Murray Bookchin RIP

It is with great sadness that I have found out that anarchist theoritician, the author of Listen Marxist, The Limits of the City, etc. Founder of the Social Ecology Movement and anti-Lifestylist/Anti-Post Leftist Anarchism, and general curmodgen of the anarchist movement, Murray Bookchin has passed away.I agreed with Bookchin more than I disagreed with him.

For instance he dared to challenge the tree huggers with this idea; strip mining is better than deep mining. Mining is a horrible experience for workers as we can tell from the amount of mine accidents that occur. Far safer is strip mining. While it looks awful, the fact is that for the workers who mine, it is far more effective and safe. And the land can be reclaimed. While a mine can never be reclaimed. Those who talk about strip mining raping the earth should think about the miles of deep mines that dig into the earth never to be used again for anything expect perhaps for dumping toxic and nuclear waste. Brilliant.

A toast to Murray who will be with us still in his volumous writings. And I hope will continue to influence our movement with his thoughts. Because he remains a real alternative to the dweebs like the Chuck O , Jason McQuinn and the Green Anarchists. They are intellectual fleas and woe betide our movement with them as the next generation of anarchists. Ok everyone back to the books, lets read our Bookchin to get a good grounding in modern anarchist thought.


Here is a biography/eulogy on Murray.

SOURCE http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/74070.html

Murray Bookchin, visionary social theorist, dies at 85

Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died

this Sunday, July 30.

By Brian Tokar

Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died

during the early morning of Sunday, July 30th in his home in Burlington,

Vermont. During a prolific career of writing, teaching and political

activism that spanned half a century, Bookchin forged a new

anti-authoritarian outlook rooted in ecology, dialectical philosophy and

left libertarianism.

Keywords: Analysis, Global, Political Theory,

Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died

during the early morning of Sunday, July 30th in his home in Burlington,

Vermont. During a prolific career of writing, teaching and political

activism that spanned half a century, Bookchin forged a new

anti-authoritarian outlook rooted in ecology, dialectical philosophy and

left libertarianism.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, Bookchin built upon the legacies of utopian

social philosophy and critical theory, challenging the primacy of

Marxism on the left and linking contemporary ecological and urban crises

to problems of capital and social hierarchy in general. Beginning in the

mid-sixties, he pioneered a new political and philosophical

synthesis*termed social ecology*that sought to reclaim local

political power, by means of direct popular democracy, against the

consolidation and increasing centralization of the nation state.

From the 1960s to the present, the utopian dimension of Bookchin’s

social ecology inspired several generations of social and ecological

activists, from the pioneering urban ecology movements of the sixties,

to the 1970s’ back-to-the-land, antinuclear, and sustainable technology

movements, the beginnings of Green politics and organic agriculture in

the early 1980s, and the anti-authoritarian global justice movement that

came of age in 1999 in the streets of Seattle. His influence was often

cited by prominent political and social activists throughout the US,

Europe, South America, Turkey, Japan, and beyond.

Even as numerous social movements drew on his ideas, however, Bookchin

remained a relentless critic of the currents in those movements that he

found deeply disturbing, including the New Left’s drift toward

Marxism-Leninism in the late 1960s, tendencies toward mysticism and

misanthropy in the radical environmental movement, and the growing focus

on individualism and personal lifestyles among 1990s anarchists. In the

late 1990s, Bookchin broke with anarchism, the political tradition he

had been most identified with for over 30 years and articulated a new

political vision that he called communalism.

Bookchin was raised in a leftist family in the Bronx during the 1920s

and ‘30s. He enjoyed retelling the story of his expulsion from the Young

Communist League at age 18 for openly criticizing Stalin, his brief

flirtation with Trotskyism as a labor organizer in the foundries of New

Jersey, and his introduction to anarchism by veterans of the immigrant

labor movement during the 1950s. In 1974, he co-founded the Institute

for Social Ecology, along with Dan Chodorkoff, then a graduate student

at Vermont’s Goddard College. For 30 years, the Institute for Social

Ecology has brought thousands of students to Vermont for intensive

educational programs focusing on the theory and praxis of social

ecology. A self-educated scholar and public intellectual, Bookchin

served as a full professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey despite his

own lack of conventional academic credentials.He published more than 20

books and many hundreds of articles during his lifetime, many of which

were

translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish and other

languages.

