Mumford Gutkind Bookchin:
The Emergence of Eco-decentralism
by
Janet Biehl http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/books/
 |
| http://www.biehlonbookchin.com |
In
the 1950s the aging Rose Bookchin still lived in the old apartment in East
Tremont, the Bronx neighborhood where she and her family had lived since 1920
and where her son Murray had grown up. Rose had been a diabetic for two decades
and was nearly blind. She was incapable of giving herself daily insulin
injections, so every day Murray took the Third Avenue El to East Tremont to
administer them.
He
would step onto the platform, and if he looked to the south, he could see over
the tops of the buildings the trees of Crotona Park. Then down the stairs and
onto the sidewalk, and he stroke briskly past his old street-side haunts: the
kosher butcher, the deli with pickles and whitefish and knishes, the old candy
store, the dairy with its slabs of butter — the old familiar shops were still
there. Most of the kids he’d known in YCL had moved away too, but their parents
still lived here — the buildings were rent controlled, after all, and it suited
them fine. The vacancy rate in East Tremont was less than one percent. Snatches
of Yiddish in the streets came to his ears, as in the old days, a comforting
sound as always. One difference: the farmers from New Jersey who’d brought
their produce over the bridge into the Bronx — they didn’t come here anymore.
Their farmlands were paved over. No one was farming there or in Yonkers now.
It
was early December 1952, and he headed to the four - story brick building on
175th Street, where he’d lived too back in the 1940s, before he got married.
When he got to the apartment, his mother seemed upset. Earlier that week, she
told him, one of her elderly neighbors, in a building nearby, had gone
downstairs to get her mail and found a terrifying letter, on official New York
City letterhead: one of the city authorities, it said, was planning to build a
highway through East Tremont. The Cross Bronx Expressway. It was to have six
lanes. The neighbor’s apartment building was in the way, said the letter. The
city was going to condemn it and tear it down. The neighbor had ninety days to
leave. Signed Robert Moses[1].
And
she wasn’t the only one, Rose told Murray — others have been getting the letter
too, Would she be next? Robert Moses was the city’s unelected power broker, a
veritable dictator of public works. For about fifteen years now, he had ripped
up working - class neighborhoods to build highways, tunnels, and bridges — and
now he had East Tremont in his cross-hairs, where the elderly residents could
not put up a fight.
Thankfully
Rose’s own building was never threatened. But in the next years thousands of
her neighbors lost their homes, irreplaceable to them. And every time Murray
visited his mother, he could look eastward and see it coming closer, now a few
blocks away, now a block: earth-moving machines and bulldozers.
But first
came the blasting. East Tremont stood on solid rock hills, the same rolling
topography that made Crotona Park so lovely; but a road has to be level, so now
the construction crews were using dynamite to blow up the rock. The blasts
shook the buildings. “Mortar and brick were jarred loose from one end of the
neighborhood to the other,” wrote Moses’s biographer, Robert Caro. “As
apartment houses settled or were pushed up as the earth beneath them heaved,
huge gaping fissures began to appear in their walls and ceilings.” Then huge
wrecking balls smashed into the walls, sending them crashing down into heaps of
rubble.
Although
Rose couldn’t see what was happening, she could hear the staccato jackhammers
and the exploding dynamite. Over the ruins mammoth cranes lumbered, and then
the bulldozers and trucks and earth -movers. Rock dust and grit from the
blasting hung in the air and got in your pores; the windows couldn’t keep it
out. “East Tremonters called it ‘fallout,’” says Caro. More neighbors fled. In
the buildings they left behind, windows were boarded up, vandals grabbed
whatever wasn’t nailed down and much that was, smashed mirrors and scattered
shards of broken glass on the wooden floors. Then came rats and urine and
vomit—and the wrecking ball[2].
#
“Urban Renewal”
Welcome
to the modern city. In 1945-46, once their soldiers returned home from Europe
and the Pacific, Americans had turned their attention to domestic matters, and
urban planners had turned theirs to the major cities. Mostly they found them to
be crowded, unhealthy places, congested with tenements. That wasn’t suited to
the American Century, the planners thought; modern times demanded modern
cities. They were beguiled by the ideas of Le Corbusier, a Swiss architect of
the International style, who made stripped-down buildings of glass and steel
and concrete, and streamlined plazas. An archetypal example is the UN building,
which Bookchin called a “faceless matchbox on its edge.”[3] They were modern
buildings for a modern America.
In
1949 Congress passed the Housing Act, which began a notorious “urban renewal”
effort. The basic idea was to get rid of the old neighborhoods, by designating
them blighted slums, then erecting modern buildings in their stead. Never mind
that the old neighborhoods were actually densely settled havens for immigrants
and working-class communities. Under urban renewal, these places were
“renewed” — destroyed — and replaced them with functional, sterile towers. In
the next years, where once-vital neighborhoods had been, monolithic high rises
were built, separated by soulless, wide - open plazas. Working-class people,
their homes gone, their community ties ruptured, were pushed into the towers
and forced to make do.[4]
And
now that people were getting around in automobiles, New York had to be remade
on their behalf of the automobile. Robert Moses saw to it that it was.
#
The Medieval City
Bookchin’s
mentor and friend Josef Weber, a German expatriate who led a political group
that Murray belonged to in the 1950s, never let anyone forget how much he hated
New York. The cockroaches! The noise! Bookchin had always been able to say, But
look at East Tremont, with its neighborhood shops and its beautiful park and
its tight-knit community. That’s part of New York too. And now it had been
sacrificed. He must have been devastated. What was happening to cities anyway?
Contemplating
the problem, he turned to a book by Lewis Mumford, written in 1938, called The
Culture of Cities.[5]
It opened with a lyrical description of the small medieval European city.
Mumford admired its urban form: it was the product of long, slow settlement,
yet it was still small scale, with everything in walking distance. Its streets
were irregular, its houses low-slung, its church spire soared — it was a
delight to the eye. It had a central open space where people could meet,
gossip, trade, pray, and politick — that is, its layout encouraged face-to-face
encounters. Medieval life was communal and associational, its residents sharing
common values that endowed their lives with significance. It was unexpectedly
rural in character: it had lots of open green spaces. A wall constrained further
growth, but just beyond was the open countryside.
