The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin

PKK militants duly formed democratic assemblies and experimented with organic agriculture female members took leadership roles.

'My worldview,' he told his lawyers, 'is very close to that of Bookchin.' In March 2005 he issued the 'Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan,' calling on his followers to embrace a version of libertarian municipalism. He believed Bookchin's work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform themselves into democratic movements without losing their revolutionary ambitions and recommended that all PKK-affiliated politicians in Turkish Kurdistan read Urbanisation without Cities and all guerrilla fighters read Ecology of Freedom. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel 'The Dispossessed' in part on Bookchin's early work) but Gary Snyder denounced him as a 'thug,' the Situationists dismissed him as 'spit in the horrible communitarian soup,' and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him.īookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. In 'The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship' (1987) and 'Urbanisation without Cities' (1992), he proposed 'libertarian municipalism' as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. In 'Ecology of Freedom' (1982), he argued that man's destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. He told Bookchin that he considered himself his 'student,' 'had acquired a good understanding of his work, and was eager to make the ideas applicable to Middle Eastern societies.'īookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism.

In prison he'd abandoned Marxism-Leninism and was in search of a new philosophy. Öcalan was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement on an island off the Turkish coast. In spring 2004, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey, sent a letter to Murray Bookchin, an 83-year-old, wheelchair-bound, arthritic eco-anarchist in Burlington, Vermont.

The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin