We cannot content ourselves with simplistically dividing civilization into a workday world of everyday life that is properly social, as I call it, in which we reproduce the conditions of our individual existence at work, in the home, and among our friends, and, of course, the state, which reduces us at best to docile observers of the activities of professionals who administer our civic and national affairs. Between these two worlds is still another world, the realm of the political, where our ancestors in the past, at various times and places historically, exercised varying, sometimes complete control over the commune and the confederation to which it belonged.
– Murray Bookchin, A Politics for the Twenty-First Century
Today, the concept of citizenship has already undergone serious erosion through the reduction of citizens to “constituents” of statist jurisdictions, or to “taxpayers” who sustain statist institutions.
– Murray Bookchin, Cities
In the spirit of my recent interest in direct democracy and the future of human governance, I finally got around to reading something that’s been on my radar for a while. It’s a collection of nine essays by the late political philosopher Murray Bookchin published together in a book titled:The Next Revolution – Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy. It did not disappoint.
While there are numerous key points on which Bookchin and I would have disagreed spiritedly, that’s not the purpose of this piece. Aside from being a wealth of information and knowledge (he closely studied nearly every major revolution in the Euro-American world), his greatest service here is a framework through which to understand human governance and how and why it’s all gone so terribly wrong. Many of his themes cover ideas and realizations I’ve come to on my own, but the clarity with which he describes certain key concepts helped refine my thinking. The purpose of this post is to outline some of these ideas.
The most fundamental and significant distinction he emphasizes is the difference between what he calls “statecraft” and “politics.” Statecraft is something done by “the state,” as opposed to politics, which is something done by humans engaged in self-governance. It goes without saying that the modern world is filled with statecraft and very little politics, as properly defined. So much so that we erroneously use the term politics to describe statecraft, something Bookchin finds dangerous and disingenuous.
If statecraft is the practice of using the instruments of the state to exercise power, we need to define what “the state” is. Bookchin offers his own definition in various places.
In The Communalist Project he notes:
Historically, politics did not emerge from the state — an apparatus whose professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of a privileged class.
In The Need to Remake Society he writes:
To create a state is to institutionalize power in the form of a machine that exists apart from the people. It is to professionalize rule and policy-making, to create a distinct interest (be it of bureaucrats, deputies commissars, legislators, the military, the police, ad nauseam) that, however weak or however well intentioned it may be at first, eventually takes on a corruptive power of its own.
One would have to be utterly naive or simply blind to the lessons of history to ignore the fact that the state, “minimal” or not, absorbs and ultimately digests even its most well-meaning critics once they enter it.
The notion that human freedom can be achieved, much less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic – a contradiction in terms.
In Nationalism and the National Question, he notes:
Nation-states, let me emphasize, are states, not only nations. Establishing them means vesting power in a centralized, professional, bureaucratic apparatus that exercises a social monopoly of organized violence, notably in the form of its armies and police. Te state preempts the autonomy of localities and provinces by means of its all-powerful executive and, in republican states, its legislature, whose members are elected or appointed to represent a fixed number of “constituents.” In nation-states, what used to be a citizen, in a self-managed locality vanishes into an anonymous aggregation of individuals who pay a suitable amount of taxes and receive the state’s “services.” “Politics” in the nation-state devolves into a body of exchange relationships in which constituents generally try to get what they pay for in a “political” marketplace of goods and services.
Finally, in The Future of the Left, he writes:
What constitutes a state is not the existence of institutions but rather the existence of professional institutions, set apart from the people, that are designed to dominate them for the express purpose of securing their oppression in one form or another.
Bookchin considered the state to be an aberration, a tool of domination and a cancer on human society. Although statecraft is often sold to the public as democracy or self-government, in reality it is nothing of the sort. It’s the difference between what he would call “professionalized power” (the state) vs. “popular power” (politics).
As Bookchin notes in Libertarian Municipalism:
More importantly, it involves a redefinition of politics, a return to the word’s original Greek meaning as the management of the community, or polis.
The word politics now expresses direct popular control of society by citizens through achieving and sustaining a true democracy in municipal assemblies — this as distinguished from republican systems of representation that preempt the right of the citizen to formulate community and regional policies.
In Cities, he explains:
But democracy, conceived as a face-to-face realm of policymaking, entails a commitment to the Enlightenment belief that all “ordinary” human beings are potentially competent to collectively manage their political affairs — a crucial concept in the thinking, all its limitations aside, of the Athenian democratic tradition and, more radically, of those Parisian sections of 1793 that gave equal voice to women as well as all men.
Bookchin was a huge supporter of direct democracy, in other words, of the people making decisions for themselves within their own communities. He envisioned this being done in a face-to-face manner within public assemblies. Like myself, Bookchin believed this sort of thing would only work properly (and resist statist tendencies) if employed at the local level. He understood that centralization leads to statism and vice versa.