During the 1960s - ‘80s, Bookchin emphasized his fundamental

theoretical break with Marxism, arguing that Marx’s central focus on

economics and class obscured the more profound role of social hierarchy

in the shaping of human history. His anthropological studies affirmed

the role of domination by age, gender and other manifestations of social

power as the antecedents of modern-day economic exploitation. In The

Ecology of Freedom(1982), he examined the parallel legacies of

domination and freedom in human societies, from prehistoric times to the

present, and he later published a four-volume work,The Third Revolution,

exploring anti-authoritarian currents throughout the Western

revolutionary tradition.

At the same time, he criticized the lack of philosophical rigor that

has often plagued the anarchist tradition, and drew theoretical

sustenance from dialectical philosophy*particularly the works of

Aristotle and Hegel; the Frankfurt School*of which he became

increasingly critical in later years*and even the works of Marx and

Lenin. During the past year, even while terminally ill in Burlington,

Bookchin was working toward a re-evaluation of what he perceived as the

historic failure of the 20th century left. He argued that Marxist crisis

theory failed to recognize the inherent flexibility and malleability of

capitalism, and that Marx never saw capitalism in its true contemporary

sense. Until his death, Bookchin asserted that only the ecological

problems created by modern capitalism were of sufficient magnitude to

portend the system’s demise.

Murray Bookchin was diagnosed several months ago with a fatal heart

condition. He will be remembered by his devoted family members*including

his long-time companion Janet Biehl, his former wife Bea Bookchin, his

son, daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter*as well as his friends,

colleagues and frequent correspondents throughout the world. There will

be a public memorial service in Burlington, Vermont on Sunday, August

13th. For more information, contact info(at)social-ecology.org.

Also See:

Anarchists

Anarchism

RIP/Obitruaries



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SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND COMMUNALISM MURRAY BOOKCHIN

http://new-compass.net/sites/new-compass.net/files/Bookchin%27s%20Social%20Ecology%20and%20Communalism.pdf

Social Ecology and Communalism - New Compass | 

Still, it is his treatment of ecological and political issues that has made Bookchin known to most readers, and some of his older books, notably Post-Scarcity ...

http://www.psichenatura.it/fileadmin/img/M._Bookchin_What_is_Social_Ecology.pdf

What is Social Ecology? By Murray Bookchin - Psiche & Na... 

From Social Ecology and Communalism, AK Press, first printing, 2007. Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological ...

 https://we.riseup.net/assets/461284/Bookchin+Murray+1993+What+Is+Social+Ecology.pdf

What Is Social Ecology? 

Murray Bookchin has long been a major figure in anarchlst and utopian political theory, theory of technology, urbanism, and the philosophy of nature.

https://files.libcom.org/files/Social%20ecology%20after%20Bookchin%20-%20Unknown.pdf

Social ecology after Bookchin - Libcom.org 

1 his article is forthcoming in Bookchin's Anarchism, Marxism, and the ... ogy after Bookchin means a social ecology without Bookchin. Book-.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-philosophy-of-social-ecology

The Philosophy of Social Ecology - The Anarchist Library 

Murray Bookchin. The Philosophy of Social Ecology Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Dedication. Preface to the Second Edition. Introduction:

https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/texts/425/Bookchin,%20Social%20Ecology.pdf

murray bookchin • social ecology versus deep ecology 

His many books include Toward an Ecological Society,. The Ecology of Freedom, and The Philosophy of Social Ecology. Social ecology, which Bookchin develops in ...

