Anarchism in Local Governance: A Case Study from Finland

By Stephen Condit

Stephen Condit begins ‘Anarchism in Local Governance’ arguing that anarchism and anarchists must engage with the ruling order in a more inclusive manner than radical opposition, at least in the environment of a stable and cautious welfare society like Finland. This encounter may enlarge the purposes and values of municipal governance towards some of the fundamental values of anarchism, primarily individual and communal self-governance, and as well develop anarchist thought and praxis, not to renounce radical and non-conventional action, but to enlarge its scope and opportunities by strengthening the legitimacy of anarchist values and praxis, and their practical relevance to the social order.

The discussion entails three intertwined discourses: anarchist thought in philosophical and theoretical terms with an emphasis on the possibilities of its praxis; a descriptive examination of municipal governance through its organisations, strategies and policies; and a rather anecdotal account of Condit’s 30-year career in attempting to combine these dimensions of anarchism, municipal governance and citizen participation in civil society. The counterfactual ideal of Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is a significant measure of evaluation.

Condit’s self-assessment is equivocal. He failed to instil much practical anarchism into the municipality and possibly diluted his own demonstration of anarchism beyond what most anarchists would accept. Nevertheless he considers his project justified because it has clarified potentialities for the municipality, citizen associations and anarchism, and because it may express in more coherent conceptual and ethical form significant emerging trends in Western society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785270772

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Anarchism in Local Governance

Anarchism in Local Governance

A Case Study from Finland

Stephen Condit

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© Stephen Condit 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-075-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-075-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For the citizens of Savonlinna, who sustain a good community, the municipal officials who serve them and the local politicians who represent them.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Chapter One Introduction: The Prospects of My Situation

Chapter Two Evoking Anarchism

Bracketed Perspectives

Anarchist Potentialities

Prefiguring Post-municipal Community

Empowering Participation

Associational Voluntariness in Civil Society

Chapter Three Municipal Possibilities of Anarchist Praxis

Municipal Strategy

Central Administration Department

Social Services and Healthcare Department

Anarchist Praxis Enabled

A Preliminary Assessment

Education Department

Visions of Anarchist Praxis

The Discipline of Anarchist Praxis

Technical Department

Supportive Anarchist Praxis

Adversarial Anarchist Praxis

Chapter Four The Impossible Ideals of Libertarian Municipalism

Municipal Purposes

The Aspirations of Social Ecology

The Imperatives of Citizenship

Sovereignty in Assembly

The Possibility of Potential Realities

A Praxis of Critique

The Intimidating Prospect of Community

Chapter Five A Municipal Expedient for Anarchists

The Antinomy of Democratic Obligation

Self-Governance in Obligation

Demonstrating Ethical Commitment

Dysfunctions of Compliance

Authorising Obedience

Proportioning Obligation through the Municipality

Empowerment in Representational Politics

Exploiting Its Defects

Harnessing Its Strengths

From Political Party to Civil Society

Chapter Six Latent Anarchism in Citizen Associations

Practicing Associational Democracy

Engaging Municipal Policy by Other Means

Accountability as Anarchist Praxis

The Epigenesis of Anarchist Communality

Elaborating Self-Interest

Assuming Future Responsibility

Chapter Seven An Equivocal Vindication

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Of my numerous intellectual debts I must mention the following, to represent all the others. In Berkeley: Gene Lunn, for enticing me into the disciplines of anarchism; Jim Burnett, for demonstrating the responsibilities of practical participation; in London: John W Burton, for developing alternatives to power; and in New York: Brian Kates, for his experienced wisdom in helping me through the emotional turbulence of this project. I thank also the staff of Anthem Press for their assistance in producing this book.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: THE PROSPECTS OF MY SITUATION

In the spring of 2017, I lost re-election to my seventh consecutive, four-year term on the city council of Savonlinna, Finland, thereby curtailing my career as a local politician. Savonlinna is a small industrial city in an economically depressed region of eastern Finland, located in the infrastructurally difficult and ecologically sensitive Saimaa archipelago. It is increasingly dependent on tourism, although its strategy prioritises investment in environmental technology, with some success. The municipality has high unemployment and is relatively disadvantaged on nearly all social indicators. It has regularly incurred budget deficits, leading to continual cutbacks in social, educational, environmental and recreational services. Nevertheless, it sustains a vigorous cultural life, most notably the internationally renowned opera festival. Recorded levels of citizen satisfaction are consistently satisfactory.

During my tenure, I have served at various times on the culture, environment, technical and education committees and numerous working groups, and chaired my party’s council faction for over 18 years. Presently, I am on the scrutiny and auditing committee, as well as being an alternative member of the council. I have held a number of elected posts in my political party, the Green League, at local, regional and national levels, including 10 years on the national central committee and six years on the national council. For an even longer period, I have been active as a member of steering committees or as chair in numerous citizen associations of civil society, dealing with such matters as environmental and nature protection, environmental education, human rights, school and university governance, international and sustainable development, culture and science, land use and urban planning as well as the development and internal cooperation of the third sector. Throughout my career, I have considered myself an anarchist and publicly declared so. In this context, I seek a tentative justification of my participation in the municipality and its civil society. My focus is not so much my contributions to local governance but rather my reasons and purposes as acknowledgement of a personal obligation to nudge public policy towards anarchist praxis. Insofar as my justification is valid, it may indicate spheres of anarchism’s ideals which are now obscured by the complexities of local governance and the hostility or indifference of many anarchists to it.

Because of the recurrent conflicts of citizen associations with the municipality, and my frequent stance of opposition to municipal policies and council decisions, I consider these two complementary dimensions of my public career to be a coherent whole. In both state and municipal roles, and similarly in civic activism, I have understood my purpose to be committed to the strengthening of civil society and the accountability of official institutions to it, and the extension of public policy to engage citizen associations in its formulation and implementation. Although this participation is not oppositional in the manner Gordon describes as demonstrating that anarchism is alive (Gordon 2008, 1–27), it may have a similar effect of encouraging public authorities to seek a legitimacy they might otherwise take for granted or disdain. In spite of Finland’s history of the state fostering civil society for its interests, I have assumed and sought to enhance the independence of citizen associations from statist interests.

