The Social Ecology Project

With the emergence of a new millennium, it should not be surprising that old socialist ideologies–borne of the Industrial Revolution–are no longer adequate to encompass the sweeping social changes that have occurred over the past two centuries. As transnational capitalism, [...]]]> Left Green Perspectives (formerly Green Perspectives)
A Social Ecology Publication

The Social Ecology Project

With the emergence of a new millennium, it should not be surprising that old socialist ideologies–borne of the Industrial Revolution–are no longer adequate to encompass the sweeping social changes that have occurred over the past two centuries. As transnational capitalism, facilitated by radically new technological means, becomes ever more pervasive, and as commodity relations replace seemingly imperishable human ties, people everywhere understandably feel that they are losing control over the institutions and culture that determines their loves as social beings. On matters of the greatest importance for their lives, decisions are made anonymously by the wealthy and powerful, and even mindlessly by economic forces over which they have no control. Increasingly, they are looking for ways to regain control over the institutions that affect their well-being in a matter that is fully democratic and expressive of their genuine wishes.

An awareness of these popular aspirations has been an ever-growing feature of Left Green Perspectives. Since 1986, our newsletter has been advancing libertarian municipalism, a program for face-to-face democracy, within the framework of revolutionary libertarian socialism. Since the late 1990s, friends who share these ideas have been involved in a process of transcending traditional emancipatory ideologies, especially Marxism and anarchism, while incorporating the best features of both into a new radical synthesis of ideas and politics.

We are advancing a broad set of ideas–Communalism–that seeks to elaborate a humanistic and social perspective on ecology and a radical opposition to all forms of social hierarchy and domination, as well as class rule and exploitation. Communalism seeks to rescue the highest ideals and goals of the Enlightenment from the antihumanist (even misanthropic) and antirationalist tide that is rising everywhere today in popular culture and the academy. Above all, Communalism seeks to transform cities into arenas for a new democratic political sphere, based on face-to-face democracy, structured around citizens’ assemblies at the town and neighborhood level, confederated over broader territories. In our view, face-to-face democracy is not a street protest: it is a set of permanent decision-making institutions by which people take responsibility for their communities and gain control over their economic life in the form of municipally owned and managed, as well as confederally coordinated, enterprises. We hope to explore all the details of this project in future issues of our newsletter.

At present, Left Green Perspectives is the principal organ where this new Communalist perspective is being developed in the United States. We have every expectation that this project will be taken up elsewhere as well, in other periodicals and movements and organizations. Our comrades in Scandinavia are planning a Communalist journal in the foreseeable future, to which we plan to contribute, and we will inform our readers as soon as it appears.

New ideas are needed to address new social developments. The socialist, revolutionary Left must also evolve if it is not to become a sectarian relic of the past. We urge all readers and interested people to join us in exploring the new possibilities for radical social transformation that a Communalist perspective opens.

Left Green Perspectives appears irregularly. Normally one or two essays are featured per issue, with a total length of six to twelve pages. A ten-issue subscription costs US $12.00 for North America, US $14.00 overseas. Sample copies are available on request.

Recently I have begun to encounter, especially among young people, individuals who call themselves “leftists” but who have little or no awareness of the most basic features of the Left’s longstanding analysis of capitalism, or of the history of the revolutionary movements that [...]]]> The Unity of Ideals and Practice
by Murray Bookchin

Recently I have begun to encounter, especially among young people, individuals who call themselves “leftists” but who have little or no awareness of the most basic features of the Left’s longstanding analysis of capitalism, or of the history of the revolutionary movements that have stood in fundamental opposition to bourgeois society. It distresses me that the ideological contours that have long defined capitalism and the Left are being forgotten today, as well as the most critical insights of libertarian socialism and revolutionary anarchism. Given this spreading social amnesia, I find that before I can summarize my political and social ideals, I must briefly outline the trajectory of capitalist society and the responsibility of the revolutionary Left, since my own ideas are integrally embedded in the tradition of that Left.

Certain basic concepts are fundamental to traditional leftists, especially to social anarchists, and when I encounter people who call themselves social anarchists, I must assume that, if their politics is to have any meaning, they still uphold these concepts. I must assume that social anarchists, like other leftists, understand that capitalism is a competitive market system in which rivalry compels bourgeois enterprises to continually grow and expand. I must assume they understand that this process of growth is absolutely inexorable, driven by the “competitive market forces” of production and consumption—as the bourgeoisie itself acknowledges. Nor can these “forces” be eliminated as long as capitalism exists, any more than a class-dominated economy could ever put an end to the exploitation of labor. Social anarchists, I must assume, understand that if capitalism continues to exist, it will yield catastrophic results for society and the ecological integrity of the natural world. So inherent are these features to capitalism that to expect the capitalist system not to have them is to expect it to be something other than capitalist.

Further, I must assume that social anarchists, like other leftists, believe that if humanity is ever to attain a free and rational society, capitalism must be completely destroyed. Social anarchists are distinctive among leftists, however, in maintaining that the social order that must replace it must be a collectivist, indeed a libertarian communist society, in which production and distribution are organized according to the maxim “From each according to ability, to each according to need” (to the extent, to be sure, that such needs can be satisfied given the existing resources of the society). Social anarchists agree, I must assume, that such a libertarian communist society cannot be achieved without the prior abolition not only of capitalism but of the state, with its professional bureaucracy, its monopoly over the means of violence, and its inherent commitment to the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Social anarchists agree, I must further assume, that the state must be replaced by a democratic political realm, one that comprises “communes” or municipalities of some kind that are in confederation with one another. Anarchosyndicalists believe that it is essentially workplace committees and libertarian unions that will structure these confederations. Anarchocommunists advance a variety of other forms, and my own will be summarized later. But when I meet a social anarchist, I assume that he or she shares these minimal, underlying common principles: the basic analysis of capitalism and its trajectory that I have described, as well as the imperative to replace competitive market-oriented social relations with libertarian institutions.

Didactic as my presentation may seem, I contend that to abandon any of these principles is to abandon the defining features of social anarchism, or of any revolutionary libertarian Left. To be sure, it is not easy to advance such ideas today. Former leftists who have themselves surrendered some of these principles in order to accommodate themselves to the existing society incessantly sneer at revolutionary leftists who still maintain them, accusing them of being “dogmatic,” dismissing the coherence they prize as “totalitarian,” and impugning their resolute social commitment as “sectarian.” Moreover, in a time when social and political ideas are being blurred beyond recognition, principled leftists are advised repeatedly to relinquish their militancy—and presumably succumb to the mindless incoherence and pluralism that is commonly hallowed in the name of “diversity.” Most of all, they are subjected to pressures to renounce the Left and blend in with the accommodation that is prevalent today, as so many of their former comrades have done.

Despite these personal and cultural pressures, social anarchists, I believe, must not allow their views and activities to be fragmented and thrown into the postmodern scrap heap of unrepentantly contradictory ideologies, any more than they should embrace the bourgeoisie in a love festival of class collaboration. In such times it is all the more imperative that a socially oriented, revolutionary libertarian Left firmly maintain its own integrity and ideals. If those ideals are to be maintained, there are lines that social anarchists cannot cross and still remain social anarchists.

This assertion, let me emphasize, is not an expression of intolerance. It is an appeal to preserve specificity, clarity, and self-definition against an overwhelming cultural decadence that blurs serious distinctions in the intimidating name of a specious “diversity,” “harmony,” and “compromise,” as a result of which the clarification of important political differences becomes impossible to achieve.

Nor am I trying to cast the issues that social anarchists face or the practice they should follow in needlessly harsh “either-or” terms. When a corporation or state takes action to worsen working conditions, reduce wages, or deny poor and vulnerable people the elementary amenities of life, social anarchists should raise their voices in protest and join in actions to prevent such measures from being executed. In short, they should fight exploitation and injustice on every front and become part of a variety of struggles for eliminating economic, social, and ecological abuses wherever they occur, at home or abroad. Social anarchists are no less humane in response to human suffering and no less outraged by social afflictions than the best-intentioned reformists.

But their actions should not be limited merely to advancing remedial measures—which the bourgeoisie can usually adopt if it chooses to, with little loss to itself. Indeed, bourgeois society is sometimes more than willing to ameliorate social afflictions within its own framework, all the better to conceal broader social problems or to neutralize the danger of wider social unrest.

There is a major difference, in my view, between the way social democrats, liberals, and other well-meaning people engage in everyday struggles and the way social anarchists and other revolutionary leftists do. Social anarchists do not divorce their ideals from their practice. They bring to these struggles a dimension that is usually lacking among reformists: they work to spread popular awareness of the roots of the social affliction—patiently educating, mobilizing, and building a movement that shows the connections between the abuses that exist in modern society and the broader social order from which they stem. They are profoundly concerned with showing people the sources of their afflictions and how to consciously act to remove them completely by seeking to fundamentally change society.

Disseminating this understanding, which in the past went under the name of class consciousness (an expression that is still very relevant today) or, more broadly, social consciousness, is one of the major functions of a revolutionary organization or movement. Unless social anarchists take the occasion of a protest to point to the broader social issues involved, unless they place their opposition in this context and use it to advance the transition to a rational social order like libertarian communism, their opposition is adventitious, piecemeal, and essentially reformist.

In the course of demonstrating how specific social abuses can be traced to capitalism as such, social anarchist practice, in my view, must increasingly make apparent that, if those abuses are to be fully remedied, it is society as a whole that must be changed. Whether a given reform is attained or not, the issue that generates the need for it must be expanded, cast in ever broader social terms, and linked with less obvious but related social abuses until a whole emerges from apparently disconnected parts and challenges the validity of the existing social order.

On the other hand, to ask that social abuses be addressed merely by reforms and that they be resolved by the state is to deepen the mystification, to abet the legitimation, and to gloss the ideological patina so indispensable for the existence of the entire system. From 1848 to 1997, this reformist practice, whatever ideals it claims for itself, has been the most pronounced flaw of movements for change. Indeed, struggles conducted within the framework of the existing system—while they may yield many palliative reforms—ultimately perpetuate the mystification that capitalism can “deliver the goods” (as Marcuse put it) and that the state can rise above the conflict of contending interests to serve the public good.

II

In the United States, as in other Western countries today, there is no lack of social-democratic organizations and environmental groups that concern themselves with social and environmental problems—even if it means little more than lobbying powerful officials. Despite their tendency to compromise on key issues, these groups are visible and vocal. Inasmuch as they work within the framework of the state, they sometimes find places where the system bends to the needs of the poor and the vulnerable. The widely celebrated “realism” of these groups, their lesser-evil politics, and their attempts to work amelioratively within the system sometimes lead to palliatives that seem to improve the lives of those who need help.

But the state rarely bends to popular demands for changes that are inimicable to the basic interests of the bourgeoisie. Despite the opposition of many labor unions and environmentalists as well as large sectors of the population, for example, the North American Treaty Organization (NAFTA) was passed by the Congress and signed by Clinton. Capital—big Capital—wanted NAFTA, and that was that! Doubtless there are states and states. Historically, there have been slave-owning states, feudal states, monarchical states, republican states, and totalitarian states. It would be naive to suppose that they are all alike just because they are states. Yet even the most rhetorically “free” and constitutionally constrained republics in the so-called First World—which we euphemistically call “democracies”—are class institutions. They are structured by their traditions, constitutions, laws, bureaucratic and judicial institutions, police, and armies to assure that the property, profit-making, competition, capital accumulation, and the economic authority of the bourgeoisie and other privileged strata are protected. This relationship is fundamental to the modern state.

The question of the state has been an issue of profound importance for anticapitalist revolutionaries, including social anarchists, throughout in the history of socialism. Marxists are at least consistent when they engage in parliamentarism, since Marx left us with no doubt that he thought the state was necessary, even after a proletarian revolution, in order to establish socialism, and in 1872 he even declared that it was possible to use the bourgeois parliamentary system to legislate socialism into existence in Britain, America, and possibly the Netherlands—to which Engels later added France.

When the people do not retain political power for themselves, that power is claimed by the state—conversely, whatever power the state does not have must be claimed by the masses. Modern political parties are either states in power or, when out of power, states waiting to take power. In order to function as statist organizations, the very exigencies of state power oblige them to replicate the state to one degree or another. They must, if they are to gain power, constitute themselves as top-down extensions of the state, just as capitalist enterprises must be organized to make profit at the public’s expense, their claims to be performing a beneficent “public service” to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the more parties and enterprises and even states cover themselves with a libertarian patina, the more insidiously they besmirch the very public trust they profess to hold most sacred.

The early claims of the German Greens to be a “nonparty party” reflected a tension that could not continue to exist indefinitely once the Greens were elected to the Bundestag. Whatever may have been the best intentions of their spokespersons, participation in the state of necessity reinforced every party-oriented tendency in their organization at the expense of their “nonparty” claims. Today, far from being a challenge to the social order in Germany, the Greens are one of its props. This is the product not of any ill will on the part of individual Greens but rather of the inexorable imperatives of working within the state rather than against it. Invariably, it is the state that shapes the activities and structures of those who propose to use it against itself, not the reverse.

Social anarchists, in contrast to Marxists, regard the state as such as a great institutional impediment to the achievement of libertarian socialism or communism. In bourgeois republics, the practical demand of social anarchists to desist from participating in national elections reflects their commitment to delegitimate the state, to divest it of its mystique as an indispensable agency for “public order” and the administration of social life. What is at issue in social anarchist abstention from these parliamentary rituals is their attempt to expose the authoritarian basis of the state, to dissolve its legitimacy as a “natural” source of order, and to challenge its claims to be a supraclass agency and to be the only competent institutional source of power—as distinguished from the incompetence of the masses in managing public affairs.

This responsibility of social anarchism to demystify capitalism, the nation-state, and their interconnection—indeed to challenge their legitimacy as a priori “natural” phenomena—is not simply a matter of theoretical elucidation. To be relevant to people generally, it must be embodied in a practice that is publicly visible, one that can mutate the need for reforms of the existing system (which may be allowed) into the need for a revolutionary transformation of society (which the system must resist).

III

My own version of social anarchism, as many readers of Green Perspectives will already know, involves the creation of a direct face-to-face democracy in which people directly participate in the management of their community’s affairs. In contrast to systems of “representative democracy” (the phrase is a contradiction in terms, I should emphasize), a libertarian democracy would be structured around popular assemblies, formed at the municipal level to replace existing municipal governments. These popular assemblies would be open arenas for popular decision-making for all adults in a given community to attend (or not attend, according to their wishes). Here the people themselves would make decisions about how their communities’ affairs should be run. These assemblies would be transparent and entirely open to public scrutiny.

I have given this communalist system of civic self-management the name libertarian municipalism. As a political philosophy of direct democracy, it stands in marked contrast to the state, parliamentarism, and the principle of representation. It reserves the word politics for the self-administration of a community by its citizens in a face-to-face assembly. At the risk of repeating ideas familiar to readers, let me emphasize that this kind of politics stands in direct contrast to and indeed in sharp tension with statecraft, the top-down system of professional representation that is ultimately based on the state’s monopoly of violence.

Basic to libertarian municipalism is the view that the town and city—which historically antedate the emergence of the state—represent the most basic arena of human consociation beyond the social realm of family, friends, and coworkers. The town or city neighborhood—the municipality—is the authentic realm of politics, in the direct-democratic sense from which the word is etymologically derived: the Athenian polis of the fifth century B.C.E. (I do not regard Athens as a “model” or “paradigm,” still less as an “ideal” of a libertarian municipalist city, many of my critics’ claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The shortcomings and oppressive features of ancient Athenian society and politics should not prevent us from exploring the working institutions of the municipal direct democracy that arose and persisted for a time in the self-managed Athenian polis.) Athens, in contrast to most cities in history, developed democratic institutions—especially the assembly, or ekklesia—and some of these institutions and standards of citizenship provide us with materials invaluable for forming a practical libertarian municipality.

There is a tendency within anarchism to reject democracy in any form as the imposition of the will of a majority on a minority. As distinguished from the socialistic tendency in anarchism that emphasizes social freedom, this essentially liberalistic tendency emphasizes instead personal autonomy. In my view, if any approach to decision-making is authoritarian, it is not majority rule but the requirement, as many of these individualistic anarchists propose, of attaining consensus in a large formal setting. The right of a single individual to obstruct the wishes of the majority is a form of personal tyranny that would render any society dysfunctional.

Nor is libertarian municipalism a political philosophy based on a localism that presupposes that a municipality can exist autonomously, on its own. Quite to the contrary, in modern society all communities must rely on each other, and regions on other regions, to meet their needs. Social anarchism, I believe, offers a plausible alternative to the claims made by the state—namely confederation, whereby interdependencies can be fostered in a libertarian manner. Libertarian municipalities would send delegates, mandated and recallable, to a confederal council to carry out the policies established by individual assemblies. The decisions these councils would make would be purely administrative; indeed, they would be expressly prohibited from making policy decisions, which would remain the exclusive province of the popular assemblies. Confederation is a system not of representation but of coordination. It is predicated, so far as policy-making is concerned, on decision-making by the overall majority of the citizens in the communities of the confederation.

As a form of anarchist communalism, libertarian municipalism calls for the municipalization of the economy: popular municipal assemblies themselves would take control of the productive forces within their precincts. The municipalization of the economy is to be distinguished from its nationalization (which merely reinforces statism and leads quite easily to totalitarian systems of management) and from a syndicalist approach that would place the economy in the hands of worker-controlled collectives (which often foster collective capitalist enterprises). In a municipalized economy the citizenry in their respective assemblies would make economic decisions, guided not by occupational interests, which might easily bias such decisions in favor of particular enterprises, but by the interests of the community as a whole.

It seems to me that if we were to deny that humanity is capable of creating a direct-democratic society like the one outlined by libertarian municipalism, we would have to sacrifice our commitment not only to social anarchism but to any kind of humanistic and rational society. Syndicalism, to be sure, offers an alternative—a society organized around workers’ control of economic production. If I felt that this alternative could be achieved in a consistently libertarian fashion, I might welcome it as a possible road to a social anarchist society. What troubles me is that syndicalism has been beleaguered by vocational particularism; nor is there reason to believe that syndicalist unions can avoid the hierarchical structures that are endemic to a society structured around factories.

As vital as the role of working people is in transforming society, the era has passed when the industrial proletariat enjoyed the hegemonic role assigned to it by Marxists as well as syndicalists. Social anarchists, in my view, have to take a wider view of the social conditions and of the people who are likely to be involved in any libertarian transformation of society. In any case, working people are people as well as workers: They live in communities, experience problems of pollution, education, the logistics of city life, and the like. They are not creatures of the workplace alone—they are also civic or municipal beings, with all the concerns that such people have outside the workplace.

Indeed, as any close study of past revolutions reveals, every popular uprising has had not only an economic and social dimension but a profound municipal dimension as well. It would be impossible, in fact, to understand how workers, peasants, and even radical sections of the middle-class could have been mobilized into revolutionary crowds without considering the neighborhoods and communities that formed the basis for a political culture in their places of residence.

Critics of libertarian municipalism sometimes object that today’s cities are far too large to accommodate self-government by popular assemblies. Even if one were to divide up a city like New York or Paris or Mexico City into neighborhoods and set up neighborhood assemblies, this criticism goes, the assemblies would still be too large for decision-making to be viable. But such proposals often presuppose that the entire population—infants, the infirm, the debilitated elderly, children, the insane—will participate in local assembly or will want to attend. In 1793 Paris, a city with a population of more than 700,000 people, was divided into forty-eight sections, producing an assembly democracy in one of the most remarkable communalist revolutions in history. Nor was this sectional democracy forgotten in the revolutions in Paris of 1848 and 1871, by which time the city’s population had swollen to about two million.

Moreover, this kind of criticism assumes that all parts of a large city will develop politically at the same pace; that everyone, even in the most favorable logistical circumstances, will want to attend every assembly meeting; and finally, that the modern city will always remain as it is unto eternity. The politics advanced by libertarian municipalism involves a process—a protracted one, to be sure—in which basic changes will be made unevenly. Some neighborhoods and towns can be expected to advance more rapidly than others in political consciousness. Allowances must be made for institutional variations—possibly temporary, possibly permanent—that are not foreseeable today. At the present time we are at a point were only the initiation of an anarchist or communalist politics is possible; it will have to find its own momentum over a span of years, during which urban life is likely to undergo considerable institutional and ultimately physical decentralization.

IV

Whatever mystique surrounds the role of the state in maintaining “public order” and adjusting social dislocations—including the growing abuses produced by modern capitalism—the commitment of state institutions is to the advancement of corporate (read: class) interests. The modern state remains the indispensable means by which corporations can expand and assert their power.

At a time when much is made of the “global-ization” of capitalism, it is tempting for leftists to focus primarily on corporate power and, instead of opposing the state, to look to it as a means to restrain rapacious global corporations. To do so is to overlook a basic fact about the state: that it serves the interests of wealth and property. That corporations are authoritarian institutions does not justify strengthening the state to oppose them. Corporations have always been authoritarian. Some two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution, individual factory owners made decisions—often as arrogantly as a modern CEO—that profoundly affected the lives of hundreds of people. Having been on union negotiating committees myself and observed the predatory behavior of managers and capitalists, it surprises me that leftists today can be surprised by the authoritarian relations that exist in factories and corporations.

Inasmuch as capitalist enterprises constitute the most basic elements in the capitalist scheme, it is naive to assume that the statist institutions that exist to serve them can be deployed to significantly control them, still less challenge them. The drift of present-day leftists into statist politics with the intention of restricting the power of capital is vitiated by a basic contradiction: the very state machine that they suppose can control the bourgeois forces of production and expansion is precisely the machine that capital has in great part created to extend its control over social life.

We can no more countervail and confront the state by entering into it than we can countervail and confront the corporations by entering into them. A counterpower has to be established against both the state and capitalism. It must draw on a variety of forces, some of them quite traditional but readapted to present exigencies, to oppose the entire system of what can properly be called state capitalism.

This counterpower can be created only out the great masses of people who feel neglected and denied economically and politically, and alienated and oppressed by statist institutions. At this level of social sensibility, the classical lines of proletariat and petty bourgeoisie are waning in importance. The industrial worker who, like the professional, may at any time be phased out of his or her occupation by a new technological advance; the retailer whose existence is being threatened by huge corporate chains; the educator who is being supplanted by electronic means of instruction—such instances are almost unending in number—are faced with the loss of a place in the existing society.

From this increasingly socially undefined mass, united by residence and facing the problems of a deteriorating community infrastructure, pollution, insufficient child care, overwork, proliferating malls, and the destruction of city centers, the problems of capitalism are being pooled into a fund that is no longer definable exclusively along traditional class lines. At the same time, at least in the United States, inequalities of income and wealth are wider than they have ever been in history. Most ordinary people understand that there are those who “have” and those who “have not”; those who are obscenely wealthy, and those whose income, educational opportunities, access to health care, and social mobility are dwindling at a terrifying pace.

Without in any way ignoring the elementary insults that the present society inflicts on the poor and underprivileged, libertarian municipalism raises the issue of a popular reclamation of power by the community from the state and the corporations. Most leftists are so committed to exercising their infinitesimal influence through statist institutions that social anarchists are uniquely positioned to redefine a practical politics that is consistent with their highest ideals. They alone can demand the development of community power—real, institutionalized, and concrete power—in opposition to the state. They alone can try to create confederal organizations at the local and regional levels that have political tangibility and that constitute a sphere for a public debate on all the issues that concern community members.

The “commune,” or in more contemporary language, the municipality, has always been the building block of a social anarchist vision of a libertarian society. Not only has the municipality antedated the state historically; it has often been the antithesis of the state in struggles between towns and feudal lords, absolutist monarchies, and centralistic institutions created by elitist revolutionaries such as the Jacobins and their heirs, the Bolsheviks. The tension between the municipality and the state is a longstanding historical one, and although it is more recent, the tension between the confederation and the modern nation-state is no less compelling.

What I am suggesting is that a new libertarian politics has to be formulated and put into practice that calls for a restoration of political power to people in their municipalities, in opposition to the state. The practice of my version of social anarchism involves not only radical participation in protests, as I have described them, but the building of a movement that aims to create this kind of face-to-face democracy. Social anarchists, I submit, should raise the demand for the empowerment of citizens in towns and cities in the form of directly democratic assemblies, rewrite their city charters (where they have them) to legally empower these assemblies with the authority to make far-reaching decisions about their immediate concerns, and—yes!—even run candidates for local town and city councils with a view toward creating or legally empowering citizens’ assemblies with the structural authority to regulate the municipality’s affairs.

I do not expect for a single moment that these activities will be recognized by existing city governments, many of which have functions that are distinctly statist or that rely on state support. Nor do I believe that social anarchists who initiate such assemblies will be more than a minority among the citizens who participate in them. But a sphere of potential political power, discussion, and education will have been created in which, over time and with much effort, a counterpower could develop in opposition to the state and, with enough support in the economic realm, the corporations. This dual power, once it gained the support of a large number of people, could ultimately constitute a force to confront the state and the capitalist system and replace them with a libertarian communist society.

The practice that I am suggesting is consistent with the social anarchist ideal of the “Commune of communes.” Indeed, I find it difficult to conceive of any other public practice that potentially challenges the state machinery and capitalist system in a libertarian fashion. After many decades in labor unions and direct-action organizations such as the civil rights movement, the Clamshell Alliance (a mass antinuclear organization), and the New Left, and as a participant in the formation of the American Greens (before they decided to engage in national politics), I share the social anarchist conviction that parliamentary politics is inherently corruptive.

To confine antistatism to the realm of ideals without seeing its immediate relevance to practice risks making a mockery of both ideals and practice. Choosing a reformist parliamentarism and a statist form of “political” activity, including participation in parties, amounts to saying the capitalism and the state are here to stay, and that we are essentially compelled to submit ourselves to authoritarian institutions—allowing for a modicum of room to maneuver within limitations that are tolerable to the modern bourgeois social order.

A practice that is in accordance with social anarchist ideals is the only way of making giving our ideals relevance to people who are unfamiliar with them. Ideals easily turn into daydreams—or worse—when they stand in flat contradiction to the realities of one’s practice. By separating ideals from practice, crusading movements with erstwhile high ideals, like Christianity and even various socialisms, have historically wrought enormous social harm. Without a practice that can embody our ideals, those ideals easily become mere creatures of the imagination and can be adopted or cast off at will—or, worse, be used to add spice to commonplace political behavior that has nothing in common with social anarchism. ¤

—March 25, 1997

This article was originally published in the German periodical Schwarzer Faden.

At the edge of Disney World, near Orlando, Florida, the Disney company has created yet another thematic simulacrum. Unlike Epcot Center, its model city of the future, the company this time has recreated an old-fashioned American small town, playing on a longing for a simpler era when folks were more neighborly and socialized from their front porches. Celebration, as the town is called, is “not a housing development but a community,” Disney executives like to say. Its planners tried to capture the feel of a small-scale, close-knit traditional town, with single-family houses set close to each other and to the curbs, porches and porch swings, treelined streets with sidewalks, a nearby school, a downtown only a five-minute walk from most houses (and with no national chain stores), parks, and other pleasant public spaces. Garages for cars are hidden out of sight in the backyards (accessible by service alleys), and the streets are narrow enough that cars that do pass by have to do so at a crawl.

Also unlike Epcot Center, Celebration is no sterile model. Real people actually live here—about 1,500 now, with a total of 20,000 expected. They were picked by lottery from an original pool of 5,000 would-be residents who wished to pay a 25 to 40 percent premium to buy a home here. Within two years after the first families moved in, a Tocquevillean efflorescence of scout troops, religious associations, and hobby clubs had sprung up. Obsessed with managing reality, Disney even pays someone to spend the day walking a dog up and down the sidewalks, to give the town a cozy feeling.

But Celebration lacks some crucial elements of traditional American towns. Local employment is one: few residents can gain a living within the town limits. Most drive their cars out those service alleys to go to work in Orlando, like any ordinary commuters.

The other thing Celebration lacks is town government. Its “citizens” do not elect either a mayor or a city council, let alone other town officials. Instead, it has a “community services manager”—a Disney employee whose job it is to manage town affairs. Sanitation, street lighting, recreational facilities, and law enforcement are all privatized at Celebration. Such privatization itself is no longer unusual in the United States: Hundreds of thousands of master-planned communities are now also managed by various private entities; these entities in turn are overseen by associations of homeowners, whose boards are democratically elected.

Celebration, too, has a homeowners’ association, but its residents do not elect its board (although sometime in the future they are to be permitted to do so). Rather, according to the town’s quasi-constitution, which all home-buyers are required to sign, the homeowners’ association is a creature of Disney and will remain so for as long as the company wishes and as long as it owns even one acre of land in or next to Celebration. The association cannot change any rule or restriction in Celebration without written approval from the company. Disney has the right to control all physical aspects of the town—indeed, it regulates the appearance of the streets and houses minutely. In other words, Disney has an absolute and permanent veto over every decision the homeowners’ association might make, for as long as it wishes to exercise it. As Evan McKenzie, a lawyer familiar with homeowners’ associations, said upon examining the Celebration constitution, it represents “absolute top-down control.” “The homeowners are powerless against the association, and the association is powerless against Disney. I can’t imagine anything more undemocratic.”

Yet the very physical character of Celebration fosters a heightened community awareness that almost certainly will lead to politics. After the first residents moved in in 1996, controversy was not long coming: a few months later about thirty parents became discontented with the curriculum being taught in the town’s K-12 school and met to discuss their grievances and plan action. The town had no school board or city council where they could take their concerns, so they met with Disney executives and explained the problems. When the executives were unresponsive, the parents went to the local press, which proceeded to run negative stories about Disney.

Now Disney mounted an open campaign against the dissidents and in support of the school. It hired an “educational consultant” to give pro-school press interviews, show the discontented parents the errors of their ways, and loudly support the teachers. In an ordinary town, a public arena would have been arranged where the two sides could air their differences and perhaps reach a compromise. But in his handling of the affair, Celebration’s “community services manager”—the Disney employee—patently represented the company’s interests. Instead of public forums, he organized “pep rallies” and picnics on behalf of the teachers, praising what were labeled “positive parents.” Lacking further recourse and socially outcast, the disaffected parents finally pulled their children out of the school and drove them to a nearby parochial school. Some moved out of Celebration altogether.

Disney may have wanted to create a traditional American town. But the local democracy that was integral to the community life of those towns is intolerable to this multinational corporation. Ironically, the close-knit environment is likely to generate the very thing it finds intolerable: political activity. In 1996 the company had been talking about making more such towns around the country, but it has since changed its mind. Community self-management may be too great a threat to corporate interests.¤

—J.B.

This story is based on information from Michael Pollan, “Town-Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 1997.

Militia Fever
by Janet Biehl

At a time when the political sands have shifted massively to the right nearly everywhere, when the right is riding high while the left languishes in debris, it is increasingly common to hear the cry “Neither left nor right!” Few [...]]]> The Fallacy of “Neither Left nor Right”:

Militia Fever
by Janet Biehl

At a time when the political sands have shifted massively to the right nearly everywhere, when the right is riding high while the left languishes in debris, it is increasingly common to hear the cry “Neither left nor right!” Few right-wingers issue this cry—but then, why should they? Their political label is the toast of several continents today. The fact is that the strongest political winds are blowing many leftists, like the rest of the society, toward conservatism and a glorification of the market.

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 Cockburn 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 Cockburn, “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.

Terror Reigns in Manhattan
by Michael D. Weiss

Editors’ note: The following article singles out a real crisis that is emerging in anarchism, not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well: the steady degeneration of a left-libertarian radical theory and practice into a bohemian, personalistic, and in many [...]]]> ANNALS OF ANARCHISM

Terror Reigns in Manhattan
by Michael D. Weiss

Editors’ note: The following article singles out a real crisis that is emerging in anarchism, not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well: the steady degeneration of a left-libertarian radical theory and practice into a bohemian, personalistic, and in many ways decadent lifestyle. In our view, the designation lifestyle anarchism could often be substituted for postmodernism throughout the article.

Not far from the complacent New Age-ism of the touristy West Village cafés and uptown sushi bars, terror culture is afoot. Arising from the dark fragments of postmodernism, terror culture is the defining philosophy or, to use the de rigueur term, “voice” of a new movement. With growing force and articulation, this terrible voice, the clarion of the fin-de-millennium, echoes from Columbia’s Philosophy Hall, to the cafés of SoHo and the squats of midtown. This new movement has been called the paradigm of the twenty-first century, but its philosophy signals nothing less than the death of the city.

Although the scent of postmodern decay is strongest below Fourteenth Street, the signs of it are everywhere. From amidst the phone sex ads and the club listings in underground newspapers, a careful observer glimpses the postmodern terrorists. Ghoulish books called Hunting Humans and The Atrocity Exhibition fill their shelves; Faces of Death and hard-core pornography sit next to their VCRs; tattoos and piercing adorn their bodies. Dressed in defaced jeans or in the almost passé all-black uniform of their movement, they frequent the nightclubs, galleries, and bookstores of the city.

What is truly frightening about terror culture is that it is gaining ground, making its way into the mainstream. One of the leading American movies of recent years, Silence of the Lambs, is decidedly terroristic: The serial killer Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) is transformed into a Sherlock Holmes-type hero. On TV Twin Peaks and a slew of real-life crime and talk shows popularize “real” violence and fringe lifestyles. After the Jeffrey Dahmer case, a California card distributor released serial killer trading cards. Rock album covers make the Beatles’ original mutilated baby cover of the White Album pale in comparison.

College fashion is ugly. Women with dyed black hair and nose rings wear men’s Doc Martens or cowboy boots, defaced jeans, and T-shirts sporting bizarre, horrific, or obscene logos. According to Lola, a pink-haired, nose-ringed student at Parsons, “Postmodernism is the rage in art schools. Everybody dresses in black. It’s fashion.” In fact, every person I talked to, whether a self-proclaimed devotee of terror culture or not, conceded that terror culture has affected the contemporary cultural scene.

Terror historian Arthur Kroker describes the new postmodernism as “playing at your local theater, TV studio, office tower, doctor’s office, or sex outlet. It is the implosion of contemporary culture into a whole series of panic scenes at the fin-de-millennium.”

This new movement has arisen from the fragmentation of relativism. Yet though borrowing much from the relativists, terror culture has at its core radical subversion, nihilism, and complete rejection of all contemporary concepts of value. Terror culture goes beyond the relativist observation that all concepts of value or quality are contingent and socially constructed, ultimately to espouse a theory of anti-value.

To understand terror culture one must look to its genesis in academic postmodernism. Postmodernism, as its name suggests, is first and foremost a reaction to modernity. “Modernity” represents a belief in progress and in the value of art, science, and religion. The modern era, according to historian Arnold Toynbee, is “an unbroken vista of progress toward Earthly Paradise” full of idealism and technological optimism. The modernist world is orderly and logical, and humans can ultimately conquer it through Reason.

Postmodernism, like relativism, however, rejects modernity’s premise that human beings will achieve a progressive realization of truth through human endeavor. As Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, expresses it, “Post-modernism came into existence when the notion of progress began to subside.” The postmoderns reject teleological belief systems; they reject the notions of progress, truth, and beauty because these notions make sense only inside our culture’s current dominant paradigm, or way of looking at things.

Paradigm theory, a central tenet of postmodernism, postulates that there are countless different paradigms and that our current culture’s arrangement proceeds only from the one now dominant. Truth, progress, aesthetic quality, even value are arbitrary as to one paradigm and impossible to fulfill in all paradigms at the same time. They are thus meaningless concepts that should be discarded.

The postmodernist attempts to demonstrate that the contingency and socially constructed ideals of Western culture are both liberating and emasculating. As Gitlin writes, “Post-modernism neither embraces nor criticizes but beholds the world blankly, with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony.” To the postmodernist, everything—every value, every idea—is contingent. Postmodernism rejects the earnestness of modernism as simple-mindedness and adopts all that modernism rejects. By embracing kitsch, “poor” quality, and obscenity, postmoderns reject value per se, or at least value as defined by the dominant paradigm.

This sort of kitsch pomo caught on in the art and architectural world in the late 1970s. Employing these ideas, a painting movement emerged in New York that rejected all distinctions between bad art and good art by employing tasteless images, inept drawing, poor craftsmanship, and unschooled color. The movement’s 1978 show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art had the Monty-Pythonesque title “Bad Painting.”

As expressed by Julie Wachtel, a postmodern artist whose works consist of tracings of cartoon figures from cheap greeting cards directly onto canvas, postmodernism rejects the very “idea of quality.”

The message in the title of New York Times art reporter Andy Grundberg’s “Death Comes to Post-Modernism” clearly hasn’t reached downtown. The 1980s social climber may have tired of chintz architecture and schlock ballet, but in intellectual and popular cultures postmodernism has lost none of its potency. Contemporary postmodernists fall roughly into two camps: New Age multiculturalism devotees (the children of 1960s relativism) and terror culture devotees. This second group, the postmodern terrorists, are indigenous to the postmodern scene, which, according to Kroker, “evokes, and then secretes, the fin-de-millennium mood of contemporary culture,” a world of “panic sex, panic art, panic ideology, panic bodies, panic noise, and panic theory.”

It is a movement whose intellectual heart is radical subversion and whose chief ideological progenitor is Jean Baudrillard. Born in Paris in 1929, Baudrillard has spent the last twenty years of his life crisscrossing America, writing of its “inspired banality.” The starting point of Baudrillard’s postmodernism is pain. Relying heavily on the language of cybernetics and information science, he describes a dizzying “hyperreal” world where paradigm shifts and changing images obscure all meaning.

For Baudrillard, the communications age has replaced the scene with the obscene. The obscene

is no longer then the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden, or obscure; on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more visible-than-visible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret.

Yet though everything is apparent, nothing has meaning. The massive infusion of terrifying gibberish can only be described as pornographic: It is a “whole pornography of information and communication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all functions and objects in their readability, their fluidity and availability.”

In this hyperreal environment notions of value are not only meaningless, they act as simulations that keep us away from reality. As Baudrillard says, “We are in an epoch of simulation: simulated culture, simulated intellectual life, and . . . simulated conservatism. And the simulations have almost already lost their ability to refer back to the ‘real thing.’”

Baudrillard’s goal, therefore, is to rediscover and recapture reality by bringing us something that cannot be transformed into hyperreal gibberish. Much as T. S. Eliot sought “the still point in the turning world,” so Baudrillard pursues “that critical point, that blind spot in time” where “we suddenly left reality behind.” At that point lies the “possibility of a pure event, an event that can no longer be manipulated, interpreted, or deciphered by any historical subjectivity.”

To find this spot, Baudrillard proposes a complete assault on the present paradigm: “It is true that logic only leads to disenchantment. We can’t avoid going a long way with negativity, nihilism, and all. But then don’t you think a more exciting world opens up? Not a more reassuring world, but certainly more thrilling, a world where the name of the game remains secret. A world ruled by reversibility and indetermination.”

Baudrillard concedes that

Post-modernist discourse is a violent, restless, and hallucinogenic reflection, . . . a wiping clean of the “entire horizon” as the dominant mood of twentieth-century experience.

He even illustrates this point with a story.

Take, for example, the story of a woman to whom a man sends an ardent love letter. She asks him what part of her seduced him the most. What else can he answer? Her eyes, of course. And he receives in the mail, wrapped in brown paper, the woman’s eye. The man is shattered, destroyed. The woman has abolished the symbolic order. She loses an eye, he loses face.

For Baudrillard, we are undermining all rationality and ultimately the entire paradigm by attacking the paradigm of thought embodied in the idea of metaphor.

Hence the intellectual underpinnings of terror culture contain the seeds of utter nihilism and destruction. As Jean-François Lyotard expresses the essence of terror philosophy:

Beneath the general call for an easing and abatement of pressure, we hear the murmurs of the desire to recommence terror, of the phantasm of grasping reality. The reply is: war on everything, let’s be witnesses to the unpresentable, let’s activate those differences, let’s save the honor of the name.

But terror culture’s war on the dominant paradigms is not restricted to sterile intellectual environs; it is carried on in the streets, nightclubs, bookstores, theaters, and art galleries of the world’s metropolises.

A recent exhibition at The New Gallery, 583 Broadway, illustrates the dichotomy of evolving postmodern culture. The exhibit is largely patronized by men wearing expensive overcoats and sporting trendy haircuts rather than by the denizens of the SoHo cafés who spawned the movement. On one wall of the gallery, a ten-by-twenty-foot photograph of a prison entrance serves as a screen for a slide show that spells out “opening new doors” in several different languages. Another wall features a thirty-foot-long computer image of dirty Brazilian miners. The floor boasts assorted photos of Vietnamese boat people—all very dirty, all very shocking.

The last room of the exhibit contains an installation composed of plastic wallpaper with large molded children’s toys in pastel colors, flanked by two lambs of the same material that say “bless you” on the back. Opposite the bright wall sits a wooden table that supports a two-foot-high sculpture of a fat smiling naked man surrounded by at least twenty earth-toned ceramic pitchers. The man’s arms are open wide in a joyous embrace, and a word-balloon rising from the top of his head says “Baby, I love you!” The mouths of the pitchers are reminiscent of puckered lips. This is pure kitsch, the happy ending in a sad and dizzy world, as meaningful as a music box in a pile of nuclear waste. This is the essence of postmodernism: the willful juxtaposition of terror and Toyland.

Observers of this terror show have mixed reactions, although they agree that it is provocative. An onlooker named Iddo, a recent graduate from Hammond’s Visual and Environmental Studies program, says he is familiar with this type of postmodernism. According to Iddo, “Lots of new cinema programs buy into this stuff.” He cites as an example the movie Jacob’s Ladder. “It lacks narrative; it’s grotesque; it’s medieval; it’s totally postmodern.” Looking at some of the more extreme works in the New Gallery, however, Iddo expresses some skepticism about the movement’s contribution. “Personally,” he says, “I don’t buy it. They believe in artistic and cultural relativism, that there’s no good or bad art, no way to judge the material. This stuff is highly intellectual, at least in cinema. But in the end, I think it’s just boring.” Another onlooker, a middle-aged woman dressed in black, disagrees. “You don’t understand it if you think it’s boring,” she tells him. “This is the only stuff left that’s interesting. Andrew Wyeth—that’s boring.”

The war on the dominant paradigm has certainly begun on the streets of New York. On Broadway, near Broome Street, vendors sell disembodied mannequin parts for five dollars apiece (three for $12). On St. Mark’s at Second Avenue, sidewalk artists hawk neo-obscene or grotesque pictures: an American flag, above which sits a half-clothed stripper in a Grim Reaper’s cowl, mountains of skulls against a postnuclear backdrop, headless businessmen, rotting corpses in bondage. At Art 54, at 54 Grand Street, black and white lithographs of mangled children (triple sized) and fallen angels sell for $3,500. The curator tells me the pieces sell very well. “I get a lot of interest in them. I like them. The subject matter may be a little much, but I think that’s the point. People want to be a little bit shocked.”

St. Mark’s Books, at Ninth Street and Third Avenue, advances the war on culture. The store is full of urban primitives (the vanguard of the terror culture movement), all in black, perusing magazine racks of obscure photocopied magazines on anarchism, obscenity, terror, and of course every conceivable brand of rock and roll. On the front rack are some of the best sellers: The Atrocity Exhibition, The Torture Garden, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, Assassination Rhapsody, and Freaks. Others include the complete De Sade collection, Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch, Macho Sluts, and perching nervously, Iron John. Readers sit surrounding a rack full of Exploring Teenage Culture, published out of Brooklyn. This magazine, edited by “Frank,” espouses mass murder (not serial killing, which Frank calls “weak”) and has sections on murder techniques and murder records (seventeen at McDonald’s in Fresno). A longer-haired customer wearing a tweed trench coat tells me he enjoys Frank’s writing. “I got into this stuff through photography. The interesting thing is that it keeps going and going. It’s a lifestyle; it’s something you have to do. I’m trying to do crime stuff now. Free-lance. Like Weegee, only more real.”

Another front in terror culture’s “war on everything” involves (increasingly popular) body mutilations— disfiguring, scarring, and piercing. In its upstairs quarters at 144 Fifth Avenue, the Gauntlet is the premier piercing center in New York. In its first three months, it has already performed more than eight hundred piercings (roughly fourteen a day). Its offices are inoffensive and even stylish. Minimalist couches and counters sit atop polished hardwood floors. The first tip that this is not just another trendy midtown hair boutique comes from the contents of the counter. It is filled with metal rings obviously not designed for ears. Also lying under the glass are needles, surgical forceps, jawbones, neo-Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting genital mutilations, and what looks like chain mail.

On the other side of the room is a table containing copies of P.F.I.Q. (Piercing Fans International Quarterly), a sort of combination hard-core porn/how-to guide for amateur piercers. Also on the table is Androgyny and a copy of a tattoo magazine, Body Art. The piercing rooms at the Gauntlet are extremely clean, better looking than the average doctor’s office. It has been inspected twice by the Health Department, passing easily both times. The piercing is done without anesthesia. Some piercings hurt no more than installing an earring. Others, Dan says, are “out of body experiences.”

Dan Kopka, the skin-headed, multipierced, highly tattooed manager and master pierce at the Gauntlet (“the only fully qualified pierce in town”), gives an assessment of the piercing movement. “Most of the piercings we do are the three N’s: noses, nipples, and navels. But we’ll do almost anything—genitals, eyebrows, whatever.” Dan says that his clientele is not all alternative. “We get all different types of people from all walks of life, from Wall Street to the East Village.” While I am there, a client comes in looking for a back to her nose ring. “I’m not personally really into the weird stuff,” she tells me, pointing at the genital piercing hieroglyphs, “although one of the guys I’m going out with has one like that. I think it’s a powerful statement.” Piercing is the metaphor of the postmodern terrorist.

Terror culture even has its own publication. Semiotext(e) is the definitive guide to terror culture. Semiotext(e) is published by Autonomedia, a cooperative run by Columbia University’s Jim Fleming and Sylvere Lotringer. It is headquartered in the French Department at Columbia University (512 Philosophy Hall), although it has recently expanded to additional offices in Brooklyn. In 1978 Lotringer, coeditor and French professor, decided to change the focus of the magazine, to make it more “relevant.” Thus Semiotext(e) in its current incarnation is, according to Adam Parfrey, editor of Apocalypse Culture, “kinda anarchistic, heretic, post-punk, post-situationist, cutting-edge subversive-type stuff.”

I meet Jim Fleming in the old factory building in Brooklyn that houses Semiotext(e) and, incidentally, serves as Fleming’s home. Fleming came aboard in 1979, shortly after the decision to refocus the magazine. His mission: to “do something on what we talk about, change the way people think about things, absolutely everything.” Theme issues during the next ten years included Polysexuality, featuring a half-dressed leather-biker cover, behind which lay a collection of essays on, among other things, animal sex, child sex, morbid sex, violent sex, and critical sex. The Schizo issue celebrated schizophrenia and included lyrics from the punk rock song “Teenage Lobotomy,” the Boston Declaration of Psychiatric Oppression, and academic articles that included “Fuck the Talkies,” “Politics,” and “Savage.” Its writers include a who’s who of the avant-garde: John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Kathy Acker, Phillip Glass, and William Burroughs. Recent issues of Semiotext(e) have sold more than thirty thousand copies.

Fleming does not look at all terrifying. We chat congenially in his kitchen while he cooks a large spaghetti dinner. His young son lies sprawled in the living room watching Peter Pan on the Fox network. All in all, a wholesome scene. Jim is a ABD from Iowa in linguistics, where he studied deconstruction under Derrida disciple Gayatri Spivak. He now teaches in the communications department at Hunter College. He looks the part of the comfortable intellectual, with his full beard and curly, unkempt hair. Sue Ann Harkey, the graphic artist, is the most alternative-looking person present. Her pierced nose and four or five earrings give a hint of the movement’s fascination with piercing.

As we talk, Jim pulls out a joint and lights it. He passes it around, reflecting thoughtfully that Semiotext(e) “had been moderately successful,” despite money problems and surveillance by the FBI. “One of our goals,” he says, looking at the Schizo issue, “is not to battle in the libraries. We try to be less intellectual. We want to expose people to alternative ways of living.” Discussing the issue on Italy, he says, “what we wanted was an alliance of Marxists, drug users, and the mentally ill. I respect that.” According to Fleming, “Money and media—that’s what New York is all about. People hoard knowledge. That’s how they get ahead. We [New Yorkers] are information junkies, the most in this country, maybe the world.” Semiotext(e) seems doggedly bent on feeding this information obsession, on distributing “dangerous,” hard-to-get information to as wide an audience as possible, hoping to make waves in the mainstream of popular culture.

As far as avant-garde art goes, preeminent in the creation of terror culture is performance artist Karen Finley. Finley’s performance art has been distinguished by Artforum magazine as “obscenity in its purest form.” In her act Finley smears food into her genitals and has even defecated onstage. She graphically describes violent and bizarre sex acts with priests, children, relatives, and the handicapped. Following Finley’s lead, former porno performer Annie Sprinkle now does her thing in artistic settings. Her 1988 performance at the Kitchen Center for Performing Arts’ “Carnival of Sleaze” festival included elements from a previous performance at a Screw magazine party. The Kitchen has also featured the concededly “extremely violent pornographic art films” of Richard Kern, best known for his Death Trip films. These performances graphically illustrate the terror culture agenda. The artists violently attack the idea of value, championing anti-value. They do not claim that what they do is not pornographic or obscene. Nor do they claim it is beautiful. It is terror, trying to tear down the dominant paradigm at all costs, attacking all fronts at once.

And the terror project is working. One can see its effectiveness clearly while sitting in the Life Café at Tenth Street and Avenue B at two o’clock on a Friday night. The Life is a favorite NYU hangout. (NYU, especially its Cinema Studies program, attracts many aspiring terrorists.) Still, the black leather, bald heads, and nose rings of the crowd cannot dissipate the feeling of suburban youth transplanted to the city, of amateurs “playing” terrorist. The decor is quintessential pomo: Life magazine covers, a Victorian-style embossed ceiling, cowboy hats, exterior pipes, and black and white photos. The music is loud, fast, and grinding. One pink-haired woman calls it “mainstream alternative,” training wheels for terror. Another says she thinks it is a derivative form of adolescent rebellion, though she too is dressed in the all-black costume so common to the movement.

At Cheap Jack’s I meet Christy, a member of A-Central, an anarchist collective that distributes nonauthoritarian literature, including the Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia series. Christy tells me that I won’t learn much about the terrorist enterprise in the open air of the Village. She suggests the rock group Missing Foundations as “real underground. They’re into direct action. They’re motivated by postmodern theory and aren’t into drugs.” Christy recently lived in the squats with the direct action crowd. “The postmodern art scene is totally different from the people who live in squats and are watched by the FBI.”

The squatters represent the latest wave of homeless youth who see themselves as a rebellion against false culture, a celebration of life on the edge. Recession drives young punks from cheap apartments paid for by parents to squats. They demand respect. They call themselves urban primitives, a new name for the homeless.

Arthur Kroker captures the feel of terror philosophy, of the war on the dominant paradigm being waged in the streets, theaters, cafés, bookstores, and galleries. According to Kroker, the contemporary cultural scene represents

the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation. . . . The Postmodern Scene is, therefore, a catastrophe theory for a hyper-modern culture and society which is imploding into . . . its dark and negative sign . . . , burnout, discharge, and waste as are compelled to reveal their lingering traces on the after-images of (our) bodies, politics, sexuality, and economy.

Given its increasing popularity, even trendiness, what’s wrong with terror culture? Perhaps the essence of what’s wrong is its denial that something could be wrong with anything. In waging war on all value and values—truth, beauty, progress—the postmodern terrorists champion a theory of anti-value, in the process making all dialogue not only incoherent but meaningless. Moreover, the central belief of the terrorists, that by attacking what we think of as good with what we think of as bad we will find something real, must be the ultimate nonsequitur. Even assuming that paradigm theory is true, it does not in any way follow that by attacking the present way of seeing things, something “better” or more “real” will follow. Terror culture attempts to heal its patient (society) by destroying it. It knows what it dislikes but, unable to do any better, is content to destroy what is, subsisting on its dreamlike hopes for a utopian future that will arise in its place.

Terror culture is taking hold. It desensitizes us. It creates moral, spiritual, and at its logical conclusion, physical death. It does not take psychological expertise to realize that immersing oneself in pictures of mutilated children, in hard-core pornography, and in self-mutilation is not conducive to a healthy mental state. The “ironic detachment” created by terror culture is thus more akin to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” than to Baudrillard’s “desire for the real.”

In the end the battle over terror culture will be waged, not in the ivory tower of Baudrillard and Lyotard, but on the streets with Lola and Christy and Iddo. The real always does enter into the equation, and what seems to be an ultimately unhealthy way of living will, if it is truly so, be unlivable. Theory can push reality back only for so long. The healthy conditions for human existence have a nasty way of biting any utopians on the behind. If that is so, maybe terror culture is doomed from the start, as other utopian movements before it. On the other hand, there has never really been a (dys)utopian movement of this type before. Maybe for them the rules have changed. Maybe they don’t care. As for the rest of us, caught up in the beginning of this maelstrom, maybe we should.¤

Michael D. Weiss is a freelance libertarian writer.

This article was originally published in Social Anarchism, no. 21 (1995-1996). For more information: Atlantic Center for Research and Education, 2743 Maryland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21218 U.S.A.

On a similar theme, please see the recent pamphlet Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism by Murray Bookchin (A.K. Press, P.O. Box 40682, San Francisco CA 94140-0682).

Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age
by Kirkpatrick Sale

(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995)

reviewed by Janet Biehl

For centuries throughout Europe, yarn-making and cloth-weaving had been domestic enterprises. In the Midlands and the northern counties of England, skilled craftsmen— weavers, knitters, stockingers, croppers—had long woven and finished cotton and wool, first for local use and later for the textile trade under the “putting-out” system. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, these craftsmen found their livelihoods jeopardized by the new economic and technological order of the Industrial Revolution. Large steam-powered factories were being constructed featuring spinning machines, scrubbing engines, and power looms. In 1809 a new wide-frame lace-making machine was patented that could produce more lace with less labor, thrusting the area’s lace-making artisans out of work. Between 1806 and 1817, the number of textile mills in Yorkshire alone increased fourteenfold.

Formerly independent artisans, who had once been independent and formidable enough to set their own wages, now found themselves replaced by machines, while their children were subjected to long and dismal hours of toil in the hated mills. Community animosity toward the factories was intense—it was clear to all that a whole way of life, one based on local reciprocity, was imperiled. In a culture where morality still exercised a claim over a person’s actions, those who built their fortunes by building and running factories were considered immoral. As Kirkpatrick Sale correctly puts it in Rebels Against the Future, “In the course of no more than a few generations England saw the effective end of a world based on an enclosed communitarian life, a high degree of nonmarket self-sufficiency, a simple system of local exchange and barter, a heritage of multiple crafts, and interwoven customs of mutuality lying outside the chaffer of the marketplace.”

