In the NYC Fearless Cities conference, one organisation that seemed to be a continuous thread through the event days was Symbiosis Research Collective (here's an archive of their essays on The Ecologist). Symbiosis base their theories on quite an old idea, articulated by Proudhon in 1851, called "dual power":

Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statesmen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy.

Or in Symbiosis's words:

Our political strategy is to build dual power through organizing radically democratic community institutions....As an organization, we aim to develop neighborhood councils in our communities and network them into a confederation that can transform the structures of municipal governance, remaking our cities as true democracies.

Through the creation of autonomous social services and mutual aid systems, we can meet people’s basic needs and allow them to become more fully engaged in political struggle, all the while developing community and pushing back against our social atomization.

....We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.

Their perspective is explicitly anti-capitalist. (We'd take a more eclectic line, and in any case wouldn't confuse a specifically harsh model of capitalism with the varied historic cultures of the marketplace.)

But it's interested to see them address the question that often comes to us, as we make our case at the Alternative. Which is: where and how can local power affect the bigger structures, institutions and regulations in a society?

In a column on Dark Municipalism, Symbiosis talk about the dangers of localisation becoming "not-in-my-backyard-ism", a mentality which has in the past included racial, ethnic or religious exclusion. They make this crucial point:

...We need to go beyond mere autonomy as an organisational principle. Autonomy is about securing freedom from an oppressive outside, but we’re not just trying to resist the system. We’re working to build a new system, a new society.

...Bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle for a free, feminist society. Liberation struggles of all types have articulated their just vision in terms of autonomy.

Building autonomy for individuals and communities is clearly an essential aspect of resistance and dual power, but it is limiting as a framework for the reconstruction of a better world.

Autonomy is in essence a negative political value, being defined in terms of freedom from. It conveys nothing about the actual governance of an autonomous community, and defines its relations to other communities in exclusively negative terms. It amounts to non-interference by outsiders or outside sources of repression.

Given all the potential dangers of local political autonomy, we need to be intentional about the kind of democracy we are building from the ground up. This means thinking through how a future system would equitably solve specific problems beyond the local level.

In our previous columns, we’ve made the case for a system of directly democratic assemblies organised into confederations, which would come together through recallable delegates to coordinate activities regionally and beyond.

To prevent the rise of dark municipalism, however, confederations will have to be stronger than voluntary associations of autonomous communities.