Serious thread #0987432

Let's talk about Bookchin's Libertarian Municipalism.

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-libertarian-municipalism-an-overview

In my opinion it's a modernization and extension of the social contract set forth by Rousseau.

constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm

A project that rejects parliamentary politics as fundamentally lacking in freedom and incapable of representing the people, postulating that only the people can represent the people.

The difference is that Bookchin frames the debate in terms of revolution and a break from the status quo, identifying parliamentary liberal politics as only capable of reproducing the status quo. Something that rings very true for me, after all it makes sense for the material/systemic conditions that created the current situation to tend to reproduce the same or similar situation.

For both, they recognize that the only solution, both to the problem of freedom in politics and the ability to cause radical change is for citizens on the local level to be the fundamental make up of the body politic.

made this thread since I saw a lack of serious discussion™

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How does he not make sense?

the talk of removing ALL forms of hierarchy just seems like a pipe dream. we should be focused on removing involuntary power structures, not simple organization.

not enough BOOKS user

Haven't read all of Bookchin's stuff but I get the sense that's probably more of his early stuff as he abandoned hardline anarchy later in life

you do need hierarchy to organize. it's just unavoidable. horizontalism is shit.

you may need hierarchy to organize, but not to make decisions.

I'm a fan of Libertarian Municipalism as Bookchin describes it, and I think establishing a confederated network of municipalities, organized around direct democracy and non-capitalist economic exchange, would be a tremendous and revolutionary achievement in advancing a post-scarcity society. It's appealing in that we could probably start setting up such a network right now, in America or any other state, and if successful it could pull public discourse away from capitalism, and towards a kind of revolutionary transformation/evolution of society.

My main problem is that Bookchin's vision is impossible to achieve for all but a small sliver of the current global population. Municipalities are described as small cities/townships, governed through direct democracy and living in parallel with nature. Well, the New England townships he is inspired by are not usually more than a few thousand people; Israeli kibbutzes are similarly all smaller than 2000 workers. We have seven billion plus people on Earth and not enough land for all of them to live in decentralized townships. To extend Libertarian Municipalism to everyone would require the kinds of large cities and urban areas, such as those that currently exist in capitalism, to house these people. Even if it was non-trivial to feed and supply energy to these masses, effectively governing such dense populations without resorting to representative systems, administrative bureaucracies, and thus a return of involuntary hierarchy, seems impossible. Bookchin's vision becomes unrealistically idealistic as a way of organizing a global post-scarcity communist society, unless you either A) advocate killing off a few billion people, or B) supplement it with another form of communism, that doesn't conflict with the goals of social ecology and anarchism.

Or you could just break cities down into smaller sub units