MURRAY BOOKCHIN IS KNOWN TODAY as the intellectual originator of radical ecology in the early 1960s. Social ecology, as he named it, was and remains a program for the decentralization of society into small-scale communities that, in confederation, would manage and control a socialized “post-scarcity” economy.

[. . .]

On September 21, 2012, Chris Mansour interviewed Ste­phen Eric Bronner, a professor at Rutgers University and author of Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (1980), Socialism Unbound (1990), Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (1994), and Reclaiming the En­lightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (2004), among many others. His most recent book is Mod­ernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, and Uto­pia. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

[. . .]

THERE ARE SECTIONS of the international left that support Iran’s Islamic regime, want to ban any criticism of its dictatorial practices, and condemn calls for its revolutionary overthrow because it is currently threatened by the U.S. and its allies. It is entirely legitimate to be sharply critical of this approach and to ask: What has created this bizarre allegiance of sections of the antiwar left with some of the most unsavory Islamic governments and political forces in the Middle East and beyond?

[. . .]