On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, and the Body Politic

The historic failure of proletarian socialism, particularly its Marxian form, to provide a revolutionary theory and practice for our time has been followed by a highly abstract form of socialist theoretics that stands sharply at odds with the very notion of a revolutionary project — notably, a theory that is meant to yield a viable revolutionary practice.

If this judgment seems harsh, it hardly conveys the extent to which this theoretics has become a considerable culture industry in its own right. The retreat of socialism from the factory to the academy — an astonishing phenomenon that cannot be justified by viewing “knowledge” as a technical force in society — has denied socialism the right to a decent internment by perpetuating it as a professionalized ideology. An enfeebled theory, long drained of its sweeping liberatory claims, socialism has been turned from a social phenomenon into an academic discipline, from a historic reality into a mere specimen of intellectual history that is cultured exotically all the more to obscure the need for an entirely new conception of theory and practice.

Indeed, to the degree that the academy itself has become increasingly disengaged from society, it has used socialist theoretics to indulge its worst intellectual habits. The remains of a once-insurgent movement have provided the intellectual nutrients for academic conceptual frameworks that are utterly alien to it — a level of discourse, a range of perceptions, a terminology, and a body of intellectual pretensions that mutually reinforce the reduction of academic ideology to socialism and of socialism to ideology. One must leave it to the conscience of the socialist academics to ask themselves if Marx’s account of social development as a history of class struggle can be translated into a history of “distorted communication,”{1} his critique of political economy into a specific “paradigm” of “intersubjectivity,” and his relations of production into “symbolically mediated forms of social interaction.” An earlier generation of Marxian theorists, however serious their shortcomings, would have banished the very term “sociology” from the vocabulary of radical ideas, not to speak of its desiccated categories and its odious pretensions to exactitude. Today, this vocabulary has been replaced by a more ennervated one in which socially neutral terms and concepts, denuded of the flesh and blood of experience, pirouette around each other in an intellectual ballet that imparts to them an almost dream-like transcendental quality. The most technically convoluted strategies for stating the obvious — Marx’s scientism, eco- nomism, and his roots in the Enlightenment — are cultivated to create a dichotomy between theoretics and reality that effectively immunizes concepts to the test of experience.

Partly in reaction to this trend, experience itself has been hypostasized at the expense of theoretical coherence — to a point, at times, when the refreshing immediacy of reality fosters a reverence for raw facts of “perception,” indeed, for the authority of the episodic and anecdotal. It remains to be seen if Habermas’s highly formalized theoretics can be given real social substance by the research of his colleagues at Starnberg or if various phenomenological and structural tendencies that have been drifting through Marxism can bring socialism into a meaningful confrontation with contemporary industrial capitalism. But in all of these cases, theoretical critique has been notable for its absence of radical reconstruction. Neither the later generation of “critical theorists” nor their opponents as reflected by newer formalizations of Marxism have given substance to their visions of freedom and practice. Shaped by academic templates like speech situations, systems theory, Verstehen, and research guided by the technical criteria of sociology, the harsh fact remains that socialism has been converted from a once viable social reality into the “idea” of socialism in much the same sense that Collingwood dealt with the “idea” of nature. Theoretical coherence has not been spared the revenge of a lack of experience any more than experience has been spared the revenge of a lack of theoretical coherence. Both have become equally abstract in their one-sidedness and partiality.

What is most disturbing about the self-absorption of so many of these theoretical and empirical tendencies — tendencies which may be broadly designated as “neo-Marxian” — is the promiscuity with which they meld utterly antithetical radical goals and traditions. Libertarian concepts and authoritarian ones, individualistic and collectivistic, economistic and cultural, scientistic and ethical — all have been funded together into an ecumenical radicalism” that lacks the consistency required by a serious revolutionary practice. Classical Marxian tendencies, functioning under the imperatives of organized political movements, were compelled to press the logic of their premises to the point of a combative social engagement with bourgeois reality. Neo- Marxism enjoys the luxury of theoretical reveries in which basically incompatible visions of freedom intermingle and become diffuse and obscure.

Let me state this problem concretely. Are the differences between decentralization and centralization merely differences of degree or of kind? Should we seek to strike some enigmatic “balance” between them or are they fundamentally incompatible with each other? Is direct democracy in a “mass society” (to use Marcuse’s fascinating expression in his discussion of this issue) impossible without the delegation of power to representatives or must it literally be direct, face-to-face, of the kind that prevailed in the Athenian polis, the French revolutionary sections of 1793, and the New England town meetings? Can direct democracy be equated with workers’ councils, soviets, the German Rate, an equation that is made not only by neo-Marxists, council communists, but also many anarchosyndicalists? Or do these essentially executive forms stand at odds with the communes and popular assemblies emphasized by anarcho-communists? Can bureaucracy of any kind coexist with libertarian institutions or are they inexorably opposed to each other?

Doubtless, these questions raise many problems of terminology that can easily obscure points of agreement between seemingly contrasting views. To some neo-Marxists who see centralization and decentralization merely as difference of degree, the word “centralization” may merely be an awkward way of denoting means for coordinating the decisions made by decentralized bodies. Marx it is worth noting, greatly confused this distinction when he praised the Paris Commune as a “working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.{2} In point of fact, the consolidation of “executive and legislative” functions in a single body was regressive. It simply identified the process of policy-making, a function that rightly should belong to the people in assembly, with the technical execution of these policies, a function that could be left to strictly administrative bodies subject to rotation, recall, limitations of tenure, wherever possible, selected by sortition. Accordingly, the melding of policy formation with administration placed the institutional emphasis of classical socialism on centralized bodies, indeed, by an ironical twist of historical events, bestowing the privilege of formulating policy on the “higher bodies 5 ’ of socialist hierarchies and their execution precisely on the more popular “revolutionary committees” below.

Similarly, the concept of “representation” intermingled with “direct democracy” serves to obscure the distinction between popular institutions which should decide policy and the “representative” institutions which should merely execute them. In this connection, Rousseau’s famous passage on the constitutive nature of a “people” in The Social Contract applies even more to the “mass society” of our times than the institutionally articulated one of his era. “Sovereignty, for the same reason that makes it inalienable, cannot be represented” Rousseau declares; “it lies essentially in the general will and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — is, in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free: but it is grossly mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing .” However problematical Rousseau’s concept of “general will” may be, quite aside from his archaic concept of “law,” the premises that underly it cannot be evaded: “... the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.”{3} (My emphasis — M.B.)

It is precisely in terms of a “general will” more libertarian and individuated than any conceived by Rousseau that reveals the workers’ councils, soviets, and the Rate to be socially one-sided and potentially hierarchical. Councils may be popularly constituted, but they are not constitutive of a “public sphere.” As the locus of the decision-making process in society, they absorb within executive bodies the liberties that more appropriately belong to a clearly delineable body politic and thereby subvert institutions such as communes, cooperatives, and popular assemblies that indeed constitute a people and express a popular will. Councils, in effect, usurp the political subjectivity that should be shared by all in social forms that express the individual’s claim to social sovereignty. That Bolshevism recognized this possibility and later cynically exploited it is revealed by the emphasis Lenin placed on the factory as the social basis of the soviets. Here, indeed, a “proletarian public sphere,” to use Oscar Neckt’s phrase, was acknowledged and hypostasized — not as a truly democratic arena, but as the locus for a “proletarian public” that could be strategically deployed against the great mass of “unreliable” peasants whose villages comprised the authentic “public sphere” of revolutionary Russia.

But the factory, far from being the strongest aspect of the “proletarian public sphere” is, in fact, its most vulnerable.[61] However much its social weight is reinforced by revolutionary shop committees and the most democratic forms of selfmanagement, the factory is in no sense an autonomous social organism. Quite to the contrary, it is a particularly dependent one that can only function — indeed, exist — in conjunction with other factories and sources of raw materials. The Bolsheviks were to astutely use this very limitation of the factory to centralize the “proletarian public sphere” to a point where they were to remove the last vestigial remains of proletarian democracy: first, by employing the soviets to isolate the factory from its place in the local community; then, by shifting power from the community to the nation in the form of national congresses of soviets. The use of soviets to interlink the proletariat from factory to factory across the entire breadth of Russia, literally amputating it as a social stratum from any comprehensible roots in specific localities where it could function effectively, served to hopelessly delimit its powers and to rigorously centralize it. In the immense, national congresses of soviets staged annually during the revolutionary years, the Russian proletariat had lost all power over the soviets even before the authority of the congresses had been completely usurped by the Bolshevik party.{4}

Quite likely, the centralization of the proletariat could have been achieved by the Bolsheviks in any case, without manipulating the soviet hierarchy. The very class nature of the proletariat, its existence as a creature of a national division of labor and its highly particularistic interests that rarely rise to the level of a general interest, belie Marx’s claims for its universality and its historic role as a revolutionary agent. These attributes, which hindsight clearly reveals today, explain the failure of all classical “proletarian revolutions” in the past. Neither the Paris Commune, which was really fought out by the last remnants of the traditional French sans culottes, nor the Spanish revolution, which was fought out by workers with rural roots, are exceptions. Indeed, Social Democracy and Leninism in all its varieties used this particularistic interest with great effect against broader revolutionary tendencies in society as witness Ebert’s shrewd manipulation of the German Rate, Stalin’s infamous “Lenin Levy,” and more recently, the commanding influence of European Communist and Socialist parties over the working class today.

Space does not make it possible to deal with the hierarchical nature of the factory structure and its impact on the formation of proletarian consciousness. If labor is the “steeling school” of the proletariat, as the young Marx was to emphasize, its locus, the factory, is a “school” based on “imperious obedience,” as Engels was to add in later years — indeed, a “school” marked by the complete absence of “autonomy.”{5} I have explored this issue elsewhere, in a work written more than a decade ago, and more recently, in my forthcoming Ecology of Freedom, where I question the existence of the factory as a natural fact of technics that must persist “independently of all social organization” (Engels).{6}

What is significant in all of these issues is the way they are integrated by neo-Marxism into the very problematical premises of classical Marxism, thereby neutralizing them as the bases for a thoroughly new radical theory and practice. Perhaps the most striking examples of these incongruities can be culled from Marcuse’s sixties writings, a literature which juxtaposes traditional, shopworn interpretations of political reality with philosophical, esthetic, and psychoanalytic insights that, in themselves, clearly pave new theoretical ground. These incongruities cannot be dismissed as the blind-spots of an otherwise far-ranging mind. I must reluctantly insist that they impugn the integrity of the larger vision Marcuse was to advance, the extent to which it was fully thought out, and the political conclusions that followed from it.

It is not trivial to ask why a work like An Essay on Liberation that contrasted the need for a “moral radicalism” with the scientistic radicalism of Marxian orthodoxy; that called for a “passing from Marx to Fourier” and “from realism to surrealism”; that celebrated the “new sensibility” of the sixties counterculture for its sensuousness, playfulness, and the challenge it posed to the “esprit de serieux in the socialist camp”; that singled out the “esthetic dimension” as “a sort of gauge for a free society” — indeed, that with all of this buoyant utopianism, could have casually included the observation that the “global dominion of corporate capitalism... keeps the socialist orbit on the defensive, all too costly not only in terms of military expenditures but also in the perpetuation of a repressive bureaucracy.” Or claim that in Vietnam, Cuba, and China, “a revolution is being defended and driven forward which struggles (!) to eschew the bureaucratic administration of socialism.” Or, still further, deals with the “Third World” as an “external proletariat” and its insurgent peasantry as a “rural proletariat” with the inevitable implication (stated more explicitly by Marcuse during a lecture at New York University a year earlier) that the apparent docility of the “internal proletariat” of the Euro-American “orbit” did not negate Marx’s traditional theory of class struggle when capitalism is viewd as a global phenomenon.{7}

One cannot afford to merely grimace at such distasteful Bolshevik apologetics for the “socialist orbit” as a society “deformed” by a “repressive bureaucracy” because of capitalist encirclement. Nor can one regard it as an expression of the geist of the time that Marcuse, a man thoroughly schooled in the history of the interwar Left, could mystify the Vietnamese, Cuban, and Chinese “revolutions” as anti-bureaucratic — certainly not without deliberately ignoring the Bolshevik legacy claimed by their leaders, the Stalinist structure of their parties, and the specious nature of the “revolutions” themselves. For nearly two generations, Marxists had debated the question of whether “repressive bureaucracies” within the “socialist orbit” (which certainly includes Vietnam, Cuba, and China) were merely “deformations” produced by capitalist encirclement or whether the “socialist orbit” itself constituted a historically new typology that required critique in its own right. The schizophrenic nature of Marcuse’s vision was to find its most striking expression in Counter-Revolution and Revolt where, incredibly, the “mass” Communist parties of Europe and their unions were placed on the “Left of Social Democracy” and, as a result of this meaningless “constellation,” were described as “still a potentially revolutionary force.”{8} Such observations are not episodic errors in judgment; they reflect a preformed social outlook that is more basic than encomiums to “moral radicalism,” “Fourier,” “surrealism,” and the “esthetic dimension” as “a sort of gauge for a free society.”

Characteristically, when the chips are down, Marcuse like many neo-Marxists, falls on the side of centralization, delegated power, councils, and authority, as against decentralization, direct democracy, popular assemblies, and spontaneity. Again, like his melding of “moral radicalism” with Bolshevik apologetics, he does not explore the conflicting logic of these concepts, but mystifies them- with a libertarian rhetoric that conceals his orthodox Marxist foundations. Occasionally, this rhetoric does violence to historical fact. For one who has lived through the Spanish Civil War era, for example, it is astonishing to read that the “international brigades” — a force Stalinist movements crassly employed for counterrevolutionary as well as military purposes — symbolized the “union of young intellectuals and workers.”{9} Not only was the formulation maladroit thirty years after the war, but it grossly misled the ill-informed radical youth who revered Marcuse as their elder statesman.[62] We are reaping the harvest of such historical sloppiness, today, with an effluvium of romantic eulogies to the Rosenbergs and the Stalinist hacks of the 1930s — this, quite aside from a revival of Stalinism by young sectarians who have been schooled in the writings of Ho, Mao, and Fidel. Doubtless, to impute these trends to Marcuse’s political sloppiness would be ridiculous. But that he contributed even passingly to the making of such myths rather than their ruthless demystification is not to be shrugged off as accidental and raises even larger issues about the premises of neo-Marxism as such.

