Popular Education for a Free Society
This article consists of excerpts from From Urbanization to Cities (1987; London: Cassell, 1995), with revisions. Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words… Politics is not statecraft, and citizens …
Continue reading “Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda”
The title of this book, The Third Revolution, is taken from what may seem an extraordinary historical coincidence. The demand for a “third revolution” was actually raised in two great revolutions: the French Revolution in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, and 120 years later in the Russian Revolution during the opening decades of …
Continue reading “The Third Revolution Vol 1 (introduction)”
Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. –Thoreau One of the most dangerous aspects of the present cultural and social counterrevolution is the widespread belief that capitalism is here to stay, that it is a …
Social ecology developed out of important social and theoretical problems that faced the Left in the post-World War II period. The historical realities of the 1940s and the 1950s completely invalidated the perspectives of a proletarian revolution, of a “chronic economic crisis” that would bring capitalism to its knees, and of commitment to a centralistic …
Continue reading “Theses on Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction”
For some two centuries, anarchism — a very ecumenical body of anti-authoritarian ideas — developed in the tension between two basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom. These tendencies have by no means been reconciled in the history of libertarian thought. Indeed, for much of the …
Continue reading “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm”
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 …
Rarely have the concepts that literally define the best of Western culture–its notions of a meaningful History, a universal Civilization, and the possibility of Progress–been called so radically into question as they are today. In recent decades, both in the United States and abroad, the academy and a subculture of self-styled postmodernist intellectuals have nourished …
Continue reading “History, Civilization, and Progress: Outline for a Criticism of Modern Relativism”
This document can also be found at Spunk.org Preface These essays are less an analysis of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936-39 than an evocation of the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries. Although they contain a general overview and evaluation of the Anarchist and Anarchosyndicalist movements …
Continue reading “To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936”
Nationalism and the “National Question” Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:19 AM PST Contributed by: murray By: Murray Bookchin One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For …
The problems which many people face today in “defining” themselves, in knowing “who they are”–problems that feed a vast psychotherapy industry–are by no means personal ones. These problems exist not only for private individuals; they exist for modern society as a whole. Socially, we live in desperate uncertainty about how people relate to each other. …