Murray Bookchin in Greece: The Publication of his Works and the Impact of his Ideas

Written by Costas Despiniadis, translated by Eleni Dimitriadou.

The emergence of anarchist ideas in Greece is a very old story. Already in the 19th century, there appeared people influenced by the early socialist ideas of Saint-Simonism, while the first explicitly anarchist newspapers and groups made their appearance at the end of the 19th century, in Patras, Pyrgos of Ilia, Volos, and elsewhere.

However, this first appearance of anarchist ideas was shortly interrupted after the World War I, followed by a period when anarchist ideas were essentially nonexistent in Greek society, except, perhaps, in individual cases of intellectuals, but without any social impact. This situation continued throughout the interwar period and even beyond, as the Greek Communist Party (Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδας, ΚΚΕ) constituted the only powerful pole of the left in Greece, reaching its culmination in the period of resistance to the German occupation and, shortly after, that of the Greek Civil War. To the left of the ΚΚΕ were only a few small Trotskyist groups, encountering brutal suppression both by the representatives of the Greek state who collaborated with the Germans and by the Stalinists of the ΚΚΕ.

It would take a few decades for the severed thread of anarchist ideas in Greece to get reconnected, as, among other attendant results, the fall of the military dictatorship, in 1974, also brought a publishing boom of leftist, radical, and antiauthoritarian editions.

Already in 1973, one year before the fall of the dictatorship, the relative slackening of censorship resulted in the emergence of the first leftist publishing houses, which were no longer compelled to submit the books to censorship and approval before they were published. At the same time, there took place the creation of the first anarchist publishing houses: The International Library (Diethnís Vivliothíki), founded by Christos Konstantinidis along with a small group of anarchist activists who gathered around this publishing endeavor, as well as the Free Press of George Garbis, who had then returned from England, where he was a university student and had been exposed to anarchist ideas.

With rudimentary financial means, but with abundant solicitude and fighting spirit, these publishers began to gradually bring into contact those who were oppressed by the dictatorship and thirsty for radical ideas—readers in Greece at a time when there were not only difficulties with the flow of information, but also the level of knowledge of foreign languages.

At that time, however, the radical youth was ready to accept these reading incentives and to express its political radicalism. During the university students’ uprisings in the Athens Law School and in the Polytechnic against the junta, in 1973, we already had the appearance of the first, yet small in terms of membership, anarchist groups. These were essentially formed by the core of the individuals who shortly after gathered around the already mentioned first anarchist publishing house, Diethnís Vivliothíki.

Our first acquaintance with Murray Bookchin’s work was from three editions of Listen Marxist! (1978); The Ecology of Freedom (1978); and Towards a Liberatory Technology (1979). published in Greek by Diethnís Vivliothíki in the late 1970s. These three publications bear translators’ names as imaginative pseudonymous groups, such as “Vandals’ Association of Thessaloniki,” “Association of Good Striplings and Damsels, Split Faction of the Vandals’ Association of Thessaloniki,” and “Office of Public Secrets and Collaborative Expropriation in Thessaloniki.” In the first years after the fall of the dictatorship, there was still a fear of a new coup, and the fact that many of the early versions of anarchist books in Greece were translated by persons who use pseudonyms is indicative of this fear. Today, we are at liberty to say that these three works of Bookchin were translated by Athanasios Babadjimas, who had a good knowledge of English, had studied in the US in previous years, and there he had come into contact with Bookchin’s work.

Around the same period (in the late 1970s and early 1980s), we saw the publication of a few more of Bookchin’s books, this time by the second historical anarchist publishing house of Greece, Eleftheros Typos, though some do not bear an exact date of publication. In total, Eleftheros Typos, which continued its project of publishing Bookchin’s work during the 90s, released eight short books: The Limits of the City (1979); Hierarchy and Domination (N.p.d.); Ecology and Revolutionary Thought (1980); Spontaneity and Organisation (N.p.d); The Radicalization of Nature (1985); Marxism as a Bourgeois Philosophy (1987) The Spanish Revolution of 1936 – A Critical Account (1995), and The Overpopulation Myth (1997).