Over
the centuries, however, a new kind of city had grown up: the baroque, imperial
city, a city of discipline and power. Instead of low-slung irregularities, this
city’s layout consisted of straight lines and visual axes, rigorous and
geometric, inspired by the great mathematical and mechanical conquests of early
modernity. It expressed the age of exploration and the rise of the
nation-state. The baroque city was a creature of the national state, as strong
kings centralized authority and created bureaucracies and standing armies.
History
pushed “from medieval localism to baroque centralism.”[6] Obsessed with
power and money, the baroque city submerged the small-scale, humane, medieval
city. Thereafter urban history continued to fall, as civilization, corrupted
by capitalism and authority, sank into chaos and moral confusion. Today’s city,
in Mumford’s view, was an extension of the baroque city, the brutalizing
metropolis.
#The
Athenian Polis
All
Bookchin had to do was listen to the jackhammers to recognize the truth of this
account. If the medieval city reminded him of East Tremont, the imperial city
reminded him of Moses’s New York. Mumford’s narrative of decline fascinated him
— why, it almost seemed dialectical, describing a past phenomenon and then the
development of its opposite. On the subject of historical decline, Mumford
invoked the Scottish biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes, who had
outlined a six-stage outline of city development, starting with Polis. The city
of 1938, Mumford thought to his horror, was in the fourth stage, Megalopolis,
and was poised to devolve into Tyrannopolis, then into Nekropolis, the city of
the dead.
Another,
more philosophical influence was Oswald Spengler, whose magnum opus, The
Decline of the West, compared historical processes to a cycle of organic
growth and decay.
A
dialectician like Bookchin could not be satisfied with Mumford’s Spenglerian
framework, so he turned as well to the teachers he most trusted. What had Marx
and Engels thought about cities? He was no longer a Marxist, but they had been
his intellectual masters for two decades. He pored over their writings on
agriculture, on food production, on rural life — and several passages leaped
off the pages. In Capital, Marx had said that “the whole economic history of
society can be summed up” in the development of “the antithesis between town
and country.”[7]
A startling remark, but one Bookchin pondered. And Engels had written that the
town-country antithesis had become “a direct necessity” for industrial and
agricultural production.[8]
It was tied to capitalism.
Inspired
both by Mumford and by Marx and Engels, Bookchin set out develop his own
narrative of urban history, which he called “The Limits of the City.” His
narrative made the town-country dynamic central and described a decline from a
benign past to a miserable. Unlike Mumford, he first showed a time when, in
effect, the countryside had dominated the city: the ancient Aztec civilization
of Tenochtitlan. After all, rural had long proceeded urban. Tenochtitlan had
been merely an extension of the surrounding agricultural society, as were
ancient cities in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Then
after the first millennium BC a new town-country balance — with a new agrarian
system and a new mode of urban life — emerged. “All cities constitute an
antithesis to the land,” he noted dialectically. “They are ... a germ of
negation in the agrarian community.” That is, the change was immanent: “rural
life summons forth the city from its own inner development.” With the cities
of ancient Attica, the urban is no longer a mere supplement to the countryside:
“Urban life now exists as an end in itself” and is balanced with the
countryside.[9]
The
ancient Athenian polis was as central for Bookchin as the medieval city had
been to Mumford, and holds a comparable place in his narrative. Bookchin too
celebrates a moment in the distant past, in which town and country were
integrated. He too lingers over the description. The urban-rural balance, he
wrote, was responsible for the remarkable character of the Athenians, “men of
strong character who ... had firm ties to the soil and were independent in
their economic position. Labor and land, town and country, men and society,
were joined in a common destiny.“ That balance made possible the city’s
astounding political culture, which was of supreme interest to Bookchin: in
Athens, he exulted, “civic activity involves and exceptionally high degree of
public participation. All the policy decisions of the polis are formulated
directly by a popular assembly.”[10]
Certain
aspects of the ancient polis continued into the medieval commune, notably its
spirit of independence, its focus on handcrafts, and its “self-containment.” Bookchin
admired the medieval city too, although less than Mumford, likely because of
its religiously sanctioned hierarchical class structure. But it did exist, as
Mumford had pointed out, in balance with the countryside. People fashioned
objects with their hands and traded them locally for objects that they needed.
The commune, as Bookchin called the medieval city, provided a deep sense of
community, the comfort of sociality and human scale.[11]
If
the villain of Mumford’s piece was the baroque city, the villain of Bookchin’s
was the bourgeois city, the city of capitalist society. That society is out of
balance with nature; the city, far from being an extension of the rural, now
dominates the rural. At the same time the polis’s associational life is gone. “In
bourgeois society the community dissolves into competing monads and is pervaded
by spiritual mediocrity as the material being of man is rendered enslaved,
insecure, and one sided.”[12]
What
caused the change in town-country balance? The driving force was the “commodity
relationship,” a concept derived from Marx.
The
medieval city had not been much concerned with commodities: it had produced
simple goods to meet basic needs, allocating some on the side for trade. The
guilds regulated economic activity. Individuals were concerned not with profit
but with subsistence and pride of workmanship. But the growth of international
trade undermined this situation: the products of workmanship became objects of
exchange. Commodity relations thereafter subverted the fabric of European
feudalism, undermining traditional social relations in town and country alike.
