Murray Bookchin

After returning from service in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, Bookchin worked as an autoworker and became deeply involved in the United Auto Workers (UAW). He participated in the great General Motors strike of 1946, but when its outcome betokened the accommodation of the once-radical labor movement to the social order, he began to question most of his traditional Marxist ideas about the "hegemonic" role of the industrial proletariat. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, living in New York, he worked closely with a group of exiled German Trotskyists who were moving toward a libertarian perspective (International Kommunisten Deutschlands, or IKD). The American component of this group, which engaged in both theoretical and practical work, was among the largest organized left groups in New York during the McCarthy years (1950-52). In their ambience Bookchin wrote agitational literature that opposed not only nuclear weapons but also the "peaceful uses of the atom" because of radioactive fallout; and that, in 1956, demanded U.S. intervention on behalf of the workers' uprising in Hungary against the Soviet Union.

The IKD group also helped publish a periodical called Contemporary Issues (which also appeared in German as Dinge der Zeit). Many of Bookchin's articles in the early 1950s were published in this periodical, under the pen names M. S. Shiloh, Lewis Herber, Robert Keller, and Harry Ludd. It was in Contemporary Issues that he published his earliest articles on ecological issues, framing them in a left-libertarian perspective. His very large article "The Problem of Chemicals in Food" (pseud. Lewis Herber) (1952) was published as a book in German in 1955. His first English-language book, Our Synthetic Environment (pseud. Lewis Herber) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1962. Preceding Rachel Carson's Silent Spring by nearly half a year, the book addressed a broad range of ecological issues and called for a decentralized society and the use of alternative energy sources as part of an ecological solution.

His pioneering essays on anarchism and ecology, explicitly addressed to radicals, were published in the periodicals Comment and Anarchy. Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1964) argued for a political marriage of anarchism and ecology, based on their similar themes and the necessity of each for a socially free and ecological society. Towards a Liberatory Technology (1965) argued that alternative technologies would play a crucial role in such a society. An important theme in these writings is postscarcity, the idea that the advances in technology--such as cybernation and miniaturization--make possible a reduction of the workday, thereby providing people with the free time necessary to engage in civic self-management and a democratic body politic. These articles laid the groundwork for the body of ideas that Bookchin called social ecology, adopting this name at a time when it had fallen into virtual disuse.

At the same time, in the 1960s, Bookchin was deeply involved in both the counterculture and New Left and worked to fuse the two movements into a radical-left populist movement with broad appeal for ordinary Americans. When Marxist groups threatened to enter Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and vitiate its populist potential, Bookchin wrote Listen, Marxist! (1969) to help ward off their influence. His essay The Forms of Freedom examines the organizational structures that were intended to institutionalize freedom in revolutionary movements. Bookchin's essays from the 1960s were anthologized in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Ramparts Books, 1971; Black Rose Books, 1977). His anarchist writings culminated with The Spanish Anarchists (Harper & Row, 1977; A.K. Press, 1997), a history of the development of the anarchist movement in Spain up to the years directly preceding the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Bookchin did not limit his activities to writing; he was also a dedicated participant in activist groups. After his antinuclear and pro-Hungary activism with the IKD, he entered the civil rights movement, joining CORE. He helped found the Bowery Poets' Cooperative and worked closely with two anarchist groups, the East Side Anarchists and the Anarchos Group. At a time when "ecology" was an unfamiliar concept to most people, he lectured extensively to countercultural groups throughout the country emphasizing its importance for building a left libertarian movement.

Bookchin also engaged in formal teaching. In the late 1960s he taught at the Alternative University in New York, one of the largest "free universities" in the United States, and later at City University of New York in Staten Island. In 1974 he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, and became its director; it went on to acquire an international reputation for its courses in ecophilosophy, social theory, and alternative technologies and continues to teach courses each summer. In 1974 he began teaching at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he eventually became a full professor and retired in 1981 with emeritus status.

During the 1970s Bookchin was highly influential in the growing ecology movement, which rose to significance after the original Earth Day. His writings during this period became increasingly visionary and utopian and focused on the construction of an ecological ethics. Toward an Ecological Society (Black Rose Books, 1981) is a collection of his 1970s essays. The Ecology of Freedom (Cheshire Books, 1982; republished by Black Rose Books in 1991) is a philosophical, anthropological, an historical account of the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy and a classic in the anarchist literature.

