Murray Bookchin: anarchist heretic who Inspired Spreading Revolution in Middle East

 

Posted by Julius Gavroche  from autonomies.org/ shared with thanks        The ongoing uprisings and revolution in Rojava and parts of Turkey are largely modelled on the ‘municipal anarchist’ blueprint of Murray Bookchin, whose works had been neglected and often rejected, even by anarchists as being a ‘sellout’ or ‘anti worker’ etc.

see also…RADICAL CITIES AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH JANET BIEHL

When the majority Kurdish movement, influenced by jailed leader Ocalan, finally rejected Marxism and Stalinism it adapted Bookchin’s community, ecological and anti state organisational ideas.


In this series dedicated to anarcho-syndicalism, autonomies shares Murray Bookchin’s critical reflections on this tradition within anarchism, in the excellent essay, “The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism”.  Whatever reservations we have regarding the direction of Bookchin’s anarchism towards a radically democratic municipalism, his emphasis on the communalist traditions of anarchism is of great importance, not only in reading the history of the anarchist movement, but also for critically engaging with the more recent “occupy movements” and the “anarchist” response to them. …


The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism

by Murray Bookchin (1992)

One of the most persistent of human frailties is the tendency of individuals and groups to fall back, in times of a terribly fragmented reality, onto obsolete, even archaic ideologies for a sense of continuity and security.

Today we find this not only on the right, where people are evoking the ghosts of Nazism and deadly forms of an embattled nationalism, but also on the “left” (whatever that word may mean anymore), where many people evoke ghosts of their own, be they the Neolithic goddess cults that many feminist and ecological sects celebrate or the generally anti-civilizational ambiance that exists among young middle-class people throughout the English-speaking world.

Continue reading “Murray Bookchin: anarchist heretic who Inspired Spreading Revolution in Middle East”
%d bloggers like this: