Murray Bookchin Quotes
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I feel that if people investigate the emergence of government, of State power - if they examine the logic of State power historically, and more specifically in the United States - they will find that the concept of limited government is not tenable once they adopt some type of libertarian principle.
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I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.
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I believe that any attempt on the part of a libertarian communist society to abridge the rights of a community - for example, to operate on the basis of a market economy of the kind that you describe - would be unforgivable, and I would oppose the practices of such a society as militantly as I think any reader of your publication would.
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When I talk about self-management, self-regulation, self-government, the word I emphasize is self, and my concern is with the reconstruction of the self. Marxists and even many, I think, overly enthusiastic anarchists have neglected that self.
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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.
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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.
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There are people, of course, who profess to be libertarian Marxists. I believe they mean very well, and I even write in their periodicals; but I write very militantly that I regard Marxism as a very subtle form of what I would call the totalitarian ideology - all the more subtle because it professes to advance the notions of freedom.
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My main interests right now are to publish, to write, to explicate various views which I hope have an impact on thinking people.
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I will never surrender the rights of the individual - the complete rights of the individual - to any "ism" whatever.
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Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.
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I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian society, violence will have to be banished on this planet.
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In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
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I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.
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You see something very important is happening. Personality is being eaten out, and with that the idealism that always motivated an anarchist movement - the belief in something, the ideal that there is something worth fighting for.
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We have to give people the freedom to choose lifestyles and material satisfactions that suit their needs, and we have to redefine need itself. We can't redefine need among ghetto people by telling them we should all give up our TV sets or automobiles: we have to tell them there's enough to go around, now let's talk about using it sensibly.
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The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
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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.
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Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people.
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New York has a tremendous number of people but the quality of its politics is unspeakable. By contrast, in a smaller township, I find there's a great deal of social awareness, less of a sense of powerlessness, less of a polarization of economic life.
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I've worked in the factories of this land, and I've thought freely and creatively. And I think that that has greatly enriched my capacity to abstract intellectually. The experience of being with workers, my encounters with management and my recognition of its foibles, my personal encounters with American industrial efficiency, my military experience - all of these things packaged together have greatly enriched my reading and my understanding, and I've written with what I hope is a reasonable fluency of style that is much more expressive than the academic stuff.
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The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
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I'm convinced more than ever that capitalism, with its technological development, has not been an advance toward freedom but has been an enormous setback of freedom.
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I think that people who believe in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in leading finally to unlimited government.
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After reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, I realized that capitalism did not naturally grow as [Karl] Marx would imply by his theory of historical materialism. People were dragged into capitalism screaming, shouting, and fighting all along the way, trying to resist this industrial and commercial world.
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I have been criticized for pointing out that anarchism is likely to flourish more easily, at least in the western world, and to a certain extent in eastern Europe, in those areas where there is either grim need or considerable technological development.
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I have a great admiration for pacifism, but I'm not a pacifist, mainly because I would defend myself if I were attacked.
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I've had training in electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I've never taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.
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I find it perfectly consistent for libertarians to operate on the municipal or county level, where they are close to the people and where they may have a party or a federation that is made up of the social institutions, the residual social institutions that still remain, over and beyond what the State has managed to preempt and absorb.
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I have an admiration, even though I'm not likely to do that sort of thing myself, for [Ayn] Roark's behavior when he decided that his design was not being followed - which was a gross violation, by the way, of private property rights, because the building was his.
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The State certainly played a decisive role. I also believe that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or die. That's the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally totalitarianism.
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