Anarchy after

A NOTE ABOUT C.A.L. PRESS Leftism

The publication of Anarchy afler Leftism by the Columbia Alternative Library signals the opening salvo of a new book publishing collective dedicated to the uttcr destruction of the dominant society. The collective members, Jason McQuinn, Paul Z. Simons and John Zerzan, while having in the past worked on a Bob Black variety of projects, found in the course of discussion (and to their mutual consternation), enough points of philosophical agreement to commence a venture the first fruits of which you hold in your hands. This publishing project is dedicated to bringing to the discerning public not only the newest and most devastating critiques of the awful mess we ca1l society, but also to keep in print those "classics" which have lapsed into publishing oblivion. Now, not only will our ideas be on evcryone's mind, our books will also be on their shelves. We welcome proposals for furthcr books or pamphlets. No manuscripts, please. If you have an idea, contact us at: CA.L. Press, POB 1446, Columbia, MO 65205-1446

Jason McQuinn Paul Z. Simons C.A.L. Press John Zenan Columbia Alternative Library CONTENTS

Anti-copyright @ 1997 Bob Black This book may be freely pirated and quoted. 7 Preface, Jason McQuinn The author and publisher would like to be informed at: 11 Introduction

c.A.L. Press 17 Chapter 1: OLD MAN Columbia Alternative Library MURRAY BOOKCHIN, GRUMPY POBI446 Columbia, MO 65205-1446 USA 31 Chapter 2 T IS INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM? Bob Black WHA POB 3142 50 Chapter 3 Albany, NY 12203-0142 USA LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM

Printed in the United States of America 60 Chapter 4 ON ORGANIZATION

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data 76 Chapter 5 STATIST Black, Bob. MURRAY BOOKCHIN, MUNICIPAL Anarchy after Leftism / Bob Black. Columbia, MO : CAL. Press, 1997 Chapter 6 Includes bibliographical references and index. 88 REASON AND REVOLUTION ISBN 1-890532-00-2 1. Anarchism. 2. Anarchists. I. Title. 103 Chapter 7 320.57 IN SEARCH OF THE PRIMITIVISTS PART I: PRISTINE ANGELS 10 987654321 6 ANARCHY AFrER LEFrISM

PREFACE 122 Chapter 8 IN SEARCH OF THE PRIMITIVISTS PART II: PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE Leaving the twentieth century, leftism of every stripe is in disarray and defeat-anarcho-leftism included. And Murray 130 Chapter 9 Bookchin's Social Ecology is certainly no exception to this FROM PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE TO trend. LABOR-ENSLAVING TECHNOLOGY Bookchin, one of the best known of contemporary North American anarchists, has spent much of his life staking out 138 Chapter 10 his own personal eco-anarchist ideological territory under the SHUT UP, MARXIST! banners of Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. He is the author of a steady stream of books from the sixties to 140 Chapter 11 the present, including his classic collection of essays titled ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM Post-Scarcity Anarchism published in 1971, his excellent volume on the history of the Spanish anarchist movement 151 References written in the seventies, and his failed attempt in the eighties at constructing a philosophical magnum opus in The Ecology 171 Index of Freedom. 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, Social Anarchism or LifestyleAnarchism, Bookchin aims to pin the blame for his lifetime of frustration (despite his decades of valiant effort!) on an evil anti- 9 8 PREFACE ANARCHY AFIER LEFTISM socialist conspiracy which has subverted his dreams at every an uncharacteristically generous spirit, from giving Bookchin turn: the dreaded specter of "Lifestyle Anarchism." For his due anyway. . . , Bookchin, lifestyle anarchism is a contemporary manifesta­ Bob's defense of anarchy in Anarchy after Leftism Isn t tion of the individualist anarchist currents which have always meant to express solidarity with those targeted in the latest bedeviled the world anarchist movement proper. The fact attacks framed by Bookchin's pidgin dialectics. Nor is Bob that the anarchist "movement" itself has always been more really interested in rescuing anarchist ideology from itself. He just wants to set the record strai t by c1earin away of a p�lymorphous insurrectionary milieu encompassing ?" � everythmg from anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-communists worse than useless polemics. DefendlDg the potential for and anarcho-futurists to anarchist feminists, anarchist anarchy is merely an unpleasant task of menial anti-ideologi­ primitivists and anarcho-situationists doesn't really matter to cal labor that Bob has performed because no one else volun­ him. The important thing is that he has finally been able to teered to wash these particular dirty dishes; while he wants to get on with cooking another meal. name the anti-organizational cabal which opposes him and . .' But that's by no means all that's gOlOg on her . DlspOSlng to explain the esoteric links between its often seemingly � . unrelated or even mutually contradictory efforts! of Murray Bookchin's ideological and rhetoncal rubbish Enter Bob Black. gives Bob the chance to develop the grounds for a more general attack on the remain ng estiges of le tism while he's Now a lot of people don't like Bob Black. Many anarchists � � � would be abrmed if he moved in next door. Anyone with at it. Cleaning house of lefllsm IS a much bigger task than good sense would probably be upset if he started dating her dealing with one man's leftist career. So n one sense, by . � younger sister. Most everyone is loathe to provoke his anger drawing attention to his ineffectual polemiC, Bookchm has or face it head on. made himself an excuse for the beginning of a much larger And not without reason. Bob may be a brilliant critic and process of critique, a process that will undoubtedly continue hilarious wit, but he's not a nice guy. His infamous reputa­ to unfold with increasing militance into the coming century. tion isn't built on fair play or good sportsmanship. Maybe this is why Murray Bookchin's latest rant, Social Anarchism or LifestyleAnarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm • The FiJlh Eswle's David Walson (aka George Bradford) has never criticizes Bob Black directly. In fact it never so muc h just written a valuable critique of major themes in Boo chin's work as mentions Bob's name. Even though it's obvious from the titled Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Soctal� Ecology. book's contents that by all rights Bob should have received pubtished by Autonomedia (Brooklyn, NY) an Black & Red the same type of attempted (though ultimately feeble) (Detroit, MI). t was also sti�ulalcd by Bookchm? s abys��l S�clQl thrashing Bookchin reserved for George Bradford, John � . Anarchism or LifestyleAllarch,sm. However, Watson 5 work IS a�med Zerzan, Hakim Bey, et al. more lOwards defending anarcho-primitivism and rehabilitating a Obviously, Murray knows better than to challenge Bob to non-Bookchinist Social Ecologythan towards the crilique Bob takes a duel, even a rhetorical one. But that hasn't stopped Bob, in on in this volume of Bookchin's leftover leftism served in biode­ gradable ecological and municipalisl wrappings. 10 PREFACE

It will require awareness and effor t from all this ta k, of us to finish � but it will be done. Bob s double critiqu . e in Anarch aifl ler incisiv Leftism only gains eness from the Y attitude of mpen nob/ has adopted �sse oblige he for his task Rath I� . INTRODUCTION er t an lettmg hIS past (and prese Own sordid nt) get th w y, motive � the lack of any (seemingly Bob'i� t revenge S avon muse) unleash his allows him to pen with just as � muc wit, but with herrings obscure fewer red This small book is nothing more than a critique of another put- doWns and tortur than ev ed self-justifications r. "The result I'S a small book, Murray Bookchin's Social Anarchism or Lifestyle ; rnad est feast ad e up . ' tently entert � af conSls- Anarchism: All Unbridgeable Chasm. His consists of the aining prose Imma' . be ' nent cn�l ue of a eminent social critic �� � wouJd­ a e more naIl obsolete I ' m the coffin of �ftism, anarchist_sty e You mIght not � I Edinburgh, Scotland & San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1995. . want to invite� Bob certa int a your house. I All references consisting solely of numerals parentheses are page mly WOllldn. 't B ut in . at least thank him dIshes. And for doing the references to this book. All other references-be they to Bookchin's let's get On with the next feast! other writings or the writings of others-follow an approximation Jason McQuinn of social-science citation style. That is, they consist of a parentheti­ Anarchy: A Journ al of Desire Anned cal reference to a source by the last name of the author and [he Alternative Press Review year of publication followed by, in some instances, specific page references. For example, (Btack 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 Sometime!> 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 fo rbearance 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 1 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 bibliographicdetails. (continued ... ) 12 INTRODUCTION ANARCHY AFTER LEFIlSM 13 title essay plus "The Left Th at W as: A Personal Published . Reflection." They do now. Bookchin views-with-alarm almost every new in 1995! • It was an unexpected . IOtramural itn ervenhon' an tendency in anarchism except his own specialty, ecology. debate which had . 10 b een ?olOg On for twenty years .. at least What's more, the nefarious novelties exhibit malign thematic betwe l O : nar hists-leftist, affinities. Not only are they pernicious, they are pernicious ",:orkerist, Organizatio li �;��:���t�an� an dIverse (and :: ��� � ever more in essentially the same way. They represent a recrudescence an ever m ore numerous) contingent of chists who have anar- of an old heresy, "individualism," decked out in trendy post­ 10· one way or .nothe orthodoxy, . r d eparte d from modernist fashions in a configuration Bookchin calls "life­ at least in Bookch inS, eyes · Bookchin caught style anarchism." Much worse than a falling-away from some a lot of US heterodox anarchists by aspects of classical left-wing anarchism, lifestyle anarchism surprise. Most of us have ea d some of and . Bookchin'S books is (he insists) fundamentally opposed to the defining tenets many of us m self ; d a le d especially the o th , of anarchism. (How this could have happened on !tis watch arl r b r�: 1 � e s, chm subsequent and �ever-intensifie � ; �: ,,;;;. �. 00� ",'s he does not explain.) �:�.Yin p eoc upatlOn pal politics � � WIth munici- For Bookchin, then, lifestyle anarchists are not just errant we were mostl n � I as an idiosyn_ crasy. He seemed comrades, they are traitors. As such they are even worse to take i e �� !��;e we were up He was absent f �� ��� to than avowed opponenls of anarchism. He mistreats them bl"tc :ons� like Popular Reality, � the Fifth Estate accordingly. His jeremiad is downright nasty. There aren't le' e atch.,, Journal ;,:�: and Anarchy: A: many epithets he doesn't work in somewhere or another, and of Desire Amzedf� It ";f · S f he too the anarchists for granted. They never mind if they sometimes contradict each other (for didn't kn t o � were sinking swiftly t t they instance, "individualism" and "fascism" applied to the same into ideological:: :�i :� :' :n; �� 1 ��: people). They don't have to be true to be effective. Bookchin � started out as a Stalinist, and it sure shows in the abusive I ( . ...cOntm ued) style and unscrupulous content of his polemic. He wants no Some anarchists dialogue with his self-appointed enemies, only their irrepara­ arc unduly imP . ressed" b y the trappmgs ship, unaware of scholar- that . if carefull y scrutmlZed . ble discredit. they arc sometImes cIaptrappings . Some . ' only . are even susceptible I get the distinct impression that Bookchin, an elderly man t 0 1ypeset text as If typesetting were such, as . . some sort of guarantee said to be in ill health, is cashing in his chips as a prominent that the I I· presump- tlvcly Important and ex IS /or Irue. anarchist theorist and staking all his influence and reputation To a considerable extent Bookchin' . s scemm scholarship on demolishing all possible alternatives to his own creed, shallow or sham, � is and that's s peciall A Y t rue of Social Anarchism what he calls "social anarchism." parting shot. LifestyleAnal'chisl1J . To d � or emonstra(e that as He missed the target. He had to miss the target, since scholarship ' th' IS essay does, my will have to be much b efter and Careful much more honest. there is none. There's no such thing as "lifestyle anarchism." referencing and . ' a cl car un erstandingd referencmg, of my method of There are only a lot of anarchists exploring a lot of ideas-a is crucial to thaI . de monstratlOn . For the worst is �ou, gentle reader, lot of different ideas-that Bookchin disapproves of. It now behind yo u. Let t h e games begm! 14 INfRODUCIlON ANARCHY AFtER LEFttSM 15 follows that this book is not a defense of "lifestyle anar­ chism." There's no such unicorn, crushing force on "an ugly, stupid style and substa�ce of I so I couldn't defend it even sumval of if wanted to. The very phrase is Bookchin's invention, doctrinal harangue" (Black 1992: 189), the v.:orst much as Stalin invented a nonsense category, the "bloc of Bookchin's original Marxism. I've done. It before. and, Rights and Trotskyists," to collect all his frankly, I rather resent having to do it agal�. Bookc�m has for their political enemies made the cardinal author's mistake of fallmg for hiS own more convenient disposal. At the time, Bookchin e such a wretch­ believed this, and everything else, the Party told him to jacket blurbs. Otherwise he could never wri� . . believe. He hasn't changed much; or, if he ed screed and hope to get away with It. HIS prevIOus back. did, he's changed contributions to anarchism, even if they were as epochal as If I were he likes to think, are no excusefor this kind of gutter-gabble. only taking Bookchinto task for his incivility, I'd And sour be a hypocrite, for I've penned plenty of blunt critiques of His swan-song sounds nothing but sour notes. various anarchists and anti-authoritarians. A Dutch anarchist, grapes. . Siebe Thissen, has Which is why I think there's a place fo� my p�lemlc. If described me-not as a criticism-as the can't get away with talkmg trash, severest critic of contemporary anarchism (1996: 60). Maybe even the great Bookchin am, although criticism of anarchists takes up only a fraction maybe less eminent anarchists will be le�s ,tempt�d to talk Iof the content of my previous three books. But I've often trash. If even the quasi-academic Bookchm s qu�sl-Scholar­ been tough on anarchists I considered authoritarian, ship doesn't hold up under even �odest scrutmy, ma�be est or stupid. dishon­ some unduly impressionable anarchists will learn to questIOn Often harsh but, I like to think, the authority of footnotes and jacket blurbs. Better schol�rs people, rarely unfair. Some than Bookchin live in dread of somebody someday lookmg especially those I've criticized, mistake my being them, articulate for my being rude, or mistake my noticing up their footnotes. I'll be getting around to several of for being obsessed them too. But, worst things first. with them. Be that as it may, for me to . I set myself up as the Miss Manners of anarchism would not Most people will take no interest in what B�okchl.n and be appropriate. I do think Murray Bookchin have to say about anarchism. These books aren t dest.med f�r in manners, needs a lesson the best-seller lists. Even some feel.good anar�hlsts Will and I'm going to give him one, but incivility is least the least of what's wrong with his dyspeptic diatribe. It's dismiss the ruckus as Uin-fighting." But on one pOint at what he says, far more than how he says it, I think Bookchin would agree with me: in-fighting can be as have done that I mean to important as out-fighting. Indeed it's impossible t� tell the� with. . who I am not, except incidentally, defending those whom apart. The fighting has a lot to do with determmmg .1S Bookchin targets as "lifestyle anarchists." (For the record, in and who is out. But anybody who thinks that anarchism IS, I'm not one of his identified targets.) I am debunking or might be, important should consi?er this cont�oversy very category of lifestyle the important. admit I'm almost as vam as B?okchm, but anarchism as a construct as mean· ami ingless as it is malicious. I maybe I the "lifestyle anarchist" to call him out for a And am coming down with showdown at high noon out at the Cucle-A. Ranch. 16 INfRODUCTION

A throwbac to . vulgar Marxism in mOre than one sense S C1 l Anarc/llsm� or Lifestyle : t Anarchism may turn out to b t e ast tract of its kind, CHAPTER 1 . at least the last one with anarchist� p�etenslons. Soon there . . . . . will be nobody left in North Amenca MURRAY BOOKCHIN, th e requIsIte LeDlDlSt background WIth to practice this highly GRUMPY OLD MAN styr Ize d g nre f def . � � amation. Debunking it ma assisty anarchIsts tn lett go of . the leftism they h ave outgrown s0 0 t 109 f h em WIthout realizing it. Cleansed resl'7 ues, of its left is anarch�anarchism minus Marxism-will ; Social Anarchism or LifestyleAnarchism may well be the to get better be free at be what it is. worst book about anarchists that any of them has ever 109 written. According to the cover blurb, Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, has been "a lifelong radical since the early 193Os." "Radical" is here a euphemism for "Stalinist"; Bookchin was originally "a militant in the Young Pioneers and the Young Communist League" (Clark 1990: 102; Bookchin 1977: 3). Later he became a Trotskyist. At one timecf. Bookchin himself, "as one who participated actively in the 'radical' movements of the thirties" (1970: 56), put the word "radical," consider­ ing 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 pseudonym, Our Synthetic Society(Herber 1963), which anticipated (although it seems not to have influenced) the environmentalist movement. In 1970, by which time he was pushing 50 and calling himself an anar­ chist, 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 Anar­ chism (1971), Bookchin disdained to conceal his delight with the disarray of his Marxist comrades-turned-competitors. He 18 MURRAY GRUMPY ANARCHY R BOOKCHIN, OLD MAN AFTE LEFTISM 19 thought he sa his chance. would � Under his tutelage, anarchism foremost contemporary anarchist theorist" (Clark 1990: 102; finally d�splace . Marxism, and Bookchin would place Clark 1982: 59)-in fact, not many anarchists acknowl­ the stamp of his specIalty, "social ecology," on anarchism. cf.odged him as Iheir dean. They appreciated his ecological �ot onl! would he be betting on the winning horse, he would orientation, to be sure, but some drew their own, more far­ e the Jockey. As one of his followers has written "if your reaching conclusions from it. The Dean came up against an efforts. at �reating your own mass movement unexpected obstacle. The master-plan called for anarchists pathellc faIlures, find someone h�ve been " else's movement and try 0 to increase in numbers and to read his books, and those lead .1 (Clark 1984: 108). t Bookchin parts came off tolerably well. It wasokay if they also read a . thereupon set out to conquer the anarchists for few anarchist classics, Bakunin and Kropotkin for instance the eco-rad.cals (the Greens), the Greens for the (8), vetted by the Dean, with the understanding that even the and all for one-the great one-Murray Bookchinanarchists He himself best of them afford "mere glimpses" of the forms of a free would supply the "muscularity of thought" (Book chin: society (Bookchin 1971: 79) subsequently built upon, but 19�7b: 3) tliat they lacked. By now he's been "a prophetic transcended by, the Dean's own epochal discovery, social :olce In the ecolo movement for mind standing .f he does say gy more than thirty years," ecology/social anarchism. Bookchin docs not so himself (Institute for Social Ecology 1996' on the shoulders of giants-he rather enjoys the feel of them 13) (Bookchin co-founded the ISE). He cranked out severa under his heel-so long as he stands tallest of all. well-padded, largely 171e i Freedom repetitious books. Ecology of He must have had no doubt that he would. He seemed to (1982; rev. ed. 1991) is the one he apparently have no competition intramurally. Paul Goodman, "the most regards as h.s magnum opus. At any rate one of his jacket widely known anarchist" (Dc Leon 1978: 132), untimely died. blurbs (Bookchin 1987a) quotes a revol Tweedy British and Canadian anarchist intellectuals like weekly, Village Vo ice, �tionary anarchist the to that effect (cf Clark [1984]. Herbert Read, AlexComfort and George Woodcock shurned 215). ' ' off into the literary world. Aging class-struggle fundamental­ The '?�terial ase for these superstructural effusions ists like Sam Dolgoff and Albert Meltzer could be counted Bookchm s proVidenhal? appointment was ColI ge as a Dean at Godd d on to just keep doing what they were doing, whatever that � near Burlington, Vermont, a cuddle-college r was, and with their usual success. "We all stand on the hlpp.es and, more recently, punks, with wealthy �: shoulders of others," as the Dean generously allows (1982: Goddard College 1995) parents (cf Ramapo . He also held an appointment a Acknowledgements). Dean Bookchin could stand on the College. Bookchin, who sneers at leftists who have; shoulders of midgets too. The footing was even surer there. embarked upon "alluring university . would careers" (67) ' IS one 0f What the Dean did not expect was that anarchists them. start reading outsidehis curriculum and, worse yet, occasion­ Something went awry' Although Dean B OO k h'cm ally Ihink for Ihemselves, something that-in all fairness­ I�' dd' ee dle y read by North American was instance, hiS WI anarchists-one of nobody could have anticipated. They read, for acknowledged sycophants (Clark 1984: 11) calls him "the about the ethnography of the only societies-certain of the MURRAY B 20 OOKCHIN, GRUMPY OLD ANARCHY AFrER LEfTISM 21 MAN so-called primitive societies-which have actually been in the original). operative anarchist societies on a long-term basis. They also This was not a solemn revolt, a coup d'etal bu­ read about plebeian movements, communities, and insurrec­ reaucratically plotted and manipulated by a "van­ tions-Adamites, Ranters, Diggers, Luddites, Shaysites, guard" party; it was witty, satirical, in�entive 3?d Enrages, Carbonari, even . pirates (to mention, to be brief, creative-and therein lay Its strength, Its capacIty only Euro-American, and only a few Euro-American for immense self-mobilization, its infectiousness. examples)-seemingly outside of the Marxist-Bookchinisl progressive schema. They scoped out Dada and Surrealism. The lumpen-bohemian crazy who penned thi.' paean to They read the Situationists and the pro-situs. And, yes, like "neo-Situationist 'ecstasy''' (26) is the prelapsarlan .Murray earlier generations of anarchists, they were receptive to Bookchin (1971: 249-250, 251). These are all, In fact, currents of cultural radicalism. Indeed, instead of listening to situationist slogans. Some of us believed him then. Now he "decenl music" (64 n. 37), they often preferred he ever punk rock to tells us we were wrong, although he never tells us Pete Seeger and Utah Philips ("the folk song," he has was. Why should we believe him now? explained, "constitutes the emotional, .. aesthetic, and spiritual The Hard Right Republicans like Newt Gmgrlch along expression of a people" [Bookchin 1996: 19]). And usually with the Neo-Conservative intellectuals (most of the lat�er, their hair was either too long or too short. Who sent them being high-income, elderly Jewish ex-Manasts down like the Dean this twisted path? up as journalists and/or from New Y rk City who ended . In some cases it was the "self-styled anarchist" (1, 2, � VI lzat on on the 9)­ academics) blame the decline of West�rn C� � , this is a favorite Bookchin slur-who wrote: T· e 60s '60s. Bookchin can't credibly do that, smce II was 10 t� that he came out as an anarchist, and built up the begmnlngs The graffiti on the walls of Paris-"Power to the of his reput�tion as a theorist. In his golden years, he has to Imagination," "It is forbidden to forbid," "Life tread very carefully on this dark and bloody ground: without dead times" [sic), "Never work"-represent a more probing analysis of these sources [of revolu­ For all its shortcomings, the anarchic countercul­ tionary unrest in modern society) than all the ture during the early part of the hectic 1?6Os was theoretical tomes inherited from the past. The often intensely political and cast expresSIOns hke uprising revealed that we are al the end of an old desire and ecstasy in eminently social terms, often era and well into the beginning of a new one. The deriding the personalistic tendencies of the later motive forces of revolution today, at least in the Woodstock generation (9). industrialized world, are not simply scarcity and material need, but also the quality of everyday life, By definitiOl. "the early part of the hectic 196Os" is presum­ the demalld for the liberatioll of experiellce, the ably the years 1960-1964. This is the first time I've heard tell attempt to gaill cOlltrol over olle's . destillY [emphasis of an "anarchic counterculture" dUring the Kennedy Admm- 22 MURRAY BOOKCHIN, GRUMPY OLD MAN ANARCHY AFl'ER LEITISM 23

