Hip Culture: Six Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential

by Murray Bookchin, George Metefsky

Paperback

First published June 1, 1971

About the author

Murray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

Reviews

[Kelli Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I took this out from the St Tammany Parish public library when I was 13. Just found it in my zine drawer at my parents house and I'm really getting a kick out of re-reading it.

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Very interesting little pamphlet from 1971 with a lot of bad writing (some good writing) — in general, it varies greatly from article to article with contributions coming from writers published elsewhere as well as high school students. The articles examine the phenomenon of hip (or hippie culture) in relation to various groups oppressed by the then current socio-political-economic (mostly economic) environment. Marxist thinking was apparently huge at this time, there are inklings of the future environmental movement, but the feminist writers seem to have the most considered and articulate articles in the pamphlet. If any of these articles were to have been reprinted anywhere, it would be the lower east side women's collective's assessment of women's lowered status in hip culture. Interesting