Introduction

These essays have been collated for a special purpose: to recover the very idea of a radical critique of social life.

At the outset it should be clear that this is no abstract or insignificant task. Perhaps at no time in modern history has radical thought been in such grave peril of losing its very identity as a consistent critique of the existing social order and a coherent project for social reconstruction. Unless we are prepared to retreat to the sectarian politics of a by-gone era, it must be bluntly asserted that hardly any authentic revolutionary opposition exists in North America and Europe. Worse, the mere notion of what a revolutionary opposition consists of has itself become blurred and diluted to the point of sheer opaqueness. If the ghosts of Gerrard Winstanley, Jacques Danton, Gracchus Babeuf, Mikhail Bakunin, Louise Michel — yes, even Marx, Luxemburg, and Lenin — occasionally haunt us, they have become so spectral and inchoate that we can no longer see or hear them, even as voices of social conscience.

What we now call “radical” is an odious mockery of three centuries of revolutionary opposition, social agitation, intellectual enlightenment, and popular insurgency. Radical politics in our time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car-bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies, and finally, the knee-bent, humble pleas for small reforms — in short, the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary project in history. Not that petitions, slogans, rallies, and the tedious work of public education have no place in these projects. But we do not have to hypostasize adventuristic escapades to recognize the loss of a balanced revolutionary stance, one that has enough sense of time and place to evoke the appropriate means to achieve appropriate goals. My point is that the very goals of contemporary radicalism have all the features of a middle-aged bourgeois opportunism — of “tradeoffs” for small gains, of respectability for “mass” but meaningless constituencies, of a degenerative retreat into the politics of the lesser evil” that itself generates a world of narrowing choices, finally of a sclerotic ossification of social ideas, organizational habits, and utopistic visions.

What is most terrifying about present-day radicalism is that the piercing cry for “audacity” — «L’audace! L’audace! encore l’audace!» — that Danton voiced in 1793 on the hightide of the French Revolution would simply be puzzling to self-styled radicals who demurely carry attache cases of memoranda and grant requests into their conference rooms, suitcases of their books into their lecture halls, and bull horns to their rallies. The era of the “managerial radical” (to use Andrew Kopkind s damning phrase) has pushed radicalism itself into the shadows of history. What we encounter today is the universal bureaucratization and technocratization of radicalism as such not merely in the triumph of organizational bureaucracies and centralized leaderships but in the very outlook, vision, and ideas of its most articulate acolytes. The “managerial radical” is the practitioner of organizational technique, of efficient manipulation, of mass mobilization as goals in themselves. Technique has become the substitute for social idealism.

Radical theory, in turn, fares even worse as the ideology for this historic turn in radical politics. Where socialism and even anarchism have not been reduced to dogmatic echoes of the last century, they have become disciplines within the academy, where they serve to garnish “managerial radicalism” with theoretical exotica. Much that now passes for “radical” theory are either footnotes to the history of ideas or intellectual obscurantism that supports the pragmatic obscurantism of the political marketplace. The term “marketplace” should not be taken as a metaphor. The colonization of society by a bourgeois sensibility — a result of the colonization of society by the market is now complete. For the market has absorbed not only every aspect of production, consumption, community life, and family ties into the buyer-seller nexus; it has permeated the opposition to capitalism with bourgeois cunning, compromise, and careerism. It has done this by restating the very meaning of opposition to conform with the system’s own parameters of critique and discourse.

In any case it is not “anti-intellectual” or “anti-theoretical” to slap academic snobbery in the face by demanding that radical theory at least provide some guide to radical practice. But it is surely tedious punditry to so completely divorce theory from practice that it ceases to have anything but professional relevance to intellectual careerists — the academy’s counterpart of the political careerists in today’s “radical” movements.

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If my remarks seem overly contentious, it is because I am deeply concerned with the integrity of new, inherently radical issues that have emerged in recent years — issues that potentially at least have more far-reaching emancipatory implications than the radical ones of the past. I refer to ecology, feminism, and community control — a group of problems that reaches beyond the largely economistic conflicts of the movements of the last generation. These new problems raise expansive notions of freedom and an emancipatory moral sensibility, not merely of justice and material exploitation. What is at stake, today, particularly in the movements and tendencies that have formed around ecology, feminism, and community control is the extent to which they can be fully actualized as liberatory forces.

These movements and tendencies are now faced with a crisis that threatens to warp their emancipatory logic into aborted, subservient, and conventional ideologies of the status quo. Their destiny may well be determined by our ability to unearth that emancipatory logic, to reveal its revolutionary content, and to explore the new meaning it can give to the word “freedom.” Should we fail in this momentous endeavor, the colonization of society by a deeply sedimented bourgeois sensibility will be complete — perhaps so complete that it is doubtful if a revolutionary opposition will emerge again in the present century.

