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Is Communalism Anarchist?

Communalism brings production and property under the control of municipal assemblies, who decide how property should be distributed.

[Libertarian municipalism's goal is to] create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.

While not being a state by the most common definition (since it's localized), municipal assemblies are certainly a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, but it's not anarchy.

Localized hierarchies are still hierarchies and communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-by-the-majority); which should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy as this hierarchy can easily be exploited by authoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to self-determination. Any society that allows the majority to force their will on a minority can't honestly be described as anarchist in nature.

Furthermore, organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in 20th century society is restrictive and shortsighted.

Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology.

For instance: Marxism requires that a highly advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism was implemented lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including mass-displacement of people); eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold they simply didn't fit.

The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma; however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies popping up. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.

The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, once identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between what he termed 'lifestylist' anarchists and socialists, denouncing 'lifestylists' as being beneath him. This elitist divide he created continues to reverberate today, with some social anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchism into two opposing factions and led to needless infighting and distraction.

  1. A Green Anarchist Perspective

A Green Anarchist Perspective

Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin's ideas because of his concept of 'post-scarcity'; which to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we're in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don't cease to be scarce when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction; including by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there's no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a 'post-scarcity' economy is intrinsically flawed.

Bookchin saw technology as a revolutionary tool, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical.

One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially 'rule by machine'. Tasks are assigned, decisions made and resources distributed by computers; largely diminishing an individual's self-determination and leaving it up to software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could potentially be hijacked by malicious actors who could seize control of the system and give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also exposed to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software.

Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies:

Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man's future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.

Advanced technologies that forever alter the way we live our lives can detach humans from the environment and train us to seek fleeting relief from technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend on to survive. It's easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use technology to escape from reality. At least until the ecosystems are so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives.

A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically advanced people and exploited underclasses whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It's easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies.

Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new advances, but years after his death, technology has improved greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world's ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.

Bookchin wrote:

Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist today.

While it is true that 'green' fuels can be less destructive than 'dirty' fuels, they still remain incredibly destructive, and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings.

The machines he speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap labor.

The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people, or that all people in the world would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies is naive at best, or a malicious falsehood at worst. Bookchin's insistence that technology is only destructive because of capitalism, and would instead be liberating under socialism has no basis in reality, as the technologies he talks of remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place.

Bookchin:

The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry "Black is beautiful" or "Make love, not war" marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.

Bookchin's plans for localized, ecologically-sound, self-supporting, automated micro-industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream; vaporware if you will. In the 21st century, as the Earth's ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood and countless species of plants and animals go extinct forever, his vision of distributing industrial technology equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren't something to base a political movement for lasting social change on. Not on a planet being rapidly exterminated by industry.

Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more sensible ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in Western Asia, which has had mixed results in achieving his vision.

Reading

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm by Murray Bookchin

Withered Anarchism: A Surrebuttal to Murray Bookchin by Bob Black

Post Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin


Source code

Communalism brings production and property under the control of municipal assemblies, who decide how property should be distributed.

>[Libertarian municipalism's goal is to] create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.

While not being a state by the most common definition (since it's localized), municipal assemblies are certainly a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, but it's not anarchy. 

Localized hierarchies are still hierarchies and communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-by-the-majority); which should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy as this hierarchy can easily be exploited by authoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to self-determination. Any society that allows the majority to force their will on a minority can't honestly be described as anarchist in nature.

Furthermore, organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in 20th century society is restrictive and shortsighted.

Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology. 

For instance: Marxism requires that a highly advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism was implemented lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including mass-displacement of people); eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold they simply didn't fit.

The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma; however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies popping up. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.

The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, once identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between what he termed 'lifestylist' anarchists and socialists, denouncing 'lifestylists' as being beneath him. This elitist divide he created continues to reverberate today, with some social anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchism into two opposing factions and led to needless infighting and distraction.

## A Green Anarchist Perspective ##

Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin's ideas because of his concept of 'post-scarcity'; which to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we're in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don't cease to be scarce when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction; including by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there's no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a 'post-scarcity' economy is intrinsically flawed. 

Bookchin saw technology as a revolutionary tool, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical. 

One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially 'rule by machine'. Tasks are assigned, decisions made and resources distributed by computers; largely diminishing an individual's self-determination and leaving it up to software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could potentially be hijacked by malicious actors who could seize control of the system and give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also exposed to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software.

Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies:

>Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man's future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.

Advanced technologies that forever alter the way we live our lives can detach humans from the environment and train us to seek fleeting relief from technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend on to survive. It's easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use technology to escape from reality. At least until the ecosystems are so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives.

A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically advanced people and exploited underclasses whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It's easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies. 

Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new advances, but years after his death, technology has improved greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world's ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.

Bookchin wrote:

>Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist today.

While it is true that 'green' fuels can be less destructive than 'dirty' fuels, they [still remain incredibly destructive](https://truthout.org/articles/china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse/), and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings. 

The machines he speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap labor.

The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people, or that all people in the world would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies is naive at best, or a malicious falsehood at worst. Bookchin's insistence that technology is only destructive because of capitalism, and would instead be liberating under socialism has no basis in reality, as the technologies he talks of remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place.

Bookchin:

>The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry "Black is beautiful" or "Make love, not war" marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.

Bookchin's plans for localized, ecologically-sound, self-supporting, automated micro-industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream; vaporware if you will. In the 21st century, as the Earth's ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood and countless species of plants and animals go extinct forever, his vision of distributing industrial technology equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren't something to base a political movement for lasting social change on. Not on a planet being rapidly exterminated by industry. 

Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more sensible ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in Western Asia, which has had mixed results in achieving his vision. 

**Reading**

[Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm ](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-anarchism-or-lifestyle-anarchism-an-unbridgeable-chasm) by Murray Bookchin

[Withered Anarchism: A Surrebuttal to Murray Bookchin](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-withered-anarchism) by Bob Black

[Post Scarcity Anarchism](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism) by Murray Bookchin