So what did Bookchin see as the ideal political unit for self-governance? He saw it in the municipality.
In The Communalist Project he explained what he wanted to see:
It seeks to radically restructure cities’ governing institutions into popular democratic assemblies based on neighborhoods, towns, and villages.
In The Meaning of Confederalism, Bookchin explains:
The municipality, as I have pointed out in earlier writings, is the most immediate political arena of the individual — the world that is literally a doorstep beyond the privacy of the family and the intimacy of personal friendships. In that primary political arena, where politics should be conceived in the Hellenic sense of literally managing the polis or community, the individual can be transformed from a mere person into an active citizen — from a private being into a public being…The municipality is thus the most authentic area of public life, however much it may have been distorted over the course of history.
Further, in Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy, he notes:
Today, with the increasing centralization and concentration of power in the nation-state, a “new politics” — one that is genuinely new — must be structured institutionally around the restoration of power by municipalities…it presupposes a genuinely democratic desire by people to arrest the growing powers of the nation-state and reclaim them for their community and region.
Importantly, Bookchin believed such self-governing, decentralized municipalities should be connected with one another in a system called confederalism. He defines the term in his essay, The Meaning of Confederalism:
What, then, is confederalism? It is above all a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the polices formulated by the assemblies themselves. Their function is thus a purely administrative and practical one, not a policymaking one like the function of representatives in republican systems of governance.
A confederalist view involves a clear distinction between policymaking and the coordination and execution of adopted policies. Policymaking is exclusively the right of popular community assemblies based on the practices of participatory democracy. Administration and coordination are the responsibility of confederal councils, which become the means for interlinking villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities into confederal networks. Power thus flows from the bottom up instead of from the top down, and in confederations, the flow of power from the bottom up diminishes with the scope of the federal council ranging territorially from localities to regions and from regions to ever-broader territorial areas.
For anyone interested in political philosophy, I highly recommend this book. Though I disagree with Bookchin on several important points, this is a man who thoughtfully and honestly spent most of his life studying past revolutions and thinking about human governance — how it’s been done in the past and how it could be better in the future. The clear distinctions he outlines between statecraft and politics can help readers across the ideological spectrum see the world as it truly functions today, and admit the fact that although democracy and self-government are given great lip service by politicians, it rarely exists in practice.
What humans employ for governance in 2019 primarily consists of “states,” i.e. professional power, as opposed to people power. The general public is made up of electoral constituents, not free citizens participating in the governance of their communities. Bookchin was in favor of decentralized, local rule via direct democracy in contrast to today’s world governed by centralized mega states showcasing a facade of democracy in order to mask an underlying corporate oligarchy or bureaucratic technocracy.
One thing I didn’t expect to see in his work, but proved a pleasant though sobering surprise, was an admission that people themselves need to change in order to successfully implement the sort of governance model he advocates. Since the public is so used to being mere subjects, it’ll be a monumental task to transform them into actual engaged citizens.
Consciousness is another huge factor, and one I’ve written about in the past. Human civilization can only truly take a giant leap forward if enough people experience a profound leap in consciousness. I’m certain this can happen, I just don’t know how long it’ll take.
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Excellent. This current situation, can’t be changed until the populace changes. That becomes revolution.
‘Revolt of the Masses’ by Ortega y Gasset is good as well, also deals with state and nation in chapter 14: Who Rules In the World? A problem with
direct democratic rule is ‘the common man,’ ‘mass man,’ has no well founded public opinions, too absorbed in inane celebrity worship in all its manifestations. No enlightened plebiscite. Direct action in the name of state sans liberal rule of law et al, equals fascism. Ortega was well versed on fascism, having lived in Spain as it was coming on in Spain and Italy in 1930’s.
Consciousness is self perception. In the absence of chains, walls, or fences, people cannot see themselves as captives. As with battery hens, the only way to “Free” them is by changing circumstances, in their case, getting rid of the cages. – They fear this, and if imposed on them, most die terribly.
The accumulation of knowledge and life skills necessary for a free life, is actually considerably more than just a whole lifetime. The hoped for transition is obviously a matter of education, NOT knowledge such as can be found on any computer.
After reading MK’s thoughts and the comments here I must agree with your well written thoughts. The people are not ready for self rule and the only way to prepare them for such a circumstance is through their education. This would seem to be at least one whole generation away and the societal upheavals would be considerable as the old was swept away replaced with the new. The thoughts of John Taylor Gatto on the Trivium method of educating comes to mind.
Over the years I’ve lost confidence in the American public steering political discourse in a new direction for a few reasons. The bankers, MIC, and other interests will fight it with everything they have, plus the general public has become apathetic and lazy. Boomers in particular have no desire to upset the status quo. The fact that we Americans have grown to intensely dislike each other doesn’t help either.
That said, there are potential catalysts that could spark change, such as a crazy war with Iran. Have to say that my respect for Iran has grown these last few weeks after repeatedly calling Trump’s bluffs. They’re trying to force us to either leave them alone (which we’ll never do) or launch a full invasion. It’s the bravest form of military brinkmanship I’ve seen in my lifetime, and if they do sacrifice themselves at the MIC altar, we may all owe Iran a debt of gratitude for throwing a wrench into the works. They definitely have more guts than we do.
To Michael’s point, consciousness can change through economic upheaval, which the Fed and all central banks will collude to prevent, or through the horror of war, which Iran can unleash far better than the 7-8 other countries we’re currently bombing. They’re a much tougher nut than Syria was, plus Russia and China may be forced to help since they’d be next on our list.
I agree with concept of direct democracy as presented by Bookchin, but as both he and Michael stated, “people need to change”, before there is a chance for what I would call “compassionate communalism”. I live in NW Tucson, AZ, and that area is just obsessed with the conservative notion of “rugged individualism” – I see stickers all over that state, “Doesn’t play well with others”, as if this is some kind of moral virtue. This has to change for more locally based governance to work.
Another example of great “direct democracy” was found in the Plains Indians Councils – small groups in a circle, passing the talking stick, and whoever had the stick, had the floor, and could present relevant issues to the “council”. There was no paper, no records – it was all based on honesty and belief in the truth of your word.
That’s a good point. When I lived in northern CO, I used to go up to Wyoming a lot and frequently talked to people in our office there. WY has a big suicide/ substance abuse problem and the state motto should be “leave me alone”, similar to the rugged individualism ideal elsewhere in the west. What these guys have learned the hard way is that when you ask the world to leave you alone, they just might do it, hence the huge problem of people feeling isolated over time. They’re so obsessed with ideological purity that they equate the metropolis of Cheyenne with New York or LA. They’re all city people, right?
The left has an obsession with diversity at any cost and the right embraces isolation and religious fanaticism. While TPTB are indeed playing a divide and conquer game, many of us have willingly walled ourselves off from others. Apparently the propaganda is too strong to resist.
They say that every virtue taken to excess becomes a vice. For example, an over reliance on courage soon leads to rashness, compassion turns into enabling, humility into passivity, etc. The “rugged individualism” of ranchers can lead to isolation, detachment, pride, and eventually suicide when fate deals them a losing hand that would cause even John Wayne to fold.
Is it any wonder that the ancient philosophers taught their pupils to follow the “golden mean” or “middle path” between the extremes? Similarly, the Buddha advised that the best note was obtained when the musical instrument was strung neither too tight nor too loose.
Where is this taught anymore? I don’t see it. I see a general lack of “fine tuning” in almost everything our culture produces. Movies: good vs evil in the most black and white extremes – very little gray area which might require the flexing of moral muscles. Politics: Conservatives vs liberals, Repubs vs Demos – tribalism and personalities! How often do you see actual issues sliced and diced to find out which aspects have merit and which don’t? Most often I find people falling into “all or nothing” camps, as we see with abortion or immigration. Where is the middle way? Where is reason?
From my perspective this is a problem of education, which more often than not does nothing to develop the emotional, moral, and intellectual range of the student (the eventual citizen). A focus on the gorging and regurgitation of facts hardly touches the various aspects of human development that make for a well-rounded or self-actualized person. Maybe George Carlin was right, they only want us smart enough to the run the machines and no more.
“Human civilization can only truly take a giant leap forward if enough people experience a profound leap in consciousness.”
The key control mechanism that the statists use to prevent that “leap in consciousness” is the Hegelian Dialectic.
Thesis vs. Anti-thesis = Solution
As long as the majority of citizens within a Nation State play into the left versus right, Party versus Party, Dialectic, there will be no leap in consciousness for the majority.
The entire Russiagate canard is a perfect example of the Dialectic being employed by the elites who benefit by keeping the Dialectic in place.
In the case of Russiagate:
Thesis: Trump colluded with the Russians to effect the election.
Anti-thesis: Trump did not collude with Russia to effect the election.
Solution: Trump did not collude with the Russians. But WE can all (both sides of the Dialectic) agree that Russia attempted to interfere with the election. Therefore WE all agree that Russia is the enemy that must be dealt with accordingly.
So the geopolitical toehold they are now setting up to move towards how Russia must be “dealt with”, is Iran.
But as always with the elites, the underlying reason is further enrichment for the elites. War is very profitable for them.
Here’s the good news. All of us as individuals have the ability (especially in this day and age) to spread the word to our friends, family, and fellow citizens, regarding the Dialectical trap they keep falling into, and stop playing into the Dialectic.
