Chapter 13. The Communalist Hallucination

The ex-Director’s emphatically prioritizing the social over the individual does not apply when he is the individual. When it comes to English usage, he is, in the rugged individualist tradition of Thoreau, a majority of one.[751] Bookchin expresses his sovereignty in many ways. Redundancy makes for a vigorous, emphatic style: thus, “airless vacuum,” “fly apart in opposite directions,” “etymological roots,” “presumably on the assumption,” “determining cause,” “arduous toil,” “unique, indeed unprecedented,” “domination and rule,” “mechanical robots,” and “direct face-to-face.” Superfluous tics like “as such” and “in effect” add style if not substance. Like raising one’s voice, italics promote understanding. Bookchin is at liberty to reverse a word’s meaning, such as using “explicitly” to mean “implicitly,” as where the right to bear arms “explicitly goes far beyond the reticent wording of the Second Amendment.”[752] (One wishes he were explicit, in his sense, more often.) The Director Emeritus denounces metaphors except when they are mixed, like his: “to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps from the rich wealth of historical facts,” as his often are.

In a departure from normative punctuation practice, the Director Emeritus does not confine quotation marks to quotations, he more often employs them to indicate disagreement or disapproval, as his reviewer Karen Field does when she refers to “Murray Bookchin, ‘social ecologist.’” Bookchin freely coins words even though corresponding terms are available in standard English: “precivilizatory,” “utopistic,” “evidentiality,” “civicism,” “respiritization,” “decentralistic,” “matricentricity,” “existentiality,” “spiritized,” “folkdom,” “equivocable,” “antiscientism,” “civically,” “mentalizing,” “progressivistic,” “bureaucratism,” “cyclicity,” “sectoriality,” “clannic,” “entelechial,” and “statified” (he complains of having had to coin this final word, so he must think the rest of them really exist).[753] Sometimes, wrestling with Bookchin’s muscular prose, I thought I was reading English as a second language. It turns out that I was.[754]

Most important — yea, essential — to the ex-Director’s discourse is the redefinition of key words like “state,” “politics,” and “anarchism,” assigning them meanings not only different from but contrary to their use in ordinary language and in standard anarchist usage. Given these inversions, it follows that Bookchin and his libertarian municipalism are anarchist by definition (until yesterday), and his critics are unimaginative, obtuse contrarians.

The dictionary bedevils the Director Emeritus at every turn. Polis, he grumbles, “is commonly mistranslated as the ‘city-state,’” and so it is.[755] This is a particularly egregious failing: “Defined in terms of its etymological roots [as opposed to its etymological branches?], politics means the management of the community or polis by its members, the citizens. Politics also meant the recognition of civic rights for strangers or ‘outsiders’ who were not linked to the population by blood ties. That is, it meant the idea of a universal humanitas, as distinguished from the genealogically related ‘folk.’”[756] Who would have thought one word could mean so much? Not the ancient Greeks. There’s a whole civics lesson in this one word.

Etymologically — in other words, for the Greeks themselves — “polis” meant “city”: “In normal usage, polis meant ‘city-state.’”[757] The Director Emeritus speaks Greek better than the Greeks, just as he speaks English better than the Anglo-Americans. By definition — his definition — the polis is a democracy, although most Greek city-states were oligarchies.[758] Where Bookchin draws a crucial distinction between “politics” and “statecraft,” the dictionary defines them to be synonymous.[759] Even the dictionary definition of “communalism,” which, he says, is not as defective as some others, is riddled with errors: “a theory and system of government [sic — his sic, not mine] in which virtually autonomous [sic — him again] local communities are loosely in a federation.”[760] For the Director Emeritus, there is something sic about the dictionary defining words as what they contingently, superficially mean and not what they essentially, processually mean.

For Hobbes, “in wrong, or no Definitions, lyes the first abuse [of Speech]: from which proceed all false and senslesse Tenets.”[761] The ex-Director’s reliance on a private language discourages disputation, since the critic has to fight to recover his vocabulary before he can even begin to argue. But the mysterious terminology also has a direct repressive effect. Posing the political alternatives as “politics” and “statecraft,” Bookchin forecloses an alternative which rejects both because of what they have in common. Prior to Bookchin, that alternative was known as anarchism. If he has his way, it will lose its name — he will expropriate it — and what cannot be named cannot even be spoken of, as he appreciates: “something that cannot be named is something that is ineffable and cannot be discussed.”[762] For the ex-Director, “lifestyle anarchism” is literally unspeakable in every way.

Like a sovereign lifestyle Stirnerist, Bookchin wields a power Roman Emperors refused, according to John Locke: “And therefore the great Augustus himself in the possession of that Power which ruled the World, acknowledged, he could not make a new Latin Word: which was as much to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint, what Idea any Sound should be a sign of, in the Mouths and Common Language of his Subjects.”[763] The anarchists were not the first beneficiaries of the ex-Director’s creativity: “‘Ecological’ is a term of distinction for Bookchin, one that applies only to approaches congruent with his own ‘social ecology.’”[764] We must perforce review Bookchin’s vocabulary. In 1982, in some moods he despaired of rehabilitating so ruined a word as “freedom”: “Thus, “to merely ‘define’ so maimed and tortured a word would be utterly naive.”[765] (Why the quotation marks?)

In this desperate hour, he throws caution to the winds. “Autonomy” and “freedom” are not, he insists, synonymous, although the dictionary says they are.[766] Autonomy is (only) individual, and bad; freedom is (only) social, and good, “despite looser usages.”[767] Here is a clear example of elimination by definition. As we have seen (Chapter 3),[768] Sir Isaiah Berlin analyzed, not freedom vs. autonomy, but “two concepts of liberty,” positive freedom (Bookchin’s “freedom”) vs. negative freedom (Bookchin’s “autonomy”). He too had a definite preference — for negative freedom — but he did not try to expropriate and monopolize the word freedom. He refined the ordinary meaning, he did not replace it. Nothing is lost. In contrast, Bookchin covets the word for its favorable connotation, which he would deny to dissenters from his new orthodoxy. He has narrowed its meaning to suit his program. If there are one or two concepts of freedom, there might be a third, or maybe two other ones,[769] and they might all be valued and conceivably even synthesized. But autonomy and freedom, since they are not synonymous, must refer to two different things, neither of which admits of subdivision (a single meaning is indivisible). What is more, they are exhaustive by definition, and between them stretches an unbridgeable chasm.

“Democracy” is an even more straightforward case of elimination by definition, and the departure from normal usage is still more extreme: “By democracy, I do not mean a type of representative government but rather face-to-face, direct democracy.”[770] Of the two types of democracy — direct and representative — Bookchin denies the definition to the only kind that presently exists, the kind to which the word, sans adjective, always refers in common parlance.[771] First he assigns to the word an unfamiliar (but admissible) meaning, then he denies the word its familiar meaning. The gambit is something like what Imer Lakatos charged Rudolph Carnap with doing: “So Carnap first widens the classical problem of inductive justification and then omits the original part.” But “it has no meaning to say that a game has always been played wrong” (Wittgenstein).[772] As Jeremy Bentham exclaimed, “How childish, how repugnant to the ends of language, is this perversion of language! — to attempt to confine a word in common and perpetual use, to an import to which nobody ever confined it before, or will continue to confine it!” As Wittenstein says, “it is shocking to use words with a meaning they never have in normal life and is the source of some confusion.”[773] No kidding.

The dictionary defines “politics” in several ways. All include the state explicitly or implicitly, except for a clearly analogous and derivative sense in which there can be office politics, etc.[774] In the case of this crucial word, the Director Emeritus dismisses the ordinary meaning. His definition “reserves the word politics for the self-administration of a community by its citizens in face-to-face assemblies, which in cities with relatively large populations would coordinate the administrative work of the city councils, composed of mandated and recallable assembly deputies.” In short, “politics” means Bookchin’s politics. The antithesis of politics is “statecraft, the top-down system of professional representation that is ultimately based on the state’s monopoly of violence.”[775] For the Director Emeritus, politics is what it is not, and it is not what it is. George Orwell anticipated Bookchin’s method: “[Newspeak’s] vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.”[776]

As for whether Communalism is anarchism or not, anarchism by definition seeks the abolition of the state. Definitions of the state vary, but one widely favored by social scientists, historians and (I had supposed) anarchists goes something like this (from Charles Tilly): “Let us define states as coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories.”[777] In the near-absence of any statement by Bookchin on this vital matter, we have to resolve it indirectly, by examining cities he considers communes to see if they are states. We need also examine whether they are Communes, i.e., whether they are — ruled? managed? or whatever you call that thing they do — by a face-to-face citizen assembly. We have to assume that the Director Emeritus in selecting examples is putting forward the clearest cases of Communal politics.

Above all there is Athens. Despite his show of indignation that anyone should claim that he regards Athens as an ideal or a model,[778] that’s exactly what Bookchin has said that it is: “My concern with the way people commune — that is, actively associate with each other, not merely form communities — is an ethical concern of the highest priority in this work... To a great extent, this is the Greek, more precisely, the Athenian, ideal of civicism [sic], citizenship, and politics, an ideal that has surfaced repeatedly throughout history.”[779] Again: “Athens and Rome ultimately became legendary models for two types of ‘popular’ government: a democracy and a republic.” (Actually, these words have always meant the same thing.[780])

Athens must be our primary focus because it is the model for all later self-governing cities, the first and the most fully realized: “In contrast, later ideals of citizenship, even insofar as they were modeled on the Athenians, seem more unfinished and immature than the original — hence the very considerable discussion I have given to the Athenian citizen and his context.” The declension is surprising since, as Aristotle says, “most ancient things are less fully articulated than modern things.” It suits me fine to regard Athens, as others including Robert A. Dahl regard it, as the closest as well as the best-known approximation to direct democracy.[781] We shall judge Athens in the next chapter. First we consider the more unfinished, immature examples. In the absence of any systematic definition from the Director Emeritus, I shall use the following as requisites for a full-fledged urban Commune: (1) most or all policy-making power belongs to a citizen assembly which (2) meets face-to-face and (3) frequently. (4) There are few if any elected or appointed officials and they are without independent authority and answer to the assembly. (5) At least a substantial minority of adult males is enfranchised and (6) at least a substantial minority of those eligible to attend the assembly actually do. (7) The military consists of a nonprofessional citizen army or militia. (8) The city or town is federated with others. (If it were up to me, I would not incorporate (8) into the definition of a commune, but it’s a part of the dictionary definition which meets with the ex-Director’s approval.)

In parts of Switzerland, open-air popular assemblies have functioned for centuries, but there is nothing in the contemporary situation to support the Director Emeritus. Only a few of the smaller cantons, the least urbanized ones, still practice assembly democracy, where the citizens assemble just once a year to elect representatives to public office, which is not direct democracy.[782] Bookchin’s source, Benjamin Barber, hymns the early modern assembly in Graubinden but does not describe its workings. It would not be an example of Bookchin’s urban Commune anyway because it is not urban, although Bookchin himself seems confused on this point.[783] (If the ex-Director knew that the urban Swiss cantons were all centralized oligarchies,[784] the irony would be lost on him. He thinks they were Communes.[785]) These rural Landsgemeinden only assembled annually.[786] And when they did, it was to elect a council to conduct everyday business. They were representative democracies with public voting, not direct democracies.[787] Bookchin gratefully quotes Alexis de Tocqueville’s encomium on the New England town meeting. He ignores the same author’s statement that from an early time the Swiss cantons were small aristocracies, closed or self-recruiting, and in most of them, three-quarters of the population was excluded from even indirect participation, not to mention that each canton had a subject population. Only one-thirteenth of the population was governed by direct democracy.[788] So much for Communes in Switzerland.

Spanish cities are best known to history for the revolt, in 1520–1521, of the comuneros, thrillingly recounted by the Director Emeritus, albeit without source references.[789] We are presumably to assume that the insurgent cities were democratic. They were not. They revolted out of resentment of foreign influence over the new king, Charles V, and against taxation, and perhaps for greater autonomy from the state, but not to defend or create democratic institutions. It was “members of the urban oligarchies and lower nobility in Castile [who] rose up in arms in what is known as the Comunero movement (from community or communal).” In the more radical València uprising, the violence was directed against “city officials and local nobility”; thus it is reasonable to assume the absence of sovereign popular assemblies. Contrary to Bookchin, “the cities never tried to create a form of political organization that could have been a Castilian version of the urban republics.”[790]

A monograph on the revolt by Stephen Haliczer dispells the myth — not that there even is one outside of Bookchin’s head — of an urban democratic revolution. Prior to the uprising, Spanish cities were governed by royally appointed corregidores who presided over city councils of regidores, who were royal appointees for life. The uprising was as much a revolt by as against these officials. In València, for example, the ruling revolutionary Junta was “dominated by the members of the city council and by delegates from the cathedral chapter and parishes.” Only the parish delegates, a minority, were elected democratically by assemblies.

