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 preempt 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.
Source: Anarchism in America (1983)
[link] #720The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
Source: The Meaning of Confederalism (1990)
[link] #733I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment--individual liberty. That's what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.
Source: Anarchism in America (1983)
[link] #744What compels me to fight this society is, of course, outrage over injustice, a love of freedom, and a feeling of responsibility, for perpetuating and enlarging the human spirit -- its beauty, creativity, and latent capacity to improve the world. I do not care to come to terms with an irrational society that corrodes all that is valuable in humanity, that eats away at all that is beautiful and noble in the human experience.
Source: Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left (1999)
[link] #800About Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 - July 30, 2006) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. Influenced by the works of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin, he was a pioneer in the environmental movement. Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called "communalism", which seeks to reconcile and expand Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist thought.
Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the democratic confederalism of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. He was a central figure in the American green movement. An autodidact who never attended college, he is considered to be one of the most important left theorists of the twentieth century.
