Heretical Resonances: Historicizing Social Ecology in the Neoliberal Epoch

Blair Taylor

Murray Bookchin was keenly aware of the unique constraints, as well as possibilities, imposed by specific historical eras on those lodged within them. Much of his political and intellectual project was expressly directed at criticizing, amending, and transcending traditions and thinkers whose ideas had, in his view, been rendered inadequate by subsequent changes in social circumstances. This text seeks to perform the same operation, highlighting how Bookchin’s ideas are circumscribed by the social and historical context he was writing within, making him an astute critic of the political realities of his day, but also unable to predict what social developments might – and indeed were about to – transcend them. I will argue that key elements of his theoretical and political project are directed primarily at a Fordist social landscape that no longer exists, necessitating reassessment in an age of neoliberal capitalism. The left has likewise changed dramatically in the last 60 years. Avant-garde in the 1960s and 70s, many of Bookchin’s political ideas have become common sense within many movements today. To this end, I will examine Bookchin’s critique of Marxist historical materialism and his counter-theorization of hierarchy in the context of when it was written, the high point of Fordist capitalism, to contend that his counter-theorization of hierarchy rests on a spatialized and overly agentive concept of power that is inadequate to understanding the depersonalized rule that happens “behind the backs of producers” within capitalism generally, and the networked, horizontal, and self-activated forms advanced by neoliberalism in particular. Bookchin’s mature political alternative to Marxism, Communalism, drew heavily from the civic republican and anarchist traditions, which valorize self-activation, “ethics,” autonomy, and decentralization. Drawing on the analysis of the French New Left’s subterranean affinities with neoliberalism articulated by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, I will argue that elements of Bookchin’s social critique and political alternative also resonate with aspects of neoliberalism.¹

The Long Shadow of Marx: From Historical Materialism to The Ecology of Freedom

From his earliest published writings in Contemporary Issues in the 1950s through his focus on radical ecology and anarchism in the 1980s and 90s, the first thirty years of Bookchin’s writings reflect an extended engagement with Marxism. Indeed, Bookchin’s more fully articulated theoretical work would not emerge until the movement ferment of the 1960s had revived Marxism after its relative disappearance during the post-war consensus and McCarthyite repression. The polemical pamphlet “Listen Marxist!” from 1969, perhaps his most widely read work, was aimed at a New Left fast abandoning the participatory democratic politics of the Port Huron Statement for various Third World socialisms, Maoism, and terrorism.² The text laid out a foundational critique of Marxism that would fundamentally shape the trajectory and content of his work until his very last writings.

The basic argument contended that Marxism, forged in a historical epoch long past, was outmoded and inadequate to the problems of the 1960s, its key premises and predictions having been proven wrong. He writes, “for the most part, as we have seen, Marxism’s economic insights belonged to an era of emerging factory capitalism in the nineteenth century.” He begins by taking aim at the central role assigned to the industrial proletariat within Marxist theory. Rather than polarization into two opposing classes, one of them increasingly radicalized by brute immiseration, Bookchin pointed to a process of class decomposition brought about by automation. The potential for a post-scarcity society made old class divisions obsolete while opening up new “trans-class” issues: qualitative concerns which were in fact more radical than the economistic demands so easily met by social democracy, pacifying the working class in the process. This insight was informed by Bookchin’s own personal experience as a worker and organizer within the post-war labor movement. Thus the working class, both objectively and subjectively, had lost the power and central role assigned to it by Marxism. Historical materialism furthermore elevated this theory of class struggle into a science driven by objective laws of political economy. This in turn sowed the seeds of an inherent authoritarianism: such objective “laws” are best understood by professional revolutionaries in a vanguard party, whose scientific mastery of history ultimately necessitates and justifies a dictatorship of, or at least in the name of, the proletariat. Having subordinated the subjective and ethical dimensions of revolutionary social change, the bureaucratic authoritarianism that characterized actually existing socialism was no surprise. The book Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) also situated this critique of Marxism within a nascent alternative: an ecological anarchism stressing decentralization, alternative technology, and an expanded critique of hierarchy and domination that went beyond class alone. The result was a sophisticated theoretical and political update of the anarchist tradition.

