Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Murray Bookchin’s Legacy of Freedom

Written by Ramazan Kaya. The following review of the Turkish edition of Bookchin’s “The Third Revolution Volume 1: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era” was originally published on 3^rd of June, 2012, on the website of the Turkish left-wing magazine Birikim. Translated into English by Ertuğ Dinseven.

“Bookchin’s Anarchism gets it’s revolutionary fire from
Bakunin and its practical suggestions from Kropotkin”
~Peter Marshall

The first volume of Murray Bookchin’s four-volume book series titled “The Third Revolution,” “From Peasant Rebellions to French Revolution” was published by Dipnot Publishing with the attentive translation of Sezgin Ata. The copyrights of the remaining volumes of the series belong to the same publishing house and a feverish translation work continues. Murray Bookchin has been most widely read in Turkey in recent times and all of his books translated into Turkish are out of print. I think we will not exaggerate If we say that he is the most talked and discussed radical thinker among subjects at different ends of the political spectrum ranging from Kurdish political cadres in prison to academia, ecological movements to urban activists and anarchist groups. The Kurdish political movement undoubtedly plays an important role in this interest. The fact that the “Democratic Autonomy” project developed by the Kurdish political movement has been significantly infuenced by Bookchin’s political views, has not only increased the interest in Bookchin, but also brought the re-discovery and discussion of his theses, which still maintain their current importance in the world of exploitation and domination of our age. Janet Biehl, the closest companion of Bookchin who wrote foreword to the book “From Peasant Rebellions to French Revolution,” greeted the political interest of the Kurdish movement in Bookchin.

Bookchin’s views can be briefly summarized as building “ecological, decentralized, self-governing cities through face-to-face democracy.”¹ The Kurdish movement which realized the authoritarian and exclusionary character of the nation-state model well, saw in Bookchin’s theses an important reference point for the aim at establishing a confederal self-government policy in Kurdistan. Murray Bookchin’s ideas have the potential to be the inspiration and a model for many movements for a long time in the questioning of centralism, industrial production, sexism, hierarchy, and representative politics. Bookchin’s politics are an invitation to create politics with ordinary people. The transfer of politics to vanguard professionals, parties and charismatic leaders is to put mortgages on the public’s determination of their own future. In his words “Political life will usually be in the hands of a small minority, as long as ordinary people have to devote much of their time to daily livelihoods.”

The issue of individualist lifestyle anarchists in North America who are unwilling to be part of a communal life and the gradually emerging new primitivism were harshly criticized by Bookchin, and since 2000, he started to define himself as a “communalist” by drawing a thick line between these kinds of anarchisms. However, this ideological borderline did not prevent Bookchin from seeing himself as part of the social anarchist tradition. Bookchin has always embraced the achievements and historical tradition of social anarchist movements, anarcho-syndicalism, as embodied in Russia, Ukraine, and Spain. The eco-anarchist ideas he developed in the early 1970s he called “Social ecology”. In 1987 Bookchin started a sharp debate with deep ecologists who preferred nonhuman nature against people and advocated for mysticism. He defended a secular, humanistic, and social ecologist perspective against these ideologies he found reactionary. In addition, Bookchin—unlike deep ecologists—questioned ecological issues on the basis of hierarchy and criticism of domination. Because, according to him, unless the harmony and equality of the human with the human was achieved, harmony with the nature could not be achieved. We can say that Bookchin has been the most renewed libertarian thinker in thought and action since the Second World War. His greatest success is that he combined traditional anarchist insights with modern ecological thinking to create a “social ecology.” Like his maestro Kropotkin, Bookchin also finds evidence of his views on free society in his anthropology and history findings. He tries to pull the “legacy of freedom” out of the hierarchy and exploitation chains of history. From this legacy of freedom, he chooses medieval millenarianist Christian sects, Digger colonists of English Revolution, New England city assemblies emerging after American Revolution, the sections established in Paris during the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, the anarchist communes and councils of the Spanish Revolution as models for freedom forms of the future. He goes beyond the objections of classical anarchist thinkers regarding state and capitalism and analyzes human history with the arguments of “hierarchy” rather than class, “domination” rather than exploitation. “Historically, the emergence of hierarchies is long before the emergence of classes, and the ongoing pressures of privileged genders, ethnic groups, nationalities, and bureaucracies can still exist in society, even if economic classes have disappeared.”² In Murray Bookchin’s philosophy, the revolution should aim not to seize the power, but to disband it. A society should be carried out with self-management. The revolutionary process should aim at the formation of popular assemblies and communities that encompass all members of the community and enable them to act as individuals. Bookchin suggests that his “ecotope” will be a confederation of self-government communes in practice. Each commune will rule itself with a form of direct democracy. Administrative tasks will be carried out by rotation method, but basic policies will be determined in public public assemblies. He does not reject technology totally. According to him, technology can also provide the precondition for a free society that increases leisure time by eliminating hard work, material insecurity and central economic control. However, he is in favour of “eco-technologies” that are compatible with nature, will only provide local materials and cause minimum pollution. Nevertheless, Hegelian teleology of Bookchin, his optimistic view about the abundance society, the enlightened humanism that places people at the centre, the European centrist understanding of history, his trust in objective reason, and modern technology continue to be subject to criticism and discussion by libertarian politics.