The traditional locus of modern radicalism — the workers movement — is dead. My essays on socialism and Marxism in this book elucidate in detail the inherent limits and mystified premises on which it rested historically. The ecology, feminist, and community movements that have emerged in the 1970s have demonstrably shattered the silence that socialism has left in its wake. They are vital, rebellious, and richly promising, but the conflicts that face these new movements have been grossly miscast. The central conflict confronting the ecology, feminist, and community movements is not merely with those who wish to despoil the environment or those who foster sexism or those who oppose community control. The despoilers, sexists, and municipal bureaucrats wear their identities on their sleeves. They can be singled out, disputed, and removed from their positions of authority. The central conflict confronting the ecology, feminist, and community movements lies within the movements themselves. Here, the problem they face is the need to discover the sweeping implications of the issues they raise: the achievement of a totally new, non-hierarchical society in which the domination of nature by man, of woman by man, and of society by the state is completely abolished — technologically, institutionally, culturally, and in the very rationality and sensibilities of the individual.

The socialist movement never raised these issues clearly in the century that it flourished between 1840 and 1940. Its primary concerns were economic and turned on the abolition of wage labor and capital, of economic classes and material exploitation. That these concerns remain with us to this day need hardly be emphasized and their resolution must be achieved if freedom is to have any substantive meaning. But there can be a decidedly classless, even a non-exploitative society in the economic sense that still preserves hierarchical rule and domination in the social sense — whether they take the form of — the patriarchal family, domination by age and ethnic groups, bureaucratic institutions, ideological manipulation, or a pyramidal division of labor. The successive layers of the hierarchical pyramid may confer no material privileges whatever on those who command and no material renunciation by those who obey; indeed, the ideological tradition of domination that associates “order” with hierarchy, the psychic privileges that confer prestige on status, the historical inertia that carries the traditional forms and sensibilities of the past into the present and future — all of these may preserve hierarchy even after classes have been abolished. Yet classless or not, society would be riddled by domination and, with domination, a general condition of command and obedience, of unfreedom and humiliation, and perhaps most decisively, an abortion of each individual’s potentiality for consciousness, reason, selfhood, creativity, and the right to assert full control over her or his daily life.[1]

The ecology, feminist, and community movements implicitly challenge this warped destiny. Ecology raises, the issue that the very notion of man’s domination of nature stems from man’s domination of man. Feminism reaches even further and reveals that the domination of man by man actually originates in the domination of woman by man. Community movements implicitly assert that in order to replace social domination by self-management, a new type of civic self — the free, self-governing citizen — must be restored and gathered into new institutional forms such as popular assemblies to challenge the all-pervasive state apparatus. Followed through to their logical conclusion, all of these movements challenge not only class formations but hierarchies, not only material exploitation but domination in everyform. Although hierarchical structures reach into the most intimate aspects of social and personal life, the supraclass problems they raise nowhere falls within the limited orbit of the socialist and labor movements. Hence, if we are to complete the logic of the ecology, feminist, and community movements, we must extend our very notion of freedom beyond any concept we have held of this notion in the past.

But will these new movements be permitted to follow the logic of their premises, to complete them in a consistent and coherent fashion?

It is around this crucial issue that we encounter two major obstacles: the attempt by socialists to reduce these expansive concepts of freedom to economistic categories and the attempt by the “managerial radicals” to compromise them. Of the two, the socialist view tends to be the most deceptive. Slogans like •“pollution is profitable,” “wages for housewives,” and “fight the slumlords” involve a subtle denaturing of the more sweeping revolutionary demands for an ecological society, the abolition of domination, and the restoration of community control. The real “slime of history,” to reinterpret Sartre’s phrase, is the muck of the past that is flung upon the present to re-sculpture it into forms — that accord with an archaic vision of social reality. A “socialist” ecology, a “socialist” feminism, and a “socialist” community movement — with its red flags, clenched fists, and sectarian verbiage — are not only contradictions in terms; they infest the newly formed, living movements of the future with the maggots of cadavers from the past and must be opposed unrelentingly.

A special onus must be borne by ideologists who perpetuate the infestation and even conceal it with theoretical cosmetics. One thinks, here, of the Andre Gorzs and Herbert Marcuses who not only worship at the mausoleum of socialism but promote it as a viable habitat for the living. What uniquely distinguishes their ideological obscurantism from that of the socialist sectarians is their repeated attempts to reformulate both sides of the issue: the old socialist categories and the new libertarian ones. The result / that inevitably follows is that the logic of each is warped and its inherent opposition to the other is blurred. Marcuse, by wedding Freud to Marx and anarchism to socialism in the sixties, muddled the meaning of all the partners in these forced alliances. What emerged from works like Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man was a mass of half-truths and gross inconsistencies. Characteristically, in Marcuse’s latest works, it was Marx who triumphed over Freud, socialism that triumphed over anarchism — and Eurocommunism that triumphed over everything.

What is at least theoretical probing in Marcuse is facilely reduced to pop culture in Gorz — with even more telling practical consequences. His Strategy for Labor, by miscasting students and intellectuals as a “new proletariat,” deflected the growing insight of sixties’ radicals from cultural movements into classical economistic ones, thereby producing massive confusion in the American student movement of the time. More than any single journalistic work, this book brought Marxism into the Students for a Democratic Society, producing the ideological chaos that eventually destroyed it.

Much the same danger now faces the ecology movement if Gorz’s treatment of the subject exercises any appreciable influence. His recent Ecology and Freedom (retitled Ecology as Politics) is essentially the New Strategy for Labor writ in ecological verbiage. It perpetuates all the incompatibilities of a mythic “libertarian socialism” that sprinkles anarchist concepts of decentralized organization with Social Democratic concepts of mass political parties and, more offensively, “radical ecology” with the opportunistic politics of conventional environmentalism. Thus Jerry Brown, governor of California, sits side-by-side with Ho Chi Minh, Fritz Schumacher, and Buddha as evidence of “les neo-anarchistes” in the American ecology movement. Imperturbably, Gorz degrades each new concept raised by ecological theory and the practice of authentically radical tendencies in the ecological movement into his own current variant of Marxian socialism.

Neither Marx nor ecology emerge untainted from this crude eclecticism. Clarity of thought, coherence of views, and, above all, the full logic of one’s radical premises are blunted by an ideological dilettantism that leaves every concept unfinished, every personality miscast, and every practice compromised — be it direct action or electoral action, decentralization or centralization, a Jerry Brown or a Ho Chi Minh. The melding of all these contradictory views becomes insufferable not because ecology is distorted into Marxism, for the evidence of distortion would be clear on first inspection to any knowledgeable reader. Rather, it lies in the fact that one can recognize neither Marxism nor ecology and the problems they raise because both are equally distorted in order to reconcile utterly alien premises that lead to completely conflicting conclusions. We must either choose between ecology, with its naturalism, its anarchistic logic of decentralization, its emphasis on humanly scaled alternate technologies, and its non-hierarchical institutions, or socialism, with its typically Marxian anti-naturalism, its political logic of centralization, its emphasis on high technology, and its bureaucratic institutions. Gorz gives us neither alternative in the name of both and perpetuates a confusion that has already produced an internal crisis in every American and European ecology movement.

I have singled out Gorz primarily because of his recent interest in ecological issues. What I have said about his hybridization of ideas could apply equally to Juliet MitchelPs treatment of feminist issues or David Harvey’s treatment of urban community issues. These names, in fact, are mere metaphors for a large number of socialist ideologists who have made eclecticism fashionable as a substitute for probing theoretical exploration. The issues that divide ecology, feminist, and community movements are basically similar. Feminism is reduced to a matter of class oppression, community issues to a matter of economic oppression. Beyond these categories — certainly true as far as they go — the intellectual horizon of the socialist eclectics tends to become opaque. Broader problems of freedom, hierarchy, domination, citizenship, and self-activity seem misty, ineffable, at times even “‘incomprehensible,” beside the “nuts-and-bolts” issues of political economy. Orchestrated by an all-pervasive tendency toward economic reductionism, homo collectivicus is consistently reduced to homo economicus and Brecht’s notorious maxim, Feed the face, then give the moral,” becomes a strategy for political immorality and socialist apologetics. As I have tried to show in my essays on Marx, this may be “hard” sociology, based on the “material facts of life,” but it is bourgeois to the core.

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No less disquieting than the socialists who have been tracking the ecology, feminist, and community movements are the technocrats from within who have been trying to degrade them for opportunistic ends. Here, ignorance is fetishized over knowledge and action over theory in the name of acquiring large constituencies, practical results, and, of course, personal power. If the Gorzs, Mitchells, and Harveys distort the premises and logic of the issues that concern them, the “managerial radical” ignores them when possible or conceals them when necessary. Technique tends to take the place of principles; journalism, the place of education; spectacles, the place of serious action; floating constituencies that can be mobilized and demobilized, (he place of lasting organizations; elites, the place of grass-roots and. autonomous movements. This is the stock-in-trade of the social engineer, not the committed idealist. It is self-serving and Sterile, when it is not simply odious and treacherous.

What makes it possible for this new class of managers to appear radical? Partly, it is the result of a lack of theoretical insight by their own followers. The “managerial radical” capitalizes on a chronic American syndrome: the pragmatic hypostasization of action, of quick results and immediate success. Fast food is not the only attribute of the American spirit; its ideological counterpart is fast politics, indeed, fast radicalism. The sixties were plagued by feverish turns in ideological fads and cultural fashions that swept through the New Left and the counterculture with.dazzling rapidity. Movements leap-frogged over entire eras of historical experience and theoretical development with an arrogant indifference for the labors of the past, abandoning anarchism for Marxism, machismo militancy for feminism, communal living for privatism, sexual promiscuity for monogamy, rock music for disco, only to revert again to new libertarian fads, sado-masochism, singles bars, punk rock in criss-crossing patterns that more closely resemble the scrawl of an infant than the decipherable messages of maturing individuals. That young men and women can write marketable, often salacious “biographies at the age of thirty or less is not surprising; there is detail aplenty to entertain the reader — but nothing of significance lo communicate.

What counts is the extent to which appearance can so easily replace reality in the American mind. Rebellion, too, can become mere theater when it lacks the substance of knowledge, theory, and wisdom. Indeed, the myth that “doing” is more important than “thinking,” that “constructive action” is more important than rational critique — these are actually mystified forms of theory, critique, and rationalism. The traditional American maxim that “philosophy is bunk” has always been a philosophical judgment in its own right, a statement of empirical philosophy as against speculative, of sensuous knowledge as against intel- tectual. The gruff attack upon theory and reason does not annul intellectual activity. “Common sense” is merely “sense” that is common, that is, untutored, uninformed, and riddled by acquired biases. It merely replaces the presuppositions of self-conscious wisdom by the presuppositions of unconscious prejudice. In either case, presuppositions are always being made and thereby involve theory, philosophy, and mentality in one form or another.

The “managerial radical” capitalizes upon this anti-theoretical syndrome, particularly on its myth of fast success. Immediacy of reward, a psychologically formative technique, fosters the infantile demand for immediate gratification and the infantilism of the manager’s constituency. Radicalism thus ceases to be a body of theory and informed practice; it becomes the fastest route to the most immediate goals. The notion that basic social change may require the labors and dedication of a lifetime — a notion so basic to revolutionary idealism — has no place in this technocratic constellation. Radicalism thus becomes methodology rather than morality, fast success rather than patient struggle, a series of manic responses rather than lasting commitment. A superficial “extremism,” which the “managerial radical” often orchestrates with the hidden cooperation of the very authorities she or, he professes to oppose, turns out to be merely another device to bring an alienated constituency into complicity with its own oppressors.

The ecology movement, even more than the feminist and community movements, thrives in this highly charged, often contrived ambiance of opposition. “Anti-nuke” groups and alliances rise and fall at a metabolic rate that excludes serious reflection on their methods and goals. To “Stop Nukes” has far- reaching social implications that go beyond the problems of adequate energy resources and radioactive pollution. The demand poses such questions as how should we try to “Stop Nukes” — by direct action or political action? How should we organize to “Stop Nukes” — by decentralized forms of autonomous affinity groups or national mobilizations and perhaps centralized parties? What will replace nukes — huge high technology solar installations managed by conventional power utilities or simple, often hand-crafted popular technologies that can be constructed and managed by a moderate-sized community? These questions alone, not to speak of innumerable issues that range around notions of’ the communal ownership and management of society’s resources, non-hierarchical structures of social organization, and changes in human sensibility, reach far beyond the more limited issue of nuclear power. “No Nukes” is not enough — at least if we wish to remove the deep-seated social forces that produced nuclear power in the first place.

“Managerial radicalism” fosters a preoccupation with method rather than an exploration of goals. It is noteworthy that surprisingly few leaders of the anti-nuke movement have tried to educate their followers (assuming they are themselves informed) as to the implications of a serious opposition to nuclear power. They have provided no theoretical transition from the construction and operation of nuclear power plants to the social forces that promote them. The goal tends to remain fixed: “No Nukes!” Their principal concerns have been with the “strategies” and “tactics” that will achieve this end: a mobilization of docile constituencies that can be assembled and conveniently disassembled at nuclear reactor sites, in demonstrations, and more recently, at polling booths.

“Managerial radicalism” exhibits no real concern over the nature of these constituencies or their qualities as educated, socially committed, and active personalities. “Mass actions” outweigh self-action; numbers outweigh ideals; quantity outweighs quality. The concept of direct action, a concept that was meant to develop active personalities who as individuals and individuated communities could take the social realm directly into their own hands — an authentic public guided by ethical considerations rather than legislative edicts — is odiously degraded into a mere matter of “tactics” rather than self-activity, self-development, and self-management. Affinity groups, an anarchist notion of organization that was meant to provide the intimate, human-scaled, decentralized forms to foster the new selves and sensibilities for a truly free society, are seen merely as “task forces” that quickly assemble and disperse to perform very limited and concrete actions. “Managerial radicalism,” in short, is primarily concerned with managing rather than radicalizing. And in the process of cultivating the manipulation of its mass following, it grossly denatures every libertarian concept of our times, often at a historic cost that yields a repellent careerism within its self-appointed elite and cynicism within its naive following.

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The essays, articles, and papers that comprise this volume have been selected precisely for their critical thrust in the hope that we may yet recast the ecological, community, and theoretical issues of our time in a revolutionary direction. My omission of discussions on feminism and the feminist movement is merely a personal recognition that the best critiques and reconstructive notions in this area have already come from women, as indeed the best scholarship in anthropology and social theory. The works which follow were written entirely during the seventies and, almost without exception, are free of the proclivities of socialists and “managerial radicals” to follow trendy issues. If certain concepts and terms in this book now seem familiar, it is often because they were picked up later by elements in the Left who found one or another sizable constituency to exploit for their own dogmatic ends. Thus these writings can justifiably claim to “lead” intellectually: certainly, they do not follow — nor do they adapt new problems to shopworn causes.

That my writings in ecology urbanism, and technics have not always been celebrated by my colleagues on the Left can, in my view, be attributed to one reason: my commitment to anarchism. I hold this commitment with pride, for if nothing else it has been an invisible moral boundary that has kept me from oozing over to neo-Marxism, academicism, and ultimately reformism. I have not tried to mix contradictions and incompatibilities in order to gain the approval of my peers. A revolutionary ethical opposition has seemed to me to be a much better destiny than the social acceptance of those eminently practical “radicals” who basicaly despise the “masses” and in time grow to despise themselves. Hence the reader will find no convenient “uncertainties,” no recipies for “success,” no shifts of focus to suit a new “lesser evil” around which to embrace an even worse evil in the long run.

A second observation I would like to make is that this collection does not stand in any contradiction to my earlier sixties collection of essays, Post-Scarcity Anarchism. On the contrary, it largely elaborates problems in the first volume within the changing context of the seventies. The counterculture, in my view, is not “dead”; it was aborted by many factors and, if anything, awaits a richer, more perceptive, and more conscious development. The ideals it raised of communal living, openness of relations, love, sexual freedom, sensuousness of dress and manner are the abiding goals of utopian thought at its best. To dismiss the sixties as a “phase” is to dismiss utopianism as a “dream” — to deny the relevance of a Charles Fourier and a William Morris to our times — and to restrict the concept of a revolutionary movement to an apparatus, denying its significance as a culture. Such rejections of goals and traditions would be nothing less than an acquiesence to the status quo. What is remarkable about the sixties counterculture is not that it has been aborted; this could have been anticipated in the absence of a theoretical armamentarium suitable to its needs. What is remarkable is that the counterculture of the sixties emerged at all in the face of a middle- aged, smug, and middle-class environment or that it survived in different ways despite the hucksters who preyed upon it, be they the media-oriented canaille who became its “spokesmen” and clowns and the leeches of the dogmatic Left who parasitized it.

Post-Scarcity Anarchism tried to explain the emergence of this astonishing cultural phenomenon — so alien to the adults of the Eisenhower era — and to offer it a perspective. That my essays advanced ecological, technological, organizational, and theoretical perspectives that are still viable today attests to the relevance of the book as a whole.

The term “post-scarcity,” however, has encountered curious difficulties that require some discussion. “Scarcity” is not a mystical or absolute condition, a floating sense of “need” that is autonomous in its own right. It is a relative term whose meaning has changed with the emergence of new needs and wants. Marshall Sahlins has emphasized that technically primitive hunting bands lack the modern body of needs that center around sophisticated energy sources, dwellings, vehicles, entertainment, and the steady diet of food that Euro-Americans take for granted. Their“tool kit” is, in fact, so utterly primitive and their needs so limited that they lack a sense of “scarcity” that riddles our own comparatively opulent society. In this sense, they are seemingly “post-scarcity” communities or, to be more accurate, “nonscarcity” communities.

