Age, chronic illnesses, and the summer heat oblige [...]]]> This article was presented as the keynote speech to the conference “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” held in Plainfield, Vermont, U.S.A., on August 26-29, 1999. The speech has been revised for publication. This article originally appeared in Left Green Perspectives (Number 41, January 2000).

Age, chronic illnesses, and the summer heat oblige me to remain at home—hence I am very sorry that I cannot participate in your conference on libertarian municipalism. I would like, however—thanks to Janet Biehl, who will read these remarks—to welcome you to Vermont and to wish you well during the course of your discussions over the next three days.

Some issues have recently arisen in discussions of libertarian municipalism, and I would like to offer my views on them. One of the most important involves the distinction that should be drawn between libertarian municipalism and communitarianism, a distinction that is often lost in discussions of politics.

Communitarianism

By communitarianism, I refer to movements and ideologies that seek to transform society by creating so-called alternative economic and living situations such as food cooperatives, health centers, schools, printing workshops, community centers, neighborhood farms, “squats,” unconventional lifestyles, and the like. Allowing for the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the notable spokespersons of communitarianism have been Martin Buber, Harry Boyte, and Colin Ward, among many others. The word communitarian is often interchangeable with the word cooperative, a form of production and exchange that is attractive because the work is not only amiably collective but worker-controlled or worker-managed.

At most, communitarianism seeks to gently edge social development away from privately owned enterprises—banks, corporations, supermarkets, factories, and industrial systems of agriculture—and the lifeways to which they give rise, into collectively owned enterprises and values. It does not seek to create a power center that will overthrow capitalism; it seeks rather to outbid it, outprice it, or outlast it, often by presenting a moral obstacle to the greed and evil that many find in a bourgeois economy. It is not a politics but a practice, whose constituency is often a relatively small group of people who choose to buy from or work in a particular cooperative enterprise.

Citing Proudhon as one of the fathers of communitarianism dates the inception of this ideology and practice back about 150 years, to an age when most workers were craftspersons and most food cultivators were peasants. During the intervening years, many cooperatives have been formed with the most far-reaching hopes and idealistic intentions—only to fail, stagnate, or turn into profit-oriented enterprises. In order to survive in the capitalist marketplace and withstand the competition of larger, more predatory, profit-oriented enterprises, they have normally been obliged to adapt to it.

Where cooperatives have been able to maintain themselves against capitalist competition, they tend to become introverted, basically centered on their internal problems and collective interests; and to the extent that they link together, they do so in order to focus on ways and means to stay alive or expand as enterprises. Above all, they rarely, if ever, become centers of popular power—partly because they are not concerned with addressing issues of power as such, and partly too because they have no way of mobilizing people around visions of how society should be controlled.

While working and/or living in cooperatives may be desirable in order to imbue individuals with collectivist values and concerns, they do not provide the institutional means for acquiring collective power. Underpinning their social ideas—before these ideas fade into dim memory—is the hope that they can somehow elbow capitalism out, without having to confront capitalist enterprises and the capitalist state. Time tends to increase these parochial tendencies, making cooperatives more introverted, more parochial, more like collective capitalists than social collectivists, and ultimately more capitalistic than socialistic in their practices and interests.

Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is decidedly a confrontational form of face-to-face democratic, antistatist politics. Looking outward to the entire municipality and beyond, it is decidedly concerned with the all-important question of power, and it poses the questions: Where shall power exist? By what part of society shall it be exercised?

Institutions and Constitutions

Above all, it asks, what institutions can make the exercise of nonstatist power possible and effective? I once read a Spanish anarchist slogan that declared: “Make war on institutions, not on people.” I find this slogan disturbing because it implies that ideally people can somehow become “autonomous” from institutional obligations, and that institutions as such are straitjackets that prevent them from discovering their “true selves” and engaging in self-determination. No—this is grossly fallacious. Animals, to be sure, can live without institutions (often because their behavior is imprinted in them genetically), but human beings require institutions, however simple or complex, to mold their societies. In a free society, these institutions would be rationally constituted “forms of freedom” (as I called them back in the 1960s) by which people would organize and express their own powers collectively as well as personally.

Moreover, such a free society would have a constitution and laws, formulated and adopted by directly democratic and discursive assemblies. In the mid-19th century, while he was a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, Proudhon refused to vote in favor of a draft Constitution that was oriented toward the protection of property and the construction of a State. While I approve of his negative vote, I thoroughly reject the reasons he gave for it. “No!” he declared, “I did not vote against the Constitution because it was good or bad, but because it was a Constitution.” This frivolous behavior reduced him, intellectually as well as politically, to the world of arbitrary power, against which oppressed Greek peasants such as Hesiod had cried out in the eighth century BCE, denouncing the “barons” who had all but enserfed and exploited the Hellenic peasantry of the ancient world and demanding a society based on laws, not on the whims of men.

Contrary to Proudhon and other anarchist theorists who have rejected laws as such, constitutions and laws have long been demands of oppressed people as instrumentalities for controlling, indeed eliminating, the arbitrary power exercised by kings, tyrants, nobles, and dictators. To ignore this historic fact and fall back on an “instinct for mutual aid” as the basis for social organization, or “an instinct for revolution,” or “an instinct for sharing” is to retreat from a much-desired civilized world into the realm of animality, a social zoology that has no application to humanity as a potentially innovative species that makes and remakes both itself and the world.

Should Cooperative Work Precede Political Work?

Some libertarian municipalists have argued that before we seek political power for our democratic ends, we must first “work over” a community by participating in communitarian activities and establishing cooperatives that will cement mutualistic ways of living throughout the community. Only then, we are told, will a community be “ready” for a libertarian municipalist effort. But do cooperatives really have mutualistic effects on their communities?

Not necessarily—indeed, all too often, for those involved, forming and maintaining a cooperative becomes an end in itself. When cooperatives do manage to survive, their relations with other cooperatives become strained—far from treating each other mutualistically, they turn their faces against each other and even enter into mutual competition. Moreover, a cooperative’s members often become an in-group in the very community they had initially set out to educate—and they abdicate all educational activities, having come to view the people in their community solely as mere customers. Forced by capitalism to adopt methods of capitalist organization, they hire managers and business consultants of one kind or another—presumably in pursuit of efficiency—with the result that, far from giving their community a political education, they deceive it in their own interests, dressing up their capitalist enterprise with the “virtuous” name cooperative instead of openly calling themselves a company or corporation.

Libertarian municipalism tries in every way to avoid losing its identity in the job of building, maintaining, and expanding cooperatives—and thereby sinking into a communitarian morass. Rather, it seeks to recover and to go beyond Aristotle’s definition of “man” as a zoon politikon, a “political being.” In Aristotle’s Politics, “man,” or at least Greeks, are meant to live in a polis (usually mistranslated as “city state”) or a municipality. For Aristotle, this is one form of our actualization and fulfillment as human beings. To use a religious term, human beings, insofar as they realize their humanity, are destined to be polis- and city-dwellers. Our teloi, which include a rationally and democratically constituted system of laws—of duties as well as rights—include as well this ability to be citizens, that is to say, to be educated in order to be competent to assume all the obligations of self-government.

They must be capable intellectually as well as physically of performing all the necessary functions in their community that today are undertaken by the State—that apparatus of soldiers, police, bureaucrats, legislative representatives and the like. The State justifies its existence in great part not only on the indifference of its constituents to public affairs but also—and significantly—on the alleged inability of its constituents to manage public affairs. It claims to have a unique competence, while considering its constituents to be incompetent children who need competent “parents” to manage their affairs. Once citizens are capable of self-management, however, the State can be liquidated both institutionally and subjectively, replaced by free and educated citizens in popular assemblies.

Education for Citizenship

If citizens are to be competent to replace the State, then education for citizenship, or paideia, must be rigorous and involve the building of character and ethical integrity as well as gaining knowledge. This is even more the case when it comes to eliminating hierarchy. Rigorous education and training, in turn, involve a systematic, carefully planned, organized learning process. Citizens cannot be produced if the education and training of the young occur in contexts where the student—usually an inchoate self that has not yet been formed—is called upon to “let everything hang out” in the name of “self-expression.” It is precisely this concern for paideia that made Greek political philosophy so great: it included educational ideas for the making of competent citizens, who would not only think systematically but learn to use weapons in their own defense and in defense of the democracy. The Athenian democracy, let me note, was established when the aristocratic cavalry was replaced by the hoplite footsoldier—the civic guard of the fifth century BCE, which guaranteed the supremacy of the people over the formerly supreme nobility.

Power and Polity

In contrast to communitarianism, libertarian municipalism is concerned with the problem of power, especially how ordinary people can acquire it. By power, I do not refer to the psychological feeling of empowerment that one may gain from attending an inspiring meeting or rally. Some fashionable forms of “self-empowerment” are often little more than emotional highs that could more or less be acquired by taking drugs Rather, I mean the tangible power embodied in organized forms of freedom that are rationally conceived and democratically constituted. In contrast to those who would simply use the demand for power as a means to make propaganda and theater, or who would refuse to accept power, even if offered, if they could potentially use it to empower the people in popular assemblies, libertarian municipalism seeks to attain collective, communal power.

A libertarian municipalist polity would thus be a constituted community—one that has rationally and democratically created its own constitution and laws; whose citizens have been fashioned ethically and intellectually by the character-building process of paideia; and which, because of its competence, armed power, democratic institutions, and discursive approach to issues and problems can not only replace the State but perform the socially necessary roles in the community formerly taken over by the State.

This is the political realm, the authentic world of politics, in which we are obliged to form a movement to recover and develop before it is effaced entirely by a Disneyland world. To dissolve this political realm into communitarian institutions and activities is to overlook the very need to reestablish this realm, indeed to play the reactionary role of diffusing it into an night where all is black and indistinguishable.

Dual Power

The issue of dual power should also be clarified, as this phrase has recently been gaining currency in libertarian circles as a “theory.” The Marxists, more specifically Trotsky, had no “theory” of dual power. The notion of a “dual power” was well rooted in Russian socialist politics long before Trotsky devoted a chapter to the concept in his History of the Russian Revolution, a chapter that occupies a mere nine pages, most of which are descriptive. The word dvoevlasty (“dual power”) was used by Russian revolutionaries of all kinds as early as February 1917, simply to describe the dual arrangement in which the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government tried to govern Russia—an arrangement that had come to an end by the October Revolution.

As a “theory,” however, “dual power” was more popular in Germany and Austria immediately after the First World War, in 1918-19, when the Raete or councils were in vogue among theorists such as Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Kautsky, and Victor Adler. These Austro-German Marxists thought of dual power as a permanent condition consisting of permanent councils, through which workers could express their interests, together with parliamentary state, through which the bourgeoisie could express its interests. These Social Democrats divested “dual power” of its revolutionary tension, and the term became a synonym for a two-part government that could conceivably have existed indefinitely.

In libertarian municipalism, dual power is meant to be a strategy for creating precisely those libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies that would oppose and replace the State. It intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist, and one must sooner or later displace the other. Moreover, it is a confluence of the means to achieve a rational society with the structure of that society, once it is achieved. The diremption between means and ends is a problem that has always plagued the revolutionary movement, but the concept of dual power as a means to a revolutionary end and the formation of a rational society overcomes the chasm between the method for gaining a new society and the institutions that would structure it.

“The streets will organize you!”

A very important problem in libertarian municipalism is the question of what kind of movement can play the educational and, yes, leadership role required to produce these transformations. Those who denounce libertarian municipalism as “statist” often favor instead, not only creating cooperatives, but engaging in episodic actions, especially in the form of demonstrations and street festivals. Even worse, some of them prefer to engage in passing attacks on “authority” by breaking windows or taunting police—and then go home to watch these escapades on television—as if “liberty” and “autonomy” could be so achieved or inspire the people.

We must at the outset dissociate ourselves from a silly cry that was voiced by I. S. Bleikhman, the supreme personality of the Petrograd Anarchist Communists, in July 1917. In those insurgent “July Days,” the Kronstadt sailors together with the Petrograd garrison and most advanced workers decided to “come out” with arms in hand to establish a soviet government. To their appeal for organization, Bleihkman responded: “The streets will organize you!” The streets, of course, “organized” absolutely nothing and no one—and partly for lack of a real leadership, the July insurrection was crushed in only a few days.

In the course of closely studying the history of past revolutions, the most important problem I have encountered has been precisely the issue of organization. The issue is crucial, not least because in a revolutionary upheaval the nature of organization can spell the difference between life and death. What has become very clear in my own mind is that revolutionaries need to create a very proactive organization—a vanguard, to use a term widely used until the New Left poisoned it by associating it with the Bolsheviks—that itself has its own rigorous paideia; that creates a responsible membership of informed and dedicated citizens; that has a structure and a program; and that creates its own institutions, based on a rational constitution.

Such an organization might well be regarded as a polis-in-the-making that, while building a libertarian municipalist movement, can safeguard its basic principles from cooptation (the usual fate of good ideas these days), nourish their development, and apply them in complex and difficult situations. Without a clearly definable organization, a movement is likely to fall into the tyranny of structurelessness.

I would like to point out that if one’s basic principles are not firm and clear, then one has no basic principles at all. One is simply floating in the air with mere opinions and off-the-cuff notions rather than clear ideas, thought-out views, and substantive theories constructed on solid foundations. One may decide to change one’s basic principles, to be sure, which itself presupposes that one had definable principles to begin with. But the prevalence of undefined and unfixed notions reflects the contemporary postmodern invertebrate mentality that regards everything as relative; that rejects the existence of fundamentals; that fosters formless, amoebic ideas; that condemns structure as authoritarian or even totalitarian; and that regards feelings are more important than careful thought.

Ideas are becoming cheap opinions, and principles are becoming ephemeral slogans, which is all the more reason why we should affirm our ideas and theories clearly. Not only for political reasons but also for cultural ones, it is the responsibility of a libertarian municipal movement based on Communalist principles to maintain the highest standards in its writings, discussions, and activities.

Moreover, politics cannot be reduced to theater. Study and experience have taught me that art does not redeem—and certainly does not produce revolutions. Art is sensitizing, emotionally enriching, and creative—but few schools of art, music, and the performing arts have impelled any appreciable number of people to build barricades, let alone fight behind them. Art may be an adjunct of the revolutionary movement, but it is not an impetus. Hence my fear of popular theatrical efforts to “reclaim” the streets—as though we ever had them!—with street festivals. And then what? Nor can elections be reduced to mere theater or even to strategies for engaging in propaganda, important as this may be. Unless we actually run candidates in city council elections, we are not dealing with power. And to live in fear that power might “corrupt” not only ignores the many cases where it did not corrupt; it ignores the need to gain power. Theater, street events, and other photogenic escapades merely play at politics rather than engage in it.

A Vanguard Organization

A libertarian municipalist movement that is created by means of distinct steps, with advanced ideas, education, and experience, has every right to regard itself as a vanguard. Obviously, any other kind of movement organization can make the same claim—no libertarian municipalist organization can deny other organizations the right to call themselves vanguards. But no major social change will ever occur without a well-organized vanguard movement that is structured by a constitution and places clear-cut requirements on the right of people to join it. I for one have had enough of the old Clamshell Alliance-type organizational practices that reduce membership to a revolving door in which people enter and leave the organization after a single meeting—but have full voting rights.

And I have had enough of consensus decision-making, in which a minority has the bizarre right to block the majority’s decisions, and that themselves become an obstructive tyranny while claiming absurdly that majority decision-making is “tyrannical.” I oppose the way movement groups often have used consensus decision-making processes to manipulate the membership. I’m sorry, but the streets will not “organize” us. Only a serious, responsible, and structured movement can do that.

Vacancy on the Left

Important as it is to create links between libertarian municipalism and oppositional movements, it would be a grave error to dissolve our movement into theirs or surrendered our identity to them. I have no compunction about declaring that we stand on a higher ground than anything else of which I know that calls itself “oppositional.” Like the word revolutionary, the word opposition has been steadily cheapened and will continue to be devalued. The political spectrum has shifted enormously from left to right—a shift that has affected the ecology movement, feminism, self-styled liberation movements, and the labor movement, as well as the bourgeoisie. .

Everywhere the Right is shifting into the darkness of outright reaction, often with dangerous racist overtones. This shift has created a vacancy in that vast space on the political spectrum where the Left should legitimately be. Without a well-anchored Left, indeed, there is no political spectrum at all—and it is my deepest fear that with the widespread ignorance and rejection of history today is dumbing down virtually all social and political standards. Anarchists affirm the importance of the state; Marxists try to fit their theories into a market economy; reformists sound like conservatives; and conservatives, not to speak of reactionaries, find a home in Telos magazine—while bizarre coalitions try to tailor their semifascistic notions to New Left notions.

Class Society

Some anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists have recently written that I do not “believe” in the existence of classes—an accusation that is almost too ridiculous to answer. I have no doubt that we live in a class society; in fact, conflicts between classes would doubtless exist in citizens’ assemblies as well. For this reason, libertarian municipalism does not forsake the notion of class struggle but carries it out not only in the factories but also into the civic or municipal arena.

It does so, that is, as long as factories continue to exist and as long as proletarians do not imagine that they are “middle class.” But I learned many years ago, while working in a foundry and in an auto plant owned by General Motors, that workers regard themselves as human beings as well as class beings. They are fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, and sons and daughters who are deeply concerned with the ordinary problems of life, such as the quality of their neighborhoods, dwellings, sanitary facilities, recreation areas, schools, air, water, and food—in short, all the problems that concern city and rural dwellers quite apart from their class status. These general interests, while they do not supplant class interests, can cut across class lines, especially the lines that divide workers from a vast variety of middle-class people.

Even during my years working in heavy industry, I found it easier to reach workers on the basis of environmental and neighborhood issues than on the basis of factory issues. During the 1960s, the transclass appeal of certain issues became obvious to me, such as in my 1963 fight against the Edison Company’s attempt to build a nuclear reactor in New York City. Workers no less than middle-class people simply overwhelmed me with questions and asked me to come to their community groups and address them. This phenomenon continues today: in November 1999, it was not only workers but middle-class people who marched against globalization and the World Trade Organization in Seattle—a march that consciously or unconsciously was aimed against the very core of modern capitalism. Such transclass issues have been emerging for decades now.

Indeed, capitalism is slowly producing these generalized concerns in all strata of society. The much-desired “general interests” that Marx and socialists as well as anarchists hoped would unite most of humanity as a whole against the bourgeoisie are very much on the horizon. If we do not recognize these general interests and formulate them in a revolutionary way, then I shall go to my grave concluding that existing anarchist scenes, in all their silly mutations, are a complete failure, and that the Marxists have done no better. If we are to face the new century with a theory that keeps pace with—or tries to see beyond—new developments, then we will have to draw on the best we can find in anarchism and Marxism and go beyond them by developing a more comprehensive body of ideas to guide us toward a rational future. For the body of ideas that I would recommend, I have given the name Communalism.

Confederation and Autonomy

Our ideas of confederation should not remain stuck in anarchist writings of the 19th century. In Proudhon’s writings on federalism, for example, we find an extremely naive vision of a “federation of autonomous communes” whose component members could choose, if they so wished, to pull out of that federation and “go it on their own.” But such “autonomy” is no longer possible, if it was even in Proudhon’s day. A unilateral choice to leave the federation, after all, would undermine the entire federation itself. We no longer live in an artisanal and craft world. Imagine if the electrical complex in upstate New York “autonomously” decided to pull out of a confederation with the Vermont electrical complex because it was piqued by Vermont’s behavior.

Equally troubling would be a confederation based on the kind of “voluntary agreements” that Kropotkin found and even celebrated in the railroad lines—no less!—of his day. If the operating principles of 19th-century railroad lines are a good example of “voluntary agreements,” then I would humbly suggest that those formulated by J.P. Morgan and Co. are priceless. The “anarcho”-capitalists would doubtless exult in this view, presented in Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, but allow me to dissent from it.

A confederation should be regarded as a binding agreement, not one that can be canceled for frivolous “voluntaristic” reasons. A municipality should be able to withdraw from a confederation only after every citizen of the confederation has had the opportunity to thoroughly explore the municipality’s grievances and to decide by a majority vote of the entire confederation that it can withdraw without undermining the entire confederation itself.

Economics and Technology

Does libertarian municipalism have an economic theory? Yes, I should emphasize, one that is very close to Marx’s critique of capitalism in volume 1 of Capital. Too often, knee-jerk rejections of Marx’s brilliant work routinely bring smiles of approval to the faces of his opponents. I refuse to participate in such routines. However much I disagree with many elements of Marxism, no other single analysis of capitalism even remotely, at this late date, approximates that amazing work.

I do not see how a thoughtful libertarian municipalist theorist can avoid studying and absorbing dialectics, or lack a rich philosophical perspective on History, as distinguished from mere Chronicles. No single theory can encompasses social phenomena that have yet to appear on the existing social horizon, but what can provide us with foresight are basic minimal principles—to which we strongly adhere until they are no longer tenable.

Libertarian municipalism is also based on the proposition that we now have the technology for a post-scarcity economy—one that can potentially abolish mindless toil and possibly most of the work that enters into industrial production today. In such a world, the communist ideal of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs” would be historically and technically feasible. Various fears that individual “needs” might be expanded to accommodate greed can be removed by giving the municipal assembly the right to determine whether certain identified “needs” are excessive and whether their fulfillment could damage the well-being of the entire economy.

The world is changing now at a pace that is absolutely stunning. If capitalism does not destroy the biosphere, then in possibly thirty, certainly fifty years the world that survives will be changed beyond our imagination. Not only will the peasant world be gone, but so too will much of the “nature” we often call “wild.” The automation of industry will probably reach incredible proportions, and the earth’s features will be vastly transformed. Whether these changes will produce an ecological crisis, or whether science and technology can mitigate their impact, however unsatisfactorily, I do not know, nor will I ever know, as I am approaching the end of my own life.

This much, however, I do believe: if a libertarian municipalist movement based on Communalist principles cannot establish a system of direct democracy and confederation, then libertarian ideals of all kinds must be significantly revised. But we cannot hope to establish any kind of truly libertarian society without creating a public sphere, beginning with a grassroots electoral politics based on the creation of popular assemblies. In my view, this is the left libertarian movement’s last stand. If you do not agree with me, so be it—but please, use a different label for your ideas, leave the name “libertarian municipalism” alone, and go your own way toward communitarian and cooperative enterprises, if not Taoist monasteries and mystical seances. I would ask my critics not to muddy up ideas that they don’t really like, while at the same time claiming to support them.

It is politically restorative to look with a fresh eye at The Manifesto of the Communist Party (to use its original title), written before Marxism was overlaid by reformist, postmodernist, spiritual, and psychological [...]]]> This article originally appeared in New Politics, vol. 6, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 24, Winter 1998

It is politically restorative to look with a fresh eye at The Manifesto of the Communist Party (to use its original title), written before Marxism was overlaid by reformist, postmodernist, spiritual, and psychological commentaries. From an examination of this work on its own terms, what emerges is that it is not a “text” intended to be served up for academic deconstruction and convoluted exegesis but rather the manifesto of a party that challenged the existence of capitalist social relations and their underlying class base. The Manifesto directly faced the exploitative social order of its time and intended to move a class—the proletariat—to revolutionary action against it.

Bringing theory to the service of building a movement, as Marx and Engels did—indeed, they perceptively interwove basic analytical ideas with programmatic and organizational issues—is becoming alien in the present era, which is sharply dichotomizing the two. To be sure, the existence of “Marxology” as a university discipline today, with its own professoriat and journals, as distinguished from a living practice, is not an entirely unprecedented phenomenon. Kautsky, among others, already began to make this dichotomy as editor of Die Neue Zeit in the 1890s. But Die Neue Zeit, at least, was the theoretical organ of a mass movement that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people on the German political scene. It was not until recent decades that strictly scholarly Marxian journals appeared that exhibited few or no political intentions and hence provided no basis for a practice engaged in transforming society. The divorce between theory and practice—and the failure of avowed leftists to build a revolutionary public sphere in the past few decades—has led to the debilitation of theory itself, as witness the current acceptance of postmodernist nihilism, Situationist aestheticism, and quite recently, even Eastern spiritualism among a number of self-professed Marxists.

By contrast, the most refreshing feature of The Manifesto as a theoretical document is that it candidly and unabashedly addresses lived social relations, not simply their cultural offshoots. Its stylistic magnetism, which made it the inimitable model for so many later programmatic statements by revolutionary movements, lies precisely in its bold candor about the material factors that guide human behavior. Far more than Nietzsche, Marx (who seems to have penned most of The Manifesto) wrote with a hammer about the realities of the capitalist system that were emerging in his time. The famous opening line—”The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”—is arrestingly declarative, allowing for no equivocation.(1)

Published in a limited German edition of 800 on the eve of the 1848 February Revolution in France, The Manifesto synthesized generations of reflection on the root causes of social injustice and conflict. As Marx himself freely acknowledged, the importance that it attaches to class struggles was not new to revolutionary thought. It can be traced back to the Levellers of the English Revolution and even to Lollards such as John Ball in the English Peasant War of the 14th century. Having no direct impact upon the events that made up the stormy year of 1848, The Manifesto nonetheless left a lasting imprint upon subsequent working-class movements, providing a definitive standard by which their revolutionary intentions were to be judged. And it placed upon every subsequent revolutionary movement the obligation to make the oppressed conscious of their status—that is to say, to inculcate among the exploited a deep sense of class consciousness and to urge them to abolish class society as such.

Pounded out as it was, the opening line of The Manifesto—unadorned and unequivocal—immediately fixed the Communist League (for which it was written) as an overtly revolutionary movement. Thereafter, socialist organizations and movements that professed to seek justice for the oppressed had to validate their standing with the emerging working class in its conflict with the bourgeoisie. After the publication of The Manifesto, class struggle was taken for granted among such movements, even if they sought to achieve socialism in peaceful and piecemeal ways by making compromises between workers and capitalists.

Moreover, Marx’s opening line announced that The Manifesto would not obfuscate the real social relations that make up capitalism. Capitalism, The Manifesto went on to emphasize, is an unrelentingly exploitative economy that is driven by its competitive relations to colonize the entire world and to bring social life as such face to face with the question of its very ability to survive in the absence of a communist society. Today, when reformism permeates most of the political thinking that goes under the name of leftism, we would do well to recall that Marx and Engels warned, a century and a half ago, that “the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law,” indeed, that “its existence is no longer compatible with society” (pp. 495, 497).*

Parts I (“Bourgeois and Proletarians”) and II (“Proletarians and Communists”) of The Manifesto lay out the main argument of volume one of Capital, in vivid, clear prose that is as excitingly programmatic as it is brilliantly theoretical. The pithy formulations are impossible to summarize without doing them injustice, while the brilliance with which Marx and Engels demonstrated that capitalism creates the conditions for its inevitable destruction is impossible to capture. The culminating passage of part I contains ideas that are provocative and prescient even for the coming century:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. . . . Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. (pp. 487, 489)

These lines were written a century and a half ago, when capitalism was hardly the prevalent social order on the European continent, although it had made great inroads into Britain and its ultimate ascendance in France and Germany was foreseeable. Industrial capitalism on the European continent was still embedded in a mixed economy—partly bourgeois, partly feudal, and largely peasant. Nearly all cities were still compact entities, crowded with winding medieval streets and surrounded by walls, and everyday commodities were still fashioned by the hands of skilled artisans. The winter of 1847-48 was still the inception of the bourgeois epoch, not its high point, let alone its end, and the words globalization and multinationalism were unheard of, even as The Manifesto described similar phenomena. The predictions in this passage might have been dismissed as fanciful visions, had they not been placed in the context of The Manifesto, which gave them an historical as well as an educative meaning that previous accounts of capitalism (a word that was still new) had lacked.

These lines demonstrate the power of theory to project itself beyond given conditions into the future—and the theoretical projections of Marx and Engels here became glaring realities many generations later, although remaining unfulfilled even into the new millennium. Paramount is the salient reality that capitalism is the uncontrollable work of historical “sorcery”—a system of production for its own sake—that, while it exists, must eat away at the natural world and drastically remake the planet, probably to the detriment of all life-forms, including human beings. Without a revolutionary change, its drive as a transformative system—a society that runs on its own, beyond even the control of the bourgeoisie itself—may be modified but cannot be arrested.

No “discourse” on the theoretical or programmatic issues of The Manifesto can be meaningful unless it addresses the need for the formation a “revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things” (p. 519). “The theory of the Communists,” as The Manifesto declares, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property” (p. 498)—or equivalently, abolition of capitalism, without any reservations. For a communist movement to fall short of this goal, as Marx and Engels understood, would be, not to “approximate” it or to “realistically” modify it, but to abandon it altogether. As the authors of The Manifesto were to write in their address to the Communist League after the events of 1848-49, reforms could validly be demanded, but only as a means to ratchet up greater demands that would be impossible for the existing social order to satisfy and that thus would lead to an armed confrontation with the bourgeoisie over the very structure of society.

Nor were the readers of The Manifesto in those years—and not even for a generation later—members of the industrial proletariat, to whom the document was addressed. By far the great majority of workers who could understand its message were artisans who aspired to the right to “associate” (in craftlike mutualistic brotherhoods or industrial trade unions) and, among the most advanced workers, to the right to “organize work” cooperatively. This artisanal or associative socialism, as historians have called it, was more cooperative than communistic, rewarding the members of associations according to their work rather than according to their needs.

By contrast, The Manifesto of the Communist Party made a dramatic leap, unequalled by any contemporary socialistic document. It showed that communism was not merely an ethical desideratum for social justice but a compelling historical necessity, flowing out of the very development of capitalism itself. This leap was reined in by its ten-point minimum program, largely the work of Engels. With its moderate demands, it seems to have been designed for the German workers’ movement, which was still allied with the middle classes against the aristocracy. Hence even the most socialistic of the ten demands, the seventh, prudently called for the “extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state” rather than the collectivization of the economy (p. 505). In a long-range perspective, part II of The Manifesto projected the concentration of all productive facilities, including the land, in the “hands of a vast association of the whole nation” (p. 505). Actually, this last phrase, “a vast association of the whole nation,” was specific to the English translation; the original German spoke of “associated individuals,” a somewhat Proudhonist formulation that would have made the document more acceptable in Germany at the time.

After classes disappear and property has become socialized, The Manifesto says, the “public power will lose its political character,” that is, its statist form:

Political power [the state], properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat in its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away the old conditions of production by force, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of class generally and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society with its class and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. (pp. 505-6)

The Communists who try to achieve these aims, says the document, have no interests “apart from those of the proletariat as a whole” (p. 496). They constitute the most resolute party in the struggle for promoting the welfare of the proletariat, but always viewing the contours of the struggle as a whole, they “everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Indeed, they always bring to the front “as the leading question in each [struggle], the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time” (p. 519).

Given its analysis of capitalism as a doomed social order within which reforms must always be placed in the service of revolution; its resolute commitment to (generally violent) revolution; its view of communism as an associative rather than a state system “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” it is only fair to ask what Marx and Engels meant by “political power” in 1847-48. The answer—idiosyncratic in the light of what the two men were to write in later years—is surprisingly libertarian.

In The Manifesto, the proletarian “state” that will replace the bourgeois “political power” and initially make the most “despotic inroads on the right of property” will consist of the proletariat raised to “the position of ruling class.” More specifically:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. (emphasis added, p. 504)

This can hardly be called a state in either the usual Marxian or the social anarchist sense of the word. In fact, the implications of this extraordinary formulation have vexed even the ablest of socialist theorists, anarchist as well as Marxist—and they dogged Marx and Engels themselves as a problem up to the last years of their lives. How could an entire class, the proletariat organized as a “movement” that would eventually speak for society as a whole, institutionalize itself into a “political” (or state) power? By what concrete institutional forms would this class, whose revolution in contrast to all previous ones would represent “the interest of the immense majority” (p. 495), exercise its economic and political sovereignty?

Until the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx and Engels probably intended for the “political power” that the proletariat would establish to be nothing more than a republic, that is, a representative form of government, albeit one rooted in political rights such as recall. Anarchist critics of Marx pointed out with considerable effect that any system of representation would become a statist interest in its own right, one that at best would work against the interests of the working classes (including the peasantry), and that at worst would be a dictatorial power as vicious as the worst bourgeois state machines. Indeed, with political power reinforced by economic power in the form of a nationalized economy, a “workers’ republic” might well prove to be a despotism (to use one of Bakunin’s more favorite terms) of unparalleled oppression.

Marx and Engels had no effective response to make to this criticism, as we can tell from their correspondence with their German supporters. Nothing in their writings shows that they gave any serious regard to the “assemblyist” tradition established by the Parisian sections during the Great French Revolution, in which the sans culottes, including the poorest and most dispossessed in the French capital, actually exercised collective power in their neighborhood assemblies during the stormy period between the August journée of 1792, which eliminated the monarchy, and the June journée of 1793, which nearly replaced the Convention with a communalist system of administration under sectional control. This tradition, which lingered in France through most of the 19th century, found no echo in the Marxist literature.

But the Paris Commune of 1871 came as a breath of fresh air to Marx and Engels, who, a generation after The Manifesto was published, embraced the Commune as the institutional structure that the proletariat would produce between a capitalist and a communist society, or as Marx put it in his Critique of the Gotha Program, “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”(2) Marx praised the Commune for introducing the right to recall deputies to the Communal Council (the equivalent of the city council of Paris), the adoption of a skilled worker’s wage as reimbursement for participating in the Council, the arming of the people, and very significantly, a “working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.”(3)

The economic achievements of the Commune were very limited; not only did it fail to socialize the economy, it brought much-needed reforms to the working class only because the more radical Internationalists, who formed a minority of the Communal Council, had to overcome the obstruction of the neo-Jacobins, who supported bourgeois legalities. In its political institutions the Commune was much more of a municipalist entity, with strong affinities to anarchist notions of a confederation of communes. It essentially challenged the existence of the French nation-state, calling upon the thousands of communes that dotted France to unite in a Proudhonist contractual network of autonomous communes rather than subject themselves to a centralized state.

Marx embraced this municipalist Commune, and in substance its call for a confederation of communes (without using the compromising word confederation, which his anarchist opponents employed), as a political structure in which “the old centralised government in the provinces” would, following Paris as a model, “have to give way to the self-government of the producers”—presumably a proletarian dictatorship. Each delegate from the various communes would be bound “by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents,” a strictly anarchist concept that reduced a delegate from a parliamentary representative or deputy to a mere agent of the people, in whose voice he was expected to speak and vote.(4)

Marx s assertion that the central government would retain “few but important functions” was brave but hardly credible—and even James Guillaume, one of Bakunin’s closest associates, regarded Marx’s favorable appraisal of the Commune’s libertarian features as the basis for a reconciliation between Marxists and anarchists in the First International. Engels, in an 1875 letter to August Bebel criticizing the Gotha Program (which had just been adopted by the German Social Democrats), even urged that instead of “People’s State,” the program use a “good old German word,” Gemeinwesen, “which can very well do service for the French ‘Commune,’” although he said little about its substance.(5)

In time, and not without vacillation, Marx went back on his favorable account of the Commune.(6) There is little doubt that he returned to the support for republican institutions that had marked his political views in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In the last years of his life, without saying much on the subject of the Commune, he clearly still favored incorporating into the republic many of the features—the pay scale for deputies, the right to recall, the need to arm the working class, and the mandat impératif—that he had praised in The Civil War in France. But the extent to which he thought a worker’s state should be centralized and how much authority he thought it should enjoy remained unanswered questions upon his death.

Republican institutions, however much they are intended to express the interests of the workers, necessarily place policy-making in the hands of deputies and categorically do not constitute a “proletariat organised as a ruling class.” If public policy, as distinguished from administrative activities, is not made by the people mobilized into assemblies and confederally coordinated by agents on a local, regional, and national basis, then a democracy in the precise sense of the term does not exist. The powers that people enjoy under such circumstances can be usurped without difficulty. Some anarchists will always find fault with any form of institutional social organization, but if the people are to acquire real power over their lives and society, they must establish—and in the past they have, for brief periods of time established—well-ordered institutions in which they themselves directly formulate the policies of their communities and, in the case of their regions, elect confederal functionaries, revocable and strictly controllable, who will execute them. Only in this sense can a class, especially one committed to the abolition of classes, be mobilized as a class to manage society.

Apart from their writings in erstwhile support of the Paris Commune, neither Marx nor Engels ever resolved the problem of the political institutions for proletarian rule that they set for themselves in The Manifesto: the problem of how a class, still less the mass of the people in bourgeois society, will take over the reins of power as a class or a people. In 1905 the Russian workers came up with their own solution to the question of a political institution for class power: the Petrograd Soviet. This citywide soviet, which emerged in the Russian capital in the 1905 Revolution, was an approximation of the assemblies that had appeared in the Great French Revolution. Had it remained merely a municipal council, it would have differed little from the Paris Commune, although it was much more working class in character.

But the Petrograd Soviet also sank deep roots in the city’s factories and was guided, through strike committees and shop committees, directly by the workers themselves. More than Lenin, it was Leon Trotsky, one of its last and certainly its most prominent chairmen, who saw in the soviet not only the institution that could mobilize the proletariat as a class but provide the transitional political and economic bridge from a capitalist to a socialist society. Lenin’s view of the soviet was more instrumental: he regarded it merely as a means for educating the working class and enlisting it in the service of the Bolshevik party.

Not until 1917 did Lenin decisively change his view about the soviets and come to regard them as institutions of working-class power. Even so, he wavered during the July events, when the Bolshevik leaders were imprisoned as a result of a premature spontaneous insurrection, but by the autumn of 1917 he had returned to the goal of a soviet government. For a time he suggested that a soviet government might include all the soviet parties—Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries of all kinds as well as Bolsheviks—but by the end of 1918, the Bolsheviks ruled the newly established soviet state entirely alone and eventually turned the soviets into docile instruments of their party apparatus.

The question of the institutions of political and social management by a class as a whole—and eventually by citizens in a classless society—has no easy resolution. Plainly it is not answered adequately by Proudhon’s system of federalism, which is too incoherent and vague and retains too many bourgeois features, such as contract and individual proprietorship, to provide a truly revolutionary solution. The solutions that later anarchists, more collectivist than the Proudhonists, offered are pregnant with possibilities, but they too suffer from a lack of definition and articulation.

For their part, anarchosyndicalists have offered workers’ control of industry as the most viable revolutionary alternative to the state, adducing the takeover of factories and agricultural land as evidence of its feasibility. An adequate account of its possibilities and limitations would require another article.(7) But as social elements for a liberatory society, workers’ control has basic problems—not only their parochialism and the highly visible decline in numbers of the manufacturing working class but most especially their tendency to turn into competitive collectively owned capitalistic enterprises. Mere economic control of plants and factories is only one side of the coin of a revolutionary transformation, a lesson the Spanish anarchosyndicalists learned only too dramatically in 1936-37, when, despite the greatest collectivization experiment in history, they failed to eliminate the bourgeois state—only to find that it returned in May 1937, forcibly demolishing the powerful anarchist enclaves in Catalonia and Aragon.

What seems necessary are the institutions of a democratic politics—to use the word politics in its Hellenic sense, not as a euphemism for modern-day Republican statecraft. I refer to a politics that would create local assemblies of the people and confederate them in purely administrative councils, in order to constitute a counterpower to the nation-state. How such a counterpower could be established and could function falls outside the province of this article; far too many important details, both historical and logistical, would be lost in a brief summary of this “assemblyist” position.(8)

That the issue of the institutions of class rule was even raised in The Manifesto of the Communist Party is one aspect of the document that makes it as living in 1998 as it was in 1848. That Marx and Engels, with their theoretical depth, foresaw the trajectory of capitalist development, in terms that are even more relevant today than in their own day, would be enough to make the work a tour de force in the realm of political thought. Both its great insights and its vexing problems live on with us to this day. The tragedy of Marxism is that it was blind to the insights of social anarchism and that later revolutionaries failed, at crucial moments in history, to incorporate the insights of both forms of socialism and go beyond them.

NOTES

* The Manifesto’s case for the bourgeoisie’s ultimate inability to take custody of social life rested on its “pauperization” of the proletariat—the famous “immiseration” thesis on which volume 1 of Capital was to conclude. With the later emergence of welfare states and their ability to manage crises, capitalism seemed able to prevent itself from sinking into a deep-seated economic crisis, causing this notion of “immiseration” to seem questionable. But the volatility of modern, “neo-liberal” capitalism and the erosion of its methods for crisis management have brought into question the ability of capitalism to be a self-correcting system. It is far from clear that, in the years ahead, economic collapse (as well as ecological disasters) will be avoided. Capitalism is still very much in flux, and The Manifesto’s warnings about “anarchy in production” can by no means be ruled out as a source of massive social unrest.

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Collected Works, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 482. All citations from The Manifesto herein are drawn from this translation, giving page numbers.
2. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 95; emphasis in the original.
3. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 22, 331.
4. Ibid., p. 332.
5. Engels, “Letter to August Bebel, March 18-28, 1875,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 71.
6. See Marx’s letter to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, February 22, 1881, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, pp. 65-66.
7. My full assessment appears in “The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism,” Anarchist Studies, vol. 1 (1993), pp. 3-24.
8. For a revolutionary politics by which people can manage their affairs through direct-democratic popular assemblies in confederations — or what I have called libertarian municipalism—the reader may care to consult my book From Urbanization to Cities (1987; London and New York: Cassell, 1996) as well as Janet Biehl’s The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997). Recent theories of “strong democracy” and the like presuppose the existence of the state and tend to defer to the notion that present-day society is too “complex” to permit a direct democracy, thereby offering no serious challenge to the existing social order.

Thank you for the privilege of addressing your conference on libertarian municipalism, if only by means of a videotape. Unfortunately, I am incapable of attending the conference because of my physical infirmities and [...]]]> This speech was originally presented to the International Conference on the Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism in Lisbon, August 26, 1998

Thank you for the privilege of addressing your conference on libertarian municipalism, if only by means of a videotape. Unfortunately, I am incapable of attending the conference because of my physical infirmities and the general weariness that comes with age. However much I dislike electronic means of engaging in what should optimally be face-to-face discussions, I must yield to the unavoidable need to present my views less directly than I would have liked. I hope you will not regard this as a justification on my part of “electronic democracy,” a notion that is so much in vogue today. With this apology, allow me to make some observations about the meaning of libertarian municipalism and respond to some of the criticisms that have been made of the theory and practice it advances.

I.

