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A review by haagen_daz
The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy by Murray Bookchin
3.0
Short and easy to skim. I don't have the theoretical background to get too deep into his arguments, but the general gist seems to be:
* Marxism & anarchism were useful frameworks for their time but now times have changed
* In particular, we see that capitalism was in its youth at the turn of the 20th century, not in its old age, and also that workers are whole entire people and not just revolutionaries
* Let's make city councils stronger, break down big cities into "human-scale municipalities," and move towards a society of loosely interdependent municipalities. This will be a moral society.
Definitely skeptical of that last point, especially since I just read a bunch of stuff about how planning complicated things doesn't really work, and the fraught-ness of top-down restructuring of society.
* Marxism & anarchism were useful frameworks for their time but now times have changed
* In particular, we see that capitalism was in its youth at the turn of the 20th century, not in its old age, and also that workers are whole entire people and not just revolutionaries
* Let's make city councils stronger, break down big cities into "human-scale municipalities," and move towards a society of loosely interdependent municipalities. This will be a moral society.
Definitely skeptical of that last point, especially since I just read a bunch of stuff about how planning complicated things doesn't really work, and the fraught-ness of top-down restructuring of society.