Fuck Bookchin

Doesn't Lenin's theory of the labor aristocracy say something similar, without abandoning Marxist Class Analysis?

how is this any different from the 'intersectionality' championed by the idpollers, though?

Youth is the revolutionary part of society in all ages and circumstances, he is not against class struggle and he considers the proletariat not inherent revolutionary but doesnt deny that it exist. Also Marx clearly primary thought about the industrial proletariat and many Marxist thought them to be the most promising parts, so criticising that focus seems logical.

Listen Marxist seems like targeted at the actually existing "Marxist" groups back in his time. He never really went into the academic circles and primarily based his critiques on what he experienced, read himself and discussed with people of a specific ideology, which creates the lack of depth he shows when criticising other philosophers.

Hierachy is a direct system of command and control and not subtle cultural biases that change your experiece of capitalism. It also has been a cause of revolutionary action throughout time.

If we're to accept only Marxian Class Analysis, all of the sudden third worlsism gains a lot of legitimacy.

Luckily, classical Marxian class-analysis is incomplete, and does not take into account the communalzing factors of second nature, that being the city.

Let me remind you that revolutions never took place the places where the industrial proletariat was the most developed, but mostly where civil society was strongly established and classes were in degeneration.

I'm not a fan of Bookchin because in order for proper ecology we need to rid ourselves of cities and move to villages no larger than ~150 people.

Also he claims to be against idpol but argues that deep ecology has too many white masculine mountain men.

Cities vs. Urbanisation is the relevant thing here, just denouncing cities while missing the massive influence capitalism had on them is to simplistic. Cities are what counteracts tribalism, enables egalitarian society and supports civics, we really cant live without them.

Is that your claim?
Because Bookchin says the opposite. Villages and urban centers must both make way for cities.

We've lived without cities before and self sustaining communes are possible.

Cities are a net negative for humanity

So if there's already a cogent third worldist explanation, whats the problem? Seems a lot more rational and explains why America and the west are so right wing compared to many parts of the third world

What's new? He was an american, those people aren't capable of deep thoughts, only surface garbage.
There's is no leftism in USA.

The problem is that we're not really seeing a whole lot of emancipatory third-world projects.
Sure, there are some, but most are merely "anti-imperialist" that replace one kind of traditionalist regressive regime with another. China and the South East Asian countries should be booming with class-conscious emancipatory movements, however they're not.
And again, Europe and America is not at all right-wing compared to the rest of the world. If you want to witness regressive tribalist traditionalism, the third world is ripe with that stuff. Europe and America still has the vestiges of socialization and innovative citizenship that cities and citizenship offered.
In China, the biggest thread to the establishment is the ecological movement and those movements that seek greater autonomy to the regions.
Thus the third worldist hypothesis falls short.

Spoken like someone who's never lived in a tribe.
Tribal society was sorta horrible in a lot of way, being rigidly structured according to tradition and those who deviated even the slightest were ostracized. Tabooo was the dominating order to tribal society.
Cities meant rationalization and emancipation of human kind. It meant the rise of rational second nature, in which human beings could move beyond their primitive origins and through mutualism and cooperation shape new societies according to their own ethics.

Granted of course, the rise of the city also gave way to the rise of the state - However, it also proved to be the best tool to undermine the state itself.

Of all the things to complain about this shows you haven't really read him. The man rants against idpol almost to a fault

Cities are awesome, you're a net negative for humanity.

In all seriousness though, it is much more reasonable to fix the ecological problems that cities create than it is to kick people out of the cities entirely.

Leaving that aside, this is exactly the problem with Bookchin's woo-woo bullshit - it encourages us to build and argue over perfect little models of the future society and try to force today's society to fit to them. That isn't effective political praxis, it's a bunch of autists playing a HO scale.

You need to understand that whether or not humanity lives in cities in the future isn't up to you, or me, or the Rojavans. It's dependent on the real material forces that underpin society. Our task as revolutionaries is to foster those forces that cause society to move away from the present mode of production and toward a new one. The operations of that new society will be determined by the material realities of its productive mode.

The best we can do is to thoroughly analyse the current society, identify those factors and forces which will enable society to adopt a new mode of production, and ensure those factors gain primacy.

But every movement for leftism is coming from a third world country. Not just Rojava, but the NPA in the Phillipines, the Naxalites in India, the Venezuelan movement, Morales in Bolivia, FARC, etc. The only western country that had a remotely leftist movement was Greece with SYRIZA and that got killt off pretty damn fast. And isn't anti imperialism better than… imperialism? even if it isn't an optimal solution we should still be anti imperialist

Yeah.
That's what Bookchin argued too.
That the institutional dencentralization of urbanized areas must come before the actual physical decentralization of cities. See, the problems of urbanized zones is not their threat to the environment - it's how they render democracy and rational society impossible.

The point of third worldism is exactly that the industrial proletariat has moved to the third world - if not, then the theory deviates hugely from any hypothesis as suggested by marx.
Rojava is not a hugely industrialized region with a large industrial proletariat - whether is the philipines, Venezuela, Bolivia ect.
India perhaps offers the best that third worldism has to offfer, yet still we see nothing out of China, Thailand, Vietnam ect.

The West still has localist and ecological movements growing, ones that largely oppose globalism - that being said, because civil society, meaning city-life, has been abolished in Europe and Armerica, here we also see tendencies were we regress to the kind of tribalism that also dominates the third world.

That means that only through the reestablishment of city-life, as has been partly been seen in Rojava and Chiapas (both places with little industrial proletariat to speak of, btw) can we reverse the currents of statism and capitalism.

To support one emperror over another is futile.
We run the risk of watering down our own ethics with empty headed anti-americanism or russophobia, which is what has happened historically.
Between the US and ISIS the one to pick is neither.

Thing is that cities are material conditions and get shaped by a complex interplay of ideology and material conditions themselves. Was the difference between american city building and soviety city building solely cause by material differences? Imo it was not, changing the city changes the society that lives within it and enables resistance against the wider capitalist system. Our idea of how our society should rather work(even if these ideas are an reaction to material conditions) have and direct impact on the future of the movement. So enabling a criticism of urbanisation and highlighting the factors that more communal cities played in out history and what they did to society makes it possible to build stable resistance against capitalism

For example in the west gentrification is THE topic which drives people to the left and makes them see the horrors of capitalism directly, occupying buildings and keeping them has been the rallying point of the Euroopean left for decades and served as bases to build resistance. Or remember the resistance against building highways through your city, destruction of cultural places ect that can bring communities together in direct resistance against capitalism.

So I think communalist analysis of cities is extremely relevant and communalist resistance has been one of the main avenues in which proletarians have fought capitalism.

Cities have a smaller footprint-per-person though. Trying to return to small communities is just going back in time.

And this ofc, politics need to be revived before any productive movement could even arise. To understand our past failures we also have to look at how we did politics. Neither the party politics or the new left activist organisations work well.

Did you exclusively read the first part of my post or something? Because I go on to call out the whole discussion on ideal population density for the autistic utopianism that it is in the very next lines.

But society shaped the city in the first place. And society was born out of the material conditions of its existence. You can impose some change on a part of the city, but if you want the entire city reshaped you're going to have to change the relations of production (aka the conditions of material existence) that shape society. Anything else is attempting to impose a particular model on society without regard for why society did things the way it did in the first place. Once you've answered that question, then you can start talking about the fundamental parts of society that need retooling to make the city better.

kek, this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that you're attempting to solve the problem by imposing your ideal state of affairs on society without regard to the underlying economic forces involved. All you end up doing is desperately fighting off the symptoms as the illness advances. You can't fight gentrification by squatting in buildings until the mean old developers go away. They won't go away, they can't - they're driven inexorably into conflict with you by the logic of the system. It's the motive force that is your real enemy - fail to fight it, and you are doomed to watch your communalist dreams die under the crushing weight of material reality reimposing itself.

FFS, read Bookchin. If you're too dumb to read him, there are plenty of interviews and lectures to listen to.

To change the relations of prodution you have to change the relations of power first.

Yes we cant do resistance because its success wont be assured until we have drive it to the end. Also building class consciousness through conflict is bad because the conflict doesnt imidiatly leads to the end of capitalism. You are fucking retarded man, are you some kind of leftcom that thinks no one but himself knows what capitalism is? One that thinks Communalism is literally being a hippie?

