Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Spreading Murray Bookchin’s Ideas in Germany

Written by Wolfgang Haug

In September 1978, an anarchist group in Southern Germany founded the publishing group, Trotzdem Verlag. At that time, many activists had ceased their political activities because of the increasing repression after the deadly attacks by the Marxist-Leninist Red Army faction and the fatal response by German police. In 1979, I came across Murray Bookchin’s ideas when he contributed to the Autogestione congress in Venice, Italy. We translated his contribution and published his text together with others from the congress in the book, Selbstverwaltung in 1981.¹ This was the beginning of a long involvement with his work which lead to a personal friendship. It was interrupted but never really stopped until his death. The concept of self-organization thrilled us in the 1970s and early 1980s; many self-organized small printing shops, housing projects, alternative community centres, bookshops, magazines, bicycle shops, publishing groups, theatre initiatives, and so forth were founded throughout Germany, but there was a lack of theory to put these projects and the subculture in general into contrast with the surrounding capitalist society. Often, a personal relationship with each other is very important for organizing future plans and activities. So, I met Murray Bookchin, his daughter Debbie, and Dimitri Roussopoulos at the international anarchist meeting in Venice, Italy, in 1984. Our group, called the Forum for Libertarian Information (FLI), presented a forum about work at the congress. The working class was not an agent for revolutionary change anymore. We had several ideas in those times that robots would take over the working place, and no more would it be the centre where the organization for a social revolutionary future could take place. Murray applauded and we listened carefully to his contribution about the rise of urbanization and the decline of citizenship. So we decided to work closely together.

We started to translate important articles by Murray and published them in our quarterly magazine, Schwarzer Faden (Black Thread Through History). The first article, about his approach to the ethics of nature, appeared in April 1985.² In September 1985, we had his thesis for a libertarian communalism.³ This approach was discussed in the meetings of FLI and in our magazine in the issues of May and August 1986.³ For us, his concept of libertarian communalism was important because it met with our approach to organize people in the neighborhood and to find a way to prevent the parliamentarism of the Green Party.

When the German edition of Murray‘s work, Ecology of Freedom, was published in 1985, Murray attended the bookfair in Frankfurt and came to our FLI meeting to discuss his work.^4. To strengthen his influence on rethinking anarchism, we published an interview with Murray done by Peter Einarssen in November 1987 and February 1988.⁵ In May 1989, we introduced “The Left Green Network to our readers.⁶ The issues in December, 1989, and April, 1990, offered Janet Biehl’s “Social Ecofeminism” (Sozialer Anarchafeminismus).⁷ in addition we put these articles afterwards in a small book of the Trotzdem publishing group edited in 1991. Her work, very much influenced by Bookchin, connected feminism to the social question and was simultaneously arguing against esoteric tendencies in feminist discussions.

In Frankfurt, our group was able to host Dimitri Roussopoulos from Black Rose Books when he attended the Frankfurt Book Fair. So our relationship and close friendship began and developed year by year, always with new ideas in mind and projects to carry out to bring the ideas of Social Ecology to a broader public. In August 1991, we published Murray‘s article about the Enlightenment to announce the German edition of Remaking Society we published in 1992. Bookchin’s program gave a good starting point. Our common aim was to bring back the big issues of enlightenment to society, like its commitment to reason, a very good education for everybody, ethical questions how humanity should live together, how technology and science could be used and to which purposes, how we can live and work in a ecological cultural society, how anarchism can find its important role in asking for choices, make people aware of hierarchies and create a culture of mutual help.

In September 1992, we took from Green Perspectives (October 1991) the article about libertarian municipalism by Murray.⁸ And in the next issue of December 1992, we gave Murray an opportunity to answer a critic of Ulrike Heider.⁹

In 1993, Andi Ries and myself gave input to a workshop on Murray’s thesis on municipalism at the “Libertarian days in Frankfurt.” The workshop was overcrowded, and therefore less efficient. We learned that sometimes, an overcrowded room is more important to an audience than developing and understanding new approaches for a radical change of society.

In summer, 1994, I travelled to Canada and the US, visited Dimitri and his partner, Lucia Kowaluk, in Montreal, and Murray and Janet in Burlington. I also met Social Ecologists Chaia Heller, Cindy Milstein, and others. In Murray and Janet’s flat, we discussed different subjects, some not connected to Social Ecology like the different attitude of Europeans and Americans to guns and pistols, the usage of lots of medication, or Murray explained the importance of the Civil War for Americans.

Before I left Germany, a new issue of our journal was planned and in August, 1994, we published Murray’s article about the future of cities.¹⁰ Also, I had taken up his advice to translate and publish L. Susan Brown‘s anarchafeminist answer to Power-feminism. When I came back to Germany, I published an interview in January, 1995, with Murray about the problems with trendy anarchism, Lifestyle Anarchism, as he called it.¹¹ We had discussed this a lot. His claim was, anarchism must speak to the people again not only to anarchist circles. In June, 1995, we published Janet’s article about ecofeminism and deep ecology.¹² We appreciated the well-considered criticism in their articles.We shared the view that there was a tendency that anarchism could become part of a chic bourgeois lifestyle, but we also saw that Murray’s view could lead him to condemn many young people who were still searching for their identity as “self-styled individualistic anarchists” who haven’t yet learned the real purpose of anarchism: i.e. the social revolution.

Meanwhile, year by year, the friendship and close working contact with Dimitri Roussopoulos developed so we were able to publish the German edition of Murray’s The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship in 1996. Bookchin was able to show the starting point of real, face-to-face democracy in the Athenian polis. Of course he didn’t overlook the failures of this first democracy like the existence of slavery, patriarchy, warfare, or class antagonisms, but he did point out the promises for a social future of equal rights for all citizens.

When the book fair was over, Dimitri came for another week to my place in Grafenau near Stuttgart where we did the interview about his work with Our Generation and the Black Rose Books, starting in 1961. The interview was published in January 1996.¹³

In 1997, we organized a debate between Murray and Noam Chomsky. Murray had critized Chomsky’s book, Powers and Prospects, so we started in issue 60 with a chapter of this book “Goals and Visions.”¹⁵⁴ Our aim was, to discuss different ways to bring back anarchism into the political sphere and to look what will be the better path to follow. Murray’s answer to Chomsky in issue 61 claims that “ideal and practical action” must be united.¹⁵ In issue 63, published in 1998, we published Chomsky’s “Consent Without Consent“ and an article by David Morris about free cities, looking closely at Murray’s municipalism concept.¹⁶ In issue 64, I advertised the first congress of Libertarian Municipalism in Lisbon taking place in August, 1998. For this event, the starting point of a new anarchist movement to influence societies around the world, we worked closely with Dimitri to publish the German edition of Janet Biehl’s book, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism,” ¹⁷ more less together with the English original done by Black Rose in 1998, it was published on time to the beginning of the congress. People who couldn’t afford to buy the book could read two chapters of Biehl’s book in Schwarzer Faden, the chapter about citizenship and about dual power in the next issues. Anarchist comrades who produced the Portuguese magazine, a Bathalha, had prepared the conference at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, and the lectures and workshops were promising. I was very confident that this had been a good start and would subsequently create a network of activists. Online discussions had been established and were used before and after the congress. Murray himself could not come to Lisbon because of his health so we had him videoconferenced into the sessions. A larger group, the Spanish CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), plus attendees from other countries, gave the impression that there was enough people to create something new. We examined the international attendence very carefully to guage the potential for organization, given the conditions in each country.

To discuss the next steps and just to relax, Dimitri and I spent another week in Portugal and on the Algarve coast. In the next issue, J. Frank Harrison from Nova Scotia, whom I met in Lisbon, wrote an article for our magazine about Bookchin and Peter Kropotkin, which showed common attitudes and theories. All seemed to be on the right track.

Next was a turning point in our ideals. When the next congress was organized in Plainfield, VT, I could not travel myself because of lack of money and time, so a good friend of mine was prepared to fly to Vermont instead. But there was something that European anarchists did not understand—the screening process. And because of that my friend and comrade was rejected because he had written a piece about Ghandi. Murray told him that a pacifist would be not welcome at the conference. Not only did I feel offended, I also felt very sad for my friend who in 2019 is still very active as a nonviolent, antimilitaristic anarchist. But more importantly, I felt that the promising new movement from Lisbon had been arrested because of the fear that it would be infiltrated by participants who do not believe in Social Ecology. But fear is never a good starting point to create social and cultural influences for a new movement. So for me, the crisis was evident, and I was not surprised that after the Plainfield meeting, the new movement generated in Europe became silent. By the 2004, when we closed Schwarzer Faden, there was not a single article on Social Ecology in the journal.

When Murray died, I wrote an obituary in the nonviolent anarchist paper, Graswurzelrevolution published in October, 2006.¹⁸ The piece also was published in the internet by Anarchopedia and a few thousand reads. The second obituary in German language was written by members of the kurdish PKK. Here, I came across for the first time the fact that the Kurds read and discuss Murray’s books and also his books that I have published in German. I became aware that Abdullah Öcalan reads Bookchin in the prison in İmralı, Turkey, and that he has organized a paradigm change of within the PKK, leaving national liberation politics behind and engaging in an open-minded political movement called Democratic Confederalism.

After Murray’s death, my interest in his ideas was still present. And of course, my friendship with Dimitri Roussopoulos was not affected, so he and Lucia visited me in 2012 where we arranged a long interview about participatory democracy, about the antiglobalization movement which had started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, about the World Social Forum and the efforts of citizens to take an active part in controlling their cities. This interview was published in two series in April and May, 2012 in Graswurzelrevolution. Dimitri’s plans to establish a Social Ecology centre in Europe, maybe in Greece, were discussed for the first time, and are seen as an option to renew the Social Ecology movement. In 2013, we met on the island of Crete with younger comrades from Greece, Norway, Sweden, France, and Italy, with the help of Brian Tokar of Vermont. At this point, the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (TRISE) was born. In 2019, TRISE has an office in Athens and is incorporated as a legal nonprofit association in Finland. The aim of TRISE is to be a pan-European resource for all those concerned with the democratization of democracy.

