Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. Drawing on the works of Hegel, Marx, and Kropotkin, he helped launch the environmental movement. He created the concept of social ecology and contributed to anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thinking on urban planning. Over his career, he wrote roughly two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, city life, and social ecology. Key titles include *Our Synthetic Environment* (1962), *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (1971), *The Ecology of Freedom* (1982), and *Urbanization Without Cities* (1987). By the late 1990s, he had grown frustrated with what he saw as the anarchist movement’s turn toward apolitical “lifestylism,” dropped the anarchist label, and developed his own libertarian socialist ideology called “communalism,” which aims to blend and advance Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist ideas. Bookchin was a strong opponent of capitalism and fascism and a supporter of social decentralization guided by ecological and democratic principles. His thinking shaped several social movements from the 1960s onward, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the democratic confederalism practiced by the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava). He played a central role in the American green movement. Though he never attended college and was self-taught, he is regarded as one of the most significant left-wing theorists of the twentieth century. Bookchin was born in New York City in 1921 to Nathan Bookchin (originally Nacham Wisotsky) and Rose (Kalusky) Bookchin, Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father came from Mazyr (now in Belarus) and his mother from Vilnius (Lithuania). Embarrassed by his given name Mortimore, he went by his childhood nickname Murray. His father adopted the surname of a relative, Bukczin, and anglicized it to Bookchin. His parents divorced in 1934. He grew up in the Bronx with his mother, uncle Daniel, and maternal grandmother Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary who introduced him to Russian populist ideas. After his grandmother died in 1930, he joined the Young Pioneers of America, a Communist youth group for children aged 9 to 14, and later the Young Communist League in 1935. He studied Marxism at the Workers School near Union Square. In the late 1930s, he broke with Stalinism and moved toward Trotskyism, joining the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In the early 1940s, he worked in a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he organized for the United Electrical Workers as a shop steward and recruited for the SWP. Inside the SWP, he belonged to the Goldman-Morrow faction, which split off after World War II. He was an auto worker and UAW member during the major General Motors strike of 1945–46. In 1949, while speaking to a Zionist youth group at City College, he met mathematics student Beatrice Appelstein; they married in 1951. Though their marriage lasted 12 years, they lived together for 35 and remained close friends and political allies for the rest of his life. They had two children, Debbie and Joseph. Bookchin was an atheist but tolerant of religious views. Starting in 1947, he worked with Josef Weber, a fellow former Trotskyist and German expatriate, in New York as part of the Movement for a Democracy of Content, a small post-Trotskyist group of about twenty people that edited the journal *Contemporary Issues – A Magazine for a Democracy of Content*. The journal embraced utopianism, arguing that earlier utopian efforts failed because they required hard labor, but modern technology had removed that necessity, opening the way to a liberatory “post-scarcity” society. To reach that goal, Bookchin developed a theory of ecological decentralism. The magazine published his first articles, including the groundbreaking “The Problem of Chemicals in Food” (1952). In 1958, he began calling himself an anarchist, seeing links between anarchism and environmentalism. His first book, *Our Synthetic Environment*, came out in 1962 under the pseudonym Lewis Herber, just months before Rachel Carson’s *Silent Spring*. In 1964, Bookchin joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and protested racism at the 1964 World’s Fair. From 1964 to 1967, while living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he co-founded and led the New York Federation of Anarchists. His essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” introduced environmentalism and ecology as radical political concepts. In 1968, he started another group that published the influential magazine *Anarchos*, which featured that essay and others on post-scarcity, sustainable technologies like solar and wind power, decentralization, and miniaturization. He lectured across the United States, helping spread ecological ideas to the counterculture. His widely reprinted 1969 essay “Listen, Marxist!” warned Students for a Democratic Society—unsuccessfully—that a Marxist group was about to take over. “Once again the dead are walking in our midst,” he wrote, “ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century.