Three books and a slew of reviews suggest an overwhelmingly adverse anarchist reaction to the ex-Director’s encyclical, although it pleased Marxists. The book’s very title announces its divisive intent. In Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995) the Director Emeritus laid down for all time what anarchists are to believe and what they are not to believe and yet many perversely persist in error. That is Murray Bookchin’s way with wayward anarchists. The tale is told of the American tourist abroad who, encountering some natives who didn’t speak his language, assisted their understanding by repeating himself in a louder voice. Perhaps some of my readers would like to help out. Press would like to publish the text in hard copy, but lacks the financing. Portions of this book have appeared as articles, usually in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and in Bob Black, Withered Anarchism (London: Green Anarchist & Eugene, OR: Anarchist Action Collective, n.d. This is where I came to the conclusion that the rejection of democracy is the most important task for contemporary anarchists.
More or less unexpectedly, this book gave me the opportunity to develop my own ideas, some of which find their first or fullest expression here, and influence my future direction. Leftists who suppose - mainly on his say-so - that Bookchin was a great scholar will learn here why no scholars think so. I adduce example after example of the falsity, bad faith and even brutality of his polemics. Here I show that Bookchin’s errors (some qualify as lies) abound in every area he bumbled into, be it history, anthropology, philosophy, political theory, cosmology, or even lexicography. It was an ordeal, but it was worth it, because it equipped me to write Nightmares of Reason. I undertook to read or reread nearly all of his books. As to how he ever maintained a reputation as a great anarchist theorist, I offer some thoughts in the following pages. Across the board and from start to finish, Murray Bookchin Thought was authoritarian, obscurantist, conceited, self-contradictory, ahistorical, hypocritical, even racist. My readings, however, revealed that SALA was not just a senile aberration. the “communalism” website maintained by his remaining acolytes, When, in the book, I demonstrated that Bookchin was not an anarchist, leftists castigated me for my “purism.” They now observe a discreet silence. What only his inner circle then knew is that Bookchin had privately renounced anarchism in 1995 ( cf. In the course of the writing, which occupied two months in 1996, I had the occasion to consult some previous books by the Director Emeritus, as I was sure that he was contradicting most of his previous positions. Press published my Anarchy after Leftism, which took the form of a point by point (or tit for tat) refutation of Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (A.K. “The general level of insight now is more educated, curiosity is wide awake, and judgments are made more quickly than formerly so the feet of them which shall carry thee out are already at the door” - Hegel A Word from the Author
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