Читать книгу How Social Movements Can Save Democracy - Donatella della Porta - Страница 9

While social movements have been studied especially as contentious actors, mainly taking to the streets to resist or promote political changes, some research has pointed towards their innovative capacity in terms of nurturing and spreading new ideas – about, among other things, democratic institutions. Traditionally considered as actors ‘at the gate’ of the institutional system, social movements instead enter institutional arenas in various forms and through various channels.

Social movements have been considered as important actors in terms of their capacity to ‘take the floor’, building public spheres and participating in them. Clearly, not all social movements promoted democracy: some movements (particularly right-wing movements) have openly declared themselves anti-democratic; others (including left-wing movements) have produced authoritarian turns. There is, however, as Charles Tilly (2004, 125) has pointed out:

a wide correspondence between democratisation and social movements. The roots of social movements are found in the partial democratisation that moved British subjects and the North-American colonies against those that governed them in the 18th century. Throughout the nineteenth century, social movements generally blossomed and developed wherever further democratisation took place, decreasing when authoritarian regimes impeded democracy. This path continued during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the maps of the development of institutions and social movements widely overlap.

If democratization favoured social movements, the majority of these supported the democratic reforms that promoted their development.

In this volume, I am primarily concerned with what we might call progressive social movements. Even though progress is a contested term (Allen 2016), I would retain it to define actors that struggle for an inclusive vision of a just society and for deepening democracy. In doing so, I do consider that progress has a dialectical nature. It has been used to stress human emancipation as opposed to social domination, but also criticized as justifying domination by implying ‘a universalist teleological form of thinking according to which some societies or groups have reached that telos earlier than others and thus have the authority, and maybe even the mission, to pull the less progressed people out of their “self-incurred immaturity” into the light of reason and freedom, possibly even overcoming their ignorant or indolent reluctance by force’ (Forst 2019, 1).

While acknowledging the tension between a normative meaning and its historical use, I follow Forst’s call for the development of a de-reified, non-teleological, non-dominating and emancipatory conception of progress. As he notes, differentiating between a technological vision of progress and moral–political progress:

the decisive question raised by the concept of moral–political progress remains how the power to define such progress and the paths leading to it is structured… Technological progress cannot count as social progress in life conditions without social evaluations of what it is good for, who benefits from it, and what costs it generates. Nor can true social progress as moral–political progress exist where the changes in question are enforced and experienced as colonization. Technological progress must be socially accepted, and socially accepted progress is progress which is determined and brought about by the members of the society in question. (Forst 2019, 1)¹

In this direction, I define as progressive those social movements that share with the so-called left-libertarian movement family of the past a combined attention to social justice and positive freedom (della Porta and Rucht 1996). Progress is thus understood as:

the liberation (or ‘emancipation’) of collectivities (for example: citizens, classes, nations, minorities, income categories, even mankind), be it the liberation from want, ignorance, exploitative relations, or the freedom of such collectives to govern themselves autonomously, that is, without being dependent upon or controlled by others. Furthermore, the freedom that results from liberation applies equally to all, with equality serving as a criterion to make sure that liberation does not in fact become a mere privilege of particular social categories. (Offe 2011, 79-80)

In Forst’s terms, I address ‘empowerment initiatives’, ‘especially those where underprivileged groups . . . win participation rights through social struggles’, thus aiming at expanding the scope of agency for individuals as well as collectives. Among them are movements that called for broader inclusion of citizens and reducing domination within and across national borders (Ypi 2012). While progressive movements are my main focus of analysis, I will argue that some of these actors’ claims for broader participation and recognition in the public sphere can spread beyond the original promoter and be articulated by various actors with more ambivalent positions towards global justice. I will also discuss to what extent democratic innovations promoted by progressive social movements can be appropriated by regressive actors.