Turning back to his last book, “From Peasant Rebellions to the French Revolution”, it covers the chapter starting from the popular revolts in the Middle Ages, peasant uprisings, sectarian-based civil wars and the results of the French Revolution. When we finish reading it, the main question we ask ourselves is whether we will see the undiscovered popular revolts and failed revolutionary attempts that emerged before modern societies as moments of opportunity that we missed freedom and equality, or modern capitalism is already inevitable and modern for freedom. Are we going to believe in Marxist teleology that says we have to wait for the dawn? The answer to this question continues to determine the perspective of the revolution and its policy-making horizon. According to Bookchin, “Marx’s view tends to make the historical revolutionary process generally very fatalistic. So much, so that it forces us to admit that none of the great liberation movements, which lasted more than four centuries, constituted an alternative to the ultimate victory of capitalism.”³ Bookchin, who writes history in the light of grassroots popular movements and revolutions, clearly rejects modern historical narratives based on free and homogeneous time. “I refrained from seeing the intentions of these movements as a reflection of the emergence and self-consolidation of industrial capitalism; instead, I described the desires of different revolutionary trends in their words”⁴ he says. Every person who reads this book will be amazed by Bookchin’s deep knowledge of history, the language that transmits historical events only with details that a person who has lived in can be such a foundation. Bookchin, who was also fascinated by the history of the resistance he carried over, admits that he would be with Jean Varlet in the 1793 uprisings of the Sans-Culottes and Jean Varlin during the war days of the Paris Commune without thinking. Murray Bookchin doesn’t see history as just a fight for classes like Marx. It recognizes that the clashes between the exploiters and the exploitees cover a significant part of history, but he does not cease to trace those who resist from top to bottom control, centralization, the state, bureaucracy, sexist oppression, religious institutions, and the fragmentation of organic community life. He tries to make the revolution organizations of the “bottom people,” which try to survive in the borders of the Jacobean revolutions and operate in the form of popular assemblies, business committees, Soviets and popular associations, visible. He reveals that the masses of the people who participated in the great revolutionary waves (of the past) did not approve of the future programs of the current vanguads and that they were included in these processes in consequence of rejecting their negative living conditions. He presents (the fact) when it comes to a turning point, every revolutionary power or parties’ conflict with the communal structures of the people, as proof. In addition, Bookchin, who angrily objected to the fact that modern history shows people who create revolutionary formations as “unconscious masses,” on the contrary he determines “followers of well-known artisans such as printers, blacksmiths, wheel makers and independent farmers were generally individuals with strong personalities and high expression.”⁵ He emphasizes that no revolutionary fire has come to a halt, and that the fire has taken fire from egalitarian and autonomous ideas that have taken root in the communal life and cultural habits of these people.

Among the “History of Revolutionary People’s Movements” that Murray Bookchin presents in this book, rebellion regiment of all revolutionary and communist movements of Feudal Europe in the Middle Ages, the independent colonial associations in America and the Sans-Culottes of the French Revolution flows with all their glory. From the heretic Christian sects (Anabaptists, Free Spirit Brothers, supporters of Thomas Münzer) to the German peasant revolts; from popular revolts demanding tribal egalitarianism in Mesopotamia and Egypt to Levellers Army in England and Gerrard Winstanley led Diggers colony, independent colonies established after the American Revolution, the New England City Council and the Paris sections of peasants and workers who wore the “red cap of freedom” in the French Revolution, all the movements that shaped the history, anonymous heroes who crack the walls of social injustice, they take their honourable place in the history of the losers. Bookchin underlines that, if these struggles were successful, it was highly likely that Western European history would have evolved in a direction of city and peasant confederations rather than central nation-states. Nevertheless, rather than lamenting the past, with the courage he takes from the history of the oppressed, Bookchin continues to insist that he will not be part of any historical period in which the revolutionary spirit disappears and intently shows that every historical period includes revolutionary opportunities in itself.