Post-scarcity anarchism

Books by Murray Bookchin

The Modern Crisis (1986)The Ecology of Freedom (1982)Toward an Ecological Society (1980)The Spanish Anarchists (1976)The Limits of the City (1973)Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971)Crisis in Our Cities (1965)Our Synthetic Environment (1962)

Post-ScarcityAnarchism

Second EditionIN PREPARATION:

Urbanization* Without Cities (1986)

Murray BookchinWith a new introduction

BLACKROSE

BOOKSMontreal-Buffalo

Copyright 1986 © by Murray Bookchin

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by means,electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without written permission from theauthor or publisher, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in anewspaper or magazine.

Black Rose Books No. 0 71ISBN Hardcover 0-920057-41-1ISBN Paperback 0-920057-39-X

To thememory of

Josef Weberand

Allan Hoffman

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bookchin, Murray, 1921-Post-scarcity anarchism

2nd rev. ed.Bibliography: p.ISBN 0-920057-41-1 (bound). — ISBN 0-920057-39-X (pbk.).

I . Anarchism—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Radicalism—Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Ecology—Addresses, essays, lectures.I. Title.

HX833.B66 1986 335'.83 C86-090135-1

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Black Rose Books

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Printed and bound in Quebec, Canada

ContentsIntroduction to the First Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Introduction to the Second Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Post-Scarcity Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Ecology and Revolutionary T h o u g h t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Towards a Liberatory Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

The Forms of Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1634

Listen, Marxist! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

A Note on Affinity Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

A Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

The May-June Events in France: 1France: a Movement for Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

The May-June Events in France: 2Excerpts from a L e t t e r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Desire and N e e d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

Introductionto the First EditionWe normally live completely immersed in the present—tosuch a degree, in fact, that we often fail to see how muchour own social period differs from the past—indeed from amere generation ago. This captivity to the contemporarycan be very insidious. It may shackle us unknowingly tothe most reactionary aspects of tradition, be they obsoletevalues and ideologies, hierarchical forms of organization,or one-sided modes of political behavior. Unless our rootsin contemporary life are broadened by a rich perspective,they may easily distort our understanding of the world asit really is, as well as its rich potentialities for the future.

For the world is changing profoundly, more profoundlythan many of us seem to recognize. Until very recently,human society developed around the brute issues posed byunavoidable material scarcity and their subjective counter-part in denial, renunciation and guilt. The great historicsplits that destroyed early organic societies, dividing manfrom nature and man from man, had their origins in theproblems of survival, in problems that involved the meremaintenance of human existence.* Material scarcity pro-vided the historic rationale for the development of thepatriarchal family, private property, class domination andthe state; it nourished the great divisions in hierarchicalsociety that pitted town against country, mind against sen-suousness, work against play, individual against society,and, finally, the individual against himself.

* By "organic societies" I mean forms of organization in which thecommunity is united by kinship ties and by common interests indealing with the means of life. Organic societies are not yet dividedinto the classes and bureaucracies based on exploitation that we findin hierarchical society.

11

12 / Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Whether this long and tortuous development could havefollowed a different, more benign, course is now irrelevant.The development is largely behind us. Perhaps like themythic apple, which, once bitten, had to be consumedcompletely, hierarchical society had to complete its ownbloody journey before its demonic institutions could beexorcised. Be that as it may, our position in that historicdrama differs fundamentally from that of anyone in thepast. We of the twentieth century are literally the heirs ofhuman history, the legatees of man's age-old effort to freehimself from drudgery and material insecurity. For thefirst time in the long succession of centuries, this cen-tury—and this one alone—has elevated mankind to an en-tirely new level of technological achievement and to anentirely new vision of the human experience.

We of this century have finally opened the prospect ofmaterial abundance for all to enjoy—a sufficiency in themeans of life without the need for grinding, day-to-daytoil. We have discovered resources, both for man and in-dustry, that were totally unknown a generation ago. Wehave devised machines that automatically make machines.We have perfected devices that can execute onerous tasksmore effectively than the strongest human muscles, thatcan surpass the industrial skills of the deftest humanhands, that can calculate with greater rapidity and preci-sion than the most gifted human minds. Supported by thisqualitatively new technology, we can begin to providefood, shelter, garments, and a broad spectrum of luxurieswithout devouring the precious time of humanity andwithout dissipating its invaluable reservoir of creative en-ergy in mindless labor. In short, for the first time in his-tory we stand on the threshold of a post-scarcity society.

The word "threshold" should be emphasized here for inno way has the existing society realized the post-scarcitypotential of its technology. Neither the material "privi-leges" that modern capitalism seems to afford the middle

Introduction / 13

classes nor its lavish wasting of resources reflects therational, humanistic, indeed unalienated, content of apost-scarcity society. To view the word "post-scarcity"simply as meaning a large quantity of socially availablegoods would be as absurd as to regard a living organismsimply as a large quantity of chemicals.* For one thing,scarcity is more than a condition of scarce resources: theword, if it is to mean anything in human terms, mustencompass the social relations and cultural apparatus thatfoster insecurity in the psyche. In organic societies thisinsecurity may be a function of the oppressive limits estab-lished by a precarious natural world; in a hierarchical soci-ety it is a function of the repressive limits established byan exploitative class structure. By the same token, theword "post-scarcity" means fundamentally more than amere abundance of the means of life: it decidedly includesthe kind of life these means support. The human relation-ships and psyche of the individual in a post-scarcity societymust fully reflect the freedom, security and self-expressionthat this abundance makes possible. Post-scarcity society,in short, is the fulfillment of the social and cultural poten-tialities latent in a technology of abundance.

Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middleclasses, tends to degrade them more abjectly than anyother stratum in society. The system deploys its capacityfor abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicitywith his own oppression—first by turning him into a com-modity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next byassimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus.Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois soci-

* Hence the absurdity of Tom Hayden's use of the expression"post-scarcity" in his recent book, The Trial. Hayden's fear that theyouth culture might slip into "post-scarcity hedonism" and becomesocially passive suggests that he has yet to understand fully themeaning of "post-scarcity" and the nature of the youth culture.


ety, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrateswith insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and morecommodities—are his very poison. In this sense there isnothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for thedeepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fairgame for exploitation and domination.

But by a supreme twist of dialectical irony, the poison isalso its own antidote. Capitalism's capacity for abun-dance—the soporific it employs for domination—stirs upstrange images in the dream world of its victims. Runningthrough the nightmare of domination is the vision of free-dom, the repressed intuition that what-is could be other-wise if abundance were used for human ends. Just as abun-dance invades the unconscious to manipulate it, so theunconscious invades abundance to liberate it. The fore-most contradiction of capitalism today is the tension be-tween what-is and what-could-be—between the actuality ofdomination and the potentiality of freedom. The seeds forthe destruction of bourgeois society lie in the very meansit employs for its self-preservation: a technology of abun-dance that is capable of providing for the first time inhistory the material basis for liberation. The system, in asense, is in complicity against itself. As Hegel put it inanother context: "The struggle is too late; and everymeans taken makes the disease worse. . . ."1

If the struggle to preserve bourgeois society tends to beself-vitiating, so too is the struggle to destroy it. Today thegreatest strength of capitalism lies in its ability to subvertrevolutionary goals by the ideology of domination. Whataccounts for this strength is the fact that "bourgeois ideol-ogy" is not merely bourgeois. Capitalism is the heir ofhistory, the legatee of all the repressive features of earlierhierarchical societies, and bourgeois ideology has beenpieced together from the oldest elements of social domina-tion and conditioning—elements so very old, so intractable,and so seemingly unquestionable, that we often mistake

Introduction / 15

them for "human nature." There is no more telling com-mentary on the power of this cultural legacy than theextent to which the socialist project itself is permeated byhierarchy, sexism and renunciation. From these elementscome all the social enzymes that catalyze the everydayrelationships of the bourgeois world—and of the so-called"radical movement."

Hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not disappearwith "democratic centralism," a "revolutionary leader-ship," a "workers' state," and a "planned economy." Onthe contrary, hierarchy, sexism, and renunciation functionall the more effectively if centralism appears to be "demo-cratic," if leaders appear to be "revolutionaries," if thestate appears to belong to the "workers," and if com-modity production appears to be "planned." Insofar as thesocialist project fails to note the very existence of theseelements, much less their vicious role, the "revolution"itself becomes a facade for counterrevolution. Marx'svision notwithstanding, what tends to "wither away" afterthis kind of "revolution" is not the state but the veryconsciousness of domination.

Actually, much that passes for a "planned economy" insocialist theory has already been achieved by capitalism;hence the capacity of state capitalism to assimilate largeareas of Marxist doctrine as official ideology. Moreover, inthe advanced capitalist countries, the very progress of tech-nology has removed one of the most important reasons forthe existence of the "socialist state"—the need(in the words of Marx and Engels) "to increase the total ofproductive forces as rapidly as possible."2 To loiter anylonger around the issues of a "planned economy" and a"socialist state"—issues created by an earlier stage of capi-talism and by a lower stage of technological develop-ment—would be sectarian cretinism. The revolutionaryproject must become commensurate with the enormoussocial possibilities of our time, for just as the material


preconditions of freedom have expanded beyond the mostgenerous dreams of the past, so too has the vision of free-dom. As we stand on the threshold of a post-scarcity soci-ety, the social dialectic begins to mature, both in terms ofwhat must be abolished and what must be created. Wemust bring to an end not only the social relations of bour-geois society, but also the legacy of domination producedby long millennia of hierarchical society. What we mustcreate to replace bourgeois society is not only the classlesssociety envisioned by socialism, but the nonrepressive uto-pia envisioned by anarchism.

Until now we have been occupied primarily with thetechnological capabilities of bourgeois society, its potentialfor supporting a post-scarcity society, and the tension thiscreates between what-is and what-could-be. Let there beno mistaken notion that this tension floats in some vaguefashion between theoretical abstractions. The tension isreal, and it finds daily expression in the lives of millions.Often intuitively, people begin to find intolerable thesocial, economic and cultural conditions that were pas-sively accepted only a decade or so ago. The growth of theblack liberation movement over the past ten years (a move-ment that has heightened every sensibility of black peopleto their oppression) is explosive evidence of this develop-ment. Black liberation is being joined by women's libera-tion, youth liberation, children's liberation and gay libera-tion. Every ethnic group and virtually every profession isin a ferment that would have seemed inconceivable a meregeneration ago. The "privileges" of yesterday are becomingthe "rights" of today in almost dizzying succession amongstudents, young people generally, women, ethnic minori-ties, and, in time, among the very strata on which thesystem has traditionally relied for support. The very con-cept of "rights" is becoming suspect as the expression of apatronizing elite which bestows and denies "rights" and

Introduction / 17

"privileges" to inferiors. A struggle against elitism and hier-archy as such is replacing the struggle for "rights" as themain goal. It is not justice any longer that is being de-manded, but rather freedom. Moral sensibilities toabuses—even the most minor abuses by earlier standards—are reaching an acuity that would have seemed incon-ceivable only a few years ago.

The liberal euphemism for the tension between actualityand potentiality is "rising expectations." What this socio-logical phrase fails to reveal is that these "expectations"will continue to "rise" until Utopia itself is achieved. Andfor good reason. What goads the "expectations" into "ris-ing"—indeed, into escalating with each "right" that isgained—is the utter irrationality of the capitalist systemitself. When cybernated and automatic machinery canreduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is moremeaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. Whenmodern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing ismore vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty.When all the resources exist to promote social equality,nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women andhomosexuals than subjugation. These contrasts could beextended indefinitely, covering all the issues that haveproduced the social agony of our era.

In attempting to uphold scarcity, toil, poverty and sub-jugation against the growing potential for post-scarcity, lei-sure, abundance and freedom, capitalism increasinglyemerges as the most irrational, indeed the most artificial,society in history. The society now takes on the appear-ance of a totally alien (as well as alienating) force. Itemerges as the "other," so to speak, of humanity's deepestdesires and impulses. On an ever-greater scale, potentialitybegins to determine and shape one's everyday view of ac-tuality, until a point is reached where everything about thesociety—including its most "attractive" amenities—seemstotally insane, the result of a massive social lunacy.


Not surprisingly, subcultures begin to emerge which em-phasize a natural diet as against the society's syntheticdiet, an extended family as against the monogamousfamily, sexual freedom as against sexual repression, tribal-ism as against atomization, community as against urban-ism, mutual aid as against competition, communism asagainst property, and, finally, anarchism as against hier-archy and the state. In the very act of refusing to live bybourgeois strictures, the first seeds of the Utopian lifestyleare planted. Negation passes into affirmation; the rejectionof the present becomes the assertion of the future withinthe rotting guts of capitalism itself. "Dropping out" be-comes a mode of dropping in—into the tentative, experi-mental, and as yet highly ambiguous, social relations ofUtopia. Taken as an end in itself, this lifestyle is not uto-pia; indeed, it may be woefully incomplete. Taken as ameans, however, this lifestyle and the processes leading toit are indispensable in remaking the revolutionary, inawakening his sensibilities to how much must be changedif the revolution is to be complete. The lifestyle is indis-pensable in preserving the integrity of the revolutionary, inproviding him with the psychic resources to resist the sub-version of the revolutionary project by bourgeois values.

The tension between actuality and potentiality, betweenpresent and future, acquires apocalyptic proportions in theecological crisis of our time. Although a large part of thisbook will deal with environmental problems, severalbroad conclusions should be emphasized. Any attempt tosolve the environmental crisis within a bourgeois frame-work must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is in-herently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulationconstitute its very law of life, a law which Marx pungentlysummarized in the phrase, "production for the sake ofproduction." Anything, however hallowed or rare, "has itsprice" and is fair game for the marketplace. In a society of

Introduction I 19

this kind, nature is necessarily treated as a mere resourceto be plundered and exploited. The destruction of thenatural world, far from being the result of mere hubristicblunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capital-ist production.

The schizoid attitude of the public toward technology—an attitude that mingles fear with hope—should not bedismissed lightmindedly. This attitude expresses a basic in-tuitive truth: the same technology that could liberate manin a society organized around the satisfaction of humanneeds must inevitably destroy him in a society organizedaround "production for the sake of production." To besure, the Manichean dualism imputed to technology is nota feature of technology as such. The capacities of moderntechnology to create or destroy are simply the two faces ofa common social dialectic—the negative and positive fea-tures of hierarchical society. If there is any truth to Marx'sclaim that hierarchical society was "historically necessary"in order to "dominate" nature, we should never forget thatthe concept of "dominating" nature emerged from thedomination of man by man. Both men and nature havealways been the common victims of hierarchical society.That both are now faced with ecological extinction is evi-dence that the instruments of production have finallybecome too powerful to be administered as instruments ofdomination.

Today, as we stand at the end of hierarchical society'sdevelopment, its negative and positive aspects can nolonger be reconciled. Not only do they stand opposed toeach other irreconcilably, they stand opposed to eachother as mutually exclusive wholes. All the institutions andvalues of hierarchical society have exhausted their "his-torically necessary" functions. No longer is there any so-cial rationale for property and classes, for monogamy andpatriarchy, for hierarchy and authority, for bureaucracyand the state. These institutions and values, together with


the city, the school and the instrumentalities of privilege,have reached their historical limits. In contrast to Marx, wewould have little quarrel with Bakunin's view that the in-stitutions and values of hierarchical society were always a"historically necessary evil." If Bakunin's verdict seems toenjoy a moral superiority over Marx's today, this is becausethe institutions have finally lost their moral authority.*

By the same token, the coming revolution and theutopia it creates must be conceived of as wholes. They canleave no area of life untouched that has been contaminatedby domination. t From the revolution there must emerge asociety that transcends all the splits of the past; indeed,one must emerge that offers every individual the feast of amany-sided, rounded and total experience.

In describing this utopia as "anarchism," I might havealso used an equivalent expression—"anarcho-commu-nism." Both terms denote a stateless, classless, decen-tralized society in which the splits created by propertiedsociety are transcended by new, unalienated human rela-* Hence the reactionary aspect of the socialist project, which stillretains the concepts of hierarchy, authority and the state as part ofhumanity's postrevolutionary future. By implication this project alsoretains the concepts of property ("nationalized") and classes("proletarian dictatorship"). The various "orthodox" Marxists(Maoists, Trotskyists, Stalinists and the hybridized sects that com-bine all three tendencies) mediate the negative and positive featuresof the overall social development ideologically—precisely at a timewhen they have never been more irreconcilable objectively.

t Hence the revolutionary core of the women's liberation move-ment, which has brought the very syntax and musculature of domi-nation into public view. In so doing, the movement has broughteveryday life itself, not just abstractions like "Society," "Class," and"Proletariat," into question. Here I must apologize for using termslike "man," "mankind," and "humanity" and the masculine genderin this book. In the absence of substitutes for "people" and "indi-viduals" my wording would have become awkward. Our languagemust also be liberated.

Introduction I 21

tionships. An anarchist or anarcho-communist society pre-supposes the abolition of private property, the distributionof goods according to individual needs, the complete dis-solution of commodity relationships, the rotation of work,and a decisive reduction in the time devoted to labor. Asthis description stands, however, we have little more thanthe anatomy of a free society. The description lacks anaccount of the physiology of freedom—of freedom as theprocess of communizing. The description, in effect, lacksthose subjective dimensions that link the remaking ofsociety to the remaking of the psyche.

Anarchists have probably given more attention to thesubjective problems of revolution than any other revolu-tionary movement. Viewed from a broad historical per-spective, anarchism is a libidinal upsurge of the people, astirring of the social unconscious that reaches back, undermany different names, to the earliest struggles of humanityagainst domination and authority. Its commitment to doc-trinal shibboleths is minimal. In its active concern with theissues of everyday life, anarchism has always been preoccu-pied with lifestyle, sexuality, community, women's libera-tion and human relationships. Its central focus has alwaysbeen the only meaningful goal social revolution can have-the remaking of the world so that human beings will beends in themselves and human life a revered, indeed a mar-velous, experience. For most radical ideologies, this goalhas been peripheral. More often than not, these ideologies,by emphasizing abstractions over people, have reducedhuman beings to a means—ironically in the name of "thePeople" and "Freedom."

The difference between socialists and anarchists revealsitself not only in conflicting theories but also in conflictingtypes of organization and praxis. I have already noted thatsocialists organize into hierarchical bodies. By contrast,anarchists base their organizational structures on the "af-finity group"—a collective of intimate friends who are no


less concerned with their human relationships than withtheir social goals. The very mode of anarchist organizationtranscends the traditional split between the psyche and thesocial world. If the need arises, there is nothing to preventthe affinity groups from coordinating into fairly largemovements (the Spanish anarchists, for example, built anationwide federation of thousands out of this nuclearform). The movements, however, have the advantage thatcontrol over the larger organization lies always with theaffinity groups rather than with the coordinating bodies.All action, in turn, is based on voluntarism and self-disci-pline, not on coercion and command. Praxis, in such anorganization, is liberatory in the personal as well as in thesocial arena. The very nature of the group encourages therevolutionary to revolutionize himself.

This liberatory approach to praxis is carried still furtherin the anarchist conception of "direct action." Generally,direct action is regarded as a tactic, as a method of abolish-ing the state without recourse to state institutions andtechniques. Although the foregoing interpretation is cor-rect as far as it goes, it hardly goes far enough. Directaction is a basic revolutionary strategy, a mode of praxisintended to promote the individuation of the "masses." Itsfunction is to assert the identity of the particular withinthe framework of the general. More important than itspolitical implications are its psychological effects, fordirect action makes people aware of themselves as indi-viduals who can affect their own destiny.*

* I should add here that the slogan "Power to the people" can onlybe put into practice when the power exercised by social elites isdissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control ofhis daily life. If "Power to the people" means nothing more thanpower to the "leaders" of the people, then the people remain anundifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolu-tion as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can neverhave power until they disappear as a "people."

Introduction I 23

Finally, anarchist praxis also emphasizes spontaneity—aconception of praxis as an inner process, not an external,manipulated process. Its critics notwithstanding, this con-cept does not fetishize mere undifferentiated "impulse."Like life itself, spontaneity can exist on many differentlevels; it can be more or less permeated by knowledge,insight and experience. In a free society, the spontaneityof a three-year-old would hardly be of the same order asthat of a thirty-year-old. Although both would be free todevelop without restraint, the behavior of the thirty-year-old would be based on a more defined and more informedself. By the same token, spontaneity may be more in-formed in one affinity group than in another, more sea-soned by knowledge and experience.

But spontaneity is no more an organizational "tech-nique" than direct action is merely an organizational tac-tic. Belief in spontaneous action is part of a still largerbelief—the belief in spontaneous development. Everydevelopment must be free to find its own equilibrium.Spontaneity, far from inviting chaos, involves releasing theinner forces of a development to find their authentic orderand stability. As we shall see in the articles that follow,spontaneity in social life converges with spontaneity innature to provide the basis for an ecological society. Theecological principles that shaped organic societies re-emerge in the form of social principles to shape Utopia.But these principles are now informed by the material andcultural gains of history. Natural ecology becomes socialecology. In Utopia man no more returns to his ancestralimmediacy with nature than anarcho-communism returnsto primitive communism. Whether now or in the future,human relationships with nature are always mediated byscience, technology and knowledge. But whether or notscience, technology and knowledge will improve nature toits own benefit will depend upon man's ability to improvehis social condition. Either revolution will create an eco-


logical society, with new ecotechnologies and ecocommu-nities, or humanity and the natural world as we know ittoday will perish.

Every revolutionary epoch is a period of convergencewhen apparently separate processes collect to form asocially explosive crisis. If our own revolutionary epochoften seems more complex than earlier ones, this is be-cause the processes that have been collecting together aremore universal than they have ever been in the past. Ourpoint of departure has no comforting historical precedentson which to rely. Earlier revolutionary epochs at leastdealt with familiar institutional categories—the family, reli-gion, property, toil and the state were taken for granted,even if their forms were challenged.* Hierarchical societyhad not exhausted these categories. Its development intomore commanding and comprehensive social relations wasstill unfulfilled.

In our time, however, this development has reached thepoint of saturation. There is no future for hierarchical soci-ety to claim, and for us there are the alternatives only ofutopia or social extinction. So heavily are we laden withthe debris of the past and so pregnant are we with thepossibilities of the future that our estrangement with theworld reaches the point of anguish. Past and future super-impose themselves on each other like latent images emerg-ing in a double exposure. The familiar is there, but, likethe psychedelic posters whose letters take the form ofwrithing human limbs, it blends elusively with the strange.A slight shift in position and the given reality is invertedcompletely. Learning to live appears to us the only modeof survival, play the only mode of work, the personal the

* This situation did not change with the Russian Revolution or the"socialist" revolutions that have occurred since then. The institu-tional categories have not disappeared; at most the names havechanged.

Introduction I 25

only mode of the social, the abolition of sex roles the onlymode of sexuality, tribalism the only mode of the family,sensuality the only mode of rationality. This interweavingof the old and new, with its incredible inversions, is notthe usual "doublespeak" of the established order; it is anobjective fact, which reflects the vast social changes thatare in birth.

Every revolutionary epoch, moreover, not only bringstogether apparently separate processes but also convergesthem on a specific locus in time and space where the socialcrisis is most acute. In the seventeenth century this centerwas England; in the eighteenth and nineteenth, France; inthe early twentieth, Russia. The center of the social crisisin the late twentieth century is the United States—an in-dustrial colossus that produces more than half of theworld's goods with little more than five percent of theworld's population. Here is the Rome of world capitalism,the keystone of its imperial arch, the workshop andmarketplace of its commodities, the den of its financialwizardry, the temple of its culture, and the armory of itsweapons. Here, too, is the center of the world counter-revolution—and the center of the social revolution that canoverthrow hierarchical society as a world-historical system.

To ignore the strategic position of the United States,both historically and internationally, would reveal an in-credible insensitivity to reality. To fail to draw all theimplications of this strategic position and act upon themaccordingly would be negligence of criminal proportions.The stakes are too great to allow for obscurantism. Amer-ica, it must be emphasized, occupies the most advancedsocial terrain in the world. America, more than any othercountry, is pregnant with the most important social crisisin history. Every issue that bears on the abolition of hier-archical society and on the construction of utopia is moreapparent here than elsewhere. Here lie the resources toannul and transcend what Marx called the "prehistory" of


humanity. Here, too, are the contradictions that producethe most advanced form of revolutionary struggle. Thedecay of the American institutional structure results notfrom any mystical "failure of nerve" or from imperialistadventures in the Third World, but primarily from theoverripeness of America's technological potential. Likehanging fruit whose seeds have matured fully, the structuremay fall at the lightest blow. The blow may come from theThird World, from major economic dislocations, even frompremature political repression, but fall the structure must,owing to its ripeness and decay.

In a crisis of this magnitude, the core problems of hier-archical society can be reached from every facet of life, bethey personal or social, political or ecological, moral ormaterial. Every critical act and movement erodes thedomestic and imperial edifice. To repel any expression ofdiscontent with sectarian harangues, borrowed from en-tirely different arenas and eras of social conflict, is simplyblindness. Carried to its logical conclusions, the strugglefor black liberation is the struggle against imperialism; thestruggle for a balanced environment is the struggle againstcommodity production; the struggle for women's libera-tion is the struggle for human freedom.

True, a great deal of the pursuit of this discontent canbe diverted into established institutional channels for atime. But only for a time. The social crisis is too deep andworld-historical for the established institutions to containit. If the system failed to assimilate the black movement,the "love generation," and the student movement of thesixties, it was not for want of institutional flexibility andresources. Despite the Cassandra-like forebodings of theAmerican "left," these movements essentially rejectedwhat the established institutions had to offer. More pre-cisely, their demands increased as each one was met. Atthe same time, the physical base of the movements ex-panded. Radiating out from a few isolated urban centers,

Introduction I 21

black, hippie, and student radicalism percolated throughthe country, penetrating high schools as well as universi-ties, suburbs as well as ghettoes, rural communities as wellas cities.

To challenge the value of the.se movements because theirrecruits are often white middle-class youth begs the ques-tion. There is perhaps no better testimony to the in-stability of bourgeois society than the fact that many mili-tant radicals tend to come from the relatively affluentstrata. It is conveniently forgotten that the fifties hadCassandras of a different type—the "Orwell generation,"which warned that bureaucratic society was engineeringAmerican youth into polished conformity with the estab-lishment. According to the predictions of that time,bureaucratic society was to acquire its main support fromsucceeding generations of young people. The ebbing gen-eration of the thirties, it was argued, would be the lastrepository of radical, humanistic values. As it turned out,the very reverse occurred. The generation of the thirtieshas become one of the most willfully reactionary sectorsof society, while the young people of the sixties have be-come the most radical.

In this seeming paradox, the contradiction betweenscarcity and the potential for post-scarcity appears in theform of outright confrontation. A generation whose entirepsyche has been shaped by scarcity—by the depression andinsecurities of the thirties—confronts another whosepsyche has been influenced by the potential for a post-scarcity society. White middle-class youth has the realprivilege of rejecting false "privilege." In contrast to theirdepression-haunted parents, young people are disen-chanted by a flatulent consumerism that pacifies but neversatisfies. The generation gap is real. It reflects an objec-tive gap that increasingly separates America today from itsown social history, from a past that is becoming archaic.Although this past has yet to be interred, a generation is


emerging that may well prove to be its gravediggers.To criticize this generation for its "bourgeois roots" ex-

hibits the wisdom of a dunce who doesn't know that hismost serious remarks are evoking laughter. All who live inbourgeois society have "bourgeois roots," be they workersor students, young people or old, black people or white.How much of a bourgeois one becomes depends exclu-sively upon what one accepts from bourgeois society. Ifyoung people reject consumerism, the work ethic, hier-archy and authority, they are more "proletarian" than theproletariat—a bit of semantic nonsense that should en-courage us to inter the threadbare elements of socialistideology together with the archaic past from which theyderive.

If this nonsense still commands any attention today, itis due to the anemic character of the revolutionary projectin the United States. American revolutionaries have yet tofind a voice that relates to American issues. First Worldproblems are not Third World problems; the two, more-over, are not bridged by retreating to ideologies that dealwith nineteenth-century problems. Insofar as Americanrevolutionaries mechanically borrow their formulas andslogans from Asia and Latin America, they do the ThirdWorld a grave disservice. What the Third World needs is arevolution in America, not isolated sects that are incapableof affecting the course of events. To promote that revolu-tion would be the highest act of internationalism and soli-darity with oppressed people abroad; it would require anoutlook and a movement that speak to the problemsunique to the United States. We need a cohesive, revolu-tionary approach to American social problems. Anyonewho is a revolutionary in the United States is necessarilyan internationalist by virtue of America's world position,so I need make no apologies for the attention I give to thiscountry.

The articles that make up this book must be seen as a

Introduction I 29

unified whole. What essentially unifies them is the viewthat man's most visionary dreams of liberation have nowbecome compelling necessities. All the articles are writtenfrom the perspective that hierarchical society, after manybloody millenia, has finally reached the culmination of itsdevelopment. The problems of scarcity, from whichemerged propertied forms, classes, the state and all thecultural paraphernalia of domination, can now be resolvedby a post-scarcity society. In reaching the point wherescarcity can be eliminated, we find that a post-scarcitysociety is not merely desirable or possible, but absolutelynecessary if society is to survive. The very development ofthe material preconditions for freedom makes the achieve-ment of freedom a social necessity.

If humanity is to live in balance with nature, we must turnto ecology for the essential guidelines of how the futuresociety should be organized. Again, we find that what isdesirable is also necessary. Man's desire for unrepressed,spontaneous expression, for variety in experience and sur-roundings, and for an environment scaled to human dimen-sions must also be realized to achieve natural equilibrium.The ecological problems of the old society thus reveal themethods that will shape the new. The intuition that all ofthese processes are converging toward an entirely new wayof life finds its most concrete confirmation in the youthculture. The rising generation, which has been largelyspared the scarcity psychosis of its parents, anticipates thedevelopment that lies ahead. In the outlook and praxis ofyoung people, which range from tribalism to a sweepingaffirmation of sensuousness, one finds those cultural pre-figurations that point to a future Utopia.

Though I devote most of my discussion to what is new inthe current social development, I definitely do not meanto ignore what is old. Exploitation, racism, poverty, class


struggle and imperialism are still with us—and in manyrespects have deepened their grip on society. These issuescan never fade from revolutionary theory and praxis untilthey are resolved completely. There is little I can contrib-ute to these issues, however, that has not been exhaus-tively discussed by others. What justifies my Utopianemphasis is the nearly total lack of material on the poten-tialities of our time. If no effort is made to enlarge thismeagerly explored area, even the traditional issues of theradical movement will appear to us in a false light—as tradi-tional. This would distort our very contact with the famil-iar. Although the issues raised by exploitation are notsupplanted by those of alienation, the development of theformer is profoundly influenced by the development ofthe latter.

Let us turn to an example of what this means. Thetraditional workers' movement will never reappear. Despiterank and file revolts, "bread and butter" issues are oftentoo well contained by bourgeois unionism to form thebasis for the old socialist type of labor union. But workersmay yet form radical organizations to fight for changes inthe quality of their lives and work—ultimately for workers'management of production. Workers will not form radicalorganizations until they sense the same tension betweenwhat-is and what-could-be that many young people feeltoday. I believe they will have to undergo major changes intheir values—and not merely those values that involve thefactory, but those that involve their lives. Only when lifeissues dominate factory issues will factory issues be assimi-lated to life issues. Then the economic strike may one daybecome a social strike and culminate in a massive blowagainst bourgeois society.

That young people in working-class families have in-creasingly responded to the culture of their white middle-class peers is one of the most hopeful signs that the factorywill not be impervious to revolutionary ideas. Once it has

Introduction / 31

taken root, a cultural advance, like a technological ad-vance, is ever more widely diffused—particularly amongpeople whose minds have not been hardened by condition-ing and age. The youth culture, with its freedom of thesenses and spirit, has its own innate appeal. The spread ofthis culture to the high schools and elementary schools isone of the most subversive social phenomena in the worldtoday.

The articles in this book are a careful elaboration of theideas raised in the foregoing pages. They appeal for a newemphasis on the problems of freedom, the environment,sex roles and lifestyle, and they advance broad Utopianalternatives to the present social order. These emphases, Iam convinced, are absolutely indispensable to the develop-ment of the revolutionary project in America.

Most of the articles were written between 1965 and1968, a mere few years ago by the calendar, but ages agoideologically. The hippie movement was just getting under-way in New York when "Ecology and RevolutionaryThought" was published, and the disastrous SDS conven-tion of June 1969 had yet to occur when "Listen, Marx-ist!" was completed. Most of the articles were published inAnarchos magazine and as Anarchos pamphlets. A fewwere published in underground papers or republished in"New Left" collections. Except for some deletions and theinclusion of several paragraphs, most of my changes havebeen stylistic.

One article, "The Forms of Freedom," has been sub-stantially rewritten to remove any misunderstanding aboutmy views on workers' councils. That these forms will benecessary to take over and operate the economy in a post-revolutionary period is a view I've held for many years—with the proviso, of course, that the councils (I prefer theterm "factory committees") are controlled completely byworkers' assemblies. Originally, this article limited its dis-cussion of workers' councils to a critique of their defects


as policy-making bodies. In rewriting portions of "TheForms of Freedom" I have tried to distinguish the func-tion of these councils as administrative organs from pol-icy-making organs.

The dedication of this book to Josef Weber and AllanHoffman is more than a sentimental gesture to two of myclosest comrades. Josef Weber, a German revolutionarywho died in 1958 at the age of fifty-eight, formulatedmore than twenty years ago the outlines of the Utopianproject developed in this book. Moreover, for me he was aliving link with all that was vital and libertarian in the greatintellectual tradition of German socialism in the pre-Leninist era. From Allan Hoffman, whose death in a truckaccident this year at the age of twenty-eight was an irrepar-able loss to the commune movement in California, Iacquired a broader sense of the totality sought by thecounterculture and youth revolt.

I owe very much to my sisters and brothers in theAnarchos group for a continual cross-fertilization of ideas,as well as for the warmth of real human relationships. In asense, what is of worth in this book draws from the in-sights of many people whom I knew on the Lower EastSide in New York, at Alternate U, and in groups and col-lectives throughout the country.

To them-Salud!Murray Bookchin

New YorkAugust-October 1970

Introductionto the Second Edition

It would be easy to revise this book, to "update" it andgive it greater contemporaneity since its publication by RampartsBooks fifteen years ago. Several publishers have asked me todo so since the book went out of print in the early eighties.But I have resisted, often unconsciously. There are works thatshould not be touched — and Post-Scarcity Anarchism is perhapsone of them. Whether deservedly or not, the book has enteredinto the literature of modern anarchism and voices in a reasonablycoherent way some of the more inspired ideals of the sixties.To alter the book would be to violate a wondrous period ofhistory itself— a period that produced a new, almost magicalromance with life that I regard as imperishable if the humanspirit is to come into its fulfillment.

It is also a book that was more influential than many ecologicaland radical theorists are likely to admit. I still hear its thoughtsechoed in widely disparate places. That an ecological perspectivehad a rich radical content and would surface as an issue thatsocialist and anarchist theorists would be obliged to deal withwas a very remote idea in the early sixties, however commonplaceit has become today.

In any case, the book's sale ran into many thousands inNorth America and Europe. Some of its essays, particularly"Listen, Marxist!" (1969), were circulated in sizable numbers— not only in its original pamphlet form which I left unsigned,but in anthologies and as articles in the widely read "undergroundpress" of the time. Much the same can be said for "Ecologyand Revolutionary Thought," which I initially printed in mytheoretical newsletter, Comment, in 1964 and republished ayear later in the British monthly Anarchy.

33

34 / Post-Scarcity Anarchism Introduction I 35

The past fifteen years since the book's publication, however,have seen major changes in the radical "constituency" forwhich it was written. American radicalism has indeed madeits "long march through the institutions," to use Rudi Dutschke'sphrase, from the stormy student campuses of the sixties to themore serene faculty rooms of the eighties. Its buoyant populismhas been abandoned for a restful Marxism. The journey, farfrom widening the horizon of the Marxist "professorial," touse Theodore Draper's term, has turned it into a more "dis-criminating" body, a word I use in a highly partisan sense.Today, almost anyone's book will make its way into the bib-liographies of this professoriat if it is labelled "Marxist,"irrespective of the hodge-podge of ideas the term is obligedto encompass. Use the word "anarchisl," and the book islikely to be consigned to academic oblivion, even such his-torically imporlanl writers as a Peter Kropolkin or a PaulGoodman.

Which is not to say that I am convinced that these writerswill disappear from the radical tradition: there are more long-range factors that ultimalely single out pioneering books andideas from epigones who try to restale them in less originaland more socially acceplable ways. What troubles me abouepigonic wriling is the way it obscures and hybridizes ideas.It is disconcerting, lo say the least, to see attempts to meld anecologism that is clearly libertarian in its view of nature witha Marxism that is structured around the dominalion of nalureas a historic desideralum. Nol only do such efforts violate themeaning of social ecology (as I choose lo call my ideas) butalso the thrusl of Marx's own ideas. Just as I stress in mywritings the fecundity, creativity, and complexity of nature asa potential "realm of freedom," so Marx's writings deal withnalure as "slingy," as mere object for human exploitation,and as a grim "realm of necessity" that dominates "man" inhis quest for a liberated world — a world liberated nol onlyfrom human dominalion bul the "dominalion" of humanilyby nature.

Indeed, Marx's justification for the emergence of class societyand the State, not to speak of his "class analysis," stems froman underlying imagery of the oppressed "savage" who must"wrestle" with an ungiving, inlraclable nalural world. TheViclorian, largely bourgeois, origins of this imagery is an issueI have discussed in some delail in other books.* To wed thisgrim drama of social developmenl lo a libertarian conceplionof nature as fecund, creative, and a potenlial "realm of freedom"is nol merely sloppy thinking; it is grossly obscuranlist. Onecan always, to sure, trot out a Gramsci or a Marcuse to paperover blatanl contradiclions thal deserve respecl and seriousresolution. But lo ignore them by prudenlly casling a veil ofsilence over works that seek to explore them with care is lodivest ideas of their integrily and denalure critical thinking assuch.

What also troubles me is the moral condilion of contemporaryradicalism. There was a lime, even as recently as the earlythirties, when radicals of all kinds formed an ethical community,despite the many ideological differences that divided them.Whether as socialisls, anarchists, syndicalists, or populisls,they shared their views in free discourse, defended each other'srights, and even aided each olher in publishing works lhal wereordinarily proscribed by the bourgeois press. Anarchisls likeEmma Goldman could find solace and help from Marxisls likeJohn Reed in limes of difficully, and anarchisls like Sacco andVanzetli rallied universal support from the Left, includingCommunisls, despite their explicil crilicisms of Soviet Russia.

These days are gone. The Left, today, is nol only fragmented;it is closeted into dogmalic slrongholds, and many of its membersare notable nol only for Iheir lack of political influence buttheir professorial spitefulness. Polemic has lost its fire and

* See particularly my essay "Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology" in Towardan Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), and my overallcritique of Marxism in The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books,1982).


honesty. It suffers from the sterility of the specialist's "journal":jargonized, stilted, pedantic, insidiously backbiting, and un-restrained in its capacity to plagiarize. Socialism has becomean industry and its literary works are commodities. They areoften vended by ambitious careerists who have long tradedaway their political ideals for their professional status. The"New Left" has aged badly. It lives in spiteful hatred of itsown youth and in fear of a revival of student militancy, arevival that may jeapardize its academic positions and peerrecognition.

In many cases, a strangely symbiotic relationship exists be-tween the academic Right and its leftist counterparts: a fewscholarly Marxists are not only a sine qua non for a sophisticatedcollege curriculum, but departments, even control of academicjournals and societies, are divided between Right and Left withan unspoken understanding that the stability of a university,even the effective control of the student body, depends upona delicate balance of forces between the two and a "pluralism"that replaces intellectual stimuli by paralysis. I need hardlysay that in this academic ecumene, anarchists are literally toogauche to have a place in the academic firmament and theirliterature must be closed out of reading lists and course adoptions.If there is a reasonable amount of peace in the academy today,it is due not only to the careerism of students in an economicallyprecarious world, but the careerism of their "radical" professorsin an academically tight market. The "professoriat" has becomean interest in its own right and strategically tends to functionmore as a safety valve for student dissent than a stimulus —a fact which more intelligent conservatives appreciate only toowell.

In rereading Post-Scarcity Anarchism, I find its sixties re-belliousness to be a healthy antidote to the prevailing moodof calculated disenchantment and reformism that is so prevalentwithin the "radical" movement today. The book spoke to atime when words like "revolution," "uprising," and even

Introduction I 37

"bourgeoisie," were not seen as exotic terms. At the sametime it was meant to be a careful correction of the revolutionaryfervor that took possession of the young radicals I knew at thetime: their earnest belief that revolution was imminent. (Seepp. 34-35.) Already middle-aged in the sixties with a longexperience in the Left of the thirties behind me, I tried to warnmy younger comrades that "there is no 'revolutionary situation'at this time in America..." Indeed, as I wrote, "There is noimmediate prospect of a revolutionary challenge to the establishedorder." Rather, there is "a greater susceptibility to radicalideas than at any time since the populist resurgence of seventyyears ago... [but] still no reason to believe that the bulk ofwhite America will accept, much less support, the idea ofrevolutionary change at the present time." These lines werepublished in the first issue of Anarchos, a magazine I launchedin 1967 with the cooperation of a few friends in New York'sLower East Side.* What troubled me profoundly was the like-lihood that revolutionary expectations among radical youngpeople were outpacing reality — a fear that was more thanamply justified, as the seventies were to show.

Yet the sixties had done wondrous things, many of whichare sedimented into American life. Its linkage of the personalwith the political, of esthetic fantasy with social reality, of anonhierarchical society with a classless one, of libertarian processwith revolutionary ends — all, not to speak of its celebratedflood of experiments in communal living, sexual freedom,radical changes in dress, diet, educational techniques, andculture as such, were latently revolutionary and expressly Utopian.The notion, so prevalent today, that this constellation of whatwas to be called a "counterculture" has been "coopted" isgrossly false. That business, ever on the lookout for new com-mercial opportunities, used bits and pieces of the countercultureto its profit is not evidence of its cooptation but rather of its

* See Robert Keller (pseud.): "Revolution in America," Anarchos, No. 1,February, 1968, p. 3.


fragmentation. One could say the same of the Paris Communeof 1871 because the Rothschilds offered to meet its monetaryneeds. To have coopted the counterculture as a whole, evenin the name of profit, would have planted a revolutionary wayof experiencing reality in the very heart of the system.

In any case, America could not accept these social andcultural changes overnight. To achieve them, even in part,would have required years of enlightenment. The "New Left"and the counterculture, initially so generous, populist, andanarchic in character, adopted a self-righteous and dogmaticstance as the years went by. The Vietnam War and the "culturalrevolution" in China did these movements no service; as BarbaraGarson has observed somewhere, it gave them a "bandwagon"to hitch on to, a phenomenon we are witnessing today in thecase of Nicaragua. That the sixties opposed American impe-rialism is indubitably creditable and admirable, but certainlynot its adoption of Vietnam and China as "models" of rev-olutionary wisdom and a new society. Disconnected from theAmerican experience, the "New Left," became increasinglyisolated, even more than the counterculture, which was alreadyhemorrhaging from its own entanglement with drugs, musicalimpresarios, and self-anointed gurus. Intolerance replaced anunderstanding desire to educate the people; Marxist-Leninistdogma, more closely akin to Stalinism than Marxism, filteredthrough a political movement whose promising beginnings hadbeen sidetracked into a form of cultural terrorism, as intolerantas the cultural conventions it professed to oppose.* Expectationsfor social change began to exceed the real possibility for achievingthem so that failure, when it came, virtually demolished sizablemovements that seemed to have limitless possibilities for growth.

* Readers who still have a good knowledge of the period would do wellto contrast the good-natured playfulness of the Dutch Provos with the repellentdogmatism of the French Situationists. The full measure of the degenerationthat occurred between 1965 and 1968 can be understood by placing thesetwo tendencies in juxtaposition to each other.

Introduction I 39

America's vicious reaction to the shootings at Kent State Uni-versity — "the National Guard should have shot more!" wasthe characteristic reply of angry parents to their shocked children— the popularity of Nixon, and finally the onset of economiccrises, placed a final seal on the closing of the sixties.

What stands out most sharply about this era was its innocence.The cultural upwelling that tried to enchant everyday life found-ered on its inability to understand the historic trends thatproduced it. Everyday life, in effect, concealed the need tograsp the larger social context in which the "New Left" andthe counterculture flourished. What was painfully lacking wasthe maturing, steadying effect of consciousness and a theoreticalcoherence of ideas which would have united the disparatethreads of the "Movement," as it came to be called, givingit meaning, a sense of direction, and ultimately the organizationalstructures that were needed to interlink it and make it sociallyeffective. Marxism, with its gospel of "class analysis" andeconomic determinism, functioned as an inertial drag on the"Movement," not as a clarifying light. For the "Movement"was nothing if it was not transclass: people united by age, asense of community, ethnically, and, later, by gender — notby their status in the "relations of production." Lacking anadequate theoretical framework, indeed rooted in a typicallyAmerican framework that eschewed ideas and the value oftheory, the "Movement," beleaguered by growing uncertaintiesabout its identity, became afraid of itself. It was seized byfear: fear of its direction, isolation, exploitation, lack of powera loss of self-assurance that came from violated innocence,and its vulnerability to the sharks — commercial and lumpen— that began to encircle it. Finally it succumbed to the economicshocks that raised serious doubts about its material viability.The sudden scramble of young people from New York's LowerEast Side after several highly publicized drug-related murders,the premature symbolic "burial of the hippie" in San Francisco'sHaight-Ashbury district, and the stormy immolation of theStudents for a Democratic Society at its Chicago convention


in June 1969, essentially brought the era to an end.

The sixties will not recur — nor should it. What it addressedwas a sense of disempowerment, alienation, displacement, anda need for existential meaning which a period, rich in thegoodies that filled a vacuous life, could not supply. Above all,it sought an authentic and creative form of community. Notthat these problems are unique to the sixties. They have existedin different forms and degrees since the end of the SecondWorld War. The distinctive nature of the era lay in the factthat it saw the decay of a traditional society side-by-side withan unprecedented period of material abundance. The tensionbetween the reality of social decay in a cultural sense and theprospect of social reconstruction in a material sense unavoidablyproduced unrest on the one hand and Utopian visions on theother. Blacks provided the unrest in ghetto uprisings on a scalethat had never been seen before, a product not only of theirgrowing misery but also of their rising expectations. Comparedto the ghetto explosions, the campus "revolts" were fairlytame affairs, but necessary ones. White youth, largely middle-class in background, provided the necessary sense of vision,such as it was or hoped to be.

But both were minorities within minorities. Black militantswere barely accepted by their own people, except when a senseof shock was needed to give their more "responsible" leaderspolitical clout. Leftist and countercultural youth were not reallyaccepted by the majority students and the ordinary run of youngpeople for whom they professed to speak, and, in the end,were more frightening, with their diet of dogmas and judgementalbehavior, than inspiring. Sizable as both currents in the sixtiesbecame, they never acquired the lasting allegiance of their ownkind. Nor did they try to earn it by painstaking education andpatient forebearance.

A future movement for basic social change will not satisfythe needs of our time —- its sense of disempowerment, alienation,displacement, meaning, and community — unless it pieces

Introduction / 41

itself together consciously, bit by bit, with the aim of ideologicalclarity and theoretical coherence. Education, in my view, isthe top "priority" for a radicalization of our time. To steprapidly out into another historic void will simply produce thesame fear and sense of isolation that brought the sixties to anend. This education must speak clearly to the transclass phe-nomena — the re-emergence of "the People," as it were —with which the modern era started centuries ago, and it mustdeal with problems that are best defined as ethical, not simplyeconomic.* Only by a supreme act of consciousness and ethicalprobity can this society be changed fundamentally. That itneeds "objective forces" to promote that consciousness andethics over and beyond educators is clear enough, but I holdmore than ever that the study group, not only the "affinitygroup," is the indispensable form for this time — especiallyin view of the appalling intellectual and cultural degradationthat marks our era.

As to the "objective forces" at work that may yet open anew period of social reconstruction, I have no reason whateverto diminish the enormous importance I attached to ecologicalproblems thirty years ago. "Ecology and RevolutionaryThought" is one of the most prescient works to appear inradical theory. Its scope, projections, and anticipations, seenfrom 1964 onward, are as valid today as they were more thantwenty years ago. That my identification of "revolutionarythought" with anarchism has precluded its extensive use bythe Marxist professoriat is testimony to an inquisitorial dog-matism, indeed an ideological fanaticism, that deserves thegreatest contempt. Pilfered wholesale by many Marxists them-selves, it stands as a lasting reproach to the myth that a radical"community" exists in the United States. The fact that ecologicalmovements, at this writing, constitute the most serious source

* See particularly my essay "Spontaneity and Organization" in Towardan Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980).


of social opposition in Germany is a reminder that the essay'sprognoses justify the emphasis I give to it in this foreword.

So, too, is the importance of feminism — particularly eco-feminism, which has drawn a good deal of inspiration fromthe essay. Whether ecofeminism will go beyond the small-group syndrome that tends to marginalize it and bypass theliberal politics of the National Organization of Women (NOW)by becoming part of a larger, hopefully libertarian Greenmovement in the English-speaking world remains to be seen.The tendency of leftist feminists to withdraw into themselvesis a problem that cannot be overlooked. It stands in flat con-tradiction to the justly universal claims of feminism in its moreadvanced forms to speak for "life on earth" against the assaultsof patriarchalism, market competition, and a sensibility ofdomination and militarism.

The peace movement, another transclass "historic force,"is faced with much the same problem of exclusivity and scope.The attempt to gauge its successes or failures by whether itcan prevent the siting of nuclear missiles, bring the "super-powers" to the "negotiating table," or achieve appreciablearms reduction reveals a disturbing degree of naivete. Its authenticand most on-going goal must ultimately be to oppose militarism,not only to advocate disarmament. This means that its basicorientation falls into the province of social ecology: to replacethe hierarchical and domineering sensibility and social relationsthat link the domination of nature with the domination of humanby human. No less than feminism, the peace movement mustbecome part of a larger whole, a more encompassing coordinationof the many separate threads, vital as each may be in its ownright, into a well-focused and ultimately libertarian politicalmovement.

Finally, the popular impulse toward community, which todaystands in flat opposition to a homogenizing, atomizing, andprivatizing urbanism — one that threatens to destroy both thecity and the countryside — has moved to the forefront of the"forces" to which I have alluded. English socialism today is

Introduction I 43

riddled by movements or tendencies that emphasize the localityrather than the nation-state, a new "local socialism" fromwhich there is much to be learned. In any case, it is only onthe local level — in the village, town, city, or neighborhood— that a new politics can be developed, one which bringstogether all of these "forces" as a form of ecological politics.Here, in municipalities, where people live out their lives inthe most immediate and personal sense, we find the locus ofreal popular power. This public sphere provides the existentialarena that makes for citizenship in an active sense. Socialecology brings all of these threads together in its oppositionto hierarchy and domination as a critical theory and its emphasison participation and differentiation as a reconstructive theory.

Elsewhere, I have drawn a sharp distinction between politicsand statecraft.* Suffice it to say that politics, in my view, isthe recovery of the Greek notion of a local public sphere —the municipality — in contrast to the statecraft of the nation-state which we have so mistakenly designated as "politics."We have yet to give enough attention to the city as a terrainfor citizenship, self-empowerment, mutual aid, and a sharedsense of humanitas that transcends the parochialism of tribalsociety and avoids the chauvinism of the nation-state. Yet theradical tradition is filled with revolutionary movements structuredaround the neighborhood or the city itself (the Parisian sectionsof 1793-94, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the town-meetingdemocracy of New England and the American Revolution, tocite only a few). We have yet to reclaim the democratic contentof the great revolutions that liberal and Marxian historiographydesignate as "bourgeois" — an interpretation with which Iemphatically disagree. This democratic content, I hold, has adistinctly libertarian core and speaks directly to existing lib-

* See my "Theses on Libertarian Municipalism" in Our Generation,Vol. 16, Nos. 3 & 4, my new introduction to The Limits of the City (Montreal:Black Rose Books, 1986), where the article is republished, and my forthcomingbook Urbanization Without Cities (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986).


ertarian traditions in America and possibly in Europe. Tragically,we have lost contact with our own radical traditions in Westernsociety and, due in no small measure to Marxism-Leninism,have replaced them with ideologies and a vocabulary that isutterly alien to our own communities.

What I have tried to summarize are the issues and ideas thathave come to the forefront of society since Post-Scarcity An-archism was published. There was no environmental movementwhen I wrote "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1964);no "appropriate technology" movement when I wrote "Towarda Liberatory Technology" (1965); no communitarian movementof a political nature when I wrote "The Forms of Freedom"(1968). It should be kept in mind that proposals for using solarand wind energy, for example, had been abandoned by specialistsin the field when my essay on technology was written, and noserious attention was given to community as a political phe-nomenon when I explored the need for liberatory institutions.For the traditional Left, these issues could have existed on themoon. Not only would it take a decade or more for Marxiststo regard these issues as more than trivial but to desist fromtreating them as "petty bourgeois" at best or outright "re-actionary" at worst.

