EDITOR: Murray Bookchin Vol. 1, No. 4 Price: 80 cents
To conceal real crises by creating specious ones is an old political trick, but the past year has seen it triumph with an almost classic example of text-book success.
The so-called "Iranian Crisis" and Russia's heavy-handed invasion of its Afghan satellite have completely deflected public attention from the deeper waters of American domestic and foreign policy. One would have to be blind not to see that the seizure of the American embassy in Teheran by a ragtail group of Maoist students spared both Khomeini and Carter a sharp decline in domestic popularity. The students, whoever they may be, functioned like a deus ex machina in promoting the political interests of the Iranian A... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author and publisher.
COMMENT
P.O. BOX 158
BURLINGTON, VT 05402
--New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought--
EDITOR: Murray Bookchin Vol. 1, No. 5
Price: 80 cents
The American Crisis II
NOTE: The following issue of COMMENT No. 5 is a continuation of No. 4. Please note that the publication of COMMENT has been moved to Burlington, Vermont, where it will be published for at least the next year. Readers who have subscribed to COMMENT will continue to receive it. Those who have not done so -- or do not intend to do so in the near future -- will cease to receive future issues owing to our very considerable print and mailing cos... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Note: This piece appeared as Vol. 1, No. 6 of Comment: New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought, edited by Murray Bookchin.
Anarchism: Past and Present
Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the Critical Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles on May 29, 1980. My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme importance today of viewing Anarchism in terms of the changing social contexts of our era - - not as an ossified doctrine that belongs to one or another set of European thinkers, valuable as their views may have been in their various times and places. Today, more than ever, the viability of Anarchism in America will depend upon its ability to speak directly -- in the language of the... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Introduction
Collectivization was a spontaneous outgrowth of the revolutionary situation. The industrial system had broken down and it became absolutely necessary to resume production. But the workers refused to go back to the old system of exploitation. They demanded the expropriation of the capitalists and full collective self-management by themselves.
Souchy points out that in many enterprises there was immediate and full collectivization. In many privately owned enterprises, as a prelude to full collectivization, workers’ control committees assumed partial control and closely watched the operations of the enterprises. Under full collectivization genuine workers’ self-management was instituted. From their own ranks the wo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Murray Bookchin is the editor of Anarchos magazine, a periodically appearing journal of anarchist thought published in New York City. Copies of his magazine and other writings are available from Anarchos, P.O. Box 466, Peter Stuyvesant Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10009 or may be picked up in person only at the Fifth Estate office.
This interview was conducted for the Fifth Estate by Dena Clamage.
Fifth Estate: What is meant by anarchism? Why talk about anarchism today?
Murray Bookchin: Most people associate anarchists with traditional bomb-throwers and nonsense like that. Anarchism is something much larger than a particular set or a particular school.
Some thousands of years ago men lived in some kind of totality ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Anarchy and Organization appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author. The essay originally was written in reply to an attack by Huey Newton on anarchist forms of organization.
ANARCHY AND ORGANIZATION
A Letter To The Left
Reprinted from
NEW LEFT NOTES
January 15, 1969
by permission of the author
There is a hoary myth that anarchists do not believe in organization to promote revolutionary activity. This myth was raised from its resting place by Marcuse in a L'Express interview some months ago and reiterated again by Huey Newton in his "In Defense of Self-Defense," which New Left Notes decided to reprint in the recent National Convention issue.
To ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) There is certainly much one can
criticize about Israeli policy, particularly under the Likud government
which orchestrated the invasion of
Lebanon. But the torrent of anti-Israeli sentiment that has surfaced in.
the local press and the virtual equation of Zionism with anti-Arab racism impels me to reply with some
vigor.
For years I had hoped that Israel
or Palestine could have evolved into
a Swiss-like confederation of Jews
and Arabs, a confederation in which
both peoples could live peacefully
with each other and develop their
cultures creatively and harmoniously
Tragically, this was not to be.
