The Municipalist Current

Murray Bookchin died in 2006, believing his politics had mostly failed to find an audience. Twenty years later his idea, that free people should govern themselves in face-to-face assemblies and federate their towns instead of submitting to a state, has run further than he could have imagined, along two very different channels. One ran through a prison cell on an island in the Sea of Marmara to the plains of northern Syria. The other ran through a housing movement in Barcelona to city halls across Europe and the Americas.

The Municipality Against the State laid out Bookchin's case and looked at Rojava as its closest live trial. This essay follows the current since then, because the last two years have changed the picture. Both channels have now met the state head on, and the results say something about what municipalism can and can't do.

The first channel: Öcalan and democratic confederalism

Abdullah Öcalan founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, as a Marxist-Leninist movement for a Kurdish nation-state, and led it through a long and violent insurgency against Turkey. Captured in 1999, he has spent the years since in prison on İmralı island. There he read widely, found Bookchin's books in Turkish translation, and wrote to him. He came to call himself Bookchin's student. By around 2005 the PKK had formally dropped the goal of a Kurdish state and adopted what Öcalan called democratic confederalism: self-governing communes and councils, federated upward, with gender liberation and ecology at the center.

When Syrian state authority collapsed in the Kurdish-majority north after 2012, the movement aligned with Öcalan built that design into a real administration. Rojava, later the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, ran neighborhood communes, town and district councils, and a co-chair system that put a woman and a man jointly in nearly every office. It did so under war, against ISIS and against repeated Turkish incursions, and with the tensions this collection has already noted: a dominant party, a military wing, and, as Janet Biehl reported in her essay, Öcalan's portrait on nearly every wall.

Then the channel turned. In February 2025, Öcalan called from prison for the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve, and the party announced its dissolution that spring. In Syria, after the fall of the Assad government, the new authorities in Damascus pressed the Kurdish-led administration to merge into the state. An agreement in March 2025 set the terms; a harder one in January 2026, after fighting, handed Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor to Damascus and began folding the Syrian Democratic Forces into the national army and police. In August 2026 the autonomous administration was formally integrated into the Syrian state. The communes and councils haven't vanished, but the confederation they were meant to form, a political order outside and against the state, has been absorbed by one.

The second channel: Barcelona and the Fearless Cities

The other channel began with housing. During Spain's mortgage crisis, Ada Colau became the public face of the PAH, a movement of people facing eviction, which blocked evictions and occupied empty bank-owned flats. In 2014 activists in Barcelona formed a citizens' platform, first called Guanyem Barcelona and then Barcelona en Comú, to run for city hall. Colau was elected mayor in 2015.

Kate Shea Baird, a Barcelona-based writer and organizer, chronicled and helped shape what came next. Her pieces for openDemocracy traced the platform's attempt to stay a movement while holding office: "Beyond Ada Colau: the common people of Barcelona en Comú" argued that its collective, horizontal structure mattered more than its famous mayor, and her study of Rosario's Ciudad Futura asked how a "movement-party" keeps its activists active once some of them become officials. In June 2017 Barcelona en Comú hosted the first Fearless Cities summit, bringing more than seven hundred participants from six continents. Shea Baird announced it as the sign of "a new international municipalist movement on the rise." Regional gatherings followed in Warsaw, New York, Brussels, Valparaíso, Belgrade, and Naples.

In 2019 the movement published its handbook, Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement, compiled by Barcelona en Comú and edited by Shea Baird and Marta Junqué, with an introduction by Debbie Bookchin, Murray's daughter, and an epilogue by Colau. It profiles some fifty municipalist platforms in nineteen countries, from Spain and Italy to Chile, Serbia, the United States, and northern Syria, and sets out the ideas that hold them together: the politics of proximity, the conviction that the city is the scale where ordinary people can actually change things; the city as a defense against the rising far right; and what Shea Baird and Laura Roth called the feminization of politics. By that they meant more than electing women. They meant changing how politics is done: collective leadership instead of strongmen, listening and cooperation instead of performance, and attention to the everyday work of care that national politics treats as invisible. Their observatory, Minim, continues to collect the movement's experiments.

