Brian Toker, in his obituary of Bookchin in Z magazine, has no doubt that this "visionary social theorist and activist" was an influence on "prominent political and social activists throughout the US, Europe, South America, Turkey, Japan, and beyond".

"From the 1960s to the present," Toker writes, "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."

This paragraph alone would have pleased Bookchin because, throughout his later years, he felt his writings had not been given credence, especially by those who preferred to cling to the out-dated political and social isms he insisted were no longer relevant in post-scarcity societies, by those neo-liberals disguised as anarchists and communists who sat at Noam Chomsky's feet and by a left-libertarian movement that is dominated by one class.

The introductions to three editions of Post-Scarcity Anarchism in 1970, 1985 and 2004 read like a testament from a man still unsure of his audience. Bookchin, despite his vision, will never attain the iconic status of those men we are told we should follow, and that would be a greater testimony to his life's work. In the last of those introductions, Bookchin left a riddle for the anarchist movement. "There can," he wrote, "be no society as such without institutions, systems of governance and laws. The only issue in question is whether these structures and guidelines are authoritarian or libertarian, for they constitute the very forms of social existence. The state is an ensemble, not of institutions as such, but of authoritarian institutions (usually controlled by classes), which is where anarchism gets lost in a tangle of highly confused individualistic concepts."

The same essay provides a clue to the riddle. In it Bookchin reveals that in the early 1960s he had become "disillusioned" with Marxist politics and was hostile to any form of directive radicalism. "I suffered," he wrote, "from a measure of confusion over the enormous differences between syndicalism and anarchism." At that point he turned to the Spanish Civil War "and only then did I nuance my own views and realise how distant were the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists from each other".

Marxism bore the brunt from Bookchin's researches. "When the hell are we finally going to create a movement that looks to the future instead of to the past?" he asked in Listen, Marxist! - one of the pivotal essays in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. "When will we begin to learn more from what is being born instead of what is dying?"

Bookchin decided that traditional Marxism's "breakdown theory" of capitalism was completely wrong. Capitalism, Bookchin wrote, "would not 'decompose' because it had to limit economic growth; rather it was faced with a permanent breakdown because it was expanding (indeed, coming into its own as a dominant economy) by ravaging the planet and simplifying complex ecosystems, reducing the earth's capacity to sustain advanced forms of life".

After several decades (the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s) and a series of works in progress (notably contained in The Ecology of Freedom in 1982/91 and in The Modern Crisis in 1987), Bookchin believed he needed to write The Philosophy of Social Ecology, which summarised his dialectic progression. Yet, for all the thousands of words in these books, when it came to summing up what he had been repeating for many years it took him a few sentences in 2004:

"Social ecology, it should be emphasised, is not anarchism any more than it is individualism. It is decidedly a new form of libertarian socialism: libertarian in its concept of an organic and 'from-the-ground-up' mode of praxis; socialist in its belief that power must be conceived as confederal communities."

Despite its age, Post-Scarcity Anarchism is as good as any one of Bookchin's books to get a grasp of social ecology from because the next step is The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, a wide intellectual journey that defines the author and thinker as much as the philosophy and the practice. And it was when Bookchin's theories started to emerge, more so in Europe than in America - despite the belief held by many Americo-centric social ecologists, that the problems that he had foreseen became apparent, which he addressed in The Modern Crisis.

When Bookchin first presented his ideas about societies based on a process of non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, collective autonomy, he did not imagine that it would be so difficult for people to grasp. Yet he knew that communities usually only respond to single-issue campaigns, when their livelihoods, their health and safety, their environment, and their way of life is threatened - and once the campaign is over they go back to their ordered lives. He also knew that political activists would be motivated by selfish desire, by political dogma, by a need to build some kind of career rather than by an altruistic impulse to change society.

So it is sad that some of his last words were: "Such is the way of the world, as my seventy years of active radicalism have taught me." It is sad because if he had been able to see beyond his north American perspective he would have realised that the continuity of radical thought he had tapped into had not been arrested in Europe, as it has been in his native USA, and that the way of the world is not the American way.

When the movements against globalisation began, all he could see was the problem from an American perspective, he could not see that his arguments about lifestyle anarchism, in particular, and these radicals' antipathy towards anarcho-syndicalism and autonomous assembly and libertarian organising were symptoms of the American disease. Elsewhere in the world, lifestyle activism and lifestyle anarchism would be ironic flowers with short seasons. The world had begun to change, leaving the US and everything that annoyed the hell out of Bookchin behind; the active change that he desired and the practical philosophy that he had worked so hard to articulate had been happening for several years - elsewhere. American radicals did not notice because they pay little or no attention to the rest of world.

It is also sad because deep down he knew that the world does not begin and end with the American empire. Interviewed in the mid-1990s Bookchin acknowledged an old tradition, rooted in Europe not in north America, that made him think the way he did. "I can't say there was any single event which caused me to arrive at the conclusions I have. I merely elaborated, embroidered and hopefully enriched notions that seemed to come with my mother's milk because my family had a very rich and very colourful revolutionary tradition in Russia, which they brought with them to the United States and which they in turn brought to me."

If Bookchin has left a legacy, he has left it to the world. If few and fewer American radicals do not understand social ecology it is their loss. If those who have been building autonomous assemblies and organising libertarian communities do not know about or have never read Murray Bookchin, it is not their loss. These peoples' assemblies have never been in need of movement intellectuals in the first place.

Whether communalism becomes a progression from marxism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism or social ecology depends not so much on how we get there from here as on how we organise. Organisation is not anti-anarchist except in the minds of the overly individualist-libertarians and the naive.

Right now, Bookchin's philosophy cuts deep into traditional anarchist exegeses. If his critique of anarchism is to mean anything it will have to be separated from the alienating mode of discourse he adopted during his later years. So, Bookchin will be remembered by those who knew him as a man without malice with hardly a hint of ego! Those who have read him over the years will acknowledge his influence. Whether they call themselves anarchists, left-libertarians, social ecologists or communalists is a different debate. But those who managed to read into his work a utopian vision more tangible than mere eco-social politics will understand these thoughts. "My utopian visions," he said, "came from an ongoing reading as well as ongoing discussions about what a rational society would look like. Let me stress that I am a strong believer in imagination. When imagination is not informed by reason it can be as dangerous as it can be creative, as destructive as it can be creative."

His bottom line, however, was, "unity in diversity" and this he learned from his days as a "live school" activist, where common agreement is something that had to be borne.

Robert Allen

First published in Bluegreenearth, Freedom and LibCom.