The Third Revolution: Volume 4

The Third Revolution #4

by Murray Bookchin

This major four-volume project, is a comprehensive account of the great revolutions that swept over Europe and America during the past three centuries. Throughout, the emphasis is on the popular movements that propelled the great revolutions to radical peaks, the little-known leaders who spoke for the people, and the liberatory social forse to which the revolutions gave rise. The four volumes of The Third Revolution form a dramatic ensemble that encompasses the hopes and social conflicts of past eras, as well as prospects for the coming century. This final volume focuses on the revolutions that took place in Germany and Spain in the early 1900s.

Genres: History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 8, 2005

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

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the examination of the Spartacus uprising in Germany of 1919, and the Spanish Revolution of 1936, Murray Bookchin concludes the series on libertarian revolutions of the European tradition. There are many conclusions one could draw from this fascinating account, but I will be focusing on only two: 1) there is no one prescription for revolution, and when blindly trying to apply it (like the Bolsheviks tried it to all other countries outside Russia), you fail. 2) imbuing the masses with a quasi-mystical ability to transform society spontaneous leads to poor decisions that can ruin a revolutionary movement.

This volume contains probably some of the harshest critique of the CNT/FAI movement, without it being against it. It is an honest examination of the last embers of revolutionary fire that Europe has seen: "The Spanish Revolution was the last time history posed the possibility of a third revolution. For that reason alone it became the zenith of the revolutionary process and thereby revealed both the limits and the possibilities of three centuries of revolutionary history." (p. 259)


The revolutionary road is tumultuous, filled with sorrow, disappointment, and failure; and I can recommend no better books than Murray Bookchin's "The Third Revolution" series to guide the reader through it.