An Important New Book on the Praxis of Social Ecology

Brian Tokar

 August 6, 2025

Cover art for the book Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond by Eleanor Finleya

Proponents of the theory and praxis of social ecology – the holistic approach to reharmonizing society and nature originated by social theorist Murray Bookchin during the 1960s – ’90s – have long sought new ways to introduce those ideas to a wider audience. While Bookchin’s writings offer an exceptional depth of analysis that has thoroughly captivated several generations of ecological thinkers and activists, even his most accessible work, Remaking Society from 1990, is sometimes viewed as too theoretical to be a sufficient starting point for some contemporary readers.

A new book by activist anthropologist Eleanor Finley offers just what many of us have been searching for. Finley discovered social ecology during the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street and then became deeply immersed in the Occupy movement. She went on to graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts and became a dedicated scholar and chronicler of a wide array of kindred movements, from municipal organizers in Barcelona to pemaculturists in Massachusetts and, most notably, Kurdish militants in Turkey and in the European diaspora. Her new book, Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond, from Pluto Press, offers a compelling synthesis of ethnographic research, journalism and political analysis, combining her field research and her own activist experiences in a highly engaging and superbly accessible manner. The book offers a kind of radical travelogue deeply rooted in radical history and theory, and along the way it addresses a host of key problems that remain as primary concerns for today’s environmental and social activists. It offers a welcome, up-to-date examination of social ecology as a living tradition.

Finley appropriately frames social ecology as a holistic response to the emerging global “polycrisis.” She invokes some of the foundational figures in left libertarian thought – writers like Kropotkin and his French comrade Elisée Reclus –  and then summarizes Bookchin’s unique political biography, as well as the evolution of the Kurdish liberation movement from Maoist-inspired armed struggle toward a goal of stateless direct democracy that is most fully realized in the region of northeastern Syria widely known as Rojava. Finley’s analysis draws upon a host of kindred contemporary outlooks, including feminist theory, degrowth economics, aspects of Indigenous thought, environmental justice and elements of Pan Africanism – a “pluriversal” movement of movements in its fullest sense. 

The book goes on to describe Bookchin’s dialectical nature philosophy in eminently accessible terms , focusing upon the emergence of a potential for self-organization and self-realization in primordial biological evolution, enabling the emergence of human consciousness and its myriad social expressions. Echoing Bookchin, she describes how, “The quest for freedom, ethics, and justice that direct democracy embodies is itself rooted in biology because we are rooted in biology.” She elaborates upon social ecology’s core understanding that today’s ecological upheavals are firmly rooted in the growth imperative of capitalism, and even more fundamentally in the long emergence of social hierarchy in all its forms, linking Bookchin’s insights to contemporary anthropological scholarship including Graeber and Wengrow’s epic Dawn of Everything. Bookchin’s 1960s era understanding of the potential for a “post-scarcity” society is updated with reference to Indigenous knowledge and contemporary degrowth outlooks, and social ecology’s advocacy for direct democracy is framed in the context of current movements such as Pan-African social ecologist Modibo Kadalie’s proposal for an “intimate direct democracy.”

One of the most compelling chapters in Practicing Social Ecology addresses the need to challenge traditional power dynamics and more effectively ground our social movements in practices of social and emotional healing. Finley draws upon experiences from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and from contemporary Indigenous activists, as well as the central historical role of consciousness raising and political education, from early African American cooperatives in the South to the example of anarchist affinity groups. As with several chapters here, the most fully developed examples are from the contemporary Kurdish movement, with its commitment to internal group study and mentorship, self-formation and deep relationship building – including a commitment to gender parity – and practices of self-criticism. While one may question the origins of the latter practice in the movement’s guerrilla history, potentially reproducing the harsh judgments of individuals that have plagued many Leninist formations, other observers have largely affirmed Finley’s conclusion that this practice currently embodies a genuinely “open and horizontal logic.” She cites Gabor Maté’s exemplary work on capitalism and trauma as a guide toward healthier internal relationships within our movements and describes the Kurdish movement’s civil justice system, rooted in the institution of People’s Houses, as an example of a consensus-driven system that advances social harmony.

Another chapter begins by reflecting on processes of symbiosis in the natural world – also an area of personal fascination for Bookchin – along with recent findings on animal intelligence, and goes on to explore a variety of practices aimed at restoring cooperative relationships with non-human nature. Finley features an extended interview with a Massachusetts-based permaculture practitioner and teacher, who was first inspired by social ecology during the global justice/alterglobalization movement of the late 1990s to early 2000s, and also reviews Institute for Social Ecology co-founder Dan Chodorkoff’s history of involvement with urban homesteaders on the Lower East Side of Manhattan starting in the 1970s. There is a Kurdish connection here as well, specifically the women-centered philosophy of jineologî and its actualization in a women-centered ecovillage in the Kurdish-majority region of northeastern Syria. The Kurdish movement in Syria and Turkey has inspired a wide array of ecological restoration efforts in response to the dual threats of desertification and military conflict. Finley has also studied the evolution of new municipal movements in Spain in great detail, and here recounts her visit to an ecovillage and social center near Barcelona that offers a unique model of ecological living and popular education. The center emerged from Barcelona’s legacy of radical squatters’ movements, and is also linked to the long-term activist encampments that have emerged in several European countries in recent years, organized to resist unwanted mega-scale development projects such as airport expansions and new fossil fuel infrastructure.

One of the central strategic contributions of social ecology over many decades has been its advocacy for direct democracy, and especially for popular assemblies in towns and neighborhoods that can then form bottom-up federations to address issues that reach beyond the local level. Finley highlights the central role of people’s assemblies in social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, as well as their role in historical events like the Paris Commune (whose legacy led Bookchin to rename his political philosophy as Communalism in his later years) and the 2011 Arab Spring – and, most notably, in a wide array of non-Western, village-centered cultural traditions. She explores how Kurdish institutions of popular governance – once resolutely patriarchal – have evolved under the current movement into structures that mandate full participation of women. The complex and often controversial unfolding of directly democratic practices during Occupy Wall Street is also examined here, with a focus on its broader social and political implications. The Occupy movement, Finley observes, “awakened in countless people a permanent desire for a better world.” She continues:

The lesson of Occupy is not that direct democracy is too impractical to work. On the contrary, the lesson is that subsequent movements have learned greatly from that experiment. If Occupy’s one-size-fits-all approach to democracy reproduced racial, ethnic, and linguistic inequality, we see today’s radical municipalist movements prioritize multiracial coalitions and the centrality of non-Western perspectives. Similarly, if Occupy lacked social cohesion and a grounding in real communities, municipalist movements have prioritized place-based struggles and identities. Radical municipalists delivered a more nuanced understanding of what real democracy means and how it can be achieved.

Another important case study described in some detail is the municipalist movement that first emerged from a May 2011 encampment in central Madrid, and later made international headlines with the electoral victories of the political formation known as Barcelona en Comú. By Finley’s account, Barcelona en Comú has remained true to its grassroots, feminist roots and achieved important successes in increasing social spending, addressing the city’s housing crisis, and closing many local streets to traffic to create more congenial and child-friendly neighborhoods. While some recent reports have been more critical of Barcelona en Comú, suggesting that its social movement base and its electoral aspirations eventually became increasingly difficult to reconcile, this account speaks to the most promising underlying potential of municipally-based movements to improve people’s lives in realms where statist institutions routinely fall short.

One of the most common critiques of self-consciously decentralist and community-centered movements is around whether they can feasibly unite to address concerns that reach beyond the local level. Finley’s exploration of this question draws mainly on examples from the Kurdish movement, but also touches upon the federated Local Autonomous Governments of the Zapatistas and the experiences of Black liberationists who came to question the nationalist politics of liberation movements in the global South. A key source here, once again, is the Pan-African social ecologist Modibo Kadalie, who was active in Detroit at the height of the Black Power movement, was expelled from teaching at Atlanta Junior College in the 1970s for supporting student activists, and collaborated on several occasions with the prominent Trinidadian libertarian Marxist C.L.R. James. Kadalie’s 2019 book, Pan-African Social Ecology, reflects upon his lifetime of experiences as an activist and community organizer, and how he came to embrace the political and ethical outlook of social ecology through those experiences. (For a wide-ranging discussion of whether locally rooted movements should aspire to ‘scaling up’ or confederating and radiating outward, see B. Tokar, et al., “Think Globally, Act Locally?,” published online by the Great Transition Initiative in 2019.)

