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Home , Albert Meltzer, Autonomedia, Bob Black, Murray Bookchin, Popular assembly, Renzo Novatore

Anarchy after Leftism 5 Preface ...... 7 Introduction ...... 11 Chapter 1: , Grumpy Old Man ...... 15 Chapter 2: What is Individualist ? ...... 25 Chapter 3: Lifestyle Anarchism ...... 37 Chapter 4: On Organization ...... 43 Chapter 5: Murray Bookchin, Municipal Statist ...... 53 Chapter 6: Reason and ...... 61 Chapter 7: In Search of the Primitivists Part I: Pristine Angles ...... 71 Chapter 8: In Search of the Primitivists Part II: Primitive Affluence . . . 83 Chapter 9: From Primitive Affluence to Labor-Enslaving . . 89 Chapter 10: Shut Up, Marxist! ...... 95 Chapter 11: after Leftism ...... 97 References ...... 105 Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind 115 Prologue to Post-Left Anarchy ...... 117 Introduction ...... 118 Leftists in the Anarchist Milieu ...... 120 Recuperation and the Left-Wing of Capital ...... 121 Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Organization ...... 122 Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Ideology ...... 125 Neither God, nor Master, nor Moral Order: Anarchy as Critique of Morality and Moralism ...... 126 Post-Left Anarchy: Neither Left, nor Right, but Autonomous ...... 128 Post-Left Anarchy? 131 Leftism 101 137 What is Leftism? ...... 139 Moderate, Radical, and Extreme Leftism ...... 140 Tactics and strategies ...... 140 Relationship to capitalists ...... 140 The role of the ...... 141 The role of the ...... 142 A Generic Leftism? ...... 142 Are All Forms of Anarchism Leftism ...... 143

1 Anarchists, Don’t let the Left(overs) Ruin your Appetite 147 Introduction ...... 149 Anarchists and the International Labor Movement, Part I ...... 149 Interlude: Anarchists in the Mexican and Russian ...... 151 Anarchists in the International Labor Movement, Part II ...... 154 Spain ...... 154 The Left ...... 155 The ’60s and ’70s ...... 156 Characteristics Vs. Definitions ...... 157 Conclusions ...... 158 The Incredible Lameness of Left-Anarchism 161 An Evasion of Discussion ...... 163 Vague Accusations with No Documentation ...... 164 Muddling the Dispute ...... 165 The Internet Makes People Crazy ...... 167 Nebulous Leftism ...... 169 Staudenmaier’s Leftist Fantasies ...... 171 Individualist Delusions and Myopic ...... 173 Abstract and Indeterminate Evasions ...... 176 The Obligatory Fascist Smear ...... 178 For a Rational Discussion of Anarchism and the Left ...... 179 Post-Script: Response from Peter Staudenmaier ...... 181 Challenge Accepted: Post-Leftism’s Rejection of the Left as a Whole . . . 181 Against Organizationalism: Anarchism as both Theory and Critique of Organization 185 Anarchists in Wonderland: The Topsy-Turvy World 191 On the radical virtues of being left alone; deconstructing Staudenmaier 203 The Unoriginality Argument ...... 205 The Bad Faith Argument ...... 205 The Straw Man Argument ...... 206 Getting Personal with a Straw Man ...... 209 Rejecting or, The Straw Man Disappears in a Puff of Smoke 210 Guilt by (False) Association ...... 212 On Spots, Both Tight and Blind ...... 213 This Is What Cooperation Looks Like ...... 214 From to Life: Ridding anarchy of the leftist millstone 217

2 Against the Corpse Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist Anarchist Critique of Violence 229 What’s the Problem? ...... 231 Our Violent Anarchist ...... 239 “The People” are Alienated by Violence and Other Myths ...... 241 The Case of Mumia ...... 256 Mean Ends ...... 260

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Anarchy after Leftism

1997

Preface

Leaving the twentieth century, leftism of every stripe is in disarray and defeat — anarcho-leftism included. And Murray Bookchin’s Social is certainly no exception to this trend. Bookchin, one of the best known of contemporary North American anarchists, has spent much of his life staking out his own personal eco-anarchist ideological territory under the banners of Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. He is the author of a steady stream of books from the sixties to the present, including his classic collection of essays titled Post-Scarcity Anarchism published in 1971, his excellent volume on the history of the Spanish anarchist movement written in the seventies, and his failed attempt in the eighties at constructing a philosophical magnum opus in . Bookchin has never been content with merely constructing one more radical ideology in competition with all the others. His dream has always been to lead a coherent left-wing ecological radical grouping into a serious contest with the powers that be. However, his attempts at constructing such a grouping (from the Anarchos journal group in the New York of the sixties to the recent Left Green Network within the Greens milieu) have never met with much success. In his latest book, or Lifestyle Anarchism, Bookchin aims to pin the blame for his lifetime of frustration (despite his decades of valiant effort!) on an evil anti-socialist conspiracy which has subverted his dreams at every turn: the dreaded specter of “Lifestyle Anarchism.” For Bookchin, lifestyle anarchism is a contemporary manifestation of the individualist anarchist currents which have always bedeviled the world anarchist movement proper. The fact that the anar- chist “movement” itself has always been more of a polymorphous insurrectionary milieu encompassing everything from anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-communists and anarcho-futurists to anarchist feminists, anarchist primitivists and anarcho- situationists doesn’t really matter to him. The important thing is that he has finally been able to name the anti-organizational cabal which opposes him and to explain the esoteric links between its often seemingly unrelated or even mutually contradictory efforts! Enter Bob Black. Now a lot of people don’t like Bob Black. Many anarchists would be alarmed if he moved in next door. Anyone with good sense would probably be upset if he started dating her younger sister. Most everyone is loathe to provoke his anger or face it head on.

7 And not without reason. Bob may be a brilliant critic and hilarious wit, but he’s not a nice guy. His infamous reputation isn’t built on fair play or good sportsmanship. Maybe this is why Murray Bookchin’s latest rant, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, never criticizes Bob Black directly. In fact it never so much as mentions Bob’s name. Even though it’s obvious from the book’s contents that by all rights Bob should have received the same type of attempted (though ultimately feeble) thrashing Bookchin reserved for George Bradford,, Hakim Bey, et al. Obviously, Murray knows better than to challenge Bob to a duel, even a rhetor- ical one. But that hasn’t stopped Bob, in an uncharacteristically generous spirit, from giving Bookchin his due anyway. Bob’s defense of anarchy in Anarchy after Leftism isn’t meant to express solidar- ity with those targeted in the latest attacks framed by Bookchin’s pidgin . Nor is Bob really interested in rescuing anarchist ideology from itself. He just wants to set the record straight by clearing away worse than useless polemics. Defending the potential for anarchy is merely an unpleasant task of menial anti- ideological labor that Bob has performed because no one else volunteered to wash these particular dirty dishes,1 while he wants to get on with cooking another meal. But that’s by no means all that’s going on here. Disposing of Murray Bookchin’s ideological and rhetorical rubbish gives Bob the chance to develop the grounds for a more general attack on the remaining vestiges of leftism while he’s at it. Cleaning house of leftism is a much bigger task than dealing with one man’s leftist career. So in one sense, by drawing attention to his ineffectual polemic, Bookchin has made himself an excuse for the beginning of a much larger process of critique, a process that will undoubtedly continue to unfold with increasing militance into the coming century. It will require awareness and effort from all of us to finish this task, but it will be done. Bob’s double critique in Anarchy after Leftism only gains incisiveness from the attitude of lumpen noblesse oblige he has adopted for his task. Rather than letting his own sordid past (and present) get in the way, the lack of any revenge motive (seemingly Bob’s favorite muse) allows him to unleash his pen with just

1 The Fifth Estate’s David Watson (aka George Bradford) has just written a valuable critique of major themes in Bookchin’s work titled Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology, published by Autonomedia (Brooklyn, NY) and Black & Red (Detroit, MI). It was also stimulated by Bookchin’s abysmal Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. However, Watson’s work is aimed more towards defending anarcho-primitivism and rehabilitating a non-Bookchinist Social Ecology than towards the critique Bob takes on in this volume of Bookchin’s leftover leftism served in biodegradable ecological and municipalist wrappings.

8 as much wit, but with fewer red herrings, obscure put-downs and tortured self- justifications than ever. The result is a modest feast made up of consistently entertaining prose, an immanent critique of a would-be eminent social critic, and one more nail in the coffin of obsolete leftism, anarchist-style. You might not want to invite Bob into your house.I certainly wouldn’t. But at least thank him for doing the dishes. And let’s get on with the next feast! Jason McQuinn Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed

9 10 Introduction

This small book is nothing more than a critique of another small book, Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm.1 His consists of the title essay plus “The Left That Was: A Personal Reflection.” Pub- lished in 1995, it was an unexpected intervention in an intramural debate which had been going on for at least twenty years between traditionalistic anarchists — leftist, workerist, organizational, and moralist — and an ever more diverse (and an ever more numerous) contingent of anarchists who have in one way or another departed from orthodoxy, at least in Bookchin’s eyes. Bookchin caught a lot of us heterodox anarchists by surprise. Most of us have read some of Bookchin’s books and many of us, myself included, have learned from them, especially the earlier books from the . Bookchin’s subsequent and ever-intensifying preoccupation with municipal politics we were mostly inclined to ignore as an idiosyncrasy. He seemed to take no notice of what we were up to. He was absent from publications like the Fifth Estate, Popular Reality, Front Line, The Match!, and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. It was as if he

1 Edinburgh, Scotland & San Francisco, CA: AKPress, 1995. All references consisting solely of nu- merals in parentheses are page references to this book. All other references — be they to Bookchin’s other writings or the writings of others — follow an approximation of social-science citation style. That is, they consist of a parenthetical reference to a source by the last name of the author and the year of publication followed by, in some instances, specific page references. For example,(Black 1994: 50) refers to page 50 of the book listed in the Bibliography as follows: Black, Bob (1994). Beneath the Underground. Portland, OR: Feral House & Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited Sometimes the author’s name is omitted if, in context, it is provided or implied in the text, e,g., (1994: 50) where the text itself has identified Black as the source. I request the forbearance of readers who think that in explaining the almost-obvious I am talking down to them.I expect that nearly all of my readers are either familiar with this citation system or else would have no difficulty figuring it out. I chose to use it to supply at least the rudiments of references simultaneously with what I make of them. I choose to explain the system here from an excess of caution. I expect the Bookchinist counterattack to rely heavily on confusionist quibbling about details, including bibliographic details. Some anarchists are unduly impressed by the trappings of scholar- ship, unaware that, if carefully scrutinized, they are sometimes only claptrappings. Some are even susceptible to typeset text as such, as if typesetting were some sort of guarantee that the text is presumptively important and/or true. To a considerable extent, Bookchin’s seeming scholarship is shallow or sham, and that’s espe- cially true of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. To demonstrate that, as this essay does, my scholarship will have to be much better and much more honest. Careful referencing, and a clear understanding of my method of referencing, is crucial to that demonstration. For you, gentle reader, the worst is now behind you. Let the games begin!

11 took the anarchists for granted. They didn’t know that Bookchin thought they were sinking swiftly into ideological and moral decay. They do now. Bookchin views-with-alarm almost every new tendency in an- archism except his own specialty, ecology. What’s more, the nefarious novelties exhibit malign thematic affinities. Not only are they pernicious, they are perni- cious in essentially the same way. They represent a recrudescence of an old heresy, “,” decked out in trendy post-modernist fashions in a configuration Bookchin calls “lifestyle anarchism.” Much worse than a falling-away from some aspects of classical left-wing anarchism, lifestyle anarchism is (he insists) fun- damentally opposed to the defining tenets of anarchism.(How this could have happened on his watch he does not explain.) For Bookchin, then, lifestyle anarchists are not just errant comrades, they are traitors. As such they are even worse than avowed opponents of anarchism. He mistreats them accordingly. His jeremiad is downright nasty. There aren’t many epithets he doesn’t work in somewhere or another, and never mind if they sometimes contradict each other (for instance, “individualism” and “fascism” applied to the same people). They don’t have to be true to be effective. Bookchin started out as a Stalinist, and it sure shows in the abusive style and unscrupulous content of his polemic. He wants no dialogue with his self-appointed enemies, only their irreparable discredit. I get the distinct impression that Bookchin, an elderly man said to be in ill health, is cashing in his chips as a prominent anarchist theorist and staking all his influence and reputation on demolishing all possible alternatives to his own creed, what he calls “social anarchism.” A parting shot. He missed the target. He had to miss the target, since there is none. There’s no such thing as “lifestyle anarchism.” There are only a lot of anarchists exploring a lot of ideas — a lot of different ideas — that Bookchin disapproves of. It follows that this book is not a defense of “lifestyle anarchism.” There’s no such unicorn, so I couldn’t defend it even if I wanted to. The very phrase is Bookchin’s invention, much as Stalin invented a nonsense category, the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyists,” to collect all his political enemies for their more convenient disposal. At the time, Bookchin believed this, and everything else, the Party told him to believe. He hasn’t changed much; or, if he did, he’s changed back. If I were only taking Bookchin to task for his incivility, I’d be a hypocrite, for I’ve penned plenty of blunt critiques of various anarchists and anti-authoritarians. ADutch anarchist, Siebe Thissen, has described me — not as a criticism — as the severest critic of (1996: 60). Maybe I am, although criticism of anarchists takes up only a fraction of the content of my previous three books. But I’ve often been tough on anarchists I considered authoritarian, dishonest or stupid.

12 Often harsh but, I like to think, rarely unfair. Some people, especially those I’ve criticized, mistake my being articulate for my being rude, or mistake my noticing them for being obsessed with them. Be that as it may, for me to set myself up as the Miss Manners of anarchism would not be appropriate.I do think Murray Bookchin needs a lesson in manners, and I’m going to give him one, but incivility is the least of what’s wrong with his dyspeptic diatribe. It’s what he says, far more than how he says it, that I mean to have done with. I am not, except incidentally, defending those whom Bookchin targets as “lifestyle anarchists.” (For the record, I’m not one of his identified targets.) I am debunking the very category of lifestyle anarchism as a construct as meaning- less as it is malicious. And I am coming down with crushing force on “an ugly, stupid style and substance of doctrinal harangue”(Black 1992: 189), the worst survival of Bookchin’s original . I’ve done it before and, frankly, I rather resent having to do it again. Bookchin has made the cardinal author’s mistake of falling for his own jacket blurbs. Otherwise he could never write such a wretched screed and hope to get away with it. His previous contributions to anarchism, even if they were as epochal as he likes to think, are no excuse for this kind of gutter-gabble. His swan-song sounds nothing but sour notes. And sour grapes. Which is why I think there’s a place for my polemic. If even the great Bookchin can’t get away with talking trash, maybe less eminent anarchists will be less tempted to talk trash. If even the quasi-academic Bookchin’s quasi-scholarship doesn’t hold up under even modest scrutiny, maybe some unduly impressionable anarchists will learn to question the authority of footnotes and jacket blurbs. Better scholars than Bookchin live in dread of somebody someday looking up their footnotes. I’ll be getting around to several of them, too. But, worst things first. Most people will take no interest in what Bookchin and I have to say about anarchism. These books aren’t destined for the best-seller lists. Even some feel- good anarchists will dismiss the ruckus as “in-fighting.” But on one point at least I think Bookchin would agree with me: in-fighting can be as important as out- fighting.Indeed it’s impossible to tell them apart. The fighting has a lot to do with determining who is in and who is out. But anybody who thinks that anarchism is, or might be, important should consider this controversy important. I admit I’m almost as vain as Bookchin, but maybe I am the “lifestyle anarchist” to call him out for a showdown at high noon out at the Circle-A Ranch. A throwback to vulgar Marxism in more than one sense, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism may turn out to be the last tract of its kind, at least the last one with anarchist pretensions. Soon there will be nobody left in North America with the requisite Leninist background to practice this highly stylized genre of defamation. Debunking it may assist anarchists in letting go of the leftism they

13 have outgrown, some of them without realizing it. Cleansed of its leftist residues, anarchy — anarchism minus Marxism — will be free to get better at being what it is.

14 Chapter 1: Murray Bookchin, Grumpy Old Man

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism may well be the worst book about anarchists that any of them has ever written. According to the cover blurb, Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, has been “a lifelong radical since the early 1930s.” “Radical” is here a euphemism for “Stalin- ist”; Bookchin was originally “a militant in the Young Pioneers and the Young Communist League”(Clark 1990:102; cf. Bookchin 1977:3). Later he became a Trotskyist. At one time Bookchin himself, “as one who participated actively in the ‘radical’ movements of the thirties” (1970: 56), put the word “radical,” considering the context, in quotation marks, but now he is nostalgic about that milieu, what he calls the Left That Was (66–86). About 25 years ago, Murray Bookchin peered into the mirror and mistook it for a window of opportunity. In 1963 he wrote, under a , Our Synthetic Society (Herber 1963), which anticipated (although it seems not to have influenced) the movement. In 1970, by which time he was pushing 50 and calling himself an anarchist, Bookchin wrote “Listen, Marxist!” — a moderately effective anti-authoritarian polemic against such Marxist myths as the revolutionary vanguard organization and the proletariat as revolutionary subject (Bookchin 1971:171–222). In this and in other essays collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), Bookchin disdained to conceal his delight with the disarray of his Marxist comrades-turned-competitors. He thought he saw his chance. Under his tutelage, anarchism would finally displace Marxism, and Bookchin would place the stamp of his specialty, “social ecology,” on anarchism. Not only would he be betting on the winning horse, he would be the jockey. As one of his followers has written, “if your efforts at creating your own mass movement have been pathetic failures, find someone else’s movement and try to lead it” (Clark 1984: 108). Bookchin thereupon set out to conquer the anarchists for the eco-radicals (the Greens), the Greens for the anarchists, and all for one — the great one — Murray Bookchin himself. He would supply the “muscularity of thought” (Bookchin 1987b: 3) that they lacked. By now he’s been “a prophetic voice in the ecology movement for more than thirty years,” if he does say so himself (Institute for Social Ecology 1996: 13)(Bookchin co-founded the ISE). He cranked out several well-padded, largely repetitious books. The Ecology of Freedom (1982; rev. ed. 1991) is the one he apparently regards as his magnum opus. At any rate, one of his jacket blurbs (Bookchin 1987a) quotes a revolutionary anarchist weekly, the Village Voice, to that effect (cf. Clark [1984]: 215).

15 The material base for these superstructural effusions was Bookchin’s provi- dential appointment as a Dean at near Burlington,Vermont, a cuddle-college for hippies and, more recently, punks, with wealthy parents (cf. Goddard College 1995). He also held an appointment at Ramapo College. Bookchin, who sneers at leftists who have embarked upon “alluring university careers” (67), is one of them. Something went awry. Although Dean Bookchin was indeed widely read by North American anarchists — one of his acknowledged sycophants (Clark 1984: 11) calls him “the foremost contemporary anarchist theorist” (Clark 1990: 102; cf. Clark 1982: 59) — in fact, not many anarchists acknowledged him as their dean. They appreciated his ecological orientation, to be sure, but some drew their own, more far-reaching conclusions from it. The Dean came up against an unexpected obstacle. The master-plan called for anarchists to increase in numbers and to read his books, and those parts came off tolerably well. It was okay if they also read a few anarchist classics, Bakunin and Kropotkin for instance (8), vetted by the Dean, with the understanding that even the best of them afford “mere glimpses” of the forms of a free society (Bookchin 1971: 79) subsequently built upon, but transcended by, the Dean’s own epochal discovery, social ecology/ social anarchism. Bookchin does not mind standing on the shoulders of giants — he rather enjoys the feel of them under his heel — so long as he stands tallest of all. He must have had no doubt that he would. He seemed to have no competi- tion intramurally. , “the most widely known anarchist” (De Leon 1978:132), untimely died.Tweedy British and Canadian anarchist intellectuals like , Alex Comfort and George Woodcock shuffled off into the literary world. Aging class-struggle fundamentalists like Sam Dolgoff and could be counted on to just keep doing what they were doing, whatever that was, and with their usual success.“We all stand on the shoulders of others,” as the Dean generously allows (1982: Acknowledgements). Dean Bookchin could stand on the shoulders of midgets too. The footing was even surer there. What the Dean did not expect was that anarchists would start reading outside his curriculum and, worse yet, occasionally think for themselves, something that — in all fairness — nobody could have anticipated. They read, for instance, about the ethnography of the only societies — certain of the so-called primitive societies — which have actually been operative anarchist societies on a long-term basis. They also read about plebeian movements, communities, and insurrections — Adamites, Ranters, Diggers,Luddites, Shaysites, Enrages, Carbonari, even pirates (to mention, to be brief, only Euro-American, and only a few Euro-American examples)— seemingly outside of the Marxist-Bookchinist progressive schema. They scoped out Dada and Surrealism. They read the Situationists and the pro-

16 situs. And, yes, like earlier generations of anarchists, they were receptive to currents of cultural radicalism.Indeed, instead of listening to “decent music” (64 n. 37), they often preferred punk rock to Pete Seeger and Utah Philips (“the folk song,” he has explained,“constitutes the emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual expression of a people” [Bookchin 1996: 19]). And usually their hair was either too long or too short. Who sent them down this twisted path? In some cases it was the “self-styled anarchist” (1, 2,9) — this is a favorite Bookchin slur — who wrote:

The graffiti on the walls of Paris —“Power to the Imagination,” “It is forbidden to forbid,” “Life without dead times”[sic], “Never work” — represent a more probing analysis of these sources [of revolutionary unrest in modern society] than all the theoretical tomes inherited from the past. The uprising revealed that we are at the end of an old era and well into the beginning of a new one. The motive forces of revolution today, at least in the industrialized world, are not simply scarcity and material need, but also the quality of everyday life, the demand for the liberation of experience, the attempt to gain control over one’s destiny [emphasis in the original]. This was not a solemn revolt, a coup d’etat bureaucratically plotted and ma- nipulated by a “vanguard” party; it was witty, satirical, inventive and creative — and therein lay its strength, its capacity for immense self-mobilization, its infectiousness.

The lumpen-bohemian crazy who penned this paean to “neo-Situationist ‘ec- stasy’” (26) is the prelapsarian Murray Bookchin (1971: 249–250, 251), These are all, in fact, situationist slogans. Some of us believed him then. Now he tells us we were wrong, although he never tells us he ever was. Why should we believe him now? The Hard Right Republicans like Newt Gingrich along with the Neo-Conserv- ative intellectuals (most of the latter, like the Dean, being high-income, elderly Jewish ex-Marxists from who ended up as journalists and/or aca- demics) blame the decline of Western on the ‘60s. Bookchin can’t credibly do that, since it was in the ‘60s that he came out as an anarchist, and built up the beginnings of his reputation as a theorist. In his golden years, he has to tread very carefully on this dark and bloody ground:

For all its shortcomings, the anarchic during the early part of the hectic 1960s was often intensely political and cast expressions like desire and ecstasy in eminently social terms, often deriding the personalistic tendencies of the later Woodstock generation (9).

17 By definition “the early part of the hectic 1960s” is presumably the years 1960–1964. This is the first time I’ve heard tell of an “anarchic counterculture” during the Kennedy Administration. As manifested in — what? the Peace Corps? the Green Berets? And while there were personalistic tendencies in the early 1960s, no one then anticipated, and so no one derided, the specific “personalistic tendencies of the later Woodstock generation.” Not Bookchin, certainly, who concluded prematurely that “Marxian predictions that Youth Culture would fade into a comfortable accommodation with the system have proven to be false” (1970: 60). What did the all-seeing Dean do to combat these nefarious trends in the 20-odd years they have been infecting anarchism? Nothing. He had better things to do than come to the rescue of the anarchist ideology he considers the last best hope of humankind. On the one hand, he was consolidating his alluring academic career; on the other, he was making a play for ideological hegemony over the Green movement. Were we all supposed to wait up for him? There were those who actually tried to implement the Dean’s directive to formulate “a coherent program” and “a revolutionary organization to provide a direction for the mass discontent that contemporary society is creating” (1). Note that Bookchin demands one organization, although he does not say if he wants an American CNT, an American FAI, or an American symbiote of both such as formed in Spain, with less than entirely positive consequences (Bookchin 1994: 20–25; cf. Brademas 1953). During the recent decades of decadence, there were several opportunities for the Dean to participate in this important work. He claims that his parents were Wobblies (2–3)—I wonder what they thought when he became a Communist? — but he did not himself join the Industrial Workers of the World although it still, after a fashion, exists.In the late 1970s, some class-struggle anarchists formed the Anarchist Communist Federation, which collapsed in acrimony after a few years. The Dean did not join. One ACF faction set up the syndicalist Workers Solidarity Alliance; Bookchin didn’t join that one either. And finally, in the last few years the direct-actionist newspaper Love & Rage has tried to turn its support groups into the nuclei of a national anarchist organization. Once again, Bookchin held himself aloof. Why? No doubt all these organizations fell somewhat short of his requirements, but as my mother says,“what do you want, an egg in your beer?” The CNT and the FAI were also imperfect. Everything is imperfect. If your fundamental critique of contemporary North American anarchists is that they have failed to assemble in a continental federation, surely you should have told them what is to be done, and how, a long time ago. The involvement of so distinguished a militant as Bookchin might energize an organization which might otherwise appear to be a sect of

18 squabbling, droning dullards, perhaps because, in each and every instance, it is a sect of squabbling, droning dullards. The only possible justification is that — to do justice to the Dean (and do I ever want to do exactly that!) — he laid down two requirements, not just one. A direc- tive organization, yes — but with “a coherent program.” Such time as remained after the performance of his administrative and academic responsibilities (and the lecture circuit) the Dean has devoted to providing the coherent program. No doubt Bookchin can organize the masses (he must have had a lot of practice, and surely great success, in his Marxist-Leninist days). So can many other comrades — but no other comrade can concoct a coherent program the way Bookchin can. It is, therefore, only rational for a division of labor to prevail. Less talented comrades should do the organizational drudge-work, freeing up Dean Bookchin — after hours — to theorize. It’s an example of what capitalist economists call the Law of Comparative Advantage. All of that Kropotkinist-Bookchinist talk about rotation of tasks, about superseding the separation of hand-work and brain-work — time enough for that after the Revolution. The Dean’s booklet thunders (in a querulous sort of a way) that “anarchism stands at a turning point in its long and turbulent history” (1). When didn’t it? In the time-honored sophist manner, the Dean offers an answer to a nonsense question of his own concoction.“At a time when popular distrust of the state has reached extraordinary proportions in many countries,” etc., etc., “the failure of anarchists — or, at least, many self-styled anarchists — to reach a potentially huge body of supporters” is due, not entirely of course, but “in no small measure to the changes that have occurred in many anarchists over the past two decades . . . [they] have slowly surrendered the social core of anarchist ideas to the all-perva- sive Yuppie and New Age personalism that marks this decadent, bourgeoisified era” (1). Now this is a curious claim. Anarchism is unpopular, not because it opposes popular ideological fashions, but because it embraces them? It’s unpopular be- cause it’s popular? This isn’t the first time I’ve identified this obvious idiocy (Black & Gunderloy 1992). Simple logic aside (where Dean Bookchin cast it), the Dean’s empirical assump- tions are ridiculous. North American anarchism is not “in retreat” (59), it has grown dramatically in the last twenty years. The Dean might have even had a little to do with that. It is leftism which is in retreat. That this growth of anarchism has coincided with the eclipse of orthodox anarcho-leftism by more interesting varieties of anarchy doesn’t conclusively prove that the heterodox are the growth sector, but it sure looks that way. For instance, the North American anarchist publication with the highest circulation, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, is on Bookchin’s enemies list (39, 50).

19 As for the supposition that “Yuppie and New Age personalism” are “all-perva- sive” in our “decadent, bourgeoisified era,” this says more about Dean Bookchin and the company he keeps than it does about contemporary society. If you are an upper middle class academic in an affluent leftist enclave like Burlington or Berkeley, you might well think so, but to generalize those impressions to the gen- eral society is unwarranted and narcissistic (“personalistic,” as it were). America (or Canada) is still much more like Main Street than Marin County. If the Dean really thinks the brat-pack collegians in his Burlington ashram are representative North American youth, he doesn’t get out enough. Berating “Yuppies” for their self-indulgence, something Bookchin carries to the point of obsession (1 & passim), doesn’t defy media-managed popular opinion, it panders to it. As is typical of progressives, Bookchin is behind the times. Not only are the ‘60s over, as he has finally figured out, so are the ‘70s and the ‘80s. The Old Left that he nostalgically recalls, what he calls the Left That Was (66–86), extolled discipline, sacrifice, hard work, monogamy, technological , het- erosexuality, moralism, a sober and orderly if not downright puritanical lifestyle, and the subordination of the personal (“selfishness”) to the interest of the cause and the group (be it the party, the union or the affinity group):

The puritanism and work ethic of the traditional left stem from one of the most powerful forces opposing revolution today — the capacity of the bour- geois environment to infiltrate the revolutionary framework. The origins of this power lie in the nature of man under , a quality that is almost automatically translated to the organized group — and which the group, in turn, reinforces in its members.

This passage might have been written by Jacques Camatte, whose essay “On Organization” has exerted an anti-organizational influence on a lot of us “lifestyle anarchists”(Camatte 1995: 19–32). By now the reader will be on to my game (one of them, anyway): the above-quoted author is once again Bookchin the Younger (1971: 47; cf. Bookchin 1977: ch. 11). Again:

In its demands for tribalism, free sexuality, community, mutual aid, ecstatic experience, and a balanced ecology, the Youth Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous communist and , freed of the trammels of and domination, a society that would transcend the historic splits between town and country, individual and society, and mind and body (Bookchin 1970: 59).

20 Bookchin the Elder’s values, in contrast, are precisely those of the New Right and the neo-conservatives who have set the country’s current political and ideo- logical agendas — not the New Age bubbleheads Bookchin may meet in Vermont’s socialist Congressman Bernie Saunders’ hot tub. “Yuppie” is, on the Dean’s lips, an ill-chosen epithet. It is (lest we forget) a neologism and semi-acronym for “young urban professional.” To which aspects of this conjuncture does Dean Bookchin object? To urbanism? Bookchin is the apostle of urbanism (1987): he thinks that “some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity: it is its destiny” (1974: 2). To profes- sionalism? A college professor/bureaucrat such as Bookchin is a professional. The high technology Bookchin counts on to usher in post-scarcity anarchism (1971: 83–135; 1989: 196) is the invention of professionals and the fever-dream of techno-yuppies. So if Dean Bookchin, an old urban professional, disparages young urban professionals, what is it about them that he hates so much? By a process of elimination, it cannot be that they are urban and it cannot be that they are professional. It must be that they are young, as the Dean is not. Actually, a lot of them aren’t all that young — most are baby boomers entering middle age — but to a Grumpy Old Man of 75 like Dean Bookchin, that’s young enough to resent. But it’s not their fault, after all, that most of them will live on long after Murray Bookchin is dead and forgotten. And one more thing: Now that we know why the heretical anarchists have “failed to reach a potentially huge body of supporters,” what’s his excuse? One of his editors calls him “arguably the most prolific anarchist writer” (Ehrlich 1996: 384). (Although he has yet to outproduce the late Paul Goodman, who “produced a stream of books containing some of his enormous output of articles and speeches” (Walter 1972: 157) and he is likely to be soon surpassed by Hakim Bey — a far better writer — which may account for some of the insensate hatred the Dean displays for Bey.) So the truth is out there. Where, after all these years, are the Bookchinist masses? The Dean’s vocabulary of abuse evokes what he calls the Left That Was (66) but hardly the fondness he feels for it. His epithets for unorthodox anarchists are the standard Stalinist epithets for all anarchists. He berates anarchist “decadence” over and over, to which he often appends abstract denunciations of “bourgeois” or “petty bourgeois” tendencies.“Decadence” is an epithet so indiscriminately applied that a spirited case has been made for retiring it from responsible discourse (Gilman 1975). Even without going quite so far, undeniably “’decadent’ as a term of political and social abuse has a generous range of applications,” especially as deployed by Marxists and Fascists (Adams 1983: 1). To speak of the Dean’s denunciations of le bourgeois as “abstract” is my char- acteristically courteous way of hinting that he of all people had better pick his

21 words more carefully. I say “abstract” because a college dean is a member of the bourgeoisie if, in any objective sense, anybody is. Bookchin surely has a higher income than anybody he’s targeted. Dean Bookchin has to be deploying the word in a subjective, moralistic, judgmental sense which, however, he isn’t defining. It never used to bother the Dean that “many militant radicals tend to come from the relatively affluent strata”(Bookchin 1971: 25) — as his student disciples still do. Who else can afford to sit at his feet? For 1996–1997, the two-semester masters’ program in Social Ecology costs $10,578 (Goddard College 1996). Back then he considered it a “historic breach” that it was “relatively affluent middle class white youth” who created the implicitly revolutionary Youth Culture (Bookchin 1970: 54–55). No one can possibly pronounce with any confidence upon the class position of present-day North American anarchists in general, much less the class positions of “individualists,” Bookchinists, etc.(Although my impression is that most anarcho- syndicalists are campus-based and none of them are factory workers. Work is much easier to glorify than it is to perform.) Nor does it bother the Dean that almost the only luminaries unconditionally admitted to his anarchist pantheon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, were hereditary aristocrats. Class-baiting is evidently a weapon to be deployed with fine discrimination. For Bookchin, as for Stalinists, class is not a category of analysis, only an argot of abuse.Long ago he dismissed “workeritis” as “reactionary to the core” rendered meaningless by the trans-class decomposition of contemporary society (1971: 186–187). So completely did class disappear from Bookchin’s ideology that a review of one of his goofier books (Bookchin 1987) exclaimed that “it is what is missing altogether that renders his book terminally pathetic. Nowhere does he find fault with the most fundamental dimension of modern living, that of wage-labor and the commodity” (Zerzan 1994: 166). He now reverts to the hoary Marxist epithets —“bourgeois,” “petit-bourgeois” and “lumpen”— but with no pretense that they have, for him, real social content. Otherwise, how could he apply all these words to the same people?In their relations to the means of production (or lack thereof), lifestyle anarchists cannot be both bourgeois and lumpens. And how likely is it that out of these “thousands of self-styled anarchists” (1), not one is a proletarian? Where Bookchin accuses rival anarchists of individualism and , Stal- inists accuse all anarchists of the same. For example, there was that contributor who referred to Bookchinism as “a crude kind of individualis- tic anarchism” (Bookchin 1971: 225)! In other words,

22 . . . capitalism promotes egotism, not individuality or “individualism.” . . . The term “bourgeois individualism,” an epithet widely used today against liber- tarian elements, reflects the extent to which bourgeois ideology permeates the socialist project —

— these words being, of course, those of Bookchin the Younger (1971: 284). That the Dean reverts to these Stalinist slurs in his dotage reflects the extent to which bourgeois ideology permeates his project. Fanatically devoted to urbanism, the Dean was being complimentary, not critical, when he wrote that “the fulfillment of individuality and intellect was the historic privilege of the urban dweller or of influenced by urban life” (1974: 1). Individuality’s not so bad after all, provided it’s on his terms. As for “decadence,” that is an eminently bourgeois swear-word for people per- ceived to be having more fun than you are. By now the word has lost whatever concrete meaning it ever had. Calling post-leftist anarchists “decadent” is just Dean Bookchin’s way of venting his envy and, as Nietzsche would say, ressenti- ment that they are not afflicted with the hemorrhoids, tax audits, or whatever it is that’s raining on his Mayday parade.

23 24 Chapter 2: What is ?

Dean Bookchin posits an eternally recurring “tension” within anarchism be- tween the individual and the social (4). As this is none other than the central conundrum of Western political , the Dean is neither original nor — more important — has he identified a specifically anarchist tension. He goes on to identify the antitheses within anarchism as “two basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom” (4). This is the “unbridgeable chasm” his book title refers to. If the Dean is right — that individual autonomy and social liberation are not just in tension but basically contradictory — then anarchy is impossible, as anti-anar- chists have always maintained. Bookchin here rejects out of hand what he used to espouse,“a society that would transcend the historic splits between . . . individual and society” (1970: 59). Not all of us share his conservative fatalism. We too have our apprehensions and our times of despair. But to surrender to them entirely (which I condemn nobody for doing, if he’s honest about it) is to renounce any affiliation with anarchism. The Dean won’t fish, neither will he cut bait. He won’t shit, neither will he get off the pot. Some of those with impeccable, Bookchin-approved credentials, such as Kropotkin, had a more tolerant take on this genuinely tragic dilemma:

Anarchist maintains that most valuable of all conquests — indi- vidual — and moreover extends it and gives it a solid basis — economic liberty — without which political liberty is delusive; it does not ask the indi- vidual who has rejected god, the universal , god the king, and god the parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of the preced- ing — god the Community, or to abdicate upon its altar his independence, his will, his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which he formerly made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary, “No society is free so long as the individual is not so!” (Kropotkin 1890: 14–15)

Bookchin is the veritable high priest of what Kropotkin calls “god the Commu- nity,” “more terrible than any of the preceding,” the most vicious and oppressive god of all.

25 “Social freedom” is like the “” in the sense that the freedom re- ferred to has to be metaphorical. It makes no literal sense to attribute freedom to behavioral interaction systems, even feedback systems, lacking the necessarily individual qualities of consciousness and intention. It’s like saying an anthill or the solar system or a thermostat is free. Free from, and for, what? What else could a society or a market possibly be free of if not autonomous individuals? If one assigns any value to individual autonomy, logically there are only two possibilities for it to even exist, much less flourish, in society. (Contrary to what the Dean implies [58], not even Max Stirner thought it was possible outside of society [1995: 161, 271–277].) The first is a compromise: liberalism. The individual exchanges part of his precarious natural liberty for society’s protection of the rest of it, and also for the practical opportunities for advancing his interests only opened up in a social state. This was the position of Thomas Hobbes,, and William Blackstone.In the public sphere, freedom means ; In the private sphere, it means individual rights. The second resolution of the quandary, the radical one, is anarchism. Anar- chism rejects the dichotomy as false — maybe not false as existing society is constituted, but false in its supposed fatality. In an anarchist society the individ- ual gains freedom, not at the expense of others, but in cooperation with them. A person who believes that this condition — anarchy — is possible and desirable is called an anarchist. A person who thinks it is not possible or not desirable is a statist. As I shall have no difficulty demonstrating later on, it so happens that the Dean himself is not an anarchist, merely, in his own terminology, a “self-styled anarchist.” But that’s no reason for those of us who (albeit unenthusiastically, if I may speak for myself) are anarchists not to heed his critique. From George Bernard Shaw to , anti-anarchists who took anarchism seriously have often supplied crucial critiques the anarchists were unable or unwilling to construct themselves. Unfortunately, Bookchin’s isn’t one of them. What is remarkable about Dean Bookchin’s posturing as the Defender of the Faith, aside from the fact that he doesn’t share it, is how many of the Church Fathers (and Mothers) he has excommunicated as “individualists.” Predictably, (5), Max Stirner (7, 11) and (8) Bookchin sum- marily dismisses as individualists, although that hardly does justice to the richness of their insights and their relevance to any anarchism.(Although even Kropotkin acknowledged that Godwin espoused communism in the first edition of Political Justice, only “mitigating” that view in later editions [Kropotkin 1995; 238], and the anarcho-syndicalist acknowledged that Godwin “was really the founder of the later communist Anarchism” [1947: 7].) 1

26 But that’s only the beginning of the purge. The Dean condemns even Proud- hon as an individualist (5), although he elsewhere pays tribute to “Proudhon’s emphasis on federal-ism [which] still enjoys considerable validity” (Bookchin) 1996: 24). When Bookchin says that something from a classical anarchist still enjoys considerable validity, this is his way of saying that’s whom he filched it from. The of Proudhon’s later years (1979) is virtually identical to Bookchin’s call for a “ of decentralized ”(60). Which is tantamount to saying that in the end Proudhon was not an anarchist, as I am not the only one to have noticed (Steven 1984). Indeed, the Dean has come close to admitting it himself (Bookchin 1977: 21). The Dean now claims that the prominent Spanish anarchist Federica Montseney was a “Stirnerite”[sic] in theory if not in practice (8). In his The Spanish Anar- chists she is “one of the FAI’s luminaries”(Bookchin 1977: 243). The FAI was a “vanguard” (the word is Bookchin’s) anarcho-communist secret society (Bookchin 1994: 21–22; cf. Brademas 1953). Even is under a cloud. Although she was an avowed anarcho- communist, she also displayed a disqualifying affinity with Nietzsche (8), and she was, after all, “by no means the ablest thinker in the libertarian pantheon” (13). Bookchin has a muscular, masculine disdain for anarchist women such as Emma Goldman, Federica Montseney and L. Susan Brown. Only his innate modesty kept the Dean from naming who is the ablest thinker in the libertarian pantheon, but then again, who, having read him, needs to be told? Paul Goodman, a “communitarian anarchist” (Stafford 1972: 112), Bookchin calls “an essentially individualistic anarchist” (12), although Goodman was essen- tially an urban-oriented, humanistic anarcho-collectivist (Goodman & Goodman 1961: ch. 6 & 220; cf. Stafford 1972: 112–113) from whom Bookchin has cribbed many ideas without admitting it. Notice, for instance, the remarkable absence of any inferences to the by then deceased Goodman in Bookchin’s The Limits of the City (1974) or The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987), although he did let slip the name in Crisis in Our Cities (Herber 1965: 177) at a time when Goodman was in his prime whereas the future Dean was so far from foreseeing his own celebrity that he wrote under a pseudonym. He’ll soon wish he’d written this trashy had under a pseudonym. “Individualist” anarchists in the original sense — people like Max Stirner (1995) and John Henry Mackay — were never numerous, as Bookchin observes with too much satisfaction (6–8). And they were always few and far between, strange to say, in decadent, bourgeois North America, supposedly their natural breeding- ground. Stirner did not identify himself as an anarchist, probably because the only (indeed, the very first) “self-styled” anarchist in the 1840s when he was writing was Proudhon, for whom moralism, as Stirner noticed, served as a surrogate for

27 religion (ibid.: 46)— as it does for the Dean. The rather few individuals who at later times considered themselves Stirnerists have, however, usually considered themselves anarchists as well, such as the Italian peasant guerrilla (Black & Parfrey 1989: 92–93) It is worth mentioning — because so many people who toss his name around have never read him — that Stirner had no social or economic program whatsoever. He was no more pro-capitalist than he was pro-communist, although Marxists like Marx, Engels and Bookchin have routinely and mindlessly castigated him as an apologist for capitalism. Stirner was just not operating at that level. He was staking a claim, the most radical claim possible, for the individual as against all the ideologies and abstractions which, purporting to liberates him in general and in the abstract, left the individual as personally, practically subordinate as ever: “In principle . . .Stirner created a utopistic vision of individuality that marked a new point of departure for the affirmation of personality in an increasingly impersonal world”(Bookchin 1982: 159). From Stirner’s perspective — which on this point is also mine — ideologies like liberalism, , Marxism, , and Bookchinism have all too much in common (cf. Black 1994: 221–222). Nobody the Dean denounces as a “Stirnerite,” not Michael William (50), not Hakim Bey (23) is a Stirnerist if this implies that he affirms amoral and is indifferent to or entirely agnostic about social and economic formations. Both obviously assume as axiomatic the need for a social matrix for individual efflores- cence. What distinguishes them, in more than one sense, from the Dean is their appreciation of the epistemic break in bourgeois thought wrought by the likes of Stirner and Nietzsche:

A sense of incompleteness haunts after Hegel’s death and explains much of the work of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Niet- zsche, the surrealists and the contemporary existentialists. For the Marxians merely to dismiss this post-Hegelian development as “bourgeois ideology” is to dismiss the problem itself.

You guessed it: Bookchin the Younger again (1971: 276). For Bookchin to dismiss this post-Hegelian development as “bourgeois ideology” is to dismiss the problem itself. In a more recent, still narrower sense, “individualism” designates those who combine rejection of government with espousal of an absolutely unlimited laissez- faire market system. Such ideologues do exist, but Bookchin never even men- tions a contemporary example, although he cannot be unaware of their existence, since he made use of one of their publishers, Free Life Books (Bookchin 1977). Considerable contact with some of them over the years has persuaded me that most anarcho-capitalists are sincere in their anarchism, although I am as certain

28 that anarcho-capitalism is self-contradictory as I am that anarcho-syndicalism is. Unlike the Dean, I’ve on occasion taken the trouble to confute these libertarians (Black 1986:141–148; Black 1992: 43–62). But the point is, nobody the Dean tar- gets in this screed is by any stretch of the imagination (not that he has one) an “individualist” anarchist in the usual contemporary sense of the term. He never even claims that any of them are. The Dean makes the bizarre allegation that those he calls lifestyle anarchists, decadent successors to the individualist anarchists, claim (the quotation marks are his) their “sovereign rights” (12):

Their ideological pedigree is basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are validated by axiomatic “natural rights,” “intrinsic worth,” or, on a more sophisticated level, an intuited Kantian transcendental ego that is generative of all know- able reality (11).

A digression on the, for lack of a better word, of punctuation marks is in order here. “Quotation marks,” wrote Theodor Adorno,

. . . are to be rejected as an ironic device. For they exempt the writer from the spirit whose claim is inherent in irony, and they violate the very concept of irony by separating it from the matter at hand and presenting a prede- termined judgment on the subject. The abundant ironic quotation marks in Marx and Engels are the shadows that totalitarian methods cast in advance upon their writings, whose intention was the opposite: the seed from which eventually came what called Moskauderwelsch [Moscow double- talk, from Moskau, Moscow, and Kauderwelsch, gibberish or double-talk]. The indifference to linguistic expression shown in the mechanical delegation of intention to a typographic cliché arouses the suspicion that the very that constitutes the theory’s content has been brought to a standstill and the object assimilated to it from above, without negotiation. Where there is something which needs to be said, indifference to literary form almost always indicates dogmatization of the content. The blind verdict of quotation marks is its graphic gesture (Adorno 1990: 303).

As a tenured academic, the Dean is presumably aware that in scholarly dis- course — and surely his magisterial essay is such — quotation marks identify quotations, yet his 45 footnotes fail to reference any use of these expressions by anybody. That is because no such quotations exist. So-called lifestyle anarchists (meaning: non-Bookchinists) don’t usually think or write that way. They tend

29 not to go in for rights-talk because it is just an ideological, mystifying way of saying what they want, something better said honestly and directly. By this maladroit misrepresentation, the Dean inadvertently exposes his origi- nal misunderstanding of the so-called individualist anarchists. Max Stirner was an amoral egoist or individualist. Godwin and Proudhon were, if they were in- dividualists at all, moralistic individualists preoccupied with what they called justice. was an example of a clearly moralistic, natural-rights individualist anarchist. But when the prominent individualist publisher Benjamin Tucker went over to Stirnerist egoism in the late nineteenth century, he split the American individualists. (This, as much as the competition from collectivists credited by Bookchin [6- 7], brought about the decline of the tendency.) Although there were exceptions, the moralistic natural-rights individualists — which were most of them — usually ended up as essentially advocates of pure free-market capitalism. Those attracted to the amoralist, egoist or (if you please)“Stirnerist” position necessarily shared with Stirner a whole-sale rejection of moralism, that being what Stirner, and Nietzsche after him, absolutely exploded as a tenable point of view. But no more than Stirner did they exhibit any interest in laissez-faire (or any) economics. Capitalism, as Max Weber noticed, has its own moralism, often if not always expressed as the “Protestant ethic.” The egoists/amoralists and the free- market natural-rightists parted over precisely this point. The egoist/amoralists have contributed something to the “lifestyle anarchists,” the natural-rightists have not. For instance, take L. Susan Brown (please!— no, just kidding), who’s attempted, says the Dean, “to articulate and elaborate a basically individualist anarchism, yet retain some filiations with anarcho-communism” (13), In a footnote he’s more candid:“Brown’s hazy commitment to anarcho-communism seems to derive more from her own preference than from her analysis”(62). In other words, maybe she means well but she’s just a ditzy dame, like Emma Goldman.Just believing in anarcho-communism isn’t good enough to acquit you of the charge of individualism.You have to emote a politically correct, anti-individualist “analysis” too.I wonder how many Makhnovists, and how many Spanish rank-and-file insurrectionaries fighting for comunismo libertario would have passed whatever final exam our pedant might assign to them to test their “analysis.” I have a pretty good idea how they would have received such an insolent inquisition. Post- situationist that I am,I am far from sure that “the revolution will not be televised,” but I am quite sure it will not be on the final exam, not if teacher knows what’s good for him. As Marx so truly said, the educator himself needs educating. And as said, why not whip the teacher when the student misbehaves? The Dean has brought “down to date”(as Mark Twain would say) the New England Puritan exercise known as the “relation of faith.” In order to join the

30 Congregational Church, the applicant not only had to affirm each and every tenet of Calvinism, he had to demonstrate that he had gone through a standardized sequence of spiritual experiences.(Alcoholics Anonymous is the only Protestant cult which still imposes this requirement.) Most believers never made it that far. What the Dean means by an inadequate “analysis” is obvious enough: any analysis other than Bookchinism is no analysis at all. The “disdain for theory” he ascribes to “individualist” anarchism (11) is really disdain for, or rather indifference to, his theory. Nowadays, anarcho-communism is Bookchinism or it is nothing — according to Bookchin (60). Like it or not — personally (and “personalistically”), I like it — there’s an irreducible individualistic dimension to anarchism, even social anarchism, as L. Susan Brown is hardly heretical in pointing out (1993: ch. 1). According to Kropotkin, Anarcho-Communism says that “No society is free so long as the individual is not!” (1890: 15). If it sounds as if anarchism has, as the Dean might say, “filiations” with liberalism, that’s because anarchism does have filiations with liberalism. What else could the Dean possibly mean when he writes that social anarchism is “made of fundamentally different stuff” than lifestyle anarchism, it is “heir to the Enlightenment tradition” (56)? As anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker wrote (and he was only summarizing the obvious):

In modern Anarchism we have the confluence of the two great currents which during and since the French Revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: and Liberalism . . . Anarchism has in common with Liberalism the idea that the happiness and the prosperity of the individual must be the standard in all social matters. And, in common with the great representatives of Liberal thought, it has also the idea of limiting the functions of government to a minimum. Its supporters have followed this thought to its ultimate logical consequences, and wish to eliminate every institution of political power from the life of society (1947: 16, 18–19).

If he hadn’t seen these words before, the Dean would have come across part of these passages as quoted by Brown (1993:110). Naturally he’d rather debunk Brown, an obscure young academic (Jarach 1996), than the illustrious anarchist elder Rocker. Bookchin’s a playground bully who doesn’t mind hitting a girl with glasses, but he’d be off his Rocker to mess with Rudolf. Nobody chooses his ancestors. Rationally, no one should be ashamed of them. Visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, even unto the fourth generation (Exodus 34:7) — as the Dean is doing, pretty much on schedule — hardly comports with the Enlightenment rationalism he claims as his ancestry (21, 56).

31 The Left That Was which provided Bookchin’s original politics, Marxism-Lenin- ism, also supplied him with a muscular polemical praxis and a versatile vocabulary of abuse. I’ve already drawn attention to one of these gambits, denigration-by-quo- tation-marks. Its “filiations” include Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1940) and countless texts by Marx and Engels, as Adorno (1990) noticed. John Zerzan, reviewing Bookchin (1987), noted a related way that the Dean abused quotation marks:“Another device is to ignore the real history of urban life, as if illusory; he resorts at times to putting such terms as ‘elected’ representatives, ‘voters’ and ‘taxpayers’ in quotes as though the terms really don’t, somehow, correspond to reality” (Zerzan 1994: 165). As if to confirm that he’s incorrigible, Bookchin refers to this review, not as a review, but as a “review” (59). Bookchin was doing the same thing almost 40 years ago when the first chapter of The Limits of the City (1974: ix) was written: Tenochtitlan was the “capital,” not the capital, of the urban, imperialistic, cannibalistic Aztec empire (ibid.: 7, 9). Bookchin just doesn’t know when to shut up. Having lambasted individual- ists as liberals, he turns around and insinuates that they are fascists! Critics of industrial technology (specifically, George Bradford of the Fifth Estate) who argue that it determines, as well as being determined by, social organization are, opines the Dean,“deeply rooted in the conservative German romanticism of the nine- teenth century” which “fed into National Socialist ideology, however much the Nazis honored their antitechnological ideology in the breach”(29). This would be a sophisticated version of guilt-by-association if it were sophisticated. The Dean doesn’t bother to even identify these “conservative German” romantics — he hasn’t read them, probably couldn’t even name them — much less substantiate their unlikely influence on contemporary “lifestyle” anarchists. Retro-leftist that he is, Bookchin must suppose that bracketing the hate-words “conservative” and “German” is a one-two punch nobody recovers from. One page later (30), he ad- mits that “there is no evidence that Bradford is familiar with Heidegger or Jünger,” the twentieth-century German intellectuals he j’accuses as carriers of nineteenth- century conservative German romantic ideology. McCarthyism is the political strategy of guilt by association. If you know a Communist, or if you know someone who knows someone who is a Communist, presumptively you are a Communist and you’ll have to talk your way out of it, preferably by ratting somebody out. The ex-Communist Bookchin has outdone Senator McCarthy. The Senator sought to uncover association as evidence of guilt. The Dean affirms guilt as evidence of association. That’s really all there is to his dirty little diatribe.To be even less fair than Joe McCarthy is quite an accomplishment, what Nietzsche used to call a “downgoing.” And another thing, nineteenth-century romanticism was neither exclusively conservative nor exclusively German. What about the liberal or radical German

32 romanticism of Beethoven and Büchner and Schiller and Heine? And what about the non-German radical romanticism of Blake and Burns and Byron and Shelley? The Dean relates that the Nazis honored their romantic, anti-technological ideology “in the breach.” “Honored in the breach” is Bookchin’s poor try at head- ing off the obvious, and decisive, objection that the Nazis didn’t have an anti- technological ideology. The Autobahn was as much a monument to technology as were its contemporaries the Moscow subway and the New York World’s Fair (which,I suspect, thrilled the 18 year old Murray Bookchin). So was the V-2. Almost openly erotic references to iron and steel recur with monotonous and pathological frequency in Nazi rhetoric. As John Zerzan remarked in a book the Dean claims to have read (39–42, 62 n. 19);

Behind the rhetoric of National Socialism, unfortunately, was only an ac- celeration of technique, even into the sphere of genocide as a problem of industrial production. For the Nazis and the gullible, it was, again a question of how technology is understood ideally, not as it really is. In 1940 the Gen- eral Inspector for the German Road System put it this way: “Concrete and stone are material things. Man gives them form and spirit. National Social- ist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content” (Zerzan 1994: 140).

I’m not one of those who cries out in horror at the slightest whiff of anti-Semi- tism. But the Dean sees fit to insinuate that even the promiscuously pluralistic Hakim Bey is ideologically akin to Hitler (22), and that the primitivist quest to recover authenticity “has its roots in reactionary romanticism, most recently in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose völkisch ‘spiritualism,’ latent in Being and Time, later emerged in his explicitly fascist works” (50). So let’s consider whether Bookchin-vetted classical anarchists are ideologically kosher. Proudhon was notoriously anti- Semitic (Silbener 1948), but since Bookchin dismisses him, however implausibly, as too much the individualist (4–5), let’s set Proudhon aside. Bakunin, the Russian aristocrat who “emphatically prioritized the social over the individual” (5) had a notion what was wrong with his authoritarian rival, . Bakunin considered Marx, “the German scholar, in his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German,” to be a “hopeless statist” (1995:142). A Hegelian, a Jew, a sort-of scholar, a Marxist, a hopeless (city-) statist — does this sound like anybody familiar? The Dean approvingly quotes on “the esthetic excellence of the machine form”(32), a phrase which might have been turned by Marinetti or Mussolini or anyone else on the ill-defined frontier between and Fascism (cf. Moore 1996: 18). In War, the Worlds Only Hygiene, Marinetti elaborated on the Bookchin/Mumford aesthetic:

33 We are developing and proclaiming a great new idea that runs through modern life: the idea of mechanical beauty. We therefore exalt love for the machine, the love we notice flaming on the cheeks of mechanics scorched and smeared with coal. Have you never seen a mechanic lovingly at work on the great powerful body of his locomotive? His is the minute, loving tenderness of a lover caressing his adored woman (Flint 1972: 90).

The Germans conquered Europe with Panzers and Stukas not by blood-and- soil hocus-pocus. Nazi ideology is far tool incoherent to be characterized as either pro- or anti-technological. The Dean in bewailing our “decadent, bourgeoisified era” (1) and our “decadent personalism” (2) is himself echoing Nazi and Stalinist rhetoric, as he surely remembers, and it’s as empty as ever. The point is that the ideology didn’t have to make sense to matter. It was vague and inconsistent so as to appeal to as many people as possible who desperately needed something to believe in, something to free them from freedom, something to command their loyalty. It didn’t have to be the same come-on for everyone. The Nazis, fishers of Menschen, understood that you need different bait to hook different fish, that’s all. And finally, individualist anarchists are terrorists — or rather, anarchist terror- ists are individualists. The inseparable association of anarchism with terrorism commenced for Amer- icans with a specific event: the Haymarket tragedy in Chicago in 1886. As the police were breaking up a peaceable workers’ rally, someone threw a bomb into their midst, killing or wounding several of them. Eight prominent anarchists involved in the union movement, but indisputably innocent of the bombing, were convicted of murder and four of them hanged (one committed suicide) on the basis of their anarchist agitation and beliefs. If there is one fact about the known to everyone who knows at least one fact about the history of anarchism, it is this: “Thereafter, anarchism, in the public mind, was inseparably linked with terrorism and destruction” (Avrich 1984: 428; cf. Schuster 1932: 166; Woodcock 1962: 464). And the anarchism with which the link was forged was the of the Haymarket defendants. That they were, as indi- viduals, innocent is irrelevant to the genesis of the mad-bomber legend.Innocent in act but not necessarily in intention:“One of them,[Louis] Lingg, had the best alibi: he wasn’t there . . . he was home, making bombs. He was thus convicted of a crime he would have liked to commit” (Black & Parfrey 1989: 67). In contrast, one historian refers to “the peaceful philosophy of Individualist Anarchism”(Schuster 1932: 159). The anarchists’ terrorist reputation was not, however, entirely fabricated by their enemies (Black 1994: 50–55). In the 1880s, left-wing European anarchists had already begun to preach, and practice,“propaganda by the deed,” such as

34 bombings —“chemistry,” as they sometimes put it — and assassinations. Even the beatific Kropotkin was originally a supporter of “the new tactic”(Bookchin 1977: 115). Some thought it the most effective way to dramatize anarchism and disseminate it to the masses. According to what the Dean calls “the best account of Spanish Anarchism from 1931 to 1936”(Bookchin 1977: 325), “the last decade of the [nineteenth] century was one in which the anarchists really were engaged in the bomb-throwing which is popularly thought to exhaust their range of activities” (Brademas 1953: 9). These anarchist terrorists were, to apply Bookchin’s terminology anachronisti- cally, usually social anarchists, rarely individualist anarchists. August Vaillant, who bombed the French Chamber of Deputies, was a leftist (Tuchman 1966: 91) and a member of an anarchist group (Bookchin 1977: 114). Of the French bombers of the 1890s, Ravachol alone, so far as anybody knows, was “almost but not quite” a Stirnerist (Tuchman 1964: 79). whom the Dean esteems above all others (1977, 1994) had perhaps the longest terrorist tradition of all. The index reference to “Terrorism, anarchist” in his history of Spanish anarchism covers dozens of pages (1977: 342). There were sporadic bombings in the 1880s which became chronic, at least in the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona, in the 1890s (Bookchin 1977: ch. 6). 1918–1923, period of violent class struggle in Spain, was the time of the pistoleros — gunmen — a term which applies to both employer-hired goons and anarcho-leftist militants. Among hundreds of others,“a premier, two former civil governors, an Arch- bishop, nearly 300 employers, factory directors, foremen, and police, and many workers and their leaders in the sindicato libre [a company union], fell before the bullets and bombs of Anarchist action groups” (Bookchin 1977: 191). The pistolero phase subsided as the anarchists, who were getting the worst of the violence anyway, were driven underground by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship at the same time that a measure of prosperity took the edge off the class struggle. But anarcho-terrorism never ceased. During the ‘2Os and ‘3Os, “the FAI’s most well-known militants — Durruti, the Ascaso brothers, Garcia Oliver — included terrorism in their repertory of :‘Gunplay, especially in “expropria- tions” and in dealing with recalcitrant employers, police agents, and blacklegs, was not frowned upon’” (Bookchin 1994: 23). Their heists “sustained Ferrer-type schools, Anarchist printing presses, and a large publishing enterprise in Paris which produced the Anarchist Encyclopedia, as well as many books, pamphlets, and periodicals” (Bookchin 1977: 199). I adduce these facts — and reference most of them, deliberately, to Bookchin — not to condemn or condone what “social anarchists” have sometimes done but to show up the Dean’s duplicity. Terrorism has been, for better or for worse, a recurrent anarchist tactic for more than a century. And the anarcho-terrorists

35 have almost always been “social,” not individualist, anarchists. I’ve had occasion to rebut leftist falsifications to the contrary (Black 1994: 50–55). Bookchin justifies Spanish anarcho-pistolero terrorism as legitimate self-defense (1977: 201–202), an opinion I share, but the fact remains that it was terrorism — in Bookchinese, “social anarchist” terrorism — not the activity of individualist anarchists.

36 Chapter 3: Lifestyle Anarchism

As fast-and-loose as the Dean plays with the word “individualism,” extrapo- lating it to something he calls “lifestyle anarchism” is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham not just nonsense, it is nonsense on stilts. Here is how he does the stretch:

In the traditionally individualist-liberal and Britain, the 1990s are awash in self-styled [that word again!] anarchists who — their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism . . . Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of [sic] everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades (9).

In a classic tale of cerebral fantasy, Jorge Luis Borges related that in Tlön, “the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author”: “Criticism is prone to invent authors. A critic will choose two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, let us say — and attribute them to the same writer, and then with all probity explore the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres . . . ” (Monegal & Reid 1981: 118). That is exactly the Dean’s modus operandi, except that Borges was joking in a very sophisticated way whereas Bookchin is serious in a very dumb, dull way. Those he has designated “lifestyle anarchists” are essentially alike because, well, he has designated them as lifestyle anarchists. The label is self-verifying. He’s cobbled together all his self-selected enemies who are also “self-styled” anarchists as “lifestyle anarchists.” In an essay only recently published, but written In 1980, the Dean cogently observed that

. . . anarchism [has] acquired some bad habits of its own, notably an ahistori- cal and entrenched commitment to its own past. The decline of the and the transformation of the sixties counter-culture into more institution- alized cultural forms compatible with the status quo created among many committed anarchists a longing for the ideological security and pedigree that also afflicts the dwindling Marxist sects of our day (1996: 23).

37 In the Middle Ages, what the Dean’s doing — but they did it better back then, and in good faith — was known as Realism. There cannot be a name (goes the ar- gument) unless there is something real which that name designates. St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, for instance, by defining God as that which nothing could be greater than, implies that God is the greatest possible being, and since something must be the greatest possible being, God must exist. The reflective reader will probably spot at least some of the flaws in this line of argument which almost all philosophers have long since recognized. I am amazed to learn that the present epoch is “awash in self-styled anarchists.” Maybe I should awash more often.I hadn’t thought any place has been awash in self-styled anarchists since certain parts of Spain were in the 1930s. Maybe Burlington is awash in Bookchinists — a veritable Yankee Barcelona — but this conjecture is as yet unconfirmed. “Lifestyle” wasn’t always a dirty word for the Dean. Recalling what was wrong with the Stalinist ‘30s, he’s written:

“Life-style?” — the word was simply unknown. If we were asked by some crazy anarchists how we could hope to change society without changing ourselves, our relations to each other, and our organizational structure, we had one ritualistic answer: “After the revolution . . . ” (Bookchin 1970: 57).

Back then the Dean was calling for “communist life-styles” as integral to the revolutionary project (ibid.: 54). Today, the Dean alleges that lifestyle anarchism is “concerned with a ‘style’ rather than a society” (34), but the “crazy anarchists” he formerly identified with, but now maligns, agree with Bookchin the Younger that is lifestyle revolution, the revolution of everyday life: “It is plain that the goal of revolution today must be the liberation of daily life”(Bookchin 1971: 44). Most of this gibberish is pejorative and content-free. If the dizzy Dean is saying anything substantive, he is claiming that those he has lumped (lumpened?) together as lifestyle anarchists are (1) anti-theoretical, (2) apolitical, (3) hedonistic and (4) anti-organizational. The question of organization is so large as to require a chapter in itself (Chapter 5). I’ll take up the other charges here.

1. Anti-Theoretical. As to this the Dean is nothing less than grotesque. When is a theorist not a theorist? When his theory is not the theory of Dean Bookchin. That disqualifies Guy Debord, , Jacques Camatte,Jean Bau- drillard and, to all intents and purposes, everybody published by Autonomedia. Bookchinism is not just the only true theory, it is the only theory. (Marxism, of course, is not theory, it is bourgeois ideology [Bookchin 1979].) Like Hegel

38 and Marx before him, Bookchin likes to think that he is not only the finest but the final theorist. As they were wrong, so is he. 2. Apolitical. This is, if anything, even zanier. How can a like anarchism — any variety of anarchism — be apolitical? There is, to be sure, a difference between Bookchinism and all anarchisms. Anarchism is anti- political by definition. Bookchinism is political (specifically, it is city-statist, as shall shortly be shown). It follows as a matter of course that Bookchinism is incompatible with anarchism, but it doesn’t follow that lifestyle anarchism is apolitical, only that lifestyle anarchism is, at worst, anarchism, and at best, contrary to Bookchinism. 3. Hedonistic. Sure, why not?

The Dean is right about one thing: it’s the truth (if no longer the wholetruth) that anarchism continues the Enlightenment tradition. As such, it stands for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a much more radical way than liberalism ever did. Godwin, for instance, argued that anarchism was the logical implication of utilitarianism. Kropotkin was convinced that “’the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is no longer a dream, a mere Utopia. It is possible” (1924: 4). His adoption of the utilitarian maxim was neither ironic nor critical. in some sense of the word has always been common ground for almost all anarchists. Rudolph Rocker attributed anarchist ideas to the Hedonists and Cynics of antiquity (1947: 5). Back before he lost his groove, the Dean praised the utopian socialist for “envision[ing] new communities that would remove restrictions on hedonistic behavior and, almost embarrassingly to his disciples, sought to harmonize social relations on the basis of pleasure” (1974: 112). As that “most unsavory” (20) of lifestyle anarchists, Hakim Bey, put it, “your inviolable freedom awaits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs”(22 [quoting Bey 1991: 4]) — “words that could be inscribed on the New York Stock Exchange,” grumps the Dean, “as a credo for egotism and social indifference” (22). Decadent degenerates that we are, lifestyle anarchists tend to favor “a state of things in which each individual will be able to give free rein to his inclinations, and even to his passions, without any other restraint than the love and respect of those who surround him.” Presumably this credo, a more overtly hedonistic version of Bey’s socially indifferent egotism, is even better suited to decorate the Stock Exchange — which would probably surprise its author, the anarcho-communist Kropotkin (1890:15). We think love and respect could be forces as powerful as they are wonderful. Even Bakunin on occasion sounded more like than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as when he wrote that the anarchist is distinguished by “his frank and human selfishness, living candidly and unsententiously for himself, and knowing that by doing so in accordance with justice he serves the whole of society” (quoted in Clark 1984: 68).

39 The plebeian radical William Benbow originated the idea of the — the “Grand National Holiday” of the working classes — in 1832 (Benbow n.d.). (The Dean is wrong when he writes that anarcho-syndicalism “can be traced back, in fact, to notions of a ‘Grand Holiday’ [sic] or general strike proposed by the English Chartists” (7). Although Benbow went on to become a Chartist, there was no Chartist movement in 1832, the Chartists never espoused the general strike, and there was never anything remotely syndicalist about the Chartists’ purely political program centered on universal male suffrage [Black 1996c].) Benbow called upon the direct producers “to establish the happiness of the immense majority of the human race”— namely, themselves — to secure their own “ease, gaiety, pleasure and happiness.” If it’s hedonistic or decadent for impoverished, exploited, overworked people to stage a revolution for generalized case, gaiety, pleasure and happiness, long live hedonism and decadence! The Dean’s yapping about “Yuppie” self-indulgence is, even aside from its gross hypocrisy, misdirected. The problem is not that Yuppies, or unionized factory workers, or small businessmen, or retirees, or whomever, are selfish.In an economy orchestrated by scarcity and risk, where almost anybody might be “downsized”(Black 1996b), only the super-rich can afford not to be selfish (but they usually are anyway: old habits die hard). The problem is the prevailing social organization of selfishness as a divisive force which actually diminishes the self. As society is now set up, individual selfishness is collectively, and literally, self-defeating. The Dean recoils in horror from a coinage he attributes to Hakim Bey, “Marxism- Stirnerism” (20) — actually, as Bookchin probably knows, Bey borrowed it from me (Black 1986: 130). It comes from my Preface to the Loompanics reprint of a pro-situationist text, (For Ourselves 1983), which argued for “communist egoism.” I made it clear that I didn’t think the essay offered any ultimate resolution of the tension between the individual the social. No theory will ever accomplish that a priori, although theory might inform its resolution in practice. But the essay is acute in distinguishing the self-sacrificing militant from the selfish revolutionary: “Any revolutionary who is to be counted upon can only be in it for himself — unselfish people can always switch loyalty from one projection to another” (For Ourselves 1983) — for example, from to to Anarchism to . . . We need, not for people to be less selfish, but for us to be better at being selfish in the most effective way, together. For that, they need to understand themselves and society better — to desire better, to enlarge their perceptions of the genuinely possible, and to appreciate the real institutional (and ideological) impediments to realizing their real desires. By “real desires” I don’t mean “what I want people to want,” I mean what they really want, severally and together, as arrived at — as

40 Benbow so presciently put it — by unconstrained, general, unhurried reflection, “to get rid of our ignorant impatience, and to learn what it is we do want.” And also what we “do not need” (Bookchin 1977: 307). In typical retro-Marxist fashion, the Dean purports to resort, on this point as on others, to the ultimate argument from authority, the argument from History:

The Austrian workers’ uprising of February 1934 and the of 1936, I can attest [emphasis added], were more than orgiastic “moments of insurrection” but were bitter struggles carried on with desperate earnestness and magnificent elan, all aesthetic epiphanies notwithstanding (23).

As a preliminary quibble —I can sometimes be as petty as lit. Dean usually is — I object to the word “attest” here.To “attest” to something — the signing of a will, for instance — means to affirm it as a witness, from personal knowledge. Bookchin was 13 in 1934 and 15 in 1936. He has no more personal knowledge of either of these revolts than my six year old niece does. Similarly, the Dean “would like to recall a Left That Was,”“the Left of the nineteenth and early twentieth century” (66), and rattles away as if he were doing exactly that — although that is, for someone born in 1921, a chronological impossibility. Another old man, Ronald Reagan, remembered the moving experience of liberating German concentration camps, although he spent World War II making propaganda films in Hollywood. What the uprising of the Austrian workers (state socialists, incidentally, not anarchists), savagely suppressed in only three days, has to do with present-day revolutionary anarchist prospects,I have no more idea than Bookchin seems to. Abstaining from “orgiastic” insurrection, if they did, must not have improved their military situation much. Spain, where anarchists played so prominent a role in the revolution, especially in its first year, is a more complicated story. Of course it was a bitter struggle. It was a war, after all, and war is hell. Hey! — this just occurred to me — did Bookchin fight the Fascists when he had the chancy in World War II? Not that I’ve ever heard. He would have been draft-age military material, at age 21, in 1942 when they were drafting almost everybody, even my spindly, nearsighted 30 year old father. Waving the bloody shirt at lifestyle anarchists might be more impressive if Bookchin had ever worn it. The fact that an experience is one thing doesn’t necessarily entail that it is only that one thing. This is the sort of metaphysical dualism which vitiates almost everything the Dean has to say (Jarach 1996). There was a great deal festivity and celebration even in the Spanish Revolution, despite the unfavorable conditions.In Barcelona, “there was a festive enthusiasm in the streets”(Fraser 1979:152). Some couples, “‘believing the revolution made everything possible’ began living together and splitting up with too much ease (ibid.: 223). George

41 Orwell, who fought with them, reported that the Catalan militiamen on the Aragon front were badly armed and even water was scarce, but “there was plenty of wine” (1952: 32). Indeed,“Orwell’s description of the city [of Barcelona] during this phase is still intoxicating: the squared and avenues bedecked with black-and-red flags, the armed people, the slogans, the stirring revolutionary songs, the feverish enthusiasm of creating a new world, the gleaming hope, and the inspired heroism”(Bookchin 1977: 306). In Barcelona, young anarchists commandeered cars — motoring was a thrill hitherto beyond their means — and careened through the streets on errands of dubious revolutionary import (Seidman 1991: 1, 168; Borkenau 1963: 70): mostly they were just joyriding. Bookchin reviles the romanticism of the lifestyle anarchists, forgetting his own statement that “Spanish Anarchism placed a strong emphasis on life-style” (1977: 4). As José Peirats remembered the Spanish Revolution, “we regarded ourselves as the last romantics” (Bolloten 1991: 769 n. 17). May they not be the last! Consider the Paris of 1871, which the Situationists referred to as the greatest rave-up of the nineteenth century:

The Communards of the Belleville district in Paris, who fought the battles of the barricades and died by the tens of thousands under the guns of the Ver- saillais, refused to confine their insurrection to the private world described by symbolist poems or the public world described by Marxist economics. They demanded the eating and the moral, the filled belly and the heightened sensibility. The Commune floated on a sea of alcohol — for weeks everyone in the Belleville district was magnificently drunk. Lacking the middle-class proprieties of their instructors, the Belleville Communards turned their in- surrection into a festival of public joy, play and (Bookchin 1971: 277).

Revolutionaries make love and war.

42 Chapter 4: On Organization

Well, finally, the Dean has identified a concrete “programmatic” difference between him and his appointed enemies. Most, maybe all of those he criticizes as “lifestyle anarchists” indeed oppose the establishment of some sort of authoritative anarchist organization, as well they should (Black 1992:1 181–193). It is something North American anarchists have always shied away from, even in the heyday of the Left That Was. The Dean, as previously noted, has spent his entire anarchist life going out of his way not to involve himself with any such organization — not from principle, apparently, but because he was preoccupied, personalistically, with his own career. Some of us think the enterprise is ill-advised, even counterproductive, even apart from our suspicion that it wouldn’t advance our careers. A lot of us don’t even have careers. Jacques Camatte (1995: 19–38) and, before him, the disillusioned socialist (1962) with whom the Dean is not entirely unfamiliar (1987: 245), provided some theoretical reasons for us to think so. Dean Bookchin himself (1977,1996) recounts the bureaucratic degeneration of what he considers the greatest anarcho-syndicalist organization of them all, the Spanish CNT-FAI. Even Kropotkin, one of the few anarchists to enjoy the Dean’s imprimatur, thought that a syndicalist regime would be far too centralized and authoritarian:“As to its Confederal Committee, it borrows a great deal too much from the Government that it has just overthrown” (1990: xxxv). With organizations, especially large-scale ones, the means tend to displace the ends; the division of labor engenders inequality of power, officially or otherwise; and representatives, by virtue of greater interest, experience, and access to exper- tise, effectively supplant those they represent. We agree with the Dean that “the words ‘,’ taken literally, are a contradiction in terms” (1987: 245). In other words,“delegated authority entails hierarchy” (Dahl 199O: 72). Thus in Spain the 30,000 faistas quickly came to control one million cenetistas, whom they led into policies — such as entering the government — to which the FAI militants should have been even more fiercely opposed than the rank-and- file CNT unionists.In a crisis — which might be of their own creation — the leadership generally consults its “personalistic” interests and the maintenance requirements of the organization, in that order; only then, if ever, their announced ideology; not the will of the membership (although the leaders will invoke it if it happens to coincide with their policies and, for that matter, even if it doesn’t). This has happened too often to be an accident. We do not reject organization because we are ignorant of the history of anar- chist organizations. We reject it, among other reasons, because we know that

43 history only too well, and Bookchin is one of those who has taught it to us. No- body is surprised that business corporations, government bureaucracies, hieratic churches and authoritarian political parties are in practice, as in theory, inimical to liberty, equality and fraternity. (Also incompetent: as Paul Goodman put it [1994: 58], central organization “mathematically guarantees stupidity.”) What at first surprises, and what cries out for explanation, is that egalitarian and libertarian organizations sooner or later — usually sooner — end up the same way. Robert Michels (himself a socialist) studied the German Social Democratic Party — a Marxist party programmatically committed to social equality — afew years before the First World War, and found it to be thoroughly hierarchic and bu- reaucratic. Vindicating Michels, the vast majority of German socialists, contrary to their official antiwar position, promptly followed their leaders in supporting the war. Anarchists might congratulate themselves that Marxism, unlike anar- chism, was a “bourgeois ideology” (Bookchin 1979) — like the Pharisees, thanking God that they are not as other men.(Although that would be “idealism,” another bourgeois ideology.) Michels, writing at a time when syndicalism seemed to be an important social movement, noted:

Here we find a political school, whose adherents are numerous, able, well- educated, and generous-minded, persuaded that in syndicalism it has dis- covered the antidote to oligarchy. But we have to ask whether the antidote to the oligarchical tendencies of organization can possibly be found in a method which is itself rooted in the principle of representation . . . Syndi- calism is . . . mistaken in attributing to parliamentary democracy alone the inconveniences that arise from the principle of delegation in general (1962: 318).

Times have changed: North American syndicalists aren’t numerous, aren’t able, and least of all are they generous-minded, although most may be “well-educated” if you equate a good education with college — something that I, having taught American college students, don’t do. The Spanish experience suggests that Michels was right about “organization” at least in the sense of large-scale organizations whose higher reaches consist of rep- resentatives, such as the Spanish CNT or the confederal “Commune of ” (57) the Dean desires. Even if these organizations are only minimally bureaucratic — a precious, and precarious, accomplishment — they are nonetheless inherently hierarchic. The CNT pyramid had at least six levels (and some outbuildings):

Section → Syndicate → Local federation of syndicates → Comercal fed- eration → Regional confederation → National confederation (congress) (Brademas 1953: 16–17)

44 This leaves out, for instance, several intermediary bodies such as the Regional Plenum, the Plenum of Regionals (no, I’m not joking) and the National Committee (Bookchin 1977: 170). What happened was just what might have been expected to happen had anybody anticipated the CNT’s abrupt rise to power. When their turn came, in Spain, the organizational anarchists blew it too. It is not only that the most vociferous FAI militants, like Montseney and García Oliver, joined the Loyalist government — that could be explained away, albeit implausibly, as “personalistic” treachery — but that most of the CNT-FAI rank-and-file went along with it (Brademas 1953: 353). Even more startling than the leaders’ support for what they were supposed to be against (the state) was their opposition to what they were supposed to be for — social revolution — which swept over much of Republican Spain without the support, and in most cases over the objections, of the leaders (Bolloten 1991; Broué &Témime 1972). The leaders placed the war ahead of the revolution and managed, at the cost of a million lives, to lose both (Richards 1983). The Spanish experience was not unique. The Italian syndicalists mostly went over to Fascism (Roberts 1979). The sham of syndicalist corporatism only needed a little fine-tuning and a touch of cosmetics to be finessed into the sham syndicalism of Fascist corporatism. For North Americans, no example — not even the Spanish example — is more important than the . Had it turned out differently, it would have recoiled upon the United States with incalculable force. Because the rev- olution was contained south of the border, in America the Federal and state governments (and the vigilantes they encouraged) had a free hand to crush the anarchists, syndicalists and socialists so thoroughly that they’ve never recovered. During the Mexican Revolution, the organized anarcho- syndicalists supported the liberals — the Constitutionalists — against the Zapatista and Villista social rev- olutionaries (Hart 1978: ch. 9). As urban rationalist progressives (like Bookchin), they despised peasant revolutionaries still clinging to Catholicism. Besides, they thought that Pancho Villa — here’s an uncanny precursor to Bookchinist jargon — acted too much like a “personalist”! (ibid.: 131). On behalf of the Constitution- alist regime — the one President Wilson sent the U.S. Army in to prop up — the anarcho-syndicalists raised “Red Battalions,” perhaps 12,000 strong,“a massive augmentation of commanding general Obregon’s Constitutional army” (ibid.: 133, 135). They soon reaped the reward — repression — that they’d earned. By 1931 the government had the Mexican working class under control (ibid.: 175–177, 183), as it still does. If revolution resumes it will be the Neo-Zapatistas, the Mayan peasants of Chiapas, who set it off (Zapatistas 1994). Without attempting a comprehensive critique of the Dean’s municipal-con- federal socialism, I’d like to raise a couple of prosaic points of fact which do not

45 depend upon, although they are consistent with, the anti-organizational critiques of Michels, Camatte, Zerzan, myself and, by now, many others. is not, and for all anybody knows, never was, all it’s cracked up to be by the Dean. Most of the extant authors from classical antiquity, who knew the working system better than we ever will, were anti-democratic (Finley 1985: 8–11), as Bookchin elsewhere admits (1989: 176). The word “democracy” was almost always used pejoratively before the nineteenth century — that is, when it referred only to direct democracy: “To dismiss this unanimity as a debasement of the currency, or to dismiss the other side of the debate as apologists who misuse the term, is to evade the need for explanation” (Finley 1985: 11; cf. Bailyn 1992: 282–285). The Athenian polis, the most advanced form of direct democracy ever practiced for any extended period, was oligarchic. It’s not only that, as Bookchin grudgingly concedes (59), the polity excluded slaves, numerous other noncitizens (one-third of free men were technically foreigners [Walzer 1970: 106]), and women, i.e., the polis excluded the overwhelming majority of adult Athenians. Even the Dean acknowledges, but attaches no importance to, the fact that maybe three-fourths of adult male Athenians were “slaves and disenfranchised resident aliens” (1987: 35). It could not have been otherwise:

These large disenfranchised populations provided the material means for many Athenian male citizens to convene in popular assemblies, function as mass juries in trials, and collectively administer the affairs of the community (Bookchin 1989: 69).

“A modicum of free time was needed to participate in political affairs, leisure that was probably [!] supplied by slave labour, although it is by no means true that all active Greek citizens were slave owners”(Bookchin 1990: 8). Greek culture, as Nietzsche observed, flourished at the expense of the “overwhelming majority”: “At their expense, through their extra work, that privileged class is to be removed from the struggle for existence, in order to produce and satisfy a new world of necessities” (1994: 178). There are two more points to ponder. The first is that the vast majority of the Athenian citizen minority abstained from participation in direct democracy, just as the majority of American citizens abstain from our representative democracy. Up to 40,000 Athenian men enjoyed the privilege of citizenship, less than half of whom resided in the city itself (Walzer 1970: 17). “All the policy decisions of the polis,” according to Bookchin,“are formulated directly by a popular assembly, or Ecclesia, which every male citizen from the city and its environs (Attica) is expected to attend” (1974: 24). In reality, the facility provided for the assembly accommodated only a fraction of them (Dahl 1990: 53–54), so most must have been expected not to attend, and didn’t.

46 Attendance probably never exceeded 6,000, and was usually below 3,000. The only known tally of the total vote on a measure is 3,461 (Zimmern 1931: 169). And this despite the fact that many citizens were slaveowners who were thereby relieved, in whole or in part, of the need to work (Bookchin 1990: 8). And despite the fact that the prevalent ideology, which even Socrates subscribed to,“emphatically prioritized the social over the individual,” as the Dean approvingly asserts that Bakunin did (5): “as a matter of course,” the Athenians “put the city first and the individual nowhere”(Zimmern 1931: 169–170 n. 1). Even most Athenians with the time to spare for public affairs avoided political involvement. In this respect they resembled the remnants of direct democracy in America, the New England town meetings. These originated in the Massachusetts Bay colony when the dispersal of settlements made a unitary central government impractical. At first informally, but soon formally, towns exercised substantial powers of self-government. The original form of self-government was the of all freemen, which took place anywhere from weekly to monthly. This system still prevails, formally, in some New England towns, including those in Bookchin’s adopted state Vermont — but as a form without content. In Vermont the town meeting takes place only one day a year (special meetings are possible, but rare). Attendance is low, and declining: “In recent years there has been a steady decline in participation until in some towns there are scarcely more persons present than the officials who are required to be there” (Nuquist 1964: 4–5). The Dean has thrown a lot of fairy-dust on present-day Vermont town meetings (1987:268–270; 1989: 181) without ever claiming that they play any real role in governance.Indeed, Bookchin hails the town meeting’s “control” (so-called) precisely because “it does not carry the ponderous weight of law” (1987: 269): in other words, it’s just a populist ritual. By failing to either “carry the ponderous weight of law” or jettison it — tasks equally beyond its illusory authority — the town meeting legitimates those who do carry, willingly, the ponderous weight of law, the practitioners of what the Dean calls statecraft. In modern Vermont as in ancient Athens, most people think they have better things to do than attend political meetings, because most people are not political militants like the Dean. Several sorts of, so to speak, special people flock to these get-togethers. These occasions tend to attract a person (typically a man) who is an ideological fanatic, a control freak, an acting-out victim of mental illness, or somebody who just doesn’t have a life, and often someone favored by some combination of the foregoing civic virtues. Face-to-face democracy is in-your-face democracy. To the extent that the tireless typicals turn up, they discourage those not so afflicted from participating actively or returning the next time. The Dean, for instance, speaks glowingly of “having attended many town meetings over the last fifteen years” (1987: 269)—

47 they aren’t even held where he lives Burlington — who but a political pervo-voyeur could possibly get off on these solemn ceremonies? Some people like to watch autopsies too. The same types who’d get themselves elected in a representative democracy tend to dominate, by their bigmouthed bullying, a direct democracy too (Dahl 1990: 54). Normal non-obsessive people will often rather appease the obsessives or even kick them upstairs than prolong an unpleasant interaction with them. If face-to-face democracy means having to face democrats like Bookchin, most people would rather execute an about-face. And so the minority of political obsessives, given an institutional opportunity, tend to have their way. That was how it was in Athens, where direction came from what we might call militants, what they called demagogues:“demagogues —I use the word in a neutral sense — were a structural element in the Athenian political system [which] could not function without them” (Finley 1985: 69). In “ADay in the Life of a Socialist Citizen,” Michael Walzer (1970: ch. 11) sent up muscular, direct democracy before Bookchin publicized his version of it. Walzer’s point of departure was what Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology about how the post-revolutionary communist citizen is a fully realized, all-sided person who “hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, rears cattle in the evening, and plays the critic after dinner” without ever being confined to any or all of these social roles (ibid.: 229). Bookchin has endorsed this vision (1989: 192, 195). Sounds good, but a muscular municipal socialist has further demands on his time:

Before hunting in the morning, this unalienated man of the future is likely to attend a meeting of the Council on Animal Life, where he will be required to vote on important matters relating to the stocking of the forests. The meeting will probably not end much before noon, for among the many-sided citizens there will always be a lively interest even in highly technical problems. Immediately after lunch, a special session of the Fishermen’s Council will be called to protest the maximum catch recently voted by the Regional Planning Commission, and the Marxist man will participate eagerly in these debates, even postponing a scheduled discussion of some contradictory theses on cattle-rearing.Indeed he will probably love argument far better than hunting, fishing, or rearing cattle. The debates will go on so long that the citizens will have to rush through dinner in order to assume their role as critics. Then off they will go to meetings of study groups, clubs, editorial boards, and political parties where criticism will be carried on long into the night (ibid.: 229–230).

In other words, “Socialism means the rule of the men with the most evenings to spare”(ibid.: 235). Walzer is far from being my favorite thinker (Black 1985), but what he sketched here is as much paradigm as parody. It scarcely exaggerates

48 and in no way contradicts Rousseau’s — his fellow Genevan Calvin’s — ascetic republican civism, which in turn is disturbingly close to Bookchin’s muscular, moralistic municipalism. The Dean has long insisted upon the potential of what he calls “liberatory technology” to free the masses from toil and usher in a post-scarcity society (1971: 83–139). “Without major technological advances to free people from toil,” anarchy — especially “primitivistic, prerational, antitechnological, and anticivilizational” anarchy — is impossible (26). No part of his Marxist heritage is more vital to Bookchin than its notion of humanity passing from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom by way of the rational, socially responsible application of the advanced technology created by capitalism. The Dean is furious with “lifestyle anarchists” who doubt or deny this postulate of positivist progressivism, but for present purposes, let’s assume he’s right. Let’s pretend that under anarcho-democratic, rational control, advanced technology would drastically reduce the time devoted to production work and afford economic security to all. Technology would thus do for the upright (and uptight) republican Bookchinist citizenry what slavery and imperialism did for the Athenian citizenry — but no more. Which is to say, not nearly enough. For even if technology reduced the hours of work, it would not reduce the hours in a day. There would still be 24 of them.Let’s make-believe we could automate all production-work away. Even if we did, technics couldn’t possibly do more than shave a few minutes off the long hours which deliberative, direct democracy would necessitate, the “often prosaic, even tedious but most important forms of self-management that required patience, commitment to democratic procedures, lengthy debates, and a decent respect for the opinions of others within one’s community” (Bookchin 1996: 20; cf. Dahl 1990: 32–36, 52). (I pass over as beneath comment Bookchin’s avowal of “a decent respect for the opinions of others.”) Having to race from meeting to meeting to try to keep the militants from taking over would be even worse than working, but without the pay. That was the first practical objection. The second is that there is no reason to believe that there has ever been an urban, purely direct democracy or even a reasonable approximation of one. Every known instance has involved a con- siderable admixture of representative democracy which sooner or later usually subordinated direct democracy where it didn’t eliminate it altogether. In Athens, for instance, a Council of 500, chosen monthly by lot, set the agenda for the meetings of the ekklesia (there was no provision for new business to be brought up from the floor [Bookchin 1971: 157; Zimmern 1931: 170 n. 1]) and which, in turn, elected an inner council of 50 for governing between assemblies, which in turn elected a daily chairman. Sir Alfred Zimmern, whose sympathetic but dated account of the Dean has referred to approvingly (1971:

49 159, 288 n. 27), observed that the Council consisted of paid officials (Zimmern 1931: 165), a detail the Dean omits.In general, “the sovereign people judged and administered by delegating power to representatives”(ibid,: 166). Generals, for instance — very important officials in an imperialist state frequently at war — were elected annually (Dahl 1990: 30; cf. Bookchin 1971: 157). These were remarkably radical democratic institutions for their day, and even for ours, but they are also substantial departures from Bookchinist direct democracy. Nonetheless the Dean only grudgingly admits that Athens was even a “quasi-state”(Bookchin 1989: 69), whatever the hell a “quasi-state,” is. Unbelievably, the Dean claims that “Athens had a ‘state’ in a very limited and piecemeal sense . . . the ‘state’ as we know it in modern times could hardly be said to exist among the Greeks” (1987: 34). Just ask Socrates. What’ll you be having? Hemlock, straight up. The Dean has elsewhere explained that in his municipal Utopia, face-to-face assemblies would set policy but leave its administration to “boards, commissions, or collectives of qualified, even elected officials”(Bookchin 1989: 175) — the experts and the politicians. Again:“Given a modest but by no means small size, the polis could be arranged institutionally so that it could have its affairs conducted by well-rounded, pub- licly-engaged men with a minimal, carefully guarded degree of representation” (Bookchin 1990: 8). Meet the new boss, same as the old boss! Consider Switzerland, a highly decentralized federal republic which for the Dean is a fascinating example of “economic and political coordination within and between communities that render[s] statecraft and the nation-state utterly superfluous” (1987: 229). Alexis de Tocqueville, as astute a student of democracy as ever was, wrote in 1848:

It is not sufficiently realized that, even in those Swiss cantons where the people have most preserved the exercise of their power, there does exist a representative body entrusted with some of the cares of government. Now, it is easy to see, when studying recent Swiss history, that gradually those matters with which the people concern themselves are becoming fewer, whereas those with which their representatives deal are daily becoming more numerous and more important. Thus the principle of pure democracy is losing ground gained by the opposing principle. The former is insensibly becoming the exception and the latter the rule (1969b: 740).

Even in the Swiss cantons there were representative bodies (legislatures) to which the executive and the judiciary were strictly subordinate (ibid.: 741). Civil were virtually unknown and civil rights entirely so, a much worse situa- tion than in most European monarchies at the time (ibid.: 738). De Tocqueville considered the Swiss Confederation of his day “the most imperfect of all the constitutions of this kind yet seen in the world”(ibid.: 744). Earlier, John Adams

50 had also made the point that the Swiss cantons were aristocratic republics as well as observing that their historical tendency was for hereditary elites to entrench themselves in office (Coulborn 1965: 101–102). As for the “economic and political coordination” which renders the Swiss “nation-state utterly superfluous”(Bookchin 1987: 229), if the Swiss nation-state is utterly superfluous, why does it exist at all? As it does, as surely as exist the Swiss banks whose numbered accounts safeguard so much of the loot of the world’s dictators and gangsters (Ruwart 1996: 4). Is there possibly a connection? Might Switzerland’s rakeoff from loan-sharking and money-laundering underwrite its direct democracy (such as it is) just as slavery and imperialism underwrote the direct democracy of Athens? A Swiss parliamentarian once referred to his country as a nation of receivers of stolen goods. Those of us who are somewhat older than most North American anarchists, although much younger than the Dean, also recall the history of efforts to form an all-inclusive anarchist organization here. Never did they come close to success. (To anticipate an objection — the Industrial Workers of the World is not now, and never has been, an avowedly anarchist organization. It is syndicalist, not anarchist [and not Bookchinist]). Not until about 1924, when most of the membership had fallen away, joined the , or in some cases gone to prison, was the little that was left of the One Big Union essentially, if unofficially, an anarchist organization.) Much later the Anarchist Communist Federation made an effort to unify the workerist/organizational anarchists, and most recently the ex- (or maybe not so ex-) Marxists around Love & Rage, whose anarchist bona fides are widely doubted, flopped too. At this time there seems to be no interest in a continental anarchist federation. The only apparent purpose for one is to legislate standards of anarchist orthodoxy (Black 1992: 181–193), an objective understandably unwelcome to the unorthodox majority of anarchists, although that now appears to be the Dean’s belated goal. While the anarchist ranks have greatly grown during the decades of decadence, we are far from numerous and united enough to assemble in a fighting organization. But no cult is ever too small for its own little Inquisition. So, yes, we “lifestyle anarchists” tend to be anti-organizational, in the sense that we know that anarchist organizations have a poor track record and also that, given our numbers, our resources, and our differences, North American anarchists have no compelling reason to believe that what’s never worked for us before would work if we tried it now. It is not as if these organizing efforts are indispensable to accomplish even what little we are already accomplishing. Mostly what we are accomplishing is publishing. After the ACF fell apart, the collective which had been responsible for producing its newspaper Strike! continued to do so on its own for some years. An organization may need a newspaper, but a newspaper

51 may not need an organization (Black 1992: 192). In the case of Love & Rage, the newspaper preceded what little there is to its continental organization. Self- reports and other reports of anarchist burnout within leftist anti-authoritarian collectives abound (No Middle Ground, Processed World, Open Road, Black Rose Books, Sabotage Bookstore, etc.). These are, for anarchists, usually ideological killing-fields. Ironically, the allegedly anti-organizational collectives, such as Autonomedia and the Fifth Estate, have outlasted most of the organizational ones. Could it be that the organizer-types are too individualistic to get along with each other?

52 Chapter 5: Murray Bookchin, Municipal Statist

There is no putting off the inevitable any longer. It has to be said: Dean Bookchin is not an anarchist. By this I do not mean that he is not my kind of anarchist, although that too is true.I mean he is not any kind of anarchist. The word means something, after all, and what it means is denial of the necessity and desirability of government. That’s a bare- bones, pre-adjectival definition anterior to any squabbling about individualist, collectivist, communist, mutualist, social, lifestyle, ecological, mystical, rational, primitivist, Watsonian, ontological, etc. anarchisms. An anarchist as such is opposed to government — full stop. Dean Bookchin is not opposed to government. Consequently, he is not an anarchist. What! “The foremost contemporary anarchist theorist” (Clark 1990: 102) is not an anarchist? You heard me. He’s not — really and truly, he’s not. And not because he flunks some abstruse ideological test of my own concoction. He’s not an anarchist because he believes in government. An anarchist can believe in many things, and all too often does, but government is not one ofthem. There’s nothing heinous about not being an anarchist. Some of my best friends are not anarchists. They do not, however, claim to be anarchists, as the Dean does. I could take some cheap shots at the Dean — come to think of it, I think I will! How many of his Red-and-Green disciples know that he was formerly in favor of a modest measure of nuclear power? Solar, wind, and tidal power should be exploited to the max, but “it would be impossible to establish an advanced industrial economy based exclusively on solar energy, wind power, or even tidal power” (Herber 1965: 193), and we must have an advanced industrial economy, that goes without saying. So, though we shouldn’t “overcommit ourselves to the use of nuclear fuels,” the clean energy sources will not suffice: “These gaps will be filled by nuclear and fossil fuels, but we will employ them judiciously, always taking care to limit their use as much as possible” (ibid.). That’s a comfort. And it would be scurrilous of me to report that this same Bookchin book (Herber 1965: ix) includes — this must be an anarchist first — a plug from a Cabinet member, then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall: “Crisis in Our Cities sets forth in one volume vivid evidence that the most debilitating diseases of our time are a result of our persistent and arrogant abuse of our shared environment . . . We cannot minimize the investments necessary to pollution control, but as Mr. Herber [Bookchin] documents, the penalties for not doing so have become unthinkable.” This is, be it noted, a call for legislation and taxation which a closet anarchist

53 allowed to adorn one of his books. There’s also an afterword from the Surgeon General of the United States. As embarrassing to the Dean as these reminders must be, they are not conclu- sive against him. It is his own explicit endorsements of the state which are decisive. Not, to be sure, the nation-state of modern European provenance. He doesn’t like that sort of state very much. It allows for too much individual autonomy. But he is enamored of the city-state of classical antiquity and the occasionally, semi-self- governing “commune” of pre-industrial western Europe.In this he is reminiscent of Kropotkin, who propounded the absurd opinion that the state did not exist in western Europe prior to the sixteenth century (cf. Bookchin 1987: 33–34). That would have surprised and amused William the Conqueror and his successors, not to mention the French and Spanish monarchs and the Italian city- states familiar to Machiavelli — whose Il Principe was clearly not directed to a mandated and revocable delegate responsible to the base, but rather to a man on horseback, somebody like Caesare Borgia. Although it is the most unremarkable of observations, the Dean carries on as if he’s genuinely incensed that John Zerzan, reviewing his The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987), pointed out that the romanticized classical Athenian polis has “long been Bookchin’s model for a revitalization of urban politics,” a “canard” to which the Dean indignantly retorts, “In fact, I took great pains to indicate the failings of the Athenian polis (slavery, patriarchy, class antagonisms, and war)” (59). He may have felt great pains at getting caught, but he took very few. The Dean made, “in fact,” all of two references — not even to slavery as a mode of production, as a social reality, but to attitudes toward slavery (1987: 83, 87), as if the fact that classical cities had mostly subject populations (Dahl 1990: 1) was the accidental result of some collective psychic quirk, some strange thousand-year head-trip. What Zerzan said is only what one of the Dean’s admirers put in stronger terms:“Bookchin continually exhorts us to hearken back to the Greeks, seeking to recapture the promise of classical thought and to comprehend the truth of the Polis” (Clark 1982: 52; Clark 1984: 202–203). Every historian knows that large-scale slavery was a necessity for the classical city (Finley 1959), although the Dean has issued the fiat that “the image of Athens as a slave economy which built its civilization and generous humanistic outlook on the backs of human chattels is false” (1972: 159). (M.I. Finley — like the Dean, an ex-Communist [Novick 1988: 328] — is a Bookchin-approved historian [1989: 178].) Some of what Zerzan writes about paleolithic society may be conjectural and criticizable, but what he writes about Bookchin is pure reportage. The Dean plainly says that “later ideals of citizenship, even insofar as they were modeled on the Athenian, seem more unfinished and immature than the original — hence the very considerable discussion I have given to the Athenian citizen and his

54 context” (1987: 83). That is perhaps because the even more unfinished and im- mature realizations of “later ideals” lacked the combination of the immense slave infrastructure and the tributary empire possessed by classical Athens. Similar paeans to Athenian citizenship pepper the Dean’s early books too (1972: 155–159; 1974: ch. 1). Manifestly what’s put a bee in Bookchin’s beret is that Zerzan has had the temerity to read Bookchin’s books, not just revere their distinguished author, and Zerzan has actually kept track of what the Dean’s been reiterating all these years. The down side of being “arguably the most prolific anarchist writer” (Ehrlich 1996: 384) is that you leave a long paper trail. Bookchin is a statist: a city-statist. A city-state is not an anti-state. Contem- porary Singapore, for instance, is a highly authoritarian city-state. The earliest states, in Sumer, were city-states. The city is where the state originated. The ancient Greek cities were all states, most of them not even democratic states in even the limited Athenian sense of the word. Rome went from being a city-state to an empire without ever being a nation-state. The city-states of Renaissance Italy were states, and only a few of them, and not for long, were in any sense .Indeed republican Venice, whose independence lasted the longest, startlingly anticipated the modern police-state (Andrieux 1972: 45–55). Taking a worldwide comparative-historical perspective, the pre-industrial city, unless it was the capital of an empire or a nation-state (in which case it was directly subject to a resident monarch) was always subject to an oligarchy. There has never been a city which was not, or which was not part of, a state. And there has never been a state which was not a city or else didn’t incorporate one or more cities. The pre-industrial city (what Gideon Sjoberg calls — a poor choice of words — the “feudal city”) was the antithesis of democracy, not to mention anarchy:

Central to the stratification system that pervades all aspects of the feudal city’s social structure — the family, the economy, religion, education, and so on — is the pre-eminence of the political organization . . . We reiterate: the feudal, or preindustrial civilized, order is dominated by a small, privileged upper stratum. The latter commands the key institutions of the society. Its higher echelons are most often located in the capital, the lower ranks residing in the smaller cities, usually the provincial capitals (Sjoberg 1960: 220).

Sjoberg anticipated the objection, “What about Athens?” He wrote, “although the Greek city was unique for its time, in its political structure it actually approx- imates the typical preindustrial city far more than it does the industrial-urban order” (ibid.: 236). Only a small minority of Athenians were citizens, and many of them were illiterate and/or too poor to be able to participate effectively, if at all, in politics (ibid.: 235). Then and there, as always in cities everywhere, politics was an elite prerogative. The “latent” democracy of any and every urban republic

55 (59) is something only Bookchin can see, just as only could see orgones under the microscope. The distinction the Dean tries to draw between “politics” mid “statecraft” (1987: 243 & passim) is absurd and self-serving, not to mention that it’s a major mutilation of ordinary English. Even if local politics is a kinder, gentler version of national politics, it is still politics, which has been well if cynically defined as who gets what, when, where, how (Lasswell 1958). It’s not just that the Dean uses an idiosyncratic terminology to reconcile (in a ramshackle sort of a way) anarchy with democracy, he’s more apoplectic than anybody could have ever thought otherwise:

Even democratic decision-making is jettisoned as authoritarian.“Democratic rule is still rule,” [L. Susan] Brown warns . . . Opponents of democracy as “rule” to the contrary notwithstanding, it describes the democratic dimension of anarchism as a majoritarian administration of the public sphere. Accord- ingly, seeks freedom rather than autonomy in the sense that I have counterpoised them (17, 57).

Moving along from his mind-boggling deduction that democracy is democratic, Bookchin further fusses that “pejorative words like dictate and rule properly refer to the silencing of dissenters, not to the exercise of democracy” (18). Free speech is a fine thing, but it’s not democracy. You can have one without the other. The Athenian democracy that the Dean venerates, for instance, democratically silenced the dissenter Socrates by putting him to death. Anarchists “jettison” democratic decision-making, not because it’s authoritar- ian, but because it’s statist. “Democracy” means “rule by the people.” “Anarchy” means “no rule.” There are two different words because they refer to (at least) two different things. I don’t claim — and to make my point, I don’t have to claim — that the Dean’s characterization of anarchism as generalized direct democracy has no basis what- soever in traditional anarchist thought. The anarchism of some of the more conser- vative classical anarchists is indeed along these lines — although Bookchin’s ver- sion, right down to such details as its philhellenism, is instead an unacknowledged appropriation from the avowedly anti-anarchist (1958). Ironically, it is the anarchists Bookchin disparages as individualists — like Proudhon and Goodman — who best represent this anarchist theme. It was the individualist egoist Benjamin Tucker who defined an anarchist as an “unterrified Jeffersonian democrat.” But another theme with as least as respectable an anarchist pedigree holds that democracy is not an imperfect realization of anarchy but rather sta- tism’s last stand. Many anarchists believe, and many anarchists have always believed, that democracy is not just a grossly deficient version of anarchy, it’s not

56 anarchy at all. At any rate, no “direct face-to-face democracy” (57) that I am aware of has delegated to comrade Bookchin (mandated, revocable, and responsible to the base) the authority to pass or fail anarchists which he enjoys to pass or fail college students. It is by no means obvious, and the Dean nowhere demonstrates, that local is kinder and gentler — not where local refers to local government. It is equally as plausible that, as James Madison argued, a large and heterogeneous polity is more favorable to liberty than the “small republic,” as then local minorities can find national allies to counteract local majoritarian tyranny (Cooke 1961: 351–353). But after all, as he says himself, the Dean isn’t interested in liberty (in his jargon, autonomy [57],) but only in what he calls social freedom, the participatory, self- ratified servitude of indoctrinated moralists to the petite polity in which they function as self-effacing citizen-units. My present purpose is not to take the full measure of Bookchinism, only to characterize it as what it manifestly is, as an ideology of government — democracy — not a theory of anarchy. Bookchin’s “minimal agenda” — this hoary Marxist word “minimal” is his, not mine (1987: 287) — is unambiguously statist, not anar- chist. The “fourfold tenets,” the Four Commandments he requires all anarchists to affirm, although most of them do not, and never did, are:

. . . a confederation of decentralized municipalities; an unwavering opposi- tion to ; a belief in direct democracy; and a vision of a libertarian (60).

By some quirk of fate, Bookchin’s minimal, believe-it-or-else anarchist creed just happens to be his creed. It also happens to be deliriously incoherent. A “confederation of decentralized municipalities” contradicts “direct democracy,” as a confederation is at best a representative, not a direct, democracy. It also contradicts “an unwavering opposition to statism” because a city-state or a federal state is still a state. And by requiring, not “a libertarian communist society,” only the vision of one, the Dean clearly implies that there is more to such a society than obedience to the first Three Commandments — but exactly what more, he isn’t saying. The Dean is relegating higher-stage anarchy (the real thing) to some remote future time, just as the Marxists relegate what they call higher-stage communism to some hazy distant future which seems, like a mirage, forever to recede. Amazingly, the Dean considers a city like New York (!) to be “largely made up of neighborhoods — that is to say, largly organic communities that have a certain measure of identity” (1987: 246). (He has elsewhere and inconsistently written that the modern world “lacks real cities”[Bookchin 1974: viii].) But community “obviously means more than, say, neighborhood”(Zerzan 1994: 157) — more than

57 mere propinquity. And obviously Bookchin’s been away from his home town for an awfully long time, especially if civility and civic virtue play any part in his conception of an organic community. I wouldn’t recommend he take a midnight stroll in some of these “organic communities” if he values his own organism. If the criterion of an organic community is “a certain measure of identity,” many wealthy all-white suburbs qualify, although Bookchin blames them for the central city’s problems (1974: 73–74). Jealously territorial and violent youth gangs are the most conspicuous manifestations of community in many impoverished and otherwise atomized New York neighborhoods, his “colorful ethnic neighborhoods” (1974: 72) of childhood memory. If racial-caste and social-class residential segregation is the Dean’s idea of what defines organic communities, then organic communities certainly exist in New York City, but not many people who live in them, except the very rich, are very happy about it. While the word “anarchism” appears on almost every page of the Dean’s di- atribe, the word “anarchy” rarely if ever does. The ideology, the ism, is what preoccupies him, not the social condition, the way of life, it’s presumably sup- posed to guide us toward. It may not be an inadvertent choice of words that what Bookchin lays down, as one of his Four Commandments of orthodox anarchism, is “an unwavering opposition to statism” (60: emphasis added), not an unwaver- ing opposition to the state. As a democrat, the Dean is at best capable of only a wavering opposition to the state, whereas an abstract rejection of an abstraction, “statism,” is easy enough to issue. And I’m sure it’s no accident that his shot at the mainstream marketing of Bookchinism (Bookchin 1987a) nowhere identifies the Dean as an anarchist or his teachings as any kind of anarchism. A further Bookchinist fiddle — this one a blatant regression to Marxism (indeed, to St.-Simonianism) — is the distinction between “policy” and “administration” (ibid.: 247–248). Policy is made, he says, by the occasional face-to-face assembly which pushy intellectuals like Bookchin are so good at manipulating. Admin- istration is for the experts, as in higher-stage Marxist Communism, where the “government of men” is ostensibly replaced by the “administration of things.” Un- fortunately it is men (and it usually still is men) who govern by administering things, and by administering people as if they were things, as governors have always governed. Policy without administration is nothing. Administration with or without policy is everything. Stalin the General Secretary, the administra- tor, understood that, which is why he triumphed over Trotsky, Bukharin and all the other policy-preoccupied politicians who perhaps possibly believed in some- thing.“Policy” is a euphemism for law, and “administration” is a euphemism for enforcement. Just what political practice does the eximious elder prescribe to anarchists? We know how higher-stage confederal municipalism looks — muscular mentating

58 men massed in meetings — but what is to be done in the here and now? The Dean despises existing anarchist efforts:

The sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and the intuitive supplant the consistent, purposive, organized, and rational, indeed any form of sustained or focused activity apart from publishing a “zine” or pamphlet — or burning a garbage can (51).

So we are not to publish zines and pamphlets as Bookchin used to do, nor are we to burn garbage cans. Nor are we to experience freedom in the temporary collective fraternizations Hakim Bey calls Temporary Autonomous Zones (20–26). We’re supposed to get organized, but Bookchin has not indicated, not even by example, what organization we’re supposed to join. What then? I On this point the Dean, usually so verbose, is allusive and elusive.I have been unable to locate in any of his writings any formulation of the “programmatic as well as activist social movement” he now demands (60). What I think he is hinting at, with nods and winks, is participation in local electoral politics:

The is a potential time bomb.To create local networks and try to transform local institutions that replicate the State [emphasis added] is to pick up a historic challenge — a truly political one — that has existed for centuries . . . For in these municipal institutions and the changes that we can make in their structure — turning them more and more into a new public sphere — lies the abiding institutional basis for a , a grassroots concept of citizenship, and municipalized economic systems that can be counterpoised to the growing power of the centralized Nation-State and centralized economic corporations (Bookchin 1990: 12).

When the Dean speaks of transforming existing local institutions, when he speaks of “the changes we can make in their structure,” he can only be referring to participation in local politics as it is actually conducted in the United States and Canada — by getting elected or by getting appointed by those who’ve gotten themselves elected. That is exactly what the world’s only Bookchinist political movement, Black Rose boss Dimitri Roussopoulos’ Ecologie Montreal groupuscule (Anonymous 1996:22) has attempted, and, fortunately, failed at. You can call this anything you want to — except anarchist. To sum up: Dean Bookchin is a statist.

59 60 Chapter 6: Reason and Revolution

The Dean denounces lifestyle anarchists for succumbing to the reactionary intellectual currents of the last quarter century, such as irrationalism (1–2, 9, 55–56 & passim). He laments the Stirnerist “farewell to objective reality” (53) an the disdain for “reason as such” (28). With his usual self-absorption sans self- awareness, Bookchin fails to notice that he is echoing the right-wing rhetoric which since the 60’s has denounced the treason of the intellectuals, their betrayal of reason and truth. There was a time when Bookchin “dismissed out of hand” the way the “bourgeois critics” condemned 60’s youth culture as “anti-rational” (1970: 51). Now he joins the neo-conservative chorus:

The sixties counterculture opened a rupture not I only with the past, but with all knowledge of the past, including its history, literature, art, and music. The young people who arrogantly refused to “trust anyone [sic] over thirty,” to use a popular slogan of the day, severed all ties with the best traditions of the past (Bookchin 1989: 162).

