Mayor Brett Smiley has said he will veto the Providence Rent Stabilization Act, an ordinance passed by the Providence City Council earlier this month that would cap annual rent increases at four percent. This means the fate of fifty-nine percent of households in Providence—the country’s least affordable city for renters—rests in the hands of a man who owns and lives in a meticulously maintained historic brownstone. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Democratic voters in the city support rent stabilization.
Smiley’s promise of a veto serves as a grim reminder that we live under a highly centralized political system, meaning most people’s basic needs are dependent on officials insulated from the consequences of their decisions. Electing a working-class mayor may provide relief in the short-term, but it’s not necessarily a long-term solution. Under centralized governing systems, social safety nets are inherently fragile. FDR’s sweeping reforms, for example, have been steadily eroded by neoliberal policies since the 1980s. Even if a robust rent stabilization bill were passed, it could be rolled back, returning people to precarious conditions.
What would stop the pendulum from swinging?
One possibility is moving toward a decentralized governance system known as democratic confederalism. Under this system, residents would collectively make decisions about things that directly affect them together, likely through a two-thirds majority vote at general assemblies. (Each assembly would ultimately decide which voting procedures work best for them.)
These assemblies would take place at three tiers: the hyperlocal level, the neighborhood level, and the city level. Federal Hill’s eight-thousand residents, for example, could be organized into about forty hyperlocal “communes.” Each commune would organize their own committees for coordinating basic needs like food, housing, finances, energy, and emergency response. Housing committees would ensure everyone has a roof over their head because those committees would be run by and for the people. There might be a housing database that works similarly to checking out a book at the library.
Each committee at the commune-level would select one or two delegates who would then coordinate with other communes’ committees in neighborhood-wide assemblies. Every neighborhood would select delegates from their committees who would serve as delegates at the city-wide level. Unlike representatives in our current system, these delegates would serve as spokespeople for their committees, not as decision makers. They’d be instantly recalled and replaced if they weren’t enacting the will of the people.
In this type of system, during a historic blizzard like the one we saw in February, neighbors would not need to wait for support from a top-down government. They’d already be organized and – ideally – well-resourced to begin shoveling and plowing their own streets. Neighbors would be resilient in the face of crisis because they’d be equipped, supported, and encouraged to respond to calamity together by design. Governance wouldn’t be dissolved into informal networks of friends helping each other out. It would be restructured toward a participatory, self-governing system.
I recognize this vision may sound overly ambitious or idealistic. But a democratic confederalist political system has been put into practice against the odds, albeit imperfectly, by millions of Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians and others in North and East Syria for the past 15 or so years. Though this woman-driven and Kurdish-led revolution, known as Rojava, may be dissolving or reformulating as the Syrian state consolidates its power, it offers an inspiring, real-world example of a participatory, feminist, and directly democratic system.
Right now, there isn’t organizing on this scale in the U.S. Yet grassroots assemblies – humble building blocks of a democratic confederalist system I described in an article for Truthout last year – have cropped up throughout the country over the past couple years. The Providence General Assembly experiments with voting on proposals through a two-thirds majority directly democratic decision-making process and organizing working groups that tackle political issues every other Saturday at Mathewson Street Church. Assemblies in Detroit, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Tulsa, Oklahoma are similarly practicing self-governance on a small-scale.
Our current system clearly isn’t working for anyone except the richest few. Nearly half of Black households and more than half of Latino households are food insecure in Rhode Island. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rates per capita in the developed world yet is not the safest. The imperialist war against Iran and Lebanon is killing thousands and destabilizing the whole world. Meanwhile, the climate crisis threatens life itself.
In this context, it may be more absurd to continue going down our current path than to re-structure things. As the Creative Capital, let’s get creative!
What systems could we create together that would actually take care of everyone, and of the planet? What are plausible paths for getting there? Could we elect officials/delegates who might commit to transferring their power to the people? Or should we try to implement a decentralized system ourselves? Or both?
The fate of our planet, strangled by the crises of centralized and extractive systems, depends on our answers and actions.
Ella Fassler is an independent journalist and researcher based in Federal Hill. They are a contributor to Truthout, and have been published in The Boston Globe, Teen Vogue, The Nation, In These Times, and elsewhere. They run a local newsletter called Researching Rhode Island.
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