Review of “Recovering Bookchin” by Andy Price

By Debbie Bookchin and Bea Bookchin On March 7, 2013 

Author/journalist Debbie Bookchin and ISE Board member Bea Bookchin offer this in-depth review of Andy Price’s new book, Recovering Bookchin (New Compass Press, November 2012):

In his important new book Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price has set himself a formidable task: he takes up the corpus of criticism of Murray Bookchin that developed during the last 20 years of his life and disentangles the valid, content-based criticism, from the many ad hominem and polemical attacks against Bookchin, showing how the latter were used to almost completely obscure the former and cast aside Bookchin’s substantive critique. Equally important, Price addresses the content-based criticism, in the process illuminating the richness of Bookchin’s theoretical and political philosophy and restoring him to his rightful role as one of the most important radical thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century.

While such a task might have resulted in a book reserved for those already familiar with Bookchin’s work, that is not the case here: Price, a senior lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, U.K., provides such a clear rendering not only of Bookchin’s thought, but also of the concerns of Bookchin’s critics, that his book serves also as one of the most cohesive and readable introductions to the philosophy and social theory of Murray Bookchin.

After describing the enormous impact that Bookchin’s ideas and writing had on radical political thought prior to 1987, Price focuses on two specific periods of Bookchin’s work. The first begins with the Gathering of American Greens conference in Amherst in 1987 that initiated the social ecology vs. deep ecology debate. The second begins eight years later in 1995 with the social anarchism vs. lifestyle anarchism, and subsequently, anarchism vs. communalism debates. Price provides a detailed summary of the long literature in which these debates and argumentation took place and shows that Bookchin’s criticisms of these two movements stemmed not from an egotistical desire to protect his turf, or some kind of querulous argumentative streak, as his critics contended, but were compelled by the need to defend and explicate the philosophical and political implications of his life’s work.  These interventions by Bookchin, Price explains, were “a direct philosophical and political expression of his own theoretical foundations.”

Murray Bookchin’s social ecology: communalism as evolutions path to self-consciousness, freedom and ethics

Murray Bookchin’s social ecology: communalism as evolutions path to self-consciousness, freedom and ethics

huhtikuu 30, 2010 Tekijä svantemalmstrom

Another article written by Jyri Jaakkola translated to english. Jyri was killed in Oaxaca, Mexico 26.4.2010.

Murray Bookchin’s social ecology: communalism as evolutions path to self-consciousness, freedom and ethics

In Elonkehä’s number 10/03 Olli Tammilehto pointed to John Clarks and David Watsons attempts to combine deep ecology and social ecology. The basics of deep ecology are most likely familiar to Elonkehä’s readers, but what is social ecology?

Social ecology is typically connected to Murray Bookchin, an American, and I will discuss his ideas in this article. According to Bookchin nearly all ecological problems are social problems. Ecological crisis is caused by the capitalist society, but it has deeper roots in social hierarchies. Social ecology proposes replacing state and capitalism with an ecological society, that is based on relations without hierarchy, geographically decentralized communities, ecotechnology, organic agriculture and human scale production facilities.

Social ecology denies a clear division or a inevitable opposition between nature and humanity or society. Movement from nature to society is gradual and basic problems that pit society against nature are growing within social evolution – not between nature and society.

What schools will not do for us

- School teachers teach students

- Schools educate the “public” to be students

- Schools even “produce” teachers, that will teach students

But where do we learn how to make a school?  Do they actually teach this anywhere?

What about medical schools, they produce physicians, nurses, biologists, technicians, but nowhere do they ever teach how to make a hospital.  Or even how to organize and create an institution that addresses the health needs of the population.  So would this make it safe to assume that those who set those institutions up did not learn how to do it in any school?  They sure had the authority to do so, and so they did what they wanted to do.

Work, Energy, Time: buyers and sellers of

One of their greatest mistakes throughout history was to allow us to engage in the study, understanding, and utilization of physics.  They must have great regrets for their mistake ever since.  It is now too late to take it back, out of our minds and out of our hands.  As long as we can communicate we can share this dangerous knowledge of physics.  In terms of our work and our time this is how physics relates the two.

Energy transfer can be used to do work, so power is also the rate at which this work is performed. The same amount of work is done when carrying a load up a flight of stairs whether the person carrying it walks or runs, but more power is expended during the running because the work is done in a shorter amount of time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics)

... the role of education in physics ...

This blog is under construction and will be presented in full once the process of post collection and initial invitation for participation is complete.



The aim is to develop a discipline where education is part of physics and not the other way around.  For long physical education, or the study of physics, has been oriented at nature as an object in the absence of woman/man and society in general.  The exception is "life sciences" which isolate the study of life from its environment in such a way as to undermine physics (non-life science) as the study of the material world without life.  As it is impossible to separate we claim that the study of physics must be done in a social context.

Imre Lakatos: Modern Physics,Modern Society

Imre Lakatos: Modern Physics,Modern Society

 

Preface

 

Imre Lakatos’s philosophy of science is rooted in a number of different fields, and not all of them are purely scientific. During his years of education, he was influenced by mathematics and natural sciences as well as by philosophy, but the role of political ideologies cannot be denied. His basic philosophical ideas – such as the rationality of science, the continual growth of knowledge, the social determinism of scientific activities, and the indispensable role of historical attitude in the philosophy of science – are definitely in accordance with his early devotion to Marxism (and Lukacs’s philosophy) both in theory and in practice.

One can easily find clear evidences that Lakatos saw basic connections between the theoretical sciences he studied and the practical principles he followed in politics. This is clearly demonstrated by the early papers he published in different journals, and it must have played an important role in the doctoral dissertation he wrote in 1947. Unfortunately, no copy of this dissertation can be found now. There are several assumptions as to when and why the paper disappeared, but most probably Lakatos himself might have “stolen” it some time before leaving Hungary in 1956. Later he hinted several times that he was rather unsatisfied with it, regarded it as “immature”, and he also said that he would not have minded if nobody had ever seen it. After some failures to find it, we have good reasons to believe that the dissertation is lost for ever.