In office, Barcelona en Comú pursued a recognizable program. It fined platforms for illegal tourist rentals and froze new tourist-flat licenses in the center. It launched a municipal electricity company. It required that new residential developments above a certain size set aside thirty percent of their units as affordable housing. It began turning grids of streets into pedestrian-first "superblocks." Colau won a second term in 2019, then lost the mayoralty in 2023. The platform remains in the city council, but no longer runs the city.

Three claims about municipal power

The two channels look very different, an armed movement in a war zone and a citizens' platform in a European city. They share a dilemma that fits the three-claim form this collection uses for hard questions.

The city is the right scale for self-government. People can know their neighbors, see the effects of decisions, and take part directly. Both Bookchin and the Fearless Cities agree on this, and so does social liberty.

A movement has to win power to change anything. Barcelona en Comú ran for office because blocking evictions one by one wasn't enough. Rojava's councils existed because someone held the territory.

Power that is won tends to become the state. In Rojava, power held under war flowed to a party and an army, and then the larger state absorbed it whole. In Barcelona, a movement that won city hall used it, as city halls do, to license, mandate, fine, and run services, and its achievements lasted only as long as its majority.

The first two seem to lead straight into the third. If self-government needs the city, and changing the city needs power, then municipalism ends up as statecraft at a smaller scale, and lives or dies by the larger state's tolerance and the next election.

The resolution is in what a municipal movement does with power once it has it. Power used to run more of life from city hall is still state power, just closer. Power used to hand decisions back, to neighborhoods, to voluntary associations, to residents who own their buildings together, to trusts that hold land outside both the market and the state, builds things that survive losing an election, because they never depended on the council. A municipalism judged by what it gives away, and not by what it administers, escapes the trap.

What a social libertarian keeps

Much of the contemporary current deserves to be kept.

Proximity is real. The Fearless Cities were right that ordinary people can still change their towns when national politics feels sealed off. This collection's own Toward an Authentic Santa Clara Valley ended with a list of local acts: attending the commission meeting, serving on the water board, putting a position in writing. That's the politics of proximity in practice.

The feminization of politics is a better description of good self-government than most theories offer. Collective leadership, cooperation, listening, and attention to the everyday aren't partisan values. They're what a voluntary association needs to stay voluntary. A movement that practices them is harder to capture, by a strongman or by a party.

Internationalism without a state. Cities learning from cities, through summits, handbooks, and observatories, is confederation by example. No one is compelled. The network works because its members find it useful, the same way private accreditation works in Accreditation and Liberty.

Öcalan's turn is itself a lesson. A movement founded to win a state concluded that the state was the wrong goal. Whatever one thinks of his record, that conclusion, reached the hard way, is Bookchin's central claim.

What a social libertarian questions

The current also carries assumptions this collection doesn't share.

Municipal ownership isn't self-government. A city-run electricity company or a remunicipalized water system may be better run than a private monopoly, but it moves control from one large institution to another. It doesn't give it to the people who use the service. A cooperative, a community land trust, or a mutual company owned by its members would be closer to the idea.

Mandates can undercut the goal. The thirty percent affordable-housing requirement was meant to house people. Critics in Barcelona argued that it discouraged new building instead, and the debate continues. Pro-Housing, Not Pro-Development argued for a different test: does a policy return a right to people, or take one from them? Licensing freezes and mandates mostly take. Community land trusts, legal boarding houses, and the right to build homes on one's own land mostly give.

The movement-party is fragile. Shea Baird saw the danger early: a movement that becomes a party risks emptying itself into government. Barcelona en Comú's loss in 2023 showed the other half of it. When the platform lost office, much of what it had built, the policies and programs, was in the city's hands, not the movement's. Self-government that depends on winning the next election is still government by majority.

