Chapter 15. City-Statism and Anarchy

Let us summarize what we know. The city of Athens was not a Commune and it was a slave-based imperialist state, and so it was not anarchist. The self-governing cities of pre-industrial Europe were not Communes and they were states. The towns of colonial New England were not Communes, again by Bookchin’s definition, and they were subordinate to higher levels of state. Revolutionary Paris was not a Commune or a Commune of Communes, and it was subordinate to a national state. It is time for a general characterization of the relationship between the city and the state.

According to the ex-Director’s latest ukase, the town and city “historically antedate the emergence of the state.”[1000] His opinion is dictated by his politics. If the state preceded the city, the city is at least in part the creation of the state. Another implication is that anarchy is prior to the city, since the state is prior to the city and anarchy is prior to the state. From which it follows that anarchy outside the commune is possible (and was once universal), whereas cities are always statist. The burden of proof is thus on those who espouse the anarchist city to demonstrate its very possibility.

When Bookchin states that the city preceded the state, if he is not making an abstract claim which is meaningless, he is making an empirical claim which is false. Most of the world’s cities, aside from a few former city-states, originated by conquest or colonization. Many of my European readers live in cities founded by the Romans. Most of my American readers must reside in or near towns or cities which were founded under state auspices. In the American west the Federal government created local governments around its extension agents.[1001] There were no cities north of Mexico until the Europeans invaded. The invaders of several nations sought various benefits here — land, gold, slaves, furs, sometimes even religious freedom — but anarchy was not one of them. On the contrary, they displaced or demolished the anarchist societies they found everywhere.

The discussion of the New England towns in Chapter 13 reveals how the towns were chartered by the Massachusetts Bay central government pursuant to legislation, which also prescribed the powers and duties of the towns. It was the same everywhere. Companies chartered by the Crown built the first towns and sponsored new settlements. Even when, later on, people settled in places where the authority of the central government was weak, they brought the state with them. As rapidly as possible the frontier civilized itself by erecting the courthouse, the gallows and the jail. Even wagon trains, which were only out of American jurisdiction for a few weeks, created an ambulatory legal system. Even squatters, lawbreakers themselves, formed “claims associations.” Miners formed miners’ meetings and claims clubs.[1002] The Wild West was far more law-abiding than legend has it.[1003] I am not necessarily saying that no story of liberty can be told about the frontier and the west, but it will not make sense outside the context of state power.[1004]

The truth is, as so often with Bookchin, the opposite of what he says: there has never been a city which was not a state, or subject to a state. The state always precedes and produces the city, as it did in the earliest (archaic) states. It did so in Mesopotamia, in China, in Mesoamerica and in Peru-Bolivia — the “pristine” states, i.e., “those whose origin was sui generis out of local conditions and not in response to pressures already emanating from an already highly organized but separate political entity.”[1005] All other historical states, and all existing states, are secondary states. The state preceded the city in archaic Greece, including Attica.[1006] Two archaeologists of Mesoamerica state the case succinctly: “While urbanized societies are invariably states, not all states are urban.”[1007] The statist origin of the city is not only a matter of inference, but of record. As Lewis Mumford states: “I suggest that one of the attributes of the ancient Egyptian god, Ptah, as revealed in a document derived from the third millennium B.C. — that he founded cities — is the special and all but universal function of kings.”[1008] In a comparative study of 23 early states, pristine and secondary, urbanization was absent in eight of them.[1009] Truly urban agglomerations depend on the state, whose emergence is the political aspect of class society.[1010] That is the “more modern view,” according to Elman R. Service: “We now know that some archaic civilizations lacked cities, while others became states before their cities developed.”[1011] “Urbanization” can be very straightforward: “when a state-level society takes over and tries to control peoples who are not used to obeying kings and rulers (i.e., tribal and other nonstate peoples), a common practice is to force people to live in towns and cities where they can be watched and controlled more easily than if they live scattered across the landscape.”[1012]

If the city preceded the state, then there can be states without cities. At first the notion of a cityless state may challenge the imagination, but actually, every reader has heard of the examples I will discuss. Eric R. Wolf mentions one way it was done: “in some societies, the rulers merely ‘camped’ among the peasantry, as the Watusi rulers did until very recently among the Bahuto peasantry of Ruanda Urundi.”[1013] Another technique is itineration: the monarch and his retinue, having no fixed abode, move about the land, accepting the hospitality of his subjects. The earliest Dukes of Normandy did that,[1014] and the kings of England still did it in the 13^th century.

