FALLECIO MURRAY BOOKCHIN - PADRE DE LA ECOLOGIA SOCIAL
Falleció el académico anarquista, activista y ecologista social Murray Bookchin, a los 85 años, quien fue cofundador del Instituto de Ecología Social en Vermont (EUA).
Murray Bookchin
De Wikipedia
Murray Bookchin (14 de enero de 1921 - 30 de julio de 2006), investigador, ideólogo y activista ecológico estadounidense, es el autor de al menos dos docenas de libros sobre política, filosofía, historia y asuntos urbanísticos así como también sobre ecología.
Nació en Nueva York
en 1921, de padres inmigrantes rusos que habían participado en el movimiento revolucionario de Rusia durante la época de los zares. Muy pronto, en los años treinta entró en el movimiento juvenil comunista, pero al final de esa década se mostró decepcionado por su carácter autoritario. Durante los años de la guerra civil española se involucró en el movimiento neoyorkino de sostén a España (Support Spain), era demasiado joven para participar directamente, aunque algunos de sus amigos mayores murieron en el frente de Madrid. Permaneció al lado de los comunistas hasta el pacto entre Stalin y Hitler en 1939, fecha en la que fue expulsado por desviacionismo trotskista.
Se incorporó al movimiento obrero y participó activamente en la organización de sindicatos al norte del Estado de Nueva Jersey cuando trabajaba en una fundición, para el Congreso de Organizaciones Industriales (CIO). Colaborando activamente con el movimiento Trotskista americano, durante los años cuarenta trabajó en la industria de fabricación de automóviles, militando durante diez años en la United Auto Workers (AUW), organización netamente libertaria antes de que Walter Reuther se convirtiera en su presidente. Después de participar en la gran huelga de la General Motors en 1948, empieza en esa época a cuestionarse todas sus concepciones tradicionales acerca del papel hegemónico de la clase trabajadora industrial, escribiendo en años posteriores extensamente sobre el tema.
Durante esa época se convirtió en un socialista libertario, colaborando estrechamente con exiliados alemanes en Nueva York que habían abandonado el comunismo y se desplazaban hacia una perspectiva anarquista (Internationalen Kommunisten Deutschlands). Muchos de sus artículos de los primeros años se publicaron en Dinge der Zeit, así como en su publicación hermana en lengua inglesa Comtemporary Issues. Su primer libro: The Problem of Chemicals in Food, se publicó en Alemania. Fue uno de los primeros activistas políticos en escribir sobre ecología, tanto en los EEUU como en la Alemania Federal. Sus escritos contribuyeron a reformar la legislación alemana sobre farmacología y alimentación.
En los años sesenta se involucró en los movimientos contraculturales y de Nueva Izquierda. Su primer libro norteamericano: Our Synthetic Enviroment se publicó en 1962. Luego escribió Crisis in our Cities, 1965,. Una colección titulada: El anarquismo después de la escasez, 1971, comprendía ensayos tan innovadores como Ecologism and Revolutionary thougth (1964) o Towards a Liberatory Technology(1965) que adelantaban la importancia crucial del tema ecológico y de las energías alternativas para los movimientos progresistas de cualquier signo. Hacia el final de los sesenta, en los EEUU y Gran Bretaña circularon por lo menos 100.000 copias de su crítica al marxismo tradicional: Listen, Marxist! (1969), influenciando profundamente al movimiento de la Nueva Izquierda norteamericana.
En los últimos últimos años de la década dio clases en la
A sus setenta años vivía semirretirado en Burlington, Vermont, y todavía impartía dos cursos básicos cada verano en el Instituto para la Ecología Social y daba conferencias ocasionales en los EEUU y Europa. Fue consultor editorial de Anarchist Studies y de Society and Nature. Junto con su compañera Janeth Biehl, y otros, ha publicado hasta la fecha más de treinta números de la revista teórica Green Perspectives.
Bookchin evolucionó desde un marxismo tradicional hacia la izquierda libertaria, en la tradición anarquista de Kropotkin. Su mayor contribución a esta tradición ha sido integrar los conceptos de la descentralización, la organización no jerárquica y el socialismo con la ecología, desde una ética y una filosofía arraigadas en la izquierda libertaria.
Una de sus propuestas más recientes es lo que él llamó el Municipalismo libertario, basada en la recuperación de las asambleas populares y la democracia directa a los niveles muncipal, de vecindad y de barrio. Para evitar que ello conduzca a un provincianismo en las ciudades propone un confederalismo cívico, demandando también una economía municipalizada, por oposición al sistema capitalista y a la economía estatizada marxista.
El 30 de julio de 2006 falleció en su casa, al padecer un infarto. Contaba 85 años.
NOTA 2
Murray Bookchin, visionary
social theorist, dies at 85
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@social-ecology.org
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Brian Tokar
Institute for Social Ecology
P.O. Box 48Plainfield, VT 05667 - USA
www.social-ecology.org
NOTA 3
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) -- Murray Bookchin, an early proponent of what he described as social ecology, died early Sunday of heart failure, his daughter said. He was 85.
Bookchin was a proponent of left-leaning libertarian ideas and among the first people in the early 1960s to promote the then-emerging field of ecology into political debate.
He published ''Our Synthetic Environment'' under the pseudonym Lewis Herber in 1962 in which he called for alternative energy supplies among other environmental proposals. It was in that book -- which predated by five months the better known work by Rachel Carson, ''Silent Spring'' -- that Bookchin introduced the notion of social ecology.
He argued that only a completely free and open society can resolve the problems that confronted the environment at that time.
Bookchin was born in New York City in 1921 of Russian immigrant parents. He joined the Communist youth organization at age 9, although he dropped out a number of years later.
He was a foundry worker and union organizer in New Jersey before joining the U.S. Army. In civilian life, he became an auto worker, but left the industry and its labor organization after the General Motors strike of 1946.
He eventually turned to his interest in the environment and writing, eventually publishing more than two dozen books on ecology, history, politics, philosophy and urban planning.
(The New York Times - July 31, 2006)
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