Agriculture is a form of culture. The cultivation of food is a social and cultural phenomenon unique to humanity. Among animals, anything that could remotely be described as food cultivation appear ephemerally, if at all; and even among humans, agriculture developed little more than ten thousand years ago. Yet, in an epoch when food cultivation is reduced to a mere industrial technique, it becomes especially important to dwell on the cultural implications of "modern" agriculture—to indicate their impact not only on public health, but also on humanity's relationship to nature and the relationship of human to human.
The contrast between early and modern agricultural practices is dramatic. Indeed, it would be very difficult to und... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
RADICALIZING DEMOCRACY by Murray Bookchin (a timely interview with Murray Bookchin conducted by the editors of Kick It Over magazine) [place tree image here] includes: on the cybernetic revolution
towards a new philosophical paradigm
the contradictions of the German Greens
building a movement for radical democracy For more copies or further information, please contact: Green Program Project P. O. Box 111, Burlington, Vermont O5401
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? K.I.O. Interviews Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin is the author of numerous boo (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 18 November 1989
P.O. Box 111 Burlington, VT 05402
Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism
by Murray Bookchin
Defying all the theoretical predictions of the 1930s, capitalism has restabilized itself with a vengeance and acquired extraordinary flexibility in the decades since World War II. In fact, we have yet to clearly determine what constitutes capitalism in its most "mature" form, not to speak of its social trajectory in the years to come. But what is clear, I would argue, is that capitalism has transformed itself from an economy surrounded by many... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Chapter 7: Postmodernist nihilism
The most academically entrenched attack upon humanism, the Enlightenment, and reason are the highly influential philosophical tendencies that go under the name of postmodernism. It is arguable whether this name adequately encompasses such disparate, even idiosyncratic views as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and a constellation of former French leftists such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, to cite the most well-known to an Anglo-American readership.
Yet certain basic commonalities, I believe, justly designate their work as postmodernist or poststructuralist (the two words are often used interchangeably). To be sure, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Murray Bookchin's "Recovering Evolution: A Reply to Eckersley and Fox", Environmental Ethics, vol. 12, Fall, 1990 appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
Recovering Evolution: A Reply to Eckersley and Fox
by Murray Bookchin*
Robyn Eckersley claims erroneously that I believe humanity is currently
equipped to take over the "helm" of natural evolution. In addition,
she provides a misleading treatment of my discussion of the relationship
of first nature (biological evolution) and second nature (social
evolution). I argue that her positivistic methodology is inappropriate
in dealing with my processual approach and that her Manichean contrast
between biocentrism and anthropocentrism virtually exclud... (From: Anarchy Archives.) From Here to There
The door that can open the way to a New Left of the future, one that embodies the experience of the thirties, sixties, and the decades that have followed them, is still swinging to and fro on its hinges.
It has neither opened fully nor closed. Its swings depend partly upon the hard realities of everyday social life — namely, whether the economy is depressed or rising, the kind of political climate that exists in various parts of the world, events in the Third World as well as the First and Second, the fortunes of radical tendencies at home and abroad, and the sweeping environmental changes that confront humanity in the years that lie ahead.
Ecologically, humanity is faced with major climatic changes, rising lev... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dear 5th May Group,
Sometime last year the comrades at Kaos Yayinlari wrote to me, asking me to write an preface for their translation of “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.” Based on their assessment of the Turkish situation from their vantage point in Istanbul, they had determined that a translation of this book into Turkish was needed. Since I had little knowledge of Turkish anarchism, I had asked them what points they would like me, in my preface, to emphasize.
I wrote:
“I’m somewhat perplexed by how I could make [a preface] relevant to an anarchist culture--yours--that, judging from your description, doesn’t seem to have lifestyle anarchists. Or does it? ... I would be gratef... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dear Comrades,
Thank you for sending me a copy of your review of my pamphlet, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. This was a courtesy I seldom encounter on the so-called ‘Left’ in the U.S. and U.K. You have my sincere respect for your probity and for the comradely way in which you examine my work. You may be right that I am “ignorant of the Anarchist movement in Ireland and Britain”. I do not receive any periodicals from either country, and alas, my limited income at the age of seventy-five does not allow me to subscribe to overseas periodicals. Hence my failure to deal with the situations in your countries. If comrades in Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales would care to send me their periodicals, I wou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Note: Murray Bookchin submitted the following resolution to the Second Continental Conference of the Left Green Network on July 1st, 1990. It was adopted by a vote of 24 -- yes; 16 -- no; 6 - Abstain.
Resolution: "On Gubernatorial Races"
Libertarian municipalism is premised on developing a dual power --
grassroots in the fullest sense in that its politics rests on the most
immediate popular institutions in the political realm namely the
municipality, and confederal relationships between municipalities in
which the coordination of power is vested in confederal councils whose
authority diminishes as the confederal structure is raised to encompass
ever-wider political jurisdictions.
State power functions on precisely the opp... (From: Anarchy Archives.) I tried last week to create some sense, first of all, of what social ecology was and what its premises were. And when it came down to working out or heading toward developing what you would call an ethics, I went through a great deal of natural evolution as you’ll remember, and tried to show what meaning there was in the organic evolutionary process.
What I would like to do today is continue that to some extent (and perhaps go into other issues as well given time) and examine the social process that emerges out of this biological process. Both the continuities and discontinuities that exist between what can be called natural evolution and social evolution. And what meaning can be given to social evolution.
The meaning th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
by Murray Bookchin
For some two centuries, anarchism -- a very ecumenical body of
anti-authoritarian ideas -- developed in the tension between two basically
contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy
and a collectivist commitment to social freedom. These tendencies have by no
means been reconciled in the history of libertarian thought. Indeed, for
much of the last century, they simply coexisted within anarchism as a
minimalist credo of opposition to the State rather than as a maximalist
credo that articulated the kind of new society that had to be created in its
place.
Which is not to say that various schools of anarchism did ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) What is Social Ecology?
Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today — apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.
If this approach seems a bit too sociological for those environmentalists who identify the primary ecological problem as being the p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 4. Ecology in Democratic Confederalism
by Ercan Ayboga
Ecology discussions and practices in the Kurdish Freedom Struggle with a focus on North Kurdistan (Bakur) Mesopotamia Ecology Movement,
www.mezopotamyaekoloji.org
Ecology is one of the three pillars of the paradigm of Democratic Confederalism, the political-theoretical concept of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Besides democracy and gender liberation, ecology has been mentioned explicitly as a dimension in this concept since 2005. However to date, ecology is less discussed and practiced than the two other pillars.
Ecological Destruction and Exploitation in Kurdistan
With the widespread introduction of capitalism to Kurdistan in the 1950s came a systemic and destructive exploitat... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology:
A Challenge for the Ecology Movement
by Murray Bookchin
[Originally published in Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5 (summer 1987). In the original, the term deep ecology appeared in quotation marks; they have been removed in this online posting.]
The environmental movement has traveled a long way since those early Earth Day festivals when millions of school kids were ritualistically mobilized to clean up streets, while Arthur Godfrey, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, and a bouquet of manipulative legislators scolded their parents for littering the landscape with cans, newspapers, and bottles.
