Chapter 5: Murray Bookchin, Municipal Statist

There is no putting off the inevitable any longer. It has to be said: Dean Bookchin is not an anarchist. By this I do not mean that he is not my kind of anarchist, although that too is true. I mean he is not any kind of anarchist. The word means something, after all, and what it means is denial of the necessity and desirability of government. That’s a bare- bones, pre-adjectival definition anterior to any squabbling about individualist, collectivist, communist, mutualist, social, lifestyle, ecological, mystical, rational, primitivist, Watsonian, ontological, etc. anarchisms. An anarchist as such is opposed to government — full stop. Dean Bookchin is not opposed to government. Consequently, he is not an anarchist.

What! “The foremost contemporary anarchist theorist” (Clark 1990: 102) is not an anarchist? You heard me. He’s not — really and truly, he’s not. And not because he flunks some abstruse ideological test of my own concoction. He’s not an anarchist because he believes in government. An anarchist can believe in many things, and all too often does, but government is not one of them.

There’s nothing heinous about not being an anarchist. Some of my best friends are not anarchists. They do not, however, claim to be anarchists, as the Dean does.

I could take some cheap shots at the Dean — come to think of it, I think I will! How many of his Red-and-Green disciples know that he was formerly in favor of a modest measure of nuclear power? Solar, wind, and tidal power should be exploited to the max, but “it would be impossible to establish an advanced industrial economy based exclusively on solar energy, wind power, or even tidal power” (Herber 1965: 193), and we must have an advanced industrial economy, that goes without saying. So, though we shouldn’t “overcommit ourselves to the use of nuclear fuels,” the clean energy sources will not suffice: “These gaps will be filled by nuclear and fossil fuels, but we will employ them judiciously, always taking care to limit their use as much as possible” (ibid.). That’s a comfort.

And it would be scurrilous of me to report that this same Bookchin book (Herber 1965: ix) includes — this must be an anarchist first — a plug from a Cabinet member, then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall: “Crisis in Our Cities sets forth in one volume vivid evidence that the most debilitating diseases of our time are a result of our persistent and arrogant abuse of our shared environment.... We cannot minimize the investments necessary to pollution control, but as Mr. Herber [Bookchin] documents, the penalties for not doing so have become unthinkable.” This is, be it noted, a call for legislation and taxation which a closet anarchist allowed to adorn one of his books. There’s also an afterword from the Surgeon General of the United States.

As embarrassing to the Dean as these reminders must be, they are not conclusive against him. It is his own explicit endorsements of the state which are decisive. Not, to be sure, the nation-state of modern European provenance. He doesn’t like that sort of state very much. It allows for too much individual autonomy. But he is enamored of the city-state of classical antiquity and the occasionally, semi-self- governing “commune” of pre-industrial western Europe. In this he is reminiscent of Kropotkin, who propounded the absurd opinion that the state did not exist in western Europe prior to the sixteenth century (cf. Bookchin 1987: 33–34). That would have surprised and amused William the Conqueror and his successors, not to mention the French and Spanish monarchs and the Italian city-states familiar to Machiavelli — whose Il Principe was clearly not directed to a mandated and revocable delegate responsible to the base, but rather to a man on horseback, somebody like Caesare Borgia.

Although it is the most unremarkable of observations, the Dean carries on as if he’s genuinely incensed that John Zerzan, reviewing his The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987), pointed out that the romanticized classical Athenian polis has “long been Bookchin’s model for a revitalization of urban politics,” a “canard” to which the Dean indignantly retorts, “In fact, I took great pains to indicate the failings of the Athenian polis (slavery, patriarchy, class antagonisms, and war)” (59). He may have felt great pains at getting caught, but he took very few. The Dean made, “in fact,” all of two references — not even to slavery as a mode of production, as a social reality, but to attitudes toward slavery (1987: 83, 87), as if the fact that classical cities had mostly subject populations (Dahl 1990: 1) was the accidental result of some collective psychic quirk, some strange thousand-year head-trip. What Zerzan said is only what one of the Dean’s admirers put in stronger terms: “Bookchin continually exhorts us to hearken back to the Greeks, seeking to recapture the promise of classical thought and to comprehend the truth of the Polis” (Clark 1982: 52; Clark 1984: 202–203).

Every historian knows that large-scale slavery was a necessity for the classical city (Finley 1959), although the Dean has issued the fiat that “the image of Athens as a slave economy which built its civilization and generous humanistic outlook on the backs of human chattels is false” (1972: 159). (M.I. Finley — like the Dean, an ex-Communist [Novick 1988: 328] — is a Bookchin-approved historian [1989: 178].) Some of what Zerzan writes about paleolithic society may be conjectural and criticizable, but what he writes about Bookchin is pure reportage. The Dean plainly says that “later ideals of citizenship, even insofar as they were modeled on the Athenian, seem more unfinished and immature than the original — hence the very considerable discussion I have given to the Athenian citizen and his context” (1987: 83). That is perhaps because the even more unfinished and immature realizations of “later ideals” lacked the combination of the immense slave infrastructure and the tributary empire possessed by classical Athens. Similar peans to Athenian citizenship pepper the Dean’s early books too (1972: 155–159; 1974: ch. 1). Manifestly what’s put a bee in Bookchin’s beret is that Zerzan has had the temerity to read Bookchin’s books, not just revere their distinguished author, and Zerzan has actually kept track of what the Dean’s been reiterating all these years. The down side of being “arguably the most prolific anarchist writer” (Ehrlich 1996: 384) is that you leave a long paper trail.

Bookchin is a statist: a city-statist. A city-state is not an anti-state. Contemporary Singapore, for instance, is a highly authoritarian city-state. The earliest states, in Sumer, were city-states. The city is where the state originated. The ancient Greek cities were all states, most of them not even democratic states in even the limited Athenian sense of the word. Rome went from being a city-state to an empire without ever being a nation-state. The city-states of Renaissance Italy were states, and only a few of them, and not for long, were in any sense democracies. Indeed republican Venice, whose independence lasted the longest, startlingly anticipated the modern police-state (Andrieux 1972: 45–55).

Taking a worldwide comparative-historical perspective, the pre-industrial city, unless it was the capital of an empire or a nation-state (in which case it was directly subject to a resident monarch) was always subject to an oligarchy. There has never been a city which was not, or which was not part of, a state. And there has never been a state which was not a city or else didn’t incorporate one or more cities. The pre-industrial city (what Gideon Sjoberg calls — a poor choice of words — the “feudal city”) was the antithesis of democracy, not to mention anarchy:

Central to the stratification system that pervades all aspects of the feudal city’s social structure — the family, the economy, religion, education, and so on — is the preeminence of the political organization.... We reiterate: the feudal, or preindustrial civilized, order is dominated by a small, privileged upper stratum. The latter commands the key institutions of the society. Its higher echelons are most often located in the capital, the lower ranks residing in the smaller cities, usually the provincial capitals (Sjoberg 1960: 220).

Sjoberg anticipated the objection, “What about Athens?” He wrote, “although the Greek city was unique for its time, in its political structure it actually approximates the typical preindustrial city far more than it does the industrial-urban order” (ibid.: 236). Only a small minority of Athenians were citizens, and many of them were illiterate and/or too poor to be able to participate effectively, if at all, in politics (ibid.: 235). Then and there, as always in cities everywhere, politics was an elite prerogative. The “latent” democracy of any and every urban republic (59) is something only Bookchin can see, just as only Wilhelm Reich could see orgones under the microscope.

The distinction the Dean tries to draw between “politics” mid “statecraft” (1987: 243 & passim) is absurd and self-serving, not to mention that it’s a major mutilation of ordinary English. Even if local politics is a kinder, gentler version of national politics, it is still politics, which has been well if cynically defined as who gets what, when, where, how (Lasswell 1958).

It’s not just that the Dean uses an idiosyncratic terminology to reconcile (in a ramshackle sort of a way) anarchy with democracy, he’s more apoplectic than anybody could have ever thought otherwise:

Even democratic decision-making is jettisoned as authoritarian. “Democratic rule is still rule,” [L. Susan] Brown warns.... Opponents of democracy as “rule” to the contrary notwithstanding, it describes the democratic dimension of anarchism as a majoritarian administration of the public sphere. Accordingly, Communalism seeks freedom rather than autonomy in the sense that I have counterpoised them (17, 57).

Moving along from his mind-boggling deduction that democracy is democratic, Bookchin further fusses that “pejorative words like dictate and rule properly refer to the silencing of dissenters, not to the exercise of democracy” (18). Free speech is a fine thing, but it’s not democracy. You can have one without the other. The Athenian democracy that the Dean venerates, for instance, democratically silenced the dissenter Socrates by putting him to death.

Anarchists “jettison” democratic decision-making, not because it’s authoritarian, but because it’s statist. “Democracy” means “rule by the people.” “Anarchy” means “no rule.” There are two different words because they refer to (at least) two different things.

I don’t claim — and to make my point, I don’t have to claim — that the Dean’s characterization of anarchism as generalized direct democracy has no basis whatsoever in traditional anarchist thought. The anarchism of some of the more conservative classical anarchists is indeed along these lines — although Bookchin’s version, right down to such details as its philhellenism, is instead an unacknowledged appropriation from the avowedly anti-anarchist Hannah Arendt (1958). Ironically, it is the anarchists Bookchin disparages as individualists — like Proudhon and Goodman — who best represent this anarchist theme. It was the individualist egoist Benjamin Tucker who defined an anarchist as an “unterrified Jeffersonian democrat.” But another theme with as least as respectable an anarchist pedigree holds that democracy is not an imperfect realization of anarchy but rather statism’s last stand. Many anarchists believe, and many anarchists have always believed, that democracy is not just a grossly deficient version of anarchy, it’s not anarchy at all. At any rate, no “direct face-to-face democracy” (57) that I am aware of has delegated to comrade Bookchin (mandated, revocable, and responsible to the base) the authority to pass or fail anarchists which he enjoys to pass or fail college students.

It is by no means obvious, and the Dean nowhere demonstrates, that local is kinder and gentler — not where local refers to local government. It is equally as plausible that, as James Madison argued, a large and heterogeneous polity is more favorable to liberty than the “small republic,” as then local minorities can find national allies to counteract local majoritarian tyranny (Cooke 1961: 351–353). But after all, as he says himself, the Dean isn’t interested in liberty (in his jargon, autonomy [57],) but only in what he calls social freedom, the participatory, self-ratified servitude of indoctrinated moralists to the petite polity in which they function as self-effacing citizen-units.

My present purpose is not to take the full measure of Bookchinism, only to characterize it as what it manifestly is, as an ideology of government — democracy — not a theory of anarchy. Bookchin’s “minimal agenda” — this hoary Marxist word “minimal” is his, not mine (1987: 287) — is unambiguously statist, not anarchist. The “fourfold tenets,” the Four Commandments he requires all anarchists to affirm, although most of them do not, and never did, are:

...a confederation of decentralized municipalities; an unwavering opposition to statism; a belief in direct democracy; and a vision of a libertarian communist society (60).

By some quirk of fate, Bookchin’s minimal, believe-it-or-else anarchist creed just happens to be his creed. It also happens to be deliriously incoherent. A “confederation of decentralized municipalities” contradicts “direct democracy,” as a confederation is at best a representative, not a direct, democracy. It also contradicts “an unwavering opposition to statism” because a city-state or a federal state is still a state. And by requiring, not “a libertarian communist society,” only the vision of one, the Dean clearly implies that there is more to such a society than obedience to the first Three Commandments — but exactly what more, he isn’t saying. The Dean is relegating higher-stage anarchy (the real thing) to some remote future time, just as the Marxists relegate what they call higher-stage communism to some hazy distant future which seems, like a mirage, forever to recede.

