Creating Free Cities

What would a free municipality look like? What would its basic institutions be? What material, political, and cultural preconditions must be met before we can arrive at them, and who will be the agents for social change? What kinds of movements and political efforts are required to create them? These questions strike to the core of Murray Bookchin’s political project, particularly as he refined it during the 1980s and 1990s. The immediate and ultimate aim of the political approach he advanced is to create free cities or municipalities, and as such it is meant to provide both a clear social ideal as well as a concrete political praxis.

By advancing libertarian municipalism, Bookchin hoped to see new civic movements emerge and claim control over their communities. Political involvement at the local level is necessary, he insisted, to guide and inspire a process of municipal empowerment. This process and the institutions it entails, he hoped, may provide a focal point for rallying progressive social movements to the common cause of political freedom in its most expansive sense. To a very large extent, creating free cities is about developing free citizens, in whose hands power over society should be squarely placed: it must reside in popular assemblies and not in bureaucracies, parliaments, or corporate boards. Libertarian municipalism is an attempt to create the political structures necessary for this shift in power. Democratized and radicalized, municipal confederations would emerge, it is hoped, as a dual power to challenge and ultimately replace the nation state and the market.

A lifelong radical and a fertile thinker, Murray Bookchin had been politically active since the 1930s; first in Communist parties, trade unions, and Trotskyist groups, then during the 1960s in the civil rights movement, urban ecology projects, anarchist groups, the radical student movement, and community groups; and later in the 1970s and 1980s in anti-nuclear movements and the early Green movement. Only in the early 1990s did his health preclude further involvement in practical political affairs, but he continued to write until the last years of his life. Bookchin’s works spanned a broad range of issues, including ecology, anthropology, technology, history, politics, and philosophy. He started to write about ecology and urban issues in the 1950s, and in 1964 wrote his seminal “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first definitive essay on radical social ecology. Later he was to refine his theories – through a corpus of more than 20 books – into a coherent body of ideas. Murray Bookchin died at the age of 85, on July 30, 2006. With his passing we lost one of the most challenging and innovative radical thinkers of the twentieth century.

Bookchin expressed his ideas on libertarian municipalism in a number of essays and articles, and advocated it in his lectures and talks. But no book has yet appeared that collects his essays on the subject. This collection of his late political essays, I am proud to say, helps fill that gap.[1] It should be seen, however, in relation to Bookchin’s full-length book on civic development, citizenship, and politics; From Urbanization to Cities.[2] When he republished this monumental work in 1992 he added the essay “The Meaning of Confederalism,” and in a later edition, in 1995, further added “Confederal Municipalism: An Overview” as well as a new prologue. Bookchin was no academic, and he did not write for purely scholarly purposes; his aim with this work “was to formulate a new politics” and by appending these essays he showed how he meant to inspire a movement to give his ideas concrete reality.

In light of this, I initially intended this book to be an expanded appendix to From Urbanization to Cities, so that both together would constitute an overview of his political thinking. In my view his late essays, collected here, make his earlier works on urbanization, ecology, and revolutionary history even more relevant and tangible. Bookchin’s essays from the 1980s and 1990s had tried to advance libertarian municipalism as an anarchist alternative, an effort that turned out to be problematical. Although for many years Bookchin called himself an anarchist, pioneering its concerns with ecology and with hierarchy, he had long had a troubled relationship with the anarchist tradition. After a bitter polemical struggle to defend what he considered to be its highest social ideals against individualists, workerists, mystics, primitivists, and autonomists, he got tired of “defending anarchism against anarchists,” as he put it, and publicly disassociated himself from anarchism as such. He had spent much time and effort formulating and presenting libertarian municipalism as an anarchist politics, but anarchists, it turned out, were not interested in these ideas, and in fact the political idea of democracy is actually alien to anarchism. Several notions in anarchism inspired Bookchin, but his ideas about municipal government, direct democracy, and confederation could not be contained within an anarchist framework. Breaking with anarchism, he urged left libertarian radicals to embrace a new set of ideas, indeed a new ideology – he called it communalism – that could transcend all classical radical theories, both Marxist and anarchist. As an attempt to revive Enlightenment radicalism, Bookchin intended communalism to be a coherent ideological platform upon which we might develop libertarian ideas today and provide the Left with a politics.

