Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a left-libertarian social theorist who, in the early 1960s, introduced the concept of ecology into radical politics. A self-described utopian, he sought a decentralized, genuinely democratic society and placed ecology in a humanistic and social framework. He wrote more than two dozen books on ecology, history, politics, philosophy, and urban planning. At all times he upheld reason against the alternatives and sought to bring a lived revolutionary past forward into the future.

He was born on Jan. 14, 1921 in New York City, the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Nathan and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin. At nine he joined the Communist youth organization but became disillusioned with the authoritarian character of the international Communist movement and broke with it in 1937. Unable to afford a college education, he worked as a foundryman in New Jersey and as a union organizer for the CIO. He served in the U.S. Army, then returned to civilian life as an autoworker. He participated in the great General Motors strike of 1946, but the strike leaders’ compromises with management caused him to abandon his faith in the industrial proletariat.

His first book, Our Synthetic Environment (written under the pseudonym Lewis Herber), published in 1962, addressed a broad range of ecological issues. Preceding Rachel Carson’s famous SilentSpring by nearly half a year, it called for a decentralized society using alternative energy sources. In this and later writings he developed what he called social ecology, which holds that ecological problems can be remedied only by the creation of a free and democratic society. At a time when “ecology” was an unfamiliar concept to most people, he lectured indefatigably on the subject to countercultural groups throughout the United States. He advanced the concept of postscarcity, holding that advances in technology would make possible a reduction of the workday, thereby providing people with the free time necessary to engage in civic self-management and direct democracy. His 1960s essays were very influential both in the counterculture and in the New Left and were anthologized in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971).

During the 1970s Bookchin’s writings and lectures influenced the formation of Green movements in the United States and abroad. Three years after moving to Burlington in 1971, he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vt., becoming its director; the school later acquired an international reputation for its curriculum on social theory, ecophilosophy, and alternative technologies. That same year he began teaching at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he became a full professor in 1977. He retired from Ramapo in 1981 with emeritus status.

In 1982 Bookchin published The Ecology of Freedom, which became a classic in social thought. His 1986 The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1986) presented his program for direct-democratic politics at the municipal, neighborhood, and town levels. In Burlington Bookchin attempted to put these ideas into practice by working with the Northern Vermont Greens, the Vermont Council for Democracy, and the Burlington Greens, retiring from politics in 1990. His ideas are summarized succinctly in Remaking Society (1989) and The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997).

Bookchin is survived and his passing mourned by his loving family members, all of whom live in Burlington: his longtime companion, Janet Biehl; his daughter, Debbie Bookchin, her husband, James Schumacher, and their daughter, Katya Bookchin Schumacher; his son, Joseph Bookchin; and his ex-wife and longtime friend, Beatrice Bookchin. He will be much missed as well by his many dear friends and by the thousands of people, unknown to him personally, whom he touched during his long and productive life.

Libertarian municipalism does not constitute a party program; nor does it advocate the formation of a party machine to attain state power. Rather, it is a program for direct democracy, in which citizens in communities manage their own affairs through face-to-face processes of decision-making.

What Is Politics?

As we all know, the state, with its monopoly of the legitimate means of violence, is a system of domination that, far from empowering the great majority of people as citizens, ensures the general abdication of their power and their subordination to rule by the few. Even though the state designates people in its jurisdiction as “citizens,” it conceives them as something less than citizens: in earlier times it was “subjects,” today it is “voters” or “constituents,” but in either cases it considers them to be too juvenile or too incompetent to manage public affairs and instead takes their power to wield itself presumably in their behalf. In the late nineteenth century, when social revolution seemed imminent in many parts of Europe, social democratic parties arose that sought to make use of state structures, not to build socialism but to head off revolution and insure that people remained in passive conformity to the social order. Most recently, the state has been reducing people to “customers” or “consumers” of the social services with which it provides them. These dependent “consumers,” as always, function passively and acquiescently, are to perform their limited tasks in a narrow corner of life, drawing salaries, raising families, and looking to the state to provide the rest.

The elites who wield power in the state are actually concerned less with the interests of the large number of people than with the practical exigencies of control and mobilization. Most notably, they form parties to try to gain power–parties that, in effect, are states-in-waiting. Professionalized and manipulative, in their periodic appeals to ordinary peeople for votes, these elite systems impersonate democracy, making a mockery of the democratic ideals to which they cynically swear fealty at opportune moments.

To label this system politics is a gross misnomer, as Bookchin has pointed out–as an apparatus for rule, it should more properly be called statecraft. Politics, by contrast, concerns the arena and insstitutions by which people directly manage their community affairs. Unfortunately, confusion between politics and statecraft has been widespread, not only in society as a whole but in the Left as well. Marxists, for example, are notorious for mistaking statecraft for politics. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has recently informed us that “the commitment to politics is what historically distinguished Marxian socialism.” What he means by politics here, however, is actually nothing more than statecraft. By calling for a workers’ state to lead us to a communist society, Marxism failed to consider politics in the sense of civic institutions of the commune by which we manage public affairs. In this sense Marxism lacks any real political theory at all.

Anarchists, most lamentably, have suffered from a similar misidentification. They too have mistaken statecraft for politics–but where Marxists did so in order to practice statecraft, anarchists did so in order to reject it altogether. Bakunin exprressed the typical view in 1871 when he wrote that the new social order can be created “only through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or antipolitical social power of the working class in city and country.” Here he made “antipolitical” into a synonym for “antistatist.” Even Kropotkin–who called for the communalization of social life in The Conquest of Bread and described endless kinds of associations and groups that practice mutual aid–omitted to tell us by what specific political institutions people would manage their community in the postrevolutionary society.

In consequence anarchism, like Marxism, has historically given insufficient attention to politics in its fullest meaning. Yet the questions that Aristotle asked two thousand years ago still express the central problem of all political theory, including our own: What kind of polity best provides for the rich flourishing of communal human life?

As libertarian municipalists, we reply that the best polity is one that builds on the traditions of direct democracy. Indeed, we use the very word politics in its original Greek sense, to refer to the self-managing activity of empowered citizens in participatory civic institutions. In the politics we advance, citizens would manage their community affairs through face-to-face democratic institutions, especially popular assemblies and confederations of municipalities.

However remote this notion of politics may seem in today’s era of nation-states, it has historically found lived expression in a variety of places. It first arose in ancient Athens, where citizens–limited, unfortunately, only to free Athenian males–nevertheless attained a remarkable degree of self-management. At laterr points in Western history, direct democracies have recurred, in the town centers of many medieval European communes after A.D. 1000, in the town meetings of eighteenth-century New England, and in the sectional assemblies of revolutionary Paris of 1793, among other places.

Each of these democracies was deeply flawed by class and hierarchical stratification, yet in each of them people successfully congregated for a time, sometimes even as free citizens, to directly manage the communities in which they lived. Generally, even as popes, princes, and kings developed overarching structures of power, people in villages, towns, and neighborhoods maintained control over much of their own community life.

The rise and consolidation of centralized nation-states did much to stifle public participation and strip towns of their power and independence. Monarchs and their henchmen first brought nearby areas under their subjection, then later subordinated even distant localities to state control. Initially they carried out this invasion in the name of a privilege to rule that was said to be sanctioned divinely, but in later centuries the builders of republican states cast aside religious justifications and appropriated the terminology of “democracy” to sanctify their strictly representative institutions–parliaments, chambers of deputies, and congresses–cloaking the elitist, paternalistic, class-based, and coercive nature of those systems in the language of “popular sovereignty.”

At the same time the state itself was dramatically eroding municipal freedoms–as it continues to do today, eviscerating neighborhood life and municipal power in favor of professionalized institutions off administration and coercion. The Second World War further strengthened the state in relation to the cities, siphoning municipal power to allocate scarce resources upward to the national level, to military planners, and to bureaucrats, rendering cities ever more dependent on state planning. Today European cities are managed in great part by battalions of statist civil servants who administer it on a day-to-day basis.

If the nation-state did much to suppress municipal power, another phenomenon is wreaking even further havoc on the municipality today. Urbanization, that immense, formless capitalist blight, is swallowing up the definable, humanly scaled entities that once were authentic cities, absorbing small communities into larger ones, cities into metropolises, and metropolises into huge megalopolitan belts. Europe’s extended regions of urbanization cross the boundaries of cities and even states, as suburbs are swallowed up and absorbed into a sprawling metropolitan octopus. So intimately have urban settlements now converged that the English Channel and the Alps are no longer barriers to their amalgamation: a single north-south metropolitan region extends from Lancashire to central Italy, while another runs east-west between Valencia and Vienna.

In the United States a corresponding trend has moved economic life away from the traditional urban centers of the Northeast and toward the Sunbelt, so that the Far West is now the most urbanized part of the country. As the megalopolis spreads, sprawl, condominium subdivisions, highways, faceless shopping malls, parking lots, and industrial parks are sweeping ever deeper into the countryside.

This spread of the market economy serves nothing but the expansionist imperatives of capital. By corroding the public sphere in favor of the market, capitalism has accelerated the demolition of municipal freedoms to the point that they may very well disappear entirely from our societies. So avidly have centralized European governments accommodated the needs of capital that many municipalities are becoming little more than agencies for the delivery of social services originating in the state.

Perhaps the most extreme instance of this process occurred in Great Britain, where throughout the decade of the 1980s Thatcher’s Tory government instituted a series of local government acts that aggressively and systematically stripped local government of many of its powers, appropriating some for itself but leaving others to private companies, culminating in the outright abolition of the Greater London Council in 1985. A new, distinctly nonpolitical model of municipal government has since emerged in Britain, in which it is expected, not to provide a democratic arena for policymaking by citizens, but to perform according to market and efficiency principles in the delivery of services. In the United States, in conjunction with the capitalist economy, municipal governments are not only privatizing public services but are blatantly pandering to corporations, doling out tax breaks to companies willing to locate within their borders.

Today the forces of capitalism cross national boundaries as well, and I sometimes think that the only place where people still sing “The Internationale” with conviction (albeit with significantly altered lyrics) must be the corporate boardroom. As the Third World or South sinks into chaos and misery, much of the world is being arranged to meet the needs of the transnational corporations and the bond market.

As these larger social forces corrode neighborhood and community life, the authentic meaning of politics is gradually being forgotten. People in Western societies are losing their memory of politics as an active, vital process of self-management, and as they do so they participate in the idea that citizenship consists of nothing more than voting and paying taxes and passively receiving state-provided services.

In the United States political activity has migrated from neighborhoods, unions, wards, and civic associations to television, where even statecraft is becoming a spectator sport. Indeed, in this “nation of spectators,” the passive consumption of media entertainment fills the void of desocialized consciousness. Moreover, the prevalent American social desideratum is not to enrich the commonmality but to acquire things for oneself. Rampant egotism, an overabundance of dishonesty, and celebrity worship pervade the culture of Dollarland.

To a great extent, however, the hollowness, the meaninglessness of this system has become evident to people in the street, who understand that the pervasive influence of money and manipulation is undermining even statecraft’s outward veneer of democracy. If they are passive in relation to state and party activities, it is often because they regard them as futile and untrustworthy, and because social and economic pressures have forced them to narrow their concerns to material survival.

Yet in many parts of the European and American world, local political life remains alive to a degree that is remarkable, considering the social forces arrayed against it. Even in communities that have been stripped of their former proud powers, formal and informal political arenas still abide–civic associations, town meetings, forums, issue-oriented initiatives, and the like–as arenas for face-to-face public proceesses. In the cities of Europe, self-government has a long and venerable tradition, and for many Europeans the municipality is still a significant locus of political identification. In the United States, a relatively decentralized system, a deep distrust of government dating back to the colonial era still persists, while a nostalgia for small-town life expresses a desire for a mutually nurturing community where people are no longer held hostage to market forces but are free to practice mutual aid and cooperation. Even in the Information Age, when asked what “community” is, people most often think of their town or neighborhood.

Nor has the city as a site of political resistance been entirely obliterated. Submerged as it is within an urbanized nation-state beholden to capitalism, it nonetheless lingers as a historic presence, a repository of long-standing traditions, sentiments, and impulses. Within itself it harbors memories of ancient civic freedoms, of self-management, on behalf of which the oppressed have struggled over centuries of social development. Cities like Paris and Lyons, Saint Petersburg and Barcelona, carry repressed memories of revolutionary activity that was based at least as much in the city neighborhood as it was in the workplace. Said the program of the Friends of Durruti, as published in Los Amigos del Pueblo, “The municipality is the authentic revolutionary government.”

A self-conscious municipal political life thus perseveres as a latent prospect, a cherished goal of human emancipation. Power, having been taken from the people, can be recovered by them once again, and the potentially of the city as an irrepressible site for political self-management haunts the state like a bad dream. Despairing of the meaninglessness of their lives, ordinary people–at the level of the municipality–may once again begin to look outward to politics as the medium of empowerment and rediscovver its communalistic joys.

Democracy potentially works best in urban communities where a long-standing commitment to the urban polity is expressed in flourishing civic associations and in a history of self-government. But that does not exclude from self-government those urban communities that lack such a history. Where the latent political realm no longer exists, a self-conscious movement for municipal direct democracy can and should revive it, so that over time it gains strength. Such a movement could enlarge the municipality’s democratic content beyond the limitations of previous eras, building it into a living arena for change, education, empowerment, and revolutionary confrontation with the state and capital.

Our project, as libertarian municipalists, is to build precisely such a movement: to resuscitate a local political realm and expand local direct democracy. We aim to institutionalize this direct democracy in citizens’ assemblies–in neighborhood and town meetings–where citizens of a given municipality may meet, deliberate, and make decisions on matterrs of common concern. Where such assemblies already exist, we aim to expand their democratic potential; where they formerly existed, we aim to revive them; and where they never existed, we aim to create them anew. We seek to build that democracy into a strong force, by which citizens may manage society as a whole. In the end, we aim to evict both the capitalist system and the nation-state in favor of humane and cooperative social relations–a rational, ecological libertarian communist society.

To bring the nascent political realm of the municipality to this fulfillment, we need to place the management of the city entirely in the hands of its competent adult community members. Shedding their artificially induced personae as passive spectators, as consumers, and as isolated monads, citizens would recognize their mutual interdependence and as such work to advance their common welfare. In the political realm they would create the institutions that make for broad community participation and sustain them on an ongoing basis, finally regaining the power that the state has usurped from them.

To begin this long and complex process, we must start with the basic seed kernels of the political sphere: the crowded city sidewalk, the square, the park, the town hall–the public spaces where private life shades into public life, where the personal becomes, to one degree or another, the commmunal. Frequent and repeated encounters among community members in these spaces are the germs of the political realm, and the issues of common interest that people discuss here are the its primary subjects of concern. Our urban and social environment, as Lewis Mumford once rightly argued, should be one that, instead of shutting people off from one another, encourages them to encounter and interact with each other most often and most immediately.

Before we begin to cultivate these seeds, we need to form study groups, to educate ourselves and those sympathetic comrades who wish to work with us about the nature of the libertarian municipalist project. We must offer an alternative vision, a utopian vision–to use an unpopular word today–of what is socially desirable, in order to open up a concrete consideration of alternative ppossibilities. We need to commit ourselves to putting that vision into practice. As social anarchists and libertarian communists, we need to ground ourselves not only in our own familiar literature but in social ecology, in left-libertarian history and theory, in the history of democratic traditions and communalist practices, both in our own areas and in other parts of the world, and in democratic and political theory.

As our study groups become political groups, it is crucial that we commit ourselves to the development of libertarian municipalist theory. Some anarchist circles today are deeply suspicious of the very notion of theory, regarding it as inherently authoritarian, confusing theory with dogma, and confusing groups that advocate a theory with political sects. But if it is impossible to have a correct position, then it is also impossible to reject an incorrect position.

Adhering to a theory is crucial for maintaining our political direction, for as we build a movement, we will inevitably be called upon to make political choices, and in order to make the best choices, we will need an end vision–a theory–to guide us. Unless we have an end in view, we cannot intelligently choose our means. Our theory should be basedd on our understanding of the strengths and failures of past revolutionary experiences, as well as our analysis of present social forces. It should not be fixed and inalterable–if we discover that part of it is wrong, then we should change it. But if we are not to be swept to the right along with most of the rest of society, we need a theory to keep ourselves mindful of what is rational.

As the Friends of Durruti repeatedly emphasized, there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. What went wrong with the CNT, they said, was that it “was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory.” The July 1936 revolution failed, they said, because “we did not have a concrete program. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty; but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists.”

As our study group commits itself to this theory and becomes a political group, it should adopt a constitution and a statement of principles, to give the group clear political definition. Having educated ourselves, we then need to go on to educate others and become an active presence in our communities. We should study local political and ecological issues of concern and produce a literature that clearly links them with our theoretical ideas. We need to publish community newspapers, make posters and leaflets. We need to distribute this literature in local bookstores and neighborhood centers and cafés. We need to get people talking with each other about the deep systemic roots of seemingly local problems.

We need to hold lecture series in public spaces. We should organize actions around immediate issues. We should be a continual presence in community politics. When issues of concern come before the local city council or planning commission, we should testify at public hearings–clearly identifying our movement. As we work on these immediate issues, we should always tie them to our demand for citizenns’ assemblies in the municipality, always call for a direct democracy and a cooperative society as a long-term solution to the issue at hand. The most important political point in our public education efforts should be the call for direct democracy.

If the citizens’ assemblies are to constitute a significant public sphere, they must eventually become arenas of substantive political power, and the decisions that citizens make there must become binding on the community. Our paramount demand to the existing local government should therefore be that these assemblies be instituted legally. We should demand that the municipal government change its governing charter to establish them, recognize their existence, and spell out their powers. Where citizens’ assemblies already exist, we should call for strengthening their powers at the expense of statist institutions.

It is highly unlikely, of course, that existing municipal governments would yield easily and willingly to this demand, that they would voluntarily surrender their powers to citizens’ assemblies. After all, in all too many respects current municipal institutions resemble miniature nation-states themselves. Indeed, existing city councils will almost certainly try to block any effort to establish effective citizens’ assemblies. In this situation our libertarian municipalist group may do two things.

First, we may take the initiative to create assemblies ourselves on an extralegal basis. We may convene them, then appeal to all citizens in our community to attend and participate in them. These assemblies would meet on a regular basis and debate local, regional, national, and even international issues, issuing resolutions and public statements as they see fit. Even though these assemblies will have as yet no legal power, what they can do is exercise enormous moral and exemplary power. In time, to the extent that more and more citizens see their moral significance and attend their meetings, existing municipal governments may well have no choice but to give them varying degrees of legality, an opening that we can then proceed to further expand and magnify.

Second, to advance the creation of assemblies on a legal basis, our group may run candidates for local elective office. Some anarchists today object to libertarian municipalism on the basis of just this notion, rejecting such electoralism as a form of parliamentarism or “city-statism.” Here a clear distinction must be made between parliamentarism and electoralism. Electoral activity in a municipality can be qualitatively different from statecraft, since the city and the state themselves are potentially qualitatively different from each other and even have a history of antagonism and even conflict. Bakunin himself favored anarchists’ undertaking local political activity, because he saw that municipal politics is basic to people’s political lives. The people, he wrote, “have a healthy, practical common sense when it comes to communal affairs. They are fairly well informed and know how to select from their midst the most capable officials. This is why municipal elections always best reflect the real attitude and will of the people.”

In the short term, our electoral campaigns will be educational efforts, intended to school citizens in the basic ideas of libertarian municipalism. They will be occasions for us to publicize our ideas and to spark public discussion. At every opportunity–in interviews, debates, and speeches–our candidates should call for the creation of citizens’ assemblies and advocate direcct democracy as forums for an authentic democracy.

Before our group engages in municipal elections, however, we should write an electoral platform that states the aims for which we are fighting–especially the radical democratization of municipal government. The platform should also contain a series of clearly speciffied immediate demands–what socialists have long called a minimum program–concerning issues of housing, transportation, environment, welfare, education, and the like. If another political group in our community demands similar reforms, we should escalate these immediate demands, always demanding ever more radical changes and popular institutions.

Our program should place these immediate demands in a radical context by tying them to the longer-term goal of fundamentally transforming society. If many people in our communities are not yet prepared to reject capitalism, we may use more palatable phrasing, referring, instead of “capitalism,” to “the market economy.” If the words “libertarian communism” are too frightening for some, then we may use the phrase “cooperative society” to refer to our ultimate vision. In any case we should speak in the idiom of our distinctive tradition even as we retain the substance of our libertarian communist ideals. Finally, when our efforts at public education have borne fruit and our community is radicalized, we may press for the achievement of our maximum program in all its magnificence–for libertarian communism in a rational, ecological anarchist society.

In the present period of political reaction, it is not likely that our movement will grow rapidly or meet with immediate electoral success. In fact, setbacks are to be expected. Only in a community whose political and democratic consciousness has been raised by the movement would it even be desirable for one of our candidates to actually win an election. If we are to avoid being demoralized by the inevitable setbacks, we must be prepared for our movement to grow slowly and organically, and we must be willing to explain our ideas over and over again, if necessary, with great patience, until the political climate finally becomes more radicalized and hence more amenable to our ideas.

When the citizens of a municipality do elect our candidates to office, it should be because they have come to agree with our platform. Immediately upon taking office, the new city councilors should begin to press, in public forums as well as the city council, for fully empowered citizens’ assemblies at the expense of existing city institutions. Where citizens’ assemblies do not exist, the councilors should aggressively introduce charter changes to create them; where they do exist, they should press for changes that give them increased power, including the legal power to formulate binding policies for the municipality as a whole.

Once we establish an assembly, by whatever means, its first action should be to constitute itself–to draw up procedural bylaws specifying how it will conduct its proceedings. These bylaws should establish the assembly’s ddecision-making procedures and define its offices, as well as its procedures for selecting individuals to hold those offices and for holding them accountable to the assembly as a whole.

The decisions that the assembly makes should be taken according to majority vote. Although this process will require the minority to conform to the results of a decision it opposes, the minority nonetheless will retain the crucial freedom to try to overturn the decision. It is free to openly and persistently articulate its reasoned disagreements to other members of the community, order to try to persuade them to reconsider the decision. By dissenting in an orderly and civil fashion, the minority keeps an issue alive and lays the groundwork for becoming the majority in its own right, hopefully advancing the political consciousness of the community in the process.

The establishment of a citizens’ assembly is not in itself a fulfillment; until its participating citizens develop radical content, it will be only an institutional structure. As such, it is a battleground for social struggles–especially the class struggle, which will be extended beyond the factory into the community at large. Clearly, conflicting class interests will appear in the assembly: Real estate developers and business people, state bureaucrats and party functionaries, proprietors and reactionaries, will all come to assembly meetings and try to advance their own interests or those of the institutions they represent. It will be the responsibility of our group and our allies to counter the self-interested and reactionary arguments of these people and persuade our fellow citizens that the system they represent should be vigorously opposed in favor of the larger community interest.

Once the minimum step of creating an assembly is taken, we may advance a transitional program of expanding the assembly’s power. As the popular democracy matures, with increased attendance at the assemblies–indeed, as citizens make these institutions their own–the assemblies can hope to acquire ever greater de facto power. Ultiimately city charters, where they exist, would have to be changed to affirm that the assemblies hold substantive power in civic affairs.

Thereafter the assemblies could work toward achieving the maximum demands of a libertarian municipalist polity: the confederation of municipal assemblies and ultimately the creation of a rational, ecological, libertarian society.

Creating a new society depends on changing not only political structures and social relations but consciousness as well, including the character qualities of the individual citizens who embody that society. Libertarian municipalism stands in the tradition of “civic humanism,” which places the highest value on the active, responsible participation of citizens in the management of their common affairs. Where modernity leaves us directionless and uprooted, civic humanism would seek to reembed us in ethical lifeways and democratic institutions.

We believe that politics is too important to be left to professionals–it must become the province of ordinary people, who have attained a high degree of political maturity, rather than the proviince of elite “specialists.” We believe that every adult citizen is potentially competent to participate directly in democratic politics. By rationally deliberating together, making decisions peacefully, and implementing their choices responsibly, citizens can be expected to develop a set of personal strengths and civic virtues–a character structure–commensurate with democratic political life.

