
What is Communality

The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism

by Murray Bookchin

Seldom have socially important words become more confused and
divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two
centuries ago, it is often forgotten, "democracy" was deprecated by
monarchists and republicans alike as "mob rule." Today, democracy is
hailed as "representative democracy," an oxymoron that refers to
little more than a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who
ostensibly speak for the powerless mass.

"Communism," for its part, once referred to a cooperative society
that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in
which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or
her ability and received the means of life according to his or her
needs. Today, "communism" is associated with the Stalinist gulag
and wholly rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin, "socialism"=D1 which
once denoted a politically free society based on various forms of
collectivism and equitable material returns for labor=D1is currently
interchangeable with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political
spectrum has shifted ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself
has not been immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere,
anarchism is being divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on
personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining it of its historic
vitality. A Stirnerite individualism=D1marked by an advocacy of
lifestyle changes, the cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and
even an embrace of outright mysticism =D1has become increasingly
prominent. This personalistic "lifestyle anarchism" is steadily
eroding the socialistic core of anarchist concepts of freedom.

Let me stress that in the British and American social tradition,
autonomy and freedom are not equivalent terms. By insisting on the
need to eliminate personal domination, autonomy focuses on the
individual as the formative component and locus of society. By
contrast, freedom, despite its looser usages, denotes the absence of
domination in society, of which the individual is part. This contrast
becomes very important when individualist anarchists equate
collectivism as such with the tyranny of the community over its
members.

Today, if an anarchist theorist like L. Susan Brown can assert that "a
group is a collection of individuals, no more and no less," rooting
anarchism in the abstract individual, we have reason to be
concerned. Not that this view is entirely new to anarchism; various
anarchist historians have described it as implicit in the libertarian
outlook. Thus the individual appears ab novo, endowed with natural
rights and bereft of roots in society or historical development.

But whence does this "autonomous" individual derive? What is the
basis for its =D2natural rights,=D3 beyond a priori premises and hazy
intuitions? What role does historical development play in its
formation? What social premises give birth to it, sustain it, indeed
nourish it? How can a "collection of individuals" institutionalize
itself such as to give rise to something more than an autonomy that
consists merely in refusing to impair the "liberties" of others =D1or
"negative liberty," as Isaiah Berlin called it in contradistinction to
"positive liberty," which is substantive freedom, in our case
constructed along socialistic lines.

(Footnote 1. L. Susan Brown, The Politics of Individualism (Montreal:
Black Rose Books, 1993), p. 12. I do not question the sincerity of
Brown's libertarian views; she regards herself as an
anarcho-communist, as do I. But she makes no direct attempt to
reconcile her individualistic views with communism in any form.
Both Bakunin and Kropotkin would have strongly disagreed with her
formulation of what constitutes "a group," while Margaret Thatcher,
clearly for reasons of her own, might be rather pleased with it,
since it is so akin to the former British prime minister's notorious
statement that there is no such thing as society=D1there are only
individuals. Certainly Brown is not a Thatcherite, nor Thatcher an
anarchist, but however different they may be in other respects, both
have ideological filiations with classical liberalism that make their
shared affirmations of the "autonomy" of the individual possible. I
cannot ignore the fact, however, that neither Bakunin's, Kropotkin's
nor my own views are treated with any depth in Brown's book (pp.
156-62), and her account of them is filled with serious
inaccuracies.

In the history of ideas, "autonomy," referring to strictly personal
"self-rule," found its ancient apogee in the imperial Roman cult of
libertas. During the rule of the Julian Claudian Caesars, the Roman
citizen enjoyed a great deal of autonomy to indulge his own desires
and lusts=D1without reproval from any authority, provided that he did
not interfere with the business and the needs of the state. In the
more theoretically developed liberal tradition of John Locke and
John Stuart Mill, autonomy acquired a more expansive sense that
was opposed ideologically to excessive state authority. During the
nineteenth century, if there was any single subject that gained the
interest of classical liberals, it was political economy, which they
often conceived not only as the study of goods and services, but also
as a system of morality. Indeed, liberal thought generally reduced
the social to the economic. Excessive state authority was opposed in
favor of a presumed economic autonomy. Ironically, liberals often
invoked the word freedom, in the sense of "autonomy," as they do to
the present day.

(Footnote 2. Liberals were not always in accord with each other nor
did they hold notably coherent doctrines. Mill, a free-thinking
humanitarian and utilitarian, in fact, exhibited a measure of
sympathy for socialism. I am not singling out here any particular
liberal theorist, be he Mill, Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek. Each had
or has his or her individual eccentricity or personal line of thought. I
am speaking of traditional liberalism as a whole, whose general
features involve a belief in the "laws" of the marketplace and "free"
competition. Marx was by no means free of this influence: he, too,
unrelentingly tried to discover "laws" of society, as did many
socialists during the last century, including utopians like Charles
Fourier.

Despite their assertions of autonomy and distrust of state authority,
however, these classical liberal thinkers did not in the last instance
hold to the notion that the individual is completely free from lawful
guidance. Indeed, their interpretation of autonomy actually
presupposed quite definite arrangements beyond the individual=D1
notably, the laws of the marketplace. Individual autonomy to the
contrary, these laws constitute a social organizing system in which
all "collections of individuals" are held under the sway of the
famous "invisible hand" of competition. Paradoxically, the laws of
the marketplace override the exercise of "free will" by the same
sovereign individuals who otherwise constitute the "collection of
individuals".

No rationally formed society can exist without institutions, and if a
society as a "collection of individuals, no more and no less," were
ever to emerge. it would simply dissolve. Such a dissolution, to be
sure, would never happen in reality. The liberals, nonetheless, can
cling to the notion of a "free market" and "free competition" guided
by the "inexorable laws" of political economy.

Alternatively, freedom, a word that shares etymological roots with
the German Freiheit (for which there is no equivalent in Romance
languages), takes its point of departure not from the individual but
from the community or, more broadly, from society. In the last
century and early in the present one, as the great socialist theorists
further sophisticated ideas of freedom, the individual and his or her
development were consciously intertwined with social evolution=D1
specifically, the institutions that distinguish society from mere
animal aggregations.

What made their focus uniquely ethical was the fact that as social
revolutionaries they asked the key question=D1 What constitutes a
rational society?=D1a question that abolishes the centrality of
economics in a free society. Where liberal thought generally reduced
the social to the economic, various socialisms (apart from Marxism),
among which Kropotkin denoted anarchism the "left wing," dissolved
the economic into the social.

(Footnote 3. See Kropotkin's "Anarchism," the famous Encyclopaedia
Britannica article that became one of his most widely read works.
Republished in Roger N. Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin=D5s Revolutionary
Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings by Peter Kropotkin (New York:
Vanguard Press, 1927; reprinted by Dover, 1970).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Enlightenment thought
and its derivatives brought the idea of the mutability of institutions
to the foreground of social thought, the individual, too, came to be
seen as mutable. To the socialistic thinkers of the period, a
"collection" was a totally alien way of denoting society; they
properly considered individual freedom to be congruent with social
freedom, and very significantly, they defined freedom as such as an
evolving, as well as a unifying, concept.

In short, both society and the individual were historicized in the
best sense of this term: as an ever-developing, self-generative and
creative process in which each existed within and through the other.
Hopefully, this historicization would be accompanied by ev
expanding new rights and duties. The slogan of the First
International, in fact, was the demand, "No rights without duties, no
duties without rights"=D1a demand that later appeared on the
mastheads of anarchosyndicalist periodicals in Spain and elsewhere
well into the present century.

Thus, for classical socialist thinkers, to conceive of the individual
without society was as meaningless as to conceive of society
without individuals. They sought to realize both in rational
institutional frameworks that fostered the greatest degree of free
expression in every aspect of social life.

Part 2

Individualism, as conceived by classical liberalism, rested on a
fiction to begin with. Its very presupposition of a social
"lawfulness" maintained by marketplace competition was far
removed from its myth of the totally sovereign, "autonomous"
individual. With even fewer presuppositions to support itself, the
woefully undertheorized work of Max Stirner shared a similar
disjunction: the ideological disjunction between the ego and society.