This line of reasoning is often convincing enough to suggest that a modern society based on “voluntary simplicity” — to use a new trendy term — might also become a “post-scarcity” society if it imposed “limits to growth” and “voluntary limits” on needs. Indeed, the implication of Sahlins’s views have been used with telling effect to demand a more austere, labor-intensive, relatively self-sufficient society — presumably one whose needs were in fact so limited that our seeming energy problems and raw materials shortages would be removed. Anthropology has been placed again in the service of the status quo — mot to remove material want but to validate it.

What this line of reasoning ignores is the considerable losses a drastic reduction of needs would create — losses in intellectual, cultural, and psychological complexity and ultimately a wealth of selfhood and personality. However much a hunting band may be in equipoise with its primitive tool-kit and its limited needs, it remains primitive and limited nevertheless. Even if one assumes that the “noble savage” is not a myth, it is a condition of “savagery” as well as nobility — one that is rooted’ in the limitations of the blood tie rather than citizenship, tribal parochialism rather than humanitas, a sexual division of labor rather than a professional one, revenge rather than justice, in short custom rather than reason and biological inflexibility instead of social malleability. It lies within human potentialities to be more than a “noble savage,” a product of natural history alone. To leave humanity’s latent capacity for actualizing the fullness of reason, creativity, freedom, personality and a sophisticated culture only partially or one-sidedly fulfilled is to deny the rich dialectic of the human condition in its full state of realization and even of nature as life rendered self-conscious.

Hence even were a “non-scarcity” society to exist, humanity would still suffer the same privation of form and development that exists in a “scarcity” society. “Post-scarcity” does not denote an affluence that would stifle the fulfillment of the human condition; indeed, an abundance of needs that can be fulfilled is more likely to perpetuate unfreedom than the “non-scarcity” condition of a hunting band. “Post-scarcity” denotes a free society that can reject false, dehumanizing needs precisely because it can be substantially free of need itself. It can decide to adopt a simpler way of material life because there is enough available for everyone to accept or reject. That it can even make such a decision reflects a high degree of social freedom in itself, a new system of social relations and values that renders libertarian social judgments possible. Gauged merely by our current agricultural and industrial output, North Americans and Europeans clearly have the material means for making such a judgment; gauged by our social relations , on the other hand, we lack the freedom, values, and sensibility to do so. Hence our affluent society — all myths of depleted or shrinking resources notwithstanding to the contrary — is as gripped by scarcity as our medieval ancestors centuries earlier. A “post-scarcity” society, in effect, would have to be a libertarian communist society that possessed enough material resources to limit growth and needs as a matter of choice, not as a matter of need — for if its limits were determined by needs that emerge from scarcity, it would still be limited by need and scarcity whether resources were in short supply or not. The need to diminish need would materially provide the basis, if not the cause, of hierarchy and domination based on privilege.

Marx hypostasized the problem of needs as the “realm of necessity,” a concept that reaches back to Aristotle, and thereby absolutized it in a way that obscured the historical formation of needs. How needs are formed — this, in contrast to the acceptance of needs as they exist — represents a complex problem which I shall not attempt to explore here. It suffices to point out that the formation of the “realm of necessity,” with the harsh split between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom,” is not a natural fact that has always been with our species or must always exist with it into the future. The “realm of necessity” is a distinctly historical phenomenon. In my view it emerged when primitive communities ceased to view nature as a co-existent phenomenon to be accepted or revered and, to use Marx’s simplistic metaphors, had to “wrestle with nature” as an “other” ultimately to be “dominated.” Once early humanity’s mutual reciprocity with the natural world dissolved into antagonism and its oneness into duality, the process of recovering a new level of reciprocity and oneness doubtless includes the scars of millenia- long struggles to master the “forces” of nature. I share the Hegelian view that humanity had to be expelled from the Garden of Eden to attain the fullness of its humanness. But I emphatically deny that this exile necessarily taints utopia with the blood and toil of history; that the “realm of necessity” must always be the “basis” or precondition for the “realm of freedom.” It remains Fourier’s lasting contribution that the “realm of necessity” can be colonized by the “realm of freedom,” the realm of toil by the realm of work, the realm of technics by the realm of play, fantasy, and imagination.

