19971997
People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Editor : Janet Biehl
Text :
According to Marx, “primitive egalitarianism” was destroyed by the rise of social classes, in which those who own wealth and property exploit the labor of those who do not. But from his observations of contemporary history, Bookchin realized that class analysis in itself does not explain the entirety of social oppression. The elimination of class society could leave intact relations of subordination and domination. Engels, in his essay “On Authority,” wrote explicitly that he not only would preserve hierarchy in a “classless” society but regarded it as indispensable in industrial production.
In order to attain the broadest possible freedom in an ecological society, Bookchin emphasized that it would be necessary to eliminate not only social classes but social hierarchies as well. Thus, where Marx had worked with categories of class and exploitation, Bookchin developed broader categories of hierarchy and domination — not to replace the Marxist categories, or to deny the reality of class and exploitation, but to subsume them as particulars within more generalized concepts. Hierarchy and domination, in Bookchin’s view, historically provided the substrate of oppression out of which class relations were formed.
In The Ecology of Freedom Bookchin shows how the rise of hierarchy eroded the complementarity of relatively egalitarian communities long before the appearance of property ownership. Although social and material factors, including population growth and physical force, were deeply involved in generating hierarchical social relations, Bookchin emphasizes the role of changes in consciousness as well. Incipient hierarchies gave rise to a hierarchical sensibility that ranked people as superior or inferior by a given standard and then used that ranking to justify the domination of the latter by the former. Once thinking was reordered along these lines, it would see hierarchy where in reality there was only difference. Mere differences in ability, experience, and knowledge would thereupon become acceptable rationales for domination.
Gradually hierarchical relations came to be elaborated along ever more complex lines, giving rise to the patriarchal domination of wives, sons, daughters, and dependents; the domination of whole communities by shamanistic and priestly guilds; the domination of one community by another; and later the domination of peoples by elite rulers. Ultimately status distinctions phased into outright class structures based on the exploitation of serfs, slaves, and the industrial proletariat.
Once a hierarchical sensibility had been established in this way, it could be projected out onto first nature, as people could begin to think in terms of dominating the natural world. Indeed, the idea of dominating first nature could not have existed unless human beings already had gained it from their experience of social domination.
Once the idea of dominating nature was formed, it became a basic assumption of Western culture that the creation of wealth depended upon it. Indeed, the supposed necessity of dominating first nature became a rationale for the further domination of human by human.
It remains one of the most widely accepted notions, from classical times to the present, that human freedom from the “domination of man by nature” entails the domination of human by human as the earliest means of production and the use of human beings as instruments for harnessing the natural world. Hence, in order to harness the natural world, it has been argued for ages, it is necessary to harness human beings as well, in the form of slaves, serfs, and workers. That this instrumental notion pervades the ideology of nearly all ruling elites and has provided both liberal and conservative movements with a justification for their accommodation to the status quo requires little if any elaboration. The myth of a “stingy” nature has always been used to justify the “stinginess” of exploiters in their harsh treatment of the exploited.[34]
Ruling classes, in order to legitimate their rule, generally try to expand the domain of what is accepted as biological or natural and therefore inalterable, at the expense of what might otherwise be thought of as social and therefore subject to human alteration. Conversely, it is an emancipatory step to try to expand the realm of what convention holds to be social at the expense of what it defines as biological, precisely to open up possibilities for the transformation of existing social relationships.
Bookchin’s contention that the domination of human by human preceded the idea of dominating first nature falls into this second category of ideas. Contrary to necessitarian myths, he argues that human emancipation does not depend on the domination of first nature; rather, a free society can as well be an ecological society. Indeed, since the ecological crisis has its origins in social pathologies, an ecological society can arise only after social hierarchy and domination have been removed.
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
Organic societies, even the most egalitarian, are not homogeneous social groups. Each member of the community is defined by certain everyday roles based on sex, age, and ancestral lineage. In early organic societies, these roles do not seem to have been structured along hierarchical lines; nor do they seem to have involved the domination of human by human. Generally, they simply define the individual’s responsibilities to the community: the raw materials, as it were, for a functional status in the complex nexus of human relationships. Lineage determines who can or cannot marry whom, and families related by marriage are often as obligated to help each other as are kin directly related by blood ties. Age confers the prestige of experience and wisdom. Finally, sexual differences define the community’s basic division of labor.
Even before material surpluses began to increase significantly, the roles each individual played began to change from egalitarian relationships into elites based increasingly on systems of obedience and command. To make this assertion raises a number of very provocative questions. Who were these emerging elites? What was the basis of their privileges in early society? How did they rework organic society’s forms of community status — forms based on usufruct, a domestic economy, reciprocity, and egalitarianism — into what were later to become class and exploitative societies? These questions are not academic: they deal with emotionally charged notions that lurk to this very day in the unconscious apparatus of humanity, notably the influence of biological facts, such as sex, age, and ancestry on social relationships. Unless these notions are carefully examined and the truths separated from the untruths, we are likely to carry an archaic legacy of domination into whatever social future awaits us....
A careful survey of food-gathering and hunting communities reveals that women enjoyed a higher degree of parity with men than we have been commonly led to believe. Both sexes occupy a distinctly sovereign role in their respective spheres, and their roles are much too complementary economically to make the domination of women by men the comfortable social norm that biased white observers served up generations ago to allay the guilt-feelings of Victorian patriarchs. In daily life, women withdraw into a sorority based on their domestic and food-gathering activities and men into a fraternity of hunters. There both sexes are completely autonomous. The sharply etched distinctions between “home” and the “world” that exist in modern society do not exist in organic communities. There home and world are so closely wedded that a man, shut out from a family, is literally a nonsocial being — a being who is nowhere. Although the male tends, even in many egalitarian communities, to view himself as the “head” of the family, his stance is largely temperamental and accords him no special or domestic power. It is simply a form of boastfulness, for the hard facts of life vitiate his pretenses daily. Woman’s food-gathering activities usually provide most of the family’s food. She not only collects the food but prepares it, makes the family’s clothing, and produces its containers, such as baskets and coiled pottery. She is more in contact with the young than the male and takes a more “commanding” role in their development. If her husband is too overbearing, she can unceremoniously put him out of the hut or simply return to her own family, where she and her children are certain of being provided for, no matter what her family thinks of her decision. As she ages, her experience becomes a revered source of wisdom; she becomes a “matriarch” in many cases, the head of the family in fact if not in form.
