Participatory Democracy- Bravo!

Participatory democracy and activist civil

society: against neoliberalism

In the approach to community development that we are labelling activist

civil society ( following Kaldor, 2003), civil society is conceived of as an

activist realm that exists in tension with, but extraneous to, both formal poli-

tics and the market. It draws on an intellectual heritage that aligns it with

civic republicanism and radical pluralism, particularly in its orientation

to civil society as a public sphere where active citizenship is conceived of

in political terms, rather than the nebulous ‘voluntary’ Putnamian construc-

tion, and where inclusivity is a key characteristic. This view places the

assumed viability and vitality of liberal democracy under great scrutiny,

and particularly the neoliberal agenda that liberal democracies have

aligned themselves with in the west over the last 20 or so years.

This approach critiques the aspects of liberal democracy such as its

inability to redeem its own promises of equality; its tendency to develop

overweening state bureaucracy; its inability and/or unwillingness to

redistribute wealth and eradicate poverty; its reluctance to extend full

citizenship to an array of marginalized groups as diverse as, for example,

women, the disabled, asylum-seekers and ethnic minorities; its recent ten-

dency to erode on a slow but inexorable basis established civil, social and

political rights such as the right to association, the right to collective bar-

gaining and the right to peaceful protest; while also being heavily critical

of the primacy afforded to the market as the expression par excellence of

social organization, and the attendant paring back of the welfare state. In

addition to this critique of political society, this approach also condemns

the encroachment of oligarchical capitalism into the lives of ordinary

people to an extent hitherto unexperienced, where unelected bodies such

as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Group of

Eight (G8) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) exert global influence

beyond the capability of most states. It is common within this view that gov-

ernments are routinely held to be at the behest of multi-national corpor-

ations (see Klein, 2007), and that representative politics therefore has

limited legitimacy.

In contrast, civil society is seen as the potential redeemer of the failed

promises of liberal democracy, as a rallying point against the perceived

injustices of global capitalism, and is held to represent the self-activation

of the citizenry in the face of the perceived encroachment of the unelected

bodies named above into the lives of ordinary people. Civil society is held

to be both site and actor in resisting these manifestations of oligarchical

capitalism, being a force for democratization. For post-Marxists like

Cohen and Arato (1992), Habermas (1996), Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and

Melucci (1989, 1995, 1996), both politics and social relations have become

decoupled from their traditional class moorings and are now more frag-

mented, predominantly along identitarian lines. As such, they see civil

society in predominantly cultural terms – as the ‘lifeworld’, in a celebrated

phrase – which in post-industrial societies comes under attack from the

bureaucratizing logic of the ‘system’, i.e. the economy and state. For post-

Marxists, the most important civil society actors are social movements. In

these views, social movements are the dynamic component of civil

society that has both a defensive quality ( particularistic, identity based)

and an offensive quality (universal, publicly oriented). Post-Marxists

stress the continuance of the liberal democratic project, albeit they envisage

an extensive reformation of it by civil society. It is the rejection of this pos-

ition, and the retention of aspects of class theory, that distinguishes post-

Marxists in the activist meaning of civil society from neo-Gramscians.

Neo-Gramscianism is, in its essential form, a reformulated Marxist

perspective that while accepting the neo-Marxist diagnosis of the death of

the Marxian political subject (the working class) refutes the attendant

claim of the eclipse of capitalism as the organizing principle of late

modernity. In doing this, neo-Gramscians rely on a predominantly cultural

conception of social class that stresses the continuous contingency of social

relations, and people’s responses to them. In this view, most recently and

most popularly articulated by Hardt and Negri (2000, 2005), class is con-

ceived of as a relationship rather than an abstract entity, as a process

rather than an objectively existing phenomenon, and as something built

rather than something given. In this sense, neo-Gramscian perspectives

draw on the legacy of cultural Marxism to be found, for example, in Thomp-

son (1963), in which both the nature of the classed relationship and the con-

ception of the classes are constantly negotiated and renegotiated in an

unfolding dialectic.

Civil society remains a vital category for neo-Gramscians, although they

do not ascribe to that category the level of certainty generally given over to

it by post-Marxists. Rather, the contingency outlined above gives a contem-

porary view of class as one decoupled from our traditional understanding

of the labouring classes to a decentred, networked and nodal conception

based on the idea of multiple oppressions stemming from the same

source, which gives rise to a locally distinct but globally linked struggle

for emancipation. In this view, civil society’s goal is to increase democracy,

eradicate poverty and attain peace. There are, of course, divisions within

this approach, but they centre more on tactics in this globalized view of

social struggle than they do on social analysis. For example, Hardt and

Negri (2005) stress the importance of the development of a global civil

society and attendant global democratic institutions as a means for achiev-

ing these goals, as do Falk (1993) and Kaldor (2003). In contrast, Ayres

(2003), Laxar and Halperin (2003) and Hamilton (2003) all contend that

the implicit assumption underpinning such a strategy – that state sover-

eignty and state structures are in terminal decline – is mistaken and Euro-

centric. Writing from the perspective of the majority south, they contend the

response to ‘Empire’ should be reasserted localized state sovereignty, and

not transnational civil society. Indeed, they go further, suggesting that the

very existence of a global civil society is overstated, arguing that purported

expressions of global civil society (Zapatista solidarity, G8 and WTO pro-

tests, etc.) are in point of fact local campaigns against globalization.

Notwithstanding these distinctions, activist civil society is a site of

politico-cultural conflict, and as such is inextricably bound up with a

local, participatory, emancipatory, activist politics. Inherent in this notion

is the emancipatory potential of ordinary people to take back control of

their contexts. Far from being cowed in the face of the neoliberal project,

ordinary people, through association in civil society, are attempting to

take back control over their lives from social elites and the dominating

logic of the purportedly ‘free’ marketplace and the neoliberal state. Over

the last two decades, as the global neoliberal project has reached what

appears to be its apogee, citizens in civil society around the globe have orga-

nized locally, nationally and internationally, to resist. While the neoliberal

project utilizes a logic of domination that acts through both the state and

the market, the forms and circumstances that this logic creates and exists

within differ from context to context. As neoliberalism becomes projected

onto different societies with variant histories and social structures, resist-

ance also takes different forms: institutionalized community resistance to

neoliberal workfare programmes in New York, USA; expressive solidarity

through community arts in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; resistance

to state-sanctioned violence defending the World Bank-supported destruc-

tion of the Narmada Valley, India; trade unionism in Paris, France; the rise

of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico; and local

community resistance to the presence of multinational corporation gas refi-

neries in Rossport, Ireland, to name but a few.

Although obviously very different, these various forms of resistance

across the globe are connected through their response to neoliberalism.

However, it is not simply a defensive reaction against the incursion of the

instrumental logic of the market and neoliberal state; it is also a positive

expression of the will to self-determination and self-development in

which the politically active citizenry has re-emerged as a self-organizing

entity that is developing an autonomous political subjectivity in civil

society, where the formal corporatist politics of the twentieth century is

being by-passed on a local, national and increasingly international scale.

The multiple connections between these various groups in an activist

civil society have posed ontological questions as to how civil society is to

be conceived. Social movements, paradigmatically understood as collective

contentious politics, are taking on new forms. This reality is beginning to

generate new social theory that is breaking down the distinctions usually

rendered between social movements, NGOs and voluntary organizations.

Writers like Hasenfeld and Gidron (2005), for example, have begun to

introduce the idea that complex organizational forms are now developing,

organizations that have characteristics of social movements, NGOs and

voluntary organizations which meld together to realize ‘hybrid’ organiz-

ations. These hybrid organizations are the result of a complex array of influ-

ences: of the continuing attraction of political association in the public

sphere to realize emancipatory goals, and hence ‘movements’; of the hol-

lowing out of the welfare state, and hence devolved social service delivery;

and of voluntarism as a favoured mode of expression for both altruistic and

pragmatic reasons. At the heart of this intersection of protest, attempted

social changes and care for fellow human beings through service provision

are the desire to participate directly and broadly in the democratic process:

to democratize ‘thin’ representative liberal democracy and to promote

participation through the agora as both instrumentally effective and intrin-

sically worthwhile in a project that may be construed as democratic

renewal. For some, such as Touraine (2001), this denotes the emergence of

a qualitatively new political actor: a ‘social left’ that, in the words of Beck

(1997), is ‘reinventing politics’ (Beck, 1997). This social left is characterized

by its proactive defence of the social, its focus on both equality and differ-

ence encapsulated in the slogan ‘all different, all equal’ and in its defence of

cultural rights.