The pivotal issue that reveals this disjunction=D1 indeed, this
contradiction=D1is the question of democracy. By democracy, of
course, I do not mean "representative government" in any form, but
rather face-to-face democracy. With regard to its origins in
classical Athens, democracy as I use it is the idea of the direct
management of the polis by its citizenry in popular assemblies
which is not to downplay the fact that Athenian democracy was
scarred by patriarchy, slavery, class rule and the restriction of
citizenship to males of putative Athenian birth. What I am referring
to is an evolving tradition of institutional structures, not a social
"model.=D3 Democracy generically defined, then, is the direct
management of society in face-to-face assemblies=D1in which policy
is formulated by the resident citizenry and administration is
executed by mandated and delegated councils.

(Footnote 4. I have never regarded the classical Athenian democracy
as a "model" or an "ideal" to be restored in a rational society. I have
long cited Athens with admiration for one reason: the polis around
Periclean times provides us with striking evidence that certain
structures can exist=D1policy-making by an assembly, rotation and
limitation of public of offices and defense by a nonprofessional
armed citizenry. The Mediterranean world of the fifth century B.C.E.
was largely based on monarchical authority and repressive custom.
That all Mediterranean societies of that time required or employed
patriarchy, slavery and the State (usually in an absolutist form)
makes the Athenian experience all the more remarkable for what it
uniquely introduced into social life, including an unprecedented
degree of free expression. It would be naive to suppose that Athens
could have risen above the most basic attributes of ancient society
in its day, which, from a distance of 2,400 years we now have the
privilege of judging as ugly and inhuman. Regrettably, no small
number of people today are willing to judge the past by the present.

Libertarians commonly consider democracy, even in this sense, as a
form of "rule"=D1since in making decisions, a majority view prevails
and thus "rules" over a minority. As such, democracy is said to be
inconsistent with a truly libertarian ideal. Even so knowledgeable a
historian of anarchism as Peter Marshall observes that, for
anarchists, "the majority has no more right to dictate to the
minority, even a minority of one, than the minority to the majority."
Scores of libertarians have echoed this idea time and again.

What is striking about assertions like Marshall's is their highly
pejorative language. Majorities, it would seem, neither "decide" nor
"debate": rather, they "rule," "dictate," "command," "coerce" and the
like. In a free society that not only permitted but fostered the
fullest degree of dissent, whose podiums at assemblies and whose
media were open to the fullest expression of all views, whose
institutions were truly forums for discussion=D1one may reasonably
ask whether such a society would actually "dictate" to anyone when
it had to arrive at a decision that concerned the public welfa

(Footnote 5. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of
Anarchism (London: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 2

How, then, would society make dynamic collective decisions about
public affairs, aside from mere individual contracts? The only
collective alternative to majority voting as a means of
decision-making that is commonly presented is the practice of
consensus. Indeed, consensus has even been mystified by avowed
"anarcho-primitivists," who consider Ice Age and contemporary
"primitive" or "primal" peoples to constitute the apogee of human
social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that consensus may be
an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups of people
who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine
consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that
when larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually
obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual
denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or
even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people
can attain is adopted=D1 precisely because everyone must agree with
it or else withdraw from voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I
have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross
manipulations=D1even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.
To take a very striking case in point: the largest consensus-based
movement (involving thousands of participants) in recent memory in
the United States was the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to
oppose the Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New
Hampshire. In her recent study of the movement, Barbara Epstein has
called the Clamshell the "first effort in American history to base a
mass movement on nonviolent direct action" other than the 1960s
civil rights movement. As a result of its apparent organizational
success, many other regional alliances against nuclear reactors
were formed throughout the United States.

I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell
Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by
members of a dubiously "anarchic" commune that was located in
Montague, Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by
its own hidden agendas. was able to manipulate many Clamshell
members into subordinating their goodwill and idealism to those
opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell
overrode the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who
entered it and undermined their morale and will.

In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision,
minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically
coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their
dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This
practice, called "standing aside" in American consensus processes,
all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point
that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process,
rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their
dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their
views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings=D1so that
a "decision" could be made. More than one "decision" in the Clamshell
Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence, and
through a chain of such intimidations, "consensus" was ultimately
achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as
participants in the process.

On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital
aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the
passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes
temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clan shell by
dull monologues=D1and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of
consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can
resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated=D1
they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and
potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part,
honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical
"one" of the "consensus" group.

