Lifestyle Anarchism

At one extreme of anarchism is an ideology that focuses overwhelmingly on the individual, supports personal autonomy, and advances a rather substantive concept of liberty. This anarchism celebrates the notion of liberty. Lifestyle Anarchists believe liberty and autonomy can be achieved by making changes in personal sensibilities and lifeways. Many lifestyle anarchists eagerly plunge into direct actions that are ostensibly intended to achieve socialistic goals. Many social anarchists, in turn, sympathize with the rebellious impulses celebrated by lifestyle anarchists.

It could be validly argued that lifestyle and politics go together; that changes in lifestyle do not necessarily entail the surrender of revolution --lifestyle anarchism is growing at the expense of rational theory and serious organization: social anarchism loses the nerve and resoluteness, not to speak of the theory, intelligence, and flexibility, necessary to create a revolutionary movement.

Social anarchism is often eclipsed on the Left by reform-oriented social-democratic and liberal ideologies, while lifestyle anarchism emerges as the embodiment of anarchism par excellence. During these periodsLifestyle Anarchists, with their exaggerated hostility to conventional lifeways, come to the foreground, constituting a revolutionary threat to the status quo.

When the rebellious 1960s bubbled up after a decade of social quiescence and numbing mediocrity, lifestyle anarchism enjoyed great popularity among the countercultural elements. Lifestyle anarchists moved increasingly to the fore as the predominant expression of anarchism.

Lifestyle anarchism, in effect, eats away at the traditions, ideas, and visions upon which anarchism as a socialist movement rests and that form its point of departure, its growing influence threatens to derail anarchism.

Free Anarchy (as distinguished from that lowly ideology "anarchism") from the Great Bookchin Conspiracy!

On David Watson

I find four basic tenets that he is promoting--each of which, if adopted by anarchists, would radically remove anarchism from the realm of Enlightenment thought

For many years, Watson has sharply rejected civilization. Thus, he told us in 1991: "Civilization is coming to be regarded . . . as a maladaption of the species, a false turn or a kind of fever threatening the planetary web of life" (CIB, p. 10). It has been little more than "a labor camp from its origins" (CIB, p. 12); it is "a machine, an organization," "a rigid pyramid of crushing hierarchies," "a grid expanding the territory of the inorganic" (CIB, p. 12). Its "railroad leads not only to ecocide, but to evolutionary suicide" (CIB, p. 13).

Nor is it merely one or several aspects of civilization that exhibits these qualities: it is civilization as such. In 1988 he wrote that civilization is "destructive in its essence to nature and humanity" (HDDE, p. 3). In 1984 he wrote that we must be "willing to confront the entirety of this civilization and reclaim our humanity" (SDT, p. 11).

The history of humanity, hunting-gathering societies existed far longer than the societies that followed the rise of written history. Obviously, man could be described as a highly destructive parasite who threatens to destroy his host--the natural world--and eventually himself.

Civilization as such must either be accepted or rejected in its entirely.

The idea of progress is merely a cover-up for the sins of civilization.

The good that civilization offers is merely a veil for its evils.

We want to equate dialectics with chaos! In a forest ecocommunity, for example, all species may affect all others, however trivially. The natural world is intrinsically neither moral nor immoral, valuable nor valueless.

What could we learn from the history of a "civilization" that is nothing but a forced labor camp?

Even science, we learn, has not given us knowledge. Science can't tell us much of anything at all. Scientific evidence is illegitimate, causing me--and perhaps other readers--to wonder about their grip on reality. Technics, economics, politics, the military, bureaucracy, ideology, and the like are all one giant monolithic "machine," all of them so closely interrelated as to be causally indistinguishable.

So--away with the mass generation of electricity, and every machine that runs on it! Needless to say, all fossil as well as nuclear fuels will have to go.

Farewell to two centuries of political economy and debates over the nature of capitalism: over whether it is a social relation (Marx), machines and labor (Smith and Ricardo), a mere factor of production (neo-capitalist economists) or, most brilliantly, the teeth of a tiger (H. G. Wells)! Farewell to the class struggle! Farewell to an economics of social and class relations!

We would thus have to eliminate computers and telecommunications; farewell, too, to telegraphs, radios, and telephones!

If Watson's anti-Enlightenment outlook were ever to prevail among a sizable number of anarchists, then anarchism would become a self-centered, fatuous, and regressive body of nonideas that deserves contempt, if not derision, for its lack of substance and social value!

What Watson doth say, so be it!

Primitivity, for this man, is essentially a world of dancing, singing, celebrating, and dreaming. In the arts, mythopoesis is a way to sharpen and deepen human sensibility. The works of Shelley and Joyce are among the fruits of mythopoesis at its best in artistic affairs. American Indian perceptions of reality include everything sensed, felt, and dreamed. Watson, however, turns this description into a prescription, indeed into a desirable epistemology in which dream and reality are essentially indistinguishable. The presidency is not an executive office in a centralized bourgeois state but merely a metaphor or--who knows?--perhaps even a worldly illusion.

By the standards of Taoism, anyone with any spirit of resistance to the social order would be pugilistic. Either an anarchist is committed to a social war against class rule and hierarchy or anarchism has been reduced to another of the many chic fads that constitute so much of the culture of modern capitalism.

The above text was taken entirely from Murray Bookchin's chapter entitled "Whither Anarchy?" from a book he's writing/dictating. Since "Lifestyle Anarchism" seems to only exist in his (and a few other) people's minds, I figured he should be the one to define it, since it seems to occupy much of his idle time.