And just in case someone drops in here with Bookchin being a Jew - let me post this from the same work:
"What is of crucial importance is that the regression to primitivism among lifestyle anarchists denies the most salient attributes of humanity as a species and the potentially emancipatory aspects of Euro-American civilization."
Indeed, this is from a work that attacks figures like Zerzan, Hakim Bey, etc.
"Anarchism must not be dissipated in self-indulgent behavior like that of the primitivistic Adamites of the sixteenth century, who ‘wandered through the woods naked, singing and dancing,’ as Kenneth Rexroth contemptuously observed, spending ‘their time in a continuous sexual orgy’ until they were hunted down by Jan Zizka and exterminated — much to the relief of a disgusted peasantry, whose lands they had plundered.[45] It must not retreat into the primitivistic demimonde of the John Zerzans and George Bradfords. I would be the last to contend that anarchists should not live their anarchism as much as possible on a day-to-day basis — personally as well as socially, aesthetically as well as pragmatically. But they should not live an anarchism that diminishes, indeed effaces the most important features that have distinguished anarchism, as a movement, practice, and program, from statist socialism. Anarchism today must resolutely retain its character as a social movement — a programmatic as well as activist social movement — a movement that melds its embattled vision of a libertarian communist society with its forthright critique of capitalism, unobscured by names like ‘industrial society.’
"In short, social anarchism must resolutely affirm its differences with lifestyle anarchism. If a social anarchist movement cannot translate its fourfold tenets — municipal confederalism, opposition to statism, direct democracy, and ultimately libertarian communism — into a lived practice in a new public sphere; if these tenets languish like its memories of past struggles in ceremonial pronouncements and meetings; worse still, if they are subverted by the ‘libertarian’ Ecstasy Industry and by quietistic Asian theisms, then its revolutionary socialistic core will have to be restored under a new name.
"Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists. Minimally, social anarchism is radically at odds with anarchism focused on lifestyle, neo-Situationist paeans to ecstasy, and the sovereignty of the ever-shriveling petty-bourgeois ego. The two diverge completely in their defining principles — socialism or individualism. Between a committed revolutionary body of ideas and practice, on the one hand, and a vagrant yearning for privatistic ecstasy and self-realization on the other, there can be no commonality. Mere opposition to the state may well unite fascistic lumpens with Stirnerite lumpens, a phenomenon that is not without its historical precedents."
- Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
"The arming of the people was a basic tenet of the Left That Was, and pious demands for gun control among today’s leftists would have been totally alien to the thinking of the Left That Was. As recently as the 1930s, the concept of “the people in arms” remained a basic tenet of independent socialist, not to speak of anarchist, movements throughout the world, including those of the United States, as I myself so well remember. The notion of schooling the masses in reliance on the police and army for public safety, much less of turning the other cheek in the face of violence, would have been regarded as heinous.
"Not surprisingly, revolutionary anarchists were even less ambiguous than socialists. In contrast to the state-controlled militia that the Second International was prepared to accept in the 1906 resolution cited above, the anarchists sought the direct arming of the masses. In Spain, weapons were supplied to anarchist militants from the very inception of the movement. The workers and peasants relied on themselves, not on the largess of statist institutions, to obtain the means for insurrection. Just as their notion of democracy meant direct democracy, so their notion of antimilitarism meant that they had to countervail the state’s monopoly of violence with an armed popular movement — not merely a state-subsidized militia." - Murray Bookchin
"Moreover, if there is to be a Left that in any sense resembles the Left That Was, it cannot be merely “left of center.” Liberalism — with its menu of small reforms that obscure the irrationality of the prevailing society and make it more socially acceptable — is an arena in its own right. Liberalism has no “left” that can be regarded as its kin or its critical neighbor. The Left must stake out its own arena, one that stands in revolutionary opposition to the prevailing society, not one that participates as a “leftist” partner in its workings." - Murray Bookchin
[ + ] Joe_McCarthy
[ - ] Joe_McCarthy [op] 0 points 3 weeksApr 9, 2025 16:11:15 ago (+0/-0)
"What is of crucial importance is that the regression to
primitivism among lifestyle anarchists denies the most salient
attributes of humanity as a species and the potentially
emancipatory aspects of Euro-American civilization."
Indeed, this is from a work that attacks figures like Zerzan, Hakim Bey, etc.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-anarchism-or-lifestyle-anarchism-an-unbridgeable-chasm
[ + ] Joe_McCarthy
[ - ] Joe_McCarthy [op] 0 points 3 weeksApr 9, 2025 16:58:56 ago (+0/-0)
"In short, social anarchism must resolutely affirm its differences with lifestyle anarchism. If a social anarchist movement cannot translate its fourfold tenets — municipal confederalism, opposition to statism, direct democracy, and ultimately libertarian communism — into a lived practice in a new public sphere; if these tenets languish like its memories of past struggles in ceremonial pronouncements and meetings; worse still, if they are subverted by the ‘libertarian’ Ecstasy Industry and by quietistic Asian theisms, then its revolutionary socialistic core will have to be restored under a new name.
"Certainly, it is already no longer possible, in my view, to call oneself an anarchist without adding a qualifying adjective to distinguish oneself from lifestyle anarchists. Minimally, social anarchism is radically at odds with anarchism focused on lifestyle, neo-Situationist paeans to ecstasy, and the sovereignty of the ever-shriveling petty-bourgeois ego. The two diverge completely in their defining principles — socialism or individualism. Between a committed revolutionary body of ideas and practice, on the one hand, and a vagrant yearning for privatistic ecstasy and self-realization on the other, there can be no commonality. Mere opposition to the state may well unite fascistic lumpens with Stirnerite lumpens, a phenomenon that is not without its historical precedents."
- Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-anarchism-or-lifestyle-anarchism-an-unbridgeable-chasm#toc10
[ + ] Joe_McCarthy
[ - ] Joe_McCarthy [op] 0 points 3 weeksApr 9, 2025 17:32:44 ago (+0/-0)
"Not surprisingly, revolutionary anarchists were even less ambiguous than socialists. In contrast to the state-controlled militia that the Second International was prepared to accept in the 1906 resolution cited above, the anarchists sought the direct arming of the masses. In Spain, weapons were supplied to anarchist militants from the very inception of the movement. The workers and peasants relied on themselves, not on the largess of statist institutions, to obtain the means for insurrection. Just as their notion of democracy meant direct democracy, so their notion of antimilitarism meant that they had to countervail the state’s monopoly of violence with an armed popular movement — not merely a state-subsidized militia." - Murray Bookchin
[ + ] Joe_McCarthy
[ - ] Joe_McCarthy [op] 0 points 3 weeksApr 9, 2025 18:17:03 ago (+0/-0)