My account is not based on what I have achieved or on the consequences of my actions. My successes have been modest and infrequent, and my consequences difficult to assess. I propose, instead, to focus on what I have intended to promote and the values which I have sought to express, always implicitly, often explicitly and, on occasion, vociferously. At the heart of these values is anarchism. In spite of the restrictiveness of municipal and associational participation, I consider myself an anarchist. Certainly, I am not of the fiery sort. Neither my temperament nor my situation would abide militancy. I seek to espouse what McLaughlin describes as a ‘weak but engaged philosophical anarchism’, which enjoins me to a duty to act for purposes intrinsic to anarchism with neither the absolutism of dogma nor the quietism of conformist obedience (McLaughlin 2010, 13). There is space in civil society and the public sector between these alternatives. But the compatibility of my public career with even weak anarchism is uncertain, and so my declaration of anarchist principles may be contestable.

I am venturing a defence of ‘soft’ anarchism, not only as a heuristic device to set standards for ruling liberal institutions, but also as an engaged praxis with and in them. This may, as Roxburgh argues, entail a tacit or explicit recognition of the priority and legitimacy of the liberal state, thereby sacrificing anarchism’s definitive purpose of opposition to the state and commitment to its abolition (Roxburgh 2018, 55–64). She assumes that any engagement with ruling liberal institutions will result in liberalism’s co-optation of anarchist praxis, severing it from anarchism’s transformational purpose and contributing ‘to the construction of a liberal discourse of anarchism which in effect co-opts and dilutes the radical critiques of anarchism’. Anarchism is negated in both theory and praxis. I cannot gainsay this risk. Nevertheless, I consider it a diminution of anarchism to dogmatic anti-statism which ill serves the needs of public policy. Anti-statism is a deficient anarchist ideal and too often a futile or destructive purpose of participation. When dogmatically adhered to, it weakens the praxis of transformational prefiguration which can further the self-governance necessary to anarchism. Contrary to Roxburgh, I hold, or perhaps hope, that anarchist thought and praxis can be enriched in and for the municipality.

The Finnish system of local government is statist. Its units, municipalities, communes and regional provinces have been created and are considerably funded by the state, on top of local income and property taxes, which are also circumscribed by national statutes. The state stipulates most of their statutory functions. Nevertheless, local governments have some latitude in determining how they discharge these functions and which non-statutory ones they assume. Local self-government is guaranteed by the constitution and jealously guarded by local officials and politicians. For several years, however, the state has pursued a number of policies to reduce both the number of local government districts and their functions, most notably in integrated social and health services. Most of these had previously been delegated by the local governments to federations of several municipalities and communes, in which case the reality of local self-government has already been much attenuated. A new system now being formulated, if and when it is implemented, will transfer many of these public functions to provincial governments, also with elected councils and possibly with powers of taxation. Statist public policy will be regionalised. The impact on local governments is unpredictable. The problems and prospects of anarchist participation, however, will remain the same, albeit perhaps weakened somewhat to the extent that regional provinces do not express or elicit the communality typical of local governments.

The political structure of municipalities and communes is parliamentary. The council is large and directly elected. In turn, it elects a number of committees and the municipal board as well as representatives to local and regional federations. These organs work closely with the administrative bureaucracy, particularly the city manager and heads of the departments and their sections. The budgetary powers and most significant policies are formulated by the committees and the board, and proposed by them to the council, which approves, amends or rejects them. It is by no means a mere rubber stamp. The procedure is thus complicatedly representational, with much of the representation being indirect through delegated or divided decision-making powers. The actual power of the council and the influence of individual councillors are often opaque, depending to a great extent on the activeness of the political parties on the council and the initiative of individual councillors.

My participation in citizen associations and the electoral party politics of the municipal and state systems is both direct and representational. The means and ends of these spheres of participation are different. In both cases, I have attempted to manage the problems of representation as a fundamental mode of public participation and not as an alienation of participatory capabilities to a political elite. Within this closely governed system, most of the associations of civil society are enmeshed in complementing state and municipal policies, often, however, through varying degrees of opposition. To a considerable extent, they are dependent on state and municipal resources. However worthy of anarchism my intentions may be, any contribution to anarchism or a channelling of some anarchist values to civil society and the public sector is circumscribed by these statist features, and possibly nullified, save in my imagination. I must consider the possibility that, whatever the sincerity of my anarchist convictions, by participating in statist institutions, I have acted against the accumulation of political capability necessary for confronting the state with its abuses of power following from its claim to sovereignty. I may be a study in bad faith. Roxburgh’s confrontational critique may be more justifiable than my soft, weak anarchism. But there are many ways for anarchists to engage with the state.

Weak anarchism need not be wholly self-delusion. It commits me to scepticism towards governing authorities and their public policies, with the consequent task of seeking the right questions to put to officials and other decision makers as an aspect of the duty to pursue open governance. This is coupled with an insistence on a practical commitment to extend voluntary, participatory citizen competence and to expand the realm of public space and policy in which such competence is relevant, needed and effective (McLaughlin 2010, 15–31). Hence, participation need not be taken as irrevocable recognition of the legitimacy of official institutions and policies. It is an origin of legitimacy if it meets some stringent standards of accountability. To the extent that it seeks to modify or oppose institutions and policies, and this is considerable, participation declares the limits of statist legitimacy, although seldom expressed or widely understood in such fundamental terms. For this reason, I hold my participation in citizen associations, electoral party politics and the statist systems of national and municipal government to be part of the same problem, requiring a common justification as a public political expression of anarchism, however weak, but engaged with the contingencies of public policy.

A further justification, which I shall query in this study, is Bookchin’s assertion that whatever its faults, the municipality does not rely on or foment exploitation, domination and coercion, but rather seeks in some manner to inculcate and use for public good the values and capabilities of a citizenship of self-governance in communality (Bookchin 1980, 9–22). In spite of possible compliance with municipal procedures and institutions, citizenship transcends the act of voting and the facts of representational institutions and procedures. It is not reducible to compliance. Bookchin’s municipal ideal is far from my realities. But he is right to stress the capability and responsibility of the municipality to represent issues which can generate a sense of communality among citizens so that citizenship becomes a causal volition of public policy. A strict test of the relevance of my municipality is the degree to which it meets this responsibility.