That's actually one of the orthodoxies that Bookchin challenges.

Cities do not seem to have formed out of material neccessity.

Catal Hüyük, for example, an ancient city in Anatolia bears no indication of agriculture or civic defense, and yet it was a city some millenea before cities became a commonplace thing. Mainly it would seem that Catal Hüyük aroe mostly out of religious reasons as a place where people could coordinate their religioous and ethical concerns, while still living as hunter-gatherers. Likewise, the Elamites developed agriculture quite early, but to the contrary, there is little evidence of actual citification of this people during the period in which they also had thriving agriculture.
In the strictest sense of materialist analysis, this would mean that the city arose out of thin air, and these two facts seriously challenges the hypothesis that the city itself has a material base rather than being a material base in of itself, like the next step in a social evolution so to say.

He has a point, in as much as the West barely has a proletariat anymore, and virtually no peasantry. The modern proletariat is concenrated in Asian sweatshop countries.

So the majority of people in the West own the means of production?

In terms of people producing tangible products through industry that are then taken away from them and then compensated for through a wage, indeed, these people are almost gone in the West and to theoretically lump in all wage-earners into one abstract salariat won't help the fact that blue-collar workers and white collar-workers show no signs of being able to recognize each other as fellow workers. Thus the workerist route of the 20th centry simply will no longer do.

perfectly accurate, no tankie has ever successfully explained why it wasn't. No tankie has ever explained the fortunes made from USSR labor, such as the Koch's. No tankie has ever explained the disparity in class, or the successful unionizing AGAINST the soviet union.

you're fucking retarded trash, you are the ones who are ahistorical.

Where does this meme from? It can't be from Marx.

What signs do you see that white-collars and blue-collars a capable of recognizing each other as fellow workers? What indicates that white-collars internally are capable of doing so?
Where are the great big white-collar worker's movements?

...

So because there is no class solidarity at this very moment there can never be class solidarity?

No, it barely has an industrial proletariat, and the ones that are left actually have pretty cushy jobs compared to most workers. In most of his writings, Marx focused on the industrial proletariat, since they were (are) the labour force that drives Capitalism and are also the group of workers with the greatest revolutionary potential (according to most Marxists of that time). While Marx's theories are still for the most part relevant today, focusing on the production of value and the industrial proletariat is a pretty stupid idea in the west, since industrial workers there have neither the numbers nor the revolutionary potential to build a movement.

The city as a whole is very interesting, although I dont think it disproves material conception of the creation of cities as thoroughly as Bookchin would have liked as it is yet a one off. Afaik the regid conception of Marxs historical materialism is revisionist anyway. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatalhöyük

We shouldnt take this as some blueprint, under capitalism materialist forces shape everything far more regidly than back then as society was a bit more organic still. But as a message how powerful ideology can be to reshape society when the technological advancements enables that freedom and when the powerstructures allow it.

Like said. The general populace of the West is the middle class of world capitalism, or in the specific case of white-collar workers, the factory managers (not owners). They are alienated and exploited, sure, but not in the same basal form a prole is.

Does an office worker or service worker get the proverbial fruits of his labor stolen from him? Unlike the prole, not physically so, because his labor has been completely abstracized, dematerialized. The prole has his commodities stolen, and is "rewarded" with a salary. The service/white-collar worker produces abstract value, and is similarly "rewarded", but more geneously so, and have much less revolutionary potential, both because they're better paid and because they're not being physically alienated from the fruits of their labor. He doesn't work any means of production at all, unless you count a stove as being the same as an automobile production line. Like the proletariat is concentrated in sweatshop nations, the middle class and factory managers (as well as the cooks and waiters of Marx's example) are concentrated in the West.

Sure, but it's largely intagible and largely theoretical to almost any worker in the West. Imagine getting engineers, carpenters, retail employees, truck driver, lawyers, marketing employees and the like all coalessing into terms of shared "workership". Sure, it was more tangible back in the day when almost everyone was a factory worker and thus the work-places looked like each other in a real tangible way, but today, proletarianism is almost entirely theoretical.

However, history is also full of examples of citizenship-based revolutions that also municipalized the economies and thus either lessened class-distinctions or got entirely rid of them.

Not quite a one-off though. That's the interesting thing about it.
There are other examples of hunter-gatherer cities.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mureybet

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beidha_(archaeological_site)

Thanks! Didnt knew about these places.

That graph is very interesting, just imagining how much we could gain with rational production and consuption and less bullshit jobs.

His criquite of Ecology is not that it is irrelevant but that the way the problem is presented to us, makes us feel bad and gives us a "easy way out". By doing this the dominant ideology lets us ignore greater problems with a clear conscience.

Also, I always disagree with Zizek on his point about democracy. I believe that there is a role for direct/local democracy for local problems. Of course we don't all have to sit down together figure out how to deliver water to each house, but decisions such as building a park or a library, ie. local issues should be solved on a local level, just as regional issues should be solved on a regional level, and global issues on a global level (eg. his example with the tsunami in japan). IMO, at least. Local democracy and higher coordination do not necessarily oppose each other.

t. people who haven't seriously studied Bookchin
youtube.com/watch?v=C1rvIRtb1AM

Definitely this. To distinguish it from the kind of ecology that Bookchin and others talk about, we might call this liberal concern for nature "environmentalism", just to separate them as terms.

I'd just like to point out that that particular graph is for employment growth, not number of jobs or share of jobs. But a GIS will confirm that the American service economy is indeed much bigger than the industrial one.

This. Zizek, Bookchin, Luxemburg, Bordiga, Marx, Stirner, Chomsky, Althusser, Adorno

wouldn't caring for the environment be "going back in time"?

Going back in time is a meme at this point

And this is bad why?(you disliking something isn't an argument against it)

how?

Just because cities are the most recent advent of human organization isn't an argument for cities unto itself .

...

I want to understand too please

I'm the Zizekposter. Ofcourse Zizek isn't against ecology, but against liberal environmentalism, I should've clarified that. I'm 100% pro-ecology.

Because, to sort of paraphrase the book man himself, if you went back to tribal society, you wouldn't be able to sit next to someone of German descent, Irish descent, African descent, etc, and listen to his lectures, because you'd be too busy killing one another. Living in a tribe was nice, because everyone in it was basically family, but everyone outside were treated as not human and were liable to being tortured and killed, and so were you by their tribe. Only with cities did we really see tribes mingling and societies being formed that weren't solely based on kinship.
Basically, fucking read Bookchin

I've read bookchin and I'm not impressed.

Tribal warfare is a hell of a lot less violent than battling nation states you get with cities.
However this idea that everyone in barbarian tribes were hell bent on killing everyone outside the tribe is not true. Also the only thing that made them "barbarians" were the fact they weren't Roman

Yeah, because there are fewer people. But that doesn't change the fact that life as a tribesperson is nasty and short.
Note how I never said barbarian. Bookchin was talking of tribes like the north American natives and the pre-agricultural Indo-European tribes which a lot of primitivists of his time fetishised. The germanic societies of the roman- and migration-era were far larger, and they were still also very tribalist. You wouldn't see Franks and Saxons mingling, unless, of course, they were trading, probably in one of the many trading CITIES that sprang up around that period.
Read Bookchin again. You obviously haven't read enough. Also, listen to his lectures. They're pretty chill.

Me neither

Rojava is not a hugely industrialized region with a large industrial proletariat - whether is the philipines, Venezuela, Bolivia ect.

Still committing Bookchin's fallacy of equating industrial workers with proletariat. Every country on earth at this historical point is part of the global system of capitalism minus maybe the DPRK and Cuba. Also, there is plenty of development in the Phillipines, Venezuela, etc. There are a ton of Call centers, factories, etc. in the Phillipines for example, have you seen Manila? The only sortof undeveloped things you listed was Rojava, and it remains to be seen if that is a successful example, or will they get crushed by the IS, or Assad, or Turks etc in a few years.

China and Vietnam already have Communist parties in charge albeit revisionist ones. I say, in time you will see more third world movements for socialism and this has been happening to an extent already, why do you focus on Asia, obviously to distract from the fact that Latin America has been going left for some time now and its third world.

I'm not in favor of localism, I think its a step backwards we should have globalism that serves the people rather than capitalism instead. Also those people are a bunch of liberals who think being ecological = buying sustainable starbucks cups to save the amazon. Also, I'm not sure you can say the west's libs are "rising" more like the west is turning alt right fascist rather than some ecoliberal dream of glocalism

Literally taking the two least developed countries examples of left movements. First off I'd argue that most countries including kurdistan and mexico are well integrated into global capitalism even if theyre poorer. Furthermore I don't really consider Chiapas a success story, more like a defeat/disarmament/surrender, or an armistice at best.

Implying 'statism' is a real and non vacuous concept

You are caricaturing anti-imperialism, not wanting the dominant countries to wage wars of aggression =/= supporting right wing nationalism

Wrong. This is the "Iron law of Wages" fallacy. This is Lassalle's socialism not Marx. Bookchin was a fucking economic illiterate.

Need I say more?

Yes and no.
The most impressive thing about Catal Hüyük and other such early cities is the fact that there is little evidence of violent death, meaning that war is something that is achieved is non-egalitarian scociety (which a city can be, granted, but is not so necessarily). Beyond that tribes frequently battled over territory and game, and foreigners were infrequently welcome at all.

And yet, in the countries that are the most industrialized, and thus have the most thriving tangible proletariat, class-struggle seems to be close to it's weakest. Hell, to name the Philippines as an outstanding feat of left-wing inssurectionism, ignores the fact that an argument can be made that the Islamic State has made more headway into the phillippines than any sort of militant left-wing organization.

China and Vietnam has nominally left-wing regimes, this is true, but both of those came into existance at points where the industrial proletariat was pretty much marginal or non-existent in both China and Vietnam. The same goes for Latin America, which has very little in terms of industrialization and are largely still agrarian societies, meaning that the fact that we're seeing

Yes. That is the whole point. That an industrial proletariat is not necessary to revolution.

Okay, so do you believe that he actually believes that or might it be that he's making a sarcastic remark as to the sorry state of the modern worker's movement and its achievements.
Keep in mind, he fucking hated hippies.

He's really not. Without even looking at the rabid anti-imperialists today, the post-October Revolution left scene of Bookchin's time was filled with people falling over themselves to justify what the Soviet Union was doing, even as the revolution was taking a strongly nationalistic bent with Stalin. And then you had the marxists of Marx's time supporting 3rd world imperialism because they thought it would advance Capitalism and thus hasten the road to Socialism, and we can only look at how things are today to see that they were dead wrong. That alone gives plenty of reason to reevaluate Marxism, though not necessarily abandoning it (and as far as I know Bookchin didn't abandon it entirely either).

That was sarcasm, fam. Also, who the fuck are you quoting?

Skipping work to smoke weed is one of the greatest and most noble endeavors a man can undertake.

This guy gets it

it was only like that because of how long ago it was

You can't just say read bookchin in place of an argument
I have and I wasn't too impressed

If you want a good argument as to why tradition ruling society as it did in tribal days over the innovative and rational ways that came with civic society, look at modern tribes that practice stuff like genital mutulation. Quite simply, tribal society does not leave much room for a community to live according to their own ethical values, only to the taboos and mythos of their far forebearers. It is a restrictive and unproductive society.

Yeah, and going back to that stage would involve making things like it was that long ago. You can't have modern medicine without modern industry, which is only possible with our large-scale, modern society, which you can't have if everyone is scattered around in tribes of at most a hundred people scratching the dirt for food. Furthermore you wouldn't be able to properly preserve or spread the knowledge we know today because everyone is isolated and hostile to eachother. Going back in time solves nothing, it just recreates old problems, and fixing those problems is just going to have you recreate the entire development of human society, which you won't see the benefit of since you'll be dead.
I did give you an argument. Read it. You should still read more Bookchin.

So what make cities so rational? They are pretty harmful to humanity compared to tribes or communes.

but we have that in cities as well however its called gender reassignment therapy or body modification.

tribal society is the community living according to its ethical values, with cities you get a monoculture with slight differences.

You can't have modern cotton clothes without modern slave industry

t. 1850s

The plants that produce medicine alone have a staff of hundreds of people each, already too big for tribal society. The industries that make the ingredients for the medicine have many more. This is not to mention that all this requires a society supporting the researchers researching and developing this medicine, who also need stuff produced by various industries, which are all impossible to have if society is organised at a tribal level. If your answer to this is automation, what you're basically proposing is communism with ooga-booga tribal mysticism, ie. fucking retarded.

but factories aren't even in the cities

Uh, yes they are. In the Victorian era they were plonked right in the middle of them. Today that's not usually the case, but they're still connected to the vast urban sprawl we call cities today. And regardless of their geographical location, they're still reliant on the advanced societies that cities bring with them, all of which you would know about if you read Bookchin, specifically From Urbanization to Cities or listened to his lectures about the book which you can find on Youtube

ITT: Fag that says he read bookchin makes arguments against bookchin that reveal that he's never actually read bookchin

and I'm the one going back in time…

Holy shit, fam. Learn to read the whole text.

Stopped here

...

wtf is wrong with you, are you some kind of Red Khmer fan? kys

imagining what a good/working world would look like instead of focusing on what it's possible to do to change the existing one

The city is the arena of rationalism precisely because it favoured discussion, thus an emphasis was put on language and persuasion and this lead to the development of rational philosophy and logic, something that the geronist elders of tribal society never needed to learn. Thus in the agora, rationality and innovation was invented in contrast to tribalist conservatism.
You point out that body modification exists today, but today it's voluntary and you the consequences for refusing to do it are nowhere as dire as they were in tribal tines.

this is a lie
yeah, he's vapid as fuck and so are the people on here who """""ironically"""" shill for him
That's because out of 10 socialists, only 4 of them agree on what that word means
Second stupid thing you've said
They are, that's why they were the ones who killed everyone in China and Cambodia, 3 stupid things you've said now
lol and you come off like an idiot with no depth of understanding of what the hippy movement was like or about.
first half of that sentence is correct, second half of that sentence is not. Please never talk about subcultures you don't have a deep understanding of. You sound like a fucking fag

Huh, instead of criticising OP because he misread Bookchin, you criticised him for being unfair to hippies. That was unexpected, never seen someone actually defend them before. For good reason.

I sincerely think they were an MKULTRA movement, I just hate that people think that all the things that the hippy movement pretended to be about or involved with are somehow invalid. there's nothing wrong with skipping work to smoke weed, or listening to music in a field high on mushrooms or having long hair or walking around barefoot or feeling like you're in love with the natural world. Those are all healthy, normal, repressed behaviors or experiences I think a lot of people need to be happy.

I think the problem is anybody trying to form any kind of praxis out of those behaviours. Elevating them to a political level where they don't really belong. Smoking weed at work or whatever might be just fine, who cares, but it's not a political act or even a transgressive act.

Working a wageslave job is "voluntary" today when being a serf or a regular slave wasn't voluntary.

Just because it is technically voluntary doesn't make it any different

where did you get that from?

Are you seriously arguing that having gender reassignment surgery is equivalent to the need to work for a wage under capitalism?

I'm saying today's "culture" is as voluntary as today's wage system

Implying supporting actually existing socialism was and/or is wrong

tfw you have no fucking understanding of Leninist theory

Note how the guy I was responding to was going on about how Anti-imperialism =/= supporting 3rd world nationalists. Except, you know, that's what "anti-imperialists" today do, and what communists back then did when hyping the Soviet Union even as it started abandoning its internationalism for a heavily nationalist and imperialist policy. As a symbolic example of how the Union's attitude changed, Bookchin brought up how they changed their national anthem from "the Internationale" to the "chauvinistic" Soviet anthem we know today.
Not Leninist, Marxist. I'm taking this from what Bookchin wrote, which he took from their writings about what was happening in their time. They applauded the formation of centralised states in the 3rd world (accomplished through imperialism), because, they argued, it would make those countries industrialise quicker.

That's idiocy.

And if the traditions of tribal society can be compared to wage slavery, then that doesn't speak very well of tribal society, does it?
I don't know what you thought your own point was.

it was though

wew

your point is moot