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Title: Cities Against Centralization Author: Greg Bryant Date: 1992 Language: en Topics: civilization, decentralization, history, democracy, the city Source: http://www.rainmagazine.com/archive/1992/cities-against-centralization
Nearly 10,000 years ago some very lucky people found a terrific spot by
a river in a rich forest not far from major runs of ruminant animals.
Catal Hüyük is the name we now use for this site in modern-day Turkey. A
city of some 6,000 people emerged, with houses pressed up so tightly
against one another, without any streets, that the town was traversed on
rooftop. Since these urbanites were capable of planting and harvesting,
we call them neolithic. But the inhabitants of Catal Hüyük, the world's
oldest known city, survived some 1,000 years overwhelmingly as
hunter-gatherers. Such subsistence is usually assumed to reflect a
nomadic life-style, not an urban one.
Many other Mesopotamian cities, rooted in fertile river valleys, grew
through reliance on improving agricultural techniques such as
irrigation. Yet there is evidence of agriculture emerging very early
without cities: the Wadi Kubbaniya of prehistoric Egypt were nomads,
using the planting and harvesting of crops as just one of many means of
survival.
In other words, cities and agriculture do not necessarily require one
another. Farming usually becomes a major tool for maintaining
settlements in surroundings not so idyllic as Catal Hüyük's. The
exceptions do not indicate that the neolithic urban trend wasn't
powerful, but they show that there must be other reasons why people pile
upon one another besides the need to manage agricultural land.
Humans were not the first species to find that mutual aid and
cooperation improved one’s chances of survival. Our social flexibility
certainly evolved before Catal Hüyük was founded. Probably very early in
that city’s history people encountered serious health and sanitation
problems with the dense living, yet the community stayed together a
thousand years. Those who were uncomfortable left, but those who stayed
benefited from reduced environmental pressures, superseded by social
pressures within a system protecting a large number of families.
Commercial pressures, such as buying cheap and selling dear along trade
routes, are often considered of primary importance in the formation of
cities. In Western Europe nearly 1,000 years ago, rising population
stimulated the rapid growth of towns and cities, which became centers of
regional trade and craftwork. Yet commerce, of the kind that in the late
middle ages gave magnates of trade and production great political power,
was of little importance in the large cities of the ancient world,
difficult as this may be to imagine.
Ancient Rome, which didn't develop a commercial port until it was
already a major power in Western Europe, was mostly a center of
consumption, military bureaucracy, and local production. This is not
surprising -- a general rule for absolutist territorial states is that
their largest cities produce very little. They are parasites: this is
how Rousseau described 18th century Paris. There is some parallel to
this among citadels of power in our own time: many of our biggest cities
consume much more than they produce in tangible goods, even those which
began as industrial manufacturing centers. But ancient west Europeans
lacked respect for commerce -- buying and selling was done but there
were no great ancient trading houses, nor a Roman bourgeoisie. Commerce
as we know it did not rule the ancient world.
Looking only for the environmental, bureaucratic or commercial pressures
that force people together into cities sidesteps what was to them an
important cohesive force: community ideology. 2,300 years ago Aristotle
protested against describing cities as strictly practical -- he felt
that strong community was itself a high point of civilization.
Because of natural and human pressures, townspeople come to see
unorganized interfamily relations as no longer sufficiently fruitful.
There emerges an apparent need for broader discussion of community
goals, ethical and practical. The society learns to depend upon this
discussion, as well as the benefits of carrying out a community plan and
the satisfaction of seeing the results. Participation in this kind of
community can become addictive.
There are exceptions of course -- there is pervasive evidence of
single-family homesteads, hamlets of a few isolated families, and
hermits engaging in either tactical or psychological refuge. Most people
lived in villages that needed to conduct rather little political
discussion on a day-to-day basis. But for others, the special kind of
community feeling in those small pre-industrial towns and cities, once
tasted, was difficult to get off the palate. When Sparta defeated
democratic Manitea, dismantled the city and dispersed the inhabitants to
villages, Xenophon suggests that the Maniteans suffered mostly
psychologically. When given a chance, they re-declared their city a
generation later, under no strictly environmental or commercial pressure
to do so. They just wanted their town back.
