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The State certainly played a decisive role. I also believe that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or die. That's the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally totalitarianism.

Murray Bookchin

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Murray Bookchin
Age: 85 †
Born: 1921
Born: January 14
Died: 2006
Died: July 30
Author
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Historian
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Politician
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
May
Dies
Market
Devour
Believe
State
Played
Wrestle
Whether
Role
Totalitarianism
Free
Certainly
Rivalry
Also
Lead
Decisive
Doe
Grow
Concentration
Problem
Roles
Ultimately
Stemmed
States
Grows
Finally
Corporatism

More quotes by Murray Bookchin

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I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.
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I think it's terribly important that networks of anarchists establish themselves with a view toward educating people.
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I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.
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I was raised as a red diaper baby.
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The only conclusion I could arrive at with the death of the workers' movement as a revolutionary force - you know the imagery of the proletarian vanguard, or proletarian hegemony - has been the community.
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I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.
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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.
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Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism.
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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.
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We don't have an appreciable American left any more in the United States. What I saw of the SDS in the '60s was very abhorrent to me: Marxism, Leninism, almost the KGB mentality - a police politics that I found completely totalitarian in nature.
Murray Bookchin
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I will never surrender the rights of the individual - the complete rights of the individual - to any ism whatever.
Murray Bookchin
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I believe that the American people should defend themselves if any attempt is made to take over the government by coup d'etat, whether by the military or the Marxists or any people who profess to be anarchists.
Murray Bookchin
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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
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Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society.
Murray Bookchin
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An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
Murray Bookchin
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When I talk about self-management, self-regulation, self-government, the word I emphasize is self, and my concern is with the reconstruction of the self. Marxists and even many, I think, overly enthusiastic anarchists have neglected that self.
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Deny my individuality and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act upon me.
Murray Bookchin
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The real problem is that limited government invariably leads to unlimited government. If history is to be any guide and current experience is to be any guide, we in the United States 200 years ago started out with the notion of limited government - virtually no government interference - and we now have a massive quasi-totalitarian government.
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I feel that we have some opportunity in North America to go back and say the American Revolution was the real thing.
Murray Bookchin
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The most important thing [anarchists] can do is educate themselves, develop a propaganda machinery in the form of books and periodicals, a literature, engage in discussion groups that are open to a community, to discuss and develop their ideas and to develop networks.
Murray Bookchin