10 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. Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism might be more than a reformist affliction. Under conditions were survival itself is at stake I question the value of the distinction of reformism and revolution and fall back on the old Epictetan formula that we have to increase our capacity to act. In one setting the squatters and the drop-outs might well be on point, whereas in another it’ll be something like the reinvigorated municipalism of the Spainish context. Interestingly the Spainish situation is one where these two elements are interacting, where a large unemployed compulsory drop-out sector has taken on housing struggles and led to the emergence of a municipal agenda. The limits to this are that it isn’t readily deployable outside of settings where municipal politics means very much and that it’s pretty limited in terms of what it can achieve at questions of scale, especially considering the challenges of the next decades will place pressure on global infrastructures that support local ones.

    In my experience the Bookchinian critique can be mapped onto organized anarchism and the “neo-anarchist” liberal Social Justice Warriors of movements like Occupy. They come with the right intentions but they fail to achieve anything much under the tyranny of structurelessness and an obsessive fixation on inclusiveness. That said, I’d bet 9 out of 10 people would agree with Bob Black in Post-Left Anarchism about the anarcho life of attending meetings for every decision would be dystopian. I certainly don’t want to attend meetings about road resurfacing works on the free way, or the schedules for replacing composting bins and maintenance of their supply lines to power production facilities.

    In fact the whole Idea of anarchism- and recall I am still a (disappearing) member of a class struggle anarchist organization- might be a weird lifestylism as such. This might sound bizarre, especially given the above, but in relation to the usage of Epictetus (“some things are within the scope of our political capacity, some things are not; the whole of strategy is to expand what falls under our agency”) anarchism might seem like a rejection of a whole lot of potential means for maximizing our abilities.

    We also have to re-orient ourselves to what we’re really after: vague ideas of revolution and post-capitalism as strategic horizons notwithstanding, our real mission has always been to organize society in such a way that suffering, misery and injustice are minimized. The practical limit of negative ulititarianism is that people do not by and large claim to want to become extinct- although a global behavioural analysis of species activity might suggest otherwise- means that it must limit itself to other means of combating evil. If we want to minimize harm to existing bodies then we’re talking about taking steps here and now to offset or alleviate problems that will emerge as consequences of climate change. I’m not sure either a Bookchinian or a post-left anarchism would be capable of producing institutional forms (anathema to many of the post-left/insurrectionists) capable of implementing social policies that could effect that. Really we require large scale bodies- larger than municipal governments- that could actively intervene at these levels. It requires transnational cooperation. And it requires it on a time scale no anarchist revolutionary movement could possibly hope to develop in.

    I would assume that the most obvious objections to the outcomes here are that it would pave the way for a techno-Leninism- a friend’s term for accelerationism- or that I’m really falling into a kind of left-pragmatism that will lead to opportunism. Actually for me all of this stems from a perspective rooted in nursing. When a body is in distress we do all we can to return it to health and/or to reduce the harm that it is experiencing. These terms might be those I’d use in favour of reform and revolution, where the former becomes harm reduction and the latter becomes health.

    Of course, a further objection is that there will be unforeseen negative effects from following a path that sacrifices the pre-figurative praxis of anarchism and naively believes it can capture institutional capacities in a way that doesn’t repeat historical agonies. I’d lean back on Schopenhauer’s observation that everything we do to reduce suffering leads to new and unexpected forms of suffering. These effects, that psychotherapist Colin Feltham calls “anthropathological loops”, are unavoidable. Indeed, even a harm-minimization approach to care (say, prescribing methadone, or providing self-harmers with razor blades) doesn’t believe in harm elimination. This is essentially what is often being asked for- instead of risk management (and positive-risk taking) the patients and psychiatrists of the deterritorialized asylum we’re living in believe we can eliminate risk.

    With all this in mind we can safely say that neither the 68ers or the Autonomen were right. Aaron Bastani talks about “opportunity structure”- ie. political affordances opened up at one scale by action carried out at another (ie: a dynamism between street and institutional/electoral politics) that accords to my Epictetan position. The accelerationists talk about an “ecology of organizations” and this must also mean an ecology of actions. On the other side we have the Disaster Communists talking about post-catastrophic social organization- thereby accepting that the worst has already happened. The worst has already happened, and it can only get worse still, but the material impact is delayed: we’re like a terminally ill patient who hasn’t yet perished. In this context anarchism might be like using homeopathy to cure an advancing tumour. We won’t breach our values, but we’ll die in agony: beautiful souls with contorted faces.

