Murray Bookchin

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The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 71 Rebecca Solnit, ‘Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite: Some Thoughts on the IMF, Global Injustice, and a Stranger on a Train’, Huffington Post, 22 May 2011, updated 22 July 2011, online at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-solnit/worlds-collide-in-a-luxur_b_865307.html [last access 27 November 2011]. 72 Rebecca Solnit, ‘Democracy Should Be Exercised Regularly, On Foot’, Guardian, 6 July 2006, online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jul/06/comment.politics [last access 27 November 2011]. 73 Murray Bookchin, ‘Listen, Marxist!’, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2004 [1970]), p. 135 [108–43]. 74 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Social Ecology?’, in Social Ecology and Communalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 45 [19–52]. 75 Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (London: Verso, 2015), p. 71. 76 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 70. 77 Murray Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992), p. x. 78 Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, ch. 7: ‘The Organization of Territory’, para. 174, online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/24 [last access 4 June 2018]. 79 Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities, p. 3. 80 Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities, p. x. 81 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 66. 82 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, in Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 66. 83 Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), p. 137. 84 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, p. 61. 85 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 87. 86 David Graeber, ‘Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making)’, Occupy Wall Street, 29 October 2011, online at http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/ [last access 2 December 2017]. 87 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Communalism?

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This tradition ran ‘from Bakunin to Kropotkin to Sophie Perovskaya to Emma Goldman to Errico Malatesta to Murray Bookchin’. It was ‘less familiar to most radicals because it has consistently been distorted and misrepresented by the more highly organized State organization and Marxist-Leninist organization’.4 Anarchism still routinely gets a bad press, but fifty years on, radicals can at least tap into the traditions that Levine and Leighton helped uncover. In this context, Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, has raised anarchism’s star to new heights. His adaptation of Murray Bookchin’s democratic communalism has been central to the constitutional project that has been initiated by Kurdish forces active in Northern Syria.

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., ‘Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck’, Days of War, Nights of Love (CrimethInc. 11 August 2000), online at https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/your-politics-are-boring-as-fuck [last access 5 July 2017]. 49 Robert Wringham, ‘An Invitation to New Escapology’, New Escapologist or: Goodbye to All That, 1 (2008), p. 12. 50 Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2010), p. 56. 51 Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 1995), p. 16. 52 Murray Bookchin, ‘The Left that Was’, in Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, p. 66. 53 Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, p. 59. 54 Matthew Wilson, Biting the Hand that Feeds Us: In Defence of Lifestyle Politics, Dysophia open letter #2 (Leeds: Dysophia, n.d.), p. 4. 55 Takurō Higuchi, ‘Global Anarchism and the Will of the Earth – Implications of Eastern Resonances’, in Kikaru Tanaka, Masaya Hiyazaki and Chihaur Yamanaka (eds), Global Anarchism: Past, Present and Future – New Anarchism in Japan (Tokyo: Association for Anarchism Studies/Kansai, 2014), p. 140. 56 Wilson, Biting the Hand that Feeds Us, p. 5. 57 Marianne Maeckelbergh, ‘Horizontal Decision-Making across Time and Place’, Cultural Anthropology, 27 July 2012, online at https://culanth.org/fieldsights/64-horizontal-decision-making-across-time-and-place [16 June 2017]. 58 Alix Kates Shulman, ‘Dances with Feminists’ [1991], Emma Goldman Papers, online at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/Features/danceswithfeminists.html [24 June 2017]. 59 Kirwin R.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Social Ecology One of the most influential expressions of anarchism has come in the growing Green movement, which has attracted not only libertarian socialists like Cohn-Bendit in Germany but avowed anarchist thinkers like Murray Bookchin in the United States. The new ‘social ecology’, which finds the roots of the ecological crisis in society and calls for an end to hierarchy and domination, has proved to be one of the most fruitful developments in contemporary anarchism. Whereas nineteenth-century anarchists like Kropotkin still saw the need for the ‘conquest of nature’ and industrial progress in order to eradicate poverty, social ecologists argue that in our post-industrial and post-scarcity society the principal concern must be to overcome the drive to conquer and master nature. As Murray Bookchin has argued, the very idea of dominating nature probably first evolved from man’s prior domination of woman.

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Thousands of people influenced by Goodman in the counter-culture in the sixties and seventies tried to do just that by creating alternative ways of living and seeing in communes and collectives. The ‘Flower Power’ generation, whom Goodman inspired and admired, attempted to put into practice the kind of pacifist anarchism to which he devoted his life. 39 Murray Bookchin and the Ecology of Freedom ONE OF THE MOST influential thinkers to have renewed anarchist thought and action since the Second World War is undoubtedly Murray Bookchin. His main achievement is to have combined traditional anarchist insights with modern ecological thinking to form what he calls ‘social ecology’. In this way, he has helped develop the powerful libertarian tendency in the contemporary Green movement.

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, Towards an Anarchist Theory of Race (Detroit, n.d.) 48 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 241 49 See Murray Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism (Cassell, 1995) 50 Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Life-Style Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm op. cit., p. 1 51 Ibid., p. 56 52 Ibid., p. 9 53 Bookchin, ‘Libertarian Muncipalism: An Overview’, Society and Nature, 1, 1 (1992), p. 94. See also Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montréal: Black Rose, 1997) 54 Bookchin, Interview with David Vanek, Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology, 2, 1 (Spring, 2003), p. 2 55 Bookchin, Introduction, third edition, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004) 56 Brian Morris, Ecology and Anarchism: Essays and Reviews on Contemporary Thought (Malvern Wells: Images, 1996), p. 5.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

Now, however, principles are frequently advanced-such as "horizontality " and "non-hierarchy "-or visions of radical democracy and the governance of the commons, that can work for small groups but are impossible to operationalize at the scale of a met­ ropolitan region, let alone for the 7 billion people who now inhabit planet earth. Programmatic priorities are dogmatically articulated, such as the abolition of the state, as if no alternative form of territorial governance would ever be necessary or valuable. Even the venerable social anarchist and anti-statist Murray Bookchin, with his theory of confederalism, vigorously advocates the need for some territorial governance, without which the Zapatistas, just to take one recent example, would also cer­ tainly have met with death and defeat: though often falsely represented as being totally non-hierachical and "horizontalist" in their organizational structure, the Zapatistas do make decisions through democratically selected delegates and officers.10 Other groups focus their efforts on the recuperation of ancient and indigenous notions of the rights of nature, or insist that issues of gender, racism, anti-colonialism, or indigeneity must be prioritized above, if not preclude, the pursuit of an anti-capitalist politics.

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To top it all, there is a conspicuous absence of broadly agreed concrete proposals as to how to reorganize divisions of labor and (monetized?) economic transactions throughout the world to sustain a reasonable standard of living for all. Indeed, this problem is all too often cavalierly evaded. As a leading anarchist thinker, David Graeber, puts it, echoing the reservations of Murray Bookchin set out above: Temporary bubbles of autonomy must gradually turn into permanent, free com munities. However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational rela­ tion with everyone around them. They have to have some way to engage with larger economic, social or political systems that surround them.

