Murray Bookchin

Two articles have recently appeared?one, by Clym Yeobright in Black Hose (Boston), #8, entitled "The Thought of Murray Bookchin" and another by Peter Kardas, "The Workplace and the Community," presented at the Inaugural Meeting of the Anarchos Institute (Montreal) in June 1982?which essentially criticize my Marxist intellectual pedigree as a disquaiifier for my criticisms of Marxism from a theoretical viewpoint. In both cases a common argument is advanced:

1. "Bookchin" accepts Marx's view that freedom has material conditions, notably freedom from material scarcity. Without the security, leisure, and control over productive forces that technical advances render possible, the necessary conditions for a nonhierarchicai society?not to speak of the sufficient conditions?do not exist. The development of industrial capitalism has now rendered such a post-scarcity society technically possible. Moreover, this technical possibility could have only been achieved through hierarchy and domination, i.e., by using human beings as instruments of production. As Yeobright puts it: "If scarcity made hierarchy and domination necessary, post-scarcity makes them unnecessary and dangerous." (Black Rose, p. 27). Although Kardas' approach is oriented toward a syndicalist position (notably, the factory is precisely the place where social resistance is either possible or necessary "because the workplace is so authoritarian"), he too advances the argument that "Bookchin" is a crypto-Marxist because he contends, in Kardas' words, that "All that domination and the agony that accompanied it were necessary to give us the good things that can liberate us today." But now that domination and hierarchy have reached their "historical limits" ("Bookchin's" words), the technics which separated us from nature "need to be taken over by a revolutionary humanity" to produce a new free society. (Kardas, p22)

Kardas, I think, aiso speaks for Yeobright when he declares: "There seems to be very little between Bookchin's basic perspective here and that of Marx. We find the same emphasis on freedom only being possible after centuries of domination, the same discussion of social relations of production needing to be squared with the material means of production, the same reduction of human beings to unwilling agents of historical forces. Yet when Bookchin is discussing these things in Marx he tears into him with a vengeance." After which Kardas, even more stridently than Yeobright, cites quotations from my writings in which I criticize Marx for making domination a "precondition" for liberation, centralization a "precondition" for decentralization, capitalism a "precondition" for socialism, etc. Indeed, I find the "patriarchal family, private property, repressive reason, the state, etc. (in Kardas' words) as having been historically necessary for the realization of freedom." Kardas, in turn, quotes Yeobright to the effect that "if scarcity does justify hierarchy and domination?and I do not see how Bookchin can avoid this?then I do not see how he can have any compelling ethical criticism of historical abuse"?which would mean that such a position could be used to justify slavery, the subjugation of women, the abuses of the Athenian polls and perhaps even the suppression of the anarchists by the Bolsheviks in Spain.

The extrapolations that Kardas and Yeobright make even from such a simplistic and reductionist image of my writings on post-scarcity are not merely overdrawn; they are simply silly. Presumably, I should be an admirer of Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane if I am to take these remarks seriously. And who hasn't encountered the "historically progressive" function of the Black Death in generating all kinds of technical developments in western Europe due to the shortage of labor that followed in its wake? Even if one were to dogmatically suppose that technical development constituted a precondition for freedom?or, at least, the material security and free time that render freedom a realistic possibility?it certainly would not follow that oppression and repression in all its forms are historically justifiable, indeed, anyone using an argument that technical development does comprise a precondition for freedom could still make a very compelling moral critique of "civilization" as a history of needless savagery, brutality, inhumanity, and environmental devastation. What is troubling about Marx's position about technics and its growth is that he condoned entire phases of history as indispensible to the "conquest of

nature" and explicitly brought domination, even hierarchy, into the very making of society as such. Engels, certainly encountering no dissent from Marx, was in fact to justify slavery in Anti-Duhring?not, incidentally, in the interests of technical development but as a mora! improvement over the proclivity of tribal peoples to slaughter captured prisoners. What is significant about the Marxist position on this matter is that domination ? whether historically justifiable or not-~is carried lock~stock-and-barrel into the communist future. Certainly Engels could not conceive of a free society without factories hierarchically organized along lines very reminiscent of their present structure and Marx could never divest the "realm of necessity" of its oppressive dimension as an unavoidable attribute of social life per se.