The Kurdish model of Democratic Confederalism, elements of which have been implemented in parts of both Syria and Turkey, is the core example that Finley draws upon here. She delves further into the historical development of the Kurdish liberation movement, and especially the imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan’s evolution from a Soviet-allied Marxism-Leninism toward a resolutely non-statist approach rooted in popular assemblies and regional federations. This is the political outlook that facilitated the liberation of much of northeastern Syria from both the Assad regime and ISIS-led military assaults, and also inspired the most potent political challenge to the increasing concentration of power by the Erdogan regime in Turkey. Finley examines the underlying structures of Kurdish-led direct democracy and its widely studied Social Contract, as well as the union of villages that once thrived around the city of Amed (a.k.a. Diyarbakir), the effective capital of Turkish North Kurdistan, until Turkish state repression crushed that political experiment in the mid-2010s.

Any effort to describe such an interwoven set of theoretical concepts and practical experiments is bound to overlook some important nuances and miss some interesting details. For example, Finley credits the Greens in Burlington, Vermont, founded by Murray and Bea Bookchin and their associates, with introducing the idea of Neighborhood Planning Assemblies in the city. Burlington’s local assemblies were in fact launched by Bernie Sanders’ mayoral administration in the early 1980s as part of a process for allocating federal community block grants, but it was the group around Murray and Bea – just prior to the formation of the Greens – that pushed to expand their scope, become more lasting institutions, and eventually challenge a series of large scale development projects that the Sanders administration once supported. Burlington’s neighborhood assemblies continue to thrive in many areas of the city to this day. Similarly, there are debates within the Kurdish movement that Finley has addressed elsewhere around the persistence of some older, militarized leadership elements amidst the movement’s institutionally democratic structures. There is clearly more to be said about the structural debates in Occupy Wall Street, the historical evolution of the Zapatista movement, and many other topics introduced here. But Practicing Social Ecology remains a uniquely comprehensive and forward-looking treatment of a wide scope of ideas and movements, one that will surely help inspire its readers to examine these and many other questions in more specialized sources.

The book appropriately ends on a hopeful note.  To quote Finley’s conclusion, 

There is no single blueprint for a democratic and ecological way of life. Indeed, if the last decades of emancipatory social movements and democratic experimentation have revealed anything, it is that each community must reinvent real democracy for itself.

The impressive scope of living examples explored in these pages offers today’s radicals a host of inspiring models for thinking about democracy and its continuing reinvention in today’s exceptionally troubled times. “The comrades whose stories appear in this book demonstrate profound courage,” Finley concludes. “Their perseverance speaks to a resilience and love of freedom embedded in nature itself. Reconciliation with nature is, at the end of the day, a reconciliation with ourselves.”

 

Ostrom’s 8 Rules of the Commons for Anarchists

Oct

23

2024

comments

From Usufruct Collective

The commons are resources self-managed by communities who need and use them. Commons are managed through dialogue, deliberation, and collective-decision-making as well as through mutual aid to meet needs. Commoning refers to the process of developing commons. Commons can include land, water-ways, fields, factories, workshops, instruments/tools, dwellings, recreational facilities, general infrastructure, miscellaneous infrastructure, fruits of re/production, mixes of all of the above, and beyond. Flourishing commons provide communities and participants with shared means of existence, production, and politics as well as access to the fruits thereof in ways that meet the needs of all. 

The commons have been under attack by the last several thousand years of hierarchy and class society as well as the last several hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism developed through multiple factors including continuous privatization of the commons enforced through state violence (Federici, 2018). Despite such systemic violence, pockets of the commons continue to exist through people developing both new and enduring commons to meet their needs and the needs of others as well as through people resisting domination and exploitation (Federici, 2018). Commoning is not only under attack by multiple entangled forms of hierarchy (institutionalized domination) such as capitalism, statecraft, patriarchy, racism, imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism; commoning is also under ideological attack through widespread propaganda and belief systems that deem various hierarchies beneficial or inevitable. 