Where the Comunero movement departs most drastically from the model is at the level few of the ex-Director’s other examples even get to, the federated communes or, we might say, the Junta of Juntas, or, officially, the Cortes. In some cities this Junta appointed corregidores and judges as the Crown had done. It also demanded payment, to it, of the very royal taxes which were a major cause of the revolution. The Junta reached all the way down to the parishes, appointing several members to be responsible for collections. At the death of the archbishop of Toledo, it forced the canons to elect its nominee as successor. Dissatisfied with the performance of the local militias (another Bookchin favorite) — which looted villages regardless which side they were on — the Junta raised a standing army recruited from former royal guards.[791] In its internal arrangements, the Cortes was as anti-federal as in its tax policies: “In order to provide for efficient decision-making, the Junta operated by majority vote and took policy decisions on the spot, without waiting for delegates to ask their cities for further instructions.”[792] Only in its final failing phase did radicals displace former council members and hidalgos (minor nobility) and take power in a few of the local Juntas, and by then the movement had lost so much popular support that these transient takeovers cannot be considered democratic.

Otherwise, I found only scattered scraps of information on the governance of Spanish cities, but all conform to the standard model of pre-industrial urban oligarchy, its composition varying somewhat at different times and places. In the 13^th century the monarchy sanctioned the regimiento, an oligarchy of the urban gentry.[793] By the end of the 12^th century, non-noble “knights” controlled urban government; in the 15^th centuries the rics homens ciutans, “rich citizens,” a small number of very rich men, controlled city government.[794] In medieval Aragon, including Catalonia, municipal government was in the hands of patricians (“honored citizens”), jurats elected by the citizens or, in some cases, choosing their own successors (cooptation). They were expected to consult the general assembly of townsmen on important matters.[795] In Barcelona specifically, government was by a Council of the One Hundred presided over by five or six of the councilors. The Council had the sole legislative initiative and authority over expenditures. By Crown directive, “honored citizens” (who were rentiers) monopolized the Council and coopted their successors.[796] In Galicia in 1633, positions were reserved for a handful of men picked by their colleagues for life; later the urban gentry were admitted to share power.[797] There is no hint of a governing popular assembly anywhere.

In Italy the Renaissance city-states were just that, states. Only a handful of Italian cities were independent, and they all rested on the exploitation of their contados — extensive rural hinterlands administered by officials from the city, as even Kropotkin admits.[798] Exploitation of powerless peasants seems to be a universal feature of sovereign cities (except for Athens, which exploited its empire and its slaves instead of its hinterland). The Director Emeritus avers that the Italian commune was more than a town, “it was above all an association of burghers who were solemnly united by an oath or conjuratio” which committed them to subordinate personal interest to the common good and even “to orderly and broadly consensual ways of governing themselves with a decent respect for individual liberty and a pledge to their mutual defense.”[799] The word “burghers” is carefully chosen to mislead. It can mean merely a townsman, but that meaning is obsolete.[800] It suggests the common people, or perhaps all the people of a town. The common people were never invited into these sworn brotherhoods. The parties to the conjuratio were aristocrats and later, also rich commoners. A chapter title from a source Bookchin quotes says it all: “The Early Commune and Its Nobility.” Entirely excluded were the poor, self-employed craftsmen, wage workers, and even merchants of the middling sort. Even at their most democratic, under the rule of the popolini, the active citizenry still excluded unskilled and farm workers, recent immigrants — the Stranger! — and many artisans. When their guilds came to power, they forbid new guilds from forming.[801]

It required a lot of cutting and pasting to turn this source, Lauro Martines, into a support for Bookchin’s thesis: “We know that its members [the consulate] were chosen at a general assembly of the commune itself, a popular assembly that ‘was quite likely convened with some regularity, and in times of trouble even more often,’ Lauro Martines tells us. ‘Here the views of leading men were heard and important decisions taken, usually by acclamation. We know, too, that this general assembly ‘of all the members of the commune’ was the ‘oldest communal institution’ of these Italian cities, and further, that the consuls usually ‘sounded out’ the general assembly’ before they made any major decisions about such issues as war and peace, taxes, and laws.”[802] Even after spinning his source like a top, the Director Emeritus offers an account which shows that the commune of history is not the Commune as he has redefined it. The assembly elects the consuls but, having done so, its role is reduced to consultation at the option of the consuls, who decide war and peace, taxes, laws — in short, everything.

It proves interesting to restore these fragments of quotation (italicized) to their context: The oldest communal institution was the general assembly of all the members of the commune.

These were the founding members and their descendants, in addition to all those who were taken into the commune from time to time. The consuls were always drawn from this corps. During the first generation or so of the commune’s existence, the general assembly was quite likely convened with some regularity, and in times of trouble even more often. Here the views of leading men were heard and important decisions taken, usually by acclamation. Later, as the commune expanded and assembly meetings became more difficult to manage, the “parliament of the whole” was called less often — on Sundays, say, or even once a year — and it carried less weight, save in emergency sessions.

Voting in the general assembly was done by fiat: men shouted yes or no. All real communal authority issued from this body and could return to it. A parliament was the supreme authority, the fnal decision-making body. But the legislative initiative, the power to move change, lay with the consuls; and historians suspect that no true discussion was permitted in the general assembly. The consuls introduced all proposals. One of the leading consuls defended the motion before the assembled commune; then, possibly, two or three of the more experienced notables were invited to speak and the assembly moved directly to a vote by acclamation.

The consulate, the assembled body of consuls, was the commune’s highest executive and judicial magistracy. All important daily matters were discussed and decided here. Having sounded out the general assembly, the consuls made war and peace, led the communal armies, were responsible for the defense of the city, levied taxes, sired legislation, and served as the final appellate court. The consulate was the focus of power in the early commune: it was always coveted, always prized by the ambitious. The number of consuls varied according to time and place. A range of from four to twenty consuls was not uncommon; more often they numbered from four to twelve. Generally speaking, a term of office was for one year — initially at Genoa for three years — and an incumbent could not return to the consulate until after the elapse of one or two additional terms. But this practice was abolished. The commune sheltered groups in favor of a tighter hold over elections and over the sorting out of power. Triumphing, these groups evolved the practice whereby consuls elected their own successors directly or indirectly. To be effective, consulates doubtless sought to have amicable relations with the commune’s collective manifestation, the general assembly. But it is clear, too, that some limiting principle, attaching most likely to quality [Martines’ italics] as a function of property and status, served to restrict effective power to a select number of men and families.[803]

And here is something else the ex-Director did not quote: “The nobility dominated the consulate, manipulated the general assembly, and ruled the city ... “[804] So cynical an instance of deceit by selective quotation does not come along often unless one often reads Bookchin.

The Director Emeritus must think his readers have the attention span of a hyperactive toddler. At one point he admits the real import of the sources: “What is insufficiently known about the Italian commune is the extent to which it became a stage for a working democracy and its actors a new expression for [sic] an active citizenry.” Translation: we don’t know if the Italian communes were democratic. He ought not to be even talking about them. But two sentences later his knowledge is now sufficient and the findings are gratifying: “Democracy clearly emerged in the early Italian cities, not only representative forms of governance and oligarchies of various kinds, only to submerge and then reappear again for a short time in richly articulated forms.”[805]

Only a tiny fraction of the “burghers” could hold office — elites numbering in the hundreds ruling city populations numbering in the tens of thousands.[806] In Venice, with a population of 120,000 in 1300 and 115,000 in 1509, 200 patrician families belonged to the Great Council. In Florence at its most democratic (1494–1512), 3,500 males out of a population of 60,000 belonged to the officeholding class. Generally, in the 14^th and 15^th centuries the officeholding class was about 1% of the population.[807] Bookchin repeats the old cliché that “urban air makes for freedom,” but very often it did not:

Benefiting from this collective solidarity supposed a citizenship that was in reality difficult to acquire. It implied admission, sponsorship, and inclusion in a trade or the purchase of property. Becoming a part of the people was not an easy matter, and most inhabitants without means proved incapable of penetrating the internal walls erected by jealous minorities.

“The elusive citizen” that Bookchin stalks through history is elusive because he is one among a small select elite.[808]

In most cities, assemblies met only annually and were passive, “of a formal character,” and were later reduced to an annual exchange of oaths of service and obedience with the consuls who held the real power. The trend was toward tighter oligarchy. “The true core of the city-state was formed by the magistracy of the consuls” who chose their own successors and whose offices were family monopolies. As another historian puts it — another irony for Bookchin the anarchist — “virtually all Italian cities developed true governments with consuls.”[809] All these so-called Communes were oligarchies.[810] Talk of their “richly articulated forms” is moonshine. The Director Emeritus is no doubt correct that the Italian communes were inferior to Athens in their realization of the ideal. They selected their rulers by indirect election or by cooptation or by lot, but never by direct election. As Peter Burke writes, “there was no true Italian parallel to the Athenian assembly.”[811] No assembly, no democracy.

Before we depart sunny Italy for the stony fields of New England, let us pay a courtesy call on Niccolo Machiavelli, who has fallen into bad company: Bookchin’s. The Director Emeritus claims that “Machiavelli’s argument clearly tips toward a republic and an armed citizenry rather than a prince and a professional army.”[812] Never mind that he titled his book The Prince and dedicated it to Lorenzo di Medici! As I have remarked, his “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.”[813] Machiavelli offered no argument that even tipped toward a republic. His preference for militia over mercenaries is explicitly addressed to princes and republics alike: one chapter title is “Princes and Republics Who Fail to Have National Armies are Much to Be Blamed.” Machiavelli, like other Florentine intellectuals, rejected Athens and favored Sparta as a model. He had ideologues like the ex-Director in mind when he wrote that “it appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination; and many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality.”[814] It used to be that Bookchin grossly distorted what his sources say. As now he soon fatigues, he takes it easy and just makes it all up.

Cities in the rest of medieval Europe lend not even a shadow of support to the ex-Director’s line. Emperors and kings held a share of power; as Ptolemy of Lucca observed at the time, “cities live politically [i.e., they are self-governing] in all regions, whether in Germany, Scythia or Gaul, although they may be circumscribed by the might of the kings or emperors, to whom they are bound by established laws.” The South German free cities “never attained the full autonomy of city-states.” They were usually ruled by oligarchies of mixed merchants and rentiers. Bookchin claims the Hanseatic League for direct democracy, but, “although the Hanse often forced kings and princes to capitulate, no one had the idea of founding a ‘modern’ city-state.”[815]

Contrary to Bookchin,[816] the Flemish cities were representative, not direct democracies. There were no assemblies. Even after revolutions made the guilds participants in political power, “the administration of the town remained in the hands of the echevins [magistrates] and the council, and no essential modification took place.”[817] In the Netherlands, “a state of 55 cities,” the vroedschap, a council chosen for life by cooptation, elected two to four burgomasters and seven or more aldermen. By the 17^th century, the size of the council was reduced, and so was the number of families admitted to government.[818] Contrary to Bookchin,[819] German towns were ruled by “elected bourgeois city councils” which were always oligarchical. From the 13^th century, they increasingly adopted the “law of Lübeck” whereby the councils renewed their memberships by cooptation.[820] French communes of the 11^th and 12^th centuries elected mayors and jures (magistrates), but they would lose even that much autonomy to the centralization of the French state.[821] In the 16^th century, towns were governed by corporations of municipal magistrates.[822]

Bookchin speaks vaguely of a “European” communal movement, but the great cities of Europe — Paris, London, Madrid, Lisbon, Palermo, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Moscow, Constantinople — were under direct royal control, and so were the cities and towns of entire countries. In late medieval and early modern times, oligarchy was universal along the Dalmatian coast, in Austria, England, Serbia and Bosnia, Poland, Hungary, Portugal and throughout northern Europe.[823] This should surprise no one but libertarian municipalists.

Only Bookchin believes that the New England town meeting is now more than a remnant of what it was, and it was never as robust as its celebrants believe. A creature of state legislation, it spends considerable time executing state mandates. It meets annually, and the officials it elects are not answerable to anyone between town meetings. Most townspeople stay home rather than bother with administrative technicalities. In Massachusetts it is not unusual for attendance to fall below 10%; in one Vermont town in the early 60s, attendance was barely 15%; in another, in 1970, it was 25%; in others, hardly anyone is present except officials who are required to be.[824] James Thurber, attending his first town meeting in 1940 (with one-seventh of the population present), summed it up thusly: “It had the heat and turmoil of the first Continental Congress without its nobility of purpose and purity of design.” Town meetings narrowed considerably in the 20^th century.[825] But how vital was the town meeting in its prime? Were Communes scattered across the stony New England landscape?

The government of Massachusetts Bay created the town meeting system for its own administrative convenience. In the early years, the General Court (the legislature) legislated in reference to the most important internal affairs of the towns. At all times “no one was allowed to treat the orders of the General Court with disrespect.” The courts, an important institution of governance, were at all times controlled by the General Court.[826] At the town meeting, attendance was compulsory, which is probably why attendance was not recorded. (In 18^th century Rhode Island, where attendance was voluntary, it never exceeded 30%, and was usually much less — much like Athens [see Chapter 14].) Low attendance was also chronic in Connecticut.[827]) In the 17^th century the town meeting met, on average, twice a year; in the 18^th, its modest apogee, four or five times a year. Although its authority extended, in principle, to almost anything, in practice, most matters were decided by the “selectmen” — annually elected magistrates.

A 1639 resolution reveals to what extent the townspeople resemble Bookchin’s civic-minded yeomen: “whereas it has been found by general experience that the general meeting of so many men in one [assembly to consider] of the common affairs thereof has wasted much time to no small damage, and business is nothing furthered thereby, it is therefore now agreed by general consent that these seven men hereunder named we do make choice of and give them full power to contrive, execute, and perform all the business and affairs of this whole town — unto the first of the tenth month next.”[828] In 17^th century Dedham, Massachusetts, selectmen served an average of ten terms each, in effect for life; in the 18^th century, for half that long.[829] In another Puritan colony, Connecticut, the town meeting transferred administrative authority to six or seven selectmen from among the town’s most prominent citizens.[830] In Rhode Island, the most radically democratic colony, legislation required town meetings only quarterly, and sometimes towns met less often, although the 18^th century average — the highest anywhere — was over five meetings a year.[831]

The Massachusetts (and Connecticut) towns fail to be Communes by still another test: they were not federated. There is nothing to Bookchin’s claim that they “were networked into [sic] the interior of the New England colonies and states.”[832] They had no political ties to one another; each was subordinated to the central government.

The Director Emeritus, supposing it confirms his vision of New England towns as places for “the active involvement of the citizen in participatory politics, public security, and the direct face-to-face [as opposed to the indirect face-to-face?] resolution of community problems,” quotes historian Robert A. Gross: “When the eighteenth-century Yankee reflected on government, he thought first of his town. Through town meetings, he elected his officials, voted his taxes, and provided for the well-ordering of community affairs. The main business of the town concerned roads and bridges, schools, and the poor — the staples of local government even today. But the colonial New England town claimed authority over anything that happened within its borders. [Examples follow.]” Bookchin fails to notice that only the second sentence refers to the town meeting. The rest of it refers to the town, which acts through selectmen and other officials as well as, and much more often than, the town meeting. With characteristic dishonesty, the Director Emeritus forbears to quote the next page: “Democracy and equality played no part in their view of the world.”[833]

The real social context is missing from the ex-Director’s sentimental invocation of “the strong-minded yeomanry” of the interior towns — 70% of the colonial population — bearers of the democratic legacy, whose farming for subsistence rather than trade was “a challenging moral statement” that theirs was “a virtuous life, not a bountiful one.”[834] Actually, “never a purely subsistence society, the New England colonies were thus from early in their histories [before 1660] and increasingly during the seventeenth century heavily involved in trade.”[835] It goes without saying that the farmers started out, as a matter of survival, producing for subsistence. But, “early in the colonial era, New England developed a diverse and tightly integrated economy.”[836] After 1700, during the Golden Age of the town meeting, “more and more of the migrants began to produce wheat, cattle, and horses for sale in the coastal cities and in the West Indies [to sustain plantation slavery].” Commercial agriculture underpinned the towns with their peculiar political systems. The commercial orientation of colonial New Englanders, as of Americans generally, was expressed in their intense involvement in land speculation.[837]

By the early 18^th century, Americans generally viewed virtue and self-interest as compatible, even mutually reinforcing. They had never shown a lot of public spirit, and now they showed less. Colonial politics offered little prospect of fame and fortune, “indeed, throughout the course of the early eighteenth century, there seems to have been a significant devaluation of the public realm ... every society in colonial British America, including New England after about 1700, exhibited a basically private orientation, a powerful underlying predisposition among the members of its free population to preoccupy themselves with the pursuit of personal and family independence.”[838]

According to the ex-Director’s paramour Biehl,

[...] their town-planning practices reflected this orientation toward democratic community. The original group who founded a town would collectively receive from the colony itself a deed to the land, which they divided among themselves. Each male inhabitant was given a one-to-ten acre plot of land as a freehold, on which he could support himself and his family. Land ownership was thus kept roughly egalitarian ... [839]

The size of the allotments is grossly understated to substantiate the egalitarian myth. They corresponded to the social hierarchy. In Sudbury, the largest allotment, 75 acres, went to the minister; the smallest was one acre. The town “ranked all of these men in an economic hierarchy which was to be fixed and final,” as reflected by their previous holdings in Watertown, their previous place of residence; in Sudbury, allotments ranged from zero acres of upland (10 out of 50 settlers) to 124 acres, with just 7 men receiving 30 acres or more. Similarly, a man’s “rank and quality,” in Dedham, was a major criterion for allotment: “a clearly defined social hierarchy was also a part of the ideal of the founders, and the town’s land policies were set accordingly.”[840] While town founders were religious communicants, “at the outset, those attending the town meeting consisted of the proprietors to whom allotments of land had been made.” The towns were founded by profit-seeking entrepreneurs who obtained grants, negotiated with the Indians, created a landholding corporation, admitted shareholders, etc.: “every town reflected the character of a business in either the structure of its institutions or the apportionment of rights.” I quote from a study with the witty title Profits in the Wilderness.[841] Bookchin has elaborated out of the ether a New England with neither Puritans nor Yankees.

Invoking the aid of yet another discredited old theory, the Director Emeritus evokes (without credit) Frederick Jackson Turner’s hoary theory that the frontier promoted American democracy: “An incredibly loose democracy and mutualism [sic] prevailed along a frontier that was often beyond the reach of the comparatively weak national government.”[842] (But usually within reach of the comparatively strong state governments.[843]) The frontier was no more democratic than the older settled areas. The 18^th century Connecticut town of Kent, for instance, had a town meeting system just like the one we have seen in eastern Massachusetts, which was not a frontier area. That is, the assembly met annually to elect selectmen and other officials (constables, grand jurors, tax listers, tax collectors, tithing men and fence viewers). Justices of the peace were chosen by the colonial government.[844] Quite democratic for its time ... but not by Bookchin’s definition. A very thorough, quantified study of the frontier period in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin — which, like Kent, had annual town meetings — found town and county governments very democratic, but less so at its frontier beginnings than after two decades of development.[845] And even Turner dismissed the cliché of the weak and distant national government: “The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe and the pack horse.”[846]

The frontier was never much different politically from the rest of the country, and it was always as much like the rest of the country as the settlers could make it. Thus, as Richard Hofstadter concludes, “while it is probably true that life was frequently more egalitarian in frontier communities than in settled areas, the truly significant facts are the brevity of the frontier experience, the small numbers of people who are involved in and directly affected by it, and the readiness with which, once the primitive stage of settlement is past, the villages and cities only recently removed from their frontier life reproduce the social stratification, political forms, and patterns of leadership and control that exist in similar communities far to the east.” New towns quickly fell under the control of powerful local elites.[847]

The traditions of the Puritans were hierarchic, deferential and thoroughly undemocratic; civil authority was of God.[848] Democracy was a dirty word in 17^th century America as it was everywhere else. The emergence of the town meeting was unintended, fortuitous and adventitious. Clearly it was never autonomous or direct-democratic enough to qualify as a Commune. The towns reveal a dysjuncture between Bookchin’s political and social ideals to which he is oblivious. In his usual dualistic way, the Director Emeritus assigns everything to categories of good and evil and then affirms the connection or coherence of the items in each category. For Bookchin, the politically good is the Commune, and the socially and economically good is the “moral economy” (i.e., subsistence farming consciously chosen instead of commerce), communitarian solidarity, and the pursuit of virtue rather than prosperity.

Anticipating the obvious empirical objections to this ideological construct, the ex-Director pulls a dialectical rabbit out of his beret, insisting on considering the Puritan towns “not simply as they existed at any given moment of time, but as they evolved, eventually to become centers of social rebellion, civic autonomy, and collective liberty.”[849] Fine, let’s think developmental. Evolving political and social trends did move — in opposite directions. As the political system moved toward a broader franchise, more frequent and vigorous town meetings, and greater town power relative to the colonial government, there was simultaneously economic diversification, increasing production for sale instead of use, continued land speculation on an ever wider scale, movement out of the country towns to the commercial centers or the frontier, dispersal out of the original nucleated settlements into the countryside, increasing litigation, religious diversity, the breakdown of congregational discipline, and in general, the ascendancy of individualism and material self-interest. The town meeting became more active precisely because communal consensus was giving way to contention premised on heterogeneity.[850] The oligarchic communally-oriented Puritan mutated into the acquisitive democratic Yankee. The ex-Director’s analysis could not be more wrong.

In any case, at no time during these developments was the town meeting truly democratic. If only because of stringent control over access to eligibility, “the town meetings of Massachusetts fall short of any decent democratic standard.”[851] Still less was it ever even slightly libertarian. Historians “emphasize the degree to which nearly every aspect of town life was minutely regulated by town officials, far beyond what might be supposed to have been the needs of local government.”[852] While there is some doubt about how democratic any of Bookchin’s showcase direct democracies were — not only the Puritan towns but also Athens and revolutionary Paris — there is no doubt about their extremely intrusive paternalism bordering on totalitarianism. The regimes he commends to anarchists aren’t merely non-anarchist, they stand out as exceptionally authoritarian.

At last we come to Bookchin’s prize exhibit, the Parisian sections during the French Revolution. He has more to say about them than about anything since the polis, although his learning rests on a slender scholarly base. He does not cite the foremost expert on the “sections,” Albert Soboul, but I will. The sections, originally electoral districts, were later used as governing bodies (note their statist origin). The National Assembly reduced their number from 60 to 48, but the sections “largely ignored the National Assembly’s decrees” — except that one. In July 1792, the sections abolished the distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens — eliminating a property qualification — and welcomed the sans-culottes of the lower classes. A year later, the National Assembly voted to pay the poor 40 sous to attend assembly meetings, but at the same time reduced the meetings to twice a week. Each section had a president, renewed monthly, and a committee to assist him; drawn from a small number of militants, they were routinely reelected every month.[853]

According to the Director Emeritus, “attendance fluctuated widely from a hundred or less when the agenda was routine to overflowing halls (usually in state-commandeered churches and chapels) when serious issues confronted the revolutionary people.”[854] But he also says that “they were often attended by only fifteen or twenty people out of one or two thousand.” Actually, attendance was usually small even for important meetings. In the militant Droits de l’Homme, the section of enrage Jean Varlet, over 3,000 citizens were eligible to vote, but on June 17, 1793, only 212 voted in the critical election for commander-in-chief of the Paris National Guard.[855]

Finally the Director Emeritus tells us what the sections do. They appoint committees: civic committees, police commissions, vigilance committees, military committees, agriculture committees, etc. Each section had a court system and justices of the peace. Among the assembly’s “enormous powers” were spying (“sources of information on counterrevolutionaries and grain speculators”), vigilantism (“dispensers of a rough-and-ready justice”), social work (poor relief, refugee relief), and relieving the peasants of their crops.[856] It’s unusual for an anarchist to celebrate a government’s possession of enormous powers, but Bookchin is nothing if not an unusual anarchist.

Bookchin is more comfortable with structure than function: “The forty-eight sectional assemblies, in turn, were coordinated by the Paris Commune to which each section elected three deputies at an assemblee primaire.” That “special assembly” elected the Bureau of the Commune, which was the mayor and several executive officials associated with him. The Communal Assembly elected from its members 16 administrateurs whose duties are not specified, but have something to do with the executive committee. With the addition of 32 more members the Bureau becomes the 48-member General Council of the Commune.[857] The division of responsibilities among these bureaucrats, which is rather involved, is not described. But it’s clear that the Commune of Paris acted as a separate power from the sections[858] — a violation of Bookchin’s confederal requirements.

Even from this version, it’s obvious that sectional sovereignty was severely compromised by the existence of other levels of government. Bookchin scoffs at the national legislature (it went through several names), but almost anytime it felt like intruding into the sectional system, it did so. It reduced the number of sections, reduced the number of meetings, and put the poor on its own payroll. Although there were several popular irruptions into the National Assembly, it was nonetheless always the case that the central government commanded the army and at least part of the National Guard. The government tolerated the sections because each successive regime used them as its popular base, until the day came when the new regime (the Revolutionary Government of the Jacobins) decided that it could dispense with the sections, and then it put them out of business within a few months: “The Revolutionary Government had decided to govern; as soon as it did that, there was an end to the ‘popular movement.’”[859] In 1795, Napoleon with his “whiff of grapeshot” proved that the people in arms felt no qualms about firing on the people in the streets.

Bookchin is wary of the Paris Commune and rightly so: it didn’t “coordinate” the sections, it governed the city as a representative democracy invested, says Kropotkin, with extensive and diverse powers. In composition it was much less representative than the sections; only a third of its members were plebeians (small masters, artisans, shopkeepers, and two workers). If, as Bookchin says, the Commune was consistently less radical than the sections,[860] what does this say about his scheme of federated sectional assemblies? Would the Commune of Communes be less radical still?

The Sections were not the exclusive vanguard of the Revolution. The political clubs and popular societies — in 1793 there were over 1,500 of them in France — likewise played major mobilizing roles. Many were affiliated with the Jacobin Society, many others with the Cordeliers Club, a few with both. Clubs and sections both sent forth emissaries to radicalize the Army. After September 9, 1793, when daily meetings of the sectional assemblies were banned, the militants continued to meet as societies whose membership was a fraction of the citizen body; they served more or less as the assemblies’ radical caucuses. In the following months of sans-culotte ascendancy, the societies controlled sectional offices. By their power to issue or withhold certificates de civisme, they could control the appointments to municipal government and even remove officeholders.[861] Territorial units are not uniquely revolutionary forms; in the French Revolution, non-territorial associations were more consistently radical.

And now to consider what else the ex-Director left out. He has repeatedly said that the Parisian sections refute the critics who say that a major city is too big for direct democracy.[862] The smallest section had 11,775 inhabitants; the largest, 24,977.[863] After the property qualification was dropped, a few thousand men (and in a few cases women) would be eligible to attend the assembly in even the smallest section. That’s not a face-to-face group; even a substantial minority of that would not be a face-to-face group; not even Noter Dame could hold them. The example proves that the critics are right.

Except that a substantial majority of citizens did not attend — at any time. By one estimate, attendance was never more than 10%; by another, the range was 4–19%. There existed a rather small elite of politically conscious sectionnaires, 3,000 to 4,000 in a population of 650,000 to 700,000, or 12 to 20 men per section at the most.[864] The entry of the sans-culottes, important municipal elections, “crises” — nothing ever produced more than a small spike in attendance. In a careless interview, Bookchin himself admits that the assemblies “were often attended by only fifteen or twenty people out of one or two thousand.” (No section was as small as 1,000.) They were the best of times, they were the worst of times, but most people didn’t have the time for the times. Or the inclination. The assemblies did not fulfill the ex-Director’s dream of mentally muscular deliberation: “As a rule, meetings appear to have been disorderly, with many heated arguments even when the sans-culottes were in complete control; frequently, no discussion at all was possible.” [865] As at Athens, mass citizen abstention was the prerequisite for self-appointed elites to rule in the name of the people.

The remarkable unity of the sections derives from more than mass solidarity. When the sans-culottes entered the assemblies, moderates left. Militants from a radical section would drive out the “aristocracy” [sic] in control of another section (this was called “fraternization”). “There was nothing democratic in this type of action, of course,” notes Morris Slavin. Or militant “hard bottoms” might just outsit the majority, until twenty-odd determined militants remained to act in the name of the assembly.[866] Within the assemblies, in the most radical phase voting was by acclamation, intimidating dissenters, as it was intended to do. According to Janet Biehl, “during even the most militant periods of the revolution, royalists and moderates still turned out for meetings, as well as extreme radicals.”[867] According to history, they stayed away in droves, but this was not always enough to save them from arrest or even execution. It is no accident that summer and autumn 1793, “the high tide of the sans culotte movement,” corresponds to the Reign of Terror, which was launched on September 5. Militants sought out the counterrevolutionaries who, they supposed, lurked everywhere. There were men who were arrested only because they did not attend the assembly or did not have a record of active support of the revolution. It was in this spirit that St. Just denounced Danton: “Are you not a criminal and responsible for not having hated the enemies of the fatherland?”[868] Failure to wear the tricolor cockade in one’s hat was grounds for arrest. There was every reason to stay away: “To the ‘silent majority,’ after four years of uproar still too bored or too busy to involve themselves in interminable assembly debates and committee business, the vindictiveness and potentially lethal violence of factional power struggles added fresh reinforcements.”[869] To speak out against the government in the assembly would be suicide. Even to mutter against it on the street invited arrest. Under these circumstances, democracy, direct or otherwise, is a sham.

In listing the administrative personnel elected by the sections, the Director Emeritus failed to mention that they were detailed to the Commune — they were city employes — and thus not exclusively answerable to their appointing bodies. Increasingly they identified with their employer, who paid them: “The civic committees, developed in the same fashion as the autonomous sectional institutions. At first, agents of their fellow citizens, the status of the commissars changed as the revolutionary government increased its control by creating a cadre of low-grade officials, soon to be nominated by committees, finally salaried by the municipality.” Likewise the Commune indemnified the members of the revolutionary committees (in charge of security), transforming them into its salaried employes.[870] The Commune drained off the most active militants, turning them into bureaucrats, lost to their sections. After five years of activism, other militants were burnt out — still a common phenomenon on the left. One study found that out of 400 Revolutionary Committee members, 150 went into the state bureaucracy, often the police department. A paid job in the War Ministry or the police, says Cobb, offered consolation to disappointed democrats: “The government bought off some of the best militants, ‘bureaucratized’ some of the most effective popular institutions — there was no doubt an agreeable irony in getting the militants to do the government’s dirty work and in transforming former tribunes into policemen.”[871]

In a final irony, the sections fell victim to their own bellicosity. They had always been the war hawks, flourishing in the wartime atmosphere of 1793, and supporting the levee en masse of August 23. In the army there were promotions for some “who had served their apprenticeship in the Paris sections.” The majority of the militants were now conscripted themselves. Even the army recruited in Paris, with many sans-culottes, was unswervingly loyal to the revolutionary government and the Convention, with no desire to replace them with direct democracy or a new hierarchy of sectional societies.[872]

