Murray Bookchin, DEMOCRAZIA DIRETTA, 2015

“The presumption that what exists must necessarily exist is the corrosive acid of any imaginative thought.”
Murray Bookchin

In this long twilight of representative democracy, the very idea of ​​politics – once the active participation of an entire community in social life – risks losing all relevance precisely because it has been reduced to a mere technique of state organization, moreover entrusted to groups of “professionals” – politicians, of course, but also bureaucrats, magistrates, soldiers, etc. – who practice a form of institutional manipulation called “government”. But this also risks losing the sense of what it means to be citizens, a status now confused with being simple voters and taxpayers, or passive recipients of goods and services provided by an omnipotent and pervasive state. However, this drift is by no means irresistible, Bookchin tells us, which shows how concrete alternatives to statehood have existed and exist, capable of opposing the dissolution of the community and the loss of the sense of citizenship. that this has produced. The result is a small manual of direct democracy, administrative decentralization and federalism, revisited in the light of the last hundred years of social history.

Murray Bookchin (New York, 1921 – Burlington 2006) has been one of the most listened to voices of the American counterculture since the 1960s and one of the pioneers of the international ecological movement.