Studies of social movements have focused especially on their progressive variety, pointing at their emancipatory potential. At the onset of social movement studies, research on collective behaviour by scholars close to the so-called Chicago School stressed that collective phenomena do not simply reflect social crisis, but rather produce new solidarities and norms, which function as drivers of change, especially in the value system. Students of collective behaviour referred to these interpretations in looking at social movements in moments of intense social change (e.g. Blumer 1951; Gusfield 1963; Turner and Killian 1987). Rooted in symbolic interactionism, they gave particular relevance to the meaning attributed to social structures by actors, and focused on how social action based on new norms transformed institutional behaviour (della Porta and Diani 2006, 12–13).

Likewise in research within the new social movement perspective, which paid attention to macro-level social transformations, social movements have been considered as main actors of innovation. Opening the scientific debate on the emergence of new conflicts, Alain Touraine (1985) has considered social movements as constituting the opposition to dominant powers within different societies. In contemporary ones, social movements struggle for control of emerging programmed societies, in which knowledge is especially relevant. Within a resonant approach, Alberto Melucci (1982, 1989, 1996) has paid particular attention to movements as producers of norms in contemporary societies defined as highly differentiated and increasingly investing in the creation of individual autonomous centres of action, but also extending control over the motives for human action. In this perspective, rather than limiting themselves to seeking material gain, new social movements promote ‘other codes’ in order to resist the intrusion of the state and of the market into the everyday life of citizens. Conflicts have therefore been seen as oriented towards the control of meanings, the circulation of information, the production and the use of scientific knowledge, the creation of cultural models for individual and collective identities. Traditionally associated with disruptive forms of political participation, in the Habermasian account of social life movements assume a positive role in mobilizing to resist the invasion of the logics of the system (Habermas 1985).

More recent social science literature has considered social movements as ‘learning sites’ (Welton 1993), capable of building knowledge through discursive processes which consist of the ‘talks and conversations – the speech acts – and written communications of movement members that occur in the context of, or in relation to, movement activities’ (Benford and Snow 2000, 623). Addressing the importance of movements as producers of knowledge, Eyerman and Jamison (1991, 68–9) singled out three dimensions of their cognitive praxis: a cosmological dimension addressing the ‘common worldview assumptions that give a social movement its utopian mission’; a technological dimension which addresses ‘the specific technological issues that particular movements develop around’; an organizational dimension as ‘a particular organizational paradigm, which means they have both ideals and modes of organizing the production and . . . dissemination of knowledge’.

Research on knowledge-practices within social movements singled out a broad range, moving:

from things we are more classically trained to define as knowledge, such as practices that engage and run parallel to the knowledge of scientists or policy experts, to micro-political and cultural interventions that have more to do with ‘know-how’ or the ‘cognitive praxis that informs all social activity’ and which vie with the most basic social institutions that teach us how to be in the world. (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 21)

In fact, social movements are: ‘1) engaging in co-producing, challenging, and transforming expert scientific discourses; 2) creating critical subjects whose embodied discourse produces new notions of democracy; and 3) generating reflexive conjunctural theories and analyses that go against more dogmatic and orthodox approaches to social change, and as such contribute to ethical ways of knowing’ (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 22). Practices of knowledge are both formal and informal, as the activist knowledge is formed through different types of knowledge-practices including concepts, theories and imaginaries as well as methodological devices and research tools. Moreover, they ‘entail practices less obviously associated with knowledge, including the generation of subjectivities/identities, discourses, common-sense, and projects of autonomy and livelihood’ (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 28).

Social movements are first of all important actors in what Rosanvallon (2006) defined as counter-democracy, in that they criticize hegemonic thinking, especially its impact on subalterns. In fact, progressive social movements play a counter-hegemonic function (Freire 1996) as

the character and relational mode of oppressed people tends to be marked by the identification with the oppressor and an often unintentional desire to emulate him/her in terms of identity, position in the social structure and ways of relating to the ‘other’. If that often unconscious tendency is not identified and actively deconstructed, the odds are that the oppressive relationship will be reproduced, this time with new protagonists. (Motta and Esteves 2014, 2)

This critique of existing knowledge aims in particular at the unlearning of the dominant discourses, and the learning, instead, of oppositional and liberatory ones (Foley 1999, 4).

