Nightmares of Reason

Word from the Author, A

“The general level of insight now is more educated, curiosity is wide awake, and judgments are made more quickly than formerly; so the feet of them which shall carry thee out are already at the door” — Hegel[1] A Word from the Author In 1997, C.A.L. Press published my Anarchy after Leftism, which took the form of a point by point (or tit for tat) refutation of Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (A.K. Press [who else?] 1996). In the course of the writing, which occupied two months in 1996, I had the occasion to consult some previous books by the Director Emeritus, as I was sure that he was contradicting most of his previous positions. He was. What only his inner cir... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 1

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 ...

Chapter 2

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]” t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3

Chapter 3. The Power of Positive Thinking, or, Positive Thinking of Power Anarchism is a philosophy of freedom. Other philosophies which are older, like liberalism, or better funded, like libertarianism, make the same claim, but they shrink from the logical, unqualified assertion of liberty against its antithesis: the state. To that extent, anarchists easily have a better understanding of freedom than its other, deeply conflicted proponents. But better is not necessarily good enough. The meaning of freedom is something anarchists more often take for granted than articulate, much less analyze. We should think more about this. Bookchin often tries to impress his readers with forays into other fields, including philosophy. And indeed his p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4

Chapter 4. This Side of Paradise Bookchin might have begun his discussion of primitive society as did Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Let us begin by laying the facts aside, as they do not affect the question.”[87] For all his huffing and puffing, the Director Emeritus adds nothing to the inadequate and dishonest “evidentiality” (one of his gratuitous neologisms) which Watson and I have already shown to be wanting in SALA. He continues to ignore the anthropological studies summarized in John Zerzan’s Future Primitive, Watson’s Beyond Bookchin, and my Friendly Fire[88] and Anarchy after Leftism. He continues to pretend that the thesis that stateless hunter-gatherers enjoyed a sort of primitive affluence was a s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 5

Chapter 5. Stone Age or Old Age: An Unbridgeable Chasm For many years now the Director Emeritus has exhibited, as I have mentioned, a personalistic preoccupation with old age. Often his opinions are scarcely sublimated emotions — for example, his transparently autobiographical anxiety that “the lives of the old are always clouded by a sense of insecurity.” And only an insecure (and paranoid) old man could suppose that one of the groups against which mass discontent is channeled by reactionaries is — besides the usual suspects (racial minorities, the poor, etc.) — “the elderly.”[187] As so often, Bookchin echoes his beloved Athenians, this time the Aristophanes character who says: “Isn&rsquo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6

Chapter 6. Book Filled with Lies The latest of the ex-Director’s ironic indiscretions is his heavy reliance on Edwin Wilmsen’s Land Filled with Flies to bash the anarcho-primitivists. In SALA, Bookchin asserted an affinity between anarcho-primitivism and post-modernism, with sublime indifference to the fact that post-modernism has no harsher critic than John Zerzan.[306] To any reader of Wilmsen not in thrall to an ulterior motive, Wilmsen is blatantly a post-modernist.[307] One of his reviewers, Henry Harpending, is a biological anthropologist who is charmingly innocent of exposure to PoMo. He had “a lot of trouble” with the beginning of the book, which contains “an alarming discussion of people and things ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7

Chapter 7. Primitivism and the Enlightenment In his prime, Bookchin could be a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, or, as he invariably referred to it, “the bourgeois Enlightenment.”[348] Now his only criticism is that with respect to primitive society, it wasn’t bourgeois enough. As he now sees it, the Enlightenment, which fought for reason and progress in its own society, inconsistently tolerated and even celebrated stagnant, backward, ignorant and superstitious primitive peoples. In this as in so many other ways, it is Bookchin’s project to perfect and complete the essentially rational and progressive project of the bourgeois Enlightenment. He always understands what people are doing better than they do. &ldquo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8

Chapter 8. The Specter of Shamanism The Sage of Burlington continues: “One of the Enlightenment’s great achievements was to provide a critical perspective on the past, denouncing the taboos and shamanistic trickery that made tribal peoples the victims of unthinking custom as well as the irrationalities that kept them in bondage to hierarchy and class rule, despite [?] its denunciations of Western cant and artificialities.”[374] Mopping up this mess will take me awhile. But briefly: primitive peoples don’t have class rule — according to Bookchin the Younger.[375] Having credited, or rather discredited, the Enlightenment with inventing primitivism, the Director now credits it with refuting primitivism by deno... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9

Chapter 9. The Rule of Law versus the Order of Custom Sir Alfred Zimmern, Murray Bookchin’s favorite historian, intended some derision when he wrote that “the modern anarchists have reinvented ‘unwritten laws,’” but Sir Alfred, unlike the Director Emeritus, was right in spite of himself.[452] Malatesta expressed the anarchist view of custom: “Custom always follows the needs and feelings of the majority; and the less they are subject to the sanctions of law the more are they respected, for everyone can see and understand their use.”[453] So did George Woodcock: “Customs and not regulations are the natural manifestations of man’s ideas of justice, and in a free society customs would ada... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 10

Chapter 10. Before the Law The Director Emeritus is full of — surprises. He takes David Watson to task for “denigrat[ing] the development of writing” — actually, all Watson did was deny the “dogma of the inherent superiority of the written tradition” to the oral tradition.[515] The irony (as always, unnoticed) is that speaking and listening are inherently sociable, whereas “reading — silent reading — is manifestly antisocial activity.”[516] Astonishingly, Bookchin’s defense of literacy takes the form of an affirmation of law: Before the written word, it should be noted, chiefs, shamans [!], priests, aristocrats, and monarchs possessed a free-wheeling liberty to improv... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 11

Chapter 11. Humanists and Subhumans The Director Emeritus identifies himself as a humanist. Indeed, he has devoted an entire book to chastising the “antihumanists” in the ecology movement. It is as a humanist, for instance, that he is scandalized by the “blatant callousness” of David Watson.[583] He has dirtied the word. A humanist is supposed to believe in the dignity and equal worth of men. What Bookchin believes is shockingly otherwise. Not only does he deny that all men are created equal, he denies that all men are men. Not only does he consider the societies and cultures of primitives inferior, he denies that primitives are social and cultural beings. They are “merely natural” — in other wor... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 12

Chapter 12. Nightmares of Reason Unconscious irony has become a hallmark of Late Bookchinism, the Highest Stage of Leftism. Well-known examples include Bookchin’s denunciations of leftists with alluring academic careers just as the then-Director retired from an alluring academic career; his scathing contempt for John P. Clark’s “cowardly” hiding behind a pseudonym the way Bookchin did in the 60s[682]; his personalistic abuse of individuals he accuses of personalism; his vilification of other writers for appearing in the same yuppie publications he’s been published by or favorably reviewed in; his denunciation of the political use of metaphor in a book whose title, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 13

Chapter 13. The Communalist Hallucination The ex-Director’s emphatically prioritizing the social over the individual does not apply when he is the individual. When it comes to English usage, he is, in the rugged individualist tradition of Thoreau, a majority of one.[751] Bookchin expresses his sovereignty in many ways. Redundancy makes for a vigorous, emphatic style: thus, “airless vacuum,” “fly apart in opposite directions,” “etymological roots,” “presumably on the assumption,” “determining cause,” “arduous toil,” “unique, indeed unprecedented,” “domination and rule,” “mechanical robots,” and “direct face-to-face.&rdqu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 14

Chapter 14. The Judgment of Athena If Athens was not by his own definition anarchist, Murray Bookchin is not an anarchist. Whatever it was, Athens was exceptional. Most of the Greek city-states were oligarchies. Indeed, in an atypically accurate statement which refutes his whole theory of urban destiny, Bookchin says that city-states naturally tend toward oligarchy.[884] The Director Emeritus errs in claiming that Aristotle (and Plato!) approved of democracy in the right circumstances. Aristotle clearly stated his preference for “polity,” described as a mixture of democracy and oligarchy. He disapproved of democracy, as M.I. Finley puts it, “on principle.” What’s more, he thought Athens was democracy at its... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 15

Chapter 15. City-Statism and Anarchy Let us summarize what we know. The city of Athens was not a Commune and it was a slave-based imperialist state, and so it was not anarchist. The self-governing cities of pre-industrial Europe were not Communes and they were states. The towns of colonial New England were not Communes, again by Bookchin’s definition, and they were subordinate to higher levels of state. Revolutionary Paris was not a Commune or a Commune of Communes, and it was subordinate to a national state. It is time for a general characterization of the relationship between the city and the state. According to the ex-Director’s latest ukase, the town and city “historically antedate the emergence of the state.&rdquo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 16

Chapter 16. Fantasies of Federalism One of its proponents insists that face-to-face direct democracy has to meet a very demanding standard: The first and most important positive act of political recognition which a participatory democracy must pay to its members is to give each of them frequent and realistic opportunities to be heard, that is to say, access to assemblies sufficiently small so all can reasonably be assured time to speak, and to matters of sufficient moment to command practical attention.[1049] Bookchin’s standard is just as high: The Greeks, we are often reminded, would have been horrified by a city whose size and population precluded a face-to-face, often familiar relationship between citizens... In ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 17

Chapter 17. Anarchist Communism versus Libertarian Municipalism Previous chapters demonstrate that libertarian municipalism, at the ground level, will be oligarchic and probably oppressive toward local minorities. At the level of the wider society, its federations and multiples of federations will be slow, cumbersome, internally unworkable, cumulatively elitist, and either too powerful or not powerful enough. Inevitably the system will evolve the features of the system it was supposed to supplant. It is objectionable, first, as being a blueprint for the future, and second, as a blueprint with too many pages missing. It has to be the most mundane utopia ever conceived[1169] — at once an affront to sense and sensibility. But is it a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 18

Chapter 18. The Organization of Power After ignoring the topic since 1971, the Director Emeritus abruptly places the organization question on the agenda: Those who wish to overthrow this vast system will require the most careful strategic judgment, the most profound theoretical understanding, and the most dedicated and persistent organized revolutionary groups to even shake the deeply entrenched bourgeois social order. They will need nothing less than a revolutionary socialist movement, a well-organized and institutionalized endeavor led by knowledgeable and resolute people who will foment mass resistance and revolution, advance a coherent program, and unite their groups into a visible and identifiable confederation.[1311] As r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 19

Chapter 19. Murray Bookchin, One-Dimensional Man My first time around, in Anarchy after Leftism, I gave Bookchin’s history of recent anarchism the scant attention it deserves. This time I’ll screwtinize it in more detail. Basically it goes like this. At the economic base, there are periods of “apparent capitalist stabilization” or “capitalist stability,” of “social peace,” and then there are periods of “deep social unrest,” sometimes giving rise to “revolutionary situations.” When capitalism is crisis-ridden, Social Anarchism “has usually held center stage” as far as anarchism goes. When capitalism is, or seems to be, stabilized — the ambiguity is a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 20

Chapter 20. Conclusion: Whither Anarchism, Indeed? “Now you see, sir, how your fooling grows old, and people dislike it” — Shakespeare, Twelfth Night[1376] Whither anarchism? If that’s the question, it is one for which Bookchin has no answer. In “The Left That Was,” the appendix to SALA, he reiterates that the classical left is forever defunct.[1377] Long ago he announced that “the traditional workers’ movement will never reappear.”[1378] He does not discuss the social composition of the “millions of people today” who experience “the sense of powerlessness” which renders them “a potentially huge body of supporters” of anarchism.[1379] Who... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix: American in Paris, An

Appendix: An American in Paris 1 When Murray Bookchin writes that there is an issue “that I find so offensive and so outrageously false that I feel obliged to examine it in some detail,”[1400] you can count on a good show. No one takes umbrage on quite the colossal scale that he does. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is incomprehensible counsel for the Director Emeritus. The issue he finds so offensive and so outrageously false — John P. Clark’s ridicule of an item on Bookchin’s revolutionary resume — holds promise for running his vital signs right off the Richter scale. So I, too, propose to examine it in some detail. As the Director Emeritus explains, “On other occasions I ha... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

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