Rethinking representation as delegation in the framework of communalist direct democracy

Van Outryve d'Ydewalle, Sixtine
(2022) From the Commune to Communalism? The Paris Commune and its Meaning for Democratic Theory and Practice — Location: Radboud University Nijmegen (19.May.2022)

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The political theory of communalism as formulated by Murray Bookchin asks anew 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 realize 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 organize in confederations, where each assembly would send delegates with imperative and recallable mandates to administer the policies formulated by them. As such, to enable decision-making across assemblies these delegates endorse a task of representation, in the generic definition of Pitkin of “making present that which is absent”, since 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. This paper intends to capture how decision-making could happen across assemblies 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. Second, I propose solutions to ease the tension between delegation through imperative mandates and decision-making across assemblies.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2022). Rethinking representation as delegation in the framework of communalist direct democracy. From the Commune to Communalism? The Paris Commune and its Meaning for Democratic Theory and Practice, Radboud University Nijmegen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/240117