Closing Down the Debate
or Just Getting Started?

On Personal Recollection and Theoretical Insight

By Andy Price

In late 2007, I was asked by the journal Anarchist Studies to review two new items of Bookchin literature, two of the first items to emerge after his death in 2006. The first was a collection of his essays, favourably introduced by one of Bookchin’s long-term colleagues.(1) The essays collected therein offered a glimpse of some of the fundamentals of the Bookchin programme, uncluttered of the polemics in which Bookchin had become embroiled in the final two decades of his life. The second piece up for review was also from an ex-colleague of Bookchin, Chuck Morse, which recalled the two or three years he spent, as he himself called it, as one of Bookchin’s “core disciples” (“Being a Bookchinite,” hereafter BAB).(2) But this offered something different: it was a more “critical” commentary, which attempted to show the “strengths and weaknesses” of Bookchin’s revolutionary organising.

I set my review up along explicit lines: the two posthumous additions to the Bookchin cannon, in my opinion, neatly reflected two distinct patterns that had emerged over the last two decades in literature on Bookchin (often stemming, like these two, from ex-confidents of Bookchin): the first, open and fair discussion of Bookchin’s ideas, both sympathetic and critical, an approach which we accord to most thinkers; and the second, something far more problematic: a body of literature that had, for various reasons, become focussed on Bookchin’s personal failings and motivations, and not on the fundamentals of his programme. Hence the title of my review: Communalism or Caricature: Patterns of Bookchin Critique, in which I establish, right at the outset, this dichotomy between these two different types of critical engagements with Bookchin(3).

Not long after publication, I received an email from the editors at Anarchist Studies: Chuck Morse had contacted them and asked for permission to reproduce my review on his blog, in order that he could offer a reply, and they had kindly sought out my permission before agreeing. Naturally, in the name of fostering debate and discussion, I agreed, and looked forward to Morse’s response. Thus far, Morse has in fact offered three different responses via his blog.(4) In truth, I welcome any response, and would have been quite happy to leave the matter as it is, no matter how many authors responded. However, the general tenor of these three responses points to the fact that they have missed the point I was making in my review, and I here offer my own brief reply.

Across all three responses posted on Morse’s site, I would argue that there are two main claims: the first, that I am trying, in Sunshine’s words “to close discussion down” around Bookchin’s legacy; the second, that in establishing the dichotomy between the different patterns of approaching Bookchin I identified in my title, I am offering a “mischaracterization” of the nature of the critique of Bookchin(5). I will come to this second, more serious claim in due course, but to the claim that I want to “close down” any criticism of Bookchin, that I represent a “dogmatic sectarianism” endemic to “Bookchinism” itself (Tell), or in Morse’s words, that I am “troubled” that he had “the temerity to advance any criticism at all”, I can only implore all three authors to revisit my review. At the very end, I argue that “we can, and should put Bookchin to the test” on his theoretical and practical principles(6). My entire section on Morse is a description of how, in BAB, he failed to do this and instead offered a recollection of his own personal interactions with Bookchin.

This central focus of my review, it seems, was lost on Morse and the others, so I will explain it again here as briefly as I can. In his reply, Morse begins by restating the opening claim of BAB: that Bookchin was unsuccessful in “mounting a revolutionary challenge” – that is, that Bookchin’s revolutionary project was a failure. He then tells us that the people involved in this failed project were “inspired and frustrated”, and it was this he tried to encapsulate in BAB. Moreover, people had responded favourably to his essay, Morse tells us: everyone, it appears, bar me. According to Morse,

However, this is to fundamentally misread my review. Morse’s remarks about Bookchin, favourable or unfavourable, are, in many ways, unchallengeable: they are his own personal recollection of his time with Bookchin, his recounting of the experience he spent in Bookchin’s inner circle. Therefore, we take it on trust that this is in fact how he felt at the time, that this is what it was like for him to work with Bookchin. But here lies the fundamental failing of the Morse essay: this personal recollection, whether good or bad, tells us nothing of the success or failure of Bookchin’s revolutionary project. I stress again, this account tell us how Morse himself felt, and not how Bookchin worked. The more serious problem here, however, is that Morse’s essay is set up entirely as a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Bookchin’s revolutionary project, as he tells us at the outset. Moreover, it is a discussion drawn out in the shadow of Morse’s grandiose opening claim: that overall, the Bookchin project was unsuccessful. BAB, then, is constructed in the following way: (1) claim the Bookchin project, both theoretically and practically, was a failure; (2) to prove this, offer an entirely personal discussion of his time with Bookchin and, worse, his own interpretation of Bookchin’s apparent personal failings.

Criticism of this fundamental flaw is the main contention of my review. As I wrote, “in terms of what an essay on the strengths and weaknesses of Bookchin’s revolutionary project should contain, we surely know that it should not be this kind of personal recollection and gossipy insinuation”(7) (emphasis added). That is to say, if Morse wants to write a piece that recalls his time spent with Bookchin, that recalls his personal relationship to him, his personal reactions to him, then of course, he is perfectly entitled to do so. Moreover, I would read it, as I read BAB: I would be interested, from a purely personal and biographical view, in these recollections (in much the same way I would read biographical accounts of Marx, or any other thinker I am interested in). However – and again, the main contention of my review – please, let us not pass this off as political and theoretical comment, as I am afraid Morse does in BAB. There has been too much of this already in the literature surrounding Bookchin, a pattern, or a trend, which has followed this personal, non-theoretical approach, which is highly problematic and, as we shall see below, deeply entrenched.

Contrary to what CN Tell claims, there are no “important political lessons that can be gleaned” from Morse’s wholly personal approach to his time with Bookchin: there is nothing, for example, to be gleaned from his description of the poster on Bookchin’s bedroom wall. Equally, there are no “important political lessons” in Morse’s musings about where Bookchin lived, or his personal reaction to Bookchin’s discussion of other thinkers. Most ridiculously, there is absolutely nothing to be learnt from recounting Bookchin’s conversations about his ill-health. These are not strengths or weaknesses of Bookchin’s revolutionary organising, but matters of personal demeanour, of personal circumstances. And as Morse surely knows, there is a time-honoured commitment in theoretical exchange to avoid this kind of ad hominem approach, to separate personal comment from objective discussion of ideas and events.

Avoiding the personal in general

In a general sense, the commitment to avoid this kind of personal approach is based, in part, on the fact that personal feelings and reactions to individuals and their respective demeanours are so wildly subjective that they cannot prove or disprove anything. Undoubtedly, there are people who had similar interactions with Bookchin and came away with radically different feelings and interpretations than did Morse. Again, accounts of these interactions would make for interesting reading, but the same principle applies: a piece that would describe how warm Bookchin was, how personable, would also tell us nothing about the philosophical and political programme he bequeathed us. Despite the suggestion from Tell that “one of the most attractive aspects of the anarchist tradition is the inclusion and centralization of the personal in politics”, we have to somehow attempt, at the very least, to separate the confusing and massively varied feelings we get through personal interaction, which differ from person to person, from what we can concretely know about the viability of a theory and practice.

In short, it is not solely Morse’s criticisms that I deemed methodologically unsound in my review, but his entire approach, his “praise” included. It is, more specifically, the confusion in BAB between an avowed attempt at objective and scholarly analysis of Bookchin’s key principles and personal criticisms. Indeed, this confusion has carried over into Morse’s reply to my piece. Here, he writes in defence of BAB that he finds “analyses that relate ideas to practice are richer than those that treat ideas alone”, and of how he “described Bookchin’s views on nature and history and social change and related them directly to the political experience that I shared with him”. If these were Morse’s genuine intentions, I can have no disagreement with them. But then, what went wrong with BAB? Why did Morse not carry through on his intentions?In truth, in BAB, Morse nowhere relates Bookchin’s ideas to practice, but rather confuses this rather difficult intellectual process with a far easier discussion of Bookchin’s personal demeanour.

Indeed, this is the modus operandi of the entire essay. For Morse, Bookchin’s educational style necessitated a closure around him; to prove it, he recounts personal conversations he had with Bookchin (and noted those he has been told about by others). For Morse there was a “defensiveness” that stemmed automatically from Bookchin’s moral conception of politics; to prove it, Morse offers his recollection that, at times, Bookchin “seemed to relish in his own isolation, as if it were a sign of grace”. Finally, for Morse, Bookchin’s “voluntarism” automatically led to a dismissal of the material conditions of change”; to prove it, Morse tells us how he used to “marvel” at the fact that Bookchin lived in the whitest state in the US. At the risk of repetition, I state again: all of these may be exactly how Morse interpreted his involvement with Bookchin at the time, but they explain nothing when considering the success or failure of his revolutionary project.

