Chapter 2. Getting Personal(istic)

A decade ago, a Green observed that “Bookchin has a tendency to be vituperative in responses to criticism.”[16] By now Bookchin is completely out of control. My book Anarchy after Leftism, according to the Director Emeritus, teems with falsehoods so numerous “that to correct even a small number of them would be a waste of the reader’s time.” AAL is “transparently motivated by a white-hot animosity toward [Bookchin],” in stark contrast to SALA, which is transparently motivated by Bookchin’s own impersonal, disinterested quest for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him History. “So malicious are its invectives [sic]” that the Director Emeritus “will not dignify them with a reply.”[17]

Even a cursory reading of SALA — more than it merits — confirms that Bookchin himself is too high-minded to indulge in “invectives.” Never (except once) does he relegate David Watson and other anarcho-primitivists to “the lifestyle zoo,” an expression so demeaning and vicious that I wonder why I didn’t think of it first. Nor does he descend, as does my “gutter journalism [sic],” to the indiscriminate, malicious, and self-contradictory outpouring of such insults as “fascist,” “decadent,” “individualist,” “mystical,” “petit bourgeois,” “infantile,” “unsavory,” “personalistic,” “liberal,” “yuppie,” “lumpen,” “bourgeois,” “squirming,” “reactionary,” etc. Never does Bookchin, who is rationality incarnate, resort to these abusive epithets, except (a hundred times or so) as objective, scientifically validated characterizations of Lifestyle Anarchists.[18]

The Lifestyle category is boldly and baldly designed to define the irreconcilably different as essentially the same to accomplish their common degradation. “It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause,” as Adolf Hitler explained.[19] In this, if in nothing else, Bookchin is the Great Leader he has always schemed to be. “One of the basic principles of conspiritology,” according to Martin Cannon, “holds that everything you don’t like must be connected.” [20] Aristotle, whom Bookchin purports to venerate, might have taught the ex-Director that “falsehoods are not all derived from a single identical set of principles: there are falsehoods which are the contraries of one another and cannot coexist.”[21] Bookchin is a hard act to follow, except with a pooper-scooper.

Since Bookchin’s dialectic takes a little getting used to, consider another example. When he says that he will not dignify with a reply a critique full of numerous falsehoods and “intense and personalistic vilification,” such as mine, the reader unlearned in dialectics might naively suppose that Bookchin means that he will not dignify with a reply a critique full of numerous falsehoods and intense, personalistic vilification. Thus the Director Emeritus would never dignify with a reply a “scandalous hatchet job” whose “almost every paragraph” contains “vituperative attacks, manic denunciations, ad hominem characterizations, and even gossipy rumors” (like the ones Bookchin relates about John P. Clark) — namely, David Watson’s Beyond Bookchin.[22] And yet he does dignify (if that’s the word for what he does) Watson’s book with 47 turgid pages of would-be rebuttal. Indeed, “almost every paragraph of BB is either an insult or a lie[23]”: even I could scarcely have surpassed it in depravity.

Once again I ask, what am I, chopped liver? (I wish Watson’s book was even a fraction as much fun as Bookchin makes it sound. Bookchin has given Watson a jacket blurb to die for.) But despair not, neophyte dialectician. Even a trained philosophy professor, avowed dialectician, and (for almost two decades) inner-circle Bookchin subaltern, John P. Clark, does not and — Bookchin belatedly relates — never did understand Dialectical Bookchinism. With the possible exception of his main squeeze Janet Biehl, only Bookchin is as yet a fully realized reasoning human who has mastered the dialectic and, deploying it masterfully, divines the “subjectivity” and “directionality” of the Universe itself.[24] The rest of us are best advised not to play with fire but rather to play it safe and simply believe whatever Bookchin tells us to this week.

