Defining the Revolutionary Project

The ideals of freedom, tainted as they have been, still exist in our midst. But rarely has the revolutionary project been more diluted by the “embourgeoisment” that Bakunin feared toward the end of his life. Nor have its terms been more ambiguous than they are today. Words like “radicalism” and “leftism” have become murky and they are in grave danger of being severely compromised. What passes for revolutionism, radicalism, and leftism, today, would have been dismissed a generation or two ago as reformism and political opportunism. Social thought has moved so deeply into the bowels of the present society that self-styled “leftists” — be they socialists, Marxists, or independent radicals of various kinds — risk the possibility of being digested without even knowing it. There is simply no conscious left of any significance in many Euro-American countries. Indeed, there is not even a critically independent radicalism, apart from small enclaves of revolutionary theorists.

What is perhaps more serious in the long run is that the revolutionary project risks the loss of its very identity, its capacity for self-definition, its sense of direction. Not only do we witness a lack of revolutionary insight today, but there is even an inability to define what is meant by the words “revolutionary change” and the full meaning of terms like “capitalism.” Bakunin’s troubled remark about the “embourgeoisment” of the working class can be matched by Marx’s fear that a day might come when a future generation of workers would take capitalism so much for granted that it would seem like a “natural” form of human affairs, not a society limited to a specific period of history. To speak of Euro-American society as “capitalist” often invites puzzlement at best or specious contrast with the so-called socialist societies of countries like Russia and China at worst. That the former is a corporate form of capitalism while the latter is a bureaucratic form often seems incomprehensible to conventional wisdom.

It may well be, to be sure, that we still do not understand what capitalism really is. Since the outbreak of the First World War, radicals have described every period of capital ism as its “last stage,” even while the system has grown, acquired international dimensions, and innovated technologies that were not foreseeable by science fiction a few generations ago. Capitalism has also exhibited a degree of stability and an ability to co-opt its opposition that would have thoroughly shaken the elders of socialism and anarchism in the last century. Indeed, it may well be that capitalism has not come completely into its own as the absolute incarnation of social evil, to use Bakunin’s words — that is to say, as a system of unrelenting social rivalry between people at all levels of life and an economy based on competition and accumulation. But this much is clear: it is a system that must continually expand until it explodes all the bonds that tie society to nature — as growing holes in the ozone layer and the increase in the greenhouse effect indicate. It is literally the cancer of social life as such.

In this case, nature will take its “revenge.” This “revenge,” to be sure, may assume the form of an uninhabitable planet for complex life-forms like our own and our mammalian cousins. But given the accelerating rate of technological innovation, including means for plumbing the very secrets of matter and life in the form of nuclear science and bioengineering, it is possible that the breakdown of natural cycles will be dealt with by a completely synthetic substitute in which huge industrial installations will supplant natural processes. It would be utterly blind, today, to overlook such a possibility — and the possibility too that future generations will be obliged to accept a nightmarish totalitarian society structured around a completely technocratic administration of social and natural affairs on a global scale. In that case the planet conceived as a self-regulating natural system of checks and balances under the rubric of the “Gaia hypothesis,” would be replaced by a partially or totally engineered technological system, perhaps a “Daedalus hypothesis,” as it were, without the Greek notion of limit and restraint.

But until such a grim prospect becomes a dear issue on the historical agenda, we desperately need to recover the revolutionary project and the new elements that have been added to it over the past half-century. Nor can we be impeded by taunts that the very idea of a revolutionary project is evidence of “sectarianism” or “radical dogmatism.” What today calls itself “liberal” or “left-of-center,” to use the prudent political verbiage of our time, is too debilitated intellectually to know what constitutes “sectarianism” as distinguished from a searching analysis of contemporary social and ecological problems.

We, in turn, must resolutely and independently reexamine the past and present periods into which the revolutionary project can be sorted out, such as the era of “proletarian socialism,” the “New Left,” and the so-called Age of Ecology. We must explore the answers that have been given in the recent past to the problems that have arisen today and the ones that lie ahead. Until we engage in a critical examination of earlier solutions, we will still be groping in the darkness of an unknown history that has much to teach us. We will be burdened by a naivety and ignorance that can completely mislead us into meaningless, futile, and even frivolous directions.

The Failure of Proletarian Socialism

To a great extent what sharply confronts us today is the fact that one of the great revolutionary projects of the modern era is no longer viable or meaningful in our present predicament. I refer in part to the Marxist analyzes of society — but, as we shall see, to proletarian socialism as a whole, which extended far beyond Marxism into libertarian forms of socialism and even certain utopian ideas. That “being determines consciousness” or, put less philosophically, that material factors determine cultural life, is at once too simplistic to carry the enormous weight it had in the latter half of the last century and the first half of the present one, when capitalism itself shaped the mentality of Europe and America along highly economistic lines.

A closer view of history shows that this largely bourgeois image of reality, which Marxism turned into a seemingly “radical” ideology, is limited to specific times in the past, however prevalent it may seem at present It would have been impossible to understand why capitalism did not become a dominant social order at various times in the ancient world if inherited cultural traditions had not restrained and ultimately undermined the capitalistic drives that were very much at work in the past ages. One could go on with endless examples of the extent to which “consciousness” seemed to determine “being” (if one wants to use such “deterministic” language) by turning our eyes to the histories of Asia, Africa, and Indian America, not to mention many European countries early in modern times. On the broad level of the relationship of consciousness to being — which still carries considerable weight with Marxist academics even as all else in the theory lies in debris — Marxism begs its own questions. Looking back from its entrenched economistic and bourgeois viewpoint, it defines in bourgeois terms a host of problems that have distinctly nonbourgeois and surprisingly noneconomic bases. Even the failure of precapitalist societies to move into capitalism, for example, is explained by a “lack” of technological development, the poverty of science and, as often happens to be the case in many of Marx’s less rigorous works like the Grundrisse, by the very cultural factors that are supposed to be contingent on economic factors.

Apart from the circular reasoning that characterizes so much of Marxism, what is of more serious concern in trying to define the revolutionary project for our time is the ideal of proletarian socialism and the historical myths that have grown up around it. Revolutionary projects have always been rooted in the special features of their period, however much they have tried to universalize their ideas and speak for humanity at all times. Peasant radicalism dates back almost to the beginnings of settled village life. Dressed in a universal religious morality, it always professed to speak for timeless values and hopes centered on land and village forms. Figures like the Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno in 1917–1921, and the Mexican populist, Emiliano Zapata, around the same time period, voiced almost identical goals. By the same token, artisanal radicalism surfaced throughout the Middle Ages and reached its zenith in the enrages movement of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was perhaps its most conscious spokesperson, although his municipalist and confederalist ideas were more far-reaching in their reconstructive implications than those of any particular class for which he spoke.

Proletarian socialism, which still lingers on today in the ideals of many independent socialists and syndicalists, has a more complex and convoluted pedigree. It stems, in part, from the transformation of many fairly self-sufficient craftsmen, by capitalism, into industrial workers during the explosive years of the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, it was influenced as a movement — all theories aside — by its rural and small town origins, notably, by the proletarianization of peasants, who were obliged to leave their villages and agrarian cultures. That they brought these precapitalist cultures, with their naturalistic rhythms and values, into industrial cities is a matter of crucial importance in explaining the character of their discontent and their militancy. The working classes of traditional industrial capitalism, even as late as the 1920s and 1930s in America and Europe, were not “hereditary” proletarians. American auto workers, for example, were recruited from the Appalachian mountains in the first half of the present century. Many French, and especially Spanish, workers were recruited from villages and small towns, when they were not simply craftspeople in large cities like Paris. The same is true of the working classes that made the 1917 revolution in Russia. Marx, it is worth noting, to his lasting confusion, generally viewed these highly volatile strata as der alte scheisse (literally, “the old shit”) and in no way counted on them to make the revolutions that his followers were to celebrate after his death.

This agrarian background yielded a highly complex mosaic of attitudes, values, and tensions between pre-industrial and industrial cultures — all of which gave a fiery, almost millenarian, character to men and women who, even though they worked with modern machinery and lived in major, often highly literate, urban areas, were guided by largely artisanal and peasant values. The magnificent anarchist workers who burned the money they found in the looted gunshops of Barcelona during the hectic days of the July, 1936 uprising (as Ronald Fraser reports), were people who acted from deep utopistic and ethical impulses, not simply from the economic interests that capitalism was to imbue in much of the working class as time passed by.[16] The proletariat of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a very special social breed. They were delasee in their thinking, spontaneous in the vital naturalism of their behavior, angry over the loss of their autonomy, and shaped in their values by a lost world of craftsmanship, a love of land, and community solidarity.

Hence, there was the highly revolutionary spirit that surged up in the workers’ movement from the June barricades of Paris in 1848, when a largely artisanal working class raised the red flags of a “social republic,” to the May barricades of Barcelona in 1937, where an even more socially conscious working class raised the red and black flags of anarcho-syndicalism.

What has so drastically changed in the decades that followed this century-long movement, and the revolutionary project that was built around it, is the social composition, political culture, heritage, and aims of the present-day proletariat. The agrarian world and the cultural tensions with the industrial world that fostered their revolutionary fervor, have waned from history. So, loo, have the people, indeed the very personalities, that embodied this background and these tensions.

The working class has now become completely industrialized, not radicalized as socialists and anarcho-syndicalists so devoutly hoped. It has no sense of contrast, no clash of traditions, and none of the millenarian expectations of its antecedents. Not only has the mass media commandeered it and defined its expectations (a convenient explanation, if one wants to anchor everything in the power of modern media), but the proletariat as a class has become the counterpart of the bourgeoisie as a class, not its unyielding antagonist. To use the language that was spawned by proletarian socialism against its own myths, the working class is simply an organ within the body of capitalism, not the developing “embryo” of a future society, a concept that figured so significantly in the revolutionary project of proletarian socialism.

We are simply witnesses not only to its failure as a “historical agent” for revolutionary change, but to its completion as a product spawned by capitalism with the development of capitalism itself. In its “pure” form, the proletariat has never been a threat, as a class, to the capitalist system. It was precisely the “impurities” of the proletariat, like the bits of tin and zinc that turn copper into hardened bronze, that gave the earlier proletariat its militancy and, at certain high points, its millenarian zeal.

We come, here, to a terribly flawed model of social change that Marx introduced into the revolutionary project of the last hundred years — one that was to be implicitly accepted by non-Marxist radicals as well. This is the belief that a new society is born within the womb of the old and eventually grows out of it like a robust child that commandeers or destroys its parents.

Nothing in antiquity supported this “embryo” theory of revolution, if it can be called that. European feudalism replaced ancient society on the northern shores of the Mediterranean — and only there — because feudal relationships were generally the form into which tribal relations decompose almost everywhere when they are not reworked into absolute monarchies of the kind that appeared in the East. The great European hinterland north of the Alps was rapidly losing its tribalistic features when it encountered Roman society. Capitalism was not born within the womb of the new European feudalism and there was no inevitability about its birth, as we are led to believe by Marxist historians of the past or by Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein in more recent times. I have tried to show elsewhere that Europe, between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, was very mixed socially and economically, offering many alternatives to capitalism and the nation-state.[17] The myth of an “embryonic” development of capitalism and the “inevitability” of its predominance was to wreak havoc in the revolutionary project of proletarian socialism.

First, it was to create the myth that the proletariat was the analog of the bourgeoisie in modern times and presumably, like the medieval bourgeoisie, was developing along revolutionary lines within capitalism itself. That the proletariat never even had the economic predominance assigned by Marx to the early bourgeoisie, indeed, that it would have to seize economic as well as political power—all of this created a can of theoretical worms that should have shown how absurd the “embryo” theory was for the proletariat, even if the medieval bourgeoisie enjoyed the power imputed to it. Precisely how the working class could rise beyond its own narrow interests, in an economy to which it was integrally wedded by its narrow demands for jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions within the capitalist system, remained an impenetrable mystery.

Marxian economics, for all its extraordinary insights into the commodity relationship and accumulation process, was a largely contrived ideology to show that capitalism would drive the proletariat to revolt through misery and chronic crises. The proletariat, it was presumed, enjoyed an advantage over all precapitalist oppressed classes in that the industrial system made for cooperation within the factory itself and that time would make it the overwhelming population of the country as capitalism itself expanded. That the factory system would, if anything, utterly domesticate the proletariat through the deadening industrial routine of the factory; that it would subdue the proletariat’s unruliness by conditioning it to a managerial hierarchy and the rationalized methods of production; that the proletariat would not be driven by sheer desperation to revolution, but would be stratified against itself in the course of which the well-paid and racially “superior” would be resolutely pitted against the poorly paid and racially “inferior”; that hopes of a chronic economic crisis would be dashed by shrewd techniques of crisis-management; that nationalism and even patriotic chauvinism would prevail over international class solidarity; indeed, that technological innovation would reduce the proletariat numerically and bring it into collusion with its own exploitation through Japanese-type management approaches — all of this was not even faintly understood as the logic of the capitalist development.

