In search of the impossible community
In contemporary political theory, libertarianism and communitarianism are looked upon more or less as opposite ends of the political spectrum. Thus, this work, which is in large part the elaboration of a libertarian communitarianism, might be met with a certain skepticism, and, indeed, might even be seen as entirely self-contradictory. But such skepticism would reveal more than anything the unfortunate limits of contemporary political discourse, and, more particularly, those of its dominant Anglo-American forms of expression. The actual existence of a phenomenon is a powerful argument in favor of its possibility. And there is, in fact, a long tradition of libertarian communitarian thought, a tradition that possesses considerable coherence and consistency. There exists, moreover, a vast range of historical phenomena that have inspired this tradition, and which instantiate many of its claims concerning social possibilities. The goal here is not only to continue this tradition and defend it, but also to explore what it would mean to realize its most radical implications. It is to show how a radically anarchistic conception of freedom and a radically communitarian conception of solidarity complement and fulfill one another. It is to show, to paraphrase Bakunin, that liberty without solidarity is privilege and injustice, while solidarity without liberty is slavery and despotism. It is to defend the thesis that it is to the degree that these values are synthesized in the free community that both injustice and despotism can be avoided.
It might, moreover, seem paradoxical that the free community that is our object of concern is described as “impossible.” In a variation on a popular theoretical parlor game, we might compare the Possibilities and Impossibilities that are relevant here to the famous Knowns and Unknowns identified by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. His goal was to direct the public’s attention to certain “Unknown Unknowns” (specifically certain unknown and ultimately nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction) about which it should be appropriately terrified. In the present discussion, our approach is ontological rather than epistemological, replacing “Knowns” and “Unknowns” with “Possibilities” and “Impossibilities.” In particular, we will focus on certain “Possible Impossibilities” about which we should be appropriately inspired (though they might be terrifying to some). “Possibility” will be used here in two senses. In the first sense, it will mean that which is actually possible, given the nature of things. In the second sense, it will mean that which is ideologically possible, that is, defined as possible according to the existing system of social determination.
Accordingly, there are four kinds of possibilities: actually possible ideological possibilities, actually impossible ideological possibilities, actually possible ideological impossibilities, and actually impossible ideological impossibilities. Possible Possibilities include everything from supplying everyone in the world with one or more cell phones with increasingly bad reception to putting the proverbial “man” on the proverbial “moon.” Impossible Possibilities include all the “false promises” of the dominant system, from infinitely expanding abundance based on devastation of the biosphere to harmonious social order based on egoistic competition for wealth and status. Possible Impossibilities include things that are possible only in “another world” beyond the present system of social determination and social domination. One such thing is the Impossible Community discussed here. Finally, Impossible Impossibilities include objects of fantasy that might be quite marvelous to dream about, but which it is pointless to “demand,” and which should never be “taken for realities.”
Free community as the concrete universal
This work is an inquiry into the possibilities for the emergence of free community “in and for itself.” At times, such a problematic will be expressed in terms of the Hegelian conception of ethical substance and the related distinction between a mere abstract moral ideal and a concrete social sphere in which the ethical—the immanently realized good—is embodied. It will be shown that from this perspective, the moment of community “in itself” exists to the extent that (to mention the four spheres that are a central focus here) the social institutional structure, the social ethos, the social ideology, and the social imaginary form an effective material basis for free community—that is, for both historically realized freedom and historically grounded solidarity. The concrete universal (the community as universal particular) is expressed not in the mere externality of an institutional form, but through the embodiment of ethical substance in the form of life of the communal subject (an ethos that is in dialectical relationship with the imaginary, ideological, and institutional moments of communal being). The moment of community “for itself” exists to the extent that all these spheres have developed to the point that effective communal agency emerges.
For the free community, this means that universality expresses itself through particularity as that community creatively shapes its form of life through an open, attentive, and caring relationship to the concrete human and natural realities it encounters within and around itself. The word that Hegel generally uses for “universal” is Allgemein, which connotes that which is “common to all.” The term he uses for “particular,” besonder, has its origin in the idea of being separated, and is related to sondern, meaning “to sunder.” These terms convey the idea that the concrete universal realizes the common through the particular, and brings together that which was separated. Accordingly, our concern will be, as it was for Debord and the Situationists, who inherited much of the same legacy, the “critique of separation.” Beyond this critique, it will be to seek the real possibilities for solving the problem of separation, a problem that is identical with the problems of social domination, social alienation, and social antagonism. Our concern will be the problem of the world, that which situates all situations.
As part of this project, we will investigate what we might call the question of social ontological difference. This question addresses the difference between communal being and communal beings. We will explore the ways in which the latter beings presuppose the former way of being, which is close to what both Hegel and the communitarian anarchist philosopher Gustav Landauer call Geist.1 Communal being is the irreducible, wholly gratuitous activity of free communal self-creation. It has nothing to do with essence, in the sense of a common quality that can be abstracted from beings or instantiated in them. It is, in fact, the very antithesis of the concept of an abstract universality (whether ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, or political) that infects essentialist communitarianism.
The most prominent, and certainly the most prolific, philosophical defender of dialectical thought today, Slavoj Žižek, draws a sharp distinction between the quest for the concrete universal and what he sees as the regressive project of communitarianism. The former, he says, “has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of aesthetic organic totality, since it reflexively ‘includes out’ the very excess and/or gap that forever spoils such a totality—the irreducible and ultimately unaccountable gap between a series and its excess, between the Whole and the One of its exception, is the very terrain of ‘concrete universality.’”2 He concludes that “the true politico-philosophical heirs of Hegel,” the true defenders of concrete universality, are not those “who endeavor to rectify the excesses of modernity via the return to some new form of organic substantial Order (like the communitarians),” but rather those “who fully endorse the political logic of the excess constitutive of every established Order.”3 More recently he has suggested that we should take from Hegel the idea that “the ultimate goal of every substantial ethical unity is to dissolve itself by giving rise to individuals who will assert their full autonomy against the substantial unity which gave birth to them.”4 The echoes of the Freudian Oedipal problematic are obvious. The failure to achieve autonomy results in, at best, a failure to come to terms with paternal authority and achieve full subjectivity, at worst, in bondage to the suffocating maternal, “organic” realm. As Žižek also states: “the direct choice of the ‘concrete universality’ of a particular ethical life world can only end in a regression to premodern organic society that denies the infinite right of subjectivity as the fundamental feature of modernity.”5
Žižek is obviously right about the implications of typical defenses of “organic, substantial Order” (particularly the kind with an essentializing, disturbingly ouroboric, upper-case “O”). The concrete universal cannot, as he phrases it so aptly, be “the organic articulation of a whole in which each element plays its unique, particular but irreplaceable part.”6 The quest for such a totality has been one of the most disastrous illusions of civilization. Though in some ways it sounds like a kind of innocuous New Age romanticism, it also evokes the entire history of organicist authoritarian ideology from Plato (or a certain “Plato”) through twentieth century Fascism. However, there is more than one variety of communitarianism, and more than one particular kind of “particular ethical life world.” The communitarianism defended here does not espouse any “totality,” aesthetic or otherwise, that is alleged to be full, complete, and “without remainder.” Such closure is anathema to the anarchist communitarian vision. Perceptive exponents of anarchism have always accepted its paradoxical nature as both the party of plenitude and the party of excess. The question is not whether, but rather where we can find that “excess-rectifying excess” that inevitably brings to ruin any project of totalization.
There are many ways in which the communitarian anarchist project differs from any totalizing project. Perhaps the most radical difference lies in the self-transformative, antiessentialist moment, what might be called a Castoriadian moment, in the communitarian anarchism (or anarcho-communism) defended here.7 This crucial moment of free, self-determining community lies in its quality of being the activity of the creative collective subject exercising the powers of the social imaginary, and demonstrating that it has no underlying substrate of communal essentiality, but rather always is what it is not and is not what it is. The free community is dynamic, self-disclosing ethical substantiality devoid of any underlying metaphysical substance. At the heart of free community lies a dialectic of social determination and creative self-negation and self-transformation. As in any case of all authentic creativity, there is content that emerges ex nihilo. The creative process cannot be reduced entirely to the conditions out of which it arose, or there would be no moment of creativity. But, at the same time, the process cannot create itself out of nothing. It would be absurd to imagine that the creative matrix, the context that nurtures creativity, could itself be created ex nihilo.8 There is a need for some positive grounding, and thus there is the possibility of a project, the possibility of evoking negative capability. The free community is a becoming-whole that presupposes that as members of a community the participants always “count themselves in,” but as members of a free association they always also “count themselves out,” since they and their community itself are in a process of going beyond any given communal bounds.
This is the experience of community that some have seen in struggles such as the Bolivian indigenous social movements. In their “Epilogue” to Zibechi’s Dispersing Power, the Colectivo Situaciones conclude that “the common” that these movements seek to actualize “is not absolutely realizable—it is an open universality, unable to be grasped in its totality,” so that community is not an already given reality, but “a coming about, an intent, a step forward.”9 The living community is never an object with complete being in itself, “organic” in Žižek’s sense, with a fixed identity with which the members can simply identify. It is an “open universality” in that it is the terrain on which the dialectic between universality and particularity endlessly works itself out. For Situaciones, “the communitarian . . . activates by way of permanent differentiation,” and the community “evades the crystallization initiatives or the freezing up of groups into institutional or state forms and at the same time electrifies popular energies. Dispersion, as a way of returning to the common, insists on combating its alienation into fixed and closed forms, including the closing up of the collective into pure communities.”10 The awakened, liberatory community, as the site of the emergence of universal particularity, is a self-negating and self-transcending whole. There is nothing “pure” about it other than the excessiveness of pure life.
One of the crucial projects for contemporary critical social theory is the exploration of the significance of the constitutive exception. The dialectical analysis of such exceptionality constitutes one of the most revealing forms of immanent critique of historical social formations that are fraught with negativity and contradiction. One of the chapters to follow analyzes how the meaning of constitutive exceptionality, of being “the part of no part,” can be disclosed in a moment of extreme crisis, in this case, the Hurricane Katrina disaster. But one must look to the conditions of life of more than a billion human beings who inhabit the great Third World megalopolises (a landscape of social disaster that Mike Davis analyzes so brilliantly in Planet of Slums11) to find the most significant realm of constitutive exceptionality within the global capitalist order. If, for many, New York, or perhaps London, is still “the City,” for everyone, whether they know it or not, such places as Mumbai, Lagos, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo are the Truth of the City.
Yet, it would be a mistake to look too hastily to this radical exceptionality as the royal road to some new revolutionary subject. We might say that it is one of many roads that lead in that general direction of such a subject, for the reigning abstract universality is riddled with constitutive exceptionality. It is a highly self-contradictory, ideologically distorted universality, containing moments of both truth and falsehood. The system is indeed in the process of producing its own gravediggers, but it unfortunately never generates a convenient, readymade gravedigger identity, as it produces class, racial, sexual, and other hierarchical identities. The way to concrete universality requires a painstaking exploration of often not very well-delineated regions of historical truth and falsehood, an experimentalist exploration that proceeds not merely through theory, but through transformative practice.12
The connection between the Impossible Community and this constitutive exceptionality is crucial. The historic role of the “part of no part” might be compared in some ways to that of the slave in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic. The slave, by facing the reality of his or her own contingency (by facing mortality), goes through a crisis of selfhood, and this opens the way for a development of a higher critical and spiritual consciousness. This idea will be echoed at various points in the present discussion, particularly regarding the theme of crisis and how an awakening of empathy and of communal consciousness can arise out of it. Those who are thrown, either through permanent marginalization or immediate disaster, into the condition of being “the part of no part” experience such a crisis and the possibilities inherent in it. Zibechi says regarding the “formation of non-state powers” that “collective energies reappear in an infinity of instances, especially in disaster situations or those in which an individual alone cannot solve the problem.”13 What some experience when disaster strikes is what multitudes experience through the ongoing disaster of living on the periphery of a brutal world system. However, what emerges out of traumatic marginalization and exclusion is liberatory communitarian potentiality, not an automatic historical necessity. Much of the present work is an exploration of what kind of theory and practice might be needed in order to realize this potentiality, whether among the oppressed masses of the squalid megalopolises and immiserated countrysides of the global periphery, among the alienated and disaffected subcultures of a disintegrating global center, or elsewhere.
The methodology of redeeming and radicalizing trauma aims at what Paulo Freire classically calls conscientization, the kind of realization that, rather than remaining on the level of self-consuming abstraction, inspires and impels collective transformative practice (thus demanding “the impossible”). In a sense, this methodology moves from, as Marx stated it, “the ruthless critique of all things existing,” to something analogous to Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” to what we might call “the theory of cruelty.” As Artaud described the theater of cruelty, it aimed at “a passionate and convulsive conception of life,” releasing a process in which “great social upheavals, conflicts between peoples and races, natural forces, interventions of chance, and the magnetism of fatality will manifest themselves.”14 A “politics of cruelty,” a ruthlessly compassionate confrontation with social reality, would do something similar. It would actuate an awakening to previously ignored social (and social ecological) problems and crises and could lead to an engaged response to them. The “convulsive,” a crucial term for the surrealists with whom Artaud was for a time closely associated, refers to that which evokes a sudden, violent coming to awareness or awakening.