If I had any reservations about the way I rudely and ruthlessly ridiculed the Director Emeritus in Anarchy after Leftism — actually, I didn’t — “Whither Anarchism?” would have laid them to rest. In Beyond Bookchin, David Watson responded a lot more respectfully to Bookchin than I did, and a lot more respectfully than Bookchin ever responds to anybody.[25] A fat lot of good it did him. The ex-Director demonized Watson in the same hysterical terms he demonized me, but at much greater length. Bookchin isn’t remotely interested in being civil, reasonable or fair. To me, and not only to me, that was already obvious from SALA. Watson let himself be played for a sucker. I can’t say I’m especially sympathetic, since Watson affects a holier-than-thou attitude only a little less unctuous than Bookchin’s. He and his fellow anarcho-liberal Fifth Estate yuppies gave me the silent treatment long before the ex-Director did. What Nietzsche wrote covers the whole lot: “It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter are still more benign, more decent than silence.”[26] Perhaps no single word better sums up Bookchin the man than indecent.

To correct even a small number of my errors, according to Bookchin, would be a waste of the reader’s time, unlike his correction of a large number of the errors of the miscreants Watson and Clark. The reader cannot be trusted to use his time wisely, since he uses it to read Bookchin. Therefore the Director Emeritus vets his own critics in his usual disinterested manner. The number “one” is, if I remember my arithmetic, as small as a whole number can get, yet it is big enough for Bookchin to draw “one sample” to “demonstrate the overall dishonesty of [my] tract.” Bookchin, the sometime champion of science, does not even know the difference between an example and a sample. One observation is, to a statistician, not a sample from which anything can be reliably inferred about even a population of two, any more than a coin coming up “heads” has any tendency to indicate whether next time it comes up heads or tails. But I am being hopelessly positivistic: the Director Emeritus disdains “logicians, positivists, and heirs of Galilean scientism.”[27]

That someone has made one error has no tendency to prove that he has made “numerous” errors. Even Bookchin — for the first time, so far as I know — now admits that he made what he considers errors, indeed serious errors, in his earlier, positive characterizations of “organic” (primitive) societies.[28] If one error is justification enough to dismiss an entire book from consideration, then by his own criterion almost every book by Bookchin must be dismissed from consideration, which is not such a bad idea. In fact, probably every book by anyone must be dismissed from consideration.

If my entire book-length critique is to be dismissed on the basis of one error, it should be a profoundly important error, one going to the fundamentals of Bookchin’s dichotomy, his posited “unbridgeable chasm” between Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism, or my more meaningful dichotomy between leftist and post-leftist anarchism. Instead, this denouncer of the “personalistic” preoccupations he attributes to the Lifestyle Anarchists is, as to me, exclusively indignant about my alleged errors in sketching his own personalistic political biography, as I do in chapter 1 of Anarchy after Leftism. And even then, his only substantive quibble is with my referring to him as “a ‘dean’ at Goddard College (AAL, p. 18), a position that, [Black] would have his readers believe, endows me with the very substantial income that I need in order to advance my nefarious ambitions,” whereas the truth is that Bookchin “ended [his] professional connections with Goddard College [as well as Ramapo College, which he also mentions] in 1981.” My citation to the 1995 Goddard College Off-Campus Catalog, “a rare document,” is an “outright fabrication,” as the Catalog does not identify Bookchin as a Dean.[29]

Indeed it does not. I never said it did. For Bookchin to claim otherwise is an outright fabrication. This is what I did cite the Catalog for: “The material base for these superstructural effusions [i.e., the many books Bookchin cranked out in the 1980s] was Bookchin’s providential appointment as a Dean at Goddard College near Burlington, Vermont, a cuddle-college for hippies and, more recently, punks, with wealthy parents (cf. Goddard College 1995 [the Off-Campus Catalog]). He also held an appointment at Ramapo College. Bookchin, who sneers at leftists who have embarked upon ‘alluring university careers’ [SALA, 67], is one of them.”[30] I cited the Catalog, not to verify Bookchin’s academic career — I never suspected he would ever deny it, since he has flaunted it for so long — but rather in support of my characterization of what kind of a college Goddard College is, an expensive private college catering to the children of rich liberals (for 2003, annual tuition was $9,100[31]). Maybe not, originally, an important point, but better a little truth than a big lie. Bookchin pretends that I was saying, in 1996, that he was then a Dean at Goddard College. He supplies no reference, since there can be none, for this false attribution.

