1. What can neighborhood associations do? Plenty. As already pointed out, the mere fact of their existence, the mere fact that people have assembled, strikes a terrific blow at capitalism because by assembling we start overcoming the isolation and fragmentation upon which capitalism so much depends. Capitalists abhor all human relationships not fractured through commodity exchange and its supporting structures (e.g., hierarchical ties to government, corporations, schools, hospitals, landlords). Witness the continuing assault on marriage and family ties, kinship being the last great reservoir of non-commodified relationships.

      Neighborhood associations can begin conducting the war against capitalism. There are many ways to do this. They can: work closely with any employee associations in the neighborhood; encourage the establishment of cooperative households; encourage the establishment of worker-owned businesses; establish a neighborhood-controlled fund in order to have some resources to do things with; start to negotiate agreements with other neighborhoods; endorse and encourage all the various ways of gutting capitalism enumerated above; start a building fund for a Meeting Hall to be constructed as soon as money is available; begin to prepare themselves to become Home Assemblies with full decision-making power for self-rule; work out discussion and voting procedures within the Assemblies; become skilled at working cooperatively and democratically; organize cop watches; try to make our neighborhoods safe; organize steps toward more self-sufficiency in electricity, heat, and food in the neighborhood; regenerate community; reestablish self-reliance in dozens of small ways instead of depending on state programs; organize resistance to corporate destruction in the neighborhood; sponsor dances. The list goes on.

      2. What can employee associations do? Plenty. Ditto the remarks above about the revolutionary significance of simply assembling. Employee associations can begin conducting the war against capitalism from within workplaces. The waters are murkier here however because of 150 years of disastrous union practices. So first of all there must be no outside bureaucratic organization, no salaried union officials, no dues, no union halls, no secret midnight motel meetings between corporate executives and union officials. Employees will struggle for the space, time, and right to meet at work, and until then we will meet in our homes or in other co-opted spaces. Not a dime will be spent on union officials, offices, or buildings. Secondly, no contracts. The fight must be conducted on a day by day basis. No promises. No deals. We want to get more and give less. That’s the sum of it. Our objective must be to work toward the day when we can seize the shop or plant, take it over, run it ourselves, establish a self-managed project, and stop selling our labor-power. But this is the long term aim. Our immediate aim is to demand more while working less. This will put a crimp in the rate of profit, in the accumulation of capital, and hence in capitalism itself.

      For the millions of shops with thirty employees or less, one peer circle will cover the whole operation. In larger plants there must be several, or many, peer circles, probably following the departmental lines of the enterprise. For example, in a newspaper plant with 1000 employees, there will be roughly 40 peer circles (taking 25 as the average size). Printers, engravers, artists, editors, truckers, mailers, compositors, bookkeepers, photographers, and secretaries will all coalesce into peer circle meetings.

      Imagine how corporate executives will shake in their boots when they realize that their entire work force has organized itself into independent autonomous groups, that these groups are meeting, are communicating with each other, are discussing what happens at the plant, are generating demands and strategies, are planning direct actions, and are implacably hostile to management. Imagine how the ruling class as a whole will go into shock when they see entire cities covered with thousands of such groups in every factory, office, and store.

      Employee associations must recover the knowledge that we are being ripped off, that capitalism is a system of theft, and that things don’t have to be this way. They must recover the knowledge that we have created this wealth and that it belongs to us. They can endorse and support in many ways the steps enumerated above for gutting capitalism. They can establish ties and cooperate with the neighborhood associations near their workplace. This is an essential step, for although traditionally syndicalists have thought that workplace councils alone could destroy capitalism, I believe that workplace struggles must be combined with the establishment of neighborhood Home Assemblies (decision-making bodies). Together with household associations we thus have a three-pronged attack which can succeed.

      Needless to say our autonomous employee associations will be violently attacked. Every effort will be made to destroy them or else co-opt and neutralize them. Make no mistake about this. This is no picnic we’re planning.

      3. What can household associations do? Here the objectives are more limited. First of all we want to try to reduce the cost of housing, and secondly to relearn how to live cooperatively and communally in extended groupings. We need to keep in mind how we’re being fleeced. First of all the capitalists, as bosses, seize part of the wealth we have produced in unpaid wages. Then the capitalists, as government bureaucrats, seize a huge chunk of our wealth in taxes. Next, capitalists, as landlords, seize another huge chunk in rent. Finally, capitalists, as merchants, through monopoly control, seize yet another huge chunk with inflated prices. After this savage assault, there’s little left for everything else.

      So household associations are a vital part of our war to destroy capitalism. Getting control of housing is not as central as controlling the workplaces but it is still vitally important. We must be moving toward the day when we can seize these residential properties.

      Let’s review what they have done to us when it comes to residential living arrangements. They destroyed the dense warren-like residences of our peasant villages and medieval towns. They have forced us instead to live in single family houses or apartments. Then within each of these individual or small family dwelling units they installed a loudspeaker so that corporations and the state can talk directly into our homes (but we can’t talk back).

      Over the centuries many steps have been taken to further guarantee that we will not associate with our neighbors (actually the whole of bourgeois culture works in this direction). For example, in the small town single-family dwellings of nineteenth century America there were front porches. In twentieth century suburban tracts these are mostly gone. No one walks around the block anymore, stopping to visit with neighbors sitting on their front porches. These individualized residences, in addition to destroying association, have a further advantage to capitalists in that they each have to be filled up with commodities. Millions of toasters sold, millions of refrigerators, washing machines, stoves, blenders, fans, beds, lamps, tables, and of course TVs and radios, and now CDs, VCRs, DVDs, and PCs.

      Suburbia is surely the most socially destructive architectural development in history. But it has suited capitalists perfectly. That is why they built it, mostly in the last fifty years. In addition to being a depository for the hundreds of commodities capitalists want to sell, each little plot has to be kept up. Maintenance on the house, car, and yard consumes the bulk of the time left over from jobs, cooking and eating, and personal upkeep. The average suburban family spends more time mowing the lawn than it does in civic duties. Capitalists couldn't have found a more effective device for destroying community and depoliticizing the population than suburbia. The atomized household has served them well. Our household associations will be a direct threat to this key feature of capitalism.

      4. How can we redress the existing imbalance of wealth between regions? The normal operation of capitalism over a five hundred year period has produced poor regions and rich regions, most notably, on a global scale, between rich northern countries and impoverished southern countries, but also internally within nations, as for example between northern and southern Italy. My scheme of an association of democratic autonomous neighborhoods has been criticized for not providing a way to redress these imbalances. Each neighborhood must start where it is, first by stopping the ongoing extraction of wealth, and secondly by trying to recover some of the wealth already extracted. My critics want a much more rapid and forceful redistribution of wealth from rich to poor regions. This presupposes the success of either social democracy or Leninism, that is, a strong central government in radical hands with the capitalists out of the picture. This has never yet happened, nor is there any reason to believe it ever will happen. So this hope they have of redressing the imbalances rapidly by force is unrealistic. Associations of free peoples however could undoubtedly take strong measures to level things out and to lift their impoverished members.

      5. Provincialism versus Universalism. Some years ago I presented this scheme at a friend’s class at the University of Massachusetts. The black students present immediately objected to the idea of community control, saying that they didn’t want to be under the heel of a bigoted, racist majority in some small town. They had in mind I guess the role the federal government has played in enforcing civil rights in the South. But just think a minute. National governments are no less likely to be racist than local governments. In fact these students were grossly misjudging the amount of protection they have received from the government. If anything, capitalist governments are the main creators and upholders of racism.

      But there is a larger issue buried here. What right does any national elite have to impose its values and beliefs on any local community? What right do secular people have to impose their beliefs on religious people? What right do fundamentalist Christians have to impose their beliefs on everyone else? What right do the Sandinistas have to impose their culture on the Miskito Indians? To ask these questions is to answer them. None. No one has any right to impose their way of life on others. Freedom means the right to live, act, speak, believe, associate, as we choose.

      This whole debate between localism and cosmopolitanism, or universalism versus particularism, is a false one. It has arisen only because we have been living in hierarchical societies for at least 4000 years in which the ruling classes have usually pretended to speak for everyone. The bourgeoisie especially has been insistent that its views are universal, timeless, and true for everyone. If, instead of class societies, we had been living all this time in a world made up of associations of democratic autonomous communities, there would be no question of anything being universal. There would only be those values or beliefs adhered to by greater or smaller numbers of communities. We should not let abstract debates like this stop us from gutting capitalism and getting free. We will be able to solve ethical questions about our relations on a case by case basis as we come to them.

      6. How do we get back the wealth already stolen? It’s not difficult to imagine the re-appropriation of wealth as long as we’re talking about material things. We can seize land, factories, equipment, houses, and goods. What is puzzling is how we can seize the accumulated corporate assets deposited as credits in the banks of the world. But perhaps this puzzle is not as difficult as it seems. This money represents claims on labor and goods. If it cannot be exchanged for these it is worthless. If we can contrive situations where this exchange can be blocked, then in a sense we have re-appropriated this wealth, by freeing ourselves from its future claims on our labor and products. Such a situation would exist if governments collapsed and with them the international monetary system. The money would be worthless then. But if this happened the savings of working class people would be lost also. So we have to invent less catastrophic ways to render the money of the ruling class worthless. We also have to start getting our wealth out of ruling class banks and currencies and put somewhere safe. Further, we can create local currencies, reestablish barter in some cases, and have different kinds of currency for various purposes. Also, if we can establish a measure of self-sufficiency, there may be times when we can simply refuse to sell (our labor or products) in exchange for their currency. So if we can seize everything material, and then render their credit worthless, we will have gotten everything. Most of that paper wealth is an illusion anyway.

      7. Meetings. My nastiest response to those who don’t like meetings is that they should get out of the radical movement because they don’t belong here. But of course this is too harsh. After all, we are 500 years deep in bourgeois culture. The bourgeoisie doesn’t like meetings — or assemblies, congregations, associations, communes, tribes, gatherings, festivals, jubilees. They hardly even meet themselves, except in their boardrooms and parliaments. (They do love “organizations” though.) For persons who have spent their entire lives in individual pursuits it is understandable that they would find meetings tedious, even unbearable.

      There is another point of view however. Meetings are occasions when our true nature as social beings finds expression. It is through meetings that we will be able to create a new social world shaped by human intelligence. In our new civilization meetings will be natural and normal events in our everyday lives in our households, projects, and neighborhoods. They will be joyous occasions, or at least enjoyable occasions, not the drag they are now under very inimical conditions.

      But it is a long way from here to there. One look at my scheme must make even the most gregarious radical blanch. There are peer circle meetings galore, as well as household-wide and project-wide assemblies, plus the meeting of the Home Assembly itself. But this looks worse than it is. The project and household meetings will be just a regular part of running the household or project, like washing the dishes or keeping the books. As for the Home Assembly, how often will we have to meet once things are set up? The real trouble about meetings is not then, after we have won, but now, when we’re fighting a war. How can anyone who is working full time at a job find time for an employee association, a household association, and a neighborhood association? There are not enough hours in the day. Obviously, we won’t all be able to fight on every front. We’ll have to split things up. Remember also that many millions of us are not employed full-time. And what if we didn’t devote so much time to the culture industry? Consider also that if we stopped wasting so much time and energy on strategies that fail we would have a lot more time and energy to build associations that can destroy capitalism. Consider also where we might take our pleasure. Couldn’t it be an intensely pleasurable experience to demolish a ruling class whose practices are responsible for millions of deaths, stunted children, a polluted planet, decimated species, and worldwide misery? Wouldn’t this yield personal satisfaction at least equal to that of going to a ball game or concert?

      So let’s first get rid of capitalism through our associations and then give ourselves time to decide whether a way of life built on frequent assemblies is pleasurable or onerous.

      8. Thinking Strategically. There is a long-standing and widespread confusion in radical social thought about whether consciousness is determined or not (variously known as the base/superstructure problem, the subject/object duality, the relation between being and consciousness). A critic of my strategy said that it presupposed an already existing, widespread, anti-capitalist consciousness. And since he didn’t believe such a consciousness existed at present, where was it going to come from? He went on to say that perhaps if capitalism started to collapse, and the survival of large numbers of people were at stake (actually the survival of hundreds of millions of people is already at stake), perhaps then the strategy would catch on. The implication here is that radical consciousness is produced by historical conditions. This is a false way of looking at things. It leaves out the free, creative response people can make to their circumstances.

      Fortunately, there is a clear way out of this muddle: think strategically. My critic did not seem to be aware that he was talking about history rather than acting in it. This is always the case with those with objectivist leanings. They are always standing outside history looking on, rather than making history as an active participant. When we have a project, when we are trying to do something (goal-oriented action), then this whole false dilemma of subject/object evaporates. We look at what we have to work with and what stands in our way and we take it from there. And where did we get the idea for this project? We created it, out of the blue.

      Marx pointed the way, long ago, when he wrote in the The Eighteenth Brumaire, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Unfortunately, this has been a difficult insight for radicals to absorb. They tend to forget about the first five words — “Men make their own history” — and instead remember only that our actions are circumscribed by the past. Even one of my favorite body of theorists, now coming to be known as Autonomous Marxists, but which I always called Anti-Bolshevik Communists or Western Marxists, is guilty all too often of writing about the working class from the outside, rather than from the inside as strategists for abolishing wage-slavery.

      The funny thing is that this deterministic approach is only applied to the working class, never to the ruling class, even by radical intellectuals. It is considered utopian for workers to imagine how we want to live and to set about creating such a life. But no one would ever think to say that the lawyers, plantation owners, and merchants who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 couldn’t do that. There is hardly a radical intellectual alive who doesn’t hold to the idea that we can’t say much now about the shape of the new society we want, and who doesn’t subscribe to the Marxist ban on utopian thinking (which has done enormous damage to the anti-capitalist struggle). But they would never even think to say that about the constitution writers of 1787. For who can deny that not only did these gentlemen write down in detail a description of the institutional structures they wanted, but they went on to set them up, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in shaping the social life of a whole nation for the next two centuries.

      Let us finally, please, at long last, have an end to all the talk that we are nothing but the pawns of history. We cannot be only that even if we wanted to, but as long as we believe that we are, it hurts our chances for freedom. We must become conscious actors on the stage of history. This is the only way we can defeat our rulers, who act this way as a matter of course, everyday, in doing the business of running and defending their empire. They constantly monitor opposition to their project, which is to accumulate capital, and take steps to counter it. They don’t agonize much about whether they are historically determined or not. In this instance, and only in this instance, we should take a tip from them. We have to if we want to survive. We have to start taking charge of our own lives. So remember: Think Strategically.

      9. Federation and other delusions. Anarchists have long deluded themselves, with the idea of federation, that they have solved the thorny problem of how they can have both direct democracy and large scale organization at the same time. It's a pat formula they repeat, ritualistically – "federated at the municipal, regional, national, and international levels." It's a grand illusion. Federation obviously creates a hierarchy, by using delegates (i.e., representatives) to form smaller and smaller decision-making units, further and further removed from the neighborhood. But this idea is garnished, to make it more palatable, with three other illusions – (a) mandated delegates, (b) instant recall, and (c) the separation of policy making from administration. I believe all three ideas are flawed and are incompatible with direct democracy, and hence with anarchism, self-government, and autonomy.

      The notion of a mandated delegate is a mirage, because as soon as a meeting convenes, everything is open. The discussion of the issues redefines those issues. Sometimes the change of only one word in a proposal can completely change the proposal's meaning and impact. In short, I do not believe that delegates can be mandated. There is no way delegates can avoid exercising their own judgement on the issues once the discussion gets under way, no matter how detailed their instructions were. So the idea that mandated delegates preserve the decision-making power of the neighborhood assemblies is an illusion.