As will be shown, we can learn much about such awakening and engagement from communities that have arisen out of trauma and crisis. One of the greatest inspirations for this work has been the Common Ground Collective, a project with strong anarchist inspiration that was created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and whose motto is “Solidarity Not Charity.” This idea is, however, much more than a motto, and the example of thousands who have put solidarity into practice has had an enormous influence on the hopes expressed here (as will be explained in the discussion of “Disaster Anarchism”). One of the central questions underlying this discussion is the extent to which there is a potentiality for solidarity to emerge from crisis, whether local, regional, or global, whether temporary or ongoing. Rebecca Solnit states provocatively in her inspiring work, A Paradise Built in Hell, that what she calls “disaster communities”
suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.15
We must explore diligently the nature of this “something” that is already present. This book assumes the necessity of a moment of materiality that gives support to the practice of solidarity. In this, it differs significantly from recent post-anarchist positions that begin with a valid critique of naïve, static, and dogmatic concepts of human nature, but end at the point of a denial of the material realities of natural and social history. Biology, anthropology, and ecology are not “destiny,” but any social theory that fails to take each of these realms seriously is destined to fail.16 Social determination (including the totality of the four spheres of determination discussed here) is not in itself a self-enclosed system, but exists in dialectical interaction with other determinations that reflect the nature of existing society as an inseparable part of larger processes of natural and social development. In recognizing such realities and determinations, this project constitutes an effort not merely to supersede, and certainly not merely to negate, but rather to continue and fulfill the work of classical anarchist thinkers such as Reclus and Kropotkin, who explored the intersection between the natural and the social.17
Even if this undeniable realm of materiality is not quite so clearly delimited as a “default setting,” it constitutes a reservoir of objective possibility upon which we can draw in the quest to create a world of solidarity and mutual aid. We have good reason to believe that, contrary to Hobbesian mythology, cooperative behavior is not the product of a contrived antisocial contract (an egoistic agreement between clashing antisocial competitors) enforced by a coercive power, but rather is something that is quite natural for human beings. As David Graeber points out, the anthropological evidence reveals that contract, rather than arising from ruthless self-interest, emerges within a context of social cooperation. He cites the pioneering anthropologist Marcel Mauss (the nephew of Durkheim), who showed in his classic work The Gift that “the origin of all contracts lies in communism, an unconditional commitment to another’s needs, and that . . . there has never been an economy based on barter: that actually-existing societies which do not employ money have instead been gift economies in which the distinctions we now make between interest and altruism, person and property, freedom and obligation, simply did not exist.”18
Hobbesian ideological common sense holds that altruism is at most a precarious social artifact, if it is not entirely illusory. However, Tomasello has shown that altruistic behavior appears spontaneously very early in life. He reports: “Infants of fourteen and eighteen months of age confront an unrelated adult they have met just moments previously. The adult has a trivial problem, and the infants help him solve it.”19 Experimental evidence shows that Hobbesian ideology, despite all its loud claims of realism, in fact turns reality on its head, as is typical of ideology in general. In experiments with young children, the addition of positive contingencies serves to make cooperative behavior conditional and to erode spontaneous cooperative tendencies. In these experiments, children who were rewarded for previously spontaneous altruistic behavior “actually helped less than those who had not been rewarded.”20 Tomasello’s findings support the communitarian anarchist hope that there are deep-seated aspects of human nature that can be revived and regenerated when the opportunity for cooperation arises, and especially when extraordinary or extreme conditions cry out for mutual aid and solidarity.
In his discussion of cooperation on the social level, Tomasello concludes that the key factor in such cooperation is mutualism, a quality much beloved by anarchists, and by communitarian anarchists in particular. He contends that “human cooperation in the larger sense of humans’ tendency and ability to live and operate together in institution-based cultural groups” is dependent above all on “mutualism, in which we all benefit from our cooperation but only if we work together, what we may call collaboration.”21 He argues that although the motivation is not competitively egoistic, in such activity the resulting benefits of cooperation to each participant are evident and further encourage mutual aid. In mutualism, “each of our efforts is required for success, and shirking is immediately apparent,” and “my altruism toward you . . . actually helps me as well, as you doing your job helps us toward our common goal.”22 This aspect of Tomasello’s argument contributes to the communitarian anarchist hope that when mutual aid and solidarity occur, they will be experienced not only as intrinsically satisfying, but also as practically beneficial to the participants.
This hope has also been given support by the work of Elinor Ostrom, recent winner of the Nobel Prize for economics. Ostrom, in a large body of experimentally based work, has shown that management of resources through participatory decision-making by those who use them results on the whole in better care for them than is the case with either private or state management. As Ostrom and Nagendra summarize these findings: “When users are genuinely engaged in decisions regarding rules that affect their use, the likelihood of users following the rules and monitoring others is much greater than when an authority simply imposes rules on users.”23 This reinforces and brings up to date what social anthropologists who have studied the relation between communal peoples and the natural world have always known. Mark Plotkin summarizes their findings in his fascinating and highly instructive book on ethnobotany and tribal medicine: “Where you have forests, you have Indians—but more importantly, where you have Indians, you have forests.”24 Recent work such as that of Tomasello and Ostrom, among many others, reinforces the communitarian anarchist contention, going back to Reclus and Kropotkin, that that there are grounds, in human nature, in the history of human community, and in the structure of cooperative activity itself, for the creation of a world consisting of a community of free communities.
Anarchy, solidarity, and legitimacy
One of our key questions will be that of the nature of social solidarity. In perhaps the best-known analysis of the concept of solidarity in classical social theory, Durkheim distinguishes between two forms, which he identifies as mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. He explains that members of “primitive” societies were united by what he calls the “mechanical” type, in which “the individual” is “tied directly” to the society “without any intermediary,” and by means of “a more or less closely organized totality of beliefs and sentiments common to all members of the group,” so that “the individuals are like ‘social molecules’” that “can act together in so far as they have no action of their own, as with the molecules of inorganic bodies.”25 He holds that modern societies are united through the “organic” form of solidarity. In this type, each individual is dependent on society by means of his or her complex dependence on the parts of that society. The whole constitutes a “system of specialized and differentiated functions,” which has a unity analogous to that of “a living body.”26 Under this form, with its increasing division of labor, “the activity of each individual becomes more personalized to the degree that it is more specialized,” and “the individuality of all grows at the same time as that of its parts.”27
Durkheim’s account contains an element of truth to the degree that it focuses on the difference between a society in which there is a consensus concerning certain traditional values (“beliefs and sentiments”) and a society in which there is a diversity of fundamental values. It correctly points out that there are areas in which the person becomes increasingly individualized as the society becomes in some ways more complex and diversified. However, this depiction goes badly astray, on the one hand, by overlooking in traditional societies the areas of greater social complexity and greater acceptance of certain kinds of social diversity, and, on the other, in ignoring the strong tendency toward standardization of values and practice in modern societies. It also misses the fact that solidarity that is based on factors such as traditional narrative, communal ritual, and complex kinship relationships results in a consonance of elements within the whole that has much in common with the “organic.” It can be compared to “the body’s seemingly intuitive integration of its diverse faculties” that Nuland sees as the basis for the metaphor of “the wisdom of the body.”28 In contrast, modern organization based on large-scale political and economic apparatuses operates very much on a “mechanical” or “mechanistic” model of external force imposed on resistant material. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear, even to many ordinary participant-observers in contemporary society, that the modern techno-bureaucratic state and the modern techno-bureaucratic corporate economic order function to an ever-increasing degree as massive machines that act upon the rest of society.
