Bookchin v. "lifesyle anarchism"

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sun May 6 06:40:10 PDT 2001


s-t-t at juno.com writes:
> > You must be kidding. Then, what *is* the appropriate anarchist term
> > for,
> > say, deciding that being a vegan, dancing in the streets, and doing
> > AdBuster approved actions is the end all be all of contemporary
> > anarchist
> > politics?
>
> Alright, that last bit was unnecessarily inflammatory. A better phrasing
> might be: Chuck0, are you saying there is no "lifestyle anarchism" as
> Bookchin defines it or that there is no variant of anarchism that
> diverges from or is antagonistic to the struggle for a free society for
> all?

There's usually one of anything, but for Bookchin to make the point he was apparently trying to make, he has to show that there are a _lot_ of vegan street-dancers who believe that what they do is the sum of contemporary anarchist politics. And presumably he wouldn't be writing about them unless they were some kind of significant political force, like, say, an obstruction to the vital and otherwise victorious Bookchinist revolution. (Actually, I don't know what Bookchin's model of revolution is, in spite of having read some of his material. I don't know if there is one.)

Under the State model of revolution, everything changes at once at the direction of the vanguard. Under the anarchist model, changes must be distributed and autonomous. The State model is _different_from_ the world it is supposed to produce (the ends justify the means); the anarchist model is _the_same_ _as_ the world it is supposed to produce (the ends _are_ the means). The former presupposes comprehensive knowledge about how the world should be organized; the latter is in accord with a learn-as-you-go approach. Hence, any anarchist model of revolution is likely to include "lifestyle" elements, that is, the revolutionaries have to try to live the life as well as talk about it, to build a new world in the shell of the old rather than get a new shell and a new world all at once dropped down from heaven or the executive committee of the vanguard.



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