Chapter 17. Anarchist Communism versus Libertarian Municipalism

Previous chapters demonstrate that libertarian municipalism, at the ground level, will be oligarchic and probably oppressive toward local minorities. At the level of the wider society, its federations and multiples of federations will be slow, cumbersome, internally unworkable, cumulatively elitist, and either too powerful or not powerful enough. Inevitably the system will evolve the features of the system it was supposed to supplant. It is objectionable, first, as being a blueprint for the future, and second, as a blueprint with too many pages missing. It has to be the most mundane utopia ever conceived[1169] — at once an affront to sense and sensibility.

But is it anarchist?

Of course not, but here is a direct demonstration. Aside from the federalist frills, the ideology calls for a sovereign, self-governing local assembly, the Commune. Eminent anarchists, as we saw in Chapter 16, consider it a state. If it is a state, then it is not anarchy, and libertarian municipalism is not anarchist. Apologies to any reader who thinks I’m belaboring the obvious. I know I am. This whole book belabors the obvious. There are still some credulous anarchists about, even after my last book, and it is safer not to take too much for granted. The anarchists who think that Noam Chomsky is the foremost anarchist thinker,[1170] for instance, are fully capable of accepting Bookchin as an anarchist too.

There are many definitions of the state, and I shall run the Commune past a few of them, but generally they approximate one of the three definitions identified by Malatesta. As we saw in Chapter 15, two that he rejects are (1) the state as society, or a special form of society, and (2) the state as a centralized administration as opposed to decentralized power, i.e., the Commune — in his sense as in Bookchin’s. Rather, (3) the state means government, period — the sum total of political, legislative, judiciary, military and fiscal institutions.[1171] Athens had such institutions, and the Commune would too.

A crucial element — the crucial element, at least for anarchists, implicit in Malatesta’s definition, is coercion. Anarchists Michael Taylor and Howard Ehrlich identify concentrated power as a necessary condition for the state. If those in whose hands the power is concentrated try to monopolize it by determining when others can use force, for Taylor the sufficient conditions of the state are present.[1172] It is clear that in the Commune power is concentrated, not diffuse. Indeed, it is more concentrated than in an American city today, or in the United States generally, where power is dispersed among discrete local, state and national authorities. The assembly has far more power than the individual citizens, even the citizens in attendance, at any given time and at every given time; in other words, all the time. The changing composition of the assembly no more renders its possession of power anarchic than the (more slowly) changing composition of the United States Congress renders its possession of power anarchic.

For Max Weber, a “state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Definitions in the Weberian tradition define the state as an organization claiming and to some significant extent enforcing a monopoly of violence over a territory.[1173] Although he never uses words like coercion and violence, the ex-Director’s affirmation of majority rule implies coercion, otherwise the majority is just one group of people deciding to do something that others, like Bartleby, would prefer not to. The Commune is to have a militia, “a free, and armed, citizenry.”[1174] One suspects that, like ancient Athens and revolutionary Paris, it will have police. Thus the Commune is coercive. It is also clear that the Communes occupy delimited territories, since they consist of villages, neighborhoods, city blocks, etc. Thus the Commune is territorial. The definition is satisfied.

Consider two modern definitions of the state by scholars in the Weberian tradition who study its earliest forms. Ronald Cohen: “The criterion most often used as a rough and ready feature to distinguish state from nonstate is that of the centralized governmental structure, operating usually at a level above local authorities. This central authority has a monopoly over legitimate coercive power, and it serves as a central point for tribute and revenue collection and redistribution.”[1175] The Commune has a centralized governmental structure because it has the only governmental structure, and it is the local authority. The fiscal policy of the Commune is something the Director Emeritus does not discuss, not even to indicate if the use of money will continue. But we are told that the Commune controls the distribution of consumer goods, which it must get from somewhere. Thus we have the collection and redistribution of wealth, whether or not it assumes a monetary form. Then there is the definition of Mogens Herman Hansen (the expert on the Athenian assembly): the state is “a central government in possession of the necessary means of coercion by which the legal order can be enforced in a territory over a population.”[1176] We have already found a “central government” and the “means of coercion” in the Commune. And we may infer the presence of a legal order from Bookchin’s otherwise irrelevant endorsement of written law (Chapter 10). Finally, the Commune of course has a bounded territory and its own population of citizen-units.

The only way for Bookchin to exonerate the Commune of the charge of statism is to tamper with the definition of the state. He’s had plenty of practice at that sort of thing. The Director Emeritus needs to add a requirement met by conventional states such as nation-states but not by the Commune. He adds two closely related, possibly identical features: professionalism and bureaucracy. In the most succinct formulation, “the state is a professional system of social coercion.”[1177] Elsewhere, in an obvious reference to the state, the Director Emeritus states that “the professional institutionalization of power and the monopolization of violence by distinct administrative, judicial, military, and police agencies occurred fairly early in history.”[1178] Furthermore, “statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of the entire regulative apparatus of the society in the form of legal and ordinance-making bodies, its governance of society by means of professional legislators, armies, police forces, bureaucracies, and the ancillary professionals who service its operations such as lawyers, educators, technicians, and the like.”[1179] This definition fails because states can and do fulfill functions which are not distinctly governmental, “proprietary functions” in the language of constitutional law. Mail delivery, trash collection and, in the Tennessee Valley, the production and sale of hydroelectric power “engage the state” as surely as keeping up the Army does, but they fall outside the final definition. The question is what are the distinctive state operations.

Max Weber provides more detailed criteria for a bureaucratic administrative staff: (1) a clearly defined sphere of competence subject to impersonal rules; (2) a rationally established hierarchy; (3) a regular system of appointment on the basis of free contract; (4) technical training as a regular requirement; (5) (frequently) fixed salaries, typically paid in money. These, though, are not the criteria for the state, but rather for the administrative aspect of the modern bureaucratic state; it is that type of state which has an administrative and legal order. In fact Weber listed these criteria to show what was absent from even the patrimonial state.[1180]

As Weber would agree, Bookchin’s requirements are far too exclusive. As Michael Taylor maintains, political specialization is not definitive, although it tends to develop together with the monopolization of violence.[1181] The chieftain, especially in a rank society, occupies a specialized political role, but in the absence of a monopoly of violence, the society is anarchic.[1182] The thoroughgoing professionalization of government is a relatively recent (and, some would say, incomplete) development in Western polities. In premodern America, public and private authority were conjoined to perform “undifferentiated leadership roles.” Leaders were selected for their social position in their communities, not for specialized expertize.[1183] Surely the absence of professional judges and legislators does not make a system anarchic. There were none of either in colonial America, where these positions were filled entirely by part-time amateurs. The U.S. Supreme Court was the first court in America on which all the judges were lawyers. Theirs were part-time jobs (as were those of Congressmen for many decades); in its first twelve years, the Supreme Court heard no more than 87 cases. The British House of Commons was composed mainly of amateurs at least until the 19^th, and I suspect until the 20^th century. The first professional police forces in England and America were not created until the 19^th century.[1184]

The requirement of professionalism may also not be exclusive enough. There is no reason why the Commune could not spawn a cadre of professional politicians, such as the Athenian rhetores and the leading Parisian sectionnaires. Brian Martin suggests that the delegates to federations are likely to turn pro:

Delegates are normally elected, and this leads to the familiar problems of representation. Certain individuals dominate. Participation in decision-making is unequal, with the delegates being heavily involved and others not. To the degree that decisions are actually made at higher levels, there is great potential for development of factions, vote trading and manipulation of the electorate.

This is where the delegate system is supposed to be different: if the delegates start to serve themselves rather than those they represent, they can be recalled. But in practice this is hard to achieve. Delegates tend to “harden” into formal representatives. Those chosen as delegates are likely to have much more experience and knowledge than the ordinary person. Once chosen, the delegates gain even more experience and knowledge, which can be presented as of high value to the voters. In other words, recalling the delegate will be at the cost of losing an experienced and influential person.[1185]

Other sources of oligarchy were discussed above (Chapter 16).

It may well be that for the Director Emeritus, professionalization and bureaucracy refer to the same thing — they form another of his redundant dyads, like “rule and domination.” If by professionalization he means government by a hierarchy of paid career functionaries, then it is just another name for bureaucracy. Assigned its distinct meaning, professionalization refers to the salience of professionals in large-scale organizations. A profession is signified by (1) a theoretical body of knowledge, (2) a set of professional norms, (3) careers supported by an association of colleagues, and (4) community recognition. Bureaucratic and professional cultures tend to clash.[1186] I doubt Bookchin has ever given a thought to any of this.

In a definition of the state, the involvement of professionals is an even more extraneous element than bureaucracy. State formation can proceed quite far without professionalization. The profession closest to the state is of course the legal profession, although the work of most lawyers is not, and never has been “ancillary” to the state as Bookchin assumes. In 17^th century America, lawyers played almost no role in government because they played almost no role anywhere, not even in the courtroom.[1187] Then their numbers and activities increased, but still almost entirely outside of government. What’s more, they were not professionals by modern standards because they often lacked technical training, there was no recognized body of professional norms (“legal ethics”), and there were no bar associations. In early national America, the Attorney General was the only Federal Government lawyer, and his was a part-time job, and he had no staff, no clerk, and no office.[1188] Lawyers were conspicuous in early legislatures, but only as part-time amateurs like everybody else. The role of lawyers qua lawyers in government was so negligible that it would be ridiculous to predicate a professionalized government upon their presence. Unless we are to characterize 19^th century America as anarchist, the professionalization requirement for a state must be dismissed.

It finally comes down to what counts as a state for anarchist purposes. Since the modern bureaucratic nation-state is the only kind of state now existing, that is the state which anarchists are accustomed to oppose. There is normally no reason to muse on the state’s essential versus incidental attributes, because contemporary states have them all. Anarchists like none of its attributes, at least when they belong to a state. But professionalization is only an annoyance compared to coercion, and the state would lose its power to annoy if not backed by coercion. It is difficult to imagine bureaucracy without coercion, but it is easy to imagine coercion without bureaucracy.

What anarchists fundamentally reject is concentrated coercive power.[1189] They accept, at most, only minimal coercive power, maximally dispersed. When the feudal levies of William the Conqueror undertook the scorched-earth “harrying of the north” of England, or an Athenian jury condemned Socrates, they were doing the sorts of things states do which make anarchists want to deprive them of the power to do anything. From the anarchist point of view, it makes no difference that William the Bastard had no professional army, or that Socrates’ judges and jurors were part-time amateurs chosen by lot. The soldiers and jurors nonetheless acted as agents of the state. They are the enemy.

It is really astounding that Bookchin does not bother to justify rule, much less majority rule, at all. Even Hobbes did that much! Except for theocrats, modern statists — even Hobbes — find justification in the consent of the governed. Even in the 17^th century, Sir Matthew Hale felt constrained to argue, implausibly, that the English Crown, though it originated in conquest, had gradually secured the “implied Consent” of the people to a “Pact or Convention” with it. Mainstream statist philosophers contend that there is at least a presumptive case for liberty, and therefore that coercion requires justification.[1190] Some of them admit that, since consent presupposes choice, hardly any modern citizens really consent, or ever had the opportunity to consent, to be governed. One of these philosophers, A. John Simmons, admits that this is the historic anarchist position.[1191] For the Director Emeritus, in contrast, the state is a given. For Oscar Wilde, a much more acute political philosopher, “democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.”[1192]

Having taken rule for granted, Bookchin reacts to rejections of majority rule with hurt feelings:

What is striking about these assertions is their highly pejorative language. Majorities, it would seem, neither decide nor debate: rather, they “rule” and “dictate,” and perhaps [?] command and coerce. But a free society would be one that not only permitted but fostered the fullest degree of dissent; its podiums at assemblies and its media would be open to the fullest expression of all views, and its institutions would be true forums of discussion. When such a society had to arrive at a decision that concerned the public welfare, it could hardly “dictate” to anyone. The minority who opposed a majority decision would have every opportunity to dissent, to work to reverse that decision through unimpaired discussion and advocacy.[1193]

The irrelevance is breathtaking. The Director Emeritus just changes the subject to one where he might have an argument — from majority rule to freedom of speech, as if the only majority coercion that anyone might possibly object to is the infringement of speech. Since words are the highest value for him, he assumes they are the highest value for everybody. But some people might have nothing to say to the assembly but “don’t tread on me!” I just might want to ignore the state, not dissent from it. Like most people, I might sometimes rather talk about something else than politics. Whether the assembly can or cannot “dictate” to anyone has nothing to do with the yammer leading up to its decisions. If “rule” is pejorative, there might be a reason for that.

The only thing Bookchin says that’s to the point is that “those who decide to enter the assembly doors, sit down, listen to discussions, and participate in them are, ethically as well as politically, qualified to participate in the decision-making process... Those who choose not to enter the doors (allowing for difficulties produced by adverse circumstances) certainly have a right to abjure the exercise of their citizenship, but by their own volition they have also disqualified themselves from decision-making. Nor do they have the ethical right to refuse to abide by the assembly’s decisions, since they could have influenced those decisions merely by attending the assembly.”[1194]

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! You are bound by assembly decisions if you participate and you are bound by them if you do not. Herbert Spencer remarked upon this “rather awkward doctrine” (as I have):

Suppose that the citizen is understood to have assented to everything his representative may do when he voted for him. But suppose he did not vote for him, and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected someone holding opposite views — what then? The reply will probably be that, by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority. And how if he did not vote at all? Why, then he cannot justly complain of any tax [or whatever], seeing that he made no protest against its imposition. So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted — whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter![1195]

What’s the basis of these supposed obligations? Those who choose not to participate have not consented to be governed, in fact, they have clearly communicated by conduct their refusal to be governed.

