The Next Revolution : Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy

Notes
Many less well-known names could be added to this list, but one that in particular I would like very much to single out is the gallant leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, Maria Spiridonova, whose supporters were virtually alone in proposing a workable revolutionary program for the Russian people in 1917–18. Their failure to implement their political insights and replace the Bolsheviks (with whom they initially joined in forming the first Soviet government) not only led to their defeat but contributed to the disastrous failure of revolutionary movements in the century that followed. I frankly regard this contradiction as more fundamental than the often-indiscernible tendency of the rate of profit to decline and thereby to render capitalist exchange inoperable—a contradiction to which Marxists assigned a decisive role in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contrary to Marx’s assertion that a s... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Further Reading
Further Reading Books by Murray Bookchin Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971; and Oakland: AK Press, 2004. The Limits of the City. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936. New York: Free Life Editions, 1977; and San Fransisco: AK Press, 2001. Toward an Ecological Society. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980. The Ecology of Freedom. Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982; and San Francisco: AK Press, 2001. The Modern Crisis. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987. The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987. Revised edition as From Urbanization to Cities: Towards a New Politics of Citizenship. London: Cassell, 1995. Remaking Society: Paths to a G... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments Some of these essays appeared previously in other venues and we would like to acknowledge them as follows: The essay “The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society” was originally written for a Greek audience in 1992 and later published in English under the title “The Ecological Crisis, Socialism, and the Need to Remake Society” in the journal Society and Nature vol. 2, no. 3, 1994. “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century” was originally a video-transmitted speech presented to the First International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, Lisbon, 1998. “The Meaning of Confederalism” was originally published in From Urbanization to Cities,London: Cassell, 1995. “Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy” was originally titled “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview” and appeared in Green Perspectives, no. 24, 1991. “Cities: The Unfolding... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9 : The Future of the Left
9. The Future of the Left By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Left envisioned itself as having reached an extraordinary degree of conceptual sophistication and organizational maturity. Generally, what was called leftism at that time was socialist, influenced to varying degrees by the works of Karl Marx. This was especially the case in Central Europe, but socialism was also intermixed with populist ideas in Eastern Europe and with syndicalism in France, Spain, and Latin America. In the United States, all of these ideas were melded together, for example, in Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party and in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). On the eve of World War I, leftist ideas and movements had become so advanced that they seemed positioned to seriously challenge the existence of capitalism, indeed, of class society as such. The words from the “Internationale,” “Tis the final conflict,” acquired a new concreteness and im... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8 : Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution
8. Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution Today, when anarchism has become le mot du jor in radical circles, the differences between a society based on anarchy and one based on the principles of social ecology should be clearly distinguished. Authentic anarchism above all seeks the emancipation of individual personality from all ethical, political, and social constraints. In so doing, however, it fails to address the all-important and very concrete issue of power, which confronts all revolutionaries in a period of social upheaval. Rather than address how the people, organized into confederated popular assemblies, might capture power and create a fully developed libertarian society, anarchists conceive of power essentially as a malignant evil that must be destroyed. Proudhon, for example, once stated that he would divide and subdivide power until it, in effect, ceased to exist. Proudhon may well have intended that government be reduced to the minimum ent... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy
5. Libertarian Municipalism: A Politics of Direct Democracy Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction—I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed—is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo. Politics today primarily means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for electoral office that offer vacuous programs for “social justice” to attract a nondescript “electorate.” Once in office, their programs usually turn into a bouquet of “compromises.” In this respect, many Green parties in Europe have been only marginally different fr... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Introduction by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor The world today confronts not one, but a series of interlocking crises—economic, political, social, and ecological. The new millennium has been marked by a growing gap between rich and poor that has reached unprecedented levels of disparity, consigning an entire generation to diminished expectations and dismal prospects. Socially, the trajectory of the new century has been equally bleak, particularly in the developing world, where sectarian violence in the name of religion, tribalism, and nationalism has turned entire regions into insufferable battle zones. Meanwhile, the environmental crisis has worsened at a pace that has exceeded even the most pessimistic forecasts. Global warming, r... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A Politics for the Twenty-First Century
3. A Politics for the Twenty-First Century It would be helpful to place libertarian municipalism in a broad historical perspective, all the more to understand its revolutionary character in human affairs generally as well as its place in the repertoire of antistatist practices. The commune, the town or city, or more broadly, the municipality, is not merely a “space” created by a given density of human habitations. In terms of its history as a civilizing tendency in humanity’s development, the municipality is integrally part of the sweeping process whereby human beings began to dissolve biologically conditioned social relations based on real or fictitious blood ties, with their primordial hostility to “strangers,&rdqu... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Communalist Project
1. The Communalist Project Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary—or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal mediocrity—will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries of the revolutionary era. The direction we select, from among several intersecting roads of human development, may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as this irrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological weapons, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire human enterprise may come to a devast... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Nationalism and the “National Question”
7. Nationalism and the “National Question” One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century. This did not mean that the nineteenth-century Left favored imperialist depredations in the colonial world. At the turn of this century, hardly any serious radi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)