Eventually almost every aspect of the productive process, including labor
power, became a commodity. Trade and capital accumulation became ends in
themselves. “Once the exchange process became widespread enough, it simply
engulfed the older order of relationships,” Bookchin wrote. “Exchange ...
demolished the self-contained domestic economy of the manor. From a marginal
source of goods and services, the market moved to the center of economic life.”[13]
The
bourgeois city was steeped in capitalism — in industry, finance and
manufacturing. Here the commodity “mediates all human relations, ... ‘unites’
society in a cash nexus and minute division of labor.” At the same time it
“separates man from the instruments of production, labor from creativity,
object, from subject, and eventually man from man.”[14] Midtown
Manhattan was the workplace of millions, a staggering workforce in a few square
miles of stone, glass, and concrete. The bourgeois city was a mere workplace,
“its structural form and its social purpose” modeled on the factory. The
factory takes over the city, negating its personal and cultural sides and
transforming it “into a commercial and industrial enterprise.” It exaggerates
the city’s economic functions “to the point of urban pathology.” In the
megalopolis, “it matters little whether the city is ugly, whether it debases
men, whether it is aesthetically, spiritually, or even physically habitable. What
counts is whether economic operations in the city are profitable.”[15]
#
Pathologies of the Metropolis
In
The Culture of Cities Mumford described the pathologies of the megalopolis in
some detail. It has grown fantastically — so
much so that it has become too congested to carry out civic functions. The city
of 1938 had swallowed up nearby towns and spread uncontrollably into the
countryside, replacing fields and forests with buildings and streets, yet it
could not be more cut off from nature. It had a centralized administration,
like the baroque city, but no plan or purpose other than to enhance the profits
of wealth - seeking capitalists. Bureaucracy reigned. The overcrowded subways
were so dehumanizing that Mumford actually welcomed the automobile as a way to
escape.
Twenty
- two years later Bookchin thought Mumford’s diagnosis was valid — it had to be
deepened and brought up to date. He tried to do that in “The Limits of the
City” (1959-60) and in a book he started writing in 1960, tentatively titled The
Rational Society. The megalopolis of 1960 was even larger than that of
1938 and its relentless growth now congested the city to the point of
dysfunction. Housing was in short supply and shoddily constructed; education
was “at the point of moral and administrative breakdown.”[16] Mainstream
commentators were even writing about it all now. And the subways were still
overcrowded and unreliable.
The
city - induced psychological ills had become much worse. Office work consisted
of overspecialized, repetitive tasks; those who performed them best were those
who suppressed their own resourcefulness, removing “all the spiritual well - springs
of imagination and thought.” They relied on habit, turning themselves in effect
into machines. The monotony and tedium caused psychological and even physical
strain — or stress, a word that had recently entered the sociological vocabulary.[17]
Outside
the workplace, civic and social life had deteriorated. The urban environment
eroded “mutual aid, simple human hospitality and decency.” It isolated urban
dwellers, leaving them “more isolated” than their “ancestors were in the countryside.”
In subways and buses, at jobs or in diners, people had become mutually
indifferent. Lost in the asphalt jungle, they were apathetic toward civic
issues, political creatures “without a polis.” Domestic life suffered too, as
family members were too exhausted to nourish one another; lacking individuality
and sympathy, they had “nothing to give or take.” The megalopolis had become “a
mere aggregate” of dispirited people “scattered among cold, featureless
structures.”[18]
Other
psychological assaults had worsened too. The urban environment had become nerve
- wracking. Noise invaded sleep. A constant barrage of advertising assailed the
senses, with crude and elemental messages designed to shock the viewer into a
response. Nerves become overly sensitive and raw. The city dweller could find
no relief or ease in parks, which were congested and crime - ridden.
The
automobile had indeed become a useful tool for escaping the city — it allowed
many to vacation elsewhere or move to the new suburbs. But as Mumford had not
foreseen, the automobile had become an enormous problem. Within the city
limits, it was ubiquitous, as traffic glutted the streets. The car’s needs
were becoming dominant over human needs.
When
an expressway (like the Cross Bronx) crossed a community, he wrote,
pedestrians, homes, and shops “shrink to mere byproducts of the highway and
motor car,” New Yorkers had to yield “residential space, parks, avenues, and
air to a steel vehicle that looks more like a missile than a means of human
transportation.”[19]
The
stress was harmful not only to people’s mental health but their physical
health. “If stress is too severe, the resistance and life span of the organism
are drastically reduced.” [20]
Chronic illness could result.
Back
in the 1870s Engels had warned that the separation of town and country
threatened “public health” and was “poisoning . . . the air, water and land.”[21] Almost a century
later environmental damage finally became an issue, and Bookchin raised the
alarm. The modern city was toxic, physically dangerous because of concentrated
air and water pollution, which he documented in detail in the Rational Society manuscript.
Even more innovatively, he pointed to the disorders caused by town - country
separation. Separated from the town, agriculture becomes industrialized and a
profit - making enterprise. In the name of efficiency and cost cutting,
industrialized agriculture becomes large scale, and instead of cultivating a
diversity of crops to meet local needs, it cultivates a single crop that it can
put on the market. That is, it prefers — and in the name of competition even
demands — a monoculture. But monocultures (as opposed to crop diversity) are
less resistant to insect infestations: all it takes is one bug to destroy a
whole field. So agricultural capitalists use chemicals to ward off pests. And
monocultures (as opposed to crop rotation) degrades and erodes soil, so
agricultural capitalists introduce more chemicals to replenish it: fertilizers.
And since the crops are raised far from where people will consume them as food,
agricultural capitalists have to ship them over long distances, then store
them. To keep them from deteriorating, still another set of chemicals is
introduced: chemical preservatives. And if the food does deteriorate over time,
still more chemicals can restore their appearance: food colorings. All these
chemicals could potentially show up in food.[22]
Here
Bookchin’s critique of the use chemicals in food converged with his urban
critique: the use of pesticides, fertilizers, preservatives, and coloring
agents could all be traced back to a specific pattern of settlement. “As long
as cities are separated from the countryside,” he wrote, food “will necessarily
include deleterious chemicals to meet problems of storage, transportation, and
mass manufacture — not to mention profit.” Moreover, as Bookchin had documented
in 1952, these chemicals were carcinogenic in humans.[23] The
separation of town and country was turning out to be harmful to human survival.
#
Bursting the Fetters
Back
in 1938, Mumford had thought that the megalopolitan city could get no worse: if
it continued, he wrote, it would destroy itself. In a section of The Culture of
Cities called “A Brief Outline of Hell,” he called the metropolis “systematic
barbarism” and asserted that it represents “the maximum possible assault on the
processes of civilization.” Our civilization, he continued, will soon see
“phenomena of the end.” The only question remaining is “whether disintegration
must be complete before a fresh start is made.”[24]
What
would finally push the city over the cliff? For Mumford, the trigger would be
financial. As the city became ever more congested with people, land values
would soar. High land values would magnify the cost of doing business;
transportation and storage would become too expensive. Growth itself thus
“economically weakens” the megalopolis, and after a certain point “it cannot
evade or pass on elsewhere the burden of its own magnified expenses.” Yet even
as it lives beyond its income, still more new residents arrive, packing into
old neighborhoods or creating new ones. But the city cannot afford to provide
them with services. The growth of the city, Mumford observed, depletes it.
Credit is no longer available, the city can’t pay its bills, and bankruptcy
threatens. The city’s food supply may be endangered. People vote with their
feet and move to the countryside, or to smaller cities. “How quickly the ornate
central offices empty: how inessential the giddy restaurants and the fifteen - room
apartments suddenly become.”[25]
Twenty
- two years later, many urban dwellers had indeed moved to the suburbs, but as
Bookchin saw, the financial crisis had not come, the megalopolis had not
collapsed, and civilization persisted. But the collapse Mumford predicted, he
was sure, had merely been delayed. The very fact that “millions of people ...
have picked up their belongings and left” for the suburbs” proved that “megalopolitan
life is breaking down — psychically, economically, and biologically.” All the
problems were still present and had worsened, and new ones had been added.
Bookchin reaffirmed that the megalopolis had reached its limits: it cannot be
“significantly improved or changed.” Indeed, “the possibilities of the city are
exhausted,” he affirmed. “They can never be revitalized again.”[26]
As
a student of Hegel, the concept of limits had particular meaning to Bookchin.
In Hegelian philosophy, a thing that develops — a growth process, a historical
process — inevitably encounters some kind of limit (Grenze) that prevents it
from continuing to grow as it was. But the development as a whole must continue
moving forward, and in order for it to do so, the process must get over and
beyond its limits. It can do so only when it senses that its deeper nature is
involved in another possible something, some larger whole that extends
further than its own limits, that must actualize its own nature; in the light
of that potentiality, limits become fetters and must be burst.[27] For Bookchin
(and Mumford surely agreed), the developing process was the city; but the
larger whole is civilization; in order for humanity to become fully civilized,
the urban process must burst the fetter that the megalopolis had become.
#
The Expressway Completed
In
1960, as Murray was writing on these subjects, Robert Moses’s construction
crews completed the East Tremont section of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Once it
was built, cars poured into the highway, belching exhaust fumes into the air,
where they entered the windows of the three thousand apartments overlooking it.
The elderly Jewish immigrants choked and gagged. All day and all night the
automobiles roared, punctuated by diesel tractor-trailers shifting gears,
making sleep impossible. “Talk to people who live in the 3000 apartments next
to the Cross Bronx Expressway,” said Caro, “and one hears applied to that
noise, over and over again, a single adjective: ‘unbearable.’”[28]
Area
residents had reached their limits and moved out, to their children’s homes,
wherever they could find a place. The storekeepers who had provided them with
whitefish and horseradish, with shoes and cigars, could no longer find buyers;
they boarded up their storefronts and joined the exodus. In these Bronx
buildings that had once offered clean, modern living spaces for immigrants
fleeing the Lower East Side tenements, windows were broken; graffiti was
scrawled; pipes were ripped out; staircases were broken. By 1965 the buildings
were ravaged hulks.
The
Cross Bronx Expressway destroyed the Bronx utopia of Bookchin’s childhood.
Rose’s last years there, during construction, must have been wretched, but she
did not endure the roar of traffic for long: she died in 1961, soon after the
highway was completed. She had come a long way from her girlhood in the rutted
dirt roads of Bessarabia (present - day Moldova). Her son changed the title of
the book he was working on: instead of The Rational Society, it would be
Our Synthetic Environment. In the acknowledgments, he thanked Lewis Mumford
“for reading my discussion of urban life.”[29]
And upon its publication in 1962, he dedicated it to Rose.
#
Garden Cities
What
would happen after the modern metropolis burst its fetters? Would it collapse into
rubble and debris, like those East Tremont
buildings? Not necessarily, in Mumford’s view: in The Culture of Cities he
offered a way out. Following the first movement (the medieval city) and the
second (the baroque city) could come, possibly, a third: regeneration. “While there
is life, there is the possibility of counter - movement, fresh growth,” he
affirmed spiritedly. It would take a great effort and would “go against the
basic pattern of the metropolitan economy,” but in the name of civilization,
the megalopolis would have to be regenerated.[30]
Mumford’s
regeneration would integrate rural and urban, as in the medieval city, but in
modern terms. Two urban planners in Great Britain, writing at the turn of the
twentieth century, influenced Mumford’s thinking along these lines. In the wake
of the Industrial Revolution, Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes too had wanted
to rebalance cities, industries, and natural regions. Another influence was the
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, whose book Fields, Factories, and workshops he
mentions respectfully but only in passing.[31]
The
British - born Howard had had the idea that the internal colonization of a
country could be done deliberately. Why should we leave the location of cities
to chance or to the past? he asked. Why should we not consciously found new
cities, in the name of civilization and civic life? He proposed the conscious
creation of Garden Cities — small - scale communities that were situated
outside the urban core, surrounded by swaths of open countryside dedicated to
agriculture, recreation, and other rural occupations. A Garden City’s
population would be limited to 30,000; the town would encompass both residences
and workplaces. “Town and country,” wrote Howard, “must be married, and out of
this union will spring a new hope, an new life, a new civilization.”[32] He proposed
this scheme in 1898, and in 1903 - 04 a garden city built after Howard’s
outline, called Letchworth, was created in Hertfordshire, and in 1920 a second,
Welwyn, nearby.
A
few years after Howard, Patrick Geddes was among the first to undertake “a
thoroughgoing civic survey as a preliminary to town planning”; fascinated by
biology, he included in his survey of Edinburgh something rather unorthodox for
urban planning: “the geographic setting, the climatic and meteorological facts,
the economic processes, the historic heritage.” Geddes elevated these
environmental aspects to “matters of first importance” and thereby “made the
necessary passage from the civic survey to the regional survey.”[33]
Following
Howard, Mumford too proposed new cities that would integrate the natural
environment into urban life, with greenbelts and parklands and dispersed
populations. Following Geddes, he wrote that regions, not cities, had to be the
focus of planning, to incorporate the rural: “To be built successfully, the
garden city should be the product of a regional authority, with a wider scope
of action than the municipality.”[34]
In the 1920s he and like - minded thinkers, planners, architects had formed the
Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), which had created several
experimental communities to demonstrate the alternative.
It
would be difficult to “break up old centers of congestion” and “create new
centers of industrial and civic life,” Mumford wrote, but it “is perhaps the
most pressing task of our civilization.”[35]
Curiously, he offered scant political strategy for how to accomplish this
agenda and achieve the regionalist republic. He seems to have hoped that he
and the RPAA could change the hearts and minds of individual people, who would
vote with their feet by leaving the city.
#
Bookchin’s Eco - decentralist Solution
Mumford
was no dialectician, but he must have sounded something like one to Bookchin
when he wrote in 1956 that he wanted to reestablish “the ecological balance
that originally prevailed between city and country in the primitive stages of
urbanization,” but “in a more complex unity, with a full use of the resources
of modern science and techniques.”[36]
In some sense the three - part structure of The Culture of Cities resembled a
Hegelian developmental process: a thesis (medieval city) and antithesis
(baroque city and metropolis), resulting in a synthesis (the Garden City in the
region).
In
any case, Bookchin borrowed the three - movement format. Having described the
Athenian polis and the bourgeois city, he too proposed a regeneration. The
megalopolis would be broken up, not by being regionalized but by being decentralized.
Engels provided validation for this aim, having said that to “fuse” town and
country one must have “as uniform
a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country.” As
Bookchin read him, Engels had meant to call for “the physical decentralization
of the cities.”[37]
Decentralizing,
according to Bookchin, would mean creating small cities or towns that were
humanistic in scale and appearance. They would be integrated with the
surrounding landscape and embedded in an agricultural matrix. Their inhabitants
would have easy access to the countryside and farmland, where they could work
on raising crops and savor recreation.
Decentralization could thereby achieve a “lasting equilibrium” between humanity
and nature.[38]
The
noise of traffic, the isolation and demoralization of city life — all would be
remedied in these well - balanced and rounded communities. One could sleep at
night. Their smallness of scale would render the automobile less necessary if
not entirely redundant. Significantly, the production of food would no longer
require chemicals. In the decentralized society’s small - scale fields, crops would
be raised not for the larger market but for local needs; this “agricultural and
biological diversity” would obviate the need for pesticides; crops would be
rotated, thereby avoiding chemical fertilizers; and since the distance between
farm and marketplace would be small, preservatives would have no place. We
could get the poisons out of our food.[39]
Small
farms would make possible “an intimacy between the farmer and the land” and
help replace economic interests with “a sense of social responsibility. “
Production would be local and guided by human needs, not by artificially
contrived wants. The baleful commodity relationship could come to an end.
People would be released from the tensions of competitive society:
insecurities, greed, avarice, and venality. Neither coercion nor the state
would be necessary. Decentralized communities would thus open “magnificent
vistas for individual and social development.”[40]
Decentralization
seemed an overwhelmingly difficult objective, and many would say it was
impossible; as much as Mumford, Bookchin had to face this problem. But he had
an original answer: modern technology, innovations in communication and
transportation, had actually made it possible. “Automobiles, aircraft, electric
power, and electronic devices have eliminated nearly all the problems of
transportation, communication, and social isolation that burdened man in past
eras,” he wrote. “We can now communicate with one another over a distance of
thousands of miles in a matter of seconds.” He was thinking of the telephone,
not the Internet. “And we can travel to the most remote areas of the world in a
few hours. The obstacles created by space and time are essentially gone.” The
objection that decentralization was impossible, then, might have been accurate
sometime in the past, but no longer.[41]
As
for manufacturing, that too could be decentralized: technology was making
thinkable the breakup of giant factories. Production that made use of
automation, miniaturization, and electronics could be scaled down to a smaller
scale: “The smoky steel town, for example, is an anachronism. Excellent steel
can be made and rolled with installations that occupy about two or three city
blocks.” Versatile and compact machines “lend themselves to a large variety of
manufacturing and finishing operations.” Once the decentralized community had
its small - scale miniaturized, automated factory, people would be left to do
finishing and handcraft work. Such quality production would be much more
satisfying than the routines of office work. Specialists would be replaced by
rounded human beings, would make all the political decisions for their own
small communities.[42]
In
another genuine innovation, Bookchin proposed that decentralization would go
hand in hand with the use of new sources of energy. Instead of fossil fuels and
nuclear power, the decentralized community could “make maximum use of its own
energy resources, such as wind power, social energy, and hydroelectric power.”
Using these sources would bring elements of nature into the social world,
contributing to a revolutionary renewal of human ties to the planet.[43]
#
Gutkind’s Decentralism
Bookchin’s
most important influence, in envisioning “decentralized balanced communities,
built on a human scale, which would combine the cultural advantages of the city
with the rural qualities of the village,” was Mumford.[44] But apart
from Mumford, the thinker who most influenced his thinking, I believe, was a
little - known German named Erwin Anton Gutkind.
Gutkind,
born in 1886, was trained as an architect and left Germany in April 1933 to
live in Paris, then in London, where he became involved in city planning. In
1945 he returned to his native Berlin as a member of the Control Commission
that governed the British Zone; he was charged with helping to reconstruct the
city but quit when he found the operation too bureaucratic. He dedicated
himself to writing books, then was hired by the University of Pennsylvania,
where he taught in the Graduate School of Fine Arts until his death in 1968.
