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Title: Interview with Murray Bookchin
Author: Jeff Riggenbach
Date: October 1979
Language: en
Topics: Murray Bookchin, interview, right libertarian, libertarian
Source: October 1979 Issue of *Reason*. Retrieved on 2020-06-07 from https://reason.com/1979/10/01/interview-with-murray-bookchin/

Jeff Riggenbach

Interview with Murray Bookchin

There’s certainly nothing precedent-shattering about the thought of a

speaker at a national Libertarian Party convention stirring up

controversy within the libertarian movement. Timothy Leary did it in

1977 at the national convention in San Francisco. And it had been done

more than a few times before that. But for a speaker at a national LP

convention to stir up the movement before he’s even assumed his position

on the speaker’s platform, before the convention he’s addressing has

even convened—now, that’s no mean feat. And Murray Bookchin, the man who

did it at the 1978 convention in Boston, may well have shattered a

precedent or two in the process.

Actually, no role could possibly have made Bookchin more comfortable at

the Boston convention than that of precedent shatterer: it’s a role he’s

been playing for the past quarter-century. In 1951,11 years before the

publication of Rachel Carson’s celebrated Silent Spring, the book that

is usually credited with launching the ecology movement, Bookchin

published an article on the environment called “The Problem of

Chemicals” in the English socialist magazine Contemporary Issues. In

1965 he anticipated dozens of later, more influential books on the

plight of the metropolis by publishing his own: Crisis in Our Cities.

Ironically, it was neither Bookchin’s views on ecology nor his views on

the cities that touched off instant controversy upon announcement of his

inclusion in the tentative program for the 1978 convention. Rather, it

was his views on organization, and specifically on political

organization. According to his critics, Bookchin opposes all

hierarchy—all organization in which some carry out the orders and plans

of others—as inherently unlibertarian. He also regards political

parties, they said, as inherently unlibertarian. How could such a person

be invited to speak at a convention of the Libertarian Party?

More or less formal protests were lodged against Bookchin’s appearance

by prominent and influential libertarians. But Bookchin was also used to

being opposed by those whom he considered his allies—in the American

labor movement of the ‘30s, in the American Communist movement of the

late ‘30s and early ‘40s, even in the New Left movement of the ‘60s,

where his famous pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!” was widely regarded as

heretical and blasphemous. But however much opposition he had

encountered, through all his many changes in political direction, he had

always managed to have his say. And he managed to have it again at the

1978 LP convention in Boston.

The convention was conveniently located for Bookchin, who lives these

days between two homes: one in New York City, where he was born 58 years

ago and has lived most of his life; and another in Vermont, where he

teaches at Goddard College. He addressed a Saturday morning breakfast

crowd of about 150 conventioneers and won a standing ovation for his

remarks, titled “Nonauthoritarian Forms of Organization.” Then he

retired to the press room for interviews. REASON’s interviewer Jeff

Riggenbach was first in line, eager to learn more about this latest

wrinkle in the unpredictable career of this Marxist-turned-anarchist. He

had integrated, or claimed to have integrated, his anarchism with

ecology and urban sociology. Had he now also achieved an intellectual

rapprochement with the positions of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard?

Riggenbach led off with a question about the issue at the root of it

all: the issue of government.

REASON: You’ve said you consider the word libertarian and the word

anarchist to be interchangeable, yet there are people who call

themselves “limited-government libertarians.” How does that idea strike

you?

BOOKCHIN: I think they probably have not followed the logic of their

premises through to their conclusions. The real problem is that “limited

government” invariably leads to unlimited government. If history is to

be any guide and current experience is to be any guide, we in the United

States 200 years ago started out with the notion of limited

government—virtually no government interference—and we now have a

massive quasi-totalitarian government. I think that people who believe

in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in

government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in

leading finally to unlimited government. I feel that if people

investigate the emergence of government, of State power—if they examine

the logic of State power historically, and more specifically in the

United States—they will find that the concept of limited government is

not tenable once they adopt some type of libertarian principle.

REASON: Some advocates of libertarian limited government say that they

are talking about something that hasn’t ever existed historically. They

say, for example, that their limited government would not have the power

to tax but would have to run lotteries and solicit contributions and

that anyone who wanted to, in Herbert Spencer’s phrase, ignore the

State, could do so.

BOOKCHIN: In which case they would have abolished the State. That’s the

reality of the situation. If the State does not enjoy a monopoly of

violence, which then gives it the power to order people’s lives and to

compel them to obey decisions over which they have no control, or just

limited control, then I think you have a consistently libertarian

society.

REASON: Do you see a fundamental inconsistency in working toward

libertarian ends by means of a political party?

BOOKCHIN: I think there is an inconsistency there, but I believe that

people have to explore that inconsistency themselves. I’m not sitting in

judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political

process whose very nature they oppose.

Look: the State is a professional apparatus that sets itself apart from

the people and apart from the institutions that the people themselves

create. It’s a monopoly on violence that manages and institutionalizes

social activities. The people are perfectly capable of managing

themselves and creating their own institutions. They have done so from

time immemorial. The State always opposes these institutions. A

bureaucracy opposes a village council or a village assembly or a town

meeting. It tries to usurp their powers.

And my personal feeling is that when one tries to function within the

State apparatus in trying to deal with it, take it over, one tends to

build one’s own structure in a fashion that replicates the State. And

one does this almost unknowingly. One is gradually seduced into creating

an executive such as the State has, a legislature such as the State has,

a national bureaucracy such as the State has. Take a very striking case

in point: the Russian Bolsheviks. Lenin created an alleged workers’

party, which in every way reflected the Czarist machine, in order to

deal with Czarism. And the danger and the hazards of trying to

accommodate libertarian principles to the political process as we know

it today is that one begins to dissolve the libertarian principles. So I

would say that there is an inconsistency there that should be explored.

But this does not mean that I believe libertarians should not get

involved in one or another level of the political process. They should.

I find it perfectly consistent for libertarians to operate on the

municipal or county level, where they are close to the people and where

they may have a party or a federation that is made up of the social

institutions, the residual social institutions that still remain, over

and beyond what the State has managed to preempt and absorb.

I find it exciting, for example, that candidates for the Amsterdam City

Council back in the ‘60s based their so-called party structure on

neighborhood associations, food cooperatives, communes. Their “party,”

as it were, was built on neighborhood structures. It was not built from

the top down—the national committee, the state committee, the local

committee, the various bureaucracies, the salaried officials—but

organically, from the bottom up, on the basis of institutions that

already existed in the neighborhoods: child-care centers, people’s

markets, farmers’ markets. It then coalesced organically, like an embryo

in the womb of the mother, into a nationwide confederation—and, in

Amsterdam, a very effective political structure. This is all-important

in my opinion, because if people do not organize in this way, they will

not develop the habits, the state of mind, the character structure, that

will make it possible for them to finally create a libertarian society.

REASON: If the State disappeared tomorrow, would there be “chaos”?

BOOKCHIN: Yes, utterly. I say this ironically, not because I favor the

State, but because people are not in the state of mind right now where

they feel that they can manage themselves. We have to go through an

educational process—which does not involve, in my opinion, compromises

with the State. But if the State disappeared tomorrow by accident, and

the police disappeared and the army disappeared and the government

agencies disappeared, the ironical situation is that people would

suddenly feel denuded.

REASON: Would you say that libertarians are right-wingers? A great many

people in the national media and in national politics continue to regard

libertarianism as some sort of splinter group of the William

Buckley-style conservatives.

BOOKCHIN: I categorically deny that. The American left today as I know

it—and believe me, I am very familiar with the American left—is going

toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism. It’s becoming the real

right in the United States. We don’t have an appreciable American left

any more in the United States. What I saw of the SDS in the ‘60s was

very abhorrent to me: Marxism, Leninism, almost the KGB mentality—a

police politics that I found completely totalitarian in nature. And in

Europe, I would say that today the real support for State power and

totalitarianism comes from the Communist parties and the Socialist

parties and, where they are sizable, the Trotskyist groups. They are the

ones that really frighten me.

People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual,

who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to

reclaim these rights—this is the true left in the United States. Whether

they are anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who

believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the

left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I

do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.

REASON: What about people like Murray Rothbard—anarcho-capitalists?

