Murray Bookchin - 1969 - A Letter To The Left

ANARCHY AND ORGANIZATION
A Letter To The Left

Reprinted from
NEW LEFT NOTES
January 15, 1969
by permission of the author
There is a hoary myth that anarchists do not believe in organization to promote revolutionary
activity. This myth was raised from its resting place by Marcuse in a L'Express interview some
months ago and reiterated again by Huey Newton in his "In Defence of Self-Defence," which New
Left Notes decided to reprint in the recent National Convention issue.
To argue the question of "organization" versus "non-organization" is ridiculous; this issue has never
been in dispute among serious anarchists, except perhaps for those lonely "individualists" whose
ideology is rooted more in an extreme variant of classical liberalism than anarchy. Yes, anarchists
believe in organization - in national organization and international organization. Anarchist
organization have ranged from loose, highly decentralized groups to "vanguard" movements of
many thousands, like the Spanish FAI, which functioned in a highly concerted fashion.
The real question at issue is not organization versus non-organization, but rather, what kind of
organization. What different kinds of anarchist organizations have in common is that they are
developed organically from below, not engineered into existence from above. They are social
movements, combining a creative revolutionary life-style with a creative revolutionary theory, not
political parties, whose node of life is indistinguishable from the surrounding rounding bourgeois
environment and whose ideology is reduced to rigid "tried-and-tested programs." They try to reflect
as much as is humanly possible the liberated society they seek to achieve, not slavishly duplicate
the prevailing system of hierarchy, class, and authority. They are built around intimate groups of
brothers and sisters, whose ability to act in common is based on initiative, convictions freely arrived
at, and deep personal involvement, not a bureaucratic apparatus, fleshed out by docile memberships
and manipulated from the top by a handful of all-knowing "leaders."
I don't know who Huey is arguing with when he speaks of "anarchists" who believe all they have to
do is "just express themselves individually" in order to achieve freedom. Tim Leary? Allen
Ginzberg? The Beatles? Certainly not the revolutionary anarchist communists I know -- and I know
a large and fairly representative number. Nor is it clear to me where Huey acquired his facts on the
May-June revolt in France. The "Communist party and the other progressive parties" of the French
"Left" hadn't merely "lagged behind the people," as Huey seems to believe; these "disciplined" and
"centralized" organizations tried in every way to obstruct the revolution and re-direct it back into
traditional parliamentary channels. Even the "disciplined," "centralized" Trotskyist FER and the
Maoist groups opposed the revolutionary students as "ultra-leftists," "adventurists," and "romantics"
right up to the first street fighting in May. Characteristically, most of the "disciplined," "centralized"
organizations of the French "Left" either lagged outrageously behind the events of, in the case of
the "Communist Party and progressive parties," shamelessly betrayed the students and workers to
the system.
I find it curious that while Huey accuses the French Stalinist hacks of merely having "lagged behind
the people" he holds the anarchists and Danny Cohn-Bendit responsible for the people being
"forced to turn back to DeGaulle." I visited France shortly after the May-June revolt and I can
substantiate with out the least difficulty how resolutely Danny Cohn Bendit, the March 22nd
Movement, and the anarchists tried to develop the assembly forms and action committees into a
"structural program" (indeed, it went far beyond mere "program") to replace the DeGaulle
government. I could show quite clearly how they tried to get the workers to retain their hold on the
factories and establish direct economic contacts with the peasants: in short, how they tried to
replace the French political and economic structure by creative, viable revolutionary forms. In this,
they met with continual obstruction from the "disciplined" "centralized" parties of the French "Left"
including a number of Trotskyist and Maoist sects.
There is another myth that needs to be exploded -- the myth that social revolutions are made by
tightly disciplined cadres, guided by a highly centralized leadership. All the great social revolutions
are the work of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions to which the revolutionary and his
organization contributes very little and, in most cases, completely misjudges, The revolutions
themselves break out spontaneously. The "glorious party" usually lags behind these events -- and, if
the uprising is successful, steps in to commandeer, manipulate, and almost invariably distort it. It is
then that the revolution reaches its real period of crises: will the "glorious party" re-create another
system of hierarchy, commination and power in its sacred mission to "protect the revolution," or
will it be dissolved into the revolution together with the dissolution of hierarchy, domination and
power as such? If a revolutionary organization is not structured to dissolve into the popular forms
created by the revolution once its function as a catalyst is completed; it its own forms are not similar
to the libertarian society it seeks to create, so that it can disappear into the revolutionary forms of
the future -- then the organization becomes a vehicle for carrying the forms of the past into the
revolution. It becomes a self perpetuating organism, a state machine that, far from "withering
away", perpetuates all the archaic conditions for its own existence.
There is far more myth than reality to the claim that a tightly "centralized" and "disciplined" party
promotes the success of a revolution. The Bolsheviks were split, divided, and riddled by factional
strife from October, 1917 to March, 1921. Ironically, it was only after the last White armies had
been expelled from Russia that Lenin managed to completely centralize and discipline his party. Far
more real have been the endless betrayals engineered by the hierarchical, "disciplined," highly
"centralized" parties of the "Left," such as the Social Democratic and Communist.
They followed almost inexorably from the fact that every organization (however revolutionary its
rhetoric and however well-intentioned its goals) which models itself structurally on the very system
it seeks to overthrow becomes assimilated and subverted by bourgeois relations. It's seeming
effectiveness becomes the source of its greatest failures.
Undeniably problems arise which can be solved only by committees, by co-ordination, and by a
high measure of self-discipline. To the anarchist, committees must be limited to the practical tasks
that necessitate their existence, and they must disappear once their functions are completed. Co-
ordination and self-discipline must be achieved voluntarily, by virtue of the high moral and
intellectual caliber of the revolutionary. To seek less that this is to accept, as a "revolutionary," a
mindless robot, a creature of authoritarian training, a manipulable agent whose personality and
outlook are utterly alien, indeed antithetical, to any society that could be remotely regarded as free.
No serious anarchist will disagree with Huey's plea on the "necessity for wiping out the imperialist
structure by organized groups." If at all possible we must work together. We must recognize too,
that in the United States, the heartland of world lmperialism today, an economy and technology has
been developed which could remove, almost overnight, all the problems that Marx once believed
justified the need for a state. It would be a disastrous error to deal with an economy of potential
abundance and cybernated production from a theoretical position which was still rooted in a
technological era based on coal, crude machines, long hours of toil, and material scarcity. It is time
we stop trying to learn from Mao's China and Castro's Cuba -- and see the remarkable economic
reality under our very eyes for all men to enjoy once the American bourgeois colossus can be
tumbled and its resources brought to the service of humanity.
Murray Bookchin
Anarchos magazine

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ANARCHY AND ORGANIZATION

A Letter To The Left

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