Second, Marx’s myth of an “embryonic” development was to mystify history and remove its essential element of spontaneity. Basically, there could be only one course of development in such a theory, not alternative ones. Choice played a very insignificant role in social evolution. Capitalism, the nation-state, technological innovation, the breakdown of all traditional ties that once fostered a sense of social responsibility — all were seen not only as inevitable but desirable. History, in effect, allowed for minimal human autonomy. “Men make their own history...” wrote Marx — a rather obvious statement that culture-oriented Marxists were to emphasize long after his death and amid growing contradictions between his theories and objective reality. They often forgot to note, however, that Marx made his statement primarily to emphasize its closing phrase: “... they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” [18]

The Marxian revolutionary project, but by no means the Marxian alone, became saddled with an array of “stages,” “substages,” and still further “substages” that rested on technological and political “preconditions.” In contrast to the anarchist policy of continually pressing against the society in search of its weak-points and trying to open areas that would make revolutionary change possible, Marxian theory was structured around a strategy of “historical limits” and “stages of development” The Industrial Revolution was welcomed as a technological “precondition” for socialism and Luddite tendencies were denounced as “reactionary”; the nation-state was heralded as a crucial step in the direction of a “proletarian dictatorship” and confederalist demands were denounced as atavistic. Everywhere along the way, centralization of the economy and the State were welcomed as advances in the direction of a “planned economy,” that is, of a highly rationalized economy. Indeed, so strongly were Marxists, including Engels personally, committed to these fatal views that the Marxist Social Democrats of Germany were reluctant to pass anti-monopoly legislation in the 1920s (to the lasting chagrin of the German petty bourgeoisie, which soon turned to the Nazis for relief) because the concentration of industry and commerce in fewer corporate hands was seen as “historically progressive” in bringing the country closer to a planned economy.

Third, the proletariat itself, already reduced to a fairly pliant instrument of production by capitalism, was treated as such by its Marxist vanguard. Workers were seen primarily as economic beings and the embodiment of economic interests. Efforts by radicals like Wilhelm Reich to appeal to their sexuality or revolutionary artists like Mayakovsky to appeal to their esthetic sensibilities invited opprobrium by Marxist parties. Art and culture were treated largely as conduits of propaganda to be placed in the service of workers’ organizations.

The Marxian revolutionary project was notable for its lack of interest in urbanism and community. These issues were dismissed as “super-structural” and presumably had no bearing on “basic” economic concerns. Human beings and their wide range of interests as creative people, parents, children, and neighbors were reconstituted artificially into economic beings, so that the Marxian revolutionary project reinforced the very degradation, deculturalization, and depersonalization of the workers produced by the factory system. The worker was at his or her best as a good trade-unionist or a devoted party functionary, not as a culturally sophisticated being with wide human and moral concerns.

Finally, this denaturing of human beings into vacuous class beings led to a denaturing of nature itself. Not only were ecological issues alien to the Marxian revolutionary project, but they were seen as insidiously counterproductive in the literal sense of the word. They inhibited the growth of industry and the mining of the natural world. Nature was treated as “stingy,” “blind,” a cruel “realm of necessity,” and an ensemble of “natural resources” that labor and technology had to subdue, dominate, and rework. The great historical advance produced by capitalism, which Marx welcomed as “necessary,” was its ruthless capacity to destroy all restraints and limits on the ravaging of the natural world. Hence we encounter encomiums by Marx to the new industrial dispensation introduced by capital which, in his eyes, was “permanently revolutionary” because of its reduction of nature to “simply an object” for human utility.[19]

Marx’s language and his views on the unbridled use of nature for social ends does not reflect the so-called humanism or anthropocentricity that is denigrated these days by so many Anglo-American environmentalists. Marx’s “humanism” actually rested on a remarkably insidious reduction of human beings to objective forces of “history,” their subjugation to a social lawfulness over which they had no control. This is a mentality that is more disconcerting than the most unfeeling form of “anthropocentrism.” Nature is turned into mere “natural resources” because human beings are conceived as mere “economic resources.” Marx’s view of human labor as the means by which “man” discovers himself in conflict with nature has the sinister implication that labor is the “essence” of humankind, a trait that set it aside from all other human traits.

In this respect, Marx cut across the grain of the authentic humanist tradition of the past, which singled out human beings because of their consciousness, morality, esthetic sensibilities, and empathy for all living things. Even more troubling, if human beings in the Marxist theory are merely “instruments of history,” the happiness and welfare of the existing generation can be mortgaged to the emancipation of later generations—an immortality that the Bolsheviks generally, and Stalin in particular, were to use with deadly effect and on a frightful scale to “build the future” on the corpses of the present.

The contribution proletarian socialism made to the revolutionary project was minimal, at best, and largely economic in character, Marx s critique of the bourgeois economy, while largely limited to his own time, was masterful. It revealed the latent power of the commodity to develop into an all-corrosive force in changing history and the subversive power of the market place to erase all traditional forms of social life. It anticipated the accumulative power of capital to a point where monopoly was seen as its outcome and automation as the logic of capitalistic technological innovation. Marx also saw that once capitalism emerged, it produced a profound sense of scarcity that no society before had generated in the human spirit Alienated humanity lived in awe and fear of the very products of its own labor. Commodities had become fetishes which seemed to govern humanity through the fluctuations of the market place and their mysterious power to decide crucial matters of economic survival. A free society could only hope to come to terms with its own fears, material insecurities, and artificially generated wants when technology had reached a level development where a superfluity of goods would render scarcity meaningless —after which it could be hoped that, in a rational and ecological society, human beings would develop meaningful wants that were not distorted by the mystified economic world created by capitalism. That this mystified world should become personalized, as it has in recent years by various reborn religions — Christian or pagan — and by the hypostasization of myth, shamanism, witchcraft, and other self-indulgent lures of the arcane, is evidence of the extent to which capitalism has infested not only the economy but also private life.

It is important to make the need for a technology that can remove modern fears of scarcity a part of the revolutionary project, that is, a post-scarcity technology. But such a technology must be seen within the context of a social development rather than as a “precondition” for human emancipation under all conditions and in all eras. For all their faults and shortcomings, precapitalist societies were structured around certain powerful moral constraints. I have already cited a medieval ordinance, singled out by Kropotkin, that “Everyone must be pleased with his work. This was by no means a rarity. The notion that work should be pleasant and that needs and wealth should not expand indefinitely served to greatly condition popular notions of scarcity itself. In fact, wealth was often seen as demonic and an excessive indulgence of needs was regarded as morally debasing. To offer gifts, to divest oneself of needless things, as we have seen, was hypostasized over the accumulation of goods and the expansion of wants. Not that the precapitalist societies consistently lacked an appetite for luxury items and the good things of life—certainly not in imperial Rome. But society quickly reacted against these “vices,” as they were seen, with ascetism and peans to self-denial.

Ironically, it was these very traditions that Marx was to deride in the strongest language, praising capitalism for undermining “the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional ways of life” [20] Production for its own sake — the typically capitalist disregard for all quality goods and their utility for mere quantity and profit—was to be matched by consumption for its own sake. This notion is comparatively recent, to be sure. But it is very deeply entrenched today among broad masses of people in the western world. Given the fetishization of commodities and the identification of material security with affluence, modern notions of consumption can no longer be modified significantly by moral persuasion alone, important as such efforts may be. Present-day consumption patterns must be shown to be irrelevant, indeed ridiculous, by virtue of the fact that technology can provide the good life for all and that the very notion of the good life can now be redefined along rational and ecological lines.

In any case, Marxism began to ebb as a revolutionary project when capitalism restabilized itself after the Second World War without any of the projected “proletarian revolutions” that were expected to end the war and rescue society from the alternative of barbarism. Its decline was still further accelerated by the transparent degeneration of Soviet Russia into another nation-state, riddled by national chauvinism and imperialistic ambitions. That Marxist studies have retreated into the enclaves of academe is testimony to its death as a revolutionary movement. It has become safe and toothless because it is so intrinsically bourgeois in its overall orientation.

Capitalist countries, in turn, have nationalized large areas of their economies. They “plan” production in one way or another and they have buffered economic fluctuation with a large variety of reforms. The working class has become a largely devitalized force for basic social change, not to mention revolution. The red flag of Marxian socialism is now draped over a coffin of myths that celebrate economic and political centralization, industrial rationalization, a simplistic theory of linear progress, and a basically anti-ecological stance, all in the name of radicalism. But red flag or not, it still remains a coffin. The myths it contains were to tragically deflect radical thought and practice from the generous ideals of freedom that had preceded it in the early half of the nineteenth century.

New Left Radicalism and Counterculture Utopianism

The revolutionary project did not die with the ebbing of Marxism, to be sure, although vulgar Marxian ideas were to taint it for decades after the thirties. By the late fifties and into the early sixties, an entirely new constellation of ideas began to fall into place. The upsurge of the civil rights movement in the United States created a social momentum around the simple demand for ethnic equality, one that was in many ways redolent of demands for equality that go back to the age of the democratic revolutions in the eighteenth century and their sweeping visions of a new human fraternity.

Martin Luther King’s speeches, for example, have a strikingly millenarian quality about them that is almost precapitalist in character. His words are openly utopistic and quasi-religious. They contain references to “dreams,” to ascents to the “mountain top like Moses, they appeal to an ethical fervor that surpasses a pica for special interests and parochial biases. They are voiced against a background of choral music that advances messages like “Freedom Now!” and “We Shall Overcome!”

The broadening of the idea of emancipation, indeed, its sanctification by a religious terminology and a prayer-like demeanor, replaced the pseudo-science of Marxism. It was a pointedly ethical message of spiritual redemption and a utopian vision of human solidarity that transcended class, property, and economic interests. Ideals of freedom were now being restated in the vernacular of the pre-Marxist revolutionary project — in language, that is, that would have been understandable to the day-dreaming Puritan radicals of the English Revolution and perhaps even the radical yeomen of the American Revolution. By degrees, the movement became more and more secular. Peaceful protests orchestrated primarily by black ministers and pacifists to bear witness to the infringement of basic human freedoms, gave way to angry encounters and violent resistance against the rambunctious use of authority. Ordinary assemblies ended in riots until, from 1964 onward, almost every summer in the United States was climaxed by black ghetto uprisings of near-insurrectionary proportions.

The civil rights movement did not monopolize the egalitarian ideals that emerged in the sixties. Preceded to a considerable extent by the “antibomb” movement of the fifties, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in England and Women’s Strike for Peace in the United States, several trends began to converge to produce the New Left, a movement which sharply distinguished itself from the Old Left in its aims, forms of organization, and strategies for social change. The revolutionary project was being recovered — not in continuity with proletarian socialism, but with pre-Marxist libertarian ideals. Percolating into this project were the counterculture strains of the “youth revolt” with its emphasis on new lifestyles, sexual freedom, and a wide-ranging body of communal libertarian values. A richly colored horizon of social ideas, experiments, and relationships emerged that glowed with extravagant hopes of radical change.

This glow did not come from ideology alone, to be sure. It was fueled by sweeping technological, economic, and social transitions in Euro-American society. Between the end of the Second World War and the early sixties, a good deal more than proletarian socialism had died in the interim that separated the two periods. Other major features of the Old Left were waning, such as the institutionalization of radicalism in the form of hierarchical workers’ parties, the economic desperation that marked the Great Depression decade, and an archaic technological heritage based on massive industrial facilities and an oversize, labor-intensive factory system. The industrial plant of the Great Depression years was not very technically innovative. The thirties may have been a decade of earnest but grim hope; the sixties, by contrast, was a decade of exuberant promise, even one that demanded the immediate gratification of its desires.

After World War II, capitalism, far from receding into the chronic depression that preceded the war, had restabilized itself on stronger foundations than it had ever known in history. It created a managed economy based on military production, buoyed by dazzling technological advances in electronics, automation, nucleonics, and agribusiness. Goods in vast quantities and varieties seemed to flow from an endless horn of plenty. This was a wealth so massive, in fact, that sizable portions of the population could live on its mere leavings. It is difficult from a distance of decades to realize what a buoyant sense of promise infused the era.

This sense of promise was clearly materialistic. The counterculture’s rejection of material things did not conflict with its own consumption of stereos, records, television sets, “mind-expanding” pharmaceuticals, exotic clothing, and equally exotic foods. Early liberal treatises like the “Triple Revolution” encouraged the highly justified belief that technologically, in the Western world at least, we had entered an era of greater freedom from toil. That society could be adjusted to take full advantage of these material and social goodies was hardly in doubt, provided, to be sure, that it could create a good life structured around a new ethical viewpoint.

These expectations infused every stratum of society, including those who were most deprived and underprivileged. The civil rights movement did not spring simply from the resentment that black people had suffered during three centuries of oppression and discrimination. In the sixties, it arose even more compellingly from popular expectations of the better life enjoyed by the white middle classes and the belief that there was more than enough to go around for all. The ethical message of King and his lieutenants had deep roots in the tension between black poverty and white affluence, a tension that made black oppression more intolerable than it had been before.

By the same token, the radicalism of the New Left became more encompassing and fundamental to the degree that the economic largess that America enjoyed was so inequitably distributed and so irrationally employed — particularly in military adventures abroad. The buoyancy of the counterculture and its claims became increasingly utopian to the degree that a comfortable life for all became more feasible. Young people, the famous “drop-outs” of the sixties, made an ethical calling of the fact that they could live well from the garbage pails of society and with “a little help from one’s friends” to reword the lyrics of a famous song by the Beatles.

I say this not to denigrate the New Left’s radicalism and the counterculture’s utopianism. Rather, I seek to explain why they took the extravagant forms they did—as well as why they were to fadeaway when the crisis management” techniques of the system re-invented the myth of scarcity and pulled in the reins of its welfare programs.

Nor do I claim that ethical ideals of freedom mechanically march in step with material realities of poverty and abundance. The revolt of peasants over five centuries of history and the utopian visions they produced, of artisans over a similar span of time with similar vision, of religious radicals tyke the Anabaptists and Puritans, finally of rationalistic anarchists and libertarian Utopians — most of whom advanced ascetic massages in times that were technologically undeveloped — would be inexplicable in terms of this premise. These revolutionary projects accepted parameters for freedom that were based on poverty, not abundance. What commonly moved them to action were the hard facts of the social transition from village to city, from city to nation-state, from artisanal forms of work to industrial toil, from mixed social forms to capitalism—each a worse condition, psychologically as well as materially, than its predecessor.

