Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin is no more. One of the great re-energizers of the anarchist project died early yesterday.
Bookchin was an important influence upon me and my fellow Vancouver anarchists back in the early days of our movement. Indeed, it seems hard to imagine anarchism developing there at that time without his influence. That combination of ecology, community and libertarian thought seemed just made for us. Raise a glass in honour of Murray!
For a Counterpunch story on Murray Bookchin see:
posted by Larry Gambone at
11:47 AM
4 Comments:
Hi. It was nice to stumble upon your post while doing a search for blogs mentioning Murray Bookchin's death (though I think we may have met on the Internet sometime before - if not through present blogs, then through some other project (like something I worked on in the past?)). Anyway, I wrote my own short tribute, though I would have liked to write more, and I cited Brian Tokar's article too.
I haven't really been in any group that worked with, and was influenced by, Bookchin though I know many people who have - from the social ecologist school in Vermont (more recently) to people who hung out with him and/or verbally sparred with him in New York City way back in the 1960s. (That is, they tell me stories about this stuff from the '60s - I was still in elmentary school.)
I was active in the anarchist "movement" in the '90s and the first couple of years of the 2000s but have drifted more toward libertarian Marxism/left communism these days (at least in terms of intellectual interest, though I feel that, like many people, I've retreated from radical activism altogether of late - maybe at a loss of what to do at this point, etc.). However, Murray Bookchin's work has stayed with me - in fact, I've actually become more interested in his work and was just experiencing a kind of renewed interest in much of it the past couple of months. I think that Bookchin's work had a theoretical and historical depth that you just don't see in much anarchist writing these days, or much radical leftist writing. And many of his ideas went well beyond the familiar territory of anarchism or any established left-wing ideology. Anyway, yes, I think he will be missed...
excellent comment richard... especially in regards to his theoretical and historical depth.
murray will be missed. in 1990, my second year of college, he was my introduction into anarchism via a little book, i think it was remaking society. i moved onto his other works my favorite being the ecology of freedom. it may be a good time for a reread of that.
i was lucky enough to meet him and hear him speak several times when i attended the institute for social ecology in 92-93. he was cranky but lovable at the same time... his crankiness was understandable. he could be rough but his roughness was very well meaning... at least it usually seemed so to me. he wanted us to push forward, to learn, and to develop... and he took it, "the project", very seriously.
in time i think much of what he believed and wrote about will prove to be very useful and relevant.
I could never make head nor tail of Bookchin's books but I gather his heart was in the right place. Like many Anarchists before him, Murray's lights went out as the flames of freedom grew dimmer and dimmer in comparison to the rockets' red glare.
Murray was a complicated man, and I'm sure that his works could be represented in "stages", even though he, like almost 100% of radicals almost 100% of the time would choke on the words, "I was wrong". Yet in each of these stages he contributed a lot. I watched Murray skitter back and forth between teleology pro and con depending on whether he had read Hegel recently---for example. But Murray's legacy is hardly in the field of philosophy, no matter how much he took pride in this as an autodictat. He shone in the fields where a self taught person shines most brightly ie in breaking new ground and establishing connections between things that seemed seperate.
Too bad we'll never hear his voice again.
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