What women in preliterate communities distinctly do lack is the male’s mobility. The human child’s protracted development and dependency — a long period of mental plasticity that is vitally necessary for elaborating a cultural continuum — restricts the mother’s capacity to move about freely. The primal division of labor that assigned hunting tasks to the male and domestic tasks to the female is based on a hard biological reality: a woman, coupled to a noisy infant, can scarcely be expected to practice the stealth and athleticism needed to hunt large animals. By its very nature, the mother-child relationship limits her to comparatively sedentary lifeways. Moreover, if woman is not weak in terms of her capacity to do hard work, she is certainly the “weaker sex” when pitted against armed, possibly hostile men from an alien community. Women need their men not only as hunters but also as guardians of the family and the group. Men become the community’s guardians not by virtue of usurpation, but because they are better equipped muscularly in a materially undeveloped culture to defend their community against hostile marauders....
As bands began to increase in size and number, as they began to differentiate into clans, tribes, and tribal federations and to make war on one another, an ever larger social space emerged that was increasingly occupied by men. Men tended to become the clan headsmen or tribal chiefs and fill the councils of tribal federations. For all of this was “men’s work,” like hunting and herding animals. They had the mobility and physical prowess to defend their own communities, attack hostile communities, and thereby administer an extra biological, distinctly social sphere of life.
In communities where matrilineal descent carried considerable cultural weight and woman’s horticultural activities formed the basis of economic life, she assumed social roles very similar to those of the man. Usually, she occupied these roles on the clan level, rarely on the tribal one. Moreover, she almost invariably shared her social role with males. In a matricentric society, these males were her brothers, not her husband. What woman’s social eminence in matricentric communities reveals, however, is that the male’s rising position in social affairs results not from any conscious degradation of woman to a domestic “unworldly” sphere. To the contrary, in the beginning at least, the male did not have to “usurp” power from the female; indeed, social “power” as such did not exist but had yet to be created. The social sphere and the man’s position in it emerged naturally. The primordial balance that assigned complementary economic functions to both sexes on the basis of parity slowly tipped toward the male, favoring his social preeminence....
The male, in a hunting community, is a specialist in violence. From the earliest days of his childhood, he identifies with such “masculine” traits as courage, strength, self-assertiveness, decisiveness, and athleticism — traits necessary for the welfare of the community. The community, in turn, will prize the male for these traits and foster them in him. If he becomes a good hunter, he will be highly regarded by everyone; by envious men and admiring women, by respectful children and emulative youths. In a society preoccupied with the problem of survival and obliged to share its resources, a good hunter is an asset to all.
Similarly, the female is a specialist in child-rearing and foodgathering. Her responsibilities focus on nurture and sustenance. From childhood she will be taught to identify with such “feminine” traits as caring and tenderness, and she will be trained in comparatively sedentary occupations. The community, in turn, will prize her for these traits and foster them in her. If she cultivates these traits, she will be highly regarded for her sense of responsibility to her family, her skill and artfulness. In a matricentric society, these traits will be elevated into social norms that could well be described as the temperament of the community. We find this temperament today in many American Indian and Asian villages that practice horticulture, even if the kinship system is patrilineal. Similarly, in a patricentric society, “masculine” traits will be elevated into the norms of a community temperament, although they rarely coexist with matrilineal systems of kinship.
There is no intrinsic reason why a patricentric community, merely because it has a “masculine” temperament, must be hierarchical or reduce women to a subjugated position. The economic roles of the two sexes are still complementary; without the support that each sex gives to the other, the community will disintegrate. Moreover, both sexes still enjoy complete autonomy in their respective spheres. In projecting our own social attitudes into preliterate society, we often fail to realize how far removed a primordial domestic community is from a modern political society.... As long as the growing civil sphere is a pragmatic extension of the male’s role in the division of labor, it is merely that and no more. Even while the civil sphere is expanding, it is still rooted in domestic life and, in this sense, enveloped by it; hence, the numinous power that surrounds woman in the most patricentric of primordial societies.
Only when social life itself undergoes hierarchical differentiation and emerges as a separate terrain to be organized on its own terms do we find a conflict between the domestic and civil spheres — one that extends hierarchy into domestic life and results not only in the subjugation of woman, but in her degradation. Then the distinctively “feminine” traits, which primordial society prizes as a high survival asset, sink to the level of social subordination. The woman’s nurturing capacities are degraded into renunciation; her tenderness to obedience. Man’s “masculine” traits are also transformed. His courage turns into aggressiveness; his strength is used to dominate; his self-assertiveness is transformed into egotism; his decisiveness into repressive reason. His athleticism is directed increasingly to the arts of war and plunder.
Until these transformations occur, however, it is important to know the raw materials from which hierarchical society will raise its moral and social edifice. The violation of organic society is latent within organic society itself. The primal unity of the early community, both internally and with nature, is weakened merely by the elaboration of the community’s social life — its ecological differentiation. Yet the growing civil space occupied by the male is still enveloped in a natural matrix of blood ties, family affinities, and work responsibilities based on a sexual division of labor. Not until distinctly social interests emerge that clash directly with its natural matrix and turn the weaknesses, perhaps the growing tensions, of organic society into outright fractures, will the unity between human and human, and between humanity and nature, finally be broken. Then power will emerge, not simply as a social fact, with all its differentiations, but as a concept — and so will the concept of freedom.
To find what is perhaps the one primary group that, more than any other in preliterate communities, transects kinship lines and the division of labor — that in its own right forms the point of departure for a separate social interest as distinguished from the complementary relations that unite the community into a whole — we must turn to the age group, particularly to the community’s elders. To be born, to be young, to mature, and finally to grow old and idle is natural fact — as much as it is to be a woman or a man, or to belong to a blood-lineage group. But the older one becomes, the more one acquires distinct interests that are not “natural.” These interests are uniquely social. The later years of life are a period of diminishing physical powers; the declining years, a period of outright dependency. The aging and the aged develop interests that are tied neither to their sexual roles nor to their lineage. They depend for their survival ultimately on the fact that the community is social in the fullest sense of the term; that it will provide for them not because they participate in the process of production and reproduction, but because of the institutional roles they can create for themselves in the social realm.
