Murray Bookchin

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.

Murray Bookchin (14 January 1921 – 30 July 2006) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher.

Quotes

As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

• An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
  • Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1965).

• Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.
  • Desire and Need (1967).

• When cybernated and automatic machinery can reduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is more meaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. When modern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty. When all the resources exist to promote social equality, nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals than subjugation.
  • Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), introduction to the First Edition (p. vii of the third edition, 2004)

• The American left today as I know it—and believe me, I am very familiar with the American left—is going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It's becoming the real right in the United States. We don't have an appreciable American left any more in the United States. What I saw of the SDS in the '60s was very abhorrent to me: Marxism, Leninism, almost the KGB mentality—a police politics that I found completely totalitarian in nature. And in Europe, I would say that today the real support for State power and totalitarianism comes from the Communist parties and the Socialist parties and, where they are sizable, the Trotskyist groups. They are the ones that really frighten me.
  • “Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas”, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39.

• People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights—this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.
  • “Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas”, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39.

• I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of capitalism of the type that you have advanced. I believe that people will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in the way of communities that wish to make other decisions. I could live beautifully in a society of the kind that you have described, as well as in a collectivistic one. However, if that collectivistic one assumed any totalitarian forms, any authoritarian forms whatever, I would oppose that. And not only that: I would join your community in fighting it. Let me make it very plain that if socialism, which is what I call the authoritarian version of collectivism, were to emerge, I would join your community. I would migrate to your community and do everything I could to prevent the collectivists from abridging my right to function as I like. That should be made very clear.
  • “Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas”, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39

• Without changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic 'classless' and 'non-exploitative' form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of 'people's democracies,' 'socialism' and the 'public ownership' of 'natural resources.' And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.
  • Toward an Ecological Society (1980).

• The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
  • What Is Social Ecology? (1984).

• To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
  • Remaking Society (1990).

• The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
  • "The Meaning of Confederalism," Green Perspectives, no. 20 (1990).

Listen, Marxist!

• Once again the dead are walking in our midst- ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century.
• For these people to call themselves reds and describe attacks upon them as redbaiting is a form of McCarthyism in reverse. To rephrase Trotsky's juicy description of Stalinism, they are the syphilis of the radical youth movement today. And for syphilis there is only one treatment-an antibiotic, not an argument.
• We argue that the problem is not to "abandon"Marxism or to "annul" it,but to transcend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegelian philosophy, Ricardian economics, and Blanquist tactics and modes of organization.
• Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.
• Not only did Lenin oppose direct workers' control within a matter of weeks after the decree of November 14, even union control came to an end shortly after it had been established. By the summer of 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed under bourgeois forms of management.
• It would be incredibly naive to suppose that Leninism was the product of a single man. The disease lies much deeper, not only in the limitations of Marxian theory but in the limitations of the social era that produced Marxism.
• This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of 'revolutionizing themselves and things,' much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People's Labor Party 'revolutionaries' is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of 'proletarian morality' replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little 'Red Book' and other sacred litanies.
  • "Listen, Marxist!" (May 1969); also available in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
• Listen, Marxist: The organization we try to build is the kind of society our revolution will create. Either we will shed the past - in ourselves as well as in our groups - or there will simply be no future to win.

The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

• Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.

• If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.
  • Page 26 of the 1991 reprint

• If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
  • Page 107 of the 2005 reprint.

Anarchism in America (15 January 1983)

Almost anyone, I suppose, can call himself or herself an anarchist, if he or she believed that the society could be managed without the state. And by the state—I don't mean the absence of any institutions, the absence of any form of social organisation—the state really refers to a professional apparatus of people who are set aside to manage society, to preëmpt the control of society from the people. So that would include the military, judges, politicians, representatives who are paid for the express purpose of legislating, and then an executive body that is also set aside from society. So anarchists generally believe that, whether as groups or individuals, people should directly run society.

Directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher.

• Almost anyone, I suppose, can call himself or herself an anarchist, if he or she believed that the society could be managed without the state. And by the state—I don't mean the absence of any institutions, the absence of any form of social organisation—the state really refers to a professional apparatus of people who are set aside to manage society, to preëmpt the control of society from the people. So that would include the military, judges, politicians, representatives who are paid for the express purpose of legislating, and then an executive body that is also set aside from society. So anarchists generally believe that, whether as groups or individuals, people should directly run society.

• I had entered the communist children's movement, an organisation called the Young Pioneers of America, in 1930 in New York City; I was only nine years of age. And I'd gone through the entire '30s as a—Stalinist—initially, and then increasingly as someone who was more and more sympathetic to Trotskyism. And by 1939, after having seen Hitler rise to power, the Austrian workers revolt of 1934 (an almost completely forgotten episode in labour history), the Spanish revolution by which I mean the so-called Spanish civil war—I finally became utterly disillusioned with Stalinism, and drifted increasingly toward Trotskyism. And by 1945, I, finally, also became disillusioned with Trotskyism; and I would say, now, increasingly with Marxism and Leninism.

• The basic problem I really have is that whenever I meet leftists in the socialist and Marxist movements, I'm called a petit-bourgeois individualist.  [audience laughs]  I'm supposed to shrink after this— Usually I'm called petit-bourgeois individualist by students, and by academicians, who’ve never done a days work life [sic] in their entire biography, whereas I have spent years in factories and the trade unions, in foundries and auto plants. So after I have to swallow the word petit-bourgeois, I don't mind the word individualist at all!

  I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment—individual liberty. That’s what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.

  And when I normally encounter my so-called colleagues on the left—socialists, Marxists, communists—they tell me that, after the revolution, they're gonna shoot me.  [audience laughs, Murray nods]  That is said with unusual consistency. They're gonna stand me and Karl up against the wall and get rid of us real fast; I feel much safer in your company.  [audience laughs and applauds]

  • In this clip, Murray Bookchin is speaking to a crowd of anarcho-capitalists and other libertarians at a Libertarian Party Conference. Karl Hess is sitting next to Bookchin at the table.

Quotes about Bookchin

• Describing his concept of an ecological society, Bookchin blithely spoke of killing animals for food, hunting, and other human purposes. He thereby typifies the entire left spectrum, which is unable to escape speciesist social conditioning to grasp that human and nonhuman animals have equal interests in freedom, happiness, and life over captivity, suffering, and death. Like Marx, Bookchin embraced the Cartesian-mechanistic view of animals as dumb creatures devoid of any complex consciousness or social life. In Bookchin's terms, animals belong to the non-reflexive world of "first nature," along with rocks, trees, and other insensate objects, and he reserved the self-conscious and creative world of "second nature" for humans. For as social evolution phased out of biological evolution, humans alone, he claimed, made the ascent from instinct and mere sensation to self-consciousness, language, and reasoning.
  • Steven Best, The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), pp. 95-96

• Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for "the poor little children who got fed under communism" (his words).
  • Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997), p. 45

• [Professor Jennifer] Burns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives or liberals for that matter, refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism—a system in which huge corporations, aided by the state, dominate a heavily-regulated and centrally-directed economy. This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate, this is what the New Left opposed. One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me thirty years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labour, specialise in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. Bookchin told me that he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions.
  • Jeff Riggenbach, "Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement," The Libertarian Tradition (12 January 2010).

External links

• Murray Bookchin Archive at Anarchy Archives