BOOK EXCERPTS 1
POLITICS
Thus, at that time, I also carried out much reading on present and alternative ways of educating our children and organising society. (See Book Lists.)
The following important extracts are taken from the latter which I presented to ‘The Green Party’ with very little success, after leaving to ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain’, where I had become frustrated.
CHOMSKY
How The World Works, Hamish Hamilton, 2012.
“In a global economy designed for the interests and needs of international corporations and finance, and sectors that serve them, most people become superfluous. They will be cast aside if the institutional structures of power and privilege function without popular challenge or control.” Page 55.
“Take democracy. According to the common sense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different – it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites. The public are to be only spectators of action not participants..........They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters - like public policy - that are none of their business.” Page 63/4.
“A business or a big corporation is a fascist structure internally. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the orders or get out.” Page 86.
“Ultimately the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion – no matter how many guns they have. This is true of the most despotic societies and the most free, he wrote (David Hume, 1711-1776). If the general population won’t accept things, the rulers are finished.” Page 130.
At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the government is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real power in society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions – the corporations, now international in scale – that control the economy and much of our social life. In fact, the corporations set the conditions within which the government operates, and control it to a large extent. The picture presented in the media is constant, day after day. People simply have no awareness of the system of power under which they are suffering. As a result – as intended – they turn their attention against the government.” Pages 156/7.
“The US is becoming very depoliticized and negative. About half the population thinks both political parties should be disbanded. There’s a real need for something that would articulate the concerns of that substantial majority of the population that’s being left out of social planning and the political process.” Page 159.
“As I mentioned earlier, they don’t want decision-makers and participants; they want a passive, obedient population of consumers and political spectators – a community of people who are so atomised and isolated that they can’t put together their limited resources and become an independent powerful force that will chip away at concentrated power.” Page 165.
“I think that there are good things about it (the internet), but there are also aspects of it that concern and worry me. This is an intuitive response – I can’t prove it – but my feeling is that, since people aren’t Martians or robots, direct face-to-face contact is an extremely important part of human life. It helps develop self-understanding and the growth of a healthy personality. You just have a different relationship to somebody when you are looking at them than you do when you’re punching away at a keyboard and some symbols come back. I suspect that extending that form of abstract and remote relationship, instead of direct, personal contact, is going to have unpleasant effects on what people are like. It will diminish their humanity I think.” Page 167.
“This scenario for interactive technology reflects an understanding of the stupefying effect spectator sports have in making people passive, atomised, obedient non-participants – non-questioning, easily controlled and easily disciplined.” Page 169.
“All the way back to the origins of American society, business has insisted on a powerful interventionist state to support its interests, and it still does. There’s nothing individualistic about corporations. They’re big conglomerate institutions, essentially totalitarian in character. Within them, you’re a cog in a big machine. There are few institutions in human society that have such strict hierarchy and top-down control as a business organisation. It’s hardly don’t tread on me – you’re being trod on all of the time. The point of the ideology is to prevent people who are outside the sectors of coordinated power from associating with each other and entering into decision-making in the political arena. The point is to leave the powerful sectors highly integrated and organized, while atomising everyone else.” Page 171.
“The search for profit, when it’s unconstrained and free from public control, will naturally try to repress people’s lives as much as possible. The executives wouldn’t be doing their jobs otherwise.” Page 177.
“If people are sufficiently intimidated, if the popular organizations are sufficiently destroyed, if the people have had it beaten into their heads that either they accept the rule of those with guns or else they live and die in unrelieved misery, then your elections will all come out the way you want. And everybody will cheer.” Page 187.
“In countries like Thailand or China, ecological catastrophes are looming. These are countries where growth is being fuelled by multinational investors for whom the environment is what’s called an ‘externality’ (which means you don’t pay any attention to it). So if you destroy the rainforests in Thailand, say, that’s OK as long as you make a short-term profit out of it. In China, the disasters which lie not too far ahead could be extraordinary - simply because of the country’s size. The same is true throughout Southeast Asia. But when the environmental pressures become such that the very survival of the people is jeopardized, do you see any change in the action? Not unless people react. If power is left in the hands of transnational investors, the people will just die.” Page 202.
