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 right; it shows how little of the book engages what Murray actually wrote.
AD HOMINEM
The argument is aimed at the man — his age (“Grumpy Old Man of 75,” “in his dotage”), his health, his supposed income — rather than at the ideas.
THE GENETIC FALLACY
His Communist youth in the 1930s is treated as a permanent verdict: “He hasn’t changed much; or, if he did, he’s changed back.” Where an idea came from does not decide whether it is true.
THE FABRICATED PREMISE, SUSTAINED BY REPETITION
The “Dean” title — false, and sixteen years stale even as a professorship — is repeated on nearly every page until it reads as fact.
THE STRAW MAN
A defense of social anarchism becomes hatred of individual freedom; an explicitly anti-state confederalism becomes “city-statism.” The position attacked is not the position held.
MOTIVE-READING
Imputed ambitions — to “colonize the anarchist scene,” to enrich himself — are treated as evidence. Murray’s reply: “he is a psychic who apparently can read my demonic mind.”
TU QUOQUE
Challenges beside the point — why didn’t the 21-year-old Bookchin fight in World War II? — stand in for engagement with what he argued.