Posts tagged Murray Bookchin
Posts tagged Murray Bookchin
“The “primate model behaviour” favored by overly hierarchical and patriarchal writers on human-animal parallels “is based more on baboon, not the gibbon.” In contrast to the baboon, the Gibbon is closer to humans physically and on the primate evolutionary scale. “Our choice of a primate role model is clearly culturally determined,” She concludes:
“Who wants to be like the unaggressive, vegitarian, food-sharing gibbons, where farther is as much involved in child-rearing and mother is, and where everyong lives in small family groups, with little aggregation beyond that? Much better to match the baboons, who live in large, tightly knit groups carefully closed against outsider baboons, where everyone knows who is in charge and where the mother looks after the babies while father is out hunting and fishing.”
Baboons, are monkeys, despite the presumed similarity to humans. They branched off from humanoid evolution 20 million years ago. Our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes, tend to demolish prejudices about hierarchy completely.”
Murry Bookchin, quoting Elise Boulding in The Ecology of Freedom.
In one paragraph, they leave the entire field of social biology in ruins… for even if Humans have some natural imperative to act like our closest relative, the justification for patriarchy and hierarchy rest on monumental ignorance or malicious lies.
I LOVE THIS! I LOVE MURRAY BOOKCHIN! <3 I try not to get too squeeish on tumblr, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
(via funwithautonomy)
What compels me to fight this society is, of course, outrage over injustice, a love of freedom, and a feeling of responsibility for perpetuating and enlarging the human spirit - its beauty, creativity, and latent capacity to improve the world. I do not care to come to terms with an irrational society that corrodes all that is valuable in humanity, that eats away at all that is beautiful and noble in the human experience.
Captalism devours us. At the molecular level of everday life, it changes us for the worse, and it compels people to make extremely unsavoury rationalisations for why they believe things they know - or at least they once knew - are false and for doing things that are trivialising and dehumanising.
When we struggle against capitalism, we are really struggling against our own dehumanisation, and once we become fully cognisant of that, then the danger of surrender to the system reinforces our resistance. As revolutionaries, we are fighting not only for a better society but for our very humanity.
