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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.

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
Revolutionary
Conclusion
Workers
Movement
Proletarian
Community
Vanguard
Force
Hegemony
Death
Imagery
Arrive

More quotes by Murray Bookchin

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The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
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.
Murray Bookchin
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There are people, of course, who profess to be libertarian Marxists. I believe they mean very well, and I even write in their periodicals but I write very militantly that I regard Marxism as a very subtle form of what I would call the totalitarian ideology - all the more subtle because it professes to advance the notions of freedom.
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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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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I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other.
Murray Bookchin
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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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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.
Murray Bookchin
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There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.
Murray Bookchin
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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.
Murray Bookchin
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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
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[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State.
Murray Bookchin
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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.
Murray Bookchin
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I have an admiration, even though I'm not likely to do that sort of thing myself, for [Ayn] Roark's behavior when he decided that his design was not being followed - which was a gross violation, by the way, of private property rights, because the building was his.
Murray Bookchin
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I'm by no means convinced that capitalism and the development of technology has made anarchism easier.
Murray Bookchin
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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
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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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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.
Murray Bookchin
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I think that people who believe in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in leading finally to unlimited government.
Murray Bookchin
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I believe that any attempt on the part of a libertarian communist society to abridge the rights of a community - for example, to operate on the basis of a market economy of the kind that you describe - would be unforgivable, and I would oppose the practices of such a society as militantly as I think any reader of your publication would.
Murray Bookchin