[.ca] Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable ... (ISBN 187317683X)

Long on Polemics, Short (but sweet) on Positive Vision:
This book contains "a short note to the reader" and two essays. At 86 pages, it looks to be a short, fast read. It isn't. (I started reading in Anchorage, continued reading during an hour layover in Seattle, and finished about 20 minutes before arriving in LA!) Bookchin stakes out his reasons for writing the first essay in a "note to the reader" that begins with: "Anarchists have formed neither a coherent program nor a revolutionary organization to provide a direction for the mass discontent that contemporary society is creating. Instead, this discontent is being abosrbed by political reactionaries and channeled into hostility toward ethnic minorities, immigrants, and the poor and marinal, such as single mothers, the homeless, the elderly, and even environmentalists, who are being depicted as the principal sources of contemporary social problems ... Thousands of self-styled anarchists have slowly surrendered the social core of anarchist ideas to the all-pervasive Yuppie and New Age personalism that marks this decadent, bourgeosified era." (p. 1) He goes on to point out that: "The various oppressions that \ocapitalism\c inflicts upon society have been grossly imputed to the impact of 'technology,' not the underlying social relationships between capital and labor, structured around an all-pervasive marketplace economy that has penetrated into every sphere of life, from culture to friendships and family." (p. 2) Looking back to the roots of anarchism (Emma Goldman, the Wobblies), he decries: "They demanded a revolution -- a _social_ revolution -- without which these aesthetic and psychological goals could not be achieved for humanity as a whole ... regrettably, this revolutionary endeavor, indeed the high-minded idealism and class consciousness on which it rests, is central to fewer and fewer of the self-styled anarchists I encounter today." (p 3) Bookchin then launches into his first essay, dedicating 52 pages to attacking what he calls Lifestyle Anarchism and then five pages to Social Anarchism. This annoys me more than anything else. I would much rather have seen a balanced treatment, spending another 50 some pages to outline his vision of Social Anarchism. The heart of his polemics seems to be attacking the substitution of an egoistic, undisciplined, do-your-own-thing mentality for solidarity and revolutionary commitment. He takes issue with those who promote an "individualism" unconnected with community, noting that the individual arises out of, is nurtured by, and co-creates with community. He assails those who promote anarchism as mere chaos. Similarly, he goes after those who would take refuge in mysticism at the expense of social analysis and concrete revolutionary commitment. He refutes those who see "technology" as THE problem, demonstrating that neo-ludditism is no substitute for a rational anarchy. (Had he read Rianne Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, he might have picked up some even more powerful arguments here.) He concludes that: "A bourgeois reality whose economic harshness grows starker and crasser with every passing day is shrewdly mutated by lifestyle anarchism into constellations of self-indulgence, inchoateness, indiscipline, and incoherence." (p. 51) "To malign civilization without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for _self-conscious_ freedom -- a freedom conferred by reason as well as emotion, by insight as well as desire, by prose as well as poetry -- is to retreat back into the shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellecuation was only an evolutionary promise." (p. 56) In the next five pages he briefly sketches out his ideas of a Democratic Communalism. He yearns for a sharing of power in face-to-face collective meetings, for an anarchism that stays connected to its Enlightenment roots. He wants an anarchism that: "is committed to rationality, while opposing the rationalization of experience; to technology, while opposing the 'megamachine;' to social institutionalization, while opposing class rule and hierarchy; to a genuine politics based on the confederal coordination of municipalities or communes" (p. 57) and warns that "if a left-libertarian vision is not to disappear ... it must offer a resolution to social problems, not flit arrogantly from slogan to slogan, shielding itself from rationality with bad poetry and vulgar graphics." (p. 57) His second essay (about 20 pages), The Left that Was, offers a nice primer on the "traditional" Left from an anarchist perspective. This essay alone was worth the price of the book. He makes a final appeal: "What this society usually does should not deter leftists from probing the logic of events from a rational standpoint or from calling for what society _should_ do. Any attempt to adapt the rational 'should' to the irrational 'is' vacates that space on the political spectrum that should be occupied by a Left premised on reason, freedom, and ecological humanism." (p. 86) (If you'd like to further discuss this review or book, please click on the "about me" link above and drop me an email. Thanks!)

a grumpy man that should be heard:
I'll concede that Bookchin comes across like a grumpy old man. On the other hand, he has a deep insight that close attention should be paid to. He makes a distinction between freedom and autonomy, and points out that freedom is a social condition which precedes autonomy. Autonomy has become sacrosanct in our American culture. Bookchin gives scathing critiques of a few anarchist books with ideas that overemphasize autonomy at the expense of social freedom. I've been thinking lately about the practical ramifications for the insight of the anarchist principle. Do we vote? The idea of an anarchist system sounds contradictory. But I think you will find in this book, a new way of thinking about these kinds of problems. I highly recommend it.

Don't waste your money:
Bookchin, a washed up Marxist, lays down a lot of nonsense about post-leftist anarchism, most likely motivated by the fact that few people are paying attention to him anymore

Anarchy after Bookchin:
This may be the worst book about anarchists any of them has ever written. Contemporary anarchists, many of whom had been influenced by Bookchin, were shocked by this diatribe, which assailed basically everything different from (not even always opposed to) Bookchin's ideology in its current Marxized version. Murray had been away for so long trying to take over the Greens movement that most anarchists perforce elaborated their various tendencies without his guidance (he's an ex-Dean). Bookchin's deliberately divisive innovation is to distinguish Social Anarchists (good anarchists who agree with the four tenets he lays down) from Lifestyle Anarchists, who are an unsavory lot of mystics, lumpenproletarians, post-modernists, primitivists, spontaneists, New Agers, Stirnerites, irrationalists, bourgeois and petit bourgeous,liberals -- and fascists (!). No attempt is made to explain the apparent irrationalities in Bookchin himself, for example, how people can be bourgeois and lumpen, or liberal and fascist at the same time. Part of this rhetoric Bookchin seems to have brought back from his controversies with deep ecologists without noticing that none of his targeted enemies are deep ecologists. He had all this rhetoric, why waste it? No one, not Bookchin even (he has a second book out on this theme, even more Marxist and authoritarian) has ever identified even one attribute shared by all these tendencies. There is only one such attribute: Murray Bookchin dislikes them. It would be no trouble (but very time-consuming) to refute most of what Bookchin now says out of his earlier writings, and two books and a number of reviews have done so. The consensus is that he was right the first time. Additionally, although the book parades its footnotes, most of them distort or entirely fail to represent the propositions they are attached to. Critics argued that Bookchin had returned to his original Stalinism (in the 1930s) or at the very least, that he was not an anarchist (he favors sovereign municipalities or neighborhoods and voting in local elections). It is sad that it is this book, and its even more execrable sequel, for which Bookchin will be remembered. -- According to an item in the magazine "Anarchy," Bookchin no longer considers himself an anarchist.