 I wrote the script some time ago, but was never sure about how well it worked. Then I saw the first episode of the HBO series, The Anarchist, and I realised my review was right first time. 45 years ago, Punk seized the headlines with the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK. Arguably the Sex Pistols, likewise rarefied in recent TV dramas, represented not anarchism, but a self-indulgent bourgeois individualism, like that of the new HBO series. So who will make the point that anarchism consists of more than just a label? Oh, okay then, I will. The problem with the label Anarchist is that the moment it is defined, it contradicts the principles it claims to represent. Like the uncertainty principle in Quantum Mechanics, anarchism negates itself when it rigidly defines its principles. The question is, does that imprecise nature leave anarchism open to easy debasement or exploitation through misguided claims over what it represents? It was this contradiction that Murray Bookchin sought to explore in his 1995 book Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, as Bookchin says at the start of the first essay. Anarchism developed in the tension between two basically contradictory tendencies, a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom. These tendencies have by no means been reconciled in the history of libertarian thought. Indeed, they simply coexisted around anarchism as a minimalist credo of opposition to the state rather than a maximalist credo that articulated the kind of new society that had to be created in its place. Bookchin considers a few examples of lifestyle anarchism. For example, the black flag which revolutionary social anarchists raised and insurrectionally struggles in Ukraine and Spain now becomes a fashionable sarong for the delectation of the chic petit bourgeois. One of the most unsavory examples of lifestyle anarchism is Hakim Bey's temporary autonomous zone. The call for autonomy is taken to length so absurd as to seemingly parody a self-absorbed and self-absorbing ideology in which this organization is conceived as an art form and graffiti supplants programs. Representing a previous generation of anarchists, Bourne of the Struggles in the 1930s, Bookchin might sound as if he's nitpicking with the younger generation, but he sets his criticism against the complex political transformation that occurred in the wake of the 1960s. Reacting to the call from the 1970s, neoliberalism weaponized economic individualism as a polarizing force against socialism. In relation to anarchism, neoliberalism's claim to promote freedom created a cognitive dissonance that, driven by commercialized fashion, used lifestyle anarchism to appropriate the space in the public's consciousness once occupied by political anarchists. Just as today's culture war focuses on wedge issues that skew debate towards the populism of the right, the crossover between economic libertarianism and lifestyle anarchism negated truly radical course of social change, transmitted them into bourgeois fashion, symbolic art, or, as in the case of HBO's new series, Neo-capitalist Social Nihilism. As Bookchin says, The price that anarchism will pay if it permits its swill to displace the libertarian ideals of an earlier period could be enormous. Ego-centric anarchism, with its post-modernist withdrawal into individualistic autonomy, threatens to render the very word anarchism politically and socially harmless, a mere fad for the titillation of the petty bourgeois of all ages. Perhaps the most direct criticism is provided in the book's introduction. At a time when popular distrust of the state has reached extraordinary proportions in many countries, anarchists have formed neither her coherent program nor revolutionary organization to provide a direction for the mass discontent that contemporary society is creating. It is due in no small measure to the changes that have occurred amongst many anarchists over the past two decades, who have slowly surrendered the social core of anarchist ideas to the all-pervasive yuppie and new-age personalism that marks this decadent, bourgeois-fied era. Perhaps because of the different questions it raises, this is one of Bookchin's less examined books. Perhaps because it challenged anarchists to justify their projects and actions objectively, criticising a number of figures in the movement, people would rather leave it alone. And 27 years after its publication, before the internet boom, many of Bookchin's visionary observations apply especially to the digital techno-libertarians. I appreciate the ideas of Hacking Bay. Likewise, the book picks apart John Zersen and anarcho-primitivism. I also give way to Bookchin, and I agree that, without a practical vision based within people's basic needs for life, many of these ideas fail to qualify objectively as anarchism. At best, they're symbolic. At worst, with the antics of the Sex Pistols or anarcho-pulco in mind, they descend into nihilism and mental masturbation, delivering no practical liberation from authoritarian hierarchies. The simple answer here, the fallback test you must apply to any uncertainty, is the objective reality which any strand of anarchism claims to represent, contrasting these to the all-too-common cultural nihilism Bookchin opposes. In the final analysis, symbolic change is not physical change. Lifestyle anarchism may be a popular fashion statement, but it doesn't represent an actionable project for revolutionary liberation, to believe otherwise is simple self-deception. HBO's new series, The Anarchists, represents exactly the kind of debasement of anarchist ideals that Bookchin warns of. It's a phony show, made by libertarian capitalists, who will freely exploit the poor and marginalised for their own gain. It is, in Bookchin's words, a meaningless erosion of the word anarchy, to the point where it becomes part of the chic bourgeois vocabulary of the coming century.