Introduction
C. George Benello and Dimitrios Rousopoulos
The phrase "participatory democracy" has been taken up by many politicians and political agencies in both the United States and Canada. However, their definition of this concept, which falls within the prevailing political lexicon and society's prevailing public philosophy, is unacceptable to us and to its originators. Those who uphold the status quo, in order not to disclose their intellectual and ideological barrenness, have usurped New Left rhetoric in an effort to swing with the style of ideas now emerging from the base of society. A book on the real meaning of participatory democracy is long overdue.
It is appropriate that the first effort at conceptualizing the nature of participatory democracy should be a collective one. We need such intellectual task forces evaluating the work of contemporaries as well as the concrete experiences in the movement for radical social change. What we hope to achieve in this volume is a vision of participatory democracy placed squarely in its proper intellectual arena, and we hope to spell out the points around which serious debate on the subject is now taking place. In the course of the book, it will become clear to the reader that the debate goes beyond the concerns of liberalism, social democracy, and the authoritarian Old Left. The thrust of the thinkers represented is to seek for structural changes in a system that is closing out true democracy and that is robbing people of a chance to have politically meaningful identities within their culture. All this is not simply a question of programs and ideologies, but of the prevailing institutions themselves.
People's desire for a community in which they can control the decisions that affect their lives has been, from the beginning, part of the very nature of society. This desire is also central to the new revolutionary movement; far more than a vague idealistic yearning, it arose as a profound reaction to the steady process of depersonalization pervading advanced industrial societies in a period of tumultuous transition.
The transition has been from market capitalism to neocapitalism. Partly initiated by extraordinary technological innovations, it has accelerated occupational specialization, accentuated interpersonal competition, and generated both a growing authoritarianism and a passive attitude that accepts all this as necessary. Politically, technological advances have concentrated power in the hands of self-appointed elites. But more importantly, these elites and their corresponding institutions exercise a highly centralized social control. If, as it is said, technology conquers nature, then to do so, it must first conquer man. The disappearance of overt political coercion should not blind us to this fact.
The authors represented in this book do not accept the belief, held by liberals and most socialists, that technology has within it a self-correcting mechanism. On the contrary, they believe that while the economic base of a society can determine the orientation of its technology, no society yet established has developed checks on the deforming drives of a "technotronic" superstructure, once it has come into being. Technological advances affect the societies in which they occur in ways so extensive that they cannot help but be political. The self-appointed elites who manage technology make decisions that have far-reaching effects on the shape of the urban landscape, on the management of resources, on where people work and live. Refusing to recognize the extent to which they are political, the political system of liberal democracies has consigned these decisions to the private sector. Participatory democracy seeks to reintroduce the concept of democracy from the ground up, which means introducing democratic process into the major organizations of society, public and private.
It is here that examples from abroad are relevant-the Israeli kibbutzim, the French communities of work, the experiences of community and worker's control in Yugoslavia. In the United States, the experience of community development corporations, short though it is, marks an important step in the movement to democratize from the ground up. While the Yugoslav efforts have focused on the work place as well as the basic geographical units, in the United States the effort has been to create community development corporations, based on the belief that urban blight and ghettoization have created a potent base for organizing around the issue of seeking greater power to meet community needs. Hence the twin themes of worker's control and community control are fundamental to any idea of participatory democracy, and appear in a number of forms throughout this book.
The New Left's early concept of participatory democracy and its applications was developed in terms of community organizing in poverty areas. With the failure of these efforts to create a truly mass movement, the New Left has gone through a number of contortions, resulting in the rise of authoritarian and vanguardist fads. The experience has burned a number of young people as they found their early definitions of participatory democracy wanting in political effectiveness. By now, however, the movement has come almost full circle, and the most urgent debates are no longer over program but over structure. The sides line up: revolutionary movement versus revolutionary party; Leninist vanguardism versus collectives, affinity groups, or communes. Interestingly, the debate within the New Left movement is a paradigm of a debate about the nature of power and society itself; although describing their efforts by a variety of names, the first generation of New Left activists have, in effect, undertaken a formal re-examination of the underpinnings of participatory democracy. This development is encouraging, but it derives more from a direct perception of the failures of the American social system than it does from the development of a theory. However, both are necessary: an experience of the ways in which elitist institutions dehumanize people, and a theory of how such institutions can be reconstructed in a democratic fashion.
Western liberal democracy has dealt with only some parts of the problem of power. For the Founding Fathers, there was little organized power to deal with outside the government, so they devoted themselves to creating an elaborate system of checks and balances within the government. In the Constitution they did not acknowledge the existence of corporate entities, hoping to isolate those who governed from the impact of social power. Their method was to enfranchise a limited electorate of the propertied class, and give to their representatives maximum freedom from popular pressures. Their ideal can be described as Platonic: to create an elected class of philosopher-kings, whose wisdom would ensure good government.
As corporate power quickly developed with the industrial revolution, a pluralist theory replaced that of the Founding Fathers, arguing that as long as no single organized group achieved a preponderance of power, freedom was guaranteed by competition among different groups. This theory of veto groups holds only to an extent; we have a kind of pluralism of the powerful, but those who are not organized and who lack access to wealth and power have no voice in the pluralist cacophony, and it is precisely these constituencies that most need to be heard. The system thus perpetuates the inequities of the status quo and, hence, is essentially conservative. The philosophy of participatory democracy, by confronting the realities of organized power in the society, would ensure that all constituencies be formally represented in assemblies at the relevant level-local, regional, or national.
In a participatory democracy, decision-making is the process whereby people propose, discuss, decide, plan, and implement those decisions that affect their lives. This requires that the decision-making process be continuous and significant, direct rather than through representatives, and organized around issues instead of personalities. It requires that the decision-making process be set up in a functional manner, so that constituencies significantly affected by decisions are the ones that make them and elected delegates can be recalled instantly, doing away with self-appointed elites whose decisions have a broad political impact on the society, but who are accountable only to themselves, or to interlocked groups of their peers.
Participatory democracy assumes that in a good society people participate fully, and that a society cannot be good unless that happens. Participation and control must be one. Furthermore, the democratic process of participation and control must be used in the movement for social change from the start; thus the means employed for change must be democratic. This does not imply that strategies should be limited to electoral politics, or even based on it. Rather, a politics of creative disorder is indicated, at once oriented to unveiling the inequities of the present, and to building a countersystem that is participatory from the ground up. New, participatory institutions must be built in all social spheres and, as they develop, will claim legitimacy and recognition as being genuinely democratic and accountable to their constituencies.
An analysis of the concept of participatory democracy can lead us to a new and liberating vision of our own society and its technology. It can also suggest a number of tools by which to arrive at a new critique. For instance, research is needed on inter-personal dynamics, on the sociology of organization, and the self-aggrandizement implicit in bureaucratic organization. Such an analysis has its roots in the democratic tradition of socialism, in Marxist humanism, and in anarchism. Primarily a socio-political critique, it does not in itself deny the importance of the economic base of a given society, but supplements that focus in needed ways. It speaks to the sense of powerlessness that prevails not only in the work place, but also in the ghetto, the atomized suburban community, the school, and the university.
Up to now the Left has believed that the nature of society would be fundamentally changed if its economic base were socialized and nationalized. This has not proven to be the case. The Chinese Marxists have admitted that contradictions do not evaporate after a socialist revolution, and, moreover, that class conflict persists. Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution represents an appreciation of this question unprecedented among Marxists. However, Mao's solutions, ironically, are conceived in "idealistic" terms. The Cultural Revolution is more of an attempt at psychological exhortation than an attempt at profound structural change leading to a non-authoritarian, non-repressive society. Hence the primacy of chant and ritual.
The deliberate transformation of technology would be one of the first crucial tasks confronting the movement for participatory democracy. Much of the elitism and inequity of the present system rests on the myth that centralized control is a prerequisite of efficiency. Democracy is considered a luxury that can be practiced in public governance, but in the critical areas where technology and production are involved, the experts of management must prevail. As a high official of the National Association of Manufacturers commented, "democracy is all right for politics, but in business, we have to be sure things get done." This ideology is self-serving and ensures that those who control also get a lion's share of the profits. It perpetuates distinctions of class, education, and wealth, and, moreover, perpetuates a system where unskilled work is so alienating that it results, in more cases than not, in mental illness.1 This approach to technology must be challenged at its roots, by citing the growing body of evidence that participation in policy-making is essential if work is to have integrity, and in no way detracts from efficiency. The social organization of the work place should not take on a mechanical form dictated by the machine; instead, the machine can and must be altered to conform to the dictates of humanistic social organization. All that is lost is the fragmentation and specialization of job function that ensures that control can be maintained from above. And that is precisely what must be eliminated.
Robert S. Lynd stated in his foreword to Robert Brady's Business as a System o f Power:
Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains men and all their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep the "system" running.
A movement for participatory democracy must combat the present ideology, which claims that technological and industrial advance can be maintained only by the present style of coercive social organization. Businessmen argue, not that democratic work organization is anti-American-we are all for democracy-but that it won't work. To prove that it will requires the development of counter-institutions that differ fundamentally in their structure from present work organizations. When these demonstrate that they can get the job done as efficiently, and at far less social cost in the form of worker alienation, pollution of the environment, dislocation of jobs and families, they will then be in a position to press their argument strongly.
In addition to exposing the depradations of the present socio-political system and its allied institutions of the military, the corporations, the foundations, the educational system, and the public bureaucracies, a movement for participatory democracy presses for local and decentralized control, for non-alienating work, for non-regimented study, for a decent environment, and for restriction on the powers of non-accountable and self-serving elites in both the public and private sectors. However, its attack on the exploitation and elitism of the present system will be firmly based only when it can point to working examples of how the key functions of the society-work, education, and community life-can be successfully carried out by nonelitist and non-exploitative forms of social organization. For it is a salient characteristic of the present system that, underneath the variety of products and services that are produced, the organizational forms are everywhere the same. People are aware of the social costs of the system, but it is a system that, after all, does deliver the goods along with the costs. In the absence of alternative systems that could deliver the goods without the costs, it is unthinkable to reject this one. Once such alternatives have been firmly established, it will be possible to give resistance and struggle a positive meaning for the many who suffer from the depradations of the system, but see no way to change it.
A movement that builds participatory democracy from the base is committed to the full dissemination of power, whether political, bureaucratic, or corporate, to those affected by it. It also involves the creation of organizational forms whereby shared power can be used for the good of all. Since the ownership of property and, in particular, industrial property is an important form of control, the democratization of such ownership must be a central feature in a program of participatory democracy. Participatory democracy is, thus, socialistic in its demand for the democratization of property so that all affected can have a voice in its disposition. But it is also anarchistic in its recognition that more than the democratization of the means of production and of industrial property is involved. All the institutions of the society must be democratized, not simply the work place.
In order to realize such a vision we need a movement that lives it. The implications of building such a movement are revolutionary, for it confronts the basic institutional structures of the present society. Confrontation is not without implications of violence when demands for participation are met with repression; but it is also a non-violent revolution since its confrontation is on the basis of an alternative vision that seeks expression in counter-institutions that adequately express the vision. Such counter-institutions can act, both as paradigms and experiments embodying a new social vision, and as sustaining bases for continuing resistance and confrontation.
The two wings of such a movement-resistance and counter-institution building-must keep in step with each other. This means that counter-institutions that do not politically challenge the institutions of society will be irrelevant: free schools must confront the public school system, community controlled enterprises must challenge private enterprise. However, a movement that limits itself exclusively to contestation cannot demonstrate concretely that it possesses a realizable vision, and, hence, is unlikely to grow. One of the major strategic problems is how to build a movement that can effectively combine both contestation and counter-institutions in such a fashion that out of the daily struggle over particular issues can come long-lasting and relevant structural changes. Such a combination, in our view, amounts to social revolution.
A Note on Structure
Not every contributor to this book accepts the total perspective just outlined. Each, however, covers an essential aspect of the whole. We have organized the essays in such a way as to present a more or less coherent case for participatory democracy, and also so as to mimic the sequence in which a participatory democracy might arise.By definition, a participatory democracy cannot be imposed from above, but must be built from the ground up. Three things are essential for this kind of growth: (I) a viable social and historical tradition, (2) a set of men capable of working from that tradition in (3) small groups that are themselves participatory. Woodcock's essay explores participatory democracy's historical roots. Calhoun shows that emerging psychological theories, which attack the cynical view that men are selfish and incapable of self-government, make a society of participation possible. And Benello offers insights into the dynamics of face-to-face groups, and shows how they can be the building blocks of a new society.
Community and Workers' Control. A society of participation must begin with daily life, with community control and workers' control. Perry and Kanter apply the theory of groups to community control, and, in particular, to the community development corporation. Already signs of change are appearing in the neighborhoods, as people organize to buy food and other items on a community-wide basis.
With community control, workers' control is most important to a participatory democracy. Gillespie discusses the organization of work on the factory floor, and Hunnius, by looking at modern Yugoslavia, shows how workers' control might affect the larger society, and how it must lead to workers' self-management. One of the lessons of the Yugoslav experience is that workers' control does not make for full participation unless it is wedded to community control. It is in making this possible that Bookchin's article on the decentralization of technology is essential.
Organizational Analysis. Again, however, the mere presence of the appropriate social structure does not guarantee participatory democracy. The organizations-the communities and the work places-must themselves be participatory. In the language of cybernetics, organizations must be self-organizing; that is, they must not be dependent upon divisions of responsibility and labor, as giant corporations are, for example. The characteristics of self-organizing systems and the ways to insure that organizations do not bog down in hierarchies are the topics of McEwan's essay. Benello's, in turn, discusses the relationship between organizational goals and structure, and human motivation. Finally, Chickering indicates that one key to making groups participatory is keeping their size down.
Socio-Political Structure. Once participatory organizations have been built in the community and the work place, the question of political superstructure can be considered, and it is to this topic that the last four essays in Part One address themselves. Communitarian social forms are preferable to class-based ones, an hypothesis that Bookchin puts forth. Bay deals with the nature and limits of freedom, and Oppenheimer cautions us against some managerial theories of freedom. This section concludes with an essay by Ward, which illuminates the relationship between political and social structures.
Inevitably there is some overlapping here, but there is also a movement from the individual to the group, from the group to organizations made up of groups, and from there to broad questions of the organization of society. All the writers share a concern to get beyond a politics of the possible, which assumes that the only realistic framework for the study of social reality is the existing system. They do not hesitate both to question prevailing assumptions and to suggest alternatives. It is in the serious consideration of alternative modes of social organization that our social and political theory is weakest, and, we hope, it is here that the real contribution of this collection lies.
1. Arthur W. Kornhauser, The Mental Health of the Factory Worker (New York: Wiley, 1964).