For the most part, my ideas since writing Post-ScarcityAnarchism have expanded from the bases charted out in thebook. There is very little I would want to discard since it waswritten. Rather, I have elaborated ideas that were dealt within a fairly scanty fashion. Thus, I would want to develop"Forms of Freedom" to include my ideas on libertarian mu-nicipalism, deepen my criticism of Marxism in "Listen, Marx-ist!" and expand my discussion of technics and work in"Towards a Liberatory Technology." I would want to excisemy use of Brecht's recipe for cynical socialism in the closinglines of the essay and temper the importance 1 gave the tech-nological "preconditions" for freedom.

Do I hold that the abolition of "scarcity" is such a "pre-

Introduction I 45

condition" in the historic sense emphasized by Marx? Myacceptance of this view, largely an inheritance of Marxistswho deeply influenced my thinking in the fifties, is not asunqualified as it would seem to be in a quick reading of thebook. The original introduction, it should be noted, deals withscarcity more as a contemporary issue than a historical one.As I note: "Whether this long and tortuous development [aroundmaterial scarcity] could have followed a different, more benign,course is now irrelevant. The development is now behind us"(p. 10). This equivocal statement was deliberately introducedfifteen years ago because I was doubtful about the concept ofscarcity in a historical sense even as I seemed to argue for itsrole in many parts of the book. Viewed as a drama of historythat our era has resolved technologically, I would have to saythat such an interpretation is now unsatisfactory in my eyes,although the role of material deprivation in the past cannot beignored. Yet I would still title this book Post-Scarcity Anarchismif I were to rewrite it. Capitalism is more of an economy thana society, as Karl Polanyi pointed out years ago. In dissolvingmost of the cultural, traditional, and ideological ties that keptneeds under a measure of control, the market system has createda phenomenon that never existed in precapitalist or traditionalsociety as a whole: a fetishization of needs, not only Marx'scelebrated "fetishization of commodities." As I indicate inThe Ecology of Freedom: "Needs, in effect, become a productiveforce, not a subjective force. They become blind in the samesense that the production of commodities becomes blind... Tobreak the grip of the 'fetishization of needs,' to dispel it, is torecover the freedom of choice, a project that is tied to thefreedom of the self to choose.'' * Post-scarcity is a ' 'precondition"under capitalism for exorcising the hold of the economy oversociety, for creating a sufficiency in goods that permits theindividual to choose what he or she really needs or wants, in

* Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books,1982), pp. 68-69.


short, for demystifying the economic by exploding it fromwithin — by sheer abundance — as an all-presiding agent overthe human condition. Put simply: under capitalism we musttry to achieve a level of abundance that renders abundancemeaningless and permits us to take possession of ourselves asfree people, capable of choosing the lifeways that suit us.

By the same token, Post-Scarcity Anarchism does not fetishizetechnology. Quite to the contrary: the reader is warned earlyon in the book that "Technology and the resources of abundancefurnish capitalism with the means of assimilating large sectionsof society to the established system of hierarchy and authority.They provide the system with the weaponry, the detectingdevices and the propaganda media for the threat as well as thereality of massive repression. By their centralistic nature, theresources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic, centralisticand bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In short,they furnish the State with historically unprecedented meansfor manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment of life— and for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation, and unfreedom"(pp. 34-35).

Lest my emphasis on the liberatory potential of technologybe mistaken as an argument for technocracy, the essay "Towardsa Liberatory Technology" introduced themes that have takenon vastly greater significance over the years. The image thattechnology is now a matter of systematic design, not simplyof inspired invention; the enormous range of uses to which"cybernated" devices lend themselves; the use of terms like"miniaturization" to apply to technology as a whole; the notionthat there is an ecological approach to technology that takesthe form of ensembles of productive units, energized by solarand windpower units — all, taken together, are still pioneeringconcepts. They have yet to be fully assimilated by many en-vironmentalists. The argument that we must recover local re-gional resources that were abandoned with the rise of a nationaldivision of labor is a pillar of the best bioregional thinking ofthe eighties. Finally, "The Forms of Freedom," written sev-

Introduction I 47

enteen years ago, still constitutes the basis for my views onlibertarian municipalism (including the assembly as the authenticbasis for democracy) and for my criticism of syndicalism.There is much I hope to expand in this essay in a future bookthat will bear the same title. But there is little I would wantto change in it.

Limitations of space do allow me to itemize point by pointthe ideas that are as relevant today as they were in the sixties.Apart from my qualifying remarks on scarcity and my use ofwords like "preconditions," Post-Scarcity Anarchism formsan indispensable introduction to views I have elaborated inlater books and articles. Nor do I have any reason to eschewthe word "anarchist." The libertarian tradition is as close tome as it was two decades ago and I freely align with it as aproponent, despite criticisms I have voiced of certain tendencieswithin it. Its persistence is a deserved one. And the manypeople in the ecology movement, not to speak of those on theLeft who acknowledge their debt to this tradition, as well asthose who use it without attribution, are living evidence of itsvalue for later generations.

Changing shifts in the world economy and technology havemade a number of items in the book somewhat dated. TheUnited States is no longer the producer of "more than half ofthe world's good" (pages 23 and 64), but rather a good dealless than a third. This relative decline, however, has not alteredmy view that it is the "keystone" in the imperial arch of worldcapitalism. Although its specific weight in production has di-minished economically, its strategic position as a technologicalinnovator and its military power is as great as ever. Nor canwe judge the leading role a country can play by productionfigures at any given time, as the Axis powers dicovered totheir grief during the Second World War when a depression-ridden America with some of the lowest production figures percapita in the world entered the war.

As to details: we can no longer speak of the need to increase


electric-power production fivefold in the remaining years ofthe century (p. 64). The estimates are now much smaller.Research on thermoelectric junctions has been supplanted byphotoelectric junctions as of this writing (p. 125). Electriccars, with their demands for electric power, might do more toincrease pollution from power plants than to diminish it (p. 75).My inclusion of nuclear fuels as part of a mosaic of energysources was perhaps understandable two decades ago, especiallysince I had so-called "clean" thermonuclear sources in mind,but it now cuts across the entire grain of my thinkng (p. 74).The DDP-124 computer runs at 1.75 million cycles a second,not 1.75 "billion." Whether this was a typographical error, Ido not know, but in any case it is wrong.*

I have been warned by a publisher that the student-workermovement that developed in France during May-June 1968 hasall but been forgotten and my comments on it have little rel-evance. Here, I feel obliged to emphasize that the contem-poraneity of an event is no guide to whether it should or shouldnot be discussed. Not only has an entire generation describeditself as the "people of '68," particularly in Europe, wherethe year and its events are regarded as the highpoint of thesixties; the '68 events themselves are too important in termsof the message they offered and the way they unfolded to beneglected. The failure of that great movement is no reason forforgetfulness but, to the contrary, reason for the most searchinganalyses. The two short pieces on "May-June," as it wascalled nearly twenty years ago, provide only part of such ananalysis but one that is indispensable to a discussion of theway in which social movements develop in our era and theway in which they may unfold in the future.

The intellectual and political elaborations I have made sincePost-Scarcity Anarchism was published are too complex to

* I wish to thank Laurence Moore of Ramparts Press for singling out mostof these errors in the book. Other observations which Larry made are interestingenough, but they are largely differences about our interpetation of socialissues rather than mistakes of fact.

Introduction I 49

develop here. My criticisms of Marxism, which were anticipatoryby any standards, have become more complex and fundamentalsince the publication of "Listen, Marxist!" Yet, on rereadingthis work, I find that it is as relevant today as it was when itfirst appeared at the crucial SDS convention of June 1969. Thework is still being republished and its impact on potentialconverts to Marxism is still as powerful as it was many yearsago. More elaborate criticisms for which the essay lays thebasis appear in Toward an Ecological Society and The Ecologyof Freedom. My prediction in the pamphlet that soldiers couldplay a revolutionary role, not simply workers, was to acquireflesh-and-blood dimensions in Portugal, when rank-and-filetroops proved to be more revolutionary than many socialistsand their working-class followers. "Listen, Marxist!" it shouldbe noted, was never seriously challenged by the Marxist pressin the sixties and seventies. Despite its enormous distribution,it was carefully enveloped in a conspiracy of silence whichpersists to this very day. Indeed, many of its ideas were simplyappropriated by so-called "neo-Marxists" years after its pub-lication and hybridized with elements of the Marxian canon.

Since the publication of Post-Scarcity Anarchism my devel-opment of social ecology has moved ahead by enormous stridesand now includes works on nature philosophy, ecological ethics,criticisms of sociobiology and other reactionary forms of biol-ogism, and a more ecological approach to natural evolution.My views on technology and social reconstruction, particularlyecological politics based on libertarian municipalism, fillhundreds of pages in Towards an Ecological Society, TheEcology of Freedom, the Black Rose edition of The Limits ofthe City, and my latest book, The Modern Crisis, a commonventure of Black Rose Books in Canada and New SocietyPublishers and the Institute for Social Ecology in the UnitedStates. Lastly, my book Urbanization Without Cities will bepublished as of this writing by Sierra Club Books in San Fran-cisco. This volume develops themes to which The Limits ofthe City forms an indispensable introduction. The two books


complement each other and should be explored by readers whoare interested in an ecological interpretation of politics and therecovery of genuine citizenship.

I have found "purity" nowhere in this world except in themature music of Mozart and the moral probity of Fermin Sal-vochea, the Spanish anarchist "saint." Every idea advancedin this book is, in some sense, very "impure" — and, worse,has its antithesis in ideas and movements that are grossly wrong.Social ecology, a term that is already finding its way into theacademic mainstream, is being cheapened by its antithesis insociobiology, antihumanism, and outright ecofascism. Naturephilosophy, such as I have advanced in my own writings, hasits antithesis in an all-inclusive application of systems theory,reductionism as a mystique of a universal "Oneness," a mythof "interconnectedness" that loses sight of all distinctions or"mediations" (to use Hegel's term), and outright appeals to"blood-and-soil" chauvinism or dialectical materialism. Anecological ethics based on freedom has its antithesis in deter-ministic doctrines of "natural law," the "morality of the gene,"social Darwinism, and the ethics of the "lifeboat" and "triage."Libertarian visions of community and politics have their antithesisin parliamentary politics, party organization, and electoral mo-bilization as distinguished from education. There is no magicstrategy or pure dogma that provides us with principles or apractice that stands above the conflicts between right and wrongor good and evil — unless it is so far removed from the realworld that it is insulated by distance and marginality from thetaint of experience. I do not have to be reminded that socialecology can breed its opposite in utterly reactionary perversionsof its truth. Or that it can be coopted in name and tarnishedin spirit. Much of my life has been devoted to writing criticalarticles against those who pervert or infiltrate authenticallyecological views with utterly alien notions that have been bredby explicit reactionaries as well as self-styled "radicals."

What the sixties should teach us, then, is that there is nosubstitute for consciousness. Truth will emerge only from insight,

Introduction / 51

critical thinking, a reality principle that does not sacrifice prin-ciples to opportunistic gains, a moral probity that can resistdescent into the surrender of ideals. Education remains on theorder of the day — indeed, more so today than earlier becauseof the complexity of our problems and the massive drift towardintellectual vulgarity.

What the sixties should also teach us is that a countercultureis not enough — important as it is. What we need are the firmskeletal structures to support such a new culture — notably,counterinstitutions. This confronts us with the need to createa political movement that is libertarian and rescues the word"politics" from the ignominy of statecraft. Impure as theymay be, there are still areas of life — notably, the municipalities— that can be reclaimed as a new political sphere by an activecitizenry in popular assemblies, confederated, and ultimatelydeveloped into a counterpower with counterinstitutions thatstand opposed to those of the nation-state. The eighties andsixties now face each other in direct confrontation — not asconflicting eras that raise opposing alternatives, but as com-plementary ones that, taken together, provide the opportunityfor fuller alternatives than those which existed twenty yearsago and today. Whether we can bring these complementarydecades together, each of which has so much to give to theother, in a reconstructive politics that opens a new way to ourpresent-day impasse will determine the future of this centuryand much of the one to come.

Murray BookchinSeptember 1985

Post-ScarcityAnarchism

PRECONDITIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

All the successful revolutions of the past have been par-ticularistic revolutions of minority classes seeking to asserttheir specific interests over those of society as awhole. The great bourgeois revolutions of modern timesoffered an ideology of sweeping political reconstitution,but in reality they merely certified the social dominance ofthe bourgeoisie, giving formal political expression to theeconomic ascendancy of capital. The lofty notions of the"nation," the "free citizen," of equality before the law,"concealed the mundane reality of the centralized state, theatomized isolated man, the dominance of bourgeois inter-est. Despite their sweeping ideological claims, the particu-laristic revolutions replaced the rule of one class byanother, one system of exploitation by another, one sys-tem of toil by another, and one system of psychologicalrepression by another.

What is unique about our era is that the particularisticrevolution has now been subsumed by the possibility ofthe generalized revolution—complete and totalistic. Bour-geois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized themeans of production on a scale unprecedented in history.This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation,has created the objective, quantitative basis for a worldwithout class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. Themeans now exist for the development of the rounded man,the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authori-tarian modes of training, and given over to desire and thesensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possibleto conceive of man's future experience in terms of a coher-

55


ent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activ-ity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, in-dividuality and community, man and nature, town andcountry, education and life, work and play are all resolved,harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively newrealm of freedom. Just as the particularized revolution pro-duced a particularized, bifurcated society, so the general-ized revolution can produce an organically unified, many-sided community. The great wound opened by propertiedsociety in the form of the "social question" can now behealed.

That freedom must be conceived of in human terms, notin animal terms—in terms of life, not of survival—is clearenough. Men do not remove their ties of bondage andbecome fully human merely by divesting themselves ofsocial domination and obtaining freedom in its abstractform. They must also be free concretely: free from mate-rial want, from toil, from the burden of devoting thegreater part of their time—indeed, the greater part of theirlives—to the struggle with necessity. To have seen thesematerial preconditions for human freedom, to have em-phasized that freedom presupposes free time and the mate-rial abundance for abolishing free time as a social privilege,is the great contribution of Karl Marx to modern revolu-tionary theory.

By the same token, the preconditions for freedom mustnot be mistaken for the conditions of freedom. The possi-bility of liberation does not constitute its reality. Alongwith its positive aspects, technological advance has a dis-tinctly negative, socially regressive side. If it is true thattechnological progress enlarges the historical potentialityfor freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control oftechnology reinforces the established organization of soci-ety and everyday life. Technology and the resources ofabundance furnish capitalism with the means for assimilat-ing large sections of society to the established system of

Post-Scarcity Anarchism / 57

hierarchy and authority. They provide the system with theweaponry, the detecting devices and the propagandamedia for the threat as well as the reality of massive repres-sion. By their centralistic nature, the resources of abun-dance reinforce the monopolistic, centralistic and bureau-cratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In short, theyfurnish the state with historically unprecedented means formanipulating and mobilizing the entire environment oflife—and for perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation and un-freedom.

It must be emphasized, however, that this manipulationand mobilization of the environment is extremely prob-lematical and laden with crises. Far from leading to pacifi-cation (one can hardly speak, here, of harmonization), theattempt of bourgeois society to control and exploit itsenvironment, natural as well as social, has devastating con-sequences. Volumes have been written on the pollution ofthe atmosphere and waterways, on the destruction of treecover and soil, and on toxic materials in foods and liquids.Even more threatening in their final results are the pollu-tion and destruction of the very ecology required for acomplex organism like man. The concentration of radio-active wastes in living things is a menace to the health andgenetic endowment of nearly all species. Worldwide con-tamination by pesticides that inhibit oxygen production inplankton or by the near-toxic level of lead from gasolineexhaust are examples of an enduring pollution thatthreatens the biological integrity of all advanced life-forms—including man.

No less alarming is the fact that we must drasticallyrevise our traditional notions of what constitutes an envi-ronmental pollutant. A few decades ago it would havebeen absurd to describe carbon dioxide and heat as pollu-tants in the customary sense of the term. Yet both mayWell rank among the most serious sources of future eco-


logical imbalance and may pose major threats to the via-bility of the planet. As a result of industrial and domesticcombustion activities, the quantity of carbon dioxide inthe atmosphere has increased by roughly twenty-five per-cent in the past one hundred years, and may well doubleby the end of the century. The famous "greenhouseeffect" which the increasing quantity of the gas is ex-pected to produce has been widely discussed in the media;eventually, it is supposed, the gas will inhibit the dissipa-tion of the world's heat into space, causing a rise in overalltemperatures which will melt the polar ice caps and resultin the inundation of vast coastal areas. Thermal pollution,the result mainly of warm water discharged by nuclear andconventional power plants, has had disastrous effects onthe ecology of lakes, rivers and estuaries. Increases inwater temperature not only damage the physiological andreproductive activities of the fish, they also promote thegreat blooms of algae that have become such formidableproblems in waterways.

Ecologically, bourgeois exploitation and manipulationare undermining the very capacity of the earth to sustainadvanced forms of life. The crisis is being heightened bymassive increases in air and water pollution; by a mountingaccumulation of nondegradable wastes, lead residues, pesti-cide residues and toxic additives in food; by the expansionof cities into vast urban belts; by increasing stresses due tocongestion, noise and mass living; and by the wanton scar-ring of the earth as a result of mining operations, lumber-ing, and real estate speculation. As a result, the earth hasbeen despoiled in a few decades on a scale that is unprece-dented in the entire history of human habitation of theplanet.

Socially, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation havebrought everyday life to the most excruciating point ofvacuity and boredom. As society has been converted into afactory and a marketplace, the very rationale of life has

Post-Scarcity Anarchism I 59

been reduced to production for its own sake—and con-sumption for its own sake.*

THE REDEMPTIVE DIALECTICIs there a redemptive dialectic that can guide the socialdevelopment in the direction of an anarchic society wherepeople will attain full control over their daily lives? Ordoes the social dialectic come to an end with capitalism, itspossibilities sealed off by the use of a highly advancedtechnology for repressive and co-optative purposes?

We must learn here from the limits of Marxism, a proj-ect which, understandably in a period of material scarcity,anchored the social dialectic and the contradictions ofcapitalism in the economic realm. Marx, it has been em-phasized, examined the preconditions for liberation, notthe conditions of liberation. The Marxian critique is rootedin the past, in the era of material want and relativelylimited technological development. Even its humanistictheory of alienation turns primarily on the issue of workand man's alienation from the product of his labor. Today,however, capitalism is a parasite on the future, a vampirethat survives on the technology and resources of freedom.The industrial capitalism of Marx's time organized its com-modity relations around a prevailing system of materialscarcity; the state capitalism of our time organizes its com-modity relations around a prevailing system of materialabundance. A century ago, scarcity had to be endured;today, it has to be enforced—hence the importance of the* It is worth noting here that the emergence of the "consumersociety" provides us with remarkable evidence of the difference be-tween the industrial capitalism of Marx's time and state capitalismtoday. In Marx's view, capitalism as a system organized around"production for the sake of production" results in the economicimmiseration of the proletariat. "Production for the sake of produc-tion" is paralleled today by "consumption for the sake of consump-tion," in which immiseration takes a spiritual rather than an econ-omic form—it is starvation of life.


state in the present era. It is not that modern capitalismhas resolved its contradictions* and annulled the socialdialectic, but rather that the social dialectic and thecontradictions of capitalism have expanded from theeconomic to the hierarchical realms of society, from theabstract "historic" domain to the concrete minutiae ofeverday experience, from the arena of survival to the arenaof life.

The dialectic of bureaucratic state capitalism originatesin the contradiction between the repressive character ofcommodity society and the enormous potential freedomopened by technological advance. This contradiction alsoopposes the exploitative organization of society to thenatural world—a world that includes not only the naturalenvironment, but also man's "nature"—his Eros-derivedimpulses. The contradiction between the exploitativeorganization of society and the natural environment isbeyond co-optation: the atmosphere, the waterways, thesoil and the ecology required for human survival are notredeemable by reforms, concessions, or modifications ofstrategic policy. There is no technology that can reproduceatmospheric oxygen in sufficient quantities to sustain lifeon this planet. There is no substitute for the hydrologicalsystems of the earth. There is no technique for removingmassive environmental pollution by radioactive isotopes,pesticides, lead and petroleum wastes. Nor is there thefaintest evidence that bourgeois society will relent at anytime in the foreseeable future in its disruption of vitalecological processes, in its exploitation of natural re-sources, in its use of the atmosphere and waterways asdumping areas for wastes, or in its cancerous mode ofurbanization and land abuse.

Even more immediate is the contradiction between the

* The economic contradictions of capitalism have not disappeared,but the system can plan to such a degree that they no longer havethe explosive characteristics they had in the past.


exploitative organization of society and man's Eros-derivedimpulses—a contradiction that manifests itself as the banal-ization and impoverishment of experience in a bureaucrati-cally manipulated, impersonal mass society. The Eros-derived impulses in man can be repressed and sublimated,but they can never be eliminated. They are renewed withevery birth of a human being and with every generation ofyouth. It is not surprising today that the young, more thanany economic class or stratum, articulate the life-impulsesin humanity's nature—the urgings of desire, sensuousness,and the lure of the marvelous. Thus, the biological matrix,from which hierarchical society emerged ages ago, re-appears at a new level with the era that marks the end ofhierarchy, only now this matrix is saturated with socialphenomena. Short of manipulating humanity's germplasm, the life-impulses can be annulled only with the an-nihilation of man himself.

The contradictions within bureaucratic state capitalismpermeate all the hierarchical forms developed and over-developed by bourgeois society. The hierarchical formswhich nurtured propertied society for ages and promotedits development—the state, city, centralized economy,bureaucracy, patriarchal family, and marketplace—havereached their historic limits. They have exhausted theirsocial functions as modes of stabilization. It is not a ques-tion of whether these hierarchical forms were ever "pro-gressive" in the Marxian sense of the term. As RaoulVaneigem has observed: "Perhaps it isn't enough to saythat hierarchical power has preserved humanity for thou-sands of years as alcohol preserves a fetus, by arrestingeither growth or decay."3 Today these forms constitutethe target of all the revolutionary forces that are generatedby modern capitalism, and whether one sees their outcomeas nuclear catastrophe or ecological disaster they nowthreaten the very survival of humanity.


With the development of hierarchical forms into a threatto the very existence of humanity, the social dialectic, farfrom being annulled, acquires a new dimension. It posesthe "social question" in an entirely new way. If man hadto acquire the conditions of survival in order to live (asMarx emphasized), now he must acquire the conditions oflife in order to survive. By this inversion of the relationshipbetween survival and life, revolution acquires a new senseof urgency. No longer are we faced with Marx's famouschoice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted withthe more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation.The problems of necessity and survival have become con-gruent with the problems of freedom and life. They ceaseto require any theoretical mediation, "transitional" stages,or centralized organizations to bridge the gap between theexisting and the possible. The possible, in fact, is all thatcan exist. Hence, the problems of "transition," which oc-cupied the Marxists for nearly a century, are eliminatednot only by the advance of technology, but by the socialdialectic itself. The problems of social reconstruction havebeen reduced to practical tasks that can be solved sponta-neously by self-liberatory acts of society.

Revolution, in fact, acquires not only a new sense ofurgency, but a new sense of promise. In the hippies' tribal-ism, in the drop-out lifestyles and free sexuality of millionsof youth, in the spontaneous affinity groups of the anar-chists, we find forms of affirmation that follow from actsof negation. With the inversion of the "social question"there is also an inversion of the social dialectic; a "yea"emerges automatically and simultaneously with a "nay."

The solutions take their point of departure from theproblems. When the time has arrived in history that thestate, the city, bureaucracy, the centralized economy, thepatriarchal family and the marketplace have reached theirhistoric limits, what is posed is no longer a change in formbut the absolute negation of all hierarchical forms as such.


The absolute negation of the state is anarchism—a situationin which men liberate not only "history," but all the im-mediate circumstances of their everyday lives. The abso-lute negation of the city is community—a community inwhich the social environment is decentralized intorounded, ecologically balanced communes. The absolutenegation of bureaucracy is immediate as distinguishedfrom mediated relations—a situation in which representa-tion is replaced by face-to-face relations in a general as-sembly of free individuals. The absolute negation of thecentralized economy is regional ecotechnology—a situationin which the instruments of production are molded to theresources of an ecosystem. The absolute negation of thepatriarchal family is liberated sexuality—in which all formsof sexual regulation are transcended by the spontaneous,untrammeled expression of eroticism among equals. Theabsolute negation of the marketplace is communism—inwhich collective abundance and cooperation transformlabor into play and need into desire.

SPONTANEITY AND UTOPIAIt is not accidental that at a point in history when hier-archical power and manipulation have reached their mostthreatening proportions, the very concepts of hierarchy,power and manipulation are being brought into question.The challenge to these concepts comes from a rediscoveryof the importance of spontaneity—a rediscovery nourishedby ecology, by a heightened conception of self-develop-ment, and by a new understanding of the revolutionaryprocess in society.

What ecology has shown is that balance in nature isachieved by organic variation and complexity, not byhomogeneity and simplification. For example, the morevaried the flora and fauna of an ecosystem, the more stablethe population of a potential pest. The more environ-mental diversity is diminished, the greater will the popula-


tion of a potential pest fluctuate, with the probability thatit will get out of control. Left to itself, an ecosystem tendsspontaneously toward organic differentiation, greater vari-ety of flora and fauna, and diversity in the number of preyand predators. This does not mean that interference byman must be avoided. The need for a productive agricul-ture—itself a form of interference with nature—mustalways remain in the foreground of an ecological approachto food cultivation and forest management. No less impor-tant is the fact that man can often produce changes in anecosystem that would vastly improve its ecological quality.But these efforts require insight and understanding, notthe exercise of brute power and manipulation.

This concept of management, this new regard for theimportance of spontaneity, has far-reaching applicationsfor technology and community—indeed, for the socialimage of man in a liberated society. It challenges the capi-talist ideal of agriculture as a factory operation, organizedaround immense, centrally controlled land-holdings, highlyspecialized forms of monoculture, the reduction of theterrain to a factory floor, the substitution of chemical fororganic processes, the use of gang-labor, etc. If food culti-vation is to be a mode of cooperation with nature ratherthan a contest between opponents, the agriculturist mustbecome thoroughly familiar with the ecology of the land;he must acquire a new sensitivity to its needs and possibili-ties. This presupposes the reduction of agriculture to ahuman scale, the restoration of moderate-sized agriculturalunits, and the diversification of the agricultural situation;in short, it presupposes a decentralized, ecological systemof food cultivation.

The same reasoning applies to pollution control. Thedevelopment of giant factory complexes and the use ofsingle- or dual-energy sources are responsible for atmos-pheric pollution. Only by developing smaller industrialunits and diversifying energy sources by the extensive use


of clean power (solar, wind and water power) will it bepossible to reduce industrial pollution. The means for thisradical technological change are now at hand. Technolo-gists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scaleindustrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisti-cated methods for converting solar, wind and water energyinto power usable in industry and the home. These substi-tutes are often more productive and less wasteful than thelarge-scale facilities that exist today.*

The implications of small-scale agriculture and industryfor a community are obvious: if humanity is to use theprinciples needed to manage an ecosystem, the basic com-munal unit of social life must itself become an eco-system—an ecocommunity. It too must become diversified,balanced and well-rounded. By no means is this conceptof community motivated exclusively by the need for alasting balance between man and the natural world; it alsoaccords with the Utopian ideal of the rounded man, theindividual whose sensibilities, range of experience and life-style are nourished by a wide range of stimuli, by a diver-sity of activities, and by a social scale that always remainswithin the comprehension of a single human being. Thusthe means and conditions of survival become the meansand conditions of life; need becomes desire and desirebecomes need. The point is reached where the greatestsocial decomposition provides the source of the highestform of social integration, bringing the most pressing eco-logical necessities into a common focus with the highestUtopian ideals.

If it is true, as Guy Debord observes, that "daily life isthe measure of everything: of the fulfillment or rather thenon-fulfillment of human relationships, of the use wemake of our time,"4 a question arises: Who are "we"

* For a detailed discussion of this "miniaturized" technology see"Towards a Liberatory Technology."


whose daily lives are to be fulfilled? And how does theliberated self emerge that is capable of turning time intolife, space into community, and human relationships intothe marvelous?

The liberation of the self involves, above all, a socialprocess. In a society that has shriveled the self into a com-modity—into an object manufactured for exchange—therecan be no fulfilled self. There can only be the beginningsof selfhood, the emergence of a self that seeks fulfill-ment—a self that is largely defined by the obstacles it mustovercome to achieve realization. In a society whose belly isdistended to the bursting point with revolution, whosechronic state is an unending series of labor pains, whosereal condition is a mounting emergency, only one thoughtand act is relevant—giving birth. Any environment, privateor social, that does not make this fact the center of humanexperience is a sham and diminishes whatever self remainsto us after we have absorbed our daily poison of everydaylife in bourgeois society.

It is plain that the goal of revolution today must be theliberation of daily life. Any revolution that fails to achievethis goal is counterrevolution. Above all, it is we who haveto be liberated, our daily lives, with all their moments,hours and days, and not universals like "History" and"Society."* The self must always be identifiable in therevolution, not overwhelmed by it. The self must alwaysbe perceivable in the revolutionary process, not submergedby it. There is no word that is more sinister in the "revolu-tionary" vocabulary than "masses." Revolutionary libera-

* Despite its lip service to the dialectic, the traditional left has yetto take Hegel's "concrete universal" seriously and see it not merelyas a philosophical concept but as a social program. This has beendone only in Marx's early writings, in the writings of the great Uto-pians (Fourier and William Morris) and, in our time, by the drop-outyouth.


tion must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimen-sions, not "mass liberation" or "class liberation" behindwhich lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state. Ifa revolution fails to produce a new society by the self-activity and self-mobilization of revolutionaries, if it doesnot involve the forging of a self in the revolutionary proc-ess, the revolution will once again circumvent those whoselives are to be lived every day and leave daily life un-affected. Out of the revolution must emerge a self thattakes full possession of daily life, not a daily life that onceagain takes full possession of the self. The most advancedform of class consciousness thus becomes self-consciousness—the concretization in daily life of the greatliberating universals.

If for this reason alone, the revolutionary movement isprofoundly concerned with lifestyle. It must try to live therevolution in all its totality, not only participate in it. Itmust be deeply concerned with the way the revolutionistlives, his relations with the surrounding environment, andhis degree of self-emancipation. In seeking to change soci-ety, the revolutionist cannot avoid changes in himself thatdemand the reconquest of his own being. Like the move-ment in which he participates, the revolutionist must tryto reflect the conditions of the society he is trying toachieve—at least to the degree that this is possible today.

The treacheries and failures of the past half centuryhave made it axiomatic that there can be no separation ofthe revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. Asociety whose fundamental aim is self-administration in allfacets of life can be achieved only by self-activity. Thisimplies a mode of administration that is always possessedby the self. The power of man over man can be destroyedonly by the very process in which man acquires power overhis own life and in which he not only "discovers" himselfbut, more meaningfully, in which he formulates his self-


hood in all its social dimensions.A libertarian society can be achieved only by a liberta-

rian revolution. Freedom cannot be "delivered" to theindividual as the "end-product" of a "revolution"; theassembly and community cannot be legislated or decreedinto existence. A revolutionary group can seek, pur-posively and consciously, to promote the creation of theseforms, but if assembly and community are not allowed toemerge organically, if their growth is not matured by theprocess of demassification, by self-activity and by self-realization, they will remain nothing but forms, like theSoviets in postrevolutionary Russia. Assembly and commu-nity must arise within the revolutionary process; indeed,the revolutionary process must be the formation of as-sembly and community, and also the destruction of power,property, hierarchy and exploitation.

Revolution as self-activity is not unique to our time. Itis the paramount feature of all the great revolutions inmodern history. It marked the journees of the sans-culottes in 1792 and 1793, the famous "Five Days" ofFebruary 1917 in Petrograd, the uprising of the Barce-lona proletariat in 1936, the early days of the HungarianRevolution in 1956, and the May-June events in Paris in1968. Nearly every revolutionary uprising in the history ofour time has been initiated spontaneously by the self-activity of "masses"—often in flat defiance of the hesitantpolicies advanced by the revolutionary organizations.Every one of these revolutions has been marked by extra-ordinary individuation, by a joyousness and solidarity thatturned everyday life into a festival. This surreal dimensionof the revolutionary process, with its explosion of deep-seated libidinal forces, grins irascibly through the pages ofhistory like the face of a satyr on shimmering water. It isnot without reason that the Bolshevik commissars smashedthe wine bottles in the Winter Palace on the night of No-vember 7, 1917.


The puritanism and work ethic of the traditional leftstem from one of the most powerful forces opposing revo-lution today—the capacity of the bourgeois environmentto infiltrate the revolutionary framework. The origins ofthis power lie in the commodity nature of man undercapitalism, a quality that is almost automatically trans-ferred to the organized group—and which the group, inturn, reinforces in its members. As the late Josef Weberemphasized, all organized groups "have the tendency torender themselves autonomous, i.e., to alienate themselvesfrom their original aim and to become an end in them-selves in the hands of those administering them."5 Thisphenomenon is as true of revolutionary organizations as itis of state and semi-state institutions, official parties andtrade unions.

The problem of alienation can never be completely re-solved apart from the revolutionary process itself, but itcan be guarded against by an acute awareness that theproblem exists, and partly solved by a voluntary but dras-tic remaking of the revolutionary and his group. This re-making can only begin when the revolutionary grouprecognizes that it is a catalyst in the revolutionary process,not a "vanguard." The revolutionary group must clearlysee that its goal is not the seizure of power but the disso-lution of power—indeed, it must see that the entireproblem of power, of control from below and controlfrom above, can be solved only if there is no above orbelow.

Above all, the revolutionary group must divest itself ofthe forms of power—statutes, hierarchies, property, pre-scribed opinions, fetishes, paraphernalia, official eti-quette—and of the subtlest as well as the most obvious ofbureaucratic and bourgeois traits that consciously and un-consciously reinforce authority and hierarchy. The groupmust remain open to public scrutiny not only in its formu-lated decisions but also in their very formulation. It must


be coherent in the profound sense that its theory is itspractice and its practice its theory. It must do away withall commodity relations in its day-to-day existence andconstitute itself along the decentralizing organizationalprinciples of the very society it seeks to achieve—community, assembly, spontaneity. It must, in JosefWeber's superb words, be "marked always by simplicityand clarity, always thousands of unprepared people canenter and direct it, always it remains transparent to andcontrolled by all."6 Only then, when the revolutionarymovement is congruent with the decentralized communityit seeks to achieve, can it avoid becoming another elitistobstacle to the social development and dissolve into therevolution like surgical thread into a healing wound.

PROSPECTThe most important process going on in America today isthe sweeping de-institutionalization of the bourgeois socialstructure. A basic, far-reaching disrespect and a profounddisloyalty are developing toward the values, the forms, theaspirations and, above all, the institutions of the estab-lished order. On a scale unprecedented in American his-tory, millions of people are shedding their commitment tothe society in which they live. They no longer believe in itsclaims. They no longer respect its symbols. They no longeraccept its goals, and, most significantly, they refuse almostintuitively to live by its institutional and social codes.

This growing refusal runs very deep. It extends from anopposition to war into a hatred of political manipulationin all its forms. Starting from a rejection of racism, itbrings into question the very existence of hierarchicalpower as such. In its detestation of middle-class values andlifestyles it rapidly evolves into a rejection of the commo-dity system; from an irritation with environmental pollu-tion, it passes into a rejection of the American city andmodern urbanism. In short, it tends to transcend every

Post-Scarcity Anarchism / 7 1

particularistic critique of the society and to evolve into ageneralized opposition to the bourgeois order on an everbroadening scale.

In this respect, the period in which we live closely re-sembles the revolutionary Enlightenment that sweptthrough France in the eighteenth century—a period thatcompletely reworked French consciousness and preparedthe conditions for the Great Revolution of 1789. Then asnow, the old institutions were slowly pulverized by molec-ular action from below long before they were toppled bymass revolutionary action. This molecular movement cre-ates an atmosphere of general lawlessness: a growing per-sonal day-to-day disobedience, a tendency not to "goalong" with the existing system, a seemingly "petty" butnevertheless critical attempt to circumvent restriction inevery facet of daily life. The society, in effect, becomesdisorderly, undisciplined, Dionysian—a condition that re-veals itself most dramatically in an increasing rate of offi-cial crimes. A vast critique of the system develops—theactual Enlightenment itself, two centuries ago, and thesweeping critique that exists today—which seeps down-ward and accelerates the molecular movement at the base.Be it an angry gesture, a "riot" or a conscious change inlifestyle, an ever-increasing number of people—who haveno more of a commitment to an organized revolutionarymovement than they have to society itself—begin sponta-neously to engage in their own defiant propaganda of thedeed.

In its concrete details, the disintegrating social process isnourished by many sources. The process develops with allthe unevenness, indeed with all the contradictions, thatmark every revolutionary trend. In eighteenth centuryFrance, radical ideology oscillated between a rigid scien-tism and a sloppy romanticism. Notions of freedom wereanchored in a precise, logical ideal of self-control, and also


a vague, instinctive norm of spontaneity. Rousseau stoodat odds with d'Holbach, Diderot at odds with Voltaire, yetin retrospect we can see that one not only transcended butalso presupposed the other in a cumulative developmenttoward revolution.

The same uneven, contradictory and cumulative devel-opment exists today, and in many cases it follows a re-markably direct course. The "beat" movement created themost important breach in the solid, middle-class values ofthe 1950s, a breach that was widened enormously by theillegalities of pacifists, civil-rights workers, draft resistersand longhairs. Moreover, the merely reactive response ofrebellious American youth has produced invaluable formsof libertarian and Utopian affirmation—the right to makelove without restriction, the goal of community, the dis-avowal of money and commodities, the belief in mutualaid, and a new respect for spontaneity. Easy as it is forrevolutionaries to criticize certain pitfalls within this orien-tation of personal and social values, the fact remains that ithas played a preparatory role of decisive importance informing the present atmosphere of indiscipline, sponta-neity, radicalism and freedom.

A second parallel between the revolutionary Enlighten-ment and our own period is the emergence of the crowd,the so-called "mob," as a major vehicle of social protest.The typical institutionalized forms of public dissatisfac-tion—in our own day, they are orderly elections, demon-stration and mass meetings—tend to give way to directaction by crowds. This shift from predictable, highlyorganized protests within the institutionalized frameworkof the existing society to sporadic, spontaneous, near-insurrectionary assaults from outside (and even against)socially acceptable forms reflects a profound change inpopular psychology. The "rioter" has begun to break,however partially and intuitively, with those deep-seatednorms of behavior which traditionally weld the "masses"


to the established order. He actively sheds the internalizedstructure of authority, the long-cultivated body of condi-tioned reflexes, and the pattern of submission sustained byguilt that tie one to the system even more effectively thanany fear of police violence and juridical reprisal. Contraryto the views of social psychologists, who see in thesemodes of direct action the submission of the individual toa terrifying collective entity called the "mob," the truth isthat "riots" and crowd actions represent the first gropingsof the mass toward individuation. The mass tends tobecome demassified in the sense that it begins to assertitself against the really massifying automatic responses pro-duced by the bourgeois family, the school and the massmedia. By the same token, crowd actions involve the redis-covery of the streets and the effort to liberate them. Ulti-mately, it is in the streets that power must be dissolved:for the streets, where daily life is endured, suffered anderoded, and where power is confronted and fought, mustbe turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed,created and nourished. The rebellious crowd marked thebeginning not only of a spontaneous transmutation of pri-vate into social revolt, but also of a return from the ab-stractions of social revolt to the issues of everyday life.

Finally, as in the Enlightenment, we are seeing the emer-gence of an immense and ever-growing stratum ofdeclasses, a body of lumpenized individuals drawn fromevery stratum of society. The chronically indebted andsocially insecure middle classes of our period compareloosely with the chronically insolvent and flighty nobilityof prerevolutionary France. A vast flotsam of educatedpeople emerged then as now, living at loose ends, withoutfixed careers or established social roots. At the bottom ofboth structures we find a large number of chronic poor-vagabonds, drifters, people with part-time jobs or no jobsat all, threatening, unruly sans-culottes— surviving on pub-lic aid and on the garbage thrown off by society, the poor


of the Parisian slums, the blacks of the American ghettoes.But here all the parallels end. The French Enlighten-

ment belongs to a period of revolutionary transition fromfeudalism to capitalism—both societies based on economicscarcity, class rule, exploitation, social hierarchy and statepower. The day-to-day popular resistance which markedthe eighteenth century and culminated in open revolutionwas soon disciplined by the newly emerging industrialorder—as well as by naked force. The vast mass of declassesand sans-culottes was largely absorbed into the factorysystem and tamed by industrial discipline. Formerly root-less intellectuals and footloose nobles found secure placesin the economic, political, social and cultural hierarchy ofthe new bourgeois order. From a socially and culturallyfluid condition, highly generalized in its structure and rela-tions, society hardened again into rigid, particularized classand institutional forms—the classical Victorian era ap-peared not only in England but, to one degree or another,in all of Western Europe and America. Critique was con-solidated into apologia, revolt into reform, declasses intoclearly defined classes and "mobs" into political constitu-encies. "Riots" became the well-behaved processionals wecall "demonstrations," and spontaneous direct actionturned into electoral rituals.

Our own era is also a transitional one, but with a pro-found and new difference. In the last of their great insur-rections, the sans-culottes of the French Revolution roseunder the fiery cry: "Bread and the Constitution of '93!"The black sans-culottes of the American ghettoes riseunder the slogan: "Black is beautiful!" Between these twoslogans lies a development of unprecedented importance.The declasses of the eighteenth century were formed dur-ing a slow transition from an agricultural to an industrialera; they were created out of a pause in the historicaltransition from one regime of toil to another. The demandfor bread could have been heard at any time in the evolu-


tion of propertied society. The new declasses of the twen-tieth century are being created as a result of the bank-ruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the endproducts of the process of propertied society itself and ofthe social problems of material survival. In the era whentechnological advances and cybernation have brought intoquestion the exploitation of man by man, toil, and mate-rial want in any form whatever, the cry "Black is beauti-ful" or "Make love, not war" marks the transformation ofthe traditional demand for survival into a historically newdemand for life.* What underpins every social conflict inthe United States today is the demand for the realizationof all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced,totalistic way of life. In short, the potentialities for revolu-tion in America are now anchored in the potentialities ofman himself.

What we are witnessing is the breakdown of a centuryand a half of embourgeoisement and a pulverization of allbourgeois institutions at a point in history when the bold-est concepts of Utopia are realizable. And there is nothingthat the present bourgeois order can substitute for thedestruction of its traditional institutions but bureaucraticmanipulation and state capitalism. This process is unfold-ing most dramatically in the United States. Within a periodof little more than two decades, we have seen the collapseof the "American Dream," or what amounts to the samething, the steady destruction in the United States of the

* The above lines were written in 1966. Since then, we have seenthe graffiti on the walls of Paris, during the May-June revolution:"All power to the imagination"; "I take my desires to be reality,because I believe in the reality of my desires"; "Never work"; "Themore I make love, the more I want to make revolution"; "Lifewithout dead times"; "The more you consume, the less you live";"Culture is the inversion of life"; "One does not buy happiness, onesteals it"; "Society is a carnivorous flower." These are not graffiti,they are a program for life and desire.


myth that material abundance, based on commodity rela-tions between men, can conceal the inherent poverty ofbourgeois life. Whether this process will culminate in revo-lution or in annihilation will depend in great part on theability of revolutionists to extend social consciousness anddefend the spontaneity of the revolutionary developmentfrom authoritarian ideologies, both of the "left" and ofthe right.

New YorkOct. 1967-Dec. 1968 Ecology

andRevolutionary

Thought

D -

In almost every period since the Renaissance the develop-ment of revolutionary thought has been heavily influencedby a branch of science, often in conjunction with a schoolof philosophy.

Astronomy in the time of Copernicus and Galileohelped to change a sweeping movement of ideas from themedieval world, riddled by superstition, into one pervadedby a critical rationalism and openly naturalistic andhumanistic in outlook. During the Enlightenment—the erathat culminated in the French Revolution—this liberatorymovement of ideas was reinforced by advances in mechan-ics and mathematics. The Victorian era was shaken to itsvery foundations by evolutionary theories in biology andanthropology, by Marx's contributions to political econ-omy, and by Freudian psychology.

In our own time, we have seen the assimilation ofthese once-liberatory sciences by the established socialorder. Indeed, we have begun to regard science itself asan instrument of control over the thought processes andphysical being of man. This distrust of science and of thescientific method is not without justification. "Manysensitive people, especially artists," observes AbrahamMaslow, "are afraid that science besmirches and de-presses, that it tears things apart rather than integratingthem, thereby killing rather than creating." 7 What is per-haps equally important, modern science has lost its criticaledge. Largely functional or instrumental in intent, thebranches of science that once tore at the chains of man arenow used to perpetuate and gild them. Even philosophyhas yielded to instrumentalism and tends to be little morethan a body of logical contrivances; it is the handmaiden

79


of the computer rather than of the revolutionary.There is one science, however, that may yet restore and

even transcend the liberatory estate of the traditionalsciences and philosophies. It passes rather loosely underthe name "ecology"—a term coined by Haeckel a centuryago to denote "the investigation of the total relations ofthe animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environ-ment." 8 At first glance, Haeckel's definition is innocuousenough; and ecology narrowly conceived of as one ofthe biological sciences, is often reduced to a varietyof biometrics in which field workers focus on food chainsand statistical studies of animal populations. There is anecology of health that would hardly offend the sensibilitiesof the American Medical Association and a concept ofsocial ecology that would conform to the mostwell-engineered notions of the New York City PlanningCommission.

Broadly conceived of, however, ecology deals with thebalance of nature. Inasmuch as nature includes man, thescience basically deals with the harmonization of natureand man. The explosive implications of an ecological ap-proach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically acritical science—critical on a scale that the most radicalsystems of political economy have failed to attain—butalso because it is an integrative and reconstructive science.This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carriedthrough to all its implications, leads directly into anarchicareas of social thought. For, in the final analysis, it isimpossible to achieve a harmonization of man and naturewithout creating a human community that lives in a lastingbalance with its natural environment.

THE CRITICAL NATURE OF ECOLOGY

The critical edge of ecology, a unique feature of thescience in a period of general scientific docility, derives

Ecology and Revolutionary Thought / 81

from its subject matter—from its very domain. The issueswith which ecology deals are imperishable in the sense thatthey cannot be ignored without bringing into question thesurvival of man and the survival of the planet itself. Thecritical edge of ecology is due not so much to the power ofhuman reason—a power which science hallowed during itsmost revolutionary periods—but to a still higher power, thesovereignty of nature. It may be that man is manipulable,as the owners of the mass media argue, or that elements ofnature are manipulable, as the engineers demonstrate, butecology clearly shows that the totality of the naturalworld—nature viewed in all its aspects, cycles and interrela-tionships—cancels out all human pretensions to masteryover the planet. The great wastelands of the Mediterraneanbasin, once areas of a thriving agriculture or a rich naturalflora, are historic evidence of nature's revenge against hu-man parasitism.

No historic examples compare in weight and scope withthe effects of man's despoliation—and nature's revenge-since the days of the Industrial Revolution, and especiallysince the end of the Second World War. Ancient examplesof human parasitism were essentially local in scope; theywere precisely examples of man's potential for destruction,and nothing more. Often, they were compensated by re-markable improvements in the natural ecology of a region,such as the European peasantry's superb reworking of thesoil during centuries of cultivation and the achievements ofInca agriculturists in terracing the Andes Mountains duringthe pre-Columbian times.

Modern man's despoliation of the environment is globalin scope, like his imperialisms. It is even extraterrestrial, aswitness the disturbances of the Van Alien Belt a few yearsago. Today human parasitism disrupts more than the at-mosphere, climate, water resources, soil, flora and fauna ofa region: it upsets virtually all the basic cycles of nature


and threatens to undermine the stability of the environ-ment on a worldwide scale.

As an example of the scope of modern man's disruptiverole, it has been estimated that the burning of fossil fuels(coal and oil) adds 600 million tons of carbon dioxide tothe air annually, about .03 percent of the total atmos-pheric mass—this, I may add, aside from an incalculablequantity of toxicants. Since the Industrial Revolution, theoverall atmospheric mass of carbon dioxide has increasedby 25 percent over earlier, more stable, levels. It can beargued on very sound theoretical grounds that this growingblanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting heat radiatedfrom the earth, will lead to more destructive storm pat-terns and eventually to melting of the polar ice caps, risingsea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas. Far re-moved as such a deluge may be, the changing proportionof carbon dioxide to other atmospheric gases is a warningabout the impact man is having on the balance of nature.

A more immediate ecological issue is man's extensivepollution of the earth's waterways. What counts here is notthe fact that man befouls a given stream, river or lake—athing he has done for ages—but rather the magnitude waterpollution has reached in the past two generations. Nearlyall the surface waters of the United States are now pol-luted. Many American waterways are open cesspools thatproperly qualify as extensions of urban sewage systems. Itis a euphemism to describe them as rivers or lakes. Moresignificantly, large amounts of ground water are suffi-ciently polluted to be undrinkable, and a number of localhepatitis epidemics have been traced to polluted wells insuburban areas. In contrast to surface-water pollution, thepollution of ground or subsurface water is immensely diffi-cult to eliminate and tends to linger on for decades afterthe sources of pollution have been removed.

An article in a mass-circulation magazine appropriatelydescribes the polluted waterways of the United States as

Ecology and Revolutionary Thought I 83

"Our Dying Waters." This despairing, apocalyptic descrip-tion of the water pollution problem in the United Statesreally applies to the world at large. The waters of the earthare literally dying. Massive pollution is destroying therivers and lakes of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as wellas the long-abused waterways of highly industrialized con-tinents, as media of life. (I speak here not only of radio-active pollutants from nuclear bomb tests and power reac-tors, which apparently reach all the flora and fauna of thesea; the oil spills and the discharge of diesel oil have alsobecome massive pollution problems, claiming marine life inenormous quantities every year.)

Accounts of this kind can be repeated for virtually everypart of the biosphere. Pages could be written on the im-mense losses of productive soil that occur annually in al-most every continent of the earth; on lethal air pollutionepisodes in major urban areas; on the worldwide distribu-tion of toxic agents, such as radioactive isotopes and lead;on the chemicalization of man's immediate environment--one might say his very dinner table—with pesticide residuesand food additives. Pieced together like bits of a jigsawpuzzle, these affronts to the environment form a patternof destruction that has no precedent in man's long historyon earth.

Obviously, man could be described as a highly destruc-tive parasite who threatens to destroy his host—the naturalworld—and eventually himself. In ecology, however, theword "parasite" is not an answer to a question, but raises aquestion itself. Ecologists know that a destructive parasi-tism of this kind usually reflects the disruption of an eco-logical situation; indeed, many species that seem highlydestructive under one set of conditions are eminently use-ful under another set of conditions. What imparts a pro-foundly critical function to ecology is the question raisedby man's destructive abilities: What is the disruption thathas turned man into a destructive parasite? What produces


a form of parasitism that results not only in vast naturalimbalances but also threatens the existence of humanityitself?

Man has produced imbalances not only in nature, but,more fundamentally, in his relations with his fellow manand in the very structure of his society. The imbalancesman has produced in the natural world are caused by theimbalances he has produced in the social world. A centuryago it would have been possible to regard air pollution andwater contamination as the result of the self-seeking activi-ties of industrial barons and bureaucrats. Today, this moralexplanation would be a gross oversimplification. It isdoubtless true that most bourgeois enterprises are stillguided by a public-be-damned attitude, as witness the reac-tions of power utilities, automobile concerns and steel cor-porations to pollution problems. But a more seriousproblem than the attitude of the owners is the size of thefirms themselves—their enormous proportions, their loca-tion in a particular region, their density with respect to acommunity or waterway, their requirements for raw mate-rials and water, and their role in the national division oflabor.

What we are seeing today is a crisis in social ecology.Modern society, especially as we know it in the UnitedStates and Europe, is being organized around immense ur-ban belts, a highly industrialized agriculture and, cappingboth, a swollen, bureaucratized, anonymous state appara-tus. If we put all moral considerations aside for the mo-ment and examine the physical structure of this society,what must necessarily impress us is the incredible logisticalproblems it is obliged to solve—problems of transportation,of density, of supply (of raw materials, manufactured com-modities and foodstuffs), of economic and political or-ganization, of industrial location, and so forth. The burdenthis type of urbanized and centralized society places onany continental area is enormous.


