Murray Bookchin is a leading anarchist thinker whose work I had never thought about until I learned that he is, of all things, respected by the Kurdish people in the Middle East.
The Kurds have struggled for decades for independence for decades against the governments of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. They are the most effective fighters in their region against the Islamic State and the successors to Al Qaeda in their region.
In all this, they have not engaged in acts of terrorism against civilians. They respect the rights of women, and even have women in their fighting forces. Although mostly Sunni Muslims, they gave refuge to people of all religions, including Christians, who suffer religious persecution.
Of course all this does not necessarily stem from their admiration for Murray Bookchin, but I am intrigued that this American thinker finds admirers in admirable people in a (to me) unlikely part of the world.
Bookchin is an anarchist, which means that he is opposed both to capitalism and to state socialism, a point of view I have come to share, late in life. Some other anarchist writers I admire, and have posted about, are David Graeber and James C. Scott.
I just finished reading Bookchin’s Remaking Society, a quick and readable, but somewhat superficial, outline of his views. I have started reading his earlier and longer book, The Ecology of Freedom: the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy, which is more detailed and profound, but more difficult to follow.
Bookchin is opposed to hierarchy as such. He thinks all domination is connected – political domination, economic domination, racism, patriarchy and the domination of nature.
His ideal is the “organic” society, in which people cooperate voluntarily for their mutual benefit, and seek to understand natural processes rather than override them.
He thinks organic societies existed in pre-historic times. Tribes based on kinship worked together for the benefit of all. Persons of superior ability became leaders, but not rulers. They had prestige, but not the power to coerce. Men and women had different functions, but neither ruled the other.
Their principle, he said, the equal treatment of unequals, which sound to me very like the Marxian principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. Our present capitalist society, he said, is based on the opposite principle – the unequal treatment of equals.
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