Accordingly, even as Marcuse exultantly praises the “rebels” of May-June 1968 for using “direct action” to transform the “indirect democracy of corporate capitalism into a direct democracy,” his libertarian fervor is increasingly dispelled by the formulations which follow. “Direct action,” and more pointedly, “direct democracy,” vaporize into “elections and representation (that) no longer serve as institutions of domination.” This hopelessly feckless formula is groomed with such traditionally Marxian rhetoric as “genuinely free selection and election of candidates, revocability at the discretion of constituencies, and uncensored education and information.” Even Lenin in State and Revolution dispensed more generous liberties that Marcuse. What links Lenin and Marcuse in a common belief is their shared view that “in a modern mass society,” to use Marcuse’s words, “democracy, no matter in what form, is not conceivable without a system of representation.” To reduce this formula to its molecular constituents, Marcuse cannot envision socialism without a “mass society” anymore than Engels can envision socialism without factories.{10}

Not surprisingly, Marcuse is more at home with the “seminal achievements of... the ‘councils’ (‘soviets,’ Rate) as organizations of self-determination, self-government (or rather preparation for self-government) in local popular assemblies.” That Rate and “local popular assemblies” stand in historic contradiction to each other is not posed as an issue because the contradiction lacks intelligibility if one thinks of a free society in largely institutional or structural terms — which are the terms with which Marcuse operates on a political level. If his Freudo- Marxism reclaims the sovereignty of the ego, of play and the “esthetic dimension” in daily life, it lacks any viable life-line to his notion of socialism as a “mass society.” This dualism that divides Marcuse’s anarchism on the personal plane from his Marxian pragmatics on the social must inevitably lead to the absorption of the personal by the social, of the “black flag” (to use his own metaphors) by the “red flag.”{11} When he advances the slogan, “Spontaneity does not contradict authority,” is it necessary to ask what he means by the word “authority.” Self-discipline, education, and wisdom, as I have argued elsewhere in advancing the notion of “informed spontaneity” — or obedience, submission, and surrogation of will? It is by no means clear that one can infer from Marcuse’s Freudo-Marxism that the rights he acknowledges for the individual can be translated into social and institutional terms. The two are loosely bonded precisely because Marcuse sees no contradiction between his anarchism on the personal level and his Marxism on the social. Theory may permit this dichotomy to exist indefinitely as an exotic flower with a prickly stem, hence the success neo-Marxism enjoys as an academic project. Practice must bring the two into bitter contradiction with each other once neo-Marxism removes itself from the campus — and where it has done so, it exercises virtually no influence.

It would be a grave error to view my remarks on Marcuse as a critique of Marcuse as an individual thinker. Inasmuch as his theoretics have dealt more directly with social problems than that of any other neo-Marxist body of theory, they more clearly reveal the limits of the neo-Marxian project. Habermas is veiled by a formalism so abstract and a jargon so equivocal and dense that he is almost beyond the reach of pointed criticism. Castoriadis has abandoned Marxism completely. More importantly, the seeming schizophrenia of Marcuse’s theoretics is not a personal trait but a generic one. Owing to Marcuse’s own courage in venturing into social issues that neo-Marxists usually avoid — direct democracy, decentralization, representation, spontaneity, and liberatory social structures — he clearly reveals the extent to which these issues are intrinsically alien to Marxism as such, indeed to socialism. To this list of issues, one may reasonably add ecology, urbanism, and more fundamentally, hierarchy, domination, and a liberatory rationality.

What neo-Marxists have not candidly faced is the extent to which Marxism in all its forms is organically structured to respond to social changes that lend themselves to analyzes of class relations, economic exploitation, industrial rationalization, political institutions, and mass constituences. To the degree social changes raise broader issues of hierarchy, domination, ecological dislocations, liberatory technologies, social forms based on face-to-face relations, and individual sovereignty, these issues must be “hydrolyzed” (if I may be permitted to use a biological analogy) into simpler, more “soluble” ingredients that render them accessible to Marxian categories, indeed, to a Marxian outlook. That such monumental social issues must be degraded so that they can be absorbed by Marxism raises the basic question of whether the theory can be perpetuated in its wholeness or whether it should not be fragmented and its more viable components absorbed into a much broader theory and practice that will eschew the very use of terms like “Marxism” and “socialism.”[63]

Ultimately, a line will have to be drawn that, by definition, excludes any project that can tip decentralization to the side of centralization, direct democracy to the side of delegated power, libertarian institutions to the side of bureaucracy, and spontaneity to the side of authority. Such a line, like a physical barrier, must irrevocably separate a libertarian zone of theory and practice from the hybridized socialisms that tend to denature it. This zone must build its anti-authoritarian, utopian, and revolutionary commitments into the very recognition it has of itself, in short, into the very way it defines itself. Given the intellectual opportunism that marks our era, there is no way that a libertarian zone can retain its integrity and transparency without describing its parameters in terms that reveal every conceivable form of treachery to its ideals, at which point it must cease to be what it professes to be. I would hold that such a zone can only be denoted by the term “anarcho-communism,” a term that denies the validity of all claims of domination by definition. Accordingly, to admit of domination is to cross the line that separates the libertarian zone from the socialist. Whosoever eschews the term in the name of a revolutionary project that is theoretically more delectable and socially more popular remains unreliable in his or her commitment to libertarian goals as such — goals that must remain tentative insofar as they are not rooted in the fixidity of consistently anti-authoritarian premises. Perhaps such a fixidity of premises may be intellectually distasteful or socially impractical. These are legitimate questions that must be decided by discussion or personal conscience. But the very fixidity of premises that define anarcho-communism as a consistently libertarian zone is the sole guarantee that a revolutionary project will not slither back to forms of theory and practice that inherently lend themselves to opportunistic compromises.

Traditions and personalities must not be permitted to stand in the way of our self-understanding of the issues involved. One may look askance at a Proudhon for his philistinism, at Bakunin for his naievete, at Kropotkin for his didacticism, at Durruti for his terrorism — and anarchist theoretics generally for its simplicity. Even if each such assessment were true, which I do not believe to be the case it would merely be episodic in the face of a social crisis so massive and a social response so opportunistic that we can no longer retain any revolutionary project without the most compelling moral imperatives. Existentially, our era allows for no commitment that falls short of the anarcho-communist project for liberation, certainly not without leading to the betrayal of humanity’s potentiality for freedom.

In any case, neo-Marxism and “libertarian socialism” fail us in the content they impart to a liberated society. To mingle direct democracy with delegated power, to build a free society on the concept of a “mass society,” to reduce hierarchy to class relations and domination to economic exploitation reveal a gross failure to understand the meaning of society — of human consociation — as a realm of freedom. With the politicization of society by state institutions, the substitution of bureaucratic ties for human relations, the homogenization of social forms and personal relations, socialist theoretics too has lost its very sense of society as more than a vague “public sphere” subject to rational, albeit “humanistic,” controls. In this wasteland of social forms, we are obliged to ask questions that would have been taken for granted in an earlier era. What constitutes a human community and a society based on self-management? What constitutes that classical self-acting agent we denote by the term “citizen”? To the extent that these questions are not adequately answered, concepts like direct democracy and self-management remain formal abstractions that can be hybridized and distorted without regard to any abiding criteria of social freedom. Ultimately, the answers we give to these questions determine the authenticity of our commitment to a free society.