Even those who participate have not necessarily consented to abide by the decisions. One who votes against a measure obviously does not consent to it, or he would have voted the other way.[1196] Voting does not signify consent, in fact, expressing consent to be governed is rarely if ever why people vote. One might participate, for instance, precisely because these people are going to rule you whether you like it or not, so you might as well try to influence their rule — under duress. Duress does not signify consent, it negates it. So argued Lysander Spooner:

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; ... He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself of this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defense, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing.[1197]

Nor is there any reason why even truly voluntary participation is binding. I might have no more influence on who wins by entering the assembly doors and attending the meeting than I have entering a baseball stadium and attending the game. When I cast a losing vote, by definition my participation and my vote had no influence on the decision. In fact, it is the same if I cast a winning vote, unless mine was the deciding vote, which it rarely is. Thus, the normal situation under direct democracy is that nobody has consented to any governmental measure, not even if he voted, and not even if he voted with the majority.

Is consent to be ruled to be inferred from residence in the Commune? Not as to those residents who have made clear that they do not intend for their residence to confer consent. After all, you have to live somewhere, and if Bookchin has his way, Communes will occupy the whole world.[1198] Quite possibly my residence will have antedated the formation of the Commune. If my new neighbors later form an association, why am I suddenly subject to its rule? What if my anarchist neighbors and I post signs announcing a “Politics-Free Zone” or “Permanent Autonomous Zone” — does that mean that newcomers consent to our anarchy? I am not under any obligation just because a few other people have printed up some stationery. The residence argument proves too much. If residence confers my consent to be ruled by the Commune — even if I insist that it does not — then residence confers consent to be ruled by any government.[1199] The argument implies that the libertarian municipalists must obey our existing governments today, since they reside in their territories, although at some point their revolution will have to include illegal action including an unpredictable degree of violence, as the ex-Director admits.[1200] Therefore, if the residence argument is valid, Bookchin is legally and morally obligated to renounce libertarian municipalism.

As Bookchin admits, “scores of libertarians” — actually, all of them — “have made this objection to democracy time and again.” Exactly: anarchism is avowedly anti-democratic. This is Malatesta’s version of the objection:

We do not recognize the right of the majority to impose the law on the minority, even if the will of the majority in somewhat complicated issues could really be ascertained. The fact of having the majority on one’s side does not in any way prove that one must be right. Indeed, humanity has always advanced through the initiative and efforts of individuals and minorities, whereas the majority, by its very nature, is slow, conservative, submissive to superior force and to established privileges.[1201]

David Miller summarizes the position in an encyclopedia article on anarchism: “No anarchist would allow the minority to be forced to comply with the majority decision. To force compliance would be to reintroduce coercive authority, the hallmark of the state.”[1202] Albert Parsons put it more colorfully: “Whether government consists of one over the million, or the million over the one, an anarchist is opposed to the rule of majorities as well as minorities.”[1203] Majority rule comes down to might-makes-right.[1204]

Coercion is the question. The majority can do whatever it pleases — with itself. In a further irrelevance, Bookchin demands to know how to make decisions if not by majority — the standard statist query, as noted by Robert Paul Wolff.[1205] Not tarrying for an answer, the Director Emeritus launches into a long Thersitical tirade against consensus decision-making, as illustrated by what must be a personalistic, self-serving account of the Clamshell Alliance.[1206] Consensus must have been frustrating for someone with Bookchin’s will to power, but an argument against consensus is not an argument for majority rule. He hates it so much that he calls it “degrading, not ‘democratic’” (!) because it elevates quantity over quality.[1207] Plato or Nietzsche — I was about to write, “couldn’t have said it any better,” but, of course, they did.

There are other possibilities, including temporary inaction[1208] and temporary separation. Brian Martin advocates demarchy, the random selection from volunteers of the members of functional decision-making groups. Barbara Goodwin proposes selection by lottery for a wide range of positions besides juror.[1209] The decision-rule might not be that important in structures like those proposed by Vaclav Havel, which are “open, dynamic, and small” — and temporary.[1210] The best method is, “whenever possible a solution is to be found whereby majority and minority can each follow their own policy and combine only to avoid clashes and mutual interference” (Giovanni Baldelli).[1211]

Malatesta points out the obvious: “In our opinion, therefore, it is necessary that majority and minority should succeed in living together peaceably and profitably by mutual agreement and compromise, by the intelligent recognition of the practical necessities of communal life and of the usefulness of concessions which circumstances make necessary.” He also suggested arbitration, but expected it to be as occasional as formal voting. If separate options are impossible; if differences in opinion aren’t worth splitting up over; if “the duty of solidarity” argues for unity; then the minority should recede, but even then, only voluntarily.[1212] Still another possibility is taking turns. In contrast, “democracy, as usually understood, does not include such a notion.”[1213]

Ironically, majority rule was not really even the Athenian ideal, only the practice. The ideal was consensus; it is not clear if even a majority of issues was put to a vote. And as a matter of fact, according to the Director Emeritus, until the late 1960s, Vermont “town-meeting discussions favored a decent measure of public consensus”![1214]

Anarchists recognize consensus decision-making to be consistent with — not necessarily ordained by — their principles whereas majority rule is not. Some may be surprised to learn that it is also the only decision rule which is Pareto-optimal.[1215] The ex-Director’s ego aside, the utility of consensus depends on the social setting. If the Commune is as organic as promised, the citizens, in making decisions, will decide not merely on the merits of a proposal but give due consideration to the effects of a decision on their continuing relationships with one another.[1216] In small communities without much socioeconomic differentiation, relationships are commonly, using Max Gluckman’s term, “multiplex,” multipurpose — the guy next door is not just a neighbor, he is a fellow parishioner, an occasional hired hand, a creditor, perhaps a second cousin, etc.[1217] Thus the New England town meetings were not, in practice, direct democracies: in their “disdain for direct democracy,” they aspired to, and in large measure achieved, consensus. Debate and division were rare.[1218]

In a genuinely organic society, consensus need not be difficult to arrive at. Among the Basseri tribesmen of southern Iran, who are pastoral nomads, camps of 10–40 tents are for most of the year the primary communities. Every day, the all-important decision how far to move, and where, is made unanimously by the household heads. Annual assemblies of thousands of Montenegrin tribesmen made generally realistic political decisions by consensus.[1219] Undoubtedly the Clamshell Alliance professed a communal ideology, but in reality it was a single-purpose interest group whose members associated instrumentally for a relatively narrow political purpose. Consensus in such an organization is likely to become a formality.

