Creating Free Cities

What would a free municipality look like? What would its basic institutions be? What material, political, and cultural preconditions must be met before we can arrive at them, and who will be the agents for social change? What kinds of movements and political efforts are required to create them? These questions strike to the core of Murray Bookchin’s political project, particularly as he refined it during the 1980s and 1990s. The immediate and ultimate aim of the political approach he advanced is to create free cities or municipalities, and as such it is meant to provide both a clear social ideal as well as a concrete political praxis.

By advancing libertarian municipalism, Bookchin hoped to see new civic movements emerge and claim control over their communities. Political involvement at the local level is necessary, he insisted, to guide and inspire a process of municipal empowerment. This process and the institutions it entails, he hoped, may provide a focal point for rallying progressive social movements to the common cause of political freedom in its most expansive sense. To a very large extent, creating free cities is about developing free citizens, in whose hands power over society should be squarely placed: it must reside in popular assemblies and not in bureaucracies, parliaments, or corporate boards. Libertarian municipalism is an attempt to create the political structures necessary for this shift in power. Democratized and radicalized, municipal confederations would emerge, it is hoped, as a dual power to challenge and ultimately replace the nation state and the market.

A lifelong radical and a fertile thinker, Murray Bookchin had been politically active since the 1930s; first in Communist parties, trade unions, and Trotskyist groups, then during the 1960s in the civil rights movement, urban ecology projects, anarchist groups, the radical student movement, and community groups; and later in the 1970s and 1980s in anti-nuclear movements and the early Green movement. Only in the early 1990s did his health preclude further involvement in practical political affairs, but he continued to write until the last years of his life. Bookchin’s works spanned a broad range of issues, including ecology, anthropology, technology, history, politics, and philosophy. He started to write about ecology and urban issues in the 1950s, and in 1964 wrote his seminal “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first definitive essay on radical social ecology. Later he was to refine his theories – through a corpus of more than 20 books – into a coherent body of ideas. Murray Bookchin died at the age of 85, on July 30, 2006. With his passing we lost one of the most challenging and innovative radical thinkers of the twentieth century.

Bookchin expressed his ideas on libertarian municipalism in a number of essays and articles, and advocated it in his lectures and talks. But no book has yet appeared that collects his essays on the subject. This collection of his late political essays, I am proud to say, helps fill that gap. It should be seen, however, in relation to Bookchin’s full-length book on civic development, citizenship, and politics; From Urbanization to Cities. When he republished this monumental work in 1992 he added the essay “The Meaning of Confederalism,” and in a later edition, in 1995, further added “Confederal Municipalism: An Overview” as well as a new prologue. Bookchin was no academic, and he did not write for purely scholarly purposes; his aim with this work “was to formulate a new politics” and by appending these essays he showed how he meant to inspire a movement to give his ideas concrete reality.

In light of this, I initially intended this book to be an expanded appendix to From Urbanization to Cities, so that both together would constitute an overview of his political thinking. In my view his late essays, collected here, make his earlier works on urbanization, ecology, and revolutionary history even more relevant and tangible. Bookchin’s essays from the 1980s and 1990s had tried to advance libertarian municipalism as an anarchist alternative, an effort that turned out to be problematical. Although for many years Bookchin called himself an anarchist, pioneering its concerns with ecology and with hierarchy, he had long had a troubled relationship with the anarchist tradition. After a bitter polemical struggle to defend what he considered to be its highest social ideals against individualists, workerists, mystics, primitivists, and autonomists, he got tired of “defending anarchism against anarchists,” as he put it, and publicly disassociated himself from anarchism as such. He had spent much time and effort formulating and presenting libertarian municipalism as an anarchist politics, but anarchists, it turned out, were not interested in these ideas, and in fact the political idea of democracy is actually alien to anarchism. Several notions in anarchism inspired Bookchin, but his ideas about municipal government, direct democracy, and confederation could not be contained within an anarchist framework. Breaking with anarchism, he urged left libertarian radicals to embrace a new set of ideas, indeed a new ideology – he called it communalism – that could transcend all classical radical theories, both Marxist and anarchist. As an attempt to revive Enlightenment radicalism, Bookchin intended communalism to be a coherent ideological platform upon which we might develop libertarian ideas today and provide the Left with a politics.

For these reasons, I realized very soon that these essays expanded the purpose of the anthology; they gave a remarkably consistent overview of Bookchin’s perspectives on communalism and its relationship to the Left in general. Taken together these essays not only provide an overview of Bookchin’s political ideas but explain how his political ideas stem from his broader historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives. Although the subject matter may be libertarian municipalism and practical politics, their foundational analyses are profoundly social ecological, and their ideological perspective is basically communalist.

I chose the title Free Cities for this anthology because I think it stimulates our understanding of the historical impetus behind Bookchin’s political project. In order to achieve its ideal of a rational and ecological society, libertarian municipalism is an effort to create free cities, with an emphasis on both these words. Bookchin would have insisted that we interpret free not simply as “independent,” or “autonomous.” Rather, we should understand freedom in its expansive political sense, as the collective expression of human self-recognition and consciousness. Similarly, cities should not be interpreted merely as spatial centers of population or trade. For Bookchin, the historic rise of cities brought humanity the kind of social framework needed to break out of the rigid tribal world and develop into truly social beings; such citification is a historical precondition for our notion of citizenship. The ideal of the free cities was a subject not only of great historical interest but one that gave meaning to the project for social and political emancipation. The question that occupied Bookchin was to what extent municipalities could become genuine arenas for political creativity, universalism, and freedom and thus give human society its most rational expression.

I also hope that the title Free Cities stimulates the reader to conceptualize the political ideas of social ecology in a tangible manner. How can we empower our communities and recreate them along libertarian lines? How can we democratically transform the political, cultural, and material conditions of our own towns, villages, and cities? Social ecology proposes a politics of remaking daily life not only by creating nonhierarchical social relationships but also by institutionally restructuring neighborhoods and cities. The solemn theoretical adherence of these essays to “civilizatory advances” and a “rational society” should not frighten the reader; libertarian municipalism is a concrete political practice. It is my genuine hope that this book encourages readers to consider how to revitalize their own communities, how we may remake our municipalities as great places to live – for all their citizens – and render them politically and socially free.

My choice of subtitle, Communalism and the Left, expresses Bookchin’s wish to frame his theories in a communalist framework and to define their relationship to the Left. Bookchin explains in these essays the major achievements as well as the serious deficiencies of various traditional radical Left ideologies, such as Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism. For one thing, both socialism and anarchism have ignored the need to develop a political approach in the classical sense of the term, a politics distinct from the State on the one hand and from the social sphere on the other. Communalism was for Bookchin an attempt to provide the ideological framework to resuscitate the greatest Left traditions and to formulate a libertarian politics.

The idea for this book germinated when I last saw Murray, a few months before his death. At the end of November 2005 Sveinung Legard and I visited Murray and Janet Biehl, his long-time partner and collaborator, in Burlington. During our stay we had lengthy political discussions and undertook a substantial interview with Murray, which turned out to be the last one he ever gave. At one point in our discussions, Bookchin mentioned that he hoped to see his writings on libertarian municipalism collected and published. I had already given this possibility some serious thought and had specific ideas about how to put together anthologies of his writings. For some time I had been translating his works into Norwegian, and had edited, anthologized, and published his political writings here in Scandinavia. But I had hesitated to suggest an English-language anthology, since English is my second language – an obvious shortcoming. Moreover, Murray had long benefited from the support of Janet’s superior editing skills; for many years, she had carefully helped prepare his manuscripts for publication. Hence I was reluctant to offer my assistance. But at that time Janet was exhausted from the intense work of editing The Third Revolution and was in no position to undertake any new obligation of the sort proposed. I fervently wanted to see the anthologies materialize, and, emboldened by Murray’s expressed wish, I offered to assist.

My specific suggestions were twofold. First, I would put together a small book consisting of some four essays that gave a rounded yet accessible presentation of social ecology, to be called Social Ecology and Communalism. Then I would collect the more directly political essays in a second book that would comprise a comprehensive overview. Murray and I discussed these book projects in detail, and he gave me some manuscripts and notes for my work. I assured him that I would do my very best to see that these books were edited according to his wishes, and he expressed his confidence by putting me in charge of their publication. As soon as I returned to Norway, I began to work on the books.

My own qualifications for preparing these books may not be obvious to the reader, as I not only live on the other side of the Atlantic from Murray but am not a native English speaker. But I have been involved with the ideas of social ecology and libertarian municipalism since the early 1990s. I first met Murray in 1996 and visited him many times thereafter, staying in Burlington for weeks and months, experiencing both his generosity and that of his family. Murray and I regularly had long telephone conversations throughout our ten years of friendship and cooperation. Whenever I made a decision to translate his works into Norwegian for publication, I always informed him of my choices, and I consulted him when I encountered problems. He thus became familiar with my editorial approach and abilities. When I started writing my own essays, he always read them carefully and gave me his comments. He was sometimes a stern critic, sometimes encouraging, but always his perspectives were challenging. Over the years we grew ever closer. After the Second International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism (held in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1999), I suggested the creation of an international journal to express a consistent communalist perspective. Murray eagerly joined the journal’s editorial board, the last political group to which he belonged. For its launch I wrote “Communalism as Alternative,” a manifesto-like essay presenting the basic ideological views Murray had developed.