Of these civic strengths and virtues, the most important are solidarity and reason. By any definition, citizenship presupposes solidarity, or a commitment to the public good. In contrast to the cynicism that prevails today, mature active citizens should understand that the perpetuation of their political community depends on their own active support for and participation in it. A mature identification with the community should bring with it a sense of responsibility. Each citizen can be expected to understand that, like all the others, they not only enjoy rights but owe duties to their community, and they should fulfill these responsibilities with the knowledge that everyone else was making the same effort.

Second, the faculty of reason should be of crucial importance in a direct democracy. Reasoned restraint and decorum are needed to keep a civic assembly orderly, tolerant, functional, and creative. Reason should allow citizens to weigh the possible courses of action that their community should take and select the best one. Indeed, reasonable evaluation–in contrast to emotion-laden partisanship–is a prerequisite for constructive discussion and deliberation. It is indispensaable for overcoming personal prejudices, leading us to treat our fellow citizens not with bigotry or vindictiveness but with fairness and generosity. It is also necessary to the survival of the community: Some citizens, for example, might attempt to revive private property and an entrepreneurial, profit-seeking spirit. In an attempt to gain our support for this end, they may well make appeals to our cupidity and greed. To resist these highly emotional appeals, we will need reason–as well as personal strength of character–to reject them in the interest of preserving the cooperative nature of the community.

Such a “civilizing” process should transform a group of self-interested individuals into a deliberative, rational, ethical body politic. This is not to say that a libertarian municipalist society would require individual men and women to be wholly self-sacrificing and subordinate themselves to the collectivity. On the contrary, each individual would enjoy a personal life as well, with intimate family members and with the friends and fellows they choose as companions, and with co-workers in productive activities. But as participants in a bold experiment, citizens would rely on one another to share responsibilities–and as they become more worthy of one another’s trust, they could place ever more trust in one another. Indeed, the individdual and the community, rather than be subordinate one to the other, could mutually create each other in a reciprocal process.

Historically, the societies that participated in the development of direct demcoracy have been ethnically homogeneous. But direct demoracy does not depend on ethnic homogeneity, since neither its practices nor its virtues are the exclusive property of one ethnic group. Thanks to international travel and communication, the world is shrinking, and municipalities today are becoming ever more ethnically heterogeneous; the mixing of cultures and ethnicities in cities will only grow in the coming years. In the school system of Vancouver, to cite just one example, Mandarin Chinese is now spoken more often than French, one of Canada’s official languages. Latino and Asian immigration is a central fact of life in Los Angeles. Under the present social order, it may well happen that neighborhoods will define themselves by ethnicity or national origin rather than shared civic space. Should particularistic emotions intensify beyond a certain point, the result could well be interethnic antagonism.

A rational democratic polity, however, would provide the public spaces where mutual understanding among people of different ethnic origin could grow and flourish: the citizens’ assembly would provide the neutral procedural structures by which ethnic groups could articulate their specific problems in the give-and-take of discussion, leading to greater mutual understanding. In this shared context people of all cultures could develop modesty about their own cultural assumptions. At the same time the community would share a common recognition of a general interest, based on environmental and communal concerns, that transcended particularistic concerns. A shared commitment to the development of solidarity and the practice of reason in public affairs would make our multicultural municipalities into havens of mutual aid and gardens of cultural creativity.

Our movement will thus offer more than its distinctive political platform; it will also offer a moral alternative to the vacuity and triviality of life today, in the form of radical solidarity and freedom. Like the great manifestos advanced by socialist movements in the last century, it would call for moral as well as material transformation. It would generate a cultural and artistic life to enhance the community’s political aims. It would be accompanied by communitarian institutions, like cooperatives, however limited and short-lived, that would help accustom people to the practices of cooperation. It would offer a meaningful life, with social roles far more satisfying than the never-ending buying and selling of useless goods.

If the democratic potential of the municipality is to be fulfilled, city life must ultimately be rescaled to the dimensions suitable for a democratic political realm. That is, even as municipalities undergo a process of democratization, existing large cities will have to be structurally decentralized into smaller municipalities of a manageable size.

Even the very largest of urban belts comprise within them smaller communities that share a distinctive cultural heritage or tradition. Most large cities today encompass smaller cities or boroughs, most famously London, which is a congeries of neighborhoods. The five-borough city of New York is actually a very recent phenomenon, dating back only to 1897. As recently as 1874, New York City consisted solely of the borough of Manhattan. A city that is only a hundred-odd years old has certainly not yet become eternal. At the same time, what one urban affairs specialist calls an “urban confederacy movement” is now under way in many American urban centers, such as St. Louis, Denver, and Orange County: here the citizens of what began as suburbs are finding that the large city is too big to work, and they are trying to redefine it as a league of smaller, incorporated, often multicultural pieces.

In large cities, citizens’ assemblies may at first be established in only few neighborhoods; they could then serve as models for other neighborhoods. The democratized neighborhoods that arise could then interlink with each other and form confederations that would coordinate transportation, sanitation, and other services. Neighborhoods that are in the process of being institutionally decentralized in this way could ultimately transform not only the political life of the city but its physical form as well.

As essential as decentralization is to libertarian municipalism, however, local self-reliance is not essential. No locality–not even a municipality that practices direct democracy–can be sufficient unto itself, nor should it be, in order to avoid local parochialism. Municipalities of all sorts are necessarily dependent upon one another and thereby share many common issues.

Least of all should individual communities seek to be entirely autonomous in their economic life. Any given individual community needs more resources and raw materials than it can derive from its own land. Economic interdependence is simply a fact–it is a function not of the competitive market economy, of capitalism, but of social life as such.

To allow for the full participation of citizens in political life, our libertarian communist society must rest on a sound technological as well as economic base that affords them sufficient free time; otherwise the demands of survival and personal security will overtake all other concerns and activities.

Today productive technologies have been developed sufficiently to make possible an immense expansion of free time, through the automation of tasks once performed by human labor. The basic means for eliminating toil and drudgery, for living in comfort and security, rationally and ecologically, for social rather than merely private ends, are potentially available to all peoples of the world.

Not even in the wealthiest existing societies, however, has this promise of post-scarcity–of a sufficiency in the means of life and the expansion of free time–been fulfilled. The reason lies not in the productivee technologies themselves but in the social relations that determine their use–social relations drive ever greater corporate profits and expansion. In the present society, for example, automation has very often created social hardships, like the poverty that results from unemployment, because corporations prefer machines to human labor in order to reduce production costs and increase profits. In a rational anarchist society, however, organized along cooperative lines, the social relations that drive the profit motive would be eliminated.

Under such a system, productive technologies–as part of a new economic order–could be used to create free time rather than misery. A post-scarcity society would retainn much of today’s technological infrastructure–including automated industrial plants–but it would use them to meet the basic needs of life and remove onerous toil rather than serve the imperatives of capitalism. Men and women would then have the free time to participate in political life as well as enjoy rich and meaningful personal lives. At the same time, rather than perpetuate the gross forms of concentration and centralization that we have today, we could rescale and retool our technological resources along ecological lines, decentralize them to meet a regional, even confederal division of labor and production, and thereby bring town and country into a creative balance.

The fruits of the productive forces would be distributed according to individuals’ need for them. Such distribution would be institutionalized through a system of organized cooperation, emanating from the interdependence of the democratized municipalities.

The type of political and social organization for institutionalizing such interdependence is the confederation.

A confederation is a lateral union in which several political entities combine to form a larger whole. Although in the process of confederating, these smaller entities form a larger entity, they do not dissolve themselves into it but retain their freedom and distinct identity. In the society we are seeking, the municipalities that have undergone democratization by forming citizens’ assemblies would form confederations on a regional basis to address shared transmunicipal or regional problems.

In a republican state, a parliament or legislature of representatives determines social policy by voting to approve or reject specific laws. In a confederation, by contrast, a congress or council of delegates acts to administer the policies that have been established by the assemblies of the member communities. In our new polity, the libertarian municipalities of a given region would send delegates to a confederal council. These delegates would not be policymaking representatives; rather they would individually be accountable to the assemblies that chose them, and they would be imperatively mandated by those assemblies. They would not be permitted to make policy decisions without first gaining the assent of their home assemblies, and they would be immediately recallable at the assemblies’ discretion.

Indeed, rather than making policy decisions itself, the confederal council would exist primarily for administrative and adjudicative purposes–that is, for the purpose of coordinating policies formulated by the assemblies, reconciling (with base approval) differencess among them, and carrying out their administration.

It is the citizens, deliberating in their democratic assemblies, who would make policy. They would develop possible various courses of action on a particular issue, deliberate their various strengths and weaknesses, then make their decision according to majority vote. Free citizens in assemblies alone have the right to make policy. The functions of the confederal council, by contrast, would be purely administrative and coordinative–executing policies that the municipalities have already adopted.

Would ordinary citizens in assemblies be capable of making decisions about a society that is as complex as ours? Today and every day, parliamentarians–commonly lawyers–make decisions about a multitude of various complex and difficult subjects. Even when an issue involves great technological complexity, however, these parliamentarians rarely need extensive technical knowledge in order to weigh the alternatives. Few parliamentarians today, for example, would know how to technically engineer a road, yet they frequently make policy decisions about the need for, location, and size of roads. In a free society, in cases where specific technical knowledge is actually needed to make a decision, those who have that expertise would present it clearly and accessibly, so that ordinary citizens of reasonable competence can make the best policy decision.

When a policy decision must be made on a matter that affects the entire confederation, the confederal council would coordinate confederation-wide voting by majority rule. The final outcome of the voting would be determined by tallying not the votes of individual towns voting as units, but the aggregate votes of all the citizens of all the municipalities in the confederation. The confederation would thus possess, by majority vote of its citizens, the power to prevent a particular municipality from inflicting moral or physical damage on its own members or on other towns or cities.

At the same time the aggregated municipalities would have ultimate power within the confederation, in that they embody direct democracy of free citizens and in that their separate assemblies engage in rational discourse before making decisions. The principles of assembly sovereignty and free discourse decisively distinguish our approach from statism: where statism allows, at best, for the illusory liberty of isolated monads in mass plebiscites, confederal democracy encourages citizens to frame possible approaches to an issue in their own terms and explore them thoroughly before deciding among them. Consciously formed to accommodate interdependencies, then, a confederation of municipalities would unite face-to-face democratic decision-making with transmunicipal administration. Confederations of municipalities could be formed on a global basis, thereby fulfilling the longstanding dream of revolutionary movements past, to achieve a rational “Commune of communes.”

The type of economic life that we advance is neither nationalized (as in state socialism), nor placed in the hands of workers by factory (as in syndicalism), nor privately owned (as in capitalism), nor reduced to small proprietary cooperatives (as in communitarianism). Rather, it is municipalized–that is, placed under community “ownership” and control in the form of citizens’ assemblies.

This municipalization of the economy means the “ownership” and management of the economy by the citizens of the community and its coordination with other municipalized economies through confederation. Property–including both land and factories–would come under the overall control of citizens in their assemblies, coordinated by conffederal councils. The citizens would become the collective “owners” of their community’s economic resources and would formulate their economic policies in the interest of the community as a whole.

Citizens would thus make economic decisions not for their individual workplaces but for the entire community. Those who work in a particular factory, for example, would participate in formulating policies not only for that factory but for all other factories as well. They would participate in this decision-making not as workers, farmers, technicians, engineers, or professionals, but as citizens. The decisions they make would be guided not by the interests of their specific enterprise or vocation, which may be very parochial or trade-oriented, but by the needs of the entire community.

Where resources are distributed very unevenly, popular rule cannot be sustained. Without a rough economic equality, democracy of any sort is ephemeral, giving way sooner or later to oligarchy or worse. In our free society, economic inequality would be eliminated by turning wealth, private property, and the means of production over to the municipality. Through the municipalization of the economy, citizens in assemblies would ultimately expropriate the riches of the possessing classes and place them in the hands of the community, so that it can be used for the benefit of all.

The assembly would also make decisions about the distribution of the material means of life, fulfilling the communist promise of post-scarcity. “From each according to ability and to each according to need”–the demand of all nineteenth-century communist movements–would become a living practice, with levels of need rationally dettermined by the assembly. Everyone in the community would thus have access to the means of life, regardless of the work he or she was capable of performing. A rough economic equality would emerge, based on morally and rationally formulated criteria established by its citizens’ assembly.

Economic life as such would be brought under the control of the political realm, which would absorb it as part of the public business of the assembly. Neither the factory nor the land could ever again become a separate competitive unit with its own particularistic interests.

The assembly’s decisions, it is to be expected, would be guided by rational and ecological standards, and the economy would become a moral economy. An ethos of public responsibility could avoid a wasteful, exclusive, and irresponsible acquisition of goods, as well as ecological destruction and violations of human rights. Citizens in assemblies could consciously insure that economic entities adhered to ethical precepts of cooperation and sharing. Classical notions of limit and balance could replace the capitalist imperative to expand and compete in the pursuit of profit. The community would value people, not for their levels of production and consumption, but for their positive contributions to community life.

Over the wider geographical range, citizens would make economic policy decisions through their confederations. The wealth expropriated from the property-owning classes would be redistributed not only within a municipality but among all the municipalities in a region. If one municipality tried to engross itself at the expense of others, its confederates would have the right to prevent it from doing so. A thorough politicization of the economy would thereby extend the moral economy to a broad regional scale.

We do not believe that a “Commune of communes” can be achieved in a single revolutionary upsurge. Rather, as our movement grows over the long term, more and more municipalities would democratize themselves and form confederations. Eventually, when a considerable number of municipalities are democratized and confederated, their shared power would constitute a clear threat to the state and to the capitalist system.

The existing power structure would hardly tolerate the existence of such confederations, with their democratic politics, empowered citizenry, and incipient municipalized economy. In defense of capitalism and its own power, the state would almost certainly move against the confederations. If our movement is serious about opposing the state, we must work to divest the state of its monopoly of armed force, by creating a civic guard or citizens’ militia for the protection of our freedom and rights.

For a century and a half, the international socialist movement recognized the necessity of a citizens’ militia as an alternative to the standing army. The anarchist and syndicalist movements considered an armed people to be a sine qua non for a free society. Bakunin wrote in 1866: “All able-bodied citizens should, if necessary, take up arms to defend their homes and their freedom. Each country’s military defense and equipment should be organized locally by the commune, or provincially, somewhat like the militias in Switzerland or the United States.”

A citizens’ militia is not merely a military force whose purpose is to defend major social change. It is also a symbol of the power of a free citizenry, their popular will, their resolve to assert their rights, and their commitment to build a new political dispensation based on face-to-face democracy. Moreover, the very presence of a civic militia is an appeal to the rank and file members of the state’s armed forces to support the establishment of such a democracy.

We therefore include in our program the formation of a civic militia or guard, under the strict supervision of the citizens’ assemblies. It would be a democratic institution in itself, with officers elected both by the militia and by the citizens’ assembly.

The larger and more numerous the municipal confederations become, the greater would be their latent power, and the greater would be their potentiality to constitute a counterpower to the nation-state. As they realize this potentiality, tension would likely grow between themselves and the state. Citizens must clearly recognize that this tension is highly desirable–indeed, that their confederated municipalities constitute a potential counterpower to the state.

In fact, the confederated municipalities may eventually gain enough support to constitute a dual power to the state. This situation would likely be highly unstable, and resolving it could well involve a confrontation. It is possible, too, that our direct democracy will institutionally “hollow out” the state power itself, delegitimating its authority and winning a majority of the people over to the new civic and confederal institutions. With or without a confrontation, however, power will have to be shifted away from the state and the professional practitioners of statecraft and entirely into the hands of the people and their confederated assemblies.

In Paris in 1789 and in Petrograd in February 1917, state authority collapsed in the face of a revolutionary confrontation. So hollowed out was the power of the seemingly all-powerful French and Russian monarchies that when a revolutionary people challenged them, they merely crumbled. Crucially, in both cases, the ordinary rank-and-file soldiers of the armed forces went over to the revolutionary movement, to the armed people. What happened in the past can happen again, especially with an effective, conscious, and inspired revolutionary movement and program.

Despite their historical antagonism, anarchism and Marxism share in the last instance a common social goal: a stateless communism. Where they perhaps have differed most fundamentally is on the question of the revolutionary transition: the nature of the institutions that will struggle against counterrevolution and construct a new social and political order. Marxist movements thought it would be necessary to create a workers’ state to carry out the transition; once the state carried out this function, they expected it to wither away.

As anarchists rightly pointed out, this expectation was absurd–the “workers’ state” would merely become a new tyranny and, if anything, would have to be overthrown by another revolution. Further, they objected, the wide discrepancy between Marxism’s revolutionary means and its revolutionary end was so wide as to be intrinsically immoral. Let the means and ends be the same, anarchists demanded; let a free, cooperative society be created by a free, cooperative movement on the part of the people.

Their criticism of the Marxist transition was more than justified, but on the other hand, by depending on changes of consciousness and spontaneous upsurges to enact the revolution, anarchists too often left unanswered the question of the revolutionary transition: How would the struggle against a counterrevolution be carried out? In many cases they seemed to assume that the initial spontaneous upsurge would be sufficient to eliminate the state and capitalism, and that establishing the new social order would simply be a matter of finally permitting existing cooperative institutions to rise to the surface. Bakunin was typical when he wrote: “With the abolition of the State, the spontaneous self-organization of popular life, for centuries paralyzed and absorbed by the omnipotent power of the state, will revert to the communes.”

But clearly in our day, when the state and capitalism have done so much to damage the ability of ordinary people for spontaneous self-organization; when most people are hypnotized into pursuing never-ending consumption and the maximization of their own self-interest; and when they have been reduced to passive spectators in relation to everything beyond their personal concerns–in such circumstances the new communal order will not be created by a spontaneous upsurge. The process, now if not in Bakunnin’s day, will require preparation. Civic politics is threatening to drift out of memory, and if people are to fully recover that historical memory, they will need education.

Most important, the revolution will require an institution to carry out the revolutionary transition. Certainly the revolutionary institution that the Marxists chose, the workers’ state, was nothing short of disastrous. But what, then, is an appropriate transitional institution? We reply that it is the confederal democracy itself, the Commune of communes, the rudiments of which we can work for now, and that will both educate the citizenry and make the revolutionary transition. And in accordance with anarchism’s demand for the unity of means and ends, our transitional institution, the counterpower against the state, is the same as our final institution, the polity that, as Aristotle described it so long ago, best provides a rich flourishing of human life.

As capitalism creates deeper and deeper inroads into social and political life, we cannot stand back and watch the process happen with resignation. Many of the appalling changes that society is undergoing at century’s end are not fated to take place but may be aborted, or turned to the good, or their evil delimited; together as we create a movement to transform society, we will decide how we can curtail them.

Nor can the nation-state and the capitalist system survive indefinitely. Not only is this system widening the divisions between rich and poor around the world into a yawning chasm, but it is also on a collision course with the biosphere. Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative, in particular, which seeks profit for capital expansion at the expense of all other considerations, stands radically at odds with the practical realities of interdependence and limit, both in social terms and in terms of the capacity of the planet to sustain life.

In the next century global warming alone is expected to wreak havoc with the climate, causing rising sea levels, catastrophic weather extremes, epidemics of infectious diseases, and diminished arable land and hence agricultural capacity. At the very least, hunger and disease will soar. It is reported that, at a U.S. cabinet meeting in September 1997, Robert Rubin, the U.S. Treasury secretary, exclaimed to Vice President Al Gore: “This damn global warming issue could send the economy into a death spiral!”

If such a death spiral does develop, however, its social outcome will by no means necessarily be the rational, ecological, libertarian society that social anarchists desire. It is certainly possible that states will attempt to become even more authoritarian in order to repress social unrest. If the crisis is to result in human emancipation, the liberatory alternative will have to already be in place at least to some extent. Increasingly, our choice seems clear: Either people will establish a democratic, cooperative, ecological society, or the ecological underpinnings of society will collapse. The recovery of politics and citizenship is thus not only a precondition for a free society; it may very well be a precondition for our survival as a species. In effect, the ecological question demands a fundamental reconstruction of society, along lines that are cooperative rather than competitive, democratic rather than authoritarian, communal rather than individualistic–above all by eliminating the capitalist system that is wreaking havoc on the biosphere.

Capitalism will not provide us with the popular democratic institutions that we need if we are to eliminate it. On the contrary, it will fight to the bitter end to preserve itself, its social relations, and its state institutions. If we are to gain emancipatory institutions, we must create them ourselves, with our well-organized libertarian municipalist movement.

Prerevolutionary periods are usually quite short. Once revolution is on the horizon, we are unlikely to have a great deal of time to perform the painstaking, molecular work of education and organization that the situation will require. Left libertarians should be building such a movement now, showing people how they can take their political and economic lives into their own hands, how they can coordinate and institutionalize those arenas to build a society that will restore their humanity. It will require endless patience, but it must be done, lest the coming crisis result in tyranny.

The social problems that compel us to act are quite concrete and in many cases transcend strictly class issues, as important as class issues are. The desire to preserve the biosphere is universal among most rational people. The need for community is abiding in the human spirit, welling up repeatedly over the centuries, especially in times of social crisis. As for the capitalist economy, let us recall that it is little more than two centuries old; in the mixed economy that preceded it, culture restrained acquisitive desires, and it could do so once again, reinforced by a post-scarcity technology.

It is impossible to predict when social crises will take place, or what social conditions will result from them. What is clear, however, is that the demand for a rational society summons us to be rational beings–that is, to live up to our uniquely human potentialities and construct the Commune of communes to fulfill our very humanity.

In many places old democratic institutions linger within the sinews of today’s republican states. The commune lies hidden and distorted in the city council; the sectional assembly lies hidden and distorted in the neighborhood; the town meeting lies hidden and distorted in the township; and municipal confederations lie hidden and distorted in regional associations of towns and cities. By unearthing, renovating, and building upon these hidden institutions, where they exist, and building them where they do not, we can democratize the republic and then radicalize the democracy to create the conditions for a degree of social freedom unprecedented in history.

Radicalizing a direct democracy would impart political fulfillment to the institutions that our movement has created. Hence the slogan for our movement: “Democratize the republic! Radicalize the democracy!”

Yet for a century preceding the First World War, and for nearly a half century thereafter, various kinds of socialism – statist and libertarian; economistic and moral; industrial and communalistic – constituted a powerful mass movement for the transformation of a competitive society into a cooperative one – and for the creation of a generous and humane system in which emancipated human beings could fulfill their creative and rational potentialities. People are ends in their own right, the socialist tradition asserted, not means for one another’s use; and they are substantive beings, with considered opinions and deep feelings, not mass-produced things with artificially induced notions and wants. People can and should throw away the economic shackles that bind them, socialists argued, cast off the fictions and unrealities that mystify them, and plan and construct, deliberately and consciously, a truly enlightened and emancipated society based on freedom and cooperation, reason and solidarity. Material aims would be secondary to ethical concerns, people would have rich, spontaneous social relationships with one another, and they would actively and responsibly participate in making all decisions about their lives, rather than subject themselves to external authoritarian control.

After 1917 a general enthusiasm for the stunning accomplishment of the Bolshevik Revolution pervaded almost all sectors of the international left, so much so that the humanistic ideals of socialism came to be attached to the Communist movement. In the 1930s young American intellectuals growing up under Depression conditions, especially in the vibrant radical political culture of New York City, cut their teeth on the version of socialism that the Communist movement taught them. Their minds brimming with revolutionary strategies and Marxian dialectics, their hopes and passions spurred by life-endangering battles against a capitalist system that seemed on the brink of collapse, they marshaled all their abilities to achieve the century-old socialist ideal.

Tragically, international Communism defiled that ideal. It committed monstrous abuses in the name of socialism, and when these abuses became too much to bear – the show trials of 1936-38, the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution, and the Hitler-Stalin pact – hopes that the Communist movement could usher in a socialist world were shipwrecked. Many radicals, reeling from these blows, withdrew into private life; others accommodated themselves to the capitalist system in varying degrees, even to the point of supporting the United States in the cold war. Still others, who did remain on the left politically, turned their attention to more limited arenas: aesthetics, or “new class” theory, or Frankfurt School sociology. Meanwhile, outside the academy, what remained of the Marxian left persisted in small groups, defying the prevailing “consensus” in favor of capitalism and accommodation.

Among the young intellectuals who had emerged from the 1930s Communist movement, relatively few responded to its failure by attempting to keep the centuries-old revolutionary tradition alive, by advancing a libertarian alternative to Marxism, one better suited to pursue a humane socialist society in the postwar era. It is a distinction of Murray Bookchin that in these years of disillusion, disenchantment, and retreat, he attempted to create just such an alternative.

Born in January 1921 in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants, Bookchin was raised under the very shadow of the Russian Revolution, partaking of the excitement that it aroused among his immigrant and working-class neighbors. At the same time, from his earliest years, he imbibed libertarian ideas from his maternal grandmother, who had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a quasi-anarchistic populist movement, in czarist Russia. In the early 1930s, as the United States plunged deeper into the Depression, he entered the Communist movement’s youth organizations, speaking at streetcorner meetings, participating in rent strikes, and helping to organize the unemployed, even as an adolescent, eventually running the educational program for his branch of the Young Communist League. After breaking with Stalinism – initially, in 1935, because of its class- collaborationist policies (the so-called Popular Front), then conclusively in 1937 during the Spanish civil war – he turned to Trotskyism and later to libertarian socialism, joining a group surrounding the exiled German Trotskyist Josef Weber in the mid- 1940s; his earlist works were published in this group’s periodical, Contemporary Issues. In the meantime Bookchin was deeply involved in trade union organizing in northern New Jersey, where he worked for years as a foundryman and an autoworker. (Due to his family’s poverty, he went to work in heavy industry directly after high school.) In whatever factory he worked, he engaged in union activities as a member of the burgeoning and intensely militant Congress of Industrial Organizations, particularly the United Automobile Workers.

During the 1930s Marxian precepts had seemed to explain conclusively the Great Depression and the turbulent labor insurgency that arose during the decade, seeming to challenge the very foundations of the capitalist system. But Marxist prognoses about the 1940s were glaringly unfulfilled. These predictions had it that the Second World War, like the First, would end in proletarian revolutions among the belligerent countries. But the proletariat, far from making a revolution in any Western country under the banner of internationalism, fought out the war under the banner of nationalism. Even the German working class abandoned the class consciousness of its earlier socialist history and fought on behalf of Hitler to the very end. Far from collapsing, capitalism emerged from the war unscathed and strengthened, with more stability than ever before.

The Soviet Union, for its part, was clearly far from a socialist society, let alone a communist one. Far from playing a revolutionary role during the war, it was actively involved in suppressing revolutionary movements in its own national interests. Finally, American industrial workers, far from challenging the capitalist system, were becoming assimilated into it. When a major General Motors strike in 1946 ended with his co-workers placidly accepting company pension plans and unemployment benefits, Bookchin’s disillusionment with the workers’ movement as a uniquely revolutionary force was complete, and his years as a union activist came to an end. The revolutionary tradition, he concluded, would have to dispense with the notion of proletarian hegemony as the compelling force for basic social change. With the consolidation of capitalism on a massive international scale, the idea that conflict between wage labor and capital would bring capitalism to an end had to be called into serious question.

To his credit, Bookchin, faced with these dispiriting conditions, nonetheless refused to relinquish his commitment to revolution. Rather, the revolutionary tradition, he felt, had to explore new possibilities for creating a free cooperative society and reclaim nonauthoritarian socialism in a new form. Anarchism, whose history had long intertwined with that of Marxian socialism, argued that people could manage their own affairs without benefit of a state, and that the object of revolution should be not the seizure of state power but its dissolution. In 1950s America, in the aftermath of the McCarthy period, the left generally – especially the anarchist movement – was small, fragmented, and seemingly on the wane. Yet anarchism’s libertarian ideals – “a stateless, decentralized society, based on the communal ownership of the means of production”(1) – seemed to be the basis, in Bookchin’s mind, for a viable revolutionary alternative in the postwar era.

Moving decisively toward this left-libertarian tradition in the middle of the decade, Bookchin tried to free anarchism of its more dated nineteenth-century aspects and recast its honorable principles in contemporary terms. “The future of the anarchist movement will depend upon its ability to apply basic libertarian principles to new historical situations,” he wrote in 1964.

“Life itself compels the anarchist to concern himself increasingly with the quality of urban life, with the reorganization of society along humanistic lines, with the subcultures created by new, often indefinable strata – students, unemployables, an immense bohemia of intellectuals, and above all a youth which began to gain social awareness with the peace movement and civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.”(2)

Even as he embraced the anarchist tradition, however, Bookchin never entirely abandoned Marx’s basic ideas. In effect, he drew on the best of both Marxism and anarchism to synthesize a coherent hybrid political philosophy of freedom and cooperation, one that drew on both intellectual rigor and cultural sensibility, analysis and reconstruction. He would call this synthesis social ecology.

Even as Bookchin was moving toward an anarchist outlook, the American economy of the early 1950s was undergoing enormous expansion, with unprecedented economic advances that catapulted even industrial workers into the booming middle class. It was not only military spending that propelled this growth; with government support, science and industry had combined to spawn a wide array of new technologies, suitable for civilian as well as military use. These new technologies, so it was said, seemed poised to cure all social ills of the time, if not and engineer an entirely new civilization.

Automobiles, fast becoming a standard consumer item, were promising mobility, suburbs, and jobs – giving plausibility, in the eyes of many Americans, to the slogan “What’s good for GM is good for America.” Nuclear power, it was avowed, would meet U.S. energy needs more or less for free; indeed, Lewis Strauss, the former Wall Street investment banker who first chaired the Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that electricity from nuclear power plants would become “too cheap to meter.” Miracle grains would feed humanity, and new pharmaceuticals would control formerly intractable diseases. Petrochemicals and petrochemical products – including plastics, food additives, detergents, solvents, and abrasives – would make life comfortable and provide labor-saving convenience for everyone. As for pesticides, as environmental historian Robert Gottlieb observes, they were “being touted as a kind of miracle product, supported by advertising campaigns (‘Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry’), by government policies designed to increase agricultural productivity, and a media celebration of the wonders of the new technology.” Most of the American public welcomed these new technologies, seeming to agree with the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Thomas Nolan, that the new technological resources were “inexhaustible.”(3)

It was just at this moment of collective anticipation that Bookchin audaciously suggested that an ecological crisis lay on the horizon. “Within recent years,” he wrote in a long 1952 essay, “the rise of little known and even unknown infectious diseases, the increase of degenerative illnesses and finally the high incidence of cancer suggests some connection between the growing use of chemicals in food and human diseases.”(4) The chemicals being used in food additives, he insisted in “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” could well be carcinogenic. The new economic and technological boom, despite all its rosy promises, could also have harmful environmental consequences.

Little environmentalist writing existed in the United States in these years, apart from neo-Malthusian tracts that issued dire warnings about overpopulation, like Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s The Road to Survival (both published in 1948). Although a conservation movement existed, it worked primarily for the preservation wilderness areas in national parks and showed little interest in social or political analysis. The existing literature on chemical pollution, for its part, was silent on the driving role that modern capitalism was playing in the development and application of chemicals.

So it was that before most Americans even realized that an environmental crisis was in the offing, Bookchin was telling them it was. Even more striking, he was already probing its sources. “The principal motives for chemicals,” he warned, and the “demands imposed upon [farm] land” are “shaped neither by the needs of the public nor by the limits of nature, but by the exigencies of profit and competition.”(5) The use of carcinogenic chemicals was rooted in a profit-oriented society; “profit-minded businessmen” have produced “ecological disturbances . . . throughout the American countryside. For decades, lumber companies and railroads were permitted a free-hand in destroying valuable forest lands and wildlife.”(6) Bookchin had not only rooted environmental dislocations in modern capitalism; he had found a new limit to capitalist expansion, one that held the potential to supersede the misery of the working class as a source of fundamental social change: environmental destruction.

Amid the McCarthyite intolerance of all social radicalism in 1952, it required considerable courage to write and publish a radical social analysis of environmental problems. Yet not only did Bookchin write such an analysis; he advanced, albeit in rudimentary terms, an anarchist solution to the problems he explored, calling for the decentralization of society to countervail the looming ecological crisis, in passages that presage the marriage of anarchism and ecology that he would expound more fully twelve years later:

“In decentralization exists a real possibility for developing the best traditions of social life and for solving agricultural and nutritional difficulties that have thus far been delivered to chemistry. Most of the food problems of the world would be solved to-day by well-balanced and rounded communities, intelligently urbanized, well-equipped with industry and with easy access to the land. . . . The problem has become a social problem – an issue concerning the misuse of industry as a whole.”(7)

For almost half a century, this assertion of the social causes of ecological problems, and the insistence on their solution by a revolutionary decentralization of society have remained consistent in Bookchin’s writings. He elaborated these ideas further in Our Synthetic Environment, a pioneering 1962 work that was published five months before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; unlike Carson’s book, Our Synthetic Environment did not limit its focus to pesticides. A comprehensive overview of ecological degradation, it addressed not only the connections between food additives and cancer but the impact of X-radiation, radionucleides from fallout, and the stresses of urban life, giving a social elaboration of what in those days was called “human ecology.”(8)

The freer political atmosphere of the 1960s allowed Bookchin to express more clearly his revolutionary perspective. His 1964 essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first manifesto of radical ecology, overtly called for revolutionary change as a solution to the ecological crisis. It advanced a conjunction of anarchism and ecology to create an ecological society that would be humane and free, libertarian and decentralized, mutualistic and cooperative.

In its range and depth, Bookchin’s dialectical synthesis of anarchism and ecology, which he called social ecology, had no equal in the postwar international Left. The first major effort to fuse ecological awareness with the need for fundamental social change, and to link a philosophy of nature with a philosophy of social revolution, it remains the most important such effort to this day.

Social ecology, drawing on multiple domains of knowledge, traces the roots of the ecological crisis to dislocations in society. As Bookchin put it in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”: “The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world.”(9) This inextricable relation between society and ecology remains a pillar of social ecology.

But social ecology has not only a critical dimension but a reconstructive one as well. Since the causes of the ecological crisis are social in nature, we can avert the present danger of ecological disaster only by fundamentally transforming the present society into a rational and ecological one. In this same 1964 article, in “Toward a Liberatory Technology” (written the following year), and in many subsequent works, Bookchin described his version of the truly libertarian socialist society. It would be a decentralized and mutualistic one, free of hierarchy and domination. Town and country would no longer be opposed to each other but would instead be integrated. Social life would be scaled to human dimensions. Politics would be directly democratic at the community level, so that citizens can manage their own social and political affairs on a face-to-face basis, forming confederations to address larger-scale problems. Economic life would be cooperative and communal, and technology would eliminate onerous and tedious labor.

Bookchin would elaborate and refine many aspects of this society – and the means to achieve it – over subsequent decades. But its earliest outlines were sketched as early as 1962 and developed in 1964 and 1965. Here Bookchin also proposed that an ecological society could make use of solar and wind power as sources of energy, replacing fossil fuels. At that time renewable energy sources – solar and wind power – were subjects of some research and experimentation, but they had essentially been abandoned as practical alternatives to fossil and nuclear fuels; nor did the existing environmental literature pay much attention to them. Not only did Bookchin show their relevance to the solution of ecological problems, he stood alone in demonstrating their integral importance to the creation of an ecological society.

“To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind, and tidal energy can reach us mainly in small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new devices seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity. . . . To use solar, wind, and tidal power effectively, the megalopolis must be decentralized. A new type of community, carefully tailored to the characteristics and resources of a region, must replace the sprawling urban belts that are emerging today.”(10)

These renewable sources of energy, in effect, had far-reaching anarchistic as well as ecological implications.

The list of Bookchin’s innovations in ecological politics does not stop here. To take another example: Warnings of a greenhouse effect were hardly common in the early 1960s, yet Bookchin issued just such a warning in 1964.

“It can be argued on very sound theoretical grounds that this growing blanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting heat radiated from the earth, will lead to rising atmospheric temperatures, a more violent circulation of air, more destructive storm patterns, and eventually a melting of the polar ice caps (possibly in two or three centuries), rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas.”(11)

Bookchin underestimated only the time frame – and it is testimony to the enormity of the ecological problem that the damage that he anticipated would take centuries to develop has actually developed in only a matter of decades.

Bookchin spent much of the 1960s criss-crossing the United States and Canada, indefatigably educating the counterculture and New Left about ecology and its revolutionary significance. The first Earth Day in 1970, followed by the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, signaled the arrival of ecology as a popular issue. But in the following years a less radical, more technocratic approach to ecological issues came to the fore, one that, in Bookchin’s view, represented mere environmental tinkering: instead of proposing to transform society as a whole, it looked for technological solutions to specific environmental problems.

Calling this approach reformistic rather than revolutionary, Bookchin labeled it “environmentalism,” in contradistinction to his more radical “ecology.” Although some histories of the ecological and environmental movements now assert that Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was the first to distinguish between environmentalism and ecology (in a paper on deep ecology, presented as a lecture in 197212), Bookchin made this distinction in November 1971, in “Spontaneity and Organization,” anchoring it, as always, in a social and political matrix:

“I speak, here, of ecology, not environmentalism. Environmentalism deals with the serviceability of the human habitat, a passive habitat that people use, in short, an assemblage of things called ‘natural resources’ and ‘urban resources.’ Taken by themselves, environmental issues require the use of no greater wisdom than the instrumentalist modes of thought and methods that are used by city planners, engineers, physicians, lawyers – and socialists.

“Ecology, by contrast, . . . is an outlook that interprets all interdependencies (social and psychological as well as natural) nonhierarchically. Ecology denies that nature can be interpreted from a hierarchical viewpoint. Moreover, it affirms that diversity and spontaneous development are ends in themselves, to be respected in their own right. Formulated in terms of ecology’s ‘ecosystem approach,’ this means that each form of life has a unique place in the balance of nature and its removal from the ecosystem could imperil the stability of the whole.”(13)

Bookchin’s core political program remained far too radical to gain general social acceptance in those decades. But many of his remarkably prescient insights have by now become commonplaces, not only in ecological thought but in mainstream popular culture, while their originating source has been forgotten or obscured. By advancing these ideas when he did, Bookchin exercised a strong and steady influence on the international development of radical ecological thought.

As significant as Bookchin’s prescient insights are, they are only part of what is actually a large theoretical corpus. Over the course of five decades, the ideas of social ecology have grown steadily in richness. Encompassing anthropology and history, politics and social criticism, philosophy and natural science, Bookchin’s works evoke the grand tradition of nineteenth-century generalists, who could write knowledgeably on a multiplicity of subjects – a tradition that is, lamentably, fast disappearing in the present age of scholarly specialization and postmodernist fragmentation.

Drawing on anthropology and history, Bookchin explored the libertarian and democratic traditions that could contribute to the creation of an ecological and rational society. A “legacy of freedom,” he believes, has run like an undercurrent within Western civilization and in other parts of the world, with certain social virtues and practices that are relevant to the socialist ideal. In its nascent form this legacy appears in the “organic society” of prehistoric Europe, with a constellation of relatively egalitarian social relations. These societies were destroyed by the rise of hierarchy and domination and ultimately by the emergence of states and the capitalist system.

Hierarchy and domination, it should be noted, are key concepts in Bookchin’s political work, for although in his view the ecological crisis has stemmed proximately from a capitalist economy, its ultimate roots lie in social hierarchies. The ideology of dominating the natural world, he has long maintained, is an anthropomorphic projection of human social domination onto the natural world. It could only have stemmed historically from the domination of human by human, and not the other way around. During the late 1960s and 1970s Bookchin’s anthropological, historical, and political explorations of the “legacy of freedom” and the “legacy of domination,” as he called it, percolated through radical social movements – not only the ecology movement but the feminist, communitarian, and anarchist movements as well. The concept of hierarchy in particular, assimilated by the counterculture into conventional wisdom, has become essential to radical thought due largely to Bookchin’s insistence on its nature and importance in many lectures in the late 1960s.

Bookchin’s ideas have retained an underlying continuity over the decades, and it is precisely by upholding his original principles that he has maintained his stalwart opposition to the existing capitalist and hierarchical system. As could be expected of any writer engaged in concrete political activity, his ideas have also changed over time; yet they have done so not to effect a compromise with the existing social order but to sustain a revolutionary position in response to regressive developments both in the larger society and within social movements for change. Often he has initiated intramural debates by objecting to tendencies that he considered out of place in a revolutionary movement, due to their opportunism, their accommodation to the system, or their quietism; his frequently polemical style stems from an earnest attempt to preserve the revolutionary impulse in movements that hold potential for radical social transformation. To his credit, he raised such objections even when the tendencies to which he objected were the more popular ones and when acquiescence would have enhanced his own popularity. Still, even as the key concepts of social ecology remain fundamentally unchanged since the 1960s, the many debates in which he has been engaged have primarily defined and sharpened them. If anything, his ideas have become more sophisticated over time as a result of these debates.

It is typical of Bookchin that his ideas should become honed as a result of practical movement experience. Despite his large body of theoretical writing, he is no mere armchair theorist. Throughout his life he has consistently maintained an active political practice: his union and protest activities in the Depression decade, his libertarian activities of the 1950s and 1960s, his mobilization of opposition to a nuclear power plant proposed for Queens in 1964, his civil rights activities, his participation in endless demonstrations and actions in the 1960s against the Vietnam war and in support of ecology and anarchism, his 1970s involvement in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, his efforts to preserve and expand democracy in his adopted state of Vermont, and finally his influence, in the 1980s, on the development of Green movements in the United States and abroad, trying – often unsuccessfully – to keep them on a radical course. Only in his eighth decade have physical infirmities – especially a nearly crippling arthritis – obliged him to withdraw from organized political activity.

Yet withdrawal from active political work has not meant that Bookchin has put down his pen. On the contrary, in an era of reaction, he continues to denounce tendencies that compromise the radicalism of the ecological and anarchist movements, be it a mystical “deep ecology” or an individualistic “lifestyle anarchism,” both of which he sees as personalistic and irrationalistic departures from the social, rational, and democratic eco-anarchism and socialism he has championed for decades. With the emergence of ecological-political tendencies that embraced irrationalism, he emphasize that an ecological society would neither renounce nor denigrate reason, science, and technology. So crucial is this point that he today prefers the phrase “rational society” to other labels for a free society, since a rational society would necessarily be one that is ecological. His commitment to longstanding socialist ideals, informed by Marx as well as by social anarchist thinkers, remains firm: for Murray Bookchin, the socialist utopia is still, as he once said, “the only reality that makes any sense.”

To all his writing, Bookchin brings a passionate hatred of the capitalist social order, expressed in the cadences of six decades of radical oratory. He brings to it the grim hatred of the grueling toil that he experienced in factories, and the acerbic intensity of one who has looked down the barrel of a gun during 1930s labor protests. At the same time he brings to it the originality and creativity of a thinker who is largely self-taught, and the love of coherence of one who studied dialectics with Marxists as a youth. He brings to it, in this age of diminished expectations, the outrage of one who consistently chooses morality over realpolitik, and he serves as the lacerating conscience of those who once held revolutionary sentiments but have since abandoned them.

A thorough understanding of his project would require a reading of his most important books. Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) contains the two pivotal mid-1960s essays mentioned in this introduction, which encapsulate so many ideas that he later developed more fully and that, in their uncompromising intensity, remain fresh to this day. The Ecology of Freedom (1982) is an anthropological and historical account not only of the rise of hierarchy and domination but of the “legacy of freedom,” including the cultural, psychological, and epistemological components of both. Although The Ecology of Freedom has been heralded in some quarters as Bookchin’s magnum opus, it has been followed by several books of at least equal importance. The Philosophy of Social Ecology, especially its revised edition (1995), is a collection of five philosophical essays on dialectical naturalism, the nature philosophy that underpins his political and social thought; he himself regards it as his most important work to date. Remaking Society (1989) is a summary overview of his ideas, with emphasis on their anarchist roots. From Urbanization to Cities (which has previously appeared under the titles Urbanization without Cities and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship) is a wide-ranging exposition of libertarian municipalism, Bookchin’s political program, giving much attention to popular democratic institutional forms in European and American history. Re-enchanting Humanity (1995) is his defense of the Enlightenment against a variety of antihumanistic and irrationalistic trends in popular culture today. Finally, his three-volume The Third Revolution (of which the first volume is already in print at this writing) traces the history of popular movements within Euro-American revolutions, beginning with the peasant revolts of the fourteenth century and closing with the Spanish Revolution of 1936- 37.

The present reader brings together selections from Bookchin’s major writings, organized thematically. Even as I have tried to show the development of his ideas over time, I have emphasized those works that have stood the test of time and that are most in accordance with his views today, at the expense of works that, generated in the heat of polemic, sometimes verged on one-sidedness. All of the selections are excerpted from larger works, and all have been pruned in some way, be it to achieve conciseness, to eliminate repetition among the selections in this book, or to produce a thematic balance among them. I have very lightly copyedited a few of the selections, but only where the need for it was distracting. Regrettably, but necessarily for reasons of space, I have had to cut all textual footnotes, retaining only those that cite a specific source. Except for these notes, I have indicated all cuts in the text with ellipsis points. I have provided the sources for all the selections in the listing that appears at the end of this book.

Janet Biehl

Notes

1. Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” 1964; as reprinted in Anarchy 69, vol. 6 (1966), p. 18. The section “Observations on Classical Anarchism” appeared in the original essay, as it was published in Comment in 1964 and in Anarchy in 1966, but it was cut from the reprinting in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977).
2. Ibid., pp. 18, 21.
3. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C., and Covelo, Calif.: Island Press, 1993), p. 83; Nolan is quoted on p. 37.
4. Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” Contemporary Issues, vol. 3, no. 12 (June- August 1952), p. 235.
5. Ibid., pp. 206, 211.
6. Ibid., p. 209.
7. Ibid., p. 240.
8. Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). For a comparison with Silent Spring, see Yaakov Garb, “Change and Continuity in Environmental World-View,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, edited by David Macauley (New York: Guilford, 1996), pp. 246-47.
9. “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 62.
10. Ibid., p. 74-75.
11. “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as it appeared in Anarchy, p. 5. Some of the words from this passage were cut when the essay was republished in Post-Scarcity Anarchism; see p. 60 of that book.
12. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry, vol. 16 (1973), pp. 95-100.
13. Murray Bookchin, “Spontaneity and Organization,” lecture delivered at the Telos conference, Buffalo, N.Y., 1971; published in Anarchos, no. 4 (1973) and in Liberation (Mar. 1972); republished in Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), where this quotation is on pp. 270-71

Libertarian municipalism, the political dimension of social ecology that was developed by Murray Bookchin, is the most recent manifestation of this grand tradition. As a libertarian politics of social revolution, it constitutes both a theory and a practice for building a libertarian communist society organized as a “Commune of communes.”

Libertarian municipalism does not constitute a party program; nor does it advocate the formation of a party machine to attain state power. Rather, it is a program for direct democracy, in which citizens in communities manage their own affairs through face-to-face processes of decision-making.

What Is Politics?

As we all know, the state, with its monopoly of the legitimate means of violence, is a system of domination that, far from empowering the great majority of people as citizens, ensures the general abdication of their power and their subordination to rule by the few. Even though the state designates people in its jurisdiction as “citizens,” it conceives them as something less than citizens: in earlier times it was “subjects,” today it is “voters” or “constituents,” but in either cases it considers them to be too juvenile or too incompetent to manage public affairs and instead takes their power to wield itself presumably in their behalf. In the late nineteenth century, when social revolution seemed imminent in many parts of Europe, social democratic parties arose that sought to make use of state structures, not to build socialism but to head off revolution and insure that people remained in passive conformity to the social order. Most recently, the state has been reducing people to “customers” or “consumers” of the social services with which it provides them. These dependent “consumers,” as always, function passively and acquiescently, are to perform their limited tasks in a narrow corner of life, drawing salaries, raising families, and looking to the state to provide the rest.

The elites who wield power in the state are actually concerned less with the interests of the large number of people than with the practical exigencies of control and mobilization. Most notably, they form parties to try to gain power–parties that, in effect, are states-in-waiting. Professionalized and manipulative, in their periodic appeals to ordinary peeople for votes, these elite systems impersonate democracy, making a mockery of the democratic ideals to which they cynically swear fealty at opportune moments.

To label this system politics is a gross misnomer, as Bookchin has pointed out–as an apparatus for rule, it should more properly be called statecraft. Politics, by contrast, concerns the arena and insstitutions by which people directly manage their community affairs. Unfortunately, confusion between politics and statecraft has been widespread, not only in society as a whole but in the Left as well. Marxists, for example, are notorious for mistaking statecraft for politics. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has recently informed us that “the commitment to politics is what historically distinguished Marxian socialism.” What he means by politics here, however, is actually nothing more than statecraft. By calling for a workers’ state to lead us to a communist society, Marxism failed to consider politics in the sense of civic institutions of the commune by which we manage public affairs. In this sense Marxism lacks any real political theory at all.

Anarchists, most lamentably, have suffered from a similar misidentification. They too have mistaken statecraft for politics–but where Marxists did so in order to practice statecraft, anarchists did so in order to reject it altogether. Bakunin exprressed the typical view in 1871 when he wrote that the new social order can be created “only through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or antipolitical social power of the working class in city and country.” Here he made “antipolitical” into a synonym for “antistatist.” Even Kropotkin–who called for the communalization of social life in The Conquest of Bread and described endless kinds of associations and groups that practice mutual aid–omitted to tell us by what specific political institutions people would manage their community in the postrevolutionary society.

In consequence anarchism, like Marxism, has historically given insufficient attention to politics in its fullest meaning. Yet the questions that Aristotle asked two thousand years ago still express the central problem of all political theory, including our own: What kind of polity best provides for the rich flourishing of communal human life?

As libertarian municipalists, we reply that the best polity is one that builds on the traditions of direct democracy. Indeed, we use the very word politics in its original Greek sense, to refer to the self-managing activity of empowered citizens in participatory civic institutions. In the politics we advance, citizens would manage their community affairs through face-to-face democratic institutions, especially popular assemblies and confederations of municipalities.

However remote this notion of politics may seem in today’s era of nation-states, it has historically found lived expression in a variety of places. It first arose in ancient Athens, where citizens–limited, unfortunately, only to free Athenian males–nevertheless attained a remarkable degree of self-management. At laterr points in Western history, direct democracies have recurred, in the town centers of many medieval European communes after A.D. 1000, in the town meetings of eighteenth-century New England, and in the sectional assemblies of revolutionary Paris of 1793, among other places.

Each of these democracies was deeply flawed by class and hierarchical stratification, yet in each of them people successfully congregated for a time, sometimes even as free citizens, to directly manage the communities in which they lived. Generally, even as popes, princes, and kings developed overarching structures of power, people in villages, towns, and neighborhoods maintained control over much of their own community life.

The rise and consolidation of centralized nation-states did much to stifle public participation and strip towns of their power and independence. Monarchs and their henchmen first brought nearby areas under their subjection, then later subordinated even distant localities to state control. Initially they carried out this invasion in the name of a privilege to rule that was said to be sanctioned divinely, but in later centuries the builders of republican states cast aside religious justifications and appropriated the terminology of “democracy” to sanctify their strictly representative institutions–parliaments, chambers of deputies, and congresses–cloaking the elitist, paternalistic, class-based, and coercive nature of those systems in the language of “popular sovereignty.”

At the same time the state itself was dramatically eroding municipal freedoms–as it continues to do today, eviscerating neighborhood life and municipal power in favor of professionalized institutions off administration and coercion. The Second World War further strengthened the state in relation to the cities, siphoning municipal power to allocate scarce resources upward to the national level, to military planners, and to bureaucrats, rendering cities ever more dependent on state planning. Today European cities are managed in great part by battalions of statist civil servants who administer it on a day-to-day basis.

If the nation-state did much to suppress municipal power, another phenomenon is wreaking even further havoc on the municipality today. Urbanization, that immense, formless capitalist blight, is swallowing up the definable, humanly scaled entities that once were authentic cities, absorbing small communities into larger ones, cities into metropolises, and metropolises into huge megalopolitan belts. Europe’s extended regions of urbanization cross the boundaries of cities and even states, as suburbs are swallowed up and absorbed into a sprawling metropolitan octopus. So intimately have urban settlements now converged that the English Channel and the Alps are no longer barriers to their amalgamation: a single north-south metropolitan region extends from Lancashire to central Italy, while another runs east-west between Valencia and Vienna.

In the United States a corresponding trend has moved economic life away from the traditional urban centers of the Northeast and toward the Sunbelt, so that the Far West is now the most urbanized part of the country. As the megalopolis spreads, sprawl, condominium subdivisions, highways, faceless shopping malls, parking lots, and industrial parks are sweeping ever deeper into the countryside.

This spread of the market economy serves nothing but the expansionist imperatives of capital. By corroding the public sphere in favor of the market, capitalism has accelerated the demolition of municipal freedoms to the point that they may very well disappear entirely from our societies. So avidly have centralized European governments accommodated the needs of capital that many municipalities are becoming little more than agencies for the delivery of social services originating in the state.

Perhaps the most extreme instance of this process occurred in Great Britain, where throughout the decade of the 1980s Thatcher’s Tory government instituted a series of local government acts that aggressively and systematically stripped local government of many of its powers, appropriating some for itself but leaving others to private companies, culminating in the outright abolition of the Greater London Council in 1985. A new, distinctly nonpolitical model of municipal government has since emerged in Britain, in which it is expected, not to provide a democratic arena for policymaking by citizens, but to perform according to market and efficiency principles in the delivery of services. In the United States, in conjunction with the capitalist economy, municipal governments are not only privatizing public services but are blatantly pandering to corporations, doling out tax breaks to companies willing to locate within their borders.

Today the forces of capitalism cross national boundaries as well, and I sometimes think that the only place where people still sing “The Internationale” with conviction (albeit with significantly altered lyrics) must be the corporate boardroom. As the Third World or South sinks into chaos and misery, much of the world is being arranged to meet the needs of the transnational corporations and the bond market.

As these larger social forces corrode neighborhood and community life, the authentic meaning of politics is gradually being forgotten. People in Western societies are losing their memory of politics as an active, vital process of self-management, and as they do so they participate in the idea that citizenship consists of nothing more than voting and paying taxes and passively receiving state-provided services.

In the United States political activity has migrated from neighborhoods, unions, wards, and civic associations to television, where even statecraft is becoming a spectator sport. Indeed, in this “nation of spectators,” the passive consumption of media entertainment fills the void of desocialized consciousness. Moreover, the prevalent American social desideratum is not to enrich the commonmality but to acquire things for oneself. Rampant egotism, an overabundance of dishonesty, and celebrity worship pervade the culture of Dollarland.

To a great extent, however, the hollowness, the meaninglessness of this system has become evident to people in the street, who understand that the pervasive influence of money and manipulation is undermining even statecraft’s outward veneer of democracy. If they are passive in relation to state and party activities, it is often because they regard them as futile and untrustworthy, and because social and economic pressures have forced them to narrow their concerns to material survival.

Yet in many parts of the European and American world, local political life remains alive to a degree that is remarkable, considering the social forces arrayed against it. Even in communities that have been stripped of their former proud powers, formal and informal political arenas still abide–civic associations, town meetings, forums, issue-oriented initiatives, and the like–as arenas for face-to-face public proceesses. In the cities of Europe, self-government has a long and venerable tradition, and for many Europeans the municipality is still a significant locus of political identification. In the United States, a relatively decentralized system, a deep distrust of government dating back to the colonial era still persists, while a nostalgia for small-town life expresses a desire for a mutually nurturing community where people are no longer held hostage to market forces but are free to practice mutual aid and cooperation. Even in the Information Age, when asked what “community” is, people most often think of their town or neighborhood.

Nor has the city as a site of political resistance been entirely obliterated. Submerged as it is within an urbanized nation-state beholden to capitalism, it nonetheless lingers as a historic presence, a repository of long-standing traditions, sentiments, and impulses. Within itself it harbors memories of ancient civic freedoms, of self-management, on behalf of which the oppressed have struggled over centuries of social development. Cities like Paris and Lyons, Saint Petersburg and Barcelona, carry repressed memories of revolutionary activity that was based at least as much in the city neighborhood as it was in the workplace. Said the program of the Friends of Durruti, as published in Los Amigos del Pueblo, “The municipality is the authentic revolutionary government.”

A self-conscious municipal political life thus perseveres as a latent prospect, a cherished goal of human emancipation. Power, having been taken from the people, can be recovered by them once again, and the potentially of the city as an irrepressible site for political self-management haunts the state like a bad dream. Despairing of the meaninglessness of their lives, ordinary people–at the level of the municipality–may once again begin to look outward to politics as the medium of empowerment and rediscovver its communalistic joys.

Democracy potentially works best in urban communities where a long-standing commitment to the urban polity is expressed in flourishing civic associations and in a history of self-government. But that does not exclude from self-government those urban communities that lack such a history. Where the latent political realm no longer exists, a self-conscious movement for municipal direct democracy can and should revive it, so that over time it gains strength. Such a movement could enlarge the municipality’s democratic content beyond the limitations of previous eras, building it into a living arena for change, education, empowerment, and revolutionary confrontation with the state and capital.

Our project, as libertarian municipalists, is to build precisely such a movement: to resuscitate a local political realm and expand local direct democracy. We aim to institutionalize this direct democracy in citizens’ assemblies–in neighborhood and town meetings–where citizens of a given municipality may meet, deliberate, and make decisions on matterrs of common concern. Where such assemblies already exist, we aim to expand their democratic potential; where they formerly existed, we aim to revive them; and where they never existed, we aim to create them anew. We seek to build that democracy into a strong force, by which citizens may manage society as a whole. In the end, we aim to evict both the capitalist system and the nation-state in favor of humane and cooperative social relations–a rational, ecological libertarian communist society.

To bring the nascent political realm of the municipality to this fulfillment, we need to place the management of the city entirely in the hands of its competent adult community members. Shedding their artificially induced personae as passive spectators, as consumers, and as isolated monads, citizens would recognize their mutual interdependence and as such work to advance their common welfare. In the political realm they would create the institutions that make for broad community participation and sustain them on an ongoing basis, finally regaining the power that the state has usurped from them.

To begin this long and complex process, we must start with the basic seed kernels of the political sphere: the crowded city sidewalk, the square, the park, the town hall–the public spaces where private life shades into public life, where the personal becomes, to one degree or another, the commmunal. Frequent and repeated encounters among community members in these spaces are the germs of the political realm, and the issues of common interest that people discuss here are the its primary subjects of concern. Our urban and social environment, as Lewis Mumford once rightly argued, should be one that, instead of shutting people off from one another, encourages them to encounter and interact with each other most often and most immediately.

Before we begin to cultivate these seeds, we need to form study groups, to educate ourselves and those sympathetic comrades who wish to work with us about the nature of the libertarian municipalist project. We must offer an alternative vision, a utopian vision–to use an unpopular word today–of what is socially desirable, in order to open up a concrete consideration of alternative ppossibilities. We need to commit ourselves to putting that vision into practice. As social anarchists and libertarian communists, we need to ground ourselves not only in our own familiar literature but in social ecology, in left-libertarian history and theory, in the history of democratic traditions and communalist practices, both in our own areas and in other parts of the world, and in democratic and political theory.

As our study groups become political groups, it is crucial that we commit ourselves to the development of libertarian municipalist theory. Some anarchist circles today are deeply suspicious of the very notion of theory, regarding it as inherently authoritarian, confusing theory with dogma, and confusing groups that advocate a theory with political sects. But if it is impossible to have a correct position, then it is also impossible to reject an incorrect position.

Adhering to a theory is crucial for maintaining our political direction, for as we build a movement, we will inevitably be called upon to make political choices, and in order to make the best choices, we will need an end vision–a theory–to guide us. Unless we have an end in view, we cannot intelligently choose our means. Our theory should be basedd on our understanding of the strengths and failures of past revolutionary experiences, as well as our analysis of present social forces. It should not be fixed and inalterable–if we discover that part of it is wrong, then we should change it. But if we are not to be swept to the right along with most of the rest of society, we need a theory to keep ourselves mindful of what is rational.

As the Friends of Durruti repeatedly emphasized, there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. What went wrong with the CNT, they said, was that it “was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory.” The July 1936 revolution failed, they said, because “we did not have a concrete program. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty; but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists.”

As our study group commits itself to this theory and becomes a political group, it should adopt a constitution and a statement of principles, to give the group clear political definition. Having educated ourselves, we then need to go on to educate others and become an active presence in our communities. We should study local political and ecological issues of concern and produce a literature that clearly links them with our theoretical ideas. We need to publish community newspapers, make posters and leaflets. We need to distribute this literature in local bookstores and neighborhood centers and cafés. We need to get people talking with each other about the deep systemic roots of seemingly local problems.

We need to hold lecture series in public spaces. We should organize actions around immediate issues. We should be a continual presence in community politics. When issues of concern come before the local city council or planning commission, we should testify at public hearings–clearly identifying our movement. As we work on these immediate issues, we should always tie them to our demand for citizenns’ assemblies in the municipality, always call for a direct democracy and a cooperative society as a long-term solution to the issue at hand. The most important political point in our public education efforts should be the call for direct democracy.

If the citizens’ assemblies are to constitute a significant public sphere, they must eventually become arenas of substantive political power, and the decisions that citizens make there must become binding on the community. Our paramount demand to the existing local government should therefore be that these assemblies be instituted legally. We should demand that the municipal government change its governing charter to establish them, recognize their existence, and spell out their powers. Where citizens’ assemblies already exist, we should call for strengthening their powers at the expense of statist institutions.

It is highly unlikely, of course, that existing municipal governments would yield easily and willingly to this demand, that they would voluntarily surrender their powers to citizens’ assemblies. After all, in all too many respects current municipal institutions resemble miniature nation-states themselves. Indeed, existing city councils will almost certainly try to block any effort to establish effective citizens’ assemblies. In this situation our libertarian municipalist group may do two things.

First, we may take the initiative to create assemblies ourselves on an extralegal basis. We may convene them, then appeal to all citizens in our community to attend and participate in them. These assemblies would meet on a regular basis and debate local, regional, national, and even international issues, issuing resolutions and public statements as they see fit. Even though these assemblies will have as yet no legal power, what they can do is exercise enormous moral and exemplary power. In time, to the extent that more and more citizens see their moral significance and attend their meetings, existing municipal governments may well have no choice but to give them varying degrees of legality, an opening that we can then proceed to further expand and magnify.

Second, to advance the creation of assemblies on a legal basis, our group may run candidates for local elective office. Some anarchists today object to libertarian municipalism on the basis of just this notion, rejecting such electoralism as a form of parliamentarism or “city-statism.” Here a clear distinction must be made between parliamentarism and electoralism. Electoral activity in a municipality can be qualitatively different from statecraft, since the city and the state themselves are potentially qualitatively different from each other and even have a history of antagonism and even conflict. Bakunin himself favored anarchists’ undertaking local political activity, because he saw that municipal politics is basic to people’s political lives. The people, he wrote, “have a healthy, practical common sense when it comes to communal affairs. They are fairly well informed and know how to select from their midst the most capable officials. This is why municipal elections always best reflect the real attitude and will of the people.”

In the short term, our electoral campaigns will be educational efforts, intended to school citizens in the basic ideas of libertarian municipalism. They will be occasions for us to publicize our ideas and to spark public discussion. At every opportunity–in interviews, debates, and speeches–our candidates should call for the creation of citizens’ assemblies and advocate direcct democracy as forums for an authentic democracy.

Before our group engages in municipal elections, however, we should write an electoral platform that states the aims for which we are fighting–especially the radical democratization of municipal government. The platform should also contain a series of clearly speciffied immediate demands–what socialists have long called a minimum program–concerning issues of housing, transportation, environment, welfare, education, and the like. If another political group in our community demands similar reforms, we should escalate these immediate demands, always demanding ever more radical changes and popular institutions.

Our program should place these immediate demands in a radical context by tying them to the longer-term goal of fundamentally transforming society. If many people in our communities are not yet prepared to reject capitalism, we may use more palatable phrasing, referring, instead of “capitalism,” to “the market economy.” If the words “libertarian communism” are too frightening for some, then we may use the phrase “cooperative society” to refer to our ultimate vision. In any case we should speak in the idiom of our distinctive tradition even as we retain the substance of our libertarian communist ideals. Finally, when our efforts at public education have borne fruit and our community is radicalized, we may press for the achievement of our maximum program in all its magnificence–for libertarian communism in a rational, ecological anarchist society.

In the present period of political reaction, it is not likely that our movement will grow rapidly or meet with immediate electoral success. In fact, setbacks are to be expected. Only in a community whose political and democratic consciousness has been raised by the movement would it even be desirable for one of our candidates to actually win an election. If we are to avoid being demoralized by the inevitable setbacks, we must be prepared for our movement to grow slowly and organically, and we must be willing to explain our ideas over and over again, if necessary, with great patience, until the political climate finally becomes more radicalized and hence more amenable to our ideas.

When the citizens of a municipality do elect our candidates to office, it should be because they have come to agree with our platform. Immediately upon taking office, the new city councilors should begin to press, in public forums as well as the city council, for fully empowered citizens’ assemblies at the expense of existing city institutions. Where citizens’ assemblies do not exist, the councilors should aggressively introduce charter changes to create them; where they do exist, they should press for changes that give them increased power, including the legal power to formulate binding policies for the municipality as a whole.

Once we establish an assembly, by whatever means, its first action should be to constitute itself–to draw up procedural bylaws specifying how it will conduct its proceedings. These bylaws should establish the assembly’s ddecision-making procedures and define its offices, as well as its procedures for selecting individuals to hold those offices and for holding them accountable to the assembly as a whole.

The decisions that the assembly makes should be taken according to majority vote. Although this process will require the minority to conform to the results of a decision it opposes, the minority nonetheless will retain the crucial freedom to try to overturn the decision. It is free to openly and persistently articulate its reasoned disagreements to other members of the community, order to try to persuade them to reconsider the decision. By dissenting in an orderly and civil fashion, the minority keeps an issue alive and lays the groundwork for becoming the majority in its own right, hopefully advancing the political consciousness of the community in the process.

The establishment of a citizens’ assembly is not in itself a fulfillment; until its participating citizens develop radical content, it will be only an institutional structure. As such, it is a battleground for social struggles–especially the class struggle, which will be extended beyond the factory into the community at large. Clearly, conflicting class interests will appear in the assembly: Real estate developers and business people, state bureaucrats and party functionaries, proprietors and reactionaries, will all come to assembly meetings and try to advance their own interests or those of the institutions they represent. It will be the responsibility of our group and our allies to counter the self-interested and reactionary arguments of these people and persuade our fellow citizens that the system they represent should be vigorously opposed in favor of the larger community interest.

Once the minimum step of creating an assembly is taken, we may advance a transitional program of expanding the assembly’s power. As the popular democracy matures, with increased attendance at the assemblies–indeed, as citizens make these institutions their own–the assemblies can hope to acquire ever greater de facto power. Ultiimately city charters, where they exist, would have to be changed to affirm that the assemblies hold substantive power in civic affairs.

Thereafter the assemblies could work toward achieving the maximum demands of a libertarian municipalist polity: the confederation of municipal assemblies and ultimately the creation of a rational, ecological, libertarian society.

Creating a new society depends on changing not only political structures and social relations but consciousness as well, including the character qualities of the individual citizens who embody that society. Libertarian municipalism stands in the tradition of “civic humanism,” which places the highest value on the active, responsible participation of citizens in the management of their common affairs. Where modernity leaves us directionless and uprooted, civic humanism would seek to reembed us in ethical lifeways and democratic institutions.

We believe that politics is too important to be left to professionals–it must become the province of ordinary people, who have attained a high degree of political maturity, rather than the proviince of elite “specialists.” We believe that every adult citizen is potentially competent to participate directly in democratic politics. By rationally deliberating together, making decisions peacefully, and implementing their choices responsibly, citizens can be expected to develop a set of personal strengths and civic virtues–a character structure–commensurate with democratic political life.

Of these civic strengths and virtues, the most important are solidarity and reason. By any definition, citizenship presupposes solidarity, or a commitment to the public good. In contrast to the cynicism that prevails today, mature active citizens should understand that the perpetuation of their political community depends on their own active support for and participation in it. A mature identification with the community should bring with it a sense of responsibility. Each citizen can be expected to understand that, like all the others, they not only enjoy rights but owe duties to their community, and they should fulfill these responsibilities with the knowledge that everyone else was making the same effort.

Second, the faculty of reason should be of crucial importance in a direct democracy. Reasoned restraint and decorum are needed to keep a civic assembly orderly, tolerant, functional, and creative. Reason should allow citizens to weigh the possible courses of action that their community should take and select the best one. Indeed, reasonable evaluation–in contrast to emotion-laden partisanship–is a prerequisite for constructive discussion and deliberation. It is indispensaable for overcoming personal prejudices, leading us to treat our fellow citizens not with bigotry or vindictiveness but with fairness and generosity. It is also necessary to the survival of the community: Some citizens, for example, might attempt to revive private property and an entrepreneurial, profit-seeking spirit. In an attempt to gain our support for this end, they may well make appeals to our cupidity and greed. To resist these highly emotional appeals, we will need reason–as well as personal strength of character–to reject them in the interest of preserving the cooperative nature of the community.

Such a “civilizing” process should transform a group of self-interested individuals into a deliberative, rational, ethical body politic. This is not to say that a libertarian municipalist society would require individual men and women to be wholly self-sacrificing and subordinate themselves to the collectivity. On the contrary, each individual would enjoy a personal life as well, with intimate family members and with the friends and fellows they choose as companions, and with co-workers in productive activities. But as participants in a bold experiment, citizens would rely on one another to share responsibilities–and as they become more worthy of one another’s trust, they could place ever more trust in one another. Indeed, the individdual and the community, rather than be subordinate one to the other, could mutually create each other in a reciprocal process.

Historically, the societies that participated in the development of direct demcoracy have been ethnically homogeneous. But direct demoracy does not depend on ethnic homogeneity, since neither its practices nor its virtues are the exclusive property of one ethnic group. Thanks to international travel and communication, the world is shrinking, and municipalities today are becoming ever more ethnically heterogeneous; the mixing of cultures and ethnicities in cities will only grow in the coming years. In the school system of Vancouver, to cite just one example, Mandarin Chinese is now spoken more often than French, one of Canada’s official languages. Latino and Asian immigration is a central fact of life in Los Angeles. Under the present social order, it may well happen that neighborhoods will define themselves by ethnicity or national origin rather than shared civic space. Should particularistic emotions intensify beyond a certain point, the result could well be interethnic antagonism.

A rational democratic polity, however, would provide the public spaces where mutual understanding among people of different ethnic origin could grow and flourish: the citizens’ assembly would provide the neutral procedural structures by which ethnic groups could articulate their specific problems in the give-and-take of discussion, leading to greater mutual understanding. In this shared context people of all cultures could develop modesty about their own cultural assumptions. At the same time the community would share a common recognition of a general interest, based on environmental and communal concerns, that transcended particularistic concerns. A shared commitment to the development of solidarity and the practice of reason in public affairs would make our multicultural municipalities into havens of mutual aid and gardens of cultural creativity.

Our movement will thus offer more than its distinctive political platform; it will also offer a moral alternative to the vacuity and triviality of life today, in the form of radical solidarity and freedom. Like the great manifestos advanced by socialist movements in the last century, it would call for moral as well as material transformation. It would generate a cultural and artistic life to enhance the community’s political aims. It would be accompanied by communitarian institutions, like cooperatives, however limited and short-lived, that would help accustom people to the practices of cooperation. It would offer a meaningful life, with social roles far more satisfying than the never-ending buying and selling of useless goods.

