#title Murray Bookchin and the value of democratic municipalism
#author Cain Shelley
#date 2022
#source *European Journal of Political Theory* (2022), [[https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851221128248][DOI:10.1177/14748851221128248]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-10-13T06:37:09
#authors Cain Shelley
#topics Murray Bookchin; agency; libertarian municipalism; municipal government; municipalism; political parties; trade unions; Political Theory; politics
#notes Creative Commons License
*** Abstract
Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising
social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national
political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other.
Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that
democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local
residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve
the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also
make valuable contributions to projects of just social change. I
identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of
democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the
latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this
form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions
of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent
political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade
unionism necessary to secure social justice.
Keywords: Murray Bookchin, political agency, municipal politics, partisanship, trade unionism, new municipalism
*** Introduction
Much contemporary political theory focuses on examining and constructing
abstract principles of social justice or defending the specific
institutional arrangements and policies that could put these principles
into practice. However, the successful implementation of these
principles and these institutional changes clearly depends on many
questions of political strategy and tactics, which exist in the realm of
non-ideal theory. In particular, the successful transition to a more
socially just order seems to depend heavily on identifying the agents
well-placed under present political circumstances to carry out the
actions necessary to establish these changes. Call this *the question of
appropriate political agency*.
The many issues surrounding ‘the link between principles and agency’ –
as Lea [[#index.xhtml#bibr61-14748851221128248][Ypi (2012:]] 35) has put
it – have thus far received relatively little attention in the
voluminous literature on social justice.[1] But where
political theorists have begun to turn their attention to these matters,
they have thus far tended to highlight the potential value of two kinds
of collective agents: national political parties on the one hand
([[#index.xhtml#bibr18-14748851221128248][Dryzek, 2015]];
[[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White and Ypi, 2016]]) and (to
a lesser extent) trade unions on the other
([[#index.xhtml#bibr39-14748851221128248][O’Neill and White, 2018]]). In
what follows, I want to suggest that there are further useful resources
for this unfolding debate about appropriate political agency in the
thought of American philosopher
[[#index.xhtml#bibr10-14748851221128248][Murray Bookchin (1921–2006)]].
Although Bookchin’s thought has been fairly influential across a range
of activist movements
([[#index.xhtml#bibr49-14748851221128248][Tarinski, 2021]]), his thought
is only rarely the subject of extended discussion among contemporary
political theorists ([[#index.xhtml#bibr12-14748851221128248][Brinn,
2020]]; [[#index.xhtml#bibr59-14748851221128248][White, 2011]]). This is
unfortunate, I will claim, because there are valuable resources in his
work for contending that *democratic municipalist agents* – democratic
associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood
assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and
services – can often also make valuable contributions to the political
project of just social change, alongside trade unions and national
parties.
Murray Bookchin's published writing touches on a very wide range of
issues, including debates in ecology, anthropology, and human nature
([[#index.xhtml#bibr4-14748851221128248][Biehl, 2015]]). This paper thus
certainly does not attempt a summation of Bookchin's philosophical
thought. Rather, my focus is – more modestly – on isolating just a few
strands of Bookchin's multifaceted output that I claim can provide some
valuable but overlooked resources for the contemporary debate about
political agency. I begin in the next two sections by setting down some
conceptual parameters, first offering brief definitions of national
political parties and trade unions, and then moving on to highlight how
democratic municipalist agents can represent a distinct agential form,
irreducible to these other, more familiar forms of political agency.
The following two sections then introduce what I take to be Bookchin's
two main arguments for the value of municipal political action: Bookchin
sees this form of action as, first, necessary for the eventual arrival
of a completely non-hierarchical society at some point in the future,
and second, as well-placed to help foster a more politically aware and
active citizenry in the here-and-now. Although Bookchin's long-term
argument is likely to be convincing only to those who already share in
the specifics of his utopian vision, I argue that his more short-term
case can be endorsed by those holding a fairly wide range of ultimate
normative visions and also aligns much more closely with a range of
empirical findings from the social sciences.
In the final section, I then describe what I take to be the central
implication of the Bookchinian theses I reconstruct for the emerging
debate on political agency. I claim that because of the ability of
democratic municipalist agents to contribute to combatting political
disengagement in the way Bookchin convincingly describes, many
proponents of greater social justice ought to view these agents as able
to make valuable contributions to projects of just social change, albeit
usually alongside other, more commonly discussed political agents such
as national parties and unions.
*** Parties and unions as agents of social justice
What I am calling the national political party will likely be the most
familiar form of political agency to many readers, so I begin my
definitions here, before extending my focus outward to other agential
forms. Inspired by [[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White and
Ypi’s (2016:]] 21–26) influential work, we can state that there are
three crucial conditions that typically need to be met for a national
political party to be said to exist.[2] First, there must be
a number of individuals that share a series of broad political aims.
Second, these individuals must together be involved in a formal
association of some kind. And finally, this association must make
regular efforts to control or maintain control of existing national
political decision-making institutions, in order to advance these shared
aims.
The first condition insists that several individuals exist who are
united by a series of broad political aims, rather than by (for
instance) common hair colour or a common desire to play football. White
and Ypi state that these broad political aims should amount to a
relatively all-encompassing ‘interpretation of how power should be
exercised’ in society ([[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White
and Ypi, 2016]]: 21). This interpretation of how political power, in
general, should be exercised need not be completely rigid and uniformly
shared: every political party tends to exhibit at least a degree of
transformation in its aims over time, as well as a fairly large amount
of internal disagreement. But the basic idea is that the individuals
that together make up a party typically need to share at least the
central components of a series of broad aims in order to constitute a
collective of the right kind.
The second condition insists that these individuals not only share
political aims but also be collectively involved in a formal association
with one another. As White and Ypi note, this usually means that there
are a set of documents created by the group that set down ‘a system of
rules’ of some kind ([[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White and
Ypi, 2016]]: 104). These rules typically set out the procedures
determining how the like-minded individuals that make up the party can
attain and lose the various roles or offices within the party (such as
leader, electoral candidate, or spokesperson), and what powers and
responsibilities are attached to these offices, as well as general
guidelines about how the various kinds of work the party is required to
undertake ought to be divided and conducted. Of course, party members
may associate with one another on the basis of a deeply hierarchical or
a directly democratic set of rules and procedures, so this condition
does not prejudge the specific questions of party organisation and
professionalisation. Rather, it merely states that the association must
be organised by a formal set of rules of some kind.
The final condition insists that this relatively formalised association
of individuals with shared political aims regularly acts to further its
goals in a specific set of ways. Members of national political parties
must make attempts to gain or maintain control of national-level
political decision-making institutions – what White and Ypi call the
‘executive body able to make authoritative demands’ over the entire
territory of a nation – usually through contesting elections of some
kind ([[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White and Ypi, 2016]]:
187–189). It is this third condition that most clearly distinguishes the
national political party from related agential forms such as the social
movement: a movement like *Black Lives Matter* is a relatively
formalised association of individuals united by a series of broad
political aims, but it does not make regular collective attempts to gain
control of existing political decision-making institutions in order to
advance these goals, tending instead to exert pressure on these
institutions from outside in various ways.[3]
Why might formal associations of individuals making regular attempts to
control national decision-making institutions to advance their shared
aims be valuable agents for realising just social change? Agents of this
sort are primarily seen as valuable because when members share political
aims compatible with what justice demands, the national political party
is perfectly positioned to ‘influence primary agents of justice such as
the state’, partly through exerting pressure on other political parties,
but primarily through coming to occupy the state itself
([[#index.xhtml#bibr18-14748851221128248][Dryzek, 2015]]: 381). The
basic idea here is that, assuming you live in a country where the locus
of political power remains with the centralised state, then national
political parties are often the most appropriate agents for coming to
manoeuvre the levers of power in a society such that it more closely
approximates a given set of principles of justice.
Parties in fact appear particularly well-placed to achieve the changes
required to realise social justice, because they occupy a relatively
unique intermediary role between individual citizens and the state
apparatus. These agents can not only enact social change through
alterations to state policy mechanisms but can also articulate and
sculpt shared interests in civil society
([[#index.xhtml#bibr58-14748851221128248][White and Ypi, 2017]]: 448).
White and Ypi also claim that political parties offer particularly
desirable vehicles for the maintenance and consolidation of citizens’
motivations to participate in political activity: formal and ongoing
collective associations with a chance of coming to manoeuvre the levers
of state power can often incentivise greater political participation
than more informal and spontaneous forms of collective action with a
less clear route to the alteration of national public policy (2016:
87–89).
A further important type of political agent is the trade union, which
Sidney and Beatrice Webb famously define as an ‘association of
wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions
of their working lives’ ([[#index.xhtml#bibr56-14748851221128248][Webb
and Webb, 1920]]: 1). We can translate this definition into the format
followed above fairly easily, such that the three defining conditions of
the trade union are as follows: first, there must be a number of
wage-earners each with the aim of maintaining and/or improving their
working conditions. We can construe conditions of employment broadly to
encompass everything from wages, health and safety protections, sexual
harassment policies, termination of employment and redundancy policies,
pension, holiday and sick pay entitlements, and so on. Although this
will sometimes amount to a fairly all-encompassing interpretation of how
power should be exercised in society, it need not do so. Second, these
wage-earners must be involved in a formal association with one another
of some kind (as with a political party, this usually means that there
are a set of documents created by the group setting down rules and
assigning offices and again, these rules may be hierarchical or directly
democratic). And finally, this association must make regular attempts to
influence the various decision-making institutions which together
determine the group's working conditions, in order to advance this
aim.[4]
A whole range of institutions – workplace management committees,
national regulatory bodies for employment practices, global trade
arrangements, etc. – collectively help to determine conditions in the
workplace and my definition insists that trade unions engage in attempts
to influence at least some of these institutions. Beyond specifying the
necessity of influencing what we might term workplace-defining
institutions, however, I leave the range of activities the union might
pursue very open: they might engage in collective bargaining, the
provision of work-related training, employee representation in workplace
tribunals, the funding of national political parties, strike action,
appeals to international courts, and so on.
Although trade unions have been the subject of less extended discussion
than the national political party, a number of authors have recently
highlighted the potential value of this particular agential form in
realising greater social justice. For example, O’Neill and White claim
that strong trade unions can help ensure that national parties continue
to effectively represent the interests of the communities with which
they have historic ties, even when these parties are faced with
incentives to no longer do so, through the exertion of political
pressure (funding, threats of strike, and so on)
([[#index.xhtml#bibr39-14748851221128248][O’Neill and White, 2018]]:
255–60). Gourevitch and Robin have also recently contended that because
the workplace is often experienced as an ‘institution of domination’,
trade unions are particularly well-placed to motivate political
participation. Although national political parties will sometimes appear
distant and unconnected from the daily experiences of many individuals,
active trade unions can appeal to the lived experience of many citizens
in such a way that can successfully persuade them to get involved in
social justice activism (2020: 394–5;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr39-14748851221128248][O’Neill and White, 2018]]:
255).
*** What are democratic municipalist agents?
There are many other forms of collective political agency which
currently exist or have previously existed that do not fit neatly into
the two camps described above, including social movements
([[#index.xhtml#bibr17-14748851221128248][Deveaux, 2018]]), which I have
already briefly mentioned. But the additional agential form which
interests me here, and which will be the focus of the remainder of the
paper, is what Murray Bookchin and others have termed *democratic
municipalist agents* ([[#index.xhtml#bibr10-14748851221128248][Bookchin
2006]], 107; [[#index.xhtml#bibr9-14748851221128248][1992]], 238;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr16-14748851221128248][Cumbers and Traill, 2021]]:
254; [[#index.xhtml#bibr30-14748851221128248][Kioupkiolis, 2019]]: 106;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr40-14748851221128248][Parson, 2018]]:
223).[5] The term ‘municipality’ – derived from the Latin
*municipium* – refers to a geographic subdivision within a nation state
that governs some of its own affairs. Sometimes this subdivision will be
a major city, and at other times, it will be a much smaller town, or
even one borough or ward within a larger city: this depends on the
extent and nature of political devolution in the country in question.
But the basic idea is that it is a term which refers to some organised
locality or community within a state that exercises at least a degree of
self-government, such as over matters of public transport or waste
disposal.
