Murray Bookchin
Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda
Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of
politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only
because of the confusion that surrounds the two words. . . . Politics is not
statecraft, and citizens are not "constituents" or "taxpayers." Statecraft
consists of operations that engage the state: the exercise of its monopoly of
violence, its control of the entire regulative apparatus of society in the form
of legal and ordinance-making bodies, and its governance of society by means of
professional legislators, armies, police forces, and bureaucracies. Statecraft
takes on a political patina when so-called "political parties" attempt, in
various power plays, to occupy the offices that make state policy and execute
it. This kind of "politics" has an almost tedious typicality. A "political
party" is normally a structured hierarchy, fleshed out by a membership that
functions in a top-down manner. It is a miniature state, and in some countries,
such as the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a party actually constituted
the state itself.
The Soviet and Nazi examples of the party qua state were the logical
extension of the party into the state. Indeed, every party has its roots in the
state, not in the citizenry. The conventional party is hitched to the state like
a garment to a mannikin. However varied the garment and its design may be, it is
not part of the body politic; it merely drapes it. There is nothing
authentically political about this phenomenon: it is meant precisely to contain
the body politic, to control it and to manipulate it, not to express its
will--or even permit it to develop a will. In no sense is a conventional
"political" party derivative of the body politic or constituted by it. Leaving
metaphors aside, "political" parties are replications of the state when they are
out of power and are often synonymous with the state when they are in power.
They are formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus
they are as inorganic as the state itself--an excrescence of society that has no
real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of faction, power,
and mobilization.
Politics, by contrast, is an organic phenomenon. It is organic in the very
real sense that it is the activity of a public body--a community, if you
will--just as the process of flowering is an organic activity of a plant.
Politics, conceived as an activity, involves rational discourse, public
empowerment, the exercise of practical reason, and its realization in a shared,
indeed participatory, activity. It is the sphere of societal life beyond the
family and the personal needs of the individual that still retains the intimacy,
involvement, and sense of responsibility enjoyed in private arenas of life.
Groups may form to advance specific political views and programs, but these
views and programs are no better than their capacity to answer to the needs of
an active public body. . . .
By contrast, political movements, in their authentic sense, emerge out of
the body politic itself, and although their programs are formulated by
theorists, they also emerge from the lived experiences and traditions of the
public itself. The populist movements that swept out of agrarian America and
tsarist Russia or the anarcho-syndicalist and peasant movements of Spain and
Mexico articulated deeply felt, albeit often unconscious, public desires and
needs. At their best, genuine political movements bring to consciousness the
subterranean aspirations of discontented people and eventually turn this
consciousness into political cultures that give coherence to inchoate and
formless public desires. . . .
The immediate goal of a libertarian municipalist agenda is not to exercise
sudden and massive control by representatives and their bureaucratic agents over
the existing economy; its immediate goal is to reopen a public sphere in flat
opposition to statism, one that allows for maximum democracy in the literal
sense of the term, and to create in embryonic form the institutions that can
give power to a people generally. If this perspective can be initially achieved
only by morally empowered assemblies on a limited scale, at least it will be a
form of popular power that can, in time, expand locally and grow over wide
regions. That its future is unforeseeable does not alter the fact that it
development depends upon the growing consciousness of the people, not upon the
growing power of the state--and how that consciousness, concretized in high
democratic institutions, will develop may be an open issue but it will surely be
a political adventure.
. . . The recovery and development of politics must, I submit, take its
point of departure from the citizen and his or her immediate environment beyond
the familial and private arenas of life. There can be no politics without
community. And by community I mean a municipal association of people reinforced
by its own economic power, its own institutionalization of the grass roots, and
the confederal support of nearby communities organized into a territorial
network on a local and regional scale. Parties that do not intertwine with these
grassroots forms of popular organization are not political in the classical
sense of the term. In fact, they are bureaucratic and antithetical to the
development of a participatory politics and participating citizens. The
authentic unit of political life, in effect, is the municipality, whether as a
whole, if it is humanly scaled, or in its various subdivisions, notably the
neighborhood. . . .
A new political agenda can be a municipal agenda only if we are to take our
commitments to democracy seriously. Otherwise we will be entangled with one or
another variant of statecraft, a bureaucratic structure that is demonstrably
inimicable to a vibrant public life. The living cell that forms the basic unit
of political life is the municipality, from which everything--such as
citizenship, interdependence, confederation, and freedom--emerges. There is no
way to piece together any politics unless we begin with its most elementary
forms: the villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities in which people live on
the most intimate level of political interdependence beyond private life. It is
on this level that they can begin to gain a familiarity with the political
process, a process that involves a good deal more than voting and information.
It is on this level, too, that they can go beyond the private insularity of
family life--a life that is currently celebrated for its inwardness and
seclusion--and improvise those public institutions that make for broad community
participation and consociation.
In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute
themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an
existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civic life that has continuity and
institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block
organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and
the public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single-issue
demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress to redress
social injustices. But protest alone is not enough; indeed, it is usually
defined by what protestors oppose, not by the social changes they may wish to
institute. To ignore the irreducible civic unit of politics and democracy is to
play chess without a chessboard, for it is on this civic plane that the
long-range endeavor of social renewal must eventually be played out. . . .
All statist objections aside, the problem of restoring municipal assemblies
seems formidable if it is cast in strictly structural and spatial terms. New
York City and London have no way of "assembling" if they try to emulate ancient
Athens, with its comparatively small citizen body. Both cities, in fact, are no
longer cities in the classical sense of the term and hardly rate as
municipalities even by nineteenth-century standards of urbanism. Viewed in
strictly macroscopic terms, they are sprawling urban belts that suck up millions
of people daily from communities at a substantial distance from their commercial
centers.
But they are also made up of neighborhoods--that is to say, of smaller
communities that have a certain measure of identity, whether defined by a shared
cultural heritage, economic interests, a commonality of social views, or even an
aesthetic tradition such as Greenwich Village in New York or Camden Town in
London. However much their administration as logistical, sanitary, and
commercial artifacts requires a high degree of coordination by experts and their
aides, they are potentially open to political and, in time, physical
decentralization. Popular, even block assemblies can be formed irrespective of
the size of a city, provided its cultural components are identified and their
uniqueness fostered.
At the same time I should emphasize that the libertarian municipalist (or
equivalently, communalist) views I propound here are meant to be a changing and
formative perspective--a concept of politics and citizenship to ultimately
transform cities and urban megalopolises ethically as well as spatially, and
politically as well as economically. Insofar as these views gain public
acceptance, they can be ...
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