The Next Revolution : Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin

Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin “The Left,” a meaningful term ever since the French Revolution, took on wider significance with the rise of socialism, anarchism, and communism. The Russian revolution installed a government entirely leftist in conception; leftist and rightist movements tore Spain apart; democratic parties in Europe and North America arrayed themselves between the two poles; liberal cartoonists portrayed the opposition as a fat plutocrat with a cigar, while reactionaries in the United States demonized “commie leftists” from the 1930s through the Cold War. The left/right opposition, though often an oversimplification, for two centuries was broadly useful as a description and a reminder of dynamic balan... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Introduction by Debbie Bookchin and Blai...

Introduction by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor The world today confronts not one, but a series of interlocking crises—economic, political, social, and ecological. The new millennium has been marked by a growing gap between rich and poor that has reached unprecedented levels of disparity, consigning an entire generation to diminished expectations and dismal prospects. Socially, the trajectory of the new century has been equally bleak, particularly in the developing world, where sectarian violence in the name of religion, tribalism, and nationalism has turned entire regions into insufferable battle zones. Meanwhile, the environmental crisis has worsened at a pace that has exceeded even the most pessimistic forecasts. Global warming... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 1 : The Communalist Project

1. The Communalist Project Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary—or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal mediocrity—will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries of the revolutionary era. The direction we select, from among several intersecting roads of human development, may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as this irrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological weapons, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire human enterprise may come to a dev... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 2 : The Ecological Crisis and the ...

2. The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society In addressing the sources of our present ecological and social problems, perhaps the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human. The primary implication of this most basic message is a call for a politics and even an economics that offer a democratic alternative to the nation-state and the market society. Here I offer a broad sketch of these issues to lay the groundwork for the changes necessary in moving toward a free and ecological society. First, the most fundamental route to a resolution of our ecological problems is social in character. That is to say, if we are faced with the pro... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3 : A Politics for the Twenty-Firs...

3. A Politics for the Twenty-First Century It would be helpful to place libertarian municipalism in a broad historical perspective, all the more to understand its revolutionary character in human affairs generally as well as its place in the repertoire of antistatist practices. The commune, the town or city, or more broadly, the municipality, is not merely a “space” created by a given density of human habitations. In terms of its history as a civilizing tendency in humanity’s development, the municipality is integrally part of the sweeping process whereby human beings began to dissolve biologically conditioned social relations based on real or fictitious blood ties, with their primordial hostility to “strangers,&r... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4 : The Meaning of Confederalism

4. 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 economi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 5 : Libertarian Municipalism: A Po...

5. Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction—I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed—is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo. Politics today primarily means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for electoral office that offer vacuous programs for “social justice” to attract a nondescript “electorate.” Once in office, their programs usually turn into a bouquet of “compromises.” In this respect, many Green parties in Europe have been only marginally differen... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6 : Cities: The Unfolding of Reaso...

6. Cities: The Unfolding of Reason in History Libertarian municipalism constitutes the politics of social ecology, a revolutionary effort in which freedom is given institutional form in public assemblies that become decision-making bodies. It depends upon libertarian leftists running candidates at the local municipal level, calling for the division of municipalities into wards, where popular assemblies can be created that bring people into full and direct participation in political life. Having democratized themselves, municipalities would confederate into a dual power to oppose the nation-state and ultimately dispense with it and with the economic forces that underpin statism as such. Libertarian municipalism is thus both a historical g... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7 : Nationalism and the “National ...

7. Nationalism and the “National Question” One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century. This did not mean that the nineteenth-century Left favored imperialist depredations in the colonial world. At the turn of this century, hardly any serious ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8 : Anarchism and Power in the Spa...

8. Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution Today, when anarchism has become le mot du jor in radical circles, the differences between a society based on anarchy and one based on the principles of social ecology should be clearly distinguished. Authentic anarchism above all seeks the emancipation of individual personality from all ethical, political, and social constraints. In so doing, however, it fails to address the all-important and very concrete issue of power, which confronts all revolutionaries in a period of social upheaval. Rather than address how the people, organized into confederated popular assemblies, might capture power and create a fully developed libertarian society, anarchists conceive of power essentially as a mal... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9 : The Future of the Left

9. The Future of the Left By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Left envisioned itself as having reached an extraordinary degree of conceptual sophistication and organizational maturity. Generally, what was called leftism at that time was socialist, influenced to varying degrees by the works of Karl Marx. This was especially the case in Central Europe, but socialism was also intermixed with populist ideas in Eastern Europe and with syndicalism in France, Spain, and Latin America. In the United States, all of these ideas were melded together, for example, in Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party and in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). On the eve of World War I, leftist ideas and movements had become so advanced that t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments Some of these essays appeared previously in other venues and we would like to acknowledge them as follows: The essay “The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society” was originally written for a Greek audience in 1992 and later published in English under the title “The Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the Need to Remake Society” in the journal Society and Nature vol. 2, no. 3, 1994. “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century” was originally a video-transmitted speech presented to the First International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, Lisbon, 1998. “The Meaning of Confederalism” was originally published in From Urbanization to Cities,London: Cassell, 1995. &ldqu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Notes

[1] Many less well-known names could be added to this list, but one that in particular I would like very much to single out is the gallant leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, Maria Spiridonova, whose supporters were virtually alone in proposing a workable revolutionary program for the Russian people in 1917–18. Their failure to implement their political insights and replace the Bolsheviks (with whom they initially joined in forming the first Soviet government) not only led to their defeat but contributed to the disastrous failure of revolutionary movements in the century that followed. [2] I frankly regard this contradiction as more fundamental than the often-indiscernible tendency of the rate of profit to decline and t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

<< Last Entry in Anarchism New York, New York	Current Entry in Anarchism The Next Revolution	Next Entry in Anarchism >> The Terror in Russia
All Nearby Items in Anarchism New York, New York, by John Zerzan New York Street Vendors, by Lucy Parsons Newcastle fights the fascists, by Albert Meltzer News From Nowhere, by William Morris News From Spain, by Charlotte Wilson News of the Spanish Revolution, by Federico Arcos Next Eclipse, The, by Anonymous "Soviet" Power, by Nestor Makhno "The State Always has a Conspiracy... Have You?", by Anonymous A Word, The, by Anonymous Next Revolution, The “Anarchism … is a living force within our life …” Anarchism, Education and Alternative Possibilities, by Abraham P. DeLeon Patriotism: Menace to Liberty, A, by Emma Goldman Social Significance of the Modern Drama, The, by Emma Goldman Psychology of Political Violence, The, by Emma Goldman Prisons: Social Crime and Failure, A, by Emma Goldman Russian Revolution and the Soviet Government, The, by Peter Kropotkin Words of a Rebel, by Peter Kropotkin War!, by Peter Kropotkin Wage System, The, by Peter Kropotkin Terror in Russia, The, by Peter Kropotkin

The Next Revolution : Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

By Murray Bookchin

Entry 5002

Public

Author : Murray Bookchin

Author : Ursula K. Le Guin

Chapters