A self-taught foundry worker warned about chemicals in food before Silent Spring
Murray Bookchin never went to college, yet he is considered one of the twentieth century's most important left-wing theorists. His first book, published under a pseudonym in 1962, appeared months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and he went on to develop social ecology, fusing environmental thinking with anarchist and libertarian socialist ideas.
Born in New York City on January 14, 1921, to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, he grew up in the Bronx with a grandmother who filled his head with Russian populist ideas. He joined Communist youth groups as a boy, broke with Stalinism in the late 1930s for Trotskyism, and in the early 1940s organised for the United Electrical Workers at a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey. He was also an auto worker during the General Motors strike of 1945 and 1946.
From 1947 he worked with the German exile Josef Weber on the magazine Contemporary Issues, which argued that modern technology could free people from toil and make a post-scarcity society possible. It published his 1952 article on chemicals in food. In 1958 he began calling himself an anarchist, seeing common ground with environmentalism, and Our Synthetic Environment came out in 1962 under the name Lewis Herber.
His essay Ecology and Revolutionary Thought brought ecology into radical politics, and his Anarchos magazine promoted solar and wind power and decentralisation. His much-reprinted Listen, Marxist! of 1969 tried and failed to alert the radical student movement SDS that a Marxist faction was poised to capture it. In 1971 he moved to Burlington, Vermont, to put decentralist ideas into practice, and he helped create the Institute for Social Ecology at Goddard College, which became a hub for appropriate technology.
In the late 1990s, disillusioned with what he saw as the apolitical lifestylism of contemporary anarchism, he dropped the anarchist label and founded communalism, aiming to combine Marxist, syndicalist and anarchist thought. His ideas have influenced the New Left, the anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements and Occupy Wall Street. He wrote two dozen books, including The Ecology of Freedom in 1982, and died on July 30, 2006.
Source: Murray Bookchin
