> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://murray-bookchin.ghost.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# He supported city-states.
- URL: https://murray-bookchin.ghost.io/news/misconception-2/
- Published: 2026-02-01T12:02:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-02T13:00:00.000Z
- Author: Debbie Bookchin
- Tags: #misconception, #Import 2026-08-04 06:40

#### THE CLAIM

Bob Black’s *Anarchy After Leftism* (1997) titles a chapter “Murray Bookchin, Municipal Statist” and calls his politics “city-statist.” The shorthand survives today as “Bookchin wanted city-states.”

#### THE RECORD

Libertarian municipalism rests on a distinction Murray drew for decades: *politics* — the directly democratic self-management of the municipality by popular assemblies — versus *statecraft* — rule by professional bureaucrats backed by a monopoly of violence. The municipality organized by open assemblies is, on his definition, the opposite of a state: no professional apparatus, no standing coercive monopoly, deputies to confederal councils mandated and recallable, administration strictly subordinate to policy made on the floor.

He rejected the state at every size — including the “minimal state” of the eco-socialists of his day — and rejected running for any state office. Municipalist candidacies for local office were, in his words, campaigns run *against* the state; provincial and national office he ruled out as statecraft. Confederation was to grow as a dual power that challenges and replaces the nation-state, not a federation that miniaturizes it.

As for the ancient polis: he attached the same caveat every time he praised Athens — its slavery, its xenophobia, its patriarchy — and treated it as a source of lessons about citizenship, never a model to restore. A city-state is still a state. Nothing in his program revives one; a chapter of his final collection is titled, plainly, “Not Every Government is a State.”

> “The notion that human freedom can be achieved, much less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic.”

— “THE MYTH OF A ‘MINIMAL STATE,’” IN *FREE CITIES*, 2008 · [FIND THE BOOK →](https://murray-bookchin.ghost.io/books/)

#### THE METHOD

Note how the label works: append “-statist” to a program that is explicitly anti-state, then argue against the label instead of the program. That is a straw man — the first of several patterns catalogued at the end of this page.