      So also with the idea of instant recall. For recall to work the people back home would have to be following the discussion as closely as if they were there themselves. They would have to have detailed, current knowledge of the issues as they were unfolding in debates among delegates. Even if everyone back home were watching the conference live on television (an impossibility), in order to exercise recall they would have to convene themselves, in their home assemblies, and debate whether or not a delegate had deviated from the mandate far enough to warrant recall. But of course, if they are going to do this, and if they have this kind of intimate knowledge of the issues, and this kind of communication system, they might as well be making the decisions themselves, directly, without bothering to go through the hassle of setting up conferences of delegates. A moment's reflection shows that the whole idea of recall is ridiculous, but it has been repeated uncritically for decades by radicals.

      Similarly with the idea of the separation between policy making and administration. Anyone who has worked on a project knows that all kinds of decisions have to be made constantly. It can be the most mundane decision, but have profound policy implications. But unless a decision happens to come under scrutiny, and is discussed and aired, it may not be clear what its policy implications are. In other words, it's next to impossible to separate purely administrative decisions from policy decisions, because almost any so-called administrative decision may be shown to have policy implications. The distinction is a false one. It is another illusion, a way of convincing ourselves that we still have a project based on direct democracy, when we do not.

      In this essay I have adopted the practice of treaty making as a way of avoiding hierarchy and delegated authority. Delegates from various neighborhoods will get together to hammer out agreements. But these agreements will then have to be taken back to the neighborhood assemblies for ratification. The draft of a treaty may go back and forth between the home assemblies and the delegate conference for a long time. It will be a cumbersome process. But it will be real democracy, direct democracy. Each neighborhood will keep all its decision-making power, rather than delegate it.

      If this proves unwieldy and too impractical, then it might be better to simply admit that we can't have pure direct democracy, and that we have to combine direct democracy with some form of delegated authority, in which case we ought to be examining social arrangements based on representative democracy. But I'm not willing to concede this. It would mean giving up on the possibility of autonomous communities and genuine self-rule. It would mean relinquishing our decision-making power. I reject, as undemocratic, the transfer of this power to representatives or delegates. I believe it will be possible for neighborhoods to negotiate all the treaties they need, and to keep all the power in their own hands.

      We need to remember that the endless legislative work of contemporary parliaments in bourgeois democracies is mostly concerned with conflicts generated by capitalism itself, either to manage the class struggle between the rulers and everyone else, or to manage the conflicts within the ruling class. But in a free society, how much legislative work will there be? How many times will we have to negotiate a treaty to establish a telephone network or sewage system? Once the capitalist dynamic has been abolished (the struggle of all against all), and cooperation and mutual aid put in its place, there will be considerable, even extensive, stability and continuity in social arrangements. Passing legislation is not going to consume our entire lives.

      10. Individuality and Privacy. A couple of persons objected to my sketch saying that it stifled individuality and privacy. One of these comments came from someone whom I knew to be a fanatic individualist, so I didn't pay it much heed. But the other one came from a radical friend who said that he would not like to live in the kind of society I had imagined. Too cloistered, too claustrophobic. He too said that it would destroy individual privacy and individuality in general.

      I have been puzzled by these comments. One of the main radical objections to capitalism is that it prevents individuals from realizing their maximum potential. Wage-slaves are not free to, nor do they have the resources (especially time, but also material wealth) to really be all that they could be. Capitalism in fact is not made up of individuals, but of an elite-mass. Those of us in the mass part of this duality are atomized, alienated, isolated, separated. We are mere units, commodities. We are not persons, unique and individual, in the true sense. Our strongest links are to those who are oppressing us, to the bosses, bureaucrats, and bankers. We're lucky if we manage to salvage a few family relations, and a circle of friends and acquaintances. Even if we have extensive personal contacts and memberships in a variety of voluntary organizations, we are still acting as atomized, alienated non-persons, not as true individuals. People who bemoan the 'end of the individual' have got it just backwards. Individuality has yet to be achieved. It is a goal of the revolution. It is possible only among free peoples. It is impossible among wage-slaves. Individuality, like freedom itself, is a social achievement, not an personal characteristic.

      Capitalism gives only the illusion of individuality. If you have money, you can go anytime, live anywhere, do anything (as long as you don't try to live cooperatively, that is, or reject capitalism). The seemingly endless choices offered people by capitalists are possible only within the hierarchical and elitist framework capitalists have established. Choices outside that framework are savagely eliminated. So ultimately, the choices we have, no matter what our interests, are like the choice we have between Coke and Pepsi – it is no choice at all.

      A true, rich individuality could only be achieved by a self-governing people, an autonomous people. Each person would be deeply embedded in a multitude of social relations, a rich matrix of ties to other persons, each of whom was an equal member of a cooperative, self-governing community. It is only through such ties that true individuality can emerge, not in this pitiful pretense of a life we have now.

      As for privacy, we should be careful not to confuse privacy with isolation, forced isolation. Remember, one of the worst punishments dealt out in prisons is solitary confinement. I would happily trade a little privacy for a little conviviality. And I'm not worried about autonomous neighborhood, workplace, and household assemblies not allowing me to be me. I will for sure have more personal space there than I do here. Won't others in those assemblies want to have room to grow and express themselves? Won't they want to free up time, space, and resources to permit the wild explosion of creativity made possible by our victory, by our emergence finally into the 'realm of freedom'?

      11. Territories. If nation-states disappear from the earth, with their territorial boundaries, and if land is decommodified so that no piece of land is defined any longer as property with a title which is registered with the state to facilitate its being bought and sold, will there still be other territorial boundaries left? Will cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods have territorial boundaries? Cities and towns in the United States are at present incorporated by the state, giving them distinct territorial boundaries. These boundaries establish the territory within which the authority of the city or town government holds jurisdiction, for things like collecting taxes, exercising police power, enforcing city ordinances, and providing services. Without larger states to incorporate them could cities and towns have territorial boundaries? Would neighborhood assemblies draw territorial boundaries? I suppose they could, but it wouldn't be wise to do so. Would it make any sense to say that a neighborhood owns and controls the land upon which it lives? I think not. The concept of ownership, certainly with regard to land (and the mineral deposits under it, the air over it, and the water and vegetation on it), will disappear along with the decommodification of land.

      Many physical things do have boundaries of course. Buildings have walls which separate the inside from the outside, and fields have perimeters or edges. The boundaries of highway, telephone, water, sewage, or natural gas systems might be established by tracing out the roads, phone lines (or satellite links) or the pipes. Does the wind have boundaries, or sunshine. Well, some areas get more of these than other areas, so questions might arise as to who gets to use the sunshine and wind where it is most abundant. This is now becoming clear with wind power. It is now being said that there is enough wind power in the American Midwest to supply electricity for the entire nation. If ownership can be claimed to the land over which this wind blows hardest, then even wind can be turned into a commodity, and it is.

      I suppose even a river could be said to have boundaries, marked by its headwaters, tributaries, mouth, and delta. But since, in a commodified world, water runs through artificially defined territories imposed upon the land by social definition, there often arise struggles over water rights. Who has a right to use the water (and even how much can they use)? These questions have to be worked out socially and politically. Within the social arrangements proposed in this essay these questions will be worked out by negotiation among neighborhood assemblies. With the abolition of property rights, usage rights will take their place. Property of course is a social definition too, rights to which have been written into law by the ruling class, to facilitate capital accumulation. But usage rights could just as well be settled in our directly democratic neighborhood assemblies.

      If a swimming pool or a gymnasium exists in a certain area, who will get to use it? If there are to be any restrictions on usage at all, then usage rights could be determined by membership in the Home Assembly nearest to them, or by the treaty that had been negotiated for the construction and maintenance of those facilities, and not by residence in a certain territory defined by boundaries drawn by home assemblies, since no such territorial boundaries have been drawn.

      Similarly with the construction and maintenance of all systems that cut across large areas of land, like roads, railroads, telephones, sewage, water, natural gas, oil, cable, and so forth. These will be built and maintained by inter-neighborhood treaties worked out by the assemblies. To construct such systems usually requires the disruption of the land and those living upon it. Traditionally, under territorial governments (governments which claim a monopoly of force within a certain territory), the land needed for these systems has simply been seized, through their claimed so-called right of "eminent domain". Under anarchy, in the absence of such authoritarian governments, all these questions will be up for discussion and debate, and mutually agreed upon settlements.

