It is imperative to reflect upon revolutionary moments in the past so as to improve movements and organizing now. Looking back on 1968 is especially popular among socialist groups, but everyone can take away lessons from the mass revolts in France and the causes behind them. Here we see that participatory democracy played a role and should continue to do so in foreseeable rebellions. -Editor
The French May
Source: http://socialistworker.org/2008/05/15/the-french-may
May 15, 2008
This month marks 40 years since the titanic struggles of May 1968 in France. What started with protests by students at a few universities set off a mass rebellion that paralyzed Paris and other cities--and the largest general strike in history to that point.
Joel Geier, the associate editor of the International Socialist Review, spoke on the French May and the other revolutionary events of 1968. His speech was the basis for an article in the ISR, "Year of revolutionary hope"--part of a series on 1968 that has appeared in the magazine. Here, we print an excerpt from that article.
1968 WAS a year of revolutionary hope.
Most of the time, people have little hope. They accept or adapt to existing conditions around them, even miserable ones. They feel powerless; they don't think they can change things.
Most of the time, revolutionaries are a small, marginalized minority, considered unrealistic and utopian. Revolution is seen as being impossible; people, we are told, are too apathetic or ignorant--they'll never fight back. The working class has been bought off, it's fat and contented; so forget it, relax, enjoy your own life, that's the best you can hope for.
And then suddenly, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, there are huge explosions from below, in which millions of people heroically engage in radical struggles that totally transform the world, politics and themselves. They reach for revolutionary solutions to the oppressive conditions they live under, and large numbers of them come to revolutionary consciousness.
In this country, for example, millions of people thought of themselves as revolutionaries in the late 1960s. By 1970, 40 percent of all college students said a revolution was necessary in the United States. A majority of young Blacks identified with the Black Panther Party.
What else to read :
Joel Geier's article "Year of Revolutionary Hope" can be read in the International Socialist Review.
It is part of a series of articles in the ISR chronicling key points in the revolutionary year of 1968. Others include "Tet: Turning Point in the Vietnam War" by Joe Allen and "Martin Luther King's Last Fight" by Brian Jones.
One of the best histories of May '68 is Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 by Daniel Singer, which combines an eyewitness account of events with an analysis of the social forces at work. For another view, see Revolutionary Rehearsals, which contains a chapter on May 1968 by Ian Birchall.
The veteran revolutionary Tariq Ali chronicles the struggles of 1968 through prose and pictures in a book co-authored with Susan Watkins titled 1968: Marching in the Streets. Ali also writes about 1968 in his Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties.
We're told those things can't happen in the United States--that millions of people could consider themselves to be revolutionaries--but they did. Large numbers of people wanted not just any change; they wanted a sweeping radical, revolutionary socialist change. They didn't just want to elect somebody different; they wanted to do away with rulers and ruled. They wanted to do away with rich and poor, with bankers and bosses. They wanted to run their own lives, in what was called participatory democracy.
Participatory democracy was the idea that we should have the right to make the most important decisions that affect our lives, and that we should determine the conditions under which we live. And the key word of 1968 was liberation--national liberation, Black liberation, women's liberation, and gay liberation.... CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The French May: Fifty Years Later
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Participatory Democracy Tends to Replace Representative Democracy
The following interview with Jean-Louis Laville and Roger Sue gives an optomistic view of the growing participation in community organizations. They accurately point out that there is not an established social state in some "developing" countries and that participation in diverse organizations is starting to fill this void. Meanwhile in France, the type of organizations in which people participate is changing faces due to new pressures and the co-optation by hierarchical state structure of some old organizations. They note that all around the world, people are creating organizations in the form of networks that distinguish themselves from former social movements. The full interview and additional information below it on the webpage positively reflect on the prospects for participatory democracy in the future. -Editor
Participatory democracy is tending to replace representative democracy, while new forms of citizen action are appearing through a rapidly increasing number of organizations. An interview of Jean-Louis Laville, a sociologist at CNRS-CRIDA1.
Label France: What does the recent rapid growth in the number of organizations reveal, in France in particular?
Jean-Louis Laville: The act of associating, which in France hinges on solidarity, is intrinsically linked to modern democracy. Indeed, when one adopts the principle that we live in a society of free and equal citizens the problem of living together is posed, since the social system is no longer guaranteed by reference to a transcendent authority. This structure, in fact, encompasses two concepts of liberty: the right to do what does not harm others and the power to
For a little while now, three phenomena have been contributing to the greater visibility of the voluntary organization sector. The first concerns the structural change of productive activities: jobs linked to education, health, services based on face-to-face provider-user contact, the areas in which voluntary organizations are active, are increasing.