What moved the New Left to its own revolutionary project and the counterculture to its version of unlicensed utopia were parameters for freedom based on abundance — each period a potentially better condition than its predecessor. Indeed, for the first time, it seemed, society could begin to forget about potentialities of technology to produce material well-being for all and concentrate on the ethical well-being of all.

Abundance, at least to the extent that it existed for the middle classes, and a technology of an incalculable productivity fostered a radical ethics of its own: the reasonable certainty that the abolition of oppression in any form — of the senses as well as of the body and mind — could be achieved even on the bourgeois grounds of economic instrumentalism. What may very well account for the liberal tone of the New Left’s early documents like the “Port Huron Statement was the assumption that technology was so very productive that it could be used to placate the wealthy and remove traditional fears of dispossession. The wealthy could enjoy their wealth and, leaving questions of power and social control aside, more than enough seemed to be at society’s disposal to provide an affluent life for all. Capitalism and the State, in effect, seemed to have lost their raison d’etre, their reason for being. No longer need the means of life be distributed along hierarchical lines because technology was rendering these means available for the asking.

Hence, toil ceased to be a historically explicable burden on the masses. Sexual repression was no longer necessary to divert one s libidinal energies into arduous labor. Conventions that stood in the way of pleasure were insufferable under these new conditions, and need could be replaced by desire as a truly human impulse. The “realm of necessity,” in effect, could finally be replaced by the “realm of freedom”_hence the vogue that Charles Fourier’s writings began to enjoy at the time in many parts of the Western world.

In its initial phases, the New Left and the counterculture were profoundly anarchistic and utopistic. Several popular concerns became of focal importance in the projects that began to rise to the surface of their collective consciousness. The first was richly democratic, appeals were voiced for a face-to-face system of decision-making. The words “participatory democracy” came very much into vogue as a description of grassroots control over all aspects of life, not simply political ones. Everyone was expected to be free to enter into the political sphere and to deal with people in everyday life in a “democratic” manner. What this meant, in effect, was that people were expected to be transparent in all of their relationships and the ideas they held.

The New Left and, in no small degree, the emerging counterculture that paralleled it, had a strong antiparliamentary ambiance that often verged on outright anarchism. Much has been written about the “fire in the streets” that became part of the radical activities of the time. However, there were also strong impulses toward an institutionalization of decision-making processes that went beyond the level of street protests and the demonstrations that were so common during the decade.

The principle American New Left organization. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its German counterpart, the Socialists Students Union (also SDS) were distinguished by the formality of their many conferences and workshops. But few limitations were placed on attendance — which left these organizations open to cynical invasions of parasitic dogmatic radical sects. Many of their conferences and workshops, apart from the fairly large ones, acquired an egalitarian geometry of their own — the circle, in which there was no formal chairperson or leader. Individuals yielded the forum to speakers merely by designating their successors from among the raised hands of those who wanted to voice their views.

This geometry and procedure was not simply an idle form of organizational and democratic symbolism. The entire configuration expressed an earnest belief in the ideal of face-to-face dialogue and a spontaneous form of discussion. Leadership was grossly mistrusted to a point where offices were often rotated and an entrenched officialdom was frowned upon as a step toward authoritarian control. New Left conferences contrasted dramatically with the highly formalized, often carefully orchestrated gatherings that had marked conferences in the workers’ movement a generation or two earlier. Indeed, democracy as a radical form of decision-making was seen by proletarian socialism, particularly in its Marxian form, as marginal to economic factors.

In a sense, the New Left, almost knowingly, was reviving traditions that had been spawned by the democratic revolutions of two centuries earlier. Precisely because the means of life seemed to be potentially available to all in abundance, the New Left seemed to sense that democracy and an ethical ideal of freedom was the direct pathway to the very social egalitarianism that proletarian socialism had sought to achieve by largely economic and party-oriented means. This was a remarkable shift in orientation toward the role of ethics in an era when all of humanity’s material problems could be solved in principle. The pre-Marxist age of the democratic revolutions, in effect, had melded with pre-Marxist forms of socialism and utopianism under the rubric of a participatory democracy. Economics had now become truly political and the political had begun to shed the patina of statecraft which had surrounded it for a century — a change that had fundamentally anarchic implications.

Secondly such a democratic disposition of social life was meaningless without decentralization. Unless the institutional structure of democratic life could be reduced to comprehensible, indeed a graspable, human scale that all could understand, democracy could hardly acquire a truly participatory form. New units of social intercourse had to be developed and new ways of relating to each other had to be established. In short, the New Left began to grope toward new forms of freedom. But it never developed these new forms beyond conferences that were usually convened on college campuses.

In France, during the 1968 May-June uprising, there is some evidence that neighborhood assemblies were convened in several Paris arrondissements. Neighborhood projects were started half-heartedly in the United States, notably rent-strike groups and ghetto-oriented service collectives. But the idea of developing new kinds of libertarian municipal forms as counterpower to the prevailing state forms did not take root, except in Spain where the Madrid Citizens’ Movement clayed a major role in marshaling public sentiment against the Franco regime. Thus, demands for decentralization remained an important inspirational slogan. But they never took a tangible form off the campus, where radical concerns centered on “student power.”

The counterculture offered its own version of decentralized structures in the form of communal lifestyles. The 1960s became the decade par excellence for anarchist-type communes, as so many books on the subject have called them. In cities, no less than in the countryside, communal establishments became very widespread. These establishments aimed not so much at the development of new politics than at attempts to develop radically new ways of living that were counter to the conventional ones that surrounded them. They were literally the nuclei of a counterculture. These new lifeways involved the communalization of property, the practice of usufruct in dealing with the means of life, a sharing and rotation of work tasks, collective childcare by both sexes, radically new sexual mores, attempts to achieve a certain measure of economic autonomy, and the creation of a new music, poetry, and art that were meant to cut against the grain of received tastes in esthetics. The human body and its beautification, whatever one may think of the standards that were developed, became part of attempts to beautify the environment. Vehicles, rooms, the exteriors of buildings, even the brick walls of apartment houses were decorated and covered with murals.

The fact that entire neighborhoods were largely composed of these communes led to informal systems of inter-communal associations and support systems, such as so-called tribal councils. The idea of “tribalism,” which the counterculture borrowed rather faciley from American Indian cultures, found its expression more in a vernacular of “love” and the wide use of Indian customs, rituals, and especially jewelry, than in the reality of lasting relationships and mutual aid. Groups did arise which tried to live by these tribalistic, indeed, in some cases, conscious anarchist principles, but they were comparatively rare.

Many young people who made up the counterculture were temporary exiles from middle-class suburbia, to which they were to return after the sixties. But the values of many communal lifestyles were abiding ideals that were to filler into the New Left, which established its own collectives for specific tasks like the printing of literature, the management of “free schools,” and even daycare centers. Anarchist terms like “affinity groups,” the action and cellular units of the Spanish anarchist movement, came very much into vogue. The Spanish anarchists developed these groups as personal forms of association in opposition to anonymous Socialist Party branches based on residence or places of employment, but the more anarchic elements in the New Left mixed broader counterculture elements, like lifestyle, with action in the affinity groups that they established.

Thirdly, the accumulation of property was viewed with derision. The ability to successfully “liberate” food, clothing, books, and the like, from department stores and shopping centers became a calling, as it were, and a badge of honor. This mentality and practice became so widespread that it even infected conventional middle-class people. Shop-lifting reached epidemic proportions in the sixties. Property was generally seen as something of a public resource that could be freely used by the public at large or personally “expropriated.”

Esthetic values and utopistic ideals that had been buried away in the artistic as well as political manifestoes of the past underwent an extraordinary revival. Museums were picketed as mausoleums of art, whose works the picketers felt should be located in public places so that they could be part of a living environment. Street theater for the public was conducted in the most improbable locations, such as the sidewalks of business districts; rock bands conducted their concerts in the streets or in public squares; parks were used as ceremonial areas, or places for discussion, or simply open-air habitats for seminude young people, who flagrantly smoked marijuana under the very noses of the police.

Lastly, the imagination of western society became overheated with insurrectionary images. A fatal belief began to develop within the New Left that the entire world was on the verge of violent revolutionary change. The war in Vietnam mobilized crowds in the hundreds of thousands in Washington, New York, and other cities, followed by comparable numbers in European cities as well — mobilizations of people that had not been seen since the days of the Russian Revolution. Black ghetto uprisings became commonplace, followed by bloody encounters between troops as well as police that claimed scores of lives. The assassination of public figures like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were only the most publicized of murders that claimed the lives of civil rights’ activists, student protesters, and, in one horrendous crime, black children at a church ceremony. These counter-actions began to place left-wing individual terrorism on the agenda of certain New Left tendencies.

The year 1968 saw the most spectacular upsurges of the student and black movements. In France, during May and June, millions of workers followed the students into a general strike that lasted for weeks. This “near-revolution,” as it has recently been called, was echoed throughout the world in various forms, albeit with minimal working class support—indeed, with active hostility by American and German workers, a fact that should have placed a fatal seal on the death of proletarian socialism.

Despite another major upsurge in 1970 by students in the United States, in which a general strike followed the American invasion of Cambodia, the movement was more an imaginative projection of an insurrection than the real thing. In France, workers eventually beat a retreat under the commands of their parties and unions. The middle classes were genuinely in conflict between the material benefits they acquired from the established order and the moral appeal voiced by the New Left, and even by their own children. Books by Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich, which tried to explain the ethical message of the New Left and particularly the counterculture to the older generation, met with a surprisingly favorable reception. Perhaps millions of fairly conventional people might have veered toward an actively sympathetic attitude toward anti war demonstrators, even toward the New Left itself, if its ideology had been advanced in the populist and libertarian forms that were consistent with America’s own revolutionary heritage.

The late sixties, in fact, was a profoundly important period in American history. Had there been a slower, more patient and more graded development by the New Left and the counterculture, large areas of popular consciousness could have been changed. The “American Dream ” perhaps like the national “dreams” of other countries, had deep-seated ideological roots, not only material ones. Ideals of liberty, community, mutual aid, even of decentralized confederations, had been carried over to America by its radical Puritan settlers with their congregational form of Protestantism that disallowed any clerical hierarchy. These radicals preached a gospel of a primitive Christian communalism rather than the “rugged individualism” (essentially, a western cowboy ideal of purely personal “anarchism” in which the lonely “campfire” of the armed soloist is substituted for the family hearth of the village yeomanry). Puritans had placed a high premium on face-to-face popular assemblies or town meetings as instruments of self-government rather than centralized government. Perhaps honored more in the breach than in consistent observance, this gospel still exercised enormous influence on the American imagination, an influence that could have easily wedded the New Left and counterculture ideas with an ethical democracy that many Americans would have accepted.

It is one of the appalling facts of history that the New Left, far from following this historic course, did the very opposite in the late sixties. It separated itself from its anarchic and utopistic origins. What is worse, it uncritically adopted Third World ideologies, inspired by Vietnamese, Chinese, North Korean, and Cuban social models. These were introduced to a sickening extent by the sectarian Marxist debris that lingered on from the thirties, not only in the U.S. but in Europe. The very democracy of the New Left was used against it by Maoist-type authoritarians in an attempt to “capture” SDS in America and Germany. Guilt for a middle-class pedigree was the principle mechanism for imbuing these movements with a subservient attitude to self-styled working class and black groups; indeed, for adopting a rambunctious ultra-revolutionary zealotry that totally marginalized the followers of this trend and eventually demoralized them completely. The failure of many anarchists in American and German SDS, as well as similar movements elsewhere, to develop a well-organized movement within the larger ones (particularly with the “ultra-revolutionary” braggadocio and radical swaggering in the U.S.) played directly into the hands of the more well-organized Maoist tendencies — with disastrous results for the New Left as a whole.

But it was not a lack of ideology and organization alone that brought the New Left and a rather wavering counterculture to an end. The expanding, overheated economy of the sixties was steadily replaced by the cooler, more wavering economy of the seventies. The accelerating rate of economic growth was deliberately arrested and its direction was partly reversed. Under Nixon in America and Thatcher in England, as well as their counterparts in other European countries, a new political and economic climate was created that replaced the ebullient post-scarcity mentality of the sixties with one of economic uncertainty.

The material insecurity of the seventies, and the political reaction that followed the election of conservatives in America and Europe, began to foster a personal retreat from the public sphere. Privatism, careerism and self-interest increasingly gained ascendancy over the desire for a public life, an ethics of care, and a commitment to change. The New Left waned even more rapidly than it rose and the counter-culture became the industry for boutiques and pornographic forms of sexual license. Indeed, the m ind-expanding “drug culture” of the sixties gave way to the sedating “drug culture” of the seventies — one which has created national crises in Euro-American society with the discovery of new pharmaceuticals and their exotic combinations in more intense “highs” and “lows.”

A perceptive account of the New Left and counterculture, with a full knowledge of the facts that led to their origins, development, and decay, has yet to be written. Much of the material that is now available to us is marked more by sentimentality than serious analyzes.

The radicalism of that era, however, has been sensed intuitively. The New Left was never as educated as the Old, which it tried to succeed more by an emphasis on activism than theoretical insight. Despite a spate of high-minded and electrifying propaganda tracts, it produced no perceptive intellectual accounts of the events which it had created or of the real possibilities that it confronted. Unlike the Old Left which, for all its failings, was part of a century-long historical tradition, indeed an epoch, filled with analyzes of cumulative experiences and critical evaluations of their outcome, the New Left seems more like an isolated island in history whose very existence is difficult to explain as part of a larger historical era.

