On Wed, 26 Oct 2011, Mike Beggs wrote:
> Thanks for the links - you're absolutely right. It's Bookchin's
> 'Social Anarchism vs Lifestyle Anarchism' with the adjectives changed.
I agree. But FWIW, a friend I haven't heard from in years turns out to be a list lurker, and he says they aren't the same. And since he worked with Bookchin personally, and once studied his voluminous corpus closely, I thought I'd forward his comments, attached below.
At the end he also makes related two points I thought were interesting.
One is that he feels sure that were Murray alive today, he'd be thrilled by OWS and participating in it, and points out that if you go to the website associated with his work, its full of OWS news and clearly very supportive.
Two is that when I said that at the end of his life Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist and started calling himself a social ecologist, I got the term wrong. Social ecologist was something he called himself from the beginning and refers to his theoretical outlook. The replacement term for his political identity, once he decided he was too different from current anarchists to be classed together, was "communalist."
Michael
<forwarded comment from Bookchin student/scholar/activist>
Bookchin's distinction between "lifestyle anarchists" and "social anarchists" really isn't the same as the distinction between "new anarchists" and "old anarchists" Graeber's makes for his own purposes. In fact, in his tract "Direct Action: An Ethnography," Graeber dismisses Murray's polemical description of the "unbridgeable" chasm between "lifestyle anarchists" and "social anarchists," arguing that "the dilemma is always how to sythesize the two."
The fact is, Graeber never really engages Murray's distinction on its own terms, characterizing it as differentiating between "those primarily in rebellion against alienation, and those primarily in rebellion against oppression," where Murray's primary point, perhaps overstated for purposes of political intervention, was that grounding self-realization and its correlative conceptions of positive freedom in the context of transformed social relations produces a certain set of ethical and political commitments, while asserting the ontological and political primacy of the abstract individual produces another one that is inimical to the "forms of freedom" that he believed consistent with a democratic, ecological society.
The "lifestyle anarchism" against which Murray argued was less the "new anarchism" Graeber and Grubacic may be taken to advocate -- although the two may occasionally bridge into each other -- but instead a politics of radical individualism that threatened to disregard and devalue the transformation of social relations in favor of an ultimately ahistorical, idealist, and even anti-social politics of consciousness and aesthetic gestures that, paradoxically, produced an impoverished self.
Thus it was that at the end of his life, after spending forty years as a firebrand critic of economistic, productivist, instrumentalist, and vanguardist elements in Marxism and "progressive" movements, that Murray spent his final years defending the project and the values of the post-Enlightenment revolutionary left -- including many of the analytical insights of Marxism -- against those who would opt out of it rather than transform and complete it.
While curmudgeonly and prone to repeated outbursts of sectarian behavior he was never able to unlearn, I'm relatively certain that if Murray were still alive he'd be thrilled with OWS and down there conducting teach-ins himself. Indeed, if you look at the blog of the colleagues closest to him at the Institute for Social Ecology, http://www.social-ecology.org/category/blog/, you will find it filled with news updates from the "Occupy" protests in New York and elsewhere.
As for "social ecology," Murray adopted that description of his theoretical work more than thirty years before he declared anarchism in in its late 20th/early 21st century form irredeemable and announced himself to be a "communalist" instead, after a long phase where he described his politics most often as "libertarian municipalism."
<end forwarded comments>