What is more to the point: both Yeobright and Kardas gravely misunderstand my notions of scarcity and post-scarcity even in a work that was written during the climactic years of the sixties when it was patently clear that the New Left and countercultural upsurges were in large part nourished by the material abundance that many sectors of the middle classes enjoyed in North America and western Europe. It would be sheer myopia to ignore the sense of hope that the technical and economic developments of time en-

gendered, and it would have been a grave theoretical, indeed, political, fallacy for radical libertarians not to have fostered this sense of hope in a material as well as ethical sense. Are we to suppose that slogans like "Be realistic! Do the impossible!" or "Imagination to power?" would have been possible under conditions of material insecurity? Or by the social prospects opened as a result of technical development? If people did not have the freedom to make choices for a social pathway to a future guided by desire rather than need ? a choice that was opened for that period precisely by a high degree of technical development?would Blanchot's plea for the "Great Refusal" have really been possible in the form that it acquired in 1968? Frankly, I think not?and the relentless effort by the establishment (including many environmentalists) to foster the myth that a "naturally induced scarcity" is upon us has done more to undermine the sense of hope of social liberation than the current interest and unemployment rates.

Yet it is ironical that my views, even in the sixties, were not committed to the notion of technical development as a precondition for freedom. Neither Kardas nor Yeobright take any congnizance of my statement at the opening of Post-Scarcity Anarchism that I have no way of validating whether historically we necessarily had to follow the so-called "Marxist" course of social development. Thus: "Whether this long and torturous development could have follwed a different, more benign course is now irrelevant. The development is largely behind us- Perhaps like the mythic apple, which once bitten, had to be consumed completely, hierarchical society had to complete its own bloody journey. Be that as it may, our position is that historical drama differs fundamentally from that of anyone in the past." (p. 10, emphasis added) Given these clearly qualifying remarks, it should be patently clear that in a work oriented toward the uniqueness of the period in which it was written, even Post-Scarcity Anarchy was not committed to technocratic and economistic interpretations of history. 1 find it interesting that while Yeobrtaht tries verv hard in mv discussion of the decline of the Athenian polls to give my views an overly economistic emphasis in my book The Limits of the City (Thucydides, by the way, is not the best source for a psychological interpretation of the polls' decline?a view which Yeobright seems to favor), he ignores the religious origins that underpin my explanation of the city's development. Even more strikingly, he takes no note of the alternative, more humane directions I adduce in my discussion of early capitalist development, notably in Switzerland,

where, as I point out, "the transformation from the guild workshop to the factory was so organic that Swiss communities, nearly to the present day, could be cited as models of civic balance, stability, and the integration of craft skills with mass production." (p. 53) This "organic" development of capitalism itself, at least in one area of the world, is sharply contrasted with its "savage" course in England, (p. 54)

