I've been reading Murray Bookchin. AK Press had a damaged copy of one of my books, and I was all over that. Reading digitally is really hard for me, so I save that for things that are only digital (like fanfiction I like or online zines), and try to get it in print for most other things.

Right now I'm reading about the history of communes (it's one of the chapters in the book I'm reading of his), and a hell of a lot of European history was actually cities made of neighborhood communes. And they sure don't teach that in history.

There's also lots of different ways of how these communes functioned politically, and all the experiments that were happening. That's just the European sector of the world though.

Lots more experiments with commune-like societies within the Africa, Americas, and Eastern world -- I'd like to see more books covering the rise and fall of all their city and society experiments.

I think what we need to rid ourselves of is this idea that there is a "march of progress." No. History is a messy, overlapping series of humans getting together in an infinite variety of ways, exploring ways of being together and organizing, and there is no one path that leads toward the "optimal form of society" as that assumes this capitalist hellscape is the end result of it all, when it most certainly is NOT. It's just another tangle in the vast web of humanity, and a tangle that's gotten so big that it's choking humanity. We'll need to cut that tangle out entirely and weave in a new way of being.

Anyway, not sure if that metaphors made sense. I'm having a heavy pain and fatigue day so my thoughts is more muddled than usual.

#CommunalLiving #Communes #Bookchin #history #organizing

#Bookchin #Anarchism #SocialEcology #ParticipatoryDemocracy: "He thought that to prevent the powers that be from running the show—the political and economic elites—he thought that power needed to be returned to the hands of the people directly. Democracy needed to be a matter not of representation of people going into voting booths and sending representatives to Washington to make decisions on their behalf where they could easily become corrupted. He thought that power had to stay with the people in their localities. He argued for citizens’ assemblies, or what I like to call “assembly democracy”—he didn’t use that term, but it seems to me to describe it.

It’s a democracy organized around people in assemblies making decisions about their communities, and then over broader areas. The assemblies would send mandated delegates to confederations, where decisions could be made in the aggregate for larger areas. The purpose was to ensure that power flowed from the bottom up and not from the top down. He argued for this the entire rest of his life until his death in 2006. He started a school called the Institute for Social Ecology, and leapt indefatigably around the United States, Europe, and in other parts of the world, to try to build a movement around these ideas. But, I have to say, by 2006, he had not succeeded in building a strong movement that he dreamed of in the United States and died basically a disappointed man."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/05/introducing-murray-bookchin-the-extraordinary-originator-of-social-ecology

« Deux penseurs : Murray #Bookchin et Frédéric #Lordon. L’un, étasunien, a consacré sa vie à structurer le communalisme et l’écologie sociale ; l’autre, français, s’emploie à remettre sur pied le terme « communisme » et réfléchit à quoi pourrait, concrètement, ressembler une société débarrassée du capitalisme.
Accoler ces deux noms propres peut sembler incongru. A priori seulement. »

https://www.revue-ballast.fr/bookchin-lordon/

Institute for #SocialEcology announces:

In July 2023, the Institute for Social Ecology is hosting its annual summer intensive course in Detroit, Michigan in partnership with the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center and the University of Detroit Mercy’s School of Architecture and Community Development.

Participants—local as well as from across North America—will spend six days together studying and learning the core ideas of social ecology, popular movements for direct democracy and community power, and the practice and legacy of transformative community action in the City of Detroit. Four half-days will be spent on site tours around Detroit, while the remaining time will be spent in group talks, presentations, and discussions covering topics ranging from communal stewardship of land to the Rojava Revolution.

Link: an interest form, official registration form to follow later

#ISE #Workshops #Detroit #DirectDemocracy #Bookchin

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScCeWKiLgmmc8f4rPoCUiBs1Enu3YM5p3JfpY9ArwEQ4wo-xA/viewform

https://social-ecology.org/wp/courses/confronting-ecofascism-environmental-politics-and-the-radical-right/

#ecology #antifa #education #socialecology #bookchin #googlebookchin

Hypocrisy is at the very heart of #democracy, since the very beginning in ancient Athens. I think #Bookchin was wrong to valorize democracy even if he did have some cognizance of the inherent hypocrisy of the concept. We cannot continue to talk about democracy in abstract, as a falsely transhistorical phenomenon, but as democracy as it has historically existed in history up until today. A sober reflection of real democracy reveals that is ultimately not a liberatory system.

