Pour un municipalisme libertaire

by Murray Bookchin

Depuis plus de quinze ans, la brochure Pour un municipalisme libertaire est l’un des textes les plus diffusés de l’Atelier de création libertaire. Pour nous, la raison en est simple  : un certain nombre de libertaires – ainsi que des personnes s’intéressant à un engagement conséquent dans une politique du quotidien – trouvent dans les propos de Murray Bookchin des idées leur permettant d’avoir, non pas une réponse, mais quelques pistes pour bousculer les a priori. D’un côté, celui qui déclare la démocratie morte ou, pour le moins, très ankylosée, et, de l’autre, celui qui affirme n’y avoir plus d’espace dans nos villes, dans nos quartiers, pour une politique libertaire du quotidien…


Postface de John P. Clark  : «  De la théorie à la pratique  : des assemblées communales et autres institutions horizontales et démocratiques  ».

Genres: Nonfiction

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Murray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

Reviews

[sadeleuze · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 70s and 80s, the ecological thinker Murray Bookchin developed a theory that places the city at the heart of a new model of society: libertarian municipalism.

He takes an interest in the model of Athenian democracy and is inspired by the Paris Commune with a form of self-management in 1871 and self-governance during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. (His reflections serve as models in Chiapas and Rojava).

He develops his theory of libertarian municipalism which is somewhat akin to a political program, foreseeing the functioning of its political model and the path to follow to get there. The idea is quite simple: the commune is the scale where citizens can seize power and give substance to a project in which they recognize themselves. We must therefore start by decentralizing, dividing the big cities into more manageable municipalities. It is about returning to the foundation of democracy

For him, the State makes people passive; people need to become political actors again.

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un plaidoyer du penseur anarchiste américain Murray Bookchin pour ce qu’il appelait le municipalisme libertaire, c’est-à-dire une forme de démocratie participative et communale. Intéressant.