The core of this responsibility is commitment to democracy, not as a means of contriving and expressing an ostensibly unified popular will, but for opening up the notion of will to a pluralism of participation generating diverse expressions of public right and good (Newman 2012, 178–82). It is, as he argues and I agree, always seeking to overcome its own limitations. Electoral politics, which is only one institution of democracy, enriches public discourse. But it is always defective even on its own terms insofar as it is confined to policies determined by statist institutions, such as the municipality, and restricted to its resources and capabilities. Participation in the municipality must never be confined to its own immediate interests and institutions, however much the administrative bureaucracy seeks to impose these on the council and other structures of participation. Although this responsibility does not inevitably entail the ‘radical politics’ Newman tends to fetishise, it does commit us to seek to transcend the state as a sufficient and exclusive agent of public purposes and methods. Participation in municipal institutions and public policies must imagine more inclusive legitimacy and justification. Citizen associations can challenge the statist domination of public policy.

My participation as a local politician has been normative, often at the cost of immediate effectiveness. One norm I seek to adhere to is Ehrlich’s depiction of anarchist leadership, which is without ‘followership’, working wholly within and through non-coercive, egalitarian and educative means (Ehrlich 1996a, 65). It is an exaggeration to regard a municipal councillor as a leader. But we are public figures personifying some political and social aspirations and values. Any person in that role who seeks to exploit its representational significance, as I have done, assumes also to some extent a leading role, or at least occasionally a visible role in articulating values of, justifications for and alternatives to public policies. We speak not to followers but to citizens, and we must as well listen attentively. We do not seek authority. When we do, we abuse our privileges within the municipal system. Instead, we must seek a reformulation and relocation of authority, its repossession by citizens in spite of and often against the political interests of the city (Ritter 1980, 65–71). Emerging from society, authority must reside there. Such a prefiguration of diverse modes of self-governance is an essence of anarchism.

Comprehending my situation in this way, I have eschewed the hyperbolic language which disfigures so much of anarchism’s public expression. It is too easy to dismiss anarchism by focusing on its theoretical gaps, outlandish goals and practical failures as a mode of governance. Such dismissal denies the necessary impact of diverse occurrences of radical opposition on the ruling order, or of effective, self-organised community action in emergency situations when the public sector fails to respond adequately (Clark 2013, 193–215). It also obscures the relevance of anarchism to situations in which such opposition is implausible or unnecessary, thereby obstructing both anarchists’ readiness to admit the wider relevance and responsibility of our doctrines as well as the readiness of non-anarchists to recognise, respond to and perhaps to some degree incorporate this relevance. I have imagined my public career to be an exercise in making apparent this relevance, even if perhaps too often surreptitiously, in situations seemingly immune to it. I have hoped that this might contribute to the refining of anarchist thought, enlarging and justifying it in unpropitious contexts and to persons who might otherwise remain hostile to or ignorant of anarchism as a fundamental mode of political thought and action.

The challenge to do this effectively is greater because an ostensible purpose of national, regional and local public policy in Finland, as elsewhere, is to diversify and intensify citizen participation and the public sector’s practical responsiveness to it, specifically to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state. A danger is that this may co-opt the citizen associations and non-governmental organisations of civil society into obedient compliance. But it also indicates the ruling order’s concern with its legitimacy. My attempt to justify my career thus raises the question of whether anarchism has anything distinctive to offer, in theory, ethics or praxis, that might resist co-optation and nurture genuine legitimacy. If it has none, or nothing practical in stable social situations such as mine, we may face the judgement that anarchism has failed and become irrelevant, no more than a historical wreck, save perhaps in exceptional circumstances allowing it a brief efflorescence.

But even Miller, who holds this view, still finds two things worth ‘salvaging’: an ethical insistence on the imperfections of all power structures and exercises of power, however restrained in benign institutions; and a practical ideal of free, non-coercive social relationships within which some degree of social reconstruction is possible (Miller 1984, 182–83). If these can be salvaged, perhaps anarchism is not an irrelevant wreck. It must signify something valuable to those persons who participate in whatever power inheres in public policy, as its subjects or its objects. More crucially, it must do so in a way which surpasses the scope of other doctrines. Anarchism has no monopoly of awareness of the imperfections of power and the ideal of non-coercive social structures and relationships. To establish its significance, it must demonstrate that it empowers us more critically and effectively than we otherwise could do. Anarchism must challenge us in our situations.

This is one purpose of Egoumenides’s project of formulating a ‘critical philosophical anarchism’ which may empower us to self-governance in pursuit of political legitimacy, without committing us either to alienated confrontation and resistance or acquiescence to political obligation on terms dictated by the state. The necessary condition, she argues, and I agree in my situation at least, is public participation which seeks to enlarge the sphere of good government as one mode of legitimacy, even if subsidiary to more inclusive social and communal modes (Egoumenides 2014, 39–41). We must attend to the ethical grounds of how we participate in public policy and to what effect, in order to focus on the quality of statist institutions and policies and to restrain their inherent tendencies to domination and coercion. Not the least purpose of participation, I have noticed in my career, is to reveal incidents and expressions of domination and coercion otherwise obscured or softened in policy and administrative complexities.