We have used words like “modernity” and “industrial” society to conceal a basic difference between capitalism and precapitalist societies, a difference that is highly relevant to the questions I have raised above. In whatever ways precapitalist societies differed from each other, they differed from capitalism in the fact that they were basically organic, richly articulated in forms and structures that were to be ultimately challenged and destroyed by bourgeois market relations. Even where the eye moves beyond the egalitarian world of the early human bands and clans, underlying all the bureaucratic and political formations that were to layer the surface of tribal, village, and guild-like societies were the extended families, tribal relationships, village structures, guilds, and even neighborhood associations that retained a subterranean autonomy of their own. Marx was to address himself to the tenacity of these “subpolitical” formations in his observations on the “small and extremely ancient” communities in India “that are based on the possession of land in common, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts and on an unalterable division of labor, which serves as a fixed plan and basis for action whenever a new community is started.”

The organic nature of these communities, which Marx was to emphasize even more strongly in the Grundrisse, is described in primarily economic terms, in economic categories that subtly degrade the human content of their associative implications and absorb them into the framework of historical economism that vitiates Marxian anthropology. But their inner social power, their vitality as human impulses toward sociation, seeps through Marx’s remarks nevertheless. “The law that regulates the division of labor in the community acts with the irresistibile authority of a law of nature, while each individual craftsman, the smith, the carpenter and so on, conducts in his workshop all the operations of his handicraft in the traditional way, but independently, and without recognizing any authority. The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with the same name — this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remain untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of politics.”{12}

One could wish for a discussion of this “riddle” in less reductionist economic categories, although the entire passage, taken word for word, is a fascinating guide to Marx’s methodology even when he moves beyond the sphere of bourgeois society. Whether Marx had a “social philosophy” or not, his treatment of history is intellectually unified by an economism that itself could pass for a social philosophy. Kropotkin, whose associationist sensibility is much stronger than Marx’s, points out that the early medieval city “could hardly be named a State as regard its interior organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the present centralization of functions than of the present territorial centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city was usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven sections radiating from a center, each quarter or section roughly corresponding to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in it, but nevertheless containing inhabitants of different social positions and occupations — nobles, merchants, artisans, or even half-serfs; and each section or quarter constituted a quite independent agglomeration. In Venice, each island was an independent political community. It had its own organized trades, its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and administration, its own forum; the nomination of a doge by the city changed nothing in the inner independence of the units. In Cologne, we see the inhabitants divided into... neighborhood guilds, which dated from the Franconian period,” each of which had its own judge, jury, and local militia commander. Kropotlin quotes J.R. Green to the effect that in London, before the Conquest, social life was based on “a number of little groups scattered here and there over the area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and only drawing together into a municipal union.” “The medieval city thus appears as a double federation,” Kropotkin concludes: “of all householders united into small territorial unions — the street, the parish, the section — and of individuals united by oaths into guilds according to their professions; the former being a product of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is a subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.”[64]{13}

The most striking feature of the capitalist market is its ability to unravel this highly textured social structure, to invade and divest earlier social forms of their complexity of human relations. Even as capitalism seems to amplify the autonomy and claims of the individual, it does so by attenuating the content and structure of society. As Gemeinschaft theorists like Buber have pointed out: “When we examine the capitalist society which has given birth to socialism, as a society, we see that it is a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day. By the structure of a society is to be understood its social content or community content: a society can be called structurally rich to the extent that it is build up of genuine societies, that is, local communes and trade communes and their step by step association. What Gierke says of the Cooperative Movement in the Middle Ages is true of every structurally rich society: it is ‘marked by a tendency to expand and extend the unions, to produce larger associations over and above the smaller associations, confederations over and above individual unions, all-embracing confederations over and above particular confederations.’ At whatever point we examine the structure of such a society we find the cell-tissue ‘Society’ everywhere, i.e. a living and life-giving collaboration, an essentially autonomous consociation of human beings, shaping and re-shaping itself from within. Society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units and the associations between them.”

The capitalist economy and the centralized state “peculiar to it” begin to hollow out this highly articulated social structure until the modern “individualizing process” ends up as an atomizing process, a process that divests the individual of the social substance indispensable to individuality itself. Although the old organic forms retain “their outer stability, for the most part,” they become “hollow in sense and in spirit — a tissue of decay. Not merely what we call the ‘masses” but the whole of society is in essence amorphous, unarticulated, poor in structure. Neither do those associations help which spring from the meeting of economic or spiritual interests — the strongest of which is the party: what there is of human intercourse in them is no longer a living thing, and the compensations for the lost community-forms we seek in them can be found in none. In the face of all this, which makes ‘society’ a contradiction in terms, the ‘utopian’ socialists have aspired more and more to a restructuring of society; not, as the Marxist critic thinks, in any romantic attempt to revive the stages of development that are over and done with, but rather in alliance with the decentralized counter-tendencies which can be perceived underlying all economic and social evolution, and in alliance with something that is slowly evolving in the human soul: the most intimate of all resistances — resistance to mass or collective loneliness.”{14}

There are observations I have brought into Buber’s remarks — partly directly, partly by selective quotation — that are not properly integral to his outlook. Buber does not oppose state forms as such, a difference that mars his admiration for Kropotkin — only state forms “peculiar” to capitalism. Nor does he oppose a market economy as such — only a bourgeois one. His discussion of “utopian” socialism is highly selective; it ignores “utopian” socialists like Saint-Simon who stand on a level below his own and others, like Fourier, who go far beyond him. Like a good Proudhonian, he seems oblivious to the possibility that “all- embracing confederations over and above particular confederations” could easily yield social hierarchies as domineering as ruling classes. But his emphasis on the “cell tissue ‘Society’” provides a much-needed correction of social theories that focus primarily on the skeletal infrastructure of society, be it economic or institutional. By denuding society of virtually all its molecular substance, Marxian theory and modern sociology generally have been able to formulate many broad principles of social development ; indeed, analyzes of production relations, social relations, and historical “stages” of society lend themselves to more seductively elegant logical constructs than analyzes of concrete, often highly particularized local associations. But these generalizations, valuable as they may be, are all too often achieved by defining social life in highly formalized and abstract terms. The “laws” and categories derived by creating formal typologies are often gained at the expense of insights that the molecular structures provide and the challenging conclusions they imply. Indeed, the attempt to cast society in essentially generic terms can easily provide ideological support for the “hollowing out” of associative units by capitalism and the state.[65] By rendering social thought blind to the significance of these units — villages, neighborhoods, cooperatives, and the like — Marxian and bourgeois sociology take for granted and even participate in the preemption of community by bureaucracy, associated individuals by privatized egos, the society by the state.

