People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Author : Ursula K. Le Guin
Text :
[1] Many less well-known names could be added to this list, but one that in particular I would like very much to single out is the gallant leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, Maria Spiridonova, whose supporters were virtually alone in proposing a workable revolutionary program for the Russian people in 1917–18. Their failure to implement their political insights and replace the Bolsheviks (with whom they initially joined in forming the first Soviet government) not only led to their defeat but contributed to the disastrous failure of revolutionary movements in the century that followed.
[2] I frankly regard this contradiction as more fundamental than the often-indiscernible tendency of the rate of profit to decline and thereby to render capitalist exchange inoperable—a contradiction to which Marxists assigned a decisive role in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[3] Contrary to Marx’s assertion that a society disappears only when it has exhausted its capacity for new technological developments, capitalism is in a state of permanent technological revolution—at times, frighteningly so. Marx erred on this score: it will take more than technological stagnation to terminate this system of social relations. As new issues challenge the validity of the entire system, the political and ecological domains will become all the more important. Alternatively, we are faced with the prospect that capitalism may pull down the entire world and leave behind little more than ashes and ruin—achieving, in short, the “capitalist barbarism” of which Rosa Luxemburg warned in her “Junius” essay.
[4] I use the word extraordinary because, by Marxist standards, Europe was still objectively unprepared for a socialist revolution in 1914. Much of the continent, in fact, had yet to be colonized by the capitalist market or bourgeois social relations. The proletariat—still a very conspicuous minority of the population in a sea of peasants and small producers—had yet to mature as a class into a significant force. Despite the opprobrium that has been heaped on Plekhanov, Kautsky, Bernstein et al., they had a better understanding of the failure of Marxist socialism to embed itself in proletarian consciousness than did Lenin. Luxemburg, in any case, straddled the so-called “social-patriotic” and “internationalist” camps in her image of a Marxist party’s function, in contrast to Lenin, her principal opponent in the so-called “organizational question” in the Left of the wartime socialists, who was prepared to establish a “proletarian dictatorship” under all and any circumstances. The First World War was by no means inevitable, and it generated democratic and nationalist revolutions rather than proletarian ones. (Russia, in this respect, was no more a “workers’ state” under Bolshevik rule than were the Hungarian and Bavarian “soviet” republics.) Not until 1939 was Europe placed in a position where a world war was inevitable. The revolutionary Left (to which I belonged at the time) frankly erred profoundly when it took a so-called “internationalist” position and refused to support the Allies (their imperialist pathologies notwithstanding) against the vanguard of world fascism, the Third Reich.
[5] Kropotkin, for example, rejected democratic decision-making procedures: “Majority rule is as defective as any other kind of rule,” he asserted. See Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles,” in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, edited by Roger N. Baldwin (1927; reprinted by New York: Dover, 1970), 68.
[6] I have made the distinction between politics and statecraft in, for example, Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship (1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992), 41–3, 59–61.
[7] Several years ago, while I still identified myself as an anarchist, I attempted to formulate a distinction between “social” and “lifestyle” anarchism, and I wrote an article that identified Communalism as “the democratic dimension of anarchism” (see Left Green Perspectives, no. 31, October 1994). I no longer believe that Communalism is a mere “dimension” of anarchism, democratic or otherwise; rather, it is a distinct ideology with a revolutionary tradition that has yet to be explored.
[8] To be sure, these points undergo modification in Communalism: for example, Marxism’s historical materialism, explaining the rise of class societies, is expanded by social ecology’s explanation of the anthropological and historical rise of hierarchy. Marxian dialectical materialism, in turn, is transcended by dialectical naturalism; and the anarcho-communist notion of a very loose “federation of autonomous communes” is replaced with a confederation from which its components, functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.
[9] What is so surprising about this minimalist dictionary definition is its overall accuracy: I would take issue only with its formulations “virtually autonomous” and “loosely bound,” which suggest a parochial and particularistic, even irresponsible relationship of the components of a confederation to the whole.
[10] My extensive writings on libertarian municipalism date back to the early 1970s, with “Spring Offensives and Summer Vacations,” Anarchos, no. 4, 1972. The more significant works include From Urbanization to Cities, 1987, reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992; “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” Our Generation [Montreal], vol. 16, nos. 3–4, Spring/Summer 1985; “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Green Perspectives, no. 18, Nov. 1989; “The Meaning of Confederalism,” Green Perspectives, no. 20, November 1990; “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,” Green Perspectives, no. 24, October 1991; and The Limits of the City, New York: Harper Colophon, 1974.
[11] For one such discussion, see Murray Bookchin, “The Ghost of Anarchosyndicalism,” Anarchist Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1993.
[12] One of the great tragedies of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936 was the failure of the masses to acquire more than the scantest knowledge of social logistics and the complex interlinkages involved in providing for the necessities of life in a modern society. Inasmuch as those who had the expertize involved in managing productive enterprises and in making cities functional were supporters of the old regime, workers were in fact unable to actually take over the full control of factories. They were obliged instead to depend on “bourgeois specialists” to operate them, individuals who steadily made them the victims of a technocratic elite.
[13] I have previously discussed this transformation of workers from mere class beings into citizens, among other places, in From Urbanization to Cities, 1987, reprinted by London: Cassell, 1995; and in “Workers and the Peace Movement,” 1983, published in The Modern Crisis, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987.
[14] Aristotle, Politics (1252 [b] 16), trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation, ed. J. Barnes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, vol. 2, 1987.
[15] As a libertarian ideal for the future of humanity and a genuine domain of freedom, the Athenian polis falls far short of the city’s ultimate promise. Its population included slaves, subordinated women, and franchiseless resident aliens. Only a minority of male citizens possessed civic rights, and they ran the city without consulting a larger population. Materially, the stability of the polis depended upon the labor of its noncitizens. These are among the several monumental failings that later municipalities would have to correct. The polis is significant, however, not as an example of an emancipated community but for the successful functioning of its free institutions.
[16] Aristotle, Politics (1252 [b] 29–30), trans. Jowett; emphasis added. The words from the original Greek text may be found in the Loeb Classical Library edition: Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
[17] Lefrançais is quoted in Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, New York: Horizon Press, 1968, 393. I too would be obliged today to make the same statement. In the late 1950s, when anarchism in the United States was a barely discernible presence, it seemed like a sufficiently clear field in which I could develop social ecology, as well as the philosophical and political ideas that would eventually become dialectical naturalism and libertarian municipalism. I well knew that these views were not consistent with traditional anarchist ideas, least of all postscarcity, which implied that a modern libertarian society rested on advanced material preconditions. Today, I find that anarchism remains the very simplistic individualistic and antirationalist psychology it has always been. My attempt to retain anarchism under the name of “social anarchism” has largely been a failure, and I now find that the term I have used to denote my views must be replaced with Communalism, which coherently integrates and goes beyond the most viable features of the anarchist and Marxist traditions. Recent attempts to use the word anarchism as a leveler to minimize the abundant and contradictory differences that are grouped under that term and even celebrate its openness to “differences” make it a diffuse catch-all for tendencies that properly should be in sharp conflict with one another.
[18] For a discussion of the very real problems created by anarchists’ disdain for power during the 1936 Spanish Revolution, see the article, “Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution.”
[19] I should note that by objective, I do not refer merely to existential entities and events but also to potentialities that can be rationally conceived, nurtured, and in time actualized into what we would narrowly call realities. If mere substantiality were all that the term objective meant, no ideal or promise of freedom would be an objectively valid goal unless it existed under our very noses.
[20] C. Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 63.
[21] Goethe, quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History, 3rd rev. ed., New York: The Dial Press, 1961, 578.
[22] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, book 2, chapter 4.
