Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination: A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination: A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout

 

Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the

The Emergence of Eco-decentralism

 

Mumford Gutkind Bookchin: The Emergence of Eco-decentralism

by Janet Biehl        http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/books/

http://www.biehlonbookchin.com

In the 1950s the aging Rose Bookchin still lived in the old apartment in East Tremont, the Bronx neighborhood where she and her family had lived since 1920 and where her son Murray had grown up. Rose had been a diabetic for two decades and was nearly blind. She was incapable of giving herself daily insulin injections, so every day Murray took the Third Avenue El to East Tremont to administer them.

He would step onto the platform, and if he looked to the south, he could see over the tops of the buildings the trees of Crotona Park. Then down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, and he stroke briskly past his old street-side haunts: the kosher butcher, the deli with pickles and whitefish and knishes, the old candy store, the dairy with its slabs of butter — the old familiar shops were still there. Most of the kids he’d known in YCL had moved away too, but their parents still lived here — the buildings were rent controlled, after all, and it suited them fine. The vacancy rate in East Tremont was less than one percent. Snatches of Yiddish in the streets came to his ears, as in the old days, a comforting sound as always. One difference: the farmers from New Jersey who’d brought their produce over the bridge into the Bronx — they didn’t come here anymore. Their farmlands were paved over. No one was farming there or in Yonkers now.

What is Communalism?

The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism

by Murray Bookchin  -- September 18, 1994

Seldom have socially important words become more confused and divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two centuries ago, it is often forgotten, "democracy" was deprecated by monarchists and republicans alike as "mob rule." Today, democracy is hailed as "representative democracy," an oxymoron that refers to little more than a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who ostensibly speak for the powerless many.

"Communism," for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her ability and received the means of life according to his or her needs. Today, "communism" is associated with the Stalinist gulag and wholly rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin, "socialism" -- which once denoted a politically free society based on various forms of collectivism and equitable material returns for labor -- is currently interchangeable with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political spectrum has shifted ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself has not been immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite individualism -- marked by an advocacy of lifestyle changes, the cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and even an embrace of outright mysticism -- has become increasingly prominent. This personalistic "lifestyle anarchism" is steadily eroding the socialistic core of anarchist concepts of freedom.

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.