The creative role of dissent; valuable as an ongoing democratic
phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by
consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve
hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even
Marshall's "minority of one" to block decision-making by the
majority of a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide
confederations, would essentially mutate into a Rousseauean
"general will" with a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic
conformity. In more gripping times, it could easily "force people to
be free," as Rousseau put it=D1and as the Jacobins practiced it in
1793-76

The de facto leaders of the Clamshell were able to get away with
their behavior precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently
organized and democratically structured, such that it could
countervail the manipulation of a well-organized few. The de facto
leaders were subject to few structures of accountability for their
actions. The ease with which they cannily used consensus decisi
making for their own ends has been only partly told, but consensus
practices finally shipwrecked this large and exciting organization
with its Rousseauean "republic of virtue " It was also ruined, I may
add, by an organizational laxity that permitted mere passersby to
participate in decision-making, thereby destructuring the
organization to the point of invertebracy. It was for good reason that
I and many young anarchists from Vermont who had actively
participated in the Alliance for some few years came to view
consensus as anathema.

(Footnote 6. Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural
Revolution: NonViolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), especially pp. 59,
78, 89, 94-95, 167-68, 177. Although I disagree with some of the
facts and conclusions in Epstein's book=D1based on my personal as
well as general knowledge of the Clamshell Alliance=D1she vividly
portrays the failure of consensus in this movement.

If consensus could be achieved without compulsion of dissenters, a
process that is feasible in small groups, who could possibly oppose
it as a decision-making process? But to reduce a libertarian ideal to
the unconditional right of a minority=D1let alone a "minority of one"=D1
to abort a decision by a "collection of individuals" is to stifle the
dialectic of ideas that thrives on opposition, confrontation and, yes,
decisions with which everyone need not agree and should not agree,
lest society become an ideological cemetery. Which is not to deny
dissenters every opportunity to reverse majority decisions by
unimpaired discussion and advocacy.

Part 3 

I have dwelled on consensus at some length because it constitutes
the usual individualistic alternative to democracy, so commonly
counterposed as "no rule"=D1or a free-floating form of personal
autonomy=D1against majority "rule." Inasmuch as libertarian ideas in
the United States and Britain are increasingly drifting toward
affirmations of personal autonomy, the chasm between
individualism and antistatist collectivism is becoming unbridgeable,
in my view. A personalistic anarchism has taken deep root among
young people today. Moreover, they increasingly use the word
"anarchy" to express not only a personalistic stance but also an
antirational, mystical, antitechnological and anticivilizational body
of views that makes it impossible for anarchists who anchor their
ideas in socialism to apply the word "anarchist" to themselves
without a qualifying adjective. Howard Ehrlich, one of our ablest and
most concerned American comrades, uses the phrase "social
anarchism" as the title of his magazine, apparently to distinguish
his views from an anarchism that is ideologically anchored in
liberalism and possibly wor??.

I would like to suggest that far more than a qualifying adjective is
needed if we are to elaborate our notion of freedom more
expansively. It would be unfortunate indeed if libertarians today had
to literally explain that they believe in a society, not a mere
collection of individuals! A century ago, this belief was presupposed;
today, so much has been stripped away from the collectivistic flesh
of classical anarchism that it is on the verge of becoming a personal
life-stage for adolescents and a fad for their middle-aged mentors,
a route to "self-realization" and the seemingly "radical" equivalent
of encounter groups.

Today, there must be a place on the political spectrum where a body
of anti-authoritarian thought that advances humanity's bitter
struggle to arrive at the realization of its authentic social life=D1the
famous "Commune of communes"=D1can be clearly articulated
institutionally as well as ideologically. There must be a means by
which socially concerned anti-authoritarians can develop a program
and a practice for attempting to change the world, not merely their
psyches. There must be an arena of struggle that can mobilize
people, help them to educate themselves and develop an
antiauthoritarian politics, to use this word in its classical meaning,
indeed that pits a new public sphere against the state and
capitalism.

In short, we must recover not only the socialist dimension of
anarchism but its political dimension: democracy. Bereft of its
democratic dimension and its communal or municipal public sphere,
anarchism may indeed denote little more than a "collection of
individuals, no more and no less." Even anarcho-communism, although
it is by far the most preferable of adjectival modifications of the
libertarian ideal, nonetheless retains a structural vagueness that
tells us nothing about the institutions necessary to expedite a
communistic distribution of goods. It spells out a broad goal, a
desideratum=D1one, alas, terribly tarnished by the association of
"communism" with Bolshevism and the state=D1but its public sphere
and forms of institutional association remain unclear at best and
susceptible to a totalitarian onus at work.