      Underground minerals pose an especially hoary problem, because their extraction often involves severe damage to the surface land and displacement of anyone living there. If military might cannot be brought to bear to evict the traditional inhabitants of that land, then what? Hard negotiation. If a neighborhood is setting on top of a newly discovered rare mineral which practically the whole world (of autonomous, democratic communities) claims it direly needs, then what? Hard negotiation. Cooperatively, democratically fashioned agreements. Mutual Aid. Sharing.

      This question applies to our system of Home Assemblies too. If each neighborhood has a Home Assembly, based on direct, face-to-face, democracy, over whom will the decisions of the Home Assembly have authority? My solution is to claim that a neighborhood is defined socially, not by territorial boundaries. That is, the decisions of the Home Assembly apply to the participants of the Home Assembly. The neighborhood is defined by membership in the Home Assembly, not by where a person lives. Naturally, broad and flexible definitions of membership will be needed, which will cover active members, as well as inactive members, guests, those with leaves of absence, temporary members, and so forth. For example, non-participants, like children, senile seniors, or the mentally impaired, who live in households comprised of persons in a given Home Assembly will be covered by the decisions of that Home Assembly.

      By and large, members in a Home Assembly will tend to live in the same geographical area. But since there are no territorial boundaries, membership in Home Assemblies may be somewhat jumbled in certain areas. That is, households existing side by side may belong to different Home Assemblies. Also, certain Projects located in the geographical area where most members of a Home Assembly live, might be controlled by inter-neighborhood treaties, rather than by the decisions of the Home Assembly it happens to be next to geographically. Which Projects and which Households fall under the jurisdiction of which Home Assembly is defined socially therefore, by participation in the Home Assembly, and not territorially. Some projects might be staffed by persons from different Home Assemblies (neighborhoods), but still be under the jurisdiction of a particular Home Assembly (the majority's Home Assembly probably). That is, even though a Project may be somewhat mixed, it need not always therefore be governed by an inter-neighborhood treaty. Households, however, I would think, would not be mixed. Members of a particular household would tend to belong to a particular Home Assembly, and would thus fall under the jurisdiction of that Home Assembly. But even with Households there will surely be a need for considerable flexibility, as regards membership.

      This is why I argue that anarchism (true communism) can only be socially defined and has no territorial base.

      12. Identity. All that agonizing Marxists have suffered, for nearly a century now, over the Nationalities Question was so pointless. They could have saved themselves a heap of trouble if they hadn't excluded anarchists so completely from the political and intellectual arena. There is definitely a problem here, but not the one they have perceived. Quite obviously, there is a nationalities question only when there are nations, or more precisely, nation-states. If there is a Russian Empire, and within its boundaries exist a multitude of distinct peoples with unique languages, cultures, histories, and traditions, how can these peoples be free and self-determined and still be subject to the authority of the national government? Well that's not hard. They can't be. If Ho Chi Minh and the communists are in power in Hanoi and are setting policy for the whole country, what happens to the tribal peoples in the hills? If the Sandinistas are in power in Managua, and setting policy for all of Nicaragua, what is the nature of their relations with the Miskito Indians on the Gulf Coast? Or what about the Basques and Spaniards, the Quebecois and English Canadians, the Scots and the English?

      These are all non-issues under anarchy, which is a world full of autonomous, communal peoples. If there were no ruling class, then there would be no pressure on local peoples to give up their own languages, ethnicity, and cultures in favor of those of the ruling class. There would be no King's English to be imposed on the lower orders to facilitate more efficient administration. There would be no national religion. There would be no hegemonic culture. Under the communists in China, distinct ethnic groups have been disappearing faster than ever before, as a national, homogenous culture is imposed from Beijing. Regional dialects are disappearing from an already fairly homogenous country like the United States. Similarly the world over.

      But if every neighborhood, village, or small town were self-governing and autonomous, then what reason could there be for them to give up their own language and culture? Unless they just wanted to, because they wanted to assimilate for example (but to what?), or simply to learn a second language, or adopt certain items (ideas or things) because they liked them. But they would be under no compulsion to do so. They could change or stay the same, as they chose. Under such conditions, it would even become possible again for new ethnicity, languages, and cultures to emerge, rather than disappear, which is about all they've been doing lately.

      But wouldn't essentially the same problems reappear on the neighborhood level? They would, but with a difference. It's unlikely after all that every neighborhood or village will be homogeneous (or stay homogenous). Even if they begin homogenous, new identities can emerge almost overnight to split them. A good example was the emergence in the late sixties of gender as the primary identity for millions of young women the world over. An identity which had not been especially salient suddenly became so. I suppose something similar could happen in a decentralized world.

      But on the neighborhood level, in self-governing free communities, the question of identity takes on an entirely different cast. How so? Because of the already achieved equality of power and wealth. Much of the struggle of blacks has been to get the same civil rights everyone else had. Women have sought equal rights under the law and equity in pay and work loads. Old people have wanted to live in dignity and independence, and not be shoved off to die in some holding pen. In autonomous neighborhoods based on democratic decision-making, cooperative labor, and shared wealth, all these things would be theirs as a matter of course. It's hard to see how identity politics, as we have known it this past quarter century, could even exist under anarchy. Identities in the neighborhood that would exist, would surely exist, would devolve into the standard difficulty of majority/minority relations. There will be minorities on just about every issue. But will these minorities be based on race, gender, age, or language? I doubt it. They will be political or philosophical minorities.

      One reason I'm so committed to deliberative assemblies is that they seem to me to offer us our best chance of overcoming distinctions that are extraneous and irrelevant to cooperative decisions. Through a process of discussion, we can discover whether these distinctions really matter to any given issue. If gender is relevant to a particular issue, it can be factored in. If it is not, it can be factored out. Open discussion in small assemblies will enable us to unravel this. We can come to see whether race, gender, ethnicity, age, intelligence, beauty, articulateness, or what have you, is actually relevant to and has a bearing on, any given issue in dispute which is up for discussion and decision. In this way reasoning can be brought to bear on our collective lives. Our divisions will come to be based more on different takes (political, philosophical, theoretical) on the issues, than on givens such as race, gender, or ethnicity. Our identities will come to be based more on what we believe, rather than on the color of our skins, the language we speak, the sex we are, the nation we reside in, or the age group we're in. In the long run, that is.

      In the short run we still have identity conflicts. Naturally, we hope that the horizons of human tolerance for difference will keep expanding, and that many current conflicts over race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth, can be eventually resolved (assuming the destruction of capitalism that is) through general changes in cultural understanding and increased tolerance. But on the world scale, certainly, there will always be differences in cultural identity, and rightly so. The more the better. After all, who wants to give up their own culture, race, language, or ethnicity? Hopefully, these differences will not only be tolerated, but cherished.

      Nevertheless, not all identity conflicts can be resolved by increasing tolerance. What if a community of people emerged with the conscious identity of murderers and thieves, as perhaps has actually happened with the Mafia (and has certainly happened with the capitalist ruling class, muted only by its absurdly transparent ideological dissimulation)? Is anyone going to argue that killing and stealing are really okay and that this identity has a right to exist? Would any community tolerate murderers and thieves in their projects, households, and assemblies? Wouldn't they take steps to reform such people, or if that fails, to constrain them or even expel them from their ranks?

      But could they be expelled from the neighborhood? Probably. Freedom to associate implies the freedom not to associate. Otherwise this freedom is meaningless. I don't see how the right to expel persons from a neighborhood could be abolished and still have a social arrangement based on free association. And remember, there is no higher authority to impose laws to resolve the conflict in favor of one or the other side

      Free association provides a way out of this muddle for many identity conflicts short of outright crime. New identities and lifestyles are emerging all the time. Identities are not fixed, immutable, eternal. They appear and disappear like everything else. So people with shared beliefs and practices can form communities and live together, and leave others alone to live as they please. No one is stopping them. The world is a big place. There is room for everyone. It is only as the cancer of imperialism, and the nationalism that it has spawned, has metastasized to all corners of the globe, that the world has started to seem crowded.

