Unsettling, Rooting, and Shifting: Growing Pains for the Bottom-up Confederal Democracy Movement in North American Racial-Settler Context

We are seeing today, along with awareness by the white radical left of the deeply problematic dimensions of today’s capital-state global hegemonic project, a growing appreciation for the significance of subaltern movements by communities of color. This awareness is accompanied by anxiety regarding the fragmenting dimensions of plural, decolonial energies at a time of capital-state preservation shifts, of accelerating system collapse and of resurging white nationalism. Accordingly, we are seeing calls, often from the white radical left, for strategies of convergence, for building the broad coalitions necessary to realistically counter the forces of hegemony.

I have opened my thesis in this way because the subject of the paper, the Symbiosis North American bottom-up confederalism movement, and the federation structure created by the movement, arose around an organizing frame also based in the importance of actional convergence, but with less attention to the necessity of plural worlds. My aim will be to both elevate the importance of such plurality, while raising caution about racing to subsume the newly recognized importance of plurality within presumed commonalities.

Focus and Aims of the Paper

The specific subject of this paper is a still nascent, but growing, radical organizing project centered in the U.S. with continent-wide aspirations. This project has some notable features. It provides, in concept, an organizing frame that includes bottom-up organizing of democratic structures across social, economic and environmental sectors, along with a municipally centered, confederated, directly democratic political framing that challenges and works to transform our current capital-state politics and economy. The scope and potential potency of this framing is distinctive and significant in today’s North American context.

Not surprisingly such an ambitious framing contains theoretical gaps and aspects of potential overreach that merit scrutiny within and outside the movement. In this paper I will seek to outline the core theorized features. Then I will endeavor to position this movement within the historic context of the U.S. settler state. This contextualization will serve to cast light on some core issues of the framing and practice of the movement. A central issue will be the white, Euro-centric theory and practice orientations of the movement’s framing proponents and the tensions this creates for transformative work in the highly racialized U.S. settler state. By highlighting these issues and pointing to promising lines of praxis for addressing them, I hope to prompt more consideration, rethinking, and associated adjustments within the movement.

The paper opens with a case description of an organizing Congress held in Detroit, Michigan in September 2019. The aim of this Congress was to connect activists with a vision of bottom-up revolutionary democracy, to deliberate democratically, to determine the vision and structure of a continental organization, and to launch it as a federation of local movements.¹ I participated in this Congress as an alternate at-large delegate. Dynamics at the event revealed tensions in the organizing theory and practice. The events of the Symbiosis Congress provide the precipitating moment for this analysis, but only hint at the deeper questions I will raise. To delve further into these tensions, I will present the guiding suppositions of the mobilization and consider them in the light of the U.S. history of settler colonialism and racial subjugation, processes that evolve and continue today. I will then offer a model for a set of practical steps that Symbiosis member organizations might undertake to better engage with our North American racial-settler context in their locality. 

Given the scope of the paper, spanning both theory and concrete practice, and treating many complex topics, the treatment of such topics is admittedly at a cursory level. I regret any over-simplifications and errors associated with this broad analysis. I am also conscious of the dangers of appropriating subaltern knowledge and processes and extending them beyond their rightful application. This is especially the case given my positioning as a white, male academic. While I have been intermittently immersed in domestic and international contexts of color, witnessing both deep injustice and courageous resilience, I try to resist any presumptions that I have a real grasp of such life conditions. I dearly hope to provide a fair, balanced, and constructive critique, one that may prompt thought about the inter-relationships of these important topics, inter-relations that, I believe, have important ramifications for the further development of this potentially significant movement.

Case Study: North American Organizing Congress for Confederal Democracy 

A bold, ambitious gathering convened from September 18 to 22, 2019 in a Northwest neighborhood of Detroit on the former campus of Marygrove College. On this occasion delegates from organizations across the U.S., and including representation from Canada and Mexico, came together in a Congress of Municipal Movements set in motion under the rubric of Symbiosis. They sought to establish a continental framework for confederal democracy with the revolutionary aim of establishing a bottom-up democratic system to demonstrate a form of just, ecological governance which would challenge and ultimately transform existing governing capital-state systems across the continent.

The delegates included representation from local member organizations from about 20 localities in North America along with 8 broader level, partner organizations and several at-large delegates that included some individuals from local organizations that wished to explore potentials for joining the federation. The zeal and dedication of delegates was earnest and palpable. The gathering was quite timely and notable. It occurred in the context of mounting worldwide anti-capital-state movements. The focus on an alternative form of governance to supplant the current capitalist state, while shared with some other non-U.S. movements, distinguished the Symbiosis movement from other related U.S. movements like Solidarity Economy, New Economy Coalition, Climate Justice, and related efforts. And the lessons that arose in attempting to practice and institutionalize this alternate governance may yet provide instructive, perhaps lasting, impacts of significance. 

Durand-Folco and Van Outrve describe the impetus behind this effort:

The Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) in Vermont, U.S.A. educated for decades around the radical politics of libertarian municipalism grounded in the social ecology theory of Murray Bookchin. They proposed “that political and economic affairs be handled directly and face-to-face by popular assemblies gathering all residents of an area at the municipal level, and by confederal councils of delegates with recallable and imperative mandates from these assemblies at the confederal level…” In a 2017 summer intensive organized by the ISE, communalists…decided to give life to this form of organizing by creating Symbiosis, a collective dedicated to the creation of a confederation across North America.²

According to Mason Herson-Hord, a key organizer, the summer intensive participants decided to build a confederation of some kind. Over a series of subsequent meetings the idea was refined and the concept of a founding congress emerged. He stresses that Bookchin’s ideas were one element feeding into the early vision for Symbiosis, among, for example, neo-Zapatismo, democratic confederalism, cooperativism, and the legacy of the Black Panther Party.³ My analysis began with a focus on Bookchin and then considered two sources offering the more expansive view emphasized by Herson-Hord. 

Durand-Folco and Van Outrve outline the plan for an initial organizing congress. “The plan was for delegates of local groups, assemblies, social movements and grassroots organizations across North America to meet on September 18-22, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan, to create the structure that would federate them.”⁴ After 2 years of organizer outreach, delegates from about 20 local member organizations of Symbiosis attended the congress, including those from Cooperation Jackson, Cooperation Northfield, Olympia Assembly, Carbondale Spring, Symbiosis Montreal, Symbiosis NYC, Symbiosis PDX, and La Asamblea de los Pueblos Indígenas del Istmo en Defensa de la Tierra y el Territorio (Oaxaca, Mexico). Other national organizations were present as partner organizations including the Institute for Social Ecology, Demand Utopia, Black Socialists in America, DegrowUS, and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The participating organizations brought commitments to local organizing around a variety of issues ranging across food justice, housing, energy, social and solidarity economy, education, ecology, security, healthcare, disaster relief, labor organizing, media, technology, participative research, and neighborhood democracy. Most organizations operated in urban areas, some in smaller municipalities and a few in rural localities. Both racial diversity and homogeneity were evident. Most of the organizations could be characterized as white in their membership. Some were black in their membership and focus. Representation of Latinx and Native constituencies was quite sparse. Only a few of the organizations were truly multi-racial. One example was Symbiosis PDX whose delegate team included black, white, and Latinx delegates from a mostly white city.

Among these organizations, some were explicitly organized around ideas of confederal democracy, especially in the Northwest U.S., for whom anarchist praxis was a significant component. Others were narrower in the scope of their local action. Some could more loosely be described as representing cooperative economy initiatives. A few focused on ecological concerns and others on other specific concerns. Durand-Folco and Van Outrve noted that “The wide range of groups and participants brought varied ideological perspectives generally united by a shared strategy of bottomup, dual power. The authors found that delegates brought a healthy non-sectarian attitude and open minds regarding ideological plurality.”⁵

Following the early stage setting events and a few sessions devoted to topical discussion and skill sharing breakouts, the Congress opened on Thursday evening. A key organizer, Mason Herson-Hord, outlined the concept and intentions of the organizing Congress. He used the metaphor of ‘chicken and egg’ to describe the paradoxical challenge facing Congress organizers. They sought to build a confederation of municipalist organizations with sufficient organizational aims and structure for local organizations to join it. At the same time, they wished to have member organizations determine the meaning and organizational forms of the confederation. 

To resolve this inherent tension, organizers invited a set of initial joining organizations to send delegates to the Congress to deliberate and construct a tentative structure to be subsequently ratified by the full membership of each member organization. To assure an orderly and accountable process at the Congress organizers had established a set of deliberation and decision-making procedures. They envisioned these procedures as providing a shell in which the delegates could bring the embryonic form of the confederation to life. 

Next in this opening session, two leading member organizations—Cooperation Jackson and La Asamblea—shared their work. This was intended to situate the subsequent deliberations within a foundation of established work illustrating both local and translocal issues and opportunities. The two presenting organizations showed diverse organizing contexts from black-led Jackson, MS to indigenous-led Oaxaca, Mexico. Each case exhibited significant local organizing experience, knowledge, and commitment.

On Friday through Sunday Congress participants focused on consideration of various proposals for federation structure and procedures submitted by member organizations and workgroups in advance of and during the Congress. Attention focused initially on consideration of varied proposals for Points of Unity. These were discussed in working groups and then in plenary sessions of the full assembly. The plenary sessions were facilitated by a team of mostly white volunteer facilitators versed in parliamentary procedure. Points of procedure were frequent topics of discussion. This slowed the deliberation and decision-making process. Tensions began to rise.

Some felt that more time was needed for participants and the organizations they represented to get to know each other and build working relationships. In response a session was organized in which a delegate from each organization spoke briefly in a round about their aims, structure and activities. This was well received but, some felt, insufficient. Some felt the deliberation procedure was bogging down in procedural debates. Others felt strongly that transparent, formal, rule-based decision making was necessary to assure that local organizations retained voice and priority. Tensions persisted.

Facilitators wisely included reflective opportunities at the end of plenary sessions to allow for participant evaluation of the process. The delegate from Oaxaca spoke with the authority of their long struggle and about the iterative learning processes they experienced beginning as a local initiative seeking to defend their land and later participating in the larger space of the National Indigenous Congress. Recognizing differences at many levels they considered various structures. In time they learned to accept that people walk at their own pace and that every opinion is important. With patience they found common ground and built an accepted spokescouncil structure.

As tensions were expressed and frustrations mounted, a turning point was reached on Sat. Sept 21. At this time, a notable reduction in the number of participants was observed. As remaining participants reflected on this, a crisis of sorts became apparent. Some of the participants had departed the Congress session on a pre-planned visit to D-Town Farm, a 7-acre organic farm associated with the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. This included most of the black participants and some of the white participants, especially from a rural contingent that felt conference proceedings lacked the informality and authentic participation they sought. Some participants perhaps erroneously read the absence of most black participants as a statement about the limiting nature of the congress proceedings

A black, female participant from a local black-led member organization from New Jersey attended the Saturday session. Noting that she was the only black female attendee, she spoke to her concerns regarding the dwindling participation of black delegates. Others raised related concerns about the effects of congress procedures on participant engagement. Subsequently the facilitation team asked a black member of the facilitation team, Imani Scott-Blackwell, for assistance in designing an altered set of procedures for Congress deliberations. She subsequently served as the lead session facilitator for the Saturday and Sunday sessions. These sessions brought a remarkable transformation in the tone and results of the Congress.

 Durand-Folco and Van Outrve describe the remarkable impact of this shift.

The last evening before the end of the Congress, an extra assembly was organized and the delegate from Athens for Everyone facilitated a spokescouncil of the different working groups, as well as a circle assembly, where everyone had the chance to express their feelings, expectations, fears and hopes about the project of Symbiosis. Surprisingly, the group dynamic changed substantially, creating a “moment of resonance” of shared experience and collective wisdom, as if the new form of the conversation changed the very nature of the relationship between participants and regarding their collective purpose.⁵

They then describe the changes that resulted on the final day, due to the Saturday night spokescouncil:

[Participants] decided to [set aside] the formal and “parliamentary” rules of procedure and to take the spokescouncil form for the last assembly as well as for the Symbiosis structure itself. Indeed, organized in several circles – the first composed of people reporting back from their working groups on various themes, the second of delegates and the third of observers – and with time dedicated for comments and questions on each working group’s propositions, the last assembly was both democratic and efficient [in coordinating] the work produced during the whole congress.⁵

We had experienced a radical shift in the knowledge utilized to design Congress deliberations. Our black female facilitator had led sessions based in restorative justice principles and in the work of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). We all experienced a shift in inclusiveness, of a form of growing shared knowledge, and of a consensus-like sense of agreement rather than explicit voting. The feeling of somewhat forced adherence to a preset deliberation and decision-making procedure was no longer evident.

Durand-Folco and Van Outrve also describe the outcomes of the changed deliberation process. “The outcome [was] the creation of several working groups to continue the work started during the Congress across geographical distance, [regarding the] points of unity, decision-making, [congress] structure and other activities of interest to member organizations.” These continuing federation-building processes were to offer proposals that would be voted upon by the local organizations and coordinated by a spokescouncil transition team.

The disruption of Congress procedures followed by a transformative shift prompted varied reflections by delegates in the months following the Congress. Given my history of engagement with community of color struggles and frequent experiences of more fluid, and emotion-laden, processes, I was inclined to reflect about the contrasts of such processes with the more orderly ones established by Congress organizers. For this Harbinger issue on race and racism, I resolved to conduct a deeper analysis of the implications of the events at the Congress giving attention to potential racial implications. In this analysis my understanding of the prompting events deepened and expanded.

To begin, I pulled together key ideas from Murray Bookchin’s program of libertarian municipalism, giving special attention to his treatment of issues related to race. I augmented this focus on Bookchin by considering two pieces of scholarship that offer important U.S. and North American contextual framing for developing municipalist, confederal democracy.

The Guiding Theory and Practice Orientation of Congress Organizers

My deeper analysis begins with presenting and critiquing the formulations of a prominent radical scholar-activist of the 20^th century, Murry Bookchin. Though he passed away in 2006, the thrust of his ideas still circulates within and significantly shapes the activists schooled and influenced by him over several decades. This man, over a lifetime of analysis and activism, produced ideas that provided a political program for revolutionary activity aimed at locally centered, bottom-up challenges to state-capital hegemony. His ideas evolved from early Marxism, to anarchism, and later libertarian municipalism. His concepts of social ecology provoked considerable discussion in the mid-20^th century environmental movement. 

In the latter decades of the 20^th century he labored tirelessly, but with little traction, to advance ideas to establish a political process and institutions to enable anarchists to effect real system change. He ultimately distanced himself from anarchism and distinguished his approach as libertarian municipalist politics within communalism. Though his thinking had modest impacts in the U.S. and internationally during his lifetime, they have achieved a new prominence, outside the U.S. in our current era of worldwide bottom-up insurgent action.⁶ In my analysis I found evidence that Bookchin’s conception of libertarian municipalism as the revolutionary force for transitioning to a communalist society, in significant part, lay at the core of the aims, structure and procedures of the Congress.

