[Click Here to Read “Listen, Marxist!” by Murray Bookchin]
I wrote the introduction to Listen, Marxist! that follows below for a 1988 reprint edition distributed by the Left Green Network in the early years of the American Green Party movement. We organized the Left Green Network to provide a welcoming place for people from the radical left at a time when anti-left liberals in the burgeoning Green Party movement were red-baiting leftists and trying to exclude us.
That is not an issue in today’s Green Party where most members envision some kind of radically democratic post-capitalist society. What remains an issue today is something we debated within the Left Green Network in the 1980s and 1990s. Which radical tradition should guide the Green Party? Marxism? Anarchism? A bioregional communitarianism? These alternatives have been the subject of a recent lively debate on the discussion list of the National Committee of the Green Party of the United States in June and July 2025.
So Listen, Marxist! and this introduction remains relevant to current debates. Murray Bookchin’s Listen, Marxist!, with its provocative and playful cover of Bugs Bunny winking at you next to somber portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, was directed mainly at deflating the SDSers who had recently and instantly converted to Marxist-Leninism and whose competing factions would splinter SDS into oblivion at its June 1969 convention where the pamphlet was distributed.
The polemical essay that is Listen, Marxist! aside, Murray’s regard for Marx was actually respectful. I heard him say many times in discussions we had in the 1980s that “Marx was a fucking genius, all right, but he didn’t get everything right.” Murray had on his bookshelves all 50 volumes of the collected works of Marx and Engels published in the US in cheap editions by International Publishers. He had read through them twice and told me was was doing it again in the 1990s. He knew Marx as thoroughly as any academic Marx scholar.
Murray believed there was much of value in Marx’s theories that we should carry forward, including his analyses of exploitation, alienation, commodity fetishism, and the economic dynamics of capitalism, notably its structural imperative toward endless growth that is destroying the ecological foundations of human society. Where Murray was critical of Marx was in his views of the working class as the revolutionary agent and on the post-revolutionary forms of governance.
As I note in the introduction below, Murray believed a classless society would not be created by the working class and a workers state, but by declassed revolutionaries leading a popular movement of people who were dissolving as classes into an egalitarian grassroots democracy anchored in popular assemblies. Murray’s reading of the history of the working class, influenced his own experiences working in the steel and auto industries, saw the industrial working class adapting to capitalism. He noted that the first generation of industrial workers coming from agrarian and artisanal backgrounds tended to be radical because they resisted losing control over their skills and the pace of work to the assembly line. But subsequent generations tended to fight for a better deal within capitalism, not for a new system beyond capitalism. They tended to support New Deal or social democratic regulations and public services within capitalism, but not a radical movement toward the full economic democracy of socialism.
Murray also rejected the class reductionism of Marxism. He emphasized that there was more to oppression than economic class exploitation. Social hierarchies based on age, gender, and ethnicity preceded class societies. They would have to be directly confronted along with class exploitation to have a truly free society. He emphasized that resistance to racism and colonialism, and to sexism and homophobia, and mobilizations around the trans-class issues of peace and the environment, had become the driving forces in the anti-systemic movements of the late 20th century.
When it came to the post-revolutionary forms of governance, Murray was firmly in the anarchist tradition as opposed to the Marxist tradition. He was committed to the anarchists’ vision of a federation of directly democratic communities as opposed to the Marxists’ vision of a centralized state with indirect representative democracy.
Murray hoped that the American left could build upon the directly democratic heritage of the New England town meetings that were wellsprings of the American Revolution. He hoped the left would pursue a radical municipalism or communalism that would build a popular counter-power that could ultimately replace the centralized state and giant corporations. Little did he anticipate that his ideas would be first put into practice by a mass revolutionary movement in Rojava, the Kurdish region of northern Syria, where they call their vision democratic confederalism. Murray learned of this movement toward the end of his life when Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party that was beginning to put his ideas into practice, corresponded with Murray.
As for Lenin, Murray had a picture of him on his wall. He vehemently opposed Lenin on the idea of a vanguard party with democratic centralism, seeing that model of revolutionary organization leading to a repressive state once in power. He agreed with Rosa Luxemburg in her polemics against Lenin’s position on the right of nations to self-determination on the grounds that it undermined the internationalist character that the revolutionary movement needed to replace global capitalism. But he admired Lenin for his revolutionary commitment. Lenin’s picture reminded him of the focus and dogged persistence that revolutionaries need to foster in a revolutionary movement.
