgeois sensibility — a result of the colonization of society by the market is
now complete. For the market has absorbed not only every
aspect of production, consumption, community life, and family
ties into the buyer-seller nexus; it has permeated the opposition
to capitalism with bourgeois cunning, compromise, and careerism. It has done this by restating the very meaning of
opposition to conform with the system’s own parameters of
critique and discourse.

In any case it is not “anti-intellectual” or “anti-theoretical” to
slap academic snobbery in the face by demanding that radical
theory at least provide some guide to radical practice. But it is
surely tedious punditry to so completely divorce theory from
practice that it ceases to have anything but professional relevance to intellectual careerists — the academy’s counterpart of
the political careerists in today’s “radical” movements.

----

If my remarks seem overly contentious, it is because I am
deeply concerned with the integrity of new, inherently radical
issues that have emerged in recent years — issues that potentially
at least have more far-reaching emancipatory implications than
the radical ones of the past. I refer to ecology, feminism, and
community control — a group of problems that reaches beyond
the largely economistic conflicts of the movements of the last
generation. These new problems raise expansive notions of
freedom and an emancipatory moral sensibility, not merely of
justice and material exploitation. What is at stake, today,
particularly in the movements and tendencies that have formed
around ecology, feminism, and community control is the extent
to which they can be fully actualized as liberatory forces.

These movements and tendencies are now faced with a crisis
that threatens to warp their emancipatory logic into aborted,
subservient, and conventional ideologies of the status quo. Their
destiny may well be determined by our ability to unearth that
emancipatory logic, to reveal its revolutionary content, and to
explore the new meaning it can give to the word “freedom.”
Should we fail in this momentous endeavour, the colonization of
society by a deeply sedimented bourgeois sensibility will be
complete — perhaps so complete that it is doubtful if a revolutionary opposition will emerge again in the present century.

The traditional locus of modern radicalism — the workers
movement — is dead. My essays on socialism and Marxism in this
book elucidate in detail the inherent limits and mystified premises
on which it rested historically. The ecology, feminist, and
community movements that have emerged in the 1970s have
demonstrably shattered the silence that socialism has left in its
wake. They are vital, rebellious, and richly promising, but the
conflicts that face these new movements have been grossly
miscast. The central conflict confronting the ecology, feminist,
and community movements is not merely with those who wish to
despoil the environment or those who foster sexism or those who
oppose community control. The despoilers, sexists, and municipal bureaucrats wear their identities on their sleeves. They can
be singled out, disputed, and removed from their positions of
authority. The central conflict confronting the ecology, feminist,
and community movements lies *within* the movements themselves. Here, the problem they face is the need to discover the
sweeping implications of the issues they raise: the achievement of
a totally new, non-hierarchical society in which the domination of
nature by man, of woman by man, and of society by the state is
completely abolished — technologically, institutionally, culturally,
and in the very rationality and sensibilities of the individual.

The socialist movement never raised these issues clearly in the
century that it flourished between 1840 and 1940. Its primary
concerns were economic and turned on the abolition of wage
labour and capital, of economic classes and material exploitation.
That these concerns remain with us to this day need hardly be
emphasized and their resolution must be achieved if freedom is to
have any substantive meaning. But there can be a decidedly
classless, even a non-exploitative society in the *economic* sense
that still preserves hierarchical rule and domination in the *social*
sense — whether they take the form of — the patriarchal family,
domination by age and ethnic groups, bureaucratic institutions,
ideological manipulation, or a pyramidal division of labour. The
successive layers of the hierarchical pyramid may confer no
material privileges whatever on those who command and no
material renunciation by those who obey; indeed, the ideological
tradition of domination that associates “order” with hierarchy,
the psychic privileges that confer prestige on status, the historical
inertia that carries the traditional forms and sensibilities of the
past into the present and future — all of these may preserve
hierarchy even after classes have been abolished. Yet classless or
not, society would be riddled by domination and, with domination, a general condition of command and obedience, of
unfreedom and humiliation, and perhaps most decisively, an
abortion of each individual’s potentiality for consciousness,
reason, selfhood, creativity, and the right to assert full control
over her or his daily life.[1]

[1] It remains supremely ironical that, in the history of elitism and vanguardism that
runs through millenia of social theory, hierarchy did not confer material privileges
on the rulers of ideal societies but austerity and renunciation of the material world.
Plato’s “guardians” are notably denied the sensuous pleasures of life. Their
training is demanding, their responsibilities awesome, their needs severely
restricted, their possessions communal and limited. The Church was to make the
same austere demands on the clerical elite in society, however much these were
honored in the breach. Even in modern times the early Bolsheviks were expected
to live harsh, self-abnegating lives — more confining and materially impoverished
than their proletarian followers. The ideal of hiearchy was based on a concept of
service, not on privilege. That such a notion remained an ideal does not alter the
extra-material goals it raised and the surprising extent to which these goals were
retained throughout its history.

The ecology, feminist, and community movements implicitly
challenge this warped destiny. Ecology raises, the issue that the
very notion of man’s domination of nature stems from man’s
domination of man. Feminism reaches even further and reveals
that the domination of man by man actually originates in the
domination of woman by man. Community movements implicitly
assert that in order to replace social domination by self-management, a new type of civic self — the free, self-governing
citizen — must be restored and gathered into new institutional
forms such as popular assemblies to challenge the all-pervasive
state apparatus. Followed through to their logical conclusion, all
of these movements challenge not only class formations but
hierarchies, not only material exploitation but domination in
everyform. Although hierarchical structures reach into the most
intimate aspects of social and personal life, the supraclass
problems they raise nowhere falls within the limited orbit of the
socialist and labour movements. Hence, if we are to complete the
logic of the ecology, feminist, and community movements, we
must extend our very notion of freedom beyond any concept we
have held of this notion in the past.

But will these new movements be permitted to follow the logic
of their premises, to complete them in a consistent and coherent
fashion?

It is around this crucial issue that we encounter two major
obstacles: the attempt by socialists to reduce these expansive
concepts of freedom to economistic categories and the attempt
by the “managerial radicals” to compromise them. Of the two, the
socialist view tends to be the most deceptive. Slogans like
•“pollution is profitable,” “wages for housewives,” and “fight the
slumlords” involve a subtle denaturing of the more sweeping
revolutionary demands for an ecological society, the abolition of
domination, and the restoration of community control. The real
“slime of history,” to reinterpret Sartre’s phrase, is the muck of
the past that is flung upon the present to re-sculpture it into forms —
that accord with an archaic vision of social reality. A “socialist”
ecology, a “socialist” feminism, and a “socialist” community
movement — with its red flags, clenched fists, and sectarian
verbiage — are not only contradictions in terms; they infest the
newly formed, living movements of the future with the maggots of
cadavers from the past and must be opposed unrelentingly.

A special onus must be borne by ideologists who perpetuate
the infestation and even conceal it with theoretical cosmetics.
One thinks, here, of the Andre Gorzs and Herbert Marcuses who
not only worship at the mausoleum of socialism but promote it as
a viable habitat for the living. What uniquely distinguishes their
ideological obscurantism from that of the socialist sectarians is
their repeated attempts to reformulate both sides of the issue: the
old socialist categories and the new libertarian ones. The result /
that inevitably follows is that the logic of each is warped and its
inherent opposition to the other is blurred. Marcuse, by wedding
Freud to Marx and anarchism to socialism in the sixties, muddled
the meaning of all the partners in these forced alliances. What
emerged from works like *Eros and Civilization* and *One-Dimensional Man* was a mass of half-truths and gross inconsistencies. Characteristically, in Marcuse’s latest works, it was
Marx who triumphed over Freud, socialism that triumphed over
anarchism — and Eurocommunism that triumphed over everything.

What is at least theoretical probing in Marcuse is facilely
reduced to pop culture in Gorz — with even more telling practical
consequences. His *Strategy for Labour*, by miscasting students
and intellectuals as a “new proletariat,” deflected the growing
insight of sixties’ radicals from *cultural* movements into classical
economistic ones, thereby producing massive confusion in the
American student movement of the time. More than any single
journalistic work, this book brought Marxism into the Students
for a Democratic Society, producing the ideological chaos that
eventually destroyed it.

Much the same danger now faces the ecology movement if
Gorz’s treatment of the subject exercises any appreciable
influence. His recent *Ecology and Freedom* (retitled *Ecology as Politics*) is essentially the *New Strategy for Labour* writ in
ecological verbiage. It perpetuates all the incompatibilities of a
mythic “libertarian socialism” that sprinkles anarchist concepts
of decentralized organization with Social Democratic concepts of
mass political parties and, more offensively, “radical ecology”
with the opportunistic politics of conventional environmentalism.
Thus Jerry Brown, governor of California, sits side-by-side with
Ho Chi Minh, Fritz Schumacher, and Buddha as evidence of “*les neo-anarchistes*” in the American ecology movement. Imperturbably, Gorz degrades each new concept raised by ecological
theory and the practice of authentically radical tendencies in the
ecological movement into his own current variant of Marxian
socialism.

Neither Marx nor ecology emerge untainted from this crude
eclecticism. Clarity of thought, coherence of views, and, above
all, the full logic of one’s radical premises are blunted by an
ideological dilettantism that leaves every concept unfinished,
every personality miscast, and every practice compromised — be
it direct action or electoral action, decentralization or centralization, a Jerry Brown or a Ho Chi Minh. The melding of all
these contradictory views becomes insufferable not because
ecology is distorted into Marxism, for the evidence of distortion
would be clear on first inspection to any knowledgeable reader.
Rather, it lies in the fact that one can recognize neither Marxism
*nor* ecology and the problems they raise because *both* are equally
distorted in order to reconcile utterly alien premises that lead to
completely conflicting conclusions. We must either choose
between ecology, with its naturalism, its anarchistic logic of
decentralization, its emphasis on humanly scaled alternate
technologies, and its non-hierarchical institutions, or socialism,
with its typically Marxian anti-naturalism, its political logic of
centralization, its emphasis on high technology, and its bureaucratic institutions. Gorz gives us neither alternative in the name
of both and perpetuates a confusion that has already produced an
internal crisis in every American and European ecology
movement.

I have singled out Gorz primarily because of his recent interest
in ecological issues. What I have said about his hybridization of
ideas could apply equally to Juliet MitchelPs treatment of feminist
issues or David Harvey’s treatment of urban community issues.
These names, in fact, are mere metaphors for a large number of
socialist ideologists who have made eclecticism fashionable as a
substitute for probing theoretical exploration. The issues that
divide ecology, feminist, and community movements are basically
similar. Feminism is reduced to a matter of class oppression,
community issues to a matter of economic oppression. Beyond
these categories — certainly true as far as they go — the intellectual horizon of the socialist eclectics tends to become opaque.
Broader problems of freedom, hierarchy, domination, citizenship, and self-activity seem misty, ineffable, at times even
“‘incomprehensible,” beside the “nuts-and-bolts” issues of political economy. Orchestrated by an all-pervasive tendency toward
economic reductionism, *homo collectivicus* is consistently reduced to *homo economicus* and Brecht’s notorious maxim,
Feed the face, then give the moral,” becomes a strategy for
political immorality and socialist apologetics. As I have tried to
show in my essays on Marx, this may be “hard” sociology, based
on the “material facts of life,” but it is bourgeois to the core.

----

No less disquieting than the socialists who have been tracking
the ecology, feminist, and community movements are the
technocrats from within who have been trying to degrade them
for opportunistic ends. Here, ignorance is fetishized over knowledge and action over theory in the name of acquiring large
constituencies, practical results, and, of course, personal power.
If the Gorzs, Mitchells, and Harveys distort the premises and
logic of the issues that concern them, the “managerial radical”
ignores them when possible or conceals them when necessary.
Technique tends to take the place of principles; journalism, the
place of education; spectacles, the place of serious action;
floating constituencies that can be mobilized and demobilized,
(he place of lasting organizations; elites, the place of grass-roots
and. autonomous movements. This is the stock-in-trade of the
social engineer, not the committed idealist. It is self-serving and
Sterile, when it is not simply odious and treacherous.

What makes it possible for this new class of managers to
appear radical? Partly, it is the result of a lack of theoretical
insight by their own followers. The “managerial radical” capitalizes on a chronic American syndrome: the pragmatic hypostasization of action, of quick results and immediate success. Fast
food is not the only attribute of the American spirit; its ideological
counterpart is fast politics, indeed, fast radicalism. The sixties
were plagued by feverish turns in ideological fads and cultural
fashions that swept through the New Left and the counterculture
with.dazzling rapidity. Movements leap-frogged over entire eras
of historical experience and theoretical development with an
arrogant indifference for the labours of the past, abandoning
anarchism for Marxism, machismo militancy for feminism, communal living for privatism, sexual promiscuity for monogamy,
rock music for disco, only to revert again to new libertarian fads,
sado-masochism, singles bars, punk rock in criss-crossing
patterns that more closely resemble the scrawl of an infant than
the decipherable messages of maturing individuals. That young
men and women can write marketable, often salacious “biographies at the age of thirty or less is not surprising; there is
detail aplenty to entertain the reader — but nothing of significance
lo communicate.

What counts is the extent to which appearance can so easily
replace reality in the American mind. Rebellion, too, can become
mere theater when it lacks the substance of knowledge, theory,
and wisdom. Indeed, the myth that “doing” is more important
than “thinking,” that “constructive action” is more important
than rational critique — these are actually mystified forms of
theory, critique, and rationalism. The traditional American
maxim that “philosophy is bunk” has always been a philosophical
judgement in its own right, a statement of empirical philosophy as
against speculative, of sensuous knowledge as against intel-
tectual. The gruff attack upon theory and reason does not annul
intellectual activity. “Common sense” is merely “sense” that is
common, that is, untutored, uninformed, and riddled by acquired
biases. It merely replaces the presuppositions of self-conscious
wisdom by the presuppositions of unconscious prejudice. In
either case, presuppositions are always being made and thereby
involve theory, philosophy, and mentality in one form or another.

The “managerial radical” capitalizes upon this anti-theoretical
syndrome, particularly on its myth of fast success. Immediacy of
reward, a psychologically formative technique, fosters the infantile demand for immediate gratification and the infantilism of the
manager’s constituency. Radicalism thus ceases to be a body of
theory and informed practice; it becomes the fastest route to the
most immediate goals. The notion that basic social change may
require the labours and dedication of a lifetime — a notion so
basic to revolutionary idealism — has no place in this technocratic
constellation. Radicalism thus becomes methodology rather than
morality, fast success rather than patient struggle, a series of
manic responses rather than lasting commitment. A superficial
“extremism,” which the “managerial radical” often orchestrates
with the hidden cooperation of the very authorities she or, he
professes to oppose, turns out to be merely another device to
bring an alienated constituency into complicity with its own
oppressors.

The ecology movement, even more than the feminist and
community movements, thrives in this highly charged, often
contrived ambience of opposition. “Anti-nuke” groups and
alliances rise and fall at a metabolic rate that excludes serious
reflection on their methods and goals. To “Stop Nukes” has far-
reaching social implications that go beyond the problems of
adequate energy resources and radioactive pollution. The demand poses such questions as *how* should we try to “Stop
Nukes” — by direct action or political action? How should we
*organize* to “Stop Nukes” — by decentralized forms of autonomous affinity groups or national mobilizations and perhaps
centralized parties? What will *replace* nukes — huge high technology solar installations managed by conventional power utilities
or simple, often hand-crafted popular technologies that can be
constructed and managed by a moderate-sized community?
These questions alone, not to speak of innumerable issues that
range around notions of’ the communal ownership and management of society’s resources, non-hierarchical structures of
social organization, and changes in human sensibility, reach far
beyond the more limited issue of nuclear power. “No Nukes” is
not enough — at least if we wish to remove the deep-seated social
forces that produced nuclear power in the first place.

“Managerial radicalism” fosters a preoccupation with method
rather than an exploration of goals. It is noteworthy that
surprisingly few leaders of the anti-nuke movement have tried to
educate their followers (assuming they are themselves informed)
as to the implications of a serious opposition to nuclear power.
They have provided no theoretical transition from the construction and operation of nuclear power plants to the social forces
that promote them. The goal tends to remain fixed: “No Nukes!”
Their principal concerns have been with the “strategies” and
“tactics” that will achieve this end: a mobilization of docile
constituencies that can be assembled and conveniently disassembled at nuclear reactor sites, in demonstrations, and more
recently, at polling booths.

“Managerial radicalism” exhibits no real concern over the
nature of these constituencies or their qualities as educated,
socially committed, and active personalities. “Mass actions”
outweigh <em>self</em>-action; numbers outweigh ideals; quantity outweighs quality. The concept of direct action, a concept that was
meant to develop active personalities who as individuals and
individuated communities *could take the social realm directly*
*into their own hands* — an authentic public guided by ethical
considerations rather than legislative edicts — is odiously degraded into a mere matter of “tactics” rather than self-activity,
self-development, and self-management. Affinity groups, an
anarchist notion of organization that was meant to provide the
intimate, human-scaled, decentralized forms to foster the new
selves and sensibilities for a truly free society, are seen merely as
“task forces” that quickly assemble and disperse to perform very
limited and concrete actions. “Managerial radicalism,” in short, is
primarily concerned with managing rather than radicalizing. And
in the process of cultivating the manipulation of its mass
following, it grossly denatures every libertarian concept of our
times, often at a historic cost that yields a repellent careerism
within its self-appointed elite and cynicism within its naive
following.

----

The essays, articles, and papers that comprise this volume
have been selected precisely for their critical thrust in the hope
that we may yet recast the ecological, community, and theoretical issues of our time in a revolutionary direction. My omission
of discussions on feminism and the feminist movement is merely a
personal recognition that the best critiques and reconstructive
notions in this area have already come from women, as indeed the
best scholarship in anthropology and social theory. The works
which follow were written entirely during the seventies and,
almost without exception, are free of the proclivities of socialists
and “managerial radicals” to follow trendy issues. If certain
concepts and terms in this book now seem familiar, it is often
because they were picked up later by elements in the Left who
found one or another sizable constituency to exploit for their own
dogmatic ends. Thus these writings can justifiably claim to “lead”
intellectually: certainly, they do not follow — nor do they adapt
new problems to shopworn causes.

That my writings in ecology urbanism, and technics have not
always been celebrated by my colleagues on the Left can, in my
view, be attributed to one reason: my commitment to anarchism.
I hold this commitment with pride, for if nothing else it has been an
invisible moral boundary that has kept me from oozing over to
neo-Marxism, academicism, and ultimately reformism. I have not
tried to mix contradictions and incompatibilities in order to gain
the approval of my peers. A revolutionary ethical opposition has
seemed to me to be a much better destiny than the social
acceptance of those eminently practical “radicals” who basicaly
despise the “masses” and in time grow to despise themselves.
Hence the reader will find no convenient “uncertainties,” no
recipies for “success,” no shifts of focus to suit a new “lesser evil”
around which to embrace an even worse evil in the long run.

A second observation I would like to make is that this collection
does not stand in any contradiction to my earlier sixties collection
of essays, *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*. On the contrary, it largely
elaborates problems in the first volume within the changing
context of the seventies. The counterculture, in my view, is not
“dead”; it was aborted by many factors and, if anything, awaits a
richer, more perceptive, and more conscious development. The
ideals it raised of communal living, openness of relations, love,
sexual freedom, sensuousness of dress and manner are the
abiding goals of utopian thought at its best. To dismiss the sixties
as a “phase” is to dismiss utopianism as a “dream” — to deny the
relevance of a Charles Fourier and a William Morris to our
times — and to restrict the concept of a revolutionary movement
to an apparatus, denying its significance as a culture. Such
rejections of goals and traditions would be nothing less than an
acquiesence to the status quo. What is remarkable about the
sixties counterculture is not that it has been aborted; this could
have been anticipated in the absence of a theoretical armamentarium suitable to its needs. What is remarkable is that the
counterculture of the sixties emerged at all in the face of a middle-
aged, smug, and middle-class environment or that it survived in
different ways despite the hucksters who preyed upon it, be they
the media-oriented canaille who became its “spokesmen” and
clowns and the leeches of the dogmatic Left who parasitized it.

*Post-Scarcity Anarchism* tried to explain the emergence of
this astonishing cultural phenomenon — so alien to the adults of
the Eisenhower era — and to offer it a perspective. That my
essays advanced ecological, technological, organizational, and
theoretical perspectives that are still viable today attests to the
relevance of the book as a whole.

The term “post-scarcity,” however, has encountered curious
difficulties that require some discussion. “Scarcity” is not a
mystical or absolute condition, a floating sense of “need” that is
autonomous in its own right. It is a relative term whose meaning
has changed with the emergence of new needs and wants.
Marshall Sahlins has emphasized that technically primitive
hunting bands lack the modern body of needs that center around
sophisticated energy sources, dwellings, vehicles, entertainment,
and the steady diet of food that Euro-Americans take for granted.
Their“tool kit” is, in fact, so utterly primitive and their needs so
limited that they lack a sense of “scarcity” that riddles our own
comparatively opulent society. In this sense, they are seemingly
“post-scarcity” communities or, to be more accurate, “nonscarcity” communities.

This line of reasoning is often convincing enough to suggest
that a modern society based on “voluntary simplicity” — to use a
new trendy term — might also become a “post-scarcity” society if
it imposed “limits to growth” and “voluntary limits” on needs.
Indeed, the implication of Sahlins’s views have been used with
telling effect to demand a more austere, labour-intensive, relatively self-sufficient society — presumably one whose needs
were in fact so limited that our seeming energy problems and raw
materials shortages would be removed. Anthropology has been
placed again in the service of the status quo — mot to remove
material want but to validate it.

What this line of reasoning ignores is the considerable losses a
drastic reduction of needs would create — losses in intellectual,
cultural, and psychological complexity and ultimately a wealth of
selfhood and personality. However much a hunting band may be
in equipoise with its primitive tool-kit and its limited needs, it
remains primitive and limited nevertheless. Even if one assumes
that the “noble savage” is not a myth, it is a condition of
“savagery” as well as nobility — one that is rooted’ in the
limitations of the blood tie rather than citizenship, tribal parochialism rather than *humanitas*, a sexual division of labour rather
than a professional one, revenge rather than justice, in short
custom rather than reason and biological inflexibility instead of
social malleability. It lies within human potentialities to be more
than a “noble savage,” a product of natural history alone. To
leave humanity’s latent capacity for actualizing the fullness of
reason, creativity, freedom, personality and a sophisticated
culture only partially or one-sidedly fulfilled is to deny the rich
dialectic of the human condition in its full state of realization and
even of nature as life rendered self-conscious.

Hence even were a “non-scarcity” society to exist, humanity
would still suffer the same privation of form and development that
exists in a “scarcity” society. “Post-scarcity” does not denote an
affluence that would stifle the fulfillment of the human condition;
indeed, an abundance of needs that can be fulfilled is more likely
to perpetuate unfreedom than the “non-scarcity” condition of a
hunting band. “Post-scarcity” denotes a free society that can
*reject* false, dehumanizing needs *precisely because it can be*
*substantially free of need itself*. It can decide to adopt a simpler
way of material life because there is enough available for everyone
to accept or reject. That it can even make such a decision reflects
a high degree of social freedom in itself, a new system of social
relations and values that renders libertarian social judgements
possible. Gauged merely by our current agricultural and industrial output, North Americans and Europeans clearly have the
*material* means for making such a judgement; gauged by our
social relations , on the other hand, we lack the freedom, values,
and sensibility to do so. Hence our affluent society — all myths of
depleted or shrinking resources notwithstanding to the contrary — is as gripped by scarcity as our medieval ancestors
centuries earlier. A “post-scarcity” society, in effect, would have
to be a libertarian communist society that possessed enough
material resources to limit growth and needs as a matter of
choice, not as a matter of need — for if its limits were determined by needs that emerge from scarcity, it would still be limited
by need and scarcity whether resources were in short supply or
not. The *need* to diminish need would materially provide the
basis, if not the cause, of hierarchy and domination based on
privilege.

Marx hypostasized the problem of needs as the “realm of
necessity,” a concept that reaches back to Aristotle, and thereby
absolutized it in a way that obscured the historical formation of
needs. How needs are formed — this, in contrast to the acceptance of needs as they exist — represents a complex problem
which I shall not attempt to explore here. It suffices to point out
that the formation of the “realm of necessity,” with the harsh split
between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom,” is
not a natural fact that has always been with our species or must
always exist with it into the future. The “realm of necessity” is a
distinctly historical phenomenon. In my view it emerged when
primitive communities ceased to view nature as a co-existent
phenomenon to be accepted or revered and, to use Marx’s
simplistic metaphors, had to “wrestle with nature” as an “other”
ultimately to be “dominated.” Once early humanity’s mutual
reciprocity with the natural world dissolved into antagonism and
its oneness into duality, the process of recovering a new level of
reciprocity and oneness doubtless includes the scars of millenia-
long struggles to master the “forces” of nature. I share the
Hegelian view that humanity had to be expelled from the Garden
of Eden to attain the fullness of its humanness. But I emphatically deny that this exile necessarily taints utopia with the blood
and toil of history; that the “realm of necessity” must always be
the “basis” or precondition for the “realm of freedom.” It remains
Fourier’s lasting contribution that the “realm of necessity” can be
colonized by the “realm of freedom,” the realm of toil by the realm
of work, the realm of technics by the realm of play, fantasy, and
imagination.

In any case, the “realm of necessity” can never be viewed as a
*passive* “basis”; it must always infiltrate and malform the “realm
of freedom” until Fourier’s ideal becomes a conscious reality.
Marx’s tragic fate can be resolved into the fact that, integral to his
entire theoretical edifice, he colonizes the “realm of freedom” by
the “realm of necessity as its basis.” The full weight of this
theoretical approach, with its consequent reduction of social
relations to economic relations, of creative to “unalienated
labour,” of society to “associated producers,” of individuality to
embodied “needs,” and of freedom to the “shortening of the
working day” has yet to be grasped in all its regressive content.

----

The opening essays in this compilation are united by the
emphasis I place on the synthesizing role of ecology’ — a term I
sharply distinguish in my very first essay from “environmentalism.” I claim that, having divided humanity from nature many
millennia ago, we must now return to a new unity between the
social and the natural that preserves the gains achieved by
social and natural history. Thus the *real* history of humanity
(which Marx contrasted to the irrational “prehistory” prior to a
communistic future) must be wedded to natural history. Perhaps
these are no longer the brave words they seemed to be when I
advanced them sixteen years ago in “Ecology and Revolutionary
Thought,” but their implications have not been fully developed by
the so-called “radical” movement today. The separation of
humanity from nature, its sweeping social trajectory into a history
that produced a rich wealth of mind, personality, technical
insight, culture, and self-reflective thought, marks the potential
for mind in nature itself, the latent spirit in substance that comes
to consciousness in a humanity that melds with the natural world.
The time has come to integrate an ecological natural philosophy
with an ecological social philosophy based on freedom and consciousness, a goal that has haunted western philosophy from the
pre-Socratics onward.

Doubtless, the practical implications of this goal are paramount. If we are to survive ecological catastrophe, we must
decentralize, restore bioregional forms of production and food
cultivation, diversify our technologies, scale them to human
dimensions, and establish face-to-face forms of democracy. On
this score, I agree with innumerable environmentalists such as
Barry Commoner who argue, perhaps a bit belatedly, for
decentralization and “appropriate” technologies on grounds of
pragmatism and efficiency. But my concerns go much further. I
am occupied with the value of alternate technologies not only
because they are more efficient and rest on renewable resources;
I am even more concerned with their capacity to restore
humanity’s contact with soil, plant and animal life, sun and wind,
in short, with fostering a new sensibility toward the biosphere. I
am equally concerned with the individual’s capacity to understand the operations of these new technologies so that personality itself can be enriched by a new sense of self-assurance and
autonomy over the material aspects of life. Hence my emphasis
on simpler forms — more “passive’ 5 forms, to use the vernacular
of alternate technology — of solar collectors, wind machines,
organic gardens and the like. By the same token, I am occupied
with decentralization not only because it renders these technologies more feasible and more adaptable to the bio-regions in
which they are employed; I am even more concerned with
decentralization as a means of restoring power to local communities and to the individual, to give genuine meaning to the
libertarian vision of freedom as a system of direct democracy.
Small, in my view, is not merely “beautiful”; it is also ecological,
humanistic, and above all, emancipatory.

Thus, the ages-old desideratum of the “good life” converges in
ecology (as I would define the term) with the thrust of historical
development. The French students of 1968 inscribed the slogan
“Be practical, do the impossible” on the walls of Paris; to this
slogan, I have added, “If we do not do the impossible, we will be
faced with the unthinkable.” Utopia, which was once a mere
dream in the preindustrial world, increasingly became a possibility with the development of modern technology. Today, I would
insist it has become a necessity — that is, if we are to survive the
ravages of a totally irrational society that threatens to undermine
the fundaments of life on this planet.

But above all, my emphasis on achieving a new totality between
humanity and nature is part of a larger endeavour to transcend all
the divisions on which hierarchy has been reared for centuries —
the division between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of
freedom,” between work and play, town and country, mind and
body, between the sexes, age groups, ethnic groups and
nationalities. Hence, the holistic outlook that pervades this book,
a distinctly ecological, indeed, dialectical outlook, leads to an
examination of community problems in their urban form, to
Marxism, and to the problems of self-management. That I have
compiled my articles not only on ecology and the ecology
movement, but on city planning, the urban future, Marxism,
should be seen as a meaningful and logical sequence. The modern
urban crisis largely reflects the divisions that capitalism has
produced between society and nature. “Scientific socialism,” in
turn, reflects these divisions ideologically in Marx’s own dualism
between “necessity” and “freedom.” My essays on spontaneity
and organization essentially deal with ecological “politics” within
the revolutionary paradigms and organizational issues formulated by the past century of radical practice.

Finally, this book as a whole is guided by its emphasis on
hierarchy and domination as the authentic “social question” of
human development, — this as distinguished from the economists question of class and the exploitation of labour. The
irreducible “problem areas” of society lie not only in the conflict
between wage labour and capital in the factory; they lie in the
conflicts between age-groups and sexes within the family,
hierarchical modes of instruction in the schools, the bureaucratic usurpation of power within the city, and ethnic divisions
within society. Ultimately, they stem from a hierarchical sensibility of command and obedience that begins with the family and
merely reaches its most visible social form in the factory,
bureaucracy and military. I cannot emphasize too strongly that
these problems emerged long before capitalism. Bourgeois
society ironically concealed these problems for centuries by
giving them an economistic form. Marx was to fall victim to this
historic subterfuge by ignoring the subsurface modes of obedience and command that lie in the family, school, bureaucracy,
and age structure, or more precisely, by identifying the “social
problem” with class relations at the expense of a searching
investigation into the hierarchical relations that produced class
forms in the first place. Indeed, Marxism may well be the ideology
of capitalism *par excellence* precisely because the essentials of its
critique have focused on capitalist production without challenging the underlying cultural sensibilities that sustain it. My
insistence that every revolutionary movement must be a cultural
one as well as a social one is not simply the product of an
exaggerated aversion for mass culture; it has deeper roots in my
conviction that the revolutionary project remains incomplete if it
fails to reach into the problems of hierarchy and domination as
such — in short, if it fails to seek the substitution of an ecological
sensibility for a hierarchical one.

Accordingly, this book is marked by a host of contrasts that
ordinarily remain unstated or blurred in the radical and environmental literature I have encountered. It contrasts ecology with
environmentalism, hierarchy with class, domination with exploitation, a people’s technology with an “appropriate” technology,
self-management with “economic democracy,” cultural movements with economistic parties, direct democracy with representative democracy, utopia with futurism. I have not tried to
develop all of these contrasts in these introductory remarks. The
reader must turn to the book for a clearer elucidation of them. Let
me merely voice one caveat. I nowhere claim that a hierarchical
analysis of society involves a denial of a class analysis and its
significance. Obviously the former includes the latter. I am certain
that this caveat will be magnificently ignored by socialists and
syndicalist-oriented libertarians alike. Let it merely be stated so
that the reader has been alerted to “criticisms” that more often
involves bias rather than analysis.

----

To return to my opening remarks, this book is primarily
intended to give voice to a revolutionary idea of social change,
particularly in terms of the problems that have emerged with the
decline of the traditional workers’ movement. Owing to the
growing sense of powerlessness that freezes us into adaptive
strategies for survival, an all-pervasive pragmatic mentality now
invades our thinking. We live in a society of “trade-offs” which are
rooted in a pseudo-ethics of “benefits versus risks.” An “ethics”
of “trade-offs” involves a choice between lesser evils that
increasingly carries us to the brink of the worst evils conceivable.
Such, in fact, was the destiny of the German Left, which chose
right-wing Social Democrats rather than conservative center
parties, only to be faced with reactionaries who opposed fascists,
finally to choose a Hindenburg against a Hitler who then
proceeded to make Hitler chancellor of the Reich. Our modern
“ethics” of “trade-offs” and lesser evils, an “ethics” rooted in
adaptation, pragmatism, and careerism stands in historic contrast to the ethics of pre-capitalist society. Even to such
conservative thinkers as Plato and Aristotle, politics — a realm
that could never be disassociated from ethics — denoted the
achievement of virtue in the form of justice and the good life.
Hence, authentic politics stood opposed to evil and called for its
complete negation by the good. There are no “trade-offs” in
Plato’s *Republic* or in Aristotle’s *Politics*. The ultimate goals of
these works are to assure the success of virtue over evil of
reason over superstition and custom.

Modern politics, by contrast, has decisively separated itself
from this tradition. Not only have we disassociated politics from
ethics, dealing with the former strictly as a pragmatic body of
techniques and the latter as a corpus of relativistic values based
on personal taste and opinions; we have even turned the
pragmatic techniques of politics into a choice between lesser
evils, of trade-offs,” that thereby replace virtue by evil as the
essence of political norms.[2]

Politics has now become a world of evil rather than virtue of
injustice rather than justice, a world that is mediated by “lesser”
versus “greater” transgressions of “the good,” “the right,” and
“the just.” We no longer speak of what is “right” or “good” or
“just” *as such* but what is iess or more evil in terms of the
benefits we derive, or more properly, the privations and
dangers to which we are exposed. Only the general ignorance of
culture that is slowly gathering like a darkening cloud over the
present society has made it difficult for social theorists to
understand the decisive nature of this shift in the historical norms
of humanity. This shift is utterly subversive of any significant
reconstruction of the body politic as an agent for achieving the
historic goal of the good life, not merely as a practical ideal but as
an ethical and spiritual one.

To reverse this denomination of politics by a leprous series
o trade-offs, to provide an ethical holism rooted in the objective
values that emerge from ecology and anarchism, is fundamental
to this book. For this objective to be lost to the reader is to ignore
the very meaning of the essays in this compilation. It is on this
classical ethics that all else rests in the pages that follow.

<right>
August 1979
</right>

[2] Even so intractable a bourgeois as Bentham based his ethics on a definition of
good, however philistine and quantitative its norms. The transmutation of the utilitatian credo of good as the greatest happines for the greatest number into the
modern credo of “benefits versus risks” marks a degradation even in the sphere of
bourgeois morality that has no precedent in the cultural history of western sociey.



** The Power to Create, The Power to Destroy



The power of this society to destroy has reached a scale
unprecedented in the history of humanity — and this power is
being used, almost systematically, to work an insensate havoc
upon the entire world of life and its material bases.

In nearly every region, air is being befouled, waterways
polluted, soil washed away, the land desiccated, and wildlife
destroyed. Coastal areas and even the depths of the sea are not
immune to widespread pollution. More significantly in the long
run, basic biological cycles such as the carbon cycle and nitrogen
cycle, upon which all living things (including humans) depend for
the maintenance and renewal of life, are being distorted to the
point of irreversible damage. The proliferation of nuclear reactors
in the United States and throughout the world — some 1000 by
the year 2000 if the powers-that-be have their, way — have
exposed countless millions of people to some of the most
carcinogenic and mutagenic agents known to life. The terrifying
menace to the very integrity of life may be with us for hundreds of
thousands of years. To these radioactive wastes we should add
long-lived pesticides, lead residues, and thousands of toxic or
potentially toxic chemicals in food, water, and air; the expansion
of cities into vast urban belts, with dense concentrations of
populations comparable in size to entire nations; the rising din of
background noise; the stresses created by congestion, mass
living, and mass manipulation; the immense accumulations of
garbage, refuse, sewage, and industrial wastes; the congestion of
highways and city streets with vehicular traffic; the profligate
destruction of precious raw materials; the scarring of the earth
by real estate speculators, mining and lumbering barons, and
highway construction bureaucrats. This ecological list of lethal
insults to the biosphere has wreaked a degree of damage in a
single generation that exceeds the damage inflicted by thousands
of years of human habitation on this planet. If this tempo of
destruction is borne in mind, it is terrifying to speculate about
what lies ahead in the generation to come.

The essence of the ecological crisis in our time is that this
society — more than any other in the past — is literally undoing
the work of organic evolution. It is a truism to say that humanity is
part of the fabric of life. It is perhaps more important at this late
stage to emphasize that humanity depends critically upon the
complexity and variety of life, that human well-being and survival
rest upon a long evolution of organisms into increasingly complex
and interdependent forms. The development of life into a
complex web, the elaboration of primal animals and plants into
highly varied forms, has been the precondition for the evolution
and survival of humanity and nature.

*** The Roots of the Ecological Crisis

If the past generation has witnessed a despoilation of the planet
that exceeds all the damage inflicted by earlier generations, little
more that a generation may remain before the destruction of the
environment becomes irreversible. For this reason, we must look
at the roots of the ecological crisis with ruthless honesty. Time is
running out and the remaining decades of the twentieth century
may well be the last opportunity we will have to restore the
balance between humanity and nature.

Do the roots of the ecological crisis lie in the development of
technology? Technology has become a convenient target for
bypassing the deep-seated social conditions that make machines
and technical processes harmful.

How convenient it is to forget that technology has served not
only to subvert the environment but also to improve it. The
Neolithic Revolution which produced the most harmonious
period between nature and post-paleolithic humanity was above
all a technological revolution. It was this period that brought to
humanity the arts of agriculture, weaving, pottery, the domestication of animals, the discovery of the wheel, and many other key
advances. True there are techniques and technological attitudes
that are entirely destructive of the balance between humanity and
nature. Our responsibilities are to separate the promise of
technology — its creative potential — from the capacity of technology to destroy. Indeed, there is no such word as “Technology”
that presides over all social conditions and relations; there are
different technologies and attitudes toward technology, some of
which are indispensable to restoring the balance, others of which
have contributed profoundly to its destruction. What humanity
needs is not a wholesale discarding of advanced technologies, but
a sifting, indeed a further development of technology along
ecological principles that will contribute to a new harmonization
of society and the natural world.

Do the roots of the ecological crisis lie in population growth?
This thesis is the most disquieiting, and in many ways the most
sinister, to be advanced by ecology action movements in the
United States. Here, an effect called “population growth,” juggled
around on the basis of superficial statistics and projections, is
turned into a *cause*. A problem of secondary proportions at the
present time is given primacy, thus obscuring the fundamental
reasons for the ecological crisis. True, if present economic,
political and social conditions prevail, humanity will in time
overpopulate the planet and by sheer weight of numbers turn into
a pest in its own global habitat. There is something obscene,
however, about the fact that an effect, “population growth,” is
being, given primacy in the ecological crisis by a nation which has
little more than seven percent of the world’s population, wastefully devours more than fifty percent of the world’s resources, and
is currently engaged in the depopulation of an Oriental people
that has lived for centuries in sensitive balance with its environment.

We must pause to look more carefully into the population
problem, touted so widely by the white races of North America
and Europe — races that have wantonly exploited the peoples of
Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific. The exploited
have delicately advised their exploiters that, what they need are
not contraceptive devices, armed “liberators,” and Prof. Paul R.
Ehrlich to resolve their population problems; rather, what they
need is a fair return on the immense resources that were
plundered from their lands by North America and Europe. To
balance these accounts is more of a pressing need at the present
time than to balance birth rates and death rates. The peoples of
Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific can justly point
out that their American “advisors” have shown the world how to
despoil a virgin continent in less than a century and have added
the words “built-in obsolescence” to the vocabulary of humanity.

This much is clear: when large labour reserves were needed
during the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century to
man factories and depress wages, population growth was greeted
enthusiastically by the new industrial bourgeoisie. And the
growth of population occurred despite the fact that, owing to long
working hours and grossly overcrowded cities, tuberculosis,
cholera, and other diseases were pandemic in Europe and the
United States. If birth rates exceeded death rates at this time, it
was not because advances in medical care and sanitation had
produced any dramatic decline in human mortality; rather, the
excess of birth rates over death rates can be explained by the
destruction of pre-industrial family farms, village institutions,
mutual aid, and stable, traditional patterns of life at the hands of
capitalist “enterprise.” The decline in social morale ushered in by
the horrors of the factory system, the degradation of traditional
agrarian peoples into grossly exploited proletarians and urban
dwellers, produced a concomittantly irresponsible attitude toward the family and the begetting of children. Sexuality became a
refuge from a life of toil on the same order as the consumption of
cheap gin; the new proletariat reproduced children, many of
whom were never destined to survive into adulthood, as mindlessly as it drifted into alcoholism. Much the same process
occurred when the villages of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
were sacrificed on the holy altar of imperialism.

Today, the bourgeoisie “sees” things differently. The roseate
years of “free enterprise” and “free labour” are waning before an
era of monopoly, cartels, state-controlled economies, institutionalized forms of labour mobilization (trade unions), and
automatic or cybernetic machinery. Large reserves of unemployed labour are no longer needed to meet the needs of
capital expansion, and wages are largely negotiated rather than
left to the free play of the labour market. From a need, idle labour
reserves have now turned into a threat to the stability of a
managed bourgeois economy. The logic of this new “perspective”
found its most terrifying expression in German fascism. To the
Nazis, Europe was already “overpopulated” in the thirties and the
“population problem” was “solved” in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz. The same logic is implicit in many of the neo-
Malthusian arguments that masquerade as ecology today. Let
there be no mistake about this conclusion.

Sooner or later the mindless proliferation of human beings will
have to be arrested, but population control will either be initiated
by “social controls” (authoritarian or racist methods and eventually by systematic genocide) or by a libertarian, ecologically
oriented society (a society that develops a new balance with
nature out of a reverence for life). Modern society stands before
these mutually exclusive alternatives and a choice must be made
without dissimulation. Ecology action is fundamentally social
action. Either we will go directly to the social roots of the
ecological crisis or we will be deceived into an era of totalitarianism.

Finally, do the roots of the ecological crisis lie in the mindless
consumption of goods by Americans and by peoples of European
origin generally? Here a half-truth is used to create a whole lie.
Like the “population issue,” “affluence” and the inability of a
“grow-or-die” economy to impose limits to growth is used to
anchor the ecological problem in the ordinary and powerless
peoples of the world. A notion of “original sin” is created that
deflects the causes of the ecological problem to the bedroom,
where people reproduce, or to the dinner table, where they eat,
or to the vehicles, home furnishings and clothing that in large part
have become indispensable to’ordinary living — indeed, mere
survival of the average person as seen in the context of the present society.

Can we blame working people for using cars when the logistics
of American society were deliberately structured by General
Motors and the energy industry around highways ? Can we blame
middle-class people for purchasing suburban homes when cities
were permitted to deteriorate and real-estate hucksters merchandised an “American Dream” of subdivisions, ranch-type
dwellings, and a two-car garage? Can we blame blacks, Hispanic
peoples, and other minority groups for reaching out to own
television sets, appliances, and clothing when all the basic
material means of life were denied to them for generations?

The all-engulfing inflation engineered by the energy industry,
multinational corporations, banks, and agribusiness has already
made a mockery of the meaning of “limits to growth” and
“voluntary simplicity.”’ The savings accounts, earnings, and
credit of working, middle-class and minority peoples have already
reached *their* “limits” and “simplicity” of living is no longer a
choice — it has become a necessity. What has grown in size and
complexity beyond all decency have been the incredible profits,
the interlocking directorates and the corporate structure in the
United States and throughout the world. Viewed in terms of this
structure, we can no longer speak of “limits to growth,”
“voluntary simplicty,” and “conservation,” but rather in terms of
unlimited expansion, unlimited accumulation of capital and
wealth, and unlimited waste of raw materials for useless, even
toxic, commodities and of a formidable, ever-growing arsenal of
weaponry.

If we are to find the roots of the present ecological crisis, we
must turn not to technics, demographics, growth, and a diseased
affluence alone; we must turn to the underlying institutional,
moral, and spiritual changes in human society that produced
hierarchy and domination — not only in bourgeois, feudal and
ancient society, nor in class societies generally, but at the very
dawn of civilization.

*** Ecology and Society

The basic conception that humanity must dominate and
exploit nature stems from the domination and exploitation of man
by man. Indeed, this conception goes back earlier to a time when
men began to dominate and exploit women in the patriarchal
family. From that point onward, human beings were increasingly
regarded as mere resources, as objects instead of subjects. The
hierarchies, classes, propertied forms, and statist institutions that
emerged with social domination were carried over conceptually
into humanity’s relationship with nature. Nature too became
increasingly regarded as a mere resource, an object, a raw
material to be exploited as ruthlessly as slaves on a latifundium.
This “worldview” permeated not only the official culture of
hierarchical society; it became the way in which slaves, serfs,
industrial workers and women of all social classes began to view
themselves. As embodied in the “work ethic,” in a morality based
on denial and renunciation, in a mode of behaviour based on the
sublimination of erotic desires, and in other worldly outlooks
(be they European or Asian), the slaves, serfs, workers, and
female half of humanity were taught to police themselves, to
fashion their own chains, to close the doors on their own prison
cells.

If the “worldview” of hierarchical society is beginning to wane t
today, this is mainly because the enormous productivity of
modern technology has opened a new vision: the possibility of
material abundance, an end to scarcity, and an era of free time
(so-called “leisure time”) with minimal toil.

By “material abundance” we do not mean the wasteful,
mindless “affluence” based on false needs, the  ubtle coercion of
advertising, and the substitution of mere objects — commodities — for genuine human relations, self-reflection, and selfdevelopment. We refer to a sufficiency in food, shelter, clothing
and basic comforts of life with a minimum of toil that will permit
everyone in society — not a specialized elite — to directly manage
social affairs.

Society is becoming permeated by a tension between “what is”
and “what-could-be,” a tension exacerbated by the irrational,
inhuman exploitation and destruction of the earth and its
inhabitants. The greatest impediment that obstructs a resolution
of this tension is the extent to which hierarchical society still
fashions our outlook and actions. It is easier to take refuge in
critiques of technology and population growth; to deal with an
archaic, destructive social system on its own terms and within its
own framework. Almost from birth, we have been socialized by
the family, religious institutions, schools, and by the work process
itself into accepting hierarchy, renunciation, and state systems as
the premises on which all thinking must rest. Without shedding
these premises, all discussions of ecological balance must remain
palliative and self-defeating.

By virtue of its unique cultural baggage, modern society —
our profit-oriented bourgeois society — tends to exacerbate
humanity’sconflict with nature in a morecritical fashion than preindustrial societies of the past. In bourgeois society, humans are
not only turned into objects; they are turned into commodities;
into objects explicitly designed for sale on the market place.
Competition between human beings, qua commodities, becomes
an end in itself, together with the production of utterly useless
goods. Quality is turned into quantity individual culture into mass
culture, personal communication into mass communication. The
natural environment is turned into a gigantic factory, the city into
an immense market place; everything from a Redwood forest to a
woman’s body has “a price.” Everything is reduced to dollars-
and-cents, be it a hallowed cathedral or individual honour.
Technology ceases to be an extension of humanity; humanity
becomes an extension of technology. The machine does not
expand the power of the worker; the worker expands the power
of the machine, indeed, she or he becomes a mere part of the
machine.

It is surprising, then, that this exploitative, degrading, quantified society pits humanity against itself and against nature on a
more awesome scale than any other in the past?

Yes, we need change, but change so fundamental and far-
reaching that even the concept of revolution and freedom must
be expanded beyond all earlier horizons. No longer is it enough to
speak of new techniques for conserving and fostering the natural
environment; we must deal with the earth communally, as a
human collectivity, without those trammels of private property
that have distorted humanity’s vision of life and nature since the
break-up of tribal society. We must eliminate not only bourgeois
hierarchy, but hierarchy as such; not only the patriarchal family,
but *all* modes of sexual and parental domination; not only the
bourgeois class and propertied system, but *all* social classes and
property. Humanity must come into possession of itself, individually and collectively, so that all human beings attain control of
their everyday lives. Our cities must be decentralized into
communities, or ecocommunities, exquisitely and artfully tailored to the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which they are
located. Our technologies must be readapted and advanced into
ecotechnologies, exquisitely and artfully adapted to make use of
local energy sources and materials, with minimal or no pollution
of the environment. We must recover a new .sense of our needs —
needs that foster a healthful life and express our individual
proclivities, not “needs” dictated by the mass media. We must
restore the human scale in our environment and in our social
relations, replacing mediated by direct personal relations in the
management of society. Finally, all modes of domination — social
or personal — must be banished from our conceptions of ourselves, our communities, and nature. The administration of
humans must be replaced by the administration of things. The
revolution we seek must encompass not only political institutions and economic relations, but consciousness, life style,
erotic desires, and our interpretation of the meaning of life.

What is in the balance, here, is the age-long spirit and systems
of domination and repression that have not only pitted human
against human, but humanity against nature. The conflict between humanity and nature is an extension of the conflict
between human and human. Unless the ecology movement
encompasses the problem of domination in all its aspects, it will
contribute *nothing* toward eliminating the root causes of the
ecological crisis of our time. If the ecology movement stops at
mere reforms in pollution and conservation control — at mere
“environmentalism” — without dealing radically with the need for
an expanded concept of revolution, it will merely serve as a safety
valve for the existing system of natural and human exploitation.

*** Goals

In some respects the ecology movement today is waging a
delaying action against the rampant destruction of the environment. In other respects its most conscious elements are
involved in a creative movement to totally revolutionize the social
relations of humans to each other and of humanity to nature.

Although they closely interpenetrate, the two efforts should be
distinguished from each other. Ecology Action East[3] supports
every effort to conserve the environment: to eliminate nuclear
power plants and weapons, to preserve clean air and water, to
limit the use of pesticides and food additives, to reduce vehicular
traffic in streets and on highways, to make cities more wholesome
physically, to prevent radioactive wastes from seeping into the
environment, to guard and expand wilderness areas and domains
for wildlife, to defend animal species from human depredation.

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


But Ecology Action East does not deceive itself that such
delaying actions constitute a definitive solution to the fundamental conflict that exists between the present social order and
the natural world. Nor can such delaying actions arrest the
overwhelming momentum of the existing society for destruction.

This social order plays games with us. It grants long-delayed,
piecemeal and woefully inadequate reforms to deflect our
energies and attention from larger acts of destruction. In a sense,
we are “offered” a patch of Redwood forest in exchange for the
Cascades, a nuclear power site in exchange for a neutron bomb.
Viewed in a larger perspective, this attempt to reduce ecology to
a barter relationship does not rescue anything; it is a cheap
*modus operandi* for trading away the greater part of the planet for
a few islands of wilderness, for pocket parks in a devastated world
of concrete. It is the sick strategy of “benefits-versus-risks” of
“trade-offs” that has reduced ethics to the pursuit of “lesser evils”
rather than greater good.

Ecology Action East has two primary aims: one is to increase in
the revolutionary movement the awareness that the most
destructive and pressing consequences of our alienating, exploitative society is the ecological crisis, and that any truly revolutionary society must be built upon ecological precepts; the other
is to create, in the minds of the millions of Americans who are
concerned with the destruction of our environment, the consciousness that the principles of ecology, carried to their logical
end, demand radical changes in our society and our way of
looking at the world.

Ecology Action East takes its stand with the life-style revolution that, at its best, seeks an expanded consciousness of
experience and human freedom. We seek the liberation of
women, of children, of gay people, of black people and colonial
peoples, and of working people in all occupations as part of a
growing social struggle against the age-old traditions and institutions of domination — traditions and institutions that have so
destructively shaped humanity’s attitude toward the natural
world. We support libertarian communities and struggles for
freedom wherever they arise; we take our stand with every effort
to promote the spontaneous self-development of the young; we
oppose every attempt to repress human sexuality, to deny
humanity the eroticization of experience in all its forms. We join in
all endeavours to foster a joyous artfulness in life and work: the
promotion of crafts and quality production, the design of new
ecocommunities and ecotechnologies, the right to experience on
a daily basis the beauty of the natural world, the open, unmediated, sensuous pleasure that humans can give to each other,
the growing reverence for the world of life.

In short, we hope for a revolution which will produce politically independent communities whose boundaries and populations will be defined by a new ecological consciousness;
communities whose inhabitants will determine for themselves
within the framework of this new consciousness the nature and
level of their technologies, the forms taken by their social
structures, world views, life styles, expressive arts, and all the
other aspects of their daily lives.

But we do not delude ourselves that this life-oriented world can
be fully developed or even partially achieved in a death-oriented
society. American soeiety, as it is constituted today, is riddled
with racism and sits astride the entire world, not only as a
consumer of its wealth and resources, but as an obstacle to all
attempts at self-determination at home and abroad. Its inherent
aims are production for the sake of production, the preservation of hierarchy and toil on a world scale, mass manipulation and control by centralized, state institutions. This kind of
society is unalterably counterposed to a life-oriented world. If the
ecology movement does not direct its main efforts toward a
revolution in all areas of life — social as well as natural, political as
well as personal, economic as well as cultural,  then the movement will gradually become safety valve of the established
order.

It is our hope that groups like our own will spring up throughout
the country, organized like ourselves on a humanistic, libertarian
basis, engaged in mutual action and a spirit of cooperation based
on mutual aid. It is our hope that they will try to foster a new
ecological attitude not only toward nature but also toward
humans: a conception of spontaneous, variegated relations
within groups and between groups, within society and between
individuals.

We hope that ecology groups will eschew all appeals to the
“heads of government” and to international or national state
institutions, the very criminal’s and political bodies that have
materially contributed to the ecological crisis of our time. We
believe the appeals must be made to the people and to their
capacity for *direct action* that can get them to take control of their
own lives and destinies. For only in this way can a society emerge
without hierarchy and domination, a society in which each
individual is the master of his of her own fate.

The great splits which divided human from human, humanity
from nature, individual from society, town from country, mental
from physical activity, reason from emotion, and generation from
generation must now be transcended. The fulfillment of the age-
old quest for survival and material security in a world of scarcity
was once regarded as the precondition for freedom and a fully
human life. To live we had to survive. As Brecht put it: “First feed
the face, then give the moral.”

The situation has now begun to change. The ecological crisis of
our time has increasingly reversed this traditional maxim. Today,
if we are to survive, we must begin to live. Our solutions must be
commensurable with the scope of the problem, or else nature will
take a terrifying revenge on humanity.


*** Education and Organization

Today, all ecological movements stand at a crossroad. They
are faced with basically conflicting alternatives of policy and
process — whether to work within the existing institutions or to
use direct action, whether to form centralistic, bureaucratic, and
conventional forms of organization or affinity groups. These
problems have reached their most acute form in the great antinuke alliances like Clamshell, Shad, Abalone, Catfish, to cite only
a few. And it is the destiny of these alliances that now concerns us
most profoundly.


*** The Meaning of Direct Action and Affinity Groups

At their inception, the marvelous genius of the anti-nuke
alliances is that they intuitively sensed the need to break away
from the “system” , that they began to function outside it and
*directly* enter into social life, pushing aside the prevailing
institutions, its bureaucrats, “experts,” and leaders, and thereby
pave the way for *extra-legal*, *moral*, and *personal* action. To a
large extent, to be sure, they adopted direct action because
earlier attempts to stop nuclear power plants by operating within
the “system” had failed. Endless months or years of litigation,
hearings, the adoption of local ordinances, petition and letterwriting campaigns to congressmen and the like — all, had essentially failed to stop the construction of nukes. Clamshell, the
earliest of the great regional alliances, was literally born from the
futility of trying to prevent the construction of the Seabrook nuke
by “working within the system.” Its very *identity* as an alliance
was literally defined by the need to directly occupy the Seabrook
site, to invoke moral principles over statutory laws. For any of the
alliances to ever surrender their commitment to direct action for
working within the system” is to destroy their personality as
socially innovative movements. It is to dissolve back into the
hopeless morass of “mass organizations” that seek respectability
rather than change.

What is even more important about direct action is that it forms
a decisive step toward recovering the personal power over social
life that the centralized, over-bearing bureaucracies have usurped from the people. By action *directly*, we not only gain a sense
that we can control the course of social events again; we recover
a new sense of selfhood and personality without which a truly
free’society, based on self-activity and self-management, is utterly
impossible. We often speak of self-management and self-activity
as our ideals for a future society without recognizing often
enough that it is not only the “management” and “activity” that
has to be democratized; it is also the “self” of each individual — as
a unique, creative, and competent being — that has to be fully
developed. Mass society, the real basis for hierarchy, domination,
command and obedience, like class society, is the spawning
ground for a society of homogenized spectators whose lives are
guided by elites, “stars,” and “vanguards,” be they in the
bureaucratic society of the United States or the totalitarian
societies of the socialist world. A truly free society does not deny
selfhood but rather supports it, liberates it, and actualizes it in the
belief that everyone is competent to manage society, not merely
an “elect” of experts and self-styled men of genius. Direct action
is merely the free town meeting writ large. It is the means whereby
each individual awakens to the hidden powers within herself and
himself, to a new sense of self-confidence and self-competence; it
is the means whereby individuals take control of society directly,
without “representatives” who tend to usurp not only the power
but the very personality of a passive, spectatorial “electorate”
who live in the shadows of an “elect.” Direct action, in short, is not
a “tactic” that can be adopted or discarded in terms of its
“effectiveness” or “popularity”; it is a moral principle, an ideal,
indeed, a sensibility. It should imbue every aspect of our lives and
behaviour and outlook.

Similarly, the affinity group — a term devised by the Spanish
Anarchists (FAI) in the 1920’s — is not merely a “task force” that
can be flippantly collected and disbanded for short-lived occupations. It is a permanent, intimate, decentralized *community* of a
dozen or so sisters and brothers, a family or commune as it were,
who are drawn together not only by common actions and goals,
but by a need to develop new libertarian social relations between
themselves, to mutually educate each other, share each others’
problems, and develop new, non-sexist, non-hierarchical ties as
well as activities. The affinity group should form the real cellular
tissue from which the alliance evolves, the very protoplasm that
turns it into an organic being. In contrast to the party-type of
organization, with its centralized, bureaucratic skeleton to which
all parts of the structure are mechanically appended in a system
of command and obedience, the affinity group is linked together
by proliferation and combination in its authentic locality as a truly
ecological entity. It always remains part of its local community,
sensitive to its needs and unique requirements, yet it can
coordinate locally and regionally into clusters and coordinating
committees whose *delegates* (as distinguished from “representatives”) can always be recalled, rotated, and strictly mandated to
reflect the views of the various groups in every detail. Thus, within
the affinity groups structure of an alliance, power actually
diminishes rather than increases at each ascending level of
coordination, this in sharp contrast to party-type or “league” —
type or chapter-type of organization so rooted in the existing
systems of representation” and politics. Thus, the affinity group
like direct action, is not merely an organizational device, a “task
force a tool” for implementing nuke occupations; it too is
based on a moral principle, an ideal, and a sensibility that goes
beyond the issue of nuclear power to that of spiritual power, new
humanly scaled, decentralized, ecological forms of human asso-
ciation as well as human action.

*** Between Two Choices

With the Three-Mile-Island meltdown this year and even
earlier, ,n the summer of 1978, when the Seabrook occupation
was arbitrarily turned into a star-studded “legal” festival by the
Clamshell eadership, there has been growing evidence in many
alhances of attempts to convert the anti-nuke movement as a
whole into a political and media event. It is doubtful if many ofthe
self-styfed “founders” of Clamshell clearly understood the idea
at direct action and affinity groups were more than mere
“tactics” and task forces.” Doubtless the terms sounded
attractive — so they were widely used. By the same token, many
of the Clamshell “founders” viewed “No Nukes!” as an effective
rallying point for mass, media-oriented actions, for large spectacles in which people with basically conflicting social views could
unite whether they believed in “free enterprise” or no property
for huge audiences before which they could display their
oratorical talents and abilities. To go beyond “No Nukes!” —
even as an educational responsibility — was taboo. At various
alliance conferences and congresses, even at local clusters in
which Coordinating Committee “regional travellers” (so reminiscent of the old SDS “regional travellers” of the sixties)
surfaced, thoughtful anti-nuke activists were urged to keep the
anti-nuke issue “clear” They were called upon to limit their
educational activities to the growing public interest in nuclear
reactors, not to develop a richer, more searching public consciousness of the social roots of nuclear power. In trying to find a
low common denominator that would “mobilize” virtually everyone, the new “anti-nuke establishment” really educated no one It
was Three-Mile-Island that did much of the education, and often
public understanding of the issue goes no further than problems
of technology rather than problems of society. Respectability was
stressed over principles, popularity over dissidence, mass
mobilizations in Washington and Battery Park over occupations
and more insidiously, politics over direct action.