Amending the classic analysis to take account of these realities, we will see the emergence of free community as the culmination of a development from traditional organic solidarity, passing through coercive mechanistic administration (which works to dissolve true solidarity), and culminating in free communitarian solidarity. This development is a dialectical one in which there are moments of negation, preservation, and transcendence of previous social forms. As the discussion of “the third concept of liberty” below will show, the free community, though in no way a regression to any previous social form, recapitulates in many ways the organic, cultural basis for solidarity that was lost with the decline and dissolution of traditional societies. In addition, it develops the liberatory potential of forms of individuality that emerged over the history of civilization. Finally, it posits a kind of collective agency that develops potentialities implicit in the long history of participatory democracy and communal freedom that spans the ages from tribal societies to contemporary liberation and solidarity movements.
Closely related to the question of communal solidarity is that of communal legitimation. It is important to understand the specific ways in which the free community establishes its legitimacy, and the manner in which its legitimation processes differ from those of previous social forms. Max Weber famously traced the legitimacy of any social order (defined by the degree to which there is “voluntary submission” to that order) to one of three kinds of authority. The first is called rational authority, and is identified with “belief in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules,” and “the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands.” The second is labeled traditional authority, and is defined as that which is based on “the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them.” And the third is identified as charismatic authority, and is said to be derived from “devotion to the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.”29
It is argued here that the free community that is the goal of communitarian anarchism possesses three parallel bases of legitimation. As anarchistic concepts, these bases might be conceived of as forms of solidarity, rather than forms of authority, in view of the conventional connotations of the term “authority.” However, it should be recognized there is a long history of anarchist theories of legitimate authority, which has focused in particular on the “authority of competence” as a legitimate form. Thus, these forms of legitimation may validly be seen as forms of nonauthoritarian authority, in addition to being forms of solidarity. In the free community, the function of Weber’s rational authority is performed by solidarity based on the libertarian communitarian counter-ideology. The function of Weber’s traditional authority is carried out by solidarity embodied in the community’s practice, that is, in the libertarian communitarian ethos. And the function of Weber’s charismatic authority is exercised by solidarity arising from the common inspiration deriving from the libertarian communitarian imaginary.
The universal particular and the dialectic of modernity
If in modern Western philosophy, it is Hegel who poses most trenchantly the problem of the universal particular, it is Georg Simmel who within classical social theory signals the centrality of this problematic. Simmel describes history as the record of a project of dividing society into two opposed spheres of universality and singularity, carried out through the negation and annihilation of developed particularity. If one purges his account of its ideological elements, it is found that he reveals strikingly the roots of this dualistic project in the quest for political and economic domination. In his analysis of the evolution of law, for example, Simmel shows that the origins of this project lie far back in the history of ancient empire. He explains that “the idea of total power that was contained in the Roman concept of the state had its correlate in the notion that next to the jus publicum, there was a jus privatum. . . . On the one side, there was only the community in the broadest sense; on the other side, there were only single persons.”30 Note that “the community in the broadest sense” is the “community” in its most abstract and artificial sense, the state, which is at the same time the absolute negation of community in its most real, concrete, and historically grounded sense. The entire future history of civilization is encapsulated in this opposition between an abstract universality and an abstract singularity.
The imperial project expressed in this formulation (“total power”) has continued for two millennia and is now reaching perfection in late modernity. Indeed, one of the strongest reasons for conceptualizing our age as “late modern” rather than “postmodern” is that the latter term obscures the manner in which the contemporary period is so precisely the realization and fulfillment of the logic of modernity as the final stage of the logic of civilization. The modern period, as Simmel notes, has continued the imperial project of dualistic polarization through the creation of “an all-embracing public realm” that was first established in the form of “princely absolutism.”31 As we now know, the completion of this process has required the coordinated efforts of the global state system and the global market economy. The engine of universalization has been this corporate-state apparatus, the impersonal, mechanistic Modern Prince that long ago began to displace obsolete “princely absolutism.” The ensuing world historical project has progressively reduced society to a polarity between a realm of abstract universality and a realm of abstracted singularity, the multitude of increasingly atomized individuals.
As Simmel describes the developing history of this process, “it was fundamentally a matter of destroying the narrow, internally homogeneous ‘intermediate’ associations whose hegemony had characterized the earlier condition in order to conduct development upward toward the state and downward toward the unprejudiced freedom of the individual.”32 Thus, central to the project of modernity has been the destruction of the particular in the form of communal mediations (the process that Marx epitomized in his famous judgment that as capitalism advances triumphantly, “all that is solid melts into air”), leaving a stark dualistic opposition between the abstractly universal sphere of the “free” state and the “free” market, and the abstractly individual sphere of the “free” citizen/subject and the “free” producer/consumer.
Simmel notes that this reductive polarization process is a function of political scale and could be seen as emergent even in the medieval period, as urbanization and concentration of power began to accelerate.
As early as the Middle Ages, English cities exhibit a pattern in which the larger municipalities were ruled by single corporations or magnates, whereas in the smaller cities, the people as a whole held dominion. Corresponding to the smaller circle, there is a homogeneity of elements that underlies the unvarying rate of their political participation; but in the larger circles, this homogeneity is fragmented, allowing only for the mass of private individuals on one side, and for the single ruling personality on the other.33
This historical development continued into the modern period as the nation-state and market economy emerged, imposing their distinctive forms of universality and singularity. Simmel observes: “Eighteenth-century individualism wanted only freedom, only the removal of the ‘intermediate’ circles and middle levels that separated men from mankind, that is, that inhibited the development of pure humanity that supposedly constituted the value and core of each individual’s existence, but which was hidden and truncated by particularistic historical groupings and bonds.”34 Thus, according to the dominant ideologies of the Enlightenment and of much of the subsequent Age of Revolution, communal ties are seen as an obstacle to liberation, and community itself, to the extent that it is not reformulated as nationality and citizenship in the nation-state, is seen as the antithesis of freedom.
