Spencer Beswick on Nostr: I'm re-reading Bookin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism and really appreciating his openness ...
I'm re-reading Bookin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism and really appreciating his openness to what he calls "utopian lifestyle," which he says "is indispensable in preserving the integrity of the revolutionary." So different from his later polemics against "lifestyle anarchism"!
"In the very act of refusing to live by bourgeois strictures, the first seeds of the utopian lifestyle are planted. Negation passes into affirmation; the rejection of the present becomes the assertion of the future within the rotting guts of capitalism itself. 'Dropping out' becomes a mode of dropping in—into the tentative, experimental, and as yet highly ambiguous, social relations of Utopia. Taken as an end in itself, this lifestyle is not utopia; indeed, it may be woefully incomplete.
Taken as a means, however, this lifestyle and the processes leading to it are indispensable in remaking the revolutionary, in awakening his sensibilities to how much must be changed if the revolution is to be complete. The lifestyle is indispensable in preserving the integrity of the revolutionary, in providing him with the psychic resources to resist the subversion of the revolutionary project by bourgeois values."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book
"In the very act of refusing to live by bourgeois strictures, the first seeds of the utopian lifestyle are planted. Negation passes into affirmation; the rejection of the present becomes the assertion of the future within the rotting guts of capitalism itself. 'Dropping out' becomes a mode of dropping in—into the tentative, experimental, and as yet highly ambiguous, social relations of Utopia. Taken as an end in itself, this lifestyle is not utopia; indeed, it may be woefully incomplete.
Taken as a means, however, this lifestyle and the processes leading to it are indispensable in remaking the revolutionary, in awakening his sensibilities to how much must be changed if the revolution is to be complete. The lifestyle is indispensable in preserving the integrity of the revolutionary, in providing him with the psychic resources to resist the subversion of the revolutionary project by bourgeois values."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book