Latest Murray Bookchin Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

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

  Murray Bookchin

  Anarchist, Ends, Marxist

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

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

  Murray Bookchin

  Claims

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• Terms that are related to individuals like Marxist, or Hegelian, or Bakuninist, or Kropotkinist, are completely outside my intellectual and emotional horizon. I'm a follower of no one.

  Murray Bookchin

  Emotional, Intellectual, Horizon

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Mean, My Best Friend, Movement

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• Anarchists should get together who agree, and develop their gifts at a critical point, in a critical place, and form genuine affinity groups in areas where they can have certain results, notable results - not move into areas of great resistance where they're almost certain to be crushed, defeated, demoralized.

  Murray Bookchin

  Moving, Together, Resistance

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Commitment, Responsibility, Character

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Fighting, Personality, Important

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I would like to see a critical mass of very gifted anarchists come together in an appropriate place in order to do highly productive work. That's it. I don't know why that can't be done except for the fact that I think that people mistrust their own ideals today. I don't think that they don't believe in them; I think they mistrust the viability of them. They're afraid to commit themselves to their ideals.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Thinking, Productive Work

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

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

  Murray Bookchin

  Proletariat, Anarchism, Wells

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I believe that if we do have a commonality of beliefs we should clarify them, we should strengthen their coherence and we should also develop common projects that produce a lived community of relationships.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Community, Coherence

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• We should try to become better people, ethically speaking, reflect upon ourselves and our very limited existences and develop a sense of tolerance for each other, as well as for other anarchist groups with which we may disagree. But we're not committed to toeing a line called anarchism; there are many different anarchisms.

  Murray Bookchin

  People, Tolerance, Trying

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Fighting, Agree To Disagree

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• We don't have to go around as the Protestant reformation did, or as the socialist revolution did, and execute each other as soon as we are successful - assuming we'll ever be successful.

  Murray Bookchin

  Successful, Revolution, Assuming

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Thinking, Sitting Down, Down And

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.

  Murray Bookchin

  Commitment, Responsibility, Ideas

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Sorry, Thinking, Self

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Spiritual, Believe, Ideas

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I believe that there has to be an ideal and I favour an ethical anarchism which can be cohered into an ideal.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Favour, Ethical

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Commitment, Civilization, Progress

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• After reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, I realized that capitalism did not naturally grow as [Karl] Marx would imply by his theory of historical materialism. People were dragged into capitalism screaming, shouting, and fighting all along the way, trying to resist this industrial and commercial world.

  Murray Bookchin

  Reading, Fighting, People

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Technological Development, Enormous, Capitalism

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I have been criticized for pointing out that anarchism is likely to flourish more easily, at least in the western world, and to a certain extent in eastern Europe, in those areas where there is either grim need or considerable technological development.

  Murray Bookchin

  Technological Development, Europe, Needs

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• I've been criticized by many anarchists as believing that anarchism is impossible without affluence. On the contrary, I think affluence is very destructive to anarchism. If you are absorbed by that commodity world then you're not going to move toward any radical positions, you're going to move toward a stance of protectiveness.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Moving, Thinking

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• Capitalism has created a situation called scarcity. And that scarcity is not natural, it's socially induced. Along with that sense of scarcity, or feeling of scarcity, is a feeling of economic insecurity. Along with that is a feeling of deprivation... And unless we can demonstrate that that feeling is not justified technologically, we will not be able to speak intelligently to the great majority of people and reorganize our economy so that we really know what needs are rational and human and what have been created, almost fetishisticaly, by the capitalist economy.

  Murray Bookchin

  Capitalist Economy, People, Feelings

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Giving Up, Ghetto, People

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com