There are several fairly well-known examples of democratic municipalism,
including the Italian democratic municipalism of the 19th and 20th
centuries ([[#index.xhtml#bibr33-14748851221128248][Kohn, 2003]]) and
the use of ‘popular planning’ and other democratic measures by the UK's
Greater London Council in the 1970s
([[#index.xhtml#bibr13-14748851221128248][Brownill, 1988]]). More
recently, commentators have pointed to a wave of so-called ‘New
Municipalist’ agents inspired by this historic tradition, including
contemporaneous efforts in Jackson, Mississippi
([[#index.xhtml#bibr2-14748851221128248][Akuno, 2017]];
[[#index.xhtml#bibr26-14748851221128248][Guttenplan, 2017]]), Messina,
Italy ([[#index.xhtml#bibr3-14748851221128248][Alagna 2018]]), and
Rosario, Argentina ([[#index.xhtml#bibr43-14748851221128248][Rushton
2018]]). Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this ‘renascent global
movement’ ([[#index.xhtml#bibr52-14748851221128248][Thompson, 2021]]:
334), however, is *Barcelona en Comú* (*BenC*), which swept to power
across the Spanish city in 2015, with its leader, Ada Colau, winning the
mayoralty ([[#index.xhtml#bibr23-14748851221128248][Gilmartin, 2019]]).
Since gaining office, Colau and her team have overseen a number of
municipal reforms including, most prominently, the launch of a
municipally owned renewable energy company, which supplies electricity
to all city council buildings, as well as to a growing number of
citizens’ homes. *BenC* also mandated that 30% of all newly built homes
in Barcelona are to be rented or sold at affordable rates, which has
resulted in a substantial increase in the quantity of Barcelona's
affordable housing stock. They have also sanctioned banks for the vacant
housing they own and closed over 2000 illegal tourist apartments
([[#index.xhtml#bibr45-14748851221128248][Russell and Reyes, 2017]]).
Although *BenC*'s loss of its majority in the mayoral elections of 2019
has slowed the implementation of its reform agenda somewhat
([[#index.xhtml#bibr53-14748851221128248][Vázquez 2019]]), another
policy to have been passed in recent years is the creation of a series
of ‘superblocks’, which cut through-traffic in congested, highly
polluted areas of the city by heavily restricting car use and opening up
roads for novel green space, cycle lanes, and public squares
([[#index.xhtml#bibr14-14748851221128248][Burgen, 2020]]).
*BenC* have also organised biweekly neighbourhood assemblies in each
district of Barcelona since their inception. These regular meetings
discuss issues of concern for residents and steps the platform ought to
take in order to alleviate them
([[#index.xhtml#bibr29-14748851221128248][Islar and Irgil, 2018]]). The
electoral program of *BenC* was in fact itself assembled through a
process of voting in assembly meetings among residents. And to
supplement face-to-face deliberation, BenC have also created
the ‘Decidim Barcelona’ web-based virtual democratic assembly
([[#index.xhtml#bibr52-14748851221128248][Thompson, 2021]]: 329).
Building on the definitions of national political parties and trade
unions offered above, I propose that we understand democratic
municipalist agents such as *BenC* as: *democratic associations of local
residents that both build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and make
improvements to the municipal provision of basic goods and services*. As
with national political parties and trade unions, this means there are
three central defining features of this agential form.
First, there must be a number of local residents that share the twin
aims of *democratising* municipal governance to some extent on the one
hand and *improving* the municipal provision of certain goods and
services on the other. This first aim entails wishing to shift the locus
of power within a given municipality somewhat, away from a traditional
hierarchical city council and its bureaucrats and rooting it in local
residents themselves. And the second entails wishing to enhance what
Bookchin calls ‘access to the resources that make daily life tolerable’,
such as ‘shelter or adequate park space and transportation’ (2006: 114).
Different democratic municipalist agents will clearly disagree about
exactly what ‘improving’ the provision of certain basic goods and
services of this kind will look like, and what precise form the
increased influence of local residents over municipal decision-making
ought to take. But this defining condition tries not to overly
predetermine the specific ideological content of the municipalist group
and is compatible with a wide range of shared aims that fit these broad
types.[6]
Second, the individuals sharing these aims must together be involved in
a formal *and democratic* association of some kind. This condition
leaves the exact nature of the rules and procedures governing the
association largely unspecified but is still more restrictive than the
definition of national parties and unions mentioned above.[7]
There must not only be rules and procedures of some kind governing the
association but these procedures must also ensure that those occupying
positions of authority within the association are accountable in various
ways to other members of the group.
Finally, this association must make regular efforts to *both* control or
maintain control of municipal decision-making institutions *and* to
build and empower neighborhood assemblies, in order to advance its
shared aims. Pursuing this dual set of actions is arguably the crucial
defining feature of democratic municipalism. Traditional political
parties, as White and Ypi recognise, can also seek to enter
decision-making institutions at a ‘local […] or federal’ level and make
improvements to the provision of goods and services
([[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White and Ypi, 2016]], 201).
But formal associations pursuing only this first act do not count as
democratic municipalist agents, on my definition.
Consider, for instance, Murray Bookchin's fascinating critique of Bernie
Sanders’ tenure as mayor of Vermont.
[[#index.xhtml#bibr7-14748851221128248][Bookchin (1986a)]] chastises
Sanders and his team for making positive noises about giving local
residents an ‘appreciable share in the city's government’ but in fact
practicing only a form of ‘managerial radicalism’ with a strong
‘technocratic bias’. What distinguishes municipalist managerial
radicalism from *democratic* municipalism, Bookchin notes, is that the
latter set of agents either use ‘what real power their offices confer to
legislate popular assemblies into existence’ or grant existing
neighbourhood assemblies greater influence over municipal
decision-making (2006: 115;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr4-14748851221128248][Biehl, 2015]]: 147).
Of course, there is no one way to combine the two central activities of
the democratic municipalist agent in practice, and there will often be
tensions resulting from the simultaneous pursuit of both.[8]
But again, I seek a fairly broad definition, that captures a range of
specific forms of municipalist practice: as with our accounts of parties
and unions, our definition ideally needs to be sufficiently expansive to
account for at least some of the inevitable disagreement among
participants in these agents, rather than insisting that only one very
specific combination of activities and procedures counts as a ‘real’
instance of the association.
Because democratic municipalist agents are seeking not merely to
influence decision-making institutions from the outside, but to actively
*control* them, they are, as should be clear, fairly distinct from trade
unions and social movements. Additionally, because they are not
attempting to gain control of *national* decision-making institutions,
but only municipal ones (and because they have a less broad, more
targeted set of political aims) they are also distinct from national
political parties. And because they are not solely seeking to control
*existing* municipal institutions but also to create and empower *new*
decision-making assemblies (and are organised on the basis of not just
any set of formal rules, but a democratic kind), they are also not
reducible to traditional electoralist local parties. My claim is that,
as a result of these contrasts, democratic municipal agents represent a
distinct agential form, irreducible to the various familiar forms of
political agency discussed above.
