(P.S. Sorry for the late response, I had apparently notifications off :/ )

In fact, the First Vermont Republic banned slavery from the beginning in its original 1777 constitution, 88 years before the US 13th amendment banned slavery in 1865. The Second Vermont Republic has been trying to secede from the US since 2003. See: http://www.vermontindependent.org/
http://vermontrepublic.org/

Until I finally looked them up I thought that the terms “communal” and “communalism” referred to the same thing, the common ownership of property, yet “communalism” actually means something very different.

To avoid confusing the terms as have I, keep in mind that “communalism” is a political system in which independent states comprise a nation which has very little or no central authority, having only powers granted to it by the independent states, which they can recind or modify at any time. And further, those independent states in the communalist system can have internal economic systems which emphasize either private property, or common property, or a mixture of both. They need not be strictly communal as the term would seem to suggest.

Essentially, “communal” is an economic term while “communalism” is a political or governance term.

It took me a decade to finally look these terms up at Dictionary.com, after I first learned that Murray Bookchin had used the term “communalism” in place of the term he devised of “confederal municipalism” to mean the same thing. Evidently, it took him a while to realize that there was already a term for the decentralist ideal which he advocated.

According to Dictionary.com the term “communalism” was first used to mean a decentralized nation of independent states in the early 1870s. So Bookchin did not make this up or change the definition, as I thought he had.

With this understanding I might now be able to get behind Bookchin’s concept of “communalism,” except that if I use this term in its correct meaning, other people are still going to confuse the term to mean “communal” in the same way as have I. Particularly those who wish to preserve the centralized nation-state.

So for me the term “communalism” is not the best way to convey the intended meaning of the decentralized, confederal political system. “Confederal” also means power-to-the-states as opposed to centralized “federalism.” Yet using the term “confederal” brings association with the slave-states’ Confederacy and the American Civil War, so that term is problematic as well.

Eleanor Finley’s ROAR magazine article, “Reason, Creativity and Freedom: the Communalist Model” (February 11, 2017) suggests that someone else who has been influenced by Murray Bookchin’s ideas also did not like the term “communalism,” coining for use in its place the term “democratic confederalism.” This term was created by the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, looking for a political system for his nationlesss ethnic group scattered through parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Yet there is that problematic term “confederal” again.

So what term can be used for conveying the intended meaning while avoiding misunderstanding and negative associations? The term “democracy” or “democratic” is an essential modifier for conveying the ideal of local self-determination and independence from centralization, so that word is needed. A noun that conveys the intended meaning of independence is “decentralism,” and so the term that I think best represents the desired meaning for the preferred political-economic system is then “democratic-decentralism.” I suppose that will get shortened to “dem-decism” or simply “D-D,” yet at least there should no longer be any confusion about what we are talking about as the best of all possible political systems.

Democratic-decentralism may actually be seen, eventually, as representing the ideals of both the radical left and right, showing that on the political scale of liberalism-to-conservatism, when you take the extremes far enough, they eventually curve around to come together in agreement. This shows the viability and efficacy of the political structures of “democratic-decentralism.”

What remains for clarification is just what a democratic-decentralist nation-state would look like. It certainly would not look like the current government of the United States of America. The first constitution written by the original thirteen American Colonies specified a confederal system, which was soon scrapped for the centralized Constitution that we know and (more-or-less) love. That was done for a reason, and it is hard to see America going back to confederalism, yet previously I could not envision America going where it is now headed under president number 45, so perhaps if the current conservative national administration continues the way it seems to be going, democratic-decentalism may become a national issue.

The following about the use of the term “communalism” is quoted from, The Intentioneer’s Bible: Interwoven Stories of the Parallel Cultures of Plenty and Scarcity, by A. Allen Butcher, published May, 2016 as an ebook at Amazon.com

Book V: Chapter 7 – Anarchists versus Marxist Communism

Among the most notable anarchists, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) was a printer in a small French town who was the first to call his theories “anarchist.” He moved to Paris in 1838 and published, What is Property? in 1840, popularizing the phrase, “property is theft.” His 1846 publication, System of Economic Contradictions, was attacked by Karl Marx, after which Proudhon’s reputation as the founder of anarchism was assured. As Murray Bookchin explains, Proudhon’s anarchism envisioned a society of small craftsmen and collectively-owned industries exchanging their products without competition or profit. Proudhon went so far as to experiment with a “Mutual Credit Bank” which neither paid nor charged interest, similar to the work of the “first American anarchist” Josiah Warren. In Proudhon’s theory, municipalities would join in local and regional federations, with minimal or no delegation of power to a central government. (Bookchin, 1977, pp. 20-1; Dolgoff, p. 67)

This form of anarchist theory is similar to confederal or libertarian municipalism, advocated in the late 20th century by social ecologists and Left Greens inspired in part by Murray Bookchin.

Anarchist political thought has usually proposed that social cooperation beyond the local level should take place through voluntary federations of relatively autonomous individuals, productive enterprises, or communities. While classical anarchist theorists such as Proudhon and Bakunin called such a system “federalism,” Bookchin calls his variation on this theme “confederalism.” (Clark, p. 176)

Murray Bookchin’s theory evolved over the decades, to where in 2002 he wrote in the article, The Communalist Project, his view of “communalism” as being different from anarchism, communism, socialism, and syndicalism. Eirik Eiglad writes in his book, Social Ecology and Communalism, that Bookchin’s attempt was to “go beyond all the ideologies of the traditional Left” in using a term that Bookchin himself stated, “originated in the Paris Commune of 1871.” (Bookchin, 2002, p. 98; Eiglad, p. 15)

While it is true that the Commune of Paris used a municipalist structure for local self-government, inspired in part by Proudhonist anarchism, in English the term “communalism” means something different than “municipalism.” Although large communal societies may look like small towns, they are not what Bookchin means, nor what the Paris Commune was during its short life. “Communal” typically refers to the common ownership of property, while Bookchin’s reference to the Paris Commune defines the term “communalism” as meaning autonomous districts of a city using a federal or confederal structure for participatory urban governance. Bookchin’s focus is upon decision-making or governance with no particular ownership structure or economic system identified in his use of the term “communalism.”

The confusion comes in part from the fact that in 19th century France, town and city governments were called “communes,” meaning that they had local autonomy, while the French national government refused to grant autonomy and self-governance to the City of Paris, similar to how the U.S. Congress manages Washington D.C. Since in English the term “commune” means something very different than in French, Murray Bookchin’s use of the French meaning makes it difficult for contemporary English-speaking people to understand Bookchin’s and friends’ meaning when they use the term “communalism.”

References:

Bookchin, Murray. (1977). The Spanish anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936. New York: Harper Colophon Books.

Bookchin, Murray. (2002, September 1). The communalist project. Harbinger: A social ecology journal. See: Institute for Social Ecology at social-ecology.org/wp/2002/09/harbinger-vol-3-no-1-the-communalist-project

Dolgoff, Sam. (1974) The anarchist collectives: Workers’ self-management in the Spanish Revolution 1936-1939. New York: Free Life Editions.

Clark, John. (1998). Municipal Dreams: A social ecological critique of Bookchin’s politics. In Andrew Light (Ed.), Social Ecology after Bookchin. New York: The Guilford Press.

Eiglad, Eirik. (2007). Social Ecology and Communalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press.