Murray Bookchin

pingtiao rates him. I get the impression I would rate him if I actually read some of his stuff.

<3

he's very good, post scarecity anarchism, and anarchism, marxism, and the left are the two i'd recomend at first

i don't agree with all the aspects of his class analysis, but other than that...

He's very readable, and his history of the Spansih anarchists is good.

I always thought Bob Black saw him off myself........

Spanish anarchists is great, apart from his piss-poor class terminology, and critique of Marxism. But was of its time and place I suppose.

Anarchism, Marxism and the Left is also great, though some cunt nicked my bag before I finished it. He seems like a grumpy bastard and a bit too keen on stressing his own importance ("I invented ecology!" etc. ) but seems like a nice old man really 8)

his feuds are great 8)

Haven't you heard? Everyone hates Bob Black!!...lest any American anarchist I talk to. Though like me, he hates stupid workerists (btw, I really find it funny how most of you dont even know what that means).

On the whole I really like Murray Bookchin, specifically his emphasis on the ecological and environmental side to societal change. I really want to get my hands on his history of the Spanish Anarchists, but I might get it when I'm at the bookfair (ordinarily I'd buy it and any book I wanted off the internet but, alas, I am skint now). Ofcourse there's criticisms, namely his totally oldfashioned, anthrocentric rejection of animals as having any sentient consideration and then don't get started on bloody municipalism.

I think you'll find we do. Some people choose to interpret or use it in the Italian operaist sense though, cos you and others use it as a baseless strawman insult

word on that shit John, everythings sexier in italy, even Ed's hairy arse.

actually there's more than one meaning to workerism, and time and again you morons use the one that we aren't referring to.

talk about mr strawman, d'you want examples?

no we know what you mean but we choose to embrace the label cos your arguements are shite. We also embrace the term as a reaction towards the lifestylist filth that has attached itself to "revolutionary" politics.

When you get called workerist by the SWP you know your doing something right.

...... when, as we all know, the correct term for that is "workophilia." Isn't it, Jack, you big workononce?

(Or should that be ergophilia? Where are those classically-educated CSG members when you need 'em?)

Nah that's being prolier-than-thou.

A "workerist" is someone with a conception only of a worker as employed labourer rather than as a whole class in a social factory.

AFAIK anyway.

Hi

Bookchin’s Municipalism works OK for me. I could be talked into accepting the premises behind Social Ecology, but I’m suspicious that it might be looking at the problem from the wrong end. Regardless, I dig Bookchin.

I can’t make up my mind about Bob Black, I don’t think he really expects to be taken seriously. He says things about post-leftism and play which all sound very fun and subversive, but there’s no substance, no concrete proposal, to back any of it up. It’s like getting drawn into what sounds like a really witty joke, and then finding there’s no punch line. And as for that “human shield” incident, well. Just goes to show, no matter how eloquent or lucid a person is in print, it doesn’t pay to become sentimentally attached to them as if they were your friends.

Love

LR

Three Golden Taxis Group

dear all,

bob black is a cunt, bookchin is great, and so is workerism (in the way jack correctly uses it)

love

kb

the turn und taxis group

give me black over bookchin any day of the week.

funny vs. self-aggrandizing

anti-work vs. pro-technology

alcoholic vs. holier-than-thou (well, it's not that i *like* that he's alcoholic, but it's sure better than bookchin's dogma.)

How are those opposites? Or even just opposing?

and the problem with technology is?

And Bob Black isn't funny he's a dishonest cock who spreads bullshit myths about imaginary "industrial fetishists".

Bookchin is hardly innocent of doing the same with anarcho syndicalism, but atleast Bookchins arguments approach serious analysis, whilst Black is a self indulgent cock, who sums up everything that is wrong with anarchism in the states.

especially if you read bookchin's essay on liberatory technology - and the potential for technology to help us abolish arduous tasks 8)

Quite. How exactly does Bob Black propose to do away with work if not through shitloads of technology? Or does he just not bother with minor details like that?

didn't mean to say that the concepts were opposed (just as one can be funny and self-aggrandizing), but that black is anti-work (where work has a specific definition, constructed by the current system) and i prefer that, while bookchin is pro-technology (using exactly that kind of "liberatory" terminology, which apparently makes everything ok) which i don't prefer, since to me it is just a furthering of the thinking that science is going to solve all our problems, as long as the right people become scientists (akin to "politics is fine, as long as the right people become politicians").

on the science question, anybody read/think interesting things about feuerabend?

So is Bookchin.

well then, i haven't read that about/by him.

so delete that bit of my post.

(and tell me where he writes about that? thanks.)

Mostly everywhere I've read. From the first article that looked promising in the Anarchy Archives:

"[revolution must] eliminate not only the exploitation of man by man but also the domination of man by man, the splits between man and nature, town and country, work and play, mind and physical activity, theory and practice, reason and sensuousness, survival and life."

It'd be absurb for him to place himself, and be seen in, the anarchist traditional if he didn't oppose work.

So you're opposed to decentralised production of goods, energy and food, and you're opposed to the use of automation to take over the most repetitive or draining tasks? And you claim to be anti-work?

Bookchin wants technology put to the service of human need, democratically controlled, to reduce the necessity of labour for meeting needs and allow for much greater freedom of individuals and groups to spend their time how they like. As meanoldman points out, it permeates just about everything he's written.

Scarcity used to impose work on all societies, and revolution was always about taking over and reorganising work rather than eliminating it as a concept. It's technology that supplies the potentiality of a society without work. Certainly in the West, capitalism imposes work rather than the need to actually produce the necessities of life. Even recent famines have often been to do with lack of money to buy food than lack of food (cf. Niger).

Have you read any Bookchin, or just Black's denunciations of him? How exactly does Black want to end work?

Black is absolutely shit. Everything that's bad about anarchism.

Bookchin rocks, old-skool 8)

Maybe we should have a poll...

people are absurd all the time: that is, people constantly make different associations than i (for example) would expect them to.

for example:

catch, your question doesn't seem to be asked in good faith. that is, there is absolutely NOwhere that i say i am opposed to decentralization. so clearly you are making some association that i don't share.

and since i associate technology with problematic philosophical views of the world then yes, i oppose automation.

and i don't "claim" to be anything - but thanks for the loaded language.

shit, i really did want to stay away from the tech question on this forum <she says, girding her loins...>

give me technology and a two hour week any time. Let the primos fantasize about no technology. I prefer the real world.

Catch's question only appears loaded if you aren't aware of Bookchin's view on technology. The views he asks if you oppose are Bookchin's: your stated opposition to Bookchin's views on technology is the 'where'.

That may be true but given how highly regarded he is in the anarchist bibliography it would be truly suprising if he wasn't situated firmly within that tradition.