Bookchin’s Originality
– A Reply to Marcel Van der Linden

By Janet Biehl

“The educator must himself be educated.”

In 1971 Murray Bookchin published Post-Scarcity Anarchism, a collection of immensely original essays, written in the 1960s, that promoted ideas about anarchism, ecology, democracy, and revolution. The book had a profound influence on the libertarian left, placing anarchism back on the political map as a meaningful political theory. Murray dedicated the book to two people, one of whom was a man named Josef Weber. In the book’s introduction Murray explained the dedication:

In 2001 the researcher Marcel Van der Linden attempted to account more fully for the dedication. Having examined the writings of Weber and Bookchin, he wrote an article called “The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism” in which he offered up a list of some ideas that both men had espoused.(2) Unfortunately Van der Linden made no effort to explore the intellectual relationship between the two men, or even to prove that influence, one way or the other, occurred; he simply closed his article by stating that Murray Bookchin was “partially original.”

This strange approach leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. It may even suggest or imply that Murray learned, borrowed, or stole from Weber some of the ideas for which he is best known. Perhaps Murray even appropriated Weber’s ideas and wrote about them under his own name in an effort to aggrandize himself (as his numerous ad hominem critics accused him of doing in the 1990s, in what Andy Price has called the “caricature” school of Bookchin criticism(3)). Van der Linden himself states no conclusions at all; he simply advances the phrase “partially original” and leaves the reader to suppose that the truly or fully original thinker, between the two men, was Weber.

On some level, to say that Murray was “partially original” is merely to advance a truism. After all, no creative person is wholly original, not in the visual arts, not in social theory, in philosophy, science, or any human endeavor. And that is a good thing, because if we were entirely original, we would be incomprehensible to our fellow human beings. We are all influenced, both by our predecessors and by our contemporaries. The history of literature, of the visual arts, of architecture, drama, and music, is the history of influence across generations. As for science and technology, they are nothing if not cumulative; those who make contributions in those fields inevitably rely on their predecessors. Indeed, making use of the work of one’s predecessors is there regarded as a necessity, constituting a tribute rather than a malfeasance.

So too do social theorists, like creative people generally, stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. Whole schools of thought have been built on the writings of Marx, who himself built on the work of Ricardo, Hegel, and others. As for anarchism, Bakunin openly acknowledged his debt to Proudhon, while Kropotkin, as one of his biographers has said, “literally read himself into Bakuninism.”(4) Those we respect for their contributions are neither entirely original nor entirely imitative. An honest innovator will frankly acknowledge his or her debt to others, while bringing something new to their subject that transforms it in form or content.

Thus to call a particular creative person “partially original” tells us nothing much at all. The real challenge is to determine the nature and level of one person’s influence on another. Sadly, Van der Linden neglected to undertake this far more significant task, leaving his readers with a range of implications, some of them prejudicial against Murray.

Bookchin’s Indebtedness

Murray Bookchin was the first to admit his indebtedness to his predecessors. Indeed, anything less would have been inconsistent with the dialectical approach that nourished him for most his life. Dialectical philosophy is the study of developmental change, including not only organic growth but also the cultural evolution of ideas and their manifestation in artifacts. Its very task is to trace influence; its very obsession is history, the arena in which influence occurs.

Hence Murray’s readiness to acknowledge Weber’s influence in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Moreover in the 1960s he tried to publicize Weber’s work, recommending his article “The Great Utopia” to members of his anarchist circles. Later, after he came to prominence, he encouraged scholars to write about Weber.

Still, at the top of the list of Murray’s mentors were always Hegel and Marx. This assertion may sound inflated or even pretentious – after all, those two thinkers have influenced most left social theory and philosophy, either positively or negatively, since the mid-nineteenth century. But on Murray their influence was personal and lifelong. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he would carry copies of Hegel around in his jacket pocket to read during odd moments. As for Marx, Murray had been reading him since the 1930s. The publication of a new edition or translation of either man’s work was a cause of excitement for him. Whenever he was in the process of rethinking his own social-revolutionary ideas, he reread major works of Marx. Sometimes that meant rejecting aspects of Marx’s work, as in the 1940s (on the role of the proletariat) and in the 1970s (on ecology). When I knew him (1987–2006), he would read into Marx and Hegel frequently, keeping copies of their most important books by his bedside. When he said he was influenced by them, then, he was not merely name-dropping; they were ongoing sources of inspiration and sustenance for him, even when he disagreed with them. “Marx made mistakes,” he used to say, “but what magnificent mistakes.”

Murray was also influenced by anarchist writings, albeit on a less sustained basis – too often he found himself frustrated by the vagaries of specific anarchist writers. But he genuinely revered the antistatism, confederalism, and municipalism that could be found within the anarchist tradition. Indeed, in my view much of his lifelong intellectual development involved a sorting out of both the anarchist and Marxist traditions. As he explained to Van der Linden in a letter: “Social ecology is a very broad synthesis that, irrespective of its merits or demerits, has affinities to many traditions: Marxism, anarchism, radical ecologism, Hegelianism, socialism, etc. etc., and to a number of Weber’s notions, which, in turn, also stem from a large body of left-wing traditions.”(5)

Sadly, Van der Linden chose not to inform his readers of this and other remarks in Murray’s letters to him. As such, he has left to others the task of determining whatever influence Josef Weber may or may not have had on Murray Bookchin (and perhaps vice versa). Hampering the project is the fact that Weber’s published writings are not easily accessible. A few are posted online, but even a large university research library in New York that I consulted has a woefully incomplete collection of Contemporary Issues, the periodical in which, during the years of their collaboration, Weber and Murray both wrote. (Van der Linden, for his part, is research director at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and thus has Contemporary Issues at his fingertips.) Lacking easy access to Weber’s work, and therefore unable to examine the case on their own, most readers are left in the dark and forced to accept Van der Linden’s implications.(6)

Fortunately, Murray wrote about his relationship with Weber several times, and we may reconstruct the story that Van der Linden chose not to tell. He told the story in letters to Jacob Suhl (a fellow “CI-er,” as Murray called members of the Contemporary Issues group) and to Van der Linden himself. Moreover, in 2003 Murray (who by then was too ill to write a response) allowed me to interview him on the Van der Linden article and on his relationship with Weber generally.(7)

Two Wartime Trotskyists

Josef Weber was a German Trotskyist, born in 1901 in Gelsenkirchen. At the age of seventeen he joined the KPD, the German Communist Party. Sometime in the 1920s that party expelled him, along with other sympathizers of Leon Trotsky, who thereafter banded together to form the International German Communists (IKD). Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 forced Weber and his radical comrades to flee the country; he ended up in Paris, where he became a leader of the committee in exile (AK) of the IKD. Using the pseudonym “Johre,” he co-edited a periodical called Unser Wort. When the Fourth (Trotskyist) International was formed in 1938, the IKD became the official German section.

The Nazis overran Paris in 1940, forcing Weber once again to flee, this time to Marseilles. Somehow he managed to wangle a place on a boat, which took him first to Martinique and then to New York. There he settled down and continued to write articles about the evolving situation in Europe.

