A Note from the Editors

Since the publication last year of Chuck Morse’s essay, “Being a Bookchinite,” there has emerged a substantial debate. Much of this debate concerns not only the issues raised in the essay, but also the intellectual rigor of the essay itself; in fact, these two separate strands of the debate help to explain its extent. In the first instance, Morse laid some serious accusations at the foundations of social ecology, as represented in the work of Murray Bookchin and such serious accusations warrant serious attention. In the second instance, the way in which Morse presented his argument seemed to blur the line between theoretical insight and personal recollection, between discussions of Bookchin’s perceived theoretical problems and his perceived personal problems. Moreover, these two strands taken together presented a simplistic and unexplained caricature of Bookchin and his work.

In this issue of Communalism, we present a continuation of this debate with two articles that approach separately these two different strands. In the first article, “Closing Down the Debate or Just Getting Started?”, Andy Price responds to the three replies posted on Morse’s site to his review of “Being a Bookchinite” for Anarchist Studies, and argues that his original critique of Morse’s problematic methodology still stands. In the second piece, “Measures of Failure and Success, Part I,” Eirik Eiglad offers a refutation of two of the more serious accusations that Morse made in “Being a Bookchinite” and in doing so, highlights further the problematic nature of the scholarship that marks the original essay.

This further contribution to the debate raises an interesting thought: how can an essay that, as the two pieces claim, is woefully lacking in serious comment on Bookchin raise such a sustained debate? Is this not evidence enough of the importance of the work? Taken together, the two articles presented here hopefully point to something different: that Morse’s “Being a Bookchinite” falls below the standard of rigorous theoretical endeavor and in so doing, unwittingly highlights a recurrent problematic approach to Bookchin and the debates that surround him. It is thus the very problems in Morse’s essay that have inadvertently allowed for an examination of this approach and the initiation of a more thoughtful look at the fundamentals of Bookchin’s ideas and political program.

August 17th, 2008

Andy Price
Eirik Eiglad