Avoiding the personal in Bookchin

In a more specific sense, in the particular case of Bookchin, we should be more stridently committed to such a separation of the personal and the theoretical due to emergence of a particular pattern of critiquing Bookchin throughout the 1990s. This pattern, I argue, stemmed from Bookchin’s forthright 1987 critique of the theoretical and practical problems of the deep ecology movement.(8) Here, the responses to Bookchin’s critique, barring one or two notable exceptions, paid no serious attention to the issues Bookchin raised, or to the philosophical and political foundations from which they stemmed, but instead accused him of all manner of ill-founded motivations. The interested reader should revisit these debates, where, from within both the political and intellectual movement of deep ecology, we find no engagement with the problems raised by Bookchin, but rather descriptions and discussions of Bookchin’s “attack” on the deep ecologists. We find, for example, apropos of no evidence, how Bookchin in 1987 wasn’t interested in the specifics of the debate that he initiated but in fact how he was involved in a ruse, an “attempt to corner the word ‘ecology’”.(9)

This dismissal of Bookchin’s critique as an attack, as some kind of political manoeuvre is repeated again and again. As one of the leading intellectuals of deep ecology movement claimed at the time, “in 1987, anarchists-leftists-Marxists, led by Murray Bookchin, launched an attack on deep ecology”.(10) This attack, he continued, indicated “that the deep ecology movement is considered the new boy on the block and a turf war has erupted”.(11) This apparent “turf war” was supposedly between the new ideology of deep ecology, and the “Old Left”, represented by Bookchin. Elsewhere, Bookchin’s critique would be dismissed as “sour grapes”, or the product of “envy.” Writing in the leading deep ecologist publication of the time, Chim Blea wrote that “Murray Bookchin has been toiling away for years developing and promoting his ‘Social Ecology’ and has received little notice”. Suddenly, deep ecology appears “and steal[s] all the attention that should rightfully be his”.(12)

Again, I urge the interested reader to revisit the extraordinary exchanges between Bookchin and the deep ecologists and to witness the forming of a pattern in responding to Bookchin that is undeniable: there is the emergence of a tendency to dismiss the issues Bookchin raised by casting his motives into doubt. Further, and though impossible to explain in full here, it is clear that Bookchin’s 1987 critique was a richly articulated explanation of the problems inherent in the philosophy of deep ecology and of the principles of social ecology on which his critique was based. Unfortunately, the issues were in large part lost, as the focus slipped from the theoretical to the personal.

Unfortunate also, is that this pattern did not stop with the debate with the deep ecologists: they would reappear again and again throughout the 1990s. The notion of Bookchin as dogmatic, as trying to squeeze out any ideas that might compete with his own were picked up, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, by writers in the mid-1990s who conflated a fair and unbiased critique of his ideas with the discussion of these dubious political motivations. After his critique of “lifestyle anarchism,” the same response would emerge. Here, for example, we get descriptions of him as “The General Secretary of social ecology”, who has no interest on philosophical principles and their practical manifestations but who is interested only in “intellectual bullying”.(13) Or, we are told elsewhere that, again, Bookchin is not interested in the issues but “is out to clobber the opposition”.(14)

Perhaps at the most vindictive end of the spectrum in the 1990s is the book length tirade against Bookchin from Bob Black.(15) Here, again, the reliance on the patterns of caricature established a decade earlier is undeniable. Without explaining how he can possibly know the inner workings of Bookchin’s mind, Black explains to us the real reasons for the critiques Bookchin offered of the philosophical and political movements he found problematic. “I get the distinct impression”, Black tells us, “that Bookchin, an elderly man said to be in ill-health is cashing in his chips as a prominent anarchist theorist” by “demolishing all possible alternatives to his own creed”.(16)

It is these patterns of critiquing Bookchin, resorting to the caricature established in 1987, that I suggested Morse had followed in BAB. Despite the claims made across all three responses on Morse’s blog, that BAB was an attempt at “true dialectics” (Tell), or that it offered a genuine “critical look” at Bookchin’s legacy (Sunshine), I argued that Morse fell back all too easily onto this caricature, that in fact Morse’s piece was nothing but a personal recollection of the problems Morse had with Bookchin, bolstered by the existing literature that discussed Bookchin’s personal problems. This, passed off as theoretical insight, is the patterns of critique of Bookchin that has become entrenched over the last two decades.

On patterns and mischaracterisations

Which brings us to the second main claim of the responses I want to address here, that, according to Sunshine, in identifying these problematic patterns of Bookchin critique in my review, I in fact offer a “mischaracterization of the criticisms of Bookchin during the 1990s”. That is to say, Sunshine continues, that I offer an “unscholarly dismissal of the numerous serious arguments concerning Murray Bookchin’s philosophy, particularly his relationship to Marxism, ecological philosophy, and technology”.
For evidence of my unscholarly dismissal, Spencer reproduces the following passage from my original review:

For Sunshine, this amounts to my dismissal of all criticism of Bookchin. But how did he arrive at this conclusion? I am bemused as to how this happened, considering that in the very passage he reproduces I argued that Morse’s essay “follows the same patterns of much of the critiques of Bookchin of the 1990s” (emphasis added). Not all critique; not every critique: but much of the critiques. However, Sunshine argues that this description means I dismiss all critiques, many of which “were made by a large number of intellectuals and constitute the vast majority of the ‘critiques of Bookchin of the 1990s’”.

There are two things to note here. First, as I detail above, I set my review out along very specific lines to note two distinct patterns of Bookchin critique: the robust critiques, that deal with the fundamentals of his program, and the not-so-robust critiques that focus on Bookchin’s personal demeanor and motivations. I find it confusing that a review where the existence of different patterns of Bookchin critique is identified in the title can be said to be dismissive of all Bookchin critique. Sunshine claims that my “refusal to even recognize” that serious discussions of Bookchin’s ideas have taken place “shows a real closure around the discussion of Bookchin’s philosophy”. However, at the risk of tiring the reader’s patience, I point out again the structure of my entire review: I talk here of patterns of Bookchin critique, not the pattern of Bookchin critique. My “refusal to recognize” the other distinct patterns of Bookchin critique stems from nothing more sinister than a short word limit and not from any attempt at closure.

Second, although Sunshine is right to say that there were serious appraisals and critiques of Bookchin throughout the 1990s, I would argue that the patterns of critique I was referring to in the review, and those I give brief examples of above, have a problematic effect on even the most sound and unbiased discussions of Bookchin over the last two decades. The caricature of Bookchin noted above as the dogmatic Old Leftist that so swirled around discussions of Bookchin in the 1990s and still do till this day would infiltrate and infuse even those discussions of him that ostensibly tried to rise above the personal attacks. Lest Sunshine misunderstand me again: I am not claiming that all critique is based on these patterns, but that these patterns do exist and in trying to evaluate Bookchin’s legacy, we need be aware of them and of their effect on our understanding of him and his programme.

To illustrate this, let us turn to the 1998 collection of essays on Bookchin edited by Andrew Light, Social Ecology after Bookchin (hereafter, SAB), which Sunshine holds up as an example of thoughtful, scholarly critique on Bookchin. In this collection, as I have never denied, there are indeed thoughtful pieces on Bookchin. However there is a distinct tenor to the collection, a spill-over, if you will, of the caricature into thoughtful debate. This is established right at the outset. In the editor’s introduction, Light recounts how in 1993 he “unwittingly stepped into a battlefield” after publishing a paper on Bookchin that touched upon the idea of a rapprochement, via Marcuse, between deep ecology and social ecology(17). Light tells us that Bookchin responded forcefully (he did), and that in light of the vitriolic nature of the debate between Bookchin and the deep ecologists, he could in part understand why Bookchin would take issue with his piece.

Light then claims that in collating SAB, he intends to move away from the debate between Bookchin and the deep ecologists, claiming that “there is more to Bookchin” than these disagreements(18). However, the moment Light announces his move away from the polemics between Bookchin and the deep ecologists, he unconsciously falls back onto the caricature these polemics had created. Using the very same terminology of the original deep ecology response to Bookchin, Light asks whether Bookchin’s “Old Left style [has] infected the development of political ecology as a body of theoretical works and as a movement”, and he answers in the affirmative.(19) Moreover, he continues, there has been a “slow dissolution of social ecology down to the views of one person and one person only, Murray Bookchin” and consequently, “[w]hen social ecologists go too far afield from this theory, they are pushed out of the camp”.(20)

That is to say, ten years after the first unfounded claims of Bookchin’s authoritarianism, Light repeated them in full. But as with the original accusations, he offers no evidence. There is no evidence of Bookchin exorcising people from his movement, of pushing people out of the camp (there is, in fact, evidence of quite the opposite when one looks at the specific disagreements he had with former allies). Yes, Bookchin may have left several “camps” himself, and people would have left him, but this is not the same as the accusation that Light makes here. Again, this is an example of how the debate and critiques that emerged around Bookchin in 1987 were to forever influence future reaction to him. One must ask here: would Light have been able to make such an unsubstantiated claim without the foundations of the Bookchin caricature having been laid a decade earlier? I would argue emphatically no: and crucially, nor would Morse have been able to make the claims he made in BAB without these same patterns.