Thanks to Steve Welzer for scanning and digitizing my introduction to Listen, Marxist!
– Howie Hawkins, July 23, 2025
Introduction to Murray Bookchin’s “Listen, Marxist!”
By Howard Hawkins
February 1988
Murray Bookchin’s “Listen, Marxist!” was first distributed as an unsigned Anarchos pamphlet at the tumultuous and last convention of Students for Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago in June 1969. Another statement drafted by Bookchin, “Toward a Post-Scarcity Society: The American Perspective and S.D.S.,” is appended below. It was also distributed at the June 1969 SDS convention as an unsigned Resolution of the Radical Decentralist Project.
“Listen, Marxist!” has had a profound influence in orienting many ‘60s New Left activists and subsequent generations of radicals toward the pitfalls of sectarian Marxism and toward the need for a new and coherent radical perspective appropriate to our time. More than 100,000 copies of “Listen, Marxist!” have been produced and distributed since 1969 in English. It has also been translated and distributed by radicals in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and other languages. It is still having an impact. In 1986, radical Solidarity activists produced a translation for underground distribution in Poland.
Probably the most fruitful impact of “Listen, Marxist!” has been its influence on the left-wing of West Germany’s SDS, a movement that fed into the emergence of the Greens. Among those who have acknowledged the influence of this essay on their political development are key activists in the left wing of the West German Greens, including the “radical ecologist” Jutta Ditfurth, an official national speaker for the West German Greens, and the ex-Maoist Thomas Ebermann, a leader of the so-called “eco-socialists” in Hamburg and an official speaker for the Greens’ parliamentary fraction.
The style and language of “Listen, Marxist!” and the Radical Decentralist Project’s Resolution capture well both the passion with which politics was debated in the late 60s and the high utopian aspirations of the New Left and counterculture. With Bugs Bunny winking out at us amidst the severe portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the cover of “Listen, Marxist!” expresses the irreverence that the New Left and counterculture had toward the Old Left as well as The Establishment. It exemplifies the New Left at its best: neither reformist nor authoritarian, but libertarian, populist, and radical. And it does what few writings addressed to the New Left did—it places the movement of the “generation of ’68” in its historical context in relation to both earlier revolutionary movements and the development of more statist forms of capitalism.
The use of masculine gender will grate today’s ear, but that was still the convention in 1969. But as Bookchin explained in introducing the publication of “Listen, Marxist!” in his collection of essays entitled Post-Scarcity Anarchism, “I must apologize for using the masculine gender. In the absence of substitutes … my wording would have been awkward. Our language must also be liberated.”[1] The ‘60s did change some things.
One dimension of the ‘60s that both “Listen, Marxist!” and the Radical Decentralist Project’s Resolution express especially well is the qualitatively new society that the New Left and counterculture believed was possible. As the Resolution declared:
The twentieth century is the heir of human history—the legacy of man’s age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity . . . We have opened the prospect of man’s development from an elemental mass, bitterly divided by economic conflict, racism, imperialism, war, privilege, and class interests, into a free community of creative beings, each the master of his own destiny . . . Technologically, we can now achieve man’s historical goal—post-scarcity society. But socially and culturally, we are mired in the economic relations, institutions, attitudes, and values of a barbarous past, of a social heritage created by material scarcity . . . [We are] at a point in history when the boldest concepts of utopia are realizable.
It is sometimes difficult to recall today how irrational and absurd what-existed appeared to us in the ‘60s in comparison to what-seemed-possible. The prevailing social order had lost all credibility for millions of people, especially young people. We witnessed inexcusable poverty amidst affluence. We saw naked military aggression rationalized by hypocritical officials in the Johnson and then Nixon administrations, who mouthed platitudes about democracy and self-determination while unleashing terror in Indochina. The Establishment’s rhetoric of freedom was flatly contradicted by the reality of repressive and dehumanizing relations between the races, the sexes, workers and their employers, students and their schools, youth and their parents. Urban sprawl and environmental destruction seemed totally senseless, while decentralized and ecologically balanced communities seemed perfectly feasible.
