Against representative democracy: the theory of communalist direct democracy”

Van Outryve d'Ydewalle, Sixtine [UCL]

Panel “Democratic theory Abstract: The political theory of communalism asks anew two correlated questions: that of the main political unit for a people to govern itself, and that of how public power should be exercised. It answers by advocating for the commune to be the main political unit, in order to realize direct democracy. Indeed, it is the only place where the people can gather, deliberate and directly take decisions together on a face-to-face basis, rather than having recourse to representatives to exercise public power. This paper develops the theory of direct democracy proposed by communalism, which I call communalist direct democracy. In the lineage of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the “lost treasures of the revolution”, communalism rests on the premise that public freedom should be institutionalized in public spaces where all individuals could participate in the exercise of self-rule. To actualize this premise, it sees the municipality as the locus where communities would collectively manage their own affairs through popular assemblies. These self-governed municipalities would organize in confederations, where each commune would send delegates with imperative and recallable mandates to decide on issues going beyond the scope of the municipality. The thesis of this paper is that communalist direct democracy is a coherent and valid theory of democracy, and that it offers a legitimate alternative to the paradigms of representative democracy and the nation-state. To defend this thesis, I will first propose a definition of communalist direct democracy by developing its main concepts: the continuous assembly of the people to exercise public power, and the strict delegation of such power when it can no longer be assembled, which requires a radically different conception of representation than the one of representative democracy. Second, I will use this definition to answer one of the objections that can be raised against communalist direct democracy, that of tension between strict delegation and decision-making amongst assemblies.