Murray Bookchin is the man

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…