Like
Mumford and Bookchin, Gutkind wrote narratives of urban decline and
regeneration, which by now are familiar to our ears, in two books: Community
and Environment (1954) and The Twilight of Cities (1962).[45] Preferring
small - scale communities that balanced urban and rural, he traced the city in
history from the polis to the medieval town through the fortress towns of the
Renaissance and the residential towns of the absolute prince. The Industrial
revolution brought “the fallacious belief in progress and in the promethean
power of technology,” whereupon towns expanded into cities that subordinated
the countryside. People “began to plunder the riches of the earth,” and
capitalism “swept away all limitations.” The present - day megalopolis is “at
best it is an association of different classes of society on an economic basis,
at worst an agglomeration of human atoms.” Conforming to “the rationally
conceived State,” it venerates efficiency, and is “the city of the ‘practical’
and ‘technically minded’ drawing - board architect and road builder.” But as
such it “enforces a sterile specialization and conformity on its citizens.”[46]
Gutkind
called for decentralization, by which he meant “the physical decentralization
of the cities and ... the cultural decentralization of fossilized institutions.
He criticized the Garden City movement for its willingness to leave the central
city intact and create satellites; he wanted to eliminate the central city and
disperse settlement over a broad area. Industrial production would be split up
“in publicly owned or cooperative groups”; indeed, his decentralization process
would redistribute practically all aspects of life: “homes, work, distribution,
and circulation, leisure and recreation, social intercourse, and cultural
stimulation.”[47]
Gutkind’s
new communities, ”distributed organically over the country,” would be fairly
equal in size, “without the domineering preponderance of a ‘happy few’ big
cities to the disadvantage of all the others.” Small in scale and dense in
structure, they would be imbued with “mutual aid and cooperation” and would
rejuvenate humanity, giving rise to “an inspiring diversity and a new
élan vital.”[48]
Unlike
Mumford, Gutkind was an explicit antistatist, considering “the emergence of
communities in a stateless world” to be “the highest ideal which we can discern
at present.” He gave his ideas a name, “Social Ecology,” to stress ”the
indivisibility of man’s interaction with his environment.” Social ecology as a
discipline, he wrote, can provide “a stereoscopic view of man in his
relationship to the environment.” Bookchin, also an antistatist, admired
Gutkind’s ”masterful discussion on community,” as well as the name “social
ecology,” which he borrowed for his own ideas. In the next decades, authoring
twenty - odd books and numerous articles, Bookchin would develop social ecology
into a complex and sophisticated set of ideas, giving it dimensions that had
been lacking in both Mumford and Gutkind. Suffice it to say here that even as
he made the name “social ecology” famous, he had the integrity to credit
Gutkind for originating it.[49]
#
The Limits of Fossil Fuels
But
Gutkind had no suggestions as to how decentralization would come about. The
cities and the state, “the present structure of settlement,” he says vaguely,
would wither away: “the senseless conglomerations of our cities and the
retarding isolation of the countryside will give way to a more even
distribution of population.” Perhaps one reason for his vagueness was the fact
that it took the Second World War to render his native Berlin suitable for
reconstruction. In any case, for whatever reason, Gutkind regarded “the
twilight of cities” as “a fact.”[50]
Bookchin
shared Mumford’s basic belief that people would have to change their hearts and
minds, and had absorbed from his mentor Weber a basic belief that once people
were presented with a rational idea, they see that it was right, drop their old
ideas, and embrace it. On some level he believed that when city dwellers came
to the end of their rope, when the insults to their mental and physical health
became too great, and when they learned more about decentralization as an
alternative, they would do what the proletariat hadn’t done: they would rise up
against the pernicious society and demand a humane one.
In
a 1954 article Bookchin described the molecular process by which change could happen.
“In the anonymity of daily life” people “slowly collect their experiences,
quietly drawing their own bitter conclusions.” As they do, “apathy shades from
cold indifference into unmistakable hostility.” Thereupon “the vast basin of
discontent fills, its waters grow dark with the stirrings in the deep below.”
But “precisely when all the elements in the official chorus can be detected,
... when the crescendo has finally been reached — at just this point, the first
snap ... announces the irrevocable separation of the people from the noisy
reaction ... The masses, long disillusioned and bitter, finally break away, and
with unerring instinct find their own, separate direction.”[51]
The
process of change would inevitably be political, involving movements and
organizations; but he would not address that issue till later in his life. For
now, he would say that deciding to reconstruct society along new lines would
require solidarity. Once the new society was created, people would need a
liberatory means of governance. Face – to - face democracy, deriving from the
Athenian polis but updated for modern society and without its socially
regressive features (sexism, slavery), would be the political expression of the
decentralized society.
But
no matter how rational people were, no matter how discontented, something
material would be needed to get them started. Neither propaganda nor coercion,
Bookchin wrote, “will ever supplant the daily pressure of material interests;
no inflation of personalities, however cozy the chats or demagogic the oratory,
can prevail against the need for bread, cheese and material security. “[52] Nor, for that
matter, will concerns for health.
As
a young Marxist, Bookchin had absorbed the lesson that technology drives social
change (in that case, driving the proletariat to revolution). Was there a
technological imperative for decentralization?
In
his 1964 book Crisis in Our Cities, Bookchin thought he’d found one, or at least
had come as close as humanly possible. It concerned the issue of energy issue.
Here is the argument.
Fossil
fuels are essential to the megalopolis: “The modern city depends upon coal and
oil as its principal sources of energy.” Fossil fuels are appropriate for the
larger scales of production and consumption: “They are used most economically
in immense power plants, in soaring multiple dwellings, and in large industrial
and commercial enterprises.” Fossil fuels are thus intimately intertwined with
the megalopolis, with urban gigantism — they promote and depend on each other,
like evil twins. “If for no other reason than the demands and possibilities of
this [fossil fuel] technology, cities tend to reach immense proportions and
merge into sprawling urban belts.”[53]
But
fossil fuels have no future — they are, to be Hegelian about it, “historically
limited” — because they pollute air and water and damage human health.
Moreover, they are responsible for what would later be called global warming.
Bookchin wrote presciently in 1964:
During the past one hundred years,
[people have] contributed 260 billion tons, or 13 percent more of the gas
[carbon dioxide] to the earth’s atmosphere. This blanket of carbon dioxide
tends to raise the atmosphere’s temperature by intercepting heat waves going
from the earth into outer space. ... Theoretically, after several centuries of
fossil - fuel combustion, the increased heat of the atmosphere could even melt
the polar ice caps of the earth and lead to the inundation [sic] of the
continents with sea water. Remote as such a deluge may seem today, it is
symbolic of the long - range catastrophic effects of our irrational
civilization on the balance of nature.[54]
In
other words, if we continue to use fossil fuels we face catastrophe. If our
civilization is to avoid that fate, “if an industrial civilization is to survive,”
humanity must find a replacement for fossil fuels, must “develop entirely new
sources of energy.”[55]
Bookchin ruled out nuclear fuels as too dangerous, producing radioactive
wastes. The only real solution was to turn to solar, wind, and tidal energy.
