The threads that connect Murray Bookchin to Death Stranding

 

 Over the past week or so, I've been reading The Next Revolution (NR), a collection of essays by Murray Bookchin, and talking to a friend whose been playing the 2019 game Death Stranding (DS). I enjoyed my time with the game when I played through it just over a year ago, and aside from some notes, I'm enjoying the read of NR. Since both are on my I've noticed some parallels and threads or strands if you will connecting the two.

 A quick summary, DS is a game set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event where humanity is reduced to a scattering of small settlements ranging from tiny one or two person shelters to cities that are roughly a few blocks in size with a central depot and maybe a dock. You play Sam the courier and guide him on his journey, exploring the land and delivering packages.

Murray Bookchin was a lifelong revolutionary theorist committed to answering the question of how to overcome capitalism and build a better society in its place. Bookchin went through many schools of thought, from Marxism to Anarchism to a new idea he sometimes called Libertarian Municipalism/Communalism or Ecological Communalism. But throughout his journey, his commitment to centreing ecological questions remained constant. If you were on social media in 2016-19, you may remember the meme "Google Murray Bookchin!" that was indeed about the same man.

The world of DS is one where renewable power is omnipresent and recycling of material is the driver of manufacturing, but that's not quite what I have in mind when I think of the parallels between the two works. What caught my mind is Bookchin's arguments in favour of a confederation of communes to replace capitalist and state society. A common argument against alternatives to capitalism concerns the impossibility of such a society working in practice. How can disparate communities get along and work out common problems or share without some outside authority to compel them to do so? A common response has been to stress self-sufficiency of each collective or commune, in which case it just isn't rational to fight and squabble as it won't lead to any benefits but will still require many costs in time, energy and resources. If a system of self-sufficient societies is feasible, then I suppose that would be an answer, personally I don't think it is possible to achieve a system where every single community is self-sufficient in every detail, but assuming it is possible I think that's a strong incentive for isolation and extreme localism. Bookchin is also sceptical of such a possibility, his answer is rooted in that co-dependency of communities. In this Communalist alternative, Communes will Federate or Confederate together for mutual need and benefit.

 A crucial element in giving reality to confederalism is the interdependence of communities for an authentic mutualism based on shared resources, production, and policymaking. If one community is not obliged to count on another or others generally to satisfy important material needs and realize common political goals in such a way that it is interlinked to a greater whole, exclusivity and parochialism are genuine possibilities. Only insofar as we recognize that confederation must be conceived as an extension of a form of participatory administration—by means of confederal networks—can decentralization and localism prevent the communities that compose larger bodies of association from withdrawing into themselves at the expense of wider areas of human consociation.
Essay 4: The Meaning of Confederalism

In short, this society will work together because its material needs compel it and its material structure is the most rational way of fulfilling those compulsions. 

In Death Stranding, a version of this social structure plays out. The scattered outposts of humanity seem to be sufficient alone for the bare necessities of survival and existence, but they all lack in specific equipment, resources and the things that make life fulfilling. Sam the main character is a courier and in this society it is the courier's role to take needed supplies from those who have, to those who need. In return, the people Sam helps give him more tools and resources to improve his work and survival in the wilderness and agree to actively participate in a network of exchange and support with the other settlements by joining the Chiral network (I'll explain what that is later). It's mutual assistance for collective benefit, they all prosper the more their dependence and connections with each other deepens and the network eventually grows from one isolated corner to a vast region. Some people will join up relatively quickly in gratitude for Sam's efforts and the benefits that collaboration brings, but others take more convincing or in another way negotiation through deeds.

To take one example, the character Elder, an old man who lives alone on top of a hill. He has needs that can't be provided at his camp, but he is wary of joining the network that Sam is recruiting for, so he is reluctant to sign up, he co-operates with Sam to an extent and is eventually won over by the delivery of medicine and other positive experiences and the potential benefits joining gives him. In return, he produces unique equipment and resources for Sam.

If Sam fails to deliver medication in time, Elder will die and the benefits of his joining will be denied to you.

 

 This communal interdependence being the groundwork of social interactions based on collaboration is also reinforced by the multiplayer aspects. While playing the game, other players can interact with you in the game world. This can just be emoting to each other, trading (exchange of materials) gifting items, or working collaboratively to make traversing the extremely hostile terrain more manageable and fun. 

One example stands out in my mind. To make travelling the vast distances of the world and its rivers, crevices and jagged rocks more manageable, there is a road network. However, it hasn't been built yet, that's your job should you choose to do it. There is a network of 3d printers that with enough material will build the road in sections. 

The world of DS is harsh and difficult, especially when balancing kilos of equipment and material on your back. So a road that is smooth and level is an obvious advantage, but the resources required is a barrier, especially in the early game. I spent a long while scrapping together the resources needed for the first part of the road. I still remember how my elation at seeing the printer conjure up a road deflated once I saw just how little of the road it had constructed and how big the map was. Building that on my own would be time-consuming and not fun. So, I gave up on it and focused on my missions and hauling cargo over rocks and streams, dodging scavengers. 

While I was doing that, three other players popped into my world and pooled enough resources to build enough of the road to connect the first sub-region of the world. This drastically cut down my travel time, and made it safer, and more enjoyable as I could now ride my three wheeled back or boxy truck without worrying about hitting a ditch. It even charged my vehicles' battery, boosting its range when I had to go off the grid. It's also when the multiplayer and the message of DS clicked for me. Having understood the message and mechanics of the game, working for everyone benefits everyone, I found more enjoyment in the game and made sure to put any surplus material into other road building nodes or storage boxes. This is just one example of many I could give, ranging from sheltering from a snow storm to placing ladders to help others cross rivers.

The Stranding.
Borders, countries, governments—it’s all bullshit. Least that’s how it was, and maybe always will be, but…if you really believe that there chiral network of yours can bring people together, no matter what walls stand between ‘em, then spread it all over. But you damn well better make sure that you do right by each and every American—only then can you ask them to do right by the UCA. That’s the social contract, and don’t you ever forget it.
I’m taking a chance on you, Bridges, not because I believe in you and yours, but because I want to. Don’t let me down again.
Email from Elder

It's not however a perfect depiction of Bookchin's new society. The Chiral network is not a representation of an egalitarian confederation of like-minded communities, it's run by the remnants of the United States Government, and they've tasked Sam with expanding it as part of a plan to "rebuild America". This rump USA is the central node and foundation of the network of settlements. The disparity between the cities which are the main production hubs and the smaller settlements is also a divergence. Bookchin unlike some ecological thinkers believes cities have their place, albeit in a very different organisational structure and much smaller than cities in our present world. A Communalist Death Stranding would drop the USA as a relic and instead of a few cities and dozens of one and two person shelters would restructure it to say a dozen communities of similar size. Perhaps retaining a handful of the isolated one or two person shelters as a contrast and representation of the dangers of refusing to adapt.

"War is the Health of the State" (1918) by Randolph Bourne

 

 

"War is the Health of the State"
(1918)

by Randolph Bourne

War is the health of the State.

It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them to really converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion, bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values, culminated at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced trough any other agency than war. Other values such artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

War - or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy - seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and labour. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation of nature would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defence, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of "democracy", it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort.

For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the education of man and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and beauty in the nation's communal living, are alien to our traditional ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant, throughout all history - war.

There is nothing invidious in the use of the term "herd", in connection with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer to first principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of which we all live, move and have our being. Ethnologists are generally agreed that human society made its first appearance as the human pack and not as a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in fact the original unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal individuality develop. All the most primitive surviving types of men are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social organization where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes remain strictly organized herds; and the difference between them and the modern State is one of degree of sophistication and variety of organization, and not of kind.

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together, and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war. Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defence, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behaviour, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realm and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding of the conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc.

For just as in modern societies the sex-instinct is enormously over-supplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the gregarious impulse is enormously over-supplied for the work of protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of others, to be able to co-operate with them, and to feel a slight malaise at solitude. Unfortunately however, this impulse is not content with these reasonable and healthful demands; but insists that like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life. So that all human progress, all novelty, and non-conformity, must be carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority. Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows little sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself even more fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you are out of the crowd. While even if you do not get any access of power by thinking and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection. Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual - the pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience - this gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it to the highest possible degree, sending the influences of its mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little group that can possibly be affected. An it is these impulses which the State - the organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity - is founded on and makes use of.

There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial mysticism. This sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one's desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feeling of protection. It is not for nothing that one's State is still thought of as Fatherland or Motherland, that one's relation towards it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posts of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war services, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx of power. On most people the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the most convenient of symbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants of society, or something greater than they - the State. The man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in the war management industrial services in Washington does not apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically, what a transformation has occurred! His is now not only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his industrial prerogative and sense of command.

From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be pragmatic sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honour, in the traditional acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour of suicide, as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this very craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined attack in your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol of your definite action and ideas.