39 Facts About Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher.

Murray Bookchin was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology.

Murray Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines.

Murray Bookchin's ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the democratic confederalism of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

Murray Bookchin was a central figure in the American green movement.

Murray Bookchin's father was from Mazyr and his mother from Vilnius.

Murray Bookchin was embarrassed by his given name Mortimore and went by his childhood nickname, Murray.

Murray Bookchin's father adopted the name of a relative, Bukczin, and anglicized it to Bookchin.

Murray Bookchin grew up in the Bronx with his mother, uncle Daniel, and maternal grandmother, Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary who imbued him with Russian populist ideas.

Murray Bookchin attended the Workers School near Union Square, where he studied Marxism.

In 1949, while speaking to a Zionist youth organization at City College, Murray Bookchin met a mathematics student, Beatrice Appelstein, whom he married in 1951.

On religious views, Murray Bookchin was an atheist, but was considered to be tolerant of religious views.

In 1958, Murray Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist, seeing parallels between anarchism and environmentalism.

In 1964, Murray Bookchin joined the Congress of Racial Equality, and protested racism at the 1964 World's Fair.

Murray Bookchin's groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" introduced environmentalism and, more specifically, ecology as a concept in radical politics.

Nevertheless, Murray Bookchin rejected the types of libertarianism that advocated unconstrained individualism.

In 1980, Murray Bookchin co-established the New England Anarchist Conference to organize the anarchist movement in the United States.

In 1995, Murray Bookchin lamented the decline of American anarchism into primitivism, anti-technologism, neo-Situationism, individual self-expression, and "ad hoc adventurism," at the expense of forming a social movement.

Murray Bookchin formally broke with anarchism in 1999, describing himself in 2002 as a "communalist" in a major essay elaborating his late-life views, called "The Communalist Project".

Murray Bookchin continued to teach at the ISE until 2004.

Murray Bookchin died of congestive heart failure on July 30,2006, at his home in Burlington, at the age of 85.

Murray Bookchin was critical of class-centered analysis of Marxism and simplistic anti-state forms of libertarianism and liberalism and wished to present what he saw as a more complex view of societies.

Murray Bookchin argued that both Marxism and syndicalism had focused too narrowly on appealing to workers and workplace issues.

Murray Bookchin rejected Barry Commoner's belief that the environmental crisis could be traced to technological choices, Paul Ehrlich's views that it could be traced to overpopulation, or the even more pessimistic view that traces this crisis to human nature.

The solution to this crisis, he said, is not a return to hunter-gatherer societies, which Murray Bookchin characterized as xenophobic and warlike.

Murray Bookchin presents a utopian philosophy of human evolution that combines the nature of biology and society into a third "thinking nature" beyond biochemistry and physiology, which he argues is a more complete, conscious, ethical, and rational nature.

Murray Bookchin wrote about the effects of urbanization on human life in the early 1960s during his participation in the civil rights and related social movements.

Murray Bookchin then began to pursue the connection between ecological and social issues, culminating with his best-known book, The Ecology of Freedom, which he had developed over a decade.

Murray Bookchin's argument, that human domination and destruction of nature follows from social domination between humans, was a breakthrough position in the growing field of ecology.

Murray Bookchin writes that life develops from self-organization and evolutionary cooperation.

Murray Bookchin wrote of preliterate societies organized around mutual need but ultimately overrun by institutions of hierarchy and domination, such as city-states and capitalist economies, which he attributes uniquely to societies of humans and not communities of animals.

Murray Bookchin proposes confederation between communities of humans run through democracy rather than through administrative logistics.

Murray Bookchin's work, beginning with anarchist writings on the subject in the 1960s, has continuously evolved.

In 1980 Murray Bookchin used the term "libertarian municipality" to describe a libertarian socialist system in which institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities.

Murray Bookchin proposes that these institutional forms must take place within differently scaled local areas.

Murray Bookchin posits that neither privatization nor nationalization can effectively pave the way toward an ecological society.

Murray Bookchin asserts that both models are deeply embedded in structures of domination, failing to address the root causes of environmental crises.

Murray Bookchin contends that nationalization typically shifts control from private companies to centralized bureaucratic entities, merely replacing one form of dominance with another.

When Murray Bookchin died in 2006, the PKK hailed the American thinker as "one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century", and vowed to put his theory into practice.