Murray Bookchin (1921–2006,) pseudonyms M. S. Shiloh, Lewis Herber, Robert Keller, and Harry Ludd, was an American anarchist, political philosopher, trade-union organizer, and educator. His ideas shaped the anti-globalization movement.
Born to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in New York City, Bookchin started his political odyssey as a Communist, became an anarchist, and transformed into a prominent theorist on ecology. He is best known for his organizing activities on behalf of labor unions and his fierce critiques of capitalism, globalization, and humanity’s treatment of the environment.
Bookchin was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. His notable works include Our Synthetic Environment (1962,) Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971,) The Ecology of Freedom (1982,) and Urbanization without Cities (1987.)
In the late 1990s, Bookchin founded his libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism, blending Marxist and anarchist philosophies. He wrote Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left (1999,) Social Ecology and Communalism (2007,) and The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (2015.)
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In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and “charitable” acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
—Murray Bookchin
Topics: War
Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.
—Murray Bookchin
People are never free of trying to be content.
—Murray Bookchin
Topics: Contentment
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