Although the Director Emeritus has no argument for majority rule, he quotes the most famous argument for direct democracy, from Rousseau, “the true founder of modern reaction,” as Bakunin called him:

Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — is, in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free: but it is grossly mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.[1220]

Rousseau’s famous argument is no argument at all. It begs the question. Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be alienated. Why not? Because “it consists essentially of the general will, and will cannot be represented.” Why not? Never mind about “sovereignty,” whether will can be represented is precisely the question. To say that laws passed by representatives are void is a deduction from a conclusion, not an argument in its support. “General” means “universal,” unanimous, so, as Jeremy Bentham says, by this reasoning, all laws have always been void.[1221] If it means something else, as it seems to, “general will” must be “metaphorical language,” something Bookchin detests, because will is an attribute of individuals. J.P. Plamenatz points out that Rousseau treats as the general will the common good, which is not really will at all. Even the Director Emeritus hints that the concept is dubious.[1222]

Now you can make a case, in my opinion a very good one, that will will not be represented, for all the reasons discussed in my critique of delegation by direct democracies, arguing for the tendency of delegates to evolve into representatives. Even if they did not, though, Rousseau’s argument, such as it is, applies in both situations. If English subjects are only free when they vote for a representative, Communal citizens are only free when they vote for a delegate, or for a policy: “Once the election has been completed, they revert to a condition of slavery: they are nothing.” Delegates may have less opportunity to substitute their own wills than representatives, but the difference is only in degree, and there is no other difference. Both face a possible future reckoning if they betray their trust, but between now and the future, they are sovereign and the voters are slaves. Bookchin, who is absurdly lacking in a sense of the absurd, does not appreciate that Rousseau is presenting an argument ad absurdem against direct democracy, as is quite obvious from his endorsement of elective aristocracy elsewhere in the same essay. Democracy, for him, is simply impossible:

If we take the term in the strict sense, there never has been a real democracy, and there never will be. It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed. It is unimaginable that the people should remain continually assembled to devote their time to public affairs, and it is clear that they cannot set up commissions for that purpose without the form of administration being changed.[1223]

Not only does Rousseau’s argument against representation also refute delegation, it refutes direct democracy too (if it refutes anything). Just as laws which “the People” have not ratified in person are null and void, laws which people have not ratified in person are null and void. The latter is, in fact, the better argument, because identifiable people exist in the same straightforward way that tables and chairs exist; but if the People means something else than the individual people, it is some sort of metaphysical if not mystical intellectual construct requiring independent demonstration. Only the individual can consent to be governed because, as anarchists contend, no amount of expatiation upon man’s social nature alters the reality that the individual is real in a way that an abstraction like society is not.[1224] William Godwin saw the implications of Rousseau’s position:

If government be founded in the consent of the people, then it can have no power over any individual by whom that consent is refused. If a tacit consent be not sufficient, still less can I be deemed to have consented to a measure upon which I put an express negative. This immediately follows from the observations of Rousseau. If the people, or the individuals of which 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 himself is a member.[1225]

If Rousseau is right, no one can rightfully submit to majority rule even if he wants to. Because he never understood Rousseau’s argument in the first place, recourse to Rousseau has left Bookchin worse off than before.

Consider the arguments against democracy.

1. The majority isn’t always right. As Thoreau, Bakunin, Tucker, Malatesta and Goldman said, democracy does not assure correct decisions. There’s no evidence for the claim, heard since Aristotle, that a multiplicity of decision-makers makes better decisions. Clearly corporations, unions, parties, families, and many other voluntary associations don’t think so: in the private sector, oligarchy is the norm. It is even mathematically demonstrable (but not by me) that majority decision-making generates inefficient, socially wasteful, more or less self-defeating decisions.[1226] Besides, why should anyone accept a decision he knows his wrong?

2. Democracy does not, as is sometimes promised, give everyone the right to influence the decisions affecting him, because a person who voted on the losing side had no influence on that decision. As Thoreau says, “a minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then.”[1227] Hobbes anticipated him: “And if the Representative consist of many men, the voyce of the greater number, must be considered the voyce of them all. For if the lesser number pronounce (for example) in the Negative, there will be Negatives more than enough to destroy the Affirmatives; and thereby the excesse of Negatives, standing uncontradicted, are the onely voyce the Representative hath.”[1228] “The numerical majority,” wrote John C. Calhoun, “is as truly a single power — and excludes the negative as completely as the absolute government of one or a few.”[1229]

3. Democracy, especially in small constituencies, lends itself to the disempowerment of permanent minorities, who occupy the same position in the democracy as they would in a despotism. Shifting majorities only make it less likely, not unlikely, for some group to be always opposed to the winning gang.[1230] In the American democracy, it has long been well-known, even to the Supreme Court in 1938, that “discrete and insular minorities” are at a political disadvantage beyond the mere fact (which is disadvantage enough) that they are minorities. And the smaller the constituency, the more likely that many interests may be represented “by numbers so small as to be less than the minimum necessary for defense of those interests in any setting.” [1231]

4. Majority rule ignores the urgency of preferences. Preference varies in intensity, but it is not at all clear that consent varies in intensity. The vote of a person who has only a slight preference for a man or measure counts the same as the vote of someone passionately opposed: “A majority with slight preferences one way may outvote almost as many strong preferences the other way.” There could even be, as noted, a permanently frustrated minority, which is a source of instability. To put it another way, the opportunity to influence a decision is not proportionate to one’s legitimate interest in the outcome.[1232] Democratic theorists usually ignore the issue or, like John Rawls, wave it away by dogmatizing that “this criticism rests upon the mistaken view that the intensity of desire is a relevant consideration in enacting legislation.” His Holiness notwithstanding, “the intensity question is absolutely vital to the stability of democratic systems.” — and a question to which pure majoritarian democracy has no answer.[1233]

   Rousseau at least addressed a related issue: he thought that “the more grave and important the questions discussed, the nearer should the opinion that is to prevail approach unanimity.”[1234] But there is no way in which a priori to decide the importance of future questions. The question how important the question is has to be decided first, and the majority may well rule a question to be unimportant to make sure it will be answered as the majority wishes: “If the participants disagree on the voting rules, they may first have to vote on these rules. But they may disagree on how to vote on the voting rules, which may make voting impossible as the decision on how to vote is pushed further and further back.” Elsewhere in the same essay, Rousseau inconsistently asserts that “it is consequently against the nature of the body politic for a Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe.” By definition the sovereign power is absolute.[1235]

5. Collective all-or-nothing balloting is irrational. A decision made on a momentous matter by a single vote is as valid as a unanimous vote on a trifle. That extreme rarity, the one time one’s vote makes a difference, is the very same situation — monarchy, autocracy, one-man rule — that democracy is supposed to be an improvement on!

6. Majority rule is not usually even what it purports to be; it rarely means literally the majority of the citizens.[1236] Usually the majority of a majority means plurality rule,[1237] in other words, the rule of the momentarily largest minority, which might be rather small. As Rousseau, champion of direct democracy, stated, “however small any State may be, civil societies are always too populous to be under the immediate government of all their members.”[1238]

7. Where voting is by electoral districts, outcomes are arbitrary because the boundaries of the districts determine the composition of their electorates. Redraw the boundaries and today’s majority may become tomorrow’s minority and vise versa, although no one has changed his mind about any policy. In a democracy, “the definition of the constituency within which the count is taken is a matter of primary importance,” but democratic theory is unable to say who should be included in an electorate.[1239] The smaller and more numerous the districts are, the greater the arbitrariness of majority rule. Thus Bookchin’s Communes are extremely arbitrary. They may even fall prey to the absurdity of neighborhood irredentism.

8. Then there is the Voter’s Paradox, a technical but very real contradiction in democracy discovered by Condorcet before the French Revolution. In every situation where two or more voters choose from three or more alternatives, if the voters choose consistently, the majority preference may be determined solely by the order in which the alternatives are voted on. It can happen that A is preferred to B, B is preferred to C, yet C is preferred to A![1240] This is no mere theoretical possibility: it has happened in real votes. There are, in fact, a number of these voting paradoxes. Under ideal conditions, majority rule almost always produces these cyclical preference orders. In fact, “the various equilibrium conditions for majority rule are incompatible with even a very modest degree of heterogeneity of tastes, and for most purposes are not significantly less restrictive than the extreme condition of complete unanimity of individual preferences.”[1241] What that means is that whoever controls the agenda controls the vote, or, at least, “that making agendas seems just about as significant as actually passing legislation.”[1242] Bookchin never talks about this. It is fitting that a 19^th century mathematician who wrote on the phenomenon he called cyclical majorities also wrote under the name Lewis Carroll.[1243] He came by his sense of the absurd honestly.

9. Another well-known method for thwarting majority rule with voting is logrolling. It represents an exchange of votes between factions. Each group votes for the other group’s measure, a measure which would otherwise be defeated because each group is in the minority. (Note that this is not a compromise because the measures are unrelated.)[1244] In a sense, logrolling facilitates some accommodation of the urgency of preferences, since a faction only trades its votes for votes it values more highly, but it does so through bribery and to the detriment of deliberative democracy. And those whose votes are unnecessary may be excluded from the logrolling process.[1245] The interstate highway system in Bookchin’s hallowed Switzerland was built by explicit logrolling among cantons,[1246] so the practice occurs in direct as well as representative democracies.

10. In the unlikely event a legislative body eschews logrolling, it will probably succumb to gridlock. Take the ex-Director’s favorite example, the building of a road. If three groups want a road but not in their back yards, they will gang up to scotch the project.[1247] That is an even worse outcome than with logrolling, where at least the road gets built somewhere.

11. Democracy, especially direct democracy, promotes disharmonious, antisocial attitudes. The psychology of the ekklesia (assembly) is the psychology of the agora (marketplace): “Voters and customers are essentially the same people. Mr. Smith buys and votes; he is the same man in the supermarket and the voting booth.”[1248] Capitalism and democracy rose together as the goals of the same class, the bourgeoisie, which made a common world of selfish individualism — an arena of competition, not a field of cooperation. Furthermore, democracy, like litigation, is an adversarial decision method: “Majority rule belongs to a combat theory of politics. It is a contest between opposing forces, and the outcome is victory for one side and defeat for the other.” Indeed, in one aspect, as Georg Simmel noticed, majority rule is really the substituted equivalent of force. Literally having to face an opponent publicly may provoke aggression, anger and competitive feelings.[1249] In a winner-take-all system there is no incentive to compensate or conciliate defeated minorities, who have been told, in effect, that not only do they not get their way, they are wrong. The unaccountable majority is arrogant; the defeated minority is resentful.[1250] Coercive voting promotes polarization and hardens positions; deliberation “can bring differences to the surface, widening rather than narrowing them.”[1251] These consequences, muted in systems of large-scale, secret voting in not-too-frequent elections, are accentuated by the Communal combination of very small electorates, extremely frequent elections, and public voting. Citizens will take their animosities and ulcers home with them and out into everyday life. Elections are undesirable everywhere, but nowhere would they be more destructive of community than in the ex-Director’s little face-to-face Communes.

12. Even where voting is voluntary, elections either coerce nonvoters or deny them equality. The validity of this apparent paradox is illustrated by an anecdote about elections in Prussia. Bismarck toyed with the idea of counting all nonvoters as voting for the government candidates.[1252] Outrageous? Is it all that different from the elections we have now? In effect, the majority votes the proxies of the nonvoters. The nonvoter cannot oppose the system without becoming a part of what he is opposed to. There can be no equality for anarchists, for instance, in a democracy.

13. Another source of majority irresponsibility is the felt frivolity of voting, its element of chance and arbitrariness. As Thoreau (quoted by Emma Goldman) put it, “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checquers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”[1253] The popularity of student government and Model UN confirms that there is a ludic element to deliberative decision-making which is independent of consequences. Here is another interest the delegates share with each other, but not with their constituents. Voting is a contest umpired by the majority with sometimes high stakes. To the extent that the assembled citizens are playing games with each other, that winning for its own sake (or for how you play the game, for that matter) is any part of their motivation, the quality of decision-making is reduced still further and the humiliation of submission to majority rule is that much deepened.

14. To these objections, generic to democracy, direct democracy adds its special defects. One which is not peculiar to direct democracy but is carried to extremes there is malapportionment or, when it is intentional, gerrymandering. Because Bookchin imagines the building blocks of society to be “organic” neighborhoods and so forth, these face-to-face units will not be of equal population. That Bookchin emphatically prioritizes the integrity of these units over one-man, one-vote is apparent from his discussion of the lower house of the Vermont legislature. Until the 1960s, legislators were elected from townships (effectively, he claims, from municipalities), not from electoral districts based on population. This meant that legislators represented unequal numbers of constituents and, in particular, that rural populations were overrepresented, but that’s okay, “politics was conducted in a more organic fashion than it is today.” The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr (1962) eliminated the system, mandating equality. Bookchin prefers the old system.[1254]

15. If the face-to-face units were autarchic, it would be nobody’s business but theirs how many people they included. But their delegates to the level of the municipal council and beyond will speak for more or less citizens than others but cast equal votes. In a federal system of units of unequal population, voting equality for the units means voting inequality for individuals. Bookchin doesn’t care, but as Mencken wrote, “it must be plain that a community whose votes, man for man, count for only half as much as the votes of another community is one in which half of the citizens are, to every practical intent, unable to vote at all.”[1255] The single-member, simple-plurality system evidently contemplated by the Director Emeritus is the least proportionate of all voting systems.[1256] The inequality will be compounded at every higher level. In claiming that the entire confederal system produces majority decisions, the Director Emeritus affirms the impossible as an article of faith.[1257]

16. Direct democracy, to an even greater degree than representative democracy, encourages emotional, irrational decision-making. The face-to-face context engenders strong interpersonal psychological influences which are, at best, extraneous to decision-making on the merits. The crowd is susceptible to orators and stars, and intolerant of contradiction.[1258] The speakers, in the limited time allotted to them, sacrifice reasoning to persuasion whenever they have to choose. As Hobbes wrote, the speakers begin not from true principles but from “commonly accepted opinions, which are for the most part usually false, and they do not try to make their discourse correspond to the nature of things but to the passions of men’s hearts. The result is that votes are cast not on the basis of correct reasoning but on emotional impulse.”[1259] Dissenters feel intimidated, as they were, for instance, when the Athenian assembly voted for the Sicilian expedition: “The result of this excessive enthusiasm of the majority was that the few who were actually opposed to the expedition were afraid of being thought unpatriotic if they voted against it, and therefore kept quiet” (Thucydides).[1260] Democracy is the same today, as I am reminded when I notice I am writing this passage in the early hours of September 11, 2002.

17. A specific, experimentally validated emotional influence vitiating democracy is group pressure to conform. It was strikingly demonstrated in a famous experiment by Solomon Asch. Each of seven to nine subjects was asked to compare a series of lines and in each case identify the two that were equal in length. For each comparison it was obvious, even extremely obvious, which lines matched — but time after time every member of the group gave the same wrong answer except the only subject who was unaware of the real purpose of the experiment. In these circumstances, fifty-eight percent of the test subjects changed their answer to agree with the unamimous majority. Even when subjects were each given one ally, thirteen percent of the subjects agreed with the group instead of the evidence of their senses.[1261] Some of the conformists actually changed their perceptions, but most simply decided that the group must be right, no matter how strong was the evidence that it was wrong. You might say the conformists emphatically prioritized the social over the individual.

18. Another inherent flaw in direct democracy, remarked upon by Hegel and in part a consequence of the previous one, is the inconstancy of policy. This covers really two arguments against democracy. What the assembly does at one meeting it may undo at the next, whether because citizens have changed their minds or because a different mix of people shows up. This often happened at Athens. For example, the assembly voted to give the Mytilenians, whose revolt had been crushed, the Melian treatment: death for the men, slavery for the women and children. The judgment was reversed the next day, and so only the Mytilenians held mainly responsible — over 1,000 of them — were executed.[1262]

It is bad enough if the composition of the assembly fluctuates randomly or because of politically extraneous factors, as the weather, for instance, influences American election outcomes by influencing voter turnout[1263] (higher proportions of Democrats turn out in good weather). But it might well turn on deliberate mobilization by a dissatisfied faction. This, too, happened in Athens. The general Nicias, addressing the assembly in opposition to the proposed Sicilian expedition, stated: “It is with real alarm that I see this young man’s [Alcibiades’] party sitting at his side in this assembly all called in to support him, and I, on my side, call for the support of the older men among you.” A line in Aristophanes also attests to bloc voting in the assembly.[1264] Hobbes observed that “when the votes are sufficiently close for the defeated to have hopes of winning a majority at a subsequent meeting if a few men swing round to their way of thinking, their leaders get them all together, and they hold a private discussion on how to revoke the measure that has just been passed. They resolve among themselves to attend the next meeting in large numbers and to be there first; they arrange what each should say and in what order, so that the question may be brought up again, and the decision that was made when their opponents there in strength may be reversed when they fail to show.”[1265]

Hobbes exactly describes how Samuel Adams manipulated another assembly, the Boston town meeting, at prior private meetings of his faction at the Caucus Club: “Caucusing involved the widest prevision of problems that might arise and the narrowest choice of response to each possibility; who would speak to any issue, and what he would say; with the clubmen’s general consent guaranteed, ahead of time, to both choice of speaker and what the speaker’s message would be.” Cousin John Adams was astonished, after many years of attending town meetings, to learn of this: “There they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator who puts questions to the vote regularly, and selectmen, assessors, wardens, fire wards, and representatives are regularly chosen before they are chosen by the town.”[1266] Exactly the same methods of manipulation were practiced in the Athenian assembly.[1267] Characterizing the Adams caucus as a political machine is not original to me. Direct democracy is well suited to machine politics: “The powerful town meeting named the many municipal officials, determined taxes and assessments, and adopted public service projects that were a rich source of jobs and economic largesse. For years the original Caucus and its allies in the Merchants Club had acted as the unofficial directing body of the town meeting in which Caucus stalwart Sam Adams played a key role.”[1268] This is democracy in action.

What Hobbes is talking about, as he proceeds to say, is faction, which he defines as “a sort of effort and hard work, which they use to fashion people.”[1269] His account complements James Madison’s statement, previously quoted, that direct democracy promotes factionalism. Bookchin professes to loathe political parties, and he takes for granted their absence from the Commune. Why? An organization of organizers of votes serves a purpose (its own) in any legislature. Parties could play central roles in a direct democracy, maybe greater roles than in representative democracy.[1270] Almost every Commune will commence operations with at least one faction: the Organization. Further factions may form by splits within the Organization or may arise outside of and opposed to it. Bookchin himself says so at one point.[1271] But the Organization will enjoy a tremendous home court advantage. Only the naïve will simply walk into the assembly with a proposal. The more sophisticated will first approach Organization rhetores to secure their support and, if possible, their sponsorship, just as in the 20^th century people took their problems first to the urban political machines like Tammany Hall or the Daley machine in Chicago.[1272] The assembly will be the vanguard party’s toga party.

Only regular high turnouts would minimize these arbitrary or manipulated reversals, since if most citizens attend every meeting, most of them who attend one meeting will attend another. But the Director Emeritus has repeatedly assured us of normally low turnouts. The polar possibilities are that all the same people, or all different people, attend the next meeting. If it is all the same people, it is de facto oligarchy. If it is all different people, it is chaos, the only kind of “anarchy” consistent with direct democracy. As previously explained, the outcome will probably be closer — much closer — to oligarchy.

