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Based on historical experiments of self-government, Murray Bookchin developed the political project communalism. This theory proposes to exercise power through local face-to-face popular assemblies, and federate them through councils of delegates endowed with imperative and recallable mandates from their local assemblies. Based on a two years fieldwork combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews and textual analysis, the article explores how the Yellow Vests of Commercy, a movement partly inspired by communalism, succeeded in building from scratch a federal vehicle in order to coordinate local popular assemblies and to avoid government co-optation: the “Assembly of Assemblies”. More specifically, it analyses how communalist elements of Bookchin’s thought – delegation and imperative mandate – have been interpreted and reinvented by the movement, through innovative devices such as “indicative voting” to enable delegates’ deliberation at the federal level. It also shows how the movement answered an unthought element of communalist theory: the selection of delegates.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2025). Federating assemblies in the 21st century. Publius : the journal of federalism. Submitted. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239776 (Original work published 2025)