Introduction

These essays are my final assessment of some 80 years of social reflections on the twentieth century. In a very real sense, they are the product of a lifetime of study and political work, distilled from a remarkable era of revolutionary history that spanned decades of social upheaval, from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the closing years of the twentieth century.

I make no pretense to claiming that these essays resolve any of the crises that beset the people who lived out the century. It would be remarkable indeed to know even how to properly define these crises, still less to be capable of solving them. I do not claim to be able to answer all of the questions we face, but they must be considered – hopefully as a basis for future and creative discourse. The questions we ask and the answers we give are socially and politically defining. Taken together, they actually form the battleground for the future of social life, and our responses are the basis for how we constitute ourselves as social beings.

I would like to suggest that these essays be seen as the political conclusions I have drawn from my historical and philosophical work in The Ecology of Freedom, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Re-Enchanting Humanity, From Urbanization to Cities and last but not in the least The Third Revolution. Throughout these works I have tried to meld together the most challenging historical ideals into a body of theory that generally went by the name “social ecology”. These ideas combine as strands in a common thread: a search to understand the place of humanity in the natural world and the social factors that must be present if we are to actualize our ability (as yet incomplete) to bring to bear, in all the affairs of “raw” or first nature, a “sophisticated” or second nature informed by reason. By combining the words “ecology” and “freedom” I tried to show that neither nature nor reason could be properly conceptualized independently of the other; that the natural world could not be given any meaning without the social world or the human mind, that is, without the ability to abstract experience and generalize facts into far-reaching insights.

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For most of human history, society, in effect, was familial, not civic; it was organized around blood ties (real or fictive), not legal tenets. Allocation of the means of life fulfilled necessities – especially rights and duties – among literal and figurative relatives in a nexus of shared, unquestioned responsibilities. Things were brought together in an indisputably “natural” manner, such that the “people” were unified – even more compellingly than by custom – by an inborn scheme of reality. They could not act otherwise, and their life-ways allowed for no discretion to follow any path other than what was given by the “eternal” nature of things.

The rise of organized communities – ultimately cities, civilization, and citizenship, as distinguished from habitats, customs, and folk – radically changed this state of affairs. Indeed, it marked the great rupture of Homo sapiens from merely a creative kind of animal into humans as such. The most powerful medium for achieving this radical new dispensation was a process of alienation called trade, a process that drastically remade the apprehension of reality from imagery into objectivity. The traditional world of imagination and analogical thinking gave way to a new world of systematic analysis and disciplined thought, engendered by commerce, efficient production, and careful calculation. Trade rewarded predictability based on objectivity, and knowledge based on reality, with power and wealth. To know meant to live in palpable touch with reality.

Knowledge ceased to be an end in itself; it became a tool, an instrument of control and manipulation. Yet ultimately it created a new world of thoughts and things, a new universe that redefined what it meant to be alive – generating an appetite for wealth, for competition, for growth for its own sake, for private ownership, and for power over men. What humans could imagine, they brought into existence. Even the transformation of human beings from earth-bound to flying creatures constituted a remarkable advance in the conversion of image into object – and no less significantly, it reduced a frightening mystery to a prosaic problem of engineering. Nuclear physics transformed vast, ineffable legends into problems of ordinary mathematics, no less unsolvable than the questions posed by Euclidean geometry.

But how was this even possible? The people who now grappled with the fantastic problems that had occupied human beings even several millennia earlier were, in fact, no longer the same people. Their outlook was no longer animistic, and they no longer lived in organic societies. Owing to their habitation in villages and cities, to their written literature and systematic modes of thought, to their careful retrospection and introspection, to their substitution of mythopeic fantasy with rational thought, they were becoming humanized, rationalized, and civilized – veritably a new species.

Social theory could not ignore the extent to which mythopoesis, fantasy, and unbridled subjectivity yielded to humanization, rationalization and civilization, and it did not do so. This new world, particularly its emergence, was most brilliantly elucidated in the economic works of Karl Marx and his disciples. Despite their historical limitations, they still stand as a monument to the power of thought to rise above fantasy.

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Bolstered by three massive volumes of closely reasoned economic analysis, considerable mathematical formulations, and highly persuasive historical data, Marxism emerged after World War One as the dominant ideology of the Western European radical intelligentsia and affected the thinking of great masses of literate working people. Despite many variations in Marxist tenets, Marx was seen as the man who provided the labor movement of the West with the basic ideas of socialism.