For these reasons, I realized very soon that these essays expanded the purpose of the anthology; they gave a remarkably consistent overview of Bookchin’s perspectives on communalism and its relationship to the Left in general. Taken together these essays not only provide an overview of Bookchin’s political ideas but explain how his political ideas stem from his broader historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives. Although the subject matter may be libertarian municipalism and practical politics, their foundational analyzes are profoundly social ecological, and their ideological perspective is basically communalist.

I chose the title Free Cities for this anthology because I think it stimulates our understanding of the historical impetus behind Bookchin’s political project. In order to achieve its ideal of a rational and ecological society, libertarian municipalism is an effort to create free cities, with an emphasis on both these words. Bookchin would have insisted that we interpret free not simply as “independent,” or “autonomous.” Rather, we should understand freedom in its expansive political sense, as the collective expression of human self-recognition and consciousness. Similarly, cities should not be interpreted merely as spatial centers of population or trade. For Bookchin, the historic rise of cities brought humanity the kind of social framework needed to break out of the rigid tribal world and develop into truly social beings; such citification is a historical precondition for our notion of citizenship. The ideal of the free cities was a subject not only of great historical interest but one that gave meaning to the project for social and political emancipation. The question that occupied Bookchin was to what extent municipalities could become genuine arenas for political creativity, universalism, and freedom and thus give human society its most rational expression.

I also hope that the title Free Cities stimulates the reader to conceptualize the political ideas of social ecology in a tangible manner. How can we empower our communities and recreate them along libertarian lines? How can we democratically transform the political, cultural, and material conditions of our own towns, villages, and cities? Social ecology proposes a politics of remaking daily life not only by creating nonhierarchical social relationships but also by institutionally restructuring neighborhoods and cities. The solemn theoretical adherence of these essays to “civilizatory advances” and a “rational society” should not frighten the reader; libertarian municipalism is a concrete political practice. It is my genuine hope that this book encourages readers to consider how to revitalize their own communities, how we may remake our municipalities as great places to live – for all their citizens – and render them politically and socially free.

My choice of subtitle, Communalism and the Left, expresses Bookchin’s wish to frame his theories in a communalist framework and to define their relationship to the Left. Bookchin explains in these essays the major achievements as well as the serious deficiencies of various traditional radical Left ideologies, such as Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism. For one thing, both socialism and anarchism have ignored the need to develop a political approach in the classical sense of the term, a politics distinct from the State on the one hand and from the social sphere on the other. Communalism was for Bookchin an attempt to provide the ideological framework to resuscitate the greatest Left traditions and to formulate a libertarian politics.

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The idea for this book germinated when I last saw Murray, a few months before his death. At the end of November 2005 Sveinung Legard and I visited Murray and Janet Biehl, his long-time partner and collaborator, in Burlington. During our stay we had lengthy political discussions and undertook a substantial interview with Murray, which turned out to be the last one he ever gave. At one point in our discussions, Bookchin mentioned that he hoped to see his writings on libertarian municipalism collected and published. I had already given this possibility some serious thought and had specific ideas about how to put together anthologies of his writings. For some time I had been translating his works into Norwegian, and had edited, anthologized, and published his political writings here in Scandinavia. But I had hesitated to suggest an English-language anthology, since English is my second language – an obvious shortcoming. Moreover, Murray had long benefited from the support of Janet’s superior editing skills; for many years, she had carefully helped prepare his manuscripts for publication. Hence I was reluctant to offer my assistance. But at that time Janet was exhausted from the intense work of editing The Third Revolution and was in no position to undertake any new obligation of the sort proposed. I fervently wanted to see the anthologies materialize, and, emboldened by Murray’s expressed wish, I offered to assist.

