AUTONOMY, SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND LIBERTARIAN MUNICIPALISM - DUAL POWER AND COMMUNAL RESISTANCE Communalism proposes a radically different form of economy – one that is neither nationalized nor collectivized according to syndicalist precepts. It proposes that markets and money be abolished and that land and enterprises be placed increasingly in the custody of the community – more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their delegates in confederal councils. How work should be planned, what technologies should be used, how goods should be distributed are seen as questions that can only be resolved in practice. The maxim from each according to ability, to each according to need is taken as a bedrock guide for an economically rational society, provided to be sure that goods are of the highest durability and quality, that needs are guided by rational and ecological standards, and that the ancient notions of limit and balance replace the capitalist imperative of grow or die. In such a municipal economy – confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not simply technological, standards – Communalists hold that the special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers, and so on would be melded into a general interest in which people see themselves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of their community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns. Here, it is hoped, citizenship would come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests. social-ecology.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/The_Politics_of_Social_Ecology2.pdf As Bakunin and Kropotkin argued repeatedly, individuality has never existed apart from society and the individuals own evolution has been coextensive with social evolution. To speak of The Individual apart from its social roots and social involvements is as meaningless as to speak of a society that contains no people or institutions. Merely to exist, institutions must have form, as I argued some thirty years ago in my essay The Forms of Freedom, lest freedom itself -- individual as well as social -- lose its definability. Institutions must be rendered functional, not abstracted into Kantian categories that float in a rarefied academic air. They must have the tangibility of structure, however offensive a term like structure may be to individualist libertarians: concretely, they must have the means, policies and experimental praxis to arrive at decisions. Unless everyone is to be so psychologically homogeneous and societys interests so uniform in character that dissent is simply meaningless, there must be room for conflicting proposals, discussion, rational explication and majority decisions -- in short, democracy. Like it or not, such a democracy, if it is libertarian, will be Communalist and institutionalized in such a way that it is face-to-face, direct, and grassroots, a democracy that advances our ideas beyond negative liberty to positive liberty. A Communalist democracy obliges us to develop a public sphere -- and in the Athenian meaning of the term, a politics -- that grows in tension and ultimately in a decisive conflict with the State. Confederal, antihierarchical, and collectivist, based on the municipal management of the means of life rather than their control by vested interests (such as workers control, private control, and more dangerously, State control), it may justly be regarded as the processual actualization of the libertarian ideal as a daily praxis. The fact that a Communalist politics entails participation in municipal elections -- based, to be sure, on an unyielding program that demands the formation of popular assemblies and their confederation -- does not mean that entry into existing village, town and city councils involves participation in state organs, any more than establishing an anarchosyndicalist union in a privately owned factory involves participation in capitalist forms of production. One need only turn to the French Revolution of 1789-94 to see how seemingly state institutions, like the municipal districts established under the monarchy in 1789 to expedite elections to the Estates General, were transformed four years later into largely revolutionary bodies, or sections, that nearly gave rise to the Commune of communes. Their movement for a sectional democracy was defeated during the insurrection of June 2, 1793 -- not at the hands of the monarchy, but by the treachery of the Jacobins. Capitalism will not generously provide us the popular democratic institutions we need. Its control over society today is ubiquitous, not only in what little remains of the public sphere, but in the minds of many self-styled radicals. A revolutionary people must either assert their control over institutions that are basic to their public lives -- which Bakunin correctly perceived to be their municipal councils -- or else they will have no choice but to withdraw into their private lives, as is already happening on an epidemic scale today.10 It would be ironic, indeed, if an individualist anarchism and its various mutations, from the academic and transcendentally moral to the chaotic and the lumpen, in the course of rejecting democracy even for a minority of one, were to further raise the walls of dogma that are steadily growing around the libertarian ideal, and if, wittingly or not, anarchism were to turn into another narcissistic cult that snugly fits into an alienated, commodified, introverted and egocentric society. dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/CMMNL2.MCW.html The houses of Toribio are covered in murals supporting the ‘Minga [communal work] of Social and Communal Resistance’, a movement born in the region that seeks to build a new Colombia based on human rights, a rejection of free trade agreements, and the development of communities by themselves in ways which respect the environment. The message has been spread through Colombia by marches and meetings in a process known as “walking the word” of the Minga, and shared values have been developed with non-indigenous campesinos, urban Colombians, and Afro-Colombian communities. https://intercontinentalcry.org/colombian-indigenous-guards-killed-in-toribio-25968/#imageclose-25970
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 00:04:16 +0000
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