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Title: The Meaning of Confederalism Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 1990 Language: en Topics: federalism, social ecology Source: Retrieved on April 28, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives20.html Notes: From Green Perspectives, #20
Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for
face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a
“complex society.” Modern population centers, we are told, are too large
and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots
level. And our economy is too “global,” presumably, to unravel the
intricacies of production and commerce. In our present transnational,
often highly centralized social system, it is better to enhance
representation in the state, to increase the efficiency of bureaucratic
institutions, we are advised, than to advance utopian “localist” schemes
of popular control over political and economic life.
After all, such arguments often run, centralists are all really
“localists” in the sense that they believe in “more power to the people”
— or at least, to their representatives. And surely a good
representative is always eager to know the wishes of his or her
“constituents” (to use another of those arrogant substitutes for
“citizens”).
But face-to-face democracy? Forget the dream that in our “complex”
modern world we can have any democratic alternative to the nation-state!
Many pragmatic people, including socialists, often dismiss arguments for
that kind of “localism” as otherworldly — with good-natured
condescension at best and outright derision at worst. Indeed, some years
back, in 1972, I was challenged in the periodical Root and Branch by
Jeremy Brecher, a democratic socialist, to explain how the decentralist
views I expressed in Post-Scarcity Anarchism would prevent, say, Troy,
New York, from dumping its untreated wastes into the Hudson River, from
which downstream cities like Perth Amboy draw their drinking water.
On the surface of things, arguments like Brecher’s for centralized
government seem rather compelling. A structure that is “democratic,” to
be sure, but still largely top-down is assumed as necessary to prevent
one locality from afflicting another ecologically. But conventional
economic and political arguments against decentralization, ranging from
the fate of Perth Amboy’s drinking water to our alleged “addiction” to
petroleum, rest on a number of very problematical assumptions. Most
disturbingly, they rest on an unconscious acceptance of the economic
status quo.
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the
acid that corrodes all visionary thinking (as witness the recent
tendency of radicals to espouse “market socialism” rather than deal with
the failings of the market economy as well as state socialism).
Doubtless we will have to import coffee for those people who need a
morning fix at the breakfast table or exotic metals for people who want
their wares to be more lasting than the junk produced by a consciously
engineered throwaway economy. But aside from the utter irrationality of
crowding tens of millions of people into congested, indeed suffocating
urban belts, must the present-day extravagant international division of
labor necessarily exist in order to satisfy human needs? Or has it been
created to provide extravagant profits for multinational corporations?
Are we to ignore the ecological consequences of plundering the Third
World of its resources, insanely interlocking modern economic life with
petroleum-rich areas whose ultimate products include air pollutants and
petroleum-derived carcinogens? To ignore the fact that our “global
economy” is the result of burgeoning industrial bureaucracies and a
competitive grow-or-die market economy is incredibly myopic.
It is hardly necessary to explore the sound ecological reasons for
achieving a certain measure of self-sustainability. Most environmentally
oriented people are aware that a massive national and international
division of labor is extremly wasteful in the literal sense of that
term. Not only does an excessive division of labor make for
overorganization in the form of huge bureaucracies and tremendous
expenditures of resources in transporting materials over great
distances; it reduces the possibilities of effectively recycling wastes,
avoiding pollution that may have its source in highly concentrated
industrial and population centers, and making sound use of local or
regional raw materials.
On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that relatively
self-sustaining communities in which crafts, agriculture, and industries
serve definable networks of confederally organized communities enrich
the opportunities and stimuli to which individuals are exposed and make
for more rounded personalities with a rich sense of selfhood and
competence. The Greek ideal of the rounded citizen in a rounded
environment — one that reappeared in Charles Fourier’s utopian works —
was long cherished by the anarchists and socialists of the last century.
The opportunity of the individual to devote his or her productive
activity to many different tasks over an attenuated work week (or in
Fourier’s ideal society, over a given day) was seen as a vital factor in
overcoming the division between manual and intellectual activity, in
transcending status differences that this major division of work
created, and in enhancing the wealth of experiences that came with a
free movement from industry through crafts to food cultivation. Hence
self-sustainability made for a richer self, one strengthened by
variegated experiences, competencies, and assurances. Alas, this vision
has been lost by leftists and many environmentalists today, with their
shift toward a pragmatic liberalism and the radical movement’s tragic
ignorance of its own visionary past.
We should not, I believe, lose sight of what it means to live an
ecological way of life, not merely follow sound ecological practices.
The multitude of handbooks that teach us how to conserve, invest, eat,
and buy in an “ecologically responsible” manner are a travesty of the
more basic need to reflect on what it means to think — yes, to reason —
and to live ecologically in the full meaning of the term. Thus, I would
hold that to garden organically is more than a good form of husbandry
and a good source of nutrients; it is above all a way to place oneself
directly in the food web by personally cultivating the very substances
one consumes to live and by returning to one’s environment what one
elicits from it.
Food thus becomes more than a form of material nutririent. The soil one
tills, the living things one cultivates and consumes, the compost one
prepares all unite in an ecological continuum to feed the spirit as well
as the body, sharpening one’s sensitivity to the nonhuman and human
world around us. I am often amused by zealous “spiritualists,” many of
whom are either passive viewers of seemingly “natural” landscapes or
devotees of rituals, magic, and pagan deities (or all of these) who fail
to realize that one of the most eminently human activities — namely,
food cultivation — can do more to foster an ecological sensibility (and
spirituality, if you please) than all the incantations and mantras
devised in the name of ecological spiritualism.
Such monumental changes as the dissolution of the nation-state and its
substitution by a participatory democracy, then, do not occur in a
psychological vacuum where the political structure alone is changed. I
argued against Jeremy Brecher that in a society that was radically
veering toward decentralistic, participatory democracy, guided by
communitarian and ecological principles, it is only reasonable to
suppose that people would not choose such an irresponsible social
dispensation as would allow the waters of the Hudson to be so polluted.
Decentralism, a face-to-face participatory democracy, and a localist
emphasis on community values should be viewed as all of one piece — they
most assuredly have been so in the vision I have been advocating for
more than thirty years. This “one piece” involves not only a new
politics but a new political culture that embraces new ways of thinking
and feeling, and new human interrelationships, including the ways we
experience the natural world. Words like“politics” and “citizenship”
would be redefined by the rich meanings they acquired in the past, and
enlarged for the present.
It is not very difficult to show — item by item — how the international
division of labor can be greatly attenuated by using local and regional
resources, implementing ecotechnologies, resealing human consumption
along rational (indeed, healthful) lines, and emphasizing quality
production that provides lasting (instead of throwaway) means of life.
It is unfortunate that the very considerable inventory of these
possibilities, which I partly assembled and evaluated in my 1965 essay
“Toward a Liberatory Technology,” suffers from the burden of having been
written too long ago to be accessible to the present generation of
ecologically oriented people. Indeed, in that essay I also argued for
regional integration and the need to interlink resources among
ecocommunities. For decentralized communities are inevitably
interdependent upon one another.
If many pragmatic people are blind to the importance of decentralism,
many in the ecology movement tend to ignore very real problems with
“localism” — problems that are no less troubling than the problems
raised by a globalism that fosters a total interlocking of economic and
political life on a worldwide basis. Without such wholistic cultural and
political changes as I have advocated, notions of decentralism that
emphasize localist isolation and a degree of self-sufficiency may lead
to cultural parochialism and chauvinism. Parochialism can lead to
problems that are as serious as a “global” mentality that overlooks the
uniqueness of cultures, the peculiarities of ecosystems and ecoregions,
and the need for a humanly scaled community life that makes a
participatory democracy possible. This is no minor issue today, in an
ecology movement that tends to swing toward very well-meaning but rather
naive extremes. I cannot repeat too emphatically that we must find a way
of sharing the world with other humans and with nonhuman forms of life,
a view that is often difficult to attain in overly “self-sufficient”
communities.
Much as I respect the intentions of those who advocate local
self-reliance and self-sustainabilty, these concepts can be highly
misleading. I can certainly agree with David Morris of the Institute for
Local Self-Reliance, for example, that if a community can produce the
things it needs, it should probably do so. But self-sustaining
communities cannot produce all the things they need — unless it involves
a return to a back-breaking way of village life that historically often
prematurely aged its men and women with hard work and allowed them very
little time for political life beyond the immediate confines of the
community itself.
I regret to say that there are people in the ecology movement who do, in
fact, advocate a return to a highly labor-intensive economy, not to
speak of Stone Age deities. Clearly, we must give the ideals of
localism, decentralism, and self-sustainability greater and fuller
meaning.
Today we can produce the basic means of life — and a good deal more — in
an ecological society that is focused on the production of high-quality
useful goods. Yet still others in the ecology movement too often end up
advocating a kind of “collective” capitalism, in which one community
functions like a single entrepreneur, with a sense of proprietorship
toward its resources. Such a system of cooperatives once again marks the
beginnings of a market system of distribution, as cooperatives become
entangled in the web of “bourgeois rights” — that is, in contracts and
bookkeeping that focus on the exact amounts a community will receive in
“exchange” for what it delivers to others. This deterioration occurred
among some of the worker-controlled enterprises that functioned like
capitalistic enterprises in Barcelona after the workers expropriated
them in July 1936 — a practice that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT fought
early in the Spanish Revolution.
It is a troubling fact that neither decentralization nor
self-sufficiency in itself is necessarily democratic. Plato’s ideal city
in the Republic was indeed designed to be self-sufficient, but its
self-sufficiency was meant to maintain a warrior as well as a
philosophical elite. Indeed, its capacity to preserve its
self-sufficiency depended upon its ability, like Sparta, to resist the
seemingly “corruptive” influence of outside cultures (a characteristic,
I may say, that still appears in many closed societies in the East).
Similarly, decentralization in itself provides no assurance that we will
have an ecological society. A decentralized society can easily co-exist
with extremely rigid hierarchies. A striking example is European and
Oriental feudalism, a social order in which princely, ducal, and
baronial hierarchies were based on highly decentralized communities.
With all due respect to Fritz Schumacher, small is not necessarily
beautiful.
Nor does it follow that humanly scaled communities and “appropriate
technologies” in themselves constitute guarantees against domineering
societies. In fact, for centuries humanity lived in villages and small
towns, often with tightly organized social ties and even communistic
forms of property. But these provided the material basis for highly
despotic imperial states. Considered on economic and property terms,
they might earn a high place in the “no-growth” outlook of economists
like Herman Daly, but they were the hard bricks that were used to build
the most awesome Oriental despotisms in India and China. What these
self-sufficient, decentralized communities feared almost as much as the
armies that ravaged them were the imperial tax-gatherers that plundered
them.
If we extol such communities because of the extent to which they were
decentralized, self-sufficient, or small, or employed “appropriate
technologies,” we would be obliged to ignore the extent to which they
were also culturally stagnant and easily dominated by exogenous elites.
Their seemingly organic but tradition-bound division of labor may very
well have formed the bases for highly oppressive and degrading caste
systems in different parts of the world-caste systems that plague the
social life of India to this very day.
At the risk of seeming contrary, I feel obliged to emphasize that
decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, and even confederation
each taken singly — do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a
rational ecological society. In fact, all of them have at one time or
another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even despotic
regimes. To be sure, without the institutional structures that cluster
around our use of these terms and without taking them in combination
with each other, we cannot hope to achieve a free ecologically oriented
society.
Decentralism and self-sustainability must involve a much broader
principle of social organization than mere localism. Together with
decentralization, approximations to self-sufficiency, humanly scaled
communities, ecotechnologies, and the like, there is a compelling need
for democratic and truly communitarian forms of interdependence — in
short, for libertarian forms of confederalism.