In any case, the “realm of necessity” can never be viewed as a passive “basis”; it must always infiltrate and malform the “realm of freedom” until Fourier’s ideal becomes a conscious reality. Marx’s tragic fate can be resolved into the fact that, integral to his entire theoretical edifice, he colonizes the “realm of freedom” by the “realm of necessity as its basis.” The full weight of this theoretical approach, with its consequent reduction of social relations to economic relations, of creative to “unalienated labor,” of society to “associated producers,” of individuality to embodied “needs,” and of freedom to the “shortening of the working day” has yet to be grasped in all its regressive content.

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The opening essays in this compilation are united by the emphasis I place on the synthesizing role of ecology’ — a term I sharply distinguish in my very first essay from “environmentalism.” I claim that, having divided humanity from nature many millennia ago, we must now return to a new unity between the social and the natural that preserves the gains achieved by social and natural history. Thus the real history of humanity (which Marx contrasted to the irrational “prehistory” prior to a communistic future) must be wedded to natural history. Perhaps these are no longer the brave words they seemed to be when I advanced them sixteen years ago in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” but their implications have not been fully developed by the so-called “radical” movement today. The separation of humanity from nature, its sweeping social trajectory into a history that produced a rich wealth of mind, personality, technical insight, culture, and self-reflective thought, marks the potential for mind in nature itself, the latent spirit in substance that comes to consciousness in a humanity that melds with the natural world. The time has come to integrate an ecological natural philosophy with an ecological social philosophy based on freedom and consciousness, a goal that has haunted western philosophy from the pre-Socratics onward.

Doubtless, the practical implications of this goal are paramount. If we are to survive ecological catastrophe, we must decentralize, restore bioregional forms of production and food cultivation, diversify our technologies, scale them to human dimensions, and establish face-to-face forms of democracy. On this score, I agree with innumerable environmentalists such as Barry Commoner who argue, perhaps a bit belatedly, for decentralization and “appropriate” technologies on grounds of pragmatism and efficiency. But my concerns go much further. I am occupied with the value of alternate technologies not only because they are more efficient and rest on renewable resources; I am even more concerned with their capacity to restore humanity’s contact with soil, plant and animal life, sun and wind, in short, with fostering a new sensibility toward the biosphere. I am equally concerned with the individual’s capacity to understand the operations of these new technologies so that personality itself can be enriched by a new sense of self-assurance and autonomy over the material aspects of life. Hence my emphasis on simpler forms — more “passive’ 5 forms, to use the vernacular of alternate technology — of solar collectors, wind machines, organic gardens and the like. By the same token, I am occupied with decentralization not only because it renders these technologies more feasible and more adaptable to the bio-regions in which they are employed; I am even more concerned with decentralization as a means of restoring power to local communities and to the individual, to give genuine meaning to the libertarian vision of freedom as a system of direct democracy. Small, in my view, is not merely “beautiful”; it is also ecological, humanistic, and above all, emancipatory.

Thus, the ages-old desideratum of the “good life” converges in ecology (as I would define the term) with the thrust of historical development. The French students of 1968 inscribed the slogan “Be practical, do the impossible” on the walls of Paris; to this slogan, I have added, “If we do not do the impossible, we will be faced with the unthinkable.” Utopia, which was once a mere dream in the preindustrial world, increasingly became a possibility with the development of modern technology. Today, I would insist it has become a necessity — that is, if we are to survive the ravages of a totally irrational society that threatens to undermine the fundaments of life on this planet.

But above all, my emphasis on achieving a new totality between humanity and nature is part of a larger endeavor to transcend all the divisions on which hierarchy has been reared for centuries — the division between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom,” between work and play, town and country, mind and body, between the sexes, age groups, ethnic groups and nationalities. Hence, the holistic outlook that pervades this book, a distinctly ecological, indeed, dialectical outlook, leads to an examination of community problems in their urban form, to Marxism, and to the problems of self-management. That I have compiled my articles not only on ecology and the ecology movement, but on city planning, the urban future, Marxism, should be seen as a meaningful and logical sequence. The modern urban crisis largely reflects the divisions that capitalism has produced between society and nature. “Scientific socialism,” in turn, reflects these divisions ideologically in Marx’s own dualism between “necessity” and “freedom.” My essays on spontaneity and organization essentially deal with ecological “politics” within the revolutionary paradigms and organizational issues formulated by the past century of radical practice.