Meanwhile Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, underwent a similar political evolution from Stalinist to Trotskyist. Having joined the Communist movement in 1930, he was educated as a young teenager in Marxism-Leninism at the Workers’ School on East 13th Street in New York. Disgusted in the mid-1930s by the duplicity and brutal authoritarianism of the Communists, he joined the Socialist Workers Party (Fourth International) in 1939. The SWP was at that time the major Trotskyist party in the United States and indeed the largest in the world (which is not to say that it was large – it had only about a thousand members at its peak). At the outbreak of World War II, then, both Murray and Weber were members of the international Trotskyist movement,

What did it mean to be a Trotskyist in 1939–40? This small but impassioned group of revolutionary intellectuals considered themselves to be nothing less than “the authentic movement of Bolshevism, the movement that remains true to the Russian Revolution of October 1917, to the people who led it, and to the principles embodied in it.”(8) Trotskyists wholeheartedly opposed Stalin’s counterrevolutionary and dictatorial regime and ardently supported Trotsky’s defiant struggle to reclaim the legacy of October. Rejecting the Third International, or Comintern, as merely Stalin’s pliable tool, the Trotskyists sought to mount an international proletarian revolution under the banner of their own Fourth International, against an array of foes: against the capitalist West, against the Nazis in Germany, and against Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union.

After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and the new world war began, the questions on most radicals’ minds were, What was the nature of the war? What were its possible consequences? Trotskyists saw the Second World War as essentially a repeat or continuation of what they considered to have been the First Imperialist War; that is, they saw it as a Second Imperialist War, in which both the Axis powers and the Allies sought to dominate the world. Anglo-American and Nazi imperialist systems were, in their view, “equally predatory.” As such, argued the Trotskyists dismissively, a war among rival capitalist countries (fascism being simply the culmination of capitalism) was of little relevance to the international proletariat.

But the First Imperialist War had given rise to a proletarian revolution in Russia – and only two decades later the memory was still fresh enough to be compelling. During that war the Bolsheviks had taken an antiwar position – Lenin and Trotsky had refused to support Russia’s military effort. Then in the summer of 1917 the Russian military was collapsing, its soldiers unwilling to fight a deadly, mismanaged, and futile war on behalf of the tsar. When the Bolsheviks came to power in October, it was on a platform of, among other things, getting Russia out of the war. Once they grasped the reins of power, the Bolsheviks – under Trotsky’s leadership – proceeded to negotiate a separate peace with Germany.

In 1939 the international Trotskyist movement looked back upon the Bolsheviks’ behavior with admiration. The difference now was that capitalism, since the First War, had fallen to its knees during the Great Depression and was now moribund, decaying, dying; it could not possibly survive the onslaughts of the Second War. Fascism, they believed, was merely a culmination or intensification of capitalism in its late, barbaric stage, a sign of its rapidly approaching end. So during the Second War the latter-day Bolsheviks would again follow the program that Lenin and Trotsky had successfully pursued in the First, and this time it would be all the more likely to give rise to an international proletarian revolution.

The Trotskyists of the late 1930s therefore followed their mentors and called for an international proletarian revolution. They urged the international working class – and the colonies of the imperialist countries – to rise up struggle for a socialist world against both capitalism and fascism. They should “turn the imperialist war into a civil war,” as a Bolshevik slogan ran. Trotsky himself argued in 1938 for “a parallel struggle by the workers of each country against their own imperialism, as their primary and most immediate enemy.”(9) And a few months later he reaffirmed the strategy of “conducting irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy, without being deterred by the fact that this struggle may result in the defeat of one’s own government.”(10) Once the workers rose up, the new vanguard, the Fourth International, would lead them to revolution.

To be sure, the German and Italian workers had not prevented Hitler and Mussolini from coming to power. Nor did the Polish workers rise up against the joint Nazi-Stalinist dismemberment of their country in September 1939. Then a few months later the Nazis overran France, but the workers, stunned like the rest of the country, put up little resistance, and France fell after only about six weeks. Undeterred, the Trotskyists continued to clamor for an international socialist revolution. In the last document he wrote on the subject, in August 1940, Trotsky restated that “our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat toward the second imperialist war, is a continuation of the policy during the last imperialist war, primarily under Lenin’s leadership.”(11)

Trotsky was working on this essay at his home in Coyoacán when a Stalinist agent crept into the room and murdered him, but afterward his bereaved supporters continued to advance his program. Above all, Trotskyists appealed to the workers to revolt, both in the imperialist countries and in Russia. As Murray’s friend and comrade Albert Goldman urged: “Workers of England and the United States, you are now fighting in a war which is only in the interest of your big capitalists; take the government into your own hands; take the industries away from the capitalists; proclaim your determination to build socialism. And the masses all over the world, including Germany, will rise against their Hitlers and Mussolinis. You will then win the war against all the exploiters of the world.”(12)

As Hitler overran much of Europe, Trotskyists scrutinized the landscape for signs of the coming uprising. “Revolts against Nazis Spreading Over Europe,” exulted The Militant (the SWP’s weekly newspaper) on August 9, 1941. “Growing Unrest in Occupied Lands Spells Hitler’s Doom” told of rumblings in Belgrade. In Norway the Reichskommissar had to declare a state of emergency “to preserve public order, security, and economic life.” “Mutterings of discontent” could be heard in Istanbul. “The unrest is said to be particularly acute in Rumania,” while “Serbian resistance is being steadily maintained” as guerillas led “mass revolts.” In Germany, “opposition circles” were appearing. “Only a revolutionary movement,” The Militant exhorted, “can smash Hitlerism.”

When Mussolini was ousted from power in the summer of 1943, workers’ councils were formed in Italy, prompting the American Trotskyist George Breitman to announce “The Beginning of the Italian Revolution.” European Trotskyists joined the SWP in hailing the revolt as “the first day of the proletarian revolution in Italy, the first day of the coming European revolution.”(13) But gradually the more realistic Trotskyists admitted that the workers were not fulfilling the role that Trotsky, and indeed Marx, had assigned them. “The idea that the Second [World War] was a continuation of the First and would quickly end in revolutions … was a view which Trotsky propounded and on which he wagered his reputation as a theorist,” Murray would explain to Van der Linden in 1998. “By 1943–44, it was almost self-evident that Trotsky’s prediction was totally wrong” (D). The workers did not rise up. “Within the Trotskyist movement, this issue obviously produced enormous upheavals,” Murray explained to me in 2003. “An appreciable number of my comrades were disillusioned with the Marxist theory of proletarian hegemony even before the war drew to a close” (A).

Then at last came the war’s end – and the Trotskyists watched with bated breath: Would the long-awaited proletarian revolution finally emerge? In Britain a Labor government came to power that proceeded to nationalize major industries and utilities and institute the National Health Service. That is, the system rewarded the working class for its many wartime sacrifices and thereby gave it a stake in maintaining the existing system, a strategy that turned out to be effective. As for the American workers, they mounted a large strike wave almost immediately after the Japanese surrender. Tens of thousands of oil workers, coal miners, lumber workers, truck drivers, and machinists went on strike. In the first half of 1946, 2.97 million workers, across numerous industries, downed tools; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics called those six months “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.” But this strife did not end in a revolution, and the workers ended up accepting wages that were sometimes even below wartime levels.

One of the most radical American labor unions was the United Auto Workers (UAW), which in November 1945 mounted a strike against General Motors, requesting a 30 percent wage increase. When GM refused the demand, 225,000 workers downed tools and stayed out for almost four months. In the end, however, the union accepted a paltry wage increase. After his own military service Murray went to work for General Motors in New Jersey and joined the UAW, hoping for another, more militant strike. But disappointingly for him, the 1945–46 strike was not repeated. During collective bargaining in 1948 the autoworkers accepted a guaranteed annual wage increase and other benefits. For Murray, this outcome shattered any remaining expectations he had about the working class. Never again would he believe that the working class would perform its Marx-cast role:

In the absence of the predicted international socialist revolution during the war, demoralized Trotskyists left the movement en masse. The onetime Trotskyist journalist Dwight Macdonald, for one, concluded that Marxism simply belonged on the pile of failed ideas.

In his 2001 article Van der Linden suggests that it was from Weber that Murray learned that “the labour movement is no longer an agent of revolutionary change in any of its varieties.” But this notion was a commonplace among postwar ex-Trotskyists, as Murray had previously explained to Van der Linden.

Sadly, Van der Linden chose to ignore Murray’s information about Trotskyist history. After his article was published, I asked Murray about this point:

Even Trotsky, in the late 1930s, recognized that his program might well fail. Murray showed me a passage in the Isaac Deutscher biography:

Murray continued:

To imply that Murray learned about the nonperformance of the proletariat from Weber is merely to display one’s ignorance of the international Trotskyist movement in 1939–45.

The Retrogression Thesis

Murray remained in the SWP until 1945 or 1946, at which point he left “because of my disgust with the workers’ movement” (B). Unlike some of his comrades, however, he was not interested in abandoning revolutionary politics altogether. He was willing to do something that Trotsky had advised.

What was the nature of the Second World War? Where was capitalism heading? “Some of us Trotskyists were looking for a new theory of imperialism, one that reflected these new realities,” he told me.

Meanwhile Weber, now living in New York, had been writing theoretical articles about the war and its implications. His most important piece was called “Capitalist Barbarism or Socialism,” which was published in the Trotskyist press in October 1944.(16) “Schooled as I was in the Marxian apocalyptic ‘either-or’ historical outlook,” he told me, “Weber’s work deeply impressed me as the most important theoretical challenge I knew of” (A).

Murray found the article so interesting that in late 1944 he got in touch with Weber and visited him. He found Weber to be possessed of a fine theoretical acumen. He was “a Hegelianized Marxist” who was, like himself, “in the process of shedding Marxism” (A). Moreover Murray and Weber hit it off personally: Weber had a “buoyant personality” and was a “charmer,” as well as “a good pianist who often played for his friends” (D). But further conversations between the two lapsing Trotskyists were postponed as Murray continued to work with the SWP, then was drafted into the U.S. Army in mid-1946.

When he returned to New York a year later, after his honorable discharge, he looked up Weber once again. They began working together closely, discussing ideas together. Murray typed as Weber dictated translations; Murray edited his articles, offering criticism and contributing ideas. During these early years of their collaboration, Murray told me, he came to “adore” Weber (his word) and saw him as a “father figure” (A). These intense feelings are not surprising considering that Murray’s own father, Nathan Bookchin, had abandoned the family when Murray was only six; in his short life Murray had already been further disappointed by the Stalinists and by the Trotskyists. No wonder, then, that this prestigious European socialist intellectual, twenty years his senior, became his father surrogate. In a bond that was solidly emotional as well as intellectual and political, their working relationship must have been for Murray a source of great satisfaction.

The article “Capitalist Barbarism and Socialism” attracted other lapsing Trotskyists to Weber’s fold as well, and it became the core manifesto around which a new group was formed in New York, as well as others in London and South Africa. This Movement for a Democracy of Content, as it was called, put out the journal Contemporary Issues. According to Weber’s article, the war represented a new, world-historical’ development in modern imperialism. Marxist-Leninists had argued for decades that capitalism was moribund, but Weber took the argument further, saying that capitalism was now actually “retrogressing.” Indeed, this “Retrogression Thesis” was the basic concept of “Capitalist Barbarism or Socialism,” around which the groups rallied; it consisted of people who shared in common their agreement with this thesis.

The Retrogression Thesis stated (in Weber’s words) that “in the last stage of imperialism, the economy, the politics and so forth of bourgeois society develop backward in a peculiar manner.” As the productive forces cease to grow, retrogressing capitalism goes “back to already overcome economic forms.” This “decay of capitalism” is inexorable, “subject to the same laws that were immanent in its rise as well as in its highest development.” Those laws resemble organic processes, of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death. Weber describes present-day capitalism as on its way out, “putrefying.” Such “capitalist putrefaction” generates “the development toward the modern slave state,” which is “a world phenomenon.” As capitalism “turns from progression to regression, the state becomes totalitarian, the proletarian becomes a modern slave.” By “counterposing itself to the entire world,” putrefying capitalism accentuates “the problem of the proletarian revolution”: that revolution “now appears as the saving solution, which is the direct task of humanity itself.” Thus does capitalism “generate its material negation even if the proletarian revolution fails to take place … Accomplish the revolution – or suffer the penalty of ruin!”(17)

What did all this mean in concrete terms? After the Allies vanquished the Axis powers, they would develop a new kind of imperialism, one that (capitalism being “moribund”) would artificially extend their own existence. They would dismember and deindustrialize their erstwhile capitalist rivals, Germany and Japan, and destroy their industrial capacity (their productive forces, in Marxian terminology), and drive them back to a precapitalist level of development, to feudal or even slave society. That is, they would drive them to “retrogression,” or “a stage-by-stage, point-by-point regression of society back to the Bronze Age level of civilization, with more bloodletting and ever greater cruelty” (A). Defeated Germany, Weber argued, would be reduced to an agricultural hinterland, dependent upon the United States and Britain for manufactured goods as well as scientific knowledge. The Allies would abrogate civil rights and eliminate republican institutions. They would reduce the German and Japanese populations and force those who survived into a permanent slave labor force. New generations would be educated only enough to function as instruments of labor and no more. By deindustrializing these societies, by becoming totalitarian in their own right, and by exploiting the remaining labor force, capitalist Britain and American would artificially extend their own prospects for survival.

During the war years this idea would have had some plausibility because in 1944 Hans Morgenthau, the U.S. treasury secretary, devised a blueprint for the postwar occupation of Germany. According to this Morgenthau Plan, the Allies were to remove all the infrastructure that could possibly allow the Germans ever again to make war. The plan would partition most of Germany into two states; the heavily industrialized areas (the Saar, the Ruhr, and Upper Silesia) would be internationalized and their industrial capacity dismantled. As he wrote, “This programme for eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and in the Saar is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”(18) Roosevelt proposed the Morgenthau Plan at the Quebec Conference in September 1944, and Churchill agreed to it.

At that time few people had any understanding of the resilience of capitalism, the Left remaining confident that it was “moribund.” For all anyone knew, the postwar era would be a return to the conditions of the Great Depression that had preceded the war. In any case, as Murray told me, Weber and his followers in the late 1940s – all “Trotskyists thoroughly schooled in apocalyptic Bolshevik notions” – felt that “nothing seemed more likely … than this outcome. Indeed, that the Allies would adopt such a ‘retrogression’ seemed intrinsic to capitalist imperialism. You have to understand that, during the war no nightmare seemed too dreadful to be real, and no horror seemed impossible” (A).

Moreover, the Retrogression Thesis “seemed to explain to explain the horrors of fascism in social terms, not merely as the outcome of insanity: Weber upheld the profoundly important Marxist claim that even the most gothic horrors were subject to analysis, to explanation, however fragile. He gave them a typical Marxian ‘objective basis,’ defining deindustrialization as the product of ‘social laws’” (A). Thus the Retrogression Thesis seemed to be “a rational breakthrough” that “made capitalist development and imperialism intelligible” (D). It seemed to explain the Second World War in a way that broke with Leninist and Trotskyist orthodoxy yet allowed a man like Murray to remain a revolutionary. In 1944 the Retrogression Thesis, Murray explained to Van der Linden,

In his “Prehistory” article, Van der Linden summarizes what he considers to be important features of Josef Weber’s thought, but curiously he gives no special emphasis to the Retrogression Thesis. On the contrary, he all but obscures it. But in fact the Thesis was the cardinal idea that attracted the group to Weber, as Murray told me in 2003, and as he had told Van der Linden in the 1990s. The “Capitalist Barbarism” article “was the theoretical rallying point around which the group came together – not only the New York group but those in London and South Africa as well” (D). But Van der Linden chose to ignore Murray’s information, and in his account the Thesis is so obscure as to be barely discernible.

In any case, anyone interested in elevating Weber’s intellectual reputation today has good reason to try to minimize the importance of the Retrogression Thesis. For in fact it was patently, blatantly, outrageously wrong. “It was absurd rubbish,” Murray told me. The victorious Allies abandoned the Morgenthau Plan as early as 1946 and then took the opposite path: they actually helped the defeated Axis powers redevelop their industrial and economic capacity. In 1947 the United States advanced the Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of Europe, including Germany. With that aid Europe recovered from the war in only a few years, then entered a period of unprecedented economic expansion. “Far from being reduced to a mere ‘agricultural hinterland,’ as Weber had predicted, Germany within five years was one of the most economically advanced countries in the world, and by midcentury it had become the Wirtschaftswunder, the ‘economic miracle’” (A). Moreover, instead of enslaving Japan, the United States imposed on the former empire a republican constitution. “The ultimate historical verdict on the Retrogression Thesis,” Murray told me, “is thus resoundingly negative. Absolutely nothing over the past half-century confirms a single one of Weber’s speculations and predictions” (A).

In 1948, a year after the Marshall Plan was instituted, Weber tried to rescue the Retrogression Thesis by writing a new article,(19) but it was no improvement, essentially restating the old argument but with a new cast of characters. As Murray summarized it for me: “Stalinist Russia would now ‘retrogress’ Europe – with the secret collaboration of the United States. The Cold War was a sham, a grand charade: the United States and Russia were deceiving the world into believing that they were irreconcilable enemies when in fact they were collaborators. Russia merely acted as America’s whip” (A).

In any form, Weber’s fantasy of a deindustrialized world was simply ludicrous. Yet Weber could not find it in himself to admit that he was wrong. “On the contrary,” Murray marveled to me, “in the face of all evidence of its absurdity, he continued to defend it for years. He kept referring to the Morgenthau Plan with a zealotry that beggars description, well into the 1950s. In the group, we CI-ers prudently stopped talking about the Retrogression Thesis, especially in Weber’s presence” (A). Finally in 1951 Murray and another CI-er, Leon Brownstein, decided to gently question Weber about the validity of the Thesis: “We approached him quite apprehensively and tactfully and asked him how the Retrogression Thesis could still be viable at a time when the European economy was booming, when new technologies were opening new prospects for economic development, and when, the Russian economy was teetering, Weber wagged his finger and said, ‘Wait! – you’ll see!’” (A).

The CI group, with the collapse of its mentor’s major theoretical premise, might well have fallen apart. But in fact the New York group continued to meet until the late 1950s. Even with the Thesis in debris, several factors kept it going. Murray was personally tied to Weber, he told me, by “a keen sense of solidarity and a personal allegiance. I had had useful experiences with the man. He had a great deal of personal charm, when he wanted to exercise it” (A). On some level, too, the group members wanted Weber to be the man whom they had originally taken him for. Murray confessed to “sheer blindness, my own as well as that of the rest of the group. The ideas Weber espoused existed in an imaginary world, and we CI-ers were blind to both reason and reality. At times I foolishly deferred to his opinions and biases even though I knew they were wrong. But he was, after all, twenty years my senior, and he unquestionably exploited the reverence that he received from us younger people” (A). And finally, in the prosperous, conformist 1950s, independent radicals like Murray had few political alternatives. “What remained of the Marxist Left was tiny, and it mostly clung to the old fantasies about the proletariat. … But the rest of us were trying to understand what Stalinism and fascism had wrought in the world. Weber gave us a venue to try to figure it out” (A).

The group members settled, then, for tiptoeing around their discredited mentor, and changed the subject. At group meetings they talked about the hydrogen bomb, atomic power (as nuclear power was then called), water fluoridation, colonial wars, and other topics. At this time Weber himself became a learner: “Weber actually took a great deal from us,” Murray told me (A). A new freedom of discussion entered the group: “Our discussions became ever more open, and Weber learned as much as he contributed. We moved along very much on our own, with or without his approval or theoretical insights” (A).

The fruits of some of these discussions were published in Contemporary Issues, which appeared for over a decade after 1948. In its pages we find Murray’s earliest published articles, as well as Weber’s writings after “Capitalist Barbarism,” and contributions by other members of the New York, London, and South African groups, many of them talented thinkers and writers in their own right.

Chemicals in Food

One of the new topics of discussion was the environment, especially soil erosion and deforestation; the members were particularly interested in the problem of chemicals in food: “The whole discussion on chemicals in food began when we read works by Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt, who warned about the dangers of expanding population on the environment. These two were neo-Malthusians, blaming the problem on population” (C).

Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (1948) was a cross-cultural critique of environmental mismanagement, sounding the alarm and raising a plea for conservation. William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948) made a similar critique and argued that population was surpassing the earth’s “carrying capacity.”(20) “Both books had a big impact on our CI circle,” Murray told me. Phil Macdougal, a CI member, reviewed Osborn’s book in the summer of 1948, in the third issue of Contemporary Issues. “The soil of the U.S. has been mined, not farmed, and its forest stripped far beyond the point where they might perpetuate themselves,” Macdougal wrote. “By far the major part of the American agronomy is parasitic in nature; that is to say, it flourishes by destroying the elements from which it gains sustenance.”(21)

Osborn and Vogt’s books fascinated Murray.

Agricultural Testament, published in 1940, had launched an entire movement in Britain to protest the use of toxic chemicals in food cultivation and turn to organic farming: “This book affected me profoundly, and I began to research the issue and all its ramifications (chemicals, etc.) in 1949–50” (C).

Through their discussions the group members educated Weber about environmental issues. So impressed was he by this new information that in his important 1950 article “The Great Utopia,” he devoted a paragraph to the subject:

This paragraph, maintaining as it does that capitalism and the profit motive are the cause of environmental abuses, might seem, to a researcher like Van der Linden, to be the fons et origo of ideas that Murray Bookchin would later call social ecology. Actually, Weber did little more here than restate Vogt, who despite his neo-Malthusianism had made an emphatic social analysis:

Even if Weber had failed to notice these passages, he would have learned about the issue by reading Macdougal’s review. Vogt, Macdougal noted, “shows how in North America a rapacious and expanding capitalism is well on the way to making useless – by time-honoured methods, justified by the need for profit – one of the wealthiest regions of the earth, the land of unlimited resources.”(24) In any case, by alluding to the “profit motive,” Weber added nothing that the group had not already discussed.

But let us return to “The Great Utopia.” In his next paragraph Weber took up the subject of chemicalized agriculture:

Again, the paragraph echoes one from Osborn:

Still, Osborn believed that chemicals could be used judiciously in agriculture, whereas Weber took a more extreme and rejectionist view. “Weber picked up on the idea that cancer was caused by chemicals in food,” Murray said (C), and inserted a footnote into “The Great Utopia” that read:

Murray regarded Weber’s view that chemicals in food were the exclusive cause of increased cancers and other diseases to be “embarrassing” and “an exaggeration.” One reason he wrote “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” he told me, was to lay out the issue more soberly (A). And sobriety was much needed, for Weber’s footnote continued by praising an outright quack:

In fact in his 1947 book The Art of Healing, Aschner expounds some remarkable views about the causes of cancer. (Curiously, he seems unaware that chemicals in food might be a problem.) For example, physical blows could be culprits: “I remember a particular case where a woman around forty was bitten by her lover in the breast and developed within less than a year a very malignant cancer.” Other possible causes are “premature removal of the womb.” Unaccountably, he alludes favorably to Paracelsus and a claim to cure cancer “by bleeding the haemorrhoidal veins with the lancet and by leeches.” Finally Aschner relates cancer susceptibility to personal appearance: “We know that cancer families are usually black-haired, and dark-complexioned individuals often belong to the biliary type,” in whom “the function of the bile … may produce chronic metabolic disturbances, inflammations, and new growths.” And he favorably cites “the great Viennese Professor Nothnagel,” who claimed “that cancer of the stomach may often be due to swallowing too hot food, and to artificial cooking fats.”(29) Murray recalled that Weber’s praise of Aschner caused “genuine consternation” among the CI group, because “Aschner was an obvious quack. His Art of Healing … was in tune with fads that stemmed out of the lunatic fringe of the day (A).

Meanwhile in the fall of 1950 Murray was closely following hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products. In the wake of a controversy over food-coloring additives, this U.S. congressional committee (also known as the Delaney Committee) had decided to conduct hearings into the safety of chemicals in food. Between September and December it investigated the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides (including parathion, DDT, and chlordane), hormones (DES), preservatives, flavoring and coloring agents, and processing agents (bleaches, diglycerides). The committee took testimony on the possible connection between these agents and the incidence of diseases, including cancer. A 1948 article by Harry Greene in Scientific American pointed out that synthetic chemicals may, over the long term, produce not merely local abnormality (caused by continual irritation of tissue) but a systemic or constitutional abnormality (cased by a disturbance of the organization of the cellular structure), potentially leading to tumors.(30)

In his long 1952 article “The Problem of Chemicals in Food” Murray recapitulated much of the Delaney Committee’s findings and speculated on the consequences of chemicals on human health. Like Vogt, Macdougal, and Weber, he identified the driving force behind the abuses: “The principal motives for chemicals in food arise from reasons of profit and industrial competition.” But Murray then broadened the issue into an ecological one, discussing the shift from small- to large-scale farming, and from quantity to quality of cultivation: “this meant that the land was to be exploited like any other resource under capitalism.” Industrial agriculture used chemicals to smooth out the irregularities and unpredictabilities of soil and climate: “Just as capitalist farming has ‘created’ an ‘average ‘agriculture, so it has created an ‘average’ farm worker,” the rural laborer and agricultural technician. Demands on the land are shaped “by the exigencies of profit and competition,” leading not only to the loss of topsoil and the destruction of forests and wildlife and not only to toxicity in food but to “the slow distortion of organic processes as a whole,” which raises “broad issues in ecology, chemistry, and physiology.” It disturbs “the whole cycle of nutrition, growth, organic development and the normal tempo of physical degeneration in the course of life.” The solution, Murray argued, lies in a radical social change: “In decentralization exists a real possibility for developing the beset traditions of social life and for solving agricultural and nutritional difficulties that have thus far been delivered to chemistry. Most of the food problems of the world would be solved to-day by well-balanced and rounded communities, intelligently urbanized, well equipped with industry and with easy access to the land.”(31)

Two years later, in “A Follow-up on the Problem of Chemicals in Food,” Murray wrote that the capitalist system, as well as the separation of town and country, must be overcome.

I asked Murray whether he got ecological ideas from Weber:

Nothing Weber wrote came close to the grand theoretical edifice that Murray began to construct in the 1960s, in the essays that make up Post Scarcity Anarchism, including the first manifesto of radical ecology, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought.” In these essays he initiated his critique of hierarchy and domination: proposed eco-technologies and anarchistic eco-communities; and explored “forms of freedom,” among many other things. Murray and Weber were working in the same context, the CI group. But the notion that he cribbed his best ideas from Weber, the author of a couple of paragraphs about chemicals and cancer, is absurd.

Murray explained much of this story to Van der Linden:

Sadly, Van der Linden chose not to convey Murray’s recollections of the issue to his readers.

A “Democracy of Content”

Before they began working together in 1948, Murray Bookchin and Josef Weber had both experienced at first hand the inexorable authoritarianism of Marxism-Leninism, in its Stalinist and anti-Stalinist versions. Weber had been expelled from the KPD; Murray had departed the YCL in disgust and then left the similarly tyrannical SWP. Both lapsing Trotskyists, who remained committed to revolution, understandably were keenly interested in one topic: the structure of a revolutionary movement. Both men understood that top-down structures and party elites must be avoided. Both men were looking at alternatives, which inevitably would be along democratic and even libertarian lines. As Murray explained to Van der Linden:

To his credit, then, Weber embraced the concept of democracy. As I’ve mentioned, the formal name that he gave to his several groups was “Movement for a Democracy of Content.”(33) Now, the formulation “democracy of content” is rather ambiguous: after all, democracy is by definition not a matter of content; it is in the last instance a set of rules to ensure equitable and fair popular rule. Democracy, ideally, vests power in the people (as opposed to rulers), such that each citizen has an equal voice, and none has more weight than others. The content of the issues upon which they deliberate and decide is beside the point. As we normally think of it, democracy is a matter of form and specifically not of content.

What, then, did Weber mean by this formulation? The explanation appears in the lead editorials published in the first few issues of Contemporary Issues. A democracy of content, we read on page one of issue number one, is “sharply differentiated from hitherto existing purely political or formal democracy.” An unusual proposition indeed. Its aim is “the creation of a world organisation for a democracy of content,” but it “is not to appear as a finished organisation but to arise under public control.” But how is the “public” to “control” an unfinished organization that lacks “political or formal democracy”?

The editorial continues:

In this revealing paragraph, the statement of democratic purpose gradually shades into a statement of the magazine’s editorial content. Contemporary Issues itself is the Movement for a Democracy of Content. Indeed, by virtue of it being published in two languages, English and German, “the first concrete steps toward internationalizing the bonds of this projected world organization have been achieved.” Apparently Weber envisioned the magazine itself as the center of the “world organisation.”

Later editorials confirm this impression that the magazine has become the organization. In the process of public control, “the writer is at all times responsible for his conduct and ideas to the public, and the reader is responsible for criticism and other ideational intervention: that is, writers and readers interchange through a profound and thorough dialogue.” The magazine wants to avoid becoming “one which will again deteriorate into a leadership-apparatus and deceived members.” Instead it “will seek to investigate and mirror the interests of the whole public.” The magazine wishes to “interrogate ‘officials’ and ‘bodies’ in the interests of responsible accounting to the public.’” The public is invited to “send in articles, reports, documents, newspaper extracts, etc.”(35)

And the magazine did publish numerous articles that took public officials to task on various issues, and raised new ones; it published letters from readers and responded to them. In that sense it fulfilled its rather limited goal. But what about the world outside the magazine? Was it to be associated with any larger political movement? If so, what would be its structure?

Libertarianism and Party

In “The Great Utopia” Weber addressed the question of the organizational structure of a revolutionary movement. The movement was to be “directed at the effective alteration of existing relationships.” It would “not invest any money in property, mortgages, and undertakings; it must own no offices, houses, presses, in short, no apparatus whatever and no appointed bureaucracy.” It must make no “material distinction between ‘leaders’ and members.” Indeed, it must have no structure at all: no “organization statute,” no bylaws. “In this way the democratic movement achieves a relation to all things which is determined purely by content” and “combats formalism and schematism.” To maintain “complete transparency,” it sheds all barriers between itself and the people and seeks to be “directly connected” to the masses.(36)

One of Van der Linden’s implications is that the roots of Murray Bookchin’s anarchism lie here, in these lines. And indeed, the description of structurelessness certainly has a libertarian tinge. Weber seems to have wanted above all to avoid not only elites and tyranny but bureaucracy. His “new ‘party’ was to have no bureaucracy,” Murray told me, “but then it would also have no other structure either. All apparatuses are by definition ‘bureaucratic’ in his eyes: constitutions, bylaws, programs, factions, requirements for disciplined behavior” (A). Was “The Great Utopia,” then, an anarchist manifesto? As Murray told Jacob Suhl: “‘The Great Utopia,’ apart from its party orientation, reaffirms a lot of antibureaucratic anarchist organizational theory without giving acknowledgment to the anarchists” (B).

On the other hand, “The Great Utopia” did call for a party, which is not an anarchist concept at all: aspects of the article “were focused on a party‑type organization, of which my reading about anarchism in books on the history of socialism had made me very wary. Thus, although the work was brilliantly written, it was at cross purposes with itself” (B). Decades later, in the 1980s, the German Greens would use the phrase “nonparty party” to describe their organization; the same phrase might be seen as appropriate for Weber’s ideas. But “nonparty party” is not an anarchist concept: “Nor do I feel,” Murray told Van der Linden, “that what could be called a ‘nonparty party’ or ‘anti-party party’ means more than what the German Greens created – with disastrous results as we can see today from an anarchist perspective” (D).

And in fact, Weber was not really an anarchist at all. Two years after writing “The Great Utopia,” he began working with the German People’s Party (GVP). That is not the behavior of an anarchist. Founded in 1952, the GVP’s programmatic centerpiece was a rejection of German rearmament. Weber made two trips to West Germany, in 1952 and 1954, to mobilize support for the GVP.

Murray is referring here to Gustav Heinemann, the GVP’s principal figure, who would actually leave the party in 1957 to join the Social Democrats and who later became West German interior minister and then president.

I asked Murray whether he learned about anarchism, or at least about libertarian ideas, from Weber. He denied it but also acknowledged that “as a libertarian socialist, he influenced my transition from Marxism to anarchism.

This statement accords with other statements Murray made on the subject. “I can honestly say that he influenced my whole transition from socialism to anarchism,” he told interviewer Peter Einarsson in 1984 (E). And in a letter to Van der Linden, Murray said that Weber “did not ‘make’ me into an anarchist because he was not one himself, although his ‘The Great Utopia’ helped reinforce my emerging inclination to become one. … He greatly reinforced my drift toward a more libertarian theory of social development and social change” (D).

But as Murray also told Einarsson, Weber did not go as far along that path as Murray did.

In 1970, while writing the introduction to Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray chose to quote twice from “The Great Utopia,” on the subject of libertarian movement organization.

These passages do much to account for the book’s dedication to Weber. As Murray explained to Van der Linden, “I felt more than justified, especially since I regarded Weber as a revolutionary …, in dedicating Post-Scarcity Anarchism to his memory and claiming that he provided the ‘outlines’ for a future ‘utopia.’ Indeed, he had written about a ‘Great Utopia’ at a time when utopian thinking was not in the air” (D). Clearly Murray had decided to honor this transitional figure with whom he had traveled for part of his journey.

The promise of the Movement for a Democracy of Content was thus subsumed into the publication of a periodical, Contemporary Issues. By addressing issues of concern to the general public, CI did perform a valuable service, but it was nothing more than what any other leftist or even liberal periodical might have done. And by publishing and responding to letters from readers, it did what any general-interest magazine did and does. The fact is, the question of democracy is inextricably a question of form, at least as much as content. And this question remained unfulfilled, at least for a few years, till finally one CI member came up with a new proposal, which I will take up presently.

Post-Scarcity

In the meantime, the 1950s were a time of great prosperity and galloping technological innovation, especially in automation. The subject was commonly discussed even in the mainstream: in 1955 congressional hearings were held on “Automation and Technological Change.”(38) To the CI-ers, the new technological innovations were welcome, for they seemed poised to eliminate the necessity of toil, and to relegate concern for hand-to-mouth survival to the past; people could now potentially be free to live creatively and to take charge of their own social destinies. In the 1960s Murray would call this concept “post-scarcity.” Van der Linden implies that Murray learned it from Weber.

After all, Weber began “The Great Utopia” by invoking ancient dreams of utopia: “for thousands of years [humanity] has yearned for a paradise from which it feels itself expelled and to which it wishes to return.” But material scarcity prevented the fulfillment of such dreams: “All endeavour had to remain fantasy and Utopia, the problem of humanity could, in the final analysis, find merely a temporary regulation ‘in evil’ as long as it was not possible to produce sufficient goods for the satisfaction of even the most urgent needs of everybody.”(39) The creation of a free society had definite material prerequisites; the 1950s suggested that Western societies had reached the point of material sufficiency to fulfill the ancient dream of paradise.

Murray, for his part, wrote in 1955: “For the first time in history, technology has advanced to a point where it can supply abundance for all. Humanity can now turn the means it has at hand to the service of a rational society, to a society based on use instead of profit, on co-operation instead of competition, on reason instead of demoniacal blindness. …We have only to release these enormous material forces, which are being distorted by our present-day social relations into military production, coercion and now the hydrogen bomb.”(40)

Despite the contemporaneity of the issue, the “post-scarcity” notion is Marxist in origin. As Murray told me:

So the idea did not come from Weber? I pressed him.

To his credit, Weber himself made no claim that the idea was original: elaborating this idea, he wrote, had been “the great merit of the much-maligned Marx and Engels.”(41)

Murray had clarified this issue for Van der Linden in a letter to him.

Again Van der Linden chose not to share this information with his readers

As with the issue of libertarian organization, Weber’s interest in the subject of material sufficiency likely reinforced Murray’s own interest in it. But what is more interesting is how their shared interest in the subject played out – for they interpreted the issue in quite different ways. Weber emphasized that achieving the right material conditions was adequate to solve the social question: “as long as the material pre-requisites for a higher social organization have not been destroyed, there is nothing in principle to obstruct the solution to the social question with which all controversies are concerned.”(42) Murray disagreed, saying that post-scarcity had cultural preconditions as well as material ones.

In 1954 Weber decided the time had come for him to embark on a new project: he would write a “world plan.” He asked his protégé Murray to collaborate with him by doing some research – quite a bit of research, in fact.

