News from Family & Friends
Occasional notes on the archive, new editions and translations, and pieces worth sharing.
From Bookchin to Miyazaki, by way of Le Guin
The line from social ecology runs through Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist utopias straight into the forests of Studio Ghibli.
Read the note →How to Read a Polemic
Several claims above trace to one book, Bob Black’s Anarchy After Leftism (1997). We link it in full — read it beside what it attacks. As you do, watch for six recurring moves. Naming them settles nothing about who was
Read the note →He was a Zionist.
THE CLAIM The charge circulates online, built almost entirely on one op-ed: “Attacks on Israel Ignore the Long History of Arab Conflict,” published in the Burlington Free Press on May 4, 1986 (often misdated later). THE CRITIQUE — IN HIS
Read the note →He wasn’t concerned with race and gender.
THE CLAIM That Murray’s politics was a class-and-cities affair — indifferent to racism and patriarchy, a throwback to an old workerist Left. THE RECORD This inverts his signature thesis. The argument of The Ecology of Freedom (1982) is
Read the note →He was a wealthy academic — ‘Dean Bookchin.’
THE CLAIM Anarchy After Leftism styles Murray “Dean Bookchin” or “the Dean” on nearly every page, resting on the claim of a “providential appointment as a Dean at Goddard College” and the insinuation of a comfortable academic income funding his
Read the note →‘Lifestyle anarchism’ was a paranoid invention.
THE CLAIM Anarchy After Leftism declares that “there’s no such thing as ‘lifestyle anarchism’” — that Murray invented an amalgam of unrelated writers, the way Stalin invented a “bloc” of his enemies, in order to condemn them together. THE RECORD
Read the note →His late politics was just electing left-libertarians to local office — direct democracy from the top down.
THE CLAIM That the politics of Murray’s last decades — libertarian municipalism — boiled down to getting left-libertarian politicians elected to local government, whose officials would then institute “direct democracy” from the top down. THE RECORD The description inverts the
Read the note →He supported city-states.
THE CLAIM Bob Black’s Anarchy After Leftism (1997) titles a chapter “Murray Bookchin, Municipal Statist” and calls his politics “city-statist.” The shorthand survives today as “Bookchin wanted city-states.” THE RECORD Libertarian municipalism rests on a distinction Murray
Read the note →Murray was against — and smeared — all anarchists.
THE CLAIM Because Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995) was a polemic, and because Murray publicly left anarchism in 1999, it is said that he was an enemy of anarchists — that he despised the movement and slandered it on his
Read the note →Fig. 3 · Bryum — the moss
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Read the note →(Untitled)
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Read the note →Monthly gift
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