Murray Bookchin: Requiem for a Pugilist

I only met Murray Bookchin once, in his apartment in Vermont. I was there as part of the summer program of the now defunct Institute for Social Ecology. There were 20 of us, cramped together on a couch, chairs and available floor space. Murray was in failing health even then, but he was generous enough to give his time and field our questions. Bookchin, on that evening, came off feisty. He called Foucault a "pimp" and questioned the importance of identity politics. But know I realize what he wanted to do was serve as an interlocutor of furthering our ideas. He may have realized that in the parlance of multiculturalism and consensus politics, people forgot how to argue. , This lead to a certain liberalism among radical forces, particularly around sharp issues. Murray wanted to know where people really stood. He even zoomed on me. Seeing my Che shirt, he remarked "Are you a Stalinist?"

But even in his famed misanthropy, Murray was a tremendous social theorist who synthesized Marxism and anarchism into a framework called social ecology. Before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Bookchin wrote Our Synthetic Environment, which introduced the term ecology to radical politics. More than seeing capitalism, as a system of commodity production, Bookchin understands that capital also reproduced oppressive social relationships, including our alienation from nature. "From the standpoint of ecology, man is dangerously oversimplifying his environment." he wrote in "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" "The modern city represents a regressive encroachment of the synthetic on the natural, of the inorganic (concrete, metals and glass) on the organic, of crude, elemental stimuli on variegated, wide ranging ones." The vast urban belts now developing in industrialized areas of the world are not only grossly offensive to the eye and the ear, they are chronically smog ridden, noisy, and virtually immobilized by congestion."

Bookchin's writings on nature served as an intellectual framework for the growing anarchist movement of the 1960s. Like Herbert Marcuse, Bookchin saw the political potential of "flower children" that rejected the synthetic lifestyle of the 1950s. What Bookchin saw as an overall project of the New Left was to add an ethical dimension to revolutionary movements. Bookchin wasn't so much concerned with achieving state power as to the creation of pre-figurative formations that would undermine the old society. Bookchin placed his dreams on those willing to drop out of society and live by the affirmation of refusal.
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Bookchin's support of the outsider is perhaps rooted in his own upbringing. The son of Eastern European immigrants, Bookchin grew up in New York City. His family was always to the left and Bookchin as a child was a member of the Young Pioneers, a communist group for children. Then, Marxism and communism was a living presence in New York City. Left cafeterias, John Reed Clubs, as well as housing co-operatives run by unions produced a cultural hothouse that spit out the likes of Richard Wright, Philip Guston and John Houseman. These cultural entities were important not only in producing a communist culture, but also as a vitality means of developing Jewish identity. At the time, Jews were barred from Ivy League schools by a system of quotas. Through workmen circles, the public library and above all left politics, Jewish intellectuals could produce high thought and criticism outside the academy. For Bookchin, this meant coming up in a world of working class Phds and a certain pride in being self-educated.

The Stalin-Hilter Pact and FDR's New Deal put to an end the love affair between a certain number of Jewish intellectuals and the Communist Party. More than a betrayal of morals, it was a marked symbol of the overall assimilation of the Communist Party into the American mainstream. Certain intellectuals such as Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenburg resisted this by becoming forerunners of the anti-Communist intellitgesia of the Cold War era. Others like Bookchin found their lot in Trotskyism, which provided a critique of Stalinism from the left. But Trotskyism, it seems by its nature, devolved into a scholastic exercise. Various trends or factions fought with each other over interpretations of Marxism.
Rather than being a living science to change the world, the Trotskyism of Bookchin's youth was more or less a mystical shell. Bookchin understood this and realized that the in the face of the anti-Communist hysteria and consumerism of the 1950s, the teleology of revolution wasn't going to bear fruit.


Bookchin re-conceptualize the playing field. Rather than simply looking at the struggle between workers and bosses, he began to understand that capitalism reproduces social relationship and that workers themselves were integrated into the capitalist framework through consumerism and alienation from nature. Beyond class struggle analysis, there needed to be a practical framework that incorporated a lived experience. Bookchin found his answer in the battlefield of Spain. The Spanish civil war was the first (and last) anarchist revolution of the 20th century. The Republic inspired hundreds of international volunteers, but it was also a laboratory for social revolution. Clinics, day care centers factories and even the brigades were run along the lines of volunteerism and mutualism.

In this, Bookchin saw the future. Perhaps rightly so, the early 1960s saw a growth of the civil rights movement. Born of nonviolent direct action, groups like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) practiced consensus organizing and development of grassroots leadership. Students for Democratic Society produced the Port Huron statement, one of the more deeply radical critiques of American society. Indeed, the revolutionary impulses of a new generation turned more to a critique of hierarchy, consumption and the automation of life. And Bookchin saw his wave.

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Bookchin best asset as a Trot came out: that of an interventionist. His pamphlet Listen, Marxist handed out at the SDS convention was missive against the Progressive Labor Party that was attempting to steer the organization into a more Stalinist direction. By that time, thousands of young (mostly middle class) white kids had bit their teeth in the various community programs that PLP had set up, including work in the ghetto (The Eliminate Racism and Poverty program) and taking summer jobs in factories. While the experience produced a respect for base building, it didn't come without a cost. PL by that time had taken a hard line against any liberatory social experiments. Drugs, rock music were considered "anti-working class", and they had denounced the all nationalism as racism and attacked both the Black Panther Party and the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. What PL nurtured in their milk was a return to 1930s communism, hammer and sickle in all. Listen Marxist served as a challenge to that communist framework. If anything it was a desire for a new generation to define itself. "We are asked, in short, to return to the past, to diminish instead of grow, to force the throbbing reality of our times, with its hopes and promises, into the deadening preconceptions of an outlived age."

Bookchin's passionate argumentation won some converts, but in the end it was he was a victim of an outlived age. Indeed, the emergence of the Cultural Revolution in China, as well as national liberation movements in Africa and South East Asia were lead in large part by communist. Bookchin has all but ignored the changes that had taken place and lump together popular liberation forces with Soviet bureaucracy. Yet, they were different. Understanding the mistakes of the Soviet Union, they sought to create spaces of popular power and counter institutions. The popularity of "Provisional Revolutionary Governments" in Tanzania, Cuba, or Algeria or even the concept of imperial countries as cities and Third World countries as base areas redefined the map of revolution. No longer were the subjects of revolution located in the industrial countries; they were those who really had no stake in the system, revolutionaries in the Third World, lumpen in the ghetto and increasingly queers and women.

Bookchin had no framework of understand race or gender. The communists that developed out of the 60s were deeply affected by the Black Power/liberation movement, as well as the sexual revolution. Bookchin seemed to be at a lost. He began to set the note of dialectics and democracy so high no one could touch it. And what he could not accept was that power in the hands of few corrupts, but power in the hands of many liberates. And someone, say, living in Dotham, Alabama understood that racism could only end by force not ideas. Bookchin refusal to engage in the changing world of race/gender/class power relations was to his detriment.


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State repression, funerals and dissolving movements lead to an overall sense of despair. Bookchin retreated into nature and many of the flower children that were turn on to his books did so as well. But instead being bearers of a new revolutionary formation, they dropped out of politics altogether. It must have been a bitter pill for Bookchin, because he won the battle but lost the war. What Bookchin could not understand is that revolution is a process of creating new people. And insofar as people hold the baggage of the current society, they still replicate certain oppressive relationship. Indeed, democracy is not a moral choice, but part and parcel of the struggle.
As time progressed, he rallied against "lifestyle anarchism". A comrade tells of a story when Bookchin berated an entire group of young anarchists for abandoning the struggle for the life of squats and dumpster dives. Many of them, were raised on his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

Nevertheless, Bookchin, understood the proper place of pedagogy. He established the Institute for Social Ecology, which trained hundreds of intelluctuals. Bookchin's work has been assigned in course studies and he was widely admired in Western Europe. Most of all, he left us roots, to which we can continue to grow.