Murray Bookchin
The Meaning of Confederalism
Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for
face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a "complex
society." Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too
concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level. And our
economy is too "global," presumably, to unravel the intricacies of production
and commerce. In our present transnational, often highly centralized social
system, it is better to enhance representation in the state, to increase the
efficiency of bureaucratic institutions, we are advised, than to advance utopian
"localist" schemes of popular control over political and economic life.
After all, such arguments often run, centralists are all really "localists"
in the sense that they believe in "more power to the people" - or at least, to
their representatives. And surely a good representative is always eager to know
the wishes of his or her "constituents" (to use another of those arrogant
substitutes for "citizens").
But face-to-face democracy? Forget the dream that in our "complex" modern
world we can have any democratic alternative to the nation-state! Many pragmatic
people, including socialists, often dismiss arguments for that kind of
"localism" as otherworldly - with good-natured condescension at best and
outright derision at worst. Indeed, some years back, in 1972, I was challenged
in the periodical Root and Branch by Jeremy Brecher, a democratic socialist, to
explain how the decentralist views I expressed in Post-Scarcity Anarchism would
prevent, say, Troy, New York, from dumping its untreated wastes into the Hudson
River, from which downstream cities like Perth Amboy draw their drinking water.
On the surface of things, arguments like Brecher's for centralized
government seem rather compelling. A structure that is "democratic," to be sure,
but still largely top-down is assumed as necessary to prevent one locality from
afflicting another ecologically. But conventional economic and political
arguments against decentralization, ranging from the fate of Perth Amboy's
drinking water to our alleged "addiction" to petroleum, rest on a number of very
problematical assumptions. Most disturbingly, they rest on an unconscious
acceptance of the economic status quo.
Decentralism and Self-Sustainability
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid
that corrodes all visionary thinking (as witness the recent tendency of radicals
to espouse "market socialism" rather than deal with the failings of the market
economy as well as state socialism). Doubtless we will have to import coffee for
those people who need a morning fix at the breakfast table or exotic metals for
people who want their wares to be more lasting than the junk produced by a
consciously engineered throwaway economy. But aside from the utter irrationality
of crowding tens of millions of people into congested, indeed suffocating urban
belts, must the present-day extravagant international division of labor
necessarily exist in order to satisfy human needs? Or has it been created to
provide extravagant profits for multinational corporations? Are we to ignore the
ecological consequences of plundering the Third World of its resources, insanely
interlocking modern economic life with petroleum-rich areas whose ultimate
products include air pollutants and petroleum-derived carcinogens? To ignore the
fact that our "global economy" is the result of burgeoning industrial
bureaucracies and a competitive grow-or-die market economy is incredibly myopic.
It is hardly necessary to explore the sound ecological reasons for achieving
a certain measure of self-sustainability. Most environmentally oriented people
are aware that a massive national and international division of labor is
extremly wasteful in the literal sense of that term. Not only does an excessive
division of labor make for overorganization in the form of huge bureaucracies
and tremendous expenditures of resources in transporting materials over great
distances; it reduces the possibilities of effectively recycling wastes,
avoiding pollution that may have its source in highly concentrated industrial
and population centers, and making sound use of local or regional raw materials.
On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that relatively self-sustaining
communities in which crafts, agriculture, and industries serve definable
networks of confederally organized communities enrich the opportunities and
stimuli to which individuals are exposed and make for more rounded personalities
with a rich sense of selfhood and competence. The Greek ideal of the rounded
citizen in a rounded environment - one that reappeared in Charles Fourier's
utopian works - was long cherished by the anarchists and socialists of the last
century.
The opportunity of the individual to devote his or her productive activity
to many different tasks over an attenuated work week (or in Fourier's ideal
society, over a given day) was seen as a vital factor in overcoming the division
between manual and intellectual activity, in transcending status differences
that this major division of work created, and in enhancing the wealth of
experiences that came with a free movement from industry through crafts to food
cultivation. Hence self-sustainability made for a richer self, one strengthened
by variegated experiences, competencies, and assurances. Alas, this vision has
been lost by leftists and many environmentalists today, with their shift toward
a pragmatic liberalism and the radical movement's tragic ignorance of its own
visionary past.
We should not, I believe, lose sight of what it means to live an ecological
way of life, not merely follow sound ecological practices. The multitude of
handbooks that teach us how to conserve, invest, eat, and buy in an
"ecologically responsible" manner are a travesty of the more basic need to
reflect on what it means to think - yes, to reason - and to live ecologically in
the full meaning of the term. Thus, I would hold that to garden organically is
more than a good form of husbandry and a good source of nutrients; it is above
all a way to place oneself directly in the food web by personally cultivating
the very substances one consumes to live and by returning to one's environment
what one elicits from it.
Food thus becomes more than a form of material nutririent. The soil one
tills, the living things one cultivates and consumes, the compost one prepares
all unite in an ecological continuum to feed the spirit as well as the body,
sharpening one's sensitivity to the nonhuman and human world around us. I am
often amused by zealous "spiritualists," many of whom are either passive viewers
of seemingly "natural" landscapes or devotees of rituals, magic, and pagan
deities (or all of these) who fail to realize that one of the most eminently
human activities - namely, food cultivation - can do more to foster an
ecological sensibility (and spirituality, if you please) than all the
incantations and mantras devised in the name of ecological spiritualism.
Such monumental changes as the dissolution of the nation-state and its
substitution by a participatory democracy, then, do not occur in a psychological
vacuum where the political structure alone is changed. I argued against Jeremy
Brecher that in a society that was radically veering toward decentralistic,
participatory democracy, guided by communitarian and ecological principles, it
is only reasonable to suppose that people would not choose such an irresponsible
social dispensation as would allow the waters of the Hudson to be so polluted.
Decentralism, a face-to-face participatory democracy, and a localist emphasis on
community values should be viewed as all of one piece - they most assuredly have
been so in the vision I have been advocating for more than thirty years. This
"one piece" involves not only a new politics but a new political culture that
embraces new ways of thinking and feeling, and new human interrelationships,
including the ways we experience the natural world. Words like"politics" and
"citizenship" would be redefined by the rich meanings they acquired in the past,
and enlarged for the present.
It is not very difficult to show - item by item - how the international
division of labor can be greatly attenuated by using local and regional
resources, implementing ecotechnologies, resealing human consumption along
rational (indeed, healthful) lines, and emphasizing quality production that
provides lasting (instead of throwaway) means of life. It is unfortunate that
the very considerable inventory of these possibilities, which I partly assembled
and evaluated in my 1965 essay "Toward a Liberatory Technology," suffers from
the burden of having been written too long ago to be accessible to the present
generation of ecologically oriented people. Indeed, in that essay I also argued
for regional integration and the need to interlink resources among
ecocommunities. For decentralized communities are inevitably interdependent upon
one another.
Problems of Decentralism
If many pragmatic people are blind to the importance of decentralism, many
in the ecology movement tend to ignore very real problems with "localism" -
problems that are no less troubling than the problems raised by a globalism that
fosters a total interlocking of economic and political life on a worldwide
basis. Without such wholistic cultural and political changes as I have
advocated, notions of decentralism that emphasize localist isolation and a
degree of ...
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