What a refreshing read a great majority of this text this was. I've seen myself as an anarchist since roughly 2003, and read the most "theory" of that tendency in the five years that followed. Seeking to broaden my horizons, I have since pushed myself to read a lot from other schools of socialist thought. I made a lot of compromises with foundational tenets of anarchism to broaden my perspective of liberatory politics, in order to learn from revolutionary history that didn't exclusively include anarchist-inspired movements. It has led me to make apologetics for a lot of things I fundamentally oppose. It was good to have some of those cobwebs cleared away by Bookchin's writing, which describes worlds closer to a world I want to live in. I too, "increasingly compromised [my] ideal of freedom, painfully qualifying it with transitional stages and political expediencies." We see historical models of revolution form total human freedom into practical models of assembly that degrade into councils of representation, and then to appointed executive committees and finally to autocratic dictatorship. Those who remember fondly fallen autocrats confuse the later stages of these painful qualifiers with the earliest sparks of liberatory potential.

I had to slow my reading down to comprehend a lot of the text by highlighting phrases, paragraphs even, that resonated with me. The introductions especially are littered with these. They're about as useful as the body of the text itself, infinitely moreso than the long stretches of paragraphs describing mining techniques (hoo boy don't tell 1960s Bookchin about mountaintop removal mining) or outdated engine functions, lol. Concieving of liberated human society as in harmony with the natural world rather than against it is beautiful and the longing for the richness of fully self-actualized persons is compelling. I strongly identify with the holistic definition of anarchism as "not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes man [sic] to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood [sic], to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship."

There is a theoretical gap I have trouble bridging in my head: the preconditions of the post-scarcity society and the necessity to disperse those preconditions in order to live in a liberated society that Bookchin says is predicated on that post-scarcity. We have so much meat, for example, because we have hyperexploited usually undocumented workers in factory farms in which animals are imprisoned for life and pumped full of antibiotics and feed generated on monocropped farms over graded and clear-cut rainforest, and every part of this process occurs half a world away from the next part. A globalized uniform system of brutal exploitation got us over the tyranny of want and now our central contradiction is "what is" vs "what could be." We may very well have to reckon with the return of scarcity and the primacy of justice (distribution of means of or preconditions to life) over freedom (the life worth living) as we pull apart the empire to disperse into our federated assemblies and communes.

I count myself, I suppose, among the people Bookchin describe as "divided into a gnawing fear of nuclear extinction on the one hand and a yearning for material abundance, leisure and security on the other." Can technology bridge the gap between what is and what could be? How much can we loot and pilfer from our shitty actually existing society to make abundance not dependent on the brutal system that Bookchin himself understands is unsustainable? What of the widespread use of technology to make our world smaller and worse: of smart refrigerators and Spotify that listens to your conversations to recommend music, of the reintroduction of scarcity through denial of right-to-repair or our society restructuring itself around opaque social media algorithms... ( )

I read this shortly after the energy crisis started in the 1970s, so it seemed very dated and utopian. However, Bookchin is a great person to read for well-thought out utopias. If you ignore the "we can do this right now" tone, there are many interesting ideas in this book. ( )