Sunday, July 1, 2001

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism

This book asks—and tries to answer—several basic questions that affect all Leftists today. Will anarchism remain a revolutionary social movement or become a chic boutique lifestyle subculture? Will its primary goals be the complete transformation of a hierarchical, class, and irrational society into a libertarian communist one? Or will it become an ideology focused on personal well-being, spiritual redemption, and self-realization within the existing society?
In an era of privatism, kicks, introversion, and post-modernist nihilism, Murray Bookchin forcefully examines the growing nihilistic trends that threaten to undermine the revolutionary tradition of anarchism and co-opt its fragments into a harmless personalistic, yuppie ideology of social accommodation that presents no threat to the existing powers that be. Includes the essay, "The Left That Was."

ISBN: 187317683X
Author: Murray Bookchin
Publisher: AK Press
Rating: 3.36

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Anarchism: Arguments For and Against

Anarchism: Arguments For and Against

Anarchism: Arguments For and Against

This is the second revised edition of Anarchism: Arguments For and Against and was the edition that Albert Meltzer was working on at the time of his death on May 7th, 1996. This book was an important one to Albert and it was one whose arguments he came back to often in his other writings.

Albert had become increasingly concerned about what he saw as the ghettoisation of anarchism. Separated from the working class base so necessary to achieve social revolution, anarchism could easily fall into the twin traps of philosophical radicalism or revolutionary arrogance, the "we're more militant than anyone else" approach. Both stands have appeared in British anarchism alongside a sometimes demoralising and destructive incestuous approach to revolutionary change. Anarchists talk only to other anarchists and are unable to relate to the vast majority of people who are not of their belief and see anarchism as a rather exotic or illogical idea.

This then was Albert's attempt to examine arguments people may have about why anarchism can never work and to counter them. He also examines the basic tenets of anarchist thought and practice and in doing so destroys some of the myths that have been created about anarchist theory and action. It's a book fro those of us who try to win people over to our ideas in everyday life and such it is a book that tries to break down the walls of the ghetto that anarchism has become trapped in.

ISBN: 1873176570
Author: Albert Meltzer
Publisher: AK Press
Rating: 3.23

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