Yet, over the two centuries that followed, it became clear that the individual being was torn away from communal ties, not primarily to accede to some abstract “pure humanity,” but rather to become a more disciplined and obedient subject of the modern nation-state and a more productive and profitable producer and consumer within the modern capitalist economy. Simmel was far from oblivious to these tendencies, and for this reason he is a key figure in the development of critical social theory. For example, he recognizes, no less than Marx did, that “the cash economy and its associated liberalistic tendencies” have not only “loosened or dissolved narrower confederations” and “inaugurated a world economy,” but have indeed “encouraged economic egoism to every degree of remorselessness.”35 As power became more and more centralized over the modern period, “the people” saw their “dominion” vanish entirely while “the single ruling personality” merged increasingly into the massive impersonal bureaucratic state and the vast impersonal market economy.36
However, despite Simmel’s insights, his analysis lapses into progressivist ideology when he assumes that social “homogeneity” would be eliminated as part of modern society’s inexorable movement toward a better future of greater individuality and diversity. In reality, while communal homogeneity has certainly declined, the state and the market have increasingly imposed a new homogeneity in spheres of thought, activity, and valuation.37 According to the ideology of social progress espoused by Simmel (and modern social thought in general), the developing moment of universality would “pull” the singular individual “toward all that is human, suggesting to him the notion of an ideal unity of mankind.”38 But we now know that this is no more than a modernist illusion, the fantasizing of an abstract idealist “union” that serves to disguise continuing division and domination. As Rancière has pointed out concerning the fate of abstract university in a world dominated by the state and capital, “the universal is incessantly privatized by police logic, incessantly reduced to a power-share between birth, wealth and ‘competence.’ which is at work in the State as well as in society.”39 To the extent that this illusion has not been dissolved by late modern (alias “postmodern”) disillusionment, it has been reduced to a shadowy existence in liberal and “progressive” rhetoric. It is now clear that the moment of universality can only be redeemed through the project of realizing concrete universality, as opposed to regression to the ideological illusion of universality, and that concrete universality can only be achieved if the abstract singular and the abstract universal are negated, transcended, and concretized through the universal particular.
Contemporary anarchist theory: Bridging the gap
In recent anarchist theory, Bookchin and other programmatic thinkers have strayed into abstract universality and an accompanying dogmatism, while many egoists, post-anarchists, and post-structuralist anarchists have fallen into a one-sided focus on singularity and particularity, often failing to show clearly how they can avoid the risk of relativism. The truth of universality defended on one side and the truth of singularity defended on the other must both be recognized, but each must be radicalized and developed further through dialectical engagement. The argument here for recognition of the crucial moment of the universal particular and concrete universality constitutes a response to these two divergent tendencies in contemporary anarchist thought.
The present work focuses specifically on correcting the anti-dialectical errors of these two tendencies. It seeks to rectify, on the one hand, the post-anarchist misrepresentation of dialectical thought, and, on the other, Bookchin’s misguided “dialectical naturalist” attempts to turn dialectical thought into something rather close to that misrepresentation. There is no need at this point to go into great detail concerning Bookchin, whose thought is the topic of detailed discussion below.40 However, it will be useful to mention an example of the kind of problems that emerge in his work. At one time, I was generally in accord with many aspects of Bookchin’s well-known analysis of municipalism and decentralized democracy. However, about 20 years ago, I became heavily involved in the struggle against a major transnational mining corporation that was a dominant political force in my local community, and which also was undertaking vast projects of mineral exploitation, including the world’s largest gold mine and third-largest copper mine, in West Papua (the western half of the island of New Guinea). This project involved enormous ecological destruction, social oppression, and cultural genocide against the Papuan people.
The more deeply I became engaged in this struggle, the more I discovered the very specific ways in which the particularities of local (“municipal”) issues and struggles (whether in Timika or Tembagapura on the island of Papua, or in New Orleans and Austin on the island of North America), have universal dimensions. This does not mean merely that there are abstract “human rights” that are violated here and violated there, so that “we are all in this together” as human beings, or even that there is some generalized neocolonial relationship between the First and Third Worlds. What it means is that by immersing oneself in the particularities of local issues and struggles, one discovers how they are related in very specific ways to the global capitalist economy, the global nation-state system, the global system of industrial technology, neocolonialism, various forms of racism and ethnic domination, patriarchal values and institutions, the global ecological crisis, and, indeed, every significant dimension of the world system, and the complex ways that all these elements interact at various levels, including the national, regional, bioregional, ecosystemic, local, and even personal ones.41 One discovers that the more deeply one delves into the particular, the more the universal appears in its greatest concreteness and specificity.
Over a decade of engaged inquiry into this dialectic of particularity and universality, I increasingly found Bookchin’s municipalism, despite its professed localist dimension, to be a form of abstract universalism, ungrounded in real history, disconnected from the realities of contemporary global society, and based on a highly Eurocentric theoretical problematic. It is revealing that as we moved into the twenty-first century, Bookchin could publish a book on the city with no references to places such as Kolkata, Beijing, Jakarta, Rio, Nairobi, or indeed, any of the great Third World Megalopolises. In fact, at the close of a century that saw the rise of neocolonialism and its sprawling urban slums that are the true dystopian future of the city, the contemporary Global South and its cities appear nowhere in Bookchin’s work.42 It must be admitted that such a gap has not been atypical in Western anarchist thought. These harsh global realities, and, indeed, the entire world beyond the industrialized West, are only now beginning to take their proper place at the center of anarchist theory.
Post-anarchism has tended to stray in a quite different direction from Bookchin’s kind of abstract universalism. It has, in fact, criticized the anarchist tradition for such universalism, among other shortcomings. However, one of the major problems with post-anarchism is its often simplistic and inaccurate representation of the anarchist tradition to which it claims to be “post.” Nathan Jun, in Anarchism and Political Modernity, has done an excellent job of showing these shortcomings, concluding that the works of the post-anarchists “have been characterized by remarkably limited engagement with actual anarchist texts coupled with problematical exegesis.”43 He is himself familiar with both classical anarchist and post-structuralist texts and makes a convincing case for certain strong connections between the two, notably in the cases of Deleuze, and perhaps most strikingly, of Derrida.
Interestingly, the Derridean ideas that seem most anarchistic to Jun are those that echo (though perhaps they echo a bit too faintly) the radical dialectical tradition that is defended here. Thus, Jun sees great merit in Derrida’s rejection of “binary logic,” that “operates within the limits of an exclusive disjunction,” rather than accepting the possibility that “something is both A and ~A simultaneously.”44 But such a rejection is precisely what dialectical logic has been known for long before Derrida and post-structuralism ever existed. Deconstruction, Jun says, fights against “the multiplicity of totalized binary oppositions which are constantly and variously manifesting themselves within multiple sites of oppression” by “‘overturning,’ ‘displacing,’ ‘resisting,’ ‘disorganizing,’ and ‘transgressing’ these oppositions wherever they arise,”45 and it should certainly be commended for doing this. Yet, it would be difficult to see how these concepts are in any way an advance over dialectical concepts (all of which are connotations of Aufheben) such as “negation,” “abolition,” “supersession,” “annulment,” “cancellation,” “suspension,” “sublation,” “preservation,” and “transcendence.”