With these conceptual parameters in place, I now want to consider
whether democratic municipalism might play a valuable role in bringing
about just social change. Murray Bookchin is unquestionably the
political thinker that has done the most to flesh out a case for the
potential value of municipalist agency, so the next two sections
summarise two relatively distinct arguments found in his work. First,
there is a claim about the role that municipal political agents can play
in achieving Bookchin's ultimate utopia: a completely non-hierarchical,
stateless society. Second, there is a claim about the role that
democratic municipalist politics can play in overcoming political
disengagement in the here-and-now. Having reconstructed and summarised
these claims, I then turn in the final section to what I take to be the
central implication of these claims for the contemporary debate about
appropriate political agency.
*** Bookchin's case: The long-term view
The case that Bookchin most frequently makes for the value of democratic
municipalism concerns the role that this form of agency can play in
bringing about what he calls a ‘non-hierarchical society’
([[#index.xhtml#bibr6-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1982]]: 340). The
basic idea is that the radically egalitarian forms of political
consciousness necessary for such a society to come into existence ‘can
be raised’ among residents most effectively by democratic municipalist
agents ([[#index.xhtml#bibr11-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 2015]]: 100).
The argument typically has a tripartite structure, running something
like this: (1) the most ethically desirable kind of society is one free
from hierarchy, (2) the most important precondition for stably realising
this kind of society is a radical transformation of political character,
and (3) the political actors that can most effectively deliver this
gradual process of character transformation over the long term (and thus
further the chances of realising Bookchin's ultimate goal) are
democratic municipalist agents.
Concerning (1), Bookchin's ultimate normative vision is to eradicate all
forms of hierarchy from contemporary societies. A society is
non-hierarchical, in Bookchin's view, when everyone has roughly the same
amount of power to coerce others as everyone else, that is, when there
are no salient *rankings* with respect to this capacity
([[#index.xhtml#bibr6-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1982]]: 74;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][1980]]: 29; 49). Coercion
happens when an individual has the will of another imposed on them and
is forced to act in a way contrary to their wishes solely because others
want them to ([[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1980]]:
121).
Our own societies, Bookchin claims, are currently highly divided, even
‘pyramidal’ in form with respect to this metric
([[#index.xhtml#bibr6-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1982]]: 338;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][1980]]: 60): a few individuals
possess large amounts of power to coerce others, whilst most people
exist at a much lower ranking, spending much of their time being
commanded and with little power to coerce others. Bookchin holds that a
society is only *truly* non-hierarchical when: the class structure is
abolished (removing the tendency of the owners of productive property to
exert greater coercive power over the propertyless than the propertyless
exert over them), state bureaucrats and political elites do not exert
greater coercive power over the citizenry than the citizenry exerts over
them (i.e., when the state as traditionally conceived has been
abolished), men no longer exert greater coercive power over women than
women exert over them (when patriarchy has been abolished), one racial
group no longer exerts greater coercive power over other racial groups
than these other groups exert over them (when white supremacy has been
abolished) and when the old no longer exert greater coercive power over
the young than the young exert over the old (when society is no longer
‘gerontocratic’) ([[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][Bookchin,
1980]]: 29; 63; 95). A less negative way to put Bookchin's ultimate
vision is thus as a society of maximal ‘personal empowerment’, in which
everyone retains roughly the same amount of power to decide for
themselves how they wish to act at all times, regardless of the
productive resources at their disposal, their race, gender, or age, or
whether they happen to be a professional politician or civil servant or
not ([[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1980]]: 121).
Concerning (2), Bookchin claims that a non-hierarchical society of this
sort can only be reached and endure over time if the citizens of present
hierarchical societies engage in a prolonged process of
re-socialisation. Coercive hierarchies are currently so deeply rooted in
our sensibilities and the ‘orientation of our psyches’ (1982: 340),
according to Bookchin, that the arrival of a non-hierarchical society is
politically impossible over the short or medium term. The socialisation
of contemporary citizens into a ‘hierarchical mentality’
([[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1980]]: 60) is
currently so extensive, in Bookchin's view, that without radically
reconfiguring everyday interactions and thought patterns at a
fundamental level, these various undesirable hierarchies will continue
to reproduce themselves *ad infinitum*. Engendering a deep and enduring
preference for non-hierarchy and self-government at a ‘molecular’ level,
therefore, is a crucial precondition for the eventual arrival of
Bookchin's preferred future society (1980: 76).
Concerning (3), Bookchin claims that democratic municipalist agents are
particularly well-placed to effectively deliver this gradual process of
character transformation over the long term. One important reason for
this is that municipal agents can set up and empower the kinds of
neighbourhood assemblies where Bookchin envisions this desired process
of re-socialisation most effectively playing out. Bookchin understands
participation in a local ‘discursive arena in which people can
intellectually and emotionally confront each other, indeed, experience
each other through dialogue, body language, personal intimacy, and
face-to-face modes of expression in the course of making collective
decisions’ as the perfect ‘educational and self-formative’ or
‘character-building’ process for gradually eroding hierarchical
sensibilities (1992: 249–251).
This character-building process, which Bookchin sometimes also calls –
drawing on classical Greek thought – *paideia,* plays out as people
confront their relative powerlessness through extensive democratic
discussion, gradually coming to understand the source of their problems
to be the pyramidal hierarchical structure of present society, and thus
shedding their attachment to hierarchies of all forms. Once a social
group experiences a taste of directly discussing and mandating all
exercises of coercive power over others, Bookchin suggests, they will
come to prefer this mode of self-government and self-empowerment to
present arrangements that involve being commanded by others (1992:
249–251).
Another important reason for holding that democratic municipalist agents
are well-placed to aid this long-term process of character
transformation relates to their tendency to incur the wrath of the
various beneficiaries of present hierarchical societies. The forces of
the state and its bureaucracy, and others who benefit from society's
pyramidal form, Bookchin claims, are inherently opposed to relinquishing
their power (2015: 18). Wishing to maintain power over the vast bulk of
the citizenry, these agents will make concerted attempts to co-opt and
crush democratic municipalist initiatives at the local level as they
gain in popularity and influence. An important part of the gradual
process of character transformation that democratic municipalist agents
can affect thus concerns the potentially radicalising effects on
citizens of seeing in a particularly visceral way the hostility of
certain privileged sections of society to direct democratic rule.
Bookchin's hope here is that as participants in neighbourhood assemblies
come to see the state and the broader ruling classes’ attempts to quash
them, they will ultimately learn that a society of maximal personal
empowerment and direct democratic rule is incompatible with the
continued existence of the state, and a capitalist class (2015: 18).
Bookchin thus envisions the power of society's elites gradually slipping
away as the long-term process of *paidea* in neighbourhood assemblies
eventually leads more and more citizens to reject traditional forms of
political and economic authority and come to prefer local
self-government.
That then, is Bookchin's primary argument for the value of democratic
municipalist agency: achieving a completely non-hierarchical society
depends on the radical transformation of citizens’ political character,
and the empowered neighbourhood assemblies constructed by municipalist
agents are well-placed to organise this process of re-socialisation.
What should we make of this case? One fairly uncontroversial desideratum
for any answer to the question of appropriate political agency is surely
that the causal claims it makes be characterised by a high degree of
empirical plausibility. Although a degree of empirical speculation is
unavoidable, we should insist that contributions to the appropriate
agency debate nonetheless do not require excessive leaps of the
imagination to be found plausible and be compatible with at least some
existing findings from the social sciences. Bookchin's long-term case,
however, arguably does not satisfactorily meet this desideratum. Can a
completely non-hierarchical, stateless and classless society really be
considered a feasible political goal, for instance, reachable from where
we are now? And what reasons are there to think that participation in
neighbourhood assemblies can radicalise real-world participants to the
extent that they come to reject each and every form of political,
economic and other hierarchy in society? Why should we expect the
specific causal pathways related to character transformation that
Bookchin discusses to play out in exactly the way he speculates?
Bookchin's long-term case, as it currently stands, arguably does not
provide particularly compelling answers to these questions.
An additional desideratum for a compelling answer to the question of
appropriate political agency is surely that it be capable of
accommodating at least a degree of reasonable disagreement about the
ultimate shape of a socially just society. The intuition behind this
standard is that, in severely unjust societies at least, we should be
able to say something about the broad kinds of agents and actions
required to *begin* reducing injustice without specifying too exactly
what a completely just society should look like. Contributions to the
appropriate agency debate clearly cannot remain entirely neutral on
whether–say–extreme economic inequalities are or are not compatible with
social justice (the kinds of agents required to bring about social
change will obviously radically differ depending on where one stands on
an issue like this). But this desideratum insists that claims about
appropriate political agency ideally do not require subscribing to a
very specific and contentious ultimate normative vision in order for the
agent under discussion to be found a potentially valuable one.
Bookchin's long-term case arguably also doesn't fare particularly well
on this front. In particular, whilst many proponents of social justice
will oppose the most severe and debilitating relations of hierarchy that
Bookchin discusses, they will nonetheless be sceptical of the idea that
a totally stateless and classless society is all-things-considered
normatively desirable. Bookchin's view is that there is ‘no longer […]
any social rationale […] for bureaucracy and the state
([[#index.xhtml#bibr8-14748851221128248][Bookchin 1986b]]: 19). But of
course, many proponents of greater social justice will be suspicious of
this claim and will in fact be wedded to various progressive defences of
the state. Many currently well-regarded egalitarian visions of social
justice, for instance – property-owning democracy, social democracy,
market socialism, and so on – make space for the continued existence of
states and socioeconomic classes of some kind
([[#index.xhtml#bibr46-14748851221128248][Schweickart, 2011]];
[[#index.xhtml#bibr51-14748851221128248][Thomas, 2017]];
[[#index.xhtml#bibr55-14748851221128248][von Platz, 2020]]). But because
Bookchin’s long-term case is so intimately tied to the complete
eradication of the state and the class system, proponents of visions
like these are unlikely to consider municipalist agency as key to the
arrival of their own preferred long-term institutional goals.
My claim here is not that both of these worries about Bookchin's
long-term case are entirely insurmountable, and that a sufficiently
compelling endorsement of democratic municipalism along these lines can
simply never be offered (it might be possible, at some point in the
future, to provide novel empirical evidence that supports Bookchin's
case or shows that Bookchin's completely non-hierarchical society is in
fact the best conception of a socially just society, for instance). But
I just want to flag here the difficulty of offering a defence of this
long-term case for democratic municipalism, as things currently stand,
that is likely to be sufficiently compelling to a range of contemporary
theorists (and activists) seeking to rectify social injustice.
Bookchin's claims here simply rely on too many contentious normative and
empirical claims to have much chance of persuading anyone who isn't
already a signed-up Anarchist or –
[[#index.xhtml#bibr10-14748851221128248][Bookchin’s (2006)]] preferred
term – ‘Communalist’.
*** Bookchin's case: The short-term view
Thankfully, however, there is also a second case for the value of
democratic municipalism to be found in Bookchin's work, and one which, I
think, represents a contribution to the agency debate that a greater
number of readers will consider compelling. As well as tying his case
for municipal action to his ultimate normative vision of a completely
non-hierarchical society, Bookchin also suggests a second, perhaps more
pragmatic reason for pursuing democratic municipalism: democratic
municipalist agents can create what he calls ‘a living educational arena
for developing an active citizenry’
([[#index.xhtml#bibr7-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1986a]]). Although
somewhat less pronounced in his work than the long-term case, this
argument is also present throughout and runs something like this: (1) it
would be desirable if citizens participated in political activity, and
were more preoccupied with political matters in general, to a greater
extent than is currently the case, (2) the only way to stably realise a
social change of this kind is to make targeted transformations to
political character, and (3) the political actors that can most
effectively organise this process of character transformation over the
short term are democratic municipalist agents.
Concerning (1), Bookchin claims that most citizens in capitalist
societies are currently just passive ‘spectators whose lives are guided
by elites’ (1980: 48). The ideal citizen in present societies, Bookchin
argues, ‘obeys the laws, pays taxes, votes ritualistically for
preselected candidates’ but otherwise ‘“minds his or her own business”’
(1992: 9). According to Bookchin, this state of affairs is undesirable
because political participation is an undisputed and non-negotiable
component of living well and human nature is only sufficiently expressed
or developed – we only sufficiently flourish – through participation in
directly democratic exchanges. A life that does not include extensive
political engagement and awareness is a fundamentally ‘warped and
self-degraded’ one, where ‘much that is uniquely human in human beings’
remains undeveloped ([[#index.xhtml#bibr9-14748851221128248][Bookchin,
1992]]: 228). He thus claims that it would be desirable for social
change to occur that reduces these pacifying and atomising effects of
modern capitalism and encouraged greater levels of political awareness
and participation among the citizenry.
Concerning (2), Bookchin sees current levels of political disengagement
as being deeply rooted in the individual psyche as a result of modern
consumerist culture. The spread of these forms of character is at least
partly the result of individuals applying the individualist and
instrumentalist logic they are socialised into by consumerism to the
political realm ([[#index.xhtml#bibr5-14748851221128248][Bookchin,
1980]]: 232). For Bookchin, the influence of these dynamics is
encapsulated particularly clearly in that paradigmatically capitalist
space, the shopping mall, which he claims is the nearest thing to a
properly public space in contemporary societies. ‘The massive
dissolution of personal and social ties’ witnessed under capitalism, for
instance, is apparently reflected in the fact that ‘the motor vehicles
that carry worshippers to its [the mall's] temples are self-enclosed
capsules that preclude all human contact’ (1982: 137). Consequently, and
in a similar way to his long-term case, he holds that a process of
re-socialisation or character transformation is the most important
necessary precondition for a society with greater levels of political
awareness and engagement. Citizens need to come to see, in short,
political awareness and participation as an integral part of their
existence, rather than as a distraction from and distinct from everyday
life.
Concerning (3), Bookchin again claims that democratic municipalist
agents are well-placed to bring about this necessary process of
character-transformation, or *paidea*. Part of the reason for this is
that local neighbourhoods are, in Bookchin's view, frequently the
epicentre of a series of capitalist pathologies which create grievances
that can motivate participation in democratic political activity.
Contemporary capitalist dynamics appear to not only pacify and atomise
but also create and exacerbate a whole series of grievances concentrated
primarily at the level of the neighbourhood. Bookchin lists as examples
of these neighbourhood grievances: ‘shortcomings in public services and
education […] the integrity of […] supplies of food, air, and water’, as
well as issues of safety, housing, congestion, recreation, loneliness,
and the erosion of local community (2015: 175–6). These are issues that
Bookchin labels ‘interclass in nature’, affecting ‘the middle as well as
the working class’, albeit in somewhat different ways (2015: 178). What
is crucial for Bookchin is that these kinds of pathologies do not
primarily manifest themselves in the workplace as (arguably rather crude
misreadings of) Marx's account of political motivation would seem to
suggest, but rather in the broader ‘overall environment’ which victims
of social injustice inhabit (2015: 176; 1980: 242).
For Bookchin, democratic municipalist political action can effectively
utilise the raw material of these grievances in the here-and-now as the
catalyst for a process of character transformation. As a result of these
grievances, Bookchin argues, many working- and middle-class citizens
will tend to ‘harbor basic impulses which make them very susceptible to’
participating in democratic forms of political discussion (1990: 81).
Bookchin notes two specific character-transforming contributions that he
thinks neighborhood assemblies can make. Politically active citizens
require, first and foremost, a perception of self-efficacy: a sense that
they are ‘capable of […] self-management’
([[#index.xhtml#bibr9-14748851221128248][Bookchin, 1992]]: 251) and
participation in directly democratic exchanges, Bookchin claims, can
help to gift this political self-confidence. An active citizenry also
requires, second, a loose commitment to one's fellow deliberators and
local residents captured, for Bookchin, in the ‘Greek term, *philia,*
ordinarily translated as “friendship”, but which I prefer to call
“solidarity”’ (1992: 250). For Bookchin, if appropriately organised by
democratic municipalist agents, neighbourhood assemblies can deliver
this also, enabling local residents to understand more clearly what they
share with others, both revealing previously undisclosed commonalities
of experience and desire, and also potentially building new ones.
Although in many ways structurally very similar to his long-term case
described above, it is important to note a contrast here with that
argument: the character transformation called for with this short-term
case is arguably of a much more limited and targeted kind. Bookchin has
in mind here not the deep moral reorientation against hierarchy of all
kinds described earlier, but just more of a desire to be aware of and
participate in political activity of some kind. This is what makes this
a more short-term case: regardless of the ideological views local
residents *eventually* come to hold (whether that be a wholesale
rejection of the state and the capitalist system, or not), Bookchin is
claiming, they can at least come to be more motivated to participate in
democratic political activity in the here and now as a result of the
actions undertaken by municipalist agents.
As already mentioned, I think there are several good reasons for
thinking this case is considerably less contentious and more plausible
than the long-term one. Recall the first desideratum I noted in the
previous section: contributions to the debate about appropriate
political agency ideally ought to be characterised by a high degree of
empirical plausibility. Although Bookchin's long-term case engages in a
large amount of empirical speculation, there are a number of findings in
the social sciences which we can draw on to substantiate the empirical
aspects of his short-term case. There is plentiful evidence, for
instance, that many people feel a fairly deep level of attachment to the
neighbourhood in which they live. Individuals often possess a desire to
improve the parts of the area of which they are fond and to generally
see their neighbourhood flourish
([[#index.xhtml#bibr35-14748851221128248][Lewicka, 2011]]).
There is also evidence that this attachment to place, this embeddedness
in a particular locale, often plays a significant role in determining
citizens’ political behaviour. For instance, Hahrie Han has highlighted
the centrality of individuals’ commitments to overcoming the ‘problems
in their own lives’ and those of others close to them, in determining
their motivations to engage in political activity
([[#index.xhtml#bibr27-14748851221128248][Han, 2009]]: 3). Chief among
these issues, for Han, are the inadequacy of ‘the schools their children
attend or the health care their parents receive’ (2009: 70) in their
immediate lived environment. Typically, Han argues, it is only when
people see a connection between political activity and achieving these
highly personal – and highly localised – goals that ‘the emotional
arousal necessary for action’ is likely to be present (2009: 17;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr38-14748851221128248][Nuamah and Ogorzalek, 2021]]).
There is also some promising empirical evidence that supports the claim
that through building and empowering neighborhood assemblies, democratic
municipalist agents will often be well-placed to capitalise on these
grievances. Participation in deliberative exchanges is widely seen as
able to lead to increased ‘internal political efficacy’, for instance,
increasing subjective confidence in one's own capacities to competently
participate in political affairs
([[#index.xhtml#bibr21-14748851221128248][Gastil, 2018]]: 284;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr32-14748851221128248][Knobloch and Gastil, 2014]]).
The recent ‘New Municipalist’ wave also seems to provide some evidence
of this: what seems particularly notable is that the constituency that
movements such as *BenC* have often been successful in building
encompasses many of those that feel alienated by and do not identify
with more traditional national and international forms of political
participation ([[#index.xhtml#bibr44-14748851221128248][Russell,
2019]]).
There are also many examples of participants in the latest wave of
democratic municipalism engaging in small acts of mutual aid among
themselves, for instance, which illustrate growing bonds of trust and
empathy (or what Bookchin calls *philia*). To give just one example:
some *BenC* activists serve paella at their bi-weekly meetings to reduce
the (unequally shared) burdens of care work and social reproduction and
create a more convivial atmosphere for deliberative discussion
([[#index.xhtml#bibr29-14748851221128248][Islar and Irgil, 2018]]: 495).
Taylor, Nanz, and Taylor also lend empirical weight to this when,
summarising their observations and involvement with a number of local
community initiatives that centrearound collective participatory
planning, they write that ‘[f]ace-to-face contact often softens our
stereotypical hostilities toward each other. Thereby, deliberative
communities [can] build new inclusive solidarities and trust among the
participants’ (Taylor et al., 2020: 22–3,
[[#index.xhtml#bibr47-14748851221128248][Segall 2005]]: 369).
Interestingly, the bonds of *philia* that democratic municipalist agents
can construct among local residents also often challenge the mistaken
idea of a necessary connection between the local and the parochial:
*BenC* and several other New Municipalist agents, for instance, have
played a pivotal role in raising awareness about and challenging
restrictive and punitive migration and asylum policies by serving as
‘Refuge Cities’ for refugees and migrants
([[#index.xhtml#bibr1-14748851221128248][Agustín, 2020]]). Others have
noted that *BenC* assisted migrant street vendors in the creation of ‘a
worker cooperative called *Diomcoop* with its own fashion line’
([[#index.xhtml#bibr20-14748851221128248][Forman et al., 2020]]: 138).
This is something Bookchin himself appeared to recognise: provided that
municipal agents ‘fuse’ the needs of local citizens ‘with broader social
ideals’, Bookchin claims that they can just as easily foster an
inclusive, outward-looking spirit as an exclusivist, parochial, and
chauvinist one (1980: 164; 1992: 293).
Recall also the second desideratum: contributions to the appropriate
agency debate should ideally be capable of accommodating at least a
degree of reasonable disagreement about the ultimate shape of a socially
just society. Although Bookchin's long-term case arguably requires an
endorsement of a completely non-hierarchical society as the ultimate
horizon of just social change to be viewed as compelling, the short-term
case clearly does not: it only requires that one object to current
levels of political disengagement and apathy. One need not even
necessarily think, as Bookchin does, that political participation is an
irreducible component of living well, as his case can still be found
compelling provided one holds that greater levels of political awareness
and activity among the citizenry would be instrumentally valuable in
bringing about a more just society.
For example, passing the kinds of radically redistributive policies that
many political theorists think would enable contemporary societies to
more closely approximate the correct principles of social justice will
undoubtedly be vehemently resisted by the powerful employers and
property owners that benefit from the status quo, who are likely to
employ every means at their disposal – political donations, lobbying,
media power, capital flight and strike, and so on – to retain their
advantages ([[#index.xhtml#bibr48-14748851221128248][Shelley 2021]],
462). Such resistance can surely only be overcome by a sufficiently
strong counter-power comprised of a politically active constituency of
citizens who stand to benefit from egalitarian social change. Thus,
whilst there is clearly continuing disagreement about the precise form
of the institutional matrix which best embodies principles of social
justice (property-owning democracy, social democracy, market socialism,
complete non-hierarchy, etc.), a great many egalitarian theories of
justice can arguably still note the advantages of agential forms which
can play a role in fostering greater political awareness and
participation.
*** Implications for the agency debate
What implications does this reconstruction of Bookchin's claims about
the value of democratic municipalist agency have for existing
contributions to the emerging debate about the most appropriate
political agents for realising social justice? I earlier summarised the
various ways in which national political parties and trade unions are
highlighted as desirable agents for helping to instantiate social
justice as follows. National political parties are often the most
appropriate agents for coming to manoeuvre the levers of power in a
society such that it more closely approximates a given set of principles
of justice, and these agents can not only enact social change through
alterations to state policy mechanisms but can also articulate and
sculpt shared interests in civil society
([[#index.xhtml#bibr18-14748851221128248][Dryzek, 2015]]: 381;
[[#index.xhtml#bibr58-14748851221128248][White and Ypi, 2017]]: 448).
And strong trade unions can also help ensure that national parties
continue to effectively represent the interests of the communities with
which they have historic ties, even when these parties are faced with
incentives to no longer do so, and they can appeal to the lived
experience of many citizens in such a way that can successfully persuade
them to get involved in social justice activism
([[#index.xhtml#bibr25-14748851221128248][Gourevitch and Robin 2020]]:
394–5; [[#index.xhtml#bibr39-14748851221128248][O’Neill and White,
2018]]: 255–60).
This paper provides a useful partial corrective to these claims. I don't
think it should cause us to *deny* the potentially valuable
contributions that agents such as national parties and trade unions can
make to projects of just social change. But what it does tell us is that
democratic municipalist agents can often *also* constitute another
important partial answer to the contemporary debate about political
agency, alongside the other agents more commonly highlighted in this
emerging literature. This is because there are various ways in which the
activity of democratic municipalist agents might complement trade unions
and national parties and help to generate favourable conditions for the
success of these more paradigmatic political agents.[9]
It is often the case, after all, that partisans and trade unionists in
unjust societies operate under highly hostile political conditions:
needing to grapple with unfavourable transformations in labour markets
and the media landscape, as well as a marked decline in class-based
social institutions and the increasing influence of an office-seeking,
state-orientated party elite over party decision-making
([[#index.xhtml#bibr36-14748851221128248][Mair, 2013]]). Such
unfavourable circumstances seem to recommend, I would suggest, creative
experimentation with a more diverse range of actions and agents than
would perhaps be warranted under different political conditions. What
Bookchin helps us to see in both cases is that existing neighborhood
grievances can be particularly powerful building blocks that
municipalist agents can utilise to heighten political awareness and
participation. Consequently, where favourable conditions for traditional
trade union success are wanting or unavailable, union activists may wish
to look to engage in somewhat less workplace-centred activity, such as
aiding the solidarity-strengthening struggles of democratic municipalist
agents and other local actors.[10]
Additionally, where favourable conditions for traditional national
party-building are also lacking, party activists too may have to look to
engage in less state-centric action, such as the activities practiced by
democratic municipalists. After all, the motivational benefits of
participation in national parties discussed by
[[#index.xhtml#bibr57-14748851221128248][White and Ypi (2016:]] 87–89)
still require political actors sufficiently motivated to *access* these
benefits in the first place. The emergence of widespread motivations of
this sort certainly seems *possible* in the sense that their existence
doesn't appear to be incompatible with basic laws of nature or human
psychology (a small but nonetheless significant number of citizens of
course already engage in these actions every day). But many political
dynamics are currently at work which would seem to render the
spontaneous emergence of these motivations to participate in national
partisanship on a mass scale highly unlikely indeed. Democratic
municipalism can, I would suggest, potentially play a valuable role in
*engendering* these initial participatory motivations.[11]
Of course, national and international political forces will often highly
constrain the activities of muncipalist projects, so it is not as if
there will simultaneously be unfavourable conditions for trade unions
and national political parties, and highly favourable conditions for
municipal agents. Municipal political actors will rarely possess *carte
blanche* to reshape their localities in whichever way they
please.[12] But present political conditions will often
present a variety of cracks and loopholes at the level of the
neighbourhood and the municipality, which municipalist agents can
exploit to progressive effect. For instance, the creation of the Greater
London Council – which extended London's original boundaries to include
many prosperous suburbs – was initiated by a Conservative British
government at least partly in an attempt to erode the left's existing
support base in the capital, but ultimately led to a substantial and
radical period of progressive democratic municipalist experimentation
and political consciousness-raising in the capital
([[#index.xhtml#bibr28-14748851221128248][Hatherley, 2020]]: 94).