The movement has gone beyond a naïve belief that patchwo... (From: Anarchy Archives.) SOCIETY AND ECOLOGY
The problems which many people face today in "defining" themselves, in knowing "who they are"--problems that feed a vast psychotherapy industry--are by no means personal ones. These problems exist not only for private individuals; they exist for modern society as a whole. Socially, we live in desperate uncertainty about how people relate to each other. We suffer not only as individuals from alienation and confusion over our identities and goals; our entire society, conceived as a single entity, seems unclear about its own nature and sense of direction. If earlier societies tried to foster a belief in the virtues of cooperation and caring, thereby giving an ethical meaning to social life, modern society fosters a beli... (From: Spunk.org.) I
The interface between nature and society has been a haunting philosophical, ethical, and cultural problem for thousands of years. Indeed, that it constitutes the stuff from which naïve myths and thoughtful moral credos have been formed for ages is a fact we are seldom permitted to forget, if only in a fashion that is patronizing to presumably less “sophisticated" cultures. After all, were not the earliest religions “mere” nature religions and the earliest philosophies “mere” nature philosophies? As far back as we can search into humanity’s rich reservoir of intuitions and rational formulas, our relationship to nature – indeed, humanity’s place in nature – has been a central... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We must leave the details of that revolution—its astonishing achievements and its tragic subversion—to another volume. That Sanjurjo was to perish in a plane crash on his way to Spain, leaving Franco commander of the entire military uprising; that the war on the peninsula was to become inextricably tied to European power politics; that ijpain was to endure three tormenting years of internecine conflict—all of these events belong to the conventional histories of the Spanish Civil War. Without entering into a discussion at this time of the Anarchist collectives and the experiments in workers’ control of industry that developed in the latter half of 1936, we must try to assess the meaning of the events recounted in this... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The problems of the social system in Russia have often been compared with those created by revolutionary France more than a century and a half ago. An understanding of both, it is said, requires perspective. Historians are reminded that the years have dissolved the acrimony heaped on the events of the Great French Revolution — that more 'good' than 'harm' was done. Much the same is implied for Russia. Supporters, even mild critics, of the Stalin regime tell us that so 'new' a phenomenon requires the test of many generations, that the judgment nourished by immediate events, by 'passing' abuses, must be suspended until lasting outlines appear. In place of the years and of abuses engendered by 'expediency', a vast theoretical corpus has ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) PART III. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Chapter 9. “A Kind of Revolution”
The men and women who rallied to the Leveler cause in the late 1640s faded away with the rise of Cromwell’s interregnum. But their political ideal of “an agreement of the people acceptable to the general will,” as H.N. Brailsford observes, did not disappear. “It crossed the Atlantic ... and bore ripe fruit. Defeated in Europe, the English Revolution found its triumph and its culmination in America.”[104]
Until recently, there has been a tendency among historians to deprecate the migration of radical ideals to colonial America and the radicalism of the American Revolution generally. Its revolutionary character has be... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Age, chronic illnesses, and the summer heat oblige me to remain at home—hence I am very sorry that I cannot participate in your conference on libertarian municipalism. I would like, however—thanks to Janet Biehl, who will read these remarks—to welcome you to Vermont and to wish you well during the course of your discussions over the next three days.
Some issues have recently arisen in discussions of libertarian municipalism, and I would like to offer my views on them. One of the most important involves the distinction that should be drawn between libertarian municipalism and communitarianism, a distinction that is often lost in discussions of politics.
Communitarianism
By communitarianism, I refer to movem... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Preface
These essays are less an analysis of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936-39 than an evocation of the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries. Although they contain a general overview and evaluation of the Anarchist and Anarchosyndicalist movements (the two should be clearly distinguished) in the three-year struggle at the end of the 1930s, they are not intended to be a full account of those complex events.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Spanish Revolution was the farthest-reaching movement that the Left ever produced, for reasons the essays that follow will make clear. The Spanish proletariat and peasantry, led largely by Anarchist militants whose names will never be known t... (From: Spunk.org.) There is an urgent need for a new radical approach to adequately address the new economic, ecological, technological, and cultural challenges of contemporary society; it must be one of theory and action, one that will draw on features from classical Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, yet go beyond their historical and theoretical limitations.
Conceived as they all were in the socially tumultuous era of industrial revolution, the ideologies of communism, socialism, and the more social versions of anarchism responded with a reasonable degree of adequacy to the challenges of the oppressive and exploitative circumstances and contexts in which they took form.
