Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (120 page)

It follows for Bookchin that any future revolution should not only aim to dissolve the State but to reconstruct society along new communal lines. It should develop new libertarian institutions and be concerned with nothing less than the liberation of daily life. It is this personal dimension which is most important in Bookchin’s work. Indeed, he argues that the slogan ‘power to the people’ is meaningless since the people can never have power until they disappear as a ‘people’.
⁶
The value of direct action for Bookchin lies precisely in the fact that it makes people aware of themselves as individuals who can affect their own destiny. Revolution is not therefore some abstract inevitable upheaval but a concrete form of self-activity.

Bookchin tried to develop a comprehensive philosophy of nature in which to ground his ethics and politics. It stands in a tradition of organismic and holistic thinking and may best be described — to use Bookchin’s own phrase — as a kind of dialectical naturalism. Rejecting both the mechanical materialism which sees nature as a dead body of resources to exploit, and the ‘spiritual mechanism’ in which all is dissolved in cosmic oneness, he develops the Hellenic concept of a world
nous
which finds meaning and purpose in nature.
⁷
Nature is not just a ‘lump of minerals’ but a ‘complex web of life’ which is charged with ethical meaning. It has its own order and abhors ‘the incoherence of disorganization, the lack of meaning that comes with disorder’.
⁸
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In Bookchin’s view, nature is potentially rational and conscious and even wilful. Reason in nature appears as the ‘self-organizing attributes of substance; it is the latent subjectivity in the inorganic and organic levels of reality that reveal an inherent striving towards consciousness’.
⁹
There seems, Bookchin argues, to be ‘a kind of intentionality latent in nature, a graded development of self-organization that yields subjectivity and, finally, self-reflexivity in its highly developed human form’.
¹⁰
Indeed, he follows Aristotle and Fichte in seeing human consciousness as one of the necessary manifestations of nature and echoes Elisée Reclus by describing it as ‘nature rendered self-conscious’.
¹¹
But while Bookchin discerns a
purpose within nature, this does not mean that it is deterministic. It simply implies the development of each being must be understood in terms of its interaction with other beings. Like a plant or a child, nature has a potential which it tries to unfold with a dim sense of ‘will’ and ‘choice’ but its realization depends on its relationships with other beings and things in its total environment.

Like Kropotkin, Bookchin believes that nature can offer the basis for objective ethics. Since
’nature is writing its own nature philosophy and ethics’
, it is possible to draw moral lessons from the ways of nature.
¹²
And the most important lesson is that nature is not blind, mute or stingy, but provides the grounds for human freedom.
¹³
Rejecting the market-place image of nature, he adopts an ecological image which sees it as essentially creative, directive, mutualistic and fecund.

Bookchin develops Hegel’s argument that substance is subjectivity but tries to release it from its idealist implications. He maintains that nature organizes itself into more complex and conscious forms, ever greater ‘complexity, subjectivity and mind’.
¹⁴
Bookchin further gives an account of evolution which confirms Kropotkin’s stress on co-operation as the key factor in the survival of the species but adds that it takes place through an immanent striving rather than as the chance product of external forces. He sees the earth as a self-regulating organism but refuses to see it anthropomorphically as a personified deity.

In his discussion of human nature, Bookchin pays particular attention to the self and human consciousness and is not afraid to use such words as the ‘psyche’ or the ‘human spirit’.
¹⁵
But he is not a philosophical idealist and he places the human species firmly within nature. Human society constitutes a ‘second nature’, a cultural artifact, out of ‘first nature’, or primeval, non-human nature. Where ‘first nature’ is in large part the product of biological evolution, the ‘second nature’ of society is a product of social evolution, of a mind that can act purposefully and creatively.
¹⁶
Nature thus has within it latent consciousness and subjectivity; human consciousness is nature made self-conscious. But while human beings evolve from nature they are unique in that they are creative, conscious and purposeful beings able to shape societies and make their own history.

This evolutionary view of human consciousness does not prevent Bookchin from asserting that there is such a thing as human nature. He defines it as ‘proclivities and potentialities that become increasingly defined by the installation of social needs’.
¹⁷
Although he moved later in a more rationalist direction, in his early work he talks in terms of releasing the ‘Eros-derived impulses’ and affirming the ‘life-impulses’ in human nature – ‘the urgings of desire, sensuousness, and the lure of the marvelous’. He is convinced that
a ‘basic sense of decency, sympathy and mutual aid lies at the core of human behavior’.
¹⁸

At the same time, while stressing the importance of the concrete individual, Bookchin is no rugged individualist. He repeatedly condemns the type of modern individualism which presents the individual wandering through life as a free-floating and egoistical monad. He sees ‘selfhood’ not merely as a personal dimension but also a social one: ‘The self that finds expression in the assembly and community is, literally, the assembly and community that has found self-expression — a complete congruence of form and content.”
¹⁹
We are above all social beings, and have a need to associate, and to care for our own kind.

Like Kropotkin, Bookchin finds evidence for his arguments for a free society in the findings of anthropology and history. Like Hegel, he adopts a historical approach in understanding society and culture, recognizing that their nature can only be appreciated in terms of their origins and development. In
The Ecology of Freedom
, he offers an ‘anthropology of hierarchy and domination’ out of which he tries to rescue the ‘legacy of freedom’.
²⁰

In the past, the domination of woman by man, man by man, and nature by man led to the emergence of social hierarchies justified by ‘epistemologies of rule’ which encourage competitive and hierarchical thinking. Nevertheless, there are historical precedents for a free society. Bookchin endorses the outlook of pre-literate ‘organic’ society which allegedly had no hierarchical thinking, established an equality of unequals (recognizing individual differences), and practised the principles of usufruct (the use of resources based on desire rather than exclusive right), complementarity (based on interdependence and mutual aid), spontaneity, and the guarantee of the ‘irreducible minimum’ (every one’s basic material and social needs being met regardless of their contribution to society).

Drawing on the work of anthropologists Paul Radin and Dorothy Lee among others, Bookchin argues that organic society emphasized the uniqueness of each person as well as co-operation between them. Where leadership exists it is functional and does not involve hierarchical institutions. Such societies saw nature as a harmonious whole and their tribal communities as an inseparable part of it. Their view of nature was primarily decided by the nature of their social structures. They developed a system of needs which was possible to satisfy without a struggle
against
nature. What they lacked was a developed sense of self-consciousness.

According to Bookchin, a sense of community and co-operation became more important in agricultural society. But in other hunter-gatherer
societies a division of labour between hunting and defence contributed to the emergence of domination and hierarchy. Elderly men searched for power and won the support of the warriors. But a true class system did not evolve until the formation of cities: with them came the State, authoritarian technology and organized markets. Needs multiplied and the ruling class appropriated the growing economic surplus. In the meantime, as man increasingly dominated woman and man, the attitude to nature changed from one of co-operation to one of domination. In order to create wealth it was now considered necessary to conquer nature. What is original about all this is that Bookchin shows the origins of hierarchy to be the result of a complex combination of economic, political and cultural factors, of changes in the way people think and feel as well as in their social organization.

Bookchin is not however a primitivist who calls for a return to Stone-Age living. He sees the development of Greek civilization as a great step forward for humanity, and particularly chastises those who would turn to Oriental philosophy for enlightenment.
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He praises the Greeks for having a teleological view of nature in which nature is seen as having a purpose and meaning. The Greeks also placed technology (
techne
) in an ethical context. Above all, they did not separate ethics and politics in their search for the ‘good life’ and ‘living well’.

According to Bookchin, the Hellenic notion of
autarkia
, commonly seen as self-sufficiency, sought to find a balance between mind and body, needs and resources, and the individual and society. Indeed, their concept of individuality integrated the ‘constellations’ of the individual and the social. And in the Athenian
polis
, Bookchin finds a radiant example of direct, face-to-face democracy, especially in the
ecclesia
of the Periclean period where all the citizens met as a whole to make policy and chose administrators by lot and disputes were solved by popular juries. The human scale of the
polis
, which according to Aristotle should be ‘taken in at a single view’, has important lessons for urban planners.
²²

While subsequent history in the West led to a legacy of domination, especially with the foundation of the Nation-State and the development of capitalism, Bookchin traces an alternative underground libertarian tradition. In this ‘legacy of freedom’, Bookchin singles out the millenarian Christian sects of the Middle Ages, the Diggers’ colony in the English Revolution, the town meetings in New England after the American Revolution, the Parisian sections during the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the anarchist communes and councils of the Spanish Revolution as providing models for the forms of freedom for the future. Only in the latter did a system of working-class self-management succeed, since the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists consciously sought to limit centralization.

However interesting we might find his anthropological and historical studies, Bookchin’s principal achievement lies in his impressive synthesis of anarchist and ecological thought. He became a leading exponent of ‘social ecology’ which traces the roots of the environmental crisis to society and which argues that only the creation of a free society will solve the present threat of ecological disaster confronting humanity.

Bookchin’s starting-point is that modern technology (or technics, as he calls it) has created a new stage in history by enabling humanity to pass from a realm of material scarcity to one of abundance. In the past material scarcity not only provided the rationale for the patriarchal family, private property, class domination and the State but fostered a repressive morality of denial and guilt. The immediate prospect of material abundance however has outdated earlier socialist theories, including Marxism, which saw the primary goal as overcoming scarcity. In
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
, Bookchin argued that for the first time in history the ‘technology of abundance’ has created the necessary preconditions for a free society, a society without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. There is no longer any obligation to pass through a transitional period of austerity and sacrifice as Marx and Engels argued in order to move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. It follows that the age-old ambition to satisfy basic needs can now be replaced by the fulfilment of desire. Utopia is no longer a dream but an actual possibility.

Bookchin has stressed that post-scarcity does not mean mindless affluence, but a ‘sufficiency of technical development that leaves individuals free to select their needs autonomously and to obtain the means to satisfy them’.
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He is eager to demystify the notion of a ‘stingy nature’ which has led some ecologists to call for ‘limits to growth’, ‘voluntary poverty’ and a ‘life-boat’ ethic. At the same time, he identifies freedom more with personal autonomy than material abundance, with greater choice rather than more goods.

But while the conditions of post-scarcity provide a real possibility, the recent thrust to increase production in both capitalist societies and communist States has led to a new crisis, the threat of ecological disaster. Bookchin argues however that the roots of the present ecological crisis do not lie in technology, overpopulation, or industrial growth alone but rather in the practice of domination and hierarchy. In the past, to transcend scarcity, it was thought necessary to dominate and conquer nature. But the very concept of dominating nature first emerged from man’s domination of woman in patriarchal society and man’s domination of man in hierarchical society. Both human beings and nature have therefore become common
victims of domination to such a degree that they are now faced with ecological extinction.