Editing the two anthologies was a way for me to continue our cooperation, as well as a way to show my gratitude for his intellectual generosity. Unfortunately Murray died only seven months after our meeting on the books, and he never had the chance to see either of them published. I nonetheless feel confident that Free Cities: Communalism and the Left has become what he wanted it to be. The essays gathered here are among Bookchin’s last, and they give a good overview of his ideas at the end of his life. I genuinely hope that the reader will get as much intellectual stimulation and political inspiration from reading these essays as I have done from preparing them for publication.

Some of the essays in this anthology may already be familiar to readers who have followed Bookchin’s work closely, but most of them are previously unpublished; they have been collected from letters, lectures, unfinished drafts, and manuscripts. I have tried to order them in a flowing presentation to give an overview of Bookchin’s late political outlook. Since he died before witnessing the completion of this project, I think it is only decent to explain as fully as possible my editorial choices in creating Free Cities.

Generally speaking, in addition to doing regular editorial work, such as adding titles and subheadings, or doublechecking references, dates and names, I have tried to create a common style of presentation by making the notes, letters and unfinished manuscripts into proper essays. The book consists both of independent essays on specific political issues and of more general essays in which Bookchin often gives brief synopses of his basic political ideas. As a consequence, there is inevitably some overlap between the chapters, though I have tried to keep this to a minimum. In these essays Murray made recurring references to his basic works, From Urbanization to Cities, The Ecology of Freedom, and Remaking Society, and though I have trimmed down the number of references here, I would strongly advise the reader unfamiliar with these works to consult them. Sometimes Bookchin would discuss the same idea in several places, such as the distinction between politics and statecraft, or his tripartite distinction between the political sphere, the social sphere, and the State. Suffice to say, again, readers will deepen their understanding of these ideas by exploring them further in Bookchin’s larger works.

I have also cut out some of the conceptual discussions Bookchin repeated over several of these essays: in particular his often-mentioned explanation that he is using the term politics in its classical Greek meaning, as the self-management of the polis, and his frequently repeated caveat that he is well aware of the historical shortcomings of ancient Athenian democracy in regard to slavery, xenophobia, and patriarchy. When Bookchin raises similar themes in different essays – say, on the issues of consensus, confederation, or government – I have tried to limit the repetition, either by removing sections or consolidating the discussion in one place, particularly in the previously unpublished writings. Generally I have omitted repetitions of similar arguments in different essays, but have left them intact when they approach an issue from a distinctive angle and thus serve to nuance his views. Here Bookchin was well aware of my general intention.

Whenever possible I have accommodated Bookchin’s wish to update his essays according to the communalist perspective. This issue is of course most significantly related to his break with anarchism, a matter he explains in some detail in several of the essays. To the extent that was appropriate, I have also updated some of the older essays. Similarly, when he appeals to a specific group (say, the Greens, with whom he worked with for a while) in a way that seemed outdated, I have tried to make the appeal more general (changing it to, say, “radical ecologists”). I thoroughly discussed all these changes with Bookchin and am making them here at his explicit request.

Whenever linking one paragraph to another required the addition of a transitional sentence, I have tried to make use of concrete expressions that Bookchin used elsewhere. To the best of my abilities, whenever I have had to revise paragraphs or move phrases, I have tried to preserve Bookchin’s tone. If readers sometimes miss the characteristic musicality of his writings, it is not for lack of trying on my part.

The hardest part of putting together such an anthology, however, lies in deciding which essays to include and how to organize them. I can only hope that more of Bookchin’s essays, lectures and interviews will be made available in the years to come, to shed further light on his intellectual development, particularly during the last decades. Still, based as it is on my understanding of what Bookchin wanted to see published from the last years of his life, this book presents that work as honestly as possible.

The “Introduction” is cobbled together from notes that Bookchin gave me November 2005. When we were discussing this project, I told him that I would love to have him write an introduction to this book, as his earlier essays on libertarian municipalism needed contextualization in light of his recent break with anarchism. He then revealed that he had already started drafting such an introduction, and passed along to me his draft, along with a draft for a separate essay he had recently started writing. Both these drafts were in a woefully unfinished state, almost notes, and we agreed that they had to be focused to fit this specific anthology. To ease my work, I suggested we use the drafts in combination with a short piece Bookchin had written to introduce a recent Swedish anthology of his writings – a suggestion he approved. I have thus extracted the core message of his drafts and spun them around the existing Swedish introduction. By further distinguishing his communalist approach from Marxism and anarchism, and by emphasizing the profound historicism of these ideas, I think this piece constitutes an appropriate introduction to the present anthology.

The next essay, “The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society,” brings us directly to some social ecological conclusions on political radicalism, and situates the remaining essays in the context of social ecology. I chose this essay because I find it to be an accessible leadin to libertarian municipalism as a social ecological politics, in relation to the impending ecological crisis that besets us. I also like the fact that it briefly touches on Bookchin’s criticisms of other radical tendencies in the ecology movement, criticisms that have made for defining debates. This essay was originally published as “The Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the Need to Remake Society,” in Society and Nature 2, no. 3 (1994), and has been edited only slightly to fit this anthology.

“Nationalism and the ‘National Question,’” written in March 1993, was first published in Society and Nature 2, no. 2 (1994). It has long been one of my personal favorites among Bookchin’s essays, and I am happy to include it here as it gives a solid historical argument not only against statism but also against nationalism. In this essay Bookchin explores the Left’s historically ambivalent relationship to the “national question,” and contrasts his ideas of municipalism and confederation to those of nations and states, precisely by the universal principles of democracy and human solidarity. The succinct “Nationalism and the Great Revolutions” was originally published as an addendum to the preceding essay, highlighting the universalistic spirit of the Enlightenme Bookchin’s arguments against nationalism and statism are taken further in the next piece, which I have called “The Historical Importance of the City,” and which consists of excerpts from a longer polemical essay “Comments on the International Social Ecology Network Gathering and the ‘Deep Social Ecology’ of John Clark,” written in September 1995 and published in Democracy and Nature 3, no. 3 (1997). Here we are given forceful arguments for the civilizatory and humanizing aspects of the emergence of the cities – the tendencies that libertarian municipalism ultimately wants to recover and expand. I told Bookchin that I had long wanted to highlight some of the main issues in his polemics with John Clark, and I specifically suggested these excerpts. Frustratingly, many of his political adversaries have tended to deflect attention from the real ideological questions at stake; by including these excerpts, I hope to offer the basic yet crucial arguments. I suggested to Bookchin that I include this abridged version, but would not want to suggest that this version is better than the original, only that it better serves our purpose here. Neither would I want readers to ignore the fact that every sentence in this essay is meant as a direct or indirect criticism of Clark’s position. Readers are strongly encouraged to read the polemic in full, which relates more directly to the actual points of contention and contains other important discussions as well. Other essays from Bookchin’s 1990s debates with anarchists are certainly also of interest, as they often give different emphases and nuances to his political ideas.

The 1990s debates over the nature of anarchism alienated Bookchin from the contemporary anarchist movement. Unfortunately he wrote no fundamental essays that explained his conclusions in great detail, although in retrospect we can see how Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism initiated his break with this ideology. Many of the features of “lifestyle anarchism” that he criticized were ones that he later concluded were symptomatic of anarchism as such. Murray explained his reasoning in a letter to Peter Zegers and the editorial board of Communalism (in November 2001), in which he considers even the more social forms of anarchism to be basically egoist. He also developed some of these ideas in a letter to Hamish Alcorn, written on July 30, 1999, just before his public break with anarchism. With Bookchin’s permission I have structured the essay “Anarchism as Individualism” around these two letters, incorporating as well some unpublished material from “Toward a Communalist Approach” and an early version of “The Communalist Project.” Despite its brevity, I think this essay may shed light on Bookchin’s reasons for breaking with anarchism – the political ideology with which he had been associated, and of which he had been a major representative, for four decades.

The next essay, “Anarchism, Power, and Government,” is based on the appendix Murray wrote to “The Communalist Project,” which he called “Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution,” published in Communalism, no. 2 (November 2002). I have expanded it with excerpts on the same subject originally from “The Future of the Left” and “Toward a Communalist Approach.” As these essays were written around the same time and brought up very similar issues, I have knitted similar passages together. As such, I think this short essay contains one of his weightiest arguments against anarchism, focusing particularly on its inability to deal with real-life problems in periods of social change and revolution.

The two preceding essays make an interesting contrast with “The Revolutionary Politics of Libertarian Municipalism.” Written as a video-transmitted speech that Bookchin presented to the First International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, held in Lisbon in 1998, it was one of his last attempts to present his political ideas as a direct extension of the anarchist-communist tradition. Here he tries to uphold the classical anarchist preference for communes, revolutionism, and federations, in order to rework and refine these ideals for changed social conditions: The speech was titled “A Politics for the 21st Century.” I have removed dated references and some parts that overlap with the other essays included herein. I have also tried to update the essay according to Bookchin’s expressed wishes, making minor changes concerning his ideological drift from anarchism to communalism, without changing any of its basic content. After this speech Bookchin gave up on his attempts to influence the anarchist movement from within, and, at the Second International Conference in Vermont the following year, he broke openly with anarchism as a theory and a movement. This essay contains his last important evaluation of the anarchist tradition from within, trying to emphasize its revolutionary, democratic, and socialist character. He later considered his efforts to have been an utter failure. Where he had earlier attempted to expand the federalist, cooperative, and municipalist trends within the anarchist tradition, he now tried to bring those valuable contributions into a new theoretical framework unburdened by the anti-social, anti-intellectual, and antiorganizational tendencies with which anarchism has always struggled.

The next essay, “The Future of the Left,” is in my view the jewel of this collection, tying all the other pieces together and giving this anthology its necessary coherence and breadth. Here Bookchin assesses of the state of radicalism at the turn of the twenty-first century – not only the radicalism of the contemporary resistance against “globalization,” but radicalism going back to the interwar period and twentieth-century revolutionary experiences. He takes a remarkably detached, yet engaged, look at traditional radicalism and its basic premises, specifically analyzing trends in Marxism and anarchism. Bookchin often spoke of this essay and finally showed it to me at our November 2005 meeting. The manuscript he handed over to me to edit had been written in December 2002. It was still unfinished (it actually ended mid-sentence) but was remarkably consistent in its reasoning. Although I have edited the essay, nothing of substance has been omitted, and though it broadens the focus of this anthology far beyond the collection of “strictly political” writings I had intended, it is this piece that contains Bookchin’s most mature ideas. It is fully communalist, posing a set of challenging questions for our generation of radicals to consider, and even as a stand-alone essay it gives this book a scope that stretches far into the future.

We close with an essay that Bookchin wrote for Communalism. Originally written in July 2000 as “Communalism: An Overview,” it was supposed to be revised for publication, but instead Bookchin wrote a completely new essay that ended up as the masterfully composed and theoretically challenging “The Communalist Project.” Even though the “Overview” essay was thus superseded, it contained so many interesting aspects that I always felt it deserved to be published in its own right. As a matter of fact, Bookchin himself returned to it in June 2003 and made some significant updates, and I have since taken out all the parts that overlap with “The Communalist Project.” I think it is of great interest, not because it is a definitive exposition of communalism – it is not – but rather because it is so suggestive of such an exposition. In this essay we see Bookchin still struggling with his ideological break with anarchism, framing his presentation almost entirely as a polemic against prevalent anarchist notions – unlike “The Communalist Project” and “The Future of the Left,” which stand out independently as a challenging ideological testament.

Taken together, the essays in Free Cities represent Bookchin’s most recent ideas, particularly on political and ideological issues. In my view this anthology offers both a good introduction to his political ideas as well as solid overview of his communalist approach. Not only does it contain much previously unpublished material, it helps explain ideological issues that remained unresolved at his death, particularly concerning his ideological break with anarchism. It will be easy for readers familiar with Bookchin’s writings to see how his distinct political ideas are educed from his broader theory of social ecology. For Bookchin, to advance libertarian municipalism meant to defend and build upon the ideals of the Enlightenment, which he considered the greatest tradition of social development. Based on communalism and social ecology, libertarian municipalism is a fundamental attempt to define a political humanism and to formulate and create a rational society.

I confess that preparing this manuscript for publication has not been easy, particularly since Bookchin passed away before seeing its completion. Despite the arduous task, I have nevertheless found it a pleasure to work with these wonderful ideas.

I would particularly like to thank Janet Biehl, who meticulously edited all of Murray’s work in his last two decades before it saw publication. I would also like to express my gratitude to my close comrades Yngvild Hasvik and Sveinung Legard, since their support, patience, and advice have been indispensable in finishing this project.

At the end of this preface I would also like to properly thank Murray Bookchin for allowing me to work on these ideas, and for our ten years of cooperation and friendship. It has been a privilege to be associated with him; his intellectual vigor was always a source of great inspiration, and I have gained much from his genuinely sharing personality. However much I have enjoyed his warmth and generosity on a personal level, my gratitude above all is for his achievement in providing a future movement with such challenging ideas.

If this collection of essays contributes to contemporary discussions on what kind of political institutions and radical organizations we need today, it will have served its purpose. It is my genuine hope that readers will seek to familiarize themselves with Bookchin’s ideas, here and in his other works, not as an academic exercise but as a way of preparing to change the world.

Eirik Eiglad

March 30, 2008

Introduction

These essays are my final assessment of some 80 years of social reflections on the twentieth century. In a very real sense, they are the product of a lifetime of study and political work, distilled from a remarkable era of revolutionary history that spanned decades of social upheaval, from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the closing years of the twentieth century.

I make no pretense to claiming that these essays resolve any of the crises that beset the people who lived out the century. It would be remarkable indeed to know even how to properly define these crises, still less to be capable of solving them. I do not claim to be able to answer all of the questions we face, but they must be considered – hopefully as a basis for future and creative discourse. The questions we ask and the answers we give are socially and politically defining. Taken together, they actually form the battleground for the future of social life, and our responses are the basis for how we constitute ourselves as social beings.

I would like to suggest that these essays be seen as the political conclusions I have drawn from my historical and philosophical work in The Ecology of Freedom, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Re-Enchanting Humanity, From Urbanization to Cities and last but not in the least The Third Revolution. Throughout these works I have tried to meld together the most challenging historical ideals into a body of theory that generally went by the name “social ecology”. These ideas combine as strands in a common thread: a search to understand the place of humanity in the natural world and the social factors that must be present if we are to actualize our ability (as yet incomplete) to bring to bear, in all the affairs of “raw” or first nature, a “sophisticated” or second nature informed by reason. By combining the words “ecology” and “freedom” I tried to show that neither nature nor reason could be properly conceptualized independently of the other; that the natural world could not be given any meaning without the social world or the human mind, that is, without the ability to abstract experience and generalize facts into far-reaching insights.

For most of human history, society, in effect, was familial, not civic; it was organized around blood ties (real or fictive), not legal tenets. Allocation of the means of life fulfilled necessities – especially rights and duties – among literal and figurative relatives in a nexus of shared, unquestioned responsibilities. Things were brought together in an indisputably “natural” manner, such that the “people” were unified – even more compellingly than by custom – by an inborn scheme of reality. They could not act otherwise, and their life-ways allowed for no discretion to follow any path other than what was given by the “eternal” nature of things.

The rise of organized communities – ultimately cities, civilization, and citizenship, as distinguished from habitats, customs, and folk – radically changed this state of affairs. Indeed, it marked the great rupture of Homo sapiens from merely a creative kind of animal into humans as such. The most powerful medium for achieving this radical new dispensation was a process of alienation called trade, a process that drastically remade the apprehension of reality from imagery into objectivity. The traditional world of imagination and analogical thinking gave way to a new world of systematic analysis and disciplined thought, engendered by commerce, efficient production, and careful calculation. Trade rewarded predictability based on objectivity, and knowledge based on reality, with power and wealth. To know meant to live in palpable touch with reality.

Knowledge ceased to be an end in itself; it became a tool, an instrument of control and manipulation. Yet ultimately it created a new world of thoughts and things, a new universe that redefined what it meant to be alive – generating an appetite for wealth, for competition, for growth for its own sake, for private ownership, and for power over men. What humans could imagine, they brought into existence. Even the transformation of human beings from earth-bound to flying creatures constituted a remarkable advance in the conversion of image into object – and no less significantly, it reduced a frightening mystery to a prosaic problem of engineering. Nuclear physics transformed vast, ineffable legends into problems of ordinary mathematics, no less unsolvable than the questions posed by Euclidean geometry.

But how was this even possible? The people who now grappled with the fantastic problems that had occupied human beings even several millennia earlier were, in fact, no longer the same people. Their outlook was no longer animistic, and they no longer lived in organic societies. Owing to their habitation in villages and cities, to their written literature and systematic modes of thought, to their careful retrospection and introspection, to their substitution of mythopoeic fantasy with rational thought, they were becoming humanized, rationalized, and civilized – veritably a new species.

Social theory could not ignore the extent to which mythopoesis, fantasy, and unbridled subjectivity yielded to humanization, rationalization and civilization, and it did not do so. This new world, particularly its emergence, was most brilliantly elucidated in the economic works of Karl Marx and his disciples. Despite their historical limitations, they still stand as a monument to the power of thought to rise above fantasy.

Bolstered by three massive volumes of closely reasoned economic analysis, considerable mathematical formulations, and highly persuasive historical data, Marxism emerged after World War One as the dominant ideology of the Western European radical intelligentsia and affected the thinking of great masses of literate working people. Despite many variations in Marxist tenets, Marx was seen as the man who provided the labor movement of the West with the basic ideas of socialism.