Arguments claiming that commons inevitably lead to tragedies of overuse and collective ruin deny the history of the commons while also assuming that commons are rooted in crude competitive acquisition without the very collective rules, agreements, and practices that enable them to be functional. Such straw men of the commons reflect the norms of competitive and hierarchical societies rather than the kinds of organized cooperation to meet needs so crucial to any well-functioning-commons. Responding to sweeping critiques of the commons, Elinor Ostrom empirically and theoretically demonstrated that commons have been, are, and can be well-managed by participants when they utilize several good-enough rules and practices (Ostrom, 2021). Many communities and persons have in their own ways and words convergently evolved and articulated variations of such core-design-principles. 

Commons and related self-managed institutions have existed within foraging societies, agricultural societies, villages, towns, blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and mixed method non-state societies (Boehm, 2001, Kropotkin 1902, Bookchin, 2005a, Federici, 2018, Ostrom, 2021, Graeber and Wengrow, 2023). Such a rich history demonstrates that well-managed-commons are possible and that such well-managed-commons predictably contribute to social and ecological flourishing. 

While there are plenty of examples Ostrom looks at that are in harmony with her 8 rules for managing the commons as well as a non-hierarchical approach to social-organization (Ostrom, 2021), other instances of the commons she looks at utilize some methods that those from an anti-hierarchical perspective would disapprove of. Truly emancipatory commons are distinct from quasi-commons that produce commodities and/or are gated against commoners having mutual-access (Federici, 2018). Given the goals of the self-management of each and all, mutual non-domination, wellbeing for all, and ecological flourishing, Ostrom’s core-design-principles can become more coherent through being remixed with insights from anarchism. 

The following adaptation of Ostrom’s rules for managing the commons is informed by libertarian socialism/communism/communalism, organizations and revolutions influenced by libertarian socialism that utilize community assemblies related to common decisions and resources, various commons Ostrom looks at, as well as an expanded history of commoning in multiple modes of subsistence:

1. Participants know they are part of a group and what the group is about (Wilson, 2016).
2. Agreements for sharing and at times rotating labor/work and implementation of decisions as well as for sharing the fruits thereof (Kropotkin, 1906, Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2022). People can co-create a cornucopia where there is more than enough for all or otherwise agree to specific ways of distributing less abundant fruits of re/production according to needs.   
3. Direct collective decision making by participants through deliberation. For there to be self-management of each and all, there must also be mutual non-domination. By extension, community assemblies related to the commons should utilize direct, participatory, and non-hierarchical forms of democracy (Bookchin, 2005b).  
4. Organizational transparency that allows participants to mutually-monitor the commons (Atkins, Wilson, Hayes, 2019). This can happen through the process of co-managing and interacting with the commons, collective action, living in community with others, relevant accounting/calculation as needed, and availability of relevant information to participants. 
5. Graduated defense against domination and exploitation such as: informal social disapproval, self-defense and defense of others as needed, and recourse to expelling someone from a particular collective (through deliberation, assembly, and due process) in response to the most extreme violations of the commons and freedoms of persons (Boehm, 2001, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2023).  
6. Good-enough conflict resolution such as: people talking directly to each other, mediation to find out how to move forward, dispute resolution to resolve disputes, restorative justice and transformative justice processes for people to repair harm and transform causes thereof, and organization-wide assembly when the conflict is in regards to organizational form and content. (Kaba, 2019, Usufruct Collective, 2023). 
7. Communities and participants need sufficient autonomy to organize. 
8. The use of co-federation and embedded councils. Community assemblies can co-manage inter-communal commons in a way where policy-making power is held by participants and assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, Ocalan, 2014). This enables self-management and mutual aid within and between communities as well as inter-communal management of the commons. Community assemblies can utilize mandated and recallable councils and rotating delegates to implement decisions within the bounds of policies made by community assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, 2007, 2018). 