      We cannot expect, though, that every time a serious disagreement emerges in a neighborhood, a bunch of people will just pack up and leave and establish a new neighborhood elsewhere or move into another neighborhood where people already share their beliefs, or at least tolerate them. This kind of split will be feasible only in rare cases. Gender conflicts, for example, obviously cannot be solved, on the social level, by one sex moving out and forming a new neighborhood, not if the human species is to survive that is. Living in distinct neighborhoods is certainly a solution for many existing differences though, since for the most part we already do. So we're back to the recognition that disagreements are inherent in the human situation, and to the unending contest, therefore, over whose values, perceptions, and projects will win acceptance and prevail, and whose will be rejected and fade away.

      Where intractable conflicts persist, I believe the solution lies with the principle of free association and shows the beauty and genius of this way of arranging our social life. Under free conditions, will any group be able to impose its way of life on others? I suppose some majorities in some neighborhoods might try. But how far will they get? Wouldn't they need bureaucrats, police, superintendents, and lawyers? And where are they going to get these? Furthermore, could any minority in a neighborhood be denied participation in projects, households, and the assembly? Could they be denied their fair share of the cooperatively produced wealth? They couldn't. Not and have the neighborhood still remain a member of the association. I don't deny that this is a very thorny issue.

      The long running debate in Israel over "Who is a Jew?" is an illustrative case in this regard. Certain orthodox Jews want a Jewish state peopled by Jews like themselves. This certainly excludes Palestinians and Christians. It also excludes even secular Israelis, that is, citizens of the present state of Israel, who may once have been practicing Jews, in the religious sense, but no longer are. Are these secular Israelis Jews? Does Jewishness spring from citizenship in a Jewish state or from religious beliefs and practices only?

      There is no solution to this dilemma within the framework of a territorial nation-state. Those who insist that a secular Israeli state solves the problem are simply missing the point and opting for one side in the dispute, for citizens rather than Jews. The problem is the state itself, with its citizens, and not its particular definition, whether secular or religious. The Jewish question can only be solved under anarchism, as the late-nineteenth century socialist Bundists in the Ukraine and the Polish Pale, who were opposed to Zionism, realized. Unlike Marx, who thought the solution to the Jewish Question was the disappearance of the Jewish identity in favor of a more universal human identity, these Jewish communists knew that their freedom could never be achieved by the ownership and control of a territory. They knew that they had to be free to live as they pleased – no matter where, and no matter what their identity – even as Jews.

      True communism (that is, anarchism) can never be geographically defined, but only socially. It has no territorial boundaries. Getting rid of the state of Israel (and all states everywhere) would free up the whole region (and the whole world) for an abundance of diverse, democratic, autonomous communities. Jews and Palestinians could live side by side, in their neighborhoods and villages, peacefully, as they had done for hundreds of years before Zionism and the State of Israel came along.

      Under anarchism, diversity rules, not sameness. But diversity does not mean that every tradition will exist side by side in every neighborhood (although many neighborhoods might move a ways in this direction), but only that there is room enough for every tradition to exist somewhere. People who speak the same language will tend to live together. People with strict religious practices and eating regimens will tend to live together. People who share a history and a culture will tend to live together. Families will tend to live together. In this, there is sameness. But that the world will continue to possess thousands of languages and identities, rather than one imperial language and identity, is diversity.

      13. More on Projects. Project is a term I selected for any activity undertaken by more than one person, that is, all cooperative activities in the community. I picked this term because I want to overcome several unfortunate distinctions, most importantly, the distinction between economic and non-economic activities. The category of economic stems from capitalism, and makes no sense outside that system. I also want to overcome the notion of civil society (which traditionally refers to all activities outside both the state and the economy/work). This distinction will also collapse once the state and capitalism are gone, obviously. A variation of the civil society idea is that of voluntary associations (as opposed to employment or civic duties). There will be no such thing as a voluntary association under anarchism, because all associations will be voluntary, and there will be no separate sphere labeled ‘the economy’ which you are tied to by force, on pain of starvation.

      Thus, any activity that a group of people decides to undertake, under anarchism, whether it be a chess club, a farm, a machine shop, a research project, a volleyball team, a restaurant, a theater, a daycare center, an orchestra, a debating society, a film festival, a factory, will be on an equal footing with all other projects. Some people argue that of course the necessities of life come first. But I doubt if any neighborhood will be so stupid as to starve itself or leave itself homeless and without clothes, in order to have a symphony orchestra or a good swimming pool. But who defines, after all, what is really essential to life? Even within the realm of bare necessities there is certainly a lot room for variation in emphasis. Some neighborhoods may want to settle for beans and rice in order to have resources to make beautiful pottery or music, considering these things essential to their well being. Other neighborhoods may prefer to have high cuisine rather than expensive cultural activities.

      The point is, though, that if an activity requires resources, this project will have to be discussed and decided upon by the neighborhood, and the resources allocated to it. There will probably also be, I would think, general resources earmarked and set aside by the community to enable individuals and groups to take initiatives to establish certain kinds of projects and preliminary experiments, without a formal decision or endorsement by the Home Assembly. Otherwise, creativity and initiative might be stifled. Naturally, there will be no vast accumulation of wealth by individuals, like there is now, so that rich people can do any damn thing they please without having to seek anyone's endorsement or approval. This is precisely one of the main reasons the world is in such a mess. But I would hope that any neighborhood would be wise enough to build in plenty of mechanisms to facilitate and encourage individual and group initiatives in launching new projects.

      14. More on Peer Circles. Peer Circle is just a phrase I invented to take the place of the more traditional radical term ‘council’, as in workers' council, which mostly comes out of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition and is quite closely associated with it. That's one of the reasons I wanted a new term, because I want to get away from the idea that the revolution is just about seizing "work" (what we have to seize is decision making). Workers councils have appeared in just about all revolutions, in factories and offices, sometimes in universities and government agencies, and in a few cases in the countryside too. What happens is that workers inside a factory assembly themselves into councils (these are then "federated" within the factory), and they seize the facility and run it themselves.

      In my scheme, the Peer Circle is really a central social form, perhaps even more so than the Home Assembly, because the Peer Circle is where the real, face-to-face discussion can best take place. It is strictly a deliberative assembly though. It's sole purpose is to examine and discuss the issues and vote to establish policy (within the project or household, not for the neighborhood as a whole, which is done in the Home Assembly). It is not a social gathering for any other purpose.

      So this Peer Circle, or deliberative assembly, thus conceived, should not be confused with what has come to be known as an Affinity Group, which is a common form in the contemporary movement. Affinity groups, as I understand them, have been formed primarily to enable people to take action, as for example in street demonstrations, and for that purpose friendship and trust are needed. For this purpose, eight members is thought to be a good size. But eight is way too small for a good face-to-face discussion in a deliberative assembly. Here the needed qualities are not trust and friendship but critical and creative thinking, skepticism, rejection of both tolerance and intolerance in favor of a fierce independence of mind, enough minds to formulate differences, disagreements, and policy alternatives, all of which of course are essential aspects of freedom and democracy, and of sound policy formation. The best small group democracy that I have personally participated in usually had around twenty to twenty-five participants, sometimes as many as forty, or as few as fifteen. But if only eight were present, the meeting was pretty much dead in the water.

      I had originally pictured the Peer Circles as coalescing together to form the Home Assembly, but I later dropped that idea, since votes are to be taken individually in the Home Assembly, not by Peer Circle. That is, a Peer Circle will not vote as a unit. There was the additional problem that in Inter-Neighborhood projects, Peer Circles would be made up of members from different neighborhoods, from different Home Assemblies. So as presently pictured, Home Assemblies are constituted by individuals living in the neighborhood (with the complication that the neighborhood is defined by membership in the Home Assembly, not by residence within a bounded territory).

