In 1936, at the apex of the Spanish Revolution, hundreds of Spanish villages, towns, neighborhoods and factories had organized themselves into collectives in which local residents made decisions about labor and the distribution of resources.

For a splendid few months, these workers’ and peasant assemblies and their committees took charge of nearly one third of Spain. They help to organize every aspect of political and social life: agricultural production, local administration, munitions and how to feed their people.

While each community had a great degree of autonomy, they also cooperated informally, sometimes holding general assemblies that covered more than 1,000 families across 15,000 square kilometers.

Like the French revolutionaries of the sectional assemblies of 1793 and the Paris Commune of 1871, which called for a nationwide Commune of Communes, the fiercely democratic anarchists of Spain understood that to maintain their autonomy, any decision-making body had to be directly accountable to the communities from which they derived their power.

These popular assemblies and their empowerment of ordinary people were coordinated through an important process: confederation, also known as confederalism. By coordinating collective will through a confederal council, the confederation allows for the organization of political life over a large territory and a large population in a directly democratic way.

Confederation (sometimes called co-federation or federation to avoid any association with the racist project of the Southern Confederacy) also presents a radically different logic from that of the nation-state. As a structure for organizing society that enables the non-sectarian co-existence of different races, ethnicities and religions, the confederation places itself in direct opposition to the nation-state’s project of “unity” and homogeneity of the people.

The ability to organize direct democracy at scale, while preserving its fundamental principles of political equality and the accrual of popular power to every member of society, is the reason we must turn to confederalism as our revolutionary strategy.

The importance of confederalism to a grassroots democracy

Throughout modern history, revolutionary self-governing organizations and communities have bound together against the forces oppressing them using the model of confederation. Whether the revolutionary sectional assemblies forming the ancestor of the 1871 Paris Commune during the French Revolution, the Congress of Soviets during the early days of the 1917 Russian Revolution or today’s democratic confederalism in the Kurdish-led northern Syrian region of Rojava, revolutionary movements have found in confederation both the strategic vehicle for their emancipation and the ability to realize the liberated institutions of self-rule to which they aspire at a large scale.

Under confederalism, a network of delegates are elected from popular assemblies, the face-to-face gatherings at which every member of a community is able to speak, propose, debate and deliberate about the issues facing their neighborhood and region. It allows these popular assemblies to connect with each other through a system of delegation: delegates who are strictly mandated to communicate the wishes of the assembly for which they speak — not to make decisions on their own — a critical distinction between confederalist organization and the traditional representative style of government that has dominated liberal democracies for the last two centuries.

Operating on the basis of recall, imperative mandates, accountability, constant supervision by the constituency and local autonomy, the confederal structure offers a way to organize directly democratic assemblies at scale. The scaling up of these assemblies through the confederation is necessary in order to create a power capable of challenging, and eventually replacing the state.

Against the centralized nation-state, and its sidekick — representative democracy — as the only horizon of societal organization, the confederation of communes, or commune of communes, constitutes both the means and the end to build a democratic and egalitarian society.

The confederation as a means: establishing dual power

To understand how the confederation can form a real threat to the ruling class, one needs first to understand the strategy of social change in which it is embedded: the effort to create a situation of dual power. Dual power has a long history dating back to 1917 when Russian revolutionaries used the term to describe how the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government shared power, a relationship that was unfortunately all but over by the October revolution of 1917, but that has gained increasing currency as a revolutionary theory.

Dual power proposes the strategy of creating a struggle for popular legitimacy between, on the one hand, capital and the state — i.e., the institutions of the ruling class — and on the other, the confederation of democratic and self-governed grassroots counter-institutions building popular power.

Discussing the politics of what he termed “libertarian municipalism” or “communalism,” Murray Bookchin states that dual power “intends to create a situation in which the two powers — the municipal confederations and the nation-state — cannot coexist, and one must sooner or later displace the other. Moreover, it is a confluence of the means to achieve a rational society with the structure of that society, once it is achieved.” Whether it concerns the neighborhood, the workplace, housing, food, childcare, or energy, communalism considers that “the creation of these dual power institutions must grow out of people’s everyday experience and immediate needs — our needs for freedom from domination as well as for essential goods and services.”

In order to reach a situation where municipalities can effectively challenge the state, one of the strategies of communalism, in certain times and places, consists of gaining political power over the municipality by running candidates for city councils. These candidates are endowed with a mandate from the democratic institutions that are embodied in the form of popular assemblies, thereby giving their electorally gained institutional power directly back to the assembled people. The elections are seen here as a means for the popular assembly to gain power and to achieve communal self-government, but never as an end in itself.

