Top Down vs Bottom Up: Time to Reframe the

Debate?
by Len Krimerman, coordinating editor, GEO - Grassroots Economic Organizing

"The state's supremacy approximates that of the conductor of an orchestra, who

makes no music himself but harmonizes those who in producing it are doing the
thing intrinsically worthwhile....the national state [should be seen] as just an
instrumentality for promoting and protecting other and more voluntary forms of
association, rather than a supreme end in itself."

John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 202-3.

When I was growing up, Hershel, my favorite uncle, once said to me: "When
anyone gives you a choice between A and B, take C." According to Ross Gandy,
Justin Podur, and Bob Stone, we must choose either "state power" or grassroots
control from below. Gandy holds that the former is indispensable, though he
concedes that top down transformation leads us down a repressive and
bureaucratic path and, therefore, is himself inclined towards Bakuninist base-
level organization... against the Jacobins. Podur opts for a bottom up strategy
involving participatory planning among co-ops as well as cross-border solidarity
along the lines pioneered, e.g., by the Zapatistas, but fails (according to Gandy)
to show how this will not be wiped out by hostile ruling classes running national
states. Bob's clarifying synopsis of the Gandy and Podur positions in issue #55
gives this venerable debate think of Proudhon and Bakunin vs. Marx and Engels
a lively and sharpened contemporary form.

So our grassroots and bottom up efforts need top down state power, though it will
destroy us. What we want participatory democracy and a solidarity economy of
grassroots co-ops cannot become more than marginal in world of 200 nation
states. We are thus caught in an intractable dilemma. We must choose between
A (state power) or B (grassroots democracy), but, by themselves, neither can get
us even close to where we want to go. Choosing the first leads us back to the
failed and oppressive Iron Curtain path; choosing the second, makes us easy
prey for the US empire and its military, corporate, and cultural hegemony.

Choose C , Hershel might have said. But is there a C out there in this case? On
the face of it, I'd suggest, there is indeed. Why can we not imagine, for starters, a
state or nation that:

- directs much or most of its resources tax revenues, technical, educational, and
financial expertise into the process of rebuilding from below.

- encourages and supports grassroots groups to shape, or interpret/enact, the

priorities of the overall community (nation/state).
- includes a chamber constituted by grassroots and non-governmental
organizations, whose collective voice is of equal or greater importance with that
of any geographically representative Congress.

- whose role, in general, is not to single-handedly establish policy -or or compel

compliance with its self-shaped dictates, but (largely, mainly) to help develop the
skills by which, and create the public environments in which, local and grassroots
groups can resolve their differences and shape policies they find in their common
interest.

L'etat c'est nous

Of course, like Rome or corporate capitalism, this humane or fusion sort of state
cannot be built overnight. But it seems to me a genuine option, one that would
avoid the dead end horns of (a) using repressive and bureaucratic means to
reach a future ideal society where robust and diversity-embracing democracy
blossoms, and (b) relying entirely on resource-poor and (often) politically
impotent citizen-based initiatives to offset (much less displace) institutions and
organizations whose vast wealth and power is matched only by their capacity to
unleash greed and domination.

Genuine, but not easy. Conceivable, approachable, but no rose garden.

Fortunately, what George Benello once called working models do exist: think
here of Emilia-Romagna's blend of pro-active government intervention
(supporting child care centers, building housing for workers, providing marketing
and other technical asisstance to strengthen local enterprise) and a cooperative
flexible manufacturing network economy. Or the replications throughout the
southeastern region of Brazil of the Porto Alegre participatory budget process,
conceived and engineered by the Workers Party, whose candidate, Lula, has
finally won election to the presidency of this country. (Would that these Italian and
Brazilian initiatives were combined!) And of course, the World and Regional
Social Forums provide cross-national examples of emerging horizontal alliances.
Beyond these, much of what G. D. H. Cole wrote almost a century ago about
guild socialism, with its multiplicity of associations selecting their own member-
delegates rather than relying on political representatives, speaks to ways of
getting beyond the dilemma's usual and narrow pair of suspects. So does John
Dewey's attack, in the work quoted above, on the traditional doctrine of exclusive
national sovereignty. And so do two very recent books Tom Atlee's The Tao of
Democracy and Archon Fung and Erik Wright's, Empowered Participatory
Governance, both of which concretely illuminate fresh forms of democratic
governance that colonize the state in ways that begin at least to provide
resources and influence to local and grassroots organizations.

Of course we will all need to invent our own site-specific forms of robust
democracy, but there is no shortage, given the above, of conceptual as well as
practical guideposts that can light our path.
Social change movements, have long debated whether society should be
transformed using state power or rebuilt from below in the shell of the old. (Ross
Gandy) Which foot goes first, state power or grassroots economics? (Bob Stone)
Perhaps this debate has gone on too long. There is no one single form of the
state, nor of grassroots democracy. Such a skeletal dichotomy need not, should
not, present us with any intractable dilemmas or force us to choose sides;
indeed, it seems like a weapon devised to divide and conquer the myriad forms
of creative and effective resistance. As such, it can only retard our efforts to birth
that new world Arundhati Roy has told us she can already hear breathing.

Better perhaps to start building our many roads with bridges linking centralists
and decentralists, those who would colonize the state with grassroots insurgents,
those working within and those building outside of the (current) state. To do this,
we need to reject the classical vertical debate between statists and solidarists,
top down and bottom up strategies, etc., and reframe it horizontally: that is, so
that we focus on what sort of state, or form of governance, would most embody
and support our grassroots initiatives; and, more broadly, would most reflect a
society with a place for every human gift and voice.