Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin “died in 2006 a disappointed man,” said Janet Biehl, the author of Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin. At the time of his death, his dream of social revolution had failed to materialize.

Born in New York City in 1921 to Russian-Jewish parents, Bookchin was raised as a revolutionary. His identity is described as being “socialist first, Russian second, Jewish third.” He immersed himself in the growing revolutionary spirit left in the wake of the Depression decade of the 1930s, building skills as an orator and a writer.

As time went on, Bookchin broke with the Marxist left, and began to gravitate towards environmentalism in the late 1950s—mostly due to concerns over pesticides being used on food.

He saw this as happening because of how large-scale and centralized farming had become, and then he started formulating the same critique of cities and political units. Decentralization of power became his new project, and with that he began to gravitate towards anarchism. By the end of the 1950s, Bookchin was looking to realize structures that could carry out this decentralization.

He was inspired by ancient Greece’s face-to-face democracy, despite the fact that it was an “incomplete” democracy, largely due to the marginalization of anyone who wasn’t a male with property.

He wanted to find a way to implement [assembly democracy] universally. Bookchin imagined that if everyone at the local level had to debate and vote on whether or not to scrap their own environment, it would never happen. He began to organize people towards this idea, which he termed libertarian municipalism.

As the first Earth Day came around in 1970, people began to embrace his ideas. The movement for direct democracy saw gains in cities such as Burlington, Vermont—where Bookchin lived at the time—and Montreal.