Treated like a new gospel, this “scientific” socialism was regarded as evidence, not of dogmatism, but of learning and of modern intellectual certainty. Marxist doctrine, in effect, was regarded as objective truth, which qualified its expositors to speak authoritatively on any subject as the peers of informed scientists, not only in economics but also in the life sciences and mathematics, not to speak of literature and ethics. In history, social development, and, needless to emphasize, with regard to current events, its acolytes persuasively claimed to enjoy a special knowledge of the course of events and their meaning. Owing to their adoption of Hegel’s notion of the “cunning of reason,” Marxists professed to understand the “hidden hand” of social development, as it were, looking beyond cultural, political, religious, mystical, and even artistic claims to the “underlying” class interests.

In the hands of Marxian acolytes like Georg Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky, who essentially substituted dialectics for mechanics, social theory became the deadening scientism of a new “social physics.” The interwar generation, the product of the mechanics of the class struggle, the dogma of social reductionism, and the hard-nosed idea of social dynamics rather than social dialectics, emerged as true class beings – Homo economicus. Marxism’s greatest claim to superiority over the so-called “utopian” socialists was its contention that it had prospectively established the hegemonic role of the proletariat over all other classes in achieving a socialist society. Of all classes, the proletariat, Marx expressly maintained, had nothing to sell but its abstract “labor power” (that is, its biological capacity to produce commodities in quantities beyond what was necessary for the satisfaction of its needs), and for that reason its historical destiny was to be driven to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with a planned, nationalized economy. This seminal, forcibly driven act made Marx’s work distinctive among theories of socialism.

But the greatest shortcoming of Marxism was its celebrated claim to finality. Capital asserted that capitalism appears as the dissection of the bourgeois economy in all its “wholeness,” encapsulated as a “science,” a notion that presupposes (like Quesnay’s Tableau Economique) a social stability that would have credibility only in the finitude or static perfection of Aristotle’s stars. Of course, nowhere in Being is such immobility possible, and no concept could be more nonsensical. Indeed, as the ancient Greeks emphasized, all that exists is development, elaboration, and increasing (but always incomplete) “fullness.” Thought and life are unending innovation. In a Being that is necessarily paradoxical, we strive not only for a “whole,” not only for a “totality” that is complete, but for one whose “final” contours always elude us.

These essays, then, do not work from the notion that there can be an “end to history.” Defining history as having an ultimate end would dissolve it into a meaningless conundrum, bereft of experience and development. Yet the word history is one of the few that alternately denotes both completeness and dynamism. Within a given “stage” history has a completeness to itself, but in history as a “process” a given period “flows” into the next with no terminus, so to speak. We thus find ourselves faced with a conundrum, more like a Kantian syllogism that has to be accepted as a given, or what Hegel would call a contradiction.

Not only do the grand works of philosophy have intrinsic dual meanings, they also reflect significant institutional changes that societies have undergone with the passage of time, from eras of obeisance to kings and nobles to our own. Sweeping social changes in a surprisingly brief period of time have created a need for profoundly new social terms, indeed for a dictionary more inclusionary than we have today. Such a compilation of terms, or expansions in meaning of words in common use today, amounts to the formulation of a new system of ideas. As we educe one idea from the others, we can derive from every one the potentialities of less inclusive but profoundly meaningful offspring, with a variety of divergent developments.

From this perspective, history becomes an open prospect that suggests the potentiality for a multitude of radically new forms. I presented one of a number of courses that this approach to a social dialectic might take in my book The Ecology of Freedom; alternative courses were put forward by non-European societies, particularly in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is not an idle endeavor to try to imagine what a handicraft society, whose economy was deliberately mixed and small-scale in character, might have looked like – as a “rational” society – in contrast to the medieval world that actually preceded urban society in Western Europe. It is not accidental that William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which describes such a society, has attracted so many admirers in our own time as a “model” utopia, especially among libertarian socialists and syndicalists.

What concerns us here, however, is the ossification of these libertarian and organic traditions during the period that spanned the two world wars. The “Great War” was fought largely by means of brutal trench warfare; backing out of that slaughter, the world entered the “Roaring Twenties,” then the “Great Depression” and the tumultuous 1930s, with socialist insurrections, the fascist coups of Mussolini and Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and Stalin’s massive purges. The period that thus closed with the genocidal World War Two cannot be mechanically locked into a historical box. The years from 1914 to 1950 constitute one of the most eventful periods of true history, wherein people’s actions surmount the quantitative stuff from which mere calendars are made.

The Euro-American generation of young radicals that emerged after World War One and that tried to resolve the revolutionary era of the interwar era was perhaps the most perplexing in modern history. It was certainly the most embattled and, ideologically, the most insurrectionary toward the deeply entrenched exploitative social order, notably capitalism.

After World War Two astonishing technological changes, soaring production figures, major advances in the living standards of Western workers, and broadly rightward shifts in popular political sentiments all made it evident that capitalism had more life remaining to it than the Bolsheviks and the anarcho-syndicalists had foreseen decades earlier. After the short-lived New Left of the 1960s, revolutionary movements waned steadily in numbers and purpose, while erstwhile radical social theorists immersed themselves in academic esoterica such as the peregrinations of the various Frankfurt School theorists, of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, and finally in postmodernism, the expression par excellence of the “virtues” of ideological disorder and social nihilism.

As someone who lived out this era, I was variously regarded – or regarded myself – as a communist (including one who adhered to successive views held by Trotsky), a libertarian socialist, and in a rather spotty fashion, an anarchist. In the 1970s and 1980s I expressed my ideas forcefully in a rather romantic anarchist framework. Later, however, I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile anarchism with my basic views. In the 1990s it was gradually becoming clear to me that an ideology that does little more than hail the “autonomy of the ego,” and that conceives of “liberty” in extremely individualistic terms, can never produce basic social change. A lifestyle rather than an ideology, anarchism, I came to realize, is concerned more with individual behavior than with political change and allows little room for a creative political practice.

My own experiences in the labor movement (as a foundryman and later as an autoworker) in the 1930s and 1940s had long ago convinced me that making basic and lasting change requires organization (as the IWW martyr Joe Hill voiced just before his execution). But most of the anarchists I encountered resisted organization, sometimes vehemently. And when I tried to properly define politics (as the directly democratic organization of the free municipality by popular assemblies) as the very opposite of statecraft (rule by professional bureaucrats, ultimately through a monopoly of the means of violence), my once-close anarchist associates assailed me as “statist.” Democracy, they asserted, is itself a form of “rule,” by the majority over the minority. A preposterous rejection of majority voting in favor of consensus decision-making played a major role in ruining the huge American anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s and potentially makes any movement organization and institution (beyond a small group) dysfunctional. In the end I found that I had either to close my eyes to the compelling need for organization in praxis, and for democratic institutions in public affairs in a future libertarian society, or else completely recast my views. I chose to do the latter.

Reflecting as they do my most recent and, having passed the age of 80, my most mature ideas, these essays try to explain why social ecology can no longer be seen as a mere extension of traditional radical ideologies, either Marxist or anarchist. It is now my conviction that the ensemble of views that I call social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and dialectical naturalism should properly form the basis for a new libertarian ideology and politics – communalism – that takes full account of the sweeping changes that have occurred in capitalism since the failure of proletarian socialism in the second half of the twentieth century and that suggests the new methods that are needed to transform a market-based society into a truly libertarian socialist one.

The reader alone will decide whether these essays are correct or erroneous and whether my expectations for communalism are sound or fanciful, but their most essential purpose is to create a new departure from ideologies that were inspired by the problems of the Industrial Revolution of two centuries ago, a departure that takes full account of changing class relations and hierarchical forms, of demographical transformations and ecological dislocations, and of urbanization, to cite the most important factors. Few of these issues had an important place in the writings of Marx, Bakunin, and their successors. Without ignoring the vital contributions that the ablest Marxists and left libertarians have made to social theory, I would ask the reader to recognize the centrality of these more recent issues in the essays that follow.

Only time will tell how capitalism will undermine itself, as Marx long ago expected it would, and to what degree the public – middle class and working class alike – will acquire those mutualistic impulses that the followers of Kropotkin impute to human nature. It will not be my privilege to see in my lifetime the achievement of a rational, ecological, and humanistic society in which people will finally be natural and social evolution rendered self-conscious – the great hope of Western philosophy and social progress for two thousand years. What I hold to, and what I try to impart through these essays, is my belief that the noblest role conscious human beings can play today is not only to seek the emancipation of people from the irrationalities of capitalist and hierarchical society but also to defend the Enlightenment and its message of reason in public affairs against the dark forces of irrationality, nihilism, and ultimately barbarism that stand at the gates of civilization. My own generation fought off Nazism and superstition with some success. The present and coming generations must have as their task to oppose the “dumbing down” of the human mind, its growing trivialization and juvenilization, and its appalling ignorance even of the recent past. They must oppose the new gospel of self-absorption at the expense of public affairs. They may have once again to deal with ghosts of the past – fascism and Stalinism – as well. In the meantime, we still have time to build a coherent theoretical framework for our practice and to prepare for the “final conflict” that may yet come at some point in the present century.