The city is the psychological and political center for much of recorded
history, partly because cities are where records are kept. But it must
be admitted that they can foster unusually vigorous social interaction.
Urban communities can hold as strong a place in the human imagination as
religions, ethnicities, nations, kingdoms or empires. What we today call
the Roman empire was in ancient times known primarily as Rome, the
Eternal City. To destroy their rivals the Carthaginians, some Roman
senators felt they needed to destroy the city of Carthage itself, a
difficult, rash, and genocidal deed whose ultimate consequence was the
political collapse of the Roman republic.
Many cities developed gradually from villages, castles, churches or
ports. But powerful ancient metropoles such as Rome, Carthage and Athens
established many cities at one stroke to serve as outposts and colonies.
Though quickly constructed for openly territorial purposes, these towns
were still meant to satisfy personal cravings for diversity and
interaction.
In most pre-industrial towns, ecologically responsible behavior was
perfectly compatible with the city's peculiar, vibrant level of regular
social contact. To imagine a kind of ecological city, one has to blink
away modern urban impressions, and visualize cities based in and served
by primarily rural economies, cities that produced goods mostly for
their own or their region's consumption and where urbanites helped with
their region's harvest. They were proudly local, willing to defend their
city's and their region's autonomy. Their casual contact would seem to
us today to be overwhelmingly personal. It was in these cities that the
original form of politics was born: regular group discussion and
face-to-face decision-making. This kind of direct politics has almost
disappeared in the mass media demagoguery of the modern age.
Today what we call politics is really statecraft, something done by
professional politicians and those who imitate their individualistic
manipulations in smaller groups. The change in the use of the word
politics, with its root of polis or city, reflects the astounding
changes that the world has undergone in the past two hundred years:
among them the formation of the modern bureaucratic nation state and the
invasion, through modern communication, of corporate values into our
social relations. An early example of the original politics, that of the
city, can be found in classical Athens.
An indication of unusually wide political participation in Athens is the
torrent of criticism Greek political institutions received from Greek
writers allied with the rich. In contrast, Roman institutions,
constructed to the advantage of the wealthy, were rarely criticized by
contemporary literate Romans.
The Athenian assembly gathered around 40 times a year, attended by as
much as 1/4 of the city's population. They were an experienced,
politically active group, rich farmer and poor peasant citizens alike.
When Theophratus criticizes peasants, he complains that they
inappropriately provide too much detail of assembly meetings to
neighbors in the countryside who didn’t make the gathering. We’d praise
this today as healthy grassroots communications.
A staggering number of Athenian residents were involved in running the
city and debating its future. It is difficult to compare its level of
participatory democracy to any city of its size since. From the end of
the 6th century B.C. for some two centuries, keen attendance at the open
assembly, selection by lot of 500 new people every year to serve on the
council, juries of up to 1,000 people, and scores of official posts
rotating regularly, point to a depth of citizen participation at odds
with modern ideas of politics.
Citizens participated broadly not only in decision-making, but in
carrying out policy as well. When a decision to go to war was made, it
was often a reluctant one since many of the people voting would
themselves have to go to battle. Assemblies meeting to choose among such
serious options were especially well attended. The close connection
between decision and implementation gave demagogues a very difficult
time in Athens -- no matter how well someone's speeches roused the
crowd, if their policies did not work their influence quickly dissolved.
Freedom of speech in Athens meant the freedom to speak and be heard by
the entire assembly. It meant the freedom to present legislation and
participate in the discussion prior to making decisions. The open public
assembly then had full power to act -- the assembly even structurally
dissolved itself for a short time in 411 B.C. Of course, the bulk of
public debate took place outside of the formal meetings, where even
non-citizens must have contributed.