DIVERSITY AND SIMPLICITY

The problem runs even deeper. The notion that man mustdominate nature emerges directly from the domination ofman by man. The patriarchal family planted the seed ofdomination in the nuclear relations of humanity; the classi-cal split in the ancient world between spirit and reality—indeed, between mind and labor—nourished it; the anti-naturalist bias of Christianity tended to its growth. But itwas not until organic community relations, feudal or pea-sant in form, dissolved into market relationships that theplanet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation.This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbatingdevelopment in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherentlycompetitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits hu-mans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanityagainst the natural world. Just as men are converted intocommodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into acommodity, a resource to be manufactured and mer-chandised wantonly. The liberal euphemisms for theprocesses involved are "growth," "industrial society" and"urban blight." By whatever language they are described,the phenomena have their roots in the domination of manby man.

The phrase "consumer society" complements the de-scription of the present social order as an "industrial soci-ety." Needs are tailored by the mass media to create apublic demand for utterly useless commodities, each care-fully engineered to deteriorate after a predeterminedperiod of time. The plundering of the human spirit by themarketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth bycapital. (The liberal identification is a metaphor that neu-tralizes the social thrust of the ecological crisis.)

Despite the current clamor about population growth,the strategic ratios in the ecological crisis are not the popu-lation growth rates of India but the production rates of the


United States, a country that produces more than half ofthe world's goods. Here, too, liberal euphemisms like "af-fluence" conceal the critical thrust of a blunt word like"waste." With a ninth of its industrial capacity committedto war production, the U.S. is literally trampling upon theearth and shredding ecological links that are vital to humansurvival. If current industrial projections prove to be ac-curate, the remaining thirty years of the century will wit-ness a fivefold increase in electric power production, basedmostly on nuclear fuels and coal. The colossal burden inradioactive wastes and other effluents that this increasewill place on the natural ecology of the earth hardly needsdescription.

In shorter perspective, the problem is no less disquiet-ing. Within the next five years, lumber production mayincrease an overall twenty percent; the output of paper,five percent annually; folding boxes, three percent an-nually; plastics (which currently form one to two percentof municipal wastes), seven percent annually. Collectively,these industries account for the most serious pollutants inthe environment. The utterly senseless nature of modernindustrial activity is perhaps best illustrated by the declinein returnable (and reusable) beer bottles from 54 billionbottles in 1960 to 26 billion today. Their place has beentaken over by "one-way" bottles (a rise from 8 to 21billion in the same period) and cans (an increase from 38to 53 billion). The "one-way" bottles and the cans, ofcourse, pose tremendous problems in solid waste disposal.

The planet, conceived of as a lump of minerals, cansupport these mindless increases in the output of trash.The earth, conceived of as a complex web of life, certainlycannot. The only question is whether the earth can surviveits looting long enough for man to replace the currentdestructive social system with a humanistic, ecologicallyoriented society.

Ecologists are often asked, rather tauntingly, to locate


with scientific exactness the ecological breaking point ofnature—the point at which the natural world will cave inon man. This is equivalent to asking a psychiatrist for theprecise moment when a neurotic will become a nonfunc-tional psychotic. No such answer is ever likely to be avail-able. But the ecologist can supply a strategic insight intothe directions man seems to be following as a result of hissplit with the natural world.

From the standpoint of ecology, man is dangerouslyoversimpliflying his environment. The modern city repre-sents a regressive encroachment of the synthetic on thenatural, of the inorganic (concrete, metals, and glass) onthe organic, of crude, elemental stimuli on variegated,wide-ranging ones. The vast urban belts now developing inindustrialized areas of the world are not only grossly offen-sive to the eye and the ear, they are chronically smog-ridden, noisy, and virtually immobilized by congestion.

The process of simplifying man's environment and ren-dering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural aswell as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate im-mense urban populations—to transport, feed, employ, edu-cate and somehow entertain millions of densely concen-trated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and socialstandards. A mass concept of human relations—totali-tarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends todominate the more individuated concepts of the past.Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to re-place humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous,creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standard-ized, the regulated and the massified. The space of theindividual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposedupon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Anyrecognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly sur-rendered to the manipulation of the lowest commondenominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical ap-proach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to


triumph over the precious individualized and qualitativeapproach which places the strongest emphasis on personaluniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity.

The same regressive simplification of the environmentoccurs in modern agriculture.* The manipulated people inmodern cities must be fed, and to feed them involves anextension of industrial farming. Food plants must be culti-vated in a manner that allows for a high degree of mechani-zation—not to reduce human toil but to increase produc-tivity and efficiency, to maximize investments, and toexploit the biosphere. Accordingly, the terrain must bereduced to a flat plain—to a factory floor, if you will—andnatural variations in topography must be diminished asmuch as possible. Plant growth must be closely regulatedto meet the tight schedules of food-processing factories.Plowing, soil fertilization, sowing and harvesting must behandled on a mass scale, often in total disregard of thenatural ecology of an area. Large areas of the land must beused to cultivate a single crop—a form of plantation agri-culture that not only lends itself to mechanization but alsoto pest infestation. A single crop is the ideal environmentfor the proliferation of pest species. Finally, chemicalagents must be used lavishly to deal with the problemscreated by insects, weeds, and plant diseases, to regulatecrop production, and to maximize soil exploitation. Thereal symbol of modern agriculture is not the sickle (or, forthat matter, the tractor), but the airplane. The modernfood cultivator is represented not by the peasant, the yeo-

* For insight into this problem the reader may consult The Ecologyof Invasions by Charles S. Elton (Wiley; New York, 1958), Soil andCivilisation by Edward Hyams (Thames and Hudson; London,1952), Our Synthetic Environment by Murray Bookchin [pseud.Lewis Herber] (Knopf; New York, 1962), and Silent Spring byRachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1962). The last should beread not as a diatribe against pesticides but as a plea for ecologicaldiversification.


man, or even the agronomist—men who could be expectedto have an intimate relationship with the unique qualitiesof the land on which they grow crops—but the pilot orchemist, for whom soil is a mere resource, an inorganic rawmaterial.

The simplification process is carried still further by anexaggerated regional (indeed, national) division of labor.Immense areas of the planet are increasingly reserved forspecific industrial tasks or reduced to depots for raw mate-rials. Others are turned into centers of urban population,largely occupied with commerce and trade. Cities andregions (in fact, countries and continents) are specificallyidentified with special products—Pittsburgh, Cleveland andYoungstown with steel, New York with finance, Boliviawith tin, Arabia with oil, Europe and the U.S. with indus-trial goods, and the rest of the world with raw materials ofone kind or another. The complex ecosystems which makeup the regions of a continent are submerged by an organi-zation of entire nations into economically rationalizedentities, each a way station in a vast industrial belt-system,global in its dimensions. It is only a matter of time beforethe most attractive areas of the countryside succumb tothe concrete mixer, just as most of the Eastern seashoreareas of the United States have already succumbed to sub-divisions and bungalows. What will remain in the way ofnatural beauty will be debased by trailer lots, canvas slums,"scenic" highways, motels, food stalls and the oil slicks ofmotor boats.

The point is that man is undoing the work of organicevolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of con-crete, metal and glass, by overriding and undermining thecomplex, subtly organized ecosystems that constitute localdifferences in the natural world—in short, by replacing ahighly complex, organic environment with a simplified, in-organic one--man is disassembling the biotic pyramid thatsupported humanity for countless millennia. In the course


of replacing the complex ecological relationships, on whichall advanced living things depend, for more elementaryrelationships, man is steadily restoring the biosphere to astage which will be able to support only simpler forms oflife. If this great reversal of the evolutionary process con-tinues, it is by no means fanciful to suppose that the pre-conditions for higher forms of life will be irreparably de-stroyed and the earth will become incapable of supportingman himself.

Ecology derives its critical edge not only from the factthat it alone, among all the sciences, presents this awesomemessage to humanity, but also because it presents this mes-sage in a new social dimension. From an ecological view-point, the reversal of organic evolution is the result ofappalling contradictions between town and country, stateand community, industry and husbandry, mass manufac-ture and craftsmanship, centralism and regionalism, thebureaucratic scale and the human scale.

THE RECONSTRUCTIVE NATURE OF ECOLOGY

Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions cre-ated by urbanization, centralization, bureaucratic growthand statification were viewed as a vain counterdrift to"progress"—a counterdrift that could be dismissed as chi-merical and reactionary. The anarchist was regarded as aforlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia forthe peasant village or the medieval commune. His yearn-ings for a decentralized society and for a humanisticcommunity at one with nature and the needs of the indi-vidual—the spontaneous individual, unfettered by author-ity—were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of adeclassed craftsman or an intellectual "misfit." His protestagainst centralization and statification seemed all the lesspersuasive because it was supported primarily by ethicalconsiderations—by Utopian, ostensibly "unrealistic," no-tions of what man could be, not by what he was. In re-


sponse to this protest, opponents of anarchist thought--liberals, rightists and authoritarian "leftists"—argued thatthey were the voices of historic reality, that their statistand centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practi-cal world.

Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatevermay have been the validity of libertarian and non-liber-tarian views a few years ago, historical development hasrendered virtually all objections to anarchist thoughtmeaningless today. The modern city and state, the massivecoal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, thelater, more rationalized, systems of mass production andassembly-line systems of labor organization, the central-ized nation, the state and its bureaucratic apparatus—allhave reached their limits. Whatever progressive or libera-tory role they may have possessed, they have now becomeentirely regressive and oppressive. They are regressive notonly because they erode the human spirit and drain thecommunity of all its cohesiveness, solidarity andethico-cultural standards; they are regressive from anobjective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint. Forthey undermine not only the human spirit and the humancommunity but also the viability of the planet and allliving things on it.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anarchistconcepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democ-racy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized soci-ety—these rich libertarian concepts—are not only desirable,they are also necessary. They belong not only to the greatvisions of man's future, they now constitute the precondi-tions for human survival. The process of social develop-ment has carried them out of the ethical, subjective dimen-sion into a practical, objective dimension. What was onceregarded as impractical and visionary has become emi-nently practical. And what was once regarded as practicaland objective has become eminently impractical and irrele-


vant in terms of man's development towards a fuller, un-fettered existence. If we conceive of demands for commu-nity, face-to-face democracy, a humanistic liberatorytechnology and decentralization merely as reactions to theprevailing state of affairs—a vigorous "nay" to the "yea"of what exists today—a compelling, objective case can nowbe made for the practicality of an anarchist society.

A rejection of the prevailing state of affairs accounts, Ithink, for the explosive growth of intuitive anarchismamong young people today. Their love of nature is a reac-tion against the highly synthetic qualities of our urbanenvironment and its shabby products. Their informality ofdress and manners is a reaction against the formalized,standardized nature of modern institutionalized living.Their predisposition for direct action is a reaction againstthe bureaucratization and centralization of society. Theirtendency to drop out, to avoid toil and the rat race, re-flects a growing anger towards the mindless industrial rou-tine bred by modern mass manufacture in the factory, theoffice or the university. Their intense individualism is, inits own elemental way, a de facto decentralization of sociallife—a personal withdrawal from mass society.

What is most significant about ecology is its ability toconvert this often nihilistic rejection of the status quo intoan emphatic affirmation of life—indeed, into a reconstruc-tive credo for a humanistic society. The essence of ecol-ogy's reconstructive message can be summed up in theword "diversity." From an ecological viewpoint, balanceand harmony in nature, in society and, by inference, inbehavior, are achieved not by mechanical standardizationbut by its opposite, organic differentiation. This messagecan be understood clearly only by examining its practicalmeaning.

Let us consider the ecological principle of diversity—what Charles Elton calls the "conservation of variety"—asit applies to biology, specifically to agriculture. A number


of studies—Lotka's and Volterra's mathematical models,Bause's experiments with protozoa and mites in controlledenvironments, and extensive field research—clearly demon-strate that fluctuations in animal and plant populations,ranging from mild to pestlike proportions, depend heavilyupon the number of species in an ecosystem and on thedegree of variety in the environment. The greater the vari-ety of prey and predators, the more stable the population;the more diversified the environment in terms of flora andfauna, the less likely there is to be ecological instability.Stability is a function of variety and diversity: if the envi-ronment is simplified and the variety of animal and plantspecies is reduced, fluctuations in population becomemarked and tend to get out of control. They tend to reachpest proportions.

In the case of pest control, many ecologists now con-clude that we can avoid the repetitive use of toxic chemi-cals such as insecticides and herbicides by allowing for agreater interplay between living things. We must leavemore room for natural spontaneity, for the diverse bio-logical forces that make up an ecological situation. "Euro-pean entomologists now speak of managing the entireplant-insect community," observes Robert L. Rudd. "It iscalled manipulation of the biocenose.* The biocenetic en-vironment is varied, complex and dynamic. Although num-bers of individuals will constantly change, no one specieswill normally reach pest proportions. The special condi-

* Rudd's use of the word "manipulation" is likely to create theerroneous impression that an ecological situation can be describedby simple mechanical terms. Lest this impression arise, I would liketo emphasize that our knowledge of an ecological situation and thepractical use of this knowledge are matters of insight rather thanpower. Charles Elton states the case for the management of an eco-logical situation when he writes: "The world's future has to bemanaged, but this management would not be like a game of chess. . . [but] more like steering a boat."


tions which allow high populations of a single species in acomplex ecosystem are rare events. Management of thebiocenose or ecosystem should become our goal, challeng-ing as it is."9

The "manipulation" of the biocenose in a meaningfulway, however, presupposes a far-reaching decentralizationof agriculture. Wherever feasible, industrial agriculturemust give way to soil and agricultural husbandry; the fac-tory floor must yield to gardening and horticulture. I donot wish to imply that we must surrender the gains ac-quired by large-scale agriculture and mechanization. What Ido contend, however, is that the land must be cultivated asthough it were a garden; its flora must be diversified andcarefully tended, balanced by fauna and tree shelter appro-priate to the region. Decentralization is important, more-over, for the development of the agriculturist as well as forthe development of agriculture. Food cultivation, prac-ticed in a truly ecological sense, presupposes that the agri-culturist is familiar with all the features and subtleties ofthe terrain on which the crops are grown. He must have athorough knowledge of the physiography of the land, itsvariegated soils—crop land, forest land, pasture land—itsmineral and organic content and its micro-climate, and hemust be engaged in a continuing study of the effects pro-duced by new flora and fauna. He must develop his sensiti-vity to the land's possibilities and needs while he becomesan organic part of the agricultural situation. We can hardlyhope to achieve this high degree of sensitivity and inte-gration in the food cultivator without reducing agricultureto a human scale, without bringing agriculture within thescope of the individual. To meet the demands of an eco-logical approach to food cultivation, agriculture must berescaled from huge industrial farms to moderate-sizedunits.

The same reasoning applies to a rational development ofenergy resources. The Industrial Revolution increased the


quantity of energy used by man. Although it is certainlytrue that preindustrial societies relied primarily on animalpower and human muscles, complex energy patterns de-veloped in many regions of Europe, involving a subtle inte-gration of resources such as wind and water power, and avariety of fuels (wood, peat, coal, vegetable starches andanimal fats).

The Industrial Revolution overwhelmed and largely de-stroyed these regional energy patterns, replacing them firstby a single energy system (coal) and later by a dual system(coal and petroleum). Regions disappeared as models ofintegrated energy patterns—indeed, the very concept of in-tegration through diversity was obliterated. As I indicatedearlier, many regions became predominantly mining areas,devoted to the extraction of a single resource, while otherswere turned into immense industrial areas, often devotedto the production of a few commodities. We need notreview the role this breakdown in true regionalism hasplayed in producing air and water pollution, the damage ithas inflicted on large areas of the countryside, and theprospect we face in the depletion of our precious hydro-carbon fuels.

We can, of course, turn to nuclear fuels, but it is chillingto think of the lethal radioactive wastes that would requiredisposal if power reactors were our sole energy source.Eventually, an energy system based on radioactive mate-rials would lead to the widespread contamination of theenvironment—at first in a subtle form, but later on a mas-sive and palpably destructive scale. Or we could apply eco-logical principles to the solution of our energy problems.We could try to re-establish earlier regional energy pat-terns, using a combined system of energy provided bywind, water and solar power. We would be aided by de-vices more sophisticated than any known in the past.

Solar devices, wind turbines and hydro-electric re-sources, taken singly, do not provide a solution for our


energy problems and the ecological disruption created byconventional fuels. Pieced together as a mosaic, as anorganic energy pattern developed from the potentialities ofa region, they could amply meet the needs of a decen-tralized society. In sunny latitudes, we could rely moreheavily on solar energy than on combustible fuels. In areasmarked by atmospheric turbulence, we could rely moreheavily on wind devices; and in suitable coastal areas orinland regions with a good network of rivers, the greaterpart of our energy would come from hydro-electric instal-lations. In all cases, we would use a mosaic of non-combus-tible, combustible, and nuclear fuels. The point I wish tomake is that by diversifying our use of energy resources,by organizing them into an ecologically balanced pattern,we could combine wind, solar and water power in a givenregion to meet the industrial and domestic needs of a givencommunity with only a minimal use of harmful fuels. And,eventually, we might sophisticate our non-combustionenergy devices to a point where all harmful sources ofenergy could be eliminated.

As in the case of agriculture, however, the application ofecological principles to energy resources presupposes a far-reaching decentralization of society and a truly regionalconcept of social organization. To maintain a large cityrequires immense quantities of coal and petroleum. Bycontrast, solar, wind and tidal energy reach us mainly insmall packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the newdevices seldom provide more than a few thousand kilo-watt-hours of electricity. It is difficult to believe that wewill ever be able to design solar collectors that can furnishus with the immense blocks of electric power produced bya giant steam plant; it is equally difficult to conceive of abattery of wind turbines that will provide us with enoughelectricity to illuminate Manhattan Island. If homes andfactories are heavily concentrated, devices for using cleansources of energy will probably remain mere playthings;


but if urban communities are reduced in size and widelydispersed over the land, there is no reason why these de-vices cannot be combined to provide us with all the ameni-ties of an industrialized civilization. To use solar, wind andtidal power effectively, the megalopolis must be decen-tralized. A new type of community, carefully tailored tothe characteristics and resources of a region, must replacethe sprawling urban belts that are emerging today.

To be sure, an objective case for decentralization doesnot end with a discussion of agriculture and the problemscreated by combustible energy resources. The validity ofthe decentralist case can be demonstrated for nearly all the"logistical" problems of our time. Let me cite an examplefrom the problematical area of transportation. A great dealhas been written about the harmful effects of gasoline-driven motor vehicles—their wastefulness, their role in ur-ban air pollution, the noise they contribute to the cityenvironment, the enormous death toll they claim annuallyin the large cities of the world and on highways. In ahighly urbanized civilization it would be useless to replacethese noxious vehicles by clean, efficient, virtually noise-less, and certainly safer, battery-powered vehicles. The bestof our electric cars must be recharged about every hundredmiles—a feature which limits their usefulness for transpor-tation in large cities. In a small, decentralized community,however, it would be feasible to use these electric vehiclesfor urban or regional transportation and establish monorailnetworks for long-distance transportation.

It is fairly well known that gasoline-powered vehiclescontribute enormously to urban air pollution, and there isa strong sentiment to "engineer" the more noxious fea-tures of the automobile into oblivion. Our age characteris-tically tries to solve all its irrationalities with a gimmick--afterburners for toxic gasoline fumes, antibiotics for illhealth, tranquilizers for psychic disturbances. But theproblem of urban air pollution is too intractable for gim-


micks; perhaps it is more intractable than we care to be-lieve. Basically, air pollution is caused by high populationdensities—by an excessive concentration of people in asmall area. Millions of people, densely concentrated in alarge city, necessarily produce serious local air pollutionmerely by their day-to-day activities. They must burn fuelsfor domestic and industrial reasons; they must construct ortear down buildings (the aerial debris produced by theseactivities is a major source of urban air pollution); theymust dispose of immense quantities of rubbish; they musttravel on roads with rubber tires (the particles produced bythe erosion of tires and roadway materials add significantlyto air pollution). Whatever pollution-control devices weadd to automobiles and power plants, the improvementsthese devices will produce in the quality of urban air willbe more than canceled out by future megalopolitangrowth.

There is more to anarchism than decentralized commu-nities. If I have examined this possibility in some detail, ithas been to demonstrate that an anarchist society, far frombeing a remote ideal, has become a precondition for thepractice of ecological principles. To sum up the criticalmessage of ecology: if we diminish variety in the naturalworld, we debase its unity and wholeness; we destroy theforces making for natural harmony and for a lasting equili-brium; and, what is even more significant, we introduce anabsolute retrogression in the development of the naturalworld which may eventually render the environment unfitfor advanced forms of life. To sum up the reconstructivemessage of ecology: if we wish to advance the unity andstability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize it,we must conserve and promote variety. To be sure, merevariety for its own sake is a vacuous goal. In nature, varietyemerges spontaneously. The capacities of a new species aretested by the rigors of climate, by its ability to deal withpredators and by its capacity to establish and enlarge its


niche. Yet the species that succeeds in enlarging its nichein the environment also enlarges the ecological situation asa whole. To borrow E. A. Gutkind's phrase, it "expandsthe environment,"10 both for itself and for the specieswith which it enters into a balanced relationship.

How do these concepts apply to social theory? To manyreaders, I suppose, it should suffice to say that, inasmuchas man is part of nature, an expanding natural environmentenlarges the basis for social development. But the answerto the question goes much deeper than many ecologistsand libertarians suspect. Again, allow me to return to theecological principle of wholeness and balance as a productof diversity. Keeping this principle in mind, the first steptowards an answer is provided by a passage in HerbertRead's "The Philosophy of Anarchism." In presenting his"measure of progress," Read observes: "Progress is mea-sured by the degree of differentiation within a society. Ifthe individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life will belimited, dull, and mechanical. If the individual is a unit onhis own, with space and potentiality for separate action,then he may be more subject to accident or chance, but atleast he can expand and express himself. He can develop—develop in the only real meaning of the word—develop inconsciousness of strength, vitality, and joy."

Read's thought, unfortunately, is not fully developed,but it provides an interesting point of departure. What firststrikes us is that both the ecologist and the anarchist placea strong emphasis on spontaneity. The ecologist, insofar ashe is more than a technician, tends to reject the notion of"power over nature." He speaks, instead, of "steering" hisway through an ecological situation, of managing ratherthan recreating an ecosystem. The anarchist, in turn,speaks in terms of social spontaneity, of releasing thepotentialities of society and humanity, of giving free andunfettered rein to the creativity of people. Both, in theirown way, regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limit-


ing the creative potential of a natural and social situation.Their object is not to rule a domain, but to release it. Theyregard insight, reason and knowledge as means for fulfillingthe potentialities of a situation, as facilitating the workingout of the logic of a situation, not as replacing its poten-tialities with preconceived notions or distorting their devel-opment with dogmas.

Turning to Read's words, what strikes us is that both theecologist and the anarchist view differentiation as a mea-sure of progress. The ecologist uses the term "biotic pyra-mid" in speaking of biological advances; the anarchist, theword "individuation" to denote social advances. If we gobeyond Read we will observe that, to both the ecologistand the anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved bygrowing differentiation. An expanding whole is created bythe diversification and enrichment of its parts.

Just as the ecologist seeks to expand the range of anecosystem and promote a free interplay between species,so the anarchist seeks to expand the range of social experi-ence and remove all fetters to its development. Anarchismis not only a stateless society but also a harmonized soci-ety which exposes man to the stimuli provided by bothagrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mentalactivity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spiritu-ality, to communal solidarity and individual development,to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, tospontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toiland the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid soci-ety, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeedas sharply opposed. They appear as dualities because of thevery logistics of present-day society—the separation oftown and country, the specialization of labor, the atomiza-tion of man—and it would be preposterous to believe thatthese dualities could be resolved without a general idea ofthe physical structure of an anarchist society. We can gainsome idea of what such a society would be like by reading


William Morris's News From Nowhere and the writings ofPeter Kropotkin. But these works provide us with mereglimpses. They do not take into account the post-WorldWar II developments of technology and the contributionsmade by the development of ecology. This is not the placeto embark on "utopian writing," but certain guidelines canbe presented even in a general discussion. And in present-ing these guidelines, I am eager to emphasize not only themore obvious ecological premises that support them, butalso the humanistic ones.

An anarchist society should be a decentralized society,not only to establish a lasting basis for the harmonizationof man and nature, hut also to add new dimensions to theharmonization of man and man. The Greeks, we are oftenreminded, would have been horrified by a city whose sizeand population precluded a face-to-face, often familiar,relationship between citizens. There is plainly a need toreduce the dimensions of the human community—partly tosolve our pollution and transportation problems, partlyalso to create real communities. In a sense, we musthumanize humanity. Electronic devices such as telephones,telegraphs, radios and television receivers should be usedas little as possible to mediate the relations betweenpeople. In making collective decisions—the ancient Athe-nian ecclesia was, in some ways, a model for making socialdecisions—all members of the community should have anopportunity to acquire in full the measure of anyone whoaddresses the assembly. They should be in a position toabsorb his attitudes, study his expressions, and weigh hismotives as well as his ideas in a direct personal encounterand through face-to-face discussion.

Our small communities should be economically bal-anced and well rounded, partly so that they can make fulluse of local raw materials and energy resources, partly alsoto enlarge the agricultural and industrial stimuli to whichindividuals are exposed. The member of a community who


has a predilection for engineering, for instance, should beencouraged to steep his hands in humus; the man of ideasshould be encouraged to employ his musculature; the "in-born" farmer should gain a familiarity with the workingsof a rolling mill. To separate the engineer from the soil, thethinker from the spade, and the farmer from the industrialplant promotes a degree of vocational overspecializationthat leads to a dangerous measure of social control byspecialists. What is equally important, professional and vo-cational specialization prevents society from achieving avital goal: the humanization of nature by the technicianand the naturalization of society by the biologist.

I submit that an anarchist community would approxi-mate a clearly definable ecosystem; it would be diversified,balanced and harmonious. It is arguable whether such anecosystem would acquire the configuration of an urbanentity with a distinct center, such as we find in the Greekpolis or the medieval commune, or whether, as Gutkindproposes, society would consist of widely dispersed com-munities without a distinct center. In any case, the ecologi-cal scale for any of these communities would be deter-mined by the smallest ecosystem capable of supporting apopulation of moderate size.

A relatively self-sufficient community, visibly depen-dent on its environment for the means of life, would gain anew respect for the organic interrelationships that sustainit. In the long run, the attempt to approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, prove more efficient than theexaggerated national division of labor that prevails today.Although there would doubtless be many duplications ofsmall industrial facilities from community to community,the familiarity of each group with its local environmentand its ecological roots would make for a more intelligentand more loving use of its environment. I submit that, farfrom producing provincialism, relative self-sufficiencywould create a new matrix for individual and communal


development—a oneness with the surroundings that wouldvitalize the community.

The rotation of civic, vocational and professional re-sponsibilities would stimulate the senses in the being of theindividual, creating and rounding out new dimensions inself-development. In a complete society we could hope tocreate complete men; in a rounded society, rounded men.In the Western world, the Athenians, for all their short-comings and limitations, were the first to give us a notionof this completeness. "The polis was made for the ama-teur," H. D. F. Kitto tells us. "Its ideal was that everycitizen (more or less, according as the polls was democraticor oligarchic) should play his part in all of its many activi-ties—an ideal that is recognizably descended from the gene-rous Homeric conception of arete as an all-round excel-lence and an all-round activity. It implies a respect for thewholeness or the oneness of life, and a consequent dislikeof specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—orrather a much higher ideal of efficiency; and efficiencywhich exists not in one department of life, but in lifeitself."11 An anarchist society, although it would surelyaspire to more, could hardly hope to achieve less than thisstate of mind.

If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice,social life will yield a sensitive development of human andnatural diversity, falling together into a well balanced, har-monious whole. Ranging from community through regionto entire continents, we will see a colorful differentiationof human groups and ecosystems, each developing itsunique potentialities and exposing members of the com-munity to a wide spectrum of economic, cultural and be-havioral stimuli. Falling within our purview will be an ex-citing, often dramatic, variety of communal forms—heremarked by architectural and industrial adaptations tosemi-arid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere byadaptation to forested areas. We will witness a creative


interplay between individual and group, community andenvironment, humanity and nature. The cast of mind thattoday organizes differences among humans and other life-forms along hierarchical lines, defining the external interms of its "superiority" or "inferiority," will give way toan outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological man-ner. Differences among people will be respected, indeedfostered, as elements that enrich the unity of experienceand phenomena. The traditional relationship which pitssubject against object will be altered qualitatively; the "ex-ternal," the "different," the "other" will be conceived ofas individual parts of a whole all the richer because of itscomplexity. This sense of unity will reflect the harmo-nization of interests between individuals and betweensociety and nature. Freed from an oppressive routine, fromparalyzing repressions and insecurities, from the burdensof toil and false needs, from the trammels of authority andirrational compulsion, individuals will finally, for the firsttime in history, be in a position to realize their poten-tialities as members of the human community and thenatural world.

New YorkFebruary 1965

Towards aLiberatory

Technology

DNot since the days of the Industrial Revolution havepopular attitudes toward technology fluctuated as sharplyas in the past few decades. During most of the twenties,and even well into the thirties, public opinion generallywelcomed technological innovation and identified man'swelfare with the industrial advances of the time. This was aperiod when Soviet apologists could justify Stalin's mostbrutal methods and worst crimes merely by describing himas the "industrializer" of modern Russia. It was also aperiod when the most effective critique of capitalist soci-ety could rest on the brute facts of economic and tech-nological stagnation in the United States and WesternEurope. To many people there seemed to be a direct, one-to-one relationship between technological advances andsocial progress; a fetishism of the word "industrialization"excused the most abusive of economic plans and programs.

Today, we would regard these attitudes as naive. Exceptperhaps for the technicians and scientists who design the"hardware," the feeling of most people toward techno-logical innovation could be described as schizoid, dividedinto a gnawing fear of nuclear extinction on the one hand,and a yearning for material abundance, leisure and securityon the other. Technology, too, seems to be at odds withitself. The bomb is pitted against the power reactor, theintercontinental missile against the communications satel-lite. The same technological discipline tends to appearboth as a foe and a friend of humanity, and even tradi-tionally human-oriented sciences, such as medicine, oc-cupy an ambivalent position—as witness the promise ofadvances in chemotherapy and the threat created byresearch in biological warfare.

It is not surprising to find that the tension between

107


promise and threat is increasingly being resolved in favorof threat by a blanket rejection of technology. To an ever-growing extent, technology is viewed as a demon, imbuedwith a sinister life of its own, that is likely to mechanizeman if it fails to exterminate him. The deep pessimism thisview produces is often as simplistic as the optimism thatprevailed in earlier decades. There is a very real danger thatwe will lose our perspective toward technology, that wewill neglect its liberatory tendencies, and, worse, submitfatalistically to its use for destructive ends. If we are not tobe paralyzed by this new form of social fatalism, a balancemust be struck.

The purpose of this article is to explore three questions.What is the liberatory potential of modern technology,both materially and spiritually? What tendencies, if any,are reshaping the machine for use in an organic, human-oriented society? And finally, how can the new technologyand resources be used in an ecological manner—that is, topromote the balance of nature, the full development ofnatural regions, and the creation of organic, humanisticcommunities?

The emphasis in the above remarks should be placed onthe word "potential." I make no claim that technology isnecessarily liberatory or consistently beneficial to man'sdevelopment. But I surely do not believe that man is des-tined to be enslaved by technology and technologicalmodes of thought (as Juenger and Elul imply in theirbooks on the subject*). On the contrary, I shall try to

* Both Juenger and Elul believe that the debasement of man by themachine is intrinsic to the development of technology, and theirworks conclude on a grim note of resignation. This viewpoint re-flects the social fatalism I have in mind—especially as expressed byElul, whose ideas are more symptomatic of the contemporary hu-man condition. See Friedrich George Juenger, The Failure of Tech-nology (Regnery; Chicago, 1956) and Jacques Elul, The Techno-logical Society (Knopf; New York, 1968).

Towards a Liberatory Technology I 109

show that an organic mode of life deprived of its tech-nological component would be as nonfunctional as a mandeprived of his skeleton. Technology must be viewed asthe basic structural support of a society; it is literally theframework of an economy and of many social institutions.

TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOMThe year 1848 stands out as a turning point in the historyof modern revolutions. This was the year when Marxismmade its debut as a distinct ideology in the pages of theCommunist Manifesto, and when the proletariat, repre-sented by the Parisian workers, made its debut as a distinctpolitical force on the barricades of June. It could also besaid that 1848, a year close to the halfway mark of thenineteenth century, represents the culmination of the tra-ditional steam-powered technology initiated by theNewcomen engine a century and a half earlier.

What strikes us about the convergence of these ideologi-cal, political and technological milestones is the extent towhich the Communist Manifesto and the June barricadeswere in advance of their time. In the 1840s, the IndustrialRevolution centered around three areas of the economy:textile production, iron-making and transportation. Theinvention of Arkwright's spinning machine, Watt's steamengine and Cartwright's power loom had finally broughtthe factory system to the textile industry; meanwhile, anumber of striking innovations in iron-making technologyassured the supply of high-quality, inexpensive metalsneeded to sustain factory and railway expansion. But theseinnovations, important as they were, were not accom-panied by commensurate changes in other areas of indus-trial technology. For one thing, few steam engines wererated at more than fifteen horsepower, and the best blastfurnaces provided little more than a hundred tons of iron aweek—a fraction of the thousands of tons produced dailyby modern furnaces. More important, the remaining areas

110/ Post-Scarcity Anarchism

of the economy were not yet significantly affected bytechnological innovation. Mining techniques, for example,had changed little since the days of the Renaissance. Theminer still worked the ore face with a hand pick and acrowbar, and drainage pumps, ventilation systems andhauling techniques were not greatly improved over thedescriptions we find in Agricola's classic on mining writtenthree centuries earlier. Agriculture was only emerging fromits centuries-old sleep. Although a great deal of land hadbeen cleared for food cultivation, soil studies were still anovelty. So heavy, in fact, was the weight of tradition andconservatism that most harvesting was still done by hand,despite the fact that a mechanical reaper had been per-fected as early as 1822. Buildings, despite their massivenessand ornateness, were erected primarily by sheer musclepower; the hand crane and windlass still occupied themechanical center of the construction site. Steel was arelatively rare metal: as late as 1850 it was priced at $250a ton and, until the discovery of the Bessemer converter,steel-making techniques had stagnated for centuries. Fi-nally, although precision tools had made great forwardstrides, it is worth noting that Charles Babbage's efforts tobuild a sophisticated mechanical computer were thwartedby the inadequate machining techniques of the time.

I have reviewed these technological developments be-cause both their promise and their limitations exercised aprofound influence on nineteenth century revolutionarythought. The innovations in textile and iron-making tech-nology provided a new sense of promise, indeed a newstimulus, to socialist and Utopian thought. It seemed to therevolutionary theorist that for the first time in history hecould anchor his dream of a liberatory society in thevisible prospect of material abundance and increased lei-sure for the mass of humanity. Socialism, the theoristsargued, could be based on self-interest rather than onman's dubious nobility of mind and spirit. Technological

Towards a Liberatory Technology / 111

innovation had transmuted the socialist ideal from a vaguehumanitarian hope into a practical program.

The newly acquired practicality compelled many social-ist theorists, particularly Marx and Engels, to grapple withthe technological limitations of their time. They werefaced with a strategic issue: in all previous revolutions,technology had not yet developed to a level where mencould be freed from material want, toil and the struggleover the necessities of life. However glowing and loftywere the revolutionary ideals of the past, the vast majorityof the people, burdened by material want, had to leave thestage of history after the revolution, return to work, anddeliver the management of society to a new leisured classof exploiters. Indeed, any attempt to equalize the wealthof society at a low level of technological developmentwould not have eliminated want, but would have merelymade it into a general feature of society as a whole, there-by recreating all the conditions for a new struggle over thematerial things of life, for new forms of property, andeventually for a new system of class domination. A de-velopment of the productive forces is the "absolutelynecessary practical premise [of communism]," wrote Marxand Engels in 1846, "because without it want is general-ized, and with want the struggle for necessities and all theold filthy business would necessarily be reproduced."12

Virtually all the Utopias, theories and revolutionary pro-grams of the early nineteenth century were faced withproblems of necessity—of how to allocate labor and mate-rial goods at a relatively low level of technological develop-ment. These problems permeated revolutionary thought ina way comparable only to the impact of original sin onChristian theology. The fact that men would have to de-vote a substantial portion of their time to toil, for whichthey would get scant returns, formed a major premise ofall socialist ideology—authoritarian and libertarian, Utopianand scientific, Marxist and anarchist. Implicit in the Marx-


ist notion of a planned economy was the fact, incon-testably clear in Marx's day, that socialism would still beburdened by relatively scarce resources. Men would haveto plan—in effect, to restrict—the distribution of goods andwould have to rationalize—in effect, to intensify—the useof labor. Toil, under socialism, would be a duty, a respon-sibility which every able-bodied individual would have toundertake. Even Proudhon advanced this dour view whenhe wrote: "Yes, life is a struggle. But this struggle is notbetween man and man—it is between man and Nature;and it is each one's duty to share it."13 This austere,almost biblical, emphasis on struggle and duty reflects theharsh quality of socialist thought during the IndustrialRevolution.

The problem of dealing with want and work—an age-oldproblem perpetuated by the early Industrial Revolution-produced the great divergence in revolutionary ideasbetween socialism and anarchism. Freedom would still becircumscribed by necessity in the event of a revolution.How was this world of necessity to be "administered"?How could the allocation of goods and duties be decided?Marx left this decision to a state power, a transitional"proletarian" state power, to be sure, but nevertheless acoercive body, established above society. According toMarx, the state would "wither away" as technology devel-oped and enlarged the domain of freedom, grantinghumanity material plenty and the leisure to control itsaffairs directly. This strange calculus, in which necessityand freedom were mediated by the state, differed verylittle politically from the common run of bourgeois-democratic radical opinion in the last century. The anar-chist hope for the abolition of the state, on the otherhand, rested largely on a belief in the viability of man'ssocial instincts. Bakunin, for example, thought customwould compel any individuals with antisocial proclivitiesto abide by collectivist values and needs without


obliging society to use coercion. Kropotkin, who exercisedmore influence among anarchists in this area of specula-tion, invoked man's propensity for mutual aid—essentiallya social instinct—as the guarantor of solidarity in an anar-chist community (a concept which he derived from hisstudy of animal and social evolution).

The fact remains, however, that in both cases—the Marx-ist and the anarchist—the answer to the problem of wantand work was shot through with ambiguity. The realm ofnecessity was brutally present; it could not be conjuredaway by mere theory and speculation. The Marxists couldhope to administer necessity by means of a state, and theanarchists, to deal with it through free communities, butgiven the limited technological development of the lastcentury, in the last analysis both schools depended on anact of faith to cope with the problem of want and work.Anarchists could argue against the Marxists that any transi-tional state, however revolutionary its rhetoric and demo-cratic its structure, would be self-perpetuating; it wouldtend to become an end in itself and to preserve the verymaterial and social conditions it had been created to re-move. For such a state to "wither away" (that is, promoteits own dissolution) would require its leaders and bureauc-racy to be people of superhuman moral qualities. TheMarxists, in turn, could invoke history to show that cus-tom and mutualistic propensities were never effectivebarriers to the pressures of material need, or to the on-slaught of property, or to the development of exploitationand class domination. Accordingly, they dismissed anar-chism as an ethical doctrine which revived the mystique ofthe natural man and his inborn social virtues.

The problem of want and work—of the realm of neces-sity—was never satisfactorily resolved by either body ofdoctrine in the last century. It is to the lasting credit ofanarchism that it uncompromisingly retained its high idealof freedom—the ideal of spontaneous organization, com-


munity, and the abolition of all authority—although thisideal remained only a vision of man's future, of the timewhen technology would eliminate the realm of necessityentirely. Marxism increasingly compromised its ideal offreedom, painfully qualifying it with transitional stagesand political expediencies, until today it is an ideology ofnaked power, pragmatic efficiency and social centraliza-tion almost indistinguishable from the ideologies of mod-ern state capitalism.*

In retrospect, it is astonishing to consider how long theproblem of want and work cast its shadow over revolution-ary theory. In a span of only nine decades—the yearsbetween 1850 and 1940—Western society created, passedthrough and evolved beyond two major epochs of techno-logical history—the paleotechnic age of coal and steel, andthe neotechnic age of electric power, synthetic chemicals,electricity and internal combustion engines. Ironically,both ages of technology seemed to enhance the impor-tance of toil in society. As the number of industrial work-ers increased in proportion to other social classes, labor--more precisely, toil t—acquired an increasingly high statusin revolutionary thought. During this period, the propa-ganda of the socialists often sounded like a paean to toil;not only was toil "ennobling," but the workers were ex-tolled as the only useful individuals in the social fabric.They were endowed with a supposedly superior instinctiveability that made them the arbiters of philosophy, art, andsocial organization. This puritanical work ethic of the left

* It is my own belief that the development of the "workers' state"in Russia thoroughly supports the anarchist critique of Marxist stat-ism. Indeed, modern Marxists would do well to consult Marx's owndiscussion of commodity fetishism in Capital to understand howeverything (including the state) tends to become an end in itselfunder conditions of commodity exchange.t The distinction between pleasurable work and onerous toil shouldalways be kept in mind.


did not diminish with the passage of time and in fact ac-quired a certain urgency in the 1930s. Mass unemploymentmade the job and the social organization of labor the cen-tral themes of socialist propaganda in the 1930s. Instead offocusing their message on the emancipation of man fromtoil, socialists tended to depict socialism as a beehive ofindustrial activity, humming with work for all. The Com-munists pointed to Russia as a land where every able-bodied individual was employed and where labor was con-tinually in demand. Surprising as it may seem today, littlemore than a generation ago socialism was equated with awork-oriented society and liberty with the material secu-rity provided by full employment. The world of necessityhad subtly invaded and corrupted the ideal of freedom.

That the socialist notions of the last generation nowseem to be anachronisms is not due to any superior in-sights that prevail today. The last three decades, particu-larly the years of the late 1950s, mark a turning point intechnological development, a technological revolution thatnegates all the values, political schemes and social perspec-tives held by mankind throughout all previous recordedhistory. After thousands of years of torturous develop-ment, the countries of the Western world (and potentiallyall countries) are confronted by the possibility of a mate-rially abundant, almost workless era in which most of themeans of life can be provided by machines. As we shall see,a new technology has developed that could largely replacethe realm of necessity by the realm of freedom. So obviousis this fact to millions of people in the United States andEurope that it no longer requires elaborate explanations ortheoretical exegesis. This technological revolution and theprospects it holds for society as a whole form the premisesof radically new lifestyles among today's young people, ageneration that is rapidly divesting itself of the values andthe age-old work-oriented traditions of its elders. Evenrecent demands for a guaranteed annual income sound like


faint echoes of the new reality that currently permeatesthe thinking of the young. Owing to the development of acybernetic technology, the notion of a toil-less mode oflife has become an article of faith to an ever-increasingnumber of young people.

In fact, the real issue we face today is not whether thisnew technology can provide us with the means of life in atoil-less society, but whether it can help to humanize soci-ety, whether it can contribute to the creation of entirelynew relationships between man and man. The demand fora guaranteed annual income is still anchored in the quanti-tative promise of technology—in the possibility of satisfy-ing material needs without toil. This quantitative approachis already lagging behind technological developments thatcarry a new qualitative promise—the promise of decentral-ized, communitarian lifestyles, or what I prefer to callecological forms of human association.*

I am asking a question that is quite different from whatis ordinarily posed with respect to modern technology. Isthis technology staking out a new dimension in humanfreedom, in the liberation of man? Can it not only liberateman from want and work, but also lead him to a free,harmonious, balanced human community—an ecocommu-nity that would promote the unrestricted development of

* An exclusively quantitative approach to the new technology, Imay add, is not only economically archaic, but morally regressive.This approach partakes of the old principle of justice, as distin-guished from the new principle of freedom. Historically, justice isderived from the world of material necessity and toil; it impliesrelatively scarce resources which are apportioned by a moral prin-ciple which is either "just" or "unjust." Justice, even "equal" jus-tice, is a concept of limitation, involving the denial of goods and thesacrifice of time and energy to production. Once we transcend theconcept of justice—indeed, once we pass from the quantitative to thequalitative potentialities of modern technology—we enter the un-explored domain of freedom, based on spontaneous organizationand full access to the means of life.

Towards a Liberatory Technology /117

his potentialities? Finally, can it carry man beyond therealm of freedom into the realm of life and desire?

THE POTENTIALITIES OF MODERN TECHNOLOG Y

Let me try to answer these questions by pointing to a newfeature of modern technology. For the first time in his-tory, technology has reached an open end. The potentialfor technological development, for providing machines assubstitutes for labor is virtually unlimited. Technology hasfinally passed from the realm of invention to that ofdesign—in other words, from fortuitous discoveries tosystematic innovations.

The meaning of this qualitative advance has been statedin a rather freewheeling way by Vannevar Bush, the formerdirector of the Office of Scientific Research andDevelopment:

Suppose, fifty years ago, that someone had pro-posed making a device which would cause anautomobile to follow a white line down the middleof the road, automatically and even if the driverfell asleep. . . . He would have been laughed at,and his idea would have been called preposterous.So it would have been then. But suppose someonecalled for such a device today, and was willing topay for it, leaving aside the question of whether itwould actually be of any genuine use whatever.Any number of concerns would stand ready tocontract and build it. No real invention would berequired. There are thousands of young men in thecountry to whom the design of such a devicewould be a pleasure. They would simply take offthe shelf some photocells, thermionic tubes, servo-mechanisms, relays and, if urged, they would buildwhat they call a breadboard model, and it wouldwork. The point is that the presence of a host of


versatile, cheap, reliable gadgets, and the presenceof men who understand fully all their queer ways,has rendered the building of automatic devicesalmost straightforward and routine. It is no longera question of whether they can be built, it is rathera question of whether they are worth building. 14

Bush focuses here on the two most important featuresof the new, so-called "second," industrial revolution,namely the enormous potentialities of modern technologyand the cost-oriented, nonhuman limitations that areimposed upon it. I shall not belabor the fact that the costfactor—the profit motive, to state it bluntly—inhibits theuse of technological innovations. It is fairly well estab-lished that in many areas of the economy it is cheaper touse labor than machines.* Instead, I would like to reviewseveral developments which have brought us to an openend in technology and deal with a number of practicalapplications that have profoundly affected the role oflabor in industry and agriculture.

Perhaps the most obvious development leading to thenew technology has been the increasing interpenetration ofscientific abstraction, mathematics and analytic methodswith the concrete, pragmatic and rather mundane tasks ofindustry. This order of relationships is relatively new.Traditionally, speculation, generalization and rationalactivity were sharply divorced from technology. Thischasm reflected the sharp split between the leisured andworking classes in ancient and medieval society. If oneleaves aside the inspired works of a few rare men, appliedscience did not come into its own until the Renaissance,and it only began to flourish in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries.

* For example, in cotton plantations in the Deep South, in auto-mobile assembly plants, and in the garment industry.


The men who personify the application of science totechnological innovation are not the inventive tinkererslike Edison, but the systematic investigators with catholicinterests like Faraday, who add simultaneously to man'sknowledge of scientific principles and to engineering. Inour own day this synthesis, once embodied by the work ofa single, inspired genius, is the work of anonymous teams.Although these teams have obvious advantages, they oftenhave all the traits of bureaucratic agencies—which leads toa mediocre, unimaginative treatment of problems.

Less obvious is the impact produced by industrialgrowth. This impact is not always technological; it is morethan the substitution of machines for human labor. One ofthe most effective means of increasing output, in fact, hasbeen the continual reorganization of the labor process,extending and sophisticating the division of labor. Ironi-cally, the steady breakdown of tasks to ever more inhumandimensions—to an intolerably minute, fragmented series ofoperations and to a cruel simplification of the workprocess—suggests the machine that will recombine all theseparate tasks of many workers into a single mechanizedoperation. Historically, it would be difficult to understandhow mechanized mass manufacture emerged, how themachine increasingly displaced labor, without tracing thedevelopment of the work process from craftsmanship,where an independent, highly skilled worker engages inmany diverse operations, through the purgatory of thefactory, where these diverse tasks are parceled out among amultitude of unskilled or semiskilled employees, to thehighly mechanized mill, where the tasks of many arelargely taken over by machines manipulated by a fewoperatives, and finally to the automated and cybernatedplant, where operatives are replaced by supervisory techni-cians and highly skilled maintenance men.

Looking further into the matter, we find still anothernew development: the machine has evolved from an exten-


sion of human muscles into an extension of the humannervous system. In the past, both tools and machines en-hanced man's muscular power over raw materials andnatural forces. The mechanical devices and engines devel-oped during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didnot replace human muscles but rather enlarged their effec-tiveness. Although the machines increased output enor-mously, the worker's muscles and brain were still requiredto operate them, even for fairly routine tasks. The calculusof technological advance could be formulated in strictterms of labor productivity: one man, using a given ma-chine, produced as many commodities as five, ten, fifty, ora hundred before the machine was employed. Nasmyth'ssteam hammer, exhibited in 1851, could shape iron beamswith only a few blows, an effort that would have requiredmany manhours of labor without the machine. But thehammer required the muscles and judgment of half adozen able-bodied men to pull, hold and remove the cast-ing. In time, much of this work was diminished by theinvention of handling devices, but the labor and judgmentinvolved in operating the machines formed an indispen-sable part of the productive process.

The development of fully automatic machines for com-plex mass-manufacturing operations requires the successfulapplication of at least three technological principles: suchmachines must have a built-in ability to correct their ownerrors; they must have sensory devices for replacing thevisual, auditory and tactile senses of the worker; and,finally, they must have devices that substitute for theworker's judgment, skill and memory. The effective use ofthese three principles presupposes that we have also devel-oped the technological means (the effectors, if you will)for applying the sensory, control and mind-like devices ineveryday industrial operation; further, effective use pre-supposes that we can adapt existing machines or developnew ones for handling, shaping, assembling, packaging and


transporting semi-finished and finished products.The use of automatic, self-correcting control devices in

industrial operations is not new. James Watt's fly ballgovernor, invented in 1788, provides an early mechanicalexample of how steam engines were self-regulated. Thegovernor, which is attached by metal arms to the enginevalve, consists of two freely mounted metal balls sup-ported by a thin, rotating rod. If the engine begins tooperate too rapidly, the increased rotation of the rodimpels the balls outward by centrifugal force, closing thevalve; conversely, if the valve does not admit sufficientsteam to operate the engine at the desired rate, the ballscollapse inward, opening the valve further. A similar prin-ciple is involved in the operation of thermostatically con-trolled heating equipment. The thermostat, manuallypreset by a dial to a desired temperature level, automati-cally starts up heating equipment when the temperaturefalls and turns off the equipment when the temperaturerises.

Both control devices illustrate what is now called the"feedback principle." In modern electronic equipment, thedeviation of a machine from a desired level of operationproduces electrical signals which are then used by the con-trol device to correct the deviation or error. The electricalsignals induced by the error are amplified and fed back bythe control system to other devices which adjust themachine. A control system in which a departure from thenorm is actually used to adjust a machine is called a closedsystem. This may be contrasted with an open system—amanually operated wall switch or the arms that automati-cally rotate an electrical fan—in which the control operateswithout regard to the function of the device. Thus, if thewall switch is flicked, electric lights go on or off whether itis night or day; similarly the electric fan will rotate at thesame speed whether a room is warm or cool. The fan maybe automatic in the popular sense of the term, but it is not


self-regulating like the flyball governor and the thermostat.An important step toward developing self-regulating

control mechanisms was the discovery of sensory devices.Today these include thermocouples, photoelectric cells,X-ray machines, television cameras and radar transmitters.Used together or singly they provide machines with anamazing degree of autonomy. Even without computers,these sensory devices make it possible for workers to en-gage in extremely hazardous operations by remote control.They can also be used to turn many traditional open sys-tems into closed ones, thereby expanding the scope ofautomatic operations. For example, an electric light con-trolled by a clock represents a fairly simple open system;its effectiveness depends entirely upon mechanical factors.Regulated by a photoelectric cell that turns it off whendaylight approaches, the light responds to daily variationsin sunrise and sunset. Its operation is now meshed with itsfunction.

With the advent of the computer we enter an entirelynew dimension of industrial control systems. The com-puter is capable of performing all the routine tasks thatordinarily burdened the mind of the worker a generationor so ago. Basically, the modern digital computer is anelectronic calculator capable of performing arithmeticaloperations enormously faster than the human brain.* Thiselement of speed is a crucial factor: the enormous rapidityof computer operations—a quantitative superiority ofcomputer over human calculations—has profound qualita-tive significance. By virtue of its speed, the computer canperform highly sophisticated mathematical and logicaloperations. Supported by memory units that store millionsof bits of information, and using binary arithmetic (the

* There are two broad classes of computers in use today: analogueand digital computers. The analogue computer has a fairly limiteduse in industrial operations. My discussion on computers in thisarticle will deal entirely with digital computers.


substitution of the digits 0 and 1 for the digits 0 through9), a properly programmed digital computer can performoperations that approximate many highly developed logi-cal activities of the mind. It is arguable whether computer"intelligence" is, or ever will be, creative or innovative(although every few years bring sweeping changes in com-puter technology), but there is no doubt that the digitalcomputer is capable of taking over all the onerous anddistinctly uncreative mental tasks of man in industry,science, engineering, information retrieval and transporta-tion. Modern man, in effect, has produced an electronic"mind" for coordinating, building and evaluating most ofhis routine industrial operations. Properly used within thesphere of competence for which they are designed, com-puters are faster and more efficient than man himself.

What is the concrete significance of this new industrialrevolution? What are its immediate and foreseeable impli-cations for work? Let us trace the impact of the new tech-nology on the work process by examining its applicationto the manufacture of automobile engines at the Fordplant in Cleveland. This single instance of technologicalsophistication will help us assess the liberatory potential ofthe new technology in all manufacturing industries.

Until the advent of cybernation in the automobileindustry, the Ford plant required about three hundredworkers, using a large variety of tools and machines, toturn an engine block into an engine. The process fromfoundry casting to a fully machined engine took manymanhours to perform. With the development of what wecommonly call an "automated" machine system, the timerequired to transform the casting into an engine was re-duced to less than fifteen minutes. Aside from a few moni-tors to watch the automatic control panels, the originalthree-hundred-man labor force was eliminated. Later acomputer was added to the machining system, turning itinto a truly closed, cybernated system. The computer regu-


lates the entire machining process, operating on an elec-tronic pulse that cycles at a rate of three-tenths of a mil-lionth of a second.

But even this system is obsolete. "The next generationof computing machines operates a thousand times as fast—at a pulse rate of one in every three-tenths of a billionth ofa second," observes Alice Mary Hilton. "Speeds of mil-lionths and billionths of a second are not really intelligibleto our finite minds. But we can certainly understand thatthe advance has been a thousand-fold within a year or two.A thousand times as much information can be handled orthe same amount of information can be handled a thou-sand times as fast. A job that takes more than sixteenhours can be done in one minute! And without any humanintervention! Such a system does not control merely anassembly line but a complete manufacturing and industrialprocess!"15

There is no reason why the basic technological prin-ciples involved in cybernating the manufacture of auto-mobile engines cannot be applied to virtually every area ofmass manufacture—from the metallurgical industry to thefood processing industry, from the electronics industry tothe toymaking industry, from the manufacture of prefab-ricated bridges to the manufacture of prefabricated houses.Many phases of steel production, tool-and-die making,electronic equipment manufacture and industrial chemicalproduction are now partly or largely automated. Whattends to delay the advance of complete automation toevery phase of modern industry is the enormous cost in-volved in replacing existing industrial facilities by new,more sophisticated ones and also the innate conservatismof many major corporations. Finally, as I mentioned be-fore, it is still cheaper to use labor instead of machines inmany industries.

To be sure, every industry has its own particular prob-lems, and the application of a toil-less technology to a


specific plant would doubtless reveal a multitude of kinksthat would require painstaking solutions. In many indus-tries it would be necessary to alter the shape of the prod-uct and the layout of the plants so that the manufacturingprocess would lend itself to automated techniques. But toargue from these problems that the application of a fullyautomated technology to a specific industry is impossiblewould be as preposterous as to have argued eighty yearsago that flight was impossible because the propeller of anexperimental airplane did not revolve fast enough or theframe was too fragile to withstand buffeting by the wind.There is practically no industry that cannot be fully auto-mated if we are willing to redesign the product, the plant,the manufacturing procedures and the handling methods.In fact, any difficulty in describing how, where or when agiven industry will be automated arises not from theunique problems we can expect to encounter but ratherfrom the enormous leaps that occur every few years inmodern technology. Almost every account of applied auto-mation today must be regarded as provisional: as soon asone describes a partially automated industry, technologicaladvances make the description obsolete.

There is one area of the economy, however, in whichany form of technological advance is worth describing—the.area of work that is most brutalizing and degrading forman. If it is true that the moral level of a society can begauged by the way it treats women, its sensitivity tohuman suffering can be gauged by the working conditionsit provides for people in raw materials industries, particu-larly in mines and quarries. In the ancient world, miningwas often a form of penal servitude, reserved primarily forthe most hardened criminals, the most intractable slaves,and the most hated prisoners of war. The mine is the day-to-day actualization of man's image of hell; it is a deaden-ing, dismal, inorganic world that demands pure mindlesstoil.


Field and forest and stream and ocean are theenvironment of life: the mine is the environmentalone of ores, minerals, metals [writes LewisMumford ] . . . . In hacking and digging the contentsof the earth, the miner has no eye for the forms ofthings: what he sees is sheer matter and until hegets to his vein it is only an obstacle which hebreaks through stubbornly and sends up to thesurface. If the miner sees shapes on the walls of hiscavern, as the candle flickers, they are only themonstrous distortions of his pick or his arm:shapes of fear. Day has been abolished and therhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night production first came into existence here.The miner must work by artificial light eventhough the sun be shining outside; still furtherdown in the seams, he must work by artificialventilation, too: a triumph of the 'manufactured

' 16environment.

The abolition of mining as a sphere of human activitywould symbolize, in its own way, the triumph of a libera-tory technology. That we can point to this achievementalready, even in a single case at this writing, presages thefreedom from toil implicit in the technology of our time.The first major step in this direction was the continuousminer, a giant cutting machine with nine-foot blades thatslices up eight tons of coal a minute from the coal face. Itwas this machine, together with mobile loading machines,power drills and roof bolting, that reduced mine employ-ment in areas like West Virginia to about a third of the1948 levels, at the same time nearly doubling individualoutput. The coal mine still required miners to place andoperate the machines. The most recent technologicaladvances, however, replace the operators by radar sensingdevices and eliminate the miner completely.


By adding sensing devices to automatic machinery wecould easily remove the worker not only from the large,productive mines needed by the economy, but also fromforms of agricultural activity patterned on modern indus-try. Although the wisdom of industrializing and mechaniz-ing agriculture is highly questionable (I shall return to thissubject at a later point), the fact remains that if society sochooses, it can automate large areas of industrial agricul-ture, ranging from cotton picking to rice harvesting. Wecould operate almost any machine, from a giant shovel inan open-strip mine to a grain harvester in the Great Plains,either by cybernated sensing devices or by remote controlwith television cameras. The effort needed to operate thesedevices and machines at a safe distance, in comfortablequarters, would be minimal, assuming that a human opera-tor were required at all.

It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when arationally organized economy could automatically manu-facture small "packaged" factories without human labor;parts could be produced with so little effort that mostmaintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act ofremoving a defective unit from a machine and replacing itby another—a job no more difficult than pulling out andputting in a tray. Machines would make and repair most ofthe machines required to maintain such a highly industrial-ized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely to-ward human needs and freed from all consideration ofprofit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want andtoil—the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, sufferingand inhumanity, exacted by a society based on scarcityand labor.

The possibilities created by a cybernated technologywould no longer be limited merely to the satisfaction ofman's material needs. We would be free to ask how themachine, the factory and the mine could be used to fosterhuman solidarity and to create a balanced relationship


with nature and a truly organic ecocommunity. Would ournew technology be based on the same national division oflabor that exists today? The current type of industrialorganization—an extension, in effect, of the industrialforms created by the Industrial Revolution—fosters indus-trial centralization (although a system of workers' manage-ment based on the individual factory and local communitywould go far toward eliminating this feature).

Or does the new technology lend itself to a system ofsmall-scale production, based on a regional economy andstructured physically on a human scale? This type of in-dustrial organization places all economic decisions in thehands of the local community. To the degree that materialproduction is decentralized and localized, the primacy ofthe community is asserted over national institutions-assuming that any such national institutions develop to asignificant extent. In these circumstances, the popularassembly of the local community, convened in a face-to-face democracy, takes over the full management of sociallife. The question is whether a future society will be organ-ized around technology or whether technology is nowsufficiently malleable so that it can be organized aroundsociety. To answer this question, we must further examinecertain features of the new technology.THE NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE HUMAN SCALE

In 1945, J. Presper Eckert, Jr. and John W. Mauchly ofthe University of Pennsylvania unveiled ENIAC, the firstdigital computer to be designed entirely along electronicprinciples. Commissioned for use in solving ballistic prob-lems, ENIAC required nearly three years of work to designand build. The computer was enormous. It weighed morethan thirty tons, contained 18,800 vacuum tubes with halfa million connections (these connections took Eckert andMauchly two and a half years to solder), a vast network ofresistors, and miles of wiring. The computer required a


large air-conditioning unit to cool its electronic compo-nents. It often broke down or behaved erratically, requir-ing time-consuming repairs and maintenance. Yet by allprevious standards of computer development, ENIAC wasan electronic marvel. It could perform five thousand com-putations a second, generating electrical pulse signals thatcycled at 100,000 a second. None of the mechanical orelectro-mechanical computers in use at the time couldapproach this rate of computational speed.

Some twenty years later, the Computer Control Com-pany of Framingham, Massachusetts, offered the DDP-124for public sale. The DDP-124 is a small, compact computerthat closely resembles a bedside AM-radio receiver. Theentire ensemble, together with a typewriter and memoryunit, occupies a typical office desk. The DDP-124 per-forms over 285,000 computations a second. It has a truestored-program memory that can be expanded to retainnearly 33,000 words (the "memory" of ENIAC, based onpreset plug wires, lacked anything like the flexibility ofpresent-day computers); its pulses cycle at 1.75 billion persecond. The DDP-124 does not require any air-condition-ing unit; it is completely reliable, and it creates very fewmaintenance problems. It can be built at a minute fractionof the cost required to construct ENIAC.

The difference between ENIAC and DDP-124 is one ofdegree rather than kind. Leaving aside their memory units,both digital computers operate according to the same elec-tronic principles. ENIAC, however, was composed pri-marily of traditional electronic components (vacuumtubes, resistors, etc.) and thousands of feet of wire; theDDP-124, on the other hand, relies primarily on micro-circuits. These microcircuits are very small electronic unitsthat pack the equivalent of ENIAC's key electronic com-ponents into squares a mere fraction of an inch in size.

Paralleling the miniaturization of computer componentsis the remarkable sophistication of traditional forms of


technology. Ever-smaller machines are beginning to replacelarge ones. For example, a fascinating breakthrough hasbeen achieved in reducing the size of continuous hot-stripsteel rolling mills. This kind of mill is one of the largestand costliest facilities in modern industry. It may be re-garded as a single machine, nearly a half mile in length,capable of reducing a ten-ton slab of steel about six inchesthick and fifty inches wide to a thin strip of sheet metal atenth or a twelfth of an inch thick. This installation alone,including heating furnaces, coilers, long roller tables, scale-breaker stands and buildings, may cost tens of millions ofdollars and occupy fifty acres or more. It produces threehundred tons of steel sheet an hour. To be used efficiently,such a continuous hot-strip mill must be operated togetherwith large batteries of coke ovens, open-hearth furnaces,blooming mills, etc. These facilities, in conjunction withhot and cold rolling mills, may cover several square miles.Such a steel complex is geared to a national division oflabor, to highly concentrated sources of raw materials(generally located at a great distance from the complex),and to large national and international markets. Even if itis totally automated, its operating and management needsfar transcend the capabilities of a small, decentralizedcommunity. The type of administration it requires tendsto foster centralized social forms.

Fortunately, we now have a number of alternatives-more efficient alternatives in many respects—to the mod-ern steel complex. We can replace blast furnaces and open-hearth furnaces by a variety of electric furnaces which aregenerally quite small and produce excellent pig iron andsteel; they can operate not only with coke but also withanthracite coal, charcoal, and even lignite. Or we canchoose the HyL process, a batch process in which naturalgas is used to turn high-grade ores or concentrates intosponge iron. Or we can turn to the Wiberg process, whichinvolves the use of charcoal, carbon monoxide and hydro-


gen. In any case, we can reduce the need for coke ovens,blast furnaces, open hearth furnaces, and possibly evensolid reducing agents.

One of the most important steps towards scaling a steelcomplex to community dimensions is- the development ofthe planetary mill by T. Sendzimir. The planetary millreduces the typical continuous hot-strip mill to a singleplanetary stand and a light finishing stand. Hot steel slabs,two and a quarter inches thick, pass through two smallpairs of heated feed rolls and a set of work rolls mountedin two circular cages which also contain two backup rolls.By operating the cages and backup rolls at different rota-tional speeds, the work rolls are made to turn in two direc-tions. This gives the steel skb a terrific mauling andreduces it to a thickness of only one-tenth of an inch.Sendzimir's planetary mill is a stroke of engineering genius;the small work rolls, turning on the two circular cages,replace the need for the four huge roughing stands and sixfinishing stands in a continuous hot-strip mill.

The rolling of hot steel slabs by the Sendzimir processrequires a much smaller operational area than a continuoushot-strip mill. With continuous casting, moreover, we canproduce steel slabs without the need for large, costly slab-bing mills. A future steel complex based on electric fur-naces, continuous casting, a planetary mill and a smallcontinuous cold-reducing mill would require a fraction ofthe acreage occupied by a conventional installation. Itwould be fully capable of meeting the steel needs of sev-eral moderate-sized communities with low quantities offuel.

The complex I have described is not designed to meetthe needs of a national market. On the contrary, it issuited only for meeting the steel requirements of small ormoderate-sized communities and industrially undevelopedcountries. Most electric furnaces for pig-iron productionproduce about a hundred to two hundred and fifty tons a


day, while large blast furnaces produce three thousandtons daily. A planetary mill can roll only a hundred tons ofsteel strip an hour, roughly a third of the output of acontinuous hot-strip mill. Yet the very scale of our hypo-thetical steel complex constitutes one of its most attractivefeatures. Also, the steel produced by our complex is moredurable, so the community's rate of replenishing its steelproducts would be appreciably reduced. Since the smallercomplex requires ore, fuel and reducing agents in relativelysmall quantities, many communities could rely on localresources for their raw materials, thereby conserving themore concentrated resources of centrally located sourcesof supply, strengthening the independence of the com-munity itself vis-a-vis the traditional centralized economy,and reducing the expense of transportation. What would atfirst glance seem to be a costly, inefficient duplication ofeffort that could be avoided by building a few centralizedsteel complexes would prove, in the long run, to be moreefficient as well as socially more desirable.

The new technology has produced not only miniatur-ized electronic components and smaller production facil-ities but also highly versatile, multi-purpose machines. Formore than a century, the trend in machine design movedincreasingly toward technological specialization and singlepurpose devices, underpinning the intensive division oflabor required by the new factory system. Industrial opera-tions were subordinated entirely to the product. In time,this narrow pragmatic approach has "led industry far fromthe rational line of development in production machin-ery," observe Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown. "It hasled to increasingly uneconomic specialization. . . . Speciali-zation of machines in terms of end product requires thatthe machine be thrown away when the product is nolonger needed. Yet the work the production machine doescan be reduced to a set of basic functions—forming, hold-ing, cutting, and so on—and these functions, if correctly


analyzed, can be packaged and applied to operate on a partas needed."17

Ideally, a drilling machine of the kind envisioned byLeaver and Brown would be able to produce a hole smallenough to hold a thin wire or large enough to admit apipe. Machines with this operational range were onceregarded as economically prohibitive. By the mid-1950s,however, a number of such machines were actually de-signed and put to use. In 1954, for example, a horizontalboring mill was built in Switzerland for the Ford MotorCompany's River Rouge Plant at Dearborn, Michigan. Thisboring mill would qualify beautifully as a Leaver andBrown machine. Equipped with five optical microscope-type illuminated control gauges, the mill drills holessmaller than a needle's eye or larger than a man's fist. Theholes are accurate to a ten-thousandth of an inch.

The importance of machines with this kind of opera-tional range can hardly be overestimated. They make itpossible to produce a large variety of products in a singleplant. A small or moderate-sized community using multi-purpose machines could satisfy many of its limited indus-trial needs without being burdened with underused indus-trial facilities. There would be less loss in scrapping toolsand less need for single-purpose plants. The community'seconomy would be more compact and versatile, morerounded and self-contained, than anything we find in thecommunities of industrially advanced countries. The effortthat goes into retooling machines for new products wouldbe enormously reduced. Retooling would generally consistof changes in dimensioning rather than in design. Finally,multipurpose machines with a wide operational range arerelatively easy to automate. The changes required to usethese machines in a cybernated industrial facility wouldgenerally be in circuitry and programming rather than inmachine form and structure.

Single purpose machines, of course, would continue to


exist, and they would still be used for the mass manufac-ture of a large variety of goods. At present many highlyautomatic, single-purpose machines could be employedwith very little modification by decentralized commu-nities. Bottling and canning machines, for example, arecompact, automatic and highly rationalized installations.We could expect to see smaller automatic textile, chemicalprocessing and food processing machines. A major shiftfrom conventional automobiles, buses and trucks to elec-tric vehicles would undoubtedly lead to industrial facilitiesmuch smaller in size than existing automobile plants. Manyof the remaining centralized facilities could be effectivelydecentralized simply by making them as small as possibleand sharing their use among several communities.

I do not claim that all of man's economic activities canbe completely decentralized, but the majority can surelybe scaled to human and communitarian dimensions. Thismuch is certain: we can shift the center of economicpower from national to local scale and from centralizedbureaucratic forms to local, popular assemblies. This shiftwould be a revolutionary change of vast proportions, for itwould create powerful economic foundations for thesovereignty and autonomy of the local community.

THE ECOLOGICAL USE OF TECHNOLOGY

I have tried, thus far, to deal with the possibility of elimi-nating toil, material insecurity, and centralized economiccontrol-issues which, if "utopian," are at least tangible. Inthe present section I would like to deal with a problemthat may seem highly subjective but which is nonethelessof compelling importance—the need to make man's depen-dence upon the natural world a visible and living part ofhis culture.

Actually, this problem is peculiar only to a highlyurbanized and industrialized society. In nearly all preindus-


trial cultures, man's relationship to his natural environ-ment was well defined, viable, and sanctified by the fullweight of tradition. Changes in season, variations in rain-fall, the life cycles of the plants and animals on whichhumans depended for food and clothing, the distinctivefeatures of the area occupied by the community—all werefamiliar and comprehensible, and evoked in men a sense ofreligious awe, of oneness with nature, and, more pragmati-cally, a sense of respectful dependence. Looking back tothe earliest civilizations of the Western world, we rarelyfind evidence of a system of social tyranny so overbearingand ruthless that it ignored this relationship. Barbarianinvasions and, more insidiously, the development ofcommercial civilizations may have destroyed the reveren-tial attitude of agrarian cultures toward nature, but thenormal development of agricultural systems, however ex-ploitative they were of men, rarely led to the destructionof the soil and terrain. During the most oppressive periodsin the history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, theruling classes kept the irrigation dikes in good repair andtried to promote rational methods of food cultivation.Even the ancient Greeks, heirs to a thin, mountainousforest soil that suffered heavily from erosion, shrewdlyreclaimed much of their arable land by turning to or-chardry and viticulture. It was not until commercial agri-cultural systems and highly urbanized societies developedthat the natural environment was unsparingly exploited.Some of the worst cases of soil destruction in the ancientworld were provided by the giant, slave-worked commer-cial farms of North Africa and the Italian peninsula.

In our own time, the development of technology andthe growth of cities has brought man's alienation fromnature to the breaking point. Western man finds himselfconfined to a largely synthetic urban environment, farremoved physically from the land, and his relationship tothe natural world is mediated entirely by machines. He


lacks familiarity with how most of his goods are produced,and his foods bear only the faintest resemblance to theanimals and plants from which they were derived. Boxedinto a sanitized urban milieu (almost institutional in formand appearance), modern man is denied even a spectator'srole in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfyhis material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensatereceptacle. It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that he isdisrespectful toward the natural environment; the fact is,he scarcely knows what ecology means or what his envi-ronment requires to remain in balance.

The balance between man and nature must be restored.I have tried to show elsewhere that unless we establishsome kind of equilibrium between man and the naturalworld, the viability of the human species will be placed ingrave jeopardy.* Here I shall try to show how the newtechnology can be used ecologically to reawaken man'ssense of dependence upon the environment; I shall try toshow how, by reintroducing the natural world into thehuman experience, we can contribute to the achievementof human wholeness.

The classical Utopians fully realized that the first steptowards wholeness must be to remove the contradictionbetween town and country. "It is impossible," wroteFourier nearly a century and a half ago, "to organize aregular and well balanced association without bringing intoplay the labors of the field, or at least gardens, orchards,flocks and herds, poultry yards, and a great variety ofspecies, animal and vegetable." Shocked by the socialeffects of the Industrial Revolution, Fourier added: "Theyare ignorant of this principle in England, where they ex-periment with artisans, with manufacturing labor alone,which cannot by itself suffice to sustain social union."18

To argue that the modern urban dweller should onceagain enjoy "the labors of the field" might well seem like* See "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought."


gallows humor. A restoration of peasant agriculture preva-lent in Fourier's day is neither possible nor desirable.Charles Gide was surely correct when he observed thatagricultural labor "is not necessarily more attractive thanindustrial labor; to till the earth has always been regarded. . . as the type of painful toil, of toil which is done with'the sweat of one's brow.' " 19 Fourier does not answer thisobjection by suggesting that his phalansteries will mainlycultivate fruits and vegetables instead of grains. If ourvision were to extend no further than prevailing techniquesof land management, the only alternative to peasant agri-culture would seem to be a highly specialized and central-ized form of farming, its techniques paralleling themethods used in present-day industry. Far from achievinga balance between town and country, we would be facedwith a synthetic environment that had totally assimilatedthe natural world.

If we grant that the land and the community must bereintegrated physically, that the community must exist inan agricultural matrix which renders man's dependenceupon nature explicit, the problem we face is how toachieve this transformation without imposing "painfultoil" on the community. How, in short, can husbandry,ecological forms of food cultivation and farming on a hu-man scale be practiced without sacrificing mechanization?

Some of the most promising technological advances inagriculture made since World War II are as suitable forsmall-scale, ecological forms of land management as theyare for the immense, industrial-type commercial units thathave become prevalent over the past few decades. Let usconsider an example. The augermatic feeding of livestockillustrates a cardinal principle of rational farm mechaniza-tion—the deployment of conventional machines and de-vices in a way that virtually eliminates arduous farm labor.By linking a battery of silos with augers, different nutri-ents can be mixed and transported to feed pens merely by


pushing some buttons and pulling a few switches. A jobthat may have required the labor of five or six men work-ing half a day with pitchforks and buckets can now beperformed by one man in a few minutes. This type ofmechanization is intrinsically neutral: it can be used tofeed immense herds or just a few hundred head of cattle;the silos may contain natural feed or synthetic, hormon-ized nutrients; the feeder can be employed on relativelysmall farms with mixed livestock or on large beef-raisingranches, or on dairy farms of all sizes. In short, augermaticfeeding can be placed in the service of the most abusivekind of commercial exploitation or of the most sensitiveapplications of ecological principles.

This holds true for most of the farm machines that havebeen designed (in many cases simply redesigned to achievegreater versatility) in recent years. The modern tractor, forexample, is a work of superb mechanical ingenuity. Gar-den-type models can be used with extraordinary flexibilityfor a large variety of tasks; they are light and extremelymanageable, and they can follow the contour of the mostexacting terrain without damaging the land. Large tractors,especially those used in hot climates, are likely to haveair-conditioned cabs; in addition to pulling equipment,they may have attachments for digging postholes, fordoing the work of forklift trucks, or even for providingpower units for grain elevators. Plows have been developedto meet every contingency in tillage. Advanced models areeven regulated hydraulically to rise and fall with the lay ofthe land. Mechanical planters are available for virtuallyevery kind of crop. "Minimum tillage" is achieved byplanters which apply seed, fertilizer and pesticides (ofcourse!) simultaneously, a technique that telescopes sev-eral different operations into a single one and reduces thesoil compaction often produced by the recurrent use ofheavy machines.

The variety of mechanical harvesters has reached daz-


zling proportions. Harvesters have been developed formany different kinds of orchards, berries, vines, vegetablesand field crops. Barns, feed pens and storage units havebeen totally revolutionized by augers, conveyor belts, air-tight silos, automatic manure removers, climate-controldevices, etc. Crops are mechanically shelled, washed,counted, preserved by freezing or canning, packaged andcrated. The construction of concrete-lined irrigationditches has become a simple mechanical operation that canbe performed by one or two excavating machines. Terrainwith poor drainage or subsoil can be improved by earth-moving equipment and by tillage devices that penetratebeyond the true soil.

Although a great deal of agricultural research is devotedto the development of harmful chemical agents and nutri-tionally dubious crops, there have been extraordinaryadvances in the genetic improvement of food plants. Manynew grain and vegetable varieties are resistant to insectpredators, plant diseases, and cold weather. In many cases,these varieties are a definite improvement over naturalancestral types and they have been used to open large areasof intractable land to food cultivation.

Let us pause at this point to envision how our freecommunity might be integrated with its natural environ-ment. We suppose the community to have been establishedafter a careful study has been made of its natural ecol-ogy—its air and water resources, its climate, its geologicalformations, its raw materials, its soils, and its natural floraand fauna. Land management by the community is guidedentirely by ecological principles, so that an equilibrium ismaintained between the environment and its human in-habitants. Industrially rounded, the community forms adistinct unit within a natural matrix; it is socially andaesthetically in balance with the area it occupies.

Agriculture is highly mechanized in the community, butas mixed as possible with respect to crops, livestock and


timber. Variety of flora and fauna is promoted as a meansof controlling pest infestations and enhancing scenicbeauty. Large-scale farming is practiced only where it doesnot conflict with the ecology of the region. Owing to thegenerally mixed character of food cultivation, agricultureis pursued by small farming units, each demarcated fromthe others by tree belts, shrubs, pastures and meadows. Inrolling, hilly or mountainous country, land with sharpgradients is covered by timber to prevent erosion andconserve water. The soil on each acre is studied carefullyand committed only to those crops for which it is mostsuited. Every effort is made to blend town and countrywithout sacrificing the distinctive contribution that eachhas to offer to the human experience. The ecological re-gion forms the living social, cultural and biotic boundariesof the community or of the several communities that shareits resources. Each community contains many vegetableand flower gardens, attractive arbors, park land, evenstreams and ponds which support fish and aquatic birds.The countryside, from which food and raw materials areacquired, not only constitutes the immediate environs ofthe community, accessible to all by foot, but also invadesthe community. Although town and country retain theiridentity and the uniqueness of each is highly prized andfostered, nature appears everywhere in the town, and thetown seems to have caressed and left a gentle, human im-print on nature.

I believe that a free community will regard agriculture ashusbandry, an activity as expressive and enjoyable ascrafts. Relieved of toil by agricultural machines, commu-nitarians will approach food cultivation with the sameplayful and creative attitude that men so often bring togardening. Agriculture will become a living part of humansociety, a source of pleasant physical activity and, by vir-tue of its ecological demands, an intellectual, scientific andartistic challenge. Communitarians will blend with the


world of life around them as organically as the communityblends with its region. They will regain the sense of one-ness with nature that existed in humans from primordialtimes. Nature and the organic modes of thought it alwaysfosters will become an integral part of human culture; itwill reappear with a fresh spirit in man's paintings, litera-ture, philosophy, dances, architecture, domestic furnish-ings, and in his very gestures and day-to-day activities.Culture and the human psyche will be thoroughly suffusedby a new animism. The region will never be exploited, butit will be used as fully as possible. Every attempt will bemade by the community to satisfy its requirements lo-cally—to use the region's energy resources, minerals, tim-ber, soil, water, animals and plants as rationally andhumanistically as possible and without violating ecologicalprinciples. In this connection, we can foresee that thecommunity will employ new techniques that are still beingdeveloped today, many of which lend themselves superblyto a regionally based economy. I refer here to methods forextracting trace and diluted resources from the earth,water and air; to solar, wind, hydroelectric and geothermalenergy; to the use of heat pumps, vegetable fuels, solarponds, thermoelectric converters and, eventually, con-trolled thermonuclear reactions.

There is a kind of industrial archeology that reveals inmany areas the evidence of a once-burgeoning economicactivity long abandoned by our predecessors. In the Hud-son Valley, the Rhine Valley, the Appalachians and thePyrenees, we find the relics of mines and once highly-developed metallurgical crafts, the fragmentary remains oflocal industries, and the outlines of long-deserted farms-all vestiges of flourishing communities based on local rawmaterials and resources. These communities declined be-cause the products they once furnished were elbowed outby large-scale, national industries based on mass produc-tion techniques and concentrated sources of raw materials.


The old resources are often still available for use by eachlocality; "valueless" in a highly urbanized society, they areeminently suitable for use by decentralized communitiesand they await the application of industrial techniquesthat are adapted for small-scale quality production. If wewere to take a careful inventory of the resources availablein many depopulated regions of the world, the possibilitythat communities could satisfy many of their materialneeds locally is likely to be much greater than we suspect.

Technology, by its continual development, tends to ex-pand local possibilities. As an example, let us consider howseemingly inferior and highly intractable resources aremade available by technological advances. Throughout thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Mesabirange in Minnesota provided the American steel industrywith extremely rich ores, an advantage which promotedthe rapid expansion of the domestic metal industry. Asthese reserves declined, the country was faced with theproblem of mining taconite, a low-grade ore that is aboutforty percent iron. Conventional mining methods are vir-tually impossible; it takes a churn drill an hour to bitethrough only one foot of taconite. Recently, however, themining of taconite became feasible; a jet-flame drill wasdeveloped which cuts through the ore at the rate of twentyto thirty feet an hour. After holes are burned by the flame,the ore is blasted and processed for the steel industry bynewly perfected grinding, separating and agglomeratingoperations.

Soon it may be possible to extract highly diffused ordiluted materials from the earth, from a wide variety ofgaseous waste products, and from the sea. Some of ourmost valuable metals are actually fairly common, but theyexist in highly diffused or trace amounts. Hardly a patchof soil or a common rock exists that does not containtraces of gold, larger quantities of uranium, and even largeramounts of other industrially useful elements such as


magnesium, zinc, copper and sulphur. About five percentof the earth's crust is made of iron. How can we extractthese resources? The problem has been solved, in principleat least, by the analytical techniques chemists use to detectthese elements. As the chemist Jacob Rosin argues, if anelement can be detected in the laboratory, there is reasonto hope that it can be extracted on a sufficiently largescale to be used by industry.

For more than half a century, most of the world'scommercial nitrogen has been extracted from the atmos-phere. Magnesium, chlorine, bromine and caustic soda areacquired from sea water and sulphur from calcium sul-phate and industrial wastes. Large amounts of industriallyuseful hydrogen could be collected as a byproduct of theelectrolysis of brine, but normally it is burned or releasedin the air by chlorine-producing plants. Carbon could berescued in enormous quantities from smoke and used eco-nomically (carbon is comparatively rare in nature) but isdissipated together with other gaseous compounds in theatmosphere.

The problem industrial chemists face in extracting valu-able elements and compounds from the sea and ordinaryrock is the cost of the energy needed. Two methodsexist—ion exchange and chromatography—and, if furtherperfected for industrial uses, they could be used to selector separate the desired substances from solutions, but theamount of energy needed to use these methods would bevery costly in terms of real wealth. Unless there is an un-expected breakthrough in extractive techniques, there islittle likelihood that conventional sources of energy—fossilfuels like coal and oil—will be used to solve the problem.

It is not that we lack energy per se, but we are justbeginning to learn how to use sources that are available inalmost limitless quantity. The gross radiant energy strikingthe earth's surface from the sun is estimated to be morethan three thousand times the annual energy consumption


of mankind today. Although a portion of this energy isconverted into wind or used for photosynthesis by vegeta-tion, a staggering quantity is available for other uses. Theproblem is how to collect it to satisfy a portion of ourenergy needs. If solar energy could be collected for househeating, for example, twenty to thirty percent of the con-ventional energy resources we normally employ could beredirected to other purposes. If we could collect solarenergy for all or most of our cooking, water heating, smelt-ing and power production, we would have relatively littleneed for fossil fuels. Solar devices have been designed fornearly all of these functions. We can heat houses, cookfood, boil water, melt metals and produce electricity withdevices that use the sun's energy exclusively, but we can'tdo it efficiently in every latitude of the earth, and we arestill confronted with a number of technical problems thatcan be solved only by crash research programs.

At this writing, quite a few houses have been built thatare effectively heated by solar energy. In the UnitedStates, the best known of these are the MIT experimentalbuildings in Massachusetts, the Lof house in Denver, andthe Thomason homes in Washington, D.C. Thomason,whose fuel cost for a solar-heated house barely reaches $5a year, seems to have developed one of the most practicalsystems at hand. Solar heat in a Thomason home is col-lected from the roof and transferred by circulating waterto a storage tank in the basement. (The water, incidentally,can also be used for cooling the house and as an emergencysupply for fire and drinking.) The system is simple andfairly cheap. Located in Washington near the fortiethparallel of latitude, the Thomason houses stand at the edgeof the "solar belt"—the latitudes from zero to forty de-grees north and south. This belt is the geographic areawhere the sun's rays can be used most effectively fordomestic and industrial energy. With efficient solar heat-ing, Thomason requires a miniscule amount of supple-


mental conventional fuel to heat his Washington homes.Two approaches to solar house-heating are possible in

cooler areas: heating systems could be more elaborate,which would reduce the consumption of conventional fuelto levels approximating those of the Thomason homes; orsimple conventional fuel systems could be used to satisfyanywhere from ten to fifty percent of the heating needs.As Hans Thirring observes (with an eye toward cost andeffort):

The decisive advantage of solar heating lies in thefact that no running costs arise, except the electric-ity bill for driving the fans, which is very small.Thus the one single investment for the installationpays once and for all the heating costs for the life-time of the house. In addition, the system worksautomatically without smoke, soot, and fumeproduction, and saves all trouble in stoking, refuel-ling, cleaning, repair and other work. Adding solarheat to the energy system of a country helps toincrease the wealth of the nation, and if all housesin areas with favorable conditions were equippedwith solar heating systems, fuel saving worth mil-lions of pounds yearly could be achieved. Thework of Telkes, Hottel, Lof, Bliss, and other scien-tists who are paving the way for solar heating isreal pioneer work, the full significance of whichwill emerge more clearly in the future.20

The most widespread applications of solar energy devicesare in cooking and water heating. Many thousands of solarstoves are used in underdeveloped countries, in Japan, andin the warm latitudes of the United States. A solar stove issimply an umbrella-like reflector equipped with a grill thatcan broil meat or boil a quart of water within fifteenminutes in bright sunlight. Such a stove is safe, portable


and clean; it requires no fuel or matches, nor does itproduce any annoying smoke. A portable solar oven de-livers temperatures as high as four hundred fifty degreesand is even more compact and easier to handle than a solarstove. Solar water-heaters are used widely in privatehomes, apartment buildings, laundries and swimmingpools. Some twenty-five thousand of these units areemployed in Florida and they are gradually coming intovogue in California.

Some of the most impressive advances in the use of solarenergy have occurred in industry, although the majority ofthese applications are marginal at best and largely experi-mental in nature. The simplest is the solar furnace. Thecollector is usually a single large parabolic mirror, or, morelikely, a huge array of many parabolic mirrors mounted ina large housing. A heliostat—a smaller, horizontallymounted mirror that follows the movement of the sun--reflects the rays into the collector. Several hundred ofthese furnaces are currently in use. One of the largest, Dr.Felix Trombe's Mont Louis furnace, develops seventy-fivekilowatts of electric power and is used primarily in high-temperature research. Since the sun's rays do not containany impurities, the furnace will melt a hundred pounds ofmetal without the contamination produced by conven-tional techniques. A solar furnace built by the U.S.Quartermaster Corps at Nattick, Massachusetts, developsfive thousand degrees Centigrade—a temperature highenough to melt steel I-beams.

Solar furnaces have many limitations, but these are notinsurmountable. The efficiency of the furnaces can beappreciably reduced by haze, fog, clouds and atmosphericdust, and also by heavy wind loadings which deflect equip-ment and interfere with the accurate focusing of the sun'srays. Attempts are being made to resolve some of theseproblems by sliding roofs, covering material for the mir-rors, and firm, protective housings. On the other hand,


solar furnaces are clean, they are efficient when they are ingood working order, and they produce extremely high-grade metals which none of the conventional furnaces cur-rently in use can match.

Equally promising as an area of research are currentattempts to convert solar energy into electricity. Theo-retically, an area roughly a square yard in size placedperpendicular to the sun's rays receives energy equivalentto one kilowatt. "Considering that in the arid zones of theworld many millions of square meters of desert land arefree for power production," observes Thirring, "we findthat by utilizing only one percent of the available groundfor solar plants a capacity could be reached far higher thanthe present installed capacity of all fuel-operated andhydroelectric power plants in the world."21 In practice,work along the lines suggested by Thirring has been inhib-ited by cost considerations, by market factors (there is nolarge demand for electricity in those underdeveloped, hotareas of the world where the project is most feasible) andby essentially the conservatism of designers in the powerfield. Research emphasis has been placed on the develop-ment of solar batteries—a result largely of work on the"space program."

Solar batteries are based on the thermoelectric effect. Ifstrips of antimony and bismuth are joined in a loop, forexample, a temperature differential made, say, by produc-ing heat in one junction, yields electric power. Research onsolar batteries over the past decade or so resulted in de-vices that have a power-converting efficiency as high asfifteen percent, and twenty to twenty-five percent is quiteattainable in the not too distant future.* Grouped in largepanels, solar batteries have been used to power electriccars, small boats, telephone lines, radios, phonographs,clocks, sewing machines and other appliances. Eventually,* The efficiency of the gasoline engine is rated at around elevenpercent, to cite a comparison.


the cost of producing solar batteries is expected to dimin-ish to a point where they will provide electric power forhomes and even small industrial facilities.

Finally, the sun's energy can be used in still anotherway—by collecting heat in a body of water. For some timenow, engineers have been studying ways of acquiring elec-tric power from the temperature differences produced bythe sun's heat in the sea. Theoretically, a solar pondoccupying a square kilometer could yield thirty millionkilowatt-hours of electricity annually—enough to matchthe output of a sizeable power station operating more thantwelve hours every day of the year. The power, as HenryTabor observes, can be acquired without any fuel costs,"merely by the pond lying in the sun."22 Heat can beextracted from the bottom of the pond by passing the hotwater over a heat exchanger and then returning the waterto the pond. In warm latitudes, ten thousand square milescommitted to this method of power production wouldprovide enough electricity to satisfy the needs of fourhundred million people!

The ocean's tides are still another untapped resource towhich we could turn for electric power. We could trap theocean's waters at high tide in a natural basin—say a bay orthe mouth of a river—and release them through turbines atlow tide. A number of places exist where the tides are highenough to produce electric power in large quantities. TheFrench have already built an immense tidal-power installa-tion near the mouth of the Ranee River at St. Malo withan expected net yield of 544 million kilowatt-hoursannually. They also plan to build another dam in the bayof Mont-Saint-Michel. In England, highly suitable condi-tions for a tidal dam exist above the confluence of theSevern and Wye rivers. A dam here could provide theelectric power produced by a million tons of coal annually.A superb location for producing tide-generated electricityexists at Passamaquoddy Bay on the border between Maine


and New Brunswick, and good locales exist on the MezenGulf, a Russian coastal area in the Arctic. Argentina hasplans for building a tidal dam across the estuary of theDeseado River near Puerto Desire on the Atlantic coast.Many other coastal areas could be used to generate elec-tricity from tidal power, but except for France no countryhas started work on this resource.

We could use temperature differences in the sea or inthe earth to generate electric power in sizeable quantities.A temperature differential as high as seventeen degreesCentigrade is not uncommon in the surface layers of trop-ical waters; along coastal areas of Siberia, winter differ-ences of thirty degrees exist between water below the icecrust and the air. The interior of the earth becomes pro-gressively warmer as we descend, providing selectivetemperature differentials with respect to the surface. Heatpumps could be used to avail ourselves of these differ-entials for industrial purposes or to heat homes. The heatpump works like a mechanical refrigerator: a circulatingrefrigerant draws off heat from a medium, dissipates it,and returns to repeat the process. During winter months,the pumps, circulating a refrigerant in a shallow well, couldbe used to absorb subsurface heat and release it in a house.In the summer the process could be reversed: heat with-drawn from the house could be dissipated in the earth. Thepumps do not require costly chimneys, they do not pollutethe atmosphere, and they eliminate the nuisance of stokingfurnaces and carrying out ashes. If we could acquire elec-tricity or direct heat from solar energy, wind power ortemperature differentials, the heating system of a home orfactory would be completely self-sustaining; it would notdrain valuable hydrocarbon resources or require externalsources of supply.

Winds could also be used to provide electric power inmany areas of the world. About one-fortieth of the solarenergy reaching the earth's surface is converted into wind.


Although much of this goes into making the jet stream, agreat deal of wind energy is available a few hundred feetabove the ground. A UN report, using monetary terms togauge the feasibility of wind power, finds that efficientwind plants in many areas could produce electricity at anoverall cost of five mills per kilowatt-hour, a figure thatapproximates the price of commercially generated electricpower. Several wind generators have already been usedwith success. The famous 1,250 kilowatt generator atGrandpa's Knob near Rutland, Vermont, successfully fedalternating current into the lines of the Central VermontPublic Service Co. until a parts shortage during World WarII made it difficult to keep the installation in good repair.Since then, larger, more efficient generators have beendesigned. P. H. Thomas, working for the Federal PowerCommission, has designed a 7,500 kilowatt windmill thatwould provide electricity at a capital investment of $68per kilowatt. Eugene Ayres notes that if the constructioncosts of Thomas's windmill were double the amountestimated by its designer, "wind turbines would seemnevertheless to compare favorably with hydroelectric in-stallations which cost around $300 per kilowatt."23 Anenormous potential for generating electricity by means ofwind power exists in many regions of the world. InEngland, for example, where a careful three-year surveywas made of possible wind-power sites, it was found thatthe newer wind turbines could generate several millionkilowatts, saving from two to four million tons of coalannually.

There should be no illusions about the extraction oftrace minerals from rocks, about solar and wind power, orabout the use of heat pumps. Except perhaps for tidalpower and the extraction of raw materials from the sea,these sources cannot supply man with the bulky quantitiesof raw materials and the large blocks of energy needed tosustain densely concentrated populations and highly cen-


tralized industries. Solar devices, wind turbines, and heatpumps will produce relatively small quantities of power.Used locally and in conjunction with each other, theycould probably meet all the power needs of small com-munities, but we cannot foresee a time when they will beable to furnish the electricity currently used by cities thesize of New York, London or Paris.

Limitation of scope, however, could represent a pro-found advantage from an ecological point of view. Thesun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities towhich men have responded sensuously and reverently fromtime immemorial. Out of these primal elements man de-veloped his sense of dependence on—and respect for—thenatural environment, a dependence that kept his destruc-tive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and theurbanized world that followed obscured nature's role inhuman experience—hiding the sun with a pall of smoke,blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating theearth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on thenatural world became invisible; it became theoretical andintellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks,monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical depen-dence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) intothe natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of allsensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unitywith nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves asfeeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our tech-nology and environment became totally inanimate, totallysynthetic—a purely inorganic physical milieu that pro-moted the deanimization of man and his thought.

To bring the sun, the wind, the earth, indeed the worldof life, back into technology, into the means of humansurvival, would be a revolutionary renewal of man's ties tonature. To restore this dependence in a way that evoked asense of regional uniqueness in each community—a sensenot only of generalized dependence but of dependence on


a specific region with distinct qualities of its own—wouldgive this renewal a truly ecological character. A real eco-logical system would emerge, a delicately interlaced pat-tern of local resources, honored by continual study andartful modification. With the growth of a true sense ofregionalism every resource would find its place in a natu-ral, stable balance, an organic unity of social, techno-logical and natural elements. Art would assimilate tech-nology by becoming social art, the art of the communityas a whole. The free community would be able to rescalethe tempo of life, the work patterns of man, its ownarchitecture and its systems of transportation and com-munication to human dimensions. The electric car, quiet,slow-moving and clean, would become the preferred modeof urban transportation, replacing the noisy, filthy, high-speed automobile. Monorails would link community tocommunity, reducing the number of highways that scarthe countryside. Crafts would regain their honored posi-tion as supplements to mass manufacture; they would be-come a form of domestic, day-to-day artistry. A high stan-dard of excellence, I believe, would replace the strictlyquantitative criteria of production that prevail today; arespect for the durability of goods and the conservation ofraw materials would replace the shabby, huckster-orientedcriteria that result in built-in obsolescence and an insensateconsumer society. The community would become a beauti-fully molded arena of life, a vitalizing source of cultureand a deeply personal, ever-nourishing source of humansolidarity.

TECHNOLOGY FOR LIFEIn a future revolution, the most pressing task of tech-

nology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a mini-mum of toil. The immediate purpose of this task will be toopen the social arena permanently to the revolutionarypeople, to keep the revolution in permanence. Thus far


every social revolution has foundered because the peal ofthe tocsin could not be heard over the din of the work-shop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by themundane, workaday responsibility of producing the meansof survival. Looking back at the brute facts of history, wefind that as long as revolution meant continual sacrificeand denial for the people, the reins of power fell into thehands of the political "professionals," the mediocrities ofThermidor. How well the liberal Girondins of the FrenchConvention understood this reality can be judged by theireffort to reduce the revolutionary fervor of the Parisianpopular assemblies—the great sections of 1793—by decree-ing that the meetings should close "at ten in the evening,"or, as Carlyle tells us, "before the working peoplecome. . ." from their jobs.24 The decree proved ineffec-tive, but it was well aimed. Essentially, the tragedy of pastrevolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doorsclosed, "at ten in the evening." The most critical functionof modern technology must be to keep the doors of therevolution open forever!

Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic andCommunist theoreticians babbled about a society with"work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen,demanded unemployment for everybody. The decadeshave detracted nothing from the significance of this de-mand, and they have added to its content. From themoment toil is reduced to the barest possible minimum ordisappears entirely, the problems of survival pass into theproblems of life, and technology itself passes from beingthe servant of man's immediate needs to being the partnerof his creativity.

Let us look at this matter closely. Much has been writ-ten about technology as an "extension of man." Thephrase is misleading if it is meant to apply to technology asa whole. It has validity primarily for the traditional handi-craft shop and, perhaps, for the early stages of machine


development. The craftsman dominates his tool; his labor,artistic inclinations, and personality are the sovereign fac-tors in the productive process. Labor is not merely anexpenditure of energy; it is also the personalized work of aman whose activities are sensuously directed toward pre-paring his product, fashioning it, and finally decorating itfor human use. The craftsman guides the tool, not the toolthe craftsman. Whatever alienation may exist between thecraftsman and his product is immediately overcome, asFriedrich Wilhelmsen emphasized, "by an artistic judg-ment—a judgment bearing on a thing to be made."2S Thetool amplifies the powers of the craftsman as a human; itamplifies his power to exercise his artistry and impart hisidentity as a creative being to raw materials.

The development of the machine tends to rupture theintimate relationship between man and the means of pro-duction. It assimilates the worker to preset industrial tasks,tasks over which he exercises no control. The machine nowappears as an alien force—apart from and yet wedded tothe production of the means of survival. Although initiallyan "extension of man," technology is transformed into aforce above man, orchestrating his life according to a scorecontrived by an industrial bureaucracy; not men, I repeat,but a bureaucracy, a social machine. With the arrival ofmass production as the predominant mode of production,man became an extension of the machine, and not only ofmechanical devices in the productive process but also ofsocial devices in the social process. When he becomes anextension of a machine, man ceases to exist for his ownsake. Society is ruled by the harsh maxim: "production forthe sake of production." The decline from craftsman toworker, from an active to an increasingly passive personal-ity, is completed by man qua consumer—an economic en-tity whose tastes, values, thoughts and sensibilities areengineered by bureaucratic "teams" in "think tanks."Man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine.


Man-the-machine is the bureaucratic ideal.* It is an idealthat is continually defied by the rebirth of life, by thereappearance of the young, and by the contradictions thatunsettle the bureaucracy. Every generation has to be as-similated again, and each time with explosive resistance.The bureaucracy, in turn, never lives up to its own tech-nical ideal. Congested with mediocrities, it errs continu-ally. Its judgment lags behind new situations; insensate, itsuffers from social inertia and is always buffeted bychance. Any crack that opens in the social machine iswidened by the forces of life.

How can we heal the fracture that separates living menfrom dead machines without sacrificing either men ormachines? How can we transform a technology for survivalinto a technology for life? To answer any of these ques-tions with Olympian assurance would be idiotic. The fu-ture liberated men will choose from a large variety ofmutually exclusive or combinable work styles, all of whichwill be based on unforeseeable technological innovations.Or these humans of the future may simply choose to stepover the body of technology. They may submerge thecybernated machine in a technological underworld, divorc-ing it entirely from social life, the community and crea-tivity. All but hidden from society, the machines wouldwork for man. Free communities would stand at the endof a cybernated assembly line with baskets to cart thegoods home. Industry, like the autonomic nervous system,would work on its own, subject to the repairs that our own

* The "ideal man" of the police bureaucracy is a being whose inner-most thoughts can be invaded by lie detectors, electronic listeningdevices, and "truth" drugs. The "ideal man" of the political bureauc-racy is a being whose innermost life can be shaped by mutagenicchemicals and socially assimilated by the mass media. The "idealman" of the industrial bureaucracy is a being whose innermost lifecan be invaded by subliminal and predictively reliable advertising.The "ideal man" of the military bureaucracy is a being whose inner-most life can be invaded by regimentation for genocide.


bodies require in occasional bouts of illness. The fractureseparating man from machine would not be healed. Itwould simply be ignored.

Ignoring technology, of course, is no solution. Manwould be closing off a vital human experience—the stimu-lus of productive activity, the stimulus of the machine.Technology can play a vital role in forming the personalityof man. Every art, as Lewis Mumford has argued, has itstechnical side, requiring the self-mobilization of spontan-eity into expressed order and providing contact with theobjective world during the most ecstatic moments of ex-perience.

A liberated society, I believe, will not want to negatetechnology precisely because it is liberated and can strike abalance. It may well want to assimilate the machine toartistic craftsmanship. By this I mean the machine willremove the toil from the productive process, leaving itsartistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, willparticipate in human creativity. There is no reason whyautomatic, cybernated machinery cannot be used so thatthe finishing of products, especially those destined forpersonal use, is left to the community. The machine canabsorb the toil involved in mining, smelting, transportingand shaping raw materials, leaving the final stages of art-istry and craftsmanship to the individual. Most of thestones that make up a medieval cathedral were carefullysquared and standardized to facilitate their laying andbonding—a thankless, repetitive and boring task that cannow be done rapidly and effortlessly by modern machines.Once the stone blocks were set in place, the craftsmenmade their appearance; toil was replaced by creative hu-man work. In a liberated community the combination ofindustrial machines and the craftsman's tools could reach adegree of sophistication and of creative interdependenceunparalleled in any period in human history. William Mor-ris's vision of a return to craftsmanship would be freed of


its nostalgic nuances. We could truly speak of a qualita-tively new advance in technics—a technology for life.

Having acquired a vitalizing respect for the natural en-vironment and its resources, the free decentralized commu-nity would give a new interpretation to the word "need."Marx's "realm of necessity," instead of expanding indefi-nitely, would tend to contract; needs would be humanizedand scaled by a higher valuation of life and creativity.Quality and artistry would supplant the current emphasison quantity and standardization; durability would replacethe current emphasis on expendability; an economy ofcherished things, sanctified by a sense of tradition and by asense of wonder for the personality and artistry of deadgenerations, would replace the mindless seasonal restylingof commodities; innovations would be made with a sensi-tivity for the natural inclinations of man as distinguishedfrom the engineered pollution of taste by the mass media.Conservation would replace waste in all things. Freed ofbureaucratic manipulation, men would rediscover thebeauty of a simpler, uncluttered material life. Clothing,diet, furnishings and homes would become more artistic,more personalized and more Spartan. Man would recover asense of the things that are for man, as against the thingsthat have been imposed upon man. The repulsive ritual ofbargaining and hoarding would be replaced by the sensitiveacts of making and giving. Things would cease to be thecrutches for an impoverished ego and the mediators be-tween aborted personalities; they would become theproducts of rounded, creative individuals and the gifts ofintegrated, developing selves.

A technology for life could play the vital role of inte-grating one community with another. Rescaled to a revivalof crafts and a new conception of material needs, tech-nology could also function as the sinews of confederation.A national division of labor and industrial centralizationare dangerous because technology begins to transcend the


human scale; it becomes increasingly incomprehensible andlends itself to bureaucratic manipulation. To the extentthat a shift away from community control occurs in realmaterial terms (technologically and economically), central-ized institutions acquire real power over the lives of menand threaten to become sources of coercion. A technologyfor life must be based on the community; it must be tai-lored to the community and the regional level. On thislevel, however, the sharing of factories and resources couldactually promote solidarity between community groups; itcould serve to confederate them on the basis not only ofcommon spiritual and cultural interests but also of com-mon material needs. Depending upon the resources anduniqueness of regions, a rational, humanistic balance couldbe struck between autarky, industrial confederation, and anational division of labor.