The animosity erupted into violence for about fifteen months in 1811-1812 in the movement known to history as Luddite, named after a mythical Ned Ludd. In the textile villages of Nottinghamshire, where workingmen were accustomed to make cotton into stockings and lace, stockingers began to break looms in March 1811, in protest of the cheap new processes. Highly organized, working in small disciplined bands, the stockingers moved quickly from one village to the next under cover of darkness to carry out their task of destruction. Afterward, when local authorities tried to identify the perpetrators, the villagers maintained a impenetrable front, refusing to inform on their brothers and fathers.

Inspired by the Nottinghamshire successes, the movement spread to manufacturing districts to the north early in 1812. In Yorkshire wool-cloth finishers, known as croppers, resented the introduction of new woolen looms and of wool-finishing mills. Starting in early 1812, parties of croppers, bolder than their predecessors to the south, attacked major mills using arson and burglary. In mid-April a party attacked a major factory at Rawfolds, but in the Luddites’ first setback, stooges for the owner were waiting inside with weapons. The attack failed, and two Luddites were killed.

Thereafter the Luddite movement grew increasingly desperate, even plotting to assassinate factory masters. In Lancashire the owner a large mill that used steam-operated power looms saw his mansion burned; in April the village of Westhoughton saw the most destructive Luddite raid of all, when a cotton factory with more than 170 power looms was entirely destroyed. In Huddersfield, also in April, four croppers assassinated a prominent local manufacturer who was about to open a new factory. All told in that April alone, twelve factories were attacked, and major food riots had broken out; as many as forty workers were killed. The Home Office in London received reports that an insurrection was under way.

In Yorkshire and Lancashire, which had a history of Jacobin involvement, some parts of the Luddite movement developed revolutionary aims. Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man had sold well in the northern counties, and “Paineites” now saw in the movement against steam-operated power looms an opportunity for more radical politics. As E. P. Thompson once put it, Luddism “continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives.” A Luddite leaflet of March 9, 1812, made an explicitly revolutionary appeal:

To all Croppers, Weavers &c & Public at large:

Generous Countrymen. You are requested to come forward with Arms and help the Redressers to redress their wrongs and shake off the hateful Yoke of a Silly Old Man, and his Son more silly and their Rogueish Ministers, all Nobles and Tyrants must be brought down. Come let us follow the Noble Example of the brave Citizens of Paris who in Sight of 30,000 Tyrant Redcoats brought A Tyrant to the Ground. By so doing you will be best aiming at your own Interest. Above 40,000 Heroes are ready to break out, to crush the old Government & establish a new one.

Apply to General Ludd Commander of the Army of the Redressers.

As the movement became radicalized, Luddites shifted from machine-breaking and factory-torching to conducting nighttime raids for arms and money. The government’s response to their grievances was to deploy thousands of armed forces in the northern counties. By May 1, their numbers totaled some 14,400 troops, including 1,400 cavalry, two artillery companies, and at least 800 dragoons—a larger force than London had dispatched to the Peninsula against Napoleon four years before. After the movement waned and its participants were tried, twenty-four Luddites were found guilty and hung, the same number imprisoned, and fifty-one deported to Australia.

The Luddite phenomenon is a compelling episode in the history of European labor radicalism. It was the product of a situation that was as close to revolutionary as Britain had seen since the seventeenth century, with widespread economic distress, crop failures, the cutoff of overseas trade, the interminable Continental war, a slain prime minister, and government obduracy in redressing grievances. The Luddite bands were disciplined and organized. Still, no concerted and coordinated revolutionary organization took shape; the revolutionary ideas of the March letters appear to have been held by only part of the movement. Other strains appealed to Parliament or the Prince Regent for relief.

In the narrative portions of his book, Sale brings the Luddite movement to life. Within the limitations of the subject—there is a dearth of source material about the Luddites’ motives, organization, and membership—it is well researched, and in places it reads as vividly as a novel.

All the more irritating, then, are its problems of interpretation. The period under discussion is that of the Industrial Revolution, a time of dramatic social, technological, and economic change. The invention of the steam engine in 1769 technologized the factory system, enabling the shift from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism. Arkwright’s first factory gave practical application to the new steam technology that was essential to the massive transformation. The imperatives of the market drove the application of steam toward the systematic exploitation of human labor for profit.

Sale, however, highlights one factor in this historical process—technology—and presents it as the decisive, even the determining factor. “All technologies have consequences,” he announces, “inevitable and built in, and imperatives, just as inevitable, essentially separate from human dictates and desires.” He cites approvingly a remark of Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, on “’technical determinants’ dictated by ‘the very nature’ of machines.” Such affirmations of the “inherent,” “determining” nature of technologies recur throughout the book. “Technology is not neutral, composed of tools that can be used for good or evil depending on the user,” we are warned. “There is,” he tells us, “’an intrinsic aspect of technologies’ that affects what happens regardless of who uses them or with what benign purposes; any technology, any artifact, has certain inherent attributes, its givens, impossible to change or correct, and these . . . inevitably determine the ways it is used and the consequences it has.” In some places technology seems to order all the rest of society: “An industrial society . . has its own inevitable logic, simply because its needs and values are determined by its technology.”

Having elevated machines to a commandeering status in social processes, Sale must show that the new steam technology was what brought about the Industrial Revolution. Steam did indeed play a major and indispensible role, but all too often, Sale must attribute to machines a social dynamism that is more properly characteristic of the market—that is, of capitalism. Thus, he lists the “imperatives” that were “inevitable and built in” to the steam engine. The steam engine required “larger and ever larger scales”—meaning larger and larger factories; the steam engine dictated gigantism, in effect, because “it can power so many separate machines at once.” But economies of scale were at least as likely to have required large factories. The steam engine also dictated “ever increasing production,” Sale tells us—as if the market imposed no growth imperative. Finally, steam engines dictated “centralization and specialization”—yet as at least one economic historian has noted, “The practice of gathering workers together would probably have spread over much of the old industrial field if there had no great changes in equipment, for the expansion of the market would have strained the putting-out and handicraft systems.”¹

Oddly, the reasons that Sale gives for the supposed imperative of centralization are not technological at all, but “factors of efficiency and economy.” If “factors of efficiency and economy” are at work, then no technological determinism exists. This is but one of many instances in which Sale appears to contradict his own thesis. At another point he tells us that in the new social order of the Industrial Revolution, “those who controlled capital were able to do almost anything they wished.” If they could, then again, no technological determinism exists. And when he tells us that “improved machinery meant decreased costs, which meant increased production and profit,” he is clearly describing machines in the service of capital, not in a “determining” role.

Not all the hardship the Luddites experienced was caused by the advent of the hated new machines. In fact, capitalism had arrived in English textile manufacturing before steam technology was introduced. Artisans were already part of the putting-out system, a form of preindustrial capitalism, in which independent artisans like the stockingers, lace-workers, and knitters Nottinghamshire worked on looms (known as frames) at home. Capitalist intermediaries called hosiers leased the artisans their frames, provided them with raw yarn, specified the products needed; then returned later and paid them for their piecework, marketing the finished cloth or woven goods elsewhere. Even though the artisans worked at home and not in a factory, their lifeways were no longer self-sufficient, dependent solely on the community in which they lived for sustenance. As Sale himself points out,

Grievances particular to the frame-workers rankled: being at the mercy of the hosiers, the merchant capitalists of Nottingham, for how much work was given out, how much would be paid for it, how much rent would be charged for their frames, what kinds of articles would be produced; having no way to stop new workers entering a trade already overpopulated, because certain hosiers would always accept new hands without adequate apprenticeships who would work at cheaper rates; becoming trapped in a “truck” system of payment in goods . . . instead of cash, whenever the hosier was short of funds.

The fact is that these home-working, piece-working artisans were already part of a capitalist cash nexus; had they truly had a “high degree of nonmarket self-sufficiency,” the loss of overseas markets due to the Napoleonic wars would have had little impact on their livelihoods.

Sale’s attempt to render under technology what belongs to capitalism reflects the precept of deep ecology, unmentioned in this book, that the society that is destroying the biosphere derives most prominently from the scientific worldview and scientific revolution. Deep ecologists accordingly tend to name the present society “industrial.” Social ecologists, by contrast, maintain that the present society is not merely industrial but capitalist and argue that it is the grow-or-die imperative of the market that is leading to ever greater ecological destruction. Machines have certainly been necessary to particular social developments like the Industrial Revolution and they certainly magnify the consequences of capitalist social relations, but the purposes for which the are used are not “inherent” or “determining.” Rather, the human beings who use them determine the purposes for which they are used.

Aligned as he is with the deep ecology tendency, Sale seems to have difficulty even using the word capitalism, which appears only a handful of times in his book. This is a remarkable accomplishment in a book on social change in early nineteenth-century England. Sale’s need to interpret that change as primarily technological in nature rather than capitalistic puts him in the awkward position of having to turn machines into the generators of phenomena whose causes more properly lie in capitalist social relations. Indeed, his refusal to render unto capitalism what properly belongs to it leads him to procrustean formulations.

Thus, according to Sale, “the task for the factory owner was to make sure that workers would be disciplined to serve the needs of the machines”—as if the factory owner were not motivated by profit. His “principal strategies were threefold. First, long and inflexible hours, behind locked doors, twelve and fourteen hours a day . . . next, a regimen of shop-floor penalties. . . ; and finally . . . outright physical force.” Certainly the factory system imposed an authoritarian regimen on workers, but Sale makes it seem as if its purpose were discipline for its own sake, or for the machine’s sake, rather than to squeeze ever more productivity out of workers for ever greater profit.²

When the word technological is too clearly inappropriate, Sale shifts to industrial, a conveniently ambiguous word that connotes both economic and technological factors. For example, he writes of “production—restless, relentless production—which must necessarily lie at the heart of industrial logic and from which must inevitably follow consumption—expansive, incessant consumption” (my emphasis). Tthe sentence would have meaning if industrial logic means “capitalist necessity” or “the market imperative.” But Sale explicitly defines industrialism as “the ethos encapsulating the values and technologies of Western civilization.” This subjectivization of “industrialism” as an “ethos” precludes a capitalistic component in Sale’s industrialism. Thus, he is attributing capitalist production and consumption to machines. Similarly, he defines laissez-faire as a matter of technology rather than capitalism, by masking it with the word industrialism: “According to the ideology of industrialism, called the doctrine of laissez-faire, the state was to leave the economy to its own devices.” Yet that laissez-faire is a form of capitalist social relations and not merely a doctrine, Sale himself admits only three pages later: “the laissez-faire system . . . was an economy, whatever else might be said about it, designed to unleash certain human appetites.”

In his account of the post-World War II era, Sale makes the same substitution of technology for capitalism. Certainly the postwar years saw great technological changes: nuclear weapons and nuclear power, television, computers, fiber optics, communications satellites, biotechnology. But Sale identifies technology as the cause of seemingly all postwar changes. “Since about midcentury, and especially in the last two decades, a powerful and sweeping alternation of the industrial world has taken place as a result of technological changes.” The new technologies are just as deterministic as the steam engine had been in its day: “the kind of technology shaping the second Industrial Revolution has its own special and inescapable logic.” The computer epitomizes this process, as “the ‘master technology’ that stands behind so many other inventions and processes of our lives.” Its “built-in” consequences automation—as if the capitalist imperative to reduce labor costs were not at work in the process of automation.

Suburbanization, the decline of the family farm, the pervasiveness of advertising, the manufacture of needs, the seduction of the consumer through television—all are caused by postwar technology. Cities have sprawled into megalopolises, wars have been fought, military budgets have swelled—all as part of the “miraculous manufactory of needs of the high-tech society.”

Since 1973 and the end of the postwar boom, many problems have arisen for American workers. “The problem is technology,” Sale advises. “Technology and its relentless drive toward automation, coupled with its ability to move and control employment anywhere in the world, [can] finally be seen as the culprit, eliminating, as it was always intended to do, the annoying cost of production known as labor.” To be sure, automation has played a necessary role; but to pull out one factor and make it all determining is simply absurd. “It is technology, and the fierce global competition it engenders [!], that forces the abandonment of product lines made unprofitable and the closing of plants made . . . it is also this sort of competition that has caused the flight of so many factories and businesses from the industrial metropoles to outposts in East Asia and Latin America in particular.” And all this time we thought it was global capitalism!

Finally Sale has the effrontery to blame on technology the widening gap between rich and poor today. “The conclusion, the awful truth that must lie at the heart of industrialism, is that inequalities, within nations and between, must exist and persist, in fact must grow.” One could scarcely imagine how social inequality ever existed before the computer. And even though his book lionizes “rebels against the future,” Sale apparently believes their quest hopeless, excluding the possibility of social equality as long as technology is around.

This philosophy is deeply reactionary, since it is precisely labor-saving technology that—directed for the right purposes—has the potential to eliminate toil and make possible a free and equal society. It is capitalism, on the other hand, that must be eliminated. By failing to separate the two, in fact by masking capitalist social relations with technological development, Sale diminishes the possibility of removing the root causes of competition, accumulation, a market society, and ecological devastation—social phenomena that long antedate Watt’s steam engine and computers. He thereby obscures rather than reveals not only the social relations that have brought humanity to its present crises, but how technology can be placed in the service of a post-scarcity, ecological, and rational society based on freedom from mindless toil.¤

1 Herbert Heaton, Economic History of Europe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 575.

2 After contrasting in the starkest possible terms the Dickensian misery of working people during the Industrial Revolution with the flagrant wealth of the few, one might expect Sale to abandon at last the absurd deep-ecology notion that humanity as such is responsible for the ecological crisis. Instead, we are told immediately after this section: “The Industrial Revolution was the first spectacular triumph of the human species over . . . the natural world.”

Matthew Kalman and John Murray are editors of the eco-political investigative magazine Open Eye, which has been uncovering and exposing David Icke and “New Age Nazism.” Address: BM Open Eye, London WC1N 3XX. Issue 3 is available for £1.70.

It [...]]]> From Green Messiah to New Age Nazi
by Matthew Kalman and John Murray

Matthew Kalman and John Murray are editors of the eco-political investigative magazine Open Eye, which has been uncovering and exposing David Icke and “New Age Nazism.” Address: BM Open Eye, London WC1N 3XX. Issue 3 is available for £1.70.

It has been hard in recent years to ignore the rising popularity of almost everything that comes under the heading New Age. Yoga, meditation, Kabbalah, Buddhism, alternative medicine, environmentalism, and self-improvement, as well as an array of New Age therapies, have all gained in popularity, as have other fringe interests like UFOs and the paranormal, which often appeal to the same people. Few will have avoided at least some contact.

The movement even has its own stars. In Britain, David Icke, the TV sports commentator turned Green Party national spokesman turned purple-robed “Son of God,” is the best-known leader. [See "British Green Party Cofounder Icke Goes New Age," Green Perspectives, no. 24, October 1991.] His books sell fast, and he pulls in the crowds as a charismatic speaker on a hectic schedule of speaking engagements and workshops. Though many see him as a figure of fun, his popularity is undimmed.

Icke has led a public life: from goalkeeper for the Coventry City and Hereford United teams, he then moved on to the BBC as a sports commentator. He later became national spokesperson for the Green Party before resigning in 1990, declaring himself to be “a Son of the Godhead,” wearing turquoise, and predicting catastrophic geological upheaval. His latest incarnation is more sinister.

In the summer of 1994 Icke wrote The Robots’ Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance, a book which indicated a convergence of New Age thinking with Nazi philosophy. Casting aside his pat concerns about the environment, Icke enthusiastically embraced the classic Nazi conspiracy theory, alleging that the world is controlled by a secret cadre of “The Elite.” He openly endorsed the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the tsarist anti-Semitic forgery that informed Hitler’s notion of a global Jewish conspiracy.

Icke seems oblivious to the fact that the Protocols were long ago exposed as a crude device to stir up hatred of Jews. Nor is he concerned about their popularity with Nazis from Hitler onwards. “Just because Hitler used knowledge for negative reasons doesn’t reflect on the knowledge,” says Icke.

The Robots’ Rebellion weaves a complex tapestry of extreme right-wing concerns about conspiracies to control the world through such diverse means as banking, the New World Order, freemasons, the FBI, the Waco siege, microchips, extraterrestrials, and gun control.

The anti-Semitism of the book is not concealed. Icke accuses Jewish bankers of funding both Hitler and the Bolsheviks,a classic piece of far-right propaganda. He attacks “Jehovah, the vengeful God of the Jews,” as “quite possibly an extraterrestrial.” He is unabashed in sourcing his material back to leading U.S. right-wing militia figures such as Bill Cooper, who believes in a UFO/world government conspiracy that includes aliens both good and bad: “blond Aryans” and large-nosed “Greys.”

Unfortunately, the publication of The Robots’ Rebellion aroused very little criticism of Icke, although many Green Party members began to realize the danger that their one-time figurehead now represented. Some began to picket meetings, with other antifascists later following their lead.

Now Icke has published a new book, . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free [Cambridge: Bridge of Love, 1995], which brings his anti-Semitic ideas to a chilling conclusion.

Following an Open Eye investigation and the resulting negative publicity, Icke’s publisher, Gateway, refused to handle the new book. Icke has been forced to produce it himself, with financial backing from a Jewish supporter named David Solomon. The book contains a desperate plea to readers to help sell copies.

Icke’s basic thesis is that “almost every major negative event of global significance has been part of the same long-term plan by the All-Seeing Eye cult to take over the planet via a centralized world government, central bank, currency and army.” Although Icke uses terms like Illuminati and Brotherhood to describe this elite, their true identity soon becomes apparent. “There is a global Jewish clique,” he writes, who “worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This . . . elite secured the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish state of Israel in Palestine.”

Icke says that, “given the genetic history of most Jewish people,” the Jews have no claim to Israel. This is a common argument among the far right, some of whom believe that the Anglo-Saxons of northern Europe are the true descendants of the “lost tribes of Israel.” Just in case readers have any doubts, Icke explains that the “Israeli government, its army, and its intelligence arm, Mossad, are neo-Nazi, terrorist organizations.”

Further revelations from Icke include the news that the same Jewish clique “financed Hitler to power in 1933,” and that an “Estonian Jew,” Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, gave Hitler a copy of the Protocols, thereby sealing the fate of the Jews by encouraging Hitler to embark on the Holocaust. Rosenberg was not, of course, Jewish but a viciously anti-Semitic Baltic German. In the meantime bankers like Max Warburg had already left Nazi Germany. “All this was coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite,” says Icke. The elite is “merciless . . . sick and diabolical,” as well as being controlled by the “Luciferic Consciousness.”

As if the suggestion that Jews orchestrated the Holocaust were not enough, Icke also condemns the Nuremberg trials. “Nuremberg was an insult to natural justice,” he sputters. He condemns the practice whereby free copies of Schindler’s List “are given to schools to indoctrinate children.” This is because Icke, like other neo-Nazis before him, has decided that the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is a myth.

He urges his readers to take Holocaust revisionism seriously and, without giving his name, describes and praises the French founding father of Holocaust revisionism, Paul Rassinier—a one-time French Resistance fighter who was himself incarcerated in a concentration camp. “You cannot, if you are interested in truth, just dismiss his findings and condemn him as a Nazi apologist,” says Icke. “But that is what happened to him and others too.”

What exactly are the views of Rassinier? He denies the existence of death camps and rubbishes the reports of survivors as “a collection of contradictory pieces of ill-natured gossip.” Rassinier contends that the gas chambers are an invention of the “Zionist establishment.” Why is it that the rest of us, including the Nazi perpetrators themselves, are so sure that the Holocaust did indeed happen? “The Jews have been able to dupe the world by relying on their mythic powers and conspiratorial abilities,” says Rassinier. “World Jewry has once again employed its inordinate powers to harness the world’s financial resources, media and political interests for their own purposes.”

Challenged about his endorsement of these Nazi apologists, Icke’s wife Linda dares to say things that her husband has not yet committed to print. While the book’s discussion of the Holocaust merely asserts tha the Revisionist version should at least be heard, Mrs. Icke denigrates the fact of the Holocaust itself. “We’ve had the figures come down from six million to two,” she claims, citing unnamed “Jewish” sources. “We’ve had a lifetime of one view and one story. Maybe if all things were laid out on the table the truth might come out, whatever it is.”

Icke promises that “much, much more” is yet to be revealed about the Holocaust. A flavor of what might be forthcoming is contained in a striking passage purporting to explain anti-Semitism. Like many neo-Nazis, Icke goes out of his way to deny being anti-Semitic, claiming that he is merely criticizing a “manipulating Jewish clique” who regard the mass of Jews as “cattle to be used and abused as required” in their quest for world domination.

“The Jewish people (who, like the rest of us, are evolving consciousnesses that happen to be working in a Jewish genetics spacesuit at this point), will never be free until they step out of the emotional and mental control of this tiny clique, which uses them in the most merciless ways to advance its own sick and diabolical ambitions.”

Following a common Nazi thread which goes back to Hitler, Icke blames the Jews themselves for anti-Semitism. “Thought patterns in the collective Jewish mind have repeatedly created that physical reality of oppression, prejudice and racism which matches the pattern—the expectation—programmed into their collective psyche. They expect it; they create it.”

For Further Reading . . .

In the light of the book’s content, it will come as little surprise that the further reading recommended in the back pages of . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free includes neo-Nazi and racist literature. One favorite source is the “excellent” Spotlight, an anti-Semitic tabloid published in the United States that promotes Holocaust denial as a major theme.

Icke also recommends On Target, the magazine of the British League of Rights, a racist group committed to preventing the immigration of “alien peoples” and maintaining a “homogenous” (read: whites only) society. Its editor, Donald Martin, also contributes to Spearhead, the organ of the National Front now controlled by the British National Party. Martin, whom the BNP regards as a “friend and ally,” runs Britain’s leading book-supply service for the extreme right. Among the seven hundred or so titles are Did Six Million Really Die?, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.

Donald Martin now appears to be using Icke and others in the New Age movement as fronts to soft-sell his hard anti-Semitism. As far right-watcher Larry O’Hara points out, “Icke is in many ways a more dangerous figure than Holocaust Revisionist David Irving, for he has the capacity to entice new people onto the anti-Semitic treadmill.”

The neo-Nazis have certainly picked up on Icke. Street-fighting group Combat 18 have mingled with New Agers at Icke’s lectures and favorably reviewed one of his appearances in their bulletin, Putsch.

Though Icke has now largely dropped his New Age and green message, his supporters have yet to desert him. . . . And the Truth Shall Set You Free sold out its initial print run of 4,000 in just two and a half weeks, good going for a book that has—thankfully—been sold mainly by mail order so far. The glossy New Age magazines Kindred Spirit and Vision, widely available at on newsstands, continue to promote Icke’s work.

New Age Magazines

Nexus, an Australia-based New Age/conspiracy magazine that Icke commends as “excellent,” has carried extracts of Holocaust Revisionism articles from Spotlight. It recently published a four-part history of banking that identified Hitler and Mussolini as the last two people who could have stopped the usurious bankers.

The magazine, which is hoping to build on its current 130,000-plus circulation with a special British edition due out this month, carries regular advertisements for catalogues of neo-Nazi publications and videos.

Closer to home, David Icke is not alone in pushing extreme right-wing and racist ideas within the New Age movement. The London-based magazine Rainbow Ark has a New Age appearance but has long been closely associated with both David Icke and Donald Martin, who has written articles under a pseudonym as well as lecturing at meetings organized by the magazine. Articles in Rainbow Ark attack Jewish bankers, the “Illuminati,” and Zionism. The magazine also has a strange theory about modern Israel:

“When a person has a strong hatred of another race, their higher self often (karmically) makes sure they incarnate in that race to balance them out. Thus many of the worst kind of Nazis have already incarnated in Jewish bodies, explaining therefore some of the fireworks which are going on and will go on in Israel.”

Investigations by Open Eye have revealed that Rainbow Ark has been funded by people with a long history of extreme right and racist activity and was initially based in the apartment of Mary Stanton, a prominent racist campaigner who had previously lent it out to the National Front for an election campaign. When Rainbow Ark held a public meeting at the Battlebridge New Age center in Kings Cross on September 13, a Jewish researcher who attended was physically assaulted by a Rainbow Ark editor. The researcher was mistakenly accused of helping with an exposé by Open Eye of “New Age Nazism. [See Matthew Kalman and John Murray, "New Age Nazism," New Statesman and Society, June 23, 1995.]

Despite the assault, Rainbow Ark continues to hold public meetings at the Battlebridge Center, which was originally set up to help homeless people. When the center’s organizer Julie Lowe was asked about Rainbow Ark, she explained that she believed that the Jewish conspiracy described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is true and ought to be investigated. “I met two old Jewish men at Hyde Park Corner one evening who told me they were true,” says Lowe. “They were saying that if they didn’t get their way in the things they wanted, they were able through Philadelphia in America to pull the money out of every city in the world.

“I’ve seen it happen in Sheffield, so I believe it. It depends who’s actually doing the controlling and who’s go the money. The connection between freemasonry and Jewry is very important.”

Nor are the deluded management of the Battlebridge Center the only people to welcome Icke and give him a platform. During a twenty-minute interview on BBC Greater London Radio on October 15, 1995, publicizing his new book, Icke was given free rein to describe the global conspiracy and how he was now addressing audiences of up to three hundred a night who no longer come to laugh at him but to really listen. ¤

This article originally appeared in New Moon: The Jewish Alternative (November 1995).

Jungian Mysteries

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement
by Richard Noll (Princeton University Press, 1994), $24.95

reviewed by Janet Biehl

In a period of economic and social decomposition, as many people turn to religion with the intention of experiencing connectedness with something beyond themselves, the ideas of Carl Jung are surging in popularity as never before. As Jung-inspired books, like Women Who Run with the Wolves, become best sellers, ideas of “archetypes” and a “collective unconscious” become common coin. Jung’s ideas, according to a recent article in U.S. News & World Report, are “becoming a cultural touchstone, a lens for processing experience.” Indeed, Jungianism is passing out of the realm of psychotherapy as such: not only are Jungian notions heard coming from pulpits in various established churches, but they are being used to form a spiritual system in their own right.

To be sure, Jungianism is an intensely individualistic religion; acolytes partake of the mysteries less in congregations than in one-on-one psychotherapy sessions or in solitude, while reading books or watching Bill Moyers television programs. Yet it is a religion nonetheless, perhaps eminently befitting an atomized society, and as Richard Noll’s fascinating study The Jung Cult makes clear, the day may come when conventional wisdom considers the founder’s days at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich and then in private practice as the days of a prophet. Already the events of Jung’s own life are veiled in a degree of mystery becoming for a prophet, thanks to the care with which he and his associates cultivated a legendary aura to his writings and autobiography, enshrouding them with a quasi-numinous quality. Even Jung’s collected works, as Noll points out, were assembled not in chronological order, which would have revealed the development of his ideas, but according to subject matter, as if they existed in some timeless oracular realm.

Seen in this context, Jung’s early adherence to Freud’s theory and practice of psychoanalysis, in the first decade of this century, seems something of an aberration. As has often been recounted, the two men met in 1907 and formed a close connection; they traveled to the United States together in 1909 and interpreted each other’s dreams. They soon became estranged, as Jung’s growing interest in ancient religions unsettled the atheist Freud; by 1912, Jung already realized he was a pagan in both spiritual roots and identity. And where Freud had defined the libido in strictly sexual terms, Jung went on to reconceptualize it as a generalized life-force of psychic energy. Indeed, in 1912 the man whom Freud had hoped would be his heir explicitly made the libido into a religious force: “the gods are libido. It is that part of us which is immortal, since it represents that bond through which we feel that in the race we are never extinguished. . . . Its springs, which well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our life in general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted.” The Viennese rationalist and the Swiss mystic broke decisively in 1913.