These citations, it seems to me, are a cut above Bakunin's delicious formulation that the "State is an evil but a historically necessary evil, as necessary in the past as its complete extinction will be necessary sooner or later, just as necessary as primitive bestiality and theological divinations were necessary in the past." (C.P. Maximoff; The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 145) 1 will not belabor the fact that Kropotkin not only accepted this formulation but often seems.to have confused the state with society in Mutual Aid I adduce these formulations from the "founders" of anarchism because I wish to stress how unclear issues like the State, technical "preconditions for freedom," and "historical necessity" were until very recent times. That terms like "primitive bestiality" (Bakunin) or "scientific anarchism" (Maximoff), to cite only a few dubious phrases, could have found their way into anarchist literature simply reflects the fact that anarchism itself is a social product, not an ethical Vatican that presides over the totality of history in a morally ahistorica! manner. Post-Scarc/ty Anarchism was published to write off the problems, the cross-currents, and often simplistic moral judgments that entered into the anarchist theoretical corpus, not to "Marxify" anarchism, which in any case was riddled by very naive Marxian notions long before any of us saw the light of day. What is important about the book is not whether it was influenced by Marx, but rather that it declared this influence is no longer an issue?and that alternatives might have existed to our historical development (and indeed in "Toward a Liberatory Technology" did exist m future developments) even if Marxism ceased to be an issue worthy of theoretical discourse. Given this stance, the book in effect argued that Bakunin and Kropotkin could be read on their own terms quite aside from the fact that they held that the State was "historically necessary"?-be it evil or virtuous?and that their criticisms of Marx's social theories were valid irrespective of what they borrowed or assimilated from Marx's historical perspective. Moreover, Post-Scarcity Anarchism tried to show that even if one accepts history in a Marxian sense, Marxism has become reactionary because it persists in

assigning a function ("evil" or "virtuous") to domination and hierarchy in a presumably emancipatory society.

What seems to trouble Yeobright and Kardas is that 1 see history as a process that lends itself to theoretical coherence and meaning?in their view that I "straitjacket" history into a theoretical framework. Frankly, I regard their interpretation of social development as an Anglo-American philosophical prejudice, a grossly empirical bias, no different 1 suspect in their eyes than my "Germanic" or neo~Begeiian prejudice that regards philosophical speculation as crucial in radical theory. Yeobright has personally told me that he regards Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy as a masterpiece. Unfortunately, ! do not regard this work very highly however much I hold many phases of Russell's life in high esteem. I doubt if we could ever have a meeting of the minds about the role of philosophy, or, perhaps even theory, in discussions about history. So far as anarchism is concerned, 1 personally prefer to avoid disputes around philosophy and history completely. Volumes of polemics would be required to adequately state the issues involved, much less resolve them. In addition, 1 feel somewhat iconoclastic about radical social theories generally. It means very little to me whether self-professed "anarchists" accuse me of all kinds of "deviations" from their own version of Baku-ninist or Kropotkinist verities. I naively thought that the word "anarchist" irrevocably demarcated a revolutionary from a reformist approach (see Toward an Ecological Society, p. 224), but after seeing circled "A's" painted almost mindlessly ail over the place from Zurich (where "anarchistic youth have simply evaporated in a period of little more than two years) to some American cities (where the symbol is becoming a mer-chandisable item), 1 must confess to a great deal of doubt about my earlier certainty. I regard myself as an anarchist for heuristic, philosophical, and traditional reasons (the latter, with due regard to the context of the great struggles and high hopes anarchist movements raised in contrast to the miserable history of the socialist movement they opposed). But I don't revere any nomenclature that becomes a substitute for a coherent theory and a revolutionary practice. My alienation from "anarchists" who regard the human brain as a digestive organ for churning food into spray-can paint is complete. For my part, 1 hold to a theory of anarcho-communaltsm as well as anarcho-communism that may very well involve voting on the municipal level in the spirit of the Parisian sections of 1793 and the New England town meetings. This view should be no secret to anyone who has read my writings; I advanced it in the last issue of Anar-

chos as early as 1971, not to speak of later works on libertarian munrci-palism.

What is most germane ?all complaints and criticisms on detail aside? is that I am now firmly convinced we could have followed a quite different, now unforseeable, evolutionary pathway in history. This issue arose in the early 1950s, when I was still a libertarian socialist and acolyte of josef Weber of the Contemporary Issues group. Weber, whose Marxism was a deeply ingrained part of his outlook, was to write: "In history, it is exclusively a matter of what has actually happened, not of what might have occurred under different circumstances and conditions." {Contemporary Issues, Winter, 1950, p. 3) This formulation was polemically directed against my challenge that the course of history need not have followed the direction it did?but in 1950, dear friends, Franz Boas was the most luminescent light on the anthropological horizon, Charles Beard was the American cardinal of historiography, "feminism" could be resolved into the demand for "equal pay for equal work," Robert Moses had not yet made community a crucial issue in New York, and the New Left had yet to become a glint in the eyes of the parents of the Red diaper babies of Berkeley. Had my lack of Marxian orthodoxv in

