Chapter 18. The Organization of Power

After ignoring the topic since 1971, the Director Emeritus abruptly places the organization question on the agenda:

Those who wish to overthrow this vast system will require the most careful strategic judgment, the most profound theoretical understanding, and the most dedicated and persistent organized revolutionary groups to even shake the deeply entrenched bourgeois social order. They will need nothing less than a revolutionary socialist movement, a well-organized and institutionalized endeavor led by knowledgeable and resolute people who will foment mass resistance and revolution, advance a coherent program, and unite their groups into a visible and identifiable confederation.[1311]

As recently as Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995), Bookchin wrote nothing about revolutionary organization, not even as a virtue of “The Left That Was.” In Janet Biehl’s Politics of Social Ecology (1997) the revolutionary agent is “the movement,” and the only organizations for revolutionaries to work in are municipal shadow institutions. Now the Director Emeritus calls for a vanguard Organization (or Organizations) which “would consist of interlinked affinity groups that would play a leading role in democratic popular assemblies in towns, neighborhoods, and cities.”[1312] The throwaway, “affinity groups,” is just a sop to the anarchists. Bookchin “perpetuates all the incompatibilities of a mythic ‘libertarian socialism’ that sprinkles anarchist concepts of decentralized organization with Social Democratic concepts of mass political parties” — Bookchin is talking about Andre Gorz but the words suit the ex-Director exactly.[1313] The confederal structure is a façade: “Into all parties,” writes Michels, “there insinuates itself that indirect electoral system which in public life the democratic parties fight with all possible vigor”[1314] (except that Bookchin’s party is consistently undemocratic in promoting indirect elections in government as well).

Bookchin’s proposed means of overthrowing hierarchy are patently hierarchical. Anarchists, he declaims, require “an organization ready and able to play a significant role in moving great masses of workers.” “A vanguard is necessary” to lead, and the masses are to follow, as always. Inevitably the more advanced and knowledgeable comrades lead the others, therefore these relations should be institutionalized, with the advanced militants forming an “organized leadership.” This eminently conservative (and neo-Platformist) idea was espoused by John Adams, who thought the “natural aristocracy” should be localized in the second chamber of the legislature. His friend Thomas Jefferson knew better: “I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.”[1315]

The Director Emeritus also believes that the Organization should be centralized as much as necessary.[1316] Bookchin might protest that he envisions something more reciprocal and dialectical than an organized minority dominating a disorganized majority, but on his own account, dialectics is not mere reciprocity, “some things are in fact very significantly more determining than others.” The Organization is very significantly more determining than the masses — otherwise, what is the Organization for? Obviously an organized caucus of the best and the brightest makes a mockery of Bookchin’s ascription of democracy to the face-to-face urban assembly. As Michels observed with respect to popular assemblies, “while this system limits the extension of the principle of delegation, it fails to provide any guarantee against the formation of an oligarchical camerilla.”[1317]

Bookchin has forgotten the evolutionary logic of Leninism. First an organized minority forms to lead the masses based on its advanced theory and superior knowledge. But within the Organization, a leadership for the leaders forms, again based on its even more advanced theory and even greater knowledge: “Even in those groups which want to escape the social givens,” according to Jacques Camatte, “because of unequal command of theory, the gang is even more hierarchic than the general society.”[1318] The process may unfold until the most advanced and knowledgeable leader (or so it is prudent for the lesser leaders to regard him) rests atop the hierarchy as the only unled leader. He might be called the Chairman, or the General Secretary, the Prime Mover, the Pope, the Director Emeritus, or just the Leader. He is the only member of the Organization and — after the Revolution — the only member of society who acts without being acted on. Such a person is said to exercise power.

It used to be that when his critics associated the Director Emeritus with such Leninist notions as the vanguard, the masses, the minimal and maximal programs, dual power, the transitional program, and democratic centralism,[1319] he exploded in righteous indignation. Now it appears that his critics knew where he was headed before he did. You can mark the reversal by noting the words he uses now that he formerly placed in contemptuous quotation marks: “leaders,” “masses,” “vanguards,” “transitional programs,” “left,” “liberate,” “mass organization,” “man,” “public sphere,” “precondition,” “radical,” even “revolutionary.”[1320] Formerly he thought it “sinister” to speak of “the masses,” now he overuses the phrase with not a word of explanation. What Jean Baudrillard (one of the ex-Director’s least favorite people) said on this point is apposite: “The term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpenanalytical notion.”[1321]

And now Bookchin, after years of equivocation, openly calls for involvement in elections, as his critics have always accused him of.[1322] Only local elections, of course, but his halfhearted attribution of a lesser degree of statism to local governments is derisory. If you are arrested, over 99% of the time it will be by the local (municipal or county) police, and you will be held in the local jail. If you are prosecuted, over 99% of the time it will be by the local district attorney. If you are convicted of a misdemeanor, you will be incarcerated, if you are, in the local jail. On the civil side, you will be evicted by the local sheriff and divorced by the local court. If statism is a variable, local governments are the most statist of American governments. Which is probably why the Director Emeritus covets their power.

