Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Toward
Development
Freedom
Setback
Ever
Technological
Advance
Enormous
Capitalism
Convinced

More quotes by Murray Bookchin

Image
My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.
Murray Bookchin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Murray Bookchin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If the State does not enjoy a monopoly of violence, which then gives it the power to order people's lives and to compel them to obey decisions over which they have no control, or just limited control, then I think you have a consistently libertarian society.
Murray Bookchin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of totalitarianism.
Murray Bookchin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I believe in a libertarian communist society.
Murray Bookchin
Image
I don't want to think any longer simply in terms of the Spanish Revolution or the Russian Revolution. It doesn't make any sense to talk [Peter] Makhno to an American.
Murray Bookchin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I feel that if people investigate the emergence of government, of State power - if they examine the logic of State power historically, and more specifically in the United States - they will find that the concept of limited government is not tenable once they adopt some type of libertarian principle.
Murray Bookchin