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Title: Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: municipalism Source: Retrieved on April 28, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives24.html Notes: This article was originally published as the introduction to the Social Ecology Project’s Readings in Libertarian Municipalism, a collection of writings on the subject. Green Perspectives — October 1991
Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social
reconstruction — I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology
groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed —
is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits
established by the status quo.
Politics today means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for
electoral office, that offer vacuous programs for “social justice” to
attract a nondescript “electorate.” Once in office, their programs
usually turn into a bouquet of “compromises.” In this respect, many
Green parties in Europe have been only marginally different from
conventional parliamentary parties. Nor have socialist parties, with all
their various labels, exhibited any basic differences from their
capitalist counter parts. To be sure, the indifference of the
Euro-American public — its “apoliticism” — is understandably depressing.
Given their low expectations, when people do vote, they normally turn to
established parties if only because, as centers of power, they can
produce results of sorts in practical matters. If one bothers to vote,
most people reason, why waste a vote on a new marginal organization that
has all the characteristics of the major ones and that will eventually
become corrupted if it succeeds? Witness the German Greens, whose
internal and public life increasingly approximates that of other parties
in the new Reich.
That this “political process” has lingered on with almost no basic
alteration for decades now is due in great part to the inertia of the
process itself. Time wears expectations thin, and hopes are often
reduced to habits as one disappointment is followed by another. Talk of
a “new politics,” of upsetting tradition, which is as old as politics
itself, is becoming unconvincing. For decades, at least, the changes
that have occurred in radical politics are largely changes in rhetoric
rather than structure. The German Greens are only the most recent of a
succession of “nonparty parties” (to use their original way of
describing their organization) that have turned from an attempt to
practice grassroots politics — ironically, in the Bundestag, of all
places! — into a typical parliamentary party. The Social Democratic
Party in Germany, the Labor Party in Britain, the New Democratic Party
in Canada, the Socialist Party in France, and others, despite their
original emancipatory visions, barely qualify today as even liberal
parties in which a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a Harry Truman would have
found a comfortable home. Whatever social ideals these parties may have
had generations ago have been eclipsed by the pragmatics of gaining,
holding, and extending their power in their respective parliamentary and
ministerial bodies.
It is precisely such parliamentary and ministerial objectives that we
call “politics” today. To the modern political imagination, “politics”
is precisely a body of techniques for holding power in representative
bodies — notably the legislative and executive arenas — not a moral
calling based on rationality, community, and freedom.
Libertarian municipalism represents a serious, indeed a historically
fundamental project, to render politics ethical in character and
grassroots in organization. It is structurally and morally different
from other grassroots efforts, not merely rhetorically different. It
seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic
citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism
and its mystification of the “party” mechanism as a means for public
representation. In these respects, libertarian municipalism is not
merely a “political strategy.” It is an effort to work from latent or
incipient democratic possibilities toward a radically new configuration
of society itself-a communitarian society oriented toward meeting human
needs, responding to ecological imperatives, and developing a new ethics
based on sharing and cooperation. That it involves a consistently
independent form of politics is a truism. More important, it involves a
redefinition of politics, a return to the word’s original Greek meaning
as the management of the community or polis by means of direct
face-to-face assemblies of the people in the formulation of public
policy and based on an ethics of complementarily and solidarity.
In this respect, libertarian municipalism is not one of many pluralistic
techniques that is intended to achieve a vague and undefined social
goal. Democratic to its core and nonhierarchical in its structure, it is
a kind of human destiny, not merely one of an assortment of political
tools or strategies that can be adopted and discarded with the aim of
achieving power. Libertarian municipalism, in effect, seeks to define
the institutional contours of a new society even as it advances the
practical message of a radically new politics for our day.