historiography and historical alternative not lingered in my mind for thirty years and more, I doubt if I could have written "Toward a Libera-tory Technology" (for all its faults), nor could I have dissociated the notion of "post-scarcity" from mere material affluence by qualifying my concept of "abundance" and "scarcity" with ideals borrowed from an emancipatory life world, culture, and sensibility. These views have merely matured since the sixties, not changed in any significant sense. Indeed, they have matured since the 1950s, when I was still challenging Weber with alternatives to the history of our species. I have explained in The Ecology of Freedom what "scarcity" means in my critique of the bourgeois notion of a "stingy nature" and the "fetishisation of needs." Those friends who care to explore my views on such issues would do well to consult the book and retain a modicum of sensitivity to its nuances.

This much is clear to me as a result of the development of my own ecological sensibility: Somewhere along the way, we had to separate ourselves as evolving beings from nature?from a "oneness" with nature? that would differentiate us increasingly in the direction of rationality, individuality, and a subjective, indeed, institutional universal humanity. For possibly millions of years, this separation evolved in the form of differentiation through a growing sense of social solidarity, not primarily (if at ail) through domination. I associate this differentiation with changes effected by the mother-child dependency relationship (particularly as a result of prolonged infantile dependency), the complementarity of age and sex groups, and the commitment of the community to the irreducible minimum in material life.

What form of rationality, individuality, and sense of a universal humanity this evolutionary direction would have taken I do not know. Certainly, in my view, alternative social pathways based on differentiation would have been matricentric in character, based on the primacy traits such as nurture, reproduction, love, support, and mutuality rather than the primacy of obedience, production, hatred, rivalry, and egotism. Ultimately, one would hope, the autonomous individual could have merged within a matrix distinguished by group support and imbued with a sensibility that valued a holistic unity of diversity rather than a hierarchical arrangement of difference and otherness, i would prefer to call such an evolutionary pathway an ecological rather than a matricentric one, but I am deeply cognizant of the crucial role one half of humanity?its women?has played as the guardians of these ecological values

in the early socialization of the young. Birth itself and woman's role in taking over the custody of the infant is the redeeming hope that such values will persist as a "principle of hope," to use Ernst Bloch's terms, until they can become embodied in the civil society hitherto commandeered by the male.

In The Ecology of Freedom, I have addressed myself to the technics and technical imagination, to the notions of science and reason, and to the institutional developments that seem consistent with these notions of an ecological society. That it once yielded richly benign forms ages ago is the testimony prehistory and the vestigal remains of certain preliterate cultures, indeed, even portions of history. Tragically, in my view, this ecological evolution through differentiation was supplanted by evolution through domination, a "male" achievement, which in fact served to sharpen rationality, individuality, and create the ideal of a universal humanity, but in warped and ultimately regressive forms. The medium of this male "civilization" was strife, not elaboration. At various turning points in history, periods did emerge {one thinks of the early Neolithic, the disintegration of the ancient world, and various times in the medieval world) when revolutionary change could have initiated a process of human and ecological reintegration. But this much is painfully clean once capitalism permeated all of life with economics and the market nexus, particularly after the discovery of the New World, the interlinkages created by the commodity had to be unravelled. Owing to the fact that these interlinkages found their ideological explanation in a uniquely bourgeois "sense of scarcity" based on the myth of a "stingy nature," this unravelling in my view will have to take the form of post-scarcity whose very essence is that humanity will be in a position to choose without any social constraints what it means by technical development and need. Indeed, need, technics, interest, work, the metabolism of humanity with nature and with itself will have to be radically altered. We will be obliged to recover community on a new level of development without trying to return to an archaic past with its parochial, mythopoeic, and kinship-laden traits. The transcendence of domination by differentiation will have to include the gains made under the dark sign of domination ?which is not to say that these gains, such as they are and given the form they have assumed, presuppose domination. it is in this sense that domination has reached its "historic limits," not in the sense that it has completed some "historically necessary" function (Bakunin) or desideratum (Marx).

