Chapter 16. Fantasies of Federalism

One of its proponents insists that face-to-face direct democracy has to meet a very demanding standard:

The first and most important positive act of political recognition which a participatory democracy must pay to its members is to give each of them frequent and realistic opportunities to be heard, that is to say, access to assemblies sufficiently small so all can reasonably be assured time to speak, and to matters of sufficient moment to command practical attention.[1049]

Bookchin’s standard is just as high:

The Greeks, we are often reminded, would have been horrified by a city whose size and population precluded a face-to-face, often familiar relationship between citizens... In making collective decisions — the ancient Athenian ecclesia was, in some ways, a model for making social decisions — all members of the community should have an opportunity to acquire in full the measure of anyone who addresses the assembly. They should be in a position to absorb his attitudes, study his expressions, and weigh his motives as well as his ideas in a direct personal encounter and through direct face-to-face discussion.

Direct democracy must “literally be direct, face-to-face, of the kind that prevailed in the Athenian polis, the French revolutionary sections of 1793, and the New England town meetings.”[1050] That is what did not prevail in the Athenian assembly, as we saw in Chapter 14, but that is what would have to prevail if libertarian municipalism is to be anything but a façade for oligarchy. Here, then, is the core of the ex-Director’s grand theory, Libertarian Municipalism, filched from Milton Kottler.[1051]

The Director Emeritus will not provide an estimate of the population of an urban Commune, but it would be within reasonable walking distance of its neighbors. He does put its area at one to twelve blocks. Elsewhere, he appears to approve of Plato’s Pythagorean figure, in the Laws, of a polis population of 5,040.[1052] Janet Biehl says that municipalities “may range from a small village or town in a rural area, to a small city, to a neighborhood in a vast metropolis like New York.” The Director Emeritus seems to contemplate a lower upper limit when he says the Commune would be based on neighborhoods, wards, “even blocks.”[1053] But which wards? Which blocks? Bookchin ignores the questions where, how, and by whom, the all-important boundaries of the Commune are to be drawn.

The Commune is, we are told, an “organic” unit. For once the ironic quotation marks are unwittingly appropriate. The constituent elements of Communal society are treated as givens: “Popular, even block, assemblies can be formed irrespective of the size of the city, provided its organic cultural components can be identified and their uniqueness fostered.” (Identified by whom? And what happens to the people in areas where it can’t?) Cities consist of neighborhoods, “largely organic communities that have a certain measure of identity, whether they are defined by a shared cultural heritage, economic interests, a commonality of social views, or even an esthetic tradition such as Greenwich Village.”[1054] Actually this approximates the definition of a community, a geographical clustering of people with shared interests, characteristics and association.[1055] But for Bookchin the community is useless, despite its much greater functional reality, because it is usually not a face-to-face aggregation usable as the Commune’s atomic unit. Sad to say, neighborhood or community, call it what you will, cannot be taken for granted by the would-be builders of the municipal state: “The notion of a community as a cohesive, locally based social system with shared values and a sense of belonging is not the most useful way to conceptualize the complex textures of urban social systems. Communities in this sense do occur in cities, yet many urbanites live in areas which do not resemble the traditional community.”[1056]

Even to speak of a tribal society as “organic,” as the Director Emeritus used to do,[1057] is to speak metaphorically by analogy from living organisms. Bookchin may not know this, since he thinks primitive societies are biological, like wolf packs or anthills (Chapter 11). In fact, “organic” is the sort of political metaphor that he irrationally denounces as irrationalist, even fascistic.[1058] The typical urban neighborhood is so far from resembling an organism as to make the metaphor mystifying. Except for incorporated villages, few territories of, say, 1,000 people serve any significant functions — if only because they now lack political institutions by which to function, and often also because their residents share few interests or attitudes. The boundary of a biological organism is its skin. The boundary of a state is the border. The boundary of a neighborhood is often vague and flexible.[1059] Residents often disagree about the boundaries and with the opinions of outsiders as to where the boundaries are. Whether a city has neighborhoods at all is an empirical question.[1060] Which is hardly surprising, since whether they exist or where they are is at present irrelevant. But it will be highly relevant under Communal rule.

The entire quixotic theory of urban municipalism presupposes that the politically viable muncipalities are already here. Thus Biehl writes, “Libertarian municipalism refers to such potential political communities as municipalities. To be sure, the municipalities that exist today vary widely in size and legal status [sic: neighborhoods have no legal status]; they may range from a small village or town in a rural area, to a small city, to a neighborhood in a vast metropolis like New York. But they still have sufficient features and traditions in common that we may use the same name for them.”[1061] Although the Director Emeritus has often ridiculed E.F. Schumacher, whose fame he envies, for saying “small is beautiful,” he is not above appropriating the positive resonance of “small.” The constant use of quantitative language without any quantification invites suspicion that Bookchin is being designedly vague because any figure he mentions could be pounced upon as inconsistent with one aspect or another of his utopia. I daresay any figure will be too small for viable sovereignty or too large for direct democracy. Indeed, he often speaks, as Biehl does here, of the municipality as the primary political unit; but elsewhere the municipality is a federation of neighborhoods, and it is the primary political unit. If the representative government of a municipality is the sovereign, then Communalism has none of the virtues claimed for it.

Communal boundaries are neither self-evident nor self-constructing. The only way all Communes could have “sufficient features and traditions in common” is the way Biehl makes sure they do — by definition. Do you need features and traditions or features or traditions? New communities will usually have features but no traditions in common. In others, the only “traditions” shared are what they share with millions of other massified middle-class whites, such as conventional piety and what Dwight Macdonald called Masscult. There may be nothing to distinguish them as people from the neighborhoods around them, not even an arbitrary sense of neighborhood. Such people tend to be those who are satisfied with the status quo and content to leave politics to representatives, experts and outsiders. If features-and-traditions is a requirement for municipality status, many neighborhoods don’t satisfy it. Will these attributes be engineered by the neighborhoods that do have them, exercising a colonial protectorate?

