Chapter 6
In the previous chapter, we touched on the variety of ways in which contemporary globalization has destabilized the traditional association of democracy with the nation-state that has prevailed for around 250 years. We looked at some of the ways that this destabilizing process has been understood and debated by contemporary democratic theorists and touched on some of its practical manifestations—in the new forms of citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and constitutionalism. In this final chapter, we look at other manifestations of the emerging democratic subjectivities of the neoliberal era that has seen many of the social and political elements of the modern state becoming globalized, albeit at uneven rates and in different ways. Neoliberalism has sought to provide a new totalizing logic to its global order, including a particular form of (elite) democracy, but this logic has not eliminated the disjunctures and fissures that mark the global as contingent, unpredictable, unsettled, and contestable. Indeed, we suggest, for all the certainty and predictability associated with neoliberal articulations of its globalizing project (and the suppression of the participatory democratic instincts), there is much unpredictability, contingency, and potential for democratic change in the current era.
The state remains significant to many current democratic projects. The Arab Spring that inspired democratic movements around the world—most notably the Occupy movements in the United States against deepening inequality, the arrogance of neoliberal economic elites, and the unresponsiveness of governments under the increasing influence of corporate money—has, in many ways, set the tone for a wide range of democratic movements. This is not the first time that a rebellion against an oppressive regime in the colonial and post-colonial world has inspired counter-hegemonic movements for greater democracy in the rich core of the world (note the influence of the Haitian slave revolution on the French Revolution1), but the developing specter of grassroots democratic movements is widening and deepening in current globalization.
Often noted, in this regard, is the fluidity of tactics that are increasingly apparent and are conditioning many democratic movements and events.2 Spontaneous mobilizations of democratic protesters, for example, have used cell phones and social networking to bring vast numbers into the streets, generating new populist ways of coming together. These events have been transferred to the global consciousness using this technology, helping to embolden and enhance movements with real-time information and virtual participation. Importantly too, these protests are rarely based on top-down organizations or calls from traditional party leaders but, more often, from the ground up, often beginning in small, spontaneous, and thinly planned actions and growing quickly into mass actions that spawn new ways of being democratic. And ideologies, rather than dictating demands and strategies, remain possible furrows to be plowed in the course of becoming a democratic movement.
It would, nevertheless, be analytically wrong to subsume all of the democratic movements in globalization under a single tactical type or logic. For example, as Jean-François Bayart points out, the Indonesian student movement of 1998 practiced and endorsed norms and values that do not comport easily if at all with those of the World Social Forum.3 But what all these projects seem to have in common is that they combine the local and global, combining grievances against neoliberal globalization at the general level with more specific calls for political freedoms and reforms of corrupt and oppressive regimes. The differences between them concern the uneven and disparate ways that neoliberal policies and structures have affected different locales, some focusing on the corruption of dictatorial regimes exploiting neoliberal globalism, as in Mubarak’s Egypt, or, quite differently, the way the Zapatistas in Mexico formed initially and explicitly in resistance to neoliberal globalization (particularly as a response to NAFTA), developed an ideology that assimilated the European Marxist tradition, via Gramsci, along with Mesoamerican Indian traditions, and created a global audience and far-reaching support using social networking and the global Internet.
Thus, although it is premature to characterize the new global spread of democracy projects with any precision, we speculate here that these are seeing a plurality of heterodox ways of being democratic in the age of neoliberal globalization. In this chapter, consequently, rather than attempting to create a more or less comprehensive typology of recent projects, we focus instead on a diversity of instances in which new kinds of democratic subjects are forming and seeking to re-form the worlds in which they live. This will hopefully enable a better understanding of the breadth and scope of democratic possibilities in twenty-first-century globalization.
The Idea of a Democratic “Subject”
The term “subject,” as we use it here, refers to an active social and political agency (be it individually or organizationally expressed) framed by a larger system of relations that does not have complete “freedom to choose” how to act and “be” in society but, equally, is not fully determined by the relations and rules within which such agency exists. An analogy with the “subject” in a sentence might explain this better. The subject of a sentence is the active protagonist but does not exist as such outside of its relation to other parts of speech and the overall rules of grammar and syntax that give the subject its meaning and sense. In short, the “subject” never simply refers to an independent object outside of the sentence. And while words can mean different things in different sentences and take on different nuances in meaning, subjects are always located within a particular set of “framing” relationships. Democratic subjects within contemporary globalization are no different. In short, one does not simply exist as a “subject”; one becomes a subject, and how one does so depends on the webs of social and ideational relations in which one finds oneself. Subjectivation thus involves social learning in the process of creating the social, political, and ethical life of the community. Jean-François Bayart’s description is helpful:
Contemporary globalization shapes “human types” who are bearers of “conducts of life,” with which one can identify in accordance with one’s condition, one’s activity, norms, imaginary world and the constraints of one’s family or other environment.4
We contend that forms of popular democratic politics constitute some of these new subjects.
One of the most far-reaching attempts to characterize the new political subjects in general terms in the neoliberal global order is the influential work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The new sovereign political subject they call “Empire,” and the new democratic subject is the “multitude.” Empire is “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”5 The “multitude” is that “set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them.”6
Hardt and Negri propose that we live at a time in which networks of corporate power dominate globally, creating “social worlds” that work primarily for the benefit of global capital and the political organizations that facilitate global capitalism. No one nation-state now fully dominates this new Empire of deterritorialized power centers and globalized networks and institutions, not even the United States, whose ideas set many of its terms and even though it benefits most from this global structure. Adapting Foucault, they argue that power in this the postmodern Empire is not just about managing fundamental economic contradictions and conflicts, for example between capital and labor, but also about the creation of “social worlds” that stretch transversally, no longer determined by logics of place but by far-flung networks of relations made possible by the global organization and movements of capital and labor.
The new logic of sovereignty and domination involves managing the vast flows of people, necessary for the appropriation of the labor necessary for global capitalism, that are creating new spaces and ways of life. Empire seeks to embed the new ways of life within a neoliberal order by progressively absorbing all of humanity into its networks. Flows of people and labor, they argue, can no longer be managed by the traditional means of physical borders but by more direct management of labor markets and capital markets, which can only be done through transversal structures and organizations, that is, through the vast apparatus of international organizations, global corporations that organize networks of data and digital coordination, informal cooperation of elites from all over, and by forms of commodification that turn cultural differences into marketable commodities. But these flows of people and labor overflow the networks of containment, generating the multitude.
This global multitude, argue Hardt and Negri, is no longer determined by their national location or designation or indeed by traditional categories (class, ethnicity, citizenship). What increasingly determines them are their shared experiences of the “social worlds” created by neoliberal corporatism, the shared experiences we have touched on in this work—in South and North America, Africa, subcontinental India, and Russia. “Is it possible to imagine U.S. agriculture and service industries,” they ask, “without Mexican migrant labor, or Arab oil without Palestinians and Pakistanis?”7 The communities of necessary yet “illegal” labor reappropriate the social and political spaces they come to inhabit and that cost them so much suffering. But in their movements, these migrants produce more than the profit of the corporations they work for; they produce themselves as positive political subjects. They exploit the potential of their numbers and of global communication technologies to create new ways of life, including new ways of being political. They engage in forms of autonomous organization, they organize to make claims of rights and for justice against their states and localities, they create solidarities within their new local communities and across them in diasporas, and they participate in transversal coalitions with multiple groups. Hardt and Negri usefully point to the fact that the political organization of those who lose and suffer while reproducing the neoliberal capitalist order does not limit itself or even primarily take the form of participation in the limited sense of legitimating established polyarchal institutions and practices.
To become a political subject, Hardt and Negri argue, requires that the multitude focus on the global arena. Only by confronting the neoliberal global apparatus as such—targeting international organizations, such as the IMF and World Trade Organization, and global corporations—can the multitude take control of their lives and become a political subject. Their account seems to privilege a form of global citizen action that is emerging in the World Social Forum and the Occupy movements. We will turn to them as one form of democratic subjectivity in the next section. While these incorporate local actions, the central focus of their political action, Hardt and Negri argue, needs to be on the global forces if they are to control their own destiny and their own movements in a global order that rules by constraining and managing those movements.8
It remains a question if Hardt and Negri’s multitude in general can be given sufficient specificity as such to constitute a global democratic community. It seeks to describe a global democratic citizenship based on the idea of “Humankind” as a unity and identity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the discursive democratic theories also raise the conceptual and theoretical difficulty of the collective democratic subject that replaces the national citizenry or “the people” in globalization. But this underplays the positivity of the diversity and distinctiveness of democratic subjects and projects that are forming within neoliberal globalization.9 Therefore, after turning to the subjectivity of global activism in the next section, we turn to two other forms of democratic subjectivity emerging in neoliberal globalization that engender new ways of being democratic but which do not directly seek to overturn a totalizing neoliberal global order. We describe several examples under the headings of “Intentional Economies,” following the lead of J. K. Gibson-Graham, and “Deep Democracy” and “Political Society,” following the lead of Arjun Appadurai and Partha Chatterjee.
Transversal Democratic Activism
At least two major examples of transversal democratic activism have become significant in recent times, that associated with the Occupy movements, which forced their way into the global consciousness in 2011, and that related to the World Social Forums, which have presented alternative ways of thinking and being to neoliberalism since the early 1990s. While maintaining local diversity, these aim, as Hardt and Negri suggest, at a direct confrontation with neoliberal forms of global power.
The New York Occupy Movement
On September 17, 2011, several hundred protesters entered Zuccotti Park, a privately owned but public park on Broadway, a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. They were responding to a call from Adbusters, a Canadian magazine and website, to protest corporate influence in government and to highlight inequality. Soon, several hundred had set up tents, and the protest became an occupation, which lasted for two months before New York City mayor Bloomberg ordered its disbandment, citing health and safety concerns.10 Protests eventually erupted in over 500 cities in the United States and around the world, culminating on October 15 with occupations and protests in 951 cities in 82 countries under the general heading of “United for Global Change.”11
Inspired by the Arab Spring, the occupation published a set of Principles of Solidarity, whose main democratic orientation in contrast to neoliberalism is encapsulated in the following excerpt:
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.12
Thus began a potent movement for participatory democracy, equality, and social justice that linked the local and the global. In New York, it attracted a diverse group of activists who found its slogan “We are the 99 percent” an appropriate encapsulation of the influence, greed, and corruption of the 1 percent who, they argued, under neoliberalism, own between 30 and 40 percent of all the wealth in the United States.13 (See also chapter 2.) The general purpose and meaning of the protest was best summed up in the following statement, also from Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity:
People from all across the United States of America and the world came to protest the blatant injustices of our times perpetuated by the economic and political elites. On the 17th we as individuals rose up against political disenfranchisement and social and economic injustice. We spoke out, resisted, and successfully occupied Wall Street. Today, we proudly remain in Liberty Square constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love. It is from these reclaimed grounds that we say to all Americans and to the world, Enough! How many crises does it take? We are the 99 percent and we have moved to reclaim our mortgaged future. Through a direct democratic process, we have come together as individuals and crafted these principles of solidarity.14
The occupation opened itself to a diversity of issues, refusing to focus narrowly on a set of specific demands and policy prescriptions, a point that led to much criticism not just from conservatives but also from the progressivist mainstream.15 To those assembled in their sites of protest, however, the mobilization of the protesters was their most important achievement and represented in itself a democratic value. In important respects, this is entirely consistent with a much longer tradition of democratic populism in the United States, echoing the American progressive era in its attacks on the corruption of the political system by big capital since the late nineteenth century.16 However, for the Occupy movement of the twenty-first century, the traditional democratic institutions of liberal states, now beholden to neoliberal theory and practice, are considered thoroughly corrupted by global corporate power and influence, requiring a more radical and non-statist response underpinned by direct participatory democracy to regenerate the democratic values of political and civil rights, equality and social justice, in the United States and worldwide. This has seen various “occupations” establishing direct democracy principles wherever they appear, as part of their transformation from a set of motley encampments to a transversal activist network. After the occupation disbanded its physical encampment, it began a new life, one it had already begun to cultivate while in Zuccotti Park, as a loose, leaderless organization, generating imaginative and novel organizational practices to realize participatory democracy.
The New York occupation of Zuccotti Park became a template for rethinking a decentralized participatory democratic organization. It saw the establishment of a general assembly as the authoritative legislative forum on both policy and organizational matters, with membership and participatory rights open to all. This general assembly gave priority to marginalized groups; decisions were made by discussion and consensus and, when full consensus could not be reached, by the highest percentage of those assembled. The assembly articulated policies and principles recommended by multiple working groups that carried out discussions and the everyday work of the occupation. The emerging political subjectivity of the movement and its individual members is perhaps best appreciated in terms of the statement of principles, cited above, that emerged from the initial occupation in 2011, which states:
Today, we proudly remain in Liberty Square constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love. . . . Through a direct democratic process, we have come together as individuals.
These “principles” contain a strong emphasis on the individual exercising “personal responsibility,” an emphasis that repudiates the atomistic individualism of the neoliberal world order in favor of a political subjectivity embedded in collectivist precepts and commitments. The “self” in this sense becomes a “political being” socialized in and by the processes of participatory decision making and the deliberations of the democratic working groups.
This idea invokes elements of the tradition of “developmental democracy” associated with the theories of Rousseau, Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill and more recently with C. B. Macpherson.17 They are more in tune with Rousseau, for whom the subject is created less through formal education and more through forms of social learning and interaction that cultivate mutual respect and acceptance of difference. The process of subjectivation counters the individualist, competitive spirit of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. The key idea here is that democratic citizens become such only through participation in forums of genuine democratic deliberation and decision making, in which liberal toleration has become more than a set of rules and more an internalized ethos. From this perspective, no one is naturally a democratic citizen simply by virtue of living in a democratic society, although everyone has the capacity to cultivate the democratic ethos as they participate along with diverse others.
Democratic politics, thus, is a form of “self-making” for the Occupy movement, an attempt to create new processes of subjectivation against the institutions and practices of the neoliberal world order. Political engagement for the developing democratic subject is thus focused both on immediate policy issues (for example, the political economy of neoliberalism, the corruption of the American banking sector, the fate of the “99 percent”) and on the creation of a democratic culture that reimagines the social world through political participation. Democratic citizens, from this perspective, are “made” (and remade) through education, political deliberation, and the performance of democracy as an act of solidarity and as a shared “being-in-common.”
This begs the question of who or what is the “collective” that creates this sense of common purpose for new democratic subjects of the Occupy movements. The answer, for the activists of Zuccotti Park, is to be found in the “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” which suggests that the “collective” focus and commitment is both local and global. Thus, echoing Hardt and Negri: “We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.” The “people” then are not just those in New York and the United States suffering under the corrupting influences of Wall Street and the American corporate sector but also the global 99 percent under social, economic, and political pressure in the neoliberal age of global corporatism. The “people” is defined in non-statist terms. For the Occupy movements, thus, “the people” represents both the concrete unity of citizens as a collective body, wherever they happen to live, and the abstract whole that grounds legitimate authority in a popular democracy.
The World Social Forum
The Occupy movement is not the only exemplar of global grassroots democratic activism that directly confronts the neoliberal global organization of power. The World Social Forum has been doing precisely this since the beginning of the twenty-first century, as part of a concerted effort to provide an alternative conceptual and practical image of the global order to that derived from neoliberalism. The catalyst for this democratized response to market logic and practice was a meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in late January 2001, that saw a group of intellectuals, academics, and activists, together with the Brazilian Workers’ Party, organizing a radical counterpart to the meeting of the World Economic Forum (the annual conclave of business leaders, neoliberal governments, and global investors) taking place, simultaneously, in the wealthy resort town of Davos, Switzerland. Holding their meeting in the poor and depressed Brazilian city, the organizers aimed to continue the energy and spectacle of protests against neoliberalism, most notably in the “Battle of Seattle” that shut down downtown Seattle and forced the premature cancellation of the meeting there of the World Trade Organization in November 1999. Many other protests against neoliberal globalism had taken place from the 1970s against the IMF’s “structural adjustment” programs.18 The protests in Seattle became significant both for the size of the protest (more than 50,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000, according to estimates) and for the remarkable diversity of groups that participated. Perhaps the most famous images flashed across television screens and on the Internet were of ecological protesters (dressed as turtles) marching shoulder to shoulder with old-line trade unionists. The determination of these protesters, their diversity, and their carnivalesque performance of grassroots democracy generated significant energy to what has come to be called the alter-globalization movement.19
The World Social Forum in part meant to capitalize on and to focus the energy that Seattle generated and came to symbolize for a growing number of grassroots activists. It succeeded, at least in the short term. Planning a relatively small meeting of protests, workshops, speeches, and panels, the organizers found themselves with nearly 5,000 delegates from 132 countries, with a total number of demonstrators estimated at more than 15,000 in Porto Alegre. The energy generated by the combination of utopianism—the slogan of the World Social Forum was “Another World Is Possible”—with the call to action and engagement was enormous. Indeed, since 2001, the World Social Forum has convened in different places, building upon the initial Porto Alegre meeting and the anti-neoliberal sentiments articulated there. The meeting in Dakar, Senegal, in 2011, had upward of 75,000 attendees. The World Social Forum is now coordinated by an international council comprised of a whole range of member organizations, a council that seeks to harness the energy and make coherent the radicalism of member organizations, without diluting the diversity of the many groups and individuals committed to its anticorporate, democratic principles.
Faced with the prospect of a large and serious movement, the World Social Forum set up an organization of activists in order to move forward and capture the spirit of solidarity and engagement that swelled up in Porto Alegre. The main problem was to harness the energy and to coordinate the multiplicity of activist organizations without diluting, or worse, destroying, the diversity that, to many, gave the World Social Forum its democratic character.
The Charter of Principles that emerged at the end of the meetings at Porto Alegre declared that going forward, the World Social Forum (WSF) would become “a permanent process” that “brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries of the world, but does not intend to be a body representing world civil society.”20 It is
an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth.
The aim is to produce a “network of networks” in which “the future can be imagined and objectively realized through “‘prefigurative politics’—or the enactment of the world we envision. . . . Social forum events are attempts to create miniworlds, models the forum process hopes to export around the globe.”21 Finally, it is nonviolent in its philosophy and “radical” conduct, drawing its inspiration from Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In this context, it posits militarism as antidemocratic and seeks through the disciplined performance of nonviolent resistance to create democratic subjects capable of thinking and acting beyond traditional parameters in their engagements with opponents and detractors.
In short, the new democratic subject envisaged by the World Social Forum and the Occupy movements is a politically progressive cosmopolitan agent of the neoliberal age, able to move fluidly among various sites of power and resistance, from the national to the regional, the local and the global. It seeks the flows of people, ideas, organizational capacities, and information in global networks to facilitate the emergence of a democratic ethos that holds together contentious differences while unifying against the neoliberal order. The democratic subject is formed in the space between local confrontation and global techniques of organization and consciousness raising. The image it envisages of this cosmopolitan citizenship does not seek to eliminate or even transcend national political subjectivities but to add wider commitments to traditional identities in the search for a broader and more fluid global community committed to democratic thought and practices. In this sense, it seeks what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “rhizomatic” culture for future human development that, instead of fixed, hierarchical structures and frames of reference, favors a more contingent, more spontaneous attitude toward life and decision making and an articulation of “humankind” based on more fluid and hybrid criteria.22 In organizational terms, this rhizomatic tendency is to be found in the diversity and autonomy of the groups, individuals, and movements that have sprouted up from the common democratic core of the World Social Organization.
