#date January 1986

#source http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives1.html

#lang en

These "politicians" and their "politics" are generally regarded with a certain measure of contempt by many Americans. They come to power partly through "parties," which are highly structured bureaucracies, and profess to "represent" people -- at times, one person for vast numbers of people such as Congressmen and Senators. They are "elected" and belong to "the Elect" (to translate an old religious term into a "political" one), and, in this sense, form a distinct hierarchical elite however much they profess to "speak" in "the People's" name. They are not "the People." They are its "representatives" at best, which sets them apart from the people, and its manipulators at worst, which often sets them against the people. Quite often, they are very offensive creatures because they engage in manipulative, immoral, and elitist practices, using mass media and normally betraying some of their most basic programmatic commitments to "serve" the people. Rather, they tend to serve special interest groups, usually well- heeled monied ones, who are likely to advance their careers and material well-being.

It remains to emphasize that such free communities did not always or necessarily dissolve into self-contained, mutually exclusive, and parochial units. They often networked with each other to coordinate their decisions in a cooperative way. They confederated -- initially on the equivalent of what we, today, would designate as a "county" level; later, in many cases, on a regional (perhaps equivalently, in the U.S., on a statewide) level. We have a rich history of such municipal confederations, in some cases structured around grassroots, even neighborhood, control that have yet to be given the study they deserve -- and in the U.S. no less than in Europe. In some cases, too, confederal councils coordinated decisions made by local assemblies which at all times formulated policies, while recallable, carefully supervised councils administered them in a purely technical way. Wherever experts were needed to provide strictly technical alternatives, they were organized into advisory boards and, lacking any decision-making powers, advanced various alternatives for consideration, modification, and determination by the citizens' assemblies in villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities. And where differences existed, they were simply adjudicated by conference committees or arbitration boards, such as they still are today when different, often conflicting variations of the same law are passed by the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

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The modern version of what we call "politics," today, is really statecraft. It emphasizes "professionalism," not popular control; the monopoly of power by the few, not the empowerment of the many; the "election" of an "Elect" group, not face-to-face democratic processes that involve the people as a whole; "representation," not participation. We use "politics" to mobilize "constituencies" to achieve preselected goals, not educate them into the self management of society and the formation of the strong selves that make for genuine individuality and personality. We deal with the people as a passive "electorate" whose "political" task is to ritualistically vote for "candidates" who come from so-called "parties," not for deputies who are strictly mandated to administer the policies formulated and decided by active citizens. We stress obedience, not involvement -- and even distort words like "involvement" to mean little more than a spectatorial stance in which the individual is lost in the "mass" and the "masses" are themselves fragmented into isolated, frustrated, and powerless atoms.

This image of "politics," as 1 have indicated, is a fairly recent phenomenon that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century and made its way into popular consciousness in fairly recent times. It was still not the accepted notion of "politics" in the last century. Quite to the contrary: the Nation-State in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy -- and perhaps most significantly, in the United States -- still had to make every effort to assert its authority over localities and regions against massive popular resistance. In America, this process is perhaps less Complete than most European countries. Our Revolution, two centuries ago, gave enormous powers -- initially complete power -- to regional and local areas (I refer to our first constitution, The Articles of Confederation, which gave the original thirteen states pre-emptive authority over the national government -- a constitution, I may add, that favored the farmers and urban poor over the wealthy, hence its "ignoble" place in our history texts) and structured our defense around a citizen's militia, not a professional army.