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generator: pandoc
title: Manifesto of the Perth Municipalist Organisation
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
---
2019-06-23T00:21:05+08:00
Part 0
======
1. As Bookchin says,
in our cities, citizens are shrinking to the status of anonymous
''constituents'' of elected representatives. Their principal function
is to pay taxes, to do the onerous work-a-day job of maintaining the
present society, to reproduce, and to decorously withdraw from all
political life -- a domain that is reserved for the state and its
officialdom.
2. Our cities are dissolving into enormous, alienated urban belts. The
citizen is reduced to a passive agent. They are mere recipients of
'services'. These services are provided by bureaucratic agencies,
and in this way politics has been fully degraded into statecraft.
3. Those who practice statecraft are cynical, professional manipulators
of power. You may know them personally, you may have grown up with
them.
4. Politics is now a 'business'. It is regarded as successful if it
produces fiscal surpluses, and is regarded as a failure if it is
burdened by deficits. The key principle behind statecraft, politics,
is to operate 'efficiently' - that is, to produce surpluses as large
and bountiful as possible.
5. The *ethical* content of civil life has been nullified. The life of
a municipality, the proper size for a political community, has been
replaced by an ''entrepeneurial mentality'' that emphasies the
pecuniary and brutally economic factors of life -- as Bookchin
enumerates: income, expenses, growth, and employment.
6. Power has been almost perfectly centralised. So to has wealth. Fewer
and fewer hands practice the cynical politics of statecraft, and
control the lives of the many.
7. The power that should be claimed by the people is wielded by the
state and by monopolistic economic entities.
Part 1
======
1. A gap is opening up between the enormous bureaucratic state, and the
municipal life of citizens. The state is becoming more remote and
anonymous.
2. The personal lives of people, their municipal life, increasingly
serves their direct needs. As Bookchin says,
We do not go to the nation-state to find suitable schools for our
children, for jobs, culture, and decent places in which to live. Like
it or not, the city, \[the municipality\], is still the most immediate
nevironment which we encounter and with which we are obliged to deal,
beyond the sphere of the family and friends, in order to satisfy our
needs as social beings.
3. We are obliged to seek out counter- *institutions* that stand
opposed to the power of the nation-state. The municipality presents
itself as the site for such a set of antagonistic and parallel
institutions to the state.
4. This approach is about building a movement. It is not about seizing
and building individual municipalities which single communities
merely restructure their lives on their own.
5. This is about establishing a movement which alters one community
after another and establishes a system of confederal relations
between municipalities. It is a movement which will eventually form
a regional confederal power in its own right.
6. The state knows, far better than any other entity, how destabilising
demands for local control can be to its authority.
7. That is why I propse that we establish an organisation which seeks
to seize back control of municipalities from the state and radically
democratise them, and devolve their power.