Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Murray Bookchin In Flanders Fields (Belgium)

Written by Roger Jacobs

To come straight to the point: I can’t trace back when and how I was introduced to the writings of Murray Bookchin. At some point in the 1980s, I picked up a Dutch reader with four of his most important essays.¹ Perhaps I was motivated by this reader to procure more of his books: I possess older editions of Post-Scarcity Anarchism and Toward an Ecological Society.² Underlines and margin notes (in the handwriting of my younger years) indicate which themes were very near my heart: “ecology and revolutionary thought, self-management and new technology, Listen, Marxist, spontaneity and organization, and two critical appendices on Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz. I remember that I obtained, by chance, The Ecology of Freedom via a colleague on the work floor.³ This book impressed me so much that in 1989, I started a more or less intense correspondence with Murray via Janet Biehl. Thanks to Murray’s writings, I obtained a lifelong political compass by which to understand and change our society.

From Catholicism to a Wavering Anarchism

Like so many youngsters of my generation, I became a leftist in the years that followed the May ’68 events. As the son of a working-class family with good school results, I won a public scholarship in 1972 to attend university. Originally Catholic, I started to study philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), one of the largest universities in Belgium. There, I ended up in one of the most conservative departments of the university. But neither the bars nor the walls of the Institut supérieure de Philosophie could fully quell the uproar of the shimmering student rebellion of the time. Supervised by a young Spinoza—a specialist who later on became a well-known conservative philosopher—I was introduced to the writings of Karl Marx. Outside the university walls, I attended lectures of the Trotskyist intellectual and politician, Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), one of the leaders of the Fourth International, and of the somewhat grim Maoist ideologue Ludo Martens (1946-2011) who later wrote an apologetic book on Joseph Stalin, Another view of Stalin (1994).⁴ They criticized each other and the diluted version of “beefsteak socialism” of the social democrats and the Eurocommunists. They persuaded us of the lasting value of historical and dialectical materialism and Marx’s economic analyses, and they emphasized the revolutionary potential of the working class and the necessity of democratic centralism. Their disciplined dwarf parties would assail all progressive movements for the next three decades with their dogmas.

For a year and a half, I was engaged in the midst of these Marxist-Leninists. That was long enough to realise that my Russian and Chinese “language” was not enjoyed by the Flemish public. I interrupted my studies for awhile and returned home. My family lived on a connecting road between a big coal mine and the workers cité. I became acquainted with the members of a neighbourhood committee established by activists of an organization called World Schools (Wereldscholen). The leader of the organisation was a Catholic priest, Jef Ulburghs (1922-2010), who had a lot of experience in pastoral work with working class people, including many immigrants of Italian, Spanish, and other origins. He called himself a Basis Socialist and he was inspired by the political pedagogy of the Brazilian, Paulo Freire (1921-1997), and the American community organizer, Myles Horton (1905-1990), of the Highlander Folk School. “Basis” in basis socialism has a special significance. Not everyone in the lower social levels belongs to the basis. The concept refers to a mosaic of locally scattered individuals and groups who react to signs of top-down repression. It refers to people who are motivated by the desire to get a grip on their lives and communities. At the centre of this theory of basis socialism is not only the contradiction between capital and labour, but the contradiction between top and basis which exists in divergent domains of society, and not only economically.

How was this basis socialism put into practice? Members of World Schools were active in the districts (neighbourhood committees), health care (medical collectives in poor and working-class neighbourhoods), legal aid (law centres), environment (all kinds of ecological action groups), education (People’s University) and bible study groups. “Work” was only one action domain next to many others, struggling for better working conditions in the shortterm and for workers control and self management in the longterm. The longterm aim of such initiatives and projects was their development into an alternative for the existing institutions. In an article titled, “Toward a new social movement” (1978) which I wrote with a senior colleague we can read, “These projects should have an efficient impact on the existing institutions and change them in a positive direction,” (pay attention to the vague terms in the statement).⁵ At the same time this would be to the benefit of the activity, creativity and political conscientization (to use a term of Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist, Paulo Freire) of the participants.

In the same text, there is talk of a certain aversion of the basis movement toward political parties—all parties—progressive ones not excluded. “The most important task of the basis movement is to start social experiments. The involved people have to confront the repressive situation and to replace it with an alternative. When the political parties recover the criticism by canalizing it via the existing institutions this will result in shallow reforms.” This statement boils down to a phobia for “politics.” Tolerance toward progressive parties was acceptable “but it is a bridge too far to support a local or a national government, let alone participating in such a government. This would run counter the essence of the basis movement and boil down to treason of the people who can never ‘win’ or ‘conquer the power’ because state power never equals people’s power.” A mutual friend, a priest and professor, referred in another article to the close relations between basis democracy and anarchism, suggesting that each top-down power is perverting because it represents no longer the people but only itself. Each power is in such a way ultimately anti-democratic.

Bookchin’s Compass: A Light in the Darkness

In a clumsy way, basis socialism contained several inspirational ideas but it also ran with the hare and hunted with the dogs (worker class and new social movements, Marxism and anarchism); it suffered from term confusion (politics, state, power, government) and it didn’t set clear aims (e.g. emancipatory influencing the existing institutions—how can you measure that?)

Bookchin’s Social Ecology, on the contrary, presents a clear diagnosis and remedy for the problems of our time. He cuts the knots without ambiguities. On the one side, he stated that the working class doesn’t necessarily play a revolutionary part in a capitalistic system. As a young communist militant and union organizer, he experienced that the organized working class could come to an agreement with the capitalists in exchange for a more or less comfortable place under the capitalist sun. With the institutionalization of social consultation, first in the US and later in Europe, the right to existence of the capitalist and capitalism was allowed. Exit the part of gravedigger of capital imputed by Marx to the working class.

Instead of that internal gravedigger, Bookchin claimed to have traced an external gravedigger of capitalism. No longer the contradiction between capital and labour is the Achilles’ tendon of the system but the contradiction between capital and nature: Capitalism does serious damage to the health of all people and nature. In his later writings Murray elaborated that basic idea. He then states that the idea of human domination was the result of the gradual hierarchization of human differences and the more recent class exploitation characteristic of capitalism. Therefore, the solution of the ecological problems involves the typically anarchistic striving toward the abolition of all unequal power relations and capitalism. This entanglement of the ecological and anarchistic concerns he called “Social Ecology.”

He didn’t give up his appreciation of Marxism as the most coherent attempt to develop a socialist alternative. But he regretted the stagnation of Marxist theory since the 1960s, a stagnation which was camouflaged by the somewhat artificial addition of feminism and ecology to its basically ouvrierist framework. He also rejected Marx’s identification of politics with the state which in the end has to die off (in favour of “the administration of things”). He appreciated anarchism because of its antistatism and the alternative of decentralized and confederated communities. But in the last stage of his life he conceived anarchism as the expression of the liberal ideology of unhindered autonomy. This was sometimes attended with antirationalism, individualism and voluntarism: The extoll of mediagenic actions against the state.

Bookchin thought that Marxism, anarchism, and revolutionary syndicalism shared an unjust confusion of “statecraft” and “politics.” In our Flemish view of basis socialism, we combined these terms once more with power and we considered people’s power incompatible with government. Murray put the distinction aptly in his work, From Urbanization to Cities (1995).⁶

He notes that statecraft continues to engage the state and is no different from it. Statecraft utilizes state violence to control the “regulative apparatus of society” (e.g. legal and ordinance, professional legislators, armies, police forces, and bureaucracies). “Statecraft takes a political patina when so-called ‘political parties’ attempt, in various power plays, to occupy the offices that make state policy and execute it,” he writes, emphasizing that conventional political parties are in no way derivative of the body politic or constituted by it. They are, in fact, replications of the state when they are in power. On the other hand, politics is an organic phenomenon, an expression of community, “just as the process of flowering is an organic activity of a plant.” Politics requires rational discourse, public empowerment, practical reason, and is, in essence, a participatory activity.

Excursion: Short Introduction to Belgium, Brussels, Wallonia and Flanders

I am a Flemish Belgian. That identity has important implications for my political engagement. Because of my native language—Flemish, a variant of Dutch—I hardly come into contact with my French speaking compatriots in Brussels and Wallonia.

Belgium is a small but densely populated country (11.5 million inhabitants on 30,000 km²) in the center of Western Europe with powerful neighbours: Germany, France, England and the Netherlands (in the past it functioned usually as a battlefield for all kinds of rivalries). Belgium has a complex political structure with a federal government but also with regional governments (Flanders, Wallonia and Great Brussels) and community governments (based on languages: Flanders/Brussels, Wallonia/Brussels and the German East cantons), each having their own powers. Flanders is the Dutch-speaking, northern part of Belgium (with 58% of the population), Wallonia is the French-speaking southern part of Belgium (32%). The small German-speaking cantons in the east (75,000) were annexed to compensate for the war damage of World War I.

The Belgian capital Brussels (10% of the population) occupies a special position: Initially a Flemish town on the Flemish side of the language-border, it became in the course of the last century, a French-speaking city (only a minority of 10% Flemings). When Belgium became independent in 1830 it adopted French—in those days it was the cultural language on the continent —as the official national language (used in parliament, administration, universities, army, jurisdiction, etc.). Only in the course of the twentieth century, pushed by a strong Flemish nationalist movement, Dutch became recognized as a second official language (later on German became the third one). ‘Flemish’—a mosaic of regional dialects—was relegated to the everyday language of the lower classes. The ruling elite (including its Flemish members) spoke French. The schooled Flemish middle classes were mostly bilingual with limited possibilities of social promotion. They became the pioneers of a right-wing resentment nationalism which fights for confederalism and sometimes separatism. The right-wing party NVA (National Flemish Alliance) is now the largest political party in Flanders (33%) side by side with the neo-fascists of VB (Flemish Interest, 6%), who are as racist as they legally can be.

Moreover, the (language) border between Flanders and Wallonia is amplified by a socio-political fracture. Wallonia was the first industrialized region on the continent with a combative working class and a dominating Socialist Party (side by side with the communists of the Parti du Travail who even now have two MP’s). Flanders on the contrary was mainly a rural area with many (small) farmers and middle-classers who were dominated by a distinct conservative Catholic Party, later on replaced by the center-right Christian-democrats. These Christian-democrats dominated Belgian politics—in an alternated coalition with social-democrats or liberals—till recently when they were surpassed by the Flemish nationalists. Meanwhile the economic balance between Flanders and Wallonia changed: Wallonia lost its old industrial equipment and Flanders prospered—centered around the harbour of Antwerp. In that period the Christian trade union (1.7 million members)— a defender of a capitalism “with a human face”—became more important than the socialist anticapitalist trade union (1.3 million members). In any case, the Belgian working class has resisted neoliberalism pretty well and is one of the most organized work forces in the world.

Initially the Belgian territories were called the “Southern Netherlands” because we constituted together with the “Northern Netherlands” one country ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs (the famous emperor Charles V and his son Philip II). After the religious wars in 1648. the northern protestant Dutch Republic was established but the southern Netherlands remained in the hands of the Catholic (Austrian) Habsburgs till their annexation to France by Napoleon’s armies. When Napoleon was defeated in 1815, both of the Netherlands were contracted again as a buffer against revolutionary France. But a coalition of discontented Catholic clergy and French-speaking old nobility and liberals provoked a popular revolt against the Dutch-speaking and protestant king in Den Hague. In 1830, a new constitutional monarchy was established: Independent Belgium.

As a result of this historical past, many progressive Flemish movements and action groups look to the Netherlands for information (books, magazines, and internet), contacts (most Dutch cities are within an easy reach of 100-150 km or less) and support rather than in Brussels or in Wallonia (except for important national demonstrations or interesting lectures). Comrades in Wallonia and Brussels look for inspiration and support in the northern part of France (Paris is a distance of 250 km). Of course, this living and acting each in his/her region impedes collaboration and the development of a strong internal Belgian libertarian movement.

After the “Fall of the Wall” (1989): Searching a Breeding Ground for Social Ecology

Initially I was very impressed by Murray’s Social Ecology but I soon realized that his political theory—libertarian municipalism—was the crucial cornerstone of his worldview. In the years of my acquaintance with his writings, his book, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987), was published.⁷ When we want to clean up the heaps of rubble created by global capitalism, then we need to establish a political movement which is able to develop new social institutions and a new political culture. In Murray’s words: ‘Social ecology would be obliged to embody its ethics in a politics of libertarian municipalism, in which municipalities conjointly gain rights to self governance through networks of confederal councils, to which towns and cities would be expected to send their mandated, recallable delegates to adjust differences. All decisions would have to be ratified by a majority of the popular assemblies of the confederated towns and cities.”⁸

In first instance, I tried to introduce Bookchin’s Social Ecology with emphasis on libertarian municipalism in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium via lectures and articles in Flemish and Dutch magazines, brochures and book contributions. The anarchist tradition in the Netherlands is long and solid, but Murray’s approach—his emphasis on group education, organisation, taking roots locally and lasting engagement with a short term (“democratize the republic”) and long term (“radicalize democracy”) strategy—collided with the dominating ethical—individualist and subcultural variants of anarchism. In Belgium, the situation was different: The traces of a more or less influential anarchist movement disappeared during World War I and the remains contributed to the establishment of the Belgian Communist Party. The budding new anarchism of the 1960s and 1970s was marginalized by the self-confident attitude of the many Marxist-Leninist sects who monopolized the radical left scene until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Besides the absence of a historical tradition and their quantitative weakness, Flemish anarchists were strikingly hostile to organization and indifferent to theoretical renewal (i.e. no intellectual waffling, direct action now!). Of course, Murray’s proposal to participate in local elections also aroused much suspicion. Only in the city of Gent did Flemish anarchists succeed in laying the foundations of a lasting presence.

To my surprise, there was also a positive response from some disoriented Marxists and communists who were searching for a theoretical and political renewal. This happened against the historical background of an imploding east European state socialism, a triumphant neoliberal, free market ideology, and the political shift to the right of the social democrats, who made a choice for a socially adjusted liberalism (i.e. a “Third Way” or “Purple”—a combination of the socialist “Red” and the liberal, in the European sense of supporting the free market “Blue”). In Flanders—not in Wallonia—these events were combined with the shock of “Black Sunday.”’ On November 24, 1991, the neofascists of the Flemish nationalist party, Flemish Interest (“Vlaams Belang”) scored extraordinarily well in the national elections with a scarcely concealed racist campaign: “Our own people first” (a slogan derived from another slogan of the French Front National). Their parliamentary seats increased from three to 17. For the first time since World War II, when many Flemish nationalists collaborated with the German occupier in exchange for vague promises of Flemish autonomy, the “brown pest” reared its massive head again. In those politically turbulent times, I could regularly publish articles in the Flemish Marxist Magazine and organize lectures for the circles of the Frans Masereel Fund, a former cultural organisation of the Communist Party. One of the first translations of a Bookchin article in Flanders was “The left that Was: A Personal Reflection,” published in a communist magazine.⁹

But I felt the most affinity with the Flemish Green party (Groen)that already had a small electoral breakthrough at the start of the 1980s in Flanders’ biggest city, Antwerp. (Later on the party would become professionalized, comparable with its German sister party, Die Grünen, upon which Murray once set his hopes. It evolved from a lucid and principled organization to a more “realistic” one.) In spite of this evolution, I thought it would be a mistake to put the party on par with all the other parties of the status quo. It was to the party’s great merit to cherish typical libertarian ideas such as basis democracy, decentralization, human scale organizations, unity in diversity instead of unity by hierarchy, etc. which could for this reason meet with a wider response, also outside the alternative subcultures. I took the view that at best a dialogue with green theory and practice would remain possible; at worst we could make an appeal on the bad conscience of the Greens, referring to the deep gap between their political principles and actual results.

By choosing the parliamentary strategy, the Green party risked nestling itself in the sphere of statecraft contrary to libertarian politics. But in the former political and ideological climate of restoration, I took the view that a more or less scrupulous green party could make small breeches in the dominating political style of business as usual by which the bottom up initiatives gasping for breath could get some extra oxygen. Examples are government measures which can give us a stay of execution. For instance: To prevent that our social and ecological basis corrodes to such an extent that authoritarian catastrophe-scenarios would become acceptable for a majority of the population. We also thought about measures toward political decentralisation which can enlarge the freedom of movement of municipalist initiatives.

For these reasons I argued for a mutual openness between the Green party and municipalist projects. The party cannot stop cherishing libertarian ideals. Otherwise, it slips off to the grey centre and loses its reason for existing. But the municipalists cannot survive on a diet of principles and ideals alone. They are confronted with problems which have to be solved in a feasible way. This involves a considerable dose of readiness to compromise in the course of which some top-down green support might be welcome. Moreover, there is also a more conjunctural aspect: In periods of restoration, statecraft possesses an unassailable aura resulting in the playing down of municipalist initiatives, but in the rare periods of revolutionary upheaval libertarian politics shall advance with the intention to banish statecraft once and for to the dustbin of history. So the above mentioned openness does not exclude friction and even clashes.

I have written these words in the past but I maintain my statements to the present day. In the last few months I published a long three-part article on libertarian municipalism in Oikos, the theoretical magazine of the Flemish Green party, Groen. I think that green politicians everywhere in Europe—not only in Belgium and The Netherlands—realise that the huge social transformations we need cannot be achieved in parliament alone, but that they need support from the power of the street and the power of counterinstitutions (communes, commons) built by municipalists.

The New Millennium: Times of Disillusion and Reorientation

At the end of August, 1998, I participated with my compatriot, Rafa Grinfeld, and the Dutchman, Peter Zegers, in a greatly organized but poorly attended International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism in the Portugese capital of Lisbon. The reason for the conference was to discuss the recent publication of Janet Biehl’s book, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism.¹⁰ She defined libertarian municipalism as a revolutionary alternative for the politics of the green parties shifting to a realistic perspective.

But the majority of participants—syndicalists, urban activists, community organizers, etc.— interpreted libertarian municipalsm in their own way or used it piecemeal to set up social alternatives. Some interpretations were clear misunderstandings. I think of the Spanish Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) members who used libertarian municipalism to broaden their action field from the work floor to the production sphere (public transport, health care, education, etc). But others wanted to use libertarian municipalism as an inspiring compass—which indicates the direction but not the detailed road to get somewhere—to strengthen their anticapitalist resistance and to offer a strategic perspective to their struggles. Sometimes only first steps could be realized depending on contextual conditions. Most of the participants did not expect to literally apply the political precepts of libertarian municipalism to the real world. A literal application of libertarian municipalism presupposes a revolutionary situation (think about Syria in 2012) which was totally absent in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Therefore Murray considered the conference as a missed opportunity and he retired to his office to write the remaining parts of his “The Third Revolution.”¹¹ Janet Biehl reverted in those years to her former social democratic identity.

For me, the 1998 conference was disillusioning and not the renaissance I was hoping for. Out of my personal experiences of discussing libertarian municipalism in Flanders and the Netherlands, I did not believe in the creation of a new organisation based on members who are tried and tested in the ideas of Social Ecology and libertarian municipalism. Others, mainly in Scandinavia and also in the Netherlands, did. I refer in this context to the detailed Principles & Bylaws of the Demokratisk Alternative (Oslo, 2000) and the less detailed Uitgangspunten & Statuten of the Confederaal-Basisdemocratisch Project (Amsterdam, 2001-2). The Dutch project was allotted a short life, but the Oslo chapter of Democratic Alternative still ran for office in the local elections of 2007, with shameful results: 200 votes in a city where half a million people have voting rights. Democratic Alternative cofounder, Sveinung Legard, had the courage to draw the lessons of this electoral disaster. In 2013, he wrote,

“One lesson…is that it is not enough to mobilize around the idea of a direct democracy. Most people will try to figure out whether this direct democracy will lead to a better life for themselves and their fellow citizens, and not just judge it on its merits of being inclusive or participatory…. In one way, direct democracy is an end in itself, but it is also a means to achieve social improvements. Another seminal problem was that the people in the street did not know us from before. Previously, Democratic Alternative in Oslo had mainly been active in the globalization movement and was known on the Left activist scene where we had promoted social ecology and communalism. Most of those activists were active in other parties and found it more meaningful to campaign for them than for us. If non-activists are going to support you in an election, they have to know you beforehand and trust that you will do a solid job once elected. This trust can only come through longterm engagement in issues which are important for “ordinary people” and disadvantaged groups—and not through ideological battles on the Left…. A practical advice, therefore, is for social ecologists to forget a little bit about the discussions with others on the Left, distance themselves a little bit from the activist scene and instead seek to build a reputation among people who are not already organized.”

I could not state it better than Sveinung. Ideological battles on the Left activist scene—even in a conservative region as Flanders you can easily find back ten Leftist sects counting each ten or 20 members—are for the most part a loss of energy and provoke a repulsive reaction of non-ideological activists who are in the first place motivated by the elaboration of their own local projects.

I rather believe in the establishment of a loose network of libertarian municipalists which can organize open study groups and conferences but which does not function as a vanguard. Such a network can support exemplary local initiatives (also in other countries: Spain, Rojava, Chiapas, etc.) and propose constructive solutions to the deadlocks in the further development of the municipalist movement.

The Second Birth of Libertarian Municipalism or Communalism

In connection with the death of Bookchin in the summer of 2006, I wrote two orbituaries, one on the site of the green magazine Oikos, the other for the Flemish Marxist Magazine. Six years later, I again took up the thread of communalism. In the meanwhile, I worked together with mainly ex-Trotskyist activists in a loose organisation, Socialism21, created in the wake of the antiglobalization movement. It called itself Libertarian Ecosocialist, symbolized by the colours, black, red, and green. In 2015, Socialism21 published a reader entitled, The Earth or Capitalism: Toward a Social-Ecological Society, with many translated articles by Johny Lenaerts and one by myself about “Democratic Confederalism” in Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan. It was Johny who had given me the Dutch translation of Janet Biehl’s text of the speech, “Bookchin, Öcalan and the Dialectics of Democracy,” written for the conference Challenging Capitalist Modernity: Alternative Concepts And The Kurdish Question, Hamburg, Februray 3–5, 2012).¹² In those years, I heard for the first time about the libertarian turn in the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party; Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê‎) ideology and I was surprised to read about the progress of communalist institutions and practices in the Middle-East. This unexpected Kurdish Spring revived a political theory apparently predestined to become a footnote in Leftist history. Communalism turned out to be a feasible concrete utopia and not the political fantasy of an old revolutionary. Yet I want to add some (evident) critical considerations.

Democratic confederalism in Rojava is a kind of “disaster socialism,” to use a term coined by Naomi Klein, whereby a long existing resistance movement grasps the opportunities created by the weakening of the central state and the indifference or noninvolvement of the local and the international big powers. Those powers will put an end to the political experiment as soon as it becomes an obstacle for their own strategic interests. What can the international municipalist movement do with that? The democratic confederalist experiment is a light in the darkness of the Middle-East but it should not be idealized: In the existing situation of scarcity and war, the military and political-diplomatic wings of the Kurdish movement get the upper hand on the civil society which constitutes the heart of a bottom-up democracy and a socialism from below. Is the civil society strong and dynamic enough to claim back the first place in a more or less normalized political situation? Another question: Is it possible that a traditional hierarchical vanguard movement transforms itself in the course of a decade to an exemplary libertarian socialist structure with a balanced ecological, feminist, pluralist and basis socialist program?

We do not propose an equivalent of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) to give us a truthful picture of the Kurdish utopia (title of a recent Flemish book about Rojava) under the banner of democratic confederalism but for the time being it deserves at least the benefit of the doubt and thus also our critical support.¹³

A second remark concerns the renewed interest for municipalism in the countries of the West. Well known urban protest movements such as the American Occupy movement spontaneously flourished in the wake of the financial crisis of 2009, but soon faded away. The dominant diagnosis was that they did not create a lasting alternative. Maybe communalism could fill this political gap? Murray constructed his political theory with elements taken from radical American and European political history. His libertarian municipalism was in the first place aimed to be applied in the Western urban context of post-scarcity. Thanks to the Kurdish Spring, libertarian municipalism has received a much broader political resonance and ideological respectability. We can make use of these benefits to raise municipalism as a possible strategic compass for a much needed social, ecological, and political transformation. But this has to be done in a cautious way.

Since the financial crash of 2008, the political and ideological wind has been turned. Neoliberalism has lost some of its feathers and parliamentary democracy has lost much of its legitimation. The political consequences have been ambiguous. On the one side, many people are seeking security under the wings of authoritarian leaders: from Trump in the US, Erdoğan in Turkey or Bolsonaro in Brazil, Le Pen in France, Wilders and Baudet in the Netherlands, and De Winter and Van Grieken in Flanders. On the other side, we observe a resurrection of interest for variants of participative and direct democracy and postcapitalist alternatives (“the commons”). But not in the shape of theoretical constructions or “big stories.” The interest of the active citizen is mainly focussed on local and very specific projects to enhance the life quality of their neighbourhood and environment. Critical analyses, demonstrations and direct action are not explicitly excluded—I refer in this context to the recent, very hopeful climate demonstrations by young pupils and students everywhere in Europe (initiated in Sweden and Flanders)—but considered as insufficient. For in those cases, one plays a waiting game (do the responsible authorities lend their ear for our claims?) and the initiative is left in the hands of the opponent. For this reason, many citizens engage themselves in many “small revolutions” which enable them to think for themselves, to act and to experiment. And this is a good thing: The humiliating feeling of dependence on private or public institutions is pushed back by engaging in social and political projects based on mutual help and conviviality. This can be the breeding ground of a new political participation culture which offers the reality that practically each step toward the repairing or renewal of the social fabric is a step forward in the right direction. Each initiative leading to the empowering of a neighbourhood, street or district is an aim in itself, even when the next step toward more political impact is not yet taken. There is no time wasted.

Political ideas which aim for a radical and global transformation, as communalist ideas do, have a function in this process. That is also the reason why we invest much energy and time in translating Murray’s essays and books. These theories can act as a general political compass and a narrative source of inspiration from which ideologically concerned activists can draw the power to carry on their engagement, with the understanding that this power does not translate itself directly into an unambiguous, concrete action-agenda. Communalism can provide inspiring ideas to guide us in the ongoing struggle between statecraft and weak variants of politics. But a war cannot be waged exclusively on the precepts of a political theory alone, it will be additionally led by the dialectics of the practice (mindful of the Zapatista motto of a revolution “asking as we walk”). The most inspiring example of such a revolutionary path that is making a comeback is the many Spanish local governments which are in control of municipalists since their electoral victory in 2015. These municipalists do not want to realize a good government policy to the benefit of their citizens, on the contrary, they want to return the political power back to the citizen. In the course of which they have to compromise between the Charybdys of citizens who are inclined to indifference and passivity and the Scylla of hostile classical parties and a pernicious constitution. Their possible failure to be re-elected in the spring of 2019 can have serious repercussions for the destiny of European municipalism.

Besides, one has to take into account the fact that each country and each region, everywhere in the world, has its own historical background, political culture, opportunities and obstacles which colour and shape each specific search of a political organisation from below. Consequently, I state that in spite of the impossibility of the full realization of our target aim (such as described in Murray’s political writings) undisputable steps forward can be taken toward a more decent and dignified society. To guide us as far is possible in this search is the best we can expect of a political theory that tries to open our minds and senses for the rich possibilities of a participatory and post capitalist future.

References

1. Murray Bookchin. Ecologie en anarchisme (Utrecht: Anarchisties Kollektief Utrecht, 1977).

2. Murray Bookchin. Post-Scarcity Anarchism (London: Wildwood House, 1971); Murray Bookchin. Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980).

3. Murray Bookchin. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991).

4. Ludo Martens. Un autre regard sur Staline (Another View of Stalin) (Antwerp: EPO, 1994).

5. Roger Jacobs. Toward a New Social Movement, 1978.

6. Murray Bookchin. Urbanization to Cities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995): pp.220-221.

7. Murray Bookchin. The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (Oakland: Sierra Club Books, 1987).

8. Murray Bookchin, Eirik Eigland (ed.). Social Ecology and Communalism (Chico, CA: A.K. Press, 2007).

9. Murray Bookchin. “The Left That Was: A Personal Reflection,” Green Perspectives 22, (November1991): http://social-ecology.org/wp/1991/04/the-left-that-was-a-personal-reflection/

10. Janet Biehl. The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).

11. Murray Bookchin. The Third Revolution. 4 volumes. (Vol. 1, New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 1996; Vol. 2, London: Cassell; 1998; Vol. 3, New York: Bloomsbury Academic and Professional, 2004; Vol. 4, New York: Bloomsbury Academic and Professional, 2005)

12. Janet Biehl. “Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy,” New Compass (February 16, 2012): http://new-compass.net/articles/bookchin-öcalan-and-dialectics-democracy

13. Ludo De Brabander. Het Koerdisch Utopia (The Kurdish Utopia) (Belgium: EPO, 2017).