• • IstratlOn. As manifested did nOt joi . One ACF in-what? the Peace Corps? the IIcrimony after a few years. The Dean . � . reen Berets? And Alliance; while there were personalistic tendencies faction set up the syndicalist Workers Solidarity. In� the early In the last . 196Os, no one then anticipated, and so no one Ilookchin didn't join that one either. And finally, derided, the Rage has specific "personalistic tendencies of the later few years the direct-actionist newspaper Lov� Woodstock & generation." Not Bookchin, certainly, who tried to turn its support groups into the nucleI of a natIOnal concluded prematurely that "Marxian predictions that Youth anarchist organization. Once again, Bookchin held himself Culture would fade into a comfortable accommodation with aloof. the system have proven to be fals e" (1970: 60). Why? No doubt all these organizations fell somewhat short What did you the all·seeing Dean do to combat these nefari­ of his requirements, but as my mother says, "what do ous tr nds c: in th� 20-odd years they have been infecting want, an egg inyour beer?" The CNT and the FAI were also anarchIsm? Nothing. He had better things to do than come imperfect. Everything is imperfect. If your fundamental to the rescue hat of the anarchist ideology he considers the last critique of contem porary North America? anarchists is best hop of . ratIOn,� . � humankind. On the one hand, he was consoli­ they have failed to assemble m a contmental fede datl g h,s e, and � alluring academic career; on the other, he was surely you should have told them what is to e. do� making a play for dl?stlngUlshe a ideological hegemony over the Green how, a long time ago. The involvement of so . movem . � ent. Were we all supposed to wait up for him? militant as Bookchin might energize an organizatIOn whIch Th re wer those dr ning . e: who actually tried to implement the might otherwise appear to be a sect of squabbling, ? Dean: s dJrectIve It a . to or�ulatc "a coherent program" and "a dullards, perhaps because, in each and every mstance, IS revolut onary organizatIon� � to provide a direction for the sect of squabbling,. droning dullards. ., mass d,scontent t at contemporary society is creating" The only possible justification is that-to do JustIce to the Note that Bo � (1). d wn �kchln demands Olle organization, although he Dean (and do ever want to do exactly that! -he lai � docs not A . ) ? lOn, say If he wants an American CNT, an American two requirements,I not just onc. dlrech�e orgamza� FAI or a American . remamed .' � symbiote of both such as formed in yes-but with "a coherent program " Such tIme as . Spain, WIth less than entirely positive consequences after the pcrformance of his administrative and academIC (Bookchln 1994: has 20-25; cf. Brademas 1953). responsibilities (and the lecture circuit) the Dean During doubt the recent decades of decadence there were devoted to providing the coherent program. No everal opportunities had Iot � for the Dean to parti ipate in this Bookchin can organize the masses (he must hav� � . Important work. He claims that his parents were� Wobblies of practice, and surely great success, in his Manast-Lemmst (2-3)-I wonder other comrade . what they thought when he became a days). So can many other comrades-but no Communlst?-but It he did not himself join the Industrial can concoct a coherent program the way Bookchin can. IS, Workers of Less the World although it still, after a fashion, exists. therefore only rational for a division of labor to prevail. In the late 1970s,_ some class-struggle anarchists formed the talented omrades should do the organizational drudge-work, Anarchist It's an Communist Federation, which collapsed in freeing up� Dean Bookchin-after hours-to theorize. MURRAY BOOKCHIN, GRUMPY OLD ANARCHY AFIER LEFfiSM eJLaw 0f For instance, the North American anarchist publication with talk about opot�inist-Bookchinist I he highest circulation, Allarchy: A faumaf of Desire Amled, rotation of tasks �bou� supersedmgKr the of hand-work and b'ram-wor ' -time separation on Bookchin's enemies list (39, 50). Revolution. enough for that afterthe j� As for the supposition that "Yuppie and New Age person­ The Dean's booklet thunders ('ID ulism" are "all-pervasive" in our "decadent, bourgeoisified way) that "an arc hIsm' a querulous" sort of a era," this says more about Dean Bookchin and the company and turbule stands at a tu�nt�g' !'olnt' m Its long keeps than it does about contemporary society. If you are nt history" (I) . Wh he honored sophist m en dldn t It? In the time­ on upper middle class academic in an affluent leftist enclave no ����r, the Dean �ffers an answer to a like Burlington or Berkeley, you might well think so, but to nsense question 0;";c�ncocbon . "At popular distrust of th� s a a time when generalize those impressions to the general society is prOportions . e as reached extraordinary unwarranted and narcissistic ("personalistic," as it were). ana in man CQUntnes," etc., etc., "the failure rchists-or at leI� t ''ranyself-styled anarchists-to of America (or Canada) is still much more like Main Street a POtentially h;ge b '' supporters" reach than Marin County. If the Dean really thinks the brat-pack course, but Hin no is due, not entirely of collegians in his Burlington ashram are representative North occUrred :m�l�. . measure to the changes that have American youth, he doesn't get out enough. in many h ver the ast two [they) have slowly :����n���e� the � decades ... Berating "Yuppies" for their self-indulgence, sometbing ideas . SOCial COre of anarchist Bookchin carries to the point of obsession (1 & passim), to the all -pervasive Yuppie and Ne w A th at marks this decaden t b, ourgeolslfied. . ge personalism doesn't defy media-managed popular opinion,it pallders to N l . era" (I). ow h.15" IS a cunous claim . it. As is typical of progressives, Bookchin is behind the times. e se Anarch'l Not only are the over, as he has finally figuredout, so � � PUlar id gical a � '60s ���ra ���K�:� ft? ���0i-�I��010 � ; 7h:�:s��':;'i :����� are the '70s and the '80s. The Old Left that he nostalgically isn't the first �cause. it's �o�ular? This recalls, what he calls the Left That Was (66-86), extolled & tim� I'v� n I Ie t IS obvI GUnderloy 1992). OUS IdIOCY {Black discipline, sacrifice, hard work, monogamy, technological SlInple logic aside (where . progress, heterosexuality, moralism, a sober and orderly if Dean' S . . l D ean Bookchln cast it) the not downright puritanical lifestyle, and the subordination of can an ; �fsl��� � S�:��� :S ��e ridi�u]ous. North A�eri­ a c n t r � (59), It h the personal ("selfishness") to the interest of the cause and cally in the last twenty year .as grown dramati­ the group (be it the party, the union or the affinity group): a little . s. T c Dea� might have even had to do with th at. It IS leftIsm. which is this growth of anarch Ism has . in retreat. That The puritanism and work ethic of the traditional orthOdox coincide. d WIth. th e e�li�se of left stem from one of the most powerful forces anarch anarcho-Ieflism . b more mterestmg vanetles y doesn ' t conclUSivelyY prove of opposing revolution today--the capacity of the anarchies are the gro . t hat the heterodox bourgeois environment to infiltrate the revolutionary wth sector, but It sure looks that way. framework. The origins of this power lie in the MURRAY BOOKCHIN, GRUMPY OLD MAN 26 ANARCHY APIER LEFTISM 27 commodity nature of man under capitalism, a quality that is almost automatically translated to the is its destiny" (1974: 2). To professionalism? A college organized group and which the group, in turn, professor/bu.1 reaucrat such as Bookchin is a professional. The reinforces in its members. high technology Bookchin counts on to usher in post-scarcity IInarchism (1971: 83-135; 1989: 196) is the invention of This passage might have been wrillen by Jacques Cam aile, professionals and the fever-dream of techno-yuppies. So if whose essay "On Organization" has exerted an anti-organiza­ Dean Bookchin, an old urban professional, disparages young tional influence on a lot of us "lifestyle anarchists" (Camatte urban professionals, what is it about them that he hates so 1995: 19-32). By now the reader will be on to my game (one much? Bya process of elimination, it cannot be that they are of them, anyway): the above-quoted author is once again urban and it cannot be that they are professional. It must be Bookchin the Younger (1971: 47; cf. Bookchin 1977: ch. 11). I hat they are as the Dean is not. Actually, a lot of you"g, Again: Ihem 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 In its demands for tribalism, free sexuality, com­ fault, after all, that most of them will live on long after munity, mutual aid, ecstatic experience, and a Murray Bookchin is dead and forgotten. balanced ecology, the Youth Culture prefigures, And one more thing: Now that we know why the heretical however inchoately, a joyous communist and class­ anarchists have "failed to reach a potentially huge body of less society, freed of the trammels of hierarchy and supporters," what's his excuse? One of his editors calls him domination, a society that would transcend the "arguably the most prolificanarchist writer" (Ehrlich 1996: historic splits between town and country, individual 384). (Although he has yet to outproduce the late Paul and society, and mind and body (Bookchin 1970: Goodman, who "produced a stream of books containing 59). some of his enormous output of articles and speeches" [Walter 1972: 157] and he is likely to be soon surpassed by Bookchin the Elder's values, in contrast, are precisely those Hakim Bey--a far better writer which may account for of the New Right and the neo-conservatives who have set the some of the insensate hatred the Dean displays for Bey.) So country's current political and ideological agendas-not the the truth is out there. Where, after all these years, are the Age bubbleheads Bookchinist masses? New Bookchin may meet in Vermont's The Dean's vocabulary of abuse evokes what he calls the socialist Congressman Bernie Saunders' hot tub. Left That Was (66) but hardly the fondness he feels for it. "Yuppie" is, on the Dean's lips, an ill-chosen epithet. It is His epithets for unorthodox anarchists are the standard (lest we forget) a neologism and semi-acronym for "young Stalinist epithets for all anarchists. He berates anarchist urban professional." To which aspects of this conjuncture "decadence" over and over, to which he often appends does Dean Bookchin object? To urbanism? Bookchin is the abstract denunciations of "bourgeois" or "petty bourgeois" apostle of urbanism (1987): he thinks that "some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity: AFfERLEfTISM 29 28 MURRAY BOOKCHlN, GRUMPY OLD MAN ANARCHY Kropotkin, were hereditary aris�ocrats. tend�ncies. "Decadence" is an epithet so indiscriminateJy 1111, Bakunin and deployed Wllh fine apphed that a spirited case has been made for retiring it I 'Iass-baiting is evidently a weapon to be from responsible discourse (Gilman 1975). Even without Ili\crimination. go of going quite so far, undeniably "'decadent' as a term of For Bookchin, as for Stalinists, class is not a cat� � an argot of abuse. Long ago he dlsml�sed politi al and social abuse has a generous range of applica­ ."alysis, only to the core," meamng­ ltons,� , espeCIally as deployed by Marxists and Fascists "workeritis" as "reactionary rendered . trans-class decomposition of contemporary socIety (Adams 1983: 1). itoss by the ly did class isappear from To speak of the Dean's denunciations of Ie bourgeois as (1971: 186-187). So complet� ? fier o ks "abstract" is my characteristically courteous way of hinting Bookchin's ideology that a reVIew of one of hIS go� � ? exclaimed that "it s what IS '."ISSlOg that he of all people had better pick his words more careful­ (l3ookchin 1987) termlOaIly� patheltc No­ ly. I say "abstract" because a college dean is a member of .. !together that renders his book dlme: ­ the bo rgeoisie if, in any objective sense, anybody is. where does he find fault with the most fundamental � � living, that of wage-labor and the commo�l­ Bookchm surely has a higher income than anybody he's Nion of modern reve t to th hoary aCXlst targeted. De.an Bookchin has to be deploying the word in a ty" (Zerzan 1994: 166). He .now � �, �, �--but subjective, moralistic, judgmental sense which, "petIt-bourgeOIS and I�pen however' he cpithets-"bourgeois,"they have, for him, real SOCIal content. isn't defining. with no pretense that words to th same It never used to bother the Dean that "many militant Otherwise, how could he apply all these � ( r radicals tend to come from the relatively affluent strata" people? In their relations to the means of productton � lifestyle anarchists cannot be both bourgeOIs (Bookchin 1971: 25)-as his student disciples still do. Who lack thereof), it that out of these "t o ­ else can afford to sit at his feet? For 1996-1997, the two­ and lumpens. And how likely is . l tan��n.� semester masters' program in Social Ecology costs $10,578 sands of self-styled anarchists" (1), not one IS a. pr� ,: Bookchin accuses rival anarchists of mdlVlduahsm (Goddard College 1996). Back then he considered it a Where accuse all anarchists of the same. "historic breach" that it was "relatively affluent middle class and liberalism, Stalinists Re iew . tor ,:"ho white youth" who created the im plicitlyrevo lutionary Youth For example, there was thatMOllthly � co�tnb� . to Bookchinism as "a crude klOd of lOdlvlduahsttc Culture (Bookchin 1970: 54·55). referred 1971: 225)! In other words, No one ca? .possibly pronounce with any confidence upon anarchism" (Bookchin the class posItIon of present-day North American anarchists ty or in general, much less the class positions of "individualists " ... capitalism promotes egotism, not individu�l! Bookchinists, etc. (Although my impression is that mo t "individualism." ...The term "bourgeois indiVidual­ anarcho-syndicalists are campus-based and none of them are� ism" an epithet widely used today against libertari­ factory workers. Work is much easier to glorifythan it is to an lements, reflects the extent to which bourgeois perform.) Nor does it bother the Dean that almost the only ideology� permeates the socialist project- luminaries unconditionally admitted to his anarchist panthe- MURRAY BOOKCI-IlN, GRUMPY OLD MAN 30 -these words being, of course, those of Bookchin Younger (1971: 284).That the Dean reverts to these :talinist slurs in his dotage reflects the extent to which boul CHAPTER 2 ideology permeates his project. Fanatically devoted WHAT IS INDIVIDUALIST urbanism, the Dean was being complimentary, not critiClII, ANARCHISM? when he wrote that "the fulfillment of individuality intellect was the historic privilege of the urban dweller or individuals influenced by urban life" (1974: 1). Individuality's not so bad after all, provided it's on his terms. Dcan Bookchin posits an eternally recurring "tension" As for "decadence," that is an eminently bourgeois swear­ wilhin anarchism between the individual and the social (4). word for pe,)ple perceived to be having more fun than you A, Ihis is none other than the central conundrum of Western are. By now the word has lost whatever concrete meaning it Ilolitical philosophy, the Dean is neither original nor-more ever had. Calling post-leftist anarchists "decadent" is just I'"portant-has he identified a specificallyanarchist tension. Dean Bookchin's way of venting his envy and, as Nietzsche lie goes on to identify the antitheses within anarchism as II would say, resselJtimelJt that they are not afflicted with the I wo basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic hemorrhoids, tax audits, or whatever it is that's raining on u)Jnmitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist his Mayday parade. ,'ulOmitlOent to social freedom" (4). This is the "unbridge­ IIhle chasm" his book title refers to. If the Dean is right-that individual autonomy and social liheration are not just in tension but basically cOlltradictory­ Ihcn anarchy is impossible, as anti-anarchists have always ",aintained. Bookchin here rejects out of hand what he used III espouse, "a society that would transcend the historic splits hctween... individual and society" (1970: 59). Not all of us share his conservative fatalism. We too have

Ulir apprehensions and our times of despair. But to surren­ der to them entirely (which [ condemn nobody for doing, if he's honest about it) is to renounce any affiliation with IIllarchism. The Dean won't fish, neither will he cut bait. He won't sh:t, neither will he get off the pot. Some of those with impeccable, Bookchin-approved credentials, such as Kropotkin, had a more tolerant take on I his genuinely tragic dilemma: 32 WHAT [S [NDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM? ANARCHY AFrER LEITISM 33 Anarchist Communism maintains that most valua­ ble of all conquests-individual liberty--and more­ for the practical opportunities for advancing his interests .INO over extends it and gives it a solid basis economic IIIlly opened up in a social state. This was the position of liberty--without which political liberty is delusive; it thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith and William does not ask the individual who has rejected god, 1I1tyrant, god the king, and god the III the private sphere, it means individual ghts The second resolution of the quandary, the radical one, is parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible IIlIarchism. Anarchism rejects the dichotomy as false maybe than any of the preceding-god the Community, or 1101 false as existing society is constituted, but false in its to abdicate upon its altar his independence, his will, '''pposed fatality. In an anarchist society the individual gains his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which I rcedom, not at the expense of others, but in cooperation he formerly made before the crucified god. It says with them. A person who believes that this condition­ to him, on the contrary, "No society is free so long IIl1archy--ispossible and desirable is called an anarchist. A as the individual is not so!" (Kropotkin 1890: 14-15) person who thinks it is not possible or not desirable is a tist. Bookchin is the veritable high priest of what Kropotkin calls .t "As shall have no difficulty demonstratinglater on, it so "god the Community," "more terrible than any of the happens[ that the Dean himself is not an anarchist, merely, preceding," the most vicious and oppressive god of all. his own terminology, a "self-styled anarchist." But that's in "Social freedom" is like the "free market" in the sense 110 reason for those of us who (albeit unenthusiastically, if I that the freedom referred to has to be metaphorical. It may speak for myself) are anarchists not to heed his critique. makes no literal sense to attribute freedom to behavioral From George Bernard Shaw to Guy Debord, anti-anarchists who took anarchism seriously have often supplied crucial interaction systems, even feedback systems, lacking the critiques the anarchists were unable or unwilling to construct necessarily individual qualities of consciousness and inten­ themselves. Unfortunately, Bookchin's isn't one of them. tion. It's like saying an anthill or the solar system or a What is remarkable about Dean Bookchin's posturing as thermostat is free. Free from, and for, what? What else the Defender of the Faith, aside from the fact that he could a society or a market possibly be free of if not autono­ doesn't share it, is how many of the Church Fathers (and mous individuals? Mothers) he has excommunicated as "individualists." If one assigns allY value to individual autonomy, logically Predictably, William Godwin (5), Max Stirner (7, 11) and there are only two possibilities for it to even exist, much less Benjamin Tucker (8) Bookchin summarily dismisses as flourish, in society. (Contrary to what the Dean implies [58], individualists, although that hardly does justice to the not even Max Stirner thought it was possible outside of richness of their insights and their relevance to allY anar­ society [1995: 161, 271-277].) The first is a compromise: chism. (Although even Kropotkin acknowledged that Godwin liberalism. The individual exchanges part of his precarious espoused communism in the firstedition of Political Justice, natural liberty for society'S protection of the rest of it, and WHAT Is INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM? 34 ANARCHY AFTER LEFnSM 35 only "mitigating" that view in later editions [Kropotkin 238], and the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker ackno, • to be told? edged that Godwin "was really the founder of the ,,1\ Goodman, a ucommunitarian anarchist" (Stafford communist Anarchism" [1947: 7].) IV"U lI) 112), Bookchin calls "an essentially individualistic But that's only the beginning of the purge. The 12: (12), esselltially I"'" chist" although Goodman was an urban­ condemns even Proudhon as an individualist (5), although t d & ," · n , humanistic anarcho-collectivist (Goodman elsewhere pays tribute 10 "Proudhon's emphasis on " ""dmanh e 1961: ch. 6 & 220; cf. Stafford 1972: 112-113) from ism [which] still enjoys considerable validity" Bookchin has cribbed many ideas without admitting 1996: 24). When Bookchin says that something from "hul11II Notice, for instance, the remarkable absence of any classical anarchist still enjoys considerable validity, this is 'rlc-rences to the by then deceased Goodman in Bookchin's of Ur banizatioll alld way of saying that's whom he filched it from. The federa Limits of tlze City (1974) or 771e Rise /I" , of Proudhon's later years (1979) is virtually identical ," " f)eclille of Citizells/lip (1987), although he did let slip the Crisis ill Ollr Cities 1965: 177) Bookchin's call for a "confederation of decentralized mtInic:i. '''''''0 in (Herber at a time palities" (60). Which is tantamount to saying that in the wle'n Goodman was in his prime whereas the future Dean w", so far from foreseeing his own celebrity that he wrote Proudhon was not an anarchist, as I am not the only one tlzis trashy have noticed (Steven 1984). Indeed, the Dean has come close a pseudonym. He'll soon vvish he'd written IInderIII,I·t under a pseudonym. to admitting it himself (Bookchin 1977: 21). ndividualist" anarchistsin the original sense-people like The Dean now claims that the prominent Spanish anar­ HI Stirner (1995) and John Henry Mackay-were never chist Federica Montseney was a "Stirnerite" [sic) in theory MilKlIulIlcrous, as Bookchin observes with loa much satisfaction if not in practice (8). In his Spallislz Allarclzists she is X). And they were always few and far between, strange to "one of the FA!'s luminaries"77w (Bookchin 1977: 243). The (I' in decadent, bourgeois North America, supposedly their FAI was a "vanguard" (the word is Bookchin's) anarcho­ '''Y,''',' ural breeding-ground. Stirner did not identify himself as communist secret society (Bookchin 1994: 21-22; cf. ,u, "narchist, probably because the only (indeed, the very Brademas 1953). I" hi) "self-styled" anarchist in the 1840s when he was writing Even Emma Goldman is under a cloud. Although she was WitS Proudhon, for whom moralism, as Stirner noticed, (ibid.: an avowed anarcho-communist, she also displayed a disquali­ "" ,.vcd as a surrogate for religion 46)-asit does for fying affinity with Nietzsche (8), and she was, after all, "by 'he Dean. The rather few individuals who at later times no means the ablest thinker in the libertarian considered themselves Stirnedsts have, however, usually pantheon" ('onsidered themselves anarchists as well, such as the Italian (13). Bookchin has a muscular, masculine disdain for "casant guerrilla Renzo Novatore (Black & Parfrey 1989: 92- anarchist women such as Emma Goldman, Federica 'Il). Montseney and Susan Brown. Only his innate modesty It is worth mentioning-because so many people whotoss kept the Dean frL.om naming who is the ablest thinker in the his name around have never read him-that Stirner had no libertarian pantheon, but then again, who, having read him, - W�iAT IS INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM? 36 ANARCHY AFI"ER LEFTISM 37 social or economic program whatsoever. He was no more You guessed it: Bookchin the Younger again (1971: 276). pro-capitalist than he was pro-communist, although Marxist Bookchin to dismiss this post-Hegelian development as like Marx, Engels and Bookchin have routinely and mindless "hourgeoisJiM ideology" is to dismiss the problem itself. Iy castigated him as an apologist for capitalism. Stirner w In a more recent, still narrower sense, "individualism" just not operating at that level. He was staking a claim, the ,Icsignates those who combine rejection of government with most radical claim possible, for the individual as against ,'pousal of an absolutely unlimited laissez-faire market the ideologies and abstractions which, purporting to iberatci1 ,yslem. Such ideologues do exist, but Bookchin never even him in general and in the abstract, left the individual mcntions a contemporary example, although he cannot be personally, practically subordinate as ever: unaware of their existence, since he made use of onc of their i er , principle.. .stirner created a 1I10pislic vision of u l sh s Free Life Books (Bookchin 1977). Considerable ,,p bl t wilh some of me that marked a new point of departure for the affirmation ,n ac them over the years has persuaded personality in an increasingly impersonal world" I al most anarcho-capitalists arc sincere in their anarchism, 1982: 159). From Stirner's perspective-which on this poiin h hough I am as certain that anarcho-capitalism is self­ is also mine-ideologies like liberalism, humanism, I'ontrnit adictory as I am that anarcho-syndicalism is. Unlike the syndicalism, and Bookchinism have all too much in comrn, I )can, I've on occasion taken the trouble to confute these (cf. Black 221-222). libertarians (Black 1986: 141-148; Black 1992: 43-62). But the 1994: point is, screed is by any Nobody the Dean denounces as a "Stirnerite," the Dean targets in this ofnobodthe imaginaly ion (not that he has o e Michael William (50), not Hakim Bey (23) is a Stirnerist .!retch n ) an "individu­ sense of term. this implies that he aflirms amoral egoism alld is eren IItisl" anarchist in the usual contemporary the never even claims that of or entirely agnostic about social and economic t] any them are. to I teThe Dean makes the bizarre allegation that those he calls Both obviously assume as axiomatic the need for a social] y e to matrix for individual efflorescence. What distinguishes them est l anarchists, decadent successors the individualist ,� ..lif narchists, claim (the quotation marks are his) their"sover­ in more than one sense, from the Dean is their appreciation ( 2 of the epistemic break in bourgeois thought wrought by the "ign rights" 1 ): likes of Stirner and Nietzsche: Their ideological pedigree is basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous A sense of incompleteness haunts Western philos­ individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are ophy after Hegel's death and explains much of the validated by axiomatic "natural rights," "intrinsic work of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Slirner, Nietz­ worth," or, on a more sophisticated level, an intuit­ sche, the surrealists and the contemporary existen­ ed Kantian transcendental ego that is generative of tialists. For the Marxians merely to dismiss this all knowable reality (11). post-Hegelian development as "bourgeois ideology" is to dismiss the problem itself. I S INDIVIDUALIST A 38 NARCHISM? WHAT ANARCHY AITER LEFnSM 39 A digression on the, for lack punctuatIon' . of a better wor. d , eth' ICS usually marks IS in order here. "Quo t atlon marks, lifestyle anarchists (meaning: non-Bookchinists) don't wrote Theodor Adorno, think or write that way. They tend not to go in for rights-talk hccause it is just an ideological, mystifying way of saying ... are to be rej cted as what they want, something better said honestly and directly. exempt � an ironic device. For they the. . wnter from the spirit wh ose C3I"un iS By this maladroit misrepresentation, the Dean inadvertent­ In' h . erent m Irony, and they violate the very concept ly exposes his original misunderstanding of the so-called of Irony by separating it from the Individualist anarchists. Max Stirner was an amoral egoist or and presentmg. a predetermined matter at hand Individualist. Godwin and Proudhon were, they were sub. judgment on the if ject. The abundant ironic quotation marks in Individualists at all, moralistic individualists preoccupied with Marx and En?e1s are the shadows that totalitarian what they called justice. Lysander Spooner was an example methods cast m advance Upon their wr'tmgs,' h ase of a clearly moralistic, natural-rights individualist anarchist. mtentlOn. . was the opposite: the seed 1 from W But when the prominent individualist publisher Benjamin eventually came what which Tucker went over to Stirnerist egoism in the late nineteenth Moska Karl aus caII ed l/delWelsch [Moscow double·Kr talk, from century, he split the American individualists. (This, as much Moskal/, Moscow, and Ka udelWelsC/1 . as the competition from collectivists credited by Bookchin [6- . , g'bbI ens h Or 71, d.ou bl e-talki- The mdifference to linguistic expres- brought about the decline of the tendency.) Although SIOn shown m the mechanical delegation of intention there were exceptions, the moralistic natural-rights individu­ to a typogr�phic .clicM arouses the suspicion that alists-which were most of them-usually ended up as the very d,alecllc that constitutes the th essentially advocates of pure free-market capitalism. Those co?tent has been brought eory's attracted to the amoralist, egoist or (if you please) ob . to a standstill and the ject asslmdated to. it from aboveJ wl'thou t negotla�. "Slirnerist" position necessarily shared with Stifner a whole­ tl. �n . h�re there IS something which sale rejection of moralism, that being what Stirner, and saJd, Wmdlff. erence to needs to be Nietzsche after him, absolutely exploded as a tenable point . ' literary form aIm ost a Iways md ,�ates dogmati.zation of the content. The blind of view. But no more than Stirner did they exhibit any verdIct of quotatIOn marks is its graphic gesture interest in laissez-faire (or any) economics. Capitalism, as (Adorno 1990: 303). Max Weber noticed, has its own moralism, often if not always expressed as the "Protestant ethic." The As. a tenured academic, the Dean is presum abl y aware egoists/am ora lists and the free-market natural-rightists In schI 0 arly ' th at. have dIscourse-and surely . I parted over precisely this point. The egoist/amoralists h' his mag'stI ena essay IS suc -quot lIon marks identity quotations, contributed something to the "lifestyle anarchists," the footnotes � yet his 45 fall to. reference any use of these expressIOns. by natural-righfists have not. anyb 0 d y. That IS because no such quotations For instance, take L. Susan Brown (pleasel-no, just exist. So-called kidding), who's attempted, says the Dean, "to articulate and V YV l"lAl I;:) Jl"-'UI lUUI-\Ll.,1 rtl"iI-\KL.nl;:)M : ANARCHY AFIERLEFTISM 41 elaborate a basically individualist anarchism, yet retain som filiations with anarcho-communism" (13). In a footnote he' Bookchinism or it is nothing-according to Bookchin (60). more candid: "Brown's hazy commitment to anarchromanticism of the nineteenth be ashamed of them. Visiting the sins of the fathers on the century" which "fed into National Socialist ideology, however children, even unto the fourth generation (Exodus 7)-as much the Nazis honored their antitechnological ideology in the Dean is doing, pretty much on schedule-hardly34: com­ t he breach" (29). This would be a sophisticated version of ports with guilt-by· association if it were sophisticated. The Dean doesn't the Enlightenment rationalism he claims as his hot her to even identify these "conservative German" roman­ ancestry (21, 56). tics-he hasn't read them, probably couldn't even name The Left That Was which provided Bookchin's original them-much less substantiate their unlikely influence on politics, Marxism-Leninism, also supplied him with a contemporary "lifestyle" anarchists. Retro-leftist that he is, muscular polemical praxis and a versatile vocabulary of Bookchin must suppose that bracketing the hate-words abuse. I've already drawn attention to one of these gambits, "conservative" and "German" is a one-two punch nobody denigration-by-quotation-marks. Its "filiations" include recovers from. One page later (30), he admits that "there is Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder no evidence that Bradford is familiar with Heidegger or (1940) and countless texts by Marx and Engels, as Adorno Junger," the twentieth·century German intellectuals he (1990) noticed. John Zerzan, reviewing Bookchin (1987), j'accllses as carriers of nineteenth-century conservative noted a related way that the Dean abused quotation marks: German romantic ideology. "Another device is to ignore the real history of urban life, as McCarthyism is the political strategy of guilt by associa­ if illusory; he resorts at times to putting such terms as tion. If you know a Communist, or if you know �omeone who knows someone who is a Communist, presumptively you 'elected' representatives, 'voters' and 'taxpayers' in quotes as are a Communist and you'll have to talk your way out of it, though the terms really don't, somehow, correspond to preferably by ratting somebody out. The ex-Communist reality" (Zerzan 1994: 165). As if to confirm that he's Bookchin has outdone Senator McCarthy. The Senator incorrigible, Bookchin refers to this review, not as a review, sought to uncover association as evidence of guilt. The Dean but as a "review" (59). Bookchin was doing the same thing affirms guilt as evidence of association. That's really all there almost 40 years ago when the first chapter of 77leLimits of is to his dirty little diatribe. To be even less falf. than Joe tlte City (1974: ix) was written: Tenochtitlan was the "capi­ McCarthy is quite an accomplishment, what Nietzsche used tal," not a ita , of the urban, imperialistic, cannibalistic the c p l to call a "downgoing." Aztec empire (ibid.: 7, 9). And anot!ter thing, nineteenth-century romanticism.. was Bookchin just doesn't know when to shut up. Having neither exclusively conservative nor exclusively German. lambasted individualists as liberals, he turns around and IS INDI 44 VIDUALIST AN WHAT ARCHISM? ANARCHY AFTER LEFIlSM 45 What about the liberal or radical German romanticism Beethoven and Buchner and Schiller and Heine? And Iltlcst to recover authenticity "has its roots in reactionary about the non-German radical romanticism of Blake Illmanticism, most recently in the philosophy of Martin Burns and Byron and Shelley? Ilcidegger, whose vblkisch 'spiritualism,' latent in Being and The Dean relates that the Nazis honored their time, later emerged in his explicitly fascist works" (50). So anti-technological ideology "in the breach." "Honored in let's consider whether Bookchin·vetted classical anarchists breach" is Bookchin's poor try at heading lire ideologically kosher. Proudhon was notoriously anti­ off the Semitic (Silbener 1948), but since Bookchin dismisses him, and decisive, objection that the Nazis didn't have an anti­ however implausibly, as too much the individualist (4-5),lel's technological ideology. The Alltobah" was as much a I"ct Proudhon aside. Bakunin, the Russian aristocrat who monument to technology as were its contemporaries the "emphatically prioritized the social over the individual" (5) Moscow su�way and the New York World's Fair (which, I had a notion what was wrong with his authoritarian rival, suspect, thnlled the 18 year old Murray Bookchin). So was Karl Marx. Bakunin considered Marx, "the German scholar, the V-2. Almost openly erotic references to iron and steel in his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a recur :nth monotonous and pathological frequency in Nazi German," to be a"hopeless statist" (1995: 142). A Hegelian, rhetonc. As John Zerzan remarked in a book the Dean • Jew, a sort-ofscholar, a Marxist, a hopeless (city-) statist­ claims to have read (39-42, 62 n. 19): does this sound like anybody familiar? The Dean approvingly quotes Lewis Mumford on "the Behind the rhetoric of National esthetic excellence of the machine form" (32), a phrase Socialism, unfor­ or unately, was only an acceleration of technique, even which might have been turned by Marinetti or Mussolini mto� anyone else on the ill-defined frontier between Futurism and the sphere of genocide as a problem of indus­ (cf. Moore 1996: 18). In War, the Wo rld's Only trial production. For the Nazis and the gullible it Fascism . ' Hygiene, Marinelli elaborated on the Bookchin/Mumford was, agam a question of how technology is under- aesthetic: stood ideally, not as it really is. In 1940 the General Inspector for the German Road System put it this We are developing and proclaiming a great new w,ay: "Concrete and stone are material things. Man idea that runs through modern life: the idea of gives them form and spirit. National Socialist mechanical beauty. We therefore exalt love for the technology possesses in all material achievement machine, the love we notice flaming on the cheeks ideal content" (Zerzan of mechanics scorched and smeared with coal. Have 1994: 140). you never seen a mechanic lovingly at work on the I'm not one of those who cries out in horror at the great powerful body of his locomotive? His is the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. But the Dean sees fit to minute, loving tenderness of a lover caressing his nsinuate hat even the promiscuously pluralistic Hakim Bey adored woman (Flint 1972: 90). � . � IS Ideologically akin to Hitler (22), and that the primitivist WHAT Is INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM? 46 ANARCHY AFIER LEFTISM 47 The Germans conquered Europe with Panzers and not by blood-and-soil hocus-pocus. Nazi ideology is far "I Ihe mad-bomber legend. Innocent in act but not neces­ . incoherent to be characterized as either pro- or "" lIy in intention: "One of them, [Louis) Lingg, had the best logical. The Dean in bewailing our "decadent, b01�r • lIDO .lIhi: he wasn't there ...he was home, making bombs. He was era" (1) and our "decadent personalism" (2) convicted of a crime he would have liked to commit" Ihus(1Ilack Parfrey 1989: 67). contrast, one historian refers echoing Nazi and Stalinist rhetoric, as he surely reis.lll emt In tOl "the& peaceful philosophy of Individualist Anarchism" and it's as empty as ever. The point is that the (Schuster 1932: 159). didn't have to make sense to matter. It was vague The anarchists' terrorist reputation was not, however, inconsistent so as to appeal to as many people as Illtirely fabricated by their enemies (Black 1994: 50-55). In who desperately needed something to believe in, something 1880s, left-wing European anarchists had already begun to free them from freedom, something to command their II,the preach, and practice, "propaganda by the deed," such as loyalty. It didn't have to be the same come-on for everyone. hOl11bings-"chemistry," as they sometimes put it-and The Nazis, fishers of Mellsc/lell, understood that you need IIssassinations. Even the beatific Kropotkin was originally a different bait to hook different fish, that's all. �uppbrter of "the new tactic" (Bookchin 1977: 115). Some And finally, individualist anarchists are terrorists-or I hought it the most effective way to dramatize anarchism and rather, anarchist terrorists are individualists. disseminate it to the masses. According to what the Dean The inseparable association of anarchism with terrorism calls "the best account of Spanish Anarchism from 1931 to (Bookchin 1977 "the last decade of the [nine­ commenced for Americans with a specific event: the : 325), leenth)1936" century was one in which the anarchists really were Haymarket 1886. tragedy in Chicago in As the police were engaged in the bomb-throwing which is popularly thought to breaking up a peaceable workers' rally, someone threw a exhaust their range of activities" (Brademas 1953: 9). bomb into their midst, killing or wounding several of them. These anarchist terrorists were, to apply Bookchin's Eight prominent anarchists involved in the union movement, terminologyanachronistically, usually social anarchists, rarely but indisputably innocent of the bombing, were convicted of individualist anarchists. August Vaillant, who bombed the murder and four of them hanged (one committed suicide) on French Chamber of Deputies, was a leftist (Tuchman 1966: the basis of their anarchist agitation and beliefs. If there is 91) and a member of an anarchist group (Bookchin 1977: one fact abuut the history of anarchism known to everyone 114). Of the French bombers of the 1890s, Ravachol alone, who knows at least one fact about the history of anarchism so far as anybody knows, was "almost but not quite" a t is this: "Thereafter, anarchism, in the public mind, wa Stirnerist (Tuchman 1964: 79). �IDseparably linked with terrorism and destruction" (Avrich� The Spanish anarchists whom the Dean esteems above all others (1977, 1994) had perhaps the longest terrorist tradi­ 1984: 428; cf. Schuster 1932: 166;Woodcock 1962: 464).And tion of all. The index reference to "Terrorism, anarchisl" in the anarchism with which the link was forged was the his history of Spanish anarchism covers dozens of pages collectivist anarchism of the Haymarket defendants. That they were, as individuals, innocent is irrelevant to the genesis WHA T Is I NDIVIDUALIST A NARCH ISM? ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 49 (1977: 342). There were sporadic bombings in the which became chronic, at least in the anarchist stronghold I I Incalions to lhe contrary (Black 1994: 50-55). Bookchin Barcelona, in the 1890s (Bookchin 1977: ch. 6). 1918-1923, 1"'1 incs Spanish anarchol'is/o/ero terrorism as legitimate period of violent class struggle in Spain, was the time of defense (1977: 201-202), an opinion I share, but the fact .. mains11 that it terrorism-in Bookchinese, "social pisto/eros unmen-a term which applies to both (:ml 'I was Illurchist" terrorism-not the activity of individualist anar­ hired goons-g and anarcho-Ieftist militants. Among hundl'e of others, "a premier, two former civil governors, an d,I<15. bishop, nearly employers, factory directors, foremen, police, and many300 workers and their leaders in the silldicato libre [a company union), fell before the bullets and bombs of Anarchist action groups" (Book chin 1977: 191). The pis/o/ero 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 'lOs and '3Os, "the FA!'s most well-known militants­ Durruti, the Ascaso brothers, Garcia Oliver-included terrorism in their repertory of direct action: 'Gunplay, especially in "expropriations" and in dealing with recalcitrant em ployers, policeagents, 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 theAllarcllis/ Ellcyclope­ dia, as well as many books, pam phlcts, 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 have almost always been "social," not individualist, anarchists. I've had occasion to rebut leftist • ANARCHY AITER LEFIlSM 51

