Cutline · one of sixteen

C·L·N·G

The Municipalist

collective · decentralized · national · gradual

Libertarian socialism

Build it from the town up. Co-ops, community land trusts, public banks, participatory budgets — no seizure of the centre, because the centre is not where the commonwealth gets made.


What the four letters mean

C Ownershipcollectivenot private (P)
L Controldecentralizednot centralized (A)
N Horizonnationalnot internationalist (I)
G Methodgradualnot rupture (R)

Where this has shown up

HistoricallyGuild socialism, Mondragón, Porto Alegre, the Preston model, libertarian municipalism.

All sixteen

Columns: collective → private. Within each half, internationalist then national.

Rows: centralized → decentralized. Within each half, rupture then gradual.

This page is not a diagnosis

The Municipalist is a box, and a box is a compression. It keeps the sign of each score and throws away the magnitude — so two people filed here can sit at opposite ends of it, and somebody two points the other side of a cut line has more in common with this type than with their own. The four axes are real. The lines drawn across them are a decision somebody made.

The point

Cutline will tell you the margin it used to hand you each of your four letters — including when one of them was a coin toss. That is the part every other sixteen-type system leaves out.

Take Cutline · 24 statements