by Murray Bookchin
This piece was originally published in Home! A Bioregional Reader, edited by Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, New Society Publishers, copyright 1990.
There’s a long history on the part of people living not simply in towns and villages, but even in large cities—capital cities, like Paris 200 years ago, in the early years of the French revolution—who tried to regain their autonomy from the nation state which has really been in existence for about 400 years. People on a local, grassroots level have lost most of their autonomy, their freedom, and have lost even their desire to get involved in politics because they don’t feel they can do anything. Most of the power that was enjoyed by people on the local level has been grabbed by the centralized state. But people even in fairly sizable cities like Paris, which had nearly a million people during the French revolution back in 1793 (the heyday of the neighborhood movements in the French revolution), fought to regain that power from the nation state and to form confederations.
Not only in Vermont and in the American revolution generally, but I would say right now even in eastern Europe, there is more and more a desire on the part of people to regain local control. This may take a perverted, very bloody form of nationalism, I’m sorry to say (good ideas often appear in various forms, one cannot guarantee what form they are going to take). But people are trying to regain their autonomy.
Right now, in Quebec, a new movement called Ecology Montreal has been formed, one of the main goals of which is to form neighborhood councils. In fact, there are two groups now demanding that Montreal neighborhoods—they still have them—be based somewhat on assembly-type organizations, and that power be given to the neighborhoods in the form of councils. So that, when you’re speaking of the city council, you’re speaking of representatives directly from neighborhoods, who are subject to recall, who are mandated by the people whom they represent, and who are continually subject to surveillance by the people in regular town council meetings. These tendencies exist everywhere.
And let me stress that I don’t think you can do it in just one city, or one neighborhood. The most important thing is that the cities interact with each other to form a confederal system. The main challenge now is, first, to make people politically conscious of the fact that they can take over their city councils. Second, that they can change their charters. And, most important, that they can confederate. Here in Vermont, for example, the Greens advanced the view that we must establish neighborhood assemblies, link up all the town meetings in a given county, and let the county unit be the confederal basis for that area’s communities. The more privileged or well-to-do towns would share their resources with those that are less economically well off, thereby creating a spirit of genuine mutualism—mutual aid—in which we will feel that by helping each other, we are helping ourselves as well.
Now, there’s a long tradition in New England and other parts of the United States, in which the town or the village is merely the nucleus for a much larger area, bringing the country and the town together. When town meetings are held in any township, farmers may participate who may live a mile or two miles away, and they’re as much a part of the town as the retailers, or artisans, or manufacturers and professionals who live semi-urban lives. So that the farmer and the ordinary workman are all in the same community. Their interests are pooled very beautifully. I’ve attended I don’t know how many dozens of these town meetings and people really think as though they’re one people. That creates a new sense of citizenship, something very beautiful, where people are not looking at everything from their own strict economic interests—although there are always those individuals who do.
… We just can’t go on the way we’re going. I was part of the Second World War era, and I remember a Germany that was nothing but debris. Within five years, once the energy and resources were collected, that whole Germany was literally remade until you didn’t find any more empty, or bombed out buildings. This was a stupendous task. So it can be done. We can decentralize our cities, we can use our land intelligently, ecologically, we can have people create new kinds of communities, we can bring—as I’ve seen in New York—gardens into the cities and create new open spaces where before you had nothing but junk and clutter.
Municipal libertarianism is not only designed to decentralize political structures in the city, and ultimately the physical structures of the city as much as possible, but also to maintain control of the people who profess to represent others—their constituents. The most effective way we can prevent power from corrupting representatives is by keeping them at home, number one, and creating another power in opposition to the ever-centralizing nation state: that is the power of people in confederations of communities.
(First published in Turtle Talk: Voices for a Sustainable Future by Christopher & Judith Plant,New Society Publishers, 1990.)
Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a writer, historian, and political theorist. He developed the theory of social ecology, centered on the belief that human nature is essentially cooperative. In 1974 he founded and became director of the Institute for Social Ecology, where he continued to teach until 2004. He also was deeply involved with the Green Party in Vermont and co-founded the Left Green Network in 1988. His theories continue to influence revolutionary movements around the world.