Although they were not ambulatory, the kings of the Zulus ruled a formidable cityless state until the Zulu War of 1879–1880. The Zulu nation was forcibly formed in the 19^th century through the conquest and amalgamation of many tribes by a series of ruthless kings. They controlled the population through massive terror. The kings eliminated the clans as corporate groups just as Cleisthenes eliminated the Athenian tribes as corporate groups. The rapid progress of military tactics corresponded to the progress of state formation. Low-casualty “dueling battles” characterized the tribal stage; “battles of subjugation” led to the development of chiefdoms; and “battles of conquest” gave rise to the state.[1015] The king, who officially owned all the land, ruled a population of 250,000–500,000 through local chieftains, who might in turn have subchieftains under them. Power was delegated from the top down, and the lower the level, the less power. There were no cities or towns; the king lived on a tract of land occupied by royal homesteads and military barracks. But “during the time of the kings, the State bulked large in the people’s lives.”[1016]

Another warlike, expansionist state without cities was Mongolia under Genghis Khan. 1206, the year Temuchin became Genghis Khan, can be considered “the birthday of the Mongol state.” The Great Khan, who was neither libertarian nor municipalist, destroyed more cities than anyone in history. By the 11^th century, Mongol society already included “a ruling class, a steppe aristocracy,” each noble having a retinue of bodyguards who followed him in war and managed his household in peacetime.[1017] There were territorial divisions for fiscal and civil administration. A state signifier was the presence of “a purely military and permanent establishment.” There was an assembly of notables, the khurildai, a “quasi-political assembly under the direction and rule of the Khan.”[1018] And yet this was still a society of pastoral nomads. The tribes migrated seasonally, and so did the Great Khan himself. Having no cities in which to make his capital, he itinerated long distances, moving seven times a year.[1019] Qara Qorum, on which construction began in 1235, was only an enlarged camp which a European visitor in the 1250s likened to a large French village.[1020] This was a no-frills, no-nonsense state barely beyond chieftainship, but it was state enough to conquer most of Eurasia.

A final example of a state without cities — I am deliberately choosing well-known societies — is Norway in the Viking Age. It was built on the basis of an aristocratic society of chieftains, free men and thralls (slaves). King Harold Fairhair (c. 870/880-900 A.D.) commenced the reduction of the chieftains of southwest Norway. There were no cities or towns, so, until 1050, he and his successors, with their retinues, their skalds and warriors, “traveled from farm to farm taking goods in kind, that is to say, living off the produce of their landed property as well as from contributions from the local population. This was the only way of effectively exercising royal power before a more permanent local administration was developed.” The king’s hird (bodyguard) was more than that, it was the permanent part of his army.[1021] The relation of state to urbanism is straightforward: the kings promoted the development of towns in the 11^th century and that was when towns appeared. Except for a few minor bishoprics, they would always be subordinate to the king. For the king, towns offered greater comfort and security than itineration, and better control over the surrounding districts.[1022]

The city-state, then, is only a variant on the statist city, the only sort of city which has ever existed. The state preceded the city. The earliest states were, in fact, mostly city-states. As we learn from Murray Bookchin’s favorite authority — Murray Bookchin: “It was the Bronze Age ‘urban revolution,’ to use V. Gordon Childe’s expression, that slowly eliminated the trappings of the social or domestic arena from the State and created a new terrain for the political arena.”[1023] The self-governing city is the beginning but not, as the Director Emeritus claims, the climax of political development. The only one now existing, the Singapore police state, is a fluke of history and geography — it never sought independence but was expelled from Malaysia.[1024] The Greek city-state was an evolutionary dead end, doomed to extinction: “Born at the conjunction of historical developments, some originating well outside the borders of Greece, Greek city-states were fragile and flourished briefly, to be submerged within the wake of larger historical trends and also undermined by their own success.” The Renaissance city-state, too, proved a dead end; it was not even antecedent to the nation-state.[1025]

The trouble with arguing that the polis is not a fully modern state is that where the Director Emeritus stops — just shy of the polis — is arbitrary. Measured against some Platonic archetype of statehood, other political entities might come up short, and yet any anarchist would consider them states. Hegel believed that the United States was not a real state.[1026] Surprisingly, some historians and political scientists agree with him. According to James Q. Wilson, “by European standards [the American government] is not truly a ‘state’ — that is, a sovereign body whose authority penetrates all aspects of the nation and brings each part of the nation within its reach.”[1027] Statements like this one are common (I almost said “not uncommon”): “The United States moved from a society which was scarcely governed to one in which, by century’s end, government regularly touched the daily lives of the people.”[1028] Nonetheless, for anarchists, that government is best which governs not at all.

