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Title: Radical Municipalism Author: Debbie Bookchin Date: Summer 2017 Language: en Topics: libertarian municipalism, municipalism, Murray Bookchin, social ecology, direct democracy, communalism Source: *ROAR Magazine*, Issue 6. Retrieved on 2020-03-24 from https://roarmag.org/magazine/debbie-bookchin-municipalism-rebel-cities/.
Only a global confederation of rebel cities can lead us out of the
death-spiral of neoliberalism towards a new rational society that
delivers on the promise of humankind.
---
I am the daughter of two longtime municipalists. My mother, Beatrice
Bookchin, ran for city council of Burlington, Vermont thirty years ago,
in 1987, on an explicitly municipalist platform of building an
ecological city, a moral economy and, above all, citizen assemblies that
would contest the power of the nation state. My father is the social
theorist and libertarian municipalist, Murray Bookchin.
For many years the left has struggled with the question of how to bring
our ideas, of equality, economic justice and human rights, to fruition.
And my father’s political trajectory is instructive for the argument
that I want to make: that municipalism isn’t just one of many ways to
bring about social change — it is really the only way that we will
successfully transform society. As someone who had grown up as a young
communist and been deeply educated in Marxist theory, my father became
troubled by the economistic, reductionist modes of thinking that had
historically permeated the Marxist left. He was searching for a more
expansive notion of freedom — not just freedom from economic
exploitation, but freedom that encompassed all manner of oppression:
race, class, gender, ethnicity.
At the same time, in the early 1960s, it became increasingly clear to
him that capitalism was on a collision course with the natural world.
Murray believed you could not address environmental problems piecemeal —
trying to save redwood forests one day, and opposing a nuclear power
plant the next — because ecological stability was under attack by
capitalism. That is to say, the profit motive, the grow-or-die ethos of
capitalism, was fundamentally at odds with the ecological stability of
the planet.
So he began to elaborate this idea that he called social ecology, which
starts from the premise that all ecological problems are social
problems. Murray said that, in order to heal our rapacious relationship
to the natural world, we must fundamentally alter social relations. We
have to end not only class oppression, we must also end domination and
hierarchy at every level, whether it be the domination of women by men,
of lesbians, gays and transgender people by straights, of people of
color by whites, or of the young by the old.
So the question for him became: How do we bring a new egalitarian
society into being? What type of alternative social organization will
create a society in which truly emancipated human beings can flourish —
and that will heal our rift with the natural world? The question really
is: what is the kind of political organization that can best contest the
power of the state? And so, in the late 1960s, Murray began writing
about a form of organization that he called libertarian municipalism. He
believed that municipalism offered a way out of the deadlock between the
Marxist and anarchist traditions.
Municipalism rejects seizing state power, which we all know from the
experiences of the twentieth century to be a hopeless pursuit, a dead
end, because the state — whether capitalist or socialist — with its
faceless bureaucracy is never truly responsive to the people. At the
same time, activists must acknowledge that we won’t achieve social
change simply by taking our demands to the street. Large encampments and
demonstrations may challenge the authority of the state, but they have
not succeeded in usurping it. Those who engage only in a politics of
protest or organizing on the margins of society must recognize that
there will always be power — it does not simply dissolve. The question
is in whose hands this power will reside: in the centralized authority
of the state, or on the local level with the people.
It is increasingly clear that we will never achieve the kind of
fundamental social change we so desperately need simply by going to the
ballot box. Social change won’t occur by voting for the candidate who
promises us a $15 minimum wage, free education, family leave or offers
platitudes about social justice. When we confine ourselves to voting for
the lesser of evils, to the bones that social democracy throws our way,
we play into and support the very centralized state structure that is
designed to keep us down forever.
At the same time, though often overlooked by the left, there is a rich
history of direct democracy, of radical politics and self-government by
citizens: from ancient Athens to the Paris Commune to the anarchist
collectives of Spain in 1936, to Chiapas, Mexico, to Barcelona and other
Spanish cities and towns in recent years — and now to Rojava, in
northern Syria, where the Kurdish people have implemented a profoundly
democratic project of self-rule unlike anything ever seen in the Middle
East.
A municipalist politics is about much more than bringing a progressive
agenda to city hall, important as that may be. Municipalism — or
communalism, as my father called it — returns politics to its original
definition, as a moral calling based on rationality, community,
creativity, free association and freedom. It is a richly articulated
vision of a decentralized, assembly-based democracy in which people act
together to chart a rational future. At a time when human rights,
democracy and the public good are under attack by increasingly
nationalistic, authoritarian centralized state governments, municipalism
allows us to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic
citizenship and freedom.
Municipalism demands that we return power to ordinary citizens, that we
reinvent what it means to do politics and what it means to be a citizen.
True politics is the opposite of parliamentary politics. It begins at
the base, in local assemblies. It is transparent, with candidates who
are 100 percent accountable to their neighborhood organizations, who are
delegates rather than wheeling-and-dealing representatives. It
celebrates the power of local assemblies to transform, and be
transformed by, an increasingly enlightened citizenry. And it is
celebratory — in the very act of doing politics we become new human
beings, we build an alternative to capitalist modernity.
Municipalism asks the questions: What does it mean to be a human being?
What does it mean to live in freedom? How do we organize society in ways
that foster mutual aid, caring and cooperation? These questions and the
politics that follow from them carry an ethical imperative: to live in
harmony with the natural world, lest we destroy the very ecological
basis for life itself, but also to maximize human freedom and equality.
The great news is that this politics is being articulated more and more
vocally in horizontalist movements around the world. In the factory
recuperation politics of Argentina, in the water wars of Bolivia, in the
neighborhood councils that have arisen in Italy, where the government
was useless in assisting municipalities after severe flooding, over and
over we see people organizing at the local level to take power, indeed
to build a counterpower that increasingly challenges the power and
authority of the nation state. These movements are taking the idea of
democracy and expressing it to its fullest potential, creating a
politics that meets human needs, that fosters sharing and cooperation,
mutual aid and solidarity, and that recognizes that women must play a
leadership role.
Achieving this means taking our politics into every corner of our
neighborhoods, doing what the conservatives around the world have done
so successfully in the last few decades: running candidates at the
municipal level. It also means creating a minimum program — such as
ending home foreclosures, stopping escalating rents and the
destabilization of our neighborhoods through gentrification — but also
developing a maximum program in which we re-envision what society could
be if we could build a caring economy, harness new technologies and
expand the potential of every human being to live in freedom and
exercise their civic rights as members of flourishing, truly democratic
communities.
As a next step, we must confederate, work across state and national
borders in developing programs that will address regional and even
international issues. This is an important response to those who say
that we won’t be able to solve great transnational problems by acting at
the local level. In fact, it is precisely at the local level where these
problems are being solved day in and day out. Even great issues such as
climate change can be managed through the confederation of communities
that send delegates to manage regional and global issues. We don’t need
a centralized state bureaucracy to do this. We need to create lasting
political institutions at the local level, not merely through political
leaders who articulate a social justice agenda, but through institutions
that are directly democratic, egalitarian, transparent, fully
accountable, anti-capitalist and ecologically aware and that give voice
to the aspirations of the people. It will require time and education and
the building of municipal assemblies as a countervailing power to the
nation state, but this is our only hope of becoming the new human beings
needed to build a new society.
This is our time. Around the world people want not merely to survive but
to live. If we are to transition from the death-spiral society that
decades of neoliberalism have foisted upon us to a new rational society
that delivers on the promise of humankind, we must create a global
network of fearless cities, towns and villages. We deserve nothing less.