Finally, this book as a whole is guided by its emphasis on hierarchy and domination as the authentic “social question” of human development, — this as distinguished from the economists question of class and the exploitation of labor. The irreducible “problem areas” of society lie not only in the conflict between wage labor and capital in the factory; they lie in the conflicts between age-groups and sexes within the family, hierarchical modes of instruction in the schools, the bureaucratic usurpation of power within the city, and ethnic divisions within society. Ultimately, they stem from a hierarchical sensibility of command and obedience that begins with the family and merely reaches its most visible social form in the factory, bureaucracy and military. I cannot emphasize too strongly that these problems emerged long before capitalism. Bourgeois society ironically concealed these problems for centuries by giving them an economistic form. Marx was to fall victim to this historic subterfuge by ignoring the subsurface modes of obedience and command that lie in the family, school, bureaucracy, and age structure, or more precisely, by identifying the “social problem” with class relations at the expense of a searching investigation into the hierarchical relations that produced class forms in the first place. Indeed, Marxism may well be the ideology of capitalism par excellence precisely because the essentials of its critique have focused on capitalist production without challenging the underlying cultural sensibilities that sustain it. My insistence that every revolutionary movement must be a cultural one as well as a social one is not simply the product of an exaggerated aversion for mass culture; it has deeper roots in my conviction that the revolutionary project remains incomplete if it fails to reach into the problems of hierarchy and domination as such — in short, if it fails to seek the substitution of an ecological sensibility for a hierarchical one.

Accordingly, this book is marked by a host of contrasts that ordinarily remain unstated or blurred in the radical and environmental literature I have encountered. It contrasts ecology with environmentalism, hierarchy with class, domination with exploitation, a people’s technology with an “appropriate” technology, self-management with “economic democracy,” cultural movements with economistic parties, direct democracy with representative democracy, utopia with futurism. I have not tried to develop all of these contrasts in these introductory remarks. The reader must turn to the book for a clearer elucidation of them. Let me merely voice one caveat. I nowhere claim that a hierarchical analysis of society involves a denial of a class analysis and its significance. Obviously the former includes the latter. I am certain that this caveat will be magnificently ignored by socialists and syndicalist-oriented libertarians alike. Let it merely be stated so that the reader has been alerted to “criticisms” that more often involves bias rather than analysis.

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To return to my opening remarks, this book is primarily intended to give voice to a revolutionary idea of social change, particularly in terms of the problems that have emerged with the decline of the traditional workers’ movement. Owing to the growing sense of powerlessness that freezes us into adaptive strategies for survival, an all-pervasive pragmatic mentality now invades our thinking. We live in a society of “tradeoffs” which are rooted in a pseudo-ethics of “benefits versus risks.” An “ethics” of “tradeoffs” involves a choice between lesser evils that increasingly carries us to the brink of the worst evils conceivable. Such, in fact, was the destiny of the German Left, which chose right-wing Social Democrats rather than conservative center parties, only to be faced with reactionaries who opposed fascists, finally to choose a Hindenburg against a Hitler who then proceeded to make Hitler chancellor of the Reich. Our modern “ethics” of “tradeoffs” and lesser evils, an “ethics” rooted in adaptation, pragmatism, and careerism stands in historic contrast to the ethics of pre-capitalist society. Even to such conservative thinkers as Plato and Aristotle, politics — a realm that could never be disassociated from ethics — denoted the achievement of virtue in the form of justice and the good life. Hence, authentic politics stood opposed to evil and called for its complete negation by the good. There are no “tradeoffs” in Plato’s Republic or in Aristotle’s Politics. The ultimate goals of these works are to assure the success of virtue over evil of reason over superstition and custom.

Modern politics, by contrast, has decisively separated itself from this tradition. Not only have we disassociated politics from ethics, dealing with the former strictly as a pragmatic body of techniques and the latter as a corpus of relativistic values based on personal taste and opinions; we have even turned the pragmatic techniques of politics into a choice between lesser evils, of tradeoffs,” that thereby replace virtue by evil as the essence of political norms.[2]

Politics has now become a world of evil rather than virtue of injustice rather than justice, a world that is mediated by “lesser” versus “greater” transgressions of “the good,” “the right,” and “the just.” We no longer speak of what is “right” or “good” or “just” as such but what is iess or more evil in terms of the benefits we derive, or more properly, the privations and dangers to which we are exposed. Only the general ignorance of culture that is slowly gathering like a darkening cloud over the present society has made it difficult for social theorists to understand the decisive nature of this shift in the historical norms of humanity. This shift is utterly subversive of any significant reconstruction of the body politic as an agent for achieving the historic goal of the good life, not merely as a practical ideal but as an ethical and spiritual one.

To reverse this denomination of politics by a leprous series o tradeoffs, to provide an ethical holism rooted in the objective values that emerge from ecology and anarchism, is fundamental to this book. For this objective to be lost to the reader is to ignore the very meaning of the essays in this compilation. It is on this classical ethics that all else rests in the pages that follow.