Egalitarian Local Sovereignty: YES! Mere Decentralization: No!

Class inequality with decentralization or with centralization, either way, is still class inequality, not egalitarianism

I am going to use a recent news event in my state of Massachusetts to discuss the general issues it raises, issues having to do with what kind of society do we want, and how can we state what we want without being hoodwinked by the powers that be into accidentally fighting for what we do not actually want: the old “Be careful what you wish for” problem. Here’s the news event as reported in the Oh-so-liberal Boston Globe owned by the billionaire John Henry:

What general principles of governance are raised by this news event?

First, what are the relevant aspects of this news event?

As you can see from the above, the state of Massachusetts has a new law that supposedly is about ensuring that there is affordable housing for all residents of Massachusetts, something that is notoriously lacking presently. This law requires every town in the state to make its zoning laws such that affordable housing can be built. The underlying assumption here is that affordable housing means multi-family housing—apartment buildings—and not single-family homes on relatively large plots of land.

The Town of Milton is almost all single-family homes on relatively large plots of land, and the residents of Milton recently voted NOT to change their zoning to be in compliance with the new state law, i.e., not to allow construction of multi-family apartment buildings.

The Massachusetts attorney general is now suing the Town of Milton to force the town to make its zoning compliant with the new state law so that affordable housing can be built there.

What general principle is implicitly advocated by the Massachusetts attorney general?

The attorney general’s lawsuit is based on the concept of sovereignty and relative sovereignty. “Sovereignty” of a government means that is has the right to enact laws that everybody within the given government’s jurisdiction must obey. “Relative sovereignty” of a government means that it has the right to enact only laws that do not conflict with laws of the sovereign government and that everybody within its jurisdiction must obey these laws as well as those of the sovereign government.

The attorney general’s lawsuit thus implicitly espouses the idea that the state of Massachusetts is and ought to be relatively (to the federal government) sovereign, and that towns must obey the state’s laws.

What does the liberal wing of our ruling class tell us about governmental sovereignty?

The members of the liberal wing of our ruling class tell us that federal sovereignty and relative sovereignty of the states within the United States are necessary in order to have a just society. The reason, they say, is because the federal government needs to have sovereignty in order to prevent people at the state or local level from enacting unjust laws such as the famous racist Jim Crow laws that southern states enforced until the federal government stepped in with laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that over-rode those racist laws. People old enough remember the dramatic way that president Eisenhower used federal troops to prevent Governor Wallace of Alabama from enforcing racial segregation of schools in that state. “Yay!” for federal sovereignty, said all those who opposed the racist Jim Crow laws and racial segregation.

The liberal mind set is that a strong central government (federal over states, and state over local towns) is required to make our society just. This is the mind set that supports the Massachusetts attorney general’s lawsuit against the supposedly unjust recent vote by the Town of Milton.

What we’re wrongly taught about the Civil War also makes people who oppose racism think that federal sovereignty is a wonderful idea. The orthodox idea about the Civil War is that the Southern states, in order to defend the institution of slavery against the growing opposition to it, embraced the notion of “states’ rights” that says the states, not the federal government, should have full sovereignty. Supposedly the southern states viewed federal sovereignty as a threat to their “right” to maintain slavery. This view of things makes anti-racism people fans of federal sovereignty. But they are mislead by an illogical argument resting on a false history.

The southern states of what became the slave-owners’ Confederacy (which, by the way was hated by most white southerners as I show here) were not opposed to federal sovereignty; quite the opposite. Here’s why. The U.S. Constitution said (at the time before the Thirteenth Amendment) that all states must capture and return runaway slaves to their owners. Here it is: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

The southern states, in their Declarations of Secession, complained that the northern states were not obeying federal law! The southern states wanted federal law to trump state law! This is the opposite of “states’ rights.” Read about this in detail here.

There is thus nothing about federal sovereignty that is inherently anti-racism. A federal government can be more racist that a state government, and likewise a state government can be more racist than a local town government, or vice versa; it depends on the particular circumstances. The liberal wing of the ruling class has bamboozled good anti-racism people into thinking wrongly that they must support the principle of federal sovereignty (and state relative sovereignty) in order to oppose racism. It is not so!

Is the state of Massachusetts government really on the side of people who lack affordable housing?

The Oh-so-liberal Boston Globe wants its readers to believe that the state of Massachusetts is suing the Town of Milton in order to make our society more just, in particular more just for people who cannot afford housing. But this is not true.

If the state of Massschusetts government were truly on the side of the people who cannot afford housing then it would be opposed to class inequality, which it is obviously not. The reason there are poor people who cannot afford decent housing is because the ruling billionaire plutocracy wants it to be that way. This plutocracy wants there to be a lot of have-nots whom it treats like dirt (see many examples of this here) for the purpose of keeping our society one in which there are some rich haves and many relatively poor have-nots. The Massachusetts government does absolutely nothing to challenge the power of our ruling billionaire plutocracy.

The ruling billionaire plutocracy stays in power by maintaining an economic system based on the principle, “You can only have what you can afford to buy.” The plutocracy ensures that many people can only survive by working jobs that pay too little for them to afford to buy a decent home. The way to make it so that people who today cannot afford a decent home would be able to have a decent home is to make our society be based on the truly just, and widely supported principle, “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” Read about this principle here. Yet this is the very LAST thing that the government of the state of Massachusetts will ever do.

Are the people of the Town of Milton really the bad guys here?

The median household income in the Town of Milton is $153,971 and the median household value is $710,700. The average household income in the state in 2022 was $134,568, which is close to the median of Milton. This means that if all the income in the state were shared equally among all households, then households in Massachusetts would be nearly as wealthy as half of those in Milton. And this is before taking into account how wealthy people in Massachusetts would be if we were not being forced to produce trillions of dollars worth of stuff that is not for our benefit, as touched on below.

In a truly just Massachusetts, everybody who contributed reasonably according to ability would live in homes as nice as those in Milton. The wealth that people in Massachusetts (and the U.S. generally) produce by their work presently goes not to creating things such as nice homes for them to live in but rather things such as a military force that keeps the rich in power over the entire globe by massacring the have-nots of the world whenever they try to make things be a bit more just. Read about this wealth in my 2014 article “Where’d All the Damn Money Go?”

It takes a LOT of chutzpah* for John Henry, the billionaire owner of the Boston Globe (and of the Boston Red Sox baseball team) to paint the people of Milton as the bad guys for wanting to have their town’s new housing be the kind of nice homes that ALL (who worked reasonably according to ability) would have if the billionaires allowed us to make our society a truly just one. By painting the people of Milton as the bad guys the Oh-so-liberal Boston Globe serves the likes of John Henry’s billionaire buddies by pitting the poorest people against those who are not as poor and who are not the cause of the poverty of others. It’s done in the name of asserting that poor people don’t deserve to live in nice homes but only in crowded cheap apartment buildings. And this is all done in the name of supporting a lawsuit based on the wrongheaded notion that to oppose injustice it’s really important to make sure that local communities bow to the laws of higher-level governments that are totally controlled by an oppressive billionaire plutocracy!

What about the supposed merits of ‘decentralization’?

Curiously, when the context is changed, the same good people who support federal sovereignty will sometimes turn around and support the opposite of federal sovereignty, namely ‘decentralization,’ on the grounds that the more decentralized government is the closer to “the people” it is and hence the more democratic it is. Thus many good people support things such as the secession of liberal Vermont from the union (although they might not stick to their pro-decentralization view when Texas secession comes up.) On the world stage, some good people look favorably on parts of larger nations trying to become (or remain) independent of a larger nation: Scotland from the United Kingdom, Ukraine from the Russian Federation, the Donbass oblasts of Ukraine from Ukraine, South Sudan from Sudan, etc.

The fact that the same people who support decentralization in one context oppose it in another reflects the fact that there is nothing about mere decentralization that is either good or bad. If an oppressive class has the real power in a decentralized government, then that decentralized government is an oppressive government; and vice versa. Feudalism in Europe was decentralized, and oppressive. Warlords in Asia were decentralized, and oppressive. Those who call for decentralization should be careful what they wish for.

The Moral of the Story

We must be careful what we wish for. It is a big mistake to wish for federal sovereignty or for the contrary states’ rights. It is likewise a big mistake to wish for state relative (to the federal government) sovereignty or for the contrary local town sovereignty. Oppressive ruling classes would love for us to wish for something that doesn’t actually entail the abolition of class inequality.

The way to abolish class inequality, which is the root cause of so many injustices such as racism (used to divide-and-rule the have-nots to keep the haves in power), is to aim explicitly for exactly that: the abolition of class inequality.

What about the egalitarian idea of sovereignty being held only by local assemblies of egalitarians?

The idea that sovereignty should be held only by local assemblies of egalitarians is very different from the idea of mere decentralization. Mere decentralization says nothing about whether the people with real power are for or against class inequality. In contrast, the idea that sovereignty should only be held by local assemblies of egalitarians says explicitly that only egalitarians—people who oppose class inequality—should have the real power. The reason why only LOCAL assemblies of egalitarians rather than a national (or state-level) assembly should have sovereign power is because a national (or state-level) assembly, in contrast to a local one, can too easily be seized control of by an oppressor class, as I discuss here. And the reason why sovereignty should be held only by a local assembly OF EGALITARIANS is discussed here.

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make our society a genuine democracy.

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*Chutzpah is a Yiddish word the meaning of which is often explained as what it takes for the young man who was found guilty of murdering both his parents to ask the judge for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.