Most of an entire subfield of American history — policy history — holds that for much of its history, and certainly before the Civil War, the United States was not a state. Thus one of them writes that the Civil War “created” the American state, which “had become a mere shell by 1860,” with “only a token administrative presence in most of the states.”[1029] In an oft-cited address, historian William Leuchtenburg asks: “When did we first have a state in America? Was it always here, or did it not really arrive until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, as the most recent scholarship indicates?”[1030] I reject that opinion as I reject Bookchin’s, but at least these scholars aren’t playing games with the concept of the state as the Director Emeritus does. I also point out that the policy historians are much more plausible than the Director Emeritus. Colonial America was far less statified than ancient Athens, but the easygoing statism of the colonies was still not anarchy.

Consider colonial Virginia. The House of Burgesses (the legislature), whose members were gentlemen amateurs, was the only elected body in the Old Dominion. Most counties had no towns; the county was the unit of local government. And that government was in the hands of — a court! Government existed only once a month, on court day. Gentlemen “conducted the court, lending their personal influence to what was nearly the sum and substance of government at the time — adjudicating disputes, recording transactions, and distributing small favors to the fortunate.” They swore in the juries, grand and petit, impaneled by the sheriff. In addition to its civil and criminal jurisdiction, the court was responsible for the administrative business of the county, such as issuing licenses and letting out contracts, and it “supervised the conduct of ordinaries” (taverns, one of which faced every courthouse). “The court was central to the organization of the society”: court day was also a market day, and it was the only time the community came together.[1031] There was no legislative branch. The only other governmental institution was the militia, mustered intermittently under gentry officers.[1032] Amending Skowronek’s phrase, we could say that colonial Virginia was a state of courts and parties — without the parties.

In other colonies too, the county court “became the critical institution for dealing with important matters of local community concern,”[1033] although in some colonies, as we have seen, elected town selectmen were also important. Either way, government consisted entirely of part-time amateurs (and that also goes for colonial and 19^th century legislatures too, which held only brief intermittent sessions and most of whose members were newcomers[1034]). Therefore, on Bookchin’s criteria, there was no state (or rather, no states) prior to the Revolution. So much the worse for Bookchin’s criteria.

Although the argument from authority should never be decisive, previous anarchist opinion as to the anarchist character of the Commune carries some weight. If anarchists have not often rejected the Commune explicitly, it is because it was considered it just another utopian pipedream if they thought about at all, a rival whose irrelevance was taken for granted. But they sometimes dealt with it, if only by pronouncing on the anarchist nature vel non of the Athenian Commune. To reject the alleged anarchy of Athens is to reject Bookchin’s Communalism in toto.

Kropotkin is the only prominent anarchist claimed by Bookchin as supporting his view that Athens and the medieval communes were anarchist. So far as I can tell, Prince Kropotkin thought otherwise, judging from his hatred of the “commune-State”: “Sometimes as the central government, sometimes as the provincial or local state, now as the commune-State, it pursues us at each step, it appears at every street corner, it imposes on us, holds us, harasses us.”[1035] I found nothing in Mutual Aid to support Bookchin’s claim except possibly a passing reference to the “folkmote.” I found a great deal of appreciative exposition of the self-governance of guilds and their federations, which if anything supports syndicalism, something the Director Emeritus roundly criticizes.[1036] If Kropotkin is really a libertarian municipalist, then in this, as in his anarcho-trenchist support for the Allies in World War I, he stands virtually alone. But in fact, in Mutual Aid — and in a passage Bookchin has quoted! — Kropotkin clearly identifies the medieval communes as states:

Self-jurisdiction was the essential point, and self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. But the commune was not simply an autonomous part of the State — it was a State in itself. It had the right of war and peace, of federation and alliance with its neighbors. It was sovereign in its own affairs, and mixed with no others. The supreme political power could be vested in a democratic forum, as was the case in Pskov, whose vyeche sent and received ambassadors, concluded treaties, accepted and sent away princes, or went on without them for dozens of years; or it was vested in, or usurped by, an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles as was the case in hundreds of Italian and middle European cities. The principle, nevertheless, remained the same: the city was a State ...[1037]

“The structure of the law-and-order States which we see in Europe at present was only outlined at the end of the eighteenth century.”[1038] So it seems to be Kropotkin’s position that medieval cities were real states, not just “outlined,” but that Bourbon France, Georgian England and the Prussia of Frederick the Great, which came later, were not quite states. A paradox worthy of the Director Emeritus, but not one that supports his position on city-states.

