He supported city-states.

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 →

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.