As a recent history of anarchist thought (Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible [London: HarperCollins, 1992]) has emphasized, Bookchin's major contribution to the anarchist tradition has been to integrate traditional decentralist, nonhierarchical, and populist traditions with ecology, from a left-libertarian philosophical and ethical standpoint. These views were highly original in the 1950s and early 1960s, but they have since entered into the general consciousness of our time. The radicalism of his approach lies in his exploration of the historical emergence of the notion of dominating nature from the domination of human by human, particularly in gerontocracies, patriarchies, and other oppressive strata.

Bookchin has also written extensively on urban issues, the role of the city in the Western tradition, and the conflict between town and country. His early book Crisis in Our Cities (Prentice Hall, 1965) is a journalistic account of specific urban problems. The Limits of the City (Harper and Row, 1974) is a historical exploration of the evolution of cities. His work on cities culminated in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (Sierra Club Books, 1986; republished by Cassell as From Urbanization to Cities [1995] and in Canada as Urbanization Without Cities [Black Rose Books, 1992]), which is a historical exploration of civic self-management and confederalism. This book also gives an overview of Bookchin's program for a direct-democratic and confederal politics, which he calls libertarian municipalism.

Libertarian municipalism is a politics based upon the recovery or creation of direct-democratic popular assemblies on municipal, neighborhood, and town levels. Economic life would come under the democratic control of citizens in communities, in what he calls "the municipalization of the economy." The democratized municipalities would confederate in order to manage regional issues and to form a counterpower to the centralized nation-state.

From the late 1970s onward, these ideas have been an important stimulus in the developing Green movements throughout the world, and Bookchin has written extensively on Green politics. His own activism continued in the late 1970s and 1980s with the rise of Green political movements, both in Germany and in the United States. After moving to Vermont in 1971, he worked with a variety of groups, including the Northern Vermont Greens, the Vermont Council for Democracy, and the Burlington Greens.

His political work has also taken the form of theoretical debates within the ecology and anarchist movements. In 1987, for example, when certain tendencies in the ecology movement began to exhibit antihumanist and even misanthropic tendencies – approving the starvation of Third World people as "nature taking its course" and advancing a philosophy that equates the moral worth of humans with that of all other life-forms – he did not hesitate to criticize this reactionary development (in Social Ecology vs. ‘Deep Ecology,’ published in Green Perspectives).

In the mid-1990s, when he perceived that many tendencies in the anarchist movement were shedding the leftist, socialistic heritage of anarchism in favor of individualism, mysticism, self-expression, technophobia, and even neo-primitivism, he once again stirred controversy by writing the critique Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (published in a book of the same name by A.K. Press in 1995). Re-Enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell, 1996) summarizes Bookchin's critique of misanthropy and antihumanism both in specific social movements and in popular culture today.

Underpinning Bookchin's political and ethical ideas is a reworking of dialectical thinking, one that brings a neo-Hegelian approach to the service of ecological thinking, in order to "naturalize" the dialectical tradition. His "dialectical naturalism" contrasts with Hegel's dialectical idealism and Engels's relatively mechanistic "dialectical materialism." These ideas are elucidated in considerable detail in The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Black Rose Books, 1990, revised and expanded ed. 1994).

Bookchin's ideas on politics, philosophy, history, and anthropology are summarized succinctly in Remaking Society (Black Rose Books and South End Press, 1989). An up-to-date survey of his outlook may be found in the collection of excerpts in The Murray Bookchin Reader (Cassell, 1997).

Now in his late seventies, Bookchin lives in semi-retirement in Burlington, Vermont, with his colleague and companion, Janet Biehl. Poor health restricts his ability to travel and lecture, but he lectures each summer at the Institute for Social Ecology (in Plainfield, Vermont). With Biehl he edits the theoretical newsletter Left Green Perspectives (formerly Green Perspectives). At this writing –1998 – he is at work on a three-volume history of popular movements in the classical revolutions, called The Third Revolution. Volumes 1 and 2 have already been published by Cassell, and he is preparing the concluding volume for publication in 1999.

Murray Bookchin developed from a traditional Marxist in the 1930s to a left-libertarian. At the same time his life and work have spanned two historic eras: the era of traditional proletarian socialism and anarchism, with its working-class struggles against capitalism and fascism, and the postwar era of growing capitalist consolidation, technological development, environmental decay, and statist politics. In all his writings he has tried to forge a coherent outlook that brings a lived revolutionary past forward into a new liberated future.