Frases de Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin
Fecha de nacimiento: 14. Enero 1921
Fecha de muerte: 30. Julio 2006
Murray Bookchin . Historiador, profesor universitario, investigador, ideólogo y activista ecologista estadounidense, fundador de la ecología social y uno de los pioneros del movimiento ecologista.
Es autor de una extensa colección de libros sobre historia, política, filosofía, asuntos urbanísticos y ecología. Ideológicamente Bookchin evolucionó desde un marxismo tradicional hacia el socialismo libertario, en la tradición anarquista de Kropotkin.
Frases Murray Bookchin
„Almost anyone, I suppose, can call himself or herself an anarchist, if he or she believed that the society could be managed without the state.“
— Murray Bookchin
Context: Almost anyone, I suppose, can call himself or herself an anarchist, if he or she believed that the society could be managed without the state. And by the state—I don't mean the absence of any institutions, the absence of any form of social organisation—the state really refers to a professional apparatus of people who are set aside to manage society, to preëmpt the control of society from the people. So that would include the military, judges, politicians, representatives who are paid for the express purpose of legislating, and then an executive body that is also set aside from society. So anarchists generally believe that, whether as groups or individuals, people should directly run society.
„And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.“
— Murray Bookchin
Context: The basic problem I really have is that whenever I meet leftists in the socialist and Marxist movements, I'm called a petit-bourgeois individualist. [audience laughs] I'm supposed to shrink after this— Usually I'm called petit-bourgeois individualist by students, and by academicians, who’ve never done a days work life [sic] in their entire biography, whereas I have spent years in factories and the trade unions, in foundries and auto plants. So after I have to swallow the word petit-bourgeois, I don't mind the word individualist at all!I believe in individual freedom; that's my primary and complete commitment—individual liberty. That’s what it's all about. And that's what socialism was supposed to be about, or anarchism was supposed to be about, and tragically has been betrayed.And when I normally encounter my so-called colleagues on the left—socialists, Marxists, communists—they tell me that, after the revolution, they're gonna shoot me. [audience laughs, Murray nods] That is said with unusual consistency. They're gonna stand me and Karl up against the wall and get rid of us real fast; I feel much safer in your company. [audience laughs and applauds]
In this clip, Murray Bookchin is speaking to a crowd of anarcho-capitalists and other libertarians at a Libertarian Party Conference. Karl Hess is sitting next to Bookchin at the table.
„The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.“
— Murray Bookchin
"The Meaning of Confederalism," Green Perspectives, no. 20 (1990).
„This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of 'revolutionizing themselves and things,' much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People's Labor Party 'revolutionaries' is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of 'proletarian morality' replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little 'Red Book' and other sacred litanies.“
— Murray Bookchin
"Listen, Marxist!" (May 1969); also available in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
„An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.“
— Murray Bookchin
Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1965).
„When cybernated and automatic machinery can reduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is more meaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. When modern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty. When all the resources exist to promote social equality, nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals than subjugation.“
— Murray Bookchin
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), introduction to the First Edition (p. vii of the third edition, 2004)
„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.“
— Murray Bookchin
Remaking Society (1990).
„If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.“
— Murray Bookchin
Page 26 of the 1991 reprint
„Without changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic 'classless' and 'non-exploitative' form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of 'people's democracies,' 'socialism' and the 'public ownership' of 'natural resources.' And 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.“
— Murray Bookchin
Toward an Ecological Society (1980).
„If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.“
— Murray Bookchin
Page 107 of the 2005 reprint.