BOOKCHIN: I would prefer not to give any reply to that, mainly because

Murray and I have a bit of a history together, and I think there’ve been

some grave misunderstandings, perhaps on both our parts. I would rather

see them resolved than develop into heated controversy—despite, I think,

a not very generous letter that appeared over his signature and Mr.

Williamson Evers’s signature in Liberty, the Massachusetts Libertarian

Party publication. That letter grossly misrepresented my position on

Marxism as being a “necessary ideology.” That’s archaic, to say the

least. I regard Marxism as the most sinister and the most subtle form of

totalitarianism. There are people, of course, who profess to be

libertarian Marxists. I believe they mean very well, and I even write in

their periodicals; but I write very militantly that I regard Marxism as

a very subtle form of what I would call the totalitarian ideology—all

the more subtle because it professes to advance the notions of freedom.

I don’t think that the Soviet Union and China are accidents,

aberrations; I think they follow from Marxism-Leninism. I think that

Leninism comes out of Marx’s basic convictions.

REASON: If you won’t comment directly on Murray Rothbard’s theories,

will you comment on the general idea of a capitalist society that is

also an anarchist society? Suppose we had a free society whose people

chose to divide their labor, specialize in producing certain goods and

services, and trade among themselves?

BOOKCHIN: I’d have no quarrel with them. I would say that that is not

capitalism—though there are many different definitions. One would call

that, in Marxist language—and there’s a sense in which Marx does

contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss

him than we can Hegel or Rousseau or Spinoza or Darwin; you don’t have

to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin’s views, and I don’t have to be a

Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of Marx’s writings-and

Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than

capitalism. But if you want to call it capitalism, do so. I don’t want

to get enmeshed in any semantic issues. My feeling is that whatever

people elect to do, insofar as they don’t deny the rights of others,

every effort should be made to defend their right to do it.

I believe in a libertarian communist society. But, I believe that any

attempt on the part of a libertarian communist society to abridge the

rights of a community—for example, to operate on the basis of a market

economy of the kind that you describe—would be unforgivable, and I would

oppose the practices of such a society as militantly as I think any

reader of your publication would. I want to make that very clear. On the

other hand, where an attempt is made to expropriate, as was done in so

much of the world, you know, in the name of free enterprise—in the names

of God, whiskey, commerce, and Western civilization, to use Kipling’s

language—that, of course, I would oppose.

I have no quarrel with libertarians who advance the concept of

capitalism of the type that you have advanced. I believe that people

will decide for themselves what they want to do. The all-important thing

is that they be free to make that decision and that they do not stand in

the way of communities that wish to make other decisions. I could live

beautifully in a society of the kind that you have described, as well as

in a collectivistic one. However, if that collectivistic one assumed any

totalitarian forms, any authoritarian forms whatever, I would oppose

that. And not only that: I would join your community in fighting it. Let

me make it very plain that if socialism, which is what I call the

authoritarian version of collectivism, were to emerge, I would join your

community. I would migrate to your community and do everything I could

to prevent the collectivists from abridging my right to function as I

like. That should be made very clear.

REASON: Have you read Ursula K. Le Guin’s recent novel, The

Dispossessed?

BOOKCHIN: Yes.

REASON: What do you think of the anarcho-communist society in that

novel? Is it something of the sort that you would like?

BOOKCHIN: No, it isn’t. It’s an anarcho-syndicalist society. And I think

that Ursula Le Guin is conscious of the limitations of such a society.

Anarcho-communism, or libertarian communism, is not anarcho-syndicalism.

I feel close to the anarcho-syndicalists, primarily because they are

antiauthoritarian, but I don’t believe that society will be structured

around factories or work places. I believe that a truly libertarian

society will be structured around communities, not around economies:

that the economy will merely become part of the community.

What I think Ursula, whom I greatly admire—it’s been my pleasure to have

contact with her on a more than purely literary basis, in the sense that

we’ve exchanged good vibes with each other—what I think Ursula is trying

to demonstrate is that in such an anarcho-syndicalist society, or for

that matter, in an anarcho-communist society, you can create a kind of

tyranny in the name of the libertarian ideal.

REASON: In Ursula Le Guin’s anarcho-syndicalist society, there was no

privately held land, but there was personal property. People owned books

and other portable items. In your ideal anarcho-communist society would

there be such personal property?