The domination of the sections by several thousand ideologically supercharged militants, many of them commencing careers in government, calls for qualification of Bookchin’s claim “that this complex of extremely important activities was undertaken not by professional bureaucrats but, for the most part, by ordinary shopkeepers and craftsmen.”[873] In the first place, they were not quite so “ordinary.” The sans-culottes, who were not a class, were rather a socially heterogeneous political coalition whose only common material interest was as consumers (hence the primacy of the price of bread as an issue). They were mostly self-employed artisans and craftsmen, along with their journeymen and apprentices who expected to become self-employed someday. The better-off owners and masters shaded into the bourgeoisie. The lower reaches of the bourgeoisie, sometimes including merchants, factory owners and lawyers, supplied most of the sectional militants and officials. Offices requiring literacy were closed to most sans-culottes. Justices of the peace were mostly drawn from the former legal professions (which had been technically abolished in 1791[874]). Years of activism turned the militants into political professionals who in many cases brought their skills into government (especially the police and the military). In experience, temperament and employment prospects, they were different from the masses, and so were their interests. What was supposed to be a shining example of direct democracy is actually a striking example of the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Superficially — that is to say, on Bookchin’s level — the revolutionary sections might look like “the most dazzling, almost meteoric example of civic liberty and direct democracy in modern times.” If so, it is only because there are no other examples. In reality, the sections had even less power than the New England town meetings. The town meeting had the power to tax and money to spend. The Parisian section, which had neither, had mainly a population, and it even lost some of that to national conscription. New England had locally based militias in a colony lacking a standing army. The sectionnaires gained partial control of the National Guard, but the rest of it along with the enormous army was under central government control, and sans-culotte National Guardsmen never came to the defense of the sections. Their supporters were armed but not organizable for anything except crowd action. New England towns controlled local administration. The apparently extensive administrative powers of sectional officials actually belonged to the municipal government. The sections were not federated; the Paris Commune was not a Commune of Communes. The fundamental contradiction was their support for policies, from war to price controls, which strengthened the central government. From the pinnacle of their influence they plummeted to nothing: “After the decree of 5 frimaire [November 26, 1794], the sections played no part at all in the revolutionary government.”[875]

The sans-culottes were not “pushed from the stage of history and shot down by the thousands in the reaction that followed the tenth of Thermidor (July 28, 1794), when Robespierre and his followers were guillotined.”[876] Robespierre and his colleagues and followers (104 of them) were indeed guillotined,[877] but they were not sans-culottes. Some sans-culottes were even released from prison then. The sections were quiet during the coup. There was no widespread repression of sans-culotte militants until after the later failed insurrection of Prairial (May 20–23, 1795). Then some 1200 were arrested, and others were disarmed. While this gave a strong impetus to the nascent White Terror, it was outside Paris, especially in the south of France, that patriots were slaughtered in large numbers: “But, in Paris at least, there were no massacres” (Albert Mathiez). Thermidor was not particularly bloody even for Section Droits-de-l’Homme, where, “in numerous individual cases, [the Thermidorians] released their political opponents and allowed them to return to normal life.”[878]

Actually, Bookchin also tells another story of the demise of the sections: “The movement for sectional democracy met defeat during the insurrection of June 2, 1793 — not at the hands of the monarchy, but by the treachery of the Jacobins.”[879] The insurrection of June 2 was in support of a Jacobin coup directed at the majority Girondins in the Convention, using muscle from the sections. The Girondin debuties were expelled and two dozen were guillotined. The Girondins did not support, and were not supported by, the sans-culottes, whom they held in “open contempt.” It’s ludicrous to say, as does Biehl, that “[the sans-culottes’] leaders were among the first to be arrested by the Jacobin regime when it came to power in June 1793.”[880] If direct democracy didn’t flourish in June-December 1793, it never did. The sections regarded the putsch as their victory. They supported the new regime’s policies of war, conscription, and price controls on staples.

The months following June 2 and preceding Thermidor were the “high tide of the sans-culotte movement,” in Bookchin’s words. However, the sections came to see that the centralization and regimentation imposed by the revolutionary government undermined their power (whereas the Reign of Terror taking place at the same time neither threatened nor displeased them — indeed, they were its foot soldiers). The sans-culottes were sufficiently disenchanted with the Jacobins as to make no move to defend them at Thermidor; some even participated in the anti-Jacobin coup. But the new regime correctly concluded that with the newly strengthened military and police apparatus at its disposal (including sans-culottes from the sections), the sections were irrelevant; soon they were nonexistent.[881] The short life of sectional direct democracy corresponds to the Reign of Terror, which was inherently anti-democratic. It holds no lessons, except authoritarian ones, for our time.

The Parisian Sections were remarkable if short-lived institutions, but they were not Communes, nor was the Paris Commune a Commune of Communes. Bookchin claims the sections were “coordinated by a commune that, at its revolutionary highlight [sic], called for a complete restructuring of France into a confederation of free communes.” The sections weren’t “coordinated” by anyone. The Paris Commune never made a ludicrous appeal to federate 44,000 French communes. The pamphleteer Jean Varlet, the foremost ideologue of sectional democracy, could not even get his own ultra-radical Droit l’Homme section to mandate its Convention delegates to support direct democracy.[882]

As a Marxist, the Director Emeritus has to claim that history is behind him as well as ahead of him. He excoriates Nietzsche, but borrows his most preposterous idea, Eternal Recurrence. Communes, which never existed anywhere, he sees everywhere: “The historical evidence of their efficacy and their continual reappearance in times of rapid social change is considerable and persuasive.”[883] To obtain such “historical evidence,” Bookchin has invented it or (as with respect to Renaissance city-states) selectively censored sources so outrageously that it is tantamount to forgery. His theory that communes appear in times of rapid social change is easily falsified: the Industrial Revolution, for instance, produced no Communes, whereas the democracy of Athens was the result of political maneuver, not social change. We live in a time of rapid social change, and Bookchin has been predicting Communes for decades, but there are none. In revolutionary Paris, in colonial America, and throughout preindustrial Europe — throughout the civilized world! — society, especially urban society, was hierarchic and deferential.

To sum up: such European cities as escaped royal control for any period of time were sometimes redefined as self-governing by exclusive organizations of the wealthy who dominated the general assemblies, in the minority of cities where they ever existed, and soon instituted ruling magistracies elected or coopted by, and from, their own ranks. The communal movement was about urban autonomy from kings, bishops and feudal lords, and nothing else. To employ Carl Becker’s distinction, it was about home rule, not who was to rule at home, much less how. Certainly there never existed, not even briefly, under normal conditions of life, a broad-based urban general assembly which met frequently and which elected and controlled all functionaries. By Bookchin’s own criteria, the urban Commune never existed in medieval or modern Europe. Did it even exist at Athens?