I'm a Bookchinite, and nobody has a right to claim that but me.
I believe in a libertarian communist society.
Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort - in effect, she supported military conscription.
I would like to see a critical mass of very gifted anarchists come together in an appropriate place in order to do highly productive work. That's it. I don't know why that can't be done except for the fact that I think that people mistrust their own ideals today. I don't think that they don't believe in them; I think they mistrust the viability of them. They're afraid to commit themselves to their ideals.
I got deeply involved with the Trotskyists. I assumed simply that my enemy's enemies were my friends.
I went through the communist children's movement at the age of nine, in 1930, and into the Young Communist League in 1936. The Spanish civil war brought me back. I'd already broken with the communists - or the Stalinists, more precisely - in 1935. But the civil war in Spain and the desire to aid the remarkable people struggling against Fascism brought me back to the Young Communist League, so that I could effectively participate, however far removed from Spain, in their struggle. By 1938 I was ready to be expelled. By 1939 I was expelled.
I was raised as a red diaper baby.
I don't feel the individualist anarchists, particularly in the American tradition, including the Transcendental tradition of New England, in any way deserve the derogatory comments that are often made about them by the left. When one gets down to it ultimately, my anarcho-communism stems from a commitment to true individuality. My attempt to recover the power and the right of the individual to control his or her life and destiny is the basis to my anarcho-communism.
I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.
Whether they [left in America are] anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.
We don't have to go around as the Protestant reformation did, or as the socialist revolution did, and execute each other as soon as we are successful - assuming we'll ever be successful.
I will not call myself a pacifist for the very simple reason that if something like a [Francisco] Franco should arise in Spain again, or, for that matter, in America, and tried to take away whatever dwindling civil liberties and human rights we retain, I would resist them with a club if I had to. But my admiration for pacifism as an outlook and a sensibility is enormous. I just find that it gets me into contradictions, as it often gets many pacifists into contradictory positions and strategies.
I don't want to think any longer simply in terms of the Spanish Revolution or the Russian Revolution. It doesn't make any sense to talk [Peter] Makhno to an American.
I have been criticized for pointing out that anarchism is likely to flourish more easily, at least in the western world, and to a certain extent in eastern Europe, in those areas where there is either grim need or considerable technological development.
Take a very striking case in point: the Russian Bolsheviks. [Vladimir] Lenin created an alleged workers' party, which in every way reflected the Czarist machine, in order to deal with Czarism. And the danger and the hazards of trying to accommodate libertarian principles to the political process as we know it today is that one begins to dissolve the libertarian principles. So I would say that there is an inconsistency there that should be explored.
I'm not sitting in judgment on whether or not libertarians can participate in a political process whose very nature they oppose.
I will never compromise - I can now say with assurance at the age of 57 - with my libertarian and my revolutionary commitments; they'll have to kill me first. They can't buy me out. I'm just not interested in what they have to offer. I've managed to stick it out, and the thing that has been the most rescuing, the most redeeming, feature of my life that has kept me alive, that has kept me more or less single-minded about my commitment to libertarian ideals once I escaped the trap of Marxist-Leninism - a childhood trap, to be sure - has been consciousness.
I believe that there has to be an ideal and I favour an ethical anarchism which can be cohered into an ideal.
My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life.
I've worked in the factories of this land, and I've thought freely and creatively. And I think that that has greatly enriched my capacity to abstract intellectually. The experience of being with workers, my encounters with management and my recognition of its foibles, my personal encounters with American industrial efficiency, my military experience - all of these things packaged together have greatly enriched my reading and my understanding, and I've written with what I hope is a reasonable fluency of style that is much more expressive than the academic stuff.
I've developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments.
I've had training in electronics engineering, of all things, and in languages. But I've never taken any degree, something I share with Lewis Mumford, I think.
In The Ecology of Freedom, my critique of what is called civilization and industrial society is massive, and my attack upon [Karl] Marx's commitment to it as a necessary stage in human progress and the domination of nature is very sharp.