BOOKCHIN: There would be personal property, but there would only be

private property to the extent that people elected to engage in the

private property society. My concern over private property is that it no

longer fosters individuality. The historic destiny of private property

is that it has created a highly corporatized economy, and I have to ask

myself why. What is it in the market that led 100 capitalists to

dissolve into 10 as a result of rivalry and accumulation, 10 into 3, and

I think if the system has its way, those 3 into 1?

REASON: Wasn’t it the State that was responsible?

BOOKCHIN: The State certainly played a decisive role. But I also believe

that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or

die. That’s the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to

wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not

ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally

totalitarianism.

There was a period of time, indubitably, in Jefferson’s time, when the

farmer, the yeoman—the American yeoman, standing on his land with his

musket—represented a forward step for individuality. But today the

millions that flow in and out of New York anonymously, through mass

transportation, through the tunnels and over the bridges that lead into

and out of the suburbs—these are among the most deindividualized people

I’ve encountered in 57 years of living. Most of them are organization

men and women and have become denuded of all personality and uniqueness.

They’re figments; they’re creatures, in fact. They’re creatures of the

mass media and of the corporate world that has rendered them totally

homogenized and anonymous. Now already the attempt to preserve what we

in America would call private property, the rights of US Steel and the

rights of General Motors, has become literally a step in the direction

of the deindividualization of the American people and their reduction to

masses.

REASON: Have you seen your image of an anarcho-communist society

anywhere in fiction?

BOOKCHIN: Yes. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere. That is my

favorite utopia—one of my favorite utopias, anyway.

REASON: What do you think of Ayn Rand’s novels?

BOOKCHIN: I have really mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, I

have an admiration, even though I’m not likely to do that sort of thing

myself, for Roark’s behavior when he decided that his design was not

being followed—which was a gross violation, by the way, of private

property rights, because the building was his.

That aside, I am concerned that people who admire Rand are not often

critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications

of these novels. Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have

opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort—in

effect, she supported military conscription. What higher property do you

have than your own person? I totally agree, by the way, with John

Locke’s idea that one’s body is literally the most precious property

that exists. I would say that conscription is the most heinous violation

of property that one can imagine. And I would agree that much with

people who accept private property—that conscription is an unpardonable

transgression, whether it be “corrupt” or not. The Spanish anarchists

opposed conscription during the civil war in Spain as a gross

expropriation of property, the most precious property that we have, our

own physical beings themselves. But Rand accepts that when she supports

military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics

from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to

take into account the inevitability that once you start with police

power you’re going to have a police State.

I think one must confront Rand on these limitations as well as admire

certain things that she has said that I think are libertarian. I have

very mixed feelings.

REASON: Left-wing anarchists ordinarily have nothing good to say about

writers like Lysander Spooner, Benjamin R. Tucker, and Albert Jay Nock.

What do you think about the individualist anarchists?

BOOKCHIN: I don’t feel the individualist anarchists, particularly in the

American tradition, including the Transcendental tradition of New

England, in any way deserve the derogatory comments that are often made

about them by the left. When one gets down to it ultimately, my

anarcho-communism stems from a commitment to true individuality. My

attempt to recover the power and the right of the individual to control

his or her life and destiny is the basis to my anarcho-communism.

If anarcho-communism served to regiment the population in the name of

libertarian unity, if it served in any way through collectivist measures

to deny the rights of the individual instead of reconciling the rights

of the individual with the collective, I would definitely stand

completely on the side of the individualist who is trying to rescue

above all that most precious thing that makes us human—consciousness and

personality. Wherever people defend the rights of the individual, I

stand with them above all, over and beyond any wishes relating to how an

economy should be managed or how people should govern themselves. This

is a very strong commitment on my part.

When I talk about self-management, self-regulation, self-government, the

word I emphasize is self, and my concern is with the reconstruction of

the self. Marxists and even many, I think, overly enthusiastic

anarchists have neglected that self. I regard individuality as the most

precious trait we have, because without it there is no creativity, there

is no consciousness, there is no rationality. There is nothing that

could make me speak more strongly to this point. I address myself to it

as being the primary question.

My communism attempts basically to create a shared society, that’s all;

a shared society in which individuality will flourish, along with love,

and along with mutual respect. I am not a communist first and an

individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don’t mean this

in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone

else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery

of personality, and the full development of personality.

REASON: You were a Marxist in the ‘30s. Obviously your ideas have

changed.

BOOKCHIN: Oh, drastically. I was a Stalinist in the ‘30s. I had come

from a Russian revolutionary family who simply were elated by the fact

that the Czar was overthrown by this group known as the Bolsheviks. My

family identified with anybody who overthrew the Czar. So they

identified themselves intuitively with Bolshevism. I was raised as a red

diaper baby, and I went through the communist children’s movement at the

age of nine, in 1930, and into the Young Communist League in 1936. The

Spanish civil war brought me back. I’d already broken with the

communists—or the Stalinists, more precisely—in 1935. But the civil war

in Spain and the desire to aid the remarkable people struggling against

Fascism brought me back to the Young Communist League, so that I could

effectively participate, however far removed from Spain, in their

struggle. By 1938 I was ready to be expelled. By 1939 I was expelled.

I then got deeply involved with the Trotskyists. I assumed simply that

my enemy’s enemies were my friends. But I learned that they were no

different from the Stalinists, and they expelled me, which is the

typical Marxist-Leninist way of dealing with dissenters. From that point

on, I migrated by the 1950s into anarchism, increasingly emphasizing

decentralization. Also, I made the all-important step of bridging my

social philosophy with ecology. I did that in 1952 and went on to write

a whole series of books developing an anarcho-ecological approach.

REASON: What do you think of combining anarchism with pacifism as Robert

LeFevre does—holding that violence is under no circumstances

justifiable, even in self-defense; that one should attempt to escape

rather than return violence if one is attacked?

BOOKCHIN: I have a great admiration for pacifism, but I’m not a

pacifist, mainly because I would defend myself if I were attacked, and I

believe that the American people should defend themselves if any attempt

is made to take over the government by coup d’etat, whether by the

military or the Marxists or any people who profess to be anarchists. But

I do have an intense respect for pacifists, because I believe that

ultimately, if we are to have a truly humanistic as well as libertarian

society, violence will have to be banished on this planet.

I detest violence. I have a tremendous respect not only for human life

but also for the animal life that I have to live with, and I believe

that our destiny as human beings is to become nature-conscious as well

as self-conscious, living in loving relationship and in balance and in

harmony, not only with one another, but with the entire natural world. I

have an enormous respect for it and to a great degree tend to follow it

personally: pacifist strategies and approaches, and the pacifistic

philosophy. But I will not call myself a pacifist for the very simple

reason that if something like a Franco should arise in Spain again, or,

for that matter, in America, and tried to take away whatever dwindling

civil liberties and human rights we retain, I would resist them with a

club if I had to. But my admiration for pacifism as an outlook and a

sensibility is enormous. I just find that it gets me into

contradictions, as it often gets many pacifists into contradictory

positions and strategies.

REASON: You’re something of a rebel academically, as well as

politically, being a professor without a degree.

BOOKCHIN: Yes, though I have gone to college. I’ve had training in

electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I’ve never

taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.

Instead I’ve worked in the factories of this land, and I’ve thought

freely and creatively. And I think that that has greatly enriched my

capacity to abstract intellectually. The experience of being with

workers, my encounters with management and my recognition of its

foibles, my personal encounters with American industrial efficiency, my

military experience—all of these things packaged together have greatly

enriched my reading and my understanding, and I’ve written with what I

hope is a reasonable fluency of style that is much more expressive than

the academic stuff.

This style of mine is also a reflection of my thinking. My thinking is

very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as

long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all

my life. I will never compromise—I can now say with assurance at the age

of 57—with my libertarian and my revolutionary commitments; they’ll have

to kill me first. They can’t buy me out. I’m just not interested in what

they have to offer. I’ve managed to stick it out, and the thing that has

been the most rescuing, the most redeeming, feature of my life that has

kept me alive, that has kept me more or less single-minded about my

commitment to libertarian ideals once I escaped the trap of

Marxist-Leninism—a childhood trap, to be sure—has been consciousness.

Consciousness. That’s why I prize individuality. Deny my individuality

and I become an animal, mute, a mere creature of all the forces that act

upon me. I will never surrender the rights of the individual—the

complete rights of the individual—to any “ism” whatever.