Murray Bookchin

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Western Philosophy
20th / 21st-century philosophy
Name
Murray Bookchin
Birth January 14, 1921 (New York City, New York)
Death July 30, 2006 (Burlington, Vermont) (age 85)
School/tradition founder of social ecology
Main interests Social ecology, libertarian municipalism, social hierarchy, post-scarcity anarchism, libertarian socialism, communalism, ethics, history of popular revolutionary movements
Notable ideas social ecology, libertarian municipalism, critique of lifestyle anarchism, dialectical naturalism, critique of anarcho-syndicalism, critique of Deep Ecology
Influenced by Aristotle,[1] Baruch Spinoza,[1] G.W.F. Hegel,[1] Karl Marx,[1] Peter Kropotkin,[1] Friedrich Engels,[2] Max Weber,[3] Paul Radin,[4] Dorothy D. Lee,[5] William Morris,[6] Frankfurt School[7]

Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American libertarian socialist, political and social philosopher, speaker and writer. For much of his life he called himself an anarchist[8]. The founder of the social ecology movement within libertarian socialist and ecological thought, Bookchin is noted for his synthesis of the libertarian socialist tradition with modern ecological awareness. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology.

Bookchin was 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 was a staunch critic of biocentric philosophies such as deep ecology and the biologically deterministic beliefs of sociobiology, and his criticisms of "new age" Greens such as Charlene Spretnak contributed to the divisions that affected the American Green movement in the 1990s.

Contents

[edit] Life and writings

Bookchin was born in New York City to the Russian Jewish immigrants[9] Nathan Bookchin and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin, and was imbued with Marxist ideology from his youth. He joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization, at the age of nine.[10] He worked in factories and became an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In the late 1930s he broke with Stalinism and gravitated toward Trotskyism, working with a group publishing the periodical Contemporary Issues. Then gradually becoming disillusioned with the coercion he saw as inherent in conventional Marxism-Leninism, he became an anarchist,[11] helping to found the Libertarian League in New York in the 1950s. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Bookchin worked in a number of working class situations—including a stint as a railroad stevedore. He began teaching in the late 1960s at the Free University, a counter-cultural 1960s-era Manhattan-based institution. This led to a tenured position at Ramapo State College in Mahwah, NJ. At the same time, he co-founded, in 1971, the Institute for Social Ecology at Goddard College in Vermont.

His book, Our Synthetic Environment, published under the pseudonym 'Lewis Herber' six months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,[12] 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. In 1982 Bookchin's The Ecology of Freedom was published, and had a profound impact on the emerging ecology movement, both in the United States and abroad. He was active in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance in New England, and his lectures in Germany influenced some of the founders of the German Greens. In From Urbanization to Cities (originally published as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship), Bookchin traced 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.[13] 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.[14] 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. He moved from Hoboken, NJ to Vermont upon his retirement from Ramapo and devoted his time to writing and lecturing around the world. He continued to teach at the ISE until 2004. He died of heart failure on July 30, 2006 at his home in Burlington, Vermont at the age of 85.[15]

[edit] Thought

[edit] Social Ecology

Bookchin is best known for his elaboration of a body of thought called social ecology. The basic concept of social ecology is that humans tend to impute their social structure onto non-human nature. Accordingly, the present society's tendency to dominate and exploit nature stems directly from features of hierarchy and domination within society itself.[16] Thus from very early on, Bookchin advocated the creation of affinity groups and direct action working toward a direct, decentralized democracy, as a radical solution to the ecological crisis.

[edit] Libertarian Municipalism

Bookchin was the first to use the term "Libertarian municipalism", to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the State with a confederation of free municipalities.[17] Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist. Not only is it believed to be, by its supporters, the means to achieve a rational society but its structure becomes the organization of society.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. p.11
  2. ^ Bookchin, Murray. Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998 (Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press, 1999), p.57
  3. ^ Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. p.8
  4. ^ ibid. p.8
  5. ^ ibid. p.8
  6. ^ ibid. p.9
  7. ^ ibid. p.9 (Bookchin states "In retrospect, I am less enamored of the Frankfurt School theorists than I was in the past, although their word magic, their defense of reason against mysticism, and their demanding
    intellectual level remain as inspiring to me as they were so many years ago.")
  8. ^ Anarchism In America documentary interview 1981
  9. ^ The Murray Bookchin Reader: Introduction
  10. ^ Anarchism In America documentary
  11. ^ ibid.
  12. ^ A Short Biography of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl
  13. ^ Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom. Oakland: AK Press, 2005. p.31
  14. ^ ibid. 96-7
  15. ^ Murray Bookchin, visionary social theorist, dies at 85
  16. ^ Bookchin, Murray (1991). The Ecology of Freedom, Black Rose Books, Introduction.
  17. ^ Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview

[edit] Further reading

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

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Bookchin, Murray
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Anarchist/socialist writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH July 30 2006]]
PLACE OF DEATH Burlington, Vermont