In January 2016 I wrote a piece on Murray’s anarchism and changing his mind in the last time, again in this grassroot paper. In the meantime, the war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq was fought by Kurdish troops and their allied forces, and after they got some help via air attacks by international forces, they created a decentralized society in the multiethnic region of Rojava in northern Syria based on community assemblies, local organizations, equal rights for men and women, dual power, self-organization, and active citizenship. Janet Biehl was invited to visit Rojava and has been there several times, most recently to create an illustrated book of the people of the region. Also one former member of our Trotzdem/Schwarzer Faden crew, Michael Wilk, a medical doctor, goes regularly to northern Syria to aid the wounded. So Murray did not saw those parts of his Social Ecology that have been realized and he also would not have imagined that it would happen in Syria. But it proves that his theories can be put into practice, so spreading his ideas must never stop.

References

1. Murray Bookchin, et al. Selbstverwaltung. Die Basis einer befreiten Gesellschaft. 1. Auflage (Reutlingen: Trotzdem-Verlag, 1981).

2. Murray Bookchin, “Die Radikalisierung der Natur – Zur Ethik eines radikalen Naturverständnisses” (in: Schwarzer Faden Nr.17, 1985: 22–34). Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1985-17-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n33/mode/2up. Accessed: August 20, 2019.

3. Murray Bookchin, “Thesen zum libertären Kommunalismus” (in: Schwarzer Faden, Nr.19, 1985: 14-25. Discussion in SF 21, 1986: 58–59; and 22, 1986: 61–62). Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1986-22-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n61/mode/2up. Accessed: August 20, 2019.

4. Murray Bookchin, Die Ökologie der Freiheit. Wir brauchen keine Hierarchien. (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 1985).

5. “Interview mit Murray Bookchin vom Oktober, 1984, 2 Teile,” (in: Schwarzer Faden Nr. 26 and 27, 1987: 37–47; and 1988: 40–44). Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1987-26-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#mode/2up. Accessed: August 20, 2019.

6. Friederike Kamann, “Left Green Network” (in: Schwarzer Faden, Nr. 31, 1989: 49-52). Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1989-31-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n51/mode/2up. Accessed: August 20, 2019.

7. Janet Biehl, “Der soziale Ökofeminismus” (in Schwarzer Faden, Nr. 33, 1989: 11-17). Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1989-33-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n15/mode/2up. Accessed: August 20, 2019.

8. Murray Bookchin, “Libertärer Kommunalismus—ein Konzept für eine konkrete Utopie” (in: Schwarzer Faden, Nr. 43, 1992: 20-25) Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1992-43-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n1/mode/2up Accessed: August 21, 2019; Murray Bookchin, “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview” (in: Green Perspectives 24: A Social Ecology Publication, 1991).

9. Murray Bookchin, “Vonheinem: ‘Narren der Frieheit’” (in: Schwarzer Faden, Nr. 44, 1992: 48–51) Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1992-43-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n1/mode/2up Accessed: August 21, 2019.

10. Murray Bookchin, “Die Frage nach der Zukunft der Städte” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 50, 1994: 28–35) Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1994-50-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#mode/2up Accessed: August 21, 2019.

11. Murray Bookchin, “Anarchismus is sehr shick geworden” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 52, 1995: 4–10). Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1995-52-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#mode/2up Accessed: August 21, 2019.

12. Janet Biehl, “Ökofeminismus und deep ecology: Ein unlösbarer Konflict?” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 54, 1995: 16–23) Available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/SchwarzerFaden_lidiap/1995-54-Schwarzer%20Faden_f#page/n15/mode/2up Accessed: August 21, 2019.

13. Wolfgang Haug, Andi Ries. “25 Jahr Black Rose Books: ‘Prinzip 1: Du musßt die Selbastausbeutung alkzeptieren’ Interview mit Dimitri Roussoupoulos” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 57, 1996: 47–54);

14. Noam Chomsky, Power and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (Boston: South End Press, 1991); Noam Chomksy, “Ziele und Visionen” (in: Schwarzer No. 60, 1997: 34–47).

15. Murray Bookchin, “Die Einheit von Ideal und Praxis” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 61, 1997: 21–29).

16. Noam Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 63, 1998: 17–26); David Morris, “Freie Städte an der Arbeit” (in: Schwarzer Faden No. 63, 1998: 28–29).

17. Janet Biehl, Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997).

18. Wolfgang Haug, “Das Wichtigste in den USA heutzutage ist es, Bewusstsein zu schaffen” (in: graswurzelrevolution, October, No. 312, 2006: https://www.graswurzel.net/gwr/category/ausgaben/312-oktober-2006/