To state the issue more broadly, the buyer-seller relationship of the market place, carried by the logic of the commodity relationship to the point of a market society, literally simplifies social life to the level of the inorganic. I have pointed out elsewhere that ecologically, the most significant problem we face today is not merely environmental pollution but environmental simplification,{15} Capitalism is literally undoing the work of organic evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of concrete, metal, and glass, by turning soil into sand, by overriding and undermining highly complex ecosystems that yield local differences in the natural world — in short, by replacing a complex organic environment with a simplified inorganic one — market society is literally disassembling a biosphere that has supported humanity for countless millenia. In the course of replacing the complex ecological relationships, on which all complex living things depend, for more elementary ones, capitalism is restoring the biosphere to a stage where it will be able to

support only simpler forms of life. If his great reversal of the evolutionary process continues, it is by no means fanciful to suppose that the preconditions for more complex forms of life will be irreparably destroyed and the earth will become incapable of supporting humanity itself.

This process of simplification, however, is by no means confined to ecology; it is also a social phenomenon, as sweeping in its implications for human history as it is for natural history. If the competitive nexus of market society, based on the maxim “grow or die” must literally simplify the organic world, so too must the reduction of all social relations to exchange relations literally simplify the social world. Divested of any content but the brute relationships of buying and selling, of homogenized, mass- produced objects that are created and consumed for their own sake, social form itself undergoes the attenuation of institutions based on mutual aid, solidarity, vocational affiliations, creative endeavor, even love and friendship. The “cell tissue ‘Society’” is thus reduced to the monadic ego; the extended family to the nuclear family and finally to disassociated sexual partners who enjoy neither the responsabilities of commitment nor emotional affinities but live in the vaccum of estranged intercourse and the insecurities of passionless indifference.

Indeed, the logic of market society is the market qua society: the emergence of objects, of commodities, as the materialization of all social relationships.[66] No longer are we simply confronted with the “fetishization” of commodities or the alienation of labor, but rather with the erosion of consociation as such, the reduction of people to the very isolated objects they produce and consume. Capitalism, in dissolving virtually every viable form of community association, installs the isolated ego as its nuclear social form, just as clans, families, polis , guilds, and neighborhoods once comprised the nuclear social forms of precapitalist societv

Social regression on this scale imparts a new function to bureaucracy. Under capitalism, today, bureaucratic institutions are not merely systems of social control; they are literally institutional substitutes for social form. They comprise the skeletal framework of a society that, as Greek social thought would have emphasized, edges on inherent disorder.{16} However much market society may advance productive forces, it takes its historic revenge not only in the rationalization it inflicts on society, but the destruction it inflicts on the highly articulated social relations that once provided the springboard for a viable social opposition. The most disturbing feature‘of modern’bureau- cracy is not merely the coercion regimentation, and control it imposes on society, but the extent to which it is literally constitutive of modern society: the extent to which it validates itself as the realm of “order” against the chaos of social dissolution. Just as the ancient city — its temples, gardens, political institutions, and well-cultivated environs — represented human order as against the ever-menacing encroachment of natural “disorder,” so bureaucracy emerges as the structural sinews and bones that sustain the dissolving, decaying flesh of market society. Precapitalist societies have resisted or simply side-stepped bureaucratic formations that were imposed upon them with the highly articulated internal life they developed on their own or inherited from the past. Capitality society becomes bureaucratized to its very marrow precisely because the market can never provide society with an internal life of its own.

This fact expresses both the possibilities of bureaucracy as a social infrastructure and its historical limits. The very anonymity of bureaucracy reveals the authority of the system over personality, of the social framework over its “personnel.” The ease with which Stalinism reproduced itself structurally as a grotesque persistence of bureaus amid a chronic execution of bureaucrats is testimony to a total depersonalization of social control today — the appalling asociality that bourgeois society finally achieves in its mythic “socialization” of humanity. Together with the “denaturing” of humanity, capitalism creates a synthetic society so completely divested of organic attributes that its social relations are literally mineralized into objects. The bureaucrat is truly faceless because he or she has no protoplasmic existence; the depraved notion that administrative decision-making can be taken over by computers and public expression by electronic media — a notion seriously considered as a step in the direction of “direct democracy” by theoretically sophisticated radical groups like the French Situationists, not only zany science-fiction “Utopians” — increasingly renders the flesh-and-blood bureaucrat and citizen an anachronism. As in Platonic metaphysics, the immediate world of perception becomes the imperfect, transient “copy” of an eidos that transcends the uncertain and chaotic materiality of life itself. If bureaucracy represents the culmination of social order, capitalism totally belies the historic destiny Marx imputed to it as the means for universalizing humanity and providing it with the means for controlling its own destiny. Bureaucracy, as a system perfected to the point of voiceless depersonalization, now represents a mute society even more divested of self-articulation than “mute nature.” In the structureless void to which capitalism has reduced society, the public realm literally becomes a public space, public only in the sense that it is occupied by interlinking bureaus. Flow diagrams and systems theory become the language of corporate entities that, lacking even the presence of the lusty “robber barons,” consist of objects moving through depersonalized agencies. The homeostasis of these corporate entities depends not upon personal judgments but the corrective power of deviations. Contemporary language unerringly calls this “feedback,” “input,” and “output,” not discourse, dialogue or judgment.

There is a moral that must be drawn from this massive regression to the inorganic: capitalism has not performed the historic function of “disembedding” humanity from nature. Over and beyond the haunting power of archaic tradition over the present is an “embeddedness in nature” itself — a Naturwuchsigkeit — that found expression in the organic consociation of human beings: initially, a consociation expressed in clannic ties, a sexual division of labor, the eminence of the elders, and a “nature idolatry” that slowly cemented human ties into ever- expansive forms of association. Doubtless, these were primarily biological facts, not social; organic, not synthetic. But the price humanity has paid for its socialization — for the “denaturalization” of blood groups into territorial units, tribes into towns, and the stranger into citizenship — has taken the form of capitalism, a rapacious society that has carried through human socialization by “tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and material forces. ”{17}

If it is true, as Jeremy Shapiro has argued, that for Marx capitalism creates the conditions for removing human beings from their “immersion” in archaic traditions and in nature by “(1) setting abstract labor free as a force of production through the process in which labor creates its own conditions, and (2) freeing individuals from their identification with particular social roles allotted to them by the social division of labor...,” it is no less true that capitalism removes them from organic nature only to “reembed” them in inorganic nature.{18} It removes them from a “concrete labor” that knows nature in all its wealth of forms and immerses them in an abstract labor that knows only abstract matter; it removes them from their personal identification with a social division of labor by divesting them of the very subjective apparatus required for personality. Although capitalism may seem to free labor as a force of production in the organic sphere, it enslaves it to the inorganic, transporting it from the world of living materiality to the world of dead materiality. Capitalism may have freed humanity from the archaic “idolatry of nature,” but it did so only by committing humanity to the modern idolatry of quantity. In Marxism itself, it may well be that the present releases the hold of the archaic past on itself, but the present holds the past captive to fictive conceptions of history that divest human consociation of all human attributes but “interest,” “productive power,” domination, and the values of the bourgeois Enlightenment conceived as a project of rationalization and control.