The United Nations resolution of
1947, which partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, was followed by the invas... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The posters that appeared all over Burlington — Vermont’s largest city (pop: 37,000) in the winter of 1980-81 were arresting and provocative. They showed an old map of the city with a label slapped across it that read: “For Sale.” A bold slogan across the top, in turn, proclaimed that “Burlington Is Not for Sale,” and smiling amiably in the right-hand corner was the youngish, fairly well-known face of Bernard Sanders, sans tie, open-collared, almost endearingly shy and unpretentious. The onlooker was enjoined to rescue Burlington by voting for “Bernie” Sanders for mayor. Sanders, the long-time gubernatorial candidate of Vermont’s maverick Liberty Union, was now challenging “Gordie&... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I strongly doubt if we will ever understand—and fully evaluate—the 60s without placing it against the background of another radical decade, the 30s. Having lived out both periods up to the hilt, I find that my older contemporaries as well as the younger people with whom I worked twenty years ago have seldom been able to distance themselves sufficiently from their time to draw these crucial comparisons adequately. Recent biographies by old New York socialists and communists who lived with such nostalgic exhilaration in the era climaxed by the Spanish Civil War and CIO organizing drives seem utterly estranged and uncomprehending in their attitudes toward the “new left” and counterculture. By the same token, the younger... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Reimar Heider, Öcalan intermediary, to Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl
6 Apr 2004
Dear friends,
please allow me to introduce myself: My name is Reimar Heider, I am one of the German translators of the books of Abdullah Öcalan, political prisoner and most influential kurdish thinker and politician.
Öcalan has been in solitary confinement for the last five years now. During that time he has read the Turkish translations of some of Murray Bookchin’s books, especially “The Ecology of Freedom” and “Towards an ecological society” which have influenced him deeply. He has re-built his political strategy around the vision of a “democratic-ecological-society”... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Comments on the International Social Ecology Network Gathering and the "Deep Social Ecology" of John Clark
by Murray Bookchin
Between August 14 and 19, 1995, an international social ecology network gathering met near Dunoon, Scotland, to discuss the topic "Democracy and Ecology." Its agenda featured, among other presentations, a one-hour summary of a long essay by John Clark titled "The Politics of Social Ecology: Beyond the Limits of the City."
My age and growing disabilities prevented me from attending the gathering, which caused me some concern since Clark has broken with social ecology and become, as he impishly denominated himself in The Trumpeter, an organ of the deep ecology "movement," a "deep social ecologist, or soci... (From: Anarchy Archives.) I
Seldom have socially important words become more confused and divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two centuries ago, it is often forgotten, “democracy” was deprecated by monarchists and republicans alike as “mob rule.” Today, democracy is hailed as “representative democracy,” an oxymoron that refers to little more than a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who ostensibly speak for the powerless many.
“Communism,” for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her ability and received the means of life according ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary – or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal mediocrity – will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries of the revolutionary era.
The direction we select, from among several intersecting roads of human development, may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as this irrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological weapons, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire human enterprise may come to a devastating end. Given... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author and New Politics.
The Communist Manifesto: Insights and Problems
Murray Bookchin
[from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 4 (new series), whole
no. 24, Winter 1998]
Murray Bookchin is the author of numerous books on left
social theory and history. His most recent work is The Third Revolution, a
three-volume history of popular movements in the revolutionary era, Volumes 1 and 2
of which have recently been published by Cassell.
IT IS POLITICALLY RESTORATIVE TO LOOK WITH A FRESH EYE at The Manifesto of the Communist Party (to use its original title), written before Marxism was overlaid by reformist, postmodernist, spiritual, and psy... (From: Anarchy Archives.) "Community Control or Status Politics: A Reply to David Lewis," GREEN MULTILOGUE [Toronto] (May 13, 1991)
Community Control or Statist Politics: A Reply to David Lewis
by Murray Bookchin
In his Green Multilogue hatchet job "The Thought of Director Bookchin" (May 13), David Lewis apparently sets out to undo any obstacle that my antihierarchical views -- libertarian municipalism and social ecology -- might present to his efforts to build a Green party. This does not exclude using blatant lies and gross distortions of my ideas.
