The next revolution: Popular assemblies and the promise of direct democracy

Abstract

The publication of nine of Murray Bookchin's previously unpublished essays from 1990 to 2002 in The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy is indeed a timely one. Bookchin has written extensively on anarchism, left-wing history and direct democracy since the 1960s, and his ideas are currently experiencing a renaissance. As political activists, scholars and students are trying to understand the outbursts of political action and direct democratic experimentation in Zucotti Park (Occupy Wall Street), Syntagma Square (the Greek Aganaktismenoi movement), Puerto del Sol (the Spanish Indignados movement) and elsewhere, attention has been drawn to Bookchin's work on assembly democracy. In addition, as prominent scholars such as David Graeber and David Harvey engage in the discussion on the Kurdish movement and their attempts to establish mechanisms of direct democracy and confederalism amidst the war against ISIS, these scholars acknowledge Bookchin's lasting influence on the Kurdish PKK and Abdullah Ocalan (Graeber, 2014; Harvey, 2015). Furthermore, in the recent revival of anarchist perspectives on society and politics, Bookchin is often mentioned as a leading contemporary anarchist, who has succeeded in reinvigorating the anarchist project for the twentieth century. He has done so by incorporating the problems of ecology, capitalist production and urban planning and development into classic anarchist themes of self-management and face-to-face communities (see for instance May, 1994, pp. 51-63). While reading the nine essays in The Next Revolution, it becomes clear why Bookchin's influence on various different fields is increasing. Bookchin is an imaginative thinker, who leaves few themes untouched. In one essay-'The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society'-Bookchin discusses the grievances of contemporary capitalism with 'its imperative, which no entrepreneur or corporation can ignore without facing destruction: growth, more growth and still more growth' (p. 33). Such a grow-or-die capitalism is the real root, in Bookchin's evaluation, of the present ecological crisis, and as such, it cannot be tackled by moral responsibility and individual dutieswhat Bookchin calls New Age privatism.

Realising direct democracy through representative democracy: From the Yellow Vests to a libertarian municipalist strategy in Commercy

“…For matters beyond the boundaries of the municipality, these autonomous entities organise themselves on the confederal model, that is, in a network of councils sending recallable delegates to inter-municipal meetings. These delegates are strictly mandated by their respective assemblies in order to administer, coordinate and execute the policies decided by these assemblies (Bookchin, 2015). To bring about libertarian municipalism, Bookchin proposes two strategic paths.…”

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…It points instead towards a more radical tradition devoted to constructing an alternative polity to that of the nested, hierarchical, patriarchal liberal-democratic capitalist state. This radical tradition is rooted in the communist -or, rather, 'communalist' (Bookchin, 1987(Bookchin, , 2015 -imaginary of the commune inspired by the Paris Commune. Radical municipalism ultimately aims to build alternative polities based on the commune to replace politics that reproduce the nation-state, patriarchal power structures and colonial capital accumulation.…”

“…They are -at least ideally -committed not only to certain goals, policies, and concrete outputs but also to a specific way politics is done. These experimental practices typically embody what Bookchin (1987Bookchin ( , 2015, the theorist of libertarian municipalism and communalism, envisaged as 'non-hierarchical forms' that subvert 'coercive hierarchies' and structures of domination, including: class power (property-owners over property-less), state power (officials over citizens), patriarchy (men over women), racial supremacy (white over black), gerontocracy (old over young), imperialism (core over periphery) and anthropocentrism (humans over non-human nature) (see Shelley, 2022). Prefiguration across these domains informs radical municipalist principles, policies and practices, from the feminisation of politics (Roth et al, 2020) to degrowth or postgrowth transitions (Schmid, 2023;Vansintjan, 2018) to radical forms of democracy (Roth, 2019a;van Outryve d'Ydewalle, 2019).…”

“…This places radical municipalism very much in the realm of lived experience, everyday life, and the 'urban everyday' (Beveridge and Koch, 2019) -a realm of daily rituals, libidinal energies and private as well as collective desires. For Bookchin (1987Bookchin ( , 2015, accessing this immediate, phenomenological level of human life is fundamental for municipalist transformation, as the 'hierarchical mentality' of capital, state and other forms of domination is embedded in society at a 'molecular' level. The enduring allure of face-to-face, non-hierarchical, deliberative dialogue in popular assemblies for the reformation of civic character and political subjectivities through confrontation with the desires and rationalities of others underpins radical municipalism (Bookchin, 2015;Roth, 2019b;Shelley, 2022); a school in the art and craft of collective self-government.…”

“…We find some commonality here with Erik Olin Wright's (2010) theorisation of the interrelation between three mechanisms of systemic change: 'ruptural' (revolutionary struggle); 'symbiotic' (reform of existing structures); and 'interstitial' (prefigurative alterity in the interstices). In crude terms, symbiotic and interstitial mechanisms respectively reflect the two poles of radical municipalism's 'dual power' approach: taking (and transforming) existing state power by 'occupying institutions'; and building alternative counter-powers 'in the shell of the old', centred on the commune (Bookchin, 2015). As interstitial practices grow in strength and number, and as symbiotic reforms contribute to shifts in socioeconomic and political possibility, viable ruptural change may eventually be possible.…”