Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (123 page)

It would seem most likely that the material abundance Bookchin recommends would lead to hedonism. But while he celebrates pleasure rather than happiness, there is still a puritanical streak in his ethics. He argues for instance that an anarchist society must be simple: ‘clothing, diet, furnishing and homes would become more artistic, more personalized and more Spartan.’
⁶³
Again, there are echoes of moral rearmament when Bookchin praises the ethical ‘character building’ which direct democracy would bring about.
⁶⁴
His ecological society appears as a highly sensible Utopia in which there is little room for extravagance, ostentation, or creative awkwardness.

Bookchin maintained that we are on the ‘threshold’ of a post-scarcity society. He also argues that the United States is at the centre of the social revolution that can overthrow ‘hierarchical society as a world-historical
system’ because of its technological potential.
⁶⁵
Yet even in the United States, the material well-being of the privileged is achieved as a result of the impoverishment of the rest of the world, for it consumes forty per cent of the world’s resources to support only five per cent of its population.

Abundance for all would seem a long way off. It is not enough to assert that hunger is not born of a natural shortage of food or of population growth but is merely the result of social and cultural dislocations.
⁶⁶
Many parts of the Third World, especially in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, are under constant threat of malnutrition, if not actual famine. Population growth, encouraged by poor living conditions, can be a serious threat to overall well-being. There are also definite limits to certain non-renewable resources. Bookchin’s optimistic arguments for abundance would seem to apply only to very advanced industrialized societies.

In his ethics, Bookchin makes the same logical error (known as the naturalistic fallacy) as Kropotkin when arguing that because nature works in a particular way, society should follow suit. There is no logical connection to make us move from fact to value, from what is to what ought to be. Bookchin rejects this criticism by arguing in a Hegelian way that the ethical ‘ought’ is the ‘actualization of the potential “is”’, in the same way that an oak tree ‘objectively inheres in an acorn’. His form of objective ethics is therefore rooted in ‘the objectivity of the potential’.
⁶⁷
But values are not like trees. While there are pristine values like free activity, growth and life in nature, it depends on us how we value them. One of the alleged ‘laws’ of ecology is that there is no ‘free lunch’ in nature, yet we might well choose to have ‘free lunches’ in society. If the ways of nature are considered inhumane, there is no reason why we should follow them.

Bookchin himself recognizes that our relationships with nature are always mediated by our technology and knowledge. There is no one given ‘true’ interpretation of nature and the ecological description of how nature works may be a temporary model to be superseded by another more accurate one, in the same way that Newton’s mechanical model has been superseded by Einstein’s relative one. Human beings not only decide what is valuable, but so-called ‘laws of nature’ are merely observed regularities in nature.

For all his emphasis on biological and social evolution, in his description of an ecological society, Bookchin often uses words like harmony, equilibrium, and stability. The same words are used by functionalist sociologists and systems theorists as well as ecologists. Yet the historical anarchist movement has always been opposed to stasis; indeed its principal criticism of government is that it tries to check social change and development. Most anarchists are opposed to authority and authoritarian institutions precisely
because they do not recognize the constant flow of nature and the flux of society.

Again, like Hegel and Marx, Bookchin talks of his ecological society as though it is the final end of history, the culmination of man’s struggle for survival, the ultimate actualization of human and natural potential in which nature itself becomes ‘free, rational, and ethical’. But while he criticizes the overreaching teleology of Aristotle’s and Hegel’s use of the dialectic which tends to subordinate ‘the element of contingency, spontaneity, and creativity’, he would seem to be to a degree guilty of the same thing.
⁶⁸

Much of Bookchin’s early work now reads as wildly optimistic. He was writing on the great swell of the counter-culture of the sixties, with its celebration of a natural diet, extended family, tribalism, sexual freedom, community and mutual aid. To drop out at the time was considered a mode of ‘dropping in’ to a more genuine community. The new agents of change were no longer Marx’s proletariat but the
déclassé
elements he despised such as the blacks, hippies and students. What unified the essays of Bookchin’s
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
was the belief that ‘man’s most visionary dreams of liberation have now become compelling necessities … hierarchical society, after many bloody millennia, has finally reached the culmination of its development’. The last essay in the book, written in New York in 1967, ended with the words: ‘Our Science is Utopia. Our Reality is Eros. Our Desire is Revolution.’
⁶⁹

By the end of the sixties, the student movement had collapsed and the counter-culture began to lose its way, breaking up into isolated pockets. The ‘revolutionary project’ of the 1960s in America was replaced in the 1980s by the right-wing libertarianism of Reaganism. Many radical hippies and students went into big business and the legal profession, while black leaders ended up as mayors and politicians. By 1980, Bookchin was obliged to admit that the workers’ movement was dead and that hardly any authentic revolutionary opposition existed in North America and Europe. Nevertheless, he continued to argue that the creation of Utopia is possible and that ‘In our own time, in the era of the final, generalized revolution, the general interest of society can be tangibly and
immediately
consolidated by a post-scarcity technology into material abundance for
all.
’
⁷⁰
In this respect, he remained unconvinced by ecological arguments about the limits of growth, the dangers of overpopulation, the dwindling of finite resources and the threat of global warming.

Writing in 1987, Bookchin asserted that social ecology in the political sphere is radically green:

The new social movements of the 1980s and 1990s, centred around environmentalism, feminism, municipalism, and pacifism, all developed the libertarian impetus of the sixties against growing centralized States. It was still Bookchin’s fundamental thesis — a thesis shared with the younger Marx — that the ‘harmonization of nature cannot be achieved without the harmonization of human with human’.
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If the modern crisis is to be resolved, he insisted, the colour of radicalism must turn from red to green.
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The black and red flag of anarchy seems to have been furled up and put away.

Bookchin with his strong sense of history and tradition has always taken a long-term view of things. Whatever the outcome of the libertarian and ecological struggles underway, he is probably right in seeing a major shift in human consciousness taking place at the end of the second millennium. We may well be living in a period of a new Enlightenment, as Bookchin suggests, which closely resembles the revolutionary Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, except that it not only challenges the authority of established institutions and values, but the principle of authority itself.
⁷⁴
No-one, Bookchin included, was able to forecast the sudden collapse of the rusty Iron Curtain in 1989–90, or the popular explosion of libertarian energy which led to the overthrow of State communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

For all the shortcomings of his Hegelian teleology, his naturalistic ethics, his faith in modern technology and his confidence in the prospect of economic abundance, Bookchin stands as an outstanding social thinker. His style may be difficult at times and his tone unduly virulent, but his thought is fresh and stimulating. His greatest contribution was undoubtedly to have renewed anarchist theory and practice by combining libertarian and utopian ideas with ecological principles in the creative synthesis of social ecology. It is unfortunate that towards the end of his life — he died in 2006 – he should have become increasingly sectarian and vituperative and finally returned to the Marxism of his youth.

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.
E
MMA
G
OLDMAN

Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible!
P
ARIS
, 1968

‘A
NARCHISTS
ARE
SIMPLY
UNTERRIFIED
Jeffersonian Democrats’, as Benjamin Tucker put it.
¹
They believe that the best government is that which governs least, but better still is no kind of government at all. But what kind of society would they like to see in place of existing governments and States?

Anarchists reject authoritarian organization but not organization itself. They believe that for most of their history people have been able to organize themselves and create their own self-managed institutions in order to satisfy their needs. But they vary considerably in the kind of libertarian institutions they would like to see in the place of the State and government. It is against the nature of anarchism to offer a blueprint for a free society, for free people must decide themselves how they want to live. Nevertheless, anarchists do offer some rough outlines and glimpses of how the economy in a free society might be organized based on the principles of self-management, association, and federation.

In anarchist society, no centralized body would exist to impose its will on the people. No political authority would be recognized as legitimate and there would be no coercive apparatus to enforce laws. With the dismantling of the State, society would organize itself into a decentralized federation of autonomous districts. The fundamental unit of society varies according to the anarchist thinkers — for Godwin it is the parish; for Proudhon, the association; for Bakunin and Kropotkin, the commune — but they all propose a model of society in which decisions are made in the local assemblies of the sovereign people.

Godwin started from an individualist position and argued that all cooperation to a degree is an evil since it interferes with personal autonomy. He also maintained that the producer has a permanent right to the produce of his labour but argued that he has a duty to distribute any surplus beyond his subsistence needs to the worthiest recipients. But just as a person has a duty to help others, they also in turn have a claim to assistance. We should therefore consider the good things of the world as a trust to be used in the most beneficial way. In the long run, Godwin believed that this form of voluntary distribution would lead to communism.