At this point, it should be emphasized that these first editions were essentially a selection of Bookchin’s essays, either from Post-Scarcity Anarchism or from other works, and not his entire books; a choice that is justified considering the limited resources of publishers at that time. Also, sometimes the titles of the Greek translations may not accurately reflect the original titles of the corresponding English essays, and their translations may have partial misses, as they were done at a time when the rendering in Greek of terms and political concepts was not yet consolidated.

However, despite any shortcomings, the first sowing was accomplished and Greek readers had come into contact with the thought of Bookchin. On the one hand, the anarchists in Greece found in Bookchin’s critique of Marxist political philosophy a valuable theoretical ally in their own dispute with the powerful Stalinist KKE and its offshoots. On the other hand, in a country that was in a process of “development” following the Western capitalist example—with all what this implies for the destruction of nature and the environment—the first ecological concerns met with the prolific analyses of Bookchin on these issues.

This “ecological dimension” (after the purely “anarchist”) was the second area where the Greek activists encountered Bookchin’s thought, considering that the ecological movement actually made its appearance in the 1980s. During this period, some of the people who turned towards the ecological movement came either from the antimilitarist movement of the conscientious objectors or from that of the anarchists, and they constituted the most radical parts of the ecological movement that were in search for a revolutionary, and not reformist, ecological perspective. Thus, what these people found in the work of the American philosopher, and mainly in his theory on “Political Ecology,” was a fruitful source of theoretical feedback for their activism. Indicative point of this meeting with Bookchin’s thought was the fact that in 1986, the Ecological Group of Thessaloniki issued a typewritten brochure of an interview with Bookchin under the title “Anarchism and Social Ecology.”

In the early 1990s, the anarchist publisher Michalis Protopsaltis who, in the meantime, was actively involved in the ecological movement, published two books: Bookchin’s essay, What is Social Ecology? (1992) and his book The Modern Crisis (1993) the Greek edition of which bears the title The Modern Ecological Crisis. In the same period, Exandas Publications released the Greek edition of the book Remaking Society (1993), which was the first of Bookchin’s works released by a mainstream commercial publishing house, probably indicating that at this point his thought was reaching a wider audience and not only some “initiate” activists.

Shortly afterwards, thanks to people who had significant involvement in the movement of conscientious objectors, such as Yiannis Glarnetatzis, we had the release of two more of Bookchin’s works, Towards an Ecological Society (1994) and The Limits of the City (1996). Both of these books were translated by Glarnetatzis and, once again, were published by a mainstream publishing house, Paratiritis. Characteristic of the appeal that Bookchin’s thought had already begun to have on Greek readers was the publication, in 1996, and by the same publishing house, of the book, Political Ecology, written by Dimitris Roussopoulos, a close collaborator and publisher of Bookchin, and, in a sense, a successor of the latter regarding his own writings.

In the late 1990s, and more specifically in 1999, we had the appearance of the Eutopia journal and the homonymous publishing house, with the participation of people with libertarian views, having as central elements of their action the ecological issue, as well as the issue of libertarian communalism. The original subtitle of the journal was “for direct and economic democracy, for libertarian-confederate communalism,” while the current subtitle is “periodical edition for libertarian communalism.” Both the old and the new subtitle, however, are indicative of the fact that the members of the Eutopia group are inspired by the ideas of Bookchin.

This is the first political and publishing group in Greece that had explicit references to Bookchin’s work (it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is the first “Bookchinist” group in Greece), and it frequently includes essays of the American philosopher in the issues of its journal, which continues circulation until today. Moreover, Eutopia Publications have recently released two books of his: FAI: The organization of the anarchist Spanish movement in the pre-Civil War years (1927-1936) (2014), and The Next Revolution (2017).

Apart from the members of Eutopia, there were people in Greece who were very clearly influenced by Bookchin’s work and referenced it explicitly to it in their writing and talks in the early 2000s. Through Bookchin’s thought (and this developed in the last years of his life), these people disassociated their political position (sometimes under conditions of intense polemic) from both the traditional anarchist movement and the respective ecological one. Thus, in the 2000s, and for the first time in Greece, we had activists, albeit few in number, who identified themselves as “communalists,” maintaining a clear distance from the anarchist and libertarian traditions. Moreover, we also had a number of books published (mainly, but not exclusively) by individuals who seceded from the Greek edition of the journal, Inclusive Democracy, created by Takis Fotopoulos (a thinker who had also been influenced by Bookchin in formulating his own theories). These books include the following: Social or Lifestyle Anarchism (Isnafi, 2005); History, Civilization, and Progress: Outline of a Critique of Modern Relativism (Isnafi, 2005); The Communalist Project (Alexandria, 2006); Marxism and Anarchism (Reflections on Marx and anarchism) (Isnafi, 2010).

The truth is that this evolution in Bookchin’s thought has displeased some parts of the anarchist movement in Greece (who were his first ardent readers and publishers), as they realized that this important thinker was no longer excluding themselves from his criticisms and sometimes his polemics.

In the last decade, the publication of Bookchin’s works continues steadily, and given that the economic potential of the Greek publisher—even of small and alternative publishers—is greater now, we are seeing the publication of his largest, extended books, and not just the selections of short essays, as it used to be earlier.

Thus, Vivliopelagos Publications released his important historical book, The Spanish Anarchists. The Heroic Years of 1868-1936 (2011), Alexandria Publications released his four-volume work on the history of revolutionary movements, The third revolution (2009-2017), and Antigoni Publications released one of his basic theoretical books, The Ecology of Freedom (2016). Furthermore, the publishing group, Εkdοseis ton Synadelfon, released an extended selection of his essays under the title, Libertarian Routes, with a preface by Dimitris Roussopoulos and an introduction by Bookchin’s companion, Janet Biehl. We ought to note here, as it is denotative of the wider presence in Greece of ideas inspired by Bookchin, that Janet Biehl’s essay, Ecofascism, was also released by Isnafi Publications in 2003, while Debbie Bookchin’s essay How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy was published recently (Ekdoseis ton Synadelfon, 2019). Alongside the publications of Bookchin’s major works, the interest in his ideas has been reinforced by the “Kurdish issue.”

Since the 1980s, the “Kurdish issue” has preoccupied the public opinion quite intensely in Greece, mostly from a patriotic and nationalistic perspective. In fact, the traditional political hostility between Greece and Turkey (steadily stirred up and reinforced by official state policies and the nationalists in both countries) led parts of the Greek political establishment to see an ally in the face of the Kurdish fighters. This attitude, however, is certainly not induced by some kind of pure internationalist solidarity towards a repressed people, but, instead, by an ulterior motive, a logic which in Greek is summed up with the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.¹” Moreover, it is an open secret that in the 1980s and 1990s, the “Kurdish issue” in Greece was a prime field of action for the Greek secret services.

How superficial and utilitarian this interest was on the part of the Greek politicians was made clear by the dirty role played by the Greek government at the time in its handing over of Kurdish leader, Abdullah Öcalan, to the Turkish authorities in 1999, when it was pressured by Greece’s Western allies. However, despite the indicative importance of this event, a full discussion goes beyond the purposes of this text. What is of importance to us, in the context of assessing the impact of Bookchin’s ideas in Greece, is that the developments in recent years with regards to the Kurdish movement in Rojava, as well as the salient influence of Bookchin’s thought on Kurdish fighters, have all made—for the very first time—the Kurdish issue in Greece a matter of international solidarity. In this context, it is worth noting that as soon as the Rojava movement took its current form, the hypocritical interest of Greek nationalists for the Kurds appears to have ceased forever!

This renewed, solidarity-driven interest has also been reflected in the release of relevant books by noncommercial publishers who are part of the respective solidarity movement. Thus, Eutopia Publications recently released Make Rojava Green Again (2019), a book that has been circulating in many countries, while it has recently been banned in Germany where its copies were confiscated.² As a demonstration of the new Greek solidarity with the Kurds is the publishing of four books by Abdullah Öcalan, in Greek, in which the later effect of Bookchin’s thought on the Kurdish leader is quite evident: Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution (2017); Democratic Nation (2017); Democratic Confederalism (2017). These were all published by the anarchist publishing house, Publications Stasei Ekpiptontes.

