Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (119 page)

In order to change people and society, Goodman primarily looked to education. Probably his single most important contribution was to libertarian education. His starting-point was that there is no right education except ‘growing up into a worthwhile world’. Beyond this, education should foster independent thought and expression, rather than conformity. Since compulsory education had become a universal trap, Goodman boldly suggested like Godwin that very many of the young might be better off if they had no formal schooling at all: ‘it by no means follows that the complicated artifact of a school system has much to do with education, and certainly not with good education’.
⁶⁰
There is good evidence that normal children will make up the first seven years’ school-work with four to seven months of good teaching. At least students should be able to leave and return to education periodically. Where school does exist it must be voluntary for there is no growth to freedom without intrinsic motivation.

Goodman’s educational alternatives included using the city itself as a school, involving adults from the community, making class attendance voluntary, and decentralizing urban schools and enabling children to live temporarily on marginal farms. In
Art and Social Nature
(1946), Goodman stressed like Read the importance of the aesthetic sensibility, but he came to believe that contemporary education must also be heavily weighted towards the sciences so that people can feel at home in the modern technological environment and understand the morality of a scientific way of life.

In
The Community of Scholars
(1962), Goodman dealt with higher education and showed how inadequate it was to meet the real educational needs of the young. With the huge growth of administrators and the relationships between teachers and pupils increasingly distant and official, he called for a return to the traditional university which was a small, face-to-face community of scholars, autonomous and self-governing–in short, ‘anarchically self-regulating’.
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Since teaching and learning always involve a personal relation, the teacher should be not an institutional hybrid but a veteran with experience of life.

Goodman thought that contemporary problems are not just the result of bad formal education in school and university. The whole of ‘normal’ child-rearing is to blame. In his best-selling book
Growing Up Absurd
(1960),
he showed how irrational are the traditional ways of bringing up children through coercion and discipline. But he did not despair. He was impressed by the young in America, who were dismissed by their elders as beatniks and delinquents, for their simpler fraternity and sexuality. They offered a direct contrast to the mores of the ‘“organized system”, its role playing, its competitiveness, its canned culture, its public relations, its avoidance of risk and self-exposure’.
⁶²

To remedy the alienation and division felt by members of modern society, Goodman worked as a psychotherapist, and in his remarkable contribution to
Gestalt Therapy
(1951) he searched for a new harmony between the individual and his social and physical environment. In 1968, at a time of social upheaval in the West, he declared simply:

On a broader front, Goodman called just before he died in 1972 for a
New Reformation
which would radically transform industrialized civilization. Thousands of people influenced by Goodman in the counter-culture in the sixties and seventies tried to do just that by creating alternative ways of living and seeing in communes and collectives. The ‘Flower Power’ generation, whom Goodman inspired and admired, attempted to put into practice the kind of pacifist anarchism to which he devoted his life.

O
NE
OF
THE
MOST
influential thinkers to have renewed anarchist thought and action since the Second World War is undoubtedly Murray Bookchin. His main achievement is to have combined traditional anarchist insights with modern ecological thinking to form what he calls ‘social ecology’. In this way, he has helped develop the powerful libertarian tendency in the contemporary Green movement. Just as Kropotkin renewed anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century by giving it an evolutionary dimension, so Bookchin has gone further to give it a much needed ecological perspective.

Bookchin has recently reached a wider audience, but he has been involved in Left politics for most of his life. Born in 1921 the son of poor Russian immigrants in the United States, he spent his early years as a worker in industry. As a young man he steeped himself in Marxism; first he was a Communist and then a Trotskyism. A reading of Herbert Read and George Woodcock helped wean him from Marx and Engels, and in the sixties he emerged as a powerful and controversial anarchist thinker. The first book to bring him to prominence was
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
(1971), a collection of essays inspired by the revolutionary optimism of the sixties which argued that for the first time in history the prospect of material abundance created by modern technology made possible a free society for all. The vitriolic essay ‘Listen, Marxist!’ reflected the controversial and sometimes abusive nature of his style.

In the meantime, Bookchin continued to develop his interest in environmental issues. His first published work was about the problems of chemicals in food published in German as
Lebensgefährliche Lebensmittel
(1952) which looked at the social origins of environmental pollution. It was followed by
Our Synthetic Environment
(1962), issued under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber, which reflected his interest in the way technology mediated our relationship with nature. A concern about the quality of city life led him to write his critical study of urbanism
Crisis in our Cities
(1965). In
The Limits of the City
(1973; many essays therein dated from the
1950s), he attacked the modern megalopolis and centralized planning and tried to bring a human and democratic dimension which he saw in the Greek
polis
back to modern city life. City air should make people free, not cough. This interest is further reflected in
The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship
(1987). It became a central theme in Bookchin’s writing that municipalism, with its emphasis on the human scale, local control, and decentralization, must be a fundamental anarchist goal. The citizens’ assembly should foster autonomous selfhood as well as civic virtue.

It was in his essay ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought’ (1964) which appeared in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
that Bookchin first clearly argued that a free society should be an ecological one. He took up the theme in
Toward an Ecological Society
(1980) where he developed his central thesis that the notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of man and woman by man. In his wide-ranging work
The Ecology of Freedom
(1982) he draws on history and anthropology to demonstrate the emergence of hierarchy and to argue for its dissolution. It was called at the time by John Clark ‘the most important book to appear so far in the history of anarchist thought’ and by Theodore Roszak to be ‘the most important contribution to ecological thought in our generation’.
¹

Unfortunately, it is not an easy book to read for those not well versed in philosophy and critical social theory, and the style can sometimes be obscure, repetitive and tangential. Bookchin has tried to remedy the drawback by writing
Remaking Society
(1989) as a ‘primer’ on his ideas in a more accessible and readable form. In all these later works, he developed a form of cultural politics grounded in an organic and ecological world-view. Taken together, they form an original contribution to political theory.

Like the great nineteenth-century social thinkers, Bookchin proposes a grand synthesis of philosophy, science, anthropology, and history. If he does not always weave ideas culled from different and often incompatible traditions into a coherent whole, he cannot at least be accused of not being ambitious. Bookchin’s intellectual background is remarkably wide-ranging but it is firmly placed in the Western tradition of critical theory and the Enlightenment.

His Marxist apprenticeship has left a Leninist cast to his thought: he claims to think dialectically and recognizes the central importance of history in understanding culture. Among the German Romantic thinkers, he shares Schiller’s emphasis on the imagination and art, and Fichte’s view of human consciousness as nature rendered self-conscious. He is influenced by the Frankfurt school of social theorists, especially Adorno and Horkheimer, in their critique of instrumental reason and modern civilization although he rejects their pessimistic view that man must dominate nature
in order to create economic abundance. Yet despite the wide variety of his influences and sources, he has tried to digest them into a remarkable synthesis of his own. Coherence, he admits, is his favourite word — although he does not always achieve it.

Bookchin’s anarchism draws inspiration from Bakunin in its revolutionary fervour and from Kropotkin in its proposals. His study of the Spanish Revolution, which resulted in
The Spanish Anarchists
(1976), reflects his awareness of a living anarchist tradition. Towards the end of his life, he looked back to the American Revolution and to ancient Greece for libertarian and democratic precedents.

At the same time, Bookchin unabashedly places himself in the Utopian tradition. For him Utopia is not a dreamy vision, but rather a matter of foresight. The power of Utopian thinking lies precisely in ‘a vision of society that questions
all
the presuppositions of present day society’.
²
It stirs the imagination to consider new alternatives to everyday life while having a passion for concrete proposals. He is particularly inspired by Rabelais, Charles Fourier and William Morris who offer a vision of society in which work is transformed into play, and who stress the importance of sensuousness and creativity. Bookchin thus adds his voice to the call of the Parisian students of 1968 for ‘Imagination to seize Power’ and shares with the Situationists a desire to change our habits and perceptions in everyday life.

But while Bookchin readily admits his Utopian inspiration, he is keen to stress that anarchism is extremely realistic and more relevant than ever. In the past, the anarchist was often regarded ‘as a forlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia for the peasant village or the medieval commune’, but today the anarchist concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology and decentralized society are not only ‘eminently practical’ but preconditions to human survival.
³
Bookchin’s Utopian thinking is therefore firmly based on the realities of human experience.

One of Bookchin’s most important achievements is to have helped develop a new approach to analyse economic exploitation and social oppression. He goes beyond the rather simplistic denunciation of the State and capitalism found in the classic anarchist thinkers and prefers to talk in terms of ‘hierarchy’ rather than class, ‘domination’ rather than exploitation. He eschews tired abstractions like the ‘masses’ or the ‘proletariat’. Exploitation and class rule are particular concepts within more generalized concepts of domination and hierarchy. And by hierarchy, he means not only a social condition but a state of consciousness; it involves ‘the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command’ as well as the economic and political systems of class and State.
⁴

The State moreover is according to Bookchin not merely a constellation of bureaucratic and coercive institutions but also a state of mind, ‘an instilled mentality for ordering reality’. The State as an instrument of organized violence did not suddenly evolve in society as Proudhon and Kropotkin suggest. It emerged with the gradual politicization of certain social functions and it has become meshed with society to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish the two: ‘It not only
manages
the economy but
politicizes
it; it not only
colonizes
social life but
absorbs
it.’
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