(texto completo, em português → sol2070.in/2024/09/crise-ecologica-reconstru%C3%A7%C3%A3o-sociedade-murray-bookchin-the-next-revolution/ )

"The Next Revolution" (2015) brings together articles from the 1990s and 2000s by the influential revolutionary author Murray Bookchin. As the subtitle says, it's about direct democracy and popular assemblies.

After abandoning socialism, the american Bookchin became one of the most influential anarchist authors in the 60s. In the 1990s, he also distanced himself from anarchism - not because he disagreed with its principles, but because he felt trapped by others' definitions of the movement and the resulting accusations.

As this is a book that brings together articles from his final phase, the ideas have the flavour of a synthesis of a life dedicated to revolutionary thought, which he condensed into what he called ‘social ecology’. His revolutionary theory is ‘municipalism’, with an undeniably anarchist flavour.

Legendary writer Ursula K. Le Guin writes in the book's introduction:

‘Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in this book represent the culmination of that labour: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it. He criticises the failures of past movements for social change, resurrects the promise of direct democracy and, in the last essay in this book, sketches his hope of how we might turn the environmental crisis into a moment of true choice-a chance to transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system. Reading it, I was moved and grateful, as I have so often been in reading Murray Bookchin. He was a true son of the Enlightenment in his respect for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope.’

To summarise roughly, municipalism is a theory of radical but gradual and non-violent change in societies based on small communities adopting the political model of direct democracy, in which the people themselves decide what is best for them, rather than voting for rulers and delegated parties to decide. The results of implementations of this model around the world have proved to be much more satisfactory for the communities involved. Based on this effectiveness, the model could gradually and exponentially expand into a federation of associated self-managed communities.

Below is one of the articles, which links the environmental crisis - which he already recognised as a catastrophic threat in 1992 - with the urgency of a political model beyond socialism (and, of course, capitalism).

In the book, this text comes after the chapter detailing the workings of municipalism, also called ‘communalism’; it is therefore more focussed on discussing the failings of merely reformist, or authoritarian and hierarchical models.

Perhaps in the future I'll also reproduce the chapter on municipalism.