Here, means and ends meet in a rational unity. The word politics now
expresses direct popular control of society by its citizens through
achieving and sustaining a true democracy in municipal assemblies —
this, as distinguished from republican systems of representation that
preempt the right of the citizen to formulate community and regional
policies. Such politics is radically distinct from statecraft and the
state a professional body composed of bureaucrats, police, military,
legislators, and the like, that exists as a coercive apparatus, clearly
distinct from and above the people. The libertarian municipalist
approach distinguishes statecraft — which we usually characterize as
“politics” today — and politics as it once existed in precapitalist
democratic communities.
Moreover, libertarian municipalism also involves a clear delineation of
the social realm — as well as the political realm — in the strict
meaning of the term social: notably, the arena in which we live our
private lives and engage in production. As such, the social realm is to
be distinguished from both the political and the statist realms.
Enormous mischief has been caused by the interchangeable use of these
terms — social, political, and the state. Indeed, the tendency has been
to identify them with one another in our thinking and in the reality of
everyday life. But the state is a completely alien formation, a thorn in
the side of human development, an exogenous entity that has incessantly
encroached on the social and political realms. Often, in fact, the state
has been an end in itself, as witness the rise of Asian empires, ancient
imperial Rome, and the totalitarian state of modern times. More than
this, it has steadily invaded the political domain, which, for all its
past shortcomings, had empowered communities, social groupings, and
individuals.
Such invasions have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, the conflict between
the state on the one hand and the political and social realms on the
other has been an ongoing subterranean civil war for centuries. It has
often broken out into the open — in modern times in the conflict of the
Castilian cities (comuneros) against the Spanish monarchy in the 1520s,
in the struggle of the Parisian sections against the centralist Jacobin
Convention of 1793, and in endless other clashes both before and after
these encounters.
Today, with the increasing centralization and concentration of power in
the nation-state, a “new politics” — one that is genuinely new — must be
structured institutionally around the restoration of power by
municipalities. This is not only necessary but possible even in such
gigantic urban areas as New York City, Montreal, London, and Paris. Such
urban agglomerations are not, strictly speaking, cities or
municipalities in the traditional sense of those terms, despite being
designated as such by sociologists. It is only if we think that they are
cities that we become mystified by problems of size and logistics. Even
before we confront the ecological imperative of physical
decentralization (a necessity anticipated by Frederick Engels and Peter
Kropotkin alike), we need feel no problems about decentralizing them
institutionally. When Francois Mitterand tried to decentralize Paris
with local city halls a few years ago, his reasons were strictly
tactical (he wanted to weaken the authority of the capital’s right-wing
mayor). Nonetheless, he failed not because restructuring the Large
metropolis was impossible but because the majority of the affluent
Parisians supported the mayor.
Clearly, institutional changes do not occur in a social vacuum. Nor do
they guarantee that a decentralized municipality, even if it is
structurally democratic. will necessarily be humane, rational, and
ecological in dealing with public affairs. Libertarian municipalism is
premised on the struggle to achieve a rational and ecological society, a
struggle that depends on education and organization. From the beginning,
it presupposes a genuinely democratic desire by people to arrest the
growing powers of the nation-state and reclaim them for their community
and their region. Unless there is a movement — hopefully an effective
Left Green movement — to foster these aims, decentralization can lead to
local parochialism as easily as it can lead to ecological humanist
communities.
But when have basic social changes ever been without risk? The case that
Marx’s commitment to a centralized state and planned economy would
inevitably yield bureaucratic totalitarianism could have been better
made than the case that decentralized libertarian municipalities will
inevitably be authoritarian and have exclusionary and parochial traits.
Economic interdependence is a fact of life today, and capitalism itself
has made parochial autarchies a chimera. While municipalities and
regions can seek to attain a considerable measure of self-aufficiency,
we have long left the era when self-aufficient communities that can
indulge their prejudices are possible.
Equally important is the need for confederation — the interlinking of
communities with one another through recallable deputies mandated by
municipal citizens’ assemblies and whose sole functions are coordinative
and administrative. Confederation has a long history of its own that
dates back to antiquity and that surfaced as a major alternative to the
nation state. From the American Revolution through the French Revolution
and the Spanish Revolution of 1936, confederalism constituted a major
challenge to state centralism. Nor has it disappeared in our own time,
when the breakup of existing twentieth-century empires raises the issue
of enforced state centralism or the relatively autonomous nation.
Libertarian municipalism adds a radically democratic dimension to the
contemporary discussions of confederation (as, for example, in
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) by calling for confederations not of
nation-states but of municipalities and of the neighborhoods of giant
megalopolitan areas as well as towns and villages.
In the case of libertarian municipalism’ parochialism can thus be
checked not only by the compelling realities of economic interdependence
but by the commitment of municipal minorities to defer to the majority
wishes of participating communities. Do these interdependencies and
majority decisions guarantee us that a majority decision will be a
correct one? Certainly not — but our chances for a rational and
ecological society are much better in this approach than in those that
ride on centralized entities and bureaucratic apparatuses. I cannot help
but marvel that no municipal network has been emergent among the German
Greens, who have hundreds of representatives in city councils around
Germany but who carry on a local politics that is completely
conventional and self enclosed within particular towns and cities.
Many arguments against libertarian municipalism — even with its strong
confederal emphasis derive from a failure to understand its distinction
between policy-making and administration. This distinction is
fundamental to libertarian municipalism and must always be kept in mind.
Policy is made by a community or neighborhood assembly of free citizens;
administration is performed by confederal councils composed of mandated,
recallable deputies of wards, towns, and villages. If particular
communities or neighborhoods — or a minority grouping of them choose to
go their own way to a point where human rights are violated or where
ecological mayhem is permitted, the majority in a local or regional
confederation has every right to prevent such malfeasances through its
confederal council. This is not a denial of democracy but the assertion
of a shared agreement by all to recognize civil rights and maintain the
ecological integrity of a region. These rights and needs are not
asserted so much by a confederal council as by the majority of the
popular assemblies conceived as one large community that expresses its
wishes through its confederal deputies. Thus policy-making still remains
local, but its administration is vested in the confederal network as a
whole. The confederation in effect is a Community of communities based
on distinct human rights and ecological imperatives.
If libertarian municipalism is not to be totally warped of its form and
divested of its meaning, it is a desideratum that must be fought for. It
speaks to a time — hopefully, one that will yet come when people feel
disempowered and actively seek empowerment. Existing in growing tension
with the nation-state, it is a process as well as a destiny, a struggle
to be fulfilled, not a bequest granted by the summits of the state. It
is a dual power that contests the legitimacy of the existing state
power. Such a movement can be expected to begin slowly, perhaps
sporadically, in communities here and there that initially may demand
only the moral authority to alter the structuring of society before
enough interlinked confederations exist to demand the outright
institutional power to replace the state. The growing tension created by
the emergence of municipal confederations represents a confrontation
between the state and the political realms. This confrontation can be
resolved only after libertarian municipalism forms the new politics of a
popular movement and ultimately captures the imagination of millions.
Certain points, however, should be obvious. The people who initially
enter into the duel between confederalism and statism will not be the
same human beings as those who eventually achieve libertarian
municipalism. The movement that tries to educate them and the struggles
that give libertarian municipalist principles reality will turn them
into active citizens, rather than passive “constituents.” No one who
participates in a struggle for social restructuring emerges from that
struggle with the prejudices, habits, and sensibilities with which he or
she entered it. Hopefully, then, such prejudices — like parochialism —
will increasingly be replaced by a generous sense of cooperation and a
caring sense of interdependence.