According to Bookchin, the spread of Communes will be a protracted, uneven process: “Some neighborhoods and towns can be expected to advance more rapidly than others in political consciousness.”[1062] For an extended period of time, there will be assemblies in some neighborhoods but not others. A small, unrepresentative minority (of Organization militants, usually) will have a free hand to define the Commune’s identity more or less permanently in a manner at once self-serving and self-fulfilling. There will be a strong temptation to gerrymandering — to drawing the lines so as to benefit those who are drawing them, especially since there is no organized opposition across the boundary. The apportioners may draw the lines to exclude enclaves of minorities, on the pretext, if they feel they need one, that the minorities lack the requisite ethnic, economic or ideological “identity” with the designated dominant group. Neighborhoods will become more parochial than they already are — an odd consequence of a universalistic ideology. The line might be drawn to include valuable real estate (a street, a gas station, a library) and exclude nuisances (a laggard Commune may find itself stuck with the city dump). Belatedly organized Communes will not accept the justice of first-come, first-served, but there is no higher authority for them to apply to for redress.

Since Bookchin is almost indifferent to the economic organization of his ideal society (Chapter 17), it is hard to be sure what absurdities await there. There are resources critically important to cities — oil fields, hydroelectric power dams, mines — located far from them. Who owns them? The nearest one-horse town? Who maintains interstate highways, a string of truck stops? Does a college own its college town? Does a company town own its company? Does Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood where I used to live own the Capitol and the Library of Congress? How does the common situation play out of a large factory in a small town? There may be far more workers than townsmen, maybe even more workers who live outside of town than townsmen. In Pittsburgh, for instance, in the 1980s, only 20% of workers worked in or near their neighborhoods.[1063] The “capitalist industrial city” is characterized by segregation by land use function and by class-based neighborhoods. Everybody but Bookchin knows that productive industry has fled the cities for the suburbs and exurbs. No longer the center of production and distribution, the city is fortunate if it serves as a center of administration, information exchange and service provision.[1064] Because we live in the kind of complex technological society celebrated by the ex-Director, neither neighborhood nor city self-sufficiency is even remotely possible. All the critical economic decisions are made elsewhere.

Taking the Director Emeritus at face value, it would seem that the town could manage the factory (or even a dozen factories in an industrial park) in its own interest, although such decisions are as important or more important to the workers (and to distant consumers) as to the townsmen. As workers without civic rights, they resemble the metics of Athens. It is no use their taking their problems home to their assemblies, because even if the assemblies cared about the personalistic extraterritorial problems of some of their citizens, they are powerless to act beyond their borders. About all that Bookchin says, and says often, relevant to the problem is that assemblies are not to legislate in their own “particularistic” interests, but in the general interest. That solves the problem all right, but only by justifying any form of government, since it doesn’t matter who rules as long as they are guided by the general interest. There would then be no need to set up anything as cumbersome and inefficient as libertarian municipalism.

How many levels of organization would be required to federate a national population of 262,761,000 [when I first wrote these pages: now it is over 306 million], of which 189,524,000 are over 18? Bookchin and I have independently concluded that four federal levels beyond the Commune would be necessary to reach the national level. In his final pre-anarchist days as a democratic decentralist, Bakunin thought it would be three levels, but he was thinking of the much smaller nations of 19^th century Europe, so his estimate is on the same scale as mine.[1065] For a demonstration, we have to make some assumptions. The first is that the average size of a Commune is 1,000 people, of which, using the national average, 75.12% or 751 are adults.[1066] The Director Emeritus would apparently go that high, maybe higher, since Communes may be based on “neighborhoods.”[1067]

One thousand, I submit, is obviously too large to satisfy even a weak standard of face-to-face interaction — for everybody to know everybody else, more or less — especially considering the anomie prevailing in most urban neighborhoods. It is a rare individual in any neighborhood who knows even 50 of his neighbors, unless he is a politician. Many urbanites have contacts with very few neighbors. And characteristically they interact with others “in highly segmental roles” (Louis Wirth). In fact, urban social relations typically exhibit what Simmel called “reserve,” an indifference or even mild repulsion, such that “we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbors for years.” As the pioneering urbanist Robert E. Park put it: “We don’t ever really get to know the urbane person hence never know when to trust him.”[1068]

Furthermore, unlike the organic neighborhoods of urban legend, today’s urban neighborhoods are populated in great part by people coming from or, sooner or later, going to somewhere else. The “organic” ethnic neighborhoods are among the most transient, as Luc Sante states: “Neighborhood stability has been something of a chimera in Manhattan’s history. In many if not most cases, especially after the great waves of immigration, an ethnic group’s hard-fought settlement of an area was immediately followed by its moving elsewhere [as did Murray Bookchin]... When a relative degree of prosperity was achieved by the inhabitants of a quarter, they would throw that quarter away, and it would be picked up and moved into by their successors on the lower rung.”[1069] The geographically mobile tend to believe, with some justification, that if any politics at all is relevant to their lives it is state and national politics. That’s why voter turnout is lowest — consistently so — in local elections, in which ordinary members of the general public rarely participate except to vote. Their indifference is justified: the general trend is toward reducing local autonomy still further.[1070]

In a big city, there is the opportunity to meet more people, but there will be little tendency for one’s acquaintances to reside in one’s own neighborhood. In fact, for many the lure of the big city is precisely the possibility (which is usually a probability) of geographical and social separation of residence from occupational, religious, recreational and other associational activities.[1071] Thus one source of local political apathy is that vocational interests have become more important.[1072] In modern conditions, mere propinquity is a relatively unimportant basis of common interests, and without common interests, there is little reason to get to know the neighbors. The neighbors shop at 10 supermarkets and 5 malls instead of at the general store; they worship in 20 different churches or nowhere; they drink in a dozen different bars depending on whether they are gay, black, students, sports fans, singles, wine snobs, winos, etc. In Pittsburgh, for example — which has clearly delineated neighborhoods — less than half the residents use their neighborhoods for shopping or religious, health, or recreational services.[1073] The reality is that “community implies an association of like minds, but the fact is that a residential neighborhood is generally an aggregate of strangers who happen to live next door to one another.”[1074] The extreme yet revealing expression of urban reserve is where urbanites ignore a crime or a crime victim when they could easily call 911.[1075]

Highly neighborly neighborhoods do exist, usually resting on an ethnic base — what Bookchin calls “culturally distinct neighborhoods” or “colorful ethnic neighborhoods” — but there are not many of them and their number is dwindling.[1076] Fantastically, the Director Emeritus claims that New York City today consists of “largely organic communities that have a certain measure of identity.” (There are many former New Yorkers like him, “now living elsewhere in a suburb or a small city, who wax nostalgic about their former lives in the ‘big city.’”)[1077] You do tend to find the Bloods and Crips in different neighborhoods. But the ethnic neighborhood is usually, for the second generation (Bookchin is typical), a place of assimilation soon left behind. The Jewish radical Lower East Side which the Director Emeritus fondly remembers (as one of “a thousand villages”) is gone. Indeed, as he remembers it, it was never there. Its German, then Jewish and then Italian neighborhoods “were transformed within decades and eventually vanished as their cohort of residents voluntarily relocated to better neighborhoods only to be replaced by newcomers of different ethnic backgrounds.” [1078] The “veneration of the Lower East Side” commenced at the end of World War II, by which time, not coincidentally, most of its Jewish population had moved elsewhere. It was young Jewish writers of the 1960s who created the myth of “the Lower East Side as a place where Jews had resisted the rule of bourgeois respectability.”[1079] The Director Emeritus, who denounces myth, is an example of its power.

It was the same everywhere. In Brooklyn, early 20^th century communities like Canarsie, Flatbush, Bensonhurst and Brownsville are communities no longer.[1080] Gone too are Boston’s West End (Italian), Detroit’s Poletown, and many similar urban communities. And the irony is that those that remain feel more or less besieged by current urban trends and react with a defensive conservatism which makes them among the less likely neighborhoods to take up Bookchin’s radical proposals, unless in a reactionary way. I can think of only one argument which might attract them: when they are self-governing, no one can stop them from keeping out blacks, something zoning already serves to do. Even participatory democrat Benjamin R. Barber weakly admits that only “education” might thwart exclusivist bigotry. For Bookchin, the best neighborhood for a Commune is a homogeneous neighborhood. Let’s be blunt: “Homogeneous neighborhoods are almost always white neighborhoods.”[1081] South Boston, after all, is as organic as a neighborhood gets. In Pittsburgh, primary ties are strongest in white ethnic Catholic neighborhoods.[1082] Then there are the gated communities with their physical barriers, security guards and well-screened affluent, homogeneous populations. These might be called “colorless ethnic neighborhoods.” There are 30,000 gated communities with almost four million residents, and they are increasing rapidly. Bookchin can only babble that “even these enclaves are opening up a degree of nucleation that could ultimately be used in a progressive sense.”[1083]

Bookchin is convinced that his historical examples prove that direct democracy is workable even in large cities, such as Athens with over 250,000 people, or Paris with over 750,000 (one of the three figures he’s provided). Attendance would be on the level of revolutionary Paris or ancient Athens (how can he possibly know this?)[1084] — which one? It was usually much higher in Athens. But Athens and Paris are counter-examples (Chapters 14 and 13). So is the New England town meeting (Chapter 13). In fact, every known example is a counter-example. After extolling Athenian democracy, M.I. Finley admits: “But, then as now, politics was a way of life for very few members of the community.”[1085]

Whether attendance is large or small, here lies a contradiction. The more citizens who attend, the less the assembly can be said to be a face-to-face group. But the fewer citizens who attend, the less legitimacy the assembly has in claiming to speak for all. As in any case of sampling, the smaller the attending group, the less accurately it reflects the composition of the total population.[1086] A larger group is more representative, but a smaller group is more effective. And the Director Emeritus ought not to take for granted the obedience of the predictable huge nonattending majorities which trouble him not at all. In 18^th century Rhode Island, a colony founded by refugee dissidents, chronic low attendance provoked protests against the legitimacy of town meeting decisions. Poorly attended meetings hesitated to take action. And on six occasions, town meetings reversed the acts of the previous meetings when different people showed up.[1087]

One might say that if certain people attend with regularity, they will get to know one another. But that does not escape the dilemma, it intensifies it. The regulars will know each other, work together, and together acquire political experience and skill. Because they interact frequently with each other, they will tend to like each other.[1088] They will know more about the business of the assembly than those who attend occasionally; whereas, in a large group, the typical participant is less likely to prepare himself because he will not affect the decision anyway.[1089] Through regular interaction, even the views of adversaries tend to converge, as happens, for instance, in “courtroom work groups” consisting of prosecutor, defense attorney and judge whose relations are supposedly neutral or adversarial.[1090] Groups exert pressure toward conformity, and the larger the group, the greater the pressure. Participation in a decision increases support for it.[1091] In combination, these forces make for a cohesive in-group which, because it has its own stake in decisions once made, tends to differ in opinion to an ever-increasing degree from the amorphous general population.

The citizens were already unequal, before they entered the meeting room, in respects which always tend toward inequality of participation. Participants will differ from nonparticipants in the same ways that, among participants, leaders and active participants will differ from passive participants. Political participation as measured by voting is higher for those with higher income, education, occupational status, and age, and among whites and long-term residents.[1092] Similarly, the more influential jurors and those most likely to be chosen as foremen are those with higher levels of education, income and organizational skills. Persons of higher social rank have a wider range of interactions, and they are more likely to originate their interactions they “innovate” rather than “adapt”: — they are leaders.[1093]

It is fine to posit that people will not be the same after the Revolution,[1094] but education, occupation, age, race, gender and basic personality, will not be changed by the ex-Director’s revolution. Any crackpot can say that by a fantastic stroke of fortune, the process of constructing his utopia is exactly what it takes to trim people to fit it. Even if people entered the assembly as equals, small-group research demonstrates that, purely as a matter of group dynamics, “as members of a group interact in the performance of a task, inequality of participation arises.” And the larger the group, the greater the extent by which the most active person stands out.[1095] With successive meetings, differentiation increases.[1096] In any political setting, most decisions are made by groups of considerably less than 20 people.[1097] There is no reason why the assembly should be any different. In Athens the activist elite, the rhetores, less than one hundred men out of 20,000 to 40,000 citizens, were superior in ability, education and wealth. They drafted the bills and did the talking.[1098]

In fact, we know that there will be an elite group in Bookchin’s assembly because that is part of the plan. Although Organization militants are of course to play “leading roles” at the outset of revolution, it is after the revolution that their role is critical and they must form “a more structured type of vanguard” if they have not already done so. Like the Bolshevik Party in 1917, the vanguard Organization is not just for seizing power, it is for wielding it after the masses have overthrown the old ruling classes. It “would consist of interlinked affinity groups that would play a leading role in democratic popular assemblies in towns, neighborhoods, and cities.”[1099]

Since “the establishment of popular assemblies would likely involve primarily the most politically concerned people, possibly only a fraction of a whole,”[1100] assemblies would likely by founded by Organization activists. As the Director Emeritus wisely says, political parties are “often synonymous with the state when they are in power.”[1101] The founders will bring to the assembly their working unity, organizational skills, ideological certitude, and the prestige of their victorious revolution. As a group, or as the nucleus of a broader insider group, they will dominate meetings. Citizens who occasionally attend, whose motivation to do so was not high anyway, will notice their own lack of influence and their attendance will decline, further enhancing the power of the clique. The outcome is oligarchy, just as it is under representative systems. Every Commune will be, not only a state, but a one-party state.

Thus a compact minority — a minority of the minority — has the power; power can be abused; and where power can be abused, it will be. Inevitably a clique will oppress minorities (and probably majorities), if only because it can. The people in power will be the same kind of people who were in power before.[1102] Minorities will find themselves more susceptible to oppression than under the old government, in several respects. Small units tend to be more homogeneous than large ones, simply because their capacity to accommodate diversity is more limited, and the likelihood of a dissenter finding allies is lower. And the importance of allies cannot be overstated: “If even one person supports a dissenter against a group, the chance of the dissenter’s conforming drops drastically, and a dissenter is more likely in a large group to find someone to give such support.”[1103] James Madison argued, in support of the Constitution, that “whilst all authority in [the federal republic] will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as the security for religious rights. It consists in the one case of the multiplicity of interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government.”[1104] However effective this safeguard actually is, it will not affect the Commune very much. The smaller the group, the fewer the interests represented or to put it another way, the less proportionality, and the greater the likelihood of oppression.[1105] There is some incentive not to oppress where the oppressive majority of today may be the oppressed minority of tomorrow. The Commune, in contrast, is as if designed to constitute permanent oppressive majorities.

To the evil of majoritarian tyranny is added that of faction. Although Madison was speaking of a government for a republic, direct democracy provided his examples:

From this view of the subject, it may be concluded, that a pure Democracy, by which I mean a society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.

All the American Founders denounced Athens and/or direct democracy.[1106] The Director Emeritus predicts factional struggles in the assembly. The founders would be in a minority, and “an attempt will be made by other interests, including class interests, to take over the assemblies.”[1107] Take over from whom? From the founding faction whose dominance is assumed to be permanently desirable. An assembly is performing well for him so long as the Bookchinist ideological minority perpetuates its initial dominance.

No rights, not even rights of political participation, are fundamental or “entrenched” in the sense that the decrees of the assembly cannot violate them. Such rights are incompatible with the sovereignty of the assembly, whose power is in principle unlimited. Thus, as we saw in Chapter 14, the Athenian citizen had virtually no rights. Thus Murray Bookchin nowhere speaks of rights against the power of the assembly, and he denounces all negative freedom (Chapter 3), which is the form rights usually take. He once held that the assembly would have a constitution, but the only content he mentions is the structure of government, majority rule, and the right to vote. The perspicacious Hobbes denied that there was more liberty in a democracy than in monarchy: “For even if liberty is inscribed on the gates and towers of a city in the largest possible letters, it is not the liberty of the individual citizen but of the city; and there is no better right to inscribe it on a popularly governed than on a Monarchically governed city.” [1108]

With his usual lying, disdainful quotation marks, the Director Emeritus spurns the “sovereign rights” and “natural rights” supposedly claimed by Lifestyle Anarchists.[1109] Truly, any right purportedly assured by the Commune would be merely a quote/unquote “right.” Every individual right infringes positive freedom, which is, for him, the only kind of freedom there is.[1110] The only apparent exception is also the only apparent exception at Athens: the right to participate in the assembly and hold office.[1111] Freedom of speech means freedom to speak in the assembly and, at its most expansive, freedom to speak out of doors about matters which may come before the assembly. That leaves open to mini-state control all the speech of most people and most of the speech of all people. In other words, there is freedom of speech when it serves the system, but not for the benefit of the individual. Bookchin cannot even imagine that people might want to talk about anything besides politics. Censorship is here a simple matter because the Commune owns the media.[1112] And there is no suggestion of recourse, in case even these few participation-related rights are violated, to anyone except the body violating them, the assembly. As a last resort, Athens had ostracism; any Commune might also ostracize.

Or so it seemed from everything by Bookchin that I’ve seen. In The Politics of Social Ecology, his puppet Janet Biehl repeats his line that the Communes “retain their freedom and their identity and their sovereignty even as they confederate.” By definition, the sovereign possesses the ultimate authority. Yet now we are told that any Commune could require a popular referendum of all the citizens of the federated Communes to vote on allegations that some other Commune “was wreaking ecological mayhem (dumping its wastes in the river) or violating human rights (excluding people of color)”! In direct contradiction to the principles of direct democracy, a majority of nondeliberative, non-face to face (yuck!) individuals drawn from other Communes could impose its will upon one supposedly sovereign Commune.[1113] There is thus no Communal sovereignty; the Confederacy is sovereign; for sovereignty, as Rousseau and the Antifederalists[1114] insisted, is indivisible. There is no escaping the confederal dilemma:

If a federal government possesses a constitutional authority to intervene by force in the government of a state for the purpose of ensuring the state’s performance of its duties as a member of the federation, there is no adequate constitutional barrier against the conversion of the federation into a centralized state by vigorous and resolute central government. If it does not possess such an authority, there is no adequate assurance that the federal government can maintain the character of the system when vigorous and resolute state governments take full advantage of their constitutional freedom to go their own ways.[1115]

One of two things happens: either the federation collapses or it becomes a centralized state. Collapse, such as befell the ancient Greek and medieval Italian federations, is by far the more common fate. But occasionally the central “coordinating” apparatus of a confederation transforms itself into a state, which usually takes a long time. Examples are the United States, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Quite recently, the Director Emeritus confirmed that his Confederation is the sovereign power. Proudhon and Bakunin regrettably “allowed for the possibility that a single community could opt out of the confederation if it so desired... But I don’t agree that this should be permitted.”[1116]

“Why, then,” one may ask, “is there reason to emphasize the assembly form as crucial to self-governance? Is it not enough to use the referendum, as the Swiss profess to do today, and resolve the problem of democratic procedure in a simple and seemingly uncomplicated way?” No, because, for one thing, “the autonomous individual qua ‘voter’ [why the quotation marks?] who forms the social unit of the referendum process in liberal theory is a fiction.”[1117] Indeed he is a fiction — Bookchin’s fiction. If “voters” are fictions, how is it that they elect candidates who take office and rule? “The referendum, conducted in the privacy of one’s voting booth or, as some ‘Third Wave’ enthusiasts would have it, in the electronic isolation of one’s home privatizes democracy and thereby subverts it.”[1118] In other words, voting is incompatible with democracy, which completes the severance of the word democracy from all terrestrial moorings. Just what does assembly voting add to voting? The assembly provides a forum for deliberation, of course — this, indeed, is the ex-Director’s only argument against the “farce” of electronic voting[1119] — but deliberation need not coincide with voting and it need not take place in the assembly. So it must be something else. Bookchin’s real objection, which he is ashamed to express, can only be to the secret ballot. He seeks a return to the corrupt politics of the 19^th century when voting was public and voters were exposed to intimidation and reprisals. Public voting made a mockery of Italian and Parisian democracy, where it perpetuated the oligarchy of entrenched elites. This kind of freedom, if you care to call it that, is only formal, not substantive.

Biehl’s thoughtless, half-assed scheme teems with latent difficulties. As the proposal is phrased, any one Commune can trigger a referendum just by demanding one. Isn’t it obvious that Communes on the losing side in Confederal decisions will take a second bite out of the apple by compelling referenda? They have nothing to lose. Even if neighborly harmony prevails within Communes, it is not to be expected among Confederal delegates who have no authority to negotiate, compromise or even persuade. Referenda will thus be routine, perhaps weekly events. This will inconvenience everybody. In places where referenda are now held, although they are not frequent, often only a tiny minority votes. It may be that every assembly will have to devote a substantial part of its agenda to discussing and voting on referendum questions to the detriment of its own affairs. Or use Internet voting, which, “farce” or not, has already been tried successfully.[1120] There’s no conceivable reason why the assemblies won’t just send in their vote tallies directly — by ConFederal Express! — as is done in all elections today, rather than dispatch their delegate with a briefcase. What’s more, the incessant practice of referenda will accustom citizens to voting on a Confederation-wide, translocal, equal suffrage basis. The value of deliberation declines when there is no opportunity to deliberate with the vast majority of the people voting. The citizens will adopt representation, and all the usual centralizing processes will go into play.

What happens if the wayward Commune refuses to abide by majority vote, as the Paris sectionnaires did when they expelled Girondin delegates from the Convention whom others had elected? Will the Confederation call out the militias the way an American president can “federalize” (i.e., nationalize) the National Guard? That would establish beyond doubt the statist character of the Confederation. Or merely expel the wayward Commune? If that meant economic strangulation for the Commune, this is coercion as surely as is military force. But what if the miscreant Commune, whether it is in or out of the Confederation, persists in its wrongdoing? Its polluting or prejudicial practices remain as obnoxious as ever. The question of coercion arises either way. And what if the polluting or discriminatory Commune is in another Confederation? If it is, perhaps, just across that river it is polluting? The Communes of the virtuous Confederation have no right to compel a referendum anywhere else, and there is no guarantee that if one is held, that the cause of virtue will win. What if it doesn’t? What then — war? Isn’t this scenario substantially that of the American Civil War or, as the South refers to it, the War Between the States? Anyway, the faith of Biehl qua Bookchin in the referendum as a safeguard for minorities is self-refuting, since the proposal is precisely to use it to coerce minorities. Direct democracy through referenda “does have the further disadvantage of removing any power from minority groups.”[1121]

Even if there were something like constitutional rights, there would be no courts to enforce them. In fact, there are apparently no courts to enforce anything. That courts may have a place in a direct democracy, Bookchin well knows, since he defends the Athenian system of hired mass juries and ad hoc judges, and he mentions that the sections of Paris had their courts and justices of the peace.[1122] But I have found no references in his writings to courts as Communal institutions.

Now as an anarchist I am supposed to spurn paper laws and dismiss courts as merely a source of oppression, not a protection against it. That is too facile, although the history shows that courts are most likely to act as tools of the state, of which they are a part, against the enemies of the state.[1123] Such factors as the relative independence of the judiciary, and the relative autonomy of the law as a professionally elaborated body of expert knowledge, imply that law cannot simply be deduced from immediate state (or class) interests, as Marx (a one-time law student) appreciated.[1124] My insistence that state and law are mutually entailing (Chapter 10) implies, intentionally, that anarchy excludes law.

I further willingly agree that the “abstract, impersonal legal subject,” the legal person regarded in his juridical aspect, is the abstract Economic Man of bourgeois ideology.[1125] Legal rights attain their highest development in the bourgeois state. They would be meaningless in an anarchist society as I understand it. But they would not be meaningless in the Commune, where they are not available, because the Commune is a state. Bookchin would not have boomed written law so stridently (Chapter 10) unless the rule of law, not the order of custom, is to govern the Commune. I would want rights there if I wanted them anywhere. The only thing worse than law is law without rights.

It’s a bit beguiling to fantasize about the upper reaches of the worldwide Confederal hierarchy. Assuming Communes of about 1,000, there will be about 262,761 Communes in the United States. They will not be face-to-face groups but their dominant elites will be. Artificial city boundaries having become irrelevant, the Communes, which are really neighborhoods, will federate locally (the Municipal Confederation). Here the number of those federated has to be large enough to bring together Communes with substantial common interests, yet small enough for face-to-face relations between delegates.

Now we have to posit the optimal size for an assembly of delegates. Here we cannot count on apathy to keep attendance down. All but a few of the delegates will show up for meetings, first, because they want to and were chosen to, and second, because they will be replaced if they don’t.

As Madison urged, the body must not be too small or too large, “for however small the Republic may be, the Representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude.”[1126] History offers some guidance. The Athenian Council, a full-time deliberative body, had 500 members, although even that is really too high for a face-to-face deliberative body. The U.S. House of Representatives, which has 435 members, has been considered a face-to-face group, but if it is, it’s because the vast majority of members are incumbents, often with many terms behind them, and so they already know each other. If most members of our Council are long-term incumbents, we would suspect oligarchy. If they are not, we would suspect an atomistic, nondeliberative body. 1,000 people, initially strangers to one another, is just a crowd, unsuitable for widespread participation. Even with membership set at 500, and assuming continuity based on a core of incumbents (which tends toward oligarchy), the assembly of the local federation is a face-to-face group only in a very loose sense.[1127] But anything much smaller would necessitate even more levels of federation than the five I envisage for the Tower of Babel we are erecting. So we will not exceed 500, and often go much lower.