The essential concept in this study, and of anarchism generally, is self-governance. I hope to work towards a more inclusive definition in a variety of contexts. For the moment, I define it as autonomy in one’s reasoning, beliefs, values and valuation, the capabilities to act accordingly and the will to assume the duties and responsibilities of such action. This may merely shift the burden of definition to the obscure concept of autonomy. Infinite regressions bedevil all exercises in defining concepts. Hopefully this study will give my definition more practical substance. I am seeking a meaning for my own experience. This is a reality of autonomy which derives from and stimulates a strong, idealistic concept of citizenship embracing Bookchin’s notion of selfhood, tending not to self-gratification but to self-rule, empowering us to claim the capabilities to rule in all our circumstances (Bookchin 1986a, 118–21). Autonomy must empower us to freedom in our collective public relationships. It is primarily a concept and experience of purposeful, effective will which we know to be our own as much as our situations of heteronomy allows. Autonomy must be felt to reduce heteronomy through both our experience of self-constitution and our capability of self-governance. Self-governance is both cause and consequence of freedom, which in turn is participation in the causality of community. This theme is intrinsic to anarchism. Autonomy creates a duty to act from, for and in accordance with good reasons without submission to the will of others in an unreflective assumption of their reasons. It is the repudiation of the facts, necessity and justification for heteronomy (Wall 1978, 273–90). It is necessarily anti-authoritarian not only in its declaration of self-governance but also in its extension of self-governance to other persons.

At the centre of the search for self-governance is the strong, if rather programmatic, account of self-constitution proposed by Korsgaard. She begins with the observation that by taking control of our beliefs and actions, which is the principle of autonomy, we formulate a normative self-conception through practical commitments to what we pursue as right and good. Thereby we assume the obligation to makes ourselves authors of action to these ends, necessarily cooperatively with others because right and good cannot be reduced to individual interests. Autonomy requires agency as efficacious cause of action and its consequences (Korsgaard 2009, xi–xiv, 1–44). Agency necessarily entails an integrity of wholeness in public institutions, which is more than a merely subjective experience. Yet, such experience is also a verification of the right and good through which we constitute our self-identity, even when identity precedes the capabilities of effective action or the experience of its consequences.

Although Korsgaard does not invoke anarchism, she crystallises well the burden anarchism imposes on any professed anarchist. This is not only the burden of committing to a normativity of right whose causal agency she must be but also to a continuous confrontation of personal inadequacy and failure. Agency is always less than normative will and never sufficient to master contingencies wholly. This teleology, as Korsgaard recognises it to be, is both necessary to comprehending the world and our smallness in it, and a source of strength to persevere because that is the fullest expression of selfhood. Self-governance is an immediate consequence of normative self-constitution. It is also necessarily communal because normative ends encompass actual or potential realities greater than our personal commitments, not least the agency of other self-governing persons, as we must assume them to be. We bind ourselves not only to our own agency but also to forms of collective agency. Anarchism is perhaps less self-centred than her notion of self-constitution. But without such normative commitment, anarchism cannot be a cause of right and good, or responsive to its consequences, which may not cohere with our normative teleology. I must show that the municipality can be a collective agency and therefore a sphere of self-governance even when it falls deplorably short of empowering us to self-governance.

It is apparent that I consider anarchism primarily a social ethics and anarchist self-governance an exercise in ethical agency. Among the many difficulties ethical agency encounters, not least is the Weberian dialectic of an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility (Weber 1970, 120–28). Although he considers them supplementary to one another, certain exigencies may make them incompatible, so that action demanded by one denies adherence to and the purposes of the other, thereby endangering ethical coherence and self-governance. Most obviously this occurs in situations of actual or potential violence. A frequent anarchist response to the discomforts of this dialectic is the affirmation that it need not be irresolvable in an anarchist praxis, stipulating that means must always demonstrate the potential reality of ends, which in turn must never violate the means by which anarchism is realised, pre-eminently mutual and communal empowerment to self-governance. This is the essence of prefiguring as the ideal of anarchist participation.

Most commonly, the solution is presented as the flourishing of individuality in and for flourishing communities, or in Ritter’s terms, empowerment to communal individuality (Ritter 1980, 25–39). I too take this line, as will be seen most distinctly in my understanding of citizen participation in voluntary associations. We must, however, confront the possibility that this move merely displaces the Weberian dilemma to the realities of community and individuality, which do not always cohere, prefigure anarchism or extend self-governance. They may flourish, or be claimed to flourish at cross purposes for corrupt purposes. Aggressive authoritarian populism is a case in point. Anarchist praxis may not always be exigently possible. I shall try to grapple with this problem, with the intent to show that the municipality may be an institution in which the unstable dialectic of individuality and community can be managed coherently within the demands of social order. Anarchism may thereby be furthered, if it manifests communality in a domain of rules both empowering and protecting individualities. Yet, even the best municipality will fall short because of its reliance on legal and bureaucratic administration. The ethics of communality transcends the realities of communities.

Perhaps, as Ehrnrooth suggests, anarchism is impossible because its commitment to ‘absolute freedom’ is impossible to cohere with its restrictive notions of community governed by consensus and unanimity (Ehrnrooth 2005, 161–92). He focuses on the pursuit of human dignity in the autonomy of realising individual uniqueness. With its tendency to oppressive conformity, he fears, anarchist community inevitably violates individuality. But he attributes to anarchism a totalitarian praxis of community which it does not necessarily espouse. His admission that the autonomy of uniqueness presumes public forms of reciprocity and duty, culminating in a ‘world citizenship’ transcending all lesser political affiliations, is implicitly an appeal to anarchism, or at least commensurate with it. Nevertheless, his warning must be heeded. Communality and community are contested concepts and not always benign realities. Self-governance in communal individuality may encounter, create or exacerbate conflicts which the municipality may not tolerate.

Clearly, neither the concepts nor the experiences of self-governance are unambiguous. A corollary starting point, perhaps easier to immediately experience, is the negation of self-governance in all modes of submission and submissiveness to coercion and domination. To the extent that these negations of self-governance occur in the municipality or are left uncurtailed by it, my justification will fail to meet the anarchist challenge that any compliance with statist government and political authority will necessarily lead to acceptance of hierarchy and domination whose potentiality is coercion, and that therefore the only pursuit of autonomy for an anarchist is refusal to acknowledge statist legitimacy in all its institutions. Instead, we must commit to direct action challenging it (Graham 2004, 16–34). If the municipality lacks a convincing account of its political authority and procedures for renewing its legitimacy, it cannot claim compliance from us. Indeed, the statist nature of the Finnish system of local government makes this an exigent challenge. I cannot say I have met this challenge well. Seldom do the details, demands and conflicts of municipal politics make it explicit. One purpose of my study is to examine the extent to which the municipal legitimacy we often assume as a given reality is in fact justified, and, when not justified, how it could be or might have been contested and reformulated. This may often occur in mundane and incremental ways.