Jung’s Intellectual Context

In his search for the origins of what has since become the Jungian religion, Noll removes Jung’s life from the realm of the eternal and brings it back down to earth, placing both the man and his ideas in their highly distinctive historical context—nineteenth-century German culture. He identifies a variety of intellectual trends that fed into Jung’s thinking, most obviously Romantic natural philosophy. Natur-philosophie, a school of comparative anatomy or morphology that prevailed in German scientific circles from 1790 to 1830 and that sought “Urtypen,” or primordial biological forms, has obvious parallels with Jung’s archetypes. Comparative religion and mythology (which had emerged as a new field study in Germany in the mid-1800s) had an obvious impact on Jung. Nineteenth-century biblical criticism, which cleared away much belief in Judeo-Christianity, allowed for the emergence of neopaganism such as Jung’s. Interest in ancient Iranian (“Aryan”) religion and culture, in which Jung was particularly interested, heightened. The evolutionary biology of Darwin, with its historical approach to biological phenomena, provided intellectual underpinnings for Jung. The Dionysian iconoclasm of Nietzsche, which became popular in the 1890s, reemerged in Jung, while similarities can be found “between Nietzsche’s purely theoretical idea of the übermensch and Jung’s concept of an individual or an individuated person who is brought into being through the practice of analysis.” Finally, Lebensphilosophie, the vitalistic appeal to experience and intuition over reason that became influential after 1870, allowed “intuitive” specialists of all kinds, like Jung, to offer themselves to a German nation eager to be led to spiritual awakening.

Another important fin de siècle context for Jung was the fashionle occultism that then prevailed, and the burgeoning interest in forms of spirituality that were patently elitist. Spiritualism, or the attempt to commune with the dead, had originated half a century before, in New York State, where the Fox sisters first heard preternatural rappings and rose to fame replicating them as messages from the dead. Their celebrity gave rise to a movement of mediums and seances that had spread throughout New England and then to the parlors and salons of Europe by the 1860s. In the 1870s Helena Blavatsky, a spiritualist medium who claimed to commune with long-dead “ascended” masters called “mahatmas,” was supposedly apprised by these masters of an arcane “secret doctrine” that underlies all the world’s religions. Based on these supposed revelations, she constructed an occult doctrine, called Theosophy, in the mid-1870s; and to go with it, she founded a hierarchical secret society, the Theosophical Society, whose members were trained in clairvoyance and telepathy and other psychic practices and finally became initiated into the society through participation in mystery rites that revealed to them the “secret doctrine.” By 1900 its chapters had spread throughout North America and to Europe and India. In 1913 Rudolf Steiner founded a variation of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, which shared its predecessor’s occultism, its elitism and hierarchy, and its spiritual initiations. Nor was this phenomenon limited to Germany; elitist-occultist groups appeared elsewhere in Europe and North America, like the Order of the Golden Dawn in England. As Noll points out, we may even regard the Wagner cult as having a spiritualistic dimension: The Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, dedicated to the performance of Richard Wagner’s operas, can be seen as, among other things, a temple for the nineteenth-century German equivalent of the Eleusinian mysteries, where a self-appointed spiritual elite could receive revitalization in the nationalistic ferment following Bismarck’s unification of Germany in 1871.

Many of these same intellectual trends, occult and nonoccult, subsequently shed their progressive dimensions and as such were able to feed into völkism, the antirational, anti-Enlightenment, antimodern ethnocentrism of the early twentieth century that contributed so heavily to the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s. Indeed, much of nineteenth-century German thinking had been given nationalist and racial if not racist underpinnings. Comparative religion and mythology, for example, had accustomed most Europeans to think in terms of Aryan and Semitic categories as early as 1860 and envisioned a prehistorical Aryan “mythopoetic age.” Ernst Haeckel cast Darwin’s evolutionary biology into pseudoscientific racial terms, with a version of social Darwinism that justified competition and “the survival of the fittest” not between individuals, as it was conceived in England and the United States, but among races. Anthro-posophy and Theosophy alike described a natural history of human development in terms of “root races,” including the advanced “Aryan race.’ And in Vienna a magician named Guido von List made use of the techniques of spiritualism to claim contact with the ancient “Armanen,” or Teutonic ancestors who, like Blavatsky’s “mahatmas,” imparted secret Aryan” wisdom to him, in what became known as Ariosophy. In 1911 List founded a hierarchical secret society to revive alleged ancient Teutonic religion through occult wisdom.

Meanwhile, interest in alternative religion burgeoned, much as it does today. Haeckel proposed a new pantheistic “natural religion” called Monism, that would unify spirit and matter; giving it its most complete form in Riddle of the Universe (Welträtsel), published in 1899; by 1904, the Monistic Alliance, based on his ideas, had groups all over central Europe. Biblical criticism, having delivered an intellectual assault to Judaism and Christianity, cleared the way for a surge of interest in the worship of ancient Teutons. By the 1890s, utopian nature worship was popular in Central Europe, especially a solar religion, and among the spiritually disaffected it was commonplace to regard the sun as the true deity of the Germans. Groups practicing sun-worshipping rituals dotted the German counterculture at the turn of the century, and after 1905 the youth movement adopted many such notions, often including racialist and anti-Semitic ones.

Jung would likely have been familiar with these unconventional religions since, despite his own bourgeois conventionality, the Zurich hospital where he worked was located near the epicenters of a fin de siècle counterculture that thrived from about 1900 to 1920. From Schwabing, the bohemian district of Munich, to Ascona, a Swiss town that hosted a number of alternative communes, this counterculture reached at least proportions as the 1960s in California—and it was equally fascinated with spiritual and spiritualistic phenomena. Jung would certainly have known about the variety of spiritual elites, occult groups, and neopagans that abounded so close by.

Although this völkisch culture later fed into Nazism, Noll is at pains to emphasize that völkism was not unitarily proto-Nazi. Indeed, Noll locates Jung specifically in the völkisch movement not with the aim of tying him to Nazism (after a flirtation with National Socialism in the 1930s, Jung later denounced the Third Reich); nor does he give much attention to Jung’s own anti-Semitism and racism, except to locate their roots in nineteenth-century “Aryan” scholarship. Rather, Noll’s purpose is to show that during a time of obsessive cult-founding, Jung was the founder of a cult. Far from designing a clinical method, as Freud had tried to do, Jung, like so many others in this milieu, designed instead a mystical cult of redemption, even embracing the use of mediums to commune with the dead—and insofar as these dead were “Aryan” ancestors, Jung’s approach is “directly akin to the völkisch visionary initiations into the Teutonic mysteries by List, his Armanen, and other Ariosophist groups who were doing exactly the same sort of procedure at exactly the same time as Jung.” In this respect, as Noll points out, “from 1916 onwards . . . Jung probably had far more in common with figures such as Blavatsky, List, and Steiner than he did with Freud [and] Adler.” Jung even had a being whom he too supposedly channeled—Philemon, his spiritual guru— “the counterpart to List’s [Teutonic] Armanen Brotherhood or Blavatsky’s mahatmas.” Perhaps his greatest distinction was that “the Jungian movement became the most successful of all the fin-de-siècle occult traditions.”

Jung’s Development

How did the secular approach of Freudian psychoanalysis so quickly lose its rationalist bearings in Jung? Noll’s study uncovers the most likely course of Jung’s intellectual development at the crucial fin de siècle period. Among his most important influences was the evolutionary biologist Haeckel, who in 1868 had offered the precept that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” By this “Biogenetic Law” he meant to say that the fetal development of individual members of a species replicates the evolution of the species itself. As Noll puts it, “the stages of individual development (ontogeny) could be shown to replicate, in order, the states of the development of the human race (phylogeny). . . . Each adult human being, then, in both development and structure, was a living museum of the entire history of a species.”

In 1899 Haeckel proposed suggested that one could go beyond this strictly biological approach. A “phylogenetic psychology” should be developed, he proposed, a branch of psychology that would study the “phylogeny of the soul.” Just as in biology, species history is recapitulated in the individual, so in psychology, Haeckel advised, cultural history is recapitulated in the psyche of each individual. This “phylogenetic psychology” would be take its place as a science, alongside embryology and paleontology. Jung, who read Haeckel’s Welträtsel in 1899, seems to have taken very seriously the author’s suggestion. Indeed, as Noll points out, Jung probably “based his own later phylogenetic theories of the unconscious on Haeckel’s recommendations for a ‘phylogeny of the soul.’”

Jung seems to have picked up on Haeckel’s suggestion and directed his own work accordingly. “All this experience suggests to us,” he wrote in 1912,

that we draw a parallel between he phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children, between the lower [sic] races and the dreams. This train of thought is not a strange one for us, but quite familiar through our knowledge of comparative anatomy and the history of development, which show us how the structure and function of the human body are the result of a series of embryonic changes which correspond to similar changes in the history of the race. . . . Consequently . . . the state of infantile thinking in the child’s psychic life, as well as in dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient.

And so, he believed, are the dreams of adults. Thus, “the products arising from the unconscious are related to the mythical. . . . The soul possesses in some degree historical strata, the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the unconscious.” The phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind, as hypothesized by Jung, thus contains the mythological images and thinking of pagan antiquity, which has since been covered over by a millennia-old Judeo-Christian layer. In 1909 Jung and his staff at the Burghölzli set to work diligently studying mythological works of pagan antiquity, then looking for evidence of mythological content in the dreams and fantasies of their patients.

The other pivotal intellectual influence on Jung in the crucial period of 1912-1913 was J. J. Bachofen, a scholar of ancient mythology who was very popular within the booming counterculture. Back in the mid-1800s, Bachofen had examined artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome, particularly their archaic periods, and thought he saw in them previously hidden evidence for several polygamous and matriarchal historical stages that preceded patriarchal society and that, indeed, corresponded to three general stages of prepatriarchal human social development. He laid these stages out in his 1861 book Mother-Right (Das Mutterrecht). The first stage, called Hetairism, was the stage of complete sexual freedom for both sexes; it was pre-agricultural, worshipping the deity Aphrodite. The second stage was that of Mother-Right, or matriarchy, an agricultural society whose members worshipped Mother Earth. Symbolized by the moon, this stage prized things dark and subterranean or “chthonic,” and intuition over intellect. The third stage was transitional between this lunar matriarchy and the later solar patriarchies of Greece and Rome: Embodied by Dionysos, intellect and rule by men rather than women were on the ascendant. Patriarchy, represented by Apollo and the sun, finally overthrew this third stage and wiped out almost all traces of all the previous stages, especially the old matriarchies. But evidence that they existed and were vanquished lives on in myths in which heroic males do battle with and defeat strong, “terrifying” females, replacing the worship of goddesses and Dionysos with worship of Apollo and elevating reason over “chthonic” intuition.

Jung “was very much attracted to a philosophy of pagan regeneration based on Bachofen’s ideal image of a prehistorical period of polygamous hetairism,” Noll argues. In 1912 Jung used Bachofen’s stages of human development “as his basis for identifying the strata of transformations of the libido that he had excavated in his study of the phylogenetic unconscious.” The Bachofenian stages, that is, formed the content of the “phylogenetic unconscious layer” that Jung was constellating for his “phylogenetic psychology,” as advised by Haeckel. The Bachofenian stages made up not only the social and cultural history of Europe, as Bachofen had written, but, by Haeckelian extension, the phylogenetic unconscious of individuals. Hetairism, matriarchy, and Dionysianism lie deep within the unconscious of each European. Insofar as psychoanalysis intends to uncover the contents of the unconscious, it would come upon these various psycho-cultural layers. (Non-Europeans, such as Jews, would possess different contents in their phylogenetic layers and hence the Bachofenian content would not be present in their unconscious.)

Initiation

Bachofen’s ideas gained still more significance for Jung’s emerging spiritual system, insofar as it probably influenced his ideas on gaining access to this unconscious content what to do once one did. In many myths, Bachofen had shown, heroes journey to the “underworld,” encounter terrifying maternal forces, do battle against them, then prevail over them; once the hero has vanquished them, his victory revitalizes him or even allows him to be reborn in some way. At Eleusis, for example, site of the famous ancient mystery cult, such a myth was probably reenacted, Bachofen thought; the mysteries, which he dates back to the stage of Mother-Right, brought the initiate toward an encounter with the goddess Persephone that revitalized and redeemed the initiate in some unknown way. In Jung’s hands, yet another Haeckelian ontogentic-phylogenetic analogy came into play here: In effect, Jung seems to have decided that a person undergoing psychoanalysis was comparable to an initiate at Eleusis, for his patients would wrestle with the maternal forces of their Bachofenian unconscious, much as Eleusinian initiates journeyed to the underworld, struggled, and returned; upon prevailing over those forces, Jung’s patients could experience a comparable revitalization and even a redemption. Jungian analysis thus became essentially a process of journeying to the underworld (the unconscious), making contact with divinity allegedly there (ancient gods or ancestors), and then returning to the upper world (daily life). Haeckel and Bachofen had given Jung the tools with which to refashion Eleusinian mysteries into Jungian mysteries.

One further influence contributed greatly to Jung’s cult of redemption. In 1909-1910 Jung became fascinated with Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, which were based on ancient Persian solar worship. As interpreted by fin de siecle scholarship, these ancient Persian religions involved mystery rites much like those at Eleusis (although later scholarship has shown that the evidence for such a supposition is nonexistent). The ancient Iranians were regarded by nineteenth-century German scholarship as Aryans. Rejecting (Semitic) Christianity in favor of (Aryan) Mithraism, Jung essentially grafted onto his mystery cult imagery of Aryan heroes who, after vanquishing the “terrible” forces in their ordeal, became identified with the “divine” sun.

Having developed the notions (or better, intuitions), Jung’s task as a presumptive clinician was to try to document the existence of the phylogenetic unconscious (he did not use the term collective unconscious until after World War I) by finding clinical evidence for it in his patients at the Burghölzli. As we have seen, his staff was hard at work reading up on ancient mythology. But fortunately for him if not for psychoanalysis, some of his Zurich patients likely came from the Schwabing-Ascona counterculture and would thus likely be already familiar with sun worship and Eleusinian encounters, with Mithraism and Bachofen. They would have provided Jung with just the kind of the evidence he was looking for in their “unconscious.” Oddly, Jung himself seemed rather careless in screening his patients for previous knowledge of the mythology that was supposed to lie embedded in their psyches and surface only for the first time through analysis. Of course, any previous knowledge of mythological material on the part of patients would have negated the legitimacy of the data as evidence of a phylogenetic unconscious. Yet Jung often just simply asserts that patients knew nothing in advance about the mythological evidence he excavated from their unconscious—even when they very well could have known.

One notoriously questionable case is that of the Solar Phallus Man, a Burghölzli patient around 1906-1910. The Solar Phallus Man claimed to see visions of a sun with a phallus hanging down from it—an image that accords with ancient Mithraism. But this patient, according to Jung, could not have known about Mithraic solar imagery, since the Mithraic Liturgy was not published until 1910. Such a possibility, he said repeatedly, even as late as 1959, was “quite out of the question, because that thing was not known. It was in a magic papyrus in Paris, and it wasn’t even published. It was only published four years later, after I had observed it with my patient.” But in fact the 1910 edition of the Mithraic Liturgy was the second; the first edition was published in 1903, before the patient arrived at the hospital, meaning that he could very well have read it. Nonetheless, throughout his life Jung described the case of the Solar Phallus man as definitive evidence for the collective unconscious.

Self-Deification

In 1909 Jung left the Burghölzli hospital and went into private practice nearby, in Küsnacht-Zurich; and once he left his last official teaching position in 1914, he was free to set up and maintain his mystery cult without accountability to the academic and medical worlds. The private Jung, Noll shows, developed along lines quite different from the public Jung. “The public Jung was, perhaps an eccentric psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the eyes of the academic and scientific community in 1916. The private Jung, however, within the supportive enclave of Küsnacht-Zurich and his circle of disciples, was very much the völkisch prophet.”

According to Noll, Jung “set out to design a mystery cult that promised its initiates revitalization through contact with the pagan, pre-Christian layer of the unconscious mind.” His intention to do so is clear from his 1912 Dionysian cultural manifesto, “New Paths in Psychology,” which called for redemption through psychoanalysis and sexual liberation. In the same year he founded the Society for Psychoanalytic Endeavors (Gesellschaft für psychoanalytische Bestrebungen), which Noll calls “the first foundation of a charismatic cult centered on the Lebensphilosophie of psychoanalysis and on the person of Jung.” With a membership consisting of those who had undergone Jungian analysis, the group attempted to make psychoanalysis into an encompassing worldview that could explain much of world, through “lectures applying psychoanalytic theory to the aesthetics of art, music and other nonclinical cultural areas.” Küsnacht-Zurich was becoming the Bayreuth of the Jungian mysteries.

And in 1913, the same year that Jung formally broke with Freud, Jung experienced, so he believed, the ultimate mystery experience: self-deification. As he himself revealed in a seminar he gave twelve years later, a vision Jung had induced him to believe that he had become one with the ancient Mithraic god Aion, in the form of an Aryanized Christ. In his 1913 descent to the “underworld,” visions of Druidic altars, a white snake, and a battle between light and darkness, Jung said, he encountered Salome:

Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me. I said, “Why do you worship me?” She replied, “You are Christ.” In spite of my objections she maintained this. I said, “This is madness,” and became filled with skeptical resistance. Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to circle me and press me in her coils. The coils reached up to my heart. I realized as I struggled that I had assumed the attitude of the Crucifixion. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.

Interpreting this strange vision for his sympathetic listeners at the 1925 seminar, Jung explains:

Salome’s performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus of the Mithraic mysteries, the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake’s head resting on the man’s head, and the face of the man that of a lion.

The Deus Leontocephalus, he then explained, is “Aion, the eternal being.” The experience, he said, gave him “certainty of immortality.”

Jung compared this experience of self-deification to the Hellenic mysteries, in which “it is almost certain that the symbolical rite of deification played a part.” “These images,” Jung continued, “have so much reality that they recommend themselves . . . In this deification mystery you make yourself the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. . . . all this is Mithraic symbolism from beginning to end.” Contemporary scholarship regarded Mithraism as a later version of Zoroastrianism, the religion of the ancient Aryan peoples of Persia; in becoming Aion, Jung was thus participating in an Aryanized version of the Eleusinian mysteries, “an initiation in to the most ancient of Aryan mysteries,” as Noll puts it. Indeed, Noll continues, “This makes Jung’s self-deification and travels in the ancestral lands of the dead directly akin to the völkisch visionary initiations into the Teutonic mysteries by List, his Armanen, and the other Ariosophist groups who were doing exactly the same sort of procedure at exactly the same time as Jung.” After 1916 Jung offered what Noll calls a “Aryans-only path to redemption.” That “Jung deliberately fused the symbol of Christ with potent Germanic cultural symbols” indicated “his intention to redeem those of Aryan heredity. . . . it is clear that Jung’s proposed path of spiritual redemption could only work for those of Indo-European ancestry.”

Self-deification, following Jung’s own experience as the prototype, became the primary goal of the Jungian mysteries. Starting with the founding of the Psychological Club in 1916, Jungian analysis showed patients how to deify themselves, using Jungian techniques, and thereby become part of a secret spiritual elite. In a previously unpublished transcript of the address given at the founding meeting of the Psychological Club, the speaker (unidentified in the informal transcript, but probably Jung) lays out the path to “self-deification”: Using Christ as a symbol of the collective unconscious, the initiate is to undergo a process of identification with the (Aryanized) Christ by identifying with the collective unconscious: “This identification of the personality with the collective unconscious manifests itself always in the phenomenon of self-deification.”

1916 was also the year in which Jung developed his collective unconscious theory. It is “essentially an occult or mystical notion,” Noll says, “—an article of faith that one either believes in uncritically or not.” The psychological processes that Jung was addressing in his patients were actually nothing more than the basic stuff of clinical psychology—complexes based on past experiences, recalled through the filters of the patient’s memory. What Jung did, Noll points out, was to take these processes and elevate them to a cosmic scale. It is not basic psychological drives and forces that underlie the personal complexes, but gods, or racial ancestors, and by contacting them one may gain access to their accumulated wisdom. As Jung himself wrote in 1918 (in “Role of the Unconscious”), “The connection with the suprapersonal of collective unconscious means an extension of man beyond himself; it means death for his personal being and a rebirth in a new dimension, as was literally enacted in certain of the ancient mysteries.” The collective unconscious is by no stretch of the imagination a psychoanalytic concept but rather part of a religion: Along with the archetypes, it constitutes “Jung’s transcendental or occult religious doctrine of an extramundane reality and its forces (the dead, gods, archetypes). It is his creed, his faith. This is Jung’s own version of the secret doctrine, and the metaphysical basis of his Nietzschean religion.”

A Spiritual Elite

Part of the fascination of the Jung cult was its appeal to a spiritual elite, offering initiates membership a privileged membership in an elite group that could, by their common experiences of contact with the primordial divinity within, create a new basic religion, like the “secret doctrine” of Blavatsky. It is a fascination that holds appeal to this very day: The “secret church” that Jung set up, Noll shows, transmitted Jung’s own charismatic authority through a socially cohesive discipleship and thereby gained legitimacy. After reading Noll’s book, we should have little reason to regard Jungian “analysis” as essentially different in nature from Theosophy or Anthroposophy—except for its pretensions to inhabit the universe of psychology rather than religion alone.

It is symptomatic of the social disarray of our time that the Jung cult is finding new adherents today. The notion of self-deification could hold appeal only at a time when people experience their power to effect social change diminishing, be it in 1990s America, in fin de siècle Europe, or during the decadence of the Roman Empire, when mystery cults from the East similarly fascinated the disaffected. Nor is it coincidental that Americans are losing interest in Freudianism, which despite its failings, at least maintained a commitment to secularism and to explaining psychological processes in their own right. By showing the Jungian mysteries for what they are, Noll has not only exposed the pretensions of the Jungian establishment but inadvertently, given the absence of a social context in the book, shown Jungianism to be a symptom of popular feelings of despair and helplessness in the face of an ever more rapacious and frightening social order.¤

Editors’ note: This article explores the affiliations of self-styled Communist parties in Russia with parties of the nationalist and fascist right. These groups share a common opposition to the government and policies of Boris Yeltsin and together constitute the “national-patriotic opposition.” The article [...]]]> Is Russia on the Road to Dictatorship?
by Markus Mathyl

Editors’ note: This article explores the affiliations of self-styled Communist parties in Russia with parties of the nationalist and fascist right. These groups share a common opposition to the government and policies of Boris Yeltsin and together constitute the “national-patriotic opposition.” The article was published in the German anarchosyndicalist newspaper Direkte Aktion in September 1994, two months before the Russian war against Chechnya began. Although groupings and alliances in the current Russian parliamentary election campaigns may have different names and some different personnel from those described below, the basic ideological convergence of Communists and fascists remains unchanged—if anything, they have only drawn closer together in the past fourteen months.

Political developments in Russia are running so broadly toward the right that it is difficult to describe the process adequately and comprehensively with mere words.

So dramatic is the process that I am almost inclined to repeat something I recently said in connection with a young “nonconformist” whose political views are also shifting to the right: “I can understand better now how fascism developed in Germany.” My observation should not be misunderstood as an attempt to make a flat parallel between two historical events, but it nonetheless reflects the essential fact that the Russian national-patriotic movement, which at first glance seems diffuse, has recently become the political home for national bolshevists¹ as well as fascists, whose influence is growing stronger all the time. These people consider themselves social revolutionaries, and a crazy anti-Semitism lies the core of their curiously truncated “anticapitalism,” which seeks to ally itself with the “healthy forces” among the people in order to weed out the “pests.”

“We understand the social revolution to be a synonym of the national revolution, and the national revolution to be a synonym of the social revolution,” write the signatories of the founding statement of the Revolutionary Opposition, a national-bolshevist front. National-patriotic or fascist groups like the National Radical Party, the Movement of the New Right, and the Front for National Revolutionary Action (this last group is financed by the American Garry Lauck, of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party outside Germany), on the one hand, together with Communist groups like the Russian Komsomol (the Communist youth organization, financed by the two large Communist parties, the RFCP and the RCWP) and the Movement for the Support of Cuba, on the other, have together signed the document. Garry Lauck meets Fidel Castro!

Still, if I closed my eyes, read no newspapers, and dropped my usual critical attitude—telling myself, “I’m in Russia, not in Germany, after all,” and “Everything’s very different here”—I could, as others have done, allow myself to become fascinated with the “Russian soul” and thereby miss seeing the political development in their entirety. The madness here expresses itself in a variety of ways, ranging from tolerance of this society’s militarism, imperialism, and fascism to support for it. It becomes most obvious from reading the slavering fascistoid patriotic newspapers—of which, according to the Moscow Antifascist Center, there are now 150 different ones, with a combined total print run of up to a million copies.

Even the publishers of the larger patriotic publications are moving in the direction of the fascists. I stopped by the editorial offices of the ultranationalistic newspaper Zavtra (weekly 100,000 copies) to ask them for some back issues. When I remarked that their newspaper is sometimes hard to get hold of, they asked me whether the Völkischer Beobachter [Hitler’s National Socialist party organ—trans.] is easy to get hold of in Germany.

Zavtra actually covers the whole spectrum of the national-patriotic opposition. Yet it is viewed in a rather peculiar way one Alexey Belyakov, who maintains that Zavtra “has turned out to be the most radical democratic media organ today.” The striking point is that the article where he wrote this (“Last Punks of the Empire”) was published not in a national-patriotic newspaper, where one might expect to find such a sentiment, but in the large Moscow weekly Stoliza, whose own political orientation is ostensibly radical democratic. This is just one of many examples of how Russian journalists are helping to whitewash and popularize extreme Russian nationalism.

In Moscow these days, and not only in political circles, the talk everywhere is of a possible new perevorot—the Russian name for a coup or putsch. On page one of its July 1994 issue, Zavtra ran a boldface headline: “A Month from Now Comes the Autumn of Coups and Social Tremors.” A more unequivocal battle cry could scarcely be formulated.

The various groups within the national-patriotic opposition have been moving closer together. They have brought in people like Yeltsin’s former vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi, the former chairman of the Constitutional Court V. D. Sorkin, and other formerly high-ranking politicians. The political spectrum of the national-patriotic opposition now ranges from avowed fascists, who hawk their hate-filled newspapers undisturbed in many places, to “moderate” Communists and the Agrarian Party.

I would like to present a chronological account of the most important events in the national-patriotic opposition as it emerged after Yeltsin defeated the parliamentarians in his attack on the Russian Parliament building (the “White House”) in October 1993, then describe the nationalistic tendencies outside the movement. These accounts will support my basic argument: that Russian society today is ripe for a right-wing dictatorship.

The December 1993 Elections

In October 1993 Boris Yeltsin succeeded in quashing his opposition—with the approval of Western governments—and drove the opposition leaders from the scene by imprisoning them. But two months later, the parliamentary elections showed that that opposition, which defines itself for the most part as national-patriotic, was still strong.

About half of the representatives elected to the State Duma (the lower house of Parliament) in the December 1993 elections are members of national-patriotic parties. Many more representatives with patriotic and nationalistic sympathies were able to win, too, in the direct elections back in their districts. Among them was the fascist Nikolai Lysenko, who got elected even though his National Republican Party of Russia (NRPR) had been banned from the December elections despite submitting the 100,000 signatures required to qualify. In his electoral campaign Lysenko and his party concentrated on stirring up a frenzy of hatred against Caucasian peoples. One party flyer, of which 250,000 copies were printed, demanded, “Throw these black visitors out of Russia!” The demand was accompanied by a graphic supposedly showing how much better “blacks” (Caucasians) live than “poor” Russians in Moscow do. As for Chechnyans,

Today we Russians have no more choice. Either we smash the creeping hydra of the Turkish-Caucasian fraternity, or they will crush us with satanic mercilessness—fill our cities and villages with mafia, burn our souls, strip us of our dignity, pillage and banalize our entire Russian house! For us Russians, the Third World War has long since begun. It’s only cowards and idiots who can’t see that!