A smaller council of 500 did what the full public assembly decided they
should do, and these duties changed constantly. This embodied a very
important lesson: in responsible government, representatives shouldn't
be given blanket power; instead, the full body politic must actively and
regularly decide the limits of the officials' powers, to allow for
changing circumstances. These specific limits must be determined in
person, constraining somewhat the scale at which this kind of assembly
system can be used. Athens was a very large body politic, perhaps a
hundred thousand citizens, so various mechanisms were found to ensure
that officials would not abuse their positions.
Most offices lasted for one year, could not be held twice, and were
followed by a public review of behavior in office. Influence mongering
was difficult since most offices were filled by a random drawing from
among all citizens, i.e. sortition, rather than through campaigning. Not
only did this prevent the buying of votes, but culturally it required a
deep commitment to educating everyone well enough to be loyal, competent
and principled public servants.
Athenians were, in a sense, extremely well educated. This does not mean
that they were literate, for this was mostly a verbal, interactive age.
For these Greeks, education was not a systematic program of lectures and
exams leading to certification, but rather the regular lessons and tests
of daily life. In such an active political community no one could be
shut out of unofficial discussion, since the future responsibilities of
the average citizen would be very great.
This immersion into community life was what developed the distinctive
individual. Rather than mold the citizen through the homogenization of
formal education, as Sparta did, the Athenians felt that individual
character and original opinion must develop in order to best serve the
city. A follower adds less than an independent, thinking individual,
enlivening important discussions on community direction. This was the
purpose of education, or paideia. Nietzche's complaint that genius can
develop only against the community doesn't take into account Athenian
ideals of personal development, and instead reflects the fear, among his
generation's elite, of the emerging impersonal era of mass politics.
Athenians not only encouraged individual ability -- laws often required
paid officials or jurors to take some stand in a debate -- they also
fought the creation of state structures that would limit the citizen.
Athens had no bureaucracy to speak of, making the phrase "city-state"
now applied to it seem inappropriate. The small administration changed
every year. The judicial system was not run by judges, but by juries
that were extremely large, discouraging bribery, and which were paid by
the city and selected by lot. They were diversely constituted and
empowered to interpret law, evidence, custom and notions of justice in
whatever way they felt fair. Yet courts were called only as a last
resort in resolving a conflict: prosecutors were fined if unsuccessful,
cutting down on unnecessary legal proceedings, and the overwhelming
social preference was settlement through informal mediation or sometimes
arbitration. Citizens over sixty years old were expected to make
themselves available to anyone needing mediation.
At every turn we see Athenians resisting state structure. They
considered the maintenance of standing armies in times of peace a waste
of the individual. In the end, however, they maintained a small empire,
in part because of the employment opportunities its navy offered some of
its poorer citizens. This was something of a circular trap they
inherited: the poor could find few other jobs mostly because of the
import of slaves captured in imperial looting.
Even within their empire the Athenians tried to convert others to a
direct democratic model of government, and in most subject cities they
counted on the support of the poor and the hostility of the rich. They
were well aware that their social and political achievements were unique
-- the theme runs through the best of Greek drama. But their ideas of
progress and empire were not boundless. For example, unlike many later
empires they were acutely aware of the limited ability of their local
ecology to sustain them.
Athens was the political center of a rural region, more like a modern
county than a city, with most of its wealthiest and poorest citizens
living directly off the land. Since the citizens of Athens were
overwhelmingly agriculturalists, it should not be surprising that
self-reliance was the mark of success in this city. In fact, those who
did not grow their own food were considered politically suspect -- how
could they form an independent judgement if they were not independent in
life? Because many of those who were not independent were urban manual
workers, this thinking is often misinterpreted as some general Greek
disparagement of work, brought on by the over-dependence on slave labor.