Conclusions

Completing this short essay, we can succinctly draw several conclusions. The interest in Greece for publishing Bookchin’s works over the past 40 years has been stable, and it was not a response to the many short-lived theoretical fashions that suddenly appear in the Greek publishing field, only to disappear just as suddenly. Illustrative of this lasting interest is that approximately 30 volumes of Bookchin’s works by ten different publishers have been published, as well as several essays that have appeared in various journals.

In various ways, Bookchin’s thought affected anarchist, libertarian, ecological and communalist movements in Greece, and although it never became dominant in these movements (with the exception of the communalist one, which, however, has been very limited), it has always been distinct. Bookchin provided these movements with tools for the critique of Marxist ideology and of conventional ecology, while he had essentially been the theorist who introduced, in Greece too, political ecology, communalism and libertarian communitarianism. Undoubtedly, Bookchin’s historical studies on preceding revolutionary movements were also important, as they offered, in the proportion that corresponds to them, the precious sense of historical continuity and genealogical ancestry that is often missing in activists, who usually have their interest focused on an often-ephemeral empirical “practicism.”

The relationship of the Greek anarchist movement—for which we can now say with certainty is one of the most numerous and powerful in Europe—had been rather ambivalent towards Bookchin, reflecting, perhaps, the shifts in Bookchin’s thought during his theoretical journey. However, both the majority of his publishers and his readers in Greece clearly come in one way or another from the wider anarchist-libertarian movement.

Despite the plethora of Bookchin’s works published in Greek, particularly when considering that many were the work of small publishers with limited financial means, the truth is that some of his key works are still not translated in Greek (e.g. From Urbanization to Cities, Cassel 1996).Additionally, the fact that this publishing engagement has been undertaken by different publishing houses, often disparate in their objectives resulted in the lack of systematization in the publication of his work that could permit the readers to follow the original evolution of Bookchin’s own thought. Instead, it appears that publishers and translators preferred to selectively pick and choose from his extended work whatever fitted their purposes. In fact, this weakness is pointed out by Bookchin himself in the preface to the Greek edition of his essay “The Communalist Project.”

In closing, allow me to make a personal comment, as I have tried to be as objective as I could throughout my brief report on the impact of Bookchin’s ideas in Greece: I am a steady but critical reader of Bookchin, sometimes agreeing and disagreeing with his views. Actually, I consider it to be the duty of any reader to read the political philosophers and writers critically and with vigilance, feeding and activating their own thought and not searching to find ready-made recipes and solutions for everything, as this is, in my viewpoint, to the mutual benefit of both the reader and the writer.

I have always appreciated the breadth of knowledge of this essentially self-educated man, the originality of many of his ideas, his insight regarding risks that he pointed out, but above all, I admire his lifelong devotion to the cause of universal human emancipation, as well as to the liberation of nature from human domination.

A political philosopher who selflessly devoted all of his intellectual potential to such causes is worth reading.

Bibliography

Murray Bookchin. Άκου μαρξιστή, [Listen Marxist!] (Athens: Διεθνής Βιβλιοθήκη, 1975).

Murray Bookchin. Η οικολογία της ελευθερίας, [The Ecology of Freedom] (Athens: Διεθνής Βιβλιοθήκη, 1978).

Murray Bookchin. Προς μία απελευθερωτική τεχνολογία, [Towards a Liberatory Technology] (Athens: Διεθνής Βιβλιοθήκη, 1979).

Murray Bookchin. Τα όρια της πόλης, [The Limits of the City] (Athens: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1979).

Murray Bookchin. Η οικολογία και η επαναστατική σκέψη, [Ecology and Revolutionary Thought] (Athens: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1980).

Murray Bookchin. Η ριζοσπαστικοποίηση της φύσης, [The Radicalization of Nature] (Athens: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1985).

Murray Bookchin. Ο Μαρξισμός σαν αστική κοινωνιολογία, [Marxism as a Bourgeois Philosophy] (Athens: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1987).

Murray Bookchin. Η ισπανική επανάσταση του 1936, [The Spanish Revolution of 1936] (Athens: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1995).

