“And do you think you deserve your freedom?”

Yesterday, I gave Murray Bookchin’s work a try—not out of admiration but mostly out of curiosity. What I do know about Bookchin is filtered through the Kurdish lens: Abdullah Öcalan’s interest in his theories led to their integration into the political framework of Rojava, Syria. Öcalan himself shifted from advocating for a separate Kurdish state to something more communal, but the whole trajectory remains a bit murky to me.

And while Öcalan’s communal turn may offer an alternative to statehood, it’s hard to disentangle any liberation narrative from the web of foreign sponsorship. That’s where my doubts begin to crystallize. Liberation, in principle, makes sense—until it’s filtered through foreign funding. The U.S. government has a well-documented habit of propping up “liberation” movements abroad, not for human rights, but to serve corporate interests. “Democracy,” “liberty”—if those words headline your movement, I start wondering who’s footing the bill. Arab Spring, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, even protests tagged “pro-democracy” in the media—follow the money and odds are, you’ll find U.S. dollars greasing the gears.

The U.S. government has even leveraged socialist movements when it suited their goals—just like they’ve funded “pro-democracy” campaigns, manipulated liberation narratives, and rebranded foreign resistance with whatever ideology sells best to the domestic audience. It’s not ideology; it’s utility. One chapter of empire blends into the next, and the slogans—freedom, liberty, democracy—are more PR strategy than principle.

This post isn’t some sweeping declaration—just a placeholder for later, in case I decide to dig further into Bookchin and the ideological contortions he made over time. He began in the Stalinist fold, joining the Young Communist League in the 1930s, but quickly became disillusioned with it. By decade’s end, he had migrated toward Trotskyism, drawn in by its rebellious posture and promise of revolutionary clarity. But even that lost its sheen, and eventually he broke from both camps entirely, charting his own course through communalism and social ecology.

His ideological drift—from Stalinism to Trotskyism to communalist reinvention—reads like a condensed timeline of the so-called revolutionary left’s familiar arc: conviction, disillusionment, and Marxist revisionism. Whether I take his ideas seriously or simply use them as historical markers, I just needed to mark this thread for myself.

Bookchin never knew Trotsky, but he hovered close to the orbit—attending meetings with former associates like Jean van Heijenoort and Al Goldman, absorbing the reverent party culture that framed Leon Trotsky as a martyr of principled dissent. That proximity felt ideological, almost mythic. Yet the myth frays under scrutiny. While in exile in Mexico, Trotsky wasn’t only writing manifestos against Stalin—he was also meeting U.S. consular officials, offering intelligence about communist circles, and agreeing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names for American authorities. The revolutionary posture, once lionized, begins to look more like strategic collaboration.

It eerily echoes George Orwell—another supposed guardian of principle. During the Cold War, Orwell—the man who warned against the surveillance state—handed a list of suspected “crypto-communists” to the British Foreign Office’s propaganda unit, quietly contributing to ideological gatekeeping.

The irony, of course, lies in watching dissenters morph into instruments of the very machinery they once decried. Neither Trotsky nor Orwell carried formal intelligence credentials, but both crossed a line that feels strikingly familiar: the dissenter giving aid to the apparatus he once condemned. Both, under the weight of Cold War pressure, contributed to the systems of ideological surveillance. What begins as principled defiance veers into gatekeeping.

We’re conditioned to view figures like Trotsky and Orwell as unshakable beacons—ideological lighthouses weathering the storm. But their final chapters feel more like warnings than legacies. The clarity they once wielded gets refracted through compromise, fatigue, and geopolitical gamesmanship.

These moments aren’t just historical footnotes—they reveal a system in motion. Resistance, when cornered or co-opted, begins to mirror the machinery it once defied. Moral clarity dissolves into strategic positioning. Purity is a myth. Utility wins. And the revolutionary, weathered by disillusionment, doesn’t dismantle the system—he joins it.

—Tina Antonis