(“Trust no one over thirty” (to get the slogan right) — imagine how much that must have irked Ye Olde Dean!) Essentially identical elegiac wails well up regularly from the conservative demi- intelligentsia, from Hilton Kramer, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dechter, James Q. Wilson, Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, George Will, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, William Safire, Clarence Thomas, Pat Buchanan and the Heritage Founda- tion crew. Every generation, once it senses that it’s being supplanted by the next one, forgets that it was once the upstart (the right-wing version) or insists that it still is (the left-wing version). The lifestyle anarchists are afflicted, charges the Dean, with mysticism and irrationalism. These are words he does not define but repeatedly brackets as if they had the same meaning (2, 11, 19 & passim). They don’t. Mysticism is the doctrine that it is possible, bypassing the ordinary methods of perception and cognition, to experience God/Ultimate Reality directly, unmediat- edly. In this sense, it is likely that Hakim Bey qualifies as a mystic, but I can’t think of anybody else on the Dean’s enemies list who even comes close. There is nothing innately rational or irrational about mysticism. Reason-identified philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and (the latter cited 30 times in the Dean’s magnum opus [1982: 376]) maintained that there is an Ultimate Reality. If they’re right, for all I know it may be accessible to what Hakim Bey calls non-ordinary con- sciousness (1991: 68). The “epistemological anarchist,” as philosopher of science

61 calls himself, takes great interest in experiences “which indicate that perceptions can be arranged in highly unusual ways and that the choice of a particular arrangement as ‘corresponding to reality’ while not arbitrary (it almost always depends on traditions), is certainly not more ‘rational’ or more ‘objective’ than the choice of another arrangement” (1975: 189–190). All I can say for myself is that, for better or for worse,I have never had a mystical experience and, further- more, that I do not consider the notion of ultimate or absolute reality meaningful. As I once jibed, mystics “have incommunicable insights they won’t shut up about” (Black 1986: 126). Mysticism is arational, not necessarily irrational. The Dean’s fervent faith in objective reality (53) has more in common with mysticism than it does with science. As mystics do, Bookchin believes there is something absolute “out there” which is accessible to direct apprehension — by “reason as such”(28) on his account, by other means according to theirs. Scientists have been disabusing themselves of such simplism for about a century. The hard sciences — starting with physics, the hardest of them all — were the first to abandon a metaphysical positivism which no longer corresponded to what scientists were really thinking and doing. The Dean was at one time vaguely I aware of this (1982: 281). The not-quite-so-scientific soft sciences with lower self-esteem were slower to renounce scientism, but by now, they have, too — they have too, because they have to. The rejection of positivism in social thought is no post-modernist fashion. This too began a century ago (Hughes 1961: ch. 3). The glossary to a classic contemporary textbook on social science research methods could not be more blunt: “objectivity. Doesn’t exist. See intersubjectivity” (Babbie 1992: G6). Settling for intersubjective verifiability within a community of practicing scientists is actually the most conservative post-objectivist position currently within the range of scientific respectability (e.g., Kuhn 1970). History, the maybe-science which has always had the most ambiguous and dubious claim to objectivity, held out the longest, but no longer (Novick 1988: ch. 13). Objectivity in any absolute sense is illusory, a cult fetish, a childish craving for an unattainable certitude.Intellectuals, neurotics — i.e., in a political context, ideologues — “have to do with the invisible and believe in it,” they have “always kept before their eyes again an intrinsically valid importance of the object, an absolute value of it, as if the doll were not the most important thing to the child, the Koran to the Turk”(Stirner 1995: 295). In contrast, the anarchist “does not believe in any absolute truth”(Rocker 1947: 27). Nor does the scientist. Nor does the mature adult. In the novel Seven Red Sundays, the anarchist Samar says, “This effort to stop thinking is at base religious. It represents a faith in something absolute” (Sender 1990: 253). If Stirner bid “farewell to objective reality,” if Nietzsche held “that facts are simply interpretations” (53), they were far ahead of their times. It is by now almost

62 trite to remark that there is “no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’” (Kuhn 1970: 206; cf. Bradford 1996: 259–260). Scientists dispense with objective reality for the same reason the mathematician Laplace, as he told Napoleon, dispensed with God: there’s no need for the hypothesis (cf. Bookchin 1979: 23). Reviewing two recent anthologies, Rethinking Objectivity (Megill 1994) and Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge (Hastrup & Hervik 1994), anthropologist Jay Ruby relates that no contributor to either volume argues that “an objective reality exists outside of human consciousness that is universal” (1996: 399). Intending no humor, but unwittingly providing some at Bookchin’s expense, he continues: “It is unfortunate that Megill did not seek out proponents of this position, for they can easily be found among journalists — print and broadcast, documentary filmmakers, Marxists, and the political and religious right” (ibid.). Bookchin is not the first left-wing rationalist to be outraged by this idealist, subjectivist (etc., etc.) betrayal of muscular rationalism by what one Marxist lawyer called “fideism.” But this polemical predecessor of Bookchin’s — a certain Lenin — had at least a nodding acquaintance with the content of the then-new physics which was undoing fundamentalist materialism (Lenin 1950). There is no indication that Bookchin has any real grounding in science, although thirty years ago he did an adequate job of popularizing information about pollution (Herber 1963, 1965). The true believers in objectivist, matter-in-motion rationalism are usually, like Lenin and Bookchin, wordmongers — lawyers, journalists (Ruby 1996: 399), or ideologues (Black 1996a)— not scientists. They believe the more fervently because they do not understand. They cling to objective reality “with the same fear a child clutches his mother’s hand”(ibid.: 15). As Clifford Geertz says, the objectivists are “afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it” (quoted in Novick 1988: 552). Lenin could hardly be more indignant: “But this is all sheer obscurantism, out-and-out reaction.To regard atoms, molecules, electrons, etc., as an approximately true reflection in our mind of the objectively real movement of matter is equivalent to believing in an elephant upon which the world rests!” (1950: 361). Either these impenetrable particles are bouncing around off each other down there like billiard balls on a pool table (what a curious model of objective reality [Black 1996a]) or they are fantasy beings like unicorns, lep- rechauns and lifestyle anarchists. It’s appropriate that the lawyer Lenin’s critique of the physics of scientists like Mach (Lenin 1950) was answered by a scientist, a prominent astronomer who was also a prominent libertarian communist: Anton Pannekoek (1948). Ecology is a science, but Social Ecology is to ecology what Christian Science is to science. Bookchin’s academic affiliations, undistinguished as they are, and his scholarly pretensions have made some impression on some anarchists, but then

63 again, some anarchists are all too easy to impress. According to the (Bookchin- ist) Institute for Social Ecology, its co-founder is an “internationally acclaimed author and social philosopher” (1995: 6). The Ecology of Freedom (Bookchin 1982), according to a Bookchinist, is “a work of sweeping scope and striking originality” which is “destined to become a classic of contemporary social thought” (Clark 1984: 215). How is Bookchin’s scholarship regarded by actual scholars?I decided to find out. I looked up all reviews of the Dean’s books listed in the Social Sciences Index from April 1981 to date (June 1996). I appreciate that this is a crude and incomplete measure of his reception — it fails to pick up, for instance, two notices in the academically marginal journal (Watson 1995; Eckersley 1989) — but it canvasses every important journal and most of the less important ones. There were all of two reviews of the first edition of The Ecology of Freedom, his Das Kapital, “the most important book to appear so far in the history of anarchist thought” (Clark 1984:188 n. 2). The one-page review in the American Political Science Review, after summarizing Bookchin’s contentions, asked:“Can humanity simply be integrated into the whole [i.e., Nature] without losing its distinctiveness, and can solutions to the problems of the modern world emerge in the relatively spontaneous fashion Bookchin anticipates (pp. 316–317), much as problems are dealt with by ants, bees, and beavers?” (Smith 1983: 540). There’s nothing on the pages cited which has anything to do with the relatively spontaneous solution of social problems which Smith claims that Bookchin espouses. The reviewer could hardly have misunderstood Bookchin more profoundly. The Dean is frantically insistent on distinguishing humans from animals and “animality” (47–48, 50, 53, 56), especially “four-legged animality” (39) — four legs bad, two legs good! Smith — whoever he is — clearly had no clue that he was reviewing a giant work of political theory. The seven-paragraph review in the American Anthropologist was surprisingly favorable. Reviewer Karen L. Field wrote:

The Ecology of Freedom unites materials from many disciplines, and no doubt specialists from each one will take Bookchin to task for occasional lapses of rigor. But despite its shortcomings, the work remains the kind of wide- ranging and impassioned synthesis that is all too rare in this age of scholarly specialization (1984: 162).

In other words, the best thing about the book — and I agree — is that it thinks big. On the other hand, “the scenario he constructs is not wholly persuasive”: The description of “organic” society draws largely on materials by Paul Radin and Dorothy Lee, and paints an overly homogenized — even sanitized — picture

64 of preliterate peacefulness and ; it evokes !Kung and Tasaday, but not Yanomamo and Kwakiutl. Attempting to distance himself from traditional Marxian versions of the emergence of class society, Bookchin downplays the importance of technoeconomic factors, but the corresponding emphasis he places on age stratification as the key to domination is unconvincing and suffers from such a paucity of empirical evidence that it reads at times like a “Just-So” story (ibid.: 161). That the Dean is taken to task for romanticizing the primitives by an anthropol- ogist is truly matter for mirth. Nowadays he takes the anthropologists to task for romanticizing the primitives (Chapters 8 & 9). Either the Dean has reversed him- self without admitting it, or else the most favorable review he’s ever received from a non-anarchist, bona fide scholar rested on a serious misreading of Bookchin’s magnum opus. And it was all downhill from there. The one specific point brought up by Field — the Dean’s unsubstantiated con- tention that gerontocracy was the original form of hierarchy (and still the best!) — was contested, not only by Field, but subsequently by anarchist L. Susan Brown. As a feminist, she thinks it’s more plausible that the sexual division of labor, whether or not it was necessarily hierarchical, eventually turned out to be the origin of hierarchy (1993: 160–161). I tend to think so too. That she dared to criticize the Dean, and in a book from his own main publisher Black Rose Books, probably explains why she got rounded up with the unusual suspects (13–19) although she doesn’t seem to have much else in common with them. If the academic reception of The Ecology of Freedom was less than triumphal, the Dean’s other books have fared worse. There were no reviews in social science journals of Post-Scarcity Anarchism and The Limits of the City when they were reprinted by Black Rose Books in 1986. There were no reviews of The Modern Crisis (1987), or Remaking Society (1989), or The Philosophy of Social Ecology (1990), or the revised edition of The Ecology of Freedom (1991), or Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (1993), or To Remember Spain (1995), or, for that matter, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995). There was exactly one notice of The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987a) in an social science journal, and everything about it is odd. It appeared — all two paragraphs of it — in Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, a right-wing, spook-ridden foreign policy journal, although the Dean’s book has nothing to do with international relations. According to the anonymous, and condescending, reviewer, Bookchin’s “method is to ransack world history — more or less at random — first to show how the rise of cities has corresponded to the erosion of freedom at different times and places, then to point out how some communities have fought the trend.” It’s not scholarship,“scholarship, though,

65 is not his point, or his achievement.” (That’s for sure.) The reviewer — as had Karen Field — expresses satisfaction at reading a book with “a real idea” for a change, even if the idea is a “slightly twisted one” (Anonymous 1988: 628). This falls somewhat short of a rave review, and it reverses the Dean’s understanding of urbanism, although it comports with the title of his book (later changed to Urbanization Without Cities, not obviously an improvement). The reviewer takes Bookchin to be arguing that the tendency of urbanism is to diminish human freedom, although here and there communities have managed to buck the trend for awhile. But what Bookchin really contends is the opposite: that the tendency of urbanism is liberatory, although here and there the elites have managed to buck the trend for awhile. The reviewer is right about urbanization but wrong about Bookchin. He did the Dean the favor of misrepresenting him. The Dean’s own conception of reason — dialectical reason — would have been dismissed “out of hand,” as he might say, as mystical by objective-reasonists back when there were any. Like technophilia and defamation, the “dialectical approach” (Bookchin 1987b: 3–40) is a feature of Marxism to which he has always clung stubbornly. The late Karl Popper, at one time the most prominent philosopher of science of this century, denounced dialectical reasoning, not only as mystical gib- berish, but as politically totalitarian in tendency (1962). He denounced “Hegelian dialectics; the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’” (ibid: 1: 28). I bring this up, not because I endorse Popper’s positivism — I don’t (Black 1996a) — but as a reminder that people who live in the Crystal Palace shouldn’t throw stones. I myself veto no mode of reasoning or expression, although I think some are more effective than others, especially in specific contexts. There’s no such thing, for instance, as the scientific method; important scientific discovery rarely if ever results from following rules (Feyerabend 1975). Religious forms of expression, for instance, I’ve long considered especially distorting (Black 1986: 71–75), but I’ve also insisted, as opposed to freethinker simpletons, that important truths have been expressed in religious terms: “God is unreal, but [He] has real but muddled referents in lived experience” (Black 1992:222). Bookchin was formerly aware of this (1982: 195–214). The Dean’s dialectic is more than a mode of reasoning: he has a “dialectical notion of causality” (Bookchin 1989: 203). The Universe itself exhibits “an overall tendency of active, turbulent substance to develop from the simple to the complex, from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous, from the simple to the variegated and differentiated”(ibid.: 199). To evolve, that is, from primal glop to us: “Humanity, in effect, becomes the potential voice of a nature rendered self-conscious and self-creative”(ibid.: 201; cf. 1987b: 30). We are one with nature — provided we follow his package directions — and at the same time

66 we are more natural than nature has hitherto been. Out of the evolution of consciousness emerged the consciousness of evolution and now, rational self- direction. By and through this social “second nature”— conscious humanity — the dialectic actualizes the “immanent self-directedness” (1987b: 28) of the cosmos. An “immanent world reason” is the “inherent force,” “the logos — that impart[s] meaning and coherence to reality at all levels of existence”(Bookchin 1982: 10). Humanity’s duty and destiny is to inscribe the Word on the fabric of reality. The Deanly dialectic represents the most advanced thought of, say, the fourth century B.C. In appearance, it’s the same old story of man’s God-given mission to dominate nature (Genesis 9: 1–3): the directed evolution of an objective “ecological ethics involves human stewardship of the planet” (Bookchin 1987b: 32). But in essence, second nature is a moment in the development of

. . . a radically new “free nature” in which an emancipated humanity will become the voice, indeed the expression, of a natural evolution rendered self- conscious, caring, and sympathetic to the pain, suffering, and incoherent aspects of an evolution left to its own, often wayward, unfolding. Nature, due to human rational intervention, will thence acquire the intentionality, power of developing more complex life-forms, and capacity to differentiate itself (Bookchin 1989: 202–203).

(Query: Why is it a moral imperative to make the world more complicated than it already is?) Even today, when an unemancipated humanity “is still less than human” (ibid.: 202), we are well on our way to rationalizing the “often wayward” course of evolution. Thanks to biotechnology, “thousands of microorganisms and plants have been patented as well as six animals. More than 200 genetically engineered animals are awaiting patent approval at the Patent and Trademark Office”(Rifkin 1995: 119). This would seem to he fully in keeping with Bookchin’s program (Eckersley 1989: 111–112). Nature finds freedom at long last in submis- sion to its highest manifestation: us. Just as we not-quite-humans find freedom in submission to rational direction from the first fully human being: Murray Bookchin.To paraphrase Nietzsche, not-quite-man is something to be surpassed: a rope stretched over the abyss between all the rest of us and Murray Bookchin. Is everybody with me? Bookchin is saying that nature isn’t actually free when it’s really free (where really means “what it is”), when it’s out of control. That’s just “negative freedom”—“a formal ‘freedom from’ — rather than [positive freedom,] a substantive freedom to” (4). We are no longer to let Nature take its course. Nature is actually free when it’s really controlled by its highest manifestation, humans. Humanity is essentially natural (nature for-itself), the rest of nature isn’t (nature in-itself).

67 Perhaps a political analogy will help. Workers aren’t actually free when they’re really free, i.e., uncontrolled. The working class in-itself is actually free when it’s really controlled by the class for-itself, the class-conscious vanguard — workers like Bookchin was, back when he was a worker. When he tells it the way it is, the way it “actually” is, Bookchin is irrefutable. Insofar as the evidence supports him, he is “really” right. Insofar as it does not, that is because he is, to that extent, “potentially” right. (I am using these words throughout exactly as Bookchin does [1987b: 27J.) Reality “is no less ‘real’ or ‘objective’ in terms of what it could be as well as what it is at any given moment” (ibid.: 203). Ancient Athens might not have been a genuine direct democracy “at any given moment” or indeed in any of its moments, but if it ever had the potential for direct democracy, then it was always actually, objectively a direct democracy. To divine this mystery is “to comprehend the truth of the Polis”(Clark 1982: 52; 1984: 202–203). The fact that the potential was never realized when Athens was real doesn’t matter. “An oak tree objectively inheres in an acorn” (Bookchin 1987b: 35 n. 22) — thus the acorn is actually an oak — even if a squirrel eats it. To call this an “idiosyncratic use of the word I objective” (Eckersley 1989: 101) is putting it mildly. You can make this same trick work for the city in the I abstract, and thus for any city: “Civilization, embodied in the city as a cultural center, is divested of its rational dimensions [by anti-civilizationists], as if the city were an unabated cancer rather than the potential sphere for universalizing human intercourse, in marked contrast to the parochial limitations of tribal and village life”(34). No matter how devastating a case is made against civilization, “to malign civilization without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for self-conscious freedom” is “to retreat back into the shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellectuation [sic] was only an evolutionary promise” (56). (At least the brutes didn’t use big words that don’t exist.) Democracy “lies latent in the republic” (59), any urban republic, as it has for thousands of years (and for how many thousands more?). With characteristic understatement, the Dean concedes that his is “a fairly unorthodox notion of reason” (1982: 10). It’s Hegel’s philosophy of history with an abstract Humanity replacing the World-Spirit, roughly the point reached by Feuerbach. Murray Bookchin is the world’s oldest Young Hegelian. God, taught Feuerbach, is merely the essence of Man, his own supreme being, mystified. But abstract Man, countered Max Stirner, is also a mystification:

The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as “God,” or find it in him and call it “essence of man” or “man.” I am neither God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my

68 essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me (1995: 34).

Hegel’s Christian philosophy is developing-humanity-as- supernatural. Bookchin’s is developing-humanity-as-supranatural. The difference is only terminological. Whenever Stirner says “I” he refers to himself, Max Stirner, but only as an example. Whenever he refers to the unique one or to the ego he refers, not to an abstract individual, but to each and every individual, to himself, certainly, but also to every Tom, Dick and Murray. This is why accusing Stirner of elitism (7) is bogus. Bookchin thinks that real Humanity is still less than actually human (1989: 202). Stirner thinks that every real human is more than human(ity): “‘Man’ as a concept or predicate does not exhaust what you are because it has a conceptual content of its own and because it lets itself stipulate what is human, what is a ‘man,’ because it can be defined . . . But can you define yourself? Are you a concept?” (1978: 67). Positing a human essence is unnecessary for the practice of any art or science. The indwelling essence is not discoverable by observation, experimentation, or any rational mode of inquiry. To be sure, there are those who claim to have apprehended essence directly, by non-ordinary consciousness. They’re called mystics, and Professor Bookchin professes to despise them. More likely he envies the qualitative superiority of their visions. has got to be as mundane as mysticism gets. As Hakim Bey writes: “In sleep we dream of only two forms of government — anarchy & monarchy . . . A democratic dream? a socialist dream?Impossible” (1991: 64). The Dean is indignant at this supposed denigration of “the dreams of centuries of idealists” (21) but neglects to indicate by what muscular rationalist faculty he is privy to the dreams of the dreamers of previous centuries — a ouija board perhaps? But he may be right that Bey has underestimated how far the colonization of the unconscious may have proceeded in the case of a lifelong, elderly political militant. Bookchin may well be a coun- terexample to the claim by a Nietzsche commentator that “there is no such thing as a dull unconscious” (Ansell-Pearson 1994: 168). Do androids dream of electric sheep? Or as Nietzsche put it: every “thing in itself’ is stupid (1994: 81). Whether mystical or merely mystifying, Bookchin’s conception of reason is as unreasonable as so many of its results. His latest polemic is so foolish that it invites reexamination of his previous books which mostly escaped critical attention from radicals. The accolades of liberal journalists (and they’ll forget him soon enough) won’t avert the serious devaluation he’s called down upon himself. I once defined dialectics, unfairly, as “a Marxist’s excuse when you catch him lying” (1992: 149). In this sense alone is Bookchin’s reasoning dialectical. After decades of talking down to eco- hippies who disdain “all muscularity of thought” (Bookchin 1987b:

69 3), his own mental musculature has atrophied. This time he’s bitten off more than he can gum.

70 Chapter 7: In Search of the Primitivists Part I: Pristine Angles

Bashing the primitivist anarchists is probably Dean Bookchin’s highest priority (Anonymous 1996), because they are the excommunicate anarchists whose views are most likely to be confused with, and to compete successfully with, his own. He revels in his self-image as ecology’s apostle to the anarchists, and for once, there’s some truth to his messianic machismo. It was the Dean, after all, who has for so long and in so many books clamored for the restoration of “organic community,” as he now shamefacedly admits (41; cf. Bookchin 1974, 1982, 1987a, 1989, 1991). Once again his embarrassment is that his readers took him at his word — an error that this reader, for one, will not repeat. These innocents never suspected that they were not supposed to learn anything about primitive societies or pre-industrial communities except what cleared Bookchinist censorship. The Dean is so much the “irate petty bourgeois” (52) on this subject that he lashes out at the primitivists in petty, peevish ways — even for him. Several sources John Zerzan cites in Future Primitive (1994), he huffs, are “entirely absent” from its bibliography, such as “‘Cohen (1974)’ and ‘Clark (1979)’” (62 n. 19). Zerzan cites “Cohen (1974),” not on any controversial point, but for the platitude that symbols are “essential for the development and maintenance of social order” (1994: 24) — does the Dean disagree? He never says so.“Clark (1979)” may be a misprint for “Clark (1977),” which does appear in Zerzan’s bibliography (1994: 173). As the author of a book from the same publisher, Autonomedia, in the same series,I know how sloppy the production values of this amateur, all-volunteer nonprofit collective can be. Additionally, Zerzan (1996: 1) in a letter to me admits to “faulty record-keeping” and explains that the absence of the two references the Dean carps about “goes back to switching to social science-type notes — after FE [the Fifth Estate] refused to run footnotes to my articles, in the ‘80s.” The Dean refers to part 2, ch. 4, sec. 4 of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own (64–65) although the book ends with part 2, ch. 3 (Stirner 1995: viii, 320–324). My library copy of Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Bookchin 1971) from Ramparts Press has a list of fifteen errata taped into it which presumably ought not to shatter the reader’s “faith in [Bookchin’s] research”(62 n. 19), and it is far from complete: that should be , for instance, not Jacques Elul (ibid.: 86). And that should be Alfred Zimmern, not Edward Zimmerman (ibid.: 159, 288 n. 27; cf. Zimmern 1931). Bookchin was perhaps thinking of a singer-songwriter who has interested him for decades, Bob Dylan (9), the Artist Formerly Known as Zimmerman. In an especially maladroit move, the Dean cites a favorable review

71 of Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. (1991) in the Whole Earth Review as verifying that Bey’s anarchism is a decadent, “unsavory” (20) “bourgeois form of anarchism”(22): the Whole Earth Review has, after all, a “yuppie clientele”(23). The back jacket blurbs for just one of the Dean’s books (1987) come from such arch-yuppie publications as the Village Voice and The Nation. The inside back jacket blurb boasts that he has contributed to “many journals” including CoEvolution Quarterly. CoEvolution Quarterly was the original name of the Whole Earth Review. The Dean’s devotion to urbanism is an important part of his hatred of the primitive. City-statism and primitive society are mutually exclusive. What amazes is that the Dean assumes that it’s the primitivists, not the city-statists, who are the presumptive heretics from anarchism — that they, not he, have some explaining to do. There has never been an anarchist city, not for more than a few months at the most, but there have been many longlasting anarchist primitive societies. Many anarchists have considered anarchy possible in urban conditions — among them the Dean’s bete noir Hakim Bey (Black 1994: 106)— but Bookchin is the first anarchist who ever posited that anarchy is necessarily urban. That would have come as quite a surprise to the Makhnovist peasant guerrillas in the Ukraine or the insurrectionary anarchist villagers in the pueblos of Andalusia (Bookchin 1977: ch. 5). My point is not that the efforts and experiences of urban anarchists are irrelevant or unworthy of attention — after all, I’m an urban anarchist myself — only that they are not the only anarchist experiences worthy of attention. I fail to understand why anarchists should attend only to their failures and ignore their only successes. I don’t consider myself a primitivist. Genuine anarcho- primitivists such as John Zerzan, George Bradford and Feral Faun probably don’t think I’m one of them either, any more than Hakim Bey is, although the Dean can’t quite figure out “is he is or is he ain’t” (62 n. 8). So it’s not my purpose to defend the views of John Zerzan or George Bradford against Bookchin (although, incidentally, I’ll do some of that): they are quite capable of defending themselves and I’m sure they will. Bradford, in fact, has written a lengthy rejoinder to be co-published by Autonomedia and Black & Red. But it is my purpose to show that in the way he denounces the primitivists, the Dean is, as usual, unscrupulous and malicious. When he isn’t flat-out wrong he’s usually irrelevant. In rebutting a right-wing libertarian critic,I made clear two of the aspects of primitive societies (there are others) which ought to interest anarchists:

Hunter-gatherers inform our understanding and embarrass libertarians [and Bookchinists] in at least two ways. They operate the only known viable stateless societies. And they don’t, except in occasional emergencies, work in any sense I’ve used the word (Black 1992: 54).

72 Even the Dean earlier admitted the first point: “This organic, basically pre- literate or ‘tribal,’ society was strikingly nondomineering” (1989: 47). After all, Cultural Man is at least two million years old. He was originally a hunter-gather. He was an anatomically modern human at least 50,000 years before he adopted any other mode of subsistence. As recently as 10,000 years ago he was still only a forager (Lee & DeVore 1968c: 3). And he was still an anarchist. Now it may well be that the life-ways of hunter-gatherers (also known as foragers) are not, as a practical matter, available for immediate adoption by dis- gruntled urbanites, as the Dean declaims (36). Some primitivists have said as much;John Moore, for one, is exasperated to have to keep saying so (1996: 18). Others, in my opinion, have equivocated. But that’s not the point, or not the only point. A way of life is much more than a “life-style.” Hunter-gatherers grow up in a habitat and learn its secrets, they have “a marvelous understanding of the habitat in which they lived; they were, after all, highly intelligent and imaginative beings” (47), Most anarchists should probably send for a lot of Loompanics books and practice up on a lot of survival skills before they even think of venturing into the wilderness on a long-term basis. Hardly any anarcho-primitivists propose to do so (to my knowledge, only one). But the point is to learn from the primitives, not necessarily to ape them. Dean Bookchin, in contrast, doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know anything about primitives which might suggest that low-tech, non-urban anarchy is even possible — although it’s the only kind of anarchy empirically proven to be possible. Since the whole point of the Dean’s polemic is to pass judgment upon what counts as anarchism, you’d think he’d try to indict primitives as statists. As that is impossible, he changes the subject. Repeatedly, the Dean throws what he apparently considers roundhouse punches at primitivist myths, but he never connects, either because they are not tenets of primitivism or else because they are not myths. For instance, the Dean argues at length that hunter- gatherers have been known to modify, and not merely adapt to, their habitats, notably by the use of fire (42–43). Anthropologists, and not only the ones the Dean cites, have known that for a long time. The Australian aborigines, the quintessential foragers, set fires for various purposes which transformed their landscape, usually to their advantage (Blainey 1976: ch. 5 [“A Burning Continent”]). Shifting cultivators, such as most of the Indians of eastern North America, also fired the brush with important ecological consequences, as even historians know (Morgan 1975: ch. 3). If any primitivist ever claimed otherwise, he is wrong, but the Dean does not cite when and where he did. John Zerzan, “the anticivilizational primitivist par excellence” (39), observes, without apparent disapproval, that humans have been using fire for almost two million years (1994: 22).

73 To take an ecological perspective means to hypothesize general interaction among all species and between each and all species and the inanimate environ- ment. It implies dethroning humans as the lords of nature appointed by a Judeo- Christian divinity, certainly, but it doesn’t imply or presuppose that there was ever a time or a condition of society in which humans never acted upon the rest of nature but were only acted upon. Not even amoebas are that passive and quiescent (Bookchin 1989: 200). Amazingly, Bookchin explicitly embraces the Hobbesian myth that the lives of primitive, pre-political people were nasty, brutish and short (46). For him as for Hobbes (Black 1986: 24), the purpose of the myth is to further a statist agenda. “Our early ancestors,” he remarks with satisfaction,“were more likely scav- engers than hunter-gatherers” (46). How disgusting! They ate animals which were already dead!Just as we do when we shop the meat section of a supermarket. (Perhaps there are no meat sections in Burlington supermarkets. Perhaps there are no supermarkets there, just food co-ops. Why do I find it hard to summon up an image of Bookchin putting in his four hours a month bagging groceries?) Bookchin probably picked up this tidbit from Zerzan (1994: 19). Regardless, our still-prehistoric, still-anarchic ancestors must have formed other tastes in food in becoming big game hunters (42). And these our animalistic ancestors were unhealthy too, claims the Dean. The Neanderthals suffered high rates of degenerative bone disease and serious injury (46). There is considerable controversy whether the Neanderthals were among our ancestors. If your ancestors are from Europe or the Levant, possibly; otherwise, almost certainly not. Admittedly, our early ancestors were more likely to be eaten by leopards and hyenas than we are (46), but for contemporary foragers, predation is a minor cause of death (Dunn 1968: 224–225). On the other hand, our leading killers, cancer and heart disease, appear infrequently among them (ibid.: 224), and our thousands of occupational diseases never do. Hunter-gatherers have never been afflicted by asbestosis, black lung disease, Gulf War syndrome (as I write these words, the Pentagon is finally admitting there might be such a thing) or carpal tunnel syndrome. Band societies have very low population densities, and “viral and bacterial infections cannot generally persist among small human populations” (Knauft 1987: 98). Paleolithic foragers might suffer serious or fatal injuries, but one million of them were not killed by motor vehicles in just a hundred years. According to the Dean, prehistoric mortality statistics are “appalling”: “about half died in childhood or before the age of twenty, and few lived beyond their fiftieth year” (46). Even taking these claims to be true, the aggregate figures, their vagueness aside, are highly misleading. Foraging peoples usually have a lot greater sensitivity to the carrying capacities of their habitats than techno-urbanites do.

74 The ones who didn’t have paid the price. The ones who did, and do, adjust their populations by the means at their disposal. Delayed marriage, abortion, prolonged lactation, sexual tabus, even genital surgery are among the cultural practices by which foragers hold down their birthrates (Yengoyan 1968:1941). Low-tech does have its limitations. The condom, the diaphragm, the IUD and the Pill have not been available to hunter-gatherers. Foragers have often resorted to post-partum population control as well: in other words, to infanticide and senilicide (Dunn 1968: 225). Especially infanticide (although I suspect the Dean feels a lot more threatened by senilicide). Infanticide was probably prevalent among Pleistocene hunter- gatherers (Birdsell 1968: 236), so it’s ridiculous to calculate an “average” lifespan in which the few minutes or hours some neonates were allowed to live count for as much as all the years lived by those who actually go on to have lives. It’s as if in measuring the present-day American lifespan we included in the numerator, as 0, every conception averted by contraception and every aborted fetus, while adding each of them, scored as 1, to the denominator counting the entire population. We’d come up with a startlingly low “average” lifespan for the contemporary United States — 10 years? 20 years?— which would be utterly meaningless. When contraceptive devices became available to Nunamiut Eskimo women in 1964, there was “massive adoption” of them (Binford & Chasko 1976: 77). At this point somebody might rise up in righteous indignation — from the right, from the left, a trifling distinction — to denounce my equation of contraception, abortion and infanticide. I’m not even slightly interested in whether, or where, the Pope or any other dope draws moral lines among these time-honored practices.I don’t equate them morally because I’m not moralizing.I equate them only with respect to the issue, the demographic issue, at hand. Gimmickry aside, the evidence suggests that foragers live relatively long lives. The Dean’s claim that the average lifespan of the !Kung San is 30 years (45) is unreferenced and misleading, Lee’s censuses showed

. . . a substantial proportion of people over the age of 60. This high proportion (8.7 to 10.7 percent) by Third World standards contradicts the widely held notion that life in hunting and gathering societies is “nasty, brutish, and short.” The argument has been made that life in these societies is so hard that people die at an early age. The Dobe area [of Botswana], by contrast, had dozens of active older persons in the population (Lee 1979: 44).

The population structure “looks like that of a developed country, for example, like that of the United States around 1900” (ibid.; 47). This is how two other anthropologists summarize the !Kung situation:

75 Although individuals who have reached maturity can expect to live into their middle 50s, life expectancy at birth is approximately 32 years, determined mainly by high infant mortality — between 10 and 20% in the first year, almost all due to infectious disease. In the traditional situation, infanticide made a small additional contribution to mortality (Konner & Shostack 1987: 12).

It is true that foragers have always lacked the technology to perpetuate the agony of their incapacitated elders as our insurance-driven system arranges for some of ours. When I visit my father in the nursing home — a stroke victim, a mentally confused cripple usually complaining of pain, 85 years old — I find it hard to consider longevity an absolute value. According to the Iliad, neither did Achilles:

For my mother Thetis, the goddess of the silver feet tells me I carry two sorts of destiny towards the day of my death. Either if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; or if I return to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life (quoted in Feyerabend 1987: 138).

For an urbanist (if less than urbane) crusader like the Dean, the relevant com- parisons should be different. Primitivists like Zerzan and Bradford compare the robust lives of Paleolithic foragers with the stunted lives of those caught up in the urban/agricultural complex: “The increasingly sophisticated interpretation of the archaeological record suggests that the transition to the Neolithic was ac- companied by a fairly general decline in dietary quality, evidenced in stature and decreased longevity” (Ross 1987: 12). And also a related decline in health. Almost all archeological studies “conclude that infection was a more serious problem for farmers than for their hunting and gathering forebears, and most suggest that this resulted from increased sedentism, larger population aggregates, and/or the well-established synergism between infection and malnutrition”(Cohen 1987: 269–270). For one thing, work — and when we arrive at agriculture we arrive, unambiguously, at work — is hazardous to your health. The fact that these are the findings of archeological studies of prehistoric so- cieties renders irrelevant, for present purposes, the recent argument that the much-studied San are really just an impoverished underclass within capitalism (Wilmsen 1989). This is a controversial claim (Peters 1990) — vigorously rebutted by Richard B.Lee and like-minded anthropologists (Solway & Lee 1990) — which, predictably, Bookchin whoops up with uncritical abandon (44–45). But by defini- tion, prehistoric peoples cannot have been marginal to, or relics of, or devolved

76 from historical societies. What did they devolve from? Atlantis? Lemuria? Mu? Are they the love-children of extraterrestrials (“Earth girls are easy”) who, having had their exotic fun, revved up the Chariots of the Gods and rocketed off to the next off-planet pick-up scene? The artist Goya, as quoted by the Dean, once said that “the sleep of reason begets monsters”(28). Does Bookchin think that the sleeping-around of monsters begets reasonables? And when we progress from mere agriculture to urbanism — one thing leads to another — health deteriorates even more dramatically. Throughout history, pre- industrial urban populations have usually reproduced at less than replacement levels: “Ancient cities were like tar pits, drawing country folk into their alluring but disease-ridden precincts” (Boyd & Richerson 1993: 127). The Dean is fond of the slogan that “city air makes you free” (1974: 1), but there is considerably more truth to saying that city air makes you sick (ibid.: 66). Urban “internal nonvia- bility” has three sources: (1) high population density “facilitates the genesis and communication of infectious diseases”; (2) such cities “have almost invariably had poor sanitation and hygiene, particularly with respect to water and sewage”; and (3) urbanites depend on outside sources of food, on monocultural food production subject to crop failures and difficulties of transportation, storage and distribution (Knauft 1987: 98). Industrial cities have only imperfectly coped with these unhealthy influences. They are more overcrowded than ever, with, the Dean has shown, adverse health consequences (Herber 1965). “Urban air is seriously polluted and urban wastes are reaching unmanageable proportions” — furthermore:

Nothing more visibly reveals the overall decay of the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and garbage that gathers in its streets, the noise and massive congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the apathy of its population toward civic issues, and the ghastly indifference of the individual toward the physical violence that is publicly inflicted on other members of the community (Bookchin 1974:66,67).

Even the most conspicuous health accomplishment of industrialism, the control of disease by antibiotics, is being rolled back, as resistant strains of disease vectors evolve. Even the food situation is unsatisfactory, if not for precisely the traditional reasons. Most American urbanites have unhealthy diets, and more than a few are malnourished. The Dean mostly obsesses about details — why not oblige him?— such as whether contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are “pristine” and whether hunter-gatherers have invariably been the benign stewards of their habitats. Al- though these propositions are largely irrelevant to the species “primitivism” and entirely irrelevant to its supposed genus, “lifestyle anarchism,” the ways the Dean

77 deploys them are relevant to his ulterior aims and exemplary of his unsavory methods. By “pristine” (44, 45) the Dean seems to mean the supposition that all con- temporary hunter-gatherers are living fossils who have always lived the way they do now. As usual, when the Dean puts a loaded word in quotation marks it’s a dead giveaway that he’s not quoting anybody, just talking to his favorite person, himself. (Just as his mockery of primitive “reverence for life” (42) might have been amusing — a Bookchin first — if he could only have pinned on the anarcho-primitivists a phrase employed, not by them, but by that celebrated racist paternalist, the late B’wana, Dr. Albert Schweitzer.) He might have learned that — he probably did — from John Zerzan:“surviving hunter-gatherers, who have somehow managed to evade civilization’s tremendous pressures to turn them into slaves (i.e. farmers, political subjects, wage laborers), have all been influenced by contact with outside peoples” (1994: 29–30). The call for papers for the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference — which the Dean blames for romanticizing foragers (37) — stated “that there is no assumption that living hunter-gatherers are somehow living relicts of the Pleistocene” (quoted in Binford 1968: 274). Bookchin is beat- ing a dead horse or, better yet, an extinct eohippus: “It is widely recognized that modern hunters are not pristine living relics of the Pleistocene”(Hawkes 1987: 350). The Dean cites with some satisfaction a fairly recent article by William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492” (1992), but for several reasons,I doubt the Dean has even read it. In the first place, the Dean only adverts to it as “cited in William K. Stevens,‘An Eden in Ancient America? Not Really,’ The New York Times (March 30, 1993, p. CI” (63 n. 22). The newspaper story may well have been how the Dean got wind of the article — nothing wrong with that, I often follow up on tips that way — but having served that purpose, there’s no reason to refer to a newspaper story which, at best, must have oversimplified the article. Second, the Dean misquotes the name of the journal. And finally, the title of the newspaper story, suggesting a debunking of the myth of “an Eden in ancient America,” has absolutely nothing to do with what Denevan was really writing about, although it has everything to do with the Dean’s anti-primitivist ideological agenda. Denevan’s argument, which relates only to the Western Hemisphere, is that when Europeans arrived in the New World, and for some time afterwards, the landscape they encountered — Denevan is a cultural geographer — was not “pris- tine” if this means it had been barely affected by tens of thousands of years of indigenous human presence.Indian hunting, horticulture, and especially the use of fire had wrought important transformations in many stretches of the landscape. Many North American grasslands, for instance, were produced by human action,

78 and to a lesser extent, so were the park-like woodlands of eastern North America (Morgan 1975: ch. 3; Salisbury 1982: ch. 1). But by the time the Euro-Americans moved west on a large scale, the once-numerous Indians had been decimated and much of the landscape had reverted to a tangled, pre-humanized “wilderness” the settlers mistook for pristine conditions. Denevan plausibly argues for this conclusion but does not, as the Dean does, consider it cause for celebration. But what does this have to do with anything? A humanized landscape is not necessarily a ravaged, depleted, denaturalized landscape because there was a time when humans were natural. The Dean, Professor of Social Ecology, also supposes he is saying something important when he avers that primitives may have contributed to the extinction of some species of the animals they hunted and that they may have sometimes degraded their environments (42–43). As the allegations are independent, let us address each count of the indictment separately. Even the Dean admits that the best-known claim for induced extinction, so-called Pleistocene overkill, is “hotly debated”(63 n. 23). Rapid climatic change was indisputably part of the cause, and possibly a sufficient cause, for the extinc- tion of overspecialized species like the mastodon. But supposing that prehistoric hunters were responsible for some extinctions — so what? Extinction has so far been the fate of almost every species to appear on this planet, and may in time be the fate of all of them. The continuation of natural life does not depend upon the continuation of any particular species, including ours. What difference does it make? Anyway, to say that some prehistoric primitives could and did kill game animals on a large scale (42, 62–63 n. 20), as all anthropologists are well aware, does not entail that these primitives brought about the extinction of their prey. Well into historic times, the Plains Indians killed many buffalo and the Northwest Coast Indians netted many salmon without coming close to extinguishing either species. The yield, though enormous, was sustainable. It required the intrusion of industrial society to pose a real risk of extinction with its high-tech, mass- production life destruction. An article which the Dean cites (Legge & Rowley-Conwy 1987), but must not have read very carefully — even if we disregard his mistake as to one co-author’s name (62–63 n. 20 [“Rowly”]) — actually tells against his indictment of the for- agers. Bookchin cites it for the conclusion “that migrating animals could have been slaughtered with devastating effectiveness by the use of corrals” (63 n. 20). Granting that — a point of no present importance — the article tells a more inter- esting story. The authors, archaeologists, are reporting on a site they excavated in Syria. It was first occupied by hunter-gatherers in approximately 9000 B.C. and remained occupied, with one break, well into the Neolithic (agricultural) period.

79 The authors emphasize that this was a year-round community, not a seasonal campsite. For about a thousand years after the villagers domesticated plants, hunt- ing — mainly gazelle hunting — continued to supply them with animal protein. By then, the authors believe, the farmers had hunted the gazelles into extinction, and only then did they take up animal husbandry to replace the meat formerly supplied by wild game. There are two points of interest here, and each is adverse to the Dean. Hunter- gatherers were not responsible for the extinction of the gazelles: their agricultural descendants were. These villagers had long since ceased to be foragers by the time they finished off the gazelles (locally, that is: the animals survived elsewhere). More important, they’d never really been hunter-gatherers in the sense in which hunter- gatherers interest primitivists and ought to interest all anarchists. Anthropologists have recently resolved an ambiguity in the expression “hunter- gatherers”(cf. Murdock 1968: 13–15). It refers to two kinds of society, not one: nonsedentary and sedentary. What they have in common is that they hunt and/or gather rather than plant/and or herd. They do not domesticate either plants or animals (in a few such societies, dogs are domesticated, but not as a food source). What separates them is whether they occupy locations on a long-term or short- term basis. The occupants of the Syrian site were always “hunters” in the obvious respect that, like many members of the National Rifle Association, they hunted animals. But they more closely resembled such Northwest Coast Indians as the Kwakiutl in that they were the permanent, year-round occupants of favored, restricted locations which afforded them sustenance. They were not the same sort of “hunter-gatherers” as the Australian aborigines, the San/Bushmen, the Pygmies, the Great Basin Shoshone and many others for whom frequent relocation was the condition of successful adaptation to their habitats. Sedentary hunter-gatherers are socially much more like sedentary agriculturalists and urbanites than they are like foragers who are routinely on the move. Their societies exhibit class stratification, hereditary chiefs, sometimes even slavery (Kelly 1991; Renouf 1991: 90–91, 98, 101 n. 1; cf. Renouf 1989 for a prehistoric European example). It is from these societies that the city and the state emerged — together. Possibly more relevant is the claim that primitives are not necessarily “ecologi- cally benign” (42), and there’s no reason to suppose they always are. As Denevan says, sometimes “Indians lived in harmony with nature with sustainable systems of resource management” and sometimes they didn’t (1992: 370). But Devevan was not generalizing about primitives, he was generalizing about Indians. He nowhere adduces a single example of Amerindian hunter-gatherers who degraded their environment, and neither does Bookchin, although I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep if it turned out that there was one, or even more than one group like that. A small-scale society which fouled its own nest would probably not survive, but

80 the environmental damage it did would be localized. A small-scale society which by some combination of insight and accident settled into a sustainable relation- ship with its ecosystem would be much more likely to persist. Existing foraging societies may not all have been around for millennia, but they’ve endured at least for centuries. “Primitivism” is not “indigenism,” i.e., pan-Indian racial nationalism with a left-wing spin such as Ward Churchill serves up.“Primitive” and “Indian” are not synonyms. Most primitives were never Indians and many pre-Columbian Indians weren’t primitives. The Dean reports that “forest overclearing and the failure of subsistence agriculture undermined Mayan society and contributed to its collapse” (43). One only has to refer to his own footnote to identify his references (64 n. 25) from “The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization” in The Collapse of Ancient States and to The Collapse of Complex Societies in order to notice that he’s not referring to foragers or primitives, he’s referring to a civilization, the state-organized, urban-based, agricultural, priest-ridden, class- stratified Mayan civilization. Civilizations have a long history of occasioning environmental destruction whether the civilized be red, white, black or yellow: they have belonged to all of these races.Is this news to Professor Social Ecology? Probably the most amusing aspect of the Dean’s campaign against the primi- tivists is how blatantly self-contradictory it is (Jarach 1996). While he wants to represent primitive life-ways as undesirable, the decisive point is that they are, for us, simply impossible:“Anyone who advises us to significantly, even drastically, reduce our technology is also advising us, in all logic, to go back to the ‘stone age’ — at least to the Neolithic or Paleolithic (early, middle, or late)” (36). To digress for just a bit, consider how idiotic this assertion is. The Dean says that any significant rollback of technology would reduce us to, at best, the Ne- olithic, the New Stone Age. But obviously there was a lot of technological progress, if that’s what it was, between the Neolithic Revolution (agriculture) which com- menced a few thousand years ago and the Megamachine which dominates us now. The Dean’s beloved Athenian polis, for instance, exploited a technology much inferior to what we moderns command but far beyond what the Neolithic farmers, the earliest farmers, had to work with. Early medieval Europe, an almost entirely rural society, quickly developed new technology (such as the mould- board plough) beyond anything that urban-oriented Greco-Roman civilization ever did. John Zerzan’s unspeakable heresy, as the Dean sees it, is that Zerzan thinks that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not just fail to “innovate technological change” (38), they refused domestication and the division of labor. For the Dean, progress is an offer you can’t refuse. But then, sublimely oblivious to the inconsistency, he

81 goes on to say that some primitive societies have, in his value-laden word,“de- volved” from more complex societies (44). The Mayans devolved from civilization (43). The Yuqui foragers of the Bolivian forest devolved from “a slave-holding pre- Columbian society” which was horticultural (45). Even the San have “literally devolved — probably very much against their desires — from horticultural social systems” (44; cf. Wilmsen 1989). We may “never have any way of knowing whether the lifeways of today’s foraging cultures accurately mirror those of our ancestral past” (43)— actually, archeology and paleoecology have come up with some ways — but we have an easy way to find out if the San would rather be gardeners than foragers. We can ask them. This would never occur to the Dean, for whom contemporary foragers are little more than talking dogs, but it occurred to Richard B.Lee when he lived with and studied the San in the ‘60s:“when a Bushman was asked why he hadn’t taken to agriculture he replied:‘Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”’ (Lee 1968: 33). There are many examples of voluntary “devolution.”The ancestors of most Plains Indian tribes were agriculturalists. There is absolutely no reason to suppose they were forced off their farmlands and onto the plains by environmental pressures or aggression from other tribes. When the horse, introduced by the Spanish, found its way north, these Indians seized upon this new technology to “devolve” from sedentary agriculture to nomadic buffalo hunting. We’ll never know for sure why they made this choice. Was buffalo meat tastier than corn? Was hunting more fun than farming? Was a frequent change of scenery more interesting than being stuck forever in Mudville-on-the-Missouri? Whatever it was, it was a choice. Maybe we have a choice too.

82 Chapter 8: In Search of the Primitivists Part II: Primitive Affluence

According to the Dean, the notion of primitive affluence is some silliness the hippies smoked up and put over on the anthropologists in the ‘60s:

Much of [George Bradford’s]“critical anthropology” appears to derive from ideas propounded at the “Man the Hunter” symposium, convened in April 1966 at the University of Chicago. Although most of the papers contributed to this symposium were immensely valuable, a number of them conformed to the naive mystification of “primitivity” that was percolating through the 1960s counter-culture — and that lingers on to this day. The hippie culture, which influenced quite a few anthropologists of the time, averred that hunting-gathering peoples today had been bypassed by the social and economic forces at work in the rest of the world and still lived in a pristine state, as isolated remnants of Neolithic and Paleolithic lifeways. Further, as hunter-gatherers, their lives were notably healthy and peaceful, living then as now on an ample natural largess (37).

The chief villain of the piece was anthropologist Richard B.Lee, who had “estimated that the caloric intake of ‘primitive’ peoples was quite high and their food supply abundant, making for a kind of virginal ‘affluence’ in which people needed to forage only a few hours each day” (37–38). In the above-quoted passage, “it would take a full-sized essay in itself to un- scramble, let alone refute, this absurd balderdash, in which a few truths are either mixed with or coated in sheer fantasy” (37). The Dean refers to a passage he quotes from Bradford, but might have been referring to his favorite subject — himself — except that there aren’t even a few truths in his passage, not even mixed or coated with fantasy. The revision of the Hobbesian postulate that primitive life is nasty, brutish and short commenced, not at the “Man the Hunter” symposium in 1966 (Lee & DeVore 1968), but at the symposium on band societies in Ottawa in 1965 (Damas 1969). The Chicago symposium only extended the theses of the pioneering Ottawa gathering (Renouf 1991: 89–90). April 1965 and even April 1966 (Lee & DeVore 1968: vii) are implausibly early dates to assume much hippie influence on academic scholarship, and the Dean adduces no evidence in support of his self-serving conjecture. There’s no trace of counterculture influence, for instance, in Bookchin’s 1965 book Crisis in Our Cities (Herber 1965) or his 1965 essay

83 “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (Bookchin 1971: 55- 82). Indeed, back when his memories were more recent and his memory perhaps better, Bookchin wrote that “the hippie movement was just getting underway in New York when ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought’ was published”(ibid.: 29). In contrast, the hippie movement bulks large in his 1970 essay opportunistically lauding youth culture (Bookchin 1970: 51–63). The times they were a-changin’. To Bookchin’s annoyance, they still are. If there is any relationship between ‘60s hippie culture and the anti-Hobbesian turn in anthropology, it is of the sort the statisticians call a spurious relationship. That is, the variables are associated with each other, not as cause and effect, but as consequences of a common cause (Babbie 1992: 416). The common cause would have been the general climate of distrust of authority and orthodoxy. If you read the Dean’s passage with more care than it was written with, it’s noticeable that he attributes most of the malign influence on the primitivists, not to the anthropologists, but to the hippies.I am drawing on my own distant memories here, but my recollection is that what the hippies romanticized was tribal society on the model, usually ill-understood, of certain pacific Native American tribes like the Hopi and the Navajo. At the time, Bookchin apparently thought so too. “In its demands for tribalism,” among others, “the Youth Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society” (Bookchin 1970: 59). Unless they were attending graduate school, few hippies would have been acquainted with what Bookchin calls the “‘Man the Hunter’ timewarp”(39), which was expressly and only about revising the Hobbesian view of hunter-gatherers. For the most part, hunter-gatherers don’t even live in tribes, they live in bands (Lee & DeVore 1968b: 7–8). In contrast, tribal peoples — horticulturalists or herders — occupy a social space “between bands and states”(Gregg 1991). Many of their societies are also anarchist and as such are also interesting, as well as interesting in their own right, but necessarily there are not as many valid general- izations about primitives as there are about foragers. All foragers are primitives, but not all primitives are foragers. In a way, it’s Bradford’s fault for inviting the Dean to foment confusion. If the Dean quotes him correctly — always a big if where the Dean is concerned — Bradford wrote in 1991 that the “official” anthropological view of foragers is the Hobbesian one. That was already changing even when made the same point in his 1968 essay “The Original Affluent Society” (Sahlins 1971: ch. 1). Today the “current model” (Renouf 1991: 89–90) is the one advanced at the Ottawa and Chicago conferences:“although the more idealized aspects of the Lee and DeVore model are commonly acknowledged, I think it is fair to say that no fundamental revision of it has been made”(ibid.: 90). Similarly, another anthropologist refers to the continuing prevalence of “the revised general

84 version of hunter-gatherers of the mid- 1960s” (Conkey 1984: 257). John Zerzan, not George Bradford, is correct in saying that “a nearly complete reversal in anthropological orthodoxy has come about, with important implications” (1994: 16). Bradford’s failure to update the opinions he’s expressed since the 1970s — which is typical of the Fifth Estate — afforded the Dean an undeserved opportunity to claim scientific respectability for a viewpoint long since discredited. Bradford’s other mistake, eagerly exploited by the Dean, is that he allegedly wrote that the revisionist view is based on “greater access to the views of primal people and their native descendants”(37). That gave the Dean his chance to dismiss primitive affluence as the “edenic” myth of nostalgic natives (36) feeding their fantasies, and perhaps their peyote, to credulous white hippies. This is all wrong. It was the earliest studies of hunter-gatherers, including classic accounts by Kroeber, Boas and Radcliffe-Brown, which relied on older informants’ memories of conditions 25–50 years before, on “ethnographic recon- structions of situations which were no longer intact” (Lee & DeVore 1968c: 5–6). The Man the Hunter symposium, far from overlooking this method’s shortcom- ings, made that a “central theme” (ibid.: 6). Contemporary anthropologists have lesser, not greater access to the views of so-called primal people.In the first place, primal people are disappearing almost as rapidly as leftists are. And secondly, Western anthropologists no longer enjoy as much “access” as they did when the people they studied were subject to Western colonial rule. Most indigenous peo- ples now have more power to determine whether and on what terms they will receive resident and even visiting ethnographers. Some exclude them entirely. And the national governments of some former colonial possessions which are now independent states restrict or exclude foreign anthropologists for a variety of reasons (Beals 1969: 20–27). More important, the affluence thesis is based on observation and measurement, not myth and memory. Richard B.Lee concluded that the !Kung San/Bushmen did remarkably little work compared to us — not by sitting at the feet oftheOld Wise Man like they do at Goddard College — but by following the San around to see what they were doing and for how long. He based his conclusions as to the sufficiency of their diet on measuring the calories they ingested and expended (Lee 1969, 1979), something rarely done previously. One of the resulting articles was titled “!Kung Bushmen Subsistence: An Input-Output Analysis” (Lee 1969). This is science at its most muscular, not free-form fantasy. It doesn’t necessarily follow, of course, that if San society is in a very tangible, measurable sense leisurely and affluent, then so are all or most other foraging societies. But on the Hobbesian new, the San as they lived in the 1960s were impossible, so the Hobbesian view in the muscular form espoused by the Dean has to be qualified or, as the social scientists say, “specified” (the scope of its

85 validity narrowed)(Babbie 1992: 421–422) or else rejected altogether. And what’s so intriguing is that the San live their affluence in the arid Kalahari Desert, not someplace approximating the Garden of Eden (Zerzan 1994: 29). If foraging life could be affluent there, it might have been affluent almost everywhere — and almost everywhere is where pre-historic humans lived, as foragers, for 99% of human existence (Lee & DeVore 1968c: 5). The civilized, in contrast, find it very difficult to sustain an affluent lifestyle in the desert outside of a few special locations like Palm Springs and Kuwait (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1962: 5 [quoted in Feyerabend (1987): 112 n. 14)]). These implications have not only reoriented fieldwork, they have also occa- sioned the reinterpretation of already available accounts of hunter-gatherers, both historical sources and formal ethnographies. Sahlins (1971: ch. 1) did some of both in “The Original Affluent Society,” whose conclusions he’d previewed as a discussant at the Man the Hunter symposium (Lee & DeVore 1968: 85–89). The abundant historical accounts of the Australian aborigines, for all their mispercep- tions, if carefully read, confirm the affluence thesis. And the earlier ethnographers of hunter-gatherers, although they had often announced as their conclusions the Hobbesian party line, report ample data which contradict those conclusions. An- thropologists who once slighted written, historical sources relating to foragers such as the San are now combing them very carefully (e.g., Parkington 1984). Unlike Bradford, the Man the Hunter anthropologists were not interested in primitive animism, harmony with nature, or “ecstatic techniques,” a phrase the Dean attributes to Bradford (36). Anthropologists had long since documented beyond any reasonable possibility of refutation all these aspects of many primi- tive cultures. What the Man-the-Hunter revisionists added was precisely what the Dean claims is missing, the social dimension:“Egalitarianism, sharing, and low work effort were stressed, as was the importance of gathering foods and, by extension, women’s direct role in the economy” (Renouf 1991: 89). The Dean’s entire rhetorical strategy is as misdirected as it is malicious. Primitivists contrast the orderly anarchy and the generous egalitarianism of foragers with the chaotic statism and class hierarchy of urban civilization. The Dean dredges up one for- aging society, the Yuqui of Bolivia, which, he claims, includes the institution of hereditary slavery — although he has to admit that “this feature is now regarded as a feature of former horticultural lifeways” (45). You could hardly ask for a better example of the exception that proves the rule. There were only 43 Yuqui at contact in the 1950s, far below the minimum — usually put at about 500 — for social viability. They are probably descended from a Guaraní raiding party of the late pre-Columbian period which was unable to find its way back to Paraguay. Remarkably, they maintained vestiges of slavery, something “difficult to imagine, but it did exist.” The Dean neglects to mention that

86 upon falling into the clutches of the missionaries, this social splinter abandoned both foraging and slavery (Stearman 1989). This example proves, at the most, that foraging societies are not always anarchist and egalitarian, leaving untouched the conclusion, which even the Dean doesn’t deny, that they are almost always anarchist and egalitarian. On the other hand, in thirty years of celebrating urbanism, the Dean has yet to identify a stable, anarchic, egalitarian urban society. Perhaps revolutionary Barcelona approximated one for a few months in 1936–1937, and Paris in 1968 for several weeks. But at best these are only blips on a social screen of almost un- relieved urban statism and class stratification. These “outliers,” as the statisticians refer to rare values of variables, far outside the range of all others, do remind us — as do the Yuqui — of the human capacity for extreme social plasticity. As such, they hearten me, but they fail to persuade me that “some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity: it is its destiny” (Bookchin 1974: 2). I don’t think anatomy is destiny and I don’t think urbanity is destiny either.

87 88 Chapter 9: From Primitive Affluence to Labor-Enslaving Technology

One tendency which surely belongs on the Dean’s enemies short list is zero- work, the critique of work as such, “the notion that is possible and desirable: that genuine, unconditioned needs can be met by voluntary playlike activity enjoyed for its own sake” (Black 1996d: 22). Zero-work may well be the only programmatic position shared by everybody the Dean targets, even L. Susan Brown (1995). The Left That Was not only posited work as a necessity, it regarded it as almost a sacrament. And while zero-work is not the same thing as such Bookchin bugbears as hedonism and primitivism, it complements them nicely. It is an important Bookchin target, but he attacks it with potshots, not the usual scattershot. There may be several reasons for his uncharacteristic circumspection. In his younger days (“younger” being, of course, a relative term), Bookchin understood that dealing radically with what he called “toil” was a crucial dimen- sion of post-scarcity anarchism: “The distinction between pleasurable work and onerous toil should always be kept in mind” (1971: 92). Even 25 years ago, the productive forces had developed “to a point where even toil, not only material scarcity, is being brought into question” (Bookchin 1970: 53). For the traditional left, the answer to the question of work was to eliminate , ratio- nalize production, develop the productive forces, and reduce the hours of work. To this program the ultra-left, such as the council communists and the anarcho- syndicalists, added workers’ control of production according to one formula or another. These reforms, even if completely successful on their own terms, fall short of any qualitative transformation of the experience of productive activity. Why doesn’t the Dean just contradict his former opinion without admitting it, as he does with so many others? It may be because zero-work is one dimension of avant garde anarchism which on Bookchin’s terms looks progressive not regressive — a double irony, as het- erodox anarchists tend to disbelieve in progress. Reduced hours of work is an ancient demand of the left (and of the labor movement [Hunnicutt 1988]). Marx considered it the precondition of passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (1967: 820), just like Bookchin (Clark 1984: 55). Anarchists agreed: “The eight-hour day which we officially enjoy is the cause for which the Haymar- ket anarchists of 1886 paid with their lives”(Black 1992: 29). Over a century ago, Kropotkin argued that it was then already possible to reduce the working day to four or five hours, with retirement by age 45 or 50 (1995: 96). What would

89 his estimate be today: 40 or 50 minutes? Since the Dean believes (however erro- neously) that technological progress reduces “toil,” at least potentially (26), he has to believe that the abolition of work is an ever- increasingly practical possibility. He can only criticize zero-workers, not as reactionaries, but as ahead of their time. And that debunks the whole notion of lifestyle anarchism as a surrender to the prevailing climate of reaction. The Dean might have other reasons not to be conspicuous or even explicit in his rejection of zero-work. Lifestyle anarchists have supposedly withdrawn “from the social domain that formed the principal arena of earlier anarchists”(2) because lifestyle anarchism “is concerned with a ‘style’ rather than a society” (34). But for an old Marxist like Bookchin, labor is the very essence of the social: “Labor, perhaps more than any single human activity, underpins contemporary relationships among people on every level of experience” (1982: 224). In the importance they attach to the labor process, zero-workers resemble traditional socialists, not “the growing ‘inwardness’ and narcissism of the yuppie generation” (9). Work is about real life, not lifestyle or hairstyle. Finally, there might be a very personal source of the Dean’s relative reticence. His usual method is to focus on one or two prominent expositors of each malign aspect of lifestyle anarchism. Were he to deal with zero-work that way he would probably have to deal with me. As the author of “The Abolition of Work” (Black 1986: 17–33), a widely read essay which has been published in seven languages, and other zero-work writings (Black 1992: ch. 1; 1996b), I would be the single most convenient whipping-boy. But Bookchin never refers to me with respect to zero-work or anything else. What am I, chopped liver? I can only speculate why I was spared, except by implication, the Dean’s wrath. The flattering suggestion has been made that he feared my polemic powers and hoped I’d ignore his diatribe unless personally provoked by it (Jarach 1996: 3). If so, he miscalculated. I’m a better friend to my friends than that, and besides, I like a good fight. I’m not the kind of guy who says:“First they came for the anarcho-liberal individualists, but I said nothing, for I was not an anarcho-liberal individualist; next they came for the mystics, but I said nothing, for I was not a mystic; next they came for the primitivists, but I said nothing, for I was not a primitivist,” etc. If anything,I am peeved to be overlooked. Bookchin’s enemies list looks to be for the anarchists of the ‘90s what Nixon’s enemies list was for the liberals of the ‘70s, an honor roll. I’ve previously flattened a nobody — his name doesn’t matter — who pushed the same line as Bookchin (Black 1992: 181–193; Black & Gunderloy 1992) although that one also happened not to mention my name. For me, the political is the personal. An attack upon all is an attack upon one. Solidarity forever — or make my day! ¡No paserán — baby!

90 We have already seen (Chapter 9) how the Dean blithely misrepresents the best current understanding of how, and how long, foragers work — if that is even the word for what they do for a living, or rather, for the living that they do. As I’ve summarized the situation in my book Friendly Fire:

In addition to shorter hours, “flextime” and the more reliable “safety net” afforded by food sharing, foragers’ work is more satisfying than most modern work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country. We have bosses; they have companions. Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great Utopians called for (Black 1992: 33).

I’ve cited ample supporting references in that book (which the Dean is surely familiar with, if less than happy with) as also in this one (cf. Zerzan 1994: 171–185 [Bibliography]). All Bookchin can do is fulminate that the primitive affluence thesis is hippie hokum, an ad hominem insult which is irrelevant as well as untrue. The Dean is equally wrong about work — and the relationship of technology to work — in other forms of society. In Friendly Fire I summarized some of the evidence (there’s lots more) that as technology advances, the quantity of work increases and the quality of the work experience declines (Black 1992: 19–41). In general, there’s no such thing as labor-saving technology. There’s usually, at best, only labor- rearranging technology, which from the worker’s perspective is sort of like “emigrating from Romania to Ethiopia in search of a better life”(ibid.: 13). Capitalists develop and deploy new technology, not to reduce labor, but to reduce the price of labor. The higher the tech, the lower the wages and the smaller the work-force. When he descends from declamation to detail, the Dean exposes his ignorance of the real history of work and technology. The two examples he adduces are evidence enough. Here’s his cartoon history of Southern agriculture:

In the South, plantation owners needed slave “hands” in great part because the machinery to plant and pick cotton did not exist; indeed, American tenant farming has disappeared over the past two generations because new machin- ery was introduced to replace the labor of “freed” black share-croppers (35).

In other words, Bookchin blames slavery on technological backwardness, not on a capitalist world-system which assigned to the South the function of ex- port monoculture. But cotton was of minor importance in the low-tech colonial economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when slaves were raising

91 other export crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo (McCusker & Menard 1985). As every schoolchild knows, technical progress strengthened slavery, which had been languishing, with the conjunction of the cotton gin with the textiles-based Industrial Revolution in Britain (Scheiber, Vatter & Faulkner 1976: 130–134). If what Bookchin says about slaveholders makes sense, thenevery ruling class is off the hook. The plantation owners “needed” slaves “in great part” because they lacked machines to do their work for them. Presumably industrialists “needed” child labor for the same reason. Athenian citizens “needed” slaves because their technology was inadequate to peel their grapes, give them blowjobs, and satisfy the many other needs of a civic-minded citizenry with aims so lofty that they could not be troubled with earning their own keep.“Need” is socially and economically relative. No doubt the Southern planters and the Athenian citizens needed slaves, but did the slaves need the Southern planters or the Athenian citizens? The Deans’s other example is also maladroit. It’s that classic instrument of women’s liberation, the washing machine:“Modern working women with chil- dren could hardly do without washing machines to relieve them, however min- imally, from their daily domestic labors — before going to work to earn what is often the greater part of their households’ income” (49). In other words, the washing machine reinforces the domestic sexual division of labor and enables women to be proletarianized — to enter the paid labor force at the bottom (Black 1992: 29–30). Thanks to technology, modern working women get to do the unpaid drudge-work, the “shadow work” (Illich 1981) of the patriarchal household, plus the underpaid capitalist drudge-work of the office, the restaurant and even the factory. The washing machine, and household technology in general, never saved women any labor-time. It just raised performance standards (with a Maytag, no excuse any more if your laundry’s not brighter than white) or else displaced effort to other tasks like child care (Cowan 1974, 1983). I doubt Bookchin does his own laundry, and not only because he’s always airing his dirty linen in public. In Bookchin’s civic Utopia,“a high premium would be placed on labour-saving devices — be they computers or automatic machinery — that would free human beings from needless toil and give them unstructured leisure time for their self- cultivation as individuals and citizens” (1989: 197). To believe in that is, for someone as ignorant as Bookchin, an act of faith.In recent decades productiv- ity, driven by high technology far beyond anything the Dean anticipated, has increased prodigiously — more than doubling since 1948 (Schor 1991: 1–2, 5, 29). Oddly enough, not even “material scarcity,” much less “toil,” has diminished. Real income has fallen at the same time hours of work have increased (Black 1994: 31–32; Black 1996b: 45). Even the Dean has noticed, literally on page one, “the growing impoverishment of millions of people” at the same time that “the inten- sity of exploitation has forced people in growing numbers to accept a work week

92 typical of the last century” (1). What he hasn’t noticed is that the paradox of more progress, more productivity, more poverty and more work calls his essentially Marxist celebration of the development of the productive forces, as he might say, “into question.” The Dean admits that “many are inherently domineering and ecologically dangerous”(34), but he cannot imagine that they increase and worsen work. Really he just doesn’t care. He hasn’t devoted any sustained attention to work since Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971). After 25 years as a college bureaucrat, the factory is a distant memory. His 1989 primer summarizing his views on remaking society devoted all of two sentences to work with but a perfunctory affirmation of rotation of tasks (1989: 195). All Bookchin cares about any more is politics and ecology, in that order. Provided a technology is neither “domineering” nor “dangerous,” its impact on work means nothing to him. Nothing better dramatizes the Dean’s self-deception and irrelevance thanthe contrast between his fervor for politics and his indifference to work. He believes, because he wants to believe, that “seldom in recent memory has there been a more compelling popular sentiment for a new politics” (59). That contradicts his characterization of the epoch as privatistic, personalistic and apolitical. The truth is that seldom in recent memory has there been a more compelling sentiment for no politics. On the other hand, work is if anything more salient, if less liked, in the lives of ordinary people than it’s been in decades.Longer hours, lower real incomes, and employment insecurity have done nothing to compensate for the joyless and often humiliating experience of the work itself. In the 1960s Bookchin, ever alert to sniffing out potentially revolutionary sources of social malaise, expressed approval of the younger generation’s contempt for the work trap (Bookchin 1970: 54, 61; 1971: 175–176; cf. 1994: 30). But while other Bookchin-approved tendencies, like youth culture, were recuperated, a widening revolt against work became a persistent feature of the American workplace (DeLeon 1996: 196–197; Zerzan 1988: 170–183). Spontaneous and acephalous, it could neither be bought out by bosses nor organized by leftists. The overworked and the unemployed — now there’s a potentially revolutionary force (Black 1996a).

93 94 Chapter 10: Shut Up, Marxist!

As a matter of course, unless ideology withers away, it eventually hardens into . After Jesus comes Paul, and eventually some Pope,Innocent in name only. That Bookchinism would calcify into a creed after no very long time is no surprise. Even in its prime it was arthritic with Rousseau, St.-Simon, Marx and Arendt. It was always ambiguous about technology and scarcity. Its ecological content was always at odds with its civism, to which, in retrospect, ecology seems to have always been an accessory, an add-on. It’s marred by eccentricities as various as primitive gerontocracy and Swiss anarchy. It’s unredeemed by irony, much less humor. What’s amazing is that Bookchin isn’t leaving Bookchinism to its Plekhanovs, Kautskys and Lenins. He’s vulgarizing his ideology himself. As the reviewer observes, the Dean now “goes on to crudely reduce or reject all that’s best in his Ecology of Freedom,” forsaking dialectics for dualism (Anonymous 1996: 22). In fact he’s gone back on the best of everything he’s written. This latest tract by the author of “Listen, Marxist!” might have been titled “Listen to the Marxist!” The author of “Desire and Need”(2) denounces desire as greed. The benign,“conciliatory” animism of organic society (Bookchin 1982: 98) has become “an inexplicable, often frightening dream world that they [the ignorant jungle bunnies] took for reality” (42). The author who acclaimed the drop-out culture (Bookchin 1970: 63 n. 1) now vilifies “lumpen lifeways” (56). The author who cannot spit out the word “zine” without contemptuous quotation marks (51) used to publish a zine, Comment, himself (Bookchin 1979: 28). There must be hundreds of these contradictions. The Dean is oblivious to all of them. “Certainly,” decrees the Dean, “it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists”(61). That’s the most reasonable proposal in the entire essay. I suggest he call himself a “Bookchinist anarchist” or, if his overweening modesty forbids, an “anti-lifestyle anarchist.” Nobody will know what he’s talking about, so introducing himself that way might stimulate curiosity about his views, much as would introducing oneself as a Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Primitive Baptist. Fated to failure, however, is any attempt to standardize the terminology on Bookchin’s tendentious terms. Most anarchists would already rather answer to “social anarchist” than “lifestyle anarchist.” Reading the Dean’s tract won’t turn any lifestyle anarchists — who number in the “thousands” (1) — into social anarchists, but it might encourage them to adopt protective coloration (red). We will all be social anarchists, even if, like Bookchin, we aren’t anarchists at all. Bookchinists might retaliate by calling themselves “very social anarchists,” but

95 you see where that would lead. They need a name nobody else wants. How about “Marxist”?

96 Chapter 11: Anarchy after Leftism

In one respect, Murray Bookchin is right in almost the only way he’s still capable of, i.e., for the wrong reasons. The anarchists are at a turning point. For the first time in history, they are the only revolutionary current. To be sure, not all anarchists are revolutionaries, but it is no longer possible to be a revolutionary without being an anarchist, in fact if not in name. Throughout its existence as a conscious current, anarchism has been shadowed and usually overshadowed by leftism in general, and Marxism in particular. Es- pecially since the formation of the , anarchism has effectively (and therefore ineffectively) defined itself with reference to Marxism. The reduction of anarchists to satellites of the Communists, especially in revolutionary situations, is so regular a feature of their modern history that it can’t be an accident. Fixated on their great rival, the anarchists have competed with Marxists on their own leftist terms and so the anarchists have always lost. Marxism was already ideologically bankrupt by the time European Commu- nism collapsed. As ideology, Marxism is now merely a campus — and mostly a faculty — phenomenon, and even as such its persistence is mostly parasitic upon and the racial nationalisms. As a state system, what remains of Marxism is merely Oriental despotism, unthinkable as a model for the West. Suddenly, seventy years of anarchist excuses became irrelevant. Although these developments caught the anarchists, like everybody else, by surprise, they were not as unprepared as they would have been twenty years earlier. Many of them had, if not by design, then by drift and default, strayed from their traditional position as “the ‘left wing’ of ‘all socialisms’” (6)— but not by moving to the right. Like many other North Americans, they were unable to discern any difference between left and right of such importance that they felt compelled to declare for one or the other. As the leftist veneer — or tarnish — they typically acquired in college wore off, an indigenous anti- showed through. The Marxists they encountered on campus were too ridiculous to be taken seriously as rivals or reference points. (That some of them were professors made them that much more ridiculous.) More than ever before, some anarchists insisted on a “personalistic” grounding of politics in the experience of everyday life, and they correspondingly opened up to theorists like the situationists for whom the critique of everyday life was a first principle. They took to dumpster- diving among the discards of doctrines and cultures to fashion, like a collage, recombinant world-pictures of their own. And if Nietzsche’s definition is right — that man is the animal who laughs — then they recovered some of their humanity too.

97 Now I admit this picture is too rosy because it’s not red enough. A fraction of North American anarchists, mostly syndicalists, remain out-and-out leftists. As such, they share the decline of the rest of the left. They no longer include any first-rate or even second-rate thinkers. Other pockets of anarchists act as auxiliaries of sub-leftist, particularist ideologies like feminism and Third World nationalism (including indigenism) — the larger hunks of wreckage from the New Left. These too have produced their logorrheics but nobody with anything to say. Many other anarchists retain vestiges of leftism (not always a bad thing). What’s important is how many of them, whatever their lingering influences, simply aren’t leftists any more. The Dean’s jeremiad expresses his shock of recognition at this unprecedented state of affairs. The precondition for any substantial increase in anarchist influence is for anarchists to make explicit and emphatic their break with the left. This does not mean placing the critique of the left at the center of analysis and agitation. On the contrary, that’s always been a symptom of anarchism’s satellite status. It is enough to identify leftism, as the occasion arises, as all it really is, a variant of hegemonic ideology — a loyal opposition — which was formerly effective in recuperating revolutionary tendencies. There’s no reason for anarchists to inherit an accursed share of the left’s unpopularity. Let’s make our own enemies. And our own friends. Since there really is something anarchist about some popular tendencies, we should try to make some anarchist tendencies popular. Certain anarchist themes both old and new resonate with certain widespread attitudes. It isn’t necessarily elitist or manipulative to circulate the proposition that anarchism explicates and elaborates various inchoate anti-authoritarian ten- dencies. This can be done in an imperialistic and opportunistic fashion, but I believe it can also be done, judiciously, in good faith. If we’re mistaken, no harm done, we just won’t go over very well, something we’re used to. Many people will surely shrink, at least initially, from drawing the anarchist conclusions we suggest their own attitudes and values tend toward. Then again, some others may not, not even initially — especially the young. Besides, making converts is not the only purpose of anarchist agitprop. It may also enlarge the chokingly constricted range of North American political discourse. We may never bring most of the intelligentsia over, but we can soften them up. We can reduce some of them to sympathizers, to what the Stalinists called fellow travellers, to what Lenin called useful idiots. They will traduce our ideas but also, in some mutilated form, send them around and legitimate them in the sense that they are to be taken seriously. And in so doing they will weaken their own power to counter them if and when these ideas are taken seriously enough to be acted upon by those who understand them.

98 Americans (and undoubtedly others, but I’ll stick with the American context Bookchin addresses) really are in a certain sense “anarchistic.” I’m not going to pretend, like David De Leon (1978), that there is something innately and im- memorially anarchist about Americans. Our beliefs and behavior have long been otherwise in important respects. Most contemporary American anarchists and other radicals — and I include myself here — have been consciously and conspic- uously anti-American.In college,I majored in history, but I took courses only in European history, because Europeans had a revolutionary heritage which we Americans (I assumed) did not. Much later I learned that Americans have at times been much more revolutionary (and so, to me, more interesting) than I originally supposed. While this discovery didn’t transform me into a patriot, as my anti-Gulf War activities demonstrate (Black 1992: ch. 9), it did kindle a sympathetic interest in American history which I am still pursuing. Anarchy is at once very much an elaboration of certain American values and at the same time antithetical to certain others. So it makes no sense for American anarchists to be pro-American or anti-American. They should be themselves — their one indisputable area of expertise — and see what that leads to. Post-leftist anarchy is positioned to articulate — not a program — but a number of revolutionary themes with contemporary relevance and resonance. It is, unlike Bookchinism, unambiguously anti-political, and many people are anti-political. It is, unlike Bookchinism, hedonistic, and many people fail to see why life is not to be lived enjoyably if it is to be lived at all. It is, unlike Bookchinism, “individualistic” in the sense that if the freedom and happiness of the individual — i.e., each and every really existing person, every Tom, Dick and Murray — is not the measure of the good society, what is? Many people wonder what’s wrong with wanting to be happy. Post-leftist anarchy is, unlike Bookchinism, if not necessarily rejective, then at least suspicious of the chronically unfulfilled liberatory promise of high technology. And maybe most important of all is the massive revulsion against work, an institution which has become less and less important to Bookchin at the same time it’s become more and more important, and oppressive, to people outside academia who actually have to work. Most people would rather do less work than attend more meetings. Which is to say, most people are smarter, and saner, than Murray Bookchin is. Post-leftist anarchists mostly don’t regard our times one- dimensionally, as either a “decadent, bourgeoisified era” (1) of “social reaction” (9) or as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. They tend toward pessimism, but not usually as much as the Dean does. The system, unstable as ever, never ceases to create conditions which undermine it. Its self-inflicted wounds await our salt. If you don’t believe in progress, it’ll never disappoint you and you might even make some progress.

99 In some particulars,— as I’ve come to appreciate, somewhat to my surprise, in writing this essay, — traditional anarchist themes and practices are more attuned to popular predilections than ever before. Most Americans have joined them, for instance, in from elections, and they just might be interested in the anarchists’ reasons. Class conflict at the point of production holds little interest for campus-based Bookchinist-Arendtist civilogues, but means much to post-college workers reduced, for the duration, to the degradation they briefly thought they’d escaped by graduating from high school. Now they must work to pay off the loans that financed an interval of relative freedom (a Temporary Autonomous Zone, as it were) such as they may never enjoy again, no matter how much they earn. They may have learned just enough along the way to question whether life has to be this way. But the new themes of the New Anarchism, or, better yet, the New Anarchisms also have popular appeal — not because they pander to prevalent illusions but be- cause they pander (and why not?) to prevalent disillusions. With technology, for instance. A political critique of technology may make a lot of sense to the tenders of high technology who have not experienced anything of its liberatory potential as so often promised but never delivered by the progressives, by the Marxists, syndicalists, Bookchinists and other technocrats. At the very least, trickle-down techno-liberation is as fraudulent as trickle-down enrichment through supply- side economics (make the already rich so much richer that some crumbs are bound to fall from their table). Computer programming is, if more interesting, little more liberatory than data entry, and the hours are longer. There’s no light at the end of the carpal tunnel. With whatever elements the New Anarchisms are compounded and whatever their fortunes will be, the old anarchism — the libertarian fringe of the Left That Was — is finished. The Bookchinist blip was a conjunctural quirk, an anomalous amalgam of the old anarchism and the New Left to which the Dean-to-be for- tuitously added a little pop ecology and (this part passed unnoticed for far too long) his weird city-statist fetish. Now Bookchin belatedly bumbles forth as the defender of the faith, that old-time religion. Anarchism-as-Bookchinism was a confusionist episode even he, its fabricator, seems to be in haste to conclude. If the word “decadence” means anything, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anar- chism is an exercise in decadence, not to mention an exercise in futility. If the word means anything, it means a deterioration from a previous higher level of accomplishment — it means doing worse what was formerly done better. In that sense, the New Anarchisms of the “lifestyle anarchists” cannot be decadent, for what they are doing is at best, something better, and at worst, something different from what the old-style left-wing anarchists did. Bookchin is not even doing what Bookchin once did, if never very well, then at least a lot better.

100 Within anarchism, what is taking place resembles what, in science, is known as a paradigm shift (Kuhn 1970). A paradigm is an overarching frame of reference, something broader than a theory (or ideology), which directs the development of thought for those belonging to a community of those operating within the paradigm. That this is a somewhat circular formulation its originator admits (ibid.: 176), but truth is circular, an inescapable hermeneutic circle but one whose diameter we can widen along with our perspectives. The details and, for that matter, the deficiencies of Kuhn’s much-discussed model of scientific theory and practice need not detain us here (although I commend them to anarchists capable of more muscular thinking than Bookchin and most other anarcho-eggheads are up for). Here I’m drawing attention to just two aspects of this historical approach to explaining theoretical thinking which I find suggestive. The first is the notion of “normal science,” which refers to the everyday practice of workaday scientists: the working-out of the implications of the prevailing paradigm. Newton’s physics, for instance, kept observational astronomers and experimental physicists happy, or at least busy, for over two hundred years: it assigned them problems to solve and criteria for what counted as solutions to those problems. The classical anarchism of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and especially Kropotkin may be thought of as the original anarchist political paradigm. For all their differences, together they furnished many answers and a context for developing many more. Later figures like Malatesta, Goldman, Berkman, the an- archo-syndicalists, and the intellectuals writing for Freedom in effect engaged in “normal anarchism” — in restating, elaborating, updating and in details amending the paradigm. Men like Herbert Read, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort and Paul Goodman worked within this tradition in the inclement climate of the ‘40s and ‘50s.In characterizing their activity as derivative I am by no means denigrating it, or them. Precisely because the classical paradigm was rich in potential, intel- ligent anarchists have drawn fresh insights from it by applying it to changing 20th-century developments. But the developments have long since outstripped the paradigm.Too many “anomalies,” as Kuhn calls them, have appeared to be reconciled with the paradigm without increasing strain and a deepening sense of artificiality. Classical anarchism, like leftism in general, is played out. Murray Bookchin, whom some anarchists once mistook for the first theorist of a new anarchist paradigm, has now come forth explicitly as the last champion of the old one, the anarchist tail of what he calls the Left That Was. One other suggestive feature of Kuhn’s argument is his account of how, on the ground, the supplanting of one paradigm by another actually takes place:

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners

101 [emphasis added], the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disap- pearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work (Kuhn 1970: 18–19).

Kuhn goes on to explain that this may involve intransigent individuals, “more interesting, however, is the endurance of whole schools in increasing isolation from professional science. Consider, for example, the case of astrology, which was once an integral part of astronomy” (ibid.: 19 n. 11). Not to pretend that anarchism is a science — such a pretense is itself a part of the obsolete paradigm — but the analogy is illuminating. As Bookchin admits, and deplores, “thousands” of anarchists, “the next generation’s practitioners” of anarchism, are increasingly abandoning social anarchism for lifestyle anarchism. Some of the older school’s practitioners convert, as has indeed happened. Other once-prominent figures, as Kuhn noticed (ibid.), marginalize themselves as the Dean has now done. And to clinch the comparison, what were once “integral parts” of anarchism are on the verge of splitting off on their own as did astrology from astronomy so as to have any hope of surviving at all. Bookchinism, “social ecology,” was never an integral part of anarchism, for all the Dean’s efforts to make it so. If it persists awhile after the Dean’s demise, social ecology/anarchism will bear about the same relationship to the new anarchism as astrology to astronomy. As will, I expect, the dwindling anarcho-leftist fundamentalisms. Of these there would seem to be only three. The first is the supposed pure-and-simple anarchism of, say, Fred Woodworth of The Match! or the late unlamented Bob Shea. The inherent improbability of a socially and economically agnostic anarchism — let’s abolish the state and later sort out the trifling details, such as our way of life — as well as the sheer crackpotkinism of its vestigial devotees (Black 1994: 42–44) relegate this fundamentalism to imminent oblivion. Even Bookchin would be embarrassed to be associated with it. A Marxist is capable of many errors and many horrors, and usually commits some, but one thing a Marxist cannot be indifferent to is political economy and the social relations of production. The second obsolete anarcho-leftism is anarcho- syndicalism. Although it is a workerist ideology, its few working-class adherents are elderly. Although it is by definition a union-oriented ideology, there is no perceptible syndicalist presence in any union. A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents. Only a rather small minority of North American anarchists are syndicalists. Syndicalism

102 will persist, if at all, as a campus-based cult in increasing isolation from the main currents of anarchism. The third anarcho-leftism is anarcho-feminism. The category is, I admit, ques- tionable. So-called is leftist in origin but extreme right-wing in ideology (Black 1986: 133–138; Black 1992: 195–197). Separatist in tendency and sometimes in principle, anarcho-feminism is oriented much more toward statist feminism than anarchism. It is already well on its way toward encapsu- lation and isolation from the anarchisms. The feminist presence in anarchism is more apparent than real. Many anarchist women call themselves feminists from force of habit or because they think that by not so identifying themselves they somehow undermine those women who do. But there is little if anything distinctively feminist, fortunately, in the anarchism of most nominal anarcho- feminists. Feminism is so obviously an Establishment ideology and so remote from its (largely mythical) radical roots that its affirmation by anarchists will become ever more perfunctory. Like leftism, feminism is a needless liability for anarchists. There is life after the left. And there is anarchy after anarchism. Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way — better yet, the ways — to a free future.

103 104 References

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110 Monegal, Emir Rodriguez, & Alastair Reid, eds. (1981). Borges: A Reader. New York: E.P. Dutton Moore, John (1996). “Commentary on the Anarcho-Futurist Manifesto.” Green Anarchist 40/41 (Spring): 18–20 Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company Murdoek, George Peter (1968). “The Current Status of the World’s Hunting and Gathering Peoples.” In Lee & DeVore (1968a), pp. 13–20 Newcomb, W.W., Jr. (1961). The Indians of Texas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press Nietzsche, Friedrich (1994). On the Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Novatore, Renzo (1989). “Iconoclasts, Forward!” In Black & Parfrey (1989), pp. 92–93 Novick, Peter (1988). That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Nuquist, Andrew E. (1964). Town Government in Vermont. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Government Research Center Orwell, George (1952). Homage to Catalonia. New York &London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pannekoek, Anton (1948). Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of . New York: New Essays Parkington,John E. (1984). “Soaqua and Bushmen: Hunters and Robbers.” In Schrire (1984), pp. 151–174 Pataud, Emile,& Emile Pouget (1990). How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth. London & Winchester, MA: Pluto Press Peters, Pauline (1990). “The San Historicized.” Science 248 (May 28): 905–907 Popper, Karl L. (1962). The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. Fourth Edition, Revised. New York & Evanston, IL: Harper Torchbooks Proudhon, P.-J. (1979). The Principle of Federation. Edited by Richard Vernon. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press Rasmussen, D.Tab, ed. (1993). The Origin and Evolution of Humans and Human- ness. Boston, MA & London: Jones and Bartlett Publisher Renouf, MA.P. (1991). “Sedentary Hunter-Gathers: A Case for Northern Coasts.” In Gregg (1991), pp. 89–107 Richards,Vernon (1983). Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939. Revised, Enlarged Edition. London: Freedom Press Rifkin,Jeremy (1995). The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons

111 Roberts, David D. (1979). The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press Rocker, Rudolf (1947). Anarcho-syndicalism: Vieory and Practice. Indore, India: Modern Publishers Ross, Eric B. (1987). “An Overview of Trends in Dietary Variation from Hunter- Gatherer to Modern Capitalist Societies.” In Harris & Ross (1987), pp. 7–55 Ruby, Jay (1996). “Objectivity Revisited.” American Anthropologist 98(2)(June): 398–400 Ruhart, Mary (1996). “Keeping Our Freedom in an Unfree World.” Formulations 3(3) (Spring): 3–4, 13 Sahlins, Marshall (1972). Stone Age Economics. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company Salisbury, Neal (1982). Manitou and Providence:Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press Scheiber, Harry N., Harold G.Vatter & Harold Underwood Faulkner (1976). American Economic History. New York: Harper & Row Schor, Juliet (1991). The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books Schrire, Carmel, ed. (1984). Past and Present in Hunter Gatherer Societies. Or- lando, FL: Academic Press Schuster, Eunice Minette (1932). Native American Anarchism: AStudy of Left- Wing American Individualism. (Smith College Studies in History, Vol. XVII, Nos. 1–4.) Northampton, MA: Smith College Department of History Seidman, Michael (1991). Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts. Berkeley: University of California Press Sender, Ramón J. (1990). Seven Red Sundays. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher Silbener, Edmund (1948). “Proudhon’s Judeophobia.” Historica Judaica 11(1) (April): 61–80 Sjoberg, Gideon (1960). The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press Smith, Gregory B. (1983). Review of The Ecology of Freedom, by Murray Bookchin. American Political Science Review 77(1) (March): 540 Solway, Jacqueline S., & Richard B.Lee (1990). “Foragers, Genuine or Spurious? Situating the Kalahari San in History.” Current Anthropology 31(2)(April): 109–146 Stafford, David (1972). “Anarchists in Britain Today.” In Apter & Joll (1972), pp. 99–122 Stirner, Max (1978). “Stirner’s Critics.” Philosophical Forum 8(2–4): 66–80 — (1995). The Ego and Its Own. Edited by David Leopold. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press

112 Tanaka, Jiri (1980). The San Hunter-Gatherers of the Kalahari: A Study in Ecolog- ical Anthropology. Tokyo, Japan: University of Tokyo Press Thissen, Siebe (1996). De Weg naar Croatan. (De Kunst van het Afhaken.) Rotterdam, Netherlands: Baalprodukties Sittard Tocqueville, Alexis de (1969a). Democracy in America. Edited by J.P. Mayer. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books — (1969b). “Report Given Before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on January 15, 1848, on the Subject of M. Cherbuliez’ Book Entitled On Democracy in Switzerland.” In Tocqueville (1969a), pp. 736–749 (Appendix II) Tuchman, Barbara (1966). The Proud Tower. New York: The Macmillan Com- pany Vayda, Andrew P., ed. (1969). Environment and Cultural Behavior. New York: Natural History Press Vincent, K. Steven (1984). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Repub- lican Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press Walter, Nicolas (1972). “Anarchism in Print: Yesterday and Today.” In Apter & Joll (1972), pp. 147–168 Walzer, Michael (1970). Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War; and Citizen- ship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Watson, Richard A. (1995). Review of Which Way for the Ecology Movement? by Murray Bookchin. Environmental Ethics 14(4) (Winter): 437–439 Wilmsen, Edwin N. (1989). Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari. Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press Woodburn, J. (1982). “Egalitarian Societies.” Man 7: 431–451 Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Move- ments. New York: Meridian Books Yengoyan, Aram A. (1968). “Demographic and Ecological Influences on Abo- riginal Australian Marriage Sections.” In Lee & DeVore (1968), pp. 185–199 Zapatistas (1994). Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution. Brook- lyn, NY: Autonomedia Zerzan, John (1987). Elements of Refusal. Seattle, WA: Left Bank Books — (1994). Future Primitive and Other Essays. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia & Columbia, MO: Anarchy/C.A.L. Press — (1996). Letter to Bob Black, May 20 Zimmern, Alfred (1931). The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens. Fifth Edition, Revised. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press Zubrow, Ezra B.W., ed. (1976). Demographic Anthropology: Quantitative Ap- proaches. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press

113 Anti-copyright @ 1997 Bob Black This book may be freely pirated and quoted. The author and publisher would like to be informed at: C.A.L. Press Columbia Alternative Library POB 1446 Columbia, MO 65205–1446 USA Bob Black POB 3142 Albany, NY 12203–0142 USA Retrieved on 17 March 2011 from www.scribd.com

114 Jason McQuinn

Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind

Prologue to Post-Left Anarchy

It is now nearly a decade and a half since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is seven years since Bob Black first sent me the manuscript for his book, Anarchy after Leftism, published in 1997. It’s over four years since I asked Anarchy magazine Contributing Editors to participate in a discussion of “post-left anarchy” which ultimately appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999–2000 issue of the magazine (#48). And it’s also one year since I first wrote and published “Post-Left Anarchy: Rejecting the Reification of Revolt,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002–2003 issue (#54) of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. Aside from creating a hot new topic for debate in anarchist and leftist peri- odicals, web sites and e-mail lists, one can legitimately ask what has been ac- complished by introducing the term and the debate to the anarchist, and more generally radical, milieu?In response I’d say that the reaction continues to grow, and the promise of post-left anarchy primarily lies in what appears to be a con- tinually brightening future. One of the most troubling problems of the contemporary anarchist milieu has been the frequent fixation on attempts to recreate the struggles of the past as though nothing significant has changed since 1919, 1936, or at best 1968. Partly this is a function of the long-prevalent anti-intellectualism amongst many an- archists. Partly it’s a result of the historical eclipse of the anarchist movement following the victory of Bolshevik state communism and the (self-) defeat of the Spanish Revolution. And partly it is because the vast majority of the most impor- tant anarchist theorists — like Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta — come from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The void in the development of anarchist theory since the rebirth of the milieu in the 1960s has yet to be filled by any adequate new formulation of theory and practice powerful enough to end the impasse and catch the imaginations of the ma- jority of contemporary anarchists in a similar manner to Bakunin’s or Kropotkin’s formulations in the nineteenth century. Since the 1960s the originally minuscule — but since that time, ever-growing — anarchist milieu has been influenced (at least in passing) by the Civil Rights Movement, Paul Goodman, SDS, the Yippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, Fred Woodworth, the Marxist New Left, the Situationist International, Sam Dolgoff and Murray Bookchin, the single-issue movements (anti-racist, feminist, anti- nuclear, anti-imperialist, environmental/ecological, animal rights, etc.), , Freddie Perlman, George Bradford/David Watson, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Earth First! and , neo-Paganism and New Ageism, the anti- globalization movement, and many others.Yet these various influences over the last forty years, both non-anarchist and anarchist alike, have failed to bring to the

117 fore any inspiring new synthesis of critical and practical theory. A few anarchists, most notably Murray Bookchin and the Love & Rage project, have tried and failed miserably in attempting to meld the extremely diverse and idiosyncratic anarchist milieu into a genuinely new movement with a commonly-held theory. I would argue that in our current situation this is a project guaranteed to fail no matter who attempts it. The alternative argued for by the post-left anarchist synthesis is still being created. It cannot be claimed by any single theorist or activist because it’s a project that was in the air long before it started becoming a concrete set of proposals, texts and interventions. Those seeking to promote the synthesis have been primarily influenced by both the classical anarchist movement up to the Spanish Revolution on the one hand, and several of the most promising critiques and modes of intervention developed since the 60s. The most important critiques involved include those of everyday life and the spectacle, of ideology and morality, of industrial technology, of work and of civilization. Modes of intervention focus on the concrete deployment of direct action in all facets of life. Rather than aiming at the construction of institutional or bureaucratic structures, these interventions aim at maximal critical effectiveness with minimal compromise in constantly changing networks of action. Clearly these new critiques and modes of intervention are largely incompatible with both the old left of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and most of the New Left of the 60s and 70s. And just as clearly they are engaging a growing number of anarchists who gravitate to them because they seem to be much more congruent with the global situation we find ourselves in today than the old theories and tactics of leftism. If anarchism doesn’t change to address the lived realities of the twenty-first century — by leaving the outmoded politics and organizational fetishism of leftism behind — its relevance will dissipate and the opportunities for radical contestation now so apparent will slowly vanish. Post-left anarchy is most simply a rubric through which many thoughtful contemporary anarchists would like to see the most vital of the new critiques and modes of intervention coalesce in an increasingly coherent and effective movement, which genuinely promotes unity in diversity, the complete autonomy of individuals and local groups in struggle, and the organic growth of levels of organization which don’t hold back our collective energies, spontaneity and creativity.

Introduction

Anarchist critiques of leftism have a history nearly as long as the term “left” has had a political meaning. The early anarchist movement emerged from many

118 of the same struggles as other socialist movements (which made up a major part of the political left), omfr which it eventually differentiated itself. The anarchist movement and other socialist movements were primarily a product of the social ferment which gave rise to the Age of Revolutions — introduced by the English, American and French Revolutions. This was the historical period in which early capitalism was developing through the enclosure of to destroy com- munity self-sufficiency, the industrialization of production with a factory system based on scientific techniques, and the aggressive expansion of the commodity market economy throughout the world. But the anarchist idea has always had deeper, more radical and more holistic implications than mere socialist criticism of the exploitation of labor under capitalism. This is because the anarchist idea springs from both the social ferment of the Age of Revolutions and the critical imagination of individuals seeking the abolition of every form of social alienation and domination. The anarchist idea has an indelibly individualist foundation upon which its so- cial critiques stand, always and everywhere proclaiming that only free individuals can create a free, unalienated society. Just as importantly, this individualist foun- dation has included the idea that the exploitation or oppression of any individual diminishes the freedom and integrity of all. This is quite unlike the collectivist ideologies of the political left, in which the individual is persistently devalued, denigrated or denied in both theory and practice — though not always in the ideological window dressing that is meant only to fool the naive. It is also what prevents genuine anarchists from taking the path of authoritarians of the left, right and center who casually employ mass exploitation, mass oppression and frequently mass imprisonment or murder to capture, protect and expand their holds on political and economic power. Because anarchists understand that only people freely organizing themselves can create free communities, they refuse to sacrifice individuals or communities in pursuit of the kinds of power that would inevitably prevent the emergence of a free society. But given the almost mutual origins of the anarchist movement and the socialist left, as well as their historical battles to seduce or capture the support of the international workers movement by various means, it isn’t surprising that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries socialists have often adopted aspects of anarchist theory or practice as their own, while even more anarchists have adopted aspects of leftist theory and practice into various left-anarchist syntheses. This is despite the fact that in the worldwide struggles for individual and social freedom the political left has everywhere proven itself either a fraud or a failure in practice. Wherever the socialist left has been successful in organizing and taking power it has at best reformed (and rehabilitated) capitalism or at worst instituted new tyrannies, many with murderous policies — some of genocidal proportions.

119 Thus, with the stunning international disintegration of the political left follow- ing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the time is now past due for all anarchists to reevaluate every compromise that has been or continues to be made with the fading remnants of leftism. Whatever usefulness there might have been in the past for anarchists to make compromises with leftism is evaporating with the pro- gressive disappearance of the left omfr even token opposition to the fundamental institutions of capitalism: wage labor, market production, and the rule of value.

Leftists in the Anarchist Milieu

The rapid slide of the political left omfr the stage of history has increasingly left the international anarchist milieu as the only revolutionary anti-capitalist game in town. As the anarchist milieu has mushroomed in the last decade, most of its growth has come from disaffected youth attracted to its increasingly visible, lively and iconoclastic activities and media. But a significant minority of that growth has also come from former leftists who have — sometimes slowly and sometimes suspiciously swiftly — decided that anarchists might have been right in their critiques of political authority and the state all along. Unfortunately, not all leftists just fade away — or change their spots — overnight. Most of the former leftists entering the anarchist milieu inevitably bring with them many of the conscious and unconscious leftist attitudes, prejudices, habits and assumptions that structured their old political milieus. Certainly, not all of these attitudes, habits and assumptions are necessarily authoritarian or anti-anarchist, but just as clearly many are. Part of the problem is that many former leftists tend to misunderstand anar- chism only as a form of anti-statist leftism, ignoring or downplaying its indelibly individualist foundation as irrelevant to social struggles. Many simply don’t un- derstand the huge divide between a self-organizing movement seeking to abolish every form of social alienation and a merely political movement seeking to reor- ganize production in a more egalitarian form. While others do understand the divide quite well, but seek to reform the anarchist milieu into a political move- ment anyway, for various reasons. Some former leftists do this because they consider the abolition of social alienation unlikely or impossible; some because they remain fundamentally opposed to any individualist (or sexual, or cultural, etc.) component of social theory and practice. Some cynically realize that they will never achieve any position of power in a genuinely anarchist movement and opt for building more narrowly political organizations with more room for manipulation. Still others, unused to autonomous thinking and practice, simply feel anxious and uncomfortable with many aspects of the anarchist tradition and

120 wish to push those aspects of leftism within the anarchist milieu that help them feel less threatened and more secure — so that they can continue to play their former roles of cadre or militant, just without an explicitly authoritarian ideology to guide them. In order to understand current controversies within the anarchist milieu, anar- chists need to remain constantly aware — and carefully critical — of all this. Ad hominem attacks within the anarchist milieu are nothing new, and most often a waste of time, because they substitute for rational criticism of people’s actual positions. (Too often rational criticism of positions is simply ignored by those un- able to argue for their own positions, whose only recourse is to wild or irrelevant accusations or attempted smears.) But there remains an important place for ad hominem criticism addressed to people’s chosen identities, especially when these identities are so strong that they include sedimented, often unconscious, layers of habits, prejudices and dependencies. These habits, prejudices and dependencies — leftist or otherwise — all constitute highly appropriate targets for anarchist criticism.

Recuperation and the Left-Wing of Capital

Historically, the vast majority of leftist theory and practice has functioned as a loyal opposition to capitalism.Leftists have been (often vociferously) critical of particular aspects of capitalism, but always ready to reconcile themselves with the broader international capitalist system whenever they’ve been able to extract a bit of power, partial reforms — or sometimes, just the vague promise of partial reforms. For this reason leftists have often been quite justifiably criticized (by both ultra-leftists and by anarchists) as the left wing of capital. It’s not just a problem that those leftists who claim to be anti-capitalist don’t really mean it, although some have consciously used such lies to gain positions of power for themselves in opposition movements. The major problem is that leftists have incomplete, self-contradictory theories about capitalism and social change. As a result their practice always tends towards the recuperation (or co-optation and reintegration) of social rebellion. Always with a focus on organization, leftists use a variety of tactics in their attempts to reify and mediate social struggles — representation and substitution, imposition of collectivist ideologies, collectivist moralism, and ultimately repressive violence in one form or another. Typically, leftists have employed all of these tactics in the most unrepentently heavy-handed and explicitly authoritarian of ways. But these tactics (except for the last) can also be — and have often been — employed in more subtle, less-overtly authoritarian ways as well, the most important examples for our purposes being the historical and present practices of many (but not all) left anarchists.

121 Reification is often most generally described as “thingification.” It’s the reduc- tion of a complex, living process to a frozen, dead or mechanical collection of objects or actions. Political mediation (a form of practical reification) is the attempt to intervene in conflicts as a third-party arbiter or representative. Ultimately these are the definitive characteristics of all leftist theory and practice. Leftism always involves the reification and mediation of social revolt, while consistent anarchists reject this reification of revolt. The formulation of post-left anarchy is an attempt to help make this rejection of the reification of revolt more consistent, widespread and self-aware than it already is.

Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Organization

One of the most fundamental principles of anarchism is that social organization must serve free individuals and free groups, not vice versa. Anarchy cannot exist when individuals or social groups are dominated — whether that domination is facilitated and enforced by outside forces or by their own organization. For anarchists the central strategy of would-be revolutionaries has been the non-mediating (anti-authoritarian, often informal or minimalist) self-organization of radicals (based on affinity and/or specific theoretical/practical activities) in order to encourage and participate in the self-organization of popular rebellion and insurrection against capital and state in all their forms. Even among most left anarchists there has always been at least some level of understanding that mediating organizations are at best highly unstable and unavoidably open to recuperation, requiring constant vigilance and struggle to avoid their complete recuperation. But for all leftists (including left anarchists), on the other hand, the central strategy is always expressly focused on creating mediating organizations between capital & state on the one side and the mass of disaffected, relatively powerless people on the other. Usually these organizations have been focused on mediating between capitalists and workers or between the state and the working class. But many other mediations involving opposition to particular institutions or involving interventions among particular groups (social minorities, subgroups of the working class, etc.) have been common. These mediating organizations have included political parties, syndicalist unions, mass political organizations, front groups, single-issue campaign groups, etc. Their goals are always to crystallize and congeal certain aspects of themore general social revolt into set forms of ideology and congruent forms of activ- ity. The construction of formal, mediating organizations always and necessarily involves at least some levels of:

122 • Reductionism (Only particular aspects of the social struggle are included in these organizations. Other aspects are ignored, invalidated or repressed, leading to further and further compartmentalization of the struggle. Which in turn facilitates manipulation by elites and their eventual transformation into purely reformist lobbying societies with all generalized, radical critique emptied out.) • Specialization or Professionalism (Those most involved in the day-to-day operation of the organization are selected — or self-selected — to perform increasingly specialized roles within the organization, often leading to an offi- cial division between leaders and led, with gradations of power and influence introduced in the form of intermediary roles in the evolving organizational hierarchy.) • (The formal organization increasingly becomes the focus of strategy and tactics rather than the people-in-revolt. In theory and practice, the organization tends to be progressively substituted for the people, the orga- nization’s leadership — especially if it has become formal — tends to substitute itself for the organization as a whole, and eventually a maximal leader often emerges who ends up embodying and controlling the organization.) • Ideology (The organization becomes the primary subject of theory with indi- viduals assigned roles to play, rather than people constructing their own self- theories. All but the most self-consciously anarchistic formal organizations tend to adapt some form of collectivist ideology, in which the social group at some level is acceded to have more political reality than the free individual. Wherever sovereignty lies, there lies political authority; if sovereignty is not dissolved into each and every person it always requires the subjugation of individuals to a group in some form.)

All anarchist theories of self-organization, on the contrary, call for (in various ways and with different emphases):

• Individual and Group Autonomy with Free Initiative (The autonomous indi- vidual is the fundamental basis of all genuinely anarchistic theories of organi- zation, for without the autonomous individual, any other level of autonomy is impossible. Freedom of initiative is likewise fundamental for both individuals and groups. With no higher powers comes the ability and necessity for all decisions to be made at their point of immediate impact. As a side note, post- structuralists or postmodernists who deny the existence of the autonomous anarchist individual most often mistake the valid critique of the metaphysical subject to imply that even the process of lived subjectivity is a complete fiction

123 — a self-deluded perspective which would make social theory impossible and unnecessary.) • Free Association (Association is never free if it is forced. This means that people are free to associate with anyone in any combination they wish, and to dissociate or refuse association as well.) • Refusal of Political Authority, and thus of Ideology (The word “anarchy” literally means no rule or no ruler. No rule and no ruler both mean there is no political authority above people themselves, who can and should make all of their own decisions however they see fit. Most forms of ideology function to legitimate the authority of one or another elite or institution to make decisions for people, or else they serve to delegitimate people’s own decision-making for themselves.) • Small, Simple,Informal, Transparent and Temporary Organization (Most anarchists agree that small face-to-face groups allow the most complete partic- ipation with the least amount of unnecessary specialization. The most simply structured and least complex organizations leave the least opportunity for the development of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Informal organization is the most protean and most able to continually adapt itself to new conditions. Open and transparent organization is the most easily understood and controlled by its members. The longer organizations exist the more susceptible they usually become to the development of rigidity, specialization and eventually hierarchy. Organizations have life spans, and it is rare that any anarchist organization will be important enough that it should exist over generations.) • Decentralized, Federal Organization with Direct Decision-Making and Re- spect for Minorities (When they are necessary larger, more complex and formal organizations can only remain self-manageable by their participants if they are decentralized and federal. When face-to-face groups — with the possibility for full participation and convivial discussion and decision-making — become impossible due to size, the best course is to decentralize the orga- nization with many smaller groups in a federal structure. Or when smaller groups need to organize with peer groups to better address larger-scale prob- lems, free federation is preferred — with absolute self-determination at every level beginning with the base. As long as groups remain of manageable size, assemblies of all concerned must be able to directly make decisions according to whatever methods they find agreeable. However, minorities can never be forced into agreement with majorities on the basis of any fictitious conception of group sovereignty. Anarchy is not direct democracy, though anarchists may certainly choose to use democratic methods of decision-making when and where they wish. The only real respect for minority opinions involves

124 accepting that minorities have the same powers as majorities, requiring nego- tiation and the greatest level of mutual agreement for stable, effective group decision-making)

In the end, the biggest difference is that anarchists advocate self-organization while leftists want to organize you. For leftists, the emphasis is always on re- cruiting to their organizations, so that you can adopt the role of a cadre serving their goals. They don’t want to see you adopt your own self-determined theory and activities because then you wouldn’t be allowing them to manipulate you. Anarchists want you to determine your own theory and activity and self-organize your activity with like-minded others.Leftists want to create ideological, strategic and tactical unity through “self-discipline” (your self-repression) when possible, or organizational discipline (threat of sanctions) when necessary. Either way, you are expected to give up your autonomy to follow their heteronomous path that has already been marked out for you.

Anarchy as a Theory & Critique of Ideology

The anarchist critique of ideology dates from the work of Max Stirner, though he did not use the term himself to describe his critique.Ideology is the means by which alienation, domination and exploitation are all rationalized and justified through the deformation of human thought and communication. All ideology in essence involves the substitution of alien (or incomplete) concepts or images for human subjectivity. Ideologies are systems of false consciousness in which people no longer see themselves directly as subjects in their relation to their world. Instead they conceive of themselves in some manner as subordinate to one type or another of abstract entity or entities which are mistaken as the real subjects or actors in their world. Whenever any system of ideas and duties is structured with an abstraction at its center — assigning people roles or duties for its own sake — such a system is always an ideology. All the various forms of ideology are structured around different abstractions, yet they all always serve the interests of hierarchical and alienating social structures, since they are hierarchy and alienation in the realm of thought and communication. Even if an ideology rhetorically opposes hierarchy or alienation in its content, its form still remains consistent with what is osten- sibly being opposed, and this form will always tend to undermine the apparent content of the ideology. Whether the abstraction is God, the State, the Party, the Organization, Technology, the Family, Humanity, Peace, Ecology, Nature, Work, Love, or even Freedom; if it is conceived and presented as if it is an active subject

125 with a being of its own which makes demands of us, then it is the center of an ideology. Capitalism,Individualism, Communism, Socialism, and Pacifism are each ideological in important respects as they are usually conceived. Religion and Morality are always ideological by their very definitions. Even resistance, revolu- tion and anarchy often take on ideological dimensions when we are not careful to maintain a critical awareness of how we are thinking and what the actual purposes of our thoughts are.Ideology is nearly ubiquitous. From advertisements and commercials, to academic treatises and scientific studies, almost every aspect of contemporary thinking and communication is ideological, and its real meaning for human subjects is lost under layers of mystification and confusion. Leftism, as the reification and mediation of social rebellion, is always ideological because it always demands that people conceive of themselves first of all in terms of their roles within and relationships to leftist organizations and oppressed groups, which are in turn considered more real than the individuals who combine to create them. For leftists history is never made by individuals, but rather by organizations, social groups, and — above all, for Marxists — social classes. Each major leftist organization usually molds its own ideological legitimation whose major points all members are expected to learn and defend, if not proselytize.To seriously criticize or question this ideology is always to risk expulsion from the organization. Post-left anarchists reject all ideologies in favor of the individual and com- munal construction of self-theory. Individual self-theory is theory in which the integral individual-in-context (in all her or his relationships, with all her or his history, desires, and projects, etc.) is always the subjective center of perception, understanding and action. Communal self-theory is similarly based on the group as subject, but always with an underlying awareness of the individuals (and their own self-theories) which make up the group or organization. Non-ideological, anarchist organizations (or informal groups) are always explicitly based upon the autonomy of the individuals who construct them, quite unlike leftist organi- zations which require the surrender of personal autonomy as a prerequisite for membership.

