Chapter 4: On Organization

Well, finally, the Dean has identified a concrete “programmatic” difference between him and his appointed enemies. Most, maybe all of those he criticizes as “lifestyle anarchists” indeed oppose the establishment of some sort of authoritative anarchist organization, as well they should (Black 1992:1 181–193). It is something North American anarchists have always shied away from, even in the heyday of the Left That Was. The Dean, as previously noted, has spent his entire anarchist life going out of his way not to involve himself with any such organization — not from principle, apparently, but because he was preoccupied, personalistically, with his own career. Some of us think the enterprise is ill-advised, even counterproductive, even apart from our suspicion that it wouldn’t advance our careers. A lot of us don’t even have careers.

Jacques Camatte (1995: 19–38) and, before him, the disillusioned socialist Robert Michels (1962) with whom the Dean is not entirely unfamiliar (1987: 245), provided some theoretical reasons for us to think so. Dean Bookchin himself (1977,1996) recounts the bureaucratic degeneration of what he considers the greatest anarcho-syndicalist organization of them all, the Spanish CNT-FAI. Even Kropotkin, one of the few anarchists to enjoy the Dean’s imprimatur, thought that a syndicalist regime would be far too centralized and authoritarian: “As to its Confederal Committee, it borrows a great deal too much from the Government that it has just overthrown” (1990: xxxv).

With organizations, especially large-scale ones, the means tend to displace the ends; the division of labor engenders inequality of power, officially or otherwise; and representatives, by virtue of greater interest, experience, and access to expertize, effectively supplant those they represent. We agree with the Dean that “the words ‘representative democracy,’ taken literally, are a contradiction in terms” (1987: 245). In other words, “delegated authority entails hierarchy” (Dahl 199O: 72). Thus in Spain the 30,000 faistas quickly came to control one million cenetistas, whom they led into policies — such as entering the government — to which the FAI militants should have been even more fiercely opposed than the rank-and-file CNT unionists. In a crisis — which might be of their own creation — the leadership generally consults its “personalistic” interests and the maintenance requirements of the organization, in that order; only then, if ever, their announced ideology; not the will of the membership (although the leaders will invoke it if it happens to coincide with their policies and, for that matter, even if it doesn’t). This has happened too often to be an accident.

We do not reject organization because we are ignorant of the history of anarchist organizations. We reject it, among other reasons, because we know that history only too well, and Bookchin is one of those who has taught it to us. Nobody is surprised that business corporations, government bureaucracies, hieratic churches and authoritarian political parties are in practice, as in theory, inimical to liberty, equality and fraternity. (Also incompetent: as Paul Goodman put it [1994: 58], central organization “mathematically guarantees stupidity.”) What at first surprises, and what cries out for explanation, is that egalitarian and libertarian organizations sooner or later — usually sooner — end up the same way.

Robert Michels (himself a socialist) studied the German Social Democratic Party — a Marxist party programmatically committed to social equality — a few years before the First World War, and found it to be thoroughly hierarchic and bureaucratic. Vindicating Michels, the vast majority of German socialists, contrary to their official antiwar position, promptly followed their leaders in supporting the war. Anarchists might congratulate themselves that Marxism, unlike anarchism, was a “bourgeois ideology” (Bookchin 1979) — like the Pharisees, thanking God that they are not as other men. (Although that would be “idealism,” another bourgeois ideology.) Michels, writing at a time when syndicalism seemed to be an important social movement, noted:

Here we find a political school, whose adherents are numerous, able, well-educated, and generous-minded, persuaded that in syndicalism it has discovered the antidote to oligarchy. But we have to ask whether the antidote to the oligarchical tendencies of organization can possibly be found in a method which is itself rooted in the principle of representation.... Syndicalism is... mistaken in attributing to parliamentary democracy alone the inconveniences that arise from the principle of delegation in general (1962: 318).

Times have changed: North American syndicalists aren’t numerous, aren’t able, and least of all are they generous-minded, although most may be “well-educated” if you equate a good education with college — something that I, having taught American college students, don’t do.

