Assembly Project

Whatever your political beliefs, Murray Bookchin argued against them.

When we face drastic political, environmental and economic problems, we need radical solutions. And that means that we need to look to radical traditions. That’s what led me to Murray Bookchin, an American political thinker and writer. He was an anarchist for most of his adult life before drifting onto a course of his own, and a pioneer of green thinking. I’d heard of him and his key ideas before, which are certainly relevant for assembly democracy, but this is the first time I’ve read his writings.

The Next Revolution is a posthumous collection of essays from Bookchin between 1990 and 2002. The collection is a useful presentation of his thinking and the vision he developed during his drift from anarchism, rather than his earlier environmentalist works. It was published eight years after his death and served with an introduction from the great fantasy and sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin. You can read it for free on The Anarchist Library. If that sounds unethical, I can assure you that Bookchin and his fans would rather you did that than buy it on Amazon.

I enjoyed these essays. On the one hand, I haven’t read enough to say on how well it reflects Bookchin’s later work. On the other, it did its job of making me want to read more. Although it’s not written for the wider public, I was pleasantly surprised by how accessible his writing was. Mind you, this is political theory so my expectations weren’t high!

Bookchin’s critical eye

In his writings, Bookchin could be gruff, even grouchy, but it came from a belief in the goodness of human beings and the possibility of a better world. The existing economic and political order, including the social democrats who work within it, certainly weren’t spared. In the 1980s, he criticised Bernie Sanders, then his local mayor in Burlington, Vermont, for being too pro-business. And he’d warned as early as the 1960s that capitalism’s “grow-or-die” nature would bring it into conflict with the natural world – prescient indeed.

Attempting to win the “business community” to an ecological sensibility, let alone to ecologically beneficial practices, would be like asking predatory sharks to live on grass or “persuading” lions to lovingly lie down beside lambs.

But he was critical too of the main currents of the radical left. He admired Marx as an economist, but saw Marxism as tainted by authoritarian governments, outdated as an explanation for how the economy and society worked and too narrowly focused on material interests of “the workers”. He argued that both Marxism and revolutionary syndicalism misunderstood the people they championed:

Yes, class struggles still exist, but they occur farther and farther below the threshold of class war. Workers, as I can attest from my own experience as a foundryman and as an autoworker for General Motors, do not regard themselves as mindless adjuncts to machines or as factory dwellers or even as “instruments of history,” as Marxists might put it. They regard themselves as living human beings: as fathers and mothers, as sons and daughters, as people with dreams and visions, as members of communities—not only of trade unions. [Emphases in original]

In one of the best essays, he criticised left-wing support for underdog nationalism, arguing that while subjugated peoples deserved autonomy, nationalism in general was “a disease”. Nor was he fond of the drift towards “highly parochial” identity politics. Instead, he argued that people should look for belonging in their own towns and neighbourhoods:

Identity should properly be replaced by community—by a shared affinity that is humanly scaled, nonhierarchical, libertarian, and open to all, irrespective of an individual’s gender, ethnic traits, sexual identity, talents, or personal proclivities.

Bookchin’s vision

Bookchin wanted politics refocused away from a distant national government and instead onto local governments that were run by people’s assemblies. (He often referred to people’s assemblies as “citizens’ assemblies”, before the latter phrase became associated with random selection.) He discusses in broad terms what the role of an assembly would be, rather than specific guidance on how to run them:

I do not mean only an assembly, where citizens discuss and gird themselves to fight for specific policies; I also mean the neighborhood as the center of a town, where citizens may gather as a large group to share their views and give public expression to their policies. This was the function of the Athenian agora, for example, and the town squares in the Middle Ages.

You get the impression that his advocacy of assembly-based “face-to-face democracy” was likely influenced by the example of Ancient Athens, the assemblies that sprang up during history’s revolutions, the town meetings of his adoptive home in New England and a host of societies he studied for his earlier work The Ecology of Freedom.

But Bookchin recognised that having only local politics was unworkable in an ever more inter-connected world:

Much as I respect the intentions of those who advocate local self-reliance and self-sustainability, these concepts can be highly misleading. I can certainly agree with the assertion, for example, that if a community can produce the things it needs, it should probably do so. But self-sustaining communities cannot produce all the things they need—unless it involves a return to a backbreaking way of village life…

So Bookchin complemented his localist ideas with a belief that if higher levels of government were to exist, they should not be the centralised states of today, but re-imagined as confederations of these local units (“a Commune of communes”). These would presumably deal with matters ranging from currency to defence to railways. One essay explains more about what he meant.

Bookchin’s legacy

The anarchist tradition was Bookchin’s vehicle for developing and advocating these ideas. But in the 1990s, Bookchin became disillusioned with anarchism itself, arguing it had become a “lifestyle” rather than a viable alternative, lost in its individualist and primitivist currents. As one reviewer has already noted, this does produce a flaw in this book that Bookchin is sometimes advocating anarchism and sometimes criticising it. I would’ve preferred to read the essays in chronological order and followed his drift.

In 2002, Bookchin finally announced that he was no longer an anarchist. Instead, he called himself a communalist. Not a communist, a communalist. In the last essay, The Future of the Left, which until then had been unpublished, Bookchin argues that we should learn from both the successes and failures of Marxism and anarchism, and makes a plea for a set of ideas that are not his own:

Radically new technologies, still difficult to imagine, will undoubtedly be introduced that will have a transformative effect upon the entire world. New power alignments may arise that produce a degree of social disequilibrium that has not been seen for decades, accompanied by new weapons of unspeakable homicidal and ecocidal effects, and a continuing ecological crisis. But no greater damage could afflict human consciousness than the loss of the Enlightenment program…

For most of his life, Bookchin was a respected thinker rather than a leader. Yet in the years since his death, his influence has grown. Notably, he inspired Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader, to develop his vision of democratic confederation. Then during the Syrian Civil War, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria took up the challenge of building a society based on Öcalan’s vision. Currently facing an uncertain future after the fall of Assad, their administration has been a role model for the Middle East in creating a fairer, stronger economy, governing by popular consent, advancing women’s rights and overcoming ethno-religious divisions.

More recently, Bookchin’s ideas have been cited as an inspiration by new local movements that seek to create a fairer economy and society, such as Cooperation Jackson. More about them in a future post.

Bookchin’s resonance for me

The communalist vision is undoubtedly utopian. But for once, I felt like I was reading a viable utopia, or at least a useful one. It feels like something that with enough time and political will, we could actually create. Even if we can’t, it can be a useful guiding star.

I think Bookchin is onto something important when he stresses “face-to-face democracy”. We evolved to live in face-to-face communities. Why has information-sharing technology been so detrimental to representative democracy? I think it’s because it’s shown us how much these distant governments and the bickering around them don’t really represent us. Perhaps it can be improved, but you can’t change human nature.

I also think he articulates well some important criticisms of several left-wing movements, and avoids their trappings. I too have noticed that the “Up the workers!” rhetoric of socialism and communism have felt like a cliché without resonance, even though I’m a worker myself. Many socialists dream of reviving the trade unions. That may be nice, but what we really need to do is unionise the citizens.

That said, I think he’s constrained by other trappings, such as casting himself against capitalism. For starters, this is really a vague concept. The economic system described by Karl Marx was at least as different from ours of today as it was from feudal times. According to Our World in Data, in the year The Communist Manifesto was published, government spending was 10% of the UK GDP; by 2022 it was 44%. The government plays a very different role in the economy. It also suggests throwing the baby out with the bathwater. History has shown that markets and entrepreneurship bring important benefits to society, particularly with introducing innovation – including innovations that can help us save the planet.

Bookchin was right to be worried that economic growth would destroy the environment, a view continued by the ‘degrowth’ movement. But as Hannah Ritchie notes in her book Not the End of the World, since the 1990s, rich countries have achieved economic growth even as carbon emissions have fallen and their forests have returned. This was made possible by government intervention and changing consumer preferences. It is also because entrepreneurship helped develop more energy-efficient and sustainable technology, which is good for growth.

Then you can quibble about finer points. For example, Bookchin argues that communities should not be able to secede from confederations without permission from the whole. What prompted him to arrive at that conclusion? Was it because secession has a bad name in the United States thanks to the Confederate States? Bookchin’s picture for such a confederation is incomplete, and I suspect that randomly-selected citizens’ assemblies could be a missing piece.

His desire for assembles to be more than places “where citizens discuss and gird themselves to fight for specific policies” reflects a problem that plagues public meetings. Too often, they do not result in constructive problem-solving, because the most boisterous and divisive voices dominate and few are given time to consider their views. But a good format, particularly one with a small groups discussion, might just change that.

I enjoyed my start with Bookchin, and it will be interesting to review works in the future that draw on his influence.