Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (122 page)

Bookchin believes that an ecological community would overcome the existing contradictions between town and country, work and play, mind and body, individual and society, humanity and nature. It would realize the Greek ideal of the rounded and complete person and social life would fall into ‘a well balanced, harmonious whole’.
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Such a society would take up the legacy of freedom from the past,
especially the commitment of traditional societies to usufruct, complementarity, the equality of unequals, and the irreducible minimum. It would go beyond the claims of existing class society to private property, the sanctity of contract, and its adherence to the rules of equivalence. It would also develop the Renaissance sense of universal humanity and the modern emphasis on individual autonomy, without the loss of strong communal ties enjoyed by earlier organic societies. Above all, it would replace domination and hierarchy by interdependence and mutual aid.

In order to achieve a free and ecological society, Bookchin refuses to separate the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal; only libertarian means can achieve libertarian ends. The revolution must therefore not aim at the seizure of power but its dissolution. While he defends the anarchist terrorist at the end of the nineteenth century who practised ‘propaganda by the deed’ as imbued with ‘ethical and visionary concepts’, he believes in our own time that a long period of enlightenment will be necessary before the revolutionary project of an ecological society can be realized.

A continual theme in Bookchin’s writings is a critique of authoritarian and proletarian forms of socialism, especially in their Marxist form. While recognizing Marx’s stature as a social thinker, Bookchin argues that Marxism has ceased to be applicable to our time. It was born of an era of scarcity: Marx and Engels saw the need for a State in a transitional period precisely to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Modern technology however has created a new industrial revolution which offers the possibility of material abundance, thereby enabling humanity to pass from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Marxism should therefore be transcended just as Marx transcended Hegelian philosophy. Indeed, Bookchin argues that Marxism is the ideology of capitalism
par excellence
because it focuses on capitalist production without challenging the underlying ‘cultural sensibilities’ that sustain it. Marxism is therefore not only the culmination of the ‘bourgeois Enlightenment’ but also a form of bourgeois sociology.
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Bookchin is particularly critical of ‘scientific’ socialism because its stress on economic factors in determining human affairs leads it to reject ethical goals. Overlooking the early Marx’s concern with self-realization and his critical theory of needs, Bookchin argues that Marx’s later reduction of ethics to natural laws opens the doors to domination as the ‘hidden incubus of the Marxian project’. The theme of domination is latent in Marx’s interpretation of communism, he argues, since the conquest of nature is
given as a necessary precondition for freedom. Nature for Marx is ‘simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility’.
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Bookchin singles out the Marxist ‘myth’ of class for special criticism. In the first place, domination and hierarchy in the form of patriarchy, gerontocracy and even bureaucracy antedate the formation of classes and cannot be subsumed by class rule and economic exploitation. Secondly, Marx’s class analysis which sees the proletariat as the principal agent of revolution is outmoded and incomplete. The industrial working class is no longer the majority of the population and is not becoming increasingly impoverished as Marx prophesied. On the contrary, there is a tendency for classes to decompose into entirely new subcultures which are not strictly economic groups anymore. In these new circumstances, the worker becomes revolutionary not by becoming class-conscious but by undoing his ‘workerness’.
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Indeed, Bookchin considers the workers’ movement to be dead and the most advanced elements are now the drop-out youth, blacks, students, intellectuals and artists — those very
declassé
elements which Marx condemned as the lumpenproletariat.

Bookchin also assails the Marxist ‘myth’ of the Communist Party which struggles for power by means of hierarchy and centralization. Such a project is permeated with hierarchy, sexism and renunciation which do not disappear with the foundation of a ‘worker’s State’ or a planned economy. Even the neo-Marxism of Herbert Marcuse is ‘an exotic flower with a prickly stem’ because it argues that delegated authority and representation are necessary in modern society.
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Bookchin is critical of the syndicalist interpretation of self-management which adopts a narrow economic interpretation of industrial democracy or workers’ control. It is not enough for workers merely to take over the running of a factory; Bakunin, Bookchin reminds us, agreed with Engels that the traditional factory is inherently authoritarian. It is necessary to recognize the ethical context of technology and to transform the factory so that self-management is recast in the ‘industrial management of self and work becomes ‘meaningful self-expression’.
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The way forward is not therefore to seize power as the authoritarian socialists propose. Power not only corrupts but it destroys. The only act of power excusable in a popular revolution is to dissolve power as far as possible. This would involve the ‘re-empowerment’ of the individual to shape his or her life. Above all, it is essential that the revolutionary process is not separated from the revolutionary goal:
’A society based on self-administration must be achieved by self-administration.’
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The revolutionary process must aim at the formation of popular assemblies and communities which will involve all members of the community and enable them to act as individuals.

Bookchin proposes the ‘affinity group’ as a cell of the new society. Translated from the Spanish
grupo de afinidad
, a term used earlier this century by the Spanish anarchists for their form of organization, Bookchin defines it as ‘a collective of intimate friends who are no less concerned with their human relationships than with their social goals’. Indeed, it is a ‘new type of extended family in which kinship ties are replaced by deeply empathetic relationships’.
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Such a group overcomes the split between the psyche and the social world, and is based on voluntarism and self-discipline, not coercion or command. It should affirm not only the rational, but also the joyous, the sensuous, and the aesthetic side of the revolution.

