Murray Bookchin: Form

Murray Bookchin was American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on form.
Murray Bookchin: 48 quotes2 likes

“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!

“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!

“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)

“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).

“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!