Some Encounters with Murray Bookchin
By Peter Berg
Before offering any recollections about Murray it is necessary to make the
disclaimer that if he was here he would quite possibly refute them.
And that he might even dispute that statement!
That said I can relax and share some remembrances that might otherwise go
unrecorded from the contentious albeit intellectually respectful course of my
interaction with Murray since meeting him in the early Sixties on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan where I was living at the time. It was a gathering of radical
activists of various stripes to discuss participating in the first New York City
public demonstration against the Vietnam War, a march from Washington Square in
Greenwich Village to UN headquarters. Alan Hoffman, editor of the outspokenly
anarchist magazine Good Soup, introduced us. Also there as I recall was Ben
Morea with some of his fellow Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and artist Aldo
Tambolini who performed the Dance of the Screw in front of art museums around
the city to protest the commodification of paintings.
Dissenters in that period coming out of the repressive Fifties tended to be
overly self-conscious and almost monomaniacally declarative about their
positions. Murray was a distinct exception. He was confident and almost
avuncular about his background and the tradition of anarchist philosophy. The
Spanish Civil War of almost thirty years before seemed to have just happened
when he spoke about it. He assured us that we were in good historical company,
and was optimistic about support from anti-establishment groups in Europe.
Unusual for a leftist at that time was his belief that issues of the environment
offered a new basis for unity. But his agreeableness ended with the Marxist
organizers of the demonstration and their centralized decision-making. I didn´t
recognize him in the march that eventually materialized but came away from the
meeting inspired to begin reading about the origins and practice of contemporary
anarchism.
By the late Sixties I had helped form the San Francisco Diggers, perhaps the
best model of creative anarchist social alternatives as could then be found. it
was clear that the Vietnam War was waning so we staged an "End of the War" event
in a Haight-Ashbury theater announced by a poster showing Lyndon Johnson with
his arms around Ho Chi Minh. It was a celebration of Diggerly things that could
possibly take place in a liberatory peacetime society: free food and rock music,
nude dancing, climbing cargo nets on the walls, processions with palm fronds,
film loops of seeds germinating and volcanoes erupting, and satirical
presentations by faux political candidates.
A number of New York based groups showed up including some remnants of the Up
Against the Wall Mortherfuckers who set up a card table with free pistol and
rifle ammunition, and the entire cast of the Living Theater`s "Paradise Now"
show who simply sat in the balcony wearing G-strings and stared wide-eyed at the
proceedings. Murray suddenly appeared in an Army surplus jacket, boots, and
carrying a gas mask! I asked him what he thought was going to happen and he
nervously stated the conviction that police were about to descend on us. Not
likely in San Francisco I assured him and pointed out participants who were
embracing or dancing ecstatically. The contrast between his furtive wariness and
the expansive Digger attitude was glaring and I tried to persuade him to join
in. He left immediately and afterwards I realized that some East Coast militants
seriously expected a civil war to break out when the war ended.
When I was invited to help edit the "Bioregions" issue of Coevolution Quarterly
in the late Seventies one of the first materials I sought out was Murray´s
"Ecology of Freedom". Knowing that he accepted some of the general premises of
bioregionalism as espoused by Planet Drum Foundation, I requested permission to
edit the long first chapter of the book to expose readers to advanced
anarchist-based ecology ideas. I fully expected an argument and long set of
conditions but surprisingly he responded, "There isn´t anyone who I would trust
with this more than you. Do whatever you like." I took special pains to
carefully preserve his train of thought wondering whether there was ever another
instance when Murray allowed his text to be altered. The resulting article was
invaluable to help set the autonomous and self-governing tone of bioregional
discourse.
Bookchin´s subsequent campaign during the Eighties and Nineties against Earth
First!, deep ecology, and spiritually oriented ecology proponents was a puzzling
retreat from the openness in "Ecology of Freedom". It was especially unfortunate
because of the general slowing down of public support that was occurring at that
time, and Murray seemed to be a singularly divisive force for dissent within the
environmental movement. When Gary Snyder asked me why Bookchin chose to attack
with inflammatory language including "misanthrope" and "eco-fascist" I explained
that his argumentative style stemmed from early exposure to Communist ideology,
and that it had the flavor of "Stalinist thugs". Snyder repeated that phrase
later in a newspaper interview. When I last saw Murray in the cafeteria of
Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont a few years ago he plaintively wondered
why such a hurtful term had been used to describe him. There were the two
Murrays in the same moment. He was an honestly compassionate champion of a more
human and liberated society, yet seemed to be unconscious of the overbearing and
dismissive statements that tinged his philosophical positions.
In the Enlightenment Era social and political thinkers pondered what kind of
society might exist without monarchial government, and anarchism was considered
as legitimate as other viable alternatives. It persisted as an ideal ever since
although squeezed into an increasingly narrow area of acceptance by state
socialism and bourgeois democracy which fight to diminish and ridicule it. But
in our time when globalism and planet-wide environmental destruction threaten
the whole human species, the broad vision of a sustainable society with a
foundation in mutualism that underlies Murray Bookchin´s thinking is once again
a guidepost for a positive direction.
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