III. psychology of this interesting homme de lellres .... " ('-Ionegal Reid 1981: 118). CHAPTER 3 'hnt is &exactly the Dean's modus operandi, except that

LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM IIIlies was joking in a very sophisticated way whereas 'Iphilosophers have long since recognized. invent authors, A critic will choose two dissimilar works-the Tao Te Chillg and the Nights, let us say-and attribute them to the same writer,1001 and then with all probity explore

- 2 LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM 5 ANARCHY AI'TER LEFTISM 53 I am amazed to learn that the present epoch is "awash lUke up the other charges here self-styled anarchists." Maybe . . I should awash more often. ' hadn't thought any ANTI-THEORETICAL. As to this the Dean IS nothmg place has been awash in 1. anarchists since I�ss than grotesque. When is a theorist not � theorist Whe� certain parts of Spain were Maybe in the 1930s. his theory is not the theory of Dean Bookchm. That dlsquah­� Burlington is awash in Bookchini Yankee sts-a veritable fles Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Jacques Camatte, Jean Barcelona-but this conjecture firmed. is as yet uncon­ Oaudrillard and, to all intents and purposes, everybody "Li�estyle" Ilublished by Autonomedia. Bookchinis?, is not just th� only wasn't always a dirty word Recalling for the Dean. rue theory, it is the ollly theory. (Mar sm, of course, IS not what was wrong with the � Stalinist '30s, he's written: IIheory, it is bourgeois ideology [Bookchm LIke Hegel nnd Marx before him, Bookchin likes to thmk1?79J.) that he IS not "Life-style?"-the word was simply unknown. If only the finest but the filial theorist. As they were wrong. so we were asked by some crazy anarchists how we is he. could hope to change society without changing 2. APOLITICAL. This is, if anything, even zanier. How ourselves, our relations to each other and organizational ' Our can a political philosophy like anarchism-any v riety of structure, we had one � answer: ritualistic anarchism-be apolitical? There is, to be sure, a dIfference "After the revolution .... " (Bookchin 1970: between Bookchinism and all anarchisms. Anarchism is ollti­ 57). political by definition. Bookchinism is political (specifically, Ba k then the Dean it is city-statist, as shall shortly be shown). It follows a� a � was calling for "communist life-styles" . as mtegral to the re�olutionary matter of course that Bookchinism is incompatIble WIth project (ibid.: Today, the Dean alleges that lifestyle anarchism, but it doesn't follow that lifestyle anarchism is anarchism is "concerned54). with 'style' rather a apolitical, ollly that lifestyle anarchisn;' s, at worst, anar­ than a society" (34), but the "crazy he forn anarchists" chism, and at best, contrary to Bookchllllsm.! �erly identified with, but now maligns, agree with 3. HEDONISTIC. Sure, why not? Bookc m the Young r � that social revolution lifestyle . revolullon,� the revolullon The Dean is right about one thing: it's the truth (If no of everyday life: "It is the goal is plain that longer the whole truth) that anarchism continue� the of revolution today must be the liberation of daily Enlightenment tradition As such, it stands for life liberty life" (Bookchin 44). . : 1971: and the pursuit of happiness in a much more radIcal way Most of this gibberish is pe jorative and content -free. If the dizzy Dean saying than liberalism ever did. Godwin, for instance, argued that anything substantive, he is claiming that th se he is anarchism was the logical implication of utilitarianism. ? has lu,?ped (Iumpened?) together narchlsts as lifestyle Kropotkin was convinced that '''the greatest happines of the � are (1) anll-theoretical, (2) � apolitical, (3) hedonis­ e Utop a. and (4) anti-organizational greatest number' is no longer a dream, ?,er � It IS !'C . The question of organization � . IS so large as to possible" (1924: 4). His adoption of the utIlIlanan maXImwas require a chapter in itself (Chapter ' 5). I ll neither ironic nor critical. 54 LIFESiYLE ANARCHISM ANARCHY AFtER LEFTISM 55 Hedonism in some sense of the word has Co mon always be,ol when he writes that anarcho-syndicalism "can be traced � ground for almost all anarchists. att Rudolph Rode huck, in fact, to notions of a 'Grand Holiday' [sic) or general �lb�ted anarchist ideas to the Hedonists and ant qUJty Cynics rike proposed by the English Chartists" [7). Althougb � (1947: 5). Back before he ralsed lost his groove the:�'�: HIIlenbow went on to become a Chartist, there was no Chartist � the utopian socialist Charles Fourier ' [lng) e� for vi movement in 1832, the Chartists never espoused the general � c()mm�nities that would h d remove restrictions on Htrike, and there was never anything remotely syndicalist � ?DJstlc behaVIor and, almost embarrassingly to "bout the Chartists' purely political program centered on dIscIples, sought to harmonize his social relations on universal male suffrage [Black 1996c).) Benbow called upon �f pleasure" (1 74: the basis 112) . As that "most unsavory" (20) lifestyle anarchlsts,� . the direct producers "to establish the happiness of the . HakIm Bey, put it, "your freedom awaits inviolable IlIImellSe majority of the human racc"-namely, themselves­ to be completed only ,on by the love of other to secure their own "ease, gaiety, pleasure and happiness." ? �rchs" (22 [quoting Bey 1991: Inscnb 4))-"words that could be If it's hedonistic or decadent for impoverished, exploited, d on the New Yo k Stock Dean, � � Exchange," grumps the overworked people to stage a revolution for generalized as a credo for ego tism and Decadent social indifference" (22). case, gaiety, pleasure and happiness, long live hedonism and degenerates that we are, to favor lifestyle anarchists tend decadence! ' a state of things in . which each individual The Dean's yapping about "Yuppie" self-indulgence is, able to glV: free rein will be . � to his inclinations, and paSSIOns, WIthout even to his even aside from its gross hypocrisy, misdirected. The any other restraint than respect of those who the love and problem is not that Yuppies, or unionized factory workers, surround him." Presumably a m�re o this credo or small businessmen, or retirees, or whomever, are selfish. �ertly hedonistic version of egot Bey's socially indifferen In an economy orchestrated by scarcity and risk, where ism, IS ven better suited e: to decorate the Stock ; change-whIch would probably Ex­ almost anybody might be "downsized" (Black 1996b), only surprise its author the super-rich can afford 1I0t to be selfish (but they sually anarcho-communist Kropotkin the � (1890: 15). We think respect could be loy and are anyway: old habits die hard). The problem IS the . forces as powerful as they ; Even Bakunln are wonderful. prevailing social orgallization of se/fishness as a divisive force . on occasion sounded . . Vanelgem more like Raoul which actually diminishes Ihe self. As socIety IS now set up, than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the ana as when he wrote individual selfishness is collectively, and literally, self-defeat- chist is di • � . �tinguished by "his frank se/fishness hVlng and human mg. : candidly and unsententiously . . and knOWIng for himself, The Dean recoils in horror from a comage he attnbutes to that by doing so in accordance serves the w ole with justice he Hakim Bey, "Marxism-Stirnerism" (20)-actually, as of societ( (quoted in Clark The plebeIan� . 1984: 68). Bookchin probably knows, Bey borrowed it from me (Black radlcal Wdham Benbow of th General . originated the idea 1986: 130). It comes from my Preface to the Loompanics e: Stnke-the "Grand National work classes-in Holiday" of the reprint of a pro-situationist text, 111e RiglJt to Be Greedy (For 1832 (Benbow n d) . 109 . . . (The Dean IS wrong Ourselves 1983), which argued for "communist egoism." I 57 ER LEFfiSM ANARCHY AFI 56 LIFESTYLE ANARCHISM be as petty as e I can sometimes a preliminary quibbl t" here. To m�de it clear that I didn't think the essay offered . to the word "attes usually is-l object nc:ee,..­ uillmate resolution of the t'enSlOn between the individual Dean of a will, for insta thing-the signing the social . No th eory WI'I l ever accomp I' IS h that a lIest" to some personal knowledge. . . a witness, from ans to affirm it as has no more although theory ml'ght In' form ItS resol Ut" Ion In practice. and 15 in 1936. He .. in was 13 in 1934 my six t he essay is acute in distingUlshmg the self-sacrificing m uokch of these revolts than ' knowledge of either recall from the selfish revol ut lOnary' "An y revo utlOnary who is prrsonal Dean "would like to ' . . does. Similarly, the be counted upon can on Iy bemit for hili'lseI' ,[- un:se ar old niece nineteenth and early " "the Left of the Pe op Ie can always I Left That Was, if he were doing switch 0ya It from one projection and rattles away as another" (For Ourselves 1983) r twentieth century" (66), born in 1921, a 'fo example, from that is, for someone x[lctly that-although man, Ronald to Trotskyism to An a rch' Ism to.... ty. Another old ological impossibili of liberating We need, not for people to be Iess s�lfish, but for us to ,hron moving experience remembered the World War better at being selfish in th ost effectlve way, together. itcagan, althoughhe spent ntration camps, ng that, they need to und st an d the selves and soeie (lcrman conce ood. What the uprisi ::" � ganda mms in Hollyw better-to desire bette t 0 en larg their perceptions of making propa sts, incidentally, not ' � workers (state sociali genuinely possible an t apprCClat� he real in,;t II the Austrian three days, has to do � . "f ely suppressed in only (and ideological) i:" edi; ents to reahzmg their real IInarchists), savag prospects, I have no . tionary anarchist : II nt-day revolu "orgias­ By "real d eSlres "P I don't mean wh at I want people with prese to. Abstaining from than Bookchin seems their want," I mean what tile real Iy wan , severally and more idea not have improved � n, if they did, must as arrived at-as Ben o so prescI ntly put it-by u",con· tic" insurrectio � � • ion much. the strained, general , unh: urne d reflection ,0let get nd of our military situat prominent a role in . . anarchists played so Ignorant impatience, a n d 0 earn wh a t 't Spain, where more complicated t I IS we do want . in its first year, is a I � revolution, especially a war, after And also what we "d nee :' (Bookchin 1977: 307). bitter struggle. It was course it was a me-did In typical retro-M f S lon, the Dean purports to story. Of just occurred to is hell. Hey!-this in resort, on this point as�::� on ot ers, to the ultimate argument all, and war he had the chance, � the Fascists when from authority, the argument from History: Bookchin fight . He would have that I've ever heard World War II? Not in 1942 when material, at age 21, draft-age military spindly, The Austrian workers' uprising 0f February 1934 been everybody, even my drafting almost shirt at ' they were bloody and the Spanish IV! W ar of 1936 I can aUest father. Waving the C" '1 30 year old chin had [emphasis added] , we re more than org'laS t" Ie " mo­ nearsighted impressive if Book . chists might be more ments of insurrectio n " but were bitter struggles lifestyle anar it. sarily carried on with des ate a ne tness and magnifi­ ever worn thing doesn't neces � � an experience is olle cent elan, all aesth eplp� ames notwithstanding The fact that This is the sort of ��� o>lly that one thing. (23). entail that it is 58 liFESTYLE ANARCHISM ANARCHY AFrER LEFrISM 59 metaphysical dualism which vitiates almost everything Dean has to say (Jarach 1996). There was a great deal Vcrsaillais, refused to confine their insurrection to festivity and celebration even in the Spanish the private world described by symb�list poems or despite the unfavorable conditions. In Barcelona, "there the public world described by MarxIst economIcs.. a festive enthusiasm in the streets" (Fraser 1979: 152). They demanded the eating and the moral, the filled couples, "'believing the revolution made everything pOlssi belly and the heightened sensibility. The Commu�e floated on a sea of alcohol-for weeks everyone 10 began living together and splitting up with too much the Belleville district was magnificently drunk. (ibid.: 223). George Orwell, who fought with them, nnrt Lacking the middle-class proprieties of their instruc­ that the Catalan militiamen on the Aragon front were tors the Belleville Communards turned their insur­ armed and even water was scarce, but "there was plenty rect on into a festival of public joy, play and solidar­ wine" (1952: 32). Indeed, "Orwell's description of the city ity (Bookchini 1971: 277). Barcelona) during this phase is still intoxicating: the and avenues bedecked with black-and-red flags, the make love alld war. people, the slogans, the stirring revolutionary songs, Revolutionaries feverish enthusiasm of creating a new world, the hope, and the inspired heroism" (Bookchin 1977: 306). Barcelona, young anarchists commandeered calrs--nnol:orin was a thrill hitherto beyond their means-and calreenec through the streets on errands of dubious relI0ilJti(ma.ry 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 Jose Peirats remembered the Spanish Revolu­ tion, "we regarded ourselves as the last romantics" (Bolloten 1991: 769 n. 17). May they not be the last! Consider the Paris Commune 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 � ANARCHY AFlER LEfTISM 61 Wilh organizations, especially large-scale ones, the means CHAPTER 4 ON Irnd to displace the ends; the division of labor engenders ORGANIZAT Inequality of power, officially or otherwise; and representa­ ION lives, by virtue of greater interest, experience, and access to rxpertise, effectively supplant those they represent. We agree Well,fi lially, . . with the Dean that "the words 'representative democracy,' the Dean h as � d I matic" entdied a concrete " IlIken literally, are a contradiction in terms" (1987: 245). n difference be t ween h1m and h' . n,.n Most, maybe all of those he . . . IS appomted lither words, "delegated authority entails hierarchy" (Dahl indeed oppo CrJIlclzes as "lifestyle 72). Thus in Spain the 30,000fa istas quickly came to se the est 3 live brIS hmeot of some 1')90: celletistas, anarchist or aniza . sort of au,thclTita. mntral one million whom they led into policies­ 181-193). lon as well they shou FAI It is s�meth10! 9 ' ld (Black .lIch as entering the government-to which the militanls aI ways shied away North. Arnencan' anarchists .hould have been even more fiercelyopposed than the rank­ Was. from ' �ven 10 the heyday of ha¥ . The Dean as re I .usly note the Left lind-fileCNT unionists In a crisis-which might be of their anarchist life � �� d, has spent his own creation-the leadership generally consults ils goi�g o 0 Is way not to entir, any such organizatl'on- not f . . involve himself tjpersonalistic" interests and the maintenance requirements becau se he was . rOm pnnclpI e, apparently of the organization, in that order; only then, if ever, their care . preoccuP led, personalistically, ' but er Some of us th10O k th . with his own Itnnounced ideology; not the will of the membership (al­ Counterproductive, e cntcrp'nse IS I I-advised even though the leaders will invoke it if it happens to coincide eve n apart from '1 . . ' wouId n ) t advan 0ur SUS ICion with their policies and, for that matter, even if it doesn't). ce Ollr careers. A J P that it careers. ot of us don't even have This has happened too often to be an accident. Jacq� . es Camatte (1995: 19-38) We do not reject organization because we are ignoranl of dIsIllusIOned soci R . and, before him, Ihe history of anarchist organizations. We reject it, among alist MIChels (1962) the Dean is not entir be with whom other reasons, because we know that history only too well, ely un�am�:'lar (1�87: 245), the theoretical reasons for us' to provided some and Bookchin is one of those who has taught it to us. himself (1977 1996) thmk so. Dean Bookc Nobody is surprised that business corporations, government ' recou nts the . hin of wh at he considers the bureauc ratlc degeneration bureaucracies, hieratic churches and authoritarian polilical zation of them gre�test anarcho-syndicalist parties are in practice, as in theory, inimical to liberty, all ' the SpaOls h CNT-FAI organi- o ne 0f th e few anarchists . . Even Kropotkin equality and fraternity. (Also incompetent: as Paul Goodman thought t� enJOY the Dean's ' [1994: 58], that a syndicalist regl�e would imprimatur put it central organization "mathematically and authoritarian'. "A be far too centralized guarantees stupidity.") What at first surprises, and what crie5 bo s to ItS Confedera I C rr.ows a great deal too much fr ommittee, it out for explanation, is that egalitarian and libertarian has Just overthrown (1990: XXXV�m the Government that it organizations sooner or later-usually sooner end up the " ) same way. 62 ON ORGANIZATION ANARCHY AFrER LEFTISM 63

Robert Michels (himself a socialist) studied the \)rganizations whose higher reaches consist of representa­ Social D.:mocratic Party-a Marxist party pn)gramlmilti(:a lives, such as the Spanish CNT or the confederal "Commune committed to social equality-a few years before the communes" (57) the Dean desires. Even if these organi­ World War, and found it to be thoroughly hierarchic1";., oflations are only minimally bureaucratic--a precious, and bureaucratic. Vindicating Michels, the vast majority recarious, accom plishment-they are nonetheless inherently German socialists, contrary to their official antiwar :ion phierarchic. The CNT pyramid had at least six levels (and promptly followed their leaders in supporting the �ome outbuildings): Anarchists might congratulate themselves that unlike anarchism, was a "bourgeois ideology" (Bookclili Section - Syndicate - Local federation of syndi­ 1979)-like the Pharisees, thanking God that they are not cates - Comer cal federation - Regional confed­ other men. (Although that would be "idealism," another eration - National confederation (congress) (Brademas 1953: 16-17) bourgeois ideology.) Michels, writing at a time when syndicalism seemed to be an important social movement, This leaves out, for instance, several intermediary bodies noted: such as the Regional Plenum, the Plenum of Regionals (no, I'm 1I0t joking) and the National Committee (Bookchin 1977: Here we find a political school, whose adherents 170). What happened was just what might have been are numerous, able, well-educated, and generous­ expected to happen had anybody anticipated the CNT's minded, persuaded that in syndicalism it has discov­ abrupt rise to power. When their turn came, in Spain, ered the antidote to oligarchy. But we have to ask organizational anarchists blew it too. It is not only that the whether the antidote to the oligarchical tendencies most vociferous FAI militants, like Montseney and Garda of organization can possibly be found in a method Oliver, joined the Loyalist government-that could which is itself rooted in the principle of representa­ explained away, albeit implausibly, as "personalistic" treacll­be tion .... Syndicalism is ... mistaken in attributing to ery-but that most of the CNT-FAI rank-and-file went along parliamentary democracy alone the inconveniences with it (Brademas 1953: 353). Even more startling than I that arise from the principle of delegation in general leaders' support for what they were supposed to be againSIhe (1962: 318). (the state) was Iheir opposition to what they were supposed to be for-social revolution-which swept over much of Times have changed: North American syndicalists aren't Republican Spain without the support, and in most over the objections, of the leaders (Bolloten Brou6cases numerous, aren't able, and least of all are they generous­ 1991; Temime 1972). The leaders placed the war ahead he& minded, although most may be "well-educated" if you equate revolution and managed, at the cost of a million lives, toof I a good education with college-something that I, having both (Richards 1983). lo,e 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 ON ORGANIZATION 64 ANARCHY AFTERLEFTISM 65 The Spanish experience was not unique. syndlc lIsts Iilostly The Ill-un's municipal-confederal socialism, I'd like to raise a � . went over to Fascism (Roberts sham mdustnal democracy of 1979). I"uple of prosaic points of fact which do nOt depe�d �pon, syndicalist corporatism . needed � little fine-tuning hough they are consistent with, the antl-orgamzatIonal and a touch of cosmetics It finessed mto to I r iques of Michels, Camatte, Zerzan, myself and, by now, the sham syndicalism of For Fascist cOlrpCIf IIIlIlIyh others. Direct democracy is not, and for all anybody North Americans, no example-not example-is even knows never was all it's cracked up to be by the Dean. more important than the Mexican ' Had it R,wolu Most of the exta t authors from classical antiquity, who urned out differently, it the � would have recoiled upo knew the working �system better than we ever will, were anti­ U�lted States with incalculable revolution force. Because Ilemocratic (Finley 1985: 8-11), as Bookchin elsewhere was contained south of the border, in America "dmits (1989: 176). The word "democracy" was almost Federal anJ state governments encouraged) (and the vigilantes nlways used pejoratively before the nineteenth centur�that had a free hand to syndicalists crush the when it referred only to direct democracy: "To dismiSS and socialists so thoroughly recovered. that they've nevel tII� is unanimity as a debasement of the currency, or to dismiss I : other side of the debate as apologists who misuse the D�ring the Mexican Revolution, the organized syndicalists. anarcho- leherm, is to evade the need for explanation" (Finley 1985: 11; supported the liberals-the against j' ,lna Bailyn 1992: 282-285). the Zapatista and Villista social . 1978: revolutionaries (Hart d.The Athenian polis, the most advanced form of duect �h. 9). As urban rationalist Bookchm!, . progressives (like democracy ever practiced for any extended period, was .theydespised peasant revolutionaries still . to CatholiCism. clinging oligarchic. It's not only that, as Bookchm grudgIngly con­ Besides, they thought that here's an Pancho Villa­ cedes (59), the polity excluded slaves, nu, ,erous other uncanny precursor to Bookchinist : too muc jargon-acted noncitizens (one-third of free men were techmcally foreign­ like .a "personalist"! (ibid. Constitutionalist� : 131). On behalf of the ers [Walzer 1970: 106]), and women, i.e., thepolis excluded regime-the one President . U.S. Army Wilson sent th the overwhelming majority of adult Athemans. Even the in to prop up--the anarcho-syndicalists "R . raise Dean acknowledges, but attaches no importance to, the fact ed BattalIons," perhaps 12,000 . strong, "a massive augmen­� that maybe three-fourths of adult male Athenians were tatlO of commanding general army� , . Obregon's Constitutional "slaves and disenfranchised resident aliens" (1987: 35). It (Ibld.: 133, 135). They SOon repression-that. reaped the reward­ could not have been otherwise: they'd earned. By 1931 the government had the Mexica� working class under control (ibid.: 175-177, These large disenfranchised populations provided 183), �s It stili does. If revolution resumes it will be ZapatI tas, the Mayan peasants of Chiapas, the Neo­ the material means for many Athenian male citizens � who (Zapatlstas 1994). set it off to convene in popular assemblies, function as mass juries in trials, and collectively administer the affairs Without attempting a comprehensive critique of the of the community (Bookchin 1989: 69). 66 ON ORGANIZATION ANARCHY AFrER LEFTISM 67 "A modicum of free time was needed to participate political affairs, leisure that was probably [II supplied """t Athenians with the time to spare for public affairs slave labour, although it is by no means true that all .'oided political involvement. Greek citizens were slave owners" (Bookchin 1990: III this respect they resembled the remnants of direct Greek culture, as Nietzsche observed, flourished at lIIocracy in America, the New England town meetings. expense of the "overwhelming majority" : "At their .1.I hese originated in the Massachusetts Bay colony when the through their extra work, that privileged class is pcrsal of settlements made a unitary central government ''''.Ii practical. At first informally, but soon formally, towns removed from the strugglefor existence, in order to 'rcised substantial powers of self-government. The original and satisfy a new world of necessities" (1994: 178). • , ">rm of self-government was the town meeting of all There are two more points to ponder. I.ecmen, which took place anywhere from weekly to month­ The first is that the vast majority of the Athenian ly. This system still prevails, formally, in some New England minority ab,tained from participation in direct '"wns, including those in Bookchin's adopted state just as the majority of American citizens abstain from Vermont-but as a form without content. In Vermont the representative democracy. Up to 40,000 Athenian 'own meeting takes place only one day a year (special enjoyed the privilege of citizenship, less than half of ."cetings are possible, but rare). Attendance is low, and resided in the city itself (Walzer 1970: 17). "All the declining: "In recent years there has been a steady decline in decisions of the according to Bookchin, "are ",n participation until in some towns there are scarcely more lated directly by polis,a popular" assembly, or which eve persons present than the officials who are required to be male citizen from the city and its Ecciesia,environs (Attica) there" (Nuquist 1964: 4-5). The Dean has thrown a lot of expected to attend" (1974: 24). In reality, the facility ora,vi fairy-dust on present-day Vermont town meetings (1987: 270; 1989: 181) without ever claiming that they play any 268-real ed for the assembly accommodated only a fraction of them role in governance. Indeed, Bookchin hails the town (Dahl 1990: 53-54), so most must have been expected to meeting's "control" (so-called) precisely because "it does not attend, 1101 and didn't. Attendance probably never exceeded carry the ponderous weight of law" (1987: 269): in other 6,000, and was usually below 3,000. The only known tally of words, it's just a populist ritual. By failing to either "carry the total vote on a measure is 3,461 (Zimmern 1931: 169). the ponderous weight of law" or jettison it-tasks equally And this despite the fact that many citizens were slaveowners beyond its illusory authority-the town meeting legitimates who were thereby relieved, in whole or in part, of the need those who do carry, willingly, the ponderous weight of law, to work (Bookchin 1990: 8). And despite the fact that the the practitioners of what the Dean calls statecraft. prevalent ideology, which even Socrates subscribed to, In modern Vermont as in ancient Athens, most people "emphatically prioritized the social over the individual," as think they have better things to do than attend political the Dean approvingly asserts that Bakunin did (5): "as a meetings, because most people are not political militants like matter of course," the Athenians "put the city first and the the Dean. Several sorts of, so to speak, special people flock individual nowhere" (Zimmern 1931: 169-170 n. 1). Even ON ORGANIZATION 68 ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 69 to these get-togethers. These occasions tend to attract person (typically a man) who an ideological fanatic, citizen is a fully realized, all-sided person who "hunts in control freak, an acting-out victimis of mental illness, nlNI morning, fishes in the af ternoon, rears cattle in the somebody who just doesn't have a life, and often so.ne,Ol Ihotvcning, and plays the critic after dinner" without ever being favored by some combination of the foregoing civic vi',rtulc "",fined to any or all of these social roles (ibid.: 229). Face-to-face democracy is in-your-face democracy. To lIookchin has endorsed this vision (1989: 192, 195). Sounds further demands extent that the tireless typicals turn up, they discourage Kood, but a muscular municipal socialist has his time: not so afflicted from participating actively or returning 1111 next time. The Dean, for instance, speaks glowingly Before hunting in the morning, this unalienated "having attended many town meetings over the last man of the fulure is likely to attend a meeting of years" (1987: 269)-they aren't even held where he live:s, the Council on Animal Life, where he will be Burlington-who but a political pervo-voyeur could p05isibly! required to vote on important matters relating to get off on these solemn ceremonies? Some people like the stocking of the forests. The meeting will proba­ watch autopsies too. The same types who'd get themselves bly not end much before noon, for among the elected in a representative democracy tcnd to dominate, by many-sided citizens there will always be a lively their bigmouthed bullying, a direct democracy too (Dahl interest even in highly technical problems. Immedi­ 1990: 54). Normal non-obsessive people will often rather ately after lunch, a special session of the appease the obsessives or even kick them upstairs than Fishermen's Council will be called to protest the prolong an unpleasant interaction with them. If face-to-face maximum catch recently voted by the Regional Planning Commission, and Ihe Marxist man will democracy means having to face democrats like Bookchin, participate eagerly in these debates, even postponing most people would rather execute an about-face. And so the scheduled discussion of some contradictory theses minority of political obsessives, given an institutional oppor­ aon cattle-rearing. Indeed he will probably love tunity, tend to have their way. That was how it was in argument far better than hunting, fishing, or rearing Athens, where direction came from what we might call cattle. The debates will go on so long that the militants, what they called demagogues: "demagogues-I use citizens will have to rush through dinner in order to the word in a neutral sense-were a structural element in assume their role as critics. Then off they will go to the Athenian political system [which] could not function meetings of study groups, dubs, editorial boards, without them" (Finley 1985: 69). and political parties where criticism will be carried In "A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen," Michael on long into the night (ibid.: 229-230). Walzer (1970: ch. 11) sent up muscular, direct democracy before Bookchin publicized his version of it. Walzer's point In other words, "Socialism means the rule of the men with the most evenings to spare" 235). Walzer is far from of departure was what Marx and Engels wrote in 77le (ibid.: Gennall Ideology about how the post-revolutionary commu- 70 ON ORGANIZATION ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 71 being my favorite thinker (Black 1985), but what he ske:tch here is as much paradigm as parody. It scarcely exa management that required patience, commitment to demo­ and in no way contradicts Rousseau's-his fellow Ge,n I ratic procedures, lengthy debates, and a decent respect for Calvin's-ascetic republican civism, which in turn is opinions of others within one's community" (Bookchin .. . ingly close to Bookchin's muscular, moralistic the 20; cf. Dahl 1990: 32-36, 52). (I pass over as beneath 1996: The Dean has long insisted upon the potential of what comment Bookchin's avowal of "a decent respect for the opinions of others.") Having to race from meeting to calls "Iiberatory technology" to free the masses from toil meeting to try to keep the militants from taking over would usher in a post-scarcity society (1971: 83-139). even worse than working, but without the pay. major technological advances to free people from toil, beThat was the first practical objection. The second is that anarchy--especially "primitivistic, prerational, anltitec1lm,lo there is no reason to believe that there has ever beell an logical, and anticivilizational" anarchy--is impossible urban, purely direct democracy or even a reasonable

No part of his Marxist heritage is more vital to 100kc11in approximati ...m of one. Every known instance has involved a than its notion of humanity passing from the realm l considerable admixture of representative democracy which necessity to the realm of freedom by way of the rational, sooner or later usually subordinated direct democracy where socially responsible application of the advanced technology it didn't eliminate it altogether. In Athens, for instance, a created by capitalism. Council of 500, chosen monthly by lot, set the agenda for the The Dean is furious with "lifestyle anarchists" who doubt meetings of the ekklesia (there was no provision for new business to be brought up from the floor [Bookchin 1971: or deny this postulate of positivist progressivism, but for 157; Zimmern 1931: 170 n. 1]) and which, in turn, elected an present purposes, let's assume he's right. Let's pretend that inner council of 50 for governing between assemblies, which under anarcho-democratic, rational control, advanced in turn elected a daily chairman. Sir Alfred Zimmern, whose technology would drastically reduce the time devoted to sympathetic but dated account of Athenian democracy the production work and afford economic security to all. Tech­ Dean has referred to approvingly (1971: 159, n. 27), nologywould thus do for the upright (and uptight) republi­ observed that the Council consisted of paid288 off icials can Bookchinist citizenry what slavery and imperialism did (Zimmern 1931: 165), a detail the Dean omits. In general, for the Athenian citizenry--but Which is to say, not "the sovereign people judged and administered by delegating nearly enough. 110 more. power to representatives" (ibid.: 166). Generals, for For even if technology reduced the hours of work, it would instance-very important officials in an imperialist state frequently at war-were elected annually (Dahl 1990: 30; cf. not reduce the hours in a day. There would still be 24 of Bookchin 1971: 157). These were remarkably radical demo­ them. Let's make-believe we could automate production­ cratic institutions for their day, and even for ours, but they all work away. Even if we did, technics couldn't possibly do are also substantial departures from Bookchinist direct more than shave a few minutes off the long hours which democracy. Nonetheless the Dean only grudgingly admits deliberative, direct democracy would necessitate, the "often prosaic, even tedious but most important forms of self- 73 ANARCHY AFTER LE SM ON ORGANIZATION FTI 72 by the osmg ground gained of pure democracy IS . . m- that Athens was even a "quasi-state" (Bookchin 1989: 69), . I' r IS lOS ensibly beco mg pnnclp e. The forme whatever the hell a "quasi-state" is. Unbelievably, the DeaD oppos r the rule (1969b: . . 'ion I and the latte claims that "Athens had a 'state' a very limited and ing the except piecemeal scnse ...the 'state' as we knowin it modern times 740). could hardly be said to exist among the Greeks"in (1987: representative bodies 34). . canto ns there were Even in the SWISS judiciary were Just ask Socrates. What'll you be having? Hemlock, straight the execut' Ive and the . (legiS atures) t which were l tU y up. The Dean has elsewhere explained that in his municipal . ? . . . 741) Civil liberties V £ � I subordmate (Ibid.. situatIOnII utopia, face-to· face assemblies would set policy but leave its strictly . i o' a much worse civil rights enllre Y s 738). administration to Hhoards, commissions, or collectives of unknown and . the time (ibid.: . monarc hIe s at . most E uropean 0 h'IS qualified, even elected officials" (Bookchin 1989: 175)-the than In . ConfederatIOn f . cons dere d the Swiss . experts and the politicians. Again: "Given a modest but Dc Tocqueville utions of this kmd by � ct °f \I the constit day "the most Imper � Adams had no means small size, the polis could be arranged institution­ . , d 744). Earlier, John the w�rld (I cratIC ally so that it could have its affairs conducted by well­ yet seen 10 � cantons were aristo pomt tha h Swiss rounded, publicly-engaged men with a minimal, carefully also made the :� �. historical tendency as observmg tha t their guarded degree of representation" (Bookchin 8). Meet republics as well selves in omce elites to entrench them 1990: was for hereditary the new boss, same as the old boss! 2). (Coulborn 1965: 101-1� nation" which Consider Switzerland, a highly decentralized federal c a d Orticall coordi As for the "economi � P superfluous" republic which for the Dean is a fascinating example of "oat1On-5t ate utterly renders the S'WISS is utterly "economic and political coordination within and between h e Swiss nation-state 1987: 229), I'f as communities that render[s] statecraft and the nation-state (Bookchin . � it does as surely does It eXIst at a . As ' super fl uous, why II? nts safeguar d so utterly superfluous" (1987: 229). Alexis de Tocqueville, as . . whose numbered accou e SWISS banks gangster S astute a student of democracy as ever was, wrote in 1848: eXIst th s dictators and loot of the worId' ht much 0f th e a connection? M'Ig Is there PO 'blI I It is not sufficiently realized that, even in those (Ruwart 4). � gand money-Iaunder­ 1996: ffrom Ioan-s ar in switzerland's rakeof Z it is) just as Swiss cantons where the people have most pre­ . . democr acy (such as rwnte ItS d'1 £ect 0f served the exercise of their power, there does exist ing unde . the direct democracy . nalism und erwrote ry and Impe . red to h'IS a representative body entrusted with some of the slave . mentanan once refer ens. A Swiss parha cares of government. Now, it is easy to sec, when At h ? . of stolen goods. a nation of rec ers orth studying recent Swiss history, that gradually those country as older than most N o are s�: ewhat Those of us w� r than the Dean, matters with which the people concern themselves althOugh much y ounge American anarchists, all· inclusive are becoming fewer, whereas those with which their orts t0 form an th e history of eff to representatives deal are daily becoming more also reca . . did they come close II mzahon here. Ne ver numerous and more important. Thus the principle anarchist orga 75 RCHY ANA AFTER SM 74 ON ORGANIZATION LEFTI pa- .' need a newSpaper, but a news success. (To anlicipale an objection-the Industrial Workers years. An orgamzatlOn may . ck 1992: 192). In Ihe not need an organlZalion (Bla what littie t of the World is not now, and never has been, an avowedly per mayLove Rage, Ihe newspa er preceded r • othe . . � s and• • anarchist organization. It is syndicalist, not anarchist (and case of 1 n Self-report contm& enI aI orgamza. l O authontanan not Bookchinist). Not until about 1924, when most of the here is to its burn h' leftist anti_essed World, membership had fallen away, joined the Communist Party, rcporls of anarchist (No �;;� �roulld, Proc or in some cases gone to prison, was the little that was left colleclives abound ,::; ge Bookstore, etc.). Open Road, Black Ro e BO1 k S abota g-fields. of the One Dig Union essentially, if unofficially,an anarchist � , �� u�lI ideological ki11�n organization.) Much later the Anarchist Communist Federa­ These are, for anarchists Y 'zalional coUectlVeS, such tion made an effort to unifythe workeristj organizational IronicaJly, Ihe aJlegedl a;�;,�'i:r::e, have outlasted most of edla and t �e ' zer-Iypes anarchists, and most recently the ex- (or maybe not so ex-) as Aulonom 1 be thal lhe orgam Love Rage, organizational o�es. C Id each other? Marxists around whose anarchist bona fides Ihe 10 g:� al�ng with are widely doubted, flopped& too. are too indmduahstlc 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-organiza­ tional, 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 anar­ chists 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 arc 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 ANARCHY ArTER LEFTISM 77 should be exploited to the max, but "it would be impossible CHAPTER 5. to establish �n advanced industrial economy based exclusively MURRAY BOOKCHIN, on solar energy, wind power, or even tidal power" (Herber MUNICIPAL STATIST 1965: 193), and we ",ust have an advanced industrial econo­ my, 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 There is no putting off the inevitable any longer. It has to nuclear and fossil fuels, but we will employ them judiciously, be said: Dean Bookchin is not an anarchist. By this I do nol always taking care to limit their use as much as possible" (ibid. ). mean that he is not kind of anarchist, although that too That's a comfort. my And it would be scurrilous of me to report that this same is true. I mean he is not allY kind of anarchist. The word Bookchin book (Herber 1965: ix) includes-this must be an means something, after all, and what it means is denial of anarchist first-a plug from a Cabinet member, then­ the necessity and desirability of government. That's a bare­ Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall: "Crisis ill Our bones, pre-adjectival definition anterior to any squabbling Cities sets forth in one volume vivid evidence that the most about individualist, collectivist, communist, mutualist, social, debilitating diseases of our time are a result of our persistent lifestyle, ecological, mystical, rational, primitivist, Watsonian, and arrogant abuse of our shared environment.. .. We cannot ontological, etc. anarchisms. An anarchist as such is opposed minimize the investments necessary to pollution control, but to government-full stop. Dean Bookchin is not opposed to as Mr. Herber [BookchinJ documents, the penalties for not government. Consequently, he is not an anarchist. doing so have become unthinkable." This is, be it noted, What! "The foremost contemporary anarchist theorist" call for legislation and taxation which a closet anarchista (Clark 1990: 102) is an anarchist? You heard me. He's allowed to adorn one of his books. There's also an afterword not-really and truly,1101 he's not. And not because he flunks from the Surgeon General of the United States. some abstruse ideological test of my own concoction. He's As embarrassing to the Dean asthese reminders must be, not an anarchist because he believes in government. An they are not conclusive against him. It is his own explicit anarchist too often does, endorsements of the state which are decisive. Not, to be can believe in many things, and all surc, the lIatiolJ-state of modern European provenance. He but government is not one of them. doesn't like that sort of state very much. It allows for too There's nothing heinous about not being an anarchist. much individual autonomy. But he is enamored of the city­ Some of my best friends are not anarchists. They do not, state of classical antiquity and the occasionally, semi-self­ however, claim to be anarchists, as the Dean does. governing "commune" of pre-industrial western Europe. In I could take some cheap shots at the Dean-come to think this he is reminiscent of Kropotkin, who propounded the of it, I think I will! How many of his Red-and-Green absurd opinion that the state did not exist in western Europe disciples know that he was formerly in favor of a modest measure of IIl1clear power? Solar, wind, and tidal power II', MURRAY HOOKCHIN, MUNICIPAL STATIsr

ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM prior to the sixteenth century (d. Bookchin 1987: 79 That would have surprised and amused William the.)5-. Ce, n o, outlook on the backs of human chattels is false" (1972: 159). queror and his successors, not to mention the French (M.I. Finley--like the Dean, an ex-Communist [Novick 1988: Spanish monarchs and the Italian city-states familiar to 328)-is a Bookchin-approved historian [1989: 178).) Some Machiavelli-whose Principe was clearly not directed to a of what Zerzan writes about paleolithic society may be mandated and revocableII delegate responsible to the base, conjectural and criticizable, but what he writes about but rather to a man on horseback, somebody like Caesare Bookchin is pure reportage. The Dean plainly says that Borgia. "later ideals of citizenship, even insofar as they were mod­ Although it is the most unremarkable of observations, the eled on the Athenian, seem more unfinished and immature Dean carries on as if he's genuinely incensed that John than the original-hence the very considerable discussion I Zerzan, rev;ewing his 77le Rise of Urb anization alld the have given to the Athenian citizen and his conte�" (1987: 83). That is perhaps because the even more unfimshed �nd Decline of Citizenship (1987), pointed out that the romanti­ immature realizations of "later ideals" lacked the combtna­ cized classical Athenian has "long been Bookchin's tion of the immense slave infrastructure and the tributary model for a revitalizationpolis of urban politics," a "canard" to empire possessed by classical Athens. Similar paeans to which the Dean indignantly retorts, "In fact, I took great Athenian citizenship pepper the Dean's early books too pains to indicate the failings of the Athenian polis (slavery, (1972: 155-159; 1974: ch. 1). Manifestly what's put a bee in patriarchy, class antagonisms, and war)" (59). He may have Bookchin's beret is that Zerzan has had the temerity to read fe lt great pains at getting caught, but he took very few. The Bookchin's books, not just revere their distinguished author, Dean made, "in fact," all of two references-not even to and Zerzan has actually kept track of what the Dean's been slavery as a mode of production, as a social reality, but to reiterating all these years. The down side of being "arguably allitudes toward slavery (1987: the most prolific anarchist writer" (Ehrlich 1996: 384) is that 83, 87), as if the fact that you leave a long paper trial. classical cities had mostly subject populations (Dahl 1990: 1) Bookchin is a statist: a city-statist. A city-state is not an was the accidental result of some collective psychic quirk, anti-state. Contemporary Singapore, for instance, is a highly some strange thousand-year head-trip. What Zerzan said is authoritarian city-state. The earliest states, in Sumer, were only what one of the Dean's admirers put in stronger terms: city-states. The city is where the state originated. Theancient "Bookchin continually exhorts us to hearken back to the Greek cities were all states, most of them not even demo­ Greeks, seeking to recapture the promise of classical thought cratic states in even the limited Athenian sense of the word. and to comprehend the truth of the Polis" (Clark 1982: 52; Rome went from being a city-state to an empire without ever Clark 1984: 202-203). being a nation-state. The city· states of Renaissance Italy Every historian knows that large-scale slavery was a were states, and only a few of them, and not for long, were necessity for the classical city (Finley 1959), although the in any sense democracies. Indeed republican Venice, whose Dean has issued the fiat that "the image of Athens as a slave independence lasted the longest, startlingly anticipated the economy which built its civilization and generous humanistic -- 80 MURRAY BOOKCHIN, MUNICIPAL STATIST ANARCHY AfTER LEFTISM 81 modern police-state (Andrieux 1972: 45-55). Taking a worldwide comparative-historical perspective, ,'vcry urban republic (59) is something only Bookchin can pre-industrial city, unless it was the capital of an empire ,"c, t • just as only Wilhelm Reich could see orgones under he a nation-state (in which case it was directly subject to IIllcroscope. resident monarch) was always subject to an oligarchy. lero The distinction the Dean tries to draw between "politics" passim) has never city which was not, or which was not lind "statecraft" (1987: 243 is absurd and self­ been a "crving, not to mention that& it's a major mutilation of of, a state. And there has never been a state which was not ()rdinary English. Even if local politics is a kinder, gentler a city or else didn't incorporate one or more cities. The pre­ version of national politics, it is still politics, which has been industrial city (what Gideon Sjoberg calls-a poor choice well if cynically defined as who gets what, when, where, how words-the "feudal city") was the antithesis of democracy, (Lasswell 1958). not to mention anarchy: It's not just that the Dean uses an idiosyncratic terminolo­ to reconcile (in a ramshackle sort of a way) anarchy with Central to the stratification system that pervades KYdemocracy, he's apoplectic than anybody could have ever all aspects of the feudal city's social structure-the thought otherwise: family, the economy, religion, education, and so on-is the pre-eminence of the political organiza­ Even democratic decision-making is jettisoned as tion .... We reiterate: the feudal, or preindustrial authoritarian. "Democratic rule is still rule," {L. civilized, order is dominated by a small, privileged Susan] llrown warns.... Opponents of democracy as upper stratum. The latter commands the key institu­ "rule" to the contrary notwithstanding, it describes the democratic dimension of anarchism as a majori­ tions of the society. Its higher echelons are most tarian administration of the public sphere. Accord­ often located in the capital, the lower ranks residing ingly, Communalism seeks freedom rather than in the smaller cities, usually the provincial capitals autonomy in the sense that I have counterpoised (Sjoberg 1960: 220). them (17, 57). Sjoberg anticipated the objection, "What about Athens?" He Moving along from his mind-boggling deduction that wrote, "although the Greek city was unique for its time, in democracy is democratic, Bookchin further fusses that its political structure it actually approximates the typical "pejorative words like dictate and mle properly refer to the preindustrial city far more than it does the industrial-urban silencing of dissenters, not to the exercise of democracy" order" (ibid.: 236). Only a small minority of Athenians were (18). Free speech is a fine thing, but it's not democracy. You citizens, and many of them were illiterate and/or too poor can have one without the other. The Athenian democracy to be able to participate effectively, if at all, in politics (ibid.: that the Dean venerates, for instance, democratically silenced 235).Then and there, as always in cities everywhere, politics the dissenter Socrates by putting him to death. was an elite prerogative. The "latent" democracy of any and LEFTISM 83 82 MURRAY AFrER BOOKCHlN, MUNICIPAL STATIsr ANARCHY findnational allies to counteract Anarc sts "jeltiso " democratic decision-making, liS then local minorities can 6 aft r ?� . � (Cooke 9 1: 351-35�). But � local majoritarian tyranny 1 because It s authorItarian, but because it's statist. interested m lIberty m cy' means "rule by the people." "Anarchy" means "no rule. as he says himself, the Dean isn't ls socl� 1 1111, but only in wh�t he ca � There are two different words because they refer to his jargon, autonomy [571,) mtude of �m octn­ least) two different things. freedom, the participatory, self-ratifieds � � to the petite polity in whIch they funclIon as I. don't claim-and to make my point, I don't have nated moralists claIm-that the Dean's characterization of anarchism �c1f-effacing citizen-units. f ll me sure ?f gen ralized direct democracy has no basis whatsoever My present purpose is not to take the � � � . only to characterize it as what It mamfestly IS, tradItIonal anarchist thought. The anarchism of some of l3ookchinism, t-democracy--:-not a theory.of �ore conservative classical anarchists is indeed along th,,,, liS an ideology of governmen hls hoary Ma Xlst nnarchy. Boukchin's "minimal agenda"-t . � IInes-alt�ough Bookchin's version, right down to such is his, not mine (1987: 287)-IS unambIgu­ detaIls �s .Its phil hellenism, is instead an unacknowledged word "minimal" The "fourfold tenets," the Four appropnatlOn from the avowedly anti-anarchist Hannah ously statist, not anarchist. to affirm, although rendt ( 958). Ironically, it is the anarchists Bookchin Commandments he requires all anarchists �dIsparages1 as individualists-like Proudhon and Goodman­ most of them do not, and never did, are: who best represent this anarchist theme. It was the individu. of decentralized municipalitie�; an Iist egoist Benjamin Tucker who defined an anarchist as an ...a confederation belief in dIr ct �unternfiedJeff ersonian democrat." But another theme with unwavering opposition to statism; a � democracy; and a vision of a libertanan communist as least as respectable an anarchist pedigree holds that (60). democracy. is �ot an imperfect realization of anarchy but society rather stallsm s last stand. Many anarchists believe and believe-it-or­ By some quirk of fate, Bookchin's minim.al, �any anarchists have always believed, that democracy is not just happens to be Ius creed. l.t also just a grossly deficient version of anarchy, it's not anarchy at else anarchist creed A "confederatIOn of all. At any rate, no "direct face-to-face democracy" (57) that happens to be deliriously incoherent. cy," municipalities" contradicts "di�ect democr� I am aware of lias delegated to comrade Bookchin (mandat­ decentralized is at best a representative, not a duect, ed, revoc�blc, and. responsible to the base) the authority to as a conrederation "an unwavering opposition to pass or fall anarchIsts which he enjoys to pass or fail college democracy. It also contradicts .IS stIll. a state. statism" because a city-state or a federal state students. not ua libertarian communist society," only It is by no means obvious, and the Dean nowhere And by requiring, clearly implies that there IS more demonstrates, that local is kinder and gentler-notwhere the visioll of one, the Dean first Three Com­ govemment. a society than obedience to the local refers to local It is equally as plausible to such what more, he isn't saying. The that, as James Madison argued, a large and heterogeneous mandments-but exactly (the real thing) to polIty IS. more favorable to liberty than the "small republic," Dean is relegating higher-stage anarchy 85 A LEFllSM ANARCHY FTER • 84 MURRAY BOOKCHIN, MUNICIPAL STAllsr "an unwavenng orthodox anarchism, is ('ommandments of not an unwa- some remote future time, just as the Marxists relegate . . . emph' aSls a dded) , . IIpposl. tlOn to statism " (60' the Dean IS at they call higher-stage communism to some hazy . . state . Asa democrat, opposItIon t 0 the . the state, future which seems, like a mirage, forever to recede. vering ng opposition to . . bleo f only a waven sm," Amazingly, the Dean considers a city like New York (!) hest capa . . an abstraction, "stall 15 abstract reJeclton 0f his be "largely made up of neighborhoods-that is to sav. whereas an . I't's no accident that . to ISSue. And I'm sure organic communities that have a certain measure ident easy enough Bookchinism (Bookchm t eam ark' �ttn f (1987: 246). (He has elsewhere and inconsistently ,hot at the mains � .� �� an anarchist or Identllles t e an as that the modern world "lacks real cities" [Bookchin 1987a) nowhere . his . any kind ' of anarchIsm. . viii).) But community "obviously means more than, tcachtngs as . one a blatant regreSSIOn BookchlnlSt fiddle-this . neighborhood" (Zerzan 1994: 157)-more than m,,, A further . . . lsm )-is the distinction . ddce ,0t St . _Slmonlan to MarJQsm (10 . (ibid.: 247-248). propinquity. And obviously Bookchin's been away from miniSt fat'on" I I and "ad . o-face home town for an awfully long time, especially if civility bct�ee� " C occasional face-t pOI' Y" he s b the civic virtue play any part in his conception of an ;anic Pohcy IS m?de, ; Bookchin are so go�d pushy ��;eilec uals like community. I wouldn't recommend he take a midnight stroll assembly whIch . , . . the experts, as 10 . AdmInistratIon IS for at mantpUI' atlOg. . "gove. rnmen' t in some of these "organic communities" if he values his own untsm, where the . r-stage arxist Comm nlstralton 0f organism. If the criterion of an organic community is "a lughe. . d by the "adml is ostenM SIbly rep ace men) certain measure of identity," many wealthy all-white suburbs of men" . . I it usually still is rtunate y t IS me (and qualify, although Bookchin blames them for the central city's things." Unfo � .' . � and by administering admlnlsten g hin problems (1974: 73-74). Jealously territorial and violent who govern by ? F[" overnors have always they were t a youth gang>. are the most conspicuous manifestations of people as if . Fn is nothing. Adminis­ . w hout a� : istrat!n community in many impoverished and otherwise atomized governed. Pohcy l� everything. Stalin the or wlthOU polic is New York neighborhoods, his "colorful ethnic neighbor­ tration with � . Y understoOd that, which ary, the a mm trator hoods" (1974: 72) of childhood memory. If racial-caste and General Secret ; Bukharin and all the phed over r t sky' social-class residential segregation is the Dean's idea of what is why he trium . perhaps possibly . UPied poI Itlclan? s' who defines organic communities, then organic communities other pohcy-preoc� mism for law, and mg. "P I "is a euphe who believed in s?met� 0 C mellt certainly exist in New York City, but not many people eupher Yism for ellforce . "administratIon" �s a � ximious elder live in them, except the very rich, are very happy about it. . pract ce does the e Just wltat pohtlcal higher-stage While the word "anarchism" appears on almost every page . we k nOw how . nbe to an rchists? ttng men of the Dean's diatribe, the word "anarchy" rarely if ever presc . ? . ks-muscular menta eral munt lpahsm 10o and does. The ideology, the ism, is what preoccupies him, not the confed C . to be done in the here . meet' m gs-but wh at IS social condition, the way of life, it's presumably supposed to massed 10 . ist efforts: esplses existing anarch guide us toward. It may not be an inadvertent choice of now? The Dean d words that what Bookchin lays down, as one of his Four 87 ANARCHY AFtER 86 MURRAY BOOKCHlN, MUNICIPAL STAllSI' LEFTISM 1990: economic corporations (Bookchin The sporadic, the unsystematic, Ihe incoherent, centralized the disconlinuous, and the intuilive supplant the 12). � consistent, purposive, organized, and rationa), existillg 10 al inS speaks of transforming � . �� indeed any form of sustained or focused activity When the Dean rna e 10 t : kS of "the changes we can apart from publishing lions, wh e spea in local a "zine" or pamphlet-or �� referring to participation ,I,ucture, e can on ly be burning a garbage can (51). d' he United States and t i d t ng appoin d ��! �� �e :� e y g . :������ So we are not to publish zines and pamphlets as Bo,okch; a exac t� �� ��� i ���ele�t����d. �That: IS :� used to do, nor are we to burn garbage cans. Nor are we who've gotten themselves ack Rose Bookchinist ohl1cal ; experience freedom in the temporary world's only � . l lIgroupuscule o � S ! � t fraternizations Hakim Bey calls Temporary Alltonomc,u hoss Dimitri : ��:fortu��� nately, failed �';: �i) � � at : ���, and, . Zones (20-26). We're supposed to get organized, to-except anarchISt. �� all th s anything you want . Bookchin has not indicated, not even by example, wh,a � i a statist. �:�:�:sum up: Dean Bookchin is organization we're supposed to join. What then? To On this point the Dean, usually so verbose, is allusive elusive. I have been unable to locate in any of his WT'"1O 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 municipality is a potential time bomb. To create iocal networks and try to trallsfo nn local illstillltiolls 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 abidillg institutional basis for a grassroots dual power, a grassroots concept of citizenship, and municipalized economic systems that can be counterpoised to the growing power of the centralized Nation-State and ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 89

I homas Sowell, William Safire, Clarence Thomas, Pat CHAPTER 6 lIuchanan and the Heritage Foundation crew. Every genera­ REASON tlun, once it senses that it's being supplanted by the next AND REVOLUTION IInc, forgets that it was once the upstart (the right-wing

v 'rsion) or insists that it still is (the left-wing version). The lifestyle anarchists are afflicted, charges the Dean, The Oe n � denounces lifestyle anarch lhe reactIOnary . ists for sUccumbing with mysticism and irrationalism. These are words he does IOte lectual currents century, . of the last 1I0t define but repeatedly brackets as if they had the same such as irratIOnalism� (1-2 . . ' 9, 55-56 & passi lIIeaning (2, 11, 19 passim). They don't. laments the Stir erls t m). arewell to objective reality" Mysticism is the doctrine& that it is possible, bypassing the the dIS' d'alO .or, � "e (53) reason as such" (28). W' absorpfIon Ith h'IS usual .lfdinary methods of perception and cognition, to experience Sart , . (lher of science Paul Feyerabend calls himself, takes great The young ' and musIC. peop I e wh 0 arrogantly ny . refused to "trust lnterest in experiences "which indicate that perceptions can ne [SIC) over thirty," to � � use a popular slogan of he arranged in highly unusual ways and that the choice of a c ay, severed II � ties with the best traditio (larticular arrangement as 'corresponding to reality,' while the past (Book ns of chlO 1989: 162). not arbitrary (it almost always depends on traditions), is certainly not more 'rational' or more 'objective' than the Tr�st no one Over r thirty" (to get the slo . choice of another arrangement" (1975: 189-190). All I can ImaglOe how ,uch an ? Ihal must have irked Ye say for myself is that, for better or for worse, I have never ;ssentlally de a I !dentical elegiac wails of th well up regUI�� �m had a mystical experience and, furthermore, that I do not conservatIve demi-intellige N ntsia, from Hilton Kramer, �; consider the notion of ultimate or absolute reality meaning­ orman Podhoretz, Mid e h ter, JameS Q. Wilson, I ful. As l ance jibed, mystics "have incommunicable insights Kristol, William F. Buc 0 � �ing ��ey, eorge WI, lI Newt GIOgnch, they won't shut up about" (Black 1986: 126). Mysticism is 90 REASON AND REVOL U'!10N ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 91 arational, not necessarily irrational The Dean's ferven '. absolute value of it, as if the doll were not the most impor­ t faI'th 10' 0 b' in com . . �eclIve reality (53) has lant thing to the child, the Koran to the Turk" (Stimer 1995: . mon with mystIcIsm . 100" myslIc than it does WIt h s do, Bookchin . . sCIenc' e. 295). In contrast, the anarchist "does not believe in any . believes th ere IS somet "out there" wh'Ie h . hing absolute truth" (Rocker 1947: 27). Nor does the scientist. " IS accessible to direct reason as such" Nor does the mature adult. In the novel Sel'ell Red SUlldays, (28) o� h'IS accoun according . t, other Ihe anarchist Samar says, "This effort to stop thinking is at to theirs . SCIenlIs ts . se ves have bee n d'Isa b usmg of such simplism ' ti,e. base religious. It represents a faith in something absolute" I . lOr ab out a century. The hard sCIences- . (Sender 1990: 253). starting with phYS them all-were ICS, the hardest If Stirner bid "farewell to objective reality," if Nietzsche the first t 0 ab ism andon a metaphysical which no longer corr pos held "that facts are simply interpretations" (53), they were really onded to what scienti thinking and do'I ;� sts wen far ahead of their times. It is by now almost trite to remark e Dean was at aware of this (1982 . One time Ihat there is "no theory-independent way to reconstruct ' The not-quIte-s sciences with lowe ' ;:i o-scientific phrases like 'really there'" (Kuhn 1970: cf. Bradford r se If-estee)' m were scientism slower to re. nol : 259-260). Scientists dispense with objective206; reality for ' but by now, they 1996: becau have' tOo--t h ey se they have to. Th . . have Ihe same r�ason the mathematician Laplace, as he told e �eJechon of positi thought is no vism in <')cia0, Napoleon, dispensed with Ood: there's no need for the post -mod ern 1St fashio century ago n. Th'IS too began hypothesis (cr. Bookchin 1979: Reviewing two recent (Hughes 1961.' c h 3). 23). conte . he glossary to mporary textbook On ' � anthologies, Rethillkillg Objectil'i(y (Megill 1994) and Social could SOCIal sCIence research :��:j���� not ...ox; > more Experiellce alld Allthrop% gica/ KlIow/edge (Hastrup & blunt·. "ob1ec' 11'1(y. illterSlIbjecti>'ih.,),' Doesn't exist. See Hervik 1994), anthropologist Jay Ruby relates that no . " (8 a bb'Ie 1992r . . mters . ' 06) . S eUhng ubjective verifiab'j'tI I " for contributor to either volume argues that "an objective reality " Y With 10 a camm um SCIentIsts y 0 practi exists outside of human consciousness that is universal" . . is actually the most cing POSHI COllservativ '[ f on currently within . � post-ob' �ectivi sl (1996: 399). Intending no humor, but unwittingly providing the range of sCIent (e.g., Kuhn 1970). Ificrespe ctability some at Bookchin's expense, he continues: ult is unfortunate Histor y, the maybe-science that Megill did not seek out proponents of this position, for ambig which h as always had uous and dubI'o I' " the most they can easily be found among journalists-print and us c aIm to ob'�ectIV longest, but no Ily, he d ut the broadcast, documentary filmmakers, Marxists, and the longer (Novick 19 . � . any absolu �h. 13). ?b�ectIVIt te sense is illusory � ! y in political and religious right" (ibid.). for a cult elIsh, a chIldI an unaUainable Ce sh craving Bookchin is not the first left-wing rationalist to be out­ rt'tI ud e. ntellectuals, a politic neurotics--; " al context, I' deo l ogue 'J . e in raged by this idealist, subjectivist (etc., etc.) betrayal of s-uhaveo t d 0 and believe in it .. WIth' the invisible muscular rationalism by what one Marxist lawyer called . ," they have a lways agam . kept be�ore t h'eIr an intrinsically va I'd I eyes "fideism." But this polemical predecessor of Bookchin's-a Importance of the obiect;J , an certain Lenin-had at least a nodding acquaintance with the REASON 92 AND REVOLUTION ANARCHY AFTER LEI'I1SM 93 content of the then- mental new physics which was undoing . ,, ist materialism (Lenin 1950). There furlda its co-founder IS an 'Inte rnationally acclaimed author and that Bookchin has any is no social philosopher" (1995: 6). Ecology of Fr eedom real grounding in scien . 77 thirty years ce, 00 ago he did an adequate job of .(Bookchln 1982) ,according .. to a B,e k ch'nist I, is "a work. of information about pollution (Herb POiPI sweeping scope and stnklng 0ri g inality" which is "destined believers in object er 1963, to become a c1a sic of o t m r ocial thought" (Clark usually, ivist, matter-in-motion rationalism � � :. � �� :r:': like Lenin and Bookchin, WOrc'nlOn 1984: 215). How IS Boo c In s hip regarded by actual journalists (Ruby 1996: 399), or scholars? I decided t� find Out. not ideologues (Black I 00 scientists. They believ k e d u p all reVIews 0 fth e Dean's books listed in the e the more fervently I do not understand because Social SClellces [lid,:" from A ril 1981 to date (June 1 996) . same . They cling to objective reality . : fear a child clutches "with the I appreci�te that th�s 15 a �r C a d incomplete measure or Clifford his mother's hand" (ibid.: 15). . � Geertz says, the objectivists are As his receptIon-It farls to. PI .u p, ;o r instance, two notices in going to go away unless "afraid reality is the academically mar lna� na Ellvirollmental Ethics in we believe very hard in it" 1 I Novick 1988: 552). Lenin could hardly (quoted (Watson �995; Eckers ey 1���) but it canvasses every "But this is sheer obscur be more indignant: all alltis m, out-and-out important Journal and most ?r the less important ones. regard atoms, molecules, electrons, reaction. To There were all or two revIews f the firstedition of 77le true etc., as an appro Ecology of Fr eedom tal reflection in OUr objecti ximately h,s "the most important of malter mind of the vely real movem i � ' is equivalent to believing ell/ book to appear so ar '���� �?tory or anarchist thought" which the world in an elephant UpOD Americall rests!" (1950: 361). Either (Clark. 1984: 188 n. 2). T e one-page review in the ble these Polil/cal S·Clellce Review.' particles are bouncing around off impenetra_ ar ter sum marizing Bookchin's like billiard balls each other down there contentIOns,. asked . "Can h umaDl't y simply be integrated .mto on a pool table (what CUriOIlS ' . objective reality [Black a model of the whole [i.e., Nature1 W t h ou t losing its distinctiveness, an d like unico 1996aJ) or they are fantasy beings \ rns, leprechauns and lifestyle can solutions to the prob ems f the modern world emerge appropriate that the lawyer Lenin anarchists. It's in the relatively spontane s ash' Bookchin anticipates scientists like Mach 's critique of the physics of (pp. 316-317), much P �� � r:�ealt with by ants, bees, (Lenin 1950) . tist, a prominent was answered by a scien­ and beavers?" (Smlt. � ;;83��:o) There's nothing on the libert astronomer who was also a prom ' arian communist: Anton Pannekoek inent pages cited whIch has an�h' ing ; do with the relatively Ecology is a science, but (1948). spontaneous solution of socla prob�ems which Smith claims Social Ecology . r Christian Science is to scienc is to ecology what that Book ch· m esp ouses Th e reVlewe could hardly have tions, e. Bookchin'S academic . . . undistinguished affilia­ misunderstood B 00 k hm more pro oundly . The Dean IS as they are, and his C .. . r sions have made some impres scholarly preten­ rrantical�y in�istent on dlsl1n l h' g humans from animals then again, some sion on some anarchists, but and "aDlmahty, , (47-48, 50, ff� S5�) especially "four-legged According anarchists are all too easy to impres to the (Bookchinist) Instit s. aDlma. I y (39)-four legs b'a,d t;"o legs good! Smith- ute for Social Ecology, whoeverrt" he Is-clear. y h ad no clue that he was reVIewing. . a I 94 REASON AND REVOLUTION ANARCHY AFTER LEI'I1SM 95 giant work of political theory. The tives by an anthropologist is truly matter for mirth. N :a­ seven-paragraph review in the American A,'IIAlfo,pO,!() he anthrop ologists ?, gist was surprisingly favorable. Reviewer days takes the to task for romantIcIZIng wrote: Karen the primitives (Chapters 8 9). Either the Dean has re­ L. versed himself without admitting& it, or else the most favor­ The Ecology able review he's ever received from a non-anarchist, bona of- Freedom unites materials many disciplines, and no from fide scholar rested on a serious misreading of Bookchin's one doubt specialists from each magnum opus. �I! take Bookchin to task for occasional lapses And it was all downhill from there. of ngor. But despite its shortcomings the work remain� the kind of wide-ranging The one specific point brought up by Field-the D:�n's synthesIs . and i�passioned unsubstantiated contention that gerontocracy was the ongmal that IS all too rare in this age of scholarly form of hierarchy (and still the best!)-was contested, not specialization (1984: 162). L. only by Field, but subsequently by anarch�st Susan Brown. In other words, the As a feminist she thinks it's more plaUSible that the sexual agree-is best thing about the book-and I division of la or, whether or not it was necessarily hierarchi­ that it thinks big. On the otherhand, "the scenario b he constructs IS not wholly persuasive" cal, eventually turned out to be the origin of hierarchy (19';13: : 160-161). I tend to think so too. That she. dared to cntlclze The the Dean and in a book from his own maIO publisher Black description of "organic" society draws largely Rose Bo ks, probably explains why she got round d up with on. materials by Paul Radin and Dorothy � : pamts an overly homogenized Lee, and the unusual suspects (13-19) although she doesn t seem to ictur even sanitized­ have much else in common with them. � � of preliterate peacefulness and egalitarian­ T71e Ecology of Freedom Ism; It evokes !Kung and Tasaday, If the acaJemic reception of was anomamo and Kwakiutl. but not less than triumphal, the Dean's other books have fared himself",,: Attempting to distance worse. There were no reviews in social science journals of from traditional Marxian versions Post-ScarcityAnarchism T71eLimits of the City �mergence of class society, of the and when they Importance Bookchin downplays the were reprinted by Black Rose Books in 1986. There were no of technocconomic factors, but the T71e Modem Crisis Remaking Society cor'espunding emphasis he places reviews of (1987), or cation. a the on age stratifi­ (1989), or T71e Philosophy of Social Ecology (1990), or the � key to domination is unconvincing and T71e Ecology of Freedom Wluch suffe�s from such a paucity of empirical revised edition of (1991), or that It reads at times evidence Way for the Ecology MOI'enlent? (1993), or To Remember 161). like a "Just-So" story (ibid.: Spain (1995), or, for that matter, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995). . . That the Dean is taken There was exactly one notice of T71e RIse of UrballlzatlOn. to task for romanticizing the prim i- and the Decline of Citizenship (1987a) in an social science REASON AND REVOLUTION ANARCHY ER LEFTISM 97 96 AFl journal, and everything about it is odd. It appeared-all ience of this century, denounced dialectical reas�nin.g, n?t paragraphs of it-in Orbis: A foumaf of World \Inly as mystical gibberish, but as politically totahtarlan 10 right-wing, spook-ridden foreign policy journal, diaf�� s, he although tendency (1962). He denounced "Hegelian t!.e(IbId. � : Dean's book has nothing to do with international rel", that replaced 'barren formal lOgiC ; According to the anonymous, mystery method Popper s and condescending, re,lie,., I: 28). I bring this up, not because I endorse. Bookchin's "method is to ransack world history-more ·tIVlsm-· . I don't (Black 1996a)-but as a rem10der that less at random-first to show how the rise of cities 1)051 live in the Crystal Palace shouldn't throw stones. corresponded l\Coplewho 31. to the erosion of freedom at different myself veto no mode of reas�ning or expression, . and places, then to point out how some communities thoughI think some are more effectIve than others, especIal­ ought the trend." I � It's not scholarship, "scholarship, thc)u in specific contexts. There's no s�ch .thing: for instance, �s IS �ot his point, or his achievement." (That'S for sure.) ly scientific method; important sCientIfic dIscovery rarely If reVIewer as had Karen Field expresses satisfaction tilevcr results from following rules (Feyerabend 1975): Reh­ reading a book with "a real idea" for I've long conSIdered idea a change, even if Kious forms of expression, for instance, is a "slightly twisted one" (Anonymous 1988: 628). especially distorting (Black 1986: 71-75), but .I've also falls somewhat short of a rave review, and it reverses to freethinker simpletons, that Importa�t Dea 's understanding of Insisted as opposed "Go� � urbanism, although it comports truths ave been expressed in religious terms: . IS the tItle of hIs book (later changed to Urballizatioll unreal hbut [He] has real but muddled referents 10 hved Cities, not obviously an improvement). The reviewer takl 1992: 222). Bookchin was formerly aware Bookchin to be arguing .xperi�nce" (Black that the tendency of urbanism is of this (1982: 195-214). . . diminish human freedom, although here and there COlmn"l The Dean's dialectic is more thana mode of reason1Og. he tics have managed to buck the trend for awhile. But wh. has a "dialectical notion of causality" (Bookchin 1989: 3). Bookchin really contends is the opposite: that the te.,d(:n The Universe itself exhibits "an overall tendency of acllve,� of urbanism is liberatory, although here and there the turbulent substance to develop from the simple to the have managed to buck the trend for awhile. to t e relallvely. right about The reviewer omplex, from the relatively homogeneous � urbanization but wrong about Bookchin. He heterogeneous, from the simple to the �anegated .and the Dean the favor of misrepresenting him. differentiated" (ibid: 199). To evolve, that IS, fro� prn�al The Dean's own conception of reasonl--.iaf"eti.=a us: in effect, becomes the potenll l vOIce reason-would Rlop to "Humanity, . � (IbId.: have been dismissed "out of hand " as of a nature rendered self-conscious and self-creatIve. might say, as mystical by 30). we objective-reasonists ba�k wllea cf. 1987b: We are one with nature p�oVlded there were any. Like technophilia and defamation WI; directions-and at the same lime we are "dialectical approach" (Bookchin follow his package of the 1987b: 3-40)is a feat�re more natural than nature has hitherto been. ?ut Marxism to which he has always clung stubbornly. The latc .volution of consciousness emerged the conscIOusness of Karl Popper, at one time the most prominent philosopher of evolution and now, rational self-direction. By and through 98 REASON AND REVOLtJnON ANARCHY AI·,ER LEFTISM 99 this social "second nature" -conscious �nimals are awaiting patent approval at the Patent and dialectic actualizes the "imm anent self-directedness" rrademark Office" (Rifkin 1995: 119). This would seem to 28) of the cosmos. An "immanent world reason" fully in keeping with Bookchin's program (Eckersley 1989: "inherent force," "the logos -that impart[s] he111 -112). Nature finds freedom at long last in submission to coherence to reality at all levels of existence" Its highest manifestation: us. Just as we not-quite-humans 1982: 10). Humanity's duty and destiny is to inscribe fond freedom in submission to rational direction from the Word on th� fabric of reality. The Deanly dialectic rei" sents the most I1rst fully human being: Murray Bookchin. To paraphrase advanced thought of, say, the fourth B.C. Nietzsche, not-quite-man is something to be surpassed: a 'ope stretched over the abyss between all the rest of us and In appearance, it's the same old story of man's G,od. Murray Bookchin. mission to dominate nature (Genesis 9: 1-3): the reel Is everybody with me? Bookchin is saying that nature isn't evolution of an objective "ecological ethics involves huml "el!lally free when it's really free (where really means "what stewardship of the planet" (Bookchin 1987b: 32). But is") when it's out of control. That's just "negative free­ essence, second nature is a moment in the development II()m"II �"a fo rmal 'freedom/rom I-rather than [positive free­ ,10m,] a substantive freedom to" We are no lon� r to let ... 3 radically new "free nature" (4). in which an emanci­ Nnture take its course. Nature is actually free when ,t: s really pated humanity will become the voice, indeed the 14)ntrolled by its highest manifestation, humans. Humanity is expression, of a natural evolution rendered self­ "Ksentially natural (nature for-itself), the rest of nature isn't conscious, caring, and . sympathetic to the pain, (nature in-itself). suffenng, and incoherent aspects of an evolution left Perhaps a political analogy will help. Workers aren't to its own, often wayward, unfolding. Nature, due to 'Iually free when they're really free, i.e., uncontrolled. The human rational intervention, • will thence acquire the working class in-itself is actually free when it's really con­ i�tentionality, power of developing more complex "oiled by the class for-itself, the class-conscious vanguard­ life-forms, and capacity to diff erentiate itself workers like Bookchin was, back when he was a worker. (Bookchin 1989: 202-203). When he tells it the way it is, the way it "actually" is, lIookchin is irrefutable. Insofar as the evidence supports him, (Query: Why is it a moral imperative to make the wor is "really" right. Insofar as it does not, that is because he more complicated than it already is?) Even today, when h'to that extent "potentially" right. (I am using these words unemancipated humanity uis still less than human" lI roughout exac /y as Bookchin does [1987b: 27].) Reality "is 202), we are well on our way to rationalizing the : less 'real' or; 'objective' in terms of what it could be as wayward" course of evolution. '1\) Thanks to as what it is at any given moment" (ibid.: 203). Ancient "thousands of microorganisms and plants have been pater,l, w·Ihensn might not have been a genuine direct democracy "at as well as six animals. More than 200 genetically enlgineer lilly given moment" or indeed in any of its moments, but if 100 REASON AND REVOLUTION ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 101 it ever had the potential for direct democracy, then it was The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, always actually, objectively a direct democracy. To divine this but just because it is his essence and not he himself, mystery is "to comprehend the truth of the Polis" (Clark it remains quite immaterial whether we see it 1982: 52; 1984: 202-203). The fact that the potential was outside him and view it as "God," or find it in him never realiz�d when Athens was real doesn't matter. "An and call it "essence of man" or "man." I am neither oak tree objectively inheres in an acorn" (Bookchin 1987b: God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my 35 n. 22)-thus the acorn is actually an oak even if a essence, and therefore it is all one in the main squirrel eats it. To call this an "idiosyncratic use of the word whether I think of the essence as in me or outside objective" (Eckersley 1989: 101) is putting it mildly. me (1995: 34). You can make this same trick work for the city in the abstract, and thus for any city: "Civilization, embodied in the Hegel's Christian philosophy is developing-humanity-as­ city as a cultural center, is divested of its rational dimensions supernatural. Bookchin's Marxist philosophy is developing­ [by anti-civilizationists), as if the city were an unabated humanity-as-supranatural. The difference is only terminolog­ cancer rather than the potential sphere for universalizing ical. human intercourse, in marked contrast to the parochial Whenever Stirner says "In he refers to himself, Max limitations of tribal and village life" (34). No matter how Stirner, but only as an example. Whenever he refers to the devastating J. case is made against civilization, "to malign unique one or to the ego he refers, not to an abstract civilization without due recognition of its enormous potenti­ individual, but to each and every individual, to himself, alities for self-conscious freedom" is "to retreat back into the certainly, but also to every Tom, Dick and Murray. This is shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and why accusing Slirner of elitism (7) is bogus. Bookchin thinks intellectuation [sic] was only an evolutionary promise" (56). that real Humanity is still less than actually human (1989: (At least the brutes didn't use big words that don't exist.) 202). Stirner thinks that every real human is more than Democracy "lies latent in the republic" (59), any urban human(ity): '''Man' as a concept or predicate does not republic, as it has for thousands of years (and for how many exhaust what you are because it has a conceptual content of thousands more?). its own and because it lets itself stipulate what is human, With characteristic understatement, the Dean concedes what is a 'man,' because it can be defined ... But can you that his is "a fairly unorthodox notion of reason" (1982: 10). define yourself? Are you a concept?" (1978: 67). It's Hegel's philosophy of history with an abstract Humanity Positing a human essence is unnecessary for the practice replacing the World-Spirit, roughly the point reached by of any art or science. The indwelling essence is not discover­ Feuerbach. Murray Bookchin is the world's oldest Young able by observation, experimentation, or any rational mode Hegelian. God, taught Feuerbach, is merely the essence of of inquiry. To be sure, there are those who claim to have Man, his own supreme being, mystified. But abstract Man, apprehended essence directly, by non-ordinary consciousness. countered Max Stirner, is also a mystification: They're called mystics, and Professor Bookchin professes to 102 REASON AND REVOLlITlON despise them. More likely he envies the qualitative superior­ ity of their visions. Municipal socialism has got to be· as CHAPTER 7 mundane as mysticism gets. As Hakim Bey writes: "In sleep IN SEARCH OF THE PRIMITIVISTS we dream of only two forms of government-anarchy monarchy.... A democratic dream? a socialist dream?& PART I: PRISTINE ANGELS Impossible" (1991: 64). The Dean is indignant at this supposed denigration of "the dreams of centuries of ideal­ neglects to indicate by what muscular rational­ ists" (21) but Bashing the primitivist anarchists is probably Dean ist faculty he is privy to the dreams of the dreamers of Bookchin's highest priority (Anonymous 1996), because they centuries-a ouija board perhaps? he be previous But may arc the excommunicate anarchists whose views are most Bey has underestimated how far right that the colonization likely to be confused with, and to compete successfully with, of the unconscious may have proceeded in the case of a his own. He revels in his self-image as ecology's apostle to lifelong, elderly political militant. Bookchin may well be a the anarchists, and for once, there's some truth to his counterexample to the claim by a Nietzsche commentator messianic machismo. It was the Dean, after all, who has for that "there is no such thing as a dull unconscious" (Ansell­ so long and in so many books clamored for the rest�ration Pearson 1994: 168). Do androids dream of electric sheep? of "organic community," as he now shamefacedly admIts (41; stllpid Or as Nietzsche put it: every "thing in itself' is (1994: cf. Bookchi� 1974, 1982, 1987a, 1989, 1991). Once again his 81). embarrassment is that his readers took him at his word-an Whether mystical or merely mystifying, Bookchin's error that this reader, for one, will not repeat. These conception of reason is as unreasonable as so many of its innocents never suspected that they were not supposed to results. His latest polemic is so foolish that it invites reexam­ learn anything about primitive societies or pre-industrial ination of his previous books which mostly escaped critical communities except what cleared Bookchinist censorship. attention from radicals. The accolades of liberal journalists The Dean is so much the "irate petty bourgeois" (52) on won't avert (and they'll forget him soon enough) the serious this subject that he lashes out at the primitivists in petty, devaluation he's called down upon himself. I once defined peevish ways even for him. Several sources John Ze zan dialectics, unfairly, as "a Marxist's excuse when you catch � cites in Future Primitive (1994), he huffs, are "entIrely him lying" (1992: 149). In this sense alone Bookchin's is absent" from its bibliography, such as '''Cohen (1974)' and reasoning dialectical. After decades of talking down to eco­ 'Clark (1979)'" (62 n. 19). Zerzan cites "Cohen (1974)," not hippies who disdain "all muscularity of thought" (Bookchin on any controversial point, but for the plahtude that symbols 1987b: 3), his own mental musculature has atrophied. This arc "essential for the development and maintenance of social time he's bitten off more than he can gum. 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 104 PRISTINE ANGELS ANARCHY AITER LEFrISM 105 the author of a book from the same publisher, Autonomedia, are mutually exclusive. What amazes is that the Dean in the same series, I know how sloppy the production values assumes that it's the primitivists, not the city-statists, who are of this amateur, all-volunteer nonprofit collective can be. the presumptive heretics from anarchism-that they, not he, Additionally, Zerzan (1996: 1) in a letter to me admits to have some explaining to do. There has never been an "faulty record-keeping" and explains that the absence of the anarchist -city, not for more than a few months at the most, two references the Dean carps about "goes back to switching but there have been many longlasting anarchist primitive to social science-type notes-after FE [the Fifth Estate) societies. Many anarchists have considered anarchy possible refused to run footnotes to my articles, in the '80s." in urban conditions-among them the Dean's bete noir The Dean refers to part 2, ch. 4, sec. 4 of Max Stirner's Hakim Bey (Black 1994: l06)-but Bookchin is the first 771e Ego and His Own (64-65) although the book ends with anarchist who ever posited that anarchy is necessarily urban. part 2, ch. 3 (Stirner 1995: viii, 320-324). My library copy of That would have come as quite a surprise to the Makhnovist Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Bookchin 1971) from Ramparts peasant guerrillas in the Ukraine or the insurrectionary Press has a list of fifteen errata taped into it which presum­ anarchist villagers in the pueblos of Andalusia (Bookchin ably ought not to shatter the reader's "faith in [Bookchin's) 1977: ch. 5). My point is not that the efforts and experiences research" (62 n. 19), and it is far from complete: that should of urban anarchists are irrelevant or unworthy of attention­ be Jacques Ellul, for instance, not Jacques Elul (ibid.: 86). after all, I'm an urban anarchist myself-only that they are And that should be Alfred Zimmern, not Edward not the ollly anarchist experiences worthy of attention. I fail Zimmerman (ibid.: 159, n. 27; cf. Zimmern 1931). to understand why anarchists should attend only to their Bookchin was perhaps thinking288 of a singer-songwriter who failures and ignore their only successes. has interested him for decades, Bob Dylan (9), the Artist I don't consider myself a primitivist. Genuine anarcho­ Formerly Known as Zimmerman. In an especially maladroit primitivists such as John Zerzan, George Bradford and Feral move, the Dean cites a favorable review of Hakim Bey's Faun probably don't think I'm one of them either, any more (1991) in the Whole Earth Review as verifyingthat than Hakim Bey is, although the Dean can't quite figure out Bey'sTA.2. anarchism is a decadent, "unsavory" (20) "bourgeois "is he is or is he ain't" (62 n. 8). So it's not my purpose to form of anarchism" (22): the Whole Earth Review has, after defend the views of John Zerzan or George Bradford against all, a "yuppie clientele" (23). The back jacket blurbs for just Bookchin (although, incidentally, I'll do some of that): they one of the Dean's books (1987) come from such arch-yuppie are quite capable of defending themselves and I'm sure they publications as the Village Vo ice and 77" Nation . The inside will. Bradford, in fact, has written a lengthy rejoinder to be back jacket blurb boasts that he has contributed to "many co-published by Autonomedia and Black Red. But it is my journals" including CoEvolution Quarterly. CoEvolution purpose to show that in the way he& denounces the Quarterly was the original name of the Whole Earth Review. primitivists, the Dean is, as usual, unscrupulous and mali­ The Dean's devotion to urbanism is an important part of cious. When he isn't nat-out wrong he's usually irrelevant. his hatred of the primitive. City-statism and primitive society In rebutting a right-wing libertarian critic, I made clear 106 PIUSTINE ANGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 107

two of the aspects of primitive societies (there are others). basis. Hardly any anarcho-primitivists propose to do so (to which ought to interest anarchists: my knowledge, only one). But the point is to learn from the primitives, r.ot necessarily to ape them. Hunter-gatherers inform our understanding and Dean Bookchin, in contrast, doesn't know and doesn't embarrass libertarians [and Bookchinists] in at least want to know anything about primitives which might suggest two ways. They operate the only known viable that low-tech, non-urban anarchy is even possible although stateless societies. And they don't, except in occa­ it's the only kind of anarchy empirically proven to be sional emergencies, work in any sense I've used the possible. Since the whole point of the Dean's polemic is to word (Black 1992: 54). pass judgment upon what counts as anarchism, you'd think he'd try to indict primitives as statists. As that is impossible, Even the Dean earlier admiued the first point: "This he changes the subject. organic, basically preliterate or 'tribal,' society was strikingly Repeatedly, the Dean throws what he apparently considers nondomineering" (1989: 47). After all, Cultural Man is at roundhouse punches at primitivist myths, but he never least two million years old. He was originally a hunter­ connects, either because they are not tenets of primitivism or gather. He was an anatomically modern human at least else because they are not myths. 50,000 years before he adopted any other mode of For instance, the Dean argues at length that hunter­ subsistence. As recently as 10,000years ago he was still only gatherers have been known to modify, and not merely adapt a forager (Lee DeVore 1968c: 3). And he was still an to, their habitats, notably by the use of fire (42-43). Anthro­ anarchist. & pologists, and not only the ones the Dean cites, have known Now it may well be that the life-ways of hunter-gatherers that for a long time. The Australian aborigines, the quintes­ (also known as foragers) are not, as a practical matter, sential foragers, set fi res for various purposes which trans­ available for immediate adoption by disgruntled urbanites, as formed their landscape, usually to their advantage (Blainey the Dean declaims (36). Some primitivists have said as 1976: ch. 5 ["A Burning Continent"]). Shifting cultivators, much; John Moore, for one, is exasperated to have to keep such as most of the Indians of eastern North America, also saying so (1996: 18). Others, in my opinion, have equivocat­ fired the brush with important ecological consequences, as ed. But that's not the point, or not the only point. A way of even historians know (Morgan 1975: ch. 3). If any primitivist life is much more than a "life-style." Hunter-gatherers grow ever claimed otherwise, he is wrong, but the Dean does not up in a habitat and learn its secrets, they have "a marvelous cite when and where he did. John Zerzan, "the understanding of the habitat in which they lived; they were, anticivilizational primitivist par excellence" (39), observes, after all, highly intelligent and imaginative beings" (47). Most without apparent disapproval, that humans have been using anarchists should probably send for a lot of Loompanics fire for almost two million years (1994: 22). books and practice up on a lot of survival skills before they To take an ecological perspective means to hypothesize even think of venturing into the wilderness on a long-term general interaction among all species and between each and 108 PRISTINE ANGELS , ANARCHY AfTER LEFTISM 109 all species and the inanimate environment. Il implies 224-225). On the other hand, our leading killers, cancer and dethroning humans as the lords of nature appointed by a heart disease, appear infrequently among them (ibid.: 224), Judeo-Christian divinity, certainly, but it doesn't imply or and our thousands of occupational diseases never do. presuppose that there was ever a time or a condition of Hunter-gatherers have never been afflicted by asbestosis, society in which humans never acted upon the rest of nature black lung disease, Gulf War syndrome (as I write these but were only acted upon. Not even amoebas are that words, the Pentagon is finally admitting there might be such passive and quiescent (Bookchin 1989: 200). a thing) or carpal tunnel syndrome. Band societies have very Amazingly, Bookchin explicitly embraces the Hobbesian low population densities, and "viral and bacterial infections myth that the lives of primitive, pre-political people were cannot generally persist among small human populations" nasty, brutish and short (46). For him as for Hobbes (Black (Knauft 1987: 98). Paleolithic foragers might suffer serious 1986: 24), the purpose of the myth is to further a statist or fatal injuries, but one million of them were not killed by agenda. motor vehicles in just a hundred years. "Our early ancestors," he remarks with satisfaction, "were According to the Dean, prehistoric mortality statistics are more likely scavengers than hunter-gatherers" (46). How "appalling": "about half died in childhood or before the age disgusting! They ate animals which were already dead! Just of twenty, and few lived beyond their fiftieth year" (46). as we do when we shop the meat section of a supermarket. Even taking these claims to be true, the aggregate figures, (Perhaps there arc no meat sections in Burlington supermar­ their vagueness aside, are highly misleading. Foraging kets. Perhaps there are no supermarkets there, just food co­ peoples usually have a lot greater sensitivity to the carrying ops. Why do I find it hard to summon up an image of capacities of their habitats than techno-urbanites do. The Bookchin putting in his four hours a month bagging grocer­ ones who didn't have paid the price. The ones who did, and ies?) Bookchin probably picked up this tidbit from Zerzan do, adjust their populations by the means at their disposal. (1994: 19). Regardless, our still-prehistoric, still-anarchic Delayed marriage, abortion, prolonged lactation, sexual ancestors must have formed other tastes in food in becoming tabus, even genital surgery are among the cultural practices big game hunters (42). by which foragers hold down their birthrates (Yengoyan And these our animalistic ancestors were unhealthy too, 1968: 1941). Low-tech does have its limitations. The condom, claims the Dean. The Neanderthals suffered high rates of the diaphragm, the IUD and the Pill have not been available degenerative bone disease and serious injury (46). There is to hunter-gatherers. Foragers have often resorted to post­ considerable controversy whether the Neanderthals were partum population control as well: in other words, to among our ancestors. If your ancestors are from Europe or infanticide and senilicide (Dunn 1968: 225). the Levant, possibly; otherwise, almost certainly not. Admit­ Especially infanticide (although I suspect the Dean feels a tedly, our early ancestors were more likely to be eaten by lot more threatened by senilicide). Infanticide was probably leopards and hyenas than we are (46), but for contemporary prevalent among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers (Birdsell 1968: foragers, predation is a minor cause of death (Dunn 236), so it's ridiculous to ca1culate an "average" lifespan in 1968: 110 PRISIlNE ANGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 111 which the few minutes or hours some neonates were allowed persons in the population (Lee 1979: 44). 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 The population structure "looks like that of a developed present-day American lifespan we included in the numerator, country, for example, like that of the United States around as 0, every conception averted by contraception and every 1900" (ibid.: 47). This is how two other anthropologists aborted fetus, while adding each of them, scored as 1, to the summarize the lKung situation: denominator counting the entire population. We'd come up with a startlingly low "average" lifespan for the contempo­ Although individuals who have reached maturity rary United States-lO years? years?-which would be can expect to live into their middle 50s, life expec­ utterly meaningless. When contraceptive20 devices became tancy at birth is approximately 32 years, determined available to Nunamiut Eskimo women in 1964, there was mainly by high infant mortality--between 10 and "massive adoption" of them (Binford Chasko 1976: 77). 20% in the first year, almost all due to infectious At this point somebody might rise up &in righteous indigna­ disease. In the traditional situation, infanticide made tion-from the right, from the left, a trifling distinction-to a small additional contribution to mortality (Konner denounce my equation of contraception, abortion and Shostack 1987: 12). infanticide. I'm not even slightly interested in whether, or & where, the Pope or any other dope draws moral lines among It is true that foragers have always lacked the technology these time-honored practices. I don't equate them morally to perpetuate the agony of their incapacitated elders as our because I'm not moralizing. I equate them only with respect insurance-driven system arranges for some of ours. When I to the issue, the demographic issue, at hand. visit my father in the nursing home-a stroke victim, a Gimmickry aside, the evidence suggests that foragers live mentally confused cripple usually complaining of pain, 85 relatively long lives. The Dean's claim that the average years old-I find it hard to consider longevity an absolute lifespan of the !Kung San is 30 years (45) is unreferenced value. According to the Iliad, neither did Achilles: and misleading. Lee's censuses showed For my mother Thetis, the goddess of the silver feet ...a substantial proportion of people over the age of tells me I carry two sorts of destiny towards the day 60. This high proportion (8.7 to 10.7 percent) by of my death. Either if I stay here and fight beside Third World standards contradicts the widely held the city of the Trojans my return home is gone, but notion that life in hunting and gathering societies is my glory shall be everlasting; or if I return to the "nasty, brutish, and shorL" The argument has been beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my made that life in these societies is so hard that glory is gone, but there will be a long life (quoted in people die at an early age. The Dobe area [of Feyerabend 1987: 138). Botswana), by contrast, had dozens of active older 112 PRISTINE ANGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFIlSM 113

For an urbanist (if less than urbane) crusader like the Dean, once said that "the sleep of reason begets monsters" Dean, the relevant comparisons should be different. (28). Does Bookchin think that the sleeping-around of Primitivists like Zerzan and Bradford compare the robust monsters begets reasonables? lives of Paleolithic foragers with the stunted lives of those And when we progress from mere agriculture to caught up in the urban/agricultural complex: "The increas­ urbanism-one thing leads to another health deteriorates ingly sophisticated interpretation of the archaeological record even more dramatically. Throughout history, pre-industrial suggests that the transition to the Neolithic was accompanied urban populations have usually reproduced at less than by a fairly general decline in dietary quality, evidenced in replacement levels: "Ancient cities were like tar pits, drawing stature and decreased longevity" (Ross 1987: 12). And also country folk into their alluring but disease-ridden precincts" a related decline in health. Almost all archeological studies (Boyd Richerson 1993: 127). The Dean is fond of the "conclude that infection was a more serious problem for slogan that& "city air makes you free" (1974: 1), but there is farmers than for their hunting and gathering forebears, and considerably morc truth to saying that city air makes you most suggest that this resulted from increased sedentism, sick (ibid.: 66). Urban "internal nonviability" has three larger population aggregates, and/or the well-established sources: (1) high population density "facilitates the genesis synergism between infection and malnutrition" (Cohen 1987: and communication of infectious diseases"; (2) such cities 269-270). For one thing, work-and when we arrive at "have almost invariably had poor sanitation and hygiene, agriculture we arrive, unambiguously, at work-is hazardous particularly with respect to water and sewage"; and (3) to your health. urbanites depend on outside sources of food, on The fact that these are the findings of archeological studies monocultural food production subject to crop failures and of prehistoric societies renders irrelevant, for present difficulties of transportation, storage and distribution (Knauft purposes, the recent argument that the much-studied San are 1987: 98). really just an impoverished underclass within capitalism Industrial cities have only imperfectly coped with these (Wilmsen 1989). This is a controversial claim (Peters unhealthY influences. They arc more overcrowded than ever, 1990)-vigorously rebutted by Richard B. Lee and like­ with, the Dean has shown, adverse health consequences minded anthropologists (Solway Lee 1990)-which, (Herber 1965). "Urban air is seriously polluted and urban predictably, Bookchin whoops up with& uncritical abandon wastes are reaching unmanageable proportions"-further­ (44-45). But by definition, prehistoric peoples cannot have more: been marginal to, or relics of, or devolved from historical societies. What did they devolve from? Atlantis? Lemuria? Nothing more visibly reveals the overall decay of Mu? Are they the love-children of extraterrestrials ("Earth the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and gar­ girls are easy") who, having had their exotic fun, revved up bage that gathers in its streets, the noise and mas­ the Chariots of the Gods and rocketed off to the next off­ sive congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the planet pick-up scene? The artist Goya, as quoted by the apathy of ils population toward civic issues, and the 114 PruSflNE ANGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 115

ghastly indifference of the individual toward the subjects, wage laborers), have all been influenced by contact physical violence that is publicly inflicted on other with outside peoples" (1994: 29-30). The call for papers for members of the community (Bookchin 1974: 66, 67). the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference-which the Dean blames for romanticizing foragers (37)-stated "that there is Even the most conspicuous health accomplishment of no assumption that living hunter-gatherers are somehow industrialism, the control of disease by antibiotics, is being living relicts of the Pleistocene" (quoted in Binford 1968: rolled back, as resistant strains of disease vectors evolve. 274). Bookchin is beating a dead horse or, better yet, an Even the food situation is unsatisfactory, if not for precisely extinct eohippus: "It is widely recognized that modern the traditional reasons. Most American urbanites have hunters are not pristine living relics of the Pleistocene" unhealthy diets, and more than a few are malnourished. (Hawkes 1987: 350). The Dean mostly obsesses about details-why not oblige The Dean cites with some satisfaction a fairly recent him?-such as whether contemporary hunter-gatherer article by William M. Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The societies are Upristine" and whether hunter-gatherers have Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992), but for several invariably been the benign stewards of their habitats. reasons , I doubt the Dean has even read it. In the first place, Although these propositions are largely irrelevant to the the Dean ohly adverts to it as "cited in William K. Stevens, species "primitivism" and entirely irrelevant to its supposed 'An Eden in Ancient America? Not Really,' TI,e New York genus, "lifestyle anarchism," the ways the Dean deploys them Times (March 30, 1993, p. C1" (63 n. 22). The newspaper are relevant to his ulterior aims and exemplary of his story may well have been how the Dean got wind of the unsavory methods. article-nothing wrong with that, I often follow up on tips By "pristine" (44, 45) the Dean seems to mean the that way--but having served that purpose, there's no reason supposition that all contemporary hunter-gatherers are living to refer to a newspaper story which, at best, must have fossils who have always lived the way they do now. As usual, oversimplified the article. Second, the Dean misquotes the when the Dean puts a loaded word in quotation marks it's name of the journal. And finally, the title of the newspaper a dead giveaway that he's 1I0t quoting anybody, just talking story, suggesting a debunking of the myth of "an Eden in to his favorite person, himself. (Just as his mockery of ancient America," has absolutely nothing to do with what primitive "reverence for life" (42) might have been Denevan was really writing about, although it has everything amusing-a Bookchin first-if he could only have pinned on to do with the Dean's anti-primitivist ideological agenda. the anarcho-primitivists a phrase employed, not by them, but Denevan's argument, which relates only to the Western by that celebrated racist paternalist, the late B'wana, Dr. Hemisphere, is that when Europeans arrived in the New Albert Schweitzer.) He might have learned that-he proba­ World , and for some time afterwards, the landscape they bly did-from John Zerzan: "surviving hunter-gatherers, who encountered-Denevan is a cultural geographer-was not have somehow managed to evade civilization's tremendous "pristine" if this means it had been barely affected by tens pressures to turn them into slaves (i.e. farmers, political of thousands of years of indigenous human presence. Indian 116 PRISTINEANGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 117

hunting, horticulture, and especially the use of fire had species, incbding ours. What difference does it make? wrought important transformations in many stretches of the Anyway, to say that some prehistoric primitives could and landscape. Many North American grasslands, for instance, did kill game animals on a large scale (42, 62-63 n. 20), as all were produced by human action, and to a lesser extent, so anthropologists are well aware, does not entail that these were the park-like woodlands of eastern North America primitives brought about the extinction of their prey. Well (Morgan 1975: ch. 3; Salisbury 1982: ch. 1). But by the time into historic times, the Plains Indians killed many buffalo the Euro-Americans moved west on a large scale, the once­ and the Northwest Coast Indians netted many salmon numerous Indians had been decimated and much of the without coming close to extinguishing either species. The landscape had reverted to a tangled, pre-humanized "wilder­ yield, though enormous, was sustainable. t requir�d he ness" the seulers mistook for pristine conditions. Denevan intrusion of industrial society to pose a real fisk� of extmctlOo� plausibly argues for this conclusion but does not, as the with its high-tech, mass-production life destruction. Dean does, consider it cause for celebration. An article which the Dean cites (Legge Rowley-Conwy But what does this have to do with anything? A humanized 1987), but must not have read very carefully-even& if we landscape is not necessarily a ravaged, depleted, denatural­ disregard his mistake as to one co-author's name (62-63 n. ized landscape because there was a time when humans were 20 ["Rowly"])-actuallY tells against his indictment of the natural. foragers. Bookchin cites it for the conclusion "that migrat ng . The Dean, Professor of Social Ecology, also supposes he animals could have been slaughtered wIth devastatmg� is saying something important when he avers that primitives effectiveness by the use of corrals" (63 n. 20). Granting may have contributed to the extinction of some species of that-a point of no present importance-the article tells a the animals they hunted and that they may have sometimes more interesting story. The authors, archaeologists, are degraded their environments (42-43). As the allegations are reporting on a site they excavated in Syria. It was first independent, let us address each count of the indictment occupied by hunter-gatherers in approxima ely B.C . and . . separately. remained occupied, with one break, well �mto 9000the Neohthlc Even the Dean admits that the best-known claim for (agricultural) period. The authors emphasize that this was a induced extinction, so-called Pleistocene overkill, is "hotly year-round community, not a seasonal campsite. For about debated" (63 n. 23). Rapid climatic change was indisputably a thousand years after the villagers domesticated plants, part of the cause, and possibly a sufficient cause, for the hunting-mainly gazelle hunting-continued to supply them extinction of overspecialized species like the mastodon. But with animal protein. By then, the authors believe, the supposing that prehistoric hunters were responsible for some farmers had hunted the gazelles into extinction, and only extinctions-so what? Extinction has so far been the fate of then did they take up animal husbandry to replace the meat almost every species to appear on this planet, and may in formerly supplied by wild game. time be the fate of all of them. The continuation of natural There are two points of interest here, and each is adverse life does not depend upon the continuation of any particular to the Dean. Hunter-gatherers were responsible for the /lot 118 PIUSfINE ANGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 119 extinclion of the gazelles: their agricultural descendants Possibly morc relevant is the claim that primitives are not were. These villagers had long since ceased to be foragers by necessarily "ecologically benign" (42), and there's no reason the time they finished off the gazelles (locally, that is: the to suppose they always are. As Denevan says, sometimes animals survived elsewhere). More important, they'd never "Indians lived in harmony with nature with sustainable really bee" hunter-gatherers in the sense in which hunter­ systems of resource management" and sometimes they didn't gatherers interest primitivists and ought to interest all (1992: 370). But Devevan was not generalizing about anarchists. primitives, he was generalizing about Indians. He nowhere Anthropologists have recently resolved an ambiguity in the adduces a single example of Amerindian hunter-gatherers expression "hunter-gatherers" (cf. Murdock 1968: 13-15). It who degraded their environment, and neither does Bookchin, refers to tw� kinds of society, not one: nonsedentary and although I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep if it turned out that sedentary. What they have in common is that they hunt there was one, or even more than one group like that. A and/or gather rather than plant/and or herd. They do not small-scale society which fouled its own nest would probably domesticate. either plants or animals (in a few such societies, not survive, but the environmental damage it did would be dogs are domesticated, but not as a food source). What localized. A small-scale society which by some combination separates them is whether they occupy locations on a long­ of insight and accident settled into a sustainable relationship term or short-term basis. The occupants of the Syrian site with its ecosystem would be much more likely to persist. were always "hunters" in the obvious respect that, like many Existing foraging societies may not all have been around for members of the National Rine Association, they hunted millennia, but they've endured at least for centuries. animals. But they more closely resembled such Northwest "Primitivism" is not "indigenism," i.e., pan-Indian racial • Coast Indians as the Kwakiutl in that they were the perma­ nationalism with a left-wing spin such as Ward Churchill nent, year-round occupants of favored, restricted locations serves up. "Primitive" and "Indian" are not synonyms. Most which afforded them sustenance. They were not the same primitives were never Indians and many pre-Columbian sort of ((hunter-gatherers" as the Australian aborigines, the Indians weren't primitives. The Dean reports that "forest San/Bushmen, the Pygmies, the Great Basin Shoshone and overclearing and the failure of subsistence agriculture many others for whom frequent relocation was the condition undermined Mayan society and contributed to its collapse" of successful adaptation to their habitats. Sedentary hunter­ (43). One only has to refer to his own footnote to identify gatherers are socially much more like sedentary agricultur­ his references (64 n. 25) from "The Collapse of Classic alists and urbanites than they are like foragers who are Maya Civilization" in The Col/apse of Ancient States and routinely on the move. Their societies exhibit class stratifica­ Civilizations to 771e Col/apse of Complex Societies in order to tion, hereditary chiefs, sometimes even slavery (Kelly 1991; notice that he's not referring to foragers or primitives, he's Renouf 1991: 90-91, 98, 101 n. 1; Renouf 1989 for a referring to a civilization, the state-organized, urban-based, prehistoric European example). It is fromcf. these societies that agricultural, priest-ridden, class-stratified Mayan civilization. the city and the state emerged-together. Civilizations have a long history of occasioning environmen- 121 120 PRISTINEA NGELS ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM

foragers of the Bolivian tal destruction whether the civilized be red, white, black or from civilization (43). The Yuqui pre-Columbian yellow: they have belonged to all of these races. Is this news forest devolved from "a slave-holding Even the San ha�e to Professor Social Ecology? society" which was horticultural (45). . much agamst theor Probably the most amusing aspect of the Dean's campaign "literally devolved-probably very stems" (44; cf. Wllmsen against the primitivists is how blatantly self-contradictory it desires-fr0m horticultural social sy is (Jarach 1996). While he wants to represent primitive life­ 1989). knowing w ether the ways as undesirable, the decisive point is that they are, for We may "never have any way of accurately mIrror� those us, simply impossible: "Anyone who advises us to significant­ lifeways of today's foraging cultures archeology and ly, even drastically, reduce our technology is also advising us of our ancestral past" (43)-actually, ways-but we have an in all logic, to go back to the 'stone age'-at least to th paleoecology have come up with some gardeners Neolithic or Paleolithic (early, middle, or late)" (36). � easy way to find out if the San would rather be would never occur to To digress for just a bit, consider how idiotic this assertion than foragers. We can ask them. This f ragers arc little more is. The Dean says that any significant rollback of technology the Dean, for whom cantero porary � RIchard B. Lee when he would reduce us to, at best, the Neolithic, the New Stone than talking dogs, but it occurred to '60s: "when a Bushman ge. But obviously there was a lot of technological progress, lived with and studied the San in the agriculture he replied: �.f that's what it was, between the Neolithic Revolution was asked why he hadn't taken to are so many mongongo (agriculture) which commenced a few thousand years ago 'Why should we plant, when there and the Megamachine which dominates us now. The Dean's nuts in the world?'" (Lee 1968: 33). "devolution." The beloved Athenian polis, for instance, exploited a technology There are many examples of voluntary were agriculturalists. much inferior to what we moderns command but far beyond ancestors of most Plains Indian tribes were forced what the Neolithic farmers, the earliest farmers, had to work There is absolutely no reason to suppose they by environmental with. Early medieval Europe, an almost entirely rural society off their farmlands and onto the plains tribes. When the hOrse, quickly developed new technology (such as the mould-boar pressures or aggression from other , way north, these IndIans plough) beyond anything that urban-oriented Greco·Romand introduced by the Spanish, found its from sedentary civilization ever did. seized upon this new technology to "devolve" We'll never know for John Zerzan's unspeakable heresy, as the Dean sees it, is agriculture to nomadic buffalo hunting. buffalo meat tasller that Zerzan thinks that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not sure why they made this choice. Was than farming? Was a just fail to "innovate technological change" (38), they refu sed than corn? Was hunting more fun tha being stuck domestication and the division of labor. For the Dean, frequent change of scenery more interesting � Whatever It was, It was progress is an offer you can't refuse. But then, sublimely forever in Mudville-on-the-Missouri? too. oblivious to the inconsistency, he goes on to say that some a choice. Maybe we have a choice primitive societies have, in his value-laden word, "devolved" from more complex societies (44). The Mayans devolved ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 123

needed to forage only a few hours each day" (37-38). CHAPTER 8 In the above-quoted passage, "it would take a full-sized essay in itself to unscramble, let alone refute, this absurd IN SEARCH OF THE PRIMITIVISTS balderdash, in which a few truths are either mixed with or PART II: PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE 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 According to the Dean, the notion of primitive affluence fantasy. is some silliness the hippies smoked up and put over on the The revisiun of the Hobbesian postulate that primitive life anthropologists in the '60s: is nasty, brutish and short commenced, not at the "Man the Hunter" symposium in 1966 (Lee DeVore 1968), but at Much of [George Bradford's] "critical anthro­ the symposium on band societies in& Ottawa in 1965 (Damas pology" appears to derive from ideas propounded at 1969). The Chicago symposium only extended the theses of the "Man the Hunler" symposium, convened in the pioneering Ottawa gathering (Renour 1991: 89-90). April April 1966 at the University of Chicago. Although 1965 and even April 1966 (Lee DeVore 1968: vii) are most of the papers contributed to this symposium implausibly early dates to assume &much hippie influence on were i",mensely valuable, a number of them con­ academic scholarship, and the Dean adduces no evidence in formed to the naive mystification of Hprimitivity" support of his self-serving conjecture. There's no trace of that was percolating through the 1960s counter­ counterculture influence, for instance, in Bookchin's 1965 culture-and that lingers on to this day. The hippie book Crisis ill Cilies (Herber 1965) or his 1965 essay culture, which influenced quite a few anthropologists "Ecology and Revolutionaryall' Thought" (Bookchin 1971: 55- of the time, averred that hunting-gathering peoples 82). Indeed, back when his memories were more recent and today had been bypassed by the social and economic his memory perhaps better, Bookchin wrote that "the hippie forces at work in the rest of the world and still lived movement was just gelling underway in New York when in a pristine state, as isolated remnants of Neolithic 'Ecology and Revolutionary Thought' was published" (ibid.: and Paleolithic lifeways. Further, as hunter-gather­ 29). In contrast, the hippie movement bulks large in his 1970 ers, the,r lives were notably healthy and peaceful essay opportunistically lauding youth culture (Bookchin 1970: living then as now on an ample natural largess (37) : 51-63). The times they were a-changin'. To Bookchin's annoyance, they still are. The chief villain of the piece was anthropologist Richard B. lf there is any relationship between '60s hippie culture and Lee, who had "estimated that the caloric intake of 'primitive' the anti-Hobbesian turn in anthropology, it is of the sort the peoples was quite high and their food supply abundant, statisticians call a spurious relationship. That is, the variables makIng for a kind of virginal 'affluence' in which people 124 PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 125

essay "The are associated with each other, not as cause and effect, but Marshall Sahlins made the same point in his 1968 Today the as consequences of a common cause (Babbie 1992: 416). The Original Affluent Society" (Sahlins 1971: ch. 1). advanced common cause would have been the general climate of "current model" (Renouf 1991: 89-90) is the one the more distrust of authority and orthodoxy. at the Olta"a and Chicago conferences: "although are com­ If you read the Dean's passage with more care than it was idealized aspects of the Lee and DeVore model no funda­ written with, it's noticeable that he attributes most of the monly acknowledged, I think it is fair to say that Similarly, malign influence on the primitivists, not to the anthropolo­ mental revision of it has been made" (ibid.: 90). . of gIsts, but to the hIppies. I am drawing on my own distant another anthropologist refers to the continuing prevalence. of the mld- memories here, but my recollection is that what the hippies "the revised general version of hunter-gatherers not George romanticized was tribai society on the model, usually ill­ 1960s" (Conkey 1984: 257). John Zerzan, complete understood, of certain pacific Native American tribes like the Bradford i, correct in saying that "a nearly about, with Hopi and the Navajo. At the time, Bookchin apparently reversal n anthropological orthodoxy has come failure to thought so too. "In its demands for triba1ism," among olhers, importanti hnplications" (1994: 16). Bradford's . since the 1970s-whlch "the Yo�th Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous update the opinions he's expressed Dean an unde­ commUDlst and classless society" (Bookchin 1970: 59). is typical of the FiftII Estate-afforded the . for a Unless they were attending graduate school, few hippies served opportunity to claim scientific respectablhty would have been acquainted with what Bookchin calls the viewpoint long since discredited. . Dean, "'Man the Hunter' timewarp" (39), which was expressly and Bradford's other mistake, eagerly explOIted by the is based on only about revising the Hobbesian view of hunter-gatherers. is that he allegedly wrote that the revisionist view . and thelf For the most part, hunter-gatherers don't even iive in "greater access to the views of primal people chance to tribes, they live in bands (Lee DeVore 1968b: 7-8). In native descendants" (37). That gave the Dean his . of nostalglc contrast, tribal peoples-horticult& uralistsor herders-occupy dismiss primitive affluence as the "edenic" myth , peyote, a social space "between bands and states" (Gregg 1991). natives (36) feeding their fantasies, and perhaps thelf Many of their societies are also anarchist and as such are to credulous white hippies. hunter­ also inte esting, as well as interesting in their own right, but This is all wrong. It was the earliest studies of � Boas a d necessarily there are not as many valid generalizations about gatherers, including classic accounts by Kroeber, � pr m t ves as there are about foragers. All foragers are Radcliffe-Brown, which relied on older informants' memories recon­ pnmlhves,� � � but not all primitives 3rc foragers. of conditions 25-50 years before, on "ethnographic (Lee In a way, it's Bradford's fa ult for inviting the Dean to structions of situations which were no longer intact" far& foment confusion. If the Dean quotes him correctly-always DeVore 1968c: 5-6). The Man the Hunter symposium, that a a bIg if where the Dean is concerned-Bradford wrote in from overlooking this method's shortcomings, made 1991 that the "official" anthropological view of foragers is "central theme" (ibid.: 6). Contemporary anthropologists of so-called the Hobhesian one. That was already changing even when have iesser, not greater access to the views 127 126 PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM primal people. In the first place, primal people are disap­ affluent there, it might have been affluent �Imo�t . peanng almost as rapidly as leftists are. And secondly, everywhere-and almost everywhere is where pre-h,stonc Western anthropologists no longer enjoy as much "access" humans lived, as foragers, for 99%of human existence (Lee as they did when the people they studied were subject to DeVore 19 c: 5). The civilized, in contrast, find it very & 68 Western colonial rule. Most indigenous peoples now have difficult to sustain an affluent lifestyle in the desert outside more po er to determine whether and on what terms they of a few special locations like Palm Springs and Kuwait (cf. . � . wI ll receIve resIdent and even visiting ethnographers. Some Levi-Strauss 1962: 5 [quoted in Feyerabend (1987): 112 n. exclude them entirely. And the national governments of 14)]). some former colonial possessions which arc now indepen­ These implications have not only reoriented fieldwork, they dent states restrict or exclude foreign anthropologists for a have also occasioned the reinterpretation of already available variety of reasons (Beals 1969: 20-27). accounts of hunter-gatherers, both historical sources and More important, the affluence thesis is based on observa­ formal ethnographies. Sahlins (197l: ch. 1) did some of both tion and measurement, not myth and memory. Richard B. in "The Original Arnucot Society," whose conc1usions he'd �e concluded that the !Kung San/Bushmen did remarkably previewed a> a discussant at the Man the Hunter symposium hllie work compared to us-not by sitting at the feet of the (Lee DeVore 1968: 85-89). The abundant historic�1 & Old ise Man like they do at Goddard College-but by accounts of the Australian aborigines, for all theu followmg� the San around to see what they were doing and misperceptions, if carefully read, confirm the affluence thesis. And the earlier ethnographers of hunter-gatherers, although for ho� long. He based his conclusions as to the sufficiency of theIr d,et on measuring the calories they ingested and they had often announced as their conclusions the Hobbesian party line, report ample data which contradict those conclu­ expended (Lee 1969, 1979), something rarely done previous­ . ly. One of the resulting articles was titled "!Kung Bushmen sions. Anthropologists who once slighted written, hlstoncal . . SubsIstence: An Input-Output Analysis" (Lee 1969). This is sources relating to foragers such as the San are now combmg them very carefully (e.g., Parkington 1984). science at its most muscular, not free-form fantasy, . t doesn't necessarily follow, of course, that if San society Unlike Bradford the Man the Hunter anthropologIsts . IS � a very tangIble, measurable sense leisurely and affluent, were not intereste in primitive animism, harmony with m d then so are all or most other foraging societies. But on the nature, or "ecstatic techniques," a phrase the Dean attributes Hobbesian view, the San as they lived in the 1960s were to Bradford (36). Anthropologists had long since document­ impossible, so the Hobbesian view in the muscular form ed beyond any reasonable possibility of refutation all these aspects of many primitive cultures. What the Man-the­ espoused by the Dean has to be qualified or ' as the social . ' . Hunter revisionists added was precisely what the Dean sClentl�ts say, "specIfied" (the scope of its validity narrowed) (Babble 1992: 421-422) or else rejected altogether. And claims is missing, the social dimension: "Egalitarianism, sharing, and low work effort were stressed, as was the what's so intriguing is that the San live their amuence in the . , arid Kalahari Desert, not someplace approximating the importance of gathering foods and, by extenSIOn, women s Garden of Eden (Zerzan 1994: 29). If foraging life could be 128 PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE ANARCHY AFrER LEFrISM 129 direct role in the economy" (Renouf 1991: 89). The Dean's extreme sodal plasticity. As such, they hearten me, but they entire rhetorical strategy is as misdirected as it is malicious. fail to persuade me that "some kind of urban community is Primitivists contrast the orderly anarchy and the generous not only the environment of humanity: it is its destiny" egalitarianism of foragers with the chaotic statism and class (Bookchin 1974: 2). I don't think anatomy is destiny and I hierarchy of urban civilization. The Dean dredges up olle don't think urbanity is destiny either. foraging sooiety, 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 5 for social viability. They are probably descended from a()(}- Guarani raiding party of the late pre-Columbian period which was unable to find its way back to Paraguay. Remark­ ably, they maintained vestiges of slavery, something "difficult to imagine, but it did exist." The Dean neglects to mention that 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 always anarchist and egalitarian. almost 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 unrelieved urban statism and class stratifi­ cation. 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 ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 131

the anarcho-syndicalists, added workers' control of produc­ CHAPTER 9 tion according to one formula or another. These reforms, even if completely successful on their own terms, fall short FROM PRIMITIVE AFFLUENCE TO of any qualitative transformation of the experience of LABOR-ENSLA VING TECHNOLOGY 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 onc dimension of avant One tendency which surely belongs on the Dean's enemies garde anarchism which on Bookchin's terms looks progres­ short list is zero-work, the critique of work as such, "the sive, not regressive-a double irony, as heterodox anarchists notion that the abolition of work is possible and desirable: tend to disbelieve in progress. Reduced hours of work is an that genuine, unconditioned needs can be met by voluntary ancient demand of the left (and of the labor movement playlike activity enjoyed for its own sake" (Black 1996d: 22). [Hunnicutt 1988)). Marx considered it the precondition of Zero-work may well be the ollly programmatic position passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom shared by everybody the Dean targets, even L. Susan Brown (1967: 820), just like Bookchin (Clark 1984: 55). Anarchists (1995). The Left That Was not only posited work as a agreed: "The eight-hour day which we officially enjoy is the necessity, it regarded it as almost a sacrament. And while cause for which the Haymarket anarchists of 1886 paid with zero-work is not the same thing as such Bookchin bugbears their lives" (Black 1992: 29). Over a century ago, Kropotkin as hedonism and primitivism, it complements them nicely. It argued that it was then a/ready possible to reduce the is an important Bookchin target, but he attacks it with working day to four or five hours, with retirement by age 45 potshots, not the usual scattershot. There may be several or 50 (1995: 96). What would his estimate be today: 40 or 50 reasons for his uncharacteristic circumspection. minutes? Since the Dean believes (however erroneously) that In his younger days ("younger" being, of course, a relative technological progress reduces "toil," · at least potentially term), Bookchin understood that dealing radically with what (26), he has to believe that the abolition of wor s an ever­ . he called "toil" was a crucial dimension of post-scarcity increasingly practical possibility. He can only cntlclze� � zero­ anarchism: "The distinction between pleasurable work and workers, not as reactionaries, but as ahead of their time. onerous toil should always be kept in mind" (1971: 92). Even And that debunks the whole notion of lifestyle anarchism as 25 years ago, the productive forces had developed "to a a surrender to the prevailing climate of reaction. point where even toil, not only material scarcity, is being The Dean might have other reasons not to be conspicuous brought into question" (Bookchin 1970: 53). For the tradi­ or even explicit in his rejection of zero-work. Lifestyle tional left, the answer to the question of work was to anarchists have supposedly withdrawn "from the social eliminate unem ployment, rationalize production, develop the domain that formed the principal arena of earlier anarchists" productive forces, and reduce the hours of work. To this (2) because lifestyle anarchism "is concerned with a 'style' program the ultra-left, such as the council communists and 132 LABOR-ENSlAVING TECHNOLOGY ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 133 rather than a society" (34). But for an old Marxist like enemies list looks to be for the anarchists of the '90s what Bookchin, labor is the very essence of the social: "Labor, Nixon's enemies list was for the liberals of the '70s, an honor perhaps more than any single human activity, underpins roll. I've previously flattened a nobody-his name doesn't contemporary relationships among people on every level of matter-who pushed the same line as Bookchin (Black 1992: experience" (1982: 224). In the importance they attach to the 181-193; Black & Gunderloy 1992) although that one also labor process, zero-workers resemble traditional socialists, happened nut to mention my name. For me, the political is not "the growing 'inwardness' and narcissism of the yuppie the personal. An attack upon all is an attack upon one. generation" (9). Work is about real life, not lifestyle or Solidarity forever-or make my day! iNo paser(m-baby! hairstyle. We have already seen (Chapter 9) how the Dean blithely Finally, there might be a very personal source of the misrepresents the best current understanding of how, and Dean's relative reticence. His usual method is to focus on how long, foragers work-if that is even the word for what one or two prominent expositors of each malign aspect of they do for a living, or rather, for the living that they do. As lifestyle anarchism. Were he to deal with zero-work that way I've summarized the situation in my book Friendly Fire: he would plObably have to deal with me. As the author of "The Abolition of Work" (Black 1986: 17-33), a widely read In addition to shorter hours, "flextime" and the essay which has been published in seven languages, and more reiiable "safety net" afforded by food sharing, other zero-work writings (Black 1992: ch. 1; 1996b), I would foragers' work is more satisfying than most modern be the single most convenient whipping-boy. But Bookchin work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a never refers to me with respect to zero-work or anything lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our build­ else. What am I, chopped liver? ings in our polluted cities; they move about breath­ I can only speculate why I was spared, except by implica­ ing the fresh air of the open country. We have tion, the Dean's wrath. The flattering suggestion has been bosses; they have companions. Our work typically made that he feared my polemic powers and hoped I'd implicat�s one) or at most a few hyper-specialized ignore his diatribe unless personally provoked by it (Jarach skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brain­ 1996: 3). If so, he miscalculated. I'm a better friend to my work in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the friends than that, and besides, I like a good fight. I'm not the great utopians called for (Black 1992: 33). kind of guy who says: "First they came for the anarcho­ liberal individualists, but I said nothing, for I was not an I've cited ample supporting references in that book (which anarcho-liberal individualist; next they came for the mystics, the Dean i, surely familiar with, if less than happy with) as but I said nothing, for I was not a mystic; next they came for also in this one (cf. Zerzan 1994: 171-185 [Bibliography]). All the primitivists, but I said nothing, for I was not a Bookchin can do is fulminate that the primitive affluence primitivist," etc. thesis is hippie hokum) an ad hominem insult which is If anything, I am peeved to be overlooked. Bookchin's irrelevant as well as untrue. 134 LABOR-ENSLAVING TECHNOLOGY ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 135

The Dean is equally wrong about work-and the relation­ child knows, technical progress strellgtllelled slavery, which ship of technology to work-in other forms of society. In had been languishing, with the conjunction of the cotton gin Frielldly Fire I summarized some of the evidence (there's lots with the textiles-based Industrial Revolution in Britain more) that as technology advances, the quantity of work (Scheiber, Vatter & Faulkner 1976: 130-134). increases and the quality of the work experience declines If what Bookchin says about slaveholders makes sense, (Black 1992: 19-41). In general, there's no such thing as then every ruling class is off the hook. The plantation owners labor-saving technology. There's usually, at best, only labor­ "needed" sbves "in great part" because they lacked ma­ rearranging technology, which from the worker's perspective chines to do their work for them. Presumably industrialists is sort of like "emigrating from Romania to Ethiopia in "needed" cUld labor for the same reason. Athenian citizens search of a better life" (ibid.: 13). Capitalists develop and "needed" slaves because their technology was inadequate to deploy new technology, not to reduce labor, but to reduce peel their grapes, give them blowjobs, and satisfy the many the price of labor. The higher the tech, the lower the wages other needs of a civic-minded citizenry with aims so lofty and the smaller the work-force. that they could not be troubled with earning their own keep. When he descends from declamation to detail, the Dean "Need" is socially and economically relative. No doubt the exposes his ignorance of the real history of work and Southern planters and the Athenian citizens needed slaves, technology. The two examples he adduces are evidence but did the slaves need the Southern planters or the Athe­ enough. Here's his cartoon history of Southern agriculture: nian citizens? The Deans's other example is also maladroit. It's that In the South, plantation owners needed slave classic instrument of women's liberation, the washing "hands" in great part because the machinery to machine: "Modern working women with children could plant and pick cotton did not exist; indeed, Ameri­ hardly do without washing machines to relieve them, can tenant farming has disappeared over the past however minimally, from their daily domestic labors-before two generations because new machinery was intro­ going to work to earn what is often the greater part of their duced to replace the labor of "freed" black share­ households' income" (49). In other words, the washing croppers (35). machine reinforces the domestic sexual division of labor and enables women to be proletarianized-to enter the paid In other words, Bookchin blames slavery on technological labor force at the boltom (Black 1992: 29-30). Thanks to backwardness, not on a capitalist world-system which technology, modern working women get to do the unpaid assigned to the South the function of export monoculture. drudge-work, the "shadow work" (Illich 1981) of the patriar­ But cotton was of minor importance in the low-tech colonial chal household, pillS the underpaid capitalist drudge-work of economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the office, the restaurant and even the factory. The washing slaves were raising other export crops such as tobacco, rice machine, and household technology in general, never saved and indigo (McCusker & Menard 1985). As every school- women any labor-time. just raised performance standards Il I 136 LAooR-ENSLAVING TECHNOLOGY ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 137

(with a Maltag, no excuse any more if your laundry's not devoted all of two sentences to work with but a perfunctory brighter thall white) or else displaced effort to other tasks like affirmation of rotation of tasks (1989: 195). All Bookchin child care (Cowan 1974, 1983). I doubt Bookchin does his cares about any more is politics and ecology, in that order. own laundry, and not only because he's always airing his Provided a technology is neither "domineering" nor "danger­ dirty linen in public. ous," its impact on work means nothing to him. In Bookchin's civic utopia, "a high premium would be Nothing better dramatizes the Dean's self-deception and placed on labour-saving devices-be they computers or irrelevance than the contrast between his fervor for politics automatic machinery-that would free human beings from and his indifference to work. He believes, because he wants needless toil and give them unstructured leisure time for to believe, that "seldom in recent memory has there been a their self-cultivation as individuals and citizens" (1989: 197). more compelling popular sentiment for a new politics" (59). To believe ill that is, for someone as ignorant as Bookchin, That contradicts his characterization of the epoch as an act of faith. In recent decades productivity, driven by high privatistic, personalistic and apolitical. The truth is that technology far beyond anything the Dean anticipated, has seldom in recent memory has there been a more compelling increased prodigiously-more than doubling since 1948 sentiment for 110 politics. (Schor 1991: 1-2, 5, 29). Oddly enough, not even "material On the other hand, work is if anything more salient, if less scarcity," much less "toil," has diminished. Real income has liked, in the lives of ordinary people than it's been in fallen at the same time hours of work have increased (Black decades. Longer hours, lower real incomes, and employment 1994: 31-32; Black 1996b: 45). Even the Dean has noticed, insecurity have done nothing to compensate for the joyless literally on page one, "the growing impoverishment of and often humiliating experience of the work itself. In the millions of people" at the same time that "the intensity of 1960s Bookchin, ever alert to sniffing out potentially revolu­ exploitation has forced people in growing numbers to accept tionary sources of social malaise, expressed approval of the a work week typical of the last century" (1). What he hasn't younger generation's contempt for the work trap (Bookchin noticed is that the paradox of more progress, more produc­ 1970: 54, 61; 1971: 175-176; cf. 1994: 30). But while other tivity, more poverty and more work calls his essentially Bookchin-approved tendencies, like youth culture, were Marxist celebration of the development of the productive recuperated, a widening revolt against work became a forces, as he might say, "into question." persistent feature of the American workplace (DeLeon 1996: The Dean admits that "many technologies are inherently 196-197; Zerzan 1988: 170-183). Spontaneous and acepha­ domineering and ecologically dangerous" (34), but he cannot lous, it could neither be bought out by bosses nor organized imagine that they increase and worsen work. Really he just by leftists. The overworked and the unemployed-now there's doeslI 't care. He hasn't devoted any sustained attention to a potentially revolutionary force (Black 1996a). work since Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971). After 25 years as a college bureaucrat, the fa ctory is a distant memory. His 1989 primer summarizing his views on remaking society ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 139

out the woru "zinc" without contemptuous quotation marks (51) used to publish a zine, Commellt, himself (Boo chin . CHAPTER 10 1979: 28). There must be hundreds of these contradIctIOns.� SHUT UP, MARXIST! The Dean is oblivious to all of them. Dean, "it is already no l ger "Certainly," decrees the . �:m to ll onese f n narchlst wIthout possible, in my view, � .. � adding a qualifying adjectIve to dIstIngUIsh� oneself from As a maller of course, unless ideology withers away, it lifestyle anarchists" (61). That's the most reasonable:propos­ eventually hardens into dogma. After Jesus comes Paul, and al in the entire essay. I suggest he call hImself a eventually some Pope, Innocent in name only. That "Bookchinist anarchist" or, if his overweening modesty Bookchinism would calcify into a creed after no very long forbids, an "anti-lifestyle anarchist." Nobody will know --:hat time is no surprise. Even in its prime it was arthritic with he's talking about, so introducing himself that w�y mIght Rousseau, St.-Simon, Marx and Arendt. It was always stimulate cu:iosity about his views, much as would mtr�duc­ ambiguous about technology and scarcity. Its ecological ing oneself as a Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Primitive Ba�tlst. content was always at odds with its civism, to which, in retro­ Fated to failure, however, is any attempt to standardIze the spect, ecology seems to have always been an accessory, an terminology on Bookchin's tendentious terms. Most anar­ add-on. It's marred by eccentricities as various as primitive chists would already rather answer to "social anarchist" than gerontocracy and Swiss anarchy. It's unredeemed by irony, "lifestyle anarchist." Reading the Dean's tract won't turn any much less humor. What's amazing is that Bookchin isn't lifestyle anarchists-who number in the "thousands" (1)­ leaving Bookchinism to its Plekhanovs, Kautskys and Lenins. into social anarchists, but it might encourage them to adopt He's vulgarizing his ideology himself. protective coloration (red). We will all be social anarchists, As the Green Anarchist reviewer observes, the Dean now even if, like Bookchin, we aren't anarchIsts at �1I. "goes on to crudely reduce or reject all that's best in his Bookchinists might retaliate by calling themselves "very SOCIal Ecology of Freedom, " forsaking dialectics for dualism anarchists," hut you see where that would lead. They need (Anonymous . 1996: 22). In fact he's gone back on the best of a name nobody else wants. H ow ab ou t "MarXlS t"?. everything he's wrillen. 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 inexpli­ cable, often frightening dream world that they [the ignorant jungle bunnies] took for reality" (42). The author who acclaimed the drop-out culture (Book chin 1970: 63 n. 1) now vilifies "Iumpen lifeways" (56). The author who cannot spit ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 141 everybody else, by surprise, they were not as unprepared as CHAPTER 11 they would have been twenty years earlier. Many of them had, if not by design, then by drift and default, stra�e� from ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM their traditional position as " the 'left wing' of 'all soclahsms'" (6)-but not by moving to the right. ike many oth�r North Americans, they were unable to discern� any difference In one respect, Murray Bookchin is right in almost the between left and right of such importance that they felt only way he's still capable of, i.e., for the wrong reasons. The compelled to declare for one or the other. As the leftist anarchists are at a turning point. For the first time in history, veneer-or tarnish-they typically acquired in college wore ollly off, an indigenous anti-authoritarianism showed t r?ugh. The they are the revolutionary current. To be sure, not all Marxists they encountered on campus were too ndlculous� to anarchists are revolutionaries, but it is no longer possible to be taken seriously as rivals or reference points. (That some be• a revolutionary without being an anarchist, in fact if not In name. of them were professors made them that much more Throughout its existence as a conscious current, anarchism ridiculous.) More than ever before, so.�e �narchists in�isted has been shadowed and usually overshadowed by leftism in on a "personalistic" grounding of poiatICS m the expenence general, and Marxism in particular. Especially since the of everyday life, and they correspondingly open,:� up to formation of the Soviet Union, anarchism has effectively theorists like the situationists for whom the cnl1que of (and therefore ineffectively) defined itself with reference to everyday life was a first principle. They took to dumpster­ Marxism. The reduction of anarchists to satellites of the diving among the discards of doctrines a?d cultures t.o Communists, especially in revolutionary situations, is so fashion, like a collage, recombinant world-pictures of. their regular a feature of their modern history that it can't be an own. And if Nietzsche's definition is right-that man IS th.e accident. Fixated on their great rival, the anarchists have animal who laughs-then they recovered some of their competed with Marxists on their own leftist terms and so the humanity too. anarchists have always lost. Now I admit this picture is too rosy because it's not red Marxism was already ideologically bankrupt by the time enough. A fraction of North American anarchists, mostly European Communism collapsed. As ideology, Marxism is syndicalists, remain out·and-out leftists. As such,. they share now merely a campus-and mostly a faculty--phenomenon, the decline of the rest of the left. They no longer mclude any and even as such its persistence is mostly parasitic upon first-rate or even second-rate thinkers. Other pockets of feminism and the racial nationalisms. As a state system, what anarchists act as auxiliaries of sub-leftist, particularist remains of Marxism is merely Oriental despotism, unthink­ ideologies like feminism and Third World nationalism able as a model for the West. Suddenly, seventy years of (including indigenism)-the larger hunks of wreckage from anarchist excuses became irrelevant. the New Left. These too have produced their logorrheics but nobody with anything to say. Many �ther anar h sts retain Although these developments caught the anarchists, like vestiges of leftism (not always a bad thlOg). What� s �Important

