Lifestyle anarchism is a term derived from Murray Bookchin's polemical essay "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm." He used it to criticize those anarchists who dress the look or live in certain ways, but who don't really act on the basic tenets of anarchism[1] at the expense of class struggle or coherent and effective anarchist social organization. He also directed intense criticism at anarchists like Hakim Bey and John Zerzan (who has also attacked Bey[2]) as having promoted anti-rationalism. Bookchin gives several documented examples, including a mis-named image by Jean Francisco Goya placed on the Fall/Winter 1993 cover of Fifth Estate - the title, "The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters" was altered to "The Dream of Reason Brings Forth Monsters" which changed its meaning to an attack on human reason rather than support of it.[3] The term is sometimes used by anarchists as a description of positions that concentrate on specifically superficial changes to personal behavior rather than the wholesale reorganization or abolition of class and hierarchical society.
Critics of this term have claimed the definition as a form of sectarianism. Anarchist librarian and activist Chuck Munson, for example, who first hosted the book on his infoshop web site,[4] denies that lifestylism exists, and has decried the concept as "one of the most divisive and destructive things inflicted on the anarchist movement in recent years."[5] In Munson's publication, Practical Anarchy he has said the "lifestylist" debate is "simplistic" and exhorted anarchists to move on from it.[6] Yet when it has come to the use of the term "post-left anarchism," Munson has been an open supporter,[7] though that term was created and popularized by Bob Black in polemical response to Bookchin for writing "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism."[8]