What Is A Popular Assembly?
A “popular” (or “people’s”) assembly is the gathering of people for the purpose of self-governance through democratic deliberation, decision-making and co-operation.
It is in assemblies that people can practice collective power through radical democracy and horizontal organization. Assemblies also frequently serve as institutions of political education for their participants, and they are many times sources of community-focused approaches to issues such as justice, health and education.
They are institutions that sustain communities in times of crisis or need, and they form the basis of community organizing and collective struggles, both in the short and long term. We envision them being the primary political institutional units of the new society.
Assemblies enable and encourage the participation of all who are part of a community in which all hold an equal amount of power. This egalitarian and participatory aspect opens space for all to express their voice directly in the decisions that impact their lives. This fosters the feelings of responsibility and ownership of actions that follow the decisions.
Assemblies are the places in which individuals experience that they are the movement, and that it isn’t something external to them. The collective and democratic nature of decisions foster the realization that our power itself is collective and that we are stronger together. When people come together and talk about their needs and wants they are able to see and realize new possibilities, which paves the way to action.
Assemblies offer us the ability to truly recognize one another as masters of our own fate, servants to no one. They give us an indispensable dignity we can’t buy or achieve by other means. They are also points of community and emotional connection.
In order to execute the decisions it has taken collectively,
the assembly can elect individuals to carry out the assembly’s work, being responsible to the assembly and directly revocable. The assembly can form a council for its own administrative affairs. Often, an assembly has a host of committees that deal with specific issues.
The assembly is not a single event, but rather a series of meetings that has taken on a permanent character, and it is much more than just a meeting that is open to all residents. The popular assembly is a political institution, where the whole point of the assembly itself is to be the most important decision-making institution in the area where it is located.
In order to widen the scope of their decision-making powers, popular assemblies often join other assemblies in “federations” and strive to create a directly democratic society that can challenge prevailing or threatening powers.
In the case of neighborhood or block assemblies, these would have higher authority than government in all its manifestations, just as much as assemblies of wider geographic areas would.
So where are these assemblies to be set up?
Neighborhoods and workplaces (including collectives) – places where people live and work – are the heart of local decision-making where people can come face to face. Neighborhood and workplace assemblies are places where people gather to identify their needs, deliberate common issues, and collectively decide on action plans and follow up on their execution. The institution of neighborhood and workplace assemblies is one of the primary actions of movements that prioritize society’s self-governance and people’s power. In assemblies, social change is thus rooted in everyday life and not positioned outside, besides, or supplemental to it. It is the ground for making decisions regarding things by those who are directly affected by them.
The importance of neighborhood assemblies stems from the fact that they are the structures within which the community democratically makes decisions as to how to govern itself, manage its resources and empower its own people.
One model for structuring society is using neighbourhoods and workers’ co-operatives as the minimum, two basic units for decision making. Within the neighbourhoods people cooperate to provide themselves with services such as food distribution and waste disposal.
Workers’ collectives work together on projects such as running a bus service, factories, shops, hospitals. Decisions in all these groups are made by direct democracy, each member being directly involved in making the decisions affecting their lives. Some of these groups vote, others operate by consensus but all are characterised by respect for the individual and the desire to find solutions that are agreeable to all.
However, we also advocate for popular assemblies rooted in other critical needs for self-organizations, such as queer, women, and POC self-advocacy and self-defense.
It may sound as if we have to spend all our time in committees and meetings, but in reality most things are worked out through informal and spontaneous discussion and co-operation: organising on a local level is made much easier through daily personal contact.
Assemblies are not just gatherings,
but are the very process that build grassroots power, knowledge, trust, confidence, and a sense of collectivity and community. As such, the revolutionary project of building people’s assemblies takes democracy and community both as the means and the ends of social transformation.
Assemblies have been present in revolutionary movements across history, from the Paris Commune to the First Intifada, from the Black liberation movement to the Kurdish freedom struggle. Their participants range from immigrant organizers to indigenous revolutionaries, from block club neighbors to shop floor workers. History has seen capitals of biggest world powers taken over and run by assemblies, as was Paris during the period of the Commune in 1871.
Throughout history there are many examples of people organising society themselves. Often this happens in those rare moments when a popular uprising withdraws support (and thus authority) from the state. This leaves a vacuum of power – suddenly it becomes possible for ordinary people to put ideals of self-government and mutual aid into practice on a larger scale.
People’s assemblies can adapt to different conditions and needs, however the preconditions of their emergence have often been a crisis, power vacuum, or sheer determination of peoples. They emerge as people respond to these conditions, both as a need and as a new potential for taking over the control of their own lives. But this does not mean that they cannot be built intentionally and independent of these conditions.
Popular assemblies normally arise in situations where people do not feel that their views and needs are properly addressed by other institutions, and where they see no other solutions than to take matters into their own hands. As such, the assembly is a natural choice of organization: If no one else is acting in your interest, what would be more proximate to one’s everyday life than to combine with neighbors to address pressing common issues.
Although popular assemblies often arise spontaneously, they rest on a long tradition of communal self-organization among people in villages and cities that is frequently invoked – knowingly or not – in times of social crisis.
Popular assemblies are at the heart of revolts and revolutions, because it is these type of institutions – and not radical parties or politicians – that can muster the power to create major social changes.
We believe that assemblies are institutions where we can embody the values of solidarity, liberty and co-operation, and, as such, build the world we need.
Our assemblies can restructure political authority around direct democracy and provide a real alternative basis of society against the terrible conditions we face today. As such, the building of assemblies today is not only to respond to the problems of the present, but to prepare ourselves for the self-governance of our lives tomorrow.
As Assemblies Rise to their Potential
gaining popular support and self-confidence they could,
- federate into Neighborhood and City-Wide Assemblies and declare themselves the only power in the land;
- arm their people and order the dissolution of the police and of other violent government apparatuses;
- proclaim the expropriation of capitalists, landlords, and government;
- dismiss all managers and declare the takeover of management of all workplaces by the workers themselves organized into worker cooperatives;
- proclaim the abolition of oppressive and ecologically destructive work norms;
- proceed to institute full access to the necessities of life without the need of money, the assemblies deciding how to sustainably and fairly share resources and work;
- encourage other areas to form popular assemblies and to take into their own hands the management of their respective workplaces and communities;
- ask the workers in socially useful government departments to form workers assemblies to proclaim the transformation of these state bodies into enterprises managed by those who work in them;
- reach out to farmers and other self-employed sections of the population and surrounding areas to group themselves into popular assemblies and to send their representatives to a Central Assembly;
- ask the scientific community for assistance and participation to stop humanity’s path to complete self-destruction;
- proceed to organize a provisional economic plan for discussion by all assemblies;
- streamline resources for development of the new science of sustaining popular participation in this new direct democracy;
- call on the oppressed of other areas and countries to form popular assemblies, explain to them the content and meaning of these measures, and send organizers to spread the popular assembly model as the best defense against the dangers of domestic and foreign oppressive forces.
All this would be immediately necessary. And it would contain all that is essential to build a free world and save our species from its current trajectory to its own annihilation.