Critique of the
New Left Movement
The Movement in General
Antifascism and the Cybernetic
Welfare State
Yippies and Weathermen
Communes and Collectives
Bookchinism
Women’s Liberation
The Movement in General
Of all aspects of American society few are as rotten and degraded as the
“movement” that claims to oppose it. This fact may be recognized with varying
degrees of satisfaction or indifference by those watching its last spectacular gasps, or
bemoaned with equal passivity and incomprehension by its own activists and
“spokesmen,” but everyone knows that this decade-long spectacle of opposition
has had its day.
What is considerably less understood is the real nature of the movement, the role it has played vis-à-vis the dominant society, and the reasons for its effective demise. Up until now, almost all the commentaries on the movement have represented a fundamental unity, masked by the apparent incompatibility of their versions: politicians, sociologists, newsmen, and leftists have all begun from the proposition that the movement is what it claims to be — the opposition to this society. In fact, the movement in the United States has never been a revolutionary opposition to the dominant order, but on the contrary has functioned effectively as a support for that order and a containment of all authentic revolutionary opposition.
The movement certainly contains different and even antagonistic tendencies. However, there is a fairly general agreement among the activists of black liberation, women’s liberation, anti-war action, ecology, etc., that “it’s all part of the same struggle”; and there is a considerable degree of common “participation,” mutual support, and alliances. But even when their differences seem fundamental or irreconcilable, the groups and individuals of the movement can be justifiably considered as a unity on the basis of the illusions that they all share.
We use the phrase “the movement” here in the commonly understood sense. This usage has a certain ambiguity. The real revolutionary movement for generalized self-management, expressing itself in the direct action of individuals against all forms of alienation, has little in common with “the movement” but the name. This real movement, in struggling for consciousness of itself, must first of all combat what passes for it: its various ideological distortions, its bureaucratic representations, and its spectacularization. The society of the spectacle paints it own picture of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the world and its history. It erects for itself a more or less unified pseudo-opposition that reinforces power society by the apparent all-inclusiveness of its false options. To the extent that truly radical acts escape destruction at the hands of the dominant order, the false opposition hastens to take them under its own wing: “the true becomes a moment of the false.”
Consider, for example, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 and the Watts riot of 1965. In the spectacle these events are securely situated as classic moments of the “New Left.” Their uniqueness, their “excesses,” their real significances are neutralized by being placed in this context. Watts is fit — if somewhat uneasily — into that oppositional category known as “black liberation,” where it consequently assumes an equal importance with Stokely Carmichael, the march on Selma, and the formation of the Black Panther Party. It is the “fault” of a racist establishment that didn’t move fast enough to ameliorate the condition of blacks in America; the police violence unleashed on the rioters is one more “proof” of the imminence of fascism. In an assault on the spectacle-commodity society that needed to become conscious of itself, the movement leaders can only see a battle with police that was too stupid to fight effectively. Gestures against the reign of survival are turned into an episode of the “struggle for survival.” The Situationist International was effectively alone in noting and defending the festive nature of the insurrection (in their pamphlet The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy). All of the reformist and leftist ideologists scrambled all over themselves apologizing for the looting and vandalism. Five years later the riot and all it laid bare had become so smothered in ideology that Huey Newton was able to get away with saying that Jonathan Jackson’s “revolutionary suicide” was “more revolutionary than Watts.” Evidently the blacks of Los Angeles hadn’t yet attained the “consciousness” to sacrifice their rage and their desires to the cause of “the people” (presumably under the guidance of their “Supreme Servant”).
The first significant signs of dissidence among youth in modern American society were not “political” at all. The juvenile delinquents of the 1950s were manifestations of crises in the major mechanisms of socialization — family, school, urbanism —, of the disintegration of all values, and their vandalism, theft and games of violence already expressed a crude revolt against the boredom of everyday existence, against the dead life that is the essential product of modern capitalism. All the priests of the old order — journalists, psychologists, sociologists, educators — worked overtime trying to fragment and “understand” these “rebels without a cause.” It was in fact this lack of a “cause” — the refusal of ideology — and the directness of their violence that constituted the most positive features of the delinquents’ rebellion. But their isolation, both from society as a whole and among themselves (in the hierarchy and battles of the street gangs), gave them no chance to escape the system of which they maintained an intentional ignorance. They typically returned, in their late teens, to the world of work, family, and patriotism — often preceded by a voluntary stretch in the army.
The early movement to a certain extent represented a complementary critique of modern society — its pacifism and vaguely libertarian tendencies beginning to pose questions of hierarchy and domination — but its humanism prevented it from seeing the more violent youth as allies, from affirming and extending the latter’s crude attempts at really making a party in the middle of the society of spectacular non-life. Each of these two movements of youth accepted the spectacular version of the other, and adopted the official opinions about them: the humanist-leftists dissociating themselves from the disorderliness and criminality of the delinquents (cf. the early civil rights and peace marches, in which everyone was supposed to be suited and beardless in order to make a good impression on public opinion), and the hoods ignorantly resentful of the intellectual “pinko creeps.” When, some years later, Allen Ginsberg turned the Hell’s Angels on to acid (thus averting their threatened disruption of an anti-war march) and the Yippies proclaimed the merger of the hippies and the politicos, this unity was achieved not by each side appropriating the radical tendencies of the other, but by a mutual reduction to their lowest common denominator — the passive consumption of culture and ideology: drugs, rock music, and the spectacle of community and revolution.
The specific form of the earlier rebellion of the delinquents will not reappear, being as it was the product of the dominant society’s relative poverty of mechanisms of recuperation. This vacuum has since been filled superabundantly: The teenager who exploded because he had “nothing to do” (spectacularized, for example, in the figure of James Dean) is now beckoned from all sides with things to occupy his idle hands and imagination — rock festivals, crafts, encounter groups, astrology, militant “revolution,” community service, country communes, etc. Where the official forces were not imaginative or avant-garde enough, the “opposition” manufactured its own substitutes, all the more credible for their “underground” origin: The same people who laugh at the imposture of the Peace Corps consume with respect the heroic saga of the Venceremos Brigade. The new youth will discover that their revolt is first of all against what now colonizes their lives in their own name — their “own” culture and their own “revolution.”
The movement is usually considered to have originated in certain more or less spontaneous struggles of dissident youth in the late fifties and early sixties. These youth — mainly students — developed tactics that were fairly effective in furthering the predominantly reformist aims which they set for themselves — strengthening bourgeois civil liberties, integration of blacks into the dominant society, and elimination of other admittedly archaic excesses on the fringes of that society. These struggles found a false unity and an ideological expression as the “New Left.” Its ideologists presented the New Left as distinct from the old left, which was recognized, but for the wrong reasons, as an anachronism in modern society. As an alternative to the manipulation, bureaucratization, and boredom of the old politics, the new watchwords were decentralization, “participatory democracy,” and “control over the decisions that affect our lives.”
It has been seldom noted that with all too few exceptions the “democracy” of the New Left was a myth. It would suffice of itself to demolish that myth to simply ask at what points, and for how long, there was any kind of democracy operating in the organizations and struggles of the New Left. As for a participatory democracy that would break down the separation between decision and execution, this was present only among a few small groups (for example, some of the earliest agitational experiments in the South) and, very briefly, in such massive actions as the spontaneous surrounding of the police car during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Usually whatever democracy there was lasted just long enough to elect a steering committee. Even during the FSM, the most democratic of the student strikes, the “leaders” of the various negotiating committees were not strictly mandated, but merely maintained a loose consulting relationship with the base of dissident students, reserving for themselves the possibility of “calling for the resumption of the strike” if the negotiations did not proceed satisfactorily.
Such democracy as did exist in the New Left organizations cannot be separated from its lack of subversive content. The early SDS maintained a democratized marketplace of ideas which were only the ideas of a democratized marketplace.
This plethora of fragmentary issues finds its echo in the desire for decentralization and leaderlessness (which is less the absence of leaders than the creation of the conditions for leaders to take over) within SDS chapters. . . . Many . . . militants have seen in the relative autonomy of SDS chapters not the early forms of another hierarchical organization — which it is — but a healthy rejection of hierarchies, cell bosses, party chairmen, secretaries. [Robert Chasse, The Power of Negative Thinking, or Robin Hood Rides Again]
Chasse’s critique, published April 1968, could hardly have been more definitively confirmed than by the subsequent history of SDS. That the New Left organization devolved into the control of three factions disputing the precise combination of Stalinist bureaucrats to worship has been liberally bemoaned by those who had proclaimed its essentially libertarian character; but they have never been capable of seeing the origins of this “degeneration” in the incoherence of the New Left. They have either maintained a discreet silence on this subject or impotently and tautologically referred to a “bureaucratization” which unaccountably grew out of this “healthy rejection of hierarchies.”