It was instead a disparagement of producers who were totally dependent
on buyers, and of employee-employer dependent relationships. Most
wealthy and poor citizens worked very hard for themselves and for the
community.
The community was of course not always united and cooperative. The
Greeks were keenly aware of the battle between rich and poor. The rich
often put up much money to hold festivals, developing a patron-client
relationship in city and countryside. This largesse was encouraged, and
its influence held in check, by Athens’ diverse political body.
Although it never developed the level of urban democracy Athens did,
Rome experienced a warping of a similar patron-client relationship, one
which took political power away from the poor and accountability away
from the rich, a consequence of self-sustaining wars. This is the urban
political atmosphere that spawned the gratuitous destruction and
enslavement of Carthage, leading to a burden on Rome’s poor and an
attempt by the Gracchi brothers to relieve it.
Roman tombstones always list the state offices held by the deceased
during their lives, and classical Athenian tombstones never do. The rich
in the city of Rome aspired to the bureaucracy, to powerful official
positions that emerged from centuries of military growth. A magistrate's
imperium, with its root sense of command, allowed him to issue arbitrary
punishments against the populace without appeal. This is a very long way
from Athenian direct democracy.
In Rome the Republic held assemblies, but there was little discussion of
issues. The existence of the assembly merely maintained a fiction of
popular power. Citizens could only vote on legislation and candidates
presented to them through the senate. The assembly became just another
arena for political maneuvering among a corrupt elite, of a kind we are
very familiar with today.
The senate was the key decision-making body of the Roman republic,
basically an extremely exclusive lifelong club. There were no ways to
work within the system: Livy and Dionysis of Halicarnassus attributed
what early victories were made by the poor to riots and demonstrations.
The rulers of republican Rome succeeded in professionalizing politics,
in making it less personal. In parallel, the poor lost their sense of
community power, and very often community concern, at the center of this
growing military-bureaucracy. It's easy to understand the classical
difference between democracies and republics -- in one the masses act,
in the other they are acted for. But among representatives they
occasionally find a champion.
Around 135 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus was elected a tribune of the people.
He was unusually sensitive to his role, and risked a great deal to try
to repair the lot of the poor Roman citizen. Tiberius prepared
legislation and proposals, for the approval of the open popular
assembly, within what was traditionally considered the territory of the
senatorial elite -- a strategy for power redistribution that modern
radical politicians might pursue. He had the assembly vote to remove
from office tribunes in the pockets of the rich. He passed reforms to
redistribute lands to the peasants, lands that had been taken by the
rich to create plantations farmed with the new slaves from Carthage. For
his trouble Tiberius was clubbed to death by a mob of senators.
Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius' brother, was later elected tribune and pursued
the same course -- but he managed to create a serious problem for the
elite of the Roman state by passing laws to remove the senate from
complete power over the judicial system. He was assassinated by senate
interests, and the city plunged into increasingly violent struggles for
power until Augustus established himself as Rome's first Emperor.
The popular romantic notion that the senatorial republicans were in some
way the "good guys" versus dictators and emperors, must be displaced by
the evidence that it was the republican patricians' resistance to
democratic reform, both urban and rural, that led to the destruction of
stable city politics and eventually to Imperial rule.
Around the 5th century, with the final collapse in western Europe of the
Roman empire and its formalisms and codes, came the widespread community
reassertion of informal local custom. Custom was both locally
distinctive and unwritten. Throughout the middle ages most political,
legal and economic systems were flexible: indeed those three aspects
were never considered individually. It was not until just before the
early modern period in Europe, an era we associate with the Renaissance,
that rigidity, formality and statecraft began again to seriously take
hold of daily life.
Informal custom and local common sense were the primary guides for
people in the middle ages, a time of unusually pervasive collective
rule. This does not mean that an egalitarian ideology prevailed: a loose
hierarchy was generally accepted as natural. But anyone with power had
to consult and come to agreement with their community. The basis of
these communities were assemblies, either town assemblies where everyone
could make themselves heard, or assemblies of nobles or representatives
meeting with a king. The idea of hierarchy wasn't much questioned as
long as the people in power acted responsibly, and as long as it was
possible to check corruption. If rulers overtaxed those who provided
their food, they might starve, so there were strong and deeply felt
social obstacles to abuse. When there was abuse, it was considered the
duty of those below to get rid of the abuser, despite lower social rank.
It was at this time when we first see the word 'commune' take on its
radical connotations: communities asserted themselves against the rising
nobility.
With population increases leading to a strengthening of the formality of
lordships and kingdoms in the 13th century, we see an increase in
charters declaring town rights. These were typically explanations of
existing custom presented to the nobility. Gradually the habit of
consulting with the community at large gave way to government by
committee, where not only did people need to evaluate their trust in
nobility, but also their trust in representatives attending various,
nearly invisible, small meetings. The transition to "committeeism" was a
subtle one, and though it surely seemed natural, it allowed
bureaucracies to organize decision-making without involving the public.
Yet even in these growing states popular pressure could easily assert
itself. Many communities and groups were easily organized in medieval
times, through the informal 12th century guilds of family, friends,
parish or craft, as well as through the more formal alliances of later
centuries. There was no topic truly outside an organized community's
domain: justice, public ownership, economic restrictions, parish
priests, or revolt. When decisions were made, strong unanimity was most
highly regarded, compromising consensus was accepted if unanimity was
impossible, and voting was considered a distasteful necessity on
occasion. Overall their cooperative decisions were successful in keeping
harsh domination in check.
In prehistoric times, towns like Catal Hüyük survived because they
represented advantageous cooperation, and the same can be said of many
medieval towns and cities. But if their neighborhoods were run by
conflicting crafts or families, the cities needed to form complex
governments to deal with internal conflict -- otherwise they would not
continue to enjoy the benefits of communal living. Sometimes these
actions led to further erosion of communal custom. In Italian communes a
town leader, the podestá, was often elected from outside, so as not to
be partisan to neighborhood family disputes. But an outsider could not
maintain custom and would lean increasingly on Roman and church-inspired
formalisms.
The necessary alliances of different interests within a city made
associations between cities a natural extension of politics. Cities
often formed leagues in defence against alliances of nobility. Many were
temporary, such as the Lombard League of the independent communes of
Northern Italy, whose sole purpose was to push out the German King
Frederick Barbarossa in the 12th century. Other alliances, such as the
2nd Rhenish League and the Swiss Confederation, aimed for more permanent
mutual support against the taxes and controls of Kings, Emperors and
Barons.
Most significant medieval history may be seen freshly as the actions of
alliances, and with this in mind we can see emerging awareness of the
problems with territorial centralization. When King John was forced by a
league of rebel Barons to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, the point was
unrelated to modern democracy, and was instead the maintenance of local
authorities against the King's abusive centralizing tendencies. Local
control was maintained through an alliance against the center. Kings and
Emperors were often elected positions, or treated as such, and the Magna
Carta was just one of many charters written at the time asserting the
customary collective responsibilities of people on different levels of a
hierarchy.
Cooperative associations were both pervasive and manifold in medieval
times. In Bologna, a town where many teachers and students gathered as
early as the 11th century, students felt cheated by both teachers who
did not cover much ground and by townspeople who overcharged for
lodging, clothing, food and books. The students formed a union, modeled
after the guilds, hence the name Universitas, University, meaning "all
of us" -- a medieval alliance still with us in greatly modified form.
In the 14th century many large scale alliances and interests became
formalized. The Church, nobles and patricians formed estate committees
to check the King's power within government. Demands for structural
reform arose, even demands to be freed from the hierarchy. Switzerland
is of course a prime example. In France in the 1350's Etienne Marcel
tried to unite merchants, artisans and the peasants of the Jacquerie
rebellions through the 3rd estate, an assembly meant to represent
everyone neither noble nor clerical. His attempt to create a union
against the King and nobility is of the same trend as Wat Tyler's
successful British peasant revolt in 1381, and Cola di Rienzi's
insurgent government in Rome in 1347. Cola called for an Italian
confederation of communes, and 25 Guelf towns sent him representatives.
