Long Live Murray Bookchin

I had the pleasure of doing a winter vacation with my family in Savannah, Georgia.  Walking one day I happened to notice on the back of a street sign a decal prompting the viewer to look up Murray Bookchin online.The decal moved, gladdened and tickled me.  Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was an influential Marxist-turned-anarchist/environmentalist activist, teacher, thinker and author.  A nice Jewish boy from New York, he moved to Vermont later in life.  In his mature writing he emphasized ecologically-friendly, direct, participatory democracy and radical egalitarianism, particularly when it comes to gender.  (Instead of giving you a link, just follow the sticker and look him up yourself.)

The decal in Savannah struck me so strongly because, though I vaguely knew of Bookchin’s work, I had recently read an article by Peter Galbraith in the New York Review of Books that informed me of an aspect of Bookchin’s influence that I had never heard.

Abdullah Öcalan, a Stalinist Marxist, founded the PKK, the Turkish Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a liberation movement considered a terrorist organization by many Turks, in 1978.  Some 20 years later he was finally arrested by Turkish commandos (in Kenya) and confined as the only inmate on an island prison in the Sea of Marmara.  There, he had plenty of time to read.  Among other reading material, his attorneys gave him translations of two books by Bookchin.  Öcalan became enchanted with the small-scale, decentralized society, gender-equal, post-Marxian communitarian democratic vision of Bookchin.  The former Stalinist became an impassioned fan of Bookchin.  He wrote to him (in 2004), tried to arrange a meeting with him and, amazingly, conveyed (through his attorneys) his sense of Bookchin’s teachings and recommendations to read Bookchin’s works to his followers and many other fellow Kurds.

Because of this, “northeast Syria’s many [heavily Kurdish] communities are represented in multilayered governmental structures. Legislative bodies—city councils or cantonal parliaments—include Kurds, Arabs, Christians, and Yazidis and are equally divided between male and female legislators. Each canton has a male and female co–prime minister, each municipality a female and male co-mayor, and male and female coleaders of each political party. No more than 60 percent of civil servants can be from the same gender. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) sits atop these governmental structures. It has a Kurdish woman and an Arab man as its copresidents.”

So here, the Kurds, one of the Middle East’s most dogged underdogs, have self-organized according to the vision of a Jewish thinker-tinkerer from Vermont, inspired by his proposals for a more humane world.  I love this story of serendipitous, fruitful cross-cultural influence and change-making.

Galbraith’s story seems to be available only to subscribers, but it is reprinted on this pro-Kurdish site.  The tale had been told a year earlier by Bookchin’s daughter, Debbie, also in the New York Review of Books, in fuller detail, with important additional context and a portrait of and tribute to her father.  As she reveals, Kurdish democratic and gender ideas had other sources besides Bookchin, including Sakine Cansiz, the woman who co-founded the PKK, while Bookchin had been strongly influenced by his immigrant grandmother, a former Russian revolutionary.

Go Kurds!  Long live Murray Bookchin!  Long live democracy!  May we bring about humane, sane governance, which will be possible only with the equal participation and representation of women!