Dedication

To the memory of Josef Weber and Allan Hoffman

Introductions

Introduction to the First Edition

We normally live completely immersed in the present—to such a degree, in fact, that we often fail to see how much our own social period differs from the past—indeed from a mere generation ago. This captivity to the contemporary can be very insidious. It may shackle us unknowingly to the most reactionary aspects of tradition, be they obsolete values and ideologies, hierarchical forms of organization, or one-sided modes of political behavior. Unless our roots in contemporary life are broadened by a rich perspective, they may easily distort our understanding of the world as it really is, as well as its rich potentialities for the future.

For the world is changing profoundly, more profoundly than many of us seem to recognize. Until very recently, human society developed around the brute issues posed by unavoidable material scarcity and their subjective counterpart in denial, renunciation and guilt. The great historic splits that destroyed early organic societies, dividing man from nature and man from man, had their origins in the problems of survival, in problems that involved the mere maintenance of human existence. Material scarcity provided the historic rationale for the development of the patriarchal family, private property, class domination and the state; it nourished the great divisions in hierarchical society that pitted town against country, mind against sensuousness, work against play, individual against society, and, finally, the individual against himself.

Whether this long and tortuous development could have followed a different, more benign, course is now irrelevant. The development is largely behind us. Perhaps like the mythic apple, which, once bitten, had to be consumed completely, hierarchical society had to complete its own bloody journey before its demonic institutions could be exorcised. Be that as it may, our position in that historic drama differs fundamentally from that of anyone in the past. We of the twentieth century are literally the heirs of human history, the legatees of man’s age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century—and this one alone—has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new vision of the human experience.

We of this century have finally opened the prospect of material abundance for all to enjoy—a sufficiency in the means of life without the need for grinding, day-to-day toil. We have discovered resources, both for man and industry, that were totally unknown a generation ago. We have devised machines that automatically make machines. We have perfected devices that can execute onerous tasks more effectively than the strongest human muscles, that can surpass the industrial skills of the deftest human hands, that can calculate with greater rapidity and precision than the most gifted human minds. Supported by this qualitatively new technology, we can begin to provide food, shelter, garments, and a broad spectrum of luxuries without devouring the precious time of humanity and without dissipating its invaluable reservoir of creative energy in mindless labor. In short, for the first time in history we stand on the threshold of a post-scarcity society.

The word “threshold” should be emphasized here for in no way has the existing society realized the post-scarcity potential of its technology. Neither the material “privileges” that modern capitalism seems to afford the middle classes nor its lavish wasting of resources reflects the rational, humanistic, indeed unalienated, content of a post-scarcity society. To view the word “post-scarcity” simply as meaning a large quantity of socially available goods would be as absurd as to regard a living organism simply as a large quantity of chemicals. For one thing, scarcity is more than a condition of scarce resources: the word, if it is to mean anything in human terms, must encompass the social relations and cultural apparatus that foster insecurity in the psyche. In organic societies this insecurity may be a function of the oppressive limits established by a precarious natural world; in a hierarchical society it is a function of the repressive limits established by an exploitative class structure. By the same token, the word “post-scarcity” means fundamentally more than a mere abundance of the means of life: it decidedly includes the kind of life these means support. The human relationships and psyche of the individual in a post-scarcity society must fully reflect the freedom, security and self-expression that this abundance makes possible. Post-scarcity society, in short, is the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance.

Capitalism, far from affording “privileges” to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and more commodities—are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than “privilege” today, for the deepest recesses of the “privileged” man’s psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination.

But by a supreme twist of dialectical irony, the poison is also its own antidote. Capitalism’s capacity for abundance—the soporific it employs for domination—stirs up strange images in the dream world of its victims. Running through the nightmare of domination is the vision of freedom, the repressed intuition that what-is could be otherwise if abundance were used for human ends. Just as abundance invades the unconscious to manipulate it, so the unconscious invades abundance to liberate it. The foremost contradiction of capitalism today is the tension between what-is and what-could-be—between the actuality of domination and the potentiality of freedom. The seeds for the destruction of bourgeois society lie in the very means it employs for its self-preservation: a technology of abundance that is capable of providing for the first time in history the material basis for liberation. The system, in a sense, is in complicity against itself. As Hegel put it in another context: “The struggle is too late; and every means taken makes the disease worse...”

If the struggle to preserve bourgeois society tends to be self-vitiating, so too is the struggle to destroy it. Today the greatest strength of capitalism lies in its ability to subvert revolutionary goals by the ideology of domination. What accounts for this strength is the fact that “bourgeois ideology” is not merely bourgeois. Capitalism is the heir of history, the legatee of all the repressive features of earlier hierarchical societies, and bourgeois ideology has been pieced together from the oldest elements of social domination and conditioning—elements so very old, so intractable, and so seemingly unquestionable, that we often mistake them for “human nature.” There is no more telling commentary on the power of this cultural legacy than the extent to which the socialist project itself is permeated by hierarchy, sexism and renunciation. From these elements come all the social enzymes that catalyze the everyday relationships of the bourgeois world—and of the so-called “radical movement.”

Hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not disappear with “democratic centralism,” a “revolutionary leadership,” a “workers’ state,” and a “planned economy.” On the contrary, hierarchy, sexism, and renunciation function all the more effectively if centralism appears to be “democratic,” if leaders appear to be “revolutionaries,” if the state appears to belong to the “workers,” and if commodity production appears to be “planned.” Insofar as the socialist project fails to note the very existence of these elements, much less their vicious role, the “revolution” itself becomes a facade for counterrevolution. Marx’s vision notwithstanding, what tends to “wither away” after this kind of “revolution” is not the state but the very consciousness of domination.

Actually, much that passes for a “planned economy” in socialist theory has already been achieved by capitalism; hence the capacity of state capitalism to assimilate large areas of Marxist doctrine as official ideology. Moreover, in the advanced capitalist countries, the very progress of technology has removed one of the most important reasons for the existence of the “socialist state”—the need (in the words of Marx and Engels) “to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” To loiter any longer around the issues of a “planned economy” and a “socialist state”—issues created by an earlier stage of capitalism and by a lower stage of technological development—would be sectarian cretinism. The revolutionary project must become commensurate with the enormous social possibilities of our time, for just as the material preconditions of freedom have expanded beyond the most generous dreams of the past, so too has the vision of freedom. As we stand on the threshold of a post-scarcity society, the social dialectic begins to mature, both in terms of what must be abolished and what must be created. We must bring to an end not only the social relations of bourgeois society, but also the legacy of domination produced by long millennia of hierarchical society. What we must create to replace bourgeois society is not only the classless society envisioned by socialism, but the nonrepressive utopia envisioned by anarchism.

Until now we have been occupied primarily with the technological capabilities of bourgeois society, its potential for supporting a post-scarcity society, and the tension this creates between what-is and what-could-be. Let there be no mistaken notion that this tension floats in some vague fashion between theoretical abstractions. The tension is real, and it finds daily expression in the lives of millions. Often intuitively, people begin to find intolerable the social, economic and cultural conditions that were passively accepted only a decade or so ago. The growth of the black liberation movement over the past ten years (a movement that has heightened every sensibility of black people to their oppression) is explosive evidence of this development. Black liberation is being joined by women’s liberation, youth liberation, children’s liberation and gay liberation. Every ethnic group and virtually every profession is in a ferment that would have seemed inconceivable a mere generation ago. The “privileges” of yesterday are becoming the “rights” of today in almost dizzying succession among students, young people generally, women, ethnic minorities, and, in time, among the very strata on which the system has traditionally relied for support. The very concept of “rights” is becoming suspect as the expression of a patronizing elite which bestows and denies “rights” and “privileges” to inferiors. A struggle against elitism and hierarchy as such is replacing the struggle for “rights” as the main goal. It is not justice any longer that is being demanded, but rather freedom. Moral sensibilities to abuses—even the most minor abuses by earlier standards—are reaching an acuity that would have seemed inconceivable only a few years ago.

The liberal euphemism for the tension between actuality and potentiality is “rising expectations.” What this sociological phrase fails to reveal is that these “expectations” will continue to “rise” until Utopia itself is achieved. And for good reason. What goads the “expectations” into “rising”—indeed, into escalating with each “right” that is gained—is the utter irrationality of the capitalist system itself. When cybernated and automatic machinery can reduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is more meaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. When modern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty. When all the resources exist to promote social equality, nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals than subjugation. These contrasts could be extended indefinitely, covering all the issues that have produced the social agony of our era.

In attempting to uphold scarcity, toil, poverty and subjugation against the growing potential for post-scarcity, leisure, abundance and freedom, capitalism increasingly emerges as the most irrational, indeed the most artificial, society in history. The society now takes on the appearance of a totally alien (as well as alienating) force. It emerges as the “other,” so to speak, of humanity’s deepest desires and impulses. On an ever-greater scale, potentiality begins to determine and shape one’s everyday view of actuality, until a point is reached where everything about the society—including its most “attractive” amenities—seems totally insane, the result of a massive social lunacy.