If the democratic potential of the municipality is to be fulfilled, city life must ultimately be rescaled to the dimensions suitable for a democratic political realm. That is, even as municipalities undergo a process of democratization, existing large cities will have to be structurally decentralized into smaller municipalities of a manageable size.

Even the very largest of urban belts comprise within them smaller communities that share a distinctive cultural heritage or tradition. Most large cities today encompass smaller cities or boroughs, most famously London, which is a congeries of neighborhoods. The five-borough city of New York is actually a very recent phenomenon, dating back only to 1897. As recently as 1874, New York City consisted solely of the borough of Manhattan. A city that is only a hundred-odd years old has certainly not yet become eternal. At the same time, what one urban affairs specialist calls an “urban confederacy movement” is now under way in many American urban centers, such as St. Louis, Denver, and Orange County: here the citizens of what began as suburbs are finding that the large city is too big to work, and they are trying to redefine it as a league of smaller, incorporated, often multicultural pieces.

In large cities, citizens’ assemblies may at first be established in only few neighborhoods; they could then serve as models for other neighborhoods. The democratized neighborhoods that arise could then interlink with each other and form confederations that would coordinate transportation, sanitation, and other services. Neighborhoods that are in the process of being institutionally decentralized in this way could ultimately transform not only the political life of the city but its physical form as well.

As essential as decentralization is to libertarian municipalism, however, local self-reliance is not essential. No locality–not even a municipality that practices direct democracy–can be sufficient unto itself, nor should it be, in order to avoid local parochialism. Municipalities of all sorts are necessarily dependent upon one another and thereby share many common issues.

Least of all should individual communities seek to be entirely autonomous in their economic life. Any given individual community needs more resources and raw materials than it can derive from its own land. Economic interdependence is simply a fact–it is a function not of the competitive market economy, of capitalism, but of social life as such.

To allow for the full participation of citizens in political life, our libertarian communist society must rest on a sound technological as well as economic base that affords them sufficient free time; otherwise the demands of survival and personal security will overtake all other concerns and activities.

Today productive technologies have been developed sufficiently to make possible an immense expansion of free time, through the automation of tasks once performed by human labor. The basic means for eliminating toil and drudgery, for living in comfort and security, rationally and ecologically, for social rather than merely private ends, are potentially available to all peoples of the world.

Not even in the wealthiest existing societies, however, has this promise of post-scarcity–of a sufficiency in the means of life and the expansion of free time–been fulfilled. The reason lies not in the productivee technologies themselves but in the social relations that determine their use–social relations drive ever greater corporate profits and expansion. In the present society, for example, automation has very often created social hardships, like the poverty that results from unemployment, because corporations prefer machines to human labor in order to reduce production costs and increase profits. In a rational anarchist society, however, organized along cooperative lines, the social relations that drive the profit motive would be eliminated.

Under such a system, productive technologies–as part of a new economic order–could be used to create free time rather than misery. A post-scarcity society would retainn much of today’s technological infrastructure–including automated industrial plants–but it would use them to meet the basic needs of life and remove onerous toil rather than serve the imperatives of capitalism. Men and women would then have the free time to participate in political life as well as enjoy rich and meaningful personal lives. At the same time, rather than perpetuate the gross forms of concentration and centralization that we have today, we could rescale and retool our technological resources along ecological lines, decentralize them to meet a regional, even confederal division of labor and production, and thereby bring town and country into a creative balance.

The fruits of the productive forces would be distributed according to individuals’ need for them. Such distribution would be institutionalized through a system of organized cooperation, emanating from the interdependence of the democratized municipalities.

The type of political and social organization for institutionalizing such interdependence is the confederation.

A confederation is a lateral union in which several political entities combine to form a larger whole. Although in the process of confederating, these smaller entities form a larger entity, they do not dissolve themselves into it but retain their freedom and distinct identity. In the society we are seeking, the municipalities that have undergone democratization by forming citizens’ assemblies would form confederations on a regional basis to address shared transmunicipal or regional problems.

In a republican state, a parliament or legislature of representatives determines social policy by voting to approve or reject specific laws. In a confederation, by contrast, a congress or council of delegates acts to administer the policies that have been established by the assemblies of the member communities. In our new polity, the libertarian municipalities of a given region would send delegates to a confederal council. These delegates would not be policymaking representatives; rather they would individually be accountable to the assemblies that chose them, and they would be imperatively mandated by those assemblies. They would not be permitted to make policy decisions without first gaining the assent of their home assemblies, and they would be immediately recallable at the assemblies’ discretion.

Indeed, rather than making policy decisions itself, the confederal council would exist primarily for administrative and adjudicative purposes–that is, for the purpose of coordinating policies formulated by the assemblies, reconciling (with base approval) differencess among them, and carrying out their administration.

It is the citizens, deliberating in their democratic assemblies, who would make policy. They would develop possible various courses of action on a particular issue, deliberate their various strengths and weaknesses, then make their decision according to majority vote. Free citizens in assemblies alone have the right to make policy. The functions of the confederal council, by contrast, would be purely administrative and coordinative–executing policies that the municipalities have already adopted.

Would ordinary citizens in assemblies be capable of making decisions about a society that is as complex as ours? Today and every day, parliamentarians–commonly lawyers–make decisions about a multitude of various complex and difficult subjects. Even when an issue involves great technological complexity, however, these parliamentarians rarely need extensive technical knowledge in order to weigh the alternatives. Few parliamentarians today, for example, would know how to technically engineer a road, yet they frequently make policy decisions about the need for, location, and size of roads. In a free society, in cases where specific technical knowledge is actually needed to make a decision, those who have that expertise would present it clearly and accessibly, so that ordinary citizens of reasonable competence can make the best policy decision.

When a policy decision must be made on a matter that affects the entire confederation, the confederal council would coordinate confederation-wide voting by majority rule. The final outcome of the voting would be determined by tallying not the votes of individual towns voting as units, but the aggregate votes of all the citizens of all the municipalities in the confederation. The confederation would thus possess, by majority vote of its citizens, the power to prevent a particular municipality from inflicting moral or physical damage on its own members or on other towns or cities.

At the same time the aggregated municipalities would have ultimate power within the confederation, in that they embody direct democracy of free citizens and in that their separate assemblies engage in rational discourse before making decisions. The principles of assembly sovereignty and free discourse decisively distinguish our approach from statism: where statism allows, at best, for the illusory liberty of isolated monads in mass plebiscites, confederal democracy encourages citizens to frame possible approaches to an issue in their own terms and explore them thoroughly before deciding among them. Consciously formed to accommodate interdependencies, then, a confederation of municipalities would unite face-to-face democratic decision-making with transmunicipal administration. Confederations of municipalities could be formed on a global basis, thereby fulfilling the longstanding dream of revolutionary movements past, to achieve a rational “Commune of communes.”

The type of economic life that we advance is neither nationalized (as in state socialism), nor placed in the hands of workers by factory (as in syndicalism), nor privately owned (as in capitalism), nor reduced to small proprietary cooperatives (as in communitarianism). Rather, it is municipalized–that is, placed under community “ownership” and control in the form of citizens’ assemblies.

This municipalization of the economy means the “ownership” and management of the economy by the citizens of the community and its coordination with other municipalized economies through confederation. Property–including both land and factories–would come under the overall control of citizens in their assemblies, coordinated by conffederal councils. The citizens would become the collective “owners” of their community’s economic resources and would formulate their economic policies in the interest of the community as a whole.

Citizens would thus make economic decisions not for their individual workplaces but for the entire community. Those who work in a particular factory, for example, would participate in formulating policies not only for that factory but for all other factories as well. They would participate in this decision-making not as workers, farmers, technicians, engineers, or professionals, but as citizens. The decisions they make would be guided not by the interests of their specific enterprise or vocation, which may be very parochial or trade-oriented, but by the needs of the entire community.

Where resources are distributed very unevenly, popular rule cannot be sustained. Without a rough economic equality, democracy of any sort is ephemeral, giving way sooner or later to oligarchy or worse. In our free society, economic inequality would be eliminated by turning wealth, private property, and the means of production over to the municipality. Through the municipalization of the economy, citizens in assemblies would ultimately expropriate the riches of the possessing classes and place them in the hands of the community, so that it can be used for the benefit of all.

The assembly would also make decisions about the distribution of the material means of life, fulfilling the communist promise of post-scarcity. “From each according to ability and to each according to need”–the demand of all nineteenth-century communist movements–would become a living practice, with levels of need rationally dettermined by the assembly. Everyone in the community would thus have access to the means of life, regardless of the work he or she was capable of performing. A rough economic equality would emerge, based on morally and rationally formulated criteria established by its citizens’ assembly.

Economic life as such would be brought under the control of the political realm, which would absorb it as part of the public business of the assembly. Neither the factory nor the land could ever again become a separate competitive unit with its own particularistic interests.

The assembly’s decisions, it is to be expected, would be guided by rational and ecological standards, and the economy would become a moral economy. An ethos of public responsibility could avoid a wasteful, exclusive, and irresponsible acquisition of goods, as well as ecological destruction and violations of human rights. Citizens in assemblies could consciously insure that economic entities adhered to ethical precepts of cooperation and sharing. Classical notions of limit and balance could replace the capitalist imperative to expand and compete in the pursuit of profit. The community would value people, not for their levels of production and consumption, but for their positive contributions to community life.

Over the wider geographical range, citizens would make economic policy decisions through their confederations. The wealth expropriated from the property-owning classes would be redistributed not only within a municipality but among all the municipalities in a region. If one municipality tried to engross itself at the expense of others, its confederates would have the right to prevent it from doing so. A thorough politicization of the economy would thereby extend the moral economy to a broad regional scale.

We do not believe that a “Commune of communes” can be achieved in a single revolutionary upsurge. Rather, as our movement grows over the long term, more and more municipalities would democratize themselves and form confederations. Eventually, when a considerable number of municipalities are democratized and confederated, their shared power would constitute a clear threat to the state and to the capitalist system.

The existing power structure would hardly tolerate the existence of such confederations, with their democratic politics, empowered citizenry, and incipient municipalized economy. In defense of capitalism and its own power, the state would almost certainly move against the confederations. If our movement is serious about opposing the state, we must work to divest the state of its monopoly of armed force, by creating a civic guard or citizens’ militia for the protection of our freedom and rights.

For a century and a half, the international socialist movement recognized the necessity of a citizens’ militia as an alternative to the standing army. The anarchist and syndicalist movements considered an armed people to be a sine qua non for a free society. Bakunin wrote in 1866: “All able-bodied citizens should, if necessary, take up arms to defend their homes and their freedom. Each country’s military defense and equipment should be organized locally by the commune, or provincially, somewhat like the militias in Switzerland or the United States.”

A citizens’ militia is not merely a military force whose purpose is to defend major social change. It is also a symbol of the power of a free citizenry, their popular will, their resolve to assert their rights, and their commitment to build a new political dispensation based on face-to-face democracy. Moreover, the very presence of a civic militia is an appeal to the rank and file members of the state’s armed forces to support the establishment of such a democracy.

We therefore include in our program the formation of a civic militia or guard, under the strict supervision of the citizens’ assemblies. It would be a democratic institution in itself, with officers elected both by the militia and by the citizens’ assembly.

The larger and more numerous the municipal confederations become, the greater would be their latent power, and the greater would be their potentiality to constitute a counterpower to the nation-state. As they realize this potentiality, tension would likely grow between themselves and the state. Citizens must clearly recognize that this tension is highly desirable–indeed, that their confederated municipalities constitute a potential counterpower to the state.

In fact, the confederated municipalities may eventually gain enough support to constitute a dual power to the state. This situation would likely be highly unstable, and resolving it could well involve a confrontation. It is possible, too, that our direct democracy will institutionally “hollow out” the state power itself, delegitimating its authority and winning a majority of the people over to the new civic and confederal institutions. With or without a confrontation, however, power will have to be shifted away from the state and the professional practitioners of statecraft and entirely into the hands of the people and their confederated assemblies.

In Paris in 1789 and in Petrograd in February 1917, state authority collapsed in the face of a revolutionary confrontation. So hollowed out was the power of the seemingly all-powerful French and Russian monarchies that when a revolutionary people challenged them, they merely crumbled. Crucially, in both cases, the ordinary rank-and-file soldiers of the armed forces went over to the revolutionary movement, to the armed people. What happened in the past can happen again, especially with an effective, conscious, and inspired revolutionary movement and program.

Despite their historical antagonism, anarchism and Marxism share in the last instance a common social goal: a stateless communism. Where they perhaps have differed most fundamentally is on the question of the revolutionary transition: the nature of the institutions that will struggle against counterrevolution and construct a new social and political order. Marxist movements thought it would be necessary to create a workers’ state to carry out the transition; once the state carried out this function, they expected it to wither away.

As anarchists rightly pointed out, this expectation was absurd–the “workers’ state” would merely become a new tyranny and, if anything, would have to be overthrown by another revolution. Further, they objected, the wide discrepancy between Marxism’s revolutionary means and its revolutionary end was so wide as to be intrinsically immoral. Let the means and ends be the same, anarchists demanded; let a free, cooperative society be created by a free, cooperative movement on the part of the people.

Their criticism of the Marxist transition was more than justified, but on the other hand, by depending on changes of consciousness and spontaneous upsurges to enact the revolution, anarchists too often left unanswered the question of the revolutionary transition: How would the struggle against a counterrevolution be carried out? In many cases they seemed to assume that the initial spontaneous upsurge would be sufficient to eliminate the state and capitalism, and that establishing the new social order would simply be a matter of finally permitting existing cooperative institutions to rise to the surface. Bakunin was typical when he wrote: “With the abolition of the State, the spontaneous self-organization of popular life, for centuries paralyzed and absorbed by the omnipotent power of the state, will revert to the communes.”

But clearly in our day, when the state and capitalism have done so much to damage the ability of ordinary people for spontaneous self-organization; when most people are hypnotized into pursuing never-ending consumption and the maximization of their own self-interest; and when they have been reduced to passive spectators in relation to everything beyond their personal concerns–in such circumstances the new communal order will not be created by a spontaneous upsurge. The process, now if not in Bakunnin’s day, will require preparation. Civic politics is threatening to drift out of memory, and if people are to fully recover that historical memory, they will need education.

Most important, the revolution will require an institution to carry out the revolutionary transition. Certainly the revolutionary institution that the Marxists chose, the workers’ state, was nothing short of disastrous. But what, then, is an appropriate transitional institution? We reply that it is the confederal democracy itself, the Commune of communes, the rudiments of which we can work for now, and that will both educate the citizenry and make the revolutionary transition. And in accordance with anarchism’s demand for the unity of means and ends, our transitional institution, the counterpower against the state, is the same as our final institution, the polity that, as Aristotle described it so long ago, best provides a rich flourishing of human life.

As capitalism creates deeper and deeper inroads into social and political life, we cannot stand back and watch the process happen with resignation. Many of the appalling changes that society is undergoing at century’s end are not fated to take place but may be aborted, or turned to the good, or their evil delimited; together as we create a movement to transform society, we will decide how we can curtail them.

Nor can the nation-state and the capitalist system survive indefinitely. Not only is this system widening the divisions between rich and poor around the world into a yawning chasm, but it is also on a collision course with the biosphere. Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative, in particular, which seeks profit for capital expansion at the expense of all other considerations, stands radically at odds with the practical realities of interdependence and limit, both in social terms and in terms of the capacity of the planet to sustain life.

In the next century global warming alone is expected to wreak havoc with the climate, causing rising sea levels, catastrophic weather extremes, epidemics of infectious diseases, and diminished arable land and hence agricultural capacity. At the very least, hunger and disease will soar. It is reported that, at a U.S. cabinet meeting in September 1997, Robert Rubin, the U.S. Treasury secretary, exclaimed to Vice President Al Gore: “This damn global warming issue could send the economy into a death spiral!”

If such a death spiral does develop, however, its social outcome will by no means necessarily be the rational, ecological, libertarian society that social anarchists desire. It is certainly possible that states will attempt to become even more authoritarian in order to repress social unrest. If the crisis is to result in human emancipation, the liberatory alternative will have to already be in place at least to some extent. Increasingly, our choice seems clear: Either people will establish a democratic, cooperative, ecological society, or the ecological underpinnings of society will collapse. The recovery of politics and citizenship is thus not only a precondition for a free society; it may very well be a precondition for our survival as a species. In effect, the ecological question demands a fundamental reconstruction of society, along lines that are cooperative rather than competitive, democratic rather than authoritarian, communal rather than individualistic–above all by eliminating the capitalist system that is wreaking havoc on the biosphere.

Capitalism will not provide us with the popular democratic institutions that we need if we are to eliminate it. On the contrary, it will fight to the bitter end to preserve itself, its social relations, and its state institutions. If we are to gain emancipatory institutions, we must create them ourselves, with our well-organized libertarian municipalist movement.

Prerevolutionary periods are usually quite short. Once revolution is on the horizon, we are unlikely to have a great deal of time to perform the painstaking, molecular work of education and organization that the situation will require. Left libertarians should be building such a movement now, showing people how they can take their political and economic lives into their own hands, how they can coordinate and institutionalize those arenas to build a society that will restore their humanity. It will require endless patience, but it must be done, lest the coming crisis result in tyranny.

The social problems that compel us to act are quite concrete and in many cases transcend strictly class issues, as important as class issues are. The desire to preserve the biosphere is universal among most rational people. The need for community is abiding in the human spirit, welling up repeatedly over the centuries, especially in times of social crisis. As for the capitalist economy, let us recall that it is little more than two centuries old; in the mixed economy that preceded it, culture restrained acquisitive desires, and it could do so once again, reinforced by a post-scarcity technology.

It is impossible to predict when social crises will take place, or what social conditions will result from them. What is clear, however, is that the demand for a rational society summons us to be rational beings–that is, to live up to our uniquely human potentialities and construct the Commune of communes to fulfill our very humanity.

In many places old democratic institutions linger within the sinews of today’s republican states. The commune lies hidden and distorted in the city council; the sectional assembly lies hidden and distorted in the neighborhood; the town meeting lies hidden and distorted in the township; and municipal confederations lie hidden and distorted in regional associations of towns and cities. By unearthing, renovating, and building upon these hidden institutions, where they exist, and building them where they do not, we can democratize the republic and then radicalize the democracy to create the conditions for a degree of social freedom unprecedented in history.

Radicalizing a direct democracy would impart political fulfillment to the institutions that our movement has created. Hence the slogan for our movement: “Democratize the republic! Radicalize the democracy!”

Although the cry has become more common since the collapse of the Soviet system, it did not originate in this era. Realo Greens were known to define their party as “neither left nor right” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much earlier in this century, in the interwar years, European fascists who intended to reject both capitalism and communism used a related concept to find their supposed “third way.” During the Spanish Civil War, the Falangists thought of themselves as “neither of the left nor right nor centre,” according to one farmer:

We were a movement with our own spirit, out not to defend the rich but also not to put the poor above the rich. In many points we agreed with the socialists. But they were materialist revolutionaries and we were spiritual ones. What differentiated us most was that we lacked the hatred of capitalism which they exhibited. The marxists declared war on anyone with wealth; our idea was that the right must give up a part in order to allow others to live better.(1)

In recent months the insurgent militia movement has occasioned still more rejections of the left-right dichotomy. In the leftist Nation, Alexander *censored*burn describes a “Patriot” rally in Michigan as “amiable.”(2) The Boston Globe advises its readers that the “Freemen” movement of Montana, with its ties to the militias and to apocalyptic religiosity, is “so far off the generally accepted political scale that terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ do not apply” (3/30/96). Jason McQuinn, formerly editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and currently editor of Alternative Press Review, denounces left and right as two sides of the same problem:

Left and right have both proved their bankruptcy throughout this century. And neither can lay legitimate claim to our loyalties. It’s way past time that both traditions received the scathing critiques they deserve, so that we can take what is best from them and discard what is worthless. It may be true that the left has often added far more of value to the defense of community and international solidarity than the right has ever been able to conceive. But both left and right have ultimately colluded in their support for the two “opposing” sides of capitalist development.(3)

Meanwhile libertarian author and publisher Adam Parfrey objects to leftists who would uphold distinctions between left and right, who “stump for the division of anti-establishment rightists and leftists,” since they are ultimately serving the interests of the ruling system.(4) In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, he argues, the militias have lamentably “become a scapegoat, a justification for intelligence agencies’ headlong rush into technocratic dystopia, where every financial transaction is instantly monitored by computers operated by the Fortune 500 and its omnipotent police force.” Those who criticize the militia movement, like the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Political Research Associates, ultimately serve the conspiracy itself. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates demands “ideological purification” that “creates divisions between individuals,” while Holly Sklar, in her book on the Trilateral Commission, advances a “crypto-Socialist theology.” So runs Parfrey’s argument.

That Parfrey’s neither-left-nor-right approach has found a congenial home in the pages of McQuinn’s Alternative Press Review reflects the drift of a major American anarchist editor away from the movement’s leftist roots. Meanwhile, some militia members themselves are happy to meet Parfrey and Quinn halfway in their rightward lurch. Bob Fletcher, chief propagandist for the Militia of Montana, is reassuring: “We don’t want to hear about left and right, conservative and liberal, all these bullshit labels. Let’s get back to the idea of good guys and bad guys, righteous governments—the honest, fair, proper, American government that all of us have been fooled into believing was being maintained.”(5)

To some extent, Americans of all political stripes have received a libertarian education. The United States was born in a revolution, and some of its most revered Founding Fathers extolled the right to make one. A too-obvious betrayal of the main pillar of the American promise—the ideal of democracy—could potentially inspire rebellion, even at a time when capitalism is deeply embedded in American social life. Antidemocratic forces that serve the interests of a privileged few rather than the people as a whole find that they must either mask their activities entirely or else stupefy the population by using the mass media. Still, suspicion of government persists, even intensifies today, as the institutions of the American republic are ever more palpably hocked to capitalist masters. Distrust of capitalism has not kept pace with distrust of government, even though corporate rapacity has at times been so extreme as to beget movements like the Populists of the 1890s that cast capitalism’s “creative destructiveness” as a betrayal of the American promise.

It was a year ago this month that the militia movement came to national attention, denouncing “the tyranny of a run-away, out of control government.”(6) In the wake of bungled government attacks on a militant separatist at Ruby Ridge (where an FBI sniper killed two people) and on an apocalyptic preacher and his followers at Waco (in which more than seventy people died), sentiment ran high that the government was out to divest ordinary Americans of their rights as citizens. In particular, the right to bear arms seemed under threat by the passage of the Brady bill, which authorized the beginnings of gun control. These smoldering resentments were intensified by real grievances among working-class people in the American heartland, where global and domestic restructuring was bringing downsizing, declining real wages, and permanent layoffs. Resentments burst into flames, and militia groups were established in at least forty states.

This movement swore to uphold American sovereignty against an array of international forces that seemed intent on diminishing it: the “new world order.” The Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, international trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and the United Nations had all at one time or another been castigated by the left; now the militias saw these institutions as components of a “new world order” subverting American sovereignty. They perceived, and still do perceive, a global conspiracy in which unseen but powerful hands are manipulating the American government and economy.

Conspiratorialism has a long history, as Michael Kelly recently wrote in The New Yorker, one that dates back to the late eighteenth century, when some began to believe that conspirators have been at it for more than two thousand years, perpetuating their plots through a succession of secret and semisecret societies arcing across time and cultures from the early-Christian-era Gnostics and the Jewish Cabalists, and on to the Knights Templars of the twelfth century, the Rosicrucians of the fifteenth, the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth, and from there, through the Freemasons, to the schemers of the twentieth—the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission. Along the way, step by step toward one-worldism, the plotters have caused everything from the French and Russian Revolutions to the creation of the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, and the Gulf War.(7)

In the nascent militia ideology, black helicopters, the Hong Kong police, microchips inserted under the skin, and programs to change the weather all become parts of the world-conspiratorial plot. An army representing the “new world order,” composed of United Nations troops and inner-city gangs, was soon going to occupy America and reduce its citizens to slaves. The Militia of Montana, one of the earliest and most influential of the militia groups, warns that “the Conspirators to form a socialist one world government under the United Nations are . . . at work treasonously subverting the Constitution in order to enslave the Citizens of the State of Montana, The United States of America, and the world in a socialist union.”(8)

The remnant left objects with equal ardor to the ongoing globalization and centralization of social, political, and economic forces, but its warrant is not that these forces are threatening American sovereignty; it makes no appeal to patriotism. Nor would the old leftist analysis perceive a sinister conspiracy manipulating the course of events. Rather, it rightfully argued, a specific social force is siphoning off people’s control over their lives and pulverizing their communities, commodifying social life and despoiling the biosphere, enervating convivial relationships and reducing people to wage slaves when they are at work and to mindless consumers the rest of the time. That system is capitalism.

