38 Quotes by Murray Bookchin

Present-day culture, social relations, cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and transportation have remade the traditional proletarian into a largely petty bourgeois stratum whose mentality is marked by its own utopianism of “consumption for the sake of consumption.” We.

We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.

Above all, the revolutionary group must divest itself of the forms of power – statutes, hierarchies, property, prescribed opinions, fetishes, paraphernalia, official etiquette – and of the subtlest as well as the most obvious of bureaucratic and bourgeois traits that consciously and unconsciously reinforce authority and hierarchy.

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.

If we remain merely conflicting class beings, genders, ethnic beings, and nationalities, it is obvious that any kind of harmony between human beings will be impossible. As members of classes, genders, ethnic groups, and nationalities, we will have narrowed our meaning of what it is to be human by means of particularistic interests that explicitly set us against each other.

People are never free of trying to be content.

Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not “mass liberation” or “class liberation” behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.

The phrase “consumer society” complements the description of the present social order as an “industrial society.” Needs are tailored by the mass media to create a public demand for utterly useless commodities, each carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined period of time. The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

From the family, through the school and religious institutions, the mass media, to the factory and finally trade union and “revolutionary” party, capitalist society conspires to foster obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic, and authoritarian discipline in the working class as a whole; indeed, in many of its “emancipatory” movements as well.