TOWARD A NEW POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP
Bookchin, Murray
Toward a New Politics of Citizenship BY MURRAY BOOKCHIN It would be myopic not to see that our society is so irrational that its most fundamental premises must be challenged. I refer to the...
...They mire the public's suspicion of centralized state power, its fear of losing individual freedom, its concern over the loss of grass-roots democracy, in reactionary, proprietarian, and patriarchal values...
...We must have the courage to challenge the very premises on which the present society is structured and emphasize the need to create a caring, cooperative, nonhierarch-ical, ecologically oriented society...
...And we must recover the meaning of citizenship as rational, self-motivated behavior based on inWe must show that individuality and democracy are utterly consistent with a communitarian society...
...Our agendas can no longer be established by trying to come to terms with these irrationalities...
...Citizenship, in turn, has been degraded to the anonymous membership of the individual in passive constituencies, notably as taxpayers, who are consumers of public services provided by bureaucratic institutions...
...A new politics of citizenship...
...He is the author of many books and articles on ecological issues and is director emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont...
...Notions of civic virtue and the ideal of a truly communitarian commonwealth must form the guidelines of our new political life...
...If Develop a new Left...
...His most recent work is "The Philosophy of Social Ecology...
...We must instill in the political realm a new sense of dignity, militancy, and public self-empowerment based on confederated neighborhood groups and townships...
...An ecological society and sensibility...
...I refer to the problems of mindless economic growth, massive social inequities, widespread public disempower-ment, and an almost apocalyptic clash between humanity and the natural world...
...We must advance a coherent body of ideas showing the interrelationships among a grow-or-die economy, competition, the profligate waste of resources in the interests of the few, the afflictions suffered by Third World people, and our own denied communities, on the one hand, and the widespread damage being inflicted on the planet—indeed, on the human spirit—on the other...
...We must recover the meaning of politics in its original Hellenic sense as the self-management of the polis or community by the people...
...The New Left of the 1990s must educate the public in the social roots of our growing ecological problems...
...It must begin to lay the groundwork for such a society in our neighborhoods, cities, and towns, structured in a way that avoids narrow parochialism and counteracts the overbearing power of the nation-state...
...Conservative movements have outflanked liberals and leftists...
...At a time when so many people are turning to personal solutions, New Age mysticism, and nature romanticism to cope with our ecological dislocations, we must be able to show that our major ecological problems have their roots in social problems—and that the best way to deal with them is on a societal level and not merely a personal one...
...11 Reclaim basic libertarian values from the Right...
...Murray Bookchin, a trade-union activist in the 1930s and 1940s, participated in the civil-rights movement, the New Left, and the community movements of the 1960s...
...A Left demonstrating that individuality, community, and democracy are utterly consistent with a communitarian society must emerge...
...stitutionally empowered people...
...Politics in our day has been degraded to mere statecraft in which bureaucratic parties, composed of professional politicians, duel for power...
...A Left that goes beyond all the traditional "isms" and reconstructs a way to achieve cooperative social relationships based on human needs and the needs of the non-human world must be developed if we are to arrest the growth of corporate power and state centralization...
...One of the most disquieting features of our time is that there is no Left in the United States...
...Much that passes for radicalism today is hardly distinguishable from 1930s liberalism...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