Amazingly, the Dean considers a city like New York (!) to be “largely made up of neighborhoods — that is to say, largely organic communities that have a certain measure of identity” (1987: 246). (He has elsewhere and inconsistently written that the modern world “lacks real cities” [Bookchin 1974: viii].) But community “obviously means more than, say, neighborhood” (Zerzan 1994: 157) — more than mere propinquity. And obviously Bookchin’s been away from his hometown for an awfully long time, especially if civility and civic virtue play any part in his conception of an organic community. I wouldn’t recommend he take a midnight stroll in some of these “organic communities” if he values his own organism. If the criterion of an organic community is “a certain measure of identity,” many wealthy all-white suburbs qualify, although Bookchin blames them for the central city’s problems (1974: 73–74). Jealously territorial and violent youth gangs are the most conspicuous manifestations of community in many impoverished and otherwise atomized New York neighborhoods, his “colorful ethnic neighborhoods” (1974: 72) of childhood memory. If racial-caste and social-class residential segregation is the Dean’s idea of what defines organic communities, then organic communities certainly exist in New York City, but not many people who live in them, except the very rich, are very happy about it.

While the word “anarchism” appears on almost every page of the Dean’s diatribe, the word “anarchy” rarely if ever does. The ideology, the ism, is what preoccupies him, not the social condition, the way of life, it’s presumably supposed to guide us toward. It may not be an inadvertent choice of words that what Bookchin lays down, as one of his Four Commandments of orthodox anarchism, is “an unwavering opposition to statism” (60: emphasis added), not an unwavering opposition to the state. As a democrat, the Dean is at best capable of only a wavering opposition to the state, whereas an abstract rejection of an abstraction, “statism,” is easy enough to issue. And I’m sure it’s no accident that his shot at the mainstream marketing of Bookchinism (Bookchin 1987a) nowhere identifies the Dean as an anarchist or his teachings as any kind of anarchism.

A further Bookchinist fiddle — this one a blatant regression to Marxism (indeed, to St.-Simonianism) — is the distinction between “policy” and “administration” (ibid.: 247–248). Policy is made, he says, by the occasional face-to-face assembly which pushy intellectuals like Bookchin are so good at manipulating. Administration is for the experts, as in higher-stage Marxist Communism, where the “government of men” is ostensibly replaced by the “administration of things.” Unfortunately it is men (and it usually still is men) who govern by administering things, and by administering people as if they were things, as governors have always governed. Policy without administration is nothing. Administration with or without policy is everything. Stalin the General Secretary, the administrator, understood that, which is why he triumphed over Trotsky, Bukharin and all the other policy-preoccupied politicians who perhaps possibly believed in something. “Policy” is a euphemism for law, and “administration” is a euphemism for enforcement.

Just what political practice does the eximious elder prescribe to anarchists? We know how higher-stage confederal municipalism looks — muscular mentating men massed in meetings — but what is to be done in the here and now? The Dean despises existing anarchist efforts:

The sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and the intuitive supplant the consistent, purposive, organized, and rational, indeed any form of sustained or focused activity apart from publishing a “zine” or pamphlet — or burning a garbage can (51).

So we are not to publish zines and pamphlets as Bookchin used to do, nor are we to burn garbage cans. Nor are we to experience freedom in the temporary collective fraternizations Hakim Bey calls Temporary Autonomous Zones (20–26). We’re supposed to get organized, but Bookchin has not indicated, not even by example, what organization we’re supposed to join. What then? I

On this point the Dean, usually so verbose, is allusive and elusive. I have been unable to locate in any of his writings any formulation of the “programmatic as well as activist social movement” he now demands (60). What I think he is hinting at, with nods and winks, is participation in local electoral politics:

The municipality is a potential time bomb. To create local networks and try to transform local institutions that replicate the State [emphasis added] is to pick up a historic challenge — a truly political one — that has existed for centuries.... For in these municipal institutions and the changes that we can make in their structure — turning them more and more into a new public sphere — lies the abiding institutional basis for a grassroots dual power, a grassroots concept of citizenship, and municipalized economic systems that can be counterpoised to the growing power of the centralized Nation-State and centralized economic corporations (Bookchin 1990: 12).

When the Dean speaks of transforming existing local institutions, when he speaks of “the changes we can make in their structure,” he can only be referring to participation in local politics as it is actually conducted in the United States and Canada — by getting elected or by getting appointed by those who’ve gotten themselves elected. That is exactly what the world’s only Bookchinist political movement, Black Rose boss Dimitri Roussopoulos’ Ecologie Montreal groupuscule (Anonymous 1996:22) has attempted, and, fortunately, failed at. You can call this anything you want to — except anarchist.

To sum up: Dean Bookchin is a statist.