Not surprisingly, subcultures begin to emerge which emphasize a natural diet as against the society’s synthetic diet, an extended family as against the monogamous family, sexual freedom as against sexual repression, tribalism as against atomization, community as against urbanism, mutual aid as against competition, communism as against property, and, finally, anarchism as against hierarchy and the state. In the very act of refusing to live by bourgeois strictures, the first seeds of the Utopian lifestyle are planted. Negation passes into affirmation; the rejection of the present becomes the assertion of the future within the rotting guts of capitalism itself. “Dropping out” becomes a mode of dropping in—into the tentative, experimental, and as yet highly ambiguous, social relations of Utopia. Taken as an end in itself, this lifestyle is not utopia; indeed, it may be woefully incomplete. Taken as a means, however, this lifestyle and the processes leading to it are indispensable in remaking the revolutionary, in awakening his sensibilities to how much must be changed if the revolution is to be complete. The lifestyle is indispensable in preserving the integrity of the revolutionary, in providing him with the psychic resources to resist the subversion of the revolutionary project by bourgeois values.

The tension between actuality and potentiality, between present and future, acquires apocalyptic proportions in the ecological crisis of our time. Although a large part of this book will deal with environmental problems, several broad conclusions should be emphasized. Any attempt to solve the environmental crisis within a bourgeois framework must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life, a law which Marx pungently summarized in the phrase, “production for the sake of production.” Anything, however hallowed or rare, “has its price” and is fair game for the marketplace. In a society of this kind, nature is necessarily treated as a mere resource to be plundered and exploited. The destruction of the natural world, far from being the result of mere hubristic blunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capitalist production.

The schizoid attitude of the public toward technology—an attitude that mingles fear with hope—should not be dismissed lightmindedly. This attitude expresses a basic intuitive truth: the same technology that could liberate man in a society organized around the satisfaction of human needs must inevitably destroy him in a society organized around “production for the sake of production.” To be sure, the Manichean dualism imputed to technology is not a feature of technology as such. The capacities of modern technology to create or destroy are simply the two faces of a common social dialectic—the negative and positive features of hierarchical society. If there is any truth to Marx’s claim that hierarchical society was “historically necessary” in order to “dominate” nature, we should never forget that the concept of “dominating” nature emerged from the domination of man by man. Both men and nature have always been the common victims of hierarchical society. That both are now faced with ecological extinction is evidence that the instruments of production have finally become too powerful to be administered as instruments of domination.

Today, as we stand at the end of hierarchical society’s development, its negative and positive aspects can no longer be reconciled. Not only do they stand opposed to each other irreconcilably, they stand opposed to each other as mutually exclusive wholes. All the institutions and values of hierarchical society have exhausted their “historically necessary” functions. No longer is there any social rationale for property and classes, for monogamy and patriarchy, for hierarchy and authority, for bureaucracy and the state. These institutions and values, together with the city, the school and the instrumentalities of privilege, have reached their historical limits. In contrast to Marx, we would have little quarrel with Bakunin’s view that the institutions and values of hierarchical society were always a “historically necessary evil.” If Bakunin’s verdict seems to enjoy a moral superiority over Marx’s today, this is because the institutions have finally lost their moral authority.

By the same token, the coming revolution and the utopia it creates must be conceived of as wholes. They can leave no area of life untouched that has been contaminated by domination. From the revolution there must emerge a society that transcends all the splits of the past; indeed, one must emerge that offers every individual the feast of a many-sided, rounded and total experience.

In describing this utopia as “anarchism,” I might have also used an equivalent expression—“anarcho-communism.” Both terms denote a stateless, classless, decentralized society in which the splits created by propertied society are transcended by new, unalienated human relationships. An anarchist or anarcho-communist society presupposes the abolition of private property, the distribution of goods according to individual needs, the complete dissolution of commodity relationships, the rotation of work, and a decisive reduction in the time devoted to labor. As this description stands, however, we have little more than the anatomy of a free society. The description lacks an account of the physiology of freedom—of freedom as the process of communizing. The description, in effect, lacks those subjective dimensions that link the remaking of society to the remaking of the psyche.

Anarchists have probably given more attention to the subjective problems of revolution than any other revolutionary movement. Viewed from a broad historical perspective, anarchism is a libidinal upsurge of the people, a stirring of the social unconscious that reaches back, under many different names, to the earliest struggles of humanity against domination and authority. Its commitment to doctrinal shibboleths is minimal. In its active concern with the issues of everyday life, anarchism has always been preoccupied with lifestyle, sexuality, community, women’s liberation and human relationships. Its central focus has always been the only meaningful goal social revolution can have—the remaking of the world so that human beings will be ends in themselves and human life a revered, indeed a marvelous, experience. For most radical ideologies, this goal has been peripheral. More often than not, these ideologies, by emphasizing abstractions over people, have reduced human beings to a means —ironically in the name of “the People” and “Freedom.”

The difference between socialists and anarchists reveals itself not only in conflicting theories but also in conflicting types of organization and praxis. I have already noted that socialists organize into hierarchical bodies. By contrast, anarchists base their organizational structures on the “affinity group”—a collective of intimate friends who are no less concerned with their human relationships than with their social goals. The very mode of anarchist organization transcends the traditional split between the psyche and the social world. If the need arises, there is nothing to prevent the affinity groups from coordinating into fairly large movements (the Spanish anarchists, for example, built a nationwide federation of thousands out of this nuclear form). The movements, however, have the advantage that control over the larger organization lies always with the affinity groups rather than with the coordinating bodies. All action, in turn, is based on voluntarism and self-discipline, not on coercion and command. Praxis, in such an organization, is liberatory in the personal as well as in the social arena. The very nature of the group encourages the revolutionary to revolutionize himself.

This liberatory approach to praxis is carried still further in the anarchist conception of “direct action.” Generally, direct action is regarded as a tactic, as a method of abolishing the state without recourse to state institutions and techniques. Although the foregoing interpretation is correct as far as it goes, it hardly goes far enough. Direct action is a basic revolutionary strategy, a mode of praxis intended to promote the individuation of the “masses.” Its function is to assert the identity of the particular within the framework of the general. More important than its political implications are its psychological effects, for direct action makes people aware of themselves as individuals who can affect their own destiny.

Finally, anarchist praxis also emphasizes spontaneity—a conception of praxis as an inner process, not an external, manipulated process. Its critics notwithstanding, this concept does not fetishize mere undifferentiated “impulse.” Like life itself, spontaneity can exist on many different levels; it can be more or less permeated by knowledge, insight and experience. In a free society, the spontaneity of a three-year-old would hardly be of the same order as that of a thirty-year-old. Although both would be free to develop without restraint, the behavior of the thirty-year-old would be based on a more defined and more informed self. By the same token, spontaneity may be more informed in one affinity group than in another, more seasoned by knowledge and experience.

But spontaneity is no more an organizational “technique” than direct action is merely an organizational tactic. Belief in spontaneous action is part of a still larger belief—the belief in spontaneous development. Every development must be free to find its own equilibrium. Spontaneity, far from inviting chaos, involves releasing the inner forces of a development to find their authentic order and stability. As we shall see in the articles that follow, spontaneity in social life converges with spontaneity in nature to provide the basis for an ecological society. The ecological principles that shaped organic societies re-emerge in the form of social principles to shape Utopia. But these principles are now informed by the material and cultural gains of history. Natural ecology becomes social ecology. In Utopia man no more returns to his ancestral immediacy with nature than anarcho-communism returns to primitive communism. Whether now or in the future, human relationships with nature are always mediated by science, technology and knowledge. But whether or not science, technology and knowledge will improve nature to its own benefit will depend upon man’s ability to improve his social condition. Either revolution will create an ecological society, with new ecotechnologies and ecocommunities, or humanity and the natural world as we know it today will perish.

Every revolutionary epoch is a period of convergence when apparently separate processes collect to form a socially explosive crisis. If our own revolutionary epoch often seems more complex than earlier ones, this is because the processes that have been collecting together are more universal than they have ever been in the past. Our point of departure has no comforting historical precedents on which to rely. Earlier revolutionary epochs at least dealt with familiar institutional categories—the family, religion, property, toil and the state were taken for granted, even if their forms were challenged. Hierarchical society had not exhausted these categories. Its development into more commanding and comprehensive social relations was still unfulfilled.

In our time, however, this development has reached the point of saturation. There is no future for hierarchical society to claim, and for us there are the alternatives only of utopia or social extinction. So heavily are we laden with the debris of the past and so pregnant are we with the possibilities of the future that our estrangement with the world reaches the point of anguish. Past and future superimpose themselves on each other like latent images emerging in a double exposure. The familiar is there, but, like the psychedelic posters whose letters take the form of writhing human limbs, it blends elusively with the strange. A slight shift in position and the given reality is inverted completely. Learning to live appears to us the only mode of survival, play the only mode of work, the personal the only mode of the social, the abolition of sex roles the only mode of sexuality, tribalism the only mode of the family, sensuality the only mode of rationality. This interweaving of the old and new, with its incredible inversions, is not the usual “doublespeak” of the established order; it is an objective fact, which reflects the vast social changes that are in birth.

Every revolutionary epoch, moreover, not only brings together apparently separate processes but also converges them on a specific locus in time and space where the social crisis is most acute. In the seventeenth century this center was England; in the eighteenth and nineteenth, France; in the early twentieth, Russia. The center of the social crisis in the late twentieth century is the United States—an industrial colossus that produces more than half of the world’s goods with little more than five percent of the world’s population. Here is the Rome of world capitalism, the keystone of its imperial arch, the workshop and marketplace of its commodities, the den of its financial wizardry, the temple of its culture, and the armory of its weapons. Here, too, is the center of the world counterrevolution—and the center of the social revolution that can overthrow hierarchical society as a world-historical system.

To ignore the strategic position of the United States, both historically and internationally, would reveal an incredible insensitivity to reality. To fail to draw all the implications of this strategic position and act upon them accordingly would be negligence of criminal proportions. The stakes are too great to allow for obscurantism. America, it must be emphasized, occupies the most advanced social terrain in the world. America, more than any other country, is pregnant with the most important social crisis in history. Every issue that bears on the abolition of hierarchical society and on the construction of utopia is more apparent here than elsewhere. Here lie the resources to annul and transcend what Marx called the “prehistory” of humanity. Here, too, are the contradictions that produce the most advanced form of revolutionary struggle. The decay of the American institutional structure results not from any mystical “failure of nerve” or from imperialist adventures in the Third World, but primarily from the overripeness of America’s technological potential. Like hanging fruit whose seeds have matured fully, the structure may fall at the lightest blow. The blow may come from the Third World, from major economic dislocations, even from premature political repression, but fall the structure must, owing to its ripeness and decay.

In a crisis of this magnitude, the core problems of hierarchical society can be reached from every facet of life, be they personal or social, political or ecological, moral or material. Every critical act and movement erodes the domestic and imperial edifice. To repel any expression of discontent with sectarian harangues, borrowed from entirely different arenas and eras of social conflict, is simply blindness. Carried to its logical conclusions, the struggle for black liberation is the struggle against imperialism; the struggle for a balanced environment is the struggle against commodity production; the struggle for women’s liberation is the struggle for human freedom.

True, a great deal of the pursuit of this discontent can be diverted into established institutional channels for a time. But only for a time. The social crisis is too deep and world-historical for the established institutions to contain it. If the system failed to assimilate the black movement, the “love generation,” and the student movement of the sixties, it was not for want of institutional flexibility and resources. Despite the Cassandra-like forebodings of the American “left,” these movements essentially rejected what the established institutions had to offer. More precisely, their demands increased as each one was met. At the same time, the physical base of the movements expanded. Radiating out from a few isolated urban centers, black, hippie, and student radicalism percolated through the country, penetrating high schools as well as universities, suburbs as well as ghettoes, rural communities as well as cities.

To challenge the value of these movements because their recruits are often white middle-class youth begs the question. There is perhaps no better testimony to the instability of bourgeois society than the fact that many militant radicals tend to come from the relatively affluent strata. It is conveniently forgotten that the fifties had Cassandras of a different type—the “Orwell generation,” which warned that bureaucratic society was engineering American youth into polished conformity with the establishment. According to the predictions of that time, bureaucratic society was to acquire its main support from succeeding generations of young people. The ebbing generation of the thirties, it was argued, would be the last repository of radical, humanistic values. As it turned out, the very reverse occurred. The generation of the thirties has become one of the most willfully reactionary sectors of society, while the young people of the sixties have become the most radical.

In this seeming paradox, the contradiction between scarcity and the potential for post-scarcity appears in the form of outright confrontation. A generation whose entire psyche has been shaped by scarcity—by the depression and insecurities of the thirties—confronts another whose psyche has been influenced by the potential for a postscarcity society. White middle-class youth has the real privilege of rejecting false “privilege.” In contrast to their depression-haunted parents, young people are disenchanted by a flatulent consumerism that pacifies but never satisfies. The generation gap is real. It reflects an objective gap that increasingly separates America today from its own social history, from a past that is becoming archaic. Although this past has yet to be interred, a generation is emerging that may well prove to be its gravediggers.

To criticize this generation for its “bourgeois roots” exhibits the wisdom of a dunce who doesn’t know that his most serious remarks are evoking laughter. All who live in bourgeois society have “bourgeois roots,” be they workers or students, young people or old, black people or white. How much of a bourgeois one becomes depends exclusively upon what one accepts from bourgeois society. If young people reject consumerism, the work ethic, hierarchy and authority, they are more “proletarian” than the proletariat—a bit of semantic nonsense that should encourage us to inter the threadbare elements of socialist ideology together with the archaic past from which they derive.

If this nonsense still commands any attention today, it is due to the anemic character of the revolutionary project in the United States. American revolutionaries have yet to find a voice that relates to American issues. First World problems are not Third World problems; the two, moreover, are not bridged by retreating to ideologies that deal with nineteenth-century problems. Insofar as American revolutionaries mechanically borrow their formulas and slogans from Asia and Latin America, they do the Third World a grave disservice. What the Third World needs is a revolution in America, not isolated sects that are incapable of affecting the course of events. To promote that revolution would be the highest act of internationalism and solidarity with oppressed people abroad; it would require an outlook and a movement that speak to the problems unique to the United States. We need a cohesive, revolutionary approach to American social problems. Anyone who is a revolutionary in the United States is necessarily an internationalist by virtue of America’s world position, so I need make no apologies for the attention I give to this country.

The articles that make up this book must be seen as a unified whole. What essentially unifies them is the view that man’s most visionary dreams of liberation have now become compelling necessities. All the articles are written from the perspective that hierarchical society, after many bloody millenia, has finally reached the culmination of its development. The problems of scarcity, from which emerged propertied forms, classes, the state and all the cultural paraphernalia of domination, can now be resolved by a post-scarcity society. In reaching the point where scarcity can be eliminated, we find that a post-scarcity society is not merely desirable or possible, but absolutely necessary if society is to survive. The very development of the material preconditions for freedom makes the achievement of freedom a social necessity.

If humanity is to live in balance with nature, we must turn to ecology for the essential guidelines of how the future society should be organized. Again, we find that what is desirable is also necessary. Man’s desire for unrepressed, spontaneous expression, for variety in experience and surroundings, and for an environment scaled to human dimensions must also be realized to achieve natural equilibrium. The ecological problems of the old society thus reveal the methods that will shape the new. The intuition that all of these processes are converging toward an entirely new way of life finds its most concrete confirmation in the youth culture. The rising generation, which has been largely spared the scarcity psychosis of its parents, anticipates the development that lies ahead. In the outlook and praxis of young people, which range from tribalism to a sweeping affirmation of sensuousness, one finds those cultural prefigurations that point to a future utopia.

Though I devote most of my discussion to what is new in the current social development, I definitely do not mean to ignore what is old. Exploitation, racism, poverty, class struggle and imperialism are still with us—and in many respects have deepened their grip on society. These issues can never fade from revolutionary theory and praxis until they are resolved completely. There is little I can contribute to these issues, however, that has not been exhaustively discussed by others. What justifies my Utopian emphasis is the nearly total lack of material on the potentialities of our time. If no effort is made to enlarge this meagerly explored area, even the traditional issues of the radical movement will appear to us in a false light—as traditional. This would distort our very contact with the familiar. Although the issues raised by exploitation are not supplanted by those of alienation, the development of the former is profoundly influenced by the development of the latter.

Let us turn to an example of what this means. The traditional workers’ movement will never reappear. Despite rank and file revolts, “bread and butter” issues are often too well contained by bourgeois unionism to form the basis for the old socialist type of labor union. But workers may yet form radical organizations to fight for changes in the quality of their lives and work—ultimately for workers’ management of production. Workers will not form radical organizations until they sense the same tension between what-is and what-could-be that many young people feel today. I believe they will have to undergo major changes in their values—and not merely those values that involve the factory, but those that involve their lives. Only when life issues dominate factory issues will factory issues be assimilated to life issues. Then the economic strike may one day become a social strike and culminate in a massive blow against bourgeois society.

That young people in working-class families have increasingly responded to the culture of their white middle-class peers is one of the most hopeful signs that the factory will not be impervious to revolutionary ideas. Once it has taken root, a cultural advance, like a technological advance, is ever more widely diffused—particularly among people whose minds have not been hardened by conditioning and age. The youth culture, with its freedom of the senses and spirit, has its own innate appeal. The spread of this culture to the high schools and elementary schools is one of the most subversive social phenomena in the world today.

The articles in this book are a careful elaboration of the ideas raised in the foregoing pages. They appeal for a new emphasis on the problems of freedom, the environment, sex roles and lifestyle, and they advance broad Utopian alternatives to the present social order. These emphases, I am convinced, are absolutely indispensable to the development of the revolutionary project in America.

Most of the articles were written between 1965 and 1968, a mere few years ago by the calendar, but ages ago ideologically. The hippie movement was just getting underway in New York when “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” was published, and the disastrous SDS convention of June 1969 had yet to occur when “Listen, Marxist!” was completed. Most of the articles were published in Anarchos magazine and as Anarchos pamphlets. A few were published in underground papers or republished in “New Left” collections. Except for some deletions and the inclusion of several paragraphs, most of my changes have been stylistic.

One article, “The Forms of Freedom,” has been substantially rewritten to remove any misunderstanding about my views on workers’ councils. That these forms will be necessary to take over and operate the economy in a postrevolutionary period is a view I’ve held for many years—with the proviso, of course, that the councils (I prefer the term “factory committees”) are controlled completely by workers’ assemblies. Originally, this article limited its discussion of workers’ councils to a critique of their defects as policy-making bodies. In rewriting portions of “The Forms of Freedom” I have tried to distinguish the function of these councils as administrative organs from policy-making organs.

The dedication of this book to Josef Weber and Allan Hoffman is more than a sentimental gesture to two of my closest comrades. Josef Weber, a German revolutionary who died in 1958 at the age of fifty-eight, formulated more than twenty years ago the outlines of the Utopian project developed in this book. Moreover, for me he was a living link with all that was vital and libertarian in the great intellectual tradition of German socialism in the pre-Leninist era. From Allan Hoffman, whose death in a truck accident this year at the age of twenty-eight was an irreparable loss to the commune movement in California, I acquired a broader sense of the totality sought by the counterculture and youth revolt.

I owe very much to my sisters and brothers in the Anarchos group for a continual cross-fertilization of ideas, as well as for the warmth of real human relationships. In a sense, what is of worth in this book draws from the insights of many people whom I knew on the Lower East Side in New York, at Alternate U, and in groups and collectives throughout the country.

To them—Salud!





Murray Bookchin

New York

August–October 1970

Introduction to the Second Edition

It would be easy to revise this book, to “update” it and give it greater contemporaneity since its publication by Ramparts Books fifteen years ago. Several publishers have asked me to do so since the book went out of print in the early eighties. But I have resisted, often unconsciously. There are works that should not be touched—and Post-Scarcity Anarchism is perhaps one of them. Whether deservedly or not, the book has entered into the literature of modem anarchism and voices in a reasonably coherent way some of the more inspired ideals of the sixties. To alter the book would be to violate a wondrous period of history itself—a period that produced a new, almost magical romance with life that I regard as imperishable if the human spirit is to come into its fulfillment.

It is also a book that was more influential than many ecological and radical theorists are likely to admit. I still hear its thoughts echoed in widely disparate places. That an ecological perspective had a rich radical content and would surface as an issue that socialist and anarchist theorists would be obliged to deal with was a very remote idea in the early sixties, however commonplace it has become today.

In any case, the book’s sale ran into many thousands in North America and Europe. Some of its essays, particularly “Listen, Marxist!” (1969), were circulated in sizable numbers —not only in its original pamphlet form which I left unsigned, but in anthologies and as articles in the widely read “underground press” of the time. Much the same can be said for “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” which I initially printed in my theoretical newsletter, Comment, in 1964 and republished a year later in the British monthly Anarchy.

The past fifteen years since the book’s publication, however, have seen major changes in the radical “constituency” for which it was written. American radicalism has indeed made its “long march through the institutions,” to use Rudi Dutschke’s phrase, from the stormy student campuses of the sixties to the more serene faculty rooms of the eighties. Its buoyant populism has been abandoned for a restful Marxism. The journey, far from widening the horizon of the Marxist “professorial,” to use Theodore Draper’s term, has turned it into a more “discriminating” body, a word I use in a highly partisan sense. Today, almost anyone’s book will make its way into the bibliographies of this professoriat if it is labelled “Marxist,” irrespective of the hodge-podge of ideas the term is obliged to encompass. Use the word “anarchist,” and the book is likely to be consigned to academic oblivion, even such historically imporlant writers as a Peter Kropolkin or a Paul Goodman.

Which is not to say that I am convinced that these writers will disappear from the radical tradition: there are more long-range factors that ultimately single out pioneering books and ideas from epigones who try to restate them in less original and more socially acceptable ways. What troubles me about epigonic writing is the way it obscures and hybridizes ideas. It is disconcerting, lo say the least, to see attempts to meld an ecologism that is clearly libertarian in its view of nature with a Marxism that is structured around the domination of nature as a historic desideratum. Not only do such efforts violate the meaning of social ecology (as I choose lo call my ideas) but also the thrust of Marx’s own ideas. Just as I stress in my writings the fecundity, creativity, and complexity of nature as a potential “realm of freedom,” so Marx’s writings deal with nature as “stingy,” as mere object for human exploitation, and as a grim “realm of necessity” that dominates “man” in his quest for a liberated world—a world liberated not only from human domination but the “domination” of humanity by nature.

Indeed, Marx’s justification for the emergence of class society and the State, not to speak of his “class analysis,” stems from an underlying imagery of the oppressed “savage” who must “wrestle” with an ungiving, intractable natural world. The Victorian, largely bourgeois, origins of this imagery is an issue I have discussed in some detail in other books. To wed this grim drama of social development lo a libertarian conception of nature as fecund, creative, and a potential “realm of freedom” is not merely sloppy thinking; it is grossly obscurantist. One can always, to sure, trot out a Gramsci or a Marcuse to paper over blatant contradictions that deserve respect and serious resolution. But lo ignore them by prudently castling a veil of silence over works that seek to explore them with care is lo divest ideas of their integrity and denature critical thinking as such.

What also troubles me is the moral condition of contemporary radicalism. There was a lime, even as recently as the early thirties, when radicals of all kinds formed an ethical community, despite the many ideological differences that divided them. Whether as socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, or populists, they shared their views in free discourse, defended each other’s rights, and even aided each other in publishing works that were ordinarily proscribed by the bourgeois press. Anarchists like Emma Goldman could find solace and help from Marxists like John Reed in limes of difficulty, and anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetii rallied universal support from the Left, including Communists, despite their explicit criticisms of Soviet Russia.

These days are gone. The Left, today, is not only fragmented; it is closeted into dogmatic strongholds, and many of its members are notable not only for their lack of political influence but their professorial spitefulness. Polemic has lost its fire and honesty. It suffers from the sterility of the specialist’s “journal”: jargonized, stilted, pedantic, insidiously backbiting, and unrestrained in its capacity to plagiarize. Socialism has become an industry and its literary works are commodities. They are often vended by ambitious careerists who have long traded away their political ideals for their professional status. The “New Left” has aged badly. It lives in spiteful hatred of its own youth and in fear of a revival of student militancy, a revival that may jeopardize its academic positions and peer recognition.

In many cases, a strangely symbiotic relationship exists between the academic Right and its leftist counterparts: a few scholarly Marxists are not only a sine qua non for a sophisticated college curriculum, but departments, even control of academic journals and societies, are divided between Right and Left with an unspoken understanding that the stability of a university, even the effective control of the student body, depends upon a delicate balance of forces between the two and a “pluralism” that replaces intellectual stimuli by paralysis. I need hardly say that in this academic ecumene, anarchists are literally too gauche to have a place in the academic firmament and their literature must be closed out of reading lists and course adoptions. If there is a reasonable amount of peace in the academy today, it is due not only to the careerism of students in an economically precarious world, but the careerism of their “radical” professors in an academically tight market. The “professoriat” has become an interest in its own right and strategically tends to function more as a safety valve for student dissent than a stimulus— a fact which more intelligent conservatives appreciate only too well.

In rereading Post-Scarcity Anarchism, I find its sixties rebelliousness to be a healthy antidote to the prevailing mood of calculated disenchantment and reformism that is so prevalent within the “radical” movement today. The book spoke to a time when words like “revolution,” “uprising,” and even “bourgeoisie,” were not seen as exotic terms. At the same time it was meant to be a careful correction of the revolutionary fervor that took possession of the young radicals I knew at the time: their earnest belief that revolution was imminent. (See pp. 34–35.) Already middle-aged in the sixties with a long experience in the Left of the thirties behind me, I tried to warn my younger comrades that “there is no ‘revolutionary situation’ at this time in America...” Indeed, as I wrote, “There is no immediate prospect of a revolutionary challenge to the established order.” Rather, there is “a greater susceptibility to radical ideas than at any time since the populist resurgence of seventy years ago... [but] still no reason to believe that the bulk of white America will accept, much less support, the idea of revolutionary change at the present time.” These lines were published in the first issue of Anarchos, a magazine I launched in 1967 with the cooperation of a few friends in New York’s Lower East Side. What troubled me profoundly was the likelihood that revolutionary expectations among radical young people were outpacing reality—a fear that was more than amply justified, as the seventies were to show.

Yet the sixties had done wondrous things, many of which are sedimented into American life. Its linkage of the personal with the political, of esthetic fantasy with social reality, of a nonhierarchical society with a classless one, of libertarian process with revolutionary ends—all, not to speak of its celebrated flood of experiments in communal living, sexual freedom, radical changes in dress, diet, educational techniques, and culture as such, were latently revolutionary and expressly Utopian. The notion, so prevalent today, that this constellation of what was to be called a “counterculture” has been “co-opted” is grossly false. That business, ever on the lookout for new commercial opportunities, used bits and pieces of the counterculture to its profit is not evidence of its co-optation but rather of its fragmentation. One could say the same of the Paris Commune of 1871 because the Rothschilds offered to meet its monetary needs. To have co-opted the counterculture as a whole, even in the name of profit, would have planted a revolutionary way of experiencing reality in the very heart of the system.

