So I just
read Murray Bookchin´s “Listen, Marxist!” from 1969 and “A Discussion on
`Listen, Marxist!´” from 1970. Don´t ask me why – I´m completely uninterested
in far left polemics. But then, I have nothing special to do this evening
(local time), so I thought, why not? I admit that I found them richly
entertaining! Especially since Bookchin in a somewhat later incarnation began
to attack “lifestyle anarchists”, attacks taken even further by his admirer Chaz
Bufe in a pamphlet entitled “Listen, Anarchist!”. Judging by his early
anarchist output, Bookchin was himself a “lifestyle anarchist” of sorts back in
1969-70, expressing strong support for drop-outs, déclassé youth, people who
refuse to work, and so on. In plain English: hippies.
It seems
Murray Bookchin was once the man!
Nor was he particularly
original. The ideas found in the two texts were standard fair at the time. The
traditional working class and its organizations have been co-opted by
capitalism and are bickering with the employers within the confines of the
hierarchic and authoritarian bourgeois system. Economic crises have been
abolished by a fusion of state, capital and high technology. The next
revolution will therefore be directed against hierarchy and authority as such,
rather than class exploitation specifically. Indeed, the revolution will be
triggered as much by the boredom of everyday life and the longing for Utopia,
as by concrete manifestations of oppression and domination. No single revolutionary
class exists anymore – rather, the new forms of social domination turn people
from all classes and social strata into rebels against the system. Young people
who say “no” to regimented factory work, or refuse to work at all, are positive
examples. So are people fighting “sexual repression” and the like. There are a
lot of attacks on “the work ethic” in these texts. Bakunin is said to have
foretold the bourgeois degeneration of the industrial working class, while regarding
uprooted rural people and lumpenized urbanites as the real revolutionary
forces. Bookchin seems to regard Bakunin as correct on this point as against
Marx.
Ironically
for a future eco-socialist, Bookchin´s ideas about technology and the
environment turn out to be extremely confused. He believes that Marxism emerged
in a society of scarcity and that its revolutionary strategy is based on this
fact. However, today the Western world has reached a state of post-scarcity. This
makes a libertarian revolution possible, since the masses will simply overthrow
the oppressive structures and then go on living their lives as they please,
with no particular problems of production and distribution needed to be taken
care of?! Here, Bookchin really sounds like a spoiled middle class hippie who
doesn´t understand where all the affluence (his affluence) comes from. It´s
just there for the taking…
Despite his
implicit support for high tech, Bookchin nevertheless supports the decentralist
perspective of classical anarchism. But if capitalism and state power had been
decentralized 100 years ago by a successful string of anarchist revolutions,
high technology of the kind we have today wouldn´t have been developed, and
hence no super-abundance or post-scarcity would exist. It´s amazing that
Bookchin doesn´t see this. One also wonders what he thinks of, say, oil
imports, coal mining, nuclear power, huge hydro-electric dams and other large-scale
projects necessary to sustain the “post-scarcity” condition, large-scale projects
impossible without the fusion of capital and the state he attacks at other
times. Weirdly, when Bookchin discusses the Third World, he patronizingly
assumes that of course Third World peoples don´t want our high standard of
living (!), so in those nations, low level technology with an ecological
profile is much better than the kind of high tech which exists in the Western
world. I sure wonder how he explained mass immigration from the
Third World to the United States!
The
revolutionary strategy favored by Bookchin is the creation of “affinity groups”.
Such groups probably appeal to counter-cultural people and tend to give The
Movement a distinctly sub-cultural (even slightly cultic) flair, but can they
really appeal to workers, or indeed anyone with a normal lifestyle? Somehow I
doubt it, and yet Bookchin admits that a revolution can´t succeed without
winning over the majority of the population, including the majority of the
working class. In typical anarchist fashion, he extols the spontaneity of the
masses and argues at length that all real revolutions have been spontaneous,
the “vanguard parties” often lagging behind the masses. He fails to notice that
the much-vaunted spontaneity wasn´t enough to stop Kerensky from hi-jacking the
February Revolution, or the People´s Front from hi-jacking the Spanish
Revolution. It certainly was of little use against the Bolsheviks, when they
were firmly in saddle! It struck me when reading “Listen, Marxist!” that the bourgeoisie
can very easily derail a “radical” movement of the kind described by Bookchin
by injecting a large dose of left-liberalism and “libertarianism” into the
capitalist system. Indeed, this is *exactly what they have indeed done*, making
all the hippies vote Obama or Ms Clinton instead of fighting the power through
affinity groups (and, I suppose, group sex collectives). Spontaneity is no
match to clever social engineering, it seems…
I´m not
saying everything in these old pamphlets is wrong. Bookchin did have a point
when describing the Western working class as inherently non-revolutionary. He
was right when attacking the system in the Soviet Union, or the dogmatism of
the Maoist and Trotskyist groups. The problem is his anarchistic alternative: to
organize (or non-organize?) marginal groups with little or no social power (from
disaffected campus youth to welfare mothers), having no real strategy to win
over the working class, racial and ethnic “minority” groups, and so on. I say
this as a former leftist. Today, I couldn´t care less about a strategy for
socialist revolution or anarcho-communism! As for Murray Bookchin, he must have
revised his political strategy at some later point, when he developed Social
Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. The latter strategy, despite its
revolutionary pretensions, is really reformist, with its weird infatuation with
New England town meetings (although I suppose it´s possible many former hippies
lived in rural Vermont). Social Ecology, ironically given Bookchin´s
attacks on Marxist dogmatism, sounds like just another form of…er, Marxist
dogmatism, a kind of Marxism-Bookchinism if you like. And as the
anarcho-primitivists never tired of pointing out, Bookchin´s view of high technology
remained remarkably naïve, since he apparently believed that a global high tech
system could be “self-managed” by some kind of “workers´ councils”.
It seems
the old hippie eventually grew up. Well, so did we. And the world moved on…
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