Chapter 20. Conclusion: Whither Anarchism, Indeed?

“Now you see, sir, how your fooling grows old, and people dislike it”
— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night[1376]

Whither anarchism? If that’s the question, it is one for which Bookchin has no answer. In “The Left That Was,” the appendix to SALA, he reiterates that the classical left is forever defunct.[1377] Long ago he announced that “the traditional workers’ movement will never reappear.”[1378] He does not discuss the social composition of the “millions of people today” who experience “the sense of powerlessness” which renders them “a potentially huge body of supporters” of anarchism.[1379] Who are they? They cannot be bourgeois, for the bourgeois are by definition the enemy. They cannot be proletarians, for the proletariat, according to Bookchin, has been bought off and bourgeoisified. They cannot be the underclass, the idle poor, for these are the “lumpens” Bookchin says are actual or potential fascists.[1380] (Whereas in 1970, he thought lumpens were the new revolutionary class: “If a ‘class-based’ analysis is needed by the Marxist pundits, it may be well to remind them that just as capitalism began with a lumpen class, from which it created the proletariat, so it may end with a lumpen class, from which it may create its executioners.”[1381]) So who’s left for the left?

After repeatedly and tediously denouncing Lifestyle Anarchists for their personalism, individualism, narcissism, mysticism and psychologism, the Director Emeritus himself defines the yearning millions of potential anarchists in purely personalistic, psychological terms, in terms of their “sense of powerlessness.” Are they powerless, or do they just think they are? Do they need revolution or just therapy? If all they need is therapy, the system is surely capable of supplying it (for a price). An awareness of powerlessness is surely as old as its reality. The slaves and peasants of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — and Athens! — knew they were powerless, but such awareness more often results in resignation than revolution. Bookchin cannot explain why powerless people sometimes revolt but usually don’t. For that matter, Bookchin can’t explain anything else either.

According to the Director Emeritus, the enormities and the eccentricities of the Lifestyle Anarchists are “in no small measure” responsible for the anarchist failure to recruit and deploy “a potentially huge body of supporters” ripe for revolution.[1382] That’s an extraordinary measure of blame to heap upon an imperceptible fraction of the population with no access to the mainstream media. Absolutely no evidence supports the assertion that anything anarchists of any orientation have done or not done in recent years has repelled vast numbers of people. There is no evidence that vast numbers of Americans have yet encountered anarchism in any form. Bookchin brags of having lectured at every major university in the United States, which provided him forums on a scale no Lifestyle Anarchists have ever had access to. Here was his opportunity to convert strategically situated cadres of the youth intelligentsia to his advanced ideology. Here he could have gone far toward strangling Lifestyle Anarchism in the cradle. He must have failed. More likely he never tried. His personalistic careerism took priority. If these “are the worst times in the history of anarchism,”[1383] how could this have happened on his watch? Is it accidental that it was only when his career was over that Bookchin assailed the Lifestyle Anarchists?

According to the Director Emeritus, thousands of decadent Lifestyle Anarchists have discouraged many millions of other Americans from embracing anarchism in the only version Bookchin approves of. What discouraged many millions of Americans from embracing anarchism in the many decades before Lifestyle Anarchism came along, he does not say. Did the defamations and machinations of Leninists like himself have anything to do with it? One suspects that anarchism’s unpopularity had more to do with anarchism itself than with any of its particular versions. As Malatesta stated, the problem is not the word but the thing, because it clashes with long-established prejudices.[1384] Bookchin’s fantastic exaggeration of the influence of Lifestyle Anarchists corresponds to his fantastic exaggeration of his own influence. The Lifestyle Anarchists must possess very powerful juju in order to outshout the voice of Reason as it booms forth so often and so eloquently from Murray Bookchin. The ex-Director’s acquaintance with anarchist history is so slight that he’s unaware that the unbridgeable chasm is nothing new. There were partly contradictory, partly complementary political and cultural currents in French anarchism in the 1890s, for instance.[1385] The same accusations of authoritarianism and decadence were exchanged then as now. Investigation might find this to have been the usual situation of classical anarchism. Whether or not the chasm is unbridgeable, Bookchin has fallen into it.

As in SALA, the Director rebukes the Lifestyle Anarchists — belatedly including John P. Clark — for elitism. This dictum, again unexplained, makes no more sense than it ever did. It is not clear why collectivist elitism — vanguardism — is superior to individualist elitism. Bookchin decries “abstract individualism” but never entertains the possibility that what his enemies espouse is concrete individualism, what Vaneigem calls radical subjectivity. Nor does he consider the possibility that what he espouses is abstract collectivism (totalitarianism), not concrete collectivism (community). Abstract collectivism is even worse than abstract individualism (classical liberalism). Elitism implies exclusivity, but Bookchin is the one who is reading thousands of anarchists out of the movement. Lifestyle Anarchism is intolerable, so Social Anarchism is intolerant. The movement “must become infected with intolerance against all who retard its growth by subservience to spontaneity,”[1386] as the lawyer Lenin put it.