I wish to propose that the democratic and potentially practicable
dimension of the libertarian goal be expressed as Communalism, a
term that, unlike political terms that once stood unequivocally for
radical social change, has not been historically sullied by abuse.
Even ordinary dictionary definitions of Communalism, I submit,
capture to a great degree the vision of a "Commune of communes"
that is being lost by current Anglo-American trends that celebrate
anarchy variously as "chaos," as a mystical "oneness" with "nature,"
as self-fulfillment or as "ecstasy," but above all as personalist

(Footnote 7. The association of "chaos," "nomadism=D3 and "cultural
terrorism with "ontological anarchy" (as though the bourgeoisie had
not turned such antics into an =D2ecstasy industry" in the United
states) is fully explicated in Hakim Bey's (aka Peter Lamborn
Wilson) T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York:
Autonomedia, 1985). The Yuppie Whole Earth Review celebrates this
pamphlet as the most influential and widely read "manifesto" of
America's countercultural youth, noting with approval that it is
happily free of conventional anarchist attacks upon capitalism. This
kind of detritus from the 1960s is echoed in one form or another by
most American anarchist newssheets that pander to youth who have
not yet "had their fun before it is time to grow up" (a comment I
heard years later from Parisian student activists of '68) and become
real estate agents and accountants.

For an "ecstatic experience," visitors to New York's Lower East Side
(near St. Mark's Place) can dine, I am told, at Anarchy Cafe. This
establishment offers fine dining from an expensive menu, a
reproduction of the famous mural The Fourth Estate on the wall,
perhaps to aid in digestion, and a maitre d' to greet Yuppie
customers. l cannot attest to whether the writings of Guy Debord,
Raoul Vaneigem, Fredy Perlman and Hakim Bey are on sale there or
whether copies of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, The Fifth
Estate and Demolition Derby are available for perusal, but happily
there are enough exotic bookstores nearby at which to buy them.

Communalism is defined as "a theory or system of government [sic!]
in which virtually autonomous [sic!] local communities are loosely in
a federation." No English dictionary is very sophisticated politically.
This use of the terms "government" and "autonomous" does not
commit us to an acceptance of the state and parochialism, let alone
individualism. Further, federation is often synonymous with
confederation, the term I regard as more consistent with the
libertarian tradition. What is remarkable about this (as yet)
unsullied term is its extraordinary proximity to libertarian
municipalism, the political dimension of social ecology that I have
advanced at length elsewhere.

(Footnote 8. Quoted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978

In Communalism, libertarians have an available word that they can
enrich as much by experience as by theory. Most significantly, the
word can express not only what we are against, but also what we are
for, namely the democratic dimension of libertarian thought and a
libertarian form of society. It is a word that is meant for a practice
that can tear down the ghetto walls that are increasingly
imprisoning anarchism in cultural exotica and psychological
introversion. It stands in explicit opposition to the suffocating
individualism that sits so comfortably side-by-side with bourgeois
self-centeredness and a moral relativism that renders any social
action irrelevant, indeed, institutionally meaningless.

Anarchism is on the retreat today. If we fail to elaborate the
democratic dimension of anarchism, we will miss the opportunity
not only to form a vital movement, but to prepare people for a
revolutionary social praxis in the future. Alas, we are witnessing
the appalling desiccation of a great tradition, such that n
Situationists, nihilists, primitivists, antirationalists,
anticivilizationists and avowed "chaotics" are closeting themselves
in their egos, reducing anything resembling public political activity
to juvenile antics.

None of which is to deny the importance of a libertarian culture, one
that is aesthetic, playful and broadly imaginative. The anarchists of
the last century and part of the present one justifiably took pride in
the fact that many innovative artists, particularly painters and
novelists, aligned themselves with anarchic views of reality and
morality. But behavior that verges on a mystification of criminality,
asociality, intellectual incoherence, anti-intellectualism and
disorder for its own sake is simply lumpen. It feeds on the dregs of
capitalism itself. However much such behavior invokes the "rights"
of the ego as it dissolves the political into the personal or inflates
the personal into a transcendental category, it is a priori in the
sense that has no origins outside the mind to even potentially
support it. As Bakunin and Kropotkin argued repeatedly, individuality
has never existed apart from society and the individual's own
evolution has been coextensive with social evolution. To speak of
"The Individual" apart from its social roots and social involvements
is as meaningless as to speak of a society that contains no people or
institutions.