The Spanish experience suggests that Michels was right about “organization” at least in the sense of large-scale organizations whose higher reaches consist of representatives, such as the Spanish CNT or the confederal “Commune of communes” (57) the Dean desires. Even if these organizations are only minimally bureaucratic — a precious, and precarious, accomplishment — they are nonetheless inherently hierarchic. The CNT pyramid had at least six levels (and some outbuildings):

Section → Syndicate → Local federation of syndicates → Comercal federation → Regional confederation → National confederation (congress) (Brademas 1953: 16–17)

This leaves out, for instance, several intermediary bodies such as the Regional Plenum, the Plenum of Regionals (no, I’m not joking) and the National Committee (Bookchin 1977: 170). What happened was just what might have been expected to happen had anybody anticipated the CNT’s abrupt rise to power. When their turn came, in Spain, the organizational anarchists blew it too. It is not only that the most vociferous FAI militants, like Montseney and García Oliver, joined the Loyalist government — that could be explained away, albeit implausibly, as “personalistic” treachery — but that most of the CNT-FAI rank-and-file went along with it (Brademas 1953: 353). Even more startling than the leaders’ support for what they were supposed to be against (the state) was their opposition to what they were supposed to be for — social revolution — which swept over much of Republican Spain without the support, and in most cases over the objections, of the leaders (Bolloten 1991; Broué & Témime 1972). The leaders placed the war ahead of the revolution and managed, at the cost of a million lives, to lose both (Richards 1983).

The Spanish experience was not unique. The Italian syndicalists mostly went over to Fascism (Roberts 1979). The sham industrial democracy of syndicalist corporatism only needed a little fine-tuning and a touch of cosmetics to be finessed into the sham syndicalism of Fascist corporatism.

For North Americans, no example — not even the Spanish example — is more important than the Mexican Revolution. Had it turned out differently, it would have recoiled upon the United States with incalculable force. Because the revolution was contained south of the border, in America the Federal and state governments (and the vigilantes they encouraged) had a free hand to crush the anarchists, syndicalists and socialists so thoroughly that they’ve never recovered.

During the Mexican Revolution, the organized anarcho- syndicalists supported the liberals — the Constitutionalists — against the Zapatista and Villista social revolutionaries (Hart 1978: ch. 9). As urban rationalist progressives (like Bookchin), they despised peasant revolutionaries still clinging to Catholicism. Besides, they thought that Pancho Villa — here’s an uncanny precursor to Bookchinist jargon — acted too much like a “personalist”! (ibid.: 131). On behalf of the Constitutionalist regime — the one President Wilson sent the U.S. Army in to prop up — the anarcho-syndicalists raised “Red Battalions,” perhaps 12,000 strong, “a massive augmentation of commanding general Obregon’s Constitutional army” (ibid.: 133, 135). They soon reaped the reward — repression — that they’d earned. By 1931 the government had the Mexican working class under control (ibid.: 175–177, 183), as it still does. If revolution resumes it will be the Neo-Zapatistas, the Mayan peasants of Chiapas, who set it off (Zapatistas 1994).

Without attempting a comprehensive critique of the Dean’s municipal-confederal socialism, I’d like to raise a couple of prosaic points of fact which do not depend upon, although they are consistent with, the anti-organizational critiques of Michels, Camatte, Zerzan, myself and, by now, many others. Direct democracy is not, and for all anybody knows, never was, all it’s cracked up to be by the Dean. Most of the extant authors from classical antiquity, who knew the working system better than we ever will, were anti-democratic (Finley 1985: 8–11), as Bookchin elsewhere admits (1989: 176). The word “democracy” was almost always used pejoratively before the nineteenth century — that is, when it referred only to direct democracy: “To dismiss this unanimity as a debasement of the currency, or to dismiss the other side of the debate as apologists who misuse the term, is to evade the need for explanation” (Finley 1985: 11; cf. Bailyn 1992: 282–285).

The Athenian polis, the most advanced form of direct democracy ever practiced for any extended period, was oligarchic. It’s not only that, as Bookchin grudgingly concedes (59), the polity excluded slaves, numerous other noncitizens (one-third of free men were technically foreigners [Walzer 1970: 106]), and women, i.e., the polis excluded the overwhelming majority of adult Athenians. Even the Dean acknowledges, but attaches no importance to, the fact that maybe three-fourths of adult male Athenians were “slaves and disenfranchized resident aliens” (1987: 35). It could not have been otherwise:

These large disenfranchized populations provided the material means for many Athenian male citizens to convene in popular assemblies, function as mass juries in trials, and collectively administer the affairs of the community (Bookchin 1989: 69).

“A modicum of free time was needed to participate in political affairs, leisure that was probably [!] supplied by slave labor, although it is by no means true that all active Greek citizens were slave owners” (Bookchin 1990: 8). Greek culture, as Nietzsche observed, flourished at the expense of the “overwhelming majority”: “At their expense, through their extra work, that privileged class is to be removed from the struggle for existence, in order to produce and satisfy a new world of necessities” (1994: 178).