These views form a very important aspect of my latest book. The Ecology of Freedom, and are elaborated in that work. The meaning that should be imparted to post-scarcity, indeed, to the dialectic of scarcity and need, is filled out in philosophical and historical terms. To understand what I have to say requires a thorough reading of the work with a respect for nuance and a willingness to enter into the content of the book, not to snip out phrases with a view toward "putting me in my place." I can easily understand that there will be many differences of opinion on my interpretation of the libertarian tradition and the specific views of the "founders" of nineteenth-century anarchist ideology.

But it would be rather silly to call me a "Marxist"?quite aside from the fact that 1 would acknowledge it if I were one. The people who Karl Marx would have regarded as acolytes in the later years of his life are gone. Even the word "neo-Marxism" has ceased to be fashionable. No body of theorists has more powerfully revealed the fatal flaws of Marx's variety of theories than the brilliant thinkers of the Frankfurt School?especially Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. They have been abetted in their critical dissection of Marxist ideology by men, now dead, who still called themselves Marxists, notably Ernst Block, and by a wide-ranging body of theorists from the "socialistic" Karl Polanyi to the expressly bourgeois sociologist Max Weber. I have explained in a recent article in Telos (Summer, 1982) on Jurgen Habermas that the Frankfurt School represented a transitional movement away from Marx's theoretical corpus?not a "dead end" as its critics would have us believe?that finally reached a cross-road by the late 1950s. Either it would have to move toward the radical social ecology elucidated in Toward an Ecological Society and The Ecology of Freedom or it would be entombed in the vacuous sociology of Jurgen Habermas and his "universal pragmatics."

What troubles me greatly is that there are so few anarchist theorists who recognize this highly dramatic confrontation in contemporary social theory today and are willing or able to participate in it. Certainly as a movement and a serious praxis American anarchists are doing very little these days. Admirable endeavors are being made in Montreal by the Anarchos Institute to establish a stimulating level of theoretical and cultural intercourse ?but beyond that in North America the libertarian world seems rather dessicated. How rewarding it would be to reconstruct a libertarian theoretical corpus that could confront the present and

coming century with the enlarged perspectives opened by the Frankfurt School rather than churlishly return to the previous century and fade among the ghosts of a long-lost world of anarchists and Marxists alike.

Marxism bears the shackles of a name ? Karl Marx?whose theory has become the official ideology of nearly all the totalitarian countries in Europe and Asia. Anarchism is larger in scope. It need not be sacrificed to anyone's name and it has the capacity to become a social movement (not merely an ideology or group of ideologists) that speaks to different times in different ways. It can become ever-fecund, ever-new, and ever-creative if only the anarchists themselves will permit it to grow. I believe that such growth presupposes a recognition of significant differences that separate us, the agreement to disagree and organize separately?although in cordial co-existence and relationships?with separate publications and activities. 1 believe, furthermore, that we have to draw richly from the wealth of all ideas ?including Marx's ?insofar as the result is holistic, coherent, and libertarian. If not, anarchism, will become parochial, perhaps a "ghost" as Adorno called it, and try to revive a past that is as remote from our times ideologically as Jacobinism. In which case, anarchists who elect to become the vestal virgins of the sacred flame will be living testimony to William Morris' searing verdict (all limitations of gender aside):

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

August 11, 1982 P.S. I am mindful that I have not responded fully to a number of criticisms that Yeobright and Kardas have raised, but I have respected a request by one of Black Rose's editors to be as brief as possible. My reply to many of these criticisms, in any case, is easily found in my latest book. The Ecology of Freedom, and I hope readers of this magazine will refer to the work.