There may be a sense in which some so-called Lifestyle Anarchists might be elitists, i.e., they aspire to excellence and they want to level up. But they want everybody to level up — they want company — they want a world of what Vaneigem calls “masters without slaves” — not out of pity or paternalism but because they crave a community of fulfilled, enriched, masterful other individuals to relate to. John Simon, referring to the late American critic and anarchist Dwight Macdonald, admitted that Macdonald was an elitist of sorts, but “an elitist, then, who would eagerly help others join the club, who would gladly have abandoned his badge of superiority for the sake of a world full of coequal elitists.”[1387] Only in that sense are post-left anarchists elitists.

Writing in 1989, the Director Emeritus stated: “It is tempting to return to the radicalism of the past where assured dogmas were socially inspirational and had the aura of romantic rebellion about them. Having been raised in that era of a half-century ago, I find it emotionally congenial but intellectually inadequate.”[1388] He has since succumbed to that temptation. Intellectually, orthodoxy is now more important than adequacy, although all his old criticisms of the left still hold. According to Bookchin, “these are the worst times in the history of anarchism, worse than any I have either read about or experienced.” More generally, these are times of counterrevolution.[1389] If this is counterrevolution, when was the revolution?

We are witness to the decay and the imminent demise of Bookchin’s deeply flawed theories. Most are almost universally ignored by anarchists, and they are already ignored by everybody else. His recent brutality and buffoonery have almost overshadowed the substantial and mainly positive influence he exerted on the revival of North American anarchism which commenced in the early 1970s. Bookchin’s ecological orientation never had any popular influence as did Rachel Carson’s, but in its time it had considerable influence on anarchists. Bookchin’s notion of liberatory technology did catch on at first with some anarchists, but ironically, by raising technology as a political issue, he may have directed their attention to the repressive power of really existing technology, and so indirectly inspired the anti-tech tendency. Hardly any anarchists ever took seriously the ex-Director’s longtime enchantment with the slave-based, imperialist, authoritarian Athenian polis, or his quixotic quest to “democratize the republic,” “radicalize our democracy,” and Hellenize the Euro-American city.[1390] Where he sees a seamless theoretical unity, others see only an arbitrary aggregation of eccentric isolates.

It has been Bookchin’s longterm strategy to redefine key words like “politics,” “democracy” and “anarchism” so as to enclose the commons, expropriating public words for his personalistic political benefit. Thus he tried to make off with a term, “social anarchism,” which belongs to the anarchist community. Failing in that, he repudiated the anarchists, displaying all the maturity of a little kid who won’t play ball unless he gets to pitch — but the whole team knows that all he can throw is screwballs. No one begrudges him “libertarian municipalism,” but it lacks flash. In Anarchy after Leftism, I expressed sympathy for the Director Emeritus and his followers: “They need a name that nobody else wants” — but he was perhaps right to spurn my suggestion: “How about ‘Marxist’?”[1391]

Now it appears Bookchin prepared a fallback position as long ago as 1994. He sees advantages in the word communalism (pilfered from Kenneth Rexroth): “What is remarkable about this (as yet) unsullied term is its extraordinary proximity to libertarian municipalism, the political dimension to social ecology that I have advanced at length [to say the least] elsewhere. In communalism, libertarians have an available word that they can enrich as much by experience as by theory.”[1392] It is surely a rousing word (although it might be just the italics) — but it’s already taken. The right wing has eaten his lunch: “Conservatives defend a theory of the good, communalism, which holds that individual human flourishing is best pursued through familial and communal shaping of individual character.” The “familial” part aside, so holds the Director Emeritus, who calls for citizenship training, “civic paideia.”[1393] As a radical Green writes, “it might well be wondered whether a decentralized, participatory democracy really does have anything to do with anarchism.” After wasting everybody’s time all these years, the Director Emeritus concurs: “I no longer believe that Communalism is a mere ‘dimension’ of anarchism, democratic or not.”[1394]

No matter how much he regrets it now, Bookchin did lend a lot of aid and comfort to what he now denounces as Lifestyle Anarchism: to the transvaluation of values, spontaneity, and the revolution of everyday life. If he hasn’t seeded our fields (of dreams), he has at least manured them. Our post-leftism was fertilized by his compost-leftism. Bookchin is full of shit, and we turned that to practical advantage. But what to make of him in his final decay? In Plato’s Gorgias, the sophist Callicles exclaims that philosophizing is for younger men, because old men no longer experience the life of the city — they’re out of it, like Bookchin: “But whenever I see an older man still philosophizing and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely seems to me to need a beating.”[1395]

In The Ecology of Freedom, the Director Emeritus anticipated his present situation — and mine: “The fear, pain, and commonly rapid death that a wolfpack brings to a sick or old caribou are evidence not of suffering or cruelty in nature but of a mode of dying that is integrally wedded to organic renewal and ecological stability.”[1396] First Nature always has the last word. In the words of “the incomparable Max” — Beerbohm, not Stirner — “All this sounds rather brutal. But it is a brutal thing to object to humbug, and only by brutal means can humbug be combated.”[1397] The ex-Director’s example confirms that “the sole change of mind of which an ideologue is incapable is that of ceasing to be an ideologue.”[1398] In annihilating Murray Bookchin the ideologue, in appearance my methods may seem cruel, but in essence, I am only doing the work of Nature — First Nature: “For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace” (E.M. Cioran).[1399]