Murray Bookchin (1921–2006)

This book is not about the nearly forgotten simultaneous revolution and reaction that took place in the second half of 1936 in Spain. Instead, the book focuses on the even more buried account of the preceding 70 years of anarchist agitation and organization that lead to that standoff. Murray Bookchin meticulously reconstructs the organizations, ideologies, theories, movements, historical events, intellectuals and important persons of the time in a compelling history.

What struck me the most show more about the Spanish Anarchists was the boldness of their actions. The Spanish Anarchists set out to polarize society on class lines through class warfare and strikes, destabilize the state apparatus through insurrection and mass non-participation, and then arm the people to resist the reaction of capitalists and state reactionaries. Entire villages simply declared "libertarian communism," took over land and factories, and started operating them in the interest of all until they were smashed by the reaction forces. And this before there was solidarity enough to spread this type of action across the country. This shows what is possible when oppressed people take it upon themselves to fight for their own freedom.

Bookchin takes careful note of the mistakes made by the revolutionary movement, criticising the foolhardy moves of the anarchists as well as when they seemed too conservative in their strategy. But Bookchin saves his most poisonous vitriol for excoriating Spanish Socialists, and they deserve it. Spending the majority of their time and energy on opportunistic efforts, the Spanish Socialists and Communists stood in the way of revolution far more often than they inspired it. Waiting for conditions to appear, they undermined the organizing already taking place. Acting as scabs, putting themselves in the position of mediators between the working class and the state, and refusing solidarity with anyone outside of their narrow dogma, they undermined the Spanish working class and peasant movements towards freedom. show less

What a refreshing read a great majority of this text this was. I've seen myself as an anarchist since roughly 2003, and read the most "theory" of that tendency in the five years that followed. Seeking to broaden my horizons, I have since pushed myself to read a lot from other schools of socialist thought. I made a lot of compromises with foundational tenets of anarchism to broaden my perspective of liberatory politics, in order to learn from revolutionary history that didn't exclusively show more include anarchist-inspired movements. It has led me to make apologetics for a lot of things I fundamentally oppose. It was good to have some of those cobwebs cleared away by Bookchin's writing, which describes worlds closer to a world I want to live in. I too, "increasingly compromised [my] ideal of freedom, painfully qualifying it with transitional stages and political expediencies." We see historical models of revolution form total human freedom into practical models of assembly that degrade into councils of representation, and then to appointed executive committees and finally to autocratic dictatorship. Those who remember fondly fallen autocrats confuse the later stages of these painful qualifiers with the earliest sparks of liberatory potential.

I had to slow my reading down to comprehend a lot of the text by highlighting phrases, paragraphs even, that resonated with me. The introductions especially are littered with these. They're about as useful as the body of the text itself, infinitely moreso than the long stretches of paragraphs describing mining techniques (hoo boy don't tell 1960s Bookchin about mountaintop removal mining) or outdated engine functions, lol. Concieving of liberated human society as in harmony with the natural world rather than against it is beautiful and the longing for the richness of fully self-actualized persons is compelling. I strongly identify with the holistic definition of anarchism as "not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes man [sic] to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood [sic], to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship."

There is a theoretical gap I have trouble bridging in my head: the preconditions of the post-scarcity society and the necessity to disperse those preconditions in order to live in a liberated society that Bookchin says is predicated on that post-scarcity. We have so much meat, for example, because we have hyperexploited usually undocumented workers in factory farms in which animals are imprisoned for life and pumped full of antibiotics and feed generated on monocropped farms over graded and clear-cut rainforest, and every part of this process occurs half a world away from the next part. A globalized uniform system of brutal exploitation got us over the tyranny of want and now our central contradiction is "what is" vs "what could be." We may very well have to reckon with the return of scarcity and the primacy of justice (distribution of means of or preconditions to life) over freedom (the life worth living) as we pull apart the empire to disperse into our federated assemblies and communes.

I count myself, I suppose, among the people Bookchin describe as "divided into a gnawing fear of nuclear extinction on the one hand and a yearning for material abundance, leisure and security on the other." Can technology bridge the gap between what is and what could be? How much can we loot and pilfer from our shitty actually existing society to make abundance not dependent on the brutal system that Bookchin himself understands is unsustainable? What of the widespread use of technology to make our world smaller and worse: of smart refrigerators and Spotify that listens to your conversations to recommend music, of the reintroduction of scarcity through denial of right-to-repair or our society restructuring itself around opaque social media algorithms... show less

Only got up to the third chapter, on the development of hierarchy, but there was value enough just in those 150 pages. Bookchin offers a surprising synthesis of ideas that get at the core of what capitalism is practically like, where it comes from, and what it would mean for us to have something better. Dated in places, but the philosophy that Bookchin puts forth is both radical and coherent. I particularly appreciated his rejection of the trap of primitivism, and it's less extreme relatives show more (anti-rationalism, nihilism, etc). I can see why this book would have caught the attention of someone like Ocalan, trying to articulate a vision of a post-hierarchical world to be actually put into practice today in the most urgent of situation, rather than as an intellectual dreamworld. I doubt that I'll ever live in the world that Bookchin sketches, but in line with the best of the anarchist traditions he gives ideas for what even someone like me can change to make steps towards a more humane, democratic community. show less

So disappointing. Had I read anything else by Murray Bookchin, perhaps I would have found more substantial agreement, for I wanted very much to agree with him. But twenty years of ecocide further on from when this book was published, the "anti-humanist" writers and thinkers he critiques are looking more and more prescient, while this work is looking more and more out-of-date and irrelevant. (The one exception is his trenchant critique of nihilistic postmodernist thought, but even there, some show more of the things he castigates seem much more deserving of attack than others.) I find I do agree wholeheartedly with the last line of the book: "If we are incapable of acting strenuously to free ourselves, we do not deserve to be free." The question is, what does freedom really mean? show less