Libertarian municipalism is not a new version of Paul Brousse’s reformist “possibilism” of the 1890s. Rather, it is an explicit attempt to update the traditional social anarchist ideal of the Federation of communes or “Commune of communes,” namely, the confederal linking of libertarian communist municipalities, in the form of directly democratic popular assemblies as well as the collective control or “ownership” of socially important property. Libertarian municipalism in no way compromises with parliamentarism, reformist attempts to “improve” capitalism, or the perpetuation of private property. Limited exclusively to the municipality as the locus for political activity, as distinguished from provincial and state governments, not to speak of national and supranational governments, libertarian municipalism is revolutionary to the core, in the very important sense that it seeks to exacerbate the latent and often very real tension between the municipality and the state, and to enlarge the democratic institutions of the commune that still remain, at the expense of statist institutions. It counterposes the confederation to the nation-state, and libertarian communism to existing systems of private and nationalized property.

Where most anarchist communists in the past have regarded the Federation of communes as an ideal to be achieved after an insurrection, libertarian municipalists, I contend, regard the Federation or Confederation of communes as a political practice that can be developed, at least partly, prior to an outright revolutionary confrontation with the State—a confrontation which, in my view, cannot be avoided and, if anything, should be encouraged by increasing the tension between the state and federations of municipalities. In fact, libertarian municipalism is a communalist practice for creating a revolutionary culture, and for bringing revolutionary change into complete conformity with the goals of anarchist communism.

In the last case, it unifies practice and ideal into a single and coherent means-and-ends approach for initiating a libertarian communist society, without any disjunction between the strategy for achieving such a society and the society itself. Nor does libertarian municipalism cultivate the illusion that the state and bourgeoisie will allow such a continuum to find fulfillment without open struggle, as some advocates of so-called confederal municipalism and localist politics have argued.

It would be helpful to place libertarian municipalism in a broad historical perspective, all the more to understand its revolutionary character in human affairs generally as well as its place in the repertoire of anti-statist practices. The commune, the town or city, or more broadly, the municipality, is not merely a “space” created by a given density of human habitations. In terms of its history as a civilizing tendency in humanity’s development, the municipality is integrally part of the sweeping process whereby human beings began to dissolve biologically conditioned social relations based on real or fictitious blood ties, with their primordial hostility to “strangers,” and slowly replace them by largely social and rational institutions, rights, and duties that increasingly encompassed all residents of an urban space, irrespective of consanguinity and biological facts. The town, city, municipality, or commune (the equivalent word, in Latin countries, for “municipality”) was the emerging civic substitute, based on residence and social interests, for the tribal blood group, which had been based on myths of a common ancestry. The municipality, however slowly and incompletely, formed the necessary condition for human association based on rational discourse, material interest, and a secular culture, irrespective of and often in conflict with ancestral roots and blood ties. Indeed, the fact that we can meet here peacefully in Lisbon, even discuss and share creatively in the exchange of ideas without any hostility or suspicion, despite our disparate ethnic, linguistic, and national backgrounds, is a grand historic achievement of civilization, one that is the work of centuries involving a painful discarding of primordial definitions of ancestry, and the replacement of these archaic definitions by reason, knowledge, and a growing sense of our status as members of a common humanity.

In great part, this humanizing development was the work of the municipality—the increasingly free space in which people, as people, began to see each other realistically, steadily unfettered by archaic notions of biological consanguinity, tribal affiliations, and a mystical, tradition-laden, and parochial identity. I do not contend that this process of civilization, a term that derives from the Latin word for city and citizenship, has been completely achieved. Far from it: Without the existence of a rational society, the municipality can easily become a megalopolis, in which community, however secular, is replaced by atomization and an inhuman social scale beyond the comprehension of its citizens—indeed, the space for class, racial, religious, and other irrational conflicts.

But both historically and contemporaneously, citification forms the necessary condition—albeit by no means fully actualized—for the realization of humanity’s potentiality to become fully human, rational, and collectivistic, thereby shedding divisive, essentially animalistic divisions based on presumed blood affiliations and differences, mindless custom, fearful imaginaries, and a nonrational, often intuitional, notion of rights and duties.

Hence the municipality is the potential arena for realizing the great goal of transforming parochialized human beings into truly universal human beings, a genuine humanitas, divested of the darker animalistic attributes of the primordial world. The rational municipality in which all human beings can be citizens—irrespective of their ethnic background and ideological convictions—constitutes the true arena of a libertarian communist society. Metaphorically speaking, it is not only a desideratum for rational human beings, without which a free society is impossible; it is also the future of a rational humanity, the indispensable space for actualizing humanity’s potentialities for freedom and self-consciousness.

I do not presume to claim that a confederation of libertarian municipalities—a Commune of communes—has ever existed in the past. Yet no matter how frequently I disclaim the existence of any historical “models” and “paradigms” for libertarian municipalities, my critics still try to saddle me with the many social defects of Athens, revolutionary New England towns, and the like, as somehow an integral part of my “ideals.” This criticism is cynical demagogy and beneath contempt. I privilege no single city or group of cities—be they classical Athens, the free cities of the medieval world, the town meetings of the American Revolution, the sections of the Great French Revolution, or the anarchosyndicalist collectives that emerged in the Spanish Revolution—as the full actualization, still less the comprehensive “models” or “paradigms,” of the libertarian municipalist vision.

Yet significant features—despite various, often unavoidable distortions—existed among all of these municipalities and the federations that they formed. Their value for us lies in the fact that we can learn from all of them about the ways in which they practiced the democratic precepts by which they were guided; and we can incorporate the best of their institutions for our own and future times, study their defects, and gain inspiration from the fact that they did exist and functioned with varying degrees of success for generations, if not centuries.

At present, I think it is important to recognize that when we advance a politics of libertarian municipalism, we are not engaged in discussing a mere tactic or strategy for creating a public sphere; rather, we are trying to create a new political culture that not only is consistent with our anarchist communist goals but that includes real efforts to actualize these goals, fully cognizant of all the difficulties that face us and the revolutionary implications that they hold for us in the years ahead.

Let me note here that the “neighborhood” is not merely the place where people make their homes, rear their children, and purchase many of their goods. Under a more political coloration, so to speak, a neighborhood may well include those vital spaces where people congregate to discuss political as well as social issues. Indeed, it is the extent to which public issues are openly discussed in a city or town that truly defines the neighborhood as an important political and power space.

By this I do not mean only an assembly, where citizens discuss and gird themselves to fight for specific policies; I also mean the neighborhood as the center of a town, where citizens may gather as a large group to share their views and give public expression to their policies. This was the function of the Athenian agora, for example, and the town squares in the Middle Ages. The spaces for political life may be multiple, but they are generally highly specific and definable, not random or ad hoc.

Such essentially political neighborhoods have often appeared in times of unrest, when sizable numbers of individuals spontaneously occupy spaces for discussion, as in the Hellenic agora. I recall them during my own youth in New York City, in Union Square and Crotona Park, where hundreds and possibly thousands of men and women appeared weekly to informally discuss the issues of the day. Hyde Park in London constituted such a civic space, as did the Palais-Royal in Paris, which was the breeding ground of the Great French Revolution and the Revolution of 1830.

And during the early days of the 1848 revolution in Paris, scores (possibly hundreds) of neighborhood assembly halls existed as clubs and forums and potentially formed the basis for a restoration of the older neighborhood sections of 1793. The best estimates indicate that club membership did not exceed 70,000 out of a total population of about a million residents. Yet had this club movement been coordinated by an active and politically coherent revolutionary organization, it could have become a formidable, possibly a successful force, during the weeks of crisis that led to the June insurrection of the Parisian workers.

There is no reason, in principle, why such spaces and the people who regularly occupy them cannot become citizens’ assemblies as well. Indeed, like certain sections in the Great French Revolution, they may well take a leading role in sparking a revolution and pushing it forward to its logical conclusion.

II.

A problem exists in anarchist communist theory: namely that a political sphere, distinguishable from the state and potentially libertarian in its possibilities, must be acknowledged, and its potentialities for a truly libertarian politics must be explored. We cannot simply content ourselves with simplistically dividing civilization into a workaday world of everyday life that is properly social, as I call it, in which we reproduce the conditions of our individual existence at work, in the home, and among our friends, and, of course, the state, which reduces us at best to docile observers of the activities of professionals who administer our civic and national affairs. Between these two worlds is still another world, the realm of the political, where our ancestors in the past, at various times and places historically, exercised varying, sometimes complete control over the commune and the confederation to which it belonged.

It is a lacuna in anarchist communist theory that the political was conflated with the state, thereby effacing a major distinction between a political sphere in which people in varying degrees exercised power, often through direct assemblies, over their civic environment, and the state, in which people had no direct control, often no control at all, over that environment.

If politics is denatured to mean little more than statecraft and the manipulation of people by their so-called “representatives,” then a condition that has acquired varying forms of expression in the classical Athenian assembly, popular medieval civic assemblies, town meetings, and the revolutionary sectional assemblies of Paris, is conveniently erased and the multitudinous institutions for managing a municipality become reducible to the behavior of cynical parliamentarians or worse. My point is that it is a gross simplification of historical development and the world in which we live to see the political simply as the practice of statecraft. Just as the tribe emerged long before the city, so the city emerged long before the state—indeed, often in opposition to it. Mesopotamian cities, appearing in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers some six thousand years ago, are believed to have been managed by popular assemblies long before they were forced by intercity conflicts to establish statelike institutions and ultimately despotic imperial institutions. It was in these early cities that politics—that is, popular ways of managing the city—were born and may very well have thrived. The state followed later and elaborated itself institutionally, often in bitter opposition to tendencies that tried to restore popular control over civic affairs.

Nor can we afford to ignore the fact that the same conflict also emerged in early Athens and probably other Greek poleis long before the development of the state reached a relatively high degree of completion. One can see the recurrence of similar conflicts in the struggle of the Gracchi brothers and popular assemblies in Rome against the elitist Senate and, repeatedly, in the medieval cities, long before the rise of late medieval aristocracies and the Baroque monarchies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Kropotkin did not write nonsense when he pointed to the free cities of Europe, marked not by the existence of states but by their absence.

Indeed, let us also acknowledge that the state itself underwent a process of development and differentiation, at times developing no further than a loose, almost minimal system of coercion; extending further at other times into an ever-growing apparatus; finally, in this century in particular, acquiring totalitarian control over every aspect of human existence—an apparatus that was only too familiar thousands of years ago in Asia and even in Indian America in pre-Columbian times. The classical Athenian state was only partially statist; it constituted a fraternity, often riven by class conflicts, of select citizens who collectively oppressed slaves, women, and even foreign residents. The medieval state was often a much looser state formation than, say, the Roman imperial state, and at various times in history (one thinks of the comuneros in Spain during the sixteenth century and the sections in France during the eighteenth), the state almost completely collapsed and direct democracies based on communalist political principles played a hegemonic role in social affairs.

Libertarian municipalism is concerned with the political sphere, including aspects of basic civic importance, such as the economic. It does not draw strict impenetrable barriers between the two to the point where they are implacably set against each other. Claims that I believe it does are a canard that opponents of libertarian municipalism have propagated—as though such barriers were even possible. Libertarian municipalism calls for the municipalization of the economy and, where material interests between communities overlap, the confederalization of the economy. I am certain that these dimensions of libertarian municipalism will be explored more ably and comprehensively by speakers at the conference than I can hope to do in this short text.

Nor are libertarian municipalists indifferent to the many cultural factors that must play a role in the formation of true citizens, indeed, rounded human beings. I do not hesitate to point out that I was the author of “Desire and Need” some thirty years ago, and of accounts of citizenship, paideia, and a lived practice in free public spheres. But at the same time, let us not reduce every cultural desideratum to the social sphere—to create the myth that the municipality can be reduced to a family—and ignore its overlap with the political. The distinctions between them will only be lost in that poststructural homogenization of everything, making their unique identities almost completely meaningless and potentially, in fact, totalitarian.

Thus the libertarian municipalist arena may be a school for educating its youth and its mature citizens; but what makes it particularly significant, especially at this time, is that it is a sphere of power relations that must be crystallized against capitalism, the marketplace, the forces for ecological destruction, and the state. Indeed, without a movement that keeps this need completely in mind, libertarian municipalism can easily degenerate in this age of academic cretinism into another subject in a classroom curriculum.

Finally, libertarian municipalism rests its politics today on the historically preemptive role of the city in relation to the state, and above all on the fact that civic institutions still exist, however distorted they may appear or however captive to the state they may be, institutions that can be enlarged, radicalized, and eventually aimed at the elimination of the state. The city council, however feeble its powers may be, still exists as the remnant of the communes with which it was identified in the past, especially in the Great French Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. The possibility of recreating a sectional democracy still remains, assuming either a legal or extralegal form. We must bear in mind that the French revolutionary sections did not have any prior tradition on which to rest their claims to legitimacy—indeed, they even emerged from the elitist assemblies or districts of 1789, which the monarchy had created to elect the Parisian deputies to the Estates General—except that they refused to disband after they completed their electoral role and remained as watchdogs over the behavior of the Estates in Versailles.

We, too, are faced with the task of restructuring and expanding the civic democratic institutions that still exist, however vestigial their forms and powers may be; of attempting to base them on old or new popular assemblies—and, to be quite categorical, of creating new legal or, most emphatically, extralegal popular democratic institutions where vestiges of civic democracy do not exist. In doing so, we are direly in need of a movement—indeed, a responsible, well-structured, and programmatically coherent organization—that can provide the educational resources, means of mobilization, and vital ideas for achieving our libertarian communist and municipalist goals.

Our program should be flexible in the special sense that it poses minimum demands that we seek to achieve at once, given the political sophistication of the community in which we function. But such demands would easily degenerate into reformism and even possibilism if they did not escalate into a body of transitional demands that would ultimately lead to our maximum demands for a libertarian communist society.

Nor can we give up our seemingly utopian vision that the great metropolitan areas can be structurally decentralized. Cities on the scale of New York, London, and Paris, not to speak of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bombay, and the like, must ultimately be parceled into smaller cities and decentralized to a point where they are once again humanly scaled communities, not huge and incomprehensible urban belts. Libertarian municipalism takes its immediate point of departure from the existing facts of urban life, many of which are beyond the comprehension of its residents. But it always strives to physically and well as politically fragment the great cities, until it achieves the great anarchist communist and even Marxian goal of scaling all cities to human dimensions.

III.

The ideas I have presented so summarily up to now will no doubt be explored by the conference in all their details. I would like to close this presentation with a refutation of some of the criticisms that have been leveled against libertarian municipalism by certain Marxists and lifestyle anarchists.

Perhaps the most common criticism that both Marxists and anarchists have presented is the claim that modern cities are too huge to be organized around workable popular assemblies. Some critics assume that if we are to have true democracy, everyone from age zero to one hundred, irrespective of health, mental condition, or disposition, must be included in a popular assembly—and that an assembly must be as small as a touchy-feely American encounter group (say 30 or 40 people) or “affinity group,” as one critic calls it. But in large world cities, these critics suggest, which have several million residents, we would require many thousands of assemblies in order to achieve true democracy. In such cities such a multiplicity of small assemblies, they argue, would be just too cumbersome and unworkable.

But a large urban population is itself no obstacle to libertarian municipalism. Indeed, based on this kind of calculation—which would count all residents as participating citizens—the forty-eight Parisian sections of 1793 would have been completely dysfunctional, in view of the fact that revolutionary Paris had a total of 500,000 to 600,000 people. If every man, woman, and child, indeed every pathological lunatic and totally dysfunctional person, had attended sectional assemblies, and each assembly had had no more than 40 people, my arithmetic tells me that about 15,000 assemblies would have been needed to accommodate all the people of revolutionary Paris. Under such circumstances one wonders how the French Revolution could ever have occurred.

Such critics are usually not revolutionaries at all, and would probably believe that history would have been all the better if the sections had never existed to push the French Revolution forward. Their objection represents the instrumental mind qua calculating machine at its worst. A popular democracy, to begin with, is not premised on the idea that everyone can, will, or even want to attend popular assemblies. Nor should anyone who professes to be an anarchist make participation compulsory, coercing everyone into doing so. Even more significantly, it has rarely happened—indeed, it has never happened, in my knowledge of revolutionary history—that the great majority of people in a particular place, still less everyone, engages in revolution. In the face of insurrection in a revolutionary situation, while unknown militants, aided by a fairly small number of supporters, rise up and overthrow the established order, most people tend to be either active or inactive observers.

Having reviewed carefully the course of almost every major revolution in the Euro-American world, I can say with some knowledge that even in a completely successful revolution, it was always a minority of the people who attended meetings of assemblies that made significant decisions about the fate of their society. The very differentiated political and social consciousness, interests, education, and backgrounds among masses in a capitalist society guarantee that people will be drawn into revolutions in waves, if at all. The foremost, most militant wave, at first, is numerically surprisingly small; it is followed by seeming bystanders who, if an uprising seems to be capable of success, merge with the foremost wave, and only after the uprising is likely to be successful do the politically less developed waves, in varying degrees, follow it. Even after an uprising is successful, it takes time for a substantial majority of the people to fully participate in the revolutionary process, commonly as crowds in demonstrations, more rarely as participants in revolutionary institutions.

In the English Revolution of the 1640s, for example, it was primarily the Puritan army that raised the most democratic issues, with the support of the Levellers, who formed a very small fraction of the civilian population. The American Revolution was notoriously supported, albeit by no means actively, by only one-third of the colonial population; the Great French Revolution found its principal support in Paris and was carried forward by forty-eight sections, most of which were rooted in assemblies that were poorly attended, except at times when momentous decisions aroused the most revolutionary neighborhoods.

Indeed, what decided the fate of most revolutions was less the amount of support their militants received than the degree of resistance they encountered. What brought Louis XVI and his family back to Paris from Versailles in October 1789 was certainly not all the women of Paris—indeed, only a few thousand made the famous march to Versailles—but the king’s own inability to mobilize a sufficiently large and reliable force to resist them. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 in Petrograd, for many historians the “model” of a mass spontaneous revolution (and an uprising far more nuanced than most accounts suggest), succeeded because not even the tsar’s personal guard, let alone such formerly reliable supports of the autocracy as the Cossacks, was prepared to defend the monarchy. Indeed, in revolutionary Barcelona in 1936, the resistance to Franco’s forces was initiated by only a few thousand anarchosyndicalists with the aid of the Assault Guards, whose discipline, weaponry, and training were indispensable factors in pinning down and ultimately defeating the regular army’s uprising.

It is such constellations of forces, in fact, that explain how revolutions actually succeed. They do not triumph because “everyone,” or even a majority of the population, actively participates in overthrowing an oppressive regime, but because the armed forces of the old order and the population at large are no longer willing to defend it against a militant and resolute minority.

Nor it is likely, however desirable it may be, that after a successful insurrection the great majority of the people or even the oppressed will personally participate in revolutionizing society. Following the success of a revolution, the majority of people tend to withdraw into the localities in which they live, however large or small, where the problems of everyday life have their most visible impact on the masses. These localities may be residential and/or occupational neighborhoods in large cities, the environs of villages and hamlets, or even at some distance from the center of a city or region, fairly dispersed localities in which people live and work.

No—I do not think the large size of modern cities constitutes an insuperable obstacle to the formation of a neighborhood assembly movement. The doors of the neighborhood assemblies should always be open to whoever lives in the neighborhood. Politically less aware individuals may choose not to attend their neighborhood assembly, and they should not be obliged to attend. The assemblies, regardless of their size, will have problems enough, without having to deal with indifferent bystanders and passersby. What counts is that the doors of the assemblies remain open for all who wish to attend and participate, for therein lies the true democratic nature of neighborhood assemblies.

IV.

Another criticism that I have heard against libertarian municipalism is that a large crowd, such as numerous citizens at an assembly meeting, may be manipulated by a forceful speaker or faction. This philistine criticism could be directed against any democratic institution, be it a large assembly, a small committee, an ad hoc conference or meeting, or even an “affinity” (read: encounter) group. In my view, such a transparent effort to inflict bruises on any attempt to create a popular organization hardly deserves discussion. The size of the group is not a factor here—some very abusive tyrannies appear in very small groups, where one or two intimidating figures can completely dominate everyone else.

What the critics might well ask—but seldom do—is how we are to prevent persuasive individuals from making demagogic attempts to control any popular assembly, regardless of size. In my view the only obstacle to such attempts is the existence of an organized body of revolutionaries—yes, even a faction—that is committed to seeking truth, exercising rationality, and advancing an ethics of public responsibility. Such a faction or organization will be needed, in my view, not only before and during a revolution but also after one, when the constructive problem of creating stable, enduring, and educational democratic institutions becomes the order of the day.

Such an organization will be particularly needed during the period of social reconstruction, when attempts are made to put libertarian municipalism into practice. We cannot expect that, because we propose the establishment of neighborhood assemblies, we will always—or perhaps even often—be the majority in the very institutions that we have significantly helped to establish. We must always be prepared, in fact, to be in the minority, until such time as circumstances and social instability make our overall messages plausible to assembly majorities.

Indeed, wherever we establish a popular assembly, with or without legal legitimacy, it will eventually be invaded by competing class interests. Libertarian municipalism, I should emphasize here, is not an attempt to overlook or evade the reality of class conflict; on the contrary, it attempts, among other things, to give due recognition to the class struggle’s civic dimension. Modern conflicts between classes have never been confined simply to the factory or workplace; they have also taken a distinctly urban form, as in “Revolutionary Paris,” “Red Petrograd,” and “Anarchosyndicalist Barcelona.” As any study of the great revolutions vividly reveals, the battle between classes has always been a battle not only between different economic strata in society but also within and between neighborhoods.