It remains to emphasize that libertarian municipalism is not merely an
evocation of all traditional antistatist notions of politics. Just as it
redefines politics to include face-to-face municipal democracies
graduated to confederal levels, so it includes a municipalist and
confederal approach to economics. Minimally, a libertarian municipalist
economics calls for the municipalization of the economy, not its
centralization into state-owned “nationalized” enterprises on the one
hand or its reduction to “worker-controlled” forms of collectivistic
capitalism on the other. Trade-union control of “worker controlled”
enterprises (that is, syndicalism) has had its day. This should be
evident to anyone who examines the bureaucracies that even revolutionary
trade unions spawned during the Spanish Civil War of 1936. Today,
corporate capitalism too is increasingly eager to bring the worker into
complicity with his or her own exploitation by means of “workplace
democracy.” Nor was the revolution in Spain or in other countries spared
the existence of competition among worker-controlled enterprises for raw
materials, markets, and profits. Even more recently, many Israeli
kibbutzim have been failures as examples of nonexploitative,
need-oriented enterprises, despite the high ideals with which they were
initially founded.
Libertarian municipalism proposes a radically different form of economy
one that is neither nationalized nor collectivized according to
syndicalist precepts. It proposes that land and enterprises be placed
increasingly in the custody of the community more precisely, the custody
of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal
councils. How work should be planned, what technologies should be used,
how goods should be distributed are questions that can only be resolved
in practice. The maxim “from each according to his or her ability, to
each according to his or her needs” would seem a bedrock guide for an
economically rational society, provided to be sure that goods are of the
highest durability and quality, that needs are guided by rational and
ecological standards, and that the ancient notions of limit and balance
replace the bourgeois marketplace imperative of “grow or die.”
In such a municipal economy — confederal, interdependent, and rational
by ecological, not simply technological, standards — we would expect
that the special interests that divide people today into workers,
professionals, managers, and the like would be melded into a general
interest in which people see themselves as citizens guided strictly by
the needs of their community and region rather than by personal
proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, citizenship would come into
its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the
public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests.
This is the moral basis of a moral economy for moral communities. But of
overarching importance is the general social interest that potentially
underpins all moral communities, an interest that must ultimately cut
across class, gender, ethnic, and status lines if humanity is to
continue to exist as a viable species. This interest is the one created
in our times by ecological catastrophe. Capitalism’s “grow or die”
imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of
interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist
with each other — nor can any society founded on the myth that they can
be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological
society, or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or
her status.
Will this ecological society be authoritarian, or possibly even
totalitarian, a hierarchial dispensation that is implicit in the image
of the planet as a “spaceship” Or will it be democratic? If history is
any guide, the development of a democratic ecological society, as
distinguished from a commend ecological society, must follow its own
logic. One cannot resolve this historical dilemma without getting to its
roots. Without a searching analysis of our ecological problems and their
social sources, the pernicious institutions that we now have will lead
to increased centralization and further ecological catastrophe. In a
democratic ecological society, those roots are literally the grass roots
that libertarian municipalism seeks to foster.
For those who rightly call for a new technology, new sources of energy,
new means of transportation, and new ecological lifeways, can a new
society be anything less than a Community of communities based on
confederation rather than statism? We already live in a world in which
the economy is “overglobalized,” overcentralized, and
overbureaucratized. Much that can be done locally and regionally is now
being done largely for profit, military needs, and imperial appetites —
on a global scale with a seeming complexity that can actually be easily
diminished.
If this seems too “utopian” for our time, then so must the present flood
of literature that asks for radically sweeping shifts in energy
policies, far-reaching reductions in air and water pollution, and the
formulation of worldwide plans to arrest global warming and the
destruction of the ozone layer be seen as “utopian.” Is it too much, it
is fair to ask, to take such demands one step further and call for
institutional and economic changes that are no less drastic and that in
fact are based on traditions that are deeply sedimented in American —
indeed, the world’s — noblest democratic and political traditions?