Lysenko could well be satisfied that he had expanded his party’s popularity with this flyer, for a deeply hate-filled mood against Caucasians soon became evident. Police discrimination against dark-skinned people became observable everywhere every day, while scenes of violent hatred took place in Moscow, as reported in Izvestiya on August 4 under the title, “Black Hundreds with Blue Berets.” In October, 10,000 Caucasians were forcibly deported—and in Moscow alone about 40,000 Russians volunteered to help the police out with the job. It would of course be absurd if the government under whose responsibility the deportation was carried out, were to bring to trial Representative Lysenko for his racist demagoguery. (The new constitution, however, clearly prescribes that such a case must be tried.)

Armed units of Lysenko’s NRPR have also participated in battles in the Dniester Republic and in Georgia, as leaders of the party confirmed in an interview in the patriotic Russian-Palestinian weekly Al Kods (no. 12, Apr. 1994).

More “respectable” patriotic parties than the NRPR also participate in making decisions in the Duma and thereby help determine the domestic and foreign policy of what, in surface area, is the largest country in the world and still the second superpower, at least militarily. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose importance is highly exaggerated in the West in comparison with the other patriotic forces, was able to win nearly a quarter of the votes in the December 1994 elections with its ultranationalistic slogans. The Russian Federation Communist Party (RFCP), together with the Agrarian Party, received some 20 percent of the votes. (It is legitimate to combine their vote totals this way because the Agrarian Party is more or less a branch of the RFCP: Agrarian Party leaders are simultaneously members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.)

At this point, some of my hardcore leftist readers are no doubt feeling offended (they should be!): How dare I speak of the Communist Party in the same paragraph as the national-patriots, lumping them all together? What is this anyway, some kind of anti-Communist conspiracy?

The Russian Federation Communist Party

The Russian Federation Communist Party (RFCP): What is it really, and what does it want? We can best let party chairman Gennadi Zyuganov (who is also co-chairman of the National Salvation Front) answer this question himself:

The absence of a unified patriotic outlook—a simple and understandable one—is a terrible misfortune for our homeland today, especially for the anti-Yeltsin opposition, with all its political failures. Russia is being carefully observed and analyzed, and step by step its enemies are planning to destroy it—not for the purpose of fighting socialism but in order to remove Russia from the geopolitical arena altogether. Yet we are the last power on this planet today that is capable of mounting a challenge to the New World Order—the global cosmopolitan dictatorship. We must therefore work against our would-be destroyers, using means that are just as carefully thought out and just as goal oriented as theirs are. The unity of the nationalist forces is as necessary to this end as the air we breathe is to life.

The historical challenge that our people now face is comparable in scale only to the troubles of the eighteenth century—to the invasion of Napoleon, and that of Hitler.

How are the nationalist forces are to be unified, in Zyuganov’s view? The front page of the Russian-Palestinian weekly Al Kods (no. 7, Mar. 1994) may give us an idea. The upper left section contains pictures of three people, one after the other. On the left is Gennadi Zyuganov, over the caption “Russia’s Leader 1994.” In the center is the leader of the Stalinistic RCWP, Viktor Anpilov. Finally, the third picture is captioned, “The Truth About Barkashov.”

Barkashov’s Russian National Unity

No plan to unify the national forces can omit Russian National Unity (RNU). This fascist organization, which controls a number of armed units, was the main force in the armed defense of the Parliament building in October 1993. According to various reports, it has up to 10,000 fighters across the whole country, not to speak of half a million supporters. These figures come from an Izvestiya article titled “Is Russia Becoming a Fascist State?” (Aug. 18, 1994). The basis of this article is an anonymous letter that was sent to the editors, apparently from a member of the RNU’s own secret service. Although the authenticity of this letter cannot be confirmed and although the numbers may be too high, the letter nonetheless confirms much that was previously suspected.

By no means does the RNU limit its activities to “trifles” like street terror. Instead, it is training itself to prepare for a new power struggle. Its connections to military generals and to the highest ranks of the police are well known, and a high proportion of its own fighters are police and army members. After the bloody storming of the “White House” in October 1993, in fact, the RNU’s popularity surged sharply. A mythos presently surrounds the organization and especially its leader, one that was deliberately fostered by the two large patriotic weeklies, in articles like “The Truth About Barkashov” (Al Kods) and “Hail Russia” (Zavtra, no. 12, Mar. 1994). Meanwhile Barkashov himself, whose movement advocates exterminating Jews and gypsies as soon as possible after the seizure of power (“The Russian Order of Aleksandr Barkashov,” Moscow News, no. 15, 1994), has been elevated to the rank of respectable patriot, even as photographs show him variously in uniform giving the Hitler salute and standing with familiar politicians and military men like State Duma representative Sergey Baburin, whose own highly opportunistic, ultranationalistic All-Russian People’s Union (ARPU) was also not admitted into the December elections in spite of providing the necessary 100,000 signatures.

Another national-patriotic Duma representative is Alexey Nevzorov² who, like Lysenko and Baburin, was elected in a race against prominent rivals in his local (St. Petersburg) district thanks to his great popularity. Nevzorov has started publishing a new newspaper called Inform 600 Seconds, and in the second issue he devoted the whole centerfold to an interview with Barkashov. Here we find some informative passages on RNU strategy:

I think an authentic political force should be ready for any situation that is amenable to a coup. It shouldn’t work with only one possibility. Those who are preparing themselves to decide the question through violence alone are dooming themselves to isolation. They’ll end up like the IRA, which never took possession of the minds of the people politically. Yet those who prepare only for peaceful change will be unable to act if the situation turns violent.

At the conclusion of the interview, Barkashov is counted as one of three possible leaders of Russia after the patriots seize power: the other two are Aman Tuleyev and the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg.

Blood and Soil

The Zyuganov interview from which I quoted before, the one with all the enlightening points on Communist Party ideology, was published not in the Communist press but in the fascist magazine Territory Tied by Blood (Rodnye Prostory, no. 4, 1993). My outraged Stalinist readers should know that this newspaper, the organ of a group called the Vedic League, regularly publishes the writings of Communist Party ideologists, and it tries to recruit members for the RFCP, since the Communists are the largest patriotic political party in the country. Those readers who are still unconvinced of a Communist-fascist alliance should take note: The editor of Territory Tied by Blood is a member not only of the Vedic League but of the Communist Party. (His, I may add, is not the only case of dual membership.)

What is the Vedic League? Its “Open Doctrine” was published in the magazine Narodnoye Delo³ (no. 2, 1992):

“Humanity” is a generic concept. The more specific types are “white people,” “yellow people,” “black people.” The last stage of human evolution gave rise to the white man, who has a more creative disposition, is energetically more active, and possesses a greater physiological immunity to illnesses—that is, he is healthier. To mix various kinds of people is contrary to nature and harmful. . . . The Communist Party of the Soviet Union turned away from the principles of class, which divide white people, and has crossed over to support the protection of the general-national interest.

A large picture of Zyuganov appears on the cover of the first issue of Territory Tied by Blood (1994), under the headline “The Vedic Idea—The Russian Idea—The Communist Idea—Is the Idea of Social Justice.” Next to his picture we read (referring to the RFCP): “The organized patriotic party with the most members in our country.” Actually the Communist Party has about 600,000 members in the whole country. The front page also bears a passage (republished from Komsomolskaya Pravda [Feb. 2, 1994]), in which Zyuganov reports on the twenty-eighth congress of the French Communist Party:

The 28th party congress was one of the largest social events for all left forces. It was the first forum in two or three years that representatives of leftist parties from the entire world attended–there were more than 110 delegations. . . . The whole leadership of these parties had been replaced in the interim–no one from the old guard remains, practically no one at all. The parties have been filled up with fresh faces, people who are able to carry out reforms and give expression to the demands of the working masses under modern conditions.

Which reforms, and which demands? “Comrade” Zyuganov gives the answer in the Territory Tied by Blood interview:

It must be understood that life today presents a clear but difficult challenge: Either we will take hold of the situation and mobilize all our resources for the struggle for our own survival, or else Russia as a self-standing state and the Russian people as a centuries-old spiritual community may well disappear from the face of the earth. . . The extraordinary situation demands extraordinary decisions. Such a thing happened back in 1941, when the Soviet leadership, after considering many ideological directions for a few months, recognized that holding to national values was essential to life. Today we must behave just as decisively.

The Amnesty

The second major event after the October 1993 putsch attempt also resulted in a marked strengthening of the national-patriotic opposition. At the beginning of March 1994 all the opposition leaders who had been arrested because of the October events were amnestied. Among them were the former vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi; General Makashov of the Communist Workers’ Party, the RCWP; Viktor Anpilov, the leader of the RCWP and the group Working Russia; Ilya Konstantinov,⁴ chairman of the National Salvation Front; Terekhov, chairman of the League of Officers; and Barkashov, leader of the openly fascist RNU.

Writing in Al Kods, which devoted a whole page to photographs of these “heroes,” congratulating them on their liberation, Terekhov called the amnesty a victory for the patriots. An accompanying article, titled “Russian Communists on the Right Path,” sheds light on the background of the amnesty and on the role of the Communist Party in the national-patriotic movement:

The Russian Federation Communist Party is a young party. Its leadership consists of smart, talented former members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They’re honorable people, and their honesty can be seen every day. They haven’t had it easy, least of all during the events of October 3-4. After the October events, it wasn’t easy to decide what direction to take. In the end they decided to participate in the Duma elections. A few considered this step to be a betrayal of the victims of the attack on the “White House,” while others thought the Communists were going along with the president and the government in order to get close to power. But someone finally decided that this was the only possible path: It was an opportunity that offered some hope; it might be the last chance; and many people consider Communism to mean a just society and have a good relationship with the Communists.

Now that they are in the Duma, the Communists’ activities have had an important impact. They have developed themselves into a strong force, one that Russia couldn’t do without. Gennadi Zyuganov and Viktor Ilyukhin took a very active role in freeing the prisoners from jail, after which no one could contest the legitimacy of the amnesty—not the president, not the general state prosecutor. So all the prisoners were freed.

Now the process of reconciliation is continuing, and events will show who is working on behalf of the people and who is working against them. The Communists are going to attain power and stand at its summit. Russia will once again be a socialist state, because history has shown that the Russians have been a worthy people. Under the Soviet Union, the Russian people were an authority—the strongest, the most powerful, and the greatest people of all. To give birth once again to Russia—only the Communist Party, which will spare neither force nor energy, can reestablish a powerful Russia and the great Soviet Union.

By the way, Zhirinovsky, who is much-criticized within the patriotic movement, showed up at the amnesty of the October prisoners. At one of the evenings organized by Zavtra in honor of the amnestied leaders, he called for unity of the patriotic forces.

Agreement for the Sake of Russia

Only two weeks after the amnesty, the united patriotic opposition was advancing a new project, called Agreement for the Sake of Russia. It gained the support of many high-ranking personalities in Russian society. Izvestiya, which accurately characterized this coalition as a second National Salvation Front, dedicated its front page to the event, with the headline, “A Bolshevik Agreement Threatens Russia” (Mar. 19, 1994).

First let’s look at a few passages from the Agreement’s declaration, which was published in the newspaper of the popular democratic movement of Dagestan, For the Homeland, For Stalin (no. 7, 1994), under the title “Stalin Unites the Patriots, Saves Russia!”:

In our common Russian house, it is poverty and want that rule. We hear this talked about in families and on the streets, in the dying factories and in the cold schools, from the opposition and the government, from religious and political officials, from the federal assembly and the president. All have only one feeling in their hearts: People cannot live this way. We have to put a stop to it.

We have only one path to salvation: to come to our senses and reach out to each other in forgiveness for all our past mutual recriminations and indiscretions. In this meeting there will be no victors and no vanquished. Each new quarrel that arises between us only increases the danger that Russia will perish. Instead of ill-considered words and actions, we propose that we respect the law and lay the foundation for the homeland.

A social contract among all patriotic forces and movements, ideologies, and religions, one that rejects violence, racism, and nationalism and that considers public service to the homeland as the highest value—this is what can bring the catastrophe to an end. Our only freedom is the freedom that leads to the revivification of the fatherland and that strengthens its independence, which will guarantee security and faith in the future.

Despite our different views, despite all our different lifestyles and ways of thinking, each of which represents part of our diverse ideology and politics, we nonetheless announce the foundation of the Agreement for the Sake of Russia movement, in which all Russian patriots will be united as they have never been before in the hour of Russia’s misery, and for which we will pool our resources, our abilities, and our political experience.

We ask everyone who cherishes the destiny of Russia to support our initiative. The Agreement for the Sake of Russia is open to all citizens of our long-suffering country, whoever is in a position to help their fatherland during its severe ordeal in the years to come.

We make no distinction between liberals and Communists, entrepreneurs and workers, independent and collective farmers; we make no distinction between republicans and supporters of the presidential power. We are uniting to carry out urgent tasks:

• to avert the imminent final collapse of Russia and the destruction of all the cultural, economic, and political ties—constructed over centuries—among its peoples, who have equal rights;
• to reestablish the force and power of the Russian state, which guarantees its citizens security and the preconditions for economic prosperity and for the development of their personalities;
• to preserve our great country’s national expertise and its scientific-technical and defense potential;
• to end reforms that are made merely in the name of reform, to end the destruction of our national production, to defend the national market and national capital, and to guarantee conditions for Russia’s breakthrough to a postindustrial future;
• to erect a barrier against the unbridled criminality, the plunder of the wealth that several generations of our people created, and to protect state and private property through laws;
• to put a prompt end to unemployment and hunger, and to give each citizen a dignified way and standard of life;
• to restore to the people of our country a feeling of community, of belonging to a sovereign state, of pride in it, and a belief in justice, conscience, and the good.

We have on our side the creative experience and heroism of the Russian citizens, the patriots of their homeland; we have on our side the thousand-year experience of the Russian state. After a national agreement and consolidation of society, we will strive to mobilize all citizens—patriots—to reestablish Russia that has not only been ruined but has lost its way. (March 1994)

This declaration should be closely examined and reread several times. What is immediately striking about it is its conciliatory tone. It is no Lysenko or Barkashov who is writing here, but the representatives of the national bourgeoisie, whose interests are in economic production and who are themselves adopting patriotism now more frequently than ever.

Two of the signers of the declaration are Aleksandr Prokhanov and the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg. But if they are really calling for “a social contract among all patriotic forces and movements, ideologies, and religions, one that rejects violence, racism, and nationalism,” then they are doing so only out of Goebbels-style demagoguery. Prokhanov, with his copious “red-brown” effusions, is actually the central integrating figure among the Russian national-patriots; he publishes profiles of the fascist Barkashov in the pages of his newspaper, Zavtra, that call him an “honest Russian patriot”—articles like “Hail Russia.” He builds bridges between avowed fascists, nationalistically oriented entrepreneurs, Stalinists, the counterculture (which is moving ever more to the right), high-ranking military brass, national-patriotic artists and intellectuals, and the theoretical center of the national-patriots—the Arktogeya society, the group around the new right theoretical journal Elementy. As for the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, he is an open anti-Semite and leader of the ultranationalistic parts of the Russian Orthodox Church. Named in the Barkashov interview, as we have seen, as one of the three possible leaders after the patriots take power, his writings are regularly featured in newspapers like Zavtra and Al Kods, in articles with titles like “Judaistic Extremism: A Threat to the World.”

“To defend the national market and national capital”—this indeed requires making “no distinction between entrepreneurs and workers,” to be sure. As for “reestablishing the force and power of the Russian state,” one may well ask, Within what borders will that power be reestablished? “Comrade” Zyuganov, chairman of “the largest organized patriotic party” and would-be redeemer of Russia, once again sheds some light:

First you have to be clear about what we mean by the concept of “Great Russia.” I understand by these words the Russian state, which definitely includes the territories where Russians or Russian-speaking people live. It would be a state based on the unbreakable fraternal bonds among great Russians, small Russians, and White Russians and, in fact, all tribes and peoples who voluntarily wish to adhere to such a union. I don’t think its borders would be much different from those of the Soviet Union.

Even “Comrade” Zyuganov should know that the Russian state was never precisely defined, let alone through such “voluntarism.” In fact, Russian and Soviet history consisted in great part of the subjection and colonialization of the Caucasian and Asian peoples, among others—a history of which many Russians are today unaware.

And how are we to understand the formulation “its peoples, who have equal rights,” when alongside this very declaration appears a big picture of Stalin, the Soviet leader who caused the deportation of entire peoples, a great many of whom died?

Much of the declaration reveals a nationalistic-corporatistic ideology—there is to be “no distinction between entrepreneurs and workers,” but the “national market and national capital” should be “defended.” Its political coloration limited to red and brown, Zyuganov enlarges upon its national socialistic components:

Q: As leader of the Communist party of Russia, your job is to analyze today’s events from a class standpoint. But you are emphasizing the nationalistic content of your political outlook. Is there a contradiction here?

A: No. Above all, I am a citizen of my fatherland, one small part of my people. As such, I am deeply convinced that the only forces in Russia that have a viable perspective are those that give first priority to the task of reviving the many-centuries-old values of the Russian state and Russian collectivism—that is, a social situation and self-consciousness in which the Russian people as a whole overcome the splits that have been forced on them, from both outside and inside, and reclaim themselves as a unitary family. (Territory Tied by Blood, no. 4, 1994)

Judging from the declaration, the Agreement for the Sake of Russia movement represents the “softer” style, a “peaceful” power takeover by those who stand to profit from the reestablishment of a deeply isolated Soviet Union, with forced collectivization and production oriented toward the military. Before we look at the other style of which Barkashov spoke (“I think an authentic political force should be ready for any situation that is amenable to a coup. . . . Those who prepare only for peaceful change will be unable to act if the situation turns violent”), let’s look at the the names and affiliations of those who signed the declaration of the Agreement for the Sake of Russia:

Sergey N. Baburin: chairman of the Russian Liberation Union (ROS) movement; a representative to the State Duma; connected to the New Right; with his ultranationalist All-Russian People’s Union, he collected more than 100,000 signatures but nonetheless was barred from the December 1993 elections.

Valentin Chikin: editor-in-chief of the Communist Party newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya; a representative to the State Duma; a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party

S. I. Glasiev: a former minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin; the only minister who came out against Yeltsin’s dissolution of Parliament; a representative to the State Duma

Stanislav Govorukhin: a film director who in 1989-90 joined the right wing of the democratic movement. He has directed two openly nationalistic films, One May Not Live So and The Russia We Lost. He has worked actively with the national-patriotic opposition since October 1993.

Mikhail Lapshin: chairman of the Agrarian Party and at the same time a member of the Central Committee of the RFCP; a representative to the State Duma

V. S. Lipitski: former close adviser to Rutskoi and his party, Free Russia

Aleksandr Prokhanov: editor-in-chief of Zavtra; closely allied with the United Opposition; one of the central figures of the national-patriots

Peter Romanov: director of a large Siberian industry; a member of the Russian People’s Assembly; deputy to the Federation Council (the upper house of Parliament)

Aleksandr Rutskoi: former vice president of Russia, who named himself president in October 1993, after Yeltsin ordered the dissolution of Parliament

G. N. Selesnev: editor of Pravda

A. M. Shilev: a nationalistic right-wing artist; a monarchist and extreme conservative

V. D. Sorkin: former chairman of the Constitutional Court of Russia, who in October 1993 declared the attack on Parliament to be illegal. Because of this, Yeltsin removed him from office, and he more or less went over to the United Opposition

Aman Tuleyev: a presidential candidate in the 1991 elections

A. S. Zipko: one of the leading party ideologists during the perestroika period, 1985-1991. He wrote many articles, especially against Marx; today he criticizes the government of Yeltsin and works with the United Opposition.

Gennadi Zyuganov: chairman of the Central Committee of the RFCP; co-chairman of the National Salvation Front; a member of the Russian People’s Assembly; a representative in the State Duma and leader of the second-largest political group there.

The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg: an avowed nationalist; the highest clergyman of the Russian Orthodox Church and the de facto leader of the nationally oriented Russian priests; a xenophobe and anti-Semite; works actively with the United Opposition

The National Social Movement

In March 1994 a second drumbeat began to pound. Only a week after the Agreement for the Sake of Russia was founded, Barkashov’s RNU merged with the independent unions’ Confederation of Free Unions of Russia (CFUR) to form a National Social Movement:

The RNU and the CFUR maintain that the antistate policies of the ruling regime, which are directed against the people, have brought about a critical situation in Russia today. At any moment, the destruction of Russia may reach a point where the potential of our economy falls below the level that is absolutely necessary even for industrialization. The reforms proposed and implemented by the IMF are the main factor in the disorganization of the Russian economy, and hence in the growth of national, social, and religious-denominational tensions.

As the federal power weakens, and as the economic realm and the state system of government slowly collapse, whole regions—especially those rich in petroleum, natural gas, precious metals, coal, and other strategic commodities that bring high profits—have fallen into the hands of antinational forces.

In terms of numbers, the workers are the strongest social group in Russia. It is on their labor that the well-being of the whole nation is based. The workers are the most unified, organized, and active sector of the Russian people. At present, only they can bring an end to the economic chaos that prevails in our country, once they have taken the organization and defense of production into their own hands. The economic crisis can be ended only when the nation has understood itself to be unitary, recognizing that the notion of an irreconcilable class struggle between employers and wage labor is a cruel Marxist-Zionist invention.

The interests of employers and workers should not collide in class struggle. On the contrary, the two groups should further the development of production together, on the basis of general national interests.

The social movement embodies the living fraternity of man, and for that reason it will also become the basis of spiritual life as decreed by God. . . . Hail Russia! (Zavtra, no. 12, Mar. 1994)

The founding of this National Social Movement came as something of a surprise to those few people in Russia who are paying attention to the growing fascism of Russian society. In retrospect, however, it appears to have been a logical step. For one thing, the coalition allowed the militantly fascist RNU to considerably broaden its social base—the CFUR has by its own accounts some 80,000 members. Not only that, it also stands to ease “Comrade” Zyuganov’s worries about the “absence of a unified patriotic outlook.” For what the National Social Movement presented in its founding declaration is an ideology of national-corporative socialism, freed of “destructive,” “Jewish”—presumably, foreign, “non-Russian”—”ideas of class struggle.”

In such a society, the “parasitical strata that are profiting from democracy during the collapse of the state” (as the head of the CFUR, Alexiev, puts it) would no longer exist. Instead, “good Russian” capitalists would produce for the welfare of the nation. The workers would not wage class struggle against those capitalists but would cooperate with them, or so says Alexiev. In fact, the CFUR chief went so far as to say: “It is a social duty of each person to work for the use of the nation. Usefulness to the nation is the only criterion to determine the national utility of individuals as well as various social groups.” But what happens if I don’t want to work for the nation?

At first glance, one might think Alexiev’s statement was published in a fascist paper like Territory Tied by Blood, but one would be making a mistake. Actually, it was published without further comment in Russian Labor Review, a newspaper that considers itself left-labor.

Here is how the CFUR-RNU merger works in practical terms. The city of Cherepovets is a CFUR stronghold, and workers organized in the union there were able to win many of their demands through strikes. While on strike, these workers have been and continue to be confronted by factory security units that have no qualms about shooting at unarmed workers. In such a situation, the workers have grown ever more ready to let themselves be defended by armed RNU units. Meanwhile, the RNU has been founding its own workers’ groups, not only in Cherepovets (Express Kronika, no. 23, Jun. 10, 1994) but in factories in the large Moscow industries. According to RNU ideology, these RNU troops could be used to intervene not only on behalf of strikers but also against them—namely, when a strike endangers the “well-being of the nation.” Hopefully the workers will become aware of this possibility before they feel the barrel of a rifle on their necks.

Parallel developments took place in the Ukrainian Donbass, where struggling miners had organized violent strikes in 1989, 1991, and 1993. In the 1993 strike they came out clearly against nationalism when they booed the representative of a moderate nationalistic organization when he came to speak. But the very next year, the ultranationalistic UNSO (whose motto is “Traitors to the Stakes!”) was able to create armed fighting units among these miners (members of the Anarchist Federation of the Donbass have confirmed this), since many of the miners, whom the Ukrainian government has treated in the dirtiest ways, are now threatened with layoff and social annihilation.

The Revolutionary Opposition

The next important event took place at the beginning of June 1994, when the New Right journal Elementy sponsored an event where the popular Siberian punk rock band Grashdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) performed; the fascistic RNU helped organize it. At this event the formation of the Revolutionary Opposition, a general national revolutionary or national-bolshevist movement, was announced. (See “Declaration of the Revolutionary Opposition,” p. 9; this text was published in Zavtra, no. 25 [June 1994], along with a picture of Nestor Makhno.)⁵

The names of the signatories are quite interesting. Eduard Limonov is a well-known Russian underground author, who in 1974 was expelled from the Soviet Union and in 1989 returned as a Russian nationalist. He fought on the side of the Serbs in Yugoslavia and strongly advanced their position through his journalism. Another signer is Igor Letov, a singer in Grashdanskaya Oborona, which before the 1990s sang anarchistic, anti-Soviet-state, and antimilitarist songs; in the mid-1980s Letov was imprisoned in a mental hospital for these songs. Still another signer is Aleksandr Dugin, the leading ideologist of the national-patriots and editor-in-chief of Elementy, to whose editorial board Alain de Benoist and other leaders of the European New Right also belong.

Another interesting point about this event is an article by Aleksandr Dugin published on the same page in Zavtra as the declaration. In this article, called “Anpilov, Our Red Brother,” Dugin paid tribute to Viktor Anpilov, the leader of the Communist Workers’ Party, with the obvious intention of winning him over to the new national-bolshevist front. [Anpilov is considered a "far left" Communist, in contrast to Zyuganov.—trans.] That the national bolsheviks are making overtures to Anpilov and his Stalinistic organization at all speaks volumes about how they see themselves.

Actually, unofficial conversations between Anpilov and the rest of the national-bolshevist movement seem to have been taking place for some time. I say this because I have in my possession a copy of a statement ordering the creation of a national-bolshevist front as long ago as 1993. The document (which was signed not by individuals but by organizations) was signed not only by the National Radical Party, the Movement of the New Right, and the Front for National Revolutionary Action (supported by Garry Lauck) but also by the Russian Komsomol (the former youth organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is now financed by Anpilov and Zyuganov), and the Movement to Support Cuba.

How has Anpilov responded to this courtship? The lead article that subsequently appeared in the Communist Workers’ Party newspaper Molniya (no. 1, July 1994), titled “We Will Save Russia,” tells us how:

Throughout Russia a wave of strikes is rising, demanding that the president be removed and that the organizers of the enormous experiments in colonialization that have been perpetrated on the Russian people be brought to accountability. In the wake of the October 1993 atrocity against the people and the Constitution, social resistance has intensified, and the opposition leaders are demanding unity and still more unity. No one of us, in isolation, can prevail even by legal means over our foe, who has a monopoly on television, radio, and the largest newspapers.

After years of unequal struggle against this antipopular regime, a group of fighters has come forth from the midst of the people, selflessly ready to serve the national interests of Russia . . . Let us join together on the path to victory. We ask the voters, the social and political organizations, to respond to our call, to suggest candidates for a common electoral list, and to prepare for the votes in the largest Russian cities in September. We believe in the wisdom and power of the working people. Together we will win!

