Why are confederations of participatory communities needed?
Since not all issues are local, the neighbourhood and community assemblies will also elect mandated and recallable delegates to the larger-scale units of self-government in order to address issues affecting larger areas, such as urban districts, the municipality as a whole, the county, the bioregion, and ultimately the entire planet. Thus the assemblies will confederate at several levels in order to develop and coordinate common policies to deal with common problems. This need for cooperation does not imply a centralised body. As Kropotkin pointed out, anarchists “understand that if no central government was needed to rule the independent communes, if national government is thrown overboard and national unity is obtained by free federation, then a central municipal government becomes equally useless and noxious. The same federative principle would do within the commune.” [Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 163-164] As in the economic federation of syndicates, the lower levels wil