In Marx’s hands, communism provided a philosophy, a theory of histo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Toward a Vision of the Urban Future
“Without testament,” observed Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future, “... without tradition — which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is — there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the biological cycle of creatures in it.”[57]
If the city can be added to the lost treasures which Arendt laments in her deeply sensitive essays, this loss is due in no small measure to the modern stance of “contemporaneity,” a stance which virtually denies an urban past in its deadening claim to se... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.
GREEN PERSPECTIVES Newsletter of the Green Program Project P.O. Box 111 Burlington, VT 05402 No. 1 January 1986
THE GREENING OF POLITICS: Toward a New Kind of Political Practice by Murray Bookchin 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... (From: Anarchy Archives.) This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author. Originally, this article was a statement for the fourth faction active in SDS during its final days. This faction is often overlooked by historians, who typically only emphasize the other three factions (i.e., Progressive Labor Party, RYM I and RYM II.
Toward a post-scarcity society: the American perspective and the SDS*
Radical Decentralist Project, Resolution No. I
The twentieth century is the heir of human history - the legatee of man's age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Lewis Herber [Murray Bookchin]
Note: This is the final part of a two-part article on the technological bases of freedom. The first part (Anarchos n. 2) examined the technological limitations of the previous century and their influence on revolutionary theory. An economy anchored technologically in scarcity, it was shown, circumscribed the range of social ideas and tended to subvert revolutionary concepts of freedom. These limitations were compared with the potentialities of technology today -- the substitution of invention by design, the open end in technological development, the emergence of cybernetic devices, the prospect of reducing toil to a near vanishing point. The article examined the possibility of making qualitative changes in... (From: Anarchy Archives.) Turning Up the Stones
A Reply to Clark's October 13 Message
Murray Bookchin
The May 5th Group's posting on this list (June 13, 1998), and the various subsequent exchanges, have finally led John Clark to attack me and my views with his by-now-typical malevolence (October 13, 1998; at this writing Clark's posting does not appear on the RA List archives). I am only too delighted to have this opportunity, once and for all, to expose his ongoing campaign to defame me. Virtually unrestrained by moral standards, Clark has an indefatigable capacity to slander a critic and distort his or her views, through outrageous gossip, surreptitious character assassination, and falsification. I have had enough of it, and it is time to turn up the s... (From: Anarchy Archives.) The Twilight Comes Early
by Murray Bookchin
The twilight comes early, as it should in the autumn of the seasons and in the autumn of life. Every part of my body announces the eternity that must soon follow --- the growing pain that fatal diseases colonize my body, the failure of my organs, the loss of energy, the desire for death. Even society seems to be dying, to desert me, to bid its farewell. To those who are near to death, this is as it should be. To those who are still young, I feel nothing but sorrow. How sad that my children should be faced with a full lifetime of sterility and fear.
Three days have passed since Bush was reelected. History threatens to roll back an epoch! What held my life together was socialism. ... (From: Anarchy Archives.) I
Recently I have begun to encounter, especially among young people, individuals who call themselves “leftists” but who have little or no awareness of the most basic features of the Left’s longstanding analysis of capitalism, or of the history of the revolutionary movements that have stood in fundamental opposition to bourgeois society. It distresses me that the ideological contours that have long defined capitalism and the Left are being forgotten today, as well as the most critical insights of libertarian socialism and revolutionary anarchism. Given this spreading social amnesia, I find that before I can summarize my political and social ideals, I must briefly outline the trajectory of capitalist society and the r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter Three: The Creation of Politics
Politics has acquired a fairly odious reputation among the great majority of people today. The word seems to denote techniques for the unsavory end of exercising power over human beings. We “play politics” not only on an international national, and local scale; we do so in domestic relations, in schools and places of learning, in ordinary jobs or extraordinary careers. Politics, in effect, is seen to have invaded the most private recesses of our lives. At worst, it is viewed as oppressive, manipulative, cunningly seductive, and basically degrading. Few words more readily evoke a contemptuous sneer than the term “politician.” Conceived instrumentally as a means to control peo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
