This article from the NYRB is about Murray Bookchin and the Kurdish revolutionaries who are leading the struggle for Kurdish independence.
Bookchin is the type of libertarian I have always admired, before the term was hijacked into its modern business (read: right wing) nostrums that end up supporting corporatism in practice.*
My fundamental disagreement with Bookchin is he essentially if not literally ignores the rise of corporations and corporate ideologies in American life, and how corporate ideologies have driven American imperialist drives of the past 120 years. It did not have to be that way, of course, and, further, again, of course, American imperialist efforts across the continent were initially driven by mercantile and Romanesque rhetoric also grounded in what we moderns call racism.
Bookchin believed radicalism in cities can defeat both Big Government and Big Corporations (I put them in initial capital letters consistent with the type of theorizing Bookchin would recognize). However, we see the challenges in applying his ideas in the United States most immediately and most recently in Seattle, where the leftist city council rejected a tax on Amazon and Boeing and other major businesses, that worked out to $275 a year (yes, a year) for each person employed at the major businesses, with the funds raised to be used to alleviate homelessness. There were threats from Amazon that it would leave, affecting 40,000 employees at Amazon in the area, which trickled down to shouts at the city council meeting from local business libertarian types and their small, shopkeeper allies. It is not fair to attack Bookchin for that failure, which is not my intent at all. I think the City Council should have held firm. Confrontation with corporatism is the main issue of our time.
Too bad most libertarians would rather attack Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and whatever else our federal and state governments may do to help those without economic means. If they want to be our allies in the larger Struggle (yes, let's capitalize that term for old times' sake), then Bookchin may be a place to start, and see if we find common ground--besides the usual cannabis legalization and opposition to the PATRIOT Act. As an old Communist Party friend (he had long since left the Communist Party when I met him, but he remained an ardent leftist from his days as an organizer for the United Electrical workers' union) used to say, one can agree with 70% of the libertarians' platform, but the remaining 30% is a "head shot." Meaning, one is shot in the head and one dies. If only that remaining 30% was a leg shot....
But if we can get together and overthrow economic royalty in major cities, well, that would be interesting....
* Boochkin is sometimes confused with Murray Rothbard, who is a more modern type of libertarian, who truly believes there is something called "money." Rothbard has earned my award for Dumbest Smart Man over the decades. His books are worth a perusal, and, his most scholarly work, A History of Money and Banking in the United States, is great reading. The book provides great information regarding the financial history of the nation. However, his belief in the totem known as precious metals, and his assumption that only gold or even silver have value, such that paper money is "fiat money," is one of the great Dumb Ideas that permeate modern American "conservative" and libertarian thought. Poor Rothbard. He fails to understand what David Graeber definitely understands, which is that money is a social construct, whether it is expressed in precious metals, paper, or otherwise.
