9 responses to “social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: an unbridgeable chasm”

  1. As great and on point as Bookchin can be, this is not one his finer moments. True, primitivism did need a sweeping rebuttal, but like all occasions of Luddism, it fell victim to it inability to articulate any clear praxis for the present. Yet Bookchin’s critique here goes prey to straw-man arguments far too often. “… many lifestyle anarchists articulate Michel
    Foucault’s approach of ‘personal insurrection’ rather than social revolution… “…Lifestyle, like individualist, anarchism bears a disdain for theory…” “Their ideological pedigree is basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are validated by axiomatic ‘natural rights’.” One begins to wonder if Bookchin ever met a ‘lifestyle anarchist’, or even better, what exactly a “lifestyle anarchist” really is? Or a “social anarchism”, for that matter? How do we divide the two? Is it the concept of revolution that doles out these signifiers?

    Rereading this text now, I’m reminded of the recounts of Germany in the 1980s, when the Green Party – chock full of veterans of ’68 – chastised the Autonomen, with their squats and social centers and confrontations with authority and punk rock and unruly dress. “We carried out real politics”, the 68ers said, “a respectable insurrection that your’s clearly is not.” It seems to me that this is entirely analogous to Bookchin’s polemic against the ‘lifestylists’ – given that he lectures at length on ‘autonomy’, and that the Autonomia rejected the revolutionary horizon for an immediate insurrection in everyday life tells me that the two are actually one and the same. But I don’t want to carry on his division. Anyone who’s been involved in large-scale, direct action will have seen the way that the black blocs, the Autonomia’s children, find an odd unity and tactical congruence with the so-called ‘more respectable’ sections of the action.

    Bookchin is right that Hakim Bey and the T.A..Z. are a tad bit silly in retrospect, but I wonder if I’m not alone in gaining little bits of lost hope whenever I crack open those browned, dog-eared pages. Not that that really counts for much, but how many people found their introduction into leftist politics, philosophy, whatever, through those types of delirious writings. It was Bey and Crimethinc that showed me something political, at a time when my youthful concerns were smoking copious amounts of pot, drinking wine, and making guitar feedback (things I wish I could do again, if I only had the time) – and I’ve met many people who followed the same path, regardless of how unnecessarily bombastic these writings are. It doesn’t always lead to fuzzy sloganeering of well-meaning liberals, as Bookchin says: “-the revolutionary and social goals of anarchism are suffering far-reaching erosion to a point where the word anarchy will become part of the chic bourgeois vocabulary of the coming century – naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe.” Is that not always the case with radicalism? Corporate culture feeds on insurrection to keep itself cool. But what they can gain in spectacle cannot be matched in action…

    One last point: Bookchin is at his strongest with his discourses on libertarian technics and the harmonization of technological, post-scarcity, and ecology. His models provide a useful counterpoint to accelerationist prometheanism, in that he understands the role of technology while eschewing these top-down modernist solutions and subbing them with a a green anarchism (even if it did end up being a rather reformist ‘libertarian municipalism’); for Bookchin, libertarian technics emerge from democratic processes. I would like to probe the relationship between ‘democratic processes’, as instruments of civil society, and cultural characteristics that lend flavor to civil society, particularly where technics and everyday life is concerned. We don’t have time to wait for revolution to give us libertarian technics; like the Autonomia recognized, acting now makes “revolution” something palpable while also addressing immediate problems. In this sense,it needs to be pointed out that so often (in my own experience) it is the vagabonds, the squatters and commune dwellers, the crusties and drop-outs – all people who Bookchin would label as ‘lifestylists’ – who seem to understand this the most, and are actively salvaging and repurposing all kinds of technics, infrastructures, etc, to find other ways of living and being together. Are these laboratories of everyday life not prototypes of worlds that we’re all looking for?

  2. I totally agree, edmundberger. This book appeared just as I was first getting radicalized, and I found myself at odds with a writer I really admired for much the same reasons you describe. That tension basically defined my development as an anarchist, as a thinker, as a would-be revolutionary. The way the world and our political discourses have changed in the past twenty years seems to me just to highlight the weaknesses of Bookchin’s positions here, as well as his strengths elsewhere. I’d like to recommend a related text, basically a response to SALA I guess — David Watson’s Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology (Amazon has some reviews, can’t find an online copy). I can’t say it resolved these tensions for me or tied it all together or anything, but it gave me a whole new set of lenses for looking at questions of technology, power, culture, resistance, what we nowadays call “ontology,” etc. Highly recommended.

  3. Arran, have you got a link for that Bastani on “opportunity structures”? I’m only familiar with the term from the sociology of social movements, where its meaning is fairly specific (although not actually all that well-defined), i.e. David Meyers [PDF]. I’m curious how it might work in a more radical setting, vis-a-vis “ecology of actions” and etc.

  6. thanks eb, as usual no hurry or necessity to these things, just as you know a fan of collage/bricolage along these lines.

    “Those masterful images because complete
    Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
    A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
    Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
    Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
    Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
    I must lie down where all the ladders start
    In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

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