If the “dialectic of history,” as Shapiro tells us, is to be “resolved through completion of the self-transcendence of nature that occurs when embeddedness in nature is overcome and human beings bring the historical process under control,” then this “control” must involve the re-absorption of nature into society as a “retribalized” humanity in which the archaic solidarity based on kinsEIpls replaced by free choice of association, shared concerns, and love.{19} Communes, cooperatives, and assemblies — in fact, new poleis — must replace the poverty of social forms created by the void we call “capitalism.” Let there be no mistake about the fact that we are never “disembedded” from nature. Indeed, it has never been a question of whether we were “embedded” in nature or not, but rather the kind of nature we have always been “embedded” in — organic or inorganic, eco- ligical or physical, real or mythic, whole or one-sided, subjec- tivized or “mindless.” Only the absence of a nature philosophy that reveals the natural history of mind from the very inception of the organic world to the present, a philosophy that can reveal the changing gradations of a natural dialectic into a social, that can relate the realm of “instrumental action” to “communicative,” and ultimately human society with nature as the voice of a “mute nature” resubjectivized by human consciousness — only by virtue of this lacuna in the interface between nature and society is it possible to speak of “disembeddedness” in disregard of the meaning of a truly organic society.

Today, any meaningful project for the reconstruction of a revolutionary theory and practice must take its point of departure from three basic premises: the reconstitution of the “cell tissue ‘Society’” in the physical sense of the term, as a body politic, that is bereft of the institutions of delegated authority; the abolition of domination in all its forms — not merely economic exploitation; and the obvious precondition for the latter achievement, the abolition of hierarchy in all its forms — not merely social classes. The reductionist attitude of Marxism that defines a body politic in the ambiguous terms of a “public sphere,” of domination in terms of economic exploitation, and hierarchy in terms of economic classes, masks and dissolves the differences between these concepts. That we could easily achieve a “public sphere” that professes to be free of class rule and economic exploitation, yet is riddled by patriarchy, bureaucracy, and a system of ruled and ruler based on professional, ethnic, and age differences, is painfully evident if we are to judge from the experiences of the “socialist orbit.” To speak to the needs of an organic society — the formation of an authentic body politic and a socially active citizenry — is to restore society as genuine “cell tissue.” Society, in effect, must become a body politic in the literal sense that the citizen must be physically in control of the social process, a living presence in the formation and execution of social policy.

Rousseau is only too accurate in recognizing that a body politic, divested of embodiment as a citizen assembly, is the negation of a people. The term “people” has no meaning if it lacks the institutional structure for exhibiting its physical presence and imparting to that presence a decisive social meaning — if it cannot assemble to debate, formulate, and decide the policies that shape social life. To the degree that the formulation of these policies is removed by mediated and delegated institutions, from the face- to-face decision-making process of the people in assembly, to that degree is the people subverted as the only authentic constitutive force of social life and society, vested in the sovereignty of the few, reduced to an abstraction, an unpeopled “public sphere” or a mere “public space.” Underlying every enterprise for the dissolution of the body politic into the faceless sovereignty of delegated authority is the hidden belief in an “elect” that is alone endowed with the capacity to rule and command. Ultimately, this view amounts to a denial of the human potentiality for self-management, to the spark within every individual to achieve the powers of social wisdom that a privileged few claim for themselves. That circumstances, be they resolved into the denial of education, free time, access to culture, and even an enlightened familial background, not to speak of material and occupational circumstances, have concealed this spark to the “masses” themselves is no argument for the fact that social life, particularly as it concerns the individual, could be otherwise.

Delegated authority, in effect, not only negates a people but the claims of selfhood that are underlying to the notion of popular self-management. As I have emphasized elsewhere, a society that professes to be based on self-management is inconceivable without self-activity.{20} Indeed, revolution can be defined as the most advanced form of self-activity, as direct action raised to a level where the land, the factories, indeed the very streets, are directly taken over by the autonomous people. In the absence of this level of activity, social consciousness remains mere mass consciousness that can easily be manipulated by hierarchies. Delegated authority vitiates the individuation of the “masses” into self-conscious beings who can take direct, unmediated control of society into their own hands. It denies not only the constitution of a “public sphere” into a body politic, but the individual into a social agent — into a “citizen” in the Athenian sense of the term.

We live today under the tyranny of a present that is often more oppressive than the past, Sartre’s imagery of the “slime” of the past notwithstanding to the contrary. Our social “models” for freedom have been the Russian Revolution and the so-called “revolutions” of the Third Word, of the councils, soviets, and shop committees that are so seductive to many neo-Marxists as forms of social administration. I would join M.I. Finley in seriously asking if we should not try to recover the more fascinating example of the Athenian polis which, despite its many shortcomings, provides more expansive institutional examples for a liberated society than any we are familiar with today. That Athenian democracy was based on a “sovereign Assembly... open to every citizen” and convened at least forty times a year; that it was consciously “amateurish” and antibureaucratic, managed by a rotating council of 500 whose chairmen were selected by lot for only a single day, a council itself constituted by sortition as well as election — these features together with its astonishing court system, militia, and extensive use of the lot hardly require elaboration.{21} Athenian amateurism rested on a regard for selfhood that Platonistic readings of the polis tend to de-emphasize. To the degree that the Hellenic democratic theory found written expression, it may well have been in the concepts of Protagoras that are handed down to us through the patently biased dialogue of Plato’s. Free men possess politike techne, the “art of political judgment,” as Finley translates the phrase, a judgment that uniquely defines humanity as a cooperative species, possessed of philia (shall we say “solidarity” rather than the more conventional translation of the word as “friendship”?) and dike (justice). But beyond these traits they possess a sense of community that by nature destines them to live in a polis. These traits of a free citizen, taken together, constitute a controlled selfhood, what we call “self-control,” that renders community life or koinonia possible. “Neither the sovereign Assembly, with its unlimited right of participation, nor the popular jury-courts (dicastery — M.B.) nor the selection of officials by lot nor ostracism could have prevented either chaos on the one hand or tyranny on the other had there not been self-control among enough of the citizen-body to contain its behavior within bounds,” observes Finley. Moreover, this self-control was an active form of selfhood, not the apathia or absence of feeling we so often associate with contemporary citizenship within a depersonalized formal system of “rights” and “duties.” “There was a tradition (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 8.5) that in his legislation early in the sixth century B.C. Solon passed the following law, specifically aimed against apathy: ‘When there is civil war in the city, anyone who does not take up arms on one side or the other shall be deprived of civil rights and of all share in the affairs of government.’ The authenticity of the law is doubtful, but not the sentiment. Pericles expressed it, in the same Funeral Oration in which he noted that poverty is no bar, by saying (Thucydides, 2.40.3): ‘Any man may at the same time look after his own affairs and those of the state... We consider anyone who does not share in the life of the citizen not as minding his own business but as useless.”{22}

It is ironical that we must turn to John Stuart Mill, rather than his socialist contemporaries, for an insightful evaluation of how direct participation in social life and the development of selfhood mutually reinforce each other to form the civic virtues and commitments of the citizen — that make active citizenship the highest expression of selfhood. The defects of Athenian democracy notwithstanding, the practices of the dicastery and popular assemblages, Mill was to observe, “raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern.” The Athenian citizen was obliged “to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good...” He accordingly found himself associated “in the same work with minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and operations” which supplied “reason to his understanding and stimulation to his feeling for the general interest.”{23}

Hannah Arendt was to formulate this educative process — an integral feature of what the Greeks called paideia, the spiritual forming of the individual — as an “enlarged mentality” that renders authentic judgment possible.{24} The polis was not only an end but a means that made political practice (“participation” is a feeble terms) a mode of self-formation. At this level, a people not merely arrives at a “general interest” but begins to transcend “interest” as such. “Interest,” a term nourished by the bourgeois enlightenment that surfaces throughout the Marxian literature as “class interest” and in neo-Marxism as “knowledge interest,” is replaced by the possibility of mutuality and consociation based on the Hellenic concept of philia or, in the Christian tradition, by agape.