Nor are we obliged to expect these changes to occur immediately. The
Left long worked with minimum and maximum programs for change, in which
immediate steps that can be taken now were linked by transitional
advances and intermediate areas that would eventually yield ultimate
goals. Minimal steps that can be taken now include initiating Left Green
municipalist movements that propose popular neighborhood and town
assemblies — even if they have only moral functions at first — and
electing town and city councilors that advance the cause of these
assemblies and other popular institutions. These minimal steps can lead
step-by-step to the formation of confederal bodies and the increasing
legitimation of truly democratic bodies. Civic banks to fund municipal
enterprises and land purchases; the fostering of new ecologically
oriented enterprises that are owned by the community; and the creation
of grassroots networks in many fields of endeavor and the public weal —
all these can be developed at a pace appropriate to changes that are
being made in political life.
That capital will likely “migrate” from communities and confederations
that are moving toward libertarian municipalism is a problem that every
community, every nation, whose political life has become radicalized has
faced. Capital, in fact, normally “migrates” to areas where it can
acquire high profits, irrespective of political considerations.
Overwhelmed by fears of capital migration, a good case could be
established for not rocking the political boat at any time. Far more to
the point are that municipally owned enterprises and farms could provide
new ecologically valuable and health-nourishing products to a public
that is becoming increasingly aware of the low-quality goods and staples
that are being foisted on it now.
Libertarian municipalism is a politics that can excite the public
imagination, appropriate for a movement that is direly in need of a
sense of direction and purpose. The papers that appear in this
collection offer ideas, ways, and means not only to undo the present
social order but to remake it drastically — expanding its residual
democratic traditions into a rational and ecological society.
This addendum seems to be necessary because some of the opponents of
libertarian municipalism — and, regrettably, some of its acolyte —
misunderstand what libertarian municipalism seeks to achieve indeed,
misunderstand its very nature.
For some of its instrumental acolytes, libertarian municipalism is
becoming a tactical device to gain entry into so called independent
movements and new third parties that call for “grassroots politics,”
such as those proposed by NOW and certain Labor leaders In the name of
“libertarian municipalism,” some radical acolytes of the view are
prepared to blur the tension that they should cultivate between the
civic realm and the state — presumably to gain greater public attention
in electoral campaigns for gubernatorial, congressional, and other state
offices. These radicals regrettably warp libertarian municipalism into a
mere “tactic” or “strategy” and drain it of its revolutionary content.
But those who propose to use tenets of libertarian municipalism for
“tactical” reasons as a means to enter another reformist party or
function as its “left wing” have little in common with the idea.
Libertarian municipalism is not a product of the formal logic that has
such deep roots in left-wing “analyses” and “strategies” today, despite
the claims of many radicals that “dialectics” is their “method.” The
struggle toward creating new civic institutions out of old ones (or
replacing the old ones altogether) and creating civic confederations is
a self formative one, a creative dynamic formed from the tension of
social conflict. The effort to work along these lines is as much a part
of the end as the process of maturing from the child to the adult — from
the relatively undifferentiated to the fully differentiated — with all
its difficulties. The very fight for a municipal confederation, for
municipal control of “property,” and for the actual achievement of
worldwide municipal confederation is directed toward achieving a new
ethos of citizenship and community, not simply to gain victories in
largely reformist conflicts.
Thus, libertarian municipalism is not merely an effort simply to “take
over” city councils to construct a more “environmentally friendly” city
government. These adherents or opponents of libertarian municipalism, in
effect, look at the civic structures that exist before their eyes now
and essentially (all rhetoric to the contrary aside) take them as they
exist. Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is an effort to transform
and democratize city governments, to root them in popular assemblies, to
knit them together along confederal lines, to appropriate a regional
economy along confederal and municipal lines.
In fact, libertarian municipalism gains its life and its integrity
precisely from the dialectical tension it proposes between the
nation-state and the municipal confederation. Its “law of life,” to use
an old Marxian term, consists precisely in its struggle with the state.
The tension between municipal confederations and the state must be clear
and uncompromising. Since these confederations would exist primarily in
opposition to statecraft, they cannot be compromised by state,
provincial, or national elections, much less achieved by these means.
