75
THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DESIRE
not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the
world a more human dwelling place.”9 Baldwin displayed a unique ability to
seamlessly integrate hemes of creativity and empathy within he political
project, elaborating a new sensual-political sensibility hat was to unfold
throughout he course of he decade.
A focus on the qualitative dimensions of social transformation can also
be found in the writings of Murray Bookchin. Whereas an explicit anarchism in
the U.S. had been eclipsed by socialist movements of he pre-war period,
anarchist thought was reintroduced in Bookchin’s canonical work, Post-Scarcity
Anarchism .10
Written during the late sixties, the essays in Post-Scarcity
heralded the potential for what Bookchin called a “social libido,” a radical
integration of reason and passion that he hoped would be fulfilled within the
new social movements. While Bookchin emphasized the need to overcome
material necessity,
he also
asserted
the importance
of expanding
the
revolutionary horizon to encompass qualitative concerns as well:
... the revolution can no longer be imprisoned in the realm of Need. It
can no longer be satisfied merely with the prose of political economy.
The task of the Marxian critique has been completed and must be
transcended. The subject has entered the revolutionary project with
entirely
new
demands
for
experience,
for
re-integration,
for
fulfillment, for the merveilleux [marvelous]}1
What we see in Bookchin’s early writings is an attention to the qualitative and
subjective dimensions of he revolution, dimensions that could not be
accounted for by Marxist-based theories that dissolved the individual into
essentialist categories of history of society. As Bookchin states so passionately,
“A revolution that fails to achieve a liberation of daily life is counterrevolution.
The self must always be identifiable in the revolution, not overwhelmed by
it.”12 For Bookchin, questions of desire and need constitute a complementary
matrix through which to reconstruct society as a whole: while countering the
fabricated scarcity of the post-war period by constructing social and political
counter-institutions
(institutions
and
practices
such
as
decentralized
participatory democracy, municipal economics, and ecological technologies),
revolutionaries must infuse these new cooperative and decentralized structures
with creativity and sensuality—a vitality hat he recognized within he “social
libido” of he new social movements.
During he same period, in Europe, a similar sensibility emerged,
culminating in the May 1968 revolt in Paris. In 1957, inspired by earlier
aesthetic movements such as he Symbolist, Dadaist, and Surrealist movements,
a group of avant-garde artists and. writers from across Europe formed the
Situationists International (SI). While situationist writer Guy Debord called for