Neither God, nor Master, nor Moral Order: Anarchy as Critique of Morality and Moralism

The anarchist critique of morality also dates from Stirner’s master work, The Ego and Its Own (1844). Morality is a system of reified values — abstract values which are taken out of any context, set in stone, and converted into unquestionable beliefs to be applied regardless of a person’s actual desires, thoughts or goals, and

126 regardless of the situation in which a person finds him- or herself. Moralism is the practice of not only reducing living values to reified morals, but of considering oneself better than others because one has subjected oneself to morality (self- righteousness), and of proselytizing for the adoption of morality as a tool of social change. Often, when people’s eyes are opened by scandals or disillusionment and they start to dig down under the surface of the ideologies and received ideas they have taken for granted all their lives, the apparent coherence and power of the new answer they find (whether in religion, leftism or even anarchism) can lead them to believe that they have now found the Truth (with a capital ‘T’). Once this begins to happen people too often turn onto the road of moralism, with its attendant problems of elitism and ideology. Once people succumb to the illusion that they have found the one Truth that would fix everything — if only enough other people also understood, the temptation is then to view this one Truth as the solution to the implied Problem around which everything must be theorized, which leads them to build an absolute value system in defense of their magic Solution to the Problem this Truth points them to. At this point moralism takes over the place of critical thinking. The various forms of leftism encourage different types of morality andmoral- ism, but most generally within leftism the Problem is that people are exploited by capitalists (or dominated by them, or alienated from society or from the productive process. etc.). The Truth is that the People need to take control of the Economy (and/or Society) into their own hands. The biggest Obstacle to this is the Owner- ship and Control of the Means of Production by the Capitalist Class backed up by its monopoly over the use of legalized violence through its control of the political State.To overcome this people must be approached with evangelical fervor to convince them to reject all aspects, ideas and values of Capitalism and adopt the culture, ideas and values of an idealized notion of the Working Class in order to take over the Means of Production by breaking the power of the Capitalist Class and constituting the power of the Working Class (or its representative institutions, if not their Central Committees or its Supreme Leader) over all of Society . . . This often leads to some form of (usually including the adoption of the dominant image of the culture of the working class, in other words, working-class lifestyles), a belief in (usually Scientific) Organizational Salvation, belief in the Science of (the inevitable victory of the Proletariat in) Class Struggle, etc. And therefore tactics consistent with building the fetishized One True Organization of the Working Class to contest for Economic and Political Power. An entire value system is built around a particular, highly oversimplified conception of the world, and moral categories of good and evil are substituted for critical evaluation in terms of individual and communal subjectivity.

127 The descent into moralism is never an automatic process. It is a tendency which naturally manifests itself whenever people start down the path of reified social cri- tique. Morality always involves derailing the development of a consistent of self and society. It short-circuits the development of strategy and tactics appropriate for this critical theory, and encourages an emphasis on personal and collective salvation through living up to the ideals of this morality, by idealizing a culture or lifestyle as virtuous and sublime, while demonizing everything else as being either the temptations or perversions of evil. One inevitable emphasis then becomes the petty, continuous attempt to enforce the boundaries of virtue and evil by policing the lives of anyone who claims to be a member of the in-group sect, while self-righteously denouncing out-groups.In the workerist milieu, for example, this means attacking anyone who doesn’t sing paeans to the virtues of working class organization (and especially to the virtues of the One True form of Organization), or to the virtues of the dominant image of Working Class cul- ture or lifestyles (whether it be beer drinking instead of drinking wine, rejecting hip subcultures, or driving a Ford or Chevy instead of BMWs or Volvos). The goal, of course, is to maintain the lines of inclusion and exclusion between the in-group and the out-group (the out-group being variously portrayed in highly industrialized countries as the Middle and Upper Classes, or the Petty Bourgeois and Bourgeois, or the Managers and Capitalists big and small). Living up to morality means sacrificing certain desires and temptations (regard- less of the actual situation you might find yourself in) in favor of the rewards of virtue. Don’t ever eat meat. Don’t ever drive SUVs. Don’t ever work 9–5. Don’t ever scab. Don’t ever vote. Don’t ever talk to a cop. Don’t ever take money from the government. Don’t ever pay taxes. Don’t ever etc., etc. Not a very attractive way to go about living your life for anyone interested in critically thinking about the world and evaluating what to do for oneself. Rejecting Morality involves constructing a critical theory of one’s self and society (always self-critical, provisional and never totalistic) in which a clear goal of ending one’s social alienation is never confused with reified partial goals. It involves emphasizing what people have to gain from radical critique and solidarity rather than what people must sacrifice or give up in order to live virtuous lives of politically correct morality.

Post-Left Anarchy: Neither Left, nor Right, but Autonomous

Post-left anarchy is not something new and different. It’s neither a political program nor an ideology. It’s not meant in any way to constitute some sort of

128 faction or sect within the more general anarchist milieu. It’s in no way an opening to the political right; the right and left have always had much more in common with each other than either has in common with anarchism. And it’s certainly not intended as a new commodity in the already crowded marketplace of pseudo- radical ideas. It is simply intended as a restatement of the most fundamental and important anarchist positions within the context of a disintegrating international political left. If we want to avoid being taken down with the wreckage of leftism as it crum- bles, we need to fully, consciously and explicitly dissociate ourselves from its manifold failures — and especially from the invalid presuppositions of leftism which led to these failures. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for anarchists to also consider themselves leftists — there has been a long, most often honorable, history of anarchist and left syntheses. But it does mean that in our contem- porary situation it is not possible for anyone — even left-anarchists — to avoid confronting the fact that the failures of leftism in practice require a complete critique of leftism and an explicit break with every aspect of leftism implicated in its failures. Left anarchists can no longer avoid subjecting their own leftism to intensive critique. From this point on it is simply not sufficient (not that it really ever has been) to project all the failures of leftism onto the most explicitly obnoxious varieties and episodes of leftist practice, like Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism. The critiques of leftist statism and leftist party organization have always been only the tip of a critique that must now explicitly encompass the entire iceberg of leftism, including those aspects often long incorporated into the traditions of anarchist practice. Any refusal to broaden and deepen the criticism of leftism constitutes a refusal to engage in the self-examination necessary for genuine self-understanding. And stubborn avoidance of self-understanding can never be justified for anyone seeking radical social change. We now have the unprecedented historical opportunity, along with a plenitude of critical means, to recreate an international anarchist movement that can stand on its own and bow to no other movements. All that remains is for all of us to take this opportunity to critically reformulate our anarchist theories and reinvent our anarchist practices in light of our most fundamental desires and goals. Reject the reification of revolt. Leftism is dead! Long live anarchy!

129 Retrieved on December 10, 2009 from www.insurgentdesire.org.uk

130 Jason McQuinn

Post-Left Anarchy?

There remain large numbers of anarchists who continue to identify closely with the political left in one form or another. But there are increasing numbers ready to abandon much of the dead weight associated with the left tradition. Many pages of this issue are devoted to beginning a new exploration of what is at stake in considering whether or not identification with the political left has outworn any benefits for anarchists. For most of their existence over roughly the last couple centuries, consciously anarchist activists, theorists, groups and movements have consistently inhabited a minority position within the eclectic world of would-be revolutionaries on the left. In most of the world-defining insurrections and revolutions during that time- those which had any significant permanence in their victories-authoritarian rebels were usually an obvious majority among active revolutionaries. And even when they weren’t, they often gained the upper hand through other means. Whether they were liberals, social-democrats, nationalists, socialists, or communists, they remained part of a majority current within the political left explicitly committed to a whole constellation of authoritarian positions. Along with an admirable ded- ication to ideals like justice and equality, this majority current favors hierarchical organization, professional (and, too often, cults of) leadership, dogmatic ideolo- gies (especially notable in its many Marxian variants), a self-righteous moralism, and a widespread abhorrence for social freedom and authentic, non-hierarchical community. Especially after their expulsion from the First International, anarchists have generally found themselves facing a hard choice. They could locate their critiques somewhere within the political left—if only on its fringes. Or else they could reject the majority opposition culture in its entirety and take the chance of being isolated and ignored. Since many, if not most, anarchist activists have come out of the left through disillusionment with its authoritarian culture, the option of clinging to its fringes and adapting its themes in a more libertarian direction has maintained a steady allure. Anarcho-syndicalism may be the best example of this kind of left-anar- chism. It has allowed anarchists to use leftist ideologies and methods to work for a leftist vision of social justice, but with a simultaneous commitment to anarchist themes like direct action, self-management, and certain (very limited) libertarian cultural values. Murray Bookchin’s ecological anarcho-leftism, whether going by the label of libertarian municipalism or social ecology, is another example. It is distinguished by its persistent failure to gain much of a foothold anywhere, even in its favored terrain of . A further example, the most invisible (and numerous?) of all types of left-anarchism, is the choice of a great many anarchists to submerge themselves within leftist organizations that have little or no commit- ment to any libertarian values, simply because they see no possibility of working

133 directly with other anarchists (who are often similarly hidden, submerged in still other leftist organizations). Perhaps it’s time, now that the ruins of the political left continue to implode, for anarchists to consider stepping out of its steadily disappearing shadow en masse.In fact, there’s still a chance, if enough anarchists can dissociate them- selves sufficiently from the myriad failures, purges and ‘betrayals’ of leftism, that anarchists can finally stand on their own. Along with defining themselves in their own terms, anarchists might once again inspire a new generation of rebels, who this time may be less willing to compromise their resistance in attempts to maintain a common front with a political left that has historically opposed the creation of free community wherever it has appeared. For the evidence is irrefutable. Libertarian revolutionaries of any type have consistently been denied a presence in the vast majority of leftist organizations (from the break in the International on); forced into silence in many of the left organizations they have been allowed to join (for example, the anarcho- ); and persecuted, imprisoned, assassinated or tortured by any leftists who have attained the necessary political power or organizational resources to do so (examples are legion). Why has there been such a long history of conflict and enmity between anar- chists and the left? It is because there are two fundamentally different visions of social change embodied in the range of their respective critiques and practices (although any particular group or movement always includes contradictory ele- ments). At its simplest, anarchists-especially anarchists who identify least with the left—commonly engage in a practice which refuses to set itself up as a political leadership apart from society, refuses the inevitable hierarchy and manipulation involved in building mass organizations, and refuses the hegemony of any single dogmatic ideology. The left, on the other hand, has most commonly engaged in a substitutive, representational practice in which mass organizations are subjected to an elitist leadership of intellectual ideologues and opportunistic politicians.In this practice the party substitutes itself for the mass movement, and the party leadership substitutes itself for the party. In reality, the primary function of the left has historically been to recuper- ate every social struggle capable of confronting capital and state directly, such that at best only an ersatz representation of victory has ever been achieved, al- ways concealing the public secret of continuing capital accumulation, continuing wage-slavexy, and continuing hierarchical, statist politics as usual, but under an insubstantial rhetoric of resistance and revolution, freedom and social justice. The bottom-line question is, can anarchists do better outside the left—from a position of explicit and uncompromising critique, than those who have chosen to inhabit the left have done from within?

134 Jason McQuinn, Editor

135 This editorial comes from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. This magazine is available for 5-USD from most newstands, or 6-USD from C.A.L., POB 1313,Lawrence, KS 66044. Make checks payable to C.A.L. Press Retrieved on February 17th, 2009 from www.insurgentdesire.org.uk

136 Lawrence Jarach

Leftism 101

What is Leftism?

For most it means some form of socialism, despite the fact that there are plenty of leftists who are not opposed to capitalism (clearly from the actual , not all socialists are opposed to capitalism either). Plenty of other arguments can be made about that, but let’s just keep things simple and assume that the two terms are synonymous. As is the case with most vague terms, however, it’s easier to come up with a list of characteristics than a definition. Leftism encompasses many divergent ideas, strategies, and tactics; are there any common threads that unite all leftists, despite some obvious differences?In order to begin an attempt at an answer, it is necessary to examine the philosophical antecedents to what can broadly be termed Socialism. Liberalism, Humanism, and Republicanism are political and philosophical schools of thought deriving from the modern European tradition (roughly be- ginning during the Renaissance). Without going into details, adherents of the three (especially Liberalism) presume the existence of an ideal property-owning male individual who is a fully rational (or at least a potentially rational) agent. This idealized individual stands opposed to the arbitrary authority of the economic and political systems of monarchism and feudalism, as well as the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church. All three (LH&R) presume the capacity of anyone (male), through education and hard work, to succeed in a free market (of and ideas). Competition is the overall ethos of all three. The promoters of LH&R insist that these modernist -compared to monarchism, elitism, and feudalism-are advances on the road to human freedom. They believe it more beneficial for what they call The Greater Good toadhere and promote a philosophy that at least proposes the ability of anyone to gain some kind of control over her/his own life, whether in the realm of education, economic prosperity, or political interactions. The ultimate goals of LH&R are to do away with economic scarcity and intellectual/spiritual poverty, while promoting the idea of more democratic governance. They promote this under the rubric of Justice, and they see the State as its ultimate guarantor. Socialism as a modern movement has been greatly influenced by these three philosophies. Like those who adhere to LH&R, leftists are concerned with, and are opposed to, economic and social injustice. They all propose ameliorating social ills through active intervention or charity, whether under the auspices of the State, NGOs, or other formal organizations. Very few of the proposed solutions or stopgaps promote (or even acknowledge) self-organized solutions engaged in by those directly suffering such ills. Welfare, affirmative action programs, psychiatric hospitals, drug rehabilitation facilities, etc. are all examples of various attempts to deal with social problems. Given the premises of these overlapping

139 philosophies and their practical frameworks, they have the appearance of being the results of intelligence and knowledge mixed with empathy and the desire to help people. Cooperation for The Common Good is seen as more beneficial to humanity than individual competition. However, socialism also takes the existence of competition for granted. Liberals and socialists alike believe that human beings do not naturally get along, so we must be educated and encouraged to be cooperative. When all else fails, this can always be enforced by the State.

Moderate, Radical, and Extreme Leftism

Tactics and strategies Regardless of the fact that there is plenty of overlap and blending-precluding real, discrete boundaries-I hope that describing these various manifestations of leftism will be a way to identify certain particular characteristics. In terms of strategy and tactics, moderate leftists believe that things can be made better by working within current structures and institutions. Clearly reformist, moderate leftists promote legal, peaceful, and polite superficial alterations in the status quo, eventually hoping to legislate socialism into existence. The democracy they champion is bourgeois: one person, one vote, majority rule. Radical leftists promotes a mixture of legal and illegal tactics, depending on whatever appears to have a better chance of succeeding at the moment, but they ultimately want the sanction of some properly constituted legal institutions (especially when they get to make most of the rules to be enforced). They are pragmatic, hoping for peaceful change, but ready to fight if they believe it to be necessary. The democracy they promote is more proletarian: they aren’t worried about the process of any particular election, so long as gains are made at the expense of the bosses and mainstream politicians. Extreme leftists are amoral pragmatists, a strategic orientation that can also be termed opportunistic. They are decidedly impolite, explicitly desiring the destruction of current institutions (often including the State), with the desire to remake them so that only they themselves will be able to make and enforce new laws. They are much more willing to use force in the service of their goals. The democracy they promote is usually based on a Party.

Relationship to capitalists All leftists privilege the category of worker as worker/producer, an entity that exists only within the sphere of the economy. Moderate leftists campaign for

140 workers’ rights (to strike, to have job security and safety, to have decent and fair contracts), trying to mitigate the more obvious abuses of the bosses through the passage and enforcement of progressive legislation. They want capitalism to be organized with “People Before Profits”(as the overused slogan has it), ignoring the internal logic and history of capitalism. Moderate leftists promote socially responsible investing and want a more just distribution of wealth; social wealth in the form of the much-touted “safety net,” and personal wealth in the form of higher wages and increased taxes on corporations and the rich. They want to balance the rights of property and labor. Radical leftists favor workers at the expense of the bosses. Workers are always right to the radical leftist. They wish to change the legal structure in such a way to reflect this favoritism, which is supposed to compensate for the previous history of exploitation. The redistribution of wealth envisioned by radical leftists builds on the higher wages and increased taxation of the corporations and the rich to include selective expropriation/ (with or without compensation) of various resources (banks, natural resources for example). Extreme leftists promote the total expropriation — without compensation — of the capitalist class, not only to right the wrongs of economic exploitation, but to remove the capitalist class from political power as well. At some point, the workers are to be at least nominally in charge of economic and political decision making (although that is usually meditated through a Party leadership).

The role of the State

Leftists view the State on a continuum of ambivalence. Most are clear that the role of the State is to further the goals of whatever class happens to rule at any given period; further they all recognize that the ruling class always reserves for itself a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and violence to enforce their rule. In the political imaginations of all moderate and some radical leftists, the State (even with a completely capitalist ruling class) can be used to remedy many social problems, from the excesses of transnational corporations to the abuses of those who have been traditionally disenfranchised (immigrants, women, minorities, the homeless, etc.). For extreme leftists, only their own State can solve such problems, because it is in the interest of the current ruling class to maintain divisions among those who are not of the ruling class. Despite the ambivalence, an attachment to the functions of government as executed by the State remains. This is the pivotal area of conflict between all leftists and all anarchists, despite the historical positioning of anarchism within the spectrum of leftism — about which more below.

141 The role of the individual

Missing from all these different strains of leftism is a discussion of the indi- vidual. While LH&R refer briefly to the individual, these philosophies do not take into account non-property-owning males, females, or juveniles — who are indeed considered the property of the normative individual: the adult property- owning man. This led to the complete lack on interest in (and the accompanying exploitation of) peasants and workers, a disregard that is supposed to be corrected by socialism. Unfortunately, virtually all socialists only posit the category Worker and Peasant as collective classes — a mass to be molded and directed — never considering the desires or interests of the individual (male or female) worker or peasant to control their own lives. According to the ideological imperatives of leftist thought, the self-activity of these masses is seen suspiciously through the ideological blinkers of the competitive ethos of capitalism (since the masses aren’t yet intelligent enough to be socialists); the workers will perhaps be able to organize themselves into defensive trade unions in order to safeguard their wages, while the peasants will only want to own and work their own piece of land. Again, education and enforcement of cooperation is necessary for these masses to become conscious political radicals.

A Generic Leftism?

So all leftists share the goals of making up for injustice by decree, whether the decree comes out of better/more responsive representatives and leaders, a more democratic political process, or the elimination of a non-worker power base. They all desire to organize, mobilize, and direct masses of people, with the eventual goal of attaining a more or less coherent majority, in order to propel progressive and democratic change of social institutions. Recruitment, education, and inculcating leftist values are some of the more mundane strategies leftists use to increase their influence in the wider political landscape. All leftists have a common distrust of regular (non-political/non-politicized) people being able to decide for themselves how to solve the problems that face them. All leftists share an abiding faith in leadership. Not just a trust of particular leaders who portray themselves as having certain moral or ethical virtues over and above common people, but of the very principle of leadership. This confidence in leadership never brings representational politics into question. The existence of elected or appointed leaders who speak and act on behalf, or in the place, of individuals and groups is a given; mediation in the realm of politics is taken as a necessity, removing most decision making from individuals and groups.Leftists share this commitment to leadership and representation — they believe themselves

142 able to justly represent those who have traditionally been excluded from politics: the disenfranchised, the voiceless, the weak. The leftist activist, as a representative of those who suffer, is a person who believes her/himself to be indispensable to improving the lives of others. This derives from a dual-pronged notion common to all leftists:

1. Non-political people, lefto t their own devices, will never be able to alter their situations in a radical or revolutionary manner (Lenin’s dismissal of workers as never being able to move beyond a “trade union mentality” without some professional outside help comes to mind here); and 2. Those with more intelligence or a better analysis are both wise and ethical enough to lead (whether through example or by decree) and organize others for their own good, and perhaps more importantly, the greater good.

The unspoken but implicit theme that runs through this brief assessment of leftism is a reliance on authoritarian relations, whether assumed or enforced, brutally compelling or gently rational. The existence of an economy (exchange of commodities in a market) presumes the existence of one or more institutions to mediate disputes between those who produce, those who own, and those who con- sume; the existence of a representational political process presumes the existence of one or more institutions to mediate disputes between diverse parties based on common interest (often with conflicting goals); the existence of leadership presumes that there are substantive differences in the emotional and intellectual capacities of those who direct and those who follow. There are plenty of ratio- nalizations contributing to the maintenance of such institutions of social control (schools, prisons, the military, the workplace), from efficiency to expediency, but they all ultimately rely on the legitimate (sanctioned by the State) use of coercive authority to enforce decisions.Leftists share a faith in the mediating influence of wise and ethical leaders who can work within politically neutral, socially progres- sive, and humane institutional frameworks. Their thoroughly hierarchical and authoritarian natures, however, should be clear even after a cursory glance.

Are All Forms of Anarchism Leftism

All anarchists share a desire to abolish government; that is the definition of anarchism. Starting with Bakunin, anarchism has been explicitly anti-statist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian; no serious anarchist seeks to alter that. Leftists have consistently supported and promoted the functions of the State, have an ambiguous relationship to capitalist development, and are all interested in maintaining hierarchical relationships.In addition, historically they have either

143 tacitly ignored or actively suppressed the desires of individuals and groups for autonomy and self-organization, further eroding any credible solidarity between themselves and anarchists. On a purely definitional level, then, there should be an automatic distinction between leftists and anarchists, regardless of how things have appeared in history. Despite these differences, many anarchists have thought of themselves as extreme leftists — and continue to do so — because they share many ofthesame analyses and interests (a distaste for capitalism, the necessity of revolution, for example) as leftists; many revolutionary leftists have also considered anarchists to be their (naïve) comrades — except in moments when the leftists gain some power; then the anarchists are either co-opted, jailed, or executed. The possibility for an extreme leftist to be anti-statist may be high, but is certainly not guaranteed, as any analysis history will show. Left anarchists retain some kind of allegiance to 19th century LH&R and so- cialist philosophers, preferring the broad, generalized (and therefore extremely vague) category of socialism/anti-capitalism and the strategy of mass political struggles based on coalitions with other leftists, all the while showing little (if any) interest in promoting individual and group autonomy. From these premises, they can quite easily fall prey to the centralizing tendencies and leadership functions that dominate the tactics of leftists. They are quick to quote Bakunin (maybe Kropotkin too) and advocate organizational forms that might have been appro- priate in the era of the First International, apparently oblivious to the sweeping changes that have occurred in the world in the past hundred-plus years — and they then have the gall to ridicule Marxists for remaining wedded to Marx’s out- dated theories, as if by not naming their own tendencies after other dead guys they are thereby immune from similar mistakes. The drawbacks and problems with Marxism, however — for example that it promotes the idea of a linear progression of history of order developing out of chaos, freedom developing out of oppression, material abundance developing out of scarcity, socialism developing out of capitalism, plus an absolute faith in Science as the ideologically neutral pursuit of pure Knowledge, and a similar faith in the liberatory function of all technology — are the same drawbacks and problems with the anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin. All of this seems lost on left anarchists. They blithely continue to promote a century-old version of anarchism, clearly unaware of, or unconcerned by, the fact that the philosophical and practical failures of leftism — in terms of the individual, the natural world, and appropriate modes of resistance to the continued domination of a flexible, adaptable, and expanding capitalism — are shared by this archaic form of anarchism as well.

144 Those of us who are interested in promoting radical social change in general, and anarchy in particular, need to emulate and improve upon successful (how- ever temporary) revolutionary projects for liberation, rather than congratulating ourselves for being the heirs of Bakunin (et al.). We can do this best if we free ourselves from the historical baggage and the ideological and strategic constraints of all varieties of leftism.

145 from Back to Basics volume #2 — The Problem of the Left Retrieved on August 8, 2009 from www.greenanarchy.org

146 Lawrence Jarach

Anarchists, Don’t let the Left(overs) Ruin your Appetite

1999

Introduction

An uneasy relationship has existed between anarchists and leftists from the time Proudhon positively proclaimed him self an anarchist 150 years ago. From the 1860s through the 1930s most anarchists considered themselves to be an integral part of the international labor movement, even if there were moments of extreme conflict within it; leftist anarchists saw themselves as the radical conscience of the Left — the left of the Left, as it were. But since the death of 19th century anarchism on the barricades of Barcelona in May 1937, anarchists haven’t had a movement to call their own. As a result, many anarchists trail after leftist projects, seemingly oblivious to the sometimes fatal historical rivalry that has existed between the two tendencies. They get seduced either by the seemingly antiauthoritarian characteristics of such groups (like ), or by the use of some anarchic vocabulary (direct action for example). The most notable recent example is the widespread uncritical anarchist support for and solidarity with the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army). The name of the organization should be enough to cause anarchists to pause: national liber- ation has never been part of the anarchist agenda. The use of the Mexican flag at EZLN conventions makes it clear that the EZLN is a Mexican-identified movement, not an international one. Their calls for fair elections within the context of Mexi- can history is quite radical, but it remains a statist demand, and as such cannot be anarchist by any stretch of the imagination. The EZLN, for all its revolutionary posturing, is a broad-based democratic movement for progressive social change within the fabric of the Mexican state; it is leftist, liberal, social democratic, post- modern, courageous in the face of overwhelming odds and official repression . . . you name it, but it is not anarchist. The zapatistas don’t refuse solidarity from anarchists, but to extrapolate from this fact that they themselves are anarchists — or even antiauthoritarians — is wishful thinking at best. Characteristics are not the same thing as definitions.

Anarchists and the International Labor Movement, Part I

The initial place where the rivalry between leftists and anarchists occurred was the First International (1864–76). Besides the well-known personal animosity between Marx and Bakunin, conflicts arose between the libertarian socialists and the authoritarian socialists over the ostensible goal of the International: how best to work for the emancipation of the working class. Using parliamentary

149 procedures (voting for representatives) within a framework that accepted the existence of the state was the main tactic supported by the authoritarians.In the non-electoral arena, but remaining firmly within a statist agenda, was the demand of the right of workers to form legal trade unions.In contrast, direct action (any activity that takes place without the permission, aid, or support of politicians or other elected officials) was promoted by the libertarians. Strikes and workplace occupations are the best examples of this method. The leftists preferred persuasion and the petitioning of the ruling class while the anarchists, recognizing the futility of this approach, preferred to take matters into their own hands: peacefully if possible, more insistently if necessary. Another rift had to do with the issue of nationalism, which was a reflection of the tension between centralization and decentralization. For a majority of Internationalists, nationalism was seen as a progressive force because it led to the consolidation and further industrialization of natural resources and the means of production. This in turn created a larger proletariat, and a larger proletariat meant a better chance of successful revolution. Most anarchists correctly saw national- ism as a force opposed to federalism, a basic organizing method of libertarians. These and other irreconcilable conflicts between the two tendencies (such asthe place of the individual in the class struggle) led to the decline of the International. This dissolution began in the wake of the in 1871; by the time Marx was able to relocate the General Council to New York in 1872 (far from the libertarian influence of the Spanish, French, and Italian sections), Bakunin and other leading anarchist activists had already been expelled from the organization. Individual anarchists were welcome to remain in the International, provided they dispensed with their antiauthoritarian principles. The First International became an anarchist-free zone for the last four years of its existence. The social democrats (marxist or non-marxist, but always anti-revolutionary) who began the work of creating the (1889–1914), already agreed (by the mere fact that most were members of legal socialist parties) that its methods were to be peaceful and lawful. They promoted universal male suffrage, with the program of getting their members elected to legislative bodies in order to enact pro-union laws, eventually legislating socialism into existence. Despite the total absence of any discussion of direct action, federalism, or revolution there were some anarchists (mostly syndicalists yearning for a big organization to join) who wanted to participate. They were rebuffed; the Second International was anarchist-free from the beginning.

150 Interlude: Anarchists in the Mexican and Russian Revolutions

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, primarily as a middle-class rebellion against the corrupt and ultra-conservative porfiriato (the years of the rule of Profirio Diaz). Anarchists were involved in the agitation to get rid of Diaz, most notably members of the PLM (Mexican Liberal Party), whose main theoretician was Ricardo Flores Magon. The PLM remained active throughout the revolution- ary period. They tried to gain allies and supporters for radical land redistribution programs among the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata, and to a large degree were successful. Another arena of anarchist agitation was the Casa Del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker) in Mexico City. The Casa was the place where anarcho- syndicalists, revolutionary unionists, and socialists congregated. Their focus was on legalizing unions and other aspects of industrial relations rather than on the agrarian question, even though the majority of Mexico’s poor and working people were landless peasants. A majority of those involved in the Casa were adherents of a philosophical tendency that defined its members by the term cientificos (more or less “scientists”): rational, urban, civilized. As such, they were appalled by the use of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the banners of the original zapatistas. In addition, their constant collaborations with authoritarian socialists seems to have weakened their adherence to libertarian principles; so much so that they became partners in the Red Battalions, which were organized by the center-left Constitutionalists to fight against the Zapatistas. This was the first (but unfortunately not the last) seriously embarrassing and shameful episode of anarchist history, when authoritarians took advantage of the gullibility of anarchists for their own benefit. Rather than uniting with the radical peasants in the countryside around a truly revolutionary program of total expropriation of landed estates and industries (in keeping with their pronouncements), the syndicalists of the Casa preferred to make common cause with their anti-radical legalistic leftist rivals to kill and be killed by peasant revolutionaries.Later, as the result of a general strike in 1916, the Casa and all unions were outlawed, their more radical leaders were assassinated or imprisoned, and almost all urban revolutionary activity ceased. The new Constitutionalist rulers understood that anarcho-syndicalists, the erstwhile allies of progressive leftists, could not be mollified as easily with promises of legal status as the authoritarian socialists, and the leftists didn’t seem to mind too much that their libertarian rivals were out of the picture. The overthrow of the czarist regime in in February 1917 was the defining moment of 20th century leftism. Suddenly political parties were decriminalized,

151 political prisoners were amnestied, the death penalty was abolished. Revolution- ary activity mushroomed, dominated by the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) in the countryside, the Bolsheviks (the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party) in the cities and the armed forces, and anarchists all over (their influence far out of proportion to their actual numbers). In the early months of the Russian Revolu- tion, the SRs and the anarchists supported the slogan: “The land to the peasants; the factories to the workers”; the Bolsheviks were hesitant about the slogan as a program since they were the heirs of the more cautious notion that the masses still needed to be led by technocrats and other smart people like themselves. But as the momentum and enthusiasm of revolutionary self-activity continued (in the form of councils — soviet in Russian — and factory committees), Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership adopted the slogan as well. Another slogan soon appeared: “All power to the soviets.” Each of the slogans was interpreted differently by the different revolutionary tendencies. For anarchists and left SRs (the right SRs had previously split away from the revolutionary aspects of the SR program in favor of strictly parliamentary activity) the slogan “The land to the peasants; the factories to the workers” meant just that: the peasants and workers would have total control over what was produced, how it would be produced, and how, when, and where it would be distributed. Federalism was the preferred method of organizing such a situation. For the Bolsheviks, however, such independent and decentralized self-activity was unthinkable; the State should decide how and when and where commodities were to be produced and distributed. Centralized planning was promoted as the only efficient and just way to control production and distribution. After the Bolshevik seizure of state power in October 1917, the approved revolutionary slogan became “All power to the soviets,” and that bothersome business about the land and the peasants and the factories and the workers was phased out. Similarly there were unique interpretations of “All power to the soviets,” de- pending on party affiliation. To the Bolsheviks this was a call for a government of representatives from the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers with the addition of party members who, together, would implement and guide the dicta- torship of the proletariat. To the left SRs and the anarchists, the slogan meant a federation of soviets and factory committees with or without delegates; for the anarchists this also meant no state at all. The differences of interpretation turned into armed confrontations within six months of Bolshevik rule. The soviets began to be turned into organs that merely ratified Bolshevik executive decisions, while the more independent factory com- mittees were abolished. Anarchists and left SRs who pointed out this anti-revolu- tionary tactic were arrested by the Cheka and were imprisoned — and sometimes executed — with counter-revolutionaries.In April 1918, the Cheka and regular

152 police forces carried out simultaneous raids on anarchist centers in Petrograd and Moscow; the anarchists returned fire but eventually surrendered. The surviving arrested anarchists were deported the following year. Meanwhile in the Ukraine from 1918–21, the Makhnovist Insurgent Army was creating liberated zones for workers and peasants by encouraging and facilitating the expropriation of landed estates and factories while carrying out a total war against the Whites (monarchist counter-revolutionaries), Ukrainian nationalists (republicans and socialists), and, on occasion, Trotsky’s Red Army. Twice there were formal treaties made between the Red Army and the Insurgent Army, and twice the Bolsheviks broke their agreements when it suited their military and state policy, arresting — but most often executing — the insurgent anarchists. For the Russian anarchists who supported the Makhnovists (there were many who didn’t, believing that a military structure was incompatible with true anarchist goals), this was the definitive end of their honeymoon with the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1921, the Bolsheviks faced the most serious threat to their retention of state power and their pretense of being the party of the proletariat. There was a rebellion at the island naval fortress of Kronstadt, just off the coast from Petrograd. The sailors, soldiers, and workers, frustrated with the intensely destructive policies of War Communism as well as the heavy-handed response of the Bolsheviks to a strike of factory workers in Petrograd, began a protest movement against government injustice. Their demands included an end to forced grain requisitions in the countryside, abolition of the death penalty, freedom of speech and press for all socialist groups (including anarchists), and open (that is, not dominated by the Communist Party) elections in the soviets. Hardly any anarchists were involved in the rebellion (most had already been arrested or killed, and Kronstadt was a Bolshevik stronghold), but the complaints and demands of the Kronstadters fell in line with the anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime. Lenin and Trotsky issued many misleading denunciations of the rebels, often re- sorting to outright fabrications in their characterizations of its leaders. They were afraid of the appeal (coming, as it did, from a bastion of approved revolutionary activity) such a call for a decentralized, directly democratic program would have on a population weary of War Communism (since the civil war had been officially over for several months) yet still committed to the revolutionary slogansA of“ ll power to the soviets,” and “The land to the peasants; the factories to the workers.” The Bolsheviks, preferring the methods of statecraft over revolutionary solidarity and compromise, attacked the island and massacred the rebels who survived the military suppression. Even for the anarchists who were willing to excuse the excesses of authoritarianism in the Bolshevik government, this was too much. Many left Russia voluntarily at around the same time that the dissident anarchists

153 were deported, ridding the Communist Party of its most radical opponents. The Soviet Union was subsequently unencumbered by the influence of anarchists.

Anarchists in the International Labor Movement, Part II

In the aftermath of the consolidation of Bolshevik rule in Russia, the Third — or Communist — International was formed in 1919. Non-Russian anarchists, excited about the real possibility of revolution spreading around the world in the wake of the , initially tended to overlook the centralized and authoritar- ian nature of the organization (much as their Russian counterparts had overlooked the same aspects of the Bolshevik state for the early years of its existence). At the time of the first conference of the Comintern, the majority of Russian anarchists were either dead or in prison (despite Lenin’s assurances that there were no real anarchists in his jails — only criminals). , Emma Goldman, and anarcho-syndicalists from around the world who were attending lobbied the Soviet government to release these so-called criminals from jail; the were quietly released and expelled. Members of the American IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and the Spanish CNT(National Confederation of Labor) declined to affiliate to the Comintern. Lenin’s “Left-Wing Communism — An Infantile Disorder” was published in 1921, the same year of the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the final de- struction of the Makhnovist Insurgent Army and the libertarian communes of the Ukraine, and the adoption of the neo-capitalist New Economic Policy. This screed was aimed primarily at council communists and other independent revolutionary socialists, but charges of “anarcho-syndicalist deviationism” were thrown at all of Lenin’s opponents. All those not uncritically supportive of the policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its methodology of democratic central- ism were declared to be objectively counter-revolutionary. The attempt to keep the international labor movement subservient to the orders of the headquarters in Moscow, of which Lenin’s tract was the most public aspect, was nearly totally successful. The strategy of socialism in one country was promulgated and with centralized hierarchical discipline in place, the Comintern could be used to further Soviet foreign policy goals.

Spain

The revolutionary response to the attempted military coup in Spain in July 1936 resulted in a protracted civil war between the defenders of the old monarchist

154 order and the upholders of the five year old parliamentary democracy. Members of the large anarcho-syndicalist CNT were put in an awkward position: support- ing one form of government over another. Some chose to pursue revolutionary goals rather than become government anarchists, but the majority went for col- laboration with the forces of legalism — some even entering the government by becoming Cabinet Ministers. By that time the Comintern had adopted the anti-revolutionary policy of the Popular Front, promoting parliamentary democracy in opposition to fascism through an alliance of republicans, middle-class progressives, social democrats, and Communists. This final abandonment of class struggle led directly to the May ’37 Communist-dominated Popular Front’s armed suppression of the CNT and the anti-stalinist POUM (Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification), the two mass organizations in Spain at least nominally committed to some sort of revolution. The international labor movement was in the control of stalinists for the next decade.

The Left

The Left has consistently been identified with the international labor movement from the time of the First International; with the shift of focus from western Europe toward Russia beginning in 1917 and continuing into the 1960s, leftists have identified themselves in relation to events that occurred in the workers’ paradise. Whether a leninist, trotskyist, stalinist, or non-leninist communist, each variety of leftist has a particular view of when things went wrong (or not) with the Russian revolutionary experiment. For anarchists who considered themselves part of the Left even after the de- bacles of the Internationals, this method of self-identification created a crisis: whether to make accommodations to the politics of leninism or to dispense with any and all hints of vanguardism. Most opted for the latter, but some (including the former Makhnovist Arshinov and Makhno himself) favored the militaristic vanguardism of the “Anarchist Platform.” Their more principled anarchist oppo- nents called the Platformists “anarcho-bolsheviks,” for whom it was merely a case of the unchecked authoritarian behavior of the Bolsheviks that led them to abandon the true revolution; the necessary existence, goals, and methods of a self-conscious militarized revolutionary vanguard were accepted in full. Such an analysis dispensed with the idea of a mass-based self-organized revolution and substituted the armed action of a minority; this put the Platformists firmly within a tactical framework of leninism. This was not the first — or last — time that anarchists would flirt with the more authoritarian aspects of radical theory and practice. Many anarchists would disagree with this assessment of the Platform.

155 The main lesson of the anarchist presence in relation to the first two Interna- tionals is that socialists prefer anarchists to be invisible and silent. That of the revolutionary experiences of Mexico, Russia, and Spain shows that for socialists, the only good anarchist is pro-government or dead.Loyally fighting for a Mexi- can Constitution didn’t slacken the resolve of Mexico’s rulers in outlawing and repressing anarcho-syndicalists who insisted on exercising their legal rights to organize radical trade unions. Helping to make revolutionary changes in cooper- ation with the Bolsheviks didn’t protect the anarchists from the wrath of Lenin and his cohorts when the anarchists insisted on remaining attached to libertarian principles and tactics. Neither did being part of a coalition of leftists and liberals in opposition to fascism shelter anarchists from the homicidal rivalry of stalinists and social democrats twenty years later.

The ’60s and ’70s

The social upheavals beginning in 1968 ended the near total eclipse of anar- chism in the years following the Spanish experience. The formation of the New Left in the preceding few years, precipitated by examples of non-Soviet socialist alternatives (the Chinese, Cuban, Yugoslavian, Albanian, Korean, or Vietnamese models) resurrected an interest in unconventional and non-conformist aspects of political theory, which led to a renewed study of anarchist and non-leninist revolutionary history. Tactics of anarchist organizing were adopted by non-an- archists because of their assumed inherent anti-hierarchical nature (in keeping with egalitarian presumptions, as was the trend of those early days): consensus decision-making, affinity groups, rotating leadership or the lack of any and all formal leaders. These outward forms (characteristics) of quasi-egalitarianism were usually ac- companied by the celebration of various nationalist movements that had emerged in the context of global anti-colonial struggles, giving birth to an odd hybrid: pseudo-anarchic nationalist revolutionaries — activists who adopted the anarchist slogan “smash the state” while at the same time carrying the flag of the NLF (Na- tional Liberation Front, or “Viet Cong”), a stalinist popular front whose declared aim was the consolidation and centralization of the Vietnamese state.To anti- imperialists, some states are better than others, especially if they are in conflict with the United States. The problem, from an anarchist perspective, is that the goal of this strategy is to smash a particular state, not statism or government in general. The response of ’60s militants to legal repression and the rise of third worldism contributed to the disintegration of the New Left, which began in earnest when

156 the revolutionary potential of the working classes in imperialist countries was played down and eventually dismissed. This theoretical innovation was accom- panied by the rise of urban guerrilla groups; the military actions of an elitist anti-imperialist vanguard were substituted for the self-activity of “the masses,” especially the working masses. The exploits of these violent militants superficially hearkened back to the years of anarchist propaganda by the deed: bank robberies, bombings, assassinations. From the mid-1880s through the 1920s, some anarchists engaged in spectacular violent and illegal actions. The idea behind this unorga- nized but widespread strategy was to prod normally complacent workers into mass revolutionary activity by showing the vulnerability of bourgeois society and of individual political and economic leaders in particular. It didn’t work, and was largely abandoned as counterproductive, but the popular association of anarchism with violence and mayhem was cemented. The similar tactics of armed struggle groups and anarchists of the previous cen- tury led to the equation of the two tendencies in the analyses of many observers. As often as the media and various officials portrayed all violent political groups as “anarchist,” the groups themselves never tired of pointing out (to anyone who would listen) that they were not anarchists at all, but communists or socialists or progressives or nationalists or leftists. Having the actions of urban guerrillas (fighting the imperialist state in solidarity with third world national liberationists) equated with those of armed anarchists (combating the state in solidarity with anyone — including themselves — who is oppressed by authoritarian social relations regardless of the political ideology of their rulers) must have been maddening to the leftists of the ’70s. Their ideological forebears had been struggling for the previous 150 years to be rid of the stigma of anarchism, only to have it foisted on them again because of a similarity of tactics. But the leftists had only themselves to blame for this confusion since they had already appropriated an important term from the vocabulary of anarchism: direct action.

Characteristics Vs. Definitions

In the anarchist tradition the term direct action was never used as a euphemism for violence, unlike propaganda by the deed. It simply referred to any consciously political act that took place outside the realm of electoralism and other forms of statecraft: decision-making that uses mandated and revocable delegates instead of representatives, and creating mutual-aid networks instead of relying on welfare are two examples.In a general sense then, direct action refers to actions that encourage and expand the self-activity of any person or group without resorting to the institutions of the state. Polite or violent public protests, on the other hand,

157 are undertaken in the hopes that policy makers can be influenced to implement legislative reform; this is the liberal (/conservative) or leftist (/rightist) strategy of appealing to political leaders’ good will and/or fear. Since this strategy relies on the actions of people not directly involved, it has nothing to do with an anarchist understanding of direct action. Registering public dissatisfaction with government policies (by marching, demonstrating, fighting cops, destroying property, expropriating banks, liberating prisoners, assassinating political/industrial leaders) is agitation and propaganda, not direct action. The effects of such activity on creating and sustaining anti- hierarchical communities beyond the clutches of politicians are extremely limited. It may make anarchism attractive to some people — which is exactly the point of propaganda (by the deed or idea) — but the point of direct action is to become accustomed to making decisions using anti-hierarchical methods, and then imple- menting positive egalitarian alternatives to statist ways of living. Unfortunately, most activist anarchists have adopted the leftist usage of direct action, mean- ing any angry confrontation with the state, rather than the traditional anarchist definition: ignoring the state. This confusion is the result of substituting characteristics for definitions. An- archism has a definition. It is a discrete political theory and practice; to be an anarchist means to be against all government. A social change movement might be decentralized, use some form of direct democracy (the mandated delegate model, for example), call for international solidarity, and use non-anarchist direct action (in the leftist sense of using limited violence or property destruction to further their programs), but these are characteristics of antiauthoritarian methods, not a definition of anarchism. If these tactics are used as part of a strategy for gain- ing legal recognition or influencing and/or implementing legislation, then those who use them cannot be anarchists; not because some self-appointed guardian of the ideology says so, but because anarchism is anti-legislative by definition. Anarchists are not frustrated liberals with an attitude, nor are they impatient authoritarian socialists unafraid to pick up a gun.

Conclusions

Maintaining a minority position of principled antiauthoritarianism within a larger authoritarian framework, as anarcho-leftists insist upon doing in relation to the Left, is naive at best. This brief historical survey has hopefully provided ample examples of the suicidal nature of such a project. Leftists want neither a loyal opposition nor a radical conscience, and they have made it abundantly clear over the last 150 years that they don’t like anarchists and prefer not to have them

158 around, cluttering up their moves for polite and safely legislated social change or sudden military coups d’etat. Leftist anarchists consistently refuse to learn from the history of the interactions between their ideological predecessors and their desperately desired contemporary anti-anarchist allies.Involvement in non-(and anti-) anarchist fronts and alliances tends to make anarchists suspend the pursuit of their unique goals. The conflicts that have existed between authoritarian socialists and anarchists have not gone away. Whether it’s the tension between centralization and fed- eralism, nationalism and internationalism, the role of the individual in relation to society and the state, or the more fundamental issue of statecrafte ( lectoral- ism, agitating for legislative reform, etc) versus direct action, anarchists stand in opposition to the issues and programs of all kinds of leftists. The leftist agenda is predicated on the use of legislation, representative government and all of its coercive institutions, centralized by technocrats and other experts, and a commitment to hierarchical social relations. Promoting self-activity, egalitarian interpersonal and social relations, and cul- tivating a critical perspective are among the best aspects of anarchism. As such, they are worth extending. Accepting spoon-fed solutions and programs, engaging in non-reciprocal solidarity with leftists, and other characteristics of ideological myopia need to be discarded. Anarchists, with their emphasis on the principles of mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, and direct action, cannot share a common agenda with contemporary leftists any more than they could 150 years ago. A return to authentically anarchist principles, coupled with some understand- ing of the troubled history of the relationship between leftists and anarchists, can go a long way toward reinvigorating antiauthoritarian theory and practice. At the same time, moving beyond the melioristic beliefs (especially about western European technology, culture, and science) of 19th century anarchism, which have made the programs of anarchists and leftists seem similar, is crucial. The relevance of anarchist self-activity can only increase when the vestiges of authoritarian leftist assumptions and distortions are discarded from the words and behavior of antiauthoritarian activists, critics, and theorists.

159 From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #48 (Fall/Winter 1999–2000) Retrieved on August 7, 2009 from www.geocities.com

160 Jason McQuinn

The Incredible Lameness of Left-Anarchism

2003

When I was asked to contribute an updated essay on the post-left anarchist critique to the Institute for Anarchist Studiesmonthly web column, “Theory & Politics,” I gladly accepted, even though the time I have available for writing is short these days.I accepted because I was surprised, but pleased, to learn that the heretofore rather ideologically narrow Institute for Anarchist Studies seemed to be opening itself up a bit more to the broader anarchist milieu by making such an invitation.I accepted because I have always been genuinely interested in communicating with a diverse audience, and welcomed the opportunity to present a quick critique of left-anarchism through the web publication of an organization which often seems to identify quite closely with the subject of my critique. And, finally, I accepted because I was told that immediately following my contribution Peter Staudenmaier would be writing in response “against post-left anarchism and for an anarchism that does not shed the left,” and I have always been a partisan of intelligent, rational debate within the anarchist milieu. Anarchists are desperately in need of such debate-since intelligent and rational discussion has been incredibly short in supply-and I looked forward to having some of the important points in my essay carefully evaluated and rationally criticized.

An Evasion of Discussion

Unfortunately, the response that has appeared may be “against post-left an- archism,” but careful evaluation and rational criticism play little part. Instead, readers of Staudenmaier’s essay, “Anarchists in Wonderland,” are presented with a strange combination of evasion, mystification, insinuation and petty complaints or smears. The straightforward engagement with my own and others’ post-left ar- guments-the clear statement and explanation of differences I had hoped to read-is absent. Instead, the title of my editorial in the new Fall/Winter issue (#56) of Anarchy magazine, “The Evasion of Discussion in the Radical Milieu,” now seems prescient, as if I knew beforehand the lack of response I would actually get in this particular debate. One might expect that Staudenmaier would critically evaluate the most im- portant aspects of the post-left anarchist critique in his essay, citing quotations from the most important essays on the subject, questioning their arguments and counterpoising his own.Instead he ignores most of what has been said and fails to address the most prominent post-left anarchist writers.Instead, he makes insin- uations that are never backed up with evidence. He snipes at non-essential points as though they had some important meaning. He deliberately mystifies what has been clearly stated, whether through lack of ability to counter the arguments, or through an understanding that there are no convincing ways to counter them.

163 And nowhere is he able to define what is positive about leftism and therefore worth preserving.

Vague Accusations with No Documentation

Staudenmaier opens his essay by calling the post-left anarchist critique “vague,” despite the fact that several very clear statements (summarizing it from different perspectives) have appeared in Anarchy magazine. These statements include Lawrence Jarach’s “Don’t let the Left(overs) Ruin your Appetite,” Wolfi Landstre- icher’s “From Politics to Life,” and my own “Rejecting the Reification of Revolt.” Perhaps Staudenmaier hasn’t read these essays, though they are easy enough to find. Perhaps he’s only read the updated version of my “Rejecting the Reification of Revolt” that appeared in “Theory & Politics” last month under the title “Leaving the Left Behind.” To give him the benefit of any doubt here I won’t mention the arguments in other essays and I’ll concentrate on his evasion of the very clear (and non-vague) arguments made in my own essay, since he can hardly claim to have missed it. Staudenmaier goes on to allege that post-left anarchist critiques have “gener- ated considerable debate among practically and theoretically engaged anarchists. In the course of these discussions, anarchists from a variety of backgrounds have posed a wide range of critical questions to the promoters of the post-left idea. Most of these questions have gone unanswered.” What questions? Who didn’t answer them? Why not? None of this is explained or it would become quite clear that this is just a gambit to mislead while making an unfounded accusation that most readers will never realize is absurd. Does it matter to Staudenmaier that every critical question posed to Anarchy magazine editors about post-left anarchy has been published and answered in its pages? Not at all. Aside from the few public presentations I’ve made about post-left anarchy in New Orleans, San Francisco and Lawrence, Kansas, the only other (semi-) public “discussions” I’ve come across on the subject have been on the web, where “free-for-all” would most often be a better description than “discussion.” Are these what Staudenmaier is talking about? We don’t know because he doesn’t say. Instead he continues by alleging that “not a few (questions) have provoked a remarkable level of vitu- peration from those who find the new post-left label appealing.” What questions? What kind of responses did they receive? Was all the vituperation from one side? Was the vituperation even from anarchists? No hints at all are given.Just another empty, unverifiable accusation. If Staudenmaier won’t tell us what the questions were and who made the allegedly “vituperative” remarks we’ll remain forever in the dark about whatever it is he’s talking about-as he apparently wants us to.

164 This isn’t an argument; it’s just an attempted petty smear and it’s not the most auspicious way to begin an essay. Would it be too much for Staudenmaier to publicly address his questions to Anarchy magazine? It wouldn’t be hard, and Anarchy editors would certainly answer them! Staudenmaier next jumps to a further unexplained allegation:“when the post- leftists cannot agree among themselves on even the most basic conceptual matters, such as what they mean by ‘the left,’ it is difficult for the rest of us to know exactly what it is we are being asked to believe.” Who doesn’t agree about what? Which post-leftists don’t agree? About what basic conceptual matters? The only hint we get is that Staudenmaier thinks some anarchists making a post-left critique don’t agree on a definition of “the left.” Is this so important? Leftists talk about the left every day; do they all agree on what it is? Of course not. Does this make them necessarily incoherent? Is Staudenmaier incoherent if other leftists don’t agree with his definition of “the left”-if he has one? Is it the duty of post-leftists to provide leftists with a definition of the left? This isn’t an argument; it’s just another lame excuse for evading discussion, akin to authoritarians complaining that they don’t need to answer anarchist criticisms because not all anarchists agree on definitions of the state and government.

Muddling the Dispute

Staudenmaier next actually does mention, in passing, some of the critiques which I argue together constitute the core of the post-left critique. But rather than addressing them and criticizing them, as might be expected if there was really going to be a debate, he merely sidesteps them. Amazingly, he argues that “What all this might have to do with rejecting ‘the left’1 as such, however, remains rather obscure.” To him, maybe, but I doubt to anyone else who actually reads my

1 According to the New Oxford American Dictionary “left wing” is defined as “the liberal, socialist, or radical section of a political party or system.[with reference to the National Assembly in France (1789–91), where the nobles sat to the president’s right and the commons to the left].” e“L ft” or “the left” is similarly defined as “a group or party favoring liberal, socialist, or radical views.” In common usage in North America the left includes liberals, socialists, communists and a few other lesser movements (or remnants of movements, like the Single-Taxers, Distributivists or Mutualists). Anarchists are sometimes included and sometimes not, when they are acknowledged by people to exist at all. For an interesting diagram representing the U.S. left from the perspective of U.S. social democrats see the “Left-Wing Lingo,Ideologies and History” web site: www.uhuh.com Notably, on this web site anarchists are almost entirely absent from the picture, with only minor references to “the anarchist wing of the Left Green Network (LGN), which is the moribund, left wing of the Greens USA, associated with Murray Bookchin and the Institute for Social Ecology,” and the Fifth Estate (described as “eco-anarchist”).

165 essay. He goes on to argue that “many of the core ideas of post-leftism trace their genealogy to left traditions themselves”! Duh! It’s POST-left anarchy. Would it make more sense for post-left anarchist critiques to trace their genealogy some- where else?Is it so strange that many critiques of the left should originate from people who at one time identified with it? I guess it is to Staudenmaier, since he wants to make a big deal of this. He goes on to actually cite one specific example and a couple oblique examples. He cites “The critique of organization” as being “deeply indebted to the work of Jacques Camatte.” Well, yes, Camatte has made some important contributions to this critique (which began long ago amongst anarchists) and he was once a leftist. But just as clearly his critique of leftist organizations as “gangs” instantly made him a post-leftist in this respect. This proves nothing except the irrelevance of this tack of Staudenmaier’s attempted ar- gument. Staudenmaier goes on to argue that “the insistence on linking subjective psychological factors with broader social forces” — a strangely broad statement — “is presaged in the thinking of .” Maybe, but it is also presaged in the thinking of a lot of other people, including many anarchists! No one ever claimed that every leftist has no clue about anything! This is just another irrelevant pronouncement. The funniest citation, however, is the final one ofthe paragraph, in which Staudenmaier claims that “the whole re-orientation toward domination as our central critical term was theorized by the and by Social Ecology long before it gained currency in the pages of Anarchy.” While the Frankfurt School was an important influence on many Anarchy mag- azine contributors and editors (and though critiques of domination have been a commonplace of anarchist theory since Proudhon and Bakunin), “domination” is hardly the “central critical term” of the post-left critique, which makes the first part of this statement curious, to say the least. The more hilarious part is the attempt to put Bookchin’s Social Ecology ideology in the same universe, much less the same league, as the Frankfurt School in this anyway irrelevant comment! Next Staudenmaier says that “post-leftism adamantly rejects any accommoda- tion with what it takes to be ‘the left’.” This (rejecting accommodation) could be said of any critique. What is being criticized is obviously not being “accommo- dated” but rejected in some important sense. Post-left anarchist critiques argue that anarchists can be most effective by standing up for ourselves as anarchists, and that it makes much more sense for anarchists to resist identification with leftism than to identify with it as a minor partner (for several crucial reasons that Staudenmaier is apparently incapable of criticizing directly). He goes on to complain that post-leftists don’t speak about only one type of leftist, but all of them, including “sectarian splinter groups and authoritarian demagogues,” as well as “everybody from Bukharin to Bookchin.” Guilty. The left is made up ofa whole range of liberals, social democrats, socialists and communists of various

166 self-descriptions. Sometimes post-leftists (just like leftists) will speak of liberal leftists, sometimes social democratic leftists, sometimes communist leftists, and sometimes all leftists together. There’s no mystery about this. Staudenmaier goes on to say that he sees “the left as an extraordinarily variegated continuum of conflicting participants and perspectives.” Once again, everyone making a post- left critique of whom I’m aware would agree with this, though Staudenmaier insinuates otherwise with no evidence. He continues by saying that the left is “not a monolithic entity that can be reduced to a few neat premises,” even though nobody has ever argued that the left is a monolithic entity, nor that it can be re- duced to any number of premises. Post-left critiques argue that all leftists share a certain (range of) approach to theory and practice that fundamentally differs from the anarchist approach. Staudenmaier’s entire essay is an attempt to continuously avoid dealing with these differences. Instead Staudenmaier’s strategy seems to be an attempt to confuse readers as much as possible about what might ever constitute post-left critiques, and substi- tute a stream of undocumented accusations and petty insinuations for straight- forward and rational criticism. For example, he alleges that “Many anarchists drawn to the post-left label appear to live in a world in which all leftists are Lenin- ists, except when they’re liberals, and where the left as a whole is an ominous iceberg of power-worship threatening to sink a virtually Titanic-sized anarchist movement.” Who are these “anarchists drawn to the post-left label” that he’s speaking of? Once again, we’ll never know if they exist anywhere besides Stau- denmaier’s imagination because he never even gives us a hint about who they are. Of course, many leftists are liberals, and many others are Leninists, and many leftists have worshipped power (think of the mass adulation for Lenin, Stalin and Mao, for just a few instances). But I have to say that I’ve never heard of any anarchists, even the most deluded, speak of a “Titanic-sized anarchist movement” currently existing. Where does Staudenmaier come up with these “many” alleged nutcases when none of us have ever heard from them? It’s understandable that many leftists will feel extreme discomfort when their leftism is questioned and criticized. But that doesn’t relieve leftists of the responsibility to confront the actual post-left anarchist critiques that have been made, rather than attempting to dodge them by making wild, unsubstantiated accusations.

