Organized by the Netzwerk für Kommunalismus
30 July, 2026
Remarks delivered by Eleanor Finley, Ph.D.
Twenty years ago today, the world said goodbye to one of its most important visionary thinkers, Murray Bookchin. I was asked here today to share about Murray’s contributions to today’s social movements and how his work resonates with young people. That theme raises some topics that are probably obvious to folks who would come to an event like this: the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria or municipalism in Southern Europe. However, rather than giving another overview of these well-known movements, I want to focus on the latter part of this question on the meaning of his work today and in the future.
It is true that the political philosophy of confederal direct democracy that Bookchin helped author is quietly spreading across the world. Where I live in the United States, people’s assemblies and similar formations like neighborhood or tenants’ unions inspired by Bookchin are coordinating support for families hunted by ICE, resisting the implementation of “FLOCK” street camera surveillance systems, and responding to climate emergencies. These formations are not easy to find online, in part because they focus on real, face-to-face relationships between neighbors. In this way, they are really taking Bookchin seriously.
Bookchin is also leaving his mark on more managerial and reform-minded movements, which are now increasingly acknowledging the value of local action. Progressive parties and campaigns in cities like New York City, Seattle, and Washington, DC are prioritizing public investment, regulation, and service provisioning at the city level. In this context, Bookchin reminds us that localism is more than just a means to an end. As he wrote in his piece The Forms of Freedom in 1968, “The assembly and community cannot be legislated or decreed into existence.” Freedom cannot be legislated from above.
Despite the great importance of communalist politics, I believe that perhaps the most salient contribution Bookchin’s work makes today for young people is providing a compelling defense of humanity. Young people today will endure climate-induced social, economic, and political dislocations that nearly everyone from previous generations has found unimaginable.
The same young people are experiencing an unprecedented collapse of critical thinking, attention spans, and logical coherence because of addictive algorithmic echnology. For twenty years, tech firms have forced their addictive products into schools, homes, restaurants, and everywhere in between. We are seeing the cumulative effect of this unregulated onslaught today, with universities inundated with young people who cannot compose a paragraph or analyze a simple text. Just a few days ago, we learned that AI companies are rapidly purchasing the world’s inventory of rare and out-of-print books in order to feed them to their databases and destroy them. The message is clear: the frontline of struggle has moved onto the terrain of the human mind and imagination.
Bookchin’s philosophy drives away the mist. It reminds us that the human mind will never be inferior to some corporate product. When you look back on his writing from the 1980s, for all of its flaws, he is like a Sarah Connor about to face the proverbial Terminator; grim, but determined. His weapons were arguments and reasons why humanity matters – not simply on moral grounds, but ecological grounds – not simply for economic liberation but for liberation of all life on Earth.
Through Murray’s writing, young people are able to converse with a singular mind who had the intelligence and courage to assert the impossible and fight the unthinkable. And when they do this, they gain courage. That is what I see among my students at the Institute for Social Ecology, the readers of my book Practicing Social Ecology, and the courageous activists organizing assemblies in their hometowns.
They know that the unthinkable has already arrived. Many begin their lives from a place of hopelessness and resignation. But through social ecology, through Murray’s and our work, they come to better understand their own historical agency. His work shines a rare light on the fact that there is not only a capitalist world worth fighting against, but also a genuinely liberated world worth fighting toward. There is nothing more precious than that for the young people of our time.
Speech delivered by Yavor Tarinski
It is a great pleasure to have been invited to take part in this international commemorative tribute, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the death of Murray Bookchin. I was born and raised in Bulgaria, a post-socialist country that was once part of the Warsaw Pact and the Eastern Bloc. When the state communist project failed throughout the countries of Eastern Europe, the mass of people in the region hoped for a democratic future. But the liberal order that came after was oligarchic in its essence, retaining power in the hands of narrow political elites. The introduction of electoral processes, while putting an end to totalitarianism, were unaible to give power to the people. With the time I discovered voices from around the world who took democracy seriously – voices that belonged to people like Cornelius Castoriadis, Hannah Arendt, and of course, Murray Bookchin. They realized that real popular participation could not come through occasional ritualistic elections, but require a dimension of unmediated grassroots politics. I think that one thing that characterizes Bookchin’s work is its potency to inspire political action: his influence can be felt in environmental movements, urban citizen initiatives, and even the Rojava revolution in the Middle East. And I would argue that one aspect of his thought that contributes greatly to this potency is the central role the thinker dedicates to spatiality.
There is a trait in radical thought and practice throughout history that focuses on space as crucial for the question of social organization. From Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and William Morris, through Pyotr Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, to Henri Lefebvre and Murray Bookchin, there is this libertarian tradition that suggests that political participation cannot be excercized in a void or on an abstract level. There must be a space that is being collectively experienced and cared for by those that inhabit it. For Bookchin, like many of his predecessors, this place was the municipality as a shared political environment that binds people via collectively-forged social contract.
The focus on the spatial dimension of politics ultimately centers on the everyday life of each and every individual member of society. The municipality, unlike the State, offers an inherently humane level, prone to direct and unmediated management by the citizenry. Bookchin insisted that citizenship cannot be separated from a spatial dimension that allows people to act as citizens – i.e. to directly participate in collective decision-making. Without such a space, one can be citizen only in name but not in content. Referendums and various digital tools, while surely helpful, can never be the basis of a direct democracy as they do not provide democratic spatialtiy but only a belonging to an abstract whole. For this reason Bookchin advanced the institutions of the face-to-face assembly and the council of revocable delegates as proper spaces on which a genuine direct democracy can be built upon. But as the sagacious thinker that he was, he foresaw that enclosing ourselves into our communities will lead to nothing but parochial localism. So he insisted that we should actively seek to link our municipalities into democratic confederations that allow for power and knowledge to flow horizontally, thus avoiding the danger of the emergence of new ruling castes. Such democratic spaces are also places that offer a real paideia, or civic education, that creates an anthropological type that is passionate for political participation and takes responsibility for their actions and those of their community.
By pointing at our lived environments as the proper spaces on which a coherent direct- democratic system could be built, Bookchin also underlined at the inherent interconnectedness between democracy and ecology. The quality of life it is not only determined by the towns and cities we built, but also by the natural world that surrounds us. Unlike political and business elites that have the privilege of deciding the fate of far- away places, grassroots communities often have to act as conscious stewards of their direct surrounding natural environent as their everyday life depends on it. Because of this interconnectedness Bookchin insisted that the ecological crises of our time stem from instituted social hierarchies, and if we are to resolve the former we will have to replace the latter with a non-hierarchic alternative.
The spatiality in Bookchin’s political project is so potent in provoking grassroots action first and foremost, because this humane and communal dimension that we find throughout his body of work is inherent to every human society. It is a call to action to everyone everywhere and a powerful reminder that a truly democratic and ecological civilization is not only possible, but it is up to each and every one of us.