The young Hegel, despite his scorn for a Christian equality that saw the slave as “the brother of his owner,” was deeply rooted in the millenarian ideal of a new human union and the Joachimite vision of an era of fulfillment. In this trinitarian vision, love, as embodied in the Holy Spirit, transcends the faith that marked the era of the Son and the law that marked the era of the Father. For the young Hegel, “True love, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view” — and, by the same token, to achieve this penultimate recognition of the “living beings” who are loved, they must be alike in power. (My emphasis — M.B.) Agape, as conceived in Hegel’s eschatological vision, no longer knows the drive of “interest”; indeed, it “deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character, and discovers life itself without any further defect.” This is not a world in which gray is painted on gray. “In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life (in the subject) senses life (in the object).” Indeed, love supplants law and one may justifiably ask if, in this era when all living beings are alike in power, there is any need for mediation and the state.[67]{25}

Assemblage attains its fullness in a world where “interest” yields to philia and agape, where judgment emerges from the self-formative intercourse and spiritual education of an “enlarged mentality.” Endowed with this mentality, “even when I shun all company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together only with myself in the solitude of philosophic though” Arendt observes; “I remain in this world of mutual interdependence where I can make myself the representative of everyone else. To be sure, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interest, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account... But the very quality of an opinion as of a judgment depends upon its degree of impartiality.”{26} “Impartiality” must be taken literally if Arendt’s point is to have meaning — as a condition that rises above the “partial,” or one-sided, and the “partiality” of a predetermined commitment. The emergence of a “general interest” is, in effect, the abolition of the “partiality” of a self rooted in “interest” and in a one-sided society.

It is a truism that “opinion” and judgment so formed have material preconditions and a historical background that has received sufficient emphasis not to require discussion here. Arendt’s “enlarged mentality” must emerge from a terrain that is materially incompatible with the formation of “class interest” and its ideological expression as “class consciousness.” But once these material preconditions are emphasized, we must add that a “proletarian public sphere” is an anachronism because the proletariat as a proletariat, as the fictive expression of a public sphere, is an “interest” that opposes the universalization and abolition of “interest” and the formation of a public. It is not accidental that Marx follows in the wake of bourgeois reality by denuding the proletariat of the social and personal forms without which it cannot develop its public existence as part of a universalized humanity. Marx’s writings “hollow out” the proletariat as ruthlessly as capitalism hollows out the “cell tissue ‘Society’.” Just as abstract labor confronts abstract matter, so abstract classes confront each other in a conflict of “interests” that exists beyond their will or even their clear comprehension. That Marx conceives the proletariat as a category of political economy — as the “owner” of labor power, the object of exploitation by the bourgeoisie, and a creature of the factory system — reflects and ideologizes its actual one-sided condition under capitalism as a “productive force,” not as a revolutionary force. Marx leaves us in no doubt about this conception. As the class that is most completely dehumanized, the proletariat transcends its dehumanized condition and comes to embody the human totality “through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need...” Accordingly: “The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do.”{27} (The emphasis throughout is Marx’s and provides a telling commentary on his de-subjectivization of the proletariat.) I will leave aside the rationale that this formula provides for an elitist organization. For the present, it is important to note that Marx, following the tradition of classical bourgeois political economy, totally objectifies the proletariat and removes it as a true subject. The revolt of the proletariat, even its humanization, ceases to be a human phenomenon; rather, it becomes a function of inexorable economic laws and “imperative need.” The essence of the proletariat as proletariat is its non-humanity, its creature nature as the product of “absolutely imperative need” — of brute “interest.” Its subjectivity falls within the category of harsh necessity, explicable in terms of economic law. The psychology of the proletariat, in effect, is political economy.

The real proletariat resists this reduction of its subjectivity to the product of need and lives increasingly within the realm of desire, of the possibility to become other than it is. Concretely, the worker resists the work ethic because it has become irrational in view of the possibilities for a non-hierarchical society. The worker, in this sense, transcends her or his creature nature and increasingly becomes a subject, not an object; a non-proletarian, not a proletarian. Desire, not merely need, possibility, not merely necessity, enter into her or his self-formation and self-activity. The worker begins to shed her or his status of workerness, her or his existence as a mere class being, as an object of economic forces, as mere “being,” and becomes increasingly available to the development of an “enlarged mentality.”

As the human essence of the proletariat begins to replace its factory essence, the worker can now be reached as easily outside the factory as in it. Concretely, the worker’s aspect as a woman or man, as a parent, as an urban dweller, as a youth or elderly person, as a victim of environmental decay, as a dreamer (the list is nearly endless), comes increasingly to the foreground. The factory walls become permeable to the development of an “enlarged mentality” to the degree that personal and broadly social concerns begin to compete with the worker’s “proletarian” concerns and values. No “workers group” can become truly revolutionary unless it deals with the individual worker’s human aspirations, unless it helps to de-alienate the worker’s personal milieu and begins to transcend the worker’s factory milieu. It is indeed doubtful if, in the event of truly revolutionary change, that workers will want to control production and bask in the glories of an economy based on “worker’s control.” They will probably want to alter production, indeed sever society’s technical commitment to the factory as such. This kind of working class will become revolutionary not in spite of itself but because of itself, literally as a result of its awakening selfhood.[68]

For Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal; and so even when men have no need of assistance from each other they nonetheless desire to live together.” For although they share a “common interest” in a good life, “they also come together and maintain the political partnership (actually politiken koinonian — M.B.) for the sake of life merely...”{28} For Marx, “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material conditions.”{29} Between these two definitions of “man” lie more than two thousand years not only of human “progress” in mastery over nature, but social regression in the denuding of society. The degradation of koinonia into the division of labor and of philia into class solidarity, finally of the self into an endless fount of egotism and needs, is a historical fact that cannot be ignored. But it is also an ideology that cannot be hypostasized and mystified as “revolutionary.” To deal with capitalism alone as a myth of “praxis” that incorporates precisely what should be exorcized from “civilization” as a whole in Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer, and frankly, Fourier’s meaning of the term, is a betrayal of the larger revolutionary project that awaits the critique and practice of an “enlarged mentality.” If we are not merely at the end of capitalism but at the end of “civilization” as Fourier might have observed — of hierarchy and domination — it is not enough to speak any longer of class and exploitation but rather of rank as such at the most molecular levels of human consociation. Critical theory, too, was to challenge “civilization” as a sphere of domination and a rationality of domination, but it did not deal with hierarchy, with a sensibility that organizes difference into a sphere of command and obedience. Hence, it too became victim to the hidden hierarchical dimension that perpetuates domination, the proclivity to stand above the flux of life and ultimately the test of experience. For the “emancipatory interest” to ferret out its tradition of emancipation in the academy, to build its moral imperatives within the boughs of its own intellectual Eden, is to replace revolutionary history and its far-reaching lessons by intellectual history with its diet of pale gruel. Not that theory has no imperatives of its own, but rather that it cannot be defined as a “praxis” that is guarded from life by ivy-covered walls.

