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Murray Bookchin

24 quotes

“An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1965).
“Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Desire and Need (1967).
“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 (1921–2006) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), introduction to the First Edition (p. vii of the third edition, 2004)
“Either the limits imposed on the city by modern social life will be overcome, or forms of city life may arise that are congruent with the barbarism in store for humanity if people of this age should fail to resolve their social problems. The evidence for this tendency can be seen not only in the metropolis, choking with an alienated and atomized aggregate of human beings, but in the 'well-policed' totalitarian city composed of starved black ghettoes and privileged white enclaves—a city that would be a cemetery of freedom, culture, and the human spirit.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), pp. 2-3
“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 (1921–2006) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas”, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39.
“The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What Is Social Ecology? (1984).
“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 (1921–2006) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remaking Society (1990).
“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Meaning of Confederalism," Green Perspectives, no. 20 (1990).
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. By the summer of 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed under bourgeois forms of management.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Page 26 of the 1991 reprint
“If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Page 107 of the 2005 reprint.
“The American left today as I know it—and believe me, I am very familiar with the American left—is going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It's becoming the real right in the United States. We don't have an appreciable American left any more in the United States. What I saw of the SDS in the '60s was very abhorrent to me: Marxism, Leninism, almost the KGB mentality—a police politics that I found completely totalitarian in nature. And in Europe, I would say that today the real support for State power and totalitarianism comes from the Communist parties and the Socialist parties and, where they are sizable, the Trotskyist groups. They are the ones that really frighten me.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas”, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39.
“I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of capitalism of the type that you have advanced. I believe that people will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in the way of communities that wish to make other decisions. I could live beautifully in a society of the kind that you have described, as well as in a collectivistic one. However, if that collectivistic one assumed any totalitarian forms, any authoritarian forms whatever, I would oppose that. And not only that: I would join your community in fighting it. Let me make it very plain that if socialism, which is what I call the authoritarian version of collectivism, were to emerge, I would join your community. I would migrate to your community and do everything I could to prevent the collectivists from abridging my right to function as I like. That should be made very clear.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas”, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39
“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 (1921–2006) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Toward an Ecological Society (1980).
“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 (1921–2006) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Listen, Marxist!" (May 1969); also available in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
“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.”
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source