There are two more points to ponder.

The first is that the vast majority of the Athenian citizen minority abstained from participation in direct democracy, just as the majority of American citizens abstain from our representative democracy. Up to 40,000 Athenian men enjoyed the privilege of citizenship, less than half of whom resided in the city itself (Walzer 1970: 17). “All the policy decisions of the polis,” according to Bookchin, “are formulated directly by a popular assembly, or Ecclesia, which every male citizen from the city and its environs (Attica) is expected to attend” (1974: 24). In reality, the facility provided for the assembly accommodated only a fraction of them (Dahl 1990: 53–54), so most must have been expected not to attend, and didn’t. Attendance probably never exceeded 6,000, and was usually below 3,000. The only known tally of the total vote on a measure is 3,461 (Zimmern 1931: 169). And this despite the fact that many citizens were slaveowners who were thereby relieved, in whole or in part, of the need to work (Bookchin 1990: 8). And despite the fact that the prevalent ideology, which even Socrates subscribed to, “emphatically prioritized the social over the individual,” as the Dean approvingly asserts that Bakunin did (5): “as a matter of course,” the Athenians “put the city first and the individual nowhere” (Zimmern 1931: 169–170 n. 1). Even most Athenians with the time to spare for public affairs avoided political involvement.

In this respect they resembled the remnants of direct democracy in America, the New England town meetings. These originated in the Massachusetts Bay colony when the dispersal of settlements made a unitary central government impractical. At first informally, but soon formally, towns exercised substantial powers of self-government. The original form of self-government was the town meeting of all freemen, which took place anywhere from weekly to monthly. This system still prevails, formally, in some New England towns, including those in Bookchin’s adopted state Vermont — but as a form without content. In Vermont the town meeting takes place only one day a year (special meetings are possible, but rare). Attendance is low, and declining: “In recent years there has been a steady decline in participation until in some towns there are scarcely more persons present than the officials who are required to be there” (Nuquist 1964: 4–5). The Dean has thrown a lot of fairy-dust on present-day Vermont town meetings (1987:268–270; 1989: 181) without ever claiming that they play any real role in governance. Indeed, Bookchin hails the town meeting’s “control” (so-called) precisely because “it does not carry the ponderous weight of law” (1987: 269): in other words, it’s just a populist ritual. By failing to either “carry the ponderous weight of law” or jettison it — tasks equally beyond its illusory authority — the town meeting legitimates those who do carry, willingly, the ponderous weight of law, the practitioners of what the Dean calls statecraft.

In modern Vermont as in ancient Athens, most people think they have better things to do than attend political meetings, because most people are not political militants like the Dean. Several sorts of, so to speak, special people flock to these get-togethers. These occasions tend to attract a person (typically a man) who is an ideological fanatic, a control freak, an acting-out victim of mental illness, or somebody who just doesn’t have a life, and often someone favored by some combination of the foregoing civic virtues.

Face-to-face democracy is in-your-face democracy. To the extent that the tireless typicals turn up, they discourage those not so afflicted from participating actively or returning the next time. The Dean, for instance, speaks glowingly of “having attended many town meetings over the last fifteen years” (1987: 269) — they aren’t even held where he lives Burlington — who but a political pervo-voyeur could possibly get off on these solemn ceremonies? Some people like to watch autopsies too. The same types who’d get themselves elected in a representative democracy tend to dominate, by their bigmouthed bullying, a direct democracy too (Dahl 1990: 54). Normal non-obsessive people will often rather appease the obsessives or even kick them upstairs than prolong an unpleasant interaction with them. If face-to-face democracy means having to face democrats like Bookchin, most people would rather execute an about-face. And so the minority of political obsessives, given an institutional opportunity, tend to have their way. That was how it was in Athens, where direction came from what we might call militants, what they called demagogues: “demagogues — I use the word in a neutral sense — were a structural element in the Athenian political system [which] could not function without them” (Finley 1985: 69).

