Throughout this series, we’ve argued that the best way to address today’s ecological, social, and political crises is to get people together where they live and work to provide resources that people need – eventually building up an alternative political and economic system that can replace the present, failing system. We need to build a democratic, just, and ecological world in the shell of the old.

In the previous installment, we argued that organising on the level of the neighborhood, town, and city is the most strategic approach today.

The rise of loneliness worldwide, the centrality of real estate speculation for global economic growth, and the breakdown of traditional large-scale factories that helped to bring workers together mean that we have to rethink the ways we demand change.

Common criticisms

We can build community and force elites to listen to our demands at the same time. Radical municipalism is a project to take direct democratic control over the places where we live.

When we talk to people about this strategy, the same kinds of questions often come up. In this article, we highlight three common criticisms. Each one of them revolves around the complaint that radical municipalism is too local: it can’t deal with the ‘big stuff’.

1. Because of climate change, we don’t have time

Any call for a long-term vision for social change begs the response: the urgency of the present moment means we don’t have the time for the slow work of neighbourhood-level organising.

Impending climate disruption is a ticking time-bomb. Every year we delay will make the future worse. And as a global phenomenon, it takes immediate global action. Strategically, this argument goes, we might be better off pushing our leaders to take strong stances on climate change.

The situation is so dire that the progressive environmentalist website Grist and the socialist Jacobin are publishing pieces asking us to seriously consider geo-engineering and scaling up nuclear energy – all in a bid to give us more time.

For many, the problem of climate change can only be addressed with big stuff: international agreements, renewable and nuclear energy on a massive scale, geo-engineering schemes that involve changing planetary weather systems.

This kind of response is understandable, but puts the cart before the horse. Without a coherent counter-power to corporate control over government, we have no chance of forcing our leaders to listen. We’re relying on the assumption that leaders are kind enough to listen, and that they themselves have the power to implement needed reforms.

Feet to the fire

Even if we elect the most principled people to power, and even if all politicians were to somehow realise that it’s in their own interest to do everything they can to stop climate change through a ‘Green New Deal’, the system would still be dead against them. You can’t beg a system geared toward growth, endless extraction, and exploitation to change its ways.

What is clear is that those in power – the CEOs, the bankers, and the politicians that implement their laws – would suffer greatly from necessary action on climate change.

Government debts would need to be cancelled, the most powerful industries would need to be phased out. No matter what, we’d still need a kind of popular power that hasn’t been seen in generations to hold politician’s feet to the fire.

And even if we aren’t able to meet our goal of a fully democratised system of dual power, any step toward that goal is an improvement to where we are now. The more community organisations and local democracy we have, the better we’re placed to force the hands of the government.

There’s a second answer to this objection. The fight for the right to the city is the fight for climate justice. For example, research on São Paolo in Brazil shows that the fight for affordable housing is a fight against climate change, even if poor people’s movements don’t speak in those terms.

People power

Making the center of the city accessible for everyone to live in and building social and cooperative housing reduces carbon impact. By making the places where we live more democratic and less unequal, we’re also fighting for a greener future.

In fact, we’re already seeing that cities and towns with stronger social movements pushing for change are at the forefront of radical and innovative responses to climate change.

What’s more, they’re starting to work together to provide a common front to demand change on national and international scales—the Global Covenant for Mayors for Climate and Energy is already a force to be reckoned with in international climate talks. And cities globally are leading the fight to take the fossil fuel industry to task, even suing them for contributing to climate disasters.

All this comes down to the fact that we can’t actually make the necessarily large-scale changes without taking control over the places where we live and creating the alternatives necessary for a new system. It’s precisely these alternatives that force the hand of the state to act on climate change. They create people power and show how things could be done otherwise.

In other words, radical municipalism is the best investment against climate change: it buys us time and gives us the power we need to force our leaders to act.

2. Local activism can’t address global capitalism

A common response to those who work to mobilise their neighbours and create local democracy is that localism can’t scale up. It’s always just stuck back-pedaling, unable to actually change the big stuff like predatory trade deals, foreign takeovers, the capacity of finance to make or break whole countries—the stuff that really shapes national decision-making.

Often, these same people argue that, to break out of this pattern, we need to engage with the big players. So they form think tanks, lobby groups, NGOs, and new media platforms, showing up to climate negotiations year after year and putting pressure on politicians through endless petitions. For them, the most important agents of change are well-worded policy briefs, expensive conferences, powerpoint presentations, and 40-page reports.

The key actors of social change aren’t think-tanks or lobby groups: they’re people, and people live and work somewhere. This kind of critique often forgets the fact that all successful movements of the past were also intensely local.

For example, the labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries were able to make demands of governments because they were so embedded in people’s day-to-day lives. Historically, unions weren’t just at the workplace; they ran dance halls, classes, cafeterias, and sports leagues.

It was only by broadening their reach to every aspect of life that unions were able to become indispensable to working class communities. This made it possible for them to organise effective strikes and, eventually, mount a significant challenge to the their bosses and the state.

Municipalist movements

It’s regular people that are the actors of world-historical changes. What some people deride as ‘localism’ is actually the very foundation of transformative change.