Central to this rethinking of both the anarchist and revolutionary project is the concept of hierarchy, which receives its fullest articulation in Bookchin’s magnum opus The Ecology of Freedom (further referenced as EoF).³ Written in the 1970s aftermath of the New Left, the book takes the theoretical and political limits of 1960s Marxism as the starting point for developing an anarchist counter-theorization to historical materialism. One novelty of Bookchin’s counter-theorization is that it characterizes Marxism not as a sweeping universal philosophy of history, but rather only one particular manifestation of an even more general historical dynamic – that of hierarchy. In Bookchin’s narrative, the “history of all hitherto existing human society” was not simply reducible to class struggle, as important as that may be. Instead Bookchin sought to describe the emergence of hierarchical social forms which were not always or primarily economic in nature, focusing in particular on the rise of gerontocracy and an increasingly lopsided patriarchal sexual division of labor. Hierarchy is defined early on in EoF as:

the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command… a complex system…in which elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates without necessarily exploiting them, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer.⁴

In Bookchin’s thought, hierarchy becomes the new master category which replaces Marxism’s narrower fixation on class and capitalism. He describes this analytical turn to hierarchy as a broadening of the radical imagination, one “offering a wider and more relevant scope for our time.”⁵ For Bookchin, hierarchy “includes Marx’s definition of class,” but also “goes beyond this limited meaning imputed to a largely economic form of stratification.”⁶ Bookchin contends that, “Marxism’s historical materialism, explaining the rise of class societies, is expanded by social ecology’s explanation of the anthropological and historical rise of hierarchy.”⁷ Eager to distinguish his project from the Marxian problematic of class exploitation, the opening pages of The Ecology of Freedom repeatedly stress that “hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a “classless” or “stateless” society,” and that any social analysis which failed to distinguish between these different dynamics of power might unintentionally “conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships and a hierarchical sensibility, both of which–even in the absence of economic exploitation or political coercion–would serve to perpetuate unfreedom.”⁹

On many levels, Bookchin’s political instincts and critique were sound and pointed in productive directions. Hierarchy offers a broader theoretical lens that seems better suited to grasping non-economic forms of domination like racial and sexual oppression than Marxism’s more economistic focus on class and capitalism. However, other aspects of his theorization of hierarchy pose other problems that stem, on the one hand, from his particular reading of Marxism, and on the other, the constraints posed by the historical context from which he was writing – a social order on the cusp of massive political and economic transitionfrom Fordism to neoliberalism.

From Marxian Exploitation to Anarchist Hierarchy

As established above, Bookchin takes Marx as the starting point for developing many of social ecology’s main premises. However, the Marxism he defines his project in dialectical conversation with, beginning with “Listen Marxist!”, is a rather limited representation, one which engages more with the vulgar Marxism-Leninism of the New Left than Marx proper. The result is brilliant polemic, but also considerable theoretical confusion. Firstly, Bookchin offers a highly selective reading of Marx, one which targets an extremely narrow fixation on material exploitation, a single-minded fetishization of the proletariat, an objectivistic and law-bound historical materialist philosophy of history, and authoritarian, centralized party political forms. While such a reading of Marx is possible, it requires a willful ignorance of not only the ethical Marx of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, but arguably even more importantly, the general analysis of capitalism put forth in Capital. The point is not academic; while such forms of vulgar Marxism have indeed been dominant both in the New and Old Lefts, this anemic interpretation misses the deeper insights of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society. This is especially surprising given the important influence on Murray’s political evolution played by the heterodox Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School, whose ideas address precisely the shortcomings he identified within Stalinism and vulgarized Marxism. These lacunae return to haunt Bookchin’s own theorization of hierarchy, and later, features of the political vision of his Communalist project.

Bookchin consistently portrays Marxism as primarily concerned with material immiseration stemming from the exploitation of labor, writing “their concepts of oppression were primarily confined to material exploitation, grinding poverty, and the unjust abuse of labor.”¹⁰ This is an extremely reductive reading of Marx’s analysis. Although this is indeed what historical capitalism often looks like, as well as what much of political Marxism has fixated on, Marx’s broader critique extends far beyond individual workers and bosses, or even classes, to describe a system of social domination based on the abstract, indirect, impersonal rule of capital. Capital is a story of social relations of domination which, in contrast to state power, largely happens “behind the backs of producers,” as Marx put it. This is a crucial specificity that sets capitalism apart from earlier historical epochs like feudalism or mercantilism, in that its modes of power are dynamic, invisible, persistent, and highly adaptable.

