Murray Bookchin

Origins and early life

Murray Bookchin was born in New York on 14 January 1921 to Jewish immigrant parents from the Russian empire — his father Nathan Bookchin, born Nacham Wisotsky at Mazyr in what is now Belarus, and his mother Rose Kalusky from Vilnius — and he was raised partly by his maternal grandmother Zeitel, a Russian Socialist-Revolutionary who taught him populist politics in the Bronx before he was ten. Both parental lines are documented as Jewish, and the New York Times and Los Angeles Times obituaries describe him as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants; he was not religiously observant, and this fiche says so plainly.

Work and career

He joined the communist youth at nine, was expelled at eighteen for opposing the Hitler-Stalin pact, worked as a foundryman and an auto worker and organized for the union, then broke with Marxism in the 1950s over its productivism. In 1962, under a pen name, he published Our Synthetic Environment, a study of the chemical poisoning of food, air and workplaces, six months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and covering more ground; it was ignored.

He then built what he called social ecology: the argument that the destruction of nature grows out of hierarchy among human beings, and that ecological problems are therefore social and political problems that cannot be solved by technology or personal virtue. Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Without Cities set out a programme of directly democratic municipalities federated from below, which he called libertarian municipalism.

He founded the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont in 1974. In prison, the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan read him, corresponded with him, and rebuilt the ideology of his movement on his ideas; the self-administration of north-east Syria is organized on that model. Bookchin died at Burlington on 30 July 2006.