July 31, 2006

Bookchin dead at 85

Murray Bookchin, 1921-2006.

"Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution." (from Desire and Need, 1967)

"An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles." (from Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, 1965)

"Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism."

"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."

"The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology." (from What Is Social Ecology?, 1984)

"If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be." (from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982.)

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