Is society so "complex" that an advanced industrialcivilization stands in contradiction to a decentralized tech-nology for life? My answer to this question is a categoricalno. Much of the social "complexity" of our time origi-nates in the paperwork, administration, manipulation andconstant wastefulness of capitalist enterprise. The pettybourgeois stands in awe of the bourgeois filing system—therows of cabinets filled with invoices, accounting books,insurance records, tax forms and the inevitable dossiers. Heis spellbound by the "expertise" of industrial managers,engineers, stylemongers, financial manipulators, and thearchitects of market consent. He is totally mystified by thestate—the police, courts, jails, federal offices, secretariats,the whole stinking, sick body of coercion, control anddomination. Modern society is incredibly complex, com-plex even beyond human comprehension, if we grant itspremises—property, "production for the sake of produc-tion," competition, capital accumulation, exploitation,finance, centralization, coercion, bureaucracy and thedomination of man by man. Linked to every one of these


premises are the institutions that actualize it—offices, mil-lions of "personnel," forms, immense tons of paper, desks,typewriters, telephones, and, of course, rows upon rows offiling cabinets. As in Kafka's novels, these things are realbut strangely dreamlike, indefinable shadows on the sociallandscape. The economy has a greater reality to it and iseasily mastered by the mind and senses, but it too is highlyintricate—if we grant that buttons must be styled in athousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kindand pattern to create the illusion of innovation and nov-elty, bathrooms filled to overflowing with a dazzlingvariety of pharmaceuticals and lotions, and kitchens clut-tered with an endless number of imbecile appliances. If wesingle out of this odious garbage one or two goods of highquality in the more useful categories and if we eliminatethe money economy, the state power, the credit system,the paperwork and the policework required to hold societyin an enforced state of want, insecurity and domination,society would not only become reasonably human but alsofairly simple.

I do not wish to belittle the fact that behind a singleyard of high quality electric wiring lies a copper mine, themachinery needed to operate it, a plant for producing in-sulating material, a copper smelting and shaping complex,a transportation system for distributing the wiring—andbehind each of these complexes other mines, plants,machine shops and so forth. Copper mines, certainly of akind that can be exploited by existing machinery, are notto be found everywhere, although enough copper andother useful metals can be recovered as scrap from thedebris of our present society to provide future generationswith all they need. But let us grant that copper will fallwithin the sizeable category of material that can be fur-nished only by a nationwide system of distribution. Inwhat sense need there be a division of labor in the currentsense of the term? There need be none at all. First, copper


can be distributed, together with other goods, among free,autonomous communities, be they those that mine it orthose that require it. This distribution system need notrequire the mediation of centralized bureaucratic institu-tions. Second, and perhaps more significant, a communitythat lives in a region with ample copper resources wouldnot be a mere mining community. Copper mining wouldbe one of the many economic activities in which it wasengaged—a part of a larger, rounded, organic economicarena. The same would hold for communities whose cli-mate was most suitable for growing specialized foods orwhose resources were rare and uniquely valuable to societyas a whole. Every community would approximate localor regional autarky. It would seek to achieve wholeness,because wholeness produces complete, rounded men wholive in symbiotic relationship with their environment. Evenif a substantial portion of the economy fell within thesphere of a national division of labor, the overall economicweight of society would still rest with the community. Ifthere is no distortion of communities, there will be nosacrifice of any portion of humanity to the interests ofhumanity as a whole.

A basic sense of decency, sympathy and mutual aid liesat the core of human behavior. Even in this lousy bour-geois society we do not find it unusual that adults willrescue children from danger although the act may imperiltheir lives; we do not find it strange that miners, for ex-ample, will risk death to save their fellow workers in cave-ins or that soldiers will crawl under heavy fire to carry awounded comrade to safety. What tends to shock us arethose occasions when aid is refused—when the cries of agirl who has been stabbed and is being murdered are ig-nored in a middle-class neighborhood.

Yet there is nothing in this society that would seem towarrant a molecule of solidarity. What solidarity we dofind exists despite the society, against all its realities, as an


unending struggle between the innate decency of man andthe innate indecency of society. Can we imagine how menwould behave if this decency could find full release, ifsociety earned the respect, even the love, of the individual?We are still the offspring of a violent, blood-soaked, ig-noble history—the end products of man's domination ofman. We may never end this condition of domination. Thefuture may bring us and our shoddy civilization down in aWagnerian Gotterdammerung. How idiotic it would all be!But we may also end the domination of man by man. Wemay finally succeed in breaking the chain to the past andgain a humanistic, anarchist society. Would it not be theheight of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge thebehavior of future generations by the very criteria we de-spise in our own time? Free men will not be greedy, oneliberated community will not try to dominate another be-cause it has a potential monopoly of copper, computer"experts" will not try to enslave grease monkeys, and sen-timental novels about pining, tubercular virgins will not bewritten. We can ask only one thing of the free men andwomen of the future: to forgive us that it took so long andthat it was such a hard pull. Like Brecht, we can ask thatthey try not to think of us too harshly, that they give ustheir sympathy and understand that we lived in the depthsof a social hell.

But then, they will surely know what to think withoutour telling them.

New YorkMay 1965

TheForms

of Freedom

D

Freedom has its forms. However personalized, indi-viduated or dadaesque may be the attack upon prevailinginstitutions, a liberatory revolution always poses the ques-tion of what social forms will replace existing ones. At onepoint or another, a revolutionary people must deal withhow it will manage the land and the factories from whichit acquires the means of life. It must deal with the mannerin which it will arrive at decisions that affect the commu-nity as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to betaken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the prob-lems and forms of social management. It must open topublic discussion the problems that are involved in a crea-tive development of liberatory social forms. Althoughthere is no theory of liberation that can replace experi-ence, there is sufficient historial experience, and a suffi-cient theoretical formulation of the issues involved, toindicate what social forms are consistent with the fullestrealization of personal and social freedom.

What social forms will replace existing ones depends onwhat relations free people decide to establish betweenthemselves. Every personal relationship has a social dimen-sion; every social relationship has a deeply personal side toit. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their relationship toeach other are mystified and difficult to see clearly. Theinstitutions created by hierarchical society, especially thestate institutions, produce the illusion that social relationsexist in a universe of their own, in specialized political orbureaucratic compartments. In reality, there exists nostrictly "impersonal" political or social dimension; all thesocial institutions of the past and present depend on therelations between people in daily life, especially in those

165


aspects of daily life which are necessary for survival—theproduction and distribution of the means of life, the rear-ing of the young, the maintenance and reproduction oflife. The liberation of man—not in some vague "historical,"moral, or philosophical sense, but in the intimate details ofday-to-day life—is a profoundly social act and raises theproblem of social forms as modes of relations betweenindividuals.

The relationship between the social and the individualrequires special emphasis in our own time, for never beforehave personal relations become so impersonal and neverbefore have social relations become so asocial. Bourgeoissociety has brought all relations between people to thehighest point of abstraction by divesting them of theirhuman content and dealing with them as objects. Theobject—the commodity—takes on roles that formerlybelonged to the community; exchange relationships(actualized in most cases as money relationships) supplantnearly all other modes of human relationships. In thisrespect, the bourgeois commodity system becomes the his-torical culmination of all societies, precapitalist as well ascapitalist, in which human relationships are mediatedrather than direct or face-to-face.

THE MEDIATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSTo place this development in clearer perspective, let usbriefly look back in time and establish what the mediationof social relations has come to mean.

The earliest social "specialists" who interposed them-selves between people—the priests and tribal chiefs whopermanently mediated their relations—established theformal conditions for hierarchy and exploitation. Theseformal conditions were consolidated and deepened bytechnological advances—advances which provided onlyenough material surplus for the few to live at the expenseof the many. The tribal assembly, in which all members of

The Forms of Freedom I 167

the community had decided and directly managed theircommon affairs, dissolved into chieftainship, and the com-munity dissolved into social classes.

Despite the increasing investiture of social control in ahandful of men and even one man, the fact remains thatmen in precapitalist societies mediated the relations ofother people—council supplanting assembly, and chieftain-ship supplanted council. In bourgeois society, on the otherhand, the mediation of social relations by men isreplaced by the mediation of social relations by things, bycommodities. Having brought social mediation to thehighest point of impersonality, commodity society turnsattention to mediation as such; it brings into question allforms of social organization based on indirect representa-tion, on the management of public affairs by the few, onthe distinctive existence of concepts and practices such as"election," "legislation," "administration."

The most striking evidence of this social refocusing arethe demands voiced almost intuitively by increasingnumbers of American youth for tribalism and community.These demands are "regressive" only in the sense that theygo back temporally to pre-hierarchical forms of freedom.They are profoundly progressive in the sense that they goback structurally to non-hierarchical forms of freedom.

By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand forcouncil forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt de-scribes as "the revolutionary heritage") does not breakcompletely with the terrain of hierarchical society.Workers' councils originate as class councils. Unless oneassumes that workers are driven by their interests asworkers to revolutionary measures against hierarchicalsociety (an assumption I flatly deny), then these councilscan be used just as much to perpetuate class society as todestroy it.* We shall see, in fact, that the council form

* For a discussion on the myth of the working class see "Listen,Marxist!"


contains many structural limitations which favor the de-velopment of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to saythat most advocates of workers' councils tend to conceiveof people primarily as economic entities, either as workersor nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness ofthe self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcatedbeing, the product of a social development that dividesman from man and each man from himself.

Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected bydemands for workers' management of production and theshortening of the work week, for these demands leave thenature of the work process and the quality of the worker'sfree time completely untouched. If workers' councils andworkers' management of production do not transform thework into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous ex-perience, and the workplace into a community, then theyremain merely formal structures, in fact, class structures.They perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as aproduct of bourgeois social conditions. Indeed, no move-ment that raises the demand for workers' councils can beregarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweep-ing transformations in the environment of the work place.

Finally, council organizations are forms of mediatedrelationships rather than face-to-face relationships. Unlessthese mediated relationships are limited by direct relation-ships, leaving policy decisions to the latter and mereadministration to the former, the councils tend to becomefocuses of power. Indeed, unless the councils are finallyassimilated by a popular assembly, and factories are inte-grated into new types of community, both the councilsand the factories perpetuate the alienation between manand man and between man and work. Fundamentally, thedegree of freedom in a society can be gauged by the kindof relationships that unite the people in it. If these rela-tionships are open, unalienated and creative, the societywill be free. If structures exist that inhibit open relation-


ships, either by coercion or mediation, then freedom willnot exist, whether there is workers' management of pro-duction or not. For all the workers will manage will beproduction—the preconditions of life, not the conditionsof life. No mode of social organization can be isolatedfrom the social conditions it is organizing. Both councilsand assemblies have furthered the interests of hierarchicalsociety as well as those of revolution. To assume that theforms of freedom can be treated merely as forms would beas absurd as to assume that legal concepts can be treatedmerely as questions of jurisprudence. The form and con-tent of freedom, like law and society, are mutually deter-mined. By the same token, there are forms of organizationthat promote and forms that vitiate the goal of freedom,and social conditions favor sometimes the one and some-times the other. To one degree or another, these formseither alter the individual who uses them or inhibit hisfurther development.

This article does not dispute the need for workers'councils—more properly, factory committees—as a revolu-tionary means of appropriating the bourgeois economy.On the contrary, experience has shown repeatedly that thefactory committee is vitally important as an initial form ofeconomic administration. But no revolution can settle forcouncils and committees as its final, or even its exemplary,mode of social organization, any more than "workers'management of production" can be regarded as a finalmode of economic administration. Neither of these tworelationships is broad enough to revolutionize work, freetime, needs, and the structure of society as a whole. In thisarticle I take the revolutionary aspect of the council andcommittee forms for granted; my purpose is to examinethe conservative traits in them which vitiate the revolu-tionary project.

It has always been fashionable to look for models of social


institutions in the so-called "proletarian" revolutions ofthe past hundred years. The Paris Commune of 1871, theRussian Soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Spanish revolu-tionary syndicates of the 1930s, and the Hungarian coun-cils of 1956 have all been raked over for examples offuture social organization. What, it is worth asking, dothese models of organization have in common? The answeris, very little, other than their limitations as mediatedforms. Spain, as we shall see, provides a welcome excep-tion: the others were either too short-lived or simply toodistorted to supply us with more than the material formyths.

The Paris Commune may be revered for many differentreasons—for its intoxicating sense of libidinal release, forits radical populism, for its deeply revolutionary impact onthe oppressed, or for its defiant heroism in defeat. But theCommune itself, viewed as a structural entity, was littlemore than a popular municipal council. More democraticand plebeian than other such bodies, the council wasnevertheless structured along parliamentary lines. It waselected by "citizens," grouped according to geographicconstituencies. In combining legislation with administra-tion, the Commune was hardly more advanced than themunicipal bodies in the U.S. today.

Fortunately, revolutionary Paris largely ignored theCommune after it was installed. The insurrection, theactual management of the city's affairs, and finally thefighting against the Versaillese, were undertaken mainly bythe popular clubs, the neighborhood vigilance committees,and the battalions of the National Guard. Had the ParisCommune (the Municipal Council) survived, it is extremelydoubtful that it could have avoided conflict with theseloosely formed street and militia formations. Indeed, bythe end of April, some six weeks after the insurrection, theCommune constituted an "all-powerful" Committee ofPublic Safety, a body redolent with memories of the


Jacobin dictatorship and the Terror, which suppressed notonly the right in the Great Revolution of a century earlier,but also the left. In any case, history left the Commune amere three weeks of life, two of which were consumed inthe death throes of barricade fighting against Thiers andthe Versaillese.

It does not malign the Paris Commune to divest it of"historical" burdens it never actually carried. The Com-mune was a festival of the streets, its partisans primarilyhandicraftsmen, itinerant intellectuals, the social debris ofa precapitalist era, and lumpens. To regard these strata as"proletarian" is to caricature the word to the point ofabsurdity. The industrial proletariat constituted a minorityof the Communards.*

The Commune was the last great rebellion of the Frenchsans-culottes, a class that lingered on in Paris for a centuryafter the Great Revolution. Ultimately, this highly mixedstratum was destroyed not by the guns of the Versaillesebut by the advance of industrialism.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was largely a city council,established to coordinate municipal administration underconditions of revolutionary unrest. The Russian Soviets of

* If we are to regard the bulk of the Communards as "proletarians,"or describe any social stratum as "proletarian" (as the FrenchSituationists do) simply because it has no control over theconditions of its life, we might just as well call slaves, serfs, peasantsand large sections of the middle class "proletarians." To create suchsweeping antitheses between "proletarian" and bourgeois, however,eliminates all the determinations that characterize these classes asspecific, historically limited strata. This giddy approach to socialanalysis divests the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie of allthe historically unique features which Marx believed he haddiscovered (a theoretical project that proved inadequate, althoughby no means false); it slithers away from the responsibilities of aserious critique of Marxism and the development of "laissez-faire"capitalism toward state capitalism, while pretending to retain conti-nuity with the Marxian project.


1905 were largely fighting organizations, established tocoordinate near-insurrectionary strikes in St. Petersburg.These councils were based almost entirely on factories andtrade unions: there was a delegate for every five hundredworkers (where individual factories and shops contained asmaller number, they were grouped together for votingpurposes), and additionally, delegates from trade unionsand political parties. The soviet mode of organization tookon its clearest and most stable form in St. Petersburg,where the soviet contained about four hundred delegatesat its high point, including representatives of the newlyorganized professional unions. The St. Petersburg sovietrapidly developed from a large strike committee into aparliament of all oppressed classes, broadening its repre-sentation, demands and responsibilities. Delegates wereadmitted from cities outside St. Petersburg, politicaldemands began to dominate economic ones, and links wereestablished with peasant organizations and their delegatesadmitted into the deliberations of the body. Inspired bySt. Petersburg, Soviets sprang up in all the major cities andtowns of Russia and developed into an incipient revolu-tionary power counterposed to all the governmental insti-tutions of the autocracy.

The St. Petersburg soviet lasted less than two months.Most of its members were arrested in December 1905. To alarge extent, the soviet was deserted by the St. Petersburgproletariat, which never rose in armed insurrection andwhose strikes diminished in size and militancy as traderevived in the late autumn. Ironically, the last stratum toadvance beyond the early militancy of the soviet were theMoscow students, who rose in insurrection on December22 and during five days of brilliantly conceived urbanguerrilla warfare reduced local police and military forces tonear impotence. The students received very little aid fromthe workers in the city. Their street battles might havecontinued indefinitely, even in the face of massive prole-


tarian apathy, had the czar's guard not been transported toMoscow by the railway workers on one of the few operat-ing lines to the city.

The Soviets of 1917 were the true heirs of the Soviets of1905, and to distinguish the two from each other, as somewriters occasionally do, is spurious. Like their predecessorsof twelve years earlier, the 1917 Soviets were based largelyon factories, trade unions and party organizations, butthey were expanded to include delegates from army groupsand a sizeable number of stray radical intellectuals. TheSoviets of 1917 reveal all the limitations of "sovietism."Though the Soviets were invaluable as local fighting organi-zations, their national congresses proved to be increasinglyunrepresentative bodies. The congresses were organizedalong very hierarchical lines. Local Soviets in cities, townsand villages elected delegates to district and regionalbodies; these elected delegates to the actual nationwidecongresses. In larger cities, representation to the congresseswas less indirect, but it was indirect nonetheless—fromthe voter in a large city to the municipal soviet and fromthe municipal soviet to the congress. In either case thecongress was separated from the mass of voters by one ormore representative levels.

The soviet congresses were scheduled to meet everythree months. This permitted far too long a time span toexist between sessions. The first congress, held in June1917, had some eight hundred delegates; later congresseswere even larger, numbering a thousand or more delegates.To "expedite" the work of the congresses and to providecontinuity of function between the tri-monthly sessions,the congresses elected an executive committee, fixed atnot more than two hundred in 1918 and expanded to amaximum of three hundred in 1920. This body was toremain more or less in permanent session, but it too wasregarded as unwieldy and most of its responsibilities afterthe October revolution were turned over to a small Council


of People's Commissars. Having once acquired control ofthe Second Congress of Soviets (in October 1917), theBolsheviks found it easy to centralize power in the Councilof Commissars and later in the Political Bureau of theCommunist Party. Opposition groups in the Soviets eitherleft the Second Congress or were later expelled from allsoviet organs. The tri-monthly meetings of the congresseswere permitted to lapse: the completely Bolshevik Execu-tive Committee and Council of People's Commissars sim-ply did not summon them. Finally, the congresses wereheld only once a year. Similarly, the intervals between themeetings of district and regional Soviets grew increasinglylonger and even the meetings of the Executive Committee,created by the congresses as a body in permanent session,became increasingly infrequent until finally they were heldonly three times a year. The power of the local Sovietspassed into the hands of the Executive Committee, thepower of the Executive Committee passed into the handsof the Council of People's Commissars, and finally, thepower of the Council of People's Commissars passed intothe hands of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party.

That the Russian Soviets were incapable of providing theanatomy for a truly popular democracy is to be ascribednot only to their hierarchical structure, but also to theirlimited social roots. The insurgent military battalions,from which the Soviets drew their original striking power,were highly unstable, especially after the final collapse ofthe czarist armies. The newly formed Red Army was re-cruited, disciplined, centralized and tightly controlled bythe Bolsheviks. Except for partisan bands and naval forces,soviet military bodies remained politically inert through-out the civil war. The peasant villages turned inwardtoward their local concerns, and were apathetic aboutnational problems. This left the factories as the mostimportant political base of the Soviets. Here we encountera basic contradiction in class concepts of revolutionary

The Forms of Freedom / 175

power: proletarian socialism, precisely because it empha-sizes that power must be based exclusively on the factory,creates the conditions for a centralized, hierarchical poli-tical structure.

However much its social position is strengthened by asystem of "self-management," the factory is not an auton-omous social organism. The amount of social control thefactory can exercise is fairly limited, for every factory ishighly dependent for its operation and its very existenceupon other factories and sources of raw materials. Iron-ically, the Soviets, by basing themselves primarily in thefactory and isolating the factory from its local environ-ment, shifted power from the community and the regionto the nation, and eventually from the base of society toits summit. The soviet system consisted of an elaborateskein of mediated social relationships, knitted alongnationwide class lines.

Perhaps the only instance where a system of working-class self-management succeeded as a mode of class organi-zation was in Spain, where anarcho-syndicalism attracted alarge number of workers and peasants to its banner. TheSpanish anarcho-syndicalists consciously sought to limitthe tendency toward centralization. The CNT (Confede-racion Nacional del Trabajo), the large anarcho-syndicalistunion in Spain, created a dual organization with an electedcommittee system to act as a control on local bodies andnational congresses. The assemblies had the power torevoke their delegates to the council and countermandcouncil decisions. For all practical purposes the "higher"bodies of the CNT functioned as coordinating bodies. Letthere be no mistake about the effectiveness of this schemeof organization: it imparted to each member of the CNT aweighty sense of responsibility, a sense of direct,immediate and personal influence in the activities andpolicies of the union. This responsibility was exercisedwith a highmindedness that made the CNT the most mili-


tant as well as the largest revolutionary movement inEurope during the interwar decades.

The Spanish Revolution of 1936 put the CNT system toa practical test, and it worked fairly well. In Barcelona,CNT workers seized the factories, transportation facilitiesand utilities, and managed them along anarcho-syndicalistlines. It remains a matter of record, attested to by visitorsof almost every political persuasion, that the city'seconomy operated with remarkable success andefficiency—despite the systematic sabotage practiced bythe bourgeois Republican government and the SpanishCommunist Party. The experiment finally collapsed inshambles when the central government's assault troopsoccupied Barcelona in May 1937, following an uprising ofthe proletariat.

Despite their considerable influence, the Spanishanarchists had virtually no roots outside certain sections ofthe working class and peasantry. The movement waslimited primarily to industrial Catalonia, the coastalMediterranean areas, rural Aragon, and Andalusia. Whatdestroyed the experiment was its isolation within Spainitself and the overwhelming forces—Republican as well asfascist, and Stalinist as well as bourgeois—that weremobilized against it.*

It would be fruitless to examine in detail the councilmodes of organization that emerged in Germany in 1918,in the Asturias in 1934, and in Hungary in 1956. TheGerman councils were hopelessly perverted: the so-called"majority" (reformist) social democrats succeeded in gain-ing control of the newly formed councils and using themfor counterrevolutionary ends. In Hungary and Asturias* This is not to ignore the disastrous political errors made by many"leading" Spanish anarchists. Although the leading anarchists werefaced with the alternative of establishing a dictatorship in Catalonia,which they were not prepared to do (and rightly so!), this was noexcuse for practicing opportunistic tactics all along the way.

The Forms of Freedom I \ 77

the councils were quickly destroyed by counterrevolution,but there is no reason to believe that, had they developedfurther, they would have avoided the fate of the RussianSoviets. History shows that the Bolsheviks were not theonly ones to distort the council mode of operation. Evenin anarcho-syndicalist Spain there is evidence that by 1937the committee system of the CNT was beginning to clashwith the assembly system; whatever the outcome mighthave been, the whole experiment was ended by the assaultof the Communists and the Republican government againstBarcelona.

The fact remains that council modes of organization arenot immune to centralization, manipulation and perver-sion. These councils are still particularistic, one-sided andmediated forms of social management. At best, they canbe the stepping stones to a decentralized society—at worst,they can easily be integrated into hierarchical forms ofsocial organization.ASSEMBLY AND COMMUNITY

Let us turn to the popular assembly for an insight intounmediated forms of social relations. The assembly prob-ably formed the structural basis of early clan and tribalsociety until its functions were pre-empted by chiefs andcouncils. It appeared as the ecclesia in classical Athens;later, in a mixed and often perverted form, it reappeared inthe medieval and Renaissance towns of Europe. Finally, asthe "sections," assemblies emerged as the insurgent bodiesin Paris during the Great Revolution. The ecclesia and theParisian sections warrant the closest study. Both developedin the most complex cities of their time and both assumeda highly sophisticated form, often welding individuals ofdifferent social origins into a remarkable, albeit temporary,community of interests. It does not minimize their limita-tions to say that they developed methods of functioning sosuccessfully libertarian in character that even the most


imaginative Utopias have failed to match in speculationwhat they achieved in practice.

The Athenian ecclesia was probably rooted in the earlyassemblies of the Greek tribes. With the development ofproperty and social classes, it was replaced by a feudalsocial structure, lingering only in the social memory of thepeople. For a time, Athenian society seemed to be chartingthe disastrous course toward internal decay that Rome wasto follow several centuries later. A large class of heavilymortgaged peasants, a growing number of serf-likesharecroppers, and a large body of urban laborers andslaves were polarized against a small number of powerfulland magnates and a parvenu commercial middle class. Bythe sixth century B.C., all the conditions in Athens andAttica (the surrounding agricultural region) had ripenedfor a devastating social war.

The course of Athenian history was reversed by thereforms of Solon. In a series of drastic measures, thepeasantry was restored to an economically viablecondition, the landowners were shorn of most of theirpower, the ecclesia was revived, and a reasonably equitablesystem of justice was established. The trend toward apopular democracy continued to unfold for nearly acentury and a half, until it achieved a form that has neverquite been equaled elsewhere. By Periclean times theAthenians had perfected their polis to a point where itrepresented a triumph of rationality within the materiallimitations of the ancient world.

Structurally, the basis of the Athenian polis was theecclesia. Shortly after sunrise at each prytany (the tenthday of the year), thousands of male citizens from all overAttica began to gather on the Pnyx, a hill directly outsideAthens, for a meeting of the assembly. Here, in the openair, they leisurely disported themselves among groups offriends until the solemn intonation of prayers announcedthe opening of the meeting. The agenda, arranged under


the three headings of "sacred," "profane" and "foreignaffairs," had been distributed days earlier with theannouncement of the assembly. Although the ecclesiacould not add or bring forward anything that the agendadid not contain, its subject matter could be rearranged atthe will of the assembly. No quorum was necessary, exceptfor proposed decrees affecting individual citizens.

The ecclesia enjoyed complete sovereignty over all insti-tutions and offices in Athenian society. It decided ques-tions of war and peace, elected and removed generals,reviewed military campaigns, debated and voted upondomestic and foreign policy, redressed grievances, exam-ined and passed upon the operations of administrativeboards, and banished undesirable citizens. Roughly oneman out of six in the citizen body was occupied at anygiven time with the administration of the community'saffairs. Some fifteen hundred men, chosen mainly by lot,staffed the boards responsible for the collection of taxes,the management of shipping, food supply and public facili-ties, and the preparation of plans for public construction.The army, composed entirely of conscripts from eachof the ten tribes of Attica, was led by elected officers;Athens was policed by citizen-bowmen and Scythian stateslaves.

The agenda of the ecclesia was prepared by a bodycalled the Council of 500. Lest the council gain anyauthority over the ecclesia, the Athenians carefullycircumscribed its composition and functions. Chosen bylot from rosters of citizens who, in turn, were electedannually by the tribes, the Council was divided into tensubcommittees, each of which was on duty for a tenth ofthe year. Every day a president was selected by lot fromamong the fifty members of the subcommittee that was onduty to the polis. During his twenty-four hours of office,the Council's president held the state seal and the keys tothe citadel and public archives and functioned as acting


head of the country. Once he had been chosen, he couldnot occupy the position again.

Each of the ten tribes annually elected six hundredcitizens to serve as "judges"—what we would calljurymen—in the Athenian courts. Every morning, theytrudged up to the temple of Theseus, where lots weredrawn for the trials of the day. Each court consisted of atleast 201 jurymen and the trials were fair by any historicalstandard of juridical practice.

Taken as a whole, this was a remarkable system of socialmanagement; run almost entirely by amateurs, theAthenian polis reduced the formulation and administrationof public policy to a completely public affair. "Here is noprivileged class, no class of skilled politicians, nobureaucracy; no body of men, like the Roman Senate, whoalone understood the secrets of State, and were looked upto and trusted as the gathered wisdom of the wholecommunity," observes W. Warde Fowler. "At Athens therewas no disposition, and in fact no need, to trust theexperience of any one; each man entered intelligently intothe details of his own temporary duties, and dischargedthem, as far as we can tell, with industry and integrity." 26

Overdrawn as this view may be for a class society thatrequired slaves and denied women any role in the polis, thefact remains that Fowler's account is essentially accurate.

Indeed, the greatness of the achievement lies in the factthat Athens, despite the slave, patriarchal and class fea-tures it shared with classical society, as a whole developedinto a working democracy in the literal sense of the term.No less significant, and perhaps consoling for our owntime, is the fact that this achievement occurred when itseemed that the polis had charted a headlong coursetoward social decay. At its best, Athenian democracygreatly modified the more abusive and inhuman features ofancient society. The burdens of slavery were small by com-parison with other historical periods, except when slaves


were employed in capitalist enterprises. Generally, slaveswere allowed to accumulate their own funds; on theyeoman farmsteads of Attica they generally worked underthe same conditions and shared the same food as theirmasters; in Athens, they were indistinguishable in dress,manner and bearing from citizens—a source of ironicalcomment by foreign visitors. In many crafts, slaves notonly worked side by side with freemen, but occupiedsupervisory positions over free workers as well as otherslaves.

On balance, the image of Athens as a slave economywhich built its civilization and generous humanistic out-look on the backs of human chattels is false—"false in itsinterpretation of the past and in its confident pessimism asto the future, willfully false, above all, in its cynical esti-mate of human nature," observes Edward Zimmerman."Societies, like men, cannot live in compartments. Theycannot hope to achieve greatness by making amends intheir use of leisure for the lives they have brutalized inacquiring it. Art, literature, philosophy, and all other greatproducts of a nation's genius, are no mere delicate growthsof a sequestered hothouse culture; they must be sturdilyrooted, and find continual nourishment, in the broad com-mon soil of national life. That, if we are looking for les-sons, is one we might learn from ancient Greece."27

In Athens, the popular assembly emerged as the finalproduct of a sweeping social transition. In Paris, more thantwo millennia later, it emerged as the lever of social transi-tion itself, as a revolutionary form and an insurrectionaryforce. The Parisian sections of the early 1790s played thesame role as organs of struggle as the Soviets of 1905 and1917, with the decisive difference that relations within thesections were not mediated by a hierarchical structure.Sovereignty rested with the revolutionary assemblies them-selves, not above them.


The Parisian sections emerged directly from the votingsystem established for elections to the Estates General. In1789 the monarchy had divided the capital into sixty elec-toral districts, each of which formed an assembly of so-called "active" or taxpaying citizens, the eligible voters ofthe city. These primary assemblies were expected to elect abody of electors which, in turn, was to choose the sixtyrepresentatives of the capital. After performing their elec-toral functions, the assemblies were required to disappear,but they remained on in defiance of the monarchy andconstituted themselves into permanent municipal bodies.By degrees they turned into neighborhood assemblies of all"active" citizens, varying in form, scope and power fromone district to another.

The municipal law of May 1790 reorganized the sixtydistricts into forty-eight sections. The law was intended tocircumscribe the popular assemblies, but the sectionssimply ignored it. They continued to broaden their baseand extend their control over Paris. On July 30, 1792, theTheatre-Francais section swept aside the distinction be-tween "active" and "passive" citizens, inviting the poorestand most destitute of the sans-culottes to participate in theassembly. Other sections followed the Theatre-Francais,and from this period the sections became authentic popu-lar organs—indeed the very soul of the Great Revolution. Itwas the sections which constituted the new revolutionaryCommune of August 10, which organized the attack onthe Tuileries and finally eliminated the Bourbon mon-archy; it was the sections which decisively blocked theefforts of the Girondins to rouse the provinces against rev-olutionary Paris; it was the sections which, by ceaselessprodding, by their unending delegations and by armeddemonstrations, provided the revolution with its remark-able leftward momentum after 1791.

The sections, however, were not merely fighting organi-zations; they represented genuine forms of self-manage-


ment. At the high point of their development, they tookover the complete administration of the city. Individualsections policed their own neighborhoods, elected theirown judges, were responsible for the distribution of food,provided public aid to the poor, and contributed to themaintenance of the National Guard. With the declarationof war in April 1792 the sections took on the added tasksof enrolling volunteers for the revolutionary army and car-ing for their families, collecting donations for the wareffort, and equipping and provisioning entire battalions.During the period of the "maximum," when controls wereestablished over prices and wages to prevent a runawayinflation, the sections took responsibility for the mainte-nance of government-fixed prices. To provision Paris, thesections sent their representatives to the countryside tobuy and transport food and see to its distribution at fairprices.

It must be borne in mind that this complex ofextremely important activities was undertaken not byprofessional bureaucrats but, for the most part, by ordi-nary shopkeepers and craftsmen. The bulk of the sectionalresponsibilities were discharged after working hours, dur-ing the free time of the section members. The popularassemblies of the sections usually met during the eveningsin neighborhood churches. Assemblies were ordinarilyopen to all the adults of the neighborhood. In periods ofemergency, assembly meetings were held daily; specialmeetings could be called at the request of fifty members.Most administrative responsibilities were discharged bycommittees, but the popular assemblies established all thepolicies of the sections, reviewed and passed upon thework of all the committees, and replaced officers at will.

The forty-eight sections were coordinated through theParis Commune, the municipal council of the capital.When emergencies arose, sections often cooperated witheach other directly, through ad hoc delegates. This form of


cooperation from below never crystalized into a perma-nent relationship. The Paris Commune of the Great Revo-lution never became an overbearing, ossified institution; itchanged with almost every important political emergency,and its stability, form and functions depended largelyupon the wishes of the sections. In the days preceding theuprising of August 10, 1792, for example, the sectionssimply suspended the old municipal council, confined Peti-on, the mayor of Paris, and, in the persons of their insur-rectionary commissioners, took over all the authority ofthe Commune and the command of the National Guard.Almost the same procedure was followed nine monthslater when the Girondin deputies were expelled from theConvention, with the difference that the Commune, andPache, the mayor of Paris, gave their consent (after somepersuasive "gestures") to the uprising of the radical sec-tions.

Having relied on the sections to fasten their hold on theConvention, the Jacobins began to rely on the Conventionto destroy the sections. In September 1793 the Conven-tion limited section assemblies to two a week; threemonths later the sections were deprived of the right toelect justices of the peace and divested of their role inorganizing relief work. The sweeping centralization ofFrance, which the Jacobins undertook between 1793 and1794, completed the destruction of the sections.* The sec-tions were denied control over the police and their ad-ministrative responsibilities were placed in the hands ofsalaried bureaucrats. By January 1794 the vitality of the

* Marx, it may be noted, greatly admired the Jacobins for"centralizing" France and in the famous "Address of the CentralCouncil" (1850) modeled his tactics for Germany on their policies.This was short-sightedness of incredible proportions—and institu-tional emphasis that revealed a gross insensitivity to the self-activityand the self-remaking of a people in revolutionary motion. See"Listen, Marxist!"


sections had been thoroughly sapped. As Michelet ob-serves: "The general assemblies of the sections were dead,and all their power had passed to their revolutionary com-mittees, which, themselves being no longer elected bodies,but simply groups of officials nominated by the authori-ties, had not much life in them either." The sections hadbeen subverted by the very revolutionary leaders they hadraised to power in the Convention. When the time camefor Robespierre, Saint-Just and Lebas to appeal to the sec-tions against the Convention, the majority did virtuallynothing in their behalf. Indeed, the revolutionary Gravil-liers section—the men who had so earnestly supportedJacques Roux and the enrages in 1793—vindictivelyplaced their arms at the service of the Thermidorians andmarched against the Robespierrists—the Jacobin leaders,who, a few months earlier, had driven Roux to suicide andguillotined the spokesmen of the left.

FROM "HERE" TO "THERE"

The factors which undermined the assemblies of clas-sical Athens and revolutionary Paris require very little dis-cussion. In both cases the assembly mode of organizationwas broken up not only from without, but also fromwithin—by the development of class antagonisms. Thereare no forms, however cleverly contrived, that can over-come the content of a given society. Lacking the materialresources, the technology and the level of economicdevelopment to overcome class antagonisms as such,Athens and Paris could achieve an approximation of theforms of freedom only temporarily—and only to deal withthe more serious threat of complete social decay. Athensheld on to the ecclesia for several centuries, mainly be-cause the polis still retained a living contact with tribalforms of organization; Paris developed its sectional modeof organization for a period of several years, largely be-cause the sans-culottes had been precipitously swept to the


head of the revolution by a rare combination of fortunatecircumstances. Both the ecclesia and the sections were un-dermined by the very conditions they were intended tocheck—property, class antagonisms and exploitation—butwhich they were incapable of eliminating. What is remark-able about them is that they worked at all, considering theenormous problems they faced and the formidable ob-stacles they had to overcome.

It must be borne in mind that Athens and Paris werelarge cities, not peasant villages; indeed, they were com-plex, highly sophisticated urban centers by the standardsof their time. Athens supported a population of more thana quarter of a million, Paris over seven hundred thousand.Both cities were engaged in worldwide trade; both wereburdened by complex logistical problems; both had a mul-titude of needs that could be satisfied only by a fairlyelaborate system of public administration. Although eachhad only a fraction of the population of present-day NewYork or London, their advantages on this score were morethan canceled out by their extremely crude systems ofcommunication and transportation, and by the need, inParis at least, for members of the assembly to devote thegreater part of the day to brute toil. Yet Paris, no less thanAthens, was administered by amateurs: by men who, forseveral years and in their spare time, saw to the administra-tion of a city in revolutionary ferment. The principalmeans by which they made their revolution, organized itsconquests, and finally sustained it against counterrevolu-tion at home and invasion abroad, was the neighborhoodpublic assembly. There is no evidence that these assembliesand the committees they produced were inefficient ortechnically incompetent. On the contrary, they awakeneda popular initiative, a resoluteness in action, and a sense ofrevolutionary purpose that no professional bureaucracy,however radical its pretensions, could ever hope to achieve.Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that Athens founded


Western philosophy, mathematics, drama, historiographyand art, and that revolutionary Paris contributed morethan its share to the culture of the time and the politicalthought of the Western world. The arena for these achieve-ments was not the traditional state, structured around abureaucratic apparatus, but a system of unmediated rela-tions, a face-to-face democracy organized into public as-semblies.

The sections provide us with a rough model of assemblyorganization in a large city and during a period of revolu-tionary transition from a centralized political state to apotentially decentralized society. The ecclesia provides uswith a rough model of assembly organization in a decen-tralized society. The word "model" is used deliberately.The ecclesia and the sections were lived experiences, nottheoretical visions. But precisely because of this theyvalidate in practice many anarchic theoretical speculationsthat have often been dismissed as "visionary" and "un-realistic."

The goal of dissolving propertied society, class rule, cen-tralization and the state is as old as the historical emer-gence of property, classes and states. In the beginning, therebels could look backward to clans, tribes and federa-tions; it was still a time when the past was closer at handthan the future. Then the past receded completely fromman's vision and memory, except perhaps as a lingeringdream of the "golden age" or the "Garden of Eden."* Atthis point the very notion of liberation becomes specu-lative and theoretical, and like all strictly theoretical vi-sions its content was permeated with the social material ofthe present. Hence the fact that Utopia, from More toBellamy, is an image not of a hypothetical future, but of a

* It was not until the 1860s, with the work of Bachofen andMorgan, that humanity rediscovered its communal past. By that timethe discovery had become a purely critical weapon directed againstthe bourgeois family and property.


present drawn to the logical conclusion of rationality—orabsurdity. Utopia has slaves, kings, princes, oligarchs, tech-nocrats, elites, suburbanites and a substantial petty bour-geoisie. Even on the left, it became customary to definethe goal of a propertyless, stateless society as a series ofapproximations, of stages in which the end in view wasattained by the use of the state. Mediated power enteredinto the vision of the future; worse, as the development ofRussia indicates, it was strengthened to the point wherethe state today is not merely the "executive committee"of a specific class but a human condition. Life itself hasbecome bureaucratized.

In envisioning the complete dissolution of the existingsociety, we cannot get away from the question of power-be it power over our own lives, the "seizure of power," orthe dissolution of power. In going from the present to thefuture, from "here" to "there," we must ask: what ispower? Under what conditions is it dissolved? And whatdoes its dissolution mean? How do the forms of freedom,the unmediated relations of social life, emerge from a stati-fied society, a society in which the state of unfreedom iscarried to the point of absurdity—to domination for itsown sake?

We begin with the historical fact that nearly all themajor revolutionary upheavals began spontaneously:* wit-ness the three days of "disorder" that preceded the take-over of the Bastille in July 1789, the defense of the artil-lery in Montmartre that led to the Paris Commune of 1871,the famous "five days" of February 1917 in Petrograd, theuprising of Barcelona in July 1936, the takeover of Buda-

* Here, indeed, "history" has something to teach us—preciselybecause these spontaneous uprisings are not history but variousmanifestations of the same phenomenon: revolution. Whosoevercalls himself a revolutionist and does not study these events on theirown terms, thoroughly and without theoretical preconceptions, is adilettante who is playing at revolution.


pest and the expulsion of the Russian army in 1956.Nearly all the great revolutions came from below, from themolecular movement of the "masses," their progressiveindividuation and their explosion—an explosion whichinvariably took the authoritarian "revolutionists" com-pletely by surprise.

There can be no separation of the revolutionary processfrom the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-adminis-tration. This implies the forging of a self (yes, literally aforging in the revolutionary process) and a mode ofadministration which the self can possess.* If we define"power" as the power of man over man, power can onlybe destroyed by the very process in which man acquirespower over his own life and in which he not only "dis-covers" himself but, more meaningfully, formulates hisselfhood in all its social dimensions.

Freedom, so conceived, cannot be "delivered" to theindividual as the "end product" of a "revolution"—muchless as a "revolution" achieved by social-philistines who arehypnotized by the trappings of authority and power. Theassembly and community cannot be legislated or decreedinto existence. To be sure, a revolutionary group can pur-posively and consciously seek to promote the creation ofthese forms; but if assembly and community are not al-lowed to emerge organically, if their growth is not insti-gated, developed and matured by the social processes atwork, they will not be really popular forms. Assembly andcommunity must arise from within the revolutionary proc-ess itself; indeed, the revolutionary process must be theformation of assembly and community, and with it, the

* What Wilhelm Reich and, later, Herbert Marcuse have made clearis that "selfhood" is not only a personal dimension but also a socialone. The self that finds expression in the assembly and communityis, literally, the assembly and community that has foundself-expression—a complete congruence of form and content.


destruction of power. Assembly and community must be-come "fighting words," not distant panaceas. They mustbe created as modes of struggle against the existing society,not as theoretical or programmatic abstractions.

It is hardly possible to stress this point strongly enough.The future assemblies of people in the block, the neighbor-hood or the district—the revolutionary sections to come—will stand on a higher social level than all the present-daycommittees, syndicates, parties and clubs adorned by themost resounding "revolutionary" titles. They will be theliving nuclei of Utopia in the decomposing body of bour-geois society. Meeting in auditoriums, theaters, courtyards,halls, parks and—like their forerunners, the sections of1793—in churches, they will be the arenas of demassifica-tion, for the very essence of the revolutionary process ispeople acting as individuals.

At this point the assembly may be faced not only withthe power of the bourgeois state—the famous problem of"dual power"—but with the danger of the incipient state.Like the Paris sections, it will have to fight not onlyagainst the Convention, but also against the tendency tocreate mediated social forms.* The factory committees,which will almost certainly be the forms that will take overindustry, must be managed directly by workers' assembliesin the factories. By the same token, neighborhood commit-tees, councils and boards must be rooted completely inthe neighborhood assembly. They must be answerable atevery point to the assembly; they and their work must beunder continual review by the assembly; and finally, theirmembers must be subject to immediate recall by the as-sembly. The specific gravity of society, in short, must be

* Together with disseminating ideas, the most important job of theanarchists will be to defend the spontaneity of the popularmovement by continually engaging the authoritarians in a theoreticaland organizational duel.


shifted to its base—the armed people in permanent as-sembly.

As long as the arena of the assembly is the modernbourgeois city, the revolution is faced with a recalcitrantenvironment. The bourgeois city, by its very nature andstructure, fosters centralization, massification and manipu-lation. Inorganic, gargantuan, and organized like a factory,the city tends to inhibit the development of an organic,rounded community. In its role as the universal solvent,the assembly must try to dissolve the city itself.

We can envision young people renewing social life just asthey renew the human species. Leaving the city, they beginto found the nuclear ecological communities to whicholder people repair in increasing numbers. Large resourcepools are mobilized for their use; careful ecological surveysand suggestions are placed at their disposal by the mostcompetent and imaginative people available. The moderncity begins to shrivel, to contract and to disappear, as didits ancient progenitors millennia earlier. In the new,rounded ecological community, the assembly finds itsauthentic environment and true shelter. Form and contentnow correspond completely. The journey from "here" to"there," from sections to ecclesia, from cities to communi-ties, is completed. No longer is the factory a particularizedphenomenon; it now becomes an organic part of the com-munity. In this sense, it is no longer a factory. The dissolu-tion of the factory into the community completes the dis-solution of the last vestiges of propertied, of class, and,above all, of mediated society into the new polis. And nowthe real drama of human life can unfold, in all its beauty,harmony, creativity and joy.

New YorkJanuary 1968

Listen,Marxist!

All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again—theshit about the "class line," the "role of the working class,"the "trained cadres," the "vanguard party," and the "pro-letarian dictatorship." It's all back again, and in a morevulgarized form than ever. The Progressive Labor Party isnot the only example, it is merely the worst. One smellsthe same shit in various offshoots of SDS, and in the Marx-ist and Socialist clubs on campuses, not to speak of theTrotskyist groups, the International Socialist Clubs, andYouth Against War and Fascism.

In the thirties, at least it was understandable. TheUnited States was paralyzed by a chronic economic crisis,the deepest and longest in its history. The only livingforces that seemed to be battering at the walls of capital-ism were the great organizing drives of the CIO, with theirdramatic sitdown strikes, their radical militancy, and theirbloody clashes with the police. The political atmospherethroughout the entire world was charged by the electricityof the Spanish Civil War, the last of the classical workers'revolutions, when every radical sect in the American leftcould identify with its own militia columns in Madrid andBarcelona. That was thirty years ago. It was a time whenanyone who cried out "Make love, not war" would havebeen regarded as a freak; the cry then was "Make jobs, notwar"—the cry of an age burdened by scarcity, when theachievement of socialism entailed "sacrifices" and a"transition period" to an economy of material abundance.To an eighteen-year-old kid in 1937 the very concept ofcybernation would have seemed like the wildest sciencefiction, a fantasy comparable to visions of space travel.

195


That eighteen-year-old kid has now reached fifty years ofage, and his roots are planted in an era so remote as todiffer qualitatively from the realities of the present periodin the United States. Capitalism itself has changed sincethen, taking on increasingly statified forms that could beanticipated only dimly thirty years ago. And now we arebeing asked to go back to the "class line," the "strategies,"the "cadres" and the organizational forms of that distantperiod in almost blatant disregard of the new issues andpossibilities that have emerged.

When the hell are we finally going to create a movementthat looks to the future instead of to the past? When willwe begin to learn from what is being born instead of whatis dying? Marx, to his lasting credit, tried to do that in hisown day; he tried to evoke a futuristic spirit in the revolu-tionary movement of the 1840s and 1850s. "The traditionof all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on thebrain of the living," he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaireof Louis Bonaparte. "And just when they seem to be en-gaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creatingsomething entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolu-tionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of thepast to their service and borrow from them names, battleslogans and costumes in order to present the new scene ofworld history in this time-honored disguise and borrowedlanguage. Thus Luther donned the mask of the ApostlePaul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alter-nately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, andthe revolution of 1848 knew nothing better than toparody, in turn, 1789 and the tradition of 1793 to1795. . . . The social revolution of the nineteenth centurycannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from thefuture. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped offall superstition in regard to the past. . . . In order to arriveat its content, the revolution of the nineteenth centurymust let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went

Listen, Marxist! / 197

beyond the content; here the content goes beyond thephrase."28

Is the problem any different today, as we approach thetwenty-first century? Once again the dead are walking inour midst—ironically, draped in the name of Marx, theman who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century.So the revolution of our own day can do nothing betterthan parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 andthe civil war of 1918-1920, with its "class line," its Bol-shevik Party, its "proletarian dictatorship," its puritanicalmorality, and even its slogan, "soviet power." The com-plete, all-sided revolution of our own day that can finallyresolve the historic "social question," born of scarcity,domination and hierarchy, follows the tradition of thepartial, the incomplete, the one-sided revolutions of thepast, which merely changed the form of the "social ques-tion," replacing one system of domination and hierarchyby another. At a time when bourgeois society itself is inthe process of disintegrating all the social classes that oncegave it stability, we hear the hollow demands for a "classline." At a time when all the political institutions of hier-archical society are entering a period of profound decay,we hear the hollow demands for a "political party" and a"workers' state." At a time when hierarchy as such is beingbrought into question, we hear the hollow demands for"cadres," "vanguards" and "leaders." At a time when cen-tralization and the state have been brought to the mostexplosive point of historical negativity, we hear the hollowdemands for a "centralized movement" and a "proletariandictatorship."

This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to finda haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchyas substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitterevidence of how little many revolutionaries are capableof "revolutionizing themselves and things," much lessof revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted


conservatism of the PLP* "revolutionaries" is almostpainfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchyreplace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; thediscipline of the Movement replaces the discipline ofbourgeois society; the authoritarian code of politicalobedience replaces the state; the credo of "proletarianmorality" replaces the mores of puritanism and the workethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappearsin new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraitsof Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little"Red Book" and other sacred litanies.

The majority of the people who remain in the PLP to-day deserve it. If they can live with a movement that cyni-cally dubs its own slogans into photographs of DRUMpickets; t if they can read a magazine that asks whetherMarcuse is a "copout or cop"; if they can accept a "disci-pline" that reduces them to poker-faced, programmedautomata; if they can use the most disgusting techniques(techniques borrowed from the cesspool of bourgeois busi-ness operations and parliamentarianism) to manipulateother organizations; if they can parasitize virtually everyaction and situation merely to promote the growth of theirparty—even if this means defeat for the action itself—thenthey are beneath contempt. For these people to call them-selves reds and describe attacks upon them as redbaiting isa form of McCarthyism in reverse. To rephrase Trotsky'sjuicy description of Stalinism, they are the syphilis of the

* These lines were written when the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)exercised a great deal of influence in SDS. Although the PLP hasnow lost most of its influence in the student movement, the organi-zation still provides a good example of the mentality and valuesprevalent in the Old Left. The above characterization is equally validfor most Marxist-Leninist groups, hence this passage and other ref-erences to the PLP have not been substantially altered.

t The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, part of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

Listen, Marxist! I 199

radical youth movement today. And for syphilis there isonly one treatment—an antibiotic, not an argument.

Our concern here is with those honest revolutionarieswho have turned to Marxism, Leninism or Trotskyismbecause they earnestly seek a coherent social outlook andan effective strategy of revolution. We are also concernedwith those who are awed by the theoretical repertory ofMarxist ideology and are disposed to flirt with it in theabsence of more systematic alternatives. To these peoplewe address ourselves as brothers and sisters and ask for aserious discussion and a comprehensive re-evaluation. Webelieve that Marxism has ceased to be applicable to ourtime not because it is too visionary or revolutionary, butbecause it is not visionary or revolutionary enough. Webelieve it was born of an era of scarcity and presented abrilliant critique of that era, specifically of industrial capi-talism, and that a new era is in birth which Marxism doesnot adequately encompass and whose outlines it only par-tially and onesidedly anticipated. We argue that the prob-lem is not to "abandon" Marxism or to "annul" it, but totranscend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegel-ian philosophy, Ricardian economics, and Blanquist tacticsand modes of organization. We shall argue that in a moreadvanced stage of capitalism than Marx dealt with a cen-tury ago, and in a more advanced stage of technologicaldevelopment than Marx could have clearly anticipated, anew critique is necessary, which in turn yields new modesof struggle, of organization, of propaganda and of lifestyle.Call these new modes whatever you will, even "Marxism"if you wish. We have chosen to call this new approachpost-scarcity anarchism, for a number of compelling rea-sons which will become evident in the pages that follow.

THE HISTORICAL LIMITS OF MARXISM

The idea that a man whose greatest theoretical contribu-tions were made between 1840 and 1880 could "foresee"


the entire dialectic of capitalism is, on the face of it, ut-terly preposterous. If we can still learn much from Marx'sinsights, we can learn even more from the unavoidableerrors of a man who was limited by an era of materialscarcity and a technology that barely involved the use ofelectric power. We can learn how different our own era isfrom that of all past history, how qualitatively new are thepotentialities that confront us, how unique are the issues,analyses and praxis that stand before us if we are to makea revolution and not another historical abortion.

