International: Feminist Dialogues concept paper: "Feminist Perspectives on Radical Democracy"

Why Radical Democracy?

The discourse on radical democracy proposes that democracy is not purely a political system. It is deeply connected with values of social justice and gender equality. It is a consciousness and a way of organising social life in all the dimensions in which we experience being human. All existing democratic systems that we know today (whether bourgeois, liberal or neo-liberal, or post-socialist) are devoid of these aspects.

As feminists we need to develop a deep and profound critique of democracy that will enable its transformation and radicalization, in collaboration and partnership with other social movements.

The radicalization of democracy calls for the re-construction of the notion of citizenship as well. Taking into consideration the various exclusions and marginalizations that are an integral part of democracy as we know it, we must re-cast the identity of the citizen within a political mould. We need to see citizenship as not merely a legal identity but also as an expression of affinity with others.

The re-articulation of democracy in a radical and transformed form enables us to re-visit our understandings of the nation-state and of sovereignty. This revisiting is crucial in the changing contexts of economic globalization with the rearrangement of global spaces and the subsequent restructuring of social and political relations. A key question for us to consider is whether states are really ‘losing control’ or whether they are re-shaping state sovereignty in a manner that is more in line with the challenges of aligning with global markets and supranational organizations. If we look at sovereignty as ‘an effect of practices’ associated with the law and other regulatory systems that constructs the relationships between the state, its people and the market, we can see the emergence of differentiated zones of sovereignty within the borders of one nation-state.

In other situations, we see the state surrendering its own sovereignty and allowing other actors such as international financing agencies and transnational corporations, to define the terms and conditions of existence of a section of its citizens. One example is where labour and taxation laws applicable nationally are deemed not to apply in certain areas of the nation-state dedicated as ‘growth zones’, export processing zones, free trade zones etc. In today’s world, the contestation of the rights of internally displaced persons, refugees, asylum seekers, indigenous and itinerant people, travellers and Roma people, migrants and trafficked persons remind us forcefully that the modern condition is increasingly allowing for the relaxation of state’s obligations and exposing large sections of the world’s peoples to social exclusion.

The crises faced by states in the grip of globalization calls for urgent reforms of institutional structures of the state, at the administrative, judicial, electoral and community levels. It requires reform and democratization of political parties in a manner that forces them to recognise the significance of social movements and to institutionalize regular interaction with these movements. It calls for the placing of politics, and not economics, at the centre of the discourse.

The Citizen in a Radical Democracy

What happens when citizenship is understood to mean the common political identity of a wide range of people engaged in diverse activities and movements, with differing perceptions of what constitutes the common good ? This group of citizens are bound together by a shared recognition of a set of ethical and political values that are reached through democratic debates and temporal convergances at various historical points. The articulating principles of citizenship within a radical democratic framework allows for both a plurality of allegiances and for the respect of individual liberty.

Such a democractic process calls for the creation of spaces in which the convergence of identities as radical democratic citizens will lead to modification of these same identities as citizens interact and negotiate the coalitions. (Mouffe) In order to do this, we must conceive of the social agent, or ‘subject’, not as a unitary, but as an ensemble of subject positions.

As feminists who are a part of social movements, we generate new social practices that inform the exercise of radical democratic citizenship. Citizenship in this understanding is not sustained within an abstract frame of universalism, or within a hegemonic model that naturalises differences. From the perspective of a radical democracy, citizenship is a permanently fluid and never completed process of socio-cultural construction, taken forward by politicised and socially active individuals, men and women.

Feminist Politics in a Radical Democratic Culture

As feminists, we need a plural and radical conception of democracy, that recovers the diversity of experiences and conceptions of democracy which are located outside the neoliberal hegemonic model. We need to enrich democratic visions so that they are imbued with transcultural and not occidental values, acting at different levels and in diverse dimensions. We seek to create a democracy of “high intensity” (Boaventura) one that recovers subjectivity as part of the transformation of social relations, with multiple sites that enrich emanicipatory democratic agendas. Such a high level democracy surpasses the idea that some struggles are primary and others secondary, and that some subjects are more privileged than others in the process of democratic transformation.

Some of us have been retrieving and radicalizing the most progressive aspects of liberal democracy – liberty, equality, self-determination, autonomy - and combining these with socialist conceptions of the common good. This opens up possibilities for contestation and convergence at the ideological and cultural levels, around the ethical meaning of radical democracy: That is, the transformation of power relations from a framework of domination and subordination to one of “shared authority”, within our movements, in the society, and in relation to the states.

The feminist politics within which we position ourselves generates a new political culture and new frameworks of understanding that articulate the strategies of social movements with the project of social transformation. Through this we enter a process of overcoming all forms of exploitation, domination and discrimination in each of our societies and at the global level, confronting the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism, militarisms and fundamentalisms that exclude, violate and dehumanize us, together and separately.

A radical and plural democracy that extends to the broadest spectrum of excluded social groups will radicalise the values of liberty and equality. Equality, in this process will not be viewed as the dichotomous juxtaposition of sameness and difference. Rather, equality will be seen as a legitimate human aspiration for harmonious co-existence of differences. Equality will also be a political commitment to equal opportunities and equal treatment that take into consideration the historical legacy of economic and social difference that has generated processes of social stratification in which discrimination on the basis of difference has become a part of our present understanding of reality.