Murray Bookchin

Burlington, Vermont

November, 2005

The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society

In addressing the sources of our present ecological and social problems, perhaps the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human. The primary implication of this most basic message is a call for a politics and even an economics that offer a democratic alternative to the nation-state and the market society. I would like to offer a broad sketch of these issues to lay the groundwork for the changes necessary in moving toward a free and ecological society.

The Social Roots of the Ecological Crisis

First, the most fundamental route to a resolution of our ecological problems is social in character. That is to say, if we are faced with the prospect of outright ecological catastrophe, toward which so many knowledgeable people and institutions claim we are headed today, it is because the historical domination of human by human has been extended outward from society into the natural world. Until domination as such is removed from social life and replaced by a truly egalitarian and sharing society, powerful ideological, technological, and systemic forces will be used by the existing society to degrade the environment, indeed the entire biosphere. Hence, more than ever today, it is imperative that we develop the consciousness and the movement to remove domination from society, indeed from our everyday lives – in relationships between the young and the elderly, between women and men, in educational institutions and workplaces, and in our attitude toward the natural world. To permit the poison of domination – and a domineering sensibility – to persist is, at this time, to ignore the most basic roots of our ecological as well as social problems – problems whose sources can be traced back to the very roots of our civilization.

Second, and more specifically, the modern market society that we call capitalism, and its alter ego, “state socialism,” have brought all the historic problems of domination to a head. The consequences of this “grow or die” market economy must inexorably lead to the destruction of the natural basis for complex life-forms, including humanity. It is, however, all too common these days to single out either population growth or technology – or both – to blame for the ecological dislocations that beset us. But we cannot single out either of these as “causes” of problems whose most deep-seated roots actually lie in the market economy. Attempts to focus on these alleged “causes” are scandalously deceptive and shift our focus from the social issues we must resolve.

In the American experience, people only a generation or two removed from my own generation slashed their way through the vast forests of the West, nearly exterminated millions of bison, plowed fertile grasslands, and laid waste to a large part of the continent – all using only hand axes, simple plows, horse-drawn vehicles, and simple hand tools. It required no technological revolution to create the present devastation of what had once been a vast and fecund region capable, with rational management, of sustaining both human and non-human life. What brought so much ruin to the land was not the technological implements that those earlier generations of Americans used but the insane drive of entrepreneurs to succeed in the bitter struggle of the marketplace, to expand and devour the riches of their competitors lest they be devoured in turn by their rivals. In my own lifetime, millions of small American farmers were driven from their homes not only by natural disasters but by giant agricultural corporations that turned so much of the landscape into a huge industrial system for cultivating food.

Not only has a society based on endless wasteful growth devastated entire regions, indeed a continent, with only simple technology; the ecological crisis it has produced is systemic – and not a matter of misinformation, spiritual insensitivity, or lack of moral integrity. The present social illness lies not only in the outlook that pervades the present society; it lies above all in the very structure and law of life in the system itself, in its imperative, which no entrepreneur or corporation can ignore without facing destruction: growth, more growth, and still more growth. Blaming technology for the ecological crisis serves, however unintentionally, to blind us to the ways technology could in fact play a creative role in a rational, ecological society. In such a society, the intelligent use of sophisticated technology would be direly needed to restore the vast ecological damage that has already been inflicted on the biosphere, much of which will not repair itself without creative human intervention.

Along with technology, population is commonly singled out for blame as an alleged “cause” of the ecological crisis. But population is by no means the overwhelming threat that some disciples of Malthus in today’s ecology movements would have us believe. People do not reproduce like the fruit flies that are so often cited as examples of mindless reproductive growth. They are products of culture as well as of biological nature. Given decent living standards, reasonably educated families often have fewer children in order to improve the quality of their lives. Given education, moreover, and a consciousness of gender oppression, women no longer allow themselves to be reduced to mere reproductive factories. Instead, they stake out claims as humans with all the rights to meaningful and creative lives. Ironically, technology has played a major role in eliminating the domestic drudgery that for centuries culturally stupefied women and reduced them to mere servants of men and men’s desire to have children – preferably sons, to be sure. In any case, even if population were to decline for some unspecified reason, the large corporations would try to make people buy more and still more in order to render economic expansion possible. Failing to attain a large enough domestic consumers’ market in which to expand, corporate minds would turn to international markets – or to that the most lucrative of markets, the military.

Finally, well-meaning people who regard New Age moralism, psychotherapeutic approaches, or personal lifestyle changes as the key to resolving the present ecological crisis are destined to be tragically disappointed. No matter how much this society paints itself green or orates the need for an ecological outlook, the way society literally breathes cannot be undone unless it undergoes profound structural changes: namely by replacing competition with cooperation, and profit seeking with relationships based on sharing and mutual concern. Given the present market economy, a corporation or entrepreneur who tried to produce goods in accordance with even a minimally decent ecological outlook would rapidly be devoured by a rival in a marketplace whose selective process of competition rewards the most villainous at the expense of the most virtuous. After all, “business is business,” as the maxim has it. And business allows no room for people who are restrained by conscience or moral qualms, as the many scandals in the “business community” attest. Attempting to win over the “business community” to an ecological sensibility, let alone to ecologically beneficial practices, would be like asking predatory sharks to live on grass or “persuading” lions to lovingly lie down beside lambs.

The fact is that we are confronted by a thoroughly irrational social system, not simply by predatory individuals who can be won over to ecological ideas by moral arguments, psychotherapy, or even the challenges of a troubled public to their products and behavior. It is less that these entrepreneurs control the present system of savage competition and endless growth than that the system of savage competition and growth controls them. The stagnation of New Age ideology today in the United States attests to its tragic failure to “improve” a social system that must be completely replaced if we are to resolve the ecological crisis. One can only commend the individuals who by virtue of their consumption habits, recycling activities, and appeals for a new sensibility undertake public activities to stop ecological degradation. Each surely does his or her part. But it will require a much greater effort – an organized, clearly conscious, and forward-looking political movement – to meet the basic challenges posed by our aggressively anti-ecological society.

Class, Hierarchies, and Politics

Yes, we as individuals should change our lifestyles as much as possible, but it is the utmost shortsightedness to believe that that is all or even primarily what we have to do. We need to restructure the entire society, even as we engage in lifestyle changes and single-issue struggles against pollution, nuclear power plants, the excessive use of fossil fuels, the destruction of soil, and so forth. We must have a coherent analysis of the deep-seated hierarchical relationships and systems of domination, as well as of class relationships and economic exploitation, that degrade people as well as the environment. Here, we must move beyond the insights provided by the Marxists, syndicalists, and even many liberal economists, who for years reduced most social antagonisms and problems to class analysis. Class struggle and economic exploitation still exist, and the classical – and still perceptive – class analysis reveals iniquities about the present social order that are intolerable.

But the Marxian and liberal belief that capitalism has played a “revolutionary” role in destroying traditional communities, and that technological advances seeking to “conquer” nature are a precondition for freedom, rings terribly hollow today, when many of these very advances are being used to make the most formidable weapons and means of surveillance the world has ever seen. Nor could the Marxian socialists of my day, 60 years ago, have anticipated how successfully capitalism would use its technological prowess to co-opt the working class and even diminish its numbers in relation to the rest of the population.

Yes, class struggles still exist – but they occur further and further below the threshold of class war. Workers, as I can attest from my own experience as a foundryman and autoworker for General Motors, do not regard themselves as mindless adjuncts to machines, or as factory dwellers, or as “instruments of history,” as Marxists might put it. They regard themselves as living human beings: as fathers and mothers, as sons and daughters, as people with dreams and visions, as members of communities – not only of trade unions. Living in towns and cities, their eminently human aspirations go well beyond their “historic role” as class agents of “history.” They suffer from the pollution of their communities as well as from their factories, and they are as concerned about the welfare of their children, companions, neighbors, and communities, as they are about their jobs and wage scales.

The overly economistic focus of traditional socialism and syndicalism has in recent years caused these movements to lag behind emerging ecological issues and visions – as they lagged, I may add, behind feminist concerns, cultural issues, and urban issues, all of which often cut across class lines to include middle-class people, intellectuals, small proprietors, and even some bourgeois. Their failure to confront hierarchy – not only class and domination, not only economic exploitation – has often alienated women from socialism and syndicalism to the extent that they awakened to the age-old reality that they have been oppressed irrespective of their class status. Similarly, broad community concerns like pollution afflict people as such, whatever the class to which they belong. Disasters like the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine justly panicked everyone who was exposed to radiation from the plant, not simply workers and peasants.

Indeed, even if we were to achieve a classless society free of economic exploitation, would we readily achieve a rational society? Would women, young people, the infirm, the elderly, people of color, various oppressed ethnic groups – the list is, in fact, enormous – be free of domination? The answer is a categorical no – a fact to which women can certainly attest, even within the socialist and syndicalist movements themselves. Without eliminating the ancient hierarchical and domineering structures from which classes and the state actually emerged, we would have made only a part of the changes needed to achieve a rational society. There would still be a historical intoxicant in a socialist or syndicalist society – hierarchy – that would continually erode its highest ideals, namely the achievement of a truly free and ecological society.

The Myth of a “Minimal State”

Perhaps the most disquieting feature of many radical groups today, particularly socialists who may accept the foregoing observation, is their commitment to at least a minimal state that would coordinate and administer a classless and egalitarian society – a non-hierarchical one, no less! One hears this argument from André Gorz and many others, who, presumably because of the many “complexities” of modern society, cannot conceive of the administration of economic affairs without some kind of coercive mechanism, albeit one with a “human face.”

This logistical and in some cases frankly authoritarian view of the human condition (as expressed in the writings of Arne Næss, the father of “deep ecology”) reminds one of a dog chasing its tail. Simply because the “tail” is there – a metaphor for economic “complexity” or market systems of distribution – does not mean that the metaphorical dog must chase it in circles that lead nowhere. The “tail” we have to worry about can be rationally simplified by reducing or eliminating commercial bureaucracies and the needless reliance on goods from abroad that can be produced by recycling at home, and by increasing the use of local resources that are now ignored because they are not “competitively” priced: in short, reducing the vast paraphernalia of goods and services that may be indispensable to profit making and competition, but not to the rational distribution of goods in a cooperative society. The painful reality is that most excuses in radical theory for preserving a “minimal state” stem from the myopic visions of eco-socialists like Gorz, who can accept the present system of production and distribution as it is to one degree or another – not as it should be in a moral economy. So conceived, production and distribution seem more formidable – together with their bureaucratic machinery, irrational division of labor, and “global” nature – than they actually need to be. It would take no great wisdom or array of computers to show with even a grain of imagination how the present “global” system of production can be simplified and still provide a decent standard of living for everyone. Indeed, it took only some five years or so to rebuild a ruined Germany after World War Two, far longer than it will require thinking people today to remove the statist and bureaucratic apparatus for administering the global distribution of goods and resources.

What is even more disquieting is the naive belief that a “minimal state” could indeed remain “minimal.” If history – in fact, the events of the past few years – has shown anything, it is that the state, far from being only an instrument of a ruling elite, becomes an organism in its own right that grows as unrelentingly as a cancer. Anarchism, in this respect, has exhibited a prescience that discloses the terrible weakness of the traditional socialist commitment to a state – proletarian, social democratic, or “minimal.” To create a state is to institutionalize power in the form of a machine that exists apart from the people. It is to professionalize rule and policymaking, to create a distinct interest (be it of bureaucrats, deputies, commissars, legislators, the military, the police, ad nauseam) that, however weak, or however well-intentioned it may be at first, eventually takes on a corruptive power of its own. When over the course of history have states – however “minimal” – ever dissolved themselves or constrained their growth into massive malignancies? When have they ever remained “minimal”?

The recent deterioration of the German Greens – the so-called “non-party party” that, after its acquisition of a place in the Bundestag, has now become a crude political machine – is dramatic evidence that parliamentary power corrupts with a vengeance. The idealists who helped found the organization and sought to use the Bundestag merely as a “platform” for their radical message have by now either left in disgust or have themselves become rather unsavory examples of wanton political careerism. One would have to be either utterly naive or simply blind to the lessons of history to ignore the fact that the state, “minimal” or not, absorbs and ultimately digests even the most well-meaning critics once they enter it. It is not that statists use the state to abolish it or “minimalize” its effects; it is, rather, the state that corrupts even the most idealistic anti-statists who flirt with it.

Finally, the most disturbing feature of statism – even “minimal statism” – is that it completely undermines a politics based on confederalism. One of the most unfortunate features of traditional socialist history, Marxian and otherwise, is that it emerged in an era of nation-state building. The Jacobin model of a centralized revolutionary state was accepted almost uncritically by nineteenth-century socialists and became an integral part of the revolutionary tradition – a tradition, I may add, that mistakenly associated itself with the nationalistic emphasis of the French Revolution, as seen in the “Marseillaise” and its adulation of la patrie. Marx’s view that the French Revolution was basically to be a model for formulating a revolutionary strategy – he mistakenly claimed that in its Jacobin form it was the most “classical” of the “bourgeois” revolutions – had disastrous effects upon the revolutionary tradition. Lenin adopted this vision so completely that the Bolsheviks were rightly considered the “Jacobins” of the Russian socialist movement, and, of course, Stalin used techniques such as purges, show trials, and brute force with lethal effects for the socialist project as a whole.

Beyond Statism and Privatism

The notion that human freedom can be achieved, much less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic – a contradiction in terms. Attempts to justify the existence of a cancerous phenomenon like the state, and the use of statist measures or “statecraft,” exclude a radically different form of social management, namely confederalism. For centuries, in fact, democratic forms of confederalism – in which municipalities were coordinated by mandated and recallable deputies who were always under public scrutiny – have competed with statist forms and constituted a challenging alternative to centralization, bureaucratization, and the professionalization of power in the hands of elite bodies. Let me emphasize that confederalism should not be confused with federalism, which is simply the coordination of nation-states in a network of agreements that preserve the prerogatives of policy-making with little if any citizen involvement. Federalism is simply the state writ large, indeed the further centralization of already centralized states, as in the United States’ federal republic, the European Community, or the recently formed Commonwealth of Independent States – all collections of huge continental superstates that remove even further whatever control the people have over nation-states.

A confederalist alternative would be based on a network of policy-making popular assemblies with recallable deputies to local and regional confederal councils – councils whose sole function, I must emphasize, would be to adjudicate differences and undertake strictly administrative tasks. One could scarcely advance such a prospect by making use of a state formation of any kind, however “minimal.” Indeed, to juggle statist and confederal perspectives in a verbal game by distinguishing “minimal” from “maximal” is to utterly confuse the basis for a new politics structured around a participatory democracy. Among Greens in the United States there have already been tendencies that absurdly call for “decentralization” and “grassroots democracy” while seeking to run candidates for state and national offices – that is, for statist institutions, one of whose essential functions is to confine, restrict, and essentially suppress local democratic institutions and initiatives. Indeed, as I have repeatedly emphasized, when radical ecologists and libertarian socialists of all kinds engage in libertarian municipalist politics and run for municipal public office, they are not merely seeking to remake cities, towns, and villages on the basis of fully democratic confederal networks; they are running against the state and parliamentary offices. Hence, to call for a “minimal state,” even as a coordinative institution, as André Gorz and others have done, is to obscure and countervail any effort to replace the nation-state with a confederation of municipalities.

It is to the credit of anarchism that it firmly rejects the traditional socialist orientation toward state power and recognizes the corruptive role of participating in parliamentary elections. What is regrettable is that this rejection, so clearly corroborated by the corruption of statist socialists, Greens, and members of other professed radical movements, was not sufficiently nuanced to distinguish activity on the municipal level as the basis of politics in the Hellenic sense: that is to say, to distinguish electoral activity on the local level from electoral activity on the provincial and national levels, which I have argued really constitutes statecraft. The libertarian politics of social ecology, by contrast, consistently seeks to revive or recreate the political sphere, in flat opposition to the state; it attempts to create a dual power to challenge the nationstate and replace it with a confederation of democratized municipalities. Libertarian municipalism may indeed begin in a limited way in civic wards, here and there, as well as in small cities and towns, but its aim is nothing less than the total remaking of society along rational, nonhierarchical and ecological lines.

It would not be presumptuous to claim that social ecology, whatever its other values or failings, represents a coherent interpretation of the enormous ecological and social problems we face today. Its philosophy, social theory, and political practice form a vital alternative to the ideological stagnation and tragic failure of the present socialist, syndicalist, and radical projects that were so much in vogue even as recently as the 1960s. As to “alternatives” that offer us New Age or mystical ecological solutions, what could be more naive than to believe that a society whose very metabolism is based on growth, production for its own sake, hierarchy, classes, domination, and exploitation could be changed simply by moral suasion, individual action, and a childish primitivism that essentially views technology as a curse and focuses variously on demographic growth and personal modes of consumption as primary issues? We must get to the heart of the crisis we face and develop a popular politics that will eschew statism at one extreme and New Age privatism at the other. If this goal is dismissed as “merely” utopian, I am obliged to question what many radicals today would call “realism.”

Nationalism and the “National Question”

One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anti-capitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century.

This did not mean that the nineteenth-century Left favored imperialist depredations in the colonial world. At the turn of this century, hardly any serious radical thinker, to my knowledge, regarded the imperialist powers’ attempts to quell movements for self-determination in colonial areas as a blessing. The Left scoffed at and usually denounced the arrogant claims of European powers to bring “progress” to the “barbarous” areas of the world. Marx’s views of imperialism may have been equivocal, but he never lacked a genuine aversion for the afflictions that native peoples suffered at the hands of imperialists. Anarchists, in turn, were almost invariably hostile to the European claim to be the beacon of civilization for the world.

Yet if the Left universally scorned the civilizatory claims of imperialists at the end of the nineteenth century, it generally regarded nationalism as an arguable issue. The “national question,” to use the traditional phrase in which such discussions were cast, was subject to serious disputes, certainly as far as tactics were involved. But by general agreement, leftists did not regard nationalism, culminating in the creation of nation-states, as the ultimate dispensation of humanity’s future in a collectivist or communist society. Indeed, the single principle on which the Left of the pre- World War One and the interwar periods agreed was a belief in the shared humanity of people regardless of their membership in different cultural, ethnic, and gender groups, and their complementary affinities in a free society as rational human beings with the capacity for cooperation, a willingness to share material resources, and a fervent sense of empathy. The “Internationale,” the shared anthem of social democrats, socialists, and anarchists alike up to and even after the Bolshevik revolution, ended with the stirring cry, “The ‘Internationale’ shall be the human race.” The Left singled out the international proletariat as the historic agent for modern social change not by virtue of its specificity as a class, or its particularity as one component in a developing capitalist society, but by virtue of its need to achieve universality in order to abolish class society – that is, as the class driven by necessity to remove wage slavery by abolishing enslavement as such. Capitalism had brought the historic “social question” of human exploitation to its final and most advanced form. “Tis the final conflict!” rang out the “Internationale,” with a sense of universalistic commitment – one that no revolutionary movement could ignore any longer without subverting the possibilities for passing from a “prehistory” of barbarous class interest to a “true history” of a totally emancipated humanity.

Minimally, this was the shared outlook of the prewar and interwar Left, particularly of its various socialistic tendencies. The primacy the anarchists and libertarian socialists have historically given to the abolition of the state, the agency par excellence of hierarchical coercion, led directly to their denigration of the nation-state and of nationalism generally, not only because nationalism divides human beings territorially, culturally, and economically, but because it follows in the wake of the modern state and ideologically justifies it.

Of concern here is the internationalist tradition that played so pronounced a role in the Left of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, and its mutation into a highly problematical “question,” particularly in Rosa Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s writings. This is a “question” of no small importance. We have only to consider the utter confusion that surrounds it today – when a savagely bigoted nationalism is subverting the internationalist tradition of the Left – to recognize its importance. The rise of nationalisms that exploit racial, religious, and traditional cultural differences between human beings, including even the most trivial linguistic and quasi-tribalistic differences, not to speak of differences in gender identity and sexual preference, marks a decivilization of humanity, a retreat to an age when the number of fingers with which people made the sign of the cross determined whether they and their neighbors would disembowel each other in bloody conflicts, as Nikos Kazantzakis pointed out in Zorba the Greek.

What is particularly disturbing is that the Left has not always seen nationalism as a regressive demand. The modern Left, such as it is today, all too often uncritically embraces the slogan “national liberation” – a slogan that has echoed through its ranks without regard for the basic ideal voiced in the “Internationale.” Calls for tribal “identity” shrilly accentuate a group’s particular characteristics to garner constituencies, an effort that negates the spirit of the “Internationale” and the traditional internationalism of the Left. The very meaning of nationalism and the nature of its relationship to statism are raising issues, especially today, for which the Left is bereft of ideas apart from appeals for “national liberation.”

If present-day leftists lose all viable memory of an earlier internationalist Left – not to speak of humanity’s historical emergence out of its animalistic background, its millennia-long development away from such biological facts as ethnicity, gender, and age differences toward truly social affinities based on citizenship, equality, and a universalistic sense of a common humanity – the great role assigned to reason by the Enlightenment may well be in grave doubt. Without a form of human association that can resist and hopefully go beyond nationalism in all its popular variants – whether it takes the form of a reconstituted Left, a new politics, a social libertarianism, a reawakened humanism, an ethics of complementarity – anything that we can legitimately call civilization, indeed, the human spirit itself, may well be extinguished long before nuclear war, the growing ecological crises, or, more generally, a cultural barbarism comparable only to the most destructive periods in history overwhelms us. In view of today’s growing nationalism, then, few endeavors could be more important than to examine the nature of nationalism and understand the so-called “national question” as the Left in its various forms has interpreted it over the years.

A Historical Overview

The level of human development can be gauged in great part by the extent to which people recognize their shared unity. Indeed, personal freedom consists in great part of our ability to choose friends, partners, associates, and affines without regard to their biological differences. What makes us human, apart from our ability to reason on a high plane of generalization, consociate into mutable social institutions, work cooperatively, and develop a highly symbolic system of communication, is a shared knowledge of our humanitas. Goethe’s memorable words, so characteristic of the Enlightenment mind, still haunt as a criterion of our humanity: “There is a degree of culture where national hatred vanishes, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations and feels the weal and woe of a neighboring people as if it happened to one’s own.”

If Goethe established a standard of authentic humanity here – and surely one can demand more of human beings than empathy for their “own people” – early humanity was less than human by that standard. Although a lunatic element in today’s ecology movement calls for a “return to a Pleistocene spirituality,” they would in all probability have found that “spirituality” very dispiriting in reality. In prehistoric eras, probably marked by band and tribal social organization, human beings were, “spiritually” or otherwise, first and foremost members of an immediate family, second, members of a band, and ultimately, members of a tribe. What determined membership in anything beyond one’s given family group was an extension of the kinship tie: the people of a given tribe were socially linked to one another by real or fictive blood relationships. This “blood oath,” as well as other “biological facts” like gender and age, defined one’s rights, obligations, and indeed one’s identity in the tribal society.

Moreover, many – perhaps most – band or tribal groups regarded only those who shared the “blood oath” with themselves as human. Indeed, a tribe often referred to itself as “the People,” a name that expressed its exclusive claim to humanity. Other people, who were outside the magic circle of the real or mythic blood linkages of a tribe, were “strangers” and hence in some sense were not human beings. The “blood oath” and the use of the name “the People” to designate themselves often pitted a tribe against others who made the same exclusive claim to be human and to be “the People,” even among peoples who shared common linguistic and cultural traits.

Tribal society, in fact, was extremely wary of anyone who was not one of its own members. In many areas, before a stranger could cross a territorial boundary, he had to submissively and patiently await an invitation from an elder or shaman of the tribe that claimed the territory before proceeding. Without hospitality, which was generally conceived as a quasi-religious virtue, any stranger risked life and limb in a tribe’s territory, so that lodgings and food were usually preceded by ritual acts of trust or goodwill. The modern handshake may itself have originated as a symbolic expression that one’s right hand was free of weapons.

Warfare was endemic among our prehistoric ancestors and in later native communities, notwithstanding the high, almost cultic status enjoyed by ostensibly peaceful “ecological aborigines” among white middle-class Euro- Americans today. When foraging groups overhunted the game in their accustomed territory, as often happened, they were usually more than willing to invade the area of a neighboring group and claim its resources for their own. Commonly, after the rise of warrior sodalities, warfare acquired cultural as well as economic attributes, so victors no longer merely defeated their real or chosen “enemies” but virtually exterminated them, as witness the near-genocidal destruction of the Huron Indians by their linguistically and culturally related Iroquois cousins.

If the major empires of the ancient Middle East and Orient conquered, pacified, and subjugated many different ethnic and cultural groups, thereby making alien peoples into the abject subjects of despotic monarchies, the most important single factor to erode aboriginal parochialism was the emergence of the city. The rise of the ancient city, whether democratic as at Athens or republican as in Rome, marked a radically new social dispensation. In contrast to the family-oriented and parochial folk who had constituted the tribal and village world, Western cities were now structured increasingly around residential propinquity and shared economic interests. A “second nature,” as Cicero called it, of humanistic social and cultural ties began to replace the older form of social organization based on the “first nature” of biological and blood ties, in which individuals’ social roles and obligations had been anchored in their family, clan, gender, and the like, rather than in associations of their own choice.

Etymologically, “politics” derives from the Greek politika, which connotes an actively involved citizenry that formulates the policies of a community or polis and, more often than not, routinely executes them in the course of public service. Although formal citizenship was required for participation in such politics, poleis like democratic Athens celebrated their openness to visitors, particularly to skilled craftsmen and knowledgeable merchants of other ethnic communities. In his famous funeral oration, Pericles declared:

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality, trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; where in education, [our rivals in Sparta] from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.

In Periclean times, Athenian liberality, to be sure, was still limited by a largely fictitious notion of the shared ancestry of its citizens – although less than it had been previously. But it is hard to ignore the fact that Plato’s dialectical masterpiece, The Republic, occurs as a dialogue in the home of Cephalos, whose family were resident aliens in the Piraeus, the port area of Athens where most foreigners lived. Yet in the dialogue itself the interchange between citizen and alien is uninhibited by any status considerations.

The Roman emperor Caracalla, in time, made all freemen in the Empire “citizens” of Rome with equal juridical rights, thereby universalizing human relationships despite differences in language, ethnicity, tradition, and place of residence. Christianity, for all its failings, nonetheless celebrated the equality of all people’s souls in the eyes of the deity, a heavenly “egalitarianism” that, in combination with open medieval cities, theoretically eliminated the last attributes of ancestry, ethnicity, and tradition that divided human beings from each other.