Affinity groups should only act as catalysts and not take a vanguard or leadership role. While remaining autonomous and local, they can federate by means of local, regional and national assemblies. Bookchin does not deny the need for co-ordination and planning, but insists that they should be achieved voluntarily through assemblies and conferences of the organs of self-management. Anarchist praxis thus emphasizes direct action, in which people become aware of themselves as individuals who can affect their own destiny, have control over their everyday life, and make each day as joyous and marvellous as possible. It also leaves room for spontaneity which releases ‘the inner forces of development to find their authentic order and stability’.
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Spontaneity has a special meaning in Bookchin’s writings and does not preclude organization and structure. It might be free of external constraint, but it is not mere impulse: ‘It is self-controlled,
internally
controlled, behaviour, feeling and
thought
, not an uncontrolled effluvium of passion and action.’ Bookchin stresses that self-control is an active form of selfhood in which the self is formed by ‘the light of spirit, reason, and solidarity’.
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As such, it creates its own liberated forms of organization.

Revolution for Bookchin is important not only because it tries to overthrow the established order but also because it subverts the kind of mentality it breeds. It is a ‘magic moment’ which should become a festival in the streets. In its purest form, the ‘dialectic’ of revolution is ‘a gentle transcendence that finds its most human expression in art and play’.
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Despite its profound libertarian sensibility and Utopian vision, there are still some authoritarian elements in Bookchin’s vision of social ecology. For all his celebration of a harmonious relationship with nature, he is silent about other species. Indeed, the conditions for the kind of material abundance he contemplates would seem to presuppose the continued exploitation and
enslavement of other species. Every attempt, he says, will be made to ‘use’ animals ‘rationally and humanistically’ in the best anthropocentric way. Animals with distinct and complex patterns of behaviour are neutralised into ‘livestock’. Again, Bookchin’s eco-farms are synthetic environments; he waxes lyrically about the ‘augermatic feeding of livestock … in feed pens’, without recognizing that such pens are very similar to prisons and deny the claim of every being to free movement.
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It comes as no surprise to learn that Bookchin should find a place for hunting as well as ‘stock-raising’ and ‘aquaculture’ in his ‘ecotopia’. Bookchin laments our alienation from nature, by which we lose part of ourselves as feeling beings, but he would still appear to be a victim of the process.

Bookchin rightly points out that the very concept of rights is becoming suspect as the expression of a patronizing elite. But while he might be sound about eradicating human privileges, he has nothing to say about animal rights. Indeed, he ridicules the reasonable contention of the ecologists Devall and Sessions that ‘we have no right to destroy other living beings without sufficient reason’. Bookchin would like to see an end to domination of man by man and nature by man, but is ready to accept the continued domination of animals by man. Unaware of the complex family life of pigs and the danger of imposing human values on animal behaviour, he can still write belligerently: ‘The very troughs that turned men into swine, however, contain the nutrients for armoring men against swinishness.’
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Again, Bookchin’s interventionist ethics in nature would seem to go too far. He rails against the ‘biocentric’ ethics of the ‘deep ecologists’ who argue that all creatures have intrinsic worth by calling them anti-humanist. Bookchin is certainly a humanist, and on occasion an arrogant one. He calls for active human stewardship of the rest of the creation and is still sufficiently Marxist to insist that ‘Our re-entry into natural evolution is no less a humanization of nature than a naturalization of humanity.’
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The intervention in nature he recommends would involve ‘consciously abetting the thrust of natural evolution toward a more diversified, varied, and fecund biosphere’.
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Indeed, his humanist arrogance leads him to think that it is possible to create a ‘
free
nature’, a synthesis of first and second nature in which an emancipated humanity will become ‘the voice, indeed the expression, of a natural evolution rendered self-conscious, caring, sympathetic to the pain, suffering, and incoherent aspects of an evolution left to its own, often wayward, unfolding’.
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Like Marx and other humanists before him, Bookchin insists that humanity must be an
active
agent in the world, ordering nature into a more coherent form.

In Bookchin’s teleological world, it is not clear who decides what exactly the ‘thrust’ of evolution is and how it is to be encouraged. Is it up to the ecological ‘experts’ to decide or will it be decided by popular vote? In the
end, Bookchin’s humanism is still somewhat anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, words he does not like but which he cannot avoid. He sees the rest of nature as serving man’s ends and imposes human ideas of freedom, will, choice, consciousness and subjectivity on natural processes. Ultimately, Bookchin’s view of nature, like any metaphysical presupposition, cannot be confirmed or denied. Moreover his ‘ecological image’ of nature is simply that — an image which works as a metaphor.

In his approach to technology, Bookchin argues that new technics can be used in an ecological manner to promote balance in nature, the full development of natural regions, and the creation of organic communities. Technology in his view is also a precondition of a free society by potentially eliminating toil, material insecurity and centralized economic control. In long passages, he describes laboriously the hardware of technology with all the enthusiasm of a technician. ‘The modern tractor’, we are told, ‘is a work of superb mechanical ingenuity’ but he makes no mention of the fact that the introduction of tractors in the Third World has in many places completely destroyed self-sustaining agriculture and its ecosystems.
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He foresees a time when an organized economy could automatically manufacture small ‘packaged’ factories without human labour. He even recommends the use of ‘controlled thermonuclear reactions’.
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The long-term aim of a future revolution should be according to Bookchin ‘to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil’.
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While he nods in favour of crafts (supported of course by technology), he overlooks Tolstoy’s awareness of the dignity and satisfaction of physical labour. He fails to realize that some technology is intrinsically life-denying. He betrays at times the very instrumental mentality in his discussions of technology which he allegedly rejects. Not surprisingly, he denies Jacques Ellul’s argument that modern technology not only affects the ways we think and feel but is inevitably debasing.
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