15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Long on Polemics, Short (but sweet) on Positive Vision, June 8, 2002
This review is from: Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Paperback)
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 [capitalism] 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!)
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All those who identify as Anarchists need to read and grapple with this book, July 5, 2006
This review is from: Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Paperback)
Written some ten years ago, Bookchin's devasating and concise critique is even more relevant today then when it was written. Anarchism today in the English speaking world especially is in a state of total disarray, having its socialistic core washed away and its previous concern for genuine change and an actual social revolution destroyed. In 1999 Bookchin, as a result of what was happening to Anarchism in the West, broke with Anarchism while remaining a revolutionary libertarian socialist -- a specific form of lbertarian socialism he has termed Communalism.
One cannot blame Bookchin at all for his action. For he had seen a movement he had participated in for some 40 years collapsing around him into a bourgeoisized mystical, New Age, misanthropic, anti-civilizational, cult for middle class kids who want to simply "do there own thing" but not actually do anything that might genuinely challenge the establishment. Bookchin may very well be vindicated in the end as the movement he left behind dissolves into irrelevancy, his leaving it and moving to a genuinely revolutionary democratic and libertarian philosophy, program, and ideal may help someday bring the Left back its ethical vision of a free and just world.
Hopefully some person interested in Anarchism will read this and learn that if Anarchism is to have any relevance in the struggle for human liberation, it must ask itself some very difficult questions, hopefully Bookchin's book will provoke them to do just that and create a movement that might actually change the world for the better.
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