We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold with them. An outlook that ceases to look for what is new and potential in the name of “realism” has already lost contact with the present, for the present is always conditioned by the future. True development is cumulative, not sequential; it is growth, not succession. The new always embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more adequately as the parts of a greater whole.
Murray Bookchin, “On Spontaneity and Organization,” 1971
Acknowledgments
The idea for this reader initially came from David Goodway, who, one
sunny afternoon in May 1992, sat down... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In the aftermath of the cold war, in a world that glorifies markets and
commodities, it sometimes seems difficult to remember that generations
of people once fought to create a very different kind of world. To many,
the aspirations of this grand tradition of socialism often seem archaic
today, or utopian in the pejorative sense, the stuff of idle dreams; others,
more dismissive, consider socialism to be an inherently coercive system,
one whose consignment to the past is well-deserved.
Yet for a century preceding World War I, and for nearly a half century
thereafter, various kinds of socialism — statist and libertarian; economistic
and moral; industrial and communalistic — constituted a powerful
mass movement for the tr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 1: An Ecological Society
Introduction
Bookchin’s interest in ecology arose primarily from his boyhood
curiosity about natural phenomena, from his studies of biology in
high school. and from his love of green spaces in the environs of
his native New York City, as well as from his dismay at their
diminution with the buildup of urban streets and buildings.
Yet another source of inspiration for his thinking about ecology
were the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In scattered
passages the two progenitors of Marxian socialism had alluded
provocatively to a conflicted relationship between town and
country. “The greatest division of material and mental labor,” they
wrote, “is the separation of ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 2: Nature, First and Second
Introduction
Amid the technological enchantment of the 1950s, proponents of
organic farming, like Bookchin himself, had to defend organic
agricultural techniques against the scorn of federal agencies and
the chemical industry, both of which were busily making pesticides
into agricultural commonplaces. Unlike today, when the value
of organic farming is recognized, in those years its value had to be
fought for.
As part of that struggle to defend organic farming, Bookchin
borrowed the concept “unity in diversity” from the German idealist
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Recast as a principle of organic
agriculture, the concept suggested an alternative farming technique
that was able to rid ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 3: Organic Society
Introduction
In Bookchin’s view, society and culture must be understood by
examining not only what they are at present but their origins and
subsequent development over the course of history. Thus, to rescue
a tradition of freedom in support of his ecological society, he traces
a “legacy of freedom” that has run as an alternative libertarian
undercurrent through Western history. In his 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom he gave particular attention to what he calls “organic
society” — that is, the preliterate band and tribal cultures that
preceded recorded history in Europe and America and that persisted
far longer in other parts of the world. Insofar as a number of its
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 4: The Legacy of Domination
Introduction
According to Marx, “primitive egalitarianism” was destroyed by the
rise of social classes, in which those who own wealth and property
exploit the labor of those who do not. But from his observations
of contemporary history, Bookchin realized that class analysis in
itself does not explain the entirety of social oppression. The
elimination of class society could leave intact relations of subordination
and domination. Engels, in his essay “On Authority,”
wrote explicitly that he not only would preserve hierarchy in a
“classless” society but regarded it as indispensable in industrial
production.
In order to attain the broadest possible freedom in an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 5: Scarcity and Post-Scarcity
Introduction
For all but the privileged few, history has been in great part a
chronicle of material scarcity — that is, an insufficiency of the goods
and services that people need and value — all too often as a result
of an unequal distribution of wealth. At best, people living under
conditions of material scarcity must spend an inordinate amount
of time working to produce the goods they need for material
survival, or else earn a livelihood. This necessity, Bookchin maintains,
reduces people to a quasi-animalistic existence; it prevents them
from fulfilling their potential for rationality and freedom and thus
from becoming fully human.
At the same time, material scarcity has also... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 6: Marxism
Introduction
Although Marx’s writings had a great influence on Bookchin’s ideas,
it became clear to him early on that a degree of authoritarianism,
particularly an acceptance of domination, recurred in the Marxian
writings. Even in the 1940s he was cognizant that a centralized state
was essential to Marx’s views and to the new socialist dispensation
that he would create. Moreover, even as Marx and Engels attacked
class society, they had taught that hierarchical relationships were
indispensable to a socialist society, just as a factory needed
hierarchical relationships in order to operate.
In time, Bookchin realized that the ideological rationales for
material scarcity that were typical of bou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 7: Anarchism
Introduction
In the epilogue to his 1962 history of anarchism, George Woodcock
concluded that anarchism as a movement was all but dead. “During
the past forty years,” he wrote
the influence [the movement] once established has dwindled, by
defeat after defeat and by the slow draining of hope, almost to
nothing. Nor is there any reasonable likelihood of a renaissance
of anarchism as we have known it.... History suggests that
movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never
born again.[55]
Within only a few years of Woodcock’s interment of anarchism
in the cemetery of defunct social theories, Bookchin was breathing
life back into it. With the emergence of the ecol... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 8: Libertarian Municipalism
Introduction
Bookchin’s anarchism shares with traditional anarchism an
opposition to the nation-state and a search for libertarian
alternatives, but it differs with traditional anarchism on the tangible
nature of the alternatives it embraces. Anarchism, in the main, looks
to nonpolitical arenas of society as the sites for constructing its
alternatives — variously the factory, the cooperative, even the
individual lifestyle. The typical ambition of anarchism is to create
not libertarian politics but libertarian social institutions; or as Martin
Buber once put it, “to substitute society for State to the greatest
degree possible, moreover a society that is ‘genuine’ an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 9: Dialectical Naturalism
Introduction
For much of the twentieth century relativism has plagued
philosophical thought, casting into ever-greater philosophical doubt
all claims to objective knowledge of reality. In the 1980s and 1990s
the rise of postmodernism and deconstruction have given academic
philosophy a further relativistic charge. Claims to objective knowledge
have now become deeply problematic — and the tendency is
growing, when competing claims to knowledge are debated, to
end merely with an agnostic shrug.
Despite such intellectual fashions, however, it is a staple of
political action in any era that it must have a philosophical
grounding in objective reality. Political action presupposes that a
group o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 10: Reason and History
Introduction
The ecological society that Bookchin described in 1964 remains a
constant social ideal over three decades of his writing, projecting a
clear and steady image of an ecological society, integrating town
and country, individual and community, technology and ethics,
politics and economy. The communistic principles he attributed to
organic society in 1982 remain pillars of the society he has always
envisioned: interdependence must replace hierarchy, and freedom
must be defined not in opposition to first nature but as latent within
it. The “legacy of freedom” is one he cherishes even more fervently,
in the face of an ever-more powerful “legacy of domination.”
But othe... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
List of Sources
1. An Ecological Society
Decentralization: Selected from Our Synthetic Environment, under the
pseudonym Lewis Herber (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp.
237–45. The British edition of this book was published by Jonathan
Cape (London, 1963 ); a revised paperback edition was published by
Harper Colophon Books, under the name Murray Bookchin (New
York, 1974).
Anarchism and Ecology: From “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,”
under the pseudonym Lewis Herber, Comment [NY] (1964). This essay
was republished in Anarchy [UK] 69, vol. 6 (1966); and in Murray
Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Books,
1971; London: Wildwood House, 1974; and Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1986). This... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