My specific suggestions were twofold. First, I would put together a small book consisting of some four essays that gave a rounded yet accessible presentation of social ecology, to be called Social Ecology and Communalism.[3] Then I would collect the more directly political essays in a second book that would comprise a comprehensive overview. Murray and I discussed these book projects in detail, and he gave me some manuscripts and notes for my work.[4] I assured him that I would do my very best to see that these books were edited according to his wishes, and he expressed his confidence by putting me in charge of their publication. As soon as I returned to Norway, I began to work on the books.

My own qualifications for preparing these books may not be obvious to the reader, as I not only live on the other side of the Atlantic from Murray but am not a native English speaker. But I have been involved with the ideas of social ecology and libertarian municipalism since the early 1990s. I first met Murray in 1996 and visited him many times thereafter, staying in Burlington for weeks and months, experiencing both his generosity and that of his family. Murray and I regularly had long telephone conversations throughout our ten years of friendship and cooperation. Whenever I made a decision to translate his works into Norwegian for publication, I always informed him of my choices, and I consulted him when I encountered problems. He thus became familiar with my editorial approach and abilities. When I started writing my own essays, he always read them carefully and gave me his comments. He was sometimes a stern critic, sometimes encouraging, but always his perspectives were challenging. Over the years we grew ever closer. After the Second International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism (held in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1999), I suggested the creation of an international journal to express a consistent communalist perspective. Murray eagerly joined the journal’s editorial board, the last political group to which he belonged.[5] For its launch I wrote “Communalism as Alternative,” a manifesto-like essay presenting the basic ideological views Murray had developed.

Editing the two anthologies was a way for me to continue our cooperation, as well as a way to show my gratitude for his intellectual generosity. Unfortunately Murray died only seven months after our meeting on the books, and he never had the chance to see either of them published. I nonetheless feel confident that Free Cities: Communalism and the Left has become what he wanted it to be. The essays gathered here are among Bookchin’s last, and they give a good overview of his ideas at the end of his life. I genuinely hope that the reader will get as much intellectual stimulation and political inspiration from reading these essays as I have done from preparing them for publication.

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Some of the essays in this anthology may already be familiar to readers who have followed Bookchin’s work closely, but most of them are previously unpublished; they have been collected from letters, lectures, unfinished drafts, and manuscripts. I have tried to order them in a flowing presentation to give an overview of Bookchin’s late political outlook. Since he died before witnessing the completion of this project, I think it is only decent to explain as fully as possible my editorial choices in creating Free Cities.

Generally speaking, in addition to doing regular editorial work, such as adding titles and subheadings, or doublechecking references, dates and names, I have tried to create a common style of presentation by making the notes, letters and unfinished manuscripts into proper essays. The book consists both of independent essays on specific political issues and of more general essays in which Bookchin often gives brief synopses of his basic political ideas. As a consequence, there is inevitably some overlap between the chapters, though I have tried to keep this to a minimum. In these essays Murray made recurring references to his basic works, From Urbanization to Cities, The Ecology of Freedom, and Remaking Society, and though I have trimmed down the number of references here, I would strongly advise the reader unfamiliar with these works to consult them. Sometimes Bookchin would discuss the same idea in several places, such as the distinction between politics and statecraft, or his tripartite distinction between the political sphere, the social sphere, and the State. Suffice to say, again, readers will deepen their understanding of these ideas by exploring them further in Bookchin’s larger works.