For a typical example of recent representations of the classical anarchist tradition, we might look at a critique of the tradition by Todd May. May’s analysis is particularly instructive because he has done excellent work on anarchism and is clearly one of the most capable and sophisticated contemporary anarchist theorists. Though he identifies his position as post-structuralist, rather than post-anarchist, his critique is similar to that of the post-anarchists. He asserts that “almost all anarchists rely on a unitary concept of human essence: the human essence is good; therefore, there is no need for the exercise of power.”46 He adds that anarchists are “suspicious of all power,” because “the image of power with which power operates is that of a weight pressing down—and at times destroying—the actions, events, and desires with which it comes in contact.”47 The problem is not that this description is entirely wrong. It is true that an important part of the anarchist project has been to investigate the degree to which “goodness,” or a grounding for “goodness,” can be found in human nature. Most classical anarchists addressed this issue, and the question of the nature of power has also been one of their central concerns. It is also true that some have said naïve, simplistic, and one-sided things about both of these topics. However, the problem with this generalization is that it ignores a large part of what that tradition has said about these issues, and, in particular, it overlooks the most challenging and sophisticated insights found in the tradition.
For example, this account overlooks the environmental determinist aspects of many classical anarchist theories, including those of such major figures as Godwin and Bakunin. Even though Godwin had a belief in the gradual “perfectibility” of humanity, his deterministic position led him to conclude that actual human nature could exhibit a great range of good and evil qualities. Indeed, he judges in his magnum opus, Political Justice, that “the whole history of the human species, taken in one point of view, appears a vast abortion. Man seems adapted for wisdom and fortitude and benevolence. But he has always, through a vast majority of countries, been a victim of ignorance and superstition.”48
It is also quite clear that Godwin had a very complex conception of power and its relation to human action. In Political Justice, he writes of many meanings and types of power, including, for example, the power of desire, of prejudice, of reason, of truth, of understanding, of conscience, of will, of imagination, of education, of resistance, of coercion, of government, of parties, of legislatures, of judiciaries, of executives, of multitudes, of the people, of physical objects, and of physical causes.
Bakunin also had a deterministic, and radically environmentalist view of human nature. The human being, he says,
enters life without a soul, without a conscience, without the shadow of an idea or any feeling, but with a human organism whose individual nature is determined by an infinite number of circumstances and conditions preceding his will, and which in turn determines his greater or smaller capacity to acquire and assimilate the feelings, ideas, and associations worked out by centuries of development and transmitted to everyone as a social heritage by the education which he receives. Good or bad, this education is imposed upon man—and he is in no way responsible for it.49
Whether or not we accept Bakunin’s strong environmental determinism, passages such as this, which are very common in his works, debunk the myth that classical anarchism had an extreme, ahistorical “natural goodness” view of human nature.
Regarding the issue of power, it is true that Bakunin made sweeping statements about “opposing all power,” but he also wisely contradicted such simplistic statements and revealed that his considered view of the matter was more complex. Thus, in Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism, he states that in revolutionary struggle, “power is diffused in the collective and becomes the sincere expression of the liberty of everyone.”50 In God and the State he discusses a “social power” that is not at all repressive.51 Thus, Bakunin does not always see power as repressive; he in fact sees power in the non-repressive sense as basic to the functioning of the revolutionary movement and the good society. Granted, the classical anarchists were not proto-Foucauldians, and many tended to see hierarchical power as predominantly repressive, but as the example from Godwin shows, even on this issue the story is much more complex.
To mention a problem that is particularly relevant to the present analysis, post-anarchism’s depiction of dialectical thought, whether within or outside of anarchist theory, is an area in which the misrepresentation has been most extreme. To take one of hundreds of pertinent examples, Lewis Call claims in an article on Ursula Le Guin that those who attempt “to describe Le Guin as a dialectical thinker must find a way to account for the sustained assault on binary thinking that is such a fundamental feature of her work.”52 Yet, in reality, dialectical thought is itself the most sustained attack in the history of philosophy on binary thinking. It is rather well-known for (and often attacked for) its rejection of the principle of contradiction, one of the pillars of binary thinking. Dialectical thought goes to great pains to show that binary oppositions are never an adequate depiction of reality and that they always self-destruct. As in the case of Ursula Le Guin, dialectical thinkers do not ignore the existence of binary oppositions, but rather take them up and subject them to something like a “sustained assault.”53
This is not the place to present a detailed exposition of the nature of dialectical philosophy.54 However, since it is the basis for the present work, and since it has been so systematically misrepresented in recent anarchist thought, it might be helpful to add a few words about what dialectic is and what it is not. Radical dialectic sees the world (including the social world, the natural world, and the world of ideas) as the site of constant change and transformation that takes place through processes of mutual interaction, negation, and contradiction. It asserts that a dynamic, self-transforming reality is always a step, or several steps, ahead of our processes of conceptualization. Things are in a state of becoming and therefore always are not what they are, and always are what they are not. Negation is determination. Things are what they are not in the sense that that to which they are related is internal to their being. Phenomena are conditioned by the wholes (and partial wholes) of which they are a part (and also not a part). The objects of dialectical analysis are seen as always being in motion. In the process of dialectical inquiry, which is itself a process of interaction with those objects, the analyst and the categories of analysis are themselves transformed. Dialectical analysis rejects the idea of simple teleological unfolding of potentiality. In their processes of development, phenomena generate a supplementary otherness that negates any idea of their self-contained identity and completeness. Adorno states this idea thus: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction . . . indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.”55 This statement illustrates the fact that the limitations of the principle of contradiction was hardly a discovery of post-structuralism, and that anyone who represents dialectical thinking as a fetishization of binary oppositions needs to rethink the problem of representation.
An important work on psychoanalyses once made the absolutely crucial distinction between “psychoanalytic method” and “the doctrine of Freud.”56 The author’s hope was that the reader would avoid identifying with psychoanalysis any absurdity or prejudice that Freud happened to espouse. It is equally important to understand that dialectic should not be identified with “the doctrine of Hegel” or “the doctrine of Marx,” but only with the ideas of these thinkers when they are at their most critical and dialectical. Hegel’s dialectic has nothing to do with an inevitable development of World History toward Absolute Spirit. Marx’s dialectic has nothing to do with an inevitable succession of historical modes of production culminating in Communism. Above all, it is important to realize that when one hears that dialectic means “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” one can be certain that the source, whether attacking dialectic, defending it, or giving a supposedly neutral definition of it, has never really investigated the phenomenon. It is true that there are some cases of such a triadic dialectical movement (including very important ones, such as in Hegel’s account of Being, Nothing, and Becoming in the Science of Logic). But there are, in fact, very few such cases, and defining dialectic according to such a mechanical model is a prime example of non-dialectical thinking.
Žižek notes the ironic fact that among critics of Hegel and dialectic it is “fashionable to insist how there is always a remainder of contingency, of particularity, which cannot be aufgehoben, which insists and resists its conceptual (dis)integration.”57 The irony is in that this supposedly embarrassing remainder is precisely what any good dialectical analysis consistently reveals. Žižek notes further irony in the fact that Aufhebung, “the very term Hegel uses to designate this operation is marked by the irreducible contingency of an idiosyncrasy of the German.”58 The idiosyncrasy consists in the fact that the same word can have at the same time seemingly contradictory meanings such as “to negate,” “to cancel,” “to preserve,” “to suspend,” and “to transcend.” And the irony goes on even further. The hostile stereotype of dialectic as teleological dogmatism would have it aiming at a final result “without remainder,” as all is merged into some grand mystical synthesis. However, one of the primary meanings of Aufheben is “to preserve,” and what is preserved includes various loose ends, further contradictions, and radical negativity. If one takes a dialectical approach, one always pays the most careful attention to “what remains,” since one realizes that forgotten remainders always come back to haunt one.
It can only be concluded that radical dialectic manages to be at least as antiessentialist, antisubstantialist, and antidogmatic as is any form of postmodernism, without succumbing in any way to the postmodernist tendency to collapse into relativism, nihilism, cynicism, or late capitalist ideology. It should also be recognized that non-radical pseudo-dialectic, the utilization of rigid, stereotyped formulas of development mislabeled “dialectical,” is itself mere ideology, and can collapse into almost anything. The goal of the present work is to be fully and consistently dialectical. The achievement of this goal is, of course, impossible, but this impossibility fortunately opens up new possibilities for others to carry out the task more adequately.
The chapters that follow focus in various ways on the two main themes of this book: the inquiry into the ways in which social transformation is possible, and the analysis of the goal of such transformation, which is the free community proposed by the communitarian anarchist tradition. The next chapter, “Critique of the Gotham Program” takes the form of a sympathetic critique of one of the most advanced statements of the American radical Left today, the Manifesto for a Left Turn. However, as in the case of the work of Marx that inspired its title, the primary aim is not so much the critique of a given text as the critique of social reality, the sort of critique that is capable of opening up new possibilities for radical social transformation. In pursuit of this end, a theory of social determination is outlined that encompasses an analysis of the spheres of the social institutional structure, social ideology, the social imaginary, and the social ethos. It is argued that a successful transformative political movement must constitute a comprehensive and deeply rooted form of life.
Modern political thought has been the site of a continual struggle for appropriation of the concept of liberty. Chapter 3, “The Third Concept of Liberty,” argues that the most advanced conception of freedom is offered by a communitarian anarchist theory that synthesizes “negative freedom” as noncoercion and nondomination, “positive freedom” as self-realization or flourishing, and “absolute freedom” as authentic agency realized through active participation in the collective self-determination of a free community. It is shown that the roots of such a concept are found in their most highly developed (albeit ideologically distorted) form in Hegel’s social thought, and that the eminently practical and experimental communitarian anarchism formulated by Gustav Landauer helps us understand how such an ideal might become a powerful concrete social reality today.
Chapter 4, “Against Principalities and Powers,” explores the converse of the theory of freedom, the anarchist theory of domination. The first part of the chapter investigates the major elements of the radical critique of domination, as developed in anarchist thought and in the history of critical and dialectical social theory. It is shown that this critique has established that social domination constitutes a comprehensive system containing distinct forms of domination that interact dialectically and that operate pervasively through the various spheres of social determination. It has also revealed the historical movement in the direction of social domination through impersonal mechanisms that are largely unconscious, automatic, and systemic. The second part of the chapter is an application of this critique of domination, in the form of a critical analysis of the major contemporary liberal theory of domination. It is shown that this theory is reductive, ahistorical, and ideological, that it renders much of social domination invisible, and that, in the end, the position destroys itself if carried to its own logical conclusion.
A social theory focused on the ideal of free community and the elimination of all forms of domination is inevitably characterized as “utopian.” Chapter 5, “Anarchy and the Dialectic of Utopia,” analyzes the crucial importance of utopian ideas and practice to the communitarian anarchist project, in addition to exposing the perils of many forms of utopianism. This analysis is inspired by a long tradition of libertarian communitarian thought and practice that shows the extent to which the impossible community has its roots in historical realities. This includes the communist and communitarian anarchist theoretical tradition, as developed by Reclus, Kropotkin, and Landauer, in addition to the rich history of utopian socialism and radical intentional community, ranging from the Fourierist and Owenite communal experiments of the nineteenth century through the Gandhian ashrams and radical kibbutzim of the twentieth. It is argued that there is a need for a deeply topian utopianism that synthesizes the utopian quest for a good that lies beyond the limits of conventional possibility and the topian sense of place, of embodied reality, and of the emergence of the good here and now.
Chapter 6, “The Microecology of Community,” marks a transition from the general theoretical discussion of the opening chapters to a more specific analysis of existing possibilities for social transformation. It explores the need for a politics rooted in primary communities such as affinity groups, base communities, and small intentional communities. It argues that liberatory social transformation requires a material basis in a political culture consisting of a dense network of grassroots institutions that address the most fundamental spheres of our social being. It is argued that many of the ideals of this tradition are realized in contemporary forms of small group organization and that such phenomena offer hope for the emergence of a larger movement for social regeneration.
Chapter 7, “Bridging the Unbridgeable Chasm,” defends the thesis that the contemporary anarchist movement in North America has made important advances in the development of the needed liberatory political culture. It refutes various contentions in Murray Bookchin’s well-known polemic, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism,”59 in which he argues that the contemporary anarchist movement has retreated from meaningful social engagement, is engaged in ineffectual self-indulgent gestures, and has lost its emancipatory potential. Such arguments are also representative of negative stereotypes of contemporary anarchism in current popular culture and political discourse. It is argued that, in reality, contemporary anarchist practice continues a long history of successfully synthesizing personal and communal liberation and has much to offer to the project of reaffirming and revitalizing the libertarian communitarian tradition.
Using the Hurricane Katrina disaster as a case study, Chapter 8, “Disaster Anarchism,” shows how a moment of crisis and catastrophe can help reveal the nature of the system of domination and give rise to new forms of liberatory struggle and grassroots community organization. In such moments, the dominant ideology, imaginary, and ethos are challenged by the force of events and space is opened for the emergence of what had long seemed impossible. In an analysis inspired by the communist anarchist perspective of philosopher and social geographer Reclus, it is argued that the grassroots response to the Katrina catastrophe and the forms of organization and cooperation that came out of it offer inspiration for a larger libertarian and communitarian movement for social transformation.
In Chapter 9, “The Common Good,” inspiration for renewed communitarian anarchism is found in the Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement in India, the largest anarchist-inspired movement to appear between the Spanish Revolution and the present moment. It is shown that Gandhi and the Gandhian movement put into practice such anarchist values as radical decentralism, antistatism, local participatory democracy, economic self-management, and focus on the central place of personal transformation and base organization in the process of social revolution. The chapter also shows how this Gandhian heritage is carried on in the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka. It follows a decentralist, participatory model of collective action based on a concept of personal and social awakening that moves from the level of the person, to the family, to the local community, and then to successively larger spheres of social interaction. The Gandhian tradition, while giving no blueprint for social transformation, is shown to be in many ways exemplary in addressing the interconnected spheres of institutions, ideology, imaginary, and ethos.
The final chapter consists of a detailed communitarian anarchist critique of the theory and practice of libertarian municipalism as developed in the thought of Murray Bookchin. Though this tendency currently has relatively little political influence, it is still quite significant for several reasons. First, it remains the most elaborately developed political perspective in the last generation of anarchist social thought. Second, much of the critique of libertarian municipalism applies to programmatic theory in general and can be helpful in understanding a problematical tendency that is recurrent in anarchist thought. Third, a major goal of the present work is to defend dialectical social theory, and the critique shows the distinction between nominally dialectical analysis and a truly radical dialectic.60 Finally, it is important to recognize that there is an important core of truth in libertarian municipalism, which, purged of rigid and dogmatic elements, has much to contribute to communitarian anarchist and social ecological theory. Whatever the limitations of Bookchin’s formulation may be, decentralized participatory democracy promises to be of crucial importance in future communal struggles against empire and for the liberation of humanity and nature.
1See Chapter 3 in this book for extensive discussion on this topic.
2Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 113.
3Ibid., p. 113.
4Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012), p. 442.
5Ibid, pp. 205–6. This also repeats a certain moment of Marx’s account of Man’s historical Bildung.
6Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 101.
7As the discussion of agency below will show, it is also a deeply Hegelian moment. On Cornelius Castoriadis, see especially his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). For a brief analysis of Castoriadis’s importance for many of the themes discussed here, see John P. Clark, “Cornelius Castoriadis: Thinking about Political Theory” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 49 (2002): 67–74.
8It is in this regard that certain questions arise concerning Žižek’s formulation of the Hegelian “ultimate goal” of the break with “substantial ethical unity.” First, the unity is never a mere unity, and to represent it as such usually reflects either its idealized affirmation or its idealized negation. Second, this (non-)unity is never merely “dissolved” when it is sublated, but rather also preserved as a moment of dialectical development. Third, the idea of “full autonomy” is questionable to the degree that it might be read as implying a total transcendence of determining conditions. Finally, the “assertion” of this full autonomy against the supposed unity might imply a one-sidedly reactive stance. The communitarian anarchist conception of free community attempts to avoid all these (Oedipal, Promethean, Marxian, Bakuninist, etc.) pitfalls.
9Colectivo Situationes, “Epilogue: Notes about the Notion of ‘Community,’” in Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces (Oakland, CA and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010), p. 137.
10Zibechi, Dispersing Power, p. 138.
11Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006).
12Andrei Codrescu has brilliantly explored certain dimensions of being the part of no part through his analysis of the importance of “the outside” within a given society. See The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto of Escape (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
13Zibechi, Dispersing Power, p. 12.
14Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958).
15Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009), p. 18.
16These areas, and especially the ecological, will be addressed in A Dialectical Social Ecology, a forthcoming work that will discuss the social ecological dimensions and implications of the present theoretical project in much greater detail.
17On Reclus’ enormous contribution in this area, see “The Dialectic of Nature and Culture,” in John Clark and Camille Martin, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), pp. 19–42. Another version of this analysis, “The Dialectical Social Geography of Elisée Reclus,” can be found online at http://raforum.info/reclus/spip.php?article212.
18David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), p. 17. See also Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) for a further development of the anarchistic implications of the gift economy, including the idea of the gift as “anarchist money.”
19Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 6.
20Ibid., p. 9.
21Ibid., p. 52.
22Ibid., p. 53.
23Elinor Ostrom and Harini Nagendra, “Insights on Linking Forests, Trees, and People from the Air, on the Ground, and in the Laboratory” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103. 51 (December 19, 2006): 19224–31.
24Mark J. Plotkin, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rainforest (New York: Viking Press, 1993), p. 273. He adds that “the beauty of ethnobotany is that it brings people into the forest picture, showing that tribal peoples can help provide us with answers on the best ways to use and protect the forests.”
25Emile Durkheim, Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Giddens (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 138–9.
26Ibid., pp. 138–9.
27Ibid., p. 140.
28Sherwin B. Nuland, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. xviii.
29Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 1964), p. 328.
30Georg Simmel, “Group Expansion and the Development of Individuality” in Donald N. Levine, ed., Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Form (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 283.
31Ibid., p. 280.
32Ibid., p. 279.
33Ibid., p. 280.
34Ibid., p. 286.
35Ibid., p. 289.
36Ibid., p. 280.
37This restriction of freedom is systematically overlooked in liberal conceptions, especially the “negative concept of liberty,” as will be discussed at length in Chapter 3.
38Ibid., pp. 284–5.
39Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 62.
40See Chapter 10 in this book. For a detailed critique of Bookchin’s conception of dialectic, see “Domesticating the Dialectic: A Critique of Bookchin’s Neo-Aristotelianism” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 19.1 (March 2008): 51–68.
41For a discussion of Papuan issues, see John Clark, “The Indigenous Struggle against Violence and Oppression: Resistance to State and Corporate Domination, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism in West Papua” in Santi Nath Chattopadhyay, ed., World Peace: Problems of Global Understanding and Prospect of Harmony (Kolkata, India: Punthi Pustak, 2005); online at http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/ateliers2/a10/art10–8.html.
42See Murray Bookchin, Urbanization without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1996). This is also true of his other main work on cities, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1974) in which non-Western cities are barely mentioned, and even then primarily in the context of Western theories concerning the premodern and precapitalist world.
43Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (New York: Continuum Books, forthcoming), chapter 6. See also his very perceptive article “Deleuze, Derrida, and Anarchism” in Anarchist Studies 15.2 (Fall 2007): 132–56.
44Jun, “Deleuze, Derrida, and Anarchism,” p. 143.
45Ibid., p. 144.
46Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press), p. 13.
47Ibid., p. 61.
48William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Philadelphia: Bioren and Madan, 1796) I:457; online at http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GodJust.html.
49G. P. Maximov, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 153.
50Ibid., p. 260.
51Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State; online at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html.
52Lewis Call, “Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin” in SubStance 36.2 (2007): 87–105.
53However, we might equally use a less violent depiction such as “nurture their own self-transformation.”
54In a forthcoming work presenting and defending a dialectical social ecology, the nature of dialectical social theory will be discussed in greater detail. Some of the important aspects are analyzed further in the discussion of Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School in Chapter 4 in this book.
55Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), p. 5.
56Roland Dalbiez, Psychoanalytic Theory and the Doctrine of Freud (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1941, Vol. I; 1948, Vol. II).
57Slavoj Žižek, “Hegel and Shitting: The Idea’s Constipation” in Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis, eds, Hegel & the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 230.
58Ibid.
59Murray Bookchin, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm,” at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/soclife.html.
60See John P. Clark, “Domesticating the Dialectic: A Critique of Bookchin’s Neo-Aristotelianism” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 19 (March 2008): 51–68.