Democratic Assembly

Democratic Assemblies (also known as General Assemblies, Popular Assemblies, Neighborhood Assemblies, Town Assemblies, Citizens Assemblies, Village Assemblies, Municipal Assemblies and Civic Assemblies) are the organs of local, grassroots, democratic decision-making within a libertarian socialist society. They also function as dual power, providing an alternative way of making community-wide decisions outside of the state.

Function

Free people make their own decisions and come to agreements within their communities, and develop shared means for putting these decisions into practice. Anarchists hold to the idea of the ‘popular assembly’, a place where all the people who share some kind of community (be it a neighbourhood, workplace or school/university) gather as a group at a well established place and time (for example, once a fortnight at the local park if the weathers good, or a town hall, maybe each neighbourhood takes turns using a fortnight using the same town hall, allowing 14 different neighbourhoods to use the same space).

At the popular assembly (a more radical and cool way of saying ‘meeting’) there would be various roles that people would be volunteered into (and could be kicked out of if doing a bad job) such as a mediator, timekeeper, transcriber (someone who records what has been said) and any other necessary roles to ensure peaceful discussions, or they could just choose to not use these and have an unstructured discussion (this might work better in groups that are familiar with each other) and could bring them in if things started to get heated.

People would be free to propose various ideas or raise concerns to the whole group, either anonymously submitting a letter or speaking publicly. People could discuss and modify and idea until everyone agrees on it, or fall back to majority voting if agreement is impossible (and if some people hate a certain resolution so much, they are free to leave for another neighbourhood, I talk about housing later which is important for this). 

People would discuss something for a long time, asking questions, clarifying, debating and identifying concerns. Attendance to assemblies would be voluntary, so if people became bored or don’t care in the first place, they are free not to attend. You might worry that this creates a potential new class of rulers, but the fact that this class has no fixed power and during times of crisis everyone would likely attend the assembly.

See Also

• Affinity Group
• Collective
• Confederation
• Democratic Education
• Democratic Militia