Mumford
had written a bit about renewable energy, speculatively, in his 1933 Technics
and Civilization, and Bookchin too had mentioned them in his pre-1964
writings, but now he elevated their importance. “Experimental turbines, solar
reflectors and mirrors, heat exchangers, and thermo-electric devices,” he
wrote, “could harness these forces.” He called for “parabolic collectors that
concentrate and build up the heat in sunlight” and explained their design and
functioning. These “revolutionary lines of technological innovation . . . hold
the promise of a lasting balance between man and the natural world.” From
“the heat of the sun, the fury of the winds, the surge of the tides,” humankind
“could draw inexhaustible quantities of energy without impairing the
environment.”[56]
Why
role do these technologies — which Bookchin would later call ecotechnics — play
in decentralization? Their smallness of scale makes them appropriate, of
course, for a small - scale society. But the crucial point was that these
technologies are unusable a mass scale. Solar and wind power, he wrote, simply
could not supply “the large blocks of energy needed to sustain densely
concentrated populations and highly centralized industries.” Large cities are
based “on huge packages of fuel — mountains of coal and veritable oceans of
petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind and tidal energy can reach us mainly in
small packets.” They would have to be used “locally and in conjunction with
each other” to “meet all the power needs of small communities.” If we were to
turn to them — and we had to — then we would have to change our society in
order to accommodate them and make them practical.[57]
Bookchin
also called for a shift from “gasoline - fueled motor vehicles “ to “quieter,
more efficient, and certainly cleaner electric cars” because they too would
place us “on the brink of a new urban revolution.” After all, he said a few
years later, electric cars “are not feasible for long - distance driving,” but
“they do make sense in small communities; people can be transported very
efficiently and effectively and in a nonpolluting way for distances of 80
miles, local use. Here one sees that a transport system can be developed that
is most efficient in a decentralized society.”[58]
At
least until 1976 he continued in this vein. “It is doubtful,” he wrote that
year, “if the downtown districts of large cities could be lighted by solar
energy or wind power. ... In a highly centralized so ciety based on densely
populated areas, we would require energy in such massive and concentrated
quantities” that ecotechnics “would seem irrelevant, if not utterly utopian.”
Yet “our sources of fossil fuels are limited and nuclear alternatives open the
prospect of ecological disaster.” One of the central meanings of social ecology
was that “increasingly we must think of energy not merely in terms of eco - techniques
but in the social context.[59]
#
The Limits of Defining Limits
Sadly,
these ideas got little attention. Our Synthetic Environment and Crisis
in Our Cities received a few reviews that appreciated the problems he
raised but regarded his proposed solutions as impractical.
In
the next decades, the city eluded, Houdini - like, the limits that both
Bookchin and Mumford thought had shackled it. Far from bursting their fetters
and falling into perdition, cities have grown immensely: Megalopolis has
become, not Nekropolis, but Megacity. Defined as conurbations of at least 10
million inhabitants each, megacities now dot the planet, from Mumbai to Tokyo,
from New York to Shanghai. Town and country are ever more separated; congestion
is even more extreme; agriculture has become more industrialized; soil
degradation and deforestation are widespread.
Limits
are harder to identify than social theorists may suppose. (Marxists discovered
that point, much to their dismay, when it came to proletarian revolution.) Air
pollution and water pollution have only gotten worse; to breathe the air in
many megacities (as well as smaller ones) is to choke, and some two billion
people are now at risk of not having clean drinking water. People have
displayed more tolerance for assaults on their health than Bookchin expected.
But
then, he was not alone in predicting the end of the giant city: Engels thought
the separation of town and country had reached “its extreme point” in the 1870s[60], while Mumford
thought that the city of 1938 was the end of the line. Limits are subjective,
and tolerance of hardship varies from person to person. Urban decline is often
gradual, allowing people to accommodate themselves to it; community
organizations and mutual support networks in neighborhoods sustain them.
Mumford and Bookchin criticized tedious office work, but at least it involves
no backbreaking toil in fields. And if the city has limits, it is not only
hardships that define them but also genuine pleasures. Cities offer high hopes
for a better life, and attract people from the countryside year after year, and
in pursuit of their dreams, people will tolerate much hardship. Hegelian
philosophy notwithstanding, limits are an unreliable ground upon which to rest
hopes for social change.
The
limits to runaway use of environment is another problem, as global societies
are be overwhelming finite resources; the question of limits is a signal
problem for the twenty - first century, but not one that Bookchin grappled with
in these early works. But the production and consumption of food and energy — two
problems he discussed innovatively in these writings — have both become major
economic, cultural, and political issues. The organic farming movement, driven
by a repulsion for chemicals in food, has been around for decades, joined by
green city movements, community - supported agriculture, urban gardening, the
locavore movement, and more, all reintegrating town and country.
As
for energy, Bookchin was right that our dependence on fossil fuels cannot be
maintained: the global warming that it causes, and that he predicted so long
ago, has become conventional wisdom. He was right that current rates of energy
consumption are unsustainable. And he was also right, to my knowledge, about
the connection between carbon - based fuels and largeness of scale:
petrochemicals and gasoline seem basic to large - scale agriculture, in all the
ways that he pointed out in the 1950s, and it’s not at all clear that anything
could replace them at a large scale. The alternative to petroleum - based
agriculture may indeed be smallness.
As
for renewable energy, it too has become part of progressive thought and action.
But after the mid - 1970s Bookchin seems to have dropped the idea that
renewable energy, or ecotechnics, is necessarily linked to smallness of scale.
He ceased writing about it, as proposals for large - scale solar and wind
installations (in the Arizona desert, in or outer space) seem to have disabused
him of this idea. But to date solar and wind still seem eminently suited for
local use, popular on individual homes and schools and offices. To be sure,
solar and wind energy are potentially usable over for large cities, given the
existence of electricity - distribution grids. But according to a reputable
scientific journal, “At least for the foreseeable future ... local generation
is unlikely to supply the sheer quantity of energy that large fossil - fuel
plants now provide.”[61]
#
Proud Defiance
A
few years ago, I journeyed to the Bronx in search of Bookchin’s childhood
haunts. I found East Tremont to be stuck in poverty, surely in great part
because of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Its roaring traffic has continued
unabated since 1960. Along Tremont Avenue, where Murray once bought knishes and
bagels, fast - food joints and hair salons now stand. But the people I passed
on the street had kind faces, and nearby Crotona Park, where Murray played as a
child, is still a jewel, undergoing ecological reconstruction by the city.
I
walked along 175th Street, clutching a slip of paper with the address of Rose’s
building, hoping to see where it had stood. I passed a vacant lot and — astonishingly,
number 710 was still there. It was one of the only structures on that block,
looking battered, but still providing homes for determined people. It held
itself proudly like an old warrior, in continuing defiance of Robert Moses.
The
struggle to integrate town and country, to create an ecological society, is
both arduous and necessary; perhaps sometime cities will reach their limits,
although no one hopes for a crisis that causes suffering. In the meantime the
closing words from The Culture of Cities remain as iconic today as Bookchin
thought them in 1962: for in a tribute to his mentor on urban history, he
quoted them as the closing words to Our Synthetic Environment. So as a
tribute to their common project, I reproduce them to end this article:
“We
have much to unbuild, and much more to build: but the foundations are ready:
the machines are set in place and the tools are bright and keen: the
architects, the engineers, and the workmen are assembled. None of us may live
to see the complete building, and perhaps in the nature of things the building
can never be completed: but some of us will see the flag or the fir tree that
the workers will plant aloft in ancient ritual when they cap the topmost
story.”[62]
Burlington,
Vermont
August
21, 2010
[1] Robert A. Caro,
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (NY: Alfred A. Knopf,
1974), p. 859. The description of the destruction of East Tremont is taken from
Chapters 37 and 38, which reproduce the letter from Robert Moses. Murray did
give his mother her insulin shot every day, but the details of his visit are my
reconstruction.
[3] Bookchin interviewed by Mark Saunders
in Murray Bookchin Video Biography, part 21, recorded May 1995, Burlington, online
at http://www.spectacle.co.uk.
[4] See Anthony
Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder
and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009)
[8] See Frederick
Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring) (New
York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 323.
[9] Murray
Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 20, 6,
23. Bookchin’s original long manuscript “The Limits of the City,” written in
1959 - 60, is no longer available. A truncated version was published in Contemporary
Issues in 1960, but only with the book The Limits of the City was the
full article published, as the first chapters of the book. It’s unclear which
material there dates from 1960 and which from 1974, and how much the old material
was revised. I take Murray at his word that the first chapters of the 1974 book
are more or less what he wrote in 1959-60.
[15] Lewis Herber
(pseud. for Murray Bookchin), “The Limits of the City,” Contemporary Issues 39 (Aug.-Sept.
1960), pp. 205, 198.
[18] Herber, “Limits
of the City,” pp. 208-210, 197; Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment (1962;
reprint New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 75, 244
[22] Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray
Bookchin), “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” Contemporary Issues 12 (Jun.- Aug.
1952), pp. 206-41; and Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), “A Follow-up
on the Problem of Chemicals in Food,” Contemporary Issues 6, no. 21 (Jan-Feb.
1955), p. 51-57; and Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment, pp. 211-16.
[27] Sidney Hook,
From Hegel to Marx (New York: Humanities Press), pp. 69-70; I’ve paraphrased
Hook’s explanation of this concept. Murray greatly admired this book and made
frequent use of it. Marxism, which grounded itself in Hegelian philosophy, was
concerned to determine the limits to the proletariat’s immiseration and to the
bourgeoisie’s toleration for the declining rate of profit.
[31] Murray Bookchin
absorbed Kropotkin’s ideas through Mumford. Not until the late 1960s or early
1970s would he read Kropotkin’s books.
[33] Mumford, Culture of Cities, p. 376.
Mumford, by the way, labeled Geddes an “ecological sociologist.”
[36] Lewis Mumford, “The Natural History
of Urbanization,” in William L. Thomas, Jr., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of
the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 397. This article
was particularly fascinating to Bookchin, according to Wayne Hayes, interview
by Janet Biehl, August 2009.
[37] Engels, Anti - Dühring,
p. 323; Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1970), p. 49, quoted in Bookchin, Limits of the City, p. 114n; and Murray
Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” in Post - Scarcity Anarchism
(San
Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 209.
[44] Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray
Bookchin), Crisis in Our Cities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice - Hall,
1965), p.188.
[45] E. A. Gutkind, Community and
Environment: A Discourse on Social Ecology (New York: Philosophical Library,
1954); and The Twilight of Cities (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
[49] Gutkind,
Community and Environment, pp. 81, 47, 50. Note that the subtitle of this book
is A Discourse on Social Ecology. See Bookchin, “The Concept of Ecotechnologies
and Ecocommunities,” in Toward an Ecological Society
(Montreal:
Black Rose Books, 1980), p. 108.
[51] Robert Keller (pseud. for Murray
Bookchin), “Year One of the Eisenhower Crusade,” Contemporary Issues 18 (Jun. -
Jul.
1954), p. 110.
[57] Murray
Bookchin, “Towards a Liberatory Technology” (1965), in Post Scarcity Anarchism,
pp. 128-29; Herber, Crisis in Our Cities, pp. 194 - 95.
[58] Herber,
Crisis in Our Cities, pp. 194-95; Bookchin, “Social Anarchism,” Great Atlantic
Radio Conspiracy, audiocassette tape, c. 1972.
[61] David Roberts, “Local Power: Tapping
Distributed Energy in 21st - Century Cities,” Scientific American,
June 15, 2010.
[62] Mumford, Culture
of Cities, p. 492; quoted in Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment, p.
245.American, June 15, 2010.
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