Chapter 10: Shut Up, Marxist!

As a matter of course, unless ideology withers away, it eventually hardens into dogma. After Jesus comes Paul, and eventually some Pope, Innocent in name only. That Bookchinism would calcify into a creed after no very long time is no surprise. Even in its prime it was arthritic with Rousseau, St.-Simon, Marx and Arendt. It was always ambiguous about technology and scarcity. Its ecological content was always at odds with its civism, to which, in retrospect, ecology seems to have always been an accessory, an add-on. It’s marred by eccentricities as various as primitive gerontocracy and Swiss anarchy. It’s unredeemed by irony, much less humor. What’s amazing is that Bookchin isn’t leaving Bookchinism to its Plekhanovs, Kautskys and Lenins. He’s vulgarizing his ideology himself.

As the Green Anarchist reviewer observes, the Dean now “goes on to crudely reduce or reject all that’s best in his Ecology of Freedom,” forsaking dialectics for dualism (Anonymous 1996: 22). In fact he’s gone back on the best of everything he’s written. This latest tract by the author of “Listen, Marxist!” might have been titled “Listen to the Marxist!” The author of “Desire and Need” (2) denounces desire as greed. The benign, “conciliatory” animism of organic society (Bookchin 1982: 98) has become “an inexplicable, often frightening dream world that they [the ignorant jungle bunnies] took for reality” (42). The author who acclaimed the drop-out culture (Bookchin 1970: 63 n. 1) now vilifies “lumpen lifeways” (56). The author who cannot spit out the word “zine” without contemptuous quotation marks (51) used to publish a zine, Comment, himself (Bookchin 1979: 28). There must be hundreds of these contradictions. The Dean is oblivious to all of them.

“Certainly,” decrees the Dean, “it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists” (61). That’s the most reasonable proposal in the entire essay. I suggest he call himself a “Bookchinist anarchist” or, if his overweening modesty forbids, an “anti-lifestyle anarchist.” Nobody will know what he’s talking about, so introducing himself that way might stimulate curiosity about his views, much as would introducing oneself as a Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Primitive Baptist.

Fated to failure, however, is any attempt to standardize the terminology on Bookchin’s tendentious terms. Most anarchists would already rather answer to “social anarchist” than “lifestyle anarchist.” Reading the Dean’s tract won’t turn any lifestyle anarchists — who number in the “thousands” (1) — into social anarchists, but it might encourage them to adopt protective coloration (red). We will all be social anarchists, even if, like Bookchin, we aren’t anarchists at all. Bookchinists might retaliate by calling themselves “very social anarchists,” but you see where that would lead. They need a name nobody else wants. How about “Marxist”?