Like father like daughter

[alanjjohnstone]

Debbie Bookchin walks in the shoes of her dad, Murray Bookchin and as they say, the apple never falls far from the tree.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41638-radical-municipalism-the-future-we-deserve

Noble sentiments from her but, as with her father, imposing her own parameters on her political position and tactics.

[robbo203]

That is an interesting article, Alan. But Bookchin the Younger demonstrates, unfortunately,  the same kind of black-or-white thinking that Bookchin the Elder exhibited.  I'm thinking of these two paragraphs in particular: Municipalism rejects seizing state power, which we all know from the experiences of the twentieth century to be a hopeless pursuit, a dead end, because the state — whether capitalist or socialist — with its faceless bureaucracy is never truly responsive to the people. At the same time, activists must acknowledge that we won't achieve social change simply by taking our demands to the street. Large encampments and demonstrations may challenge the authority of the state, but they have not succeeded in usurping it. Those who engage only in a politics of protest or organizing on the margins of society must recognize that there will always be power — it does not simply dissolve. The question is in whose hands this power will reside: in the centralized authority of the state, or on the local level with the people.It is increasingly clear that we will never achieve the kind of fundamental social change we so desperately need simply by going to the ballot box. Social change won't occur by voting for the candidate who promises us a $15 minimum wage, free education, family leave or offers platitudes about social justice. When we confine ourselves to voting for the lesser of evils, to the bones that social democracy throws our way, we play into and support the very centralized state structure that is designed to keep us down forever. Why is it that so often on the Left, the Marxist argument for seizing the political instrument that we call the state, is just automatically and in knee jerk fashion, equated with a programme  of reforms implemented by some "faceless bureaucracy"?  This  shows a lack of imagination or readiness to think laterally and project into a future state of affairs,  if and when there is a very substantial socialist movement  that has materialised out there (without, of course, which there can be no socialism). There is no necessary reason why the democratic capture of the state as a strategy should go down the road envisaged by  Bookchin -providing it is made clear at the outset that this is not what it is being used for.  I am very sympathetic to the idea of local intiatives along the lines Bookchin suggests but I am also aware that the fundamental social change we are arguing for absolutely requires large scale coordination  backed up by large scale so-consciousness. It cannot  happen peicemeal in the systemic sense we are talking about… This, to me, is the  absolutely key advantage that the  " parliamentary road to socialism" possesses which  no other strategy seems to possses – namely its symbolic coordinating function that concentrates the wishes of a majority in a form that enables the switchover from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production to happen – and in a manner that effectively de-legitimises the moral authority of  capitalism to continue (thus reducing the prospect of destabilising violence which is not in our interests).  How else do you coordinate the changeover from private ownership to common ownership of the means  of production? This is what the opponents of the parliamentary apporach never ever explain.  It is a huge lacuna in their argument; a fatal flaw, in my opinion Perhaps it might  be worth contacting Debbie Bookchin to engage her in an exchange of ideas on precsely this point

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