Murray Bookchin was a person that devoted his life to the development of Social Ecology and Communalism as theoretical tools of a comprehensive social project for the challenges that both humanity and nature face. Through tireless teaching, speaking, organising, and writing, Bookchin presented a humanist vision of ecology based on community, direct democracy, and the better promises of the Enlightenment, showing how we could transform our society into one that is free and egalitarian.

Bookchin was not interested in creating a new political dogma or metaphysical ideology, which to elevate him to an “armchair” intellectual status, while providing his audience with post-modern fancy word-salads. No, he was not interested in this and was not afraid to engage in fierce political debates with other thinkers and political tendencies. Bookchin did not hesitate to criticise the postmodernist nihilist politics of renowned philosophers of past and present like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Baudrillard. He was also highly critical of political movements like anarcho-syndicalism and Marxism. Bookchin recognised their historic importance, but couldn’t overlook their role today—an attempt to fall back, in times of a terribly fragmented reality, onto obsolete, even archaic ideologies in a search for a sense of continuity and security. And of course, he never hid his complete disagreement with New Age and mysticism-centred streams that tend to delude and depoliticise social movements until today.

Bookchin’s late abandonment of the anarchist label can be viewed not as a renouncement of his radical libertarian ideals, but as a symbolic act aimed at showing how little meaning there is in ideological dogmas and ideological purity. What he was most interested in was the power of vibrant and developing ideas. A classic ideology that remains entrapped in the spatiality and temporality of its birth was an obstacle to Bookchin to inspect ongoing developments in society and search for coherent alternative paths. In this sense what really interested him the most was the question of genuine revolutionary social change and all of his work should be viewed as a call to action.

Bookchin refused to remain entrapped in old ideological interpretations of the world, which is evident from his secular interest in ecology. Traditional leftist fascination with factories could not distract him from the environmental degradation provoked by industrial capitalism. Long before climate change took over the news and the human influence on it became widely accepted, Bookchin began warning humanity for the disastrous environmental impact its activities had. But unlike various mysticists and primitivists who blamed human nature as such, he noted that it was the way human societies are being structured that determines humanity’s attitude towards nature and began researching alternative forms of social organisation that could pave the way towards an ecological and democratic society. His work produced a theoretical body that he termed Social Ecology, which nowadays is gaining momentum among climate activists and beyond.

Bookchin drew a direct link between social organisation and human interaction with nature. The way societies treated their natural environment was a reflection of the way their interrelations were structured and thus suggested that statecraft and capitalism led to the creation of a reckless and wasteful anthropological type. He then explored linkages between direct democratic forms of societal organisation that could result in stewardship and a symbiotic relation with nature.

Bookchin recognized the importance of science, which often led him to clash with deep ecologists and primitivists. But while recognising the liberatory potential of technology, he was in no way a techno-fetishist. For Bookchin, the technological development in a capitalist setting was shaped by the latter’s values and driven to serve its purposes. Thus, technologies that could potentially be made to put an end to scarcity were instead used for profits and production of artificial shortages. He knew that the road to a post-scarcity society would have to be based on a libertarian political transformation, rather than on quick techno-fixes.

Bookchin’s insistence on the importance of management of political power made him quite the distinctive thinker. He could see that it was not simply a question of implementing a new economic model or developing a technological fix that could put an end to injustice and inequality. Instead, Bookchin, throughout his life emphasised on the need of ultimately creating a directly-democratic setting in which power is being radically distributed horizontally and everyone can participate as equals in the management of all spheres of social life. This helped him develop a sophisticated political strategy called libertarian municipalism, based on real historic experiences and aimed at provoking social change in the here and now. It is only logical that it has become a theoretical stepping stone for social movements around the world in the last decade, when fighting economic inequalities and political oligarchies. It’s influence is particularly evident in the Kurdish freedom movement and the decentralised confederalist system developed by the autonomous communities of Rojava.

Bookchin suggested that our struggles should be focused on the political question of power, i.e. the question of who has to decide on what course our communities in particular and our society in general should take. His political project, as he himself puts it, is decidedly a confrontational form of face-to-face democratic, anti-statist politics. Throughout his work, Bookchin seeks to relocate the space within which political power should be exercised so as to allow the greatest possible freedom to all members of society. He moves beyond the Nation-State, as it alienates the great majority from the decision-making processes, vesting almost all authority in the hands of a narrow bureaucratic and managerial stratum. He sought another space—this of the municipality—which during a significant time of human history, allowed communities to directly self-manage their common affairs. As Bookchin writes, between amorphous communities and the institutions of the Nation-State, the municipality offers a sphere of political activity and a domain for the exercise of power that can politically structure the former, while undermining and displacing the latter.

Bookchin’s legacy has spread significantly, especially in the last decades. The more social movements experiment with forms of assembly democracy, the more their interest in Murray Bookchin’s ideas rises. Nowadays, his political influence is palpable among grassroots movements all around the world. From Western European and American protesters and climate activists, to Middle Eastern revolutionaries, the spirit of direct democracy and social ecology can be observed to take shape in popular attempts at reclaiming power away from the state and capital.

Read Jay Arachnid’s opposing perspective