Libertarian municipalism is formed by its struggle with the state,
strengthened by this struggle, indeed defined by this struggle. Divested
of this dialectical tension with the state, of this duality of power
that must ultimately be actualized in a free “Commune of communes,”
libertarian municipalism becomes little more than “sewer socialism.”
Many heroic comrades who are prepared to do battle (one day) with the
cosmic forces of capitalism find that libertarian municipalism is too
thorny, irrelevant, or vague to deal with and opt for what is basically
a form of political particularism. Our spray-can or “alternative cafe”
radicals may choose to brush libertarian municipalism aside as “a
ludicrous tactic,” but it never ceases to amaze me that well-meaning
radicals who are committed to the “overthrow” of capitalism (no less!)
find it too difficult to function politically — and, yes, electorally —
in their own neighborhoods for a new politics based on a genuine
democracy. If they cannot provide a transformative politics for their
own neighborhood relatively modest task — or diligently work at doing so
with the constancy that used to mark the more mature left movements of
the past, I find it very hard to believe that they will ever do much
harm to the present social system. Indeed, by creating cultural centers,
parks, and good housing, they may well be improving the system by giving
capitalism a human face without diminishing its under lying unfreedom as
a hierarchical and class society.
A bouquet of struggles for “identity” has often fractured rising radical
movements since SDS in the 1960s, ranging from foreign to domestic
nationalisms. Because these identity struggles are so popular today,
some of the critics of libertarian municipalism invoke “public opinion”
against it. But when has it been the task of revolutionaries to
surrender to “public opinion” not even the “public opinion” of the
oppressed, whose views can often be very reactionary? Truth has its own
life — regardless of whether the oppressed masses perceive or agree on
what is true. Nor is it “elitist” to invoke truth, in contradiction to
even radical public opinion, when that opinion essentially seeks a march
backward into the politics of particularism and even racism. It is very
easy to drop to all fours these days, but as radicals our most important
need is to stand on two feet — that is, to be as fully human as possible
— and to challenge the existing society in behalf of our shared common
humanity, not on the basis of gender, race, age, and the like.
Critics of libertarian municipalism even dispute the very possibility of
a “general interest.” If, for such critics, the face-to-face democracy
advocated by libertarian municipalism and the need to extend the
premises of democracy beyond mere justice to complete freedom do not
suffice as a “general interest,” it would seem to me that the need to
repair our relationship with the natural world is certainly a “general
interest” that is beyond dispute — and, indeed, it remains the “general
interest” advanced by social ecology. It may be possible to coopt many
dissatisfied elements in the present society, but nature is not
cooptable. Indeed, the only politics that remains for the Left is one
based on the premise that there is a “general interest” in democratizing
society and preserving the planet Now that traditional forces such as
the workers’ movement have ebbed from the historical scene, it can be
said with almost complete certainty that without libertarian
municipalism, the left will have no politics whatever.
A dialectical view of the relationship of confederalism to the
nation-state, an understanding of the narrowness, introverted character,
and parochialism of identity-movements. and a recognition that the
workers’ movement is essentially dead all illustrate that if a new
politics is going to develop today, it must be unflinchingly public, in
contrast to the alternative-cafe “politics” advanced by many radicals
today. It must be electoral on a municipal basis, confederal in its
vision, and revolutionary in its character.
Indeed, in my view, libertarian municipalism, with its emphasis on
confederalism, is precisely the “Commune of communes” for which
anarchists have fought over the past two centuries. Today, it is the
“red button” that must be pushed if a radical movement is to open the
door to the public sphere. To leave that red button untouched and slip
back into the worst habits of the post-1968 New Left, when the notion of
“power” was divested of utopian or imaginative qualities, is to reduce
radicalism to yet another subculture that will probably live more on
heroic memories than on the hopes of a rational future.
April 3, 1991; addendum, October 1, 1991