As trade increased and cities grew, monarchs tried whenever possible to
tax their wealth, setting the economy of the cities against the
territorial state. Many, such as the free cities within the Hapsburg
Empire and their various leagues, resisted and maintained commercially
supported independence for centuries. However, the wealthy classes
within the cities generally made political amends with the royalty of
the solidifying territorial states, often against the interests of
peasants or rural barons. The territorial states swallowed the cities,
their wealthy merchants, independent artisans and working poor alike.
Urban governments then tended towards tyranny, maintained by gun and
guile, and were plagued by insurrection.
Unfortunately for absolutist states, they were in the end unable to
digest all the forces represented by cities, and it wasn't until the
failure of absolutism that new models of the territorial state could
emerge. And these new models had far more potential for centralization
than any previously.
In France, where royal absolutism was most developed, the Bourbon Kings
regularly taxed commerce beyond the economy's limits, making merchants
pine for a constitutionally limited monarchy, like Britain's. Revolution
against the Stuart Kings in the 17th century had weakened the British
monarchy, and this unfettered the merchant economy. Government support
for import and export set the stage for the massive textile production
of the industrial revolution.
The French monarchy went bankrupt in their support for the American
Revolution against rival Britain. The ensuing dissatisfaction with the
Bourbon administration was one of the causes of the French revolution.
Contempt for a monarch's centralizing tendencies was nothing new: the
medieval rich were a united class only in the face of peasant
rebellions. Positions like the prime minister, originally the King's
valet, smacked too much of the kingdom as an extension of the King's
household, and angered nobles who felt that power within their own
households was then undermined.
Aristocratic discontent created opportunities for the bourgeoisie, the
extremely wealthy, free-thinking group that had evolved around commerce.
With the support of the masses the modern alliance of urban insurrection
with social revolution was forged. This opened the door, which the
bourgeois then tried to shut, on a wildly democratic, revolutionary
experiment in the heart of the former absolutism: the Paris commune of
the sans-culottes. By 1792, sectional assemblies all over the city were
opened to every class, and the poor were paid to attend. The sections
ran their own police, relief and defense against the reacting
aristocracy. The assemblies succeeded in maintaining the economy and
judiciary for their sections, but within two years they were betrayed by
the hardening revolutionary government under Robespierre.
With the revolution came a major component of modern centralization:
patriotism. In France, the revolution gave a bigger portion of the
population than ever before a feeling of having a stake in their
country, more than could have ever been possible under Kings. This
patriotism allowed Napoléon to tear through Europe's aristocracies, and
develop what was at the time unprecedented central authority.
The downfall of royal power, and the emergence of an urban-based
professional class of bourgeois politician, made room for a new economic
trend. By the middle of the 19th century, after Britain's successes in
the cotton trade, industrialism began to take hold, supported by capital
and nations in a force that is one of the most destructive of modern
times: self-sustaining growth.
Transport costs had kept inland exploitation in check for centuries: the
situation in 1800 was barely better than it was in ancient times, when
it was cheaper to ship from Constantinople to Spain than overland 75
miles. But the railroad, invented originally to haul coal, opened the
land for exploitation of people and resources. The return on money
invested was phenomenal, making possible the colonization of both inland
Europe and what was to become the third world.
Expectations for investment returns were high, and the economic pressure
on borrowed money has continued to drive capital and technology into
every corner of natural and human existence. For the sake of profit,
ancient life-styles were uprooted, spawning romanticism, starvation,
migration and the dissolution of medieval agrarian self-sufficiency.
When the economy slowed down towards the end of the 19th century,
formally laissez-faire states bean to panic and compete with each other
for markets and resources, leading to wars in the 20th century of
unprecedented violence.
Transactions within the tight trading districts of cities facilitated
this growth, but cities cannot be completely blamed for the new
economies. The industrial revolution started in the countryside,
spawning new cities as it grew successful. Cities and their citizens can
most usefully be seen as tools of the process, but not passive ones:
they resisted many changes along the way.
Artisans involved in export production, such as home weavers who were
paid to use hand looms well into the industrial revolution, were
completely lost as automation began to take over. Their resistance had a
major impact on the first half of the 19th century, such as in the
nationally organized Chartist movement in Britain, and in most of the
revolutions leading to the continent wide rebellions in 1848. Guilds,
and later labor unions, were often banned because of the insurrectionary
potential of artisans, and central city police forces now first appeared
to put down riots over food and living/working conditions. Rioting
occurred more often in cities than in the countryside in part because
there were more obvious sites for protest. The rural situation was much
worse, however. In Ireland the famine of 1846-1848, during which one
million died and another million emigrated, was a consequence of the
pressure for rents by absentee landlords. The pressure forced Irish
peasants into dependence on the highest yield crop of the day: the
potato.
A civic resistance now fought the massive centralization taking place
for the sake of capital. In the worst of times in Europe, both before
the 1848 revolts and after the depression starting in the 1870's, mutual
aid societies, revolutionary organizations and socialist groups pushed
their way onto the political stage, leading many nationalist movements
and toppling many monarchs. These groups pushed for democracy, usually
in the form of electoral republicanism. It must be pointed out that
modern democracy developed in reaction to capitalism, mostly in the
second half of the 19th century, and in spite of the hesitance of a
liberal commercial class who at the time paid mostly lip-service to
equal rights.
The corporate elite looked for easier game to exploit than the newly
enfranchised people in their own countries. They began to look towards
overseas conquest, and the popular support it would bring in the
industrialized world. This mix of mass politics and gunboat economic
growth ended in territorial wars among countries no longer satisfied
with the kind of sophisticated, bounded political treaties Bismarck was
so good at forging in the late 19th century. Industry and capital grew
in great leaps, and national ambitions replaced civic ones as cities
grew larger and more impersonal. When conditions grew bad enough in
cities to affect the wealthy, great expenditure and management was
forthcoming, along with ghettos and police to isolate "the problems".
Such local and international exploitation sparked global migration,
overwhelmingly to urban centers. Within cities to this day we see very
strong immigrant neighborhoods not so easily assimilated to corporate
consumer culture. Cities are hotbeds of activism, their problems and
density often sparking cooperation that cannot be easily detected, for
example, in the suburbs of the United States, where much of the country
lives. It is difficult to imagine insurrection in suburbia, with
political discussion limited by distances and a prevailing tendency to
hire government to do politics and run cities. In suburbia we can see
considerable loss of social cohesion, and it has become obvious that, to
use Bookchin's phrase, society's grassroots are turning to straw.
When urban governments find themselves without money, as they do today,
public volunteerism begins to look more attractive. But officials still
hold onto the decision-making power, both because that is what they know
how to do and because citizens believe that the city is a business for
which one must employ professionals. But what better way to satisfy
increasing numbers of volunteer citizens than to give them back the
ability to make serious decisions? Decentralized cities can run with
much less money than centrally administered ones because the work that
gets done is for your friends and neighbors, who pay you back in similar
fashion without participating in the cash network. Athens and the first
Paris commune were both such "amateur cities", where the government's
role is to help organize, not to force ideas or perform services.
The ideals of city-democracy have not disappeared. Town meetings, still
common in New England, have a respectable resonance in US culture, and
these kind of assemblies are the key to uniting people on the local
level. In confederation it is still possible that assemblies in towns,
cities and the countryside can break up the enormous centralized power
of wasteful, hulking nation-states.