Objectively, these contradictions are even more pronounced today. But the sense of utopian possibilities that we had in the ‘60s has been shattered by almost 20 years of economic austerity and insecurity engineered by corporate and State managers, a process of class and industrial restructuring that is still underway. Not only has this restructuring turned the rising expectations of the ‘60s into a fearful scramble to maintain living standards in the ‘70s and ‘80s for most Americans. It has also affected our movements for social change. In the ‘60s every form of domination and irrationality was under question. Today’s movements, by contrast, are mostly defensive, narrowly economic, and timidly self-limiting. Yet the technological potential for an ecological and egalitarian post-scarcity society is even greater today. It is only the irrationality of commodified economic relations and hierarchical social relations that prevent the realization of a “free community of creative beings.” If reading “Listen, Marxist!” and the Radical Decentralist Project’s Resolution today conveys nothing more than the utopian outlook of 60s radicalism, it will have recaptured an important perspective for radicals today.
“Listen, Marxist!” directed its main fire at the sectarian “revolutionary” Marxist left that was destroying SDS in 1969. Marxist sects were using SDS as a recruiting ground for cadres in their own “vanguard” organizations, with very little concern for what happened to SDS as a broad and independent radical student organization. Today, the Leninist sects have largely collapsed and are less of a problem. Yet the analysis of Marxism in “Listen, Marxist!” is still very relevant to a critique of the reformist forms of Marxism that are more prevalent today in the U.S. Many Marxist tendencies are now unapologetically reformist; they style themselves as “progressive,” rather than “radical.” They function mostly as partners in coalitions with liberal Democrats, promoting an agenda of liberal reform, not fundamental change. Even most of the (ex-)Maoist groups that survive today are on the right-wing of the Rainbow Coalition. They do what they can to channel activists’ energies into the Jackson presidential campaign at the expense of organizing a Rainbow movement at the grassroots level, and to keep more radical demands out of the Rainbow’s program in order to make Jackson more acceptable to Democratic Party elites and moderate voters.
“Listen, Marxist!” is still relevant to a critique of reformist Marxism because both “revolutionary” and reformist Marxisms share the same basic Marxian scenario: the development of working class consciousness and hegemony in the movement to transform capitalism. “Listen, Marxist!” directly challenged that scenario. In this regard it was well ahead of its time. In recent years, more and more radical theorists, including such Marxist scholars as Manuel Castells and André Gunder Frank, are reaching the same conclusion.[2] It is now quite conventional for even Marxists to look to the so-called “new social movements”—people of color, women, peace, ecology, community control, and so on—as the agents of social change, often melding these definitely un-class-conscious movements into a contrived “new working class” in order to show Marx was right after all. But when “Listen, Marxist!” first appeared, almost everyone in the national leadership of SDS had recently become instant Marxists of one kind or another in response to the ideological onslaught of PL (Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group that had split off from the Communist Party a decade before at the time of the Sino-Soviet split). These activists felt the need for some sort of systematic theoretical outlook and they turned to Marxism. André Gorz’s Strategy for Labor[3] enjoyed wide circulation in SDS in this period and Gorz’s discussion of students as wage earners in training was used as a basis for the idea that students were part of a “new working class.” This idea was used to promote PL’s Worker-Student Alliance. But it was also soon used to rationalize reformist politics, the “long march through the institutions” that German SDS leader Rudi Dutschke had advanced. In the ‘70s, ex-SDS academic Marxists in such post-SDS organizations as New American Movement, which eventually dissolved into Democratic Socialists of America, turned Marxism into neo-Marxism and thus rationalized their academic careers and reform Democratic politics. Marxism, the theory of revolution by the old working class, the proletariat, now became neo-Marxism, the theory of revolution by the new working class, the professoriat.[4]
Actually, many neo-Marxist writers have taken ideas found in “Listen, Marxist!” and tried to rehabilitate Marxism by co-opting them, usually without acknowledging their anarchist origins. By doing so they have avoided the central thrust of “Listen, Marxist!”: Marxism as a theory that fundamental social change flows from the class struggle is wrong. Bookchin argues that a classless society cannot emerge from the conflict of traditional classes in a class society. To the contrary, “a social revolution can only emerge from the decomposition of the traditional classes, indeed from the emergence of an entirely new ‘class’ whose very essence is that it is a non-class, a growing stratum of revolutionaries.” In pointed opposition to the central feature of the Marxian scenario of social revolution, Bookchin argues that it is the decomposition of the old class structure, not the old class struggle, that is today preparing the ground and creating the social space for a movement that can take us beyond capitalism. Invoking Marx’s famous statement that the revolutionary movement must draw its poetry from the future and not the past, “Listen, Marxist!” calls for a recognition that Marxism is now an outdated theory. It advances an alternative theory for fundamental change which calls for the elimination of hierarchy as such, not only economic classes—a notion that has since become an integral part of feminist theory.