I have also cut out some of the conceptual discussions Bookchin repeated over several of these essays: in particular his often-mentioned explanation that he is using the term politics in its classical Greek meaning, as the self-management of the polis, and his frequently repeated caveat that he is well aware of the historical shortcomings of ancient Athenian democracy in regard to slavery, xenophobia, and patriarchy. When Bookchin raises similar themes in different essays – say, on the issues of consensus, confederation, or government – I have tried to limit the repetition, either by removing sections or consolidating the discussion in one place, particularly in the previously unpublished writings. Generally I have omitted repetitions of similar arguments in different essays, but have left them intact when they approach an issue from a distinctive angle and thus serve to nuance his views. Here Bookchin was well aware of my general intention.

Whenever possible I have accommodated Bookchin’s wish to update his essays according to the communalist perspective. This issue is of course most significantly related to his break with anarchism, a matter he explains in some detail in several of the essays.[6] To the extent that was appropriate, I have also updated some of the older essays. Similarly, when he appeals to a specific group (say, the Greens, with whom he worked with for a while) in a way that seemed outdated, I have tried to make the appeal more general (changing it to, say, “radical ecologists”). I thoroughly discussed all these changes with Bookchin and am making them here at his explicit request.

Whenever linking one paragraph to another required the addition of a transitional sentence, I have tried to make use of concrete expressions that Bookchin used elsewhere. To the best of my abilities, whenever I have had to revise paragraphs or move phrases, I have tried to preserve Bookchin’s tone. If readers sometimes miss the characteristic musicality of his writings, it is not for lack of trying on my part.

The hardest part of putting together such an anthology, however, lies in deciding which essays to include and how to organize them. I can only hope that more of Bookchin’s essays, lectures and interviews will be made available in the years to come, to shed further light on his intellectual development, particularly during the last decades. Still, based as it is on my understanding of what Bookchin wanted to see published from the last years of his life, this book presents that work as honestly as possible.

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The “Introduction” is cobbled together from notes that Bookchin gave me November 2005. When we were discussing this project, I told him that I would love to have him write an introduction to this book, as his earlier essays on libertarian municipalism needed contextualization in light of his recent break with anarchism. He then revealed that he had already started drafting such an introduction, and passed along to me his draft, along with a draft for a separate essay he had recently started writing. Both these drafts were in a woefully unfinished state, almost notes, and we agreed that they had to be focused to fit this specific anthology. To ease my work, I suggested we use the drafts in combination with a short piece Bookchin had written to introduce a recent Swedish anthology of his writings – a suggestion he approved.[7] I have thus extracted the core message of his drafts and spun them around the existing Swedish introduction. By further distinguishing his communalist approach from Marxism and anarchism, and by emphasizing the profound historicism of these ideas, I think this piece constitutes an appropriate introduction to the present anthology.

The next essay, “The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society,” brings us directly to some social ecological conclusions on political radicalism, and situates the remaining essays in the context of social ecology. I chose this essay because I find it to be an accessible leadin to libertarian municipalism as a social ecological politics, in relation to the impending ecological crisis that besets us. I also like the fact that it briefly touches on Bookchin’s criticisms of other radical tendencies in the ecology movement, criticisms that have made for defining debates. This essay was originally published as “The Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the Need to Remake Society,” in Society and Nature 2, no. 3 (1994), and has been edited only slightly to fit this anthology.

