From the Ground Up: Essays on Grassroots and Workplace Democracy

Gary Clarkson is a history lecturer at the University of Windsor and a
book reviewer for the Windsor Star.

This selection of essays by political writer and activist C. George
Benello reveals the general confusion in politics, which has become so
acute as to make political discourse part of the problem of and not the
solution to what the ancients called “the public thing.”

Benello is an anarchist who insists that “the political must become
the personal.” He holds that the form of organization is critically
related to the quality of life that the organization produces. The
individual and, notably, the leaders of a society receive almost no
attention in Benello’s socialistic, anti-historical approach. Thus, we
have the paradox of a man who, as an anarchist, values human nature by
denying the necessity and significance of leadership in society.

Claiming to scorn abstraction and insisting that practical organization
is his forte, the author nonetheless displays a sterile, pedantic, and
obfuscating academic style. What, for instance, does this mean:
“freedom is the progressive capacity to master both the inner
determination of biology and early history and the outer determination
of conformism and socialization to a limited and culture-bound
society”? Benello is not, of course, the first to becloud the nature
of human freedom by attempting a final or specific definition of
it—but that he would attempt to box in what is ultimately mystical is
chilling.

The book concludes with critiques by people familiar with Benello’s
ideas. The best of these is by Harry Boyte, who attempts to put Benello
in the context of a public philosophy. Boyte’s remarks are damning.

As if to corroborate Benello’s anti-historical approach, the reader
is given almost no biographical information on him. We are told little
more than that he produced programs for a radio station in the San
Francisco Bay area, and that his death in 1987 was “untimely.”
Unfortunately, his political notions are untimely too. With certain
qualifications, his philosophy is that of a proletarian
Trudeau—literate but without point. In any case, Benello gets us no
closer to understanding what we must understand in order to survive: the
fundamental nature of politics. It’s as important as the fundamental
nature of matter.