The Modern Crisis
By Murray Bookchin This article originally appeared in Green Perspectives No. 2 February 1986. In my article, “Toward a Libertarian Municipalism2,” I advanced the view that any counterculture to the prevailing culture must be developed together with counterinstitutions to the prevailing institutions—a decentralized, confederal, popular power that will acquire the control over social and political […]
What Is Social Ecology?
This article was originally published in Michael Zimmerman, ed., Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993) and has been slightly revised for publication here. What defines social ecology as social is its recognition of the often-overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social […]
The Greening of Politics: Toward a New Kind of Political Practice
This article originally appeared in Green Perspectives No. 1 January 1986. There are two ways to look at the word “politics.” The first—and most conventional—is to describe politics as a fairly exclusive, generally professionalized system of power interactions in which specialists whom we call “politicians” formulate decisions that affect our lives and administer these decisions […]
Radicalizing Democracy: Murray Bookchin Interviewed by Kick It Over
An interview with Murray Bookchin conducted by the editors of Kick It Over magazine. K.I.O.: You’ve said in your writings that we are undergoing a change as far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture or from agriculture to industry. Could you elaborate on this and talk a bit about why this is […]
Popular Politics vs. Party Politics
Note: This article was written and published in the River Valley Voice, a New England publication, during the 1984 Democratic primary campaign. Although it makes repeated allusions to the 1984 elections, the views it expresses have a more lasting value, and are submitted for discussion to the reader as a Green Program Project paper. A […]
The Utopian Impulse: Reflections on a Tradition
The article originally appeared in Harbinger: The Journal of Social Ecology Vol. 1 No. 1, winter 1983. The ecosphere is threatened to a degree unprecedented in humanity’s tenure on the planet. The rupture with the natural world is symptomatic of and a causal factor in the breakdown of social relations. The consciousness of exploitation and […]
From Spectacle to Empowerment: Grass Roots Democracy and the Peace Process
(Green Program Project pamphlet reprinted in The Vermont Peace Reader, 1983) Will the present-day peace movement repeat the errors of the 1960s anti-war movement by placing its primary focus on carefully orchestrated and highly centralized national actions in cities like Washington or New York? Or will it try to percolate into the localities and neighborhoods […]
The American Crisis (part 1 and 2)
The American Crisis part I and II was written Feb. and Aug. 1980 and published in COMMENT vol. 1, no. 4 and no. 5 (1980). This online version brings together part I and II.
Anarchism Past and Present
Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the Critical Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles on May 29, 1980. My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme importance today of viewing Anarchism in terms of the changing social contexts of our era – – not as […]
Toward a post-scarcity society: the American perspective and the SDS
The twentieth century is the heir of human history – the legatee of man’s age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new vision of the […]