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Institute for
Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

Feature Article  |   Vol. 2, No. 1

Interview with Murray Bookchin

By David Vanek

DV: You have called your approach anarchism. What do you mean by that concept?

MB: Today I prefer the word communalism, by which I mean a libertarian ideology that, as I said, includes the best of the anarchist tradition as well as the best in Marx. I think neither Marxism nor anarchism alone is adequate for our times: a great deal in both no longer applies to today's world. We have to go beyond the economism of Marx and beyond the individualism that is sometimes latent, sometimes explicit in anarchism. Marx's, Proudhon's, and Bakunin's ideas were formed in the nineteenth century. We need a left libertarian ideology for our own time, not for the days of the Russian and Spanish Revolutions.

The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy. We can transform local government into popular assemblies where people can discuss and make decisions about the economy and society in which they live. When we get power at the neighborhood level in a town or city, we can confederate all the assemblies and then confederate those towns and cities into a popular government — not a state (which is an instrument of class rule and exploitation), but a government, where the people have the power. This is what I call communalism in a practical sense. It should not be confused with communitarianism, which refers to small initiatory projects like a "people's" food cooperative, garage, printing press — projects that often become capitalistic when they don't fall apart or succumb to competition by other enterprises.

People will never achieve this kind of face-to-face democratic society spontaneously. A serious, committed movement is necessary to fight for it. And to build that movement, radical leftists need to develop an organization — one that is controlled from the base, so that we don't produce another Bolshevik Party. It has to be formed slowly on a local basis, it has to be confederally organized, and together with popular assemblies, it will build up an opposition to the existing power, the state and class rule. I call this approach libertarian municipalism.

DV: Some critics have said that you are mostly interested in what's going on the lower level, within municipalities, and that you don't say much about how to connect different municipalities into a higher structure, say confederation.

MB: That's absolutely untrue — the aim of confederating the popular assemblies is basic to libertarian municipalism. My writings on the subject always include a call for confederation. From the local confederations should come regional confederations, and then national or continental confederations. But the power must always reside in the popular assemblies, and the final decisions must always come from below, that is, from assemblies of the people. (I should add that anyone who does not attend an assembly is simply saying, "I am not a citizen, I don't care." So if they don't care to attend, let them live with the decisions of assemblies.)

Municipalities form the locus, the arena of a truly political life, but no municipality can be "autonomous." Autonomy is a myth — you can't achieve it, because each person depends on everyone else, and each municipality depends on all the others. We all depend on each other, just as our individual egos are formed to a vast degree by culture, not born all of a sudden or self-formed somehow, the way Max Stirner suggested. I also reject the vicious totalitarian notion of total dependence upon the state. I am for interdependence among self-governing people in assemblies.

Democracy is something that anarchism often seems to have problems with. This is one area in which I differ with authentic anarchists, who emphasize an individual ego and the fulfillment of its desires as the overriding consideration. Many anarchists reject democracy as the "tyranny" of the majority over the minority. They think that when a community makes decisions by majority vote, it violates the "autonomy" of the egos of the individuals who voted in the minority. They seem to think that somehow those who voted against a decision, because they are "autonomous," shouldn't have to follow it.

I think that that idea is naive at best and a prescription for chaos at worst. Decisions, once made, have to be binding. Of course minorities should always have the right to object to majority decisions and to freely voice their own views. Majorities have no right to try to prevent a minority from voicing its views and trying to win majority support for them.

The question is, what is the fairest way to make communitywide decisions? I think majority voting is not only the fairest but the only viable way for a face-to-face democratic society to function, and that decisions made by majority vote should be binding on all the members of the community, whether they voted in favor of a measure or against it.

And unlike many anarchists, I don't think a particular individual or municipality should be able to do whatever it wants to do at all times. Lack of structure and institutions leads to chaos and even arbitrary tyranny. I believe in law, and the future society I envision would also have a constitution. Of course, the constitution would have to be the product of careful consideration, by the empowered people. It would be democratically discussed and voted upon. But once the people have ratified it, it would be binding on everyone. It is not accidental that historically, oppressed people who were victims of the arbitrary behavior of the ruling classes — "barons," as Hesiod called them in seventh-century B.C. Greece — demanded constitutions and just laws as a remedy.

DV: What dangers do you find in the idea of autonomy or self-sufficiency?

MB: The main danger is parochialism: some people might decide that they want to exclude people of a certain race or ethnicity or sexual preference or the like. The American South, for example, long wanted to allow blacks to live in its midst as slaves or else as menial servants. Today people in many European countries want to exclude immigrants arriving from outside Europe. Our movement would have to counter such parochialism with cosmopolitanism, an outlook that affirms and even celebrates the interdependence of all people.

I think that a workable confederation must ultimately be very broad, reflecting the interdependence of municipalities. Some of the nineteenth-century anarchists who wrote about confederation left open a large loophole. Proudhon and Bakunin, in their writings, allowed for the possibility that a single community could opt out of the confederation if it so desired. The community could say to the rest of the confederation," I don't like what you're doing, I'm leaving." But I don't agree that this should be permitted. Every municipality has a deep, fundamental responsibility to every other municipality in a confederation. When a community joins a confederation, it's bound by a compact, a constitution. It shouldn't be able to leave unilaterally, just because it doesn't want to do something that the majority of the confederation has agreed to do. A community shouldn't be able to say, for example, "We want to exclude black people, but you in the confederation would force them on us, so we are going to defy you and leave the confederation." Participation is binding, because our interdependence is indissoluble. The only way a community could leave a confederation, in my opinion, would be when the majority in the confederation, acting as though it were one huge assembly, says, "All right, okay, leave if you choose, but don't expect us to help you when you need aid."

Social Ecology n 1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. 2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.

Published by the Institute for Social Ecology