In conclusion, majority rule is as arbitrary as random decision, but not nearly as fair.[1273] For a voter, the only diference between the lottery and an election is that he might win the lottery. Better pure chance than “pure democracy, or the immediate autocracy of the people,” as Joel Barlow described it.[1274] A champion of Swiss direct democracy admits: “Corruption, factionalization, arbitrariness, violence, disregard for law, and an obdurate conservatism that opposed all social and economic progress were pathologies to some extent endemic to the pure democratic life form.”[1275]

Democracy produces a particular human type, Democratic Man (and he usually is a man). He is easy to spot among American politicians and among the organizers of anarchist federations. He is a gregarious bully and an elitist demagogue. He talks too much. He hasn’t got a real life and doesn’t know what he’s missing. He politicizes everything except those finer things whose existence he cannot imagine. He has wheels in his head. His very psychic processes, such as perception and memory, are the distorted and distorting instruments of his will to power. Thus he might remember his childhood as peopled by obsessives like himself — halcyon days when, as Bookchin fantasizes, “everyone lived on a rich diet of public lectures and meetings.”[1276] The principle difference between Democratic Man and a schizophrenic is that the former’s fantasies exhibit less beauty and ingenuity. He’s often a geek and always a freak. He may be a likable fellow (there are conspicuous exceptions) if you like used-car salesmen, but he gets cross when crossed. Another kind of person may admit that his adversary, too, is honest, even that he might sometimes be right, but — writes Mencken — “such an attitude is palpably impossible to a democrat. His distinguishing mark is the fact that he always attacks his opponents, not only with all arms, but also with snorts and objurgations — that he is always filled with moral indignation — that he is incapable of imagining honor in an antagonist, and hence incapable of honor himself. “[1277]

And yet one finds statements that anarchism is democracy, and not only from the likes of Bookchin. For this we have mainly to thank, as for too much else, the conservative anarchist publishers. Ignorant anarchists may even believe, because it’s been droned into them, that Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are anarchists — not only that, they are said to be influential anarchists. But to his larger (if not very much larger) progressive public, Chomsky keeps his anarchism a secret — an easy secret to keep, since one would never suspect it from hearing his speeches or reading his books of the last 45 years. As an anarchist, Chomsky is a great linguist. But as George Woodcock wrote, “No conception of anarchism is further from the truth than that which regards it as an extreme form of democracy.” With all due respect to Benjamin Tucker, an anarchist is not “an unterrified Jeffersonian democrat.”[1278] Careless flourishes like these make aberrations like Bookchin and Chomsky possible.

Nearly all anarchists live under democratic regimes. They need not leave for the Third World to find a state to smash — and when they find one there, chances are that Noam Chomsky supports it. Are you anti-imperialist? The Imperium is under your feet, from sea to shining sea. The world’s only superpower is a democracy. Its democracy is one source of its strength. Democracy is no threat to the status quo anywhere as it is the ideology of the status quo everywhere. As John Held says, “nearly everyone today professes to be a democrat.”[1279] And of all these professors, anarchists are the least likely to be believed. Why should a small misunderstood movement try to lose itself in the crowd? Especially if the crowd’s echoes of the hegemonic democratic ideology tend to be faint: “Has there ever been so much incessant yammer about democracy, and less real interest in it?” (John Zerzan). I still believe that devotion to democracy is a mile wide and an inch deep, “that after all these years a stifled and suffering populace is weary of the democratic lie.”[1280]

And don’t tell me that the United States, the defining democracy of modern times, is not a “real” democracy. You scoff when the free-market anarchists say that what we have isn’t “real” capitalism since a few economic regulations remain in place. How much more real does capitalism have to be? How much more real does democracy have to be? If direct democracy is different, as often as not the difference is for the worse. Besides, examination of the finest specimens of direct democracy in Murray Bookchin’s bestiary confirms, as I have said before, that “there is no reason to believe that there has ever been an urban, purely direct democracy or even a reasonable approximation of one. Every known instance has involved a considerable admixture of representative democracy which sooner or later usually subordinated direct democracy where it didn’t eliminate it altogether.”[1281] The critic was certainly right[1282] who noticed before the Director Emeritus did that “a close analysis of the social ecology position is compatible with the democratization and decentralization of the state.”

Bookchin identifies his ideology as a form of Anarcho-Communism. The Anarcho- part we have seen to be bogus. The -Communism claim is also untenable.

The basis of Bookchin’s economics is municipal ownership of the means of production:

What we would try to achieve instead [of private or state ownership] is a municipalized economy; one in which the citizens’ assembly in each community would control economic life and, through city councils and confederations, decide on economic policy for an entire region. Confederal councils would help work out how best to coordinate the production and distribution of economic life that extends beyond the confines of a given community and, with the consent of the overall majority of the population in a confederal network, see to it that goods and are produced and distributed according to the needs of the citizens in the confederation.

Production and distribution would be administered merely as practical matters, based on an ethics of “from each according to ability, and to each according to need,” the ethic integral to communism. The community would formulate the distribution of goods according to what is available and what individuals and families require.[1283]

Before wading into this morass, notice what it is not. It is not political economy, “which deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with production relations which are established among people in the process of production.”[1284] There is something said here about ownership and distribution, but nothing about social relations, production relations. To put it another way, there is nothing about work. As John Zerzan earned the ex-Director’s ire by saying, “Nowhere does he find fault with the most fundamental dimension of modern living, that of wage-labor and the commodity.”[1285] Municipal ownership — the Victorians called it “gaslight socialism” — does no more to transform social roles in the production process than state ownership does. In his essay “Communism,” William Morris spoke of the results of gaslight socialism — among them that “industries may be worked by municipalities for the benefit of both producers and consumers” — as desirable reforms, “but without having made any progress on the direct road to Communism.”[1286]

For the worker, municipal ownership is consistent with wage-labor, authoritarian management, long hours, time-discipline, and arduous toil. For the employee of the Commune, it will still be true “that the object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.”[1287] It will still be true “that labor is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free physical and mental energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence the worker feels himself when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself.”[1288] The worker is still alienated in the process and from the product of his labor. Making alienation more concrete, Bookchin finally reveals what that business of negative vs. positive freedom is really about: “Hence, ‘freedom’ is still conceived as freedom from labor, not freedom for work.”[1289]

Even if the promise of free distribution is kept, only consumption is communized. Communism involves the transformation of work into free, creative activity, “the transformation of consciousness and reality on every level, historical and everyday, conscious and unconscious.”[1290] Far from realizing themselves through unalienated labor, municipal employes are merely “hands”: “Popular assemblies are the minds of a free society; the administrators of their policies are the hands.”[1291] Bookchin wrote that! But, as noted in discussing his favorite example, the building of a road (Chapter — ), after all the policymaking, coordination, administration, etc., it still remains for somebody else to do the actual work.