Still, if the credibility of my entire book turns on these three sentences, their truth assumes unwonted importance. Bookchin categorically asserts that he ended his professional connection with Ramapo College in 1981. But according to the jacket blurb for The Ecology of Freedom (1982), he “is currently Professor of Social Ecology at Ramapo College in New Jersey.” By 1987, according to the jacket blurb for The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, he “is Professor Emeritus at the School of Environmental Studies, Ramapo College of New Jersey and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology at Rochester, Vermont.” According to the 1994 Bookchin biography posted electronically “to Anarchy Archives on behalf of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl,” which remains unaltered in the years since I first read it, “in 1974, he [Bookchin] began teaching in Ramapo College in New Jersey, becoming full professor of social theory entering and retiring in 1983 in an emeritus status.” As all I said about that is that Bookchin held (notice the past tense) an appointment at Ramapo College, and all I implied was that this was in the 1980s, Bookchin’s authorized spokeswoman and doxy confirms that I was right. She also confirms, contrary to Bookchin, that he did not end his professional association with Ramapo College in 1981, but rather in 1983. Does it matter? According to Bookchin, everythig about him matters, so who is anyone else to say it doesn’t?

Then there is the affiliation with Goddard College. Now in referring to Bookchin as “the Dean,” I was merely following the custom of referring to a distinguished retiree by his highest achieved dignitary title, the way people refer to “President Clinton” or “Senator Dole.” Was my resort to this protocol, under the circumstances, ironic rather than honorific? Obviously. Bookchin is a self-important, pompous ass. He brings out the pie-throwing Groucho Marxist in me. Sure, I can also trounce him on his own sub-academic terms, and I did. So did Watson. But “beyond Bookchin” the pseudo-scholar is Bookchin the blowhard and Bookchin the bureaucrat. In a letter to me (April 28, 1996), C.A.L. Press publisher Jason McQuinn relates that “the first thing I did before I agreed to publish your book, was to call Goddard College to fact check the ‘Dean’ accusation. The first person to answer didn’t know who the hell he was, but someone else in the room confirmed that he had been such.” (I’d earlier made the same phone call and gotten the same answer.)

Bookchin’s stunning expose of my dishonesty rests, at best, on a pissant terminological quibble. As Janet Biehl says, “In 1974 he co-founded and directed the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, which went on to acquire an international reputation for its advanced courses in ecophilosophy, social theory, and alternative technology that reflect his ideas.” (I wonder what tripped-out moneybags got conned into funding that sweet set-up.) For whatever legal or administrative reasons, the ISE was set up as an entity formally distinct from Goddard College, but for all practical purposes — as Bookchin would say, “in effect” — it was the graduate school of Goddard College. Thus David Watson in Beyond Bookchin made what he undoubtedly considered a noncontroversial reference to “the Institute for Social Ecology at Goddard College.”[32] Bookchin, who objected to everything else Watson said about him, did not object to this. In almost the same words, Ulrike Heider writes: “In 1974 he founded the Institute for Social Ecology at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.”[33] Bookchin, who has strongly taken issue with everything else Heider had to say about him, has said nothing about this. Writing in 1993, Victor Ferkiss states that Bookchin “runs the Institute of Social Ecology at Goddard College in Vermont.”[34] This is how the Director Emeritus signed the preface to The Limits of the City (1974): “Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology Studies Program, Goddard College.” And this is how he signed the introduction to The Spanish Anarchists (1977): “Murray Bookchin/November, 1976/Ramapo College of New Jersey/Mahwah, New Jersey/Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont.”[35]

The administrator who has the title “Director” at the ISE has the title “Dean” at most other post-secondary schools. That’s why Goddard College spokesmen vaguely remember Bookchin as a dean. So Bookchin was a dean whether or not he was a Dean. And his “professional connection” with Goddard/ISE persisted at least until 1994 when, as Biehl then reported, “he still gives two core courses at the Institute for Social Ecology each summer, where he has the status of director emeritus.“[36] As a matter of fact, it persisted at least to 2003. The Spring/Summer 2003 Catalog listed the Director Emeritus as, well, the Director Emeritus in the faculty. listing He was scheduled to lecture on “Ecology and Society” in the summer. The catalog also confirms the former Goddard/ISE connection. The credentials listed for ISE faculty member Michael J. Cuba is “B.A., Goddard College/ISE”; for two ISE faculty members, Arthur Foelsche and Darini Nicholas, “M.A., Goddard College/ISE.”[37] Bookchin’s pretext for disregarding my critique is therefore a lie. Before I finish, I will have proven many more.

Out of consideration for Bookchin’s feelings, I herein refer to him, not as the Dean, but as the ex-Director or the Director Emeritus. He has no excuse for ignoring me now.

Let us recur to why I devoted all of several pages out of 140 to the ex-Director’s bureaucratic and academic career, which spanned a quarter of a century. One immediate purpose was simply to flag Bookchin’s gross hypocrisy in denouncing leftists who embarked upon “alluring academic careers”[38] when he had done the same thing himself for over two decades. A broader purpose, opening out from that, was to challenge what, if anything, Bookchin meant by his shotgun Marxist epithet “bourgeois.” If it is an objective category of class analysis, then Bookchin (I suggested) — as a salaried professional and order-giving bureaucrat — was a bourgeois himself,[39] unlike at least some of those he reviles as bourgeois, such as John Zerzan (a babysitter) and L. Susan Brown (an office worker), who are objectively proletarians. But if the ex-Director’s use of the word is not objective and scientific, if he is not flexing his mental muscles — the “muscularity of thought” he says he brought to the mushminded, ungrateful Greens[40] — then whatever does he mean by “bourgeois”? In what way is what he calls Lifestyle Anarchism bourgeois whereas what he calls Social Anarchism is not? He never says. For a devolved Marxist like Bookchin, “bourgeois” (and “fascist”) are, as H.L. Mencken remarked, just “general terms of abuse.”[41]

The Director Emeritus, with typical obtuseness, never notices the obvious irony in my incessantly referring to him as “the Dean,” “presumably on the assumption that mere repetition will make my title a reality.”[42] Actually, it was on the assumption that mere repetition would make his stomach sour. In SALA, Bookchin refers to Hakim Bey (the pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wilson) at least 27 times as “the Bey,”[43] presumably on the assumption that mere repetition will make his title a reality. Hakim Bey is not a Bey. Nowadays nobody is. A Bey was the governor of a province or district in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which ceased to exist long before Wilson was born. As Bookchin truly says, “one doesn’t have to be very bright or knowledgeable to make it as a professor these days.”[44]

I might have erred in Anarchy after Leftism in once referring to Bookchin as “high income,” but even that remains to be seen. Bookchin can always release his tax returns to settle the point. Undoubtedly his income fell when he retired, as does everyone’s, but from what to what? In addition to his salaries from two colleges, Bookchin collected royalties from the sales of over a dozen books (and, as he says, advances on others), and collected fees from lecturing at (his own words) every major university in the United States. I have no idea whether he managed all this money wisely, I only point out that he must have had a nice chunk of change to manage — at least enough that he should, in decency, forbear from class-baiting. I stand by my original assertion that Bookchin probably has a higher income, even now, than any individual he denounces, except maybe John P. Clark. It’s certainly higher than mine. Whatever his income, the fact remains that Bookchin is a bourgeois (in semi-retirement) whereas some anarchists he calls “bourgeois” are workers, which was already a high probability at the time Bookchin claimed otherwise. And he’s still lying about this.