Bookchin’s last publication, Social Ecology and Communalism, appeared in 2006. It consisted of four previous papers edited by Erik Eiglad under Bookchin’s supervision. Here I will summarize some of the cardinal ideas of this scholar activist, largely drawing on this last publication. He describes the concrete political dimension of communalism as libertarian municipalism. He succinctly summarizes libertarian municipalism in this way. It: 

seeks to eliminate statist municipal structures and replace them with the institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks to radically restructure cities’ governing institutions into popular democratic assemblies based on neighborhoods, towns, and villages. In these popular assemblies, citizens – including the middle classes as well as the working classes–deal with community affairs on a face-to-face basis, making policy decisions in a direct democracy, and giving reality to the ideal of a humanistic, rational society…To address problems and issues that transcend the boundaries of a single municipality, in turn, the democratized municipalities should join together to form a broader confederation. These assemblies and confederations, by their very existence, could then challenge the legitimacy of the state and statist forms of power. They could expressly be aimed at replacing state power and statecraft with popular power and a socially rational transformative politics.⁷

The communalist society Bookchin articulated would rest on new local democratic bodies promulgated by a new radical organization possessing “a new political vocabulary to explain its goals, and a new program and theoretical framework to make those goals coherent. It…requires dedicated individuals who are willing to take on the responsibilities of education and, yes, leadership.”⁸ He advocated the development of leadership, people who have been schooled in the movement’s ideas, procedures and activities. They, in turn, should, he believed, demonstrate a serious commitment to their organization. He stressed the importance of explicit structure and procedures in such organizations to assure democratic accountability. In his words this requires:

an organization whose structure is laid out explicitly in a formal constitution and appropriate bylaws. Without a democratically formulated and approved institutional framework [to which] members and leaders can be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of responsibility cease to exist. Indeed, it is precisely when a membership is no longer responsible to its constitutional and regulatory provisions that authoritarianism develops and eventually leads to the movement’s immolation. Freedom from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear, concise, and detailed allocation of power.⁹

Lastly Bookchin asserted the necessity for decision-making by majority voting. He saw this as the “only equitable way for a large number of people to make decisions.” He believed minority views are essential for community critique and innovation and that such views would be respected, and in time gain authority, in genuine democratic deliberation. However, he expressed grave reservations regarding the practice of consensus among many anarchists. He opposed giving minority individuals or groups the power to veto majority decisions.¹⁰

A Developmental Elaboration of Libertarian Municipalism

While I have underscored the centrality of Bookchin’s framing, it is important to note, however, that this is a dynamic movement. Proponents of libertarian municipalism are endeavoring to both contextualize and further develop the core Bookchin model. One key example is a paper published by several authors of the Symbiosis Research Collective (SRC) in 2017 titled “Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond.” The authors propose a comprehensive program to:

to organize practical community institutions of participatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives…This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework for crafting such a society from the ground up.¹¹

There are many notable features of this paper. I will only highlight one. The authors present a developmental orientation. They contend that organizing community institutions based in participatory democracy and mutual aid serves as the groundwork for developing a broader, directly democratic governance alternative to our current dysfunctional, oppressive systems. As possibilities the authors include “worker-owned cooperatives, neighborhood councils, community land trusts, local food distribution systems, mutual aid networks, community-owned energy, popular education models, time banks, childcare centers, community health clinics, and more.”¹² While such organizations may initially stand alone as individual projects, the aim is to build networks across them. “By working together and mutually reinforcing one another, these institutions can qualitatively change the power relations of a city or neighborhood, and lay the groundwork for new macro-structures of self-governance and civil society.”¹³

In a very recent paper¹⁴ and longer report¹⁵, Eleanor Finley and Aaron Vansintjan provide an analysis that complements the developmental framing in the Colón et. al paper. In asking why municipalism is much less evident in the U.S. and Canada than in Europe they posit that the answer lies in “the legacies of settler colonization, imperialism, chattel slavery and racialized caste-like systems that dominate US and Canadian politics.” They contend that these histories and the social fragmentation they create “complicate ideas about “the city” and “citizens” that are critical to municipalists” practicing a Euro-centric model. They suggest that experiences building radical democracy in these two countries “have much to teach municipalists, especially in Europe, but also globally, about how to cultivate stronger, more diverse movements.”¹⁶

Finley and Vansintjan describe a new tendency of grassroots organizing they see taking root in the North American context. They call this radical municipalism, which they say “galvanizes activists seeking to meet people’s basic needs through a focus on local autonomy and confederation. Linking daily struggles with the development of a powerful new political awareness, subjectivity, and praxis, radical municipalism deploys real democracy to build a future that is both socially just and ecological.”¹⁷

To show the potential lessons of radical democratic organizing in the U.S. and Canada, the authors identify and present 6 “nodes” of movement work: 1) economic democracy, 2) social ecology, 3) municipal socialist, 4) radical tenant unions, 5) mutual aid networks, and 6) Indigenous resurgence.⁵ They acknowledge that some of these movements “may never become a democratically coordinated force.” Nevertheless, by looking at their commonalities the authors see an aligned sensibility and framework for action.¹⁶

The work of Finley and Vansintjan complements the earlier SRC framing in the respect that each points to radical democracy movements, based in directly and democratically meeting people’s needs as a foundation for broader municipal and confederal democratic development. At the same time the more recent analysis of Finley and Vansintjan considers this emphasis in light of the legacies of settler colonialism, whereas the earlier paper makes very little mention of race and colonization as core contextual factors. I will return to this point in the next section. 

In this developmental orientation I see a notable adjustment of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism program tapping into the renewed momentum of solidarity economy and mutual aid initiatives today. Bookchin strove to make crucial distinctions between three societal realms: the social, the political, and the state.  He stressed that libertarian or confederal municipalism is “above all a politics that seeks to create a vital democratic public sphere.”¹⁸ He declared “however much all aspects of life interact with one another, none of these social aspects of human life properly belong to the public sphere.” He cautioned against dissolving the political into the social, especially where the social is untransformed in its practice of democracy and its commitment to freedom from exploitation. Speaking specifically about cooperatives, Bookchin praised such as educational exercises. He stated, however, “I never believed they were basic solutions to our political problems nor lasting substitutes for a municipalist politics.” He added that most of the cooperative initiatives of the 70’s and 80’s have stagnated, faded away, or become privatized.

Mason Herson Hord, a co-author of the SRC paper, noted an additional key implication of this developmental perspective that departs from Bookchin’s thinking regarding dual power. The member organizations of Symbiosis, for the most part, focused on building base institutions rather than electing local government officials to directly contest for local power.³

Hierarchies, Race and Gender in Libertarian Municipalism

Bookchin formulated his concepts of social ecology and the politics of libertarian municipalism within an anarchist critique of hierarchy. He associated the early development of patriarchy in past millennia with issues of ecological degradation. He attributed the development of current class hierarchies to the development of capitalism and nation states. And he recognized the existence and central importance of other social hierarchies. He stated: 

Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced an issue as class… New and elaborate gradations of status and interests count today to an extent that they did not in the recent past; they blur the conflict between wage labor and capital that was once so central, clearly defined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists. Class categories are now intermingled with hierarchical categories based on race, gender, sexual preference, and certainly national or regional differences. Status differentiations, characteristic of hierarchy, tend to converge with class differentiations, and a more all-inclusive capitalistic world is emerging in which ethnic, national, and gender differences often surpass the importance of class differences in the public eye.¹⁹

Speaking specifically about race, Bookchin expressed deep concern. He said “today, I feel I am witnessing not only racist exploitation, I am witnessing the very destruction of the black community. I see genocide at work against black people and other people of color throughout the cities of America. It horrifies me…The ecology movement must stand firmly against racism and actively participate in the struggle against it.”²⁰

He asserted that “the best way to build productive alliances across ethnic lines is for the radical ecology movement to adopt libertarian municipalism as one of its major strategies for change.”²¹ At the same time Bookchin acknowledged a key challenge in building multicultural alliances.

One of the tasks of the radical ecology movement [and libertarian municipalism] is to articulate a general human interest that transcends the real, but particularistic interests of class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender in order to build alliances to reconstruct our communities along more humane and ecological lines. Yet we need to be wary of talking too glibly about the general human interest. Multi-culturalism must mean more than mistaking the currently dominant culture as the universal and expecting other people to adopt the perspective of this dominant culture. This is not a productive transcendence of particularism. Unfortunately, such a narrow universalist perspective has historically plagued predominantly white and middle-class movements.²²

While Bookchin showed here an awareness of the perils of imposing a universal dominant conception and practice on multicultural democracy, most of his writings on libertarian municipalist politics omitted direct attention to this concern and, or offered little attention to conceptions, methods or structures for addressing this. I will attempt to show this in the way Bookchin sought to address the various hierarchies of identity, experience, and interests in his conception of the political. 

Essentially, he defined the politics of the assembly as the arena where persons and groups of divergent or contesting interests would come together to resolve them as enlightened citizens concerned for general interests transcending such differences. He stated: 

in Communalist political life, workers of different occupations would take their seats in popular assemblies not as workers – printers, plumbers, foundry workers and the like, with special occupational interests to advance – but as citizens, whose overriding concern should be the general interest of the society in which they live. Citizens should be freed of their particularistic identity as workers, specialists, and individuals concerned primarily with their own particularistic interests. Municipal life should become a school for the formation of citizens, both by absorbing new citizens and by educating the young, while the assemblies themselves should function not only as permanent decision-making institutions, but as arenas for educating the people in handling complex civic and regional affairs.²³

He saw the municipal political arena as the antidote to the “bouquet of struggles for ‘identity’ [that] has often fractured rising radical movements.”²⁴ He said that “as radicals our most important need is to stand on two feet — that is, to be as fully human as possible — and to challenge the existing society on behalf of our shared common humanity, not on the basis of gender, race, age, and the like.”⁵ He believed the municipality “constitutes the discursive arena in which people can intellectually and emotionally confront each other, indeed, experience each other through dialogue, body language, personal intimacy, and face-to-face modes of expression” in the “all-important process of communizing, of the on-going intercourse of many levels of life, that makes for solidarity.”²⁵

In Bookchin’s treatment of hierarchy and race I find a troubling tendency to overlook critiques of white left universalism and the role it plays in diminishing and sometimes silencing the perspectives of marginalized communities of color, and especially so in majority white localities. I have previously described two significant contributions (from the Symbiosis Research Collective and Finley/Vansintjan) that provide a more developmental orientation than we find in Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism. These framings each bring to the fore examples of radical democracy organizing in North America rooted in meeting basic needs while building a broader, democratic self-governance. The examples include organizing based in black, indigenous, and other subaltern communities. In this sense the authors implicitly endorse the value of learning from, and relating to, the knowledges of subaltern movements. However, I must note that neither contribution directly addresses issues of white supremacy, a crucial concern to the movements by communities of color they reference. Nor do they address the challenges of bridging the differences in aims, framings, and strategies across such movements, and more specifically regarding bridging across racial divides and specifically white-nonwhite divides. 

At this stage my analysis indicated a need for our bottom-up democratic confederalism movement to further address the implications of revolutionary organizing in the racial-settler colonial context of North America. To address this concern, I will present a synopsis of the intersectional forces of settler coloniality and racial capitalism that shaped Euro-centric occupation and society building in the U.S. and more broadly the North American continent. Concern will also be raised regarding presumptions of the white left regarding their solidarity with communities subjugated by this context.

Recognizing Racial-Settler Colonization of North America and Facing Its Implications 

Voices of resistance to the mounting costs of our global, racialized political economy, from activists and scholars, especially those of color, have progressed from post-colonial analyses focused on fostering independence movements in European colonies, to analyses that expose the continuing racial coloniality of present-day regimes. An especially potent analysis originated by white Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe has been taken up by scholars of color, especially indigenous and black, in the last decade.²⁶ This is the framing of a distinction between franchise colonies and settler colonies. According to Wolfe, both types of colonies were part of the European colonization of extensive regions of the world. 

In franchise colonies the colonizers assume control of a subjugated population and endeavor to extract surplus value from their labor and their natural resources. When such colonies revolt their white colonizers are ostensibly thrown out. By contrast in settler colonies the colonizers set out to lay claim to colony lands, to remove and decimate indigenous populations, and (in some cases like the U.S with plantation economies) to bring in forced labor to extract surplus value for the superior white settlers. Over time such colonies typically become settler states. As they face resistance by subjugated and displaced populations they use varying strategies over time to defer, accommodate, or repress such resistance. The U.S. is an archetype of white settler colonialism.

To fully understand settler colonization in the U.S., one must understand its origins in European white supremacy. The work of Cedric Robinson shows us that the elements of white supremacy developed in Europe prior to colonization of other regions.²⁷ Bonds and Inwood identify white supremacy as “a central organizing logic of western modernity,” which:

legitimat[es] both European colonization and settler projects. It is therefore foundational to the historic development of settler colonial states, but also to contemporary postcolonial societies… European and, later, North American colonists created and developed a logic of race that placed white, European men at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy and all others in various positions of subordination…These imaginations valorized whiteness and sanctioned the violence of white domination, enslavement, and genocide while bolstering Eurocentric understandings of land use, private property, and wealth accumulation.²⁸

Andrea Smith contends that white supremacy in settler colonies operates through three primary and inter-related logics. These logics are: “(1) slaveability/anti-Black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3) orientalism, which anchors war.”²⁹ She argues that each of these logics continues to operate and mutate in today’s settler colonial state and to both differentially and jointly affect nonwhite groups.

According to Smith and others, anti-Black racism provided a foundation for racial capitalism. This concept was pioneered by Cedric Robinson.³⁰ He contended that all capitalism is racial. Staying close to Robinson’s seminal understanding, Jodi Melamed writes:

the term “racial capitalism” requires its users to recognize that capitalism is racial capitalism. Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires.³¹

Combining Robinson and Smith we can derive that the concepts and practices of  white supremacy, initially developed in Europe, was later applied to settler colonization to: 1) acquire land for improvement and profit, by displacement and genocide of indigenous population, 2) establish imported slave labor to work the land and provide the foundation for racial capitalism, and 3) set borders for controlling entry, exclusion and deportation of foreign populations of color deemed as threats, in order to achieve economic exploitation, maintain white control, and justify foreign wars.

In Smith’s formulation of white supremacy is not enacted in a singular fashion. It operates through the three separate, and distinct, but interrelated logics. She argues that communities of color are both victims of and complicit with white supremacy. “What keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced with the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars.”³² She calls for people of color organizing to make strategic alliances with each other “based on where we are situated within the larger political economy… These approaches might help us to develop resistance strategies that do not inadvertently keep the system in place for all of us, and keep all of us accountable.”⁵ For a comprehensive analysis of the domination and exploitation of racial minorities in the U.S. see Natsu Saito’s Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists, published in 2020.³³

The white left in America has a complicated relationship with white supremacy. Such individuals and groups on the left have accrued the social and material advantages conferred by their racial designation. They have also often exercised a Euro-centric universalism in their knowledge, aims, and strategies, mainly contesting the (also Euro-centric) capitalist formulations of the right. In defying capitalism, the leftist critique has corresponded in key ways with liberation struggles of communities of color. However, while white workers and others suffered under capitalism, they did not suffer the greater brutality of white supremacy reserved for communities of color. As left movements expanded around feminist, environmental, and other critiques, too often perspectives of communities of color were overlooked or sidelined.

Lewis provides a critique of the white left and more specifically Eurocentric anarchism and its inattention to the racialized settler state contexts of North America. He agrees that the operations of white supremacy, and the three pillars that uphold it, must be understood by anarchists in their local terrain of struggle.³⁴ Referencing Day,³⁵ Lewis contends that:

there is a dangerous tendency within those white anarchists or other radicals on the left to think that, because of their politics, that they are somehow free of oppressive dynamics, while they in fact are intimately involved in maintaining such dynamics…This point is underscored by more general failures and dynamics of white dominance in Left social movement organizing.³⁶

Further and deeper insight about an assumed solidarity around anti-oppressive values can be gained from the analysis of Dana Olwan.³⁷ In considering the efforts of indigenous groups and Palestinians to form solidarity and contest conditions of occupation and colonialism across diverse spatial contexts, she observed drawbacks of assumptive solidarity. She cautions that relying on “assumptions of inherent relationality, mutuality, and connection” and a “genuine desire to find solidarity between and amongst our peoples, we often unconsciously disappear the particularities of one another’s histories.”³⁸ Solidarity, she asserts “cannot be assumed or given, but must be relational. It is developed by constantly challenging the politics of short- and long-term alliance and through reworking our relationships to one another in non-hierarchical and non-dominant ways.”²¹

She crystallizes in clear language the shortcomings of assumptive solidarity and the necessity for long-term commitments to sometimes difficult processes of building historically situated, politically conscious, mutual forms of solidarity.

Assumptive solidarity is romantic—allowing us to imagine allies in unimaginable and unlikely spaces and places. It is a form of solidarity that diminishes fears of our Others, rendering them same in our minds and hearts… This form of solidarity is comfortable; it is felt affectively but never experienced materially, situationally, or historically. While enticing, this form of solidarity does not move us closer to those whom we wish to be in alliance with, nor does it directly confront or transform the conditions under which we come to encounter one another. Instead of this model, I want to commit to working toward responsible, ethical, and mutual forms of solidarity that are historically situated and politically conscious.⁵

Though Olwan’s analysis is derived from relations between subaltern groups the relevance to presumptions sometimes held by activists of the white left regarding their solidarity with communities of color is clear.

Towards Bridging of Local Worlds for Joint Action and Relearning 

A growing literature showcases alternative cosmologies and practices fashioned by indigenous, black, and other subaltern communities in North America and beyond. It is vital that we look to these perspectives and strategies for ways to counter capital-state hegemony, in particular in racial settler colonial states. In the US today the principal leadership for decolonial liberation is vested in communities of color, usually in a particular racial-cultural constituency, and sometimes in cross-racial efforts. For an extensive discussion and historical mapping of radical black-brown convergences see Lauren Pulido and Juan De Lara’s “Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice” published in 2018.³⁹ Recently we are seeing some consideration of the inter-relations and tensions of black liberation and indigenous decolonization struggles.⁴⁰

Within these counter movements vital and relevant conceptualizations and work regarding bridging across subaltern groups has been pioneered by black and other feminists of color. I cannot tap the full wealth of this work here. Instead, I will look to a set of specific concepts and tactics that highlight real practices in real and diverse contexts that focus on inter-group relationships. I do this for three primary reasons, first because I believe building white-nonwhite bridging is essential for the work of the Symbiosis federation in our racial-settler context; second, because conducting such work will yield vital specific lessons in context as well as broader lessons for the movement; and third, because these practices deny white left universalism, instead focusing on contextualized dimensions addressed through constructive interaction with alternative perspectives from marginalized communities.

Intersectionality and Transversal Politics

To open up consideration of concepts and tactics to respond to these questions I will first revisit Andrea Smith. She contends that white supremacy is hetero-patriarchical. It is vested in, and founded on, a hierarchical, binary system of only two genders with males dominating females. She contends that “just as the patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Any liberation struggle that does not challenge [patriarchy] and heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge…white supremacy.”⁴¹ Her analysis shows the intersectional nature of white supremacy. It also leads us toward broader work on intersectional analysis and transformation.

I will now turn to the combination of intersectional analysis and the practice of transversal politics. Both have been developed and advanced by American black and other international feminists. Their resistance to their subordinate role in white patriarchic supremacy systems gives them an alternative lens crucial to transforming such systems. Nira Yuval-Davis, an early promoter of transversal politics, recognizes the importance of political struggles to gain recognition and assert rights of particular social categories and identities.⁴² She also recognizes problems with such framings. “Such politics tend to mask power relations within these groups and organizations, to reify boundaries of social collectivities and to homogenize group membership, attachments, and values.”⁴³ She presents situated intersectionality analysis, combined with transversal politics, as an alternative political strategy which avoids these problems.

The term “intersectionality” was formulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. She discussed the intersection of gender, race, and class matters regarding exploitation and exclusion of black women in employment.⁵ She gave formal framing to a form of analysis present for some time in black feminist and some European and post-colonial feminists work. Yuval-Davis presents a particular version of intersectionality called “situated intersectionality.”⁴⁴ As such, intersectionality refers to “the differential hierarchical locations of individuals and groupings of people on society’s grids of power.” It does not reduce power constructions into a single social division, but frames them as a mutually constituted construction of particular social locations in particular social, economic and political contexts and in particular historical moments. 

Yuval-Davis further contends that some social location divisions have more saliency and effect in particular contexts than others. Accordingly, it is important to recognize “the ways particular categories of social divisions have different meanings ­ and often different relative power ­ in the different spaces in which the analyzed social relations take place.”

Yuval-Davis formulated the concept-practice of transversal politics in 1997.⁴⁵ It has subsequently been studied and applied across diverse contexts. Yuval-Davis was born in Israel and became active as an anti-Zionist socialist. She later emigrated to England. She derived the concept/practice of transversal politics from the work of Italian feminists who traveled to and engaged with women in war-torn countries, including Israel and Palestine, who were striving for peace. She translated their term ‘politica trasversale’ for their work as “transversal politics.”⁵ Yuval-Davis developed the idea “as an alternative to the assimilationist ‘universalistic’ politics of the Left on the one hand, and to identity politics on the other hand. While the first has proved to be ethnocentric and exclusionary, the second has proved to be essentialist, reifying boundaries between groups and, by homogenising and collapsing the individual into collective identities, undemocratic within groups.”⁴⁶

Transversal politics practice operates according to several key components. The impetus usually comes from women concerned about violence to themselves and others in varying contexts who strive to join in shared efforts to build peace across such contexts. This aspiration takes the form of coalitional dialogues yielding joint action.

As noted earlier by Yuval-Davis, women’s experiences and positionings occur in relation to multiple structures of power and differ across individuals and contexts. She contends that these differences should be recognized, and also that women can have a voice beyond their positioning boundaries in terms of what they want to achieve. Thus, across their differences they are capable of creating shared value systems.⁴⁷ Women establish their own positioning using reflexive knowledge of categories like ethnicity, religion, class, gender and the like and of the relationships between them that they have experienced.⁴⁸ This process is called rooting. 

Then, in order to communicate across differences and consider other positionings, participants in transversal politics engage in a process of “shifting.” In shifting women seek to approach and to understand the perspectives of other women with different positioning. As participants recognize the positioning of others they come to understand that their own situated knowledge is incomplete and that there are possibilities for reshaping such knowledge as a part of the dialogue.⁵ It is also important to note that the process of shifting does not imply that women adopt an uncritical solidarity, nor de-center their own positionality.⁴⁹ Alliances focus on issues and action on which participants can agree despite also recognizing and respecting nonnegotiable matters.⁵⁰

Women engaged in transversal politics take care in establishing shared values. It is on this basis that differences can be transcended. Cockburn documented this component in studying the Women’s Support Network in Northern Ireland.⁵¹ Such values might be ones like nonviolence, equality, or justice. For example, in this dialogue where justice was a shared value, “it was necessary to recognize injustices done to all sides in the conflict, but particularly the injustices currently impeding its peaceful resolution. Wrongs had to be admitted, but without ascription of collective guilt – no blame by ‘name.’”⁵

Lastly, participants in transversal politics develop and use skilled group processes, such as ways of relating, speaking, writing and decision-making. These processes facilitate “clear and confident expression of differences, yet careful negotiation of identities and values.”⁵ These strategies are difficult to enact and participants do not always achieve the agreement and understanding they seek. Nonetheless, “participants were conscious and articulate about what they were attempting, even when they failed.”⁵

Patricia Collins presented a correspondence between transversal politics and a politics of flexible solidarity developed by black women in America. Black women were committed to black solidarity, but 

an unquestioned solidarity could be neither inherently desirable nor effective when it rested on male-dominated, intergenerational gender hierarchies. Such solidarity was hierarchical, rigid, often backed up by religious theology or tradition, and created roadblocks for effective political action. Black women saw the need for solidarity, yet calibrated their ideas and actions to hone critical understandings of solidarity that were better suited for specific political projects, for example, opposing both lynching and rape because they were interconnected practices of violence. [Their] flexible understanding of solidarity enabled African American women to work with the concept, molding it to the particular challenges at hand.⁵²

Collins concludes that the “idea of flexible solidarity within Black feminism lays a foundation for the kind of elasticity that Nira Yuval-Davis assigns to transversal politics.”⁵

Intersectional, transversal politics responds to the need for deep, transformative change in today’s structures of domination and exploitation. To be clear these structures and their defenders do not change easily. We can learn from the women practitioners of transversal politics how to build common ground, across divides, to work on vital issues. Yet we must not expect structural changes to occur readily. This work requires a long-term commitment to dedicated transversal relationship building and action with uncertain results.⁵³

Extending Feminist Transversality to White-Nonwhite, Multi-Gender Bridging

Thus far I have considered theory and practice of intersectional, situated transversal politics from cases of women to women dialogue and action. Can these be extended to multi-gender dialogic coalition work that includes both white participants and participants of color in contexts of white patriarchal supremacy? Kimberlé Crenshaw defines intersectionality as “the multidimensionality of marginalized subjects’ lived experiences.”⁵⁴ Certainly, experiences of marginality seem significant to the dispositions necessary to do this work. As Cardenas relates, the women in Myanmar and Georgia created alliances based on shared experiences of disadvantage and political exclusion anchored in specific values, stances and contexts. She asserts that “the awareness of unbalanced power relations and the experience of being excluded is crucial in creating empathy and mutual recognition.”⁵⁰

Yuval-Davis, however, argues strongly that intersectional analysis encompasses all members of society. She asserts that “everybody, not just racialized minorities, have ethnicities and that members, especially men, of hegemonic majorities are not just human beings, but are gendered, classed, and ethnocized, etc.”⁵⁵ This at least suggests that men also have the experiential capability to engage in transversal politics. Taking this as a real possibility I will now turn to a framework that, in theory, can encompass participants beyond women only in such processes. This can be found in Marcos Scauso’s interpretation of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s relational Andean cosmology.⁵⁶ She understands participants in relationships as equal subjects in a dialogue.⁵⁷

In Scauso’s words: “She teaches us to construct action without the arrogance that emerges from assuming it as corresponding to unquestionable foundations.”⁵⁸ She does this by elevating a bounded concept of relational equality that enables decolonial action. Such relational action is detached from questions or assertions of ultimate realities. She creates a precarious epistemic platform that creates a moment of action. In this moment “we assume that convergences make diverse ways of knowing, being, and enacting equally valid.” This epistemic assumption precludes annexing or articulating diverse knowledges and discourses “into the logic of dominant discourses that locate ‘them’ as inferior, less ‘real,’ more ‘traditional,’ or ‘uncivilized.’”⁵⁹

Cusicanqui’s epistemic notion of convergence does more than elevate varied discourses to a position of equality. It also provides “a way to determine how much deconstruction is required in a particular context to construct more decoloniality and difference. That is, it demands the de-universalization of the dominant discourses that annex ‘others’ in particular contexts, but once these ways of knowing, being, and enacting lose their privilege, the approach no longer demands further deconstruction.” While she seeks to resist the universality of western ideas her aim is to create “a possibility of heterogeneity and difference for multiple worlds, including provincialized western ideas.”⁵

In Scauso’s view, Cusicanqui’s approach avoids the problems attendant on universal presumptions about reality. “Instead, it is a constantly present question that also demands action, but always reminding us about the inevitable limitations of our provincialized epistemic constructions. Consistently, the profession of faith in the equality of meaningful convergences [also] avoids the threat of pure deconstruction and/or relativism.”⁶⁰ I believe this formulation offers a constructive way forward for application of feminist practices more broadly, and that can include a decolonizing approach for male white radicals. 

The question that arises is how may radical white males, in particular, de-universalize their participation in the dominant discourses that annex ‘others’ in particular contexts.⁵⁹ To answer this, in part, I turn to the discourse of white unsettling within indigenous decolonization discourse. Heather Elliott et al., drawing on DiAngelo⁶¹ contend that white decolonizing: 

may involve acknowledging whiteness as a specific racial identity, carrying with it a “white [Eurocentric] frame of reference and a white worldview,” rather than a universal experience, and that this identity gives “a social and institutional status and identity imbued with legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others.” In this recognition, white people are challenged to unpack the ways that Eurocentrism shapes organizational practices and structures to their benefit, making them inexorably, if unconsciously, invested in white supremacy.⁶²

The unsettling process entails unpacking and contextualizing the Euro-centric ideas and practices that have been presumptively universalized across non-European contexts. Unsettling can extend deeply to implicit and explicit Eurocentric presumptions about patriarchy, heterosexuality, the primacy of class analysis, the nature of the state, and more. For example, Anne Ross-Smith and Martin Hornberger show that rationality, from its Euro-centric philosophical beginnings, has been linked to masculinity. Significantly, this masculine rationality, they contend, still shapes organizational discourse and managerial practices.⁶³

For the white left, unsettling also means exploring the complicated relationship with white supremacy described earlier. One should also expect uncomfortable emotions to accompany this unsettling. Paulette Regan argues that such emotions open up a “space of not knowing [which] has power that may hold a key to decolonization for settlers.”⁶⁴ Unsettling at this level is clearly a vast project. Inroads can be made at a broad educational level. My focus, however, will be on the more actionable level of the locality. 

To bring unsettling to an actionable scale I am proposing, in accord with the preceding principles of transversal politics, that addressing concrete issues at a local level is the prime venue. I will focus on what I am calling white-centric organizations. These are organizations that are either all white in their composition, or have a substantial majority of white constituents. This produces a tacit culture that privileges norms and practices familiar to white participants. A useful way to identify this condition is to ask members of color about their experiences of the organization’s working culture.

To prepare for a cross-racial dialogue at the local level, a radical white-centric organization could identify and examine a specific issue of significant concern to a community of color as a vehicle toward unsettling. With a focus on the issue, the members of the white-centric group would seek to provincialize their understanding of the issue. This involves reconsidering the issue with an aim to uncover perspectives that counter one’s conventional understanding. In this process one also uncovers the power relations that have shaped the issue. These efforts call for seriously studying how key subaltern groups frame: the issue, the roles of white asymmetric power, and desired change. The white centric group can gain important insight on their own perspectives by considering their reactions to those community of color perspectives. 

This process seeks to build awareness of the ways the issue has been mutually constituted by the interplay of differing perspectives and groups. The aim is for the white centric group to depart from ways they have approached the issue with a universalizing perspective and to instead position their understanding and role as only one of multiple provincialized perspectives, yet one that has likely exerted asymmetric power.⁶⁵ Through this unsettling process the racially dominant group can consider its readiness to engage in a transversal politics exchange with a group of color tackling the issue locally. 

