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Title: Resolution: "On Gubernatorial Races" Author: Murray Bookchin Date: July 1st, 1990 Language: en Topics: libertarian municipalism, democracy, voting, resolutions Source: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/resolution.html Notes: Murray Bookchin submitted the following resolution to the Second Continental Conference of the Left Green Network on July 1st, 1990. It was adopted by a vote of 24 -- yes; 16 -- no; 6 - Abstain.
Libertarian municipalism is premised on developing a dual power --
grassroots in the fullest sense in that its politics rests on the most
immediate popular institutions in the political realm namely the
municipality, and confederal relationships between municipalities in
which the coordination of power is vested in confederal councils whose
authority diminishes as the confederal structure is raised to encompass
ever-wider political jurisdictions.
State power functions on precisely the opposite principle -- namely, the
preemptive authority of the nation-state over gubernatorial
jurisdictions and of gubernatorial jurisdictions over municipalities,
which have been appropriately designated from a statist viewpoint as
mere "creatures" of the state. Historically, over many centuries, there
has been a continual struggle on the part of statists to establish
politically hierarchical nation-states in flat opposition to efforts by
municipalities to establish confederal associations. As recently as the
last century, not to speak of conflicts that occurred in the French
Revolution, the "commune" and "the commune of the communes" have been
advanced as an authentic revolutionary alternative to the nation-state.
THE IMAGE OF A CONFEDERAL MUNICIPALIST POSITION AND A RECOGNITION OF THE
TENSION THAT HAS ALWAYS EXISTED BETWEEN CONFEDERAL MUNICIPALITIES AND
PURELY STATIST FORMS, such as national governments and provincial or
state governments, is fundamental to the new politics that the left
Greens advance. Libertarian municipalism stands or falls on whether this
tension between a struggle to re-construe society around confederated
municipalities and confederal structures on the one hand, and state
structures of all kinds on the other, forms a cornerstone of the Left
Green Network's program. To obscure the distinctions between
confederated municipalities and state structures is to utterly subvert
and thoroughly denature this conceptual and political framework.
Gubernatorial campaigns utterly obscure this historically crucial
tension.
Indeed, the functionality LGN and is to clarify these distinctions, to
accentuated and heighten them, to a point where there is a direct,
genuine confrontation over where political power will repose - in the
confederated municipalities or in the state.
Governorships in the United States and provincial premieres in Canada
are purely state structures. They represent exactly, together with
national governments, the type of structures that the LGN seeks to
abolish and replace completely by confederations of municipalities.
Mayors in municipal governments, however professional their position,
are at least enveloped by the municipality itself and are accountable to
their communities. Governors, provincial premieres, their councils, and
their legislators, by their very nature, represent purely statist
structures and claim preemptive powers over municipalities. No campaign
program, irrespective of its radicalism and claims, can alter this
profound and irrevocable institutional cleavage between completely
statist forms in confederal municipalist forms.
IT IS THEREFORE INCOMPATIBLE WITH PRINCIPLES OF THE LEFT GREEN NETWORK
TO PROPOSE CANDIDATES, ENGAGE IN ELECTION CAMPAIGNS, AND/OR TO MAKE
COMPROMISES THAT ARE DESIGNED TO FUNCTION ON GUBERNATORIAL LEVEL. It is
a total opportunistic surrender of the LGN's position in support of
confederal municipalism to represent such campaigns as the expressions
of libertarian municipalism, and it is opportunistic to conduct such
campaigns on the principle that they provide us with a "broader"
propagandistic arena. One might just as well argue with the COC Greens
who are trying to establish a Green Party that running candidates on a
statewide and national level furthers the Green cause by running
candidates for Congress, the presidency, and in effect by becoming a
conventional political party that does not differ in any decisive way
from so-called Progressive, Democratic, or NDP parties in North America
generally.