Yes, the fact is that there is now an “anti-nuclear establishment that resembles in many structural, manipulatory, tactical,
and perhaps even financial respects the very nuclear establishment it professes to oppose. It is not a very holy alliance, this
career-oriented, star-studded, and politically ambitious establishment that often stands in harsh opposition or contradiction to the
libertarian principles of major alliances like Clamshell, Shad
Abalone, and Catfish. Its elite membership has been recruited in
some cases from the self-styled “founders” of the libertarian
alliances themselves. Others, like Tom Hayden, the Cockburn-Ridgeway axis, PIRG luminaries, and Barry Commoner openly
shunned the alliances or their equivalent — Hayden and
Cockburn-Ridgeway, by denouncing all environmental groups at
one time or another as white, middle-class, self-indulgent movements; Commoner, by disdainfully refusing to even take cognizance of Clamshell’s requests for verbal support of its 1977
Seabrook occupation, that is, until the occupation received
massive press reportage. Today, this new flower in the anti-nuke
bouquet is the prize orator of recent anti-nuke rallies and,
according to some reports, a potential presidential candidate for
the recently concocted “Citizen’s Party.” The Tom and Jerry
side-show from California, as the Washington rally revealed
seems to have a distinct political odour of its own.

Finally, MUSE and similar “fund-raising” groups, reportedly
orchestrated in part by Messrs. Sam Lovejoy and Harvey
Wasserman, have added the tint of grass-roots activism to what is
a jet-set organization. The drift toward mass constituencies
personal careerism, political power, party-type structures bureaucratic manipulation-in short, toward “effective” means for
operating within the system with the excuse that the anti-nuke
movement can use the system against itself — is now unmistakable. The huge crowd that assembled at Battery Park to hear
the anti-nuke establishment and its rock starts were passive
people, often depersonalized and homogenized like any
television audience. This may have well been the case for many
people who attended the Washington mobilization. The
anti-nuclear establishment has brought to what was once a
consistently populist and libertarian movement an alien taste for
politics, high-finance (where possible), mass followings, public
“spokesmen,” and institutional recognition.

The danger of this elitist alliance to the non-hierarchical
alliance that have emerged throughout the United States is a
grave one. Were the anti-nuclear establishment easily defined with a clear identity of its own, it could easily be resisted. But this
establishment emerges in our very midst — as one of us. By dissolving
many real and far-reaching differences that should be explored and resolved with the simplistic slogan, “No Nukes!”;
by staking out claims as “stars” with media-appeal, or “power
brokers” with financial appeal, or “legislators” with political
appeal, or “scientists” with technical appeal or “just plain folks”
who helped found the alliances, the anti-nuclear establishment
incubates in our midst like pathogenic spores that periodically
break out in acute illnesses. To speak bluntly, it cultivates our
worst vices. It appeals to our desire for “effectiveness” and our
hope of achieving “mass support” without revealing the immoral, in fact, demoralizing implications of the methods it employs. It conceals the fact that its methods are borrowed from the very social structures, indeed, the very advertising agencies, that reduce people to “masses,” media-orchestrated spectators, “groupies” of the “stars” who seem larger than life becayse their appetites for power are often larger than their egos.

We have emphasized the problems created by the anti-nuclear establishment not from any desire for divisiveness or any sense of personal malice. There is a deeper sense of tragedy that runs through my remarks rather than anger. A few members of this establishment are doubtless naive; others are frankly opportunists whose careers and ambitions by far outweigh their commitment to a humanistic, ecological society. My emphasis stems basically from a need not only to acknowledge that serious
differences exist within the anti-nuclear movement and should
not be concealed by specious demands for “unity”; my main
concern is that we recover and advance *our own identity* in the
years that lie ahead — our commitment to direct action, to affinity
groups, decentralization, regionalism, and libertarian forms of
coordination.

The future of the anti-nuke movement, particularly of its great
alliances, depends not only upon what we reject but what we
accept — and the *reasons* why we accept certain principles,
organizational forms, and methods. If we limit ourselves to “No
Nukes! is enough,” we will remain simplistic, naive, and tragically
innocent whom careerists can cynically and shrewdly manipulate. If we see direct action and affinity groups merely as
“tactics” or “task forces,” we will foreclose any real contact with
those millions of restive Americans who are looking for an
alternative to a system that denies them any power over their
lives. If our alternate energy fairs extol solar or wind energy as
such without warning people that huge, space-age solar collectors and wind mills are on the drawing boards of power utilities
and multi-national corporations, we will help the powers-that-be
meter the sun and the wind in much the same way that Con
Edison meters electrical energy. We should educate people not
simply into an alternate, “appropriate” (for what?), or “soft”
technology. We should raise the vision of a <em>people</em>’s technology — the passive, simple, decentralized solar, wind, and food-producing technologies that the individual can understand,
control, maintain, and even build.

By the same token, to call for “decentralization” and to plead
for “voluntary simplicity” are completely meaningless if their
functions are simply logistical or conservation-oriented. We can
easily have a “decentralized” society that is little more than a huge
suburbia, managed by the same political bureaucrats, fed by the
same agribusiness plantations and shopping malls, policed by the
same Kojaks, united by the same corporate directors, interlaced
by the same highways, and sedated by the same mass-media that
manages our existing centralized society. To demand “decentralization” without self-management in which every person
freely participates in decision-making processes in every aspect
of life and all the material means of life are communally owned,
produced, and shared according to need is pure obscurantism.
To delude Americans into the belief that a mere change in design
necessarily yields a real change in social life and spiritual
sensibility is sheer hypocrisy. To leave questions like “who owns
what” and “who runs what” unanswered while celebrating the
virtues or beauties of “smallness” verges on demagoguery.
Decentralization and human scale, yes! — but in a society whose
property, produce, and environment are shared communally and
managed in a non-hierarchical manner.

To call for “voluntary simplicity,” yes! — but only when the
means of life are really simple and available to all. Gloria
Vanderbilt jeans and fringed suede jackets do not “voluntary
simplicity” make. The Stanford Research Institute’s plea for
“voluntary simplicity” and “limits to growth” as the fastest growth
industry on fhe commercial horizon parallels Exxon’s and Mobil’s
claims to energy conservation. That a multi-million dollar “think-
tank” for big business advances “voluntary simplicity” as a new
growth industry for future capital investment; that agribusiness
may well turn to organic food cultivation to meet the growing
market for “natural foods”; that the Club of Rome can advance a
gospel of “limits to growth” reveal how utterly superficial these
demands can become when they do not challenge the basic
corporate, property, bureaucratic, and profit-oriented social
structure at its most fundamental level of ownership and control.

The most effective steps we can take at our congresses and
conferences to assure a meaningful future for the anti-nuke
movement is to unrelentingly foster the development of affinity
groups as the bases of our alliances and direct action as the bases
of our activities. Direct action does not merely mean nuclear site
occupations; it means learning how to manage every aspect of
our lives from producing to organizing, from educating to
printing. The New England town meetings, during their more
revolutionary periods around the 1760’s, were near-models of
direct action as carried into the social world. So, too, for direct
action — of which our affinity groups and congresses can be
models no less than Seabrook or Shoreham or Rocky Flats.
Direct action, however, decidedly does not mean reducing
oneself to a passive spectator of a “star’s” performance, whether
it be at a speakers rostrum, a rock band’s stage, or on the portico
of the State House in Sacramento or the White House in
Washington.

On the other hand, if we are afraid to remain in a minority by
speaking out openly and honestly — even at the risk of being
“ineffective” or insolvent for a time — we deserve the fate that
awaits us — respectability at the price of surrender, “influence” at
the price of demoralization, power at the price of cynicism,
“success” at the expense of corruption. The choice lies in either
direction and there is no “in-between” terrain on which to
compromise. In any case, for once, the choice we make will be the
future we will create.

<right>
Revised:<br>
November, 1979
</right>


** Toward an Ecological Society


The problem of environmental degradation seems to be
falling into a curious focus. Despite massive public support for
environmentalist measures-as witness the positive public response in recent state referendums on such issues — we are
being warned about a backlash against “extremists” who are
raising radical demands for arresting environmental degra-
dat’on. Much of this “backlash” seems to be generated by
industry and by the White House, where Mr. Nixon complacently
assures us that “America is well on the way to winning the war
against environmental degradation; well on the way to making
our peace with nature.” This rhetoric is suspiciously familiar;
presumably we are beginning to see the “light” at the end of the
environmental tunnel. In any case, advertising compaigns by the
petroleum, automobile, lumber, and chemical industries are
urging Americans to be more “reasonable” about environmental
movements, to “sensibly” balance “benefits” against “losses,”
to scale down norms for cleaner air and water that have already
been adopted by the Environmental Protection Administration,
to show “patience” and “understanding” for the ostensibly
formidable technical problems that confront our friendly neighborhood industrial oligopolies and utilities.

I will not try, here, to discuss the scandalous distortions that
enter into propaganda of this kind. Many of you are already
familiar with the recent study by a committee of the National
Academy of Sciences that accuses the automobile industry of
concentrating (in the words of a *New York Times* report) on the
“most expensive, least satisfactory means” of meeting the 1975
Federal exhaust emission standards. As to the pious rhetoric
from the White House, Mr. Nixon’s efforts to make “peace” with
nature seem to be several cuts below his efforts to produce peace
in Indonesia. As the *Times* opines editorially, Mr. Nixon’s
statement is totally at variance with the facts... The air over the
nation s cities is getting only marginally cleaner, if at all. Every
major river system in the country is badly polluted. Great
portions of the Atlantic Ocean are in danger of becoming a dead
sea. Plastics, detergents, chemicals and metals are putting an
insupportable burden on the biosphere. The land itself is being
eroded, blighted, poisoned, raped.”

Far from adhering to the claim that many environmentalist
demands are too “radical,” I would argue that they are not radical
enough. Confronted by a society that is not only polluting the
planet on a scale unprecedented in history, but undermining its
most fundamental biogeochemical cycles, I would argue that
environmentalists have not posed the strategic problems of
establishing a new and lasting equilibrium with nature. Is it
enough to stop a nuclear plant here or a highway there? Have we
somehow missed the essential fact that environmental degradation stems from much deeper sources than the blunders or ill-intentions of industry and government? That to sermonize
endlessly about the possibility of environmental apocalypse —
whether as a result of pollution, industrial expansion, or population growth — inadvertently drops a veil over a more fundamental crisis in the human condition, one that is not exclusively
technological or ethical but profoundly social? Rather than deal
again with the scale of our environmental crisis, or engage in the
easy denunciation that “pollution is profitable,” or argue that
some abstract “we” is responsible for producing too many
children or a given industry for producing too many commodities,
I would like to ask if the environmental crisis does not have its
roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the
changes that are needed to create a new equilibrium between the
natural world and the social do not require a fundamental, indeed
revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines.

I would like to emphasize the words “ecological lines.” In trying
to deal with the problems of an ecological society, the term
“environmentalism” fails us. “Environmentalism” tends increasingly to reflect an instrumentalist sensibility in which nature is
viewed merely as a passive habitat, an agglomeration of external
objects and forces, that must be made more serviceable for
human use irrespective of what these uses may be. Environmentalism,” in effect, deals with “natural resources,” urban
resources,” even “human resources.” Mr. Nixon, I would suppose, is an “environmentalist” of sorts insofar as the “peace” he
would establish with nature consists of acquiring the “know-how”
for plundering the natural world with minimal disruption of the
habitat. “Environmentalism” does not bring into question the
underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate
nature; rather, it seeks to facilitate that domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination. The very notion of domination itself is not brought into
question.

Ecology, I would claim, advances a broader conception of
nature and of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. To
my thinking, it sees the balance and integrity of the biosphere as
an end in itself. Natural diversity is to be cultivate not only
because the more diversified the components that make up an
ecosystem, the more stable the ecosystem, but diversity is
desirable for its own sake, a value to be cherished as part of a
spiritized notion of the living universe. Ecologists have already
pointed out that the more simplified an ecosystem — as in arctic
and desert biomes or in monocultural forms of food cultivation —
the more fragile the ecosystem and more prone it is to instability,
pest infestations, and possible catastrophes. The typically holistic
concept of “unity in diversity,” so common in the more reflective
ecological writings, could be taken from Hegel’s works, an
intellectual convergence that I do not regard as accidental and
that deserves serious exploration by contemporary neo-Hegelians. Ecology, furthermore, advances the view that humanity
must show a conscious respect for the spontaneity of the natural
world, a world that is much too complex and variegated to be
reduced to simple Galilean physico-mechanical properties. Some
systems ecologists notwithstanding, I would hold with Charles
Elton’s view that “The world’s future has to be managed, but this
management would not be like a game of chess... (but) more like
steering a boat.” The natural world must be allowed the
considerable leeway of a spontaneous development — informed,
to be sure, by human consciousness and management as nature
rendered self-conscious and self-active — to unfold and actualize
its wealth of potentialities. Finally, ecology recognizes no hierarchy on the level of the ecosystem. There are no “kings of the
beasts” and no “lowly ants.” These notions are the projections of
our own social attitudes and relationships on the natural world.
Virtually all that lives as part of the floral and faunal variety of an
ecosystem plays its coequal role in maintaining the balance and
integrity of the whole.

These concepts, brought together in a totality that could be
expressed as unity in diversity, spontaneity, and complementarity, comprise not only a judgement that derives from an artful
science” or “scientific art” (as I have described ecology elsewhere); they also constitute an overall sensibility that we are
slowly recovering from a distant archaic world and placing it in a
new social context. The notion that man is destined to dominate
nature stems from the domination of man by man — and perhaps
even earlier, by the domination of woman by man and the
domination of the young by the old. The hierarchical mentality
that arranges experience itself — in all its forms — along hierarchically pyramidal lines is a mode of perception and conceptualization into which we have been socialized by hierarchical
society. This mentality tends to be tenuous or completely absent
in non-hierarchical communities. So-called “ primitive” societies.
that are based on a simple sexual division of labour, that lack
states and hierarchical institutions, do not experience reality as
we do through a filter that categorizes phenomena in terms of
“superior” and “inferior” or “above” and “below.” In the absence
of inequality, these truly organic communities do not even have a
word for equality. As Dorothy Lee observes in her superb
discussion of the “primitive” mind, “equality exists in the very
nature of things, as a byproduct of the democratic structure of
the culture itself, not as a principle to be applied. In such societies,
there is no attempt to .achieve the goal of equality, and in fact
there is no concept of equality. Often, there is no linguistic
mechanism whatever for comparison. What we find is an
absolute respect for man, for all individuals irrespective of age
and sex.”

The absence of coercive and domineering values in these
cultures is perhaps best illustrated by the syntax of the Wintu
Indians of California, a people Lee apparently studied at first
hand. Terms commonly expressive of coercion in modern
languages, she notes, are so arranged by the Wintu that they
denote cooperative behavior. A Wintu mother, for example, does
not “take” her baby into the shade; she “goes” with it into the
shade. A chief does not “rule” his people; he “stands” with them.
In any case, he is never more than their advisor and lacks
coercive power to enforce his views. The Wintu “never say, and
in fact they cannot say, as we do, ‘I have a sister,’ or a ‘son,’ or
husband Lee observes. “<em>To live with</em> is the usual way in which
they express what we call possession, and they use this term for
everything they respect, so that a man will be said to live with his
bow and arrows.”

“To live with” — the phrase implies not only a deep sense of
mutual respect and a high valuation of individual voluntarism; it
also implies a profound sense of oneness between the individual
and the group. The sense of unity within the group, in turn,
extends by projection to the relationship of the community with
the natural world. Psychologically, people in organic communities must believe that they exercise a greater influence on
natural forces than is afforded by their relatively simple technology, an illusion they acquire by group rituals and magical
procedures. Elaborate as these rituals and procedures may be,
however, humanity’s sense of dependence on the natural world,
indeed, on its immediate environment, never entirely disappears.
If this sense of dependence may generate abject fear or an equally
abject reverence, there is also a point in the development of
organic society where it may generate a sense of symbiosis, more
properly, of mutualistic interdependence and cooperation, that
tends to transcend raw feelings of terror and awe. Here, humans
not only propitiate powerful forces or try to manipulate them;
their ceremonials help (as they see it) in a creative sense: to
multiply food animals, to bring changes in season and weather, to
promote the fertility of crops. The organic community always has
a natural dimension to it, but now the community is conceived to
be part of the balance of nature — a forest community or a soil
community — in short, a truly ecological community or
*eco-community* peculiar to its ecosystem, with an active sense of
participation in the overall environment and the cycles of nature.

This outlook becomes evident enough when we turn to
accounts of ceremonials among peoples in organic communities. Many ceremonials and rituals are characterized not only
by social functions, such as initiation rites, but also by ecological
functions. Among the Hopi, for example, the major agricultural
ceremonies have the role of summoning forth the cycles of the
cosmic order, of actualizing the solstices and the different stages
in the-growth of maize from germination to maturation. Although
the order of the solstices and the stages in the growth of maize are
known to be predetermined, human ceremonial involvement is
integrally part of that predetermination. In contrast to stricly
magical procedures, Hopi ceremonies assign a participatory
rather than a manipulatory function to humans. People play a
mutualistic role in natural cycles: they facilitate the workings of
the cosmic order. Their ceremonies are part of a complex web of
life which extends from the germination of maize to the arrival of
the solstices. “Every aspect of nature, plants and rocks and
animals, colors and cardinal directions and numbers and sex
distinctions, the dead and the living, all have a cooperative share
in the maintenance of the universal order,” Lee observes.
“Eventually, the effort of each individual, human or not, goes into
this huge whole. And here, too, it —  is every aspect of a person
which counts. The entire being of the Hopi individual affects the
balance of nature; and as each individual develops his inner
potential, so he enhances his participation, so does the entire
universe become invigorated.”

It is not difficult to see that this harmonized view of nature
follows from the harmonized relations within the early human
community. Just as medieval theology structured the Christian
heaven on feudal lines, so people of all ages have projected their
social structure onto the natural world. To the Algonkians of the
Norht American forests, the beaver lived in clans and lodges of
their own, wisely cooperating to promote the well-being of the
community. Animals, too, had their “magic,” their totem ancestors, and were invigorated by the Manitou, whose spirit
nourished the entire cosmos. Accordingly, animals had to be
conciliated or else they might refuse to provide humans with skins
and meat. The cooperative spirit that formed a precondition for
the survival of the organic community thus entered completely
into the outlook of preliterate people toward nature and the
interplay between the natural world and the social.

The break-up of these unified organic communities, based on a
sexual division of labour and kinship ties, into hierarchical and
finally class societies gradually subverted the unity of society with
the natural world. The division of clans and tribes into gerontocracies in which the old began to dominate the young; the
emergence of the patriarchal family in which women were
brought into universal subjugation to men; still further, the crystallization of hierarchies based on social status into economic
classes based on systematic material exploitation; the emergence of the city, followed by the increasing supremacy of town
over country and territorial over kinship ties; and finally, the
emergence of the state, of a professional military, bureaucratic,
and political apparatus exercising coercive supremacy over the
remaining vestiges of community life — all of these divisions and
contradictions that eventually fragmented and pulverized the
archaic world yielded a resocialization of the human experimental
apparatus along hierarchical lines. This resocialization served not
only to divide the community internally, but brought dominated
classes into complicity with their own domination, women into
complicity with their own servitude. Indeed, the very psyche of
the individual was divided against itself by establishing the
supremacy of mind over body, of hierarchical rationality over
sensuous experience. To the degree that the human subject
became the object of social and finally self-manipulation according to hierarchical norms, so nature became objectified,
despiritized, and reduced to a metaphysical entity in many
respects no less contrived conceptually by a physico-mechanical
notion of external reality than the animistic notions that prevailed
in archaic society. Time does not permit me to deal in any detail
with the erosion of archaic humanity’s relationship with the
natural world. But perhaps a few observations are appropriate.
The heritage of the past enters cumulatively into the present as
lurking problems which our own era has never resolved. I refer
not only to the trammels of bourgeois society, which bind us with
compelling immediacy, but also those formed by millenia of
hierarchical society that bind the family in patriarchy, age groups
in gerontocracies, and the psyche in the contorted postures of
renunciation and self-abasement.

Even before the emergence of bourgeois society, Hellenistic
rationalism validates the status of women as virtual chattels and
Hebrew morality places in Abraham’s hands the power to kill
Isaac. The reduction of humans to objects, whether as slaves,
woman, or children, finds its precise parallel in Noah’s power to
name the beasts and dominate them, to place the world of life in
the servitude of man. Thus from the two mainstreams of western
civilization, Hellenism and Judaism, the Promethean powers of
the male are collected into an ideology of repressive rationality
and hierarchical morality. Woman “became the embodiment of
the biological function, the image of nature,” observe Horkheimer and Adorno, “the subjugation of which constituted that
civilization’s title to fame. For millenia men dreamed of acquiring
absolute mastery over nature, of converting the cosmos into one
immense hunting-ground. It was to this that the idea of man was
geared in a male-dominated society. This was the significance of
reason, his proudest boast. Woman was weaker and smaller.
Between her and man there was a difference she could not
bridge — a difference imposed by nature, the most humiliating
that can exist in a male-dominated society. Where the mastery of
nature is the true goal, biological, inferiority remains a glaring
stigma, the weakness imprinted by nature as a key stimulus to
aggression.” It is not accidental that Horkheimer and Adorno
group these remarks under the title of “Man and Animals,” for
they provide a basic insight not only into man’s relationship with
woman, but man’s relationship in hierarchical society with the
natural world as a whole.

The notion of justice, as distinguished from the ideal of
freedom, collects all of these values into a rule of equivalence that
denies the entire content of archaic equality. In organic society,
all human beings have a right to the means of life, irrespective of
what they contribute to the social fund of labour. Paul Radin calls
this the rule of the “irreductible minimum.” Archaic equality,
here, recognizes the fact of inequality — the dependence of the
weak upon the strong, of the infirm upon the healthy, of the young
and old upon the mature. True freedom, in effect, is an equality of
unequals that does not deny the right to life of those whose
powers are failing or less developed than others. Ironically, in this
materially undeveloped economy, humanity acknowledges the
right of all to the scarce means of life even more emphatically —
and in the spirit of tribal mutualism that makes all kin responsible for each other, more generously — than in a materially
developing economy that yields growing surpluses and a concomitant scramble for privileges.

But this true freedom of an equality of unequals is degraded on
its own terms. As material surpluses increase, they create the
very social classes that glean from the labour of the many the
privileges of the few. The gift which once symbolized an alliance
between men akin to the blood tie is slowly turned into a means
of barter and finally into a commodity, the germ of the modern
bourgeois bargain. Justice emerges from the corpse of freedom
to guard the exchange relationship — whether of goods or
morality — as the exact principle of equality in all things. Now the
weak are “equal” to the strong, the poor to the wealthy, the infirm
to the healthy in all ways but their weakness, poverty, and
infirmity. In essence, justice replaces freedom’s norm of an
equality of unequals with an inequality of equals. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe: “Before, the fetishes were subject to
the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself has become a
fetish. The blindfold over Justitia’s eyes does not only mean that
there should be no assault upon justice, but that justice does not
originate in freedom.”

Bourgeois society merely brings the rule of equivalence to its
logical and historic extreme. All men are equal as buyers and
sellers — all are sovereign egos on the free market place. The
corporate ties that once united humanity into bands, clans,
tribes, the fraternity of the *polis*, and the vocational community of
the guild, are totally dissolved. Monadic man replaces collective
man; the exchange relationship replaces the kinship, fraternal, or
vocational ties of the past. What unites humanity in the bourgeois
market place is competition: the universal antagonism of each
against all. Graduated to the level of competing capitals, of
grasping and warring bourgeois enterprises, the market place
dictates the ruthless maxim: “Grow or die” — he who does not
expand his capital and devour his competitor will be devoured. In
this constellation of ever-regressive asocial relationships, where
even personality itself is reduced to an exchangeable object,
society is ruled by production for the sake of production.
Equivalence asserts itself as exchange value; through the mediation of money, every artistic work, indeed every moral qualm,
is degraded to an exchangeable quantum. Gold or its paper
symbol makes it possible to exchange the most treasured
cathedral for so many match sticks. The manufacturer of shoe
laces can transmute his wares into a Rembrandt painting,
beggaring the talents of the most powerful alchemist.

In this quantitative domain of equivalences, where society is
ruled by production for the sake of production and growth is the
only antidote to death, the natural world is reduced to natural
resources — the domain of wanton exploitation *par excellence*.
Capitalism not only validates precapitalist notions of the domination of nature by man; it turns the plunder of nature into
society’s law of life. To quibble with this kind of system about its
values, to try to frighten it with visions about the consequences of
growth is to quarrel with its very metabolism. One might more
easily persuade a green plant to desist from photosynthesis than
to ask the bourgeois economy to desist from capital accumulation. There is no one to talk to. Accumulation is determined
not by the good or bad intentions of the individual bourgeois, but
by the commodity relationship itself, by what Marx so aptly called
the cellular unit of the bourgeois economy. It is not the perversity
of the bourgeois that creates production for the sake of
production, but the very market nexus over which he presides
and to which he succumbs. To appeal to his human interests over
his economic ones is to ignore the brute fact that his very
authority is a function of his material being. He can only deny his
economic interests by denying his own social reality, indeed, by
denying that very authority which victimizes his humanity. It
requires a grotesque self-deception, or worse, an act of ideological social deception, to foster the belief that this society can
undo its very law of life in response to ethical arguments or
intellectual persuasion.

Yet the even harsher fact must be faced that this system has to
be undone and replaced by a society that will restore the balance
between human society and nature — an ecological society that
must first begin by removing the blindfold from Justitia’s eyes and
replacing the inequality of equals by the equality of unequals. In
other writings, I have called such an ecological society anarcho-
communism; in my forthcoming book it is described as “eco-
topia.” You are welcome to call it what you will. But my remarks
up to now will mean nothing if we fail to recognize that the attempt
to dominate nature stems from the domination of human by
human; that to harmonize our relationship with the natural world
presupposes the harmonization of the social world. Beyond the
bare bones of a scientific discipline, natural ecology will have no
meaning for us if we do not develop a social ecology that will be
relevant to our time.

The alternatives we face in a society ruled by production for the
sake of production are very stark indeed. More so than any
society in the past, modern capitalism hastrought the development of technical forces to their highest point, to a point, in
fact, where we could finally eliminate toil as the basic condition of
life for the great majority of humanity and abolish the ages-old
curse of material scarcity and insecurity as the underlying feature
of society. We live today on the threshold of a post-scarcitv
society in which the equality of unequals need no longer be the
primordial rule of a small group ot collective kin, but the universal
condition of humanity as a whole, of the individual whose social
affiliations are determined by free choice and personal affinities
rather than the archaic blood oath. The Promethean personality,
the patriarchical family, private property, repressive reason, the
territorial city, and the state have done their historic work in
ruthlessly mobilizing the labour of humanity, developing the
productive forces, and transforming the world. Voday, they are
totally irrational as institutions and modes of consciousness —
the so-called “necessary evils” in Bakunin’s words that have
turned into absolute evils. The ecological crisis of our time is
testimony to the fact that the means of production developed by
hierarchical society and particularly by capitalism have become
too powerful to exist as means of domination.

On the other hand, if the present society persists indefinitely to
do its work, the ecological problems we face are even more
formidable than those which we gather under the rubric of
“pollution.” A society based on production. for the sake of
production is inherently anti-ecological and its consequences are
a devoured natural world, one whose organic complexity has
been degraded by technology into the inorganic stuff that flows
from the end of the assembly line; literally, the simple matter that
formed the metaphysical presuppositions of classical physics. As
the cities continue to grow cancerously over the land, as complex
materials are turned into simple materials, as diversity disappears
in the maw of a synthetic environment composed of glass, bricks,
mortar, metals, and machines, the complex food chains on which
we depend for the health of our soil, for the integrity of our oceans
and atmosphere, and for the physiological viability of our beings
will become ever more simple. Literally, the system in its endless
devouring of nature will reduce the entire biosphere to the fragile
simplicity of our desert and arctic biomes. We will be reversing
the process of organic evolution which has differentiated flora
and fauna into increasingly complex forms and relationships,
thereby creating a simpler and less stable world of life. The
consequences of this appalling regression are predictable enough
in the long run — the biosphere will become so fragile that it will
eventually collapse from the standpoint of human survival needs
and remove the organic preconditions for human life. That this
will eventuate from a society based on production for the sake of
production is, in my view, merely a matter of time, although when
it will occur is impossible to predict.

We must create an ecological society — not merely because
such a society is desirable but because it is direly necessary. We
must begin to live in order to survive. Such a society involves a
fundamental reversal of all the trends that mark the historic
development of capitalist technology and bourgeois society — the
minute specialization of machines and labour, the concentration
of resources and people in gigantic industrial enterprises and
urban entities, the stratification and bureaucratization of life, the
divorce of town from country, the objectification of nature and
human beings. In my view, this sweeping reversal means that we
must begin to decentralize our cities and establish entirely new
ecocommunities that are artistically molded to the ecosystems in
which they are located. I am arguing, here, that decentralization
means not the wanton scattering of population over the countryside in small isolated households or countercultural communes,
vital as the latter may be, but rather that we must retain the urban
tradition in the Hellenic meaning of the term, as a city which is
comprehensible and manageable to those who inhabit it, a new
*polis*, if you will, scaled to human dimension which, in Aristotle’s
famous dictum, can be comprehended by everyone in a single
view.


Such an ecocommunity, I will argue, would heal the split
between town and country, indeed, between mind and body by
fusing intellectual with physical work, industry with agriculture in
a rotation or diversification of vocational tasks. An ecocommunity would be supported by a new kind of technology — or
ecotechnology — one composed of flexible, versatile machinery
whose productive applications would emphasize durability and
quality, not built-in obsolesence, and insensate quantitative
output of shoddy goods, and a rapid circulation of expendable
commodities. Let me emphasize, here, that I am not advocating
that we abandon technology and return to paleolithic foodgathering. Quite to the contrary, I insist that our existing
technology is not sophisticated enough by comparison with the
smaller-scaled, more versatile ecotechnology that could be
developed and to a large extent is already available in pilot form or
on drawing boards. Such an ecotechnology would use the
inexhaustible’energy capacities of nature — the sun and wind, the
tides and waterways, the temperature differentials of the earth
and the abundance of hydrogen around us as fuels — to provide
the ecocommunity with non-polluting materials or wastes that
could be easily recycled. Indeed, decentralization would make it
possible to avoid the concentrated solid waste problems created
by our giant cities, wastes which can only be burned or dumped in
massive quantities into our seas.

I would hope that ecocommunities and ecotechnologies,
scaled to human dimensions, would open a new era in face-to-face relationships and direct democracy, providing the free time
that would make it possible in Hellenic fashion for people to
manage the affairs of society without the mediation of bureaucracies and professional political functionaries. The splits opened
by hierarchical society ages ago would now be healed and
transcended. The antagonistic division between sexes and age-
groups, town and country, administration and community, mind
and body would be reconciled and harmonized in a more
humanistic and ecological synthesis. Out of this transcendence
would emerge a new relationship between humanity and the
natural world in which society itself would be conceived as an
ecosystem based on unity in diversity, spontaneity, and non-hierarchical relationships. Once again we would seek to achieve
in our own minds the respiritization of the natural world —
not, to be sure, by abjectly returning to the myths of the archaic
era, but by seeing in human consciousness a natural world
rendered self-conscious and self-active, informed by a non-
repressive rationality that seeks to foster the diversity and
complexity of life. Out of this non-Promethean orientation would
emerge a new sensibility, one that would yield in Marx’s words the
humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity.

In counterposing environmentalism to ecology, I am not saying
that we should desist from opposing the construction of nuclear
power plant or highways and sit back passively to await the
coming of an ecological millenium. On the contrary, the existing
ground must be held on to fervently, everywhere along the way,
to rescue what we still have so that we can reconstitute society on
the least polluted and least damaged environment available to us.
But the stark alternatives of ecotopia or ecological devastation
must be kept in the foreground and a coherent theory must
always be advanced lest we offer alternatives that are as
meaningless as the prevailing society’s perspectives are barbarous. We cannot tell the “Third World,” for example, not to
industrialize when they are faced with harsh material denial and
poverty. With a coherent theory that reaches to the fundamentals of the social problem, however, we can offer to the
developing nations those technological and community models
we require for own society. Without a coherent theoretical
framework, we have very little to say except for tiring platitudes, episodic struggles, and pious hopes that the public can
with good reason ignore except insofar as its own narrow day-to-
day interests are concerned.

I suppose I could discuss these issues endlessly. Let me
conclude on a rather ruthless but honest observation. The unique
freedom that could await us results ironically or should I say,
dialectically — from the fact that our choices are woefully limited.
A century ago, Marx could validly argue that the alternatives to
socialism are barbarism. Harsh as the worst of these alternatives
may be, society could at least expect to recover from them.
Today the situation has become far more serious. The ecological
crisis of our time has graduated society’s alternatives to a more
decisive level of futuristic choices. Either we will create an
ecotopia based on ecological principles, or we will simply go
under as a species, in my view this is not apocalyptic ranting —
it is a scientific judgement that is validated daily by the very law of
life of the prevailing society.

<right>
March 1974
</right>


** An open letter to the Ecological Movement



With the opening of the eighties, the ecology movement in
both the United States and Europe is faced with a serious crisis.
This crisis is literally one of its identity and goals, a crisis that
painfully challenges the movement’s capacity to fulfill its rich
promise of advancing alternatives to the domineering sensibility,
the hierarchical political and economic institutions, and the
manipulative strategies for social change that have produced the
catastrophic split between humanity and nature.

To speak bluntly: the coming decade may well determine
whether the ecology movement will be reduced to a decorative
appendage of an inherently diseased,anti-ecological society, a
society riddled by an unbridled need for control, domination and
exploitation of humanity and nature — or, hopefully, whether the
ecology movement will become the growing educational arena for
a new ecological society based on mutual aid, decentralized
communities, a people’s technology, and non-hierarchical, libertarian relations that will yield not only a new harmony between
human and human, but between humanity and nature.

Perhaps it may seem presumptuous for a single individual to
address himself to a sizable constituency of people who have
centered their activities around ecological concerns. But my
concern for the future of the ecology movement is not an
impersonal or ephemeral one. For nearly thirty years I have
written extensively on our growing ecological dislocations. These
writings have been reinforced by my activities against the growing
use of pesticides and food additives as early as 1952, the problem
of nuclear fallout that surfaced with the first hydrogen bomb test
in the Pacific in 1954, the radioactive pollution issue that emerged
with the Windscale nuclear reactor “incident” in 1956, and Con
Edison’s attempt to construct the world’s largest nuclear reactor
in the very heart of New York City in 1963. Since then, I have
been involved in anti-nuke alliances such as Clamshell and Shad,
not to speak of their predecessors Ecology Action East, whose
manifesto, *The Power to Destroy, The Power to Create,* I wrote
in 1969, and the Citizens Committee on Radiation Information,
which played a crucial role in stopping the Ravenswood reactor in
1963. Hence, I can hardly be described as an interloper or newcomer to the ecology movement. My remarks in this letter are the
product of a very extensive experience as well as my individual
concern for ideas that have claimed my attention for decades.

It is my conviction that my work and experience in all of these
areas would mean very little if they were limited merely to the
issues themselves, however important each one may be in its own
right. “No Nukes,” or for that matter, no food additives, no
agribusiness, or no nuclear bombs is simply not enough if our
horizon is limited to each one issue alone. Of equal importance is
the need to reveal the toxic social causes, values, and inhuman
relations that have created a planet which is already vastly
poisoned.

Ecology, in my view, has always meant *social* ecology: the
conviction that the very concept of dominating nature stems from
the domination of human by human, indeed, of women by men, of
the young by their elders, of one ethnic group by another, of
society by the state, of the individual by bureaucracy, as well as of
one economic class by another or a colonized people by a colonial
power. To my thinking, social ecology has to begin its quest for
freedom not only in the factory but also in the family, not only in
the economy but also in the psyche, not only in the material
conditions of life but also in the spiritual ones. Without changing
the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those
between men and women, adults and children, whites and other
ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is
considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a
socialistic “classless” and “nonexploitative” form. It would be
infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of
“people’s democracies,” “socialism” and the “public ownership” of “natural resources.” And as long as hierarchy persists, as
long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites,
the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and
inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.

The emergence of the women’s movement, even more so than
the counterculture, the “appropriate” technology crusade and
the anti-nuke alliances (I will omit the clean-up escapades of
“Earth Day”), points to the very heart of the hierarchical
domination that underpins our ecological crisis. Only insofar as a
counterculture, an alternate technology or anti-nuke movement
rests on the non-hierarchical sensibilities and structures that are
most evident in the truly radical tendencies in feminism can the
ecology movement realize its rich potential for basic changes in
our prevailing anti-ecological society and its values. Only insofar
as the ecology movement *consciously* cultivates an anti-hierarchical and a non-domineering sensibility, structure, and strategy
for social change can it retain its very *identity* as the voice for a
new balance between humanity and nature and its goal for a truly
ecological society.

This identity and this goal is now faced with serious erosion.
Ecology is now fashionable, indeed, faddish — and with this sleazy
popularity has emerged a new type of environmentalist hype.
From an outlook and movement that at least held the promise of
challenging hierarchy and domination have emerged a form of
*environmentalism* that is based more on tinkering with existing
institutions, social relations, technologies, and values than on
changing them. I use the word “environmentalism” to contrast it
with ecology, specifically with social ecology. Where social
ecology, in my view, seeks to eliminate the concept of the
domination of nature by humanity by eliminating the domination
of human by human, environmentalism reflects an “instrumentalist” or technical sensibility in which nature is viewed merely as a
passive habitat, an agglomeration of external objects and forces,
that must be made more “serviceable” for human use, irrespective of what these uses may be. Environmentalism, in fact, is
mqrely environmental engineering. It does not bring into question
the underlying notions of the present society, notably that man
must dominate nature. On the contrary, it seeks to facilitate that
domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards
caused by domination. The very notions of hierarchy and
domination are obscured by a technical emphasis on “alternative” power sources, structural designs for “conserving”
energy, “simple” lifestyles in the name of “limits to growth” that
now represent an enormous growth industry in its own right —
and, of course, a mushrooming of “ecology”-oriented candidates for political office and “ecology”-oriented parties that are
designed not only to engineer nature but also public opinion into
an accommodating relationship with the prevailing society.

Nathan Glazer’s “ecological” 24-square-mile solar satellite,
O’Neil’s “ecological” spaceships, and the DOE’s giant “ecological” windmills, to cite the more blatant examples of this
environmentalists mentality, are no more “ecological” than
nuclear power plants or agribusiness. If anything, their “ecological” pretensions are all the more dangerous because they are
more deceptive and disorienting to the general public. The hoopla
about a new “Earth Day” or future “Sun Days” or “Wind Days,”
like the pious rhetoric of fast-talking solar contractors and
patent — hungry “ecological” inventors, conceal the all-important
fact that solar energy, wind power, organic agriculture, holistic
health, and “voluntary simplicity” will alter very little in our
grotesque imbalance with nature if they leave the patriarchal
family, the multinational corporation, the bureaucratic and
centralized political structure, the property system, and the
prevailing technocratic rationality untouched. Solar power, wind
power, methane, and geothermal power are merely *power*
insofar as the devices for using them are needlessly complex,
bureaucratically controlled, corporately owned or institutionally
centralized. Admittedly, they are less dangerous to the physical
health of human beings than power derived from nuclear and
fossil fuels, but they are clearly dangerous to the spiritual, moral
and social health of humanity if they are treated merely as
techniques that do not involve new relations between people
and nature and within society itself. The designer, the bureaucrat,
the corporate executive, and the political careerist do not
introduce anything new or ecological in society or in our
sensibilities toward nature and people because they adopt “soft
energy .paths,” like all “technotwits” (to use Amory Lovins’
description of himself in a personal conversation with me), they
merely cushion or conceal the dangers to the biosphere and to
human life by placing ecological technologies in a straitjacket of
hierarchical values rather than by challenging the values and the
institutions they represent.

By the same token, even decentralization becomes meaningless if it denotes logistical advantages of supply and recycling
rather than human scale. If our goal in decentralizing society (or,
as the “ecology”-oriented politicians like to put it, striking a
“balance” between “decentralization” and “centralization”) is
intended to acquire “fresh food” or to’“recycle wastes” easily or
to reduce “transportation costs” or to foster “more” popular
control (not, be it noted, *complete* popular control) over social
life, decentralization too is divested of its rich ecological and
libertarian meaning as a network of free, naturally balanced
communities based on direct face-to-face democracy and fully
actualized selves who can really engage in the <em>self</em>-management
and <em>self</em>-activity so vital for the achievement of an ecological
society. Like alternate technology, decentralization is reduced to
a mere technical stratagem for concealing hierarchy and domination. The “ecological” vision of “municipal control of power,”
“nationalization of industry,” not to speak of vague terms like
“economic democracy,” may seemingly restrict utilities and
corporations, but leaves their overall control of society largely
unchallenged. Indeed, even a nationalized corporate structure
remains a bureaucratic and hierarchical one.

As an individual who has been deeply involved in ecological
issues for decades, I am trying to alert well-intentioned
ecologically oriented people to a profoundly serious problem in
our movement. To put my concerns in the most direct form
possible: I am disturbed by a widespread technocratic mentality
and political opportunism that threatens to replace social ecology
by a new form of social engineering. For a time it seemed that the
ecology movement might well fulfill its libertarian potential as a
movement for a non-hierarchical society. Reinforced by the most
advanced tendencies in the feminist, gay, community and socially
radical movements, it seemed that the ecology movement might
well begin to focus its efforts on changing the basic structure of
our anti-ecological society, not merely on providing more palatable techniques for perpetuating it or institutional cosmetics for
concealing its irremediable diseases. The rise of the anti-nuke
alliances based on a decentralized network of affinity groups, on a
directly democratic decision-making process, and on direct
action seemed to support this hope. The problem that faced the
movement seemed primarily one of self-education and public
education — the need to *fully* understand the meaning of the
affinity group structure as a lasting, family-type form, the full
implications of direct democracy, the concept of direct action as
more than a “strategy” but as a deeply rooted sensibility, an
outlook that expresses the fact that *everyone* had the right to
take *direct control* of society and of her or his everyday life.

Ironically, the opening of the eighties, so rich in its promise of
sweeping changes in values and consciousness, has also seen the
emergence of a new opportunism, one that threatens to reduce
the ecology movement to a mere cosmetic for the present
society. Many self-styled “founders” of the anti-nuke alliances
(one thinks here especially of the Clamshell Alliance) have
become what Andrew Kopkind has described as “managerial
radicals” — the manipulators of a political consensus that operates *within* the system in the very name of opposing it.

The “managerial radical” is not a very new phenomenon. Jerry
Brown, like the Kennedy dynasty, has practiced the art in the
political field for years. What is striking about the current crop is
the extent to which “managerial radicals” come from important
radical social movements of the sixties and, more significantly,
from the ecology movement of the seventies. The radicals and
idealists of the 1930s required decades to reach the middle-aged
cynicism needed for capitulation, and they had the honesty to
admit it in public. Former members of SDS and ecology action
groups capitulate in their late youth or early maturity — and write
their “embittered” biographies at 25,30, or 35 years of age, spiced
with rationalizations for their surrender to the status quo. Tom
Hayden hardly requires much criticism, as his arguments against
direct action at Seabrook last fall attest. Perhaps worse is the
emergence of Barry Commoner’s “Citizen’s Party,” of new
financial institutions like MUSE (Musicians United for Safe
Energy), and the “Voluntary Simplicity” celebration of a dual
society of swinging, jeans-clad, high-brow elitists from the middle
classes and the conventionally clad, consumer-oriented, lowbrow underdogs from the working classes, a dual society
generated by the corporate-financed “think tanks” of the
Stanford Research Institute.

In all of these cases, the radical implications of a decentralized society based on alternate technologies and closely knit
communities are shrewdly placed in the service of a technocratic
sensibility, of “managerial radicals,” and opportunistic careerists.
The grave danger here lies in the failure of many idealistic
individuals to deal with major social issues on their own terms —
to recognize the blatant incompatibilities of goals that remain in
deep-seated conflict with each other, goals that cannot possibly
coexist without delivering the ecology movement to its worst
enemies. More often than not, these enemies are its “leaders” and
“founders” who have tried to manipulate it to conform with the
very system and ideologies that block any social or ecological
reconciliation in the form of an ecological society.

The lure of “influence,” of “mainstream politics,” of “effectiveness” strikingly exemplifies the lack of coherence and consciousness that afflicts the ecology movement today. Affinity
groups, direct democracy, and direct action are not likely to be
palatable — or, for that matter, even comprehensible — to millions of people who live as soloists in discotheques and singles
bars. Tragically, these millions have surrendered their social
power, indeed, their very personalities, to politicians and bureaucrats who live in a nexus of obedience and command in which
they are normally expected to play subordinate roles.
*Yet this is precisely the immediate cause of the ecological crisis of our time* — a cause that has its historic roots in the market society
that engulfs us. To ask powerless people to regain power over
their lives is even more important than to add a complicated,
often incomprehensible, and costly solar collector to their
houses. Until they regain a new sense of power over their lives,
until they create their own system of self-management to oppose
the present system of hierarchical management, until they
develop new ecological values to replace current domineering
values — a process which solar collectors, wind machines, and
French-intensive gardens can *facilitate* but never replace —
nothing they change in society will yield a new balance with the
natural world.

Obviously, powerless people will not eagerly accept affinity
groups, direct democracy, and direct action in the normal course
of events. That they harbor basic impulses which make them very
susceptible to these forms and activities — a fact which always
surprises the “managerial radical” in periods of crisis and
confrontation — represents a potential that has yet to be fully
realized and furnished with intellectual coherence through painstaking education and repeated examples. It was precisely this
education and example that certain feminist and anti-nuke
groups began to provide. What is so incredibly regressive about
the technical thrust and electoral politics of environmental technocrats and “managerial radicals” today is that they recreate in
the name of “soft energy paths,” a specious “decentralization,”
and inherently hierarchical party-type structures the worst forms
and habits that foster passivity, obedience and vulnerability to the
mass media in the American public. The spectatorial politics
promoted by Brown, Hayden, Commoner, the Clamshell
“founders” like Wasserman and Lovejoy, together with recent
huge demonstrations in Washington and New York City breed
*masses*, *not citizens* — the manipulated objects of mass media
whether it is used by Exxon or by the CED (Campaign for
Economic Democracy), the Citizen’s Party, and MUSE.

Ecology is being used against an ecological sensibility, ecological forms of organization, and ecological practices to “win”
large constituencies, *not to educate them*. The fear of “isolation,”
of “futility,” of “ineffectiveness” yields a new kind of isolation,
futility and ineffectiveness, namely, a complete surrender of one’s
most basic ideals and goals. “Power” is gained at the cost of losing
the only power we really have that can change this insane
society — our moral integrity, our ideals, and our principles. This
may be a festive occasion for careerists who have used the
ecology issue to advance their stardom and personal fortunes; it
would become the obituary of a movement that has, latent within
itself, the ideals of a new world in which masses become
individuals and natural resources become nature, both to be
respected for their uniqueness and spirituality.

An ecologically oriented feminist movement is now emerging
and the contours of the libertarian anti-nuke alliances still exist.
The fusing of the two together with new movements that are likely
to emerge from the varied crises of our times may open one of the
most exciting and liberating decades of our century. Neither
sexism, ageism, ethnic oppression, the “energy crisis,” corporate
power, conventional medicine, bureaucratic manipulation, conscription, militarism, urban devastation or political centralism can
be separated from the ecological issue. All of these issues turn
around hierarchy and domination, the root conceptions of a
radical social ecology.

It is necessary, I believe, for everyone in the ecology movement
to make a crucial decision: will the eighties retain the visionary
concept of an ecological future based on a libertarian commitment to decentralization, alternative technology, and a libertarian practice based on affinity groups, direct democracy, and
direct action? Or will the decade be marked by a dismal retreat
into ideological obscurantism and a “mainstream politics” that
acquires “power” and “effectiveness” by following the very
“stream” it should seek to divert? Will it pursue fictitious “mass
constituencies” by imitating the very forms of mass manipulation,
mass media, and mass culture it is committed to oppose? These
two directions cannot be reconciled. Our use of “media,”
mobilizations, and actions must appeal to mind and to spirit, not
to conditioned reflexes and shock tactics that leave no room for
reason and humanity. In any case, the choice must be made now,
before the ecology movement becomes institutionalized into a
mere appendage of the very system whose structure and
methods it professes to oppose. It must be made consciously and
decisively — or the century itself, not only the decade, will be lost
to us forever.

<right>
February 1980
</right>


** Energy, “Ecotechnocracy” and Ecology

With the launching of the “energy crisis,” a new mystique has
developed around the phrase “alternate energy.” In characteristic American fashion, this takes the form of ritualistic
purification: guilt over the extravagant use of irreplacable energy
resources, fear in response to the apocalyptic consequences of
“shortages,” repentance over the afflictions resulting from waste,
and the millenarian commitment to “new” techniques for achieving a stable energy system, i.e., “alternate energy.” The operational term here is “technique.” Whether one chooses to focus on
Gerald Ford’s plan to afflict America with some 200 nuclear
reactors by 1980 or Professor Heronemus’ plan to string the
northern Atlantic with giant wind generators, the phrase “alternate energy” runs the grave risk of being debased and its radical
content diffused of its serious social implications.

The trick is familiar enough. One intentionally confuses a mere
variation of the status quo with fundamentally opposing concepts of life style, technology, and community. Just, as the word
“state” was cunningly identified with society, “hierarchy” with
organization, “centralization” with planning — as though the
latter couldn’t exist without the former, indeed, as though both
words were synonymous — so projects that reflect a shrewd
reworking of established techniques and outlooks are prefixed by
the word “alternate.” With this one magical word, they acquire
the aura of the radically new, the different, the “revolutionary.”
The word c energy,” in turn, becomes the solvent by which richly
qualitative distinctions are reduced to the gray, undifferentiated
substrate for a crude psychic, physical and “ecological” cybernetics — the ebb and flow, the blockage and release of quantified
power. Accordingly, by dint of shrewd linguistic parasitism, the
old in a seemingly “new” form becomes little more than an
alternative to itself. Variety, qualitative difference and uniqueness, those precious traits of phenomena to which an authentic
ecological sensibility must always be a response, are rarefied into
a “cosmic” oneness, into a universal “night in which” (to borrow
the mocking language of a great German thinker) “all cows are
black.”

If energy becomes a device for interpreting reality on the
cosmic scale of the Chinese Qi or Reich’s orgone, we will then
have succumbed to a mechanism that is no less inadequate than
Newton’s image of the world as a clock. I use the word
“inadequate” advisedly: there is certainly truth in all of these
conceptions — Newton’s no less than the Chinese and Reich’s —
but it is a one-sided truth, not truth in its wholeness and
roundedness. If Newton’s image was essentially mechanical, a
vision of the world united in the ebb, flow and distribution of
energy is essentially thermodynamical. Both reduce quality to
quantity; both are “world views” in search of mathematical
equations; both tend toward a shallow scientism that regards
mere motion as development, changes as growth, and feedback
as dialectic. Acupuncture and psychology aside, in ecology the
Newton of this thermodynamics, or more properly, energetics, is
Howard Odum. In Odum’s work, systems-analysis reduces the
ecosystem to an analytic category for dealing with energy flow as
though life forms were mere reservoirs and conduits for calories,
not variegated organisms that exist as ends in themselves and in
vital developmental relationships with each other. Ironically, far
too many well-intentioned people who are rightly dissatisfied with
the linear thinking, the despiritizing formulas, and above all, the
mechanical materialism of traditional science have unknowingly
turned to,its opposite face — a mechanical spiritualism that subtly
betrays them with a different rhetoric to the very world view they
have rejected.

In terms of outlook, the results of flipping from one face of the
coin to the other — from mechanics to energetics — tend to
produce an ideological omelet, as formless and scattered as the
real article itself. Cosmic oneness achieved merely through
energetics easily decomposes into an obsessive preoccupation
with gadgetry. Here, the mechanical begins to subvert the
spiritual. One cannot live in a universal night all the time. Even if
the cows are black, there must be enough light to delineate them.
Among many “eco-freaks” — and I can think of no other term to
describe my sisters and brothers in the alternate technology
community — daylight often means neither a mellow dawn nor a
soft twilight but the harsh glare of high noon, when structural
detail and technical proficiency become ends in themselves.
Small domes graduate into big ones; horticulturists are lured by a
burgeoning market for pure foods into a questionable form of
organic agribusiness; solar collectors and wind generators
acquire a certain technical precosity that finds its armor in the
patent office. In itself, this development might even be valuable if
it were the “spin-off” of a flourishing social perspective, distinctly
critical of the entire social order, and formed by moral, spiritual,
and ecological values of a clearly revolutionary character. But as
long as energetics is the sole thread that unites outlook with
practice, the “eco-freak” often drops into an eco-technocratic
limbo in which means become ends and the end is simply
technical proficiency at best — or a sizeable income at worst.
What I am saying quite simply is that, lacking a solidity of social
ideas, an authentic ecological sensibility, a life-oriented outlook,
and moral integrity, scientism and frankly capitalism overtly
recolonize even the rhetorical ground which was claimed by
mechanical spiritualism. If the dream that guides the “eco-freak”
is held together by energetics, ecology with its broadly philosophical outlook that seeks the harmonization of humanity with
nature dissolves into “environmentalism” or what amounts to
mere environmental engineering, an organic approach dissolves
into systems analysis, and “alternate technology” becomes
technocratic manipulation.

The landscape of alternate technology is already marred by this
regressive drift, especially by mega-projects to “harness” the sun
and winds. By far the lion’s share of federal funds for solar energy
research is being funneled into projects that would occupy vast
areas of desert land. These projects are a mockery of “alternate
technology.” By virtue of their scale, they are classically traditional in terms of their gigantism and in the extent to which they
would exacerbate an already diseased, bureaucratically centralized, national division of labour — one which renders the
American continent dependent upon and vulnerable to a few
specialized areas of production. The oceans too have become
industrial real estate, not merely as a result of proposals for
floating nuclear reactors but also long strings of massive wind
generators. And as if these mega-projects were not enough,
Glaser’s suggestions for mile-square space platforms to capture
solar energy beyond the atmosphere and beam microwaves to
earthbound collectors would redecorate the sky with science-
fiction industrial installations. Doubtless, many of these megaproject designers are well-intentioned and high-minded in their
goals. But in terms of size, scale and ecological insight, their
thinking is hardly different from that of James Watt. Their
perspectives are the product of the traditional Industrial Revolution rather than a new ecological revolution, however sophisticated their designs may be.

Human beings, plants, animals, soil, and the inorganic substrate of an ecosystem form a community not merely because
they share or manifest a oneness in “cosmic energy,” but because
they are qualitatively *different* and thereby complement each
other in the wealth of their diversity. Without giving due and
sensitive recognition to the differences in life-forms, the unity of
an ecosystem would be one-dimensional, flattened out by its lack
of variety and the complexity of the food web which gives it
stability. The horrendous crime of the prevailing social order and
its industry is that it is undoing the complexity of the biosphere. It
is simplifying complex food webs by replacing the organic with the
inorganic — turning soil into sand, forests into lumber, and land
into concrete. In so simplifying the biosphere, this social order is
working against the thrust of animal and plant evolution over the
past billion years, a thrust which has been to colonize almost
every niche on the planet with variegated life-forms, each
uniquely, often exquisitely, adapted to fairly intractable material
conditions for life. Not only is “small beautiful,” to use E.F.
Schumacher’s expression, but so is diversity. Our planet finds its
unity in the diversity of species and in the richness, stability and
interdependence this diversity imparts to the totality of life, notin
the black-painted-on-black energetics of mechanical spiritualism.

“Alternate energy” is ecological insofar as it promotes this
diversity, partly by fostering an outlook that respects diversity,
partly by using diverse sources of energy that make us dependent
on variegated resources. The prevailing social order teaches us to
think in terms of “magic bullets,” whether they be chemotherapeutic “solutions” to all disease or the “one” source of energy that
will satisfy all our needs for power. Accordingly, the industrial
counterpart to antibiotics is nuclear energy, just as Paul Ehrlich’s
salvarsan, the “magic bullet” of the turn of the century, found its
counterpart in petroleum. A “magic bullet” simplifies all our
problems. It overlooks the differences between things by prescribing one solution for widely dissimilar problems. It fosters the
view that there is a common denominator to the variegated world
of phenomena — biological, social, or psychological — that can be
encompassed by a single formula or agent. A respect for diversity
is thus undermined by a Promethean view of the world as so
much “matter” and “energy” that can be “harnessed” to serve the
maw of agribusiness and industry. Nature becomes “natural
resources,” cities become “urban resources,” and eventually
even people become “human resources” — all irreducible “substances for exploitation and production. The language itself
reveals the sinister transformation of the organic into the
inorganic, the simplification of a richly diverse reality into uniform
“matter” to feed a society based on production for the sake of
production, growth for the sake of growth, and consumption for
the sake of consumption.

To make solar energy alone, or wind power alone, or methane
alone the exclusive “solution” to our energy problems would be
as regressive as adopting nuclear energy. Let us grant that solar
energy, for example, may prove to be environmentally far less
harmful and more efficient than conventional forms. But to view it
as the exclusive source of energy presupposes a mentality and
sensibility that leaves untouched the industrial apparatus and the
competitive, profit-oriented social relations that threaten the
viability of the biosphere. In all other spheres of life, growth would
still be pursued for its own sake, production for its own sake, and
consumption for its own sake, followed eventually by the
simplification of the planet to a point which would resemble a
more remote geological age in the evolution of the organic world.
Conceptually, the beauty of “alternate energy” has been not
merely its efficiency and its diminution of pollutants, but the
ecological *interaction* of solar collectors, wind generators, and
methane digesters with each other and with many other sources
of energy including wood, water — and yes, coal and petroleum
where necessary — to produce a new energy *pattern*, one that is
artistically tailored to the ecosystem in which it is located. Variety
would be recovered in the use of energy just as it would be in the
cultivation of the soil, not only because variety obviates the need
to use harmful “buffers,” but because it promotes an ecological
sensibility in all spheres of technology. Without variety and
diversity in technology as a whole, solar energy would merely be
a substitute for coal, oil, and uranium rather than function as a
stepping stone to an entirely new way of dealing with the natural
world and with each other as human beings.

What is no less important, “alternate energy” — if it is to form
the basis for a new *ecotechnology* — would have to be scaled to
human dimensions. Simply put, this means that corporate
gigantism with its immense, incomprehensible industrial installations would have to be replaced by small units which people
could comprehend and directly manage by themselves. No
longer would they require the intervention of industrial bureaucrats, political technocrats, and a species of “environmentalists” who seek merely to engineer “natural resources” to
suit the demands of an inherently irrational and anti-ecological
society. No longer would people be separated from the means
whereby they satisfy their material needs by a suprahuman
technology with its attendant “experts” and “managers”; they
would acquire a direct grasp of a comprehensible ectotechnology
and regain the power over everyday life in all its aspects which
they lost ages ago to ruling hierarchies in the political and
economic sphere.[4] Indeed, following from the attempt to achieve
a variegated energy pattern and an ecotechnology scaled to
human dimensions, they would be obliged to decentralize their
cities as well as their industrial apparatus into new ecocommunities — communities that would be based on direct face-to-face relations and mutual aid.


[4] At the risk of spicing these remarks with some politically debatable issues, I
would like to remind some of my libertarian Marxist friends — the sects we can
give up as hopeless — that even “workers’ control of production,” a very
fashionable slogan these days, would not be any sort of “control” at all if
technology were so centralized and suprahuman that workers could no longer
comprehend the nature of the technological apparatus other than their own
narrow sphere. For this reason alone, libertarian Marxists would be wise to
examine social ecology in a new light and emphasize the need to alter the
technology so that it is controllable, indeed, to alter work so that it is no longer
mind-stunting as well as physically exhausting toil. Victor Ferkiss, in his latest
book (*The Future of Technological Civilization*) has dubbed my views “eco-anarchism.” If “ecoanarchism” means the technical — not only the spiritual and
political — power of people to create an ecotechnology that is comprehensible to
them, one that they can really “control,” I accept the new label with eagerness.


One can well imagine what a new sense of humanness this
variety and human scale would yield — a new sense of self, of
individuality, and of community. Instruments of production
would cease to be instruments of domination and social antagonism: they would be transformed into instruments of liberation
and social harmonization. The means by which we acquire the
most fundamental necessities of life would cease to be an
awesome engineering mystery that invites legends of the unearthly to compensate for our lack of control over technology and
society. They would be restored to the everyday world of the
familiar, of the *oikos*, like the traditional tools of the craftsman.
Selfhood would be redefined in new dimensions of self-activity,
self-management, and self-realization because the technical
apparatus so essential to the perpetuation of life — and today, so
instrumental in its destruction — would form a comprehensible
arena in which people could directly manage society. The self
would find a new material and existential expression in productive as well as social activity.

Finally, the sun, wind, waters, and other presumably “inorganic” aspects of nature would enter our lives in new ways and
possibly result in what I called, nearly a decade ago, a “new
animism.” They would cease to be mere “resources,” forces to be
“harnessed” and “exploited,” and would become manifestations
of a larger natural totality, indeed, as respiritized nature, be it the
musical whirring of wind-generator blades or the shimmer of light
on solar-collector plates. Having heard these sounds and seen
these images with my own ears and eyes at installations reared in
Vermont at Goddard College and in Massachusetts at the
research station of New Alchemy Institute East, I have no
compunction in using esthetic metaphors to describe what might
ordinarily be dismissed as “noise” and “glare” in the vernacular of
conventional technology. If we cherish the flapping of sails on a
boat and the shimmer of sunlight on the sea, there is no reason
why we cannot cherish the flapping of sails on a wind rotor and
the reflection of sunlight on a solar collector. Our minds have shut
out these responses and denied them to our spirit because the
conventional sounds and imagery of technology are the ear-splitting clatter of an assembly line and the eye-searing flames of a
foundry. This is a form of self-denial with a vengeance. Having
seen both technological worlds, I may perhaps claim a certain
sensitivity to the difference and hope to transmit it to the reader.