I have detailed at length in many articles and books (particularly The
Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship) the history of
confederal structures from ancient and medieval to modern confederations
such as the Comuneros in Spain during the early sixteenth century
through the Parisian sectional movement of 1793 and more recent attempts
at confederation, particularly by the Anarchists in the Spanish
Revolution of the 1930s. Today, what often leads to serious
misunderstandings among decentralists is their failure in all too many
cases to see the need for confederation — which at least tends to
counteract the tendency of decentralized communities to drift toward
exclusivity and parochialism. If we lack a clear understanding of what
confederalism means — indeed, the fact that it forms a key principle and
gives fuller meaning to decentralism — the agenda of a libertarian
municipalism can easily become vacuous at best or be used for highly
parochial ends at worst.
What, then, is confederalism? It is above all a network of
administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from
popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages,
towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these
confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible
to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and
administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves.
Their function is thus a purely administrative and practical one, not a
policy making one like the function of representatives in republican
systems of government.
A confederalist view involves a clear distinction between policymaking
and the coordination and execution of adopted policies. Policymaking is
exclusively the right of popular community assemblies based on the
practices of participatory democracy. Administratiom and coordination
are the responsibility of confederal councils, which become the means
for interlinking villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities into
confederal networks. Power thus flows from the bottom up instead of from
the top down, and in confederations, the flow of power from the bottom
up diminishes with the scope of the federal council ranging
territorially from localities to regions and from regions to
ever-broader territorial areas.
A crucial element in giving reality to confederalism is the
interdependence of communities for an authentic mutualism based on
shared resources, produce, and policymaking. If one community is not
obliged to count on another or others generally to satisfy important
material needs and realize common political goals in such a way that it
is interlinked to a greater whole, exclusivity and parochialism are
genuine possibilities. Only insofar as we recognize that confederation
must be conceived as an extension of a form of participatory
administration — by means of confederal networks — can decentralization
and localism prevent the communities that compose larger bodies of
association from parochially withdrawing into themselves at the expense
of wider areas of human consociation.
Confederalism is thus a way of perpetuating the interdependence that
should exist among communities and regions — indeed, it is a way of
democratizing that interdependence without surrendering the principle of
local control. While a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency is
desirable for every locality and region, confederalism is a means for
avoiding local parochialism on the one hand and an extravagant national
and global division of labor on the other. In short, it is a way in
which a community can retain its identity and roundedness while
participating in a sharing way with the larger whole that makes up a
balanced ecological society.
Confederalism as a principle of social organization reaches its fullest
development when the economy itself is confederalized by placing local
farms, factories, and other needed enterprises in local municipal hands
— that is, when a community, however large or small, begins to manage
its own economic resources in an interlinked network with other
communities. To force a choice between either self-sufficiency on the
one hand or a market system of exchange on the other is a simplistic and
unnecessary dichotomy. I would like to think that a confederal
ecological society would be a sharing one, one based on the pleasure
that is felt in distributing among communities according to their needs,
not one in which “cooperative” capitalistic communities mire themselves
in the quid pro quo of exchange relationships.
Impossible? Unless we are to believe that nationalized property (which
reinforces the political power of the centralized state with economic
power) or a private market economy (whose law of “grow or die” threatens
to undermine the ecological stability of the entire planet) is more
workable, I fail to see what viable altemative we have to the
confederated municipalization of the economy. At any rate, for once it
will no longer be privileged state bureaucrats or grasping bourgeois
entrepreneurs — or even “collective” capitalists in so-called
workers-controlled enterprises — all with their special to promote who
are faced with a community’s problems, but citizens, irrespective of
their occupations or workplaces. For once, it will be necessary to
transcend the traditional special interests of work, workplace, status,
and property relations, and create a general interest based on shared
community problems.
Confederation is thus the ensemble of decentralization, localism,
self-sufficiency, interdependence — and more. This more is the
indispensable moral education and character building — what the Greeks
called paideia — that makes for rational active citizenship in a
participatory democracy, unlike the passive constituents and consumers
that we have today. In the end, there is no substitute for a conscious
reconstruction of our relationship to each other and the natural world.
To argue that the remaking of society and our relationship with the
natural world can be achieved only by decentralization or localism or
self-sustainabilty leaves us with an incomplete collection of solutions.
Whatever we omit among these presuppositions for a society based on
confederated municipalities, to be sure, would leave a yawning hole in
the entire social fabric we hope to create. That hole would grow and
eventually destroy the fabric itself — just as a market economy,
cojoined with “socialism,” “anarchism,” or whatever concept one has of
the good society, would eventually dominate the society as a whole. Nor
can we omit the distinction between policy making and administration,
for once policy making slips from the hands of the people, it is
devoured by its delegates, who quickly become bureaucrats.
Confederalism, in effect, must be conceived as a whole: a consciously
formed body of interdependencies that unites participatory democracy in
municipalities with a scrupulously supervised system of coordination. It
involves the dialectical development of independence and dependence into
a more richly articulated form of interdependence, just as the
individual in a free society grows from dependence in childhood to
independence in youth, only to sublate the two into a conscious form of
interdependence between individuals and between the individual and
society.
Confederalism is thus a fluid and ever-developing kind of social
metabolism in which the identity of an ecological society is preserved
through its differences and by virtue of its potential for ever-greater
differentiation. Confederalism, in fact, does not mark a closure of
social history (as the “end of history” ideologists of recent years
would have us believe about liberal capitalism) but rather the point of
departure for a new eco-social history marked by a participatory
evolution within society and between society and the natural world.
Above all, I have tried to show in my previous writings how
confederation on a municipal basis has existed in sharp tension with the
centralized state generally, and the nation-state of recent times.
Confederalism, I have tried to emphasize, is not simply a unique
societal, particularly civic or municipal, form of administration. It is
a vibrant tradition in the affairs of humanity, one that has a
centuries-long history behind it. Confederations for generations tried
to countervail a nearly equally long historical tendency toward
centralization and the creation of the nation-state.
If the two — confederalism and statism — are not seen as being in
tension with each other, a tension in which the nation-state has used a
variety of intermediaries like provincial governments in Canada and
state governments in the United States to create the illusion of “local
control,” then the concept of confederation loses all meaning.
Provincial autonomy in Canada and states’ rights in the United States
are no more confederal than “soviets” or councils were the medium for
popular control that existed in tension with Stalin’s totalitarian
state. The Russian soviets were taken over by the Bolsheviks, who
supplanted them with their party within a year or two of the October
Revolution. To weaken the role of confederal municipalities as a
countervailing power to the nation-state by opportunistically running
“confederalist” candidates for state govemment — or, more nightmarishly,
for governorship in seemingly democratic states (as some U.S. Greens
have proposed) is to blur the importance of the need for tension between
confederations and nation-states — indeed, they obscure the fact that
the two cannot co-exist over the long term.
In describing confederalism as a whole — as a structure for
decentralization, participatory democracy, and localism — and as a
potentiality for an ever-greater differentiation along new lines of
development, I would like to emphasize that this same concept of
wholeness that applies to the interdependencies between municipalities
also applies to the muncipality itself. The municipality, as I pointed
out in earlier writings, is the most immediate political arena of the
individual, the world that is literally a doorstep beyond the privacy of
the family and the intimacy of personal friendships. In that primary
political arena, where politics should be conceived in the Hellenic
sense of literally managing the polls or community, the individual can
be transformed from a mere person into an active citizen, from a private
being into a public being. Given this crucial arena that literally
renders the citizen a functional being who can participate directly in
the future of society, we are dealing with a level of human interaction
that is more basic (apart from the family itself) than any level that is
expressed in representative forms of governance, where collective power
is literally transmuted into power embodied by one or a few individuals.
The municipality is thus the most authentic arena of public life,
however much it may have been distorted over the course of history.
By contrast, delegated or authoritarian levels of “politics” presuppose
the abdication of municipal and citizen power to one degree or another.
