Chapter 3: Lifestyle Anarchism

As fast-and-loose as the Dean plays with the word “individualism,” extrapolating it to something he calls “lifestyle anarchism” is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham not just nonsense, it is nonsense on stilts. Here is how he does the stretch:

In the traditionally individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the 1990s are awash in self-styled [that word again!] anarchists who — their flamboyant radical rhetoric aside — are cultivating a latter-day anarcho-individualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism.... Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of [sic] everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades (9).

In a classic tale of cerebral fantasy, Jorge Luis Borges related that in Tlön, “the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author”: “Criticism is prone to invent authors. A critic will choose two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, let us say — and attribute them to the same writer, and then with all probity explore the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres....” (Monegal & Reid 1981: 118).

That is exactly the Dean’s modus operandi, except that Borges was joking in a very sophisticated way whereas Bookchin is serious in a very dumb, dull way. Those he has designated “lifestyle anarchists” are essentially alike because, well, he has designated them as lifestyle anarchists. The label is self-verifying. He’s cobbled together all his self-selected enemies who are also “self-styled” anarchists as “lifestyle anarchists.” In an essay only recently published, but written In 1980, the Dean cogently observed that

...anarchism [has] acquired some bad habits of its own, notably an ahistorical and entrenched commitment to its own past. The decline of the New Left and the transformation of the sixties counter-culture into more institutionalized cultural forms compatible with the status quo created among many committed anarchists a longing for the ideological security and pedigree that also afflicts the dwindling Marxist sects of our day (1996: 23).

In the Middle Ages, what the Dean’s doing — but they did it better back then, and in good faith — was known as Realism. There cannot be a name (goes the argument) unless there is something real which that name designates. St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God, for instance, by defining God as that which nothing could be greater than, implies that God is the greatest possible being, and since something must be the greatest possible being, God must exist. The reflective reader will probably spot at least some of the flaws in this line of argument which almost all philosophers have long since recognized.

I am amazed to learn that the present epoch is “awash in self-styled anarchists.” Maybe I should awash more often. I hadn’t thought any place has been awash in self-styled anarchists since certain parts of Spain were in the 1930s. Maybe Burlington is awash in Bookchinists — a veritable Yankee Barcelona — but this conjecture is as yet unconfirmed.

“Lifestyle” wasn’t always a dirty word for the Dean. Recalling what was wrong with the Stalinist ‘30s, he’s written:

“Life-style?” — the word was simply unknown. If we were asked by some crazy anarchists how we could hope to change society without changing ourselves, our relations to each other, and our organizational structure, we had one ritualistic answer: “After the revolution....” (Bookchin 1970: 57).

Back then the Dean was calling for “communist life-styles” as integral to the revolutionary project (ibid.: 54). Today, the Dean alleges that lifestyle anarchism is “concerned with a ‘style’ rather than a society” (34), but the “crazy anarchists” he formerly identified with, but now maligns, agree with Bookchin the Younger that social revolution is lifestyle revolution, the revolution of everyday life: “It is plain that the goal of revolution today must be the liberation of daily life” (Bookchin 1971: 44).

Most of this gibberish is pejorative and content-free. If the dizzy Dean is saying anything substantive, he is claiming that those he has lumped (lumpened?) together as lifestyle anarchists are (1) anti-theoretical, (2) apolitical, (3) hedonistic and (4) anti-organizational. The question of organization is so large as to require a chapter in itself (Chapter 5). I’ll take up the other charges here.

1. Anti-Theoretical. As to this the Dean is nothing less than grotesque. When is a theorist not a theorist? When his theory is not the theory of Dean Bookchin. That disqualifies Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Jacques Camatte, Jean Baudrillard and, to all intents and purposes, everybody published by Autonomedia. Bookchinism is not just the only true theory, it is the only theory. (Marxism, of course, is not theory, it is bourgeois ideology [Bookchin 1979].) Like Hegel and Marx before him, Bookchin likes to think that he is not only the finest but the final theorist. As they were wrong, so is he.

2. Apolitical. This is, if anything, even zanier. How can a political philosophy like anarchism — any variety of anarchism — be apolitical? There is, to be sure, a difference between Bookchinism and all anarchisms. Anarchism is anti-political by definition. Bookchinism is political (specifically, it is city-statist, as shall shortly be shown). It follows as a matter of course that Bookchinism is incompatible with anarchism, but it doesn’t follow that lifestyle anarchism is apolitical, only that lifestyle anarchism is, at worst, anarchism, and at best, contrary to Bookchinism.