“Nationalism and the ‘National Question,’” written in March 1993, was first published in Society and Nature 2, no. 2 (1994). It has long been one of my personal favorites among Bookchin’s essays, and I am happy to include it here as it gives a solid historical argument not only against statism but also against nationalism. In this essay Bookchin explores the Left’s historically ambivalent relationship to the “national question,” and contrasts his ideas of municipalism and confederation to those of nations and states, precisely by the universal principles of democracy and human solidarity. The succinct “Nationalism and the Great Revolutions” was originally published as an addendum to the preceding essay, highlighting the universalistic spirit of the Enlightenme Bookchin’s arguments against nationalism and statism are taken further in the next piece, which I have called “The Historical Importance of the City,” and which consists of excerpts from a longer polemical essay “Comments on the International Social Ecology Network Gathering and the ‘Deep Social Ecology’ of John Clark,” written in September 1995 and published in Democracy and Nature 3, no. 3 (1997). Here we are given forceful arguments for the civilizatory and humanizing aspects of the emergence of the cities – the tendencies that libertarian municipalism ultimately wants to recover and expand. I told Bookchin that I had long wanted to highlight some of the main issues in his polemics with John Clark, and I specifically suggested these excerpts. Frustratingly, many of his political adversaries have tended to deflect attention from the real ideological questions at stake; by including these excerpts, I hope to offer the basic yet crucial arguments. I suggested to Bookchin that I include this abridged version, but would not want to suggest that this version is better than the original, only that it better serves our purpose here. Neither would I want readers to ignore the fact that every sentence in this essay is meant as a direct or indirect criticism of Clark’s position. Readers are strongly encouraged to read the polemic in full, which relates more directly to the actual points of contention and contains other important discussions as well.[8] Other essays from Bookchin’s 1990s debates with anarchists are certainly also of interest, as they often give different emphases and nuances to his political ideas.

The 1990s debates over the nature of anarchism alienated Bookchin from the contemporary anarchist movement. Unfortunately he wrote no fundamental essays that explained his conclusions in great detail, although in retrospect we can see how Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism initiated his break with this ideology.[9] Many of the features of “lifestyle anarchism” that he criticized were ones that he later concluded were symptomatic of anarchism as such. Murray explained his reasoning in a letter to Peter Zegers and the editorial board of Communalism (in November 2001), in which he considers even the more social forms of anarchism to be basically egoist. He also developed some of these ideas in a letter to Hamish Alcorn, written on July 30, 1999, just before his public break with anarchism. With Bookchin’s permission I have structured the essay “Anarchism as Individualism” around these two letters, incorporating as well some unpublished material from “Toward a Communalist Approach” and an early version of “The Communalist Project.” Despite its brevity, I think this essay may shed light on Bookchin’s reasons for breaking with anarchism – the political ideology with which he had been associated, and of which he had been a major representative, for four decades.

The next essay, “Anarchism, Power, and Government,” is based on the appendix Murray wrote to “The Communalist Project,” which he called “Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution,” published in Communalism, no. 2 (November 2002). I have expanded it with excerpts on the same subject originally from “The Future of the Left” and “Toward a Communalist Approach.” As these essays were written around the same time and brought up very similar issues, I have knitted similar passages together. As such, I think this short essay contains one of his weightiest arguments against anarchism, focusing particularly on its inability to deal with real-life problems in periods of social change and revolution.

The two preceding essays make an interesting contrast with “The Revolutionary Politics of Libertarian Municipalism.” Written as a video-transmitted speech that Bookchin presented to the First International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, held in Lisbon in 1998, it was one of his last attempts to present his political ideas as a direct extension of the anarchist-communist tradition. Here he tries to uphold the classical anarchist preference for communes, revolutionism, and federations, in order to rework and refine these ideals for changed social conditions: The speech was titled “A Politics for the 21^st Century.” I have removed dated references and some parts that overlap with the other essays included herein. I have also tried to update the essay according to Bookchin’s expressed wishes, making minor changes concerning his ideological drift from anarchism to communalism, without changing any of its basic content. After this speech Bookchin gave up on his attempts to influence the anarchist movement from within, and, at the Second International Conference in Vermont the following year, he broke openly with anarchism as a theory and a movement. This essay contains his last important evaluation of the anarchist tradition from within, trying to emphasize its revolutionary, democratic, and socialist character. He later considered his efforts to have been an utter failure. Where he had earlier attempted to expand the federalist, cooperative, and municipalist trends within the anarchist tradition, he now tried to bring those valuable contributions into a new theoretical framework unburdened by the anti-social, anti-intellectual, and antiorganizational tendencies with which anarchism has always struggled.

The next essay, “The Future of the Left,” is in my view the jewel of this collection, tying all the other pieces together and giving this anthology its necessary coherence and breadth. Here Bookchin assesses of the state of radicalism at the turn of the twenty-first century – not only the radicalism of the contemporary resistance against “globalization,” but radicalism going back to the interwar period and twentieth-century revolutionary experiences. He takes a remarkably detached, yet engaged, look at traditional radicalism and its basic premises, specifically analyzing trends in Marxism and anarchism. Bookchin often spoke of this essay and finally showed it to me at our November 2005 meeting. The manuscript he handed over to me to edit had been written in December 2002. It was still unfinished (it actually ended mid-sentence) but was remarkably consistent in its reasoning. Although I have edited the essay, nothing of substance has been omitted, and though it broadens the focus of this anthology far beyond the collection of “strictly political” writings I had intended, it is this piece that contains Bookchin’s most mature ideas. It is fully communalist, posing a set of challenging questions for our generation of radicals to consider, and even as a stand-alone essay it gives this book a scope that stretches far into the future.

We close with an essay that Bookchin wrote for Communalism. Originally written in July 2000 as “Communalism: An Overview,” it was supposed to be revised for publication, but instead Bookchin wrote a completely new essay that ended up as the masterfully composed and theoretically challenging “The Communalist Project.”[10] Even though the “Overview” essay was thus superseded, it contained so many interesting aspects that I always felt it deserved to be published in its own right. As a matter of fact, Bookchin himself returned to it in June 2003 and made some significant updates, and I have since taken out all the parts that overlap with “The Communalist Project.” I think it is of great interest, not because it is a definitive exposition of communalism – it is not – but rather because it is so suggestive of such an exposition. In this essay we see Bookchin still struggling with his ideological break with anarchism, framing his presentation almost entirely as a polemic against prevalent anarchist notions – unlike “The Communalist Project” and “The Future of the Left,” which stand out independently as a challenging ideological testament.

Taken together, the essays in Free Cities represent Bookchin’s most recent ideas, particularly on political and ideological issues. In my view this anthology offers both a good introduction to his political ideas as well as solid overview of his communalist approach. Not only does it contain much previously unpublished material, it helps explain ideological issues that remained unresolved at his death, particularly concerning his ideological break with anarchism. It will be easy for readers familiar with Bookchin’s writings to see how his distinct political ideas are educed from his broader theory of social ecology. For Bookchin, to advance libertarian municipalism meant to defend and build upon the ideals of the Enlightenment, which he considered the greatest tradition of social development. Based on communalism and social ecology, libertarian municipalism is a fundamental attempt to define a political humanism and to formulate and create a rational society.

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I confess that preparing this manuscript for publication has not been easy, particularly since Bookchin passed away before seeing its completion. Despite the arduous task, I have nevertheless found it a pleasure to work with these wonderful ideas.

I would particularly like to thank Janet Biehl, who meticulously edited all of Murray’s work in his last two decades before it saw publication. I would also like to express my gratitude to my close comrades Yngvild Hasvik and Sveinung Legard, since their support, patience, and advice have been indispensable in finishing this project.

At the end of this preface I would also like to properly thank Murray Bookchin for allowing me to work on these ideas, and for our ten years of cooperation and friendship. It has been a privilege to be associated with him; his intellectual vigor was always a source of great inspiration, and I have gained much from his genuinely sharing personality. However much I have enjoyed his warmth and generosity on a personal level, my gratitude above all is for his achievement in providing a future movement with such challenging ideas.

If this collection of essays contributes to contemporary discussions on what kind of political institutions and radical organizations we need today, it will have served its purpose. It is my genuine hope that readers will seek to familiarize themselves with Bookchin’s ideas, here and in his other works, not as an academic exercise but as a way of preparing to change the world.

Eirik Eiglad
March 30, 2008