The problem is not that Marxism is a "method" whichmust be reapplied to "new situations" or that "neo-Marx-ism" has to be developed to overcome the limitations of"classical Marxism." The attempt to rescue the Marxianpedigree by emphasizing the method over the system or byadding "neo" to a sacred word is sheer mystification if allthe practical conclusions of the system flatly contradictthese efforts.* Yet this is precisely the state of affairs inMarxian exegesis today. Marxists lean on the fact that thesystem provides a brilliant interpretation of the past whilewillfully ignoring its utterly misleading features in dealingwith the present and future. They cite the coherence thathistorical materialism and the class analysis give to theinterpretation of history, the economic insights of Capitalprovides into the development of industrial capitalism, and

* Marxism is above all a theory of praxis, or to place this relation-ship in its correct perspective, a praxis of theory. This is the verymeaning of Marx's transformation of dialectics, which took it fromthe subjective dimension (to which the Young Hegelians still tried toconfine Hegel's outlook) into the objective, from philosophical cri-tique into social action. If theory and praxis become divorced, Marx-ism is not killed, it commits suicide. This is its most admirable andnoble feature. The attempts of the cretins who follow in Marx'swake to keep the system alive with a patchwork of emendations,exegesis, and half-assed "scholarship" a la Maurice Dobb and GeorgeNovack are degrading insults to Marx's name and a disgusting pollu-tion of everything he stood for.


the brilliance of Marx's analysis of earlier revolutions andthe tactical conclusions he established, without once recog-nizing that qualitatively new problems have arisen whichnever existed in his day. Is it conceivable that historicalproblems and methods of class analysis based entirely onunavoidable scarcity can be transplanted into a new era ofpotential abundance? Is it conceivable that an economicanalysis focused primarily on a "freely competitive" sys-tem of industrial capitalism can be transferred to a man-aged system of capitalism, where state and monopoliescombine to manipulate economic life? Is it conceivablethat a strategic and tactical repertory formulated in a per-iod when coal and steel constituted the basis of industrialtechnology can be transferred to an age based on radicallynew sources of energy, on electronics, on cybernation?

As a result of this transfer, a theoretical corpus whichwas liberating a century ago is turned into a straitjackettoday. We are asked to focus on the working class as the"agent" of revolutionary change at a time when capitalismvisibly antagonizes and produces revolutionaries among vir-tually all strata of society, particularly the young. We areasked to guide our tactical methods by the vision of a"chronic economic crisis" despite the fact that no suchcrisis has been in the offing for thirty years.* We are askedto accept a "proletarian dictatorship"—a long "transitionalperiod" whose function is not merely the suppression ofcounterrevolutionaries but above all the development of atechnology of abundance—at a time when a technology ofabundance is at hand. We are asked to orient our "strate-gies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immisera-tion at a time when revolutionary sentiment is beinggenerated by the banality of life under conditions of mate-rial abundance. We are asked to establish political parties,

* In fact Marxists do very little talking about the "chronic [eco-nomic] crisis of capitalism" these days—despite the fact that thisconcept forms the focal point of Marx's economic theories.


centralized organizations, "revolutionary" hierarchies andelites, and a new state at a time when political institutionsas such are decaying and when centralization, elitism andthe state are being brought into question on a scale thathas never occurred before in the history of hierarchicalsociety.

We are asked, in short, to return to the past, to diminishinstead of grow, to force the throbbing reality of ourtimes, with its hopes and promises, into the deadeningpreconceptions of an outlived age. We are asked to operatewith principles that have been transcended not only theo-retically but by the very development of society itself.History has not stood still since Marx, Engels, Lenin andTrotsky died, nor has it followed the simplistic directionwhich was charted out by thinkers—however brilliant—whose minds were still rooted in the nineteenth century orin the opening years of the twentieth. We have seen capi-talism itself perform many of the tasks (including thedevelopment of a technology of abundance) which wereregarded as socialist; we have seen it "nationalize" prop-erty, merging the economy with the state wherever neces-sary. We have seen the working class neutralized as the"agent of revolutionary change," albeit still strugglingwithin a bourgeois framework for more wages, shorterhours and "fringe" benefits. The class struggle in the clas-sical sense has not disappeared; it has suffered a moredeadening fate by being co-opted into capitalism. Therevolutionary struggle within the advanced capitalistcountries has shifted to a historically new terrain: it hasbecome a struggle between a generation of youth that hasknown no chronic economic crisis and the culture, valuesand institutions of an older, conservative generation whoseperspective on life has been shaped by scarcity, guilt, re-nunciation, the work ethic and the pursuit of materialsecurity. Our enemies are not only the visibly entrenchedbourgeoisie and the state apparatus but also an outlookwhich finds its support among liberals, social democrats,


the minions of a corrupt mass media, the "revolutionary"parties of the past, and, painful as it may be to the aco-lytes of Marxism, the worker dominated by the factoryhierarchy, by the industrial routine, and by the work ethic.The point is that the divisions now cut across virtually allthe traditional class lines and they raise a spectrum ofproblems that none of the Marxists, leaning on analogieswith scarcity societies, could foresee.

THE MYTH OF THE PROLETARIA TLet us cast aside all the ideological debris of the past andcut to the theoretical roots of the problem. For our age,Marx's greatest contribution to revolutionary thought ishis dialectic of social development. Marx laid bare thegreat movement from primitive communism through pri-vate property to communism in its higher form—a commu-nal society resting on a liberatory technology. In thismovement, according to Marx, man passes on from thedomination of man by nature, to the domination of manby man, and finally to the domination of nature by man*and from social domination as such. Within this largerdialectic, Marx examines the dialectic of capitalism itself—a social system which constitutes the last historical "stage"in the domination of man by man. Here, Marx makes notonly profound contributions to contemporary revolution-ary thought (particularly in his brilliant analysis of thecommodity relationship) but also exhibits those limita-tions of time and place that play so confining a role in ourown time.

The most serious of these limitations emerges fromMarx's attempt to explain the transition from capitalism tosocialism, from a class society to a classless society. It isvitally important to emphasize that this explanation wasreasoned out almost entirely by analogy with the transi-* For ecological reasons, we do not accept the notion of the "domi-nation of nature by man" in the simplistic sense that was passed onby Marx a century ago. For a discussion of this problem, see "Ecol-ogy and Revolutionary Thought."


tion of feudalism to capitalism—that is, from one classsociety to another class society, from one systemof property to another. Accordingly, Marx points out thatjust as the bourgeoisie developed within feudalism as aresult of the split between town and country (more pre-cisely, between crafts and agriculture), so the modern pro-letariat developed within capitalism as a result of the ad-vance of industrial technology. Both classes, we are told,develop social interests of their own—indeed, revolutionarysocial interests that throw them against the old society inwhich they were spawned. If the bourgeoisie gained con-trol over economic life long before it overthrew feudalsociety, the proletariat, in turn, gains its own revolutionarypower by the fact that it is "disciplined, united, organ-ized" by the factory system.* In both cases, the develop-ment of the productive forces becomes incompatible withthe traditional system of social relations. "The integumentis burst asunder." The old society is replaced by the new.

The critical question we face is this: can we explain thetransition from a class society to a classless society by

* It is ironic that Marxists who talk about the "economic power" ofthe proletariat are actually echoing the position of the anarcho-syndicalists, a position that Marx bitterly opposed. Marx was notconcerned with the "economic power" of the proletariat but with itspolitical power; notably the fact that it would become the majorityof the population. He was convinced that the industrial workerswould be driven to revolution primarily by material destitutionwhich would follow from the tendency of capitalist accumulation;that, organized by the factory system and disciplined by industrialroutine, they would be able to constitute trade unions and, aboveall, political parties, which in some countries would be obliged to useinsurrectionary methods and in others (England, the United States,and in later years Engels added France) might well come to power inelections and legislate socialism into existence. Characteristically,many Marxists have been as dishonest with their Marx and Engels asthe Progressive Labor Party has been with the readers of Challenge,leaving important observations untranslated or grossly distortingMarx's meaning.


means of the same dialectic that accounts for the transi-tion of one class society to another? This is not a textbookproblem that involves the juggling of logical abstractionsbut a very real and concrete issue for our time. There areprofound differences between the development of thebourgeoisie under feudalism and the development of theproletariat under capitalism which Marx either failed toanticipate or never faced clearly. The bourgeoisie con-trolled economic life long before it took state power; ithad become the dominant class materially, culturally andideologically before it asserted its dominance politically.The proletariat does not control economic life. Despite itsindispensable role in the industrial process, the industrialworking class is not even a majority of the population, andits strategic economic position is being eroded by cyberna-tion and other technological advances.* Hence it requiresan act of high consciousness for the proletariat to use itspower to achieve a social revolution. Until now, theachievement of this consciousness has been blocked by thefact that the factory milieu is one of the most well-en-trenched arenas of the work ethic, of hierarchical systemsof management, of obedience to leaders, and in recenttimes of production committed to superfluous commodi-ties and armaments. The factory serves not only to "disci-pline," "unite," and "organize" the workers, but also todo so in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion. In the factory,

* This is as good a place as any to dispose of the notion that anyoneis a "proletarian" who has nothing to sell but his labor power. It istrue that Marx defined the proletariat in these terms, but he alsoworked out a historical dialectic in the development of the prole-tariat. The proletariat developed out of a propertyless exploitedclass, reaching its most advanced form in the industrial proletariat,which corresponded to the most advanced form of capital. In thelater years of his life, Marx came to despise the Parisian workers,who were engaged preponderantly in the production of luxurygoods, citing "our German workers"-the most robot-like inEurope-as the "model" proletariat of the world.


capitalistic production not only renews the social relationsof capitalism with each working day, as Marx observed, italso renews the psyche, values and ideology of capitalism.

Marx sensed this fact sufficiently to look for reasonsmore compelling than the mere fact of exploitation orconflicts over wages and hours to propel the proletariatinto revolutionary action. In his general theory of capital-ist accumulation he tried to delineate the harsh, objectivelaws that force the proletariat to assume a revolutionaryrole. Accordingly he developed his famous theory of im-miseration: competition between capitalists compels themto undercut each others' prices, which in turn leads to acontinual reduction of wages and the absolute impoverish-ment of the workers. The proletariat is compelled to revoltbecause with the process of competition and the centrali-zation of capital there "grows the mass of misery, oppres-sion, slavery, degradation."*

But capitalism has not stood still since Marx's day. Writ-ing in the middle years of the nineteenth century, Marxcould not be expected to grasp the full consequences of hisinsights into the centralization of capital and the develop-ment of technology. He could not be expected to foresee

* The attempt to describe Marx's immiseration theory ininternational terms instead of national (as Marx did) is sheer subter-fuge. In the first place, this theoretical legerdemain simply tries tosidestep the question of why immiseration has not occurred withinthe industrial strongholds of capitalism, the only areas which form atechnologically adequate point of departure for a classless society. Ifwe are to pin our hopes on the colonial world as "the proletariat,"this position conceals a very real danger: genocide. America and herrecent ally Russia have all the technical means to bomb the under-developed world into submission. A threat lurks on the historicalhorizon—the development of the United States into a truly fascistimperium of the nazi type. It is sheer rubbish to say that thiscountry is a "paper tiger." It is a thermonuclear tiger and theAmerican ruling class, lacking any cultural restraints, is capable ofbeing even more vicious than the German.


that capitalism would develop not only from mercantilisminto the dominant industrial form of his day—from state-aided trading monopolies into highly competitive indus-trial units—but further, that with the centralization ofcapital, capitalism returns to its mercantilist origins on ahigher level of development and reassumes the state-aidedmonopolistic form. The economy tends to merge with thestate and capitalism begins to "plan" its development in-stead of leaving it exclusively to the interplay of competi-tion and market forces. To be sure, the system does notabolish the traditional class struggle, but manages to con-tain it, using its immense technological resources to assimi-late the most strategic sections of the working class.

Thus the full thrust of the immiseration theory isblunted and in the United States the traditional classstruggle fails to develop into the class war. It remains en-tirely within bourgeois dimensions. Marxism, in fact,becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advancedforms of the state capitalist movement—notably Russia. Byan incredible irony of history, Marxian "socialism" turnsout to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marxfailed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism.* Theproletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary classwithin the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organwithin the body of bourgeois society.

The question we must ask at this late date in history iswhether a social revolution that seeks to achieve a classlesssociety can emerge from a conflict between traditionalclasses in a class society, or whether such a social revolu-tion can only emerge from the decomposition of the tradi-tional classes, indeed from the emergence of an entirelynew "class" whose very essence is that it is a non-class, a

* Lenin sensed this and described "socialism" as "nothing but statecapitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people. "29 This is anextraordinary statement if one thinks out its implications, and amouthful of contradictions.


growing stratum of revolutionaries. In trying to answer thisquestion, we can learn more by returning to the broaderdialectic which Marx developed for human society as awhole than from the model he borrowed from the passageof feudal into capitalist society. Just as primitive kinshipclans began to differentiate into classes, so in our own daythere is a tendency for classes to decompose into entirelynew subcultures which bear a resemblance to non-capitalistforms of relationships. These are not strictly economicgroups any more; in fact, they reflect the tendency of thesocial development to transcend the economic categoriesof scarcity society. They constitute, in effect, a crude,ambiguous cultural preformation of the movement of scar-city into post-scarcity society.

The process of class decomposition must be understoodin all its dimensions. The word "process" must be empha-sized here: the traditional classes do not disappear, nor forthat matter does the class struggle. Only a social revolutioncould remove the prevailing class structure and the con-flicts it engenders. The point is the traditional classstruggle ceases to have revolutionary implications; it re-veals itself as the physiology of the prevailing society, notas the labor pains of birth. In fact the traditional classstruggle stabilizes capitalist society by "correcting" itsabuses (in wages, hours, inflation, employment, etc.). Theunions in capitalist society constitute themselves into acounter-"monopoly" to the industrial monopolies and areincorporated into the neomercantile statified economy asan estate. Within this estate there are lesser or greaterconflicts, but taken as a whole the unions strengthen thesystem and serve to perpetuate it.

To reinforce this class structure by babbling about the"role of the working class," to reinforce the traditionalclass struggle by imputing a "revolutionary" content to it,to infect the new revolutionary movement of our timewith "workeritis" is reactionary to the core. How often dothe Marxian doctrinaires have to be reminded that the his-


tory of the class struggle is the history of a disease, of thewounds opened by the famous "social question," of man'sone-sided development in trying to gain control over na-ture by dominating his fellow man? If the byproduct ofthis disease has been technological advance, the main prod-ucts have been repression, a horrible shedding of humanblood, and a terrifying distortion of the human psyche.

As the disease approaches its end, as the wounds beginto heal in their deepest recesses, the process now unfoldstoward wholeness; the revolutionary implications of thetraditional class struggle lose their meaning as theoreticalconstructs and as social reality. The process of decomposi-tion embraces not only the traditional class structure butalso the patriarchal family, authoritarian modes of up-bringing, the influence of religion, the institutions of thestate, and the mores built around toil, renunciation, guiltand repressed sexuality. The process of disintegration, inshort, now becomes generalized and cuts across virtuallyall the traditional classes, values and institutions. It createsentirely new issues, modes of struggle and forms of organi-zation and calls for an entirely new approach to theoryand praxis.

What does this mean concretely? Let us contrast twoapproaches, the Marxian and the revolutionary. The Marx-ian doctrinaire would have us approach the worker—orbetter, "enter" the factory—and proselytize him in "pref-erence" to anyone else. The purpose?—to make the worker"class conscious." To cite the most neanderthal examplesfrom the old left, one cuts one's hair, grooms oneself inconventional sports clothing, abandons pot for cigarettesand beer, dances conventionally, affects "rough" manner-isms, and develops a humorless, deadpan and pompousmien.

* On this score, the Old Left projects its own neanderthal imageon the American worker. Actually this image more closely approxi-mates the character of the union bureaucrat or the Stalinistcommissar.


One becomes, in short, what the worker is at his mostcaricaturized worst: not a "petty bourgeois degenerate,"to be sure, but a bourgeois degenerate. One becomes animitation of the worker insofar as the worker is an imita-tion of his masters. Beneath this metamorphosis of thestudent into the "worker" lies a vicious cynicism. One triesto use the discipline inculcated by the factory milieu todiscipline the worker to the party milieu. One tries to usethe worker's respect for the industrial hierarchy to wed theworker to the party hierarchy. This disgusting process,which if successful could lead only to the substitution ofone hierarchy for another, is achieved by pretending to beconcerned with the worker's economic day-to-day de-mands. Even Marxian theory is degraded to accord withthis debased image of the worker. (See almost any copy ofChallenge—the National Enquirer of the left. Nothingbores the worker more than this kind of literature.) In theend, the worker is shrewd enough to know that he will getbetter results in the day-to-day class struggle through hisunion bureaucracy than through a Marxian party bureauc-racy. The forties revealed this so dramatically that within ayear or two, with hardly any protest from the rank-and-file, unions succeeded in kicking out by the thousands"Marxians" who had done spade-work in the labor move-ment for more than a decade, even rising to the top leader-ship of the old CIO internationals.

The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becomingmore of a worker but by undoing his "workerness." Andin this he is not alone; the same applies to the farmer, thestudent, the clerk, the soldier, the bureaucrat, the profes-sional—and the Marxist. The worker is no less a "bour-geois" than the farmer, student, clerk, soldier, bureaucrat,professional—and Marxist. His "workerness" is the diseasehe is suffering from, the social affliction telescoped to indi-vidual dimensions. Lenin understood this in What Is to BeDone? but he smuggled in the old hierarchy under a red


flag and some revolutionary verbiage. The worker begins tobecome a revolutionary when he undoes his "workerness,"when he comes to detest his class status here and now,when he begins to shed exactly those features which theMarxists most prize in him—his work ethic, his character-structure derived from industrial discipline, his respect forhierarchy, his obedience to leaders, his consumerism, hisvestiges of puritanism. In this sense, the worker becomes arevolutionary to the degree that he sheds his class statusand achieves an un-class consciousness. He degenerates—and he degenerates magnificently. What he is shedding areprecisely those class shackles that bind him to all systemsof domination. He abandons those class interests that en-slave him to consumerism, suburbia, and a bookkeepingconception of life.*

The most promising development in the factories todayis the emergence of young workers who smoke pot, fuckoff on their jobs, drift into and out of factories, grow longor longish hair, demand more leisure time rather than morepay, steal, harass all authority figures, go on wildcats, and

The worker, in this sense, begins to approximate the socially transi-tional human types who have provided history with its most revolu-tionary elements. Generally, the "proletariat" has been mostrevolutionary in transitional periods, when it was least "proletarian-ized" psychically by the industrial system. The great focuses of theclassical workers' revolutions were Petrograd and Barcelona, wherethe workers had been directly uprooted from a peasant background,and Paris, where they were still anchored in crafts or came directlyfrom a craft background. These workers had the greatest difficultyin acclimating themselves to industrial domination and became acontinual source of social and revolutionary unrest. By contrast, thestable hereditary working class tended to be surprisingly non-revolu-tionary. Even in the case of the German workers who were cited byMarx and Engels as models for the European proletariat, the major-ity did not support the Spartacists in 1919. They returned largemajorities of official Social Democrats to the Congress of Workers'Councils, and to the Reichstag in later years, and rallied consistentlybehind the Social Democratic Party right up to 1933.


turn on their fellow workers. Even more promising is theemergence of this human type in trade schools and highschools, the reservoir of the industrial working class tocome. To the degree that workers, vocational students andhigh school students link their lifestyles to various aspectsof the anarchic youth culture, to that degree will the prole-tariat be transformed from a force for the conservation ofthe established order into a force for revolution.

A qualitatively new situation emerges when man is facedwith a transformation from a repressive class society, basedon material scarcity, into a liberatory classless society,based on material abundance. From the decomposingtraditional class structure a new human type is created inever-increasing numbers: the revolutionary. This revolu-tionary begins to challenge not only the economic andpolitical premises of hierarchical society, but hierarchy assuch. He not only raises the need for social revolution butalso tries to live in a revolutionary manner to the degreethat this is possible in the existing society.* He not only

* This revolutionary lifestyle may develop in the factories as well ason the streets, in schools as well as in crashpads, in the suburbs aswell as on the Bay Area-East Side axis. Its essence is defiance, and apersonal "propaganda of the deed" that erodes all the mores, institu-tions and shibboleths of domination. As society begins to approachthe threshold of the revolutionary period, the factories, schools andneighborhoods become the actual arena of revolutionary "play"—a"play" that has a very serious core. Strikes become a chronic condi-tion and are called for their own sake to break the veneer of routine,to defy the society on an almost hourly basis, to shatter the mood ofbourgeois normality. This new mood of the workers, students andneighborhood people is a vital precursor to the actual moment ofrevolutionary transformation. Its most conscious expression is thedemand for "self-management"; the worker refuses to be a "man-aged" being, a class being. This process was most evident in Spain,on the eve of the 1936 revolution, when workers in almost everycity and town called strikes "for the hell of it"-to express theirindependence, their sense of awakening, their break with the socialorder and with bourgeois conditions of life. It was also an essentialfeature of the 1968 general strike in France.


attacks the forms created by the legacy of domination, butalso improvises new forms of liberation which take theirpoetry from the future.

This preparation for the future, this experimentationwith liberatory post-scarcity forms of social relations, maybe illusory if the future involves a substitution of one classsociety by another; it is indispensable, however, if the fu-ture involves a classless society built on the ruins of a classsociety. What, then, will be the "agent" of revolutionarychange? It will be literally the great majority of society,drawn from all the different traditional classes and fusedinto a common revolutionary force by the decompositionof the institutions, social forms, values and lifestyles of theprevailing class structure. Typically, its most advanced ele-ments are the youth—a generation that has known nochronic economic crisis and that is becoming less and lessoriented toward the myth of material security so wide-spread among the generation of the thirties.

If it is true that a social revolution cannot be achievedwithout the active or passive support of the workers, it isno less true that it cannot be achieved without the activeor passive support of the farmers, technicians and profes-sionals. Above all, a social revolution cannot be achievedwithout the support of the youth, from which the rulingclass recruits its armed forces. If the ruling class retains itsarmed might, the revolution is lost no matter how manyworkers rally to its support. This has been vividly demon-strated not only by Spain in the thirties but by Hungary inthe fifties and Czechoslovakia in the sixties. The revolutionof today—by its very nature, indeed, by its pursuit ofwholeness—wins not. only the soldier and the worker, butthe very generation from which soldiers, workers, techni-cians, farmers, scientists, professionals and even bureau-crats have been recruited. Discarding the tactical hand-books of the past, the revolution of the future follows thepath of least resistance, eating its way into the most sus-ceptible areas of the population irrespective of their "class


position." It is nourished by all the contradictions in bour-geois society, not simply by the contradictions of the1860s and 1917. Hence it attracts all those who feel theburdens of exploitation, poverty, racism, imperialism and,yes, those whose lives are frustrated by consumerism, sub-urbia, the mass media, the family, school, the supermarketand the prevailing system of repressed sexuality. Here theform of the revolution becomes as total as its content-classless, propertyless, hierarchyless, and wholly liberating.

To barge into this revolutionary development with theworn recipes of Marxism, to babble about a "class line"and the "role of the working class," amounts to a subver-sion of the present and the future by the past. To elabo-rate this deadening ideology by babbling about "cadres," a"vanguard party," "democratic centralism" and the "pro-letarian dictatorship" is sheer counterrevolution. It is tothis matter of the "organizational question"—this vitalcontribution of Leninism to Marxism—that we must nowdirect some attention.

THE MYTH OF THE PARTY

Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups orcadres, they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forcesand contradictions that activate large sections of the popu-lation. They occur not merely because the "masses" findthe existing society intolerable (as Trotsky argued) butalso because of the tension between the actual and thepossible, between what-is and what-could-be. Abjectmisery alone does not produce revolutions; more oftenthan not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse,a private, personalized struggle to survive.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain ofthe living like a nightmare because it was largely the prod-uct of "intolerable conditions," of a devastating imperial-istic war. Whatever dreams it had were virtually destroyedby an even bloodier civil war, by famine, and by treachery.


What emerged from the revolution were the ruins not of anold society but of whatever hopes existed to achieve a newone. The Russian Revolution failed miserably; it replacedczarism by state capitalism.* The Bolsheviks were thetragic victims of their own ideology and paid with theirlives in great numbers during the purges of the thirties. Toattempt to acquire any unique wisdom from this scarcityrevolution is ridiculous. What we can learn from the revo-lutions of the past is what all revolutions have in commonand their profound limitations compared with the enor-mous possibilities that are now open to us.

The most striking feature of the past revolutions is that

* A fact which Trotsky never understood. He never followedthrough the consequences of his own concept of "combined de-velopment" to its logical conclusions. He saw (quite correctly) thatczarist Russia, the latecomer in the European bourgeois develop-ment, necessarily acquired the most advanced industrial and classforms instead of recapitulating the entire bourgeois developmentfrom its beginnings. He neglected to consider that Russia, torn bytremendous internal upheaval, might even run ahead of the capitalistdevelopment elsewhere in Europe. Hypnotized by the formula"nationalized property equals socialism," he failed to recognize thatmonopoly capitalism itself tends to amalgamate with the state by itsown inner dialectic. The Bolsheviks, having cleared away the tradi-tional forms of bourgeois social organization (which still act as arein on the state capitalist development in Europe and America),inadvertently prepared the ground for a "pure" state capitalist de-velopment in which the state finally becomes the ruling class. Lack-ing support from a technologically advanced Europe, the RussianRevolution became an internal counterrevolution; Soviet Russiabecame a form of state capitalism that does not "benefit the wholepeople." Lenin's analogy between "socialism" and state capitalismbecame a terrifying reality under Stalin. Despite its humanistic core,Marxism failed to comprehend how much its concept of "socialism"approximates a later stage of capitalism itself—the return to mercan-tile forms on a higher industrial level. The failure to understand thisdevelopment led to devastating theoretical confusion in the contem-porary revolutionary movement, as witness the splits among theTrotskyists over this question.


they began spontaneously. Whether one chooses to exa-mine the opening phases of the French Revolution of1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the czar in1917, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, or the Frenchgeneral strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally thesame: a period of ferment explodes spontaneously into amass upsurge. Whether the upsurge is successful or notdepends on its resoluteness and on whether the troops goover to the people.

The "glorious party," when there is one, almost in-variably lags behind the events. In February 1917 thePetrograd organization of the Bolsheviks opposed the call-ing of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution whichwas destined to overthrow the czar. Fortunately, theworkers ignored the Bolshevik "directives" and went onstrike anyway. In the events which followed, no one wasmore surprised by the revolution than the "revolutionary"parties, including the Bolsheviks. As the Bolshevik leaderKayurov recalled: "Absolutely no guiding initiatives fromthe party were felt. . .the Petrograd committee had beenarrested and the representative from the Central Com-mittee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any direc-tives for the coming day."30 Perhaps this was fortunate.Before the Petrograd committee was arrested, its evalu-ation of the situation and its own role had been so dismalthat, had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtfulthat the revolution would have occurred when it did.

The same kind of story could be told of the upsurgeswhich preceded 1917 and those which followed—to citeonly the most recent, the student uprising and generalstrike in France during May-June 1968. There is a con-venient tendency to forget that close to a dozen "tightlycentralized" Bolshevik-type organizations existed in Parisat this time. It is rarely mentioned that virtually every oneof these "vanguard" groups disdained the student uprising


up to May 7, when the street fighting broke out in earnest.The Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire wasa notable exception—and it merely coasted along, essen-tially following the initiatives of the March 22nd Move-ment.* Up to May 7 all the Maoist groups criticized thestudent uprising as peripheral and unimportant; the Trot-skyist Federation des Etudiants Revolutionnaires regardedit as "adventuristic" and tried to get the students to leavethe barricades on May 10; the Communist Party, of course,played a completely treacherous role. Far from leading thepopular movement, the Maoists and Trotskyists were itscaptives throughout. Ironically, most of these Bolshevikgroups used manipulative techniques shamelessly in theSorbonne student assembly in an effort to "control" it,introducing a disruptive atmosphere that demoralized theentire body. Finally, to complete the irony, all of theseBolshevik groups were to babble about the need for "cen-tralized leadership" when the popular movement col-lapsed—a movement that occurred despite their "direc-tives" and often in opposition to them.

Revolutions and uprisings worthy of any note not onlyhave an initial phase that is magnificently anarchic but alsotend spontaneously to create their own forms of revolu-tionary self-management. The Parisian sections of 1793-94were the most remarkable forms of self-management to becreated by any of the social revolutions in history. t Morefamiliar in form were the councils or "soviets" which the

* The March 22nd Movement functioned as a catalytic agent in theevents, not as a leadership. It did not command; it instigated, leavinga free play to the events. This free play, which allowed the studentsto push ahead on their own momentum, was indispensable to thedialectic of the uprising, for without it there would have been nobarricades on May 10, which in turn triggered off the general strikeof the workers.

t See "The Forms of Freedom."


Petrograd workers established in 1905. Although lessdemocratic than the sections, the councils were to re-appear in a number of later revolutions. Still another formof revolutionary self-management were the factory com-mittees which the anarchists established in the SpanishRevolution of 1936. Finally, the sections reappeared asstudent assemblies and action committees in the May-Juneuprising and general strike in Paris in 1968.*

At this point we must ask what role the "revolutionary"party plays in all these developments. In the beginning, aswe have seen, it tends to have an inhibitory function, not a"vanguard" role. Where it exercises influence, it tends toslow down the flow of events, not "coordinate" the revo-lutionary forces. This is not accidental. The party is struc-tured along hierarchical lines that reflect the very society itprofesses to oppose. Despite its theoretical pretensions, itis a bourgeois organism, a miniature state, with an appara-tus and a cadre whose function it is to seize power, notdissolve power. Rooted in the prerevolutionary period, itassimilates all the forms, techniques and mentality ofbureaucracy. Its membership is schooled in obedience andin the preconceptions of a rigid dogma and is taught torevere the leadership. The party's leadership, in turn, isschooled in habits born of command, authority,manipulation and egomania. This situation is worsened* With a sublime arrogance that is attributable partly to ignorance, anumber of Marxist groups were to dub virtually all of the aboveforms of self-management as "Soviets." The attempt to bring all ofthese different forms under a single rubric is not only misleading butwillfully obscurantist. The actual Soviets were the least democraticof the revolutionary forms and the Bolsheviks shrewdly used themto transfer the power to their own party. The Soviets were not basedon face-to-face democracy, like the Parisian sections or the stu-dent assemblies of 1968. Nor were they based on economic self-management, like the Spanish anarchist factory committees. TheSoviets actually formed a workers' parliament, hierarchically organ-ized, which drew its representation from factories and later frommilitary units and peasant villages.


when the party participates in parliamentary elections. Inelection campaigns, the vanguard party models itselfcompletely on existing bourgeois forms and even acquiresthe paraphernalia of the electoral party. The situationassumes truly critical proportions when the party acquireslarge presses, costly headquarters and a large inventory ofcentrally controlled periodicals, and develops a paid"apparatus"—in short, a bureacracy with vested materialinterests.

As the party expands, the distance between the leader-ship and the ranks invariably increases. Its leaders not onlybecome "personages," they lose contact with the livingsituation below. The local groups, which know their ownimmediate situation better than any remote leader, areobliged to subordinate their insights to directives fromabove. The leadership, lacking any direct knowledge oflocal problems, responds sluggishly and prudently. Al-though it stakes out a claim to the "larger view," to greater"theoretical competence," the competence of the leader-ship tends to diminish as one ascends the hierarchy ofcommand. The more one approaches the level where thereal decisions are made, the more conservative is the natureof the decision-making process, the more bureaucratic andextraneous are the factors which come into play, the moreconsiderations of prestige and retrenchment supplant crea-tivity, imagination, and a disinterested dedication to revo-lutionary goals.

The party becomes less efficient from a revolutionarypoint of view the more it seeks efficiency by means ofhierarchy, cadres and centralization. Although everyonemarches in step, the orders are usually wrong, especiallywhen events begin to move rapidly and take unexpectedturns—as they do in all revolutions. The party is efficientin only one respect—in molding society in its own hier-archical image if the revolution is successful. It recreatesbureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters the


bureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters thevery social conditions which justify this kind of society.Hence, instead of "withering away," the state controlledby the "glorious party" preserves the very conditionswhich "necessitate" the existence of a state—and a partyto "guard" it.

On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vul-nerable in periods of repression. The bourgeoisie has onlyto grab its leadership to destroy virtually the entire move-ment. With its leaders in prison or in hiding, the partybecomes paralyzed; the obedient membership has no oneto obey and tends to flounder. Demoralization sets inrapidly. The party decomposes not only because of therepressive atmosphere but also because of its poverty ofinner resources.

The foregoing account is not a series of hypotheticalinferences, it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxianparties of the past century—the Social Democrats, theCommunists, and the Trotskyist party of Ceylon (the onlymass party of its kind). To claim that these parties failedto take their Marxian principles seriously merely concealsanother question: why did this failure happen in the firstplace? The fact is, these parties were co-opted into bour-geois society because they were structured along bourgeoislines. The germ of treachery existed in them from birth.

The Bolshevik Party was spared this fate between 1904and 1917 for only one reason: it was an illegal organiza-tion during most of the years leading up to the revolution.The party was continually being shattered and reconsti-tuted, with the result that until it took power it neverreally hardened into a fully centralized, bureaucratic, hier-archical machine. Moreover, it was riddled by factions; theintensely factional atmosphere persisted throughout 1917into the civil war. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leadershipwas ordinarily extremely conservative, a trait that Leninhad to fight throughout 1917—first in his efforts to re-


orient the Central Committee against the provisionalgovernment (the famous conflict over the "April Theses"),later in driving the Central Committee toward insurrectionin October. In both cases he threatened to resign from theCentral Committee and bring his views to "the lower ranksof the party."

In 1918, factional disputes over the issue of the Brest-Litovsk treaty became so serious that the Bolsheviks nearlysplit into two warring communist parties. OppositionalBolshevik groups like the Democratic Centralists and theWorkers' Opposition waged bitter struggles within theparty throughout 1919 and 1920, not to speak of opposi-tional movements that developed within the Red Armyover Trotsky's propensity for centralization. The completecentralization of the Bolshevik Party—the achievement of"Leninist unity," as it was to be called later—did not occuruntil 1921, when Lenin succeeded in persuading the TenthParty Congress to ban factions. By this time, most of theWhite Guards had been crushed and the foreign interven-tionists had withdrawn their troops from Russia.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Bolshevikstended to centralize their party to the degree that theybecame isolated from the working class. This relationshiphas rarely been investigated in latter-day Leninist circles,although Lenin was honest enough to admit it. The storyof the Russian Revolution is not merely the story of theBolshevik Party and its supporters. Beneath the veneer ofofficial events described by Soviet historians there wasanother, more basic, development—the spontaneous move-ment of the workers and revolutionary peasants, whichlater clashed sharply with the bureaucratic policies of theBolsheviks. With the overthrow of the czar in February1917, workers in virtually all the factories of Russia spon-taneously established factory committees, staking out anincreasing claim on industrial operations. In June 1917 anall-Russian conference of factory committees was held in


Petrograd which called for the "organization of thoroughcontrol by labor over production and distribution." Thedemands of this conference are rarely mentioned in Lenin-ist accounts of the Russian Revolution, despite the factthat the conference aligned itself with the Bolsheviks.Trotsky, who describes the factory committees as "themost direct and indubitable representation of the prole-tariat in the whole country," deals with them peripherallyin his massive three-volume history of the revolution. Yetso important were these spontaneous organisms of self-management that Lenin, despairing of winning the Sovietsin the summer of 1917, was prepared to jettison the slogan"All Power to the Soviets" for "All Power to the FactoryCommittees." This demand would have catapulted theBolsheviks into a completely anarcho-syndicalist position,although it is doubtful that they would have remainedthere very long.

With the October Revolution, all the factory commit-tees seized control of the plants, ousting the bourgeoisieand completely taking control of industry. In acceptingthe concept of workers' control, Lenin's famous decree ofNovember 14, 1917, merely acknowledged an accom-plished fact; the Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workersat this early date. But they began to whittle down thepower of the factory committees. In January 1918, a scanttwo months after "decreeing" workers' control, Leninbegan to advocate that the administration of the factoriesbe placed under trade union control. The story that theBolsheviks "patiently" experimented with workers' con-trol, only to find it "inefficient" and "chaotic," is a myth.Their "patience" did not last more than a few weeks. Notonly did Lenin oppose direct workers' control within amatter of weeks after the decree of November 14, evenunion control came to an end shortly after it had beenestablished. By the summer of 1918, almost all of Russianindustry had been placed under bourgeois forms of


management. As Lenin put it, the "revolution demands . . .precisely in the interests of socialism that the massesunquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of thelabor process."* Thereafter, workers' control wasdenounced not only as "inefficient," "chaotic" and"impractical," but also as "petty bourgeois"!

The Left Communist Osinsky bitterly attacked all ofthese spurious claims and warned the party: "Socialismand socialist organization must be set up by the proletariatitself, or they will not be set up at all; something else willbe set up—state capitalism."31 In the "interests of social-ism" the Bolshevik party elbowed the proletariat out ofevery domain it had conquered by its own efforts andinitiative. The party did not coordinate the revolution oreven lead it; it dominated it. First workers' control andlater union control were replaced by an elaborate hier-archy as monstrous as any structure that existed in pre-revolutionary times. As later years were to demonstrate,Osinsky's prophecy became reality.

The problem of "who is to prevail"—the Bolsheviks orthe Russian "masses"—was by no means limited to the fac-

* V. I. Lenin, "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," inSelected Works, vol. 7 (International Publishers; New York, 1943),p. 342. In this harsh article, published in April 1918, Lenin com-pletely abandoned the liberatarian perspective he had advanced theyear before in State and Revolution. The main themes of the articleare the needs for "discipline," for authoritarian control over thefactories, and for the institution of the Taylor system (a systemLenin had denounced before the revolution as enslaving men to themachine). The article was written during a comparatively peacefulperiod of Bolshevik rule some two months after the signing of theBrest-Litovsk Treaty and a month before the revolt of the CzechLegion in the Urals-the revolt that started the civil war on a widescale and opened the period of direct Allied intervention in Russia.Finally, the article was written nearly a year before the defeat of theGerman revolution. It would be difficult to account for the "Im-mediate Tasks" merely in terms of the Russian civil war and thefailure of the European revolution.


tories. The issue reappeared in the countryside as well asthe cities. A sweeping peasant war had buoyed up themovement of the workers. Contrary to official Leninistaccounts, the agrarian upsurge was by no means limited toa redistribution of the land into private plots. In theUkraine, peasants influenced by the anarchist militias ofNestor Makhno and guided by the communist maxim"From each according to his ability; to each according tohis needs," established a multitude of rural communes.Elsewhere, in the north and in Soviet Asia, several thou-sand of these organisms were established, partly on theinitiative of the Left Social Revolutionaries and in largemeasure as a result of traditional collectivist impulseswhich stemmed from the Russian village, the mir. It mat-ters little whether these communes were numerous or em-braced large numbers of peasants; the point is that theywere authentic popular organisms, the nuclei of a moraland social spirit that ranged far above the dehumanizingvalues of bourgeois society.

The Bolsheviks frowned upon these organisms from thevery beginning and eventually condemned them. To Lenin,the preferred, the more "socialist," form of agriculturalenterprise was represented by the state farm—an agricul-tural factory in which the state owned the land and farm-ing equipment, appointing managers who hired peasants ona wage basis. One sees in these attitudes toward workers'control and agricultural communes the essentially bour-geois spirit and mentality that permeated the BolshevikParty—a spirit and mentality that emanated not only fromits theories, but also from its corporate mode of organiza-tion. In December 1918 Lenin launched an attack againstthe communes on the pretext that peasants were being"forced" to enter them. Actually, little if any coercion wasused to organize these communistic forms of self-manage-ment. As Robert G. Wesson, who studied the Soviet com-munes in detail, concludes: "Those who went into corn-


munes must have done so largely of their own volition."32

The communes were not suppressed but their growth wasdiscouraged until Stalin merged the entire developmentinto the forced collectivization drives of the late twentiesand early thirties.

By 1920 the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves fromthe Russian working class and peasantry. Taken together,the elimination of workers' control, the suppression of theMakhnovtsy, the restrictive political atmosphere in thecountry, the inflated bureaucracy and the crushing mate-rial poverty inherited from the civil war years generated adeep hostility toward Bolshevik rule. With the end of hos-tilities, a movement surged up from the depths of Russiansociety for a "third revolution"—not to restore the past, asthe Bolsheviks claimed, but to realize the very goals offreedom, economic as well as political, that had rallied themasses around the Bolshevik program of 1917. The newmovement found its most conscious form in the Petrogradproletariat and among the Kronstadt sailors. It also foundexpression in the party: the growth of anticentralist andanarcho-syndicalist tendencies among the Bolsheviksreached a point where a bloc of oppositional groups,oriented toward these issues, gained 124 seats at a Moscowprovincial conference as against 154 for supporters of theCentral Committee.

On March 2, 1921, the "red sailors" of Kronstadt rosein open rebellion, raising the banner of a "Third Revolu-tion of the Toilers." The Kronstadt program centeredaround demands for free elections to the Soviets, freedomof speech and press for the anarchists and the left socialistparties, free trade unions, and the liberation of all priso-ners who belonged to socialist parties. The most shamelessstories were fabricated by the Bolsheviks to account forthis uprising, acknowledged in later years as brazen lies.The revolt was characterized as a "White Guard plot" de-spite the fact that the great majority of Communist Party


members in Kronstadt joined the sailors—precisely as Com-munists—in denouncing the party leaders as betrayers ofthe October Revolution. As Robert Vincent Daniels ob-serves in his study of Bolshevik oppositional movements:"Ordinary Communists were indeed so unreliable. . . thatthe government did not depend upon them either in theassault on Kronstadt itself or in keeping order in Petro-grad, where Kronstadt's hopes for support chiefly rested.The main body of troops employed were Chekists andofficer cadets from Red Army training schools. The finalassault on Kronstadt was led by the top officialdom of theCommunist Party—a large group of delegates to the TenthParty Congress was rushed from Mosow for this pur-pose."33 So weak was the regime internally that the elitehad to do its own dirty work.

Even more significant than the Kronstadt revolt was thestrike movement that developed among the Petrogradworkers, a movement that sparked the uprising of thesailors. Leninist histories do not recount this critically im-portant development. The first strikes broke out in theTroubotchny factory on February 23, 1921. Within a mat-ter of days the movement swept one factory after another,until by February 28 the famous Putilov works—the "cru-cible of the Revolution"—went on strike. Not only wereeconomic demands raised, the workers raised distinctlypolitical ones, anticipating all the demands that were to beraised by the Kronstadt sailors a few days later. On Feb-ruary 24, the Bolsheviks declared a "state of siege" inPetrograd and arrested the strike leaders, suppressing theworkers' demonstrations with officer cadets. The fact is,the Bolsheviks did not merely suppress a "sailors' mutiny";they crushed the working class itself. It was at this pointthat Lenin demanded the banning of factions in the Rus-sian Communist Party. Centralization of the party wasnow complete—and the way was paved for Stalin.

We have discussed these events in detail because they


lead to a conclusion that the latest crop of Marxist-Lenin-ists tend to avoid: the Bolshevik Party reached its maxi-mum degree of centralization in Lenin's day not to achievea revolution or suppress a White Guard counterrevolution,but to effect a counterrevolution of its own against thevery social forces it professed to represent. Factions wereprohibited and a monolithic party created not to prevent a"capitalist restoration" but to contain a mass movement ofworkers for soviet democracy and social freedom. TheLenin of 1921 stood opposed to the Lenin of 1917.

Thereafter, Lenin simply floundered. This man whoabove all sought to anchor the problems of his party insocial contradictions found himself literally playing anorganizational "numbers game" in a last-ditch attempt toarrest the very bureaucratization he had himself created.There is nothing more pathetic and tragic than Lenin's lastyears. Paralyzed by a simplistic body of Marxist formulas,he can think of no better countermeasures than organiza-tional ones. He proposes the formation of the Workers'and Peasants' Inspection to correct bureaucratic deforma-tions in the party and state—and this body falls underStalin's control and becomes highly bureaucratic in its ownright. Lenin then suggests that the size of the Workers' andPeasants' Inspection be reduced and that it be merged withthe Control Commission. He advocates enlarging the Cen-tral Committee. Thus it rolls along: this body to be en-larged, that one to be merged with another, still a third tobe modified or abolished. The strange ballet of organiza-tional forms continues up to his very death, as though theproblem could be resolved by organizational means. AsMosche Lewin, an obvious admirer of Lenin, admits, theBolshevik leader "approached the problems of governmentmore like a chief executive of a strictly 'elitist' turn ofmind. He did not apply methods of social analysis to thegovernment and was content to consider it purely in termsof organizational methods."34


If it is true that in the bourgeois revolutions the "phrasewent beyond the content," in the Bolshevik revolution theforms replaced the content. The Soviets replaced theworkers and their factory committees, the party replacedthe Soviets, the Central Committee replaced the Party, andthe Political Bureau replaced the Central Committee. Inshort, means replaced ends. This incredible substitution ofform for content is one of the most characteristic traits ofMarxism-Leninism. In France during the May-June events,all the Bolshevik organizations were prepared to destroythe Sorbonne student assembly in order to increase theirinfluence and membership. Their principal concern wasnot the revolution or the authentic social forms created bythe students, but the growth of their own parties.

Only one force could have arrested the growth ofbureaucracy in Russia: a social force. Had the Russianproletariat and peasantry succeeded in increasing thedomain of self-management through the development ofviable factory committees, rural communes and freeSoviets, the history of the country might have taken adramatically different turn. There can be no question thatthe failure of socialist revolutions in Europe after the FirstWorld War led to the isolation of the revolution in Russia.The material poverty of Russia, coupled with the pressureof the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militatedagainst the development of a socialist or a consistentlylibertarian society. But by no means was it ordained thatRussia had to develop along state capitalist lines; contraryto Lenin's and Trotsky's initial expectations, the revolu-tion was defeated by internal forces, not by invasion ofarmies from abroad. Had the movement from below re-stored the initial achievements of the revolution in 1917, amultifaceted social structure might have developed, basedon workers' control of industry, on a freely developingpeasant economy in agriculture, and on a living interplayof ideas, programs and political movements. At the very


least, Russia would not have been imprisoned in totali-tarian chains and Stalinism would not have poisoned theworld revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascismand the Second World War.

The development of the Bolshevik Party, however, pre-cluded this development—Lenin's or Trotsky's "goodintentions" notwithstanding. By destroying the power ofthe factory committees in industry and by crushing theMakhnovtsy, the Petrograd workers and the Kronstadtsailors, the Bolsheviks virtually guaranteed the triumph ofthe Russian bureaucracy over Russian society. The central-ized party—a completely bourgeois institution—became therefuge of counterrevolution in its most sinister form. Thiswas covert counterrevolution that draped itself in the redflag and the terminology of Marx. Ultimately, what theBolsheviks suppressed in 1921 was not an "ideology" or a"White Guard conspiracy," but an elemental struggle ofthe Russian people to free themselves of their shackles andtake control of their own destiny.* For Russia, this meantthe nightmare of Stalinist dictatorship; for the generationof the thirties it meant the horror of fascism and the

* In interpreting this elemental movement of the Russian workersand peasants as a series of "White Guard conspiracies," "acts ofkulak resistance," and "plots of international capital," the Bol-sheviks reached an incredible theoretical low and deceived no onebut themselves. A spiritual erosion developed within the party thatpaved the way for the politics of the secret police, for characterassassination, and finally for the Moscow trials and the annihilationof the Old Bolshevik cadre. One sees the return of this odious men-tality in PL articles like "Marcuse: Cop-out or Cop?"-the theme ofwhich is to establish Marcuse as an agent of the CIA. (See ProgressiveLabor, February 1969.) The article has a caption under a photo-graph of demonstrating Parisians which reads: "Marcuse got to Paristoo late to stop the May action." Opponents of the PLP are in-variably described by this rag as "redbaiters" and as "anti-worker."If the American left does not repudiate this police approach andcharacter assassination it will pay bitterly in the years to come.


treachery of the Communist parties in Europe and theUnited States.

THE TWO TRADITIONSIt would be incredibly naive to suppose that Leninism wasthe product of a single man. The disease lies much deeper,not only in the limitations of Marxian theory but in thelimitations of the social era that produced Marxism. If thisis not clearly understood, we will remain as blind to thedialectic of events today as Marx, Engels, Lenin andTrotsky were in their own day. For us this blindness willbe all the more reprehensible because behind us lies awealth of experience that these men lacked in developingtheir theories.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were centralists—notonly politically, but socially and economically. They neverdenied this fact and their writings are studded with glow-ing encomiums to political, organizational and economiccentralization. As early as March 1850, in the famous"Address of the Central Council to the CommunistLeague," they call upon the workers to strive not only for"the single and indivisible German republic, but also strivein it for the most decisive centralization of power in thehands of the state authority." Lest the demand be takenlightly, it is repeated continually in the same paragraph,which concludes: "As in France in 1793, so today in Ger-many the carrying through of the strictest centralization isthe task of the really revolutionary party."

The same theme reappears continually in later years.With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, for ex-ample, Marx writes to Engels: "The French need a thrash-ing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state powerwill be useful for the centralization of the German workingclass."35

Marx and Engels, however, were not centralists because


they believed in the virtues of centralism per se. Quite thecontrary: both Marxism and anarchism have always agreedthat a liberated, communist society entails sweeping de-centralization, the dissolution of bureaucracy, the aboli-tion of the state, and the breakup of the large cities."Abolition of the antithesis between town and country isnot merely possible," notes Engels in Anti-Duhring. "It hasbecome a direct necessity . . . the present poisoning of theair, water and land can be put to an end only by the fusionof town and country. . . ." To Engels this involves a"uniform distribution of the population over the wholecountry"36 —in short, the physical decentralization of thecities.

The origins of Marxian centralism are in problems aris-ing from the formation of the national state. Until wellinto the latter half of the nineteenth century, Germanyand Italy were divided into a multitude of independentduchies, principalities and kingdoms. The consolidation ofthese geographic units into unified nations, Marx andEngels believed, was a sine qua non for the development ofmodern industry and capitalism. Their praise of centralismwas engendered not by any centralistic mystique but bythe events of the period in which they lived—the develop-ment of technology, trade, a unified working class, and thenational state. Their concern on this score, in short, is withthe emergence of capitalism, with the tasks of the bour-geois revolution in an era of unavoidable material scarcity.Marx's approach to a "proletarian revolution," on theother hand, is markedly different. He enthusiasticallypraises the Paris Commune as a "model to all the industrialcenters of France." "This regime," he writes, "once estab-lished in Paris and the secondary centers, the old central-ized government would in the provinces, too, have to giveway to the self-government of the producers." (Emphasisadded.) The unity of the nation, to be sure, would not


disappear, and a central government would exist during thetransition to communism, but its functions would belimited.

Our object is not to bandy about quotations from Marxand Engels but to emphasize how key tenets of Marxism—which are accepted so uncritically today—were in fact theproduct of an era that has long been transcended by thedevelopment of capitalism in the United States and West-ern Europe. In his day Marx was occupied not only withthe problems of the "proletarian revolution" but also withthe problems of the bourgeois revolution, particularly inGermany, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. He dealt withthe problems of transition from capitalism to socialism incapitalist countries which had not advanced much beyondthe coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, andwith the problems of transition from feudalism to capital-ism in countries which had scarcely advanced much be-yond handicrafts and the guild system. To state theseconcerns broadly, Marx was occupied above all with thepreconditions of freedom (technological development,national unification, material abundance) rather than withthe conditions of freedom (decentralization, the formationof communities, the human scale, direct democracy). Histheories were still anchored in the realm of survival, notthe realm of life.

Once this is grasped it is possible to place Marx's theo-retical legacy in meaningful perspective—to separate itsrich contributions from its historically limited, indeedparalyzing, shackles on our own time. The Marxian dialec-tic, the many seminal insights provided by historicalmaterialism, the superb critique of the commodity rela-tionship, many elements of the economic theories, thetheory of alienation, and above all the notion that freedomhas material preconditions—these are lasting contributionsto revolutionary thought.

By the same token, Marx's emphasis on the industrial


proletariat as the "agent" of revolutionary change, his"class analysis" in explaining the transition from a class toa classless society, his concept of the proletarian dictator-ship, his emphasis on centralism, his theory of capitalistdevelopment (which tends to jumble state capitalism withsocialism), his advocacy of political action through elec-toral parties—these and many related concepts are false inthe context of our time and were misleading, as we shallsee, even in his own day. They emerge from the limitationsof his vision—more properly, from the limitations of histime. They make sense only if one remembers that Marxregarded capitalism as historically progressive, as an indis-pensable stage to the development of socialism, and theyhave practical applicability only to a time when Germanyin particular was confronted by bourgeois-democratic tasksand national unification. (We are not trying to say thatMarx was correct in holding this approach, merely that theapproach makes sense when viewed in its time and place.)

Just as the Russian Revolution included a subterraneanmovement of the "masses" which conflicted with Bol-shevism, so there is a subterranean movement in historywhich conflicts with all systems of authority. This move-ment has entered into our time under the name of "anar-chism," although it has never been encompassed by asingle ideology or body of sacred texts. Anarchism is alibidinal movement of humanity against coercion in anyform, reaching back in time to the very emergence ofpropertied society, class rule and the state. From thisperiod onward, the oppressed have resisted all forms thatseek to imprison the spontaneous development of socialorder. Anarchism has surged to the foreground of thesocial arena in periods of major transition from one histori-cal era to another. The decline of the ancient and feudalworld witnessed the upsurge of mass movements, in somecases wildly Dionysian in character, that demanded an endto all systems of authority, privilege and coercion.


The anarchic movements of the past failed largelybecause material scarcity, a function of the low level oftechnology, vitiated an organic harmonization of humaninterests. Any society that could promise little morematerially than equality of poverty invariably engendereddeep-seated tendencies to restore a new system of privi-lege. In the absence of a technology that could appreciablyreduce the working day, the need to work vitiated socialinstitutions based on self-management. The Girondins ofthe French Revolution shrewdly recognized that theycould use the working day against revolutionary Paris. Toexclude radical elements from the sections, they tried toenact legislation which would end all assembly meetingsbefore 10 p.m., the hour when Parisian workers returnedfrom their jobs. Indeed, it was not only the manipulativetechniques and the treachery of the "vanguard" organiza-tions that brought the anarchic phases of past revolutionsto an end, it was also the material limits of past eras. The"masses" were always compelled to return to a lifetime oftoil and rarely were they free to establish organs of self-management that could last beyond the revolution.

Anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, however,were by no means wrong in criticizing Marx for his em-phasis on centralism and his elitist notions of organization.Was centralism absolutely necessary for technological ad-vances in the past? Was the nation-state indispensable tothe expansion of commerce? Did the workers' movementbenefit by the emergence of highly centralized economicenterprises and the "indivisible" state? We tend to acceptthese tenets of Marxism too uncritically, krgely becausecapitalism developed within a centralized political arena.The anarchists of the last century warned that Marx'scentralistic approach, insofar as it affected the events ofthe time, would so strengthen the bourgeoisie and the stateapparatus that the overthrow of capitalism would be ex-tremely difficult. The revolutionary party, by duplicating

Listen, Marxist I 235

these centralistic, hierarchical features, would reproducehierarchy and centralism in the postrevolutionary society.

Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta were not so naive asto believe that anarchism could be established overnight.In imputing this notion to Bakunin, Marx and Engels will-fully distorted the Russian anarchist's views. Nor did theanarchists of the last century believe that the abolition ofthe state involved "laying down arms" immediately afterthe revolution, to use Marx's obscurantist choice of terms,thoughtlessly repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution.Indeed, much that passes for "Marxism" in State andRevolution is pure anarchism—for example, the substitu-tion of revolutionary militias for professional armed bodiesand the substitution of organs of self-management forparliamentary bodies. What is authentically Marxist inLenin's pamphlet is the demand for "strict centralism,"the acceptance of a "new" bureaucracy, and the identifica-tion of soviets with a state.

The anarchists of the last century were deeply pre-occupied with the question of achieving industrializationwithout crushing the revolutionary spirit of the "masses"and rearing new obstacles to emancipation. They fearedthat centralization would reinforce the ability of the bour-geoisie to resist the revolution and instill in the workers asense of obedience. They tried to rescue all those precapi-talist communal forms (such as the Russian mir and theSpanish pueblo) which might provide a springboard to afree society, not only in a structural sense but also a spiri-tual one. Hence they emphasized the need for decentraliza-tion even under capitalism. In contrast to the Marxianparties, their organizations gave considerable attention towhat they called "integral education"—the development ofthe whole man—to counteract the debasing and banalizinginfluence of bourgeois society. The anarchists tried to liveby the values of the future to the extent that this waspossible under capitalism. They believed in direct action to


foster the initiative of the "masses," to preserve the spiritof revolt, to encourage spontaneity. They tried to developorganizations based on mutual aid and brotherhood, inwhich control would be exercised from below upward, notdownward from above.

We must pause here to examine the nature of anarchistorganizational forms in some detail, if only because thesubject has been obscured by an appalling amount of rub-bish. Anarchists, or at least anarcho-communists, acceptthe need for organization.* It should be as absurd to haveto repeat this point as to argue over whether Marx ac-cepted the need for social revolution.

The real question at issue here is not organization versusnon-organization, but rather what kind of organization theanarcho-communists try to establish. What the differentkinds of anarcho-communist organizations have in com-mon is organic developments from below, not bodies engi-neered into existence from above. They are social move-ments, combining a creative revolutionary lifestyle with acreative revolutionary theory, not political parties whosemode of life is indistinguishable from the surroundingbourgeois environment and whose ideology is reduced torigid "tried and tested programs." As much as is humanlypossible, they try to reflect the liberated society they seekto achieve, not slavishly duplicate the prevailing system ofhierarchy, class and authority. They are built around inti-mate groups of brothers and sisters—affinity groups—whose ability to act in common is based on initiative, onconvictions freely arrived at, and on a deep personal

* The term "anarchist" is a generic word like the term "socialist,"and there are probably as many different kinds of anarchists as thereare socialists. In both cases, the spectrum ranges from individualswhose views derive from an extension of liberalism (the "individual-ist anarchists," the social-democrats) to revolutionary communists(the anarcho-communists, the revolutionary Marxists, Leninists andTrotskyists).


involvement, not around a bureaucratic apparatus fleshedout by a docile membership and manipulated from aboveby a handful of all-knowing leaders.

The anarcho-communists do not deny the need for coor-dination between groups, for discipline, for meticulousplanning, and for unity in action. But they believe thatcoordination, discipline, planning, and unity in actionmust be achieved voluntarily, by means of a self-disciplinenourished by conviction and understanding, not by coer-cion and a mindless, unquestioning obedience to ordersfrom above. They seek to achieve the effectiveness im-puted to centralism by means of voluntarism and insight,not by establishing a hierarchical, centralized structure.Depending upon needs or circumstances, affinity groupscan achieve this effectiveness through assemblies, actioncommittees, and local, regional or national conferences.But they vigorously oppose the establishment of an organi-zational structure that becomes an end in itself, of com-mittees that linger on after their practical tasks have beencompleted, of a "leadership" that reduces the "revolu-tionary" to a mindless robot.

These conclusions are not the result of flighty "indi-vidualist" impulses; quite to the contrary, they emergefrom an exacting study of past revolutions, of the impactcentralized parties have had on the revolutionary process,and of the nature of social change in an era of potentialmaterial abundance. Anarcho-communists seek to preserveand extend the anarchic phase that opens all the greatsocial revolutions. Even more than Marxists, they recog-nize that revolutions are produced by deep historicalprocesses. No central committee "makes" a social revolu-tion; at best it can stage a coup d'etat, replacing one hier-archy by another—or worse, arrest a revolutionary processif it exercises any widespread influence. A central commit-tee is an organ for acquiring power, for recreating power,for gathering to itself what the "masses" have achieved by


their own revolutionary efforts. One must be blind to allthat has happened over the past two centuries not to rec-ognize these essential facts.

In the past, Marxists could make an intelligible (al-though invalid) claim for the need for a centralized party,because the anarchic phase of the revolution was nullifiedby material scarcity. Economically, the "masses" were al-ways compelled to return to a daily life of toil. The revolu-tion closed at ten o'clock, quite aside from the reaction-ary intentions of the Girondins of 1793; it was arrested bythe low level of technology. Today even this excuse hasbeen removed by the development of a post-scarcity tech-nology, notably in the U.S. and Western Europe. A pointhas now been reached where the "masses" can begin, al-most overnight, to expand drastically the "realm of free-dom" in the Marxian sense—to acquire the leisure timeneeded to achieve the highest degree of self-management.

What the May-June events in France demonstrated wasnot the need for a Bolshevik-type party but the need forgreater consciousness among the "masses." Paris demon-strated that an organization is needed to propagate ideassystematically—and not ideas alone, but ideas which pro-mote the concept of self-management. What the French"masses" lacked was not a central committee or a Lenin to"organize" or "command" them, but the conviction thatthey could have operated the factories instead of merelyoccupying them. It is noteworthy that not a singleBolshevik-type party in France raised the demand of self-management. The demand was raised only by the anar-chists and the Situationists.

There is a need for a revolutionary organization—but itsfunction must always be kept clearly in mind. Its first taskis propaganda, to "patiently explain," as Lenin put it. In arevolutionary situation, the revolutionary organization pre-sents the most advanced demands: it is prepared at everyturn of events to formulate—in the most concrete

Listen, Marxist I 239

fashion—the immediate task that should be performed toadvance the revolutionary process. It provides the boldestelements in action and in the decision-making organs ofthe revolution.

In what way, then, do anarcho-communist groups differfrom the Bolshevik type of party? Certainly not on suchissues as the need for organization, planning, coordination,propaganda in all its forms or the need for a social pro-gram. Fundamentally, they differ from the Bolshevik typeof party in their belief that genuine revolutionaries mustfunction within the framework of the forms created by therevolution, not within the forms created by the party.What this means is that their commitment is to the revolu-tionary organs of self-management, not to the revolution-ary "organization"; to the social forms, not the politicalforms. Anarcho-communists seek to persuade the factorycommittees, assemblies or Soviets to make themselvesinto genuine organs of popular self-management, not todominate them, manipulate them, or hitch them to anall-knowing political party. Anarcho-communists do notseek to rear a state structure over these popular revolu-tionary organs but, on the contrary, to dissolve all theorganizational forms developed in the prerevolutionaryperiod (including their own) into these genuine revolu-tionary organs.

These differences are decisive. Despite their rhetoric andslogans, the Russian Bolsheviks never believed in the so-viets; they regarded them as instruments of the BolshevikParty, an attitude which the French Trotskyists faithfullyduplicated in their relations with the Sorbonne students'assembly, the French Maoists with the French laborunions, and the Old Left groups with SDS. By 1921, theSoviets were virtually dead, and all decisions were made bythe Bolshevik Central Committee and Political Bureau. Notonly do anarcho-communists seek to prevent Marxistparties from repeating this; they also wish to prevent their


own organization from playing a similar role. Accordingly,they try to prevent bureaucracy, hierarchy and elites fromemerging in their midst. No less important, they attemptto remake themselves; to root out from their own person-alities those authoritarian traits and elitist propensities thatare assimilated in hierarchical society almost from birth.The concern of the anarchist movement with lifestyle isnot merely a preoccupation with its own integrity, butwith the integrity of the revolution itself.*

In the midst of all the confusing ideological cross-currents of our time, one question must always remain inthe foreground: what the hell are we trying to make arevolution for? Are we trying to make a revolution torecreate hierarchy, dangling a shadowy dream of futurefreedom before the eyes of humanity? Is it to promotefurther technological advance, to create an even greaterabundance of goods than exists today? It is to "get even"with the bourgeoisie? Is it to bring PL to power? Or theCommunist Party? Or the Socialist Workers Party? Is it toemancipate abstractions such as "The Proletariat," "ThePeople," "History," "Society"?

Or is it finally to dissolve hierarchy, class rule and coer-cion—to make it possible for each individual to gain con-trol of his everyday life? Is it to make each moment asmarvelous as it could be and the life span of each indi-vidual an utterly fulfilling experience? If the true purposeof revolution is to bring the neanderthal men of PL topower, it is not worth making. We need hardly argue the* It is this goal, we may add, that motivates anarchist dadaism, theanarchist flipout that produces the creases of consternation on thewooden faces of PLP types. The anarchist flipout attempts to shatterthe internal values inherited from hierarchical society, to explodethe rigidities instilled by the bourgeois socialization process. Inshort, it is an attempt to break down the superego that exercisessuch a paralyzing effect upon spontaneity, imagination and sensi-bility and to restore a sense of desire, possibility and the marvelous—of revolution as a liberating, joyous festival.


inane questions of whether individual development can besevered from social and communal development; obviouslythe two go together. The basis for a whole human being isa rounded society; the basis for a free human being is afree society.

These issues aside, we are still faced with the questionthat Marx raised in 1850: when will we begin to take ourpoetry from the future instead of the past? The dead mustbe permitted to bury the dead. Marxism is dead because itwas rooted in an era of material scarcity, limited in itspossibilities by material want. The most important socialmessage of Marxism is that freedom has material precondi-tions—we must survive in order to live. With the develop-ment of a technology that could not have been conceivedby the wildest science fiction of Marx's day, the possibilityof a post-scarcity society now lies before us. All the insti-tutions of propertied society—class rule, hierarchy, thepatriarchal family, bureaucracy, the city, the state—havebeen exhausted. Today, decentralization is not only desi-rable as a means of restoring the human scale, it is neces-sary to recreate a viable ecology, to preserve life on thisplanet from destructive pollutants and soil erosion, to pre-serve a breathable atmosphere and the balance of nature.The promotion of spontaneity is necessary if the socialrevolution is to place each individual in control of hiseveryday life.

The old forms of struggle do not totally disappear withthe decomposition of class society, but they are beingtranscended by the issues of a classless society. There canbe no social revolution without winning the workers,hence they must have our active solidarity in every strugglethey wage against exploitation. We fight against socialcrimes wherever they appear—and industrial exploitation isa profound social crime. But so are racism, the denial ofthe right to self-determination, imperialism and povertyprofound social crimes—and for that matter so are pollu-


tion, rampant urbanization, the malignant socialization ofthe young, and sexual repression. As for the problem ofwinning the working class to the revolution, we must bearin mind that a precondition for the existence of the bour-geoisie is the development of the proletariat. Capitalism asa social system presupposes the existence of both classesand is perpetuated by the development of both classes. Webegin to undermine the premises of class rule to the degreethat we foster the declassifying of the non-bourgeoisclasses, at least institutionally, psychologically and cultu-rally.

For the first time in history, the anarchic phase thatopened all the great revolutions of the past can be pre-served as a permanent condition by the advanced tech-nology of our time. The anarchic institutions of thatphase—the assemblies, the factory committees, the actioncommittees—can be stabilized as the elements of a libe-rated society, as the elements of a new system of self-management. Will we build a movement that can defendthem? Can we create an organization of affinity groupsthat is capable of dissolving into these revolutionary insti-tutions? Or will we build a hierarchical, centralized,bureaucratic party that will try to dominate them, sup-plant them, and finally destroy them?

Listen, Marxist: The organization we try to build is thekind of society our revolution will create. Either we willshed the past—in ourselves as well as in our groups—orthere will simply be no future to win.

New YorkMay 1969

A Note on Affinity GroupsThe term "affinity group" is the English translation of theSpanish grupo de afinidad, which was the name of anorganizational form devised in pre-Franco days as the basisof the redoubtable Federation Anarquista Iberica, theIberian Anarchist Federation. (The FAI consisted of themost idealistic militants in the CNT, the immense anar-cho-syndicalist labor union.) A slavish imitation of theFAI's forms of organization and methods would be neitherpossible nor desirable. The Spanish anarchists of thethirties were faced with entirely different social problemsfrom those which confront American anarchists today.The affinity group form, however, has features that applyto any social situation, and these have often been intui-tively adopted by American radicals, who call the resultingorganizations "collectives," communes" or "families."

The affinity group could easily be regarded as a newtype of extended family, in which kinship ties are replacedby deeply empathetic human relationships—relationshipsnourished by common revolutionary ideas and practice.Long before the word "tribe" gained popularity in theAmerican counterculture, the Spanish anarchists calledtheir congresses asambleas de las tribus—assemblies of thetribes. Each affinity group is deliberately kept small toallow for the greatest degree of intimacy between thosewho compose it. Autonomous, communal and directlydemocratic, the group combines revolutionary theory withrevolutionary lifestyle in its everyday behavior. It creates afree space in which revolutionaries can remake themselvesindividually, and also as social beings.

Affinity groups are intended to function as catalystswithin the popular movement, not as "vanguards"; theyprovide initiative and consciousness, not a "general staff"

243


and a source of "command." The groups proliferate on amolecular level and they have their own "Brownian move-ment." Whether they link together or separate is deter-mined by living situations, not by bureaucratic fiat from adistant center. Under conditions of political repression,affinity groups are highly resistant to police infiltration.Owing to the intimacy of the relationships between theparticipants, the groups are often difficult to penetrateand, even if penetration occurs, there is no centralizedapparatus to provide the infiltrator with an overview of themovement as a whole. Even under such demanding condi-tions, affinity groups can still retain contact with eachother through their periodicals and literature.

During periods of heightened activity, on the otherhand, nothing prevents affinity groups from workingtogether closely on any scale required by a living situation.They can easily federate by means of local, regional ornational assemblies to formulate common policies andthey can create temporary action committees (like thoseof the French students and workers in 1968) to coordinatespecific tasks. Affinity groups, however, are always rootedin the popular movement. Their loyalties belong to thesocial forms created by the revolutionary people, not to animpersonal bureaucracy. As a result of their autonomy andlocalism, the groups can retain a sensitive appreciation ofnew possibilities. Intensely experimental and variegated inlifestyles, they act as a stimulus on each other as well as onthe popular movement. Each group tries to acquire theresources needed to function largely on its own. Eachgroup seeks a rounded body of knowledge and experiencein order to overcome the social and psychological limita-tions imposed by bourgeois society on individual develop-ment. Each group, as a nucleus of consciousness andexperience, tries to advance the spontaneous revolutionarymovement of the people to a point where the group canfinally disappear into the organic social forms created bythe revolution.

A Discussion on"Listen,

Marxist!"

D

Robert B. Carson, in an article published in the April 1970issue of Monthly Review, writes that the "major thrust" of'Listen, Marxist!' is to "destroy a class-based analysis ofsociety and revolutionary activity." This criticism has beenmade by many Marxists who read the article. *

Carson's accusation is quite absurd. I seriously doubt if hedid more than skim the article. Carson goes on to say thatmy approach is "ahistorical" and that I try to promote a"crude kind of individualistic anarchism"—this despite thefact that a large portion of the article attempts to drawimportant historical lessons from earlier revolutions anddespite the fact that the article is unequivocally committedto anarcho-comrnunism.

The most interesting thing about Carson's criticism iswhat it reveals about the theoretical level of many Marx-ists. Apparently Carson regards a futuristic approach as"ahistorical." He also seems to regard my belief that free-dom exists only when each individual controls his daily lifeas "a crude kind of individualistic anarchism." Here we getto the nub of the problem. Futurism and individual free-dom are indeed the "main thrust" of the pamphlet.Carson's reply confirms precisely what the pamphlet setout to prove about Marxism today, namely that Marxism(I do not speak of Marx here) is not futuristic and that itsperspectives are oriented not toward concrete, existential

* This is an edited summary of several discussions on "Listen, Marx-ist!," most of which occurred at my anarcho-communism class atAlternate U, New York's liberation school. I have selected the mostrepresentative and recurrent questions raised by readers of thepamphlet.

247


freedom, but toward an abstract freedom—freedom for"Society," for the "Proletariat," for categories rather thanfor people. Carson's first charge, I might emphasize, shouldbe leveled not only at me but at Marx—at his futurism inthe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

As to the charge that I am opposed to a "class-basedanalysis of society and revolutionary activity," need I saythat a "class analysis" permeates the pamphlet? Is it con-ceivable that I could have terms like "capitalist" and"bourgeois" without working with a "class-based analy-sis"? Originally I thought there could have been no doubtabout the matter. I have since changed the expression"class analysis" in the text to "class line," and perhaps Ihad better explain the difference this change is meant toconvey.

What Carson is really saying is that I do not have aMarxist "class analysis"—a "class analysis" in which theindustrial proletariat is driven to revolution by destitutionand immiseration. Carson apparently assumes that Marx'straditional "class line" exhausts all there is to say aboutthe class struggle. And in this respect, he assumes far toomuch. One need only turn to Bakunin, for example, tofind a class analysis that was quite different from Marx's—and more relevant today. Bakunin believed that the indus-trial proletariat by no means constitutes the most revolu-tionary class in society. He never received the credit duehim for predicting the embourgeoisement of the industrialworking class with the development of capitalist industry.In Bakunin's view, the most revolutionary class was notthe industrial proletariat—"a class always increasing innumbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the verymechanisms of capitalist production itself" (Marx)—butthe uprooted peasantry and urban declasses, the rural andurban lumpen elements Marx so heartily despised. We needgo no further than the urban centers of America—not to

Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!" / 249

speak of the rice paddies of Asia—to find how accurateBakunin was by comparison with Marx.

As it turned out, the development of capitalist industrynot only "disciplined," "united" and "organized" theworking class but, by these very measures, denatured theproletariat for generations. By contrast, the transitionaland lumpenized classes of society today (such as blacks,drop-out youth, people like students, intellectuals andartists who are not rooted in the factory system, andyoung workers whose allegiance to the work ethic has beenshaken by cultural factors) are the most radical elements inthe world today.

A "class analysis" does not necessarily begin and endwith Marx's nineteenth-century version, a version I regardas grossly inaccurate. The class struggle, moreover, doesnot begin and end at the point of production. It mayemerge from the poverty of the unemployed and unem-ployables, many of whom have never done a day's work inindustry; it may emerge from a new sense of possibilitythat slowly pervades society—the tension between "whatis" and "what could be"—which percolates through vir-tually all traditional classes; it may emerge from the cul-tural and physical decomposition of the traditional classstructure on which the social stability of capitalism wasbased. Finally, every class struggle is not necessarily revolu-tionary. The class struggle between the original Romanproletarius and patricius was decidedly reactionary andeventually ended, as Marx observed in the opening lines ofthe Communist Manifesto, "in the common ruin of thecontending classes."37

Today, not only poverty but also a relative degree ofaffluence is causing revolutionary unrest—a factor Marxnever anticipated. Capitalism, having started out by pro-letarianizing the urban declasses, is now ending its life-cycle by creating new urban declasses, including "shiftless"


young industrial workers who no longer take the jobs, thefactory discipline or the work ethic seriously. This stratumof declasses rests on a new economic base—a post-scarcitytechnology, automation, a relative degree of material abun-dance—and it prefigures culturally the classless society theMarxists so devoutly envision as humanity's future. Onewould have thought that this remarkable dialectic, this"negation of the negation," would have stirred a flicker ofunderstanding in the heavy thinkers of the Marxist move-ment.

It would be difficult to conceive of a revolution in anyindustrially advanced capitalist country without the sup-port of the industrial proletariat.

Of course. And "Listen, Marxist!" makes no claim that asocial revolution is possible without the participation ofthe industrial proletariat. The article, in fact, tries to showhow the proletariat can be won to the revolutionary move-ment by stressing issues that concern the quality of lifeand work. I agree, of course, with the libertarian Marxistsand anarcho-syndicalists, who raise the slogan "workers'management of production." I wonder, however, if thisslogan goes far enough now. My suspicion is that theworkers, when they get into revolutionary motion, willdemand even more than control of the factories. I thinkthey will demand the elimination of toil, or, what amountsto the same thing, freedom from work. Certainly a drop-out outlook is growing among kids from working-classfamilies—high school kids who are being influenced by theyouth culture.

Although many other factors may contribute to thesituation, it remains true that the workers will developrevolutionary views to the degree that they shed their tra-ditional working-class traits. Young workers, I think, willincreasingly demand leisure and the abolition of alienated


labor. The young Marx, I might add, was not indifferent tothe development of unconventional values in the proletar-iat. In The Holy Family, he cites with obvious favor aParisian working-class girl in Eugene Sue's The WanderingJew who gives of her love and loyalty spontaneously, dis-daining marriage and bourgeois conventions. He notes,"she constitutes a really human contrast to the hypo-critical, narrow-hearted, self-seeking wife of the bourgeois,to the whole circle of the bourgeosie, that is, to the officialcircle."38 The working class, in the young Marx's view, isthe negation of capitalism not only in that it suffers totalalienation, abasement and dehumanization, but also in thatit affirms life forces and human values. Unfortunately,observations of this kind tend to fade away as Marx'ssocialism becomes increasingly "objectivist" and "scien-tific" (the admirers of Marx's famous—but untranslatedand little-read—Grundrisse notwithstanding). The laterMarx begins to prize the bourgeois traits of the worker—the worker's "discipline," "practicality," and "realism"—asthe characteristics necessary for a revolutionary class.

The approach which Marx followed in The Holy Familywas, I think, the correct one. Trapped by the notion thatthe working class, qua class, implied the liquidation ofclass society, Marx failed to see that this class was the alterego of the bourgeoisie. Only a new cultural movementcould rework the outlook of the proletariat—and depro-letarianize it. Ironically, the Parisian working-class girls ofMarx's youth were not industrial workers, but ratherpeople of transitional classes who straddled small- andlarge-scale production. They were largely lumpenized ele-ments, like the sans-culottes of the French Revolution.

If the analysis in "Listen, Marxist!" is "class-based," whatis the nature of the class struggle?

The class struggle does not center around material ex-


ploitation alone but also around spiritual exploitation. Inaddition, entirely new issues emerge: coercive attitudes,the quality of work, ecology (or, stated in more generalterms, psychological and environmental oppression). More-over, the alienated and oppressed sectors of society arenow the majority of the people, not a single class definedby its relationship to the means of production; the moreradical as well as more liberatory sensibilities appear in theyounger, not in the more "mature," age groups. Terms like"classes" and "class struggle," conceived of almost entirelyas economic categories and relations, are too one-sided toexpress the universalization of the struggle. Use theselimited expressions if you like (the target is still a rulingclass and a class society), but this terminology, with itstraditional connotations, does not reflect the sweep andthe multi-dimensional nature of the struggle. Words like"class struggle" fail to encompass the cultural and spiritualrevolt that is taking place along with the economicstruggle.

"Listen, Marxist!" speaks a great deal about the poten-tialities of a post-scarcity society, but what of the actu-alities? There is still a great deal of poverty and hunger inthe U.S. Inflation is a growing problem, not to speak ofunemployment, bad housing, racial discrimination, workspeed-ups, trade union bureaucracy, and the danger offascism, imperialism and war.

"Listen, Marxist!" was written to deal with the simplifi-cations of social problems (the economic and Third World-oriented "either/or" notions) that were developing in the"New Left." The post-scarcity viewpoint advanced in thepamphlet was not designed to replace one simplification(class struggle) by another (utopia). Yes, these economic,racial and bureaucratic actualities exist for millions ofpeople in the U.S. and abroad. Any revolutionary move-

Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!" I 253

ment that fails to deal energetically and militantly withthem will be as distorted as a movement that deals withthem, singly or severally, to the exclusion of all others. Mywritings on post-scarcity possibilities, ecology, utopia, theyouth culture and alienation are intended to help fill amajor gap in radical theory and praxis, not to createanother gap.

The really important problem we face is how the actu-alities of the present scarcity society are related to—andconditioned by—the potentialities for a future post-scarcity society. So far as this really dialectical problem isconcerned, the heavy thinkers of the "left" show them-selves to be incredibly light-minded and narrowly empir-ical. In the industrialized Western world, scarcity has to beenforced, so great is the productive potential of tech-nology. Today economic planning has one basic purpose:to confine a highly advanced technology within a com-modity framework. Many of the social problems whichwere endured almost passively a generation ago are nowregarded as intolerable because the tension between "whatis" and "what could be" has reached a point where "whatis" seems utterly irrational. This tension adds an explosivecharacter to many actualities that evoked only a flicker ofprotest a quarter of a century ago. Moreover, the tensionbetween "what is" and "what could be" conditions all thetraditional economic and social issues that have occupiedradical movements for generations. We can no longer dealwith these issues adequately unless we view them in thelight of the economic, social and cultural possibilities ofpost-scarcity.

Let me present a concrete example. Assume there is astruggle by welfare mothers to increase their allotments. Inthe past, the mothers were organized by liberal groups orStalinists; petitions were drawn up, demonstrations wereorganized, and perhaps a welfare center or two was occu-pied. Almost invariably, one of the groups or parties


trotted out a "reform candidate" who promised that, ifelected, he would fight "unflinchingly" for higher welfareexpenditures. The entire struggle was contained within theorganizational forms and institutions of the system: formalmeetings of the mothers (with the patronizing "organ-izers" pulling the strings), formal modes of actions (peti-tions, demonstrations, elections for public office), andmaybe a modest amount of direct action. The issue prettymuch came to an end with a compromise on allotmentincreases and perhaps a lingering formal organization tooversee (and later sell out) future struggles around welfareissues.

Here actuality triumphed completely over potentiality.At best, a few mothers might be "radicalized," whichmeant that they joined (or were shamelessly used by)organizations such as the Communist Party to promotetheir political influence. For the rest, most of the welfaremothers returned to the shabbiness of their daily lives andto varying degrees of passivity as human beings. Nothingwas really changed for those who did not ego trip as"leaders," "politicals" and "organizers."

To revolutionaries with a "post-scarcity consciousness"(to use Todd Gitlin's phrase), this kind of situation wouldbe intolerable. Without losing sight of the concrete issuesthat initially motivated the struggle, revolutionaries wouldtry to catalyze an order of relationships between themothers entirely different from relationships the usualorganizational format imposes. They would try to foster adeep sense of community, a rounded human relationshipthat would transform the very subjectivity of the peopleinvolved. Groups would be small, in order to achieve thefull participation of everyone involved. Personal relation-ships would be intimate, not merely issue-oriented. Peoplewould get to know each other, to confront each other;they would explore each other with a view toward achiev-ing the most complete, unalienated relationships. Womenwould discuss sexism as well as their welfare allotments,


child-rearing as well as harassment by landlords, theirdreams and hopes as human beings as well as the cost ofliving.

From this intimacy there would grow, hopefully, asupportive system of kinship, mutual aid, sympathy andsolidarity in daily life. The women might collaborate toestablish a rotating system of baby sitters and child-careattendants, the cooperative buying of good food at greatlyreduced prices, the common cooking and partaking ofmeals, the mutual learning of survival skills and new socialideas, the fostering of creative talents, and many othershared experiences. Every aspect of life that could be ex-plored and changed would be one part of the new kinds ofrelationships. This "extended family"—based on exploredaffinities and collective activities—would replace relation-ships mediated by "organizers," "chairmen," an "execu-tive committee," Robert's Rules of Order, elites, andpolitical manipulators.

The struggle for increased allotments would expandbeyond the welfare system to the schools, the hospitals,the police, the physical, cultural, aesthetic and recreationalresources of the neighborhood, the stores, the houses, thedoctors and lawyers in the area, and so on—into the veryecology of the district.

What I have said on this issue could be applied to everyissue—unemployment, bad housing, racism, work con-ditions—in which an insidious assimilation of bourgeoismodes of functioning is masked as "realism" and "actual-ity." The new order of relationships that could be de-veloped from a welfare struggle is Utopian only in the sensethat actuality is informed and conditioned by post-scarcityconsciousness. The future penetrates the present; it recaststhe way people "organize" and the goals for which theystrive.

Perhaps a post-scarcity perspective is possible in the U.S.and Europe, but it is hard to see how a post-scarcity


approach has any relevance for the Third World, wheretechnological development is grossly inadequate to meetthe most elementary needs of the people. It would seemthat the libertarian revolution and the non-coercive, un-mediated social forms that are possible for the U.S. andEurope would have to be supplanted by the rigorousplanning of highly centralized, coercive institutions inAsia, Africa and Latin America. Carl Oglesby has evenargued that to help these continents catch up with theU.S., it will be necessary for Americans to work ten ortwelve hours daily to produce the goods needed.

I think we must dispel the confusion that exists about theThird World. This confusion, due partly to the super-ficiality of knowledge about the Third World, has doneenormous harm to radical movements in the First World."Third World" ideology in the U.S., by promoting a mind-less imitation of movements in Asia and Latin America,leads to a bypassing of the social tasks in the First World.The result is that American radicals have often eased thetasks of American imperialism by creating an alien move-ment that does not speak to issues at home. The "Move-ment" (whatever that is) is isolated and the Americanpeople are fair game for every tendency, reactionary aswell as liberal, that speaks to their problems.

I think we should begin with some essentials. The ThirdWorld is not engaged in a "socialist revolution." One mustbe grossly ignorant of Marxism—the favored ideology ofthe Third World fetishists—in order to overlook the realnature of the struggle in Asia, Africa and Latin America.These areas are still taking up the tasks that capitalismresolved for the U.S. and Europe more than a centuryago—national unification, national independence andindustrial development. The Third World takes up thesetasks in an era when state capitalism is becoming predomi-nant in the U.S. and Europe, with the result that its own


social forces have a highly statified character. Socialismand advanced forms of state capitalism are not easy todistinguish from each other, especially if one's conceptionof "socialism" is highly schematic. Drape hierarchy with ared flag, submerge the crudest system of primitive accumu-lation and forced collectivization in rhetoric about theinterests of "the People" or "the "Proletariat," cover uphierarchy, elitism and a police state with huge portraits ofMarx, Engels and Lenin, print little "Red Books" thatinvite the most authoritarian adulation and preach themost inane banalities in the name of "dialectics" and"socialism"—and any gullible liberal who is becoming dis-enchanted with his ideology, yet is totally unconscious ofthe bourgeois conditioning he has acquired from the patri-archal family and authoritarian school, can suddenly be-come a flaming "revolutionary" socialist.

The whole process is disgusting—all the more so becauseit stands at odds with every aspect of reality. One istempted to scream: "Look, motherfucker! Help the ThirdWorld by fighting capitalism at home! Don't cop out byhiding under Ho's and Mao's skirts when your real job is tooverthrow domestic capitalism by dealing with the realpossibilities of an American revolution! Develop a revo-lutionary project at home because every revolutionaryproject here is necessarily internationalist and anti-imperialist, no matter how much its goals and language arelimited to the American condition." Oglesby's hostility toa post-scarcity approach on the grounds that we will haveto work ten or twelve hours daily to meet the ThirdWorld's needs is simply preposterous. To assume that theworking day will be increased by an American revolution isto invite its defeat before the first blow is struck. If, insome miraculous way, Oglesby's "revolution" were to bevictorious, surely he doesn't think that the Americanpeople would accept an increased working day without astrong, centralized state apparatus cracking its whip over


the entire population. In which case, one wonders whatkind of "aid" such a regime would "offer" to the ThirdWorld?

Like many of the "Third World" zealots, Oglesby seemsto have an incomplete knowledge of America's industrialcapacity and the real needs of the Third World. Roughlyseventy percent of the American labor force does abso-lutely no productive work that could be translated intoterms of real output or the maintenance of a rationalsystem of distribution. Their work is largely limited toservicing the commodity economy—filing, billing, book-keeping for a profit and loss statement, sales promotion,advertising, retailing, finance, the stock market, govern-ment work, military work, police work, etc., ad nauseam.Roughly the same percentage of the goods produced issuch pure garbage that people would voluntarily stop con-suming it in a rational society. Working hours could bereduced enormously after a revolution without losing highproductive output, provided that the available labor supplyand raw materials were used rationally. The quality of theproductive output, moreover, could be so improved thatits durability and usefulness would more than cancel outany reduction in productive capacity.

On the other side, let us look more closely at the mate-rial needs of the Third World. As Westerners, "we" tend toassume out of hand that "they" want or need the samekind of technologies and commodities that capitalism pro-duced in America and Europe. This crude assumption isbolstered by the fear consciously generated by imperialistideology, that millions of black, brown, and yellow peopleare hungrily eyeing "our" vast resources and standard ofliving. This ideology reminds us how lucky "we" are to beAmericans or Europeans, enjoying the blessings of "freeenterprise," and how menacing "they" are, festering inpoverty, misery and the ills of overpopulation. Ironically,the "Third World" zealots share this ideology in the sense


that they, too, conceive of Asian, African and LatinAmerican needs in Western terms—an approach that mightbe called the Nkrumah mentality of technological gigan-tism. Whatever is living and vital in the precapitalist societyof the Third World is sacrificed to industrial machismo,oozing with the egomaniacal elitism of the newly con-verted male radical.

Perhaps no area of the world is more suitable for aneco-technology than the Third World.* Most of Asia,Africa and Latin America lie in the "solar belt," betweenlatitudes 40 degrees north and south, where solar energycan be used with the greatest effectiveness for industrialand domestic purposes. New, small-scale technologies aremore easily adapted for use in the underdeveloped areasthan elsewhere. The small-scale gardening technologies, infact, are indispensable for the productive use of the soiltypes that are prevalent in semi-tropical, tropical, and high-land biomes. The peasantry in these areas have a long tradi-tion of technological know-how in terracing and horti-culture, for which small machines are already available oreasily designable. Great strides have been made in devel-oping an irrigation technology to provide year-round waterresources for agriculture and industry. A unique combina-tion could be made of machine and handcrafts, crafts inwhich these areas still excel. With advances in the standardof living and in education, the population of these areascould be expected to stabilize sufficiently to remove pres-sure on the land. What the Third World needs above all is arational, sophisticated communications network to redis-tribute food and manufactures from areas of plentifulsupply to those in need.

A technology of this kind could be developed for the* The alternatives to a "Western"-type technology for the ThirdWorld and the resolution of the "population problem" in this areawill be discussed in some detail in my forthcoming book, The Ecol-ogy of Freedom, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf and as aVintage paperback.


Third World fairly rapidly by American and European in-dustry without placing undue strain on the resources ofthe West. The rational use of such a technology presup-poses a sweeping social revolution in the Third Worlditself—a revolution, I believe, that would almost im-mediately follow a social revolution in the U.S. With theremoval of imperialism's mailed fist, a new perspectivecould open for the Third World. The village would acquirea new sense of unity with the elimination of the localhierarchies appointed by the central governments whichhave so heavily parasitized the regions. An exchange econ-omy would continue to exist in the Third World, althoughits base would probably be collectivist. In any case, theexploitation of labor and the domination of women bymen would be eliminated, thus imposing severe restrictionson the use of income differentials for exploitative pur-poses.* The resources of the First World could be used topromote the most revolutionary social alternatives—apeople's movement as against an authoritarian one, decen-tralized, immediate relations as against centralized medi-ated institutions.

It would be difficult to say what kind of institutionalstructure would emerge from revolutionary changes in theThird World following a complete social revolution in theFirst World. Until now, the Third World has been obligedto fight imperialism largely on its own. Although there hasbeen a great deal of international solidarity from millionsof people in Europe and the U.S. for Third World struggles,there has been no real, disinterested material support* More can be learned, I think, from the impact the Spanish anar-chist movement had on the village economy than from Mao or Hoand the movements they spoke for. Unfortunately, very little infor-mation on this development is available in English. The spontaneoustakeover and collectivization of the land by Spanish pueblos duringthe early weeks of Franco's rebellion provides us with one of themost remarkable accounts of how the peasantry can respond tolibertarian influence.


from these key industrial areas. One wonders what willhappen when a revolutionary United States and Europebegin to aid the Third World fully and disinterestedly, withnothing but the well being of the African, Asian and LatinAmerican peoples at issue. I believe that the social develop-ment in the Third World will take a more benign and liber-tarian form than we suspect; and that surprisingly littlecoercion will be needed to deal with material scarcity inthese areas.

In any case, there is no reason to fear that a quasi-statistdevelopment in the Third World would be more than tem-porary or that it would affect the world development. Ifthe U.S. and Europe took a libertarian direction, theirstrategic industrial position in the world economy would, Ithink, favor a libertarian alternative for the world as awhole. Revolution is contagious, even when it occurs in arelatively small and economically insignificant country. Icannot imagine that Eastern Europe could withstand theeffects of a libertarian revolution in Western Europe andthe U.S. The revolution would almost certainly engulf theSoviet Union, where massive dissatisfaction exists, andfinally the entire Asian continent. If one doubts the ful-fillment of this possibility, let him consider the impact ofthe French Revolution on Europe at a time when theworld economy was far less interdependent than it istoday.

After the revolution the planet would be dealt with as awhole. The relocation of populations in areas of high den-sity, the development of rational, humanistic birth controlprograms oriented toward improving the quality of life,and the modification of technology along ecological lines—all of these programs would be on the agenda of history.Aside from suggesting some basic guidelines drawn fromecology, I can do no more than speculate about how theresources and land areas of the world could be used toimprove life in a postrevolutionary period. These programs


will be solved in practice and by human communities thatstand on a far higher level, culturally, psychologically andmaterially, than any community that exists today.

"Listen, Marxist!" seems to be quite relevant as a critiqueof the vulgar Marxists—Progressive Labor, the Trotskyists,and other "Old Left" movements. But what of the moresophisticated Marxists—people such as Marcuse, Gorz andthe admirers of Gramsci? Surely "Listen, Marxist!" im-putes too much to the "Old Left" in taking it as the pointof departure for a critique of Marxism.

Marcuse is the most original of the thinkers who still callthemselves Marxists, and I must confess that even on thosepoints where I may have disagreements with him, I amstimulated by what he has to say.

With this exception, I would differ with the claim that"Listen, Marxist!" is relevant only as a critique of the "OldLeft." The article is relevant to all types of Marxist ideo-logy. Two things trouble me about Marx's mature writings:their pseudo-objectivity and the obstacles they raise toUtopian thinking. The Marxian project, as it was formu-lated by Marx himself, deepened the early socialist tradi-tion but also narrowed it, and in the long run this hasproduced a net setback rather than a net gain.

By Marx's pseudo-objectivity I mean the astonishing ex-tent to which Marx identified "scientific socialism" withthe scientism of the nineteenth century. Although there isa tendency today for the more sophisticated "neo-Marxists" to cast the Marxian project in terms of alien-ation, the project (as it developed in Marx's hands) wasabove all an attempt to make socialism "scientific," toprovide it with the authority of a scientific critique. Thisled to an emphasis on "objectivity" that increasingly sub-verted the humanistic goals of socialism. Freedom and eros(where the latter was taken up at all) were anchored so


completely in the material preconditions for freedom thateven the loss of freedom, if it promoted the materialdevelopment, was viewed as an "advance" of freedom.Marx, for example, welcomed state centralization as a stepin the development of the productive forces without onceconsidering how this process enhanced the capacity of thebourgeoisie to resist revolution. He disclaimed any moralevaluation of society and in his later years became increas-ingly captive to scientism and to mathematical criteria oftruth.

The result of this development has been a major loss forthe humanistic and imaginative elements of socialism.Marxism has damaged the left enormously by anchoring itin a pseudo-objectivity that is almost indistinguishablefrom the juridical mentality. Whenever I hear "New Left"Marxists denounce a position as "objectively counter-revolutionary," "objectively racist," or "objectively sex-ist," my flesh crawls. The charge, flung randomly againstall opponents, circumvents the need for an analytic or adialectical critique. One simply traces "counterrevolution,""racism" or "sexism" to be the preconceived "objectiveeffects." Marx rarely exhibited the crudity of the "OldLeft" and "New Left" in his use of this approach, but heused the approach often enough—and often as a substitutefor a multi-dimensional analysis of phenomena.

You must see how consequential this is. Freedom isdivested of its autonomy, of its sovereignty over the hu-man condition. It is turned into a means instead of an end.Whether freedom is desirable or not depends upon whetherit furthers the "objective" development. Accordingly, anyauthoritarian organization, any system of repression, anymanipulatory tactic can become acceptable, indeed admir-able, if it favors the "building of socialism" or "resistanceto imperialism"—as though "socialism" or "anti-imperialism" is meaningful when it is poisoned by manipu-lation, repression, and authoritarian forms of organization.

i


Categories replace realities; abstract goals replace realgoals; "History" replaces everyday life. The universal,which requires a complex, many-sided analysis to begrasped, is replaced by the particular; the total, by theone-sided.

No less serious is the rejection of Utopian thought—theimaginative forays of Charles Fourier and William Morris.What Martin Buber called the "utopian element in social-ism" is rejected for a "hardheaded" and "objective" treat-ment of "reality." But, in fact, this approach shrivelsreality by limiting one's purview of social experience anddata. The hidden potential of a given reality is either sub-verted by an emphasis on the "objective" actualities or, atleast, diminished by a one-sided treatment. The revolution-ary becomes a captive to experience not as it exists dialec-tically, in all its actualities and potentialities, but as it isdefined in advance by "scientific socialism." Not surpris-ingly, the New Left, like the Old Left, has never graspedthe revolutionary potential of the ecology issue, nor has itused ecology as a basis for understanding the problems ofcommunist reconstruction and Utopia. At best the issue isgiven lip service, with some drivel about how "pollution isprofitable"; at worst it is denounced as spurious, diversion-ary and "objectively counterrevolutionary." Most of thesophisticated Marxists are as captive to these limiting fea-tures of Marxism as their New Left brethren. The dif-ference is that they are simply more sophisticated.

In contrast to most radical works, "Listen, Marxist!" con-tinually speaks of "hierarchical society" instead of "classsociety," of "domination" instead of "exploitation." Whatsignificance do these differences in language have?

A difference is definitely intended. Pre-Marxian socialismwas, in many ways, much broader than the Marxian vari-ety. Not only was it more utopian, it was also occupied


more with the general than the particular. Varlet, the lastof the great enrages, who survived the death of his com-rade Jacques Roux and Robespierre's purge of the left,concluded that government and revolution are utterly "in-compatible." What a splendid insight! In this one observa-tion revolutionary consciousness expanded from a critiqueof a specific class society to a critique of hierarchical soci-ety as such. The pre-Marxian socialist and radical theoristsbegan to occupy themselves with domination, not onlyexploitation; with hierarchy, not only class rule. With Fou-rier, consciousness advanced to the point where the goal ofsociety was viewed as pleasure, not simply happiness.

You must see what an enormous gain this was. Exploita-tion, class rule and happiness are the particular within themore generalized concepts of domination, hierarchy andpleasure. It is theoretically—and, in great part, actually-possible to eliminate exploitation and class rule or toachieve happiness, as these concepts are defined by Marx-ism, without achieving a life of pleasure or eliminatingdomination and hierarchy. Marx, by "scientifically"anchoring exploitation, classes, and happiness in the eco-nomic domain, actually provided the rationale for atheoretical regression from the original socialist values.Marxian economic solutions, such as nationalization ofproperty, may even create the illusion that hierarchy hasdisappeared. One has only to study the torment of theTrotskyist movement over the nature of the Russian stateto see how obfuscating Marxian theory can be.

This particularization of the general is precisely whatMarxism achieved. As I noted in reply to the previousquestion, socialism was given greater theoretical depth bythe acquisition of dialectical philosophy, but it was nar-rowed disastrously by Marx's economic emphasis. EvenMarx's writings shrivel in content as the man "matures."They increasingly center on the "objective" economic ele-ments of society, until Marx sinks into a grotesque fetishi-


zation of economic theory of the kind we find in volumetwo of Capital. With Marx's death, an immense exegeticalliterature emerges on capitalist circulation, accumulationand "realization theory." Even Rosa Luxemburg wascaught in this swamp, not to speak of the Keynesian Marx-ists who churn out their papers for the American Eco-nomic Review and Science and Society.

Marxism created a stupendous intellectual furniture thatone must clear away to make contact with reality. Thefield abounds with "experts" and heavies, with academicsand authorities whose bullshit makes original, indeeddialectical, thought virtually impossible. Once we rescuethe essentials, this theoretical garbage must be junked. It isvitally necessary that we return to the generalized terrainthat pre-Marxian socialism established, and then go for-ward again.

The youth culture has already posed the "social ques-tion" in its richest and most meaningful terms—"Life ver-sus death." I would say, with an eye towards the insightsof Marxism, "Life versus survival." In any case, we have toget away from the one-sided, repressive jargon of Marxism,which defines our perspective in a limiting manner. I amreminded of a fine passage from Paul Avrich's recent book,Kronstadt 1921, in which the language of the revolution-ary Kronstadt sailors is contrasted with that of the Bolshe-viks. "Rebel agitators," Avrich notes, speaking of the sail-ors, "wrote and spoke (as an interviewer later noted) in ahomespun language free of Marxist jargon and foreign-sounding expressions. Eschewing the word 'proletariat,'they called, in true populist fashion, for a society in whichall the 'toilers'—peasants, workers and the 'toiling intelli-gentsia'—would play a dominant role. They were inclinedto speak of a 'social' rather than a 'socialist' revolution,viewing class conflict not in the narrow sense of industrialworkers versus bourgeoisie, but in the traditional narodnik


sense of the laboring masses as a whole pitted against allwho throve on their misery and exploitation, includingpoliticians and bureaucrats as well as landlords and capital-ists. Western ideologies—Marxism and liberalism alike—hadlittle place in their mental outlook."39

The point, of course, is not Western ideologies versusRussian, or "homespun" versus "foreign-sounding" lan-guage. The real point is the broader concepts with whichthe "masses" worked almost intuitively—concepts drawnfrom the experience of their own oppression. Note howthe sailors had a broader view of the "laboring masses" andtheir "oppressors" than the Bolsheviks, a view that in-cluded the elitist Bolsheviks among the oppressors. Notewell, too, how Marxist jargon made it possible for theBolsheviks to exclude themselves as oppressors in flatdenial of the real situation. For my part, I am delightedthat the New Left in America has replaced the words"workers and "proletariat" by "people." Indeed, it issignificant that even professedly Marxian groups like thePanthers and Weathermen have been obliged to use a popu-list language, for this language reflects the changed realityand problems of our times.

To sum up: what I am talking about is a human condi-tion reflected by the word "power." We must finally re-solve the historic and everyday dichotomies: man's powerover woman, man's power over man, and man's power overnature. For inherent in the issue of power—ofdomination—are the contradictory, destructive effects ofpower: the corruption of life-giving sexuality, of a life-nourishing society, of a life-orienting ego, and of a life-sustaining ecology. The statement "power corrupts" is nota truism because it has never been fully understood. It mayyet become understood because power now destroys. Noamount of theoretical exegesis can place power in the serv-ice of history or of a revolutionary organization. The only


act of power that is excusable any longer is that one act—popular revolution—that will finally dissolve power as suchby giving each individual power over his or her everydaylife.

New YorkAugust 1970

TheMay-June

Eventsin France: 1

France: a Movementfor Life

THE QUALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFEThe 1968 May-June uprising was one of the most impor-tant events to occur in France since the Paris Commune of1871. Not only did it shake the foundations of bourgeoissociety in France, it raised issues and posed solutions ofunprecedented importance for modern industrial society.It deserves the closest study and the most thoroughgoingdiscussion by revolutionaries everywhere.

The May-June uprising occurred in an industrialized,consumption-oriented country—less developed than theUnited States, but essentially in the same economic cate-gory. The uprising exploded the myth that the wealth andresources of modern industrial society can be used toabsorb all revolutionary opposition. The May-June eventsshowed that contradictions and antagonisms in capitalismare not eliminated by statification and advanced forms ofindustrialism, but changed in form and character.

The fact that the uprising took everyone by surprise,including the most sophisticated theoreticians in the Marx-ist, Situationist and anarchist movements, underscores theimportance of the May-June events and raises the need tore-examine the sources of revolutionary unrest in modernsociety. The graffiti on the walls of Paris—"Power to theImagination," "It is forbidden to forbid," "Life withoutdead times," "Never work"—represent a more probinganalysis of these sources than all the theoretical tomesinherited from the past. The uprising revealed that we areat the end of an old era and well into the beginning of anew one. The motive forces of revolution today, at least inthe industrialized world, are not simply scarcity and mate-rial need, but also the quality of everyday life, the demandfor the liberation of experience, the attempt to gain con-

271


trol over one's own destiny. It matters little that the graf-fiti on the walls of Paris were initially scrawled by a smallminority. From everything I have seen, it is clear that thegraffiti (which now form the content of several books)have captured the imagination of many thousands in Paris.They have touched the revolutionary nerve of the city.

THE SPONTANEOUS MAJORITY MOVEMENT

The revolt was a majority movement in the sense that itcut across nearly all the class lines in France. It involvednot only students and workers, but technicians, engineersand clerical people in nearly every stratum of the state,industrial and commercial bureaucracy. It swept in profes-sionals and laborers, intellectuals and football players, tele-vision broadcasters and subway workers. It even touchedthe gendarmerie of Paris, and almost certainly affected thegreat mass of conscript soldiers in the French army.

The revolt was initiated primarily by the young. It wasbegun by university students, then it was taken up byyoung industrial workers, unemployed youth, and the"leather jackets"—the so-called "delinquent youth" of thecities. Special emphasis must be given to high school stu-dents and adolescents, who often showed more courageand determination than the university students. But therevolt swept in older people as well—blue- and white-collarworkers, technicians and professionals. Although it wascatalyzed by conscious revolutionaries, especially by anar-chist affinity groups whose existence no one had evenfaintly supposed, the flow, the movement of the uprisingwas spontaneous. No one had "summoned it forth"; no onehad "organized" it; no one succeeded in "controlling" it.

A festive atmosphere prevailed throughout most of theMay-June days, an awakening of solidarity, of mutual aid,indeed of a selfhood and self-expression that had not beenseen in Paris since the Commune. People literally dis-covered themselves and their fellow human beings anew—

May-June Events in France: I I 273

or remade themselves. In many industrial towns, workersclogged the squares, hung out red flags, read avidly anddiscussed every leaflet that fell into their hands. A feverfor life gripped millions, a reawakening of senses thatpeople never thought they possessed, a joy and elationthey never thought they could feel. Tongues wereloosened, ears and eyes acquired a new acuity. There wassinging with new, and often ribald, verses added to oldtunes. Many factory floors were turned into dance floors.The sexual inhibitions that had frozen the lives of so manyyoung people in France were shattered in a matter of days.This was not a solemn revolt, a coup d'etat bureaucrati-cally plotted and manipulated by a "vanguard" party; itwas witty, satirical, inventive and creative—and therein layits strength, its capacity for immense self-mobilization, itsinfectiousness.