For a reasonable next tier within statistical parameters, there is the Metro area. Anything smaller would arbitrarily divide an economic and ecological unity. Because the statistical metro area in my Albany example is small in population (under 900,000) and rather underestimates the centripetal influence of the three largest cities, it might be extended in several directions, and across state lines, to take in many small towns and much countryside for a population of perhaps 2 million. These areas could be represented at the national level by a convenient number of delegates, 132, but there’s a vast political field to be traversed there. Surely there should be a Regional level, which might in a few cases correspond to a state, but would usually encompass a few of them. With populations of 20 million and more, the Regions could be represented at the National Council by as few as 12 or 13 delegates, although more would be preferable to reflect the wide diversity of interests within regions, except that nobody in this Roman melodrama is supposed to represent interests. There might be a Continental or Hemispheric Council, and assuredly an International Council.

Here is the whole hierarchy:

Communal → Municipal → Metropolitan → Regional → National → ... n

Thus the average comrade in the Commune is subordinate to at least five hierarchically ordered levels of government, counting the assembly. In Spain, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT proposed four,[1128] which is the most I have ever heard suggested till now. No federation in history was ever like this. Our Federal system, whose complexities prolong law school by at least a year, is simple by comparison: two levels above the citizen. (Local government, which has no independent constitutional standing, is just a department of state government.) Bookchin’s system is not, as he calls it, the Commune of Communes. Rather, it is the Commune of Communes of Communes of Communes of Communes. The idea that the representative of the representative of the representative of my representative represents me is laughable. The Communal comrade will probably not even know the names of his representatives except maybe the lowest one, and vise versa.

There is no reason a priori why the number of levels which is optimal for effective administration is also optimal for effective representation. And just as they do in traditional representative systems, successively higher levels of government aggravate inequality. Indirect elections are well known to have this consequence, which is why they are the favorite kind of elections for conservatives. In his history of the French Revolution, Kropotkin noted that they favor the wealthy. The U.S. Electoral College, for instance, was supposed to consist of “a small number of persons, selected from their fellow citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to so complicated an investigation.”[1129] All the oligarchic influences within the Commune are multiplied, with cumulative impact, at each higher level. The Municipal delegates will be higher in class, wealth, education, political aptitude — and whiteness — than the Communards generally. The Metropolitan delegates will score even higher in these respects, and so forth twice more. The National Council will not look like America, it will look like the U.S. Senate or the Microsoft board of directors.

Direct democracy and federalism are antagonistic principles. Consider, for instance, a delegate to the Municipal Council. His claim to legitimacy rests on his familiarity with the people of his neighborhood as well as his election by a plurality of the minority that showed up for the assembly on election day. In the Municipal Council, in contrast, he is at first a stranger. He must ingratiate himself with his colleagues until he shares a community of experience with them as he does with his neighbors. In other words, he has to join a second face-to-face group in order to serve the first. But time devoted to one group is time taken from the other. He cannot serve his neighbors effectively without losing touch with them, with the result that, again, he cannot serve his neighbors effectively. He can serve effectively, but then it is not his neighbors whom he serves.

At the next level, what is a delegate supposed to do? Now he has three face-to-face groups to keep up with. As this is impossible, he is likely to slight the Commune, whose leash is the longest. Formally he represents the Municipal Council, but what if the Council mandates a position he believes to be against the interests of his Commune? His mandate precludes his reopening the question at the Metropolitan level, and the Council will recall him if he tries. He belongs to a deliberative body, but he cannot even speak his mind, much less deliberate in good faith. Conscientious or conflicted delegates will lose influence relative to opportunists and loose cannons who know what they want and go for it. It is the latter who will choose delegates (from among themselves) to the Regional Council, where the same process will assure that members of the National Council will be a different kind of people than ordinary Americans.

The rejoinder is that the higher the level, the less authority it possesses, implying that the Regional and especially the Federal levels are almost supernumerary. Thus the Director Emeritus claims that “Switzerland has rendered the nation-state utterly superfluous.” To which I raised the obvious objection, “if the Swiss nation-state is utterly superfluous, why does it exist at all?”[1130] His own sources confirm that the national (federal) government of Switzerland has been gaining power at the expense of the cantons for centuries.[1131] That always happens in federations, as it has happened in the United States, unless they break up first. Since the Swiss state is superfluous now, somehow it must have been less than superfluous in the 19^th century when de Tocqueville criticized it as the most imperfect confederation in history.[1132] In the 16^th through 18^th centuries, it must have been less than less than superfluous. It was, of course, never superfluous at any time.

As unsatisfactory as Bookchin’s historical examples of Communes are, he at least provides a little detail. When it comes to historic federations, he tells us nothing relevant. There were “at least 15” ancient Greek federations, for instance, but nearly all are now just names, and the Director Emeritus does not even provide most of the names. One striking feature of some of the Greek federations was intercity citizenship: if they made the trip, citizens of one city could attend the assembly of another city. The ex-Director does not advocate this aspect of Greek federal practice. From the little he says about their functions, it appears that the Greek federations were primarily military alliances, which again has no contemporary relevance.[1133] Something he does not tell us is that they all had some sort of a central government.[1134] James Madison undertook a more searching scrutiny of the Greek federations. He thought their bad example was an argument for the U.S. Constitution. But really the truth is that we know little about these federations except that they were failures, and usually short-lived failures.[1135]

The United States, which also had a central government under the Articles of Confederation, is a glaring if understandable omission from the ex-Director’s discussion. The familiar story of how the failings of an American confederation led to the adoption of a more centralized national government is not one that Bookchin cares to tell. But the issue evokes another peevish outburst. “Even as a word,” he states — when Bookchin gets hold of a word, you know what to expect — “‘confederation’ implies a commitment to liberatory ways of associating.” Not so; in fact, it usually or especially refers to a union of states.[1136] Somehow the Articles of Confederation were replaced in a devious way: “It is notable that the first American constitution was deliberately called ‘Articles of Confederation,’ which, for all its limitations, was cynically and secretively replaced by a so-called ‘federal’ constitution, one that Hamilton and his supporters foisted on the American people as the next best alternative to a constitutional monarchy.”[1137] This tale is popular with uneducated leftists like Bookchin.

It is indeed true that the Articles of Confederation were named “deliberately,” not accidentally, but not because of the liberatory implications of the word “confederation,” because then, as now, the word had no such implications. Joel Barlow, for instance, referred to the system under the Constitution as a confederation. So did future Supreme Court Jusice James Wilson addressing the Convention. In 1787, the word “federate” “was almost exactly synonymous with “confederate.”[1138] Addressing the House of Representatives in 1791, James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, referred to the system under the Constitution as “the Confederation.”[1139] Actually, whatever “confederation” meant precisely to the person who made up the name, we know that, for him, it did not exclude a sovereign union with a Congress of theoretically unlimited authority, because that is what John Dickinson proposed in his first draft of the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.”[1140] His title, but little else of his draft — which designed a highly centralized state — was retained in the final version.

The Articles were not “secretively replaced” by the Constitution — that is childish conspiracy theory. They were superseded after extensive public debate (Anti-Federalist campaign literature alone fills five volumes[1141]) as the conventions meeting in nine states (shortly joined by three more) publicly ratified the proposal. Because, until ratified, that’s all it was, a proposal, so it is not too important that it was formulated in closed session. The Convention followed the procedure established in the states for the writing or amendment of constitutions by an ad hoc body instead of the legislature, with the new constitution then placed before the people for ratification.

Indeed the Confederation Congress cooperated in its own overthrow. When the Convention forwarded the proposed Constitution to Congress, the latter had it “transmitted to the several Legislatures in order to be submitted to a convention of delegates chosen in each State by the people thereof, in conformity to the resolves of the convention.” After all, 10 of the 31 Congressmen were Philadelphia Framers. Not only was it Congress which summoned the delegates to Philadelphia, it paid the Convention’s expenses and even extended franking privileges to the delegates. Congress actively assisted in its own demise.[1142] Devised in secret — and its critics made the charge of “conspiracy”[1143] one of their strongest arguments — nonetheless, the Constitution “was widely, fully, and vigorously debated in the country at large; and it was adopted by (all things considered) a remarkably open and representative procedure.”[1144]

The image of Hamilton the Machiavellian monarchist persists, although no historian has believed in it since the 19^th century. At the Convention, Hamilton had no influence or supporters. He was consistently outvoted by his two New York colleagues (voting was by states), and when they went home early (going on to be prominent Antifederalists), that left Hamilton with not even a losing vote to cast, so he went home too. He was not a monarchist; he stated that Britain had the best form of government, not that it was the best form of government for the United States.[1145] (As Fisher Ames — least democratic of Federalists — later recalled, “the body of the federalists were always, and yet are, essentially democratic in their political notions.”[1146]) In a five hour speech to the Convention, Hamilton offered a plan for a highly centralized government (but not a monarchy) as a talking piece only. It was politely received and ignored. As another delegate put it, “the gentleman from New York ... has been praised by everybody, he has been supported by none.” Briefly returning in September, a few days before the final draft Constitution was completed, he bluntly expressed his “dislike of the scheme of government”! And in a self-epitaph he wrote in 1804, near the end of his life, he wrote that no one had done more to sustain the Constitution than he had, but “contrary to all my anticipations of its fate ... I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric.”[1147]

Quite mysterious are the functions of Bookchin’s federations. The delegates thereto are mandated and revocable, but do not make policy decisions.[1148] Then what are they mandated to do? And who does make the decisions? It has to be the Communes, but how do one thousand oil-consuming Communes in the northeast obtain their winter heating oil from one thousand oil-producing Communes in the southwest? The consumer Communes can send up their requisitions to be aggregated at the regional level, but has the corresponding producer federation the authority to assign production quotas to the federations at the next level down, and so forth? There are a hundred unanswered questions like these.

The federations are without coercive authority, they just “coordinate” — meaning what? To coordinate is to “Cause (things or persons) to function together or occupy their proper place as parts of an interrelated whole.”[1149] How do you cause buyers and sellers to function together? The usual methods are through money (the market) or coercion (the state), but Bookchin rejects these institutions. Coordination is either consent or a euphemism for coercion. Consent is forthcoming only when the participants in an activity share a common purpose. Otherwise, coordination means coercion, and “telling another person to coordinate, therefore, does not tell him what to do. He does not know whether to coerce or bargain, to exert power or secure consent.”[1150] The Communes have not told the federations what to do, only how not to do it. Power and market, the impersonal methods of coordination, are not the only ones. But coordination by personalized consent is only possible for a small number of participants usually already connected through preexisting relationships.

Actually, Bookchin could use some coordination himself. He says the confederations will coordinate the Communes, but he also refers to “the self-administration of a community by its citizens in face-to-face assemblies, which in cities with relatively large populations would coordinate the administrative work of the city council, composed of mandated and recallable assembly deputies.”[1151] If he is self-contradictory about who coordinates “the work,” he is silent as to who does it. This is one of those occasions on which the ex-Director’s head is in the clouds, or somewhere else: “The decision to build a road, for example, does not mean that everyone must know how to design and construct one.” After devoting four paragraphs to this topic, Biehl concludes, almost as an afterthought:

Finally, the road itself would have to be constructed [as if that were the easy part]. Unlike the other stages of the process, the construction of the road would be strictly an administrative responsibility — it would require no deliberation, no voting [what a relief]. The road-builders would carry out the decision made by the assembly, building the road according to the chosen plan. This strictly technical process of execution is an example of administration — in which no policy-making is involved.[1152]

Building a road is not a strictly administrative process! And what if the construction workers won’t build the road according to the chosen plan — chosen by others — perhaps because they think they know better than voters and bureaucrats how to build a road, as they probably do? Execution is not administration, it is work, real work, and sometimes hard work, as in the case of road-building, judging from “the sound of the men/working on the chain ga-a-ang” (Sam Cooke).

The Director Emeritus has a naïve and simple-minded conception of administration:

The technical execution or administration of these policies would be carried out by the appropriate specialists. The most important functions of the confederal councils would be administrative. In fact, these city and confederal councils would have to ultimately refer all policy-making decisions to the assemblies and only with their approval undertake their administration. These policy decisions would be made by a majority of the people themselves in their face-to-face assemblies. The city and confederal councils would merely execute these decisions, or at most adjust differences between them.

There shall be no “melding of policy formation with administration,” which was the “regressive” practice of the Paris Commune.[1153] In other words, “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions.” This was, indeed the best political thinking of the 19^th century — Woodrow Wilson wrote this in 1887. By now it has been confuted by the experience of every bureaucracy: “no structure can approach the old-fashioned textbook ideal in which bureaucrats merely carry out or execute policy directives chosen for them by legislative authorities.” On the contrary, “implementation should not be divorced from policy.”[1154] Bookchin’s is the regressive view.

“Administration” is, as Benjamin Tucker pointed out, a euphemism for coercion: “Some champions of the State evidently consider aggression its principle, although they disguise it alike from themselves and from the people under the term ‘administration,’ which they wish to extend in every possible direction.”[1155] Anarchists reject the Marxist distinction between the government of men and the administration of things. The Director Emeritus not only affirms it, he criticizes Marx for once ignoring it and taking a realistic view of the Paris Commune.[1156]

All you have to do is walk around any city with your eyes open to see important governmental activity which it would be inefficient if not impossible to carry out at the level of a neighborhood of one thousand people inhabiting, says Bookchin, one to twelve blocks.[1157] Sanitation and garbage collection must be organized citywide because germs and smells disrespect neighborhood sovereignty. Land use planning by tiny territorial units is an invitation to self-interested parochialism. Chodorkoff Commune will want to site a factory as far as possible from its population concentration — at the border with Biehl Commune, which derives no benefit from the factory but may get some of its noise and pollution. The organization, as opposed to the recruitment, of the militia — without which no Commune is complete — must be on a larger than neighborhood scale, or we will have 100 or 1000 little armies which, if they are ever to “federate” for war or to suppress Lifestyle Anarchist insurrections, will have to be standardized in everything from training to ammunition. Effective militias are critical, since Communes will co-exist with nation-states, or try to, for a protracted period. The medieval and Renaissance city-states succumbed to the overwhelming superior force of the nation-states.[1158] The ex-Director’s Communes will have to do better with people mostly without any military experience, unlike the citizen-soldiers of Athens.

These are more than problems of coordination. They derive from imperatives of technology and geography which cannot be avoided, at least in the short run. Delegates truly responsive to the base will shuttle back and forth as the implementation of their instructions creates new situations which necessitate more instructions which will never anticipate every contingency. [1159] The more the assemblies try to provide for contingencies, the more numerous and heterogeneous will be the mandates their delegates take back to the council, and the more difficult their aggregation into a decision will be. Arguing in the First Federal Congress against instruction, one Representative aptly stated: “Perhaps a majority of the whole might not be instructed to agree to any one point.” Usually nothing will be decided, or nothing will be decided until it is too late.

Sometimes something will be decided, not because it was what the majority wanted, but because it was what the majority failed to forbid, as when, as we saw (Chapter 13), delegates to the Junta of the Comuneros voted taxes without seeking new instructions from their cities. They might even enact what the constituencies did forbid. For example, the delegates to the Second Continental Congress were instructed, and their instructions were, whatever else they did, not to declare American independence. But as every schoolboy used to know, that is what they did.[1160] The delegates, supposedly coordinators, will be powerless to coordinate themselves.

In the 1780s, Noah Webster criticized the practice of “instructing” the representatives to state legislatures: instructions “imply a decision of a question, before it is heard — they reduce a Representative to a mere machine, by restraining the exercise of his reason.” In theory, delegates are nothing but errand boys: “The delegates’ functions would be to convey the wishes of the municipality to the confederal level” (Biehl).[1161] No genuine discussion can take place in an assembly unless the members are prepared to listen to each other and perhaps change their minds. [1162] Confined to a menial role, distrusted by their assemblies, the delegates will become resentful and reluctant to serve. (The ones who are never reluctant to serve are the ones to watch out for.)

Sooner or later, assemblies and delegates will get tired of wasting so much time and trouble on even seemingly simple decisions which don’t turn out right anyway. Undersupervised delegates will rediscover what John Dickinson, an instructed delegate to the Second Continental Congress, thought to do: he wrote his own instructions for the Pennsylvania Assembly to “impose” on him.[1163] Tired of their robotic role, delegates will interpret their mandates to authorize various implementing decisions. They may look to the purpose of the mandate, or derive a decision by analogy from what the assembly did in a similar situation, or do what they think the assembly would have wanted had it foreseen the current situation, or even persuade themselves that the words of the mandate announce a decision after all. In other words, they will reinvent the creative methods that judges use when they apply the law.[1164]

Which is not so surprising, because they will recapitulate judicial history. Originally the judicial function is not differentiated from the executive or administrative function. American courts still have important administrative functions, such as corporate reorganization and the administration of decedents’ estates.[1165] In England, not only is the king originally the maker of law, as we saw in the case of the Anglo-Saxon codes (Chapter 10), he also applies it. King John, for instance, often sat with his judges, who itinerated as he did.[1166] We also see the combination of administrative and judicial functions in 17^th century Massachusetts and 18^th century Virginia (Chapters 14 & 16). It is the old story of differentiation of functions leading to specialization of office. The delegates will not forever accept the duties of a legislature without the powers, even if they act in good faith. It is only one aspect of their inevitable development of common interests unshared by their constituents. Quoth Robert de Jouvenel: “There is less difference between two deputies of whom one is a revolutionary and the other is not, than between two revolutionaries of whom one is a deputy and the other is not.”[1167]

The assemblies will likely abet the delegates in their tacit usurpation of legislative power. Even the more politically inclined Communards will weary of petty and repetitious importunities from their mandated and revocable delegates. Mandates will be framed more broadly, and discretion will be explicitly or implicitly conferred. Searching questions will not normally be asked of those assuming the thankless role of delegate. It may be that some assemblies will stop electing delegates at all, either because no one acceptable wants the job or because the council’s performance is not unsatisfactory. In 18^th century Massachusetts up to the Revolution, many towns failed to send representatives, or as many representatives as they were entitled to, to the colonial legislature. Even in 1765–1769, a period of high political excitement during the Stamp Act crisis, only 53% of towns sent representatives.[1168] In Bookchin’s world, some neighborhoods may never have federated in the first place, perhaps because they are rife with individualists, or perhaps because they are rife with statists, or just because most people are not political animals, just animals.