It is precisely here that the concept of hierarchy falls short. Even the brief definition from the introduction to The Ecology of Freedom directs our primary attention to relationships of “obedience and command” wherein “elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates.”⁴ Bookchin here construes power as primarily direct, personal, conscious, active, unmediated, and embodied in specific actors. Elites give commands, and others must obey. But even freed from bosses, owners, and relationships of command and obedience in the workplace, one is still subject to the rule of capital. As highlighted in Marxian and Foucauldian conceptualizations, power is not reducible to direct relations between particular subjects, and therefore cannot be understood as a simple hierarchy.

This reveals a second and related shortcoming. In addition to focusing our attention primarily on direct and agentive forms of power, the concept of hierarchy also encourages a fundamentally spatial understanding of power: one whose defining feature is verticality. Evoking the classic pamphleteer’s image of a pyramid-shaped society with capitalists and politicians at the top, this theorization leads Bookchin to valorize its opposite: decentralization. This concept would become a key element of his political critique and vision, laid out in “Listen Marxist!”, reflected in the name of his Students for a Democratic Society splinter group the Radical Decentralist Project, and articulated as a central component of Libertarian Municipalism and Communalism. Decentralization, for over 50 years, remained a consistent and crucial element for Bookchin to politically distinguish his project from Marxism’s emphasis on nationalization and seizure of the state apparatus.

Bookchin’s efforts to “go beyond” Marx via the category of hierarchy was an important and in some ways pioneering political intervention that sought to broaden the left’s political scope and avoid the economic reductionism which sidelined “non-economic” forms of domination like race and gender. But at the same time, this very strength is also a limitation. Any theory that attempts to explain the rise of such diverse social hierarchies as gerontocracy, patriarchy, or white supremacy must by definition remain highly general, sacrificing fine-grained and historically specific analysis for scope and breadth. Indeed, The Ecology of Freedom has been criticized for its combination of speculative historical philosophy and selective use of historical and anthropological evidence.¹¹ At times hierarchy seems to become a catch-all term that refuses clear definition. Reflecting this ambiguity, Bookchin concedes, “I doubt that the word can be encompassed by a formal definition. I view it historically and existentially.”⁶ Such phrases are telling; in attempting to capture all forms of oppression and domination via one theoretical concept, hierarchy loses its historical specificity and becomes highly abstract and free-floating. Indeed, he goes on to note in the same paragraph that “Hierarchy is not merely a social condition; it is also a state of consciousness.” In his flight from a reductive and overly objectivist Marxism, Bookchin overcorrects and veers into an abstract idealism insufficiently rooted in specific historical forms and institutions.

Taken together, these characteristics hew fairly closely to core features of the classical anarchism Bookchin worked within for decades before eventually abandoning, namely its tendencies towards idealism, an embodied and hierarchical notion of power, and its central emphasis on the state. Bookchin’s theorization of hierarchy is well suited to analyzing forms of political power and status domination, but is less adroit at capturing the logic of capitalism. The concept of hierarchy alone on its own is incapable of grasping the deeper grammar of capitalism, because the latter is not solely spatial in nature or enforced via embodied and personal forms of domination, but rather operates through abstract, mediated, and depersonalized forms. In short, capitalist society has never been the simple hierarchy depicted on the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and has become even less so under neoliberalism.

