Murray Bookchin
Anarchism: Past and Present
Note: This piece appeared as Vol. 1, No. 6 of Comment: New Perspectives in
Libertarian Thought, edited by Murray Bookchin.
Anarchism: Past and Present
Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the Critical
Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles on May 29, 1980.
My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme importance today of viewing
Anarchism in terms of the changing social contexts of our era - - not as an
ossified doctrine that belongs to one or another set of European thinkers,
valuable as their views may have been in their various times and places. Today,
more than ever, the viability of Anarchism in America will depend upon its
ability to speak directly -- in the language of the American people and to
living problems of the American people -- rather than to resurrect ideas,
expressions, slogans and a weary vernacular that belong to eras past. This is
not to deny the internationalist spirit of Anarchism or its historical
continuity, but rather to stress the need to solidarize with libertarian
traditions and concepts that are clearly relevant to dominated peoples in the
areas -- conceived in terms of place, time, and forms -- in which libertarian
movements function.
There is a grave danger that Anarchism may be dealt with simplistically,
the way we deal with most radical "isms" today -- as a fixed body of theory and
practice that so often reduces Socialism to the textual works of Marx and Engels
and their acolytes. I do not mean to deny the generic meaning of terms like
"Socialism. " There are many types of Socialisms ranging from the utopian to the
Leninist, from the ethical to the scientific. I simply wish to stake out the
same claim for Anarchism. We must always remember that there are also many forms
of Anarchism, notably anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-individualism,
anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, and, amusingly enough,
anarcho-Bolshevism if I read the history of the Spanish Anarchist movement
correctly. These Anarchist theories and movements have been burdened by all the
intramural conflicts we encounter between Socialists, albeit in a less bloody
and lethal form.
What really concerns me with the wide range of Anarchisms, however, goes
well beyond the generic character of the term. I cannot stress strongly enough
that Anarchism not only encompasses a wide variety of theories and movements but
more importantly it has a very rich historical genesis and development. This is
crucial to an understanding of what I have to say. More so than any radical
movement with which we are familiar, Anarchism is a profoundly social movement
as distinguished from the usual political movements we associate with The Left.
Its vitality, its theoretical form, indeed its very raison d'etre stem from its
capacity to express the millenia-long aspirations of peoples to create their own
egalitarian or, at least, self-administered social structures, their own forms
of human consociation by which they can exercise control over their lives. In
this sense, Anarchism really constitutes a folk or people's social philosophy
and practice in the richest sense of the term, just as the folk song constitutes
the emotional expression of a people in their esthetic or spiritual depths. The
Hellenic origins of the terms anarche or "no rule" should not deceive us into
thinking that it can be readily placed in the academic spectrum of social ideas.
Historically, Anarchism has found expression in non-authoritarian clans, tribes
and tribal federations, in the democratic institutions of the Athenian polis, in
the early medieval communes, in the radical Puritan congregations of the English
Revolution, in the democratic town meetings that spread from Boston to
Charleston after 1760, in the Paris Commune of 1871, the soviets of 1905 and
1917, the Anarchist pueblos, barrios, and worker-controlled shops of the Spanish
Revolution of 1936 -- in short, in the self-directed, early and contemporary,
social forms of humanity that have institutionally involved people in
face-to-face relations based on direct democracy, self-management, active
citizenship, and personal. participation.1 It is within this electric public
sphere that the Anarchist credo of direct action finds its real actualization.
Indeed, direct action not only means the occupation of a nuclear power plant
site but less dramatic, often prosaic, and tedious forms of self-management that
involve patience, commitment to democratic procedures, lengthy discourse, and a
decent respect for the opinions of others within the same community.
This institutional framework and sensibility is the authentic mileau of
Anarchism, its very protoplasm. The theories that emerge from the activity of
this protoplasm are the forms of self-reflexive rationality that give it
coherence and consciousness. To my thinking, the "Digger" Winstanley, the Enrage
Varlat, the artisan Proudhon, the worker Pelloutier, and the Russian
intellectuals Bakunin and Kropotkin voice at various levels of consciousness
different, often clearly delineable, phases of humanity's organic evolution
toward freedom. One can often associate these individuals or the ideas they
developed with the actual development of the popular social forms from which
they emerged or to which they gave ideological coherence. Thus one can
justifiably associate Winstanley's ideas with the agrarian Anarchism of the
yeoman communities in seventeenth-century England, Varlat with the urban
neighborhood Anarchism of the revolutionary sections and Enrage movement of
Paris in 1793, Proudhon with the artisan Anarchism of craftspeople in
pre-industrial France, Bakunin's anarcho-collectivism with the peasant villages
of Russia and Spain, Pelloutier's anarcho-syndicalism, with the industrial
proletariat and emerging factory system and, perhaps most prophetically,
Kropotkin's anarcho-communism with our own era, a body of theory that readily
lends itself to the ecological, decentralist, technological, and urban issues
that have come to the foreground of social life today.
The anti-statist and anti-political views of these Anarchist thinkers
should not obscure the positive content of their views and their roots. The
Marxian notion that human "socialization" reaches its most advanced historical
form with bourgeois society -- a society that strips humanity of its remaining
biosocial trappings -- would have been emphatically rejected by these Anarchists
if only on the intuitive grounds that society can never be totally denatured. As
I have argued elsewhere (see my "Beyond Neo-Marxism" in Telos, No. 36), society
never frees itself of its natural matrix, even in the internal relations between
individuals. The actual issue, if one is to learn from the ecological problems
of our time, is the nature of that nature in which society is rooted -- organic
(as was the case in many precapitalist communities) or inorganic (as is the case
in market society). The clan, tribe, polis, medieval commune, even the Parisian
sections, the Commune, certainly the village and decentralized towns of the
past, were rooted in bio-social relations. Market society with its atomization,
competition, total objectification of the individual and her or his labor-power
-- not to speak of the bureaucratic sinews that hold this lifeless structure
together, the concrete, steel, and glass cities and suburbs that provide its
environments, and quantification that permeates every aspect of its activity --
all of these not only deny life in the biological and organic sense but reduce
it to its molecular components in the physical and inorganic sense. Bourgeois
society does not achieve society's domination of nature; rather, it literally
desocializes society by making it an object to be appropriated by inorganic
nature, by the bourgeois in his inner being and his social being. The
bureaucracy colonizes the social institutions of humanity; the concrete city,
the organic relations of nature; cybernetics and the mass media, the
individual's personality; in short, market "society" colonizes every aspect of
personal and social life.
I cannot emphasize too strongly the umbilical cord that unites organic
societies, in the sense and with the qualifications I have described them, with
Anarchist theories and movements. Nor can I desist from noting the extent to
which Marxism, by contrast, is linked to the most inorganic of all human
structures, the state -- and at other layers of hierarchy, with that most
inorganic of all oppressed classes, the proletariat and such institutionalized
forms of centralized power as the factory, the party, and the bureaucracy. That
the very "universality" of the proletariat that Marx celebrates in the form of
its dehumanization by capital, its association with a technological framework
based on centralization, domination, and rationalization which presumably render
it into a revolutionary force reveals the extent to which Marx's own theoretical
corpus is rooted in bourgeois ideology in its least self-reflexive form. For
this "universality" as we can now see celebrates the "hollowing out" of society
itself, its increasing vulnerability to bureaucratic manipulation in industry
and politics by capital and trade unions. "Schooled" by the nuclear family, by
vocational supervisors, by the hierarchical factory structure, and by the
division of labor, the "universality" of the proletariat turns out to be the
faceleseness of the proletariat -- its expression not of the general interests
of humanity in its progress toward socialism but ...
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