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Mur ray Bookchin (1921–2006) was perhaps the most significant and widely read English-language anarchist thinker of the post–World War II era. His work also made significant contributions to political thought in relation to a range of issues aside from anarchism, including radical ecology, the history of the 1936 Spanish Revolution, neo-Marxism, and urban studies. His writings influenced a variety of political movements and tendencies, including the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalism, and municipalism.

Bookchin’s most significant political contributions centered on his theoretical integration of ecological concerns with anarchist philosophy. He argued that environmental destruction was an outcome of authoritarian social relations and class hierarchies within capitalist societies that allowed for the massive exploitation of common resources to serve the ends of privately controlled profit. Ending ecological damage could not occur through statist reforms that left structures of exploitation intact, but required a fundamental rearrangement of social life along antiauthoritarian lines. Bookchin signaled this concern in his groundbreaking work Our Synthetic Environment (1952), which was largely overlooked because of its radical conclusions.

Bookchin’s anarchist approach to radical ecology is termed social ecology and still provides an influential perspective within environmentalist circles. As a social ecologist, Bookchin argues that radical activism, to be dark green, must be informed most decisively by the moral considerations surrounding each manifestation of struggle. He argues that the capitalist mode of production and hierarchically rationalized workplaces have only negative consequences for workers as a class and for the environment. Bookchin’s critique further engages a direct confrontation with productivist visions of ecological or socialist struggles that, still captivated by illusions of progress, accept industrialism and capitalist technique while rejecting the capitalist uses to which they are applied. The ecological conclusion reached by Bookchin is revealed in the assertion that the sources of conflicting interests in society must be confronted and overcome in a revolutionary manner. This means that the earth can no longer be owned and must become a shared commons. These statements represent crucial aspects of radical alliances between ecological and labor movements beyond a limited “jobs versus environment” construction. Bookchin offers social ecology as an alternative to notions of deep ecology that argued that humans as a species should be held accountable for ecological destruction. Deep ecologists seek a mystical transformation of individual consciousness in which people, without regard to social context, status, or opportunity, are called to abandon industrial civilization. Such an approach was anathema to Bookchin because it overlooked the structures of inequality within class societies, holding poor people as accountable for ecological damage as corporate executives and elites who consumed vastly greater resources.

During the 1990s, Bookchin became increasingly critical of anarchist movements. His book Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1996), which criticized anarchists for confining their activities to subcultural or countercultural enclaves, shocked anarchist communities of North America, becoming one of the most controversial books in a long line of controversial literature. For Bookchin, contemporary anarchists have forsaken the revolutionary tradition of anarchism, preferring to become, in his view, just another bohemian subculture with no interest in confronting the powers of state and capital. He suggested that contemporary anarchism represents a fatal retreat from the social concerns (and communal politics) of classical anarchism into episodic adventurism (confrontation with authorities) and a decadent egoism. This unfortunate transformation threatens to make anarchism irrelevant at precisely the moment when it is most needed as a counterforce to globalization and the social dislocations engendered by neoliberal policies.

Bookchin’s distancing from anarchism grew over the last years of his life as he increasingly turned to his new theoretical innovation libertarian municipalism. Libertarian municipalism argued for a strategic shift in community organizing toward involvement in municipal politics as the most immediate and local venue for formal political engagement. Many anarchists viewed this as a retreat into reformism and came to disregard Bookchin as an anarchist.

Bibliography:

Biehl, Janet. The Murray Bookchin Reader. London: Cassell, 1997.
Bookchin, Murray. Post-scarcity Anarchism. New York: Ramparts, 1971.
The Ecology of Freedom:The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Montreal: Black Rose, 1982.
The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Montreal: Black Rose, 1996.
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. San Francisco: AK Press, 1996.
Shantz, Jeff. “Radical Ecology and Class Struggle: A Re-consideration.” Critical Sociology 30, no. 3 (2004): 691–710.
Radical Ecology and Social Myth: The Difficult Constitution of Counterhegemonic Politics. Saarbrucken, Germany:VDM Verlag, 2008.