Merely to exist, institutions must have form, as I argued some thirty
years ago in my essay "The Forms of Freedom," lest freedom itself=D1
individual as well as social=D1 lose its definability. Institutions must
be rendered functional, not abstracted into Kantian categories that
float in a rarefied academic air. They must have the tangibility of
structure, however offensive a term like structure may be to
individualist libertarians: concretely, they must have the means,
policies and experimental praxis to arrive at decisions. Unless
everyone is to be so psychologically homogeneous and society's
interests so uniform in character that dissent is simply
meaningless, there must be room for conflicting proposals,
discussion, rational explication and majority decisions=D1in short,
democracy.

Like it or not, such a democracy, if it is libertarian, will be
Communalist and institutionalized in such a way that it is face-
face, direct and grassroots, a democracy that advances our ideas
beyond negative liberty to positive liberty. A Communalist
democracy would oblige us to develop a public sphere=D1and in the
Athenian meaning of the term, a politics=D1that grows in tension and
ultimately in a decisive conflict with the state. Confederal,
antihierarchical and collectivist, based on the municipal
management of the means of life rather than their control by vested
interests (such as workers' control, private control and, more
dangerously, state control), it may justly be regarded as the
processual actualization of the libertarian ideal as a daily praxis.

The fact that a Communalist politics entails participation in
municipal elections=D1based, to be sure, on an unyielding program that
demands the formation of popular assemblies and their
confederation=D1does not mean that entry into existing village, town
and city councils involves participation in state organs, any more
than establishing an anarchosyndicalist union in a privately owned
factory involves participation in capitalist forms of production. One
need only turn to the French Revolution of 1789-94 to see how
seemingly state institutions, like the municipal "districts"
established under the monarchy in 1789 to expedite elections to the
Estates General, were transformed four years later into largely
revolutionary bodies, or "sections," that nearly gave rise to the
"Commune of communes." Their movement for a sectional democracy
was defeated during the insurrection of June 2, 1793=D1not at the
hands of the monarchy, but by the treachery of the Jacobins.

(Footnote 9. I should emphasize that I am not counterposing a
communalist democracy to such enterprises as cooperatives,
people's clinics, communes, and the like. But there should be no
illusion that such enterprises are more than exercises in popular
control and ways of bringing people together in a highly atomized
society. No food cooperative can replace giant retail food markets
under capitalism and no clinic can replace hospital complexes, any
more than a craft shop can replace factories or plants. I should
observe that the Spanish anarchists, almost from their inception,
took full note of the limits of the cooperativist movement in the
1880s, when such movements were in fact more feasible than they
are today, and they significantly separated themselves from
cooperativism programmatically.

Capitalism will not generously provide us the popular democratic
institutions we need. Its control over society today is ubiquitous,
not only in what little remains of the public sphere but in the minds
of many self-styled radicals. A revolutionary people must either
assert their control over institutions that are basic to their public
lives=D1which Bakunin correctly perceived to be their municipal
councils=D1 or else they will have no choice but to withdraw into their
private lives, as is already happening on an epidemic scale today. It
would be ironic indeed if an individualist anarchism and its various
mutations, from the academic and transcendentally moral to the
chaotic and the lumpen, in the course of rejecting democracy even
for "a minority of one," were to further raise the walls of dogma
that are steadily growing around the libertarian ideal, and if,
wittingly or not, anarchism were to turn into another narcissistic
cult that snugly fits into an alienated, commodified, introverted and
egocentric society.

=D1September 18, 1

(Footnote 10. For Bakunin, the people "have a healthy, practical
common sense when it comes to communal affairs They are fairly
well informed and know how to select from their midst the most
capable officials. This is why municipal elections always best
reflect the real attitude and will of the people." Bakunin on Anarchy,
Sam Dolgoff, ed (New York: Alfred & Knopf. 1972; republished by
Black Rose Books: Montreal), p. 223.1 have omitted the queasy
interpolations that Dolgoff inserted to "modify" Bakunin's meaning.
It may be well to note that anarchism in the last century was more
plastic and flexible than it is today.