By themselves, these democratic popular assemblies will not be strong enough to build a counter-power able to confront the power of capitalism and the state, or to eventually replace them. To amass power and challenge the ruling class, these democratic institutions need to connect to each other through a directly democratic vehicle. In this way, they can share resources, practice solidarity, develop a common strategy and mutually reinforce each other.

The confederation becomes the umbrella democratic counter-institution that joins the forces of the multitude of democratic assemblies by pooling resources and knowledge, engaging in shared struggles, emboldening new ones, and creating a formidable dual power that could constitute the tipping point for a new democratic and egalitarian society.

The confederation as an end: making direct democracy possible

In its most radical manifestation, direct democracy stands for the direct exercise of public power by the people meeting, deliberating and deciding in popular assemblies. But how to ensure that the people are still the source of political and economic decisions when they can no longer be physically assembled as a single mass to collectively make such decisions?

Because of the physical impossibility of holding the entirety of the people in one room to make decisions that would affect a larger territory, representative democracy has concluded that regular people should leave the entire task of policy-making to a class of professional politicians elected every few years. Against this elitist political choice, confederalism presents itself as a way to organize the political life of a large territory, ensuring that decisions remain the results of the will of local popular assemblies, even when these decisions must be coordinated over a large region.

In his essay “The Meaning of Confederalism,” Bookchin locates confederalism as an important part of a communalist politics, a politics that embraces organizing at the municipal level as part of a social ecology framework. He defines the confederation as “a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves.”

Delegates versus Representatives

This proposition of confederalism in the framework of communalism differs from the classical understanding of representation. Generically defined by Hannah Pitkin as the making present of that which is absent, representation has been interpreted since modern revolutions as enabling elected representatives to make present what they interpret to be the interests of their constituency — traditionally: white men holding property.

Contrary to this model in which professional rulers accrue all political power, communalist confederalism starts from the principle that when local popular assemblies are physically absent at the confederal level, their already-deliberated and decided views will be “made present” by delegates. In order to entitle delegates to make decisions in the name of their assemblies, and to hold them accountable, they are endowed with imperative and recallable mandates.

This means that the assembly grants a mandate to a chosen person empowered to represent specific decisions in the name of the assembly. If the delegate does not respect the terms of the mandate, they will be deprived of that power, and somebody else will be selected for this mission. In antithesis to traditional representative democracies, under confederalism, the delegate’s role is administrative, not policymaking. It is confined to coordinating and executing the policies adopted by the local assemblies, ensuring that power flows from the bottom up.

In order to prevent delegates from capturing power, becoming career politicians and forming another type of government — a risk that haunts any revolutionary movement intending to give back power to the people — a communalist movement needs to empower people with the ability to collectively make decisions about their lives through a constant lived practice of decision-making.

This requires making the assemblies conscious that they are the ones entitled to legitimate decision-making power, so that they will be the ones to recall delegates if they overstep their mandates and the will of the assembly. In this way, the assembly structure abolishes the possibility of the ruling class of professional politicians that might emerge from large-scale policy-making unaccountable to the base.

The decisions of popular assemblies across larger territories are coordinated and collaborated upon, allowing for region-wide decisions on economic, environmental, human rights, and other issues within a structure in which the delegate must always return to the base for instruction.

Creating popular assemblies to gather the people so that they collectively form their will around political and economic matters — and allowing the delegate to represent the collective will of the assembly only through recallable and imperative mandates — makes policy-making the everyday task of everyone, rather than the profession of a few.

Importantly, the confederation also prevents the practice of local autonomy from exhibiting itself in a reactionary way. According to Bookchin, the interdependence of municipalities for satisfaction of their material needs and for the realization of common political goals means that the confederation also serves as a bulwark against parochialism and exclusivity. Indeed, it gives the confederation the power to rein in a community that tries to deny certain members their rights or harm the ecology of the region.

As Bookchin explains:

“This is not a denial of democracy but the assertion of a shared agreement by all to recognize civil rights and maintain the ecological integrity of a region. These rights and needs are not asserted so much by a confederal council as by the majority of the popular assemblies conceived as one large community that expresses its wishes through its confederal deputies. Thus policy-making still remains local, but its administration is vested in the confederal network as a whole. The confederation in effect is a Community of communities based on distinct human rights and ecological imperatives.”

Confederal structures today

Confederal structures exist not only in the world of ideas; they have emerged throughout history in popular movements fighting the forces that try to dominate them. Two recent examples deserve special attention for the ways they are employing confederation to wage their struggles: democratic confederalism in Rojava, and the Assembly of Assemblies of the Yellow Vests in France. A third, which is in nascent form but represents an important hope for expanding confederalism in North America, is the Symbiosis project, which held its first congress in September 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.

While these examples of confederation are different in terms of context, nature, purpose, practice, preparation, strategy, and actors, they illustrate how the confederal model is critical for organizing popular assemblies, exercising direct democracy and creating a mass movement.

Democratic Confederalism in Rojava

In 2012, near the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the Kurdish region of northern Syria declared autonomy and began to implement a series of revolutionary political changes that had already been in practice in the Kurdish regions of southeastern Turkey. In conformance with a 96-point Social Contract that would be ratified two years later, the Kurds established a society that aimed to be governed primarily by communes at the local level according to the principles of feminism, ecology, and grassroots democracy.

This political formation, known as Democratic Confederalism, inspired by the writings of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, who was influenced by Bookchin, calls for a committee system in which, depending on the size of the village, city or town, every 30 to 400 households forms a “commune” that decides issues within its zone. Those communes in turn send delegates to the neighborhood council, which sends delegates to the district council — the city and its surrounding land council. Finally, delegates are sent to the Rojava-wide People’s Council, which contains delegates from all seven of the regions that comprise Rojava, more formally known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

Every commune meeting is open to every resident, including young people who are also able to participate in discussions. In keeping with their commitment to non-sectarianism and multi-ethnicity, there are quotas for representation by minorities and women, with women co-chairing every administrative position, and members of the Arab, Syriac Christian, Turkmen, Yezidi and other minority communities holding positions of power.

This project in Rojava, which is nearly twice the size of Belgium and shares a border of about 400 kilometers with Turkey to its north, is under direct threat because of its radical challenge to the nation-state.

In January 2018, Turkey attacked Afrin, in the most western portion of Rojava, looting, kidnapping, and forcing 350,000 residents from their homes. Three days after a phone call with American President Donald Trump in early October 2019, Turkey again attacked Rojava, killing hundreds of civilians, bombing hospitals, food stuffs, infrastructure and again pushing more than 300,000 Kurds out of their homes, this time east of the Euphrates.

The invasion and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Turkey is a grotesque reminder of how terrifying the Kurdish confederal system is to authoritarian regimes because of its radically different logic from that of the nation-state. The confederal structure — with its emphasis on diversity and its celebration of cultural heterogeneity — stands in direct opposition to the nation-state’s project of unity and homogeneity of the people. This has been made clear by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who, like his predecessors, has for decades denied the Kurds their cultural identity and sees this democratic model as an existential threat.

The Kurds emphasize that democratic confederalism is not simply about making local structures more responsive to the needs of local people, important as that may be. Their goal is to change the very nature of politics as a participatory project done by anyone and everyone to empower people in every aspect of their lives. It includes a strong educational component because democratic confederalism is above all, the Kurds say, about changing the “mentality” of the individual struggling on their own in a world in which global capital reaches into every corner of life, to one of interdependence, reliance on the community and its networks to reshape what it means to be a free human being.

“The mentality of the state is that people in society cannot run things for themselves. … That is the mentality that the state is constantly imposing on people. With our system in Rojava we show them that it’s possible that society can do it for itself,” explains Boze Mella, a member of the Derik council in Rojava. Against ferocious odds — terrorism, profound infrastructure challenges, medical supply shortages and ecological havoc wreaked by Turkey — democratic confederalism in Rojava made enviable strides in empowering people at the local level.

“Even [in the height of the war against the Islamic State] when we had nothing, we had hope,” adds Sirin Ali, a co-chair of the Derik commune in the Qamishli Province of the Cizre Region. “The first thing we did was to create the communes and after that, the councils, to make people come back to humanity again.”

Among the many challenges facing the region, the people of Rojava recognize that continuing to strengthen confederated face-to-face local control is one of the more significant ones. That means prioritizing the involvement of women and minorities, two groups that have been traditionally excluded from political power, and resisting any kind of political structure that tilts toward the formation of a centralized state.

But the future of the entire Rojava project is now at grave risk. Helping ensure the survival of this political and social structure — one of the most advanced expressions of radical confederal democracy in history — in the face of the recent Turkish onslaught must be central to anyone who considers themselves a feminist, progressive, or leftist.