02.05.1996

Utopian at heart

Ian Mahoney reviews Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: An unbridgeable chasm by Murray Bookchin (AK Press, pp86, £5.95)

Although expensive for such a slim volume, this eloquent polemic from veteran anarchist Bookchin is well worth reading.

He suggests that anarchism is at a “turning point”. Despite the increasingly favourable objective conditions for mass unrest, “anarchists have formed neither a coherent programme nor a revolutionary organisation to provide a direction for the mass discontent that contemporary society is creating” (p1). Instead, he notes with alarm that “in growing numbers” they have followed others into the swamp of a “decadent personalism in the name of their sovereign ‘autonomy’, a queasy mysticism in the name of ‘intuitionism’ and a prelapsarian vision of history in the name of ‘primitivism’” (p2).

The ascendancy of this form of “naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe” (p2) anarchism is an episode in the historical struggle between “two basically contradictory tendencies”: an intensely individualised commitment to personal autonomy and a collective understanding of social freedom. Bookchin provides a brief but instructive overview of this historical tension within anarchism.

He roots the contemporary growth of lifestyle anarchism in today’s “reactionary social context ... when even respectable forms of socialism are in pell-mell retreat from principles that might in any way be construed as radical” (p8). Within anarchism, the collapse of a coherent alternative social vision has sent many quite mad. Bookchin quotes from Fifth Estate (Summer 1989) which advises us that “anarchy [recognises] the imminence of total liberation and as a sign of your freedom, be naked in your rites”: stop worrying about your council tax and start “dancing, singing, laughing, feasting, playing”. As Bookchin sardonically remarks - Could anyone short of a mummified prig argue against these Rabelaisian delights?” (p26).

Only there is a problem.

“Rabelais’s Abbey of Theleme, which Fifth Estate seems to emulate, was replete with servants, cooks, grooms and artisans, without whose hard labour the self-indulgent aristocrats of his distinctly upper class utopia would have starved ...” (Ibid)

Bookchin is certainly correct that that there is “a certain splendour in the claptrap” (p41) that he rails against, in much the same way that there was a certain dignity in the antics of the Marx brothers. He does an effective - even if short - job on it. But does he prove his central thesis, pithily summarised in the book’s subtitle?

Although there is certainly a “chasm” between a genuine revolutionary anarcho-communist like Bookchin and the petty bourgeois esoterica of the anarchist movement, is it “unbridgeable”? In other words, does not what Bookchin calls social anarchy - as a body of theory, a political movement with a problematic history - actually contain within itself the contradictions that produce “life-style anarchism”?

For example, Bookchin is right to suggest a “contrast” between Bakunin and Proudhon that essentially mirrors that between ‘social’ and ‘individual’ anarchism: Bakunin the revolutionary and collectivist as opposed to Proudhon the reformist and individualist. Yet within the practice of Bakunin and the Bakuninists was lodged a political DNA that produced monstrosities similar to Proudhon. Anarchism at this stage represented the revolt of classes and strata doomed by the rise of capital. Marx and Engels recognised that their battles with the anarchists in the First International would not simply be resolved in the course of fierce debates, but also by the further development of capitalism itself.

This objectively progressive evolution would wipe out the classes whose despairing revolt against capital anarchism came to represent. In their place, the modern proletariat - with its corresponding forms of organisation and politics - would rise.

In contrast, Bakunin believed that “popular revolution is born from the merging of the revolt of the brigand with that of the peasants” (cited in P Thomas, Karl Marx and the anarchists, p292). From this flowed his understanding of revolutionary struggle. Anarchists, he wrote, “recognise no other activity but the work of extermination, but we admit the forms in which this activity will show itself will be extremely varied - poison, the knife, the rope” (cited in EH Carr, Mikhail Bakunin, p380).

Of course, I am not trying to suggest that this bloodcurdling and rather melodramatic quote tells us the last word about Bakunin and his notion of revolution. The man was a heroic fighter for what he perceived as human liberation. I include it merely to illustrate that the tension between individual revolt and the question of social revolution is something that has been consistently present, even within that wing of anarchism that Bookchin defines as revolutionary.

The form has changed as the social classes have changed. Yet today anarchism - even in its most revolutionary form - still carries within it that strain of individual utopianism that assumes its most grotesque forms in the “lifestyle” clowning Bookchin effectively ridicules.

Politically, this would lead our class to disaster. A few years ago, the Virus paper warned against communist parties, as they were a duplication of “ruling class values in their authoritarianism, their high degree of centralism, their worship of hierarchy and sheep-like submission of the rank and file to the ‘omnipotent’ and ‘all-wise’ leaderships” (Virus No5).

Personally, in this sort of talk I hear little more than the brittle voice of touchy individual revolt, obsessed with personal freedom, contemptuous of proletarian organisation, proletarian discipline and proletarian authority.

Ian Mahoney