Learning is then oriented towards emancipation, going beyond the critique of hegemonic thinking and experimenting instead with alternatives. Being self-reflexive actors, progressive social movements acquire and produce knowledge in different stages of their activities. Learning is related to participation in the general activities of progressive movements, including meetings, protest, organizing, educational activities, as well as in self-reflection on their actions (Mayo and English 2012, 202–3).

Critical and creative approaches to knowledge aim at social transformation. Scholars have stressed the capacity of progressive social movements to offer alternative analysis and develop responses to situations of exploitation and exclusion starting from the direct experience of those situations. Thus, ‘If scientific knowledge aspires to develop generalizable theoretical and methodological models (some of which is indeed often relied upon by movement actors), “peoples’ knowledge” is based on grounded experience that can differently enhance particular processes of social emancipation’ (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 48).

Social movement knowledge is in fact said to be situated rather than universal, committed rather than detached, focused on changes at the roots of the system rather than on the symptoms (Mayo 1999). It tries to provide useful skills; to develop a critical understanding of power and of agency (Foley 2004); and to connect the local and the global (Crowther et al. 2005). The knowledge produced is ‘embedded in and embodied through lived, place-based experiences, [which] means that they offer different kinds of answers than more abstract knowledge: knowledges that are situated and embodied, rather than supposedly neutral and distanced (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008, 42–3). Movements generate knowledge which moves from practice to theory (Gordon 2007). Their knowledge is therefore considered as basically oriented to articulating theory and praxis, taking concrete realities as the point of departure: ‘The goal is that of creating an appropriate and operative theoretical horizon, very close to the surface of the “lived”, where the simplicity and concreteness of elements from which it has emerged achieve meaning and potential’ (Malo de Molina 2004, 13).

The importance of social movement knowledge is also related to its emergence in action. In particular, movement theorizing is

grounded in the process of producing ‘social movements’ against opposition. It is always to some extent knowledge-in-struggle, and its survival and development is always contested and in process of formation. Its frequently partial, unsystematic and provisional character does not make it any the less worth our attention, though it may go some way towards explaining why academic social movements theory is too often content with taking the ‘cream off the top’, and disregarding – or failing to notice – everything that has to happen before institutionalized social movement theorizing appears in forms that can be easily appropriated. (Barker and Cox 2002, 11)

Thus, theorization based on alternative knowledge and practices represents an aspect of citizens’ engagement in creating collective institutions such as social movement organizations, which are expected to empower them in the pursuit of their aim of resistance and change (Barker and Cox 2002, 21).

In sum, progressive social movements have engaged and engage in democratic innovation. They experiment with new ideas in their internal life, prefiguring alternative forms of democratic politics, and they spread these ideas within institutions. They not only transform democratic states through struggles for policy change, but also express a fundamental critique of conventional politics, thus addressing meta-political issues and experimenting with participatory and deliberative ideas. Historically, progressive social movements have been the carriers of participatory and deliberative democratic qualities, calling for necessary adaptation through innovation in democratic institutions, playing a most relevant role in countering social injustice and struggling for democracy. In these struggles, they have produced innovative ideas and alternative knowledge. This has been, and is, all the more important in times of crisis, which old institutions appear unable to address. Rather than gradual change, these critical junctures require new ideas, even new paradigms, with which social movements may already have experimented. As mentioned, progressive social movements experiment with democratic innovations in their internal practices. In fact, their activities are oriented towards prefiguration of alternative forms of internal democracy. Self-reflexive actors, they experiment with new ideas of democracy, which are then the basis of proposed changes in democratic governance.