The sexes complement each other economically; the old and the young do not. In preliterate communities, the old are vital repositories of knowledge and wisdom, but this very function merely underscores the fact that their capacities belong largely to the cultural and social sphere. Hence, even more than the boasting self-assertive male who may be slowly gaining a sense of social power, the aging and the aged tend to be socially conscious as such — as a matter of survival. They share a common interest independent of their sex and lineage. They have the most to gain from the institutionalization of society and the emergence of hierarchy, for it is within this realm and as a result of this process that they can retain powers that are denied to them by physical weakness and infirmity. Their need for social power, and for hierarchical social power at that, is a function of their loss of biological power. The social sphere is the only realm in which this power can be created and concomitantly the only sphere that can cushion their vulnerability to natural forces. Thus, they are the architects par excellence of social life, of social power, and of its institutionalization along hierarchical lines.
The old can also perform many functions that relieve young adults of certain responsibilities. Old women can care for the children and undertake sedentary productive tasks that would otherwise be performed by their daughters. Similarly, old men can make weapons and teach their sons and grandsons to use them more effectively. But these tasks, while they lighten the burdens of the young, do not make the old indispensable to the community. And in a world that is often harsh and insecure, a world ruled by natural necessity, the old are the most dispensable members of the community. Under conditions where food may be in short supply and the life of the community occasionally endangered, they are the first to be disposed of. The anthropological literature is replete with examples in which the old are killed and expelled during periods of hunger, a practice that changes from the episodic into the customary in the case of communities that normally leave their aged members behind to perish whenever the group breaks camp and moves to a different locale.
Thus, the lives of the old are always clouded by a sense of insecurity. This sense is incremental to the insecurity that people of all ages may feel in materially undeveloped communities. The ambiguity that permeates the outlook of the primordial world toward nature — a shifting outlook that mixes reverence or ecological adaptation with fear — is accented among the aged with a measure of hatred, for insofar as fear is concerned, they have more to fear from nature’s vicissitudes than do the young. The nascent ambiguities of the aged toward nature later give rise to western “civilization’s” mode of repressive reason. This exploitative rationality pits civil society against domestic society and launches social elites on a quest for domination that, in a later historical context, transforms insecurity into egotism, acquisitiveness, and a craze for rule — in short, the social principle graduated by its own inner dialectic into the asocial principle. Here, too, are the seeds for the hatred of eros and the body, a hatred, in turn, that forms the archetypal matrix for willful aggression and the Thanatic death wish.
Initially, the medium by which the old create a modicum of power for themselves is through their control of the socialization process. Fathers teach their sons the arts of getting food; mothers, their daughters. The adults, in turn, consult their parents on virtually every detail of life, from the workaday pragmatic to the ritual. In a preliterate community, the most comprehensive compendium of knowledge is inscribed on the brains of the elders. However much this knowledge is proffered with concern and love, it is not always completely disinterested; it is often permeated, even if unconsciously, by a certain amount of cunning and self-interest. Not only is the young mind shaped by the adults, as must necessarily be the case in all societies, but it is shaped to respect the wisdom of the adults, if not their authority. The harsh initiation ceremonies that many preliterate communities inflict on adolescent boys may well have the purpose of using pain to “brand” the elders’ wisdom on young minds, as a number of anthropologists contend; but I would also suggest that it “brands” a sense of their authority as well. The aged, who abhor natural necessity, become the embodiment of social necessity: the dumb “cruelty” that the natural world inflicts on them is transmitted by social catalysis into the conscious cruelty they inflict on the young. Nature begins to take her revenge on the earliest attempts of primordial society to control her. But this is nature internalized, the nature in humanity itself. The attempt to dominate external nature will come later, when humanity is conceptually equipped to transfer its social antagonisms to the natural world outside....
In fairness to primordial society, we must note that hierarchy founded merely on age is not institutionalized hierarchy. Rather, it is hierarchy in its most nascent form: hierarchy embedded in the matrix of equality. For age is the fate of everyone who does not die prematurely. To the extent that privileges accrue to the elders, everyone in the community is heir to them. Inasmuch as these privileges vary with the fortunes of the community, they are still too tenuous to be regarded as more than compensations for the infirmities that elders must suffer with the aging process. The primordial balance that accords parity to all members of the community, women as well as men, is thereby perpetuated in the privileges accorded to the old. In this sense they cannot be regarded simply as privileges.
What is problematical in the future development of hierarchy is how the elders tried to institutionalize their privileges and what they finally achieved. Radin, in a perceptive if overly ruthless discussion of agelinked hierarchy, notes that the elders in food-gathering communities “almost always functioned as medicine-men of some kind or another” and, with the development of clan-agricultural societies, acquired their “main strength” from the “rituals and ritualistic societies which they largely controlled.” Social power begins to crystallize as the fetishization of magical power over certain forces of nature. In trying to deal with this dialectical twist, we must refocus our perspective to include a unique mode of social sensibility and experience, one that is strikingly modern: the sensibility and experience of the elder cum shaman.
The shaman is a strategic figure in any discussion of social hierarchy because he (and at times she, although males predominate in time) solidifies the privileges of the elders — a general stratum in the primordial community — into the particularized privileges of a special segment of that stratum. He professionalizes power. He makes power the privilege of an elect few, a group that only carefully chosen apprentices can hope to enter, not the community as a whole. His vatic personality essentially expresses the insecurity of the individual on the scale of a social neurosis. If the male hunter is a specialist in violence, and the woman food-gatherer a specialist in nurture, the shaman is a specialist in fear. As magician and divinator combined in one, he mediates between the suprahuman power of the environment and the fears of the community. Weston La Barre observes that in contrast to the priest, who “implores the Omnipotent,” the shaman is “psychologically and socially the more primitive of the two.... External powers invade and leave his body with practiced ease, so feeble are his ego boundaries and so false his fantasies.” Perhaps more significant than this distinction is the fact that the shaman is the incipient State personified. As distinguished from other members of the primordial community, who participate coequally in the affairs of social life, the shaman and his associates are professionals in political manipulation. They tend to subvert the innocence and amateurism that distinguishes domestic society from political society. Shamans “banded informally [together] even in the simplest food-gathering civilizations,” notes Radin. “As soon as the clan political patterns emerged we find them formally united together, either in one group or separately.” Bluntly stated, the shamanistic groups to which Radin alludes were incipient political institutions....
