Active Defunct Publications Works Murray Bookchin (/ˈbʊktʃɪn/; January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006[1]) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher.
He grew up in the Bronx with his mother, uncle Daniel, and maternal grandmother, Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary who imbued him with Russian populist ideas.
In the early 1940s, he worked in a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he was a trade union organizer and shop steward for the United Electrical Workers as well as a recruiter for the SWP.
In 1949, while speaking to a Zionist youth organization at City College, Bookchin met a mathematics student, Beatrice Appelstein, whom he married in 1951.
By the second conference in January 1981 in Somerville, Massachusetts, the NEAC devolved into sectarianism, which moved Bookchin to lose faith in a socialist revolution happening in the US.
Bookchin criticized Sanders' politics, claiming he lacked a drive to establish direct democracy, followed a Marxian deprioritization of ecology, and was a “'centralist' who narrowly focused on economic growth.
[23] In 1995, Bookchin lamented the decline of American anarchism into primitivism, anti-technologism, neo-Situationism, individual self-expression, and "ad hoc adventurism," at the expense of forming a social movement.
[2]: 31 The dialectical writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, environmentalist approach.
[27][28] Bookchin was critical of class-centered analysis of Marxism and simplistic anti-state forms of libertarianism and liberalism and wished to present what he saw as a more complex view of societies.
There is a strong theoretical need to contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of the words class and State; careless use of these terms can produce a dangerous simplification of social reality.
This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day—not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception.
[30] Bookchin's book about humanity's collision course with the natural world, Our Synthetic Environment, was published six months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
Bookchin likewise opposed "a politics of mere protest, lacking programmatic content, a proposed alternative, and a movement to give people direction and continuity.
[31]The answer then lies in communalism, a system encompassing a directly democratic political organization anchored in loosely confederated popular assemblies, decentralization of power, absence of domination of any kind, and replacing capitalism with human-centered forms of production.
Bookchin's social ecology proposes ethical principles for replacing a society's propensity for hierarchy and domination with that of democracy and freedom.
It seeks to resolve them through the model of a non-hierarchical ecological society based on self-determination at the local level,[37] which opposes the current capitalist system of production and consumption.
[38] Bookchin wrote about the effects of urbanization on human life in the early 1960s during his participation in the civil rights and related social movements.
[46][47] Adopted by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) since 2005, Öcalan's project represents a major ideological shift away from their previous goal of establishing a Marxist–Leninist state.
[50][51][52] On January 6, 2014, the cantons of Rojava, in Syrian Kurdistan, federated into autonomous municipalities, adopting a social contract which established a decentralized non-hierarchical society, based on principles of direct democracy, feminism, ecology, cultural pluralism, participatory politics and economic cooperativism.
[48][49][53] Bookchin's vision of an ecological society is based on highly participatory, grassroots politics, in which municipal communities democratically plan and manage their affairs through popular assembly, a program he called communalism.
He writes: Libertarian Municipalism constitutes the politics of social ecology, a revolutionary effort in which freedom is given institutional form in public assemblies that become decision-making bodies.
According to Bookchin, systems based on private ownership promote competition and individualism, which he argues are incompatible with the cooperation and solidarity needed to build a fair and sustainable society.
He contends that nationalization typically shifts control from private companies to centralized bureaucratic entities, merely replacing one form of dominance with another.
This can lead to what Bookchin describes as a "privatized economy in a collectivized form," where workers remain detached from their labor and ecological exploitation persists.
[60] Though Bookchin, by his own recognition, failed to win over a substantial body of supporters during his own lifetime, his ideas have nonetheless influenced movements and thinkers across the globe.
Among these are the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and closely aligned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey, which have fought the Turkish state since the 1980s to try to secure greater political and cultural rights for the country's Kurds.
When Bookchin died in 2006, the PKK hailed the American thinker as "one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century", and vowed to put his theory into practice.
[63] "Democratic confederalism", the variation on communalism developed by Öcalan in his writings and adopted by the PKK, does not outwardly seek Kurdish rights within the context of the formation of an independent state separate from Turkey.
[63] The PKK has had some success in implementing its programme, through organizations such as the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), which coordinates political and social activities within Turkey, and the Koma Civakên Kurdistan (KCK), which does so across all countries where Kurds live.