The macro-micro report:
As I continue reading the Bookchin book of essays, I post a notice on unityme.org about a special town meeting on Jan. 16 to approve new TIF guidlines and create an economic development committee. A local assembly will do some direct democracy as regards their municipal affairs.
...historically, politics did not emerge from the state—an apparatus whose professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of a privileged class. Rather, politics, almost by definition, is the active engagement of free citizens in the handling of their municipal affairs and in their defense of its freedom. One can almost say that politics is the “embodiment” of what the French revolutionaries of the 1790s called civicisme. Quite properly, in fact, the word politics itself contains the Greek word for “city” or polis, and its use in classical Athens, together with democracy, connoted the direct governing of the city by its citizens.
I also posted it on a FaceBook page called Tax Payers of Unity, Maine, where it will quickly grow into conspiracy theories and angry rants.
Ideas grow and mature best, in fact, not in the silence and controlled humidity of an ideological nursery but in the tumult of dispute and mutual criticism.
In addition to the long-standing New England traditions of town meetings, planning boards, budget committees, we can add the transparency measures of websites and social media to do the communalist work of building "lasting organizations and institutions that can play a socially transformative role in the real world."
No one is complaing much about our unseasonably warm temps or lack of snow. We are all still traumatized from last winter which started on Halloween and didn't let up until April. This reminds me of winter in Lacombe which just looks like an extended November. It's so easy to get around without snow and ice. Icing at the lake edge is usually a November event, but I took this shot just a few days ago.
The best thing we have to celebrate this holiday is that Melissa has a new job with a decent salary and benefits. She will work for WaldoCAP, the agency that provides HeadStart classes in this county, coordinating a 0 to 5 program. Her office will be in Belfast.
Tech note. With each OS upgrade, my 4 year old iPad seemed to slow down more, so I acquired a snappy new Samsung Galaxy S2 9.7 inch Android tablet with a sharp 2048 x 1536 resolution. A pretty face with upgradable memory. Phone, tablets, computer: they are all screens showing your cloud world in various sizes.
That young woman at a Trump rally silently reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen. That was a book moment.
Thoreau reads the Bhagavad Gita and writes Civil Disobedience. Gandi reads Thoreau and makes civil disobedience work. Martin Luther King reads Gandi and makes civil disobedience work. Round and round skipping across continents.
Murray Bookchin(1921-2006), an American anarchist living in the Bronx, writes a book called The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy in 1982. He advocates for small secular communities with no hierarchy, gender equality, protection of the environment. The small communities form into confederations of communities, but with no national state. His most accessible book might be this short collection of essays I'm currently reading: The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy which came out this year with a forward by Ursula La Guin.
Meanwhile...
In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers' Party was founded in 1978 by Abdulla Ocalan. They sought an independent socialist Kurdish state. Ocalan was arrested and put in prison in 1999 where he had some time to read. He read Bookchin. Ocalan abandoned Marxism as the basis for socialism and adopted Bookchin's democratic confederalism and stopped calling for an independent state. Wikipedia quotes him: "The democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a State system, it is the democratic system of a people without a State... It takes its power from the people and adopts to reach self-sufficiency in every field including the economy." Their Peoples Protection Units are fierce fighters and have defeated ISIS in several areas. It takes this background to explain the picture of women in combat in Syria, or said another way,ISIS is afraid of girls:
Read more about it.
If Rojava is what democratic confederalism (libertarian municipalism) looks like in a chaotic war-torn place, what might it look like in a peaceful place like the U.S.?
Bookchin thought the most important place for social change should be the municipal level. "The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality—the city, town, and village—where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy." (Wikipedia). In my little part of the world, we do a lot of face to face democracy, and there are a lot of localist and self-sufficiency movements.
And another book moment: on Tuesday night, the Waterville Opera House was filled up with people who were there to hear a poet read.
And because the poet was Richard Blanco and because he served on the Bethel planning board, yesterday I stopped in at the town office and put my name on the list to serve on the planning board.