If the current literature on alternate sources of energy is
conceived merely as an unconventional version of the
*Mechanical Engineering Handbook*, it will have failed completely to
achieve its purpose. Mere gadgetry for its own sake, or in what
philosophers call a “reified” form, exists everywhere and is to be
desperately shunned. To be sure, one must know one’s craft, no
less so in ecotechnology than in conventional technology. This is
the burden (if “burden” it be) of the sculptor as well as the mason,
of the painter as well as the carpenter. But in ecotechnology one
must deal with craftsmanship in a special way. Overjnflated into a
swollen balloon, it may well carry us away from the ground on
which we originally stood, from our sense of *oikos*, the ecological
terrain which initially shaped our interests and concerns. I have
seen this occur among my sisters and brothers in the ecological
movement only too often. Indeed, having received a considerable
training in electronics decades ago, I also know only too well how
insanely obsessed one can become with the unending, even
mindless, improvisation of circuit diagrams until one is as
enamored by drawing, say, the electronic trigger for a nuclear
bomb as for a television set. It is from people obsessed with reified
technology and science that the AEC recruits its weapons
engineers, the FBI its wire-tappers, the CIA its “counter-
insurgency” experts. Let us not deceive ourselves: “ecofreaks”
are no more immune to “the man” from Honeywell and NASA
than “electronic freaks” are to “the man” from General Electric
and the AEC — that is, until they have become ecotechnologists,
informed by a deeply spiritual and intellectual commitment to an
ecological society.

This means, in my view, that they are committed not merely to
an “efficient” alternate technology but to a deeply human
alternate technology — human in scale, in its liberatory goals, in
its community roots. This means, too, that they are committed to
diversity, to a sense of qualitative distinction, to energy and
technology as an artistically molded pattern, not as a “magic
bullet.” Finally, it means that they are ecologists, not “environmentalists, people who have an organic outlook, not an
engineering outlook. They are motivated by a more sweeping
drama than an appetite for mere gadgets and scientistic “curiosities. They can see the wound that opened up in society and in
the human spirit when the archaic community began to divide
internally into systems of hierarchy and domination — the elders
constituting themselves into a privileged gerontocracy in order to
dominate the young, the males forming privileged patriarchies in
order to dominate women, lastly male elites collecting into
economic ruling classes in order to exploit their fellow men. From
this drama of division, hierarchy, and domination emerged the
Promethean mentality, the archetypal myth that man could
dominate nature. Not only did it divide humanity from nature into
a cruel dualism that split town from country, but it divided the
human spirit itself, rearing thought above passion, mind above
body, intellect above sensuousness. When finally every group
he from clan to guild — dissolved into the market placejungle of
atomized buyers and sellers, each in mutual competition with the
other; when finally the sacred gift became the avaricious bargain,
the craze for domination became an end in itself. It brought us a
formidable body of scientific knowledge and a stupendously
powerful technology, one which, if properly reworked and
rescaled, could finally eliminate scarcity, want, and denial, or one
which could tear down the planet if used for profit, accumulation and mindless growth.

The authentic ecotechnologist knows that the wounds must be
healed. Indeed, these wounds are part of her or his body.
Ecotechnologies and ecocommunities are the mortar that will
serve not only to unite age groups, sexes, and town and country
with each other in a non-hierarchical society; they will also help to
close the splits in the human spirit and between humanity and
nature. Whether these splits were necessary or not to achieve the
striking advances in technology of the past millennia; whether we
had to lose the child-like innocence of tribal society in order to
acquire the mature innocence of a future society, ripened by the
painful wisdom of history — all of this is a matter of abstract
interest. What should count when confronted by a technical work
is that we are not beguiled from these immense themes — this
sweeping drama in which we split from blind nature only to return
again on a more advanced level as nature rendered self-conscious
in the form of creative, intelligent, and spiritually renewed beings.
To deal with alternate energy sources in a language that is alien to
social ecology, to reify the literature on the subject as a
compendium of gadgets — a mere encyclopedia of gimmicks —
would be worse than an error. It would be a form of betrayal — not
so much to those who have worked in this field as to oneself.

<right>
February 1975
</right>


** The Concept of Ecotechnologies and Ecocommunities

The expression “human habitat” contains a paradox that
should be examined if it is not to lead us into a certain measure of
confusion. Clearly any man-made structure, indeed, any artifact
that figures in an environment is “human” and part of a “human
habitat.” Viewed in terms of this all-embracing definition, a
human habitat could include the scarring towers of New York
City’s World Trade Center and the low-slung town houses of
Boston’s Beacon Hill or the steel mills of Pittsburg and the artisan
shops of Williamsburg. What is man-made in a habitat is
“human,” strictly speaking, and many serious writers see ‘no
discordancies in juxtaposing towers and town houses or mills and
shops as components of a human habitat.

But this definition, while obviously secure in its technical
accuracy, is somewhat disquieting. It seems to preclude the basis
for judging whether certain man-made things are desirable or
not — and it has been used to achieve this exclusion with telling
effect. More than one horrendous urban design has been force-
fed to the public on the grounds that it is no less “human,”
technically speaking, than a Florentine neighborhood square,
and no pains have been spared to remind irate citizens that they
are exercising inexcusable “value judgements” in describing the
one as “inhuman” and the other as eminently “human.” Yet we
tend to resist the notion that the man-made origin of a thing
suffices to characterize it as “human.” We press the point that the
word “human” should have considerably more than a technical
meaning, that it should reflect deeply felt moral needs and ends.

This vexing paradox by no means confronts conventional
technologists and planners alone. Even the new, so-called
“countercultural” technologists and communitarians have confused technique with values or, more strictly speaking, the
dimensions of a structure with its ethical or “human” qualities. It
does not always improve our insight into this paradox to declare
that small is beautiful” or to decribe “small” technologies as
“soft,” “intermediate,” or “appropriate.” Such adjectives are
more neutral morally than E. F. Schumacher (who coined most of
these terms) would have us believe.[5] As a critic of Schumacher
has recently observed; if big is not good, small is not necessarily
beautiful.[6] Indeed, much that is small — such as a suburban
tract, a back-breaking plow, a tiring handloom, or the modest
office of a local real estate broker — may be downright repellent
and dehumanizing by any standards. Dimensions are no more
substitutes for values than the technical origins of a particular
thing, although they may certainly be a factor in launching an
individual on a particular ethical trajectory that rejects “big” for
one reason or “small” for another.

That social philosophers, researchers, and popular writers
who identify “small” with “human” have touched a nerve in a
sizable segment of the American public seems to be one of the
more obvisous facts of our times. Practical efforts to create a
human habitat based on comparatively small communities,
horticultural techniques of food cultivation, modest-sized complexes of solar-wind-methane energy installations, and craft
technologies are widespread today and derive directly from the
“countercultural” upsurge of the sixties. The constituency for
these alternate technologies and communities is, in fact, much
larger than the casual observor is likely to realize and its
underlying philosophy, even if largely intuitive, has a coherence
that has rarely been articulated in the conventional literature.

Nor can this movement be dismissed as episodic. Aside from
the likelihood that it will have an existential impact comparable to
the “counterculture” from which it derived, it has already
pioneered in new technologies, service organizations, and community forms that have a tangibility, a reconstructive character, and a justly earned public recognition that can scarcely be
compared with its almost formless and erratic antecedents of the
lastdecade. Far from being episodic, this new quest for a “human
habitat” articulates, even more than it fully recognizes, a well-
formed and far-reaching historic tradition. Classical Hellenic
thought initiated this tradition with its view of the *polis* as an
ethical community; later, anarchist theorists such as Peter
Kropotkin were to give it modernity with their concepts of face-
to-face democracy and popular self-administration.



*** “Human” as Human Scale

It is important to emphasize the Hellenic (and largely western)
origins of the new quest for a “human habitat” if only to place in
c earer perspective the mystical Asian ambience that surrounds
it. Despite the tendency of so many new technologists and
communitarians to slight science as spiritually desiccating, they
retain closer affinities to the western scientific outlook than they
are hkely to admit.[7] Quite often, in fact, the much-despised
mechanical materialism associated with Newtonian science is
simply replaced by an equally mechanical spiritualism that
satisfies neither the needs of the new technologists for systematic
research nor the needs of the new communitarians for a human-
oriented value system.[8]

At the risk of seeming heretical, I would like to suggest that the
Indian and Chinese philosophical works so much in vogue today
provide no satisfactory melding of the disciplined rationalism,
technical sophistication, social activism, and personalistic ethics
t at actually vitalize this quest. One must grossly misread Asian
literature to find the rational, technical, and ethical inspiration for
developing human-oriented technologies and communities.[9]
Despite the widely expressed need for a sense of unity with
nature that Asian philosophy is said to satisfy, the primacy this
philosophy gives to “cosmic” concerns over mundane social and
individual needs tends to conflict with the intense subjectivism of
its western acolytes, their activism, and the practical wisdom they
exercise in designing their technologies and communities.

If we , must anchor the new quest for a human habitat in
philosophical traditions of a pre-industrial era, it would seem that
Hellenic rather than Asian thought is more relevant, even if it
tends to receive scant attention. The fascinating Hellenic blend of
metaphysical speculation with empirical study, of qualitative with
quantitative science, and of natural with social phenomena is
rarely equalled by Asian thinkers and religious’teachers. We still
“talk Greek,” as it were, when we speak of “ecology,” “technology,” and “economics.” We also “think Greek” when we
impute^“good” or “evil,” “just” or “unjust,” “human” or “inhuman in short, an ethical dimension — to data that conventional science views as hard facts. Although modern science can
justly claim its origins in Hellenic philosophy, so too can the new
technologists and communitarians who seek a human habitat,
perhaps with even greater validity. For Greek “science,” if such it
can be called in the modern sense of the term, is rarely free of an
ethical stance toward reality and experience. To Plato and
Aristotle, the analysis of phenomena at all levels of reality is never
exhausted by the strictly descriptive query, “how.” Analysis must
include an acknowledgement of functional interrelationship,
indeed, of a metaphysical *telos*, which is expressed by the
intentional query, “why.”[10] Despite the high degree of secularism
and factual systematization that Greek thought (expecially in
Aristotle’s extant writings) introduced into the western intellectual tradition, its center was eminently ethical and its orientation was human and social.

“Human,” in Greek thought, means scaled to human dimensions, at least as far as social institutions and communities are
concerned. Although it has been observed that Plato in The Laws
computes the most satisfactory number of households in his
“best *polis*” on the basis of Pythagorean numerology, a close
study of that dialogue shows that his motives are strikingly
pragmatic. The number, 5040, enjoys the alluring advantage that
it contains the “largest number of consecutive divisors” and yet
comprises a number that suffices “for purposes of war and every
peacetime activity, all contracts and dealings, and for taxes and
grants.”[11] No figure could be so all-inclusive. In blending Pythagorean mysticism with pragmatic considerations, Plato affords
his contemporaries a bridge to span the gap between the archaic
world of the mythopoeic and the practical world of social
organization, a characteristic example of “cosmic” and social
parallelism that has proved so appealing to the new technologists
and communitarians of our own time.

Aristotle is more secular: he replaces Plato’s mysticism by
strictly ethical premises. But these very premises provide him
with his uniquely Hellenic stance — a moral conception of what
we (borrowing our social terminology from zoology) designate as
a “habitat.” In a widely quoted passage, Aristotle tells us that the
“best *polis*” must be one that “can be taken in at a single view.”[12]
His reasons for this scale, although rarely cited, form what is
perhaps one of the most compelling arguments in social theory
for decentralization. The population of a *polis* must suffice to
achieve not only the “good life” and “self-sufficiency” in a
“political community,” but must be limited to a size which renders
it possible for citizens to “know each other’s personal characters,
since where this does not happen to be the case the business of
electing officials and trying law suits is bound to go badly;
haphazard decision is unjust in both matters, and this must
obviously prevail in an excessively numerous community.”[13]

“Small” in Aristotle’s view, is human because it allows for

individual control over the affairs of the community and the
exercise of individual human powers in the social realm. A “big”
community may be more efficient for economic or military
purposes, but it would be “unjust.” Its citizens would be incapable
of making decisions of profound social importance and would
thereby fail to realize their distinctive human capacities for
rational social judgement.[14] Hence the *polis* must be large
enough to meet its material needs and achieve self-sufficiency,
but small enough to be taken in at one view. Only in such a *polis*
would human beings be able to realize their humanity, that is to
say, to actualize their potentialities for rational judgement.

The Hellenic interpretation of “human” as self-consciousness
and self-realization in the private sphere of life recurs throughout western thought from Descartes to the contemporary
existentialists. A highly individualistic subjectivism is the intellectual hallmark of philosophy in the modern era. The Hellenic
interpretation of “human” as self-activity and self-administration,
in the public sphere, however, is surprisingly rare. The Protestant
sects which were to gather together under the ample rubric of
Puritan Congregationalism seem to have articulated perhaps the
earliest modern attempts to establish the administrative autonomy of small decentralized groups as opposed to the centralized
hierarchies of the Catholic and Anglican clergy. In colonial
America, the Puritan congregation was to be extended from the
religious to the political sphere — if, indeed, Puritan ideology
established any distinction between the two — by vesting considerable civil authority in town meetings.[15] The theme is picked up
again by Rousseau in his critique of deputized power and
representative government. His praise of the Greek popular
assembly based on face-to-face democracy is all the more
remarkable if one bears in mind that it was written at a high-point
in the development of the centralized nation-state.[16] Finally, the
concept of a human habitat as a modern *polis* acquires its clearest
coherence and multidimensionality in the work of Peter Kropotkin, one of the major theorists of nineteenth-century anarchism
and a distinguished biogeographer in his own right.[17] In
*Fields, Factories and Workshops*, a classic that has exercised immense
direct and indirect influence since its publication as a series of
articles in the late 1880s, Kropotkin formulates the most impressive case for decentralized communities.[18] His concept of a
human habitat is based on an ecological integration of town and
countryside, a highly flexible technology and communications
system, a revival of artisanship as a productive form of “aesthetic
enjoyment,” and direct local democracy freed of the social ills,
notably slavery, patriarchialism, and class conflict, that subverted
Greek democracy.

The revival of interest in Kropotkin’s work, a revival that has
been nourished by *The New Ecologist* in England and by what
Victor Ferkiss describes as the “eco-anarchism” of many new
technologists and communitarians in the United States, could
well serve as a valuable point of departure for formulating an
ethical dimension to the word “human.” If our values are not to
be entirely arbitrary and relativistic, they must be rooted in
certain, objective criteria about humanity itself. What clearly
unites an Aristotle with a Kropotkin, despite a historic span of
more than two millenia, is their emphasis on self-consciousness
as the most distinctive of human attributes, notably, the capacity
of human beings to engage in self-reflection, rational action, and
foresee the consequences of their activities. Human action is not
merely any action by human beings, but action that fosters
reflexivity, rational practice, and foresight. Judging a habitat by
this criterion, we would be obliged to look beyond the mere
presence of human artifacts and inquire into whether or not the
habitat promotes distinctively human traits and potentialities.

Clearly a habitat that is largely incomprehensible to the
humans who inhabit it would be regarded as inhuman. Whether
by reason of its size, its centralization, or the exclusivity of its
decision-making process, it would deny the individual the opportunity to understand key social factors that affect his personal
destiny. Such a habitat, by closing to the individual a strategic
area for the formation of consciousness, would challenge the
integrity of consciousness itself. That this trend, so apparent in
the years following World War II, can evoke popular resistance is
suggested by the often violent social unrest, particularly among
American youth, of the 1960s. The official “habitat,” marked by a
formidable degree of centralization and bureaucratization, seems
to have generated, in reaction, the “subhabitats” or “subcultures” of the last decade from which so many of the new
technologists and communitarians were to emerge.

But the same trend toward gigantism and centralization can
produce a mind-numbing quiescence. An inhuman habitat tends
to produce a dehumanizing one — dehumanizing in the sense that
the degradation inflicted on the public sphere eventually invades
the private sphere. The individual who is denied the opportunity
to exercise self-administration in the public sphere suffers an
attrition not only of self-consciousness but also of self-hood. The
primacy of subjectivity, which philosophy since the Renaissance
placed above all other considerations in the western intellectual
tradition, is vitiated by the erosion of the ego. The shrivelling of
the public sphere is followed by the shrivelling of the private
sphere — that inviolable area which is presumably the last refuge
of the individual in an overly centralized and bureaucratized
society. The ego, increasingly desiccated by the aridity of the
social sphere, becomes fit material for mass culture, stereotyped
responses, and a preoccupation with trivia.[19]

A human habitat minimally presupposes human scale, that is to
say, a scale that lends itself to public comprehension, individual
participation, and face-to-face relationships. But a caveat must be
sounded: it is not enough to deal with such a habitat exclusively in
terms of its artifacts or their dimensions. Even the most delicately
wrought “garden cities” do not make a human habitat if the term
“human” is to mean more than pleasant vistas, comfortable
homes, and efficient logistics. The “big” literally dwarfs the ego,
but the “small” does not in itself elevate it. Beyond “big” or
“small” are the compelling problems of the “just” and “good” in
the Hellenic and libertarian sense of these terms: the “good life”
as a materially secure and reflexive one, the “good society” as an
ethical community based on justice, public participation, and
mutual concern. It is patently impossible to describe such a
habitat strictly in terms of its physical attributes, however
important they may be. Eventually, any such description must
include the political infrastructure, institutions, interpersonal
relations, and guiding values that justify the use of the word
“human.” In the absence of these political, institutional, psychological, and moral elements, the description becomes a mere
inventory of things and structures, an artifactual aggregate that
may secure the individual’s self-preservation and creature comforts, but explains nothing about the development of his selfhood
and moral outlook.

*** Ecology and Environmentalism

The extent to which a designer accepts this multidimensional
notion of human scale generally tells us whether his work can be
regarded as qualitatively “new” or merely an extension of the
conventional technical wisdom into new fields of research.

A considerable amount of research is currently underway in
non-nuclear “alternate” sources of energy such as solar, wind,
and methane installations, in food cultivation, and in energysaving dwellings and communities. From a strictly artifactual
standpoint, this research is often difficult to distinguish. To cite a
few examples: it is not unusual to read accounts of the new
technology” that contain fast-and-loose comparisons between
the Meinel design for monumental “solar farms” and Steve Baer’s
small, delightfully playful solar-heated “drumwall”- house. One
finds William E. Heronemus’s scheme for stringing large windmill
installations across prairies and stretches of ocean juxtaposed
with Hans Meyer’s 12-foot-high wind generator. R. Buckminster
Fuller’s “Tetrahedral City,” a soaring pyramidal structure designed to accomodate a million residents may be found together
with a description of Moshe Safdie’s compact modular “Habitat,”
both of which are adduced as evidence of “organic” design and
structural growth.[20]

But can such sharply contrasting proposals and projects be
grouped together because they employ similar technical principles or profess adherence to an “organic” design concept? The
Meinel, Heronemus, and Fuller proposals differ not only in their
physical dimensions from the installations designed by Baer,
Meyer, and Safdie; they differ even more significantly in their
conceptualization of a human habitat, whether this difference is
explicitly stated, presupposed or, in Fuller’s case, grossly misstated. The habitats that would emerge from the Meinel,
Heronemus, and Fuller proposals would differ from a New York
City, a Chicago, or a Pittsburgh primarily by virtue of their
capacity to use inexhaustible resources such as solar and wind
power, and an inexhaustible form of “real estate,” notably the
upward reaches of space. None of these proposals involves any
appreciable structural modifications of existing habitats; none of
them is likely to arrest the trend toward urban gigantism, political
and economic centralization, bureaucratic manipulation, and the
ethic of brute self-interest. Perhaps the only significant claim they
can make is long-run efficiency in the use of key resources — a
claim that has been seriously challenged by friendly critics as well
as opponents.[21]

Such an approach might well be described as “environmental-
istic” if, by this term we mean a morally neutral but more efficient
technical administration of nature for concrete pragmatic ends.
Environmentalism can thus be regarded simply as a form of
natural engineering. The objectives of the environmentalist
presuppose no uniquely beneficient relationship between man
and nature that is implicit in so many statements of an “ecological ethic,” notably a respect for the biosphere, a conscious
effort to function within its parameters, and an attempt to achieve
harmony between society and the natural world. Indeed, it is
doubtful if words such as “nature” and “harmony” have any
meaning for the environmentalist. “Nature” would be regarded as
an inventory of “natural resources” and “harmony” as a poetic
metaphor for “adaptation.” Environmentalism advances the goal
of using these resources efficiently and prudently, with minimal
harm to public health and with due regard to the conservation of
raw materials for future generations.

Although Baer, Meyer, and Safdie are likely to agree with the
environmentalist emphasis on efficiency and prudence, they can
hardly be regarded as mere technicians. It is fair to assume from
their designs and sense of human scale that they are committed
to an ecological ethic, not merely involved in the concerns of
technical proficiency. Baer’s sense of outrage over the social
indifference of some of his colleagues, Meyer’s almost rhapsodic
commitment to a naturalistic sensibility, and Safdie’s organic and
communitarian vision, despite its puzzling eclecticism, reflect a
decentralistic concept of habitats, a fervent regard for human
beings as ends in themselves, and a holistic attitude toward
nature. In their quest for technologies and communities that will
serve to harmonize man with man and human society with
nature, they might well be called “social ecologists” rather than
designers, a term the late E.A. Gutkind coined a quarter of a
century ago in a masterful discussion on community.[22] Their
technologies and communities, in turn, could be described as
“ecotechnologies” and “ecocommunities,” terms that are meant
to impart an ecological ethic to conventional notions of technics
and urbanism.[23]

If Baer, Meyer, and Safdie seem to reflect a largely intuitive
commitment to social ecology, The New Alchemy Institute and
urban service groups such as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
exhibit a high degres of ideological sophistication. The assumption that John Todd, director of The New Alchemy
Institute, is guided by a “practical, how-to-do it approach” (as a
journalist recently reported in a major New York daily) is grossly
misleading.[24] The New Alchemy Institute, which Todd did so
much to establish, scores a major advance over many new
technologists by integrating ecotechnologies into functionally
interrelated systems that stand in marked contrast to the
mutually exclusive units one so often encounters at other
research installations. The Institute’s windmills, solar collectors,
aquacultural units and, very significantly, its extensive gardens —
all taken together — could be described as a highly unique
ecosystem. Todd, it is worth noting, explicitly acknowledges the
influence of Kropotkin and other libertarian thinkers on his
decentralistic and integrative outlook. He views his work as a
project to alter social consciousness and human sensibility as well
as technical practice.[25]

This emphasis on the integration of small-scale ecotechnologies acquires a distinct communitarian thrust in the work of the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The Institute, while occupied
with more modest installations than New Alchemy, promotes
rooftop gardens, solar energy units, waste recycling, and retrofitting projects in the very midst of Washington, D.C. Ecotechnologies are expressly viewed by the Institute’s members as a
means for achieving a new kind of urban community based on
popular control of the resources and institutions that-affect the
urban dweller’s life. They stress full public participation in local
governance and finance, neighborhood control of food and
energy resources, decentralization, and mutual aid. Accordingly,
technology is not the sole focus of the Institute but rather one of
many means for achieving active participation in community life.
Like New Alchemy, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has been
consciously influenced by Kropotkin and libertarian ideas. The
tendency to report the approach of The New Alchemy Institute
and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance as a “practical, how-to-do
it” one reflects the intractability of the conventional mind to
notions of a human habitat as an ethical community.[26] Even
when these notions are cast in a familiar ecological jargon, they
tend to be debased to technical “nuts-and-bolts” terms.

Ecotechnology, in fact, can scarcely be exemplified by a
statuesque solar collector or a dramatic wind generator reared in
splendid isolation from the ecosystem in which it is located. If the
word “ecotechnology” is to have more than a strictly technical meaning, it must be seen as the very ensemble itself,
functionally integrated with human communities as part of a
shared biosphere of people and nonhuman life forms. This
ensemble has the distinct goal of not only meeting human needs
in an ecologically sound manner — one which favours diversity
within an ecosystem — but of consciously promoting the integrity of the biosphere. The Promethean quest of using technology to “dominate nature” is replaced by the ecological ethic of
using technology to harmonize humanity’s relationship with
nature.

Human consciousness, in effect, is placed in the service of both
human needs and ecological diversity. Inasmuch as human
beings are themselves products of the natural world, human self-
consciousness could be described in philosophical terms as
nature rendered “self-conscious,” a natural world guided by
human rationality toward balanced or harmonious ecological as
well as social ends. This philosophical vision has a historical
pedigree in the western intellectual tradition. It reaches back to
Hellenic philosophy as the concept of a world nous, a concept
which, in Fichte’s stirring prose, envisions consciousness “no
longer as that stranger in Nature whose connection with
existence is so incomprehensible; it is native to it, and indeed one
of its necessary manifestation.”[27]

Ecocommunity, in turn, could scarcely be exemplified by any
urban aggregate or, for that matter, any rural houshold that
happens to acquire its resources from solar and wind installations. If the word “ecocommunity” is to have more than a strictly logistical and technical meaning, it must describe a decentralized community that allows for direct popular administration, the
efficient return of wastes to the countryside, the maximum use of
local resources — and yet it must be large enough to foster
cultural diversity and psychological uniqueness. The community,
like its technology, is itself the ensemble of its libertarian
institutions, humanly-scaled structures, the diverse productive
tasks that expose the individual to industrial, craft, and horticultural work, in short, the rounded community that the Hellenic
*polis* was meant to be in the eyes of its great democratic
statesmen. It is within such a decentralized community, sensitively tailored to its natural ecosystem, that we could hope to
develop a new sensibility toward the world of life and a new level
of self-consciousness, rational action, and foresight.

Just as we are warned by many scholars that merely structural
terms like “city-state” do not fully capture the meaning of a civic
fraternity like the *polis*, so morally neutral words like “intermediate technology” and “environment” do not capture the
meaning of ethically-charged concepts like “ecotechnology” and
“ecocommunity.” A blending of ecotechnologies and ecocom-
munities would more closely resemble a balanced, rationally-
guided ecosystem than a passive ensemble of physical surroundings with the “appropriate technology” to sustain it. Indeed,
until our estranged species with its increasing sense of alienation
toward any earthly surrroundings can achieve this balanced,
rationally guided ecosystem, it is doubtful if we can meaningfully describe any environment as a suitable habitat for people,
much less a truly human one.

<right>
December 1976
</right>

----

Reprinted with permission from *Habitat International* Pergamon Press, Ltd.


FOOTNOTES


[5] E.F. Schumacher, *Small is Beautiful* (Harper & Row, New York, 1974).

[6] To rephrase the title of Tony Mullaney’s two-part article, “If Big is Not Good,
Small is Not Beautiful,” *Peacework* (a New England publication of the
American Friends Service Committee), December 1975 (No. 37) and January
1976 (No. 38). Mullaney’s criticism is very trenchant but, unfortunately,
it overstates the case for centralism and planning in the Third World with
the result that it tends to veer over to the position of Marxian criticisms of
Schumacher.

[7] Murray Bookchin, “Energy, ‘Ecotechnocracy’ and Ecology,” Liberation,
Vol. 19, No. 2 (1975), pp. 29–33, and published elsewhere in this book.

[8] See Chogyam Trungpa, *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* (Shambhala
Berkeley, Ca., 1973).

[9] See C.K. Yang, “The Functional Relationship between Confucian Thought
and Chinese Religion,” in *Chinese Thought and Institutions* (edited by John
K. Fairbanks (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1957), pp. 270–71,
for the larger context of rationalism and Asian philosophy.

[10] R. G. Collingwood, *The Idea of Nature* (Oxford University Press, New York
1945), pp. 29–92.

[11] Plato, *The Laws*, V, 737e, 738a (Trevor J. Saunders translation).

[12] Aristotle, *The Politics*, VIII, 5, 1326b25 (B. Jowett translation).

[13] Aristotle, *The Politics*, VIII, 5, 1326bl5 (H. Racham translation in Loeb
Classical library). The latter translation has been selected, here, for its
greater accuracy.

[14] In Aristotle, this intimacy of association advances beyond mere institutional
relationships to. the level of friendship. “Political friendship is not an
agreement of opinion as it might occur between strangers, or an agreement
on scientific propositions,” observes Eric Vogelin; “it is an agreement
between citizens as to their interests, an agreement on policies and their
execution.” Eric Vogelin, *Plato and Aristotle* (Lousiane State University
Press, Baton Rouge, La., 1957), p. 321.

[15] See Summer Chilton Powell, *The Puritan Village* (Wesleyan University
Press, Middletown, Conn., 1963); Michael Zucherman, Peaceable Kingdoms
(Vintage Books, New York, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge,
*A New England Town* (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1970).

[16] J. J. Rousseau, *The Social Contract* (Modern Library, New York, 1950),
pp. 94–96. “In Greece, all that the people had to do, it did for itself; it was
constantly assembled in the public square,” Rousseau observes. “... the
moment a people allows itself to be represented,” he adds, “it is no longer
free: it no longer exists.”

[17] Kropotkin did not actually model his image of a decentralized society on the
Hellenic *polis*, but rather on the medieval communes. The author owes a
debt to the German radical theorist, the late Josef Weber, who used the
expression “the new or modern *polis*” in personal discussions that date
back to the 1950s.


[18] Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (Benjamin Blom Publishers, New York, 1968 reissue of 1913 edition). An abridged version,
updated by commentaries, has been prepared by Colin Ward and published by Harper & Row, New York, 1974.

[19] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, *The Dialectic of Enlightenment*
(Seabury Press, New York, 1972), pp. 151–52, 155, 166–67. The discussion
is masterful in its profundity and, considering the year in which it was
written (1944), its predictive insights.

[20] Aden and Marjorie Meinel, “A Briefing on Solar Power Farms,” presented
before the Task Force on Energy of the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics, Washington, D.C., 6 March 1972;
Steve Baer, Sunspots (Zomeworks Corp., Albuquerque, N. M., 1975), p. 97;
William E. Heronemus, “The United States Energy Crisis: Some Proposed
Gentle Solutions,” presented before a joint conference of The American
Society of Mechanical Engineers and The Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, West Springfield, Mass., 12 January 1972; R. Buckminister
Fuller: Tetrahedral City, 1966 in Justus Dahinden, *Urban Structures for the Future* (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1972), pp. 162–63; Moshe
Safdie, Beyond Habitat (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

[21] Wilson Clark, *Energy for Survival* (Anchor Books, New York, 1974),
pp. 412–16, 426–27.

[22] E. Al Gutkind, *Community and Environment* (Philosophical Library, New
York, 1954), p. 9. For a lengthy discussion of the distinction between
ecology and environementalism, see Murray Bookchin, “Toward an Ecological Society,” Philosophica, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1974), pp. 73–85. This paper,
originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Michigan in 1973, explores
the concept of “ecotechnology” and “ecocommunity,” terms which the
author coined in the 1960s and which have entered into the vernacular of
the new technologists in forms that have no relation to their original meaning.
The essay appears in this book.

[23] Ted Morgan, “Looking for: Epoch B,” *The New York Times Magazine*,
29 February 1976, p. 32.

[24] *Ibid*.

[25] John Todd (interview) in *What Do We Use For Lifeboats?* published as
part of a collection of interviews by Harper & Row, New York, 1976, p. 76.

[26] Conversations between the author and John Todd of The New Alchemy
Institute and Gil Friend of The Institute of Local Self-Reliance, 5 March 1976.

[27] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, *Lie Besiimmung des Menschen* (1800), translated
by R. M. Chisholm as *The Vocation of Man* (The Bobbs-Merrill Co., New
York, 1956), p. 20.






** Self-Management and the New Technology



Self-management in all its rich and varied meanings has
always been closely wedded to technical developments — often
to an extent that has not received the explicit attention it
deserves. By emphasizing the association between the two, I do
not mean to advance a crude, reductionist theory of technological determinism. People are completely social beings. They
develop values, institutions, and cultural relationships that either
foster or inhibit the evolution of technics. It need hardly be
emphasized that basic technical inventions such as the steam
engine, so vital to capitalist, indeed to early industrial society were
known to the Hellenistic world more than two millenia ago. That
this major source of power was never used as more than a
plaything attests to the enormous hold of ancient values and
culture on the evolution of technics generally and specifically on
eras that were not assimilated to a market-oriented rationality.

But it would be equally crude and in its own way reductionist to deny the extent to which technics, once it is established
in one form or another, contributes to humanity’s definitions and
interpretations of self-management. This is evident today when
self-management is conceived primarily in economic terms such
as ‘workers’ control,” “industrial democracy,” “workers participation,” indeed, even as radical anarchosyndicalist demands for
“*economic* collectivization.
 The fact that this unadorned economic interpretation of self-management has pre-empted other
interpretations of the term, notably forms reminiscent of the
municipal confederations of medieval society, the French revolutionary sections of 1793, and the Paris Commune, will be
discussed later. This much is clear: when we speak of “selfmanagement, today, we usually mean one or another form of
syndicalism. We mean an economic formation that involves the
way in which labour is organized, tools and machines deployed,
and material resources rationally allocated. In short, we mean
technics.

Once we bring technics into the situation, however, we open
the way to a number of paradoxes that cannot be dismissed by
bellicose rhetoric and moral platitudes. If the role of technics in
shaping society and thinking has often been overstated by writers
as disparate in their social views as Marshall MacLuhan and
Jacques Ellul, its influence in forming social institutions and
cultural attitudes cannot be dismissed. The highly economistic
meaning we so often impart of the term “self-management” is
itself damning evidence of the extent to which industrial society
“industrializes” the meaning to terms.[28] The words “self-management” become intellectually dissociated into their components and ideologically opposed to each other. “Management”
tends to pre-empt “self”; administration tends to assume sovereignty over individual autonomy. Owing to the influence of
technocratic values over thinking, self-hood — so crucial to the
meaning of libertarian management in all aspects of life — is
subtly displaced by the virtues of efficient administrative
strategies. Accordingly, “self-management” is increasingly promoted for functional rather than liberatory reasons, even by the
most committed syndicalists. We are urged to think that small is
beautiful” because it yields the conservation of “energy” rather
than a human scale that renders society comprehensible and
controllable by all. Self-activity and self-management are seen as
aspects of industrial logistics that resolve economic and technical
problems rather than moral and social ones. Thus the very
technocratic society that denies selfhood to humanity establishes
the terms of discourse for those who wish to replace it by a
libertarian one. It reaches into the sensibility of its most radical
opponents by establishing the parameters for their critique and
practice, in short, by “industrializing” syndicalism.



[28] Consider the degree to which cybernetics has entered into commonplace
linguistic usage, for example, as evidence of this development. We no longer ask
for an interlocutor’s “advice” but for his or her “feedback” and we no longer
engage in a “dialogue” but solicit an individual’s “input.” This sinister invasion of
the world of “logos,” in its wide-ranging meaning as speech and reason, by the
electronic terminology of modern technocracy represents not only the subversion
of human interaction at every level of social experience but of personality itself as
an organic and developmental phenomenon. LaMettrie’s
*Man a Machine* enters
his modern estate as a cybernetic system — not merely in his physical attributes
but in his very subjectivity.

No less paradoxical is the limited nature of “self-management”
itself when it leaves its technical premises unquestioned. Can we
comfortably assume that collectivized enterprises controlled by
workers have changed the social, cultural, and intellectual status
of workers to a decisive degree? Do factories, mines and large-
scale agricultural enterprises become domains of freedom because their operations are now managed — however anarchis-
tically — by workers’ collectives ? By eliminating economic exploitation have we actually eliminated social domination? By removing class rule have we removed hierarchical rule? To state
the issue bluntly: can present-day technics remain substantially
the way it is while the men and women who operate it are
expected to undergo significant transformation as human
beings?

Here, notions such as “workers’ control,” “industrial democracy,” and “workers’ participation” face the challenge of an
exploitative technics in its sharpest form. Perhaps no more
compelling argument has been advanced against syndicalist
notions of economic organization than the fact that modern
technology is intrinsically authoritarian. Such arguments, as we
shall see, come not merely from overtly bourgeois ideologists but
from seemingly “radical” ones as well. What underpins these
arguments from all parts of the political spectrum is a shared
assumption that technics is socially neutral. The functional view
that technics is merely the instrumental means for humanity’s
“metabolism” with nature is broadly accepted as given. That
factories are the loci of authority is reduced to a “natural fact” —
in short, a fact beyond the purview of ethics and social
consideration.

Tragically, when ethical views of technics are removed from
their historic and social context, the functional view tends to
prevail for precisely the same reason that the ethical view fails —
for both views assume that technology is always a matter of mere
design, a “given” that is either efficient or not. Only recently have
we begun to see a popular questioning of technics as merely
“given,” notably with respect to nuclear power installations. The
notion that even the “peaceful atom” is *intrinsically* a “demonic
atom” has become very widespread as a result of the Three-Mile-
Island meltdown at Harrisburg. What is perhaps most significant
about this nuclear “incident” is that critics of nuclear power have
focused public attention on new, ecologically sound, and implicitly more *humanistic* technologies that await development and
application. The distinction between “good” and “bad” technics — that is, an *ethical* evaluation of technical development —
has taken root on a scale that is unknown at any time in the past
since the early Industrial Revolution.

What I propose to emphasize, here, is the need for proponents of self-management to deal with technics in the same
*ethical* context that anti-nuclear groups deal with energy resources. I propose to ask if the factory, mine, and modern
agricultural enterprises can legitimately be regarded as an
acceptable arena for a libertarian concept of self-management —
and if not, what alternatives exist that can legitimate that concept
on a new ethical, social, and cultural level. This responsibility
becomes all the more crucial today because “self-management”
has increasingly been denatured to mean a mere technical
problem in industrial management, one that renders it palatable
to sophisticated sections of the bourgeoisie and to neo-Marxian
tendencies. “Workers’ control” may even become fashionable
management strategy as long as workers consent to remain
merely workers. Their “decisions” may be viewed as desirable —
indeed, “productive” — if they contribute to the technical rationalization of industrial operations, however “radical” the rhetoric
and colourful the institutions within which they “manage”
industry.

Yet if self-management remains no more than another form of
management of existing forms of technics; if toil is socialized or
collectivized rather than transmuted into meaningful self-expression — and if these feeble, indeed, insidious, modifications of
the material conditions of life are equated with “freedom” —
self-management becomes a hollow goal. Viewed from this
perspective, the very concept of self-management requires reexamination if freedom is itself to be rescued from the semantics
of technocracy. We would do well to examine some basic
conceptions of “self” and “management” — particularly in relation to technological development — before the two words are
recoupled again as a liberatory social ideal.

Selfhood has its authentic origins in the Hellenic notion of
*autonomia*, of “self-rule.” The word “rule” deserves emphasis.
That *autonomia* or “autonomy” has come, in our own time, to
mean merely “independence” is evidence of our gross simplification of terms that often had a rich ethical meaning in premarket eras. Greek “selfhood” was intimately associated with
rule, *social* rule, the capacity of the individual to directly
participate in governing society even before he could manage his
economic affairs. The very term “economics,” in fact, denoted
the management of the household — the oikos — rather than
society, a somewhat inferior, even if necessary, activity by
comparison with participation in the community or *polis*.

Selfhood, I would claim, was thus associated with individual claims *to power within society* rather than the management of
material life. To be sure, the ability to exercise power within
society — and thereby to be an *individual*, a “self” — presupposed
the leisure and material freedom afforded by a well-managed
household. But once this *oikos* was granted, “selfhood” presupposed considerably more, and these presuppositions are
tremendously significant for our own age, when the self has
become grossly powerless and individuality has become little
more than a euphemism for egotism.

To begin with, selfhood implied the recognition of individual
competence. Autonomia or “self-rule” would have been completely meaningless if the fraternity of selves that composed the
Hellenic *polis* (notably, the Athenian democracy) was not
constituted of men of strong character who could discharge the
formidable responsibilities of “rule.” The *polis*, in short, rested on
the premise that its citizens could be entrusted with “power”
because they possessed the personal capacity to use power in a
trustworthy fashion. The education of citizens into rule was
therefore an education into personal competence, intelligence,
moral probity, and social commitment. The *ecclesia* of Athens, a
popular assembly of the citizen body that met at least forty times
a year, was the testing ground of this education into self-rule; the
*agora*, the public square where Athenians transacted almost
every aspect of their affairs, was its authentic school. Selfhood, in
effect, originated first and foremost in a politics of personality, not
in processes of production.[29] It is almost meaningless etymologically to dissociate the word “self” from the capacity to
exercise control over social life, to “rule” in the Greek sense of
the term. Denied its characterological meaning — its connotations of personal fortitude and moral probity — selfhood dissolves into mere “egohood,” that hollow, often neurotic shell of
human personality that lies strewn amidst the wastes of bourgeois society like the debris of its industrial operations.

[29] It should be evident to the reader that I use the word “politics” in the Hellenic
meaning of the terms, as the administration of the *polis*, not in any electoral sense.
The administration of the *polis* was seen by the Athenians as a continual educative
process as well as a vital social activity in which each citizen was expected to
participate.

To divest selfhood of these personal traits is to be irresponsibly
footloose with any term to which the word “self” is appended.
“Self-activity,” to use another common expression, implies the
activation of these strong character traits in social processes. It,
too, rests on the demanding foundations of a politics of personality that is educative of the individual, formative of his or her
capacity to intervene and directly alter social events, and, carried
into action itself, to enter into a shared social practice. Without
the personal judgement, moral force, will, and sensibility to be
active in this *full* and *direct* sense of the term, such a self would
atrophy and its activity would be reduced to a relationship based
on obedience and command. Self-activity, in this sense, can only
be direct action. But direct action, like rule, can only be
understood as the predicates of a self that is engaged in the social
processes these terms denote. Self, the education toward
selfhood, and the exercise of selfhood — almost as a daily
gymnastic in the making of individuality — is an end in itself,, the
culmination of what we so flippantly call “self-actualization.

Anarchist organization and its policy of direct action is, by
definition, the educational instrument for achieving these time-
honoured goals. It is the *agora*, as it were, for a politics of
personality. The “affinity group” form, at its best, is a unique form
of consociation based on a mutual recognition of competence in
all its members or, at least, the need to attain competence. Where
such groups cease to educate toward this goal, they become
mere euphemisms. Worse, they “produce militants rather than
anarchists, subordinates rather than selves. Optimally, the
anarchist affinity group is an ethical union of free, morally strong
individuals who can directly participate in consensual rule
because they are competent and live in a mutual recognition of
each other’s competence. Only when they have attained this
condition and thereby sufficiently revolutionized *themselves* as
selves can they profess to be revolutionaries — to be the citizens
of a future libertarian society.

I have dwelt upon these aspects of the term “self” — and only
space prevents me from dealing with it in the detail it deserves —
because it has become the weakest link in the concept of “selfmanagement.” Until such selves are minimally attained, selfmanagement becomes a contradiction in terms. Self-management without the “self” that is expected to engage in this
“managing,” in fact, turns into its very opposite: hierarchy based
on obedience and command. The abolition of class rule in no way
challenges the existence of such hierarchical relations. They may
exist within the family between sex and age groups, among
disparate ethnic groups, within bureaucracies and in administrative social groups that profess to be executing the policies of
a libertarian organization or a libertarian society. There is no way
to immunize any social formation, even the most dedicated
anarchist groups, from hierarchical relations except through the
wisdom of “self-consciousness” that comes from the “self-
actualization” of the individual’s potentiality for selfhood. This
has been the message of western philosophy from Socrates to
Hegel. Its plea for wisdom and self-consciousness as the sole
guide to truth and insight remains even more compelling today
than it did in earlier, more articulated social eras.

Before turning to the challenge posed by technics in the
process of “self-formation,” it is important to remember that self-
rule — *autonomia* — historically precedes the modern notion of
“self-management.” Ironically, the fact that *autonomia* denotes
“independence” with its implications of a free-wheeling materialistic bourgeois ego rather than a socially involved individual is
significant. Self-rule applies to society as a whole, not merely to
the economy. Hellenic selfhood found its fullest expression in the
*polis* rather than the oikos , in the social community rather than
the technical. Once we cross the threshold of history, selfmanagement is the management of villages, neighbourhoods,
towns, and cities. The technical sphere of life is conspicuously
secondary to the social. In the two revolutions that open the
modern era of secular politics — the American and French —
self-management emerges in the libertarian town meetings that
swept from Boston to Charleston and the popular sections that
assembled in Parisian *quatiers*. The intensely *civic* nature of selfmanagement stands in marked contrast to its crassly *economic*
nature today. It would be redundant, given Kropotkins impressive work in this field, to explore earlier social periods for
evidence of this juxtaposition or enter into additional details. The
fact remains that self-management had a broader meaning in
libertarian practice than it has at the present time.

Here, technics must be assigned a greater role in producing
this change than it ordinarily receives. The tool-using artisan
nature of pre-capitalist societies always provided a material space
for a subterranean libertarian development, even when politically
centralized states had attained a considerable degree of growth.
Beneath the imperial institutions of European and Asian states lay
the clannic, village, and guild systems of consociation that neither
army nor tax farmer could effectively demolish. Both Marx and
Kropotkin include classic descriptions of this archaic social
network — an ancient, seemingly faceless world impervious to
change or destruction. The Hellenic *polis* and the Christian
congregation added the rich tints of individuality — of selfhood
and self-consciousness — to this tapestry until self-management
acquired the resplendent colours of a highly individuated world.
In the urban democracies of central Europe and Italy, as in the
*polis* of the Greek promontory, municipal self-management in
towns scaled to comprehensible human dimensions reached a
colourful, if brief, effloresence in the fullest sense of the term. The
norms of a socially committed individualism were established that
were to haunt the American and French revolutions centuries
later and define the most advanced concepts of self and
management into our own time.

There can be no return to these periods — either socially or
technically. Their limits are only too clear to excuse an atavistic
yearning for the past. But the social and technical forces that
were to destroy them are even more transitory than we tend to
believe. I will focus, here, on the technical dimension to the
exclusion of the institutional. Of the technical changes that
separate our own era from past ones, no single “device” was
more important than the least “mechanical” of all — the factory.
At the risk of casting all caution to the winds, I will aver that
neither Watt’s steam engine nor Bessemer’s steel furnace was
more significant than the simple process of rationalizing labour
into an industrial engine for the production of commodities.
Machinery, in the conventional sense of the term, heightened this
process vastly — but the systematic rationalization of labour to
serve labour in ever-specialized tasks totally demolished the
technical structure of self-managed societies and ultimately of
workmanship — the “selfhood” of the economic realm.

We must pause to weigh the meaning of these remarks.
Artisanship relies on skill and a surprisingly small toolkit. Skill, in
fact, is its real premise: training and long experience in a rich
variety of expressive, often artistic tasks; highly purposeful, often
intellectual activity; dexterity of fingers and coordination of body;
the challenge of a rich variety of stimuli and subtle expressions of
self. Its background is the work song, its spirituality the pleasure
of articulating in raw materials their own latent possibilities for
acquiring a pleasing and useful form. Not surprisingly, Plato’s
deity is literally a craftsman who imprints the forms on matter.
The presuppositions that support these artisan traits are obvious — a roundedness and fullness of personal virtuosity that is
ethical, spiritual, and esthetic as well as technical. True craftsmanship is loving work, not onerous toil. It arouses the senses,
not dulls them. It adds dignity to humanity, not demeans it. It
gives free range to the spirit, not aborts it. Within the technical
sphere it is the expression of selfhood *par excellence* — of
individuation, consciousness, and freedom. These words dance
throughout every account of well-crafted objects and artistic
works.

The factory worker lives merely on the memory of such traits.
The din of the factory drowns out every thought, not to speak of
any song; the division of labour denies the worker any relationship to the commodity; the rationalization of labour dulls his or
her senses and exhausts his or her body. There is no room
whatever for any of the artisan’s modes of expression — from
artistry to spirituality — other than an interaction with objects
that reduces the worker to a mere object. The distinction
between artisan and worker hardly requires elucidation. But two
significant facts stand out that turn the transformation from craft
to factory into a social and characterological disaster. The first
fact is the dehumanization of the worker into a mass being; the
second is the worker’s reduction into a hierarchical being.

There is a certain significance in the fact that this devolution of the artisan into a mere toiler was adduced by Marx and
Engels as evidence of the proletariat’s intrinsically revolutionary
traits. And it is precisely in this gross misjudgment of the
proletariat’s destiny that syndicalism often follows in the wake of
Marxism. Both ideologies share the notion that the factory is the
“school” of revolution (in the case of syndicalism, of social
reconstruction) rather than its undoing. Both share a common
commitment to the factory’s structural role as a source of social
mobilization.

For better or worse, Marx and Engels express these views
more clearly than syndicalist — and anarchosyndicalist — theorists. Conceived as a mass being or a class being, Marx’s
proletariat becomes a mere instrument of history. Its very
depersonalization into a category of political economy ironically frees it of every human trait but need, “urgent, no longer
disguisable, absolutely imperative *need*...” As pure “class” or
social “agent,” comparable to the pure, disenchanted social
world produced by capitalism, it has no *personal* will but only a
*historical* one. It is an instrument of history in the strictest sense
of the term. Thus, to Marx, “The question is not what this or that
proletarian, or even the whole proletariat considers as its aim.
The question is *what the proletariat is*, and what, consequent on
that being , it will be compelled to do.”

Here, being is separated from person, action from will, social
activity from selfhood. Indeed, it is the very divestiture of the
proletariat’s selfhood — its dehumanization — that gives it the
quality of a “universal” social agent, one that gives it almost
transcendental social qualities. My quotations, taken from
*The Holy Family* of the early 1840s, were to permeate Marx’s writings
for decades to follow. Without bearing them in mind during
readings of Marx in his later works, these works become


unintelligible — all rhetoric about the moral superiority of the
proletariat notwithstanding to the contrary.

Accordingly, it is not surprising to find that for Marx the factory
provides a virtually ecclesiastical arena for the schooling of this
social “agent.” Here, technics functions not only as a means for
humanity s metabolism with nature but for humanity’s metabolism with itself. Together with the centralization of industry
through competition and expropriation, “the mass of misery,
oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but
with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class
constantly increasing in numbers, and <em>trained, united and
organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of
production</em>,” declares Marx in the closing pages of volume one of
Capital. “The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the
mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it...
This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private
property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (My
emphasis — M.B.)

The importance of these famous lines by Marx lies in the
revolutionary function they assign to the factory, its role in
training, uniting, and organizing the proletariat “by the very
mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” The factory,
one might very well say, almost “fabricates” revolution with the
same impersonality that it “fabricates” commodities. But even
more significant is the fact that is “fabricates” the proletariat itself.
This specific view is intrinsic to syndicalism as well. Paradoxically,
the factory structure in both cases is not merely a technical
structure; it is also a social structure. Marx tends to disdain it
historically as a domain of necessity, one whose invasion into life
must ultimately be attenuated by the free-time required for
communism. Syndicalism hypostasizes this structure; it forms
the contours for a libertarian society. Both, however, underscore
its significance as a technical arena for social organization,
whether it be for the proletariat as a class or for society as a
whole.

We arrive at the troubling fact that this structure, far from
functioning as a force for social change, actually functions as a
force for social regression. Marxism and syndicalism alike, by
virtue of their commitment to the factory as a revolutionary social
arena, must recast self-management to mean the industrial
management of the self. For Marxism this poses no problem.
Selfhood can never exist within the factory walls. The factory
serves not only to mobilize and train the proletariat but to
dehumanize it. Freedom is to be found not within the factory but
rather outside it. For freedom “cannot consist of anything else
but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers,
regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under
their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some
blind power...” Marx observes in volume three of *Capital*. “But it
always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that
development of human power, which is its own end, the true
realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that
realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day
is its fundamental premise.”

Obviously, the factory conceived as a “realm of necessity”
requires no need for self-management. Indeed, it is the very
antithesis of a school for self-formation like the agora and the
Hellenic notion of education. For contemporary Marxists to ape
their syndicalist opponents by demanding “workers’ control” of
industry is a travesty of the very spirit of Marx’s concept of
freedom. It is to demean a great thinker in his own name on terms
that are completely alien to his ideas. Appropriately, Engels, in his
essay “On Authority,” draws Marx’s critique of anarchism to its
harshest conclusions precisely on the basis of factory operations.
Authority, conceived as “the imposition of the will of another
upon ours,” as “subordination,” is unavoidable in any industrial
society, including communism. It is a *natural* fact of modern
technics, as indispensable (in Engels’ view) as the factory itself.
Engels then proceeds to detail this view against the anarchists
with the philistine exactitude of the Victorian mind. Coordination of industrial operations presupposes subordination to
command; indeed, to the “despotism” of automatic machinery
and the “necessity of authority,... of *imperious* authority” to
managerial command. (My emphasis — M.B.) Engels never fails
us in our narrowest prejudices on this score. He deftly skips from
the commanding role of cotton-spinning machinery to the
“instantaneous and absolute obedience” required by the captain
of a ship. Coordination is dutifully confused with command,
organization with hierarchy, agreement with domination — indeed, “imperious” domination.

What is more interesting than the fallacies of Engels’ essay is its
insidious truths. The factory is, in fact, a realm of necessity —
not a realm of freedom. It is a school for hierarchy, for obedience
and command, not for a liberatory revolution. It reproduces the
servility of the proletariat and undermines its selfhood, its
capacity to transcend need. Accordingly, insofar as self-management, self-activity, and selfhood are the very essence of the
“realm of freedom,” they must be denied at the “material base” of
society while they are presumably affirmed in its “superstructure” — at least as long as the factory and the technics of capitalist
production are conceived *merely* as technics, as natural facts of
production.

On the other hand, viewed as a social arena, we must further
conceive that this dehumanized realm of necessity — riddled by
“imperious authority” — can somehow enlarge the class consciousness of a dehumanized working being into a universal
social consciousness; that this being, divested of all selfhood in its
daily life of toil can recover the social commitment and competence puresupposed by a sweeping social revolution and a truly
free society based on self-management in the broadest sense of
the term. Finally, we must conceive that this free society can
remove hierarchy in one realm while “imperiously” fostering it in
another, perhaps more basic one. Carried to its fullest logic, the
paradox assumes absurd proportions. Hierarchy, like overalls,
becomes a garment that one discards in the “realm of freedom”
only to don it again in the “realm of necessity.” Like a see saw,
freedom rises and falls at the point where we place our social
fulcrum — possibly at the center of the plank in one “stage” of
history, closer to one end or another at other “stages, but in any
event strictly measurable by the length of the “working day.”

Syndicalism shares this fatal paradox no less than Marxism.
Its redeeming virtue lies in its implicit awareness — virtually
explicit in the works of Charles Fourier — that technics must be
divested of its hierarchical and joyless character if society is to be
freed of these burdens. With syndicalism, however, this awareness is often warped by its acceptance of the factory as the
infrastructure of the new society within the old, as a model for
working class organization, and as a school for the humanization of the proletariat and its mobilization as a revolutionary
social force. Hence, technics raises a startling dilemma for
libertarian concepts of self-management. From what source are
workers — indeed, all dominated people such as women, young
and elderly people, ethnic groups, and cultural communities —
to acquire the subjectivity that fosters selfhood? What technologies can supplant the hierarchical mobilization of labour into
factories? And finally, what constitutes “management” that
involves the fostering of authentic competence, moral probity,
and wisdom ?

The answer to each of these questions would require a sizable
work in itself. In this article, I will confine myself in cursory fashion
to the second question: the new, potentially non-hierarchical
technologies that could supplant the factory as the technics for a
libertarian society — one which I identify with anarchocom-
munism.

Technics is no more a “natural fact” than our chemically
treated food crops and our synthetically fermented beverages.
Even Marx is obliged to treat it in a social context when he sees it
in term of its class functions. Far from being a “given,” it is
potentially the most malleable of humanity’s modes of “metabolizing” with nature. The institutions, values, and cultural shibboleths with which humans engage in a “metabolic” relationship
with the natural world are often less amenable to change than the
tools and machines that give them material tangibility. Their
“primacy” over social relations, technological determinists notwithstanding to the contrary, is mythic. They are immersed in a
social world of human intentions, needs, wills, and interactions.

The factory exhibits this social dimension with a vengeance. Its
appearance in the world was determined not by strictly mechanical factors but organic ones. It was a means for *rationalizing*
labour, not for *implementing* labour with tools. Once this fact is
fully weighed, the factory ceases to enjoy the autonomy it
acquires from Engels and his acolytes. It is a “realm of necessity”
only insofar as a need remains for its existence. But this need is
not strictly technical; to the contrary, it is largely social. The
factory is the realm of hierarchy and domination, not the
battleground of “man’s” conflict with nature. Once its functions


as an instrument of human domination are questioned, we can
reasonably ask how valid is the “need” for its perpetuation. By the
same token, money, weapons, and nuclear power plants are
instruments of a society gone mad. Once the insanity of society is
lifted, we can also ask how valid is the “need” for their
perpetuation. “Need” itself is a socially conditioned phenomenon — a fact not unknown to Marx by any means — that may be
intrinsically rational or irrational. The <em>“realm of necessity” thus
has highly elastic, perhaps ineffable boundaries; in fact, it is as
“necessary” socially as the vision one has of freedom. To
separate one from the other inexorably is sheer ideology, for it
may well be that freedom does not “base” itself on the “realm of
necessity” but really determines it.</em>

To Fourier, this conclusion was implicit in the best lines of his
writings. The two “realms” of necessity and freedom were
resynthesized into a higher level of societal behavior and values in
which joy, creativity, and pleasure were ends in themselves.
Freedom had subsumed necessity and joy has subsumed toil. But
such sweeping notions cannot be advanced abstractly. They
must be established concretely — or else the rich possibilities of
reality become elusive categories that deny the claims of
imagination. Hence the enormous power of utopian thinking at its
best: the ability to show almost visually what so often remains the
abstractions of competing ideologies. Consider concretely, indeed utopistically, the alternatives that may turn arduous work
into festive play: a harvest that is marked by dancing, feasting,
singing, and loving contrasted with the monotony of gang labour
or deadening mechanization. One form of harvesting reinforces
community; the other, isolation and a sense of oppression. The
same task performed esthetics may be a work of art; performed
under the lash of domination, it becomes an ignominious burden.
The identical task under conditions of freedom is an esthetic experience; under conditions of domination, it becomes
onerous toil. To assume that every arduous task must be a
tormenting one is a social judgement that is determined by the
social structure itself, not simply the technical conditions of
work. The employer who demands silence from his employees is,
in fact, an employer. The same work may be performed playfully,
creatively, imaginatively, even artistically in the absence of social
constraints that identify responsability with renunciation and
efficiency with sobriety.

Elsewhere, I have assessed and inventoried the technical
alternatives that are available to existing forms of technology.[30]
Since this assessment, there is much I would add and much I
would reject in the technical aspects of my account. Perhaps
more important than any details which can now be found in such
outstanding books like *Radical Technology* by British anarchists
are the principles I would want to emphasize here. A new
technology is emerging — a technology no less significant for the
future than the factory is for the present. Potentially, it lends itself
to a sifting of existing technics in terms of their ecological integrity
and their impact on human freedom. On its own terms, it can be a
highly decentralized technics that is human in scale, simple in
construction, and naturalistic in orientation. It can acquire its
energy from the sun and wind, from recycled wastes and
replenishable “resources” such as timber. It affords the possibility
of making food cultivation into a spiritually and materially
rewarding form of gardening. It is restorative of the environment
and, perhaps more significantly, of personal and communal
autonomy.

[30] See “Toward a Liberatory Technology” in my *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (Black
Rose Books, 1977)


This new technology may rightly be called a “people’s technology.” The French-intensive community gardens spontaneously opened by ghetto dwellers in gutted neighbourhoods of New
York, the hand-crafted solar panels that are gradually appearing
on the rooftops of tenements, the small windmills that have been
reared aloft beside them to generale electric power — all, taken
together, express new initiatives by ordinarily passive communities to reclaim control over the material conditions of their lives.
What counts is not whether a food cooperative can replace a
giant supermarket or a community garden the produce supplied
by agribusiness or a wind-powered generator the electricity
supplied by a smothering public utility. The cooperatives, gardens, and windmills are the technical *symbols* of a resurgence of
selfhood that is ordinarly denied to the ghetto “masses” and a
growing sense of competence that is ordinarily denied to a client
citizenry. The factory image of the city, even of citizenship, has
already gone so far in repressing the smallest sparks of public life
that technical and institutional alternatives may be able to go far
enough to restore a sense of self-management in its traditional
civic forms.

If one grants the silence that exists in factories today, the
most important voices for self-management in any popular sense
are heard from the neighbourhoods of municipalities (perhaps its
most traditional source), from feminist and ecological movements, from “masses” that have acquired a new stake in
personal, cultural, sexual, and civic autonomy. The new technology to which I have alluded has not initiated this development. If anything, it may well be the result of a new sensibility of
selfhood and competence that an overbearing technocratic
society has produced as a result of its own repressive excesses.
Solar and wind power and community gardens are vastly older
technical strategies than the factory. That they have been revived
as a people’s technology suggests a driving need to disengage
from a social system whose greatest weakness and strength is its
all-encompassing nature. But these alternative technics provide a
new, perhaps historic context for social change. They impart the
*tangible* possibility for a recovery of self-management with all the
rich nuances of the past, albeit without a return to the past. Their
concreteness makes them thoroughly utopian, even realistically
rather than visionary. Finally, as educative devices for community, they tend to create a politics of personality that compares
only with the anarchist “affinity group” as an educative arena.