Confederation needs protection from the larger state. Rojava's councils were real, but they had no answer to a state with an army and international backing that wanted them absorbed. Barcelona's platform could be outvoted. A social libertarian answer is to build institutions whose authority comes from voluntary membership and secure property, land held in trust, buildings owned by their residents, associations accredited by their peers, so that a change of government doesn't erase them.

A side channel: the crypto city

While Barcelona's platform governed, a very different group was sketching cities that would need no city hall to capture. At the end of 2021, near the peak of the crypto boom, Bernardo Vicente published "A Case for Harbergeorgist Economics", a proposal for running networked crypto cities, and cities in the metaverse, on two economic ideas joined together. From Henry George it takes the land value tax: people keep the wealth they make, but the value of land belongs to everyone. From the economist Arnold Harberger it takes the self-assessed tax: owners declare what their assets are worth, pay tax on the declared figure, and must sell to anyone who offers that price.

In Vicente's design, a new city issues a tradable token backed by shares of its land, so residents and investors hold a stake in its value. A DAO, an organization run by its token holders through code on a blockchain, collects the land tax and the Harberger tax, pays for public services through transparent smart contracts, and distributes the surplus as a basic income. He pointed to CityDAO, which planned physical land governed this way, to CityCoins, and to the virtual land markets of Decentraland and The Sandbox. He also named the risks: early buyers cornering the territory, speculators trading the city token without living there, and the political weight of anyone already holding land.

Much of this is close to what this collection argues. The Georgist core is the same. The idea of a city as a voluntary association that people join, not a jurisdiction they're born into, is closer to social liberty than either Rojava's councils or Barcelona's city hall. And a public ledger that shows every assessment, every payment, and where the land rent goes is exactly what Three Blind Assessors asked of assessment: open, reproducible, and checkable by anyone.

But the design carries assumptions this collection has questioned before.

A forced sale makes every home provisional. Three Blind Assessors took the Harberger mechanism seriously and still rejected it in its pure form: when anyone with the money can buy you out at your declared price, secure possession, the ability to stay put and build a life in a place, is gone. That security is part of liberty, not an obstacle to efficiency.

A city token turns residents into investors. If everyone's savings rise and fall with the city's land price, everyone has a reason to want land prices up. That's the growth machine's interest, which Pro-Housing, Not Pro-Development called the pursuit of exchange value over use value, now built into the city's currency. And when the token holders don't live there, the land rent flows out to them, the absentee landlord problem by another name.

Token voting isn't self-government. A DAO weights votes by holdings. Bookchin's assembly, and the Fearless Cities' politics of proximity, gave a voice to people because they lived somewhere, not because they owned a share of it.

Virtual land is scarce by decree. Georgism rests on the fact that no one made the land and no one can make more. A metaverse parcel is scarce only because its developers chose to limit the supply. Its rent comes from that choice, not from nature or community. Most of those virtual land markets lost the bulk of their value after the crypto crash of 2022.

What's worth keeping from the crypto city is its tools: open ledgers for assessment, programmable ways to return land rent to a community, and membership that people choose. Joined to secure possession and face-to-face governance, those tools could serve the kind of municipalism this collection is after. Without them, the crypto city is a land market with a constitution attached.

Where the current runs next

The two great experiments of contemporary municipalism, one armed and one electoral, have both now been absorbed or outvoted. That doesn't mean the current has run dry. It means its next channel will probably look less like taking power and more like building around it: cooperatives and land trusts, neighborhood associations with real decisions to make, cities sharing what works through networks no state controls, and perhaps open ledgers that show any resident where a place's land rent goes.

That direction is close to what this collection has called social liberty. Bookchin was right that freedom has to be practiced somewhere close to home. The Fearless Cities were right that ordinary people can still change the places they live. What the last two years add is a warning: the institutions that last are the ones people hold themselves, not the ones a movement holds for them.

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A note on how this piece was written: the subject, the questions it asks, and the positions it takes are mine. Much of the research, the examples, and the sentences were drafted by an AI model working from that direction, and then edited by hand. I'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.