3. Hedonistic. Sure, why not?

The Dean is right about one thing: it’s the truth (if no longer the whole truth) that anarchism continues the Enlightenment tradition. As such, it stands for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a much more radical way than liberalism ever did. Godwin, for instance, argued that anarchism was the logical implication of utilitarianism. Kropotkin was convinced that “’the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is no longer a dream, a mere Utopia. It is possible” (1924: 4). His adoption of the utilitarian maxim was neither ironic nor critical.

Hedonism in some sense of the word has always been common ground for almost all anarchists. Rudolph Rocker attributed anarchist ideas to the Hedonists and Cynics of antiquity (1947: 5). Back before he lost his groove, the Dean praised the utopian socialist Charles Fourier for “envision[ing] new communities that would remove restrictions on hedonistic behavior and, almost embarrassingly to his disciples, sought to harmonize social relations on the basis of pleasure” (1974: 112). As that “most unsavory” (20) of lifestyle anarchists, Hakim Bey, put it, “your inviolable freedom awaits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs” (22 [quoting Bey 1991: 4]) — “words that could be inscribed on the New York Stock Exchange,” grumps the Dean, “as a credo for egotism and social indifference” (22). Decadent degenerates that we are, lifestyle anarchists tend to favor “a state of things in which each individual will be able to give free rein to his inclinations, and even to his passions, without any other restraint than the love and respect of those who surround him.” Presumably this credo, a more overtly hedonistic version of Bey’s socially indifferent egotism, is even better suited to decorate the Stock Exchange — which would probably surprise its author, the anarcho-communist Kropotkin (1890:15). We think love and respect could be forces as powerful as they are wonderful. Even Bakunin on occasion sounded more like Raoul Vaneigem than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as when he wrote that the anarchist is distinguished by “his frank and human selfishness, living candidly and unsententiously for himself, and knowing that by doing so in accordance with justice he serves the whole of society” (quoted in Clark 1984: 68).

The plebeian radical William Benbow originated the idea of the General Strike — the “Grand National Holiday” of the working classes — in 1832 (Benbow n.d.). (The Dean is wrong when he writes that anarcho-syndicalism “can be traced back, in fact, to notions of a ‘Grand Holiday’ [sic] or general strike proposed by the English Chartists” (7). Although Benbow went on to become a Chartist, there was no Chartist movement in 1832, the Chartists never espoused the general strike, and there was never anything remotely syndicalist about the Chartists’ purely political program centered on universal male suffrage [Black 1996c].) Benbow called upon the direct producers “to establish the happiness of the immense majority of the human race” — namely, themselves — to secure their own “ease, gaiety, pleasure and happiness.” If it’s hedonistic or decadent for impoverished, exploited, overworked people to stage a revolution for generalized case, gaiety, pleasure and happiness, long live hedonism and decadence!

The Dean’s yapping about “Yuppie” self-indulgence is, even aside from its gross hypocrisy, misdirected. The problem is not that Yuppies, or unionized factory workers, or small businessmen, or retirees, or whomever, are selfish. In an economy orchestrated by scarcity and risk, where almost anybody might be “downsized” (Black 1996b), only the super-rich can afford not to be selfish (but they usually are anyway: old habits die hard). The problem is the prevailing social organization of selfishness as a divisive force which actually diminishes the self. As society is now set up, individual selfishness is collectively, and literally, self-defeating.

The Dean recoils in horror from a coinage he attributes to Hakim Bey, “Marxism-Stirnerism” (20) — actually, as Bookchin probably knows, Bey borrowed it from me (Black 1986: 130). It comes from my Preface to the Loompanics reprint of a pro-situationist text, The Right to Be Greedy (For Ourselves 1983), which argued for “communist egoism.” I made it clear that I didn’t think the essay offered any ultimate resolution of the tension between the individual the social. No theory will ever accomplish that a priori, although theory might inform its resolution in practice. But the essay is acute in distinguishing the self-sacrificing militant from the selfish revolutionary: “Any revolutionary who is to be counted upon can only be in it for himself — unselfish people can always switch loyalty from one projection to another” (For Ourselves 1983) — for example, from Stalinism to Trotskyism to Anarchism to....

We need, not for people to be less selfish, but for us to be better at being selfish in the most effective way, together. For that, they need to understand themselves and society better — to desire better, to enlarge their perceptions of the genuinely possible, and to appreciate the real institutional (and ideological) impediments to realizing their real desires. By “real desires” I don’t mean “what I want people to want,” I mean what they really want, severally and together, as arrived at — as Benbow so presciently put it — by unconstrained, general, unhurried reflection, “to get rid of our ignorant impatience, and to learn what it is we do want.” And also what we “do not need” (Bookchin 1977: 307).

In typical retro-Marxist fashion, the Dean purports to resort, on this point as on others, to the ultimate argument from authority, the argument from History:

The Austrian workers’ uprising of February 1934 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936, I can attest [emphasis added], were more than orgiastic “moments of insurrection” but were bitter struggles carried on with desperate earnestness and magnificent elan, all esthetic epiphanies notwithstanding (23).

As a preliminary quibble — I can sometimes be as petty as lit. Dean usually is — I object to the word “attest” here. To “attest” to something — the signing of a will, for instance — means to affirm it as a witness, from personal knowledge. Bookchin was 13 in 1934 and 15 in 1936. He has no more personal knowledge of either of these revolts than my six year old niece does. Similarly, the Dean “would like to recall a Left That Was,” “the Left of the nineteenth and early twentieth century” (66), and rattles away as if he were doing exactly that — although that is, for someone born in 1921, a chronological impossibility. Another old man, Ronald Reagan, remembered the moving experience of liberating German concentration camps, although he spent World War II making propaganda films in Hollywood. What the uprising of the Austrian workers (state socialists, incidentally, not anarchists), savagely suppressed in only three days, has to do with present-day revolutionary anarchist prospects, I have no more idea than Bookchin seems to. Abstaining from “orgiastic” insurrection, if they did, must not have improved their military situation much.

Spain, where anarchists played so prominent a role in the revolution, especially in its first year, is a more complicated story. Of course it was a bitter struggle. It was a war, after all, and war is hell. Hey! — this just occurred to me — did Bookchin fight the Fascists when he had the chancy in World War II? Not that I’ve ever heard. He would have been draft-age military material, at age 21, in 1942 when they were drafting almost everybody, even my spindly, nearsighted 30-year-old father. Waving the bloody shirt at lifestyle anarchists might be more impressive if Bookchin had ever worn it.

The fact that an experience is one thing doesn’t necessarily entail that it is only that one thing. This is the sort of metaphysical dualism which vitiates almost everything the Dean has to say (Jarach 1996). There was a great deal festivity and celebration even in the Spanish Revolution, despite the unfavorable conditions. In Barcelona, “there was a festive enthusiasm in the streets” (Fraser 1979:152). Some couples, “‘believing the revolution made everything possible’ began living together and splitting up with too much ease (ibid.: 223). George Orwell, who fought with them, reported that the Catalan militiamen on the Aragon front were badly armed and even water was scarce, but “there was plenty of wine” (1952: 32). Indeed, “Orwell’s description of the city [of Barcelona] during this phase is still intoxicating: the squared and avenues bedecked with black-and-red flags, the armed people, the slogans, the stirring revolutionary songs, the feverish enthusiasm of creating a new world, the gleaming hope, and the inspired heroism” (Bookchin 1977: 306). In Barcelona, young anarchists commandeered cars — motoring was a thrill hitherto beyond their means — and careened through the streets on errands of dubious revolutionary import (Seidman 1991: 1, 168; Borkenau 1963: 70): mostly they were just joyriding. Bookchin reviles the romanticism of the lifestyle anarchists, forgetting his own statement that “Spanish Anarchism placed a strong emphasis on life-style” (1977: 4). As José Peirats remembered the Spanish Revolution, “we regarded ourselves as the last romantics” (Bolloten 1991: 769 n. 17). May they not be the last!

Consider the Paris Commune of 1871, which the Situationists referred to as the greatest rave-up of the nineteenth century:

The Communards of the Belleville district in Paris, who fought the battles of the barricades and died by the tens of thousands under the guns of the Versaillais, refused to confine their insurrection to the private world described by symbolist poems or the public world described by Marxist economics. They demanded the eating and the moral, the filled belly and the heightened sensibility. The Commune floated on a sea of alcohol — for weeks everyone in the Belleville district was magnificently drunk. Lacking the middle-class proprieties of their instructors, the Belleville Communards turned their insurrection into a festival of public joy, play and solidarity (Bookchin 1971: 277).

Revolutionaries make love and war.