Murray BookchinRezensionen

A readable and intelligent account of how ecological sensitivities can be merged into a self-consistent form of anarchism.

I'm oversimplifying things, but this book was 90% historical fiction ("the past was so great, especially participatory democracy (if you were a white, male property owner)) and 10% utopian novel. In the tiny amount of pages he spent talking about the future he desires he never really explained how to get there besides education, which at this point in time just doesn't seem like enough. He also grossly misunderstands and falsely defines biocentrism

Probably my favorite Bookchin writings. In the past I've found him to be a bit too focused on the past and not focused enough on laying out his thoughts about the present and future, but this group of essays does a better job in getting that across. They are much easier to follow than other essays and books by him that I've read. Workers and the Peace Movement was my favorite essay, while An Appeal for Social and Ecological Sanity was the scariest. These were all written in the '80s yet wring as true today as they did back then

Good book I guess, but I feel like I need to take some philosophy courses and read a couple hundred classics before understanding most of what he's saying.

A good wide-ranging (and early) account of the negative effects of industrial chemistry evident by the mid-20th century. Appearing the same year as Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_, Bookchin's explicit attentions to the modern political and cultural environment was sadly less noticed by the reading public.

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Bookchin-Lcologie-sociale-Penser-la-liberte-au-de...

> « je voudrais voir naître aujourd’hui un mouvement anti-technologique
qui s’oppose à ces développements en attendant qu’on ait les transformations
sociales nécessaires pour que les avancées technologiques puissent être
au service de l’amélioration de la nature et de la condition humaine,
au lieu de la dégrader. »
—Murray Bookchin, fondateur de l’Ecologie sociale

Anarquismo social o anarquismo personal Un abismo insuperable
http://www.asesoria-legal-ya.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=bibl_autor_bookchin_murray...

too little for the effort.

This book was published in 1994. In the fast moving world of climate science, that is a long time. The prevailing issue that Bookchin attacks is a neo-Malthusian assault upon human existence.

The idea that population control is necessary is now rather less popular, although, it does crop up from time to time. The truth is that we now know that, once a society feels that its food sources are safe and that general security of existence can be taken for granted, humans do not over populate.

The main enjoyment that I got from this book was the dismissal of those who wish to insist that a return to a precivilisation mode, believing in ancient, or quasi ancient, gods. The besmirchment of science, as only one string to be balanced with "deeper knowledge of the ancients" is given short shrift indeed.

I went to Barcelona in 1978 for a day. There were nervous looking teenagers standing around in uniforms w/ machine guns. Franco had been dead for 4 yrs. I left. I went to Madrid in 1984 to visit a friend. It was amazing. Very liberated. I went to Barcelona again in 2004 - pd to do so by the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona to participate in a hactivist festival of sorts. I read this bk before & during being there. It was extremly useful in understanding the culture. Of course, for anarchists like myself, Republican Spain was an amazing thing, a peak in the history of anarchy. Nonetheless, the anarchists lost the civil war to the fascists. As such, I think it's important to remember that to win against fascism there must be a total revolution in human consciousness. If it boils down to a war, the fascists are more likely to 'win' because that type of winning is based almost solely on levels of brutality & that's the specialty of fascists - wch is, obviously, why anarchists oppose them.

A fantastic introduction to Bookchin's communalist ideology and how he distinguishes it from socialism and anarchy more broadly. There is room for growth, but Bookchin's work is a fantastic starting point on the subject.

Bookchin does a great job untangling the mess that is Leftist thought. He highlights the strengths of anarchism and communism and finds a way to ideologically synthesis them with his idea of libertarian communalism. While the work towards a truly free and rational society is likely far off in the future, he asks the questions that must be asked and provides a number of strong answers of his own. Thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in moving beyond the capitalist hellscape we are living in at the moment.

Al hilo de uno de los debates más recurrentes en el seno del anarquismo (como indica Ruymán Rodríguez en el prólogo a este libro, el conflicto entre anarquismo individualista y anarquismo societario cuenta con más de un siglo de vida), Murray Bookchin aborda en este texto lo que considera algunas debilidades, contradicciones y contraindicaciones de las corrientes más influyentes en los ámbitos libertarios durante las últimas décadas.

Acentuando uno de los aspectos más afilados de su personalidad intelectual, polemiza con las tesis primitivistas, informalistas o antitecnológicas —diferenciando estas últimas de la crítica antidesarrollista— y concluye que resultan inofensivas como herramientas tanto teóricas como prácticas, a la hora de subvertir la sociedad capitalista.

Con el cuestionamiento de figuras de referencia como John Zerzan, David Watson o Hakim Bey, Bookchin denuncia lo que entiende como un anarquismo posmoderno de retraimiento a la experiencia individual, para reivindicar un anarquismo social sustentado en los vínculos colectivos, sociales y organizativos.

What a refreshing read a great majority of this text this was. I've seen myself as an anarchist since roughly 2003, and read the most "theory" of that tendency in the five years that followed. Seeking to broaden my horizons, I have since pushed myself to read a lot from other schools of socialist thought. I made a lot of compromises with foundational tenets of anarchism to broaden my perspective of liberatory politics, in order to learn from revolutionary history that didn't exclusively include anarchist-inspired movements. It has led me to make apologetics for a lot of things I fundamentally oppose. It was good to have some of those cobwebs cleared away by Bookchin's writing, which describes worlds closer to a world I want to live in. I too, "increasingly compromised [my] ideal of freedom, painfully qualifying it with transitional stages and political expediencies." We see historical models of revolution form total human freedom into practical models of assembly that degrade into councils of representation, and then to appointed executive committees and finally to autocratic dictatorship. Those who remember fondly fallen autocrats confuse the later stages of these painful qualifiers with the earliest sparks of liberatory potential.

I had to slow my reading down to comprehend a lot of the text by highlighting phrases, paragraphs even, that resonated with me. The introductions especially are littered with these. They're about as useful as the body of the text itself, infinitely moreso than the long stretches of paragraphs describing mining techniques (hoo boy don't tell 1960s Bookchin about mountaintop removal mining) or outdated engine functions, lol. Concieving of liberated human society as in harmony with the natural world rather than against it is beautiful and the longing for the richness of fully self-actualized persons is compelling. I strongly identify with the holistic definition of anarchism as "not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes man [sic] to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood [sic], to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship."

There is a theoretical gap I have trouble bridging in my head: the preconditions of the post-scarcity society and the necessity to disperse those preconditions in order to live in a liberated society that Bookchin says is predicated on that post-scarcity. We have so much meat, for example, because we have hyperexploited usually undocumented workers in factory farms in which animals are imprisoned for life and pumped full of antibiotics and feed generated on monocropped farms over graded and clear-cut rainforest, and every part of this process occurs half a world away from the next part. A globalized uniform system of brutal exploitation got us over the tyranny of want and now our central contradiction is "what is" vs "what could be." We may very well have to reckon with the return of scarcity and the primacy of justice (distribution of means of or preconditions to life) over freedom (the life worth living) as we pull apart the empire to disperse into our federated assemblies and communes.

I count myself, I suppose, among the people Bookchin describe as "divided into a gnawing fear of nuclear extinction on the one hand and a yearning for material abundance, leisure and security on the other." Can technology bridge the gap between what is and what could be? How much can we loot and pilfer from our shitty actually existing society to make abundance not dependent on the brutal system that Bookchin himself understands is unsustainable? What of the widespread use of technology to make our world smaller and worse: of smart refrigerators and Spotify that listens to your conversations to recommend music, of the reintroduction of scarcity through denial of right-to-repair or our society restructuring itself around opaque social media algorithms...

Bookchin content exemplary, the format hortible

Here you can read a thorough critique Bookchin makes of "lifestyle" anarchism which is exemplary in all respects.

The quality and formatting of this book is sad at best and clearly was posted for sale with zero quality control.

Almost unreadable the formatting is poor, lots of mistakes and true crap too be honest.

If I wasn't so interested in Bookchins content I would have returned for a refund.

Interesting ideas, but he's not a good writer.

This book is not about the nearly forgotten simultaneous revolution and reaction that took place in the second half of 1936 in Spain. Instead, the book focuses on the even more buried account of the preceding 70 years of anarchist agitation and organization that lead to that standoff. Murray Bookchin meticulously reconstructs the organizations, ideologies, theories, movements, historical events, intellectuals and important persons of the time in a compelling history.

What struck me the most about the Spanish Anarchists was the boldness of their actions. The Spanish Anarchists set out to polarize society on class lines through class warfare and strikes, destabilize the state apparatus through insurrection and mass non-participation, and then arm the people to resist the reaction of capitalists and state reactionaries. Entire villages simply declared "libertarian communism," took over land and factories, and started operating them in the interest of all until they were smashed by the reaction forces. And this before there was solidarity enough to spread this type of action across the country. This shows what is possible when oppressed people take it upon themselves to fight for their own freedom.

Bookchin takes careful note of the mistakes made by the revolutionary movement, criticising the foolhardy moves of the anarchists as well as when they seemed too conservative in their strategy. But Bookchin saves his most poisonous vitriol for excoriating Spanish Socialists, and they deserve it. Spending the majority of their time and energy on opportunistic efforts, the Spanish Socialists and Communists stood in the way of revolution far more often than they inspired it. Waiting for conditions to appear, they undermined the organizing already taking place. Acting as scabs, putting themselves in the position of mediators between the working class and the state, and refusing solidarity with anyone outside of their narrow dogma, they undermined the Spanish working class and peasant movements towards freedom.

Only got up to the third chapter, on the development of hierarchy, but there was value enough just in those 150 pages. Bookchin offers a surprising synthesis of ideas that get at the core of what capitalism is practically like, where it comes from, and what it would mean for us to have something better. Dated in places, but the philosophy that Bookchin puts forth is both radical and coherent. I particularly appreciated his rejection of the trap of primitivism, and it's less extreme relatives (anti-rationalism, nihilism, etc). I can see why this book would have caught the attention of someone like Ocalan, trying to articulate a vision of a post-hierarchical world to be actually put into practice today in the most urgent of situation, rather than as an intellectual dreamworld. I doubt that I'll ever live in the world that Bookchin sketches, but in line with the best of the anarchist traditions he gives ideas for what even someone like me can change to make steps towards a more humane, democratic community.

Readable if somewhat shallow introduction to a very interesting thinker. When I went to the library to return this one I left with two more books of his, so take that as a recommendation.

Reviewed in the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/03/no-wonder-they-hate-him-199...

This book is a compilation of four essays:
"What is Social Ecology?"
"Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism"
"The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction"
"The Communalism Project"

They were and revised by Murray Bookchin and introduced by Erik Eiglad. Published shortly after Bookchin's death in 2006, this books aims to offer a brief summary of his life's work.

Bookchin was born in the Bronx in 1921 to Jewish-Russian immigrants. He started out a Marxist, became an anarchist, and then later identified as a Communalist. He lived most of his life in Burlington, VT. Bookchin is considered on of the primary scholars in the field of social ecology.

To quote the first sentence of the first essay, "Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems."

Bookchin attempts to develop a number of distinctions or thresholds in these essays. The distinction between social and cultural. The distinction between politics and statecraft. The distinction between cities and urban areas. The distinction between socialism and municipalism.

By the end of the book, I'm not sure that I've yet grasped all of these distinctions. But it does seem that Bookchin espouses science and rationality and distances himself from spirituality and mysticism.

There were two thoughts that stood out to me in the first essay: 1) the conception of the natural world as a developmental process, and 2) that the nature we experience is the holographic history of nature.

Bookchin's writing is certainly intellectually stimulating. I may move on to his "The Ecology of Freedom" at some point to try to get a better grasp on his worldview and ideas. I can't say that this compilation was exactly what I was looking for, but I did get a taste of Bookchin.

Written in 1962, this book gives an overview of the challenges raised by the way man interacts with his environment. This covers such diverse topics as chemicals introduced into foods, industrialized agriculture, the stress induced by living in our congested cities, radiation, medical progress, what defines health. This is not a rant, but rather a thoughtful review of the various aspects of how man has changed his environment and what consequences arise from there and how to mitigate the negative impacts while not losing the advantages. Though some aspects are dated, most of the book is still very valid in the points it raises and very readable.

So disappointing. Had I read anything else by Murray Bookchin, perhaps I would have found more substantial agreement, for I wanted very much to agree with him. But twenty years of ecocide further on from when this book was published, the "anti-humanist" writers and thinkers he critiques are looking more and more prescient, while this work is looking more and more out-of-date and irrelevant. (The one exception is his trenchant critique of nihilistic postmodernist thought, but even there, some of the things he castigates seem much more deserving of attack than others.) I find I do agree wholeheartedly with the last line of the book: "If we are incapable of acting strenuously to free ourselves, we do not deserve to be free." The question is, what does freedom really mean?

This was a challenge for me to complete, but I'm glad I did. In retrospect, it seems largely composed of long, detailed tangents strung together thematically as historical evidence for Bookchin's ideas about the history of civilization. That's what I mean when I say I found it difficult. In the same way, Mumford's [b:Technics and Human Development|90209|Myth of the Machine Technics and Human Development|Lewis Mumford|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1193426316s/90209.jpg|87057] became a bog of historical detail. That should probably be attributed more to my preferences than the authors' deficiencies, however.

Bookchin sees two currents flowing through our history: one libertarian, one authoritarian. The former, he argues, was the one more characteristic of pre-literate, pre-state societies. The latter, with the upper hand since the rise of the state, has formed a world alien to our ancestors and our true nature:

“Trapped by a false perception of a nature that stands in perpetual opposition to our humanity, we have redefined humanity itself to mean strife as a condition for pacification, control as a condition for consciousness, domination as a condition for freedom, and opposition as a condition for reconciliation.” (365)

These conditions preserve social relations domination and hierarchy, even as "equality" is upheld by the powerful as a fundamental value.

Equality is not typically associated with an authoritarian impulse. But Bookchin's insight is to distinguish between "inequality of equals" (the sense implied in the US Declaration of Independence) and the "equality of unequals." The latter is the truly libertarian equality, in force since the earliest human societies, which the authoritarian political ideologies based on false equivalence that we have inherited (from sources as far back as the Greeks) will never tolerate.

Despite thousands of years of repression, he argues, the libertarian ideal persists. Ecology, then, provides a new mode of expressing these age-old values of "organic society" that may be incorporated into a new society with the added recognition of a universal humanity--the great gift of civilization--beyond mere tribal and national identity, without our self-imposed separation from nature, to the world's ultimate benefit.

Bookchin's observations and concerns ring true today more than ever, in a era where many young people have fallen in love with the anarchist "lifestyle" but also disturbingly see anarchism as individualistic, anti-organizational, and anti-political. Recognizing the troubling implications of this trend for the future of class struggle, Bookchin advocates embracing direct-democracy and workers' self-management as elements of core anarchist belief. While many have over-emphasized his distant Marxist past, Bookchin never advocates a return to Marxism. Rather, he challenges anarchists to dedicate themselves to social revolution and not simply lifestyle rebellion. An outstanding and principled polemic, recommended for all students of anarchism.