Triggered by dissatisfaction with centralized and bureaucratic representative democracy, since the 1970s so-called new social movements have pushed for various forms of participation in decision-making, spreading through a sort of ‘contagion from below’ (Rohrschneider 1993). Emerging trends within social movements that mobilized in the wave of protest against the financial crisis and for democratization illustrate this form of democratic innovation. Recently, the Global Justice Movement as well as anti-austerity protests have produced knowledge about direct democratic processes (Cox 2014, 965). In the beginning of the new millennium, with their reflexive practices inspired by Zapatistas and the building of deliberative spaces, the Global Justice Movement paid specific attention to knowledge production. More recently in the 2010s, those who protested in Tahrir, Porta del Sol, Syntagma Square or Zuccotti Park, and later in Gezi Park or Place de la République, have both criticized existing representative democracy as deeply corrupted and experimented with different models of democracy, stressing especially participatory and deliberative qualities. As a protest repertoire and organizational form, the acampadas – long-term camps in squatted public spaces – have been seen as the incarnation of a democratic experiment that has been adopted and adapted in different contexts. Aiming at participation and deliberation, the acampadas developed from previous practices of internal democracy, such as social forums, in the attempt to learn from their limits and try to address them (della Porta 2015b). In these activities, conceptions of participation from below, cherished by progressive social movements, have in fact been combined with a special attention to the creation of egalitarian and inclusive public spheres (della Porta 2013). With their emphasis on consensus, the acampadas privileged the participation of lay persons – the citizens, the members of the community – mobilized as individuals rather than members of associations of various types (Juris 2012), building on their personal experience and knowledge.

Contemporary progressive movements have considered transparency, equality and inclusivity as important democratic values. In particular, the setting up of camps in open-air space has aimed at enhancing the public and transparent nature of the process, expressing a reclaiming of public spaces by citizens. Choosing open spaces as the main site of protest, activists place a special emphasis on the inclusivity of the process, which involves the entire agora. The heterogeneity of participants is mentioned as a most positive aspect of the camps, in which people of different backgrounds, classes and ideology sit together and talk with each other (Gerbaudo 2012, 69). In this way, the acampadas, by occupying and subverting the use of prominent urban public spaces, aimed at reconstructing a public sphere in which problems and solutions could be discussed among equals (Halvorsen 2012, 431). Within the camps, the general assemblies aimed at mobilizing the common people – not activists but communities of citizens – through placards and individualized messages. Alternative practices were also developed in the everyday management of camp activities, including through free kitchens, medical tents, libraries, media centres and information centres for visitors and new participants (Graeber 2012, 240).

In all these activities, there were attempts at balancing the principle of direct democracy with a search for consensus. In the camps, consensual decision-making was built upon the practices devised by the horizontal wing in the Global Justice Movement (della Porta 2009), as collective thought was expected to emerge through inclusivity and respect for the opinions of all, even in large assemblies involving often hundreds of thousands of people. A consensual, horizontal decision-making process was based on the continuous formation of small groups, which then reconvened in the larger assemblies. Deliberation through consensus was in general seen as an instrument against bureaucratization, but also against the routinization of the assembly, and a way to construct a community (Graeber 2012, 23). So, the acampadas have been sites of contention, but also of exchange of information, reciprocal learning, individual socialization and knowledge building. Their ultimate goal was building a community through the personal knowledge of the participants and their direct experiences, including the expression of strong emotions. So, the occupied free spaces had to develop ‘possible utopias’, by attracting the attention of the media and inspiring participation, but also by ‘providing a space for grassroots participatory democracy; ritual and community building, strategizing and action planning, public education and prefiguring alternative worlds that embody movement visions’, as well as networking and coordinating (Juris 2012, 268). Camps were thus considered as places not only for talking and listening, but also for the building of collective identities, happening through the development of strong emotions and longer-lasting relations. Open public spaces were to create intense ties and sharing of a common belonging through encounters among diverse people. Camps therefore had to show opposition but also to prefigure new relations, experimenting with another form of democracy.