Murray loyally accepted the assignment. But during the nine months he spent on it, he became increasingly unhappy: “After working almost a year I became deeply disillusioned with Weber’s work and realized I was wasting my time and resources on a crank project” (A). He realized its conclusion was trite: “All my work proved nothing more than the well-established fact that American capitalism, in the form of the U.S. government, produced ample resources to make the country’s population prosperous. Everyone knew that already” (A).

The thankless task reinforced Murray’s own view that a rational society had cultural as well as material preconditions.

In general, Weber was more of a materialist than Murray was, as Murray explained to Van der Linden: “Philosophically, we were surprisingly at odds with each other about ‘materialism.’ … [Weber] thought Lenin’s Empirio-Criticism and Materialism was the ‘greatest work ever written in philosophy” (D). As Murray told me, “If anything, Weber tended to give the concept a mechanistic form. He held to the rather simplistic illusion that ‘all we have to do is show that there is enough to go around’; then everyone will recognize that fact and abolish capitalism and replace it with ‘utopia,’ whatever Weber might have understood by this word” (A).

So Murray stopped working on it, but “before I abandoned the ‘World Plan’ project, I wrote an introduction that contained a critique of the materialistic premise” (A). Weber objected to the introduction, but by that time Murray and Weber were bitterly estranged personally over other issues: “He denounced the introduction as ‘useless’ and forcefully opposed its publication in CI” (A). After Weber’s death, however, the piece was published in Contemporary Issues – attributed to Weber.

In his 1996 letter Murray told Marcel Van der Linden about this episode and specifically informed him that he himself was the author of the “World Plan” introduction:

Yet in his 2001 article Van der Linden not only failed to apprise his readers of Murray’s claim to authorship; he proceeded to quote from “The World Plan” twice as if it were Weber’s own work. He did not even provide a footnote noting Murray’s authorship. In this connection Van der Linden appears to have behaved rather disingenuously (A).

Careful readers will discern that if those passages in Van der Linden’s article sound a lot like Murray, it is because Murray wrote them. In fact, the “World Plan” introduction is unmistakably Murray’s, not only because its references to environmental issues are well-informed, but also because the piece reflects Murray’s point of view. In contrast to Weber’s outlook, it is steeped in ethical and cultural considerations as well as material ones: “a rich flora of variegated social life,” encompassing “quality production and creative activity,” “genuine personal intercourse,” “the easy interchange of occupations,” “free deliberation by all the people of small communities,” “the preservation of our resources, the repair of the damage done, the restoration of healthful conditions of life” are all necessary, says “A World Plan,” to a post-scarcity society. (44) These passages corroborate the authenticity of Murray’s claim.

Polis Democracy

During the mid-1950s Weber’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He despaired at the failure of the Retrogression Thesis. He could write little more than fragments or scattershot pieces. His already-poor health deteriorated. He designated Murray his “heir,” then withdrew the title. He and Murray quarreled, over materialism and other issues. Still Murray, who was deeply loyal to people he cared about, desperately sought to preserve his intellectual relationship with his beloved mentor and indeed to infuse new life into it.

He tried to get Weber interested in new ideas. As it happened, Murray had been reading about the ancient Athenian polis and realized that the face-to-face democratic institutions were an important contribution to the problem of democratic form. Indeed, face-to-face democracy could be both the structure of a revolutionary movement and the form of a new society – a “form of freedom,” as Murray would later call it. Murray was eager to share this insight with his fragile, irascible, ailing mentor: “I had given him H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks to read, and Edith Hamilton’s The Greeks, and had pressed my increasingly anarchic views upon him … as pru­dently as I could” (B). Murray wrote an article on the subject, called “The Limits of the City,” which he submitted to CI. And he gave Weber more books on the subject of polis democracy.

In 1998 Murray described this interaction to Van der Linden:

Nonetheless, in his 2001 article Van der Linden implies that Murray got his ideas about the face-to-face democracy from Weber. (Again, he neglects even to note that Murray had provided him with a far different view.) To document his claim, and to portray Weber as an advocate of face-to-face democracy as the foundation for a new movement, Van der Linden quotes a passage from one of Weber’s articles:

The quoted sentences certainly sound like they come from a strong affirmation, perhaps even from some major theoretical article. But in fact “The Campaign Against Remilitarization in Germany”(46) is actually less a sober article than a self-indulgent rant against various critics, real or imagined; Weber vents his spleen against them in colorful, sarcastic, and even vituperative language. Sadly, since most readers’ access to Contemporary Issues is limited, I must devote some space here to describing this remarkable piece.

A few pages before the lines that Van der Linden quotes, Weber is replying mockingly to a letter from one Dr. Alfred M. Franzke, who represents something called the League for German Emigration. Weber describes his correspondent, Frankze, this way:

In replying to the “court jester” Weber sarcastically and incoherently alludes to such things as “emigrant German, the rules of which are not yet fixed”; “the Misters Talmudists Schwartz, Wolf”; “the offspring of the Boer Swart and the two arch Teutons, Wolf and Fischer”; “a Janizary from gruesome Turkey”; a “counter-love-epistle”; and a belief that “Uncle Joe has in reality no greater worry than to help the Trojan hero (Harry the Great) to bring Western German remilitarization safely home” (p. 205). Weber quotes a few more lines from Franzke, then says:

Amid this farrago Weber makes remarks about polis democracy, the ones that Marcel Van der Linden quotes in order to insinuate that Weber was a serious theorist of face-to-face democracy. Such discourse is not sober, responsible theorizing. It is mere rambling. Indeed, Weber’s very attitude toward the polis is far from clear: Van der Linden does not tell us that Weber also expresses a rather elitist attitude toward face-to-face democracy: he is ambivalent about the participation of people who are unschooled in politics, people he calls “dilettantes.”

He seems almost to be belittling it, and he appears genuinely appalled by the fact that it would allow for “dilettantism” – hardly a libertarian point of view, and contrary to the transparency he advocated six years earlier in “The Great Utopia.”

The article is so drenched in vituperative sarcasm on obscure, forgotten topics that it is almost unreadable today. Amid the spleen-venting, it remains unclear why Weber inserted lines about the polis at all. Surely his enthusiastic young protégé Murray was excited about what he’d read in Kitto and Zimmern and had been urging Weber to write about it; Weber (whose own theories lay in ruins) appears to have agreed in a half-hearted, slapdash way. “The Campaign Against Remilitarization” was the result. The cycle came to its perfect conclusion when, in the year 2001, Van der Linden insinuated that Murray had learned about the polis from Weber, when actually the opposite was true.

For the rest of his life Murray developed his ideas about face-to-face democracy into a major pillar of his political theorizing. (And he would always qualify his allusions to ancient Athens by rejecting the Athenian exclusion of women from polis democracy, as well as the city’s reliance on slavery.) In the 1950s it was Murray’s idea, not Weber’s, to bring that subject into the discourse of the Left.

The Relationship Ends

By the mid-1950s Weber was entering his final decline. He became ever more vain and demanding. He refused to publish Murray’s articles, including “The Limits of the City,” Murray’s article on the democratic polis.(47) Another casualty was Murray’s brilliantly dialectical paper “The Decline of the Proletariat” – again, Weber refused to publish it in CI, and it exists only in manuscript form. He attacked Murray “venomously” (C). (In a letter of 1959 he would insult Murray as one of the despised “dilettanti.”(48)) He betrayed Murray personally. Finally it was all too much for Murray, who ended their relationship. Weber left New York for Germany in 1957, where he died of a heart attack two years later.