Not only did “Listen, Marxist!” anticipate changes in radical theory that are more widely accepted today. It also had a predictive power that is remarkable in retrospect. Few today would question that the Leninist party-building efforts that many activists turned to in the wake of the collapse of SDS were a dead-end, as “Listen, Marxist!” warned. Less immediately apparent to the reader, however, may be how Bookchin’s essay anticipated events in Portugal five years later.
In challenging the myths of the vanguard party and of working class hegemony in a revolutionary movement, Bookchin pointed out that an equal case could even be made for soldiers as a revolutionary vanguard. Ironically, five years later, the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA) in Portugal overthrew the fascist regime of Salazar in April 1974, ending Portugal’s colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau and catalyzing a popular revolutionary movement within Portugal that continued through most of 1975. This movement exhibited all the traits of social revolution that “Listen, Marxist!” analyzes historically and predicts are possible in our era. As the old regime in Portugal fell, broad sectors of the population spontaneously created their own directly democratic organizations for social self-management: Soldiers Committees, Sailors Committees, Neighborhood Committees, Workers Committees, Peasants Committees. Peasants seized the land, workers their factories, citizens their neighborhoods. Agricultural cooperatives, workers councils, and neighborhood committees confederated to coordinate economic and social administration from the bottom up. The Old Left parties—Stalinist, Maoist, Trotskyist, and social democratic alike—played the completely reactionary role that “Listen, Marxist!” predicted. Indeed, the popular movement began to call itself a “non-party” (apartidário) movement for “popular power” in reaction to the resistance it was encountering from the Old Left parties. While the Portuguese Communist Party thought it was denouncing this spontaneous popular movement for direct democracy and self-management by labeling it “anarcho-populism,” the term is actually quite apt. All of the sizeable old parties, “anti-capitalist” and capitalist alike, which were sharing cabinet posts in the succession of provisional governments set up by the MFA and were trying to bring the State back into a position of control, called for a moratorium on direct popular expropriations of landlords and capitalists until elections could be held to give such actions “legality.”
The Portuguese revolution had perhaps insurmountable obstacles to overcome in trying to consolidate “popular power” at that time. It was taking place in a small and technologically backward country and it was isolated (for example, Franco was still firmly in charge in neighboring Spain). By 1976, when presidential elections were held, the popular movement had been subdued, the people had been removed from the stage of history, and capitalism and the State were no longer being seriously challenged by a popular movement. But the analysis of “Listen, Marxist!” on the reactionary role of Marxist parties and the potential for radicalization in many strata of society in our era—not just the industrial proletariat—was supported by the experience of the Portuguese revolution.[5]
Unfortunately, “Listen, Marxist!” has yet to exercise the same influence on U.S. radicals that it has had on the left-wing of the West German Greens. In 1969, however, the potential definitely existed for a much broader New Left before SDS splintered. “Listen, Marxist!” could have provided the theoretical alternative that was needed to the moribund Marxism that so many SDS leaders had adopted. But the potential for a broad libertarian left at that time did not fulfill itself. While the presence at the last SDS convention of the “Listen, Marxist!” pamphlet and the Radical Decentralist Project has been noted in passing in histories of SDS,[6] the fate of this tendency has not been told.
The Radical Decentralist Project proposed a fundamentally different direction for SDS than that advanced by the two other major factions. One of these factions was PL which was trying to promote a Worker-Student Alliance and asked students to abandon their own concerns to support the adult working class (or at least PL’s insulting caricature of workers). The other faction was called RYM, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a tendency promoted by the National Office of SDS. Among its supporters were people who were soon to call themselves the Weathermen. The RYM/Weatherman faction also promoted the idea that students should abandon their own concerns. It wanted students to devote all their energies to mobilizing white working class youth in support of black and Third World liberation struggles.
The Radical Decentralist Project’s Resolution rejected guilt and renunciation as viable motives for a radical movement. It affirmed that students had their own stake in fundamental change, that the best way for students to act against racism, exploitation, and imperialism was for the realization of their own full humanity, a struggle that encompassed the resolution of these issues to be sure—but much more as well. The Resolution rejected the pessimistic view that the majority of Americans could not be won to a radical perspective. Instead, the Resolution proposed that SDS build upon the real concrete possibilities for fundamental change in America and particularly upon the anti-authoritarian youth revolt that was percolating through American society in the 60s. It called for student power and the transformation of the university into a liberated space open to the community:
Together with the issues of racism and the concrete expressions of American imperialism, our chapters should also deal with the authoritarian nature and structure of the university, the idiocy of grading, bourgeois ideology masquerading as education, the right of students to form their own classes (with teachers merely as consultants), the determination of campus policy by student assemblies, and ultimately to transcend the university, converting it into a liberated space, a community center in the fashion of the Sorbonne and particularly of Censier in the French revolt of May-June 1968 . . . The May-June events in France in 1968 provide almost a paradigm of how the revolutionary process can develop today in an advanced industrial country.
In reaching out to the community, the Resolution urged SDS to follow “paths of least resistance” rather than the preconceived formulas of the sectarian Marxist factions:
By “paths of least resistance” we do not mean that we should compromise our principles, modes of struggle, or goals, but simply that we should devote our main efforts to those sectors of the population most susceptible to radicalization. If these are minority groups or workers or sections of the middle classes, the energies of the chapters should be distributed to those sectors . . . The real challenge we face is whether we can deal with living issues—issues that have meaning to youth and the local community—or whether we will work with contrived preconceptions of reality and suck solutions out of an archaic body of theoretical formulas.
In dealing with how to conduct the anti-war struggle, the Resolution declared: “The best way we can help the Third World is by changing the First World.” Rather than ally itself politically with authoritarian Third World movements, the resolution urged that the movement focus on the concrete evils of the war in Vietnam in order to mobilize a broad anti-war movement in the U.S., a movement that could provide a meaningful context for further radicalization around issues relevant to Americans’ lives. The way to most effectively oppose imperialism abroad was to build a movement for fundamental change at home.
I have no doubt that the perspectives of the Radical Decentralist Project had a much wider following among the tens of thousands of rank-and-file activists in SDS and the broader youth revolt and counterculture at that time than PL’s stolid Maoism or RYM/Weatherman’s guilt-driven “Third Worldism.” That was certainly my own impression as a Bay Area high school student who had been initiated into “The Movement” over the previous two years. The activists I was encountering in the 1968-69 school year at the strike at San Francisco State and People’s Park in Berkeley widely regarded the Leninist “politicos” as boring “pains-in-the-ass,” usually counterproductive, and often incomprehensible. PL’s overnight, mid-struggle reversal of support for the multi-racial student/faculty strike for open admissions and autonomy for the Black Studies Department at San Francisco State was characteristically stupid and obscure. Though the PL and RYM/Weatherman factions were represented at the Chicago convention in disproportionate numbers compared to their actual base in SDS, there were still many unaffiliated activists in attendance. We will never know how the Radical Decentralist Project’s slate of candidates for the National Executive Committee would have fared had a vote been taken. But before a vote could be taken, the RYM/Weatherman faction, acting on the advice of the Black Panther Party, demanded that PL be expelled from SDS. RYM/Weatherman then led the non-PL delegates into an adjacent hall. Jeff Jones, a supporter of the Weatherman position, opened this rump session by declaring, “The convention of the real SDS will now commence. Does anyone want to speak from the floor?” The first to speak, ironically, was Murray Bookchin for the Radical Decentralist Project. His appeal was well-received, but whatever support it had was lost in the unstructured debate that followed over the rest of the weekend.
In September 1969 an attempt was made to create a new independent SDS based on the ideas of the Radical Decentralist Project’s Resolution. Some 150-200 activists met at Black River, a state park in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, certain naive enthusiasts of the counterculture who opposed any structure whatever essentially undermined this all-important conference with their demands for consensus on every decision.[7] As a result, a document expressing the new organization’s outlook was never written, even though much of the “underground press” (with a circulation of some 5 million readers) was waiting to print it.
