Please don't do this.
Doug ------ Sorry but I posted a couple of things a couple of days ago but they didnt appear to make it to the list. I wasnt sure if i was even connected properly. Here is my post from Sun. re the question of Bookchin's 'lack of Praxis' as someone put it . . .
-Pradeep **************************
> Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 12:07:09 -0400
> From: Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: Bookchin v. "lifesyle anarchism"
>
>
> It also ignores the wholeness of the system -- it participates
> in the very partitioning with which leftists often tax liberals.
>
> Is Bookchin is associated with any praxis whatever? Does anyone
> know? I know he talks a good fight, but I haven't heard that
> he has involved himself in, say, union organizing or local
> electoral politics, which his theories seem to call for.
Here is an excerpt from a response Bookchin posted in response to the the slander against him by the academic hack(prof. of philosophy at Loyola), the anarcho-social-democrat/social ecologist and brown nosing sycophant(who apparently used to constantly try to suck up to Bookch.) opportunist John Clarke. I dont agree with everything Bookchin writes about -- particularly a lot of the localist stuff -- but I think he pretty much hit it on the nail with Lifestye Anarchism. If people actually read the essay in question they will note that Bookchin has always been in favour of lifestyle issues so long as they werent the end or center of politics I'm posting this small excerpt of Bookchins defense because it contains an account of Bookch. early political history . .
>From Fantasy to Falsehood
It is difficult, often impossible, to address a defamation campaign based on gossip that reaches me only secondhand and by inference. But it is much easier to address the palpable falsehoods that arise when Clark's fantasies finally take the tangible form of the printed word. A case in point is Clark's outrageous assertion in the "Confession" that "the most concrete action [I] ever took against corporate capitalism" was to "complain about Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream" (p. 61).
What makes this passage so outrageous is that, having burrowed through my files and unpublished manuscripts, not to speak of the many leaflets I wrote during my hectic political life, this hollow man knows perfectly well that I have risked personal endangerment and suffered police repression in political struggles that cover the greater part of this century.
More than most, he knows that well before 1936 I was involved in unemployed movements, in street fights, in actions to "capture the streets" (as the Communists of the Third Period line put it), in welfare center occupations, and in numberless hunger marches. More than most, he knows that between 1936 and 1939 I zealously organized support for the Spanish workers' movement, engaged in antifascist street fights, antiwar activities, student strikes (the Oxford Pledge days), and labor organizing in northern New Jersey, one of the major industrialized areas in United States at that time. More than most, he knows that I was assaulted by company goons and Hudson County deputies, threatened, beaten, and arrested. More than most, he knows that as a foundryman (and later a General Motors auto worker), I was a shop steward and an unpaid union secretary in a plant that contained more than two thousand industrial workers, and that I participated in two major historical strikes, the one immediately following V-J day and the famous General Motors strike of 1948, both of which are regarded as turning points in American labor history.
More than most, he knows that I was among the first to campaign against not only the military but even the peaceful uses of atomic power. More than most, he knows that in 1956 I campaigned for arms to be sent to assist the Hungarian uprising--he has seen in my files the leaflets I wrote and distributed on both occasions. More than most, he knows that in 1963-64 I provided the crucial literature and engaged in the principal organizing work against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Ravenswood, Queens, New York. More than most, he knows that in the civil rights movement I belonged to CORE and got arrested on the opening day of the 1964 World's Fair, where I spent a week in a former prisoner-of-war camp with some two hundred arrestees and most of the rest of the year in court over the arrest. More than most, he knows that in the 1960s, finding no viable anarchist movement in existence in New York, I founded several anarchist groups on my own--one of which, the Anarchos Group, went on to become surprisingly influential despite its limited numbers.
More than most, he knows that I educated both the New Left and the counterculture about the importance of the ecological question, long before they regarded it as an issue; that I wrote the earliest socially revolutionary ecological literature in 1964 and 1965, containing ideas that Clark first encountered not in the works of Elisée Reclus or Lewis Mumford but in my own--notwithstanding his current attempts to rewrite the history of radical political ecology and my role in it. More than most, he knows that in the late 1960s I tried to influence SDS in a left-libertarian direction. More than most, he knows that during the 1970s I helped form the Vermont section of the Clamshell Alliance (which opposed the construction of a nuclear reactor at Seabrook, New Hampshire) and helped create its left wing.
More than most, he knows that during the 1970s and 1980s I frequently went to Germany and tried, addressing thousands, to keep the German Greens from becoming a parliamentary party. More than most, he knows that during the 1980s I fought to strengthen local democracy in Vermont. And more than most, he knows that in the late 1980s I helped found the Left Green Network to countervail attempts by the likes of statists and red-baiters such as Charlene Spretnak (whom Clark now praises!) to turn the American Greens into a political party.
How dare this campus-potted academic impugn my work as an activist! How dare this well-fed, pampered middle-aged hippie, who stood on the sidelines during the Mississippi Summer of 1964, only a few miles from his New Orleans home, reduce more than sixty years of work--among proletarians, unemployed workers, African-Americans, feminists, students, Third World peoples, and antinuclear activists, and in civil rights' organizations and anti-Vietnam-war actions that involved beatings by police, jailings, and economic hardship in major strikes--to complaints about Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream! How dare this man use specious "satire" to defame a lifetime of serious and responsible work in the revolutionary movement!
My political life has been an open book for decades. What can Professor Doctor John P. Clark tells us about his own? Was he ever arrested while fighting against his celebrated mining company or any other struggle? Or for activities in the civil rights movement, which particularly roiled his neck of the woods during the 1960s? If so, how many times? Has he ever set foot in a factory in his life? If so, where and for how long? Has he ever marched on a labor picket line? If so, where? Has he ever been beaten with clubs by police or been subjected to teargas attacks? If so, where? When? Why does his own past seem to extend not very far beyond the academic cloister?
I did not raise the issue of our comparative political histories--Clark is the one who put it into print. Then let him give us an accounting, now, of his fifty-odd years on this planet! And I would ask all the good anarchists on the RA List to join me in demanding that he either provide such an accounting or desist from spreading any further falsehoods about my past.
A Case of Toxic Gossip
A particularly malevolent sentence in Clark's "Confession" reads: "I promise to always to ... carry a gun, and remain in air-conditioned places like Comrade Bookchin."
Clark knows that, at nearly seventy-eight, I am a diabetic who was once nearly hospitalized for my high blood sugar level. My mother, also a diabetic, died from dehydration during a New York heat wave--a death that could have been prevented by air-conditioning. Air-conditioning has probably saved my own life, as well as those of countless other elderly people, particularly those for whom diabetic dehydration is a very serious danger.
As for Clark's reference to any weapon I carried when I knew him: my present inability to walk even a few feet without the aid of a cane or a wheelchair, let alone run from anyone who tries to assault me, makes me a very easy target for criminals in Burlington. Indeed, late one night in the spring of 1991 (at which time I already needed a cane to walk), as I was leaving my office, I was passing through Burlington's pedestrian mall to get to my car, when I was physically threatened by a drugged young man who suddenly pulled a metal pipe out from under his raincoat. He brandished it over my head, threatening to crush my skull. What prevented him from finishing me off altogether was a piece of metal equipment that I had in my possession, with which I persuaded him--happily, for both our sakes--to back away. He dropped the pipe, and I hobbled off--past onlookers who had watched the entire episode without lifting a finger to disarm him. They had actually called the police a half-hour earlier because the youth had been menacing other, more agile people as well. The police only arrived (I later learned) about fifteen minutes after my encounter--even though the police station was located only two blocks from where we were standing.
I have made it abundantly clear in my writings that I believe in an armed people as against an armed state. My writings publicly call for a popular civic militia--which is a basic revolutionary socialist and anarchist position, adopted at various congresses of both movements for generations--to replace the state's monopoly of force. RA List members may or may not agree with me, but I have always been consistent in this position--another presumed "anarcho-Bolshevik" view that not only Bakunin but Elisée Reclus, Louise Michel, Alexander Berkman, and Buenaventura Durruti, to cite some of the more outstanding figures in the history of anarchism, also held.
Still, I must pause here to take stock of what Clark did when he put into print the statement that "Comrade Bookchin" carried a gun, thereby informing readers of a widely distributed "anarchist" tabloid (Anarchy--nebbich!) that I carried a firearm seven years ago. The readers of this repellent rag include not only a host of lifestyle anarchists but also, very likely, members of state police forces who, had I ventured into nearby New York State, could have arrested me for a felony charge of gun possession, which involves a one-year mandatory prison sentence.
I do not regard Clark's behavior in this regard as a trivial matter, however much I was within my rights in carrying a weapon in Vermont. Government "security" forces have no love of me. In the late 1970s I was subpoenaed to give testimony in Washington at a federal trial that resulted from the Church Committee's post-Watergate investigations of Nixon's Cointelpro operations. The investigators had brought charges against two major figures in J. Edgar Hoover's old FBI for directing activities against radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 the FBI had been keeping close surveillance over me and my collective in Vermont--long before Ben and Jerry, if you please, established their ice cream business and even before I had the appalling misfortune to admit John P. Clark into my life. The two FBI chiefs had ordered agents to invade my vacant New York City apartment, searching for connections between me and wanted Weatherman terrorists (whose ideas and methods I detest). In the late 1970s, after a Church Committee investigation, the two FBI chiefs were placed on trial, and it was due overwhelmingly to my testimony that they were convicted. The FBI, needless to say, was not pleased with me. Ever since, I have had every reason to be wary about doing anything that would allow them to repay me in their own inimitable way for testifying against two of their chieftains.
Moreover, Clark knew of my court experience when he penned his odious "Confession" and put it in print in Anarchy. (I strongly doubt that Clark has such difficulty with federal authorities in New Orleans.) How am I to react to this malevolent behavior? With Taoist resignation? My friend Eirik Eiglad tells me that, at the 1995 Dunoon gathering in Scotland, Clark even had the gall to chortle rather freely, to people he encountered there, about my ownership of a weapon. Should I respond to Clark's endless gossip against me by revealing what I know about his own domestic life? What he described to me in protracted nightly telephone calls about his dysfunctional family? Am I free to disclose the number of air conditioners that cooled his house when I visited him? Would subscribers on the RA List find such behavior on my part hilarious or clever? Or simply evidence of the sewer into which Clark drags his critics--an effort in which I will not allow myself to participate? And if so, why is he not censured by RA List subscribers for practicing this behavior with wild abandon in his "Confession" and "Bookchin Agonistes"? . . .