It will take some time. But once there are enough people who see through it, a groundswell effect will occur.
In the meantime, let’s hope it doesn’t take a war to create that “leap in consciousness”.
—
While the decentralization of power to the township/village/municipal level is, in theory, attractive, in practice, the inevitable result is a level of local chronyism that is nearly forgotten in today’s times.
Even under a direct democracy (what a shitty, shitty idea that is!) where all legislative changes might come down to a vote, there is still a bureaucratic element that will improperly wield whatever power to which it is given or can assume.
Chronyism at the highest levels of government will remain in place, while expanded at the local level.
Think old school county politics, Boss Hogg-style
There will always be people who are oriented towards service to self.
That does not mean that they will always hold positions of power and influence indefinitely that allow them to employ chronyism indefinitely on a local or national level.
But that’s more about a sea change in collective consciousness that will not happen overnight. Nonetheless, it will happen.
if you want people to change their world views you have to reshape the truths of their daily lives. In the usa, but really anywhere, the biggest influence on people for how the world works is focused home/ work relationships. In thdcworkplacd you have the employee/employer relationship. Its common knowledge that this relationship is hierarchical in the majority of businesses. Every choice in our lives is focused on will you be the employee or the employer. What power will you yield as the employee or employer. So you have a system where the average person plans to spend atleast 40hrs a week for their adult lives. From birth you are influenced by weither your parents are the employee/emlloyers. They will seek education to make you a model employee/employer. They will promote/demote your behaviours to suit that future role. You get to view how you parents survive in their current roles in order to decide if that is for you.
The home is also hierarchical. Parents control children, elders control youth. There is no decentralized control in the household. You are not shaped to make any choices until you have your own household.
It becomes clear why the hierarchical system is so commonly accepted by the majority when put forth in politics. The turths of these systems of home/work are what people see everyday and accept this is just the way it works everywhere else.
So how can you get to a political system of decentralization, well you have to start in the family unit and the workplace, if you every want people to spread that truth to government. If they know the decentralized direct democracy model works in family and work, its an easy sell to politics.
It is important to remember that the “state” as Bookchin defines it, evolved within a society whose structure was one of fundamental Disparity of power in society. The development of capitalism did not change this. On the contrary it replaced the old structures of disparity with a new one that responded to the growing awareness of the little people, vile creature that they are. As a result the lower orders believe they have been liberated when they’ve merely been lliberalized.
If you are to have a free society you must rid yourself of the Great Disparity. Ignore it and you will only have more of the same whether you call it capitalism or socialism.
I don’t see local assemblies, coordinating administratively with others effectively. For example, if one locale wants to expand a shared road to a 4 line highway because of traffic to a large growing commercial area within its community, why would the nearby one do so if it had no similar benefit to gain from it. A “state” can provide necessary upgrades that may on the surface benefit some locales disaportionaly but overall the benefits filter out to nearby locales.
in one post you write that bad people crave power more than good and will do anything to get it.
they don’t need a state to get power, they just need their own willfull violence.
so good people for professionalized institutions to protect themselves, from BAD people and thus the state is born. maybe you disagree, but if the state didn’t serve the good people in many capacities it would be torn down. and alas, herein lies the circuitous definition of the monstrous oxymoron, but. poorly described by bookchin or you.
pressure collapsing the state upon itself builds as it increasingly oppresses teh people and decreasingly serves them. this is the point where the ‘good people’ and ‘bad’ too, both begin to critique oppose and attack the state as well as , possibly, the privileged classes it more commonly serves than the unprivileged. and still….anarchy is not a good thing. the state may trick others into believing small government is anarchy, in order to preserve its status and size, but this does not negate the terrible problem of an absence of any government. just look at venezuala.
in the absence of all total professional governance, a complex, and large society, built up with massive stores of wealth, stares down the loss of all that wealth as the vultures come to strip it down. all it takes is a small set of thieve-thugging vultures to asset strip an entire society by creating fear and panic with violence, and then steal the easy pickings. look at post soviet russia for the idea that ‘small government’ and absence of government are the same. they are not. post soviet russia’s small government was so small it could not fight off the gang wars and mafia wars of the oligarchs who fought and fueded to own what little could be stolen that had previously belonged to the state and that now could only be said to be an asset of the ‘nation’ .
nothing to be said about the oligarch wars other than they were bloody and destructive and the wealth stolen fled to swiss bank accounts. perhaps putin is a cretin and theif in charge, but the people in russia now at least have a sense of governance and order, and not open chaos. the tax rate is 13percent. and sure it may be corrupt but so is everywhere else, and it’s orderly . the state is helping the nation grow wealth by maintaining this order.