      Peer Circles, as I conceive them, are a way to break down large Projects and Households into smaller groups of approximately 25 people (but they could range from two to forty if necessary) in order to have better face-to-face discussion and direct democracy decision making. As an example, let's take a large hospital with a staff of 250 persons. We have doctors, nurses, orderlies, lab technicians, radiologists, secretaries, bookkeepers, janitors, pharmacists, and so forth. It would make sense I think for the Peer Circles in the hospital to be organized along the lines of the division of labor, but this need not necessarily be the case, if another way seems preferable (by floor, by department, for example). As I picture it, most of the discussion and decision making will take place in these smaller groups. Votes will be taken within Peer Circles, but tallied across all Peer Circles in the Project (that is, the entire hospital staff). Tallying the votes will be easier now that we have computers, but certainly could have been done adequately before we had them.

      For this system to work, a way will have to be found to set the agenda in a democratic way, according to the principles of direct democracy and the non-delegation of authority. And this has always seemed to me to be a pretty severe obstacle to overcome, although I think it can be. What is to be discussed, the issues to be decided, are of course crucial matters, and are often the most politically charged ones. Setting the agenda cannot be left to a delegated body, but must be decided upon by everyone. But assuming that this problem can be solved, the hospital will be self-governed by this network of Peer Circles. As I picture it, Project-wide meetings (of, in this case, the entire hospital staff) will be much less frequent, say once or twice a year, as opposed to more frequent meetings of Peer Circles (say once a week).

      But further discussions have caused me to recognize something. If we got very skilled at face-to-face direct democracy decision making and became competent at exercising these skills in larger meetings (which of course I hope we do), then the hospital might be self-governed more by meetings of the entire 250-member staff, rather than by the smaller Peer Circles. This would undoubtedly require more frequent project-wide meetings. Originally, I had thought the project-wide meetings would set basic policy for the project, with the Peer Circles dealing more with day to day affairs. But it might be possible to make all the necessary decisions (on matters which require collective resolution) in more frequent, say monthly, project-wide meetings.

      This might be especially true of smaller Projects. A Project with only 25 people obviously doesn't need to be broken down into Peer Circles. This might hold true also for Projects with 50, or 100, or 150, if the meetings skills are there. I think I still prefer though, in Projects larger than 25, to have Peer Circles, because the airing of issues, and face-to-face discussion, can be done so much better in smaller groups (provided of course that these groups are linked up into a network, are considering basically the same issues, and have access to all the information they need).

      Conversely, if we became skilled at making decisions quickly and democratically through a network of Peer Circles, perhaps we could dispense with the larger Project-wide meetings. I tend to believe though that the larger meetings would continue to be valuable and necessary in that they would expose members to a greater variety of opinion in a way that couldn't be done through even a very good communication system among Peer Circles.

      As I see them, Peer Circles will be a person's main link to the deliberative process, the place where they most frequently engage in self-government, decision making, discussion, debate, and so forth. In some projects, such meetings might even be daily, or every other day, or twice weekly, or weekly, depending on the situation. These meetings will become just a normal part of the project's activity, like any other function, like bookkeeping, cleaning, or ordering supplies. They will not be seen as something separate. In our currently existing hierarchical society, decision making is separated out from those who are actually doing the work. All these decisions are made by the administrators, managers, bosses. This is why it will seem strange for us to be doing this work, why holding meetings will seem unusual, extra, outside the work itself. But of course, decision making is an integral part of the work, and always has been. It's just that we haven't been doing it ourselves. So once we do start doing it ourselves, it will become natural and easy, just a normal part of our daily routine. It seems unlikely, also, that Peer Circle discussions will be strictly limited to those issues immediately relevant to the Project, but possibly might widen into discussions of issues currently being debated in the neighborhood at large.

      There is some ambiguity about the relations between Peer Circles, Households, and Projects. A Household might be considered a Project of course, but I've separated it out because of its distinctive residential character. This is where we live after all, and where many of our loved ones, friends, and family members live, where we sleep, where we eat most of our meals, where we take some of our recreation, where we might have been educated (if we grew up in such a Household), where we get basic medical care, and so forth. Whereas Projects are activities we go out to. Except of course for those persons whose main Project is in the Household, such as teachers, cooks, or nurses. (I'm obviously talking about the larger, expanded Household I've described in this essay, not a single house co-op). So it would be onerous, and just too much, if persons who go outside the Household to participate in Projects (most persons), are expected to participate in a Peer Circle in that Project as well as participate in a Peer Circle in the Household.

      In my projection therefore, only persons who do not go outside the household for a project, but who stay in the household on a daily basis, will form Peer Circles in the Household. This way, everyone will be a member of just one Peer Circle (leaving aside the problem of persons who work in two or more Projects outside the Household). This way, any given person will have their fairly frequent Peer Circle meetings, to self-govern their Project, an occasional Project-Wide meeting, an occasional Household-wide meeting, and the Home Assembly (neighborhood) meetings (which also will be fairly infrequent, except right at the very beginning when the new social forms are being established and the basic agreements hammered out).

      This may seem like a lot of meetings, especially to persons embedded in the currently dominant extreme individualistic outlooks and behavior patterns. We have never been a self-governing people, so we are frightened by the prospect, frightened by the effort it will take to make decisions collectively, because this work has always been done for us, by our rulers. For the most part, we presently lack decision making skills. We also lack confidence in our ability to assume responsibility for governing our own lives, and we perceive the time and energy needed to do this as a burden, rather than as liberation. The false distinction between work and leisure is deeply ingrained in us, a separation made possible only in a hierarchical society where the basic framework is established by the rulers, so that when we are not at work we are free to do our own thing, as long, that is, as doing our own thing does not challenge in any way the established order.

      I argue though that once we get going, and get things set up, and have improved our meeting skills, we will be able to reduce both the length and frequency of these meetings. Plus the meetings themselves will become easy, enjoyable, fun. They will be social occasions, convivial occasions. They will become just a normal part of our lives, like eating, or sleeping, or playing, or studying. Plus our disagreements will become less critical and momentous. With our basic lives secured, through cooperative labor and mutual aid, our disagreements will not often be a matter of life or death, as they are now, under capitalism. It will not often be the case, as it is now, that a wrongly chosen path will lead to a life-threatening catastrophe. It is because our lives are currently threatened and insecure (and have been for a long time), it is because our lives are under direct attack by our rulers and we are forced into a vicious fight for our very existence, that everything seems to be so urgent and serious. This extreme tension carries over into everything we do, and into our meetings too. If there were no oppressive ruling class, the social world would be a much calmer place.

      A calm social world is a ways down the road though. For now, and especially as we attempt to set up our assemblies, we are going to come under attack, much more so that we already are. They will try to bust up our assemblies. They will try to coopt them. The authoritarians among us will be trying to get them to "federate" into national structures. But this is nothing new. The ruling class has been attacking everything we've tried for the past five hundred years.

      15. On the matter of the size of Households and Home Assemblies. A critic of my proposal said that my size estimates, for households and neighborhood assemblies, were way off. She thought that 25 would be more appropriate and realistic for households (not 100-200), and 250 for Home Assemblies (not 1000-2000). I don't think the size of Households really matters all that much. The size of these can vary a lot, as far as I'm concerned. You will recall though that by Household I mean a really extended grouping, not a single family residence or even a housing cooperative. I picture it more as a mini community. I want it large enough for it to make sense for it to have a birthing room, machine shop, recreational facilities, laundry, and communal kitchen. I start from what I envision might be built from scratch, namely a large complex of buildings, all interconnected, with the above mentioned facilities, and living quarters for different kinds of family groups. I am picturing something like a small manor in the Middle Ages, or one of those large households in Greece or Rome, with the large courtyard surrounded by family rooms and workshops. I recently visited a large Convent in Oaxaca, which was built like this, with communal, residential, and work rooms built around a courtyard. It surely houses at least 200 people, probably more. But of course we will not be building from scratch, or at least not very much, not at first. It will be a matter of combining existing structures. The existing physical plant will probably determine, for the most part and for the foreseeable future, the size of households.

      Twenty-five people is not at all my picture of the kind of Households I have in mind. You could house 25 people in a large house. One large apartment building has a lot more than 25 people. Perhaps size is not the key question though. Rather, it's what a household does. Is it large enough to assume educational responsibilities, basic health care, building maintenance, some recreation, child care, communal cooking, workshops, and so forth? I had envisioned these expanded Households as a way of rearranging, in the long run, our everyday residential lives. But these residences would not correspond to families or even extended families. From this point of view, I don't think 100 to 200 is too many. But of course, because of the absence of the appropriate architecture, we'll probably have to start with much smaller households. This doesn't affect my scheme seriously one way or the other.

