>From an essay by Bookchin's wife:

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/janet-biehl-bookchin-breaks-with-anarchism

Some members of the Anarchos collective strongly disagreed with its
calls for participation in municipal electoral campaigns. That is,
democracy, even face-to-face democracy, based as it is on the will of
the majority, is inherently tyrannical. Malina offered an anarchist
alternative:

Yes, the people should take over local control at the community level
— but not through the municipal governments which, through party
lines, are always closely bound to state and federal governmental
structures. Instead, the people should take over control by creating
community structures from below. Such structures will not exist
parallel to the governmental municipal structures — but will in fact
— wrest the power from them. ... The criticism here is not of the
forms of local organization that the Anarchos group proposes, but
only of the submission to the jurisdiction of the local
constitutional government.

Murray surely responded in some way to Malina, but to my knowledge no
written record of it survives. He recalled the incident in 1985:

Someone wrote a reply to me stating that anarchists should never
participate in any elections of any kind ... I’m saying that city
government, as you call it, has to be restructured at the grassroots
level. ... what anarchists should be doing is not hesitating to get
involved in local politics to create forms of organization in which
they may run once they’ve established these forms or, alternatively,
running on a platform to establish these forms.

Malina’s objection would recur frequently in the following decades, but
few expressed it as clearly and thoroughly as she did, at the outset.
Murray, in turn, would frequently respond to Malina’s type of argument
about parallel institutions. Alternative community groups that exist
parallel to the municipality have no real power, he argued. Citizens
might be motivated to attend one or two meetings, out of concern over a
specific issue, but they would have no real reason to continue to
participate in them over time, or to maintain their existence for its
own sake. For a group of people to actively work to keep an institution
alive, it must have some form of structural power.

Murray would later conclude that anarchists misunderstand the nature of
power and were therefore unprepared to address it.

Anarchists conceive of power as an essentially malignant evil that
must be destroyed. Proudhon, for example, once stated that he would
divide and subdivide power until it, in effect, ceased to exist ... a
notion as absurd as the idea that gravity can be abolished ... The
truly pertinent issue ... is not whether power will exist but whether
it will rest in the hands of an elite or in the hands of the people
... Social revolutionaries ... must address the problem of how to
give power a concrete institutional emancipatory form.

Libertarian municipalism
========================

In the early 1980s Murray developed his ideas about face-to-face
democracy into a specific approach. Libertarian municipalism was his
strategy for achieving democratic revolutionary institutions, as well as
the political infrastructure of a rational ecological society.

We need a “new politics,” Murray argued, one based, not in a national
capital, but at the community level. “Here, in the most immediate
environment of the individual — the community, the neighborhood, the
town, or the village — where private life slowly begins to phase into
public life, the authentic locus for functioning on a base level exists
insofar as urbanization has not totally destroyed it.” Here a “new
politics” of citizenship may be instituted, one in which people take
charge of their own political life, through participation in popular
assemblies. Murray distinguished between politics (which is practiced by
citizens in assemblies) and statecraft (which is practiced by
officeholders in the institutions of the nation-state). He believed that
politics must be “a school for genuine citizenship.

Libertarian municipalist activists would therefore create groups to run
candidates in municipal elections, on platforms calling for the creation
of face-to-face democracy in popular assemblies. When the citizenry
elected enough such candidates to office, the new city councilors would
fulfill the one purpose for which they had been elected: they would
alter city and town charters to create popular assemblies. Thus the
assemblies would come about as a result of a conscious devolution of
power from existing statist municipal institutions: The assemblies, so
empowered, would take over the functions of municipal governments. They
would municipalize the economy, taking over the ownership and management
of local economic life, allowing the people of community to make
decisions about economic activity in their area.

...