In “A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen,” Michael Walzer (1970: ch. 11) sent up muscular, direct democracy before Bookchin publicized his version of it. Walzer’s point of departure was what Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology about how the post-revolutionary communist citizen is a fully realized, all-sided person who “hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, rears cattle in the evening, and plays the critic after dinner” without ever being confined to any or all of these social roles (ibid.: 229). Bookchin has endorsed this vision (1989: 192, 195). Sounds good, but a muscular municipal socialist has further demands on his time:

Before hunting in the morning, this unalienated man of the future is likely to attend a meeting of the Council on Animal Life, where he will be required to vote on important matters relating to the stocking of the forests. The meeting will probably not end much before noon, for among the many-sided citizens there will always be a lively interest even in highly technical problems. Immediately after lunch, a special session of the Fishermen’s Council will be called to protest the maximum catch recently voted by the Regional Planning Commission, and the Marxist man will participate eagerly in these debates, even postponing a scheduled discussion of some contradictory theses on cattle-rearing. Indeed he will probably love argument far better than hunting, fishing, or rearing cattle. The debates will go on so long that the citizens will have to rush through dinner in order to assume their role as critics. Then off they will go to meetings of study groups, clubs, editorial boards, and political parties where criticism will be carried on long into the night (ibid.: 229–230).

In other words, “Socialism means the rule of the men with the most evenings to spare” (ibid.: 235). Walzer is far from being my favorite thinker (Black 1985), but what he sketched here is as much paradigm as parody. It scarcely exaggerates and in no way contradicts Rousseau’s — his fellow Genevan Calvin’s — ascetic republican civism, which in turn is disturbingly close to Bookchin’s muscular, moralistic municipalism.

The Dean has long insisted upon the potential of what he calls “liberatory technology” to free the masses from toil and usher in a post-scarcity society (1971: 83–139). “Without major technological advances to free people from toil,” anarchy — especially “primitivistic, prerational, antitechnological, and anticivilizational” anarchy — is impossible (26). No part of his Marxist heritage is more vital to Bookchin than its notion of humanity passing from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom by way of the rational, socially responsible application of the advanced technology created by capitalism.

The Dean is furious with “lifestyle anarchists” who doubt or deny this postulate of positivist progressivism, but for present purposes, let’s assume he’s right. Let’s pretend that under anarcho-democratic, rational control, advanced technology would drastically reduce the time devoted to production work and afford economic security to all. Technology would thus do for the upright (and uptight) republican Bookchinist citizenry what slavery and imperialism did for the Athenian citizenry — but no more. Which is to say, not nearly enough.

For even if technology reduced the hours of work, it would not reduce the hours in a day. There would still be 24 of them. Let’s make-believe we could automate all production-work away. Even if we did, technics couldn’t possibly do more than shave a few minutes off the long hours which deliberative, direct democracy would necessitate, the “often prosaic, even tedious but most important forms of self-management that required patience, commitment to democratic procedures, lengthy debates, and a decent respect for the opinions of others within one’s community” (Bookchin 1996: 20; cf. Dahl 1990: 32–36, 52). (I pass over as beneath comment Bookchin’s avowal of “a decent respect for the opinions of others.”) Having to race from meeting to meeting to try to keep the militants from taking over would be even worse than working, but without the pay.

That was the first practical objection. The second is that there is no reason to believe that there has ever been an urban, purely direct democracy or even a reasonable approximation of one. Every known instance has involved a considerable admixture of representative democracy which sooner or later usually subordinated direct democracy where it didn’t eliminate it altogether. In Athens, for instance, a Council of 500, chosen monthly by lot, set the agenda for the meetings of the ekklesia (there was no provision for new business to be brought up from the floor [Bookchin 1971: 157; Zimmern 1931: 170 n. 1]) and which, in turn, elected an inner council of 50 for governing between assemblies, which in turn elected a daily chairman. Sir Alfred Zimmern, whose sympathetic but dated account of Athenian democracy the Dean has referred to approvingly (1971: 159, 288 n. 27), observed that the Council consisted of paid officials (Zimmern 1931: 165), a detail the Dean omits. In general, “the sovereign people judged and administered by delegating power to representatives” (ibid,: 166). Generals, for instance — very important officials in an imperialist state frequently at war — were elected annually (Dahl 1990: 30; cf. Bookchin 1971: 157). These were remarkably radical democratic institutions for their day, and even for ours, but they are also substantial departures from Bookchinist direct democracy. Nonetheless the Dean only grudgingly admits that Athens was even a “quasi-state” (Bookchin 1989: 69), whatever the hell a “quasi-state,” is. Unbelievably, the Dean claims that “Athens had a ‘state’ in a very limited and piecemeal sense... the ‘state’ as we know it in modern times could hardly be said to exist among the Greeks” (1987: 34). Just ask Socrates. What’ll you be having? Hemlock, straight up. The Dean has elsewhere explained that in his municipal Utopia, face-to-face assemblies would set policy but leave its administration to “boards, commissions, or collectives of qualified, even elected officials” (Bookchin 1989: 175) — the experts and the politicians. Again: “Given a modest but by no means small size, the polis could be arranged institutionally so that it could have its affairs conducted by well-rounded, publicly-engaged men with a minimal, carefully guarded degree of representation” (Bookchin 1990: 8). Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!

Consider Switzerland, a highly decentralized federal republic which for the Dean is a fascinating example of “economic and political coordination within and between communities that render[s] statecraft and the nation-state utterly superfluous” (1987: 229). Alexis de Tocqueville, as astute a student of democracy as ever was, wrote in 1848:

It is not sufficiently realized that, even in those Swiss cantons where the people have most preserved the exercise of their power, there does exist a representative body entrusted with some of the cares of government. Now, it is easy to see, when studying recent Swiss history, that gradually those matters with which the people concern themselves are becoming fewer, whereas those with which their representatives deal are daily becoming more numerous and more important. Thus the principle of pure democracy is losing ground gained by the opposing principle. The former is insensibly becoming the exception and the latter the rule (1969b: 740).

Even in the Swiss cantons there were representative bodies (legislatures) to which the executive and the judiciary were strictly subordinate (ibid.: 741). Civil liberties were virtually unknown and civil rights entirely so, a much worse situation than in most European monarchies at the time (ibid.: 738). De Tocqueville considered the Swiss Confederation of his day “the most imperfect of all the constitutions of this kind yet seen in the world” (ibid.: 744). Earlier, John Adams had also made the point that the Swiss cantons were aristocratic republics as well as observing that their historical tendency was for hereditary elites to entrench themselves in office (Coulborn 1965: 101–102).

As for the “economic and political coordination” which renders the Swiss “nation-state utterly superfluous” (Bookchin 1987: 229), if the Swiss nation-state is utterly superfluous, why does it exist at all? As it does, as surely as exist the Swiss banks whose numbered accounts safeguard so much of the loot of the world’s dictators and gangsters (Ruwart 1996: 4). Is there possibly a connection? Might Switzerland’s rakeoff from loan-sharking and money-laundering underwrite its direct democracy (such as it is) just as slavery and imperialism underwrote the direct democracy of Athens? A Swiss parliamentarian once referred to his country as a nation of receivers of stolen goods.

Those of us who are somewhat older than most North American anarchists, although much younger than the Dean, also recall the history of efforts to form an all-inclusive anarchist organization here. Never did they come close to success. (To anticipate an objection — the Industrial Workers of the World is not now, and never has been, an avowedly anarchist organization. It is syndicalist, not anarchist [and not Bookchinist]). Not until about 1924, when most of the membership had fallen away, joined the Communist Party, or in some cases gone to prison, was the little that was left of the One Big Union essentially, if unofficially, an anarchist organization.) Much later the Anarchist Communist Federation made an effort to unify the workerist/organizational anarchists, and most recently the ex- (or maybe not so ex-) Marxists around Love & Rage, whose anarchist bona fides are widely doubted, flopped too.

At this time there seems to be no interest in a continental anarchist federation. The only apparent purpose for one is to legislate standards of anarchist orthodoxy (Black 1992: 181–193), an objective understandably unwelcome to the unorthodox majority of anarchists, although that now appears to be the Dean’s belated goal. While the anarchist ranks have greatly grown during the decades of decadence, we are far from numerous and united enough to assemble in a fighting organization. But no cult is ever too small for its own little Inquisition.

So, yes, we “lifestyle anarchists” tend to be anti-organizational, in the sense that we know that anarchist organizations have a poor track record and also that, given our numbers, our resources, and our differences, North American anarchists have no compelling reason to believe that what’s never worked for us before would work if we tried it now. It is not as if these organizing efforts are indispensable to accomplish even what little we are already accomplishing. Mostly what we are accomplishing is publishing. After the ACF fell apart, the collective which had been responsible for producing its newspaper Strike! continued to do so on its own for some years. An organization may need a newspaper, but a newspaper may not need an organization (Black 1992: 192). In the case of Love & Rage, the newspaper preceded what little there is to its continental organization. Self-reports and other reports of anarchist burnout within leftist anti-authoritarian collectives abound (No Middle Ground, Processed World, Open Road, Black Rose Books, Sabotage Bookstore, etc.). These are, for anarchists, usually ideological killing-fields. Ironically, the allegedly anti-organizational collectives, such as Autonomedia and the Fifth Estate, have outlasted most of the organizational ones. Could it be that the organizer-types are too individualistic to get along with each other?