Becoming mayor to abolish the position of mayor? Thinking the line between reform and revolution in a Communalist perspective

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, many movements have emerged across the world not only to criticize the state and capitalism, but also to create a space for direct democracy. Whether it is Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados movement in Spain or Nuit Debout in France, these calls for the physical occupation of public squares have connected social movements from different horizons. While these spaces have given people a glimpse of how power could be exercised in a horizontal and non-hierarchical way, the fundamental issue is that they had no power to exercise. These occupations of public spaces eventually vanished due to the lack of institutionalization of their project of social transformation. Attempting to remedy both the lack of power and institutionalization, many municipalist movements have arisen throughout the world. They have created citizens platforms, run for municipal elections, were elected and are now trying to change the game of traditional representative democracy from city hall. This paper primarily intends to create a conceptual framework to capture the relation of these movements to the existing legal and political order. It will analyze the tensions inevitably generated when movements adopt the reformist strategy of winning municipal elections in order to advance a revolutionary project, that is creating a society in which the main political unit and the locus of self-government is the municipality, and not the state