Authors List
Authors List
Murray Bookchin
Quotes by Murray Bookchin
Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not mass liberation or class liberation behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.
It is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.
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.
We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
As a credo, individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom ("free love") and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.
The great majority of people have to work in order to earn a livelihood, and a sizable proportion of them are productive workers. A huge number of workers are unproductive as well. They operate entirely with the circumstances and framework created by the capitalist system, such as shuffling invoices, contracts, credit slips, insurance policies, and so forth. Probably nine out of ten "workers" wouldn't have any work to do in a rational society - one that would not require insurance or any other commercial transactions.
The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena - such as technology or population growth - for growing environmental dislocations.
Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems.
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as that of hierarchy itself.
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.
Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics - notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.
What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life.
When lifestyle anarchists call for autonomy rather than freedom, they thereby forfeit the rich social connotations of freedom.
Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists.
The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.
Ironically, the world idealized by primitivists would actually preclude the radical individualism celebrated by the individualist heirs of Max Stirner.
Like it or not, the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.
The sovereign, self-sufficient "individual" has always been a precarious basis upon which to anchor a left libertarian outlook.
Our being is becoming, not stasis. Our science is utopia, our reality is eros, our desire is revolution.
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