In any case, America could not accept these social and cultural changes overnight. To achieve them, even in part, would have required years of enlightenment. The “New Left” and the counterculture, initially so generous, populist, and anarchic in character, adopted a self-righteous and dogmatic stance as the years went by. The Vietnam War and the “cultural revolution” in China did these movements no service; as Barbara Garson has observed somewhere, it gave them a “bandwagon” to hitch on to, a phenomenon we are witnessing today in the case of Nicaragua. That the sixties opposed American imperialism is indubitably creditable and admirable, but certainly not its adoption of Vietnam and China as “models” of revolutionary wisdom and a new society. Disconnected from the American experience, the “New Left,” became increasingly isolated, even more than the counterculture, which was already hemorrhaging from its own entanglement with drugs, musical impresarios, and self-anointed gurus. Intolerance replaced an understanding desire to educate the people; Marxist-Leninist dogma, more closely akin to Stalinism than Marxism, filtered through a political movement whose promising beginnings had been sidetracked into a form of cultural terrorism, as intolerant as the cultural conventions it professed to oppose. Expectations for social change began to exceed the real possibility for achieving them so that failure, when it came, virtually demolished sizable movements that seemed to have limitless possibilities for growth. America’s vicious reaction to the shootings at Kent State University—“the National Guard should have shot more!” was the characteristic reply of angry parents to their shocked children—the popularity of Nixon, and finally the onset of economic crises, placed a final seal on the closing of the sixties.

What stands out most sharply about this era was its innocence. The cultural upwelling that tried to enchant everyday life foundered on its inability to understand the historic trends that produced it. Everyday life, in effect, concealed the need to grasp the larger social context in which the “New Left” and the counterculture flourished. What was painfully lacking was the maturing, steadying effect of consciousness and a theoretical coherence of ideas which would have united the disparate threads of the “Movement,” as it came to be called, giving it meaning, a sense of direction, and ultimately the organizational structures that were needed to interlink it and make it socially effective. Marxism, with its gospel of “class analysis” and economic determinism, functioned as an inertial drag on the “Movement,” not as a clarifying light. For the “Movement” was nothing if it was not transclass: people united by age, a sense of community, ethnically, and, later, by gender—not by their status in the “relations of production.” Lacking an adequate theoretical framework, indeed rooted in a typically American framework that eschewed ideas and the value of theory, the “Movement,” beleaguered by growing uncertainties about its identity, became afraid of itself. It was seized by fear: fear of its direction, isolation, exploitation, lack of power a loss of self-assurance that came from violated innocence, and its vulnerability to the sharks—commercial and lumpen—that began to encircle it. Finally it succumbed to the economic shocks that raised serious doubts about its material viability. The sudden scramble of young people from New York’s Lower East Side after several highly publicized drug-related murders, the premature symbolic “burial of the hippie” in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, and the stormy immolation of the Students for a Democratic Society at its Chicago convention in June 1969, essentially brought the era to an end.

The sixties will not recur—nor should it. What it addressed was a sense of disempowerment, alienation, displacement, and a need for existential meaning which a period, rich in the goodies that filled a vacuous life, could not supply. Above all, it sought an authentic and creative form of community. Not that these problems are unique to the sixties. They have existed in different forms and degrees since the end of the Second World War. The distinctive nature of the era lay in the fact that it saw the decay of a traditional society side-by-side with an unprecedented period of material abundance. The tension between the reality of social decay in a cultural sense and the prospect of social reconstruction in a material sense unavoidably produced unrest on the one hand and Utopian visions on the other. Blacks provided the unrest in ghetto uprisings on a scale that had never been seen before, a product not only of their growing misery but also of their rising expectations. Compared to the ghetto explosions, the campus “revolts” were fairly tame affairs, but necessary ones. White youth, largely middle-class in background, provided the necessary sense of vision, such as it was or hoped to be.

But both were minorities within minorities. Black militants were barely accepted by their own people, except when a sense of shock was needed to give their more “responsible” leaders political clout. Leftist and countercultural youth were not really accepted by the majority students and the ordinary run of young people for whom they professed to speak, and, in the end, were more frightening, with their diet of dogmas and judgemental behavior, than inspiring. Sizable as both currents in the sixties became, they never acquired the lasting allegiance of their own kind. Nor did they try to earn it by painstaking education and patient forebearance.

A future movement for basic social change will not satisfy the needs of our time—its sense of disempowerment, alienation, displacement, meaning, and community—unless it pieces itself together consciously, bit by bit, with the aim of ideological clarity and theoretical coherence. Education, in my view, is the top “priority” for a radicalization of our time. To step rapidly out into another historic void will simply produce the same fear and sense of isolation that brought the sixties to an end. This education must speak clearly to the transclass phenomena—the re-emergence of “the People,” as it were—with which the modern era started centuries ago, and it must deal with problems that are best defined as ethical, not simply economic. Only by a supreme act of consciousness and ethical probity can this society be changed fundamentally. That it needs “objective forces” to promote that consciousness and ethics over and beyond educators is clear enough, but I hold more than ever that the study group, not only the “affinity group,” is the indispensable form for this time—especially in view of the appalling intellectual and cultural degradation that marks our era.

As to the “objective forces” at work that may yet open a new period of social reconstruction, I have no reason whatever to diminish the enormous importance I attached to ecological problems thirty years ago. “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” is one of the most prescient works to appear in radical theory. Its scope, projections, and anticipations, seen from 1964 onward, are as valid today as they were more than twenty years ago. That my identification of “revolutionary thought” with anarchism has precluded its extensive use by the Marxist professoriat is testimony to an inquisitorial dogmatism, indeed an ideological fanaticism, that deserves the greatest contempt. Pilfered wholesale by many Marxists themselves, it stands as a lasting reproach to the myth that a radical “community” exists in the United States. The fact that ecological movements, at this writing, constitute the most serious source of social opposition in Germany is a reminder that the essay’s prognoses justify the emphasis I give to it in this foreword.

So, too, is the importance of feminism—particularly eco-feminism, which has drawn a good deal of inspiration from the essay. Whether ecofeminism will go beyond the small-group syndrome that tends to marginalize it and bypass the liberal politics of the National Organization of Women (NOW) by becoming part of a larger, hopefully libertarian Green movement in the English-speaking world remains to be seen. The tendency of leftist feminists to withdraw into themselves is a problem that cannot be overlooked. It stands in flat contradiction to the justly universal claims of feminism in its more advanced forms to speak for “life on earth” against the assaults of patriarchalism, market competition, and a sensibility of domination and militarism.

The peace movement, another transclass “historic force,” is faced with much the same problem of exclusivity and scope. The attempt to gauge its successes or failures by whether it can prevent the siting of nuclear missiles, bring the “superpowers” to the “negotiating table,” or achieve appreciable arms reduction reveals a disturbing degree of naivete. Its authentic and most on-going goal must ultimately be to oppose militarism, not only to advocate disarmament. This means that its basic orientation falls into the province of social ecology: to replace the hierarchical and domineering sensibility and social relations that link the domination of nature with the domination of human by human. No less than feminism, the peace movement must become part of a larger whole, a more encompassing coordination of the many separate threads, vital as each may be in its own right, into a well-focused and ultimately libertarian political movement.

Finally, the popular impulse toward community, which today stands in flat opposition to a homogenizing, atomizing, and privatizing urbanism—one that threatens to destroy both the city and the countryside—has moved to the forefront of the “forces” to which I have alluded. English socialism today is riddled by movements or tendencies that emphasize the locality rather than the nation-state, a new “local socialism” from which there is much to be learned. In any case, it is only on the local level—in the village, town, city, or neighborhood—that a new politics can be developed, one which brings together all of these “forces” as a form of ecological politics. Here, in municipalities, where people live out their lives in the most immediate and personal sense, we find the locus of real popular power. This public sphere provides the existential arena that makes for citizenship in an active sense. Social ecology brings all of these threads together in its opposition to hierarchy and domination as a critical theory and its emphasis on participation and differentiation as a reconstructive theory.

Elsewhere, I have drawn a sharp distinction between politics and statecraft. Suffice it to say that politics, in my view, is the recovery of the Greek notion of a local public sphere—the municipality—in contrast to the statecraft of the nationstate which we have so mistakenly designated as “politics.” We have yet to give enough attention to the city as a terrain for citizenship, self-empowerment, mutual aid, and a shared sense of humanitas that transcends the parochialism of tribal society and avoids the chauvinism of the nation-state. Yet the radical tradition is filled with revolutionary movements structured around the neighborhood or the city itself (the Parisian sections of 1793–94, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the town-meeting democracy of New England and the American Revolution, to cite only a few). We have yet to reclaim the democratic content of the great revolutions that liberal and Marxian historiography designate as “bourgeois”—an interpretation with which I emphatically disagree. This democratic content, I hold, has a distinctly libertarian core and speaks directly to existing libertarian traditions in America and possibly in Europe. Tragically, we have lost contact with our own radical traditions in Western society and, due in no small measure to Marxism-Leninism, have replaced them with ideologies and a vocabulary that is utterly alien to our own communities.

