Democracy Works

Joining Theory and Action to Foster Global Change

Torry D. Dickinson, Terrie A. Becerra, Summer B.C. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Throughout the world, from the United States to Tanzania, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka, people increasingly work together and take actions to improve their lives, end inequality, and change global society. Action groups and movements see dialogue and learning as important ways to extend democracy and, with their inclusiveness, remake society. By putting strategy with theory, local groups and movements are able to begin making changes in civil society and institutions that allow people to begin living in new ways. Written for activists, people, and students interested in change, this book takes readers on a journey of discovery as it shows how various groups have brought theory and action together to make urban, rural, and transnational change. The case studies and explanatory articles reveal how feminist, antiracist, ecological, and peace movements reinforce each other to initiate and achieve well-placed and enduring change.

La Movilización
Artist: Jafeth Gómez Ledesma

Part I
Examining Theory, History, Methodology, and Action

1
Using Democracy to Promote a Historical Transition Today

Torry D. Dickinson

Making a New Society

Peaceful, democratic groups are bringing in a new era of history. Local groups, global networks, and social movements are extending the application of democratic practices far beyond the realm of national politics to the project of reconstructing global society. Democratic groups work to end inequalities ranging from interpersonal to global, challenge institutions to meet human needs, and rebuild the world from the ground up and the top down. A loosely woven constellation of political actors are now unraveling unequal, unsustainable global relations and defining new ones based on justice and peace. Working in tandem and often without knowledge of one another, a diverse body of global groups is applying democracy to the remaking of society. By shaping the historical transition that is taking place today, movements of everyday people are having a say in what the world will become.

The need to bridge the global North-South divide is a major part of the historical transition that can be described as bringing the decline of a 500-year-old, hierarchical, profit-based world-system and the emergence of new ways of organizing society (Wallerstein 2004, 1996). As the world is being shaken by innumerable forces, some violent and unseen, local groups and diverse global networks extend and test the meaning of democracy by reconstructing society through new belief-related, personal, cultural, social, political, and economic practices. Although the outcome is unknown, learning-focused change groups courageously participate in history in the making, opening up local and global possibilities for the development of inclusive, peaceful, ecological societies. Now and in the future, at a time when power holders and even well-meaning advocates can twist democratic participation into support for violent bureaucracies, new patriarchies, and racialized orders, social-action groups are learning to apply democratic decision making in ways that humanize all relationships (Dickinson and Schaeffer 2008).

At least two interdependent historical waves of applied collective energy are evident in these democratic practices. First, democratic learning groups are unraveling and deconstructing the material and ideological social processes that have been recreating the global system. As the global system begins to contract and die, activists still fight the system’s inequities and push institutional agents to meet people’s needs. This is because lethal systemic processes, such as war, environmental degradation, and labor exploitation, are ongoing and seem to be intensifying. Second, action groups are creating society anew by introducing and nurturing new social processes that build inclusive, peaceful, and ecological relations in localities and global networks. Action groups typically engage in both types of social transformation. They work for change on multiple fronts, fighting and unraveling the global institutions of gender, race, class, and colonialism, as well as the institutions of the business firm, market, state, and household. They push institutional organizations and agents to change, as democratic groups try to organize and establish new social relations of equality, ecological balance, and peaceful cooperation. As they unravel the old and create the new, action groups shape the historical transition by making democracy work.

As the historical life cycle of the world-system seems to be coming to an end—or at least as it undergoes a monumental shift—action groups’ implementation of institutional-change and social-reconstruction strategies is directly connected to the transition that we now are undergoing. These social-change movements are remaking the world, getting their initial fuel from the workings of an unequal world. People’s opposition to the divisions, exclusions, and disenfranchisements of global society as well as to its forces of violence and environmental degradation has provided them with the energy to learn about changing the world. This book considers how democratic social groups have joined theory and action to bring about change. And it places these experiences within a common framework to see what we can learn about changing the world. It explores how we can develop new action-informed theories and strategies that may facilitate global change.

Why do movements take common forms, at least at the general level? The prevalence of institutional-change and social-reconstruction strategies is evident partly because we all live in the same world-system, and the general possibilities for fostering democratic change are fairly limited by the system’s common workings and its formation of common openings for change. And, as Wallerstein has demonstrated, the world’s people all confront finite aspects of historical capitalism’s workings: the end of limitless low-cost rural labor for agricultural and industrial firms, the rise of interconnected urban laborers who require and demand higher levels of monetary remuneration and state services, the decline of natural resources that firms defined as production’s inputs—which, once processed, required seeking locations to dump unusable outputs—and the growing costs of taxation and the often militarily secured price of stability and protection (Wallerstein 2004, 82–85). As working people try to shape lives that are molded by these global pressures, embedded in their actions and movements is the struggle against institutional inequalities of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, and global location, which are embedded in local-to-global relations. As they struggle against the system’s exclusionary forces—a process that began as soon as the system began to grow 500 years ago—action groups and movements remake gender, race, class, and the unequal relations between the global North and South. Even though democratic groups are undoing divisions at the same time the system continues to divide the world’s population, action groups maintain their goal of becoming a diverse and powerful humanizing force, one that will end people’s division.

Some of the underlying causes that shape movement strategies can be understood better if democratic change makers saw how concatenation helped shape global society, its historical beginning and ending (if that is what we are seeing), and the long-term emergence of movements that resist and transform society. Concatenation is the coming together of forces from the past and the present in unexpected ways and at unexpected transitional moments to shape society and help make the future (Anderson 1974, 422). Historical capitalism grew because institutional bodies seized societies, changed them into a form that produced for capitalism, and destroyed and/or subordinated diverse cultures, reducing cultural diversity at the same time institutions created new types of diversity through new, market-centered, multi-cultural interactions. In doing so, global society totally eliminated some cultures, changed surviving groups, and marked how contemporary movements would emerge. This attack on social diversity was accompanied by an attack on genetic and environmental diversity, linking the movements for cultural diversity and natural diversity right from the start (Awiakta 1993). The continual presence of anti-institutional politics and the generation of new relations throughout the world-system’s history can be helped by an appreciation of concatenation today: the overlaying of multiple politics and the generation of ideas and often democratic practices from various cultures, all within the historical development of a common, unequal, and differentiating society that subordinates the world majority and stimulates democratic movements for societal change. Whether activists feel that they are connected to resistance since the time of incorporation of their groups or homes, to movements that resist global society, to general or particular efforts to change society’s institutions and build new relations, or simply to microlevel changes that may not be linked to an understanding of institutions or civil-societal and civil-commons movements, it is evident that democratic groups often employ common strategies for changing the world.

The contributors to Democracy Works’ collectively show that diverse action groups and movements rely heavily on institutional-change and civil-societal reconstruction strategies, even though particular strategic forms and tactics may appear to be very different. Using a global framework that explores how groups unravel and change institutional arrangements and how they reconstruct society, this collection of writings explores a diverse sliver of global citizenry’s democratic engagement in change. The book’s chapters are written by a multicultural, transnational grouping of intellectual activists who have been involved in democratic projects that reconnect people in the global North and South and that initiate alternative relations in different countries and on different continents. The structure of the book highlights how democratic projects unravel destructive processes perpetuated by an unequal global society and how projects construct new, inclusive, ecological ways of living, both in the shadow of changing institutions and within civil society. All of the chapters examine social-relational projects that address the global system’s institutional base: the intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, class, and colonialism. By their placement in the book, the editors encourage readers to consider as a collectivity those inclusive projects that challenge and reshape the business firm, market, state, and household.

All of the book’s chapters emphasize that both social-relational institutions (such as global society’s sexist relations, including those involving paid and unpaid work) and location-based institutions (such as global society’s state, corporate, and other firms as well as its organizations, including schools and police and military forces) have divided, excluded, and separated the world’s people in unequal ways. Even though one cannot easily find the sources of sexism or racism, a defining characteristic of historical capitalism is its global intersecting matrix, made up of unequal hierarchies—which are some of the global institutions—that come from and perpetuate profit-making competition on a world scale (Collins 2000). To unravel and redirect the use of social resources held by male-dominated households, racialized firms, and hierarchically situated state governments, democratic groups have begun to work for equality across the board and to eliminate power-derived social differences. Likewise, the building of egalitarian communities has required peaceful action groups to eliminate processes that have created inequalities in the world and to establish social relations that can lead to inclusion and freedom.

The organizational structure of Democracy Works suggests that the forces of renewal and rebirth both create new social foundations. Furthermore, both state-directed actions and anticolonial actions can challenge institutional agents of all types to promote change from within the system. The embracing and extension of global democracy is a critical part of this process. Democracy redefined leads to more inclusive decision making in many social spheres, including the home, paid work, and transnational politics. Social movements that undo unequal, nonecological living patterns and those that create equal, ecological social relations carry the promise of producing peaceful, democratic, and equal social relations in localities and around the world. Overlapping movements—led by a mix of feminists, antiracists, pro-Southern activists, antihunger activists, human-rights activists, peacemakers, ecologists, self-defined cultural groups, creators of new ways of thinking, and others—all need to be seen together. Local-to-global movements form an emerging mass of committed society shifters, a characteristic of our historical time. What will happen with these change makers is still to be seen. People’s often undervalued historical, cross-generational, racialized, and gendered knowledge prepares them to change their lives in diverse places and with multicultural groups of individuals whom they now may regard as belonging with them at “home” (hooks 1994).

Democracy Works provides an introductory examination of theories and practices related to intellectual activists’ work to change the world-system’s institutions and create new relations within civil society and other spaces. Within a global framework of historical transition, both the inductive and deductive generation of theories is considered in relation to the deconstruction of intersecting hierarchies, the unraveling of location-specific global institutions, and the promotion of democratic projects that rebuild society. The formation of theories of democratic participation, including that in the global North, is explored to demonstrate how action makers have applied and extended democratic ideas and practices through lifelong, collective learning.

To help prepare groups to address the system’s intersecting hierarchies and other institutions and to help them build inclusive societies, this introductory chapter provides an overview of how various democratic projects have promoted egalitarian changes. This includes movements that confront institutions and those that initiate new social relations in civil society, made up of the social spaces that largely fall outside the control of business and the state. I will share some of my experiences with democratic community-action projects around the globe. All of the volume’s authors urge people to remember that they have knowledge and skills that can help them end hunger, war, and environmental degradation and that they can create new relations that humanize rather than dehumanize. Through their descriptions and analyses, writers who join theory and action in their work will take readers on this thoughtful, interactive journey towards social change. This journey brings up the global quest for realizing people’s social hopes and dreams that were raised during historical capitalism.

How the World-System Works: Definitions and Relationships

The idea that the world’s people are of equal worth is becoming an important foundation for cultivating global civic engagement and democracy. Global democracy is the local-to-global process of engaging people in governance (defining issues, making decisions, and carrying out public and private agreements). This means that democracy is being applied in all institutions and at all levels, from personal relationships to civil-societal and state practices to global interconnections. This concept of global democracy widens the traditional definition of democracy beyond limited engagement in state-organized electoral politics. It broadens the definition to include participatory engagement in the creation of equitable work and compensatory practices around the world, the promotion of a regenerative global ecology, the growth of local and global peace initiatives in political to personal relationships, and the formation of relations and structures that lead to more inclusive and egalitarian world governance.

In global society, the institutions that define everyone’s lives in the world are households, business firms and the market, states, gender groups (including sexuality and age), racialized groups, classes, and the global South and North. Because everyone lives within these overlapping, mutually influencing institutions (even though people live in different hybridized cultures), wherever people are, they have some means and some power to join theory and action in the process of addressing global social processes. Because everyone has been created as members of unequal relationships on many levels—as dominators and as the dominated—everyone is at the heart of the system, and everyone can change it on many levels (Mohanty 2003; Mies 1999).

Democratic learning groups put pressure on global institutions and weaken their connections. By challenging institutional agents to meet people’s needs, action groups are taking on the unequal global division of labor. Industrial, commercial, and financial firms, working within the context of anarchic global financial forces, participate in the generation of profit making and wealth derived from profits on a world scale (Dickinson and Schaeffer 2001). Within the context of the global division of labor and the stratified interstate system, the state establishes local and global conditions that generate the expanding accumulation of capital. Although it can fluctuate widely and in ways that often make individual and national firms less competitive, business owners and managers often see the market as its steady and reliable counterpart. The global market is the set of unequal processes that organizes the distribution, sale, and consumption of products, allowing the cycle of production to be completed and permitting the reinvestment of profits.

The state and the forces that struggle to shape it have enabled the global system to continue by ensuring the establishment of the basic conditions necessary to sustain global accumulation of capital. In general, the state includes executive (law-making), judicial (law-enforcing) and agency (law-implementing) branches. The state serves as a primary link between firms/markets and working people by reinventing imperialism on an ongoing basis. It opens new areas for capital expansion and new means of waste disposal that provide limited benefits, and it educates future labor forces, thus maintaining control of labor. It also provides for national military stability, policing and imprisoning the most disenfranchised and potentially most rebellious sectors of underemployed populations, thus limiting democratic-electoral participation to minimize change. It establishes reproduction conditions for current and future workers and for regulating potential and employed laborers, including methods such as military recruitment and the draft. Because the state claims to represent the interests of everyone, this provides many openings for democratic social-change groups.

The household is the microunit of global labor that sustains current, potentia...