“Participatory democracy” was almost always an ideology in the service of New Left bureaucrats who originally prided themselves on their “rejection of ideologies.” The logic of their theoryless (if often originally honest) activism leads these veterans of pragmatic struggles to the position of specialists in participatory democracy — “community organizers,” benevolent knights who go to the people to “involve” them, to prove to them, by a patronizing arrangement of protests and local issues, that they “have no power over the decisions that control their lives.”
* * *
The early years of increased participation in the war in Vietnam provoked mass resistance. From draft card burnings and refusal of induction to the stopping of troop trains in Berkeley and of buses outside several induction centers, American youth refused as individuals to participate in a war they totally opposed. The slogan “Hell no, we won’t go” embodied the spirit of their refusal which, even if it was isolated and confused, took on the nature of a rebellion, both because it was directly opposed to a major policy of the government and because it was so widely practiced. Their resistance was not a symbolic mass protest but a direct attempt to halt the war. It was only later when opposition to the war became institutionalized in the demonstrations of the Peace Movement that it acquired the decency and good conscience which became the trademark of the anti-war movement.
The absence of a revolutionary movement in the US reduced the left to a mass of spectators swooning each time the exploited in the colonized countries took up arms against the masters. They could not help but see in the wars of national liberation the destruction of world capitalism. The New Left facilely identified itself with the Third World bureaucracies because it believed that they were fighting a common enemy — the American state — and because their internal policies seemed humane compared to the United States. Following the dictum that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, it imagined that any force which fought US imperialism was necessarily revolutionary.
Expecting the sum total of burning issues of the super-exploited to inspire an American revolutionary movement is the domestic counterpart to the movement’s contemplative reliance on the Third World to precipitate a global revolution.
* * *
With an ideology of “serving the people” the movement organizer justifies his reformist programs; for him they take on revolutionary significance. What is wrong with reformism is not the desire to ameliorate the immediate conditions of a number of people, but rather that these reforms are sought in order to transform these people into a constituency. In the movie The Troublemakers, made in 1965, Tom Hayden convinces some angry Newark blacks that what they need is a traffic light. In order to “educate them” he leads them through the proper bureaucratic channels. Here the individual is important only as another body to be used as leverage in bargaining with power.
The movement falsifies what lies at the center of all acts of radical refusal, the desire for a totally new life. When the organizer moves in, the totality is drowned in a sea of particulars; qualitative refusal is parcelized into particular defined needs. The organizers encourage the proliferation of a host of pseudoclasses: youth, blacks, women, gays, Chicanos... Separated according to their special interests, individuals are more easily manipulated.
Formerly the movement organizer (especially in the black and peace movements) relied heavily on guilt in order to motivate passive participation. Later he appealed to the “self-interest” of various groups — staying behind in order to coordinate their tactical alliance. As the movement decomposed, the old self-interest issues lost their recruiting power and new, more specific ones were improvised: gay vets for equal rights in the military, Asian women for separatist health care... Each hybrid made the frantic search for constituencies more absurd. Movement bureaucrats rushed in to fill every possible need, and collectives developed issue-specialization in order to justify their existence. As one women’s collective put it: “We’re filling a need that wasn’t being met before.”
At the same time, attempts were being made to join all these partial struggles together negatively, against a common enemy. Once the base had been “radicalized,” divided up by the movement bureaucrats, it was reunited in a pseudototality of solidarity. Connections which the very process of “radicalizing” had made seem obscure were demonstrated. We were told: “It’s all the same struggle.” This “radical” pluralism stands on the same ground as liberal pluralism in conceiving of social change as a particular remedy for every particular dissatisfaction, and thus in conceiving of history as a series of frozen, quantitatively equivalent moments evolving toward an abstract goal; the radicals can only distinguish themselves from the liberals by calling the final goal “socialism.”
The most recent manifestation of this pluralism, the New American Movement, makes workers into one of its proposed constituencies, and lumps workers’ control with all the classical movement issues, and some new ones, in an attempt to link all possible constituencies in a broader mass base. Having discovered that “bureaucracies alienate people,” the NAM proposes that “autonomous local groups administer the decisions of the national governing committee” (paraphrased) in order to ensure participation. They use the image of a decentralized democratic practice to modernize what is still in reality the old central committee/ignorant masses routine.
Antifascism and the Cybernetic Welfare State
The Movement adopted for itself an appropriate opponent in fascism. This
convenient straw man enabled the Left to avoid defining itself positively; it provided a
cover for the fact that the Movement failed to embody a radical critique of the system
itself — of commodity production, wage labor, hierarchy. The daily misery produced
everywhere by capitalism was made to seem normal — if not progressive — in the
light of the barbaric excesses paraded before our eyes. Is the revolution ebbing? That new
escalation of the war will give it some life. Or police atrocities, a repressive law, a
new martyr, scandal in high places... The people will get so pissed off
(“radicalized”) they’ll be ready for anything different. In the
same way that war is the health of the State, atrocities are the health of a parasitic
movement.
In the film Z, held up by Bobby Seale for the emulation of the United Front Against Fascism audience, the entire plot consists of the struggle to get the goods on the military dictatorship, to prove they broke the law. The role of the proletariat in this drama is evidently to have such shocking outrages revealed to them, after which radicalization they accordingly vote in (with ballots or bullets) the progressive heroes.
Fascism is an extreme development of capitalism, but it is also a retrograde one. It revives and relies upon outmoded institutions which the revolutionary bourgeoisie was originally obliged to attack: myth, family, the Leader, overly crude nationalism and racism. Its existence is precarious enough in Greece or Spain. Fascism can at best be only a temporary, stop-gap measure in the defense of capitalism, because it interferes with the system’s full development, its modernization and rationalization.
The actual movement of modern capitalism is not towards fascism, but towards a qualitatively new mode of social domination: the Cybernetic Welfare State. In marked contrast to fascism, this new form, at the same time that it strengthens and extends the capitalist system, is also that system’s natural development and rationalization. With the advance of the Cybernetic Welfare State, the various previous modes of domination become reduced to a consistent, smoothly running, all-pervading abstract control.
The Movement, since it does not make a radical critique of the existing system, is even more incapable of understanding the development of that system in the direction of greater subtlety. And so it happens that while it busies itself with things it can understand — super-exploitation, the cop’s club — it unknowingly enters into the service of the emerging cybernetic organization of life. Precisely because the Movement’s is only a surface critique, its struggles for “participatory democracy,” “quality of life,” and “the end of alienation” remain within the old world as agitation for its humanized modification. The “vanguard” movement joins with the advance guard of bourgeois society in an unconscious Alliance for Progress for the rationalization of the system. Bureaucratic capitalism does not always see the reforms necessary for its survival. In their search for constituencies, for issues to suck on, the Movement bureaucrats sniff out the incipient crises and, in their concern to appear as practical servants of the people, come up with reformist schemes with revolutionary ideology tacked on. Already the new volunteer social workers are administering medical and food programs, sketching out forms for new welfare and service institutions.
The agitation for Community Control of Police well exemplifies the role of fragmentary opposition in reinforcing the system’s control of the community. Is there a trouble spot the rulers haven’t properly diagnosed? White cops aren’t working out well in the ghetto? Why, the unconscious trouble-shooters are already at work, formulating the “problem” and suggesting a “workable solution.” A little oppositional initiative greases the wheels, and the commodity-spectacle grinds on, this time with humanist watchdogs.
The function of opposition as a feedback mechanism here still operates rather crudely; the vanguard scouts get paid bullets for their services. With the advance of the system towards totalitarian self-regulation the role of participatory feedback becomes extended qualitatively.
When participation is on a low level, we should expect people to be more apt to feel that the regulations are imposed upon them from above and that they are being pushed around by “them” — the bosses, the bureaucrats, and the oligarchies in the organizations, and by the strange and distant forces in Wall Street and Washington. This might breed feelings of resentment, and will anyhow frustrate people’s feelings of solidarity and identification with the purposes of the regulations. [Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State]
The bureaucrats themselves wish to “overcome bureaucracy” (i.e. its dangerous visibility and obsolete inefficiencies). The “decision-making” (within the dominant framework of social separation) must be “democratized.” Self-regulatory institutions must be developed which allow — if not encourage — the active participation of the masses in running their own alienation. Such mechanisms serve to adjust the system to danger spots with a minimum of friction. “Political democracy, by incorporating larger and larger numbers in social decision-making, facilitates feedback. And it is precisely this feedback that is essential to control” (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock).
Yippies and Weathermen
The rejection at its base of the Movement’s degeneration into fragmentary
opposition necessitated alternatives to left politics which would recapture the feeling of
unity embodied in the early New Left’s “total commitment.” The most
profound attempt was the Yippies, whose emergence expressed the widespread recognition
that the Movement’s neglect of the cultural revolt among its constituency was
dangerous as well as artificial. The Yippies took their ideas on fun from bohemia, their
communalism from the Diggers, and their moralism from the more romantic Third World
bureaucrats. This fusion begat monsters: making a revolution for fun became doing it for
the joy of surviving in the face of a capitalism made hostile by taunts. Reacting in
images to the image of rightist reaction, Hoffman and Rubin tried to ride the wave of
false consciousness in an effort to devalue it. Entering the spectacle as clowns to make
it ridiculous, they created diversions which, far from promoting the refusal of the
spectacle, merely made passivity more interesting by offering a spectacle of refusal.
Actions such as the invasion of the Stock Exchange or the presidential candidacy of a pig
were meant to advertise the decomposition of bourgeois values, while promoting (through,
e.g., the “Festival of Life”) their replacement with the less obviously
recuperative aspects of the counterculture. The Yippies’ practice was centered around
creating chaos through good-natured terrorism, and creating myths to fill the void thus
opened up. This myth-making made them conscious partners of the spectacle: foregoing the
Movement’s ambivalence toward the media, the Yippies’ practical significance was
seen by themselves as equal to the spectacle they could create through these
media. (“If you don’t like the news, go out and make your own news.”) The
complement of this farcical frontal attack was an ideology of subversive survival
inherited from the Motherfuckers and the Diggers, where the mere generalization of theft
adds up to revolution. In the end the Yippies displayed all the positivity and negativity
of populist criminals, whose method of forging a life underground is helpful in its
practical suggestions for survival, but retards the growth of proletarian opposition
through its primitive dualism and its opportunities for partial or vicarious
participation. The Yippies further retarded themselves through the continued acceptance of
false antinomies of the counterculture (hip/straight, the generations, Eastern and Western
consciousness at all levels of mystification), and by their symbiotic relationship with
the Left, which offered them a questionable stage in return for their questionable
support. All these contradictions reached their dismal conclusion in Abbie Hoffman, who is
reduced to collecting old shoplifting tricks and debating with Charles Reich.
Coming out of the student movement rather than the hip underground, Weatherman attacked the Yippies as not serious (sacrificial) enough, and appropriated only the signs but not the psychology of the hippies. Whereas the Yippies were an expression of what was nebulously there, the SDS bureaucrats who built the WeatherMachine forged a place for themselves at the vanguard of an increasingly passive and dwindling Left. Relating alternately to the images of the peasant guerrilla, the party bureaucrat, and the urban terrorist (in proportions varying with each militant’s standing within the Weather hierarchy), Weatherman attempted to create a myth of powerful bravado which would force the hand of the entire “class” of white youth, the only group it deemed capable of assisting its project of flying kamikaze for the world war on America. Their strategy was based on the shock value of exemplary (suicidal) militancy. They succeeded in inheriting the mantle of the fading Panthers, who had held the Left spellbound for two years with the mere rhetoric of Acts. With Weatherman, this myth of concreteness was escalated to the concreteness of myth as Weatherman acted out the Panther slogans (“Take the initiative,” “Off the pig,” etc.). One of their songs says, “We used to talk but now we do it.” The very concreteness of actually blowing a hole in the wall of a bank or courthouse placed Weatherman at the pinnacle of the spectacle of opposition. It was this “really doing something” — no matter how inane — that made them the focal point of all leftist discussions for over a year, against which each leftist measured his own inactivity. Particularly susceptible to such pressure were the students and intellectuals, dimly aware of their own impotence. In this religious division of labor, the leftist hero emerges from an ordeal of action to win the adherence of those who in their passivity are mystified by it. But interest in this kind of Passion Play, however intense, is always fleeting; by the time the cops closed down the show most of the audience had left. Weatherman first chose to return this spite by refusing to include anyone in their definition of the revolutionary motor. When even that failed to disturb America’s conscience, they decided to include everyone, and dissolved into the hip underground.
The desire for total opposition was expressed in the attempts of both the Yippies and Weatherman for a revolution in daily life, attempts mediated and frustrated by ideology. While the Yippies created an illusory radical subjectivity based on romantic individualism and the thrill of watching themselves piss in public, Weatherman sought to smash all subjectivity in order to build a WeatherMachine in which all resistance to bureaucratic authority was deemed bourgeois. Thus the former built a politics based on its lifestyle and the latter tried to build a militarized lifestyle based on its politics. The recognition that the revolution must be made in living was dissimulated through the ritualization of living the revolution.
Communes and Collectives
The early urban communes were a product of a widespread rejection of bourgeois roles
and values — particularly of work, school, and the nuclear family. They were designed
to protect those who rejected these values, to foster experimentation in new ways to live,
and to enable their members to survive. They were to some degree (though not nearly so
much as imagined) a free space in which the qualitative questions that bourgeois daily
life represses were at least posed. But they were never answered — as the
communes’ rejection of the old world failed to take up the project of its
supersession, the communes began to fall apart. While utopian communalists dreamed of a
mass movement of changing heads, the communes failed even to survive, as their tolerance
and passivity left them open to underworld and police harassment, internal manipulation,
endless crashers, disease, mental breakdowns and rip-offs. They failed because they
accepted the false choice offered by the spectacle: to accept the world as it is or to
abandon it; their advances and their failure were due to their “separation” from
the dominant society.
With guilt as its lever, the Left put the finishing touches on the decomposition of the original commune movement. Radical militants criticized the communalists for their naïve isolationism, and introduced them to the joys of the bureaucratic reality principle. Seeking to attract the counterculture as a constituency in order to revitalize the faltering Left, Movement bureaucrats endorsed the form of the commune as they rejected its content. The result of this enlargement of the scope of reformist activity was a widespread mechanistic synthesis of daily life and politics institutionalized in a commune form usually referred to as “collectives.”
The commune movement’s preoccupation with “lifestyle,” though mystified and quite rigid, was at least a rudimentary critique of the capitalist daily life of augmented survival. In the collectives, on the other hand, there was a decided shift in emphasis from spontaneous social experimentation toward a total absorption in the politics of marginal survival. The collective, like the nuclear family it replaces, organizes the individual’s personal subsistence in return for his allegiance to the collectivity. The communalization of economic poverty is accompanied by a communalization of intellectual poverty. Most collectives have a few informal hierarchs who get their power by synthesizing from amongst the garbage heap of leftist ideologies the particular form of eclecticism of that particular collective. Thus there are anarcho-nihilist collectives, Stalino-surrealist groups, Third World suicide terrorist cells, and social service units. The leaders establish their positions by mastering the mysteries of this melange and consolidate it through the management of political tactics (alliances, “actions,” etc.) and of the reified experiments in daily life promoted by collectivist ideology. The struggle sessions against informal hierarchy are endless since there are neither rigorous criteria for membership in the collective nor exclusion of those who attempt to dominate or fail to participate autonomously.
Like the communalists, the collectivists base their strategy on reproducing themselves until the dominant society is “outnumbered” (i.e. at least until the ideological force of collectivism surpasses that of the bourgeoisie); thus the mere quantitative enlargement of a necessarily marginal phenomenon is seen to be the crux of social change. Through the panacea of reproduction, collectives hope to avoid facing their inability to enlarge the qualitative scope of their practice, a growth stunted by a reified ideology which forces each collective to start from scratch and defines the outer limits of its development.
The heart of collectivist ideology is “survival is revolutionary.” Everything the collective does is revolutionary because the collective does it in the face of pig repression. The collectives’ hope for victory lies in the strategy of out-surviving the society of survival. And the deus ex machina is supposed to be the police, who will promote the growth of collectives through repression. Thus we see the tired old story of utopian reformism and its dual revolution: one which is “lived” (pantomimed), the other which is idealized and postponed indefinitely.
Bookchinism
Murray Bookchin arrives at the scene of decay with the history of anarchism in his
carpetbag, determined to heal the split between self and organization just as he would
cure the “disease” of class society — by a rational triumph of the will.
“The very mode of anarchist organization transcends the traditional split between the
psyche and the social world.” Bookchin’s version of this timeless mode is the
affinity group, which he models after the Spanish FAI, the Parisian sections, and the
Athenian ecclesia in direct proportion to their age and inverse proportion to their
proletarian content. (The Spanish model is evoked by Bookchin more for the structure of
the revolutionary organization, while the ecclesia and sections dominate his vision of
post-revolutionary society; but the distinctions are always hazy.) It is of course not
these forms themselves which are counterrevolutionary, but their utopian evocation
separated from their own content as well as from the present. Bookchin uses the past to
idealize the future and appreciate the present (i.e contemporary oppositional movements).
Notably, he found the Spanish affinity group in the hero-worshipping, mystified activism
of the Motherfuckers, and in the contentless democracy of Anarchos. Rather than shoot a
sitting duck by attacking his sense of practice (which has virtually evaporated anyhow),
we will mercifully turn to a critique of his theory of revolution.
Bookchin defines the affinity group in a moral critique of Stalinism which appeals to the counterculture by praising its lack of rigidity. In the process he only winds up celebrating its lack of rigor, which lack allowed it to be used by the Left in the first place. The abstention from domination is the only goal articulated for the affinity group; it is the revolutionary institutionalization of doing one’s own thing. Bookchin would have this revolutionary group “marked always by simplicity and clarity, always thousands of unprepared people can enter and direct it, always it remains transparent to and controlled by all.” (This confusion of the “revolutionary group” — which he previously modeled after the tightly-knit, coherent, ephemeral grupo de afinidad — with the general assembly must be expected from an anarchist, who constantly tries to force together the present and the future (i.e. the revolutionary process) by slips of the tongue and magic tricks.) To fill the void created by this “clarity,” he fetishizes the encounter within a vaguely praised general assembly and criticizes workers’ councils for their lack of constant face-to-face encounter.
Bookchin’s vision is in the great tradition of the petty bourgeois utopians: His vision of the future, dominated by the past, is completely unconnected with an endless present entitled “living the revolution.” Bookchin sees mankind, with consciousness raised by ecological disasters and political repression, merely deciding one fine day to reorganize society along rational grounds. His ecological determinism, rather than merely being an attempt to be stylish, is based on his variation of Engels’s mistaken attempt to construct a dialectics of nature: instead of trying to make nature fit into the materialist revolutionary dialectic, Bookchin tries to reduce revolution to a science of social ecology. This organic theory of revolution finds itself bewildered before proletarian self-activity, whose form Bookchin always celebrates without a clue to its content. The most profound praise he can find for the great proletarian uprisings is that they all surprised and surpassed the leftist bureaucrats. His praise of spontaneity never mentions organizational advances or shortcomings (the content of spontaneity). The revolutionary activity of the “masses” is defined only negatively against the hierarchy of the masters and deceivers; it becomes a series of battles connected only by the spirit and heroism of the oppressed. Thus the anarchist learns nothing from revolutionary failures except that the masses were deceived or had illusions, and he joins himself to the mass movement as either an uncritical participant or a professorial advisor.
Bookchin seeks to repeat the Yippies’ synthesis of left politics and hip culture on a higher level by having control of both political and cultural factors. He thus gently prods dozing mystics into nodding agreement with his nightmares, and attacks fading Stalinist bureaucrats in an effort to anarchize their constituents. He is slightly more abreast of reality than they are — thus he hopes that his anarchism will be the avant-garde of a reconstituted Movement.
Women’s Liberation
Women’s Liberation, originating in opposition to the “male movement,”
never really escaped the latter’s mystifications but only reproduced them in new
forms. For the straw man of fascism it substituted male chauvinism. In attempting to
overcome the overt hierarchy of the movement it created informal hierarchies. Criticizing
the movement for defining itself only in terms of the oppression of others, it merely
replaced the penitent militant purging himself before the image of Third World Revolution
with the sister surrendering herself to abstract womanhood.
Within the movement the position of women has often been compared to that of blacks and other “super-oppressed” groups. But the “woman question” was essentially different in that it could never be considered as a question of “survival.” The factors that constitute the particular alienation of women tend to be central, advanced: the family, sexual roles, the banality and boredom of housework, consumer ideology.
In the early discussion groups there was the beginning of a critique of daily life and especially of roles. But this critique underwent a closure and rigidified around the problems of women; it only considered women qua women. The individual found herself in a therapy session or encounter group where she was to “become sensitive to her oppression as a woman” — and wallow in it, going over each detail until her “sensitivity” became resentment and her critique a moral one. A politics of resentment toward the oppressor, men, and abstract solidarity with all women replaced any critical sense she may have had at the beginning of her “consciousness raising.” Now the sister demanded not something so complex as a system to transform, but rather a living adversary to attack. Her rage to overcome her condition excited her aggression against men and her resentment materialized in the production of spectacles to haunt their guilty consciences. She had rejected passive sacrifice to the desires of men, but only to sacrifice herself to the “needs of women.” Pursuing the reflection of her abandoned self, she now goes to organize other women with whom she shares only a catharsis in a common misery.
Sharing this melodrama was that lesser known antihero of female liberation — the sister’s boyfriend. His dragged-out and slightly terrified look attested to his weary struggle to free himself from his oppression of his girlfriend. If he was at first hostile to her jeremiads, he soon recognized that his own alienation was insignificant compared to that of women. For this St. Anthony, besieged by the ghosts of his crimes against women, Women’s Liberation came just in time to replace his impotent activity in the collapsing movement.
Women’s Liberation rejected the hierarchy of the “male movement” but was never able to overcome hierarchy within its own groups. Since their organizational practice was based on an abstract democracy in which all women were admitted, the groups were forced to increasingly confine their internal practice to combating informal hierarchy and specialization, using quantitative means: the small group, lots, automatic rotation of tasks, quantitative criteria for exclusion. But all these methods only concealed the maintenance of separations and inequalities absorbed initially. The contradiction between the antihierarchical position of the women’s movement and its abstract solidarity with all women set the stage for the split of the antisexists and anti-imperialists at the Vancouver Conference (April 1971), where the antisexists of the Fourth World Manifesto exposed the anti-imperialists’ manipulative appeal to sisterhood in order to preserve a Stalinist united front while in the same breath embracing a group of “sisters” sent to the conference as a public-relations corps by the North Vietnamese state.
The role of Women’s Liberation has been to incite the dominant society to realize the abstract equality of total proletarianization. With demands for more jobs and a transference of housework into the public sector, the women’s movement has worked, in effect, for the integration of women into a more rationalized system of alienation. The varieties of women’s liberationists all have in common a reformist program, although some try to dissimulate this by claiming that women per se are a revolutionary class. They see not men and women in servitude to the commodity, but the commodity in the service of male chauvinism, which they facilely identify with power.
Women’s Liberation never left enemy terrain because they had failed to identify the enemy. The terrain was the spectacle of opposition. Women’s Liberation began by castigating male militants for hogging the stage, then set up a parallel spectacle. Eventually this departure from an anti-hierarchical perspective was attacked by those who again wanted more democratic access to the spectacle (see especially “The Dialectics of the Celebrity”).
Women’s Liberation clears away the exhausted images of the passive woman only to replace them with the image of the liberated woman. The openly reformist NOW image committee consults with advertising agencies in order “to convince them to use a pro-lib approach. . . . We tell them women are changing and they better show it because it’s good not only for us but for them.” The shattered myth of female inferiority is replaced by the stereotypes of female liberation. The self-proclaimed bitch, the witch, the radical lesbian and the struggling feminist enter the who’s who of the spectacle with the careerist, the Cosmopolitan cover girl and the housewife. The old and new types battle, support and modify one another. Jane Fonda sheds her devalued cosmetics and transforms herself from a sex goddess into a star radical.
CONTRADICTION
(unpublished drafts, April 1972)
Excerpts from these drafts were reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb. Some critical comments on them can be found in Remarks on Contradiction.
No copyright.