The municipality must always be understood as this truly authentic
public world. To compare even executive positions like a mayor with a
govemor in representative realms of power is to grossly misunderstand
the basic political nature of civic life itself, all its malformations
notwithstanding. Thus, for Greens to contend in a purely formal and
analytical manner — as modern logic instructs that terms like
“executive” make the two positions interchangeable is to totally remove
the notion of executive power from its context, to reify it, to make it
into a mere lifeless category because of the extemal trappings we attach
to the word. If the city is to be seen as a whole, and its
potentialities for creating a participatory democracy are to be fully
recognized, so provincial governments and state governments in Canada
and the United States must be seen as clearly established small
republics organized entirely around representation at best and
oligarchical rule at worst. They provide the channels of expression for
the nation-state — and constitute obstacles to the development of a
genuine public realm.
To run a Green for a mayor on a libertarian municipalist program, in
short, is qualitatively different from running a provincial or state
governor on a presumably libertarian muncipalist program. It amounts to
decontextualizing the institutions that exist in a municipality, in a
province or state, and in the nation-state itself, thereby placing all
three of these executive positions under a purely formal rubric. One
might with equal imprecision say that because human beings and dinosaurs
both have spinal cords, that they belong to the same species or even to
the same genus. In each such case, an institution — be it a mayoral,
councillor, or selectperson — must be seen in a municipal context as a
whole, just as a president, prime minister, congressperson, or member of
parliament, in turn, must be seen in the state context as a whole. From
this standpoint, for Greens to run mayors is fundamentally different
from running provincial and state offices. One can go into endless
detailed reasons why the powers of a mayor are far more controlled and
under closer public purview than those of state and provincial
office-holders.
At the risk of repetition, let me say that to ignore this fact is to
simply abandon any sense of contextuality and the environment in which
issues like policy, administration, participation, and representation
must be placed. Simply, a city hall in a town or city is not a capital
in a province, state, or nation-state.
Unquestionably, there are now cities that are so large that they verge
on being quasi-republics in their own right. One thinks for example of
such megalopolitan areas as New York City and Los Angeles. In such
cases, the minimal program of a Green movement can demand that
confederations be established within the urban area — namely, among
neighborhoods or definable districts — not only among the urban areas
themselves. In a very real sense, these highly populated, sprawling, and
oversized entities must ultimately be broken down institutionally into
authentic muncipalities that are scaled to human dimensions and that
lend themselves to participatory democracy. These entities are not yet
fully formed state powers, either institutionally or in reality, such as
we find even in sparsely populated American states. The mayor is not yet
a governor, with the enormous coercive powers that a govemor has, nor is
the city council a parliament or statehouse that can literally legislate
the death penalty into existence, such as is occurring in the United
States today.
In cities that are transforming themselves into quasi-states, there is
still a good deal of leeway in which politics can be conducted along
libertarian lines. Already, the executive branches of these urban
entities constitute a highly precarious ground — burdened by enormous
bureaucracies, police powers, tax powers, and juridical systems that
raise serious problems for a libertarian municipal approach. We must
always ask ourselves in all frankness what form the concrete situation
takes. Where city councils and mayoral offices in large cities provide
an arena for battling the concentration of power in an increasingly s
trong state or provincial executive, and even worse, in regional
jurisdictions that may cut across many such cities (Los Angeles is a
notable example), to run candidates for the city council may be the only
recourse we have, in fact, for arresting the development of increasingly
authoritarian state institutions and helping to restore an
institutionally decentralized democracy.
It will no doubt take a long time to physically decentralize an urban
entity such as New York City into authentic municipalities and
ultimately communes. Such an effort is part of the maximum program of a
Green movement. But there is no reason why an urban entity of such a
huge magnitude cannot be slowly decentralized institutionally. The
distinction between physical decentralization and institutional
decentralization must always be kept in mind. Time and again excellent
proposals have been advanced by radicals and even city planners to
localize democracy in such huge urban entities and literally give
greater power to the people, only to be cynically shot down by
centralists who invoke physical impediments to such an endeavor.
It confuses the arguments of advocates for decentralization to make
institutional decentralization congruent with the physical breakup of
such a large entity. There is a certain treachery on the part of
centralists in making these two very distinct lines of development
identical or entangling them with each other. Libertarian municipalists
must always keep the distinction between institutional and physical
decentralization clearly in mind, and recognize that the former is
entirely achievable even while the latter may take years to attain.
November 3, 1990