In the light of a social situation approaching bankruptcy, it seems cynical to say, let’s wait and see what happens. The absence of an antifascist movement in Russia itself leaves me with no recourse but to write about developments in the national-patriotic movement. ¤

Markus Mathyl lives in Hamburg, Germany, where he works with the Hamburg Libertarian Center. He has often traveled to Russia and writes extensively on contemporary Russian radicalism for the anarchist press in Europe.

Translated by Janet Biehl. Originally published in Direkte Aktion, September 1994. For more information: Direkte Aktion, Bismarckstrasse 41a, 47443 Moers, Germany.

2 “Of all the new-style Russian nationalistis Nevzorov is undoubtedly the best-known, the most popular, and at the same time the most despised. His St. Petersburg television show, 600 Seconds, is watched by seventy million viewers. It was initially a local chronicle, mainly of crime, in which Nevzorov figured as a courageous, unpolitical, anti-establishment figure, voicing the concerns of the man in the street, attacking the Communist bureaucrats and the “Mafia.” . . . However, within a year the program became highly politicized—favoring a strong, united Russia, defending the interests of Russians outside Russsia. Nevzorov dropped his erstwhile monarchism and rabid anticommunism and moved closer to a National Bolshevik stance.” Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 269.

3 Organ of the Popular Socialist Party—trans.

4 “Ilya Konstantinov, a native of Leningrad . . . made his debut in the Russian Christian movement and was instrumental in drawing some of the striking workers in the Siberian coal mines to the cause of the right.” Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred, p. 268.

5 The declaration later led to the founding of the National Bolshevik Party at the end of 1994, which is chaired by Eduard Limonov. It also formed the core of a Communist-fascist youth movement, which is very active and is now considered the strongest explicitly political tendency among Russian youth. -M.M.

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right,
changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary,
and does not consist wholly with anything which was.

–Thoreau

One of the most dangerous aspects of the present cultural and social counterrevolution is the widespread belief [...]]]> When “Realism” Becomes Capitulation

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right,
changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary,
and does not consist wholly with anything which was.

–Thoreau

One of the most dangerous aspects of the present cultural and social counterrevolution is the widespread belief that capitalism is here to stay, that it is a “natural” social order, and that attempts to change its basic structure are futile and irrelevant at best and pernicious at worst. This belief, the conventional wisdom of the present generation, is now deeply rooted in the “children of the sixties,” the hell-raisers of 1968, who upon reaching middle age have found new pathways back to the society that they once denounced with insurrectionary theatrics. Nothing is more distasteful than 1960s anarchists and socialists who, roaring with “revolutionary” declamations a generation ago, have now ensconced themselves in the academy, professions, and business–and are currently waging an unrelenting criticism of positions that radically challenge the present social order as “sectarian.”

We have already encountered this message from former socialists who have transformed themselves into so-called “radical democrats” and from former anarchists who have transformed themselves into what Deleuze and Guattari have called (in all seriousness!) “desiring machines,” focused on a Yuppie pursuit of self-expression and a fulfilled “personhood.” If, as refurbished “radicals” now tell us, socialism in all its forms is a lost cause; if liberal capitalism is the best outcome we can expect from humanity’s long journey out of animality; then any hope that people can ever share this planet with one another in a benign, caring, and ecological way–indeed, that reason can shape social development to achieve the historic aim of an ethical society–has been mindlessly jettisoned. Humanity, we must suppose, can no longer attempt of its own free will to produce a cooperative society, and its future must be founded on a variant of the Hobbesian notions of a war of all against all.

No one, to be sure, can deny the right of 1960s socialists and anarchists to embrace the status quo in their various ways or adopt restful ideologies that threaten nothing in the established social order. But the difficulty that former radicals face, alas, is that capitalism will not leave them in peace. Society will not allow them to enjoy the economic and political quietude so necessary for stasis. Like natural evolution, social evolution goes on, and no “end of history” has produced the ideological and psychological certitudes on which to create a world of adaptation and self-satisfaction. Wrong as Marx was about the hegemonic role of the proletariat in transforming society, he was brilliantly insightful in delineating the explosive contradictions within capitalism–to which we today can add the inevitable contradiction between capitalist society and the natural world.

The great tradition, born from past revolutions both of society and of the mind, must be preserved if we are to retain our own humanity and a sense of hope. We hold the conviction that a truly communistic society is not only possible but necessary as the outcome of humanity’s potential for freedom and self-consciousness; that reason can guide human affairs within society as well as our dealings with the natural world; that the hovering shadows of a dismal, fearful, and antirational past, with its mystical appeals to and denigration of the human spirit, can be effaced by enlightenment, secularity, and a commitment to progress.

If libertarian socialism in some form is not to be part of humanity’s destiny, and if reason is to be merely a contrivance for adapting to the status quo or its basically bourgeois permutations, then what passes for consciousness today is adaptive rather than innovative and more animalistic than potentially human. In the face of today’s massive surrender of erstwhile leftists, one is tempted to cry, “If you cannot challenge the foundations of this malignant social order, then have the decency to refrain from calling those who still do ‘sectarian’ and ‘dogmatic.’ Pray, do not lecture those who are still trying to carry on the revolutionary tradition, the centuries-long struggle for a cooperative society and a truly democratic politics, on the need for a new ‘realism’ and ‘pragmatism’”–least of all at a time when social and ecological collision threatens to attain apocalyptic proportions.

To “radical democrats” and lifestyle anarchists, we would like to suggest that they find what niche they can in this increasingly constrictive and barbarous world, and luxuriate in it with all the fantasies they please. But have the moral probity to recognize that in the present time, nothing could be more indecent that to condemn the revolutionary tradition, its visions of a free, cooperative, and ecological society, and its adherents committed to serious social action in a lived public sphere as “sectarians” and “dogmatists.”

If the persistence of radical commitment is troubling because it recalls former ideals worn down by three decades of defeat, and now replaced by an ugly cynicism, then by all means shed these ideals completely, without diluting them into reforms that provide a patina for modern capitalism. But should a future generation emerge that knows nothing of the revolutionary tradition because it has been removed from academic and public “discourse,” the phrase “human spirit” will be a euphemism for cultural barbarism, spiritual death, and a self-indulgent narcissism.

—The Social Ecology Project

Theses on Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction
by Murray Bookchin

Social ecology developed out of important social and theoretical problems that faced the Left in the post-World War II period. The historical realities of the 1940s and the 1950s completely invalidated the perspectives of a proletarian revolution, of a “chronic economic crisis” that would bring capitalism to its knees, and of commitment to a centralistic workers’ party that would seize state power and, by dictatorial means, initiate a transition to socialism and communism. It became painfully evident in time that no such generalized crisis was in the offing; indeed, that the proletariat and any party–or labor confederation–that spoke in the name of the working class could not be regarded as a hegemonic force in social transformation.

Quite the the contrary: capitalism emerged from the war stronger and more stable than it had been at any time in its history. A generalized crisis could be managed to one degree or another within a strictly bourgeois framework, let alone the many limited and cyclical crises normal to capitalism. The proletariat, in turn, ceased to play the hegemonic role that the Left had assigned to it for more than a century, and Leninist forms of organization were evidently vulnerable to bureaucratic degeneration.

Moreover, capitalism, following the logic of its own nature as a competitive market economy, was creating social and cultural issues that had not been adequately encompassed by the traditional Left of the interwar era (1917-1939). To be sure, the traditional Left’s theoretical cornerstone, notably, the class struggle between wage labor and capital, had not disappeared; nor had economic exploitation ceased to exist. But the issues that had defined the traditional Left–more precisely, “proletarian socialism” in all its forms–had broadened immensely, expanding both the nature of oppression and the meaning of freedom. Hierarchy, while not supplanting the issue of class struggle, began to move to the foreground of at least Euro-American radical concerns, in the widespread challenges raised by the sixties “New Left” and youth culture to authority as such, not only to the State. Domination, while not supplanting exploitation, became the target of radical critique and practice, in the early civil rights movement in the United States, in attempts to remove conventional constraints on sexual behavior, dress, lifestyle, and values, and later, in the rise of feminist movements, ecological movements that challenged the myth of “dominating” the natural world, and movements for gay and lesbian liberation.

It is unlikely that any of these movements would have emerged had capitalism at midcentury not created all the indispensable technological preconditions for a libertarian communist society–prospects that are consistent with Enlightenment ideals and the progressive dimensions of modernity. One must return to the great debates that began in the late 1950s over the prospects for free time and material abundance to understand the ideological atmosphere that new technologies such as automation created and the extent to which they were absorbed by the “New Left” of the 1960s. The prospect of a post-scarcity society, free of material want and demanding toil, opened a new horizon of potentiality and hope–ironically, reiterating the prescient demands of the Berlin Dadaists of 1919 for “universal unemployment,” which stood in marked contrast to the traditional Left’s demand for “full employment.”

II

Social ecology, as developed in the United States in the early sixties (long after the expression had fallen into disuse as a variant of “human ecology”), tried to advance a coherent, developmental, and socially practical outlook to deal with the changes in radicalism and capitalism that were in the offing. Indeed, in great part, it actually anticipated them. Long before an ecology movement emerged, social ecology delineated the scope of the ecological crisis that capitalism must necessarily produce, tracing its roots back to hierarchical domination, and emphasizing that a competitive capitalist economy must unavoidably give rise to unprecedented contradictions with the nonhuman natural world. None of these perspectives, it should be noted, were in the air in the early 1960s–Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with its emphasis on pesticides notwithstanding. Indeed, as early as 1962, social ecology projected the alternative of solar energy, wind power, and water power, among other new ecotechnologies, and alternatives to existing productive facilities that were to become axiomatic to a later generation of ecologists. It also advanced the vision of new ecocommunities based on direct democracy and nonhierarchical forms of human relations. These facts should be emphasized in view of deep ecology’s attempt to rewrite the history of the ecology movement in terms of its own quasi-religious and scarcity-oriented outlook. Nor should we overlook the fact that social ecology’s antihierarchical analyses laid the theoretical basis for early feminism, various community movements, the antinuclear movement, and in varying degrees, Green movements, before they turned from “nonparty parties” into conventional electoral machines.

Nonetheless, social ecology makes no claim that it emerged ab novo. It was–and it remains–deeply rooted in Enlightenment ideals and the revolutionary tradition of the past two centuries. Its analyses and goals have never been detached from the understandably less developed theoretical analyses of Karl Marx and the classical anarchists (particularly Peter Kropotkin), or from the great revolutions that culminated in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1937. It eschews any attempt to defame the historic traditions of the Left in favor a neoliberal patchwork of ideas or a queasy political centrism that parades as “postmodernism” and “post-industrialism,” not to speak of the “postmaterialist” spiritualism fostered by ecofeminists, lifestyle anarchists, deep ecologists, and so-called “social deep ecologists” or “deep social ecologists.”

Quite to the contrary: social ecology seeks to countervail attempts to denature the Enlightenment and revolutionary project by emphasizing the need for theoretical coherence, no less today than it did in the 1960s, when the “New Left” drifted from a healthy libertarian populism into a quagmire of Leninist, Maoist, and Trotskyist tendencies. Social ecology retains its filiations with the Enlightenment and the revolutionary tradition all the more emphatically in opposition to the quasi-mystical and expressly mystical trends that are thoroughly sweeping up the privileged petty bourgeoisie of North America and Europe, with their goulash of antirational, spiritualistic, and atavistic ideologies. Social ecology is only too mindful that capitalism today has a nearly infinite capacity to coopt, indeed commodify, self-styled “oppositional trends” that remain as the detritus of the “New Left” and the old counterculture. Even anarchism, once a formidable tradition, has been repackaged by Hakim Bey, Bob Black, David Watson, and Jason McQuinn into a merchandisable boutique ideology that panders to petty-bourgeois tastes for naughtiness and eccentricity.

Ecology, too, has been packaged and repackaged into a variety of “deep ecologies” that generally emphasize an animalistic reductionism, a neo-Malthusian “hunger politics,” antihumanism, and bio- or “eco-”centrism–in short, a pastiche that renders it equally palatable to members of the British royal family at the summit of the social hierarchy and to lumpenized anarchoids at its base. Feminism, initially a universalized challenge to hierarchy as such, has devolved into parochial, often self-serving, and even materially rewarding species of ecofeminism and express theisms that pander to a myth of gender superiority (no less ugly when it concerns women than when it concerns men) in one form or another–not to speak of the outright wealth-oriented “feminism” promoted by Naomi Wolf et al.

Capitalism, in effect, has not only rendered the human condition more and more irrational, but it has absorbed into its orbit, to one degree or another, the very consciousness that once professed to oppose it. If Fourier insightfully declared that the way a society treats its women can be regarded as a measure of its status as a civilization, so today we can add that the extent to which a society devolves into mysticism and eclecticism can be regarded as measure of its cultural decline. By these standards, no society has more thoroughly denatured its once-radical opponents than capitalism in the closing years of the twentieth century.

III

This devolution of consciousness is by no means solely the product of our century’s new global media, as even radical theorists of popular culture tend to believe. Absolutism and medievalism, no less than capitalism, had their own “media,” the Church, that reached as ubiquitously into every village as television reaches into the modern living room. The roots of modern cultural devolution are as deep-seated as the ecological crisis itself. Capitalism, today, is openly flaunted not only as a system of social relationships but as the “end of history,” indeed, as a natural society that expresses the most intrinsic qualities of “human nature”–its ostensible “drive” to compete, win, and grow. This transmutation of means into ends, vicious as the means may be, is not merely “the American way”; it is the bourgeois way.

The commodity has now colonized every aspect of life, rendering what was once a capitalist economy into a capitalist culture. It has produced literally a “marketplace of ideas,” in which the coin for exchanging inchoate notions and intuitions is validated by the academy, the corrupter par excellence of the “best and brightest” in modern society and the eviscerator of all that is coherent and clearly delineable. Indeed, never has “high culture,” once guarded by academic mandarins, been so scandalously debased by academic presses that have become the pornographers of ideology.

Bourgeois society qua culture, especially its academic purveyors, abhors a principled stand, particularly a combative one that is prepared to clearly articulate a body of coherent principles and thrust it into opposition against the capitalist system as a whole. Theoretically and practically, serious opposition takes its point of departure from the need to understand the logic of an ideology, not its euphemistic metaphors and drifting inconsistencies. Capitalism has nothing to fear from an ecological, feminist, anarchist, or socialist hash of hazy ideas (often fatuously justified as “pluralistic” or “relativistic”) that leaves its social premises untouched. It is all the better for the prevailing order that reason be denounced as “logocentrism,” that bourgeois social relations be concealed under the rubric of “industrial society,” that the social need for an oppositional movement be brushed aside in favor of a personal need for spiritual redemption, that the political be reduced to the personal, that the project of social revolution be erased by hopeless communitarian endeavors to create “alternative” enterprises.

Except where its profits and “growth opportunities” are concerned, capitalism now delights in avowals of the need to “compromise,” to seek a “common ground”–the language of its professoriat no less than its political establishment–which invariably turns out to be its own terrain in a mystified form. Hence the popularity of “market socialism” in self-styled “leftist” periodicals; or possibly “social deep ecology” in deep ecology periodicals like The Trumpeter; or more brazenly, accolades to Gramsci by the Nouvelle Droite in France, or to a “Green Adolf” in Germany. A Robyn Eckersley has no difficulty juggling the ideas of the Frankfurt School with deep ecology while comparing in truly biocentric fashion the “navigational skills” of birds with the workings of the human mind. The wisdom of making friends with everyone that underpins this academic “discourse” can only lead to a blurring of latent and serious differences–and ultimately to the compromise of all principles and the loss of political direction.

The social and cultural decomposition produced by capitalism can be resisted only by taking the most principled stand against the corrosion of nearly all self-professed oppositional ideas. More than at any time in the past, social ecologists should abandon the illusion that a shared use of the word “social” renders all of us into socialists; or “anarchy,” into anarchists; or “ecology,” into radical ecologists. The measure of social ecology’s relevance and theoretical integrity consists of its ability to be rational, ethical, coherent, and true to the ideal of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary tradition–not of any ability to earn plaudits from the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, or Gary Snyder, still less from academics, spiritualists, and mystics. In this darkening age when capitalism–the mystified social order par excellence–threatens to globalize the world with capital, commodities, and a facile spirit of “negotiation” and “compromise,” it is necessary to keep alive the very idea of uncompromising critique.

It is not dogmatic to insist on consistency, to infer and contest the logic of a given body of premises, to demand clarity in a time of cultural twilight. Indeed, quite to the contrary, eclecticism and theoretical chaos, not to speak of practices that are more theatrical than threatening and that consist more of posturing than convincing, will only dim the light of truth and critique. Until social forces emerge that can provide a voice for basic social change rather than spiritual redemption, social ecology must take upon itself the task of preserving and extending the great traditions from which it has emerged. Should the darkness of capitalist barbarism thicken to the point where this enterprise is no longer possible, history as the rational development of humanity’s potentialities for freedom and consciousness will indeed reach its definitive end.

—August 9, 1995

Theses on Social Ecology and Deep Ecology
by Janet Biehl

Ever since the debate between social ecology and deep ecology broke out in the summer of 1987, various individuals have taken it upon themselves to attempt to reconcile the two approaches and produce what they feel is a higher synthesis. Social ecology and deep ecology, however, are incommensurable, for several basic reasons. Deep ecologists differ among themselves as to the content of their approach, which often renders deep ecology itself self-contradictory and amorphous. Nevertheless, based on the writings of its major theorists, its basic areas of disagreement with social ecology may be identified.

I

Social ecology argues that the idea of dominating nature resulted from the domination of human by human, rather than the reverse. That is, the causes of the ecological crisis are ultimately and fundamentally social in nature. The historical emergence of hierarchies, classes, states, and finally the market economy and capitalism itself are the social forces that have, both ideologically and materially, produced the present despoliation of the biosphere.

Deep ecology, by contrast, locates the origin of the ecological crisis in belief-systems, be they religions or philosophies. Most particularly, deep ecologists identify ancient near eastern religions, including those of Mesopotamia and Judea; Christianity; and the scientific worldview as fostering a mindset that seeks to “dominate nature.” It is by “asking deeper questions,” as Arne Naess puts it, that these origins are identified, so that the social causes of the ecological crisis are somehow relegated to the category “shallow.”

II

Social ecology views the natural world as a process–and not just any process, but a development toward increasing complexity and subjectivity. This development was not predetermined from the outset and need not have occurred, but retrospectively the increasing complexity of natural evolution and the development of increasing subjectivity are impossible to miss. With the emergence of human beings, biological evolutionary processes (first nature) have continued in and been sublated by social and cultural evolutionary processes (second nature). Unlike sociobiology, which reduces the social to the biological, social ecology emphasizes the gradations between first and second nature: second nature emerged out of first nature. Yet the boundary between human and nonhuman nature is real and articulated.

Deep ecology, by contrast, views first nature, in the abstract, as a “cosmic oneness,” which bears striking similarities to otherworldly concepts common to Asian religions. In concrete terms, it views first nature as “wilderness,” a concept that by definition means nature essentially separated from human beings and hence “wild.” Both notions are notable for their static and anticivilizational character. (Deep ecologists sometimes highlight the evolution of large animals strategically, as a rationale for expanding wilderness areas.) Deep ecologists emphasize an ungraded, nonevolutionary continuity between human and nonhuman nature, to the point of outright denial of a boundary between adaptive animality and innovative humanity.

III

Social ecology aims to reintegrate human social development with biological development, and human communities with ecocommunities, producing a rational and ecological society. The mere biological presence of humans in large numbers does not determine the type of society they will form. Even large numbers of human beings are capable of organizing society along lines that are not only not destructive of first nature but even enhance it. A sensitive combination of ecotechnics and existing technologies prudently applied constitutes the technological basis for post-scarcity, affording humans the free time to manage their social, political, and economic affairs along rational lines and fostering and restoring the ecological complexity of first nature.

Deep ecology, by contrast, does not aim to integrate humans with first nature. It regards the mere biological presence of human beings in any large numbers as intrinsically harmful to first nature, and sometimes even the basic means of human sustenance as damaging. Instead, deep ecology seeks to preserve and expand wilderness areas, excluding human beings from ever-larger tracts of land and forest. “Subsistence agriculture,” writes George Sessions, “which destroys tropical forests, cannot be considered long-term economic progress for the poor. The severe overpopulation in Third World countries requires that most of the poor will live in urban areas in the near future.” Of paramount importance to deep ecology is a radical and potentially ruthless scaling-down of the human population–indeed, population reduction as an issue has been named the “litmus test” of deep ecology. Maximizing wilderness and minimizing human population, some deep ecologists look upon even farming as such with disfavor, views that have rightfully given rise to charges that deep ecology is misanthropic.

IV

Social ecology openly asserts that human beings are potentially the most advanced life-form that natural evolution has produced, in crucial respects of intelligence, moral capacity, and dexterity–which in no way provides a license for humans to wantonly destroy first nature. Indeed, in a rational society, human beings could be nature rendered self-conscious. Clearly it is part of their evolutionary makeup to intervene in the natural world; what is not determined is whether that intervention will be ecologically benign or malign, a problem that is resolved by what kind of society they create.

Deep ecology, by contrast, regards human-centeredness or anthropocentrism as the fatal feature common to belief-systems generative of the ecological crisis. It advances instead a concept of biocentrism or “ecocentrism,” which attributes equal intrinsic moral worth to human and nonhuman life-forms and even to ecosystems. It regards various striking capacities of particular creatures as “skills” of equal value to human capacities. In making decisions about whether humans should engage in a potentially ecologically damaging project, deep ecology upholds the “vital needs” of life-forms against the “nonvital needs” of humans. Which needs are vital, however, remains undefined. Invoking the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold, deep ecology is biased against human intervention in first nature and often appears to regard human intervention as inherently destructive. Yet insofar as deep ecology calls upon human beings to alter their behavior in the light of the ecological crisis, it tacitly acknowledges that the behavior of human beings is decisive. Thus deep ecology is inherently self-contradictory.

V

Social ecology, while strongly emphasizing the need for an ecological sensibility, indeed an ethic of complementarity, contends that addressing the ecological crisis requires engaging in social and political activity to confront and ultimately eliminate its objective social causes: capitalism, social hierarchy, and the nation-state. Social ecology’s political dimension, libertarian municipalism, is a program for establishing direct, face-to-face democracies and confederating them into a dual power to confront these forces. Social ecology thus places itself in the Enlightenment and revolutionary tradition.

Deep ecology, by contrast, overwhelmingly emphasizes subjective factors. Drawing on subjectivists like Lynn White, Jr., it calls upon people to develop a quasi-mystical “ecological consciousness” by which they will feel themselves part of the natural world, as a “self-in-Self.” Deep ecologists approach this consciousness through highly personalistic philosophies or “ecosophies” that draw on an eclectic mix of alternative worldviews: native American, Buddhist, Taoist, pagan, and “Pleistocene.” Regardless of whether such views are accurately understood or, in some cases, are even knowable to people today, they share the common feature of instilling submersion to a larger “one” that, as a whole, has more value than the individual human. Deep ecology in practice is quietistic, emphasizing contemplation rather than intervention, to attain a state of awareness of the alleged absence of boundaries between human consciousness and the “cosmic oneness.” Some deep ecologists explicitly eliminate moral imperatives from this “ecological consciousness.” Although one deep ecologist makes the claim that attaining “ecological consciousness” will foster political activity, deep ecology often expresses an aversion to most political activity as such as anthropocentric, apart from basic conservationism and trite liberal attempts to curtail wilderness destruction. Participation in political movements is of value, however, insofar as it may contribute to personal transformation. Most often, deep ecology urges that people make lifestyle changes that reduce their consumption.

VI

Social ecology argues that one of humans’ distinctive features, their capacity to reason at a high level of generality, gives them the ability to potentially understand natural processes and potentially organize society along ecological and rational lines. Even as it criticizes the ubiquitous claims of a “means-ends” rationalism that has historically instrumentalized human and nonhuman phenomena, it advances a dialectical reasoning that is appropriate for comprehending human social and natural evolutionary processes. In itself, it embodies this commitment to rationality by upholding and demonstrating coherence in social thought.

Deep ecology, by contrast, disparages and often even demonizes reason as endemic to the anthropocentric worldviews that have produced the ecological crisis. Alternatively, deep ecology advances intuition as an equal or even superior form of cognition. Through intuition, deep ecologists argue, the continuity between the human self and the “cosmic one” may be apprehended and appreciated. As an intuitional approach, however, deep ecology is subject to the dangers represented by earlier antirational and intuitionist worldviews that, carried over into the political realm, have produced antihumanistic and even genocidal movements. Deep ecology, by its very amorphousness, makes itself amenable to use by any parts of the modern social hierarchy, depending on how needs are defined. Indeed, it is not accidental that some deep ecology theorists are devotees of the “late” work of Heidegger, whose basic premises are socially and intellectually reactionary.

—August 1, 1995

by Wolfgang Haug

This issue of Green Perspectives focuses on recent developments in Russia from the perspective of anarchist Vadim Damier. Since 1987, Damier, who lives in Moscow, has been active in a number of different political tendencies. He presently belongs to the Group [...]]]> Inside Russia Today:
An Interview with Vadim Damier

by Wolfgang Haug

This issue of Green Perspectives focuses on recent developments in Russia from the perspective of anarchist Vadim Damier. Since 1987, Damier, who lives in Moscow, has been active in a number of different political tendencies. He presently belongs to the Group of Revolutionary Anarchosyndicalists/Friends of the IWA (International Workingmen’s Association), which is made up partly of members of KAS (Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists) and partly of members of FRAN (Federation of Revolutionary Anarchists).

This interview was conducted in June 1994 near Stuttgart, Germany, by Wolfgang Haug, publisher of the magazine Schwarzer Faden, where it was originally published.¹ Translated by Janet Biehl.

* * *

Q: I’d like to ask about your personal political development, since it’s an example of how people living under totalitarian regimes can arrive at oppositional ways of thinking.

Damier: My political career began relatively late, actually, in 1987. Before then, my political positions — which I kept private — could be characterized as radical left, but they weren’t differentiated yet as anarchistic or anything like that. In the Soviet Union, we had no real access to books and articles written by various independent thinkers. Those who wanted to find out about the political ideas of unorthodox theorists could read a book like Critique of Petty Bourgeois Socialism — the book, of course, rejects these ideas. We just ignored all the slanderous parts, and based on what we read, we began to construct our own positions. As a result, our ideas were a hodge-podge — you probably couldn’t call what emerged a clear, substantive position favoring a concrete leftist tendency.

Starting in the Brezhnev era, there were dissidents who were openly active politically, but they remained entirely marginalized. They didn’t have any public outreach — you couldn’t develop a relationship with their groups except through personal contact with a member. I had no personal contact with such people, nor did I know how I could ever get it. Besides, we knew very little about leftist tendencies among dissidents — we heard about dissidents over Western radio, and it sounded as if most of them were bourgeois liberal or even nationalistic, like Solzhenitsyn. Of course, that wasn’t very appealing to leftists. Only later did we learn that there had also been leftist dissident groups, but at the time we heard very little about them, which as a rule obstructed any concrete contact with them.

I belonged to the “kitchen dissidents,” as they were called at the time. “Kitchen dissidents” were people who had a more or less critical mentality, usually members of the intelligentsia. They would gather in the evenings in someone’s kitchen, drink tea or whatever, and discuss the political situation, tell each other anecdotes, and so on. They would make informal contact like this. The kitchen was used as the meeting place because of the housing problem in Moscow, where the apartments are pretty small. The kitchen was practically the only place in an apartment big enough for people to meet. That’s the reason for the name “kitchen dissidents” — it wasn’t a separate political grouping, it referred only to this informal communication. That was the milieu of my own politicization. Later, my family joined me; they already had an oppositional orientation, though not in any unified way.

