A Space for Participatory Democracy?
What is participatory democracy? At first glance, the question seems unanswerable. Can we imagine conditions under which movements would agree on a definition of the term? Can we imagine a coherent proposal for participatory democracy on the local, national, and global scales?
Participatory democracy can be understood in two ways. First, it can be defined as an attempt to organize a movement in a decentralized, non-hierarchical, and transparent manner. Such movements operate according the principle of prefigurative politics—the idea that we should prefigure in the here-and-now the kind of world we wish to create in the future. Thus, if we want a non-hierarchical world, we need to have a non-hierarchical movement.
Second, participatory democracy can be defined as a proposal for a new governance framework at the local, national, and global levels. Such proposals hinge on the principle of subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible. Thus, we should make power gravitate to the local level.
It goes without saying that the principles of prefigurative politics and subsidiarity have made their presence known in social movements since the 19th century. In the current period, they figure prominently not only in peasant and indigenous movements in the global South, but also in solidarity organizations in the global North. It would be tempting to write exegeses of these principles. But I will use future blogs to explore how the principles operate in movements—to the end of elucidating the issue of participatory democracy.
For the moment, it is sufficient to not that participatory democracy attempts to move beyond the most significant debate in the history of the left—the debate between advocates of “reform” (social democrats favoring the parliamentary path to power) and proponents of “revolution” (communists favoring the seizure of the state apparatus). Notwithstanding profound differences in organization and doctrine, these two approaches—often termed “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” socialism respectively—share an emphasis on party politics and a vision of the state as the primary agent of social transformation.
Present in embryonic form at the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 and reaching their mature articulations with the Great Schism in the working-class movement in 1919-1920, these two tendencies defined the trajectory of the left through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar reconstruction, and the peak of US hegemony (1945-early 1970s). However, things began to change in the crisis of the 1970s—a crisis that afflicted Keynesian welfare states in the First World, state socialism in the Second World, and developmental states—whether “bourgeois,” “non-aligned,” or “socialist”—in the Third World. As transnational corporations began to break out of the strait-jacket of regulation (culminating in the post-Fordist regime of production), left and center-left parties began to give up on the Keynesian management of capitalism. Over time, the implementation of neoliberal policies created—as an unintended consequence, to be sure—a space for community groups, grassroots movements, NGOs, and other “civil society actors.” This is where the story became interesting. Stay tuned.