In practice, it goes without saying, these attributes still persisted, and various peoples retained parochial allegiances to their villages, localities, and even cities, countervailing the tenuous Roman and particularly Christian ideals of a universal humanitas. The unified medieval world was fragmented juridically into countless baronial and aristocratic sovereignties that parochialized local popular commitments to a given lord or place, often pitting culturally and ethnically related peoples against each other in other areas. The Catholic Church opposed these parochial sovereignties, not only for doctrinal reasons but in order to be able to expand papal authority over Christendom as a whole. As for secular power, wayward but strong monarchs like Henry II of England tried to impose the “king’s peace” over large territorial areas, subduing warring nobles with varying degrees of success. Thus did pope and king work in tandem to diminish parochialism, even as they dueled with each other for control over ever-larger areas of the feudal world.

Yet authentic citizens were deeply involved in classical political activity in many places in Europe during the Middle Ages. The burghers of medieval town democracies were essentially master craftsmen. The tasks of their guilds, or richly articulated vocational fraternities, were no less moral than economic – indeed, they formed the structural basis for a genuine moral economy. Guilds not only “policed” local markets, fixing “fair prices” and assuring that the quality of their members’ goods would be high; they participated in civic and religious festivals as distinct entities with their own banners, helped finance and construct public buildings, saw to the welfare of the families of deceased members, collected money for charity, and participated as militiamen in the defense of the community of which they were a part. Their cities, in the best of cases, conferred freedom on runaway serfs, saw to the safety of travelers, and adamantly defended their civic liberties. The eventual differentiation of the town populations into wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless, and “nationalists” who supported the monarchy against a predatory nobility, makes up a complex drama that cannot be discussed here.

At various times and places some cities created forms of association that were neither nations nor parochial baronies. These were intercity confederations that lasted for centuries, such as the Hanseatic League, cantonal confederations like that of Switzerland, and more briefly, attempts to achieve free city confederations like the Spanish comuñero movement in the early sixteenth century. It was not until the seventeenth century – particularly under Cromwell in England and Louis XIV in France – that centralizers of one form or another finally began to carve out lasting nations in Europe.

Nation-states, let me emphasize, are states – not only nations. Establishing them means vesting power in a centralized, professional, bureaucratic apparatus that exercises a social monopoly of organized violence, notably in the form of its armies and police. The state preempts the autonomy of localities and provinces by means of its all-powerful executive and, in republican states, its legislature, whose members are elected or appointed to represent a fixed number of “constituents.” The citizen in a self-managed locality vanishes into an anonymous aggregation of individuals who pay a suitable amount of taxes and receive the state’s “services.” “Politics” in the nation-state devolves into a body of exchange relationships in which constituents generally try to get what they pay for in a “political” marketplace of goods and services. Nationalism as a form of tribalism writ large reinforces the state by providing it with the loyalty of a people of shared linguistic, ethnic, and cultural affinities, indeed legitimizing the state by giving it a basis of seemingly all-embracing biological and traditional commonalities among the people. It was not the English people who created an England but the English monarchs and centralizing rulers, just as it was the French kings and their bureaucracies who forged the French nation.

Indeed, until state-building began to acquire new vigor in the fifteenth century, nation-states in Europe remained a novelty. Even when centralized authority based minimally on a linguistic commonality began to foster nationalism throughout Western Europe and the United States, nationalism faced a very dubious destiny. Confederalism remained a viable alternative to the nation-state well into the latter half of the nineteenth century. As late as 1871, the Paris Commune called upon all the communes of France to form a confederal dual power in opposition to the newly created Third Republic. Eventually the nation-state won out in this complex conflict, and statism, in fact, was firmly linked to nationalism. The two were virtually indistinguishable from each other by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Nationalism and the Left

Radical theorists and activists on the Left dealt in very different ways with the host of historical and ethical problems that nationalism raised with respect to efforts to build a communistic, cooperative society. Historically, the earliest leftist attempts to explore nationalism as a problem obstructing the advent of a free and just society came from various anarchist theorists. Pierre‑Joseph Proudhon seems never to have questioned the ideal of human solidarity, although he never denied the right of a people to cultural uniqueness and even to secede from any kind of “social contract,” provided, to be sure, that no one else’s rights were infringed upon. Although Proudhon detested slavery – he sarcastically observed that the American South “with Bible in hand, cultivates slavery,” while the American North “is already creating a proletariat” – he formally conceded the right of the Confederacy to withdraw from the Union during the Civil War of 1861–65.

More generally, Proudhon’s federalist and mutualistic views led him to oppose nationalist movements in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. His anti-nationalist notions were somewhat diluted by his own Francophilism, as the French socialist Jean Jaurès later noted. Proudhon feared the formation of strong nation-states on or near France’s borders. But he was also a product in his own way of the Enlightenment. Writing in 1862, he declared: “I will never put devotion to my country before the rights of Man. If the French Government behaves unjustly to any people, I am deeply grieved and protest in every way that I can. If France is punished for the misdeeds of her leaders, I bow my head and say from the depths of my soul, ‘Merito haec patimur’ – ‘We have deserved these ills.’”

Despite his Gallic chauvinism, the “rights of Man” remained foremost in Proudhon’s mind; nor was he oblivious to the fact that India and China were, in his words, “at the mercy of barbarians.” “Do you think that it is French egoism, hatred of liberty, scorn for the Poles and Italians that cause me to mock at and mistrust this commonplace word nationality,” he wrote to Herzen, “which is being so widely used and makes so many scoundrels and so many honest citizens talk so much nonsense? For pity’s sake ... do not take offense so easily. If you do, I shall have to say to you what I have been saying for six months about your friend Garibaldi: ‘Of great heart but no brain.’”

Michael Bakunin’s internationalism was as emphatic as Proudhon’s, although his views were also marked by a certain ambiguity. “Only that can be called a human principle which is universal and common to all men,” he wrote in his internationalist vein; “and nationality separates men, therefore it is not a principle.” Indeed, “There is nothing more absurd and at the same time more harmful, more deadly, for the people than to uphold the fictitious principle of nationality as the ideal of all the people’s aspirations.” What counted finally for Bakunin was that “Nationality is not a universal human principle.” Still further: “We should place human, universal justice above all national interests. And we should once and for all time abandon the false principle of nationality, invented of late by the despots of France, Russia, and Prussia for the purpose of crushing the sovereign principle of liberty.”

Yet Bakunin also declared that nationality “is a historic, local fact, which like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance.” Not only that, but this is a “natural fact” that deserves “respect.” It may have been his rhetorical proclivities that led him to declare himself “always sincerely the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands.” But he argued that the right of every nationality “to live according to its own nature” must be respected, since this “right” is “simply the corollary of the general principle of freedom.”

The subtlety of Bakunin’s observations should not be overlooked in the midst of this seeming self-contradiction. He defined a general principle that is human, one that is abridged or partially violated by asocial or “biological” facts that for better or worse must be taken for granted. To be a nationalist is to be less than human, but it is also inevitable insofar as individuals are products of distinctive cultural traditions, environments, and states of mind. Overshadowing the mere fact of “nationality” is the higher universal principle in which people recognize themselves as members of the same species and seek to foster their commonalities rather than their “national” distinctiveness.

Such humanistic principles were to be taken very seriously by left libertarians generally and strikingly so by the largest anarchist movement of modern times, the Spanish anarchists. From the early 1880s up to the bloody civil war of 1936–39, the anarchist movement of Spain opposed not only statism and nationalism but even regionalism in all its forms. Despite their enormous Catalan following, the Spanish anarchists consistently raised the higher human principle of social liberation over national liberation and opposed the nationalist tendencies within Spain that so often divided Basques, Catalans, Andalusians, and Galicians from one another and particularly from the Castilians, who enjoyed cultural supremacy over the country’s minorities. Indeed, the word “Iberian” rather than “Spanish” that appears in the name Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) served to express not only a commitment to peninsular solidarity but an indifference to regional and national distinctions between Spain and Portugal. The Spanish anarchists cultivated Esperanto as a “universal” human language more enthusiastically than any major radical tendency, and “universal brotherhood” remained a lasting ideal of their movement – as it historically did in most libertarian socialist movements up to the present day.

Prior to 1914, Marxists and the Second International generally held similar convictions, despite the burgeoning of nineteenth-century nationalism. In Marx and Engels’s view, the proletariat of the world had no country; authentically unified as a class, it was destined to abolish all forms of class society. The Communist Manifesto ends with the ringing appeal: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” In the body of the work (which Bakunin translated into Russian), the authors declared: “In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries, [Communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.” And further: “The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.”

The support that Marx and Engels did lend to “national liberation” struggles was essentially strategic, stemming primarily from their geopolitical and economic concerns rather than from broad social principle. They vigorously championed Polish independence from Russia, for example, because they wanted to weaken the Russian empire, which in their day was the supreme counter-revolutionary power on the European continent. And they wanted to see a united Germany because a centralized, powerful nation-state would provide it with what Engels, in a letter to Karl Kautsky in 1882, called “the normal political constitution of the European bourgeoisie.”

Yet the manifest similarities between the internationalist rhetoric of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto and the internationalism of the anarchist theorists and movements should not be permitted to conceal the important differences between these two forms of socialism – differences that were to play a major role in the debates that separated them. The anarchists were in every sense ethical socialists who upheld u