It was the young Hegel, again, who most clearly formulated the place of wisdom as paideia, specifically in the fruitful interchange of teacher and taught rather than leader and led — a paideia that informs the development of a revolutionary culture or “movement” as much as it does a revolutionary sensibility. That age, experience, and personal talents may confer wisdom is no reason that they should confer power. Hegel’s distinction between Jesus and Socrates draws this point out unerringly on its authentic social terrain. The Christian apostles were mere acolytes. “Lacking any store of spiritual energy of their own,” Hegel observes, “they had found the basis of their conviction about the teachings of Jesus principally in their friendship with him and dependence on him. They had not attained truth and freedom by their own exertions; only by laborious learning had they acquired a dim sense of them and certain formulas about them. Their ambition was to keep this doctrine faithfully and to transmit it faithfully to others without any addition, without letting it acquire any variations in detail by working on it themselves.”

By contrast, Socrates’s friends from “their youth up... had developed their powers in many directions. They had absorbed that democratic spirit which gives an individual a greater measure of independence and makes it impossible for any tolerably good head to depend wholly and absolutely on one person. In their state it was worth while to have a political interest, and an interest of that kind can never be sacrificed. Most of them had already been pupils of other philosophers and other teachers. They loved Socrates because of his virtue and his philosophy, not virtue and his philosophy because of him. Just as Socrates had fought for his native land, had fulfilled all the duties of a free citizen as a brave soldier in war and a just judge in peace, so too all his friends were something more than mere inactive philosophers, than mere pupils of Socrates.”{30}

The polis, with its emphasis on freedom and activity, stands opposed to the congregation with its emphasis on reverence and quietism. Hegel touches precisely on the differing social contexts that produce pupils in Greece and disciples in Judea, teachers and leaders, the democratic koinonia of the polis and the hierarchical infrastructure of the Church. In the tension between these two extremes, different senses of selfhood emerge: the controlled self formed by the light of spirit, reason and solidarity and the controlled self formed by the whip-lash of a rationalized society, dogma, and fragmentation. In reality, there is no longer room for an intermediate ground, whether in the revolutionary movement or in society. The history of this century has been poisoned by the endless “gains” and “mediations” that threaten to become the bonfires of society itself — the “improvements” that have been brought into the service of a domination so ubiquitous that it brings the self into complicity with its own enslavement. Nearly forty years ago, Horkheimer could have written that “The revolutionary movement negatively reflects the situation which it is attacking.”{31} Today these words seem tame. The “revolutionary” movement — as the Left calls itself — positively supports the situation it professes to attack. The mass party is the precondition for the existence of a mass society, the political face of its institutional bureaucracy. The entire future of the Left diverges on whether it seeks to recover a body politic — the koinonia of a face-to-face citizenry — or whether, in the name of the “pragmatic,” the “expedient,” and the appropriate “mediations” it will foster the ever-greater rationalization of the society with the rhetoric of progress, planning, reform — and even “revolution.”

Beyond the intramural disputes of the Left lie the larger social issues of historic recovery and social advance. The municipal tradition, however faint, persists in western society today as an American tradition that may well speak to an American revolutionary movement with greater meaning than the European emphasis on centralization. “The continued growth of the New England town by division of the central nucleus into new cells, having an independent life of their own, recalled the earlier pattern of Greece,” Lewis Mumford has observed. “But the New England towns added a new feature that has never been sufficiently appreciated nor as widely copied as it deserved: the township. The township is a political organization which encloses a group of towns, villages, hamlets, along with the open country area that surrounds them: it performs the functions of local government, including the provision of schools and the care of local roads, without accepting the long-established division between town and country.”

Mumford’s lament that the failure of “both the Federal and the State Constitutions” to incorporate the township as the basic unit of American democracy “was one of the tragic oversights of postrevolutionary political development” is an understatement. The “post-revolutionary political development” of the early republic was largely counterrevolutionary and the township, particularly its town meetings, were deliberately excluded precisely because they gave “concrete organs” to an “abstract political system of democracy...”{32} As Merril Jensen has pointed out in a fascinating account of that very period, “the nature of city government came in for heated discussion.” Town meetings, whether legal or informal, “had been a focal point of revolutionary activity.” The anti-democratic reaction that set in after the American Revolution was marked by efforts to do away with town meeting governments that had spread well beyond New England to the mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Attempts by conservative elements were made to establish a “corporate form (of municipal government) whereby the towns could be governed by mayors and councils” elected from urban wards. Judging from New Jersey, the merchants “backed incorporation consistently in the efforts to escape town meetings.” Such efforts were successful not only in cities and towns of that state but also in Charleston, New Haven, and eventually even Boston. Jensen, addressing himself to the incorporated form of municipal government and restricted suffrage that replaced the more democratic assembly form of the revolutionaries of 1776 in Philadelphia, expresses a judgment that could apply to all the successful efforts in behalf of municipal incorporation following the revolution: “The counterrevolution in Philadelphia was complete.”{33}

Here, then, lies a history and a liberatory tradition that awaits full and conscious expression as a demand for human scale, local popular control, decentralization, and face-to-face democracy both within the revolutionary movement and within society. In turning the notion of the “people” against its bourgeois utopian origins, this liberatory tradition recovers and transcends a vision for which the material premises were established by bourgeois society itself. A new “revolutionary subject” exists in the social vacuum left by society and the centralized power at its summits.{34} The system turns everyone against it — be it the conservationist or the small struggling entrepreneur, the worker or the intellectual, women, blacks, aged, or the seemingly privileged suburbanite. The denuding of the individual from “brothers” and “sisters” into “citizens” and finally “taxpayers” expresses the common lot of every individual who is burdened by a terrifying sense of powerlessness that is so easily mistaken for apathy. Bureaucracy can never blanket this open, unoccupied social domain. This domain can eventually be filled by neighborhood assemblies, cooperatives, popular societies, and affinity groups that are spawned by an endless array of social ills — above all, decentralized groups that form a counterweight and a radicalizing potential to the massive centralization and concentration of social power in an era of state capitalism.

Socialism, inspired by the imagery of the Robespierrist Committee of Public Safety, offers no promise of affecting (indeed, of comprehending) this new social development, so congenial to the American social tradition. The simplification of the “social problem” into issues like the restoration of local power, the increasing hatred of bureaucratic control, the silent resistance to manipulation on the everyday level of life holds the only promise of a new “revolutionary subject” on which resistance and eventually revolution can be based. It is to these issues that revolutionary theory must address itself, and it is to a reinstitutionalization of a conscious body politic that revolutionary practice must direct its efforts.