Murray Bookchin Quotes

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.

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

Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort - in effect, she supported military conscription.

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 in a libertarian communist society.

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

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.

The only conclusion I could arrive at with the death of the workers' movement as a revolutionary force - you know the imagery of the proletarian vanguard, or proletarian hegemony - has been the community.

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.

In The Ecology of Freedom, my critique of what is called civilization and industrial society is massive, and my attack upon [Karl] Marx's commitment to it as a necessary stage in human progress and the domination of nature is very sharp.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

I was raised as a red diaper baby.

In some instances even certain social services that normally were supplied, or pre-empted by the state. Take the United States, the [Ronald] Reagan administration is withdrawing assistance, all kinds of welfare programs, and if people don't improvise their own resources to cope with problems of the ageing, problems of the sick, problems of the young, problems of the poor, problems of tenant rights, who will?

My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.

I regard individuality as the most precious trait we have, because without it there is no creativity, there is no consciousness, there is no rationality. There is nothing that could make me speak more strongly to this point.

I would agree that much with people who accept private property - that conscription is an unpardonable transgression, whether it be "corrupt" or not. The Spanish anarchists opposed conscription during the civil war in Spain as a gross expropriation of property, the most precious property that we have, our own physical beings themselves.

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'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 went through the communist children's movement at the age of nine, in 1930, and into the Young Communist League in 1936. The Spanish civil war brought me back. I'd already broken with the communists - or the Stalinists, more precisely - in 1935. But the civil war in Spain and the desire to aid the remarkable people struggling against Fascism brought me back to the Young Communist League, so that I could effectively participate, however far removed from Spain, in their struggle. By 1938 I was ready to be expelled. By 1939 I was expelled.

We have to give people the freedom to choose lifestyles and material satisfactions that suit their needs, and we have to redefine need itself. We can't redefine need among ghetto people by telling them we should all give up our TV sets or automobiles: we have to tell them there's enough to go around, now let's talk about using it sensibly.

There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.

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 would not want to be in the same movement with an anarcho-syndicalist, however much I may respect and like that person. Some of my best friends are anarcho-syndicalists. I mean, I realize that we do not have a commonality, even a language, that makes it possible for us to communicate.

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

My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it's eco-anarchism as well. And it's not oriented toward the proletariat.

The State is a professional apparatus that sets itself apart from the people and apart from the institutions that the people themselves create. It's a monopoly on violence that manages and institutionalizes social activities. The people are perfectly capable of managing themselves and creating their own institutions.

I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of totalitarianism.

New York has a tremendous number of people but the quality of its politics is unspeakable. By contrast, in a smaller township, I find there's a great deal of social awareness, less of a sense of powerlessness, less of a polarization of economic life.

The State certainly played a decisive role. I also believe that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or die. That's the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally totalitarianism.

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ 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 ‘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.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

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.

To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society.

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'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.

The real problem is that "limited government" invariably leads to unlimited government. If history is to be any guide and current experience is to be any guide, we in the United States 200 years ago started out with the notion of limited government - virtually no government interference - and we now have a massive quasi-totalitarian government.

I'm a Bookchinite, and nobody has a right to claim that but me.

I'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.

Take a very striking case in point: the Russian Bolsheviks. [Vladimir] Lenin created an alleged workers' party, which in every way reflected the Czarist machine, in order to deal with Czarism. And the danger and the hazards of trying to accommodate libertarian principles to the political process as we know it today is that one begins to dissolve the libertarian principles. So I would say that there is an inconsistency there that should be explored.

When I die Bookchinism comes to an end, and all the allusions to it both among Marxists and anarchists.

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.

In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.

You 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.

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.

Whether they [left in America are] anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.