Alternatives are today in conflict on a scale comparable only to
the breakdown of traditional society on the eve of the capitalist
era. The same new technology can also become a corporate
technology — the bases for solar power utilities, space satellites,
and an “organic” agribusiness comparable only to the highly
chemicalized one so prevalent today. The decentralized gardens,
solar panels, windmills, and recycling centers can be centralized,
industrialized, and structured along rationalized hierarchical
lines. Neither Marxism nor syndicalism can comprehend the
nature of these alternatives, much less their subtle implications.
Yet rarely has there been a greater need for theoretical insight
into the possibilities that lie before us, indeed, the historically new
directions which humanity may follow. In the absence of a
libertarian interpretation of these directions, of a libertarian
*consciousness* that articulates the logic of this new technical
framework, we may well witness the integration of a people s
technology into a managerial and technocratic society. In which
case, we will have been reduced like a Greek chorus to
lamentations and incantations to a fate that leaves the future
predetermined and cruelly destined to efface the entire human
experience. This may be a heroic posture — but it is also a futile
one.

<right>
June 1979
</right>


** The Myth of City Planning


City planning today lives within the tension of an historic
contradiction: the idealization of urbanity as the *summum bonum* of social life and the crass realities of urban decay. In
theory, at least, the city is revered as the authentic domain of
culture, the strictly man-made social substance from which
humanity fashions the essential achievements of consociation. In
this tradition, the city is viewed as society distinguished from
nature, territory from kinship, rationality from custom and myth
the civic compact of individuals from the archaic group cemented
by the blood oath. Ideally conceived, the city is the arena for a
mode of human propinquity that is freed from the deadening grip
of custom, irrationality, the vicissitudes of natural contingency; in
sum, the social domain in which the sovereign citizen is free to
fashion her or his selfhood and personal destiny. Herein lies the
utopian content of urban theory; and in truth, from an historic
perspective, it would be difficult to dispute Max Horkheimer’s
assertion that the “fortunes of the individual have always been
bound up with the development of urban society. The city dweller
is the individual *par excellence*.”[31]

Yet contemporary urban reality presents an entirely different
picture. Today, urban history at its best grins scornfully at the
modern city, and its ideals, tarnished beyond recognition, lie
buried in the rubble of their own high precepts. No longer is the
city nature domesticated, the arena of unfettered human propinquity, the space for individuality and rationality. The modern city
reverts beyond even the archaic blood group to a herd territory of
alienated humanity and to all that is demonic in human society.

I he city in our time is the secular altar on which propinquity and
community are sacrificed to a lonely anonymity and privatized
atomization; its culture is the debased creature of commodity
production and the advertising agency, not the gathered wisdom
of the mind; and its claims to freedom and individuality are
mocked by the institutionalized manipulation of unknowing
masses among whom crass egotism is the last residue of the
selfhood that once formed the city’s most precious human goals.
Even the city’s form — or lack of form — bespeaks the dissolution of its civic integrity. To say with Marx that the modern city
urbanizes the land is testimony not so much to its dominance as
to its loss of identity. For the city, by the very nature of the case,
disappears when it becomes the whole, when it lacks the
specificity provided by differentiation and delineability of form.

Caught in the contradiction between ideal and real, city
planning emerges not merely as ideology but as myth. The myth
originates in the very term “city planning,” in the nomenclature
and pedigree which this seeming discipline appropriates for itself.
Juxtaposed to the megalopolis, to the formless urbanity that
sprawls across the land and devours it, the word “city” has
already become a euphemism, an erstwhile reality digested by
what Lewis Mumford so justly calls the “anti-city.” In dealing with
the putative as fact, city planning enthrones the shadow of the
real city in a futile effort to stake out a legacy to what is forever
gone. Even more basely, it subtly devalues this memory in the
very act of invoking it, for if the shadow must be presented as the
real, the real must be degraded. Accordingly, city planning
reduces all that is vital in the traditional city, including the ideal
itself, to a deadening caricature — the megalopolis as “city, the
non-city as the representation of its very antithesis. All the high
standards of urbanity, as these have been developed over the
centuries, are degraded to establish a false continuity between
past and present, to offer up the death of the city as the token of
its life.

The word “planning” merely compounds this grotesque act of
violation. To the modern mind, “planning” implies rationality, a
conceptual purposiveness that brings order to disorder, that
reorganizes chance and contingency into humanly meaningful
design. Behind the seeming rationality imparted to this word lies
an inherent social irrationality. Under capitalism, “planning” is
basically the conscious organization of scarcity amidst abundance, the attempt to impose a social nexus of want, denial, and
toil on a technological system that, potentially at least, could
remove all pf these dehumanizing conditions from social life.
Thus, “planning” emerges not only as the validation of the
given — as opposed to revolution — but as the rationalization of
the irrational. City planning does not escape from the contradictory nature of contemporary social planning as a whole. To the
contrary, it is the application of rational technique to urbanity
gone mad, the effort systematically to piece together a fragmentation that constitutes the very law of life of modern urbanity.
Reinforcing the myth that the megalopolis is a city is the myth that
planning can transcend its unquestioned social premises, that
technique is a value in itself apart from the ends to which it is
captive.

The critique of city planning can be true to itself only if it
becomes a totalistic process of demystification, if it reaches into
the social whole that yields the negation of the city. Its point of
departure cannot be the techniques which the planner tries to
place in the forefront of the discussion, a procedure which retains
the illusory notion that design can be a substitute for the basic
processes of social life. Critique must scrupulously examine the
hidden premises which urban design assimilates. Accordingly,
the megalopolis can no longer be examined in separation from the
larger context of social development and the emergence of its
urban ideals. To treat the city as an autonomous entity, apart
from the social conditions which produce it, is to participate in the
city planner’s typical reification of urbanity, to isolate and
objectify a habitat that is itself contingent and formed by other
factors. Behind the physical structure of the city lies the social
community its workaday life, values, culture, familial ties, class
relations, and personal bonds. To fail to consider how this hidden
dimension of urbanity forms the structure of the city is as
valueless, indeed misleading, as to ignore the role of the structure
in reinforcing or undermining the social community. As a design
isolate, the city is nothing but an archeological artifact; as the
expression of a social community, it could well sum up the totality
of a society’s life processes.

These seemingly obvious considerations require emphasis
because city planning is cursed by the nature of its origins: it
usually emerges as a distinct discipline when the city has already
become problematical. Before the city acquires a structural
consciousness of itself as the unique object of self-study, its
design and development are invariably functions of social processes other than urbanism. Not surprisingly, city planning wears
a mien of introspection rather than innovation, all its futuristic
pretensions aside. The problematically given predetermines the
elaboration of the planner’s techniques and designs. City planning, in effect, tries to “solve” problems, not remove them. It
thereby retains the status quo in its solutions even when it seems
most occupied in altering the urban structure, hence the
mystifying role its ideology plays in modern social life. Critique
must puncture this myth — not by denying the validity of design,
but by relating it critically and in a revolutionary fashion to the
social conditions of life.

Perhaps the first step in formulating a critique of city planning is
to recover some sense of the urban tradition at its best, a tradition
against which we can compare the thrust of contemporary
planning and urban development. Without some notion of what
was achieved by the city in the past, we tend to lose our
perspective toward the extent to which it has declined in the
present. This is not to say that any specific early city forms a
paradigm on which we must model our own urban future; merely,
that certain high standards were achieved and formulated that
are valuable in themselves and which we may usefully regard as
criteria for judging the direction that urban society has followed in
our own time. A “model city” that might have existed prior to the
modern city is a fiction, yet examples exist in the past that have an
imperishable value of their own, examples which comprise, by
their mere existence, a devastating critique of the degradation
that afflicts contemporary cities.

What obviously makes urban space unique is that it provides a
strictly human basis for association. Economic and social life
ceases to depend exclusively on a sexual division of labour and
kinship ties — the biological matrix of social life that segregates
the labour process according to brute physical capacities and
views the stranger as enemy — but rather is organized along
territorial lines that open the possibility for social life as a function
of self-worth and uniquely individual capacities, thereby establishing the basis for a community that is properly human and
social. This development was a long and complex process of
disengagement from specifically non-urban, indeed, highly biologically conditioned social organisms, a slow crystallization of
civil society out of the family, clan, and tribe based on blood ties
and a sexual division of labour. In this respect, the early cities with
which we are most familiar were not authentically urban entities.
Like Tenochtitlan in Indian Amercia, the city was essentially the
religious and administrative center of a clan and tribal society,
hierarchical, to be sure, and drifting toward bureaucratic modes
of civic management, but nevertheless anchored in archaic
naturalistic forms of social organization and based materially on a
rural economy with dominant strata whose primary social
interests were agrarian in character.

Looking toward the centers of our own civilization, this
essentially agrarian type of city persists as the prehistory of urban
society for thousands of years in the Near East and Asia. It
becomes increasingly elaborated into administrative hierarchies
and a more complex division of labour, without changing its
intrinsically rural character. The city may divest the clan of any
administrative function in civic management; it may collect
thousands of artisans, priests, bureaucrats, nobles, and soldiers
within its confines; indeed, it may resemble the modern city
structurally and in terms of its size and density of population. Yet
this kind of city belongs to urban prehistory in the sense that its
social wealth consists primarily of agricultural surpluses and its
rulers are defined by their roots in the countryside rather than the
town. Accordingly, its internal market is poorly developed and its
merchant class is a subordinated stratum in the service of
agrarian rulers. The countryside dominates the town just as
thousands of years later, in our own era, the town will dominate
the countryside. In their monumental architectural forms these
cities express the power of agrarian interests. Their civic
structure and social relations, reinforced by religious precepts
and tradition, imply the denial of individuality, indeed, the
incapacity of the individual to find self-expression in a psychological space of her or his own, apart from the suzerainty of the
supreme ruler. The ruler’s sole claim to personality as the
embodiment of the archaic communal conditions of life effaces
the right of personality to the obedient mass below. Hegel quite
appropriately describes the “gorgeous edifices” of this era as the
expressions of a world “in which we find all rational ordinances
and arrangements, but in such a way, that individuals remain as
mere accidents.” These ordinances and arrangements “revolve
round a centre, round the sovereign, who, as patriarch — not as
despot in the sense of the Roman Imperial Constitution — stands
at the head.” As Hegel goes on to note: “The glory of Oriental
conception is the One Individual as that substantial being to
which all belongs, so that no other individual has a separate
existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom.”[32]

Not until we arrive at the Hellenic *polis* do we find a mode of
civic life that acquires its own mainsprings of development and an
urban organism that acknowledges the individuality of all its
citizens, indeed, that promotes individuality without denying its
base in an integrated social community. I do not want to
romanticize or idealize the *polis*. The Hellenic city was reared in
no small measure on the harsh confinement of women to the
domestic sphere and its degradingly mundane chores. The
leisure that made it possible for the citizen to fully participate in
civic affairs depended partly upon slave labour. The *polis* was also
a class society even within the citizen body itself, which conferred
material benefits on the few that were largely denied to the many.
Moreover, it was the closed fraternity of the *demos*, of the
ancestral citizen, which, although guaranteeing safety and legal
protection to the stranger, denied him any role in the management of its political life.

Yet, after all these qualifications are noted — and they are
characteristic of the ancient world as a whole — we cannot help
but admire the extent to which Hellenic civic rationality contained, and in many ways surmounted, its own archaic roots.
That women were confined to the household, that the muscles
of slaves made it possible for the citizen to acquire the free time
for reflection and civic activity, that the stranger performed those
commercial functions which temporarily insulated the *demos*
from the debasing effects of trade and self-interest, are the
consequences not merely of an archaic tradition that reaches
back to tribal life, but perhaps more compellingly, of an undeveloped technological base and meagre agricultural resources.
Tradition, in fact, often becomes a thin rationalization for a real
poverty of material resources — and Greek thought reveals a
surprisingly secular candor about the relationship between the
two, as one can glean from a reading of Thucydides and Aristotle.
Yet, paradoxically, the very agricultural poverty of Greece made
the *polis* possible as a fairly independent urban entity. The poor
soil of the Hellenic promontory and the isolation fostered by its
rugged, mountainous terrain precluded the development of the
strong centralized agrarian power we encounter in the fertile
agriculturally rich river valleys of the Near East and Orient.’
Accordingly, to a degree virtually unknown up to the classical era
the *polis* could create and enlarge a uniquely urban space of its
own — not as a society in which the land dominated the city or the
city the land, but as an almost artistic equipoise of town and
country, and psychologically, a balance that reflected the outlook
of the yeoman farmer and urban citizen harmoniously united in a
single personality.

From these conditions of life, I believe, emerges the Hellenic
notion of *autarchia* which, apart from its popular economic
connotations of material self-sufficiency, implies for the Greek a
balance between mind and body, needs and resources, individual
and society. Neither collectivity nor subjectivity are uncon-
ditional; the Hellenic individual is, in microcosm, the society of
which he is a part. But this relationship implies no denial of
individual uniqueness; merely, that the wholeness and roundedness of the individual is a function of the *polis*, a civic entity that
includes not only the city proper but its rural environs. The
relationship, in effect, is reciprocal and mutually reinforcing To
speak of the priority of the community or the individual over each
other is to project our own sense of social alienation back to
Hellenic times, for the very essence of the *polis* is its integration of
the two. Greek individuality is an integrated constellation of the
personal and social, not a separation of the two components into
an antagonistic dualism. The *polis*, far from establishing a priority
over personality, is at once its constitutive material and the
laboratory for its elaboration. We grossly misread Hellenic
dualism when we permeate it with our own anxious sense of
apartness and polarity, for this dualism is always synthesized by
Hellenic culture, hence the enormous difficulties we encounter in
classifying Greek philosophy into “materialistic” and “idealistic”
schools of thought.

The integration of individual and society is clearly revealed by
the very structure of the *polis* itself and its theoretical conception of urbanism. The underlying theory of civic management is amateurism — the accessibility of virtually all organs of
power to the citizen, the conscious despecialization of municipal
agencies, the formulation of policy in face-to-face assemblies, and
the use of the lot in the selection of public officials. The civic
structure both affirms individuality and contains it. By the
unimpaired expression which this structure gives to the citizen, it
individuates him along social lines. Thus, life is to be lived not in
the home but in the *agora* — the municipal square and market
place — where matters of state become subjects of personal talk.
Ironically, the fact that politics becomes “gossip” does not
degrade politics but personalizes it and gives it a vitally existential
dimension. The remarkable power of Aristophanic mockery is its
capacity to interpret immense themes in the rough jargon of the
public square. This desanctification of great themes, their rough-
and-ready vernacularization, implies not a debasement of important ideas, but a largeness of mind in the community itself, an
acknowledgement of its capacity to discuss them and a conscious
despecialization of thought as the preserve of an elite. The agora,
in turn, prepares the way for the *ecclesia*, the assembly of all
citizens which convenes each tenth of the year. Here, in the open
hillside of the *pnyx*, the citizen body assembles to debate the
policies of the community. The practice of formulating policy in
the open reveals the essential commitment of the *polis* to public
purview and face-to-face relationships.

We find, here, a transcendence of the city that is not often
made in the historical literature on urban society. Until the
Hellenic era, the city had a typically magical or cosmological
orientation; structurally, in the layout of its streets and in the
symbolism of its architecture, it provided testimony to the
authority of natural forces and suprahuman powers. Tech-
nochtitlan is laid out according to a traditional orientation along
the cardinal points, an orientation we find not only throughout
Eastern cities but even in Rome. By contrast, the Hellenic mind
turned its civic outlook from nature and cosmology to man by
adding a vividly humanistic dimension to the largely religious
concepts of Eastern urbanism. Athens, like the free people who
nurtured it, was a spontaneous civic creation. The apparent
“anarchy” of the city’s residential quarters marks a sharp break
with an earlier urban outlook that placed nature and the cosmos
above human beings. Dwellings are located where they are simply
becauses the locations are places where *people* live — not
planned according to recipes contrived by a priesthood
Location is a function of life and sociability, of community and
intercourse freely and spontaneously expressed, not of magic or
religious cosmology. The Hellenic sense of space is completely
humanistic and communitarian; its pell-mell character suggests
that the Greeks found their civic fulfillment more in themselves
and m their interrelationships than in the privatized domain of
their dwellings and work places.

If territoriality is conceived merely as the historic solvent of
blood ties, then the Greek sense of space added a uniquely
positive dimension to this conception that transcends it A
territory defined by human propinquity and intercourse implies
the complete subordination of territoriality to the people who
occupy an area — the humanized space of a true community that
is internalized and acquires a subjective character, not merely a
geographic one. Thus, as Zimmern observes, wherever the
ancient Greeks came together there was a *polis*, that is, a free
community, and it mattered little where it was located. When the
*polis* finally passed into the shadows of history, it mattered little if
or where they came together: the *polis* was gone forever The
abstract externalized sense of territoriality that marks the
modern city, like the priority it gives to design over community is
in every sense an urban atavism. If the priests of pre-Hellenic
urbanism were architects who imposed a cosmological design on
the city, the architects of modern urbanism are priests whose
designs are crassly utilitarian. Both are architects of the mythic
insofar as they subserve the human essence of the city — its
communitarian dimension — to suprahuman or inhuman ends.

A *polis* so large that it transcended a scale comprehensible to
the citizen meant that it became merely territorial and vitiated its
goal as a community. Accordingly, Aristotle establishes the rule
that the *polis*  should properly house “the largest number which
suffices for the purposes of life and can be taken in at a single
view.”[33] In sharp contrast to the modern metropolitan impulse to
unlimited growth — an impulse that Hegel would call a “bad
infinity” — the Hellenic impulse always emphasized limit, and the
*polis* was always limited by what the Greek could take in “at a
single view.” This high regard for limit, E. A. Gutkind observes,
“dominates Greek town planning to such a degree that, to give
only one example, Syracuse at the time of its greatest expansion
consisted of five different towns, each surrounded by its own wall.
Strabo called it Pentapolis.”[34]

Space limitations do not make it possible to discuss the reasons
why the *polis* declined except to remind the reader that it was a
class society and hence an inherently contradictory one. Eventually it fell victim to a growing Mediterranean commerce that
undermined its most precious civic values while precluding its
development along authentically bourgeois lines. The urban
values of the *polis* appear again, more than a millenium later, in
the medieval town — but only intuitively, without the clear
rationality that the Greeks brought to their social life. Like the
*polis*, the medieval town emerged in the space left for urban
development by a weak agrarian society, decentralized by
geography and by internal conflict. Again like the *polis*, the
medieval town and outlying countryside achieved a certain
balance that is reflected in the modest dimensions of the town
itself and its early democratic structure. Both were scaled to
human dimensions and could be taken in “at a single view. But
between the *polis* and the medieval town there are significant
differences that partly account for the diverging historical
developments they followed. The *polis* was not structured
civically around the family but rather around the *agora*, which
was more public square than market place. The medieval town
merged work with the family in a domestic economy that turned
the public square as much into a market place as an arena for
social intercourse. The intense political interests of the Greeks,
indeed, the fact that they were farmers as well as urban dwellers,
relegated commercial activity to a secondary place in their lives;
actually, the Greek tended to disdain commerce and left it in the
hands of resident non-citizens. The medieval burgher, by contrast, was mainly an artisan or merchant, and only incidentally a
food cultivator in the garden behind his home. His principal
interest focused on trade and not surprisingly he pioneered the
path toward capitalism and the bourgeois city.

Trade is the reduction and quantification of the world to
commodity equivalents, the leveller of quality, skill, and concrete
labour to numerical units that can be measured by time and
money, by clocks and gold. What sets this abstract quantified
world in motion is competition — the struggle for self-preservation on the market place. Capitalism, the domain of competition *par excellence*, has its fair share of violence, plunder,
piracy, and enslavement; but in the normal course of events its
mode of self-preservation is a quiet process of economic
cannibalization — the devouring of one capitalist by another and
the ever-greater centralization of capital in fewer hands. This
takes place as a ritual peculiar to the capitalist mode of
production notably, as production for the sake of production,
as growth for the sake of growth. The bourgeois maxim, “grow or
die, becomes capitalism s very law of life. The inevitable impact
of this unceasing expansion on the city can only be appreciated
fully in our own time by the limitless expansion of the modern
megalopolis, as the arena both for the endless production of
commodities and their sale. If the Greeks subordinated the
market place to the city, the emerging bourgeoisie subordinated
the city to the market place — indeed, it eventually turned the city
itself into a market place. This development marked not only the
end of the small, sharply contoured medieval town, but the
emergence of the sprawling capitalist megalopolis, a maw which
devours every viable element of urbanity. Precapitalist cities were
limited by the countryside, not only externally in the sense that
the growth of free cities inevitably came up against social,
cultural, and material barriers reared by entrenched agrarian
interests, but also internally, insofar as the city reflected the social
relations on the land. Except in the case of the late medieval cities,
exchange relations were never completely autonomous; to one
degree or another, they were placed in the service of the land. But
once exchange relations begin to dominate the land and finally
transform agrarian society, the city develops according to the
workings of a suprasocial law. Production for the sake of
production, translated into urban terms, means the growth of the
city for its own sake — without any intrinsic urban criteria or even
uman criteria to arrest that growth. Limit becomes the enemy of
growth; the human scale, the enemy of the commercial scale;
quality, the enemy of quantity; the synthesis of dualism, the
enemy of the buyer-seller dichotomy. Paradoxically, capitalism
yields an urbanized world without cities — a world of urban belts
that lack internal structure, definition, and civic uniqueness.

Bourgeois society, which abolishes urban limit and dissolves
urban form, acquires an historic dynamic that has very far-
reaching civic and psychic consequences. Competition tends to
transform the numerous small enterprises that marked the
inception of the industrial era into fewer and fewer highly
centralized corporate giants. All the elements of society begin to
change their dimensions. Civic and political gigantism parallel
industrial and commercial gigantism. The city acquires dimensions so far removed from the human scale and human control
that it ceases to appear as the shelter of individuality. Urban
space reaches not only outward over the land but upward into the
sky, blotting out the horizon as well as the countryside. The
faceless geometric architecture of soaring skyscrapers and
immense complexes of high-rise dwellings bespeaks a monu-
mentalism that reflects the authority not of superhuman persons
but of suprahuman bureaucratic institutions. No natural or
human forms adorn these structures, forms on which the
imagination can fasten in awe or defiance. Their cold geometry
and functional design instill a sense of powerlessness in the urban
dweller that precludes the presence of human meaning, for these
structures appear no longer as the works of man but of
institutions. They even tend to bear the names of the corporations that erected them. Before such gigantic, undefinable,
bureaucratic entities, the urban dweller feels psychically as well
as physically dwarfed. Unlike the monumental structures of the
Baroque city, whose ornamentation was evidence of personified
power, the institutional monumentalism of the megalopolis
becomes a source of bewilderment and disorientation. Confronted every day by this architectural nullity, the urban dweller
finds no monarch against whom she or he can rebel, no gods to
defy, no priests and courtiers to overthrow. There is nothing, in
fact, but an interminable bureaucratic nexus that traps the
individual in an impersonal skein of agencies and corporations.
These soaring geometric structures exude social power in its
most reified form: power for the sake of power, domination for
the sake of domination.

The urban ego, driven back from the social basis of individuality, must desperately learn to fend for itself. In this highly
privatized world of isolated monads, the great crowds that
surround the individual in the megalopolis lack any communitarian content. Louis Wirth, a generation ago, could remark
upon the superficiality of urban relationships, of acquaintanceships that “stand in a relationship of utility” to each other and the
disappearance of “the spontaneous self-expression, the morale,
and the sense of participation that comes with living in an
integrated society.”[35] The gay Parisian crowds in which Baudelaire loved to immerse himself a century earlier had become, by
Wirth’s time, the blase crowds whose spontaneity was carefully
regulated and whose contacts were coolly superficial. Spontaneity of intercourse had been replaced by a prudent courtesy. The
megalopolis carries this degradation to its most primal depths.
Cornered in a sense of isolation that is accentuated by the
massive, unknowing, impersonal crowds that surround the urban
dweller, the individual ceases to be gay or even blase, but fearful.
The egoistic, calculating mentality which the bourgeois market
normally generates in its isolated monads and by which it
corrodes the sense of community that marked precapitalist
urbanity is heightened by the megalopolis into a hostility that
verges on mutual terror.

The megalopolis, in effect, atavistically travels the full circle of
urban history back to the primitive community’s dread of the
stranger — but now, without the solidarity that the primitive
community afforded to its own kind. The freedom which urban
territoriality increasingly provided for the outsider, the individuality which the city eventually generated in all who inhabited
its environs, the right of the urban dweller to be taken on her or
his own merits apart from kinship ties and blood lineages, and
perhaps more fundamentally, the solidarity the city forged among
its citizens *qua* individuals into a purely social community unified
by propinquity and an urbanely rational heritage — all of this is
dissolved by the megalopolis into an alienating, crassly utilitarian, externalized mode of sociation in which everyone now reverts
to the status of the outsider, to the primal stranger as real or
potential foe. The barbarism of the past returns to settle over the
forest of skyscrapers and high-rise dwellings like a sickening
miasma. If the medieval town celebrated the fact that city air is
‘‘free air,” the bourgeois megalopolis chokes on a polluted air that
is poisoned not only by the toxicants of its industries, motor
vehicles, and energy installations, but by a darkening cloud of
hostility and fear. By virtue of a dialectical irony unique to itself,
the city at its “height” in the most urbanized of urban worlds
regenerates the mythic traditions of a humanity that has barely
advanced beyond animality, yet without the redeeming innocence that marked this primal age.

The tribalism of the past reappears in the megalopolis as
mocking caricature — as a ubiquitous process of ghettoiza-
tion. To the degree that dread replaces spontaneous intercourse and its degradation into courtesy, panic unites normally
alienated people of the same area and status in a hierarchy of
fears against those who are sequentially more different and more
removed from the familiar conditions of their lives. Tribalism
appears in the degenerated form of the urban enclave. The ghetto
is not merely the condition of the blacks and the poor who occupy
the central districts of the megalopolis: as the beleaguered
enclave of suburbia, exurbia, and the residential pockets of the
well-to-do-in the inner city, the ghetto becomes the condition of
everyone who is caught in the megalopolitan skein. The outward
radiation of modern urban society from its civic nuclei reads like a
spectrum of either increasingly deprived or seemingly privileged
ghettoes: the materially denied black and Puerto Rican ghettoes
in the central parts of the city (marbled, to be sure, by well-policed
enclaves of fearful whites); the materially more aflluent but
spiritually denied suburbanite fringe, united merely by its aversion for the city proper; and finally that pathetic caricature of all
privilege in bourgeois society, the beleagured exurbanite fringe,
inwardly paralyzed by a suspicion of invaders from the central
city and suburbs. Just as the bourgeois market place makes each
individual a stranger to another, so the bourgeois city estranges
these central and fringe areas from each other. The paradox of
the megalopolis is that it unites these areas internally not in the
felicitous heterogeneity of unity in diversity that marked the
medieval commune — a heterogeneity unified by mutual aid and a
common municipal tradition — but rather in the suspicions,
anxieties, and hatreds of the stranger from the “other” ghetto.
The city, once the refuge of the stranger from archaic parochialism, is now the primary source of estrangement. Ghetto
boundaries comprise the unseen internal walls within the city that
once, as real walls, secured the city and distinguished it from the
countryside. The bourgeois city assimilates archaic parochialism
as a permanent and festering urban condition. No longer are the
elements of the city cemented by mutual aid, a shared culture,
and a sense of community; rather, they are cemented by a social
dynamite that threatens to explode the urban tradition into its
very antithesis.

To these historic contradictions and tendencies, city planning
and its disciplinary cousin, urban sociology, oppose the platitudes
of analytical and technical accomodation. Leonard Reissman
does not speak for himself alone when he affirms that, while
“there have been recurrent crises” in urban history, “there is little
chance for a perfect solution...” The thrust of this thinking is
strictly ideological: the megalopolis is here to stay, and the sooner
we learn to live with it, the better. A dysutopian mentality
increasingly pervades contemporary city planning and urban
sociology, an outlook misleadingly formulated in terms of a
regression to rural parochialism or adjustment to an “urbanized
world.” Radical critique tends to be denigrated. Typically,
Reissman belabours “rural sociologists” for seeking “a rural idyll
or an urban utopia.” Such thinking, he scornfully adds, is “supercritical, with the result that “we continue to criticize the city
more often than we praise it, to magnify its faults more often than
we stress its advantages.” These remarks conclude with the
pragmatically triumphant note that “In any case, such discussions have hardly slowed the pace of urban growth.”[36]

Reissman is unique in that he examines the assumptions of
urban sociology. More often than not, these assumptions are
simply taken for granted. Urban sociology presupposes that the
city can be taken as a social isolate — often, quite apart from
other social factors that define it — and examined on its own
terms. Economics becomes “urban economics”; social relations,
urban relations , politics, urban politics”; and the city dweller,
an “urban man” in an “urbanized world.” “Urbanism,” in effect,
replaces capitalism as the legitimate object of social investigation. On this derivative level, urban sociology becomes descriptive rather than critical, analytical rather than censorious.
To the more vulgar urban sociologist, the problems of the
megalopolis are to be explained as the work of the self-seeking,
the greedy, and the indifferent. Even Reissman is not above this
level of discourse; “the economics of avarice, the politics of
ignorance,” we are told, “make the perfect city only a utopia.”[37]
These villainous traits are imputed not only to land speculators,
construction barons, government bureaucrats, landlords and
banking interests, but rather flippantly to the general public.
People, we are told, do not care enough about their urban
environment to do anything for it. An abstract “we” is distilled from the medley of conflicting social interests, a target of
insidious propaganda that demands concern, but denies the
power of action to those who are most concerned — the ordinary
urban dwellers who must endure the megalopolis not only as a
place of work but also as a way of life.

In city planning the counterpart of this abstract “we” is the
abstract design: the architectural sketch that will resolve the
gravest urban problems with the most sophisticated knowhow.” “One question about city planning,” observes Frank
Fisher, “must have come to the mind of anyone who has fingered
the magnificent volumes in which the proposals of planners are
generally presented. Why do those green spaces, those carefully
placed skyscrapers, those pleasant residential districts, and
equally pleasant factory and working areas, still remain dreams
for the most part? Why are our cities hardly any less ugly and
unpleasant than they were at the height of the 19<sup>th</sup> century’s
Industrial Revolution ?”[38] Fisher’s questions, quite humane in
themselves, are nevertheless loaded with presuppositions about
the nature of residence, work, the relationship of town to
country, and structural size that require critical examination
before “the magnificent volumes” can be compiled. For the
purposes of our discussion, however, the most important of these
presuppositions is that a rational city is primarily a product of
good designing — that “green spaces,” “pleasant residential districts,” “equally pleasant factory and working areas,” not to
speak of “carefully placed skyscrapers,” in themselves produce
human, rational, or even viable cities.

The priority that city planning assigns to structural design
represents a fairly recent development. Western notions of the
city, certainly as we know them from earlier visionaries of urban
reconstruction, were clearly linked to a larger, often sharply
critical, conception of the nature of society itself. Plato’s *Republic*
advances a notion of the *polis* not only in terms of what it *ought* to
be, but how class relations, education, social attitudes, modes of
administration, and ownership of property form its very essence
and determine its size and configuration. To the degree that
design factors enter into the dialogue, they are seen as a function
of social life. However unpalatable the hierarchical bias of the
dialogue may be, Plato follows a tradition that discusses the city
as the result of a distinctive social configuration, not as an
autonomous entity that can be isolated and reserved for analysis
and design on its own terms.

This tradition is perpetuated by Aristotle, More, Campanella,
Andreae, indeed, by virtually all the visionaries of the city well into
the early nineteenth century. A high point is reached in the
works of Fourier, who combines social critique and reconstruction in a strikingly revolutionary manner. In contrast even to
Owen, the English utopian, Fourier conceives of the phalanstery
not merely as a sober community of labour, but a shelter of
sensuous pleasure. A delightfully unguarded hedonism pervades
his notions of work, of the relationship between the sexes, of food
and adornment, even of the design of the phalanstery itself which
will provide “elegant communication with all parts of the building
and its dependencies.”[39] Here, Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme is
thorougly democratized. The right to “Do what thou wouldst,”
which forms the rule of the “Thelemite order,” ceases to be the
privilege of a Renaissance elite and becomes the prerogative of
society at large.

The notion that design dictates urban conditions of life
becomes dominant in an ambience of social protest, when cities
in Europe and America had undergone appalling decay under the
impact of the Industrial Revolution. Although the emergence of
the modern city planning movement is usually dated with the
publication in 1898of Ebenezer Howard’s *Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform* (later retitled *Garden Cities of Tomorrow*),
Howard’s efforts had been preceded by L’Enfant’s plan for the
city of Washington and, in the case of a more sinister enterprise,
by Haussman’s remodeling of Paris, an immense effort visibly
designed to deal effectively with the insurrections that had
plagued the French ruling classes. No less significantly, the
middle years of the century were marked by legislation and
regulations to cope with the disastrous hygienic conditions of the
time. Major cholera epidemics threatened not only the poorer
quarters of European and American cities but also the wealthy
ones, and these could be brought under control only by serious
efforts to improve urban sanitation and living conditions. Moreover, the 1840s reminded the European bourgeoisie that it had a
restive, increasingly class-conscious proletariat on its hands.
Accordingly, the middle part of the century opened a period of
bourgeois paternalism toward working-class dwellings, as witnessed by the construction of Louis Napoleon’s *cites ouurieres*,
state-subsidized “model villages” for English workers, and the
Krupp settlements in the Ruhr. On the whole, however, these
programs did not appreciably affect the established cities, nor did
they greatly alter the urban landscape of Europe and the United
States. As to the latter country, Mel Scott not unjustly observes
that as late as “that painful decade now ironically called the Gay
Nineties there were few urban Americans who would have
subscribed to the belief, or hope, that entire cities and metropolitan regions can be developed and renewed by a continuous process of decision-making based on long-range
planning.”[40]

Howard’s impact on this state of mind, both by means of his
book and his practical endeavours in creating the first “garden
city” of Letchworth, is almost legendary. “*Garden Cities of Tomorrow*,” Mumford rightly observes, “has done more than any
single book to guide the modern town planning movement and to
alter its objectives.”[41] id In many respects, it originated this
movement, for the idea that town planning should be a cause, an
ideal around which to mobilize popular interest, state resources,
and social opinion, must be ascribed more to Howard than to any
of his predecessors and successors. Yet Howard can also be
regarded as fathering, however unintentionally, the myth that
structural design is equatable with social rationality. Although
deeply influenced by Henry George and Peter Kropotkin,
Howard’s social ideals are repeatedly vitiated by the exigencies of
design and by a British proclivity for a compromising “realism.”
As F. J. Osborn, one of his closest associates, emphasizes,
Howard “was not a political theorist, not a dreamer, but an
inventor. The curious juxtaposition of these words and the
pragmatic, indeed technical bias it reveals tells us much about the
“garden city” movement as a whole. As Osborn explains: “The
inventor proceeds by first conceiving an idea of a possible new
product or instrument, next by evolving a design on paper with
patient thought for the adaptation of the structure to the
conditions it has to fulfill, and finally by experimentation with
models to test the design in practice.”[42]

This crudely Baconian mentality pervades modern city
planning. To Aristotle, the city was a way of life: its achievement was gauged not by its size, population, or logistical
efficiency, but by the extent to which it enabled its citizens “to live
temperately and liberally in the enjoyment of leisure.”[43] To Le
Corbusier, by contrast, the city is a “tool,” a logistical device.[44]
Even Frank Lloyd Wright once described the city as “the only
possible ideal machine...”[45] This mechanistic orientation has its
conceptual antecedents in the functionalist theories of the
bourgeois Enlightenment architects — figures such as Lodoli,
who provocatively expressed a greater admiration for the sewers
of Rome than the sacristy of St. Peter’s. Speculative thought
tends to be replaced by pragmatic realism, human values by
operationalism, ends by the hypostasization of means. With
Lodoli, as Alexander Tzonis observes, we see an end to the
period when “theories of architecture considered the design of a
building to be determined by a set of independent objectives,
whether the Vitruvian triad (‘Accomodation, Handsomeness and
Lastingness) or Perrault s dichotomy between ‘Positive’ and
‘Arbitrary’values.”[46]

Modern city planning is the stepchild of this degraded rationalism and functionalism. Inspired as Howard’s intentions may
be, he assigns to design the task of achieving goals that involve
sweeping revolutionary changes in the economic, social, and
cultural fabric of bourgeois society. Compared to the megalopolis, Howard’s garden city is attractive enough: a compact
urban entity of some thirty thousand people, scaled to human
dimensions, and surrounded by a green belt to limit growth and
provide open land for recreational and agricultural purposes.
Suitable areas of the green belt are to be occupied by farmers
(Howard limited this agricultural population to two thousand);
the larger urban population of thirty thousand is to engage in
manufacturing, commerce, and services. All land is to be held in
trust and leased to occupants on a rental basis. Howard spelled
out many design and fiscal details of this proposal, but he was
careful to emphasize at the very outset of his book that these
were “merely suggestive, and will probably be much departed
from.”[47]

But even the most generous modifications of Howard’s garden
city do not alter the fact that the project is a structural design —
and, as such, neither more nor less than what such a design can
perform. The design may provide the basis for greater human
contiguity, the structural instruments for community, and easy
communication with places of work, with shopping centers, and
with service enterprises. Nevertheless it leaves undefined the
nature of human contiguity, community, and the relationship
between the urban dweller and the rural environs. Most importantly, it leaves undefined the nature of work in garden city, the
control of the means of production, the problem of distributing
goods and services equitably, and it leaves unanalyzed the
conflicting social interests that collect around these issues.
Actually, Howard’s “invention” does provide an orientation
toward all of these problems — namely, a system of benevolent
capitalism that presumably avoids the “extremes” of “communism” and “individualism.”[48] Howard’s *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* is permeated by an underlying assumption that a
compromise can be struck between an inherently irrational social
reality and a moral ideology of high-minded conciliation.

Yet the offices, industrial factories, and shopping centers that
are intended to provide garden city with the means of life are
themselves battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. Within
these entities we find the sources of alienated labour, of income
differentials, and of disparities between work time and free time.
By itself, no structural design can reconcile the conflicting
interests and social differences that gather beneath the surface of
garden city. These interests and differences must be dealt with
largely on their own terms — by far-reaching changes in social and
economic relations. Which is not to say that a social resolution of
the problems created by the bourgeois factory, office, and
shopping center obviates the need for a structural design that will
promote community and a balance between town and country;
rather that one without the other is a truncated solution, and
hence, no solution at all.

Howard’s garden city, it is worth noting, falls far short of the
highly progressive criteria advanced by earlier utopias and
historical experiences in dealing with problems of social management and modes of work. In contrast to the Greek *polis*,
which administered its affairs on the basis of a face-to-face
democracy, Howard merely proposes a Central Council and a
departmental structure based on elections. Garden city has none
of the recall mechanisms that were established by the Paris
Commune of 1871. Unlike More’s Utopia, there is no proposal for
rotating agricultural and industrial work. In garden city, the mode
of social labour is decided simply by the needs of capital. Inasmuch as Howard’s economic horizon is not substantially broader
than that of any benevolent bourgeois of his day, notions of
industrial self-management are simply absent from his work.

The intrinsic limits of Howard’s garden city, indeed, of the
thirty-odd “new towns” that have been constructed in England
and those that are aborning in the United States, are that these
communities do not encompass anywhere near the full range and
possibilities of human experience. Neighborliness is mistaken for
organic social intercourse and mutual aid; well-manicured parks
for the harmonization of humanity with nature; the proximity of
work places for the development of a new meaning for work and
its integration with play; an eclectic mix of ranch-houses, slab-like
apartment buildings, and bachelor-type flats for spontaneous
architectural variety; shopping-mart plazas and a vast expanse of
lawn for the *agora*; lecture halls for cultural centers; hobby
classes for vocational variety; benevolent trusts or municipal
councils for self-administration. One can add endlessly to this list
of warped criteria that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the
high attainments of the urban tradition. Although people may
earn their income without leaving these communities — and a
substantial portion must travel for considerable distances to the
central city to do so — the nature of their work and the income-
differentials that group them into alien social classes are not a
matter of community concern. A crucial area of life is thus
removed from the community and delivered to a socio-economic
system that exists apart from it even as it exists within it. Indeed,
the appearance of community serves the ideological function of
concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social
life. Key elements of the self are formed outside the parameters of
the design by forces that stem from economic competition, class
antagonisms, social hierarchy and domination, and economic
exploitation. Although people are brought together to enjoy
certain conveniences and pleasantries, they remain as truncated
and culturally impoverished in garden cities and “new towns” as
they were in the megalopolis, with the difference that in the big
cities the stark reality of urban decay removes any veil of
appearances from the incompleteness and contradictions of
social life.

These internal contradictions have not been faced with candour by either the supporters or opponents of the garden city
concept. That the “new towns” of England, the United States,
and other countries modeled on the garden city design have not
awakened “the soft notes of brotherliness and goodwill” Howard
described as their essential goal; that they have not placed “in
strong hands implements of peace and construction, so that
implements of war and destruction may drop uselessly down” —
all of this is painfully obvious fact.[49] Nor has there been any
promise that they will remotely approximate such far-reaching
goals. In the best of cases, the new towns differ from the suburbs
by virtue of the ease with which people can reach their work
places and acquire services within the community. In the worst of
cases, these communities are little more than bedroom suburbs
of the big cities and add enormously to their congestion during
working hours.

Nor has reality been any kinder to the devotees of the
metropolis. The old cities keep growing even as the number of
“new towns” multiply, each urban form slowly encroaching on
the other and creating urban belts that threaten to undermine the
integrity of both. Jane Jacob’s spirited defense of traditional
neighborhood life partakes of all the illusions that mar Frederic J.
Osborn’s defense of Howard’s vision. Culturally, this neighborhood world if faced with extinction: the same forces that
truncate the inhabitant of the “new town” are delivering the small
shop over to the supermarket and the old tenement complex to
the aseptic high-rise superblock. Colourful enclaves of neighborhood culture will doubtless continue to exist as urban
showpieces — contemporary counterparts of the existing medieval and Renaissance towns that attract tourists to Europe for
visual respite from the urban monotony that is rapidly prevailing
in most cities of the world.

To the degreee that the urban dweller becomes disenchanted
with an undisguisedly functional design rationality, city planning
begins to flirt with a design exotica that rehabilitates this very
rationality in a mystified form. A pop ideology of urbanism — half
science fiction, half fraud — tends to defuse the urban dweller’s
frustration by evoking design elements that are unique only in the
nightmarish dimensions they add to prevailing modes of city
planning. In Buckminster Fuller, Paoli Soleri, Constantinos
Doxiades, Yona Friedman, Nicolas Schoffer, and a bouquet of
newly arrived Japanese designers, the system tries to recover its
social credibility with the shamanistic and occult. Fuller, to
examine the most prominent of these shamans, finds no inconsistency in trying to reconcile an appeal for individual spontaneity
with a suprahuman tetrahedronal structure that will house a
million people. Perhaps more absurdly, he tries to combine an
ecological perspective with an air-conditioned dome over
Manhattan Island.

Fuller, in fact, is an artist in advancing an outlook so “cosmic”
in its insensibility to qualitative distinctions that individuality and
community dissolve into mere digits in a computerized “world
game.” His inflated, oversized vision lacks not only human scale
but even natural scale. Yet once we strip away the “mega”-
verbiage he borrows from cybernetics, systems analysis, and the
aerospace industry, what remains of his thinking is a mechanistic
reductionism embodying the crudest features of the prevailing
functional rationality. “The environment,” we are told, “always
consists of energy — energy as matter, energy as radiation,
energy as gravity and energy as ‘events.’” An environment so
divested of qualitative distinctions beggars even the machine-like
Cartesian world of mere matter and motion. In this universe,
everything is interchangeable. Accordingly, Fuller adds:
“Housing is an energetic environment-controlling mechanism.
Thinking correctly of all housing as machinery (one is tempted to
ask, not as home or community? — M.B.) we begin to realize the
complete continuity of interrelationship of such technological
evolution as that of the home bedroom into the railway sleeping
car, into the automobile with seat-to-bed conversions, into the
filling-station toilets, which are accessories of the parlour-on
wheels; the trailer, the motels, hotels, and ocean liners.”[50]
Portability replaces community and mobility a sense of rootedness and place. The individual becomes a camper who belongs
everywhere — and nowhere. Perhaps more appropriately, Ful-
lerian social theory envisions the individual as an astronaut who
pilots the earth as a mechanical spaceship. Here, hypostasized
design leaves even the mundane world of conventional planning
for the interstellar space of Kubrick’s *2001*. This magic is
essentially cinematic — as synthetic as the film on which it
unfolds.

That Fuller’s work arouses popular interest can be explained
by default — that is, as a result of the vacuum left by the absence
of a searching radical theory of the city and community. Why, it
may be asked, did Fourier’s interpretations of community fail to
acquire relevance for so many of the generations that followed his
own? At what point — and for what reasons — did the generous
utopian visions that surfaced in the early nineteenth century lose
continuity with later periods that so desperately required their
elaboration and fulfillment? The rupture can be dated from the
ascendency of Marxism as a social movement. Largely under the
impetus of Marx’s class theory, the city ceased to be a matter of
serious concern to radical analysts and the notion of community a
goal in social reconstruction. Radicalism found an almost exclusive locus in the factory and proletariat. Just as bourgeois urban
sociology neglected the work place for the city, so radical social
theory neglected the city for the work place. That the two arenas
could have been integrated as a unified realm of critique and
reconstruction occurred to only a few radical theorists of the last
century, notably Kropotkin and William Morris.

Yet even the worker does not exist merely in a factory milieu
and her or his social experiences are not exhausted at the point of
production. The proletarian is not only a class being but also an
urban being. Capitalism generates a broad social crisis that often
makes workers more accessible to revolutionary visions as urban
dwellers — as victims of pollution, congestion, isolation, real
estate extortion, neighborhood decay, bad transportation, civic
manipulation, and the spiritually dehumanizing effects of megalo-
politan life — than as exploited producers of surplus value. Marx
and Engels were far less oblivious to this fact than the epigones
who were to speak in their names. In *The Housing Question*,
written in 1872, Engels creditably links his views with the most
vital concepts of Owen and Fourier; to resolve the housing
problem — and, one may add, the urban problem as a whole —
Engels argues that the big cities must be decentralized and the
antithesis between town and country overcome. The same theme
is taken up 13 years later in Engels’ highly influential work,
*Anti-Duhring*. With the vulgarization of Marxism and its transformation into a powerful political ideology, this tradition receded
into the background. The notion of “scientific socialism” fostered
a distinct bias against Marx’s utopian predecessors and the
communitarian visions that permeated their works. By the turn of
the century, urban problems ceased to be an issue of any real
significance in Marxist theory. Even the notion of decentralization was airily dismissed as a “utopian” absurdity.

Not until the late 1960s do we begin to see design emerge as a
function of an entirely new way of life. That this approach had its
isolated devotees in the long interim between Fourier’s day and
our own is evident enough from any reading of urban history. The
Sixties are unique, however, in that the concept of community
began to develop on a broad popular scale — indeed, a largely
generational scale — when young people in considerable numbers, disenchanted with the prevailing society, reoriented themselves toward reconstructive utopistic projects of their own. New
values were formulated that often involved a total break with the
commodity system as a whole and charted the way to new forms
of sociation.

The young people who began to formulate these new values
and forms of sociation — values and forms that have since been
grouped under the rubric of “the counterculture” — unquestionably comprised a privileged social stratum. For the most part,
they came from the affluent, white, middle-class suburbs and the
better universities of the United States, the enclaves and training
grounds of the new American technocracy. To adduce their
privileged status as evidence for the trifling nature of the
movement itself sidesteps a key question: why did privilege lead
to a rejection of the social and material values that had spawned
these very privileges in the first place? Why, in fact, didn’t these
young people, like so many before them in previous generations,
take up the basic values of their parents and expand the arena of
privilege they had inherited?

These questions reveal an historic change in the material
premises for the radical social movements in the advanced
capitalist countries. By the Sixties, the so-called “First World
had undergone unprecedented technological changes. Technology had advanced to a point where the values spawned by
material scarcity, particularly those values fostered by the
bourgeois era, no longer seemed morally or culturally relevant.
The work ethic, the moral authority imputed to material denial,
parsimony, and sensual renunciation, the high social valuation
placed on competition and “free enterprise,” the emphasis on
privatization and individuation based on egotism, seemed obsolete in the light of technological achievements that afforded
entirely contrary alternatives — freedom from a lifetime of toil and
a materially secure social disposition oriented toward community
and the full expression of individual human powers. The new
alternatives opened by technological advances made the cherished values of the past seem not only obsolete but odious. There
is no paradox in the fact that the weakest link in the old society
turned out to be that very stratum which enjoyed the real
privilege of rejecting false privilege.

Which is not to say that the technological context of the
counterculture was consciously grasped and elaborated into a
coherent perspective for society as a whole. Indeed, the outlook
of most middle-class dropout youth and students remained
largely intuitive and often fell easy prey to the faddism nurtured by
the established society. The erratic features of the new movement, its feverish and its quixotic oscillations, can be partly
explained by this lack of adequate consciousness. Often, young
people were easily victimized and crudely exploited by commercial interests that shrewdly pandered to the more superficial
aspects of the new culture. Large numbers of this dropout youth,
exultant in their newly discovered sense of liberation, lacked an
awareness of the harsh fact that complete freedom is impossible
in a prevailing system of unfreedom. Insofar as they hoped rapidly
to replace the dominant culture by their own merely on the
strength of example and moral suasion, they failed. But insofar as
they began to see themselves as the most advanced sector of a
larger movement to revolutionize society as a whole, their culture
has a compelling relevance as part of an historic enlightenment
that eventually may change every aspect of social life.

The most striking feature of this culture is the emphasis it
places on personal relations as the locus of abstract social ideals,
its attempt to translate freedom and love into existential realities
of everyday life. This personalistic yet socially involved approach
has yielded not only an increasingly explicit critique of doctrinaire
socialist theory, but also of design-oriented city planning. Much
has been written about the “retreat” of dropout youth to rural
communes. Far less has been written about the extent to which
ecologically minded young people began to subject city planning
to a devastating critique, often advancing alternative proposals to
dehumanizing urban “revitalization” and “rehabilitation” projects. Generally, these alternatives stemmed from a perspective
toward design that was radically different from that of conventional city planners. For the countercultural planners, the point of
departure for any design was not the extent to which the city
expedites traffic, communications, and economic activities.
Rather, they were primarily occupied with the relationship of
design to the fostering of personal intimacy, many-sided social
relationships, nonhierarchical modes of organization, communistic living arrangements, and material independence from the
market economy. Design, here, took its point of departure not
from abstract concepts of space and efficiency, but from an
explicit critique of the status quo and a conception, rooted in
developing life-styles, of the free human relationships that were to
replace it. The design elements of the plan followed from radically
new social alternatives that were already being practiced as
subcultures in many communities throughout the country. To
use an expression that was very much in the air: the attempt was
made to replace hierarchical space by liberated space.

Among the many plans of this kind to be developed in the late
Sixties and early Seventies, perhaps the most impressive was
formulated in Berkeley by an ad hoc group from People’s
Architecture, the local Tenant’s Union, and members of the local
food cooperative. The plan shows a remarkably high degree of
radical social consciousness. It draws its inspiration from the
“People’s Park” episode in May 1969, when dropout youth,
students, and later ordinary citizens of Berkeley fought with
police for more than a week to retain a lovely park and
playground which they had spontaneously created out of a
neglected, garbage-strewn lot owned by the University of California. The park, eventually reclaimed by its university proprietors at the cost of a young man’s life, many severe injuries, and
massive arrests, is at this writing a parking lot and paved soccer
field. But the memory of the episode has waned slowly. To the
young Berkeley planners, “People’s Park was the beginning of the
Revolutionary Ecology Movement” — a movement, unfortunately, that has yet to live up to these high hopes. The thrust of the
plan, entitled Blueprint for a Communal Environment , is radically
countercultural. “The revolutionary culture,” declare the writers
,of the Blueprint, “gives us new communal, eco-viable ways of
organizing our lives, while people’s politics gives us the means to
resist the System.”[51] The Blueprint is a project not only for
reconstruction but also for struggle on a wide social terrain
against the established order.

This document of the Berkeley planners aims at more than the
structural redesigning of an existing communty; it avows and
explores a new way of life at the most elementary level of human
intercourse. The new way of life is communal and seeks as much
as possible to divorce itself from commodity relationships. The
goal of the design is “Communal ways of organizing our lives (to)
help to cut down on consumption, to provide for basic human
needs more efficiently, to resist the system, to support ourselves
and overcome the misery of atomized living.” The social and
private are thoroughly fused in this one sentence. Design gives
expression to a new life-style that stands opposed to the
repressive organization of society.[52]

Shelter is redesigned to “overcome the fragmentation of our
lives... to encourage communication and break down priva
tization.” The plan’s authors observe that with “women’s liberation, and a new communal morality, the nuclear family is
becoming obsolete.” Accordingly, floor plans are proposed which
allow for larger multi-purpose rooms which promote more interaction, ‘such as communal dining rooms, meeting spaces and
work areas.” Methods are suggested for creating roof openings
and converting exterior upper walls into communicating links
with neighboring houses as well as between rooms and upper
stories.[53]

“All land in Berkeley is treated as a marketable commodity”
observe the young planners. “Space is parcelled into neat
consumer packages. In between rows of land parcels are
transportation ‘corridors’ to keep people flowing from workplace to market.” The *Blueprint* proposes the dismantling of
backyard and sideyard fences to open land as interior parks and
gardens. Platform “bridgeways” between houses are suggested
to break down the strict division between indoor and outdoor
space. The purpose of these suggestions is not merely to restore
nature to the urban dweller’s world, but to open avenues of
intimate communication. The plan focuses not merely on public
plazas and parks, but the immediate neighborhoods in which
people live their daily lives. Indeed, with magnificent insouciance,
the plan tosses all considerations of private property to the winds
by suggesting that vacant lots be appropriated by neighborhoods
and turned into communal space.[54]

Half the streets of Berkeley, the plan notes, could easily be
closed off to stimulate collective transportation experiments and
reduce traffic congestion in residential areas. This would “free
*ten times* more land area for public use than we now have in park
acreage. Intersections could become parks, gardens, plazas, with
paving material recovered and used to make artificial hills.” The
plan recommends that Berkeley residents should walk or bicycle
to places whenever feasible. If motor vehicles must be used, they
should be pooled and maintained on a communal basis. People
should drive together to common destinations in order to reduce
the number of vehicles in use and to share the human experience of common travel. Community services will make a
“quantum leap,” observe the planners, when “small groups of
neighbors mobilize resources and energy in order to cement
fragmented neighborhoods back together and begin to take care
of business (from child care to education) on a local level and in an
integrated way.” In this connection, the *Blueprint* suggests that
men and women should rotate the use of their homes for childcare centers. First-aid skills and knowledge of more advanced
medical techniques should be mobilized on a neighborhood basis.
Finally, wastes should be collectively recycled to avoid pollution
and the destruction of recyclable resources.[55]

The *Blueprint* advances a refreshingly imaginative program for
ruralizing the city and fostering the material independence of its
inhabitants. It suggests communally worked backyard gardens
for the cultivation of organic food, even entering into the specifics
of composting, mulching, and the preparation of seedlings. It
proposes the establishment of a “People’s Market... which will
receive the organic products of rural communes and small
farmers, and distribute them to the neighborhood (food) conspiracies. Such a market place will have other uses craftspeople can sell their wares there.” The “People’s Market is
visualized as a “solid example of creative thinking about communal use of space. Its structure will be portable, and will be built in
such a way as to serve neighborhood kids as play equipment on
non-market days.”[56]

The Blueprint leaves no illusion that this ensemble of reconstructive ideas will “liberate” Berkeley or other communities. It
sees the realization of these concepts as the first steps toward
reorienting the individual self from a passive acceptance of
isolation and dependence on bureaucratic institutions to popular
initiatives that will recreate communal contacts and face-to-face
networks of mutual aid. Ultimately, society as a whole will have to
be reorganized by the great majority who are now forced into
hierarchical subservience to the few. Yet until these revolutionary changes are achieved, a new state of mind, nourished by
working community ties, must be fashioned so that people will be
able to fuse their deepest personal needs with broader social
ideals. Indeed, unless this fusion is achieved, these very ideals will
remain abstractions and will not be realized at all.

Many of the <em>Blueprint</em>’s structural suggestions are not new.
The idea of using roof openings to link houses is obviously
borrowed from Pueblo Indian villages, the urban gardens from
medieval communes and precapitalist towns generally, the
pedestrian streets and plazas from the Renaissance cities and
earlier urban forms. What makes the plan unique, however, is
that it derives its design concepts from radically new life-styles
that are antithetical to an increasingly bureaucratic society.
Doubtless, each of its design elements could be assimilated in
piecemeal fashion to conventional ways of life as has been the
case with so many radical ideas in the past. The plan is sensitive to
this possibility. From the outset, it adopts a revolutionary stance.
Its premise in advance of any design is a culture that is counter to
the prevailing one — one that emphasizes community rather than
isolation, the sharing of resources and skills rather than their
privatized possession, independence from rather than dependence on the bourgeois market place, loving relations and mutual
aid rather than egotism and competition. The *Blueprint* clearly
articulates the social preconditions for a free community that
other, ostensibly radical, plans leave unexamined. It is humanistic, not “iconoclastic”; it is radical, not “original.” And whether
or not the planners were fully conscious of their historic
antecedents, they were presenting a Hellenic vision of urban life.
The truly human city, to them, is a way of life (not a mere
“design”) that fosters the integration of individual with society, of
town with country, of personal needs with social ones without
denying the integrity of each.

The Sixties have passed — and with them many of the high
hopes raised by dropout youth and radical students. An insecure,
so-called “middle American” adult public, seeking respite from
challenges to traditional values, is trying to entrench itself in the
status quo, indeed, to evoke an “innocence” imputed to the past
that is apocryphal in any case. Where the counterculture has
managed to hold its own against overtly hostile forces, it has had
to contend with a political mode of dope-peddling in the form of
sectarian Marxism and “Third World” voyeurism. Here, archaic
ideologies and modes of organization assume the semblance of
“radicalism” and, like toxic germs, fester in the wounds opened
by public malaise and political repression.

Yet even this ebbing phase of what is surely a much larger
cultural and social development could be valuable as a sobering
period of maturation. A new world will not be gained merely by
strewing the pathway to the future with flowers. The largely
intuitive impulses that exploded with such naive enthusiasm in
the Sixties, only to become bitter, harsh, and dehumanizing in the
pseudo-radicalism that closed the decade, were never adequate
to the long-range historic project of developing a wider public
consciousness of the need for social change. By the late Sixties,
the counterculture ceased to speak to America with understanding and in relevant terms. Its politicization took the worst
form possible — arrogance and a senselessly violent rhetoric. Far
more than the flowers of the mid-Sixties, the angry clenched fists
of the late Sixties served to alarm and utterly alienate an
uncomprehending public.

Yet many of the demands raised by this movement of young
people are imperishable. No matter how far the movement may
recede from its earlier eminence, these demands must inevitably
be recovered and advanced if there is to be any social future. In
calling for a melding of the more abstract ideals of social liberation
with personal liberation, in seeking to form the nuclear libertarian
communistic relationships so necessary to the rearing of a truly
emancipated society, in trying to subvert the influence of the
commodity nexus on the individual self and its relationship with
other selves, in emphasizing the need for a spontaneous expression of sensuality and a humanistic sensibility, in challenging
hierarchy and domination in all its forms and manifestations, in
trying to synthesize new decentralized communities based on an
ecological balance with the natural world — in raising all of these
demands as a single ensemble, the counterculture gave a modern
expression to a long historic mainstream of human dreams and
aspirations. And however intuitively, it did so on the basis of the
historic challenge posed by technological advances unprecedented in history. These demands can never be fully submerged
by political repression; they have become the voice of an
increasingly self-conscious reason that is sedimented into the
very perspective of humanity toward its future. What were only
recently the hotly debated views of a small minority of the young
are almost unconsciously accepted by millions of people in all age
groups.

What strongly favours the growth of these demands is the
harsh fact that society is left with very few choices today. The city
has completed its historic evolution. Its dialectic from the village,
temple area, fortress, or administrative center, each dominated
by agrarian interests, to the megalopolis which completely
dominates the countryside, marks the absolute negation of the
city as we have known it in history. With the modern city, we can
no longer speak of a clearly defined urban entity with a collective
urban interest of its own. Just as each phase or “moment” of the
city in history is marked by its own internal limits, so the
megalopolis represents the limits of the city as such — of *civitas* as
distinguished from *communitas*. The political principle in the
form of the state dissolves all the elements of the social principle,
replacing community ties by bureaucratic ones. Personified
space dissolves into institutional space — and with the violent
ghettoization of the modern city, into what Oscar Newman
crassly describes as “defensible space.” The human scale is
enveloped by urban gigantism. This “anti-city,” neither urban nor
rural, affords no arena for the development of community or even
humanistic sociation. At most, the megalopolis is pieced together
by mutually hostile enclaves each of which is internally “united”
by its hostility to the stranger on the perimeter. At its worst, this
urban cancer is in physical, moral and logistical decay. It ceases
even to function on its own terms, as an efficient arena for the
production and marketing of commodities.

City planning validates the urban crisis by dealing with it as a
problem of logistics and design. The conventional planner’s
concern for efficient movement involves the reduction of human
beings to little more than commodities that circulate through the
capitalist economy as exchange values. The triumph of computer-simulation techniques in city planning reflects the degradation of the urban dweller from the status of “brother” in the
medieval commune to that of “citizen” in the traditional bourgeois city and ultimately to that of a mere digit in the megalopolis. If the traditional city emancipated human sociation from
blood ties, the megalopolis dissolves sociation as such and
reduces it to digital aggregation. City planning presents this
dissolution as ideology. In the dynamic design, people become
“population” and their relations mere movement guided by the
needs and constraints of the prevailing system.

We see, here, the profound difference between the sensibility
of the young Berkeley planners and their conventional counterparts. The Berkeley planners start from the premise that urbanity
does not emancipate human sociation from the blood tie merely
to deliver the individual to the alienated and privatized world of
the bourgeois market place. In the *Blueprint*, sociation is
recovered in the commune, in ties freely formed by human affinity
rather than ancestral lineage. Urbanity, in effect, is fulfilled as a
commune composed of communes. Conventional city planning,
by accepting the city as it is, prevents us from understanding what
humanized territory could be — namely, a new *polis* that would be
a commune made up of communes, of nuclear groups united by
choice and selective affinity, not simply by kinship and blood ties.
Accordingly, just as people become mere “population,” territo-
rialism becomes mere “space” through which people, vehicles,
and commodities flow. City planning becomes the mechanical
organization of space by design, not the ecological colonization of
territory by people. *Civitas* completely assimilates *communitas*;
the political principle, the social principle.

To restore urbanity as a humanized terrain for sociation, the
megalopolis must be ruthlessly dissolved and its place taken by
new decentralized ecocommunities, each carefully tailored to the
carrying capacity of the natural ecosystem in which it is located.
One might reasonably say that these ecocommunities will
possess the best features of the *polis* and medieval commune,
supported by rounded ecotechnologies that rescale the most
advanced elements of modern technology to local dimensions.
The equilibrium between town and country will be restored — not
as a sprawling suburb that mistakes a lawn or a woodlot for
“nature,” but as an interactive functional ecocommunity that
unites industry with agriculture, mental work with physical. No
longer a mere spectatorial object to be seen from a window or
during a stroll, nature will become an integral part of all aspects of
the human experience, from work to play. Only in this way can
the needs of the natural world become integrated with those of
the social to yield an authentic ecological consciousness that
transcends the instrumentalist “environmental” mentality of the
sanitary engineer.

Our place in the history of the city is unique. Precapitalist cities,
owing to an incomplete technological development that perpetuated material scarcity, either stagnated within their limits or
exploded destructively beyond them, only to fall back again to
their original dimensions or disappear entirely. Where the city
was not frozen (as in Asia and the Near East) by hereditary castes
and agrarian hierarchies, its unity was dissolved by the commodity system and market place. This was the fate of the *polis*.
Modern technology has now reached so advanced a level of
development that it permits humanity to reconstruct urban life
along lines that could foster a balanced, well-rounded, and
harmonious community of interests between human beings and
between humanity and the natural world. This ecocommunity
would be more than what we have always meant by a city; it
would be a social work of art, a community fashioned by human
creativity, reason, and ecological insight.

Alternatively, we are confronted by an urban development that
is almost certain to disintegrate into bureaucratic mobilization,
chronic social war, and a condition of permanent violence. If the
earliest hieroglyph of the city was a wall intersected by two roads,
the symbol of the megalopolis may well become a police badge on
which a gun is superimposed. In this kind of “city,” the revenge of
social irrationality will claim its toll in the form of an absolute
division of human from human. This is the very negation of
urbanity. Perhaps more significantly, the limits of the megalopolis
can be formulated as nothing less than the limits of society itself as
an instrument of hierarchy and domination. Left to its own
development, the megalopolis spells the doom not only of the city
as such but of human sociation. For in such an urban world,
technology, subserved to irrational and demonic forces, becomes
not the instrument of harmony and security, but the means for
systematically plundering the human spirit and the natural world.

<right>
May 1973
</right>

[31] Max Horkheimer, *The Eclipse of Reason* (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1947), p. 131.

[32] G.W.F. Hegel, *The Philosophy of History* (New York: Dover Publications,
1956), p. 105.

[33] Aristotle, “Politica” in *The Basic Works of Aristotle* (New York: Random
House, 1941), p. 1284, Book VII, 4:25.

[34] E.A. Gutkind, *The Twilight of Cities* (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe,
1962), p. 17.

[35] Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in
*Community, Life and Social Policy* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 120.

[36] Leonard Reissman, *The Urban Process* (New York: The Free Press of
Glencoe, 1964), p. 10.

[37] Ibid., p. 7.

[38] Frank Fisher, “Where City Planning Stands Today,” *Commentary*, January
1954, p. 75.

[39] Charles Fourier, *Selections* (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), p. 138.

[40] Mel Scott, *American City Planning* (Berkeley : University of California
Press, 1971), p. 1.

[41] Lewis Mumford, “The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning,” in Ebenezer
Howard, *Garden Cities of Tomorrow* (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965),
p. 29.

[42] F.J. Osborn (preface), *Ibid*., p. 21.

[43] Aristotle, *op. cit*., p. 1284, Book VII, 5:32.

[44] Le Corbusier, *The City of Tomorrow* (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1971),
p, 1.

[45] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The City as Machine,” in *Metropolis: Values in
Conflict*, ed. C.E. Elias, Jr., et al (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth Publishing
Co., Inc., 1964), p. 94.

[46] Alexander Tzonis, *Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment* (Boston: i Press, Inc., 1972), p. 66.

[47] Ebenezer Howard, *op. cit.*, p. 51.

[48] *Ibid*., see especially pp. 90, 113–15.

[49] *Ibid*., p. 150.

[50] R. Buckminster Fuller, *Utopia or Oblivion* (New York: Bantam Books,
1969), p. 360.

[51] “Blueprint for a Communal Environment,” in *Sources*, ed. Theodore Roszak
(New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), p. 393.

[52] *Ibid*., p. 394.

[53] *Ibid*., p. 395.

[54] *Ibid*., pp. 399, 400.

[55] *Ibid*., pp. 411–12.

[56] *Ibid*., p. 405.



** Toward a Vision of the Urban Future


“Without testament,” observed Hannah Arendt in *Between Past and Future*, “... without tradition — which selects and
names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where
the treasures are and what their worth is — there seems to be no
willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither
past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the
biological cycle of creatures in it.”[57]

If the city can be added to the lost treasures which Arendt
laments in her deeply sensitive essays, this loss is due in no small
measure to the modern stance of “contemporaneity,” a stance
which virtually denies an urban past in its deadening claim to
sempiternal change, to an eternality of problems that have
neither the retrospect of uniqueness nor the prospect of visionary
solutions. To the degree that the very word “city” is still applied to
the formless urban agglomerations that blot the human landscape, we live with the shallow myth that the problems of the civic
present are equatable with those of the civic past — and hence, in
a sinister sense, with the civic future. Accordingly, we know
neither past nor future but only a present that lacks even the self-
consciousness of its social preconditions, limitations, and historic
fragility.

Our very language betrays the limitations within which we
operate — more precisely, the preconceptions with which we
define the functions of the modern city and our “solutions” to its
problems. However operational it may be, the most unspoken
preconception that guides our view of the modern city is an
entirely entrepreneurial one. Indeed, all shabby moral platitudes
aside, we simply view the city as a business enterprise. Our
underlying urban problems are commonly described in fiscal
terms and often attributed to “poor management,” “financial
irresponsibility,” and “imbalanced budgets.” Judging from this
terminology, it would seem that a “good city” is a fiscally secure
city, and the job of civic institutions is to manage the city as a
“sound business.” Presumably, the “best city” is not only one that
balances its budget and is self-financing but even earns a sizable
profit.

To anyone who has even a glancing acquaintance with urban
history, this is a breathtaking notion of the city, indeed, a notion
that could arise only in the most unadorned and mediocre of
bourgeois epochs. Yet lacking a sense of both past and future, we
would do well to recall that the city has variously been seen as a
ceremonial center (the temple city), an administrative center (the
palace city), a civic fraternity (the *polis*), and a guild city (the
medieval commune). Heavenly or secular, it has always been
uniquely a social space, the terrain in which the suspect
“stranger” became transformed into the citizen — this, as distinguished from the biological parochialism of the clan and tribe with
its roots in blood ties, the sexual division of labour, and age
groups. As the Greeks so well knew, the “good city” represented
the triumph of society over biology, of reason over impulse, of
humanity over folkdom. That capitalism with its principle of
unlimited growth and its own economic emphasis on “sempiternal change” began to expand the medieval marketplace
beyond any comprehensible human scale is a problem that has
been more than adequately explored; but where this tendency
would take us was still conjectural.[58] The last century saw the city
defer to — and even model itself — on the factory.[59] The opening
years of the present century witnessed the conceptual
reduction of the city to a “machine,” a notion which was accepted
by such presumably disparate architects and planners as Le
Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. McLuhan brought us into the
multinational corporate world with his catchy phrase “the global
village,” and Doxiades presumably afforded us the “multidisciplinary” tools for making the multinational city seem like an
international one.[60]

If the schemes of Le Corbusier, Wright, McLuhan, and
Doxiades seem remote at present, if they have been pre-empted
by the bookkeeping of Abe Beame, the shift is not without its
irony. Beame plodded his way to the center of New York politics
as a comptroller, not as a social reformer or city planner. His
concept of community is probably exhausted by the New York
Democratic Party’s headquarters and backrooms. He lacks even
the Dickensian eccentricities of a Scrooge. Only his gray hair,
aging face, and diminutive stature rescue him from appearing as a
corporate technocrat. He is, oddly enough, a man of the
LaGuardia generation who, like the Abbe Sieyes of the French
Revolution, could claim a supreme credential for having lived in a
colourful, dramatic, and dynamic era: he managed to survive. By
virtue of his very appearance and professional background,
Beame personifies the transformation of New York’s urban
problems from those of social reform into those of fiscal
manipulation.

Lest this transformation be taken too much for granted, it has
implications that go far beyond any mere headlines. The change
means that our modern capitalist society has not only subverted
the city s historic role as a medium for socializing parochial fold
into worldly humans; it has completely degraded the city into a
mere business venture to be gauged by monetary rather than
social or cultural criteria. It has, in effect, added a vulgar
dimension to Arendt’s worst fears of “sempiternal change” by
removing the city from the history books and placing it in account
books. The city has become a problem not in social theory,
community, or psychology but in bookkeeping. It has ceased to
be a human creation and has become a commodity. Its achievement is to be judged not by architectural beauty, cultural
inspiration, and human association but by economic productivity, taxable resources, and fiscal success. The most startling
aspect of this development-long in the making when the city
was subordinated to the factory and to commerce — is that urban
theory must cease to pretend that its revered social and cultural
criteria apply to the modern city. Architecture, sociology
anthropology, planning, and cultural history tell us nothing about
the city as it exists today. Urban ideology is business ideology,
ts tools are not Doxiades’ ekistics but double-entry bookkeeping.

The extent to which we have removed the city from the history
books and placed it in the account books is evidenced not only by
the declining ining cities of the northeast but by the burgeoning cities of
the sunbelt. Success, here, is a quixotic form of failure — for the
historic urban trend of our day has not been toward cities but
rather a curious form of urbanization without cities. The
devolution of the sunbelt cities almost entirely into industrial and
commercial “mousetraps” (to quote a *Fortune* journalist) has
yielded a devastating form of “success.” Business has become a
cult; growth, a deity; money, a talisman. The mythic has
reappeared in its most mundane quantified form to create one of
the most dehumanizing ideologies in urban history. In the plastic,
unadorned subdivisions, high-rises, and slab office buildings of
Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, and Houston eastward to Tampa
and Miami, life and culture have been sacrificed to the most
robotized forms of mass production, mass merchandizing, and
mass culture. The faceless structures that sprawl across the
“southern rim” lack the seasoning of history, of authentic cultural
intercourse, of urban development and centering. The cities
themselves have moved, for the most part, by huge leaps, not by
evolution, and the propelling force of the leaps has been some
sort of “resource,” be it copper or petroleum, aerospace or
electronics, range empires or agribusiness. The “gold fever” has
never left the sunbelt; it has merely produced gold in different,
often more feverish ways. If the American empire found its
original colonies on the western frontier, the sunbelt cities have
been its traditional outposts and provided the nodal points for its
most aggressive domestic impulses.

Accordingly, these nodal points — now, sprawling Standard
Metropolitan Statistic Areas — are economically “relevant.”
They form the centers of the “new” industries spawned by World
War II, of intensively worked factory “farms,” of fuels for high-
technology, of shopping malls and retail emporiums. Big government, particulary the Federal government, occupies every niche
that has not been filled by big business and the two inevitably
interlink to form big bureaucracy. Municipal autonomy has rarely
been a strategic concept in the SMSA’s of the sunbelt. The earliest
cities were often cavalry fortresses, not the new “Jerusalems”
established by radical, often anarchistic religious and political
dissenters. Although the frontier nourished the myth of rugged
individualism, community, and vigilantism, its daily life and
tenacious greed nourished self-interest and privatism. Not surprisingly, regional administration tends to supplant municipal
administration, digesting not only neighborhoods but entire cities
in the entrails of huge administrative bureaucracies. Citizenship,
in turn, tends to be gauged more by the capacity to attract
investment, make money, and engage in big-spending than by
civic activism and social reform.

The northeastern cities are significantly different. New York,
whose urban agony has made it paradigmatic for the cities of the
entire region, was the most important point of entry for immigrants into the continent and their first point of contact with the
realities of the “American Dream.” The city achieved its elevated
status not merely as a major port and financial center, but as the
crucible in which the polyglot immigrants of Europe were melded
into a usable labour force. American business itself accorded the
city a special status, however resentfully and boorishly. Whether
by virtue of high investments, political privileges or, more
significantly, social reforms, the city had to be supported as the
demographic and cultural placenta to Europe. More cosmopolitan than any other city in the land, it formed a lifeline to the old
world with its material and intellectual riches. If a single part of the
United States was the American “melting pot,” it was New York
City, and if America needed a space to achieve a measure of
demographic and cultural homogeneity from which to draw
Europe’s labour and skills, it was through New York City.

The present “fiscal crisis” in New York means, quite frankly,
that the city has been abandoned. Its traditional function is no
longer necessary. Today, New York does not receive the bulk of
its immigrants from Europe but from within the United States and
its Hispanic “posessions.” At a time when technology requires
less muscle and more skill, New York has ceased to be an historic
port of entry for needed “human resources” and has become the
dumping ground for superfluous “human waste.” The Statue of
Liberty exhibits its backside to domestic refugees from religious
and political persecution. With its growing proportion of blacks,
Hispanics, and aged, the city has turned into an economic
anachronism and a political menace. Its “minorities,” who now
comprise residential majorities in many parts of the city, are seen
as impediments to a highly corporate, mechanized, and planned
economy. Like the “masterless men” who appeared all over
Europe during the decline of feudalism, these minorities have
become marginal people in an era of technocratic state capitalism. From the bad conscience of the system, the city rears itself
up as a spectre from the past that must be exorcised. Physically it must be set adrift, abandoned to its squalor, archaisms,
and leprous process of decay.

It is not a satisfactory argument to rake up the trite explanations, such as “fiscal mismanagement” and an “eroding tax
base,” that Washington has flung at New York to justify its
neglect of the city. One could reasonably ask if Washington itself
has a more sound fiscal or economic base than the cosmopolis to
the north. That Washington is largely a subsidized city, indeed
subsidized partly by the massive taxes it drains from New York,
suggests that the viability of any city in an era of oligopoly and
state controls can no longer be explained by the precepts of “free
enterprise” economics. Washington is artificially sustained because it is needed as a national administrative center. To the
degree that any city is a heavy recepient of direct or indirect
Federal funds, exorbitant revenues from oligopolistic practices,
or loot drained by leisured high-income counties from exploited
low-income ones, it is artificially sustained by the country as a
whole. Accordingly, Washington lives on tax revenues requisitioned on a national scale, the sunbelt cities on aeronautic, and
military subsidies, oil money, and real-estate hustles, the wealthy communities of southern California on riches plundered from
the poorer countries of the north and east, the Imperial Valley on
artifically inflated food prices by which New Yorkers, Bostonians, and Chicagoans are bled daily. That New York has been the
object of opprobrium rather than support at all levels of the
Federal government and the financial world is evidence not so
much of its “fiscal mismanagement” but its lack of economic
relevancy. Its eminence as a center of immigrant labour has
waned and the immigrants it currently receives are viewed as
despised social flotsam.

Perhaps no less significantly, the city has become politically
dangerous. One could easily visualize that New York, which once
provided the space for melding needed immigrant labour, could
again be favored as a space in which “dispensable” sectors of the
population could be dumped. It might seem plausible that, as
“friendly fascism” oozes over the social landscape, it might leave
oases in which the ethnically abused, the indigent, even the
eccentrics, might find a home in the interests of social pacification. The most sinister feature of the trend toward corporate
and state capitalism is that such oases are basically incompatible
with a totalitarian trend, even of the “friendly” variety. The sixties
have vividly demonstrated that “affluence” does not placate the
restless but awakens them. In the language of modern sociol-
ogese, improved material conditions arouse “high expectations”
and ultimately a rebellious ambience throughout the country.
Viewed from this standpoint, current attempts to subvert New
York City’s traditional reformistic policies are not without
political cunning. The centralized state’s growing police functions
and its increasing manipulation of the economy have been
followed by its growing control over local administrative authority. New York’s loss of municipal self-administration to the central
government could portend a far-reaching destruction of municipal institutions everywhere. Rearing up before us would be an
immense political behemoth that could engulf the last administrative structures of American towns and cities.

In the sunbelt cities, the emergence of such a behemoth
already has acquired considerable reality. The tremendous
weight that is given to economic expansion, to business operations, to governmentally fostered projects has served not only
to promote mindless urban expansion but an appalling degree of
civic passivity. The extent to which these cities have surrendered
to industrial, commercial, and governmental operations is comparable only to the squalid decay of cities during the Industrial
Revolution. The consequences of this surrender can be expressed as a form of municipal growth that occurs in inverse
proportion to civic attrition — civic in the sense that that city once
comprised a vital body politic. Homogeneity has effaced neighborhoods, regionalization has effaced municipalities, and immense enterprises, fed by the bequests of big government, have
effaced the existence of a socially active citizenry. The basic
concerns of the sunbelt cities are growth, not reform; the basic
concerns of its citizens are services, not social participation.
Politically, the residents of the sunbelt cities constitute a client
population, bereft of citizenship and social activism by the very
success of their economic growth. To the degree that meaningful
politics is practiced in these cities, it is bureaucratically orchestrated by business and government.

If the great Hellenic standards of urbanism have meaning any
longer for students of the city and its development, the disappearance of an active body politic, of an authentic, socially
involved citizenry is equivalent to the death of the city itself.
Greek social thought viewed the city as a public arena, a realm of
discourse and rational administration that presupposed a public
opinion, public institutions, and a public man. In the absence of
such a public, there was no *polis*, no citizens, no community. The
sunbelt cities have replaced public life by publicity, by a spectacular, typically American form of “dialogue” that involves the
promotion of political and economic entities. In the spectac-
ularized world of publicity, even the classical market of free
entrepreneurs is converted into oligopolistically managed
shopping malls, democratic political institutions into appointed
bureaucracies, and citizens into taxpayers. What remains of the
city is merely its high residential density, not its urbane populace.

If the municipal success of the sunbelt cities is marked by civic
failure, the municipal failures of the older cities have been marked
by a certain degree of civic success. Owing to the decline of
municipal services in the older cities of the northeast, a vacuum is
developing between the traditional institutions that managed the
city and the urban population itself. These institutions, in effect,
have been compelled to surrender a considerable degree of their
authority to the citizenry. Understaffed municipal agencies can
no longer pretend to adequately meet such basic needs as
sanitation, education, health, and public safety. An eerie municipal “no-man’s-land” is emerging between the institutional apparatus of the older cities and the people it professes to service. This
“no-man’s-land” — this urban vacuum, to be more precise — is
slowly being filled by the ordinary people themselves. Far more
striking than New York’s fiscal crisis is the public response it has
evoked. Libraries, schools, even hospitals and fire houses, have
been occupied by aroused citizens, a trend that is significant not
because amateurs can often exhibit a technical capacity to
replace the services of professionals but rather the high degree of
social activism that the crisis has aroused at a grass roots level.
From the seeming decline of the older cities, taxpayers are slowly
being transformed into citizens, privatized districts into authentic neighborhoods, and a passive populace into an active
public.


If would be naive to overstate this trend and view it as a
practical solution to the crises that beleaguer the northeastern cities. The awakening of public life in these cities will not end
the erosion of their economic and fiscal bases. If the destiny of the
American city is to be determined largely by its industrial and
commercial “growth potential,” this very criterion implies a
redefinition of the city as a business enterprise, not a social and
cultural space. So conceived, the city will have ceased to exist
precisely because of its strictly economic preconditions and its
standards of successful performance.

If the real historic basis of the city, on the other hand, is seen to
be an active body politic and a spirited public life, then New York
is more successful as an authentic municipality than Dallas or
Houston. The evidence for this reawakening of citizen activity
amidst urban decay is often compelling. For example, a convocation last year of block-association representatives by the
Citizens Committee for New York City and the Federation of
Citywide Block Associations, yielded 1,300 activists who, according to a *New York Times* report, “debated community with
the zest, and frequently the contentiousness, of an election-year
political convention.” The report notes that the “neighborhood
activists” were guided by the “conviction that civic betterment
starts on the block where on lives.” However oppressive the
problems discussed — “crime, sanitation, housing improvements, fund-raising, recycling, day care and ‘fighting City Hall’” —
the mood of the activists “was anything but grim. There was
almost an evangelical, upbeat spirit as block leaders told of ways
they had successfully dealt with safety problems or found new
techniques of raising money for tree planting.”

It matters little that the issues raised may often be trivial and
inconsequential. What is far more important than the agenda of
such forms is the extraparliamentary nature of the form itself and
the participatory features of the association. Convocations of
molecular civic groups like “block associations” that resemble a
“political convention” in a normal year mark a rupture with
institutionalized governmental processes. They comprise, in
Martin Buber’s sense, social structures as distinguished from
political ones. Power acquires a public, indeed a personal,
character which, to the bureaucrat, is a kind of social “vigilantism” and “anarchy” and to the participant is a “town
meeting.” The energy that buoys up the convocation, the anti-
hierarchical character that often marks its organization, and the
verve of its participants implies a renewed sense of power as
distinguished from the powerlessness that constitutes the social
malaise of our times.

The trivialities of the agenda should not blind us to the historic
importance of municipal reawakenings at this level of action. The
role of civic activism as means for far-reaching social change
dates back to the American and French revolutions, and formed
the basis for revolutionary change in the Paris Commune of 1871.
In revolutionary America, “the nature of city government came in
for heated discussion,” observes Merril Jensen in a fascinating
discussion of the period. Town meetings, whether legal or
informal, “had been a focal point of revolutionary activity.” The
antidemocratic reaction that set in after the American revolution was marked by efforts to do away with town meeting
governments that had spread well beyond New England to the
mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Attempts by conservative
elements were made to establish a “corporate form (of municipal
government) whereby the towns could be government by mayors
and councils” elected from urban wards. Judging from New
Jersey, the merchants “backed incorporation consistently in the
efforts to escape town meetings.” Such efforts were successful
not only in cities and towns of that state but also in Charleston,
New Haven, and eventually even Boston. Jensen, addressing
himself to the incorporated form of municipal government and
restricted suffrage that replaced the more democratic assembly
form of the revolutionaries of 1776 in Philadelphia, expresses a
judgement that could apply to all the successful efforts on behalf
of municipal incorporation following the revolution: “The counter-revolution in Philadelphia was complete.”

A decade later, the French revolutionaries faced much the
same problem when the *sans culottes* and *enrages* tried to affirm
the power of the Parisian local popular assemblies or “sections”
over the centralized Convention and Committee of Public Safety
controlled by Robespierrists. Ironically, the final victory of the
Convention over the sections was to cost Robespierre his life and
end the influence of the Jacobins over subsequent developments.
The municipal movement, indeed a rich classical heritage of the
city as community that had nourished the social outlook of
German idealism and later utopian socialist and anarchist
theories, dropped from sight with the emergence of Marxism and
its narrow “class analysis” of history. Yet it can hardly be ignored
that the Paris Commune of 1871, which provided Marxism and
anarchism with its earliest models of a liberated society, was
precisely a revolutionary municipal movement whose goal of a
“social republic” had been developed within a confederalist
framework of free municipalities or “communes.”

Although the older northeastern cities of the United States
hardly bear comparison with their own ancestral communities of
two centuries ago, much less revolutionary Paris, it would be
myopic to ignore certain fascinating similarities. The block
committees of New York City are not the town meetings of
Boston or the sections of Paris; they do not profess any historic
goals for the most part nor have they advanced any programmatic expression in support of major social change. But they
clearly score a new advance in the demands of their participants — primarily, a claim to governance in the administration of
their “blocks,” a proclivity for federation, and in the best of cases,
an emerging body politic. The city itself is riddled by tenants
associations, ad hoc committees and councils to achieve specific
neighborhood goals, a stable Neighborhood Housing Movement,
and broad-spectrum organizations that propound an ideology of
“neighborhood government.” These groups, often networks,
that advance a concept of decentralized self-management,
however intuitive their views, stand out in refreshing relief against
a decades-long history of municipal centralization and neighborhood erosion. Even demands of “municipal liberty” are
being heard in terms that are more suggestive of an earlier civic
radicalism than its proponents are prepared to admit.

In a number of instances, such “block” and neighborhood
organisations have gone beyond the proprieties of convocations,
fundraising, sanitation, public safety, and even demonstrations to
take over unused or abandoned property and stake out a moral
right to cooperative ownership. Apart from episodic occupations
of closed libraries, schools, and a “peoples” firehouse, the most
important of these occupations have been neglected or unhabitable buildings. One such action, now called the “East Eleventh
Street Movement” has achieved a national reputation. Initially,
the Movement was a Puerto Rican neighborhood organization,
one of several in the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, which formed
an alliance with some young radical intellectuals to rehabilitate an
abandoned tenement that had been gutted completely by fire.
The block itself, one of the worst in the Hispanic ghetto, had
become a hangout for drug addicts, car-strippers, muggers, and
arsonists. Unlike most buildings which are taken over by
squatters, 519 East 11 St. was a city-acquired ruin, a mere shell of
a structure that had been boarded up after it had been totally
destroyed by fire. This building was to be totally rebuilt by coopers, composed for the most part of Puerto Ricans and some
whites, by funds acquired from a city “program” that accepts
labour as equity for loans — the now famous “sweat equity
program.” The Movement’s attempts to acquire the building, to
fund it, to expand its activities to other abandoned structures
were to become a cause celebre that has since inspired similar
efforts both in the Lower Eastside and other ghetto areas. To a
certain degree, the building was taken over before “sweat equity”
negotiations with the city had been completed. The city was
patently reluctant to assist the co-opers and apparently yielded to
strong local pressure before supplying aid. The building itself was
not only rebuilt but also “retrofitted” with energy-saving devices,
insulation, solar panels for preheating water and a Jacobs wind
generator for some of its electric power. An account of the
conflicts between the “East Eleventh Street Movement,” the city
bureaucracy, and finally Consolidated Edision would comprise a
sizable article in itself. What is perhaps the most significant
feature of the project is its libertarian ambience. The project was
not only a fascinating structural enterprise; it was an extraordinary cooperative effort in every sense of the term.
Politically, the Movement was “fighting City Hall” — and it did so
with an awareness that it was promoting decentralized local
rights over big municipal as well as big State and Federal
government. Economically, it was fighting the financial establishment by advancing a concept of labour — “sweat equity” — over the usual capital and monetary premises of investment. Socially, it was fighting the pre-eminence which bureauracy has claimed over the community by intervening and often
disrupting the maddening regulatory machinery that has so often,
in itself, defeated almost every grass-roots movement for structural and neighborhood rehabilitation.

All of these conflicts were conducted with a minimal degree of
hierarchy and a strong emphasis on egalitarian organizational
forms. Participants were encouraged to voice their views and
freely assume responsability for the building itself and the group’s
conflicts with municipal agencies and utilities. This organizational
form has been preserved after the rebuilding of 519 East 11 Street
was completed and occupied. The entire block was — and, in
part, remains — involved in varying degreees with the group’s
activities and its efforts to reclaim other buildings in the area.
Many participants have acquired a heightened sense of social
awareness as a result of their own efforts to achieve a degree of
“municipal liberty,” if only for their own physical space and
nearby blocks. Activists who remain involved with the larger
aspects of the project — its explosive political, social, and economic implications — have a radical consciousness of their goals.
What began as a desperate effort of housing co-opers to rescue
their own homes, in effect, has become a social movement.

Such movements, in some cases involving “illegal” seizures of
abandoned buildings, are growing in number in New York and
other older cities. Although they have not always exhibited the
staying power and libertarian ambience of the “East Eleventh
Street Movement,” they must be seen in terms of the context
they have themselves created. “Municipal liberty” in the older
cities, to be sure, does not mean the “liberty, equality, and
fraternity” which the more radical Parisian sections tried to
foster; nor does it have the mobilizing and solidarizing qualities of
the more radical American town meetings. The projects than can
be related to this new civic trend — be they housing co-opers,
“sweat equity” programs, block committees, tenants groups,
neighborhood “alliances, or cooperative day-care, educational,
cultural, and even food projects — vary enormously in their
longevity, stability, social consciousness, and scope. In some
cases, they are blatently elitist and civically exclusionary. To a
large extent, they form a constellation of new subcultures that
have evolved from the broader countercultural movement of the
sixties, a constellation that has been greatly modified by ethnic
disparaties, urban disarray, a broad disengagement of municipal
government from its own constituency, an emerging “free space”
for popular, often libertarian, civic entities, and the civic bases for
a new body politic.

But a living trend they remain — and the most important trend
to emerge in American cities today. In contrast to the bureaucratically managed and municipally regimented sunbelt cities,
they represent a largely regional development. The very fact that
they have been fueled by urban decay conceals their significance
as the most significant trend in generations to reclaim the city as
the public space for an authentic citizenry. If they are not a
“vision” of the future, they may well be one of its harbingers.
Certainly they are one of the most exciting links American cities
have yet produced between the urban past and the urban
future — a new “treasure,” as Arendt might have put it, in the
development of human community and the human spirit.

A vision of the urban future — if it is to be conceived as a city
and not a sprawling agglomeration of man-made structures —
is haunted by the past. The assumption that we cannot “return”
to the past can become a trite excuse for ignorance of that very
past or an unconditional renunciation of what we can learn from
it. To the serious student of urban life, the most fascinating point
of departure for relating past to future is the Hellenic *polis*. That
we live in a world of nation-states and multinational corporations
is no excuse to continue do so. The urban future must be viewed
from a standpoint that may sharply contradict the immediate
future of our present SMSAs, a future that seems to consist of
more business, more structural as well as economic growth, and
more centralization, whether in the name of “regionalization” or
“federalism.” That future must be above all a new conception of
the “city of man” that fulfills our most advanced concepts of
humanity’s potentialities: freedom and self-consciousness, the
two terms that form the historic message of Western civilization.

Self-consciousness, at the very least, implies a new self: a self
that can be conscious. Consciousness, certainly in the fulness of
its truth, presupposes an environment in which the individual can
conceptually grasp the conditions that influence his or her life and
exercise control over them. Indeed, insofar as an individual lacks
these dual elements of consciousness, he or she is neither free
nor fully human in the self-actualized sense of the term. Denied
intellectual and institutional access to the economic resources
that sustain us, to the culture that nourishes our mental and spiritual growth, and to the social forms that frame our behaviour as
civilized beings, we are not only denied our freedom and our
ability to function rationally but our very selfhood. The great
cultural critics of society have voiced this conclusion for centuries. This conclusion has even more relevance today — an era
of social decay that seems almost cosmic in its scale — than at any
time in the past.

In terms of the city, such a conclusion means that a vision of the
urban future can be regarded as rational and humanly viable only
insofar as the city lends itself to individual comprehension —
notably, that it is an entity that can be understood by the
individual and modified by individual action. That the city whose
population “can be taken in at a single view” (Aristotle) — that is,
scaled physically and numerically to human dimensions — remained essential to the Hellenic ideal of the *polis* is merely
another way of saying that a city without a citizenry, an active
body politic, is not a city, indeed unworthy of anything but
barbarians. Human scale is a necessary condition for human
self-fulfillment and social fulfillment. A humanistic vision of the
future city must rest on the premise that the authentic “city of
man” is comprehensible to its citizens or else they will cease to be
citizens and public life itself will disappear. A vision of the urban
future is thus meaningless if it does not include from its very
outset the decentralization of the great SMSAs, the restoration of
city life as a comprehensible form of public life.

Still another vision of the future must include the recovery of
face-to-face form of civic management — a selfhood that is
formed by self-management in assemblies, committees, and
councils. We can never “outgrow” the Hellenic *ecclesia* or the
American town meeting without debasing the word “growth” to
mean mere change rather than development. The existence of an
authentic public presupposes the most direct system of communication we can possibly achieve, notably, face-to-face communication. Again, another of Aristotle’s caveats is appropriate
here: “... in order to decide questions of justice and in order to
distribute the offices according to merit it is necessary for the
citizens to know each other’s personal characters, since where
this does not happen to be the case, the business of electing
officials and trying law-suits is bound to go badly; haphazard
decision is unjust in both matters, and this must obviously prevail
in an excessively numerous community.” It need hardly be
emphasized that Aristotle would have been appalled as much by
the telecommunications of a “global village ” as he would have
been by the very concept of the world as a huge city or village.
Human scale thus means human contact, not economic, cultural,
and institutional comprehensibility alone. Not only should the
things, forms and organizations that make up a community be
comprehensible to the citizen, but the very individuals — their
“personal characters” — who form the citizen body. The terms
“citizen body,” in this sense, assume more than an institutional
concept; they take on a physical, existential, sensory, indeed
protoplasmic, quality.

Thus far, I have been careful to stress the conditions that
foster public life rather than the things that make for the “good
life” materially. Decentralization and human scale have been
emphasized as the bases for a new civic arena. Whether they are
more “efficient” systems of social organization or more “ecological” types of association, as some writers have argued, has not
been emphasized. That a city, landscaped into the countryside,
will promote a new land ethic and afford its citizens greater access
to nature — perhaps even restore the urbanized farmer so prized
by the Athenian *polis* and republican Rome — adds to the case for
physical environment. But ultimately it is the very need for a
reactivated citizenry that must be stressed over efficiency,
ecological awareness, and vocational roundedness. Without that
citizenry we now face the loss not only of our cities, but of
civilization itself.

Finally, the recovery of a body politic and a civic community
can scarcely be imagined without the commutarian sharing of the
means of life — the material as well as social communizing that
authentic community presupposes. In a technological world
where the means of production are too powerful to be deployed
any longer for means of domination, it is doubtful if society, much
less the city, can survive a privately owned economy riddled by
self-interest and an insatiable need for growth. More than the
“good life,” materially speaking, is involved in a communitarian
system of production and distribution; the very existence of a
coherent community interest is now at issue. Here, too, Hellenic
culture has much to teach us about the future. Private interest
can not be so dominant a motive in social relationships that it
subverts the public interest. If private property once formed
an underpinning of individualism in the corporatized cities of the
past such as the guild-directed medievel towns, today, in the “free
market” of giant oligopolies it has become the underpinning of
naked egotism, indeed, the institutionalized expression of asocial
behaviour of the most ruthless kind. If the city is to become a
public body of active citizens, it must extend the public interest to
the material as well as institutional and cultural elements of civic
life.

Here we can part company with the Hellenic outlook and view
the future as more than a recovery of the past. Modern
technology — “hard,” “soft,” “appropriate,” or as I would prefer
to call it, liberatory — has finally made it possible for us to
eliminate the fears which stalked Aristotle: “an overpopulous
*polis* / of / foreigners and metics / who / will readily acquire
the rights of citizens...” To these potential upstarts, one might
also add slaves and women. The leisure or schole — the freedom
from labour — that made it possible for Athenian citizens to
devote their time to public life is no longer a birthright conferred
by slavery on an ethnic elite but one conferred by technology on
humanity as a whole. That we may feel free to reject that
birthright for a “simpler,” “labour intensive” way of life is a historic
privilege that itself is conferred by the very existence of technology. Although a “global village” created by telecommunications would be an abominable negation of the city as a citizen
body, “global citizenship” in clearly defined cities would constitute its highest actualization — the civic socialization of parochial folk into a universal humanity.

This vision of the urban future must now stand as it is — vague,
perhaps, and broad but hopeful. Any additions or details would
be utopian in the worst sense of the word. They would form a
“blueprint” that seeks to design without discussion and impose
without consent. A libertarian vision should be a venture in
speculative participation. Half-finished ideas should be proferred
deliberately, not because finished ones are difficult to formulate
but rather because completeness to the point of details would
subvert dialogue — and it is dialogue itself that is essential to civic
relations, just as it is logos that forms the basis of society.

<right>
December 1978
</right>

[57] The ambiguity of the tendency is evident in the writings of Marx and Engels.
Despite Engels’s critical thrust in his well-known pamphlet “The Housing
Question,” he clearly shared Marx’s view that the bourgeois city marked a
distinct advance over rural “parochialism.”

[58] Notably organizations such as the Alliance for Neighborhood Government in
the United States and the Montreal Citizens Movement (MCM) in Canada,
The MCM, which already holds a considerable number of seats in Montreal’s
city council, has advanced the most radical program of all. “Nous devons
instaurer notre propre democratic afin de realiser notre plan de reorganisation de la societe,” it declares in its latest program. And further:
“Le conseil de quartier (which the MCM seeks to substitute for the existing
“districts electoraux”) ne devra done jamais devenir un autre palier de
gouvernement a I’interieur de la societe capitaliste” (Montreal Citizens
Movement, 1976).

[59] There is, in fact, no offical “sweat equity program” in New York City. The
“program” is the legal and funding nexus which youthful activists on the
East 11 Street project and “U-Hab,” a New York homesteading group,
created when early attempts were made to rebuild abandoned structures in the
city. For the most recent survey of “sweat equity” projects in New York, see
the Third Annual Progress Report of the Urban Homesteading Assistance
Board.

[60] Milton Kotler (1975), for example, has emphasized the efficiency of decentralization and F.S. Schumacher (1973), its capacity to promote ecological
awareness. In the latter case, I must share some responsability for this
emphasis in as much as Dr. Schumacher, quoting me by earlier pseudonym,
Lewis Herber, accepts my assertion that “reconciliation of man with the
natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become necessary” (p. 107).

*** References

<biblio>
ARENDT, H. (1954). Between past and future. New York: Viking.

ARISTOTLE (1943). Politics (B. Jowett, trans.). New York: Modern Library.

BOOKCHIN, M. (1973). The limits of the city. New York: Harper and Row.
 — (forthcoming). Urbanization without cities. San Francisco: Sierra Club.

CARO, R.A. (1974). The power broker. New York: Knopf.

DOXIADES, C.A., and DOUGLAS, T.B. (1965). The new world of urban man.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

JENSEN, M. (1950). The new nation: A history of the United States during the
confederation, 1781–1789. New York: Knopf.

KOTLER, M. (1969). Neighborhood government. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
 — (1975). “Neighborhood government.” Liberation, 19 (8 and 9): 119–125.

Le CORBUSIER (1971). The city of tomorrow. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.

McLUHAN, M., and FIORE, Q. (1968). War and peace in the global village.
New York: Bantam.

New York Times (1976). March 26.

SCHUMACHER, F.S. (1973). Small is beautiful. London: Blond and Briggs.

WRIGHT, F.L. (1964). “The city as a machine.” Pp. 91–94 in C.E. Elias, Jr. et al.
(eds.), Metropolis: Values in conflict, Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.
</biblio>

----

“Toward a Vision of the Urban Future” by Murray Bookchin is reprinted from The
Rise of the Sunbelt Cities (URBAN AFFAIRS ANNUAL REVIEWS, Vol. 14)
David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins, Editors, copyright 1977 pp. 259–276 by
permission of the Publisher, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills/London)






** Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology



Marx’s work, perhaps the most remarkable project to
demystify bourgeois social relations, has itself become the most
subtle mystification of capitalism in our era. I refer not to any
latent “positivism” in the Marxian corpus or to any retrospective recognition of its “historical limits.” A serious critique of
Marxism must begin with its innermost nature as the most
advanced product — indeed, the culmination — of the bourgeois
Enlightenment. It will no longer suffice to see Marx’s work as the
point of departure for a new social critique, to accept its
“method” as valid despite the limited content it yielded in its day,
to extol its goals as liberatory apart from its means, to view the
project as tainted by its dubious heirs or adherents.

Indeed, Marx’s “failure” to develop a radical critique of
capitalism and a revolutionary practice emerges not even as a
failure in the sense of an enterprise that remains inadequate to its
goals. Quite to the contrary. At its best, Marx’s work is an
inherent self-deception that inadvertently absorbs the most
questionable tenets of Enlightenment thought into its very
sensibility and remains surprisingly vulnerable to their bourgeois
implications. At its worst, it provides the most subtle apologia for
a new historic era that has witnessed the melding of the “free
market” with economic planning, private property with nationalized property, competition with the oligopolistic manipulation
of production and consumption, the economy with the state — in
short, the modern epoch of state capitalism. The surprising
congruence of Marx’s “scientific socialism” — a socialism which
reared the goals of economic rationalization, planned production,
and a “proletarian state” as essential elements of the revolutionary project — with the inherent development of capitalism
toward monopoly, political control, and a seemingly “welfare
state has already brought institutionalized Marxian tendencies
such as Social Democracy and Euro-Communism into open
complicity with the stabilization of a highly rationalized era of
capitalism. Indeed, by a slight shift of perspective, we can easily
use Marxian ideology to describe this state capitalist era as
“Socialist.”

Can such a shift of perspective be shrugged off as a “vulgarization” or “betrayal” of the Marxian project? Or does it comprise
the very realization of Marxism’s most fundamental assumptions — a logic that may have even been hidden to Marx himself?
When Lenin describes socialism as “nothing but state capitalist
monopoly made to benefit the whole people,” does he violate the
integrity of the Marxian project with his own “vulgarizations” ? Or
does he reveal underlying premises of Marxian theory that render
it historically into the most sophisticated ideology of advanced
capitalism? What is basically at stake in asking these questions is
whether there are shared assumptions between all Marxists that
provide real premises for Social-Democratic and Euro-Communist practice and Lenin’s futuristics. A theory that is so readily
“vulgarized,” “betrayed,” or, more sinisterly, institutionalized
into bureaucratic power forms by nearly all of its adherents may
well be one that lends itself to such “vulgarizations,” “betrayals,”
and bureaucratic forms as a *normal condition of its existence*.
What may seem to be “vulgarizations,” “betrayals,” and bureaucratic manifestations of its tenets in the heated light of doctrinal
disputes may prove to be the fulfillment of its tenets in the cold
light of historical development. In any case, all the historical roles,
today, seem to have been totally miscast. Rather than refurbishing Marxism so that it can catch up with the many advanced
phases of modern capitalism, it may well be that many advanced
phases of modern capitalism in the more traditional bourgeois
countries have yet to catch up with Marxism as the most
sophisticated *ideological* anticipation of the capitalist development.

Let there be no mistake that I am engaged in an academic play
of words. Reality exhibits even more compelling paradoxes than
theory. The Red Flag flies over a world of Socialist countries that
stand at mutual war with each other, while Marxian parties
outside their perimeter form indispensable props for an increasingly state capitalist world that, ironically enough, arbitrates
between — or aligns itself with — its contending Socialist neighbors. The proletariat, like its plebian counterpart in the ancient
world, shares actively in a system that sees its greatest threat
from a diffuse populace of intellectuals, urban dwellers, feminists,
gays, environmentalists — in short, a trans-class “people” that
still expresses the utopian ideals of democratic revolutions long
passed. To say that Marxism merely takes no account, today, of
this utterly unMarxian constellation is to be excessively generous
toward an ideology that has become the “revolutionary” persona
of state capitalist reaction. Marxism is exquisitely constructed to
*obscure* these new relationships, to distort their meaning, and,
where all else fails, to reduce them to its economistic categories.

The Socialist countries and movements, in turn, are no less
“socialist” for their “distortions” than for their professed
“achievements.” Indeed, their “distortions” acquire greater significance than their “achievements” because they reveal in
compelling fashion the ideological apparatus that serves to
mystify state capitalism. Hence, more than ever, it is necessary
that this apparatus be explored, its roots unearthed, its logic
revealed, and its spirit exorcised from the modern revolutionary
project. Once drawn into the clear light of critique, it will be seen
for what it truly is — not as “incomplete,” “vulgarized” or
“betrayed” but rather as the historic essence of counterrevolution, indeed, of counterrevolution that has more effectively
used every liberatory vision against liberation than any historic
ideology since Christianity.

*** Marxism and Domination

Marxism converges with Enlightenment bourgeois ideology at
a point where both seem to share a scientistic conception of
reality. What usually eludes many critics of Marx’s scientism,
however, is the *extent* to which “scientific socialism” objectifies
the revolutionary project and thereby necessarily divests it of all
ethical content and goals. Recent attempts by neo-Marxists to
infuse a psychological, cultural, and linguistic meaning into
Marxism challenge it on its own terms without candidly dealing
with its innermost nature. Whether consciously or not, they
share in the mystifying role of Marxism, however useful their
work may be in strictly theoretical terms. In fact, as to the matter
of scientific methodology, Marx can be read in many ways. His
famous comparison in the “Preface” to *Capital* of the physicist
who experimentally reproduces natural phenomena in their
“pure state” and his own choice of England as the “*locus classicus*” of industrial capitalism in his own day obviously reveals
a scientistic bias that is only reinforced by his claim that *Capital*
reveals the “natural laws” of “economic movement” in capitalism ; indeed, that the work treats “the economic formation of
society (not only capitalism — M.B.)... as a process of natural
history...” On the other hand, such formulations can be counterbalanced by the dialectical character of the *Grundrisse* and of
*Capital* itself, a dialectic that probes the internal transformations
of capitalist society from an organic and immanent standpoint
that hardly accords with the physicist’s conception of reality.

What decisively unites both the scientism of physics and the
Marxian dialectic, however, is the concept of “lawfulness” itself —
the preconception that social reality and its trajectory can be
explained in terms that remove human visions, cultural influences, and most significantly, ethical goals from the social
process. Indeed, Marxism elucidates the function of these
cultural, psychological, and ethical “forces” in terms that make
them contingent on “laws” which act behind human wills. Human
wills, by their mutual interaction and obstruction, “cancel” each
other out and leave the “economic factor” free to determine
human affairs. Or to use Engels’s monumental formulation, these
wills comprise “innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series
of parallograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the
historic event.” Hence, in the long run, “the economic ones are
ultimately decisive.” (Letter to J. Bloch) It is by no means clear
that Marx, who adduces the physicist’s laboratory as a paradigm, would have disagreed with Engels’s social geometry. In
any case, whether social “laws” are dialectical or not is beside the
point. The fact is that they constitute a consistently *objective*
basis for social development that is uniquely characteristic of the
Enlightenment’s approach to reality.

We must pause to weigh the full implications of this turn in what
could be called Marx’s “theory of knowledge.” Greek thought
also had a notion of law, but one that was guided more by a
concept of “destiny” or *Moira* than “necessity” in the modern
sense of the term. *Moira* embodied the concept of “necessity”
governed by meaning, by an ethically conditioned goal fixed by
“destiny.” The actual realization of “destiny” was governed by
justice or *Dike* which preserved the world order by keeping each
of the cosmic elements within their appointed bounds. The
mythic nature of this conception of “law” should not close our
eyes to its highly ethical content. “Necessity” was not merely
compulsion but *moral* compulsion that had *meaning* and *purpose*. Insofar as human knowledge has a right to assume that the
world is an orderly one — an assumption that modern science
shares with mythic cosmologies if only to make knowledge
possible — it has a right to assume that this order has intelligibility or meaning. It can be translated by human thought into a
purposive constellation of relations. From the implicit concept of
goal that is inherent in any notion of an orderly universe, Greek
philosophy could claim the right to speak of “justice” and “strife”
in the cosmic order, of “attraction” and “repulsion,” of “injustice”
and “retribution.” Given the eventual need for a nature philosophy that will guide us toward a deeper sense of ecological insight
into our warped relationship with the natural world, we are by no
means free of a less mythic need to restore this Hellenic
sensibility.

The Enlightenment, by divesting law of all ethical content,
produced an objective cosmos that had order without meaning.
Laplace, its greatest astronomer, removed not only god from his
description of the cosmos in his famous reply to Napoleon, but
also the classical ethos that guided the universe. But the
Elightenment left one arena open to this ethos — the social arena,
one in which order still had meaning and change still had purpose.
Enlightenment thought retained the ethical vision of a moral
humanity that could be educated to live in a moral society. This
vision, with its generous commitment to freedom, equality, and
rationality was to be the well-spring of utopian socialism and
anarchism in the century to follow.

Ironically, Marx completed Enlightenment thought by bringing
the Laplacian cosmos into society — not, to be sure, as a crude
mechanist but certainly as a scientist in harsh opposition to any
form of social utopianism. Far more significant than Marx’s belief
that he had rooted socialism in science is the fact that he had
rooted the “destiny” of society in science. Henceforth, “men”
were to be seen (to use Marx’s own words in the “Preface” to
*Capital*) as the “personification of economic categories, the
bearer of particular class interest,” not as individuals possessed
of volition and of ethical purpose. They were turned into the
objects of social law, a law as divested of moral meaning as Laplace’s cosmic law. Science had not merely become a means for
describing society but had become its fate.

What is significant in this subversion of the ethical content of
law — indeed, this subversion of dialectic — is the way in which
domination is elevated to the status of a natural fact. Domination is annexed to liberation as a precondition for social
emancipation. Marx, while he may have joined Hegel in a
commitment to consciousness and freedom as the realization of
humanity’s potentialities, has no *inherent* moral or spiritual
criterion for affirming this destiny. The entire theory is captive to
its own reduction of ethics to law, subjectivity to objectivity,
freedom to necessity. Domination now becomes admissible as a
“precondition” for liberation, capitalism as a “precondition” for
socialism, centralization as a “precondition” for decentralization,
the state as a “precondition” for communism. It would have been
enough to say that material and technical development are
preconditions for freedom, but Marx, as we shall see, says
considerably more and in ways that have sinister implications for
the realization of freedom. The constraints, which utopian
thought at its best placed on any transgression of the moral
boundaries of action are dismissed as “ideology.” Not that Marx
would have accepted a totalitarian society as anything but a
vicious affront to his outlook, but there are no *inherent* ethical
considerations in his theoretical apparatus to exclude domination from his social analysis. Within a Marxian framework,
such an exclusion would have to be the result of objective social
law — the process of “natural history” — and that law is morally
neutral. Hence, domination can be challenged not in terms of
an ethics that has an inherent claim to justice and freedom; it can
be challenged — or validated — only by objective laws that have a
validity of their own, that exist behind the backs of “men” and
beyond the reach of “ideology.” This flaw, which goes beyond the
question of Marx’s “scientism,” is a fatal one, for it opens the door
to domination as the hidden incubus of the Marxian project in all
its forms and later developments.


*** The Conquest of Nature

The impact of this flaw becomes evident once we examine the
premises of the Marxian project at their most basic level, for at
this level we find that domination literally “orders” the project and
gives it intelligibility. Far more important than Marx’s concept of
social development as the “history of class struggle” is his drama
of the extrication of humanity from animality into society, the
“disembeddedness” of humanity from the cyclic “eternality” of
nature into the linear temporality of history. To Marx, humanity is
socialized only to the degree that “men” acquire the technical
equipment and institutional structures to achieve the “conquest”
of nature, a “conquest” that involves the substitution of “universal” mankind for the parochial tribe, economic relations for
kinship relations, abstract labour for concrete labour, social
history for natural history. Herein lies the “revolutionary” role of
capitalism as a social era. “The bourgeois period of history has to
create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand the
universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of
mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand
the development of the productive powers of man and the
transformation of material production into a scientific domination
of natural agencies,” Marx writes in *The Future Results of British Rule in India* (July, 1853). “Bourgeois industry and commerce
create these material conditions of a new world in the same way
as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.
When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of
the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern
powers of production, and subjected them to the common
control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human
progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would
not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

The compelling nature of Marx’s formulations — their evolutionary schema, their use of geological analogies to explain
historical development, their crassly scientistic treatment of
social phenomena, their objectivization of human action as a
sphere beyond ethical evaluation and the exercise of human
will — are all the more striking because of the period in which the
lines were written (Marx’s *Grundrisse* “period”). They are also
striking because of the historic “mission” Marx imparted to
English rule in India: the “destruction” of ancient Indian lifeways
(“the annihilation of old Asiatic society”) and the “regeneration”
of India as a bourgeois nation (“the laying of the material
foundations of Western society in Asia”). Marx’s consistency in
all of these areas deserves respect, not a tasteless refurbishing of
classic ideas with eclectical exegesis and a theoretical adorning or
“updating” of Marx with patchwork conclusions that are borrowed from utterly alien bodies of ideas. Marx is more rigorous in
his notion of historic progress as the conquest of nature than his
later acolytes and, more recently, neo-Marxians. Nearly five
years later, in the *Grundrisse*, he was to depict the “great
civilizing influence of capital” in a manner that accords completely with his notion of the British “mission” in India: “the production
(by capital) of a stage of society compared with which all earlier
stages appear to be merely *local progress* and idolatry of nature.
Nature becomes for the first time simply an object for mankind,
purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognized as a power in
its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent
laws appears only as a strategem designed to subdue it to human
requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the
means of production. Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed
beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of
existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the
reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all
this, and permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles
that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion
of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and
exchange of natural and intellectual forces.”

These words could be drawn almost directly from D’Holbach’s
vision of nature as an “immense laboratory,” from D’Alembert’s
paeans to a new science that sweeps “everything before it... like a
river which has burst its dam,” from Diderot’s hypostasization of
technics in human progress, from Montesqieu’s approving image
of a ravished nature — an image that, judiciously mixed with
William Petty’s metaphor of nature as the “mother” and labour as
the “father” of all commodities, clearly reveal the Enlightenment
matrix of Marx’s outlook. As Ernst Cassirer was to conclude in
an assessment of the Enlightenment mind: “The whole eighteenth century is permeated by this conviction, namely, that in
the history of humanity the time had come to deprive nature of its
carefully guarded secrets, to leave it no longer in the dark to be
marveled at as an incomprehensible mystery but to bring it under
the bright light of reason and analyze it with all its fundamental
forces.” (*The Philosophy of the Enlightenment*)

The Enlightenment roots of Marxism aside, the notion that
nature is “object” to be used by “man” leads not only to the total
despiritization of nature but the total despiritization of “man.”
Indeed, to a greater extent than Marx was prepared to admit,
historic processes move as blindly as natural ones in the sense
that they lack consciousness. The social order develops under
the compulsion of laws that are as suprahuman as the natural
order. Marxian theory sees “man” as the embodiment of two
aspects of material reality: firstly, as a producer who defines
himself by labour; secondly, as a social being whose functions are
primarily economic. When Marx declares that “Men may be
distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like (but they) begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of
subsistence,” (*The German Ideology*), he essentially deals with
humanity as a “force” in the productive process that differs from
other material “forces” only to the degree that “man” can
conceptualize productive operations that animals perform instinctively. It is difficult to realize how decisively this notion of
humanity breaks with the classical concept. To Aristotle, “men”
fulfilled their humanity to the degree that they could live in a *polis*
and achieve the “good life.” Hellenic thought as a whole
distinguished “men” from animals by virtue of their rational
capacities. If a “mode of production” is not simply to be regarded
as a means of survival but a “definite *mode of life*” such that
“men” are “what they produce and how they produce” (*The German Ideology*), humanity, in effect, can be regarded as an
instrument of production. The “domination of man by man” is
primarily a *technical* phenomenon rather than an *ethical* one.
Within this incredibly reductionist framework, whether it is valid
for “man” to dominate “man” is to be judged mainly in terms of
technical needs and possibilities, however distasteful such a
criterion may seem to Marx himself had he faced it in all its brute
clarity. Domination, too, as we shall see with Engels’ essay “On
Authority,” becomes a technical phenomenon that underpins the
realm of freedom.

Society, in turn, becomes a mode of labour that is to be judged
by its capacity to meet material needs. Class society remains
unavoidable as long as the “mode of production” fails to provide
the free time and material abundance for human emancipation.
Until the appropriate technical level is achieved, “man’s” evolutionary development remains incomplete. Indeed, popular
communistic visions of earlier eras are mere ideology because
“only want is made general” by premature attempts to achieve an
egalitarian society, “and with want the struggle for necessities and
all the old shit would necessarily be reproduced.” (*The German Ideology*).

Finally, even where technics reaches a relatively high level of
development, “the realm of freedom does not commence until
the point is passed where labour under the compulsion of
necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of
things it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict
meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature,
in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and
reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all
forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With
his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because
his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production
increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this
field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized
man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with
nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish
their task with the least expenditure of energy and under
conditions most adequate to their human nature and most
worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it
begins that development of human power, which is its own end,
the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only
upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the
working day is its fundamental premise.” (*Capital*, Vol. Ill) The
bourgeois conceptual framework reaches its apogee, here in
images of the “savage who must wrestle with nature,” the
unlimited expansion of needs that stands opposed to “ideological” limits to need (i.e., the Hellenic concepts of measure,
balance, and self-sufficiency), the rationalization of production
and labour as desiderata in themselves of a strictly technical
nature, the sharp dichotomy between freedom and necessity,
and the conflict with nature as a condition of social life in all its
forms — class or classless, propertied or communistic.

Accordingly, socialism now moves within an orbit in which, to
use Max Horkheimer’s formulation, “Domination of nature
involves domination of man” — not only “the subjugation of
external nature, human and nonhuman” but human nature.
(*The Eclipse of Reason*) Following his split from the natural world,
“man” can hope for no redemption from class society and
exploitation until he, as a technical force among the technics
created by his own ingenuity, can transcend his objectification.
The precondition for this transcendence is quantitatively measurable : the “shortening of the working day is its fundamental
premise.” Until these preconditions are achieved, “man” remains
under the tyranny of social law, the compulsion of need and
survival. The proletariat, no less than any other class in history, is
captive to the impersonal processes of history. Indeed, as the
class that is most completely dehumanized by bourgeois conditions, it can only transcend its objectified status through “urgent,
no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need...” For Marx,
“The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the
whole proletariat at the moment, *considers* as its aim. The
question is *what the proletariat is*, and what, consequent on that
being, it will be compelled to do.” (*The Holy Family*) Its “being,”
here, is that of object and social law functions as *compulsion*, not
as “destiny.” The subjectivity of the proletariat remains a product
of its objectivity — ironically, a notion that finds a certain degree
of truth in the fact that any radical appeal merely to the objective
factors that enter into the forming of a “proletarian consciousness” or class consciousness strike back like a whiplash
against Socialism in the form of a working class that has “bought
into capitalism,” that seeks its share in the affluence provided by
the system. Thus where reaction is the real basis of action and
need is the basis of motivation, the bourgeois spirit becomes the
“world spirit” of Marxism.

The disenchantment of nature yields the disenchantment of
humanity. “Man” appears as a complex of interests and class
consciousness as the generalization of these interests to the level
of consciousness. To the degree that the classical view of self-
realization through the *polis* recedes before the Marxian view of
self-preservation through Socialism, the bourgeois spirit acquires
a degree of sophistication that makes its earlier spokesmen
(Hobbes, Locke) seem naive. The incubus of domination now
fully reveals its authoritarian logic. Just as necessity becomes the
basis of freedom, authority becomes the basis of rational
coordination. This notion, already implicit in Marx’s harsh
separation of the realms of necessity and freedom — a separation
Fourier was to sharply challenge — is made explicit in Engels’s
essay “On Authority.” To Engels, the factory is a natural fact of
technics, not a specifically bourgeois mode of rationalizing labour ; hence it will exist under communism as well as capitalism. It
will persist “independently of all social organization.” To coordinate a factory’s operations requires “imperious obedience,” in
which factory hands lack all “autonomy.” Class society or
classless, the realm of necessity is also a realm of command and
obedience, of ruler and ruled. In a fashion totally congruent with
all class ideologists from the inception of class society, Engels
weds Socialism to command and rule as a natural fact. Domination is reworked from a social attribute into a precondition for
self-preservation in a technically advanced society.

*** Hierarchy and Domination

To structure a revolutionary project around “social law” that
lacks ethical content, order that lacks meaning, a harsh opposition between “man” and nature, compulsion rather than consciousness — all of these, taken together with domination as a
precondition for freedom, debase the concept of freedom and
assimilate it to its opposite, coercion. Consciousness becomes
the recognition of its lack of autonomy just as freedom becomes
the recognition of necessity. A politics of “liberation” emerges
that reflects the development of advanced capitalist society into
nationalized production, planning, centralization, the rationalized control of nature — and the rationalized control of “men.” If
the proletariat cannot comprehend its own “destiny” by itself, a
party that speaks in its name becomes justified as the authentic expression of that consciousness, even if it stands opposed to
the proletariat itself. If capitalism is the historic means whereby
humanity achieves the conquest of nature, the techniques of
bourgeois industry need merely be reorganized to serve the goals
of Socialism. If ethics are merely ideology, Socialist goals are the
product of history rather than reflection and it is by criteria
mandated by history that we are to determine the problems of
ends and means, not by reason and disputation.

There seem to be fragments in Marx’s writings that could be
counterposed to this grim picture of Marxian Socialism. Marx’s
“Speech at the Anniversary of the *People’s Paper*” (April, 1856),
for example, describes the enslavement of “man” by “man” in the
attempt to master nature as an “infamy.” The “pure light of
science seems unable to shine but on a dark background of
ignorance” and our technical achievements “seem to result in
endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying
human life into a material force.” This moral evaluation recurs in
Marx’s writings more as explanations of historic development
than justifications that give it meaning. But Alfred Schmidt, who
quotes them at length in *Marx’s Concept of Nature*, neglects to
tell us that Marx often viewed such moral evaluations as evidence
of immature sentimentality. The “speech” mocks those who
“wail” over the misery that technical and scientific advances yield.
“On our part,” Marx declares, “we do not mistake the shape of
the shrewd spirit (one may justifiably translate “shrewd spirit” to
read “cunning of reason” — M.B.) that continues to mark all these
contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces
of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men —
and such are the working men.” The speech, in fact, ends with a
tribute to modern industry and particularly to the English
proletariat as the “first born sons of modern industry.”

Even if one views Marx’s ethical proclivities as authentic, they
are marginal to the core of his writings. The attempts to redeem
Marx and fragments of his writings from the logic of his thought
and work becomes ideological because it obfuscates a thorough
exploration of the meaning of Marxism as a practice and the
extent to which a “class analysis” can reveal the sources of
human oppression. We come, here, to a fundamental split within
Socialism as a whole: the limits of a class analysis, the ability of a
theory based on class relations and property relations to explain
history and the modern crisis.

Basic to anti-authoritarian Socialism — specifically, to Anarchist Communism — is the notion that hierarchy and domination
cannot be subsumed by class rule and economic exploitation,
indeed, that they are more fundamental to an understanding of
the modern revolutionary project. Before “man” began to exploit
“man,” he began to dominate woman; even earlier — if we are to
accept Paul Radin’s view — the old began to dominate the young
through a hierarchy of age-groups, gerontocracies, and ancestor-worship. Power of human over human long antedates *the very formation of classes and economic modes of social oppression*. If
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles,” this order of history is preceded by an earlier, more
fundamental conflict: social domination by gerontocracies, patriarchy, and even bureaucracy. To explore the emergence of
hierarchy and domination is obviously beyond the scope of this
work. I have dealt with it in considerable detail in my forthcoming
book, *The Ecology of Freedom*. Such an exploration would carry
us beyond political economy into the realm of the domestic
economy, the civil realm into the family realm, the class realm into
the sexual realm. It would provide us with an entirely new psychosocial set of foundations from which to read the nature of human
oppression and open an entirely new horizon from which to
gauge the true meaning of human freedom. We would certainly
have to shed the function Marx imparts to interest and technics
as social determinants — which is not to deny their role historically, but to search into the claims of non-economic factors such
as status, order, recognition, indeed, into rights and duties which
may even be materially burdensome to commanding strata of
society. This much is clear: it will no longer do to insist that a
classless society, freed of material exploitation, will necessarily be
a liberated society. There is nothing in the social future to suggest
that bureaucracy is incompatible with a classless society, the
domination of women, the young, ethnic groups or even professional strata.

These notions reveal the limits of Marx’s own work, his inability
to grasp a realm of history that is vital to understanding freedom
itself. So blind is Marx to authority as such that it becomes a mere
technical feature of production, a “natural fact” in “man’s”
metabolism with nature. Woman, too, becomes an exploited
being not because she is rendered docile by man (or “weak” to
use a term that Marx regarded as her most endearing trait) but
because her labour is enslaved to man. Children remain merely
“childish,” the expression of untamed and undisciplined “human
nature.” Nature, needless to say, remains mere object of utility,
its laws to be mastered and commanded in an enterprise of
conquest. There can be no Marxian theory of the family, of
feminism, or of ecology because Marx negates the issues they
raise or worse, transmutes them into economic ones. Hence,
attempts to formulate a Marxian feminism tend to degenerate
into “wages for housewives,” a Marxian psychology into a
Marcusan reading of Freud, and a Marxian ecology into “pollution is profitable.” Far from clarifying the issues that may help
define the revolutionary project, these efforts at hybridization
conceal them by making it difficult to see that “ruling class”
women are ruled by “ruling class” men, that Freud is merely the
alter ego of Marx, that ecological balance presupposes a new
sensibility and ethics that are not only different from Marxism but
in flat opposition to it.

Marx’s work is not only the most sophisticated ideology of
state capitalism but it impedes a truly revolutionary conception of
freedom. It alters our perception of social issues in such a way
that we cannot relevantly anchor the revolutionary project in
sexual relations, the family, community, education, and the
fostering of a truly revolutionary sensibility and ethics. At every
point in this enterprise, we are impeded by economistic categories that claim a more fundamental priority and thereby
invalidate the enterprise at its outset. Merely to amend these
economistic categories or to modify them is to acknowledge their
sovereignty over revolutionary consciousness in altered form,
not to question their relationship to more fundamental ones. It is
to build obscurantism into the enterprise from the outset of our
investigation. The development of a revolutionary project must
*begin* by shedding the Marxian categories from the very beginning, to fix on more basic categories created by hierarchical
society from its inception all the more to place the economic ones
in their proper context. It is no longer simply capitalism we wish to
demolish; it is an older and more archaic world that lives on in the
present one — the domination of human by human, the rationale
of hierarchy as such.

<right>
February, 1979
</right>


** On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, and the Body Politic

The historic failure of proletarian socialism, particularly its
Marxian form, to provide a revolutionary theory and practice for
our time has been followed by a highly abstract form of socialist
theoretics that stands sharply at odds with the very notion of a
revolutionary project — notably, a theory that is meant to yield a
viable revolutionary practice.

If this judgment seems harsh, it hardly conveys the extent to
which this theoretics has become a considerable culture industry
in its own right. The retreat of socialism from the factory to the
academy — an astonishing phenomenon that cannot be justified
by viewing “knowledge” as a technical force in society — has
denied socialism the right to a decent internment by perpetuating
it as a professionalized ideology. An enfeebled theory, long
drained of its sweeping liberatory claims, socialism has been
turned from a social phenomenon into an academic discipline,
from a historic reality into a mere specimen of intellectual history
that is cultured exotically all the more to obscure the need for an
entirely new conception of theory and practice.

Indeed, to the degree that the academy itself has become
increasingly disengaged from society, it has used socialist theoretics to indulge its worst intellectual habits. The remains of a
once-insurgent movement have provided the intellectual nutrients for academic conceptual frameworks that are utterly alien
to it — a level of discourse, a range of perceptions, a terminology,
and a body of intellectual pretensions that mutually reinforce the
reduction of academic ideology to socialism and of socialism to
ideology. One must leave it to the conscience of the socialist academics to ask themselves if Marx’s account of social development
as a history of class struggle can be translated into a history of
“distorted communication,”{1} his critique of political economy into a specific “paradigm” of “intersubjectivity,” and his relations of
production into “symbolically mediated forms of social interaction.” An earlier generation of Marxian theorists, however
serious their shortcomings, would have banished the very term
“sociology” from the vocabulary of radical ideas, not to speak of
its desiccated categories and its odious pretensions to exactitude. Today, this vocabulary has been replaced by a more
ennervated one in which socially neutral terms and concepts,
denuded of the flesh and blood of experience, pirouette around
each other in an intellectual ballet that imparts to them an almost
dream-like transcendental quality. The most technically convoluted strategies for stating the obvious — Marx’s scientism, eco-
nomism, and his roots in the Enlightenment — are cultivated to
create a dichotomy between theoretics and reality that effectively immunizes concepts to the test of experience.

Partly in reaction to this trend, experience itself has been
hypostasized at the expense of theoretical coherence — to a
point, at times, when the refreshing immediacy of reality fosters a
reverence for raw facts of “perception,” indeed, for the authority of the episodic and anecdotal. It remains to be seen if
Habermas’s highly formalized theoretics can be given real social
substance by the research of his colleagues at Starnberg or if
various phenomenological and structural tendencies that have
been drifting through Marxism can bring socialism into a
meaningful confrontation with contemporary industrial capitalism. But in all of these cases, theoretical critique has been
notable for its absence of radical reconstruction. Neither the later
generation of “critical theorists” nor their opponents as reflected
by newer formalizations of Marxism have given substance to their
visions of freedom and practice. Shaped by academic templates
like speech situations, systems theory, *Verstehen*, and research
guided by the technical criteria of sociology, the harsh fact
remains that socialism has been converted from a once viable
social reality into the “idea” of socialism in much the same sense
that Collingwood dealt with the “idea” of nature. Theoretical
coherence has not been spared the revenge of a lack of
experience any more than experience has been spared the
revenge of a lack of theoretical coherence. Both have become
equally abstract in their one-sidedness and partiality.

What is most disturbing about the self-absorption of so many of
these theoretical and empirical tendencies — tendencies which
may be broadly designated as “neo-Marxian” — is the promiscuity with which they meld utterly antithetical radical goals and
traditions. Libertarian concepts and authoritarian ones, individualistic and collectivistic, economistic and cultural, scientistic
and ethical — all have been funded together into an ecumenical
radicalism” that lacks the consistency required by a serious
revolutionary practice. Classical Marxian tendencies, functioning
under the imperatives of organized political movements, were
compelled to press the logic of their premises to the point of a
combative social engagement with bourgeois reality. Neo-
Marxism enjoys the luxury of theoretical reveries in which
basically incompatible visions of freedom intermingle and become diffuse and obscure.

Let me state this problem concretely. Are the differences
between decentralization and centralization merely differences of
degree or of kind? Should we seek to strike some enigmatic
“balance” between them or are they fundamentally incompatible
with each other? Is direct democracy in a “mass society” (to use
Marcuse’s fascinating expression in his discussion of this issue)
impossible without the delegation of power to representatives or
must it literally be direct, face-to-face, of the kind that prevailed in
the Athenian *polis*, the French revolutionary sections of 1793,
and the New England town meetings? Can direct democracy be
equated with workers’ councils, soviets, the German *Rate*, an
equation that is made not only by neo-Marxists, council communists, but also many anarchosyndicalists? Or do these essentially executive forms stand at odds with the communes and
popular assemblies emphasized by anarcho-communists? Can
bureaucracy of any kind coexist with libertarian institutions or
are they inexorably opposed to each other?

Doubtless, these questions raise many problems of terminology that can easily obscure points of agreement between
seemingly contrasting views. To some neo-Marxists who see
centralization and decentralization merely as difference of degree, the word “centralization” may merely be an awkward way of
denoting means for *coordinating* the decisions made by decentralized bodies. Marx it is worth noting, greatly confused this
distinction when he praised the Paris Commune as a “working,
not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same
time.{2} In point of fact, the consolidation of “executive and
legislative” functions in a single body was regressive. It simply
identified the process of policy-making, a function that rightly
should belong to the people in assembly, with the technical
execution of these policies, a function that could be left to strictly
administrative bodies subject to rotation, recall, limitations of
tenure, wherever possible, selected by sortition. Accordingly, the
melding of policy formation with administration placed the
institutional emphasis of classical socialism on centralized bodies,
indeed, by an ironical twist of historical events, bestowing the
privilege of formulating policy on the “higher bodies 5 ’ of socialist hierarchies and their execution precisely on the more popular
“revolutionary committees” below.

Similarly, the concept of “representation” intermingled with
“direct democracy” serves to obscure the distinction between
popular institutions which should decide policy and the “representative” institutions which should merely execute them. In this
connection, Rousseau’s famous passage on the constitutive
nature of a “people” in *The Social Contract* applies even more to
the “mass society” of our times than the institutionally articulated one of his era. “Sovereignty, for the same reason that
makes it inalienable, cannot be represented” Rousseau declares;
“it lies essentially in the general will and will does not admit of
representation: it is either the same or other; there is no
intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore,
are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its
stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the
people has not ratified *in person* is null and void — is, in fact, not a
law. The people of England regards itself as free: but it is grossly
mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of
parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and
it is nothing .” However problematical Rousseau’s concept of
“general will” may be, quite aside from his archaic concept of
“law,” the premises that underly it cannot be evaded: “... the
moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer
free: *it no longer exists*.”{3} (My emphasis — M.B.)

It is precisely in terms of a “general will” more libertarian and
individuated than any conceived by Rousseau that reveals the
workers’ councils, soviets, and the Rate to be socially one-sided
and potentially hierarchical. Councils may be popularly constituted, but they are not *constitutive* of a “public sphere.” As the
locus of the decision-making process in society, they absorb
within executive bodies the liberties that more appropriately
belong to a clearly delineable body politic and thereby subvert
institutions such as communes, cooperatives, and popular
assemblies that indeed constitute a people and express a popular
will. Councils, in effect, usurp the political subjectivity that should
be shared by all in social forms that express the individual’s claim
to social sovereignty. That Bolshevism recognized this possibility and later cynically exploited it is revealed by the emphasis
Lenin placed on the factory as the social basis of the soviets.
Here, indeed, a “proletarian public sphere,” to use Oscar Neckt’s
phrase, was acknowledged and hypostasized — not as a truly
democratic arena, but as the locus for a “proletarian public” that
could be strategically deployed against the great mass of
“unreliable” peasants whose villages comprised the authentic
“public sphere” of revolutionary Russia.

But the factory, far from being the strongest aspect of the
“proletarian public sphere” is, in fact, its most vulnerable.[61]
However much its social weight is reinforced by revolutionary
shop committees and the most democratic forms of selfmanagement, the factory is in no sense an autonomous social
organism. Quite to the contrary, it is a particularly dependent one
that can only function — indeed, exist — in conjunction with other
factories and sources of raw materials. The Bolsheviks were to
astutely use this very limitation of the factory to centralize the
“proletarian public sphere” to a point where they were to remove
the last vestigial remains of proletarian democracy: first, by
employing the soviets to isolate the factory from its place in the
local community; then, by shifting power from the community to
the nation in the form of national congresses of soviets. The use of
soviets to interlink the proletariat from factory to factory across
the entire breadth of Russia, literally amputating it as a social
stratum from any comprehensible roots in specific localities
where it could function effectively, served to hopelessly delimit its
powers and to rigorously centralize it. In the immense, national
congresses of soviets staged annually during the revolutionary
years, the Russian proletariat had lost all power over the soviets
even before the authority of the congresses had been completely
usurped by the Bolshevik party.{4}

[61] I say this provocatively because the myth still persists among council
communists, many neo-Marxists, and particularly anarchosyndicalists (who,
owing to the resurgence of the CNT in Spain, represent a very vocal constituency in the European libertarian Left) that “workers control” of the economy
is equivalent to worker’s control of society. All theoretical considerations aside,
the ease with which the CNT was out-maneuvered by the bourgeois state, despite
its massive control of the Catalan economy in 1936–37, should have dispelled such
simple economistic notions of power a generation ago.

Quite likely, the centralization of the proletariat could have
been achieved by the Bolsheviks in any case, without manipulating the soviet hierarchy. The very class nature of the
proletariat, its existence as a creature of a national division of
labour and its highly particularistic interests that rarely rise to the
level of a general interest, belie Marx’s claims for its universality
and its historic role as a revolutionary agent. These attributes,
which hindsight clearly reveals today, explain the failure of all
classical “proletarian revolutions” in the past. Neither the Paris
Commune, which was really fought out by the last remnants of
the traditional French *sans culottes*, nor the Spanish revolution,
which was fought out by workers with rural roots, are exceptions.
Indeed, Social Democracy and Leninism in all its varieties used
this particularistic interest with great effect against broader
revolutionary tendencies in society as witness Ebert’s shrewd
manipulation of the German *Rate*, Stalin’s infamous “Lenin
Levy,” and more recently, the commanding influence of European Communist and Socialist parties over the working class
today.

Space does not make it possible to deal with the hierarchical
nature of the factory structure and its impact on the formation of
proletarian consciousness. If labour is the “steeling school” of the
proletariat, as the young Marx was to emphasize, its locus, the
factory, is a “school” based on “imperious obedience,” as Engels
was to add in later years — indeed, a “school” marked by the
complete absence of “autonomy.”{5} I have explored this issue
elsewhere, in a work written more than a decade ago, and more
recently, in my forthcoming *Ecology of Freedom*, where I
question the existence of the factory as a natural fact of technics
that must persist “independently of all social organization”
(Engels).{6}

What is significant in all of these issues is the way they are
*integrated* by neo-Marxism into the very problematical premises
of classical Marxism, thereby neutralizing them as the bases for a
thoroughly new radical theory and practice. Perhaps the most
striking examples of these incongruities can be culled from
Marcuse’s sixties writings, a literature which juxtaposes traditional, shopworn interpretations of political reality with philosophical, esthetic, and psychoanalytic insights that, in themselves,
clearly pave new theoretical ground. These incongruities cannot
be dismissed as the blind-spots of an otherwise far-ranging mind. I
must reluctantly insist that they impugn the integrity of the larger
vision Marcuse was to advance, the extent to which it was fully
thought out, and the political conclusions that followed from it.

It is not trivial to ask why a work like *An Essay on Liberation* that contrasted the need for a “moral radicalism” with the
scientistic radicalism of Marxian orthodoxy; that called for a
“passing from Marx to Fourier” and “from realism to surrealism”;
that celebrated the “new sensibility” of the sixties counterculture for its sensuousness, playfulness, and the challenge it
posed to the “*esprit de serieux* in the socialist camp”; that singled
out the “aesthetic dimension” as “a sort of gauge for a free
society” — indeed, that with all of this buoyant utopianism, could
have casually included the observation that the “global dominion
of corporate capitalism... keeps the socialist orbit on the defensive, all too costly not only in terms of military expenditures but
also in the perpetuation of a repressive bureaucracy.” Or claim
that in Vietnam, Cuba, and China, “a revolution is being defended
and driven forward which struggles (!) to eschew the bureaucratic administration of socialism.” Or, still further, deals with the
“Third World” as an “external proletariat” and its insurgent
peasantry as a “rural proletariat” with the inevitable implication
(stated more explicitly by Marcuse during a lecture at New York
University a year earlier) that the apparent docility of the “internal
proletariat” of the Euro-American “orbit” did not negate Marx’s
traditional theory of class struggle when capitalism is viewd as a
global phenomenon.{7}

One cannot afford to merely grimace at such distasteful
Bolshevik apologetics for the “socialist orbit” as a society
“deformed” by a “repressive bureaucracy” because of capitalist
encirclement. Nor can one regard it as an expression of the geist
of the time that Marcuse, a man thoroughly schooled in the
history of the interwar Left, could mystify the Vietnamese,
Cuban, and Chinese “revolutions” as anti-bureaucratic — certainly not without deliberately ignoring the Bolshevik legacy
claimed by their leaders, the Stalinist structure of their parties,
and the specious nature of the “revolutions” themselves. For
nearly two generations, Marxists had debated the question of
whether “repressive bureaucracies” within the “socialist orbit”
(which certainly includes Vietnam, Cuba, and China) were
merely “deformations” produced by capitalist encirclement or
whether the “socialist orbit” itself constituted a historically new
typology that required critique in its own right. The schizophrenic
nature of Marcuse’s vision was to find its most striking expression
in *Counter-Revolution and Revolt* where, incredibly, the “mass”
Communist parties of Europe and their unions were placed on
the “Left of Social Democracy” and, as a result of this meaningless “constellation,” were described as “still a potentially revolutionary force.”{8} Such observations are not episodic errors in
judgement; they reflect a preformed social outlook that is more
basic than encomiums to “moral radicalism,” “Fourier,” “surrealism,” and the “aesthetic dimension” as “a sort of gauge for a free
society.”

Characteristically, when the chips are down, Marcuse like
many neo-Marxists, falls on the side of centralization, delegated
power, councils, and authority, as against decentralization, direct
democracy, popular assemblies, and spontaneity. Again, like his
melding of “moral radicalism” with Bolshevik apologetics, he
does not explore the conflicting logic of these concepts, but
mystifies them- with a libertarian rhetoric that conceals his
orthodox Marxist foundations. Occasionally, this rhetoric does
violence to historical fact. For one who has lived through the
Spanish Civil War era, for example, it is astonishing to read that
the “international brigades” — a force Stalinist movements crassly employed for counterrevolutionary as well as military purposes — symbolized the “union of young intellectuals and
workers.”{9} Not only was the formulation maladroit thirty years
after the war, but it grossly misled the ill-informed radical youth
who revered Marcuse as their elder statesman.[62] We are reaping
the harvest of such historical sloppiness, today, with an effluvium
of romantic eulogies to the Rosenbergs and the Stalinist hacks of
the 1930s — this, quite aside from a revival of Stalinism by young
sectarians who have been schooled in the writings of Ho, Mao,
and Fidel. Doubtless, to impute these trends to Marcuse’s
political sloppiness would be ridiculous. But that he contributed
even passingly to the making of such myths rather than their
ruthless demystification is not to be shrugged off as accidental
and raises even larger issues about the premises of neo-Marxism
as such.

[62] For my own part, I could cite many personal experiences where young people
who read this passage in Marcuse’s essay and viewed such repellent “documentaries” as *To Die in Madrid* had to be educated into the real facts about Spain,
not to speak of such myths as the “libertarian” proclivities of Maoism and theory
of an “external proletariat,” a position that was later to become the keystone of
Weatherman propaganda.

Accordingly, even as Marcuse exultantly praises the “rebels”
of May-June 1968 for using “direct action” to transform the
“indirect democracy of corporate capitalism into a direct democracy,” his libertarian fervor is increasingly dispelled by the
formulations which follow. “Direct action,” and more pointedly,
“direct democracy,” vaporize into “elections and representation
(that) no longer serve as institutions of domination.” This
hopelessly feckless formula is groomed with such traditionally
Marxian rhetoric as “genuinely free selection and election of
candidates, revocability at the discretion of constituencies, and
uncensored education and information.” Even Lenin in
*State and Revolution* dispensed more generous liberties that Marcuse.
What links Lenin and Marcuse in a common belief is their shared
view that “in a modern mass society,” to use Marcuse’s words,
“democracy, no matter in what form, is not conceivable without a
system of representation.” To reduce this formula to its molecular constituents, Marcuse cannot envision socialism without a
“mass society” anymore than Engels can envision socialism
without factories.{10}

Not surprisingly, Marcuse is more at home with the “seminal achievements of... the ‘councils’ (‘soviets,’ *Rate*) as organizations of self-determination, self-government (or rather preparation for self-government) in local popular assemblies.” That
*Rate* and “local popular assemblies” stand in historic contradiction to each other is not posed as an issue because the
contradiction lacks intelligibility if one thinks of a free society in
largely institutional or structural terms — which are the terms
with which Marcuse operates on a political level. If his Freudo-
Marxism reclaims the sovereignty of the ego, of play and the
“aesthetic dimension” in daily life, it lacks any viable life-line to his
notion of socialism as a “mass society.” This dualism that divides
Marcuse’s anarchism on the personal plane from his Marxian
pragmatics on the social must inevitably lead to the absorption of
the personal by the social, of the “black flag” (to use his own
metaphors) by the “red flag.”{11} When he advances the slogan,
“Spontaneity does not contradict authority,” is it necessary to
ask what he means by the word “authority.” Self-discipline,
education, and wisdom, as I have argued elsewhere in advancing
the notion of “informed spontaneity” — or obedience, submission, and surrogation of will? It is by no means clear that one can
infer from Marcuse’s Freudo-Marxism that the rights he acknowledges for the individual can be translated into social and
institutional terms. The two are loosely bonded precisely because
Marcuse sees no contradiction between his anarchism on the
personal level and his Marxism on the social. Theory may permit
this dichotomy to exist indefinitely as an exotic flower with a
prickly stem, hence the success neo-Marxism enjoys as an
academic project. Practice must bring the two into bitter
contradiction with each other once neo-Marxism removes itself
from the campus — and where it has done so, it exercises virtually
no influence.

It would be a grave error to view my remarks on Marcuse as a
critique of Marcuse as an *individual* thinker. Inasmuch as his
theoretics have dealt more directly with social problems than that
of any other neo-Marxist body of theory, they more clearly reveal
the limits of the neo-Marxian project. Habermas is veiled by a
formalism so abstract and a jargon so equivocal and dense that he
is almost beyond the reach of pointed criticism. Castoriadis has
abandoned Marxism completely. More importantly, the seeming
schizophrenia of Marcuse’s theoretics is not a personal trait but a
generic one. Owing to Marcuse’s own courage in venturing into
social issues that neo-Marxists usually avoid — direct democracy,
decentralization, representation, spontaneity, and liberatory
social structures — he clearly reveals the extent to which these
issues are intrinsically alien to Marxism as such, indeed to
socialism. To this list of issues, one may reasonably add ecology,
urbanism, and more fundamentally, hierarchy, domination, and a
liberatory rationality.

What neo-Marxists have not candidly faced is the extent to
which Marxism in *all* its forms is organically structured to
respond to social changes that lend themselves to analyses of
class relations, economic exploitation, industrial rationalization,
political institutions, and mass constituences. To the degree
social changes raise broader issues of hierarchy, domination,
ecological dislocations, liberatory technologies, social forms
based on face-to-face relations, and individual sovereignty, these
issues must be “hydrolyzed” (if I may be permitted to use a
biological analogy) into simpler, more “soluble” ingredients that
render them accessible to Marxian categories, indeed, to a
Marxian outlook. That such monumental social issues must be
degraded so that they can be absorbed by Marxism raises the
basic question of whether the theory can be perpetuated in its
wholeness or whether it should not be fragmented and its more
viable components absorbed into a much broader theory and
practice that will eschew the very use of terms like “Marxism” and
“socialism.”[63]

[63] I cannot help but note that Freudo-Marxism itself is an unstable hybridization of
subjective categories with the value-free “social science” Marx sought to bestow
on socialism. Women’s liberation, like ecology, urbanism, even “workers’ control”
and neighborhood sovereignty, must be grafted on to the Marxian corpus like
alien theoretical transplants. Alas, the sutures barely hold the grafts to the main
body. A veritable industry, maintained by a number of well-known “neo-Marxist”
hacks, has been established to provide the necessary cosmetics for the disfiguring
effects of this bizarre surgery. But behind it all, one invariably encounters the
same Marxian outlook with its fixation on the proletariat (“external” or “internal,”
“old” or “new”), on economic data and power constellations. Important as these
areas surely are, they are not the last word in social analyses and as mere subjects
of analyses do not provide the fundamental bases for theoretical reconstruction
and a new radical practice.

Ultimately, a line will have to be drawn that, by definition,
excludes any project that can tip decentralization to the side of
centralization, direct democracy to the side of delegated power,
libertarian institutions to the side of bureaucracy, and spontaneity to the side of authority. Such a line, like a physical barrier,
must irrevocably separate a libertarian zone of theory and
practice from the hybridized socialisms that tend to denature it.
This zone must build its anti-authoritarian, utopian, and revolutionary commitments into the very recognition it has of itself, in
short, into the very way it defines itself. Given the intellectual
opportunism that marks our era, there is no way that a libertarian
zone can retain its integrity and *transparency* without describing
its parameters in terms that reveal every conceivable form of
treachery to its ideals, at which point it must cease to be what it
professes to be. I would hold that such a zone can only be
denoted by the term “anarcho-communism,” a term that denies
the validity of all claims of domination by definition. Accordingly,
to admit of domination is to cross the line that separates the
libertarian zone from the socialist. Whosoever eschews the term
in the name of a revolutionary project that is theoretically more
delectable and socially more popular remains unreliable in his or
her commitment to libertarian goals as such — goals that must
remain tentative insofar as they are not rooted in the fixidity of
consistently anti-authoritarian premises. Perhaps such a fixidity
of premises may be intellectually distasteful or socially impractical. These are legitimate questions that must be decided by discussion or personal conscience. But the very fixidity of premises
that define anarcho-communism as a consistently libertarian zone is the sole guarantee that a revolutionary project will not slither
back to forms of theory and practice that inherently lend
themselves to opportunistic compromises.

Traditions and personalities must not be permitted to stand in
the way of our self-understanding of the issues involved. One may
look askance at a Proudhon for his philistinism, at Bakunin for his
naievete, at Kropotkin for his didacticism, at Durruti for his
terrorism — and anarchist theoretics generally for its simplicity.
Even if each such assessment were true, which I do not believe to
be the case it would merely be episodic in the face of a social crisis
so massive and a social response so opportunistic that we can no
longer retain any revolutionary project without the most compelling moral imperatives. Existentially, our era allows for no
commitment that falls short of the anarcho-communist project
for liberation, certainly not without leading to the betrayal of
humanity’s potentiality for freedom.

In any case, neo-Marxism and “libertarian socialism” fail us in
the content they impart to a liberated society. To mingle direct
democracy with delegated power, to build a free society on the
concept of a “mass society,” to reduce hierarchy to class
relations and domination to economic exploitation reveal a gross
failure to understand the meaning of *society* — of human consociation — as a realm of freedom. With the politicization of
society by state institutions, the substitution of bureaucratic ties
for human relations, the homogenization of social forms and
personal relations, socialist theoretics too has lost its very sense
of society as more than a vague “public sphere” subject to
rational, albeit “humanistic,” controls. In this wasteland of social
forms, we are obliged to ask questions that would have been
taken for granted in an earlier era. What constitutes a human
community and a society based on self-management? What
constitutes that classical self-acting agent we denote by the term
“citizen”? To the extent that these questions are not adequately
answered, concepts like direct democracy and self-management
remain formal abstractions that can be hybridized and distorted
without regard to any abiding criteria of social freedom. Ultimately, the answers we give to these questions determine the
authenticity of our commitment to a free society.

We have used words like “modernity” and “industrial” society
to conceal a basic difference between capitalism and precapitalist societies, a difference that is highly relevant to the questions I
have raised above. In whatever ways precapitalist societies
differed from each other, they differed from capitalism in the fact
that they were basically *organic*, richly articulated in forms and
structures that were to be ultimately challenged and destroyed by
bourgeois market relations. Even where the eye moves beyond
the egalitarian world of the early human bands and clans,
underlying all the bureaucratic and political formations that were
to layer the surface of tribal, village, and guild-like societies were
the extended families, tribal relationships, village structures,
guilds, and even neighborhood associations that retained a
subterranean autonomy of their own. Marx was to address
himself to the tenacity of these “subpolitical” formations in his
observations on the “small and extremely ancient” communities
in India “that are based on the possession of land in common, on
the blending of agriculture and handicrafts and on an unalterable
division of labour, which serves as a fixed plan and basis for action
whenever a new community is started.”

The organic nature of these communities, which Marx was to
emphasize even more strongly in the *Grundrisse*, is described in
primarily economic terms, in economic categories that subtly
degrade the human content of their associative implications and
absorb them into the framework of historical economism that
vitiates Marxian anthropology. But their inner social power, their
vitality as human impulses toward sociation, seeps through
Marx’s remarks nevertheless. “The law that regulates the division
of labour in the community acts with the irresistibile authority of a
law of nature, while each individual craftsman, the smith, the
carpenter and so on, conducts in his workshop all the operations
of his handicraft in the traditional way, but independently, and
without recognizing any authority. The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when
accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with
the same name — this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of
the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking
contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic
states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure
of the fundamental economic elements of society remain untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of
politics.”{12}

One could wish for a discussion of this “riddle” in less
reductionist economic categories, although the entire passage,
taken word for word, is a fascinating guide to Marx’s methodology even when he moves beyond the sphere of bourgeois society.
Whether Marx had a “social philosophy” or not, his treatment of
history is intellectually unified by an economism that itself could
pass for a social philosophy. Kropotkin, whose associationist
sensibility is much stronger than Marx’s, points out that the early
medieval city “could hardly be named a State as regard its interior
organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the
present centralization of functions than of the present territorial
centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city
was usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven
sections radiating from a centre, each quarter or section roughly
corresponding to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in
it, but nevertheless containing inhabitants of different social
positions and occupations — nobles, merchants, artisans, or
even half-serfs; and each section or quarter constituted a quite
independent agglomeration. In Venice, each island was an
independent political community. It had its own organized trades,
its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and administration,
its own forum; the nomination of a doge by the city changed
nothing in the inner independence of the units. In Cologne, we see
the inhabitants divided into... neighborhood guilds, which dated
from the Franconian period,” each of which had its own judge,
jury, and local militia commander. Kropotlin quotes J.R. Green to
the effect that in London, before the Conquest, social life was
based on “a number of little groups scattered here and there over
the area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and
institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and only
drawing together into a municipal union.” “The mediaeval city
thus appears as a double federation,” Kropotkin concludes: “of
all householders united into small territorial unions — the street,
the parish, the section — and of individuals united by oaths into
guilds according to their professions; the former being a product
of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is a
subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.”[64]{13}

[64] The patronizing attitude of many Marxist theorists toward Kropotkin’s work in
this area and the cultivated oblivion they exhibit toward historical disputes that
were waged between Marxists and anarchists over such widely ranging issues as
the general strike and the importance of popular control of revolutionary
institutions is evidence of an odious “partyness” that must be directly confronted
wherever it exists. Are we to forget that Rose Luxemburg in the
*Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions* grossly misrepresented the anarchist emphasis
on the general strike after the 1905 revolution in Russia in order to make it
acceptable to Social Democracy? That Lenin was to engage in the same
misrepresentation on the issue of popular control in
*State and Revolution*? That
in recent years Marxist writers, who have adduced the factory as a “school” for
conditioning the proletariat into submission to union and party hierarchies have
yet to acknowledge the anarchist literature that originally pointed to this problem ?
Much the same can be said around such issues as ecology, utopianism, and even
gay and women’s liberation. As long as neo-Marxists stake out a claim to concepts
that are historically alien to their traditions in Marxism, they not only perpetuate
the mystification of radical history, but exhibit a moral probity that is hardly better
than that of the society they profess to oppose.



The most striking feature of the capitalist market is its ability to
unravel this highly textured social structure, to invade and divest
earlier social forms of their complexity of human relations. Even
as capitalism seems to amplify the autonomy and claims of the
individual, it does so by attenuating the content and structure of
society. As *Gemeinschaft* theorists like Buber have pointed out:
“When we examine the capitalist society which has given birth to
socialism, *as a society*, we see that it is a society inherently poor in
structure and growing visibly poorer every day. By the structure
of a society is to be understood its social content or community
content: a society can be called structurally rich to the extent that
it is build up of genuine societies, that is, local communes and
trade communes and their step by step association. What Gierke
says of the Co-operative Movement in the Middle Ages is true of
every structurally rich society: it is ‘marked by a tendency to
expand and extend the unions, to produce larger associations
over and above the smaller associations, confederations over and
above individual unions, all-embracing confederations over and
above particular confederations.’ At whatever point we examine
the structure of such a society we find the cell-tissue ‘Society’ everywhere, i.e. a living and life-giving collaboration, an
essentially autonomous consociation of human beings, shaping
and re-shaping itself from within. Society is naturally composed
not of disparate individuals but of associative units and the
associations between them.”

The capitalist economy and the centralized state “peculiar to
it” begin to hollow out this highly articulated social structure until
the modern “individualizing process” ends up as an atomizing
process, a process that divests the individual of the social
substance indispensable to individuality itself. Although the old
organic forms retain “their outer stability, for the most part,” they
become “hollow in sense and in spirit — a tissue of decay. Not
merely what we call the ‘masses” but the whole of society is in
essence amorphous, unarticulated, poor in structure. Neither do
those associations help which spring from the meeting of
economic or spiritual interests — the strongest of which is the
party: what there is of human intercourse in them is no longer a
living thing, and the compensations for the lost community-forms
we seek in them can be found in none. In the face of all this, which
makes ‘society’ a contradiction in terms, the ‘utopian’ socialists
have aspired more and more to a restructuring of society; not, as
the Marxist critic thinks, in any romantic attempt to revive the
stages of development that are over and done with, but rather in
alliance with the decentralized counter-tendencies which can be
perceived underlying all economic and social evolution, and in
alliance with something that is slowly evolving in the human soul:
the most intimate of all resistances — resistance to mass or
collective loneliness.”{14}

There are observations I have brought into Buber’s remarks —
partly directly, partly by selective quotation — that are not
properly integral to his outlook. Buber does not oppose state
forms as such, a difference that mars his admiration for Kropotkin — only state forms “peculiar” to capitalism. Nor does he
oppose a market economy as such — only a bourgeois one. His
discussion of “utopian” socialism is highly selective; it ignores
“utopian” socialists like Saint-Simon who stand on a level below
his own and others, like Fourier, who go far beyond him. Like a
good Proudhonian, he seems oblivious to the possibility that “all-
embracing confederations over and above particular confederations” could easily yield social hierarchies as domineering as
ruling classes. But his emphasis on the “cell tissue ‘Society’”
provides a much-needed correction of social theories that focus
primarily on the skeletal infrastructure of society, be it economic
or institutional. By denuding society of virtually all its molecular
substance, Marxian theory and modern sociology generally have
been able to formulate many broad principles of social development ; indeed, analyses of production relations, social relations,
and historical “stages” of society lend themselves to more
seductively elegant logical constructs than analyses of concrete,
often highly particularized local associations. But these generalizations, valuable as they may be, are all too often achieved by
defining social life in highly formalized and abstract terms. The
“laws” and categories derived by creating formal typologies are
often gained at the expense of insights that the molecular
structures provide and the challenging conclusions they imply.
Indeed, the attempt to cast society in essentially generic terms
can easily provide ideological support for the “hollowing out” of
associative units by capitalism and the state.[65] By rendering social
thought blind to the significance of these units — villages, neighborhoods, cooperatives, and the like — Marxian and bourgeois
sociology take for granted and even participate in the preemption of community by bureaucracy, associated individuals by
privatized egos, the society by the state.


[65] Historically, one of the most striking examples of this support must be placed
directly at the doorstep of Marx himself. For Marx to have described capital as a
“great civilizing influence” that not only reduces nature purely to an “object for
man (Menschen — “mankind” in the McLellan translation, “humankind” in the
Nicolaus!), purely as an object of utility,” but also as a force that drives beyond “all
traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and
reproductions of old ways of life” must now be viewed as more closely akin to this
ideological process than a form of naive nineteenth-century evolutionism.
(*Grundrise*, Random House, pg. 410; the Nicolaus translation has been corrected
to remove the fiction that Marx was a committed feminist in his terminology)
These remarks by Marx must not be dismissed as a mere theoretical matter.
Bitter conflicts within the Russian and Spanish revolutionary movements over
opponents and supporters of the more desirable features of village society were to
reflect conflicting attitudes toward Marx’s encomiums to the “historically
progressive” role of capitalism, particularly in its destruction of precapitalist
formations. Isaiah Berlin, in his excellent introduction to Franco Venturi’s
*Roots of Revolution* (Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), has discussed this cleavage
in the Russian revolutionary movements with great sympathy for the anarchistic
Populists. I have dealt with the same issue in the Spanish revolutionary movements in my *Spanish Anarchists* (Free Life Editions, 1977), a work that is also
available as a Harper & Row paperback.

To state the issue more broadly, the buyer-seller relationship of the market place, carried by the logic of the commodity
relationship to the point of a market society, literally simplifies social life to the level of the inorganic. I have pointed out
elsewhere that ecologically, the most significant problem we face
today is not merely environmental pollution but environmental
simplification,{15} Capitalism is literally undoing the work of
organic evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of
concrete, metal, and glass, by turning soil into sand, by overriding
and undermining highly complex ecosystems that yield local
differences in the natural world — in short, by replacing a
complex organic environment with a simplified inorganic one —
market society is literally disassembling a biosphere that has
supported humanity for countless millenia. In the course of
replacing the complex ecological relationships, on which all
complex living things depend, for more elementary ones, capitalism is restoring the biosphere to a stage where it will be able to



support only simpler forms of life. If his great reversal of the
evolutionary process continues, it is by no means fanciful to
suppose that the preconditions for more complex forms of life will
be irreparably destroyed and the earth will become incapable of
supporting humanity itself.

This process of simplification, however, is by no means
confined to ecology; it is also a social phenomenon, as sweeping
in its implications for human history as it is for natural history. If
the competitive nexus of market society, based on the maxim
“grow or die” must literally simplify the organic world, so too must
the reduction of all social relations to exchange relations literally
simplify the social world. Divested of any content but the brute
relationships of buying and selling, of homogenized, mass-
produced objects that are created and consumed for their own
sake, social form itself undergoes the attenuation of institutions
based on mutual aid, solidarity, vocational affiliations, creative
endeavour, even love and friendship. The “cell tissue ‘Society’” is
thus reduced to the monadic ego; the extended family to the
nuclear family and finally to disassociated sexual partners who
enjoy neither the responsabilities of commitment nor emotional
affinities but live in the vaccum of estranged intercourse and the
insecurities of passionless indifference.

Indeed, the logic of market society is the market *qua* society:
the emergence of objects, of commodities, as the materialization
of *all* social relationships.[66] No longer are we simply confronted
with the “fetishization” of commodities or the alienation of labour,
but rather with the erosion of consociation as such, the reduction
of people to the very isolated objects they produce and consume.
Capitalism, in dissolving virtually every viable form of community
association, installs the isolated ego as its nuclear social form, just
as clans, families, *polis* , guilds, and neighborhoods once comprised the nuclear social forms of precapitalist societv


[66] I have emphasized the word “all” because a market society is no longer a
market *economy*. The colonization of every aspect of life by capitalism —
personal as well as social, domestic as well as industrial, retail as well as
productive — is a relatively recent phenomenon that really came into its own after
World War II. Until the 1950s, the individual could still find a refuge from the
workaday world of the capitalist economy in the private world of home and
neighborhoods. Not until the postwar years did capitalism fully colonize the realm
of consumption; its prewar triumphs were largely limited to the realm of production.
Neighborhoods, structured around a viable domestic world, small retail shops,
and a dazzling variety of cultural societies, existed up to the early 1950s. The
dissolution of neighborhoods by suburbs, of retail shops by shopping malls, and
cultural societies by television, not to speak of domestic life by the nuclear family,
finally ended the neighborhood as a form of village life within the city. Capitalist
consumption, now triumphant, has ended even the most externalized notions of a
public space. ’ The nearest thing to such a “space” is literally the shopping mall,
where consumers engage in a ballet with commodities and adolescents wander
amidst deserted lobbies to meet for sexual assignations and, of course, smoke
marijuana.

Social regression on this scale imparts a new function to
bureaucracy. Under capitalism, today, bureaucratic institutions
are not merely systems of social control; they are literally
institutional substitutes for social form. They comprise the
skeletal framework of a society that, as Greek social thought
would have emphasized, edges on inherent disorder.{16} However much market society may advance productive forces, it
takes its historic revenge not only in the rationalization it inflicts
on society, but the destruction it inflicts on the highly articulated
social relations that once provided the springboard for a viable
social opposition. The most disturbing feature‘of modern’bureau-
cracy is not merely the coercion regimentation, and control it
imposes on society, but the extent to which it is literally
*constitutive* of modern society: the extent to which it validates
itself as the realm of “order” against the chaos of social
dissolution. Just as the ancient city — its temples, gardens,
political institutions, and well-cultivated environs — represented human order as against the ever-menacing encroachment of
natural “disorder,” so bureaucracy emerges as the structural
sinews and bones that sustain the dissolving, decaying flesh of
market society. Precapitalist societies have resisted or simply
side-stepped bureaucratic formations that were imposed upon
them with the highly articulated internal life they developed on
their own or inherited from the past. Capitality society becomes
*bureaucratized* to its very marrow precisely because the market
can never provide society with an internal life of its own.

This fact expresses both the possibilities of bureaucracy as a
social infrastructure and its historical limits. The very anonymity
of bureaucracy reveals the authority of the system over personality, of the social framework over its “personnel.” The ease with
which Stalinism reproduced itself structurally as a grotesque
persistence of bureaus amidst a chronic execution of bureaucrats
is testimony to a total depersonalization of social control today —
the appalling *asociality* that bourgeois society finally achieves in
its mythic “socialization” of humanity. Together with the “denaturing” of humanity, capitalism creates a synthetic society so
completely divested of organic attributes that its social relations
are literally mineralized into objects. The bureaucrat is truly
faceless because he or she has no protoplasmic existence; the
depraved notion that administrative decision-making can be
taken over by computers and public expression by electronic
media — a notion seriously considered as a step in the direction of
“direct democracy” by theoretically sophisticated radical groups
like the French Situationists, not only zany science-fiction
“Utopians” — increasingly renders the flesh-and-blood bureaucrat and citizen an anachronism. As in Platonic metaphysics, the
immediate world of perception becomes the imperfect, transient
“copy” of an *eidos* that transcends the uncertain and chaotic
materiality of life itself. If bureaucracy represents the culmination
of social order, capitalism totally belies the historic destiny Marx
imputed to it as the means for universalizing humanity and
providing it with the means for controlling its own destiny.
Bureaucracy, as a system perfected to the point of voiceless
depersonalization, now represents a *mute society* even more
divested of self-articulation than “mute nature.” In the structureless void to which capitalism has reduced society, the public
realm literally becomes a public *space*, public only in the sense
that it is occupied by interlinking bureaus. Flow diagrams and
systems theory become the language of corporate entities that,
lacking even the presence of the lusty “robber barons,” consist of
objects moving through depersonalized agencies. The homeostasis of these corporate entities depends not upon personal
judgements but the corrective power of deviations. Contemporary language unerringly calls this “feedback,” “input,” and
“output,” not discourse, dialogue or judgement.

There is a moral that must be drawn from this massive
regression to the inorganic: capitalism has not performed the
historic function of “disembedding” humanity from nature. Over
and beyond the haunting power of archaic tradition over the
present is an “embeddedness in nature” itself — a *Naturwuchsigkeit* — that found expression in the organic consociation of
human beings: initially, a consociation expressed in clannic ties, a
sexual division of labour, the eminence of the elders, and a
“nature idolatry” that slowly cemented human ties into ever-
expansive forms of association. Doubtless, these were primarily
biological facts, not social; organic, not synthetic. But the price
humanity has paid for its socialization — for the “denaturalization” of blood groups into territorial units, tribes into towns,
and the stranger into citizenship — has taken the form of
capitalism, a rapacious society that has carried through human
socialization by “tearing down all the barriers which hem in the
development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs,
the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and
exchange of natural and material forces. ”{17}

If it is true, as Jeremy Shapiro has argued, that for Marx
capitalism creates the conditions for removing human beings
from their “immersion” in archaic traditions and in nature by “(1)
setting abstract labour free as a force of production through the
process in which labour creates its own conditions, and (2)
freeing individuals from their identification with particular social
roles allotted to them by the social division of labour...,” it is no
less true that capitalism removes them from organic nature only
to “reembed” them in *inorganic* nature.{18} It removes them from a
“concrete labour” that knows nature in all its wealth of forms and
immerses them in an abstract labour that knows only abstract
matter; it removes them from their personal identification with a
social division of labour by divesting them of the very subjective
apparatus required for personality. Although capitalism may
seem to free labour as a force of production in the organic sphere,
it enslaves it to the inorganic, transporting it from the world of
living materiality to the world of dead materiality. Capitalism may
have freed humanity from the archaic “idolatry of nature,” but it
did so only by committing humanity to the modern idolatry of
quantity. In Marxism itself, it may well be that the present releases
the hold of the archaic past on itself, but the present holds the
past captive to fictive conceptions of history that divest human
consociation of all human attributes but “interest,” “productive
power,” domination, and the values of the bourgeois Enlightenment conceived as a project of rationalization and control.

If the “dialectic of history,” as Shapiro tells us, is to be “resolved
through completion of the self-transcendence of nature that
occurs when embeddedness in nature is overcome and human
beings bring the historical process under control,” then this
“control” must involve the re-absorption of nature into society as
a “retribalized” humanity in which the archaic solidarity based on
kinsEIpls replaced by free choice of association, shared concerns, and love.{19} Communes, cooperatives, and assemblies —
in fact, new *poleis* — must replace the poverty of social forms
created by the void we call “capitalism.” Let there be no mistake
about the fact that we are never “disembedded” from nature.
Indeed, it has never been a question of whether we were
“embedded” in nature or not, but rather the *kind* of nature we
have always been “embedded” in — organic or inorganic, eco-
ligical or physical, real or mythic, whole or one-sided, subjec-
tivized or “mindless.” Only the absence of a nature philosophy
that reveals the natural history of mind from the very inception of
the organic world to the present, a philosophy that can reveal the
changing gradations of a natural dialectic into a social, that can
relate the realm of “instrumental action” to “communicative,”
and ultimately human society with nature as the voice of a “mute
nature” resubjectivized by human consciousness — only by virtue of this lacuna in the interface between nature and society is it
possible to speak of “disembeddedness” in disregard of the
meaning of a truly organic society.

Today, any meaningful project for the reconstruction of a
revolutionary theory and practice must take its point of departure from three basic premises: the reconstitution of the “cell
tissue ‘Society’” in the *physical* sense of the term, as a body
politic, that is bereft of the institutions of delegated authority; the
abolition of domination in all its forms — not merely economic
exploitation; and the obvious precondition for the latter achievement, the abolition of hierarchy in all its forms — not merely social
classes. The reductionist attitude of Marxism that defines a body
politic in the ambiguous terms of a “public sphere,” of domination
in terms of economic exploitation, and hierarchy in terms of
economic classes, masks and dissolves the differences between
these concepts. That we could easily achieve a “public sphere”
that professes to be free of class rule and economic exploitation, yet is riddled by patriarchy, bureaucracy, and a system of
ruled and ruler based on professional, ethnic, and age differences,
is painfully evident if we are to judge from the experiences of the
“socialist orbit.” To speak to the needs of an organic society —
the formation of an authentic body politic and a socially active
citizenry — is to restore society as genuine “cell tissue.” Society,
in effect, must become a body politic in the literal sense that the
citizen must be *physically* in control of the social process, a living
presence in the formation and execution of social policy.

Rousseau is only too accurate in recognizing that a body
politic, divested of *embodiment* as a citizen assembly, is the
negation of a people. The term “people” has no meaning if it lacks
the institutional structure for exhibiting its physical presence and
imparting to that presence a decisive social meaning — if it cannot
assemble to debate, formulate, and decide the policies that shape
social life. To the degree that the formulation of these policies is
removed by mediated and delegated institutions, from the face-
to-face decision-making process of the people in assembly, to that
degree is the people subverted as the only authentic constitutive
force of social life and society, vested in the sovereignty of the
few, reduced to an abstraction, an unpeopled “public sphere” or a
mere “public space.” Underlying every enterprise for the dissolution of the body politic into the faceless sovereignty of delegated
authority is the hidden belief in an “elect” that is alone endowed
with the capacity to rule and command. Ultimately, this view
amounts to a denial of the human potentiality for self-management, to the spark within *every* individual to achieve the
powers of social wisdom that a privileged few claim for themselves. That circumstances, be they resolved into the denial of
education, free time, access to culture, and even an enlightened familial background, not to speak of material and occupational circumstances, have concealed this spark to the
“masses” themselves is no argument for the fact that social life,
particularly as it concerns the individual, could be otherwise.

Delegated authority, in effect, not only negates a people but the
claims of selfhood that are underlying to the notion of popular
self-management. As I have emphasized elsewhere, a society that
professes to be based on self-management is inconceivable
without self-activity.{20} Indeed, revolution can be defined as the
most advanced form of self-activity, as direct action raised to a
level where the land, the factories, indeed the very streets, are
directly taken over by the autonomous people. In the absence of
this level of activity, social consciousness remains mere *mass*
consciousness that can easily be manipulated by hierarchies.
Delegated authority vitiates the individuation of the “masses” into
self-conscious beings who can take direct, unmediated control of
society into their own hands. It denies not only the constitution of a “public sphere” into a body politic, but the individual
into a social agent — into a “citizen” in the Athenian sense of the
term.

We live today under the tyranny of a present that is often more
oppressive than the past, Sartre’s imagery of the “slime” of the
past notwithstanding to the contrary. Our social “models” for
freedom have been the Russian Revolution and the so-called
“revolutions” of the Third Word, of the councils, soviets, and
shop committees that are so seductive to many neo-Marxists as
forms of social administration. I would join M.I. Finley in seriously
asking if we should not try to recover the more fascinating
example of the Athenian *polis* which, despite its many shortcomings, provides more expansive *institutional* examples for a
liberated society than any we are familiar with today.  That
Athenian democracy was based on a “sovereign Assembly...
open to every citizen” and convened at least forty times a year;
that it was consciously “amateurish” and antibureaucratic,
managed by a rotating council of 500 whose chairmen were
selected by lot for only a single day, a council itself constituted by sortition as well as election — these features together
with its astonishing court system, militia, and extensive use of the
lot hardly require elaboration.{21} Athenian amateurism rested on
a regard for selfhood that Platonistic readings of the *polis* tend to
de-emphasize. To the degree that the Hellenic democratic theory
found written expression, it may well have been in the concepts of
Protagoras that are handed down to us through the patently
biased dialogue of Plato’s. Free men possess *politike techne*, the
“art of political judgement,” as Finley translates the phrase, a
judgement that uniquely defines humanity as a cooperative
species, possessed of *philia* (shall we say “solidarity” rather than
the more conventional translation of the word as “friendship”?)
and dike (justice). But beyond these traits they possess a sense of
community that by *nature* destines them to live in a *polis*. These
traits of a free citizen, taken together, constitute a controlled
*selfhood*, what we call “self-control,” that renders community life
or *koinonia* possible. “Neither the sovereign Assembly, with its
unlimited right of participation, nor the popular jury-courts
(dicastery — M.B.) nor the selection of officials by lot nor
ostracism could have prevented either chaos on the one hand or
tyranny on the other had there not been self-control among
enough of the citizen-body to contain its behaviour within
bounds,” observes Finley. Moreover, this self-control was an
active form of selfhood, not the *apathia* or absence of feeling we
so often associate with contemporary citizenship within a
depersonalized formal system of “rights” and “duties.” “There
was a tradition (Aristotle, *Constitution of Athens*, 8.5) that in his
legislation early in the sixth century B.C. Solon passed the
following law, specifically aimed against apathy: ‘When there is
civil war in the city, anyone who does not take up arms on one
side or the other shall be deprived of civil rights and of all share in
the affairs of government.’ The authenticity of the law is doubtful,
but not the sentiment. Pericles expressed it, in the same Funeral
Oration in which he noted that poverty is no bar, by saying
(Thucydides, 2.40.3): ‘Any man may at the same time look after
his own affairs and those of the state... We consider anyone who
does not share in the life of the citizen not as minding his own
business but as useless.”{22}

It is ironical that we must turn to John Stuart Mill, rather than
his socialist contemporaries, for an insightful evaluation of how
direct participation in social life and the development of selfhood
mutually reinforce each other to form the civic virtues and
commitments of the citizen — that make active citizenship the
highest expression of selfhood. The defects of Athenian democracy notwithstanding, the practices of the dicastery and popular
assemblages, Mill was to observe, “raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which
there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or
modern.” The Athenian citizen was obliged “to weigh interests
not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another
rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles
and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common
good...” He accordingly found himself associated “in the same
work with minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas
and operations” which supplied “reason to his understanding and
stimulation to his feeling for the general interest.”{23}

Hannah Arendt was to formulate this educative process —
an integral feature of what the Greeks called paideia, the spiritual
*forming* of the individual — as an “enlarged mentality” that
renders authentic judgement possible.{24} The *polis* was not only
an end but a means that made political practice (“participation” is
a feeble terms) a mode of self-formation. At this level, a people not
merely arrives at a “general interest” but begins to transcend
“interest” as such. “Interest,” a term nourished by the bourgeois
enlightenment that surfaces throughout the Marxian literature as
“class interest” and in neo-Marxism as “knowledge interest,” is
replaced by the possibility of mutuality and consociation based on
the Hellenic concept of *philia* or, in the Christian tradition, by
*agape*.

The young Hegel, despite his scorn for a Christian equality that
saw the slave as “the brother of his owner,” was deeply rooted in
the millenarian ideal of a new human union and the Joachimite
vision of an era of fulfillment. In this trinitarian vision, love, as
embodied in the Holy Spirit, transcends the faith that marked the
era of the Son and the law that marked the era of the Father. For
the young Hegel, “True love, or love proper, exists only between
living beings *who are alike in power* and thus in one another’s
eyes living beings from every point of view” — and, by the same
token, to achieve this penultimate recognition of the “living
beings” who are loved, they must be alike in power. (My
emphasis — M.B.) Agape, as conceived in Hegel’s eschatological
vision, no longer knows the drive of “interest”; indeed, it
“deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character, and discovers
life itself without any further defect.” This is not a world in which
gray is painted on gray. “In love the separate does still remain, but
as something united and no longer as something separate; life (in
the subject) senses life (in the object).” Indeed, love supplants law
and one may justifiably ask if, in this era when all living beings are
alike in power, there is any need for mediation and the state.[67]{25}

[67] To my knowledge, this implicit anarchism in the young Hegel has been ignored
by neo-Marxists and its Joachimite roots examined only casually, if at all. The
considerable attention which has been given to labour and language in Hegel’s
early writings has often slighted their utopian dimension and has turned Hegel not
merely into a “precursor” of Marxism but also one of its victims.

Assemblage attains its fullness in a world where “interest”
yields to *philia* and *agape*, where judgement emerges from the
self-formative intercourse and spiritual education of an “enlarged
mentality.” Endowed with this mentality, “even when I shun all
company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I
am not simply together only with myself in the solitude of
philosophic though” Arendt observes; “I remain in this world of
mutual interdependence where I can make myself the representative of everyone else. To be sure, I can refuse to do this
and form an opinion that takes only my own interest, or the
interests of the group to which I belong, into account... But the
very quality of an opinion as of a judgement depends upon its
degree of impartiality.”{26} “Impartiality” must be taken literally if
Arendt’s point is to have meaning — as a condition that rises
above the “partial,” or one-sided, and the “partiality” of a
predetermined commitment. The emergence of a “general
interest” is, in effect, the abolition of the “partiality” of a self
rooted in “interest” and in a one-sided society.

It is a truism that “opinion” and judgement so formed have
material preconditions and a historical background that has
received sufficient emphasis not to require discussion here.
Arendt’s “enlarged mentality” must emerge from a terrain that is
materially incompatible with the formation of “class interest” and
its ideological expression as “class consciousness.” But once
these material preconditions are emphasized, we must add that a
“proletarian public sphere” is an anachronism because the
proletariat as a proletariat, as the fictive expression of a public
sphere, is an “interest” that opposes the universalization and
abolition of “interest” and the formation of a public. It is not
accidental that Marx follows in the wake of bourgeois reality by
denuding the proletariat of the social and personal forms without
which it cannot develop its public existence as part of a
universalized humanity. Marx’s writings “hollow out” the proletariat as ruthlessly as capitalism hollows out the “cell tissue
‘Society’.” Just as abstract labour confronts abstract matter, so
abstract classes confront each other in a conflict of “interests”
that exists beyond their will or even their clear comprehension.
That Marx conceives the proletariat as a category of political
economy — as the “owner” of labour power, the object of
exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and a creature of the factory
system — reflects and *ideologizes* its actual one-sided condition
under capitalism as a “productive force,” not as a *revolutionary*
force. Marx leaves us in no doubt about this conception. As the
class that is most completely dehumanized, the proletariat
transcends its dehumanized condition and comes to embody the
human totality “through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely
imperative *need*...” Accordingly: “The question is not what this
or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment
considers as its aim. The question is *what the proletariat is*, and
what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do.”{27}
(The emphasis throughout is Marx’s and provides a telling
commentary on his de-subjectivization of the proletariat.) I will
leave aside the rationale that this formula provides for an elitist
organization. For the present, it is important to note that Marx,
following the tradition of classical bourgeois political economy,
totally objectifies the proletariat and removes it as a true subject.
The revolt of the proletariat, even its humanization, ceases to be a
human phenomenon; rather, it becomes a function of inexorable
economic laws and “imperative need.” The essence of the
proletariat as proletariat is its non-humanity, its creature nature
as the product of “absolutely imperative need” — of brute
“interest.” Its subjectivity falls within the category of harsh
necessity, explicable in terms of economic law. The psychology of
the proletariat, in effect, is political economy.

The real proletariat resists this reduction of its subjectivity to
the product of need and lives increasingly within the realm of
*desire*, of the *possibility* to become other than it is. Concretely,
the worker resists the work ethic because it has become irrational
in view of the possibilities for a non-hierarchical society. The
worker, in this sense, transcends her or his creature nature and
increasingly becomes a subject, not an object; a non-proletarian,
not a proletarian. *Desire*, not merely need, *possibility*, not merely
necessity, enter into her or his self-formation and self-activity.
The worker begins to shed her or his status of workerness, her or
his existence as a mere class being, as an object of economic
forces, as mere “being,” and becomes increasingly available to
the development of an “enlarged mentality.”

As the *human* essence of the proletariat begins to replace its
factory essence, the worker can now be reached as easily outside
the factory as in it. Concretely, the worker’s aspect as a woman
or man, as a parent, as an urban dweller, as a youth or elderly
person, as a victim of environmental decay, as a dreamer (the list
is nearly endless), comes increasingly to the foreground. The
factory walls become permeable to the development of an
“enlarged mentality” to the degree that personal and broadly
social concerns <em>begin to compete with the worker’s “proletarian” concerns and values</em>. No “workers group” can become truly
revolutionary unless it deals with the individual worker’s human
aspirations, unless it helps to de-alienate the worker’s personal
milieu and begins to transcend the worker’s factory milieu. It is
indeed doubtful if, in the event of truly revolutionary change, that
workers will *want* to control production and bask in the glories of
an economy based on “worker’s control.” They will probably want
to alter production, indeed sever society’s technical commitment
to the factory as such. This kind of working class will become
revolutionary not *in spite* of itself but because of itself, literally as a
result of its awakening selfhood.[68]



[68] Most of my observations about the proletariat were made at the *Telos*
Conference on Organization at Buffalo, New York, in November, 1971, and were
developed in my article “On Spontaneity and Organization.” These observations
can be traced back to my “Listen, Marxist!” of April, 1969. They have since been
appropriated by many Neo-Marxists to add a legitimation precisely to a
“proletarian consciousness” an interest that my remarks were meant to
challenge. I adduce this type of distortion primarily to guard the reader against
“neo-Marxist” tendencies that attach basically alien ideas to the withering
conceptual framework of Marxism — not to say something new but to preserve
something old with ideological formal dehyde — to the detriment of any intellectual growth that the distinctions are designed to foster. This is mystification at its
worst, for it not only corrupts ideas but the very capacity of the mind to deal with
them. If Marx’s work can be rescued for our time, it will be by dealing with it as an
invaluable part of the development of ideas, not as pastiche that is legitimated as a
“method” or continually “updated” by concepts that come from an alien zone of
ideas.


For Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal; and so even
when men have no need of assistance from each other they
nonetheless desire to live together.” For although they share a
“common interest” in a good life, “they also come together and
maintain the political partnership (actually *politiken koinonian* —
M.B.) for the sake of life merely...”{28} For Marx, “Men can be
distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish
themselves from animals as soon as they begin to *produce* their
means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their
physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence
men are indirectly producing their actual material conditions.”{29}
Between these two definitions of “man” lie more than two
thousand years not only of human “progress” in mastery over
nature, but social regression in the denuding of society. The
degradation of *koinonia* into the division of labour and of *philia*
into class solidarity, finally of the self into an endless fount of
egotism and needs, is a historical *fact* that cannot be ignored. But
it is also an *ideology* that cannot be hypostasized and mystified as
“revolutionary.” To deal with capitalism alone as a myth of
“praxis” that incorporates precisely what should be exorcised
from “civilization” as a whole in Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer, and
frankly, Fourier’s meaning of the term, is a betrayal of the larger
revolutionary project that awaits the critique and practice of an
“enlarged mentality.” If we are not merely at the end of capitalism
but at the end of “civilization” as Fourier might have observed —
of hierarchy and domination — it is not enough to speak any
longer of class and exploitation but rather of *rank as such* at the
most molecular levels of human consociation. Critical theory,
too, was to challenge “civilization” as a sphere of domination and
a rationality of domination, but it did not deal with hierarchy, with
a sensibility that organizes *difference* into a sphere of command
and obedience. Hence, it too became victim to the hidden
hierarchical dimension that perpetuates domination, the proclivity to stand above the flux of life and ultimately the test of
experience. For the “emancipatory interest” to ferret out its
tradition of emancipation in the academy, to build its moral
imperatives within the boughs of its own intellectual Eden, is to
replace revolutionary history and its far-reaching lessons by
intellectual history with its diet of pale gruel. Not that theory has
no imperatives of its own, but rather that it cannot be defined as a
“praxis” that is guarded from life by ivy-covered walls.

It was the young Hegel, again, who most clearly formulated the
place of wisdom as *paideia*, specifically in the fruitful interchange
of teacher and taught rather than leader and led — a *paideia* that
informs the development of a revolutionary culture or “movement” as much as it does a revolutionary sensibility. That age,
experience, and personal talents may confer wisdom is no reason
that they should confer power. Hegel’s distinction between Jesus
and Socrates draws this point out unerringly on its authentic
social terrain. The Christian apostles were mere acolytes.
“Lacking any store of spiritual energy of their own,” Hegel
observes, “they had found the basis of their conviction about the
teachings of Jesus principally in their friendship with him and
dependence on him. They had not attained truth and freedom by
their own exertions; only by laborious learning had they acquired
a dim sense of them and certain formulas about them. Their
ambition was to keep this doctrine faithfully and to transmit it
faithfully to others without any addition, without letting it acquire
any variations in detail by working on it themselves.”

By contrast, Socrates’s friends from “their youth up... had
developed their powers in many directions. They had absorbed
that democratic spirit which gives an individual a greater measure
of independence and makes it impossible for any tolerably good
head to depend wholly and absolutely on one person. In their
state it was worth while to have a political interest, and an interest
of that kind can never be sacrificed. Most of them had already
been pupils of other philosophers and other teachers. They loved
Socrates because of his virtue and his philosophy, not virtue and
his philosophy because of him. Just as Socrates had fought for his
native land, had fulfilled all the duties of a free citizen as a brave
soldier in war and a just judge in peace, so too all his friends were
something more than mere inactive philosophers, than mere
pupils of Socrates.”{30}

The *polis*, with its emphasis on freedom and activity, stands
opposed to the congregation with its emphasis on reverence and
quietism. Hegel touches precisely on the differing social contexts
that produce pupils in Greece and disciples in Judea, teachers
and leaders, the democratic *koinonia* of the *polis* and the
hierarchical infrastructure of the Church. In the tension between
these two extremes, different senses of selfhood emerge: the
controlled self formed by the light of spirit, reason and solidarity
and the controlled self formed by the whip-lash of a rationalized
society, dogma, and fragmentation. In reality, there is no longer
room for an intermediate ground, whether in the revolutionary
movement or in society. The history of this century has been
poisoned by the endless “gains” and “mediations” that threaten
to become the bonfires of society itself — the “improvements”
that have been brought into the service of a domination so
ubiquitous that it brings the self into complicity with its own
enslavement. Nearly forty years ago, Horkheimer could have
written that “*The revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking*.”{31} Today these words seem tame.
The “revolutionary” movement — as the Left calls itself — *positively supports the situation it professes to attack*. The mass
party is the precondition for the existence of a mass society, the
political face of its institutional bureaucracy. The entire future of
the Left diverges on whether it seeks to recover a body politic —
the *koinonia* of a face-to-face citizenry — or whether, in the name
of the “pragmatic,” the “expedient,” and the appropriate “mediations” it will foster the ever-greater rationalization of the society
with the rhetoric of progress, planning, reform — and even
“revolution.”

Beyond the intramural disputes of the Left lie the larger social
issues of historic recovery and social advance. The municipal
tradition, however faint, persists in western society today as an
American tradition that may well speak to an American revolutionary movement with greater meaning than the European
emphasis on centralization. “The continued growth of the New
England town by division of the central nucleus into new cells,
having an independent life of their own, recalled the earlier
pattern of Greece,” Lewis Mumford has observed. “But the New
England towns added a new feature that has never been
sufficiently appreciated nor as widely copied as it deserved: the
township. The township is a political organization which encloses
a group of towns, villages, hamlets, along with the open country
area that surrounds them: it performs the functions of local
government, including the provision of schools and the care of
local roads, without accepting the long-established division
between town and country.”

Mumford’s lament that the failure of “both the Federal and the
State Constitutions” to incorporate the township as the basic unit
of American democracy “was one of the tragic oversights of postrevolutionary political development” is an understatement. The
“post-revolutionary political development” of the early republic
was largely counterrevolutionary and the township, particularly
its town meetings, were deliberately excluded precisely because
they gave “concrete organs” to an “abstract political system of
democracy...”{32} As Merril Jensen has pointed out in a fascinating
account of that very period, “the nature of city government came
in for heated discussion.” Town meetings, whether legal or
informal, “had been a focal point of revolutionary activity.” The
anti-democratic reaction that set in after the American Revolution was marked by efforts to do away with town meeting
governments that had spread well beyond New England to the
mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Attempts by conservative
elements were made to establish a “corporate form (of municipal
government) whereby the towns could be governed by mayors
and councils” elected from urban wards. Judging from New
Jersey, the merchants “backed incorporation consistently in the
efforts to escape town meetings.” Such efforts were successful
not only in cities and towns of that state but also in Charleston,
New Haven, and eventually even Boston. Jensen, addressing
himself to the incorporated form of municipal government and
restricted suffrage that replaced the more democratic assembly
form of the revolutionaries of 1776 in Philadelphia, expresses a
judgement that could apply to all the successful efforts in behalf of
municipal incorporation following the revolution: “The counterrevolution in Philadelphia was complete.”{33}

Here, then, lies a history and a liberatory tradition that awaits
full and conscious expression as a demand for human scale, local
popular control, decentralization, and face-to-face democracy
both within the revolutionary movement and within society. In
turning the notion of the “people” against its bourgeois utopian
origins, this liberatory tradition recovers and transcends a vision
for which the material premises were established by bourgeois
society itself. A new “revolutionary subject” exists in the social
vacuum left by society and the centralized power at its
summits.{34} The system turns everyone against it — be it the
conservationist or the small struggling entrepreneur, the worker
or the intellectual, women, blacks, aged, or the seemingly
privileged suburbanite. The denuding of the individual from
“brothers” and “sisters” into “citizens” and finally “taxpayers”
expresses the common lot of every individual who is burdened by
a terrifying sense of powerlessness that is so easily mistaken for
apathy. Bureaucracy can never blanket this open, unoccupied
social domain. This domain can eventually be filled by neighborhood assemblies, cooperatives, popular societies, and affinity
groups that are spawned by an endless array of social ills —
above all, *decentralized* groups that form a counterweight and a
radicalizing potential to the massive centralization and concentration of social power in an era of state capitalism.

Socialism, inspired by the imagery of the Robespierrist Committee of Public Safety, offers no promise of affecting (indeed, of
comprehending) this new social development, so congenial to the
American social tradition. The simplification of the “social
problem” into issues like the restoration of local power, the
increasing hatred of bureaucratic control, the silent resistance to
manipulation on the everyday level of life holds the only promise
of a new “revolutionary subject” on which resistance and
eventually revolution can be based. It is to these issues that
revolutionary theory must address itself, and it is to a reinstitutionalization of a conscious body politic that revolutionary
practice must direct its efforts.

<right>
April 1978
</right>

{1} See Albrecht Wellmer: “Communications and Emancipation: Reflections
on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory” in *On Critical Theory*, ed. John
O’Neill (Seabury Pres, 1976), p. 254.

{2} Karl Marx: “The Civil War in France,” *Selected Works*, Vol. II (Progress
Publishers, 1969), p. 220.

{3} Jean-Jacques Rousseau: *The Social Contract* (Everyman Edition, 1959),
pp. 94, 96. Rousseau’s influence on Hannah Arendt is almost as great as
Aristotle’s. Compare these remarks with Arendt’s in On Revolution (Viking
Press, 1965), pp. 239–40.

{4} See my *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (Black Rose Books, 1977), pp. 150–53.

{5} Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: *The Holy Family* (Progress Publishers,
1956), pp. 52–53; Frederick Engels: “On Authority” in Marx, Engels, Lenin:
*Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism* (International Publishers, 1972), p. 102.

{6} *Ibid*., p. 102.

{7} Herbert Marcuse: *An Essay on Liberation* (Beacon Press, 1969), pp. VII,
VIII, 22, 57, 64, 80,85.

{8} Herbert Marcuse: *Counter-Revolution and Revolt* (Beacon Press, 1972),
p. 41.

{9} Marcuse: *An Essay on Liberation*, op. cit., p. 14.

{10} Marcuse, *ibid*., p. 69 and fn. on same page.

{11} *Ibid*., p. VIII.

{12} Karl Marx: *Capital*, vol. I (Vintage, 1977), pp. 477–78, 479.

{13} Peter Kropotkin: *Mutual Aid* (Extending Horizons Books, 1955), pp. 179–80,
181.

{14} Martin Buber: *Paths in Utopia* (Beacon Press, 1958), op. 13–14.

{15} See *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*, op. cit., p. 65.

{16} Karl Marx: *Grundrisse* (Random House, 1973), p. 410.

{17} Jeremy J. Shapiro: “The Slime of History” in *On Critical Theory*, op. cit.,
pp. 147–48.

{18} *Ibid*., p. 149.

{19} *Ibid*.

{20} See my “On Spontaneity and Organization, *Liberation*, March, 1972,
pp. 6–7. (See pp. 249–274 below)

{21} M.I. Finley: *Democracy: Ancient and Modern* (Rutgers University Press,
1973), p. 18.

{22} *Ibid*., pp. 29–30.

{23} John Stuart Mill: *Considerations on Representative Government* (World
Classics Edition, 1948), pp. 196–98.

{24} Hannah Arendt: “Truth and Politics” in *Philosophy, Politics and Society*
(edited by Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Blackwell & Co., 1967),
p. 115.

{25} G.W.F. Hegel: *The Early Theological Writings* (University of Chicago Press,
1948), pp. 304–5.

{26} Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Op. cit., p. 115.

{27} Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: *The Holy Family*, op. cit., pp. 52–53.

{28} Aristotle: *Politics* (Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 1278bl5-30 and Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels: *The German Ideology* (International Publishers, 1947),
p. 7.

{29} G.W.F. Hegel: *The Early Theological Writings*, op. cit., p. 81, 82.

{30} *Ibid*.

{31} Max Horkheimer: “The Authoritarian State,” Telos, Spring, 1973, p. 6.

{32} Lewis Mumford: *The City in History* (Harcourt, Bacee & World, 1961),
p. 332.

{33} Merril Jensen: *American in the Era of the Articles of Confederation*

{34} See my “Toward a Vision of the Urban Future” in *Urban Affairs* Annual
Review (Sage Publications, 1978) in press. (See pp. 171–191 above)



** On Spontaneity and Organisation



It is supremely ironical that the socialist movement, far from
being in the “vanguard” of current social and cultural developments, lingers behind them in almost every detail. This
movement’s shallow comprehension of the counterculture, its
anemic interpretation of women’s liberation, its indifference to
ecology, and its ignorance even of new currents that are drifting
through the factories (particularly among young workers) seems
all the more grotesque when juxtaposed with its simplistic “class
analysis,” its proclivity for hierarchical organization, and its
ritualistic invocation of “strategies” and “tactics” that were
already inadequate a generation ago.

Contemporary socialism has shown only the most limited
awareness that people by the millions are slowly redefining the
very meaning of freedom. They are constitutively enlarging their
image of human liberation to dimensions that would have seemed
hopelessly visionary in past eras. In ever-growing numbers they
sense that society has developed a technology that could
completely abolish material scarcity and reduce toil to a near
vanishing point. Faced with the possibilities of a classless postscarcity society and with the meaninglessness of hierarchical
relations, they are intuitively trying to deal with the problems of
communism, not socialism.[69] They are intuitively trying to
eliminate domination in *all* its forms and nuances, not merely
material exploitation. Hence the widespread erosion of authority
*as such* — in the family, in the schools, in vocational and
professional arenas, in the church, in the army, indeed, in virtually
every institution that supports hierarchical power and every
nuclear relationship that is marked by domination. Hence, too,
the intensely *personal* nature of the rebellion that is percolating
through society, its highly subjective, existential, and cultural
qualities. The rebellion affects *everyday life* even before it visibly
affects the broader aspects of social life and it undermines the
*concrete* loyalties of the individual to the system even before it
vitiates the system’s abstract political and moral verities.


[69] “Communism” has come to mean a stateless society, based on the maxim,
“From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” Society’s
affairs are managed directly from “below” and the means of production are
communally “owned.” Both Marxists and anarchists (or, at least, anarcho-
communists) view this form of society as a common goal. Where they disagree is
primarily on the character and role of the organized revolutionary movement in
the revolutionary process and the intermediate “stages” (most Marxists see the
need for a centralized “proletarian dictatorship,” followed by a “socialist” state —
a view anarchists emphatically deny) required to achieve a communist society. In
the matter of these differences, it will be obvious that I hold to an anarchist
viewpoint.

To these deep-seated liberatory currents, so rich in existential
content, the socialist movement continues to oppose the constrictive formulas of a particularistic “working class” interest, the
archaic notion of a “proletarian dictatorship,” and the sinister
concept of a centralized hierarchical party. If the socialist
movement is lifeless today, this is because it has lost all contact
with life.

We are travelling the full circle of history. We are taking up
again the problems of a new organic society on a new level of
history and technological development — an organic society in
which the splits within society, between society and nature, and
within the human psyche that were created by thousands of years
of hierarchical development can be healed and transcended.
Hierarchical society performed the baneful “miracle” of turning
human beings into mere instruments of production, into objects
on a par with tools and machines, thereby defining their very
humanity by their usufruct in a universal system of scarcity, of
domination, and, under capitalism, of commodity exchange.
Even earlier, before the domination of man by man, hierarchical
society brought woman into universal subjugation to man,
opening a realm of domination that reached beyond exploitation — a realm of domination for its own sake, of domination in its
most reified form. Domination, carried into the very depths of
personality, has turned us into the bearers of an archaic, millenia-
long legacy that fashions the language, the gestures, indeed, the
very posture we employ in everyday life. All the past revolutions
have been too “olympian” to affect these intimate and ostensibly
mundane aspects of life, hence the ideological nature of their
professed goals of freedom and the narrowness of their liberatory
vision.

By contrast, the goal of the new development toward communism is the achievement of a society based on self-management in which each individual participates fully, directly, and
in complete equality in the unmediated management of the
collectivity. Viewed from the aspects of its concrete human side,
such a collectivity can *be* nothing less than the fulfillment of the
liberated self, of the free subject divested of all its “thingifi-
cations,” of the self that can concretize the management of the
collectivity as an authentic mode of <em>self</em>-management. The
enormous advance scored by the counter-cultural movement
over the socialist movement is attested precisely by a personalism that sees in impersonal goals, even in the proprieties of
language, gesture, behaviour and dress, the perpetuation of
domination in its most insidious unconscious forms. However
marred it may be by the general unfreedom that surrounds it, the
countercultural movement has thus *concretely* redefined the
now innocuous word “revolution” in a truly revolutionary manner, as a practice that subverts apocryphal abstractions and
theories.

To identify the claims of the emerging self with “bourgeois
individualism” is a grotesque distortion of the most fundamental
existential goals of liberation. Capitalism does not produce
individuals; it produces atomized egotists. To distort the claims
of the emerging self for a society based on self-management and
to reduce the claims of the revolutionary subject to an eco-
nomistic notion of “freedom” is to seek the “crude communism”
that the young Marx so correctly scorned in the 1844 Manuscripts. The claim of the libertarian communists to a society
based on self-management asserts the right of each individual to
acquire control over her or his everyday life, to make each day as
joyous and marvelous as possible. The abrogation of this claim by
the socialist movement in the abstract interests of “Society,” of
“History,” of the “Proletariat,” and more typically of the “Party,”
assimilates and fosters the *bourgeois* antithesis between the
individual and the collectivity in the interests of bureaucratic
manipulation, the renunciation of desire, and the subservience of
the individual and the collectivity to the interests of the State.



There can be no society based on self-management without
self-activity. Indeed, revolution *is* self-activity in its most advanced form: direct action carried to the point where the streets,
the land, and the factories are appropriated by the autonomous
people. Until this order of consciousness is attained, consciousness at least on the social level remains *mass* consciousness, the object of manipulation by elites. If for this reason alone,
authentic revolutionaries must affirm that the most advanced
form of class consciousness is self-consciousness: the individuation of the “masses” into conscious beings who can take direct,
unmediated control of society and of their own lives. If only for
this reason, too, authentic revolutionaries must affirm that the
only real “seizure of power” by the “masses” is the *dissolution* of
power: the power of human over human, of town over country, of
state over community, and of mind over sensuousness.

It is in the light of these demands for a society based on selfmanagement, achieved through self-activity and nourished by
self-consciousness, that we must examine the relationship of
spontaneity to organization. Implicit in every claim that the
“masses” require the “leadership” of “vanguards” is the conviction that revolution is more a problem of “strategy” and
“tactics” than a social process;[70] that the “masses” cannot create
their own liberatory institutions but must rely on a state power —
a “proletarian dictatorship” — to organize society and uproot
counterrevolution. Every one of these notions is belied by history,
even by the particularistic revolutions that replaced the rule of
one class by another. Whether one turns to the Great French
Revolution of two centuries ago, to the uprisings of 1848, to the
Paris Commune, to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and March,
1917, to the German Revolution of 1918, to the Spanish
Revolution of 1934 and 1936 or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956,
one finds a social process, sometimes highly protracted, that
culminated in the overthrow of established institutions without
the guidance of “vanguard” parties (indeed, where these parties
existed they usually lagged behind the events). One finds that the
“masses” formed their own liberatory institutions, be these the
Parisian sections of 1793–1794, the clubs and militias of 1848 and
1871, or the factory committees, workers’ councils, popular
assemblies, and action committees of later upheavals.


[70] The use of military or quasi-military language — “vanguard,” “strategy,”
“tactics” — betrays this conception fully. While denouncing students as “petty
bourgeois” and “shit,” the “professional revolutionary” has always had a grudging
admiration and respect for that most inhuman of all hierarchical institutions, the
military. Compare this with the counterculture’s inherent antipathy for “soldierly
virtues” and demeanour.



It would be a crude simplification of these events to claim that
counterrevolution reared its head and triumphed where it did
merely because the “masses” were incapable of self-coordination
and lacked the “leadership” of a well-disciplined centralized
party. We come here to one of the most vexing problems in the
revolutionary process, a problem that has never been adequately
understood by the socialist movement. That coordination was
either absent or failed — indeed, that effective counterrevolution
was even *possible* — raises a more fundamental issue than the
mere problem of “technical administration.” Where advanced,
essentially premature revolutions failed, this was primarily because the revolutions had no material basis for consolidating the
general interest of society to which the most radical elements
staked out an historic claim. Be the cry of this general interest
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” or “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness,” the harsh fact remains that the technological
premises did not exist for the consolidation of this general interest
in the form of a harmonized society. That the general interest
divided again during the revolutionary process into antagonistic
particular interests — that it led from the euphoria of “reconciliation” (as witness the great national fetes that followed the fall
of the Bastille) to the nightmare of class war, terror, and
counterrevolution — must be explained primarily by the material
limits of the social development, not by technical problems of
political coordination.

The great bourgeois revolutions succeeded socially even
where they seemed to fail “technically” (i.e., to lose power to the
radical “day-dreaming terrorists”) *because they were fully adequate to their time*. Neither the army nor the institutions of
absolutist society could withstand their blows. In their beginnings, at least, these revolutions appeared as the expression of
the “general will,” uniting virtually all social classes against the
aristocracies and monarchies of their day, and even dividing the
aristocracy against itself. By contrast, all “proletarian revolutions” have failed because the technological premises were
inadequate for the *material* consolidation of a “general will,”
*the only basis on which the dominated can finally eliminate domination*. Thus the October Revolution failed socially even though it
seemed to succeed “technically” — all Leninist, Trotskyist, and
Stalinist myths to the contrary notwithstanding — and the same is
true for the “socialist revolutions” of Asia and Latin America.
When the “proletarian revolution” and its time are adequate to
each other — and precisely because they are adequate to each
other — the revolution will no longer be “proletarian,” the work of
the particularized creatures of bourgeois society, of its work
ethic, its factory discipline, its industrial hierarchy, and its values.
The revolution will be a *people’s* revolution in the authentic sense
of the word.[71]

[71] The word “people” (*le peuple* of the Great French Revolution) will no longer be
the Jacobin (or, more recently, the Stalinist and Maoist) fiction that conceals
antagonistic class interests within the popular movement. The word will reflect
the general interests of a truly human movement, a general interest that expresses
the material possibilities for achieving a classless society.

It is not for want of organization that the past revolutions of
radical elements ultimately failed but rather because all prior
societies were organized systems of want. In our own time, in the
era of the final, generalized revolution, the general interest of
society can be tangibly and *immediately* consolidated by a postscarcity technology into material abundance for *all*, even by the
disappearance of toil as an underlying feature of the human
condition. With the lever of an unprecedented material abundance, the revolution can remove the most fundamental premises of counterrevolution — the scarcity that nourishes privilege
and the rationale for domination. No longer need *any* sector of
society “tremble” at the prospect of a communist revolution, and
this should be made evident to *all* who are in the least prepared to
listen.[72]

[72] The utter stupidity of the American “left” during the late Sixties in projecting a
mindless “politics of polarization” and thereby wantonly humiliating so many
middle-class — and, yes, let it be said: *bourgeois* — elements who were prepared
to listen and to learn, can hardly be criticized too strongly. Insensible to the *unique*
constellation of possibilities that stared it in the face, the “left” simply fed its guilt
and insecurities about itself and followed a politics of systematic alienation from all
the authentic radicalizing forces in American society. This insane politics, coupled
with a mindless mimicry of the “third world,” a dehumanizing verbiage (the police
as “pigs,” opponents as “fascists”), and a totally dehumanizing body of values,
vitiated all its claims as a “liberation movement.” The student strike that followed
the Kent murders revealed to the “left” and the students alike that they had
succeeded only too well in polarizing American society, but that *they*, and not the
country’s rulers, were in the minority. It is remarkable testimony to the inner
resources of the counter-culture that the debacle of SDS led not to a sizeable
Marxist-Leninist party but to the well-earned disintegration of the “Movement”
and a solemn retreat back to the more humanistic cultural premises that appeared
in the early Sixties — humanistic premises that the “left” so cruelly ravaged in the
closing years of that decade.

In time, the framework opened by these qualitatively new
possibilities will lead to a remarkable simplification of the historic
“social question.” As Josef Weber observed in *The Great Utopia*,
this revolution — the most universal and totalistic to occur —
will appear as the “next *practical* step,” as the immediate praxis
involved in social reconstruction. And, in fact, step by step the
counter-culture has been taking up, not only subjectively, but
also in their most *concrete and practical* forms, an immense host
of issues that bear directly on the utopian future of humanity,
issues that just a generation ago could be posed (if they were
posed at all) only as the most esoteric problems of theory. To
review these issues and to reflect upon the dizzying rapidity with
which they emerged in less than a decade is simply staggering,
indeed, unprecedented in history. Only the principal ones need
be cited: the autonomy of the self and the right to self-realization;
the evocation of love, sensuality, and the unfettered expression of
the body; the spontaneous expression of feeling; the dealienation of relations between people; the formation of communities and communes; the free access of all to the means of life;
the rejection of the plastic commodity world and its careers; the
practice of mutual aid; the acquisition of skills and countertechnologies; a new reverence for life and for the balance of
nature; the replacement of the work ethic by meaningful work
and the claims of pleasure; indeed, a *practical* redefinition of
freedom that a Fourier, a Marx, or a Bakunin rarely approximated in the realm of thought.

The point to be stressed is that *we are witnessing a new Enlightenment* (more sweeping even than the half-century of
enlightenment that preceded the Great French Revolution) that
is slowly challenging not only the authority of established
institutions and values but authority as such. Percolating downward from the intelligentsia, the middle classes, and youth
generally to all strata of society, this Enlightenment, is slowly
undermining the patriarchal family, the school as an organized
system of repressive socialization, the institutions of the state,
and the factory hierarchy. It is eroding the work ethic, the sanctity
of property, and the fabric of guilt and renunciation that internally
denies to each individual the right to the full realization of her or
his potentialities and pleasures. Indeed, no longer is it merely
capitalism that stands in the dock of history, but the cumulative
legacy of domination that has policed the individual from within
for thousands of years, the “archetypes” of domination, as it
were, that comprise the State within our *unconscious* lives.

The enormous difficulty that arises in understanding this
Enlightenment is its invisibility to conventional analyses. The new
Enlightenment is not simply changing consciousness, a change
that is often quite superficial in the absence of other changes. The
usual changes of consciousness that marked earlier periods of
radicalization could be carried quite lightly, as mere theories,
opinions, or a cerebral punditry that was often comfortably
discharged outside the flow of everyday life. The significance of
the new Enlightenment, however, is that it is altering the
*unconscious apparatus of the individual* even before it can be
articulated consciously as a social theory or a commitment to
political convictions.

Viewed from the standpoint of a typically socialist analysis — an
analysis that focuses almost exclusively on “consciousness” and
is almost completely lacking in psychological insights — the new
Enlightenment seems to yield only the most meagre “political”
results. Evidently, the counter-culture has produced no “mass”
radical party and no visible “political” change. Viewed from the
standpoint of a communist analysis, however — an analysis that
deals with the unconscious legacy of domination — the new
Enlightenment is slowly dissolving the individual’s obedience to
institutions, authorities, and values that have vitiated every
struggle for freedom. These profound changes tend to occur
almost unknowingly, as for example among workers who, in the
concrete domain of *everyday life*, engage in sabotage, work
indifferently, practice almost systematic absenteeism, resist
authority in almost every form, use drugs, and acquire various
freak traits — and yet, in the *abstract* domain of *politics* and *social*
*philosophy*, acclaim the most conventional homilies of the
system. The explosive character of revolution, its suddenness
and utter unpredictability, can be explained only as the eruption
of these unconscious changes into consciousness, as a release of
the tension between unconscious desires and consciously held
views in the form of an outright confrontation with the existing
social order. The erosion of the unconscious restrictions on these
desires and the full expression of the desires that lie in the
individual unconscious is a precondition for the establishment of
a liberatory society. There is a sense in which we can say that the
attempt to change consciousness is a struggle for the unconscious, both in terms of the fetters that restrain desire and the
desires that are fettered.

Today, it is not a question of whether spontaneity is “good” or
“bad,” “desirable” or “undesirable.” Spontaneity is integrally part
of the very dialectic of self-consciousness and self-dealienation
that removes the subjective fetters established by the present
order. To deny the validity of spontaneity is to deny the most
liberatory dialectic that is occuring today; as such, for us it must
be a given that exists in its own right.

The term should be defined lest its content disappear in
semantic quibbling. Spontaneity is not mere impulse, certainly
not in its most advanced and truly human form, and this is the
only form that is worth discussing. Nor does spontaneity imply
undeliberated behaviour and feeling. Spontaneity is behaviour,
feeling and *thought* that is free of *external* constraint, of *imposed*
restriction. It is self-controlled, *internally* controlled, behaviour,
feeling, and thought, not an uncontrolled effluvium of passion and
action. From the libertarian communist viewpoint, spontaneity
implies a capacity in the individual to impose self-discipline and to
formulate sound guidelines for social action. Insofar as the
individual removes the fetters of domination that have stifled her
or his self-activity, she or he is acting, feeling, and thinking
spontaneously. We might just as well eliminate the word “self”
from “self-consciousness,” “self-activity,” and “self-management” as remove the concept of spontaneity from our
comprehension of the new Enlightenment, revolution, and communism. If there is an imperative need for a communist consciousness in the revolutionary movement today, we can never
hope to attain it without spontaneity.

Spontaneity does not preclude organization and structure. To
the contrary, spontaneity ordinarily yields non-hierarchical forms
of organization, forms that are truly organic, self-created, and
based on voluntarism. The only serious question that is raised in
connection with spontaneity is whether it is *informed* or not. As I
have argued elsewhere, the spontaneity of a child in a liberatory
society will not be of the same order as the spontaneity of a youth,
or that of a youth of the same order as that of an adult; each will
simply be more informed, more knowledgeable, and more
experienced than its junior.[73] Revolutionaries may seek today to
promote this informative process, but if they try to contain or
destroy it by forming hierarchical movements, they will vitiate the
very process of self-realization that will yield self-activity and a
society based on self-management.

[73] Obviously I do not believe that adults today are “more informed, more
knowledgeable, and more experienced” than young people in any sense that
imparts to their greater experience any revolutionary significance. To the
contrary, most adults in the existing society are mentally cluttered with
preposterous falsehoods and if they are to achieve any real learning, they will have
to undergo a considerable unlearning process.

No less serious for any revolutionary movement is the fact that
only if a revolution is spontaneous can we be reasonably certain
that the “necessary condition” for revolution has matured, as it
were, into the “sufficient condition.” An uprising planned by an
elite and predicated on a confrontation of power with power is
almost certain today to lead to disaster. The state power we face
is too formidable, its armamentarium is too destructive, and, if its
structure is still intact, its efficiency is too compelling to be
removed by a contest in which weaponry is the determining
factor. The system must fall, not fight; and it will fall only when its
institutions have been so hollowed out by the new Enlightenment,
and its power so undermined physically and morally, that an
insurrectionary confrontation will be more symbolic than real.
Exactly when or how this “magic moment,” so characteristic of
revolution, will occur is unpredictable. But, for example, when a
local strike, ordinarily ignored under “normal” circumstances,
can ignite a revolutionary general strike, then we will know that
the conditions have ripened — and this can occur only when the
revolutionary process has been permitted to find its own level of
revolutionary confrontation.[74]

[74] This is a vitally important point and should be followed through with an
example. Had the famous Sud-Aviation strike in Nantes of May 13, 1968, a strike
that ignited the massive general strike in France of May-June, occurred only a
week earlier, it probably would have had only local significance and almost
certainly would have been ignored by the country at large. Coming when it did,
however, after the student uprising, the Sud-Aviation strike initiated a sweeping
social movement. Obviously, the tinder for this movement had accumulated
slowly and imperceptibly. The Sud-Aviation strike did not “create” this movement; it *revealed* it, which is precisely the point that cannot be emphasized too
strongly. What I am saying is that a militant action, presumably by a minority —
an action unknowingly radical even to itself — had revealed the fact that it was
the action of a *majority* in the only way it could so reveal itself. The social material
for the general strike lay at hand and *any* strike, however trivial in the normal
course of events (and perhaps unavoidable), might have brought the general
strike into being. Owing to the unconscious nature of the processes involved,
there is no way of foretelling when a movement of this kind will emerge — and it will
emerge only when it is left to do so on its own. Nor is this to say that will does not
play an active role in social processes, but merely that the will of the individual
revolutionary must become a *social* will, the will of the great majority in society, if it
is to culminate in revolution.

If it is true that revolution today is an act of consciousness in the
*broadest* sense and entails a demystification of reality that
removes all its ideological trappings, it is not enough to say that
“consciousness follows being.” To deal with the development of
consciousness merely as the reflection in subjectivity of the
development of material production, to say as the older Marx
does that morality, religion, and philosophy are the “ideological
reflexes and echoes” of actuality and “have no history and no
development” of their own, is to place the formation of a
communist consciousness on a par with the formation of ideology
and thereby to deny this consciousness any authentic basis for
transcending the world as it is given.[75] Here, communist consciousness itself become an “echo” of actuality. The “why” in the
explanation of this consciousness is reduced to the “how,” in
typical instrumentalist fashion; the subjective elements involved
in the transformation of consciousness become completely
objectified. Subjectivity ceases to be a domain for itself, hence the
failure of Marxism to formulate a revolutionary psychology of its
own and the inability of the Marxists to comprehend the new
Enlightenment that is transforming subjectivity in all its dimensions.


[75] The young Marx in *Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law* held a
quite different view: “It is not enough that thought should seek its actualization;
actuality must itself strive toward thought.”





Revolutionaries have the responsibility of helping others
become revolutionaries, not of “making” revolutions. And this
activity only begins when the individual revolutionary undertakes
to remake herself or himself. Obviously, such a task cannot be
undertaken in a personal vacuum; it presupposes existential
relations with others of a like kind who are loving and mutually
supportive. This conception of revolutionary organization forms
the basis of the anarchist affinity group. Members of an affinity
group conceive of themselves as sisters and brothers whose
activities and structures are, in Josef Weber’s words, “transparent to all.” Such groups function as catalysts in social
situations, not as elites; they seek to advance the consciousness and struggles of the larger communities in which they
function, not assume positions of command.

Traditionally, revolutionary activity has been permeated by the
motifs of “suffering,” “denial,” and “sacrifice,” motifs that largely
reflected the guilt of the revolutionary movement’s intellectual
cadres. Ironically, to the extent that these motifs still exist, they
reflect the very anti-human aspects of the established order that
the “masses” seek to abolish. The revolutionary movement (if
such it can be called, today) thus tends, even more than ideology,
to “echo” the prevailing actuality — worse, to condition the
“masses” to suffering, sacrifice, and denial at its own hands and in
the aftermath of the revolution. As against this latter-day version
of “republican virtue,” the anarchist affinity groups affirm not only
the rational but the joyous, the sensuous, and the aesthetic side of
revolution. They affirm that revolution is not only an assault on
the established order but also a festival in the streets. The
revolution is desire carried into the social terrain and universalized. It is not without grave risks, tragedies, and pain, but these
are the risks, tragedies, and pain of birth and new life, not of
contrition and dealth. The affinity groups affirm that only a
revolutionary movement that holds this outlook can create the
so-called “revolutionary propaganda” to which the new popular
sensibility can respond — a “propaganda” that is art in the sense
of a Daumier, a John Milton, and a John Lennon. Indeed, truth
today can exist only as art and art only as truth.[76]

[76] As the decline of fictional literature attests. Life is far more interesting than
fiction, not only as social life but as personal experience and autobiography.

The development of a revolutionary movement involves the
seeding of America with such affinity groups, with communes and
collectives — in cities, in the countryside, in schools, and in
factories. These groups would be intimate, decentralized bodies
that would deal with all facets of life and experience. Each group
would be highly experimental, innovative, and oriented toward
changes in life-style as well as consciousness; each would be so
constituted that it could readily dissolve into the revolutionary
institutions created by the people and disappear as a separate
social interest. Finally, each would try to reflect as best it could
the liberated forms of the future, not the given world that is
reflected by the traditional “left.” Each, in effect, would constitute
itself as an energy center for transforming society and for
colonizing the present by the future.

Such groups could interlink, federate, and establish communication on a regional and national level as the need arises without
surrendering their autonomy or uniqueness. They would be
organic groups that emerged out of living problems and desires,
not artificial groups that are foisted on social situations by elites.
Nor would they tolerate an organization of cadres whose sole
nexus is “programmatic agreement” and obedience to functionaries and higher bodies.

We may well ask if a “mass organization” can be a revolutionary organization in a period that is not yet ripe for a communist
revolution? The contradiction becomes self-evident once we
couple the word “mass” with “communist revolution.”[77] To be
sure, mass movements have been built in the name of socialism
and communism during non-revolutionary periods, but they have
achieved mass proportions only by denaturing the concepts of
socialism, communism, and revolution. Worse, they not only
betray their professed ideals by denaturing them, but they also
become obstacles in the way of the revolution. Far from shaping
the destiny of society, they become the creatures of the very
society they profess to oppose.


[77] I would argue that we are not in a “revolutionary period” or even a “prerevolutionary period,” to use the terminology of the Leninists, but rather in a
revolutionary epoch. By this term I mean a *protracted* period of social
disintegration, a period marked precisely by the Enlightenment discussed in the
previous sections.







The temptation to bridge the gap between the given society
and the future is inherently treacherous. Revolution is a rupture
not only with the established social order but with the psyche and
mentality it breeds. Workers, students, farmers, intellectuals,
indeed all potentially revolutionary strata, literally *break with*
*themselves* when they enter into revolutionary motion, not only
with the abstract ideology of the society. And until they make this
break, they are not revolutionaries. A self-styled “revolutionary”
movement that attempts to assimilate these strata with “transitional programs” and the like will acquire their support and
participation for the wrong reasons. The movement, in turn, will
be shaped by the people it has vainly tried to assimilate, not the
people by the movement. Granted that the number of people who
are revolutionary today is miniscule; granted, furthermore, that
the great majority of the people today is occupied with the
problems of survival, not of life. But it is precisely this *preoccupation* with the problems of survival, and the values as well as
needs that promote it, that *prevents* them from turning to the
problems of life — and then to revolutionary action. The rupture
with the existing order will be made only when the problems of life
infiltrate and assimilate the problems of survival — when life is
understood as a precondition for survival today — not by rejecting the problems of life in order to take up the problems of
survival, i.e., to achieve a “mass” organization made up only of
“masses.”

Revolution is a magic moment not only because it is unpredictable ; it is a magic moment because it can also precipitate into
consciousness within weeks, even days, a disloyalty that lies
deeply hidden in the unconscious. But revolution must be seen as
more than just a “moment”; it is a complex dialectic even within
its own framework. A majoritarian revolution does not mean that
the great majority of the population must necessarily go into
revolutionary motion all at the same time. Initially, the people in
motion may be a minority of the population — a substantial,
popular, spontaneous minority, to be sure, not a small, “well-
disciplined,” centralized, and mobilized elite. The consent of the
majority may reveal itself simply in the fact that it will no longer
*defend* the established order. It may “act” by *refusing* to act in
support of the ruling institutions — a “wait and see” attitude to
determine if, by denying the ruling class its loyalty, the ruling class
is rendered powerless. Only after testing the situation by its
passivity may it pass into overt activity — and then with a rapidity
and on a scale that removes in an incredibly brief period
institutions, relations, attitudes, and values that have been
centuries in the making.

In America, any organized “revolutionary” movement that
functions with distorted goals would be infinitely worse than no
movement at all. Already the “left” has inflicted an appalling
amount of damage on the counter-culture, the women’s liberation movement, and the student movement. With its overblown
pretensions, its dehumanizing behaviour, and its manipulatory
practices, the “left” has contributed enormously to the demoralization that exists today. Indeed, it may well be that in any future
revolutionary situation, the “left” (particularly its authoritarian
forms) will raise problems that are more formidable than those of
the bourgeoisie, that is, if the revolutionary process fails to
transform the “revolutionaries.”

And there is much that requires transforming — not only in
social views and personal attitudes, but in the very way “revolutionaries” (especially male “revolutionaries”) interpret experience. The “revolutionary,” no less than the “masses,” embodies
attitudes that reflect an inherently domineering outlook toward
the external world. The western mode of perception traditionally
defines selfhood in antagonistic terms, in a matrix of opposition
between the objects and subjects that lie outside the “I.” The self
is not merely an ego that is distinguishable from the external
“others”; it is an ego that seeks to master these others and to
bring them into subjugation. The subject/object relation defines
subjectivity as a function of domination, the domination of objects
and the reduction of other subjects to objects. Western selfhood,
certainly in its male forms, is a selfhood of appropriation and
manipulation in its very self-definition and definition of relationships. This self- and relational definition may be active in some
individuals, passive in others, or reveal itself precisely in the
mutual assignment of roles based on a domineering and dominated self, but domination permeates almost universally the
prevailing mode of experiencing reality.

Virtually every strain in western culture reinforces this mode of
experiencing — not only its bourgeois and Judeo-Christian
strains, but also its Marxian one. Marx’s definition of the labour
process as *the* mode of self-definition, a notion he borrows from
Hegel, is explicitly appropriative and latently exploitative. Man
forms himself by changing the world: he appropriates it, refashions it according to his “needs,” and thereby projects,
materializes, and verifies himself in the objects of his own labour.
This conception of man’s self-definition forms the point of
departure for Marx’s entire theory of historical materialism. “Men
can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion
or anything else you like,” observes Marx in a famous passage
from *The German Ideology*. “They begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to *produce* their means
of subsistence... As individuals express their life, so they are.
What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both
with *what* they produce and with *how* they produce. The nature
of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”

In Hegel’s *Phenomenology of the Spirit*, the theme of labour is
taken up within the context of the master /slave relationship.
Here, the subject becomes an object in the dual sense that
another self (the slave) is objectified and concomitantly reduced
to an instrument of production. The slave’s labour, however,
becomes the basis for an autonomous consciousness and
selfhood. Through work and labour the “consciousness of the
slave comes to itself...,” Hegel observes. “Labour is desire
restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in
other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing.” The activity
of “giving shape and form” is the “pure self-existence of (the
slave’s) consciousness, which now in the work it does is
externalized and passes into the condition of permanence. The
consciousness that toils and serves accordingly attains by this
means the direct apprehension of that independent being as its
self.”

Hegel transcends the imprisonment of labour in the master/
slave relationship — i.e., in the framework of domination — with
the dialectic that follows this “moment.” Eventually, the split
between subject and object as an antagonism is healed, although
as reason fulfilled in the wholeness of truth, in the Absolute Idea.
Marx does not advance beyond the moment of the master/ slave
relationship. The moment is transfixed and deepened into the
Marxian theory of class struggle — in my view a grave shortcoming that denies consciousness the history of an *emergent*
dialectic — and the split between subject and object is never
wholly reconciled. All interpretations of the young Marx’s
“Feuerbachian naturalism” notwithstanding, humanity, in Marx’s
view, transcends domination ambivalently, by dominating nature.
Nature is reduced to the “slave,” as it were, of a harmonized
society, and the self does not annul its Promethean content.[78]
Thus, the theme of domination is still latent in Marx’s interpretation of communism; nature is still the object of human domination. So conceived, the Marxian concept of nature — quite
aside from the young Marx’s more ambivalent notions — vitiates
the reconciliation of subject and object that is to be achieved by a
harmonized society.

[78] One sees this in Marx’s restless concept of practice and especially of material
“need,” which expands almost indefinitely. It is also clearly seen in the exegetical
views of Marxian theorists, whose concepts of an unending, willful, power-
asserting practice, assumes almost Dionysian proportions.

That “objects” *exist* and *must* be “manipulated” is an obvious
precondition for human survival that no society, however
harmonized, can transcend. But whether “objects” exist *merely*
as objects or whether their “manipulation” remains *merely*
manipulation — or indeed, whether labour, as distinguished from
art and play, constitutes the primary mode of self-definition —
is quite another matter. The key issue around which these
distinctions turn is domination — an appropriative relation that is
defined by an egotistical conception of need.[79] Insofar as the self’s
need exists exclusively for itself, without regard to the integrity
(or what Hegel might well call the “subjectivity”) of the other, the
other remains mere object for the self and the handling of this
object becomes mere appropriation. But insofar as the other is
seen as an end in itself and need is defined in terms of mutual
support, the self and the other enter into a *complementary*
relationship. This complementary relationship reaches its most
harmonized form in true art, just as will reaches its most
harmonized form in authentic play.[80] Complementarity as distinguished from domination — even from the more benign forms
of contractual relationships and mutual aid designated as “reciprocity” — presupposes a new animism that respects the other
for its own sake and responds *actively* in the form of a creative,
loving, and supportive symbiosis.

[79] And “need,” here, in the sense of psychic as well as material manifestations of
egotism. Indeed, domination need not be exploitative in the material sense alone,
as merely the appropriation of surplus labour. Psychic exploitation, notably of
children and women, may well have preceded material exploitation and even
established its cultural and attitudinal framework. And unless exploitation of this
kind is totally uprooted, humanity will have made no advance into humanness.

[80] Music is the most striking example where art can exist for itself and even
combine with play for itself. The competitive sports, on the other hand, are forms
of play that are virtually degraded to marketplace relations, notably in the frenzy
for scoring over rivals and the egocentric antagonisms that the games so often
engender. The reader should note that a dialectic exists within art and play, hence
my use of the words “true art” and “authentic play,” i.e., art and play as ends in
themselves.

Dependence *always* exists. *How* it exists and *why* it exists,
however, remain critical toward an understanding of any distinction between domination and complementarity. Infants will
always be dependent upon adults for satisfying their most
elemental physiological needs, and younger people will always
require the assistance of older ones for knowledge and the
assurances of experience. Similarly, older generations will be
dependent upon the younger for the reproduction of society and
for the stimulation that comes from inquiry and fresh views
toward experience. In hierarchical society, dependence ordinarily yields subjugation and the denial of the other’s selfhood.
Differences in age, in sex, in modes of work, in levels of
knowledge, in intellectual, artistic, and emotional proclivities, in
physical appearance — a vast array of diversity that could result
in a nourishing constellation of interrelationships and interdependencies — are all reassembled objectively in terms of
command and obedience, superiority and inferiority, rights and
duties, privileges and denials. This hierarchical organization of
appearances occurs not only in the social world; it finds its
counterpart in the way phenomena, whether social, natural, or
personal, are internally experienced. The self in hierarchical
society not only lives, acts, and communicates hierarchically; it
thinks and feels hierarchically by organizing the vast diversity of
sense data, memory, values, passions, and thoughts along
hierarchical lines. Differences between things, people, and relations do not exist as ends in themselves; they are organized
hierarchically in the mind itself and pitted against each other
antagonistically in varying degrees of dominance and obedience
even when they could be complementary to each other in the
prevailing reality.

The outlook of the early organic human community, at least in
its most harmonized form, remained essentially free of hierarchical modes of perception; indeed, it is questionable if humanity
could have emerged from animality without a system of social
reciprocities that compensated for the physical limitations of a
puny, savannah-dwelling primate. To a large extent, this early
non-hierarchical outlook was mystified; not only plants and
animals, but wind and stones were seen as animate. Each was
seen, however, as the spiritualized element of a whole in which
humans participated as one among many, neither above nor
below the others. Ideally, this outlook was fundamentally egalitarian and reflected the egalitarian nature of the community. If we
are to accept Dorothy Lee’s analysis of Wintu Indian syntax,
domination in any form was absent even from the language; thus
a Wintu mother did not “take” her infant into the shade, she
“went” with her child into the shade. No hierarchies were
imputed to the natural world, at least not until the human
community began to become hierarchical. Thereafter, experience itself became increasingly hierarchical, reflecting the splits
that undermined the unity of the early organic human community. The emergence of patriarchalism, of social classes, of the
towns and the ensuing antagonism between town and countryside, of the state and finally of the distinctions between mental
and physical labour that divided the individual internally undermined this outlook completely.

Bourgeois society, by degrading all social ties to a commodity
nexus and by reducing all productive activity to “production for
its own sake,” carried the hierarchical outlook into an absolute
antagonism with the natural world. Although it is surely correct to
say that this outlook and the various modes of labour that
produced it also produced incredible advances in technology, the
fact remains that these advances were achieved by bringing the
conflict between humanity and nature to a point where the
natural fundament for life hangs precariously in the balance. The
institutions that emerged with hierarchical society, moreover,
have now reached their historical limits. Although once the social
agencies that promoted technological advance, they have now
become the most compelling forces for ecological disequilibrium
The patriarchal family, the class system, the city, and the state are
breaking down on their own terms; worse, they are becoming the
sources of massive social disintegration and conflict. As I’ve
indicated elsewhere, the means of production have become too
formidable to be used as means of domination. It is domination
itself that has to go, and with domination the historical legacy that
perpetuates the hierarchical outlook toward experience.

The emergence of ecology as a social issue reminds us of the
extent to which we are returning again to the problems of an
organic society, a society in which the splits within society and
between society and nature are healed. It is by no means
accidental that the counter-culture turns for inspiration to Indian
and Asian outlooks toward experience. The archaic myths,
philosophies, and religions of a more unified, organic world
become alive again only because the issues they faced are alive
again. The two ends of the historic development are united by the
word “communism”: the first, a technologically primitive society
that still lived in awe and fear of nature; the second, a
technologically sophisticated utopia that could live in reverence
for nature and bring its consciousness to the service of life.
Moreover, the first lived in a social network of rigidly defined
reciprocities based on custom and compelling need; the second
could live in a free constellation of complementary relations
based on reason and desire. Both are separated by the enormous
development of technology, a development that opens the
possibility of a transcendence of the domain of necessity.

That the socialist movement has failed utterly to see the
implications of the communist issues that are now emerging is
attested by its attitude toward ecology: an attitude that, when it is
not marked by patronizing irony, rarely rises above petty
muckraking. 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 artful science
or scientific art, and at its best, a form of poetry that combines
science and art in a unique synthesis.[81] Above all, it is an outlook
that interprets all interdependencies (social and psychological as
well as natural) non-hierarchically. 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. The natural world, left largely to itself, evolves by
colonizing the planet with ever more diversified life forms and
increasingly complex interrelationships between species in the
form of food chains and food webs. Ecology knows no “king of
beasts”; all life forms have their place in a biosphere that becomes
more and more diversified in the course of biological evolution.
Each ecosystem must be seen as a unique totality of diversified
life forms in its own right. Humans, too, belong to the whole, but
only as one part of the whole. They can intervene in this totality,
even try to manage it consciously, provided they do so in its own
behalf as well as society’s; but if they try to “dominate” it, i.e.,
plunder it, they risk the possibility of undermining it and the
natural fundament for social life.



[81] “Art” in the sense that ecology demands continual improvisation. This demand
stems from the variety of its subject matter, the ecosystem: the living community
and its environment that form the basic unit of ecological research. No one
ecosystem is entirely like another, and ecologists are continually obliged to take
the uniqueness of each ecosystem into account in their research. Although there
is a regressive attempt to reduce ecology to little more than systems analysis, the
subject matter continually gets in the way, and it often happens that the most
pedestrian writers are obliged to use the most poetic metaphors to deal with their
material.




The dialectical nature of the ecological outlook, an outlook that
stresses differentiation, inner development, and unity in diversity
should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with Hegel’s writings.
Even the language of ecology and dialectical philosophy overlap
to a remarkable degree. Ironically, ecology more closely realizes
Marx’s vision of science as dialectics than any other science
today, including his own cherished realm of political economy.
Ecology could be said to enjoy this unique eminence because it
provides the basis, both socially and biologically, for a devastating
critique of hierarchical society as a whole, while also providing the
guidelines for a viable, harmonized future utopia. For it is
precisely ecology that validates on scientific grounds the need for
social decentralization based on new forms of technology and
new modes of community, both tailored artistically to the
ecosystem in which they are located. In fact, it is perfectly valid to
say that the affinity-group form and even the traditional ideal of
the rounded individual could be regarded as ecological concepts.
Whatever the area to which it is applied, the ecological outlook
sees unity in diversity as a holistic dynamic totality that tends to
harmoniously integrate its diverse parts, not as an aggregate of
neutrally co-existing elements.

It is not fatuity alone that blocks the socialist movement’s
comprehension of the ecological outlook. To speak bluntly,
Marxism is no longer adequate to comprehend the communist
vision that is now emerging. The socialist movement, in turn, has
acquired and exaggerated the most limiting features of Marx’s
works without understanding the rich insights they contain. What
constitutes the *modus operandi* of this movement is not Marx’s
vision of a humanity integrated internally and with nature, but the
particularistic notions and the ambivalences that marred his
vision and the latent instrumentalism that vitiated it.

History has played its own cunning game with us. It has turned
yesterday’s verities into today’s falsehood, not by generating new
refutations but by creating a new level of social possibility. We are
beginning to see that there is a realm of domination that is
broader than the realm of material exploitation. The tragedy of
the socialist movement is that, steeped in the past, it uses the
methods of domination to try to “liberate” us from material
exploitation.

We are beginning to see that the most advanced form of class
consciousness is self-consciousness. The tragedy of the socialist
movement is that it opposes class consciousness to self-consciousness and denies the emergence of the self as “individualism” — a self that could yield the most advanced form of
collectivity, a collectivity based on self-management.

We are beginning to see that spontaneity yields its own
liberated forms of social organization. The tragedy of the socialist
movement is that it opposes organization to spontaneity and tries
to assimilate the social process to political and organizational
instrumentalism.

We are beginning to see that the general interest can now be
sustained after a revolution by a post-scarcity technology. The
tragedy of the socialist movement is that it sustains the particular
interest of the proletariat against the emerging general interest of
the dominated as a whole — of all dominated strata, sexes, ages,
and ethnic groups.

We must begin to break away from the given, from the social
constellation that stands immediately before our eyes, and try to
see that we are somewhere in a process that has a long history
behind it and a long future before it. In little more than half a
decade, we have seen established verities and values disintegrate
on a scale and with a rapidity that would have seemed utterly
inconceivable to the people of a decade ago. And yet, perhaps, we
are only at the beginning of a disintegrating process whose most
telling effects still lie ahead. This is a revolutionary epoch, an
immense historical tide that builds up, often unseen, in the
deepest recesses of the unconscious and whose goals continually
expand with the development itself. More than ever, we now
know a fact from lived experience that no theoretical tomes could
establish: consciousness can change rapidly, indeed, with a
rapidity that is dazzling to the beholder. In a revolutionary epoch,
a year or even a few months can yield changes in popular
consciousness and mood that would normally take decades to
achieve.

And we must know what we want, lest we turn to means that
totally vitiate our goals. Communism stands on the agenda of
society today, not a socialist patchwork of “stages” and “transitions” that will simply mire us in a world we are trying to
overcome. A non-hierarchical society, self-managed and free of
domination in all its forms, stands on the agenda of society today,
not a hierarchical system draped in a red flag. The dialectic we
seek is neither a Promethean will that posits the “other” antagonistically nor a passivity that receives phenomena in repose. Nor
is it the happiness and pacification of an eternal status quo. Life
begins when we are prepared to accept all the forbidden
experiences that do not impede survival. Desire is the sense of
human possibility that emerges with life, and pleasure the
fulfillment of this possibility. Thus, the dialectic we seek is an
unceasing but gentle transcendence that finds its most human
expression in art and play. Our self-definition will come from the
humanized “other” of art and play, not the bestialized “other” of
toil and domination.

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.

<right>
November 1971
</right>


** Conclusion: Utopianism and Futurism

<em>To the memory of our martyred dead, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti — let time never allow us to forget...</em>

----

To build the future from the rich potentialities of humanity,
not from paralyzing limitations created by presentday social
barbarism; to seek what is fresh, new, and emergent in the
human condition, not what is stagnant, given, and regressive; to
work within the realm of what *should* be, not what is — these
alternatives separate two entirely antagonistic ways about thinking about the world. Truth, conceived as an evolving process of
thought and reality, always appears on the margins of experience
and practice, even as the center seems triumphant and almost all-
pervasive. To be in the minority is not necessarily testimony to
the futility of an ideal or a vision; it is often a token of what is yet to
come in the fulfillment of human and social potentialities. Indeed,
nothing is more insidious than the myth that rapid success and
popularity are evidence of truth. Success and popularity, in the
sense of a massive human commitment to an ideal, are matters of
growth, painstaking education, development, and the ripening of
conditions that render the actualization of human and social
potentialities the real epochal changes in the individual and
society.

To build the future from the social limitations of society, from
the stagnant, the given, and the regressive is to see the “future”
merely as an extrapolation of the present. It is the “future” as
present quantified, whether by expansion or attrition. Vulgarians
like the Alvin Tofflers have made futurism into a matter of
“shock”; the Paul Ehrlichs into a matter of demographic catastrophe; the Marshall MacLuhans into a matter of media;
the Herman Kahns and Anthony Weiners into a matter of
technocratic “scenarios”; the Buckminster Fullers into a matter
of mechanistic design; the Garrett Hardins into a matter of
ecofascistic ethics. Whatever claims these futurists may make for
their “visions” or “dreams,” their scenarios are notable for one
compelling fact: they offer no challenge to the bases of the status
quo. What exists in nearly all futuristic “scenarios” and “visions”
is the extension of the present — be it into the year “2000,” into
space, into the oceans or under the earth. The status quo, in
effect, is enlarged rather than challenged, even by futurists who
profess to favour “miniaturization” and “decentralization.” It is
presupposed that the existing political, economic, property, and
value systems, often the existing cities, media networks, bureaucracy, multinational corporations, market structure, monetary
relations, and even military and police machinery — all, will
*continue to exist* in one form or another. Futurists rarely examine
their highly conventional presuppositions. Like the customs of
archaic societies, the premises of the prevailing society are not
merely assumed but rather so completely introjected into
futuristic thought that its hierarchical, domineering, and property
structure do not even lie on the surface of consciousness. These
structures are extended to the future as such , hence the future
merely becomes the present writ large (or small) with the verbal
veneer of a utopian vocabulary. It is interesting to note that
Kubrick’s cult movie, “2001,” retains the military cadres, the
scientistic banalities, the cold-war ambience, even the fast-food
emporia and svelte airline hostesses of the period in which it was
produced. The “light show” that explodes toward the end of the
movie, a product of the thirties dance floor, is Kubrick’s principal
concession to the counterculture of the sixties — a culture that
has since become a caricature of itself.

Futurism, in fact, is the specious “utopianism” of environmentalism as distinguished from the unsettling logic of ecology. It
can afford to be schizoid and contradictory because the society
from which it projects its “visions” is itself schizoid and contradictory. That Buckminister Fuller can describe man as “a selfbalancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped, an electrochemical
reduction plant, integral with the segregated stowages of special
energy extracts in storage batteries,” the human nervous system
as a “universally distributed telephone system needing no service
for 70 years if well-managed,” and the human mind as a “turret in
which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and
recording range-finders, a spectroscope, *et cetera*” — and still be
described by his dazzled acolytes as an “ecologist,” a “citizen of
the world” (one may justly ask: which one?), and as a “utopian
visionary” should come as no surprise. It would be trite merely to
examine the extent to which Fuller’s “ecology” parallels La
Mettrie’s treatment of man as a machine. What counts is that his
constituency often fail to exhibit even a glimmer of insight into his
analytically mechanistic outlook and the serious challenge it
poses to an organically ecological sensibility. Ultimately, it is not
the schizophrenia of Fuller that is startling and the extent to
which his acolytes meld his mechanistic contradictions with
ecology but, even more fundamentally, the schizophrenia and
contradictions that riddle present-day society. If holism implies,
at the very least, a unity and coherence of relations, the present-
day society is the most fragmented in history.

A society that has substituted means for ends, consistency for
truth, technique for virtue, efficiency for the human good,
quantity for quality, and object for subject is a society that is
literally designed for no other purpose but survival on any terms.
To continue to “exist” — whether or not that existence is
meaningful, satisfying, creative, and realizes the potentialities of
the human spirit — leads to adaptation as an end in itself. Insofar
as survival is the only principle or end that guides the behaviour of
the present-day society, *any* means that can promote that end is
socially acceptable. Hence solar power can co-exist with nuclear
power, “appropriate” technology with high technology, “voluntary simplicity” with media-orchestrated opulence, decentralization, with centralization, “limits to growth” with unlimited
accumulation, communes with multinational corporations,
hedonism with austerity, and mutual aid with competition.

But beneath this goal of survival is not mere existence as such.
The present-day society has a definite character. It is a propertied
society that concentrates economic power in corporate elites. It
is a militaristic society that concentrates the means of violence in
professional soldiers. It is a bureaucratic society that concentrates political power in centralized state institutions. It is a
patriarchal society that allocates authority to men in varying
degrees. And it is a racist society that places a minority of whites
in a self-deceptive sovereignty over a vast worldwide majority of
peoples of colour. Taken together, the prevailing society retains
assumptions about the economy, politics, sex roles, and ethnic
heritage of humanity that are prudently hidden from consciousness. Hence its concern with survival and adaptation is
guided by distinct institutions, values, prejudices, and traditions
that must always be open to critical examination. Survival and
adaptation keep these assumptions hidden by providing a
technique for masking them with the rhetoric of “tolerance” and
“co-existence.” The society will “co-exist” with anything or any
vision that does not follow its logic of critique and fulfillment. To
“play the game” with a cordial smile, to mingle the most odious
contradictions with courtesy, to seek the lowest common
denominator in ideas and constituencies with stylish “sensitivity,”
to ignore coherence and consistency by appealing to “consensus” and “unity” — all of this makes “coexistence” the device
*par excellence* for adaptation, survival, and above all, the
domination and sovereignty of the status quo.

