Rebel Cities-David Harvey

THE CREATION OF THE URBAN COMMONS 85municipal assemblies, and the delegates will be recallable and answerableat all times to the will of the municipal assemblies. The confederalcouncilsbecome the means fo r interlinking vUlages, towns, neighborhoods, andcities into confederal networks. Power thus flows from the bottom upinstead of from the top down, and in confederations, the flow of powerfrom the bottom up diminishes with the scope of the federal councilranging territorially from localities and regions and from regions to everbroaderterritorial areas. 29Bookchin's proposal is by far the most sophisticated radical proposalto deal with the creation and collective use of the commons across avariety of scales, and is well worth elaborating as part of the radical anticapitalistagenda.This issue is all the more pressing because of the violent neoliberalattack upon the public provision of social public goods over the last thirtyyears or more. This corresponded to the ro ot-and-branch attack upon therights and power of organized labor that began in the 1970s (from Chileto Britain), but it focused on the costs of social reproduction of labordirectly. Capital has long preferred to treat the costs of social reproductionas an externality-a cost for which it bears no market responsibility-butthe social-democratic movement and the active threat of a communistalternative forced capital to internalize some of those costs, along withsome of the externality costs attributable to environmental degradation,up until the 1970s in the advanced capitalist world. The aim of neoliberalpolicies since 1980 or so has been to dump these costs into the globalcommons of social reproduction and the environment, creating, as itwere, a negative commons in which whole populations are forced nowto dwell. Questions of social reproduction, gender, and the commons areinterlinked.30The response on the part of capital to the global crisis conditionsafter 2007 has been to implement a draconian global austerity plan thatdiminishes the supply of public goods to support both social reproductionand environmental amelioration, thereby diminishing the qualitiesof the commons in both instances. It has also used the crisis to facilitateeven more predatory activity in the private appropriation of the