Although the potential for a broad anti-authoritarian left certainly existed in 1969, it never found effective organizational expression and theoretical clarification. Women, to their credit, withdrew in large numbers from the sectarian absurdities that overwhelmed SDS and the New Left at the end of the 60s. The women’s movement of the 70s was one of the few threads of the 60s that grew and indeed thrived in the relatively quiet aftermath of the 60s. The radical ecology movement found its stride in the mid-70s with the emergence of the direct action-oriented Clamshell Alliance and the anti-nuclear alliances that soon appeared across the country. The experience gained in these struggles was brought to bear in the direct-action movements for disarmament and non-intervention of the 80s. Students have sprung to life again in the mid-80s in struggles to rid universities of apartheid-linked investments and CIA recruiters. Hopefully, as we enter the 90s, we will be able to pull these and other threads together into a broad radical movement for fundamental change, one that can pick up where the 60s left off. The analyses in “Listen, Marxist!” and the Radical Decentralist Project’s Resolution are as relevant for this project today as they were 20 years ago.
Notes
- Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 18. A 1986 revised edition is currently in print and available from Black Rose Books, 3981 boul. St. Larent, Montréal, Québec, H2W 1Y5, Canada.
- Manuell Castells is well-known as a Marxist urbanologist. But his recent study of urban social movements has led him to abandon Marxian class-struggle explanations of social change. He found that radical social movements—from the Spanish Comunidades of the 1520s to the Paris Commune of 1871 to the American urban revolts of the 1960s—were multi-class, popular movements which did not recognize themselves as classes, but as a communities seeking autonomy and democratic self-management. See his The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). André Gunder Frank is well-known for his Marxian analyses of imperialism. But in a recent essay (with Marta Fuentes), he writes, “The many social movements in the West, South and East that are now commonly called ‘new’ are with few exceptions new forms of social movements which have existed throughout the ages. Ironically, the ‘classical’ working class/union movements date mostly only from the last century, and they increasingly appear to be only a passing phenomenon related to the development of industrial capitalism. On the other hand, peasant, localist community, ethnic/nationalist, religious, and even feminist/women’s movements have existed for centuries and even millennia in many parts of the world . . . Only the ecological/green movement(s) and the peace movement(s) can more legitimately be termed ‘new,’ and that is because they respond to social needs which have been more recently generated by world developments.” See André Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes, “Nine Theses on Social Movements,” International Foundation for Development Alternatives Dossier (63, January/February 1987), pp. 27-44.
- André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
- That Marxism quite easily lends itself to reformist politics and an accommodation to capitalism in its more statist forms has been explored by Bookchin in later essays, notably “Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology” and “On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, and the Body Politic,” both of which appear in his Toward an Ecological Society (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980).
- For a description of the popular revolutionary movement in Portugal in 1974-75, see Phil Mailer, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution (London: Solidarity; Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1977).
- See, for example, Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 558; James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 17; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 387.
- Feminist writers have provided us with the best critiques that analyze the myths of structureless movements and of consensus as a decision-making panacea. These myths not only crippled efforts to build a broad anti-authoritarian left in the 60s; they continue to plague organizing efforts today, particularly in certain tendencies of the peace and ecology movements. On “structurelessness,” see Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology (1970) and reprinted under the name of Joreen in The Second Wave 2 (1, 1972); in Radical Feminism, edited by Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle, 1973); and elsewhere. On consensus, see Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and “Feminism and the Forms of Freedom” in Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy, edited by Frank Fischer and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). An essay summarizing Mansbridge’s views based on excerpts from Beyond Adversary Democracy appeared as “Unitary and Adversary: The Two Forms of Democracy” in In Context, No. 7, Autumn 1984, pp. 10-13. The organizational problems encountered by the late 60s feminist movement was the instigation for Freeman’s essay. Mansbridge drew on that experience as well as the organizational problems of the broader New Left. Other useful discussions of the New Left’s organizational problems in the 60s include Michael Lerner, “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory,” in his Surplus Powerlessness (Oakland: Institute for Labor and Mental Health, 1986); Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin & Gervey, 1982); Staughton Lynd, “Prospects for the New Left,” in Strategy and Program: Two Essays Toward a New American Socialism by Staughton Lynd and Gar Alperowitz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); and Murray Bookchin’s reply to Black Panther Party Chairman Huey Newton’s appeal to SDS to adopt democratic centralism, “Anarchy and Organization: A Letter to the Left,” New Left Notes (January 15, 1969). For an examination of these issues in a more recent context, see Barbara Epstein’s discussion of the Livermore Action Group, “The Culture of Direct Action”, Socialist Review (82/83, July-October 1985).
[Click Here to Read “Listen, Marxist!” by Murray Bookchin]