[23] P.-J. Proudhon, letter to Dulieu, December 30, 1860, Correspondence, vol. 10, 275, republished in S. Edwards, ed., Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, trans. Elizabeth Frazer, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969, 185.
[24] P.-J. Proudhon, La Federation et l’unite en Italie, 1862, 122–25, in Edwards, Selected Writings, 188–89.
[25] P.-J. Proudhon, letter to Dulieu, December 30, 1860, Correspondence, vol. 10, 275–76, republished in Edwards, Selected Writings, 185.
[26] P.-J. Proudhon, letter to Alexander Herzen, April 21, 1861, Correspondence, vol. 11, 22–24, republished in Edwards, Selected Writings, 191, emphasis in the original.
[27] P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, New York: Free Press of Glencoe, London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1953, 324–35, emphasis added.
[28] K. Marx, F. Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Selected Works, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, 120.
[29] Ibid., 124.
[30] Despite the genderedness of these words—the product of the era in which Bakunin lived—they obviously may be interpreted as signifying humanity generally.
[31] P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, 325.
[32] These revolutionary syndicalists conceived the means by which they had carried out this transformation as a form of direct action. In contrast to the riots, stone throwing, and violence that many anarchists today extoll as “direct action,” by this term they meant well-organized and constructive activities directly involved in managing public affairs. Direct action, in their view, meant the creation of a polity, the formation of popular institutions, and the formulation and enactment of laws, regulations, and the like, which authentic anarchists regarded as an abridgment of individual “will” or “autonomy.”
[33] In the intervening year, the CNT leaders had discovered that their rejection of power for the Catalan proletariat and peasantry did not include a rejection of power for themselves as individuals. Several CNT-FAI leaders actually agreed to participate in the bourgeois state as ministers and were holding office when their members were being suppressed in the battle of Barcelona in May 1937.
[34] Whether in Russia or in Germany, the conviction that “bourgeois democracy” (that is, capitalism) was a preconditional stage for leading society to socialism helped justify the reluctance of Social Democracy to lead the workers to make a proletarian revolution between 1917 and 1919. Marx’s “stages theory,” in effect, was not only an attempt to give an interpretation to historical development; it played a vital role in Marxist politics from the German and Russian Revolutions of 1917–21 to the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37.
[35] I refer here not to the conventional criticisms that were mounted against Marxism by political opponents—criticisms that emerged from the very inception of Marx’s theoretical activities and the emergence of the socialist movements based in varying degrees on his ideas. Nor am I concerned with Marxist critics such as Eduard Bernstein, who mounted their critiques within the Marxist movement itself in the 1890s. Rather, I refer to the critiques that emerged with the Frankfurt School and assorted writers like Karl Korsch, who seriously challenged the many premises of Marx’s philosophical and historical concepts.
[36] Marx, “Preface to a Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy,” in Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1, 504.
[37] All of which induced Georg Lukács to impart this hegemonic role to the “proletarian party,” which mystically embodies the proletariat as a class, even when its leadership is usually predominantly petty bourgeois.
[38] I am not trying to downplay the importance of economic issues. Quite to the contrary: only in recent times, especially since the mid-twentieth century, has capitalism’s commodity economy become a commodity society. Commodification has now penetrated into the most intimate levels of personal and social life. In the business-ese that prevails today, almost everything is seen as a tradeoff. Love itself becomes a “thing,” with its own exchange value and use value, even its own price—after all, do we not “earn” the love of others by our behavior? Still, this kind of commodification is not complete; the value of love is not entirely measurable in terms of labor or supply and demand.
[39] Ealham, C., “From the Summits to the Abyss: The Contradictions of Individualism and Collectivism in Spanish Anarchism,” in The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain,eds. Preston, P. and Mackenzie, A. L., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996, 140. This essay is one of the most important contributions I have read to the literature on the contradictions in anarchism.
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January 02, 2021 : Notes -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Notes -- Updated.
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