Clearly, as Weber declined, his worst came out. But Weber’s worst remains to be told. Back in 1948 Weber had written on the subject of the Holocaust in terms that can only be described as relativizing. Certainly the German mass murder of Jews and Gypsies was, he says, a “monstrosity.” But they were murdered not “as such on account of their race or nationality”; rather, the cause was the capitalist system (of which German fascism was merely a late stage), which was so irrational that it even killed a valuable work force under conditions of wartime. It was thus not bigotry but irrational economics that underlay the Holocaust. In this remarkable discussion, Weber went on to note instances of racial persecution by peoples other than Germans: the United States, for example, was guilty of “lynch justice” against African Americans, and American universities imposed quotas on Jewish admission. Germans were thus not the only people to be guilty of anti-Semitism: and “anti-semitism [existed] in general and pogroms [took place] against Jews outside of Germany.”

Above all, the Soviet Union was guilty of crimes against Jews, including pogroms. The “death-rate among Stalin’s slaves,” Weber points out, was “as high as 30 percent”; in 1939 Stalin had sent half a million Polish Jews to Siberia, where they died of privation and overwork. Weber, who a few lines earlier denied that Germany killed Jews “on account of their race or nationality,” now complains that Stalin’s Russia persecuted Germans “on account of their German descent.” And Germans continued even now to be victims of persecution – witness “the present expulsion of Germans (as such!),” apparently from Hungary. And the Nazis killed only four million Jews, he wrote, not six million. Weber continued relativizing the Holocaust in this vein for a few more sentences.(49)

The rest of the story is highly sensitive, so I will let Murray recount it in his own words.

At one point in his 2001 article, Van der Linden notes a resemblance between certain ideas of Weber and those of “later authors” who aimed “to exonerate the crimes of the Hitler regime.”(50) Perhaps the resemblance is closer than Van der Linden suspected.

Advancing the Revolutionary Project

To summarize: While Josef Weber had a strong influence on Murray Bookchin, the nature of that influence was not what Van der Linden insinuates. Murray did not derive his rejection of workerism from Weber: the proletariat’s failure to revolt was by 1945 a commonplace of Trotskyism. As for the idea of post-scarcity, Weber and Murray shared a particular interest in this old Marxist idea, but they strongly disagreed on how to interpret it. Nor did Murray learn about ecology from Weber: other CI members were talking about environmental issues before either of them did, and even the U.S. Congress was holding hearings on the subject of chemicals in food in 1950, the year Weber wrote his article. Nor did Murray learn about anarchism from Weber, who was not an anarchist. As for polis democracy, Murray clearly educated Weber about that subject. As Murray wrote to Suhl, “He said nothing about the polis, the environment, or anarchism that I did not hand to him on a silver platter in our endless discussions” (B).

In a diary he kept in the early 1990s Murray wrote twice of Weber:

But the reasons for the dedication are nonetheless easy to fathom: he wished to pay tribute to the man who had reinforced his transition from Marxism-Leninism to the libertarian Left, a man whom he had once respected and even loved (despite his anti-Semitism) as a surrogate father. His constructive relationship with Weber did not last long, but for as long as it did, it was a crucial personal experience.

During 1947–56 Murray and Weber, in the wake of the Trotskyist failure, were collaboratively in the process of following Trotsky’s injunction to “rethink” Marxism-Leninism. Both took it seriously; both were sorting through the legacy, deciding what to preserve and build on to advance the revolutionary project, and what to dispense with. For a time, by virtue of their collaboration, they traveled some distance together on the road from Marxism-Leninism to the libertarian left.

Here is how Murray explained the relationship to Van der Linden:

Weber did not teach Murray about anarchism or ecology, or post-scarcity, but by showing interest in the subjects, he reinforced Murray’s interest in them. For example, Weber clearly reinforced Murray’s interest in post-scarcity.

As for anarchism, Weber reinforced Murray in their common transition from Marxism-Leninism toward something more or less libertarian.

In my view Weber did, however, transmit a positive body of knowledge to Murray and in that sense did actively mentor him: he taught his protégé about the German socialist tradition (which would fascinate Murray for the rest of his life), and he introduced him to the ideas of the Frankfurt School (which would greatly influence Murray’s thinking in The Ecology of Freedom). But I will explore that positive legacy elsewhere.(52)

In the end Murray himself regarded Weber as a transitional figure.

Sadly, again, Van der Linden did not choose share these remarks with readers of his “Prehistory” article.

As the reader will have realized, Van der Linden was in receipt of several letters from Murray, in which Murray carefully and painstakingly clarified his complex relationship with Weber. Van der Linden could have used these letters to write a responsible and illuminating account, to attempt to reconstruct the Bookchin-Weber relationship. Unfortunately, he neglected to tell Murray’s side of the story and thereby did a disservice to his readers. Implication and suggestion are no substitute for elucidation. Josef Weber may have been original in developing the Retrogression Thesis, but originality is of little interest if one is quite simply wrong (let alone bigoted). By contrast, the writings of Weber’s protégé are not only remarkably original but a lasting contribution to the history of social theory.

Murray’s aim, throughout his life, was not to call attention to himself, or to come up with some new theory for its own sake, or to advance his “career.” On the contrary, his goal, always, originating in his early childhood, was to advance the revolutionary project that he served with unwavering devotion up until he last drew breath. That project had been developing for over a century, but by the 1940s it had greatly exhausted itself. Committed to building on this project – the creation of the forebears whom he revered – Murray found ways to preserve what was worth preserving within it but also to introduce new ideas that could reinvigorate it. He thereby carried the revolutionary project forward into a new era, on new terms that would offer inspiration, guidance, and hope to new generations of social radicals.

Leaving behind Weber’s notions of libertarian “anti-party party,” Murray would go on in the 1960s to embrace and reinvent anarchism, with its “concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized society.” Characterized by spontaneity, diversity, and complexity, he would write, anarchism was the appropriate and even necessary political ideology for the age of ecology. Moreover, as “both men and nature have always been the common victims of hierarchical society,” an ecological anarchism promised to liberate oppressed humanity even as it rescued the natural world from destruction. Leaving behind Weber’s notions of a “democracy of content,” Murray would go on to develop complex ideas about “forms of freedom.” Face-to-face democracy would become, for him, both the structure of the revolutionary movement and the structure of a rational society.(53)

Leaving behind discussions of the workers as agents of revolution, Murray in the 1960s would go on to call for “the liberation of daily life.” Leaving behind the Weber-esque concept of materialistic abundance as all but sufficient for a post-scarcity society, he would develop post-scarcity as “the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance.” Leaving behind discussions of agricultural despoliation, Murray would go on to write that “bourgeois exploitation and manipulation are undermining the very capacity of the earth to sustain advanced forms of life” by “simplifying” the environment and “undoing the work of organic evolution.” Capitalism, he would write, “is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life.” As we enter the “age of ecology,” the decentralized, agriculturally sensitive “ecocommunity” should become the basic communal unit of social life, he would argue, as he advanced ideas of ecotechnologies and renewable energy.(54)

A close study of the work of Josef Weber reveals, more than anything, how innovative Murray Bookchin actually was. The stunning synthesis of Post-Scarcity Anarchism was something that only a genuinely original mind, earnestly serving the project of his forebears, could have achieved.

33.) Murray disliked the name; he told me that he would have preferred “Movement for a Rational Society.”