Existing forms of municipal government, which are representative and bureaucratic, preclude libertarian municipalism. The goal of the Organization must be to take them over and do away with them. Facilitating this, Bookchin wrote 25 years ago, is a new “multitude of various local associations, ‘alliances,’ and block committees that stress local control as well as economic justice”: “Community and action groups have invaded local politics, a terrain that was once the exclusive preserve of political parties, on a scale that has significantly altered the entire landscape of municipal policy making.”[1323] That last bit is, of course, not true. The landscape of municipal policy making is as it was 25 years ago, and 25 years before that. The goal of community activists in those days was community councils, which are something like what Bookchin called for in Burlington.[1324] But by 1978, this was the situation: “they have been extremely sporadic, and even at their best they seldom attain active participation from more than a small minority of the citizenry.”[1325] Grass-roots organizations come and go. With the ongoing development of political and economic centralization, local groups are always losing any modest influence they had.

Meanwhile, the gradual decline of the New England town meeting continues. No one ever sets up new ones: they are historical survivals. Montana presents an instructive example of the popular demand for town meetings. In 1972, a new constitution in one state authorized small towns to adopt town meeting government. None did.[1326] In New Hampshire, to promote participation — which it is supposed to fear — the legislature in 1995 provided for “referendum town meetings” by local option. There are two sessions. The first or “deliberative” session is for discussion and amendment of the warrant articles. At the second, the articles are voted on and town officials are elected. Average attendance at the first session is 2% of eligibles. 75% of attendees are from government bodies.[1327] It is self-government — by government. I can see this happening in the Commune.

If city politics was ever the exclusive preserve of political parties (which I doubt), that time was ending by the 1870s. From the 1870s through the 1930s, middle-class and business associations were established which sought to reform boss-ridden urban governments and police forces.[1328] If thwarted locally, they might apply to sympathetic state legislatures for legislation. This they could do for a reason the Director Emeritus dislikes but does not understand, although it is highly relevant to his political ambitions. The states, like the national government, are recognized by the Constitution and built in to the political structure it creates.[1329] Municipal corporations are not mentioned, and they have no Federal constitutional status.

“The current legalistic image of the city as a ‘creature’ of the state,” Bookchin assures us, “is an expression of fear, of careful deliberation in a purposive effort to subdue popular democracy.”[1330] The ex-Director calls the image “current” to imply, falsely, that it is something new; in fact, it was just as current in the 1870s, or 1770s, and in fact goes back to medieval England. This is wishful thinking raised to a faith, a version of idealism often signaled by the ex-Director by appending -istic to an otherwise meaningful adjective. There is no evidence of either the fear or the conspiracy. What thwarts the Organization is not a “legalistic image” but a legal reality. Municipalities derive their legal status from the states, and they exercise only enumerated powers, narrowly interpreted (the “Dillon Rule”).[1331]

Thus, in the unlikely event that the Organization elected its activists to every possible local office, they would not be allowed to subvert the local power structure. For one thing, much of what a city does is on behalf of the state, such as enforcing its criminal law.[1332] If, for example, its council members radically altered the police department — civil service laws would only be the first obstacle, followed by the unions — their enemies would entangle them in litigation and, failing that (not that I think it would fail), they might appeal to the state legislature for a state takeover of the force. It’s more than an abstract possibility. In 1857, the state of New York took control of the New York City police force from the Tammany Hall machine and replaced nearly all the police; local control was not restored until after the Civil War. In 1885, the same thing happened in Boston. The mayors of major New York cities were likewise state appointees in the early 19^th century.[1333] Bookchin’s strategy contemplates a period of “dual power” — which, 25 years ago, was already emerging! — which seems to mean a situation of formal or informal Organization dominance over the city which will “countervail” the state and national governments.[1334] That leaves the latter, especially the state governments, plenty of opportunity, from a position of as yet undiminished strength, to hold the Commune to existing law or to restrictive new law. What is the rise of urbanism and the decline of citizenship that he’s bellyaching about if not the state’s superior power position? Besides, dual power is a Leninist, not an anarchist concept, since anarchists aim to abolish power, not duplicate it.[1335]

