A Life Against Hierarchy

Born January 14, 1921 to Nathan Bookchin and Rose Kaluskaya, Russian-Jewish immigrants steeped in revolutionary politics. The street corners, union halls, and tenements of the Bronx were his first school.

1921 — Born in the Bronx, New York City, and raised partly by his grandmother Zeitel, a former Socialist Revolutionary.

1930 — Joins the Young Pioneers, the communist children’s organization, at age nine; later the Young Communist League.

1930s — The Depression bites — evictions, odd jobs from age twelve: selling ice cream in the park, hawking the Daily Worker on street corners.

1939 — Expelled from the communist movement after the Hitler–Stalin pact, accused of “Trotskyist-anarchist deviations.”

A decade on shop floors — a foundry in New Jersey, then auto plants — organizing for the UAW and slowly losing faith in the industrial proletariat as history’s chosen agent.

1940s — Works as a foundryman and later an autoworker; serves in the U.S. Army; shop-floor organizer with the United Auto Workers.

1946 — Takes part in the great General Motors strike — for him, its settlement marked the end of the workers’ movement’s revolutionary horizon.

late ’40s — Drifts from Trotskyism toward the libertarian left, reading his way out of orthodoxy.

Writing under pseudonyms for the journal Contemporary Issues, Bookchin turned to questions no left tendency was asking — food, chemicals, cities, the texture of everyday life.

1951 — Marries Beatrice (Bea) Appelstein, whom he met speaking at City College — a partnership, and later a lifelong friendship and alliance.

1952 — “The Problem of Chemicals in Food” appears under the name Lewis Herber — an early alarm about industrial agriculture.

1950s — Writes as Lewis Herber, M. S. Shiloh, Robert Keller, and Harry Ludd; abandons Marxism for libertarian socialism.

1958 — Begins the research that will become Our Synthetic Environment — ecology as a political question.

Months before Silent Spring, Bookchin published a book-length case that modern society was poisoning its own ground. Then he did what no one else had: he fused ecology with the idea of freedom.

1962 — Our Synthetic Environment published (as Lewis Herber) by Knopf, six months before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

1963 — In lower Manhattan, active in the civil-rights congress CORE and the early movement against the war in Vietnam.

1964 — “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” introduces social ecology — ecological crisis rooted in social hierarchy.

1965 — “Towards a Liberatory Technology” imagines renewable energy and automation serving decentralized, human-scaled communities.

1967 — Co-founds the Anarchos group and journal on New York’s Lower East Side.

late ’60s — The Bleecker Street apartment becomes a movement hub — Abbie Hoffman, Herbert Marcuse, and Raoul Vaneigem pass through as Anarchos comes together.

1969 — “Listen, Marxist!” circulates through a fracturing SDS — a broadside against the old workerist orthodoxy.

With Post-Scarcity Anarchism in print, Bookchin left New York for Burlington, Vermont — and set about building places where social ecology could be taught, argued, and lived.

1971 — Post-Scarcity Anarchism published; moves to Burlington, Vermont, his home for the rest of his life.

early ’70s — With Bea and the Anarchos circle, opens a Burlington coffee house — cheap meals, study groups, movement meetings.

1974 — Co-founds the Institute for Social Ecology with Dan Chodorkoff at Goddard College; joins the faculty at Ramapo College.

1977 — The Spanish Anarchists recovers the buried history of the world’s largest anarchist movement.

1977–79 — Active in the Clamshell Alliance’s mass direct action against the Seabrook nuclear plant.

His central book traced hierarchy from its first emergence — in age, gender, priesthood, and state — and argued that freedom, too, has a legacy: organic societies, communes, and assemblies waiting to be renewed.

1982 — The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy is published.

mid ’80s — Bea returns from Frankfurt with news of die Grünen and helps found the Burlington Greens.

1987 — Bea Bookchin runs for city council — the first consciously municipalist campaign in the country.

1987 — The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship; at the first U.S. Green gathering in Amherst, he publicly challenges deep ecology’s misanthropic turn.

1989 — Remaking Society — the most compact statement of the whole project.

The final decade of the century was combative: defending reason and social politics against mysticism and withdrawal, and giving his municipalism a name of its own.

1990 — The Philosophy of Social Ecology sets out dialectical naturalism, his philosophy of nature.

1991 — Defending the Earth — the public dialogue with Earth First!’s Dave Foreman.

1995 — Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism and Re-enchanting Humanity take aim at individualism and anti-humanism on the left.

1996 — The Third Revolution begins — a four-volume history of popular movements within the great revolutions.

1999 — Formally breaks with anarchism, naming his politics Communalism.

In his last years Bookchin condensed a lifetime into the essays later collected as The Next Revolution. He did not live to see how far they would travel.

2002 — “The Communalist Project” — the late summation: popular assemblies, confederation, a new politics of the city.

2004 — From an İmralı prison cell, Abdullah Öcalan reads Bookchin; democratic confederalism begins reshaping the Kurdish movement.

2006 — Passes away at home in Burlington on July 30, aged 85.

2015 — The Next Revolution published by Verso, edited by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor; his ideas are cited from Rojava to municipalist city halls.