[1] The most comprehensive and accessible overview of these ideas is Janet Biehl’s book The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1998), a work that Bookchin himself often recommended as the best introduction to his political ideas.

[2] The book was originally published by Sierra Club Books (San Francisco) as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship in 1987; republished by Black Rose Books (Montréal) in 1992 as Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship; and finally republished in a revised version as From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a Politics of Citizenship, by Cassell (London) in 1995. Despite the fairly dry titles, the book gives a vivid account of the emergence and meaning of politics, citizenship, and civic development.

[3] This small book was published by AK Press in 2007.

[4] We also discussed his manuscript on philosophy, The Politics of Cosmology, which he wanted me to work on; he gave me a copy with instructions on how to edit it, and I gave him my promise that I would see to its publication.

[5] Communalism was first launched in October 2002 on the Internet. Apart from Murray Bookchin and myself, the other members of the editorial board were Janet Biehl, Peter Zegers, Gary Sisco, and Sveinung Legard. (At our first meeting, in August 1999, I was elected general editor.) Bookchin suggested the subtitle on its masthead – International Journal for a Rational Society – and took a great interest in the workings of the journal, although his declining health impeded him from playing a more active role. (The journal continues to appear, at www.communalism.net; now available in print.)

[6] For Janet Biehl’s account of this ideological break, see “Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism,” in L. Gambone and P. Murtagh, eds., Anarchism for the 21^st Century (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, forthcoming). This essay was also published in Communalism, no. 12 (October 2007).

[7] This introduction was written on December 14, 2002, and has been known only to Scandinavian audiences. See Murray Bookchin, Perspektiv för en ny vänster: Essäer om direct demokrati, moralisk ekonomi, socialekologi och kommunalism, translated by Jonathan Korsár and Mats Runvall (Malmö: Frihetlig Press, 2003).

[8] In fact, the original essay should be read together with Bookchin’s “The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction,” in Social Ecology and Communalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2007), pp. 68–76; “Whither Anarchism? A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” in Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays 1993–1998 (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 1998), particularly pp. 216–46; and “Turning Up the Stones: A Reply to John Clark’s October 13 Message,” sent to the RA-list and available online at dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_ Archives/bookchin/turning.html.

[9] Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm? (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994).

[10] This essay was originally published in Communalism, no. 2 (November 2002), and later included in Social Ecology and Communalism.

[11] Goethe quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History, 3^rd edn. (New York: The Dial Press, 1961), p. 578.

[12] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book 2, Chapter 4 (New York: Modern Library, 1944), pp. 121–2.

[13] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, letter to Dulieu, December 30, 1860, in Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Frazer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 184.

[14] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Fédération et l’unité en Italie (1862), in Selected Writings, pp. 188–9.

[15] Proudhon, letter to Dulieu, December 30, 1860, in Selected Writings, p. 185.

[16] Proudhon, letter to Alexander Herzen, April 21, 1861, in Selected Writings, p. 191.

[17] All Bakunin quotations are from P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (New York: Free Press of Glencoe; London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1953), pp. 324–35; emphasis added.

[18] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 120.

[19] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” p. 124.

[20] Despite the genderedness of these words – a product of the era in which Bakunin lived – they obviously may be interpreted as signifying humanity generally.

[21] Elites who studied the Tao Te Ching, for their part, could easily find it a useful handbook for ruling and manipulating a servile peasantry. Depending upon which translation the English reader uses, several interpretations are valid, but what is clear to everyone but the blind is that quietism underlies the entire work.

[22] Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 63.

[23] John Clark, “Not Deep Apart,” The Trumpeteer, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1995), p. 104.

[24] A striking example is found in Victor Serge’s quarrel with his French “pure” anarchist compatriots over the historical importance of the outbreak of revolution in Russia. In response to Serge’s excitement, these café anarchists or “Individualists,” as he chooses to call them, “mocked [Serge] with their store of cynical stock phrases: ‘Revolutions are useless. They will not change human nature. Afterwards reaction sets in and everything starts all over again. I’ve only got my own skin; I’m not marching for wars or revolutions, thank you.’” Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated and abridged by Peter Sedgewick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 53.

[25] Peter Kropotkin, “The Commune,” in Words of a Rebel (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), p. 81; emphasis added.

[26] See Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles,” in R. Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover Press, 1970), pp. 51–2.

[27] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism,” p. 63; also Conquest of Bread, ed. P. Avrich (New York: New York University Press, 1972), pp. 66–7.

[28] Martin A. Miller, “Introduction” to Peter Kropotkin’s Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. M.A. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 31.

[29] These basic assumptions can also go a long way in explaining why anarchism has been so fascinated by mystifications of the peasantry, bioregionalism, not to speak of deep ecology, Buddhism, Tolstoyism, Gandhi-ism, and the like.

[30] It should be mentioned, though, that despite their basic differences, syndicalism has also been burdened by its expressly anti-intellectual stance, and it shares with authentic anarchism a disdain for rationalism and theory. Despite its commitment to mass organization and social transformation, syndicalism has no strategy for fundamental change beyond the general strike. Invaluable as general strikes may be in revolutionary situations, they do not have the essentially mystical capacity that syndicalists assigned to them, as the vast general strike initiated in Germany in 1921 during the Kapp Putsch demonstrated. Such failures are, in fact, evidence that militant direct actions in themselves are not equatable with revolutions nor even with profound social changes. For a critique of syndicalism, see my “The Ghost of Anarcho- Syndicalism,” in Anarchist Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993).

