Murray Bookchin
THE GREENING OF POLITICS: Toward a New Kind of Political Practice
There are two ways to look at the word " politics."
The first -- and most conventional -- is to describe politics as a fairly
exclusive, generally professional ized system of power interactions in which
specialists whom we call "politicians" formulate decisions that affect our lives
and administer these decisions through governmental agencies and bureaucrats.
These "politicians" and their "politics" are generally regarded with a certain
measure of contempt by many Americans. They come to power partly through
"parties," which are highly structured bureaucracies, and profess to "represent"
people -- at times, one person for vast numbers of people such as Congressmen
and Senators. They are "elected" and belong to "the Elect" (to translate an old
religious term into a "political" one), and, in this sense, form a distinct
hierarchical elite however much they profess to "speak" in "the People's" name.
They are not "the People." They are its "representatives" at best, which sets
them apart from the people, and its manipulators at worst, which often sets them
against the people. Quite often, they are very offensive creatures because they
engage in manipulative, immoral, and elitist practices, using mass media and
normally betraying some of their most basic programmatic commitments to "serve"
the people. Rather, they tend to serve special interest groups, usually well-
heeled monied ones, who are likely to advance their careers and material
well-being.
This professionalized, elitist, often immoral, and manipulative system of
"politics," which usually makes a mockery of the democratic processes we
associate with our traditions, is a relatively new political conception. It
arose with the Nation-State several hundred years ago, when the Absolute
monarchs of Europe like Henry VIII in England or Louis XIV in France began to
centralize enormous power in their hands, forming the hierarchical states we
associate with "Government" and carving out those distinct large-scale
jurisdictions we call "nations" from more decentralized jurisdictions such as
free cities, confederations of localities, and a variety of feudal domains.
Before the formation of the Nation-State "politics" had a meaning that was very
different from the one it has today -- and the "powers that be" are doing
everything they can to erase the memory of this meaning from our minds. At its
best, it meant that people at the community level -- in villages, towns,
neighborhoods, and cities - managed the public affairs that have since been
pre-empted by politicians and bureaucrats. They managed these affairs in direct,
face-to-face citizens' assemblies such as we still encounter in New England
town-meetings. At most they elected councils to administer policy decisions
which the citizens formulated in their own assemblies. And the assemblies were
careful to closely supervise the administrative activities of the councils,
recalling "deputies" whose behavior became the object of public disapproval.
Moreover, political life extended beyond citizens' assemblies to include a rich
political culture: daily public discussions in squares, parks, street-corners,
educational institutions, open lectures, clubs, and the like. People discussed
politics wherever they came together, as though they were preparing themselves
for the citizens' assemblies. Politics was a form of education, not
mobilization; its goal was not only formulating decisions but building character
and developing mind. It was a self-formative process in which the citizen body
developed not only a rich sense of cohesion but a rich sense of personal
selfhood -- that indispensable self-development so necessary to foster
self-administration and self- management. Finally, the concept of a political
culture gave rise to civic rituals, festivals, celebrations, and shared
expressions of joy and mourning that provided every locality, be it a village,
town, neighborhood, or city, with a sense of personality and identity, one which
supported individual uniqueness rather than subordinated it to the collective.
Such politics, in effect, was organic and ecological rather than "structural" in
the top-down sense of the word. It was a continual process, not a fixed and
limited "event" such as we encounter on "election days." The citizen developed
personally as a result of his or her political involvement because of the wealth
of discussion and interaction it entailed and the sense of empowerment it
engendered. Citizens correctly believed that they had control over their
destinies and could determine their fate -- not that it was predetermined for
them by people and forces over which they had no control. This feeling was
mutualistic: the political domain reinforced the personal by giving it a sense
of power, and the personal domain reinforced the political by supporting it with
a sense of loyalty. In this reciprocal process, the individual "I" and the
collective "we" were not subordinated to each other, but each nourished the
other. The public sphere provided the collective base and soil for the
development of strong personal characters and the latter united together to form
the contours and domain of a strong public sphere.
It remains to emphasize that such free communities did not always or necessarily
dissolve into self-contained, mutually exclusive, and parochial units. They
often networked with each other to coordinate their decisions in a cooperative
way. They confederated -- initially on the equivalent of what we, today, would
designate as a "county" level; later, in many cases, on a regional (perhaps
equivalently, in the U.S., on a statewide) level. We have a rich history of such
municipal confederations, in some cases structured around grassroots, even
neighborhood, control that have yet to be given the study they deserve -- and in
the U.S. no less than in Europe. In some cases, too, confederal councils
coordinated decisions made by local assemblies which at all times formulated
policies, while recallable, carefully supervised councils administered them in a
purely technical way. Wherever experts were needed to provide strictly technical
alternatives, they were organized into advisory boards and, lacking any
decision-making powers, advanced various alternatives for consideration,
modification, and determination by the citizens' assemblies in villages, towns,
neighborhoods, and cities. And where differences existed, they were simply
adjudicated by conference committees or arbitration boards, such as they still
are today when different, often conflicting variations of the same law are
passed by the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.
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The modern version of what we call "politics," today, is really statecraft. It
emphasizes "professionalism," not popular control; the monopoly of power by the
few, not the empowerment of the many; the "election" of an "Elect" group, not
face-to-face democratic processes that involve the people as a whole;
"representation," not participation. We use "politics" to mobilize
"constituencies" to achieve preselected goals, not educate them into the self
management of society and the formation of the strong selves that make for
genuine individuality and personality. We deal with the people as a passive
"electorate" whose "political" task is to ritualistically vote for "candidates"
who come from so-called "parties," not for deputies who are strictly mandated to
administer the policies formulated and decided by active citizens. We stress
obedience, not involvement -- and even distort words like "involvement" to mean
little more than a spectatorial stance in which the individual is lost in the
"mass" and the "masses" are themselves fragmented into isolated, frustrated, and
powerless atoms.
This image of "politics," as 1 have indicated, is a fairly recent phenomenon
that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century and made its way into popular
consciousness in fairly recent times. It was still not the accepted notion of
"politics" in the last century. Quite to the contrary: the Nation-State in
France, Spain, Germany, and Italy -- and perhaps most significantly, in the
United States -- still had to make every effort to assert its authority over
localities and regions against massive popular resistance. In America, this
process is perhaps less Complete than most European countries. Our Revolution,
two centuries ago, gave enormous powers -- initially complete power -- to
regional and local areas (I refer to our first constitution, The Articles of
Confederation, which gave the original thirteen states pre-emptive authority
over the national government -- a constitution, I may add, that favored the
farmers and urban poor over the wealthy, hence its "ignoble" place in our
history texts) and structured our defense around a citizen's militia, not a
professional army.
The reality of early politics persisted for generations even after the
Nation-State began to assert itself juridicially. 'That is to say, regions and
municipalities retained enormous de facto power and provided vital political
arenas despite the enactment of laws to diminish their activities and place them
under the Nation-State's sovereignty. The American tradition, often in marked
contrast to the European, stresses this ideal of local autonomy and the dangers
of excessive State power. That tradition emphasizes the rights of the individual
to assert himself or herself against authority, the desirability of a relative
degree of self-sufficiency, the claims of the community against corporate power
-- the "inalienable" rights of human beings to "life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness," an expression that is notable for the absence ...
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