The Next Revolution Quotes

“We must consciously create our own world, not according to mindless customs and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“Capitalism is a compulsively expansive system. A modern market economy dictates that an enterprise must grow or die, and nothing will prevent capitalism from industrializing—more accurately, expanding—endlessly over the entire face of the planet whenever it is prepared to do so. Only the complete reconstruction of society and the economy can end the dilemmas that globalization raises—the exploitation of workers and the enhancement of corporate power to the point of threatening the stability, indeed the very safety, of the planet.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“Present-day culture, social relations, cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and transportation have remade the traditional proletarian into a largely petty bourgeois stratum whose mentality is marked by its own utopianism of “consumption for the sake of consumption.” We”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“Issues such as gender discrimination, racism, and national chauvinism must be recast not only as cultural and social regressions but as evidence of the ills produced by hierarchy. A growing public awareness must be fostered in order to recognize that oppression includes not only exploitation but also domination, and that it is based not only on economic causes but on cultural particularisms that divide people according to sexual, ethnic, and similar traits.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“The middle and working classes no longer think of the present society as structured around classes. Current opinion holds that the rich are deserving and the poor are not, while an incalculable number of people linger between the categories. A huge section of public opinion in the Western world tends to regard oppression and exploitation as residual abuses, not inherent features of a specific social order. The prevailing society is neither rationally analyzed nor forcefully challenged; it is prudently psychoanalyzed and politely coaxed, as though social problems emerge from erratic individual behavior.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“the Left has repeatedly mistaken statecraft for politics by its persistent failure to understand that the two are not only radically different but exist in radical tension—in fact, opposition—to each other.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably, environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“Too often, ideas meant to yield a certain practice are instead transported into the academy, as fare for ‘enriching’ a curriculum and, of course, generating jobs for the growing professoriat.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in this book represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

“He doesn’t want to see that joy, that freedom, come crashing down, yet again, among the ruins of its own euphoric irresponsibility.”
― Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy