The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy by Murray Bookchin

Author:Murray Bookchin [Bookchin, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Radicalism, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Process, General, Socialism
ISBN: 9781781685822
Google: GigqBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-01-06T06:16:02+00:00

Thus, libertarian municipalism is not merely an effort simply to take over city councils to construct a more environmentally friendly city government. Such an approach, in effect, views the civic structures that exist now and essentially (all rhetoric to the contrary aside) takes them as they exist. Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is an effort to transform and democratize city governments, to root them in popular assemblies, to knit them together along confederal lines, to appropriate a regional economy along confederal and municipal lines.

In fact, libertarian municipalism gains its life and its integrity precisely from the dialectical tension it proposes between the nation-state and the municipal confederation. Its “law of life,” to use an old Marxian term, consists precisely in its struggle with the state. The tension between municipal confederations and the state must be clear and uncompromising. Since these confederations would exist primarily in opposition to statecraft, they cannot be compromised by state, provincial, or national elections, much less achieved by these means. Libertarian municipalism is formed by its struggle with the state, strengthened by this struggle, indeed, defined by this struggle. Divested of this dialectical tension with the state, libertarian municipalism becomes little more than “sewer socialism.”

Many comrades who are prepared to one day do battle with the cosmic forces of capitalism find that libertarian municipalism is too thorny, irrelevant, or vague and opt instead for what is basically a form of political particularism. Such radicals may choose to brush libertarian municipalism aside as “a ludicrous tactic,” but it never ceases to amaze me that revolutionaries who are committed to the “overthrow” of capitalism find it too difficult to function politically, including electorally, in their own neighborhoods for a new politics based on a genuine democracy. If they cannot provide a transformative politics for their own neighborhood—a relatively modest task—or diligently work at doing so with the constancy that used to mark the left movements of the past, I find it very hard to believe that they will ever do much harm to the present social system. Indeed, by creating cultural centers, parks, and good housing, they may well be improving the system by giving capitalism a human face without diminishing its underlying “unfreedom” as a hierarchical and class society.

A range of struggles for “identity” has often fractured rising radical movements since SDS in the 1960s, ranging from foreign to domestic nationalisms. Because these identity struggles are so popular today, some critics of libertarian municipalism invoke “public opinion” against it. But when has it been the task of revolutionaries to surrender to public opinion—not even the public opinion of the oppressed, whose views can often be very reactionary? Truth has its own life, regardless of whether the oppressed masses perceive or agree on what is true. Nor is it elitist to invoke truth, in contradiction to even radical public opinion, when that opinion essentially seeks a march backward into the politics of particularism and even racism. We must challenge the existing society on behalf of our shared common humanity, not on the basis of gender, race, age, and the like.

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