That said, we shouldn’t forget that, without a long-term vision, a coherent plan of action, and trans-local alliances, every local movement is doomed to become a relic in the town museum.

Keep in mind that capitalism works at scale. That’s the genius of it. Stop one development in your neighbourhood, and investors just move their money elsewhere. Take on giants like Amazon, and they’ll just move to another city. So, in that sense, we would agree that local action, on its own, will always fail.

This is why, for radical municipalism to be successful, it requires collaboration at different scales. This July, the Fearless Cities Summit in New York City will bring together municipalist movements around the world to share resources and action plans.

In our own work as Symbiosis, we hope to bring together radical municipalist movements from across North America to form a democratically run network of local movements.

Autonomous communes

In the short term, these kinds of movements are already proving to be a challenge to big corporations. In Seattle, the city council passed a law that would tax big companies like Amazon—money which would then go into subsidies for affordable housing.

In Barcelona, the city is turning AirBnB apartments into social housing. Only local, democratic, and people-based movements can force politicians to bring transnational corporations to task. What we need to do now is learn from each other’s victories and work together to scale them up.

In the long term, a system of dual power would transform into what we call communalism or democratic confederalism: an allied network of autonomous communes or regions that work together in a directly democratic way.

On the local level, the neighbourhood assembly makes the decisions and decides the course of action. On a bigger level, these organisations band together in what is called a confederation: a body of recallable delegates with imperative mandates and accountable to their communities.

This body would allow autonomous communes to exchange resources, support each other, and make democratic decisions. Without this kind of networking, collaboration, and interdependence, local movements are just that: local, isolated, and doomed to fail, again and again.

3. We can only make real change by taking over the state

For many, the state is the best vehicle for action to fight the major systemic problems of climate chaos, finance capital running amok, and global inequality.

Further, with the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, now seems like a bad time to encourage people not to get involved with national politics. After all, conservative movements thrive off of voter apathy. If you ignore elections, then you cede the ground to the welfare-bashing, poor-blaming, and racist right.

How should radical municipalist movements engage with the state? First, it’s important not to frame the debate in terms of the state (them) vs. social movements (us).

We’re trying to build democratic institutions that can, in the present, extract concessions from the state. These will inevitably exist within the current (statist) system and leverage available (state) institutions and resources toward that goal.

Eventually, these new institutions would form an ecosystem of dual power that can force a crisis within the state. This is not a contradiction, it’s just to acknowledge that the state has embedded itself into almost every aspect of our lives and that abolishing it can’t be done in one day.

Window of debate

If we want to get rid of the state, does that mean we want to get rid of institutions that the state provides, like welfare, health care, or disaster response?

On the contrary, it’s our position that whatever is good for the poor—whatever improves people’s quality of life, such as welfare or access to health insurance—is worth fighting for.

Dismantling the welfare state won’t help us dismantle the state, instead, it demobilizes movements and erodes people’s basic capacity to meet their needs and get involved in politics.

And how much energy should we really be spending on elections? Because of the way liberal democracies and mainstream media work, elections can broaden the window of debate.

Rewire its institutions

In that way, we see elections as a useful tool for propaganda, a platform to spread ideas. But we can’t depend on them for turning those ideas into practice; only vibrant social movements that hold elected representatives accountable can do that.

What kinds of policies would a radical municipalist movement put on their electoral platform, if they had one? In each case, it helps to ask: how does this policy build popular power? What institutions can be built to force the state to be held accountable?

No matter what the state does, however, it’s crucial that people practice doing politics themselves. In fact, building these kinds of institutions is the antidote to apathy and encourages civic engagement.

In other words, we propose to challenge the state in order to replace it by building democracy at the neighbourhood level. It’s only in this way that we can challenge the state and, at the same time, rewire its institutions—already running through every aspect of our lives—into something new.

Turning local action into global power

It’s easy to criticise everything under the sun as insufficient, not good enough. Organising in your own neighbourhood can sometimes feel distant from the important stuff happening around the world.

But while local action alone is insufficient, organising should still be a part of people’s everyday lives: it should be place-based. Fighting for affordable housing means fighting climate change.

Taking on AirBnB or Amazon in your city means struggling against corporate control over politics. Working with your neighbours doesn’t mean giving up on national electoral politics. It’s all part of the same strategy: building local democracy is the necessary ingredient for taking on the state.

How can we solidify these distant, local actions into an intentional power that can take on state, corporate, and global powers? Through learning from each other, networking, forming alliances, and, eventually, confederating. Without a democratic politics of scale, we’ll just stay stuck in the local.

In the next installment of this column, we’ll discuss another common objection—one that has become more and more pressing: can radical municipalism avoid what we call ‘dark municipalism’: the rise of a fascist, reactionary localist movement that seeks to protect only its own and expel anyone who doesn’t fit the norm.

These Authors

The Symbiosis Research Collective is a network of organizers and activist-researchers across North America, assembling a confederation of community organizations that can build a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Twitter: @SymbiosisRev This article was written by Aaron Vansintjan (@a_vansi).