I love encountering my boy Bookchin in the wild :)

For the unfamiliar, he was a libertarian communist organizer, philosopher, and author who repeatedly found himself disillusioned with and disappointed by ideologies that weren’t ready for his consistent and critical ethics. One of his more minor yet possibly most controversial opinions later in life was a rejection of what he felt was a “dogmatic” adherence to consensus-based (100% complete agreement) decision making within all anarchist contexts. He argued this is often a straightjacket on material progress, is highly susceptible to the corruption of charismatic individuals, and can function as blinders that undermine or erode groups into disbanding. He spent a lot of time studying self-governing polities through history and working in them himself, and advocated for a “right tool for the job” approach to consensus-finding in communal meetings. This included democratic-style voting, especially when the decision being made is a procedural function or opinion poll rather than a final outcome. He thought a lot about consensus-finding mechanisms and when each method can be most effectively utilized to not only synthesize the desires of all participants, but do it in a practical and joyful way. Still, this experience and advocacy combined with his previous warnings against ecofascism within anarchism, led a cohort of outspoken anarchists to basically self-report as the exact dogmatic, charismatic, ecofascist types he had described as they began an extended smear campaign against him in magazines and essays. Their primary argument: That because Bookchin advocated for democracy at all, in any context, that he could not possibly be an anarchist. That by calling himself an anarchist he was essentially stealing valor from anarchy. He fought a civil war with these people in essay and debate for several years before being overwhelmed by disgust at how much of his energy they’d wasted. Eventually he said fine, fuck you, I’m not an anarchist. You can go ruin the idea of anarchism, I’m now a communalist. Or maybe a municipalist. Or fuck it, maybe a democratic confederalist (He corresponded at length with the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who inspired the Kurds to follow a governance model based in Bookchin’s ideas).

/leftywalloftext

His fictional inspiration.