But even the promise of free distribution according to the famous formula is forsworn immediately. “The community” would distribute goods according to what various people are deemed by others to “require,” not what they want. If the individual is not free to determine his own requirements, the arrangement is rationing, not free communism. In fact, he is worse off than under capitalism, since now he cannot by any effort of his own increase his share of the social product. If he wants more, he will have to beg for it like a Dickens urchin — “Please, sir, can I have some more?” “The distributing board of equity,” says Stirner, “lets me have only what the sense of equity, its loving care for all prescribes”: collective wealth is as much a check to the individual as the private wealth of others. Communism (so conceived), “loudly as it always attacks the ‘state,’ what it intends is itself again a state, a status, a condition hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me.”[1292] Remarkably, Marx too rejected this crude communism as not the negation but the generalization and completion of private property, a community of labor and an equality of wages paid by “the community as universal capitalist.”[1293]

Actually, in addition to the community as universal capitalist, the Director Emeritus contemplates coexistence with private capitalists: “Nor does libertarian municipalism intend to eliminate private association as such [sic] — without the familial and economic aspects of life, human existence would be impossible in any society.”[1294] To say that the economic aspects of life will remain in the hands of private associations (i.e., corporations) of course completely contradicts municipal control of economic decision-making. It’s easy to see that private business would control more and more of the economy. The Commune by free distribution of necessities would be paying part of the wage bill of business, which could then outbid the Commune for employes. The upshot would be what we have now: a mixed economy of private and state capital. Municipalization would have to take place gradually “in such a way as not to infringe on the proprietary rights of small retail outlets, service establishments, artisan shops, small farms, local manufacturing enterprises, and the like”[1295] — in other words, no municipalization of the only enterprises operating on a small enough scale for municipalization to be feasible.

I don’t deny that anarchist explications of communism also tend to be brief, infrequent and vague. I am not faulting Bookchin for not improving on them. I am faulting him for explications which, in addition to being brief and infrequent, are not vague but rather all too distinct in repudiating such principles of communism as are clear. Luigi Galleani, an anarcho-communist of unimpeachable orthodoxy, agreed that communism was about the unmediated satisfaction of needs. But he pointed out that needs were not only variable among individuals, with the satisfaction of each level of needs starting with “the urgency of purely animal, purely physiological needs,” new levels of newly possible experiences engender more complicated and extensive needs, and bring more capacities into play, in a continuing series. From these not terribly controversial psychological assumptions Galleani infers that only the individual can judge his own needs: “Since these needs vary, not only according to time and place, but also according to the temperament, disposition and development of each individual, it is clear that only he or she who experiences and feels them is in a position to appreciate them and to measure adequately the satisfaction they may give.”[1296]

Thus communism is the final fulfillment of individualism[1297] and the final confounding of Bookchin’s mystified straw-man ideology of abstract individualism. It turns out that after all the hand-waving about the abstract, sovereign, bourgeois, selfish, blah blah blah individual, after the fog lifts, the concrete, real individual still stands. He — each one of her — is the measure of all value, for all value is relative to him and so unique to her. The apparent contradiction between individualism and communism rests on a misunderstanding of both.[1298] Subjectivity is also objective: the individual really is subjective. It is nonsense to speak of “emphatically prioritizing the social over the individual,” as Bookchin does.[1299] You may as well speak of prioritizing the chicken over the egg. Anarchy is a “method of individualization.”[1300] It aims to combine the greatest individual development with the greatest communal unity.[1301]

The Director Emeritus has been downplaying and disparaging the working class since 1947. The class is bourgeoisified.[1302] “The classical industrial proletariat” has waned in numbers, class consciousness and political consciousness.[1303] Workers qua workers are not driven to attack hierarchic society.[1304] For revolutionary purposes, the proletariat is passe. Transclass political movements are where the action is: “This amounts to saying that workers must see themselves as human beings, not as class beings.”[1305] So sure is Bookchin of this that he denied any class content to the French events of 1968, although their major feature by far was the general strike and the factory occupations (see Appendix).[1306]

Now I am well-known as a critic of productivism and workerism. I reject class-based social systems like syndicalism and council communism because they caricature class society without abolishing the social division of labor on which it rests. They don’t abolish the commodity form, they only veil it. I reject attempts to reduce the critique of civilization to obsolete, narrow class analyzes in an epoch when the sources and manifestations of alienation and its rejoinder, resistance, pervade all institutions of society, not just economic institutions which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from political and ideological institutions anyway. But so long as ours is (among other things) a class society, class struggle has to be part, though not a privileged part, of revolutionary struggle. Workers who want to be free have no choice but to resist — to employ the ex-Director’s pig Latin — qua workers. Everyone, whatever his current relation to the mode of production (or lack thereof), has a stake in that struggle.

It is easy enough, looking down from the lectern, to tell workers “to see themselves as human beings, not as class beings; as creative personalities, not as ‘proletarians’; as self-affirming individuals, not as ‘masses.’” It is easy enough, looking down from the Acropolis, to tell workers to check their class interests at the door of the assembly and enter “without being burdened by their occupational status.”[1307] As if they could unburden themselves of their class status without abolishing it! “The primacy given to economics, an emphasis uniquely characteristic of a market-economy mentality — and most evident, ironically, in socialist and syndicalist ideologies” is not a perverse mistake. It reflects a reality, the primacy of the market economy. That may not be clear to someone who’s been saying for years that only now, perhaps, do we have a fully capitalist economy.[1308]

To explain away the historic failure of even the highest forms of Communalism, Bookchin blames exogenous factors:

We cannot interpret the decline of the Athenian Ecclesia, the ultimate failure of the Parisian sections, and the waning of the New England town meetings as denying the popular assembly’s feasibility for a future society. These forms of direct democracy were riddled by class conflicts and opposing social interests; they were not institutions free of hierarchy, domination, and egotism.[1309]

In other words, democratic forms are compatible with hierarchy, domination and egotism. Thus they are not the means for overcoming hierarchy, domination and egotism. Rather, hierarchy domination and egotism are the means for overcoming direct democracy. Revolution is not about persuading people to ignore their interests, it is about the transformation and satisfaction of their interests. In a society otherwise organized on the basis of self-interest, politics will be based on self-interest, regardless of the form of government. Capitalism has flourished under classical liberalism, corporate liberalism, fascism and Marxism, under ruling ideologies of egotism and under ruling ideologies of sacrifice. It certainly flourished under what Bookchin considers direct democracy, such as the Hanseatic League (whose whole purpose was trade) and the commerciallized New England towns in the 18^th century.

The Director Emeritus has made clear that the Commune accepts the fundamental institutions of capitalism, such as wage-labor and the market, rejecting little more than the ethos of egotism. It was an historic if limited achievement when proletarian interests, when proletarian “egotism” was accorded a measure of legitimacy. Now the public philosophy will condemn proletarian selfishness. The only legitimate interest is the public interest, which — since “public” is an abstraction — refers to the state. Freedom is now “positive” — freedom to serve the state (and freedom to work). And the state, according to Bookchin, is an end in itself.[1310]