But the shaman’s position in primordial society is notoriously insecure. Often highly remunerated for his magical services, he might be vindictively attacked, perhaps assassinated outright, if his techniques fail. Thus, he must always seek alliances and, more significantly, foster the creation of mutually advantageous power centers for his protection from the community at large. As a quasi-religious formulator, a primitive cosmologist, he literally creates the ideological mythos that crystallizes incipient power into actual power. He may do this in concert with the elders, enhancing their authority over the young, or with the younger but more prominent warriors, who tend to form military societies of their own. From them, in turn, he receives the support he so direly needs to cushion the ill effects that follow from his fallibility. That he may compete with these powers and attempt to usurp their authority is irrelevant at this period of development. The point is that the shaman is the demiurge of political institutions and coalitions. He not only validates the authority of the elders with a magico-political aura, but in his need for political power, he tends to heighten the “masculine” temperament of a patricentric community. He exaggerates the aggressive and violent elements of that temperament, feeding it with mystical sustenance and supernatural power.
Domination, hierarchy, and the subordination of woman to man now begin to emerge. But it is difficult to delineate in this development the emergence of organized economic classes and the systematic exploitation of a dominated social stratum. The young, to be sure, are placed under the rule of a clan or tribal gerontocracy; the elders, shamans, and warrior chiefs, in turn, acquire distinct social privileges. But so ingrained in society are the primordial rules of usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum that the economy of this early world proves to be surprisingly impervious to these sociopolitical changers. “The majority of aboriginal tribes,” observes Radin, “possessed no grouping of individuals based on true class distinctions.” He adds that “slaves not a few of them had, but, while their lives were insecure because they had no status, they were never systematically forced to do menial work or regarded as an inferior and degraded class in our sense of the term.” Men of wealth there were, too, in time, but as Manning Nash observes, “in primitive and peasant economies leveling mechanisms play a crucial role in inhibiting aggrandizement by individuals or by special groups.” These leveling mechanisms assume a variety of forms:
forced loans to relatives or co-residents; a large feast following economic success; a rivalry of expenditures like the potlatch of the Northwest Coast Indians in which large amounts of valuable goods were destroyed; the ritual levies consequent on holding office in civil and religious hierarchies in Meso-America; or the giveaways of horses and goods of the Plains Indians. Most small-scale economies have a way of scrambling wealth to inhibit reinvestment in technical advance, and this prevents crystallization of class lines on an economic base.
In fact, independent wealth, the most precious of personal goals in bourgeois society, tends to be highly suspect in preliterate societies. Often it is taken as evidence that the wealthy individual is a sorcerer who has acquired his riches by a sinister compact with demonic powers. Wealth so acquired is “treasure,” bewitched power concretized, the stuff from which mythology weaves its Faustian legends. The very “independence” of this wealth — its freedom from direct social controlimplies a breach with the most basic of all primordial rules: the mutual obligations imposed by blood ties. The prevalence of the lineage system, as distinguished from “civilization’s” territorial system, implies that, even if hierarchy and differentials in status exist, the community consists of kin; its wealth, as Patrick Malloy observes, must be “used to reinforce or expand social relations,” not weaken or constrict them. Wealth can be acquired only within the parameters of the lineage system, and it effectively filters down to the community through the workings of the “leveling system.” As Malloy astutely observes: the “richest man” in the community will frequently “be the worst off because he has given all of his material wealth away.” He has definite obligations “to provide gifts when requested, take care of bride-wealth, and other important functions critical to the survival of the community.”
Thus, nature still binds society to herself with the primal blood oath. This oath validates not only kinship as the basic fact of primordial social life but its complex network of rights and duties. Before hierarchy and domination can be consolidated into social classes and economic exploitation; before reciprocity can give way to the “free exchange” of commodities; before usufruct can be replaced by private property, and the “irreducible minimum” by toil as the norm for distributing the means of life — before this immensely vast complex can be dissolved and replaced by a class, exchange, and propertied one, the blood oath with all its claims must be broken.
Hierarchy and domination remain captive to the blood oath until an entirely new social terrain can be established to support class relations and the systematic exploitation of human by human. We must fix this preclass, indeed, preeconomic, period in social development clearly in our minds because the vast ideological corpus of “modernity” — capitalism, particularly in its Western form — has been designed in large part to veil it from our vision. Even such notions as primitive communism, matriarchy, and social equality, so widely celebrated by radical anthropologists and theorists, play a mystifying role in perpetuating this veil instead of removing it. Lurking within the notion of primitive communism is the insidious concept of a “stingy nature,” of a “natural scarcity” that dictates communal relations — as though a communal sharing of things were exogenous to humanity and must be imposed by survival needs to overcome the “innate” human egoism that “modernity” so often identifies with selfhood. Primitive communism also contains the concept of property, however communal in character, that identifies selfhood with ownership. Usufruct, as the transgression of proprietary claims in any form, is concealed by property as a public institution. Indeed, communal property is not so far removed conceptually and institutionally from “public property,” “nationalized property,” or “collectivized property” that the incubus of proprietorship can be said to be removed completely from the sensibility and practices of a communist society. Finally, “matriarchy,” the rule of society by women instead of men, merely alters the nature of rule; it does not lead to its abolition. “Matriarchy” merely changes the gender of domination and thereby perpetuates domination as such.
“Natural scarcity,” property, and rule thus persist in the very name of the critique of dass society, exploitation, private property, and the acquisition of wealth. By veiling the primordial blood oath that constrains the development of hierarchy and domination into class society, economic exploitation, and property, the class critique merely replaces the constraints of kinship with the constraints of economics instead of transcending both to a higher realm of freedom. It reconstitutes bourgeois right by leaving property unchallenged by usufruct, rule unchallenged by nonhierarchical relationships, and scarcity unchallenged by an abundance from which an ethical selectivity of needs can be derived. The more critical substrate of usufruct, reciprocity, and the irreducible minimum is papered over by a less fundamental critique: the critique of private property, of injustice in the distribution of the means of life, and of an unfair return for labor. Marx’s own critique of justice in his remarks on the Gotha Program remains one of the most important contributions he made to radical social theory, but its economistic limitations are evident in the tenor of the work as a whole.
(from From Urbanization to Cities, 1987)
Contrary to rationalistic and contractual image of the state, state institutions emerged slowly, uncertainly, and precariously out of a social milieu that was distinctly nonstatist in character. In fact, the social and organic sources of the state had to be meticulously reworked before they could give rise to state institutions. The ancient temple corporation, actually a religious legitimation of tribal collectivity and public control of land, seems to have been the most likely source of the Near Eastern state. This was a time when priests commonly became kings or, at least, when the kingship often took on a priestly character. In either case the temple and palace monumentalized as well as deified the tribal community.
Despite the increasing secularization of the state, notably in Greece and Rome, the state never completely lost its religious trappings and its function as the custodian of the collectivistic community. This attribute, whether as an ensemble of feudal nobles or a monarchy and ultimately as an absolutist empire, remained with it well into recent times. The traditional “head of state,” be he a lord or a king, always remained the “father of his people,” whether by divine right or as a divinity in his own right. Hence, prior to the rise of republican systems of governance, the state always appeared not as a constituted phenomenon but as a reworking of a very traditional, organic, patriarchal, indeed tribalistic body of relationships in which power was not simply conferred by the community, as in the case of elected kingships, but inherited along lineage and blood lines in a manner redolent of the ancient tribalist blood tie. The present always entails a reworking of the past, a transmutation rather than a dissolution of traditional forms to meet new needs and imperatives.
It is notable that the rise of the centralized nation-state in Europe also followed this archaic and highly organic process of transmutation of old into new. Indeed, until “the age of the democratic revolutions,” to use the title of R. R. Palmer’s distinguished book, it was not through the constitution of new states but the recovery of ancient rights that king and community were thrown into civil war with each other, a conflict that often took the shape of monarchy against municipality. Both parties sought not to innovate new forms of governance but to restore old ones from the past. Characteristically, the earliest form of the European nation-state appears not as the emergence of a national economy, significant as this development proved to be, but as the increasing sovereignty of the kingly household itself — the monarchical oikos — and the image of the “nation” as a kingly patrimony....
What makes the English state interesting is the challenge it raises to simplistic theories of state formation and rule. I refer to its organic roots and its evolution out of household offices. The English state was born not out of an administrative body of autonomous departments but rather out of the personal responsibilities of the king’s servants — his immediate household coterie — often in opposition to the doubtful loyalties of the king’s own feudal barons. Perhaps the foremost of these royal servants was the king’s personal secretary, his chancellor, who carried the royal seal and coordinated the emerging departments that comprised the administrative portion of the royal court. In time the chancellor became the pole around which an increasing number of clerks, experts, and specialists in various governmental areas, and overseers of what was to become a fairly complex executive authority, collected to form the all-important English chancery. Almost every aspect of monarchical rule fell within its purview, principally the king’s exchequer, who saw to the collection of taxes and Henry Il’s professional judiciary.
In fact, the English state was formed largely from the king’s bedroom, dining table, men-in-waiting, and household clergy, not from constituted principles of government that spoke in the interests of a specific “ruling class.” Class theories of the “origins of the state” to the contrary notwithstanding, the English state of the Middle Ages began as the elaboration of a patrimony rather than as the institutionalization of one class’s authority over that of another. The English barons, who were to view the formation of this state with suspicion and later with overt hostility, found it difficult to claim it as their own. A continual tension existed — occasionally expressing itself in a violent form — between the baronial infrastructure of English medieval society and the monarchy, which formed the originating impulse of the authentic, fairly complete state. In its patrimonial form, th::: English state is no exception to the “origins of the state” generally; this mode of state formation is very similar to the way in which the “barbarian” chiefdoms of an earlier tribal society gradually extended their power from networks furnished by their personal retainers and clans. The journey from valet to prime minister, amusing as the juxtaposition may seem, is closer to the truth of state formation than the more sociological idea that the state emerged as an agency of class interest — whatever it was to become later in history.
I have dwelt in some detail on the origins of the English state — in time to be regarded as the prototype of the nation-state par excellencenot because of its uniqueness but rather because of its continuity with the ancient past. The organic growth of the English monarchy parallels to a remarkable degree the rise of the oikos forms of statehood. Historically, these forms go back to early Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, and even Rome before the empire became heavily bureaucratized....
By the end of the twelfth century, France had already begun to catch up with England by creating officiers du roi (officials of the king) who shared power with the French barons in the traditional royal council. By degrees, the French began to outpace their English rivals. FunCtionaries, emerging from the royal household, acquired expanding administrative roles so that the kingly servants were soon to be royal bureaucrats rather than household administrators.... In time, the immense French bureaucracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in theory answerable only to the monarchy, acquired a life — indeed, an outlook — of its own. The emergence of a bureaucratic sensibility, permeating all levels of French society, can hardly be emphasized too strongly. A new, almost ubiquitous “nobility of the robe,” ennobled more as functionaries of the monarchy than by virtue of birth, began to overshadow the hereditary “nobility of the sword.” In contrast to so much of feudal Europe, the sons of the French middle classes began to regard the royal bureaucracy rather than the clerical hierarchy as the avenue toward upward mobility and power, a shift in perspective that linked the French “bourgeoisie,” whatever that word meant some two centuries ago, to the monarchy more tightly than historians of “class conflict” would have us believe. The French Revolution, conceived as the “classic bourgeois revolution” of emerging capitalism, was to test this “class analysis” in the fiery crucible of insurrection, with more dismal results than later, nineteenth-century historians suspected....
What is most intriguing is that neither absolutism nor the rise of a nation-state provides us with an adequate explanation for the rise of a “national economy,” as Hannah Arendt suggests.... Although European nation-states from the sixteenth century onward created the arena for a national economy, they did not necessarily create the forces that shaped it. Absolutism, which sculpted a sense of nationhood out of feudal parochialism, played a very crucial role: it not only supplanted localism with nationalism; it also stifled a highly decentralistic, localistic, and spontaneous society, marked by a rich diversity of cultural, economic and communal attributes, replacing it with increasingly homogenized lifeways, bureaucratized institutions, and centralized state forms. In some cases, this absolutist alternative favored the later expansion of a market economy; in others, it led to state parasitism and outright regression. In all cases, however, it turned localist politics into nationalist statecraft, divesting citizenship of its classical attributes and turning vital, empowered, and strongly etched men and women into passive, disempowered, and obedient “subjects.”
This shift from a living people to deadened subjects did not occur without furious resistance. A belief in autonomy, regional and local identity, and citizen empowerment ran very high between the late Middle Ages and fairly recent times. The battle to retain these distinctly political qualities and rights was to be fought not in national political parties or by professional statesmen; rather, it was conducted on the level of village, town, neighborhood, and city life, where the ideals of confederation were to be opposed to demands for a nation-state and the values of decentralization were to be opposed to those of centralization. What lay in the balance was not only the future of the town and countryside but the development of political institutions as opposed to state institutions — and an active citizenry as opposed to a passive “constituency.”
(from From Urbanization to Cities, 1987)
The market society that we call capitalism — a society that tends to reduce all citizens to mere buyers and sellers and debases all the ecologically varied social relationships produced by history to the exchange of objects called commodities — did not “evolve” out of the feudal era. It literally exploded into being in Europe, particularly England, during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, although it had existed in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and with growing significance in the mixed economy of the West from the fourteenth century up to the seventeenth. It is still spreading around the world — intensively in its traditional Euro-American center and extensively in the non-European world. Its forms have varied from the largely mercantile (its earliest kind) through the industrial (its more recent eighteenth — and nineteenth-century forms) to the statist, corporate, and multinational forms of our own time. It has slowly penetrated from its special spheres, such as market arenas of exchange and the production of commodities in cottages and later in factories, into domestic life itself, such as the family and neighborhood. This is a fairly recent “advance” that can be dated most strikingly from the midpoint of the twentieth century. Its invasion of neighborhoods, indeed of villages and small towns into the recesses of domestic or familial relationships, has subverted the social bond itself and threatens to totally undermine any sense of community and ecological balance and diversity in social life.
Moreover, the newly gained dominance of the capitalist market relationship over all other forms of production and consociation is a major source of what I have denoted “urbanization” — the explosion of the city itself into vast urban agglomerations that threaten the very integrity of city life and citizenship. What makes the market society we call capitalism unique, even by contrast to its early mercantile form, is that it is an ever-expansive, accumulative, and in this respect cancerous economic system whose “law of life” is to “grow or die.” Capitalism in its characteristically modern and “dominant” form threatens not only to undermine every “natural economy” (to use Marx’s own term), be it small-scale agriculture, artisanship, or simple exchange relationships; it threatens to undermine every dimension of “organic society,” be it the kinship tie, communitarian forms of association, systems of self-governance, and localist allegiances — the sense of home and place. Owing to its metastatic invasion of every aspect of life by means of monetization and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “commodification,” it threatens the integrity of the natural world — soil, flora, fauna, and the complex economies that have made presentday life-forms and relationships possible by turning everything “natural” into an inorganic, essentially synthetic form.[35] Soil is being turned into sand, variegated landscapes into level and simplified ones, complex relationships into more primal forms such that the evolutionary clock is being turned back to a biotically earlier time when life was less varied in form and its range more limited in scope.
The effect of capitalism on the city has been nothing less than catastrophic. The commonly used term “urban cancer” can be taken literally to designate the extent to which the traditional urbs of the ancient world has been dissolved into a primal, ever-spreading, and destructive form that threatens to devour city and countryside alike. Growth in the special form that singles out modern capitalism from all earlier forms of economic life, including earlier forms of capitalism itself, has affected what we persist in calling the “city” by leading to the expansion of pavements, streets, houses, and industrial, commercial, and retail structures over the entire landscape, just as a cancer spreads over the body and invades its deepest recesses.
Cities, in turn, have begun to lose their form as distinctive cultural and physical entities, as humanly scaled and manageable political entities. Their functions have changed from ethical arenas with a uniquely humane, civilized form of consociation, free of all blood ties and family loyalties, into immense, overbearing, and anonymous marketplaces. They are becoming centers primarily of mass production and mass consumption, including culture as well as physically tangible objects. Indeed, culture has become objectivized into commodities, as have human relationships, which are increasingly being simplified and mediated by objects. The simplification of social life and the biosphere by a growth-oriented economy in which production and consumption become ends in themselves is yielding the simplification of the human psyche itself. The strong sense of individuation that marked the people of the mixed society preceding capitalism is giving way to a receptive consumer and taxpayer, a passive observer of life rather than an active participant in it, lacking economic roots that support self-assertiveness and community roots that foster participation in social life. Citizenship itself, conceived as a function of character formation, and politics, as part of paideia or the education of a social being, tend to wane into personal indifference to social problems. The decline of the citizen, more properly his or her dissolution into a being lost in a mass societythe human counterpart of the mass-produced object — is furthered by a burgeoning of structural gigantism that replaces the human scale and by a growing bureaucracy that replaces all the organic sinews that held precapitalist society together. The counselor is the humanistic counterpart of the indifferent bureaucrat and the counseling chamber is the structural counterpart of the governmental office.
Let it be said that this debasement of the ecological complexity of the city, of its politics, citizens, even of the individuals who people its streets and structures, is of very recent origin. It did not really begin in a manorial society, with its barons and serfs, food cultivators, and artisans, and all the “orders” we denote as feudal. Nor did it follow from those grossly misnamed revolutions, the “bourgeois–democratic” ones of England, America, and France, that ostensibly catapulted capital into political control of a society it presumably “controlled” economically during earlier generations. Rather, this development began to appear with technical innovations that made possible both the mass manufacture of cheap commodities and, what is crucially important, their increasingly rapid transportation into the deepest recesses of western Europe, inexpensive and highly competitive with the products of local artisans who had serviced their localities for centuries. It need hardly be emphasized that this development depended enormously for its success on the opening of colonial markets abroad: the Americas, Africa, and particularly Asia, the area where the English crown found its richest jewel, notably India.
It was the extraordinary combination of technical advances with the existence of a highly variegated society, relatively free of the cultural constraints on trade that prevailed in antiquity, that gave economic ascendancy to the capitalistic component of the mixed economy over all its other components. Neither wealth from the Americas nor the large monetary resources accumulated by port cities from long-distance trade fully explains the rise of industrial capitalism — a form of capitalism that more than any other penetrated into the very inner life of Europe. Had the wealth acquired from the New World been a decisive factor in creating industrial capitalism, Spain rather than England should have become its center, for it was Spanish conquistadores who initially plundered the Aztec and Inca empires and brought their precious metals to Europe. The very wealth these “empires” provided for the ascendant nation-state in Spain served to weaken town life in the Iberian peninsula and provide the means for absolute monarchs to embark on an archaic program of continental empire building that eventually ruined Spanish cities and the countryside alike.
Nor did long-distance trade provide the most important sources for capitalizing industrial development. Rather it fostered consumption more than production, the dissolute lifeway that makes for a diet of luxuries instead of the parsimonious habits that steer investment into new means of production. Indeed, too much state centralization and too much commerce, despite the wealth they initially generated, ultimately led to excessive expenditures for territorial expansion and high living by elite groups in all the orders of a courtly society. That nation-building, increased centralization, or more properly, national consolidation prepared the way for industrial capitalism by opening more “hinterlands” to trade is patently clear. So, too, did the increases in the population of dispossessed, propertyless hands, whether as a result of land enclosures or normal demographic growth, hands that were available for a factory system that had yet to appear on the economic horizon. Europe, in effect, was more open than any part of the world to the expansion of its capitalist component along industrial lines. This was especially true of England.... What pushed the capitalist component of this mixed economy into a nation that could regard itself as the “workshop of the world” in the nineteenth century was a series of inventions that made the factory system and the distribution of its wares possible.
Nor need we be concerned with whether the needs of a “rising bourgeoisie” produced the Industrial Revolution or the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the “bourgeoisie,” which in any case was always a presence in all the major cities of Europe. Factories, in fact, had begun to appear in eighteenth — and even seventeenth-century England long before an industrial technology had emerged. Whether the “bourgeoisie” entered into the productive sphere rather than the commercial, it tried to bring labor together and rationalize output even with tools; hence a strictly technological interpretation of the rise of industrial capitalism would be greatly misleading. My concern here is how industrial capitalism managed to gain ascendancy over other forms of production, including commercial capitalism, and alter all social relations that encountered its power. Waterwheels had preceded the steam engine as a prime mover, and worksheds organized around simple tools had preceded mechanized factories. But without the inventions that introduced the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is doubtful that industrial capitalism could have impacted so powerfully on Europe and ultimately on the entire world....
Within a span of some two generations, England was transformed on a scale unprecedented in the history of western Europe. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, a period piece based on personal observations in 1844, could justly call the changes introduced by the new industrial inventions — principally in textiles, metallurgy, and transportation — a historic change of unprecedented proportion. The rapidity of the transformation is what makes these changes so startling in a domain of human endeavor — technology — which had developed over centuries at a slow, piecemeal pace. The social and cultural ramifications of this technological revolution were nothing less than monumental.
(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)
By the middle of the present century, large-scale market operations had colonized every aspect of social and personal life. The buyer-seller relationship — a relationship that lies at the very core of the marketbecame the all-pervasive substitute for human relationships at the most molecular level of social, indeed personal life. To “buy cheaply” and “sell dearly” places the parties involved in the exchange process in an inherently antagonistic posture: they are potential rivals for each other’s goods. The commodity — as distinguished from the gift, which is meant to create alliances, foster association, and consolidate sociality — leads to rivalry, dissociation, and asociality.
Although philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel articulated their concern for the dissociative role of a commerce and industry organized for exchange, society itself had long buffered exchange with a social etiquette — one that still lingers on in the vestigial face-to-face archaic marketplace of the bazaar. Here one does not voice a demand for goods, compare prices, and engage in the market’s universal duel called bargaining. Rather, etiquette requires that the exchange process begin gracefully and retain its communal dimension. It opens with the serving of beverages, an exchange of news and gossip, some personal chit-chat, and, in time, expressions of admiration for the wares at hand. One leads to the exchange process tangentially. The bargain, if struck, is a bond, a compact sealed by time-honored ethical imperatives.
The apparently noncommercial ambiance of this exchange process should not be viewed as mere canniness or hypocrisy. It reflects the limits that precapitalist society imposed on exchange to avoid the latent impersonality of trade, as well as its potential meanness of spirit, its insatiable appetite for gain, its capacity to subvert all social limits to private material interest, to dissolve all traditional standards of community and consociation, to subordinate the needs of the body politic to egoistic concerns.
But it was not only for these reasons that trade was viewed warily. Precapitalist society may well have seen in the exchange of commodities a return of the inorganic, of the substitution of things for living human relationships. These objects could certainly be viewed symbolically as tokens of consociation, alliance, and mutuality — which is precisely what the gift was meant to represent. But divested of this symbolic meaning, these mere things or commodities could acquire socially corrosive traits. Left unchecked and unbuffered, they might well vitiate all forms of human consociation and ultimately dissolve society itself. The transition from gift to commodity, in effect, could yield the disintegration of the community into a marketplace, the consanguineous or ethical union between people into rivalry and aggressive egotism.
That the triumph of the commodity over the gift was possible only after vast changes in human social relationships has been superbly explored in the closing portion of Capital. I need not summarize Marx’s devastating narration and analysis of capitalist accumulation, its “general law,” and particularly the sweeping dislocation of the English peasantry from the fifteenth century onward. The gift itself virtually disappeared as the objectification of association. It lingered on merely as a byproduct of ceremonial functions. The traditional etiquette that buffered the exchange process was replaced by a completely impersonal, predatory — and today, an increasingly electronic — process. Price came first, quality came later; and the very things that were once symbols rather than mere objects for use and exchange became fetishized, together with the “needs” they were meant to satisfy. Suprahuman forces now seemed to take command over the ego itself. Even selfinterest, which Greek social theory viewed as the most serious threat to the unity of the polis, seemed to be governed by a market system that divested the subject of its very capacity to move freely through the exchange process as an autonomous buyer and seller.
Ironically, modern industry, having derived from archaic systems of commerce and retailing, has returned to its commercial origins with a vengeful self-hatred marked by a demeaning rationalization of trade itself. The shopping mall with its extravagant areas delivered over to parked motor vehicles, its sparseness of sales personnel, its cooing “muzak,” its dazzling array of shelved goods, its elaborate surveillance system, its lack of all warmth and human intercourse, its cruelly deceptive packaging, and its long checkout counters that indifferently and impersonally record the exchange process — all speak to a denaturing of consociation at levels of life that deeply affront every human sensibility and the sacredness of the very goods that are meant to support life itself.
What is crucially important here is that this world penetrates personal as well as economic life. The shopping mall is the agora of modern society, the civic center of a totally economic and inorganic world. It works its way into every personal haven from capitalist relations and imposes its centricity on every aspect of domestic life. The highways that lead to its parking lots and its production centers devour communities and neighborhoods; its massive command of retail trade devours the family-owned store; the subdivisions that cluster around it devour farmland; the motor vehicles that carry worshipers to its temples are self-enclosed capsules that preclude all human contact. Not only does the inorganic return to industry and the marketplace; it calcifies and dehumanizes the most intimate relationships between people in the presumably invulnerable world of the bedroom and nursery. The massive dissolution of personal and social ties that comes with the return of the inorganic transforms the extended family into the nuclear family and finally delivers the individual over to the purveyors of singles’ bars.
With the hollowing out of community by the market system, with its loss of structure, articulation, and form, comes the concomitant hollowing out of personality itself. Just as the spiritual and institutional ties that linked human beings together into vibrant social relations are eroded by the mass market, so the sinews that make for subjectivity, character, and self-definition are divested of form and meaning. The isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated as the highest achievement of “modernity” turns out to be the mere husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as an ego was responsible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded and complete community.
As the inorganic replaces the organic in nature, so the inorganic replaces the organic in society and personality. The simplification of the natural world has its uncanny parallel in the simplification of society and subjectivity. The homogenization of ecosystems goes hand in hand with the homogenization of the social environment and the so-called individuals who people it. The intimate association of the domination of human by human with the notion of the domination of nature terminates not only in the notion of domination as such; its most striking feature is the kind of prevailing nature — an inorganic nature — that replaces the organic nature that humans once viewed so reverently.
We can never disembed ourselves from nature — any more than we can disembed ourselves from our own viscera. The technocratic “utopia” of personalized automata remains a hollow myth. The therapies that seek to adjust organic beings to inorganic conditions merely produce lifeless, inorganic, and depersonalized automata. Hence nature always affirms its existence as the matrix for social and personal life, a matrix in which life is always embedded by definition. By rationalizing and simplifying society and personality, we do not divest it of its natural attributes; rather, we brutally destroy its organic attributes. Thus nature never simply coexists with us; it is part of every aspect of our structure and being. To turn back natural evolution from more complex forms of organic beings to simpler ones, from the organic to the inorganic, entails the turning back of society and social development from more complex to simpler forms.
Dispelling the myth that our society is more complex than earlier cultures requires short shrift; our complexity is strictly technical, not cultural; our effluvium of “individuality” is more neurotic and psychopathic, not more unique or more intricate. “Modernity” reached its apogee between the decades preceding the French Revolution and the 1840s, after which industrial capitalism fastened its grip on social life. Its career, with a modest number of exceptions, has yielded a grim denaturing of humanity and society. Since the middle of the present century, even the vestiges of its greatness — apart from dramatic explosions like the 1960s — have all but disappeared from virtually every realm of experience.
What has largely replaced the sinews that held community and personality together is an all-encompassing, coldly depersonalizing bureaucracy. The agency and the bureaucrat have become the substitutes for the family, the town and neighborhood, the personal support structures of people in crisis, and the supernatural and mythic figures that afforded power and tutelary surveillance over the destiny of the individual. With no other structures to speak of but the bureaucratic agency, society has not merely been riddled by bureaucracy; it has all but become a bureaucracy in which everyone, as Camus was wont to say, has been reduced to a functionary. Personality as such has become congruent with the various documents, licenses, and records that define one’s place in the world. More sacred than such documents as passports, which are the archaic tokens of citizenship, a motor vehicle license literally validates one’s identity, and a credit card becomes the worldwide coinage of exchange.
The legacy of domination thus culminates in the growing together of the State and society — and with it, a dissolution of the family, community, mutual aid, and social commitment. Even a sense of one’s personal destiny disappears into the bureaucrat’s office and filing cabinet. History itself will be read in the microfilm records and computer tapes of the agencies that now form the authentic institutions of society. Psychological categories have indeed “become political categories,” as Marcuse observed in the opening lines of his Eros and Civilization, but in a pedestrian form that exceeds his most doleful visions. The Superego is no longer formed by the father or even by domineering social institutions; it is formed by the faceless people who preside over the records of birth and death, of religious affiliation and educational pedigree, of “mental health” and psychological proclivities, of vocational training and job acquisition, of marriage and divorce certificates, of credit ratings and bank accounts; in short, of the endless array of licenses, tests, contracts, grades, and personality traits that define the status of the individual in society. Political categories have replaced psychological categories in much the same sense that an electrocardiograph has replaced the heart. Under state capitalism, even economic categories become political categories. Domination fulfills its destiny in the ubiquitous, all-pervasive State; its legacy reaches its denouement in the dissolution, indeed the complete disintegration, of a richly organic society into an inorganic one — a terrifying destiny that the natural world shares with the social.
Reason, which was expected to dispel the dark historic forces to which a presumably unknowing humanity had been captive, now threatens to become one of these very forces in the form of rationalization. It now enhances the efficiency of domination. The great project of Western speculative thought — to render humanity selfconscious — stands before a huge abyss: a yawning chasm into which the self and consciousness threaten to disappear.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
November 30, 1996 : Chapter 4 -- Publication.
January 02, 2021 : Chapter 4 -- Added.
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