At his crudest (and he can be very crude indeed), he describes people who agree with my work as my "followers" and in the same vein demagogically makes an analogy between me and Chairman Mao ("Direct... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
GREEN PERSPECTIVES
Newsletter of the Green Program Project
A LEFT GREEN PERIODICAL
P.O. Box 111 Burlington, VT 05402
No. 6, May 1988
Price:$1.50
The Crisis in the Ecology Movement
by Murray Bookchin
American ecology movements -- and particularly the American Greens -- are faced with a serious crisis of conscience and direction.
Will ecologically oriented groups and the Greens become a movement that sees the roots of our ecological dislocations in social dislocations -- notably, in the domination of h... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
GREEN PERSPECTIVES
Price:$1.00
A LEFT GREEN PUBLICATION Number 23 June 1991
P.O. Box 111 Burlington, VT 05402
A Critique of the Draft Program of the Left Green Network
by Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl
Editors note: The Left Green Network is in the process of writing, developing and debating its program. The draft proposal for the program was published in the April/May 1991 issue of the Network's organizing bulletin, Left Green Notes, number 7. The following critique was written in response to that program. The proposed program will be debated at the upcoming continental conference of the Network, over the July 4 weekend in Chica... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author. It appeared originally in The Progressive, August 1989, pp. 19-23.
DEATH
OF A
SMALL
PLANET It's growth that's killing us BY MURRAY BOOKCHIN
We tend to think of environmental catastrophes -such as the recent Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska-as "accidents": isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?
President Bush was content to blame the spill of more ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Publisher’s Note
This Freedom Press title has grown out of The Raven 17 issue on The Use of Land. Rodney Aitchtey’s, and Brian Morris’s contributions were submitted for inclusion in that issue as was Graham Purchase’s. Since we already had more material to fill an issue of The Raven (in fact that Raven ended up being 112 pages long) it seemed to us that we had material for a Freedom Press title on Ecology, but only if we could persuade our comrade Murray Bookchin to add his comments to these three contributions, which he has done, and we are sure that the discussion will continue in the pages of The Raven and of Freedom.
This volume opens with a challenging contribution ‘Can Life Survive?’ w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Foreword: Turning Debate Into Dialogue by David Levine, Founder and Director, The Learning Alliance
This small but important book grows out of “The Great Debate.” That’s what — for months in advance — many environmental activists around the country called the first public meeting between social ecology theorist Murray Bookchin and deep ecology activist Dave Foreman. Most expected political fireworks at the joint talk organized in November 1989 by the Learning Alliance, New York City’s alternative education and action organization.
Given the confrontational rhetoric and the all-too-frequent name-calling that has characterized the volatile political debate between various advocates of “s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Marat/Sade
Most of the articles that have been written thus far about the Marat/Sade play have been drivel and the tritest remarks have come from its author, Peter Weiss. A good idea can slip from the hands of its creator and follow its own dialectic. This kept happening with Balzac, so there is no reason why it shouldn’t happen with Weiss.
The play is mainly a dialogue between Desire and Need—a dialogue set up under conditions where history froze them into antipodes and opposed them violently to each other in the Great Revolution of 1789. In those days, Desire clashed with Need: the one aristocratic, the other plebeian; the one as the pleasures of the individual, the other as the agony of the masses; the one as th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Robert B. Carson, in an article published in the April 1970 issue of Monthly Review, writes that the "major thrust" of 'Listen, Marxist!' is to "destroy a class-based analysis of society and revolutionary activity." This criticism has been made by many Marxists who read the article.[1]
Carson's accusation is quite absurd. I seriously doubt if he did more than skim the article. Carson goes on to say that my approach is "ahistorical" and that I try to promote a "crude kind of individualistic anarchism"—this despite the fact that a large portion of the article attempts to draw important historical lessons from earlier revolutions and despite the fact that the article is unequivocally committed to anarcho-communism.
The most... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This manuscript was provided to Anarchy Archives by the author.
Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
by Lewis Herber (pseudonym for Murray Bookchin)
[Originally published in Bookchin’s newsletter Comment in 1964 and republished in the British monthly Anarchy in 1965.]
In almost every period since the Renaissance, the development of revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced by a branch of science, often in conjunction with a school of philosophy.
Astronomy in the time of Copernicus and Galileo helped to guide a sweeping movement of ideas from the medieval world, riddled by superstition, into one pervaded by a critical rationalism, openly naturalistic and humanistic in outlook. During the Enlightenment—t... (From: Anarchy Archives.) 3. The Emergence of Hierarchy
The breakdown of early Neolithic village society marks a decisive turning point in the development of humanity. In the millennia-long era that separates the earliest horticultural communities from the "high civilizations" of antiquity, we witness the emergence of towns, cities, and finally empires — of a qualitatively new social arena in which the collective control of production was supplanted by elitist control, kinship relations by territorial and class relations, and popular assemblies or councils of elders by state bureaucracies.
This development occurred very unevenly. Where settled agricultural communities were invaded by pastoral nomads, the shift from one social arena to another may have occu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author. From: Telos, no. 50
(Winter 1981-82).
Telos Discussions:
FINDING THE SUBJECT: NOTES ON WHITEBOOK AND "HABERMAS LTD."
by Murray Bookchin
"For a whole series of reasons, the reputation of Karl Marx has been reborn in a new form, the form of Marx as a sociologist. I believe that this is error: that Marx neither was -- nor in a very important sense intended to be -- a sociologist..."
Donald G. Macrae (1)
Whitebook has known for years that I reject the very use of the word "modernity." So his attempt to dissociate me from it is quite gratuitous. (2) He also knows that I reject it for reasons that have nothing to do ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Freedom has its forms. However personalized, individuated or dadaesque may be the attack upon prevailing institutions, a liberatory revolution always poses the question of what social forms will replace existing ones. At one point or another, a revolutionary people must deal with how it will manage the land and the factories from which it acquires the means of life. It must deal with the manner in which it will arrive at decisions that affect the community as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to betaken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the problems and forms of social management. It must open to public discussion the problems that are involved in a creative development of liberatory social forms. Although there is no theo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) [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 v... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One of the most entrenched ideas in western thought is the notion that nature is a harsh realm of necessity, a domain of unrelenting lawfulness and compulsion. From this underlying view, two extreme either/or attitudes have emerged. Either humanity must yield with a religious, a more recently, “ecological” humility to the dicta of “natural law” and take its abject place side by side with the lowly ants on which it “arrogantly” treads or it must “conquer” nature with its technological and rational astuteness — an enterprise, I may add, that may very well entail the subjugation of human by human in a shared project to ultimately “liberate” all of humanity from the compulsion of... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This manuscript was provided to Anarchy Archives by the author.
The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism
by Murray Bookchin
One of the most persistent of human frailties is the tendency of individuals and groups to fall back, in times of a terribly fragmented reality, onto obsolete, even archaic ideologies for a sense of continuity and security. Today we find this not only on the right, where people are evoking the ghosts of Nazism and deadly forms of an embattled nationalism, but also on the "left" (whatever that word may mean anymore), where many people evoke ghosts of their own, be they the Neolithic goddess cults that many feminist and ecological sects celebrate or the generally anti-civilizational ambiance that exists among young mid... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This manuscript has been provided to Anarchy Archives by the author.
History, Civilization, and Progress:
Outline for a Criticism of Modern Relativism
by Murray Bookchin
Rarely have the concepts that literally define the best of Western
culture--its notions of a meaningful History, a universal Civilization, and the
possibility of Progress--been called so radically into question as they are
today. In recent decades, both in the United States and abroad, the academy
and a subculture of self-styled postmodernist intellectuals have nourished an
entirely new ensemble of cultural conventions that stem from a corrosive
social, political, and moral relativism. This ensemble encompasses a crude
nominalism, pluralism, and skepticism,... (From: Anarchy Archives.)