One further point I have to mention is that my socio-logical work also influenced my political development. I wrote a dissertation on the Green, or rather the alternative, movement in West Germany, and because of that I got access to the special sections of libraries where Western newspapers and books — even by leftists — were collected. I began to study these works systematically. I developed sympathies in 1980 with the Solidarity movement in Poland, for example, and with self-management. . . . Then this interest converged with the issue of ecology. In 1987, as the social movements were surfacing in the Soviet Union, I thought that what I’d learned about the Green movement in the West could become useful in Russia. Ever since 1988 I’ve been active in the ecology movement. I tried to influence the founding of the Green party — I was even a member of the coordinating committee for a while. At the time, we tried to construct the party as a real eco-socialist, eco-anarchist organization for self-management, but we failed.

From the beginning of the 1990s I had more and more to do with the anarchist and anarchosyndicalist movements. In 1989 I joined the KAS (Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists), even though I didn’t agree with all of their ideas, like their notion of market socialism. Instead, I tried to spread the ideas of libertarian communism. In 1991 I cofounded the Revolutionary Anarchist Organization in Russia.

Q: What about the earlier dissident groups? The trade-union-oriented SMOT [the Free Interprofessional Workers' Union, the only leftist dissident organization in the Soviet Union before perestroika, organized in 1978] became known to us as a leftist group here in what was then West Germany, and it gained a great deal of press attention. Was this group wholly unknown to you?

Damier: It was very little known, and to people who didn’t listen to Western radio broadcasts, it was probably entirely unknown. I was listening to Western radio starting in about 1975, so I knew about it. But efforts like SMOT were always quickly destroyed.

Q: Is there any successor to this group today?

Damier: Yes, SMOT still exists, but most of the people aren’t the same as the ones who started it. From the begin-ning, SMOT was a kind of gathering place for representatives of very different political orientations. It was an oppositional trade-union initiative. It had anarchists, left-socialists and even nationalistic groups. In the earliest phase, social democratic positions were the most widely held, I think. But this first generation was more or less eliminated pretty early on: they were thrown into prisons and mental hospitals. Even Klebanov, one of the founders of the free unions [i.e., unions independent of the Communist Party], had to spend many years in psychiatric treatment — he was freed only at the beginning of perestroika.

What remained was no longer a trade-union initiative but a very small group. At the beginning of perestroika, SMOT was practically refounded. Klebanov tried to revive the free unions, but he had changed his own position. Before, he had considered himself a leftist, a Marxist; now he said his free unions had to adapt to capitalism. But it all remained a pretty limited collection of small organizations in various cities, no more than a hundred people all together. There are some cities, like Minsk, in which SMOT really is a trade union. But then there are other places where SMOT attracts virtually only right-wing people — like Smolensk, where they’re monarchists! That’s a different bag of beans. The information office of SMOT still exists in Moscow — we exchange information with them. They say they’re in-terested in everything from independent trade-union work to syndicalism, and that they’re against the Communist Party, but otherwise they call themselves “apolitical.”

Q: I’d like to ask you about the October 1993 “putsch” [Yeltsin's attack on the parliamentarians in the Russian parliament building, or "White House"]. The Western press has portrayed President Yeltsin, both before and after, as representing democracy. But after the fight over the White House, after the barricades were taken away, we heard the reaction of the left opposition and learned that for you he represents dictatorship.

Could you explain what caused you to arrive at this conclusion? Which particular steps of his did you criticize? What politics does he stand for, and what do Rutskoi² et al. stand for? It would be helpful if you could distinguish these positions, since the left opposition is somewhere between these two poles: Yeltsin on the one hand, and Rutskoi, Khasbulatov, and the nationalist groups on the other. What issues do the radical leftists advance?

Damier: It’s been obvious for some time that the so-called liberals of the ruling bureaucracy show authoritarian ten-dencies. It started gradually. Their faction came to power under slogans of democratization, calling for a strengthening of the legislative branch. But once they were in power, they began to build up the executive. In 1993 it was clear to us that the confrontation between two bourgeois models of the state was reaching its climax. One model was parliamentary, by which many moderate leftists wanted to grant priority to the parliament; the other was the one in which all power would derive from the president. The constitution, which Yeltsin and his followers drew up, was clearly tailored for a strong, autocratic president. He can dissolve the parliament, and the government is controlled by the president, not by the parliament — in short, the president makes policy. All that’s left to the parliament is financial matters and confirming individual ministers and the like.

So during this conflict the so-called left-democratic forces, including social democrats, sided with the parliament — not because they wanted to defend the present composition of the parliament but because of the idea of parliamentarism.

As far as the radical leftists were concerned, they saw the conflict a bit differently: their starting point was that a few weeks before the “coup d’état,” Yeltsin had brought his man Yegor Gaidar, the former prime minister and an advocate of “shock therapy,” back into power. [He had left the government for a time — W.H.] He named him vice premier.

At the same time the delegation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Moscow, which makes up the economic background of the conflict. Broader market reforms were then being discussed — especially the contin-uation of the “shock therapy” policy. The Yeltsin camp stood for implementing the IMF plans and, consequently, for shutting down numerous factories, eliminating state subsidies and the like. These factories, after all, did not make a profit from production but depended on the civil service bureaucracy, as well as on the newly emerging commercial bourgeoisie — including the mafia bourgeoisie.

In contradistinction to the Yeltsin camp, the “parlia-mentary faction” represented the interests of the industrial bureaucracy, the top managers who wanted to privatize the factories under the management of the “workforce.” Their (capitalist) views came from their desire to maintain control of the factories, and so they resisted some of the strictures of the IMF. During the October conflict, this camp was sup-ported by the nationalist/fascist and Communist faction, which constituted itself as the “irreconcilable” opposition to Yeltsin and represented the interests of the old bureaucratic stratum, which at the time was being either laid off or discriminated against. It was also generally supported by Russian banking and industrial circles, which feared Western competition.

Before the October events, Yeltsin was clearly taking steps to consolidate his power in order to institute concrete social and economic policies. The radical leftists had been against such policies all along — the whole development seemed to us to be a “Pinochet-ization,” that is, the intro-duction of a dictatorship in order to rapidly convert to a market economy. On the other hand, we were certainly not in favor of the parliament: first, because we are against the prin-ciple of representation as such and, second, because we knew that most of the people who stood behind the parliament belonged to other factions of the same ruling bureaucracy.

Q: Officially, it wasn’t reported in the West that Yeltsin stood unconditionally for the IMF. Here, the main criticism of the parliamentary faction was that the parliament had not been freely elected.

Damier: But it was elected! And the election was, in principle, free — that is, there were many different candidates. Even though it took place in 1990, it was still a multiparty election. The Yeltsinists, of course, said that the parliament wasn’t democratic because it had been elected while the Communist Party still held power. But there were already several parties, and it was this parliament that had chosen Yeltsin to be its speaker. At the time, Yeltsin saw the parliament as good, and until 1991, both factions worked together. Only later was this harmony was disrupted, when the power struggle began — but not because the parliament had made undemocratic and inhumane decisions. . . .

The position of the radical leftists in 1993 was the same as it had been in August 1991 [during the failed coup against Gorbachev]: we didn’t support either side. In both cases we didn’t take part in the barricades but instead distributed pamphlets denouncing the declaration of a state of emergency and opposing militarization, the ban on strikes and the curtailments of freedoms. . . .

There were a few groups of radical leftists who, to some extent, took the side of the parliament. Their reasons were like those of the social democrats, but they also had their own particular reasons. On the evening after Yeltsin expelled the parliament, barricades were constructed around the White House. The people who built them were Trotskyists and a few (I would emphasize this) anarchists, who did it completely spontaneously — that is, no organization made any decision to do it. These particular people just decided to make use of the situation, probably to try to radicalize the people who had gathered around the White House and push them in a certain direction.

It’s clear that the people gathered around the White House weren’t only ultrarightists and nationalists — this fact was determined afterward and was confirmed in interviews with people who had been in front of the White House. There were four types. First the nationalists and ultrarightists, who considered Yeltsin an agent of international Zionism and supported the parliament even though they had difficulties with Khasbulatov, who is Chechen.³ Second were people from former state-Communist groups, who hoped that during the struggle against Yeltsin, the situation could be changed in their favor — that if Yeltsin were toppled, they could bring back the Soviet Union. Third were democrats who had been disappointed since 1990 and 1991 but who still held the same positions — they thought parliamentary institutions had to be protected from the authoritarian tendencies of the executive. And finally, there were those who came simply to protest the existing regime, because that regime promised no future.

The radical leftists had only minimal success in influencing these people, though, partly because there were too few radical leftists there, and in my own opinion, partly because it was useless from the outset. It wasn’t our affair, it wasn’t our struggle. But the main reason was that the ultrarightists soon drove the radical leftists from the area around the White House. There were fights between anarchists and Nazis — the people who support Alexander Barkashov [a prominent anti-Semitic polemicist, organizer of Slavic congresses and leader of the Russian National Unity Group]. One anarchist had to defend himself with a knife, and afterward the Nazis handed him over to the police.

That the Nazis and the police cooperated was clear. They may already have had a relationship, since the Barkashov people from the Russian National Unity Group — who I consider to be the most dangerous ultrarightists in Russia — had somehow been permitted to use police training facilities, and they had rifles from somewhere, nobody knows where. Something similar happened to two anarchists from Belarus, who had come to Moscow in order to understand the situation themselves. They were in the square and began to debate and then got into fights with neo-Nazis, who handed them over to the police as “provocateurs.”

Q: Had there already been clashes between radical leftists and Nazis before this? In a leftist newspaper, I read about a confrontation over literature distribution.

Damier: It’s been going on since the early summer of 1993, when there were clashes between distributors of leftist and Nazi literature. It started when Nazis attacked some people who were selling a Communist newspaper in front of the Lenin Museum. Let me explain this. The Lenin Museum, in the center of Moscow (it’s closed at the moment and is supposed to be changed over into a historical museum), back then still held exhibitions in the Communist style, and the Communists saw it as their natural holy place. The distributors of Nazi literature saw it as a good place to concentrate their propaganda. Before the 1917 revolution, by the way, this building was where the Moscow city parliament met. The Nazis attacked the distributors of the Communist newspaper and claimed the building for themselves.

Later, there were attacks on other people selling radical-left literature. In public the Communist leaders downplayed all this, though, so that the alliance of opposition forces (that is, between Communists and nationalists) would not be disrupted. Trotskyists and anarchists were trying to resist these attacks when a larger clash came in August 1993, and Nazis handed over two radical leftists to the police. While they were in the police station, those arrested saw the Russian flag — with a swastika added — hanging there; one of them was beaten up at the police station. In any case, no legal proceedings were brought against the leftists, since the events of September-October overshadowed everything else.

As far as we’re concerned, I think Nazis have to be fought, probably even physically, but to tell you the truth, we have very little means to do this. Our group is very small and the Nazi groups are pretty big; they’re militarily trained and they have rifles. Some reports say that the Barkashov people have hundreds of trained fighters.

Q: After the confrontation over the White House, in which this Barshakov group functioned more or less as a protective guard [for the parliamentarians], didn’t the government go after them?

Damier: Actually, what happened was that the media gave this group a lot of publicity, in effect creating an image for them. Since then, according to a few more recent reports, this group has grown even larger.

The Barshakov group was one of several militarized groups around the White House, and they organized the guard inside the parliament building. They participated in the storming of the broadcasting station,⁴ and they drove some of the other oppositional forces out of the parliament building, including a few Communist deputies. They later claimed that two of their own people died during the storming of the White House, but most of the Barkashov people had let themselves out of the building before Yeltsin’s attack, as if they had been tipped off in advance that it was about to happen. There are also hints that their organization, Russian National Unity, played a provocative role in the affair. In one demonstration, for example, a radical leftist asked a policeman who was standing passively nearby, “Do you like the fact that there are swastikas in the center of Moscow?” The policeman pointed in the direction of the Kremlin and said, “All questions must be addressed there.” It shouldn’t be excluded that Yeltsin’s crowd used the ultrarightists as provocateurs. The shootout started with them. . . . Finally, the military assault came from the Yeltsin side — even official television had to admit that.

Officially it was reported that the activities of the Barshakov group were stopped. Barkashov himself went underground. A decree was issued for his arrest — but nobody could find him! This is really very interesting — the powerful police of great Russia could not find and arrest him for three whole months! Later, he explained that he’d been in a dacha near Moscow during this time. In December he was attacked — somebody shot at him from a passing car and wounded him. As a result, his whereabouts became known; he was arrested and brought back to Moscow — taken to a military hospital! There he lay until he was once again healthy, and then he was freed. His group, although they were still not legally permitted to exist, started selling their newspaper, Russian Order, out in the open, and it had an immediate circulation of 340,000 copies. Nobody interfered with this. . . .

Q: In the West, Yeltsin’s opponents are portrayed mainly as a collection of Communists, ultrarightists and nationalists living in the past. But you’ve suggested that they really work together. It would be important to look more closely at this new red-brown solidarity.

Damier: Of course, to people in the West it’s incomprehensible that Stalinist Communists would have anything to do with open neo-Nazis. Certainly in Germany they don’t. But you have to remember that Stalinism has always incorporated ideas of nationalism and Great Russian chauvinism. In Russia, this really isn’t so incomprehensible — Stalinism was in power long enough to carry out its nationalistic content. The Stalinists and nationalists have at least one thing in common: the idea of a state that encompasses the republics of the former USSR, and the so-called patriotism around that idea. For this nationalism, the Communists drew heavily from theories of the national liberation struggles, in which the working class and the national bourgeoisie were allied in the common struggle against imperialism. The Stalinists advanced this policy for countries of the so-called Third World.

It goes back in Germany to the 1920s and 1930s too. In 1923 Karl Radek, who was then the German representative to the Communist International, tried to advance similar ideas, to the point where he practically suggested that the Communists and the working class make an alliance with the right-wing völkisch forces so that they could struggle together against the system established by the Versailles Treaty. To paraphrase, Radek’s argument was: “Germany is subjugated by international imperialism. A national liberation movement must be created.” The Communists would be the best patriots in this regard, Radek thought, since they would be able to protect the country’s national interests better than the bourgeoisie. More or less the same argument resurfaced during the 1930s in documents from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). There was a KPD program for national and social liberation.

Today, the argument coming from the Russian Stalinists sounds pretty much the same: “Russia is a country that is subjugated by international imperialism/Zionism. Allied with the patriotic forces of the national bourgeoisie we must lead a struggle for national liberation.”

Q: How does this emphasis on Zionism always get into it?

Damier: That goes back to the Stalin era, after the Second World War. In 1953, shortly before Stalin died, there was actually a project to deport all Jews from the European part of Russia to Siberia. After Stalin’s death, fortunately, this didn’t happen. Anti-Zionism was revived in 1967, when the Arab-Israeli war flared up. At that time, Brezhnev took the side of the Arab countries. An intense anti-Zionist campaign broke out in Russia. In nasty caricatures, for example, it was asked why Jewish citizens should be allowed to study in Russian schools, since they were only building up cadres for Israel. Books were published that placed the blame for the medieval pogroms on the Jews themselves — something along these lines: “The Jews were rich, and the struggles weren’t really about racial hatred but were ‘class struggles.’ “

Q: Have the Party versions of history omitted the fact that many Jews played very revolutionary roles in 1917 and afterward?

Damier: Yes, it’s been forgotten in Party history — but not by the nationalists! In Russia today there are certainly some nationalists who don’t mind working alongside Communists. But other nationalists are anti-Communist and want nothing to do with the Communist Party, since the 1917 revolution was a “Jewish conspiracy.” The nationalists who are willing to work with Communists have a tacit understanding not to mention such matters.

Q: Nationalism, as an ideology “beyond parties,” holds together political alliances, and no group seems to be either able or willing to separate itself from it. In the Russian case, the development of a new racism and nationalism are attributed not only to the collapse of the Soviet Union but also to the terrible social and economic conditions there, or at least those conditions have contributed to it. Can you give a few clear-cut conditions that at this moment are shaping life in Russia? I’m thinking of inflation, the discrepancy between prices and wages, the alignment of prices to the Western level.

Damier: The social crisis plays an enormous role in causing the growth of nationalistic opinions. The economic situation is bad, and the social situation is even worse. In principle, however, it’s pretty difficult to compare prices and wages in Russia with those of the West. One must first of all consider what they were like before perestroika. Back then, you couldn’t compare wages and prices at all — even currency exchange rates were arbitrary. But then, those exchange rates weren’t entirely wrong since at least they maintained a balance. Now prices are set, on principle, at the international level, so the tendency is that a few things still cost less than in the West — things like bread and some foodstuffs particular to Russia. But other items, like clothing, imported goods and so on, are priced at the world level.

Wages, however, are much, much lower than at the world level. It’s hard to figure out what the average wage is. The figures the government issues are entirely different from figures the unions give out. But my approximate estimate for Moscow is that a qualified worker on the production line last fall got about 70 rubles; now it could be about 200 rubles.⁵ People who don’t work in manufacturing or the new commercial sphere get even less — and that includes everyone who works in education, science and medicine.

What makes it even more difficult is that the people who work in manufacturing receive their wages only irregularly. The authorities agree that wages should be raised, but then these wages aren’t paid out for maybe three months. By the time they’re finally paid, inflation has grown, and the wages have lost much of their purchasing power. So one of the main demands during the recent labor conflicts has been that wages be paid regularly.

Q: What’s the outlook concerning unemployment?

Damier: Unemployment is still not very high. That’s probably why our situation still has a degree of internal stability. In spite of all demands for reform, in spite of all the IMF demands, there hasn’t yet been a single bankruptcy of a state industry. But the new government has already announced that unemployment is going to come. And what will happen then? It doesn’t seem likely that there will be unemployment insurance or any other money for the unemployed. Up to now, unemployment money was paid out for a few months after someone lost a job, and after that, no more.

In any case, the state hasn’t got the money to pay insurance to millions of unemployed people. There are no programs. There’s an idiotic television program that depicts the labor office as a place that can help the jobless find new work, industries find new workforces and unemployed people start up their own business. The producers of this program must think that a good way to fight unemployment is to transform people into businessmen. . . .

Q: Let’s go on to another question about nationalism. Is there any kind of a liberal media in Russia that refuses to be tainted by nationalism? Are there any newspapers that at least make a pretense of reporting objectively?

Damier: I have to say, unfortunately, that nationalism is the prevailing consensus in Russia at the moment. Practically all parties have a more or less nationalistic tone in their programs. And I mean all parties — even the extreme market-economy liberals, like the people around Gaidar. They too speak of Greater Russia now, and of the need to defend great-power interests and protect Russian minorities in the other republics. That’s the consensus. And it’s no accident: every state has to have a basic ideological consensus, otherwise it can’t function. If the basic idea isn’t going to be state communism, then it has to be something else — say, bourgeois-democracy or bourgeois-liberalism. But in Russia, the situation is too unstable and too delicate, so some other integrating factor must be found, one that isn’t going to cost anything materially. That leaves only nationalism.

There are still intellectuals and small groups that reject extreme nationalistic ideas. There is still critique, for example, in a few liberal newspapers like Moscow News. But they only critique — they can’t suggest alternatives. Moreover, coming from them, the liberal critique sounds very strange. There’s an organization called the Antifascist Center, for example. It’s a movement that was started up by Yeltsin’s own Democratic Center. You can hear its members criticizing the far right on television and radio. But what they themselves propose as an alternative sounds really terrible: they say that “nationalistic demagoguery” and “class demagoguery” are equivalent, and that both should be banned by the state and prosecuted repressively.

So in our new constitution, there’s a point that says “social and national demagoguery” is to be “forbidden and prosecuted.” “Class struggle” is officially banned. Even a person like Gaidar. Shortly after the December elections, when the Zhirinovsky party got so many votes, Gaidar suddenly was explaining that we have to build an antifascist front. Gaidar — a leading antifascist? A man who makes Pinochet-istic prescriptions himself now wants to be considered an antifascist? Many people would say, “If he’s an antifascist, let’s be fascists.” So Gaidar is actually making propaganda for fascism instead of counterpropaganda.

Q: Has the new constitution, which forbids “social” agitation too, been used against the radical-left press?

Damier: Not yet. One reason would be that most of the radical-left newspapers aren’t officially permitted. These newspapers are published unofficially and only half legally. So it’s very difficult to get them around. At least I haven’t yet heard of any legal proceedings being brought on the grounds of “social demagoguery.” But then, this could also be due to the fact that these days the level of “social struggle” in Russia is very low.

Q: Let’s talk about the different nationalistic groups. Here in the West, criticism of the new nationalism and fears of a nationalistic Russia have mainly been focused on Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Judging from your accounts, it seems that he is only one of many and perhaps not even the most significant.

Damier: As I’ve already mentioned, nationalism is predominant in Russia today. That’s reflected even in the revival of heraldry. Russia has reintroduced its old tsarist coat of arms — and even the double-headed eagle with the crown. We call it the “crowned, broiled Chernobyl chicken.” But to Russia’s neighbors and the national minorities within Russia, this symbol clearly evokes Great Russian chauvinism. The tsarist flag is also valid today. There’s a wide range of extreme-right and openly Nazi groups. A great many of them developed out of the Pamyat⁶ movement — although the party of Zhirinovsky didn’t.

Zhirinovsky, who even describes himself as “crazy,” is popular — he got twenty-five percent of the vote in December 1993. You could say this was really only a protest vote, and it was. But out of all the possibilities for casting a protest vote, the people still chose him.

All told, however, Zhirinovsky’s party is not a fascist party in the true sense of the word. I doubt that Zhirinovsky himself has any real political convictions. He started out in his political career wanting to write the political program for the Social Democratic Party. Then he founded this “Liberal Democratic Party.” Its first program was oriented toward the market economy. Now he calls for more state intervention, but of course everything is capitalistic, market-oriented. His career doesn’t seem to follow any consistent principle. Besides, he still hasn’t got any storm troopers!

Q: Doesn’t he work with little extreme-right groups for that?

Damier: He’s pretty isolated politically. The Communists and Socialists don’t find him acceptable — after all, he once supported the politics of Yeltsin. He came out in support of that authoritarian constitution, the one that gives more power to the president. It’s even been said that if Zhirinovsky hadn’t supported Yeltsin, Yeltsin never would have gotten his constitution adopted. For this and other, personal reasons — he’s half Jewish — many nationalists don’t accept him either. One right-wing, nationalistic newspaper even wrote that he was a Jewish agent within the patriotic movement.

Q: What are we to make of this? On the one hand, he got twenty-five percent of the vote, which wasn’t only a protest vote but a nationalist vote. On the other hand, few of the nationalists will work with his group. Are you suggesting that these other groups are potentially more successful?

Damier: That’s hard to say. During the last election, many nationalistic organizations weren’t allowed to be on the ballot. Their constituencies boycotted the election, or else they voted for Zhirinovsky or the Communists in spite of everything. As for the attempts to produce a united nationalist-Stalinist opposition, Rutskoi finally initiated this at the end of May, and I think the majority of the nationalistic forces adhered to it. Not all the radical rightists came along, and of course, the boundaries between them are sometimes permeable.

Normally, however, these groups stand on their own and make their own politics entirely. They’re training themselves, getting themselves ready — although no one knows for what or when. But they are strong. Russian National Unity is estimated to have ten thousand men; other far-right entities in other regions are stronger still. It’s a good thing that these groups aren’t unified.

Q: Is there also a so-called “New Right”?

Damier: Russia has become the Mecca of the “New Right.” In Moscow there’s a journal called Elementi that shares the common project of the “New Rightists” in other countries. It publishes the writings, for example, of Alain de Benoist.⁷ The largest opposition newspaper in Russia, Sabra, is produced by “New Rightists.” Whereas previously the rightists were inflexible and made statements against the youth culture, for instance, and said rock music was Satanism and so on, they’re now trying to establish a “rock resistance,” a purely Russian rock music. They’re advancing the repulsive idea that all oppositionists, all radicals, whether left or right, should work together, since all are against the capitalist system.

Q: Do you have allies with which you can do antifascist work, ones who have earned this name?

Damier: The moderate leftists, the Party of Labor, have made an antifascist effort. They’re oriented toward social democracy. . . . This past spring, this group, some individual social democrats, and a few people from the Communist Party got together to found a League of Internationalists. They can do some things together, at least propaganda, but only in a limited way. They’re oriented toward the state, saying, “Nationalism is bad, patriotism is good.”

Q: You said that you are very few in number. Two years ago, a May 1 demonstration organized by the KAS (Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists) looked much more promising. A few hundred people marched under the black flag through the city, and even Western TV took note of the new anarchists. What’s happened to them?

Damier: At that time, KAS supposedly had about a thousand members. Probably that’s an exaggeration. What happened was that in those days not everyone who called themselves anarchists really were anarchists. It’s a paradox: Normally we’re told that it’s very difficult to be an anarchist in a country with such statist traditions as ours; but then in a crisis situation, when movements emerge and struggle for more freedom, it can go the other way. During those times, many people can find anarchism, or at least antistatism, to be appealing — without entirely sharing the concepts of anarchism. So among these kinds of people there were a few who later became businesspeople and today call themselves anarcho-capitalists.

For young people, that time was the beginning of their political careers. A few started out in KAS and then went into the social-democratic or even bourgeois parties. Some young people went along with anarchism and KAS out of fashion — like the punk movement. It was easy to go along then — there weren’t any membership dues to pay or anything. . . .

Since then the situation has changed. Being an anarchist is riskier, and under such circumstances, only those continue who are able and willing to do systematic work. Now several small groups remain — they quarrel with each other pretty often and often take strange positions. I’m not speaking of the anarcho-capitalists but of the majority of today’s KAS (which in the whole former USSR has only about a hundred members). They’re seeking to achieve a market socialism without a state, in the sense of Proudhon.

Q: Are you saying that they want to bring in the free market economy?

Damier: It looks like it. Every factory would belong to the workers who worked in it. It would belong to them as property — not as an object of their management, but as an object of their profit. What they produce, they are to exchange on the free market — with other factories or with consumers. Everything is to run totally according to the laws of the free market — that is, with prices, profits and so on.

These KAS members call themselves collectivists, but that’s wrong. They understand “collectivism” not as distribution according to the products of the workers’ labor but as collectivism on the basis of shared workforce property. They understand “equality” only as equality of opportunity — that is, in wholly bourgeois terms.

Q: I’d like to come back to the question of ecology, which was also your personal starting point. The concept of “social ecology” comes from Murray Bookchin, which he closely integrates with an ecological society with little or no domination. In Russia, there’s a Social Ecological Union. Does it have anything to do with Bookchin’s ideas, and if not, what’s it all about?

Damier: The Social Ecological Union emerged wholly autonomously. The ecology movement was actually the first and largest social movement to appear in the former Soviet Union, although only a little remains of it now. The SEU is the largest ecological organization that still exists from that time. It still organizes people today, even people who live outside Russia. Its founders, who used and still use the idea of social ecology, had no notion of Bookchin’s ideas. They were pure conservationists. Only over time did they come to understand that you can’t just protect nature, you also have to solve the social problems that lead to the destruction of nature. This last point sounds like Bookchin, but first you have to decide what you mean by social change. German Social Democrats also propose the “ecological reconstruction of society,” but they aren’t social ecologists in Bookchin’s sense either.

