With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the projected horizon of Marx’s philosophy of history, and the utopian belief that life might be lived otherwise, has been put on trial on a global scale. Inherited in part from the work of such sceptics as Hayek and Popper, and seemingly demonstrated in the previous century’s violent totalitarian experiments, cynicism toward the idea of utopia, if not an outright anti-utopian mentality, pervades and permeates all areas of our present public discourse and political culture. Even those on today’s academic left, who have become all too comfortable calling into question the very validity of those so-called grand narratives that gave political radicalism authority in the previous century, appear to have put dreams of revolution on hold and have, in turn, ceased putting forth proposals of how a radically changed society might (and should) look. Wherever one looks the concept of utopia has been unanimously dismissed as a damaging fantasy.
The American social theorist Murray Bookchin, however, was, as Dan Chodorkoff mentions in the foreword of this timely collection of essays, ‘unabashedly utopian’ (xiii). Bookchin’s work, in the true spirit of utopia and utopian thinking, determinedly attempts to sketch the core organising principles of an alternative society, and does so by ambitiously fusing anthropology, ecology, history and philosophy in order to produce a holistic view of the breadth of human potentiality. Indeed, one of Bookchin’s great strengths here is to give the idea of utopia, and radical political movements themselves, new life in our political present.
Unlike those who believe our revolutionary moment has passed, Bookchin suggests we are more equipped today – in light of the development of new technologies and radical sensibilities – to realise a wholly utopian world. For Bookchin, these new sensibilities and perspectives owe its flourishing, in part, to the global counterculture of the sixties which brought nonhierarchical forms of sociation and an expanded idea of human freedom out of political obscurity and into the mainstream of political life and thinking. ‘The sixties are unique’, he contends, ‘in that the concept of community began to develop on a broad popular scale – indeed, a largely generation scale – when young people in considerable numbers, disenchanted with the prevailing society, reoriented themselves toward reconstructive utopistic projects of their own.’ (141)
Against the view that such a movement died in this decade, against the view that it was a mere passing trend in the history of our culture, Bookchin argues its demise was brought about by multiple factors and ‘if anything, awaits a richer, more perceptive, and more conscious development.’ (13) Even as Bookchin himself concedes that the movement was ‘never adequate to a long-range project of developing a wider public consciousness of the need for social change’ (149) and destined ‘to alarm and utterly alienate an uncomprehending public’ (148) through its radicalism, he maintains that ‘[t]he ideals it raised of communal living, openness of relations, love, sexual freedom, sensuousness of dress and manner are the abiding goals of utopian thought at its best.’ (13) To dismiss the sixties as a mere ‘phase’ is ‘to dismiss utopianism as a dream.’
The inspiration the author finds in this decade and the development of its radical sensibilities, also resolves another major philosophical concern of these essays and his broader work itself. As Bookchin tirelessly emphasises, revolutionary projects will remain incomplete if they fail to reckon with all forms and manifestations of domination. For him, we cannot leave any stone unturned in our battle to establish a world free of exploitation. This leads Bookchin, in one of the collection’s more radical essays, to highlight the shortcomings of Marx’s own revolutionary philosophy. He writes in ‘Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology’: ‘Marx’s work is not only the most sophisticated ideology of state capitalism, but it impedes a truly revolutionary conception of freedom. It alters our perception of social issues in such a way that we cannot relevantly anchor the revolutionary project in sexual relations, the family, community, education, and the fostering of a truly revolutionary sensibility and ethics.’ (169) As a result, ‘it will no longer do to insist that a classless society, freed of material exploitation, will necessarily be a liberated society.’ (168)
This is not to say that Bookchin denies the significance of class or the class analysis of society itself. It is rather the case that the revolutionary project must do more than simply overturn hierarchies constructed on class lines. It must equally purge society of hierarchy as such – those organised on the lines of gender and race, as well as the more hidden aspects of domination that reside in the family and in education. ‘The irreducible problem areas of society lie not only in the conflict between wage labor and capital in the factory’, he writes, ‘they lie in the conflicts between age groups and sexes within the family, hierarchical modes of instruction in the schools, the bureaucratic usurpation of power within the city, and ethnic divisions within society.’ (19)
The revolutionary project, therefore, even for those nations of ‘real socialism’ that existed in Bookchin’s time, remained incomplete. Harking back to his criticism of Marx, Bookchin notes that ‘there can be a decidedly classless, even a nonexploitative society in the economic sense that still preserves hierarchical rule and domination in the social sense.’ (5) Hierarchy might persist even where class has seemingly been abolished.
This, according to Bookchin, is why the movements which emerged out of the sixties are so significant for our own revolutionary purposes. While radical movements of the past primarily accounted for class and economic concerns, the values established by the sixties counterculture movements moved beyond such considerations and pointed toward an entirely egalitarian way of organising society. Today there is similarly great potential, if not greater potential, for our political radicalism to widen its embrace and apprehensions – especially now that the societies that grew from proletarian revolutions have perished. The fall of the nations of ‘real socialism’, in this sense, can only be interpreted in positive terms.
But Bookchin’s political vision is not without scepticism. In fact, he is keen to remind us that radical movements inevitably encounter problems in the forms of techniques employed by its members. Taking the establishment of anti-nuke collectives as point de repère in the essay ‘The Power to Destroy, The Power to Create’, Bookchin suggests these groups are at great risk of involvement with the very forces they profess to oppose. Such movements do so when they derive for purposes of exposure and organisation the techniques of advertisement and managerialism, when it deludes millions seeking a radical alternative that agreements with its enemies, which are mere ‘trade-offs’ in the grand scheme of things, will bring about a radically changed social world – in short, when they work within the system to moderate the ecological damages caused by contemporary capitalism rather than work toward the creation of an alternate society founded on alternate principles. As Bookchin illuminatingly puts it: ‘[i]t appeals to our desire for “effectiveness” and our hope of achieving “mass support” without revealing the immoral, in fact, demoralizing implications of the methods it employs.’ (41) These movements ‘when they do not challenge the basic corporate, property, bureaucratic, and profit-oriented social structure at its most fundamental level of ownership and control’ (43), emerge at best, ineffective, and at worst, completely out of touch with the demands necessary to evade an environmental point of no return. For Bookchin, environmentalist demands, and the techniques for achieving such demands, are simply ‘not radical enough.’ (46)
Even the counterculture movements, and those movements organised around the development and promises of new technology, which Bookchin diligently commends, are at risk of something similar. Bookchin, for instance, admits that the young, primarily affluent, people who forged the new values and sensibilities would fall easy prey to the commercial system as the new values entered the market in commodified form. ‘Often, young people were easily victimized and crudely exploited by commercial interests that shrewdly pandered to the more superficial aspects of the new culture. Large numbers of this dropout youth, exultant in their newly discovered sense of liberation, lacked an awareness of the harsh fact that complete freedom is impossible in a prevailing system of unfreedom.’ (143) In the essay ‘Energy, “Ecotechnology,” and Ecology’, Bookchin fears alternative energy and technology will similarly be co-opted by the economic status quo if it fails to offer a radical alternative to the profit-oriented social relations of the existing capitalist and industrial apparatus. A mere introduction of alternative energy and technology, though promising on the surface, would only leave the prevailing anti-ecological society intact.
And yet, despite this, the techniques of the counterculture movements, unlike those of the anti-nuke collectives at which Bookchin takes aim, emerge closer to those techniques Bookchin believes are most effective in our attempts to establish a world free of market and anti-ecological sensibilities. Against the methods employed by radical movements of his day, he favours a form of direct assembly and action, alongside the development of affinity groups, which found varied successes in political movements of the past – namely those employed in the Paris Commune and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalism movement. Such techniques will not be satisfied with petty deals made with the political establishment; nor will it conform and reproduce the logic of capitalism found in the methods employed by both anti-nuke and environmental movements that appear to do no more than deliver it to its worst enemies. Instead, it will enrich a radically anti-hierarchical and non-domineering sensibility, where individuals belong to a community of equals and where they can truly ‘take control of society directly, without representatives.’ (37) In this sense, it is much more than a mere method of organisation employed against power and its interests. It also provides a glimpse of alternate principles that might govern a future, more human society; one where important political decisions are made collectively and with the consent of the broader community.
The stakes of the future direction of the ecology movement, as with radical movements in toto, are particularly high: ‘the coming decade may well determine whether the ecology movement will be reduced to a decorative appendage of an inherently diseased, anti-ecological society, a society riddled by an unbridled need for control, domination, and exploitation of humanity and nature – or, hopefully, whether the ecology movement will become the growing educational arena for a new ecological society based on mutual aid, decentralized communities, a people’s technology, and nonhierarchial, libertarian relations that will yield not only a new harmony between human and human but between humanity and nature.’ (61)
And yet despite the grave nature of these stakes, Bookchin retains an unshakeable faith in the power of utopian thinking, and the ability for us to forge new social and communal sensibilities that might bring about an alternative and ecologically oriented society. In fact, rather than being completely politically impotent to shape our futures now that the revolutionary movements of the past have died away, now that the societies forged in the name of proletariat revolution have fallen, we in our historical epoch, reinforced by the most advanced tendencies and techniques inherited by feminist, gay, community movements and more keen to widen the embrace of our radicalism, are better armed with the tools to build society anew. We are uniquely free of history, and must, as Bookchin prophetically illuminates in the collection’s conclusion, endeavour ‘to create it rather than be created by it.’ (264)
If we are to recover the power of social movements to undermine the economic status quo and forge relationships with each other within a rich nexus of love and solidarity, if we are to renew belief and respect in the concept of utopia which has been intellectually vilified by today’s political establishment, Bookchin (and his essays compiled here) is an indispensable and much needed guide in the battles that lie ahead.
Reviewed by Reece Rogers