Deciding at the Federal Level in Communalist Direct Democracy
(2023) Decentralised Federalism in Anarchist Political Thought — Location: University of Exeter (22.June.2023)
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- Among anti-statist and federalist political thoughts, communalism occupies a peculiar position as it builds on both anarchist and communist traditions. From anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin, Bakunin and Proudhon, it draws the critique of hierarchies and the idea of building a federation of free communes based on direct democracy (though it rather uses the term confederation), while rejecting anti-institutional tendencies that anarchist theories and practices can sometimes present. From communism in its initial Marxist formulation, it draws the objective to bring about a society without exploitation, without classes and without the state, in which the means of production are collectivised. It nevertheless proposes a different strategy to do so and extends the critique of exploitation beyond the economic sphere. Formulated by the American thinker Murray Bookchin, the political theory of communalism asks two correlated questions: that of the main political unit for a people to govern itself, and that of how public power should be exercised. It answers by advocating for the commune to be the main political unit, in order to realise direct democracy. Indeed, communalism sees the municipality as the locus where communities would collectively manage their own affairs through popular assemblies. To decide on issues going beyond the scope of the municipality, these self-governed municipalities would organise in confederations, where each assembly would send delegates with imperative and recallable mandates to administer the policies formulated by the assemblies. As such, to enable decision-making across assemblies, these delegates endorse a task of representation, if it is understood as the act of “making present that which is absent” under Pitkin’s generic definition. Indeed, they make present the will of the absent popular assembly at the confederal level through the imperative mandate. However, this conception of representation is radically different than the one of representative government in the statist tradition. This paper intends to capture how decision-making could happen across assemblies at the confederal level, and to rethink what representation would mean in a communalist framework. To this end, I first develop the main concepts of the theory of direct democracy proposed by communalism, that I call communalist direct democracy: the continuous assembly of the people to exercise all public power (political and economic), and the delegation, or direct representation, of such power when it can no longer be assembled, that is, at the confederal level. Second, I propose solutions of democratic devices at the confederal level to ease the tension between delegation through imperative mandates, and decision-making across assemblies.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2023). Deciding at the Federal Level in Communalist Direct Democracy. Decentralised Federalism in Anarchist Political Thought, University of Exeter. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/240101