In the early days, the Social Ecological Union wanted to be an ecological organization, not a political one. They wanted to influence policies through lobbyists. They didn’t actually do this themselves, though. Many people from the left tried to work with them and push them in a radical-left direction. But they didn’t know anything about Bookchin’s ideas at that time either. Instead, they strongly oriented themselves toward the Green Party in Germany. Only one of those who initiated the SEU, I think, is still active, but he’s very influential — Sergey Fomichov from Nizhni Novgorod. At the moment, he is co-chair of the League of Green Parties, a Green association that we have. He belongs to the activists of a militant ecological organization and he’s publisher of the anarcho-ecological newspaper Third Way. The League of Green Parties and the Party of the Greens, however, have both clearly become our local realos.

The first person in the Green milieu to make himself familiar with Bookchin’s ideas was actually me. I read his writings in German, then summarized and translated articles written by him that later became familiar in the Social Ecological Union. Since the end of last year they’ve aroused more and more interest, because the SEU has had enough of traditional “politics.” Yeltsin had an ecological adviser who worked with older members of the SEU. In the fall of 1993, during the election, they tried to organize an ecological list with the Party of the Greens (the farther to the right of the two parties), but this effort failed. Afterward, the SEU concluded that the Party of the Greens had brought them too much into politics, so at present they’re opposed to becoming politicized in the sense of “participation in power.” The more the SEU comes into contact with Western environmentalists, the more it discusses alternative theories.

In March 1994, the eco-anarchists held a discussion conference with the SEU, and they drew up a declaration of principles for an alternative society. The draft called for the creation of a federation of parks for the protection of nature, alternative factories that operate along ecological principles and communes. Social experiments and ecological experiments would be brought together, on condition that they involve “no destruction of nature.” This formulation was acceptable both to the eco-anarchist participants and to the representatives of the SEU.

As for the base of the Social Ecological Union, it’s hard to determine what their influence is, since the membership is so varied. You can scarcely develop a united strategy there. There are members who are Cossacks, whose orientation is nationalistic and right-wing, and there are radical conservationists, who want nothing to do with politics at all.

The SEU has been working closely with an American environmental group [the National Toxics Campaign Fund], which has given them computer technology, modems and so on, so that now the magazine Third Way can be more widely distributed.

Q: Can you say something about the praxis of the Social Ecological Union or the ecology movement as such?

Damier: Unfortunately, things have changed a great deal here, too. Previously, ecological actions were massive. One of the goals of the radical ecology movement was to include the population of each place in their action. But now what happens is that activists from different cities come to a place and hold their action or protest day; the population supports them only passively, and then the activists go away. That’s not so good, of course, because it precludes the development of consciousness, which must be an essential goal of such actions. Also, if the local population doesn’t actively support the action, then the question arises of whether the activists are behaving responsibly.

Q: In closing, I’d like to ask what message you consider most important to convey to Western radical leftist.

Damier: It’s important for people in the West to understand the real situation in Russia, because very little is understood now. In Russia, nothing has actually changed in the constella-tion of forces. The old ruling class has, for all intents and purposes, remained in power — that’s very important. I don’t know whether that’s true in the other countries of the old East Bloc, but it’s true with us. The bureaucracy has merely changed its face. The bureaucracy can make an alliance with speculative capitalists and mafia capitalists. The methods of exploitation may change, the methods of profit maximization may change, but the old class remains. Right now there’s no question of a real democratization among us, or of a real development toward freedom. Neither of the parties that are struggling for power now should be supported. What really must be done is to construct a radical-left initiative toward freedom. ¤

2 Alexander Rutskoi, former Afghan war hero, was Yeltsin’s vice-president before September 1993. Along with Ruslan Khasbulatov, speaker of the parliament, he led the Communist, nationalist and other parliamentary deputies who opposed Yeltsin in the summer and fall of 1993. From September 21 to October 4, fifteen hundred deputies holed up in the White House and refused to leave; they claimed to elevate Rutskoi to the presidency instead of Yeltsin. On October 4, at the climax of the two-week confrontation, Yeltsin’s government troops fired machine guns and government tanks fired 125-millimeter shells into the seventeen-story White House. In two days of fighting, 193 people died and 600 were wounded. Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and other deputies filed out of the building and were arrested. The two leaders were convicted and imprisoned, but in the spring of 1994 Rutskoi was amnestied. — trans.

3 A Chechen is a person from Chechnya, a region in the Caucasus Mountains on the border with Georgia that announced its secession from Russia in 1991. Khasbulatov is thus not an ethnic Russian. — trans.

4 On October 3, the day before the storming of the White House, Rutskoi urged a crowd of ten thousand supporters around the White House to continue the struggle against Yeltsin’s government by seizing the mayor’s office and the Ostankino broadcasting center, which is the national media center and the government’s link to the rest of the country. Two thousand armed protesters seized the media center with rocket-propelled grenades and temporarily knocked programming off the air, forcing government spokespeople like Gaidar to appeal for help over a makeshift radio. A hundred elite government soldiers armed with machine guns took the media center back; twenty-one died in the battle. — trans.

5 As of mid-October 1993, when the ruble’s value fell precipitously, the exchange rate is 3,000 rubles to the dollar. — trans.

6 Pamyat (“Memory”) was the major Russian far-right group in the 1980s, when it had the extreme right end of the political spectrum mostly to itself. Notable for its anti-Jewish campaigns and patriotic cultural events, it blames a conspiracy of Jews and Masons for Russia’s social and moral decay, crime, weakened family ties and alcoholism. In 1989-90 it shifted its political loyalty from the Communist Party to monarchism and the Russian Orthodox Church — but its anti-Semitism remained firm. — trans.

7 The leading thinker of the French Nouvelle Droite. See Wolfgang Haug, “Pogroms Begin in the Mind,” Green Perspectives 26. — trans.

The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism
by Murray Bookchin

Seldom have socially important words become more confused and divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two centuries ago, it is often forgotten, “democracy” was deprecated by monarchists and republicans alike as “mob rule.” Today, democracy is hailed [...]]]> What is Communalism?

The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism
by Murray Bookchin

Seldom have socially important words become more confused and divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two centuries ago, it is often forgotten, “democracy” was deprecated by monarchists and republicans alike as “mob rule.” Today, democracy is hailed as “representative democracy,” an oxymoron that refers to little more than a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who ostensibly speak for the powerless many.

“Communism,” for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her ability and received the means of life according to his or her needs. Today, “communism” is associated with the Stalinist gulag and wholly rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin, “socialism” — which once denoted a politically free society based on various forms of collectivism and equitable material returns for labor — is currently interchangeable with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political spectrum has shifted ideologically to the right, “anarchism” itself has not been immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite individualism — marked by an advocacy of lifestyle changes, the cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and even an embrace of outright mysticism — has become increasingly prominent. This personalistic “lifestyle anarchism” is steadily eroding the socialistic core of anarchist concepts of freedom.

Let me stress that in the British and American social tradition, autonomy and freedom are not equivalent terms. By insisting on the need to eliminate personal domination, autonomy focuses on the individual as the formative component and locus of society. By contrast, freedom, despite its looser usages, denotes the absence of domination in society, of which the individual is part. This contrast becomes very important when individualist anarchists equate collectivism as such with the tyranny of the community over its members.

Today, if an anarchist theorist like L. Susan Brown can assert that “a group is a collection of individuals, no more and no less,” rooting anarchism in the abstract individual, we have reason to be concerned. Not that this view is entirely new to anarchism; various anarchist historians have described it as implicit in the libertarian outlook. Thus the individual appears ab novo, endowed with natural rights and bereft of roots in society or historical development.¹

But whence does this “autonomous” individual derive? What is the basis for its “natural rights,” beyond a priori premises and hazy intuitions? What role does historical development play in its formation? What social premises give birth to it, sustain it, indeed nourish it? How can a “collection of individuals” institutionalize itself such as to give rise to something more than an autonomy that consists merely in refusing to impair the “liberties” of others — or “negative liberty,” as Isaiah Berlin called it in contradistinction to “positive liberty,” which is substantive freedom, in our case constructed along socialistic lines?

In the history of ideas, “autonomy,” referring to strictly personal “self-rule,” found its ancient apogee in the imperial Roman cult of libertas. During the rule of the Julian-Claudian Caesars, the Roman citizen enjoyed a great deal of autonomy to indulge his own desires — and lusts — without reproval from any authority, provided that he did not interfere with the business and the needs of the state. In the more theoretically developed liberal tradition of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, autonomy acquired a more expansive sense that was opposed ideologically to excessive state authority. During the nineteenth century, if there was any single subject that gained the interest of classical liberals, it was political economy, which they often conceived not only as the study of goods and services, but also as a system of morality. Indeed, liberal thought generally reduced the social to the economic. Excessive state authority was opposed in favor of a presumed economic autonomy. Ironically, liberals often invoked the word freedom, in the sense of “autonomy,” as they do to the present day.²

Despite their assertions of autonomy and distrust of state authority, however, these classical liberal thinkers did not in the last instance hold to the notion that the individual is completely free from lawful guidance. Indeed, their interpretation of autonomy actually presupposed quite definite arrangements beyond the individual — notably, the laws of the marketplace. Individual autonomy to the contrary, these laws constitute a social organizing system in which all “collections of individuals” are held under the sway of the famous “invisible hand” of competition. Paradoxically, the laws of the marketplace override the exercise of “free will” by the same sovereign individuals who otherwise constitute the “collection of individuals.”

No rationally formed society can exist without institutions, and if a society as a “collection of individuals, no more and no less,” were ever to emerge, it would simply dissolve. Such a dissolution, to be sure, would never happen in reality. The liberals, nonetheless, can cling to the notion of a “free market” and “free competition” guided by the “inexorable laws” of political economy.

Alternatively, freedom, a word that shares etymological roots with the German Freiheit (for which there is no equivalent in Romance languages), takes its point of departure not from the individual but from the community or, more broadly, from society. In the last century and early in the present one, as the great socialist theorists further sophisticated ideas of freedom, the individual and his or her development were consciously intertwined with social evolution — specifically, the institutions that distinguish society from mere animal aggregations.

What made their focus uniquely ethical was the fact that as social revolutionaries they asked the key question — What constitutes a rational society? — a question that abolishes the centrality of economics in a free society. Where liberal thought generally reduced the social to the economic, various socialisms (apart from Marxism), among which Kropotkin denoted anarchism the “left wing,” dissolved the economic into the social.³

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Enlightenment thought and its derivatives brought the idea of the mutability of institutions to the foreground of social thought, the individual, too, came to be seen as mutable. To the socialistic thinkers of the period, a “collection” was a totally alien way of denoting society; they properly considered individual freedom to be congruent with social freedom, and very significantly, they defined freedom as such as an evolving, as well as a unifying, concept.

In short, both society and the individual were historicized in the best sense of this term: as an ever-developing, self-generative and creative process in which each existed within and through the other. Hopefully, this historicization would be accompanied by ever-expanding new rights and duties. The slogan of the First International, in fact, was the demand, “No rights without duties, no duties without rights” — a demand that later appeared on the mastheads of anarchosyndicalist periodicals in Spain and elsewhere well into the present century.

Thus, for classical socialist thinkers, to conceive of the individual without society was as meaningless as to conceive of society without individuals. They sought to realize both in rational institutional frameworks that fostered the greatest degree of free expression in every aspect of social life.

II

Individualism, as conceived by classical liberalism, rested on a fiction to begin with. Its very presupposition of a social “lawfulness” maintained by marketplace competition was far removed from its myth of the totally sovereign, “autonomous” individual. With even fewer presuppositions to support itself, the woefully undertheorized work of Max Stirner shared a similar disjunction: the ideological disjunction between the ego and society.

The pivotal issue that reveals this disjunction — indeed, this contradiction — is the question of democracy. By democracy, of course, I do not mean “representative government” in any form, but rather face-to-face democracy. With regard to its origins in classical Athens, democracy as I use it is the idea of the direct management of the polis by its citizenry in popular assemblies — which is not to downplay the fact that Athenian democracy was scarred by patriarchy, slavery, class rule and the restriction of citizenship to males of putative Athenian birth. What I am referring to is an evolving tradition of institutional structures, not a social “model.”⁴ Democracy generically defined, then, is the direct management of society in face-to-face assemblies — in which policy is formulated by the resident citizenry and administration is executed by mandated and delegated councils.

Libertarians commonly consider democracy, even in this sense, as a form of “rule” — since in making decisions, a majority view prevails and thus “rules” over a minority. As such, democracy is said to be inconsistent with a truly libertarian ideal. Even so knowledgeable a historian of anarchism as Peter Marshall observes that, for anarchists, “the majority has no more right to dictate to the minority, even a minority of one, than the minority to the majority.”⁵ Scores of libertarians have echoed this idea time and again.

What is striking about assertions like Marshall’s is their highly pejorative language. Majorities, it would seem, neither “decide” nor “debate”: rather, they “rule,” “dictate,” “command,” “coerce” and the like. In a free society that not only permitted but fostered the fullest degree of dissent, whose podiums at assemblies and whose media were open to the fullest expression of all views, whose institutions were truly forums for discussion — one may reasonably ask whether such a society would actually “dictate” to anyone when it had to arrive at a decision that concerned the public welfare.

How, then, would society make dynamic collective decisions about public affairs, aside from mere individual contracts? The only collective alternative to majority voting as a means of decision-making that is commonly presented is the practice of consensus. Indeed, consensus has even been mystified by avowed “anarcho-primitivists,” who consider Ice Age and contemporary “primitive” or “primal” peoples to constitute the apogee of human social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that consensus may be an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups of people who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that when larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted — precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations — even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.

To take a very striking case in point: the largest consensus-based movement (involving thousands of participants) in recent memory in the United States was the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to oppose the Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New Hampshire. In her recent study of the movement, Barbara Epstein has called the Clamshell the “first effort in American history to base a mass movement on nonviolent direct action” other than the 1960s civil rights movement. As a result of its apparent organizational success, many other regional alliances against nuclear reactors were formed throughout the United States.

I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a dubiously “anarchic” commune that was located in Montague, Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by its own hidden agendas, was able to manipulate many Clamshell members into subordinating their goodwill and idealism to those opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell overrode the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who entered it and undermined their morale and will.

In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called “standing aside” in American consensus processes, all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings — so that a “decision” could be made. More than one “decision” in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence, and through a chain of such intimidations, “consensus” was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as participants in the process.

On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues — and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated — they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical “one” of the “consensus” group.

The creative role of dissent, valuable as an ongoing democratic phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even Marshall’s “minority of one” to block decision-making by the majority of a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide confederations, would essentially mutate into a Rousseauean “general will” with a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic conformity. In more gripping times, it could easily “force people to be free,” as Rousseau put it — and as the Jacobins practiced it in 1793-94.

The de facto leaders of the Clamshell were able to get away with their behavior precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently organized and democratically structured, such that it could countervail the manipulation of a well-organized few. The de facto leaders were subject to few structures of accountability for their actions. The ease with which they cannily used consensus decision-making for their own ends has been only partly told,⁶ but consensus practices finally shipwrecked this large and exciting organization with its Rousseauean “republic of virtue.” It was also ruined, I may add, by an organizational laxity that permitted mere passersby to participate in decision-making, thereby destructuring the organization to the point of invertebracy. It was for good reason that I and many young anarchists from Vermont who had actively participated in the Alliance for some few years came to view consensus as anathema.

If consensus could be achieved without compulsion of dissenters, a process that is feasible in small groups, who could possibly oppose it as a decision-making process? But to reduce a libertarian ideal to the unconditional right of a minority — let alone a “minority of one” — to abort a decision by a “collection of individuals” is to stifle the dialectic of ideas that thrives on opposition, confrontation and, yes, decisions with which everyone need not agree and should not agree, lest society become an ideological cemetery. Which is not to deny dissenters every opportunity to reverse majority decisions by unimpaired discussion and advocacy.

III

I have dwelled on consensus at some length because it constitutes the usual individualistic alternative to democracy, so commonly counterposed as “no rule” — or a free-floating form of personal autonomy — against majority “rule.” Inasmuch as libertarian ideas in the United States and Britain are increasingly drifting toward affirmations of personal autonomy, the chasm between individualism and antistatist collectivism is becoming unbridgeable, in my view. A personalistic anarchism has taken deep root among young people today. Moreover, they increasingly use the word “anarchy” to express not only a personalistic stance but also an antirational, mystical, antitechnological and anticivilizational body of views that makes it impossible for anarchists who anchor their ideas in socialism to apply the word “anarchist” to themselves without a qualifying adjective. Howard Ehrlich, one of our ablest and most concerned American comrades, uses the phrase “social anarchism” as the title of his magazine, apparently to distinguish his views from an anarchism that is ideologically anchored in liberalism and possibly worse.

I would like to suggest that far more than a qualifying adjective is needed if we are to elaborate our notion of freedom more expansively. It would be unfortunate indeed if libertarians today had to literally explain that they believe in a society, not a mere collection of individuals! A century ago, this belief was presupposed; today, so much has been stripped away from the collectivistic flesh of classical anarchism that it is on the verge of becoming a personal life-stage for adolescents and a fad for their middle-aged mentors, a route to “self-realization” and the seemingly “radical” equivalent of encounter groups.

Today, there must be a place on the political spectrum where a body of anti-authoritarian thought that advances humanity’s bitter struggle to arrive at the realization of its authentic social life — the famous “Commune of communes” — can be clearly articulated institutionally as well as ideologically. There must be a means by which socially concerned anti-authoritarians can develop a program and a practice for attempting to change the world, not merely their psyches. There must be an arena of struggle that can mobilize people, help them to educate themselves and develop an anti-authoritarian politics, to use this word in its classical meaning, indeed that pits a new public sphere against the state and capitalism.

In short, we must recover not only the socialist dimension of anarchism but its political dimension: democracy. Bereft of its democratic dimension and its communal or municipal public sphere, anarchism may indeed denote little more than a “collection of individuals, no more and no less.” Even anarcho-communism, although it is by far the most preferable of adjectival modifications of the libertarian ideal, nonetheless retains a structural vagueness that tells us nothing about the institutions necessary to expedite a communistic distribution of goods. It spells out a broad goal, a desideratum — one, alas, terribly tarnished by the association of “communism” with Bolshevism and the state — but its public sphere and forms of institutional association remain unclear at best and susceptible to a totalitarian onus at worst.

I wish to propose that the democratic and potentially practicable dimension of the libertarian goal be expressed as Communalism, a term that, unlike political terms that once stood unequivocally for radical social change, has not been historically sullied by abuse. Even ordinary dictionary definitions of Communalism, I submit, capture to a great degree the vision of a “Commune of communes” that is being lost by current Anglo-American trends that celebrate anarchy variously as “chaos,” as a mystical “oneness” with “nature,” as self-fulfillment or as “ecstasy,” but above all as personalistic.⁷

Communalism is defined as “a theory or system of government [sic!] in which virtually autonomous [sic!] local communities are loosely in a federation.”⁸ No English dictionary is very sophisticated politically. This use of the terms “government” and “autonomous” does not commit us to an acceptance of the state and parochialism, let alone individualism. Further, federation is often synonymous with confederation, the term I regard as more consistent with the libertarian tradition. What is remarkable about this (as yet) unsullied term is its extraordinary proximity to libertarian municipalism, the political dimension of social ecology that I have advanced at length elsewhere.

In Communalism, libertarians have an available word that they can enrich as much by experience as by theory. Most significantly, the word can express not only what we are against, but also what we are for, namely the democratic dimension of libertarian thought and a libertarian form of society. It is a word that is meant for a practice that can tear down the ghetto walls that are increasingly imprisoning anarchism in cultural exotica and psychological introversion. It stands in explicit opposition to the suffocating individualism that sits so comfortably side-by-side with bourgeois self-centeredness and a moral relativism that renders any social action irrelevant, indeed, institutionally meaningless.

Anarchism is on the retreat today. If we fail to elaborate the democratic dimension of anarchism, we will miss the opportunity not only to form a vital movement, but to prepare people for a revolutionary social praxis in the future. Alas, we are witnessing the appalling desiccation of a great tradition, such that neo-Situationists, nihilists, primitivists, antirationalists, anticivilizationists and avowed “chaotics” are closeting themselves in their egos, reducing anything resembling public political activity to juvenile antics.

None of which is to deny the importance of a libertarian culture, one that is aesthetic, playful and broadly imaginative. The anarchists of the last century and part of the present one justifiably took pride in the fact that many innovative artists, particularly painters and novelists, aligned themselves with anarchic views of reality and morality. But behavior that verges on a mystification of criminality, asociality, intellectual incoherence, anti-intellectualism and disorder for its own sake is simply lumpen. It feeds on the dregs of capitalism itself. However much such behavior invokes the “rights” of the ego as it dissolves the political into the personal or inflates the personal into a transcendental category, it is a priori in the sense that has no origins outside the mind to even potentially support it. As Bakunin and Kropotkin argued repeatedly, individuality has never existed apart from society and the individual’s own evolution has been coextensive with social evolution. To speak of “The Individual” apart from its social roots and social involvements is as meaningless as to speak of a society that contains no people or institutions.

Merely to exist, institutions must have form, as I argued some thirty years ago in my essay “The Forms of Freedom,” lest freedom itself — individual as well as social — lose its definability. Institutions must be rendered functional, not abstracted into Kantian categories that float in a rarefied academic air. They must have the tangibility of structure, however offensive a term like structure may be to individualist libertarians: concretely, they must have the means, policies and experimental praxis to arrive at decisions. Unless everyone is to be so psychologically homogeneous and society’s interests so uniform in character that dissent is simply meaningless, there must be room for conflicting proposals, discussion, rational explication and majority decisions — in short, democracy.

Like it or not, such a democracy, if it is libertarian, will be Communalist and institutionalized in such a way that it is face-to-face, direct and grassroots, a democracy that advances our ideas beyond negative liberty to positive liberty. A Communalist democracy would oblige us to develop a public sphere — and in the Athenian meaning of the term, a politics — that grows in tension and ultimately in a decisive conflict with the state. Confederal, antihierarchical and collectivist, based on the municipal management of the means of life rather than their control by vested interests (such as workers’ control, private control and, more dangerously, state control), it may justly be regarded as the processual actualization of the libertarian ideal as a daily praxis.⁹

The fact that a Communalist politics entails participation in municipal elections — based, to be sure, on an unyielding program that demands the formation of popular assemblies and their confederation — does not mean that entry into existing village, town and city councils involves participation in state organs, any more than establishing an anarchosyndicalist union in a privately owned factory involves participation in capitalist forms of production. One need only turn to the French Revolution of 1789-94 to see how seemingly state institutions, like the municipal “districts” established under the monarchy in 1789 to expedite elections to the Estates General, were transformed four years later into largely revolutionary bodies, or “sections,” that nearly gave rise to the “Commune of communes.” Their movement for a sectional democracy was defeated during the insurrection of June 2, 1793 — not at the hands of the monarchy, but by the treachery of the Jacobins.

Capitalism will not generously provide us the popular democratic institutions we need. Its control over society today is ubiquitous, not only in what little remains of the public sphere but in the minds of many self-styled radicals. A revolutionary people must either assert their control over institutions that are basic to their public lives — which Bakunin correctly perceived to be their municipal councils — or else they will have no choice but to withdraw into their private lives, as is already happening on an epidemic scale today.¹⁰ It would be ironic indeed if an individualist anarchism and its various mutations, from the academic and transcendentally moral to the chaotic and the lumpen, in the course of rejecting democracy even for “a minority of one,” were to further raise the walls of dogma that are steadily growing around the libertarian ideal, and if, wittingly or not, anarchism were to turn into another narcissistic cult that snugly fits into an alienated, commodified, introverted and egocentric society.

— September 18, 1994

2. Liberals were not always in accord with each other nor did they hold notably coherent doctrines. Mill, a free-thinking humanitarian and utilitarian, in fact exhibited a measure of sympathy for socialism. I am not singling out here any particular liberal theorist, be he Mill, Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek. Each had or has his or her individual eccentricity or personal line of thought. I am speaking of traditional liberalism as a whole, whose general features involve a belief in the “laws” of the marketplace and “free” competition. Marx was by no means free of this influence: he, too, unrelentingly tried to discover “laws” of society, as did many socialists during the last century, including utopians like Charles Fourier.

3. See Kropotkin’s “Anarchism,” the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica article that became one of his most widely read works. Republished in Roger N. Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings by Peter Kropotkin (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927; reprinted by Dover, 1970).

4. I have never regarded the classical Athenian democracy as a “model” or an “ideal” to be restored in a rational society. I have long cited Athens with admiration for one reason: the polis around Periclean times provides us with striking evidence that certain structures can exist — policy-making by an assembly, rotation and limitation of public offices and defense by a nonprofessional armed citizenry. The Mediterranean world of the fifth century B.C.E. was largely based on monarchical authority and repressive custom. That all Mediterranean societies of that time required or employed patriarchy, slavery and the State (usually in an absolutist form) makes the Athenian experience all the more remarkable for what it uniquely introduced into social life, including an unprecedented degree of free expression. It would be naive to suppose that Athens could have risen above the most basic attributes of ancient society in its day, which, from a distance of 2,400 years we now have the privilege of judging as ugly and inhuman. Regrettably, no small number of people today are willing to judge the past by the present.

5. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 22.

6. Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Non-Violent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), especially pp. 59, 78, 89, 94-95, 167-68, 177. Although I disagree with some of the facts and conclusions in Epstein’s book — based on my personal as well as general knowledge of the Clamshell Alliance — she vividly portrays the failure of consensus in this movement.

7. The association of “chaos,” “nomadism” and “cultural terrorism” with “ontological anarchy” (as though the bourgeoisie had not turned such antics into an “ecstasy industry” in the United States) is fully explicated in Hakim Bey’s (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1985). The Yuppie Whole Earth Review celebrates this pamphlet as the most influential and widely read “manifesto” of America’s countercultural youth, noting with approval that it is happily free of conventional anarchist attacks upon capitalism. This kind of detritus from the 1960s is echoed in one form or another by most American anarchist newssheets that pander to youth who have not yet “had their fun before it is time to grow up” (a comment I heard years later from Parisian student activists of ’68) and become real estate agents and accountants.

For an “ecstatic experience,” visitors to New York’s Lower East Side (near St. Mark’s Place) can dine, I am told, at Anarchy Café. This establishment offers fine dining from an expensive menu, a reproduction of the famous mural The Fourth Estate on the wall, perhaps to aid in digestion, and a maître d’ to greet Yuppie customers. I cannot attest to whether the writings of Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Fredy Perlman and Hakim Bey are on sale there or whether copies of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, The Fifth Estate and Demolition Derby are available for perusal, but happily there are enough exotic bookstores nearby at which to buy them.

8. Quoted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978).

9. I should emphasize that I am not counterposing a communalist democracy to such enterprises as cooperatives, people’s clinics, communes, and the like. But there should be no illusion that such enterprises are more than exercises in popular control and ways of bringing people together in a highly atomized society. No food cooperative can replace giant retail food markets under capitalism and no clinic can replace hospital complexes, any more than a craft shop can replace factories or plants. I should observe that the Spanish anarchists, almost from their inception, took full note of the limits of the cooperativist movement in the 1880s, when such movements were in fact more feasible than they are today, and they significantly separated themselves from cooperativism programmatically.

10. For Bakunin, the people “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.” Bakunin on Anarchy, Sam Dolgoff, ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972; republished by Black Rose Books: Montreal), p. 223. I have omitted the queasy interpolations that Dolgoff inserted to “modify” Bakunin’s meaning. It may be well to note that anarchism in the last century was more plastic and flexible than it is today.