Moreover, the neighborhood, town, and village also generates searing issues that cut across class lines: between working people (the traditional industrial proletariat, which is now dwindling in numbers in Europe and the United States and is fighting a rearguard battle with capital), middle-class strata (which lack any consciousness of themselves as working people), the vast army of government employees, a huge professional and technical stratum that is not likely to regard itself as a proletariat, and an underclass that is essentially demoralized and helpless.

We cannot ignore the compelling fact that capitalism has changed since the end of the Second World War; that it has transformed the very social fiber of the great majority of people, both attitudinally and occupationally, in Western Europe and the United States; that it will wreak even further changes in the decades that lie ahead, with dazzling rapidity, especially as automation is further developed and as new resources, techniques, and products replace those that seem so dominant today.

No revolutionary movement can ignore the problems that capitalism is likely to generate in the years that lie ahead, especially in terms of capital’s profound effects on both society and the environment. The futility of syndicalism today lies in the fact that it is still trying to address the problems generated by the old industrial revolution, and in the context of the social setting that gave these problems meaning in the first half of the twentieth century. If we have historically exhausted the syndicalist alternative, it is because the industrial proletariat is everywhere destined, by virtue of technological innovation, to become a small minority of the population. It will not do to try to theoretically fabricate a “proletariat” out of clerical, service, and professional “workers” who, in many if not most cases, will not acquire the class consciousness that identified and gave a historical standing to the authentic proletarian.

But these strata, often among the most exploited and oppressed, can be enlisted to support our anarchist communist ideals on the basis of the larger environment in which they live and the larger issues of their sovereignty in a world that is racing out of control: namely their neighborhoods, cities, and town, and the expansion of their democratic rights as free citizens in a world that has reduced them to mere electoral constituents. They can be mobilized to support our anarchist communist ideals because they feel their power to control their own lives is diminishing in the face of centralized state and corporate power. Needless to say, I am not denying that working people have grim economic problems that may pit them against capital, but their quasi-middle class outlook if not status diminishes their ability to see the ills of capitalism exclusively as an economic system.

Today we live in an era of permanent industrial revolution in which people tend to respond to the extreme rapidity and vast scope of change with a mysticism that expresses their disempowerment and a privatism that expresses their inability to contend with change. Indeed, capitalism, far from being “advanced,” still less “moribund,” continues to mature and extend its scope. What it will look like a half century or a century from now is open to the boldest of speculations.

Hence, more than ever, any revolutionary libertarian communist movement must, in my view, recognize the importance of the municipality as the locus of new, indeed often transclass problems that cannot simply be reduced to the struggle between wage labor and capital. Real problems of environmental deterioration affect everyone in a community; real problems of social and economic inequities affect everyone in a community; real problems of health, education, sanitary conditions, and the nightmare, as Paul Goodman put it, of “growing up absurd” plague everyone in a community—problems that are even more serious today than they were in the alienated 1960s decade. These transclass issues can bring people together with workers of all kinds in a common effort to seek their self-empowerment, an issue that cannot be resolved into the conflict of wage labor against capital alone.

Nor are workers mere “agents” of history, as vulgar Marxists (and implicitly, syndicalists) would have us believe. Workers live in cities, towns, and villages—not only as class beings but as civic beings. They are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, and no less than their ecological counterparts among the petty bourgeoisie, they are concerned with environmental issues. As parents and young people, they are concerned with the problems of acquiring an education, entering a profession, and the like. They are deeply disturbed by the decay of urban infrastructures, the diminution of inexpensive housing, and issues of urban safety and aesthetics. Their horizon extends far beyond the realm of the factory or even the office to the residential urban world in which they and their families live. After I had spent years working in factories, I was not surprised to find that I could reach workers, middle-class people, and even relatively affluent individuals more easily by discussing issues relating to their lived environments—their neighborhoods and cities—rather than to their workplaces.

Today, in particular, the globalization of capital raises the question of how localities can keep productive resources within their own confines without impairing the opportunities of peoples in the so-called “Third World” or South to freely develop technologically according to their own needs. This conundrum cannot be resolved by legislation and economic reforms. Capitalism is a compulsively expansive system. A modern market economy dictates that an enterprise must grow or die, and nothing will prevent capitalism from industrializing—more accurately, expanding—endlessly over the entire face of the planet whenever it is prepared to do so. Only the complete reconstruction of society and the economy can end the dilemmas that globalization raises, including the one-sided economic development of the South, often at the expense of workers in the North, and the enhancement of corporate power to the point of threatening the stability, indeed the very safety, of the planet.

Here again, I would contend that only a grassroots economic policy, based on a libertarian municipalist agenda and movement, can offer a major alternative—and it is precisely an alternative that many people seek today—capable of arresting the impact of globalization. For the problem of globalization, there is no global solution. Global capital, precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its roots, specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at the base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who, mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional economic alternatives to its industrial operations. Developing this resistance would involve subsidizing municipally controlled industries and retail outlets, and taking recourse to regional resources that capital does not find it profitable to use. A municipalized economy, slow as it may be in the making, will be a moral economy, one that—concerned primarily with the quality of its products and their production at the lowest possible cost—can hope to ultimately subvert a corporate economy, whose success is measured entirely by its profits rather than by the quality of its commodities.

Let me stress than when I speak of a moral economy, I am not advocating a communitarian or cooperative economy in which small profiteers, however well-meaning their intentions may be, simply become little “self-managed” capitalists in their own right. In my own community I have seen a self-styled “moral” enterprise, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, grow in typical capitalist fashion from a small, presumably “caring,” and intimate enterprise into a global corporation, intent on making profit and fostering the myth that “capitalism can be good.” Cooperatives that profess to be moral in their intentions have yet to make any headway in replacing big capitalist concerns or even in surviving without themselves becoming capitalistic in their methods and profit-oriented in their goals.

The Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers—as opposed to a genuinely socialistic or libertarian communistic endeavor—can slowly eat away at capitalism should finally be dispelled. Sadly, these generally failed illusions are still promoted by liberals such as Harry Boyte and by naive lifestyle anarchists such as the journalistic ruffians at “Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed,” and pure academics such as John Clark and his associates. Either municipalized enterprises controlled by citizens’ assemblies will try to take over the economy, or capitalism will prevail in this sphere of life with a forcefulness that no mere rhetoric can diminish.

Capitalist society has effects not only on economic and social relations but on ideas and intellectual traditions as well, indeed, on all of history, fragmenting them until knowledge, discourse, and even reality become blurred, divested of any distinctions, specificity, and articulation. The culture that promotes this celebration of diffuseness and fragmentation—a culture that is epidemic in American colleges and universities—goes under the name of poststructuralism or, more commonly, postmodernism. Given its corrosive precepts, the postmodernist worldview is able to level or homogenize everything that is unique or distinctive, dissolving it into a low common denominator of ideas.

Consider, for example, the obscurantist term “earth citizenship,” which dissolves the very complex notion of “citizenship,” with its presuppositions of paideia—that is, the lifelong education of the citizen for the practice of civic self-management—into a diffuse category, by extending (and cheapening) the notion of citizenship to include animals, plants, rocks, mountains, the planet, indeed the very cosmos itself. With a purely metaphorical label for all relationships as an “earth community,” the historical and contemporary uniqueness of the city disappears. It presumably preempts every other community because of its wider scope and breadth. Such metaphors ultimately flatten everything, in effect, into a universal “Oneness” that, in the name of “ecological wisdom,” denies definition to vital concepts and realities by the very ubiquity of the “One.”

If the word “citizen” applies to every existing thing, and if the word “community” embraces all relationships in this seemingly “green” world, then nothing, in fact, is a citizen or a community. Just as the logical category “Being” is rendered as mere existence, Being can only be regarded as interchangeable with “Nothing.” So, too, “citizen” and “community” become a universal passport to vacuity, not to uniquely civic conditions that have been forming and differentiating dialectically for thousands of years, through the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. To reduce them to an abstract “community” is to ultimately negate their wealth of evolutionary forms and particularly their differentiation as sophisticated aspects of human freedom.

V.

The constraints of time, of my physical infirmities, and your patience urge me to conclude this presentation, yet I cannot do so without at least briefly mentioning the many other issues that I would have liked to discuss. Given the opportunity, I would explore with you why libertarian municipalism must be conceived as a process, a patient practice that will almost have only limited success at the present time, and even then only in select areas that can at best provide examples of the possibilities it could hold if and when it is adopted on a large scale. We will not create a libertarian municipalist society overnight, and in this era of counterrevolution, we must be prepared to endure more failures than successes. Patience and commitment are traits that revolutionaries of the past cultivated assiduously; alas, today in our fast consumerist society, the demand for immediate gratification, for fast food and fast living, inculcates a demand for fast politics. Individuals who are prone to adopt a fast lifestyle over one that acknowledges the need for slow growth, with all its disappointments, would do well to learn the art of throwing bricks and painting graffiti rather than commit themselves to the educational responsibilities required by a libertarian municipalist movement. What should count for us is whether libertarian municipalism is a rational means for achieving the rational culmination of human development, not whether it is suitable as a quick fix for present social problems.

We must learn to be flexible without allowing our basic principles to be replaced by a postmodernist quagmire of ad hoc, ever-changeable opinions. For example, if we have no choice but to use electronic means, such as to establish popular participation in relatively large citizens’ assemblies, then so be it. But we should, I would argue, do so only when it is unavoidable and for only as long as it is necessary. By the same token, if certain measures involve a degree of centralization, then we should adopt them—without sacrificing, let me insist, the right to immediate recall. But here, too, we should endure such organizational measures for only as long as they are necessary and no longer. Our basic principles in such cases must always be our guide: we remain committed to a direct face-to-face democracy and a well-coordinated, confederal, but decentralized society.

Nor should we fetishize consensus over democracy in our decision-making processes. Consensus, as I have argued, is practicable with very small groups in which people know each other intimately. But in larger groups it becomes tyrannical because it allows a small minority to decide what will be the practice of large or even sizable majority; and it fosters homogeneity and stagnation in ideas and policies. Minorities and their factions are the indispensable yeast for maturing new ideas—and nearly all new ideas start out as the views of minorities. In a libertarian group, the “rule” of the majority over a minority is a myth; no one expects a minority to give up its unpopular beliefs or to yield its right to argue its views—but the minority must have patience and allow a majority decision to be put into practice. This experience and the discussion it generates should be the most decisive element in impelling a group or assembly to reconsider its decision and adopt the minority’s viewpoint, spurring on the further innovation of practices and ideas as other minorities emerge. Consensus decision-making can easily produce intellectual and practical stagnation if it essentially compels a majority to forgo a specific policy in order to please a minority.

I will not enter into my distinction between policy decisions and their enactment in practice by those qualified to administer them. I will only note something that my friend Gary Sisco has pointed out, that if the U.S. Congress—a gathering, for the most part, of lawyers—can make basic policy decisions on the reconstruction of the American infrastructure, on war and peace, on education and foreign policy, etc. etc., without having full knowledge of all aspects of these fields, leaving the administration of their decisions to others; then I fail to understand why a citizens’ assembly cannot make policy decisions on usually more modest issues and leave their administration, under close supervision, to experts in the fields involved.

Among the other issues that we must at some point consider are the place of law or nomos in a libertarian municipalist society, as well as constitutions that lay down important principles of right or justice and freedom. Are we to vest the perpetuation of our guiding principles simply in blind custom, or in the good nature of our fellow humans—which allows for a great deal of arbitrariness? For centuries oppressed peoples demanded written founding constitutional provisions to protect them from the arbitrary oppression of the nobility. With the emergence of a libertarian communist society, this problem does not disappear. For us, I believe, the question can never be whether law and constitutions are inherently anti-anarchistic, but whether they are rational, mutable, secular, and restrictive only in the sense that they prohibit the abuse of power. We must, I believe, free ourselves of the fetishes born of remote polemics with authoritarians, fetishes that have pushed many anarchist communists into unreflective one-sided positions that are more like dogmas than reasonedtheoretical ideas.

Admittedly, the present time is not one that is favorable for the spread of anticapitalist, social anarchist ideas and movements. Unless we are to let the capitalist cancer spread over the entire planet, however, even absorbing the natural world into the world economy, anarchist communists must develop a theory and practice that provides them with an entry into the public sphere—a theory and practice, I should emphasize, that is consistent with the goal of a rational libertarian communist society.

Finally, we must assert the historic right of speculative reason, resting on the real potentialities of human beings as we know them from the past as well as the present, to project itself beyond the immediate environment in which we live, indeed, to claim that the present irrational society is not the actual—or “real”—that is worthy of the human condition. Despite its prevalence—and, to many people, its permanence—it is untrue to the project of fulfilling humanity’s potentiality for freedom and self-consciousness, and hence it is unreal in the sense that it is a betrayal of the claims of humanity’s greatest qualities, the capacity for reason and innovation.

If our attempts to think, fight for, educate people about, and rise in battle for a libertarian communist society based on the Commune of communes are evidence of “Bakuninist will,” for which present-day mystics such as John Clark (aka “Max Cafard” or “C”) have criticized me, then I can only reply that I find all the more flattering this association with Bakunin, who would have denounced Clark’s Taoist notions of passivity and “going with the flow” as a fundamental accommodation to the status quo.

By the same token, that broad school of ideas that we call “anarchism” is faced with a parting of the ways between social anarchists—who wish to focus their efforts on the revolutionary elimination of hierarchical and class society—and self-indulgent lifestyle anarchists who, if they believe in anything beyond mere adventures (say, throwing bricks at police), see social change only in terms of their personal self-expression and the replacement of serious ideas with mystical fantasies.

I personally do not believe that anarchism can become a public movement unless it formulates a politics that opens it to social intervention, indeed that brings it into the public sphere as an organized movement that can grow, think rationally, mobilize people, and actively seek to change the world. The social democrats have offered us parliamentary reforms as a practice, and the results they have produced have been debilitating—most notably, a radical decline in public life and a disastrous growth in consumerist self-indulgence and privatism. Although the Stalinists as architects of the totalitarian state have mostly passed from the public scene, a few persist as parasites on whatever radical movement may emerge among oppressed peoples. And fascism, in its various mutations, has attempted to fill the void created by disempowerment and a lack of human scale in politics as well as community, with tragic results.

As anarchist communists we must ask ourselves what mode of entry into the public sphere is consistent with our vision of empowerment. If our ideal is the Commune of communes, then I submit that the only means of entry and social fulfillment is a politics—that is, a movement and program that finally emerges on the local electoral scene as the uncompromising advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development of a municipalized economy. I know of no other alternative to capitulation to the existing society—unless some among us wish to throw rocks at police, deface walls with graffiti, or engage in ad hoc “actions” that disappear without any trace like a pebble thrown into a lake.

I have no doubt that libertarian municipalism, if it meets with a measure of success, will face many obstacles and the possibility of being coopted or of degenerating into a form of “sewer anarchism”; that it will face not only a civic realm of ideological discord but internal discord within its own organizational framework; that it opens a broad field of political conflict, with all its risks and uncertainties. At a time when social life has been trivialized beyond description, when accommodation to capitalist values and lifeways has reached unprecedented levels; when anarchism and socialism are seen as the “lost causes” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—one can only hope that such discord becomes a genuine public reality. At no time has mediocrity been more triumphant than it is today, and at no time has indifference to social and political issues been as widespread as it is today.

I do not believe that social change can be achieved without taking risks, allowing for uncertainties, and recognizing the possibility of failure. If we are to have any effect on the fossilization of public life—to the extent that the present period is marked in any sense by a genuine public life—history too must move with us. On this score, I am much too old to make worthwhile predictions about how the course of events will unfold, except to say that the present, whether for good or ill, will hardly be recognizable to the generation that will come of age in fifty years from now, so rapidly are things likely to change in the coming century.

But where change exists, so too do possibilities. The times cannot remain as they are—any more than the world can be frozen into immobility. What we can hope to do is to preserve the thread of rationality that distinguishes true civilization from barbarism—and barbarism would indeed be the outcome of a world that is permitted to tumble into a future without rational activity or guidance. If this endeavor be evidence of “Bakuninist will,” then so much the better for those who will a world of freedom and self-consciousness, as distinguished from those who, in the name of organic thought, reduce themselves to bystanders, their behavior guided by the Taoist doctrine of “wu-wei,” that is, the “virtues” of nonaction or “going with the flow.

What form will anarchism take as it enters the twenty-first century? What basic ideas will it advance? What kind of movement, if any, will it try to create? How will it try to change the [...]]]> Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice.
Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
– Mikhail Bakunin

What form will anarchism take as it enters the twenty-first century? What basic ideas will it advance? What kind of movement, if any, will it try to create? How will it try to change the human sensibilities and social institutions that it has inherited from the past?

In a fundamental sense these were the issues that I tried to raise in my 1995 polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm.[1] The title and especially the subtitle were deliberately provocative. In part, I intended them to highlight a profound and longstanding contradiction within anarchism, an ideology that encompasses views that are basically hostile to each other. At one extreme of anarchism is a liberal ideology that focuses overwhelmingly on the abstract individual (often drawing on bourgeois ideologies), supports personal autonomy, and advances a negative rather than a substantive concept of liberty. This anarchism celebrates the notion of liberty from rather than a fleshed-out concept of freedom for. At the other end of the anarchist spectrum is a revolutionary libertarian socialism that seeks to create a free society, in which humanity as a whole–and hence the individual as well–enjoys the advantages of free political and economic institutions.

Between these two extremes lie a host of anarchistic tendencies that differ considerably in their theoretical aspects and hence in the kind of practice by which they hope to achieve anarchism’s realization. Some of the more common ones today, in fact, make systematic thinking into something of a bugaboo, with the result that their activities tend to consist not of clearly focused attacks upon the prevailing social order but of adventurous episodes that may be little more than street brawls and eccentric “happenings.” The social problems we face–in politics, economics, gender and ethnic relations, and ecology–are not simply unrelated “single issues” that should be dealt with separately. Like so many socialists and social anarchists in the past, I contend that an anarchist theory and practice that addresses them must be coherent, anchoring seemingly disparate social problems in an analysis of the underlying social relations: capitalism and hierarchical society.

It should not be surprising that in a period of social reaction and apparent capitalist stabilization, the two extremes within anarchism–the individualistic liberal tendency and the socialistic revolutionary one–would fly apart in opposing directions. At best, they have previously existed only in uneasy tension with each other, submerging their differences to their common traditions and ideological premises. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the liberal tendency, with its strong emphasis on individual rights and sensibilities, gave greater emphasis to individual self-expression, ranging from personal eccentricities to scandalous or even violent behavior. By contrast, the socialistic tendency placed its greatest emphasis on popular mobilizations, especially in syndicalist organizations, working-class strikes, and the everyday demands of opposition to capitalism in the public sphere.

Supporters of the socialistic tendencies in anarchism, which I have called social anarchism, never denied the importance of gaining individual freedom and personal autonomy. What they consistently argued, however, was that individual freedom will remain chimerical unless sweeping revolutionary changes are made that provide the social foundations for rounded and ethically committed individuals. As social anarchism has argued, the truly free individual is at once an active agent in and the embodiment of a truly free society. This view often clashed with the notion, very commonly held by individualistic or, as I have called them, lifestyle anarchists, that liberty and autonomy can be achieved by making changes in personal sensibilities and lifeways, giving less attention to changing material and cultural conditions.

It is not my intention to repeat my exposition of the differences between social and lifestyle anarchism. Nor do I deny that the two tendencies–the liberal and the social–have often overlapped with each other. Many lifestyle anarchists eagerly plunge into direct actions that are ostensibly intended to achieve socialistic goals. Many social anarchists, in turn, sympathize with the rebellious impulses celebrated by lifestyle anarchists, although they tend to resist purely personal expressions.

Not surprisingly, the ability of social anarchism to make itself heard in the public sphere has generally fluctuated with the economic times. In periods of capitalist stability, social anarchism is often eclipsed on the Left by reform-oriented social-democratic and liberal ideologies, while lifestyle anarchism emerges as the embodiment of anarchism par excellence. During these periods anarchism’s cranks, often more rebellious than revolutionary, with their exaggerated hostility to conventional lifeways, come to the foreground, constituting a cultural more than a revolutionary threat to the status quo. By contrast, in times of deep social unrest, it is social anarchism that, within anarchism, has usually held center stage. Indeed, during revolutionary situations in the past, social anarchism has enjoyed a great deal of popularity among the oppressed and in some cases was responsible for organizing the masses in such a way as to pose a serious threat to the social order.

The varying fortunes of social and lifestyle anarchism belong to a long history of revolutions and counterrevolutions, of rebellion and conformity, of social unrest and social peace. When the rebellious 1960s bubbled up after a decade of social quiescence and numbing mediocrity, lifestyle anarchism enjoyed great popularity among the countercultural elements, while social anarchism exercised a measure of influence with some New Leftists. During the political apathy and social conformity of the 1970s and 1980s, as the counterculture was absorbed into New Age narcissism, lifestyle anarchists moved increasingly to the fore as the predominant expression of anarchism.