Proposals for “direct Government” were in circulation in Proudhon’s time. As he stated the case: “Let the Constitution and the laws become the expression of our own will; let the office holders and magistrates, who are our servants elected by us, and always subject to recall, never be permitted to do anything but what the good pleasure of the people has determined upon.” But government of all by all is still government:

The principle, that is to say, Government, remaining the same, there would still be the same conclusion.
“No more hereditary royalty,
“No more presidency,
“No more representation,
“No more delegation,
“No more alienation of power,
“Direct government,
“THE PEOPLE! In the permanent exercise of their sovereignty.”

“What is there at the end of this refrain which can be taken as a new and revolutionary proposition, and which has not been known and practiced long before our time, by Athenians, Boeotians, Lacedemonians, Romans, &c.?” For Proudhon, nothing. Direct government leads straight to dictatorship. Let there be no laws passed, either by majority vote or unanimously.[1039]

Errico Malatesta, the anarchist’s anarchist, also addressed the issue directly. By “state,” anarchists mean “government”; other usages are to be distinguished. For anarchists, “state” does not mean society, and it does not mean “a special kind of society, a particular human collectivity gathered together in a particular territory irrespective of the way the members of the said collectivity are grouped or of the state of relations between them” — it does not mean, for example, a nationality. And it does not mean the Commune: “The word State is also used to mean the supreme administration of a country: the central power as opposed to the provincial or communal authority. And for this reason others believe that anarchists want a simple territorial decentralization with the governmental principle left intact, and they thus confuse anarchism with cantonalism and communalism.”[1040]

Emma Goldman, who emphatically prioritized the individual over the social, spurned “the majority for centuries drilled in State worship, trained in discipline and obedience and subdued by the awe of authority in the home, the school, the church and the press.” She considered that “more pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible — the tyranny of the majority.”[1041]

No need for any extended explanation why the Anarcho-Syndicalists are anti-Communalist. For them the basic political unit is not the town or neighborhood, it is the trade union. The unions in a locality federate in Industrial Alliances (Rudolf Rocker’s term) or Trade Federations (Pataud and Pouget’s term), and these federations federate, etc., to organize production. Local unions would also federate with the unions of their trade in other localities in Labor Cartels (Rocker’s term) or Labor Exchanges (Pataud and Pouget’s term), and these federations federate, etc., to organize consumption.[1042] Pataud and Pouget made quite clear what this system implied for the commune: “Public life had henceforth other centers: it was wholly within the Trade Unions. From the communal and departmental point of view, the Union of local Trade Unions, — the Labor Exchange, — was about to gather to itself all the useful functions; in the same way, from the national point of view, functions with which the State had adorned itself were about to return to the Trade Federations, and to the Confederation, a union of district and national organizations, — Labor Exchanges and Trade Federations.”[1043]

It goes without saying that Max Stirner would reject the polis as statist: “Political liberty means that the polis, the state, is free,” not the egoist.[1044] Leo Tolstoy, the original Green anarchist, would reject the urban commune if only because it was urban: he hated cities and favored the simple life of the peasant. He predicted (erroneously), and approved, a major shift of population from city to country: “All men should contribute equally to food production, and this requires men of all walks of life, not just peasants, to return to the countryside and perform manual labor.” He also rejected voting and officeholding: “To take a part in elections, courts of law, or in the administration of government is the same thing as a participation in the violence of the government.”[1045]

The Individualist Anarchists would reject the Commune — not for being a collectivity, for they favored and formed intentional communities — but for its governance by majority rule. Lysander Spooner observed that “obviously, there is nothing in the nature of majorities, that insures justice at their hands.”[1046]

Finally, William Godwin might be expected to accept the Commune, since his vision of anarchy does include the occasional meetings of parish assemblies. But Godwin rejected majority rule as emphatically as Thoreau did: “If the people, or the individuals of whom the people is constituted, cannot delegate their authority to a representative, neither can any individual delegate his authority to a majority, in an assembly of which he is himself a member.”[1047]

Thus, with one possible exception, all major anarchist theorists reject Murray Bookchin’s Commune as not anarchist. Direct democracy is not anarchist. Thus Benjamin R. Barber — Bookchin’s source on Swiss democracy — opposes direct democracy to anarchy, and in fact penned the most scurrilous attack on anarchism in recent times. Communalism, considered as the self-governing community of equal citizens, “is nearly the opposite” of anarchist communism.[1048]