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Thus, Massimo de Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Glo bal Capital, London: Pluto Press, 2007: 1 34, writes that "Hardin has engineered a justi fication for privatization of the commons space rooted in an alleged natural necessity:' 3. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commo ns: The Evolu tio n of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: CUP, 1 990. 4. Eric Sheppard and Robert McMaster, eds, Scale and Geographic Inqu iry, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 5. One anarchist theorist who does take this problem seriously is Murray Bookchin, in Remaking Society: Path ways to a Green Fu ture, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1 990; and Urban ization witho ut Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizensh ip, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1 992. Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in A rgentina, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006, provides a stirring defense of anti-hierarchical thinki ng.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem, 2013); Michael Hanlon, ‘The Golden Quarter’, Aeon Magazine, 3 December 2014, at aeon.co. 83.For a detailed account of this, see Mazzucato, Entrepreneurial State, Chapter 5. 84.Mariana Mazzucato, Building the Entrepreneurial State: A New Framework for Envisioning and Evaluating a Mission-Oriented Public Sector, Working Paper No. 824, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2015, pdf available at levyinstitute.org, p. 9; Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003). 85.Mazzucato, Building the Entrepreneurial State, p. 2. 86.For more, see missionorientedfinance.com. 87.Caetano Penna and Mariana Mazzucato, ‘Beyond Market Failures: The Role of State Investment Banks in the Economy’, paper presented at the Conference on Mission-Oriented Finance for Innovation, London, 24 July 2014, available on youtube.com. 88.Germany’s major transformation towards renewable energy provides perhaps the best current example of this. 89.Nick Dyer-Witheford, ‘Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism’, in Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack, eds, Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 206–7; Adrian Smith, Socially Useful Production, STEPS Working Paper 58 (Brighton STEPS Centre, 2014), at steps-centre.org, p. 2. 90.This shares some properties with Murray Bookchin’s notion of liberatory technologies, though we are obviously less inclined towards his vision of a small-scale communitarian future. Murray Bookchin, ‘Towards a Liberatory Technology’, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004). 91.Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making? (London: Allison & Busby, 1981), p. 16. 92.Ibid., pp. 10, 89. 93.Ibid., pp. 101–7. 94.Smith, Socially Useful Production, p. 5. 95.Ibid., p. 1. 96.Ibid., p. 2. 97.Wainwright and Elliott, Lucas Plan, p. 231. 98.Ibid., p. 157. 99.Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, n.d., at theanarchistlibrary.org. 100.Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (London: MIT Press, 2011), p. 26. 101.Ibid., p. 64. 102.Ibid., p. 72. 103.Ibid., p. 146. 104.Ibid., p. 150. 105.Ibid., p. 79. 106.Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic; Toscano, ‘Logistics and Opposition’; Mike Davis, ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’

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Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto, 2007), p. 20. 8.While we remain unconvinced of the large-scale prospects for direct democracy in its face-to-face and/or consensus-driven forms, this certainly does not preclude thinking about how participative democracy might be conceived along more complex, technologically mediated lines. 9.Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004), p. xxviii. 10.Ibid., p. 58. 11.Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), p. 11. 12.The origin of the form of consensus decision-making used in contemporary left activism is generally thought to have been with the Quaker religious movement around 300 years ago.

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., The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community? (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2010); Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Weeks, Problem with Work. 93.Walter Van Trier, ‘Who Framed “Social Dividend”?’, presented at the First USBIG Conference, CUNY, New York, 8 March 2002, at econpapers.repec.org, p. 29. 94.Lynn Chancer, ‘Benefitting from Pragmatic Vision, Part I: The Case for Guaranteed Income in Principle’, in Aronowitz and Cutler, Post-Work, p. 86. 95.Evelyn Forget, The Town with No Poverty: Using Health Administration Data to Revisit Outcomes of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2011); Derek Hum and Wayne Simpson, ‘A Guaranteed Annual Income?

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

For the cyclist, these myriad aspects of the city are immediate and tactile, not concealed behind steel and glass.63 Bicycling, in the simplest terms, transforms “out there” to “right here.” But there is a much deeper sense in which this physical/technological shift becomes meaningful as a restorative act—a small way to subvert the fractioning of everyday life that andré Gorz and Murray Bookchin, for example, see manifested in capitalism and reproduced/reified through the daily practice of driving.64 it does not always foster a more authentic or real engagement with the city, as Williams and so many other bicyclists (and car critics) would have it, but it necessarily “forces a different kind of interaction with the world.”65 louis Mendoza, who undertook a cross-country bicycle trip to research immigration and the “latinoization” of the United States, suggests that this mode of interaction is “not always better . . . but that may well be the point.”66 indeed, one of the reasons why bike riders are so passionate about bicycling, and by extension so excited about the idea of a bike culture in development, is because traveling outside of the cage—a term that motorcycle riders and some Massers use for the car—is seen as a point of entrée to a less mediated experience of the world that is precisely not predetermined or mundane.67 Bicycling, in this sense, is quite literally a way of exposing oneself to “the social,” and of embracing what Jen petersen calls the “dialectical relationship with urbanity.”68 That is to say, riding a bike can cultivate a keen awareness of not only one’s right to the city but also one’s right to be produced by the city.

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Jeff Ferrell speaks to the latter aspect of this intervention: putting ourselves and our bicycles on the line, confronting automotive dominance through direct action, we invent the impossible: an island of safety, calm, and conversation in the middle of a busy street. and, in fine reflexive fashion, we inhabit this island with talk of Critical Mass rides in other cities, strategies for surviving encounters with motorists, sabotage in the workplace, anarchist history, and other subversions.70 at their best, such moments are likened to a temporary autonomous zone (TaZ), which Hakim Bey (aka peter lamborn Wilson) defines as “an uprising which does not engage directly with the State: a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhere, before the State can crush it.”71 Within this literal or metaphorical domain, the typical norms governing a material or social space are reworked for a brief moment in time, in the same way Mikhail Bakhtin envisioned the “free and familiar contact” of the carnival.72 One of the obvious problems posed by a political reading of the TaZ is that temporary moments of resistance do not do anything politically, as it were, much less provide a sustainable model for widespread mobilization. Murray Bookchin’s scathing denunciation of “lifestyle anarchism,” for example, takes issue with Hakim Bey’s paradigm for precisely this reason: like an andy Warhol “happening,” a TaZ is a passing event, a momentary orgasm, a fleeting expression of the “will to power” that is, in fact, conspicuously powerless in its capacity to leave any imprint on the individual’s personality, subjectivity, and even self-formation, still less on shaping events and reality. . . .

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He writes, “The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. it cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.” Murray Bookchin, whose work is also heavily influenced by Karl Marx, makes a similar point: “City planning is an expression of mistrust in the spontaneity of contemporary social relations, and for good reason. Bourgeois society divides virtually all spheres of life against each other; it universalizes competition, profit, and the primacy of exchange value over mutual aid, art, and utility.”

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Echoing an ancient Aryanist theme, Reich added that “the forest is where they come from, it is the place where they feel closest to themselves, it is renewal. Nature is not some foreign element. Nature is them.”37 However, the thinker who ultimately separated ecological pessimism from its blood-and-soil associations and turned it into a pillar of the New Left was Murray Bookchin. An admirer of the nineteenth-century anarchist tradition and a close student of earlier antitechnic critics such as Lewis Mumford and Paul Goodman, Bookchin embraced Marcuse’s idea that postscarcity society represented a profoundly new and dangerous development for civilization. In 1966 Bookchin published Crisis of the Cities, in which he predicted that America’s industrial cities were spreading “like a rampant cancer” into the hinterland, destroying wilderness, agricultural land, and waterways.

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“The modern Western self,” Naess explained, “is defined as an isolated ego striving narrowly for hedonistic gratification or … individual salvation in this life or the next.” This false self-image “robs us of the beginning of our search for our unique spiritual/biological personhood” through oneness with nature.41 Murray Bookchin’s The Modern Crisis pointed to the challenge of bringing to heel modern man’s “market society and the vicious mentality it breeds.” Pollution, industrial degradation of the environment, acid rain, global warming, and nuclear militarism on a massive scale were all the egregious products of Western capitalism.

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As Dave Foreman puts it, “I think that the role of an avant garde group is to throw out ideas that are objected to as absurd or ridiculous at first, but end up trickling into the mainstream and becoming more accepted over time.” This had been the case with the Gaia thesis, which radicals now frown on as being too human-friendly.76 This extremism has raised the ire of more pacific figures like Murray Bookchin, who has accused Earth First! of indulging in “eco-fascism.”77 On the other hand, the German Greens have condoned violence “against objects”—such as animal rights groups throwing paint on fur coats—as part of civil disobedience. In 1990 Earth First! activists tore down electricity towers in central California as part of their “monkey-wrenching” protest against Earth Day (the symbol of environmental humanism).

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak

Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

If the wishful paradigm that sparked discussion of issues like these was a somewhat romanticized neoprimitivism, that may be of less intellectual im- portance than the quality of the ideas that soon found currency within this unlikely public of dissenting and dropped-out middle class youth. For these in- cluded the human-scaled economics (sometimes quaintly called the "Buddhist economics") of E.F. Schumacher, the communitarian philosophy of Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin, the feminist in- surgency of the women's movement, the convivial social theories of Ivan Illych, the ecological poetics 10 of Gary Snyder, human humanistic and so many the manifold insights of the potential psychologies. Like tributaries, these currents of thought at last flowed into the environmental movement of the early seventies, which survives as the most durable offshoot of countercultural protest.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Alexis Madrigal, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011), 124–125. 53. Ibid., 125. 54. Ibid., 87. 55. Ibid., 92–126. 56. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York & London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1954), 14. 57. Murray Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999), 18–19, 91. 58. Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: New Press, 1992), 193. 59. Barry Commoner, Crossroads: Environmental Priorities for the Future (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1988), 146. 60. Ibid., 182. 61. Amory B.

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The key to ending humankind’s alienation from nature, the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued in 1954, was for societies to use unreliable, not reliable, renewables. He condemned hydroelectric dams, which created large reservoirs of water that allowed for energy to be created whenever humans needed it. By contrast, he praised windmills.56 In 1962, American socialist writer Murray Bookchin denounced cities for spreading over the countryside like a rampant “cancer” and praised renewables as an opportunity for bringing land and city into a “synthesis of man and nature.” Bookchin recognized that his proposal “conjures up an image of cultural isolation and social stagnation, of a journey backward in history to the agrarian societies of the medieval and ancient worlds.”

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Asked to explain this odd name, Verily’s CEO Andy Conrad said it had been chosen because ‘only through the truth are we going to defeat Mother Nature’. Two Rise of the Juggernaut Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Murray Bookchin I still remember when I first learned about the history of capitalism in school. It was a happy story that started with the invention of the steam engine in the eighteenth century and worked its way through a parade of technological innovations, from the flying shuttle all the way up to the personal computer.

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I’ve also learned from and been inspired by the writings of many others: Silvia Federici, Jason Moore, Andreas Malm, Naomi Klein, Kevin Anderson, Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor, Vandana Shiva, Arturo Escobar, George Monbiot, Herman Daly, Kate Aronoff, Robert Macfarlane, Abdullah Öcalan, Ariel Salleh, David Wallace-Wells, Nnimmo Bassey, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Timothy Morton, Daniel Quinn, Carolyn Merchant, Vijay Prashad, David Harvey, Maria Mies, Gustavo Esteva, André Gorz, Serge Latouche, Bill McKibben, Jack D. Forbes, Philippe Descola, David Abrams, Kofi Klu, Bruno Latour, Suzanne Simard, Murray Bookchin, and Ursula Le Guin. Their works have been signposts along the way. But this list only barely scratches the surface. And I cannot leave out the towering figures whose words – and lives – I find myself returning to over and over again, for grounding and direction: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Sankara, Berta Cáceres, Mahatma Gandhi, Patrice Lumumba, Samir Amin.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Instead of arguing for simple technological fixes such as speed limiters in every automobile, which Europe has made mandatory for all new vehicles in 2022, or vastly improving public transit to get more people out of cars, their solutions are not just to keep people in cars, but to encourage more automobile use with a range of increasingly ridiculous proposals that avoid the fact that mass automobility and the desire for vehicles to move as fast as possible are central parts of the problem. While this is frustrating, and far from helpful, it is not surprising. In 1978, then-anarchist Murray Bookchin gave a speech where he described the language of futurism and of electronics as “the language of manipulation.”13 Bookchin argued that these powerful figures dreaming up big ideas for the future of humanity did not think critically about how society had arrived at its contemporary point and whether the social relations of the time were working for most people.

