I’ve long considered myself an anarchist and while I’m not very well read, I’m also not a baby anarchist. I haven’t read too many books on theory, instead I mostly learn from podcasts and discussions with peers. For whatever reason, I struggle to find the mental energy to get through books. I’m vaguely familiar with communalism but I’m still struggling with conflicting information.
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Is communalism compatible with anarchism? I’ve come across people who identify as both as well as communalists who view their philosophy and goals as distinct from anarchism.
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Is communalism statist or anti-statist? I’ve heard it described as anti-statist, yet depictions of it (when distinguished from anarchism) sound to me like they aim to establish a highly decentralized and directly democratic confederation of states.
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How do anarchists and communalists in this community feel about the others’ praxis? I’m intrigued by both, including especifismo and libertarian municipalism.
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To my understanding, communalism is approximate to collectivism, prioritizing the community over the individual, working toward communal benefit. Anarchism is effectively a negative position, no one can have authority over someone else. It is technically possible for a group to be focused on mutual benefit without a hierarchy. It’s just hard to start/maintain.
Vs? Nah, anarchism + communalism. They are very compatible. You can have local organizations structured on anarchist principles that facilitate the flow of resources in commonalist ways. Tool Libraries, Housing Cooperatives, Community Cafeterias, worker collectives, etc.
It’s a subcategory of Anarchism, similar to how Syndicalism is one. Some more purist Anarchist consider it a lesser form as it does include some state like characteristics at municipal level, and on the other hand the person who is maybe most well known for Communalism (Murray Bookchin) decided to denounce Anarchism, because of (old man yells at kids playing on his lawn) “lifestyle anarchists”.
I don’t agree with everything Bookchin said, but I believe that this is mostly due to the info that was available at the time (it’s the ecology of freedom that I have in mind). At the same time, I really like his openness to look for new ways for social change. To my understanding, this is how he got to anarchy.
If I got this right, through his book social anarchism or lifestyle anarchim he actually denounced the path anarchy was taking: abandoning collective freedom practices, for personal freedom. I agree with this point, because imo, the important thing is to create societies that are organised in such a way (horizontaly, bottom-up etc) that nurture people so we can explore our full potential as humans. For me, the goal is not to do what I want at all times.
So he came up with social ecology and communalism, as a solution to the problems he found that contemporary anarchism had/has. And Rojava came along.
I dunno, at least this is my super-brief understanding so far.
I am a … fan … of social ecology etc. But I feel such theories are difficult to apply in today’s large-scale politics. Even the path to trying out any such theories in practice probably starts with trying smaller changes like liquid democracy (that is already proven in the corporate shareholder world).
These theories might go through massive changes if they meet reality. Remnants of past “experiments”, say the basis of Liedloff’s continuum concept, are not quite as neat as these untested theories.
Communalism was theorized in the mid 20th century, we already had nation states and supranational bodies like the UN in existence. It is not a primitivist program. Instead of centralized national governance, it calls for a federation of communes and lays out a mechanism for them to make decisions over large amounts of territory/large populations as necessary via instantly-recallable delegates & community assemblies.
For perspective, hierarchical systems are not very good at governing large scale complex populations, as we can see from all available evidence.
