Bookchin, Murray

Bookchin, Murray

Murray Bookchin, also called by the pseudonyms M.S. Shiloh, Lewis Herber, Robert Keller, and Harry Ludd, (born January 14, 1921, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died July 30, 2006, Burlington, Vermont), American anarchist, political philosopher, trade-union organizer, and educator best known for his organizing activities on behalf of labour unions and his vehement critiques of capitalism, globalization, and humanity’s treatment of the environment.

Bookchin was the son of Russian emigrés Nathan and Rose Bookchin. His father was a farmer in Russia who became a hatter after arriving in the United States; his mother was a member of a radical industrial union. Bookchin joined the Communist youth movement at age 9 and remained for another nine years, serving as his local branch’s education director by 1934 or 1935. He was discharged from the Communist Party for promoting Trotskyist anarchism during the party’s turn toward authoritarianism at the time of the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. After graduating high school, Bookchin worked as a foundryman and a labour organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in New Jersey.

He joined the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in 1944 and worked in the machine shop at a General Motors (GM) plant in Manhattan. Bookchin was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1946 as the armed forces were demobilizing after World War II. He served in the motor pool and in tanks at Fort Knox in northern Kentucky. Upon his discharge in 1947, Bookchin returned to his job at GM and continued his work as a labour organizer.

As a member of the UAW union, he helped to organize and participated in the General Motors strike of 1946. By 1948 the GM strike had resulted in automatic cost-of-living wage increases for UAW workers; later concessions included pension and health insurance benefits. Although he had hoped that the General Motors strike and others like it would spark a larger revolution to introduce fundamental labour reforms that would reduce the power of company owners and financiers, he saw that the union and its workers were bought into compliance by the company executives.

After becoming disillusioned by the lack of revolutionary will among the workers, Bookchin left General Motors in 1950. He eschewed Marxism, realizing that the workers were not as prone to class struggle as the philosophy had promised, for libertarian socialism—the philosophy that all people should have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to take part in all decisions of the community that affect them. During this period, he wrote several articles under the pseudonym “M.S. Shiloh” for a periodical called Dinge der Zeit (as well as its English-language publication Contemporary Issues), which was run by the New-York-City-based German dissident group International Kommunisten Deutschlands (IDK). He published Lebensgefährliche Lebensmittel (1955), which was one of the first works of its kind to consider the use of food preservatives and pesticides, and Our Synthetic Environment (1962), which considered the relationship of these factors and X-rays to illness. He wrote “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” in 1964, an essay that sought to bring together ecology and anarchist thought to create what he called Social Ecology—a school of thought that called for the replacement of unjust, hierarchical relationships in human society, which he believed were ingrained in capitalism, with decentralized small-scale communities and systems of production.

Bookchin also promoted his ideas through the educational system. By the late 1960s he taught at the Alternative University in New York. By 1974 he had cofounded and had become the director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont. The same year, he took a position teaching social theory at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey. He taught at both institutions until 2004 and 1983, respectively.

Bookchin authored 27 books during his lifetime—including The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982), which explored the notions of oppression and dominance, specifically the push for people to control nature and the various ways in which people attempt to control one another through hierarchies, such as those that are built upon age and gender differences. His second major work, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1986), considered the idea of libertarian municipalism, that is, the idea of scaling down government institutions and bureaucracy common to centralized nation-states to function within smaller municipalities controlled by direct, rather than representative, democracy.