Some of the mentioned innovative ideas about democracy have been at the basis of institutional experiments that were indeed inspired by the same principles of participation and deliberation. Besides engaging in internal practices of democratic innovation, social movements are in fact also carriers of innovation in institutions, performing this role in a variety of ways and with different results. In short, social movements raise claims not only on specific policies, but more broadly on the way in which the political system as a whole functions: its institutional and formal procedures, elite recruitment and the informal configuration of power (Kitschelt 1986). Movements have often obtained decentralization of political power and channels of consultation with citizens on particular decisions; appeals procedures against decisions by the public administration; the possibility to be allowed to testify before representative institutions and the judiciary, to be listened to as counter-experts, to receive legal recognition and material incentives. Repertoires of collective action, which were once stigmatized and dealt with as public order problems, have slowly become legal and legitimate (della Porta and Reiter 1998), while direct democracy has been developed as a supplementary channel of access to those opened within representative democracy (della Porta, O’Connor et al. 2017a). Social movements also contribute to the creation of new arenas for the development of public policy, such as expert commissions or specific administrative and political branches, for example state ministries or local bureaus on women’s and ecological issues in many countries. Within international organizations, such as the EU, movement activists have been co-opted by specific public bodies as members of their staff (Ruzza 2004) and opportunities for conflictual cooperation develop within regulatory agencies through consultation, to incorporation in committees, to delegation of power (Giugni and Passy 1998, 85). These institutions mediate social movement claims and even ally themselves with movement activists with whom they may have frequent contact.

In recent times, democratic innovations have included participatory arenas open to the participation of normal citizens in public debates on relevant (and often divisive) issues. Especially at the local level, there have been various attempts at increasing participation, through the creation of high-quality communicative arenas and the empowering of citizens. In fact, one can distinguish, with Graham Smith (2009), two main institutional formulas: assembleary, or oriented to the construction of a ‘mini-public’, usually selected by lot. The former in particular have seen the participation of social movement activists in neighbourhood assemblies or even thematic assemblies, neighbourhood councils, consultation committees, strategic participatory plans and the like. In particular, participatory budgets have spread from Porto Alegre, a Brazilian city of 1,360,000 inhabitants, to being recognized by the United Nations as one of the forty ‘best practices’ at global level (Allegretti 2003, 173). In order to achieve social equality and provide occasions for empowerment, citizens are invited to decide about the distribution of certain public funds through a structured process of involvement in assemblies and committees. The objectives of these institutions include effective prob-lem-solving and equitable solutions, as well as broad, deep and sustained participation. The participatory budget has been credited with creating a positive context for association, fostering greater activism, networking associations, and working from a citywide orientation (Baiocchi 2002). Even though the intensity of participation, its duration and influence, vary greatly between the various participatory devices, they all point towards the limits of a merely representative conception of democracy. The aim of improving managerial capacities, through greater transparency and the circulation of information, is linked with the transformation of social relations, by reconstructing social ties, fostering solidarity and eventually ‘democratising democracy’ (Bacqué et al. 2005). Such instruments have been analysed as improving the capacity to address problems created by local opposition to the construction of big infrastructure (Bobbio and Zeppetella 1999). They are supposed to increase the legitimacy of public decisions as ‘all potentially affected groups have equal opportunity to get involved in the process and equal right to propose topics, formulate solutions, or critically discuss taken-for-granted approaches, and because decision-making is by exchange of argument’ (Baccaro and Papadakis 2008, 1).

Going beyond the discussion of democratic innovations within movements and existing research on participatory institutions and social movements (which I have addressed elsewhere, see della Porta 2013; 2015b), I want to analyse in this volume some institutional outcomes of contemporary progressive movements in terms of the spreading of their participatory and deliberative conceptions and practices in constitutional processes, direct democracy and party politics. In fact, as mentioned, a main assumption in this work is that, at a time in which tensions in democracies are increasing, progressive social movements might offer important resources for reinvigorating democratic participation and deliberation. Notwithstanding that institutional democratic innovations and social movements have been mostly considered in isolation from each other, the two often interact:

Deliberative democracy and collective action have often been opposed as offering conflicting ways of constructing the common good, based on cooperative discussion on the one hand, and adversarial protest and negotiation on the other. Social movements have however shaped the inception and organization of democratic innovations to a large extent. Historically, the first wave of deliberative and participatory institutions appeared in the 1970s as a response to social movements’ claims for a greater inclusiveness of the political process. Social movements also influence the way democratic innovations work, by participating in, or on the contrary boycotting, new forms of democratic engagement. Finally, social movements’ internal democratic practices and reflections about the limits of informal decision making have inspired the field of deliberative democracy, which has, in turn, influenced collective action research. (Talpin 2015, 781)

As I am going to argue in this volume, social movements can play a key role in introducing democratic innovations (which they experiment with in their internal practices) in public institutions, by using specific institutional mechanisms, such as constitution-building, direct democratic procedures and party politics.

