Murray Bookchin

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Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American anarchist/libertarian socialist speaker and writer, and founder of the "Social Ecology" school of anarchist and environmental thought.

He was born in New York City and grew up as a self-described "red-diaper baby", imbued with Marxist ideology from his youth. In adolescence he gravitated towards Trotskyism, then gradually became disillusioned with the coercion he saw as inherent in conventional Marxism-Leninism. In some circles he became known for his ability to deliver devastating criticisms of Marxist ideology using conventional Marxist language.

Bookchin has remained a radical anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society. He was influential on the anti-globalization movement. His idea of libertarian municipalism has had an influence on the green movement.

Bookchin was the author of many works, including Post Scarcity Anarchism and The Ecology of Freedom.

He died of heart failure on July 30, 2006 at his home in Burlington, Vermont at the age of 85.

Contents

[edit] Published works

His book Our Synthetic Environment, published under the psuedonym 'Lewis Herber' 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 the 1960s 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.

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 major published work was The Third Revolution, a four-volume history of the libertarian impulse in European and American revolutionary movements.

[edit] Partial bibliography

[edit] Critical Works

  • Black, Bob (1997). Anarchy after Leftism. Columbia, Mo.: C.A.L. Press.
  • Watson, David (1996). Beyond Bookchin. New York: Autonomedia.

[edit] Further reading

  • Selva Varengo, La rivoluzione ecologica. Il pensiero libertario di Murray Bookchin (2007) Milano: Zero in condotta. ISBN 9788895950006.

[edit] Quotes

  • "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."

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin"
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