The America of the mid-1960s that had seemed to be weighing new, indeed utopistic possibilities opened by ferment among people of color, students, women, gays, and community activists, has been replaced, in the 1990s, by an America that is narcissistic and self-absorbed, moved by mystical, antirational, often otherworldly, and decidedly personal concerns. The visionary pursuit of social change that was so widespread a mere quarter-century ago has yielded, as the German social theorist Joachim Hirsch observes, to a “fatalistic and radically anti-utopian consciousness.” Social activity, such as it is, focuses overwhelmingly on single issues and seeks to reform the existing social order rather than challenge its basic institutions and economic relationships. Not only is today’s consciousness fatalistic and radically anti-utopian; it is derisively antirevolutionary and even antiradical. The enormous change in social and moral temper is reflected by the conventional ideology of the present time, with its emphasis on trivial concerns, financial markets, consumerist escapes, and personal psychology. It has all but eliminated, for the present, any principle of hope, to use Ernst Bloch’s phrase. Where social criticism does exist, it tends to focus on the abuses of specific corporations or on the defects of specific governmental actions (all valuable work, to be sure) rather than on the capitalist and state system that produces them. Cynicism about the possibility of social change now prevails, as well as an appalling narcissism in everyday life.

Despite Hirsch’s verdict, even this jaded public temper–a temper that prevails no less among young people than among their parents–needs compensatory escapisms to soften a life without inspiration or meaning. It is not easy to accept a gray world in which acquisition, self-absorption, and preoccupation with trivia are the main attributes of everyday life. To improve the “comfort level” of middle-class life, Euro-American society has witnessed an explosion of mystical, antirational, and religious doctrines, not to speak of innumerable techniques for personal self-improvement. The personalistic form of these anodynes makes self-expression into a surrogate for a politics of genuine empowerment. Far from impelling people to social activism, these nostrums are infected with an ancient Christian virus: namely, that personal salvation precedes political change–indeed, that in every sense the political is reduced to the personal, and the social to the individual.

Not only have lifestyle anarchism and social anarchism diverged very sharply, but their divergence reflects an unprecedented development in capitalism itself: its historic stabilization and its penetration into ever more aspects of everyday life. This development, not surprisingly, engulfs even the ideologies that profess to oppose it, so that in the end they actually work to justify those changes. More than any society that preceded it, capitalism (to use Marx and Engels’s phrase in The Communist Manifesto) “turns everything solid into air”–and polluted air at that. Rock ‘n’ roll, the music of countercultural rebellion, has long entered the liturgical ceremonies of modern churches, while radical folksinger Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” appears in television commercials for a giant airline. The “culture war” that created so many professorial jobs in major universities is rapidly drawing to a close. As Thomas Frank, editor of a recent anthology, Commodify Your Dissent, has observed, “The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy. . . . However the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets of Information Age business theory.”[2]

In Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (SALA), I tried to show that lifestyle anarchism is well on its way to becoming just this kind of rebellious chic, in which jaded Americans rakishly adorn themselves with the symbols and idioms of personal resistance, all the more to accommodate themselves to the status quo. Anarchism’s lifestyle tendencies orient young people toward a kind of rebellion that expresses itself in terms of narcissism, self-expression, intuition, and personalism–an orientation that stands sharply at odds with the socialistic core of anarchism that was celebrated by Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta, among so many others.

Lifestyle anarchism thus recasts the spirit of revolt itself–however residual it may be today–and subverts the very basis for building the radical social opposition that will be needed in times more propitious for a rational social development. Lifestyle anarchism, in effect, eats away at the traditions, ideas, and visions upon which anarchism as a socialist movement rests and that form its point of departure for the development of future revolutionary libertarian movements. In effect, its growing influence threatens to derail anarchism, with its rich implications for society as a whole, and redirect it toward the self as the locus of rebellion and reconstruction. In this respect, lifestyle anarchism is truly regressive. If a space is to be preserved on the political spectrum for serious left-libertarian discussion and activity–for use in the future, if not always in the present–then the growing influence of lifestyle anarchism must be earnestly resisted.

It is not only anarchism that is plagued by the advent of a an anti-Enlightenment culture with psychologistic, mystical, antirational, and quasi-religious overtones. Some of the ostensibly new reinterpretations of Marxism are patently psychologistic and even mystical in nature, while the ecology movement risks the prospect of becoming a haven for primitivism and nature mysticism. Goddess worship has invaded feminism, while postmodernism reigns in the formerly radical portions of the Academy. Indeed, the attempt to displace Enlightenment values of reason, secularism, and social activism with an emphasis on intuition, spiritualism, and an asocial psychologism pervades society as a whole. In this respect SALA may be seen as an appendix to my larger book, Re-Enchanting Humanity, which critiques the more general cultural manifestations of these tendencies.

Sorting Out the Issues

Nothing more strikingly supports my contention that lifestyle anarchism reflects present trends in bourgeois culture–its psychologism, antirationalism, primitivism, and mysticism–than the replies that lifestyle anarchists themselves have written to SALA since its publication. As of this writing (February 1998), two books, one pamphlet, and several articles have been published, all decrying my essay, yet all serving overwhelmingly as evidence to bolster my case against this tendency.

Consider, for example, a review of my essay in the journal Social Anarchism, written by Kingsley Widmer, an anarchist who harbors strong sympathies for primitivism and technophobia.[3] The critical thrust of his piece is that I insist on standing “in lonely splendor” on the “ghostly shoulders of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and their descendants in such as the Spanish anarchists of more than two generations ago,” which makes me a proponent of an “antique left-socialism,” a “narrow and thin libertarianism of a different time and place and conditions.”

I collapse to the floor in shame. Never did I expect that the day would come when an anarchist–in fact, a member of Social Anarchism‘s advisory board–would regard this lineage as “ghostly” and “thin”! Perhaps it would be more relevant to our time, in Widmer’s view, if I ended my “lonely isolation” and adopted today’s fashionable technophobia? Perhaps he believes I should join those who mystify the preindustrial age (which was already going into eclipse several generations ago)? Or those who mystify the Neolithic era of four hundred generations ago? or the Paleolithic of some 1,200 generations ago? If being up to date is the standard for social relevance, then the mere two generations that have passed since the Spanish Revolution undoubtedly give me the edge over the primitivists whom Widmer defends (although in all fairness to him, he appears to be not quite certain where he stands on primitivism anymore).

Despite its brevity, Widmer’s review touches on substantive issues concerning primitivism and technology that other critics have argued at greater length and which I will address later in this essay. Suffice it to note here that Widmer also makes use of a polemical technique that my longer-winded critics also use–namely, to demonize me as a “dogmatic” Leninist or even Stalinist. Widmer, however, makes this insinuation in a rather convoluted way: he reproves me for using the words “infantile” and “fascistic” in describing certain aspects of lifestyle anarchism–his objection being that “‘political infantilism’ was a favorite epithet of Leninists,” while “‘social fascism’ of Stalinist and fellow-traveling ‘progressives’ in the Thirties.”

This would be a damning criticism indeed if I had used these words in any sense that is relevant to Lenin, still less Stalin’s characterizations. Nowhere did I suggest that my opponents are infantile leftists, as Lenin did, or designate any of my opponents “social fascists,” as the Third Period Stalinists did. Am I to understand from Widmer that the words “infantile” and “fascistic” must be excised from the vocabulary of critical discourse today simply because Lenin and Stalin’s Communist International used them nearly seventy years ago? If my ideas really do constitute an “antique left-socialism” that belongs to “dogmatically exclusionary political movement,” then it is remarkable that Widmer can find a place on the anarchist spectrum at all for this “old socialist anarchist.”

What troubles me about this polemical strategy, as many of my current critics use it, is that by its own terms, commitment to principle comes to be chastised as “dogma”; support for revolution over reform is condemned as “sectarian”; fervent objections to opponents’ arguments are castigated as “authoritarian”; and polemical argumentation is designated as “Marxist” or “Leninist.” In my own case, even my authorship of more than a dozen books becomes evidence of my agenda to “dominate” or “master” anarchism. At the very least, such methods reflect the ugly personalism that pervades this highly individualistic and trivialized culture.

This polemical techniques and many others are also put to use in Robert C. Black’s Anarchy After Leftism, another response to SALA that is pervaded with a far more intense and personalistic vilification.[4] Black, the reader should be warned, is no mere author; he is a psychic who apparently can read my demonic mind, divine all my self-serving intentions, and unearth the Machiavellian meanings hidden in all of my writings, which are part of my devilish master plan to gain power and prestige, enrich my own wealth, and imperialistically colonize the entire anarchist scene as my own private fiefdom. Did I say that Black is a psychic? Actually, he is also an exorcist, and a cabalistic study of his book will surely free Anarchy (as distinguished from that lowly ideology “anarchism”) from the Great Bookchin Conspiracy to take over that flourishing galactic realm.

To be serious about Black’s endeavor–which his publisher, Jason McQuinn (aka Lev Chernyi) called “brilliant” in a recent issue of Anarchy–this ugly book is transparently motivated by a white-hot animosity toward me. So cynical, so manipulative, and so malicious are its invectives, even by the lowest standards of gutter journalism, that I will not dignify them with a reply. As I indicated in the subtitle to SALA, the chasm between people like this author and myself is unbridgeable.

Indeed, so numerous are the falsehoods in Black’s book that to correct even a small number of them would be a waste of the reader’s time. One sample must suffice to demonstrate the overall dishonesty of the tract. Black seems to establish early on that I am a “dean” at Goddard College (AAL, p. 18), a position that, he would have his readers believe, endows me with the very substantial income that I need in order to advance my nefarious ambitions. Consummate scholar that Black is, he sedulously documents this claim by citing Goddard College’s 1995 Off-Campus Catalog. Thereafter, throughout the book, I am referred to as “Dean Bookchin” or “the Dean,” presumably on the assumption that mere repetition will make my title a reality.[5]

Goddard’s 1995 Off-Campus Catalog is a rare document, one that even I had difficulty acquiring–a fact upon which Black is apparently relying. Those few individuals who are able to find it, however, will learn that Black’s claim is an outright fabrication. My name appears nowhere in that catalog nor in any other recent edition, for the very good reason that I ended my professional connections with Goddard College (as well as Ramapo College, which he also mentions) in 1981. Anyone who cares to find out my status as an employee of Goddard is invited to telephone the college and ask them.

Far from enjoying the material wealth that Black attributes to me, I live on a pension and Social Security, both of them paltry, supplemented by a occasional lecture fees and book advances. I shall conclude this obligatory sketch of my economic status by noting that my supplemental income has diminished considerably in recent years because the physical infirmities caused by advanced age prevent me from traveling or writing easily any longer. Some of Black’s followers will no doubt prefer to believe his statement that I am a well-to-do dean at Goddard, irrespective of the facts. I have neither the time nor the disposition to disenchant people who want to believe in his book.[6]

The Long, Dark Road Back

The second full-size book that contains a response to SALA is Beyond Bookchin: Preface to a Future Social Ecology (BB) written by David Watson (more widely known by his pseudonym George Bradford).[7] The leading writer for the Detroit anarchist periodical Fifth Estate, Watson is an individual whose writings I criticized in SALA for technophobia, anticivilizationism, primitivism, and irrationalism. In BB Watson, in turn, not only defends his positions, as he doubtless ought to do, but radically confirms my claim that the chasm between his ideas and mine is unbridgeable. Indeed, what puzzles me about his work is that he ever found my writings interesting at all, especially given our incommensurable views on technology, or that they even influenced him, as he says they did.

The fact is that BB is not merely a reply to my criticisms–it is also a sweeping critique of almost everything I have ever written. “It is the intent of this essay,” Watson declares early on, “to reveal how seriously limited Bookchin’s work was from the very beginning” (BB, p. 10, emphasis added). Nor is BB simply a sweeping critique of my work “from the very beginning”; it is a scandalous hatchet job on my thirty years of writing to create a body of ideas called social ecology. By the end of the book we learn that Watson true purpose is to “abandon [Bookchin's] idea of social ecology” altogether (BB, p. 245). Or as Steve Welzer advises in his laudatory introduction to the book, “social ecology itself must be liberated from Bookchin” (BB, p. 4).

In this 250-page indictment, Watson pokes into the smallest crevices in my writings while omitting the aspects of my writings that, on his own admission, allowed him to set himself up as an libertarian thinker. Divesting all my writings of their contexts–spanning some forty years in social movements–he wantonly tosses together my casual observations and polemical exaggerations with my more considered writings on social theory, ecology, urban development, politics, and philosophy.

Running through almost every paragraph of Watson’s book are vituperative attacks, manic denunciations, ad hominem characterizations, and even gossipy rumors. In time, the reader becomes so drenched in Watson’s downpour of trivia, distortion, and personal venom that he or she may well lose sight of the basic differences between Watson and myself–the very issues that motivated my critique of his views in SALA.

What, after all, are the views that Watson is really trying to advance as the “future social ecology” that he advertises as an advance over my own? What precisely does it consist of? Amid the thickets, thorns, and weeds of personal invective that proliferate in Watson’s book, I find four basic tenets that he is promoting–each of which, if adopted by anarchists, would radically remove anarchism from the liberating realm of Enlightenment thought and entomb it in the mystical realm of anticivilizationism, technophobia, primitivism, and irrationalism.

Civilization and Progress

For many years, in many different essays, as I pointed out in SALA, Watson has sharply rejected civilization, presumably in its Western form (although he devotes little space to denunciations of Oriental despotisms, with their megamechanical armies of serflike gang laborers). Thus, he told us in 1991: “Civilization is coming to be regarded . . . as a maladaption of the species, a false turn or a kind of fever threatening the planetary web of life” (CIB, p. 10). It has been little more than “a labor camp from its origins” (CIB, p. 12); it is “a machine, an organization,” “a rigid pyramid of crushing hierarchies,” “a grid expanding the territory of the inorganic” (CIB, p. 12). Its “railroad leads not only to ecocide, but to evolutionary suicide” (CIB, p. 13).

Nor is it merely one or several aspects of civilization that exhibits these qualities: it is civilization as such. In 1988 he wrote that civilization is “destructive in its essence to nature and humanity” (HDDE, p. 3). In 1984 he wrote that we must be “willing to confront the entirety of this civilization and reclaim our humanity” (SDT, p. 11). While considering the mystical pap of Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (in their book The Great Mother Goddess) to be “fascinating,” he nonetheless reproaches them for placing quotation marks around the word civilization because it suggests “a reverse or alternative perspective on civilization rather than . . . challenge its terms altogether” (CIB, p. 14, n. 23).

Metaphors for civilization as a unitary, monolithic grid or railroad, whose nature is necessarily destructive, are shallow, unmediated, and in fact reactionary. By putting quotation marks around “civilization,” a writer can at least acknowledge civilization’s advances without accepting its abuses.[8] If Watson will not allow even this concession to civilization’s role, then it becomes clear that for him, redemption can be achieved only by regression. The rise of civilization becomes humanity’s great lapse, its Fall from Eden, and “our humanity” can be “reclaimed” only through a prelapsarian return to the lost Eden, through recovery rather than discovery–in short, through a denial of humanity’s advance beyond the horizon of prehistory.

This sort of rubbish may have been good coin in medieval monasteries. But in the late Middle Ages, few ideas in Christian theology did more to hold back advances in science and experimental research than the notion that with the Fall, humanity lost its innocence. One of the Enlightenment’s great achievements was to provide a critical perspective on the past, denouncing the taboos and shamanistic trickery that made tribal peoples the victims of unthinking custom as well as the irrationalities that kept them in bondage to hierarchy and class rule, despite its denunciations of Western cant and artificialities.

Nor does Watson have the least use for the idea of progress; indeed, he even denigrates the development of writing, disparaging the “dogma of the inherent superiority of the written tradition” over nonliteracy as “embarrassingly simplistic” (BB, p. 24) and “an imperial tale” (BB, p. 100), and praises the oral tradition. Before the written word, it should be noted, chiefs, shamans, priests, aristocrats, and monarchs possessed a free-wheeling liberty to improvise ways to require the oppressed to serve them. It was the written word, eventually, that subjected them to the restrictions of clearly worded and publicly accessible laws to which their rule, in some sense, was accountable. Writing rendered it possible for humanity to record its culture, and inscribing laws or nomoi were where all could see them remains one of the great advances of civilization. That the call for written laws as against arbitrary decisions by rulers was a age-old demand of the oppressed is easily forgotten today, when they are so readily taken for granted. When Watson argues that the earliest uses of writing were for authoritarian or instrumental purposes, he confuses the ability to write with what was actually written–and betrays an appalling lack of historical knowledge.

On the subject of modern medicine, our poet–as he styles himself–delivers himself of the sublime view that “it could conceivably [!] turn out to be medicine which extinguishes humanity rather than ecological disaster or human conflagration” (BB, p. 115). Not nuclear war? Not a terrifying and rampant epidemic? Not even “ecological disaster”–but medicine?[9]

Watson’s rejection of “civilization in bulk” and his denial of even the most obvious advances of progress leaves us with the conclusion that, for him, civilization as such must either be accepted or rejected in its entirely. Such mental rigidity, such unitary determinism, gives us no choice but to define civilization exclusively by its evils. Accordingly, while Watson concedes that my defense of civilization’s achievements “might represent in some sense what is ‘best’ in Western culture,” ideas of civilization and progress “have also typically served as core mystifications concealing what is worst” (BB, p. 9). For Watson, then, the idea of progress is merely a cover-up for the sins of civilization.

That the “official story” of progress contains both good and evil, indeed that civilization is “Janus-faced” (RS, p. 180) and constitutes a subtle dialectic between a “legacy of freedom” and a “legacy of domination” (which I elaborated for nearly fifty pages in The Ecology of Freedom) is conveniently ignored in Watson’s discussion of this subject. Instead, he debases my account of civilization’s substance and form, divests my discussion of history’s interacting dialectic of all its development, flesh, bone, and blood, leaving only a straw man: a blind champion of all aspects of civilization, the unmediated reverse of his own radically simplistic rejection.

Which is not to say that Watson is unaware of his butchery of ideas; much later in his book, and in an entirely different context, he lets slip the fact that I see the “city” as “Janus faced . . . in its look toward the prospect of a common humanity as well as in its look toward barbarities in the name of progress” (BB, p. 171; quoting RS, p. 180). Unfortunately, in the original passage from which he draws this quote, I wrote that “civilization,” not the “city,” is Janus-faced–a distortion should warn Watson’s readers about the need to refer back to my writings whenever he undertakes to quote from me.

Having inserted this misquotation at the book’s end, Watson feels free to describe me as the “lone defender of civilization” (BB, p. 7), at the very beginning the book. This honor, however, is too great for me to bear alone. I must share my laurels with Lewis Mumford, who (even more than Langdon Winner, Lao-Tzu, and Fredy Perlman) seems to be the supreme guru of Watson’s “future social ecology.” As it turns out, Mumford also posited a dual legacy for civilization–and, like Mor and Sjoo, put quotation marks around “civilization” to cite one of them.[10]

In fact, Mumford explicitly condemned anticivilizationist positions like the one Watson espouses, describing them as a “nihilist reaction.” “The threatened annihilation of man by his favored technological and institutional automatisms,” he once lamented, “. . . has in turn brought about an equally devastating counter-attack–an attack against civilization itself.“[11] Mumford bluntly repudiated “the notion that in order to avoid the predictable calamities that the power complex is bringing about, one must destroy the whole fabric of historic civilization and begin all over again on an entirely fresh foundation.”[12] He objected to “a revolt against all historic culture–not merely against an over-powered technology and an over-specialized, misapplied intelligence, but against any higher manifestations of the mind.”[13]

The only person here who would seem to have difficulty accepting the existence of ambiguities in civilization appears to be Watson himself, the unwavering denouncer “civilization in bulk.”

Technophobia

If Watson claims that the good that civilization offers is merely a veil for its evils, it is not likely that he and I will ever agree on so provocative an issue as technology. My conviction is that productive and communications technologies will be needed by a rational society in order to free humanity from the toil and the material uncertainties (as well as natural ones) that have in the past shackled the human spirit to a nearly exclusive concern for subsistence. Watson, by contrast, is an outright technophobe.

What makes this disagreement particularly abrasive, however, is his persistent tendency to misrepresent my views. Consider, for example, his assertion that because my “notion of social evolution is clearly linked [!] to technological development and an expansion of production” (BB, p. 96), I am an icy technocrat who rhapsodizes about the technics of the “megamachine,” especially the chemical and nuclear industries.[14] Watson, who seems to have difficulty acknowledging the existence even of a mere “link,” as he puts it, between technological and social development, performs the kind of fabrication at which he excels and turns a “link” into sufficient cause:

Only [!] technological development, [Bookchin] says, would bring “a balance . . . between a sufficiency of the means of life, a relative freedom of time to fulfill one’s abilities in the most advanced levels of human achievement, a degree of self-consciousness, complementarity, and reciprocity that can be called truly human in full recognition of humanity’s potentialities” [EF: 67-68]. (BB, p. 96)

In fact, the reader who consults the whole passage from which Watson has cynically clipped this quotation will find that I made no statement that “technological development” alone creates these marvels. Quite to the contrary, by inserting the word “only” and clipping the words after “balance,” Watson distorts my claim. What I actually wrote was not that technology will bring such a “balance” but that a “balance must be struck between a sufficiency of the means of life” and self-consciousness, complementarity, reciprocity, and so on. That is, technological development, far from “bringing” these features, must “strike a balance” with them!