Treated like a new gospel, this “scientific” socialism was regarded as evidence, not of dogmatism, but of learning and of modern intellectual certainty. Marxist doctrine, in effect, was regarded as objective truth, which qualified its expositors to speak authoritatively on any subject as the peers of informed scientists, not only in economics but also in the life sciences and mathematics, not to speak of literature and ethics. In history, social development, and, needless to emphasize, with regard to current events, its acolytes persuasively claimed to enjoy a special knowledge of the course of events and their meaning. Owing to their adoption of Hegel’s notion of the “cunning of reason,” Marxists professed to understand the “hidden hand” of social development, as it were, looking beyond cultural, political, religious, mystical, and even artistic claims to the “underlying” class interests.

In the hands of Marxian acolytes like Georg Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky, who essentially substituted dialectics for mechanics, social theory became the deadening scientism of a new “social physics.” The interwar generation, the product of the mechanics of the class struggle, the dogma of social reductionism, and the hard-nosed idea of social dynamics rather than social dialectics, emerged as true class beings – Homo economicus. Marxism’s greatest claim to superiority over the so-called “utopian” socialists was its contention that it had prospectively established the hegemonic role of the proletariat over all other classes in achieving a socialist society. Of all classes, the proletariat, Marx expressly maintained, had nothing to sell but its abstract “labor power” (that is, its biological capacity to produce commodities in quantities beyond what was necessary for the satisfaction of its needs), and for that reason its historical destiny was to be driven to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with a planned, nationalized economy. This seminal, forcibly driven act made Marx’s work distinctive among theories of socialism.

But the greatest shortcoming of Marxism was its celebrated claim to finality. Capital asserted that capitalism appears as the dissection of the bourgeois economy in all its “wholeness,” encapsulated as a “science,” a notion that presupposes (like Quesnay’s Tableau Economique) a social stability that would have credibility only in the finitude or static perfection of Aristotle’s stars. Of course, nowhere in Being is such immobility possible, and no concept could be more nonsensical. Indeed, as the ancient Greeks emphasized, all that exists is development, elaboration, and increasing (but always incomplete) “fullness.” Thought and life are unending innovation. In a Being that is necessarily paradoxical, we strive not only for a “whole,” not only for a “totality” that is complete, but for one whose “final” contours always elude us.

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These essays, then, do not work from the notion that there can be an “end to history.” Defining history as having an ultimate end would dissolve it into a meaningless conundrum, bereft of experience and development. Yet the word history is one of the few that alternately denotes both completeness and dynamism. Within a given “stage” history has a completeness to itself, but in history as a “process” a given period “flows” into the next with no terminus, so to speak. We thus find ourselves faced with a conundrum, more like a Kantian syllogism that has to be accepted as a given, or what Hegel would call a contradiction.

Not only do the grand works of philosophy have intrinsic dual meanings, they also reflect significant institutional changes that societies have undergone with the passage of time, from eras of obeisance to kings and nobles to our own. Sweeping social changes in a surprisingly brief period of time have created a need for profoundly new social terms, indeed for a dictionary more inclusionary than we have today. Such a compilation of terms, or expansions in meaning of words in common use today, amounts to the formulation of a new system of ideas. As we educe one idea from the others, we can derive from every one the potentialities of less inclusive but profoundly meaningful offspring, with a variety of divergent developments.

From this perspective, history becomes an open prospect that suggests the potentiality for a multitude of radically new forms. I presented one of a number of courses that this approach to a social dialectic might take in my book The Ecology of Freedom; alternative courses were put forward by non-European societies, particularly in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is not an idle endeavor to try to imagine what a handicraft society, whose economy was deliberately mixed and small-scale in character, might have looked like – as a “rational” society – in contrast to the medieval world that actually preceded urban society in Western Europe. It is not accidental that William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which describes such a society, has attracted so many admirers in our own time as a “model” utopia, especially among libertarian socialists and syndicalists.

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What concerns us here, however, is the ossification of these libertarian and organic traditions during the period that spanned the two world wars. The “Great War” was fought largely by means of brutal trench warfare; backing out of that slaughter, the world entered the “Roaring Twenties,” then the “Great Depression” and the tumultuous 1930s, with socialist insurrections, the fascist coups of Mussolini and Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and Stalin’s massive purges. The period that thus closed with the genocidal World War Two cannot be mechanically locked into a historical box. The years from 1914 to 1950 constitute one of the most eventful periods of true history, wherein people’s actions surmount the quantitative stuff from which mere calendars are made.

The Euro-American generation of young radicals that emerged after World War One and that tried to resolve the revolutionary era of the interwar era was perhaps the most perplexing in modern history. It was certainly the most embattled and, ideologically, the most insurrectionary toward the deeply entrenched exploitative social order, notably capitalism.

After World War Two astonishing technological changes, soaring production figures, major advances in the living standards of Western workers, and broadly rightward shifts in popular political sentiments all made it evident that capitalism had more life remaining to it than the Bolsheviks and the anarcho-syndicalists had foreseen decades earlier. After the short-lived New Left of the 1960s, revolutionary movements waned steadily in numbers and purpose, while erstwhile radical social theorists immersed themselves in academic esoterica such as the peregrinations of the various Frankfurt School theorists, of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, and finally in postmodernism, the expression par excellence of the “virtues” of ideological disorder and social nihilism.

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As someone who lived out this era, I was variously regarded – or regarded myself – as a communist (including one who adhered to successive views held by Trotsky), a libertarian socialist, and in a rather spotty fashion, an anarchist. In the 1970s and 1980s I expressed my ideas forcefully in a rather romantic anarchist framework. Later, however, I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile anarchism with my basic views. In the 1990s it was gradually becoming clear to me that an ideology that does little more than hail the “autonomy of the ego,” and that conceives of “liberty” in extremely individualistic terms, can never produce basic social change. A lifestyle rather than an ideology, anarchism, I came to realize, is concerned more with individual behavior than with political change and allows little room for a creative political practice.

My own experiences in the labor movement (as a foundryman and later as an autoworker) in the 1930s and 1940s had long ago convinced me that making basic and lasting change requires organization (as the IWW martyr Joe Hill voiced just before his execution). But most of the anarchists I encountered resisted organization, sometimes vehemently. And when I tried to properly define politics (as the directly democratic organization of the free municipality by popular assemblies) as the very opposite of statecraft (rule by professional bureaucrats, ultimately through a monopoly of the means of violence), my once-close anarchist associates assailed me as “statist.” Democracy, they asserted, is itself a form of “rule,” by the majority over the minority. A preposterous rejection of majority voting in favor of consensus decision-making played a major role in ruining the huge American anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s and potentially makes any movement organization and institution (beyond a small group) dysfunctional. In the end I found that I had either to close my eyes to the compelling need for organization in praxis, and for democratic institutions in public affairs in a future libertarian society, or else completely recast my views. I chose to do the latter.

Reflecting as they do my most recent and, having passed the age of 80, my most mature ideas, these essays try to explain why social ecology can no longer be seen as a mere extension of traditional radical ideologies, either Marxist or anarchist. It is now my conviction that the ensemble of views that I call social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and dialectical naturalism should properly form the basis for a new libertarian ideology and politics – communalism – that takes full account of the sweeping changes that have occurred in capitalism since the failure of proletarian socialism in the second half of the twentieth century and that suggests the new methods that are needed to transform a market-based society into a truly libertarian socialist one.

The reader alone will decide whether these essays are correct or erroneous and whether my expectations for communalism are sound or fanciful, but their most essential purpose is to create a new departure from ideologies that were inspired by the problems of the Industrial Revolution of two centuries ago, a departure that takes full account of changing class relations and hierarchical forms, of demographical transformations and ecological dislocations, and of urbanization, to cite the most important factors. Few of these issues had an important place in the writings of Marx, Bakunin, and their successors. Without ignoring the vital contributions that the ablest Marxists and left libertarians have made to social theory, I would ask the reader to recognize the centrality of these more recent issues in the essays that follow.

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Only time will tell how capitalism will undermine itself, as Marx long ago expected it would, and to what degree the public – middle class and working class alike – will acquire those mutualistic impulses that the followers of Kropotkin impute to human nature. It will not be my privilege to see in my lifetime the achievement of a rational, ecological, and humanistic society in which people will finally be natural and social evolution rendered self-conscious – the great hope of Western philosophy and social progress for two thousand years. What I hold to, and what I try to impart through these essays, is my belief that the noblest role conscious human beings can play today is not only to seek the emancipation of people from the irrationalities of capitalist and hierarchical society but also to defend the Enlightenment and its message of reason in public affairs against the dark forces of irrationality, nihilism, and ultimately barbarism that stand at the gates of civilization. My own generation fought off Nazism and superstition with some success. The present and coming generations must have as their task to oppose the “dumbing down” of the human mind, its growing trivialization and juvenilization, and its appalling ignorance even of the recent past. They must oppose the new gospel of self-absorption at the expense of public affairs. They may have once again to deal with ghosts of the past – fascism and Stalinism – as well. In the meantime, we still have time to build a coherent theoretical framework for our practice and to prepare for the “final conflict” that may yet come at some point in the present century.

Murray Bookchin
Burlington, Vermont
November, 2005