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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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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
Real
North
Thing
Revolution
American
Opportunity
America
Back
Feel
Feels

More quotes by Murray Bookchin

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Whether they [left in America are] anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.
Murray Bookchin
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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
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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
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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'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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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 believe in a libertarian communist society.
Murray Bookchin
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I'm not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.
Murray Bookchin
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I would say that today the real support for State power and totalitarianism comes from the Communist parties and the Socialist parties and, where they are sizable, the Trotskyist groups. They are the ones that really frighten me.
Murray Bookchin
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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
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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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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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I would agree that much with people who accept private property - that conscription is an unpardonable transgression, whether it be corrupt or not. The Spanish anarchists opposed conscription during the civil war in Spain as a gross expropriation of property, the most precious property that we have, our own physical beings themselves.
Murray Bookchin
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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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The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
Murray Bookchin
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Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.
Murray Bookchin
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I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of totalitarianism.
Murray Bookchin
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Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.
Murray Bookchin
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People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights - this is the true left in the United States.
Murray Bookchin
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My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it's eco-anarchism as well. And it's not oriented toward the proletariat.
Murray Bookchin