What I have tried to summarize are the issues and ideas that have come to the forefront of society since Post-Scarcity Anarchism was published. There was no environmental movement when I wrote “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964); no “appropriate technology” movement when I wrote “Toward a Liberatory Technology” (1965); no communitarian movement of a political nature when I wrote “The Forms of Freedom” (1968). It should be kept in mind that proposals for using solar and wind energy, for example, had been abandoned by specialists in the field when my essay on technology was written, and no serious attention was given to community as a political phenomenon when I explored the need for liberatory institutions. For the traditional Left, these issues could have existed on the moon. Not only would it take a decade or more for Marxists to regard these issues as more than trivial but to desist from treating them as “petty bourgeois” at best or outright “reactionary” at worst.

For the most part, my ideas since writing Post-Scarcity Anarchism have expanded from the bases charted out in the book. There is very little I would want to discard since it was written. Rather, I have elaborated ideas that were dealt with in a fairly scanty fashion. Thus, I would want to develop “Forms of Freedom” to include my ideas on libertarian municipalism, deepen my criticism of Marxism in “Listen, Marxist!” and expand my discussion of technics and work in “Towards a Liberatory Technology.” I would want to excise my use of Brecht’s recipe for cynical socialism in the closing lines of the essay and temper the importance 1 gave the technological “preconditions” for freedom.

Do I hold that the abolition of “scarcity” is such a “precondition” in the historic sense emphasized by Marx? My acceptance of this view, largely an inheritance of Marxists who deeply influenced my thinking in the fifties, is not as unqualified as it would seem to be in a quick reading of the book. The original introduction, it should be noted, deals with scarcity more as a contemporary issue than a historical one. As I note: “Whether this long and tortuous development [around material scarcity] could have followed a different, more benign, course is now irrelevant. The development is now behind us” (p. 10). This equivocal statement was deliberately introduced fifteen years ago because I was doubtful about the concept of scarcity in a historical sense even as I seemed to argue for its role in many parts of the book. Viewed as a drama of history that our era has resolved technologically, I would have to say that such an interpretation is now unsatisfactory in my eyes, although the role of material deprivation in the past cannot be ignored. Yet I would still title this book Post-Scarcity Anarchism if I were to rewrite it. Capitalism is more of an economy than a society, as Karl Polanyi pointed out years ago. In dissolving most of the cultural, traditional, and ideological ties that kept needs under a measure of control, the market system has created a phenomenon that never existed in precapitalist or traditional society as a whole: a fetishization of needs, not only Marx’s celebrated “fetishization of commodities.” As I indicate in The Ecology of Freedom: “Needs, in effect, become a productive force, not a subjective force. They become blind in the same sense that the production of commodities becomes blind... To break the grip of the ‘fetishization of needs,’ to dispel it, is to recover the freedom of choice, a project that is tied to the freedom of the self to choose.” Post-scarcity is a “precondition” under capitalism for exorcising the hold of the economy over society, for creating a sufficiency in goods that permits the individual to choose what he or she really needs or wants, in short, for demystifying the economic by exploding it from within—by sheer abundance—as an all-presiding agent over the human condition. Put simply: under capitalism we must try to achieve a level of abundance that renders abundance meaningless and permits us to take possession of ourselves as free people, capable of choosing the lifeways that suit us.

By the same token, Post-Scarcity Anarchism does not fetishize technology. Quite to the contrary: the reader is warned early on in the book that “Technology and the resources of abundance furnish capitalism with the means of assimilating large sections of society to the established system of hierarchy and authority. They provide the system with the weaponry, the detecting devices and the propaganda media for the threat as well as the reality of massive repression. By their centralistic nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In short, they furnish the State with historically unprecedented means for manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment of life—and for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation, and unfreedom”

Lest my emphasis on the liberatory potential of technology be mistaken as an argument for technocracy, the essay “Towards a Liberatory Technology” introduced themes that have taken on vastly greater significance over the years. The image that technology is now a matter of systematic design, not simply of inspired invention; the enormous range of uses to which “cybernated” devices lend themselves; the use of terms like “miniaturization” to apply to technology as a whole; the notion that there is an ecological approach to technology that takes the form of ensembles of productive units, energized by solar and windpower units—all, taken together, are still pioneering concepts. They have yet to be fully assimilated by many environmentalists. The argument that we must recover local regional resources that were abandoned with the rise of a national division of labor is a pillar of the best bioregional thinking of the eighties. Finally, “The Forms of Freedom,” written seventeen years ago, still constitutes the basis for my views on libertarian municipalism (including the assembly as the authentic basis for democracy) and for my criticism of syndicalism. There is much I hope to expand in this essay in a future book that will bear the same title. But there is little I would want to change in it.

Limitations of space do allow me to itemize point by point the ideas that are as relevant today as they were in the sixties. Apart from my qualifying remarks on scarcity and my use of words like “preconditions,” Post-Scarcity Anarchism forms an indispensable introduction to views I have elaborated in later books and articles. Nor do I have any reason to eschew the word “anarchist.” The libertarian tradition is as close to me as it was two decades ago and I freely align with it as a proponent, despite criticisms I have voiced of certain tendencies within it. Its persistence is a deserved one. And the many people in the ecology movement, not to speak of those on the Left who acknowledge their debt to this tradition, as well as those who use it without attribution, are living evidence of its value for later generations.

Changing shifts in the world economy and technology have made a number of items in the book somewhat dated. The United States is no longer the producer of “more than half of the world’s good” (pages 23 and 64), but rather a good deal less than a third. This relative decline, however, has not altered my view that it is the “keystone” in the imperial arch of world capitalism. Although its specific weight in production has diminished economically, its strategic position as a technological innovator and its military power is as great as ever. Nor can we judge the leading role a country can play by production figures at any given time, as the Axis powers discovered to their grief during the Second World War when a depression-ridden America with some of the lowest production figures per capita in the world entered the war.

As to details: we can no longer speak of the need to increase electric-power production fivefold in the remaining years of the century. The estimates are now much smaller. Research on thermoelectric junctions has been supplanted by photoelectric junctions as of this writing. Electric cars, with their demands for electric power, might do more to increase pollution from power plants than to diminish it. My inclusion of nuclear fuels as part of a mosaic of energy sources was perhaps understandable two decades ago, especially since I had so-called “clean” thermonuclear sources in mind, but it now cuts across the entire grain of my thinkng. The DDP-124 computer runs at 1.75 million cycles a second, not 1.75 “billion.” Whether this was a typographical error, I do not know, but in any case it is wrong.

I have been warned by a publisher that the student-worker movement that developed in France during May–June 1968 has all but been forgotten and my comments on it have little relevance. Here, I feel obliged to emphasize that the contemporaneity of an event is no guide to whether it should or should not be discussed. Not only has an entire generation described itself as the “people of ’68,” particularly in Europe, where the year and its events are regarded as the highpoint of the sixties; the ’68 events themselves are too important in terms of the message they offered and the way they unfolded to be neglected. The failure of that great movement is no reason for forgetfulness but, to the contrary, reason for the most searching analyses. The two short pieces on “May–June,” as it was called nearly twenty years ago, provide only part of such an analysis but one that is indispensable to a discussion of the way in which social movements develop in our era and the way in which they may unfold in the future.

The intellectual and political elaborations I have made since Post-Scarcity Anarchism was published are too complex to develop here. My criticisms of Marxism, which were anticipatory by any standards, have become more complex and fundamental since the publication of “Listen, Marxist!” Yet, on rereading this work, I find that it is as relevant today as it was when it first appeared at the crucial SDS convention of June 1969. The work is still being republished and its impact on potential converts to Marxism is still as powerful as it was many years ago. More elaborate criticisms for which the essay lays the basis appear in Toward an Ecological Society and The Ecology of Freedom. My prediction in the pamphlet that soldiers could play a revolutionary role, not simply workers, was to acquire flesh-and-blood dimensions in Portugal, when rank-and-file troops proved to be more revolutionary than many socialists and their working-class followers. “Listen, Marxist!” it should be noted, was never seriously challenged by the Marxist press in the sixties and seventies. Despite its enormous distribution, it was carefully enveloped in a conspiracy of silence which persists to this very day. Indeed, many of its ideas were simply appropriated by so-called “neo-Marxists” years after its publication and hybridized with elements of the Marxian canon.

