From: THE VERMONT PEACE READER 1983. This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
From Spectacle to Empowerment:
Grass Roots Democracy and the Peace Process
By Murray Bookchin
Will the present-day peace movement repeat the errors of the 1960s anti-war movement by placing its primary focus on carefully orchestrated and highly centralized national actions in cities like Washington or New York? Or will it try to percolate into the localities and neighborhoods of the country -- into the body politic itself -- and become a genuinely popular movement that reaches deeply into America as a force for education as well as action, for a broad view of the causes of war as well as the dangers of war, for a... (From: Anarchy Archives.) There are two ways to look at the word " politics."
The first -- and most conventional -- is to describe politics as a fairly exclusive, generally professional ized system of power interactions in which specialists whom we call "politicians" formulate decisions that affect our lives and administer these decisions through governmental agencies and bureaucrats.
These "politicians" and their "politics" are generally regarded with a certain measure of contempt by many Americans. They come to power partly through "parties," which are highly structured bureaucracies, and profess to "represent" people -- at times, one person for vast numbers of people such as Congressmen and Senators. They are "elected" and belong to "the Elect" (to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Note: This piece was printed in Alternative Forum, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall, 1991
INTELLIGENTSIA AND THE NEW INTELLECTUALS
By Murray Bookchin
Editorial Introduction:
The following lecture was delivered as the opening address at the fourth continental Youth Greens conference that took place on the campus of Goddard College in Vermont on July 27,1990 The social theorist Murray Bookchin, whose work on ecology began with an article on the chemical additives in food in 1952, is a long-standing activist in the ecology movement and the author of several books, including The Ecology of Freedom, Remaking Society and The Philosophy of Social Ecology. In many ways, this confrontational and thought-provoking address ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) There’s certainly nothing precedent-shattering about the thought of a speaker at a national Libertarian Party convention stirring up controversy within the libertarian movement. Timothy Leary did it in 1977 at the national convention in San Francisco. And it had been done more than a few times before that. But for a speaker at a national LP convention to stir up the movement before he’s even assumed his position on the speaker’s platform, before the convention he’s addressing has even convened—now, that’s no mean feat. And Murray Bookchin, the man who did it at the 1978 convention in Boston, may well have shattered a precedent or two in the process.
Actually, no role could possibly have made Bookch... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I would like to recall a Left That Was–an idealistic, often theoretically coherent Left that militantly emphasized its internationalism, its rationality in its treatment of reality, its democratic spirit, and its vigorous revolutionary aspirations. From a retrospective viewpoint of a hundred years or so, it is easy to find many failings in the Left That Was: I have spent much of my own life criticizing the Left’s failings (as I saw them) and many of its premises, such as its emphasis on the historical primacy of economic factors (although this fault can be overstated by ignoring its social idealism), its fixation on the proletariat as a “hegemonic” class, and its failure to understand the problems raised by status hi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author and consists of excerpts from From Urbanization to Cities (1987; London: Cassell, 1995), with revisions.
Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda
by Murray Bookchin
Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words. . . . Politics is not statecraft, and citizens are not "constituents" or "taxpayers." Statecraft consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of its monopoly of violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus of society in the form of legal and ordinance-making... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview by Murray Bookchin
Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction -- I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed -- is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo.
Politics today means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for electoral office, that offer vacuous programs for "social justice" to attract a nondescript "electorate." Once in office, their programs usually turn into a bouquet of "compromises " In this respect, many Green parties in Europe have been only marginally different from conventional parliamentary parties. Nor h... (From: Anarchy Archives.) 2. The Rise of the Bourgeois City
Only in western and central Europe, did the rise of urban life yield a lasting domination of town over country — not as a special Case in the Crevices of the ancient world, but as the general feature of a continental society, Europe’s development closely recapitulates the evolution of agrarian society through the social phases we have discussed in connection with Greece and Latium; but while the development of urban life in antiquity led to a cul de sac, in Europe the towns developed capitalism and established the bourgeois city.
The striking social advances scored by European cities can be explained by many factors unique to the continent itself, although what stands out as the principal on... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) From Post Scarcity Anarchism, 1971.
Listen, Marxist!
by Murray Bookchin
All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again--the shit about the "class line," the "role of the working class," the "trained cadres," the "vanguard party," and the "proletarian dictatorship." It's all back again, and in a more vulgarized form than ever. The Progressive Labor Party is not the only example, it is merely the worst. One smells the same shit in various offshoots of SDS, and in the Marxist and Socialist clubs on campuses, not to speak of the Trotskyist groups, the International Socialist Clubs and the Youth Against War and Fascism.
In the thirties, at least it was understandable. The United States was paralyzed by a chronic economic cri... (From: Anarchy Archives.) 1. France: A Movement for Life
The Quality of Everyday Life
The 1968 May–June uprising was one of the most important events to occur in France since the Paris Commune of 1871. Not only did it shake the foundations of bourgeois society in France, it raised issues and posed solutions of unprecedented importance for modern industrial society. It deserves the closest study and the most thoroughgoing discussion by revolutionaries everywhere.
