This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author and publisher.
COMMENT
P.O. BOX 158
BURLINGTON, VT 05402
--New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought--
EDITOR: Murray Bookchin Vol. 1, No. 5
Price: 80 cents
The American Crisis II
NOTE: The following issue of COMMENT No. 5 is a continuation of No. 4. Please note that the publication of COMMENT has been moved to Burlington, Vermont, where it will be published for at least the next year. Readers who have subscribed to COMMENT will continue to receive it. Those who have not done so -- or do not intend to do so in the near future -- will cease to receive future issues owing to our very ... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
--New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought--
EDITOR: Murray Bookchin Vol. 1, No. 4 Price: 80 cents The American Crisis
To conceal real crises by creating specious ones is an old political trick, but the past year has seen it triumph with an almost classic example of text-book success.
The so-called "Iranian Crisis" and Russia's heavy-handed invasion of its Afghan satellite have completely deflected public attention from the deeper waters of American domestic and foreign policy. One would have to be blind not to see that the seizure of the American embassy in Teheran by a ragtail group of Maoist students spared both Khomeini and Carter a sha... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
Note: This piece appeared as Vol. 1, No. 6 of Comment: New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought, edited by Murray Bookchin.
Anarchism: Past and Present
Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the Critical Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles on May 29, 1980. My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme importance today of viewing Anarchism in terms of the changing social contexts of our era - - not as an ossified doctrine that belongs to one or another set of European thinkers, valuable as their views may have been in their various times and places. Today, more than ever, the viability of Anarchism in America will depend upon its ability to speak directly -- in the language of th... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
Anarchists, Bolsheviks, and Serge
From Daniel Guerin's _Anarchism_ (Monthly Review Press) (reprinted with permission):
During the revolutionary days that brought Kerensky's bourgeois republic to an end, the anarchists were in the forefront of the military struggle, especially in the Dvinsk regiment commanded by old libertarians like Grachoff and Fedotoff. This force dislodged the counter-revolutionary "cadets." Aided by his detachment, the anarchist Gelezniakov disbanded the Constituent Assembly: the Bolsheviks only ratified the accomplished fact. Many partizan detachments were formed or led by anarchists... and fouch unremittingly against the white armies between 1918 and 1920.
Scarcely a major city was without an anarchist or a... (From : Spunk.org.)
CONTROVERSY: ANARCHISTS IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION
by Sam Dolgoff
In 1974, or early 1975, I reviewed in the English anarchist paper Freedom
a book by Carlos Semprun Maura, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in
Catalonia (French edition). In my review I criticized both Semprun Maura
and Vernon Richards' book Lessons of the Spanish Revolution for presenting
a distorted, over-simplified interpretation of events- a scenario. This
provoked a heated rejoinder from Richards (three or four articles in
Freedom).
Over forty years after the tragic defeat of the Spanish Revolution - 1936
to 1939 - the question of anarchist participation in the Republican
government and the role of anarchists in a revolution is a fundamental
p... (From : Flag.Blackened.net.)
Anarchy and Organization appears in Anarchy Archives with the premission of the author.The essay originally was written in reply to an attack by Huey Newton on anarchist forms of organization.
ANARCHY AND ORGANIZATION
A Letter To The Left
Reprinted from
NEW LEFT NOTES
January 15, 1969
by permission of the author
There is a hoary myth that anarchists do not believe in organization to promote revolutionary activity. This myth was raised from its resting place by Marcuse in a L'Express interview some months ago and reiterated again by Huey Newton in his "In Defense of Self-Defense," which New Left Notes decided to reprint in the recent National Convention issue.
To ... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
"Community Control or Status Politics: A Reply to David Lewis," GREEN MULTILOGUE [Toronto] (May 13, 1991)
Community Control or Statist Politics: A Reply to David Lewis
by Murray Bookchin
In his Green Multilogue hatchet job "The Thought of Director Bookchin" (May 13), David Lewis apparently sets out to undo any obstacle that my antihierarchical views -- libertarian municipalism and social ecology -- might present to his efforts to build a Green party. This does not exclude using blatant lies and gross distortions of my ideas.
At his crudest (and he can be very crude indeed), he describes people who agree with my work as my "followers" and in the same vein demagogically makes an analogy between me and Chairman Mao ("Dire... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
This article appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author. It appeared originally in The Progressive, August 1989, pp. 19-23.
DEATH
OF A
SMALL
PLANETIt's growth that's killing usBY MURRAY BOOKCHIN
We tend to think of environmental catastrophes -such as the recent Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska-as "accidents": isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?
President Bush was content to blame the spill of more than ten m... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
This manuscript was provided to Anarchy Archives by the author.
Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
by Lewis Herber (pseudonym for Murray Bookchin)
[Originally published in Bookchin’s newsletter Comment in 1964 and republished in the British monthly Anarchy in 1965.]
In almost every period since the Renaissance, the development of revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced by a branch of science, often in conjunction with a school of philosophy.
Astronomy in the time of Copernicus and Galileo helped to guide a sweeping movement of ideas from the medieval world, riddled by superstition, into one pervaded by a critical rationalism, openly naturalistic and humanistic in outlook. During the Enlightenment—the era t... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
This letter is part of the International Institute of Social History's Alexander Berkman archive and appears in Anarchy Archives with permission. The transcription is incomplete and in parts mere guesswork due to the difficulty of reading Kropotkin's handwriting..
Letter From Peter Kropotkin to Alexander Berkman, RE: Blast
Personalnot for print
Viola. Muswill Hill RowLondon, N.November 20, 1908
Dear Berkman
You are quite right in taking a hopeful view of the progress of our ideas in America. It would have been far greater, I am sure, if the American anarchists had succeeded in merging themselves into the mass of the workingmen. So long as they remain a knot, a handfull, aristocratically keeping apart from the mass of the ... (From : Anarchy Archives.)