In one further respect my situation entails a problem whose ethical import is unclear. I am an immigrant and naturalised citizen. I have contracted explicitly with the state to obey its laws and contribute to its public order. The stipulations of this contract are vague, little more than a general injunction to law-abidingness. But it cannot be nullified by the usual arguments against tacit consent. Its purpose for me was not a matter of convenience but the declaration of a profound personal self-definition, and to that extent of self-constitution and self-governance as well. I cannot engage in insurrection without reneging on the contract, but neither can I abdicate my Emersonian commitment to my ethical identity expressed in self-governance. Emerson declares this the valid mode of freedom to the extent that it is intended only to cultivate a character of wisdom. Whenever and to whatever extent it is forced on others it becomes corrupt and false. This includes demands that others are as law-abiding as I, as well as the expectation that I must obey the law merely because others do. These are corrupt and false forms of self-governance, and typical of the state. ‘Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well […] Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience’ (Emerson 1950a, 427–29). Participation in municipal government necessarily entails an obligation to obey the law and an expectation that others do likewise. In spite of Mill’s declaration that participation is the best means ensuring that government protects liberty, and only then with great risk and severe restrictions (Mill 1984, 163–87), such participation is not necessarily a mode of freedom. It must be purposively made so. To the extent that I encourage others to participate as I have done, I may corrupt my self-governance. And yet, participation assumes reciprocity from others, most obviously in standing for election and most exigently in citizen associations.

My contract with the state does not settle this contradiction for me; it places me in the midst of it, with no clear resolution. I have regarded my public career as an exercise to resolve it, seeking to avoid the displacement of public interests by private ends, which is a reading of Emerson he sometimes makes too easy, and similarly to avoid the corruptions of power, even of the nominal kind which has customarily been my lot. But I cannot comprehend my situation truly if I deny the pursuit of power, conventionally defined as the acknowledged competence to participate in representative decision-making. This is intrinsic to any public participation and necessary to any pretence of effectiveness within the municipal system and civil society. It is also, or may too easily degrade to, an imposition of my competence on to others and their subordination, just as I am suborned by those with greater competence than mine. Participation can only, with difficulty, be purged of domination.

As an anarchist, I have a case to answer. My answer can only be tentative, and it is not grounded on success. I cannot claim de facto legitimacy from the fact of other persons’ acquiescence in my public roles save to the extent that I contribute to their empowerment. But my failures do not necessarily negate the relevance of my experience to the development of anarchism or to its significance in a liberal, constitutional, capitalist social order. If I can convey somewhat of this about anarchism to anarchists and others, I might enrich anarchist thought. Anarchism is a contested and contestable concept. This feature ought not to be suppressed or evaded but rather embraced as a reason for anarchist praxis in the ruling order to enrich it as well. As with other contested concepts, anarchism can be rendered politically intelligible, relevant and valued by demonstrating its internal contestation (Pennanen 2015, 153–58). Working out the contestations within it can lead us to productive involvement in its environing concepts, social situations and public institutions. It can become a relevant factor of other, seemingly unrelated or even hostile social structures. But anarchism may also thereby be diluted and lose its coherence.

That I cannot venture beyond a tentative justification is not necessarily a hindrance. As Clark argues, all anarchist interpretations of the nature and justifiability of existing social orders and the possibilities of anarchism within them are tentative. In any context of domination, modes of opposition will emerge. At its most ambitious, anarchism will aspire to an ‘authority discourse’ about the prospects for public policy justified and motivated by a concept of legitimate authority which does not derive from the state (Clark 2007, 47–71). This is not easily achieved, but it is an essential purpose of participation to create capabilities which diminish the scope and pressures of domination. These capabilities take a variety of forms, some of which, as in my situation, do not immediately present themselves as practices of resistance or anarchism. To the extent that an authority discourse entails concepts of duty which inhere in the concept of legitimacy, the self-governance of authority may be experienced as something far from resistance or even opposition. It may proportion domination to more justifiable standards of right and good.

In this study, I am interrogating the record of my discharge of duties as a municipal councillor and citizen activist, and as an ostensible anarchist, in order to see how and to what extent some kind of anarchist praxis might be possible within, through and for the municipality. Have I reduced domination, or perpetuated, transmitted and justified it? My method is to examine a number of parallel approaches to assessing the relevance anarchism and the municipality may have to each other. These approaches include diverse empirical accounts of their interaction and as well chains of conceptual reasoning. They may be mutually reinforcing, but they may also suffice separately to ground my justification. Hopefully they will cohere somewhat. I tend to the stipulative reasoning Proudhon develops to arrive at an inclusive comprehension of society through the narrower concept of property. Social knowledge is, to him, moral. Consequently its gravest error is dogma, which degrades ethical reasoning to commands. Instead, he relies in a Kantian manner on empirical observation and praxis formulated through principles which, when observed in practice, are corrected and refined, becoming ever more comprehensive and self-evident, although never sufficiently so (Proudhon 1970, 15–28). We are the agents of principle. To the extent that our principles are inadequate, inappropriate or erroneous, so too is our praxis. The degree of truth in our principles is indicated by the congruence between our intentions and our consequences. Where Proudhon looks to property, I look to the municipality. It is not the inclusive concept or reality that Proudhon imagines property to be. But it does confront us with possible principles of right, how we may practice or violate them. The municipality is a crucible for testing some anarchist principles. Anarchism and the municipality may emerge enhanced.

Chapter Two

EVOKING ANARCHISM

In this interrogation of my possible contribution to anarchism through local governance, I must initially accept the restrictions of the municipal system’s practicalities. I hope to transcend them in due course, but I cannot make a convincing case by forcing my narrative into a structured theory of anarchism or dogmatically interpreting the practicalities to validate such a theory. I encounter difficulties enough in comprehending any fact of my public career as a demonstration of anarchism and deriving from it plausible justifications of my career. I must work towards justification with circumspection. To the extent that anarchist praxis seems impossible or irrelevant in my situation as either a normative purpose or heuristic analysis, I must eventually both reinterpret the facts of my situation and reformulate my anarchist convictions in order to explicate their reciprocal relevance. This necessitates empirical selectivity and may entail the loss, somewhat, of theoretical coherence.

