For much of his adult life Murray Bookchin was known as a major anarchist theorist, perhaps the most wide-ranging and innovative of the twentieth century. When he died in July 2006, the Times (London) Online called him “the most important anarchist thinker in North America for more than a quarter of a century.”[1] But the fact is that by the time of his death Murray no longer identified himself as an anarchist.
As early as 1995 he was telling the people closest to him that he no longer considered himself part of that movement. At a conference in 1999 in Plainfield Vermont he made the rupture public; and he put it in writing in 2002, in an article published online.
The break, however, was fairly easy to miss. Af... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
February 3–5, 2012, a conference was organized in Hamburg, Germany. The theme was “Challenging Capitalist Modernity: Alternative concepts and the Kurdish Question.” The following text was delivered as a speech to the conference.
In February 1999, at the moment when Abdullah Öcalan was abducted in Kenya, Murray Bookchin was living with me in Burlington, Vermont. We watched Öcalan’s capture on the news reports. He sympathized with the plight of the Kurds—he said so whenever the subject came up—but he saw Öcalan as yet another Marxist-Leninist guerrilla leader, a latter-day Stalinist. Murray had been criticizing such people for decades, for misleading people’s impulses toward free... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Reimar Heider, Öcalan intermediary, to Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl
6 Apr 2004
Dear friends,
please allow me to introduce myself: My name is Reimar Heider, I am one of the German translators of the books of Abdullah Öcalan, political prisoner and most influential kurdish thinker and politician.
Öcalan has been in solitary confinement for the last five years now. During that time he has read the Turkish translations of some of Murray Bookchin’s books, especially “The Ecology of Freedom” and “Towards an ecological society” which have influenced him deeply. He has re-built his political strategy around the vision of a “democratic-ecological-society”... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Introduction
For most compassionate and humane people today, the ecological crisis is a source of major concern. Not only do many ecological activists struggle to eliminate toxic wastes, to preserve tropical rainforests and old-growth redwoods, and to roll back the destruction of the biosphere, but many ordinary people in all walks of life are intensely concerned about the nature of the planet that their children will grow up to inhabit. In Europe as in the United States, most ecological activists think of themselves as socially progressive. That is, they also support demands of oppressed peoples for social justice and believe that the needs of human beings living in poverty, illness, warfare, and famine also require our most serious... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
At a time when the political sands have shifted massively to the right nearly everywhere, when the right is riding high while the left languishes in debris, it is increasingly common to hear the cry “Neither left nor right!” Few right-wingers issue this cry — but then, why should they? Their political label is the toast of several continents today. The fact is that the strongest political winds are blowing many leftists, like the rest of the society, toward conservatism and a glorification of the market.
Although the cry has become more common since the collapse of the Soviet system, it did not originate in this era. Realo Greens were known to define their party as “neither left nor right” in the late 19... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
During the past five years, the Kurds of southeastern Turkey have built communalist institutions on a scale unprecedented in the world. Earlier this year, in“Hasankeyf: A Story of Resistance,” I described the long-term Kurdish resistance to a massive hydroelectric dam project, coordinated by 36-year-old Ercan Ayboga.
After the article was published, Ercan (pronounced AIR-john) wanted to reach out to communalists in other parts of the world, and make the Kurdish achievement in assembly democracy known to them, so we agreed on an interview. We began our conversation the by e-mail. Then in September, I visited Diyarbakir for the Mesopotamian Social Forum, and on a sunny day in Sumer Park, we sat down and continued the interv... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold with them. An outlook that ceases to look for what is new and potential in the name of “realism” has already lost contact with the present, for the present is always conditioned by the future. True development is cumulative, not sequential; it is growth, not succession. The new always embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more adequately as the parts of a greater whole.
Murray Bookchin, “On Spontaneity and Organization,” 1971
Acknowledgments
The idea for this reader initially came from David Goodway, who, one
sunny afternoon in May ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Best known for introducing the idea of ecology to the left, and for first positing that a liberatory society would also have to be an ecological society, Murray Bookchin. over the course of several decades, developed the basic components of “libertarian municipalism”—how to create free cities.
Written in short, to-the-point chapters, this book presents an introductory overview and sketches the historical and philosophical context in which these ideas are grounded. Substantial material on the practical question of creating and organizing a new municipal movement toward such democratic cities is included. Bookchin has generously provided the lengthy interview that makes up the last third of the book.
Author’s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The Revolutionary Moment by Janet Biehl. Today Rojava has become the epicenter of popular desires for radical democratic change. Like Paris in 1789, St. Petersburg in 1905 and 1917, and Barcelona in 1936-37, it crystallizes an era’s aspirations for social and political revolution. The last book that Murray Bookchin authored before his death in 2006 was a history of such revolutions, with emphasis on the popular movements:
The Third Revolution
(4 vols., 1996-2004). The book’s title is the key to its meaning. The First Revolution is the preindustrial revolution, in which the people rebel against feudalism, as in 1789, when the French peasantry rose up against the aristocracy and monarchy. In 1792-93, working people i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
(This article coauthored with Murray Bookchin)
When “Realism” Becomes Capitulation Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. — Thoreau Ever since the debate between social ecology and deep ecology broke out in the summer of 1987, various individuals have taken it upon themselves to attempt to reconcile the two approaches and produce what they feel is a higher synthesis. Social ecology and deep ecology, however, are incommensurable, for several basic reasons. Deep ecologists differ among themselves as to the content of their approach, which often renders deep ecology itsel... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Full of admiration, but not without critique: Janet Biehl shares some of her ideas on the Rojava revolution after her recent visits to the region.
In this interview, independent filmmaker and journalist Zanyar Omrani talks to Janet Biehl about her late companion Murray Bookchin, her trips to Rojava and the important question of how to build bottom-up power structures without risking the reversal of the process over time.
Janet Biehl has traveled to Rojava twice in the past year and has written extensively about her experiences and observations while visiting the autonomous cantons in northern Syria. She is the author of the book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin.
Zanyar Omrani has visited Rojava severa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The “21 Theses,” dated July 2014 and published in November 2015, marked the birth of the Social Ecology Cooperative in Paris. In May 2016 I had the opportunity to ask Patrick Farbiaz, one of its founders, what the cooperative meant by social ecology. He explained that it views ecology through the eyes of the poor in the global South. It advances an “ecology of liberation” inspired by the “theology of liberation,” a formulation of Christian doctrine seen through the eyes of the poor, especially in Latin America. This form of political ecology has strong overtones with the environmental justice movement that emerged in the United States in the 1970s, which sought to organize those most affected by environme... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)