Chapter 1. Introduction

The tale is told of the American tourist abroad who, encountering some natives who didn’t speak his language, assisted their understanding by repeating himself in a louder voice. That is Murray Bookchin’s way with wayward anarchists. In Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995)[2] the Director Emeritus laid down for all time what anarchists are to believe and what they are not to believe; and yet many perversely persist in error. The book’s very title announces its divisive intent. Three books[3] and a slew of reviews suggest an overwhelmingly adverse anarchist reaction to the ex-Director’s encyclical, although it pleased Marxists.[4] For Bookchin, there is only one possible explanation for anarchist intransigence: they didn’t hear him the first time. For who — having heard — could fail to believe?

And so it came to pass — like wind — that the Director Emeritus is repeating himself, louder than ever, in Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left, especially in the previously available essay “Whither Anarchism? A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics.”[5] But it’s not a reply, just a replay. In the words of Theodor Adorno, Bookchin’s “verbal demeanor calls to mind the young man of low origins who, embarrassed in good society, starts shouting to make himself heard: power and insolence mixed.” If, as Mill maintained, “the weakest part of what everybody says in defense of his opinion is what he intends as a reply to antagonists,”[6] understandably an argument which commenced in exhaustion resumes in paralyzes.

For those unfamiliar with the ex-Director’s dialectical mode of reasoning — shame on you! — the distinction between appearance and essence must be made incorrigibly clear. Thus, when the Director Emeritus writes that “it is not my intention to repeat my exposition of the differences between social and lifestyle anarchism,” in appearance, he is saying that it is not his intention to repeat his exposition of the differences between Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism. But understood dialectically, in essence, he is saying that it is his intention to repeat his exposition of the differences between Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism. And that is exactly what, and all that, he proceeds to do, which validates the method.

There may be those who, having read (let us hope) Anarchy after Leftism, wonder if there is any point in my producing a second essay which necessarily covers some of the same ground as the first. Bookchin already stands exposed, in Goethe’s phrase, as “captious and frivolous in old age.”[7] After all, neither Bookchin nor, to my knowledge, anyone else even purports to have controverted even one of my arguments. There is some risk that what’s been said about another critique of Bookchin might be said about this one: “while there is much here to engage (and provoke) the readers specifically interested in Bookchin, it is not always clear who else will find the book a rewarding experience.”[8] And besides, Murray Bookchin has now confirmed what I wrote there: he is not an anarchist.[9] Only AK Press and Black Rose Books remain in the dark.

For over ten years I have relentlessly pursued a single goal: “Through my satire I make unimportant people big so that later they are worthy targets of my satire, and no one can reproach me any longer” (Karl Kraus). For it ought not to be “rashly assumed that those attacked by a respectable philosopher must themselves be philosophically respectable.”[10] I can at least say, as did one of my reviewers, that what was a joy to write is a joy to read.[11] This book should be interesting, if it is interesting at all (and it is), almost as much to those who are unfamiliar with Bookchin as to those who are. It should satisfy those readers who, pleased as they are with the rebuttal of SALA, wish I had elaborated the critique of libertarian municipalism and other Bookchin dogmas.[12]. It is an expose, at once entertaining and informative, whose hapless subject is merely a pretext for me to show off. My method is no more original than my message. I cribbed it from Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and Karl Kraus.

At this juncture, there cannot be too much deconstruction of sham scholarship in anarchist argumentation. While no one who has read Anarchy after Leftism will take Bookchin’s latest parade of sources at face value, there must be some readers for whom his first reply-to-critics, “Whither Anarchism?” is something new and presents an impressive façade. Traditionally, as Lawrence Jarach has long maintained, many anarchists have a weakness for typescript. Nor are all of the other texts with which it was published devoid of interest, certainly not the fond reminiscences of Bookchin’s Stalinist childhood and Trotskyist youth; or the tantalizingly brief accounts of how the Director Emeritus heavily influenced the peace movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the women’s movement, the New Left, the counterculture, and the environmental movement. Here is information you cannot get anywhere else, as the participants and historians of those movements have neglected to mention his important role. They have neglected to mention him at all.

This book is written in the “ethnographic present,” without trying to keep pace with Bookchin’s continued free-fall into statism. He now admits that he failed to hijack the phrase “social anarchism” for his personalistic purposes. It only took him 45 years to realize that anarchism is “simply not a social theory,” and to denounce the anarchist “myth” and “illusion” that “power can actually cease to exist.”[13] His renegacy of course confirms my arguments, but they needed no confirmation.

Bookchin is the kind of writer you can come back to again and again and always find another mistake. That experience, frequently repeated, accounts for the length of this essay. The smaller part of it corroborates Anarchy after Leftism. More of it enlarges the scope of the critique there. The entire Bookchin ideology is laid open, like a wound. I hope many readers come across something in my copious references which, like Bookchin, they might like to run down. The ever-growing legions of Bookchin-haters will welcome another demonstration that Bookchin’s unbridgeable chasm is between his ears. Laughter means, according to Nietzsche, being schadenfroh — taking mischievous delight in another’s discomfiture, “but with a good conscience.”[14] Here is an example. Finally, there are these ponderable words by James Gallant: “Much ado about nothing beats nothing, hands down.”[15]