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generator: pandoc

title: Manifesto of the Perth Municipalist Organisation

viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'

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2019-06-23T00:21:05+08:00

Part 0

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1. As Bookchin says,

in our cities, citizens are shrinking to the status of anonymous

''constituents'' of elected representatives. Their principal function

is to pay taxes, to do the onerous work-a-day job of maintaining the

present society, to reproduce, and to decorously withdraw from all

political life -- a domain that is reserved for the state and its

officialdom.

2. Our cities are dissolving into enormous, alienated urban belts. The

citizen is reduced to a passive agent. They are mere recipients of

'services'. These services are provided by bureaucratic agencies,

and in this way politics has been fully degraded into statecraft.

3. Those who practice statecraft are cynical, professional manipulators

of power. You may know them personally, you may have grown up with

them.

4. Politics is now a 'business'. It is regarded as successful if it

produces fiscal surpluses, and is regarded as a failure if it is

burdened by deficits. The key principle behind statecraft, politics,

is to operate 'efficiently' - that is, to produce surpluses as large

and bountiful as possible.

5. The *ethical* content of civil life has been nullified. The life of

a municipality, the proper size for a political community, has been

replaced by an ''entrepeneurial mentality'' that emphasies the

pecuniary and brutally economic factors of life -- as Bookchin

enumerates: income, expenses, growth, and employment.

6. Power has been almost perfectly centralised. So to has wealth. Fewer

and fewer hands practice the cynical politics of statecraft, and

control the lives of the many.

7. The power that should be claimed by the people is wielded by the

state and by monopolistic economic entities.

Part 1

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1. A gap is opening up between the enormous bureaucratic state, and the

municipal life of citizens. The state is becoming more remote and

anonymous.

2. The personal lives of people, their municipal life, increasingly

serves their direct needs. As Bookchin says,

We do not go to the nation-state to find suitable schools for our

children, for jobs, culture, and decent places in which to live. Like

it or not, the city, \[the municipality\], is still the most immediate

nevironment which we encounter and with which we are obliged to deal,

beyond the sphere of the family and friends, in order to satisfy our

needs as social beings.

3. We are obliged to seek out counter- *institutions* that stand

opposed to the power of the nation-state. The municipality presents

itself as the site for such a set of antagonistic and parallel

institutions to the state.

4. This approach is about building a movement. It is not about seizing

and building individual municipalities which single communities

merely restructure their lives on their own.

5. This is about establishing a movement which alters one community

after another and establishes a system of confederal relations

between municipalities. It is a movement which will eventually form

a regional confederal power in its own right.

6. The state knows, far better than any other entity, how destabilising

demands for local control can be to its authority.

7. That is why I propse that we establish an organisation which seeks

to seize back control of municipalities from the state and radically

democratise them, and devolve their power.