To be sure, elite planning bodies do exist, according to Holly Sklar, author of Trilateralism, but they are not conspiracies:

Going back to the early 20th century, there are organizations that have placed fundamental role—not conspiracies but elite planning bodies, there’s a fundamental difference—in planning not just U.S. policy but global policy. I want to distinguish how I see the Trilateral Commission from a conspiracy theory. It’s not a conspiracy that pulls puppet strings and controls everything and everybody. It is the single most important international planning and consensus building organization among people from Western Europe, Japan, the U.S. and Canada who represent the interests of global corporations and banks—corporations like Exxon, General Motors, Sony, Toyota, Siemens, etc. . . . Too many think there’s either a grand conspiracy that controls everything all the time, or there are no important institutions whose motives and goals we need to understand. Too many people look at the Trilateral Commission that way. Either it’s a conspiracy or it’s a joke. That’s completely absurd.(9)

Some leftists have apparently suspended this rational understanding of social and economic forces to find a certain sympathy with the militias. The siren song of conspiratorialism, with its facile explanations and its occasional relish for dystopia, makes it all too easy to forget the overwhelmingly structural social forces that have produced misery in the world today. “This is the terrain,” as Philip Smith puts it, “where the Liberty Lobby meets the left, where the Trilateral Commission runs the world, and one-time Vietnam War protesters join militias to fend off the New World Order.” Distinctions between left and right can fall by the wayside, on the “climb toward the speculative heights where Communism and Capitalism are merely facets of the one great conspiracy.”(10) Avowed anarchist McQuinn maintains that while we must always remember our social analysis, we should not shut our minds to conspiracies: he would investigate and expose “the workings of the real world, whether this leads down the road to conspiratorial or structural explanations, or both.” Meanwhile Parfrey, a true conspiratorialist, defends the militias as kindred albeit misinformed spirits, since “the militia man with his Manichean conspiracies and apocalyptic dreams” presents a challenge to the “interlocking network” of government, private corporations, foundations, universities, and media.

Militia Antistatism

Militia members do share some views with traditional leftists, including left-libertarians. Indeed, militia ideology shares with traditional anarchism not only an opposition to a “new world order,” however one may define it, but a commitment to resisting government tyranny in defense of individual rights. In a passage that could have come from any leftist who takes seriously the legacy of the American Revolution, the Militia of Montana states that it intends to “put at odds any scheme by government officials to use the force of the government against the people.

When the codes and statutes are unjust for the majority of the people, the people will rightly revolt, and the government will have to acquiesce without a shot being fired, because the militia stands vigilant in carrying out the will of the people in defense of rights, liberty, and freedom. The purpose of government is in the protection of the rights of the people, when it does not accomplish this, the militia is the crusade who steps forward, and upon it rests the mantle of the rights of the people.(11)

In statements that would not have been outlandish in the traditional left, the militia movement calls for the people to be armed, in defense of individual rights:

The security of a free state . . . is found in the citizenry being trained, prepared, organized, equipped to and lead [sic] properly so that if the government uses its force against the citizens, the people can respond with a superior amount of arms, and appropriately defend their rights. . . . Remember Thomas Jefferson’s words that the primary purpose of the second amendment was to ensure that Americans as a last resort would be able to defend themselves against a tyrannical government.(12)

Although the notion is distasteful to many on the left today, calls for an armed people were once well known at that end of the political spectrum. At a meeting of the Second International in Stuttgart in August 1907, the congress adopted a resolution co-authored by Lenin and Luxemburg that called for the establishment of militias:

The Congress sees in the democratic organization of the army, in the popular militia instead of the standing army, an essential guarantee for the prevention of aggressive wars, and for facilitating the removal of differences between nations.(13)

Structurally, as a loose network of small groups rather than a centrally controlled organization, the militia movement calls to mind traditional anarchist movements. The local groups are to be coordinated “using correspondence committees, which is the traditional method.”(14) “These committees do not attempt to act as regional, state, or national organizations, but only to facilitate communications among local units, the sharing of literature, and the building of a consensus for action.” The whole movement “must be committed to the same cause . . . but specific tactics should be left up to the individual elements.”(15) In other words, militia members are to think globally but act locally.

Again echoing anarchist opposition to hierarchy and leadership elites, militia ideology advocates a concept of “leaderless resistance.” According to this concept, “All individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction.” Reflecting this decentralization, the movement was organized overwhelmingly through Internet newsgroups and fax networks, which allowed for a wide dissemination of ideas and dispensed with the old former necessity for a demagogic, crowd-stirring leader. The purpose of “leaderless resistance” is “to defeat state tyranny. . . . Like the fog which forms when conditions are right and disappears when they are not, so must the resistance to tyranny be.”(16)

Decentralized in structure, tactics, and action, the movement’s purported aims are decentralist as well. Militia members look with favor upon local political units, indeed define themselves in terms of their locality, denying the legitimacy of political entities beyond. According to the Constitution Society:

The militia, like citizenship, is fundamentally local. We are first and foremost citizens of our local community. The word “citizen” has the same root as the word “city.” Although people may also be concurrently citizens of larger political entities, such as states or the nation, and although those entities may be considered to be composed of their citizens, they are essentially composed of localities, and it is the local community that is the basis for the social contract, although it may be considered to include a certain amount of surrounding territory. Today we would usually identify the locality with the county.(17)

The county as the highest level of legitimate government is a notion that has a long currency in the far right. It ultimately derives from the Posse Comitatus, a white supremacist movement that rejected government authority and called for popular sovereignty. Today a county supremacy movement has brought direct legal challenges to the authority of the federal government over public lands, asserting that these lands should be subject to county control. Talk of direct democracy is scarce, however, in the militia movement. The sheriff is to be the highest elected official—but the nature of his power and his accountability are undefined, leaving open authoritarian possibilities. No inkling do we glean of community self-management, and little is said of self-government in towns and cities, where most people live today.

Here it is instructive to compare militia ideology with libertarian municipalism, the political dimension of social ecology. Social ecology, a legatee of the traditional left, looks to the neighborhood, town, and city as the locale for popular direct democracy. Its first political aim is the development of free, democratic cities through a process of civic education, creating citizens out of present-day constituents and taxpayers, showing disempowered people the power of citizenship in assembly, exercising their powers of self-government, and expanding the latent and existing democratic institutions of the municipality at the expense of the state. As readers of Green Perspectives are well aware, libertarian municipalism calls for these freed, democratized cities, increasingly scaled to human dimensions, to confederate, constitute a dual power, and ultimately eliminate the existing nation-state.

It is a quintessentially social revolutionary process. The militia movement, by contrast, speaks of no such process and proffers no concept of citizenship or civic education. Nor does it explain how society is to be organized—socially, politically, economically—in a county-dominated polity. Instead, the tactical emphasis is on an armed people—and by armed people, it most often appears to mean armed individuals who perform individual actions, like refusing to pay taxes, get social security numbers, or use driver’s licenses or license plates. Its heroes are strong, even Rambo-esque individuals like Bo Gritz, who was David Duke’s running mate in his1992 presidential campaign for that electoral battalion of neo-Nazis and Klan members known as the Populist Party.

Another such action is to declare a local area, even an individual farm or dwelling, to be sovereign—outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States. An obscure theory (known as “allodial title”) dating from feudal times and advanced in Militia of Montana literature purports to validate claims that individuals who own land outright can be considered sovereign. Hence the so-called “Freemen” enclave in northeastern Montana, renamed “Justus Township,” and dozens of other such enclaves around the country.

When it comes to defining its enemies, militias tend to confuse individuals with institutions. That is, they “take aim” not at a social order but at individuals, threatening to murder members of specific group of people—government employees, simply by virtue of their holding government office. Militias have sent death threats to senators and local officials alike. In 1995 the “Justus Township” members of the “Freemen” placed a million-dollar “bounty” on the sheriff of Garfield County—they said they would try him in one of their own “common law courts” and hang him if he were found guilty. They threatened to hang the county attorney by a rope from a bridge, without even the nicety of a “common law” trial. Two other “Freemen” issued a death threat against a U.S. district judge in Billings. Such tactics are calls not to social revolution but to private acts of cold-blooded murder.

Constitutionalism

Despite their belief in government at the county level and below, militia members commonly say they uphold the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To fight the takeover of the United States by the New World Order, the Militia of Montana announced its aim “to defend the Constitution of The United States of America and the Constitution of The State of Montana against All Enemies, Both Foreign and Domestic.”(18) In a country that still basically reveres its Constitution after two hundred years, such language falls well within the range of conventional political discourse. In fact, so ardently do militias champion the Constitution that an influential group within the Militia of Montana call themselves Constitutionalists. To libertarians like Parfrey, the militias’ apparent commitment to civil liberties is a point in their favor. “Militias remain largely defensive,” he writes, “chartered to protest the erosion of constitutional rights. . . . Militias are sure to react as the government continues to overturn the Constitution, discarding the right to keep and bear arms, suffocating the right to free speech, or roping off the right to public assembly.”(19) Progressives may even feel a measure of sympathy for people so committed to upholding the Bill of Rights that they are even willing to sacrifice life and limb.

These assertions of fealty, however, are not what they seem. Militias like that of Montana recruit new members precisely by using such unimpeachable language in the course of championing broadly popular conservative causes like the assault on gun control or environmental regulation or abortion. The Constitution and Bill of Rights that these militia members are actually supporting is not the one that constitutes the fundamental law of the United States today. The latter, Constitutionalists believe, is an illegitimate document. Only the original Constitution, as it came out of the Philadelphia convention in 1787, is valid, in their view, along with the original ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is to be interpreted strictly, as it was originally written, much as fundamentalists read the Bible. And it is to be read in the context of its time, not according to any later judicial interpretations. At the time the original Constitution was adopted, most citizens were white Christian men, enjoying rights with which God endowed them—they were what the militias call “state” or “organic” citizens. It is almost certainly these citizens to which the Militia of Montana refers when it says it is “dedicated to the preservation of the freedoms of all citizens . . . of the United States of America.”(20) Since Jews are not Christians, they would not be part of the polity defined by the original Constitution. Contrary to widespread conservative belief, however, the original Constitution gives no preference the Christian religion; the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws “respecting the establishment of religion.”

The later constitutional amendments that followed after number ten—like the ones that protected the rights of newly freed slaves and gave the vote to women—were not part of the original Constitution and as such are considered neither legal nor binding. People who gained their citizenship only by these later amendments are called “Fourteenth Amendment” citizens and have rights and duties only under the amended Constitution. The additional amendments, however, invalidated the Constitution, and somehow therefore white males need not obey it or defer to it. Indeed, inasmuch as they were given neither rights nor duties by the Fourteenth Amendment, they are not necessarily citizens under the amended Constitution.

In fact, to disclaim their association with the present governmental system all the more dramatically, a number of militia members have publicly renounced their citizenship. One group that did so explained their reasons to the local newspaper in Ravalli, Montana:

in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, [I] solemnly Publish and Declare my American National Status and rights to emancipate absolute my “res” in trust from the foreign jurisdiction known as the municipal corporation of the District of Columbia, a Democracy. Any and all, past and present, political ties implied by operation of law or otherwise in trust with said democracy are hereby dissolved. By this emancipation I return to an estate of primary sovereignty and freedom that preexists all government(s).(21)

Presumably they were returned to the “state of nature”—the ultimate sovereign individual, exempt from the necessity of obeying any laws apart from the “common law,” the governments they set up for themselves, and the Bible. Indeed, white Christian males are supposed to be exempt from paying federal income tax, presumably on the grounds that the IRS was created by a later amendment. Since the “Internal Revenue Code is completely in violation of the Constitution,” individuals have the right to defend themselves against the IRS when it intrudes on their sovereign territory.(22) The IRS, of course, as a tool of the state, would not be part of the moneyless, post-scarcity society toward which social ecologists strive; “taxes” would be relevant only when people in assemblies decided they were necessary in some form and imposed them on a face-to-face, democratic basis. But “Freemen” need not pay taxes for a different reason, as one of those in the 1996 Montana farmhouse siege, Rodney Skurdal, explained in 1994: “[If] we the white race are God’s chosen people . . .and our Lord God stated that ‘the earth is mine,’ why are we paying taxes on ‘His Land’?”(23) (Because of his own refusal to pay taxes, Skurdal’s own property had previously been confiscated by the IRS.) If “Freemen” are tax exempt, however, “Fourteenth Amendment” citizens aren’t so fortunate—they must pay the income tax. In fact, an outrageously twisted reading of the very amendments that guaranteed blacks freedom is interpreted to mean that blacks must return to slavery.

In the United States today, overtly racist words are unacceptable in broad political discourse, so that those who wish to express racial hatreds must use code words as a substitute. Most recently, in the Republican presidential primaries, Patrick Buchanan referred to Latinos using the codeword “José” and to Jews by invoking “Goldman Sachs” and “Brandeis students”; he expressed his ethnic preferences not by using words derogatory to blacks but by supporting the flying of the Confederate flag. Similarly, the “Constitution-alism” of the militia ideology is in its essence an oblique vehicle for expressing racism. A large number of white supremacists today use this vehicle, designating themselves Christian Patriots and advocating the “Constitutionalist” exclusion of blacks, Jews, and women from the American polity.

The “Freemen” in the Montana farmhouse, too, are a Christian Patriot or Constitutionalist group, and it is by virtue of these beliefs that they have their own “common law” court system that issues bounties for the “arrest” of county officials. Nor need Christian Patriots obey existing American laws, according to Skurdal.

How many of the People of Israel (Adam/white race) have rejected the words of Almighty God, and rejected their “faith” (surety) in Almighty God, to worship man made laws, “color of law,” such as applying for a social security card/number, marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, insurance, vehicle registrations, welfare from the corporations, electrical inspections, permits to build your private home, income taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc., etc., etc. . . . Once you have applied for these benefits . . . you have voluntarily become their new “slaves” to tax at their will, for you are no longer “free,” i.e., a “freeman.”(24)

At this writing, the “Freemen” under seige by the FBI have given notice that they will defend their sovereign land by force if necessary: “Our Special orders . . . is for our special appointed constables and our Lawful Posse to shoot to kill any public hireling or 14th amendment citizen who is caught in any act whatsoever of taking private property.”(25) Here, “Constitutionalism” has become a shoot-to-kill license against people that “Freemen” despise, simply because they despise them.

The militias oppose laws, too, because they are the laws of a state that they abhor. But judging by their pronouncements and their actions, the new political units that would replace the state would be at least as bad as the existing one. The death penalty would remain in place, and private property would be preserved. People would be excluded on the basis of ethnicity, and women would lose the franchise. Environmental conservation, land-use planning, and zoning would recede to dim memory. The individual would be so disencumbered of community responsibilities and obligations that the atomized, self-interest-maximizing, egotistical individual of classical liberal political theory would seem the soul of benevolence by comparison. At the same time, a fundamentalist Christian religion would be established, available to justify any exercise of authority as divinely sanctioned.

Christian Identity and Anti-Semitism

Lest there be any doubt, this is not a leftist ideology; nor is it one that leftists should touch with a ten-foot pole. Nonetheless, some may be ignorant of the militias’ racism and find sympathy for them as insurgents against the “new world order.” Whatever they—or George Bush—actually understood the phrase “new world order” to mean during the Gulf War, it has burgeoned with a family of meanings that have little to do with a leftist critique of capitalism and everything to do with a new version of the conspiratorialism described by Kelly. And as is so commonplace in the history of that conspiratorialism, the unseen secret elite that conspires to pull the strings of world events is made up of Jews. Donald Ellwanger, a Patriot in Washington state, expressed the scenario this way in 1994:

a “British Banking cartel (Rothschilds Bank of London and Berlin)” owns 52 % of the stock in the deceptively named “Federal Reserve System,” which is also a Foreign Private Corporation and controls the IRS. The IRS is the Federal Reserve System’s private collection agency. The remaining 48% of the Federal Reserve System stock is held by foreign and domestic subsidiaries of the Rothschilds Bank of London.(26)

This Jewish-controlled international banking system, with its “collection agency,” is to be fought at all costs, including its “supporters” inside the United States, according to the anti-Semitism typical of the far-right milieu in which the militias exist.

Kenneth Stern, who studies hate groups for the American Jewish Committee, argues that although many people join militias innocently, for reasons that have nothing to do with hating Jews and blacks, anti-Semitism and racism are nonetheless “essential to the movement.”

Many of the movers and shakers of the militia movement are anti-Semites [like John Trochmann]. . . . It would be nearly impossible to attend any militia meeting in the United States, even one run by a group without an anti-Semitic history or agenda, and not encounter literature from anti-Semitic and white supremacist individuals and groups [like Bo Gritz and the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby's Spotlight]. . . . The conspiracy theories that underlie the movement are rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [which] . . . posits that Jews are secretly plotting to run the world.(27)

Militia anti-Semitism derives in great measure from Christian Identity, a “religion” that holds that “Aryans” are the lost tribes of Israel and hence are the authentic Jews, while those who call themselves Jews today are actually the spawn of the Devil—and people of color are “mud people.” It is hard to know with certainty how many militia members adhere to Christian Identity, but it too is endemic to the milieu that fostered the militia movement. Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance, remnants of the Posse Comitatus, Christian Reconstructionists (who call for a religious dictatorship), militant antiabortionists, and Constitutionalists all make up this milieu. So do members of the Christian right who accept the worldview of Pat Robertson’s 1991 The New World Order, a book intended to show that a conspiracy of secret elites controls the world, using the UN as a tool. Loosely known as Patriots, these various groups also gave the militias key points of their ideology, which also has antecedents in the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. The militias, says Chip Berlet, are “the armed wing of the patriot movement.”(28) The concept of “leaderless resistance” was in fact drawn up by Louis Beam, a leader and theorist for the Aryan Nations and former head of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a private Klan army.

And anti-Semitism and racism have been endemic to this milieu from its beginnings in the 1970s, when the California neo-Nazi Richard Butler led a group of Christian Identity “church” members to Idaho; the other name of his church was the Aryan Nations. The “races” should live apart, Butler maintained, and he ranted against the Zionist Occupational Government, by which Jews supposedly controlled America, and against Jewish plots to take over the entire world and build a “new world order.” He called upon his fellow white Christian males to take up arms against them—to “eliminate Jewry.” On the walls of the office he established at Hayden Lake, Idaho, he hung swastikas and pictures of Hitler.

Conspiratorialist Adam Parfrey, libertarian defender of the militias, agrees that the various Patriot groups are anti-Semitic: “the usurpation of Hebrew identity by the Christian right-wing is correctly identified as a threat to Jews, since Identity types believe Jews to be Satanic impostors.” But he implies that neither Jews nor anyone else should go so far as to raise objections to this admitted threat:

Unfortunately, the sensationalizing of Identity groups by watchdog organizations and their persecution by government authorities, have simply justified the Identity Christians’ own persecutorial and millennial beliefs. In my opinion, Identity Christians are best left alone in the same way adherents of Nation of Islam ideology are allowed to practice their own religion without the same level of harassment. Continued friction can only increase the likelihood of causing a volatile reaction.(29)

Never mind that the anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam, especially Louis Farrakhan, is well known and widely criticized; why militias should be exempt from similar scrutiny is unclear. Parfrey goes on to say that “perceived anti-Semitic overtones in militia conspiracy literature” are “at least partially due to Jewish oversensitivity. . . . The presumption of anti-Semitism in the militia movement is overstated.”(30)

If any single person can be said to have founded the militia movement, it is John Trochmann, who co-founded the Militia of Montana in February 1994. Although Trochmann himself denies being an anti-Semite or a racist, the ideology with which he infused the militia movement is rife with anti-Semitism. When asked who is behind the threats to American sovereignty, he replies: “The Warburgs and the Rothschilds. International finance. The Federal Reserve, and its chairman Alan Greenspan. ‘The Anti-Christ Banksters.’”(31) Trochmann has been a featured speaker at Aryan Nations meetings and has frequented the Aryan Nations compound; as a Christian Identity adherent, he is seeking to link that “faith” with the militias. “I am following God’s law,” he told one interviewer. “Blacks, Jews, are welcome. But when America is the new Israel, they’ll need to go back where they came from. It’s just nature’s law—kind should go unto kind.”(32)

Trochmann’s anti-Semitism and racism are of the greatest concern because he aggressively has spread the militia ideology. According to Kenneth Stern, “Of all the militia groups that formed across the United States in 1994 and 1995, Trochmann’s was not only the first significant organization, it was also the most active disseminator of militia propaganda around the country.”(33) His group sent out a wide variety of literature and videos through its expansive mail-order program and spread its ideas over talk radio, TV, and the Internet. Trochmann and his associates helped build the Michigan Militia, whose spokesman Mark “Mark from Michigan” Koernke often praised the Militia of Montana over his shortwave frequencies.

In his recruitment literature, Trochmann waters down his propaganda drastically, talking about relatively innocuous issues like the Second Amendment. He thereby attracts people who care about gun control and Waco and Ruby Ridge. Only after they have responded does he send out literature propounding anti-Semitic conspiracy theories based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus it is that many militia members may not know exactly what kind of movement they belong to. Those who accept the racist and anti-Semitic theories may gradually find that they are no longer merely gun-control activists but have joined a racist hate group.

Conclusion

Not all militia members share Trochmann’s racist ideology fully; nor are all militias connected to hate groups. No one knows for sure how universally accepted among militia groups is the ideology on which the movement was originally based. But those who accept it are indeed hate groups. It seems certain, given the culture from which the movement sprang and the views of its key organizers, that a great many do in fact seek to return American society to a time when white Christian males were the exclusive political actors.

At a time when left-libertarians themselves are increasingly withdrawing into lifestyle and cultural concerns, it is deeply troubling that antistatism has been adopted by a movement of insurgent hate. At a time when the left has been declared all but dead, the very existence of the militias makes crystal clear the need for a left. Left-libertarians should know what this movement is and criticize it rather than look for affinities with it.

Turning to conspiracies for explanations is an anodyne, the equivalent of turning to Prozac to ward off depression. Yet the temptation to take the conspiracy pill is itself a symptom. With the dearth of leftist theory today, much of the work that the remaining leftists are doing is to report on abuses and injustices—by the IMF and World Bank, by transnational corporations, by the American government, by the CIA. Such journalism is indubitably and absolutely necessary. Yet without theory and analysis to account for those abuses, to explain them according to a rational theoretical framework, the drift toward conspiratorialism and thence to the right can be surprisingly easy.

More than ever in this era of globalization and downsizing, a serious leftist expression of the libertarian tradition is much needed to render populist distrust of corporations progressive rather than reactionary. Lacking such expression, its potential dynamism will continue to find expression on the right. The fact is that the left has nothing to learn from paranoid racists, no matter how psychedelic their conspiracies may be. ¤

2 Alexander *censored*burn, “Who’s Left? Who’s Right?” Beat the Devil, Nation (June 12, 1995), p. 820.

3 Jason McQuinn, “Conspiracy Theory vs. Alternative Journalism?” Alternative Press Review (Winter 1996), p. 2.

4 Parfrey defends the militias by exculpating them from any connection with Oklahoma City bombing (which he equates with the Reichstag fire). His far-fetched speculations are designed variously to dissociate the militia movement from McVeigh and to show McVeigh innocent of the bombing. Thus we learn that intelligence agencies used doubles to implicate McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the militias, and that McVeigh’s buttocks were implanted with a “microchip” that allowed his location to be charted. Parfrey goes beyond merely making a principled defense of the militias against the corporate-governmental-techno-cartel, as he claims; he seems in fact to share many of their views. He even finds reason to support the existence of the notorious black helicopters. Adam Parfrey, “Finding Our Way out of Oklahoma,” Alternative Press Review (Winter 1996), pp. 60-67, esp. pp. 63, 67; reprinted from Adam Parfrey, Cult Rapture (Portland, OR: Feral House, 1995).]

5 Quoted in Michael Kelly, “Road to Paranoia,” New Yorker (June 19, 1995), pp. 60-75, esp. 63.

6 Militia of Montana Web site: http://www.nidlink.com/-%7Ebobhard/mom.html

7 Kelly, “Road to Paranoia,” p. 61. Kelly’s article, however, seems to disallow the possibility that people could have genuine social grievances and genuinely seek to redress them. For Kelly, even a leftist social revolution against capitalism would appear to be based on a conspiratorial analysis.

8 Militia of Montana Web site, ibid.

9 David Barsamian, “Militias and Conspiracy Theories: An Interview with Chip Berlet and Holly Sklar,” Z Magazine (Sept. 1995), pp. 29-35, esp. 30.

10 Philip Smith, “Off the Shelf” (book review section), CovertAction Quarterly (Spring 1996), pp. 64-66, esp. 64.

11 Quoted in Kenneth S. Stern, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 76.

12 Ibid., p. 71.

13 Quoted in J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, abridged ed. (New York/London/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 270-71.

14 Constitution Society, “What Is the Militia” (1994), Web site: http://www.scimitar.com/revolution/by-topic/firearms/militia/-history.html

15 Quoted in Stern, Force, p. 37.

16 Quoted in ibid., p. 36.

17 Constitution Society, Web site.

18 Militia of Montana Web site.

19 Parfrey, “Out of Oklahoma,” p. 67.

20 Militia of Montana Web site.

21 Quoted in Stern, Force, p. 82.

22 Quoted in ibid., p. 51.

23 Quoted in ibid., p. 89.

24 Quoted in Stern, Force, p. 89.

25 Reuters, Mar. 27, 1996.

26 Quoted in Stern, Force, p. 84.

27 Stern, Force, pp. 246-47. Stern gives a fourth reason for the militias’ “essential” anti-Semitism and racism: that calls for local control are merely “covers for bigotry.” This reason is less tenable; left-libertarian and social anarchist calls for local control have sought local control as a way to attain popular self-management, not as a pretext for excluding people of one ethnicity or another.

28 Barsamian, “Militias and Conspiracy Theories,” p. 29.

29 Parfrey, “Out of Oklahoma,” p. 63.

30 Ibid., p. 67. These statements were published in Alternative Press Review, a periodical edited by Jason McQuinn. In 1992, McQuinn himself minimized the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis to “hundreds of thousands.” “It’s undeniable,” he remarked in an outrageous contribution to Holocaust revisionism, “that ‘The Holocaust’ has been magnified into a larger than life tale of historical racial persecution.” (“Holocaust or Bust?” in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, no. 34 (Fall 1992), p. 17.

31 Quoted in Stern, Force, p. 71.

32 Quoted in Daniel Voll, “At Home with M.O.M.,” Esquire (July 1995), pp. 46-52, esp. 48.

33 Stern, Force, p. 74.

Among many Greens in the United States, which has a winner-take-all electoral system, it is fashionable to praise European Green parliamentary successes and envy the systems of proportional representation that have allowed Greens to be catapulted into positions of political power at various levels in Germany, Italy, and France. Such celebrations, however, ignore a disturbing side of many European Green electoral “achievements.” In fact, to the extent that these Western European Greens have become part of parliamentary systems, their politics have most often undergone major changes for the worse, by comparison with the earlier grassroots-oriented, often revolutionary outlook of the movements upon which they based themselves. Green parties in Germany, France, Italy, and Britain have quickly adapted themselves to conventional power politics and the nation-state, variously abandoning movement ties, accountability structures, and programmatic principles in the process.

Even the American mainstream press has noticed this shift. The New York Times noted in 1989, “The Green groups, which once insisted on a radical overhaul of Western society, today have become more mainstream and have toned down anti-establishment language. Even the European Parliament, which they have long derided as a stodgy bureaucracy, is now looked on as an appealing forum where new power and input can be gained.”1 The Associated Press wire service compared “the once-radical Greens” of several years ago with “today’s mellower Greens” and their “new respectability.”2 Greens in many West European countries have become largely professional politicians, and their parties routine parliamentary parties with an environmentalist cast. Their radical calls for general social transformation along ecological lines have been watered down to mere environmentalism.

The German Greens (die Grünen)

It was in then-West Germany that Greens fought out the question of the dangers of parliamentarism most thoroughly and concluded it most decisively; indeed, it was in West Germany that Greens have most notably found themselves in situations that afforded them regional- and national-level power and coalition governments. Die Grünen had started out perhaps more firmly base and grassroots-oriented than any other Green party in Western Europe. Back in the early 1980s they constituted themselves as the electoral arm of a mass movement whose practice was direct action and citizens’ initiatives on single issues. When the die Grünen began to take a public political role in legislatures, they declared that the internal decision-making structure of their party caucuses in legislatures, would at all times remain subject to grassroots control. Moreover, they avowedly opposed professionalism: Both in program and in practice they were committed to a politics of collectivism, in which all members are basically equal and officeholders are merely the voice of the organization’s membership who present its views on the floor of the other parliamentary bodies. “The central idea in this respect,” their original program reads, “is the continuous control of all office holders, delegates, and institutions by the rank and file.”

Thus, when the German Greens first entered the Bundestag in March l983, the movement expected to control its representatives by an “imperative mandate,” so that the center of political gravity would remain outside the Bundestag. Parliamentary tenure would be limited by the rotation of deputies and of other elected officials. That is, they were to surrender their posts to other Greens after a year or two, to allow as many people as possible to gain political experience. All Green deputies were to give half of their large parliamentary salaries to a special party fund for environmental and social causes and keep only the remaining portion to live on. The principle of “separation of office and mandate” prevented the concentration of power in only a few hands by barring Bundestag members from holding high office in the party itself.

The Transition to Professionalism

But access to power and money proved all too compelling. Almost as soon as die Grünen entered the federal apparatus, the defining democratic impulses of the movement were brought into question and even abandoned by many of the Bundestag delegates themselves. Those who became generally committed to exercising parliamentary power came to be known as “realos”; those who defended the original values, in turn, generally came to be known as “fundis” and later regrouped as the left within the movement; the also encompassed Greens who accepted the use of the parliamentary apparatus to publicize and dramatize their program. It was the realos who now rejected the principles of Green extraparliamentary grassroots-democratic radicalism and adapted to the conventional framework of the parliamentary establishment. Otto Schily, a lawyer who in the 1970s had been a flamboyant, defense attorney for the members of the Baader Meinhof terrorist group, now basked in the limelight as a Bundestag deputy and did as much as he could to professionalize die Grünen and eliminate rotation. (He later left the Greens and joined the Social Democratic Party.) Two former leaders of the “Spontis” (or Revolutionary Struggle, anarchistic street revolutionaries from Frankfurt in the 1970s)–Joschka Fischer and Daniel (“the Red”) Cohn-Bendit–entered the party after it had achieved a measure of success and became media darlings and joined Schily in arguing that Greens should be able to hold parliamentary offices in the conventional way. Together these realos attempted to professionalize the Greens into an environmentalist and pragmatist party that would be comfortable within in the existing system rather than remain a collectivist “non-party party” that would challenge it.

The transition to professionalism, then, can be traced back to the very beginnings of the history of Green party statecraft. Early on, the realo leaders pushed through a restructuring of the parliamentary caucus to eliminate the Greens’ mandated collectivist procedures. They gutted “working circle” procedures and strengthened the power of individual parliamentary offices. They made sure the fundis–who constituted a minority in the Bundestag party caucus, although they were in fact the majority in the party membership–got unimportant committee assignments and used the resources, access to media, and legal power that were now available to them to promote their own positions. Where the center of gravity that determined party policy had once been the extraparliamentary movement, it now shifted to elected representatives who claimed to be speaking for several million Green voters.

Needless to say, the content of realo politics shifted as well. While the fundis called for the elimination of nuclear power plants and tried to keep the peace movement going after the 1983 siting of Euromissiles in West Germany, the realos tended to concentrate on reformist, state-financed projects at best and intraparty political manipulation at worst. The realos toned down their opposition to nuclear power plants and even reversed the demand for German withdrawal from NATO (ironically, a position that they continued to hold even in 1988-89, when withdrawal from NATO became popular among many West German liberals).

by Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl

The proposed Left Green Network program, as it was published in Left Green Notes, is very much at odds with itself. Lacking coherence, it mixes high-minded revolutionary rhetoric with pragmatic, often blatant forms of social engineering, leaving the thinking reader confused as to its essential intentions and goals. The “strategy” section of the proposed program, for example, states that the Left Green Network “refus[es] to take responsibility for the impossible task of making an irrational system rational,” a formulation with which we certainly agree, having emphasized it in our own statements. The proposed program also defines the Left Green Network as a “fundamental opposition” and defines Left Greens as social ecologists. Splendid! This is very much to the good. The same is true for the brief explanation of libertarian municipalism and similar broad views. But often quite suddenly the reader then encounters concrete demands for “reconstruction” that are little more than liberal in character. In some of its most far-reaching sections, the proposed program presents Left Greens as fundamentally antihierarchical and antistatist, yet ironically, many of its planks presuppose the very existence of the nation-state that it is committed to abolishing. Similarly, the proposed program presents Left Greens as anticapitalist, but some of its key demands can easily be satisfied within the very capitalistic system it so forcefully opposes. In what follows, we shall single out some of the more important–at times, even absurd–errors that we believe Left Greens should carefully consider in altering the proposed program or in developing a new one.

Integrate the Hierarchy?

“The various forms of hierarchy and domination that permeate our society,” the proposed program reads, “are integrated by two overarching institutions today: the capitalist economy and the nation-state. If we are to have an ecological society, capitalism and the nation-state must be uprooted and replaced by new decentralized forms of grassroots political and economic democracy.” So far, so good. And the proposed program commendably makes an attempt to define short-term goals (minimum program) and long-term goals (maximum program). But unfortunately, these two types of goals become convoluted in the text so that they are often not clearly distinguished from each other and sometimes interlace with each other somewhat carelessly. Many of the minimum demands, in fact, contradict the maximum program. Thus, at the same time that the proposed program calls for the destruction of hierarchy and the state on the one hand, it makes demands that presuppose the existence of state and hierarchy, on the other hand.

We read under “public health service,” for example, that Left Greens want “national health service boards.” Perhaps the use of the word national here was simply an oversight. But we also read that Left Greens want to “democratize the United Nations,” of all things, and we find this formulation astonishing! Obviously, the United Nations is actually the United Nation-States. This demand thus amounts to tacit recognition of nation-states–presumably, as long as their participation in the UN is “democratically” organized! We regret to say that this formulation is silly as well as contradictory. We further read that Left Greens want to extend “sovereignty” to native peoples. Although the document does not say what the word sovereign means, the implication is the establishment of a state of some kind: for example, a sovereign Native American state, outside the existing sovereign United States, and presumably Canada and Mexico.

But are Left Greens really committed to creating more states in this overly nationalistic world? Left Greens, we think, should support cultural autonomy for Native Americans, as for other groups who want it, in a decentralized confederation of all peoples. Nobody should have “sovereignty” in the conventional sense of the term in an ecological society, or in any society for that matter, except human beings in free, face-to-face democratic assemblies. Today, nationalism is one of the great banes of our era, and in the past it was perhaps the most powerful force that fragmented the workers’ movement (as witness the national divisions within the Socialist International at the beginning of World War I). The “internationalism” of the Left Greens, namely their abhorrence of all nation-states, should be one of their theoretical hallmarks, whether they are dealing with a minimum or maximum program. This point cannot be stressed too emphatically.

To continue: The proposed program calls for “genuine representative democracy”–but only a statist mentality would not see that “representative democracy” is an oxymoron. Have discussions of the difference between democracy and representation not filled a library of volumes? Still further, we read that Left Greens think that “if a woman is a manager, she should be called a manager and paid accordingly, rather than called an executive secretary and paid much less.” Really! In other words, the proposed program thinks that Left Greens want to call women by their appropriate ranks in a bourgeois status hierarchy, lest women not get due recognition of their place in it or due remuneration. Presumably, if Left Greens accept this document, it means that they would like their hierarchies to be very clear-cut and people in different ranks to be paid according to their hierarchical status. Come now! Much as we believe that people are discriminated against in their jobs, we shall show that this is not a problem intrinsic to capitalism as such, and a great deal can be said about the nature of work and its remuneration today. However well intended this demand may be, as it stands, it basically presupposes the very hierarchy that other parts of the document claim Left Greens are trying to eliminate. Would Left Greens advocate women generals, too, with equal pay, as an emancipatory step? Or that women should aspire for titular and remunerative “equality” in a managerial status system? Such demands reveal a traditionally economistic bias in which equality of pay becomes so important that it tends to override the serious effects of hierarchical structures and ways of thinking. In seeking equal pay for equal work, the proposed program unconsciously absorbs the hierarchical structures and titles that have always been so oppressive in human history.

Further instances of an implicit acceptance of hierarchy and/or the state permeate the proposed program: Independent politics is defined as independence of the Democratic and Republican parties. (Independence of the Canadian NDP, we think, should also be emphasized, as well as independence of the Institutional Revolutionary party in Mexico, the repellent claimant to the traditions of the Mexican Revolution.) But this very narrow definition of the term independent politics implies that a third party in the United States might be acceptable to Left Greens, as long as it is not one of the mainstream parties. “Independent politics” of this kind could give Left Greens carte blanche to run for statewide, provincial, and national office. We would like to think that Left Greens are trying to establish an independent movement, one that has no parallel or equal on the present political horizon. The Left Greens, we would like to think, are trying to reflect an entirely new outlook toward politics, freedom, and ecological problems–indeed, a new outlook toward the natural world itself–not simply a collection of programmatic planks that can be matched up with, contrasted with, or melded with those of other parties and movements. We believe that the term independent politics should be defined more broadly to include a “new politics” and a commitment to free citizens, independent of the nation-state and its institutions, as well as independent of all parties.

We further read that Left Greens want to “dismantle the national security state apparatus.” But if the Left Greens want to dismantle the state, of which this apparatus is a major part, why single out the “natural security state apparatus,” as if it had a life apart from the state? Either this passage is redundant, or it implies that Left Greens would tolerate the existence of other parts of the state, such as its vast bureaucracies, its judicial, legislative, and executive institutions, and the like. Similarly, the demand to “cut the Pentagon budget by 95 percent” implies that Left Greens are prepared to accept at least the existence of a Pentagon, albeit one that is reduced in size. Given the Left Green worldview, one may reasonably ask, why do we need any institution like the Pentagon, even one with 5 percent of the budget or less? This demand becomes especially silly when the proposed program calls for a “civilian defense system . . . eventually (!) as a substitute for military defense.” Even the Second International’s 1908 program did better than this when it called for the replacement of armies by militias. That the “civilian defense system” is to be “nonviolent,” alas, eliminates the legitimacy of citizens’ militias armed in defense of their freedoms.

The proposed program is riddled with such ambiguities and hedgings, but they are most evident in its sections on economics. Here again, many of the demands presuppose the existence of the nation-state, albeit without saying so. The “Economic Reconstruction” section, for example, calls for a guaranteed right to a job through public job banks; a guaranteed annual income at 125 percent of the poverty line (an old liberal bromide that dates back at least to the 1950s); progressive taxation (as in Sweden, perhaps?); variable taxation (by whom?) of automated production; a $10 per hour minimum wage (marvelous–and certainly quite possible under capitalism, inasmuch as such a minimum wage would still be inadequate for many families); a thirty-hour work week with no loss in income (also possible); and a worker’s superfund (again, quite possible under capitalism). Most of these demands, the result of conventional statist thinking, imply statecraft on a national scale and seem to point to a new version of Swedish Social Democracy. The section on “taxation on automated production,” too, implies a national scope. Apart from the fact that this passage is so overloaded with convoluted language as to be difficult to understand, it is unnecessary for a Left Green program to spell out funding mechanisms and the like. Left Greens, the proposed program tells us elsewhere, are committed to the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” If that is the case, why even talk about taxes that are quite compatible in principle with the capitalist system and that are partly in existence already?

Moreover, in these and other sections of the proposed program, the word public is used, disquietingly, with no adjectives before it. The word used alone is ambiguous: it can mean the “public” of the direct-democratic polities we are trying to create, or it can mean the “public” of the nation-state. Like the word democracy, the word public has so many connotations that, lacking a suitable rootedness in the idea of a municipal-confederal “public sphere,” it can mean anything to anyone.

A General or a Particularistic Interest?

In our view, it is basic to Left Green politics that Left Greens seek to create a new citizen in a new political sphere at the municipal level, confederated regionally and beyond. The subtitle of the “Cooperative Economic Democracy” section seems to promote this process by calling for “public [!] ownership and democratic control of basic industries,” although this formulation conspicuously lacks the word municipal. Happily, the section states that Left Greens “seek to replace capitalist and statist economic forms with grassroots-democratic forms.” But then what?

The proposed program goes on to demand something very different from the concept of municipal control that social ecology advances, indeed something rather archaic. “Private sector firms in the market sector,” it states, “should be collectively owned and controlled by their employees on the model of the Mondragon cooperative” (emphasis added). Most people know very little about the Mondragon cooperative, whose future as a social entity is very uncertain and whose weaknesses can easily be debated. But it is startling to come upon an endorsement of workers’ ownership of the production process when no such thing is mentioned in the Principles of the Left Green Network. In fact, this is a major departure from the agreed-upon Left Green Principles, offered without batting an eye.

It should be understood by everyone concerned that employee ownership is not public ownership, and that “workers’ control” of enterprise is not necessarily a form of economic democracy. When social ecologists argue that the municipalities should control the economic life of the community, one of their purposes is to eliminate the possibility that particularistic interests of any kind will develop in economic life, interests that could potentially return us to the kind of competitive market society in which we are all now being strangled. But workers’ ownership and control places the workers of an enterprise in a position where they can become such a particularistic interest within their community, possibly outside its control and solely accountable to themselves as “collective capitalists” with a common interest in expanding their enterprises and increasing their profits. The proposed program even demands that the municipal public subsidize the takeover of firms by workers–currently a claim of the “Progressives” in our own city, Burlington, Vermont, not to speak of many Social Democrats.

The history of many such efforts shows that worker-owned cooperative enterprises have indeed drifted toward capitalistic forms of competition on behalf of their own entrepreneurial interests, competing with each other no differently from typical capitalist firms. Any close student of the anarcho-syndicalist industrial confederations formed during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-37 knows that the CNT (Spain’s huge anarchosyndicalist labor union) was deeply vexed by the fact that many of the enterprises that even CNT workers had taken over began to function as mere collectivities of capitalists. Although this fact has not been emphasized in anarchist or syndicalist accounts of the revolution, it appears clearly in the writings of Gaston Laval, who surveyed the collectives produced by that great event, and it is known in some detail by one of the authors of this critique, who talked to many CNT militants-in-exile in the 1960s.

Another problem that arose historically is what one means by “workers’ control.” Again, one of the authors who has examined the data on the Spanish revolution with care found that the meaning of “control” varied considerably in Spain. It could mean little more than co-management, in which workers were merely consulted about the operations of an enterprise, or it could mean a fairly extensive takeover, in which assembly forms of democracy were practiced, at least at the very beginnings of the revolution. Many of these enterprises were eventually absorbed with regrettable ease by the bureaucrats of the Catalan government and even the burgeoning bureaucracy of the CNT itself, although one always encounters notable exceptions.

Actually, “workers’ control” does not necessarily threaten capitalism. In the years that lie ahead, in fact, it may become merely a different form of capitalism. Recently, some firms, even Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Goodyear, and General Mills, have been instituting “workers’ self-management.” A composite picture of the authority that these companies have given to their workers in certain plants would dazzle some of the most diehard syndicalists: the authority to discipline workers, to set production schedules, to determine if individual “colleagues” deserve raises, to participate in interviewing and selecting employees, and to shut down production lines if products are defective. Supervisors have been abolished in some cases and replaced by a “manager” and team with rotating coordinators.

Who knows where they will stop? Such companies reportedly find that these programs reduce costs and make for better quality products, greater efficiency, and happier workers–or “members,” as they are sometimes euphemistically renamed. Employee stock ownership plans have given a degree of ownership to ten million U.S. workers; in many of them, in fact, employees own the majority of the stock. Avis was actually bought by its workers in 1987. Combined with worker-involvement programs, such worker-participation schemes boost morale, “productivity,” and competitiveness, in the spirit of the Avis worker-owners who sport buttons that read “Owners Try Harder.” Capitalist corporations may well eventually let workers look at their books without fear of revealing their appetite for profits–partly because workers’ class consciousness has been waning enormously since the 1930s, and partly because there is growing agreement among Americans generally that “entrepreneurs” should make profits from their efforts. In Sweden and Switzerland, distribution cooperatives have proved “successful” only when they aggressively managed and marketed their commodities like any other capitalist company. And in Mexico, the government is now actively promoting “partnerships” between campesino cooperatives and private agribusiness–an effort that the campesinos are rejecting by turning to a version of municipal control very similar in character to what we have propounded.

Is this what Left Greens want? Demands that may have seemed terribly radical fifty years ago are gradually turning into a bourgeois cliché today. The slogans and cries of yesteryear that seemed to be so earth-shaking and innovative are being coopted–without the traditional radical language, to be sure–to accommodate the capitalist economy to an increasing extent.

As social ecologists and libertarian municipalists, we believe that workers should be regarded not as workers per se–a particularistic class existence that has been inflicted upon them by bourgeois society–but as human beings like everyone else, with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and the full range of human needs and sensibilities, including civic and ecological concerns. For years, this has been a key argument of social ecologists against conventional socialists, Marxists, and anarchosyndicalists. We have stressed values as well as material problems, ecology as well as factory problems, freedom as well as “social justice.” We are trying to create a new political sphere by developing citizen assemblies that actively participate in the management of enterprises under their control, rather than limit that control to those who operate those enterprises and thereby reinforce their proletarian status and ways of thinking.

We work with the category of “citizens,” not “workers,” because like all other citizens, workers in a democratized polity would have a general public interest as social beings continually in mind. We do believe that workers in their area of the economy have a technical expertise that gives them a place on technical advisory boards at the service of the community, but only as part of their own roles as citizens. In this capacity, knowledgeable as they are about their vocational and professional activities, they can assist the citizen assemblies in making decisions that pertain to the economic area with which they are very familiar. These functions are purely advisory and do not entail policy-making. They are not “soviets,” factory councils, or syndicalist trade-union locals. They are merely technical agencies, with no power to make policy decisions, a function that must be relegated exclusively to citizen assemblies. Indeed, the more varied the suggestions they make for the resolution of a particular problem, the more desirable their suggestions will be, so that citizens’ assemblies can at least make choices and thereby exercise their autonomy as the policy-making bodies of society. But for any kind of economic cooperative to remain benign, it must be brought under the control of the municipality–that is, the people in face-to-face assemblies–like any other part of the economy. We therefore favor citizens’ control of a moral economy, not workers’ control of an entrepreneurial economy. (We note that the crucial phrase moral economy does not appear in the proposed program; nor would we want it to appear if its meaning is warped and distorted by obsolete notions of council communism and syndicalism.)

We believe that if Left Greens are to be truly radical and ecological, they must also raise the images of rotation of work, of high-quality and artistic products, and of the virtues of craftspersonship after machinery is used to remove onerous toil. We are as concerned with the quality of life in what Marx called “the realm of necessity” as we are with liberty in “the realm of freedom.” Indeed, it is one of social ecology’s major tenets that “the realm of necessity”–toil, repetitive work, and alienated labor–must be increasingly colonized by the “realm of freedom” so that work becomes an expressive, self-defining, creative, and pleasurable activity that enriches the human spirit.