In “Whither Anarchism?” the narrow, impoverished critique of SALA is further foreshortened. In SALA, the Director Emeritus startled anarchists, whom he had neglected for many years, by abruptly departing the Green fields of Social Ecology for the killing fields of Social Anarchism. He argued — or rather, he declaimed — that a tendency he calls Lifestyle Anarchism, the sinister shadow of Social Anarchism, has since the 60s increasingly supplanted the latter, a usurpation he attributes to a “climate of social reaction” which has prevailed since the 60s. Curiously, this was the period in which almost all the ex-Director’s own books were published, including all of them with even a little explicit anarchist content (several had none). Apparently the climate of social reaction proved as bracing for Bookchin as for the Lifestyle Anarchists, for whom he never had a discouraging word until 1996. But in his reply to anarchist critics (or rather, to the weakest ones), the Director Emeritus addresses, not criticism of his Social Anarchism, but criticism of his Social Ecology — which was not the subject of SALA. And even on that plane, his rebuttal dwindles to not much more than denouncing David Watson and John P. Clark as mystics, which, even if true, is only name-calling, unresponsive to their concrete criticisms of his Thought. And not even Bookchin is insolent enough to accuse me of mysticism. I’m too mean to be a mystic.

The Director Emeritus and diviner of world-historical directionality disdains to debate me directly, except as to details of his biography, already dealt with here to his disadvantage. Ignoring me didn’t work for him before and it won’t work now.[45] My summary dismissal is only an extreme expression of his essay’s monumental lack of proportion. In “Whither Anarchism?” he says nothing about work, wage-labor, organization, or even his pet preoccupation, municipal politics, but he devotes two pages (there was more in the online version) to debating with Watson the political meaning of a Goya engraving.[46]

The Director Emeritus declines to explain or justify his previous abuse of the epithet “bourgeois” — in fact, he makes even more use of it, as if other words are failing him — but spares ten pages to denounce Taoism.[47] All of his gossipy, personalistic, self-serving stories — especially concerning John P. Clark’s decades of disciplehood — are, even if accurate, not a reply to critics. Judging Bookchin’s priorities from what he finds important to discuss, he is much less interested in the future of anarchism than in the future of his reputation. The irony is that SALA and the reaction to it and now to Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left have surely done more damage, and much sooner, to Bookchin’s anarchist reputation than has its molecular erosion by Lifestyle Anarchist tendencies.

Some of the ex-Director’s ongoing obsessions are of only symptomatic interest to me. I don’t read Spanish and I don’t know anything about Goya. Having read very little of Lewis Mumford, I continue to stay out of the unseemly custody struggle for his corpse — I meant to say, his corpus — between Bookchin and Watson. (Although I was amused to discover, quite by accident, that Mumford espoused a version of the primitive-affluence thesis![48]) I’m willing to grant that Bookchin understood Mumford well enough to steal Social Ecology from him, although he also stole the name and the concept from someone else.[49] I don’t think that trees talk to each other, something Watson reportedly does not rule out, but I do think that no tree could be much more wooden-headed than Murray Bookchin.