The Internet Makes People Crazy

To further evade a direct debate over anything at all substantive in my essay (or other essays appearing in Anarchy magazine), Staudenmaier cites a web “debate” on “Anarchy after Leftism” accessible on www.infoshop.org (more of an

167 incoherent free-for-all in my opinion) as including, he says,“Perhaps the most telling instances of post-left zeal.” That sounds at least potentially correct; ifyou want to find some relatively incoherent, but zealous argumentation, the first place to look would be discussion sites on the internet! However, if you’re honest about what you find you’ll generally have to acknowledge that the incoherence and zealotry almost always go both ways. Peter claims (once again, without citing anyone so there’s no way to prove it or disprove it without wading through dozens upon dozens of pages in an attempt to figure out what he’s speaking about) that somewhere in this book-length free-for-all “debate” people sympathizing with at least some sorts of post-left anarchist critiques disagree on what is included under the concept of the left. Just checking out the first few defenders of the left in the first fifty exchanges in this web discussion,I come across plenty of incoherent anarcho-leftism and plenty of irrational leftist zealotry, though I’m afraid to say that I don’t find much of anything that could be called post-left anarchist incoherence or zealotry amidst these posts. First, in a silly self-contradiction, self-proclaimed anarchist and leftist Shawn Ewald says, “Being anarchists, we all agree that anarchism . . . is superior to any other ideology or methodology . . . Therefore, to imply that anarchism is beyond or outside ‘leftism’ leads to a danger where anarchists might think, by being anarchists, that they ‘themselves’ are not only outside of ‘leftism’ but more evolved and more enlightened than the left as a whole-a la Marxist revolutionary vanguards.” Apparently, for Shawn it’s okay for anarchists to think anarchism is superior if it’s conceived as a part of the left, but it’s vanguardist for anarchists to think anarchism is superior if anarchism is conceived as being outside the left! Go figure. Score one for anarcho-leftist incoherence. But that’s not all. Unfortunately, his posts are full of this kind of bizarre stuff. He next argues with regard to post- left anarchist criticism of the left (specifically from my editorial on the subject in Anarchy magazine) that “These are very classic leftist arguments, it should be pointed out. Many a newly formed Trot splinter group have made similar justifications for their actions. The implications are not pleasant to think about.” Of course, he doesn’t give a single example of any Trotskyist splinter group ever in history that has actually made the same (or even roughly similar) arguments because none ever have! Anyone ever hear of post-left Trotskyism? Of course not. It doesn’t exist. Score another point for left-anarchist irrationalism. It would be easy to continue in this vein, but I for one would rather not. What would it prove? The main point is not that there is a vast supply of incoherent arguments made by left-anarchists. The point is that if we are going to debate we need to face the strongest arguments of our opponents head-on and not run from the field of debate like Staudenmaier does looking for weak links in the realms of hearsay or internet comments from anonymous or pseudonymous posters whose

168 identities may never be known for sure. Peter Staudenmaier, if there are coherent arguments for post-left critiques and you’re afraid to face these arguments and offer arguments for alternative positions. Guess what? You’ve already lost the debate, because you’ve fled the field. If you want to win arguments, you need to quit running.

Nebulous Leftism

Staudenmaier complains again about post-leftist characterizations of leftists. As per his by now standard operating procedure, he makes numerous little al- legations while never citing any particular sources. All we have is his not very convincing word that despite the supposedly “nebulous notion of ‘the left’ that animates the post-left critique,” there are some very particular “extravagant de- nunciations” made by some unnamed people that annoy him very much.Looking at these claims we find that Staudenmaier alleges that some post-left anarchist somewhere in the world has argued that leftists “are all simultaneously totalitar- ian and reformists”! Not that there is anything unusual about totalitarian leftists reforming capitalism in various anti-revolutionary ways.(Just think about the Stalinists, Maoists and all the followers of the petty Communist Party dictators of the last half century or so.) But who in the world would say that all leftists are totalitarian reformists? Nobody I know. Probably nobody you know. Possibly nobody anyone knows, since Staudenmaier never deigns to enlighten us about who this person might be. Next he complains that some post-leftist somewhere has argued that leftist “movements are disintegrating, trapped in inevitable decline.” Does any anarchist besides Staudenmaier think differently since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dis- integration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Maoist ideological facade in China, the capitulation of social democratic regimes in the face of neo-liberal imperatives, etc.? I’d be surprised to hear it! Staudenmaier further complains that another-or possibly the same-hapless post-left anarchist (whose name he won’t reveal) has said that leftists’ “mere presence threatens to overwhelm those anarchists foolish enough to ignore the urgent danger.” This certainly sounds a bit exaggerated, though whether it is the allegedly post-left anarchist or Stauden- maier himself doing the exaggerating is impossible to tell given Staudenmaier’s continuing refusal to document his sources. Be that as it may, the tens of thou- sands of anarchists imprisoned or murdered by leftists over the last ninety years might have nonetheless appreciated such an exaggerated warning if they had received one in time.

169 Finally, Staudenmaier actually addresses something I’ve said in my latest essay on the post-left anarchist critique. Well, sort of. He actually complains thatIuse the words “’all’ and ‘every,’ ‘always’ and ‘everywhere,’” not to mention “the vast majority,” and that using these words indicates a “lack of nuance”! Pardon me, but it only indicates a lack of nuance if the words in context exaggerate. Each of these words can also indicate the precisely correct nuance of argument as well. It depends upon the entire statements of which the words are merely parts, and it depends upon the contexts in which these entire statements appear. I’ve rarely seen a more bizarre argument than this one.Ignore the actual statements you want to criticize and instead attack the use of particular isolated words used in the statements! This is a brilliant innovation in evasion! Bravo! It’s meaningless, but certainly it will be effective in distracting at least some readers’ attentions from its absolute logical poverty. Oops! Staudenmaier actually does follow this meaningless exercise in diversion with a quotation of an entire sentence from my essay addressing the difference between the strictly anarchist emphasis on self-organization and the leftist em- phasis on integrating radicals into leftist political organizations:“For leftists, the emphasis is always on recruiting to their organizations, so that you can adopt the role of a cadre2 serving their goals.” But then he for some reason neglects to mention any of the many, many exceptions to this statement that he surely thinks must exist. Let’s see, surely we can come up with one or two? Of course, we’ll have to eliminate all of the leftist political parties whose goals are precisely to convert independent radical activists into party cadre. Then we’ll have to elim- inate all of the leftist pre-party organizations, whose goals are really the same, though they don’t have full-fledged party organizations yet. And then there are the leftist front groups, the party youth groups, the single-issue campaign groups and even the small splinter groups. Well, maybe it isn’t so easy to come up with an example of leftists whose emphasis is at least sometimes on encouraging genuine self-organization they have no intention of managing or dominating. I really can’t think of any. Can you? But what about anarcho-leftists? Maybe we can come

2 According to the New Oxford American Dictionary “cadre” is defined as “a small group of people spe- cially trained for a particular purpose or profession” or “a group of activists in a communist or other revolutionary organization.” And similarly, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary “cadre” is defined as “a nucleus or core group especially of trained personnel able to assume control and to train others,” or, “a cell of indoctrinated leaders active in promoting the interests of a revolutionary party.” I use the word “cadre” in the sense of a person or people assimilated into organizations whose ideologies they have learned and reproduce, and to whose goals they subordinate their own thinking and activities. Cadre organizations are quite different from anarchist organizations, which are based upon critical self-theory, self-activity and self-organization-preserving individual and small group autonomy and refusing to surrender sovereignty to any group, leadership or temporary majority.

170 up with some anarcho-leftists who sometimes encourage self-organization? But then is the encouragement of self-organization the result of the anarcho- or the leftist influence? I think we can all guess the real answer to that question. So maybe the reason that Staudenmaier doesn’t provide us with a counterexample to disprove the statement of mine he quotes is that there really aren’t any. Let’s give him another chance, though. Peter Staudenmaier, please give us all an example of a self-defined leftist group that consistently emphasizes genuine self-organi- zation with no attempts at manipulation, no attempts to infiltrate or control, no hidden leaderships, no ideological agendas, etc. If you can come up with even one, I promise to amend my statement above to read: “For leftists, the emphasis is almost always on recruiting to their organizations, so that you can adopt the role of a cadre serving their goals.”

Staudenmaier’s Leftist Fantasies

Staudenmaier claims that “the post-leftmage i of the left . . . is frequently wrong on particulars,” citing as an example my mention that “’the critique of everyday life’ is ‘largely incompatible’ with ‘most of the New Left of the 60s and 70s.” Amazingly enough, Staudenmaier rousingly claims that “In Germany, France, and North America, at the very least, large segments of the New Left enthusiastically embraced the critique of everyday life . . . ” Of course, he once again gives zero examples. Do I detect a pattern developing? Who were these “large segments of the New Left”? I sure don’t recall any New Left socialist or communist groups, Trotskyist splinter groups, or Maoist groupuscles that “enthusiastically embraced the critique of everyday life.” The Situationist International, of course, encouraged this critique, but its members were contemptuous of the left, so it can’t count here. In the U.S. the SDS, the Progressive Labor Party, the Weatherman organization, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and other major New Left groups would have rejected the critique of everyday life, ifthey had ever heard of it. Sure, there were amorphous anti-authoritarian currents throughout the New Left, including a few which heeded the S.I.’s call for a critique of everyday life. But the vast majority of the New Left groups had no use for this essentially anarchistic turn of critique away from the exploitation of labor. (Or, for the more liberal and pacifist New Leftists, away from the confrontation of moral conscience with the establishment; and for the feminists, civil rights groups and black nationalists, away from the reifications of identity politics.) Staudenmaier clarifies his claim by adding that: “the profoundly anti-author- itarian upsurge of that era . . . owed much of its vigor and inclusiveness to this re-orientation toward everyday relationships.” However, while it may be true

171 that there was a sort of generalized New Left e“r -orientation towards everyday relationships,” this hardly constituted any sort of genuine critique of everyday life. Most of the “re-orientation towards everyday relationships” during the time was fraught with ideological baggage that precisely prevented the development of such a critique. There were all kinds of incoherent amalgamations floating around, including aspects of drug culture, feminism, , anarchism, sexual liberation, drop-out culture, etc. But they were just that-incoherent amalgama- tions-and not coherent critiques of everyday life in any way comparable to that of Raoul Vaneigem’s critique in his Revolution of Everyday Life. This type of coherent critique would have immediately called into question the rampant in- coherence involved in the , moralism, identity politics, workerism and authoritarianism of New Left organizations at the time. As for Henri LeFebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life series, it was almost unknown and simply irrelevant in North America at the time (where it was yet to be translated, anyway), while Richard Gombin’s otherwise interesting book remains most remarkable for its highly idiosyncratic and bizarre definition of leftism, under which the Situationist International was categorized as leftist despite its public disdain for the left in its own terms (for just one example, speaking of “the hierarchical ideology of leftism” in “Theses on the Situationist International and its Time” by Guy Debord & Gianfranco Sanguinetti).3 Staudenmaier goes on to argue that: “the concrete practice of countless New Leftists was explicitly predicated on a forceful rejection of precisely those values which McQuinn takes to be constitutive of the left as such.” As usual he provides no examples. Funny, I never noticed these “countless” post-left anarchists at the time. Where were these “countless” people? Why don’t they appear in any history of the New Left, except, possibly, in cases of a few tiny groups like the Diggers or the Motherfuckers? The New Left I lived through was thoroughly leftist. The anarchists were almost completely invisible. Almost nobody at the

3 The fact that Richard Gombin employs an idiosyncratic definition of “leftism” doesn’t, however, lessen the importance of his book as a study of some of the most important French currents which attempted to transcend leftism as it is more commonly defined, which is why C.A.L. Press has long distributed it. In his book Gombin defines “ ... leftism as that segment of the revolutionary movement which offers, or hopes to offer, a radical alternative to Marxism-Leninism as a theory of the and its development.” (The Origins of Modern Leftism, p.17) This extremely narrow definition (Gombin is aware it is unusual, and calls it a “technical” definition as opposed to what he calls “the generally accepted, journalist’s” definition) would leave out most of what is commonly considered the left in North America, and is obviously not what either post-left anarchists or Staudenmaier have in mind in use of the term. Staudenmaier’s reference to this book and to Gombin’s analysis is obviously meant to mystify, since he expects that most people reading his essay will not be familiar with it, and he certainly has no intention of putting it in any sort of intelligent context.

172 time ever talked about the critique of organizational fetishism, the critique of everyday life, the critique of the state, the critique of ideology (except in the least perceptive Marxist senses), the critique of technological fetishism (beyond superficial environmentalist concerns), or the critique of civilization. Even the few anarchists were oblivious to most of this. If Staudenmaier can provide any evidence I’d be happy to concede that the times were far more radical than I realized. But in the complete absence of any evidence for his amazing fantasies, I’ll have to stick with the 60s and 70s I saw with my own eyes. Staudenmaier further claims that: “The actual history of the left includes nu- merous instances when such innovative critical approaches emerged to contest the conformism and repressiveness of the cadre model.” I bet you can guess by now that he doesn’t give even one example of what he’s talking about. What “numerous . . . innovative and critical approaches” advanced the model of anti-au- thoritarian, anti-statist self-organization outside of the anarchist milieu?Looking at the historical record there’s not much evidence for any. Of course, if Stauden- maier actually means that there were really a few timid criticisms made of the excesses of leftist organizational fetishism (let’s not be quite so rigid, let’s allow the common people to contribute ideas once in awhile, let’s vote on our party policies) this isn’t the same thing at all as what post-left anarchists argue, and it would be absurd to think it was. Staudenmaier does make one good, though entirely irrelevant, point in all this. He argues:“some leftists have been thoughtful and resolute allies of anarchism at crucial junctures in our history.” But nobody has claimed otherwise. A few exceptional leftists-like George Orwell-had some anarchist sympathies, despite their abhorrence for anarchist indiscipline, subversion and bad manners. Daniel Guerin is another example. Nobody has claimed that all leftists are incapable of working with anarchists, just that non-anarchist leftists have a significantly different theory and practice than anarchists that is basically incompatible with anarchy. This should really be no surprise. They’re just not anarchists.

Individualist Delusions and Myopic Autonomy

We get to the heart of one of the biggest differences between anarchism and leftism when we assess the place of individuals in communities and in social change. Anarchists (at least, those anarchists whose anarchism is stronger than their leftism) generally argue that free individuals and free communities cannot be coerced into existence.Leftists argue otherwise. Anarchists contend that individu- als and communities should be autonomous (self-governing, self-directing) rather than dependent upon government and the forced imposition of heteronomous

173 decisions.Leftists, for the most part, can hardly conceive that people free to make their own decisions might ever be socially-conscious, much less able to carry out a social revolution in the right situation. (This attitude is exemplified by the infamous Leninist insistence that workers are only capable of “trade-union con- sciousness,” and the corresponding delusion that only the Leninist party can be consistently revolutionary.) In fact, for most socialist and communist leftists (and, unfortunately, also for many left-anarchists) individualism seems to be nothing but a dirty word. The difference between anarchism and leftism here is the difference between a specific meaning of the word “individualism“4 and a specific meaning of the word “.“5 Anarchists are all individualists in the narrow and specific sense of “ . . . favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.” (New Oxford American Dictionary) Leftists are collectivists in the specific and narrow sense of favoring “ . . . social organization in which the individual is seen as being subordinate to a social collectivity such as a state, a nation, a race, or a so- cial class.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)Left anarchists of various types make a range of uneasy compromises between these two positions-some closer to anarchism, some closer to leftism.6 This particular difference between anarchism and leftism has nothing to do with the various ideologies of individualism or of individualist anarchism, none of which have a significant presence within the contemporary

4 According to the New Oxford American Dictionary “individualism” is defined as “the habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant.” While the secondary definition is “a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “individualism” as “1a. Belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence. b. Acts or an act based on this belief. 2a. A doctrine advocating freedom from government regulation in the pursuit of a person’s economic goals. b. A doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state or social group. 3a. The quality of being an individual; individuality.” And according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “individualism” is “political and social philosophy that places high value on the freedom of the individual and generally stresses the self-directed, self-contained, and comparatively unrestrained individual.” 5 According to the New Oxford American Dictionary “collectivism” is defined as “the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.” This is the way most people in the U.S. will understand the term. The secondary definition given, one not used in this essay (nor in “Leaving the Left Behind”), is “the theory and practice of the ownership of land and the means of production by the people or the state.” According to the Encyclopedia Britannica “collectivism” is “any of several types of social organization in which the individual is seen as being subordinate to a social collectivity such as a state, a nation, a race, or a social class.” 6 Every major anarchist theorist — Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Guillaume, Kropotkin, Faure, Malatesta — has strongly defended the goals of individual freedom and self-realization in ways both absent from and incompatible with (non-anarchist) leftism. Only the most rabidly leftist of anarchists agree with the bulk of left opinion that even Bakunin or Kropotkin or Malatesta must be denounced for their lapses into excessive “individualism.”

174 anarchist milieu, anyway. Yet Staudenmaier objects to my claim that “The anar- chist idea has an indelibly individualist foundation,” by bringing up the largely irrelevant history of individualist anarchists despite the fact that in “Leaving the Left Behind” I nowhere refer to this history and nowhere defend any ideological individualism in any form.7 This is another diversionary tactic. Specifically, it is a straightforward use of the straw-man fallacy, in which Staudenmaier argues with a position he’s constructed out of thin air, rather than arguing with the position that’s actually been put forth.To be overly fair, this is a fairly common tactic used by all sorts of unscrupulous leftists to attack anyone interested in individual freedom, which is seen by most leftists as at best only a bourgeois conceit. This is why almost all leftists with any remaining semblance of opposition to capitalism repeatedly denounce anarchism as merely a form of “bourgeois individualism” or “petty-bourgeois individualism” or “lumpen individualism.” But no matter how common it is the construction of straw-man arguments serves primarily to reveal the extreme weakness of the positions of those making them. Straw men are attacked precisely because leftists are unable to counter the actual arguments. At this point Staudenmaier explains to dubious readers that the “insistence on individual autonomy” is “myopic.” Presumably this means that more far-seeing anarchists will renounce their individual autonomy (self-direction) in favor of an organizational ideology and/or organizational directives and/or democratic majority decisions made somewhere. If there is another explanation I’d really like to hear it. After this his argument reverts to the www.infoshop.org “Anarchy after Leftism” web discussion. He complains that “several spokespeople for post-left positions emphatically declared their opposition to egalitarianism.” No context or definitions are given by Staudenmaier, though there is a long history of anarchist

7 Perhaps I should have made it absolutely clear that not only does the anarchist idea have an indelibly individualist foundation, but that the actual history of anarchist milieux and movements has been overwhelmingly socialist or communist as well. I have to admit that this seems so incredibly self-evident to me that I never would have imagined Staudenmaier might in his wildest imagination attempt to claim or imply I thought otherwise! As anyone who has read Anarchy magazine for the last twenty years might realize, I’ve never propounded an ideology of individualist anarchism, though I have consistently championed the importance of Max Stirner’s (widely misunderstood) phenomenological analyses of subjectivity and ideology for social revolutionary anarchist theory and practice.(Stirner, by the way, would have been the first to deny the label of “individualist anarchist” that so many wish to pin on him.) I’ve long considered myself an anti-ideological anarchist first and foremost-which means that I am both an individualist and communist in the nonideological meanings of these terms. Anyone attempting to construct my anti-political theoretical and practical positions as being exclusively (not to mention, ideologically) “individualist” must first selectively ignore, obscure or deny at least nine-tenths of what I have written over the last twenty years or so, and then explain how the other decontextualized ten percent still can make any sense.In other words, this would be a task of blatant falsification (not that other Social Ecologists haven’t already proven their adeptness at this kind of task).

175 critiques of egalitarian ideologies which aim to level society by force.(Bakunin’s eloquent dictum,“socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality” comes quickly to mind.) Staudenmaier further claims that “a number” of these people “claimed to reject social institutions per se” though once again refusing to explain or contextualize these comments. Who are these “spokespeople” and what did they actually say? Staudenmaier uses these alleged comments to argue that “Though the promoters of these notions strenuously deny it, what this attitude amounts to is a rejection of the very possibility of communal existence.” But if they so “strenuously deny” this, couldn’t it be that Staudenmaier either misunderstands their positions, or is taking liberties with his description of them? We don’t known since he once again refuses to quote or at least cite the precise location of these alleged comments. But, again, what is the point of all this? Staudenmaier continues to evade the careful critiques that have appeared in Anarchy magazine and in the IAS “Theory & Politics” web column by running away to caricature and denounce some very likely off-hand comments that most people will never see, that nobody can check, and whose importance to anything is far less than clear.

Abstract and Indeterminate Evasions

Staudenmaier gets even more clever in his tactics of evasion when he actually does finally quote a very short, direct comment from the infoshop.org “Anarchy after Leftism” web discussion site: “I want to be left alone.” Although he doesn’t indicate where in the vast discussion this comment was made or who has made it, I actually recall reading it, and the fact that he quotes it allows anyone with access to the internet to search the infoshop.org discussion site for the comment . . . and discover immediately that it is taken out of context and completely falsified by Staudenmaier’s deliberate misinterpretation of it to mean “free of all the annoying attachments of social life, without other people interjecting their own opinions or offering critical comments on each other’s behavior.” But this complete falsifi- cation doesn’t keep Staudenmaier from sermonizing about things nobody would disagree with in the first place. He actually condescends to argue that “liberatory forms of social interaction sometimes require us to challenge each other’s opin- ions and actions rather than just accepting them . . . [blah, blah, blah.]” Oh my, please tell us it’s not so! But this insipidly intentional misunderstanding by Staudenmaier gets even worse. As with any effective sermonizing a devil must be produced, which in this case is a devious serpent he calls “post-left repressive tolerance,” whose “deeper implications” he divines to be “an invitation to intolerance and parochialism.” My,

176 my, my. So much to divine from so little (manufactured) evidence!Let’s be crystal clear. Post-left anarchist critiques are based upon the careful study of world history, including the history of the left. They are critiques of well over a hundred years of the whole range of actual, sustained leftist theories and practices, with all their gory, too-often totalitarian or just-plain brutal results. Post-left anarchist critiques do not call for refusing to learn from history or from the vast experiences of peoples around the world in revolt. On the contrary, post-left critiques call for examining and seeking to understand every significant form of contestation in which people engage around the world, in every level of society and in every sphere of life. Constructing a mythical “post-leftep r ressive tolerance” from an out-of-context quote that “I want to be left alone” is simply a breathtaking exercise in bad faith. Moving on from this, Staudenmaier hesitates for not even a second before launching a different-but nearly as breathtaking-evasion, this time seeking to minimize into nonexistence the criticisms of leftism (most of which it is now clear he dare not ever explicitly acknowledge in any detail) that I make in “Leaving the Left Behind.” He alleges that I focus my attention “on the manifold shortcomings of contemporary radical politics.” (Who would have guessed?) And that I charge that “leftists have incomplete, self-contradictory theories about capitalism and social change.” But he acknowledges this focus and this charge only in order to dismiss them absolutely from either importance or consideration by saying simply, “But we all have these.” Okay! We all have incomplete, self-contradictory theories. Who cares if some lead to dictatorship and others lead to incoherence, if some lead to support for repression and others lead to support for all forms of contestation? We’re all in the same leftist boat according to Staudenmaier, and I shouldn’t be rocking it. No matter that I have made detailed and highly specific criticisms of leftism in my essay. He argues that “Capitalism is a contradictory system. Revolutionary social change is an incomplete process. Working through these contradictions requires close attention to the concrete determinants of currently prevalent modes of domination and hierarchy, so that we can create forms of resistance adequate to the particular demands of our specific historical and social situation.” Wow.I guess that means as long as we don’t raise any criticisms of the left, then, everything will be hunky-dory! As long as we don’t do anything rash like speaking of “a commitment to ‘general social revolt,’” which according to Staudenmaier would “promote the kind of false generalism that is already rife in North American anarchist circles,” we’ll weather the storm and all will be well. Staudenmaier says it’s alright if we “learn from the civil rights struggle . . . or the strategies pioneered by peasant revolts in the global south” as long as we don’t generalize too much or criticize the role of the left in these contestations. Worst of all, anarchists should never even think it is possible that the anarchist milieu could

177 “stand on its own and bow to no other movements.” The direct implication is that unless it subordinates itself to the left the anarchist movement “will be ill equipped to engage in this sort of learning process.” The only thing never explained is what the hell subordinating anarchism to leftism has to do with any of this at all-except in his own mind? In this case, too much abstract and indeterminate evasiveness makes for absolute incoherence.

The Obligatory Fascist Smear

Given the history of Staudenmaier’s concerns with the likelihood that any forms of critical theory and practice except his own are liable to be co-opted by fascism, it is unsurprising that he raises the specter of an alleged post-left anarchist susceptibility to the allures of this bogeyman. His evidence? He claims that “A few post-left anarchists go so far as to extol the right wing tendencies within anarchism as a healthy corrective to the grave dangers of social equality and the dastardly connivance of anarchists and power-mad leftists.” Wow. I’d love to see the names of these “post-left anarchists,” along with the wild quotations in prominent places that must have led to Staudenmaier’s unconstrained paraphrasing! Oh, I almost forgot, that’s not how Staudenmaier operates. But couldn’t we at least see some sort of citations allowing us to find the origin of his accusations? Not likely. Classified leftist information,I suppose. Not that it’s impossible for people to say such things (one assumes on the anonymous internet . . . since they wouldn’t likely get into print anywhere). But given a lack of citation or direct quotation we’re once again left entirely in the dark, just as Staudenmaier apparently wants us to be. Were these real comments? If so were they actually made by anarchists or by people posing as post-leftists? (The latter is always possible in the almost completely anonymous and pseudonymous world of internet discussion free-for- alls where it’s impossible to know who is really speaking, and where it’s fully possible to see people post the most insane comments under your own name.) What these nasty, unverifiable allegations by Staudenmaier evade is the incred- ibly huge, dirty secret that in historical actuality (as opposed to leftist fantasy), it was ex-leftists in immense numbers who helped populate the fascist movements (which, of course, is not to belittle the many leftists who never abandoned the anti- fascist struggle during this time). It certainly wasn’t a few insignificant anarchist critics of the left who helped push fascism into power. And the reason for the easy conversion of masses of leftists to fascist and Nazi causes was that leftism and fascism are similar in so many more ways than anarchism and fascism are. National socialism (one form of fascism) substitutes the nation as the collectivist focus, while class-struggle socialism and syndicalism center on class as the collec- tivist focus around which life is to be subordinated. Red Fascism () is

178 a form of national socialism paradoxically built on an ideology of class struggle. Left anarchists must deal with this dirty history of the left straightforwardly if they want to be taken seriously. Making smears based on unverifiable allegations, while ignoring the bulk of actual history, does nothing to enhance the reputation of left anarchism.

For a Rational Discussion of Anarchism and the Left

Seldom have I seen a less direct and more evasive response to anything in the anarchist milieu than Staudenmaier’s “Anarchists in Wonderland.” But putting it behind us, where does that leave us? Certainly no wiser about any intelligent, rational arguments against post-left critiques, though I, for one, am certain that such arguments can be made and would welcome them.To repeat the recom- mendations in the editorial of the new Anarchy magazine issue might be the best place to start. (See www.anarchymag.org for the entire editorial.)

1. Always attack the comments made rather than the author(s). This is accom- plished by avoiding a number of things, and by accomplishing one simple goal. Avoid making spurious, irrelevant, or patently false accusations by stick- ing resolutely to actual points made in the words and context in which the author(s) you want to criticize has actually made them! If you can’t quote the author(s)(without distorting the context) and address your criticisms directly to the quoted words, then simply don’t comment! (Here I guess I should add that citations of some sort should be made when referencing lengthy source documents so that readers can find what you are talking about to check on its context and meaning themselves.) 2. Refuse straw man arguments. Challenge the actual meaning of the words you quote by either accepting the definitions used by the author you want to criticize, or by making it clear why you think the author’s definitions are so inadequate as to require different definitions. If you can’t find any place where an author actually has said something you want to criticize, don’t argue that she or he has said it, or would agree with it, or secretly believes it. If one person makes a particular statement, this does not mean that all people you may want to group with that person agree with that statement. If you want to draw some logical conclusions from the author’s statements in order to criticize them (or to show that the statements lead to absurd conclusions), then first run your alleged logical conclusions by several people to make sure that your conclusions are more solid than idiosyncratic, and then be sure to acknowledge that it is your conclusions that are absurd, and not the author’s.

179 Above all, read any texts you want to criticize with extreme care. Avoid superficial readings and always make a conscientiousness effort to understand what is at stake. If there is something you don’t understand, then simply ask about it before you criticize it.” Beyond these points we can also learn from Staudenmaier’s peculiar odyssey into his own little wonderland:

1. Argue with your opponents strongest positions. If you want to criticize Marx- ism, for example, don’t focus primarily on the words of Stalin’s barber. If you want to criticize anarchism, don’t settle for a criticism of Proudhon’s patriarchal attitudes. Going after irrelevant targets of opportunity is a show of weakness, never strength. 2. Try a little turnabout. Would your arguments make sense to you if someone else turned them on you in some form? If not, don’t use them. 3. Keep your abstractions grounded with convincing details, examples, quota- tions and documentation. Anyone can construct abstract platitudes. It’s what the abstractions mean for everyday practice that makes any real difference to people.

180 Post-Script: Response from Peter Staudenmaier

Challenge Accepted: Post-Leftism’s Rejection of the Left as a Whole

Critique is a difficult thing to engage in, whether you’re in the role of the critic or of the criticized. Part of the challenge involves trying to sort out which ideas are promising enough that they can be worked on and refined in a rewarding way, and then figuring out how to make these ideas more sensible and useful for our practical efforts. That sort of immanent critique is what I tried to offer with my skeptical appraisal of post-left anarchism.In my original response to Jason McQuinn’s article “Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind,” I wrote that this much-needed process of theoretical and practical refinement would be more effective if post-left adherents could bring themselves to engage with the criticisms put forward by other anarchists. McQuinn’s intemperate reply indicates that these words went unheeded. Complaining that my criticisms of his argument were not the criticisms he hoped for rather misses the point. In some respects, the ugly tone this debate always seems to take may have to do with fundamentally contrary assumptions about the function of critique itself. Much of McQuinn’s indignation appears to stem from disappointment that I failed to write another essay altogether. Thus rather than responding to the criticisms I did offer, he presents a litany of themes I did not address. This strikes me as an odd way to approach the issue; the list of topics on which I have nothing to say is quite long, and it is difficult to see how such a method will clarify the core issues at stake. Perhaps it is all based on a misunderstanding: my essay was not a comprehensive review of McQuinn’s various beliefs, or of the last several volumes of Anarchy Magazine; it was a direct response to McQuinn’s article, particularly the parts of that article that I found unpersuasive and flawed. There is nothing evasive about this form of critique. At times McQuinn’s musings on “The Incredible Lameness of Left Anarchism” read like an supplement to my own essay. After I pointed out the chronic levels of vagueness and vituperation that so frequently afflict post-left arguments, Mc- Quinn provides yet more vagueness and amplified vituperation. After I scolded post-leftists for pointless caricatures of the history of the left, McQuinn offers another reductionist parody of the New Left, which in his eyes apparently con- sisted primarily of Old Left cadre parties. Perhaps the oddest aspect of McQuinn’s

181 reply is his insistence that I neglected to provide any source for the views of other post-left enthusiasts.I did, of course, provide this source, along with a link to it, and explained this procedure clearly in my essay. The tension between these vernacular expressions of post-leftism and McQuinn’s own more theoretical variety forms a major component of my analysis. All in all, the post-left perspective seems even less cogent in the wake of McQuinn’s splenetic recapitulation. Anarchists who are wondering what allthe fuss is about have yet to receive clear answers, much less compelling ones. Aside from veering between casual disavowal and vehement re-affirmation of the same positions he staked out in his initial article, McQuinn still hasn’t faced the basic logical conundrum at the heart of his stance: Why would the sordid record of some parts of the leftequ r ire an undifferentiated rejection of the left as a whole? Answering this straightforward question would go a long way toward making our disagreements less frenzied and more relevant to anarchist practice today.

182 Retrieved on July 8, 2009 from news.infoshop.org and news.infoshop.org

183 184 Jason McQuinn

Against Organizationalism: Anarchism as both Theory and Critique of Organization

One of the most annoying and oftepea r ted clichés of leftist political rhetoric concerns the unquestioned imperative for nonspecific, generic “organization.” Whatever else might define the left, it has always and consistently called forthe creation and development of formal organizations that are supposed to represent and lead the masses or the working class (or these days often the appropriate iden- tity-group or “minority”). Of course, when leftists leave the realm of rhetoric and enter the realm of practice, it becomes quite evident why the details of organiza- tion are usually left unspecified. It’s easy to say that unorganized or disorganized people probably won’t have much success pursuing large, complex projects. But when the form of organization actually proposed calls for a “transmission-belt” structure with an explicit division between leaders and led, along with provisions to discipline rank and file members while shielding leaders from responsibility to those being led, more than a few people wise up to the con game and reject it. Even the addition of a little democracy these days isn’t enough to disguise the stench of power politics. None of this is surprising to most anarchists, because the mainstream left has been explicitly hierarchical, authoritarian and statist since the time of the Jacobins and the French Revolution. However, even anarchists — or at least the more leftist of anarchists — have not been immune to organizational fetishism. From a genuine concern for helping to create the conditions for the have-nots to take back their world, the leftist organizational imperative is too often mistaken for a healthy underlying strategy which has unfortunately been undermined and discredited by unethical or power-hungry authoritarian leftists. It’s true that the increasingly widespread disillusionment with formal orga- nization amongst genuine radicals is often a direct result of two hundred years of counterproductive leftist practice. But leftist organizational practice isn’t just a good strategy corrupted by bad personnel. The same organization-building strategies with more radical theory and values grafted in place would continue to produce the same type of self-defeating practice precisely because the under- lying problems are structural and not incidental. The cult of organizationalism — in which the construction and enlargement of formal, mass political and eco- nomic organizations take priority over the encouragement and generalization of anarchist self-organization — directly contradicts anarchist principles and goals. Organizationalism encourages and produces authoritarian, hierarchical, and alien- ating practices because it is based on the idea that people should be organized by politically-conscious militants rather than the anarchist idea that people must organize themselves for their own liberation. Historically, the anarchist idea, anarchist theory and the international anarchist movement all originated in large degree in critical response to the problems posed by radical organization. Yet, today, all too many left anarchists are taking on the

187 job of rehabilitating a highly problematic organizationalist rhetoric and practice, relying only on superficial criticisms of the explicitly authoritarian, statist left to preven — they hope — their own projects from duplicating the duplicity of the many leftist disasters that litter revolutionary history. All anarchists differ from the political left in one central way: anarchists pro- pose individual and communal self-activity, self-direction and self-organization as the only possible method for genuinely taking control of our lives. The political left, on the contrary, proposes organizing people as objects in order to gain the political power necessary to change institutional social conditions. The more radical of leftists will add that such change in institutional conditions can help bring about the possibility that the masses will eventually develop enough self- awareness to directly govern themselves. But this is, of course, relegated to the indefinite future. Given the ongoing disintegration of the international left, it has become ever more important for anarchists to rediscover and reconsider the foundations of the anarchist movement in the anarchist theory and critique of organization. As more leftists and ex-leftists drift into the anarchist milieu, it becomes increasingly impor- tant to remember that anarchism isn’t merely a form of leftism without an explicit goal of taking state power. The entire leftist political culture of representation, hierarchical organization, heteronomous discipline and the cult of leadership is contrary to the anarchist culture of autonomy, free association, self-organization, direct action and personal responsibility. The leftist practice of creating formal mass organizations in order to build political power involves entirely different assumptions and goals than the anarchist practice of encouraging generalized self-initiated, self-directed activity. All the various forms of left anarchism involve attempted syntheses of aspects of left organizationalism with aspects of anarchist organization. And all ofthese attempted syntheses require some degree of sacrifice of anarchist theory, practice and values in exchange for an anticipated increase in ideological appeal or practi- cal power. But anarchists will always sacrifice their own principles at great risk. There have been powerful left-anarchist syntheses that have made great practical contributions towards revolt, insurrection and revolution at times in the past: the heyday of anarcho-syndicalism around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century being one. But these have always come at the price of also diluting and confusing the anarchist side of the syntheses, which has ultimately led to their defeat. In order to prevent further defeats, we can consciously base our practice on consistent principles of self-organization, always with as few compromises as possible, and with a clear eye on our goals.

188 Retrieved from www.geocities.com (now defunct)

189 190 Peter Staudenmaier

Anarchists in Wonderland: The Topsy-Turvy World

2003

Throughout this thoroughly muddled dispute, the most consistently reasonable theorist for the post-left tendency has been Jason McQuinn, founding editor of Anarchy Magazine. McQuinn’s take on the post-left idea is essentially a recapit- ulation of the themesthat have preoccupied him since the 1970s: the critique of ideology, the rejection of moralism, suspicion toward formal organization, and the liberatory power of individual desire. These are familiar topics for many anarchists today, and have also found significant resonance among non-anarchist sectors of various radical movements. There is much to be said about each of these notions in their specifically anar- chist form, and McQuinn’s latest essay (posted at the IAS website) offers ample opportunity to reflect on their implications for our praxis. What all this might have to do with rejecting “the left” as such, however, remains rather obscure. Indeed many of the core ideas of post-leftism trace their genealogy to left tradi- tions themselves. The critique of organization, for example, is deeply indebted to the work of Jacques Camatte; the insistence on linking subjective psychological factors with broader social forces is presaged in the thinking of Cornelius Cas- toriadis; and the whole re-orientation toward domination as our central critical term was theorized by the Frankfurt School and by Social Ecology long before it gained currency in the pages of Anarchy. Despite the provenance of many of its own fundamental principles, however, post-leftism adamantly rejects any accommodation with what it takes to be“the left”. This phrase itself seems to expand or contract to fit the circumstances; when post-left anarchists talk about leftists, sometimes they mean sectarian splinter groups and authoritarian demagogues, and sometimes they mean everybody from Bukharin to Bookchin. Many anarchists drawn to the post-left label appear to live in a world in which all leftists are Leninists, except when they’re liberals, and where the left as a whole is an ominous iceberg of power-worship threatening to sink a virtually Titanic-sized anarchist movement. Since I do not live in that world, I am frequently at a loss when asked to reply to the claims of post-leftism.In the world where I live, the left is an extraordi- narily variegated continuum of conflicting participants and perspectives, not a monolithic entity that can be reduced to a few neat premises. And the anarchist movement is a relatively small but vitally important current within that broader continuum, a current that still has much to learn from other radical tendencies and social movements. But in the hope of sparking something like a coherent debate on these questions,I will once more venture down the rabbit-hole and see what sense I can make of post-left theory in its myriad forms. McQuinn’s latest essay begins on a promising note. He observes, accurately enough, that the “void in the development of anarchist theory” has “yet to be filled by any adequate new formulation”, and offers the post-left alternative as a

193 way to address this gap. His conclusion strikes a conciliatory tone as well: “there has been a long, most often honorable, history of anarchist and left syntheses.” This would seem to leave considerable room for critical engagement between anarchists and leftists. But this raises an obvious problem: Why are McQuinn’s more judicious state- ments of the post-left position at odds with both the details of his own argument and the vehement declarations of so many other post-left anarchists? The simplest explanation is that adherents of post-leftism are still working out the specifics of their vision, something that other anarchists can hardly fault them for. In this process, however, a number of the more troubling versions of post-left thinking will require serious reconsideration if the tendency is to live up to its own best intentions. And it is far from clear that McQuinn’s current proposal is able to accommodate this much-needed reconsideration. Perhaps the most telling instances of post-left zeal can be found in a sprawling on-line debate from 2002, hosted by the comrades at infoshop.org. The exchange can be found here: flag.blackened.net Just about the only thing to emerge clearly from that discussion was that a number of the more vocal post-left anarchists are committed to a series of implausible claims that McQuinn’s essay does not address, much less defend. We might simply stop at this point and ask, Will the real post-leftists please stand up? But maybe a more productive approach is to read McQuinn’s contribution in light of the background provided by less discreet fans of the post-left position. Let’s begin with the nebulous notion of “the left” that animates the post-left critique. The leftists we meet in the extravagant denunciations proffered by post- left anarchists are an impressively protean bunch: they are all simultaneously totalitarians and reformists; their movements are disintegrating, trapped in in- evitable decline, yet their mere presence threatens to overwhelm those anarchists foolish enough to ignore the urgent danger; they are ruthlessly fixated on an all-encompassing abstract ideology, yet at the same time they fritter away their activist energies on single-issue concrete campaigns. Even their opposition to cap- italism is mostly fake. McQuinn himself relies on such caricatured portraits more often than not; his essay resounds with telltale modifiers like “all” and “every”, “always” and “everywhere”. This lack of nuance does little to further anarchist evaluations of left practice. McQuinn is similarly fond of sweeping assertions about what “the vast majority” of leftists have thought and done throughout history. More careful descriptions are overshadowed by categorical pronouncements: “For leftists, the emphasis is always on recruiting to their organizations, so that you can adopt the role of a cadre serving their goals.” To an extent this can be chalked up to simple rhetorical

194 excess, but such undifferentiated claims are often taken literally by the post-leftist faithful, who fail to notice that these indiscriminate generalizations do not accord well with McQuinn’s ringing criticisms of reductionism. The post-leftmage i of “the left”s i not just overly simplified, it is frequently wrong on the particulars. McQuinn writes, for example, that the “critique of everyday life” is “largely incompatible” with “most of the New Left of the 60s and 70s.” In Germany, France, and North America, at the very least, large segments of the New Left enthusiastically embraced the critique of everyday life; indeed the profoundly anti-authoritarian upsurge of that era — which was of course accom- panied by an authoritarian backlash — owed much of its vigor and incisiveness to this re-orientation toward everyday relationships. The influential three-volume work The Critique of Everyday Life was written not by an anarchist, but by the French leftist Henri Lefebvre. Themes such as the critique of everyday life and the critique of ideology have in fact been central to radical forms of left politics for decades. The classic primer by Richard Gombin, for example, The Origins of Modern Leftism, devotes a pivotal chapter to “A Critique of Everyday Life”. More important, the concrete practice of countless New Leftists was explicitly predicated on a forceful rejection of precisely those values which McQuinn takes to be constitutive of the left as such. This strand of left radicalism did not appear out of nowhere in the 1960s; it has its roots in earlier figures such as Alexandra Kollontai or Wilhelm Reich, and found one of its most articulate spokespeople in , whose work on the topic reached back to the 1930’s. All of these individuals were non-anarchist leftists. Similar points could be made about the critique of industrial technology, which McQuinn also takes to be essentially foreign to leftist thought. The actual history of the leftnc i ludes numerous instances when such innovative critical approaches emerged to contest the conformism and repressiveness of the cadre model. There is no sensible reason to collapse this multifaceted record into a one-dimensional tale of leftist perfidy. Moreover, some leftists have been thoughtful and resolute allies of anarchism at crucial junctures in our history. Many anarchists learn about the Spanish revolution through the superb account Homage to Catalonia, penned by George Orwell. Orwell was a leftist who fought side by side with other leftists and anarchists against both the right and the Stalinists in Spain.Today one of the chief ways that inquisitive anarchists have easy access to the classics of our own tradition is through the work of leftists like Daniel Guerin. Selective memory will not help us make sense of the conflicted history of left interactions with anarchists. But the problem here goes beyond one-sided depictions of the left. Post-left an- archists also rely on a truncated conception of anarchism itself. McQuinn’s essay is not immune to this tendency; at several points he insists that anarchism as a

195 whole rests on an “indelibly individualist foundation”. If this were true, it would be difficult to explain the centuries-old internal struggles between individualist an- archists and social anarchists. Without recapitulating these debates here, suffice it to say that many contemporary anarchists reject McQuinn’s contention that “collectivism” is inherently suspect while “individual self-theory” is the source of liberation. His ill-considered invocations of Stirner aside, McQuinn neglects the crucial dialectic between individual and collective that is the distinctive feature of social anarchist praxis. While we can probably all agree with McQuinn’s ob- servation that “without the autonomous individual, any other level of autonomy is impossible”, post-leftists would do well to remember that the reverse is equally true: Without autonomous collectivities, individual autonomy is impossible. Mc- Quinn’s commitment to individualist assumptions leads him to misconstrue this fundamental relationship. Getting things more or less backwards, he writes that “only free individuals can create a free, unalienated society.” But free individuals do not drop out of the sky; they are themselves the product of free societies. This myopic insistence on individual autonomy comes back to haunt post-left- ism when its more hyperbolic advocates take the floor. In the aforementioned infoshop debates, several spokespeople for post-left positions emphatically de- clared their opposition to egalitarianism (hardly surprising in a tendency that takes its cues from Stirner and Nietzsche), and a number of them claimed to reject social institutions per se, maintaining that all social structures of whatever sort are inherently oppressive. Forgetting the cultural context within which many US-based anarchists operate, some of these post-leftists carry the ideal of rugged individualism to the point of self-parody, declaring that in the liberated future, nobody will ever have to associate with people they don’t personally like. One of them summed up the post-left stance by saying simply “I want to be left alone”, free of all the annoying attachments of social life, without other people interjecting their own opinions or offering critical comments on each other’s behavior. Though the promoters of these notions strenuously deny it, what this attitude amounts to is a rejection of the very possibility of communal existence. If all social structures are inherently oppressive, there is no point in trying to create a free society. If libertarian and participatory social institutions are impossible by definition, we can all stay home and read Foucault. It may seem trivial to state these matters so baldly, but sharing the world with other people means that sometimes we can’t do exactly what we want to do, and sometimes we will indeed need to cooperate with people we don’t like very much. The false promise of absolute individual autonomy is not simply an idle fantasy, it is profoundly indebted to those classical liberal principles that underwrite capitalist society as we know it. Genuine autonomy is not the mere absence of constraints.In its more extreme versions, the post-left vision is encumbered by a negative conception

196 of freedom, a conception reduced to the liberty of atomized individuals, who jealously guard their private rights and prerogatives. It cannot accommodate a positive conception of social freedom, a kind of freedom that flourishes in cooperation with others and demands equality as its necessary counterpart, a kind of freedom that is embodied in anti-authoritarian social structures and cooperative social practices. Many post-left enthusiasts also seem to think of “leftists” as a bunch of busy- bodies who are constantly telling other people what to do. Some leftists do fit this description, and it is likely that this propensity often compounds the existing au- thoritarian disposition of a certain leftist personality type. But apart from the fact that these same trends are fiercely combatted by many other leftists of a more anti- authoritarian disposition, there is something disconcertingly complacent about the unexamined perceptions of proper behavior that underlie this particular post- left complaint. After all, liberatory forms of social interaction sometimes require us to challenge each other’s opinions and actions rather than just accepting them. The world will not be a better place if we keep our thoughts to ourselves and largely leave each other alone — especially when we’re engaged with people who are not our personal friends and familiar acquaintances. The time-honored anar- chist principle of free association does not license insularity; instead it encourages exploration and mutual recognition, including critical contestation of what other people say and do. This is how social cohesion is kept transparent and solidarity is nourished.To abandon such efforts in the name of individual sovereignty would mean an impoverishment of anarchist comradeship. McQuinn’s essay does not confront this form of post-left repressive tolerance, whose deeper implications are actually an invitation to intolerance and parochial- ism. Rather McQuinn focuses his attention on the manifold shortcomings of contemporary radical politics. Overlooking the aporias of his own theory, he notes that “leftists have incomplete, self-contradictory theories about capitalism and social change.” But we all have these. Capitalism is a contradictory system. Revolutionary social change is an incomplete process. Working through these contradictions requires close attention to the concrete determinants of currently prevalent modes of domination and hierarchy, so that we can create forms of resistance adequate to the particular demands of our specific historical and social situation. Under present conditions, trumpeting our commitment to “general social revolt” simply promotes the kind of false generalism that is already rife in North American anarchist circles.Too many of us think that since we’re anar- chists, we are “by definition” opposed to all forms of oppression; thus we don’t really need to grapple with any of them in particular. This is one area where an informed engagement with several left traditions could do anarchists a lot of good. Instead of the abstract negation of existing society that post-leftists sometimes

197 preach, critical contact with “single-issue campaigns” and experienced activists can help us move toward a determinate negation of the systems of power that surround us. Learning from the civil rights struggle, for example, or the strategies pioneered by peasant revolts in the global south, could bring a wealth of grassroots perspec- tives to bear on the contestations we are part of in our own local contexts. But an anarchism that hopes to “stand on its own and bow to no other movements” will be ill equipped to engage in this sort of learning process; indeed it will be unprepared for active solidarity with those movements it consigns to “the left”. This attitude exacerbates the existing tendency among anarchists to consider our own perspectives invariably more comprehensive than those of non-anarchists. Whether there is in fact “a huge divide” between the project of abolishing “every form of social alienation”, on the one hand, and the myriad sub-projects concen- trating on particular instances of alienation on the other, is not a question that can be answered in advance. The more radicalized and ambitious such concrete struggles become, the more they narrow this gap and reach toward fuller forms of liberation. But this is a matter of practice, of hands-on confrontation with specific manifestations of unfreedom under definite historical conditions.To declare such “partial goals” woefully incomplete is to miss the point. Adopting a more all-encompassing critical viewpoint, even one that fancies itself free of reification and ideology, does not in itself render the social circumstances ripe for total revolution. In overlooking these potentially radicalizing occasions for mutual aid and reciprocal learning, the post-left tendency deprives itself of a much-needed coun- terweight to its individualist preferences and its skepticism toward democratic procedures. At times this suspicion toward collective endeavors and toward non- anarchist varieties of radicalism suggests a misguided desire for purity: We are the only ones with an uncompromising commitment to thoroughgoing liberation in all spheres of life, post-left anarchists sometimes seem to say, and we must guard against contaminating this precious legacy with insufficiently intransigent elements.In its most unreflective form, this mindset is nothing more than a recipe for anarchist sectarianism, the bane of any movement that wants to change the world. All of this casts a rather different light on McQuinn’s forays into psychology. He is convinced that left anarchists who are unpersuaded by the rhetoric of post- leftism are simply anxiously resisting “the self-examination necessary for genuine self-understanding.” In reality, a number of post-leftism’s critics have tried to provoke greater self-examination among anarchists, a more serious re-appraisal of the lacunae within our own traditions, by questioning the tendentially elitist

198 undertones that mark so much anarchist discourse.Individualist strands of an- archism are especially susceptible to a disdain for “the masses”, and the post-left persuasion frequently accentuates the inegalitarian aspects of this worldview. A few post-left anarchists go so far as to extol the right wing tendencies within anarchism as a healthy corrective to the grave dangers of social equality and the dastardly connivance of anarchists and power-mad leftists. On this score, McQuinn’s essay sets off alarm bells for readers familiar with the neglected history of anarchist flirtations with the right. Anarchism has long had something of a Janus face, oscillating between emancipatory and exclusivist poles. Stirner himself is an exemplary figure in this regard: simultaneously the chief inspiration for one wing of anarchism, and a darling of the right, from its proprietarian faction to its pronounced elitist and authoritarian variants. The problem here is not really that of an “opening to the political right”, as McQuinn anticipates, but rather the naïve notion that anarchists can now, through force of will alone, walk through the looking glass into the promised land of “neither left nor right”. Post-left anarchists would do well to examine the history of this foolish slogan before adopting it into their repertoire.In its modern form the phrase was popularized by the right wing of the German Greens, particularly the far-right authoritarian Herbert Gruhl, during the reactionary backlash of the early 1980’s. But the roots of the neither-left-nor-right idea go considerably further back; a version of this stance was popular within the nationalist and populist völkisch movement in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, and the pretence of offering a ‘third way’ between left and right became one of the major selling points for European fascism. Anarchists have not always escaped this kind of political disorientation. From the peculiar response of Proudhonists to the Dreyfus Affair, to the Italian syndi- calists who joined Mussolini, to the “national anarchists” and “third positionists” of today, anarchist militants have sometimes found a comfortable home on the extreme right end of the spectrum. Although post-left anarchists often dismiss such cases as either isolated or irrelevant, the record of anarchist crossover into far right terrain is in fact remarkably long. Among the better known examples are Georges Sorel in France, Günther Bartsch in Germany, Troy Southgate in Britain, and Bill White in the US. The desire to move ‘beyond left and right’ played a key role in several of these instances, and continues to do so today. The conclusion to McQuinn’s essay suggests an indifferent attitude, at best, toward this regrettable history. All in all, the post-left paradigm still needs a lot of refining.In the midst of condemning reductionism, reification, and the failed politics of the sectarian left, it relies on a reductionist view of left history and a reified notion of absolute individuality while encouraging the sectarian strands within anarchism. The

199 much-needed process of theoretical and practical refinement would be more effective if post-left adherents could bring themselves to engage with the criticisms put forward by left anarchists.Indeed that step alone might spur a re-thinking of the categories post-leftists hold so dear, along with a recognition that there are important libertarian and anti-statist strands within the left. Drawing the consequences from this recognition would likely mean a major overhaul of post- left anarchy in its present form.In place of wholesale rejection of a mythical “left” that is devoid of distinctions, post-leftists would have to acknowledge that the left, just like the right, is an extremely heterogeneous spectrum, not a single entity, and that some of its currents warrant more than scorn. Anarchists are working toward a society where everyone who wants to can participate in social affairs on an equal footing, where domination and hierarchy have been replaced by solidarity and self-management. The project of creating such a society will require cooperation with a broad range of oppositional move- ments, many of whom have solid grounds for refraining from a wholehearted embrace of anarchist doctrine. A nuanced understanding of how our own prin- ciples can be articulated to the insights and experiences of compatible struggles will go a long way toward overcoming the blind spots in the anarchist tradition. An anarchism that wishes to avoid reification and leave the mistakes of the past behind will take this lesson to heart.

200 Retrieved on July 8, 2009 from news.infoshop.org

201 202 Lawrence Jarach

On the radical virtues of being left alone; deconstructing Staudenmaier

2004

The Unoriginality Argument

The first thing a critic does who can’t deal with the content of what s/he is criticizing is to try to show that it isn’t original. Like the argumentthat worker’s self-management is more efficient at production than private ownership, this argument relies exclusively on capitalist criteria (innovation being seen as the sure road to success). So like most critics who show little desire to understand their targets, Peter Staudenmaier (PS) first attacks post-left anarchy (PLA) by asserting that it isn’t original — even though nobody says it is.In fact, like anarchism itself, it can be seen as an attempt to provide a (more or less) coherent theoretical framework for, and a description of, a tendency already being expressed. The neo-Platformists are fond of quoting the authors of the Platform when the latter said that anarchism didn’t spring forth from the minds of great thinkers like Bakunin and Kropotkin, but rather was their objective analysis of contemporary class struggles. Clearly the anarchic impulse can be seen in many rebellions and writings that predate the moment when Proudhon proudly proclaimed himself an anarchist. So too it is with the discussions that make up PLA. We are merely trying to make the argument that this impulse against , polarized dualities, centralization, bureaucratism, nationalism, the cult of personality (etc.), have been a part of anarchist theory and practice from the beginning (and probably existed before as well). The urge to distance anarchism from the authoritarian nature of leftism was already strong by the time Marx and Engels were able todesignand execute the expulsion of Bakunin and most of his fans from the First International.

The Bad Faith Argument

PS’s proof for the unoriginality of PLA is that it resembles the critiques of — horror of horrors — leftists! Camatte, Castoriadis, and the various theorists attached to the Frankfurt School are cited as major (perhaps he would have preferred to say exclusive) influences on what he sees as the core components of PLA. But since he has only a rudimentary and bad faith understanding of PLA (in that he isn’t really interested in debating its proponents — as can be seen by his insulting and evasive allegations), he cannot hope to have a comprehensive grasp on its influences. He links these leftists to PLA as if this were some secret he has discovered and can therefore proudly expose, hoping that the whole PLA house of cards will come tumbling down. PS smugly points out the leftist pedigree of this constellation of thinkers as if PLAs wanted to remove any possible connection with any leftist at any time, as if the PLA discourse were called “anti-left” or “non- left” anarchism (another bad faith, and I would go so far as to say dishonest, slur

205 intended to prove that PLA is actually a right-wing phenomenon — more about that below). The “post” in PLA clearly means that leftists have influenced PLAs, and that we recognize that anarchism has an undisputed leftist genealogy — but it is the aim of PLA to move anarchist theory and practice beyond those limits. I would venture to guess that most who consider themselves PLAs or who are interested in PLA have at least heard of or know something about Camatte, Castoriadis, Marcuse, Benjamin, Adorno, et al. I have read some of their works, just as I have read material by lots of other non-anarchists (like Reich, Foucault, Debord, Memmi among others), who have influenced me, and whose writings have spurred me on to deeper analyses of various topics.I would say that the aspects of leftist thought and practice that bothered most or all of those authors enough to critique them from the inside (as it were) are the same kinds of things that (do and should) bother PLAs as well. Is PS trying to say that since PLAs have been influenced to different degrees by leftist thinkers, that therefore PLAs cannot declare themselves “post” left?

The Straw Man Argument

The next ploy is to fabricate positions not held by any of his targets.To be generous to PS, perhaps some of his allegations are true; but we’d never know it because he never says who holds such positions, denying everyone the possibility of either agreeing with or refuting him. The first allegation is that “post-leftism adamantly rejects any accommodation with what it takes to be ‘the left.’” Not to be too much of a smart-ass, but “post- leftism” doesn’t do anything — post-leftists do.In any case, which post-leftists reject “any accommodation” with the left? What does “accommodation” look like, and then, what does its rejection look like? PS is unsatisfied with the configuration of the left that has been offered by post-leftists, complaining that the term “itself seems to expand or contract tofit the circumstances.” This is a neat rhetorical trick, perhaps, but one that remains unconvincing. Here’s what I have said in two different places:

“ . . . the Left includes , Leninism, , cer- tain kinds of liberalism, and various other aspects of reined-in capitalism” (from a letter sent to the British periodical Total Liberty, and published in Black Badger #4, 2000)

“The Left has consistently been identified with the international labor move- ment from the time of the First International; with the shift of focus from

206 western Europe toward Russia beginning in 1917 and continuing into the 1960s, leftists have identified themselves in relation to events that occurred in the workers’ paradise . . . The leftist agenda is predicated on the use of legislation, representative government and all of its coercive institutions, centralized economic planning by technocrats and other experts, and a com- mitment to hierarchical social relations.” (from “Don’t Let the Left(overs) Ruin Your Appetite,” Anarchy magazine #48 Fall/Winter 1999–2000)

While PS can’t be held responsible for not reading the first (Black Badger has only limited distribution), the second excerpt comes from the issue of Anarchy that tried to initiate this discussion; the words on the cover — in big red letters — say “Post-Left Anarchy!” One might think that PS, as an aspiring critic of the trend, might have wanted to read the four essays that started this whole thing. Sadly, we’ll never know if he did, since he never cites any of those authors, let alone their essays. PS further complains:“Many anarchists drawn to the post-left label appear to live in a world in which all leftists are Leninists, except when they’re liberals, and where the left as a whole is an ominous iceberg of power-worship threatening to sink a virtually Titanic-sized anarchist movement.” Who says that all leftists are Leninists? Not me, as can be seen from the two quotes above (and since, as will be seen later, PS knows who I am, he can hardly be let off the hook for overlooking what I’ve written in places besides the internet). Leninists are a subset of leftism, as are (left) liberals. Who remains? Social democrats? Who else? PS never tells us. PLAs can perhaps be faulted for tending to ignore the full spectrum of what usually gets called the left but why should the champions of the left avoid it? Maybe PS should tell us what the left is, so we can determine if we agree with his determination. The left is certainly larger than all the anarchists (of whatever tendency) put together. Where does PS get the idea that PLAs think of the anarchist movement as huge? Regardless of the relative sizes of each tendency, however, leftists have proven over the past hundred years (in places as diverse as Mexico, Russia, China, Spain, Cuba) their homicidal predisposition when dealing with anarchists. “Ominous”? “Power-worship[ing]”? Indeed. Given the historical facts, why shouldn’t they be so considered? PS then avers, “the anarchist movement is . . . a current that still has much to learn from other radical tendencies and social movements.” Who says anything different? As already mentioned,I have learned plenty from non-anarchist radical thinkers, and I expect to do more of that in the future. But I know where I won’t

207 be looking: in the history and theories of Leninism and liberalism and social democracy. Education is a process of learning what is useful as well as what is pernicious; what I have learned from mainstream leftism I consider not useful for promoting any kind of anarchy. This is my educated opinion and analysis. PS offers nothing to dissuade me from these conclusions. Other straw man slurs include the following:“A few post-left anarchists go so far as to extol the right-wing tendencies within anarchism as a healthy corrective . . . ” Just who these post-left anarchists might be, or what right-wing tendencies they extol, remains a complete mystery. Then there’s the old stand-by of the right-wing canard:“Post-left anarchists would do well to examine the history of this foolish slogan before adopting it into their repertoire.” What slo- gan? “Neither left nor right,” which is yet another example of PS’s fake concerns. No post-left anarchist I know of uses this slogan for the simple reason that this tendency is called “post-left,” not “post-right” (the only place that I’ve seen it is in the subscription ad for this journal — and it’s an ad, not a manifesto.) In fact, there’s nothing in the post-left anarchist discussions that can be put within the realm of right-wing politics. As I wrote to a comrade in Black Badger #5 (2002):

“I have a few things to say about this Beyond Left and Right bullshit. The reason that post-left anarchists (at least some of my pals and me) say that we’re post-left is that we acknowledge that anarchism has been historically considered part of the revolutionary left. No serious anarchist would ever say that anarchism has to be post-right . . . Anarchists are not ‘beyond the right’ because we’ve never been part of it. Those ‘third position’ nitwits are trying to be clever and shrewd, and their success among anarchists is only an indication of how desperately weak the ‘third position’ is and how stupid anarchists can be.”

Mixed in with these straw man attacks, however, PS does include one tantalizing sentence, but unfortunately he follows it up with as little evidence as anywhere else in his tirade. He says:“ . . . there are important libertarian and anti-statist strands within the left.” I’ve heard that too, and I even know some people who call themselves anti-state or left communists who are easy to get along with, and with whom I have begun to collaborate on a more serious basis. But what strands and which theorists are PS talking about? We’ll never know.

208 Getting Personal with a Straw Man

PS writes, “some of these post-leftists carry the ideal of rugged individualism to the point of self-parody, declaring that in the liberated future, nobody will ever have to associate with people they don’t personally like. One of them summed up the post-left stance by saying simply ‘I want to be left alone,’ free of all annoying attachments of social life, without other people interjecting their own opinions or offering critical comments on each other’s behavior.” Talk about a straw man — and I should know, because he’s talking about me! First of all, I don’t call myself an individualist (rugged or not) because for most people both within and outside the anarchist scene, “individualist” is usually taken to mean someone who is in favor of , which I am not. Being suspicious of conformity masquerading behind calls for unity, I do tend to favor the individual in relation to groups — but not necessarily at the expense of the group.I also recognize that there are plenty of times when there’s no tension at all. If my preferences put me within the generally understood category of “individualist” I won’t deny it, but this usage is ahistorical. Second, what (if anything) does not wanting to associate with people whom one may not like have to do with individualism? Can PS not conceive of any left anarchist whose opinions are substantially similar to his own, but whose personality is so obnoxious that he would prefer never to have to be in the same room with her/him? Finding others unappealing may have something to do with individual taste, but it has precious little to do with any historically accurate understanding of individualism. I suppose a quick reminder of a basic anarchist principle is on order here: voluntary association. PS’s invocation of “free association,” which “encourages exploration and mutual recognition, including critical contestation of what other people say and do” is quite a nice explanation of it. But, as usual, there’s something missing. Not only does voluntary association mean that people have the ability to collaborate with others in a freely chosen manner, but it also means that people have the ability not to associate with others.Is PS implying that anarchists should be compelled to associate with anyone and everyone who wants to associate with them? Next, we come to the issue of quotations.I did in fact say that part of my political vision could be summed up with the phrase “I want to be left alone.” But PS puts my quote in a bizarre context. I wasn’t trying to sum up “the post-left stance,” but merely my personal preference in terms of not wanting to be told by some committee or other group what I must or mustn’t do, and with whom (I seem to remember that my statement came quickly after the issue of not wanting to be forced to associate with someone I didn’t like). This has nothing to do with

209 whether or not my vision is post-leftist or not. I consider such a sentiment to be a corollary of voluntary association. If PS’s left anarchist vision includes a mandate not to leave me alone (what ever happened to the ability of a minority to secede?), then what makes his vision different from other non-anarchist leftist visions? In terms of criticizing certain behavior, that depends. If some behavior is being engaged in by a self-proclaimed anarchist and goes against anarchist principles, then I’d consider it an anarchist responsibility to call that behavior into question. But that certainly doesn’t — and shouldn’t — apply to all behavior. Frivolous criticism is both unwanted and unwarranted; criticism from people one respects looks and sounds a lot different from criticism from people who are nosy and annoying.Is PS implying that anarchists have an open-ended imperative to interfere in the lives of others? Finally we come to the really interesting part of his allegation, which is that “being left alone” really means that I want to be free of all social interactions. Thankfully for PS, he didn’t put that part in quotation marks — because I have never said anything even remotely similar. This is his fantasy about what “being left alone” means to me. Being left alone is not the same as being isolated or disconnected, as just about anyone who understands English should understand. “Being left alone” does not equal being alone.

Rejecting Subjectivity or, The Straw Man Disappears in a Puff of Smoke

“Though the promoters of these notions strenuously deny it . . . ” PS here asserts that what he’s about to allege is denied by his targets. Not only does he dismiss these denials out of hand, he also doesn’t care that they are made in the first place. Either way, PS is asserting that he knows best what’s really going on, regardless of the fact that his targets (the promoters — whoever they are — and their notions) are fantasies. The refusal and rejection of what others say about themselves is one of the defining characteristics of authoritarians of all stripes. By stating that he knows what is objectively true for others, PS puts himself in league with other leftists, to be sure, but he also has thrown in his lot with just about every arrogant authoritarian know-it-all who ever imposed their power and ideology on anyone else. I will say it clearly: my attitude does not reject “the very possibility of com- munal existence.” I live with my partner and our dog;I co-facilitate a weekly anarchist study group;I co-organize an annual anarchist theory conference;I collaborate on the editorial decisions of this journal; I have had (and plan to continue to have) occupations where I have to engage regularly with plenty of

210 people — almost none of them anarchists or radicals of any kind. And I almost always enjoy these diverse communal interactions. Unless PS wishes to alter the definition of “communal” to fit his other fantasies, my life is overflowing with such things.I will also gladly declare the following:I do not believe that “all social structures are inherently oppressive.” I don’t know any anarchist who actually says or believes that. Does PS know of any anarchist who believes it — let along anyone who has written it? We won’t know because, once again, he doesn’t tell us. “[S]haring the world with other people means that sometimes we can’t do exactly what we want to do, and sometimes we will need to cooperate with people we don’t like very much.” This is certainly true, and I would never deny it. But acknowledging that this is true and demanding that we must cooperate with people we don’t like, or celebrating that we can’t always do exactly what we would prefer, is two different things. PS, in his condemnation of my desire to be left alone, clearly implies that I should be forced to interact with people I dislike, and that I should also be forced to submit to the will of others. Negotiation is the key, based on respect and solidarity — neither of which can be imposed if they are to have any authentic meaning. There have been plenty of times in my life when I have interacted with people who annoy me, and there have been plenty of occasions when I have submitted to others’ desires, but I’ll be damned if I will allow myself to be forced to do so by PS and people like him. What PS refers to as a “false promise”I would call a “false position.” Who proclaims the desire for “absolute individual autonomy”? Nobody I know among anarchists. PS is correct that such a strange concoction is “indebted to those classical liberal principles that underwrite capitalist society . . . ” What anarchist says anything else? Who are these phantoms who continue to swirl in and around the mind of PS? He then touts “a positive conception of social freedom, a kind of freedom that flourishes in cooperation with others and demands equality as its necessary coun- terpart, a kind of freedom that is embodied in anti-authoritarian social structures and cooperative social practices.” Sounds great; I don’t deny the possibility for such things to occur. I have my own imagination to draw from to fill in the gaps in this scenario, but since they come out of my imagination,I can’t be certain about any of them or about their effectiveness in promoting freedom or equality. Maybe PS knows of some positive examples. But just as he never gives us any examples of people who hold the alleged positions he complains about, he also never gives us any hint about what these particular structures might be or look like, or what these particular practices might entail. We have nothing by which to assess the accuracy of his claims. This, like much of the rest of his complaint, is a dodge built on smoke and mirrors. Not only does he refuse to provide examples,

211 but he also doesn’t bother to explain how such structures can be kept free of bureaucratism or coercive force to compel individuals and groups to accept them or cooperate with them. Nobody, apparently, is allowed to question any of the assumptions that lead him to these conclusions — he says it, he believes it, it is self-evident, and that’s it. Arguments based on common sense and self-evident conclusions aren’t — and shouldn’t be — convincing.

Guilt by (False) Association

In one of PS’s lowest moments, he slanders PLA as a haven for potential right- wingers.“ . . . anarchist militants have sometimes found a comfortable home on the extreme right end of the spectrum. Although post-left anarchists often dismiss such cases as either isolated or irrelevant, the record of anarchist crossover into far right terrain is in fact remarkably long.” In all the reading and writing I’ve done on post-left anarchy, I have never mentioned this phenomenon, let alone tried to dismiss it. I have remarked on the unfortunate tendency of some Italian syndicalists in the 1920s and ‘30s to dive into fascist politics, but not within the context of talking about the virtues of having a post-left analysis. The people he trots out (and it’s not even clear that Sorel or White were ever actually any kind of anarchist — I can’t say anything about Bartsch or Southgate since I’ve never heard of either of them) as examples of this unfortunate trend obviously found something lacking in anarchism, and I would argue that when they veered off into reactionary politics, they just as quickly stopped being anarchists.Is PS saying that these right-wingers retained their anarchist credentials after abandoning anarchism? What have their anarchist contemporaries said about that? Once again, we’ll never know. What could be more interesting for the purposes of assessing the relevance of a post-left analysis would be tracking the “crossover” of anarchists into Lenin- ism and Stalinism. We could begin with Robert Minor, Mao, Arshinov, Serge, and countless others — and I would wager that this list is at least equal to PS’s anarchist-to-rightist list. What would we learn from examining that particular phenomenon? About as much as from examining the right-wing “crossovers”: not much. People change; we cannot necessarily draw any conclusions about the strength or weakness of their later convictions by looking at those they held earlier. And it would definitely be odd to draw any conclusions at all about the political philosophies themselves based on the twists and turns of the allegiances of individual anarchists through time. If the majority of anarchists became either fascists or Leninists, then there might be something to say, but my sense is that

212 the majority of anarchists remain self-identified anarchists — even if their under- standing of anarchism changes. Perhaps the only realistic conclusion that can be made is that those anarchists who “crossed over” were always more authoritarian than either they or their erstwhile comrades were aware. And that, of course, has nothing to do with any kind of anarchism at all.

On Spots, Both Tight and Blind

“The project of creating such a society [of solidarity and self-management] will require cooperation with a broad range of oppositional movements, many of whom have solid grounds for refraining from a wholehearted embrace of anar- chist doctrine.” I’m all for cooperation with anyone who promotes and supports anti-statist and non-hierarchical self-organization. Some who do are certainly not anarchists; why should anarchists expect otherwise, since anarchists can claim neither the invention nor sole proprietorship of such ideas. But the difficult questions to answer about “cooperation”(much like the similarly thorny issue of organization) are what kind? and with whom? If PS’s “cooperation” with (pre- sumably leftist) non-anarchists looks like it has all through the troubled history of the interactions between leftists and anarchists, then I will remain steadfastly sus- picious of it, if not outright opposed to it. This century and a half of “cooperation” has looked almost exclusively like the complete political subordination and active marginalization of anarchists, often with the requirement of the abandonment of anarchist principles, and occasionally including the dispensing of murderous rage. Such “cooperation” has definitely put anarchists in tight spots historically. PS complains about “the blind spots in the anarchist tradition”; his own particular blind spots have to do with this history of real anarchists. In a revolutionary situation (if the history of such events is any indication), it will be necessary for people from many varieties of political traditions to col- laborate with each other. If anarchists are interested in propelling revolutionary actions into the realm of authentic liberation and freedom, we must remain ded- icated to our principles, come what may. This includes a refusal to cooperate with any state or government. Too often, politicians (that is, those who are inter- ested in exercising some kind of power) disguised as revolutionaries or anarchists have managed to hoodwink other anarchists into abandoning our principles with the excuses of efficiency and/or expediency. Too often, these same people have steered anarchists into the most unlikely collaborations with statists of all leftist varieties in the name of Unity or fighting The Greater Enemy. Has the anarchist project of liberation and freedom come any closer to fruition as a result of these notable examples of cooperation?I am forced to wonder: are any of the 20th

213 century examples cited earlier considered by PS to be among “the blind spots” that must be overcome or “the mistakes of the past” that anarchists must leave behind? PS not only refuses to acknowledge any of these troubling aspects of his calls for “cooperation,” but he also refuses to acknowledge that post-left anarchy “is not a single entity.” He’s sad that PLAs don’t acknowledge the “extremely heterogeneous spectrum” of leftism, but he never offers any corrective examples — he only repeats that it exists. He never offers any convincing arguments for why anarchists should remain within the historically bankrupt tradition of , welfare statism, and other forms of tinkering with the state.

This Is What Cooperation Looks Like

“Anarchists are working toward a society where everyone who wants to can participate in social affairs on an equal footing.” This statement might be more convincing if this “equal footing” were accepted by left anarchists who maintain that all anarchists — in order to be considered anarchists in the first place — must be leftists; those of us who identify to one degree or another with thePLA discourse should be approached on this “equal footing” or it’s just a slogan with no meaning. Further, it might be more convincing if left anarchists were to demand that this equality be put into practice when cooperating with (or sucking up to) authoritarians instead of being content to be the utopian (and therefore easily dismissible) conscience of the left. Cooperation between anarchists and non-anarchists might be more attractive to anarchists of all tendencies if the non-anarchists were to adapt themselves and their methods to some of our principles for a change. Some typically anarchist tactics have been introduced to non-anarchists over the years, and have even been used by them on occasion. Non-hierarchical decision-making, mutual aid, direct action, collaborative groups based on political affinity — all these things have been discussed and used by various activists, from the anti-nuclear movement of the ‘70s to the contemporary anti-globalization movement. Many of these activists might be surprised — even horrified — to learn about the origins of these tactics within anarchist theory and practice. These tactics are used because they work well in many circumstances, but non-anarchists would certainly abandon them quickly whenever it appears that the success of an action or a campaign is at stake. I, for one, would demand a stubborn adherence to, and thorough application of, these principles as a pre-condition for cooperation with anyone, including other anarchists; if leftists or other non-anarchists wish to join in a project withthese

214 parameters, then I’m happy to cooperate with them.In that case, radical, even revolutionary, cooperation will finally be implemented on anarchist terms. The history of the unfortunate attempts at unity between leftists and anarchists is littered with the corpses of anarchists. Plenty of anarchists have thought the false promises of unity were worth dying for — I’m more interested in the possibilities of non-hierarchical cooperation based on genuine solidarity. That’s a future worth living for.

215 Retrieved on July 8, 2009 from news.infoshop.org

216 Wolfi Landstreicher

From Politics to Life: Ridding anarchy of the leftist millstone

From the time anarchism was first defined as a distinct radical movement it has been associated with the left, but the association has always been uneasy. Leftists who were in a position of authority (including those who called themselves anarchists, like the leaders of the CNT and the FAI in Spain in 1936–37) found the anarchist aim of the total transformation of life and the consequent principle that the ends should already exist in the means of struggle to be a hindrance to their political programs. Real insurgence always burst far beyond any political program, and the most coherent anarchists saw the realization of their dreams precisely in this unknown place beyond.Yet, time after time, when the fires of insurrection cooled (and even occasionally, as in Spain in 1936–37, while they still burnt brightly), leading anarchists would take their place again as “the conscience of the left”. But if the expansiveness of anarchist dreams and the principles that it implies have been a hindrance to the political schemes of the left, these schemes have been a far greater millstone around the neck of the anarchist movement, weighing it down with the “realism” that cannot dream. For the left, the social struggle against exploitation and oppression is essentially a political program to be realized by whatever means are expedient. Such a conception obviously requires a political methodology of struggle, and such a methodology is bound to contradict some basic anarchist principles. First of all, politics as a distinct category of social existence is the separation of the decisions that determine our lives from the execution of those decisions. This separation resides in institutions that make and impose those decisions. It matters little how democratic or consensual those institutions are; the separation and institutionalization inherent in politics always constitute an imposition simply because they require that decisions be made before the circumstances to which they apply arise. This makes it necessary that they take on the form of general rules that are always to be applied in certain types of situations regardless of the specific circumstances. The seeds of ideological thinking — in which ideas rule the activities of individuals rather than serving individuals in developing their own projects — are found here, but I will go into that later. Of equal importance from an anarchist perspective is the fact that power lies in these decision-making and enforcing institutions. And the leftist conception of social struggle is precisely one of influencing, taking over or creating alternative versions of these institutions. In other words, it is a struggle to change, not to destroy institutionalized power relationships. This conception of struggle, with its programmatic basis requires an organiza- tion as the means for carrying out the struggle. The organization represents the struggle, because it is the concrete expression of its program. If those involved define that program as revolutionary and anarchist, then the organization comes

219 to represent revolution and anarchy for them, and the strength of the organiza- tion is equated with the strength of revolutionary and anarchist struggle. A clear example of this is found in the Spanish revolution where the leadership of the CNT, after inspiring the workers and peasants of Catalonia to expropriate the means of production (as well as arms with which they formed their free militias), did not dissolve the organization and allow the workers to explore the recreation of social life on their own terms, but rather took over management of production. This confusion of management by the union for workers’ self-management had results that can be studied by anyone willing to look at those events critically. When the struggle against the ruling order is thus separated from the individu- als carrying it out and placed into the hands of the organization, it ceases to be the self-determined project of those individuals and instead becomes a external cause to which they adhere. Because this cause is equated with the organization, the primary activity of the individuals who adhere to it is the maintenance and expansion of the organization. In fact, the leftist organization is the means through which the left intends to transform institutionalized power relationships. Whether this is done through appeal to the current rulers and the exercise of democratic rights, through the electoral or violent conquest of state power, through the institutional expropria- tion of the means of production or through a combination of these means is of little importance.To accomplish this, the organization tries to make itself into an alternative power or a counter-power. This is why it must embrace the current ideology of power, i.e., democracy. Democracy is that system of separated and institutionalized decision-making that requires the creation of social consensus for programs put forward. Although power always resides in coercion, in the democratic framework, it is justified through the consent it can win. This is why it is necessary for the left to seek as many adherents as possible, numbers to tally in support of its programs. Thus, in its adherence to democracy, the left must embrace the quantitative illusion. The attempt to win adherents requires the appeal to the lowest common denom- inator. So instead of carrying on a vital theoretical exploration, the left develops a set of simplistic doctrines through which to view the world and a litany of moral outrages perpetrated by the current rulers, which leftists hope will have mass appeal. Any questioning or exploration outside of this ideological framework is vehemently condemned or viewed with incomprehension. The incapacity for serious theoretical exploration is the cost of accepting the quantitative illusion according to which numbers of adherents, regardless of their passivity and igno- rance, are considered the reflection of a strong movement rather than the quality and coherence of ideas and practice.

220 The political necessity of appealing to “the masses” also moves the left to use the method of making piece-meal demands to the current rulers. This method is certainly quite consistent with a project of transforming power relationships, precisely because it does not challenge those relationships at their roots. In fact, by making demands of those in power, it implies that simple (though possibly extreme) adjustments of the current relationships are sufficient for the realization of the leftist program. What is not put into question in this method is theruling order itself, because this would threaten the political framework of the left. Implicit in this piece-meal approach to change is the doctrine of progressivism (in fact, one of the more popular labels among leftists and liberals nowadays — who would rather leave behind these other sullied labels — is precisely “progressive”). Progressivism is the idea that the current order of things is the result of an ongoing (though possibly “dialectical”) process of improvement and that if we put in the effort (whether through voting, petition, litigation, , political violence or even the conquest of power — anything other than its destruction), we can take this process further. The concept of progress and the piece-meal approach that is its practical expression point to another quantitative aspect of the leftist conception of social transformation. This transformation is simply a matter of degrees, of one’s position along an ongoing trajectory. The right amount of adjustment will get us “there”(wherever “there” is). Reform and revolution are simply different levels of the same activity. Such are the absurdities of leftism which remains blind to the overwhelming evidence that the only trajectory that we have been on at least since the rise of capitalism and industrialism is the increasing impoverishment of existence, and this cannot be reformed away. The piece-meal approach and the political need for categorization also leads the left to valorize people in terms of their membership in various oppressed and exploited groups, such as “workers”, “women”, “people of color”, “gays and lesbians” and so on. This categorization is the basis of identity politics.Identity politics is the particular form of false opposition in which oppressed people choose to identify with a particular social category through which their oppression is reinforced as a supposed act of defiance against their oppression.In fact, the continued identification with this social role limits the capacity of those who practice identity politics to analyze their situation in this society deeply and to act as individuals against their oppression. It thus guarantees the continuation of the social relationships that cause their oppression. But only as members of categories are these people useful as pawns in the political maneuverings of the left, because such social categories take on the role of pressure groups and power blocs within the democratic framework. The political logic of the left, with its organizational requirements, its embrace of democracy and the quantitative illusion and its valorization of people as mere

221 members of social categories, is inherently collectivist, suppressing the individual as such. This expresses itself in the call for individuals to sacrifice themselves to the various causes, programs and organizations of the left. Behind these calls one finds the manipulative ideologies of collective identity, collective responsibility and collective guilt. Individuals who are defined as being part of a “privileged” group — “straight”, “white”, “male”, “first-world”, “middle class”— are held responsible for all the oppression attributed to that group. They are then manipulated into acting to expiate these “crimes”, giving uncritical support to the movements of those more oppressed than they are.Individuals who are defined as being part of an oppressed group are manipulated into accepting collective identity in this group out of a mandatory “solidarity” — sisterhood, black nationalism, queer identity, etc. If they reject or even deeply and radically criticize this group identity, this is equated with acceptance of their own oppression.In fact, the individual who acts on his or her own (or only with those with whom s/he has developed real affinity) against her or his oppression and exploitation as s/he experiences it in his or her life, is accused of “bourgeois individualism”, in spite of the fact that s/he is struggling precisely against the alienation, separation and atomization that is the inherent result of the collective alienated social activity that the state and capital — so-called “bourgeois society” — impose upon us. Because leftism is the active perception of social struggle as a political program, it is ideological from top to bottom. The struggle of the left does not grow out of the desires, needs and dreams of the living individuals exploited, oppressed, dominated and dispossessed by this society. It is not the activity of people striving to reappropriate their own lives and seeking the tools necessary for doing so. Rather it is a program formulated in the minds of leftist leaders or in organizational meetings that exists above and before people’s individual struggles and to which these latter are to subordinate themselves. Whatever the slogan of this program — socialism, communism, anarchism, sisterhood, the African people, animal rights, earth liberation, primitivism, workers’ self-management, etc., etc. — it does not provide a tool for individuals to use in their own struggles against domination, but rather demands individuals to exchange the domination of the ruling order for the domination of the leftist program.In other words, it demands that individuals continue to give up their capacity to determine their own existence. At its best, the anarchist endeavor has always been the total transformation of existence based on the reappropriation of life by each and every individual, acting in free association with others of their choosing. This vision can be found inthe most poetic writings of nearly every well-known anarchist, and it is what made anarchism “the conscience of the left”. But of what use is it to be the conscience of a movement that does not and cannot share the breadth and depth of one’s dreams, if one desires to realize those dreams? In the history of the anarchist movement,

222 those perspectives and practices closest to the left, such as anarcho-syndicalism and , have always had far less of the dream and far more of the program about them. Now that leftism has ceased to be a significant force in any way distinguishable from the rest of the political sphere at least in the West of the world, there is certainly no reason to continue carrying this millstone around our necks. The realization of anarchist dreams, of the dreams of every individual still capable of dreaming and desiring independently to be the autonomous creators of their own existence, requires a conscious and rigorous break with the left. At minimum, this break would mean:

1. The rejection of a political perception of social struggle; a recognition that revolutionary struggle is not a program, but is rather the struggle for the indi- vidual and social reappropriation of the totality of life. As such it is inherently anti-political. In other words,it is opposed to any form of social organization — and any method of struggle — in which the decisions about how to live and struggle are separated from the execution of those decisions regardless of how democratic and participatory this separated decision-making process may be. 2. The rejection of organizationalism, meaning by this the rejection of theidea that any organization can represent exploited individuals or groups, social struggle, revolution or anarchy. Therefore also the rejection of all formal organizations — parties, unions, federations and their like — which, due to their programmatic nature, take on such a representative role. This does not mean the rejection of the capacity to organize the specific activities necessary to the revolutionary struggle, but rather the rejection of the subjection of the organization of tasks and projects to the formalism of an organizational pro- gram. The only task that has ever been shown to require formal organization is the development and maintenance of a formal organization. 3. The rejection of democracy and the quantitative illusion. The rejection of the view that the number of adherents to a cause, idea or program is what determines the strength of the struggle, rather than the qualitative value of the practice of struggle as an attack against the institutions of domination and as a reappropriation of life. The rejection of every institutionalization or formalization of decision-making, and indeed of every conception of decision- making as a moment separated from life and practice. The rejection, as well, of the evangelistic method that strives to win over the masses. Such a method assumes that theoretical exploration is at an end, that one has the answer to which all are to adhere and that therefore every method is acceptable for getting the message out even if that method contradicts what we are saying. It leads one to seek followers who accept one’s position rather than comrades and accomplices with which to carry on one’s explorations. The

223 practice instead of striving to carry out one’s projects, as best one can, in a way consistent with one’s ideas, dreams and desires, thus attracting potential accomplices with whom to develop relationships of affinity and expand the practice of revolt. 4. The rejection of making demands to those in power, choosing rather a practice of direct action and attack. The rejection of the idea that we can realize our desire for self-determination through piece-meal demands which, at best, only offer a temporary amelioration of the harmfulness of the social order of capital. Recognition of the necessity to attack this society in its totality, to achieve a practical and theoretical awareness in each partial struggle of the totality that must be destroyed. Thus, as well, the capacity to see what is potentially revolutionary — what has moved beyond the logic of demands and of piece-meal changes — in partial social struggles, since, after all, every radical, insurrectionary rupture has been sparked by a struggle that started as an attempt to gain partial demands, but that moved in practice from demanding what was desired to seizing it and more. 5. The rejection of the idea of progress, of the idea that the current order of things is the result of an ongoing process of improvement that we can take further, possibly even to its apotheosis, if we put in the effort. The recognition that the current trajectory — which the rulers and their loyal reformist and “revolutionary” opposition call “progress” — is inherently harmful to individ- ual freedom, free association, healthy human relations, the totality of life and the planet itself. The recognition that this trajectory must be brought to an end and new ways of living and relating developed if we are to achieve full autonomy and freedom. (This does not necessarily lead to an absolute rejec- tion of technology and civilization, and such a rejection does not constitute the bottom line of a break with the left, but the rejection of progress most certainly means a willingness to seriously and critically examine and question civilization and technology, and particularly industrialism. Those who are not willing to raise such questions most likely continue to hold to the myth of progress.) 6. The rejection of identity politics. The recognition that, while various oppressed groups experience their dispossession in ways specific to their oppression and analysis of these specificities is necessary in order to get a full understanding of how domination functions, nonetheless, dispossession is fundamentally the stealing away of the capacity of each of us as individuals to create our lives on our own terms in free association with others. The reappropriation of life on the social level, as well as its full reappropriation on the individual level, can only occur when we stop identifying ourselves essentially in terms of our social identities.

224 7. The rejection of collectivism, of the subordination of the individual to the group. The rejection of the ideology of collective responsibility (a rejection that does not mean the refusal of social or class analysis, but rather that re- moves the moral judgment from such analysis, and refuses the dangerous practice of blaming individuals for activities that have been done in the name of, or that have been attributed to, a social category of which they are saidto be a part, but about which they had no choice — e.g., “Jew”, “gypsy”, “male”, “white”, etc.). The rejection of the idea that anyone, either due to “privilege” or due to supposed membership in a particular oppressed group, owes uncrit- ical solidarity to any struggle or movement, and the recognition that such a conception is a major obstruction in any serious revolutionary process. The creation of collective projects and activities to serve the needs and desires of the individuals involved, and not vice versa. The recognition that the funda- mental alienation imposed by capital is not based in any hyper-individualist ideology that it may promote, but rather stems from the collective project of production that it imposes, which expropriates our individual creative ca- pacities to fulfill its aims. The recognition of the liberation of each and every individual to be able to determine the conditions of her or his existence in free association with others of her or his choosing — i.e., the individual and social reappropriation of life — as the primary aim of revolution. 8. The rejection of ideology, that is to say, the rejection of every program, idea, abstraction, ideal or theory that is placed above life and individuals as a con- struct to be served. The rejection, therefore, of God, the State, the Nation, the Race, etc., but also of Anarchism, Primitivism, Communism, Freedom, Reason, the Individual, etc. when these become ideals to which one is to sacrifice one- self, one’s desires, one’s aspirations, one’s dreams. The use of ideas, theoretical analysis and the capacity to reason and think abstractly and critically as tools for realizing one’s aims, for reappropriating life and acting against everything that stands in the way of this reappropriation. The rejection of easy answers that come to act as blinders to one’s attempts to examine the reality one is facing in favor of ongoing questioning and theoretical exploration.

As I see it, these are what constitute a real break with the left. Where any of these rejections are lacking — whether in theory or practice — vestiges of the left remain, and this is a hindrance to our project of liberation. Since this break with the left is based in the necessity to free the practice of anarchy from the confines of politics, it is certainly not an embrace of the right or any other part of the political spectrum. It is rather a recognition that a struggle for the transformation of the totality of life, a struggle to take back each of our lives as our own in a collective movement for individual realization, can only be hampered by political programs, “revolutionary” organizations and ideological constructs that demand our service,

225 because these too, like the state and capital, demand that we give our lives to them rather than take our lives as our own. Our dreams are much too large for the narrow confines of political schemes. It is long past time that we leave the left behind and go on our merry way toward the unknown of insurrection and the creation of full and self-determined lives.

226 Retrieved on April 7, 2009 from www.geocities.com

227 228 Ashen Ruins

Against the Corpse Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist Anarchist Critique of Violence

2002

What’s the Problem?

Sometimes anarchists are slow learners. Disregarding the famous, definitive and prognostic Marx-Bakunin split in the First International near the end of the 19th century, anarchists overall have continued to cling to the obsolete notion that anarchy is best situated within the otherwise statist Leftist milieu, despite the bourgeois democratic origins of the Left-Right spectrum. Since then communists and Marxists, liberals and conservatives alike have had us right where they want us — and it’s shown in our history. In continuing to view ourselves as Leftists, despite the glaring contradictions in such a stance, we have naturally relegated ourselves to the role of critic within larger movements, and often found ourselves either marching towards goals which stand in direct opposition to our own inter- ests or suckered by counter-revolutionary appeals to anti-fascist or anti-capitalist unity. The anarchist, as Leftist, swims in a sea of contradictions, much of which derives from our passive acceptance of the grip that Leftists have over the political dialogue, both in terminology and in the framing of issues.In conceding to them the underlying territory of debate, North American anarchists have historically been forced into reactionary roles, arguing for nonsensical nuanced points or for means over outcomes. Until we are able to break this cycle and forge an independent critique that reflects our own ends, we are doomed to replay the past. If our goal is genuine revolution (and why settle for less?), then Leftism, and the hold it has over our discourse must be rejected. Similarly, we must also confront within our movement the privileges that make the Leftist dialogue attractive. While there are many aspects of Leftism with which anarchy comes into conflict (critiques — or lack thereof — of technology, progress, sexism, hierarchy, statism, white supremacy, etc., all of which need to be evaluated on their own merits), one in particular deserves special attention: violence. Violence must never be romanticized or fetishized, and resorting to violence should not be a casual decision, tactically, strategically or personally. However, the current dominant anarchist critique shares much too much common ground, not incidentally, with that of the Statists and Leftists, which may as well be the standards of the capitalist and the politician for all the difference it makes. As such these standards deserve careful — and skeptical — scrutiny. Rather than reflecting a genuinely unique perspective, the current anarchist critique of violence is clouded by Statist assumptions and middle class fears. The rise of the primitivist critique of society, and the linkage that critique makes between early human societies and our own, provides not only a great example for anarchists to point to of the practicality of anarchist values, but it also allows us the opportunity to finally remove ourselves from under the shadow of the

231 State and capitalism and to forge an independent vision that is not reactionarily anti-Statist, but rather, presents a positive stateless alternative that is informed by human experience before the rise of the State as well as our experience after it. In this sense Statism is reactionary. However, this is not a nuanced argument, nor is it mere semantics. As long as anarchy remains reactionary, there is little hope that we will have a chance of creating a society much different from the one in which we already live (throw in a little worker’s control here, a few neighborhood assemblies there, federate, federate, federate — industrial democracy, bourgeois democracy). Refusing to confront and reconcile the effect anarchism’s modern industrial origins has had on its vision (likewise the Bohemian middle class current gaining popularity), as well as failing to appreciate the opportunities presented by taking a serious look at the Primitivist critique (are you paying attention anarcho- syndicalists?), will surely spell failure just as quickly as joining the government did in Spain ’36 (anarcho-syndicalists, are you still listening?). Part of this transition means that anarchists must reconcile our own violent past with our vision of the future society and reject the hold that Leftism, Statism and privilege has over the debate. Realistically, it may mean breaking with some of the more Leftist influenced strains of anarchism, like anarcho-syndicalism, which probably deserves to remain on the Left, and has a vision that still looks too much likethe shell of the old world it claims to want to supplant (plus, the One Big Union looks a lot like One Big State, and I have little faith either will whither away). Muchof the critique of breaking with the Left will be quite useful in evaluating anarcho- syndicalism, however that is beyond the scope of this essay. The weight of their history and critiques, however, may turn out to be our cement shoes in the end if we fail to evaluate them honestly and critically. The anarchist as reactionary is clearly illustrated by the continuing debate over violence. Not unlike the capitalist press, we anarchists have never come to terms with our violent history. With the rise of anarchy as a growing force, the stereotype of the anarchist as a violent disturber of public order has again been raised and reinforced by the media, government and within the larger affiliated movement itself in an effort to discredit and marginalize us. Again and again, anarchists are forced to make nuanced arguments about how “property destruc- tion is not violence” and that “the real violent element is the police”, despite the fact that these arguments are not getting through and without recognizing their defensive nature. Do anarchists really eschew violence? Not at all. The violence/ non-violence dichotomy is a false one, but playing into it effectively prevents us from forging our own strategies and distinct vision of society. Rather than making the point that violence is often necessary and even appro- priate within the struggle, we have allowed the moralizing Leftists and liberals to control the dialogue and to impose their own hypocritical standards of violence

232 on us. It should not be forgotten that Leftists inherently believe in the legitimacy of the State, support its monopoly on violence and largely (and rightly) see violent opposition to the State or capitalism as repudiations of this presumption, particu- larly when it comes from anarchists, who obviously seek its absolute destruction. Implicitly recognizing the right of some to rule over others,Leftists seek to “speak truth to power”, not to smash it. Even Leftists who support armed struggle are in truth merely extreme examples of the overall trend within Leftism as a whole; while they may approve of violence as a means of struggle for their particular group or faction, in the end they seek to reconstitute the State’s monopoly of force — in their hands, or that of their party (where, presumably, we are to believe they will utilize it more justly). In this sense they are very much within the “burn the village in order to save it” political tradition — a tradition with which, like fascism, the State is clearly quite comfortable. The skepticism with which most anarchists view these groups’ commitments to post-revolutionary non-violence is certainly justified. It also should not be forgotten that even revolutionary Marxist groups do not reject electoral politics as legitimate vehicles for change.In many ways this validates the anarchist critique of the State: revolutionary Leftists do not see violent change as an exception to their otherwise non-violent politics.Instead, their violent revolutionary politics should more properly be viewed as a natural extension of the unspoken (by Leftists) acknowledgement of the violence inherent in the State.In fact, many “revolutionary” Marxists and communists acknowledge this, claiming that the State must be preserved, temporarily, of course, so that it may utilize its monopoly of violence to attack counter-revolutionaries (guess who they are?) and, paradoxically, preserve the revolution so that the State can then whither away. The revolutionary black anarchist, Kuwasi Balagoon, put it this way in his classic essay, “Anarchy Can’t fight Alone”: . . . the goals of anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist and nationalist revolutionaries who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution. They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place. Therefore, since the aims of the Left involve mere changes in leadership, they cannot be legitimately considered revolutionary. Why, then, if our goals are opposed, should we allow their moral rubric to be imposed upon us?Instead of claiming that smashing a window isn’t violent — a point that average people reject out of common sense (and therefore makes me wonder about the common sense of some anarchists)— why don’t we drop the semantics and admit that, yes, it’s very clearly violent and then make a case for it? Do we consider the Israeli

233 bulldozing of Palestinian homes non-violent? If, on the other hand, smashing a window is merely a symbolic act, but not violent, what message are we trying to send? With smashing a window thus set as the absolute limit of appropriate dissent, aren’t we really making the absurdly contradictory point that this violent system must be opposed through a variety of tactics, up to and including smashing a window (which is not violent, by the way). But no further. Is this the limit, then, of our resistance? What a sad comment on our motivations, if non-violence is the furthest frontier of our rage in the face of this corpse machine, America. What do we do then, once anarchists or, more realistically, everyday folk do start picking up rocks (or other weapons) and using them against cops?In the case of average people engaged in revolt, what will distinguish our moralizing denunciations from those of the Leftists and the State? When this happens with anarchists (much less frequently, of course), Leftists and liberals point fingers and, in response, anarchist comrades will go to great lengths to explain how the poor anarchists were merely defending themselves. But let’s examine the logic of this point: must we always be on the defensive then? Are we perpetual victims? Or is it more likely, as Alfredo Bonnano pointed out in his essay, Armed Joy, that we have created an ideological construct which does not allow us to see ourselves as instigators of conflict? One fine morning during a peaceful demonstration the police start shooting. The structure reacts, comrades shoot too, policemen fall. Anathema! It was a peaceful demonstration. For it to have degenerated into individual guerrilla actions there must have been a provocation. Nothing can go beyond the perfect framework of our ideological organization as it is not just a ‘part’ of reality, but is ‘all’ reality. We cannot perceive ourselves as acting first nor of seizing the initiative once we are attacked. What, then, are the implications of this? Pacification. Reaction. Can revolution realistically be touted as one of our goals as long as this construct holds sway? Even when anarchists are not condemning the use of violence, we’re usually the last to know when it’s going to be used. Take for instance the recent uprising in Cincinnati. How come in an anarchist movement that’s bigger than it’s been in decades (maybe longer), the best we can do is make a token showing when the shit hits the fan? The bulk of our participation was limited to either watching on TV(or the Internet — the Spectacle adapts with technology) or writing papers after the fact lamenting the lack of anarchist participation. Clearly busing white anarchists in from the suburbs is probably not the best way to support such revolts (as long as anarchists remain outsiders, that is). However, the fact that anarchist participation was negligible speaks volumes. Of course, there are plenty of ways that white anarchists can tie up police and support such revolts without actually driving into non-white rebelling neighborhoods.

234 How come white anarchists, who can be so creative when it comes to the letter- number road protests, (lock-downs, street theater, property destruction, Black Blocs, molotovs) are at a complete loss when this kind of thing happens? It isn’t timing, believe me. If we hope to change this we must examine and root out the source of our reluctance. Setting aside the pure hilarity of permitting the Left or Statists to act as the moral authority on violence, or anything else, the contradictions of the Leftist- influenced stance on violence takes on racist undertones when we consider that anarchists often support violent struggles in the Third World. This raises the troubling conclusion that anarchists, like the rest of our self-proclaimed Leftist “comrades”, are really just a bunch of racist NIMBY’s1 who, while supporting the violent struggles of non-white people abroad, fear its implications at home (Chiapas but not here; East Timor but not here; Colombia but not here, etc). In fact, many North American Leftists strongly condemn the State’s increasing war against the FARC and other violent authoritarian communist groups while effectively blaming the anarchists here in America for the police repression at mass actions. Until the World Economic Forum protest in New York and the September 11th attacks weeded most of them out, the Left has claimed exclusive ownership over the major protests, while the presence of unruly anarchists has elicited much hand-wringing concern from them, especially when anarchists steal the show with their violent antics (which, by the way, not once causes the least bit of introspection among Leftists about why their politics and tactics are just so damn uninteresting in the first place). And yet one senses that, as the Village Voice put it recently in their story, “Keepers of the Flame”, that “anarchism has now become ‘the pole that everyone revolves around,’ much as Marxism was in the ’60s.In other words, even young activists who don’t identify as anarchists have to position themselves in relation to its values.” This creates the conundrum of anarchism as both the black sheep and the heart of the movement. This seems like quite a perplexing situation until we start to think of it within the overall eclipse of the Left in North America. Perhaps the Left senses its own impending irrelevancy. But then anarchists are hardly alone in the contempt they receive from the Left. When it comes to issues of race, which in America is basically just code for class anyhow, the American Left has historically ignored at best —orat worst, undermined — the struggles of non-white people in the U.S. As one case in a much larger point, Noel Ignatiev remarks on this particular historical American Leftist myopia in his essay, Introduction to the United States: An Autonomist Political History. The whole essay should be essential reading, but one section dealing with

1 Not In My Back Yard

235 the Left’s refusal to join the fight against the end of Reconstruction makes the point quite well: So it was that New York in 1871 witnessed a march of 20,000, demonstrating solidarity with the workers of Paris, 20,000 radicals who were able to look across the ocean to the Paris Commune but were unable to look five hundred miles to the South . . . The Civil Rights movement of the 60’s was the one real highpoint for the Left when it came to race, if we are to believe their own mythology. And yet, a more careful look at that struggle shows again the failure of the Left when it came the attacking white supremacy. Further, we often forget that the anti- war movement and the Civil Rights movements were not one and the same. The truth is, the black anti-war refrain,“No Vietnamese ever called me nigger,” had little resonance with the bulk of the Left, despite the Leftist mythology that now dominates such discourse. Meanwhile most blacks in America quite clearly understood the link between their oppression by the white supremacist system at home and the colonial oppression of non-whites abroad in ways the white Left never did. Eventually, the white Left fell away disillusioned before the war was even over, leaving the Black Panthers and other non-white radical groups in ruins thanks to COINTELPRO and their own internal personal and structural flaws (a point which many anarchists fail to realize but should not be afraid to make). Chris Crass does a good job highlighting the different methods of organizing in his essay, Looking to the Light of Freedom:Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement and Thoughts on Anarchist Organizing. He discusses the case of Ella Baker, civil rights organizer, and the resistance she encountered attempting to organize horizontally rather than hierarchically as the bulk of the Left wanted.In her days working for the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed by Martin Luther King, she encountered sexism, cults of personality and top-down organizational structures that actively discouraged grassroots organizing. And, of course, that is one of anarchism’s main critiques of the Left — it’s organizing style. But while the Left in general failed to get the link between the imperialist war abroad and civil rights at home, it was painfully clear to Black America. Writing at that time, Charles Ross commented, No black man should fight in Vietnam. No white man should fight in Vietnam; but definitely no black man.. here is a man, who is already in slavery, . . . going somewhere to fight for the freedom of somebody else. If a black man is going to fight anywhere, he ought to be fighting in Africa, Mississippi, or Columbus. Most white Leftists were much more involved in the anti-war movement than they were in the fight for civil rights, which echoes Ignatiev’s earlier point. Again, it’s useful to look to Ignatiev for a description of that era, especially its end:

236 “The process in the white movement was quite different: there the students had hurled themselves at the walls of power, to no apparent avail — the war was still going on. Never able to recognize the Black struggle as their own cause, unable to develop an approach to the white worker, the majority of white student radicals turned away from radicalism.” Of course, its not just winners who write history, it’s also written by defeated, but surviving institutions, so the story that the Left tells itself about that era serves its own interests. Even in retreat, the Left’s version of the Civil Rights struggle and anti-war movement plays up the roles of white students and leaders, while ignoring the contributions of everyday people and, interestingly, the Vietnamese people entirely, who became mere landscape — background — to the white settler mind, both student and soldier. To hear the Left tell it, the war was stopped by white students, presumably splitting their time between their classes, fighting against the war and for civil rights, while the Vietnamese people, suffering well over a million deaths, played mere supporting roles hardly worthy of credit. Ward Churchill does a good number on this presumption in his book Pacifism As Pathology, where he writes, “ . . . as always, it was the armed struggle waged by the Vietnamese themselves — without the pretense of systematic support from American pacifists — which finally forced the war to a close . . .” As Churchill points out, that kind of patronizing revisionism is something that anarchy would surely do better without. Among Leftists in North America it is generally accepted that the in-your-face attitude of anarchists will lead to widespread repression of the Left, effectively reversing their position on violence as it applies overseas.In fact, what is more likely the case is that the aggressive tactics of the anarchists have legitimized the more reformist center in the eyes of the State, which is already recruiting willing accomplices amongst the Left to a “seat at the table”. Groups like Global Exchange and celebrities like U2’s Bono (featured recently in a Time magazine cover story, “Can Bono Save the World?”) are already lining up, while the media, capitalist lapdogs that they are, have continued their quest to deliver our heads on platters to the new “anti-terrorist” regime. On the international scene, fearing for their legitimacy in the eyes of world power brokers, the World Social Fo- rum in Puerto Allegro recently excluded “violent” anarchists where, presumably, they would have rubbed shoulders with French and other government officials famous for their advocacy of non-violence in places like Algiers, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, the irony was lost on the Statist organizers. On the ground this Leftist/State symbiosis reveals itself in “radical” peace police linking arms to protect Starbucks from the rampaging or co-operating in point- ing out and apprehending property-destroying anarchists for the police. This is

237 a strategic point that anarchists ought to consider carefully. However it seems likely that the solution is not to back off violent tactics, but rather to continue to push the Left into increasingly ridiculous and conciliatory positions with regards to the State so as to remove the illusion of separateness that surrounds them. The Left is still very much a part of the State system — they validate each other the same way that unions validate capitalism and placate workers; that is, continued escalation of tactics will reveal them as the peas of the same pod that they really are. Just as the Left is an integral part of the system, so then are anarchists who continue to support the Left. In this context, then, isn’t the continued insistence by some that property destruction is not violent really just an attempt to corral anarchists into relationships with the Left that do not threaten its overall reformist goals and bankrupt values? But are anarchists afraid, like Leftists, that if the violence genie is let out of the bottle then those with a real interest in change will run amok, perhaps taking the whole bankrupt system down once and for all, along with the white supremacy and other attendant privileges which underpin it? This strikes me as distressingly reminiscent of the classic “mob rule” arguments with which rich white men defended their privileged power in the face of 19th and 20th Century reforms that expanded the franchise to women, Blacks and non-propertied white males (and many suffragettes, it should not be forgotten, justified extending the vote to white women in white supremacist terms in order to counteract the influence of non-white males). But this characterization really becomes quite fitting once we begin to reconceive the Left and the State as complementary rather than oppositional entities. Given the dominance of white, middle-class, college-degreed (or soon-to-be degreed) men in the North American anarchist movement — who probably have good reason to fear a broad revolution, by the way — this hardly seems like an inappropriate conclusion to draw. Especially given the lackadaisical attitude most white, male anarchists take towards confronting or putting their privileges on the line. As privileged folks, do white, middle or upper class anarchists presume that their example leads the way for oppressed people, and, if so, then how does this differ from the white savior notions that drive liberal and Leftist do-good-ism? This assumption is pure vanguardism and refuses to recognize the constantly existing violent resistance occurring all around us. Not to mention the fact that it exhibits an ostrich-like ability to ignore the everyday violence which confronts the poor, especially the non-white poor in this country. The only way out of this predicament is finally to recognize the logical conclusions of our own arguments, and that means entirely rejecting the bullshit violence/non-violence debate, and Leftism along with it.

