Torry D. Dickinson - Democracy Works: Joining Theory and Action to Foster Global Change

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

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

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

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

Why do movements take common forms, at least at the general level? The prevalence of institutional-change and social-reconstruction strategies is evident partly because we all live in the same world-system, and the general possibilities for fostering democratic change are fairly limited by the systems common workings and its formation of common openings for change. And, as Wallerstein has demonstrated, the worlds people all confront finite aspects of historical capitalisms workings: the end of limitless low-cost rural labor for agricultural and industrial firms, the rise of interconnected urban laborers who require and demand higher levels of monetary remuneration and state services, the decline of natural resources that firms defined as productions inputswhich, once processed, required seeking locations to dump unusable outputsand the growing costs of taxation and the often militarily secured price of stability and protection (Wallerstein 2004, 8285). As working people try to shape lives that are molded by these global pressures, embedded in their actions and movements is the struggle against institutional inequalities of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, and global location, which are embedded in local-to-global relations. As they struggle against the systems exclusionary forcesa process that began as soon as the system began to grow 500 years agoaction groups and movements remake gender, race, class, and the unequal relations between the global North and South. Even though democratic groups are undoing divisions at the same time the system continues to divide the worlds population, action groups maintain their goal of becoming a diverse and powerful humanizing force, one that will end peoples division.