Only a little more interesting to me is John P. Clark’s opinion that Taoism is, or could be, compatible with anarchism. Offhand it looks like it all depends on what you mean by Taoism and what you mean by anarchism. If this seems like a banal observation, well, that reflects my level of interest in the issue. I notice, though, that many eminent anarchists, including the orthodox anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker, have considered Taoism anarchist. So did Herbert Read.[50] The Taoist sage Chuang Tzu said that there must be no government: “If the nature of the world is not distracted, why should there be any governing of the world?”[51] One the other hand, even a cursory scan of the text reveals many instances of advice to rulers. In fact, most surviving Taoist texts, like many Confucianist texts, are advice on good government.[52] Still, no anarchists have expressed the ex-Director’s opinion that the Tao te Ching is a tyrants’ manual comparable to Plato’s Republic.[53]

Indeed, despite what he says now, in the 60s Bookchin saw something politically positive in Taoism: “Drawing from early rock-and-roll music, from the beat movement, the civil rights struggles, the peace movement, and even from the naturalism of neo-Taoist and neo-Buddhist cults (however unsavory this may be to the ‘Left’), the Youth Culture has pieced together a life-style [!] that is aimed at the internal system of domination that hierarchical society so viciously uses to bring the individual into partnership with his/her own enslavement.”[54] I am provisionally inclined to accept George Woodcock’s judgment that calling Lao-Tse an anarchist is a mythmaking attempt to invest anarchism with the authority of an illustrious pedigree.[55] I suspect the claim to be ahistorical or at least anachronistic. But I am not about to place any credence in the ex-Professor’s contrary professions, familiar as I am with the source. Bookchin has a way of discrediting even correct views by occasionally agreeing with them. But this does not happen very often.

The Director Emeritus claims that he could “never accept Clark’s Taoism as part of social ecology” — but he kept his criticisms private so long as Clark acted in public as his loyal adjutant. According to Bookchin, “that my association with Clark lasted as long as it did is testimony to my silent endurance of his Taoist claptrap and my distinctly nondogmatic tolerance of views not in accordance with my own.” Such stoic fortitude! Such latitudinarian generosity! “But in the late 1980s, as this type of mystical quietism gained more and more influence into [sic] the ecology movement, I could no longer remain silent.”[56] So then (the reader has been primed to expect) — with regret the Director Emeritus went public with his critique of Clark, notwithstanding that Clark was “widely assumed” to be the ex-Director’s “spokesman,” perhaps because “from the mid-1970s until early 1993, the author was a close associate of [his]”?

Er — actually, not. As the ex-Director goes on to say, in the late 1980s he critiqued, not Clark, but deep ecologist Dave Foreman of Earth First! Whatever Foreman’s failings, and they are many, he was no Taoist. Bookchin never openly repudiated Clark’s dabbling in Taoism until Clark broke with Bookchin in 1993. The Director’s “silent endurance” — silence, like “quietism,” is a quality Bookchin does not conspicuously display — looks more like opportunism than tolerance. Either way, Bookchin must never have thought that Taoism was any kind of serious threat to, or important influence on, contemporary anarchism — and it isn’t.

It does the Director Emeritus no good to disinvite me to his (vanguard) party. Erisian that I am, I’m crashing it. First I dispose of his misappropriated, misunderstood distinction between negative and positive freedom, which he fumbles as he always does when he affects intellectual sophistication. Next, as in Anarchy after Leftism, I set forth what has become a comprehensive refutation of Bookchin’s prejudices against primitive society. These are a slurry of Christian moralism, vulgarized 18^th century irreligion, Marxisant 19^th century social evolutionism, Judaic blood taboos, and pure racism, and embellished with a personalistic preoccupation with old age. Not every point of rebuttal is highly important, but I am not doing all this just to show how many facts the Director Emeritus got wrong or faked. Believe me, I only scratch the surface. I am also debunking, root and branch, a rhetorical style — call it Lie Style Anarchism — a malignant Marxist import, alien to anarchist discourse but tempting to the neo-platformist and workerist anarchists closest to the authoritarian left. They must be taught not to count on their irrelevance to secure them against comprehensive critique. Finally, although it’s hard to believe, there’s a Bookchin personality cult kept up by, at this point, mainly his publishers, who have so heavily invested in this fading star that all they can do is talk him up as if they weren’t dreading the arrival of his next manuscript. They are fettered to a corpse, but here I provide the key.