Murray Bookchin: In Memoriam

In his extensive writings on ecology and social change, Murray Bookchin tried to take us beyond Marx toward a more fundamental critique, a holistic rationality, a deeper freedom. Under the watchword of “coherence,” Bookchin sought to provide “pathways to a green future,” but his work ultimately fell short of its early promise.

Bookchin’s stature as a significant utopian theorist of our times was not entirely undeserved; his work was often stimulating, suggesting interesting avenues of thought. During the 1960s and 1970s he gained a reputation for prescience with his recognition of the centrality of the ecological critique and his understanding that the New Left’s vision of a participatory democracy could only be realized under conditions of thoroughgoing decentralization. In developing what he would call Social Ecology, Bookchin sought to transcend his early “Marxian intellectual training.”[1]

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Murray Bookchin came of age politically in New York City at the height of the Depression-era leftist ferment. Disdaining armchair radicalism, he became a socialist militant and union organizer. Many of his cohort of New York-based radicals eventually burned out in the Marxist movement or abandoned their youthful passion for progressive social change, but Bookchin’s commitment was rekindled when his intellectual development took a new turn during the 1950s. He began to examine issues that mainstream leftists regarded as peripheral, such as environmental degradation and cultural dissent. This manifested in his publication of books and essays such as “The Problem of Chemicals in Foods” (1952), Our Synthetic Environment (1962), and “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964).

By the late sixties Bookchin’s work had started to gain recognition within those currents of “The Movement” that constituted the first expressions of an emerging post-Marxist radicalism. His essays from that period were collected in an influential volume, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), excerpts of which appeared throughout the thriving alternative press of that era.

Bookchin put the ecological critique front and center at a time when most leftists continued to view it as merely a subset of the analysis of capital’s drive to minimize costs and exploit resources. His treatment of the subject was more sophisticated, and when activists (notably those associated with the American Clamshell Alliance and the emerging European Green Parties) acknowledged Bookchin’s theoretical influence, more serious attention was given to his writings.

Inspired by the attention, Bookchin set out to codify his ideas into a new System. Standing on the shoulders of Hegel and Marx, he felt he could see beyond Historical Materialism to what he called Dialectical Naturalism. On this basis he sought to provide theoretical leadership for the Green politics movement.

It is instructive to compare Bookchin’s elaboration of Social Ecology in his best known work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), with other post-sixties efforts to extend the domain of theory.[2] Most of the latter did little but de-center the “class contradiction” by incorporating feminist, identity, and/or ecological perspectives. Bookchin’s work, to his credit, was self-consciously part of a more profound transition of thought, from a “Red” to a “Green” analysis and critique.[3] Yet, despite his pivotal role in the initiatory phases of that process, it would turn out that Murray had opened doors through which he ultimately could not pass.

Wedded to a modernist/anthropocentric outlook, Bookchin was appalled when a new generation of green theorists challenged the notion of human history as a process of progressive development. In his 1996 volume-length essay, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology, David Watson wrote: “Bookchin’s one-dimensional idea of rationality informs his increasingly vituperative defense of history, civilization and progress … His recent essays typically contain the obligatory challenge to what he calls ‘a new pessimism toward civilization as such … a widespread assault against the ability of reason, science and technology to improve the world for ourselves and life generally.’ Of course, the problem isn’t that people are questioning technology; [to the contrary, what’s problematic is] the massive, if dysfunctional, resignation to runaway technics and development … and the ubiquitous sigh of oppressed and oppressor alike, that ‘you can’t stop progress.’ It’s sad Bookchin feels the need to watchdog such an arsenal of domination.”

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The idea of “liberating theory” is an entirely appropriate one for our time. Unfortunately, those who thought they could find a way forward through the ultimate “coherence” of Bookchin’s Social Ecology either found themselves disillusioned or learned to tolerate a very uneven and idiosyncratic stream of work from an increasingly cantankerous pen. In Beyond Bookchin, Watson expressed the hope that a viable, healthy, open Social Ecology might yet be realized[4]. What’s clear is that it will have to emanate from a perspective more chastened and less dogmatic than Bookchin’s.

Murray’s early work prompted important discussions in New Left, counterculture and ecology circles about communitarianism, the nature of human liberation, and the prospects for social change. He sought nothing less than a new paradigm and, for many years, our movement benefited from his explorations. He failed to arrive at his destination because he could never shake his visceral allegiance to Marx’s modernism and progressivism — and his later writings constituted a bitter brew of frustration, disappointment, and degeneration of thought.

Whether or not Social Ecology will become revitalized in the wake of Bookchin’s passing remains to be seen. In mourning Murray, we in the Green movement mourn theoretical potential yet unrealized, shoes of leadership still unfilled.

Notes

1. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), page 1.

2. See: Michael Albert, et. al., Liberating Theory (Boston: South End Press, 1986), or: Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory (New York: Praeger, 1981).

3. “Ecological thinking, today, can provide the most important synthesis of ideas we have seen since the Enlightenment, two centuries ago.” (Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future [Boston: South End Press, 1990], page 18).

4. “Murray Bookchin is the Elmer Fudd of North American anarchism, and David Watson is the Bugs Bunny.” (Peter Lamborn Wilson quoted on the back cover of Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology [New York: Autonomedia, 1996]).

(this article appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Green Horizon Magazine)