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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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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, 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.
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