Why did Murray bother?

"Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism" is a polemical tract by Murray Bookchin, the founder of Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. At the time, Bookchin still called himself a social anarchist.

The tract is an attack on other forms of anarchism, dubbed "lifestyle anarchism" by the author. This includes Max Stirner's extreme individualism, the Situationistic and new agey poetry of one Hakim Bey, and the neo-primitivism of John Zerzan, George Bradford (David Watson) and the Fifth Estate magazine.

Bookchin fears that this kind of anarchism is really a middle class fad and ultimately harmless to the establishment. He spends considerable time criticizing the primitivists in particular.

While Bookchin does score some points here and there, the polemic nevertheless feels very in-house, even personal. But above all, it feels meaningless. Why did Bookchin bother? Marxists groups couldn't care less about Max Stirner, Black Elk or TAZ. More orthodox-sounding anarchists might, but I don't think it's their main activity. Bookchin, however, seems to have been obsessed by constantly attacking hippies, yuppies, yippes or the New Age. But surely solid political activists aren't interested in Hakim Bey's poetry or Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia in Brooklyn?

I have a lingering suspicion that Bookchin cared because, at bottom, he belonged to the same social milieu. After all, he did seem to have lengthy phone conversations with George Bradford at Fifth Estate!

How ironic.