Murray #Bookchin, une pensée pour irriguer un projet politique visant à l'abolition de toutes les formes de domination et de hiérarchie. L'écologie sociale, qui va bien au delà de quelque chose extérieur à soi.

Wondering if the uncontrolled proliferation of AI amplified disinformation will create the necessary preconditions for Bookchin's Confederalism. If you can't trust anything that's transmitted as being real, is the only solution to structure governance around hyper-local direct democracy?

#communalism #bookchin #democracy #ai #llm

In today’s edition of #myfavoritethings we have Street Farm, a radical collective founded at the Architectural Association here in London in 1971. A half-generation younger than #Archigram (who’d similarly grown out of encounters at the AA), the Street Farmers pursued a completely different vision of technology in the urban everyday, drawn largely from Our #Bookchin & based on techniques we’d now call #regenerative or #permaculture. Dig Graham Craine’s metabolic diagram of his Street Farmhouse!

Beyond the Caricature: The Need to Recover #Bookchin

#SocialEcology #Communalism #DemocraticConfederalism #MurrayBookchin

http://trise.org/2023/02/02/beyond-the-caricature-the-need-to-recover-bookchin/

Super émission sur l'histoire de l'anarchisme. Ce 4ème épisode articule #Ecologie Politique et #Anarchisme. Les voix de Jacques #Ellul, Bernard #Charbonneau, Murray #Bookchin ou Françoise d#Eaubonne illustrent les propos de Patrick Chastenet et Edouard Jourdain. Émouvant et instructif ! Découverte ou piqûre de rappel, toujours bien utile en ces temps agités.

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/en-quete-de-politique/en-quete-de-politique-du-samedi-28-janvier-2023-6082230

#ecology #anarchism #degrowth #lowtech #feminism

Call for Papers
Challenging Capitalist Modernity IV: We Want Our World Back - Do Autonomous Education and Organize

Conference: 7―9 April 2023,
University of Hamburg

#SocialEcology #Bookchin #Öcalan #Kurdistan #AutonomousEducation #PaoloFreire

http://trise.org/2023/01/17/conference-challenging-capitalist-modernity-iv/

@janef0421 have you heard of Abdullah Ocalan?

He is a kurdish revolutionary leader, heavily influenced by #Bookchin, that provided the ideological foundation of today's #Rojava Autonomous Region.

He had some ideas very similar to the ones you mention.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/abdullah-ocalan-the-revolution-is-female

That's enough #quotes from me.

As you see #Bookchin is awesome. And we all should read some more of his work.

So head along to the Anarchist Lubrary and grab yourself some free #ebooks by him: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/search?query=&sort=&filter_author=%2Fcategory%2Fauthor%2Fmurray-bookchin

If you want actual printed #books or you want to buy some #ebooks, AKPress has some really good stuff (it's on sale too) https://tinyurl.com/26rad6j5

Or you know, get some from your library!
Happy Birthday Mr Bookchin, thank you for all the great ideas!

“An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.”
― Murray #Bookchin

“Society is ruled by the harsh maxim: "production for the sake of production." The decline from craftsman to worker, from an active to an increasingly passive personality, is completed by man qua consumer—an economic entity whose tastes, values, thoughts and sensibilities are engineered by bureaucratic "teams" in "think tanks." Man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine.”
― Murray #Bookchin, Post-Scarcity #Anarchism

“Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with "work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody.”
― Murray #Bookchin, Post-Scarcity #Anarchism

“There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.”
― Murray #Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

“#Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society that exposes man to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal #solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship.”
― #Bookchin, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought

“The truth is that man has produced imbalances not only in nature but more fundamentally in his relations with his fellow man--in the very structure of his society. To state this thought more precisely: the imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world.”
― Murray #Bookchin, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought