Murray Bookchin, the PKK and Utopian Anarchism

[David Morris]

Thanks.

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 8:49 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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