What are y'all's critique of Bookchin?
What are y'all's critique of Bookchin?
Bookchin prefigured many ideas in solarpunk and degrowth before these things were even coined. But what are your critiques of him?
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Tl;dr: He got a bit crazy in his later years, started a cult like commune and always had a bit of a blind spot for problems faced by BIPOCs etc.
Typical story of well known anarchist writers... ambiguous personalities 😅
One of the things I love about anarchist thinkers is that you don't have to pretend they were infallible idols. There's a little bit of mythologizing that goes on among anarchists, but most of us acknowledge that as a rule they were insufferable people naturally replicating the trauma they experienced from the political systems they lived under onto others. If someone is like "Bakunin was an antisemite" you can be like, "yeah, and fuck him for that. Fuck all antisemitism. But he hated the state most of all, so lets talk about why."
I don't think that's a good thing -- it has definitely been an obstacle in anarchist organizing, and we wouldn't say "Be careful with each other..." if we didn't need to be reminded. Maybe if there was an anarchist Mr. Rogers, we'd have automated transgender space luxury communism already.
No Gods, no masters also means no anarchist gods or masters.
Cool comment
Reminds me of something I heard someone say a few years ago (I can't remember who said it): Build statues of ideas, not people.
Lmao I need to learn more about this, what commune?
Well... it's probably a bit unfair to describe it like that. I was going by some unfavourable description of his later years in the ISE in Plainfield.
It's this potentially an instance of separating the work from the man? Picasso was a pretty shitty man, but recognized art. They could still be "correct," if there even is such a thing, but they didn't necessarily act according to their ideals.