Murray Bookchin. Ο μύθος του υπερπληθυσμού, [The Overpopulation Myth] (Athens: Ελεύθερος Τύπος, 1997).

Murray Bookchin. Αναρχισμός και κοινωνική οικολογία, [Anarchism and Social Ecology] (Thessaloniki: Οικολογική Κίνηση Θεσσαλονίκης, 1986).

Murray Bookchin. Τι είναι κοινωνική οικολογία, [What is Social Ecology] (Athens: Βιβλιοπέλαγος, 1992).

Murray Bookchin. Η σύγχρονη οικολογική κρίση, [The Modern Ecological Crisis] (Athens: Βιβλιοπέλαγος, 1993).

Murray Bookchin. Ξαναφτιάχνοντας την κοινωνία, [Remaking Society] (Athens: Εξάντας, 1993).

Murray Bookchin. Προς μια οικολογική κοινωνία, [Towards an Ecological Society] (Thessaloniki: Παρατηρητής, 1994).

Murray Bookchin. Τα όρια της πόλης, [The Limits of the City] (Thessaloniki: Παρατηρητής, 1996).

Dimitri Roussopoulos. Πολιτική Οικολογία, [Political Ecology] (Thessaloniki: Παρατηρητής, 1996).

Murray Bookchin. Η οργάνωση του αναρχικού ισπανικού κινήματος στα προεμφυλιακά χρόνια (1927-1936), [The organization of the anarchist Spanish movement in the pre-Civil War years (1927-1936)] (Athens: Ευτοπία, 2014).

Murray Bookchin. Η επομενη επανασταση, [The Next Revolution] (Athens: Ευτοπία, 2017).

Murray Bookchin. Κοινωνικός αναρχισμός η Lifestyle αναρχισμός, [Social or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm] (Ioannina: Ισνάφι, 2005).

Murray Bookchin. Ιστορία, πολιτισμός και πρόοδος: Περίγραμμα μιας κριτικής του σύγχρονου σχετικισμού, [History, Civilization, and Progress: Outline of a Critique of Modern Relativism] (Ioannina: Ισνάφι, 2005).

Murray Bookchin. Το πρόσταγμα του Κομουναλισμού, [The Communalist Project] (Athens: Αλεξάνδρεια, 2006).

Murray Bookchin. Μαρξισμός και αναρχισμός, [Marxism and Anarchism] (Ioannina: Ισνάφι, 2010).

Murray Bookchin. Οι ισπανοί αναρχικοί: τα ηρωικά χρονια 1868 – 1936, [The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years of 1868-1936] (Athens: Βιβλιοπέλαγος, 2011).

Murray Bookchin. Η τρίτη επανάσταση Vol 1-4, [The Third Revolution Vol 1-4] (Athens: Αλεξάνδρεια, 2009-2017).

Murray Bookchin. Η Οικολογία της Ελευθερίας, Η Ανάδυση και η Διάλυση της Ιεραρχίας, [The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy] (Thessaloniki: Αντιγόνη, 2016).

Murray Bookchin. Ελευθεριακές διαδρομές, [Libertarian Routs] (Athens: Εκδοσεις των Συναδελφων, 2017).

Janet Biehl & Peter Staudenmaier. Οικοφασισμός, [Ecofascism] (Ioannina: Ισνάφι, 2003).

Debbie Bookchin. Πώς οι ιδέες του πατέρα μου βοήθησαν τους Κούρδους να δημιουργήσουν μια καινούργια δημοκρατία, [How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy] (Athens: Εκδοσεις των Συναδελφων, 2019).

Internationalist Commune of Rojava. Να ξανακάνουμε πράσινη τη Ροζάβα, [Make Rojava Green Again] (Athens: Ευτοπία, 2019).

Abdullah Ocalan. Απελευθερώνοντας τη ζωή: Η γυναικεία επανάσταση, [Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution] (Athens: Στάσει Εκπίπτοντες, 2017).

Abdullah Ocalan. Δημοκρατικός συνομοσπονδισμός, [Democratic Confederalism] (Athens: Στάσει Εκπίπτοντες, 2017).