[31] As Ronald Fraser observes in Blood of Spain (in my view the best book to date on the Spanish Revolution): “The two differentiated but linked concepts which comprised anarcho-syndicalism, as its hyphenated name suggested, could by the 1930s be schematically stated in a series of polarities: rural/urban, local/ national, artisanal/industrial, spontaneous/organized, autarkic/ interdependent, anti-intellectual/intellectual.” Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books; 1972), p. 542. These polarities were never reconciled; indeed, the civil war of 1936–39 exacerbated them to a near breaking point.

[32] These revolutionary syndicalists conceived the means by which they had carried out this transformation as a form of direct action. They meant by that term well-organized and constructive activities directly involved in managing public affairs. Direct action, in their view, meant the creation of a polity, the formation of popular institutions, and the formulation and enactment of laws, regulations, and the like – which authentic anarchists regarded as an abridgment of individual will or autonomy.

[33] The Spanish socialists of the UGT, who rivaled the CNT among the workers, also created an appreciable number of these committees or participated in them, but the committee structure was primarily – and in Catalonia, entirely – in the hands of CNT workers.

[34] Quoted in Pierre Broué and Emile Témine, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, trans. Tony White (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 131.

[35] Whether in Russia or in Germany, the conviction that “bourgeois democracy” (that is, capitalism) was a preconditional stage for leading society to socialism helped justify the reluctance of Social Democracy to lead the workers to make a proletarian revolution between 1917 and 1919. Marx’s “stages theory,” in effect, was not only an attempt to give an interpretation to historical development; it played a vital role in Marxist politics from the German and Russian Revolutions of 1917–21 to the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37.

[36] I refer, here, not to the conventional criticisms that were mounted against Marxism by political opponents – criticisms that emerged from the very inception of Marx’s theoretical activities and the emergence of the socialist movements based in varying degrees on his ideas. Nor am I concerned with Marxist critics such as Eduard Bernstein, who mounted their critiques within the Marxist movement itself in the 1890s. Rather I refer to the critiques that emerged with the Frankfurt School and assorted writers like Karl Korsch, who seriously challenged the many premises of Marx’s philosophical and historical concepts.

[37] Karl Marx, “Preface to a Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy,” in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Vol. 1, p. 504.

[38] All of which induced Georg Lukács to impart this hegemonic role to the “proletarian party,” which mystically embodies the proletariat as a class even when its leadership is usually predominantly petty bourgeois.

[39] I am not trying to downplay the importance of economic issues. Quite to the contrary: only in recent times, especially since the mid twentieth century, has capitalism’s commodity economy become a commodity society. Commodification has now penetrated into the most intimate levels of personal and social life. In the business-ese that prevails today, almost everything is seen as a tradeoff. Love itself becomes a “thing” with its own exchange value and use value, even its own price – after all, do we not “earn” the love of others by our behavior? Still, this kind of commodification is not complete; the value of love is not entirely measurable in terms of labor or supply and demand.

[40] What the public thinks at any time should play no role in determining the policies of a rational movement. If the public should want nuclear power, then it is wrong – and nothing more – and the movement should do whatever can be done to change its mind in a manner consistent with democratic procedure. But at no time, in my view, should the movement drop, modify, or bypass the issue of eliminating nuclear power because it lacks public support or alienates people. In this terribly dumbed-down and juvenilized society, truth must learn to stand on its own feet, so to speak, and continually gnaw away at public naivety, ignorance, and fatuity, if only to provide an example of integrity.

[41] Chris Ealham, “From the Summits to the Abyss: The Contradictions of Individualism and Collectivism in Spanish Anarchism,” in The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain, eds. Paul Preston and Ann L. Mackenzie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 140. This essay is one of the most important contributions I have read to the literature on the contradictions in anarchism.

[42] Today ecological issues are highly fashionable and acceptable to leftists, but even during the tumultuous 1960s they were readily dismissed. I recall publishing key, manifesto-type articles such as “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” in 1964, and raising environmental issues for years in radical circles, only to be snidely derogated for “ignoring” class issues (as though the two were in conflict with each other!) and not adopting views that were more closely linked to Cold War diplomacy than they were to socialism. The same was true of feminist issues. It took the Left decades to show any appreciation of the crises opened by global warming, to which I had alluded in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” and several decades to remove itself from the mire of Cold War “socialism,” such as Maoism. Now, to be sure, one learns that Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, and Reclus were ecologically oriented all the time – as far back as the nineteenth century – and clairvoyantly anticipated all the new issues that were raised in the last half of the twentieth century! Nevertheless, the left-wing movements lack a clear idea of how these issues can be given a programmatic character on which people can act.

[43] The term “transitional program,” coined by Trotsky in the 1930s, could be applied to any socialist program that seeks to escalate “reformist” demands to a revolutionary level. That the phrase was formulated by Trotsky does not trouble me; it is precise and appropriate, and its use does not make one into a Bolshevik.