Historicizing Hierarchy: From Fordism to Neoliberalism

The theoretical program of Bookchin’s post-scarcity anarchism was developed during the highwater mark of the Fordist era of capitalism, and as a result closely reflects the assumptions, concerns, and possibilities posed by that historical period. His critique was forged in and directed towards a context of post-war affluence characterized by a robust and growing economy in which gigantic firms worked intimately with a Cold War military-industrial state. This state-economy nexus was stabilized by unions which guaranteed a pacific working class that was materially satisfied via high wages and lifetime employment, resulting in the primacy of labor issues steadily losing ground within left politics to qualitative concerns like antiauthoritarianism, antiracism, feminism, and ecology. Like many other thinkers from this time, Bookchin concerned himself not with the poverty and material immiseration described by Marx, but the rise of the alienated “one-dimensional” or “organization” man in tweed suits and the hubristic arrogance of white-coated scientists who threatened the fabric of life itself with atom bombs and chemicals, the stifling conformity of a social life hollowed out by the market but also by state intrusion. These updated historical features become the basic starting point for his project of transcending Marxism:

After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics.¹²

As class and labor appeared to be waning as nodes of revolt, new targets appeared that reflected the vast military-industrial-scientific complex of Cold War Fordism, “Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced an issue as class – as witness the extent to which many social analyses have singled out managers, bureaucrats, scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly dominant groups.”¹³ Bookchin’s work provides a perfect snapshot of a confident American empire at the height of its power in the late 1960s, part of a familiar constellation of critical themes from the era which found wide expression ranging from The Twilight Zone to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Yet despite his careful sensitivity to the possibility that classless societies could still be hierarchical societies, Bookchin devoted little attention to the opposite case: a relatively decentralized and horizontal society that is nonetheless still unfree. At the moment he was developing his theory of hierarchy, a new socio-political regime was unfolding that shared certain aspects of his critique of the stifling effects of gigantism, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and the state: neoliberalism. Neoliberal capitalism sought to break up huge, inefficient (yet unionized) vertical corporations into leaner, more efficient units, decentralizing production into network structures characterized by outsourced labor, shifts from steady mass manufacture to flexible “just in time” production-on-demand, and which often used the same miniaturized and later even ecological technologies championed by Bookchin. The political, economic, and cultural tide turned against statist “elites” of all kinds, which were negatively contrasted to empowered, autonomous citizen-entrepreneurs operating in a supposedly free and democratic market. It is often overlooked the extent to which neoliberalism also had utopian elements. It rejected, at least in theory, the exertion of coercive power from above, most of all by the state, and advanced a language of freedom, however limited and bourgeois in nature. Politicians, bureaucrats, union leaders, but also bosses, managers and other hierarchs of the Fordist era become almost universally reviled symbols of power. While thoroughly capitalist, neoliberalism’s critique of the welfare state resonated with some aspects of the New Left’s critique of the paternalistic statism of Great Society and other state service programs, including Bookchin’s.

Offered in their stead was an ethos of networked, creative, collaborative, and self-directed production wherein workers have internalized the entrepreneurial ethos of self-management within the strict confines of capitalism. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s book, The New Spirit of Capitalism (2000), charts the overlaps between New Left critiques of the hierarchical society of Fordism and neoliberalism. It examines how the 1968 generation of socialists, culminating in the presidency of François Mitterand in 1980, replaced the classic “social critique” of exploitation and inequality with an “artistic” critique demanding freedom, autonomy, and authenticity, becoming the unwitting handmaidens of neoliberalism in the process. They go on to suggest this subterranean resonance partly explains the weakness of the global left during the 80s-2000s, the era when neoliberalism went into overdrive, as resulting from its critical energies being dulled through cooptation and recuperation by this new form of capitalism. This line of critique can to some extent be extended to Bookchin’s political project. Despite his uncompromising anticapitalism, his antistatism, decentralism, and focus on hierarchy mirrored aspects of the emerging neoliberal order. The question is to what extent these resonances undermine or challenge his social theory, and if it retains the same critical energy in an age of horizontal and self-managed forms of capitalism.

Marxist versus Ecological Anticapitalism: Twin Objectivisms?

At roughly the same time, Bookchin’s project sought to shift the critique of capitalism away from Marx’s allegedly economistic paradigm to a more fundamental and potentially universal contradiction between capitalism’s cancerous “grow or die” logic and nature. In this regard, Bookchin was an early and influential figure in a general intellectual and political trend during the period which shifted the core of anticapitalist critique away from one focused on labor, poverty, and material exploitation, to one dependent upon ecological limits. He contends, “a capitalistic society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately devour the natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host.”¹⁴ As with his conceptualization of hierarchy, his theorization of an ecological anticapitalism has important theoretical and political implications, and must be historicized against the backdrop of Fordist affluence and a complacent working class.

Firstly, it arguably replaces one objectivist dynamic of crisis and social change with another, namely supplanting Marx’s “objective” economic laws with natural ones – ecological limits to capitalist growth. But both rely on an implicit “immiseration theory”: in one the objective laws of capitalism grind workers down until revolution becomes unavoidable, while in the other, planetary ecological integrity becomes so degraded by capitalism’s insatiable appetite that humanity is compelled to either change or face extinction. Both are indeed varieties of “crisis critique,” as they pivot on a functionalist assumption that a given society internally generates its own crisis dynamic, which in turn begins to impede the very functionality of that system while also generating new impulses for change.

Bookchin’s critique was ahead of its time. New Left Marxism/Maoism proved bankrupt by the early 70s and began to fade; the collapse of state socialism in 1989 put the final nail in the coffin. Building on the New Social Movements of the 70s and 80s, ecology became the new beating heart of North American radicalism in the 1990s, filling the political vacuum left by the global collapse of Marxism. In the course of 30 years, the Marxist critique of capitalism had been largely replaced by critiques largely motivated by ecological concerns. Yet even what would appear to be the most objective limit imaginable – nature – has not proven to be capitalism’s silver bullet, at least not yet. Ecologists have now relied on a discursive strategy warning of impending ecological collapse for at least fifty years. While ecological problems are more visible now, like all crises, their impacts remain unevenly distributed. They have yet to result in either widespread political mobilization from below or drastic government action from above. Were such ecological limits to become acute, elites might simply wall themselves off from ecological problems as they have from social ones, such as those currently seeking escape to remote seasteads, New Zealand, or the moon. And as Bookchin warned, such ecological “limits” are no guarantee of social transformation; they are just as likely to point in reactionary political directions, as evidenced by the rise of ecofascist discourse and the ubiquity of post-apocalyptic cultural products.¹⁵

Indeed, ecology could even prove to be capitalism’s savior: even as ecological degradation proceeds apace, we’ve seen the emergence of “green capitalism” and calls for a “Green New Deal.” Capitalism today offers a dazzling panoply of “green” products, new markets in carbon credits, and innovative ways to profit from disaster capitalism. Perhaps tellingly, as ecology became increasingly incorporated into neoliberalism, it also became a noticeably less prominent theme in Bookchin’s writings during the last decade of his life. He instead directed his attention to developing Communalism, accompanied by a spirited defense of what he saw as a dying left commitment to freedom, universality, rationality, and revolution – all traits central to the Marxist tradition he spent much of his life criticizing yet increasingly praised in his final years. Despite his central role in popularizing an ecological critique of capitalism, his earlier faith that looming ecocide would forge a new trans-class revolutionary subject is noticeable for its almost complete absence in his later work.

Ecology has made important contributions to the critique of capitalism, while at the same time obscuring other dimensions. Although it supplanted Marxism as the dominant anticapitalist frame in the eighties and nineties, it harbors similar objectivist and antipolitical tendencies. Ecological discourse often occludes the fact that “crisis,” whether caused by ecological degradation or social immiseration, is never simply given, but always mediated, framed, and therefore subject to normative and political interpretation. Ecological crisis critique, like reductive forms of Marxism before it, defines the problem too narrowly while displacing difficult political questions into other arenas, often, in the case of climate change discourse, into the even more specialized and inaccessible realm of science. But what constitutes a “crisis” is always and unavoidably a political struggle that cannot be solved through recourse to the comforting laws of natural science. This was a central insight of Bookchin’s critique of Marxism, and his subsequent valorization of the political sphere. Even if objective limits exist, they might not ultimately matter, or could turn out to be the wrong political frame. The present crisis demonstrates that breakdowns in systemic function mean nothing if not accompanied by actors offering new political directions. Indeed, the current impasse of neoliberal technocrats pitted against a nationalist populism suggests that “crisis,” social or ecological, quite possibly advantages the wrong frame – fixing one or another version of the existing system, at any cost.