The World Social Forum and the Occupy movements draw attention toward the direct confrontation with neoliberalism as such. However, other democratic projects are emerging, creating alternative democratic subjectivities, that are not focused on directly overturning the neoliberal global order but that address it in more local, although globally structured and connected, terms. In the next section, we turn to two examples of what J. K. Gibson-Graham (Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) call “intentional economies.”23
Alternative Democratic “Intentional Economies”
Neoliberal globalism presumes a single world economy, totalizing the market form for all economies. As we discussed in chapter 2, neoliberals proclaim that globalization is inevitable, and therefore, all economic life must be absorbed into the single global market. Hardt and Negri also proclaim that globalization is “irresistible and irreversible,” and therefore, transformational politics must focus on the macro level, the “big picture.”24 Both perspectives assume that the logics of all democratic projects can be subsumed within the logic of the global market or conversely the multitude and, therefore, have little to say about the logics of the plurality of specific democratic projects in globalization that do not directly confront the totality of neoliberal globalization. In this section, we discuss two such projects, focusing on the democratic subjectivities they produce, that presume the possibility of multiple economies rooted in the formation of ethical and democratic communities.
The Mondragon Cooperative
In 1956, a Catholic priest, Father Arizmendiarrieta, began a small cooperative at Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain to produce paraffin lamps.25 From this modest beginning, the Mondragon Cooperative created a network of cooperatives in a range of goods: consumer electronics, tool and dye manufacturing, retail businesses and services, including a bank, insurance firms, and education facilities. In 1991, it became the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) and has grown to an association of more than 140 cooperatives, operating in 41 countries with sales in 150 sites worldwide. It is the tenth-largest business organization in Spain, employing more than 83,000 workers globally.26 The Mondragon Cooperative remains an inspiration for many seeking ways to fold an ethics of social justice and a democratic ethos into everyday life of their economy. Mondragon, in this sense, is a practical model of alternative democratic subjectivity or what J. K. Gibson-Graham call an “intentional economy,” which treats the economy not as a site of individualist competitions and self-aggrandizement but as “a political and ethical space of [democratic] decision making.”27 And there has been important institutional inspiration too, with the UN declaring 2012 the “International Year of the Co-operative.” This, in turn, acknowledges the increasing significance of the International Cooperative Alliance, begun in 1895, that opened its head office headquarters in Geneva in 1982 and its first regional office in San José, Costa Rica, in 1990. It now has regional headquarters in Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Pacific, and Europe.
The modern idea of worker-owned producer cooperatives was not born in Spain in the 1950s, of course. It dates from at least the first half of the nineteenth century and the utopian socialism of Robert Owen and others. Against the extraordinary backdrop of the industrial revolution, Owen formed community-based economies based on the principles of worker ownership, democratic participation in decision-making, and commitment to social transformation. He believed, contrary to Marx, that alternative community-based modern economies could be formed against the extremes of capitalist domination—without replacing capitalism. Instead, his “utopian socialism” proposed that active ownership and participation in productive life would create new kinds of modern capitalist subjects—ethical beings who would build new societies and ways of life in which social justice, equality, and cooperation would become second nature. This general theme has continued to inspire radicals and democrats around the world to the present day who, like Father Arizmendiarrieta, see, in local democratic workers cooperatives, a means of contesting the neoliberal approach to globalization while enhancing an everyday lived reality in which economies are structured around social justice, democratic decision making, and participation.
The members of the cooperative are “worker-members.” They operate as members of the co-op on several registers: in their jobs as workers, as participants in democratic management, as voters and constituents of representative policy-making and oversight bodies, as bearers and performers of an ethos of social justice and cooperation. The economic, the political, and the social all come together in the ethos of the subject through a democratic organization of the cooperative, the emphasis on cooperative self-management and participation on the part of workers, and in the practices of education and self-development of the workers and solidarity with the larger social world, regional, national, and international. The MCC is based on a set of democratic political principles and social commitments that promote self-management, equity, social responsibility, and a democratic organization meant to encourage participation by co-op members. As Gibson-Graham put it:
Commitment to [these principles] is part of a practice of subjectivation, the cultivation of a distinctive economic way of being. Working to realize and concretize them is an ethical practice that simultaneously constitutes the cooperators as communal subjects and as members of the Mondragón community.28
The political structure of the cooperative is centered on strict principles of representative democracy. The preeminent policy-making body is the General Assembly, consisting of 650 co-op members. It approves policies and oversees the company’s everyday management, including appointing and, when warranted, removing members of the Governing Council—a body elected by all members of the General Assembly for four-year terms that oversees the everyday management of the co-op. The whole enterprise is guided by the principle that capital is to be subordinated to labor, echoing Owen’s notion that dignified labor is the main factor in transforming nature, society, and humankind to a more ethical state of being. Crucial too is the principle concerning the distribution of wealth in the cooperatives, where the divide between the lowest laborer and the highest professionals is one to six. Unlike neoliberal capitalist corporations that are beholden to financial stockholders, the cooperative does not seek short-term profit at the expense of the working conditions and the quality of work produced by workers. In this sense, they create economies—spaces of calculation and materiality—in which democratic political subjects can form and operate. Thus, the dualisms that create subjects in the neoliberal order—between the political and the economic, between the market and the state, between personal and collective responsibility, between labor and capital, between ethics and accumulation—become democratic intersections and sites of negotiating difference rather than subsuming all differences into market equivalences as in neoliberal capitalism.
In Mondragon the economy is politicized and socialized, contrary to neoliberalism’s efforts to isolate the economy as the dominant and domineering master logic of social relations. The cooperative makes the economy into a site for the production of democratic subjects for whom being-in-common with others is folded into economic relations. The economic becomes a space in which co-op members develop the skills to make decisions in common with the others with whom they share the economic enterprise. Economic decisions—setting of wages, investment decisions, assignments of tasks including management—become simultaneously political decisions subject to the development of skills for economic and political cooperation. This is why education is so important to the cooperative and why it insists on continual education for its member-workers.
The production of democratic subjectivity within alternative community economies is not limited to the large-scale industrial cooperative. One example of a rural democratic cooperative developed on the Mondragon model is the Mararikulam Experiment, a network of over 1,500 women-owned cooperatives in Kerala, India (see also chapter 4), formed in the late 1990s as a means of combating poverty. As part of the larger democratic experiment in Kerala, these cooperatives bind together the economic, the political, and the social as part of their democratic response to the TINA principle. Important in this context is the emphasis on economic and political self-management, developing programs of literacy and self-development at the community level and building solidarity with workers in the outside world.
We can also cite some community-based tourism in which the economy becomes a site of the formation of democratic subjects. For example, we can cite the Stibrawpa Association, a women’s cooperative of handicraft production in Yorkin, a Bribri people’s village in the southeast corner of Costa Rica. “Stibrawpa” (Women Who Make Handcrafts) was formed after many of the men of the village returned ill from working on the banana and pineapple plantations of large U.S. multinationals in Costa Rica and elsewhere in Latin America. In 1996, it became the “Stibrawpa Women’s House Association” managed by an all-women board from the village. It has since become part of a broader village and Bribri indigenous people’s economy that infuses sustainable agriculture, ecotourism, and handicraft production. It was formed to create a community alternative to the reliance on wage labor in the corporate estates of large agribusiness. As one of the prominent members of the board describes the aim of the association:
In the past, our men had to leave for months to work on banana plantations, and over time we started noticing that as they aged, their health deteriorated. They [often] died young, and, we believe, from exposure to the chemicals. We wanted to create a local source of income for them to stay here with their families, and live a healthier lifestyle.29
Stibrawpa and the Yorkin collective work together with ACTUAR (Costa Rican Community-Based Rural Tourism Association), which was formed in 2001 through the United Nations’ Small Grants Program. The aim was to help to foster sustainable rural economies, especially for indigenous peoples, by creating alternative, democratically organized local economies in which the economy became a site of interweaving organic agriculture, cultural preservation, and exchange through community-based and controlled tourism and democratic political decision-making as an alternative to corporate globalization. ACTUAR principles are:
They instantiate what Gibson-Graham describe as the “community economy” against the neoliberal idea of the economy as a separate, domineering, and totalizing logic and against its TINA principle:
Resocializing (and repoliticizing) the economy involves making explicit the sociality that is always present, and thus constituting the various forms and practices of interdependence as matters for reflection, discussion, negotiation, and action.30
In order to create this alternative community economy and to create the economy as an ethical community under the direction of its members, the village had to become adept at negotiating multiple registers of social relations, such as state agencies, Costa Rican political parties, transnational trade and development NGOs, foreign-aid donors and construction companies (they convinced a company in Oregon to supply the co-op with solar panels for its school, lodge, and workshop), ecotourism companies, the UN, several universities in Costa Rica and abroad, and several fair-trade organizations. It now combines organic farming, handicraft production, and an ecotourist lodge and has been able to create a revived alternative economy to the prevailing corporate agricultural economy. Much of the resultant profits has been channeled back into the community, providing funding for local schools and the revival of the local Bribri language and culture.
Community economies as sites of democratic subjectivation in response to neoliberal globalization share much with more urban spaces. They have similarly become adept at negotiating, as a community, on multiple spatial registers—local, city, regional, national, transnational, and global—with a variety of agents that seek to govern them in order to create themselves as ethical communities infusing democratic politics. We turn to these now.
Deep Democracy and Political Society
Throughout this book, we have stressed the need for more participatory and activist forms of democracy in the age of neoliberal globalization. This idea informed the historical vignettes in chapter 1 and led us to stress Sheldon Wolin’s critique of the passivity and “inverted totalitarianism” of neoliberalism and polyarchal democracy in chapter 2. In chapters 3 and 4, we examined how neoliberal globalization is limiting participation in its various articulations with states in various parts of the world, and in chapter 5, we discussed how the stretching of democratic norms into forms of global governance and cosmopolitan democracy, while promising in some respects, seems to us too ambiguous and limited in the space it opens for democratic participation. In chapter 6, we have turned to the ways that more participatory forms of democratic subjectivity are emerging in various sites around the world. Perhaps it is ironic that having begun with a discourse of democracy that was largely rooted in Western traditions, we conclude with examples of how templates for participatory democracy are emerging not from advanced states but from the poor struggling in the interstices of neoliberal globalization.
In his 2002 essay, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Arjun Appadurai describes “an urban activist movement with global links” that combines “local activism with horizontal global networking.”31 In 1987, a housing-advocacy partnership called the “Alliance” was formed in Mumbai, India, bringing together three groups: the National Slum Dwellers’ Federation (NSDF), a community-based grassroots organization; the Society for the Protection of Area Resource Centers (SPARC), an organization of professional social workers in Mumbai; and Mahila Milan, an organization and network of poor women focused on fostering a savings culture among poor women as a way to combat poverty. The Alliance presents us with an exemplar of a new form of democratic subjectivity that mobilizes the poor to better their lives by forming democratic collectivities that are local and participatory, that develop the capacities to exploit the governmental regulatory regimes of states, and that constitute global linkages to other like communities, thereby creating networks within which a democratic ethos and culture might thrive.
Against the neoliberal claim that free markets produce democracy, the Alliance politicizes and socializes the economy through democratic empowerment and organization.
Instead of relying on the model of an outside organizer who teaches local communities how to hold the state to its normative obligations to the poor, the Alliance is committed to methods of organization, mobilization, teaching, and learning that build on what poor persons already know and understand. The first principle of this approach is that no one knows more about how to survive poverty than the poor themselves.32
At the core of these democratic principles “is the idea of individuals and families as self-organizing members of a political collective who pool resources, organize lobbying, provide mutual risk-management devices, and confront opponents, when necessary.” Above all, this principle “serves to remind all members . . . that the power of the Alliance lies not in its donors, its technical expertise, or its administration, but in the will to federate among poor families and communities.”33
The poor create the meaning of citizenship as they participate in creating their own conditions, their own social world. Appadurai makes clear the functioning of the Alliance as a form of subjectivation, that democratic subjects are created. It aims to create new people, a new ethos and moral life of its members that makes them agents in the creation of their own world:
As with all serious movements concerned with consciousness-changing and self-mobilization, there is a conscious effort to inculcate protocols of speech, style, and organizational form within the Alliance. The coalition cultivates a highly transparent, nonhierarchical, antibureaucratic, and antitechnocratic organizational style.34
While the Alliance maintains offices, they are structured informally, with people moving in and out constantly, and most of the work does not take place in formal settings but through mobile communications. The informality and setting of the work in mobilities—communications over the phone and Internet, through constant movement of staff and personnel to meetings, including site visits by staff and by representatives of the communities themselves (often local activists travel to communities in other countries, and local communities host visits of members of communities from abroad)—creates a condition in which subjects learn to interact with others, creating a consciousness of respect and openness that creates this particular form of participatory subject.
One of the central activities of the Alliance, the central focus of the women of Mahila Milan, is encouraging a collective culture of savings, which is focused not on the immediacy of the project (savings is less about the immediate gain for the individual) but more focused on the long term, on “the importance of slow learning and cumulative change against the temporal logic of the project.”35 Indeed, this temporality and subjectivation is at the core of the Alliance’s principle of federation:
What is important to recognize here is that when Alliance leaders speak about a way of life organized around the practice of saving—in Jocklin’s words, it is like “breathing”—they are framing saving as a moral discipline. The practice builds a certain kind of political fortitude and commitment to the collective good and creates persons who can manage their affairs in many other ways as well.36
Appadurai’s essay was published in 2002, but we should note that the Alliance has remained and grown in the interim. According to SPARC’s website, the Alliance now (March 2013) operates in over seventy cities in India and is networked with over twenty countries.37 Homeless International reports that the NSDF now (again, March 2013) has over two million members in seventy-two towns and cities in India.38
The Alliance provides an example of what Partha Chatterjee calls “the politics of the governed” in “political society.”39 Political society is a heterogeneous space in which groups and communities form in circumstances of deprivation and oppression in order to resist and exploit the regulatory powers of the state and powerful corporations and groups (such as negotiating with power companies to legalize or otherwise accept siphoning off electricity into squatter settlements). The struggles are precarious, circumstantial, and tentative. They often stem from illegal populations outside of civil society, such as illegal squatters’ developments in overcrowded global cities. Subjects in political society form associations to provide services for themselves (health care, housing, job training, etc.), to pressure the state to change laws or to grant them exceptions to the law so they can maintain their living quarters or technically illegal livelihoods (street vendors or cab drivers, for example), to negotiate recognition as a distinct population group in order to gain inclusion in state programs or to change the rules of those programs to better suit their needs.40 In doing so, they “give to the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a community.”41
The subjects of political society
do not relate to the organs of the state in the same way that the middle classes do, nor do governmental agencies treat them as proper citizens belonging to civil society. Those in political society make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations.42
The poor create for themselves an alternative moral and civic world as they negotiate the conditions and agencies that govern them. Rather than overturning the neoliberal governmental order or creating an alternative economy or passively accepting state administration as legitimated by polyarchal democracy, the poor in political society seek to turn the administration of their lives by the organs of governmentality to their advantage and needs. In doing so, the poor and others in most of the world are creating civic lives for themselves and struggling for inclusion on new terms in the civic life of the larger entities that govern them. They do so by reclaiming the spaces of their lives against the efforts of their governors to limit and orchestrate their movements.