Many people transcended the narrow limitations thathad impeded their social vision. For thousands of students,the revolution destroyed the prissy, tight-assed sense of"studenthood"—that privileged, pompous state that is ex-pressed in America by the "position paper" and by thestuffy sociologese of the "analytical" document. The indi-vidual workers who came to the action committees atCensier* ceased to be "workers" as such. They becamerevolutionaries. And it is precisely on the basis of this newidentity that people whose lives had been spent in universi-ties, factories and offices could meet freely, exchange ex-periences and engage in common actions without anyself-consciousness about their social "origins" or "back-ground."

The revolt had created the beginnings of its own class-less, nonhierarchical society. Its primary task was toextend this qualitatively new realm to the country atlarge—to every corner of French society. Its hope lay inthe extension of self-management in all its forms—the* The new building of the Sorbonne Faculty of Letters.


general assemblies and their administrative forms, theaction committees, the factory strike committees—to allareas of the economy, indeed to all areas of life itself. Themost advanced consciousness of this task seems to haveappeared not so much among the workers in the moretraditional industries, where the Communist-controlledCGT exercises great power, as among those in newer, moretechnically advanced industries, such as electronics. (Letme emphasize that this is a tentative conclusion, drawnfrom a number of scattered but impressive episodes thatwere related to me by young militants in the student-worker action committees.)

AUTHORITY AND HIERARCHY

Of paramount importance is the light that the May-Junerevolt cast on the problem of authority and hierarchy. Inthis respect it challenged not only the conscious processesof individuals, but also their most important unconscious,socially conditioned habits. (It does not have to be arguedat any great length that the habits of authority and hier-archy are instilled in the individual at the very outset oflife—in the family milieu of infancy, in childhood "educa-tion" at home and in school, in the organization of work,"leisure" and everyday life. This shaping of the characterstructure of the individual by what seem like "archetypal"norms of obedience and command constitutes the veryessence of what we call the "socialization" of the young.)

The mystique of bureaucratic "organization," of im-posed, formalized hierarchies and structures, pervades themost radical movements in nonrevolutionary periods. Theremarkable susceptibility of the left to authoritarian andhierarchical impulses reveals the deep roots of the radicalmovement in the very society it professedly seeks to over-throw. In this respect, nearly every revolutionary organiza-tion is a potential source of counterrevolution. Only if the


revolutionary organization is so "structured" that its formsreflect the direct, decentralized forms of freedom initiatedby the revolution, only if the revolutionary organizationfosters in the revolutionist the lifestyles and personality offreedom, can this potential for counterrevolution bediminished. Only then is it possible for the revolutionarymovement to dissolve into the revolution, to disappearinto its new, directly democratic social forms like surgicalthread into a healing wound.

The act of revolution rips apart all the tendons that holdauthority and hierarchy together in the established order.The direct entry of the people into the social arena is thevery essence of revolution. Revolution is the most ad-vanced form of direct action. By the same token, directaction in "normal" times is the indispensable preparationfor revolutionary action. In both cases, there is a substitu-tion of social action from below for political action withinthe established, hierarchical framework. In both cases,there are molecular changes of "masses," classes and socialstrata into revolutionary individuals. This condition mustbecome permanent if the revolution is to be successful—ifit is not to be transformed into a counterrevolutionmasked by revolutionary ideology. Every formula, everyorganization, every "tried-and-tested" program, must giveway to the demands of the revolution. There is no theory,program or party that has greater significance than therevolution itself.

Among the most serious obstacles to the May-June up-rising were not only de Gaulle and the police, but also thehardened organizations of the left—the Communist Partythat suffocated initiative in many factories and the Lenin-ist and Trotskyist groups that created such a bad odor inthe general assembly of the Sorbonne. I speak here not ofthe many individuals who romantically identified them-selves with Che, Mao, Lenin or Trotsky (often with all four


at once), but of those who surrendered their entire iden-tity, initiative and volition to tightly disciplined, hier-archical organizations. However well-intentioned thesepeople may have been, it became their task to "discipline"the revolt, more precisely, to de-revolutionize it by imbu-ing it with the habits of obedience and authority that theirorganizations have assimilated from the established order.These habits, fostered by participation in highly structuredorganizations—organizations modeled, in fact, on the verysociety the "revolutionaries" profess to oppose—led to par-liamentary maneuvering, secret caucusing, and attempts to"control" the revolutionary forms of freedom created bythe revolution. They produced in the Sorbonne assembly apoisonous vapor of manipulation. Many students to whomI spoke were absolutely convinced that these groups wereprepared to destroy the Sorbonne assembly if they couldnot "control" it. The groups were concerned not with thevitality of the revolutionary forms but with the growth oftheir own organizations. Having created authentic forms offreedom in which everyone could freely express his view-point, the assembly would have been perfectly justified tohave banned all bureaucratically organized groups from itsmidst.

It remains to the lasting credit of the March 22nd Move-ment that it merged into the revolutionary assemblies andvirtually disappeared as an organization, except in name.In its own assemblies, March 22nd arrived at all its deci-sions by the "sense of the assembly," and it permitted alltendencies within its midst to freely test their views inpractice. Such tolerance did not impair its "effectiveness";this anarchic movement, by the common agreement ofnearly all observers, did more to catalyze the revolt thanany other student group. What distinguishes March 22ndand groups such as the anarchists and Situationists from allothers is that they worked not for the "seizure of power"but for its dissolution.


THE DIALECTIC OF MODERN REVOLUTION

The French events of May and June reveal, vividly anddramatically, the remarkable dialectic of revolution. Theeveryday misery of a society is highlighted by the possibili-ties for the realization of desire and freedom. The greaterthese possibilities, the more intolerable the everydaymisery. For this reason, it matters little that Frenchsociety has been more affluent in recent years than at anytime in its history. Affluence in its highly distorted bour-geois form merely indicates that the material conditionsfor freedom have developed, that the technical possibilitiesfor a new, liberated life are overripe.

It is plain, now, that these possibilities have hauntedFrench society for a long time, even if unperceived bymost people. The insensate consumption of goods graphs,in its own warped way, the tension between the shabbyreality of French society and the liberatory possibilities ofa revolution today, just as a sedating diet and extravagantobesity reveal the tension in an individual. A time is finallyreached when the diet of goods becomes tasteless, whenthe social obesity becomes intolerable. The breaking pointis unpredictable. In the case of France, it was the barri-cades of May 10, a day which shook the conscience of theentire country and posed a question to the workers: "Ifthe students, those 'children of the bourgeoisie,' can do it,why can't we?" It is clear that a molecular process wasgoing on in France, completely invisible to the most con-scious revolutionaries, a process that the barricades precipi-tated into revolutionary action. After May 10, the tensionbetween the mediocrity of everyday life and the possibili-ties of a liberatory society exploded into the most massivegeneral strike in history.

The scope of the strike shows that nearly all strata ofFrench society were profoundly disaffected and that therevolution was anchored not in a particular class but in


everyone who felt dispossessed, denied, and cheated oflife. The revolutionary thrust came from a stratum which,more than any other, should have "accommodated" itselfto the existing order—the young. It was the young whohad been nourished on the pap of Gaullist "civilization,"who had not experienced the contrasts between the rela-tively attractive features of the prewar civilization and theshabbiness of the new one. But the pap didn't work. Itspower to co-opt and absorb, in fact, is weaker than wassuspected by most critics of French society. The pap-fedsociety could not withstand the drive for life, particularlyin the young.

No less important, the lives of young people in France,as in America, had never been burdened by the Depressionyears and the quest for material security that shaped thelives of their elders. The prevailing reality of French lifewas taken by the young people for what it is—shabby,ugly, egotistical, hypocritical and spiritually annihilating.This single fact—the revolt of the young—is the mostdamning evidence of the system's inability to prevail on itsown terms.

The tremendous internal decay of Gaullist society, adecay long antedating the revolt itself, took forms that donot fit into any of the traditional, economically orientedformulas of "revolution." Much had been written about"consumerism" in French society to the effect that it wasa polluting form of social stabilization. The fact that ob-jects, commodities, were replacing the traditional subjec-tive loyalties fostered by the church, the school, the massmedia and the family, should have been seen as evidence ofgreater social decomposition than was suspected. The factthat traditional class consciousness was declining in theworking class should have been evidence that conditionswere maturing for a majority social revolution, not aminority class revolution. The fact that "lumpen" values indress, music, art and lifestyle were spreading among

May-June Events in France: I / 279

French youth should have been evidence that the potentialfor "disorder" and direct action was ripening behind thefacade of conventional political protest.

By a remarkable twist of dialectic irony, a process of"debourgeoisification" was going on precisely whenFrance had attained unprecendented heights of materialaffluence. Whatever may have been the personal popularityof de Gaulle, a process of deinstitutionalization was goingon precisely when state capitalism seemed more en-trenched in the social structure than at any time in therecent past. The tension between drab reality and theliberatory possibilities was increasing precisely whenFrench society seemed more quiescent than at any timesince the 1920s. A process of alienation was going on pre-cisely when it seemed that the verities of bourgeois societywere more secure than at any time in the history of therepublic.

The point is that the issues that make for social unresthad changed qualitatively. The problems of survival, scar-city and renunciation had changed into those of life, abun-dance and desire. The "French dream," like the "Americandream," was eroding and becoming demystified. Bourgeoissociety had given all it could give on the only terms it wascapable of "giving" anything—a plethora of shabby mate-rial goods acquired by meaningless, deadening work.Experience itself (not "vanguard parties" and "tried-and-tested programs") became the mobilizing agent and sourceof creativity for the May-June uprising. And this is as itshould be. Not only is it natural that an uprising breaksout spontaneously—a feature of all the great revolutions inhistory—but it is also natural that it unfolds sponta-neously. This hardly means that revolutionary groupsstand mute before the events. If they have ideas and sug-gestions, it is their responsibility to present them. But touse the social forms created by the revolution for manipu-latory purposes, to operate secretly behind the back of the


revolution, to distrust it and try to replace it by the"glorious party," is wantonly criminal and unforgivable.Either the revolution eventually absorbs all politicalorganisms, or the political organisms become ends inthemselves—the inevitable sources of bureaucracy, hier-archy and human enslavement.

To diminish the spontaneity of a revolution, to breakthe continuum between self-mobilization and self-emancipation, to remove the self from the process in orderto mediate it with political organizations and institutionsborrowed from the past, is to vitiate the revolution's libe-ratory goals. If the revolution does not start from below, ifit does not enlarge the "base" of society until it becomesthe society itself, then it is a mere coup d'etat. If it doesnot produce a society in which each individual controls hisdaily life, instead of daily life controlling each individual,then it is a counterrevolution. Social liberation can onlyoccur if it is simultaneously self-liberation—if the "mass"movement is a self-activity that involves the highest degreeof individuation and self-awakening.

In the molecular movement below that prepares thecondition for revolution, in the self-mobilization thatcarries the revolution forward, in the joyous atmospherethat consolidates the revolution—in all of these successivesteps, we have a continuum of individuation, a process inwhich power is dissolved, an expansion of personal experi-ence and freedom almost aesthetically congruent with thepossibilities of our time. To see this process and articulateit, to catalyze the process and pose the next practicaltasks, to deal unequivocally with the ideological move-ments that seek to "control" the revolutionary process—these, as the French events have shown, are the primaryresponsibilities of the revolutionary today.

ParisJuly 1968

TheMay-June

Eventsin France: 2

Excerptsfrom

a Letter

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTION:WHAT HAPPENED. . . .WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED. . . .

You ask how the May-June revolt could have developedinto a successful social revolution.* I shall try to give youmy own views as clearly as possible. My answer applies notonly to France, but to any industrialized country in theworld. For what happened in France could be regarded asa model of social revolution in any advanced bourgeoiscountry today. It astonishes me that there is so little dis-cussion about France in the United States. The May-Juneevents are the first really clear illustration of how a revolu-tion can unfold in an industrially developed country in thepresent historical period, and they should be studied withthe greatest care.

The general strike, let me point out, occurred not onlybecause of the wage grievances that were piling up inFrance, but also—and mainly, in my opinion—because thepeople were fed up. Intuitively, unconsciously, and oftenquite consciously, the strikers were disgusted with thewhole system, and they showed it in countless ways. Acartoon published in France after the May-June eventsshows a CGT official addressing the strikers: "What do youwant?" he shouts. "Better pay? Shorter hours? Longervacations?" Each time this Stalinist hack asks one of thesequestions, the strikers respond with silence. Finally, theCGT official cries out in anger: "Tell me, damn it! I am

* This is an excerpt from a letter written shortly after the May-Juneevents.

283


your representative!" And the strikers answer with a hugecry: "We want the revolution!"

To a very large extent, this response is accurate. Thecartoon expressed a sentiment which was still very diffuse,of course, but was nevertheless quite real. That is why thecartoon was so popular in France when it came out. Itexpressed what many workers (especially young workers)felt in a vague way—and perhaps not so vaguely.

The student barricades of May 10 precipitated thegeneral strike, the largest general strike in history. Theworkers (mainly the young workers) said to themselves,"If the students can do it, so can we." And out of theSud-Aviation plant in Nantes, a city with the strongestanarcho-syndicalist tendencies in France, came the generalstrike. The strike swept into Paris and brought out almosteverybody, not only industrial workers. Insurance em-ployees went out, as well as postal workers, departmentstore clerks, professionals, teachers, scientific researchers.Yes, even the football players took over the building oftheir professional association and put out a banner thatproclaimed, "Football belongs to the people!" It was notonly a workers' strike; it was a people's strike that cutacross almost all class lines. You must understand this, forit is a very important fact about the possibilities of ourtime. At Nantes, peasants brought their tractors into thecity to help the movement and longshoremen emptied theholds of the ships to feed the strikers. The most advanceddemands, I should emphasize, were raised in the newerindustries—for example, in the electronics plants. In onesuch plant, a firm composed largely of highly skilledtechnicians, the employees declared publicly, "We haveeverything we want. We won large wage increases andlonger vacations in negotiations we conducted last month[April]. We are now striking for only one demand:workers' control of industry—and not only in our plant,but for all the plants in France."

May-June Events in France: II I 285

What an astonishing development! And this demand wasprecisely the key to the whole situation. The workers hadoccupied the plants. The economy was in their hands.Whether this sweeping movement would become a com-plete social revolution depended upon one thing—wouldthe workers not only occupy the plants, but work them?This was the barrier that had to be surmounted. Had theworkers begun to work the plants under workers' manage-ment, the revolt would have advanced into a full-scalesocial revolution.

Let us now try to imagine what would have happened ifthe workers had actually surmounted this barrier. Eachplant would elect its own factory committee from amongits own workers to administer the plant. (Here the workerscould have counted on a great deal of cooperation fromthe technical staff, most of whom would have gone over tothe revolution.) I emphasize "administer" because policywould be made by the workers in the plant, by an as-sembly of the workers on the factory floor. The factorycommittee would merely execute and coordinate thesepolicies. Here you have true revolutionary democracy, andin the arena of production, where the means of life aremade.

Let us go further (and what I shall describe was abso-lutely possible). The factory committees of all the localplants could now link together to form an area administra-tive council, whose function would be to deal with what-ever supply problems exist. Each member of this councilwould be rigorously controlled by the workers in the plantfrom which he or she came and would be fully accountableto the factory assembly. The tasks of the council, I mustemphasize, would be entirely administrative; many of itstechnical functions could be taken over by computers,and membership on the council would be rotated asoften as possible.

Together with these industrial forms of organization,


there would also be neighborhood organizations—as-semblies corresponding to the French revolutionary sec-tions of 1793, as well as action committees to perform theadministrative tasks of the neighborhood assemblies. Theytoo would form an administrative council, which wouldwork with the factory-committee council, the two meetingtogether periodically to deal with common problems. Oneof the most important functions of the neighborhoodassemblies—the new "sections"—would be to recycle em-ployment from nonproductive areas of the economy (sales,insurance, advertising, "government," and other sociallyuseless areas) into productive areas. The goal here wouldbe to shorten the work week as rapidly as possible. Inthis way, everyone would benefit almost immediately fromthe new arrangement of society—both the industrialworker and, say, the ex-salesman whom the worker trainsin the factory. All would get the means of life for a frac-tion of the time they devote to work under bourgeoisconditions. The revolution would thus undercut the posi-tion of many counterrevolutionary elements who, fromtime immemorial, have argued that the old conditions oflife were better than the new.

What is essential here is not the fine detail of this struc-ture, which could be worked out in practice, but the disso-lution of power into the assemblies, both factory andneighborhood. In the past, very little attention has beengiven to the role and importance of unmediated relationsand popular assemblies. So strongly was the notion of"representation" fixed in the thinking of revolutionarygroups and the people that the assemblies, where theyexisted, arose almost accidentally. Apart from the Greekecclesia, they emerged, in most cases, not as a result ofconscious design, but rather of fortuitous circumstances.Ordinarily, the various councils and committees in earlierrevolutions were given enormous powers in formulatingpolicy; the demarcation between administrative work and

May-June Events in France: II / 287

policy decisions was murky at best, or simply nonexistent.As a result, the committees and councils became socialagencies exercising enormous political powers over society;they became a nascent state apparatus that rapidly ac-quired control over society as a whole. This can now beavoided, partly by making all committees and councilsdirectly answerable to assemblies, partly by using the newtechnology to shorten the work week radically, therebyfreeing the whole people for active participation in themanagement of society.

At first the various committees, councils and assemblieswould use the existing mechanism of supply and distribu-tion to meet the material needs of society. Steel wouldcome to Paris the way it always has: by means of the sameordering methods and the same railways and trucks, prob-ably operated by the same engineers and truck drivers. Thepostal, cable and telephone networks that were used be-fore the revolution to request materials would be usedagain after the revolution. Finally, finished goods would bedistributed by the same warehouses and retail outlets—except that the cash registers would be removed. The prin-cipal functions of the new factory-committee councils andneighborhood councils would be to deal with any bottle-necks and obstructive practices that might emerge and topropose changes that would lead to a more rational use ofexisting resources.

Capitalism has already established the physical mecha-nism of circulation—of distribution and transportation—that is needed to maintain society without any stateapparatus. This physical mechanism of circulation can bevastly improved upon, to be sure, but it would still be asworkable the day after the revolution as it was the daybefore the revolution. It needs no police, jails, armies orcourts to maintain it. The state is superimposed on thistechnical system of distribution and actually serves to dis-tort it by maintaining an artificial system of scarcity.


(This, today, is the real meaning of the "sanctity of prop-erty.")

I must emphasize again that since we are concerned withhuman needs, not with profit, a vast number of peoplewho are needed to operate the profit system could befreed from their idiotic work. So could many people whoare occupied with working for the state. These peoplecould join their brothers and sisters in productive jobs,thus drastically shortening everyone's work week. In thisnew system, the producers and the community couldjointly manage the economy from below, coordinatingtheir administrative operations through factory commit-tees, councils of factory committee representatives, andneighborhood action committees—all directly accountableto the plant and neighborhood assemblies, all recallable fortheir actions. At this point, society takes direct control ofits affairs. The state, its bureaucracy, its armies, police,judges and jails, can disappear.

You may object that the old system of production anddistribution is still centralized structurally and based on anational division of labor. Agreed; you are perfectly cor-rect. But does its control have to be centralized? As long aspolicy is made from below and everyone who executesthat policy is controlled locally, administration is sociallydecentralized although the means of production are struc-turally fairly centralized as yet. A computer used to coor-dinate the operations of a vast plant, for example, is aninstrument for structural centralization. However, if thepeople who program and operate the computer arecompletely answerable to the workers in the plant, theiroperations are socially decentralized.

To pass from a narrow analogy to the broader problemsof administration, let us suppose that a board of highlyqualified technicians is established to propose changes inthe steel industry. This board, we may suppose, advancesproposals to rationalize the industry by closing some


plants and expanding the operations of others in differentparts of the country. Is this a "centralized" body or not?The answer is both yes and no. Yes, only in the sense thatthe board is dealing with problems that concern thecountry as a whole; no, because it can make no decisionsthat must be executed for the country as a whole. Theboard's plan must be examined by all the workers in theplants that are to be closed down, and those whose opera-tions are to be expanded. The plan itself may be accepted,modified, or simply rejected. The board has no power toenforce "decisions"; it merely offers recommendations.Additionally, its personnel are controlled by the plant inwhich they work and the locality in which they live.

Similar boards, I may add, could be established to planthe physical decentralization of the society—boards com-posed of ecologists as well as technologists. They coulddevelop plans for entirely new patterns of land use in dif-ferent areas of the country. Like the technicians who aredealing with the existing steel industry, they would haveno decision-making powers. The adoption, modificationor rejection of their plans would rest entirely with thecommunities involved.

But I've already traveled too much into the "future."Let us return to the May-June events of 1968. What ofde Gaulle, the generals, the army, the police? Here wecome to another crucial problem that faced the May-Junerevolt. Had the armament workers not merely occupiedthe arms factories but worked them to arm the revolu-tionary people, had the railroad workers transported thesearms to the revolutionary people in the cities, towns andvillages, had the action committees organized armedmilitias—then the situation in France would have changeddrastically. An armed people, organized into militias by itsown action committees (and there are plenty of reservistsamong the young people to train them), would haveconfronted the state. Most of the militants I spoke to do


not believe that the bulk of the army, composed over-whelmingly of conscripts, would have fired on the people.If the people were armed, every street could have beenturned into a bastion and every factory into a fortress.Whether de Gaulle's most reliable troops would havemarched upon them in these circumstances is very ques-tionable. Alas, the situation was never brought to thatpoint—the point that every revolution has to risk.

Let me emphasize again that all I have sketched out foryou was perfectly possible. I write here of a reality thatstared the French revolutionaries in the face. All that wasnecessary was for the workers to work the factories andturn their strike committees into factory committees. Thisdecisive step was not taken; hence the people were notarmed and the bourgeois system of property relations wasnot shattered. The Stalinists shrewdly deflected the revolu-tionary movement into political lines by calling for aCommunist-Socialist coalition cabinet. Thus the strugglewas channeled into an election campaign on strictly bour-geois grounds. For these reasons and others, the revoltreceded and in so doing produced a "backlash" from themass of people who were watching and waiting. Thesepeople might have been won to the revolution had it suc-ceeded. They seemed to be standing by and saying: "Let'ssee what you can do." Once the revolt failed, however,they voted for de Gaulle. De Gaulle at least had reality;the revolution, on the other hand, had been vaporizedby failure.

How did the Maoists and Trotskyists, the "vanguard"Bolshevik parties and groupuscules, behave? The Maoistsopposed every demand for workers' control. (Some ofthem, after the revolt receded, began to revise their viewsand are now called "anarcho-Maoists"!) Chairman Mao hadopined that workers' control is anarcho-syndicalism—hencea "petty bourgeois deviation." The job of the workers,cried the Maoists, was to "seize state power." Thus, in the


name of "Bolshevik realism," the only basis for a socialrevolution—the occupation of the factories—was subordi-nated to abstract political slogans that had no reality in theliving situation. Let me give you an example: marching tothe Billancourt plant of Renault, the Maoists carried a bigbanner which read "Vive the CGT!"—this at a time whenthe most revolutionary workers were carrying on a bitterstruggle with the CGT and were trying to shed the bureau-cratic apparatus with which the labor federation hadsaddled the workers. What the Maoists were saying was"put us in control of the CGT." But who the hell wantedthem?

The Trotskyists? Which ones-the FER? The JCR? Theother two or three splits? The FER played an overtlycounterrevolutionary role at almost every decisive point,condemning all the street actions that led to the generalstrike as "adventuristic." The students had their hands fullwith them in the street-fighting before the Sorbonne,where they tried to get the students to go home, and in thebarricade fighting on the night of May 10, when theydenounced the students as "romantics." Instead of joiningthe students, they held a "mass meeting" at the Mutualite.All of this did not prevent the FER from politicking likemad in the corridors and assembly meetings of the Sor-bonne—after the students had succeeded. As to the JCR,more often than not they dragged their feet and created agreat deal of confusion in the Sorbonne assembly withtheir politicking. Toward the end of the May-June events,they held back the movement and accommodated them-selves to the non-Stalinist electoral left.

What was "missing" in the May-June events? Certainlynot "vanguard" Bolshevik parties. The revolt was afflictedwith these parties like lice. What was needed in France wasan awareness among the workers that the factories had tobe worked, not merely occupied or struck. Or to put itdifferently, what the revolt lacked was a movement that


could develop this consciousness in the workers. Such amovement would have had to be anarchic, similar either tothe March 22nd Movement or the action committees thattook over Censier and tried to help the workers, not domi-nate them. Had these movements developed before therevolt, or had the revolt lasted long enough for them todevelop an impressive propaganda and action force, eventsmight have taken a different turn. Anyway, the Commu-nists combined with de Gaulle to deflect the revolt andfinally destroy it.

In my opinion, these are the real lessons of the May-June events. In reading what I have written, it becomesvery clear why Marxist-Leninists in America devote littlediscussion to the May-June events in France: the events,even the memory of them, challenge all their tenets, pro-grams, and strategies.

ParisJuly 1968

Desireand

Need

MARAT/SADEMost of the articles that have been written thus far aboutthe Marat/Sade play have been drivel and the tritest re-marks have come from its author, Peter Weiss. A good ideacan slip from the hands of its creator and follow its owndialectic. This kept happening with Balzac, so there is noreason why it shouldn't happen with Weiss.

The play is mainly a dialogue between Desire andNeed—a dialogue set up under conditions where historyfroze them into antipodes and opposed them violently toeach other in the Great Revolution of 1789. In those days,Desire clashed with Need: the one aristocratic, the otherplebeian; the one as the pleasures of the individual, theother as the agony of the masses; the one as the satisfac-tion of the particular, the other as the want of the general;the one as private reaction, the other as social revolution.In our day, Marat and de Sade have not been rediscovered;they have been reinterpreted. The dialogue goes on, butnow on a different level of possibility and toward a finalresolution of the problem. It is an old dialogue, but in anew context.

In Weiss's play, the context is an asylum. The dialoguecan only be pursued by madmen among madmen. Sanemen would have resolved the issues raised by the dialogueyears ago. They would have resolved them in practice. Butwe talk about them endlessly and we refract them througha thousand mystical prisms. Why? Because we are insane;we have been turned into pathological cases. Weiss, on thisscore, is only just; he places the dialogue where it belongs,in an asylum policed by guards, nuns and an administrator.We are insane not only because of what we have done, butalso because of what we haven't done. We "tolerate" too

295


much. We tremble and cower with "tolerance."How, then, are we to act? How, following the credo im-

puted to Marat, are we to pull ourselves up by the hair,turn ourselves inside out, and see the world with fresheyes? "Weiss refuses to tell us," says Peter Brook in anintroduction to the script, and then Brook trails off intotalk about facing contradictions. But this doesn't carry anyconviction. The dialogue, launched by its literary creatorand by its stage director, has its own inner movement, itsown dialectic. At Corday's third visit, de Sade lasciviouslydisplays her before Marat and asks: ". . . what's the pointof a revolution without general copulation?" De Sade'swords are taken up by the mimes and then by all the"lunatics" in the play. Even Brook cannot leave the an-swer alone. The ending of the play, equivocal in the scriptversion, turns into a riotous bacchanal in the movie ver-sion. The "lunatics" overpower the guards, nuns, visitorsand administrator; they grab all the women on the stageand everybody fucks like mad. The answer begins toemerge almost instinctively: the revolution that seeks toannul Need must enthrone Desire for everybody. Desiremust become Need!

DESIRE AND NEED POLARIZED

Need—the need to survive, to secure the bare means ofexistence—could never have produced a public credo ofDesire. It could have produced a religious credo of renun-ciation, to be sure, or a republican credo of virtue, but nota public credo of sensuousness and sensibility. Theenthronement of Desire as Need, of the pleasure principleas the reality principle, is nourished as a public issue by theproductivity of modern industry and by the possibility ofa society without toil. Even the widely touted recoil of theflower children from the verities of consumption, drudgeryand suburbia has its origin in the irrationalities of modernaffluence. Without the affluence, no recoil. To state the

I Desire and Need / 297

matter bluntly, the revolutionary growth of modern tech-nology has brought into question every historical preceptthat promoted renunciation, denial and toil. It vitiatesevery concept of Desire as a privileged, aristocratic domainof life.

This technology creates a new dimension of Desire, onethat completely transcends the notions of de Sade, or forthat matter of the French symbolists, from whom we stillderive our credo of sensibility. De Sade's unique one,Baudelaire's dandy, Rimbaud's visionary, each is an iso-lated ego, a rare individual who takes flight from the medi-ocrity and unreality of bourgeois life into hallucinatedreveries. In spite of its high, anti-bourgeois spirit of nega-tion, this ego remains distinctly privileged. Baudelaire, oneof the most unequivocal of the symbolist writers, expressesits aristocratic nature with bluntness in his notion ofDandyism. The Dandy, the man of true sensibility, he tellsus, enjoys leisure and is untroubled by Need. This leisure isdefined by the opposition of the Dandy to the crowd, ofthe particular to the general. It is anchored in the verysocial conditions that breed Marats and the enrages of1793—the world of Need. Dandyism, to be sure, assertsitself against the existing elites, but not against elitism;against the prevailing privileges, but not against privilege."Dandyism flourishes especially in periods of transition,"Baudelaire notes with acuity, "when democracy is not yetall-powerful and the aristocracy is just beginning to totterand decay. Amidst the turmoil of these times, a smallgroup of men, declasses, at loose ends, fed up—but all ofthem rich in determination—will conceive the idea offounding a new sort of aristocracy, stronger than the old,for it shall be based on only the most precious, the mostindestructible factors, on those heaven-sent gifts that nei-ther money nor ambition can confer." The truth, however,is that its gifts are not heaven-sent. This aesthetic elitefloats on the surface of the social war, a richly ornamented


debris that presupposes, objectively, the very aristocracyand bourgeoisie it repudiates in spirit.

What, then, of the revolutionary movement—the move-ment that seeks to reach below the surface of the socialwar into its very depths? For the most part it dispensesalmost completely with a concrete credo of sensuousness.Marxism, the dominant project within the revolutionarymovement, offers itself to the proletariat as a harsh, sober-ing doctrine, oriented toward the labor process, politicalactivity, and the conquest of state power. To sever all theties between poetry and revolution, it calls its socialismscientific and casts its goals in the hard prose of economictheory. Where the French symbolists formed a concreteimage of man, defined by the specifics of play, sexualityand sensuousness, the two great exiles in England formedan abstract image of man, defined by the universals ofclass, commodity and property. The whole person—con-crete and abstract, sensuous and rational, personal andsocial—never finds adequate representation in eithercredo.* This is tragedy in the Hegelian sense that bothsides are right. In retrospect, it is only fair to add that thesocial situation of their time was inadequate for the com-plete fulfillment of humanity. Ordinarily the social periodadmits neither of the liberated personality nor of the libe-rated society; its doors are closed to the free expression ofsensuousness and to the unfettered exercise of reason.

But the doors are never solid. There are moments whenthey, and indeed the entire house, are shaken to the foun-dations by elemental events. In such moments of crisis,when the senses of everyone are strained to extraordinaryacuity by social emergencies, the doors break down and

* A sense of incompleteness haunts Western philosophy afterHegel's death and explains much of the work of Kierkegaard,Schopenhauer, Stirner, Nietzsche, the surrealists and the contem-porary existentialists. For the Marxians merely to dismiss this post-Hegelian development as "bourgeois ideology" is to dismiss theproblem itself.

Desire and Need I 299

the people surge past the hanging portals, no longer asmasses but as awakened personalities. These people cannotbe crucified on theoretical formulas. They acquire theirhuman reality in revolutionary action. The Paris Communeof 1871 represents precisely such a moment when neitheraesthetic nor social theory adequately encompasses theoverall social situation. The Communards of the Bellevilledistrict in Paris, who fought the battles of the barricadesand died by the tens of thousands under the guns of theVersaillese, refused to confine their insurrection to theprivate world described by symbolist poems or the publicworld described by Marxist economics. They demandedthe eating and the moral, the filled belly and the height-ened sensibility. The Commune floated on a sea ofalcohol—for weeks everyone in the Belleville district wasmagnificently drunk. Lacking the middle-class proprietiesof their instructors, the Belleville Communards turnedtheir insurrection into a festival of public joy, play andsolidarity. Perhaps it was foredoomed that the prose ofbourgeois society would eventually digest the songs of theCommune—if not in an orgy of slaughter, then in theday-to-day compromises and retreats required by work,material security and social administration. Faced with abloody conflict and nearly certain defeat, the Commu-nards flung life away with the abandon of individuals who,having tasted of experience in the open, can no longerreturn to the coffins of daily routine, drudgery and denial.They burned down half of Paris, fighting suicidally to thevery last on the heights of their district.

In the Paris Commune of 1871, we have the expressionnot merely of social interest, but of social libido.* It ishard to believe that the repression following the fall of theCommune—the mass shootings, the ruthless trials, the exile

* Is it any different in other great revolutions? Can we resolve theanarchic, intoxicating phase that opens all the great revolutions ofhistory merely into an expression of class interest and the oppor-tunity to redistribute social wealth?


of thousands to penal colonies—owed its savagery strictlyto class vengeance. A review of the memoirs, newspapersand letters of the time shows that the bourgeois directedhis vengeance against his own subterranean humanity. Inthe spontaneous outburst of social libido which we call theParis Commune the bourgeois saw the breakdown of allthe repressive mechanisms that maintain hierarchicalsociety. He recoiled with the horror and ferocity of a manwho suddenly comes face to face with his unconsciousdrives.

THE SELF: MYTH AND REALITY

No one really learned from the Communards of the Belle-ville district, with the result that Desire and the revolu-tionary credo developed away from each other. In separat-ing, both were divested of their human content. The credoof Desire evaporated into a misty subjectivism, far re-moved from all social concerns; the credo of revolutionhardened into a dense objectivism, almost completely ab-sorbed in the techniques of social manipulation. The needto round out the revolutionary credo with Desire, or De-sire with the revolutionary credo, remains a pressing, per-haps the most pressing, problem of our times. Serious at-tempts to achieve this totality were made in the 1920s,when the surrealists and Wilhelm Reich tried to resynthe-size Marxism and transcend it with a larger conception ofthe revolutionary project. Although this project did notsucceed, it did not fail. All the issues were passed on to us,transformed by new dimensions of thought and by a newsense of immediacy produced by the technological ad-vances of our time.

Ironically, the greatest single obstacle to fulfilling thisproject is the revolutionary credo itself. Leninism and itsvarious offshoots have refocused the revolutionist's atten-tion from social goals to political means, from Utopia tostrategy and tactics. Lacking any clear definition of its


human goals, the revolutionary movement, at least in itscurrently organized forms, has assimilated the hierarchicalinstitutions, puritanism, work ethic and general charac-terology of the very society it professes to oppose. Thegoals of Marxism are largely contained in the demand forthe seizure of power rather than the dissolution of power;the former implies the existence of hierarchy and thepower of an elite over society as a whole.

Almost equally important as an obstacle to the projectenvisioned by the surrealists and Reich is the emergence ofa crude, undifferentiated subjectivism that casts the redis-covery of man exclusively in terms of self-discovery—in thejourney inward. What is basically wrong with this form ofsubjectivism is not its emphasis on the subject, on theconcrete individual. Indeed, as Kierkegaard has empha-sized, we have been overfed with the universals of science,philosophy and sociology. The error that vitiates this sub-jectivism is its operating principle that the self can bedivorced completely from society, subjectivity from objec-tivity, consciousness from action. Ironically, this inner,isolated self turns out to be one of the most fictitious ofuniversals, one of the most treacherous abstractions, ametaphysical concept in which consciousness, far fromexpanding, contracts into banalities and trivia. Philo-sophically, its ultimate state is pure being, a purity ofexperience and inner repose that adds up to nothing.* Itsultimate state, in short, is the dissolution of Desire intocontemplation.

The fact is, the self cannot be resolved into an inherent"it," a cryptic "soul" covered and obscured by layers ofreality. In this abstract form, the self remains an undiffer-entiated potentiality, a mere bundle of individual proclivi-ties, until it interacts with the real world. Without dealing

* My concern with this philosophical aspect of subjectivism stemsfrom the fact that it is advanced not only by a salad of HinduCagliostros but also by serious thinkers such as Norman O. Brown.


with the world it simply cannot be created in any humansense. Nietzsche reveals this feature of the Self when hedeclares ". . . your true nature lies not concealed deep inyou, but immeasurably high above you, or at least whatyou call your self." Valid introspection turns out to be theconscious appropriation of a self formed largely by theworld, and thus a judgment of the world and of the ac-tions needed to reconstitute it along new lines. This orderof self-consciousness reaches its height during our time inrevolutionary action. To revolt, to live revolt, is the com-plete reconstitution of the individual revolutionary, achange as far-reaching and as radical as the remaking ofsociety. In the process of discarding accumulated experi-ences, of integrating and re-integrating new experience, anew self grows out of the old. For this reason it is idioticto predict the behavior of people after a revolution interms of their behavior before it. They will not be thesame people.

If it is true that valid introspection must culminate inaction, in a reworking of the self by experience with thereal world, this reworking achieves a sense of directiononly insofar as it moves from the existent to the possible,from the "what is" to the "what could be." Precisely thisdialectic is what we mean by psychic growth. Desire itselfis the sensuous apprehension of possibility, a completepsychic synthesis achieved by a "yearning for . . ."Withoutthe pain of this dialectic, without the struggle that yieldsthe achievement of the possible, growth and Desire aredivested of all differentiation and content. The very issueswhich provide a concept of the possible are never formu-lated. The real responsibility we face is to eliminate notthe psychic pain of growth but rather the psychic sufferingof dehumanization, the torment that accompanies the frus-trated and aborted life.

The goal of crude subjectivism is stasis—the absence ofpain, the achievement of undisturbed repose. This stasis


yields an all-embracing placidity that dissolves anger intolove, action into contemplation, willfullness into passivity.The absence of emotional differentiation means the end ofreal emotion. Confronted with the goal of insensate stasis,dialectical growth could justly demand any right toemotion—including the right to hate—to reclaim a realstate of sensibility, including the ability to love selectively.The apostle of the undifferentiated type of sensibility(more precisely, sensation) is Marshall McLuhan, whosefantasies of integral communication consist entirely ofkicks and highs. Technique, here, is degraded into ends,the message into the media.

THE DISINTEGRATING SELFThe fact remains, nonetheless, that there can be no mean-ingful revolutionary credo that fails to include the subjectin its point of departure. We have passed beyond a timewhen the real world can be discussed without taking up indepth the basic problems and needs of the psyche—apsyche that is neither strictly concrete nor strictly uni-versal, but both newly integrated and transcended. Therediscovery of the concrete psyche is the most valid contri-bution of modern subjectivism and existentialist philoso-phy to the revolutionary credo, albeit the rediscoveredpsyche is partial and incomplete, and often tends to be-come abstracted. In an era of relative affluence, whenmaterial immiseration is not the exclusive source of socialrestiveness, the revolution tends to acquire intensely sub-jective and personal qualities. Revolutionary oppositioncenters increasingly around the disintegration of the qual-ity of life, around the anti-life perspectives and methods ofbourgeois society.

To put this matter differently, the revolutionist iscreated and nourished by the breakdown of all the greatbourgeois universals—property, class, hierarchy, free enter-prise, the work ethic, patriarchalism, the nuclear family


and so on, ad nauseam. From all of this wreckage, the selfbegins to achieve self-consciousness and Desire begins torecover its integrity. When the entire institutional fabricbecomes unstable, when everyone lacks a sense of destiny,be it in job or social affiliations, the lumpen periphery ofsociety tends to become its center and the declasses beginto chart out the most advanced forms of social and per-sonal consciousness. It is for this reason that any work ofart can be meaningful today only if it is lumpenized.

The lumpen's self is permeated by negativity, a reflec-tion of the overall social negativity. Its consciousness issatyr-like and its mockery is acquired by its distance fromthe verities of bourgeois society. But this very mockeryconstitutes the self's transcendance of the repressive ideol-ogies of toil and renunciation. The lumpen's acts of dis-order become the nuclei of a new order and his sponta-neity implies the means by which it can be achieved.

Hegel understood this fact beautifully. In a brilliant re-view of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, he writes: "Themocking laughter at existence, at the confusion of thewhole and at itself, is the disintegrated consciousness,aware of itself and expressing itself, and is at the same timethe last audible echo of all this confusion. . . . It is theself-disintegrating nature of all relations and their con-scious disintegration. . . . In this aspect of the return toself, the vanity of all things is the self's own vanity, or theself is itself vanity . . . but as the indignant consciousness itis aware of its own disintegration and by that knowledgehas immediately transcended it. . . . Every part of thisworld either gets its mind expressed here or is spoken ofintellectually and declared for what.it is. The honest con-sciousness [the role that Diderot allots to himself in thedialogue*] takes each element for a permanent entity and

* Diderot takes the role of the virtuous man, the petty bourgeois,engaged in a dialogue with Rameau's nephew, a Figaro-like scampand pimp.


does not realize in its uneducated thoughtfulness that it isdoing just the opposite. But the disintegrated con-sciousness is the consciousness of reversal and indeed ofabsolute reversal; its dominating element is the concept,which draws together the thoughts that to the honest con-sciousness lie so wide apart; hence the brilliance of its ownlanguage. Thus the contents of the mind's speech aboutitself consist in the reversal of all conceptions and realities;the universal deception of oneself and others and theshamelessness of declaring this conception is therefore thegreatest truth. . . . To the quiet consciousness which in itshonest way goes on singing the melody of the True and theGood in even tones, i.e., on one note, this speech appearsas 'a farrago of wisdom and madness. . . .' "40

Hegel's analysis, written more than a century and a halfago, anticipates and contains all the elements of the "abso-lute refusal" advanced so poignantly at the present time.Today, the spirit of negativity must extend to all areas oflife if it is to have any content; it must demand a completefrankness which, in Maurice Blanchot's words, "no longertolerates complicity." To lessen this spirit of negativity isto place the very integrity of the self in the balance. Theestablished order tends to be totalistic: it stakes out itssovereignty not only over surface facets of the self but alsoover its innermost recesses. It seeks complicity not only inappearances but also from the most guarded depths of thehuman spirit. It tries to mobilize the very dream-life of theindividual—as witness the proliferation of techniques andart forms for manipulating the unconscious. It attempts, inshort, to gain command over the self's sense of possibility,over its capacity for Desire.

DESIRE AND REVOLUTIONOut of the disintegrating consciousness must come the re-covery, the reintegration and the advance of Desire—a newsensuousness based on possibility. If this sense of possi-


bility lacks a humanistic social content, if it remainscrudely egoistic, then it will simply follow the logic of theirrational social order and slip into a vicious nihilism.* Inthe long run, the choices confronting the modern bohe-mian—hip or freak—are not between a socially passive sub-jectivism and a politically active reformism (the prevailingsociety, as it moves from crisis to crisis, will eliminatethese traditional luxuries), but between the reactionaryextremism of the SS man and the revolutionary extremismof the anarchist.

Bluntly, to drop out is to drop in. There is no facet ofhuman life that is not infiltrated by social phenomena andthere is no imaginative experience that does not float onthe data of social reality. Unless the sense of the mer-veilleux, so earnestly fostered by the surrealists, is to cul-minate in a credo of death (a credo advanced with consis-tency by Villiers de 1'Isle Adam in Axel), honesty requiresthat we acknowledge the social roots of our dreams, ourimagination and our poetry. The real question we face iswhere we drop in, where we stand in relation to the whole.

By the same token, there is nothing in the prevailingreality that is not polluted by the degeneration of thewhole. Until the child is discharged from the diseasedwomb, liberation must take its point of departure from adiagnosis of the illness, an awareness of the problem, and a

* This is perhaps as good a place as any to emphasize that capitalismpromotes egotism, not individuality or "individualism." Althoughbourgeois society loosened the hold of precapitalist unitary societieson the ego, the ego it created was as shriveled as the one it replaced.The tendency in modern state capitalism is to homogenize andmassify the ego on a scale that can be compared only with thetotalitarian societies of the archaic Oriental world. The term "bour-geois individualism," an epithet widely used by the left today againstlibertarian elements, reflects the extent to which bourgeois ideologypermeates the socialist project; indeed, the extent to which the"socialist" project (as distinguished from the libertarian communistproject) is a mode of state capitalism.

Desire and Need / 307

striving to be born. Introspection must be corrected bysocial analysis. Our freedom is anchored in revolutionaryconsciousness and culminates in revolutionary action.

But the revolution can no longer be imprisoned in therealm of Need. It can no longer be satisfied merely withthe prose of political economy. The task of the Marxiancritique has been completed and must be transcended. Thesubject has entered the revolutionary project with entirelynew demands for experience, for re-integration, for fulfill-ment, for the merveilleux. The very character structurepromoted by the revolutionary project in the past is nowat issue in its most nuclear forms. Any hierarchical organi-zation of human differences—sexual, ethnic, generationalor physical—must now give way to the dialectical principleof unity in diversity. In ecology, this principle is alreadytaken for granted: the conservation, indeed elaboration, ofvariety is regarded as a precondition for natural stability.All species are equally important in maintaining the unityand balance of an ecosystem. There are no hierarchies innature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes ofhuman thought, but rather differences merely in functionbetween and within living things. The revolutionary proj-ect will always remain incomplete and one-sided until itrecognizes the need to remove all hierarchical modes ofthought, indeed all conceptions of "otherness" based ondomination, from its own midst. Social hierarchy is un-deniably real today in the sense that it stems from a clashof objectively conflicting interests, a clash that up to nowhas been validated by unavoidable material scarcity. Butprecisely because this hierarchical organization of appear-ances exists in bourgeois society at a time when the prob-lem of scarcity can be solved, it must be eliminated com-pletely from the revolutionary community. And it must beeliminated not only in the revolutionary organization, butin the outlook and character structure of the individualrevolutionary.


To rephrase Pierre Reverdy's words, the poet nowstands on the ramparts—not only as dreamer, but also asfighter. Stalking through the dream, permeating the surrealexperience, stirring the imagination to entirely new evoca-tive heights are the liberatory possibilities of the objectiveworld. For the first time in history, object and subject canbe joined in the revolutionary affinity group—the anarchic,revolutionary collectivity of sisters and brothers. Theoryand praxis can be united in the purposive revolutionarydeed. Thought and intuition can be merged in the newrevolutionary vision. Conscious and unconscious can beintegrated in the revolutionary revel. Liberation may notbe complete—for us, at least—but it can be totalistic, in-volving every facet of life and experience. Its fulfillmentmay be beyond our wildest visions, but we can movetoward what we can see and imagine. Our Being is Becom-ing, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros,our Desire is Revolution.

New YorkJune 1967

References1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie,

2nd ed. rev. (Humanities Press; New York, 1949), p. 654.2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "The Communist Manifesto,"

in Selected Works (International Publishers; New York, n.d.),vol. 1, p. 227.

3 Raoul Vaneigem, "The Totality for Kids" (International Situa-tionist pamphlet; London, n.d.), p. 1.

4 Guy Debord, "Perspectives for Conscious Modification of DailyLife," mimeographed translation from Internationale Situatio-niste, no. 6 (n.p., n.d.), p. 2.

5 Josef Weber, "The Great Utopia," Contemporary Issues, vol. 2,no. 5 (1950), p. 12.

6 Ibid., p. 19 (my emphasis).7 Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Van Nos-

trand; New York, 1962), p. viii.8 Quoted in Angus M. Woodbury, Principles of General Ecology

(Blakiston; New York, 1954), p. 4.9 Robert L. Rudd, "Pesticides: The Real Peril," The Nation, vol.

189 (1959), p. 401.10 E. A. Gutkind, The Twilight of the Cities (Free Press; Glencoe,

N.Y., 1962), pp. 55-144.11 H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Aldine; Chicago, 1951), p. 16.12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Inter-

national Publishers; New York, 1947), p. 24.13 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? (Bellamy Library;

London, n.d.), vol. 1, p. 135.14 U.S., Congress, Joint Committee on the Economic Report,

Automation and Technological Change: Hearings before theSubcommittee on Economic Stabilization, 84th Cong., 1st ses-sion (U.S. Govt. Printing Office; Washington, 1955), p. 81.

15 Alice Mary Hilton, "Cyberculture," Fellowship for Reconcilia-tion paper (Berkeley, 1964), p. 8.

16 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Harcourt, Brace andCo.; New York, 1934), pp. 69-70.

17 Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown, "Machines without Men,"Fortune, November 1946.

18 F. M. C. Fourier, Selections from the Works of Fourier, (S.Sonnenschein and Co.; London, 1901), p. 93.

19 Charles Gide, introduction to Fourier, op. cit., p. 14.20 Hans Thirring, Energy for Man (Harper & Row; New York,

1958), p. 266

309

310 / References

21 Ibid., p. 269.22 Henry Tabor, "Solar Energy," in Science and the New Nations,

ed. Ruth Gruber (Basic Books; New York, 1961), p. 109.23 Eugene Ayres, "Major Sources of Energy," American Petroleum

Institute Proceedings, section 3, Division of Refining, vol. 28[III] (1948), p. 117.

24 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (Modern Library; NewYork, n.d.), p. 593.

25 Friedrich Wilhelmsen, preface to Friedrich G. Juenger, The Fail-ure of Technology (Regnery; Chicago, 1956), p. vii.

26 W. Warde Fowler, The City State of the Greeks and Romans(Macmillan & Co.; London, 1952), p. 168.

27 Edward Zimmerman, The Greek Commonwealth, 5th ed.(Modern Library; New York, 1931), pp. 408-9.

28 Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," inMarx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 318.

29 V. I. Lenin, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It,The Little Lenin Library, vol. 11 (International Publishers; NewYork, 1932), p. 37.

30 Quoted in Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution(Simon & Schuster; New York, 1932), vol. 1, p. 144.

31 V. V. Osinsky, "On the Building of Socialism," Kommunist, no.2, April 1918, quoted in R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of theRevolution (Harvard University Press; Cambridge, 1960), pp.85-86.

32 Robert G. Wesson, Soviet Communes (Rutgers University Press;New Brunswick, N.J., 1963), p. 110.

33 R. V. Daniels, op. cit., p. 145.34 Mosche Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (Pantheon; New York,

1968), p. 122.35 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence

(International Publishers; New York, 1942), p. 292.36 Frederick Engels, Hen Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science

(Anti-Duhring) (International Publishers; New York, 1939) p323.

37 Marx and Engels, "The Communist Manifesto."38 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Foreign Lan-

guages Publishing House; Moscow, 1956), p. 102.39 Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton University Press; Prince-

ton, N.J., 1970), pp. 172-73. For a different interpretation ofthe Kronstadt events see my introduction to Ida Mett, TheKronstadt Uprising (Black Rose Books; Montreal, 1971).

40 Hegel, op. cit. The passage cited here is quoted in Marx and Engels,Selected Correspondence, pp. 542-43.

THE ANARCHISTMOMENT__________

Reflections on Culture,Nature and Power

by John Clark

This original contribution to radical social thought attemptsfor the first time to integrate contemporary philosophicalcriticism within a framework of ecological concerns and thephilosophies of nature.

Arguing for the integration of self, society and nature,Clark finds available social theory inadequate and offersinstead a theoretical perspective which combines both Easternand Western traditions of thought with a radical organicistframework. He speculates that anarchism is capable of being"much more than a noble dream" but is rather "a necessarymovement of negation constituting an essential element ofthe theory of liberation."

Dr. John Clark teaches political science at Loyola Universityin New Orleans, Louisiana.

250 pagesPaperback ISBN: 0-920057-07-1Hardcover ISBN: 0-920057-08-XPhilosophy/Politics

$12.95$29.95

1984 AND AFTER...edited by

Marsha Hewitt andDimitrios I. Roussopoulos

With the ominous year of 1984 in mind as a social realitymore than a calendar year, this collection of essays bringstogether some of the most distinguished contemporary criticsof authoritarian tendencies in our society. The historical,political and intellectual problems that gave rise to Orwell'sgreat book are examined with viewpoints spanning the gamutof serious opinion. The authors offer a fresh and provocativeanalysis of authoritarianism and its libertarian alternatives.

Contributors include George Woodcock, Murray Bookchin,Noam Chomsky, Frank Harrison, Stephen Schecter, JeanEllezam, Jean-Pierre Deslauriers, Yolande Cohen, ClaireCulhane, John Clark, and Robert Mayo.

234 pagesPaperback ISBN: 0-920057-29-2 $ 12.95Hardcover ISBN: 0-920057-28-4 $29.95Current Affairs/Politics

HX 833 .B724Post-scarcity anarchismBookchin, Murray,

3 1510 00045 2871

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