Aren participatory communities and confederations just new states?
No. As we have seen in section B.2, a state can be defined both by its structure and its function. As far as structure is concerned, a state involves the politico-military and economic domination of a certain geographical territory by a ruling elite, based on the delegation of power into the hands of the few, resulting in hierarchy (centralised authority). As Kropotkin argued, “the word ‘State’ . . . should be reserved for those societies with the hierarchical system and centralisation.” [Ethics, p. 317f] In a system of federated participatory communities, however, there is no ruling elite, and thus no hierarchy, because power is retained by the lowest-level units of confederation through their use of direct democracy and mandated, rotating, and recallable delegates to meetings of higher-level confederal bodies. This eliminates the problem in “representative” democratic systems of the delegation of power leading to the elected officials becoming isolated from and beyond the control of
