Since 2014 solidarity activists, independent leftists, and others have been crossing the Tigris to study the developments in Rojava, the independent multi-ethnic enclave in northern Syria. Here the Kurdish people, whose aspirations have been stomped on for generations throughout the Middle East, are building a society structured institutionally around an assembly / council democracy and […]
The International Workingmen’s Association, 1868 The Rules and Program of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy Founded in Geneva in October 1868 Written: by Bakunin, October 1868; Translated: (from French) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (Moscow). The socialist minority of the League of Peace and Freedom having separated itself from the League as a result […]
Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a complex society. Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level…our economy is too global to unravel the intricacies of […]
Social anarchism is made of fundamentally different stuff, heir to the Enlightenment tradition, with due regard to that tradition’s limits and incompleteness. Depending upon how it defines reason, social anarchism celebrates the thinking mind without in any way denying passion, ecstasy, imagination, play, and art. Rather than reify them into hazy categories, it incorporates them into […]
If many pragmatic people are blind to the importance of decentralism, many in the ecology movement tend to ignore very real problems with “localism” — problems no less troubling than the problems raised by a globalism that fosters a total interlocking of economic and political life on a worldwide basis. Without wholistic cultural and political […]
Above all, I have tried to show in my previous writings how confederation on a municipal basis has existed in sharp tension with the centralized state generally, and the nation-state of recent times. Confederalism, I have tried to emphasize, is not simply a unique societal, particularly civic or municipal, form of administration. It is a […]
Decentralism and self-sustainability must involve a much broader principle of social organization than mere localism. Together with decentralization, approximations to self-sufficiency, humanly scaled communities, ecotechnologies, and the like, there is a compelling need for democratic and truly communitarian forms of interdependence — in short, for libertarian forms of confederalism. I have detailed at length in […]
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking (as witness the recent tendency of radicals to espouse “market socialism” rather than deal with the failings of the market economy as well as state socialism). Doubtless we will have to import coffee for those people who need […]
Murray Bookchin Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a “complex society.” Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level. And our economy is too “global,” presumably, […]
Derived from Abdullah Ocalan The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for […]
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