Murray Bookchin - Whither Anarchism?: A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics

Whither Anarchism?

A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics

by
Murray Bookchin

1998

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Whither Anarchism?
A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics
Copyright 1998 Murray Bookchin

The following article is forthcoming in Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left (San Francisco and Edinburgh: A.K. Press, 1998).

Murray Bookchin in his article "Whither Anarchism? A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics" gives an account of how John Clark and Dimitri Roussopoulos were "dropped" from the International Advisory Board of Democracy and Nature (formerly Society and Nature), which is completely inaccurate. Although, as Bookchin points out, it is true that the journal never claimed to be a social ecology journal, still the fact that we published more articles from social ecologists than from any other political current created the impression to some, including Andrew Light in the CNS interview that Bookchin refers to, that the journal is an organ of social ecology. However, as far as the journal is concerned, it has clearly declared since its very first issue, back in 1992, and repeated since then, that its aim was "to initiate an urgently needed dialogue on the crucial question of developing a new liberatory social project, at a moment in History when the Left has abandoned this traditional role; the materialisation of the liberatory project and the transition from a hierarchical society to an ecological one is meant as the outcome of a dialectical synthesis of three tendencies that are expressed in corresponding political traditions and movements: the autonomous- democratic tradition (that includes the feminist movement), the libertarian socialist and the radical green movements". Obviously, for us in the journal, social ecology and libertarian municipalism have always been just a component -albeit an important one- of this synthesis. In fact, Murray himself has misconceived the nature of the journal and its aims and this has led him to dissociate from the journal and resign from its advisory board as soon as he became conscious of this misconception (see reply of the editorial board to Murray Bookchin's resignation letter, Democracy & Nature no 9 (1997).

Contents

Introduction

Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice.
Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.
Mikhail Bakunin

What form will anarchism take as it enters the twenty-first century? What basic ideas will it advance? What kind of movement, if any, will it try to create? How will it try to change the human sensibilities and social institutions that it has inherited from the past?

In a fundamental sense these were the issues that I tried to raise in my 1995 polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm.[1] The title and especially the subtitle were deliberately provocative. In part, I intended them to highlight a profound and longstanding contradiction within anarchism, an ideology that encompasses views that are basically hostile to each other. At one extreme of anarchism is a liberal ideology that focuses overwhelmingly on the abstract individual (often drawing on bourgeois ideologies), supports personal autonomy, and advances a negative rather than a substantive concept of liberty. This anarchism celebrates the notion of liberty from rather than a fleshed-out concept of freedom for. At the other end of the anarchist spectrum is a revolutionary libertarian socialism that seeks to create a free society, in which humanity as a whole and hence the individual as well enjoys the advantages of free political and economic institutions.

Between these two extremes lie a host of anarchistic tendencies that differ considerably in their theoretical aspects and hence in the kind of practice by which they hope to achieve anarchism's realization. Some of the more common ones today, in fact, make systematic thinking into something of a bugaboo, with the result that their activities tend to consist not of clearly focused attacks upon the prevailing social order but of adventurous episodes that may be little more than street brawls and eccentric happenings. The social problems we face in politics, economics, gender and ethnic relations, and ecology are not simply unrelated single issues that should be dealt with separately. Like so many socialists and social anarchists in the past, I contend that an anarchist theory and practice that addresses them must be coherent, anchoring seemingly disparate social problems in an analysis of the underlying social relations: capitalism and hierarchical society.

It should not be surprising that in a period of social reaction and apparent capitalist stabilization, the two extremes within anarchism the individualistic liberal tendency and the socialistic revolutionary one would fly apart in opposing directions. At best, they have previously existed only in uneasy tension with each other, submerging their differences to their common traditions and ideological premises. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the liberal tendency, with its strong emphasis on individual rights and sensibilities, gave greater emphasis to individual self-expression, ranging from personal eccentricities to scandalous or even violent behavior. By contrast, the socialistic tendency placed its greatest emphasis on popular mobilizations, especially in syndicalist organizations, working-class strikes, and the everyday demands of opposition to capitalism in the public sphere.

Supporters of the socialistic tendencies in anarchism, which I have called social anarchism, never denied the importance of gaining individual freedom and personal autonomy. What they consistently argued, however, was that individual freedom will remain chimerical unless sweeping revolutionary changes are made that provide the social foundations for rounded and ethically committed individuals. As social anarchism has argued, the truly free individual is at once an active agent in and the embodiment of a truly free society. This view often clashed with the notion, very commonly held by individualistic or, as I have called them, lifestyle anarchists, that liberty and autonomy can be achieved by making changes in personal sensibilities and lifeways, giving less attention to changing material and cultural conditions.

It is not my intention to repeat my exposition of the differences between social and lifestyle anarchism. Nor do I deny that the two tendencies the liberal and the social have often overlapped with each other. Many lifestyle anarchists eagerly plunge into direct actions that are ostensibly intended to achieve socialistic goals. Many social anarchists, in turn, sympathize with the rebellious impulses celebrated by lifestyle anarchists, although they tend to resist purely personal expressions.

Not surprisingly, the ability of social anarchism to make itself heard in the public sphere has generally fluctuated with the economic times. In periods of capitalist stability, social anarchism is often eclipsed on the Left by reform-oriented social-democratic and liberal ideologies, while lifestyle anarchism emerges as the embodiment of anarchism par excellence. During these periods anarchism's cranks, often more rebellious than revolutionary, with their exaggerated hostility to conventional lifeways, come to the foreground, constituting a cultural more than a revolutionary threat to the status quo. By contrast, in times of deep social unrest, it is social anarchism that, within anarchism, has usually held center stage. Indeed, during revolutionary situations in the past, social anarchism has enjoyed a great deal of popularity among the oppressed and in some cases was responsible for organizing the masses in such a way as to pose a serious threat to the social order.