238 Our Violent Anarchist History

Let’s face it, anarchist history was often very violent. Bombs were thrown, clergy were killed, fascists were shot, industrialists were stabbed, politicians were assassinated and police were attacked, often with massive support and even participation from non-anarchist poor people. Violent acts, by themselves, do not necessarily alienate people.Voting alienates people — ask the more than half of Americans who don’t vote. Protests alienate the people — ask the vast majority who don’t attend. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the impotence of Leftism, let’s look around us for the signs of everyday struggle and see what there is to support. Let’s see what the Statists and liberals are afraid to acknowledge or support. Let’s evaluate the differences between the anarchists of yesteryear and those of today. For one, anarchists of days gone by did not allow their often-violent tactics to be defined by the rest of the left. Part of the reason why is because they clearly situated themselves among the oppressed and saw their struggles as coming from solidly within it. Many anarchists, among them Emma Goldman, , and , advocated the full range of violence, from the affinity group of the “propaganda by the deed” anarchists at the turn of the century to the more broad-based insurrections in Spain before and during the Civil War (the anarchists called them the “highschools of the revolution” — i.e. practice for the big one). The CNT, for all its flaws still the self-professed mass vehicle for anarchist revolution in Spain, declared in its program of May 1936, Once the violent aspect of the revolution has ended, we will abolish: private property, the State, the principle of authority, and consequently, the classes that divide men into exploiters and exploited, oppressors and oppressed. Expressing a similar sentiment, yet more to the point is the declaration of Hay- market martyr Louis Lingg, upon being sentenced to death: “If they use cannons against us, we shall use dynamite against them.” Likewise, anarchists like Santo Caserio expressed similar sentiments when they physically attacked politicians and capitalists. “Long live the revolution!Long live anarchy!” shouted Caserio as he stabbed, assassinating, the President of France.“Death to bourgeois society! Long live anarchy!” exclaimed August Vaillant at his execution for throwing a bomb at the French Chamber of Deputies in 1894. , protesting the indictment of , bombed Wall Street, killing 30, wounding hun- dreds more and doing $2 million damage (including blowing up the office of the notorious capitalist J.P. Morgan). Alexander Berkman, attempted assassin of that strikebreaker, Frick, most memorably wrote in Mother Earth, “Has a single step been made on the road of progress without violence and bloodshed? Has capital ever granted concessions without being forced to it? Has

239 labor won ought but defeat and humiliation in the arena of legality? Away with deceit and cant! As long a you uphold the capitalist system of murder and robbery, just so long will labor resort to violence to wrest better terms. And the sooner we gain the courage to face the situation honestly, the speedier will come the day when the arch-crime of the centuries — Capitalism — the source and breeder of all other crime and violence, will be abolished and the way cleared for a society based on the solidarity of interests, where brotherhood and humanity will become a reality . . .” Yohann Most wrote in The Social Monster that, “The anarchists . . . have no lust for murder and incendiarism. But they carry on a revolutionary agitation because they know that the power of a privileged class has never yet been broken by peaceable means.” Echoing that sentiment, Errico Malatesta said, There may be cases where passive resistance is an effective weapon, and it would then obviously be the best of weapons, since it would be the most econom- ical in human suffering. But more often than not, to profess passive resistance only serves to reassure the oppressors against their fear of rebellion, and thus it betrays the cause of the oppressed. Along similar lines, several years later he reaffirmed that sentiment, writing in La Question Sociale, the most influential Italian-American Anarchist newspaper in America at the time (later edited by Galleani), We want to expropriate the property-owning class, and with violence, since it is with violence that they hold onto social wealth and use it to exploit the working class. Not because freedom is a good thing for the future, but because it is a good thing at all times, today as well as tomorrow. The property owners, by denying us the means of exercising our freedom, in effect take it away from us. We want to overthrow the government, all governments — and overthrow them with violence since it is by the use of violence that they force us to obey — and, once again . . . because governments are the negation of freedom and it is not possible to be free without being rid of them. By force we want to deprive the priests of their privileges, because with the privileges, secured by the power of the State, they deny others the right, that is, the means, of equal freedom to propagate their ideas and beliefs. While they never really succeeded in creating the broad popular support it takes to stave off the State’s suppression, the anarchists of yore at least did not suffer the schizophrenic second-guessing that bedevils many modern anarchists’ actions (and rightly so, given the relative privilege of many anarchists). In reading the writings of 19th and early 20th century Italian and Jewish anarchists one gets the sense that the role of violence in struggle has never been so generally held in ill-regard as it is among anarchist today. While violence has never been un- controversial, Paul Arvich writes in his book, Anarchist Portraits, quoting Joseph

240 Cohen, that after Berkman’s attack on Frick, “[his] name became ‘a kind of tal- isman, a source of inspiration and encouragement.’” Some anarchists were, of course, alienated by propaganda by the deed but, Most, Galleani and Malatesta, all open supporters of insurrection and propaganda by the deed, should rightly be considered the most influential writers among Jewish and Italian anarchists at the time. In Spain during the Revolution anarchists like Buenaventura Durutti and Sabate frequently used violence, and ’s peasant army did not shy from its use either. Anarchist illegalists in France and Argentina provide a powerfully rev- olutionary contrast to present-day CrimethInc. as they frequently used violence to further their liberatory desires and to refuse the authoritarian rule of the State that sought to curb them. Despite a creeping tendency towards vanguardism, and because, as and , they existed in many ways outside the social construct of whiteness (which, at the height of American anarchism, did not yet include them), they did not feel the alienation that many privileged modern day anarchists feel towards the genuinely oppressed. However, this should not be taken as a full endorsement of their worldview because, as Ignatiev noted, that support did have serious failures when it came to recognizing and supporting the struggles of people of color. At the same time, that should not be construed as a failure of their view of violence.

“The People” are Alienated by Violence and Other Myths

The dirty little secret that many anarchists and Leftists alike are trying desper- ately to avoid exposing is that violent actions often have a mass base of support (consider popular support for the many late 20th and early 21st Century wars and the death penalty as but two obvious mainstream socially acceptable examples), but that anarchists today have failed to maintain their place within this base. Hence the ease with which the Left has subsumed and co-opted our energies and at the same time foreshadowing the ease with which the State will bring its violence to bear on us, likely accompanied by hardly a whimper of dissent from the amongst the poor, for whom our actions often have little relevance, regardless of our grand pronouncements to the contrary. What’s particularly troubling — for anarchists, that is — is that all this is despite the fact that poor folk kill police, rob banks, shoot politicians and attack capitalists (and their proxies) relatively frequently, and with much quiet support from oppressed people across the coun- try. Much of the reason for this disconnect is the privileged way anarchists have continued to locate themselves within the Leftist tradition, unlike the majority of

241 the poor who have quietly opted out of both the Left and the Right, along with electoral and union politics in general (largely for the same reasons). When did anarchists start believing the inherently conservative Leftist lie that “now is not the time”, that non-violence is the only legitimate method of social change or that “the people are alienated by violence,” especially given the massive evidence to the contrary? Rejecting the millenarianism of Marxism, anarchists have always insisted that any time could be the right time. But the preponderance of privilege within our movement has created the curi- ous new role of anarchist as conservative. As such, we have left the poor without anyone to support their far-ranging, if isolated, resistance. Even in times of class retreat, there is resistance. Unfortunately for those seeking the validation that official organizations give to a movement (it provides something to join or follow — thus alleviating the peculiarly anarchist dilemma of being among the first on the ground — which requires sacrifice, listening and supportive skills that many anarchists do not have), unorganized resistance is happening all around us. This decentralized resistance is in many ways a positive development for anarchists who have a critique of mass organizations and the co-optive, disciplining and conservatizing roles that unions, parties, revolutionary federations and other organizations play in revolutionary times.Imagine for a second, what a mass, decentralized revolt, unmediated by either party or union would look like, not to mention the threat that it would pose to the prevailing order. The failures of revolutions have been many, however, a great deal of the blame can be placed on the fact that they were co-optible in the first place, and that argument is really about structure. The struggle of the revolutionary element has always been twofold: against the present regime and also against the opportunists who seek to control them (even within their own organizations). We are not conservatives — what stake do we have in the prevailing social order? Eschewing the vanguard, anarchists have always recognized that it was average people who would make the revolution. It is possible and desirable to create a praxis that encourages this type of decentralized, unofficial organization. Unlike the party, union or revolutionary federation, the affinity group is the organizational model of criminal, conspirator, street protestor, FAI saboteur and ELF midnight gardener alike, and this overlap makes it a natural choice for the basic unit of revolutionary action.In fact, it’s probably the most natural form of class resistance, in addition to being the type least conducive to co-optation, the democratic model quickest to act, the least likely to become bogged down in procedure and the most likely to create the kind of broad, sweeping destruction that a modern social revolution would require. All that’s lacking for “anti-organi- zational”/insurrectionist anarchists is a genuine recognition of the central role of white supremacy in America and a commitment to attack it. Where are the ELF

242 attacks against environmental racism? The ELF is listed as public enemy number one by the FBI, and yet its existence goes largely unnoticed by poor communities of color because for them it is largely irrelevant. The burden is on the ELF to bridge that gap. The only paradigm within which most are able to conceive people of color is the imperialist one. They have no critique of race within the American context. That is, the only space environmentalists have for them is as indigenous people struggling in far off places against forces largely beyond anyone’s (re: white people’s) control (at the extreme end, appropriate actions include boycotts or informative leafleting to help raise awareness for more concerted non-violent action). If you do not fit that definition, you may as well not exist for the . Similarly, American insurrectionists cannot expect to simply transfer wholesale the writings and ideas of the great Ital- ian insurrectionists without seriously considering the role that white supremacy plays in the maintenance of the American State.To do so is to create a fantasy world just as illusory as that of the environmentalists. However, not only are most anarchists unwilling to take part in such acts themselves, but many are unwilling to support them when even regular, officially non-politicized people carry them out — even when those acts demonstrate an in- herent, though mostly unarticulated, . Where is the anarchist support for the non-political, poor bank robber? What happened to the “class heroes”, as ’ mother used to call them, that we used to celebrate and mythologize? Why do we on one hand decry those who seek to speak for the people and at the same time refuse to recognize when non-politicized people, refusing the mediation of both party and union, strike back at their oppressors? Is it because we ourselves feel unable to act and therefore cannot support it when others do? Can it also be that we have fallen into the Leftist habit of viewing as il- legitimate (read: dangerously uncontrollable) any resistance that is not organized or directed (read as “mediated”) by a formal association of some kind? What of the wildcat strike? Do anarchists refuse to support these acts of independence? What of riots? Don’t we often support these un-organized rampages against authority? Don’t we support affinity group actions? The argument I hear most frequently is that “the people” will be alienated by violence.Left unspoken is the fact that the “people” referred to are usually the middle and upper classes. For instance, I once sat in on a nonviolence workshop at a globalization conference in Colorado in which a very enthusiastic young woman broke society down into a spectrum. The poor, she conceded, were not alienated by violence (a stunning revelation in its own right). But the middle- and upper-class people — whom she characterized as “those people who watch the news and read the paper” — those people were alienated by the images of violence they saw at big demos. She was just one example among many. Biased by

243 their middle class baggage, many anarchists, like their Leftist counterparts, view the politically aware class as synonymous not with the poor but with the upper classes. Used to using the State’s capitalist barometers of political awareness (voting, union membership, reading the New York Times or even the local paper, etc), and therefore paying too much attention to them as social indicators (getting favorable media coverage, organizing a shop, etc., become ends in their own right), many anarchists’ politics are completely patronizing to the poor — neglecting entirely not only the history of insurrections and revolutions, but also one of the key foundations of anarchy: that the people are the best determiners of their own fate. Paraphrasing an anarchist of yore: if I’m smart enough to choose my leader then I’m smart enough not to be led, nor to need leading. Of course that does not reflect well on Leftists, given their never-ending supply of wanna-be leaders. The growing split between anarchists’ middle class perspectives and anarchy’s classical class analysis has given rise to all sorts of Bohemian strains, of which CrimethInc. is only one prominent example.Increasingly, class analysis has been dropped entirely from many anarchists critique, who focus instead on lifestyle issues and hippy-style drop-out, “feel good” politics. Thanks to CrimethInc., drop-out, white privilege, middle-class, poverty-fetishizing road festival vacations masquerade as revolutionary strategy as almost all references to class and race are stripped away by their post-modern teen rebellion vision and, with it, all potentialities for long-term liberation. As a result society is reduced not to the conflict between exploiter and exploited, oppressed and oppressor, but rather to the tension between fun times and bummers, boredom and excitement. Applying this analysis, we are lefto t rebelling for its own sake (isn’t it fun?), rather than fighting to permanently remove the conditions of our oppression. But how long until anarchy becomes boring (and where does that leave CrimethInc.’s comrades fighting for real change?)? CrimethInc. is the new hippy movement, too focused on its own spoiled-kid good-time to seriously consider itself revolutionary (or even to consider revolution, to mimic the Situationists and turn the phrase on its head). A constant quest for fun will not bring down capitalism and the State, and fire dancing is not a revolutionary strategy (and neither is dumpster diving). Such things validate — not challenge — capitalism and the State and offer no paths to long term liberation. Living off the excess of capitalism requires that capitalism continue, and eventually they’ll lock up all the dumpsters anyhow. It pretends to liberate but really just breeds dependence. Meanwhile, the scams all go away, one by one, as no one realizes that it’s the exercising of white privilege that makes it possible in the first place to expect to travel from city to city, shoplifting and scamming, without attracting the suspicious eye of security guards, cops and store managers. CrimethInc. does not challenge white supremacy; it wallows in it. Anarchists need to recognize

244 that our role is not to exercise privilege to extricate ourselves from capitalism at the expense of everyone else, but rather to dedicate ourselves to kicking the whole damn system over in solidarity of those without it. After all, it is not the privileged that will make revolution. Opting out without committing oneself to actively challenging capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the State is to sell out just as surely as taking that 9 to 5 job. We cannot evolve ourselves out of capitalism, nor can we drop out until it collapses.To think so is to be criminally naive and to ignore the core of the anarchist critique of the State: the chief business of the State, as Alexander Berkman said, is murder. It also ignores one of the main differences between anarchism and Marxism. Marxists believe that Capitalism is one stage on the inevitable road to socialism and that one must be allowed to play itself out until the other can come about. But, anarchists do not believe such millenarian hogwash. The State and capitalism must be brought down — they will not simply collapse on their own. Or at least, we need not wait for them to, in any case, since they could churn on for centuries more. Considering the historical failure of white people — even white working class people — to recognize that their lot is best thrown in with revolutionary poor non-whites, the State is probably quite content to have white, middle class kids drop out in relatively small numbers, for a period of time (especially if it means they won’t be joining their comrades in the broader struggle). We should not forget that counter-culture validates, and is in reaction to (that is, not independent of), the dominant culture in many ways. However, in the end, the State will use violence if it is threatened, even against white kids (as shocking as that may seem). Only middle and upper class white kids refuse to understand this. Everyone else is quite familiar with the violence of the State. The privilege of middle class dropouts shields them from this truth. The perfect example of the failure of the dropout strategy is the illicit drug trade. Many black and brown poor people live in ghettos and barrios with 30 percent unemployment or more, which forces many of them to opt out of legal capitalism by selling drugs (among other illegal activities). It is worth noting that this is not a choice, like it is for white, middle class kids. So, what happens to these people? Are there work-free, cop-free paradises in our inner cities? Of course not. The State has criminalized these activities precisely because poor black people in particular have always been the primary threat to the white upper class in terms of revolutionary potential. In this sense, forcing these communities into opting out is a form of social control enacted by the State to keep poor blacks, and others, in line.To the extent that white middle class kids are allowed or even encouraged to drop out is exactly because such behavior is not a threat to the State. So, since CrimethInc.’s dropout culture does not pose any real threat to capital- ism, it’s really just another way to validate it. CrimethInc. does not live its values

245 in opposition to Capitalism; it lives them precisely because of capitalism. Flipping through their first book speaks volumes. One is hard pressed to find a single non- white face in any of the images or photos. And there is hardly any mention of race at all. This is no coincidence. The white middle class has historically failed to understand the way that race and class interact in this society. In fact, much of its social position (including that of much of the white working class) is derived from the surplus value extracted from non-whites, particularly blacks, handed down to them by the capitalists in order to buy their complacency and complicity in the exploitation of everyone, including themselves, ironically. There’s no reason to expect, given CrimethInc.’s close relationship to that class, that they would reflect different values, and this explains a lot. In this sense, isn’t CrimethInc.’s dumpstering and petty theft just another way of profiting from the oppression of non-whites and the poor rather than a way to attack that system of oppression in solidarity with them?To point out another irony, doesn’t the ethic of the dumpster diver really bring him/her in conflict with those who seek to oppose Capitalism and its wastefulness just the same as it comes in conflict with the manager who locks the dumpster? Alfredo Bonnano offers a good alternative to CrimethInc. He vehemently opposes work, but he recognizes the importance of bringing direct to the oppressor. His words are inflammatory and action-oriented, as in “Armed Joy”: People are tired of meetings, the classics, pointless marches, theoretical discus- sions that split hairs in four, infinite delays, the monotony and poverty of certain political analyses. They prefer to make love, smoke, listen to music, go for walks, sleep, laugh, play, kill policemen, lame journalists, blow up barracks. Anathema! The struggle is only legitimate when it is comprehensible to the leaders of the revolution. Otherwise, there being a risk that they might let the situation go beyond their control, there must have been a provocation. Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a new police prevents you. Hurry to say No, before the new repression convinces you that saying no is useless, mad, and that you should accept the hospitality of the mental asylum. Hurry to attack capital, before a new ideology makes it sacred toyou. Hurry to refuse work before some new sophist tells you yet again that work makes you free. Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself. This statement stands in stark contrast to, even if it parallels at times, Crime- thInc.’s essay that starts off, “Your politics are boring as fuck”, with all it’s appeals to drop out and leave behind any illusions of physically challenging the State and capitalism. It’s advice?“Enjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for

246 being bored . . . or boring!” The CrimethInc. book, Evasion, says on its back cover, “Homelessness. Unemployment. Poverty. If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right”, which screams of privilege (and sounds a lot like a Hollywood script to me — and the parallels between this and the white supremacist, Reaganite, “color blind”, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vision of capitalism are truly disturbing). And, lastly, the response to its publication couldn’t be more different than that which greeted Armed Joy (Evasion is appearing on library shelves while Bonanno did time in prison just for writing his essay). In this context Crime- thInc.’s bold claim that “Our lives are our weapons” stands as sad and pathetic, which is how it should be. Bonnano points out that, for instance, while it is true that the State is a social relation, and that it depends on all of us upholding it to continue, at the same time it is a concrete thing that can be attacked and made not to work. For instance, the police clearly depend on everyone believing that we need them (i.e., calling them, voting for law and order politicians, etc.), but at the same time, the police do operate out of very real places in space and time and have a hierarchical and centralized structure which has real weaknesses. That is, while I have an obligation to opt out by refusing to support or work with police,I also have an obligation to recognize that blowing up the police station will have a very real effect on the ability of the police to organize, especially if timed correctly (to use a common example). Like CrimethInc., Bonanno is anti-work, but he recognizes that it is not enough to merely reject work and the unions, clergy, parties and capitalists that glorify and depend on it. Refusal is part of the strategy, but physically attacking it is the other part. For example, the Contra war against the Sandinistas is an extreme, terroristic, right-wing application of this idea — the physical foundation of the Nicaraguan State was attacked, until it simply did not run. Certainly anarchists would not apply this theory of warfare in the same way, but it is a lesson worth learning, nonetheless (it is unlikely, of course, that anarchists would target people merely because of their profession — except, of course, cops and politicians). In France during the height of the illegalist and “propaganda by the deed” anarchism, often all it took was for workers to whistle on the shop floor the songs exalting the past assassinations of capitalists to exact concessions from weak-kneed bosses. The and other individualist anarchists robbed banks and battled cops, all driven by their own egos (in the Stirner sense). As mentioned before, Sabate and Durutti did the same in the Spanish Revolution, although not for the same reasons (though the common ground is interesting). These are examples worth remembering, even if not worth duplicating. Some will inevitably bring up the example of terrorism, but I think it is im- portant to realize that in an anarchist world without morality, it is ethics that

247 will define our actions. That is, as with our critique of law, we cannot attempt to create a category before hand into which we will dump all future actions. And the conditions on actions aimed at liberation should be defined by the oppressed, not the oppressor. Anarchism requires active participation in decision-making, and as such all possibilities must be evaluated on their own merits — that is, according to each particular circumstance. Terrorism is very much in the eye of the beholder, a point that many people would be willing to concede — to a point. That is, we should remember that Denmark Vessey’s planned slave insurrection intended to kill every single white person, including women and children.In his mind, all the white oppressors, both current and future, had to be wiped out. We may view this as terrorism now, but we should evaluate why very carefully. Is it because we are against violence, or is it because under his analysis of race in America we are embarrassed to find that many of us are oppressors? Columbine and the school shooting in Germany, in which 13 teachers were killed, again cloud the issue of terrorism. Generally, classmates and teachers would not be considered legitimate targets for violence — although as I mentioned, the Contras targeted them and anarchists in the past targeted capitalists and politicians, often for deterrent effect. However, it is not hard to understand how one could perceive of teachers and school bullies as oppressors to whom a negative example is worth providing to deter future oppression. It is likewise not difficult to understand how a Third World peasant farmer might consider all Americans enemies by the nature of their First World lifestyles. These are matters for anarchist ethics and it is not useful to lump them into preconceived categories for easy digestion.To do so is a cop-out. Certainly many of these Bohemian-anarchists raise some important issues, and the flaw of many self-described anarchists like Murray Bookchin has been their failure to appreciate that the dichotomy between providing for oneself and building a class-focused revolution is in fact a false one. Likewise, the Primitivist critique of the “totality”, while a useful tool for evaluating the techno-post-indus- trial First World, certainly seems a bit too “cart before the horse” for a movement that has not yet addressed patriarchy and white supremacy. A cynical person might perceive it as an attempt to sidestep those issues uncomfortable to whites and males (just as the New Left did in its day). In this sense, periodicals like seem a bit premature given that we have yet to deal seriously with whiteness on any major scale. And, even just speaking tactically, it’s hard to imag- ine what a human/animal common front united against civilization would even look like, much less how such a thing would be organized. Given the necessity of being the voice for the voiceless when it comes to animal and Earth liberation, and also considering that in such struggles the revolutionary subject (animals, the “earth”) cannot speak for itself or talk back — much less participate in its own

248 liberation — the parallels between such movements and the white savior complex become disturbingly clear. In many ways, such organizing represents the ultimate playground for white activists because it does not challenge their privileges or comfort zones in the least. On the other side of the coin, many anarchists have focused too much on a few tactics and discounted the rest as not revolutionary at all. Community gardens and other attempts at self-sufficiency and real-world application of anarchist values are often snobbishly rejected by some anarchists whose vision of the world, lacking a commitment to localized production, looks strikingly similar to the globalized world we already see around us. Many times what is discounted out of hand as “lifestylism” is really just small scale revolutionary acts that are not yet contectualized within a larger struggle. That is, guerilla gardens ought to be defended like they are revolutionary, not temporary, acts of defiance. And that’s how they ought to be conceived. Gardens are no more non-violent than the cops and corporates who are going to come and bulldoze it. Guerilla gardens are expropriations, and does anyone believe that expropriations are non-violent? It’s worth quoting Balagoon again (this time from his Brinks Trial Opening Statement): “Expropriation is an act of war carried out by every revolutionary army in history.” While he was talking about bank robbery, the link between Balagoon’s point and that below of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution is obvious; it’s hard to imagine how a truly free society could ever exist without procuring the bulk of its needs from the region it’s in, and such acts should not be taken lightly. Looked at this way, the abolition of work fits nicely into this revolutionary strategy, as such concerns cannot be left until after the revolution. In fact, the affinity group does well at providing a revolutionary context for such actions. Formal organizations view such affinity group actions as counter- revolutionary — that is, uncontrollable rebellions against their authority. And that, of course, is one of the few things they get right. But, at the same time, we should not delude ourselves into believing the evolutionist myth that we can all withdraw from the capitalist system without the State utilizing its monopoly on violence to force us back in line. As mentioned, Ervin’s book Anarchism and the Black Revolution, refutes that false dichotomy, pointing out that [t]he idea behind a mass commune is to create a dual power structure as a counter to the government, under conditions, which exist now.In fact, Anarchists believe the first step towards self-determination and the Social revolution is Black control of the Black community. This means that Black people must form and unify their own organizations of struggle, take control of the existing Black communities and all the institutions within them, and conduct a consistent fight to overcome every form of economic, political and cultural servitude, and any system of racial and class inequality which is the product of this racist Capitalist society . . .

249 . . . The commune is the staging ground for the Black revolutionary struggle. For instance, Black people should refuse to pay taxes to the racist government, should boycott the Capitalist corporations, should lead a Black General Strike all over the country, and should engage in an insurrection to drive the police out and win a liberated zone. Clearly Ervin did not see such struggles as pointless.Instead, he clearly saw them rooted within the larger struggle, as evident by his linking of the creation of the commune to the cop-clearing insurrection he envisioned. He saw the building of the commune and self-sufficiency as the power base from which the violent revolution would be launched, not as a distraction to that end. Putting this back in the context of violence and, said more bluntly — even if they were, who cares if the middle and upper classes are alienated by violence? They already had their violent revolution and we’re living in it right now. It churns on every day. Further, the whole notion that the middle and upper classes are alienated by violence is completely false. As mentioned above, they support violence all the time, whether it is strikebreaking, police brutality, prisons, war, sanctions or capital punishment. What they really oppose is violence directed at dislodging them and their privileges. And, in saying that, have we finally revealed a bit about many Leftists’ and anarchists’ true objections and sympathies as well? William Meyers writes in his essay, Non-Violence and its Violent Consequences, that, “The only times the corporate media is against violence is when it does not serve the greater ends of corporations.” While he’s talking about the media, we could just as well substitute “middle and upper classes” and “the State” in the obvious places and it would still ring just as true. The question is not about violence, then, but about whether we have helped support and create a political climate of resistance among the poor that will back such action. That is, have we overcome the alienation and atomization of modern, post-industrial life in America, which leaves each American suffering or resisting in solitude or small affinity groups, unaware that such sentiments are broadly shared? Take for instance the case of the woman in New York who, upon being visited by an armed police officer serving her with an eviction notice, attacked him, knocked him down several flights of stairs and then set him on fire. Where was the support from the anarchist community for this woman? Her actions were clearly defensible. This was not the first time that an officer serving an eviction had been killed in NY, and it was certainly not the first time that such an officer had been attacked and, in fact, these officers are armed for precisely this reason. Some may be turned off by the brutal method of execution, but surely that reflects back on the system that pushed this women to such extremes. But, if she had non-violently resisted her eviction, would anarchists then have come to her aid? Further, given our general alienation from real struggle, would we

250 have even noticed at all had she resisted non-violently? It’s unlikely that without the violence the media would have covered it at all. In this sense, an argument against violence in this case is very similar to the one’s Leftists make about our rowdy behavior at protests. They think of it as a distraction, but the fact is that without it the media doesn’t cover these events at all (i.e., they get bumped on the evening news by a water-skiing hamster or some other pressing story). And, because of the nature of the capitalist media, little of substance comes out in terms of message no matter what we do. It’s like they say, it doesn’t matter what you wear on the radio or what you say on TV. It is unlikely that any point worth making could be articulated through the media anyhow. But, this leads one to ask under what circumstances would we have supported this woman? What if she had first (or after) issued a dense manifesto loaded with archaic Leftist phrases and invectives (or a condemnation of the same) in a widely distributed anarchist journal or prominent national daily newspaper? What if her entire apartment complex had resisted together? Isn’t it the nature of our atomized lives that such resistance will certainly appear as seemingly isolated acts of resistance, at least at first? Absent a mass movement, isn’t this the nature of the beast? And doesn’t treating them as such play right into the hands of those who would rather keep things that way? Instead of support, what I heard was condemnation, although, in fairness, most anarchists failed to notice at all. Some claimed she ought not to have used violence. Some claimed she ought to have taken a lesson from the un-evictions of the 30’s. In those days whole communities met the authorities en masse outside the tenements and forcibly moved evictees back into their apartments (of course, the threat of violence implicit in a mass of people confronting a few officials of the State was ignored, as it always is by pacifists and non-violence advocates — unless that mass is marching on a Starbucks, that is). But what if the structure for such a fight is not yet in place? How can she expect to organize an un-eviction if there isn’t even an informal tenants union? Should she then have caved in? Mustn’t there always be a first to resist (not that she was the first — we anarchists shouldn’t get off that easy)? And wouldn’t we do well to remember that in this case the victim was not the agent of the State who came to evict her: it was the tenant. To treat it otherwise would be a curious reversal of our class analysis. Are we, in denying her the right to use whatever force she deems necessary to defend her home, also potentially denying the lightning strike that sparks the forest fire? Or, more likely, aren’t we really just showing how off guard anarchists will be caught when something really does set off general insurrection?Incidents like these have sparked uprisings many times in U.S. history. There have been some who have argued in a variety of ways, most notably and recently in the Rock Block Collective’s Stick ito t the Manarchy, that violence is

251 masculine, and that it marginalizes and alienates women and other less privileged people by it’s “uncompromising” attitude.“Manarchy,” is defined in the document as, “[a]ggressive, competitive behavior within the anarchist movement that is frighteningly reminiscent of historically oppressive male gender roles.” They give their take on violence, claiming that taking an aggressive stand towards authority and capitalism (the capitalists and their minions, they somehow forget, are the truly privileged ones, after all), “ . . . means that many women, people of color, the young and elderly, and the economically disadvantaged do not have what it takes to participate in the manarchist revolution.” Not only does this show a startling lack of appreciation for the history of working class revolutions that, after all, are made by the disadvantaged — it also fails to appreciate the history of revolt within communities of color and by women and in many ways paints women as the same dainty emotional creatures as do the sexist defenders of male-dominated politics.Is it perhaps possible that modern Leftist feminists have finally found common ground with the patriarchs in their joint attack on violence as contrary to women’s more noble, innate nurturing and mothering instincts? Suffragettes rioted on many occasions, burning churches, attacking officials, battling cops and destroying property. It is more convenient to the Statist argu- ment to forget that on more than one occasion national monuments, theaters and government offices shut down, and downtown shops were boarded up to protect them not from rampaging black-clad youths, but from the attacks of violent stone- throwing Suffragettes. Likewise forgotten are the Bolivian women who strapped dynamite to their bodies and seized government buildings or the courageous old women who stood strong just recently against whip-wielding Argentine police. And what of the women of the BLA and Weather Underground? What of Diane Oughton, blown up with two comrades when the bombs they were making ac- cidentally detonated? What of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade? Are we to believe that any time a woman acts aggressively that she is male-identified? Granted, the “Manarchist” document does not explicitly use this term, but it may as well, given the way that it’s used by self-appointed non-violence and pacifist authorities in the larger movement to marginalize women who are out of their control or make them uncomfortable. Rather than claiming that violence goes against women’s nature, isn’t a better explanation of the underrepresentation of women in armed groups the patriarchal system of privileges and exclusion that dominates society, and our own groups, in general? Also dissenting from the self-proclaimed feminist mainstream is Laina Tangle- wood in her article, “Against the Masculinization of Militancy”. She says, Some recent “feminist” critiques of anarchism have condemned militancy as being sexist and non-inclusive to women. It was claimed that on-the-street ag- gressive behavior of Black Bloc members — such as property destruction and

252 confronting the pigs — is sexist because it excludes women. This idea is actually the sexist one. Instead of condemning the black bloc men and ignoring the black bloc women, both women and men who want to fight should be welcome and encouraged to do so while those (male and female) who do not feel comfortable taking such risks can engage in a variety of other activities. Again, as Tanglewood points out, much of this argument hinges on the already addressed falsehood that violence alienates and that non-violence is inclusive. But, the Leftist/Statist myth of social change, exacted non-violently or handed down from on high by benevolent leaders, falls apart upon even cursory examination (and despite the dogged insistence of the left). It’s not the threat that mobs, once massed by the hundreds of thousands in the streets, will attack the polling booths, ballots in hand, that terrifies the ruling class in revolutionary times. In fact, the masculinization of violence, with it’s unstated sexist concomitant, the feminization of passivity, really owes more to the presumptions of those whose notion of change does not include revolution or the annihilation of the State. If the government is viewed as at least potentially responsive, and necessary, as the Leftists and Statists believe, then of what use are violent tactics? Petitioning, voting and non-violent civil disobedience ought to do the job. Clearly anarchists refute most of these tactics as avenues for radical change, else why not pick up a ballot or petition and head down towards the local legislature (where one is sure to run into many, many poor and disenfranchised folk)? Mainstream and Leftist feminism has a vested ideological interest in maintaining the State, so why should we adopt its values with regards to violence? Their critiques do not include the State, and often not even capitalism, except when it comes to the gender of those in charge or on our money. As philosophies rooted in capitalism and interested in advancement — not leveling — they require the maintenance of the State to protect the privileges of capitalist women just as much as male capitalists. These privileges may be relative in comparison to rich males’ accumulated wealth and power, but Leftist feminism is interested in a more equal sharing of power among elites (i.e., half of all bosses and presidents should be women) not an attack on these inequalities as they exist in society in general. Rejecting kings in favor of queens is not compromise that anarchists should be willing to make. And yet this is precisely the logical end that we come to when we trace back the assumptions inherent in the violence-as-masculine argument. Uttering what must be blasphemy to conventional feminists,Tanglewood ends her essay this way: “Come the revolution, women will be (as women have historically) physically fighting oppression.” The truth is, rather than being a call for a diversity of tactics in confronting the State, nonviolence is in actuality a call for the pacification of revolt, with all the obvious implications for revolution.

253 Even more off base are the claims that violence by anarchists alienates and excludes people of color. This would perhaps be true if anarchists continue to refuse to confront their overwhelming privilege in comparison to most non-white people. That is, violence imposed from outside an oppressed group fighting for revolutionary change, regardless of whether the perpetrator is the cops, the Klan or a group of well-meaning privileged activists, is clearly not only undemocratic and un-anarchist, but is counterproductive as well. However, this is not a reason to attack violence as a means of creating change. Rather it is an argument for many anarchists to reflect on their privilege and to consider why it is that they find themselves outside this struggle. Or, perhaps its an argument for white, privileged anarchists to give up their vanguardist white savior pipe dreams of leading (or saving) from the suburbs the black (or brown) revolution in the ghetto. Such illusions must be seen as what they are, conservative attempts to head off a genuine revolution that would threaten white privilege. What anarchists are really lamenting, in accepting the Statist’s terms of debate, is their own alienation from the struggle.In this sense, anarchists very often are, in fact, an outside group that ought seriously to consider every action and its implications for the oppressed. However, an anarchist movement solidly situated within and in supportive roles with regards to the oppressed would face no such schizophrenia. But even a cursory look at history shows that communities of color throughout American history have often employed violence. Many white anarchists have yet fully to understand that the class struggle in America is very much a racial issue. J. Sakai, in an interview entitled When Race Burns Class, said, “Why should it be so hard to understand that capitalism, which practically wants to barcode our assholes, has always found it convenient to color-code its classes?” And yet many North American anarchists have not yet to taken up either active support of the struggles of people of color nor the fight against white supremacy in the white community. Nearing the end of the last century, Kuwasi Balagoon, again writing in his seminal essay, Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone, said, We permit people of other ideologies to define Anarchy rather than bring our views to the masses and provide models to show the contrary. We permit corporations to not only lay off workers and to threaten the balance of workers while cutting their salaries, but to poison the air and water to boot. We permit the police, Klan and cops to terrorize whatever sector of the population they wish without repaying them back in any kind.In short, by not engaging in organizing and delivering war to the oppressors we become anarchists in name only. Black Panther Party co-founder, Bobby Seale, discussing the rise of the armed BPP and the shocking effect it had on white Americans, said, We [were] a broke little organization with a number of shotguns, a very weak treasury and worried about how to pay the rent . . . but white America . . . [was]

254 saying,‘Niggers with guns.’ It’s like a fear. I mean they [didn’t] even have to say it. Their faces said it: ‘There’s just too many niggers with guns.’ It’s like they know that they’ve oppressed us and now here we’ve organized with guns. It’s a new step.I mean, it’s symbolic that, ‘oh, they’re not going to be non-violent anymore.’ Innumerable full-scale slave insurrections, along with even more planned but betrayed revolts fill our history (Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner are but a few). Herbert Aptheker, in his book American Negro Slave Revolts, catalogs hundreds of such uprisings. Balagoon writes: “Throughout slavery there were numerous rebellions and conspiracies to rebel, and laws were enacted against it, defining rebellion as criminal . . . there were over 250 slave revolts during these 300 years of slavery, and countless cases of arson and poisoning.” The violent revolts of black people continue today, with uprisings in L.A. and Cincinnati among the more prominent and recent. And they continue to strike fear into the hearts of the white supremacist elite in America, as well as the white middle and even working class, thus betraying where the true loyalties of these classes lie in this system that has built the white standard of living at practically all economic levels on the exploitation of non-white labor and the theft of their land. This fact has formed a white-skin bond between the rich white ruling elite and even poor whites, and is a point on which any serious revolutionary strategy will surely turn. Indigenous people fought a desperate and violent war, lasting centuries, that has never really ended (witness Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, among others). Again, Ward Churchill, indigenous activist, makes the case for revolutionary violence quite clearly in Pacifism as Pathology. The fact that these struggles have failed to achieve their goals reflects not the failure of violence as a tactic, but rather the lack of support for them among whites who, rather than join the struggles of the oppressed, have every time overwhelmingly chosen instead to throw their lot in with America’s white supremacist government and capitalist elite, themselves clearly reliant for legitimacy on violence and the mythology of the State as of rights to justify their rule.In so doing, of course, poor whites selfishly maintain all the rights and privileges from which they — and many anarchists — benefit. The argument over violence, it turns out, is really just an argument over privilege and vested interests masquerading as tactics. This is another point of which North American anarchists in particular ought to take careful note.

255 The Case of Mumia

Unlike Kuwasi Balagoon, whose first-hand defense of violent expropriation is so moving, the obfuscation that is the hallmark of Mumia’s case is a good example of the effects Leftism and privilege has had on anarchist discourse. The fetishizing of Mumia abu Jamal, particularly among anarchists has always troubled me a great deal. I have often found it quite amazing the way anarchists will argue till they’re blue in the face about how Mumia is innocent and the poor victim of a cruel frame-up. What’s more, his innocence is often the lynchpin of their argument. Discussions framed this way usually wind up centering around evidence, court rulings, precedent, the relationships of various parties to various other parties (as with Judge Sabo’s relationship to the Fraternal Order of Police) and other seemingly important details. While I can see why these details are interesting to liberals and progressives, who maintain, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the idiotic belief that the system can work if we just get the right people in there (for them, the nagging suspicion that it can’t goes a long way towards explaining their constant state of moral outrage and amazement). However, when did anarchists start having such faith in the system? Do we really believe that Mumia would have gotten justice had his judge been someone less directly affiliated with the police? Certainly we haven’t forgotten that the same legislature pays both judge and prosecutor, have we (and warden and cop, if we want to get right down to it)? There is a name for this type of thinking. It’s called the bad apple theory. The press uses it to explain “bad” cops all the time. As anarchists, we don’t believe that there can be good cops, do we? Doesn’t the nature of the job preclude this, and doesn’t thinking this come into conflict with our critique, as anarchists, of the State and, in particular, the [in]justice system? As anarchists, when we start using the concepts of “guilty” and “innocent” in these contexts (that is, adopting and in the process validating the State’s loaded terminology) we not only concede the territory of debate, we also become unable to make the larger critique of the [in]justice system as a whole — that it’s inca- pable of delivering justice, no matter how many trials one gets (merely having to stand trial, with all the costs and potential meantime no-bail imprisonment that come with it, is in itself an injustice). As anarchists, this is a unique and crucial element of our critique of society — and one with which many non-politicized non-anarchists agree, by the way. Put more bluntly: Who cares if Mumia is innocent or guilty? Isn’t it a tragedy either way? Even if we take the state of Pennsylvania’s case at face value — that Mumia came upon a cop stopping (and probably harassing) his brother, and then shot the cop, what objection do we as anarchists have to this? Wouldn’t it be a potentially much more radicalizing point to say that we think Mumia probably

256 did kill that cop and that we support him for it. People shoot cops all the time — there is a lot of anger against the State and its agents.Isn’t this a good thing from our perspective and something to be encouraged and built upon? The fact is, there are tons of non-anarchists who quietly smile to themselves when a cop gets it. The limits of the hedging Leftist critique also reveals the limits of their commitment to real change. Mumia’s own assertions of innocence certainly elicit much sympathy, and rightly so. But these proclamations must be seen as reflecting his own particular situation, and we must recognize that that’s not necessarily the same as ours. Mumia needs to convince the State the he is innocent because he has chosen that as a strategy and, more importantly, because there is not a serious revolutionary movement in America right now that could free him by other means. However, that does not mean that the strategy of the broader movement must be the same. We can want him freed by any means necessary, but we should not hinge our support of him on such minute details as innocence or guilt. Likewise, if he is “proven” by the State’s standards to be innocent, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he did not kill that cop. Further, in applying our own critique, we are able to broaden the debate and at the same time make an end run around the pointless banter of both Left and Right. The point isn’t that there’s one person on death row, it’s that anyone is on death row. The point isn’t that one innocent person is in prison, it’s that we reject that entire idea — no one deserves prison; everyone should be free, regardless of how the State labels them, cop-killer or not. Why do non-pacifist anarchists have such a weak heart when it comes to contemporary violence? If we recognize that violence has been a tool of many of our forebears and an integral part of past struggles, why do we shy away from endorsing it when working people, the poor and other oppressed groups do it now?In this sense, many of the so-called “criminal class”(again, that is the language of the state, with many implications) are far beyond anarchists in terms of their willingness to struggle, violently if need be, in a system which looks for any reason to lock them up from the time they are born. Many of the poor live outlaw lives from the day they are born — and many Mexican immigrants in this country are illegal simply for being in the U.S. And, while not officially illegal anymore, Black folks in this country certainly suffer a defacto criminalization that follows them through life. This reflects on the relative privilege of many anarchists, most of whom have the distinct choice of whether to face off with the cops, and goes a long way towards explaining why we have a hard time being relevant to the struggles of the oppressed. One wonders, if their struggles were organized into federations or if cop-killers used our insular jargon (e.g.,

257 “affinity group”, “spokescouncil”), would we then find them valid and worthy of our support? Unfortunately, making comments in favor of this type of thing are viewed within the anarchist community as dangerous and a certain amount of self- and group-censorship is applied to those who express such thoughts. When that happens we look a lot like the wishy-washy liberals who try to silence anarchists at meetings or who denounce the Black Bloc or anarchists in general as too aggressive (“it will overshadow the message”, is a common complaint); we know they’re really just scared of losing control of events and the dialogue. It also smacks of a more passive-aggressive version of the “now is not the time” argument that liberals and Leftists who, lacking a true commitment to kick the whole damn system over, constantly preach to those who dare doubt the munificent counsel of the ever-learned Left. While such censorship is usually justified on grounds (wrongly), they seem to me more accurately to derive from the unacknowledged white supremacist and vanguardist assumptions which underlie the middle class anarchist critique. As discussed previously, there is a clear difference between the “propaganda by the deed” revolutionary anarchists of years long gone and people like Mumia. They were largely white by contemporary standards and therefore do not challenge white anarchists’ latent white supremacist notions. That is, Alexander Berkman stabbing Frick does not threaten contemporary white anarchists’ weltanschauung — he was a fellow white anarchist (or at least they can create a revisionist history that defines him as such). Therefore, when it’s good ol’, long-dead Berkman, who fits into the modern construct of whiteness (attacking a symbol of capitalism, one of the few oppressions that white, male anarchists regularly encounter), it’s something that anarchists can support (although, as mentioned previously, there is a strong current in anarchy today that even attempts to distance itself from that). However, when it’s Mumia, a black man, white anarchists instinctively retreat to the machinations of the white supremacist State for validation. White anarchists have a hard time supporting him, as a black man killing a white man (and a cop, defender of the color line, at that), unless he receives the State’s stamp of approval: innocent. How is this kind of behavior different from white jurors many times greater zeal in handing down death penalties when blacks transgress the traditional color caste and kill whites? The relationship seems clear enough. As with all reactionary positions, this presumption reveals as much about us as about the object of our condemnation. Another weakness is, despite all our loud denunciations of vanguardism, we are also uncomfortable with the idea of a revolution moving ahead without us, and we are too busy with our nuanced arguments to take the time to look around and see what sorts of anti-white supremacist, anti-State, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist,

258 anti-work, anti-tech struggles are happening all around us. More experience and less theory, how about? Or at least equal parts . . . Too many anarchists still ad- here to the notion that, despite not being terribly oppressed themselves, that their particular notion of revolution is the one true way, however ill-informed it may be.Too many contemporary anarchists dogmatically adhere to a revolutionary plan that elevates workplace organizing over other forms of community organiz- ing (which might have to deal with uncomfortable issues like white supremacy). Police brutality organizing is pooh-pooh’ed as a distraction, or at least, less im- portant than workplace organizing. Currently anti-police brutality organizing (among other strategies), which directly confronts white supremacy, Statism and capitalism, is subordinated to the struggle in the workplace which, despite its failure to produce revolutionary fruit in over a hundred years (and the increasing emptiness and irrelevance with which most people view their work), still is pre- sumed to be paramount in revolutionary strategy for anarchists. What if, instead, workplace organizing supported anti-police brutality organizing, rather than the other way around? Flipping this formula on its head might inject the kind of fresh energy into our movement that could really begin to produce results. Isn’t police brutality organizing the kind of thing that workers, zero-workers, the un- employed, the community in general and those in the underground economy can all agree on? And couldn’t increased militancy in community defense translate to the workplace? Couldn’t the ideas of community self-defense (especially when done in an affinity group style) be very easily, and flexibly, rooted to an anarchist critique that included collectivization of the workplace? Couldn’t it also very easily translate, if properly conceptualized and trained, to community militias that could drive the cops out of our communities, thus leaving no one to oppose our attacks on and re-organization of the capitalists’ property? We need to re-evaluate the way we, as anarchists, prioritize our struggles. As North American anarchists, rather than trying to fit a 19th century European revolutionary, work-centered, anarchist model over our current situation, we ought to be looking hard for where the struggle presently is taking place, however disorganized and small. That is, we should be asking ourselves how the struggle currently manifests itself within our society (not Spain 1936, for instance, and for fucksake not the Paris Commune), and attempting to encourage within it the libertarian elements we find there. Certainly there is something to be learned from past struggles. However, too many anarchists are historians, not revolutionaries. A revolutionary is someone who appreciates the past yet seeks to overthrow the present in the interest of the future. We are not prisoners of history and neither can we re-fight the Paris Commune. If our goal is revolution, then we must encourage society’s insurrectionist ten- dencies, including considering support for bank robbers to cop killers to black

259 market escapes from work. Organizing in small, unofficial bands based on com- mon goals and outlook should be encouraged.To do otherwise is to cave in to bourgeois tendencies. Clearly some brands of anarchy, particularly Leftism and anarcho-syndicalism, have little relevance in today’s society (although there is something of value to be taken from both — like a general strike not to seize but rather to abandon the means of production, such that they are in post-industrial America). However, a commitment to rejecting either/or dichotomies and petty ideological rivalries must be combined with a eyes-wide-open appreciation for the current state of the struggle outside our inward and backward looking anarchist community (and even the political community in general). Forging a coherent and relevant message must be our priority, and that must be tied to a commitment to leave in the dustbin of history the tired-old Leftist organizations and methods that have failed us in the past. Moving in that direction will allow us to re-concep- tualize ourselves so that, rather than being a part of, or drawing our membership (in the loosest possible sense of the word) from the Left, we re-situate ourselves within the larger, spontaneous struggle that surrounds us daily (and of which we ought to be a part). The Left is its own willing executioner and anarchists should neither stay their hand towards this end nor resurrect them after they’ve finished themselves off. Our continued association within its tradition can only serve to prolong its life; if the rise of Leftism were conducive to successful anarchist revolutions, we’d have ample evidence of it by now. It’s time to try something different. The Left and anarchy must be de-linked as soon as possible.

Mean Ends

Another way that Leftists attempt to undermine an independent anarchist critique of violence is through the claim that the ends and the means are the same, and that if we want a non-violent world, we must utilize non-violent means. Not only is this ridiculous coming from Statists, whose goals are anything but non-violent. But who says that anarchists want a non-violent society, anyway? Violence is inherent in nature, why should we presume to be able to eliminate it in ourselves? While clearly there was violence before the rise of the State, the Leftist presumption is based on the false belief that the human world before its benevolent ascendancy was violent and brutish. This begs the question, if it was so, why did it take so long for primitive people to invent the State? These presumptions are those of Hobbes, and the defense of the State that he makes in his book, Leviathan, written in the 17th Century, differs little from that made today by his political progeny (which shows how little their game has changed since then):

260 . . . without a common power to keep them all in awe . . . every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The anarchist knows that this is not the case, however, and that all the presump- tions that flow from it are similarly flawed. Of course, we ought to rid ourselves of the equally naïve notion that violence can be completely eliminated. The fact is, sometimes violence is an appropriate means of dealing with a problem, political or not. The victim kills her rapist in the act. Two people with a grudge duke it out. A bomb goes off at a government or corporate building. Who’s to say that these are inappropriate methods of dealing with problems? Not every dispute needs to be mediated or moderated by an outside force.Isn’t this principle, too, at the core of the anarchist critique? While ends and means are both important, many anarchists today fetishize the means, ignoring entirely the fact that different means, while not justified by the ends, can have different outcomes, some of which are more desirable than others. Simply because we have created a category (“violence”) into which we have arbitrarily lumped all sorts of dis-similar actions (everything from fistfights to fusion bombs) does not mean that we are off the hook when it comes to evaluating their usefulness and place in society. Further, all sorts of things that probably could just as well be considered violent have been left out, and each omission reflects specific value judgments in its own right. “Self-defense”, fishing, a bug smashed on the windshield of a speeding car, carpal tunnel syndrome, a worker buried under a load of bricks at work, pumping gas into your car that was taken from a pipeline in Colombia so you can go to work, an ant squashed underfoot, a car crash, and a white blood cell devouring a virus are all examples of actions that are not generally considered violent, despite the quite reasonable case that could be made for qualifying them as such. Looking at primitive societies, we see a variety of methods of dealing with the issue of violence, but one thing we don’t see is a Hobbsian war of all against all. Ironically, it’s not until the rise of the State that we see this.Just as fascism’s jackboot and open State-industry collaboration reflects the extreme, last-ditch capitalist defense of wealth, conflicts such as the wars in Afghanistan, Somalia and other similar “lawless” places need to be recognized for what they really are:

261 contests for State power. As such we should not be surprised that both exhibit the most despicable and vile aspects of each system. But such struggles are not examples of anarchy as anarchists mean it, nor as things were before the rise of the State. Pierre Claustre, in his book The Archeology of Violence, lists ritualized warfare, duels and feuds as among the violent ways that early anarchic humans solved problems and redistributed power. More importantly, such means were often fundamental to the maintenance of delicate balances of power between tribes and within regions. For instance, the Iroquois League, while exhibiting many of the traits of an anarchist society, was made up of several very violent tribes, among them the Mohawks, whose name literally meant “cannibal”. That is, violence, while perhaps being a rarity, should not be considered as separate to creating and preserving an egalitarian society. Rather, the evidence seems to suggest that it could quite possibly be a very necessary requirement. So, while we do see violence before the rise of the State, we do not see cutthroat societies in which “everyone for him/herself” rules. In fact, as Claustre notes, What, in this case, would be the principal result of war of all against all? It would institute precisely the political relationship that primitive society works constantly to prevent; the war of all against all would lead to the establishment of domination and power that the victor could forcibly exercise over the vanquished. So, we see that, far from being utopian societies of peace and love, primitive societies had many outlets and uses for violence. However, at the same time, they were not the nasty, violent and brutish communities Hobbes imagined. Said another way, while a non-violent anarchist world would indeed be an unattainable utopia, non-violent Statism remains the real utopian vision — never to be realized because of the violence, unstoppable and massive in scale, inherent in the State. The world preceding the ascendancy of the State was not a non-violent one.But, because the State is capable of violence on a much more massive scale, it was a much less violent one. If we seek a world without judges, cops, courts and prisons, we must recognize all sorts of ways of resolving disputes, including those that do not require or ask for mediation. We must also recognize the possibility that such violence may be crucial to such a society’s continued existence. P.M., in his classic anarchist book, Bolo’Bolo lays out a vision of a future anarchist society. In it he not only acknowledges the reality of violence, he incorporates it directly into the society by reviving the notion of the duel as a dispute resolution mechanism. Interestingly, P.M. also makes another case for the continued existence of violence in an anarchist society. There are no humanist, liberal or democratic laws or rules about the content of nimas [common socio/political/cultural backgrounds] and there is no State to enforce them. Nobody can prevent a bolo [community] from committing mass suicide, dying of drug experiments, driving itself into madness or being unhappy

262 under a violent regime. Bolos with a bandit-nima could terrorize whole regions or continents, as the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and adventure, generalized ter- rorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering — everything goes. This vision perhaps goes a bit further than many anarchists would be willing to concede, but P.M. clearly has a realistic appreciation for the fact that in a truly anarchist society, not all anarchist values will be universally adopted, whether because the revolution will not occur simultaneously everywhere, or in the same way, or because some people may decide simply to opt out of an anarchist society (blasphemy, I know). Pre-State societies have shown a wide range of attitudes towards violence: from human sacrifices, warfare and cannibalism on one hand to raw foodism and peaceful co-existence on the other — it is unlikely that an anarchist world would ever settle on just one standard (and what a bland and boring world that would be if they did). That goes for private property as well as violence — while we want to abolish it, it’s unlikely that absolute abolition would come immediately, everywhere (and who says we have to wait?). There are many ways that societies deal with property; even traditional anarchism has come up with several different models. And, of course, despite our most persuasive arguments, some communities may simply choose to keep it anyway, although I sincerely doubt anyone could maintain it on any large scale without the State (it amazes me how some dogmatic anarchists’ visions rival the McDonald- ization of globalization in the uniformity of the structure they imagine for the post-revolutionary world). This is particularly obvious with the Platformists, for instance, who seem to have spent a whole lot of time planning out to very minute details the shape of their ideal post-revolutionary world.In all likelihood, such planning will probably turn out to be in inverse proportion to the relevance such plans will actually have when the revolution comes, however. It seems common-sensical, but clearly agrarian Third-World anarchism will not much resemble the anarchy of the post-industrial North or the newly indus- trialized South — much to the dismay of both Primitivist moralizers and anarcho- syndicalist historians, I’m sure. The anarchy of the Black revolution in America may seriously differ from that of the indigenous peoples of Central America (and when it comes, white America better be prepared to join in or get the hell out of the way, that’s for sure). But the point is not that we are busy constructing a world free of violence, but rather that we are building a world that recognizes and is more in tune with violence, although on an infinitely smaller and personal scale than that with which we are accustomed to under the State. P.M. points out that this diversity does not prevent anarchist communities from actively undermining or sanctioning those who choose to live in ways destructive to others, nor from encouraging and harboring runaways from such societies. It merely presents a

263 case in which the anarchist revolution is at once decentralized and in constant struggle with both itself and outsiders, and where that struggle may in fact be integral to its continued existence. Such a society would be in constant revolt against itself (anyone remember Jefferson’s “tree of liberty”?). However, one need not go as far as P.M. to understand the point he is making. As anarchists, our critique has generally been that the State is the largest perpe- trator of violence, not that violence can be eliminated altogether. Just as simply because we believe co-operation is the prime motivator for human beings in deal- ing with others, doesn’t mean that this will be the case in all places and at all times. It is the Leftist and privileged belief in the benevolent State that has tainted our vision. And it is their record, ample and there for all to see, which ought to be defended — not that of anarchy. The burden of proof is on the Statists, not the anarchists. The fact that they have successfully kept us on the defensive, cleverly distracting everyone from their own genocidal and imperialist past, shows the degree to which we have become trapped in a no-win argument. It’s time to change the terms of the debate. A frank re-evaluation of our positions on violence could address the biggest complaint that those unfamiliar with anarchy make: what about violence? Rather than being forced into the reactionary position of declaring that the anarchist utopia will be a peaceful one, we should state the obvious: No, an anarchist world will not be free from violence, and neither will be the transition between capitalism and anarchy. But, in the end it will certainly be a much less violent world, what with the elimination of the state, the death of capitalism, the sharing of wealth, the re-evaluation of work and technology, and all the rest. Further, the values of co-operation and mutual aid that underpin anarchy will certainly serve to create a different climate from the cutthroat competition and envy of capitalism. This will further reduce the likelihood that people will resort to violence tosolve their problems. However, that does not mean that there will be no violence. It is probably likely that violence itself can never be eliminated; nor, perhaps, should we want to do so if we are interested in building well-functioning stateless societies. In fact, the idea of non-violence itself is a construction that serves specific ends. Just like the myth that “you can’t fight city hall”, its conclusions are conservative, restraining action rather than encouraging it. Further, framing the debate this way not only makes us look utopian, it also serves to funnel dissent into other so-called “legitimate” or “approved” channels, which also coincidentally validate the State, elections, power, authority and white supremacy. It also serves the interests of those who choose to make those their fields of battle (on which we are severely disadvantaged, it should be remembered). Stepping out of this ideological trap will permit us to determine our own path, rather than to have it dictated to us by those

264 who seek to co-opt, marginalize or criminalize us. No longer defined in reaction to Statism by ending its defacto (and lazy) association with the rest of the Left, anarchy could finally pro-actively define itself . . . and making this distinction brings us one step closer to framing a consistent, and realistic anarchist set of politics, which is a clear pre-requisite for any anti-capitalist, anti-State revolution aimed at . It will also allow us to get down to the serious work of supporting and constructing a truly broad-based, diverse, anarchist movement, and of presenting an attainable and realistic vision for the world that is quite different from the current one, but yet one that remains attainable and realistic — and one that can successfully challenge and bring down the State and capitalism once and for all.

265 (’Ashen Ruins’ = ’Necrotic State’) Retrieved on July 19, 2009 from www.infoshop.org

266 The Anarchist Library Anti-Copyright

June 1, 2012

267