Murray Bookchin, the PKK and Utopian Anarchism

[rich]

interesting stuff from Adam Curtis as usual

Murray Bookchin was born in New York in 1921. In the 1930s he joined the
American Communist Party. But after the second world war he began to
question the whole theory that underpinned revolutionary marxism.

What changed everything for him was the experience of working in a factory.
Bookchin had gone to work for General Motors - and he realized as he
watched his fellow workers that Marx, Lenin and all the other theorists
were wrong about the working class.

The Marxist theory said that once working men and women came together in
factories the scales would fall from their eyes - and they would see
clearly how they were being oppressed. They would also see how they could
bond together to become a powerful force that would overthrow the
capitalists.

Bookchin saw that the very opposite was happening. This was because the
factory was organised as a hierarchy - a system of organisation and control
that the workers lived with and experienced every second of the day. As
they did so, that hierarchical system became firmly embedded in their minds
- and made them more passive and more accepting of their oppression.

But Bookchin didn’t do what most disillusioned American Marxists in the
1950s did - either run away to academia, or become a cynical
neo-conservative. Instead he remained an optimist and decided to completely
rework revolutionary theory.

Here is Bookchin in 1983 talking about how his thinking became transformed
- and how his factory experiences led him towards anarchism. It’s part of a
fantastic film called Anarchism in America - as well as Bookchin it’s got a
great bit with Jello Biafra, and it’s really worth watching if you can get
hold of it.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/HAPPIDROME-Part-One
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