💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › iain-mckay-bookchin-remembered.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:55:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Bookchin remembered Author: Iain McKay Date: August 16, 2006 Language: en Topics: Murray Bookchin, obituary Source: Retrieved on 26th October 2020 from https://libcom.org/news/bookchin-remembered-freedom-160806
Murray Bookchin died at home on the 30^(th) of July at the age of 85,
surrounded by his family. From the 1960s onwards, Bookchin was, rightly,
considered one of the world’s leading anarchist thinkers. His death,
while not unexpected, is still a sad day for our movement.
It is hard to know where to start. Bookchin contributed so much to the
development of anarchism over since the 1960s that to summarise his work
is difficult, if not impossible. I still remember how thrilled I was to
read “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” – this was an author who knew what
anarchism was about. Reading “Toward an Ecological Society” and “The
Spanish Anarchists” confirmed this.
Bookchin placed ecological thought and concerns at the heart of
anarchism and vice versa. His account of the Spanish Anarchist movement
is unsurpassed and his critique of Marxism and Leninism still essential
reading. His argument that only a free and open society (i.e.
libertarian socialism) can resolve the problems confronting the
environment remains as true today as first formulated in the 1960s.
The negative effects of hierarchy, statism and capitalism on the
ecosystem have reached such proportions that even key sections of the
ruling elite cannot ignore them – although, of course, their solutions
will be technological fixes (what Bookchin termed environmentalism)
rather than genuine solutions which tackle the root causes rather mere
symptoms (ecology). A clear and thoughtful writer on many subjects,
Bookchin’s works have enriched anarchist thought and he will be solely
missed.
Saying that, his legacy is not unproblematic. His ideas on social
ecology, while essential for any modern anarchist, were tied to a
strategy (libertarian municipalism) which was inherently reformist. The
idea of anarchists standing in local elections to provide a legal base
for creating popular assemblies was always doomed to failure, for
reasons anarchists had explained to Marxists since the 1860s. We are, in
other words, direct actionists for good reasons!
Then there is his critique of the working class as a force of social
change. Here, I think, he most showed that his initial political
experience was with Marxism (he joined the Communist youth organization
at age 9, expelled a few years later he became a Trotskyist for a short
period before becoming an anarchist).
Sadly, this early experience seemed to have shaped his notion of what
“proletarian” and “worker” meant, limiting it to those wage slaves in
mass production industries rather than all people who sell their labour
to a boss. Such a definition of “worker” always seemed to me to be
narrow and a handicap to political analysis. As confirmed when his ideas
were used by those who would later turn against him to attack class
struggle anarchists as “workerists” (indeed, those who attack
“workerist” anarchists always seem to me to have an understanding of
class far more in common with “vulgar” Marxists than the people they are
attacking).
That said, Bookchin correctly placed hierarchy back at the heart of
contemporary anarchism after some (particularly syndicalists) focused it
more on to (economic) class. I think that few, if any, class struggle
anarchists today have such a narrow focus – even if some of our
opponents claim we do – and that is thanks, in large part, to Bookchin’s
work (even if, at times, he appeared to throw the baby out with the bath
water!). Similarly, few, if any, anarcho-syndicalists or other class
struggle anarchists today would be as uncritical of existing
technologies and the division of labour they imply as they appeared to
be before Bookchin’s work on the subject.
The last five years of his life saw him distance himself from, then
vigorously attack, the anarchism he had done so much to enrich and
develop (for example, his account of Spanish Anarchism in volume 4 of
his “The Third Revolution” utterly contradicts his early praise and
analysis, coming across as a bitter tirade by someone ignorant of his
subject and his introduction to the last edition of “Post-Scarcity
Anarchism” mars a classic book).
This flowed from the polemics produced by his “Social Anarchism versus
Lifestyle Anarchism” and conducted (by both sides) with increasing
personal abuse and venom. Having recently reread that book, I still find
his critique valid, if flawed in parts. By concentrating on minor
mistakes as well as Bookchin’s own reformist strategy, his critics
managed to ignore the very valid critique of technophobia, primitivism
and related nonsense it contained. Sadly, rather than dismiss his
critics as being not his kind of anarchist and moving on, he ended up
agreeing with them that anarchism was inherently individualistic!
However, his later attempts to deny that social ecology was a form of
eco-anarchism can, and will, be forgotten in favour of his early works.
So while Bookchin may have tried to trash his own legacy in the last
years of his life (undoubtedly a product of the Alzheimer’s disease he
suffered from), anarchists (I hope) will be more generous and remember,
apply and develop the contributions of a great, if flawed, comrade.