The Bookchin Trust - From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism

From Commercy, we call for the creation of popular committees throughout France, which function in regular general assemblies. Places where speech is liberated, where one dares to express oneself, to educate oneself, to help one another. If there must be delegates, it is at the level of each local Yellow Vests popular committee, closer to the voice of the people. With imperative, recallable, and rotating mandates. With transparency. With trust.

The Yellow Vests of Commercy, November 30, 2018

Ideas travel through time and place. Especially inspiring ones. From Murray Bookchins typewriter in the United States of 1985, to a group of Yellow Vests occupying the Commercy city center in northeastern France some thirty years later, ideas about organizing at the local level in face-to-face popular assemblies, about educating oneself to debate and decide on public matters, about de-professionalizing politics through delegates with imperative and recallable mandates have become material and real.

The New Municipal Agenda Bookchin elaborated in From Urbanization to Cities has given direction to the deep democratic aspirations of people in struggles around the world. In particular, Bookchins thought has been a resource for the Yellow Vests, a grassroots protest movement for political and economic reform, inspiring the Commercy Yellow Vests to call on their fellow protesters throughout France to organize in popular assemblies and reject representative government. In addition to popular assemblies at the city level, the Yellow Vests also created confederal egalitarian structures to enable collective decision making: the Assembly of Assemblies, as well as the Commune of communesas Bookchin urges in his 1998 essay A Politics for the Twenty-First Century.

Even after the Yellow Vest movement was brutally repressed at the national level, the struggle for direct democracy continued locally. Some Yellow Vests decided to create a citizens assembly and run a list for the municipal elections. They voted to tie candidates mandates to the decisions of the local popular assemblyone of the strategies Bookchin proposed to radically restructure local politics in order to prioritize direct democracy. And what started in Commercy has shown itself to be much more than a local phenomenon. The Yellow Vest movement is just one of the many international struggles that are planting the seed of what Bookchin calls libertarian municipalism in the minds of people who are discontented with the practice of representative government. From the surge of municipalist movements across Europe, to the popular assemblies growing in countries throughout the Americas, to the Kurdish-led democratic confederalism of Rojava in Northeast Syria, more and more communities are bringing to life the ideas Bookchin unearthed from his study of popular history so many decades ago.

That human beings possess an intrinsic tendency to organize democratically in popular assemblies at the level of the city is the essential message of From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism . Such a tendency has unfolded throughout the centuries, from the Neolithic to the present, passing through classical Athens, medieval towns, Comuneros in Early Modern Spain, New England town meetings, the Paris Commune of both 1792 and 1871, and the Russian, German, Spanish, and Hungarian revolutions. What Bookchin shows us in this important book is that, throughout history, there is an enduring legacy of communal popular assemblies as a form of self-government, and of the city as the arena in which to develop politics and citizenship, despite the rise of the nation-state. Especially in times of social unrest, the assembly form of democracy has been the preferred vehicle for the community to act on its future.