Person

Bookchin, Murray

1921-2006

Murray Bookchin, was an American political philosopher and activist. He was an author of more than 20 books, espousing views on the evil of capitalism, promoting a decentralised society, alternative energy and predicted future work on pesticides, cancer and obesity. His writing in 1964 anticipated the greenhouse effect.
Bookchin was born in the Bronx to immigrant parents from southern Russia and as a nine-year-old he joined the communist Young Pioneers, and by 1934 he was in the Young Communist League, which he quit, rejoined - at the time of the Spanish civil war - and then left again. After a high school education, he went to work in a foundry. Later, he was briefly a Trotskyist. After wartime army service guarding the gold in Ford Knox, he worked at General Motors until 1950, during which time he took part in the 1946 GM strike. He then studied electronic engineering at the RCA Institute. By the early 1950s Bookchin had moved from Marxism towards a libertarian socialism and was writing for Contemporary Issues magazine. By the late 1960s Bookchin, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, was teaching at New York's Free University. He was a critical player in the anarchist movement, until parting with them in 1998. Employed at the Ramapo State College in Mahwah, New Jersey, in 1971 he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology, in Plainfield, Vermont, which won an international reputation for its courses in social theory, eco-philosophy and alternative technologies. He taught there until 2004. In retirement, he settled in Vermont, where in the 1970s he was active in the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear group which pioneered tactics of non-violent direct action.

"Murray Bookchin." The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/aug/08/guardianobituaries.usa.