I have not been without theoretical context. Elsewhere I have attempted to formulate some elements of a practical theory of anarchism, and this has informed my comprehension of my political and associational participation. At the heart of my reflections is an ethical commitment to what ought to be, and therefore what might be and can be, in circumstances apparently inhospitable to such a commitment. From this follows a stipulation of potentiality as a fundamental cause of freedom and an obligatory norm of communality as a teleological ideal. The ideal entails expressive rationality, moral imagination and causal volition engaged to the project of self-governance, which is not reducible to individuality or rather to the forms of individualism sanctioned by the statist ruling order (Condit 1987, 15–36). I have frequently been dissatisfied with my demonstration of individuality, uneasy that it can be justified as significant. My motivation to a public career has seldom been a pursuit of my uniqueness, or evidence of it. Particular modes of communality entailing an obligation to self-governance may be prefigured in this framework. Each person is enjoined to assume the duty of being a self-governing cause of society. On these grounds, for example, I have stood as a candidate in local and national elections, and served in office when elected, and participated in voluntary citizen associations. But I have not admitted my career to be a quest for individuality.

Hopefully without succumbing to self-righteousness, I try to comprehend my career as a striving towards the virtue of ‘excellence in being for the good’. This entails both a personal commitment to participate in causing social good beyond self-regarding pleasures and an experience of virtue as an origin and demonstration of communality (Adams 2006, 65–94). Communality inheres in the notion of excellence which enlarges and distributes good, expands experiences of selfhood and eschews an ‘idolatry’ of disproportional self-interest. It is an onerous burden. As Adams insists, and I agree, excellence must entail commitment to common projects, including institutions, beyond their instrumental purposes. Virtue is an empowerment to ‘collaborative projects’ of good.

I believe that the most excellent ideals for human community involve patterns of social relationship in which the good of each person is a common project shared with others, and in principle a project of the community as such. (Adams 2006, 109)

Even if we risk idealising real communities, commitment to ethical virtue, however inadequate or even misguided, may reveal a more complete comprehension of our realities. We thereby empower ourselves ‘to inhabit well a good social role’ (ibid. 142,125–30). I must propose being a municipal councillor and citizen activist as good roles, specifically for the anarchist task of empowering other persons through our shared communality. Anarchism can be a cause of society as it ought to be even in unpropitious circumstances.

To declare oneself as an ethical cause of society is a strong commitment to communality, with strict criteria of what kinds of community merit this commitment. The quest for virtue is necessarily a critique of real communities, their purposes and consequences, and of the social roles they allow or demand of their members (Wright 2010, 104–9). A significant demonstration of self-governance is the pursuit of virtue in public roles which elicit excellence from other persons in a shared communality. It is a declaration of the criteria constituting a potential community. These criteria are ecological and ethical, in the first instance a morally reasoned encounter with society’s natural environment, and subsequently enlarged to encompass all dimensions of the environments in which ethically justifiable potentialities can be expressed. Ecology is enlarged to include purposes and values of social structures which exist as future ideals. This is a purpose of causal volition, to prefigure more inclusive realisations of right and good (Condit 1993, 49–53, 59–64). From these commitments, we can derive somewhat various modes of self-governance without submission to domination or coercion, and similarly participate in the self-governance of others. We may not imagine these commitments as declarations of individuality, but they demand a strong sense of selfhood. This ideal may be pervasive to all modes of knowing, being and acting through which we can become subjects in society and causes of its authority (Condit 2011, 239–78). Self-governance on these terms may be engaged in spheres far removed from the conventionally political concerns of anarchist thought, for example, in nature tourism (Condit 2013, 453–528). Anarchism pertains to all things. Self-governance will not be confined by ruling institutions.

There is more practical content in these inquiries than I have indicated. Let my account suffice to suggest two theoretical assumptions in this assessment of my public career which delineate my evocation of anarchism. One assumption is the need to transcend a narrower notion of anarchism as a mode of opposition, confrontation or resistance, and to indicate the extent of its praxis as a doctrine of empowerment to self-governance which is not subservient to society’s institutional structure and prevailing social order, but not severed from them or incompatible with them. A potentiality of opposition inheres in empowerment, but empowerment is not sufficiently realised therein. Whether I have redeemed or forsaken a commitment to opposition as a necessary dimension of prefiguring is an acute problem of my justification.

A corollary assumption is the impractical romanticism of many anarchist schemes of confrontational resistance to the ruling order in my situation. This is a problem I encounter with Newman’s notion of ‘postanarchism’ as the horizon of radical politics, which he seems to equate, wrongly I think, with democracy (Newman 2012, 1–25). He educes many sound purposes from this premise, such as the commensurability of equality and liberty, the predominance of ethics in political praxis, a practical utopian imagination in immediate social situations and the prioritisation of autonomy, or self-governance, as the foundation of politics. He is committed to a potentiality of what could be. But he cripples his account by a doctrinaire rejection of ‘state sovereignty’, disallowing participation in any statist institution, such as electoral politics and the municipality, although they may create roles in which virtue is possible. Somewhat inconsistently, he enjoins us to engage with structures of power in order to transcend them, yet his notion of engagement is one-sidedly adversarial and confrontational.

My public career has not been on the horizon. In itself, this is not sufficient to demonstrate that it is more practical in prefiguring ideals than Newman’s doctrine of resistance and rejection. We must be cautious in deeming a scheme impractical. The ruling order defines impracticality widely. Effective empowerment may create practicality where before there seemed none. At the risk of excessive cautiousness, perhaps, I have sought to exploit the contingent practicalities of my situation in the statist municipal system and civil society, not primarily in the cause of opposition but of empowerment, even if institutionally circumscribed. I cannot rely much on holistic theories, including my own, or on revolutionary romanticism. Rather, I must evoke a more inchoate form of anarchism, which does not bind me to doctrinal certainty.

Yet, I agree with Graham’s rejection of scepticism as a philosophical foundation for anarchism, in spite of my own sceptical doubt about how substantial my anarchism is. He seeks to reject scepticism by grounding anarchism in the ethical ideals and practical pursuit of anti-statism, voluntary associations, anti-authoritarianism wherever it is relevant, anti-parliamentary political commitment and libertarian methods of direct action (Graham 2018, 32–57). Although he does not define them in detail, a reduction of anarchist credentials for these criteria must deny my own practice, in spite of its considerable commensurability with them. I share his concern for a ‘robust and substantial’ anarchism, but I must cleave to much of the substance of my situation, which exceeds his putatively definitive criteria of anarchist praxis.

Ritter considers much anarchist strategy futile because its ostensible objectives are too radical to generate either practical efficacy or legitimacy (Ritter 1980, 109–11). He does not dispute the extent or justifiability of the changes anarchism seeks to prefigure. But a premature commitment to action to impose changes may be counterproductive if it obscures the preconditions of character development of virtue, which would invest even hesitant first steps towards transformation with communal legitimacy. We cannot convincingly pursue change while denying responsibility for its consequences, including its failures and dysfunctions. We must have the character to bear this responsibility. Self-governance must begin with an interrogation of one’s own character, motives, purposes and capabilities, from which we may derive some ethical coherence. This includes a practical commitment to possibilities of participation in the governing institutions of our situations. Ethical prefiguration begins with this task of self-governance, which is intrinsically collective and potentially communal. The fostering of character development does not lend itself easily to effective strategies of action, but the nurturing of ideal, non-authoritarian communality through the empowering persons to commit to it in palpable ways may be a demonstration of anarchism. How fertile a ground statist municipal politics and civil society are for this responsibility is the matter I must address.

Bracketed Perspectives

In order to interpret my career as an exercise in anarchism, I must provisionally bracket or at least modify some prevalent perspectives of anarchism as outside my framework. I do not deny their significance to anarchism elsewhere or, indeed, their increasing relevance in the decomposition of constitutional statism. The growing threat of populist authoritarianism, verging on protofascism, may create conditions favouring anarchist radical praxis, if liberal statism succumbs to it or is unable to contain it. Policies of coercive domination to impose more hierarchies of power on society must have reverberations in local government as well. When this happens, and preferably before it happens, anarchism must sharpen its praxis of opposition and resistance. The difficulty is to combine this praxis with participation in ruling institutions to strengthen them against authoritarianism. Anarchism’s confrontational features have not lost relevance. But we must attend carefully to the exigencies of our situations. We must estimate their relevance and not prematurely weaken statist institutions by depriving them of our commitment to legitimate public policies.

Thus far, anarchism’s confrontational perspectives have not been timely in my public career. They may return to me in due course as lost potentialities and neglected opportunities. But they have been marginal in my situation, despite their potential to empower citizens to prefigurative participation. Finland has an illustrious recent history of direct action explicitly or inadvertently tending to anarchism as its legitimisation. Occupations of premises to establish so-called ‘social centres’, practical self-governance in establishing and disseminating alternative media, mass demonstrations for or against significant public issues as well as specific special interests, for example, animal rights, resistance to neo-fascism, street art events and the rights of refugees, alongside more inclusive ideological and ethical campaigns such as feminism, environmental responsibility, resistance to capitalist globalisation and particularly the empowerment of the emerging ‘precariat’ – all of these causes and more have mobilised particularly young persons to inject ethical issues into public discourse which otherwise might be deaf to them (Monti and Purokuru 2018, 7–254). Although the issues have usually been international and the actions centred on a few of the larger cities, their reverberations are felt throughout the country. Several leading persons in diverse movements or organisations have gained prominence in conventional politics. The impacts of these direct actions on small- and medium-sized localities have been mostly indirect. They are spectacles observed through the media, to be deplored or envied. But they enrich political culture. I cannot discount their relevance, at least as potentialities whose time may come even in Savonlinna. I do not bracket them. I have merely judged them to be an impractical or premature praxis in my situation.

Most obviously I bracket a notion of anarchism as an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice (Graeber 2009, 103–12). There is in this view an essential merit that anarchist discourse ought to tend to a praxis of change, to influence what kinds of change occur and to strengthen both resolve and resources to pursue and endure change. As Graeber suggests, anarchist discourse must be an experience of doing something palpable. But revolution is not palpable in my situation. In the best case, such a discourse may stimulate an awareness of the ambiguities about where revolution and reform meet and of the potential qualitative transformation of reform into something revolutionary in some respect, without sacrificing the institutional discipline of public policy. For now, revolution is a fiction and its pursuit an infantile disorder. But I do not disallow radical opposition even in moderately socially just situations, such as mine, should the need arise.

Similarly, anarchist thought ought not to be an idle academic exercise to secure a niche in the academy or on its fringes, to which paradoxically revolutionary rhetoric often leads. This way lies powerlessness on the margins, and to the academic anarchist who takes the discourse seriously, frustration and resignation to the inevitability of submissiveness to domination (Hankamäki 2005, 162–64). There is frustration and powerlessness enough in the meetings, agenda, negotiations, documents and obscure decisions typical of municipal governance. It is frequently impossible to recognise any aspect of a decision-making process as a realm or a consequence of one’s own volition to social causality. There might be some satisfaction in the simplicities of declaring for revolution, however unspecified and implausible against the laborious context of formulating detailed policies on the intricate matters of public administration. It is a denial of reality to deny the intricacies, although attempting to articulate the simplicities within them is a necessary function of participation which is not usually enhanced by adversarial confrontation. Plausible anarchism must entail an ethical justification of responsibility for the consequences of participation, even when they are contrary to one’s own intentions.