The May–June uprising occurred in an industrialized, consumption-oriented country—less developed than the United States, but essentially in the same economic category. The uprising exploded the myth that the wealth and resources of modern industrial society can be used to a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) GREEN PERSPECTIVES
A Left Green Publication
Number 20 November 1989
P.O. Box 111
Burlington, VT 05402
The Meaning of Confederalism
by Murray Bookchin
Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a "complex society." Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level. And our economy is too "global," presumably, to unravel the intricacies of production and commerce. In our present transnational, often highly centralized social system, it is better to enhance representation in the state, to increase the efficiency ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author. Originally published in The Raven: Anarchist Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 1994), pp. 328-46.
A Meditation on Anarchist Ethics
Ulrike Heider, Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994; 153 pages)
by Murray Bookchin
In the late winter of 1989, one Ulrike Heider appeared at my home in Burlington, Vermont, for an interview, armed with a tape recorder, clothing for a weekend visit--and apparently a butcher's cleaver, looking for as much blood as she could draw from an unsuspecting victim. Citing an old anarchosyndicalist whom I knew as a reference and her plan to write a book on American anarchists as her aim, she was hou... (From: Anarchy Archives.) MUNICIPALIZATION Community Ownership of the Economy1
by Murray Bookchin
In my article, "Toward a Libertarian Municipalism2," I advanced the view that any counterculture to the prevailing culture must be developed together with counterinstitutions to the prevailing institutions -- a decentralized, confederal, popular power that will acquire the control over social and political life that is being claimed by the centralized, bureaucratic nation-state.
Through much of the nineteenth century and nearly half of the twentieth, the classical center of this popular power was located by most radical ideologies in the factory, the arena for the conflict between wage labor and capital. The factory as the locus of the "power question" reste... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Chapter 6: Marxism
Introduction
Although Marx’s writings had a great influence on Bookchin’s ideas,
it became clear to him early on that a degree of authoritarianism,
particularly an acceptance of domination, recurred in the Marxian
writings. Even in the 1940s he was cognizant that a centralized state
was essential to Marx’s views and to the new socialist dispensation
that he would create. Moreover, even as Marx and Engels attacked
class society, they had taught that hierarchical relationships were
indispensable to a socialist society, just as a factory needed
hierarchical relationships in order to operate.
In time, Bookchin realized that the ideological rationales for
material scarcity that were typical of bou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Social revolutions are not “made” by parties, groups, or cadres; they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely (as Trotsky argued) because the “masses” find the existing society intolerable, but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between “what is” and “what could be.”
Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain of the living like a nightmare because it was largely a project of “in... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century.
This did not mean that the nineteenth-century Left favored imperialist depredations in the colonial world. At the turn of this century, hardly any serious radical thinker, to my knowledge, regarded the imper... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The fact of the matter is that every attitude we have had toward nature has actually been an echo and, even more precisely, a reflection of the attitude we have had toward each other, and that there have been as many different views toward the natural world as there have been in society itself in the relationship between human and human.
Our attitudes are entirely a product of our own relationship to each other, our attitudes toward the natural world, but this can be traced back almost to prehistory, to tribal society itself, and we can see the evolution, not only of society, but with society and along with new and different social relationships, different attitudes toward nature. Among so-called ‘primitive peoples’ the n... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 1. The Communalist Project
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 dev... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The term "affinity group" is the English translation of the Spanish grupo de afinidad, which was the name of an organizational form devised in pre-Franco days as the basis of the redoubtable Federación Anarquista Ibérica, the Iberian Anarchist Federation. (The FAI consisted of the most idealistic militants in the CNT, the immense anarcho-syndicalist labor union.) A slavish imitation of the FAI's forms of organization and methods would be neither possible nor desirable. The Spanish anarchists of the thirties were faced with entirely different social problems from those which confront American anarchists today. The affinity group form, however, has features that apply to any social situation, and these have often been intuitivel... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Death normally invites eulogy–even for a Mafia capo. Accordingly it is not surprising that the death of Francisco Franco summoned up the usual tribute from the acolytes of “relevancy”–a genre of people who are likely to praise any dictator from Stalin to Franco for “modernizing” their countries and ushering them into the “industrial age.” In the case of El Caudillo, Nixon happened to lead the pack. He praised Franco as “a loyal friend and ally of the United States…who brought Spain back to economic recovery and “unified a divided nation through a policy of firmness and fairness toward those who had fought against him.” At the other end of the spectrum, according to som... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
On "Remaking of the American Left"
Murray Bookchin
STANLEY ARONOWITZ has written a generally admirable and important work in Socialist Review, "The Remaking of the American Left," that deserves widespread discussion. For the present, I would like to focus on what I regard as a core issue of the article, notably Aronowitz's distinction "between the ideological left of socialists, communists, libertarians of various sorts . . . and the popular left" which in past decades consisted of movements for redistributive justice," by which I take Aronowitz to mean the traditional labor, agrarian, and unemployed movements of the 1930s and earlier periods. While these... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Introduction
There can be few words more misused in politics than the word ‘spontaneity.’ It is often used to denote something which seems to happen without obvious cause, without apparently being the result of previous preparation. In the sense of ‘an effect without a cause’ there is probably no such thing as ‘spontaneity’ — either in politics or life. Human behavior is always influenced by previous experience. If a person is not consciously aware of why he is acting in a particular way, this does not at all mean that there are no causes for what he is doing. It only means that the causes elude him.