Amazingly, of all things, the proposed program takes no descriptive account of the ecological problems that workers encounter in the workplace today, such as the toxics they handle, the polluted air they breathe, and the generally unhealthy environment in which they work–an issue that could provide them with a linkage to a radical ecology movement in their vocational capacities as well as in their civic capacities as citizens, parents, and neighbors who live in communities as well as work in factories. On these questions, as on the question of the quality of work, the debilitating impact of toil, and other seemingly “utopistic” issues that we have raised, the proposed program has nothing to say. We gain no sense that the proposed program has even as a maximum demand a realm of work or “economy” that will be marked by these attributes. In this respect, it lacks utopian vision, vitality, and expressiveness. It still falls within the orbit of old-time socialist programs that read more like inventories of the evils of present-day society with suggested “correctives” than a visionary utopistic program–a dimension that we believe belongs as much in the Left Green Network Program as it does in the Statement of Principles of the Left Green Network.

Capitalism with a Human Face?

The proposed program has a strangely ambiguous attitude toward capitalism itself that appears in several disturbing ways. Despite the fact that the proposed program opens with a great deal of anticapitalist rhetoric, under “Economic Reconstruction,” we are told that Left Greens want in the short term to “stabilize the economy.” Stabilize the economy? We are accustomed to such language from the Business Roundtable, but since when has economic stability been even a short-term radical, much less a revolutionary demand? This word comes out of the academic textbooks of business schools. Let us make this clear: It is not the responsibility of Left Greens, if they bear the name Left, to stabilize the economy or to try to rationalize its basic contradictions. Capital and the state do what they can to accomplish this, together with their social democratic allies. Since when have the Left Greens joined that unholy team?

Nor are the demands in the economic section of the proposed program particularly confrontational in dealing with capitalism. Consider these words from the program: “We advocate a system of ‘true cost’ pricing [!] to democratically internalize social and ecological costs in production.” “A $10/hour minimum wage, indexed to inflation [!], will raise demand for basic necessities (an antirecessionary stimulus [!]).” The public health service, we are told, would “employ” “salaried” health workers. (One cannot help but wonder who the “employers” will be who pay the “salaries” in this system). Left Greens, we are told, want to “recategorize . . . jobs where needed to protect women’s rights to . . . comparable worth . . . raising salaries for traditional women’s work.” Here again, the Left Green ecotopia sounds more like Sweden than anything else.

The proposed program goes on to state that Left Greens support “democratic unions and rank-and-file movements in existing unions for union democracy” as well as the “unionization of workforces predominantly women.” It cannot have escaped many people’s notice by now that the establishment trade unions are among the pillars of capitalism, however much they are denounced by various capitalists today. There is little reason, alas, to think that “democratic” and “women’s” unions would be much different from those we already have. The fact is that the trade union movement, despite its radical aspirations in earlier periods of social history, plays a complementary role to the prevailing system. Its ambition is to gain for workers their share of capitalist society’s existing wealth. To do so, trade unions, especially since the 1930s, have largely become the system’s instruments for mobilizing and disciplining labor. Today their activities are streaked by chauvinistic asides against Japanese and Mexican workers and by using ethnic stereotypes in some advertising that hardly do the trade union movement credit. “Democratic” trade unions may resist such blatant appeals to chauvinism (we hope!), but we see little prospect that they will uphold a genuinely revolutionary practice any better than their forebears did or seek something beyond their share of the wealth.

Let it be understood that none of these remarks are intended to diminish the efforts of workers or other exploited groups to organize in order to improve their lot. It is the Left Greens’ responsibility, however, as we shall point out below, to consistently and unfailingly anchor their practical demands in the need for basic social change, if they are to get at the sources of the problems we face. The passages in the proposed program dealing with workers and trade unions, wages and job equality, do not link the problems of workers and their organizations to the need for fundamental social change. They offer no hint of the history of the trade unions’ betrayals of the working class as a whole, or of the need to go beyond economic analyses and capitalist institutions and emphasize the “political realm,” as social ecology understands that term.

Today, Left Greens have good reason to feel chary of programmatic encomiums to trade unions that lack the radical attributes of movements like the English Chartists (particularly its Owenite wing), the French CGT, the Spanish CNT, and the American IWW. The latter two were explicitly committed to an unrelenting “class war” against the capitalist system, as anyone who reads the preamble of the IWW will instantly recognize. Yet as militant and revolutionary as that preamble was in its day, we have long passed the time when the workers’ movement and its institutions can be regarded as “hegemonic,” much less revolutionary. The industrial proletariat is not only diminishing numerically as automated machinery replaces the routine functions of the factory, but enough of a labor aristocracy has been created (called “technicians” or “associates”) who no longer have anything resembling the class consciousness that marked the proletariat from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Even those workers who have a modicum of class consciousness today are marginal to the economy as a whole, have lost the attributes of a “proletarian culture” that reinforced the class struggles of yesteryear, and are not susceptible in any meaningful way to radical, much less revolutionary, ideas. Regrettable as this may be, we must face the brutal fact that the proletariat (allowing for all the myths that may have existed about its revolutionary destiny) is today so formless that even striking workers, as one of the authors has observed, call themselves “us middle-class workers.”

We would remind Left Greens that even Marx and Engels were very hesitant to place much hope in labor unions in their day. They usually emphasized the need to form “a revolutionary workers’ party.” An outstanding anarchist like Errico Malatesta was initially a strong opponent of syndicalism because of its limited proletarian orientation and its economistic bias. Malatesta instead called for a broader and more moral type of movement–regrettably only to be swept up later in the syndicalist tide that deluged many anarchist groups during the early part of this century. Ironically, Lenin too fought a bitter battle against economic reformers in the Russian Social Democratic party, whom he designated “economists.” It was primarily with the growth of Stalin’s Popular Front policies during the 1930s, which avowedly suspended the class struggle and formed amalgams with middle-class and even bourgeois parties, that statements of unqualified support for even “democratic” trade unions of the kind that appears in the proposed program, became widespread among “leftists.” (We may note that even the most “democratic” of the trade unions in the 1930s, like the United Automobile Workers, had a hierarchical structure, which Walter Reuther utilized to the hilt until trade union “democracy” was virtually eliminated from this fascinating labor union, as one of the authors of this critique can attest.)

We hope we are not mistaken, but we really have been thinking all along that it is basic to Left Green politics not to confine its program overwhelmingly to the goal of “giving everyone a piece of the capitalist pie,” whether it be democratic unions or nondemocratic unions, women or men, black or white. After all, if the bourgeoisie wanted to, it could give way to part or all of the proposed program’s “demands” and thereby make everybody think they had won something–ironically, it could even remove poisons from factories, albeit with the greatest difficulty–and capitalism would continue, even more successfully, with even more “stability” than before. Why should the proposed program stop with merely endorsing comparable worth and democratic unions? Why does it not demand that corporations provide childcare and even eldercare, as many companies already are? Why not demand that companies manage the wildlife on their acreage, as Du Pont has already found it expedient to do, in the name of ecological consciousness? Why not demand the full range of “benefits” that corporations could provide–and thereby interlock workers’ lives even further with the future of their beloved corporations?

Left Greens as Social Engineers?

Many sections of this surpassingly nonconfrontational program, far from challenging the marketplace, do indeed seek to stabilize it and the economy as a whole. In fact, taken together, the economic and other sections of this program constitute a good way to plan capitalism, to create what amounts to “capitalism with a human face.” The proposed program seems to feel that it must provide a solution for every problem that capitalism has created, for every social idiocy that exists today–and to a considerable extent these solutions are provided within the orbit of capitalism itself. Even the reform of public education gets a plank such as one could find in any Democratic party, Rainbow Coalition, or NDP platform, all of which are eager to manage the present social order “for the benefit of the people” and essentially make an irrational society seem rational. (Issues like racism and the AIDS pandemic, however, are strangely absent.)

Nor is it far-fetched to characterize the proposed program this way. Indeed, by the program’s own admission, it is a Left Green goal to feed other parties ideas. Under “independent politics,” we read that Left Greens “will force the establishment parties to adopt some of our reforms.” Reforms is a well-chosen word here, for many of the demands in the proposed program seem tailored precisely for “adoption” by “establishment parties” or self-styled “progressive” organizations. But all in all, this is truly an amazing and, we regret to say, rather revealing statement. Who is the proposed program trying to please, after all, with these liberal demands? The Green Committees of Correspondence? Wavering social democrats? The youth section of DSA? It is hard to recall a genuinely revolutionary movement that stated its own willingness for its planks to be amicably coopted by mainstream parties. Please, dear friends, let us seriously question why such formulations appear in the proposed program–and why they should be removed.

There are, to be sure, social problems around which Left Greens should make demands that could well be ameliorated within capitalism although not, we think, resolved by it. These problems are those that threaten the basis for life itself, which are by their very nature prepolitical. The worst disasters–the massive destruction of nonhuman nature to the point where forests are virtually disappearing; the ravages of diseases and epidemics like AIDS; genocide, whether in the form of catastrophic famine or outright mass murder that threatens to biologically exterminate an entire people–all these directly threaten not only the existence of complex life-forms but vast sections of humanity itself. A Left Green program should oppose anything that threatens this prepolitical fabric of human and nonhuman life. It should demand immediate solutions to the problems raised by the AIDS pandemic that threatens to wipe out the populations of entire Third World countries, for example, and by the destruction of tropical rainforests, which may disastrously alter climatic patterns and completely efface aboriginal cultures that have been in existence from prehistory. It should voice Left Greens’ unqualified opposition to genocide, most recently the danger of biological and cultural extinction that faced the Kurdish people in northern Iraq. Furthermore, Left Greens should adamantly oppose anything that threatens the rights that have been hard won over centuries of human history, such as civil rights and human rights. They should seek to preserve and expand these rights (including reproductive freedom for women) in any way they can, for it is essential to the Left Green project to expand existing human rights, even within the capitalist system. It is not accidental that as social ecologists, we have raised the slogan: “Democratize the Republic, and Radicalize the Democracy!”–a slogan that is underpinned by a considerable analysis of North American history.

Like all Left Greens, we are sympathetic to the miserable conditions under which the homeless exist. Like all Left Greens, we are horrified by the devastation that drugs like crack have wrought in black communities (not even mentioned in the proposed program). Like all Left Greens, we want the conditions of people’s lives to improve. But Left Greens should raise these problems in a descriptive manner, as symptoms of the system’s irrationality, to orient the thinking of people toward basic social change. There are other movements that are more than willing to engage in reformist enterprises–liberals, socialists, “progressives,” Jesse Jackson supporters, Audrey McLaughlin supporters, et cetera ad nauseam. The most fundamental problems of the present society can be solved only by a transformation of the social order. It is the existence of intractable problems that cannot be solved within the capitalist system that makes it necessary for us to be revolutionaries rather than social engineers. A leftist movement that seeks to distribute a piece of the existing pie for everyone, within the existing social order, faces the problem of its own embourgoisement and renders it and its planks vulnerable to absorption or negotiation by reformist movements. One has only to look at the German Greens to see how easily this was done–owing in great measure to their attempt to form coalitions with bourgeois parties and gain electoral support in periods of social reaction.

Fundamental to the problems with the proposed program is that it confuses the reactionary policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations with capitalism as such. Today in the United States we are immersed in the Reagan-Bush era, in Canada in the Mulroney era, in Mexico in the Salinas era. Left Greens should recognize that capitalism permits wide swings within itself, however, and that it allows itself a wide latitude in engineering the system. From time to time the bourgeoisie has also been known to be “enlightened”–in its own interest, to be sure–and to try to give capitalism a “human face,” as it did under FDR and Lyndon Johnson (despite the Vietnam war). In its more “enlightened” phases, capitalist leaders are willing to pay higher wages, provide better working conditions, give longer vacations, and recognize professional status, if they help to stabilize the system. In Germany, unions have long participated in management, with union representatives sitting on supervisory boards and boards of directors–arrangements that German managers find useful for controlling the workforce.

Capitalism above all seeks stability and the opportunity to make profits. The prospect of ending ethnic and gender discrimination does not pose a threat to the stability of the system. Indeed, the prospect of social instability troubles the capitalist system much more than prospect of workplace equality for ethnic minorities and women. To be sure, many corporations and a sizable proportion of the population are biased against ethnic minorities and women. But these corporate and “popular” groups represent a cultural lag that capitalism has been slowly diminishing for generations, despite patently atavistic and reactionary periods. The large corporations of the Business Roundtable, for example–certainly Robert Allen of AT&T–recently clashed with the Bush administration over issues of minority hiring. Allen wanted to come to an agreement with minority leaders over hiring that would have been more beneficial to minorities than the Bush administration was prepared to allow, owing to its desire to make itself appetizing to racist elements in the U.S. population for electoral reasons. The welfare states of the world, either in part or in whole, have been willing to grant many of the demands that the proposed program seems to regard as “radical.” We are not concerned here with the details of Allen’s proposal, its adequacy, or the kind of resistance it met from the Bush administration. Such details would be utterly spurious and would mistake the trees for the forest. What we are concerned with is the overall thrust that a development follows in the long run, and what the system really needs in order to meet its basic goals of profit and stability.

Thus, although many of the reforms on the proposed program may seem radical in the North America of today, a large number of them could easily fit into a future New Deal or Great Society-type program. Under FDR, for example, trade unions won great latitude. That right-wing administrations are in power now on this continent does not mean that leftists should temper their revolutionary demands with reforms and drift in a liberal direction. The fact that the Reagan and Bush administrations, in a very specific political and economic period, have had their own reasons for trying to weaken the influence of trade unions on the economy does not make the proposed program’s unqualified support for “democratic” trade unions a radical, much less a revolutionary demand. In ten years the United States may have a Lyndon Johnson-type who would give it all back. The point is that this demand, like so many in the proposed program, is quite negotiable and easily lends itself to cooptation–yes, by existing political parties. The proposed program, in effect, duels with the Reagan and Bush administrations rather than with the capitalist system itself.

We believe that Left Greens should not shape their program in reaction to the specific behavior of those in power at a given time. Nor should their demands be subject to the swings between “enlightenment” and “reaction” within capitalism. Reforms based on an intelligent bourgeois vision of how a class and hierarchical society can be rendered palatable are the job of social democracy and liberalism. What should be a major matter of concern to Left Greens is the system’s extraordinary capacity to coopt entire movements that have radical pretentions, as well as specific reform planks. Left Greens should always direct their major focus toward the systemic problems of capitalism: its inexorable need to grow, to simplify the ecology of the planet, to turn back the clock of natural evolution to a point where it will be impossible for complex life-forms to exist. Left Greens should emphasize that capitalism commodifies every aspect of human social relations to a point where people are reduced to mere objects, to buyers and sellers, to consumers of trashy goods. That in the course of commodifying not only the economy but society, it subverts all natural and human relations, such as mutual aid, complementarity solidarity, and any balanced relationship between town and country. In short, that it reduces society to a huge shopping mall, in which dazed people move through the corridors of retail outlets beleaguered by Muzak and are ultimately wrapped up with the very commodities they produce and buy. Capitalism projects this as the destiny of humanity as a whole, be it in the first world or the third world. Already third world countries are witnessing the rise of an expanding middle class, of the western work ethic, and of the promise, however unsatisfied as yet, of the “good” life as General Motors and other large corporations conceive it.

The reversal of the natural evolutionary process and the commodification of society are too fundamental for Left Greens to ignore. The centrality of these systemic problems should not be cluttered over with bookkeeping to maintain the “stability” of the social order. It is by means of a forceful analysis of the sources of the systemic problems in economic and political life that Left Greens assume the ethical high ground from which to project the image of a moral and ecological society. In short, Left Greens should be engaged not in social engineering, but in changing consciousness for a social revolution.

Reform or Revolution?

The problem of relating reformist demands to revolutionary ones has long perplexed the Left historically. In the previously mentioned preamble of the IWW, for example, the expressions of the IWW’s intentions are unequivocal: from the very outset, it declares that an irreconcilable war exists between capital and labor. The Wobblies engaged in historic strikes, fought for union recognition, and tried to improve the living conditions of the working class. But even in the minimal reforms to which they acceded, they always emphasized their syndicalist approach and refused to give any ground to the prevailing social order.

In retrospect, we now know they didn’t go far enough. Today, as we have seen, there is reason to regard the centrality of the wage labor-versus-capital conflict as limited to a specific historical period. But the orientation of the IWW preamble is not only relevant to our time, it should be crucial to those writing the program of revolutionary movements today. Little if anything in their actions–and there were many different tendencies in the IWW–indicates that they were gentle caretakers who wanted the working class to enjoy the satisfactions of having their reformist demands be met. Their revolutionary framework provided the all-pervasive context of their practical demands. For the Wobblies, fighting for “reforms” was simply a way to enhance the initiative of the working class, to mobilize it, to develop extremely libertarian institutions in its midst that would countervail the hierarchical factory system, and to expand strike movements to a point where they would achieve, they hoped, a revolutionary general strike. No thinking person during the early part of this century could have doubted that the IWW was a revolutionary movement or that it was engaged in an irreconcilable struggle with the capitalist system.

What the IWW could not have anticipated was the enormous cooptive power of capitalism to absorb their demands for the acceptance of industrial unions and a considerable measure of “workers’ control.” In the time in which they flourished, the capitalist system seemed to them to be utterly intractable, indeed murderously brutal, in preventing workers from creating trade unions on an industrywide scale. Today, we know differently, and the nature of the relationship of reform to revolution has therefore changed. We know that the cooptive powers of capital are absolutely enormous, bearing in mind that capitalism primarily seeks stability, growth, and profiteering. We know that the real historical limits of capitalism are not ones that are “immanent” within the system, as Marxists and many anarchists thought, but external ones, the natural world itself and the threat that the simplification of nonhuman nature poses to humanity and most complex life-forms. The unique function of a revolutionary ecology movement today must be to focus upon the insuperable natural obstacles to capitalist growth and in great measure accumulation and profiteering. More than ever today, in view of capitalism’s cooptive powers, leftist criticism of the system must be as fundamental as possible, and the Left Green program should be structured in such a way as to guide its readers and potential supporters toward those systemic problems.

And it must be a political program! Politics plays a far greater role in the ecological and economic facts of life than could have been anticipated in earlier periods, given the increasingly pervasive role of the state in social life today. We live in an era of increasing state capitalism, despite attempts in Eastern countries to create a market economy. In the West, where capitalism has followed a “normal” or classical development, the market, public life, and even private life are increasingly controlled by the state, indeed in great measure enveloped by it, including its enormous powers of surveillance. In the interplay between the commodification of life and the state’s control of even intimate aspects of life by bureaucracies, the overall effect is to totally disempower the individual, who as a commodity and an object of state manipulation and surveillance seems to exercise no control over his or her life. The need to lift bureaucratic controls and state supremacy from public life has given a priority to politics that exceeds anything we have seen in the recent past. The proposed program’s economistic bias should be significantly shifted toward an ethical, ecological, democratic, and political orientation. In dealing with the economy, it should make the immediate, minimal demand that the factory system and the capitalist marketplace be increasingly taken over by the municipality and popular citizen assemblies, with alternative technologies, new forms of confederal municipal management of the economy, a people’s bank to finance municipally controlled enterprise, and sharp limits to growth. The image of a moral economy should be spelled out in visionary political as well as ethical terms that describe a rational and ecological future based on empowered citizens, rather than in terms of the market economy, to whose abuses this program offers only surprisingly modest correctives.

We believe that the Left Greens’ minimum program should center on issues like control of growth, creating a decentralized, confederal participatory democracy (which the nation-state and its bureaucracy certainly do not want), and ecological issues that can be dealt with on a local level. The proposed program is surprisingly lacking in even a basic ecological outlook, let alone a prominent one. Left Green groups will surely want to provide guidance to their communities in struggles for the preservation of wetlands, forests, lakes, good agricultural land, and particularly the activation of citizens in municipal and regional public life. With all the fervor they have, Left Greens should cite the many patent injustices–even ones that are unjust by bourgeois standards–as examples of capitalism’s abuses. They should view all such struggles as descriptive jumping-off points for elucidating the radical views of the Left Greens and the need for basic changes in the social order–changes that are incompatible with the existence of capitalism and that stand in flat contradiction to the present social order. Even their seemingly “reformist” demands should generate the greatest degree of radicalization possible and present utopistic alternatives to the irrationality of the economy and the overwhelming tendency of capitalism to despoil the natural world and commodify human beings. In this way, the Left Green position–based overwhelmingly on ecological preservation, on opposition to growth, and on the expansion of democratic rights–can give a revolutionary thrust to what initially may seem like “reforms.”

But Left Greens cannot in all honesty and morality profess to offer remedies for those abuses without fundamental social change. They should eschew programmatic remedies within the capitalist system and avoid carefully formulated, pragmatic, almost fiscally sound, fiduciary solutions. They should not bend basic Left Green notions out of shape and recognition so that they will seem “practical” in the modern political arena. Neither Left Greens nor any other leftists can hope to provide rational answers, we must emphasize again and again, to the problems created by an irrational society without becoming liberal social engineers, making social irrationality more palatable, and its persistence even more assured. The Left Greens should be uncompromising in their spirit of opposition and bitterly critical of attempts by the establishment, particularly conventional parties, to dilute their demands to a point where they become in fact barebone reforms. We know of no other way to countervail the cooptive powers of capitalism but to oppose to it the most demanding ecological positions in our movement.

We would like to remind readers of the sorry history of what happens when a reformist program is presented in the name of revolution. Norman Thomas, the putative heir to Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist party’s perennial candidate for U.S. president in the 1930s, moaned shortly before his death at a public meeting in the l960s that the reason why the Socialist party in the United States had dwindled from a mass organization into virtual nonexistence was that its proposals had been taken over by the New Deal. Few remarks sum up more pathetically the failure of what had been an avowedly revolutionary movement earlier in this century. In the years that lie ahead, the Left Greens may eventually become a mass Green movement, but if they do so by abdicating their basic ideals, they will be no better than the German Greens, or for that matter the German Social Democratic party, who are now virtually indistinguishable from each other. ¤

–May 24, 1991

Farewell to the German Greens
by Janet Biehl

At this time last year, few observers of the German Greens could have predicted how fast the fundis–the “left” of the German Greens, encompassing Radical Ecologists and others–would fall. Few realos, in their wildest fantasies, could have dreamed of how soon they would get their way in restructuring the party and reformulating its purpose. But realo control of the party is now an established fact, and the fundis are for all intents and purposes gone. Although the Greens have for some time now been a preponderantly state-oriented party, some still held out for a movement based on the grassroots and they still maintained leftist ideals despite running for the Bundestag. But leftists in Green movements worldwide ought now to bid the German Greens a final farewell as a party with any pretentions either of being leftist or of having a movement base.

The party’s process of ridding itself of all vestiges of “leftism” began immediately after the December 2 elections last year. In those federal elections, the Greens had failed to go over the 5 percent hurdle that is required of any party for Bundestag representation. This put them out of the federal parliament for the first time in eight years. As the Greens, or western Greens as they should be called, vacated their offices, Bundestag representation was left to the easterners, the Alliance 90/Greens: a grouping of Democracy Now, New Forum, East-Greens, and other groups from the heady citizens’ movement days that culminated in the fall of the Berlin wall and German unification in recent years.

As befits an increasingly conventional party, the German Greens generally regarded their federal electoral defeat as a catastrophe, certainly a a “disaster” for the themselves and a disappointment to Greens worldwide. Other observers, such as Green Perspectives, regarded it as par for the course. If anything, the electoral defeat might force the German Greens to go back to their grassroots and to explore the possibilities of developing a libertarian-municipalist approach to democratizing the many strongholds they have in town and city councils and confederating them. Unfortunately, the various erstwhile fundis and other Radical Ecologists adopted no such view and in large part remained within a basically socialist orbit, trying to combine their anticapitalist Marxist roots with vaguely ecological, often environmental demands that produced a tangle more than a strong analysis of events or a decentralized, confederal popular politics. Put simply: They had no coherent program to offer.