Situated, Intersectional Transversal Politics: Applications by Symbiosis Federation Member Organizations

The preceding review of processes of intersectional analysis, unsettling, and transversal politics has been provided to specifically address the challenges the racial settler context of North America poses for the Symbiosis bottom-up confederal democracy movement. These processes can enable consideration of, and action aimed at, building sustained cross-race relations in localities, steps vital for advancing this movement. I will now speculate on some possible applications of these processes to hopefully demonstrate the relevance and potential applicability of these decolonizing convergences. In line with my preceding emphasis on unsettling white racial supremacy, I will focus on applications that center on white-nonwhite dialogues. Other aspects of intersectionality will, of course, be salient and will also shape such applications, but will not be developed here.

First, a brief summary of the racial diversity across different local contexts in the U.S. underscores the importance of situated analysis and action previously presented. The ongoing racial-settler colonial history of the US has established local community contexts rooted in conceptions and practices of white supremacy that vitiate in key ways against equal and just participation of marginalized communities of color. These conditions also create deep challenges for liberation movements.

Some geographies are populated by concentrations of communities of color. While liberation efforts might secure a degree of autonomy for such communities, they would still be subject to broader political forces vested in white supremacy. And they are ever subject to the disruptive forces of gentrification. Some local geographies have a white liberal to radical population that has mobilized around ecologic, economic or social transformation. However implicit practices of white supremacy usually prevent committed and sustained partnering with communities of color. 

Within the racial-ethnically fragmented and separated localities of the U.S., each historically shaped in similar and distinct ways by forces of white supremacy, the conditions for white-nonwhite partnering are challenging, to say the least. Communities of color are hard pressed to muster resources and energy to exercise sustained resistance. They often lack the energy to also conduct bridging efforts with white-centric groups, even those ostensibly offering support. This impasse reflects long histories of mistrust of white intentions and sustained commitment. 

The Symbiosis federation has assembled a broadly based membership across diverse geo-social contexts. This includes a few Canadian and Mexican members and a substantial membership sprinkled across the various regions of the U.S. At the local level most member organizations are largely constituted by a single or dominant racial-ethnic group. This includes several black constituted groups with most of the remaining as white constituted. There are few, if any Latinx and, and just one native tribal, majority group. I must note that this characterization of the racial composition of local member organizations is based on representation at the Congress of Municipal Movements. Subsequently several additional organizations have joined the Federation. I have little information on their racial composition.

A number of white-centric local Symbiosis organizations in urban areas have conducted outreach to local color-led initiatives, offering types of ally support and hoping to build relations of more mutual trust. These are positive, often necessary first steps. My applications below will aim to support further steps bringing more mutual and member transformative relationships and actions represented by practices of transversal politics.

In order to build inter-racial bridges as proposed by this paper I propose a combination of work at the federation and the local levels, but see the local level as primary and essential. In significant measure this is because each local context will have its own distinctive racial and intersectional history and accordingly its own readiness and need for specific cross-race convergences. At the federation level efforts might be enacted to support the white unsettling process described above, at a general level through educational activities. Practices of intersectional situated transversal politics might also be introduced at this level. Hopefully this might prompt interested white-centric local Symbiosis member organizations to explore and undertake transversal politics with communities of color in or near their local context. The ideas and practices reviewed above provide some general guidelines but no recipe for how varied local organizations might proceed. Here are a few key considerations.

Central consideration must be given to three factors: readiness of local Symbiosis members to pursue unsettling, identification of shared values across groups, and existence or building of sufficient trust to engage in transversal dialogues. The unsettling process is crucial in order for Symbiosis members to genuinely accept organizations/initiatives of color as possessing equal knowledge and strategies meriting equal dialogue. Identification of potential shared values provides a rationale for entering cross-group dialogue to jointly take action addressing the values. Trust building is both a pre-condition for entering dialogue and an ongoing dimension of the dialogue. As mentioned, white centric groups may need to begin trust building with allyship supporting color-led initiatives. This could build toward sufficient trust to enter transversal work. The interested local organization would need to consider these factors, at a minimum, for varied potential transversal partners in their specific local context, before seriously undertaking a transversal politics initiative.

Concluding Synthesis of Analysis and Steps Toward White-Nonwhite Bridging

Through this paper I hope we have been on an unsettling journey, one of revisiting our North American context and our suppositions about engaging with and changing it. The analysis herein was prompted by events at the Congress of Municipal Movements for forming the Symbiosis bottom-up confederal democracy movement, formalized as a federation. During the Congress tensions around the congress processes produced a remarkable turn toward processes associated with community of color mobilizing. The altered processes brought positive results, but also some lingering questions regarding the meaning of the disruption and transformation for future federation work. 

In this paper I have undertaken to explore those questions more deeply. The evolution of my understanding of the Congress events and their implications was significant. I came to see that a racial explanation for the objections to Congress procedures was too narrow. Not only did some white participants also seek more attention to relation building and more fluid communications, but such concerns reflected the anarchist-politics tension in Bookchin’s writings. At the same time my concerns about the treatment of race within libertarian municipalism, including inclusive participation, proved valid and worthy of attention. The investigation led to seeing the importance of applying feminist intersectional analysis and the relational approaches of transversal politics to organizing across the deep racial differences created in settler colonial states. These strategies offer promise to build real and enduring cross-racial trust essential for the bottom-up transformative work of Symbiosis. 

I first summarized the events at the Congress. Then to better understand the tensions I pulled together key ideas from Murray Bookchin’s program of libertarian municipalism giving special attention to his treatment of issues related to race and hierarchy. I found that Bookchin’s theorizing was centered in Eurocentric ideas and practices and, in particular, offered a politics to go beyond the strategies of anarchism. Bookchin stressed the importance of procedures to secure clear decisions and structures expressing the general interest of the community and around which unified revolutionary action could carry forward. 

I was troubled, however, that Bookchin saw the municipal political arena as the antidote to the “bouquet of struggles for ‘identity’ that has often fractured rising radical movements.” He proposed instead within the municipal arena that citizens should be freed from their particularistic concerns and engage around the general interest of the society. He seemed to overlook critiques of white left universalism and the role it plays in diminishing and sometimes silencing the perspectives of marginalized communities of color, and especially so in majority white localities.

Going further I highlighted salient points from two papers expanding on Bookchin’s ideas. Each framing points to radical democracy movements, based in directly and democratically meeting people’s needs as a foundation for broader municipal and confederal democratic development. I found that both of these papers pointed toward a more developmental orientation than I found in Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism.

The two framing pieces included descriptions of organizing based in black, indigenous, and other subaltern communities. In this sense the authors implicitly endorsed the value of learning from, and relating to, the knowledges of subaltern movements. The second piece explicitly addressed North America’s racial-settler colonial history. These two reports showed positive steps in engaging with non-white, alternative conceptions of revolutionary struggle. However, neither contribution directly addressed issues of white supremacy, and the significant implications of such analysis for North American confederal democracy. These pieces also did not address the challenges of bridging the differences in aims, knowledge, framings, and strategies across such community of color movements, nor more specifically, regarding bridging across white-nonwhite divides. 

At this stage my analysis indicated a need for our bottom-up democratic confederalism movement to further engage with, and address, the racial-settler colonial context of North America. To address this concern, I presented a synopsis of the intersectional forces of settler coloniality and racial capitalism that shaped Euro-centric occupation and society building in the U.S. and more broadly the North American continent. I concluded that the core formulations guiding Symbiosis have significant tensions and omissions with regard to mobilizing an alternative locally grounded future governance system for this context. 

Recognizing the wealth of alternative conceptions and practices advanced by marginalized communities throughout the history of racial colonization I gave consideration to concepts and practices that focus on bridging across deep differences among subaltern groups, practices that avoid both left universalism and essentialism. In particular, I focused on practices developed and pioneered by international and black feminists. They entail situated, intersectional analysis and transversal politics grounded in rooting and shifting. These perspectives and analytic methods enable us to see the situated, intersectional histories of such places. More importantly they enable us to address the social divisions incurred by such histories via transversal politics.Tthese approaches, provided by feminists, portend the importance of looking to female leadership of such processes, and to giving attention to patriarchic elements conjoined with racial elements. I perceived these as offering some ways forward, not as a wholesale solution, but as specific initiatives that could move Symbiosis to greater engagement with our racial-settler context. 

I then proposed a way to translate these practices to white-nonwhite, cross-race dialogues and joint action. For this I considered a formulation by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, as interpreted by Marcos Scauso. In her approach groups may enter into dialogue with each other only when diverse ways of knowing, being, and enacting are treated as equally valid. For white radicals to do this I proposed that a process of unsettling is necessary. Lastly, I offered some key guidelines for applying this model at the federation level in support of primary applications at local Symbiosis organization levels. 

I urge Symbiosis as a federation, and particularly as local organization members, to consider and hopefully undertake the situated intersectional and transversal initiatives I have outlined. I see these as steps toward greater engagement in the realities of our racial-settler colonial state context. I anticipate these will yield crucial lessons for local contexts. Drawing on these lessons we may find ourselves in a better position to address the vital broader matters of any needed reconsidering of Symbiosis aims, approach, structure, procedures, and beyond. We are embarked on a journey that calls for courage to face the unknown, rooted in values, to proceed on uncertain, yet beckoning paths. This journey will be difficult. Through processes of unsettling, rooting and shifting we can grow our movement for the impact we desire to achieve.

1. Symbiosis Launch Statement for the Congress of Municipal Movements (2019). https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org/launch/.
2. Jonathan Durand-Folco and Sixtine Van Outryve, “Symbiosis: Federating Municipalist Movements in North America for Real Democracy” Minim (Oct. 2019). https://minim-municipalism.org/magazine/symbiosis-federating-municipalist-movements-in-north-america-for-real-democracy.
3. Mason Herson Hord, 2022, communication as manuscript editor.
4. Durand-Folco and Van Outryve 2019.
5. ibid.
6. Yavor Tarinski, Enlightenment and Ecology: The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 2021).
7. Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland, AK Press, 2006), edited by Eirik Eiglad, 101.
8. ibid 111.
9. ibid 112.
10. ibid 109-110.
11. John Michael Colón, et al, “Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond,” The Next System Project (Apr 2017), 3. https://thenextsystem.org/community-democracy-mutual-aid.
12. ibid 7.
13. ibid 6.
14. Eleanor Finley and Aaron Vansintjan, “Where are the municipalists in the US and Canada?”, Minim (November 2021a). https://minim-municipalism.org/magazine/where-are-the-municipalists-in-the-us-and-canada.
15. Eleanor Finley and Aaron Vansintjan, “The Lay Of The Land: Radical Municipalism In The Us And Canada,” Minim (November 2021b). https://minim-municipalism.org/reports/the-lay-of-the-land-radical-municipalism-in-the-us-and-canada.
16. Finley and Vansintjan 2021a.
17. Finley and Vansintjan 2021b.
18. Murray Bookchin, “Comments on the International Social Ecology Network Gathering and the ‘Deep Social Ecology’ of John Clark,” Anarchist Archives (1995). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-comments-on-the-international-social-ecology-network-gathering-and-the-deep-soc.
19. Bookchin 2006, 84.
20. Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Debate (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1991), 98.
21. ibid 99.
22. ibid 102-103.
23. Bookchin 2006, 12.
24. Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview, originally the introduction to the Social Ecology Project’s Readings in Libertarian Municipalism, Green Perspectives (October 1991). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-libertarian-municipalism-an-overview.
25. Murray Bookchin, Urbanization without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1992), 249-250.
26. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research (Vol. 8, No. 4, 2006), 387-409.
27. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Revised and Updated Third Edition (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
28. Ann Bonds and Joshua Inwood, “Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism”, Progress in Human Geography (Vol. 40, No. 6, 2016), 715-733 (720).
29. Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” chapter 4 of Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2012), 68.
30. Robinson 2021.
31. Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies (Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2015), 76-85 (77).
32. Smith 2012, 69.
33. Natsu Saito, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists (New York, New York University Press 2020).
34. Adam Lewis, “Anti-State Resistance On Stolen Land: Settler Colonialism, Settler Identity and the Imperative of Anarchist Decolonization”, chapter 7 of New Developments in Anarchist Studies, P. J. Lilley and Jeff Shantz (Brooklyn, Thought|Crimes, 2015), 145-186.
35. Richard Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London and Ann Arbor, MI, Pluto Press, 2005).
36. Lewis 2005, 147-148.
37. Dana Olwan, “On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms,” Feral Feminisms (Issue 4, 2015), 89-102.
38. ibid 93.
39. Lauren Pulido and Juan De Lara, “Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition”, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (Vol. 1, No. 1-2, 2018), 76-98.
40. Joey Mauro, “Mapping the Conversation: Tracing Incommensurability and Solidarity in Theories of Indigenous and Diasporic Liberation,” The Ascendant Historian (Vol. 2, June 2022), 50-60.
41. Andrea Smith, “Hetero-Patriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” chapter 6 of Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, edited by INCITE! Women of Color against Violence (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016), 70.
42. Nira Yuval-Davis, “Recognition, Intersectionality, Transversal Politics,” chapter 8 of Recognition as Key for Reconciliation: Israel, Palestine, and Beyond, edited by Yoram Meital and Paula Rayman (Brill, 2018), 157-167.
43. ibid 157.
44. Nira Yuval-Davis, “Situated Intersectionality and Social Inequality,” Raisons politiques (Vol. 58, No. 2, 2015), 91-100.
45. Cynthia Cockburn, “Transversal Politics – A Politics of Peace,” Pacifist Feminism (No. 22, Feb. 2015), 1-6. https://www.icip.cat/perlapau/en/article/transversal-politics-a-practice-of-peace/?pdf.
46. Nira Yuval-Davis, “What is Transversal Politics,” Soundings (Vol. 12, 1999), 94-98, (94).
47. Magda Lorena Cardenas, “Rooting, shifting and mobilizing: Women’s peacebuilding across differences in Georgia and Myanmar,” Women’s Studies International Forum (Vol 91, March–April 2022).
48. Yuval-Davis 1999.
49. Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Los Angeles and London, Sage, 2011).
50. Cardenas 2022.
51. Cockburn 2015.
52. Patricia Hill Collins, “On violence, intersectionality and transversal politics,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (Vol. 40, No. 9, 2017), 1460-1473 (1469).
53. Cynthia Cockburn, “When is peace? Women’s post-accord experiences in three countries,” Soundings (No. 53, April 2013), 143-160.
54. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (Vol. 1989, 1989), 139-167.
55. Yuval-Davis 2018, 161.
56. Marcos Scauso, “Intersectional Decoloniality: Listening to the Other ‘Others’,” E-International Relations (Jun 2021), 1-7. https://www.e-ir.info/2021/06/04/intersectional-decoloniality-listening-to-the-other-others/.
57. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, El Mundo Ch’ixi Es Posible: Ensayos Desde Un Presente En Crisis (Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2018), 90.
58. Scauso 2021, 3.
59. ibid 4.
60. ibid 5.
61. DiAngelo, Robin, White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, Beacon Press, 2018), 78-80.
62. Heather Elliott, et. al., ‘We have a lot of (un)learning to do’: whiteness and decolonial prefiguration in a food movement organization,” Settler Colonial Studies (Vol 12, Jun 2022).
63. Anne Ross-Smith and Martin Kornberger, “Gendered Rationality? A Genealogical Exploration of the Philosophical and Sociological Conceptions of Rationality, Masculinity and Organization,” Gender Work and Organization (Vol. 11, No. 3, 2004), 280-305.
64. Paulette Reagan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 18.
65. Nora Onar and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, “The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a post-colonial power,” Cooperation and Conflict (Vol. 48, No. 2, June 2013), 283-303.