Social individualism or Nihilist Orgies?

Friday, April 30, 2010

I recently read "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgable Chasm" by Murray Bookchin. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the position carved out in it. On one hand, Bookchin critisizes nihilistic and irrationalist elements that have popped up in contemporary anarchist thought that I think are definitely problematic. On the other hand, he seems to want to paint the entirety of individualist anarchism with this brush, even going so far as to attack Proudhon, while digging in to a sectarian position in favor of syndicalism and communism. He mocks the idea of personal autonomy as the subjective lashing out of blind rebellion, contrasting it with "social freedom".

To be sure, part of what Bookchin attacks is the sort of raw atomistic and nihilistic sense of individualism associated with Max Stirner, which is all about the individual ego in an asocial and amoral sense. I do think that this is not a particularly sensible view, especially if one wants to favor interpersonal goals and advance a workable strategy that requires people to meaningfully cooperate. But it seems as if Bookchin makes a non-sequitor and an overgeneralization by condemning individualist anarchism as such. He lambasts individualism in the most perjorative sense of the term without taking the social and moral elements that are at play at least within elements of individualist anarchism.

In essence, I think that Bookchin presents us with a false choice between being atomists and absolute communalists. The "unbridgable chasm" that he talks about, if anything, is precisely what most anarchists have attempted to do from the beginning, I.E. there is a conceptual balance between individualism and sociality or an attempt to make some sort of synthesis between personal freedom and society. I basically see no reason why one could not be a "social individualist" or an "individualist socialist". It also seems as if, in his zeal to oppose short-sighted whimsicality, Bookchin overlooks the particular dangers of the subordination of people to community pressures that is part of what may cause people to be attracted to individualism in the first place.

Part of what Bookchin is reacting against is the influence of existentialist and postmodern thought on contemporary anarchism. I can sympathize with this concern to a certain extent, insofar as it may function to negate any sense of unity or genuine solidary that goes along with social revolution, while celebrating contradiction or ambiguity in a way that at least appears to erode rational underpinnings of libertarian ideas. On the other hand, Bookchin may have been acting naively about the problems with enlightenment universalism. He seems to take some sort of rationalism for granted, without much of an explaination for it. While talking about philosophical positions, he mostly appears to be engaging in heated polemics.

Another target of Bookchin's criticism, which he associates with individualism, are the primitivists and the anti-civilization crowd. I must admit that I cannot particularly think of anything to say in defense of these ideas, since I essentially find them to be ridiculous. There is one perjorative sense of individualism that does accurately describe such views, which is the notion of pure individual (or extremely small-scale) "self-sufficiency" taken to the point of opposing any meaningful social structure that we could comprehend in a modern context. But it hardly seems as if primitivists particularly pose a significant threat to anyone. They are minority within a minority within a minority. Their voice within the anarchist movement is rather marginal.

It seems as if part of what Bookchin means by "lifestyle anarchism" is the fragmented proliferation of a multitude of personal causes, a cambrian explosition of identity politics inside of anarchism. This bothers him in that it rubs up against his notion of a large-scale cohesive or participatory movement that is unified towards certain universal goals. I suppose Bookchin's concern is understandable at a certain level, in terms of maintaining at least some ground norms that unify anarchism and provide a framework for something strategically significant. On the other hand, if this is taken too far it could be seen as the total elimination of pluralism or an overly narrow view that opposes the particular ways in which people want to express their freedom.

Ultimately, while I sympathize with some of the concerns that Bookchin brings up, it seems like he was being too much of a partisan in "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism". I feel like he frames the question in a way that is designed to force us to choose between blind individual self-expression and lockstep dedication to a particular universalist creed, with him trying to persuade us to "get with the program" through his polemics against certain groups. Still, some of the issues that he touches on resonate with me in terms of the problems that I see with too nihilistic of a philosophy being embraced by anarchists. The problem is that he doesn't do the best job of showing why this is a problem, and I don't fully buy into the alternative that he presents.

Posted by Brainpolice at 7:46 PM

Labels: Anarchism, Anarcho-collectivism, Egoism, Ideology, Individualism, Individualist Anarchism, Libertarianism, Max Stirner, Murray Bookchin,Nihilism, Post-left Anarchism, Postmodernism, Primitivism