We then turn to the first essay in the Light collection, written by Joel Kovel, which Sunshine also cites approvingly. Here, we are presented with an ostensibly theoretical piece, written from within the academy, that claims to show how Bookchin’s dialectic is in fact a dialectic of “non-recognition”, of how there is a conflict in what Bookchin claims to be his dialectical natural philosophy and the rancorous practice of Bookchin the polemicist. In short, Kovel claims that there is a potential problem in the forthright polemical style of Bookchin and his commitment to dialectical development and all that this entails. However, after a lengthy heuristic endeavour, in which Kovel sets up the dichotomy between these two narratives in Bookchin’s work, Kovel’s theoretical mask slips, and we get to the bottom of his disagreement with Bookchin, and it reveals itself as being infused, yet again, with the patterns of caricature established earlier in the 1990s.

“The world”, Kovel informs us, “is full of bad people in the eyes of Murray Bookchin”, and Bookchin is consumed with offering a critique of these people – the post-modernists, the deep ecologists, the lifestyle anarchists. Furthermore, and quite without explaining how he, like Black, has come to know the inner workings of Bookchin’s mind, Kovel explains that there is, for Bookchin, an ever-present “Satan”, the slaying of which Bookchin has determined his role to be. “Let there be no mistake”, Kovel contends, “that one big devil hangs over” the rest of Bookchin’s opponents, and that devil is “Bookchin’s bête noire, Karl Marx”.(21) Much like the earlier reaction from the deep ecologists, then, Kovel enacts the same shift of focus away from the issues raised by Bookchin (this time, in his critique of Marx) and on to these unknowable but inferred motivations. Continuing his ad hominem approach, Kovel informs us that Bookchin sets out not to discuss the theoretical and historical failings of Marx and Marxism, but to somehow knock Marx’s work out of the way to make way for his own:

Despite his claim to have uncovered a material reason for Bookchin’s desire to “displace” Marx, this is nothing more than insinuation and aspersion about Bookchin’s motives that, in truth, Kovel can know nothing of. As with the similar elements of critique of Bookchin that slip into personal slurs, the primary evidence these critics have for such claims is the existence of similar materials: this problematic pattern of approaching Bookchin fed upon itself throughout the 1990s, and moreover, exists up to the present day. Take, for example, the latest piece by John Clark in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.(23) Here, Clark offers a largely theoretical discussion of Bookchin’s version of dialectic, and of course, as no-one would deny, this is a valid (and necessary) avenue of investigation when examining Bookchin’s legacy. These types of theoretical investigations of Bookchin’s philosophical fundamentals are precisely the approach we should be taking to Bookchin and his work.

However, what to do with Clark’s opening gambit, that “Bookchin’s concept of dialectic is implicitly an apologia for his own life and politics, and a rationalization of the failures of that life and politics”?(24) What does this do to the essay overall? What does it do to the unsuspecting reader, to have Bookchin’s apparent personal failures thrust into their mind at the outset, based on nothing but insinuation? On the other hand, what does it do to the reader who is committed to avoiding this kind of unsubstantiated claim? At best, it sours the rest of Clark’s piece, it muddies the water, casts doubt over Clark’s judgement; at worst, taken together with the other slips into personal slur that appear throughout the piece, it renders the rest of his essay easily dismissible, the product not of genuine theoretical endeavour but of Clark’s obvious personal distaste for Murray Bookchin.

It is this type of pattern, this trend, that I criticised Morse’s BAB for falling back onto. I would argue that no other thinker of recent times suffers such a blurring of the theoretical and the personal as does Bookchin. Whether one sees this as Bookchin’s own fault, the product of his own personal failings, or an over-zealous polemical style, or whether one sees it as the product of a misunderstanding of the political action which his philosophical principles necessitated, is, in the final analysis, beside the point. The main focus should be, as it should be with any thinker, on the theoretical and political legacy Bookchin left behind, the re-evaluation of a philosophy that, in the light in the ever-increasing need for a solution to the ecological crisis, may serve to offer a significant contribution. The teasing out of this contribution is a process I hope to be involved in myself in the coming years and as such, despite the claims of Morse et al, I have no interest in closing this discussion down; on the contrary, this debate, shorn of the more problematic literature from the last two decades, is only just getting started.

Notes: