Chapter 11: Anarchy after Leftism

In one respect, Murray Bookchin is right in almost the only way he’s still capable of, i.e., for the wrong reasons. The anarchists are at a turning point. For the first time in history, they are the only revolutionary current. To be sure, not all anarchists are revolutionaries, but it is no longer possible to be a revolutionary without being an anarchist, in fact if not in name.

Throughout its existence as a conscious current, anarchism has been shadowed and usually overshadowed by leftism in general, and Marxism in particular. Especially since the formation of the Soviet Union, anarchism has effectively (and therefore ineffectively) defined itself with reference to Marxism. The reduction of anarchists to satellites of the Communists, especially in revolutionary situations, is so regular a feature of their modern history that it can’t be an accident. Fixated on their great rival, the anarchists have competed with Marxists on their own leftist terms and so the anarchists have always lost.

Marxism was already ideologically bankrupt by the time European Communism collapsed. As ideology, Marxism is now merely a campus — and mostly a faculty — phenomenon, and even as such its persistence is mostly parasitic upon feminism and the racial nationalisms. As a state system, what remains of Marxism is merely Oriental despotism, unthinkable as a model for the West. Suddenly, seventy years of anarchist excuses became irrelevant.

Although these developments caught the anarchists, like everybody else, by surprise, they were not as unprepared as they would have been twenty years earlier. Many of them had, if not by design, then by drift and default, strayed from their traditional position as “the ‘left wing’ of ‘all socialisms’” (6) — but not by moving to the right. Like many other North Americans, they were unable to discern any difference between left and right of such importance that they felt compelled to declare for one or the other. As the leftist veneer — or tarnish — they typically acquired in college wore off, an indigenous anti-authoritarianism showed through. The Marxists they encountered on campus were too ridiculous to be taken seriously as rivals or reference points. (That some of them were professors made them that much more ridiculous.) More than ever before, some anarchists insisted on a “personalistic” grounding of politics in the experience of everyday life, and they correspondingly opened up to theorists like the situationists for whom the critique of everyday life was a first principle. They took to dumpster-diving among the discards of doctrines and cultures to fashion, like a collage, recombinant world-pictures of their own. And if Nietzsche’s definition is right — that man is the animal who laughs — then they recovered some of their humanity too.

Now I admit this picture is too rosy because it’s not red enough. A fraction of North American anarchists, mostly syndicalists, remain out-and-out leftists. As such, they share the decline of the rest of the left. They no longer include any first-rate or even second-rate thinkers. Other pockets of anarchists act as auxiliaries of sub-leftist, particularist ideologies like feminism and Third World nationalism (including indigenism) — the larger hunks of wreckage from the New Left. These too have produced their logorrheics but nobody with anything to say. Many other anarchists retain vestiges of leftism (not always a bad thing). What’s important is how many of them, whatever their lingering influences, simply aren’t leftists any more. The Dean’s jeremiad expresses his shock of recognition at this unprecedented state of affairs.

The precondition for any substantial increase in anarchist influence is for anarchists to make explicit and emphatic their break with the left. This does not mean placing the critique of the left at the center of analysis and agitation. On the contrary, that’s always been a symptom of anarchism’s satellite status. It is enough to identify leftism, as the occasion arises, as all it really is, a variant of hegemonic ideology — a loyal opposition — which was formerly effective in recuperating revolutionary tendencies. There’s no reason for anarchists to inherit an accursed share of the left’s unpopularity. Let’s make our own enemies.

And our own friends. Since there really is something anarchist about some popular tendencies, we should try to make some anarchist tendencies popular. Certain anarchist themes both old and new resonate with certain widespread attitudes. It isn’t necessarily elitist or manipulative to circulate the proposition that anarchism explicates and elaborates various inchoate anti-authoritarian tendencies. This can be done in an imperialistic and opportunistic fashion, but I believe it can also be done, judiciously, in good faith. If we’re mistaken, no harm done, we just won’t go over very well, something we’re used to. Many people will surely shrink, at least initially, from drawing the anarchist conclusions we suggest their own attitudes and values tend toward. Then again, some others may not, not even initially — especially the young.

Besides, making converts is not the only purpose of anarchist agitprop. It may also enlarge the chokingly constricted range of North American political discourse. We may never bring most of the intelligentsia over, but we can soften them up. We can reduce some of them to sympathizers, to what the Stalinists called fellow travelers, to what Lenin called useful idiots. They will traduce our ideas but also, in some mutilated form, send them around and legitimate them in the sense that they are to be taken seriously. And in so doing they will weaken their own power to counter them if and when these ideas are taken seriously enough to be acted upon by those who understand them.