Since the publication of Post-Scarcity Anarchism my development of social ecology has moved ahead by enormous strides and now includes works on nature philosophy, ecological ethics, criticisms of sociobiology and other reactionary forms of biologism, and a more ecological approach to natural evolution. My views on technology and social reconstruction, particularly ecological politics based on libertarian municipalism, fill hundreds of pages in Towards an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom, the Black Rose edition of The Limits of the City, and my latest book, The Modern Crisis, a common venture of Black Rose Books in Canada and New Society Publishers and the Institute for Social Ecology in the United States. Lastly, my book Urbanization Without Cities will be published as of this writing by Sierra Club Books in San Francisco. This volume develops themes to which The Limits of the City forms an indispensable introduction. The two books complement each other and should be explored by readers who are interested in an ecological interpretation of politics and the recovery of genuine citizenship.

I have found “purity” nowhere in this world except in the mature music of Mozart and the moral probity of Fermin Salvochea, the Spanish anarchist “saint.” Every idea advanced in this book is, in some sense, very “impure”—and, worse, has its antithesis in ideas and movements that are grossly wrong. Social ecology, a term that is already finding its way into the academic mainstream, is being cheapened by its antithesis in sociobiology, antihumanism, and outright ecofascism. Nature philosophy, such as I have advanced in my own writings, has its antithesis in an all-inclusive application of systems theory, reductionism as a mystique of a universal “Oneness,” a myth of “interconnectedness” that loses sight of all distinctions or “mediations” (to use Hegel’s term), and outright appeals to “blood-and-soil” chauvinism or dialectical materialism. An ecological ethics based on freedom has its antithesis in deterministic doctrines of “natural law,” the “morality of the gene,” social Darwinism, and the ethics of the “lifeboat” and “triage.” Libertarian visions of community and politics have their antithesis in parliamentary politics, party organization, and electoral mobilization as distinguished from education. There is no magic strategy or pure dogma that provides us with principles or a practice that stands above the conflicts between right and wrong or good and evil—unless it is so far removed from the real world that it is insulated by distance and marginality from the taint of experience. I do not have to be reminded that social ecology can breed its opposite in utterly reactionary perversions of its truth. Or that it can be coopted in name and tarnished in spirit. Much of my life has been devoted to writing critical articles against those who pervert or infiltrate authentically ecological views with utterly alien notions that have been bred by explicit reactionaries as well as self-styled “radicals.”

What the sixties should teach us, then, is that there is no substitute for consciousness. Truth will emerge only from insight, critical thinking, a reality principle that does not sacrifice principles to opportunistic gains, a moral probity that can resist descent into the surrender of ideals. Education remains on the order of the day—indeed, more so today than earlier because of the complexity of our problems and the massive drift toward intellectual vulgarity.

What the sixties should also teach us is that a counterculture is not enough—important as it is. What we need are the firm skeletal structures to support such a new culture—notably, counterinstitutions. This confronts us with the need to create a political movement that is libertarian and rescues the word “politics” from the ignominy of statecraft. Impure as they may be, there are still areas of life—notably, the municipalities—that can be reclaimed as a new political sphere by an active citizenry in popular assemblies, confederated, and ultimately developed into a counterpower with counterinstitutions that stand opposed to those of the nation-state. The eighties and sixties now face each other in direct confrontation—not as conflicting eras that raise opposing alternatives, but as complementary ones that, taken together, provide the opportunity for fuller alternatives than those which existed twenty years ago and today. Whether we can bring these complementary decades together, each of which has so much to give to the other, in a reconstructive politics that opens a new way to our present-day impasse will determine the future of this century and much of the one to come.

Murray Bookchin

September 1985

Introduction to the Third Edition

It is difficult to believe that some forty years have passed since I wrote “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” one of the most influential works in this collection of 1960s essays. I tried to call the emerging consciousness of an environmental crisis “social ecology.” The word ecology was meant to emphasize the need for Wholeness, or as Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School would have called it, “Totality.” Social, in turn, was meant to stand for “socialism,” of the highly plastic kind that came into vogue during the interwar period, before Stalinism came to represent a cruel bureaucratic dogma. Properly nuanced and explored, the unconventional neo-socialism of Lukács and the pre-Hitler Eastern European academics imparted to the young Marx’s language a new configuration—a sort of double helix, as I visualized it, in which one strand of the helix (the “legacy of freedom”) interacted dialectically with the other (a developing “legacy of domination”), creating an ever-expanding spiral, hopefully to broaden and encompass freedom at the expense of domination.

This configuration, I believed, would lead to the expansion of freedom at the expense of domination. Dualism would not disappear; indeed, there would be a vital interaction between the two in which what was authoritarian in one legacy would yield the expansion of freedom. Formalistic as this conception of social development must now seem, I was wrestling, in effect, with a problem with which the Marxists of my generation had contended for decades: if historic development is marked by circularity (as Hegel seemed to say a century earlier) and every end is marked by a new, more advanced beginning, what level could a communism that would succeed the “end of history” reach? Or was Hegel’s notion of circularity one of those philosophical myths that had to be supplanted by a notion of indefinite “progress” or, more dismally, by a gray liberalism of the kind suggested by Francis Fukuyama and his admirers?

My interest in the issue of the “end of history” was not metaphysical. When Fukuyama’s book of that name appeared, the prospect of an end to humanity was not academic. Nuclear weapons, bioweapons, synthetic diseases, not to speak of climatic disruption on a vast scale and the actual extinction of thousands of species all portended the abiding reality of the end of life among advanced species, if not a vast die-off of ecologically sensitive species.

Accordingly, if history is marked by ascending spirals, the kind of society that would replace the modern capitalism was no longer a matter of dystopian speculation. Nothing, to be sure, exists indefinitely. Every society is obliged to consider the certainty of its ultimate demise. Long before nuclear weapons were produced, speculative writers turned their Imagination to the disappearance of humanity—one thinks of Jack London‘s The Scarlet Plague or H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.” Judging by the tidal wave of fantasy that fills every conceivable form of electronic media today, we might assume that nearly every avenue of communication has been exploited to alert humanity of the likelihood of its self-extinction and every possible means for its extermination.

Ecology, in particular, has become the most realistic source of the new scenarios for supplanting the “invasions,” “inventions,” and endless variety of methods for achieving our species self-extermination. Indeed, not since the end of the medieval world has the human species devoted so much of its literature and art to depictions of how our species will bring itself to a spectacular end.

Earlier accounts of our demise were represented by artists who saw the human types around them in terms of physical attributes edging on genuine fantasy. They had a simian, and not quite truly human, appearance. Subtle changes seem to have expressed the drift of artistic sensibility toward humanization rather than animalization. In an age of mechanization—indeed, an Age of Steel—human life must cope with the requirements of giant factories, immensely destructive weapons, and murder on a mass scale. We are creating a radically new nature, a second nature, one that needs a mythic world of birdlike creatures to act as a counterweight to the harsh first nature from which we are emerging.

This fact alone has given ecology a centrality it never could have had several centuries ago. Ecology deals with the interface between first (“virginal”) nature and humanity’s second (“synthetic”) nature. In the first place, more than purely environmental issues as chemicals in food, organic gardening, and solar and wind power, ecological issues deal with technology conceptualized not only as a means to an end but as a defining aspect of the end we hope to achieve by such methods.

Installing an array of solar engines, for example, will not resolve our energy problems unless they are integrated into an ecological Whole that is, in a sense, truly a part of a larger environmental horizon. Solar engines must be seen as a component of the Totality that includes moral, aesthetic, social, institutional, and creative factors, all sensitively interlaced with one another; in short, a technics that forms a unity with values and beauty. Technics, in short, seeks to raise and answer questions that by modern standards of beauty and truth are currently nontechnical, if not antitechnical. As Hegel or Schiller might have put it, they are part of the truth of the world, and are delicately and subtly interlaced with it. With its emphasis on unity in diversity, ecology-specifically social ecology creates a tapestry of life that weaves all the elements of development into a Whole that is ever-expanding and all-encompassing, bringing together the many with the one along a developing horizon of phenomena, both subjectively and objectively and, like a fermenting brew, turning the Many into a One without violating the identity of each.

Wedded to socialism, social ecology opens a new ecological terrain that gives it the calling to create a second nature, bringing freedom into the realm of first primeval nature. It not only obliges ecology to play the role of arbiter in refashioning first nature; it sees in first nature the terrain for remaking the world institutionally as well as ethically, along rational political lines. Far from being a neutral domain of knowledge, it is highly partisan and committed to the authentic welfare of life. Here science becomes a politics: it is completely involved in the problems and hopes of the world. Ecology becomes a political movement and, most important, a means for changing the world, not passively observing it.

Finally, social ecology provides the compass for negotiating humanity’s place in the natural world. It reveals the only dialectic that gives meaning to the natural world as a realm where mind can interpret first nature, employ it as a rational guide to an ever-developing wholeness, and use the Whole at every given stage as the means to make the parts meaningful in achieving self-awareness and creativity. In his virtually forgotten book, the great British archeologist of the 1920s and 1930s, V. Gordon Childe, not only wrote an account of the beginning of humanity’s self-consciousness but also showed how this capacity for self consciousness (unknown in any other life-form) took the concrete steps in fashioning a new second nature that reproduced not only old natural laws but also created new ones. In this great transcendental step (an Aufhebung equal only to the emergence of life itself) humanity became the principal medium for creating itself.

This was the most advanced form of political economy possible in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it was brilliantly critiqued, almost alone, by Karl Marx. Syndicalism was also the most comprehensive form of social theory that could have been devised at that time. Carried to Its most simplified conclusion, syndicalism could easily be confused with anarchism, a form of unnuanced nihilism redolent of Artsybashev’s 1907 novel Sanin, which totally confused thousands of young Russians in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution.

There can be no society as such without institutions, systems of governance, and laws. The only issue in question is whether these structures and guidelines are authoritarian or libertarian, for they constitute the very forms of social existence. The state is an ensemble, not of institutions as such, but of authoritarian institutions (usually controlled by classes), which is where anarchism gets lost in a tangle of highly confused individualistic concepts.

Why, then, did I title this collection Post-Scarcity. Anarchism and use that term in the essays within? I must acknowledge that my reasons were primarily propagandistic. The earliest essays in this book were published after I had become disillusioned with Marxist politics and was suffering from a exaggerated hostility to any form of directive radicalism. No less significantly, I was enamored of radical romanticism and myself suffered from a measure of confusion over the enormous differences between syndicalism and anarchism. In the 1970s, under the ubiquitous shadow of modern history, the Russian Revolution, I began to give zealous attention to the Spanish Civil War—and only then did I nuance my own views and realize how distant were the anarchists and the anarcho-syndicalists from each other. This recognition also made it possible for me to properly situate how much Karl Marx’s writings could contribute to a new synthesis of socialist theory, one that could keep pace with changes that were going on over the past century.

Moreover, I was fortunate in developing a deeper insight into the changes that capitalism was undergoing and how they were producing new questions that required new answers. Of immense importance was the extent to which traditional Marxism’s “breakdown theory” of capitalism was completely wrong. Capitalism, it was apparent to me, would not “decompose” because it had to limit economic growth; rather, It was faced with a permanent breakdown because it was expanding (indeed, coming into its own as a dominant economy) by ravaging the planet and simplifying complex ecosystems, reducing the earth’s capacity to sustain advanced forms of life.

Today this thesis is not novel—it has been heard repeatedly. But when I first advanced it, it was regarded as a distraction from “pressing issues” like the class struggle and the coming “proletarian revolution”—concepts that tenaciously cling to socialist theory like hungry leeches, notwithstanding the fact that history has kept them on hold for a half-century.

Social ecology, it should be emphasized, is not anarchism any more than it is individualism. It is decidedly a new form of libertarian socialism: libertarian in its concept of an organic and “from-the-ground-up” mode of praxis; socialist in its belief that power must be conceived as confederal communities. As Gustav Lefrancais, a Parisian Communard of 1871, declared that he was a communalist, not an anarchist, please.” (See Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Grove Press, page 393.)

Today, Lefrancais might well have participated in regular municipal elections, as a libertarian municipalist. He might have called for the formation of popular municipal assemblies and tried to coordinate assemblies of municipalities into county-wide municipal confederations with diminishing authority, and into national confederations, each forming a dual power to supplant the parallel state institutions that, as components of the “legacy of domination,” challenge their existence. A detailed account of a communalist political structure can be found in the closing chapter of my From Urbanization to Cities..

The oldest essay in this book, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” was published in 1964 in Comment and was revised for publication in Post-Scarcity Anarchism in 1971. In the early 1960s anarchism was a very scarce commodity in the United States and was preoccupied with refusals to vote with almost dogmatic fervor. I recall that it lived a fragile, almost senile existence in a small room in lower Manhattan; the majority of its members were pensioners, mostly foreign-born, and puzzled by the emerging 1960s “counterculture.” When I emphasized to them the importance of technological development and the prospects it opened for a materially abundant socialist society, my “tried and tested fellow workers” (to use the language of the time) denounced me as a Marxist but they might have denounced Diego Abad de Santillán, the Spanish FAI’s principal theorist in the 1930s, for many of the same reasons

I am pleased that, reprinted as it was repeatedly in anthologies and pamphlets, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” and “Listen, Marxist!” were read by many thousands and led to conversions from standard brands of Social Democracy and even Stalinism to anarchism. The reader should note that “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” was filled with predictions that have never been acknowledged, notably, that the use of fossil fuels would produce “a growing blanket of carbon dioxide” and, “by intercepting heat radiated by the earth, (would) lead to more destructive storm patterns and, eventually, to melting of the polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas” (page 60). I warned of toxic wastes in water and on land and many of the ills that beset the planet today. These predictions were unheard of at the time and have never been duly accredited.

A year later “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” my account of the social and technological alternatives to the sources of the “ecological crisis,” as I called it then, was less widely read but was widely pilfered. The world was afflicted by the pop rubbish of “radical ecologists,” exotic technicians and biologists like Buckminster Fuller, Barry Commoner, and the like, who in my view became celebrities more than serious social theorists. People who can on Monday applaud Paul Ehrlich, who flaunted neo-Malthusian opinions, then suddenly denounce the same neo-Malthusian views on Tuesday have hardly earned my admiration. But such is the way of the world, as my seventy years of active radicalism have taught me.

Murray Bookchin

August 20, 2004

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Preconditions And Possibilities

All the successful revolutions of the past have been particularistic revolutions of minority classes seeking to assert their specific interests over those of society as a whole. The great bourgeois revolutions of modern times offered an ideology of sweeping political reconstitution, but in reality they merely certified the social dominance of the bourgeoisie, giving formal political expression to the economic ascendancy of capital. The lofty notions of the “nation,” the “free citizen,” of equality before the law,” concealed the mundane reality of the centralized state, the atomized isolated man, the dominance of bourgeois interest. Despite their sweeping ideological claims, the particularistic revolutions replaced the rule of one class by another, one system of exploitation by another, one system of toil by another, and one system of psychological repression by another.

What is unique about our era is that the particularistic revolution has now been subsumed by the possibility of the generalized revolution—complete and totalistic. Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man’s future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom. Just as the particularized revolution produced a particularized, bifurcated society, so the generalized revolution can produce an organically unified, many-sided community. The great wound opened by propertied society in the form of the “social question” can now be healed.

That freedom must be conceived of in human terms, not in animal terms—in terms of life, not of survival—is clear enough. Men do not remove their ties of bondage and become fully human merely by divesting themselves of social domination and obtaining freedom in its abstract form. They must also be free concretely: free from material want, from toil, from the burden of devoting the greater part of their time—indeed, the greater part of their lives—to the struggle with necessity. To have seen these material preconditions for human freedom, to have emphasized that freedom presupposes free time and the material abundance for abolishing free time as a social privilege, is the great contribution of Karl Marx to modern revolutionary theory.

By the same token, the preconditions for freedom must not be mistaken for the conditions of freedom. The possibility of liberation does not constitute its reality. Along with its positive aspects, technological advance has a distinctly negative, socially regressive side. If it is true that technological progress enlarges the historical potentiality for freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control of technology reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life. Technology and the resources of abundance furnish capitalism with the means for assimilating large sections of society to the established system of hierarchy and authority. They provide the system with the weaponry, the detecting devices and the propaganda media for the threat as well as the reality of massive repression. By their centralistic nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In short, they furnish the state with historically unprecedented means for manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment of life—and for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation and unfreedom.

It must be emphasized, however, that this manipulation and mobilization of the environment is extremely problematical and laden with crises. Far from leading to pacification (one can hardly speak, here, of harmonization), the attempt of bourgeois society to control and exploit its environment, natural as well as social, has devastating consequences. Volumes have been written on the pollution of the atmosphere and waterways, on the destruction of tree cover and soil, and on toxic materials in foods and liquids. Even more threatening in their final results are the pollution and destruction of the very ecology required for a complex organism like man. The concentration of radioactive wastes in living things is a menace to the health and genetic endowment of nearly all species. Worldwide contamination by pesticides that inhibit oxygen production in plankton or by the near-toxic level of lead from gasoline exhaust are examples of an enduring pollution that threatens the biological integrity of all advanced lifeforms—including man.

No less alarming is the fact that we must drastically revise our traditional notions of what constitutes an environmental pollutant. A few decades ago it would have been absurd to describe carbon dioxide and heat as pollutants in the customary sense of the term. Yet both may well rank among the most serious sources of future ecological imbalance and may pose major threats to the viability of the planet. As a result of industrial and domestic combustion activities, the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by roughly twenty-five percent in the past one hundred years, and may well double by the end of the century. The famous “greenhouse effect” which the increasing quantity of the gas is expected to produce has been widely discussed in the media; eventually, it is supposed, the gas will inhibit the dissipation of the world’s heat into space, causing a rise in overall temperatures which will melt the polar ice caps and result in the inundation of vast coastal areas. Thermal pollution, the result mainly of warm water discharged by nuclear and conventional power plants, has had disastrous effects on the ecology of lakes, rivers and estuaries. Increases in water temperature not only damage the physiological and reproductive activities of the fish, they also promote the great blooms of algae that have become such formidable problems in waterways.

Ecologically, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation are undermining the very capacity of the earth to sustain advanced for