The Next Revolution
"Many similarities exist between the new movements against austerity that have emerged since 2011, ranging from Taksim Square in Turkey to the Chilean student protests, and from Greece to NYC. One of them is their return to the principles of direct democracy and their organization around popular assemblies. These ideas are hardly new - Murray Bookchin, who is one of the leading anarchist thinkers of the twentieth century, has been elaborating ideas about popular assemblies for several decades that have influenced thinkers such as David Harvey. The Next Revolution brings together Bookchin's writings on popular assemblies for the first time, just as his ideas are rekindling the radical imagination worldwide"
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2017–2019years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You're very welcome. I first came to appreciate Bookchin through his interviews on YouTube, but I am now reading a book of his essays called "The Next Revolution", which I can recommend!
- > I'd love to hear about either a possible alternative government structure in which there are no politicians or a way to attract the smartest people in governments.
In all seriousness this is the aim of all historical anarchist movements. Despite the propagandization of the term "anarchism", that philosophy has a long history of attempts and writers and thinkers, and it has more often than not "failed" when a powerful state entity violently disbanded the efforts or killed prominent leaders. In other cases anarchism has not failed at all but has existed in tribal communities in different ways long before european thinkers wrote on the subject.
In particular anarcho-communism or the more detailed Communalism of Murray Bookchin (The Next Revolution, 2015 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239261/the-next-rev...) looks totally plausible to me.
The biggest issue with state-less society is the conflict with the existing state powers this philosophy creates. However the method of governance has found success in present day Mexico with the Zapatistas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww46lxIc6-w As well as Rojava in Syria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcndZ0nZ0mo
- Anyone agreeing with this should read The Next Revolution by ya boy Murray Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism has the members of democratic citizen's assemblies of a town or city creating laws directly, and the representatives form a completely administrative role. By separating legislation and representation he even suggests that randomly selecting the delegates is completely reasonable.
- Ongoing reads:
* Principles of Neural Design by Peter Sterling
* What Science Offers the Humanities by Edward Slingerland
* Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski
* How Do You Feel? by Bud Craig
Completed reads:
* The Book of Why by Judea Pearl
* Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi
* The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
* The Next Revolution by Murray Bookchin
* Democratic Confederalism by Abdullah Ocalan
* A bunch of trashy pulp scifi
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