Although far from unconstrained, there is thus a long tradition of
democratic municipalist actors succeeding in exploiting the
opportunities presented by the devolvement of political power to local
authorities in order to foster more favourable conditions for just
social change.
*** Conclusion
Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising
social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national
political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other.
Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article has suggested
that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local
residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve
the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also
make valuable contributions to projects of just social change. After
distinguishing democratic municipalist agents from national political
parties and trade unions, I identified both a long-term and a more
short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in
Bookchin's thought. The former focused on the role that these agents can
play in bringing about an entirely non-hierarchical society, whereas the
latter focused on the ability of democratic municipalist agents to
contribute to combatting political disengagement. By assessing these two
cases against two desideratum for a contribution to the appropriate
agency debate (empirical plausibility and capacity to accommodate a
degree of reasonable disagreement about the ultimate shape of a socially
just society), I claimed that Bookchin's short-term case provides a
useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the
nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social
justice.
*** Acknowledgements
The author thanks Paul Apostolidis, Max Kiefel, Lea Ypi, and two
anonymous reviewers, for very helpful comments and discussion.
*** Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
*** Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work
was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number
1950987).
*** References
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[1] Michael Goodhart has also recently complained that ‘questions about strategy and tactics and agency and implementation’ have received only scant attention from contemporary political theorists (Goodhart, 2018: 177). There are – of course – certain exceptions to this general rule (Deveaux, 2018; Laurence, 2020).
[2] Abstract definitions of this sort are – of course – unlikely to capture everything in our messy political reality. But establishing an ‘ideal type’ of this sort nonetheless helps to fix ideas (White and Ypi, 2016: 24).
[3] The activity of social movements is not always exhausted by these efforts to pressure political decision makers: many also seek to directly address various social ills themselves. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this important point. For a fascinating history of the role played by food provision and mutual aid in the US civil rights movement, see Cope (2022).
[4] If the wage-earners share one occupation or trade, this will often be termed a ‘craft’ trade union. If they differ in terms of specific occupation but nonetheless share a common economic sector, their association will typically be known as an ‘industrial’ trade union. Associations of wage-earners who share neither of these features are typically organised into ‘general’ trade unions. For more on the distinction between these three sub-variants of trade unions, see Visser (2012: 136) and Mosimann and Pontusson (2022: 1316).
[5] Bookchin himself actually more often uses the term libertarian municipalist (Bookchin, 2015: 84–5) but I prefer the democratic epithet because it seems to more accurately capture the central defining features of this form of agency, as well as doing so without the (arguably unhelpful) connotations of left-libertarian and right-libertarian political ideology.
[6] Different municipalist actors in different places will also have differing levels of power at their disposal to enhance access to these various resources. But political decision-making on at least some of these issues will often be devolved to the level of the municipality. For a discussion of the kinds of powers municipal authorities typically have over public transportation in London, see Hatherley (2020: 151–3). For a recent international survey of the success of local authorities in bringing public utilities such as water, energy, telecommunications, waste, and transport back under local control, see Kishimoto et al. (2020).
[7] Some municipalist agents, like BenC, prefer to refer to themselves as horizontalist ‘citizen platforms’, in order to differentiate themselves from what they consider more hierarchical and professionalised local parties (Thompson, 2021: 326–328; Forman et al., 2020: 136). But other instances of democratic municipalism have been undertaken by (democratically run) parties (Brownill, 1988; Kohn, 2003).
[8] For example, Gelderloos (2019) has provided a Bookchin-esque critique of BenC for concentrating too much on its reform agenda and losing sight of its democratisation agenda. Whereas leaders of BenC retort that concentrating primarily on these more top-down reforms can help to catalyse participation in assemblies and help engender a more participatory culture, when participation levels are currently ‘not sufficiently intense’, primarily by reducing understandable scepticism about the impossibility or undesirability of transformative change (Gilmartin 2019).
[9] The kinds of life-enhancing political changes that democratic muncipalist agents like BenC have been able to implement, such as building the city's renewable energy provision, increasing its affordable housing stock and decreasing air pollution, will also often be morally valuable in their own right, regardless of their contribution to broader processes of social change.
[10] This position is not as heterodox as it may at first sound: in practice, some labour relations scholars already hold the view that trade unions will be most effective when they think in terms of organising broader neighbourhoods and communities, rather than solely operating at the level of the workplace (Fletcher Jr and Gapasin, 2008).
[11] Existing normative work on parties and partisanship has thus far tended to focus overwhelmingly on differing options for the internal organisation of parties, and the various arguments in favour of more democratic and deliberative organisations in particular (Wolkenstein, 2019). Although these are certainly important issues, this means that the question of how national parties ought to relate externally with other political actors – particularly at the local, neighbourhood or constituency level – has barely received any attention in the existing literature.
[12] For example, the Spanish government's recent ‘Montoro Law’ curtails the ability of BenC and other municipal agents to hire city government staff and pursue an agenda of re-municipalisation (Rubio-Pueyo, 2017). There is also a great deal of historical precedent for acts of these kinds. In 1986, for instance, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government abolished the progressive Greater London Council, despite various polls showing a clear majority of Londoners – in some cases almost as many as three quarters - opposed to abolition (Pimlott and Rao, 2002: 41).