Reviews

The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy by Murray Bookchin

ursulawren's review against another edition

4.0

I had already read most of these essays in other forms, but the introduction by U.K. Le Guin made me decide to grab this copy as well.

In my opinion, a lot of the essays in this are the less compelling, "grumpy" Bookchin that I don't love as much as the old starry-eyed utopian version. It's a great primer though, and I might recommend it to people who need a more stern criticism of the purist ideologies.

sm0gster's review against another edition

5.0

It's the perfect book for an introduction to Murray Bookchin's social ecology and a starting point on understanding libertarian municipalism and communalism. I strongly recommend this book to everyone looking for some radical and progressive thoughts.

boithorn's review

3.0

I'm a fan of Bookchin's thoughts on achieving a libertarian left society through communalism, but he's such a grumpy asshole throughout most of these essays that it's pretty unpleasant to read. I understand that there are no easy victories when it comes to leftist organizing, but some of the marginal assertions (chiefly, that recognition of identity politics will only recreate oppressive power structures, that anarchism doesn't have a coherent political ideology, or that 90s/00s movements failed because of a lack of discipline rather than the sheer weight of globalized capital) are ludicrous to anyone who has actually studied these concepts. All in all, worth a read, but maybe stick to other people iterating on his ideas.