Deciding for Ourselves

The Promise of Direct Democracy

Cindy Milstein

• Publisher: AK Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781849353731
• eBook ISBN: 9781849353748
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There’s a growing sense that we’ll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that “the impossible is possible.” A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable. It is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world—from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece—as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this “sense of freedom in the air, ” as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Prelude: Deciding for Ourselves
• The Promise of Dignified Lives
• A Horizontal City
• Pan-Africanism, Social Ecology, and Intimate Direct Democracy
• From #RickyRenuncia Protests to People’s Assemblies in Puerto Rico
• Restoring the Old Ways in the Anishinabe Nation
• VioMe and Notara 26
• Guarani-Kaiowá
• Christiania
• The Bonfires of Autonomy in Cherán
• “Only with You, This Broom Will Fly”
• Pirate Ships, Stormy Seas, and Finding Solid Ground
• Coda: Waking to Revolution
• Acknowledgments
• Friends of AK Press
• Copyright
• Praise for Deciding for Ourselves