Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> >Bookchin, I believe considers himself to be an
> >anarcho-communist.
>
> Municipal socialism is his thing. If it's larger than face-to-face,
> it's too big.
>
This view is grounded in what I think is an important reality: politics (in the sense of left mass politics have to be grounded in units which meet this criterion. The division of Athens into demes (which often or usually corresponded to traditional villages), and the independence of those demes from any obligations landed aristocrats, was the material basis of athenian democracy. Marx's idea of a _working_ rather than merely deliberative parliament (and the instant recall of representatives) was an attempt to envisage something like that working in a socialist order.
Obviously, I would say, there have to be units much larger than face-to-face units, and to that extent anarchism is simply a pipe-dream (and potentially reactionary) -- but any democracy that is one must somehow inocorporate this principle. (And could one say that the famous (or notorious), nearly invisible, difference between menshevik and bolshevik resolutions on party membership turned on this? No members-at-large allowed.
Carrol
See Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Peasant-Citizen & Slave: The Foundations of
Athenian Democracy_, pp. 105-107 and notes.
> Doug