Murray Bookchin does not use the word ‘spontaneity’ in this crude and unre... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Our Synthetic Environment
Murray Bookchin
CHAPTER SIX: RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH
The Effects of Radiation
It is hardly necessary to emphasize that since the explosion of a nuclear weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 ionizing radiation has become the most serious threat to man's survival. If nuclear weapons are further developed or increased in number, it is quite conceivable that a future war will virtually extinguish human life. Grave as this danger may be, ionizing radiation is associated with a number of subtle hazards that warrant equal public concern. "Today... sources of ionizing radiation are rapidly becoming more and more widely used," observes a team of radiation specialists for the U. S. Public Health Se... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author and is the introduction to The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, 2nd ed. revised (Montreal:
Black Rose Books, 1995).
A Philosophical Naturalism
by Murray Bookchin
What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world?
In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. They are not abstract philosophical questions that should be relegated to a remote, airy world of metaphysical speculation. Nor can we answer them in an offhand way, wi... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Introduction:
A Philosophical Naturalism
What is nature? What is humanity’s place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world?
In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. They are not abstract philosophical questions that should be relegated to a remote, airy world of metaphysical speculation. Nor can we answer them in an offhand way, with poetic metaphors or unthinking, visceral reactions. The definitions and ethical standards with which we respond to them may ultimately decide whether human society will creatively foster natural evolution, or whether we will render the pl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
Green Program Project -- Discussion Paper No. 2
Popular Politics vs. Party Politics
Note: This article was written and published in the River Valley Voice, a New England publication, during the 1984 Democratic primary campaign. Although it makes repeated allusions to the 1984 elections, the views it expresses have a more lasting value, and are submitted for discussion to the reader as a Green Program Project paper.
Murray Bookchin
A new American politics is definitely needed today. The problem we face is what kind? If the goal of "independent political action" is to gain "power," to "function effectively" as a means to "lobby" or ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) The Population Myth--I
by Murray Bookchin
The "population problem" has a Phenix-like existence: it rises from the ashes at least every generation and sometimes every decade or so. The prophecies are usually the same namely, that human beings are populating the earth in "unprecedented numbers" and "devouring" its resources like a locust plague.
In the days of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Malthus, a craven English parson, formulated his notorious "law of population" which asserts that while food supplies expand only arithmetically, population soars geometrically. Only by wars, famines, and disease (Malthus essentially argued) can a "balance" be struck between population and food supplies. Malthus did not mean this to be an argument to... (From: Anarchy Archives.) To Our Readers:
For the past three months, the editors of Green Perspectives were obliged to suspend publication because of the demanding municipal electoral campaign that was conducted in Burlington from January to March by the Burlington Greens. The Greens, of which the editors are members, ran a slate of three candidates - one for mayor and two for alderman - in the campaign, and the editors were deeply involved in the effort.
Our race was widely featured - not only in the Vermont media and in regional newspapers like the Boston Globe, but also in the national media; at the end of February, Newsweek devoted the greater part of a page to "The Greens of Vermont."
The race posed very sharp alternatives between a Democrat (many of whose ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) A Post-Affluence Critique by Jeremy Brecher
Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin (Ramparts Press, 1971)
I
Throughout the 1960’s, the themes of a return to nature, hostility to synthetics, anti-“consumerism,” dissolution of sexual restrictions and roles, community and tribalism, internal exploration through drugs and other means, all became widespread among college and dropout youth, and were echoed by many young professionals — all underpinned by a discontent with the established roles assigned them by present-day society. Their experimentation was made possible by their relative affluence and economic security. This put them in direct contrast with the generation which had been scarred by the ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) PRECONDITIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
All the successful revolutions of the past have been particularistic revolutions of minority classes seeking to assert their specific interests over those of society as a whole. The great bourgeois revolutions of modern times offered an ideology of sweeping political reconstitution, but in reality they merely certified the social dominance of the bourgeoisie, giving formal political expression to the economic ascendancy of capital. The lofty notions of the "nation," the "free citizen," of equality before the law," concealed the mundane reality of the centralized state, the atomized isolated man, the dominance of bourgeois interest. Despite their sweeping ideological claims, the particularistic revoluti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
