I've worked in the factories of this land, and I've thought freely and creatively. And I think that that has greatly enriched my capacity to abstract intellectually. The experience of being with workers, my encounters with management and my recognition of its foibles, my personal encounters with American industrial efficiency, my military experience - all of these things packaged together have greatly enriched my reading and my understanding, and I've written with what I hope is a reasonable fluency of style that is much more expressive than the academic stuff.
Murray BookchinI've had training in electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I've never taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.
Murray BookchinYou see something very important is happening. Personality is being eaten out, and with that the idealism that always motivated an anarchist movement - the belief in something, the ideal that there is something worth fighting for.
Murray BookchinWherever people defend the rights of the individual, I stand with them above all, over and beyond any wishes relating to how an economy should be managed or how people should govern themselves. This is a very strong commitment on my part.
Murray BookchinTo speak of โlimits to growthโ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be โpersuadedโ to limit growth than a human being can be โpersuadedโ to stop breathing. Attempts to โgreenโ capitalism, to make it โecologicalโ, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Murray BookchinI 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.
Murray Bookchin