Such a new political democratic culture requires the subordination of the economic to the political, and the subordination of the market to social interests. This means an implacable confrontation with neoliberalism and capitalism, and with the forces of exclusion and domination that are integral to it.

In a radical democratic frame, gender identities are seen not in and of themselves, but rather in a permanent interaction and articulation with other identities and discriminations of race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, geographical space, as expressions of one over-arching system of domination. This system of domination contains, expresses and consecrates the different ways in which the category of ‘woman’ is constructed as subordinate. (Mouffe). We need a multiplicity of struggles that do not make differences invisible, but on the contrary, provoke a multiplicity of responses, in order to expand the space of social experience, at local and global level and in order to bring about processes of transformation.

In this process, feminisms have produced and supported the production of substantive ruptures in the conception of democracy, as they articulate change at the personal level with social change, as they incorporate the struggle for equality in the public realm in inextricable articulation with the struggle for the democratization of daily life. Democracy in the country and in the home, at the local and at the global level, in the intimate dimension and in the public world: The transformations we aspire to are material as well as symbolic, cultural as well as social and political.

One of the challenges of radical democracy is to understand the relationship between sexuality, production and reproduction as questions that are a part of the symbolic and material dimensions of social relations of domination and exploitation.(Betania Avila) This is an analytic exigency, posed through the politicization of various dimensions of social conflict that reveal the actions and reflections of social movements, producing new frameworks of understanding with which other dynamics also begin to interact. Among these could be struggles oriented towards global justice, coming from a variety of streams, as well as emancipatory struggles that confront obsolete paradigms, searching and experimenting creative and novel ways of replacing them.

In the process of radicalizing democracy, women’s movements and feminist movements propose to take the struggle into a variety of terrains: Among these are struggles against material and symbolic exclusions; struggles for redistributive justice and the justice of recognition; struggles for local, global and inter-societal justice and peace; struggles for recognition of body politics; struggles for the recognition and dialogue between diversities.

These are not only sectoral or specific struggles, although struggles at those levels are also clearly necessary . These struggles constitute strategies for a new political culture, oriented towards a retrieval of gender justice as a part of all other situations of injustice. These strategies can take the struggle for a single right forward into the space of transformative politics, with the possibility of having an impact on social, economical political, cultural and symbolic relations. They can also advance the ‘recovery’ of democracy as a terrain of negotiation rather than of negation, as a terrain in which the conflicts that arise out of plurality and difference can be resolved through dialogue rather than through war. This democracy will both celebrate and promote disputes as well as agreements as a part of the plurality of voices and interests that we bring forward.

Feminist interacting with Social Movements in the Arena of Radical Democracy

The practices of social movements within the radical democratic framework generate new dimensions of conflict, making visible and recovering dimensions that have been absent till now. They enrich the process of radicalizing democracy with new voices, new presences and new proposals for freedom. That is why we can today speak about the sexual dimension of citizenship, as well as about the ecological and global dimensions of citizenship, as terrains of conflict for political recognition.

In these new frameworks of understanding, how can we build dialogues with other emancipatory struggles? How can we get rid of fixed identities and, at the same time, create new spaces for negotiation between differences? Which are the differences that deserve recognition and which do not? How can we extend our “epistemological community” without losing our specific profile? Without making invisible the urgent need for redistribution of power and for political recognition that are part of many dynamic and diverse claims for justice and visibility?

Feminist Challenges

To change the multiple dynamics of exclusion on women s life from an emancipatory perspective calls for multiple strategies for multiple transformations. One of the challenges faced by feminists and by progressive activists within the hegemonic democratic frameworks now in place is that of overcoming the systems of exclusion of women from the public/political space, incorporating the recognition of the urgent processes of democracy in the private. And, in these processes, the democratization of the movements themselves

Feminist movements in the new millennium are oriented towards the enriching of the radical democratic political project in which diversity is recognised, is taken on and worked on, in subjective terms, not seen as something to be merely tolerated. We seek spaces where feminists can express themselves and enrich themselves, through processes of learning and experiencing change, thereby bringing recognition and a connection with other democratic struggles at local, national, regional and global levels. This, in turn, will enrich the new democratic cultures than are expressing themselves in an explosion of new issues, new identities and new social actors. This is where the justice of redistribution and recognition can become the feminist axis strengthening the processes of transformation.

These new perspectives on democracy have found relevance and strength in new global spaces such as the World Social Forum that is today a space of building and articulating knowledge, as well as of engaging in global democratic reflections and of generating global strategies within and between social movements.

As Betania Avila says, these are spaces where feminists find a fertile ground to build alliances , to relate with other subjects and movements, and to express the feminist contribution to the radicalization of democracy and the democratization of politics. It is a space of exchange and growing and also a space for dispute and dialogue, on every aspect of identity and power.

The imbalances that exist in the present are the raw materials from which more audacious proposals will emerge, that can expand and connect diverse views and perspectives, surpassing fragmentation and “single visions” (pensamientos unicos) that feeds neo-liberalisms and fundamentalisms.

In these arenas, it is critical for feminists and for feminist movements to preserve their own identity and autonomy, while at the same time negotiating alliances with other movements. Through the Feminist Dialogues, we bring the feminist discourse on radical democracy to the WSF.

Another world will not be possible without another conception of democracy. And another democracy is only possible through a process of personal and subjective revolutions, of men and women, with an active recognition of diversity, taking on the intersectionalities of struggles as a collective challenge.

16 January 2007