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Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World, Grove Press, 1986, Theanarchist library.com. 9 Ibid. 10 Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Rant about ‘Technology’,” Ursula K. Le Guin (blog), 2004, Ursulakleguinarchive.com. 11 Ibid. 12 Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, Verso Books, 2018, p. 46. 13 Murray Bookchin, “Utopia, Not Futurism: Why Doing the Impossible Is the Most Rational Thing We Can Do,” lecture at Toward Tomorrow Fair in Amherst, Massachusetts, trans. Constanze Huther, October 2, 2019 [August 24, 1978], Unevenearth.org. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ben Fried, “How Paris Is Beating Traffic without Congestion Pricing,” Streetsblog USA, April 22, 2008, Usa.streetsblog.org. 17 Laura Bliss, “Los Angeles Passed a Historic Transit Tax.

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The moral vacuum of the counterculture disturbed religious radicals, such as Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, the Catholic Worker leader Dorothy Day, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, as well as stalwarts from the decimated Communist Party and old anarchists such as Dwight Macdonald and Murray Bookchin. The transition from street protester to grant applicant was, as Bookchin noted sourly, not hard, given the moral vacuum in the New Left. “Radical politics in our time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, carbumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies and finally, the knee-bent, humble plea for small reforms,” Bookchin wrote:in short, the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary project in history. . . .

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“On the Air,” New American Review 10 (August 1970), 20. 2 Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 47-48. 3 Sharon Smith, Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 216-217. 4 Murray Bookchin, Towards an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 11-12. 5 Irving Howe, “The Age of Conformity,” 151. 6 Ibid., 152. 7 Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage, 1988), 132. 8 Ibid., 135. 9 Eva Cockroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 132. 10 Carol Becker, Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender and Anxiety (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 9. 11 Alan Magee, interview, New York, March 30, 2010. 12 Rob Shetterly, interview, New York, July 11, 2010. 13 Ben Fulton, “Calling on artists to lead the way; Fine arts: Columbia University dean Carol Becker to speak at U,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 27, 2010. 14 C.

Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

Still others have shown the capacity for grassroots movements to influence national policy, like the citizens’ assembly in Ireland which initiated the national referendum that overturned the country’s longstanding ban on access to abortion. Much has been written on the theoretical foundations of democratic localism, from Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution to Murray Bookchin, whose ideas were taken up in the democratic federalism of Rojava. The recent achievements of collectivist movements rooted in neighbourhoods and communities all over the world demonstrate that community wealth-building and local decision-making are not just a theory, but a proven practical strategy which shows how alternative ways of living and working can be developed through a variety of approaches.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

As many countries have adopted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, national emissions have usually continued to rise despite the increased efficiency. A STEADY-STATE ECONOMY It is clear that we have to move to something more like the steady-state economy first proposed by economist Herman Daly.347 But how do we do that when, as Murray Bookchin, the American social ecologist and libertarian philosopher, said, ‘Capitalism can no more be “persuaded” to limit growth than a human being can be “persuaded” to stop breathing’?348 When Daly developed the concept of a steady-state economy people were more concerned about using up the earth’s finite mineral and agricultural resources than they were with global warming.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

(This was a troubling arrangement for Turkey, whose rulers have spent decades suppressing Kurdish insurgencies inside their borders.) The Kurds, at last out of Damascus’s reach, declared their new regime in 2012, among the ruins left from the ISIS occupation and subsequent liberation. They professed a doctrine of “democratic confederalism,” derived from the ideas of US philosopher Murray Bookchin, as synthesized by Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan from his jail cell in Turkey. It’s a system meant to render the nation-state obsolete through overlapping networks of local “communes.” Gender equality, environmentalism, and ethnic pluralism are celebrated, and the police—while perhaps necessary for a time as the war goes on—are designed for eventual abolition.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

I should note here that the first mass use of consensus process, in the antinuclear movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was often quite rocky—partly out of simple lack of experience, partly out of purism (it was only later that modified consensus for larger groups came into common use)—and many who went through the experience, most famously libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, who promoted the idea of communalism, came out strongly against consensus and for majority rule. b One does sometimes worry that the Gouverneur Morrises of the world have ultimately been successful in preventing such knowledge from reaching most of the population. c It wouldn’t have to be based on a system of strict consensus, by the way, since, as we’ll see, absolute consensus is unrealistic in large groups—let alone on a planetary scale!

Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centre right, feminist movement, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, information retrieval, language acquisition, machine translation, means of production, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Norman Mailer, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strong AI, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, theory of mind, Yom Kippur War

The values, the intellectual rigor, and the concern for emancipatory movements that pervade the many works of both men testify to their tenacity and integrity as intellectuals and individuals. They inspired one another. Russell Jacoby does not mention Harris in his work The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, but what he says about Chomsky, Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman, and Isaac Rosenfeld could be applied equally to Harris: "to the extent that they are anarchists, they distrust large institutions, the state, the university, and its functionaries. They are less vulnerable to the corruptions of title and salary because their resistance is moral, almost instinctual."

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Well, consider an alternative like usufruct, which is sometimes advocated in alternative economics circles. The idea is that nobody ‘owns’ the land, but that individuals can have the right to its ‘fruit’. In other words, you can farm the land and make your living from its produce. Usufruct is, in Murray Bookchin’s words: ‘the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used. Function, in effect, replaces our hallowed concept of possession.’24 The problem lies with the ‘as long as they are being used’ because it leaves unclear who gets to decide what counts as appropriate use.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; William Leiss, The Domination of Nature, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1974; Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1973; Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1990; Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts, Global Political Ecology, New York, Routledge, 2011; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

There is clearly a paradox here. If participation is really what matters, and material goods provide a language to facilitate that, then richer societies ought to show more evidence of it. But the very opposite appears to be the case, and has been for some time. Writing over 40 years ago, the ecologist Murray Bookchin suggested that modern society had already reached ‘a degree of anonymity, social atomization and spiritual alienation that is virtually unprecedented in human history’. And at the turn of this millennium, the sociologist Robert Putnam documented the extent of this collapse of community in his provocative book Bowling Alone.6 For years before the financial crisis, modern Western society was already in the grip of a social recession.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

“Some day, political conservatism will once again be defined as contented living within limits,” he wrote in 1993.53 Thus environmentalism united enemies of capitalism and the Western ideal of freedom from otherwise mutually antagonistic ideologies. Anarchists were other foes of capitalism who founded environmentalism. The aim of the anarchist movement, Murray Bookchin wrote in an extraordinarily prophetic 1964 essay, was a stateless, decentralized society based on communal ownership of the means of production. Burning fossil fuels showed modern man’s disruptive role. The amount of carbon dioxide had increased by thirteen percent since the Industrial Revolution.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

To better understand the reasons why this failure occurred, we will then consider some more successful expansions of early farming populations in Africa, Oceania and the tropical lowlands of South America. Historically speaking, there is no direct connection among these cases; but what they show, collectively, is how the fate of early farming societies often hinged less on ‘ecological imperialism’ than on what we might call – to adapt a phrase from the pioneer of social ecology, Murray Bookchin – an ‘ecology of freedom’.17 By this we mean something quite specific. If peasants are people ‘existentially involved in cultivation’,18 then the ecology of freedom (‘play farming’, in short) is precisely the opposite condition. The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death.