Bookchin got dogpiled out of the discourse in the 90s by nascent ecofascists and by the time I discovered him a decade ago there were still enough parrots of those people around that when he got mentioned they’d come out of the woodwork to tell you he wasn’t an anarchist because he accepted participation in municipal politics, or because he found democracy acceptable for locating concensus in specific circumstances. The kind of divisive context clipping that tankies do. Honestly I feel like he was the most compelling anarchist thinker of the past 50 years, his ideas are exciting and practical and prefigurative, I think those “dogmatists” as he called them did anarchism a massive disservice that set us back by decades when they placed this cloud of taboo around the man. It saddens me when people who make lists of their canonical anarchist idea people have literally never heard of him.
Bookchin got dogpiled out of the discourse in the 90s by nascent ecofascists and by the time I discovered him a decade ago there were still enough parrots of those people around that when he got mentioned they’d come out of the woodwork to tell you he wasn’t an anarchist because he accepted participation in municipal politics, or because he found democracy acceptable for locating concensus in specific circumstances. The kind of divisive context clipping that tankies do. Honestly I feel like he was the most compelling anarchist thinker of the past 50 years, his ideas are exciting and practical and prefigurative, I think those “dogmatists” as he called them did anarchism a massive disservice that set us back by decades when they placed this cloud of taboo around the man. It saddens me when people who make lists of their canonical anarchist idea people have literally never heard of him.
I get told that Bookchin renounced anarchism.
Fucking seriously,and even if you don’t like his municipalism, his social ecology is pretty neat.