    • Contrary to the tone of my initial post, I do agree with you, Arran, on the majority of your points. I have a feeling that we have a pretty similar political trajectory (in terms of transition perhaps more than perspective). I find myself at a rather schizoid crossroads: I participate in some local anarchist circles (encompassing both ends of Bookchin’s perceived spectrum), while also being a member of a rather doctrinaire Marxist group, and then I find myself defending liberalism to my conservative and libertarian friends. Rather than be plagued by the contradictions or attempting to say “I am this, I am not that”, it becomes a matter of learning the importance of various approaches. From anarchism we gain critical insight to the necessity of intransigence, and the way this ‘being-against’ informs DIY practices as well a different modes of life; from the Marxists we learn the skills of political economy and critical edges; from liberalism (in its successes as well as its blatant limitation) we think at the level of scale and immediacy that others cannot (yet) think at, other than at the theoretical level or micropolitical practice. But then again, at the same time, I am an Autonomist at heart, for whom the conditions of the present is a brutalizing trauma that leads to the embrace things that I don’t want to embrace. I don’t want to speak of reform, but it must be said. I want to talk of revolution, but must acknowledge its impossibility at this turn.

      Anyway, regarding both Bastani’s opportunity structure – “political affordances opened up at one scale by action carried out at another (ie: a dynamism between street and institutional/electoral politics” – this what I was kind of describing in regards, on a smaller scale, to the relationship between the black blocs and more ‘acceptable’ (in traditional social terms) contingencies of protests. It’s a not the best example; a better one can be found in the Autonomen and the Greens, who despite their denouncings of one another, were able to afford the other with opportunities that may not have existed without one or the other’s existence or actions. The synergy between the squatters and drop outs and the Spanish municipalism is another one, describing perfectly the failure of Bookchin’s divisions of anarchists. We see the same in the US, albeit on more dispersed and localized level – it always seems to be the one’s who could clarified as “lifestyle anarchists” who understand the needs to build entrenched, egalitarian social structures and actively take part in it. Ironically, I experienced this very much first hand at OWS. I spent some time in the “headquarters” of the movement, which was full of white, middle class, college-educated liberal ‘radicals’. They viewed themselves as akin to the “immaterial laborers” described by the post-Autonomists: most of the work involved computers or interacting with the media; they took care of food and housing (after the eviction), and the like. Meanwhile, I saw a whole other side, driven primarily by people of color, the displaced and the marginalized, and the drop-outs and punks, who went out in the communities devastated by finance capitalism and started working right away, in the context of the ruins themselves. Not plugged into the cybernetic circuitry of the media machine, and because their works were ‘less interesting’ to those engorged on the spectacle, this incredible thing passes unacknowledged in popular memory of the event. Of course, both sides of this coin were necessary, but the structural disjunction between the two, combined with the media and police action, were able to dismantle all these things with ease.

      I’m firmly convinced that any politics in the Anthropocene, regardless of its scale, requires us to think through (both critically and practically) design practices, or more specifically between design practices (i.e., the borderlands where things begin to mesh together and produce hybrid forms). Aside from small, localized prototypes carried out in anarchic communities, a lot of this design work takes place, on one hand, with certain artistic tendencies, and on the other within hacklabs and hackerspaces. I mention this in the context of the ecology of action you mention, because many of these design projects exist in a line of flight (for example, the roots of the hacklabs and hackerspaces in the anarchist social center and squatters movement, as well as the incredible influence of tactical media strategies on cutting edge design-art, which has it own origins in the Autonomists) while also providing the spaces of codification necessary for capitalist reproduction (the way that artistic prototypes, instead of practical application, find their realization on the art market, or the way that hackerspaces act as petri dishes for the tech industry). We have to keep in the mind the environment that fosters divergent and necessary actions, while also being fully aware that those environments can and most likely produce things that will be applied antithetical to their original goals. Today’s disaster communism could part and parcel of tomorrow’s capitalist fix-it. Kind of a fatalistic thought, but what thoughts are we capable of that aren’t fatalistic?

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  7. 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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