The governed participate in globalization first as its remainders, conditioned by globalization, as when real-estate developers and speculators enclose places in the city in order to integrate them into the global capitalist economy that displaces large numbers, especially of the poor. But then they participate as protagonists who utilize the networks to create new strategies to further their goals. The Alliance studied by Appadurai, for example, exists locally and within networks with both NGOs and UN agencies working on homelessness, housing, and sanitation, and the NSDF continually exchanges information and knowledge and meets with like organizations in over twenty other countries.43 It participates in the Homeless International but is not defined or controlled by it. Again, Chatterjee describes the global dimensions of this activism well:
There is a second answer to the question of how the results of local experiments may be replicated on a wider scale. Here, the local initiative does not attempt to be total and comprehensive; it does not seek to refashion the community in its wholeness. Rather, it seeks to develop specific practices with appropriate institutions. When successfully developed in a local context, these could acquire the form of a set of techniques which may be transported elsewhere after being released from their local constraints.44
These certain techniques can exploit, counter, manipulate, reinvest, the governmental practices of states and the global order and spread throughout the globe.
Chatterjee argues that the micro-democratic politics in political society involves an alternative conception of time-space from the representations of democracy as a unity of a singular form, as in neoliberal globalism.45 Time is heterogeneous in the sense that different human associations do not all fit into a linear homogeneous time. The latter suggests that politics must be the same everywhere and that all forms of democracy can be understood in their relation to some form that is unfolding, perhaps unevenly but nevertheless as a naturalized identity, existing in a single time frame. Modernity has just one positive form. This is the underlying conception of neoliberal globalization. But democracy in globalization, as Chatterjee’s argument suggests, is forming through the subjective actions of concrete actors in multiple forms dependent on the dense time/space framing in local settings and conditions. Democracy develops in local, historically contingent spaces, differently in different places.
While Chatterjee describes political society as a frame of the activities of the poor in India, it would seem relevant even in more affluent populations as well where governmentality targets population groups through regulation. He says, “As a matter of fact, it could even be said that the activities of political society in postcolonial countries represent a continuing critique of the paradoxical reality in all capitalist democracies of equal citizenship and majority rule, on the one hand, and the dominance of property and privilege, on the other.”46 We could cite here housing programs for gay men with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s as an example when gay men organized to first be recognized as a population group eligible for city-subsidized housing and then to eliminate the AIDS-only wards in group homes that the city set up that wound up spreading the disease and reinforcing stereotypes of gay men.
Arguing that the Western idea of democracy is in crisis, its limits having been exposed and its promises undermined by its increasing preoccupation with a narrow instrumentalist and managerial governmentality, a similar argument to Sheldon Wolin’s in Democracy Inc. that we discussed in chapter 2, Chatterjee contends that a new context has emerged for democratic politics among the poor and disenfranchised in postcolonial cities that can be replicated elsewhere. Therefore, the reimagining and perhaps reinvention of democracy in the novel participatory practices of the governed in states such as India promises not just potential new forms in postcolonial contexts but for democracy more globally as well:
It is incumbent upon those who are still marginal in the world of modernity to use the opportunities they have to invent new forms of the modern social, economic, and political order. There are many experiments that have been carried out in the last hundred years or so. . . . It is worth considering whether many of these . . . might not in fact contain the possibility of entirely new forms of economic organization or democratic governance never thought of by the old forms of Western modernity.47
We have addressed examples in this chapter.
In this chapter we have seen democratic movements that form new democratic ways of being, new moral-political ways of living in self-conscious, direct confrontation with neoliberal globalism. We have also discussed others that are forming more modest yet robust democratic subjectivities in local struggles to resocialize and repoliticize their economies and to take control of the spaces in which they live. These involve negotiating the techniques of neoliberal governmentalization and are generating transversal networks that both create coalitions with like democratic communities both below and across the institution and power of the state and are projecting new techniques and ways of being democratic beyond Western democratic forms of polyarchy. In earlier chapters, we noted how democratic movements are emerging in response to neoliberal articulations of the state as nodes of global markets and corporate power, re-signifying democracy in the process (chapters 3 and 4), and how new imaginaries and experiments with transversal forms of liberal-democratic constitutionalism and the democratization of global governance are emerging to re-embed the global economy in liberal-democratic political projects (chapter 5). We have sought to stress this heterogeneity and heterodoxy of the democratic practices and subjectivities that are emerging in our rapidly globalizing world.
We have been guided throughout by our commitment to more participatory forms of democracy against the neoliberal contention that there is only one way to be democratic in the twenty-first century, an economic democracy in which individuals become privatized entrepreneurs who are largely passive participants in the rituals of polyarchal democracy. On the contrary, we argue that there is no single keystroke that sounds democracy in globalization, no wonder drug like the capitalist market that will produce it. New and inventive forms of participation are being invented and need to be cultivated. If some forms of global democratic constitutionalism and citizenship are to emerge and if new imaginings and ways of being democratic are to flourish in our global world, it will be as parts of counter-hegemonic projects taking various forms.