The above should be further fleshed out, qualified, and wisely adapted to conditions, needs, and desires of communities and participants. When there are good-enough institutions and agreements for collective action, individuals benefit through the flourishing of the commons and mutually-contributing to the commons– blending self-interest with collective-interest. Although specifically related to common-economics, Ostrom’s core-design-principles and coherent adaptations thereof can be used to reflect upon and develop various self-managed collectives that have shared practices and goals (Wilson, 2016). 

The self-management of each and all on every scale requires the flourishing of the commons and related general assemblies. Developing the commons in the context of a hierarchical society requires both the reconstruction of the commons as well as opposition to domination and exploitation. Such functions can be done through self-managed community assemblies that utilize mutual aid and direct action to meet needs and solve social problems. That kind of community organizing can happen as a crucial part of a broader social movement ecosystem that includes workplace organizing, student organizing, and beyond. In addition to the commons and related general assemblies being needed for political economic freedom of each and all: developing the commons and sharing social re/production can meet needs of social movement organizations, participants thereof, and the non-ruling class while building the new world in the shell of the old and increasing capacity for people to solve social problems and oppose hierarchies.

***

PS:

Additional critique of Ostrom: 

Ostrom does want the commons to expand and increase. However, Ostrom sees the commons as a sector that should exist alongside capitalism and states. This is distinct from the anti-domination and anti-exploitation approach of libertarian socialism. While Ostrom does talk about the need to have sufficient autonomy to self-organize, Ostrom does not properly touch upon developing the commons through opposition against capitalism, statecraft, and hierarchy more broadly.   

Atkins, Paul W.B., David  Sloan Wilson, and Steven C. Hayes. Prosocial: Using evolutionary science to build productive, equitable, and collaborative groups. Context Press, 2019.

Boehm, Cristopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University, 2001.

Bookchin, Murray. Urbanization without cities: The rise and decline of citizenship. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992.

Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005a.

Bookchin, Murray. “Municipalization: Community Ownership of the Economy.” libcom.org. 2005b. https://libcom.org/article/municipalization-community-ownership-economy.

Bookchin, Murray. Social Ecology and Communalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007.

Bookchin, Murray. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. AK Press, 2018.

Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, 2018.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Kaba, Mariame, and Shira Hassan. Fumbling towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators. Chicago: Project NIA, 2019.

Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. New York: McClure Phillips and Co., 1902.

Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. 1906.

Ocalan, Abdullah. Democratic Confederalism. Transmedia Publishing, 2014.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 

Sixth Commission of the EZLN. Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra I. Durham, NC: PaperBoat Press, 2016.

Wilson, David Sloan. “The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life’s Greatest Dilemmas.” Evonomics, April 5, 2016. https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/.

Usufruct Collective. “The Conquest of Sandwiches.” Usufruct Collective, February 1, 2022. https://usufructcollective.wordpress.com/2022/02/01/the-conquest-of-sandwiches/.

Usufruct Collective. “Kick the Cops off Your Block.” Usufruct Collective, June 14, 2023. https://usufructcollective.wordpress.com/2023/06/04/kick-the-cops-off-your-block-2/.

Debbie Bookchin: Turkey is actually engaged in a grotesque example of ethnic cleansing in Rojava

Debbie Bookchin underlined that Turkish President Erdogan sees the democratic, feminist and ecological system in Rojava as a threat to himself.

EREM KANSOY
LONDON
Wednesday, 12 Oct 2022,


Debbie Bookchin, Secretary General of the Rojava Emergency Committee in the US, spoke to ANF. Debbie Bookchin, who noted that Erdogan's picture of a war against the PKK is actually a war waged against the entire Kurdish people, said that it is in fact another grotesque example of ethnic cleansing.

Stating that as long as NATO membership continues, the Coalition will not take a step towards closing the airspace to Turkey in Rojava, Bookchin said: “Of course, we can put serious pressure on Erdogan to impose some sanctions. With these pressures, Erdogan can take a step back in military operations and approach peace talks with the PKK again. At the moment, we clearly see that the Turkish state is carrying out heavy massacres in the region. It is trying to de-Kurdishize the region and resettle the 'refugees' in Turkey as they did in Afrin.”


The system in Rojava seen as a threat by Turkey

Underlining that Erdogan sees the democratic, feminist, ecological system in Rojava as a threat to himself, Bookchin said: “We clearly see that Erdogan has trampled on human rights. Western state leaders should today be ashamed to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, while at the same time remaining silent about Erdogan's attacks on the Kurdish people and Rojava. We will continue to fight. We hope that we will succeed in the coming period in order to change the political approach of the West to the region.”

Swiss Climate Strike Initiative calls for closure of Rojava airspace

The Swiss Climate Strike Initiative has announced that they support the call for the closure of Rojava’s airspace.

ANF
LUCERNE

 
Saturday, 15 Oct 2022, In a statement, the Swiss Climate Strike (Klimastreik Schweiz), emphasized that the people living in Northern Eastern Syria have been building a self-governing region based on grassroots democracy, women's freedom and social ecology values for the for last 10 years.

The statement said: "The gains of the Rojava Revolution have been under pressure from the very beginning. Rojava, which has been fighting against the Islamic State, is being invaded by Turkey today. There is an economic boycott against the region.

Since its last major military operation in 2019, Turkey's war strategy against Rojava has changed. Regular attacks are carried out by drones and artillery to give way to ground operations. The main purpose is to evacuate the region by wearing down the population of the region.”

The statement continued: “These attacks on Rojava have dire consequences for the civilian population. On 18 August this year, 5 children died as a result of the attack by a Turkish drone on a training center for girls supported by the United Nations.

The United States condemned the attack but also has air sovereignty over the region. That's why these attacks are allowed. There is a demand for a no-fly zone over Rojava against these attacks. And we support this demand."

An Editorial Flop Revisited: Rethinking the Impact of M. Bookchin’s Our Synthetic Environment on its Golden Anniversary

January 2013
Global Environment 6(12):250-273
DOI:10.3197/ge.2013.061211
Authors:

Juan D. Pérez-Cebada
Universidad de Huelva

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Abstract
2012 is the golden anniversary of two important books in the history of the American Environmental movement: Our Synthetic Environment (OSE), written by Murray Bookchin (under the pseudonym “Lewis Herber”) and Rachel Carsons’ canonical Silent Spring, published just a few months later. Both books deal with the complex problem of chemicals in food, and have a clear objective: to achieve a popular audience. But, these books had a very different reception on the part of critics and public. While Silent Spring was a genuine bestseller, OSE seemed to fall l into oblivion. For some, even, it was a complete flop. This article however revises the reception of Bookchin’s work and shows that although Bookchin cannot certainly be considered a mass author like Carson, he was an influential thinker in selected North American and European academic circles of his time. The book had its origin in an article entitled 'The Problems of Chemicals in Food' (1952). In the first part of this article, we study this and other related articles that preceded the publication of OSE as well as their impact in the intellectual world. The second section analyzes specific bibliography and documentation from Jonathan Cape Ltd, the English publisher of the book (1963), in order to establish its reception. Jonathan Cape had hired Durrant’s, a well known press cutting firm, to prepare a complete report on references to the book in newspapers and other periodical publications both in the U.K. and the Commonwealth. Durrant´s dossier confirms that the book was favorably appraised in the United States by outstanding figures such as B. Commoner, R. Dubos or W. Vogt. However the documentation shows a better reception of the book in Europe, especially in U.K. and Germany. The final section stresses the contribution of OSE to the Environmental movement and the Green left though

Our Synthetic Environment - Libcom.org

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by M Bookchin · Cited by 243 — Our Synthetic Environment. Murray Bookchin ... Recent changes in our synthetic environment have created new problems that are as ... preservatives, and chemical "technological aids," many of which may impair his health. His waterways and ...

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