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Murray Bookchin Quotes

Murray Bookchin was an American anarchist and libertarian socialist author, orator, historian, and political theorist. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin initiated the critical theory of social ecology within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment , Post-Scarcity Anarchism and The Ecology of Freedom . In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the increasingly apolitical lifestylism of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets, as well as the democratic confederalism of Rojava.

✵ 14. January 1921 – 30. July 2006
Murray Bookchin photo

Works

Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin: 24   quotes 2   likes

Famous Murray Bookchin Quotes

“And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.”

Murray Bookchin

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.
Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)
Context: 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]

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”

Murray Bookchin

"The Meaning of Confederalism," Green Perspectives, no. 20 (1990).

“An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.”

Murray Bookchin

Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1965).

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

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

Murray Bookchin

What Is Social Ecology? (1984).

“There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.”

Murray Bookchin book Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Source: Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Murray Bookchin Quotes about people

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

"Listen, Marxist!" (May 1969); also available in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
Listen, Marxist!

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

“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.”

Murray Bookchin book Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), introduction to the First Edition (p. vii of the third edition, 2004)

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Toward an Ecological Society (1980).

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

“Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas” http://reason.com/archives/1979/10/01/interview-with-murray-bookchin/1, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39.

Murray Bookchin Quotes

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)
Context: 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.

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

Dead

“Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.”

Murray Bookchin

Desire and Need (1967).

Reality , Science

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

War , Children , Age , History

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

Past , Future

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

Understanding , Nature , Problem , Universe

“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. Bu the summer of 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed under bourgeois forms of management.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

Summer

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Remaking Society (1990).

Nature

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Page 26 of the 1991 reprint
The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

Food , Thinking , Animals

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

Murray Bookchin

Page 107 of the 2005 reprint.
The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

“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.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

Problem

“Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.”

Murray Bookchin

Listen, Marxist!

Personality

“Directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher.”

Murray Bookchin

Anarchism in America http://alexpeak.com/art/films/aia/ (15 January 1983)

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