      The question of the size of the Home Assembly though probably represents a more serious issue. A size of 250 is more like a block association, than a neighborhood assembly. The smaller the neighborhood assemblies are, the more of them there will be, and the fewer resources each one will control, making more inter-neighborhood agreements necessary. My figure was set by what I thought was the upper limit of possible democratic decision making all in one room. New England Town Meetings can be quite large, and they work okay. I once lived in a mid western town that had a very large auditorium, built in a circular manner, which held nearly 6000 people. I have personally participated in business meetings in this building (filled to capacity), conducted in a democratic fashion, using Robert's Rules, but nevertheless with lots of participation by lots of people, lots of debate, a thorough airing of the issues, done in an orderly way, with everyone following along, and with the votes taken. This is probably the upper limit though, as regards size. I don't want meetings this large. But I can imagine meetings of 1000, 1500, or 2000 working quite well, especially given that there will be great advancements made in decision making skills. It's possible that the image that has been emerging lately in the global justice movement, from the Direct Action Network and other groups, of small affinity groups using so-called consensus decision-making, has taken us in the wrong direction and clouded our vision of how more permanent deliberative assemblies will work.

      My critic seemed to think that even 250 was too large. She argued that "When you have a group this size, certain people begin to completely dominate the discussion, while everyone else listens." But this can happen in a group as small as eight just as well. The eradication of informal hierarchies is not really related to size (at least up to a certain point). A lot of good work is currently being one on precisely this — on the nuts and bolts of deliberative assemblies; on explicit procedures and practices needed to avoid informal hierarchies and to ensure direct democracy. With improved meeting skills (direct democracy skills), we will be able to block authoritarian patterns from ever emerging, both in very small groups and in much larger meetings. The biggest problem with large home assemblies now is that we simply don't have the physical facilities for them. And until we do, we'll probably have to start with smaller assemblies. But I see no inherent difficulties, from the standpoint of democracy, or lifestyle, in larger assemblies, and I see a number of advantages. But I'm not trying to engrave anything in stone. I doubt if there are any hard and fast rules on these questions. I can imagine communities arranging themselves in any number of ways.

      All that is absolutely essential, to my mind, is that we be self-governing, through deliberative assemblies, based on direct democracy, with no authority delegated to representatives, with inter community needs being met through negotiated treaties. The main reason for wanting to avoid delegating decision-making power to representatives, is not that people thereby hand over their power to others and create a decision-making elite, although this is bad enough. It is not that they are thereby no longer "autonomous individuals", for there is no such thing. Rather, it is that they bar themselves, by this action, from participating in the discussion of the issues. They forfeit their natures as thinking persons, and instead hand over this function to others.

      16. Organic versus Deliberative. One critic of my scheme complained that it "had too many institutions," and "was bureaucratic." What she wanted was an "organic" society, implying, I think, that direct democracy is bureaucratic. On the contrary, direct democracy, in small face-to-face assemblies, is precisely the antidote to bureaucracy, not its manifestation. Bureaucracy occurs when people abandon their meetings in favor of electing officers or representatives to make the decisions. There is thus created a decision-making elite.

      Actually, my image of a new social world is beautifully simple, compared to other things that are being proposed, like Michael Albert’s convoluted scheme, or other proposals for federated structures of workers councils, and certainly compared to what exists now.

      The call for an organic society shows, I believe, a resistance to making things explicit, that is, to conscious deliberation as a way of making decisions and setting up social arrangements. There are even philosophers who reject the very idea of a deliberative society because they think it is too rational, and they do not believe humans are rational animals. My critic perhaps was simply objecting to the idea of having meetings at all, and thought of these as bureaucratic, a criticism which probably reflected her orientation toward individualism. Many contemporary anarchists like to keep decision making informal. Things are just suppose to happen, organically. In my experience, most such informal processes have embedded, hidden hierarchies.

      Traditional, archaic societies were "organic" in a sense, but they still had rules, norms, and customs, since humans are intensely cultural creatures who require customs (rules, norms, laws) in order to live. It's just that these customs had grown up over long periods of time, and had become embedded in "tradition" — traditions which were nevertheless enforced by real live persons in the present; that is, most archaic societies tend to have informal hierarchies, although in general they are more egalitarian than the social forms which replaced them. Given our stage of history, the interconnectedness of the world, the speed of change, and so forth, there is no way we can return to the organic societies of the past which lived according to customs built up slowly over centuries. Our only choice is whether someone else will determine the customs by which we live, or whether we will do it ourselves. If we do it ourselves, we will need deliberative assemblies. I just don't see how we could arrange our social lives without them.

      This critic also felt that my scheme was "too cold" and suspected "that it had been conceived by men." I had thought that at least one thing the feminist movement of the past quarter century had succeeded in doing was eradicating the stereotype that men are rational whereas women are emotional. Apparently I'm mistaken. I complete reject the false duality of reason versus emotion. Everyone has both reason and emotion whether they like it or not. It's possible that she meant something else by cold, but this seems the most likely interpretation. She was probably referring to the deliberative aspect of the proposed social forms, to the fact that people assemble together to make decisions. She might have mistakenly thought that this involves only reason, whereas in fact any argument made in an assembly in favor of or in opposition to a proposal inevitably involves emotion. It's not useful to think in terms of reason versus emotion, in my opinion. Moreover, her desire that people "discuss their feelings and be very emotionally close" may not be as progressive as she thinks, given that mainstream culture is riddled with psycho babble, sensitivity training, encounter groups, and endless counseling, most of which functions to keep our attention focused on our own inner psyches, and on the flaws in our characters, rather than on the structures of power and wealth that are oppressing us.

      17. The Threat of Individualism. I believe there is no greater threat (other than capitalists themselves) to the success of the revolutionary movement for freedom than the rampant individualism that seems to be everywhere, including inside the anarchist movement. This threat is far greater than that posed by the fast vanishing remnants of the now thoroughly discredited Leninist Vanguard Party, or other authoritarians. It’s not surprising, but deeply disturbing and disappointing, that this virus has infected our movement. Rugged Individualism, after all, is a hegemonic trait of American culture. You would think though that anarchists would know better. But many don’t. They have fallen victim to the Myth of the Autonomous Individual. They have embraced, as their own, the very thing that has been imposed on them by capitalists — the world of atomized and alienated individuals. They have not managed to escape the individual/society duality. Both these terms are mere abstractions. There is in fact no such thing as an individual, anymore than there is such a thing as a society or collective. Humans are intersubjective creatures. We are deeply social and cultural animals. We come into being and exist through interaction with others like ourselves. Our language is also intersubjective and cultural. We could not even live, or talk, without culture. But individualists do not see this, or else deny it. What they see is a world full of completely separate autonomous individuals, individuals who can go their own ways, and do their own things, independently of all others if necessary. They think that each person is the ultimate ‘authority’, and is “sovereign.”.

      This explains why they hate meetings. Crimethinc has written, in their widely distributed pamphlet, Fighting For Our Lives, “Don’t sit endlessly in meetings, meeting about when you should be meeting to discuss how to conduct your next meeting.” Decisions taken in meetings infringe on the “sovereignty” of the individual. For these people, democracy is a dirty word. They believe that since there are no gods or masters each of us can make our own rules and do whatever we want. There is no morality other than the one each person invents. They think that “the root of anarchism is the simple impulse to do it yourself.” It’s hard to think of anything further from anarchism than this. Anarchism has been a cooperative endeavor from the get go.

      Jason McQuinn, founder and editor of the magazine, Anarchy, has written: “The anarchist idea has an indelibly individualist foundation upon which its social critiques stand, always and everywhere proclaiming that only free individuals can create a free, unalienated society.” This is not true. Classical anarchism recognizes that any freedom that exists for anyone is a social creation. Thus the idea that there can be such a thing as a “free individual” is nonsensical. His confusion is apparent. He sees the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ as separate things. He evidently thinks that first you must have an aggregate of these ‘free individuals’, who will then set up a free society. This is not the way it works. He remains trapped in the false abstractness of the individual/society duality.