In each of the following three chapters, I will therefore refer to the toolkit of social movement studies in order to account for some of the democratic innovations brought about by grassroots constitutional processes, referendums from below, as well as movement parties. Social movements need to challenge existing institutions, producing cracks (or at least turning points) in the system. Research in social movement studies has indeed focused on political opportunities, looking at both the contingent availability of potential allies (their dispositions and strength) and more stable channels of access to political institutions (mainly functional and territorial divisions of power) (see della Porta and Diani 2006, ch. 7, for a review). The main assumption has been that the opening of political opportunities influences collective mobilization and its forms, as rational activists tend to invest in collective action when their effort seems worthwhile. Broadly tested from cross-national (e.g. Kriesi et al. 1995; della Porta 1995) and cross-time (e.g. Tarrow 1989) perspectives, the political opportunity approach has suggested that protest is, by and large, more frequent and less radical when stable and/or contingent channels of access to institutions by outsiders are open. In fact, even in the face of economic crises and structural weakness of the lower classes, scholars have cited the opening up of political opportunities to explain the emergence of protest as well as its success (Tarrow 2011).

In their struggles, social movements mobilize material and symbolic resources. Social movement studies have thus looked at the capacity of horizontal networks to mobilize resources, as well as at the framing processes for mobilization, in particular at the bridging of specific issues to broader themes as well as the amplification of the importance of some topics for the everyday life of the people. Frames, defined as the dominant worldviews that guide the behaviour of social movement groups, are produced by the organizational leadership, which provides the necessary ideological background within which individual activists can locate their experiences. Frame analysis thus focuses on the process of the attribution of meaning, which lies behind any conflict. In particular, within progressive movements the quality of communication has been considered as of fundamental value not only for the development of informed opinions on a specific policy, but also for the quality of democracy in general (della Porta and Diani 2006, ch. 1).

More recently, within a more dynamic perspective, research on the political context for contentious activities has moved from a consideration of opportunities as structurally given into paying attention to the ways in which protest itself can create opportunities by challenging existing routines and destabilizing elite coalitions. The concept of repertoire of contention refers to what people know they can do when they want to oppose a public decision they consider unjust or threatening (Tilly 1986, 2). Initially focusing only on the more or less stable protest as a public display of disruptive action, Charles Tilly (2008) has addressed broader contentious performances, with some historical adaptations in the various forms of contentious politics. The characteristics of protest have often been connected with contextual opportunities and constraints, with the opening of opportunities favouring moderate forms of action. Beyond adapting to a changing opportunity structure, social movements can, however, also try to create their own opportunities through ‘eventful protests’, which constitute processes during which collective experiences develop through the interactions of the different individual and collective actors who, with different roles and aims, take part in it (della Porta 2008; 2017). Some protest events have a transformative effect, as ‘events transform structures largely by constituting and empowering new groups of actors or by re-empowering existing groups in new ways’ (Sewell 1996, 271). They put in motion social processes that ‘are inherently contingent, discontinuous and open ended’ (Sewell 1996, 272). Eventful protests have cognitive, affective and relational impacts on the very movements that carry them out as they affect structures by fuelling mechanisms of social change: organizational networks develop; frames are bridged; personal links foster reciprocal trust. Some forms of action or specific campaigns have a particularly high degree of eventfulness (della Porta 2008). During these intense times, signals about the possibility of collective action are sent (Morris 2000), feelings of solidarity created, and organizational networks consolidated. In fact, as Mark Beissinger (2002, 47) reminded us, ‘not all historical eras are alike. There are times when change occurs so slowly that time seems almost frozen, though beneath the surface considerable turbulence and evolution may be silently at work. There are other times when change is so compressed, blaring, and fundamental that it is almost impossible to take its measure.’ Eventful protests might therefore transform relations through causal mechanisms such as appropriation of opportunities, the activation of networks, and the increased resonance of some frames (McAdam et al. 2001; della Porta 2017a).