Given more to action than to reflection, the New Left seized upon refurbished versions of the most vulgar Marxist dogmas to shore up its guilt-ridden reverence of Third World movements, its own middle-class insecurities, and the hidden elitism of its more opportunistic, media-oriented leaders who were proof that power ultimately docs corrupt The more dedicated of the sixties radical youth went into factories for brief spans of time to “win” a largely indifferent working class, while others turned to “terrorism” — in some cases, a parody of the real thing, in other cases, a costly tragedy that claimed the lives of highly dedicated, if sadly misguided, young people.

Errors that had been repeated generation after generation over the past century were thus being recycled again: a disregard for theory, an emphasis on action that excluded all serious thought, a tendency to fall back on shopworn dogmas when action is reified, and the resulting certainty of defeat and demoralization. And this was precisely what occurred as the sixties began to draw to a close.

But not everything is lost in a development. Proletarian socialism had focused the attention of the revolutionary project on the economic aspects of social change — the need to create the material conditions, particularly under capitalism, for a forward-looking vision of human liberation. It revived and fully explored the fact — long emphasized by writers like Aristotle — that people had to be reasonably free from material want to be able to function fully as citizens in the political sphere. Freedom that lacked the material bases for people to act as self-managing and self-governing individuals or collectives was the purely formal freedom of the inequality of equals, the realm of mere justice. Proletarian socialism died partly because of its sobriety and lack of imagination, but it also provided a necessary corrective to a purely ethical emphasis by earlier radicals on political institutions and a largely imaginative vision of the economic arrangements that were so necessary for full popular participation in shaping society.

The New Left restored the anarchic and utopian visions of the pre-Marxian revolutionary project and it greatly expanded them in accordance with the new material possibilities created by technology after the Second World War. To the need for solid economic underpinnings of a free society, the New Left and the counterculture added certain Fourieresque qualities. They advanced the image of a sensuous society, not only one that was well-fed; a society free from toil, not only one that was free from economic exploitation; a substantive democracy, not only a formal one; the release of pleasure, not only the satisfaction of need.

Antihierarchical, decentralist, communalist, and sensuous values were to still persist into the seventies, despite the ideological contortions of the decomposing New Left and its drift into an imaginative world of insurrection, “days of rage,” and terrorism.

While it is true that many of the New Left’s activists were to find their way into the very university system they despised in the sixties and lead fairly convendonal lives, the movement also vastly broadened the definition of freedom and the scope of the revolutionary project, extending them beyond their traditional economic confines into vastly cultural and political domains. No radical movement of any importance in the future could ignore the ethical, esthetic, and anti-authoritarian legacy created by the New Left and the communalist experiments that emerged in the counterculture, although the two tendencies were by no means identical. But two questions now remained. What specific forms should a future movement assume if it hoped to reach the people generally? And what new possibilities and additional ideas lay before it that would still further expand the ideals of freedom?

Feminism and Ecology

The answers to these questions began to emerge even while the New Left and the new counterculture were very much alive and begun to center around two basically new issues: ecology and feminism.

Conservative movements, even environmental movements to correct specific pollution abuses, have a long history in English-speaking countries, particularly in the United States and in central Europe, where nature mysticism reaches back to the late Middle Ages. The emergence of capitalism and the appalling damage it inflicted on the natural world gave these movements a new sense of urgency. The recognition that particular diseases like tuberculosis — the famous “White Plague” of the nineteenth century — have their main origins in poor living and working conditions became a major issue for socially conscious physicians like Rudolph Virchow, a German liberal, who was deeply concerned with the lack of proper sanitation among Berlin’s poor. Similar movements arose in England and spread throughout most of the western world. A relationship between the environment and health was thus seen as a problem of paramount importance for well over a century.

For the most part, this relationship was seen in very practical terms. The need for cleanliness, good food, airy living quarters, and healthful working conditions were dealt with in rather narrow terms that posed no challenge to the social order. Environmentalism was a reform movement. It raised no broad problems beyond the humanitarian treatment of the poor and the working class. In time, and with piecemeal reforms, its supporters could expect that there would be no serious conflict between a strictly environmental orientation and the capitalist system.

Another environmental movement, basically American (albeit fairly widespread in England and Germany), emerged from a mystical passion for wilderness. The various strains that entered into this movement are too complex to unravel, here. American conservationists like John Muir found in wilderness a spiritually reviving form of communion with nonhuman life; one that presumably awakened deep-seated human longings and instincts. This view goes back even further in time to Rousseau’s idyllic passion for a solitary way of life amid natural surroundings. As a sensibility, it has always been marked by a good deal of ambiguity. Wilderness, or what is left of it today, can give one a sense of freedom, a heightened sense of nature’s fecundity, a love of nonhuman life-forms, and a richer esthetic outlook and appreciation of the natural order.

But it also has a less innocent side. It can lead to a rejection of human nature, an introverted denial of social intercourse, a needless opposition between wilderness and civilization. Rousseau leaned toward this viewpoint in the eighteenth century for very mixed reasons that need not concern us in this discussion. That Voltaire called Rousseau an “enemy of mankind” is not entirely an overstatement. The wilderness enthusiast who retreats into remote mountain areas and shuns human company has provided a bouquet of innumerable misanthropes over the ages. For tribal peoples, such individual retreats, or “vision quests” are ways of returning to their communities with greater wisdom; for the misanthrope it is often a revolt against one’s own kind; indeed, a disclaiming of natural evolution as it is embodied in human beings.

This pitting of a seemingly wild “first nature” against social “second nature” reflects a blind and tortured inability to distinguish what is irrational and anti-ecological in capitalist society from what could be rational and ecological in a free society. Society is simply condemned wholesale. Humanity, irrespective of its own internal conflicts between oppressor and oppressed, is lumped together as a single “species” that constitutes an accursed blight on a presumably pristine, “innocent,” and “ethical” natural world.

Such views easily lend themselves to a crude biologism that offers no way of fixing humanity and society in nature, or, more precisely, in natural evolution. The fact that human beings, too, are products of natural evolution and that society grows out of that evolutionary process, incorporating in its own evolution the natural world as transmuted into social life, is generally given a subordinate place to a very static image of nature. This simplistic type of imagery sees nature as a mere piece of scenery of the kind we encounter in picture postcards. There is very little naturalism in this view; rather, this view is largely esthetic rather than ecological The wilderness enthusiast is usually a visitor or a vacationer to a world that, uplifting as it may be for a time, is basically alien to their authentic social environment. Such wilderness enthusiasts carry their social environment within themselves whether they know it or not, no less than the fact that the knapsacks they shoulder are often products of a highly industrialized society.

The need to go beyond these traditional trends in environmentalism emerged in the early 1960s, when an attempt was made in 1964 by anarchist writers to rework libertarian ideas along broadly ecological lens. Without denying the need to stop the degradation of the environment from pollution, insensate deforestation, the construction of nuclear reactors, and the like, a reformist approach with its focus on single issues was abandoned for a revolutionary one, based on the need to totally reconstruct society along ecological lines.