The second is linked to the restructuring of the Welfare State: many activities were organized with finance and regulations emanating from the Social State. Lastly, the crisis of the traditional institutions of socialization such as the family, the Church, political parties or trade unions, has encouraged community networks to flourish, which are no longer inherited but chosen.
At the same time, it is also the forms of public commitment that are changing...
We are witnessing both a crisis and a resurgence of voluntary service. Some political parties and trade unions, institutionalized organizations, are seeing a disaffection of their membership while other structures are expanding rapidly. Once we had forms of militancy, to which one subscribed for the duration - people committed themselves to a cause for twenty or thirty years - they made sacrifices - they were prepared to neglect some aspects of their lives - and very much based on delegation. Now, people want to play a more active role, and obtain rapid results. They have less confidence in representative democracy and are more involved in participatory democracy.
Interest and disinterest mingle in the stories of individuals and communities. An unemployed man who gets involved in an organization for the jobless, what is it that makes him decide to act? The desire to improve his situation or the feeling of belonging to a group ignored in public life? Probably both. Ditto for the Aids militants. Certainly, commitment is often linked to a personal experience, but, at the same time, this drive to form a genuine movement to win recognition of a decent status for the sick cannot be explained solely by personal interest.
It is true that there is a paradox between this aspiration of citizens to become involved and the rise of individualism. Historically, individualism has been associated with emancipation. But alongside its advance, it was rooted in society, tried and tested from participating in the great institutions. Now, with their function disrupted, they no longer constitute such poles of reference, and this can lead to an individualism experienced as a withdrawal into the private sphere, a lack of care for others, and become an obstacle to democracy. Moreover, for me, the future of the relationship between the individual and democracy is in part contained in the coming changes in a number of everyday services.
For example?
With women’s involvement in working life, the care of children and help to old people at home are no longer provided by the traditional family. Organizing these services thus becomes a problem for society. Now two models can be envisaged; that of private companies, which will define standardized interventions and will adapt to the user perceived as a consumer, with the risks of selection by money to which this leads: and one based on a community spirit, which will try to instigate a dialogue with users, perceived as citizens, and attempt to involve them.
Behind these changes, there are really two models of society being sketched out. Depending on the option chosen to regulate these relationships between the generations, forms of collective action will be supported, people seeing that it is possible to be committed to simple actions which make for a very structured community life; or negative individualism will be consolidated.
Is the voluntary organization movement a new form of social movement?
A social movement is a form of integrated collective action, highly delegated, which aims to bring about changes generated by relationships based on force. Contemporary forms of voluntary group action seem to make our way of understanding it inadequate. When an association of the unemployed is formed, political groups systematically try to wield power in it. The old ways of working, referring to a sacrificial militancy, thus represent themselves as being the only social movements and deny all legitimacy to more recent forms of organizing.
Another example: the mobilisation of the NGOs at the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle (United States) in December 19992. This is not the construction of a social movement as it used to be seen: there is no single movement, which, through the mechanisms of representative democracy, constitutes a homogeneous force standing up against the great powers. It is organized much more as a network - and on an international scale - than as a pyramid, with, moreover, the help of the new technologies. If this is indeed collective action proving its ability to affect decisions, can one nonetheless talk about a social movement?
Today, economies can no longer be regulated solely at national government level. Thus there are attempts to democratize the economy through a variety of citizen actions. These phenomena assume that it is possible to have an interdependent, human economy. At the supranational level, this is expressed through co-ordinated campaigns like those in Seattle which plead for world trade to be regulated by equitable commerce, respecting social and environmental rules.
At the infranational level, this takes the form of actions whose object is to generate local development, not focused on the market economy but oriented towards economies useful to the people living in a particular country. In both cases, the difficulty is managing to reconcile in action the ability to ask critical questions and the construction of a society. The fact that the networks concerned are seeking to act together underlines the link between these forms of action.
It is obvious that we no longer live in triumphant liberalism and that a counter-power with the capacity to intervene has appeared. On the one hand, there are nonetheless difficulties in reaching a definition of common objectives for networks that have come out of the same rejection. On the other, in all regions of the world, community life is making progress and, in developing countries, this advance is part of the process of constructing a social State, which does not yet exist. In any case, we must stop seeing civil society as being in opposition to the State. They are complementary, and it is exactly this that is being reformulated in various countries. The actions of organizations in civil society must be thought of in relation to those of social rights and thus of public intervention3.
Friday, February 8, 2008
France's Ségolène Royal: What Might Have Been...and What May Be
Ségolène Royal, the socialist candidate in last year's general election in France campaigned in large part on a platform of expanding participatory democracy within France. Early in her campaign she launched an internet based e-consultation through her website "désirs d'avenir" which allowed citizens to contribute thier input into her platform. She had plans to institute systems of participatory governance and budgeting throughout France. Unfortunately she lost the presidential election to her conservative rival Nicolas Zarkozy. This has not deterred her in her push for participatory democracy however, and she has introduced participatory budgeting in her home region of Poitou-Charentes, which even allows student participation in school budgeting. Now, with the cooperation of the regions of Tuscany, Italy and Catalonia, Spain, she has launched the European Foundation for Participatory Democracy in order to promote participatory democracy throughout Europe. If the initiative continues it's current success, perhaps people in France will take a closer look at her policies and if she runs again, sieze upon the opportunity to expand democracy and governance in France down into the grassroots level where it belongs. - Editor
EUROPE: 'Participatory Democracy Can Resolve Crisis'
With participatory budgeting, one of the most widespread mechanisms, citizens decide on allocation of public funds. Such budgeting was developed at the end of the 1980s in the Brazilian town Porto Alegre, and is now implemented in over 50 cities in Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Portugal and Poland. --Stefania Milan
By Stefania Milan
(Source: http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/10/europe_particip.html)
FLORENCE, Oct 19 (IPS) - "Participatory democracy can be the answer to the European crisis," says Ségolène Royal, Socialist candidate in the last general election in France.
Since 2004 Royal has been president of Poitou-Charentes, a region on the west coast of France 400 kilometres from Paris. She heads the local Socialist government.
Royal was in Florence to launch the European Foundation for Participatory Democracy, in cooperation with the Tuscany region of Italy and Catalonia in Spain. The foundation aims to promote participatory democracy in Europe through cooperation and exchange of best practices.
"Including participatory mechanisms in the daily practices of the European Union could promote more proximity of the Union to its citizens, and more transparency," president of the Tuscany region Claudio Martini said.
Participatory democracy devices such as a referendum, participatory budgeting, e-consultations and citizens' juries are intended to include citizens' voices in decision-making processes. They can be consultative, or imply a real transfer of decision-making power from politicians to citizens.
With participatory budgeting, one of the most widespread mechanisms, citizens decide on allocation of public funds. Such budgeting was developed at the end of the 1980s in the Brazilian town Porto Alegre, and is now implemented in over 50 cities in Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Portugal and Poland.
"Participatory democracy is often seen in opposition to representative democracy," Royal said. "But we believe that if citizens do not participate in political decisions, decisions are not understood and shared by the population. Decisions are strongest if authorities agree to put themselves under discussion."
Royal's region, Poitou-Charentes, is in the forefront of implementation of participatory democracy mechanisms. Since 2005, high school students have been invited to have a say in allocation of the 10 percent of the regional budget for education.
Ninety-three schools participate in distribution of 10 million euro per year. Students, parents and teachers are consulted on a regular basis, make concrete proposals, and vote their favourite project. The regional council then distributes funds. So far 706 projects have been financed this way.
Poitou-Charentes is a largely rural region. Many students live in boarding schools and have been lamenting poor living conditions, and lack of services and cultural initiatives.
"There was a lot of criticism that students would finance just anything. But they have expressed a need for cultural enrichment: more music and arts in the schools but also easier access to outside initiatives, including the institution of a cultural facilitator," Royal told IPS.
Participatory budgeting in high schools is also financing driving licence courses for young people at professional schools. In 2008 Poitou-Charentes will set up a citizens jury to evaluate the environmental impact of regional policies.
The relationship between institutions and citizens has changed since introduction of participatory budgeting, says Anja Röcke, consultant to the Poitou-Charentes region.
"The regional school administration has become more transparent and open towards users. The person in charge goes to the meeting with the school community. People understand why decisions are taken, and what the region is doing," Röcke told IPS.
However, participatory budgeting is not a simple process. "Some schools are very active, they seem to understand better what democracy means. In other places the process is still quite top-down, and no one is coming to the meetings. But overall it is a positive dynamic, it is going in the right direction," Röcke said.
Tuscany region has taken the French experience as a model for its own regional law on citizens' participation, adopted in July 2007 following consultations with citizens. Citizens will have six months to give their opinion on matters such as creation of high-impact infrastructure. But "the final decision is still in the hands of institutions," said Martini.
In November Massa Carrara town in Tuscany will host the second 'Electronic Town Meeting' in which 300 randomly selected citizens will use new technologies to allocate the regional health budget, and decide who should pay for certain health services, and to what extent.
Tuscany and Poitou-Charentes are also partners in a European project on e-participation, promoting citizens' participation through new technologies and the Internet.
European Foundation for Participatory Democracy: http://www.demo-part.org/ (Under Construction)
Poitou-Charentes participatory school budgeting site: http://www.democratie-participative.fr/