The essence of futurism and, for that matter, of environmentalism and Marxism is that the society’s institutions, values, and
prejudices are not examined in a truly fundamental sense. Where
futurism does more than merely extend the present into the
future, it often denatures alternatives that are designed to
radically replace the present by a qualitatively new society. When
Le Corbusier and his traditional opponent, Frank Lloyd Wright,
both described the city as a “machine,” their disputes over urban
gigantism and centralization became meaningless. Their shared
notion that human communities can be described in mechanistic
terms effaced the real significance of their differences. When
Fuller can now describe the earth as a “spaceship,” his claims to
an ecological sensibility become a travesty of ecology. When
MacLuhan can impart to media a capacity to produce a “global
village,” the contradictory nature of the term itself renders his
“utopianism” into a mockery of utopia. Unless we study this
society with a third eye that is not born of its institutions,
relations, and values, we become ideologically and morally
entrapped in presuppositions that have been built into our normal
thinking as unconsciously as breathing.

The power of utopian thinking, properly conceived as a vision
of a new society that questions *all* the presuppositions of the
present-day society, is its inherent ability to see the future in
terms of radically new forms and values. By “new,” I do not
merely mean “change” — “change” that can merely be quantitative, inertial, and physical. I mean “new” in terms of development and process rather than “motion” and “displacement.” The
latter are merely logistical phenomena; they are changes of place
and quantity as distinguished from a development that is
qualitative. Hence, under the rubric of “utopia” I place only
consistently revolutionary visions of a future that are *emergent*,
the results of deep-seated processes that involve the radical
reconstruction of personality, sensibility, sexuality, social management, technics, human relations, and humanity’s relationship with nature. The time lapse that turns present into future is
not merely quantitative; it is a change in development, form, and
quality.

Utopian thinking has its own history as well as the historically specific visions utopias unconsciously absorb from the
society they wish to replace. That More’s utopia tolerated
slavery, that Andrea’s was modelled on the monastaries of his
time, that Mably and Morelly based their codes of “nature” on
Sparta, and that Rabelais’s Abbey of Theleme partly anticipated
the court life of Versailles are obvious. Utopias have been
modelled on long-gone recollections of tribal society, the Athenian *polis*, modern “primitive” communities, or, as in Bacon’s
case, the laboratory, in Sade’s the boudoir, and in the contemporary cinema, the “Saturday night” discotheque toward which
the entire week converges. What crucially distinguishes utopias,
be they real or specious, from each other is the extent to which
they are libertarian. From this standpoint, even the remarkable
man who devised the word “utopia,” Thomas More, could hardly
be called a utopian, not to speak of Plato, Campanula, Andrea,
Bacon, Defoe, and the so-called “communists” of the Enlightenment, Mably and Morelly, later Saint-Simon, Cabet, and Bellamy.

By contrast, folk utopias like the Land of Cockaygne, visions of
the future advanced by the Diggers of the English Revolution,
Rabelais’s Abbey of Theleme, and most notably, Charles Fourier’s phalanstery and William Morris’s quasi-medieval commune,
remain inherently libertarian. What strikes us about these visions
is their own seemingly unconscious counterthrust to the unstated
presuppositions of “civilization” (to use this word in Fourier’s
sense). Even where they seem to accept the claims of property
(Rabelais and Fourier), they inherently deny its authority over
freedom. “Do as thou wiltst!” — the explicit maxim of Rabelais’s
Abbey of Theleme and the implicit maxim of Fourier’s phalanstery — necessarily subverts the power of property by denying
the power of authority itself. To the hidden presuppositions of the
present-day society, these Utopians advance hidden presuppositions of their own which we shall examine below. Hence the need
for the concreteness of utopian thinking, its specific and day-to-
day character, its narrative qualities. Literally, one form of
everyday life is opposed to another form of everyday life.
Ironically, the theoretical paucity of utopian thinking, at least in
the past, is its *raison d’etre*, its hold on the mind and on behaviour. Rousseau realized the importance of that power in *Emile* just
as Sade in the *Philosophy of the Bedroom*. Human beings as the
embodiment of ideals deal with us without losing their credibility and concreteness. Their very humanness — one thinks here
particularly of Rabelais’s *Gargantua and Pantagruel*, of Diderot’s
*Jacques le Fataliste* and *Bougainville* dialogue, and Claude
Tillier’s *Mon Oncle Benjamin* — engages our humanness in the
fullness of life and personal involvement.

The immensity of the maxim, “Do as thou wilst!,” is a direct
expression of freedom that goes beyond the most expansive
notions of democracy, even of the direct democracy practiced by
the Athenian popular assembly, the New England town meetings
of the 1760s, and the revolutionary Parisian sections of 1793.
Ultimately, what these Utopians affirm are the claims of *personality* (not merely those of an abstractly conceived “individual”) over
the power of custom, tradition, and institutions. When the
Spanish Anarchists of the 1930s raised the cry, “Death to
institutions — not to people,” they more closely approximated
this fleeting Rabelaisian and Fourierist recognition of personality
than any radical movement of our era. Not that institutions as
such were abolished in Rabelais’s and Fourier’s utopias, both of
which have a manorial ambience. But their institutions exist to
reinforce and enrich personality, not to diminish human uniqueness and creativity. The very tension that emerges between
individual and society, so marked even in the decadent phase of
the *polis*, is simply removed.

The removal of this tension is the most significant feature of the
libertarian utopias. Literally, it is achieved by recognizing not only
the claims of freedom but of spontaneous expression. Sexuality,
art, pleasure, variety, play, and unimpeded self-expression are
avowed over technical rationalization, propaganda, happiness,
uniformity, and mass mobilization — features that the authoritarian Utopians were to share with the authoritarian socialists
and, no less pointedly, many futurists of the present day. The
historic demand for “happiness” had been replaced by the more
liberatory demand for pleasure. The claims of unfettered sexuality, variety, creation, and a full recognition of individual
proclivities and personal uniqueness become the ends that
efficiency, coordination, work, and technics are meant to serve.
The two major divisions of life that were to be opposed to each
other by all great social theorists from Plato to Freud — the
“realms” of freedom and necessity — are thus integrated.

That the libertarian Utopians of the past did not provide
“blueprints” for the future that we can regard as acceptable today
hardly requires emphasis. “Blueprints,” in any case, were vehicles for a concreteness that pitted the presuppositions of the
new against the old. Their need for detail is now irrelevant to an
age that requires full *consciousness of all* presuppositions, be
they the hidden ones of the status quo or of the Utopians, to attain
a totally liberated ecological society. In a sense, we must now be
free of history — not of its memory but its icy grasp on consciousness — to *create* history rather than to be created by it.
The historical roots of the old Utopians are only too clear to be
acceptable to a more demanding era. The Abbey of Theleme was
serviced by grooms, farmers, blacksmiths, in short, by an
anonymous body of subservient people who could not practice its
maxim. Nor did Fourier open his phalansteries to the destitute
and the maimed, the victims of the new industrial bourgeoisie he
so savagely attacked. Whether any of these utopias were possible
on their own terms, within the material context of their own level
of technical development, will always remain uncertain. What is
important about their vision is its extraordinarily far-reaching
radical nature: they had challenged and, in a faltering way, tried to
remove the power of need over freedom — indeed, the tainting of
the ideal of freedom by archaic notions of need. From this
challenge, all else stemmed — the removal of the power of social
and economic rationalization over personality, work over play,
austerity over beauty, institutions over social administration, the
state over society.


Utopia has now ceased to be mythic. The concern of this
generation with the future, a concern that emerges from the
unimaginable power hierarchy can command physically and
psychically, has made utopianism a matter of foresight rather
than dreamy visions. Futurism has abolished the future. It has
done so by assimilating the future to a present that thereby
acquires a stagnant eternality by virtue of the extent to which it
permeates the eras that lie ahead. Not to form visions that break
radically with the present is to deny a future that can be
qualitatively different from the present. This is worse than an
abolition of the wisdom of history; it is an abolition of the promise
of society to advance into a more humanistic world.

Utopia redeems the future. It recovers it for the generations to
come and restores it to them as a future which they can creatively
form and thoroughly emancipate — not with hidden presuppositions but conscious artfulness. The greatest utopian ideals —
those of Rabelais, Fourier, and Morris — must be projected
beyond the limits of their time. Not only do we seek pleasure
rather than the small satisfactions of “happiness,” personality
rather than the egotism of individuality, play rather than monotonous work, mutual aid rather than competition, beauty rather
than austerity; we seek a new unity with nature, the abolition of-
hierarchy and domination, the fullness of spontaneity and the
wealth of diversity.

To draw up a blueprint — a “scenario” — for the realization of
such a utopia would be a regression to the hidden presuppositions and the concreteness that earlier Utopians opposed to the
hidden presuppositions and explicit realities of their own prevailing societies. We do not need the novels, diagrams, character
studies, and dialogues that the traditional Utopians employed to
oppose one form of everyday life to another. That everyday life
must be central to the revolutionary project of our times can now
be stated explicitly and rooted in a wealth of consciousness and in
the commitment of revolutionaries to their movements as
cultures, not merely as organizations. More demanding than, the
“blueprints” of yesterday are the ecological imperatives of today.
We must “phase out” our formless urban agglomerations into
ecocommunities that are scaled to human dimensions, sensitively
tailored in sized, population, needs, and architecture to the
specific ecosystems in which they are to be located. We must use
modern technics to replace our factories, agribusiness enterprises, and mines by new, human-scaled ecotechnologies that
deploy sun, wind, streams, recycled wastes, and vegetation to
create a comprehensible *people’s* technology. We must replace
the state institutions based on professional violence by social
institutions based on mutual aid and human solidarity. We must
replace centralized social forms by decentralized popular assemblies; representatives and bureaucracies by coordinating
bodies of spokespersons with mandated administrative powers,
each subject to rotation, sortition, and immediate recall.

All of this must be done if we are to resolve the ecological crisis
that threatens the very existence of the biosphere in the decades
that lie ahead. It is not a visionary “blueprint” or “scenario” that
mandates these far-reaching alterations in our social structures
and relations, but the dictates of nature itself. But these
alterations become social desiderata because they bring the sun,
wind, soil, vegetation, and animals back into our lives to achieve a
new sense of renewal with nature. Without recovering an
ecological relationship with the biosphere and profoundly altering
our sensibilities toward the natural world, our hope of achieving
an ecological society regresses to a merely futuristic “scenario.”

Equally significantly, we must renew our relationship to each
other in a rich nexus of solidarity and love, one that ends all
hierarchical and domineering relationships in our species. To
decentralize, to develop an “appropriate technology,” to aspire
to simplicity, all merely for reasons of logistics, technical
efficiency, and conservation would be to betray the ideal of
human scale, human participation, and human self-development.
To compromise decentralization with centralization “where
necessary” (to use Marcuse’s memorable formulation), to use
“appropriate technology” in conjunction with factories, to foster
“voluntary simplicity” amidst mindless opulence is to taint the
entire ecological project in a manner that renders the ecological
crisis unresolvable. Like Gresham’s Law, not only does bad
money drive out good, but futuristic “scenarios” will destroy the
utopian dimension of the revolutionary project. Never in the past
has it been so necessary to retain the utmost clarity, coherence,
and purposefulness that is required of our era. In a society that
has made survival, adaptation, and co-existence a mode of
domination and annihilation, there can be no compromises with
contradictions — ‘Only their total resolution in a new ecological
society or the inevitability of hopeless surrender.

<right>
November 1979
</right>


** Appendix: Andre Gorz Rides Again — or Politics as Environmentalism



Ecology and the ecological imbalances of our time open a
sweeping social horizon that profoundly challenges every conventional theory in the ideological spectrum. The split between
humanity and nature; the notion that man can dominate nature, a
notion that derives from the domination of human by human; the
role of the market economy in developing technologies that can
undo the work of natural evolution in only a few generations; the
absurdity of dealing with ecosystems and food webs in hierarchical terms — all of these issues and tenets raise immense
possibilities for developing a radical social ecology that transcends orthodox Left ideologies at one extreme and the crudities
of sociobiology at the other. A serious theorist would want to
explore these issues and would want to use them recon-
structively to foster the reharmonization of nature with humanity
and of human with human, both as fact and sensibility.

As fact, the attempt to achieve a new harmony between
humanity and nature would involve an exploration of the uses of
ecotechnologies as the technical and creative means for recovering humanity’s metabolism with nature in a non-Promethean
way. I refer to the use of new methods of food cultivation,
ecological sources of energy (solar, wind, methane, and the like),
the integration of craft with “high” technologies, fulfilling forms of
work or of work as play. It would involve an exploration of the
decentralized, confederal, ecocommunities and forms of direct
democracy that a new society would seek to create. As sensibility, the attempt to achieve a new harmony between humanity
and nature would involve an exploration that opens the fascinating discussion of a nature philosophy as the basis for a new
ethics, of feminism as the basis for a new sensibility, and of the
commune as the new form of human interaction and the arena for
self-development.

The ecological project conceived as a project of a radical social
ecology would thereby provide the bases for a rich critique of
prevailing ideologies — bourgeois and socialist alike — that would
transcend the traditional “radical” critiques of political economy.
It would open the way for a discussion of new forms of
organization (for example, the affinity group), new forms of
struggle (direct action, conceived as the praxis of self-management, not merely the occupation of nuclear power-plant sites),
new forms of citizenship (self-activity, viewed as forms of self-
realization). The ecological project, so conceived, would provide
the social gymnasium for shedding the sense of powerlessness
that threatens to reduce the public sphere to a bureaucratized
substitute for all forms of human consociation.

Critique and practice would thus merge to form a coherent and
consistently revolutionary perspective. This perspective would
open a thoroughly radical critique of such crucial problems as
patriarchialism, urban decay, corporate power, hierarchy, domination, pollution, technocratic manipulation — indeed, a multitude of issues that acquire meaning and authenticity in the light of
a libertarian, yes, anarchist, interpretation of social ecology. Most
precious of all to such a theorist would be the coherence and
revolutionary consistency one would be expected to attain as a
result of the theoretical and practical possibilities opened by a
radical social ecology, particularly one that has a revolutionary
anarchist focus.

Given these sweeping implications, Andre Gorz’s
*Ecology as Politics* turns out to be a very disappointing book — indeed, a
highly disorienting one. Apart from the ideas Gorz pilfers quite
freely from the works of anarchist theorists of the past and of the
American New Left, the book contains very little that is new or
interesting. It was to be hoped that French readers, at least,
would have acquired a fuller knowledge of these ideas in their
original form, with emendations and possibly newer interpretations by Gorz. But Gorz is content not only to repeat them
(with minimal or no acknowledgement) in a cursory, often
tattered fashion. He does substantially worse: he debases them
and divests them of their roots, of their coherence, of their
internal logic and their revolutionary thrust. *Ecology as Politics* is
not only an intellectual pastiche of ideas whose theoretical
pedigree is utterly alien to that of Gorz’s; the book is an example
of bad ecology as well as bad politics, often written in bad faith
with respect to the real traditions on which Gorz leans.


What makes Gorz’s book particularly distasteful is its attempt
to refurbish an orthodox economistic Marxism with a new
ecological anarchism. Almost every page sounds a false note. To
critically review a volume of some 200 pages with the detail that it
requires would yield a work two or three times the size of the
original. To illustrate the magnitude of this problem, let us closely
examine Gorz’s “Introduction,” which presumably presents the
theoretical basis of the book. Although this “Introduction” is
scarcely more than seven printed pages, the piece acquires
particular interest when one looks beyond its pretension to
sweep and scope. What lies under the carpet of Gorz’s theoretical ponderosity is an appalling amount of intellectual confusion — and an interesting glimpse of Gorz’s methodology,
notably the sectarian Marxian orthodoxy that always subverts
the author’s sense of “vision” and “discovery.”

From the outset, the “Introduction” begins to crumble into
semantic confusion. Its purpose is to distinguish “Two Kinds of
Ecology” (this is the actual subtitle of the “Introduction”). But as it
actually turns out, Gorz is really concerned with two kinds of
politics. To the ecologist who can use a viable politics, this might
be a laudable endeavour if Gorz were intent on discussing politics
as ecology, that is, to determine how politics can be developed in
ecological terms. But actually, this is not Gorz’s claim. He is
trying to tell us something about ecology *itself* as it relates to
social questions — to explore its special qualities and how they
interface with society. And it is precisely here that the book
begins to fall apart, for it becomes apparent that Andre Gorz
knows very little about ecology, or, more precisely, “ecological
thinking” as he puts it. There *are* in fact two different kinds of
“ecology” — notably, *ecology* and *environmentalism* — but Gorz
is basically oblivious to the difference. When Gorz speaks of
“Two Kinds of Ecology” he is actually talking of two kinds of
politics — bourgeois politics and his own. That ecology has very
little to do with the distinction he means to develop becomes
evident when, scarcely a few lines into the “Introduction,” we are
somberly advised that “Ecological *thinking* still has many opponents in the (corporate) board rooms, but *it already has enough converts in the ruling elite to ensure its eventual acceptance by major institutions of modern capitalism*.” (My
emphasis — M.B.)

While loose formulations of this kind might have been tolerable
years ago, they become totally obfuscatory today. To describe
the kind of environmentalistic thinking that goes on in corporate
“board rooms” as “ecological” is to set back the clock of
ecological thinking and the ecological movement historically. The
attempt to rescue the term “ecology” from “board rooms” and
from writers like Gorz has been long in the making. Ecology,
particularly conceived as *social* ecology, contains very radical
philosophical and cultural implications. These center around the
non-hierarchical nature of ecosystems and the importance of
diversity as a function of biotic stability. Extended to society, they
suggest the need for non-hierarchical social relations and a non-
hierarchical sensibility to achieve a truly harmonious balance with
nature and between people. What Gorz means by “ecological
thinking” in the “board rooms” is in fact what should properly be
called “environmentalism,” the largely *technocratic* strategems
for manipulating nature. Taken as an academic discipline,
“environmentalism” is essentially an instrumental body of techniques that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology once
taught as “sanitary engineering.” Like Barry Commoner, who
consciously eschews the word “ecology” for “environmentalism,” Gorz is mindful that he is advancing a *politics* that is
environmentally oriented, not an ecological sensibility that is
meant to yield a political orientation. To distinguish ecology from
environmentalism and to explore the social thrust of ecological
thinking as distinguished from the merely technical strategies of
environmental thinking would actually compel Gorz to confront
the serious challenges a radical social ecology raises to his *own*
mode of thinking — notably, *socialist* “thinking.” For the real
conflict that faces the Left so far as society and the natural world
is concerned <em>is not between a specious form of bourgeois
“ecology” and socialist politics but between a libertarian form of
social ecology and an economistic, technologically oriented form
of socialism — in short, Marxism</em>. And this, as we shall see, is not
what Andre Gorz seriously intends to do. Ecology, in effect, is
reduced to environmentalism all the more to spuriously fuse
Marxist “thinking” with the ecological issues of our time.


Accordingly, Gorz proceeds to underpin his own environmentalist “thinking” by asserting that capitalism, far from being
faced with an ecological impasse that can tear down the entire
biosphere, can actually “assimilate ecological necessities as
technical constraints and adapt the conditions of exploitation to
them.” Ironically, this formulation is not only “sanitary engineering” with a vengenance; is is even bad Marxism. If any
serious ecological conclusion is to be drawn from *Capital*, Vol. I,
it is from Marx’s compelling demonstration that the very law of life
of capitalist competition, of the fully developed market economy,
is based on the maxim, “grow or die.” Translated into ecological
terms, this clearly means that a fully developed market economy
must unrelentingly exploit nature to a point (which even Marx
could not foresee) that is literally regressive geologically and
biologically. Capitalism, in effect, is not only polluting the world
on a historically unprecedented scale; it is simplifying all the
ecosystems of the planet, turning soil into sand, the oceans into
lifeless sewers, indeed, threatening the very integrity of our
sources of atmospheric oxygen. If one were to follow the logic of
this tendency to its very end, capitalist — and hierarchical —
society are utterly incompatible with a viable biosphere. What
limits the ecological validity of Marx’s view is obviously not his
revelation of capitalism’s “law of life” but rather the “progressive”
role he imparts to capitalism’s “success” in supposedly achieving
the technical domination of nature. This Janus-faced aspect of
Marx’s writings is what throw them into conflict with an authentic
ecological sensibility. Gorz, by contrast, side-steps *exactly* what
we must learn in the contradictory position of Marx, namely, that
the very technical achievements of capitalism, far from *assimilating* “ecological necessities as technical restraints,” are governed by a “law of life” that technologically lacks *any* form of
“restraint.”

Having twisted himself into a pretzel, Gorz proceeds to
raise a hammering demand: “Reform or revolution?” Shall we
have “one” kind of “ecology,” a reformist one that resolves our
disequilibrium with nature by means of technology? Or shall we
have another kind of “ecology” that resolves our disequilibrium with nature by means of revolution? As it turns out, these
fiery demands are mere pablum. If Gorz is correct and capitalism
*can* adapt to “ecological necessities” merely by developing
pollution-controlling devices (and this is what Gorz means by
“technical restraints”), why not have a series of nice, orderly,
genteel reforms instead of a messy, possibly bloodly revolution?

It is at this point that the seemingly “semantic” distinction
between ecology and environmentalism acquires considerable
significance. If, as I personally suspect, Barry Commoner is really
a closet Euro-Communist who, at heart, is committed to
centralized economic planning, he rightly prefers to designate
himself as an environmentalist rather than an ecologist. The
concepts of social ecology stand at odds with his basically
orthodox Marxian views. By rejecting his social theories as
ecological, Commoner quite consistently can retain his refurbished Marxian views under the socially neutral term of “environmentalism.”

Gorz, whether he is clearly mindful of the fact or not, does
precisely the same thing. And it is not what is most viable in
Marx’s writing that Gorz chooses for the theoretical underpinnings of his views, but what is largely moribund or, at least,
most questionable. In Gorz’s view, capitalism threatens to
produce a profound social crisis not as a form of ecological
disequilibrium and breakdown but rather as a form of economic
disequilibrium and breakdown. If one is to take Gorz’s “Introduction” seriously, ecology can be regarded simply as an
exacerbating factor in a much larger economic crisis that faces
capitalism. If one peers behind the rich verdure of Gorzian
“ecology,” one finds the most dismal cobwebs of orthodox
Marxism. For, when all is said and done, what Gorz really argues
in his “Introduction” is that capitalism, by introducing such
“technical constraints” as pollution-controlling devices increases
the “organic composition of capital,” that is to say, the ratio of
constant capital (machinery and raw materials) to variable capital
(labour). Inasmuch as labour, in Marxian economic theory, is the
source of all value and hence of all profit, this changing ratio yields
the horrendous result that “either the rate of profit declines or the
price of products increases.” Hence “price will tend to rise faster
than real wages, purchasing power will be reduced, and it will be
as if the cost of pollution control had been deducted from the
income available to individuals for the purchase of consumer
goods.”[82] The suspicion that Gorz is concerned not with ecology
or even with environmentalism but with politics, specifically with
economics, not only emerges with stark clarity, but even his
economics turns out to be highly dubious. Its crudity is matched
only by its simplicity. To Gorz, price rises are the result not
primarily of oligopolistic or monopolistic manipulations of the
market, but of diminishing profits due to increasing capital costs.
As it turns out, *this is precisely the argument that the bourgeoisie itself uses against environmental controls*. For Gorz to ignore the
profound structural changes in modern capitalism such as pricefixing in order to rehabilitate Marx’s most dubious theories in the
so-called “free market” era of the last century reflects poorly not
only on Gorz the environmentalist but on Gorz the economist.
The essays that follow the “Introduction” in noway redeem
these crudities. On the contrary, as we shall note, they echo the
most preposterous shibboleths of bourgeois media propaganda.


[82] It is interesting to note that, as far back as the 19<sup>th</sup> century, Marx’s labour theory of value has been justly criticized for its schzoid nature. In *Capital*, Vol. I, the labour theory of value functions brilliantly as a qualitative analysis of the emergence
and form of bourgeois social relations. In *Capital*, Vol. Ill, however, the theory
functions *quantitatively* as a very dubious description of price formation, the
distribution of profits between different enterprises and the so-called “tendency of
the rate of profit to decline.” This “tendency” has never been clearly established in terms of Marx’s labour theory because it is largely unprovable. It becomes meaningless and mechanistic, in fact, when value is viewed merely in quantitative terms and it can be justly regarded as equivocal in view of the countervailing factors Marx himself invokes, factors which serve to shake the credibility of
the “tendency” as an economic reality. Accordingly, this “tendency” has not only
divided Marxian economists from non-Marxian, but has also led to endless
quarrels among the most devout acolytes of the master for generations. For Gorz,
this highly disputable “tendency” is merely adduced as given — and that is that!

In any case, to talk about “ecology” when one actually means
environmentalism is no mere word-play. It means that one
reduces ecology to environmentalism so that social ecology can
be replaced by something else — in Commoner’s case, by a closet
form of Euro-Communism; in Gorz’s case, by a very naive form
of Marxian socialism that rests on economic reductionism. It is
worth emphasizing that Gorz’s economization of ecology is not a
mere episode in his book; it is really its underlying theoretical
basis and leitmotif. Scratch Gorz the ecologist and you find Gorz
the environmentalist. Scratch Gorz the environmentalist and you
find Gorz the vulgar Marxist. Scratch Gorz the vulgar Marxist
and you find Gorz the reformist. To a great extent, this
summarizes the basic content of the entire book.

Until Gorz concludes his “Introduction” with a survey of his
“utopia,” the remaining portions of the piece are largely declamations that have been stated with greater clarity and coherence in
other, more original, works. That limited growth under capitalism
would produce unemployment and misery, as Gorz solemnly
avers, is painfully obvious. Even the bourgeoisie, in its denunciations of the environmentalist movement, has said as much.
That certain goods (say, ocean liners, castles, ski slopes, and
space ships — Gorz, in fact, focuses on such trivial and delectable
items as Mercedes Benzs and swimming pools) must either
remain scarce or be shared by everyone due to nature’s cruel
material limits hardly requires emphasis. Gorz’s grandiose
ethic — “The only things worthy of each are those which are good
for all” — is so trite that it has the earmarks of a Benthamite
philistine. Yes, Bentham was right: the good is the greatest
happiness for the greatest number — which did not prevent Marx
from viewing Bentham as a moral cretin.

Gorz’s capacity to debase a subject to the level of sheer
absurdity, however, finds its most telling expression in the
concluding portion of the “Introduction: his ’’utopia.” And what,
pray, is Gorzutopia? With breathless ardour we learn that
Gorzutopia will focus on the “production of apparently indestructible material” (hopefully, an “indestructible” Mercedes Benz, if
not a solidly built swimming pool), “collective dwellings” and
collectively used transport, lots of bicycles, “major industries,
centrally planned,” that are meant to meet basic requirements of
people without regard to styles, local “public workshops” that will
be well-equipped with tools and machines for every individual to
use, and a salad of other proposals that are promiscuously drawn
from the gardens of Peter Kropotkin, Paul Goodman, and other
anarchist theorists without the slightest reference to their
intellectual pedigree. None of these people are noted in terms of
the broader body of ideas for which each one speaks, the
tradition that each one represents, the continuity of these ideas
into recent anarchist theories and reconstructive proposals. That
we are saturated with Marx goes without saying, even if the brew
has begun to turn sour — and, of course, with a generous amount
of Gorzian eclecticism.

Is all of this possible in a market economy, cries Gorz? “No!”
he resoundingly replies, “for such a ‘utopia’ corresponds to the
most *advanced*, not the most *primitive*, form of socialism (one is
prone to ask what Gorz means by this delicious contrast: hippie
tribalism or the “primitive” anarchist “rebels” from whom Gorz
pilfers most of his ideas for a utopia — M.B.) — to a society
without bureaucracy, where the *market withers away*, where
there is enough for everyone, where people are collectively and
individually free to shape their lives, where people produce
according to their fantasies, not only according to their needs.”
We will leave this explosition of “primitive” Fourieresque rhetoric
aside and merely note, for the moment, that Gorzutopia acquires
its appropriate seal of approval by closing with the following
quotation: “in short, a society where ‘the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all” (Karl Marx,
*The Communist Manifesto*, 1848).” (My emphasis — M.B.) Thus
the halo of the Master is placed over an effluvium of intellectual
goulash that would make even so scrupulous a theorist as the
author of *The Critique of the Gotha Program*, a brilliantly
unrelenting piece of criticism, disclaim his acolyte.

Now all of this may be spicey fare for certain Parisian
*gauchistes* and the more naive adherents of Commoner’s
Citizen’s Party, but it is utterly tasteless to anyone who is even
minimally familiar with radical social ecology. Quality production,
libertarian collectivism, and other Gorzutopian appropriations
from “primitive” socialists and anarchists aside, one is stunned by
the paradoxes that coexist in Gorz’s “vision.” How in the name of
intellectual coherence can Andre Gorz dream of a “society
without bureaucracy” whose “major industries” (no less!) are
“centrally planned”? Note well that Gorz does not speak simply
of planning or even coordination or even of regionalism — but of
centralization. Will these “major industries” be centralized by
mindless robots, by “good vibes,” by stoned hippies or will they
be centralized by agencies (read: bureaus) which are staffed by
bureaucrats? How will this planning and centralization be
executed — by mutual love, by the high moral probity so nobly
exhibited by the Russian Bolsheviks, or perhaps by a harsh
system of obedience and command which Engels invoked in his
insidious essay “On Authority”? Gorz is at pains to tell us that we
must learn to live without Mercedes Benzs and swimming pools
for each family, but he tells us virtually nothing about the
administrative structures around which his utopia will be organized.

If Gorz’s evocation of a “society without bureaucracy” whose
“major industries (are) centrally planned” seems indigestible, his
image of a “market (that) withers away” produces outright
heartburn. One senses that the withering away of the market is
not far-removed from such ominous formulations like the “withering away of the state” — and sure enough, Gorz does not fail us:
the formulation *does* appear in the book! If it should come to pass
that in Gorzutopia the “market withers away,” it is fair to assume
that Gorzutopia will after all contain a market from its very
inception. One can reasonably invoke Marx’s searching analysis’
of the emergence of the market, its immanent capacity to
undermine all forms of reciprocity and mutualism, finally its
triumph over every aspect of economic life. One does not have to
be a Marxist to accept the enormous catalytic role Marx imputes
to the value and market relationship, any more than one has to
reject anarchism to mock Proudhon’s “People’s Bank,” patriarchal family relationships, and contractual theory of social
relations.

It was to be hoped that if Gorz planned to outline the most
“advanced... form of socialism,” he would not do so with the most
primitive theoretical equipment. Surely, he would know — we
hoped — that markets in a technologically “advanced” society,
burdened by a savage historical legacy of ruthless profit-seeking,
parasitic exchange, and cruel egoism, would make the withering
away of the market as preposterous as the withering away of the
state. All of which raises the really fundamental issues of Gorz’s
“Introduction”: is Gorz actually posing an authentic choice
between reform and revolution? Or must one always look
beneath Gorz’s rhetoric and ask the embarrassing questions that
follow from the internal logic of *Ecology as Politics*: environmentalism *or* ecology? Centralization *or* decentralization? A
market economy *or* reciprocity and mutualism? State *or* society ?
An inextricable variant of Marxian orthodoxy or a consistently
libertarian theory? Centralized power or decentralized coordination ? These questions and others haunt the entire book with
their contradictory alternatives, pedigree, and internal logic.
Neither Gorz’s intentions or rhetoric, however well-meaning
their intent, can remove the intellectual confusion they are likely
to foster in a reading public that is already plagued by more
sinister publicists than an Andre Gorz.

Having taken up the first seven pages of *Ecology as Politics*
with a modest degree of care, it should be obvious to the reader
that it would be impossible to bring the same degree of detail to a
critical analysis of the other essays. I shall thus confine myself to
the more outstanding “idiosyncracies” that mar so much of the
book. Yet for all my selectiveness, I cannot help but note that the
very first paragraph of the first chapter immediately ensnares us
in sheer nonsense. Thus, the chapter opens with the resounding
remark: “Growth-oriented capitalism is dead”; so too, for all
practical purposes, is “growth-oriented socialism.” “Marxism,
although irreplaceable as an instrument of analysis, has lost its
prophetic value.”

Now all of this is really a mouthful — and apparently it takes
very little effort for Gorz to utter it. Unfortunately, “growth-
oriented capitalism” (has there every been any *other* kind ?) is not
dead at all, not even metaphorically. To the contrary, it is alive
and kicking. It is not even “dead” in the Marxian sense that it has
ceased to exercise a “great civilizing influence” historically (to use
Marx’s formulation in the *Grundrisse*), a view that Karl Polanyi
brilliantly challenged decades ago. Furthermore, since Marxism
“as an instrument of analysis” has never advanced any theory of
socialism but one that is also “growth-oriented” (see *Capital*, Vol.
III, *The Grundrisse*, and many smaller works by Marx), we
encounter another Gorzian paradox: either Marxism is very
unsatisfactory “as an instrument of analysis” or one of its most
important conclusions — the historic, indeed, progressive role of
growth and the expansion of “needs” — is basically unsound.
Finally, in all fairness to Marx, the Master never assigned a
“prophetic value” to his theories. In fact, he explicitly rejected as
“utopian” any project for describing the contours of a future
communist society. So Gorz’s remarks begin with nonsense and
they conclude with nonsense. Again, the false note that rings in
virtually every page of Gorz’s book is sounded at its outset. What
Gorz really seems to believe, when all the rhetoric is discarded, is
that Marx’s “instrument of analysis” is “irreplaceable.”

It may be well to pause and examine this argument since it rears
itself in ghostly fashion with every defense of Marxism against its
most fallacious theoretical conclusions. The Marxian corpus lies
in an uncovered grave, distended by gases and festering with
molds and worms. Its once rich sweep — the project of a scientific
socialism, historical materialism as a base-superstructure theory
of social development, the call to proletarian insurrection, the
ideal of a centralized planned economy, the strategy of developing revolutionary workers’ parties in industrially advanced
countries of the world — all, have turned into a sickly, fetid jelly.
But lest we face up to the decay of the Marxian project and draw
serious lessons from its tragic destiny, we are inevitably reminded
by Marxist pundits that the “instrument of analysis” survives,
indeed, is “irreplaceable.” Marxism, in effect, is a success as a
*method* however much it is a failure as a theory.

Why such an “irreplaceable” method should yield such impoverished results remains inexplicably unclear. Indeed, the crucial
relationship between methodology and reality raises far-reaching
philosophical questions which can hardly be discussed at any
length here. It is difficult not to note that the decline of philosophy
itself from an interpretation of the world into a mere “method” of
“analysis” has been the subject of brilliant critique by the theorists
of the Frankfurt School, notably Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno. One may justifiably turn this critique against Marxism
itself, which has increasingly been turned by its acolytes into an
analytical instrumentalist methodology rather than a theory of
actual social change. That Hegel’s dialectic, too, was reduced by
Marx to a “method” may very well tell us a great deal about the
instrumental dimension that vitiates much of Marx’s own work,
but at least he clothed it in a *reality* that followed intrinsically from
his use of that “method.” If Marxism, too, must now be reduced
to a “method” — that is, a mere *technique* of analysis deprived of
its social substance or ontological content — we can fairly ask
what this trend means for the corpus of its social theory.

In any case, this instrumentalist strategy for exorcising
Marxism’s logical theoretical results hangs like a shadow over the
entire corpus, a shadow which even the most skeptical neo-
Marxists have not dispelled. The orthodox Marxian sects, of
course, have no problems whatever. The corpus is not seen as an
irreparable failure but merely as the victim of a conspiratorial
“betrayal” by “petty bourgeois” intellectuals or, to borrow from
Lenin’s rich political vocabularly, by “social patriots,” “traitors,”
and “renegades” to undo the method, the theory, or both.
Nevertheless, the fetishization of a “living Marxism” as a
“method” persists — reinforced by intense peer pressure among
radicals in the academy, a peer pressure that morally degrades its
victims as well as its high priests. Indeed, utterly alien theories like
syndicalism, anarchocommunism, and utopian socialism, not to
speak of Freudianism and structuralism, are grafted on to
Marxism in a persistent race to catch up with — rather than
“lead” in — such exotic issues of our time as ecology, feminism,
and neighborhood self-management.

Which still raises the question: what is this remarkable
“method” that has survived a century of failure, “treachery,” and
misadventure? Stated quite bluntly, it is Marx’s method of class
analysis — a social and historical strategy for determining the
conflicting material interests that have increasingly asserted
humanity’s “domination” of nature by means of technological
growth, expanding needs, and the domination of human by
human. To Marx, what makes this method so powerful is that it
removes the “ideological” cloak, the “general process of social,
political and intellectual life” (to use Marx’s own formulations),
that conceals the production relations which people enter into
“independent of their will,” the totality of which form the “real
foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure
and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”
(“Preface,” *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*)

What is decisive in any discussion of Marx’s “method” — as
distinguished from the Marxian corpus — is Marx’s more fundamental theory of a superstructure-base interpretation of society.
Without this superstructure-base theory, Marx’s “method” — his
“class analysis” — is simply meaningless. In short, the “method” is
meaningful only if it reveals the material interests that underlie
“social consciousness,” that is, only if social consciousness is
seen as the derivative, however broadly and indirectly, of
production relations. Culture, social institutions, family relations,
ideologies, and the like can only be clearly analyzed if their
ultimate economic foundations and more specifically, the material and class interests they serve, are revealed. Herein lies the
power and practicality of Marx’s “method.” As it turns out, the
much-maligned Marxist sectarians, however shrill and repellent
their denunciations, are very sound Marxists indeed. More so
than the “neo-Marxist” critics (and presumably Gorz may be
included among the latter), they insist on “revealing” the
“underlying” material or class interests that ecology, feminism,
and other such “ideologies” conceal — the real “base” which
Marx’s “method” discloses. One cannot accept the “method”
without accepting the superstructure-base theory that underpins
it.

Gorz’s real dilemma here is that he wants to have his cake and
eat it. Marx’s superstructure-base theory has been the target of
such powerful critical analyses, be it at the hands of Max Weber in
the early part of the century or the Frankfurt School in more
recent decades, that its validity is completely in question. More
currently, even such “superstructural” phenomena as the State
have been designated as “technologies” so that the concepts of
“superstructure” and “base” have become too interchangeable
to be distinguishable. Aside from the fact that modern society is
clearly a capitalistic one — and we can reasonably add the
“socialist” world to this category — the class analysis developed
by Marx for the modern world hangs by a thread. Doubtless,
Gorz would scarcely want to remove himself from the charmed
circle of such superb social critics as Weber and the Institute for
Social Research, but neither can he retain his prestige as an
authentic Parisian *gauchiste* without the appropriate genuflections to Marx. That neither the “neo-Marxists” or Gorz have
carried their analyses of Marx’s “method” down to its reductionist roots as a superstructure-base theory has done nothing to
remove the peer pressure that surrounds the entire issue of
Marxism as a whole. That a “method” which hangs in the air
without any ontological content, social reality, and intellectual
validity is little more than rank instrumentalism, will hardly
persuade the “neo-Marxists” to apply their own critique of
bourgeois instrumentalism to Marx’s.[83]


[83] Albrecht Wellmer’s *Critical Theory of Society* does, in fact, point to the
“instrumental dimension” of Marx’s writings and subjects it to valuable criticism.
But Wellmer’s criticism, unfortunately, stops short of an outright rejection of
Marxism as a social theory and essentially falls within the orbit of Jurgen
Habermas’s critique rather than a consistently libertarian one.


Gorz’s *Ecology as Politics* thus incorporates problems that are
not even evident to its own author. Not only is ecology confused
with environmentalism, revolution with reformism, centralization
with decentralization, a “withering away of the market” with a
hortatory denunciation of market society (I leave aside Gorz’s
ability to accept a “withering away of the state”), but a resolute
rejection of Marxism is completely tainted by a tacit acceptance
of its theoretical core — the superstructure-base theory of society. Had Gorz confined his book to a mere journalistic account
of the ecological crisis, it might be regarded as naive but well-
meaning. But since *Ecology as Politics* engages in theoretical
“summitry” as well as newsy chit-chat, it becomes laughable at
best and grossly obfuscatory at worst.

The remainder of the book is largely journalistic. Unfortunately, as one might expect, it is no less contradictory in its
treatment of facts as it is in its treatment of theory. Gorz fudges
everywhere he can and rarely does he advance his views in a
forthright and unequivocal manner. To be sure, one might excuse
his contradictions by regarding each essay or “chapter” as a step
in his development from Marxian orthodoxy toward a hybridized
version of libertarian ecology. But as Hegel caustically observed
of Schelling: why must he conduct his education in public? For
what we witness is not how Gorz arrives at a clear libertarian
outlook (one he has yet to achieve even in his latest book,
*Adieu au Proletariat*) but how painful such an ordeal must be — not only
to the author but to his utterly confused readers.

That Gorz seems to dislike capitalism is the only certainty with
which we can function. For the rest, almost everything that
follows the “Introduction” is misty or simply muddled. A few
examples should illustrate what I mean:

**Item**: “It is impossible to derive an ethic from ecology.” (pg. 16)
**Fact**: Perhaps no field these days holds *more* promise of an
ethics than ecology, as Hans Jonas and other searching thinkers
have suggested. Gorz, here, simply doesn’t know what he is
talking about if only because the problem of a nature philosophy
is beyond his competence.

**Item**: We must beware of “centralized institutions and hard
technologies (this is the technofascist option, the path along
which we are already halfway engaged)” (pg. 17) **Fact**: But only a
few pages earlier (pg. 9), Gorz has told us that our “major
industries” must be “centrally planned.” What are our “major
industries” if not “hard technologies” and how can they be
“centrally planned” without “centralized institutions”?

**Item**: “The total domination of nature inevitably entails a
domination of people by the techniques of domination” (pg. 20).
**Fact**: That Gorz has simply pilfered this sentence with curious
modifications from recent American anarchist writings hardly
requires discussion. What is interesting is that, even when he
uses it, he does so erroneously. Humanity can never achieve the
“total domination of nature” if only because it is part of nature —
not physically above it or beyond it. For humanity to achieve the
“total (no less — M. B.) domination of nature” would be equivalent
to lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps- — a nice metaphor,
perhaps, but a gravitational impossibility. What Gorz apparently
means to say (as I have some fifteen years ago) is that the notion
of dominating nature derives from the domination of human by
human — a formulation that reverses the Marxian one that the
domination of man by man stems from the need to dominate
nature. This is a crucial reformulation that requires considerable
discussion. Gorz confuses the *notion* with an illusory reality.
What the *notion* has in fact produced is the increasing simpli-
cation of nature, the increasing reduction of the organic to the
inorganic — a crisis that may well render the planet insupportable
for a complex species like human beings.

**Item**: “All production is also destruction” (pg. 20). **Fact**: “All
destruction is also creation” (Mikhail Bakunin). Or for that
matter, Hegel.

**Item**: “Marx demonstrated that, sooner or later, the average
rate of profit must decline...” (pg. 22) **Fact**: Utterly false! Marx
leaves this question completely open — and, if anything, he
speaks of a “tendency,” not a certainty. Gorz should at least
consult Maurice Dobbs’s essays on the subject and the disputes
that surround it before he plunges into areas in which he patently
has limited knowledge...

**Item**: When air, water, and urban (!) land become scarce (pg.
25)... the exhaustion of the most accessible mineral deposits (pg.
25)... the obstacles to growth have become substantive ones (pg.
27)... the increasing scarcity of natural resources (pg. 27)...” etc.
*ad nauseum*. In short, Gorz has bought into the entire media
myth of a shortage of energy and mineral resources. **Fact**: There
are probably some six trillion barrels of oil in the ground today
and even the most extravagant estimates of petroleum reserves
have proven historically to be underestimations. Actually, not all
of this geological largesse is accessible to us, nor is it likely to be
historically. What is far more significant for this period and
possibly for the next two generations are not the “substantive”
limits to capitalism but the structural ones. As Peter Odell, energy
consultant to the British government observes: “The so-called
generally accepted oil shortage’ is the outcome of commercially
oriented interests rather than a statement of the essential realities
of the oil resources of the world.” That the “bonanza” oil field like
the Texas and Oklahoma ones of the 1920s and the Near Eastern
ones of the 1960s are limited may well be true as things now stand,
but a mass of material can be adduced to demonstrate that
current energy and mineral shortages are the result of oligopolistic market manipulation and controlled petroleum production for
price advantages. Indeed, if we were to believe the “official”
estimates of various governmental agencies (based almost entirely on oil company reports), we should have exhausted our oil
reserves in 1925, 1950, and now, 1980–90. There is no serious
evidence that the latest estimates are authentic or based on real
facts other than those which the energy industry wants us to
believe. For example, the Oil and Gas Journal placed the world’s
“proven reserves” outside of the so-called “socialist world” at 72
billion barrels. Recent evidence now reveals that some 230 billion
barrels of oil discovered prior to 1950 somehow failed to appear in
the 1950 estimate. This game has gone on repeatedly and seems
to find no echo in Gorz’s book.

Much the same is true of metals and minerals. Estimates of
declining lead, zinc, bauxite, cobalt, manganese, chrome, and
similar resources have flooded the press, but much of the data is
specious at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Traditional
mining operations are largely privately worked and fears of
shortages serve the interests of price-fixing operations, not to
speak of crassly imperialistic policies. Even some of the most grim
predictions of the Brookings Institution’s John Titlon are tinged
with irony. If the reader finds his predictions ‘‘disconcerting,”
Titlon notes, many important mineral resources are increasing at
an even faster rate than they are being depleted and an
acceptable substitute can be found for virtually every diminishing
mineral in use today. Which is not to say that capitalism can
plunder the world forever. But the greatest danger these
practices raise is not depletion but simplification and the limits to
capitalist expansion are ecological, not geological.

One can go on indefinitely comparing and contrasting Gorz’s
remarks in one part of the book with contrary ones in another
part. The fact is that Gorz simply does not know how to deal with
the meaning of the word “scarcity.” That “scarcity” is a social
problem, not merely a “natural” one, is something he has learned
from Marx. But how “natural” it is and how “social” it is confuses
him completely — as it has the ecology movement generally. To
clearly explore these distinctions and their dialectic would have
been the most important service Gorz could have performed in
the entire book. Instead, Gorz the Marxist dissolves almost
completely at times into the crudest environmentalist. Accordingly, the Club of Rome’s notorious report (I refer to the
Meadows’s version), *The Limits to Growth*, earns Gorz s
admiration as a document that “brought grist to the mill of all who
reject capitalism because of its logic, premises, and consequences” (pg. 78) Later, Gorz reiterates his concurrence with the
report by adding: “Even if the figures in the Meadows report are
unreliable, the fundamental truth of its thesis remains unchanged.” (pg. 84) Having spent years in the radical ecology
movement, I’m not at all certain what “mill” Gorz is talking about
or how anti-capitalist the “consequences” of the report may be.

Actually, Gorz would not be Gorz if he did not try to qualify
such utterly absurd remarks. So we then learn later that the
report is also designed to rescue capitalism. “When the Meadows
report looks forward to tripling worldwide industrial production
while recommending zero growth in industrial countries, doesn’t
it imply this neo-imperialist vision of the future?” (pg. 85) —
notably, a maximum exploitation of Third World resources.
“Americans will become a nation of bankers, busy recirculating
their profits levied on the work of others” (pg. 85). That the
United States, in fact, is now undergoing a massive, indeed,
historic industrial revolution of its own in concert with Western
Europe and Japan is an immensely important reality that hardly
crosses Gorz’s intellectual horizon. The man is still on the level of
Lenin’s *Imperialism*, a work long-outdated by far-reaching structural changes in the industrially advanced countries of the world.

His Marx, in turn, is a source primarily of the most shallow
theories of overaccumulation and classical bourgeois theories of
economic crises. Thus the maxim, “Grow or die,” finally surfaces
well on in the book (page 22) but not to explore its ecological
implications; rather, Gorz uses it to shore up his emphasis on the
“decline in the rate of profit,” which he now deals with not as a
“tendency” but as a fact. In short, a social theory of scarcity is so
crudely interlocked with a geological one that it is hard to
determine if Gorz has abandoned social theory for economics,
economics for biology, or biology for geology. Accordingly, the
very man who has told us on the opening page of his “Introduction” that “ecological thinking... has enough converts in the
ruling elite to ensure its eventual acceptance by the major
institutions of modern capitalism” (pg. 3) has no difficulty in
emphasizing (fifteen pages later) that “the ecological perspective
is incompatible with the rationality of capitalism” (pg. 18). Gorz
literally drops these contradictions all over the place — within his
essays, between them, or quite promiscuously, among them.

Gorzutopias and theses abound in one form or another all over
the place. In “one of several possible utopias,” Gorz presents a
scenario of how Gorzutopia (version two) might come about after
“the elections, but during the period of transition to the new
administration.” Exactly who has been elected and by what form
of organizational process remains unclear. What we learn is “that
a number of factories and enterprises had been taken over by the
workers.” Is this Paris, 1871? Barcelona, 1936? Budapest, 1956?
Paris, again, 1968? These are not idle questions if one wishes,
even lightmindedly, to deal with a “period of transition.” All we
know is that there is “turmoil.” Everyone begins to occupy
everything — the “young unemployed — who had the previous
two years been occupying abandoned plants ; empty buildings... transformed into communes”; schools, by students and
their teachers — and everywhere, “hydroponic gardens” (Gorz,
incidentally, couldn’t have made a worse choice here for ecological gardening), “facilities for raising fish, installations for
“woodworking, metal-working, and other crafts...” We must
assume on our own that the CRS has decided to occupy its
barracks, the Parisian “flicks” their police headquarters, and the
French Army its long-lost forts in Algeria, much to the delight of
the ORA.

Suddenly the veil is lifted: the “President of the Republic and
Prime Minister” appear on evening television. Mass media scores
another triumph! Together, the two men give the French people
a heavy dose of Gorzutopia which happily mixes the fancies of
Fritz Schumacher and Ivan Illich together with Andre Gorz and
Karl Marx. The “*government*,” we are told, has “developed a
program for an alternative pattern of growth, based on an
alternative economy and alternative institutions.” Frenchmen
and Frenchwomen *will* “work less,” “more effectively, and in
“new ways.” Everyone will, “as a matter of right, be entitled to the
satisfaction of his or her needs.” c We must consume better, the
President warns, and “the dominant firms in each sector” will
become “the property of society.” “We must re-integrate culture
into the everyday life of all.” The Presidential address to the
nation runs through such delightfully diverse notions as individual
and local autonomy, environmental controls, and a degree of
decentralization that will avoid the “dictatorship (not the abolition — M.B.) of the state.” (My emphasis throughout — M.B.)

To jazz up the scenario, Groz focuses on the Prime Minister,
who rapidly lists “twenty-nine enterprises and corporations” that
will be “socialized” by the “National Assembly.” Workers will be
“*free* to hold general assemblies” that will essentially take over
production and work itself will be confined to the afternoon so
that the proletariat can be free to make its decisions in the
morning — alternating hours, redesigning the goods that befit
Gorzutopia, and setting suitable salaries. Somehow “Money itself
will no longer confer any rights,” declares the Prime Minister —
but apparently it will continue to exist, together with prices,
markets, and luxuries, which, presumably by governmental edict,
will begin to wither away together with the State. But before the
State totally disappears, Gorz cannot deny himself one delicious
act of coercion: “After completing *compulsory* education, the
Prime Minister went on, each individual would be *required* to put
in twenty hours of work each week (for which he or she would
earn a full salary), in addition to continuing whatever studies he or
she desired.” (My emphasis — M.B.)

This is no “scenario”; it is a childish “libertarian” Disneyland in
which Gorz permits his readers to indulge in social spectacles on
a cartoon level. The book itself could already be dismissed as an
overdone comic strip were it not for the pits Gorz reaches when
he reconnoiters the infamous “population problem.” Here, Gorz
passes from Marx and Disney to Malthus and Garrett Hardin.
“Twelve Billion People?” cries Gorz in alarm — and the reader is
enjoined to tremble over the certitude of “famine,” “epidemics,”
“population pressure,” resource exhaustion, and “a classic game
theory scenario — c the tragedy of the commons’.” Whether Gorz
knows that Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is one of
the opening shots in the emergence of ecofascism and the
“lifeboat ethic” I do not know. But Hardin’s views, like those of
Malthus, are trotted out with the same aplomb as those of Marx.
Accordingly, if the population growth-rate in not slowed, “there
will be 9 billion people in 1995, 40 billion in 2025, and 100 billion in
2075.” By this time, Gorz cries, “Catastrophe will be inevitable.”
Happily, he adds, “the Indian government knows something
about this” — and one seriously wonders if Gorz has Indira
Gandhi’s forced sterilization program in mind when he celebrates
“sterilization campaigns” as well as the Gorzian “achievement of
a living standard that encourages a spontaneous birth rate,”
“agrarian reform” and “the emancipation of women.” It is
noteworthy that feminism, so vital to any libertarian “population”
discussion, rates three words in the entire book.

What Gorz does here is simply embarrassing. His population
projections, like those of the Population Foundation, deal with
human beings as though they were fruit flies. His methodology
implies an acceptance of neo-Malthusian demography. Hardin’s
“Tragedy of the Commons” mentality gains greater creditability
and attention than Josue de Castro’s views in *The Geopolitics of*
*Hunger*, which seem more like an after-thought rather than a
serious program for analysis and action. The social roots of
population growth, not to speak of feminism and Marx’s critique
of Malthus, are subordinated to hypothetical ratios of proliferation. The “Green Revolution” gets its obligatory wristslap, but
Gorz offers only a minimal explanation of the interrelationship
between famine and imperialism or, for that matter, hunger and
geopolitics. Here, the neo-Malthusian restatement of “original
sin” (i.e., the “population problem” begins in everyone’s bedroom, not in the world’s brokerage houses) acquires an extraordinary degree of eminence. The “crisis” appears more as a crisis
of numbers than of social relations in which “technical constraints” like condoms are equally as significant as social factors.
What ecology has done for Gorz is to confuse him. Far from
enriching his outlook with the need for a nature philosophy, an
ethics, the problems of society’s interaction with the biotic world,
and a radical practice, it has actually cultivated his most philistine
intellectual qualities and his inner proclivity for ideological
sensationalism. Despite its radical rhetoric, *Ecology as Politics*
contains some of the worst, albeit *fashionable*, prejudices of the
environmentalist movement, tastelessly decorated with Marxian
terminology.

It is time to bring this critical review to an end. I will not follow
Gorz through his ritualized discussion of nuclear power and
public health. If the reader has scanned Anna Gyorgy’s
*No Nukes!* and Ivan Ilich’s *Medical Nemisis*, she or he requires no
additional comments. The book concludes with a series of
personal, largely “countercultural” vignettes of a Gorzean journey through California, titled: “The American Revolution Continues.” To be frank, in California Gorz might just as well have
looked for the world revolution — everything “continues” in one
way or another in that part of the world. Needless to say, the
vignettes include the prescribed “Jim,” who is still active in
campus politics; the indispensable “Susie,” who hates California
smog; the necessary “George,” who practices socialism in one
neighborhood; the cryptic “Heinz,” who has moved to California from Germany. It also contains my personal friends, Lee
Swenson and Karl Hess (the latter lives in West Virginia) and


there is hardly anything that Gorz can say about them that is
harmful.

Perhaps the most interesting remarks in these vignettes
however, center around Ralph Nader and Jerry Brown. Nader,
Gorz has told his French readers, “believes that people have to
organize and take power over their own lives” (pg. 203). Having
recently engaged in a brief verbal duel with Nader, I can attest to
the fact that this consumer advocate is more oriented toward
Establishment politics than popular action. Jerry Brown, in
Gorz’s sketch, is virtually characterized as a “neo-anarchist” (the
term is Gorz’s, not mine). Like all “neo-anarchists,” no doubt,
Jerry’s “models are Ho Chi Minh, Ghandi, and Mao. His bedside
reading is *Small Is Beautiful*... and he spends a lot of time at the
Zen (Buddhist) center.” The French reader is further told that
“Brown has become immensely popular. He refuses to live in the
governor’s mansion, he sleeps on a mattress on the floor in a
rented apartment, and he makes his staff go on work retreats that
can last from 7 A.M. to 2 P.M. Somewhat like Fidel Castro, he
shows up where he is least expected... “So on and so forth. Linda
Ronstadt receives no mention in this idyllic picture of the “neoanarchist” Governor of California, so it hardly pays to say more.

That a Marxist, or a publicist trained in *some* kind of Marxism,
can believe that any Governor of California is a credible figure,
however, does warrant some comment. It matters little what
Jerry Brown says he is or what he claims he reads. What matters
is that a supposedly “leading” French “radical” *believes* it and
describes Brown’s manufactured persona with an even modest
degree of credulity. It now becomes painfully evident that Gorz’s
absurdities have a rationality of their own. Gorz’s reality principle
is hopelessly one-dimensional, indeed, surprisingly askew. The
book itself is not simply a bizarre mixture of utterly contradictory
theories and facts; it is a compelling symptom of the crisis of
modern socialism. The double meanings which Gorz gives to
“ecological thinking,” “decentralization,” “autonomy,” “the
State,” and his “utopian” scenarios for a new society become
problems not of theoretical analyses but of social diagnoses.
What appear as conflicting ideas in the book are not ideological
contradictions; they are really cultural traits of an emerging era of
intellectual confusion and incoherence as a normal condition of
the international Left. If Herb Gintis can praise this book to the
skies, if the reviews it receives in the radical press are in any way
favourable, it will be because the Left itself has descended to
unprecedentedly low depths — together with the *culture* in which
it is rooted.

The most disquieting aspect of this theoretical and cultural
regression is the inability of Left social critics to distinguish
between the differences in the premises and logic of profoundly
disparate theories or even bear solemn witness to the internal
contradictions that must inevitably cause them to clash with each
other. Like those ponderous banks at the turn of the century that
combined Greek columns with rococo bas reliefs, leaving the
viewer in an architectural limbo, socialist theorists dip freely into
disparate and profoundly contradictory traditions to fashion their
blurred ideologies. To be out of focus is not merely fashionable today but absolutely necessary if one wishes to resonate with
the prevailing culture. Gorz is merely one of the more vulnerable
examples of this ideological eclecticism. Perhaps more clearly
than most, he is the tombstone to an era when revolutionaries
took their ideas seriously; when they criticized their opponents
with ruthless logic; when they demanded clarity, coherence, and
insight. One may agree or disagree with the Marx who wrote *The Critique of the Gotha Program*; but one cannot help but admire
his stunning and unrelenting powers of critique, his willfull
demand for consistency, and his meticulous demand for coherence. With Gorz we enter an entirely different era: one where the
State legislates anarchy into existence, where Marx must endure
the company of Malthus, where centralized production co-exists
with decentralized communes, where workers’ control is exercised under a planned from above economy, and where not only
the State but the market “withers away.” Neither Marx nor
Bakunin, Engels nor Kropotkin, Lenin nor Malatesta are permitted to speak in their own voices. Gorz tunes them in, out, or
up as his journalistic needs require, like a television technician toying with his monitoring panel. Accordingly, fashion
becomes a substitute for theory and the latest gimmick a
substitute for serious practice.

Books like *Ecology as Politics* are not merely a problem but a
challenge. Will ideas become matters of serious concern or mere
topics for radical chit-chat? Will revolution be the lived experience that literally provides the substance of life or entertaining and expendable episodes? Will movements be guided by
coherent ideas or dissolve into tasteless spectacles? To claim
that these questions can be answered today would be mere
pretension. But if truth should always be its own end, then the
answer too should be clear enough. In any case, it will not be
found in radical comic books that have been prepared by
ideological cartoonists.

<right>
September 1980
</right>


** Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to Dimitri Rousso-
poulos and Lucia Kowaluk for the contribution they have made to
the preparation and publication of this book. My deep personal
friendship and high regard for both of these splendid people
should not colour their many years of effort they have given to our
shared libertarian ideals. Their own gifts aside, their’s is a virtue
and dedication of nearly two decades of day-to-day work, of
moral probity, and reliability that quietly and unobtrusively turn
dreams into reality amidst the clamour and oratorical flourishes
of compatriots long gone. For this steadfastness, loyalty to our
common ideas, and depth of perception, I thank them earnestly
and warmly.

Apart from the “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” all the essays
in this book have appeared in the periodical literature — although
several very important ones are published for the first time in their
complete and unedited form. “Toward an Ecological Society”
first appeared in WIN, “The Open Letter to the Ecology
Movement” in Rain , the “Myth of City Planning” and “Spontaneity and Organization” in Liberation, “Toward a Vision of an
Urban Future” in *The Urban Affairs Annual Review*, Vol. 34
(Sage Publications), “The Concept of Ecotechnologies and
Ecocommunities in Habitat International (Pergamon Press)
“Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology” in Comment, and “Self-
Management and the New Technology” and an abridged version
of “On Neo-Marxism...” called “Beyond Neo-Marxism” in *Telos*
(including my review of Andre Groz’s book on ecology). To all of
these periodicals I would like to express my appreciation for
permission to republish the aforementioned works. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to Paul Piccone and Paul Breines for
their independence of mind in publishing some of my most
controversial articles on Marxism in the journal, *Telos*, that has
been associated with a neo-Marxian orientation.