What is significant about this new approach, rooted in the writings of Kropotkin, was the relationship it established between hierarchy and the notion of dominating nature. Put simply: the very idea of dominating nature, it was argued in this anarchistic interpretation, stemmed from the domination of human by human. As I have pointed out earlier in this book, this interpretation totally reversed the traditional liberal and Marxist view that the domination of human by human stems from a shared historical project to dominate nature by using human labor to overcome a seemingly “stingy,” withholding, intractable natural world whose “secrets” had to be unlocked and rendered available to all in order to create a beneficent society.

No ideology, in fact, has done more to justify hierarchy and domination since Aristotle’s time than the myth that the domination of nature presupposes the domination of “man by man.” Liberalism, Marxism, and earlier ideologies had indissolubly linked the domination of nature with human freedom. Ironically, the domination of human by human, the rise of hierarchy, of classes, and the State, were seen as “preconditions” for their very elimination in the future.

The views advanced by anarchists were deliberately called social ecology to emphasize that major ecological problems have their roots in social problems — problems that go back to the very beginnings of patricentric culture itself. The rise of capitalism, with a law of life based on competition, capital accumulation, and limitless growth, brought these problems — ecological and social — to an acute point; indeed, one that was unprecedented in any prior epoch of human development. Capitalist society, by recycling the organic world into an increasingly inanimate, inorganic assemblage of commodities, was destined to simplify the biosphere, thereby cutting across the grain of natural evolution with its ages-long thrust toward differentiation and diversity.

To reverse this trend, capitalism had to be replaced by an ecological society based on nonhierarchical relationships, decentralized communities, eco-technologics like solar power, organic agriculture, and humanly scaled industries—in short, by face-to-face democratic forms of settlement economically and structurally tailored to the ecosystems in which they were located. These views were explored in such pioneering articles like “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964) and “Toward a Liberatory Technology” (1965), years before “Earth Day” was proclaimed and an obscure word, “ecology,” began to enter into everyday discourse.

What should be emphasized is that this literature anchored ecological problems for the first time in hierarchy, not simply in economic classes; that a serious attempt was made to go beyond single-issue environmental problems into deep-sealed ecological dislocations of a monumental character; that the relationship of nature to society, formerly seen as an inherently antagonistic one, was explored as part of a long continuum in which society had phased out of nature through a complex and cumulative evolutionary process.

It may have been asking too much of an increasingly Maoist New Left and an increasingly commercialized counterculture, both with a strong predilection for action and a deepening mistrust of theoretical ideas, to absorb social ecology as a whole. The use of words like “hierarchy,” a term rarely employed in New Left rhetoric, surfaced widely in the radical discourse of the late sixties and began to assume particular relevance for a new movement — notably, feminism. With the notion that woman, as such, is a victim of a male-oriented “civilization” irrespective of her “class position” and economic status, the term “hierarchy” became particularly relevant to early feminist analyzes. Social ecology was increasingly reworked by early radical feminist writers into a critique of hierarchical forms, not simply class forms.

In a broad sense, social ecology and early feminism directly challenged the economistic emphasis Marxism had placed on social analysis and reconstruction. It rendered the New Left’s anti-authoritarian outlook more explicit and more clearly definable by singling out hierarchical domination, not simply anti-authoritarian oppression. Woman’s degraded status as a gender and status-group was rendered clearly visible against the background of her seeming “equality” in a world guided by justice’s inequality of equals. At a time when the New Left was decomposing into Marxist sects and the counterculture was being transformed into a new form of boutique retailing, social ecology and feminism were expanding ihe ideal of freedom beyond any bounds that had been established in recent memory. Hierarchy as such — be it in the form of ways of thinking, basic human relationships, social relations, and society’s interaction with nature—could now be disentangled from the traditional nexus of class analyzes that concealed it under a carpet of economic interpretations of society. History could now be examined in terms of general interests such as freedom, solidarity, and empathy for one’s own kind; indeed, the need to be an active part of the balance of nature.

These interests were no longer specific to a particular class, gender, race, or nationality. They were universal interests that were shared by humanity as a whole. Not that economic problems and class conflicts could be ignored, but to confine oneself to them left a vast residue of perverted sensibilities and relationships that had to be confronted and corrected on a broader social horizon.

In terms that were more expansive than any that had been formulated in the sixties or earlier, the revolutionary project could now be clearly defined as the abolition of hierarchy, the reharmonization of humanity with nature through the reharmonization of human with human, the achievement of an ecological society structured on ecologically sound technologies and face-to-face democratic communities. Feminism made it possible to highlight the significance of hierarchy in a very existential form. Drawing heavily from the literature and the language of social ecology, it rendered hierarchy concrete, visible, and poignantly real owing to the status of women in all classes, occupations, social institutions, and familial relationships. As long as it revealed the demeaned human condition that all people suffered, particularly women, it demystified subtle forms of rule that existed in the nursery, bedroom, kitchen, playground, and school—not only in the workplace and the public sphere generally. Hence social ecology and feminism logically intertwined with each other and complemented each other in a shared process of demystification. They exposed a demonic incubus that had perverted every advance of “civilization” with the poison of hierarchy and domination. An agenda even larger than that advanced by the early New Left and counterculture had been created by the mid-sixties; one that required elaboration, educational activity, and serious organization to reach people as a whole, not merely a particular sector of the population.

This project could have been reinforced by issues that cut across all traditional class lines and status groups: the subversion of vast natural cycles, the growing pollution of the planet, massive urbanization, and increases in environmentally induced diseases. A growing public began to emerge that felt deeply implicated in environmental problems. Questions of growth, profit, the future of the planet, assumed in their no longer single issues or class issues but human and ecological issues. That various elites and privileged classes still advanced their own bourgeois interest could have served to highlight the extent to which capitalism was itself becoming a special interest whose existence could no longer be justified. It could be made clearly evident that capitalism did not represent a universal historical force, much less a universal human interest.

The close of the sixties and the opening of the seventies formed a period filled with extraordinary alternatives. The revolutionary project had come into its own. Ideals of freedom whose threads had been broken by Marxism were once again picked up and advanced along anarchic and utopian lines to encompass universal human interests — the interests of society as a whole, not of the nation-stale, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat as particularistic social phenomena.

Could enough of a New Left and a counterculture be rescued from the process of decomposition that followed 1968 to embrace the expanded revolutionary project opened by social ecology and feminism? Could a radical sentiment and the energies of radicals generally be mobilized on a scale and with the intellectuality that equaled the broad revolutionary project advanced by these two tendencies?

Vague demands for participatory democracy, social justice, disarmament, and the like, had to be linked together into a coherent outlook and program. They required a sense of direction that could be given only by a deeper theoretical insight, a relevant program, and more definable organizational forms than the New Left of the sixties could generate, Rudi Dutschke’s appeal to German SDS for a “Long march through the institutions,” which amounted to little more than adapting to the institutions that exist without troubling to create new ones, led to the loss of thousands within the institutions. They went in—and never came out.