Murray Bookchin

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Murray Bookchin[link] (born January 14, 1921) is an American libertarian socialist speaker and writer, and founder of the "Social Ecology" school of anarchist and ecological thought. He is the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology.

Bookchin was born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants and was imbued with Marxist ideology from his youth. He joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization, at the age of nine. In the late 1930s he broke with Stalinism and gravitated toward Trotskyism, working with a group publishing the periodical Contemporary Issues in the 1950s. Then gradually became disillusioned with the coercion he saw as inherent in conventional Marxism-Leninism.

His book Our Synthetic Environment, published six months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, described a broad range of environmental ills but received little attention because of his political radicalism. His groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" introduced ecology as a concept for radical politics. Other essays from that time pioneered innovative ideas about ecological technologies. Lecturing all over the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture. His widely republished 1969 essay "Listen, Marxist!" warned Students for a Democratic Society (in vain) against its takeover by a Marxist group. These and other influential 1960s essays are anthologized in Post Scarcity Anarchism.

In 1971 Bookchin moved to Vermont and in 1974 co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in that state. He became a professor at Ramapo College in New Jersey, retiring in 1980. His 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom had a profound impact on the emerging ecology movement, both in the United States and abroad. He was active in the antinuclear movement in New England, and his lectures in Germany influenced some of the founders of the German Greens. He continued to teach at the ISE until 2004.

Bookchin has remained a radical anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, grassroots democracy, had an influence on the Green Movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets. He is a staunch critic of biocentric philosophies such as deep ecology and the biologically deterministic beliefs of Sociobiology.

His book From Urbanization to Cities (originally published as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship) traces the democratic traditions that influenced his political philosophy and defines the implementation of the libertarian municipalism concept. A much smaller work, The Politics of Social Ecology, written by his partner of twenty years, Janet Biehl, briefly summarizes these ideas. In 1999 Bookchin broke with anarchism and placed his ideas into the framework of communalism.

In addition to his political writings, Bookchin wrote extensively on his philosophical ideas, which he called dialectical naturalism. The dialectical writings of Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, even ecological approach. His later philosophical writings emphasize humanism, rationality, and the ideals of the Enlightenment.

His last-published work is The Third Revolution, a magisterial four-volume history of the libertarian impulse in European and American revolutionary movements. He is currently retired and living in Vermont.

Contents

1 Quotes
2 Partial bibliography
3 References
4 External links

Quotes

"Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution." (from Desire and Need, 1967)
"An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles." (from Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, 1965)
"Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism."
"Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society."
"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."
"The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology." (from What Is Social Ecology?, 1984)
"This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of 'revolutionizing themselves and things,' much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People's Labor Party 'revolutionaries' is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of 'proletarian morality' replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little 'Red Book' and other sacred litanies." (from Listen, Marxist! in Post Scarcity Anarchism, 1971)
"If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be." (from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982.)

Partial bibliography

Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971 and 2004) ISBN 1-904859-062.
The Limits of the City (1973) ISBN 0060910135
The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years (1977 and 1998) ISBN 1-873176-04-X
Toward an Ecological Society (1980) ISBN 0919618987
[link]The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982 and 2005) ISBN 1904859267.
The Modern Crisis (1986) ISBN 086571083X
The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987 and 1992) ISBN
The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (1990 and 1996) Montreal: Black Rose Books. ISBN
[To Remember Spain] (1994) ISBN 1873176872
Re-Enchanting Humanity (1995) ISBN 030432843X
The Third Revolution. Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era (1996-2003) London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-304-33594-0. (4 Volumes)
[Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm] (1997) ISBN 187317683X
The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (1997) Montreal: Black Rose Books. ISBN 1551641003.
Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left. Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998 (1999) Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press. ISBN 1-873176-35-X.

References

Janet Biehl (1997), The Murray Bookchin Reader.(An Anthology) Cassell ISBN 0-304-33874-5.
Marshall, P. (1992), Murray Bookchin and the Ecology of Freedom,p.602-622 in, Demanding The Impossible. Fontana Press. ISBN 0006862454

External links

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