The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship
By Murray Bookchin
Sierra Club Books, San Francisco 1987
Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a vaguely anarchist author and activist in the environmental movement in the United States. I say vaguely anarchist because after reading this book I have realized that Bookchin was largely incapable of maintaining a coherent argument throughout this book – which may enlighten one as to the nature of other contradictions in Bookchin’s work throughout his life – but I wouldn’t bet too much on that.
The first argument that Bookchin puts forth is that urbanization and the rise of cities are two very different phenomenon. To Bookchin, cities are nice, clean, idealized community with a solid social and economic basis for a happy and moral lifestyle. Urbanization is some terrible process these cities are subjected to as a result of capitalism.
Bookchin begins by claiming that the first sedentary human settlements were not the result of economic or ecological factors, but was instead a sort of intentional community. He uses Catal Huyuk, an early Neolithic settlement in Anatolia, as his example. Bookchin claims that Catal Huyuk’s economy was probably “an ecologically oriented community of late Paleolithic hunters and gatherers rather than an early Neolithic community of food cultivators.” Bookchin bases this assumption on the fact that no pottery, “one of the principal hallmarks of Neolithic culture that, together with plow agriculture and domesticated animals, would normally be associated with a compact city of thousands.” I know very little about Catal Huyuk other than very brief overviews in archaeology classes, but I know far more generally about archaeology and anthropology than Bookchin. For Bookchin to expect one of the earliest sedentary human settlements to employ plow agriculture shows a high degree of ignorance. The settlement was very probably sustained by horticulture, hunting, gathering, and trade. Also Bookchin’s statement that it was an “ecologically oriented community” is very confusing. What community is not oriented toward the ecology of the environment around it? But this is not explored because Bookchin favors an explanation that Catal Huyuk was a community with an “intensely religious life that is equally suggestive of an intensely active civic life.”
This is just projecting ideas of modernity onto the past – which is something Bookchin excels at. For Bookchin, citizenship is the hallmark of all things good of civilization. This is a citizenship in a polis. The polis is the idealized direct democracy of ancient Athens. Citizenship in the polis “exorcises the blood oath (of tribal society) from the family with its parochial myths and its chauvinistic exclusivity, while retaining or reworking its concept of socialization.” I agree that this generally is a good thing, but the city and state (be it city-state or nation-state) really only offers nationalism as an alternative identity and is not yet an internationalist solidarity, which I think should be the object of contemporary social activism.
Bookchin spends most of the book explaining fragmented histories of the development of cities: Catal Huyuk, Athens, Italian city-states, French communes. Bookchin also repeats his differences with Marx and Marxism over and over. Some of these are solid criticisms: “what is most disquieting about Marx’s vision of social change is the extent to which it denies the power of speculative thought to envision a new society long before the old one becomes intolerable…” I absolutely agree. But Bookchin criticizes Marx for “dictat[ing] the material or productive limits of their vision, ‘preconditions,’ its possibilities, and its place in a theory of history structured around various ‘stages’ and ‘presuppositions.’” This may very well be the case with Marx, but Bookchin seems to me to be doing the very same thing with his arbitrary distinction between municipal citizenship against tribalism and cities against urbanization. Furthermore, when Bookchin rejects Marx, he rejects class and offers no alternative explanation of class. In fact, throughout he makes reference to the various middle classes as being the ideal class safeguarding and participating in his direct democracies of the city he is so proud of: “Without the leadership provided by artisans, small proprietors, occasionally professionals, and even members of the nobility it is unlikely that [democratic] uprisings would have gone very far.” Yet latter Bookchin rejects the worker self-management programs of other anarchists as provoking professional snobbishness. I would argue that professors, doctors, lawyers, basically any “workers” with less alienated labor of today are the most jealous in the guarding in their power that is not granted so much by class as by their power over professional knowledge – something I have a hard time believing didn’t equally afflict the “middle” classes of ancient times as well.
Bookchin is right in rejecting the dogmatism of the Marxist slogan that the historic role of the working class is to overthrow capitalism; but rejecting class outright does him no good in being a relevant challenger of capitalist urbanization.
The revolutionary agent for Bookchin is the neighborhood. “In retrospect, what makes the popolo’s ways of organizing so revolutionary was its highly localist and organic fashion of acting politically, a form of organizing that is utterly antithetical to modern concepts of party politics.” Bookchin claims that cities were the primary site of resistance to the formation of nation-states. Despite his outlining of peasant uprisings and diverse conflicting class interests within cities Bookchin maintains that cities as autonomous entities were the antithesis of the absolutist monarchies of the first nation-states. I wonder then why royalist and statist regimes have always based themselves within cities, um, uh, like capital cities? It is Bookchin’s insistence on his libertarian municipalism strategy that leads him to these counterintuitive conclusions.For Bookchin it is not common access to resources that allows for a higher degree of political freedom, rather “Municipal freedom, in short, is the basis for political freedom…For centuries, the city was the public sphere for politics and citizenship, and in many areas the principal source of resistance to the encroachment of the nation-state.”
I think what Bookchin is getting at is that human agency is just as important as productive factors and that social relations are real relationships between real people and any theory of social change needs to understand this. I find this to be the strength of all of Bookchin’s work. Yet it is hard to forgive the inconsistency of vocabulary, arbitrariness of definition, and tenuous grasp of anthropology and history. What Bookchin very unfortunately does not address is gentrification, urban pollution (very strange considering his credentials as an environmentalist), and the current lack of public space (due to neoliberalism in many instances) in urban and suburban areas. These issues would all be critical to a complete critique of modern urbanization.
In looking for systematic thought, Bookchin isn’t the place to start, but then again few anarchists ever are great at consistent thought, so perhaps it should be forgiven. What is likable about this book and Bookchin’s writing in general is to be found in the frequent rants against the status quo.
I’ll end with some of my favorites:
On politics vs. statecraft:
Politics is not statecraft, which alas, is what we ordinarily mean when we speak of “politics” today. And citizens are not “constituents” or “voters.” Statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of its monopoly of violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus of society in the form of legal and ordinance-making bodies, its governance of society by means of professional legislators, armies, police forces, bureaucracies, and the ancillary professionals who service its operations such as lawyers, educators, technicians, and the like.
On political parties:
A political “party” is normally a highly structured hierarchy, fleshed out by a membership that functions in a top-down manner. It is a miniature state, and in some countries, notably modern Russia, actually constitutes the state itself. The Soviet example of the state qua party is simply the logical extension of the party into the state if only because every party has its roots in the state, not in the citizenry. The conventional party is hitched to the state like a garment on a clothing hook. However varied the garment and its design may be, it is not part of the body politic; it merely clothes it. There is nothing authentically political about this phenomenon: it is meant precisely to contain the body politic, to control it and to manipulate it, not to express its will – or even permit it to develop a will… “political” parties are replications of the state when they are out of power and often synonymous with the state when they are in power. They are formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus they are as inorganic as the state itself – an excrescence of society that has no real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of faction, power, and mobilization.
On mass society:
Social justice, idealism, and agrarian values of community gave way to privatization, self-indulgence, and suburban cookouts. [Culture} was a sanitized and socially vacuous world.. an “above ground” culture engineered by government and corporations. A mass society, notable for its despiritualized and amoral version of “possessive individualism” had emerged from the debris of the thirties, a mass society structured around television networks, counseling offices, bureaucratic agencies, and, above all, commodities.
Three out of five syndicalist stars.