If the Director Ameritus really believes modern cities are a power vacuum (or, as he might say, an “airless vacuum”) for the Organization to swoosh into, he’s been spending too much time at town meetings and not enough time observing even Burlington city government or just reading the newspaper. When the long-gone grassroots organizations of the 60s and 70s went to city hall, they had to wait in line. Many other private organizations were, and are, already there: the League of Women Voters, the PTA, professional associations, chambers of commerce, churches, unions, taxpayers’ leagues, the media, service organizations, good-government groups, and many business organizations: there’s an organization equipped to lobby for every business interest in the city.[1336] A neighborhood political association is just another interest group.[1337] The Organization’s militants, especially if they exhibit the ex-Director’s vicarious arrogance and sense of destiny, are likely to alienate not only the officeholders but the other organizations too, some of which are potential coalition partners. There is every reason to believe that the Organization will start out weak and decline from there.

Bookchin does not explain why forms of organization which have never been necessary for revolutions before are necessary now. After all, as he has told us himself, sounding just like Robert Michels, all organizations, even revolutionary organizations, tend to render themselves autonomous, to be alienated from their original aims, and to become ends in themselves. It is no doubt true that ignoring the problem does not solve it, but institutionalizing the problem doesn’t solve it either. The case study for Michels’ conclusion that “who says organization, says oligarchy” was a nominally revolutionary socialist party with instructed delegates and all the rest of the democratic rigmarole. Combine large-scale organization with the pursuit of power, and “the revolutionary party is a state within a state” (Michels), “the party is nothing but a state in the state” (Stirner), the party is “nothing more than a state which is waiting for the opportunity to acquire power” (Bookchin).[1338]

The author of a history of Spanish anarchists who also considers organization the only road to revolution might be expected to have discussed in some detail the organization of the Spanish anarchists, but he devoted only a few pages to the structure of the CNT, and claimed that the confederation was more democratic than its rules would suggest.[1339] We are expected to take his word for it. In 1974 he again approved of the rather different structures of the CNT and the FAI, and he introduced the idea of institutionalizing the “influential militant.” Yet despite these duly confederal structures, the Director Emeritus reported developments such as Michels predicts. In the CNT, “charismatic individuals [‘influential militants?’] at all levels of the organization came very close to acting in a bureaucratic manner.” And “the FAI increasingly became an end in itself and loyalty to the organization, particularly when it was under attack or confronted with severe difficulties, tended to mute criticism.”[1340] In no published work has the Director Emeritus considered if there was a relationship between the organization of the CNT and FAI and their leaders accepting government ministries. The National Committee of the CNT let only selected leaders and “influential militants” in on its political ambitions before joining the Catalan government on September 27, claiming it was joining, not a government, but a “Regional Defense Council.”[1341] The CNT, in ideology and in organization, was specifically designed on federal principles with all possible safeguards against usurpation of power by the leadership. Clearly Michels, not Bookchin, is the better prognosticator of the inherently undemocratic fate of a large-scale political Organization, even one that is anarchist.

To illustrate the frightful consequences of failure to unite in a well-led Organization, Bookchin cites an episode in the short-lived German Revolution of 1918–1919. The story as he tells it is this: to protest the dismissal of the leftist chief of police (!) in Berlin, “the city’s leftist organizations — the Independents Social [sic] Democrats, the pre-Leninist [sic] Communists around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards — distributed leaflets denouncing the move and calling for a protest rally.”

They are correctly described as potentially the greatest proletarian army the world had ever seen, and they were in a belligerent, indeed revolutionary mood. They waited expectantly in the squares and streets for their leaders — who had called the mobilization — to give them the signal to move. None was forthcoming. Throughout the entire day, while this huge proletarian army waited for tactical guidance, the indecisive leaders debated among themselves. Finally evening approached, and the masses of armed proletarians drifted home, hungry and disappointed.[1342]

The next day, a Monday, another appeal to take to the streets was distributed among the workers, and the same numerically huge mass of armed workers reappeared, once again ready for an uprising. Their demonstration was comparable in its potential revolutionary force to the one that had assembled on the previous day — but the leaders still behaved indecisively, still debating their course of action without coming to any definitive [sic] conclusion. By nightfall, after waiting throughout the day [1343] in a cold fog and steady rain, the crowd dispersed again, never to return.[1344]

The moral? “Had the leaders been unified and decisive; had they given the signal to unseat the government, the workers might well have succeeded in taking over Berlin,” perhaps sparking uprisings throughout Germany. “Had today’s lifestyle anarchists been on the scene in 1919,” adds Bookchin, “I can only suppose that their position — or lack of one — would have helped to seal the doom of the German Revolution by excluding decisive organized action.”[1345] Thank goodness they weren’t there, otherwise the Revolution might have failed!

