Libertarian municipalism

Libertarian municipalism is a political program developed by libertarian socialist theorist Murray Bookchin, to create democratic citizens' assemblies in towns and urban neighborhoods. The assemblies in these free municipalities join together to replace the state with a directly democratic confederation.

Bookchin became an advocate of face-to-face or assembly democracy in the 1950s, inspired by writings on the ancient Athenian polis by H. D. F. Kitto and Alfred Eckhard Zimmern. For the concept of confederation, he was influenced by the nineteenth century anarchist thinkers. Bookchin tied libertarian municipalism to a utopian vision for decentralizing cities into small, human-scaled eco-communities, and to a concept of urban revolution.

Libertarian municipalism uses the strategy of dual power to create a situation in which two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—can coexist.

Bookchin's The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1986) is an overview of the historical conflict between city and nation-state, which also presents his municipalist program. In Burlington, Vermont, Bookchin attempted to put these ideas into practice by working with the Northern Vermont Greens, the Vermont Council for Democracy, and the Burlington Greens, retiring from politics in 1990. His ideas are summarized succinctly in Remaking Society (1989) and The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997).

While Bookchin long placed libertarian municipalism within the framework of postcolonial anarchism, in the late 1990s he broke with anarchism and in his final essay, The Communalist Project (2003), identified libertarian municipalism as the main component of communalism. Communalists believe that libertarian municipalism is both the means to achieve a rational society and the structure of that society.

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