[lbo-talk] On Theorizing the Demand for Demands

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Wed Oct 26 15:44:29 PDT 2011


On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:


> 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.

Of course - I never would have expected otherwise.


> 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."

Yes, I definitely notice the difference between the early Bookchin, when he sometimes sounds himself more like what he would come to call a 'lifestyle anarchist', and the later. It was mainly the later Bookchin whose stuff I read in the 1990s, and the 'lifestyle anarchist' tag was just so apt to what I saw around me.

The only early Bookchin pamphlet I read at that time was 'Listen Marxist', and I don't think I had any idea then that it was more than 30 years old. It made a lot of sense to me too - was there a better advertisement for anarchism in the 1990s than 'Leninism'? It was only at university I found there was more to the Marxian tradition than that.

Mike



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