______IL- �.�I ______142 ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 143 is how many of them, whatever their lingering influences, may never bring most of the intelligentsia over, but we can simply aren't leftists any more. The Dean'sjeremiad express­ soften them up. We can reduce some of them to sympathiz­ es his shock of recognition at this unprecedented state of ers, to what the Stalinists called fellow travellers, to what affairs. Lenin called useful idiots. They will traduce our ideas but The precondition for any substantial increase in anarchist also, in some mutilated form, send them around and influence is for anarchists to make explicit and emphatic legitimate them in the sense that they are to be taken their break with the left. This does not mean placing the seriously. And in so doing they will weaken their own power critique of tl:e left at the center of analysis and agitation. On to counter them if and when these ideas are taken seriously the contrary, that's always been a symptom of anarchism's enough to be acted upon by those who understand them. satellite staius. It is enough to identify leftism, as the Americans (and undoubtedly others, but I'll stick with the occasion arises, as all it really is, a variant of hegemonic American context Bookchin addresses) really are in a certain ideolo a loyal opposition-which was formerly effective sense "anarchistic." I'm not going to pretend, like David De in recuperatinggy-- revolutionary tendencies. There's no reason Leon (1978), that there is something innately and immemori­ for anarchists to inherit an accursed share of the left's ally anarchist about Americans. Our beliefs and behavior have long been otherwise in important respects. Most unpopularity. Let's make our OW/J enemies. And our own friends. Since there really is something contemporary American anarchists and other radicals-and anarchist about some popular tendencies, we should try to I include myself here-have been consciously and conspicu­ make some anarchist tendencies popular. Certain anarchist ously anti-American. In college, I majored in history, but I themes both old and new resonate with certain widespread took course� only in European history, because Europeans attitudes. It isn't necessarily elitist or manipulative to had a revolutionary heritage which we Americans (I as­ circulate the proposition that anarchism explicates and sumed) did not. Much later I learned that Americans have elaborates various inchoate anti-authoritarian tendencies. at times been much morc revolutionary (and so, to mc, more This can be done in an imperialistic and opportunistic interesting) than I originally supposed. While this discovery fashion, but I believe it can also be done, judiciously, in good didn't transform me into a patriot, as my anti-Gulf War faith. If we're mistaken, no harm done, we just won't go over activities demonstrate (Black 1992: ch. 9), it did kindle a very well, something we're used to. Many people will surely sympathetic interest in American history which I am still shrink, at least initially, from drawing the anarchist conclu­ pursuing. Anarchy is at once very much an elaboration of sions we suggest their own altitudes and values tend toward. certain American values and at the same time antithetical to Then again, some others may not, not even initially­ certain others. So it makes no sense for American anarchists especially the young. to be pro-American or anti-American. They should be Besides, making converts is not the only purpose of themselves-their one indisputable area of expertise-and anarchist agitprop. It may also enlarge the chokingly con­ see what that leads to. stricted range of North American political discourse. We Post-leftist anarchy is positioned to articulate-not a 144 ANARCHY AITER LEFTISM ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 145 program-but a number of revolutionary themes with them, for instance, in abstention from elections, and they just contemporary relevance and resonance. It is, unlike might be interested in the anarchists' reasons. Class conniet Bookchinism, unambiguously anti-political, and many people at the point of production holds lillie interest for campus­ are anti-political. It is, unlike Bookchinism, hedonistic, and based Bookchinist-Arendtist civilogues, but means much to many people fail to see why life is not to be lived enjoyably post-college workers reduced, for the duration, to the if it is to be lived at all. It is, unlike Bookchinism, "individu­ degradation they brieny thought they'd escaped by graduat­ alistic" in the sense that if the freedom and happiness of the ing from high school. Now they must work to pay off the individual-Le., each and every really existing person, every loans that financed an interval of relative freedom (a Tom, Dick and Murray-is not the measure of the good Temporary Autonomous Zone, as it were) such as they may society, what is? Many people wonder what's wrong with never enjoy again, no matter how much they earn. They may wanting to be happy. Post-leftist anarchy is, unlike have learned just enough along the way to question whether Bookchinism, if not necessarily rejective, then at least life has to be this way. suspicious of the chronically unfulfilled liberatory promise of But the new themes of the New Anarchism, or, better yet, high technology. And maybe most important of all is the the New Anarchisms also have popular appeal-not because massive revulsion against work, an institution which has they pander to prevalent illusions but because they pander become less and less important to Bookchin at the same (and why not?) to prevalent disillusions. With technology, for time it's become more and more important, and oppressive, instance. A political critique of technology may make a lot of to people outside academia who actually have to work. Most sense to the tenders of high technology who have not people would rather do less work than attend more meet­ experienced anything of its liberatory potential as so often ings. Which is to say, most people arc smarter, and saner, promised but never delivered by the progressives, by the than Murray Bookchin is. Post-leftist anarchists mostly don't Marxists, syndicalists, Bookchinists and other technocrats. At regard our limes one-dimensionally, as either a "decadent, the very least, trickle-down techno-liberation is as fraudulent bourgeoisified era" (1) of "social reaction" (9) or as the as trickle-down enrichment through supply-side economics dawning of the Age of Aquarius. They tend toward pessi­ (make the already rich so much richer that some crumbs are mism, but not usually as much as the Dean does. The bound to fall from their table). Computer programming is, system, unstable as ever, never ceases to create conditions if more interesting, little more liberatory than data entry, and which undermine it. Its sclf-innicted wounds await our salt. the hours are longer. There's no light at the end of the you don't believe in progress, it'll never disappoint you and carpal tunnel. youH might even make some progress. With whatever elements the New Anarchisms are com­ In some particulars,-as I've come to appreciate, some­ pounded and whatever their fortunes will be, the old what to my surprise, in writing this essay,-traditional anarchism-the libertarian fringe of the Left That Was-is anarchist themes and practices are more attuned to popular finished. The Bookchinist blip was a conjunct ural quirk, an predilections than ever before. Most Americans have joined anomalous amalgam of the old anarchism and the New Left 146 ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 147 to which the Dean-to-be fortuitously added a little pop I find suggestive. ecology and (this part passed unnoticed for far too long) his The first is the notion of "normal science," which refers to weird city-statist fetish. Now Bookchin belatedly bumbles the everyday practice of workaday scientists: the working-out forth as the defender of the faith, that old-time religion. of the implications of the prevailing paradigm. Newton's Anarchism-as-Bookchinism was a confusionist episode even physics, for instance, kept observational astronomers and he, its fabricator, seems to be in haste to conclude. experimental physicists happy, or at least busy, for over two If the word "decadence" means anything, Social Allarchism hundred years: it assigned them problems to solve and or Lifestyle Anarchism is an exercise in decadence, not to criteria for what counted as solutions to those problems. mention an exercise in futility. If the word means anything, The classical anarchism of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin it means a deterioration from a previous higher level of and especially Kropotkin may be thought of as the original accomplishment-it means doing worse what was formerly anarchist political paradigm. For all their differences, done better. In that sense, the New Anarchisms of the together they furnished many answers and a context for "lifestyle anarchists" cannot be decadent, for what they are developing many more. Later figures like Malatesta, doing is at best, something better, and at worst, something Goldman, Berkman, the anarcho-syndicalists, and the different from what the old-style left-wing anarchists did. intellectuals writing for Freedom in effect engaged in Bookchin is not even doing what Bookchin once did, if never "normal anarchism"-in restating, elaborating, updating and very well, then at least a lot better. in details amending the paradigm. Men like Herbert Read, Within anarchism, what is taking place resembles what, in George Woodcock, Alex Comfort and Paul Goodman science, is known as a paradigm shift (Kuhn 1970). A worked within this tradition in the inclement climate of the paradigm is an overarching frame of reference, something '4Os and '50s. In characterizing their activity as derivative I broader than a theory (or ideology), which directs the am by no means denigrating it, or them. Precisely because development of thought for those belonging to a community the classical paradigm was rich in potential, intelligent of those operating within the paradigm. That this is a anarchists have drawn fresh insights from it by applying it to somewhat circular formulation its originator admits (ibid.: changing 20th-century developments. But the developments 176), but truth is circular, an inescapable hermeneutic circle have long since outstripped the paradigm. Too many but one whose diameter we can widen along with our "anomalies," as Kuhn calls them, have appeared to be perspectives. The details and, for that matter, the deficien­ reconciled with the paradigm without increasing strain and cies of Kuhn's much-discussed model of scientific theory and a deepening sense of artificiality. Classical anarchism, like practice need not detain us here (although commend them leftism in general, is played out. Murray Bookchin, whom to anarchists capable of more muscularI thinking than some anarchists once mistook for the first theorist of a new Bookchin and most other anarcho-eggheads are up for). anarchist paradigm, has now come forth explicitly as the last Here I'm drawing attention to just two aspects of this champion of the old one, the anarchist tail of what he calls historical approach to explaining theoretical thinking which the Left That Was. 148 ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM ANARCHY AFrER LEFTISM 149

One other suggestive feature of Kuhn's argument is his anarchism, for all the Dean's efforts to make it so. If it account of how, on the ground, the supplanting of one persists aV/hile after the Dean's demise, social paradigm by another actually takes place: ecology/anarchism will bear about the same relationship to the new anarchism as astrology to astronomy. When, in the development of a natural science, an As w;]l, I expect, the dwindling anarcho-leftist individual or group first produces a synthesis able to fundamentalisms. Of these there would seem to be only attract most of the next generation's practitioners three. The first is the supposed pure-and-simple anarchism [emphasis added], the older schools gradually of, say, Fred Woodworth of The Match! or the late unla­ disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by mented Bob Shea. The inherent improbability of a sociaUy their m�mbers' conversion to the new paradigm. and economicaUy agnostic anarchism-let's abolish the state But there are always some men who cling to one or and later s<>rt out the trifling details, such as our way of another of Ihe older views, and they are simply read life-as weU as the sheer crackpotkinism of its vestigial out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their devotees (Black 1994: 42-44) relegate this fundamentalism to work (Kuhn 1970: 18-19). imminent oblivion. Even Bookchin would be embarrassed to be associated with it. A Marxist is capable of many errors Kuhn goes on to explain that this may involve intransigent and many horrors, and usually commits some, but one thing individuals, "more interesting, however, is the endurance of a Marxist cannot be indifferent to is political economy and whole schools in increasing isolation from professional the social relations of production. science. Consider, for example, the case of astrology, which The second obsolete anarcho-leftism is anarcho­ was once an integral part of astronomy" (ibid.: 19 n. 11). syndicalism. Although it is a workerist ideology, its few Not to pretend that anarchism is a science-such a working-class adherents are elderly. Although it is by pretense is itself a part of the obsolete paradigm-but the definition a union-oriented ideology, there is no perceptible analogy is illuminating. As Bookchin admits, and deplores, syndicalist presence in any union. A syndicalist is more likely "thousands" of anarchists, "the next generation's practitio­ to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk ners" of anarchism, are increasingly abandoning social singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, anarchism for lifestyle anarchism. Some of the older school's syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this practitioners convert, as has indeed happened. 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Zubrow, Ezra B.W., ed. (1976). Demographic Alllhropology: Qualltitative Approaches. Albuquerque, NM: University of 1001 Nights 50 anti-Semitism 44 New Mexico Press Abolition of Work, The 130-132 anti-technological 44, 46 Adamites 20 Arendt, Hannah 82, 138 Adams, John 73 Aristotle 89 Adorno, Theodor W. 38, 42 Ascaso brothers 48 Alcoholics Anonymous 40 Athenian(s) 65-68, 70, 71, 78, 79-81, amoralist 39 120, 135 anarchism 7-9, 11-19, 22, 24, 27, 29, Athens 67, 68, 71-73, 78-80, 99, 100 31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 46, 47, Autonomedia 9, 53, 75, 104, 105 50-53, 56, 58, 62, 81, 82, 84, 85, autonomy 31, 32, 77, 81, 83 95, 104, 105, 107, 114, 130-132, Aztec 42 136, 140, 142, 145-150 Bakunin, Mikhail 19, 29, 45, 54, 66, Anarchist Communist Federation 147 (ACF) 22, 23, 74 Barcelona 48, 52, 58, 128 Anarchist Encyclopedia 48 Baudrillard 53 anarchists 7,8, 11-20, 22-24, 26-31, Beethoven 44 33-35, 37, 39. 43, 45, 46, 47-52, Being and Time 45 54, 57, 58, 60, 62-64, 70, 73-76, Benbow, WilHam 54-56 82, 83, 85, BS, 89, 92, 103, 105, Berkeley 25 106, 118, 131, 133, 139-150 Bey, Hakim 8, 27, 36, 44, 54,55, 86, anarcho-capitalism 37 89, 102, 104, 105 anarcho-communism 40, 41 Black & Red 9, 105 anarcho-communist(s) 8, 34, 54 Dlack Rose Books 75, 95 anarcho-feminism 149, 150 Blackstone, William 33 anarcho-syndicalism 37, 55, 149 Blake, William 44 anarcho-syndicalisl(s) 8, 28, 34, 41, Boas, Franz 125 60, 64, 131, 147 bomb(s) 46, 47, 48, 86 anarchy 9, 10, 1�, 16, 24, 25, 31, 33, Bookchin, Murray 7-9, 11-15, 17-37, 70, 80-84, 102, 105, 107, 128, 138, 39, 41-45, 47-49, 51-53, 55-73, 140, 143, 144, 150 76-79, 81-BS, 90-105, 107, 108, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 112-115, 117, 119, 123, 124, 10, 12, 2S 129-140, 143, 144, 146-149 unti-anarchist(s) 31, 33, 82 Bookchinism 29, 36, 40, 41, 53, 83, Ilnti-authoritarian(s) 14, 17, 75, 142 85, 138, 144, 146, 148 172 INDEX ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 173

Bookchinist(s) 9, 11, 20, 24, 27, 28, Constitutionalist 64 Fifth Estate 9, 12, 43, 75, 125 humanity 26, 70, 93, 97-101, 129, 39, 52, 64, 70, 71, 74, 85, 87, 92, Crisis in Our Cities 35, 77, 123 Foucault, Michel 53 141 93, 103, 139, 145 cult 40, 74, 90, 149 Fourier, Charles 54 ideological 7, 9, 12, 22, 24, 26, 37, Borges, Jorge Luis 50, S1 Cynics 54 free market, free-market 32, 39 39, 51, 56, 68, 75, 76, 115 bourgeois 25, 27-30, 35-37, 53, 62, Dada 20 freedom 7, 18, 31-33, 46, 54, 70, 81, ideology 7, 9, 22, 29, 30, 36, 37, 43, 88, 103, 104 De Leon 19, 143 83, 86, 93-96, 99, 100, 131, 138, 44, 46, 53, 61, 62, 66, 68, 83, 84, Bradford, George 8, 9, 43, 91, 105, Debord, Guy 33, 53 144, 145, 147 138, 140, 142, 146, 149, 150 lI2, 122-125, 127 decadence 22, 27, 28, 30, 55, 74, 146 French Revolution 41 individualism 13, 29, 37, 40, 50 Brown, L Susan 34, 39, 41, 95, 130 Dechter, Midge 88 Friendly Fire 133, 134 individualist(s) 8, 28, 31, 33-35, 37, Buchanan, Patrick 89 democracy 33, 61, 62, 64-68, 70-73, Front Line 12 39, 40, 42, 45-50, 76, 82, 132 Buchner, Georg 44 80-83, 99, 100. Future Primitive 103 Industrial Revolution 135 Buckley, William F. 88 desire 10, 12, 21, 25, 50, 56, 138 general strike 54, 55 Industrial Workers of the World Bukharin 85 dialectic(s) 9, 38, 97, 98, 102, 138 German Ideology, The 68 22, 74 Burlington 18, 25, 52, 68, 108 Diggers 20 Gennan Social Democratic Part Institute for Social Ecology 18, 92 Bums 44 Diogenes 40 62 Italy 79 Byron 44 Dolgoff, Sam 19 gerontocracy 95, 138 Junger 43 Calvin 70 dualism 58, 138 Gingrich, Newt 21, 88 Kant, Immanuel 89 Camatle, Jacqces 26, 53, 60, 65 DurruH, Buenaventura 48 god 32, 51, 62, 89, 91, 97, 98, 100, Kicrkegaard, Soren 36 Canada 25, 87 ecclesia, ekklesia 66, 71 101 Kramer, Hilton 88 capitalism 26, 29, 36, 37, 39, 70, 112 ecology 7, 9, 13, 18, 19, 26, 28, Goddard College 18, 28, 126 Kraus, Karl 38 Carbonari 20 92-95, 103, 116, 120, 123, 137, Godwin, William 33, 34, 39, 53, 147 Kristal, lIVing 88 Chartist 55 138, 146, 148, 149 Goldman, Emma 34, 40, 147 Krocher 125 Chiapas 64 Ecology of Freedom, The 7, 18, Goodman, Paul 19, 27, 35, 61, 82, Krapotkin, Piotr 19, 29, 31-33, 41, Chicago 46, 122, 123, 125 93-95 147 47, 53, 54, 60, 77, 131, 147 Churchill, Ward 119 Ego and His Own, The 104 Gaya 112 Kuhn, Thomas 90, 91, 146-148 35, 78, 79, 86, 95 citizenship 66, egoism 36, 39, 55 Green Anarchist 138 (Kung 94, 110, 111, 126 city-state 77, 79, 83 egoist(s) 39, 82 Green Berets 22 Kwakiutl 94, 118 civilization 21, 78, 100, 114, 119-121, egotism 29, 54 greens 7, 18 Laplace 91 128 Engels, Friedrich 36, 38, 42, 68 Guarani 128 Lee, Dorothy 94 Clark, John 17-19, 54, 76, 78, 93, England 40, 67 Haymarket 46, 131 Lee, Richard B. 112, 121, 122, 126 100, 103, 13l Enlightenment 41, 42, 53 hedonism 54, 55, 130 Left That Was 12, 17, 25, 27, 42, CNT 22, 23, 60, 61, 63 Enrages 20 Hegel, G.W.F. 36, 53, 89, 100, 101 57, 60, 130, 145, 147 CoEvolution Quarterly 104 FAI 22, 23, 34, 48, 60, 61, 63 Heidegger, Martin 43, 45 leftism 7, 9, 10, 16, 24, 140-142, 147, Comfort, Alex 19, 147 fascism 13, 45, 64 Heine 44 149, 150 Comment 139 fascists 28, 43, 57 Herber, Lewis 17, 35, 77, 92, 113, leftist(s) 9, 12, 16, 18, 25, 30, 43, 47, communist(s) 8, 17, 22, 26, 34, 36, Faun, Feral 105 123 48, 75, 126, 137, 140, 141-144 43, 52, 54, 55, 69, 74, 76, 79, 83, feminism 140, 141, 149, 150 Heritage Founoation 89 149, 150 92, 124 130, 140 feminist(s) 8, 95, 150 hierarchy 26, c1, 95, 128 Lenin 42, 91, 92, 143 comunismo libertario 40 Feuerbach, Ludwig 100 Hobbes, Thomas 33, 108 liberal(s) 37, 41, 42, 44, 50, 64, 102, Congregational Church 40 Field, Karen L. 94-96 Hopi 124 132, 133 174 INDEX ANARCHY AFTER LEFTISM 175

liberalism 29, 32. 36, 41, 53 Moore, John 45, 106 Podhoretz, Nonnan 88 Decline of Citizenship, The 35, libertarian 7, 29, 34,61, 83, 92, 105, moralism 25, 35, 39 polis 65, 66, 72, 78, 100, 120 78, 95 145 moralist(s) 12, 83 Popper, Karl 96, 97 Rocker, Rudolf 34,41, 42, 54, 91 lifestyle anarchism 7-9, 11-14, 16, Moscow 38, 44 Pop ular Reality 12 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 54, 70, 138 17, 41, SO, 52, 53, 95, 114, 131, Mumford, Lewis 45 post-modernist 13, 90 Roussopoulos, Dmitri 87 132, 146, 148 Mussolini 45 Post-Scarcity Anarchism 7, 17, 27, Ruby, Jay 91, 92 Limits of the City, The 35, 42, mysticism 89, 90, 102 95, 104, 130, 136 Sabotage Bookstore 75 95 Napoleon 91 primitivism 9, 107, 114, 119, 130 Safire, William 89 Lingg, Louis 47 Nation, The 72, 77, 104 primitivist(s) 8, 44, 76, 103, Sahlins, Marshall 125, 127 Listen, Marxist 17, 138 nation-state 72, 73, 77, 79, SO, 86 105-107, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120, San 11, 110, 112, 118, 121, 126, 127 Locke, John 33 National Socialist 43, 44 122, 124, 128, 132 Saunders, Bernie 26 Love & Rage 23, 74, 75 nationalism 119, 141 Primo de Rivera 48 Schiller 44 Luddites 20 natural rights 37 pro-situationist, pro-situs 20, 55 Schopenhauer 36 Jumpen 10, 21, 29, 138 nature 26, 97-99, 108, 119, 127 Processed World 75 Seeger, Pete 20 Mach 92 Navajo 124 proletariat 17 Shaw, George Bernard 33 Machiavelli 78 Nazi(s) 43, 44, 46 Protestant ethic 39 Shaysites 20 Mackay, John Henry 35 neo-conservative(s) 21, 26, 88 Proudhon, Pierre-J. 34, 35, 39, 45, Shelley, Percy Bysshe 44 Madison, James 82 New Age 24-26 82, 147 Shea, Bob 149 Makhnovist(s) 40, 105 New Left 51, 141, 145 punk rock 20 Shoshone 118 Malatesta, Errico 147 New York 7, 21, 44, 54, 84, 115, 123 Pygmies 118 situationist(s) 8, 20, 21, 40, 55, 58, Marinetti 45 Newton, Isaac 147 Radcliffe-Brown 125 141 Marx, Karl 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 53, 68, Nietzsche, Friedrich 30, 34,36, 39, Radin, Paul 94 slaves 65, 114, 134,135 131, 138 43, 66, 91, 99, 102, 141 Ramapo College 18 Smith, Adam 33 Marxism 15, 16, 18, 36, 42, 53, 55, Nixon, Richard 133 Ranters 20 social anarchism 7-9, 11-13, 16, 17, 62, 85, 96, 140 No Middle Ground 75 rationalism 42, 91, 92 19,41, 95, 146, 148 Marxist(s) 17, 20, 21, 23, 28, 29, 36, North America 16, 35, 107, 116 Ravachol 47 Social Anarchism or Lifestyle 45, 51, 56, 59, 62, 69, 70, 74, 83- Novatore, Renzo 35 Reagan, Ronald 57 Anarchism 7-9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 95, 85, 91, 101, 102, 132, 136, 138, objectivity 90, 91 Read, Herbert 19, 147 146 139-141, 145, 149 Obregon 64 realism 51 social ecology 7, 9, 18, 19, 28, 92. Mate/!! The 12, 149 Oliver, Garda 48, 63 reason 8, 33, 71, 74, 88-91, 96, 98, 95, 116, 120, 148, 149 Mayans 64, 119, 120 Op en Road 75 100, 102, 113, 115, 119, 121, 135, socialism 41, 44, 65, 69, 102 McCarthyism 43 organization 17, 22, 23, 26, 43, 52, 142 socialist(s) 8, 26, 29, 43, 44, 54, 57. Megill, Allan 91 55, 60-62, 73-75, 80, 86 Red Battalions 64 60, 62, 64, 68, 69, 102, 132 Meltzer, Albert 19 organizationalist 12 religion 35, SO, 146 Socrates 66, 72, 81 Mexican Revolution 64 Our Synthetic Society 17 Remaking Society 95, 136 sovereignty 37 Michels, Robert 60, 62, 65 Paris 20, 48, 58, 128 Republicans 21 Soviet Union 140 Modern Crisis, The 95 Paris Commune 58 revolution 20, 24, 25, 40, 41, 52, 55, Sowell, Thomas 89 Monthly Review 29 Peace Corps 22 57, 58, 63, 64, 88, 120, 135 Spain 22, 48, 52, 57, 61, 63, 95 Montreal 87 Philips, Utah 20 Right to Be Greedy, The 55 Sp anish Anarchists, The 34, 47 Montseney, Federica 34, 63 Philosophy of Social Ecology, The 95 Rise of Urbanization and the Spanish Revolution 58 176 INDEX spiritualism 45 urbanism 26, 30. 96, 104. 113. 128 Spooner, Lysander 39 utilitarianism 53 St. Anselm 51 utopia 53, 72, 136 Stalin, Josef 14, 85 Vaillant. August 47 Stalinist(s) 13, 17, 27, 29, 30. 46, 52. Vaneigem, Raoul 54 143 Vennont 18. 26, 67 statism 82, 83, 85, 104. 128 Villa, Pancho 64 Stimer, Max 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 91, Village Vo ice 18, 104 100, 101, 104 Walzer, Michael 66, 68, 69 Stirnerism 55 War, the World's Only Hygiene 45 Stirnerist(s) 35, 36, 39, 47, 88 Watson ian 76 Strike! 74 Weber, Max 39 Surrealism 20 Will, George 88 surrealists 36 William, Michael 36 Switzerland 72, 73 Wilson, James Q. 88 syndicalism 36, 37, 55, 62, 64, 149 women 34, 65, 110, 127, 135, 150 syndicalist(s) 8, 23, 28, 34, 41, 55, women's liberation 135 60, 62, 64, 74, 131, 141, 145, 147. Woodcock, George 19. 46, 147 149 Woodworth, Fred 149 Tao Te Ching 50 workerist(s) 12, 74, 149 Tasaday 94 Workers Solidarity Alliance 23 technology 27, 43, 44, 70, 111, 120, Yanomamo 94 121, 130, 134-138, 144, 145 Young Communist League 17 Tenochtitlan 42 Young Pioneers 17 terrorism 46-49 youth 22, 25, 26, 28, 84, 88, 123, Third World 110, 141 124, 137 Thomas, Clarence 89 yuppie(s) 24-27, 55, 104, 132 To Remember Spain 95 Yuqui 121, 128 Trotsky, Leon 85 Zerzan. John 8, 29, 42, 44, 65, 78, Trotskyist(s) 14, 17 79, 84, 103-105, 107, 108, 112, Tucker, Benjamin 33, 39, 82 114 120, 125, 126, 133, 137 Twain, Mark 40 zine 86, 139 Udall, Morris 77 Zapatista(s) 64 Ukraine 105 Zimmem, Alfred 66, 71, 104