Best 141 quotes of Murray Bookchin on MyQuotes

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.

An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.

Anarchists should get together who agree, and develop their gifts at a critical point, in a critical place, and form genuine affinity groups in areas where they can have certain results, notable results - not move into areas of great resistance where they're almost certain to be crushed, defeated, demoralized.

As for the workers' movement, I find that I reach workers more easily as neighbors than I do standing outside the factory despairingly giving out a leaflet telling them to take over, say the Ford plant.

As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.

[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State.

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.

Capitalism has created a situation called scarcity. And that scarcity is not natural, it's socially induced. Along with that sense of scarcity, or feeling of scarcity, is a feeling of economic insecurity. Along with that is a feeling of deprivation... And unless we can demonstrate that that feeling is not justified technologically, we will not be able to speak intelligently to the great majority of people and reorganize our economy so that we really know what needs are rational and human and what have been created, almost fetishisticaly, by the capitalist economy.

Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

Deny my individuality and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act upon me.

Here's what I do believe very strongly: that once capitalism comes into existence, once it creates this mythology of a stingy nature, then that myth has to be exorcised. In other words, we have to get out of people's heads the idea that without a market economy, without egotism, competition, rivalry and self-interest, without all the technological advances that [Karl] Marx imputed to capitalism, we have to eliminate the feeling that we would sink into some kind of barbarism.

Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.

I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

I am puzzled by people today who, after moralizing about the need for cooperation and goodwill and love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, suddenly invoke the most primitive, barbarous motivations for any kind of progress.

I believe in a libertarian communist society.

I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.

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.

I believe that if we do have a commonality of beliefs we should clarify them, we should strengthen their coherence and we should also develop common projects that produce a lived community of relationships.

I believe that it's terribly important to have a movement that is spiritual, not in the supernatural sense, but in the sense of German Geist, spirit, which combines the idea of mind together with feeling, together with intuition.

I believe that the American people should defend themselves if any attempt is made to take over the government by coup d'etat, whether by the military or the Marxists or any people who profess to be anarchists.

I believe that there has to be an ideal and I favour an ethical anarchism which can be cohered into an ideal.

I categorically deny that. The American left today as I know it - and believe me, I am very familiar with the American left - is going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It's becoming the real right in the United States.

I detest violence. I have a tremendous respect not only for human life but also for the animal life that I have to live with, and I believe that our destiny as human beings is to become nature-conscious as well as self-conscious, living in loving relationship and in balance and in harmony, not only with one another, but with the entire natural world.

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.

I don't feel the individualist anarchists, particularly in the American tradition, including the Transcendental tradition of New England, in any way deserve the derogatory comments that are often made about them by the left. When one gets down to it ultimately, my anarcho-communism stems from a commitment to true individuality. My attempt to recover the power and the right of the individual to control his or her life and destiny is the basis to my anarcho-communism.

I don't think anarchism consists of sitting down and saying let's form a collective. I don't think it consists of saying we're all anarchists: you're an anarcho-syndicalist; you're an anarcho-communist; you're an anarcho-individualist.

I don't think that the Soviet Union and China are accidents, aberrations; I think they follow from Marxism-Leninism. I think that Leninism comes out of Marx's basic convictions.

I don't want to think any longer simply in terms of the Spanish Revolution or the Russian Revolution. It doesn't make any sense to talk [Peter] Makhno to an American.

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.

I feel that we have some opportunity in North America to go back and say the American Revolution was the real thing.

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.

If the State does not enjoy a monopoly of violence, which then gives it the power to order people's lives and to compel them to obey decisions over which they have no control, or just limited control, then I think you have a consistently libertarian society.

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.

If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)… Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.

I got deeply involved with the Trotskyists. I assumed simply that my enemy's enemies were my friends.

I have a great admiration for pacifism, but I'm not a pacifist, mainly because I would defend myself if I were attacked.

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.

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.

I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of capitalism . I believe that people will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in the way of communities that wish to make other decisions.

I know one thing: that you can do a lot of things but if you don't educate people into conscious anarchism it gets frittered away.

I learned that [Trotskyism] were no different from the Stalinists, and they expelled me, which is the typical Marxist-Leninist way of dealing with dissenters. From that point on, I migrated by the 1950s into anarchism, increasingly emphasizing decentralization. Also, I made the all-important step of bridging my social philosophy with ecology. I did that in 1952 and went on to write a whole series of books developing an anarcho-ecological approach.

I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.

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.

I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.

I'm much more interested in developing human character in society. And I'm much more interested in the social conditions that foster commitment to ideals, a sense of solidarity, purposefulness, steadfastness, responsibility.

I'm not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.

I'm sorry that some self-styled anarchists have picked up on the word spirit and have turned me into a theological ecologist, a notion which I think is crude beyond all belief.

I'm talking of the idea, basically very widespread in America, that the less government the better, which is obviously being used to the advantage of the big corporations, but none-the-less has very radical implications. The idea of a people that exercises a great deal of federalist or confederalist control, the ideal of a grass-roots type of democracy, the idea of the freedom of the individual which is not to get lost in the mazes of anarcho-egotism à la Stirner, or for that matter right-wing libertarianism.