💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › murray-bookchin-municipalization.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:31:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Municipalization Author: Murray Bookchin Date: February 1986 Language: en Topics: municipalism, libertarian municipalism, community organizing, economics Source: *Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project* No. 2 February 1986. Notes: Portions of this article have been selected from the new and supplemented edition of Murray Bookchin’s The Limits of the City (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 3981 Ste.-Laurent Blvd., Montreal H2W IY5, Quebec, Canada; 1986).
In my article, “Toward a Libertarian Municipalism,”[1] I advanced the
view that any counterculture to the prevailing culture must be developed
together with counterinstitutions to the prevailing institutions — a
decentralized, confederal, popular power that will acquire the control
over social and political life that is being claimed by the centralized,
bureaucratic nation-state.
---
Through much of the nineteenth century and nearly half of the twentieth,
the classical center of this popular power was located by most radical
ideologies in the factory, the arena for the conflict between wage labor
and capital. The factory as the locus of the “power question” rested on
the belief that the industrial working class was the “hegemonic” agent
for radical social change; that it would be “driven” by its own “class
interests” (to use the language of radicalism during that era) to
“overthrow” capitalism, generally through armed insurrection and
revolutionary general strikes. It would then establish its own system of
social administration — whether in the form of a “workers’ state”
(Marxism) or confederal shop committees (anarchosyndicalism).
In retrospect we can now see that the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 was
the last historic effort by a seemingly revolutionary European working
class to follow this model.[2] In the fifty years that have passed
(almost to the very month of this writing), it is apparent that the
great revolutionary wave of the late thirties was the climax and the end
of the era of proletarian socialism and anarchism, an era that dates
back to the first workers’ insurrection of history: the uprising by the
Parisian artisans and workers of June, 1848, when the barricades were
raised under red flags in the capital city of France. In the years that
have followed, particularly after the 1930s, the limited attempts to
repeat the classical model of proletarian revolution (Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland) have been failures, indeed,
tragic echoes of great causes, ideals, and efforts that have faded into
history.
Apart from insurrectionary peasant movements in the Third World, no one,
aside from some dogmatic sectarians, takes the “models” of June, 1848,
the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the
Spanish Revolution of 1936 seriously — partly because the type of
working class that made those revolutions has been all but demobilized
by technological and social change, partly because the weaponry and
barricades that gave these revolutions a modicum of power have become
merely symbolic in the face of the immense military armamentorium
commanded by the modern nation-state.
There is another tradition, however, that has long been part of European
and American radicalism: the development of a libertarian municipal
politics, a new politics structured around towns, neighborhoods, cities,
and citizens’ assemblies, freely confederated into local, regional, and
ultimately continental networks. This “model,” advanced over a century
ago by Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin among others, is more than an
ideological tradition: it has surfaced repeatedly as an authentic
popular practice by the Comuneros in Spain during the 16^(th) century,
the American town meeting movement that swept from New England to
Charleston in the 1770s, the Parisian sectional citizens’ assemblies of
the early 1790s, and repeatedly through the Paris Commune of 1871 to the
Madrid Citizens’ Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Almost irrepressible whenever the people have gone into motion,
libertarian municipalism always reappears as movements from below — all
radical dogmas based on the proletariat notwithstanding to the contrary
— such as the “local socialism” to which people have turned in England
today, radical municipal coalitions in the United States, and popular
urban movements thoughout Western Europe and North America generally.
The bases for these movements are no longer the usual strictly class
issues that stem from the factory; they consist of broad, indeed
challenging issues that range from the environmental, growth, housing,
and logistical problems that are besetting all the municipalities of the
world. They cut across traditional class lines and have brought people
together in councils, assemblies, citizens’ initiative movements, often
irrespective of their vocational roots and economic interests. More so
than any constellation of issues, they have done something which
traditional proletarian socialism and anarchism never achieved: they
have brought together into common movements people of middle-class as
well as working class backgrounds, rural as well as urban places of
residence, professional as well as unskilled individuals, indeed, so
vast a diversity of people from conservative as well as liberal and
radical traditions that one can truly speak of the potential for a
genuine people’s movement, not merely a class-oriented movement of which
industrial workers have always been a minority of the population.[3]
Implicitly, this kind of movement restores once again the reality of
“the people” on which the great democratic revolutions rested
ideologically until they became fragmented into class and group
interests. History, in effect, seems to be rebuilding in the real world
what was once a tentative and fleeting ideal of the Enlightenment from
which stemmed the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth
century. For once, it is possible of conceiving of majoritarian forces
for major social change, not the minoritarian movements that existed
over the past two centuries of proletarian socialism and anarchism.
Radical ideologues tend to view these extraordinary municipal movements
with skepticism and try, when they can, to bring them into captivity to
traditional class programs and analyses. The Madrid Citizens’ Movement
of the 1960s was virtually destroyed by radicals of all parts of the
political spectrum because they tried to manipulate a truly popular
municipal effort which sought to democratize Spain and give a new
cooperative and ethical meaning to human urban association. The MCM
became a terrain for strengthening the political aspirations for the
Socialists, Communists, and other Marxist-Leninist groups until it was
all but subverted for special party interests.
---
That libertarian municipal movements form the only potential challenge
to the nation-state, today, and constitute a major realm for the
formation of an active citizenry and a new politics — grassroots,
face-to-face, and authentically popular in character — has been explored
in other works written by this writer and do not have to be examined,
here.[4] For the present, it is necessary to ask a very important
question: is libertarian municipalism merely a political “model,”
however generously we define the word “politics,” or does it include
economic life as well?
That a libertarian municipalist perspective is incompatible with the
“nationalization of the economy,” which simply reinforces the juridicial
power of the nation-state with economic power, is too obvious to
belabor. Nor can the word “libertarian” be appropriated by
propertarians, the acolytes of Ayn Rand and the like, to justify private
property and a “free market” Marx, to his credit, clearly demonstrated
that the “free market inevitably yields the oligarchic and monopolistic
corporate market with entrepreneurial manipulations that in every way
parallel and ultimately converge with state controls.[5]
But what of the syndicalist ideal of “collectivized” self-managed
enterprises that are coordinated by like occupations on a national level
and coordinated geographically by .collectives” on a local level? Here,
the traditional socialist criticism of this syndicalist form of economic
management is not without its point: the corporate or private
capitalist,“worker-controlled” or not — ironically, a technique in the
repertoire of industrial management that is coming very much into vogue
today as “workplace democracy” and “employee ownership” and constitutes
no threat whatever to private property and capitalism. The Spanish
anarchosyndicalist collectives of 1936–37 were actually union-controlled
and proved to be highly vulnerable to the centralization and
bureaucratization that appears in many well-meaning cooperatives
generally after a sufficient lapse of time. By mid-1937, union-man
agement had already replaced workers’ management on the shop floor, all
claims of CNT apologists to the contrary notwithstanding. Under the
pressure of “anarchist” ministers like Abad de Santillan in the Catalan
government, they began to approximate the nationalized economy advocated
by Marxist elements in the Spanish “Left.”
In any case, “economic democracy” has not simply meant “workplace
democracy” and “employee ownership.” Many workers, in fact, would like
to get away from their factories if they could and find more creative
artisanal types of work, not simply “participate” in “planning” their
own misery. What “economic democracy” meant in its profoundest sense was
free, “democratic” access to the means of life, the counterpart of
political democracy, that is, the guarantee of freedom from material
want. It is a dirty bourgeois trick, in which many radicals unknowingly
participate, that “economic democracy” has been re-interpreted as
“employee ownership” and “workplace democracy” and has come to mean
workers’ “participation” in profit sharing and industrial management
rather than freedom from the tyranny of the factory, rationalized labor,
and “planned production,” which is usually exploitative production with
the complicity of the workers.
Libertarian municipalism scores a significant advance over all of these
conceptions by calling for the municipalization of the economy — and its
management by the community as part of a politics of public self
management. Whereas the syndicalist alternative re-privatizes the
economy into “self-managed” collectives and opens the way to their
degeneration into traditional forms of private property — whether
“collectively” owned or not — libertarian municipalism politicizes the
economy and dissolves it into the civic domain. Neither factory or land
appear as separate interests within the communal collective. Nor can
workers, farmers, technicians, engineers, professionals, and the like
perpetuate their vocational indentities as separate interests that exist
apart from the citizen body in face-to-face assemblies. “Property” is
integrated into the coummune as a material constituent of its
libertarian institutional framework, indeed as a part of a larger whole
that is controlled by the citizen body in assembly as citizens — not as
vocationally oriented interest groups.
What is equally important, the “antithesis” between town and country, so
crucial in radical theory and social history, is transcended by the
“township,” a traditional New England jurisdiction, in which an urban
entity is the nucleus of its agricultural and village environs — not as
an urban entity that stands opposed to them.[6] The township, in effect
is a small region within still larger ones, such as the county and the
“bioregion.”
So conceived, the municipalization of the economy must be distinguished
from “nationalization” and “collectivization” — the former leading to
bureaucratic and top-down control, the latter to the likely emergence of
a privatized economy in a collectivized form and the perpetuation of
class or caste identities. Municipalization, in effect, brings the
economy from a private or separate sphere into the public sphere where
economic policy is formulated by the entire community — notably, its
citizens in face-to-face relationships working to achieve a general
“interest” that surmounts separate, vocationally defined specific
interests. The economy ceases to be merely an economy in the strict
sense of -the word — whether as “business,” “market,” capitalist,
“worker-controlled” enterprises. It becomes a truly political economy:
the economy of the polis or the commune. In this sense, the economy is
genuinely communized as well as politicized. The municipality, more
precisely, the citizen body in face-to-face assembly absorbs the economy
as an aspect of public business, divesting it of an identity that can
become privatized into a self-serving enterprise.
What can prevent the municipality from becoming a parochial city-state
of the kind that appeared in the late Middle Ages? Anyone who is looking
for “guaranteed” solutions to the problems raised, here, will not find
them apart from the guiding role of consciousness and ethics in human
affairs. But if we are looking for countertendencies, there is an answer
that can advanced. The most important single factor that gave rise to
the late medieval city-state was its stratification from within — not
only as a result of differences in wealth but also in status positions,
partly originating in lineage but also in vocational differentials.
Indeed, to the extent that the city lost its sense of collective unity
and divided its affairs into private and public business, public life
itself became privatized and segmented into the “blue nails” or plebians
who dyed cloth in cities like Florence and the more arrogant artisan
strata, who produced quality goods. Wealth, too, factored heavily in a
privatized economy where material differentials could expand and foster
a variety of hierarchical differences.
The municipalization of the economy absorbs not only the vocational
distinctions that could militate against a publically controlled
economy; it also absorbs the material means of life into communal forms
of distribution. From each according to his ability and to each
according his needs” is institutionalized as part of the public sphere,
not ideologically as a communal credo. It is not only a goal; it is a
way of functioning politically — one that becomes structurally embodied
by the municipality through its assemblies and agencies.
Moreover, no community can hope to achieve economic autarchy, nor should
it try to do so unless it wishes to become self-enclosed and parochial,
not only “self-sufficient.” Hence the confederation of communes — the
Commune of communes — is reworked economically as well as politically
into a shared universe of publically managed resources. The management
of the economy, precisely because it is a public activity, does not
degenerate into privatized interactions between enterprises; rather it
develops into confederalized interactions between municipalities. That
is to say, the very elements of societal interaction are expanded from
real or potential privatized components to institutionally real public
components. Confederation becomes a public project by definition, not
only because of shared needs and resources. If there is any way to avoid
the emergence of the city-state, not to speak of self-serving bourgeois
“cooperatives,” it is through a municipalization of political life that
is so complete that politics embraces not only what we call the public
sphere but material means of life as well.
---
It is not “utopian” to seek the municipalization of the economy. Quite
to the contrary, it is practical and realizable if only we will think as
freely in our minds as we try to achieve freedom in our lives. Our
locality is not only the arena in which we live out our everyday lives;
it is also the authentic economic arena in which we work and its natural
environs are the authentic environmental arena that challenges us to
live in harmony with nature. Here we can begin to evolve not only the
ethical ties that will link us together in a genuine ecocommunity but
also the material ties that can make us into competent, empowered, and
self-sustaining — if not “self-sufficient” — human beings. To the extent
that a municipality or a local confederation of municipalities is
politically united, it is still a fairly fragile form of association. To
the extent that it has control over its own material life, although not
in a parochial sense that turns it into a privatized city-state, it has
economic power, a decisive reinforcement of its political power.
[1] Our Generation (Vol. 16, Nos. 3–4, Spring-Summer 1985, pp.9–22),
available from Our Generation, 3981 Ste.- Laurent Blvd., Montreal H2W
IY5, Quebec, Canada
[2] For an overview of the Spanish Civil War after fifty years, see my
articles “On Spanish Anarchism,” Our Generation (1986) and “The Spanish
Civil War: After Fifty Years” in New Politics (Vol. 1, No. 1, New
Series; Spring, 1986), available from New Politics, 328 Clinton St.,
Brooklyn NY 11231. For background on the subject, see The Spanish
Anarchists: The Heroic Period by this writer, formerly a Harper & Row
book, currently distributed by Comment Publishing Project, P. 0. Box
158, Burlington VT 05402.
[3] This has always been the greatest defect of revolutionary
working-class movements and accounts for the bitter civil wars which
they produced in the few cases where they were particularly successful.
[4] See “The Greening of Politics: Toward a New Kind of Political
Practice,” Green Perspectives, No. 1, January 1986 and “Popular Politics
vs. Party Politics,” Green Program Project Discussion Paper No. 2, both
available from the Green Program Project, P. 0. Box 111, Burlington VT
05402. Also see the new supplemented edition of The Limits of the City
cited in note 1 above.
[5] The absurdity that we can persuade or reform the large corporations
— to “moralize” greed and profit as it were -is a typical example of
liberal naivete which a thousand years of Catholicism failed to achieve.
Movies like “The Formula” tell us more about corporate “morality” and
“efficiency” than the flood of books and articles generated by many
reform-minded periodicals.
[6] See Lewis Mumford’s excellent discussion of the New England township
in the City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World; 1961, pp.
331–33). Mumford, unfortunately, deals with the township form as a thing
of the past. My interest in the subject comes from yew of study in my
own state, Vermont, where, despite many changes, the integration of town
and country is still institutionalized territorially and legally around
town meetings. Although this political form is waning in much of New
England today, its workability and value is a matter of historical
record, not of theoretical speculation.