Americans (and undoubtedly others, but I’ll stick with the American context Bookchin addresses) really are in a certain sense “anarchistic.” I’m not going to pretend, like David De Leon (1978), that there is something innately and immemorially anarchist about Americans. Our beliefs and behavior have long been otherwise in important respects. Most contemporary American anarchists and other radicals — and I include myself here — have been consciously and conspicuously anti-American. In college, I majored in history, but I took courses only in European history, because Europeans had a revolutionary heritage which we Americans (I assumed) did not. Much later I learned that Americans have at times been much more revolutionary (and so, to me, more interesting) than I originally supposed. While this discovery didn’t transform me into a patriot, as my anti-Gulf War activities demonstrate (Black 1992: ch. 9), it did kindle a sympathetic interest in American history which I am still pursuing. Anarchy is at once very much an elaboration of certain American values and at the same time antithetical to certain others. So it makes no sense for American anarchists to be pro-American or anti-American. They should be themselves — their one indisputable area of expertize — and see what that leads to.

Post-leftist anarchy is positioned to articulate — not a program — but a number of revolutionary themes with contemporary relevance and resonance. It is, unlike Bookchinism, unambiguously anti-political, and many people are anti-political. It is, unlike Bookchinism, hedonistic, and many people fail to see why life is not to be lived enjoyably if it is to be lived at all. It is, unlike Bookchinism, “individualistic” in the sense that if the freedom and happiness of the individual — i.e., each and every really existing person, every Tom, Dick and Murray — is not the measure of the good society, what is? Many people wonder what’s wrong with wanting to be happy. Post-leftist anarchy is, unlike Bookchinism, if not necessarily rejective, then at least suspicious of the chronically unfulfilled liberatory promise of high technology. And maybe most important of all is the massive revulsion against work, an institution which has become less and less important to Bookchin at the same time it’s become more and more important, and oppressive, to people outside academia who actually have to work. Most people would rather do less work than attend more meetings. Which is to say, most people are smarter, and saner, than Murray Bookchin is. Post-leftist anarchists mostly don’t regard our times one-dimensionally, as either a “decadent, bourgeoisified era” (1) of “social reaction” (9) or as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. They tend toward pessimism, but not usually as much as the Dean does. The system, unstable as ever, never ceases to create conditions which undermine it. Its self-inflicted wounds await our salt. If you don’t believe in progress, it’ll never disappoint you and you might even make some progress.

In some particulars, — as I’ve come to appreciate, somewhat to my surprise, in writing this essay, — traditional anarchist themes and practices are more attuned to popular predilections than ever before. Most Americans have joined them, for instance, in abstention from elections, and they just might be interested in the anarchists’ reasons. Class conflict at the point of production holds little interest for campus-based Bookchinist-Arendtist civilogues, but means much to post-college workers reduced, for the duration, to the degradation they briefly thought they’d escaped by graduating from high school. Now they must work to pay off the loans that financed an interval of relative freedom (a Temporary Autonomous Zone, as it were) such as they may never enjoy again, no matter how much they earn. They may have learned just enough along the way to question whether life has to be this way.

But the new themes of the New Anarchism, or, better yet, the New Anarchisms also have popular appeal — not because they pander to prevalent illusions but because they pander (and why not?) to prevalent disillusions. With technology, for instance. A political critique of technology may make a lot of sense to the tenders of high technology who have not experienced anything of its liberatory potential as so often promised but never delivered by the progressives, by the Marxists, syndicalists, Bookchinists and other technocrats. At the very least, trickle-down techno-liberation is as fraudulent as trickle-down enrichment through supply-side economics (make the already rich so much richer that some crumbs are bound to fall from their table). Computer programming is, if more interesting, little more liberatory than data entry, and the hours are longer. There’s no light at the end of the carpal tunnel.

With whatever elements the New Anarchisms are compounded and whatever their fortunes will be, the old anarchism — the libertarian fringe of the Left That Was — is finished. The Bookchinist blip was a conjunctural quirk, an anomalous amalgam of the old anarchism and the New Left to which the Dean-to-be fortuitously added a little pop ecology and (this part passed unnoticed for far too long) his weird city-statist fetish. Now Bookchin belatedly bumbles forth as the defender of the faith, that old-time religion. Anarchism-as-Bookchinism was a confusionist episode even he, its fabricator, seems to be in haste to conclude.

If the word “decadence” means anything, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism is an exercise in decadence, not to mention an exercise in futility. If the word means anything, it means a deterioration from a previous higher level of accomplishment — it means doing worse what was formerly done better. In that sense, the New Anarchisms of the “lifestyle anarchists” cannot be decadent, for what they are doing is at best, something better, and at worst, something different from what the old-style left-wing anarchists did. Bookchin is not even doing what Bookchin once did, if never very well, then at least a lot better.

Within anarchism, what is taking place resembles what, in science, is known as a paradigm shift (Kuhn 1970). A paradigm is an overarching frame of reference, something broader than a theory (or ideology), which directs the development of thought for those belonging to a community of those operating within the paradigm. That this is a somewhat circular formulation its originator admits (ibid.: 176), but truth is circular, an inescapable hermeneutic circle but one whose diameter we can widen along with our perspectives. The details and, for that matter, the deficiencies of Kuhn’s much-discussed model of scientific theory and practice need not detain us here (although I commend them to anarchists capable of more muscular thinking than Bookchin and most other anarcho-eggheads are up for). Here I’m drawing attention to just two aspects of this historical approach to explaining theoretical thinking which I find suggestive.

The first is the notion of “normal science,” which refers to the everyday practice of workaday scientists: the working-out of the implications of the prevailing paradigm. Newton’s physics, for instance, kept observational astronomers and experimental physicists happy, or at least busy, for over two hundred years: it assigned them problems to solve and criteria for what counted as solutions to those problems.

The classical anarchism of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and especially Kropotkin may be thought of as the original anarchist political paradigm. For all their differences, together they furnished many answers and a context for developing many more. Later figures like Malatesta, Goldman, Berkman, the anarcho-syndicalists, and the intellectuals writing for Freedom in effect engaged in “normal anarchism” — in restating, elaborating, updating and in details amending the paradigm. Men like Herbert Read, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort and Paul Goodman worked within this tradition in the inclement climate of the ‘40s and ‘50s. In characterizing their activity as derivative I am by no means denigrating it, or them. Precisely because the classical paradigm was rich in potential, intelligent anarchists have drawn fresh insights from it by applying it to changing 20^th-century developments. But the developments have long since outstripped the paradigm. Too many “anomalies,” as Kuhn calls them, have appeared to be reconciled with the paradigm without increasing strain and a deepening sense of artificiality. Classical anarchism, like leftism in general, is played out. Murray Bookchin, whom some anarchists once mistook for the first theorist of a new anarchist paradigm, has now come forth explicitly as the last champion of the old one, the anarchist tail of what he calls the Left That Was.

One other suggestive feature of Kuhn’s argument is his account of how, on the ground, the supplanting of one paradigm by another actually takes place:

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners [emphasis added], the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work (Kuhn 1970: 18–19).

Kuhn goes on to explain that this may involve intransigent individuals, “more interesting, however, is the endurance of whole schools in increasing isolation from professional science. Consider, for example, the case of astrology, which was once an integral part of astronomy” (ibid.: 19 n. 11).

Not to pretend that anarchism is a science — such a pretense is itself a part of the obsolete paradigm — but the analogy is illuminating. As Bookchin admits, and deplores, “thousands” of anarchists, “the next generation’s practitioners” of anarchism, are increasingly abandoning social anarchism for lifestyle anarchism. Some of the older school’s practitioners convert, as has indeed happened. Other once-prominent figures, as Kuhn noticed (ibid.), marginalize themselves as the Dean has now done. And to clinch the comparison, what were once “integral parts” of anarchism are on the verge of splitting off on their own as did astrology from astronomy so as to have any hope of surviving at all. Bookchinism, “social ecology,” was never an integral part of anarchism, for all the Dean’s efforts to make it so. If it persists awhile after the Dean’s demise, social ecology/anarchism will bear about the same relationship to the new anarchism as astrology to astronomy.

As will, I expect, the dwindling anarcho-leftist fundamentalisms. Of these there would seem to be only three. The first is the supposed pure-and-simple anarchism of, say, Ferd Woodworth of The Match! or the late unlamented Bob Shea. The inherent improbability of a socially and economically agnostic anarchism — let’s abolish the state and later sort out the trifling details, such as our way of life — as well as the sheer crackpotkinism of its vestigial devotees (Black 1994: 42–44) relegate this fundamentalism to imminent oblivion. Even Bookchin would be embarrassed to be associated with it. A Marxist is capable of many errors and many horrors, and usually commits some, but one thing a Marxist cannot be indifferent to is political economy and the social relations of production.

The second obsolete anarcho-leftism is anarcho- syndicalism. Although it is a workerist ideology, its few working-class adherents are elderly. Although it is by definition a union-oriented ideology, there is no perceptible syndicalist presence in any union. A syndicalist is more likely to be a professor than a proletarian, more likely to be a folk singer than a factory worker. Organizers on principle, syndicalists are disunited and factionalized. Remarkably, this dullest of all anarchisms attracts some of the most irrational and hysterical adherents. Only a rather small minority of North American anarchists are syndicalists. Syndicalism will persist, if at all, as a campus-based cult in increasing isolation from the main currents of anarchism.

The third anarcho-leftism is anarcho-feminism. The category is, I admit, questionable. So-called radical feminism is leftist in origin but extreme right-wing in ideology (Black 1986: 133–138; Black 1992: 195–197). Separatist in tendency and sometimes in principle, anarcho-feminism is oriented much more toward statist feminism than anarchism. It is already well on its way toward encapsulation and isolation from the anarchisms. The feminist presence in anarchism is more apparent than real. Many anarchist women call themselves feminists from force of habit or because they think that by not so identifying themselves they somehow undermine those women who do. But there is little if anything distinctively feminist, fortunately, in the anarchism of most nominal anarcho-feminists. Feminism is so obviously an Establishment ideology and so remote from its (largely mythical) radical roots that its affirmation by anarchists will become ever more perfunctory. Like leftism, feminism is a needless liability for anarchists.

There is life after the left. And there is anarchy after anarchism. Post-leftist anarchists are striking off in many directions. Some may find the way — better yet, the ways — to a free future.