MikeDunnAuthor<p>Today in Labor History July 30, 2006: Murray Bookchin died. He was an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, social theorist, libertarian socialist, and founder of social ecology. He published over two dozen books. In the 1990s, disillusioned by the increasingly “apolitical, lifestylism” of mainstream anarchism, he stopped calling himself an anarchist and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology that he called “communalism,” which sought to combine elements of Marxism and anarchosyndicalism. His ideas, more generally, have influenced numerous movements, including the New Left, anti-nuclear, Occupy Wall Street, and the People Defense Units (YPG) and the Rojava Kurdish Autonomous Region of Syria. In 1988, along with Howie Hawkins, he cofounded the Left-Green Network, as a radical alternative to the liberal Greens, with a focus on Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism. His critique of Deep Ecology, popular among many in the radical Earth First! Movement, led many Earth Firsters to refer to him as Bernie Munchkin. He rejected the popular view of Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich that the environmental crisis was caused by technology or overpopulation, or human nature, but was rather the product of capitalism, its “grow or die imperative,” and its emphasis on profit or human life and security.</p><p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/workingclass" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>workingclass</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/LaborHistory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>LaborHistory</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/murrybookchin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>murrybookchin</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/anarchism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>anarchism</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/libertarianmunicipalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>libertarianmunicipalism</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/anarchosyndicalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>anarchosyndicalism</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/socialism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>socialism</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/marxism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>marxism</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/ecology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ecology</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/kurdish" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>kurdish</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/rojava" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>rojava</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/earthfirst" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>earthfirst</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>capitalism</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/environmentalcrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>environmentalcrisis</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/ypg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ypg</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/syria" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>syria</span></a></p>