The same misquoted passage from The Ecology of Freedom leads into a discussion of the fact that material scarcity is not only the result of physically limiting conditions but is also “socially induced” and “may occur even when technical development seems to render material scarcity completely unwarranted. . . . A society that has enlarged the cultural goals of human life may generate material scarcity even when the technical conditions exist for achieving outright superfluity in the means of life” (EF, p. 68, emphases added). Expressed in more general terms: technics is a necessary condition for progress, but it is not a sufficient one. Let emphasize quite strongly, as I have repeatedly argued, that without moral, intellectual, cultural, and, yes, spiritual progress, a rational society will be impossible to achieve.

In the same passage, I then went on to discuss the “fetishization of needs” that capitalism creates, and which a rational society would eliminate. That is, capitalism creates artificial needs by making people feel they must buy the most status-elevating motor vehicle or the fastest computer in the market.

Watson’s distortion of my views cannot be written off as accidental; indeed, it is hard to believe that it is not cynically deliberate, leading me to conclude that he is a demagogue who regards his readers as gullible fools.

What is basic to my views is that the ecological crisis is more the result of the capitalist economy, with its grow-or-die imperatives, than of technology or “mass technics.” Capitalist enterprise employs technologies to produce on a wide scale for the market, but in the end these technologies remain the instruments of capitalism, not its motor, amplifying the effects of a grow-or-die economy that is ruinous to the natural world. Yet as devastating as the effects of technology can be when driven to maximum use by capitalist imperatives, technologies on their own could not have provided the imperatives that produced the ecological damage we are now witnessing.

Nor do the technologies that capitalism drives to the point of wreaking ecological destruction need always be sophisticated industrial ones. The romantic heaths of Yorkshire that excite such wonder in travelers today were once covered by stately forests that were subsequently cut down to produce the charcoal that fueled the making of metals even before capitalist development in Britain got under way. European entrepreneurs in North America used mere axes, adzes, and hammers to clear forested land. A nearly Neolithic technology deforested much of Europe in the late Middle Ages, well in advance of the “megamachine” and the impacts Watson assigns to it.

To distinguish his own view of the relationship between technology, capitalism, and the rest of society from mine, Watson turns philosophical. He disparages my ostensibly simplistic ways of thinking in favor of his supposedly more dialectical mental processes. I am not at all sure what Watson thinks dialectics is; instead of standing on his own philosophical ground, he turns to John Clark for a quick philosophy lesson. Clark, whose philosophical insights I have always found to be less than trenchant, advises Watson that mere causal notions, presumably of the kind I advance concerning capitalism, are “uni-directional.” Dialectics, he advises us, must instead be understood in the following terms: “If the [social] totality is taken as the whole of society, rather than the superstructure, and if reciprocity is extended to encompass all relations, including the economic ones, then this represents a model for a dialectical social theory in the full sense” (quoted in BB, p. 157; emphasis added). Put in less pompous language: We can identify no single cause as more compelling than others; rather, all possible factors are mutually determining.

This morass of “reciprocity,” in which everything in the world is in a reciprocal relationship with everything else, is precisely what dialectical causality is not, unless we want to equate dialectics with chaos. Dialectics is a philosophy of development, not of mutually determining factors in some kind of static equilibrium. Although on some remote level, everything does affect everything else, some things are in fact very significantly more determining than others. Particularly in social and historical phenomena, some causes are major, while others are secondary and adventitious. Dialectical causality focuses on what is essential in producing change, on the underlying motivating factors, as distinguished from the incidental and auxiliary. In a forest ecocommunity, for example, all species may affect all others, however trivially, but some–the most numerous trees, for example–are far more prominent than the ferns at their base in determining the nature of that forest.

In Clark’s befuddled understanding of dialectic, however, a potpourri of causes are so “interrelated” (a magic word in modern ecobabble) with one another that major and secondary causes are impossible to distinguish. Watson nonetheless accepts Clark’s wild mix of “reciprocity” not only as serious thinking but as true dialectics and blandly incorporates it into his own position on technics. “It makes no sense,” he sagaciously muses, “to layer the various elements of this process in a mechanistic [!] hierarchy of first [!] cause and secondary effects”–that is, to assign greater potency to either capitalism or even technology as generating the ecological crisis. “There is no simple or single etiology to this plague, but a synergy of vectors” (BB, p. 128).

Watson then goes on to offer us his version of a “synergy of vectors”: the megamachine. This is a concept he borrows from Mumford, in which technics, economics, politics, the military, bureaucracy, ideology, and the like are all one giant monolithic “machine,” all of them so closely interrelated as to be causally indistinguishable. In this universe etiology is indeed meaningless; everything is the “synergy of vectors” known as the megamachine.

Still, in some passages of BB, etiology sneaks back into Watson’s rarefied dialectical cogitations: “Technology also forms a matrix,” (BB, p. 125), he tells us, “by way of a synergistic tendency to reshape the pattern within which it emerged” (BB, p. 125). Not only do “technological relations” (whatever they may be) “shape human action”(BB, p. 120), but in some societies “technology has thoroughly shaped and redefined the social imaginary” (BB, p. 124).

Far from advancing a “synergy of vectors,” in fact, Watson advances a very clear “etiology,” with one very clear determining cause: technology. A decade and a half of Watson’s writings show that he has been consistent (might one even say dogmatic?) on this score:

“The technological apparatus has transformed human relations entirely, recreating us in its image.” (ATM, p.5)

“Technology is not a tool but an environment, a totality of means enclosing us in its automatism of need and production and the geometric runaway of its own development.” (SDT, p. 11)

Our “form of social organization, an interconnection and stratification of tasks and authoritarian command” is “necessitated by the enormity and complexity of the modern technological system in all of its activities. (SDT, p. 11)

“The direction of governance flows from the technical conditions to people and their social arrangements, not the other way around. What we find, then, is not a tool waiting passively to be used but a technical ensemble that demands routinized behavior.” (Winner quoted in SDT, p. 11)

Mass technics is “a one-way barrage of mystification and control.” (SDT, p. 11)

“Mass technics have become . . . ‘structures whose conditions of operation demand the restructuring of their environments.’” (Winner quoted in SIH, p. 10)

These quotations give “uni-directional” determinism a bad name. So habituated is Watson to making such all-encompassing statements that, even while he was writing BB, he sometimes forgot about Clarkean “dialectics.” Technology, he writes, “bring[s] . . . about imperatives unanticipated by their creators, which is to say: technological means come with their own repertoire of ends” (BB, p. 120; the emphases here and in the next paragraphs are mine). “Technicization” is “now extinguishing vast skeins in the fabric of life” (BB, p. 126). The technological system “requires” people to operate within it (BB, p. 143). Technics makes “hierarchy, specialization, and stratified, compartmentalized organizational structures . . . inescapable” (BB, p. 144).

A similar intellectually paralyzing reductionism is also reflected in passages Watson quotes from other authors. Jacques Ellul is trotted in to say that technology is establishing “a new totality” (BB, p. 144). Ivan Illich remarks on “the industrially determined shape of our expectations” (BB, p. 142). Langdon Winner observes that all tools “evoke a necessary reaction from the person using them” (BB, p. 126) and that “the technical ensemble demands routinized behavior” (144). And:

“Ultimately,” [Winner] explains, “the steering is inherent in the functioning of socially organized technology itself,” which is to say that the owners and bosses must steer at the controls their technology provides. As the monster says to Doctor Frankenstein, “You are my creator, but I am your master.” (BB, p. 143)[15]

Not only does Watson single out technology as a determining cause, he explicitly regards capitalism as secondary, a mere expression of a supposed technological imperative. “Market capitalism,” he writes, “has been everywhere the vehicle for a mass megatechnic civilization” (BB, p. 126). Accordingly, it is not simply “capitalist greed” that produces oil spills; “not only capitalist grow-or-die economic choices, but the very nature of the complex petrochemical grid itself makes disasters inevitable” (BB, p. 120).

I have often written that, because capitalism is still developing so rapidly, we cannot be sure what actually constitutes mature capitalism. Watson puts his own spin on my formulation and offers a redefinition of capitalism that is so broad as it strip it of its specific features and submerge it to the megamachine altogether:

We need a larger definition of capitalism that encompasses not only market relations and the power of bourgeois and bureaucratic elites [!] but the very structure and content of mass technics, reductive rationality and the universe they establish; the social imaginaries of progress, growth, and efficiency; the growing power of the state; and the materialization, objectifications and quantification of nature, culture and human personality. (BB, p. 126)

So much is included within this “larger” definition of capitalism that capitalism in its specificity and in all its phases is completely lost. Elsewhere, in a quintessential example of his obscurantism, Watson tells us with finality: “Technology is capital” (ATM, p. 5).

Farewell to two centuries of political economy and debates over the nature of capitalism: over whether it is a social relation (Marx), machines and labor (Smith and Ricardo), a mere factor of production (neo-capitalist economists) or, most brilliantly, the teeth of a tiger (H. G. Wells)! Farewell to the class struggle! Farewell to an economics of social and class relations! When Watson slows down his dervishlike whirl and gives us a chance to examine his ecstatic spinning, we find that it leads to the elimination of the social question itself, as a century of socialist thought called it. Watson is now here to apprise us that the great conflict that has beleaguered history is not really workers and bosses, or between subjects and elites. Fools that we have been–it is between human beings and their machines! Machines are not the embodiment of alienated labor but in fact the “social imaginary” that looms over them and control their lives! And all this time, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, et al. foolishly labored under the illusion that the social question stems from exploitation and domination, scarcity and toil.

If my conclusion seems overstated, then I would suggest that readers follow Watson himself down into his dark valley of technological absurdity. Approvingly quoting Langdon Winner, Watson enjoins us to practice “epistemological luddism” as a “method of inquiry” (BB, p. 132). To those who notice that these phrases are empty, Watson concedes that they are “inchoate and embryonic” (BB, p. 132)–so why present them? But only three paragraphs later, we learn that Watson’s luddism is not merely “epistemological” or a “method of inquiry.” Rather, it is a concrete agenda. We will require, he enjoins, “a careful negotiation with technics” and (approvingly quoting the mystic Theodore Roszak) “the selective reduction of industrialism” (BB, p. 133).

Roszak, at least, was sensible enough to speak of a selective reduction of industrialism. For Watson, however, selectivity all but disappears, and his “negotiated” dismantling of industry becomes nothing less than spectacular. “Let’s begin dismantling the noxious structures,” he has enjoined; “let’s deconstruct the technological world” (BPA, p. 26). We have to “dismantle mass technics” (SIH, p. 11)–that is to say, all those “vectors” that make up the “megamachine” and civilization.

What is Watson’s opening “negotiating” position? For the most part, in his other writings, he has long avoided naming which technologies he would keep and which he would dispose of, even airily disparaging the question. But for one who wishes to “negotiate,” the necessity for him to identify technologies he favors and disfavors should be self-evident. These other writings give us some idea of Watson’s alternative to the cage of megamechanical civilization.

“Let’s reforest and refarm the cities,” he counsels; “no more building projects, giant hospitals, no more road repair” (BPA, p. 26). I may be simple-minded, but this seems to be a call to pull down cities and reduce them to forests and farmland. In the absence of cities and roads, Watson seems to want us to return to small-scale farming, “a clear context where small scale, the ‘softness’ of technics, labor-intensiveness, and technical limits all crucially matter” (BB, p. 138). Clearly tractors and the like will be excluded–they are clearly products of the megamachine. But I would hope Watson’s brave new world will not be so extreme as to exclude the plow and horses–or are we being domineering if we put horses into harnesses?

“Stop the exponential growth of information, pull the plug on the communications system” (BPA, p. 26). We would thus have to eliminate computers and telecommunications; farewell, too, to telegraphs, radios, and telephones! It is just as well we do so, since Watson doesn’t understand telephones: the work of telephone line workers, he says, is “a mystery” to him (BB, p. 146). So good riddance! He has also written that “the wheel is not an extension of the foot, but a simulation which destroys the original” (MCGV, p. 11, emphasis added). So away with the wheel! Away with everything that “simulates” feet! And who knows–away with the potter’s wheel, which is a “simulation” of the hand!

As to energy sources, Watson really puts us in a pickle. He disapproves of “the elaborate energy system required to run” household appliances and other machines, since it renders people “dependent” (Christopher Lasch quoted in BB, p. 141). So–away with the mass generation of electricity, and every machine that runs on it! Needless to say, all fossil as well as nuclear fuels will have to go. Perhaps we could turn to renewable energy as an alternative–but no, Watson has also voiced his sovereign disapproval of “solar, wind and water technologies” as products of “an authoritarian and hierarchical division of labor” (NST, p. 4). All of this leaves us with little more than our own muscles to power our existence. Yes, “revolution will be a kind of return” (BB, p. 140), indeed!

To be sure, we will eliminate such noxious products of the megamachine as weapons, but if we also dispense with roads (clearly if we do not repair them, they will disappear), typewriters and computers (except the computer owned by Fifth Estate, presumably, for otherwise how will Watson’s golden words reach the public?), any form of mechanical agriculture (which Watson seems to confuse with agribusiness), et cetera ad nauseam. The reader has only to walk through his or her home, look into each room, and peer into closets and medicine chests and kitchen cabinets, to see what would be surrendered in the kind of technological world that Watson would “negotiate” with industrialism.

Let it be noted, however, that a return to the economic conditions of twelfth-century Europe would hardly create a paradise. Somehow, even in the absence of advanced technology to generate them, oppressive social relations still existed in this technological idyll. Somehow feudal hierarchies of the most oppressive kind (in no way modeled on ecclesiastical hierarchies, let alone “shaped” by technology) superimposed themselves. Somehow the peasant-serfs who were ruled and coerced by barons, counts, kings, and their bureaucratic and military minions failed to realize that they were free of the megamachine’s oppressive impact. Yet they were so unecological as to drain Europe’s mosquito-infested swamps and burn its forests to create meadows and open farmland. Happily spared the lethal effects of modern medicine, they usually died very early in life of famine, epidemic disease, and other lethal agents.

Given the demands of highly labor-intensive farming, what kind of free time, in the twelfth century, did small-scale farmers have? If history is any guide, it was a luxury they rarely enjoyed, even during the agriculturally dormant winters. During the months when farmers were not tilling the land and harvesting its produce, they struggled endlessly to make repairs, tend animals, perform domestic labor, and the like. And they had the wheel! It is doubtful that, under such circumstances, much time would have been left over for community meetings, let alone the creation of art and poetry.

Doubtless they sowed, reaped, and did their work joyously, as I pointed out in The Ecology of Freedom. The workman’s song–proletarian, peasant, and artisan–expresses the joy of self-expression through work. But this does not mean that work, bereft of machinery, is an unadulterated blessing or that it is not exhausting or monotonous. There is a compelling word for arduous labor: toil! Without an electric grid to turn night into day, active life is confined to daylight hours, apart from what little illumination can be provided by candles. (Dare I introduce such petroleum derivatives as kerosene?) It is one of the great advances of the modern world that the most arduous and monotonous labor can often be performed entirely by machines, potentially leaving human beings free to engage in many different tasks and artistic activities, such as those Charles Fourier described for his utopian phalansteries.

But as soon as I assign to technology the role of producing a society free of want and toil, Watson takes up the old dogmatic saw and condemns it to perdition as “the familiar marxist version” (BB, p. 129). Watson may enjoy appealing to unthinking political reflexes that date back to the Marx-Bakunin battles of the First International, but the merit of an idea interests me more than its author. Instead of directly addressing the problem of scarcity and toil in any way, however, Watson settles the issue, at least in his own mind, by quoting his guru, Lewis Mumford: “The notion that automation gives any guarantee of human liberation is a piece of wishful thinking” (quoted in BB, p. 130)–as though a technological advance in itself were a “guarantee” of anything under capitalism, apart from more exploitation and destruction. (It is astonishing that one has to explain this concept to a former Trotskyite like Watson, who should have some knowledge of Marx’s ideas.)

Alas, Mumford does not serve him well. In The Pentagon of Power (the same work from which Watson quotes), Mumford himself actually gives what Watson would be obliged to dismiss as “the familiar marxist version.” Mumford notes, first quoting from an unattributed source:

“The negative institutions . . . would never have endured so long but for the fact that their positive goods, even though they were arrogated to the use of the dominant minority, were ultimately at the service of the whole community, and tended to produce a universal society of far higher potentialities, by reason of its size and diversity.” If that observation held true at the beginning, it remains even more true today, now that this remarkable technology has spread over the whole planet. The only way effectively to overcome the power system is to transfer its more helpful agents to an organic complex.[16]

Elsewhere in the same book, speaking of “the decrepit institutional complex one can trace back at least to the Pyramid age,” Mumford says that “what modern technology has done is . . . . rehabilitate it, perfect it, and give it a global distribution.” Then, more significantly: “The potential benefits of this system, under more humane direction” are “immense.” Indeed, elsewhere he speaks of “our genuine technological advances.”[17] Now what does Watson have to say about that?

How should the technological level of a free society be determined? Watson’s thoughts on this question are such as to render his libertarian views on technics and human needs more authoritarian than is immediately evident. Suppose, for example, that nonindustrialized and even tribal people actually want not only wheels, roads, and electric grids, but even the material goods, such as computers and effective medications, that people in industrialized countries enjoy–not least of all, Watson himself and the Fifth Estate collective. I have argued in The Ecology of Freedom that no one, particularly in a consumption-oriented country such as the United States, has any right to bar nonindustrialized societies from choosing the way of life they wish. I would hope that they would make their choices with full awareness of the ecological and even psychological consequences of consumption as an end in itself, which have been amply demonstrated for them by the course of developed nations; and I would engage in a concerted effort to persuade all peoples of the world to live according to sound ecological standards. But it would be their indubitable right to acquire what they believe they need, without anyone else dictating what they should or should not acquire.

Not only is my proposal intolerable in Watson’s eyes, he cannot even paraphrase it correctly. He must distort it in order to make it seem ridiculous: “What are we to make of the proposal to develop mass technics and a combination consumer-producer utopia [!] in order to reject them?” (BB, p. 107). The implication of this distortion is, I believe, that poor societies must develop capitalism and technology in order to know the consequences of doing so, irrespective of the fact that the consequences of doing so are quite clear and the information is widely available, not least of all because of communications technology.

For Watson, however, the ecological crisis to be too urgent to wait for a policy as slow as mine. “Neither ecological wisdom nor the health of the planet can wait for this grotesque overindulgence [that I supposedly advocate] to have its curative effect,” he firmly declares (BB, p. 108). How, then, would our lifestyle anarchist handle this very real problem himself? He doesn’t tell us, but he does call on people in the industrialized countries to seek “a new relationship to the phenomenal world–something akin to what [Marshall] Sahlins calls ‘a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own’” (BB, p. 108). May I suggest that this is dodging the issue? If the urgency of resolving the ecological crisis is the paramount factor, Watson’s own solution would seem rather inadequate as well, requiring as it does an ethereal spiritual revolution on the basis of one-by-one conversion. Nor is such an approach likely to succeed, any more than Christianity succeeded in creating a loving, self-sacrificing, and all-forgiving world in two thousand years of one-by-one conversions–and the Church, at least, promised pie in the sky (as the old IWW song has it) in the next world if not in this one.

As for people in the industrial-capitalist world, Watson, who has tried to prejudice his readers against my views as “marxist,” “authoritarian,” and “dogmatic,” suddenly mutates into an ideological despot in his own right. He finds it inconceivable that people could actually make conscious decisions about the use of technology, still less place moral constraints upon it. Quite to contrary, inasmuch as, in his view, technology governs people rather than the other way around, we can scarcely hope to spring the trap and decide for ourselves. Watson ridicules the notion that “a moral society . . . could sit down and decide how to ‘use’” a technology (bioengineering is cited here) “without catastrophic results” (BB, p. 125). He arrogantly forecloses democratic decision-making by ordinary people on the proper use of advanced technologies, because open civic discussions would “inevitably” result in “compliance with the opinion of experts” and “would of necessity be based on persuasion and faith” (BB, pp. 146-47, emphasis added). Lest we have any doubt that Watson means what he says, he reiterates the same disdainful view: “It’s ludicrous [!] to think that citizen assemblies could make informed decisions about chemical engineering strategies, communications grids, and complicated technical apparatus” (BB, p. 180).

One may modestly ask: why should this be “ludicrous”? Expert knowledge is by no means necessary to make general decisions about the uses of technology: a reasonable level of ordinary competence on the part of citizens is usually quite adequate. In fact, today legislators at the local, state, and national levels make such decisions every day, and ordinary people can clearly do the same. Watson’s argument that such decisions are beyond the ken of ordinary people is (possibly unknown to him) precisely the argument that Lenin advanced in 1918 against workers’ control of factories (which, of course, Watson would abandon wholesale) and in favor of one-man management (to use Bolshevik terminology). Does our poetic lifestyler really have so little faith in the competence of ordinary people? Doubtless workers, technicians, and farmers need someone with higher wisdom–perhaps Watson himself–to specify their appropriate level of technology for them?

Actually, Watson seems to be suffering from a memory lapse. Somewhat later in his book he gives us the very opposite message, notably that “people have the capacity, in fact the duty to make rational and ethical choices about technics” (BB, p. 203). How, then, will they avoid all the “inevitable” and “necessary” obstacles that Watson himself earlier raised? One gets the distinct impression that, no matter what specific issue us under discussion, if I say yea, Watson is certain to say nay–even if it means he must reverse himself on a later occasion.

Primitivism

There is nothing new about the romanticization of tribal peoples. Two centuries ago, denizens of Paris, from Enlighteners such as Denis Diderot to reactionaries like Marie Antoinette, created a cult of “primitivism” that saw tribal people as morally superior to members of European society, who presumably were corrupted by the vices of civilization. This romanticization later infected not only the early nineteenth-century Romantics but thinkers so disparate as Marx and Engels, Jacob Bachofen and Lewis Morgan. These and others who wistfully thought that humanity had exiled itself from a benign, “matriarchal,” caring, and cooperative world to a civilization filled with immoral and egoistic horrors.

The more urbanized and suburbanized bourgeois culture of the 1960s was far from immune to this trend. During the 1960s anthropologists celebrated the “noble savage” in his or her pristine paradise, which more than ever seemed like a refuge, however imaginary, for jaded urban (and suburban) dwellers of the industrial capitalist world. Inhabitants of American cities and suburbs, from San Francisco to New York, were completely enchanted by myths of primal naiveté, particularly members of the youth culture, which stressed the virtues of innocence and passivity and harbored a basic sympathy for “noble savage” anthropology.

This anthropology, contrary to less sanguine views of primitive lifeways, argued that foraging peoples were compelled to work at hunting and food-gathering for only a few hours each day. Wrote anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore:

Even some of the “marginal” hunters studied by ethnographers actually work short hours and exploit abundant food sources. Several hunting peoples lived well on two to four hours of subsistence effort.

Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words… Politics is not statecraft, and citizens [...]]]> This article consists of excerpts from From Urbanization to Cities (1987; London: Cassell, 1995), with revisions.

Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words… Politics is not statecraft, and citizens are not “constituents” or “taxpayers.” Statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of its monopoly of violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus of society in the form of legal and ordinance-making bodies, and its governance of society by means of professional legislators, armies, police forces, and bureaucracies. Statecraft takes on a political patina when so-called “political parties” attempt, in various power plays, to occupy the offices that make state policy and execute it. This kind of “politics” has an almost tedious typicality. A “political party” is normally a structured hierarchy, fleshed out by a membership that functions in a top-down manner. It is a miniature state, and in some countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a party actually constituted the state itself.

The Soviet and Nazi examples of the party qua state were the logical extension of the party into the state. Indeed, every party has its roots in the state, not in the citizenry. The conventional party is hitched to the state like a garment to a mannikin. However varied the garment and its design may be, it is not part of the body politic; it merely drapes it. There is nothing authentically political about this phenomenon: it is meant precisely to contain the body politic, to control it and to manipulate it, not to express its will — or even permit it to develop a will. In no sense is a conventional “political” party derivative of the body politic or constituted by it. Leaving metaphors aside, “political” parties are replications of the state when they are out of power and are often synonymous with the state when they are in power. They are formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus they are as inorganic as the state itself — an excrescence of society that has no real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of faction, power, and mobilization.

Politics, by contrast, is an organic phenomenon. It is organic in the very real sense that it is the activity of a public body — a community, if you will — just as the process of flowering is an organic activity of a plant. Politics, conceived as an activity, involves rational discourse, public empowerment, the exercise of practical reason, and its realization in a shared, indeed participatory, activity. It is the sphere of societal life beyond the family and the personal needs of the individual that still retains the intimacy, involvement, and sense of responsibility enjoyed in private arenas of life. Groups may form to advance specific political views and programs, but these views and programs are no better than their capacity to answer to the needs of an active public body…

By contrast, political movements, in their authentic sense, emerge out of the body politic itself, and although their programs are formulated by theorists, they also emerge from the lived experiences and traditions of the public itself. The populist movements that swept out of agrarian America and tsarist Russia or the anarcho-syndicalist and peasant movements of Spain and Mexico articulated deeply felt, albeit often unconscious, public desires and needs. At their best, genuine political movements bring to consciousness the subterranean aspirations of discontented people and eventually turn this consciousness into political cultures that give coherence to inchoate and formless public desires…

The immediate goal of a libertarian municipalist agenda is not to exercise sudden and massive control by representatives and their bureaucratic agents over the existing economy; its immediate goal is to reopen a public sphere in flat opposition to statism, one that allows for maximum democracy in the literal sense of the term, and to create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally. If this perspective can be initially achieved only by morally empowered assemblies on a limited scale, at least it will be a form of popular power that can, in time, expand locally and grow over wide regions. That its future is unforeseeable does not alter the fact that it development depends upon the growing consciousness of the people, not upon the growing power of the state — and how that consciousness, concretized in high democratic institutions, will develop may be an open issue but it will surely be a political adventure.

… The recovery and development of politics must, I submit, take its point of departure from the citizen and his or her immediate environment beyond the familial and private arenas of life. There can be no politics without community. And by community I mean a municipal association of people reinforced by its own economic power, its own institutionalization of the grass roots, and the confederal support of nearby communities organized into a territorial network on a local and regional scale. Parties that do not intertwine with these grassroots forms of popular organization are not political in the classical sense of the term. In fact, they are bureaucratic and antithetical to the development of a participatory politics and participating citizens. The authentic unit of political life, in effect, is the municipality, whether as a whole, if it is humanly scaled, or in its various subdivisions, notably the neighborhood…

A new political agenda can be a municipal agenda only if we are to take our commitments to democracy seriously. Otherwise we will be entangled with one or another variant of statecraft, a bureaucratic structure that is demonstrably inimicable to a vibrant public life. The living cell that forms the basic unit of political life is the municipality, from which everything — such as citizenship, interdependence, confederation, and freedom — emerges. There is no way to piece together any politics unless we begin with its most elementary forms: the villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities in which people live on the most intimate level of political interdependence beyond private life. It is on this level that they can begin to gain a familiarity with the political process, a process that involves a good deal more than voting and information. It is on this level, too, that they can go beyond the private insularity of family life — a life that is currently celebrated for its inwardness and seclusion — and improvise those public institutions that make for broad community participation and consociation.

In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civic life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and the public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single-issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress to redress social injustices. But protest alone is not enough; indeed, it is usually defined by what protestors oppose, not by the social changes they may wish to institute. To ignore the irreducible civic unit of politics and democracy is to play chess without a chessboard, for it is on this civic plane that the long-range endeavor of social renewal must eventually be played out…

All statist objections aside, the problem of restoring municipal assemblies seems formidable if it is cast in strictly structural and spatial terms. New York City and London have no way of “assembling” if they try to emulate ancient Athens, with its comparatively small citizen body. Both cities, in fact, are no longer cities in the classical sense of the term and hardly rate as municipalities even by nineteenth-century standards of urbanism. Viewed in strictly macroscopic terms, they are sprawling urban belts that suck up millions of people daily from communities at a substantial distance from their commercial centers.

But they are also made up of neighborhoods — that is to say, of smaller communities that have a certain measure of identity, whether defined by a shared cultural heritage, economic interests, a commonality of social views, or even an aesthetic tradition such as Greenwich Village in New York or Camden Town in London. However much their administration as logistical, sanitary, and commercial artifacts requires a high degree of coordination by experts and their aides, they are potentially open to political and, in time, physical decentralization. Popular, even block assemblies can be formed irrespective of the size of a city, provided its cultural components are identified and their uniqueness fostered.

At the same time I should emphasize that the libertarian municipalist (or equivalently, communalist) views I propound here are meant to be a changing and formative perspective — a concept of politics and citizenship to ultimately transform cities and urban megalopolises ethically as well as spatially, and politically as well as economically. Insofar as these views gain public acceptance, they can be expected not only to enlarge their vision and embrace confederations of neighborhoods but also to advance a goal of physically decentralizing urban centers. To the extent that mere electoral “constituents” are transformed by education and experience into active citizens, the issue of humanly scaled communities can hardly be avoided as the “next step” toward a stable and viable form of city life. It would be foolhardy to try to predict in any detail a series of such “next steps” or the pace at which they will occur. Suffice it to say that as a perspective, libertarian municipalism is meant to be an ever-developing, creative, and reconstructive agenda as well as an alternative to the centralized nation-state and to an economy based on profit, competition, and mindless growth.

Minimally then, attempts to initiate assemblies can begin with populations that range anywhere from a modest residential neighborhood to a dozen neighborhoods or more. They can be coordinated by strictly mandated delegates who are rotatable, recallable, and above all, rigorously instructed in written form to either support or oppose whatever issue that appears on the agenda of local confederal councils composed of delegates from several neighborhood assemblies.

There is no mystery involved in this form of organization. The historical evidence for their efficacy and their continual reappearance in times of rapid social change is considerable and persuasive. The Parisian sections of 1793, despite the size of Paris (between 500,000 and 600,000) and the logistical difficulties of the era (a time when nothing moved faster than a horse) functioned with a great deal of success on their own, coordinated by sectional delegates in the Paris Commune. They were notable not only for their effectiveness in dealing with political issues based on a face-to-face democratic structure; they also played a major role in provisioning the city, in preventing the hoarding of food, and in suppressing speculation, supervising the maximum for fixed prices, and carrying out many other complex administrative tasks. Thus, from a minimal standpoint, no city need be considered so large that popular assemblies cannot start, least of all one that has definable neighborhoods that might interlink with each other on ever-broader confederations.

The real difficulty is largely administrative: how to provide for the material amenities of city life, support complex logistical and traffic burdens, or maintain a sanitary environment. This issue is often obscured by a serious confusion between the formulation of policy and its administration. For a community to decide in a participatory manner what specific course of action it should take in dealing with a technical problem does not oblige all its citizens to execute that policy. The decision to build a road, for example, does not mean that everyone must know how to design and construct one. That is a job for engineers, who can offer alternative designs — a very important political function of experts, to be sure, but one whose soundness the people in assembly can be free to decide. To design and construct a road is strictly an administrative responsibility, albeit one that always open to public scrutiny.

If the distinction between policy making and administration is kept clearly in mind, the role of popular assemblies and the people who administer their decisions easily distinguishes logistical problems from political ones, which are ordinarily entangled with each other in discussions on decentralistic politics. Superficially, the assembly system is “referendum” politics: it is based on a “social contract” to share decision making with the population at large, and abide by the rule of the majority in dealing with problems that confront a municipality, a regional confederation of municipalities, or for that matter, a national entity…

That a municipality can be as parochial as a tribe is fairly obvious — and is no less true today than it has been in the past. Hence any municipal movement that is not confederal — that is to say, that does not enter into a network of mutual obligations to towns and cities in its own region — can no more be regarded as a truly political entity in any traditional sense than a neighborhood that does not work with other neighborhoods in the city in which it is located. Confederation — based on shared responsibilities, full accountability of confederal delegates to their communities, the right to recall, and firmly mandated representatives — forms an indispensable part of a new politics. To demand that existing towns and cities replicate the nation-state on a local level is to surrender any commitment to social change as such…

What is confederalism as conceived in the libertarian municipalist framework, and as it would function in a free ecological society? It would above all be a network of councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. These confederal councils would become the means for interlinking villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities into confederal networks. Power thus would flow from the bottom up instead of from the top down, and in confederations the flow of power from the bottom up would diminish with the scope of the federal council, ranging territorially from localities to regions and from regions to ever-broader territorial areas.

The members of these confederal councils would be strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves. The functions of the councils would be purely administrative and practical, unlike representatives in republican systems of government, who have policy-making powers. Indeed, the confederation would make the same distinction that is made on the municipal level, between policy-making and administration. Policy-making would remain exclusively the right of the popular community assemblies based on the practices of participatory democracy. Administration — the coordination and execution of adopted policies — would be the responsibility of the confederal councils. Wherever policy-making slips from the hands of the people, it is devoured by its delegates, who quickly become bureaucrats.

A crucial element in giving reality to confederalism is the interdependence of communities for an authentic mutualism based on shared resources, produce, and policy-making. While a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency is desirable for each locality and region, confederalism is a means for avoiding local parochialism on the one hand and an extravagant national and global division of labor on the other. Unless a community is obliged to count on others generally to satisfy important material needs and realize common political goals, interlinking it to a greater whole, exclusivity and parochialism become a genuine possibilities. Only insofar as confederation is an extension of participatory administration — by means of confederal networks — can decentralization and localism prevent the communities that compose larger bodies of association from parochially withdrawing into themselves at the expense of wider areas of human consociation.

Confederalism is thus a way of perpetuating interdependence among communities and regions — indeed, it is a way of democratizing that interdependence without surrendering the principle of local control. Through confederation, a community can retain its identity and roundedness while participating in a sharing way with the larger whole that makes up a balanced ecological society…

Thus libertarian municipalism is not an effort simply to “take over” city councils to construct a more “environmentally friendly” city government. These adherents — or opponents — of libertarian municipalism, in effect, look at the civic structures that exist before their eyes now and essentially (all rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding) take them as they exist. Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is an effort to transform and democratize city governments, to root them in popular assemblies, to knit them together along confederal lines, to appropriate a regional economy along confederal and municipal lines.

In fact, libertarian municipalism gains its life and its integrity precisely from the dialectical tension it proposes between the nation-state and the municipal confederation. Its “law of life,” to use an old Marxian term, consists precisely in its struggle with the State. Then tension between municipal confederations and the State must be clear and uncompromising. Since these confederations would exist primarily in opposition to statecraft, they cannot be compromised by the State, provincial or national elections, much less achieved by these means. Libertarian municipalism is formed by its struggle with the State, strengthened by this struggle, indeed, defined by this struggle. Divested of this dialectical tension with the State, of this duality of power that must ultimately be actualized in a free “Commune of communes,” libertarian municipalism becomes little more than sewer socialism.

Why is the assembly crucial to self-governance? Is it not enough to use the referendum, as the Swiss do today, and resolve the problem of democratic procedure in a simple and seemingly uncomplicated way? Why can’t policy decisions be made electronically at home — as “Third Wave” enthusiasts have suggested — by “autonomous” individuals, each listening to debates and voting in the privacy of his or her home?

A number of vital issues, involving the nature of citizenship and the recovery of an enhanced classical vision of politics, must be considered in answering these questions. The “autonomous” individual qua “voter” who, in liberal theory, forms the irreducible unit of the referendum process is a fiction. Left to his or her own private destiny in the name of “autonomy” and “independence,” the individual becomes an isolated being whose very freedom is denuded of the living social and political matrix from which his or her individuality acquires its flesh and blood… The notion of independence, which is often confused with independent thinking and freedom, has been so marbled by pure bourgeois egoism that we tend to forget that our individuality depends heavily on community support systems and solidarity. It is not by childishly subordinating ourselves to the community on the one hand or by detaching ourselves from it on the other that we become mature human beings. What distinguishes us as social beings, hopefully with rational institutions, from solitary beings who lack any serious affiliations, is our capacities for solidarity with one another, for mutually enhancing our self-development and creativity and attaining freedom within a socially creative and institutionally rich collectivity.

“Citizenship” apart from community can be as debasing to our political selfhood as “citizenship” in a totalitarian state. In both cases, we are thrust back to the condition of dependence that characterizes infancy and childhood. We are rendered dangerously vulnerable to manipulation, whether by powerful personalities in private life or by the state and by corporations in economic life. In neither case do we attain individuality or community. Both, in fact, are dissolved by removing the communal ground on which genuine individuality depends. Rather, it is interdependence within an institutionally rich and rounded community — which no electronic media can produce — that fleshes out the individual with the rationality, solidarity, sense of justice, and ultimately the reality of freedom that makes for a creative and concerned citizen.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the authentic elements of a rational and free society are communal, not individual. Conceived in more institutional terms, the municipality is not only the basis for a free society; it is the irreducible ground for genuine individuality as well. The significance of the municipality is all the greater because it constitutes the discursive arena in which people can intellectually and emotionally confront one another, indeed, experience one another through dialogue, body language, personal intimacy, and face-to-face modes of expression in the course of making collective decisions. I speak, here, of the all-important process of communizing, of the ongoing intercourse of many levels of life, that makes for solidarity, not only the “neighborliness” so indispensable for truly organic interpersonal relationships.

The referendum, conducted in the privacy of one’s voting booth or, as some “Third Wave” enthusiasts would have it, in the electronic isolation of one’s home, privatizes democracy and thereby subverts it. Voting, like registering one’s preferences for a particular soap or detergent in a opinion poll, is the total quantification of citizenship, politics, individuality, and the very formation of ideas as a mutually informative process. The mere vote reflects a preformulated “percentage” of our perceptions and values, not their full expression. It is the technical debasing of views into mere preferences, of ideals into mere taste, of overall comprehension into quantification such that human aspirations and beliefs can be reduced to numerical digits.

Finally, the “autonomous individual,” lacking any community context, support systems, and organic intercourse, is disengaged from the character-building process — the paideia — that the ancient Athenians assigned to politics as one of its most important educational functions. True citizenship and politics entail the ongoing formation of personality, education, and a growing sense of public responsibility and commitment that render communizing and an active body politic meaningful, indeed that give it existential substance. It is not in the privacy of the school, any more than in the privacy of the voting booth, that these vital personal and political attributes are formed. They require a public presence, embodied by vocal and thinking individuals, a responsive and discursive public sphere, to achieve reality. “Patriotism,” as the etymology of the word indicates, is the nation-state’s conception of the citizen as a child, the obedient creature of the nation-state conceived as a paterfamilias or stern father, who orchestrates belief and commands devotion. To the extent that we are the “sons” and “daughters” of a “fatherland,” we place ourselves in an infantile relationship to the state.

Solidarity or philia, by contrast, implies a sense of commitment. It is created by knowledge, training, experience, and reason — in short, by a political education developed during the course of political participation. Philia is the result of the educational and self-formative process that paedeia is meant to achieve. In the absence of a humanly scaled, comprehensible, and institutionally accessible municipality, this all-important function of politics and its embodiment in citizenship is simply impossible to achieve. In the absence of philia or the means to create it, we gauge “political involvement” by the “percentage” of “voters” who “participate” in the “political process” — a degradation of words that totally denatures their authentic meaning and eviscerates their ethical content…

Be they large or small, the initial assemblies and the movement that seeks to foster them in civic elections remain the only real school for citizenship we have. There is no civic “curriculum” other than a living and creative political realm that can give rise to people who take management of public affairs seriously. What we must clearly do in an era of commodification, rivalry, anomie, and egoism is to consciously create a public sphere that will inculcate the values of humanism, cooperation, community, and public service in the everyday practice of civic life. Grassroots citizenship goes hand in hand with grassroots politics.

The Athenian polis, for all its many shortcomings, offers us remarkable examples of how a high sense of citizenship can be reinforced not only by systematic education but by an etiquette of civic behavior and an artistic culture that adorns ideals of civic service with the realities of civic practice. Deference to opponents in debates, the use of language to achieve consensus, ongoing public discussion in the agora in which even the most prominent of the polis‘s figures were expected to debate public issues with the least known, the use of wealth not only to meet personal needs but to adorn the polis itself (thus placing a high premium on the disaccumulation rather than the accumulation of wealth), a multitude of public festivals, dramas, and satires largely centered on civic affairs and the need to foster civic solidarity — all of these and many other aspects of Athens’s political culture created the civic solidarity and responsibility that made for actively involved citizens with a deep sense of civic mission.

For our part, we can do no less — and hopefully, in time, considerably more. The development of citizenship must become an art, not merely an education — and a creative art in the aesthetic sense that appeals to the deeply human desire for self-expression in a meaningful political community. It must be a personal art in which every citizen is fully aware of the fact that his or her community entrusts its destiny to his or her moral probity and rationality. If the ideological authority of state power and statecraft today rests on the assumption that the “citizen” is an incompetent being, the municipalist conception of citizenship rests on precisely the opposite. Every citizen would be regarded as competent to participate directly in the “affairs of state” — indeed, what is more important, he or she would be encouraged to do so.

Every means would be provided, whether aesthetic or institutional, to foster participation in full as an educative and ethical process that turns the citizen’s latent competence into an actual reality. Social and political life would be consciously orchestrated to foster a profound sensitivity, indeed an active sense of concern for the adjudication of differences without denying the need for vigorous dispute when it is needed. Public service would be seen as a uniquely human attribute, not a “gift” that a citizen confers on the community or an onerous task that he or she must fulfill. Cooperation and civic responsibility would become expressions of acts of sociability and philia, not ordinances that the citizen is expected to honor in the breach and evade where he or she can do so.

Put bluntly and clearly, the municipality would become a theater in which life in its most meaningful public form is the plot, a political drama whose grandeur imparts nobility and grandeur to the citizenry that forms the cast. By contrast, our modern cities have become in large part agglomerations of bedroom apartments in which men and women spiritually wither away and their personalities become trivialized by the petty concerns of amusement, consumption, and small talk.

The last and one of the most intractable problems we face is economic. Today, economic issues tend to center on “who owns what,” “who owns more than whom,” and, above all, how disparities in wealth are to be reconciled with a sense of civic commonality. Nearly all municipalities have been fragmented by differences in economic status, pitting poor, middle, and wealthy classes against each other often to the ruin of municipal freedom itself, as the bloody history of Italy’s medieval and Renaissance cities so clearly demonstrates.

These problems have not disappeared in recent times. Indeed, in many cases they are as severe as they have ever been. But what is unique about our own time — a fact so little understood by many liberals and radicals in North America and Europe — is that entirely new transclass issues have emerged that concern environment, growth, transportation, cultural degradation, and the quality of urban life generally — issues that have been produced by urbanization, not by citification. Cutting across conflicting class interests are such transclass issues as the massive dangers of thermonuclear war, growing state authoritarianism, and ultimately global ecological breakdown. To an extent unparalleled in American history, an enormous variety of citizens’ groups have brought people of all class backgrounds into common projects around problems, often very local in character, that concern the destiny and welfare of their community as a whole.

Issues such as the siting of nuclear reactors or nuclear waste dumps, the dangers of acid rain, and the presence of toxic dumps, to cite only a few of the many problems that beleaguer innumerable American and British municipalities, have united an astonishing variety of people into movements with shared concerns that render a ritualistic class analysis of their motives a matter of secondary importance. Carried still further, the absorption of small communities by larger ones, of cities by urban belts, and urban belts by “standard metropolitan statistical areas” or conurbations has given rise to militant demands for communal integrity and self-government, an issue that surmounts strictly class and economic interests. The literature on the emergence of these transclass movements, so secondary to internecine struggles within cities of earlier times, is so immense that to merely list the sources would require a sizable volume.

I have given this brief overview of an emerging general social interest over old particularistic interests to demonstrate that a new politics could easily come into being — indeed one that would be concerned not only with restructuring the political landscape on a municipal level but the economic landscape as well. The old debates between “private property” and “nationalized property,” are becoming threadbare. Not that these different kinds of ownership and the forms of exploitation they imply have disappeared; rather, they are being increasingly overshadowed by new realities and concerns. Private property, in the traditional sense, with its case for perpetuating the citizen as an economically self-sufficient and politically self-empowered individual, is fading away. It is disappearing not because “creeping socialism” is devouring “free enterprise” but because “creeping corporatism” is devouring everyone — ironically, in the name of “free enterprise.” The Greek ideal of the politically sovereign citizen who can make a rational judgment in public affairs because he is free from material need or clientage has been reduced to a mockery. The oligarchical character of economic life threatens democracy, such as it is, not only on a national level but also on a municipal level, where it still preserves a certain degree of intimacy and leeway.

We come here to a breakthrough approach to a municipalist economics that innovatively dissolves the mystical aura surrounding corporatized property and nationalized property, indeed workplace elitism and “workplace democracy.” I refer to the municipalization of property, as opposed to its corporatization or its nationalization… Libertarian municipalism proposes that land and enterprises be placed increasingly in the custody of the community — more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils… In such a municipal economy — confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not simply technological, standards — we would expect that the special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers, and the like would be melded into a general interest in which people see themselves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of their community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, citizenship would come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests.

As for the workplace, public democracy would be substituted for the traditional images of productive management and operation, “economic democracy” and “economic collectivization.” Significantly, “economic democracy” in the workplace is no longer incompatible with a corporatized or nationalized economy. Quite to the contrary: the effective use of “workers’ participation” in production, even the outright handing over of industrial operations to the workers who perform them, has become another form of time-studied, assembly-line rationalization, another systematic abuse of labor, by bringing labor itself into complicity with its own exploitation.

Many workers, in fact, would like to get away from their workplaces and find more creative types of work, not simply participate in planning their own misery. What “economic democracy” meant in its profoundest sense was free, democratic access to the means of life, the guarantee of freedom from material want — not simply the involvement of workers in onerous productive activities that could better be turned over to machines. It is a blatant bourgeois trick, in which many radicals unknowingly participate, that “economic democracy” has been reinterpreted to mean “employee ownership” or that “workplace democracy” has come to mean workers’ “participation” in industrial management rather than freedom from the tyranny of the factory, rationalized labor, and planned production.

A municipal politics, based on communalist principles, scores a significant advance over all of these conceptions by calling for the municipalization of the economy — and its management by the community as part of a politics of self-management. Syndicalist demands for the “collectivization” of industry and “workers’ control” of individual industrial units are based on contractual and exchange relationships between all collectivized enterprises, thereby indirectly reprivatizing the economy and opening it to traditional forms of private property — even if each enterprise is collectively owned. By contrast, libertarian municipalism literally politicizes the economy by dissolving economic decision-making into the civic domain. Neither factory nor land becomes a separate or potentially competitive unit within a seemingly communal collective.

Nor do workers, farmers, technicians, engineers, professionals, and the like perpetuate their vocational identities as separate interests that exist apart from the citizen body in face-to-face assemblies. “Property” is integrated into the municipality as the material component of a civic framework, indeed as part of a larger whole that is controlled by the citizen body in assembly as citizens — not as workers, farmers, professionals, or any other vocationally oriented special-interest groups.

What is equally important, the famous “contradiction” or “antagonism” between town and country, so crucial in social theory and history, is transcended by the township, the traditional New England jurisdiction, in which an urban entity is the nucleus of its agricultural and village environs — not a domineering urban entity that stands opposed to them. A township, in effect, is a small region within still larger ones, such as the county and larger political jurisdictions.

So conceived, the municipalization of the economy should be distinguished not only from corporatization but also from seemingly more “radical” demands such as nationalization and collectivization. Nationalization of the economy invariably has led to bureaucratic and top-down economic control; collectivization, in turn, could easily lead to a privatized economy in a collectivized form with the perpetuation of class or caste identities. By contrast, municipalization would bring the economy as a whole into the orbit of the public sphere, where economic policy could be formulated by the entire community — notably its citizens in face-to-face relationships working to achieve a general interest that surmounts separate, vocationally defined specific interests. The economy would cease to be merely an economy in the conventional sense of the term, composed of capitalistic, nationalized, or “worker-controlled” enterprises. It would become the economy of the polis or the municipality. The municipality, more precisely, the citizen body in face-to-face assembly, would absorb the economy into its public business, divesting it of a separate identity that can become privatized into a self-serving enterprise.

… The municipalization of the economy would not only absorb the vocational differences that could militate against a publicly controlled economy; it would also absorb the material means of life into communal forms of distribution. “From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs” — the famous demand of various nineteenth-century socialisms — would be institutionalized as part of the public sphere. This traditional maxim, which is meant to assure that people will have access to the means of life irrespective of the work they are capable of performing, would cease to be merely a precarious credo: it would become a practice, a way of functioning politically — one that is structurally built into the community as a way of existing as a political entity.

Moreover, the enormous growth of the productive forces, rationally and ecologically employed for social rather than private ends, has rendered the age-old problem of material scarcity a moot issue. Potentially, all the basic means for living in comfort and security are available to the populations of the world, notwithstanding the dire — and often fallacious — claims of present-day misanthropes and antihumanists such as Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and regrettably, advocates of “simple living,” who can barely be parted from their computers even as they deride technological developments of almost any kind. It is easily forgotten that only a few generations ago, famine was no less a plague than deadly infectious diseases like the Black Death, and that the life-span of most people at the turn of the last century in the United States and Europe seldom reached fifty years of age.

No community can hope to achieve economic autarky, nor should it try to do so. Economically, the wide range of resources that are needed to make many of our widely used goods preclude self-enclosed insularity and parochialism. Far from being a liability, this interdependence among communities and regions can well be regarded as an asset — culturally as well as politically. Interdependence among communities is no less important than interdependence among individuals. Divested of the cultural cross-fertilization that is often a product of economic intercourse, the municipality tends to shrink into itself and disappear into its own civic privatism. Shared needs and resources imply the existence of sharing and, with sharing, communication, rejuvenation by new ideas, and a wider social horizon that yields a wider sensibility to new experiences.

The recent emphasis in environmental theory on “self-sufficiency,” if it does not mean a greater degree of prudence in dealing with material resources, is regressive. Localism should never be interpreted to mean parochialism; nor should decentralism ever be interpreted to mean that smallness is a virtue in itself. Small is not necessarily beautiful. The concept of human scale, by far the more preferable expression for a truly ecological policy, is meant to make it possible for people to completely grasp their political environment, not to parochially bury themselves in it to the exclusion of cultural stimuli from outside their community’s boundaries.

Given these coordinates, it is possible to envision a new political culture with a new revival of citizenship, popular civic institutions, a new kind of economy, and a countervailing dual power, confederally networked, that could arrest and hopefully reverse the growing centralization of the state and corporate enterprises. Moreover, it is also possible to envision an eminently practical point of departure for going beyond the town and city as we have known them up to now and for developing future forms of habitation as communities that seek to achieve a new harmonization between people and between humanity and the natural world. I have emphasized its practicality because it is now clear that any attempt to tailor a human community to a natural “ecosystem” in which it is located cuts completely against the grain of centralized power, be it state or corporate. Centralized power invariably reproduces itself in centralized forms at all levels of social, political, and economic life. It not only is big; it thinks big. Indeed, this way of being and thinking is a condition for its survival, not only its growth.

As for the technological bases for decentralized communities, we are now witnessing a revolution that would have seemed hopelessly utopian only a few decades ago. Until recently, smaller-scale ecotechnologies were used mainly by individuals, and their efficiency barely compared with that of conventional energy sources, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power plants. This situation has changed dramatically in the past fifteen to twenty years. In the United States, wind turbines have been developed and are currently in use that generate electric power at a cost of 7 to 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 20 cents only a decade earlier. This figure is very close to the 4-to-6-cent cost of power plants fueled by natural gas or coal. These comparisons, which can be expected to improve in favor of wind power in the years to come, have fostered the expansion of this nonfossil-fuel source throughout the entire world, particularly in India, where there has been “a major wind boom” in 1994, according to the Worldwatch Institute.1

A similar “boom” seems to be in the making in a variety of solar power devices. New solar collectors have been designed that increasingly approximate the costs of conventional energy sources, particularly in heating water for domestic uses. Photovoltaic cells, in which silicon is used to convert solar energy into electrons, have been developed to a point where “thousands of villagers in the developing world [are] using photovoltaic cells to power lights, televisions, and water pumps, needs that are otherwise met with kerosene lamps, lead-acid batteries, or diesel engines.” In fact, more than 200,000 homes in Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, and some 2,000 in the Dominican Republic have been “solarized,” probably with a good many more to come.2 It can be said with reasonable confidence that this increasingly sophisticated technology will become one of the most important — if not the most important — sources of electrical energy in the years to come, yet one that is eminently suitable for humanly scaled communities.

To view technological advances as intrinsically harmful, particularly nonpolluting sources of energy and automated machinery that can free human beings of mindless toil in a rational society, is as shortsighted as it is arrogant. Understandably, people today will not accept a diet of pious moral platitudes that call for “simple means” that presumably will give them “rich ends,” whatever these may be, especially if these platitudes are delivered by well-paid academics and privileged Euro-Americans who have no serious quarrel with the present social order apart from whether it affords them access to “wilderness” theme parks.

For the majority of humanity, toil and needless shortages of food are an everyday reality. To expect them to become active citizens in a vital political, ecologically oriented community while engaging in arduous work for most of their lives, often on empty bellies, is an unfeeling middle-class presumption. Unless they can enjoy a decent sufficiency in the means of life and freedom from mindless, often involuntary toil, it is the height of arrogance to degrade their humanity by calling them “mouths,” as many demographers do, or “consumers,” as certain very comfortable environmentalists do.

Indeed, it is the height of elitism and privilege to deny them the opportunity and the means for choosing the kind of lifeways they want to pursue. Nor have the well-to-do strata of Euro-American society deprived themselves of that very freedom of choice — a choice, in fact, that they take for granted as a matter of course. Without fostering promising advances in technology that can free humanity as a whole from its subservience to the present, irrational — and, let me emphasize, anti-ecological — social order, we will almost certainly never achieve the free society whose existence is a precondition for harmony between human and human and between humanity and the natural world.

Which is not to say that we can ignore the need for a visionary ethical ideal. Ironically, it has been the Right’s shrewd emphasis on ethics and matters of spirit in an increasingly meaningless world that has given it a considerable edge over the forces of progress. Nazism achieved much of its success among the German people a half century ago not because of any economic panaceas it offered but because of its mythic ideal of nationhood, community, and moral regeneration. In recent times, reactionary movements in America have won millions to their cause on such values as the integrity of the family, religious belief, the renewal of patriotism, and the right to life — a message, I may add, that has been construed not only as a justification for anti-abortion legislation but as a hypostatization of the individual’s sacredness, unborn as well as born.

Characteristically, liberal and radical causes are still mired in exclusively economistic and productivistic approaches to political issues. Their moral message, once a heightened plea for social justice, has given way increasingly to strictly material demands. Far more than the Right, which practices egoism and class war against the poor even as it emphasizes community virtues, the political middle ground and the Left take up the eminently practical issue of bread on the table and money in the bank but offer few values that are socially inspirational. Having emphasized the need to resolve the problems of material scarcity, it is equally necessary to emphasize the need to address the moral emptiness that a market society produces among large numbers of people today.

Morality and ethics, let me add, cannot be reduced to mere rhetoric to match the claims of reactionaries but must be the felt spiritual underpinnings of a new social outlook. They must be viewed not as a patronizing sermon but as a living practice that people can incorporate into their personal lives and their communities. The vacuity and triviality of life today must be replaced precisely by radical ideals of solidarity and freedom that sustain the human side of life as well as its material side, or else the ideals by which a rational future should be guided will disappear in the commodity-oriented world we call the “marketplace of ideas.”

The most indecent aspect of this “marketplace” is that ideals tend to become artifacts — mere commodities — that lack even the value of the material things we need to sustain us. They become the ideological ornaments to garnish an inherently antihuman and anti-ecological society, one that threatens to undermine moral integrity as such and the simple social amenities that foster human intercourse.

Thus a municipal agenda that is meant to countervail urbanization and the nation-state must be more than a mere electoral platform, such as we expect from conventional parties. It must also be a message, comparable to the great manifestos advanced by various socialist movements in the last century, which called for moral as well as material and institutional reconstruction. Today’s electoral platforms, whether “green” or “red,” radical or liberal, are generally shopping lists of demands, precisely suited for that “marketplace of ideas” we have misnamed “politics.”

Nor can a municipal agenda be a means for effacing serious differences in outlook. The need for thinking out ideas and struggling vigorously to give them coherence, which alone renders an agenda for a new municipal politics intelligible, is often sacrificed to ideological confusion in the name of achieving a specious “unity.” A cranky pluralism is replacing an appreciation of focused thinking; a shallow relativism is replacing a sense of continuity and meaningful values; a confused eclecticism is replacing wholeness, clarity, and consistency. Many promising movements for basic social change in the recent past were plagued by a pluralism in which totally contradictory views were never worked out or followed to their logical conclusions, a problem that has grown even worse today due to the cultural illiteracy that plagues contemporary society… .

A serious political movement that seeks to advance a libertarian municipalist agenda, in turn, must be patient — just as the Russian populists of the last century (one of whom is cited in the dedication to this book) were. The 1960s upsurge, with all its generous ideals, fell apart because young radicals demanded immediate gratification and sensational successes. The protracted efforts that are so direly needed for building a serious movement — perhaps one whose goals cannot be realized within a single lifetime — were woefully absent. Many of the radicals of thirty years ago, burning with fervor for fundamental change, have since withdrawn into the university system they once denounced, the parliamentary positions they formerly disdained, and the business enterprises they furiously attacked.

A libertarian municipalist movement, in particular, would not — and should not — achieve sudden success and wide public accolades. The present period of political malaise at best and outright reaction at worst renders any sensational successes impossible. If such a libertarian municipalist movement runs candidate for municipal councils with demands for the institution of public assemblies, it will more likely lose electoral races today rather than win even slight successes. Depending upon the political climate at any give time or place, years may pass before it wins even the most modest success.

In any very real sense, however, this protracted development is a desideratum. With rapid success, many naïve members of a municipal electorate expect rapid changes — which no minority, however substantial, can ever hope to achieve at once. For an unpredictable amount of time, electoral activity will primarily be an educational activity, an endeavor to enter the public sphere, however small and contained it may be on the local level, and to educate and interact with ever larger numbers of people.

Even where a measure of electoral success on the local level can be achieved, the prospect of implementing a radically democratic policy is likely to be obstructed by the opposition of the nation-state and the weak position of municipalities in modern “democratic” nation-states. Although it is highly doubtful that even civic authorities would allow a neighborhood assembly to acquire the legal power to make civic policy, still less state and national authorities, let me emphasize that assemblies that have no legal power can exercise enormous moral power. A popular assembly that sternly voices its views on many issues can cause considerable disquiet among local authorities and generate a widespread public reaction in its favor over a large region, indeed even on a national scale.

An interesting case in point is the nuclear freeze resolution that was adopted by more than a hundred town meetings in Vermont a decade ago. Not only did this resolution resonate throughout the entire United States, leading to ad hoc “town meetings” in regions of the country that had never seen them, it affected national policy on this issue and culminated in a demonstration of approximately a million people in New York City. Yet none of the town meetings had the “legal” authority to enforce a nuclear freeze, nor did the issue fall within the purview of a typical New England town meeting’s agenda. Historically, in fact, few civic projects that resemble libertarian municipalism began with a view toward establishing a radical democracy of any sort.

The forty-eight Parisian sections of 1793 actually derived from the sixty Parisian electoral districts of 1789. These districts were initially established through a complicated process (deliberately designed to exclude the poorer people of Paris) to choose the Parisian members of the Third Estate when the king convoked the Estates General at Versailles. Thereafter the districts, having chosen their deputies, were expected to disband. In fact, the sixty districts refused to desist from meeting regularly, despite their lack of legal status, and a year later became an integral part of the city’s government. With the radicalization of the French Revolution, the fearful city and national authorities tried to weaken the power of the districts by reducing their number of forty-eight — hence, the mutation of the old districts into sections. Finally, the sections opened their doors to everyone, some including women, without any property or status qualifications. This most radical of civic structures, which produced the most democratic assemblies theretofore seen in history, thus slowly elbowed its way into authority, initially without any legal authority whatever and in flat defiance of the nation-state. For all their limitations, the Parisian sections remain an abiding example of how a seemingly nonlegal assembly system can be transformed into a network of revolutionary popular institutions around which a new society can be structured…

What is of immense practical importance is that prestatist institutions, traditions, and sentiments remain alive in varying degrees throughout most of the world. Resistance to the encroachment of oppressive states has been nourished by village, neighborhood, and town community networks, witness such struggles in South Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The tremors that are now shaking Soviet Russia are due not solely to demands for greater freedom but to movements for regional and local autonomy that challenge its very existence as a centralized nation-state. To ignore the communal basis of this movement would be as myopic as to ignore the latent instability of every nation-state; worse would be to take the nation-state as it is for granted and deal with it merely on its own terms. Indeed, whether a state remains “more” of a state or “less” — no trifling matter to radical theorists as disparate as Bakunin and Marx — depends heavily upon the power of local, confederal, and community movements to countervail it and hopefully to establish a dual power that will replace it. The major role that the Madrid Citizens’ Movement played nearly three decades ago in weakening the Franco regime would require a major study to do it justice.

The problem of dealing with the growing power of nation-states and of centralized corporations, property ownership, production, and the like is precisely a question of power — that is to say, who shall have it or who shall be denied any power at all. Michel Foucault has done our age no service by making power an evil as such. Foucauldian postmodernist views notwithstanding, the broad mass of people in the world today lack what they need most — the power to challenge the nation-state and arrest the centralization of economic resources, lest future generations see all the gains of humanity dissipated and freedom disappear from social discourse.

Minimally, if power is to be socially redistributed so that the ordinary people who do the real work of the world can effectively speak back to those run social and economic affairs, a movement is vitally needed to educate, mobilize, and, using the wisdom of ordinary and extraordinary people alike, initiate local steps to regain power in its most popular and democratic forms. Power of this kind must be collected, if we are to take democracy seriously, in newly developed institutions such as assemblies that allow for the direct participation of citizens in public affairs. Without a movement to work toward such a democratic end, including educators who are prepared, in turn, to be educated, and intellectually sophisticated people who can develop and popularize this project, efforts to challenge power as it is now constituted will simply sputter out in escapades, riots, adventures, and protests…

Power that is not retained by the people is power that is given over to the state. Conversely, whatever power the people gain is power that must be taken away from the state. There can be no institutional vacuum where power exists: it is either invested in the people or it is invested in the state. Where the two “share” power, this condition is extremely precarious and often temporary. Sooner or later, the control of society and its destiny will either shift toward the people and their communities at its base or toward the professional practitioners of statecraft at its summit. Only if the whole existing pyramidal social structure is dismembered and radically democratized will the issue of domination as such disappear and be completely replaced by participation and the principle of complementarity.

Power, however, must be conceived as real, indeed solid and tangible, not only as spiritual and psychological. To ignore the fact that power is a muscular fact of life is to drift from the visionary into the ethereal and mislead the public as to its crucial significance in affecting society’s destiny.

What this means is that if power is to be regained by the people from the state, the management of society must be deprofessionalized as much as possible. That is to say, it must be simplified and rendered transparent, indeed, clear, accessible, and manageable such that most of its affairs can be run by ordinary citizens. This emphasis on amateurism as distinguished from professionalism is not new. It formed the basis of Athenian democratic practice for generations. Indeed, it was so ably practiced that sortition rather than election formed the basis of the polis‘s democracy. It resurfaced repeatedly, for example, in early medieval city charters and confederations, and in the great democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century.

Power is also a solid and tangible fact to be reckoned with militarily, notably in the ubiquitous truth that the power of the state or the people eventually reposes in force. Whether the state has power ultimately depends upon whether it exercises a monopoly of violence. By the same token, whether the people have power ultimately depend upon whether they are armed and create their own grassroots militia, to guard not only themselves from criminals or invaders but their own power and freedom from the ever-encroaching