A more benign and partially bracketed discourse is utopianism, which often is implicated in revolutionary rhetoric. Utopian discourse can be lazy either because it has no consequences or because, if acted on, it would alienate participation from public policy. I have eschewed utopian rhetoric in my career. Nevertheless, utopian thought may be significant in anarchism’s moral imagination and therefore also in its praxis. Amster argues that utopian visions and particularly the process of articulating them are a mode of prefiguring. They can reveal the inability of a social order dependent on coercion and submission to respect the individualities of self-governing persons, and also the extent to which it is indeed so dependent (Amster 2009, 290–99). Utopian visions are communal and can enlarge public space through cooperative participation in communities not yet fully in being. I accept this, on the condition that the actions emerge from exigent social conditions and not from an attempt to impose utopia on people who may have other visions. With sufficient discipline, utopian thinking can generate potentialities of presumably unrealisable alternatives and demonstrate practical means to approach them (Shukaitis 2010, 303–11). A good utopia is firmly rooted in reality and is responsive to its ambiguities. It does not cede reality to exercises of power claiming to determine the parameters of how we can act. It can stimulate participation. Utopian thinking is not narrowly realistic, but imaginary. In Newman’s account, it is an escape from reality by opening up alternatives to it through which we can immediately experience emancipation and transformation. It is a ‘(non)-place of alterity’ (Newman 2012, 66–70). I do not see this as an escape; I rather see this as an immersion into reality but without his insistence that it disorder ruling institutions.

But even this expanded notion of utopia allows it little scope in municipal governance. Too much utopia endangers responsible praxis; too little reduces prefiguring. Opposition declaring only utopian purposes will wither to irrelevance or be suppressed. Yet, the absence of revolutionary and utopian discourse may commit even principled opposition to continued dependence on established public policy. A street demonstration against cuts to the municipal appropriations for cultural services, in which on two occasions I have been involved, leads to a mere alleviation of the effects of the cuts through continued, if reduced, access to municipal funds. Dependence is perpetuated, and to that extent domination and submission. This is an unsatisfactory experience of empowerment. More utopian experiments in autonomous culture are needed, even if a small municipality lacks the capability to generate them. But it can sustain them through associational participation, as is now the case in Savonlinna.

Conventional, non-institutional participation may move public policy somewhat towards more liberatory and inclusive practices. In my city, when it was facing bankruptcy and suspension of local government by intervention from the state, utopian visions have been sometimes necessary, even if they have not been effective contributions to managing the immediate problems. It is one thing to stimulate widespread public participation in defence of the municipal theatre because of its contribution to people’s self-governance, and quite another thing to work out the details of its financing and organisation. If the latter fails, the theatre will be abolished, no matter how eloquently it is justified. The theatre’s contribution to amateur performative art, which otherwise might not survive, has utopian implications. In another instance, a scheme to develop an ecologically sustainable, self-governing housing project failed through the refusal of the city to assist in planning and financing it. Utopian experiments, even when only proposed, can challenge the competence of municipal administration and sometimes complement it. The burden on municipal governance is to respond constructively without seeking either to suppress or smother them by incorporating them too facilely into public policy.

Similarly, the concept of revolution cannot be wholly discarded. It need not be, as Miller describes it, an ideological break with the prevailing social order (Miller 1984, 62–77). But anarchism must empower us to extend our receptibility to social forms not yet existing in order to prefigure the dissolution of authoritarian structures and practices. Such empowerment presumes a discourse not wholly disciplined by the interests of the prevailing social order and its exigent problems. Yet, explicit revolutionary rhetoric may not be politically credible. I once proposed to the council that certain social services be administered through self-organised groups rather than be granted directly to individual recipients. It was a tame expression of revolution. The proposal was not legally possible, but it generated some public discussion on the rights of welfare service users, during which I stressed its conservative ramifications. Miller doubts whether revolutionary discourse can lead to evolutionary prefiguring. Somewhat inconsistently, he seems to adhere primarily to the revolutionary discourse of anarchism, or rather, he assumes that anarchists and anarchism rightly do so, whom he then accuses of failure. In my situation, however, revolutionary rhetoric is mostly a mere distraction. The discourses of municipal politics and much more so of associational citizen activism are more palpable and accessible, albeit more ambiguous experiences of the virtues of character for empowerment to communality and prefigurative action.

The notion of revolution may re-emerge with an altered, but related meaning. Thoreau holds that any action from principle rather than expedience is revolutionary because it alters the agent’s relation to all things and persons involved in the action (Thoreau 1975, 119, 130–36). It is incumbent on us to act from principle, despite the pressures of society to do otherwise. Thoreau’s incitement to revolution in this sense is not typically activist. He seeks not to remedy evil or social ills but merely to be as excellently good as his character and situation will allow. This aspiration lends itself easily to a reclusive and self-centred quietism that sits poorly with participation and which too often does not clearly reveal principles or the contingencies of principled action. An uncompromising adherence to this practice of revolution will not always result in effective participation. But anarchist participation cannot forsake principles. Their significance to our character is decisive, and this is a resource for public participation. Not the least of our responsibilities is to address the contradictions among discretely desirable principles in order to pursue them in reciprocally coherent ways. Public policy is always a compromise of principles. Revolutionary rhetoric, genuine or ersatz, may jeopardise principles by severing them from the constraints of policy. We must bracket such self-indulgence.

From the complexities of utopianism and revolution it follows that I must bracket the anarchist perspective of the rejection of the state as a condition for liberation from external authority relying on domination and coercion (Kinna 2005, 54–84). Here, too, an essential truth is blemished by dogmatism. No doubt the state may cause or facilitate inequality, cultural impoverishment and ecological degradation, even in my situation in which the state is largely benign and its representatives well-intentioned. Coercion may always be implicit in the implementation of most state policies on the municipal level as well. Kinna argues, and I agree, that against these aspects of statism we need greater scope for enlightened private judgement and ethical communality. But for the time being, these must be developed within and for a stable social order which can restrain the possible excesses of doctrinal moral dogmatism, which is personal judgement exaggerated into self-righteous authoritarianism through certainty about principles. This is not a virtue of self-governance.

An assertion that statist authority in all its myriad forms always corrupts ethics and usurps self-governance, that it is invariably unjust, exploitative and alienating, is often factually wrong and can only lead to a clumsy rejection of participation in it. This risks an abdication of self-governance and the capacity to encounter and empower the self-governance of others. Kinna suggests that no legitimate mode of governance can flourish within the state. I argue that, despite the recurring tension and conflicts, a statist context may be, in some