REVIEW: ‘We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System’ Is a Rousing How-To Guide for Fighting Corporate Greed

As American city dwellers are assailed by masked federal agents while the Trump administration attends not at all to the actual crises of housing, food, and healthcare plaguing every single metropolis, along comes a steadying, even encouraging, new book— part movement history, part collective political memoir —that lifts up a fascinating, decade-long municipalist experiment in Seattle for scrutiny and study. 

Originally articulated by social philosopher Murray Bookchin, municipalism is a people’s politics that seeks to undermine and erode the ruinous power of capitalist states by building an alternative to them, rather than attempting their overthrow. Almost 40 years ago, in a response to the neoliberal order quickly consolidating under Reaganomics, Bookchin published “Municipalization,” a quick and dirty essay proposing a new model for achieving community control of the economy. Instead of vainly waiting for a worker’s revolution unlikely to materialize, libertarian municipalism or communalism, he argued, offered a vehicle for peoples’ movements beyond the factory walls, one organized far away from establishment forces and at the level of the local. 

Under municipalism, movements are self-governed by neighborhood assemblies that when confederated not only can win real gains, but also build dual power (creating “a new world in the shell of the old”) by showing what can be done but hasn’t been. The most essential pillar of municipalism is the practice of direct democracy, which Bookchin had espoused since co-founding the Institute of Social Ecology in 1974, believing that the urban neighborhood or rural town was where community self-management could best be activated. 

People’s movements in Seattle have embraced the neighborhood assembly as a vehicle for directing their policy demands, strategies, and tactics, as have the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People’s Organization 2,500 miles away. Directed by a people’s assembly and guided by a theory of liberatory change outlined in the Jackson-Kush Plan, the Black-majority state capital of Jackson, Mississippi in 2009 modeled a directly democratic municipalist alternative to a level of state domination no longer tolerable ecologically or morally. Another notable example of municipalist practice from rural communities would be the Carbondale Spring movement in Southern Illinois, whose food autonomy projects endure as a basis for ongoing community renewal.

Read the REVIEW on Deceleration News