If I had to ransack the history books for an anti-organizational cautionary tale, this just might be it. The Director Emeritus demands a political organization: the Berlin workers had three of them, working — for once — closely and harmoniously together, at least during this episode. The ex-Director demands leaders: 86 leaders met on Sunday night. The Berlin workers had so many leaders that they could spare some to lead the other side too. For today’s enemies were almost literally yesterday’s leaders: the Government consisted of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party to which all the workers adhered in November and many still adhered in January.

Bookchin would not be the Director Emeritus if he told a story without leaving something important out. The workers were not as sheeplike as he makes them out to be. On that first day, not everybody waited for orders: “Just as on November 9 a few courageous people suddenly took the initiative, issued instructions and assembled in armed groups and columns.” They occupied the major newspaper publishers and the railway stations, with armed columns roaming the streets all night[1346] — in other words, they started the revolution. The revolution would fail because the other workers relied on organizational leadership instead of themselves.

What transpired Sunday night is also interesting. The leaders of the three organizations Bookchin mentions assembled at police headquarters (!) in a state of high excitement after the day’s unexpected events. The Director Emeritus blames the leadership as not “unified and decisive.” But they were both. The vote “to take up the fight against the Government and carry it on until its overthrow” carried by a vote of 80–6. That resolve was implicit at best in the flier calling the Monday mass rally, saying: “Now bigger issues are at stake.” So Monday went much as Sunday had, with some additional occupations.[1347]

Now it is not even obvious that the leadership erred. On Sunday it was caught by surprise; evidently none of the platform speakers, not even Karl Liebknecht, felt authorized to order a revolution on his own initiative. It is leaders too, not just followers, who become dependent on the Organization. And on Sunday night, the two soldiers’ delegates warned that the soldiers and even the military vanguard, the sailors, could not be counted on. They proved prophetic: on Monday the leaders appealed to the troops, and the 53-man Revolutionary Committee transferred to the sailors’ headquarters, but none of the armed forces would act: “What had happened? Above all it was this: the hoped-for support of the troops for this second wave of revolution had failed to materialize.”[1348] It’s possible that there was no insurrection, not because the leaders were indecisive, but because they made a decision not to call one at that time without military support. But this much is certain: “Evidently nobody was ready to attempt a decisive assault on the Government buildings without being given the order — and no order came.”[1349]

No order came. For decades, the German working class had been organized, educated, and drilled by the pride of the Second International, the Social Democratic Party. In that time, this “numerically huge” party became hierarchic, bureaucratic, centralized and disciplined, the unwitting shadow of a hierarchic, bureaucratic, centralized and disciplined society. As early as 1895, Bertrand Russell identified these aspects of the organization. Robert Michels, whose party membership cost him what Bookchin would call an alluring academic career, wrote Political Parties, a sociological classic, to explain why a party whose ideology was democracy was itself an oligarchy.[1350] I’ll draw on some of its insights a little later. Its present interest is that it describes the school in which a generation of German workers learned politics. Their capacity for self-activity found no organizational channels of expression, in fact, rank and file initiative was strongly discouraged. These workers were used to looking to leaders for directions. Without them, at a critical yet fleeting moment, they waited, and then they waited again, and then it was all over.

The German Revolution failed because it was more German than revolutionary. In the words of Ernst Toller, a major figure in the Bavarian Revolution, “alas, the German workmen had been too long accustomed to blind obedience; they wanted only to obey. They confused brutality with strength, bluster with leadership, suppression of freedom with discipline. They missed their accustomed atmosphere; they found their freedom chaos,” they were, in Emma Goldman’s words, “the Bis-Marxian Socialists of Germany.”[1351] Lenin praised them for their subservience to their leaders. They failed from too much organization and not enough spontaneity. Ernst Schneider, who participated in the contemporaneous Wilhelmshaven naval mutiny, concluded that “the political parties are no better informed than the masses. This has been proved in all actual revolutionary struggles. As long as parties operate as separate groups within the mass, the mass is not revolutionary, but neither are the parties.”[1352]

And by the way ... Bookchin doesn’t really believe the German Revolution failed for lack of a vanguard organization. That is — as he once wrote prior to acquiring an interest in saying the opposite — a “crude simplification.” He earlier included that revolution on the list of 20^th-century revolutions which could not have won because there was then no “material basis” for a revolution for the general interest: “It is not for want of organization that the past revolutions of radical elements ultimately failed but rather because all prior societies were organized systems of want.”[1353] The Director Emeritus now says that which is not.