Communalism against Capitalism: Autonomy, Decentralization, Democracy

In the last years of his life, Bookchin shifted his focus from the revolutionary potential of ecology to refining the directly democratic anticapitalist politics he eventually called Communalism. Communalism grounds Bookchin’s critiques of Marxian economism and anarchism’s distrust of even democratic power in an alternate reading of revolutionary history that locates popular assemblies as a crucially overlooked institutional locus of freedom. Communalism offers a novel synthesis of various currents of radical political traditions, seeking to correct and complement their perceived shortcomings. But it also retains some of the same political blind spots discussed above, especially regarding key differences between statist and capitalist forms of power. These problems include: a residual anarchist state-centricity, limitations of an ethical anticapitalism rooted in civic republican notions of the “common good,” and insufficient explanation of why direct democracy would be any more likely or capable of taming capitalism than other failed historical attempts.

How should one understand the politics of Communalism? Bookchin applauds the accuracy of even the common dictionary definition of the term: “Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism… is, ‘a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”¹⁶ He continues, “The concrete political dimension of Communalism is known as libertarian municipalism… [which] resolutely seeks to eliminate statist municipal structures and replace them with the institutions of a libertarian polity.”¹⁷ This description is remarkably consistent with the theorization of hierarchy laid out in The Ecology of Freedom twenty years prior, and the political vision of the New Left Decentralist Project. The priority given to autonomy and decentralism reflects two core assumptions: one, that power is spatial, i.e. hierarchical, and two, that it resides primarily or most importantly in the state. But the values of autonomy, decentralization, and antistatism say little about capitalism; indeed, this is what makes these same terms so attractive to conservatives. To clarify, he adds a few pages later that Communalism:

seeks to alter not only the political life of society but also its economic life. On this score, its aim is not to nationalize the economy or retain private ownership of the means of production but to municipalize the economy. It seeks to integrate the means of production into the existential life of the municipality, such that every productive enterprise falls under the purview of the local assembly, which decides how it will function to meet the interests of the community as a whole.¹⁸

In contrast to the Marxian critique of capitalism, understood as overly objectivist and economistic, Bookchin articulated the need for an ethical anticapitalism where the distinct social sphere of economics has been dissolved altogether, replaced by rational control and allocation coordinated by directly democratic local assemblies.

In a Communalist way of life, conventional economics, with its focus on prices and scarce resources, would be replaced by ethics, with its concern for human needs and the good life… Municipal assemblies would become not only vital arenas for civic life and decision-making but centers where the shadowy world of economic logistics, properly coordinated production, and civic operations would be demystified and opened to the scrutiny and participation of the citizenry as a whole.¹³

Such assemblies are distinct from Marxism’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” in that they are a trans- or post-class affair; production is geared towards the gain of neither the bourgeoisie or proletariat, but the “common good.”

Radicalizing a lineage that includes Aristotle, Arendt, and Habermas, Communalism hews closely to core elements of the civic republican, defined as “tradition of political thought that stresses the interconnection of individual freedom and civic participation with the promotion of the common good.”¹⁹ It shares its emphasis on the transformative potential of public deliberation and decision-making on individuals and communities, but with an explicitly antistatist and anticapitalist twist. Rather than class struggle animated by conflicting material interests, this critique valorizes pursuit of the common good via debate in a rational public sphere. For Bookchin, the antidote to capitalism is direct democracy, wherein popular assemblies “become arenas where class conflicts could be played out and where classes could be eliminated.”²⁰

However, the theoretical and political shift in emphasis from class particularism towards an abstract civic-ethical universalism does not automatically resolve underlying class divides in society. Just as there is no outside of capitalism, there is no outside of class relations. Indeed, it is important to note that just as the Greek polis was founded on the relative “post-scarcity” of a slave economy, post-scarcity anarchism was predicated on the seemingly endless abundance of the robust and stable post-war Fordist economy. However, both were relatively short-lived and ultimately destroyed in no small part by broader economic pressures. Communalism’s articulation of civic republicanism reflects Bookchin’s theoretical work of the Sixties, which argued that automation and the relative transcendence of material security had rendered class obsolete and opened up the potential for a trans-class left geared towards issues of quality of life rather than mere quantity. Yet this pronouncement came just as the Golden Age of post-war capitalism was about to unravel into a neoliberal future where democracy increasingly came to justify, not dissolve capitalism, resulting in an increasingly unequal, yet formally “free” society with few alternatives in sight. The relevant point here is that whether in times of feast or famine, capitalism is more than simple scarcity or exploitation; it is therefore no more likely to disappear during periods of abundance, which have in any case proven to be the exception rather than the rule.

Although criticizing “[a]narchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos) – the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society” as “the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy,” Communalism assumes this tension is overcome simply by refracting individual self-regulation through collectivities expressed via popular assemblies.²¹ This puts too much faith in the transformative power of deliberation – assuming that if only unmediated by elites, political outcomes would change dramatically – and posits too much autonomy between politics and economics. These weaknesses highlight troubling affinities with classical liberalism – the emphasis on an abstract common good determined from an undisclosed Archimedean standpoint of universality, as well as reinforcing a bifurcation between the economic and political spheres, as if one functions independently of the culture and institutional power of the other. In fact, Communalism’s emphasis on autonomy and decentralization shares many points of theoretical overlap with anarchism, liberalism, and many strains of conservatism. Indeed, in 1978, Bookchin spoke at the national Libertarian Party conference, joking that since most leftists would be just as likely to put him against the wall he felt “safer in your company.”²² Despite such overtures, his speech and presence was not well-received by the avowedly capitalist crowd. Based on Bookchin’s concept of hierarchy, Communalism frequently presents power relations as primarily a struggle between elite “statecraft” versus democratic self-governance. Although he came to emphatically reject anarchism, its foundational fixation on state power would persist in Bookchin’s political ideas. This depiction of power relations, however, does not adequately take into account how both capitalism and various psychological “epistemologies of rule” permeate all of society, enacting non-hierarchical domination that is not necessarily carried out by state elites and potentially exists even in unmediated, horizontal forms of direct democracy.

Indeed, the general libertarian turn in society today suggests just this possibility. It valorizes antistatism, initiatives, referenda, and unmediated social relations more generally, self-activation and maximization, health and wellness, the local, authentic, cultural, and ecological – all while leaving the deeper logic of capitalism unquestioned. The very term “autonomous” is problematic, as it suggests political autonomy is possible within capitalism, concealing the latter’s unique ability to enforce social control in indirect and non-personalized ways. An astute observer of the limits of leftist attempts to transcend capitalism, Bookchin was well aware of these problems. He warned not only of the faux ethical capitalism of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream but also the cooperative movement, noting “Cooperatives that profess to be moral in their intentions have yet to make any headway in replacing big capitalist concerns or even in surviving without themselves becoming capitalistic in their methods and profit-oriented in their goals.”²³

This critique included more radical past endeavors as well, noting:

the drift among many ‘socialistic’ self-managed enterprises, even under the red and red-and-black flags, respectively, of revolutionary Russia and revolutionary Spain, toward forms of collective capitalism that ultimately led many of these concerns to compete with one another for raw materials and markets.²⁴

Despite such sensitivities, he paid far less attention to why local municipalities might succeed in controlling capitalism where actors ranging from the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, the CNT in Spain, powerful modern nations like France under Mitterand, to the explicitly anticapitalist Syriza in Greece all failed.

Conclusion: Stronger in Practice than in Theory?

Rejecting both the Marxian goal of conquering the state and anarchist attempts to evade or destroy power altogether, Communalism is an ambitious theoretical project that combines core insights from each tradition to create a new political formulation. Bookchin mines the history of urban social movements to argue that cities provide a locus for radical democracy beyond the ‘temporary autonomous zones’ of protest encampments or ephemeral general assemblies. They offer concrete locations that spotlight whose “right to the city” is taken seriously, furnishing a visible public space for contesting the legitimacy of politics usually conducted at a remove from the populace. Political history from the Paris Commune to Tahrir Square today suggests that cities represent a unique arena for the emergence of a democratic counterpower capable of transcending both the ephemeral power of the street as well as authoritarian state institutions long molded to serve the needs of the status quo.

At the same time, cities remain subject to many of the same threats faced by other forces of political contestation. Detroit was abandoned by industry despite desperate and conciliatory unions, while nearby Flint was subjected to rule by unelected emergency financial managers in order to avoid bankruptcy. Thus while cities can offer an arena for envisioning and indeed mobilizing against capitalism, that same spatialization also imposes constraints which a highly deterritorialized, mobile, and digitized capital can easily evade. Nonetheless, there are strong strategic reasons to embrace the municipal realm as a crucial arena for political struggle. For one, radical ideas have more power in the political realm of persuasion than in the realm of building economic alternatives reliant on material resources; relatedly, they are unique arenas where the opposing logics of public good versus private gain can be counterposed. The principle of confederation can help act as a bulwark against attempts to evade municipal popular power such as capital flight, although this doesn’t automatically overcome the competition between cities fostered by capitalism. Libertarian Municipalism is perhaps best understood not as a grand theorization of society and certainly not a fetishization of localism and decentralism, but rather a strategic wager, one which provides a focus that counters the “everything everywhere all at once” pluralism of activist culture while honoring both anarchist concerns for authoritarianism and Marxist attention to strategy and institutional power. Global movements today seem to be intuitively gravitating towards a similar politics; our aim should be to provide a mass political vehicle akin to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that weds a progressive socialist agenda to commitments to creating communalist political forms. The recent growth of DSA has significantly expanded its earlier narrow fixation on electoral politics, although this remains a central focus, with all the attendant pitfalls. But as long as faux-democratic representative democracy exists, so will the power it exerts over our lives, making it foolhardy to simply decry its legitimacy, ignore it, or create alternative institutions that are equally compromised by capitalist imperatives or limitations of scale. Libertarian municipalism is a political praxis that can both fill those positions of power while also pointing beyond them.

Bookchin was fond of pointing out how history imprisons thinkers and traditions in the times they lived. Thus it is somewhat odd that his preferred moments of historical inspiration go back even further – the Greek polis on the one hand, and the Paris Commune on the other. Although both are inspiring examples of directly democratic popular power, neither were tested by the dynamism of capitalism in its developed modern form.¹⁰ Communalism represents a powerful social vision and a promising political strategy, elements of which can be seen in diverse rebellions across the globe today. Yet the outcomes of these recent uprisings also highlight some problems with a primary strategic focus on the state. The popular democratic uprising in Egypt resulted in military rule within a year and delivered the most immediate gains to the repressive but well-organized Muslim Brotherhood. Mass resistance to austerity in Greece led to the creation of a new radical left party, one which then oversaw the continuation of austerity, while neo-fascist group Golden Dawn grew by tapping into anticapitalist sentiment and providing mutual aid. While neither example reflects Communalist politics, they nonetheless raise important questions about the limitations of overcoming hierarchy, let alone capitalism, via a radical civic republicanism focused mostly on the state. Operating within this political tradition and compounded by lingering anarchist presumptions, Communalism’s theorization of power in capitalist society remains incomplete and vulnerable to recuperation by ever-evolving forms of power. However, it can be deepened by incorporating complementary insights from Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School Critical Theory that Bookchin drew heavily from in other respects, as well as thinkers like Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. Together, these political and intellectual resources provide an updated and more nuanced analysis of capitalism and the complicated, ever-evolving nature of power within it. Combining these traditions, rather than counterposing them in a stale (post)anarchist versus Marxist turf war, offers up a powerful political and theoretical toolbox that is better suited to understanding and transcending the multifaceted forms of hierarchy and domination required by capitalist society.

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2000).
Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971).
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982).
ibid 4.
Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 98.
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 4.
Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project” in The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, eds. Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor (New York: Verso Books, 2016), footnote 9.
⁸Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 3-4.
ibid 2.
See for example, Andy Price, Recovering Bookchin (New Compass, 2012), and Damien White, Bookchin, A Critical Appraisal (Pluto, 2008).
Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,” 4.
ibid.
Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 15.
For another view on the reactionary potential of ecology, see Alex Gourevitch, “The Politics of Fear Part I: What Ever Happened to the War on Terror?” N+1 (No. 6, 2007).
Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,” 11.
ibid 12.
ibid 13.
From Encyclopedia Britannica entry for “civic republicanism:” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1916872/civic-republicanism
Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,” 12.
ibid 7.
The speech can be viewed here: https://social-ecology.org/wp/2008/12/video-murray-bookchin-interview/
Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 57-8.
Murray Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,” 13.