“When does a child get to the point where the parent does not need to provide authority?.....I don’t think there is a simple answer to that question. The growth of autonomy and self-control, and expansion of the range of legitimate choices, and the ability to exercise them – that’s growing up.” Page 204.
“There’s nothing in the principle of democracy that says that power and wealth should be so highly concentrated that democracy becomes a sham.” Page 205.
“Being alone, you can’t do anything. All you can do is deplore the situation. But if you join with other people, you can make changes.” Page 205.
“Two technical economists in Holland found that every single one of the hundred largest transnational corporations on Fortune magazine’s list has benefitted from the industry policy of its home country, and that at least twenty of them wouldn’t have even survived if their governments hadn’t taken them over or given them large subsidies when they were in trouble.” Page 214.
“You can make as much money as you want, but if you get into trouble, it’s the taxpayers’ responsibility to fix things. Under capitalism, investment is supposed to be as risk-free as possible. No corporations wants free markets – what they want is power.” Page 215.
“The big transnationals want to reduce freedom by undermining the democratic functioning of the states in which they’re based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful enough to protect and support them........if you look through the whole history of modern economic development, you find that – virtually without exception – advocates of ‘free markets’ want them applied to the poor and the middle-class but not to themselves. The government subsidizes corporations’ costs, protects them from market risks and lets them keep the profits.” Page 216.
“In any case, it’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you.” Page 217.
“It (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, 1996) says seven year old children have to take responsibility. It gives them opportunities they were deprived of before – like the opportunity to starve. It’s just another assault against defenceless people, based on a very effective propaganda campaign to make people hate and fear the poor.” Page 222.
“So we’re moving from the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, to the idea that an injury to one is just an injury to one. That’s the ideal of a capitalist society – except for the rich. Boards of directors are allowed to work together, and so are banks and investors and corpor-ations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.” Page 224.
“....public funding shouldn’t be funnelled through private tyrannies (let alone the military system), and the public should decide what to invest in. I don’t think we should live in a society where the rich and powerful determine how public money is spent, and nobody even knows about their decisions.” Page 227.
“Business wants popular aspects of government, the ones that actually serve the population, beaten down, but it also wants a very powerful state, one that works for it & is removed from public control.” Page 227.
“Now that these workers are superfluous (because their jobs have gone abroad), what do you do with them? First of all, you have to make sure they don’t notice that society is unfair and try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to hate and fear one another. Every coercive society immediately hits on that idea, which has two other benefits: it reduces the number of superfluous people (by violence) and provides places to put the ones who survive (prisons).” Page 228.
“Call it (tagging, home imprisonment) Orwellian or whatever you like – I’d say it’s just ordinary state capitalism. It’s a natural evolution of a system that subsidizes industrial development and seeks to maximize short-term profit for the few at the cost of the many.” Page 231.
“Where I differ from a lot of people is, I don’t think the CIA has been involved as an independent agency: I think it does what it’s told to do by the White House. It’s used as an instrument of state policy, to carry out operations the government wants to be able to ‘plausibly deny.’” P. 232.
“....it’s the idea that grave enemies are about to attack us and we need to huddle under the protection of domestic power. You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what’s really happening to them. You have to somehow engender fear and hatred, to channel the kind of rage - or even just discontentment - that’s being aroused by social and economic conditions.” Page 233.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.” Page 234.
“Over and over again it (television) rams into your head messages designed to destroy your mind and separate you from other people. That eventually has an effect.” Page 241.
“Many people today just want business to be a bit nicer, for there to be a little less corporate welfare and a little more welfare capitalism. But others would like to see more radical changes: we don’t know how many, because the polls don’t ask about radical alternatives, and they aren’t readily available for people to think about.” Page 247.
“....you have to make use of the state, all the time recognizing that you ultimately want to eliminate it.” Page 263.
“The UN mostly does what the US - meaning US business - wants done. A lot of its peacekeeping operations are aimed at maintaining the level of ‘stability’ corporations need in order to do business. It’s dirty work and they’re happy to have the UN do it.” Page 283.
“People don’t like the system. As mentioned earlier, 95% of Americans think corporations should lower their profits to benefit their workers and the communities they do business in. 70% think businesses have too much power and 80% think that working people don’t have enough say in what goes on, that the economic system is inherently unfair, and that the government basically isn’t functioning, because it’s working for the rich.” Page 300.
“If people become aware of constructive alternatives, along with even the beginnings of mechanisms to realise those alternatives, positive change could have a lot of support.” Page 300.
“It’s also the home of the international entertainment industry, (i.e. TV), whose products are mainly a form of propaganda........and spends a huge amount on marketing (which is basically an organised form of deceit). A large part of that is advertising, which is tax-deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.” Page 301.
“.....one big business party, with two factions, runs things. We won’t break out of that until we democratize the basic structure of our institutions.” Page 302.
“But when you come back from the Third World to the West – the US in particular – you’re struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.” Page 311.
“In the documentary Bitter Paradise (about the plight of East Timor), you say, ‘The press isn’t in the business of letting people know how power works. It would be crazy to expect that.......They’re part of the power system - why should they expose it?” Page 313.
“The future can be changed. But we can’t change things unless we at least begin to understand them.” Page 314.
BIEHL (with BOOKCHIN)
The Politics of Social Ecology, Black Rose Books Ltd, 1998.
Author’s Note (Pages vii – x)
“Libertarian Municipalism, the political dimension of the broader body of ideas known as social ecology, was developed over the course of several decades by the anarchist social theorist Murray Bookchin. It is the culmination of a lifetime of his thinking about how society might best be radically transformed in a humane and rational way.” Page vii.
“In brief, libertarian municipalism seeks to revive the democratic possibilities latent in existing local governments and transform them into direct democracies. It aims to decentralize these political communities so that they are humanly scaled and tailored to their natural environments. It aims to restore the practices and qualities of citizenship, so that men and women can collectively take responsibility for managing their own communities, according to an ethics of sharing and cooperation, rather than depend on elites. Once direct democracies have been created, the democratized municipalities could be knit together into confederations that could ultimately present a challenge to capitalism and the nation state, leading to a rational ecological anarchist society.” Page viii.
“Across the American political spectrum, a wide variety of thinkers are lamenting the evisceration of the civic sphere in the United States today. Not only the left but the centre and even the right are all bewailing the decline of community life and civic participation........Finally, around the world, transnational capital is creating a giant market in which incalculable profits are reaped by the few, plunging many into poverty and despair, obliterating traditional societies, and poisoning the biosphere.” Page ix.
“Probably inevitably, my presentation is refracted through the prism of the culture in which I live and write, I hope that readers outside the United States will be able to interpret the main principles in the context of their own cultures.” Page x.
Chapter 1 (Pages 1 – 11)
Politics versus Statecraft
“Libertarian Municipalism is one of many political theories that concern themselves with the principles and practices of democracy. In contrast to most such theories, however, it does not accept the conventional notion that the State and governmental systems typical of Western countries today are truly democracies. On the contrary, it considers them republican States with pretensions of being democratic. Republican States, to be sure, are more ‘democratic’ than other kinds of States, like monarchies and dictatorships, in that they contain various kinds of representative institutions.
But they are nonetheless States - overarching structures of domination in which a few people rule over the great majority. A State, by its very nature, is structurally and professionally separated from the general population – in fact, it is set over and above ordinary men and women. It exercises power over them, making decisions that affect their lives. Its power in the last instance rests on violence, over whose legal use the State has a monopoly, in the form of its armies and police forces. In a structure where power is distributed so unevenly, democracy is impossible. Far from embodying rule by the people, even a republican State is incompatible with popular rule.
Libertarian democracy advances a kind of democracy, by contrast, that is no mere fig leaf for State rule. The democracy it advances is direct democracy – in which citizens in communities manage their own affairs through face-to-face processes of deliberation and decision-making, rather than have the State do it for them.”
In contrast to theories of representative “democracy”, libertarian municipalism makes a sharp distinction between politics and Statecraft. In conventional use, to be sure, these concepts are nearly synonymous. Politics, as we normally think of it, is an essential component of representative systems of government. It is the set of procedures and practices by which “the people” choose a small group of individuals – politicians – to speak for them and represent them in a legislative or executive body.
These politicians, in “politics-as-we-know-it”, are affiliated with political parties, which are supposed to be associations of people who share a commitment to a particular political agenda or philosophy: the politicians who belong to a party, in theory, speak for its agenda and advance its philosophy. As an election for governmental office approaches, various parties put forth politicians as candidates and, assisted by many consultants, wage electoral campaigns to try to persuade citizens to vote for them. Each party touts its own candidate’s suitability for office and disparages that of its rivals. During the campaign the candidates express their respective positions on the important issues of the day, which clarifies their differences, in order that voters may grasp the full range of choices that they have.
Hopefully, after carefully weighing the issues and soberly judging the positions of each candidate, the voters – who have now become an “electorate” – make their choice. The contenders whose positions accord most fully with those of the majority are rewarded by being granted the office they covet. Upon entering the corridors of government, such is the belief, these new officeholders will labour tirelessly on behalf of those who voted for them (who by now have gained yet another appellation, “constituents”). Scrupulously they adhere to the commitments they avowed during their electoral campaigns, or so we are told. Indeed, as they cast their votes on legislation or otherwise make decisions, their primary loyalty is allegedly to the positions supported by their “constituents.” As a result, when a piece of legislation or an executive order or any other type of action is taken, it reflects the will of the majority of citizens.
It should be clear to any sensate reader that this sketch is a civics class illusion, and that its ‘democratic’ nature is chimerical. Far from embodying the will of the people, politicians are actually professionals, whose career interests lie in obtaining power precisely through being elected or appointed to higher office. Their electoral campaigns, which only partly or trivially reflect the concerns of ordinary men and women, more often use the mass media to sway and manipulate their concerns, or even generate spurious concerns as distractions. The manipulative nature of this system has been particularly egregious in recent US elections, where, financed by big money, political campaigns focus increasingly on trivial but emotionally volatile issues, diverting the attention of the ‘electorate’ and masking the deep-seated problems that have a real effects on their lives. The programs the candidates run on are even more vacuous, loaded with ever more pabulum – and by general acknowledgement, have less and less connection to the candidate’s future behavior in office.
Once they have gained office, indeed, politicians quite commonly renege on their approved campaign commitments. Instead of attending to the needs of those who cast their ballots for them or advancing the policies they supported, they usually find it more rewarding to serve the monied interest groups that are eager to enhance their careers. Vast sums of money are required in order to wage an electoral campaign in the first place, and candidates are therefore dependent upon big donors to get themselves into office. To one degree or another, then, those who are elected to represent the people are likely to end up advancing policies that protect the interests of established wealth rather than those of the group they supposedly represent.
Politicians make such choices not because they are “bad people” – indeed, many of them originally enter public service with idealistic motivations. Rather, they make these choices because they have become part of a system of power interactions whose imperatives have come to rule over them. This system of power interactions, let it be said candidly, is the State itself, dominated by big money. By functioning in the framework of this system, they come to share its aims of securing and maintaining a monopoly of power for an elite group of professionals, and of protecting and advancing the interests of the wealthy, rather than the more popular aims of empowering the many and redistributing wealth.
The political parties with which “politicians” are associated, in turn, are not necessarily groups of high-minded citizens who share like political views. They are essentially hierarchically structured, top-down bureaucracies that are seeking to gain State power for themselves through their candidates. Their main concerns are the practical exigencies of faction, power, and mobilization, not the social well-being of the officeholder’s ‘constituents,’ except insofar as professions of concern for the well-being of ordinary men and women attracts votes. But in no sense are these kinds of political parties either derivative of the body politic or constituted by it. Far from expressing the will of the people, parties function precisely to contain the body politic, to control it and to manipulate it – indeed, to prevent it from developing an independent will.
However much political parties may be in competition with each other and however much they may genuinely disagree on some specific issues, all of them share in assenting to the existence of the State and operating within its magisterial parameters. Every party that is out of power is in effect a ‘shadow’ State waiting to take power – State in waiting.
To label this system politics is a gross misnomer: it should more properly be called Statecraft. Professionalised, manipulative and immoral, these systems of elites and masses impersonate democracy, making a mockery of the democratic ideals to which they cynically swear fealty in periodic appeals to the “electorate”. Far from empowering people as citizens, Statecraft presupposes the general abdication of citizen power. It reduces citizens to “taxpayers” and “voters” and “constituents”, as if they were too juvenile or too incompetent to manage public affairs themselves. They are expected to function merely passively and let elites look out for their best interests. They are to participate in “politics” mainly on election days, when “voter turnout” gives legitimacy to the system itself - and on tax days, of course, when they finance it. The rest of the year, the masters of Statecraft would prefer that people tend to their private affairs and disregard the activities of “politicians”. Indeed, insofar as people slough off their passivity and begin to take an active interest in political life, they may create problems for the State by calling attention to the discrepancies between social reality and the rhetoric that it espouses.
Politics as Direct Democracy
Despite their interchangeability in conventional usage, politics is not at all the same thing as Statecraft; nor is the State its natural domain. In past centuries, before the emergence of the Nation-State, politics was understood to mean the activity of citizens in a public body, empowered in shared, indeed participatory institutions. In contrast to the State, politics, as it once was and as it could be again, is directly democratic. As advanced by libertarian municipalism, it is the direct management of community affairs by citizens through face-to-face democratic institutions, especially popular assemblies.
In today’s mass society the prospect that people could manage their own affairs in such assemblies may seem woefully remote. Yet the times in history when people did so are nearer to us than we may think. Direct democracy was essential to the political tradition that Western societies claim to cherish – it lies at its very fountainhead. For the democratic political tradition originated not with the Nation-State but with the face-to-face democracy of ancient Athens, in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. Politics, as it was first described in the writings of Aristotle, originally denoted a direct democracy – the very word politics is etymologically derived from polis, the ancient Greek word (commonly mistranslated as ‘city-state’) for the public, participatory dimension of a community.
In the Athenian polis, direct democracy attained a remarkable degree of realization. During one of the most astonishing periods in European, indeed world history – between the eighth and fifth century B.C.E. – Athenian men and their spokesmen, like Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles (all three of them ironically, renegade aristocrats), gradually dismembered the traditional feudal system that had been endemic to Homeric times and created institutions that opened public life to every adult Athenian male. Power ceased to be the prerogative of a small, aristocratic stratum and became instead a citizen activity. At high water the body politic of ancient Athens probably consisted of some forty thousand adult male citizens. (Unfortunately, it excluded women, slaves, and resident aliens, including Aristotle himself, from political participation.)
The ancient Athenians had a strikingly different concept of political life from the one to which most people in today’s Western “democracies” are accustomed. Today we most often regard individuals as essentially private beings who sometimes find it necessary or expedient to enter public life, perhaps against their will, in order to protect or advance their private concerns. In the common present day view, political participation is a (usually) unpleasant but nonetheless unavoidable extraneous burden that must be borne stoically before one returns one’s “real life” in the private sphere.
By contrast, the ancient Athenians thought that adult Greek men are inherently political beings, that it is in their nature to consociate with one another in order to organize and manage their shared community life. Although their nature has both political and private components, the Athenians believed, their distinctive humanity lies in the political component. As political beings, then, Greek men cannot be fully human unless they participate in organized community life: without their participation there is no community life, indeed no organized community – no freedom.
Unlike the professionals who run the citadels of State power today and perform the machinations of Statecraft, the ancient Athenians maintained a system of self-governance that was consciously amateur in character. Its institutions, especially its almost-weekly meetings of citizens’ assembly and its judicial system structured around huge juries – made it possible for political participation to be broad, general, and on-going. Most civic officials were selected from among the citizens by lot and were frequently rotated. It was a community in which citizens had the competence not only to govern themselves but to assume office when chance summoned them to do so.
The direct democracy of Athens waned in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war, and during the Roman Empire and afterward the idea of democracy itself received a bad name as congruent with “mob rule”, especially from theorists and writers who served imperial, kingly, or ecclesiastical masters. But the notion of politics as popular self-management was never wholly extinguished: to the contrary, both the idea and its reality have persisted in the centuries that span those eras and ours. In the town centres of many medieval European communes, in colonial New England, and in revolutionary Paris, among many other places, citizens congregated to discuss and manage the community in which they lived. Popes, princes, and kings, to be sure, often developed overarching structures of power, but at the local level, in villages, towns, and neighbourhoods, people controlled much of their own community life well into modern times.
It must be conceded at the outset that history affords us no example of an ideal direct democracy. All of the notable instances of it, including ancient Athens, were greatly flawed by patriarchal and other oppressive features. Nevertheless, the best features of these instances can be culled and assembled to form a composite political realm that is neither parliamentary nor bureaucratic, neither centralized nor professionalized, but democratic and political.
Here at the base of society rich political cultures flourished. Daily public discussions bubbled up in squares and parks, on street corners, in schools, cafes, and clubs, wherever people gathered informally. Many of the neighbourhood plazas in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance cities were places where citizens spontaneously congregated, argued out their problems, and decided on courses of action. These lively political cultures encompassed cultural aspects as well as explicitly political ones, with civic rituals, festivals, celebrations, and shared expressions of joy and mourning. In villages, towns, neighbourhoods, and cities political participation was a self-formative process, in which citizens, by virtue of their ability to manage their community’s pursuits, developed not only a rich sense of cohesion as a political body but a rich individual selfhood.
The Recreation of Politics
With the rise and consolidation of Nation-States, centralized power began to stifle this public participation, subjecting even distant localities to State control and terminating whatever autonomy they had hitherto enjoyed. At first this invasion was carried out in the name of monarchs claiming a divinely sanctioned privilege to rule, but even after the concept of democracy became an object of passionate popular aspiration in the early nineteenth century, builders of republican States appropriated it as a gloss for their ‘representative’ institutions – parliaments and congresses – and at the same time as a mantle to cloak their elitist, paternalistic, and coercive nature. So it is that Western Nation States today are routinely referred to as “democracies” without a murmur of objection. With the creation of the welfare or Social State, the State’s powers – as well as its acceptability to the unwary – were even further expanded, assuming many of the social tasks for which communities had once been responsible on their own account.
Still, in most parts of the European and American world, political life remained to some degree alive at the local level, as it does to this day. Direct democracy, of course, no longer exists in the ancient Athenian sense. Yet even in communities that have been stripped of their former proud powers, formal and informal political arenas still abide – civic associations, town meetings, forums, issue-oriented initiatives, and the like – as venues for face-to-face public processes. That is, even if direct democracy no longer exists, local public spheres do persist.
To be sure, those remnant public spheres are themselves being gravely undermined today, as larger social forces corrode neighbourhood and community life. Economic pressures are forcing people to spend ever more of their time earning a livelihood, which leaves them less time to devote even to socialising or to family life, let alone to community affairs. The ethos of consumption in capitalist society draws men and women to give over much of what free time that they do have to shopping, even as a form of recreation, or else to television-watching, which primes them for more shopping. As family life comes by necessity a ‘haven in a heartless world’, political life comes to recede even further from their grasp. In such a situation neither political life nor family life can flourish.
Thus, the very meaning of politics is gradually being forgotten. People in Western societies are losing their memory of politics as an active, vital process of self-management, while the enervated concept of citizenship – as voting and tax-paying and the passive receipt of State-provided services – is mistaken for citizenship itself. Deracinated from community, the individual is isolated and powerless, alone in a mass society that has little use for him or her as a political being.
But if people lack apparent interest in public life, as so many commentators today lament, it may be because public life lacks meaning – that is, because it lacks substantial power. Instead of residing in local political realms, most decision-making power lies in the hands of the State. It did not get there by accident, or an act of God, or a force of nature. It was placed there by human agency. Builders of States appropriated it, compelling or seducing people to surrender their power to the larger edifice.
But power, having been taken from people, can also be recovered by them once again. It should come as no surprise that in all parts of the Euro-American world today men and women are increasingly rejecting the existing party system and the paltry political role that has been doled out to them by the State. Alienation from what passes for “political” processes has become widespread – witness massive voting abstentions – while “politicians” are distrusted far and wide. Even when pandered to extravagantly, citizens increasingly react with disgust and even hostility to electoral manipulation. Such revulsion against the processes of Statecraft is a salutary trend, one on which a libertarian municipalist politics can build.
The project of libertarian municipalism is to resuscitate politics in the older sense of the word – to construct and expand local direct democracy, such that ordinary citizens make decisions for their communities and for their society as a whole. It is not, it should be understood, an attempt to expand citizen involvement in the processes of the republican State. It is not a call for greater voter turnout at the next election, or for citizen mobilisation in influencing legislation (“write your representative”), or even for expanding the use of tools like the initiative, referendum, and recall with the intention of “democratising” the Nation-State. Nor is it an attempt to replace winner-takes-all systems (typical of the United States, Britain, and Canada) with proportional representation, to allow members of small or third parties to gain office in accordance with the votes they receive. In short, it does not seek to embroider upon the ‘democratic’ veils of the State, by working for “democratic reforms.” Least of all does it encourage men and women to actively participate in a structure that, all its masquerades to the contrary, is geared to control them. Libertarian municipalism, in fact, is antithetical to the State since the State as such is unassimilable with community self-management and a thriving civic sphere.
It is the aim of libertarian municipalism, rather, to revive the public sphere that is being precipitately lost, and to transform it into a political realm. It is to engender active citizens out of passive constituents and endow them with a political context in which they have meaningful choices. It aims to create this context by institutionalising their power in neighbourhood assemblies and town meetings. In a very radical sense, libertarian municipalism goes back to the very roots of politics, to revive direct democracy and expand it, along with the rational and ethical virtues and practices that support it.”
SELF-GOVERNANCE
The Community (Pages 53-54)
“Libertarian municipalism is the name of the process that seeks to recreate and expand the democratic political realm as the realm of community self-management. As such, the starting place for this process must be the community.
A community comprises individuals whose dwellings are clustered in the vicinity of a public space, forming a discernible community entity. This public space, whether it be a square, a park, or even a street, is the place where private life shades into public life, where the personal becomes more or less the communal. Behind their private doorways people enjoy the pleasures and cope with the demands of private life; but once one leaves one’s doorway, one enters into a world where he or she is accessible to others, even as a degree of the closeness of private life is preserved. Here people encounter one another, unmediated by telephones or written messages, on a regular and occasional basis, and after repeated encounters they may become acquainted.
It is not shared kinship or ethnicity that makes possible the ties of a public sphere (although in some parts of cities people of the same ethnic groups may choose to live in the same neighbourhood). Nor is it a common workplace, from which people return after earning their daily bread. Rather, it is residential proximity and the shared problems and interests that arise in a single community, such as environmental, educational and economic issues that form the underpinnings of a shared civic life. Encounters among community members are thus the germs of the political realm. The issues that community members have in common, as opposed to issues native to their private lives, become the subjects of concern in the political realm.
To be sure, people encounter one another on a face to face basis in other areas of society, like the workplace and the university, and these areas too have the potential to be democratised – in fact, they must be. Only the community, however, is open to all adult members qua residents, not to workers and students alone, and can therefore become a broad arena for the management of communitywide affairs.
It is from this incipient political level of the community that libertarian municipalism strives to create and renew the political realm, then expand it. Here people can potentially reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into citizens who recognize each other, are mutually interdependent and as such are concerned for their common welfare. It is here that they can create those political institutions that make for broad community participation and sustain them on an ongoing basis. It is here that citizenship can become meaningful as citizens regain and expand the power that the State has usurped from them.”
Confederal Councils (Page 105)
“In an ecological society, the direct-democratic municipal assemblies would elect their delegates to serve on a confederal council. This council would be a congress of the delegates from the various municipal assemblies. Like the commission in the Swiss example, the council would have little power of its own but would merely carry out the will of the municipalities.
Moreover, the delegates would be strictly mandated to vote according to the wishes of their home municipalities, which would give them rigorous instructions in writing. They would not be permitted to make policy decisions without their home municipality’s specific instructions. Entirely responsible to the citizens’ assemblies, the delegates would be recallable in the event that they violated a mandate.
Rather than making policy decisions in its own right, the confederal council would exist primarily for administrative purposes – that is for the purpose of coordinating and executing policies formulated by the assemblies.”
Community Ownership (Pages 117-118)
“The notion of public ownership is not popular today. Its recent history has been nothing if not dismal, most notably in the case of the former Soviet Union. But in that and similar instances in which property has been nationalised, public ownership is something of a misnomer. “Public ownership” through nationalisation means ownership by the Nation State. Although the phrase “public ownership” implies ownership by the people, State ownership is not public ownership because the State, as we have seen, is an elite structure set over the people; it is not the people itself. “Public ownership” in the sense of the nationalisation of property does not give the people control over economic life; it merely reinforces State power with economic power.
The Soviet State, for example, took over the means of production and used it to enhance its power, but it left the hierarchical structures of authority intact. The greater part of the public had little or nothing to do with making decisions about their economic life. Calling such nationalisation “public ownership” is as obfuscatory, indeed as fraudulent, as calling Statecraft “politics” or calling a bourgeois republic a “democracy”. Real public ownership would be ownership by the people themselves in their communities not by the State.”
KLEIN
This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs. The Climate, Penguin Books, 2015.
“I have come to think of that night as the climate movement’s coming of age: it was the moment when the realisation truly sank in that no one was coming to save us......leaders are not looking after us......’we are not cared for at the level of our very survival’......it really is the case that we are on our own and hope......will have to come from below.” Page 12.
“What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism......) Page 18.
“...the corporate globalisation process.......was always about using these sweeping deals.....to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible – while paying as little in taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wish list, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which would trickle down to the rest of us, eventually.” Page 19.
“The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privat-isation of the public sphere, deregulation of the public sector and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.” Page 19.
“But in 2012 Stix wrote.......’If ever we are to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus.’ ” Page 24.
“Climate change...is a civilisation wake-up call. A powerful message ...telling us that ...we need a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us we need to evolve.” Klein, This Changes Everything, Page 25.
“A destabilised climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.” Page 82.
“So what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” Page 88.
(Under Construction)