      The New Left had a strong current of individualism, which got labeled ‘anarchist’ at the time, because of the prevailing Leninist orthodoxy. The New Left was chock full of people who believed in the maxim: “do your own thing”. This was not anarchism though, but liberal individualism. Individualism and authoritarianism are two sides of the same coin. The New Left was eventually rent asunder by the collision of these two wrong-headed tendencies. There was also a genuine anarchist current in the New Left, but it was poorly articulated, and went largely unnoticed.

      This individualist current in the contemporary anarchist movement seems to have trouble handling abstractions. In addition to not getting past the abstractions of individual/collective, they have gotten hung up on at least four others: civilization, organization, work, and the left. They have launched vociferous attacks on all four of these abstractions. It is one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever witnessed. The damage and confusion being caused by these campaigns is truly unforgivable. I hope someone does a job on all this nonsense soon.

      18. Civil Society. This concept has a long history, beginning at least with John Locke and Adam Smith, and moving on down through Hegel and Tocqueville to contemporary writers like Benjamin Barber and John Keane. It has gained prominence lately because of its use by the Zapatistas and by global justice activists.

      I don’t like the concept and never use it. Nor am I inclined to adopt it just because it has become fashionable. An idea like this could only have emerged in an already fairly well developed capitalism, wherein governance had been seized by politicians and bureaucrats, and work had been separated out from the rest of life and labeled ‘economic’. What was left over was called ‘civil society’. And this is still explicitly recognized by contemporary civil society theorists, like Barber for example, who writes that “there is a place for us between big government and commercial markets.” He simply accepts, as a given, the continued existence of the state and capitalism.

      Some people claim that the concept is being used differently now by global justice activists, but my reading of essays and documents from this movement does not persuade me they’re right about this. I see precious few direct attacks on the state. It seems to me that most of these activists are closer to a liberal like Barber and simply accept the distinction between state and civil society (a dualism the abolition of which is one of the objectives of the revolution).

      But why use an abstract term like civil society at all? Why waste time arguing over its meaning? There are ways of expressing ourselves, in the best communist and anarchist traditions, that are far superior to this. Why not use these? Better yet, why not just simply describe concretely, in everyday language, the social forms we want and then set about creating them?

      19. Courts, Crime, Rights, and Law. In my 1970 “Draft Constitution for our Post-Revolutionary Society” (which is included in my Selected Writings), I envisioned local courts composed of about twenty persons, selected by lot from the community, with limited, non-repeatable terms of service, with no professional judges, no professional lawyers, and no superior regional or national courts, and of course, no supreme court. I still think that this was pretty much on the mark.

      We have to realize that questions of crime, law, and rights will take on a completely different character in an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods. There is no such thing as an objective definition of crime. There is no such thing as a universal law. There is no such thing as an inalienable right. So these matters are in fact conceptually the same as majority/minority disputes within Home Assemblies.

      In fact, the Home Assembly might simply adjudicate disputes itself, or at least some disputes. I can also imagine however that a number of Home Assemblies might strike an agreement to convene a court to do this. I can even imagine a regional court convened in this fashion. This would have the advantage of putting some distance between the neighborhood where the dispute took place and the persons who are judging it. This can be helpful in some cases. The point though is that the Home Assembly will define what crime is and how to deal with it. It’s the same with “law” (if there is any), and human rights.

      Take for example the notion of so-called International Law, a phrase that we have heard incessantly in recent years. International Law is actually just the collection of treaties that have been ratified by various governments, like the Geneva Protocols, the Nuremberg Judgements, the treaty on torture, or on land mines. But in the absence of a world government with police and armies, the treaties have no teeth, except morally. So governments ignore them at will, even governments which have ratified the treaties. Does the idea of a ‘law’ have any meaning in the absence of the means of violence (arrests, imprisonment, fines, executions, armed invasion) necessary to enforce it? Oddly enough, this situation is comparable to the one that will be faced by an Association of Home Assemblies.

      Take another example, the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, whose primary author was Eleanor Roosevelt, was adopted by the United Nations, and thereby became, according to the US Constitution, the law of the land in the United States, as it similarly did in other member states. As it happens though, it is totally incompatible with capitalism and its partner for life, the system of nation-states. So the Universal Declaration is universally ignored by all governments.

      To get another bead on this let’s consider the question of animal rights, children’s rights, and gay rights. In recent decades minorities have mobilized to argue and agitate for these rights. In the case of children and animals, since they can’t argue for themselves, it is a group of adults who are asserting these rights for them. In any case, others, probably the majority in each case, ridicule the notion that animals, children, and gays and lesbians have rights. So it’s clear that the assertion by someone of a right is a political struggle between those who want it and those who deny it.

      This is true even for something like murder. Capitalists obviously don’t believe they are criminals when they murder, and they engage in the practice on a massive scale – assassinations, bombings, starvation, death squads, slaughters, poisonings, and so forth. They advance arguments justifying these actions. They have also not considered it a crime to kill workers in their factories and mines. But now we have a world wide movement which is trying to define these actions as crimes. An international court has been established, by a treaty, to judge these cases. Of course it has no enforcement powers, but it will nevertheless be able to bring some pressure to bear. (The USA, naturally, has refused to sign on.) But leaving capitalists aside (who are so abominable it’s sickening to even have to consider them), it is commonly thought that anyone has a right to kill in self defense. This too however is disputed by committed pacifists.

      The point is that all these things – crime, law, rights – come down to a struggle between some people and others, between minorities and majorities. And this is the way it will be in our Home Assemblies. There will be no government, no supreme court, to decide the issue, picking one side or the other. We will have to work it out ourselves.

      I’m not sure how much of the vast canon of law built up over the centuries by governments and their courts will prove useful to free peoples. I suspect very little. I would hope that whatever rules we feel we need to make to govern our lives together will be kept to the absolute minimum, and be made as simple as possible. The problem of gaining compliance with them is no different than getting compliance on any other decision taken by the Home Assembly, and we can follow basically the same procedures. It’s not a separate category, or a big mystery. Communities have been doing these things for centuries.

      20. Further Studies. Most urgently needed is a full-scale scholarly critique, drawing on both theoretical and historical works, of representative government, in defense of direct democracy. A few books and numerous web sites are labeled ‘direct democracy’, but by this is meant referendums and television voting, not face-to-face, participatory decision-making in local assemblies. For such a central concept to be so poorly fleshed out and defended, theoretically, is embarrassing. It would make a good project for someone.

      The same can be said of the idea of abolishing money. This has long been a central tenet of anarchist thinking, but there is virtually nothing of substance written about it, that I know of, although a group in France has recently organized to pick up on the work of Marcel Mauss in order to explore the ins and outs of a gift economy. This is also embarrassing, and would also make a good project for someone.

      Equally urgent, in my view, are better answers to the question “What Do We Want?”. Fortunately though, at long last, a lot of good work is being done on this topic. The scheme I’ve outlined in this essay, for how we might want to live, is of course one person’s contribution to this effort. More are needed. I hope to do a more thorough survey of the various attempts to imagine anarchy soon. Many of the books now appearing however are written by progressive populists, global justice activists, and others who are not exactly on the same page as anarchists, although such books contain many useful ideas and insights. I will mention two: Trent Schroyer, editor, A World That Works: Building Blocks for a Just and Sustainable Society; and William F. Fisher and Thomas Ponniah, editors, Another World is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum. I list all such books I am aware of, as of 2004, including the few specifically anarchist contributions, in my bibliography on Emancipatory Social Thought.

      A lot of work is needed on decision making procedures for our assemblies, on majority rule for example, and consensus voting, and other techniques. I have included a recent, brief essay on these matters in my Selected Works.

      Beyond this there are numerous other topics that need attention. I briefly survey thirty-one of them in a document I wrote in 2000, called “Some Possible Topics for a Workshop on Anarchism.” This paper is also included in my Selected Writings: 1969-2004.