Introduction
On Feb. 15/16, 2003, 15 million people around the world, with over a million of them in the US, took to the streets to say no, and possibly to politically obstruct, the impending US invasion of Iraq. This global action represented a vast popular awareness of what the US was, and of the horror and destruction that would be the invasion's unprovoked and arbitrary criminality would mean. Such a predictive understanding of a powerful institution represents a deep knowledge of that institution.
Oddly, after the invasion of Iraq began, sentiment in the US shifted. Where the primary anti-war issue should have been sovereignty -- the crime of violating the sovereignty of another nation -- it got nationalized into "supporting" the troops. And the media manipulated social thinking away from the ethics of sovereignty to the question of Bush's popularity. Though the invasion (of both Iraq and Afghanistan) violated international law, the UN charter, a host of international treaties, the US Constitution, and international ethics, opposition got focused on the safety of US soldiers in the war. This not only implied that US troops counted as a higher form of human being than the Iraqi people and culture destroyed by the invasion, but the consciousness of what the US government was doing as an institution was jettisoned. It seemed that the actuality of violence easily trumped the concept of justice. Between criminality and the Orwellian idea that aggression was defense (against a non-existent aggression), US thinking (even in the movement) seemed to feel at home.
Despite its pride in having formed before the war it opposed had
even started, the movement seemed to lose touch with the meaning of its
existence. It immersed itself in the electoral campaign of 2004, as if
it could undeclare a war through the official channels of elections
that it had had no role in declaring at any institutional level. Where
it had once understood the illegitimacy of the war machine's
intentions, it later gave credence and legitimacy to war machine's
operations. Nothing is more undemocratic than making war; even the act
of declaring war is necessarily autocratic.<1> Nevertheless, the
anti-war movement brought itself to believe that the US was democratic
despite the war's proof that it was not. It is what the movement did
not recognize about itself, in doing so, that this essay will seek to
examine.
Social Justice Movements
A "social justice movement" is a movement of people whose consensual need is to counteract extant injustice. Racial discrimination, economic exploitation, cultural exclusion or oppression are general categories of injustice; movements form against them in terms of opposition to segregated housing, a racialized prison industry, police brutality and profiling, the death penalty, masculinist violence against women and women's bodies, corporate despoliation of the environment, US economic and military intervention in post-colonial nations around the world, and war. Labor unions, despite their absorption into the establishment, come out of social justice movements that fought for humane work conditions and the right to organize. The many movements of our recent past in the US emerged from the most dire struggles against white supremacy and racial discrimination, and spread to include women's movements, student movements, campaigns to free political prisoners, and opposition to corporate globalization. Each movement contained a panoply of organizational forms, communities, and ideological groupings; the spectrum ran from traditional communities to issue oriented affinity groups and populist gatherings. What they all have in common is their existence, and their call for justice. An anti-war movement is an especially dire call for justice, since it calls for the end of the arbitrary mass murder that war is.
The idea of social justice movements does not include pro-racist organizations, such as the White Citizens Councils or the militias, however. The white cry of "reverse discrimination" is a demand for white justice, an exclusionary justice, and hence for injustice. Indeed, the all too general confusion of "white justice" with justice in mainstream thinking is what renders the US an essentially right-wing society.
As an outcry of people against injustice, each social justice movement confronts an institutionality, but from beyond it, outside that institutionality, and essentially excluded institutionally by its very call for justice. It is the nature and meaning of this exclusion that this paper will attempt to examine.
In traditional thinking, the existence of a social justice movement is taken as proof that society is democratic -- that is, as proof of an openness to all political expression. But in reality, the existence of social movements indicates the opposite. If democracy means governance by and for the people, then the avenues and channels of expression and participation would have to be open and extant for the people. This implies more than writing letters on issues provided by government, or voting for candidates provided by institutionalized parties. It means participating in deciding what issues are important, and what are not; it means debating those issues in ways that allow participation in making policy on them; and it means electing representatives who then represent those discussions and debates rather than electing representatives that then do the debating and discussing for the people.
If the avenues of participation existed, people would not have to organize special avenues of expression to get the ear of the government, and have some influence. If society were democratic, the organization of massive demonstrations, the invention of special tactics or strategies, would not be necessary. The fact that people have to organize movements in order to express themselves on such central concerns as justice means that those avenues and channels of expression, debate, influence, and participation are not open or extant, and that they are needed. As a force for expression and participation, a movement is in its existence a pro-democratic force confronting an absence or withholding of the means expression and participation. And thus, insofar as it must exert this pro-demcoratic force against closed channels (of expression and participation), it is structurally outside the institution. Indeed, It is the very closing of democratic means, and the exclusion of people from participation, that brings movements into existence in the first place.<2>
Thus, the first meaning that attaches to the existence of movements is that social institutions, despite their political rhetoric, are undemocratic. And the movements point to where that is the case. Furthermore, for society or government to make it necessary for people to build organizations, mobilize themselves in massive events, just to establish a presence in civil society, is itself an injustice. Thus, social justice movements point to injustice in both their content (demands) and their form (their existence).
It is faithless to claim that legislative representation provides just such channels of expression. That is precisely what representation cannot do. Each elected representative represents a district which is composed of many contradictory or conflicting class interests, cultural traditions, community identities, ideological perspectives, and social values. It is politically impossible for a single delegate to represent them all. The representative ends up representing him/herself within a legislative culture isolated from all its constituencies, and thus, goes to the highest bidder. In the early days of the republic, this representationism may have been democratic, when the electorate was homogeneous, composed of only white male property owners. But as mass movements (of workers, people of color, white women, many others) extended the franchise, representationism became wholly inadequate to the task. Today, representationism only appears democratic because it preserves the ritual of voting. But its inadequacy is confronted whenever a community movement forms to elect a non-party or non-institutional or opposition candidate. It quickly recognizes that the hardest task becomes holding that representative responsible to the movement that elected him/her. The halls of legislature are a separation, not a connection, between the people and governance. Representationism marks that structural disconnect, the place where the avenues and channels of expression and participation are cut off.<3> Nothing demonstrates this disconnect more forcefully than the issue of war, the fact that a nation can be taken to war arbitrarily, as has the US.
But in addition to pointing out where society is undemocratic, social justice movements are necessarily attempts to establish democracy where it does not exist. The repertoire of tactics (petitions, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, etc.) are not only means of gaining visibility, to get the attention of the people as well as governing institutions; in themselves, they constitute the construction of alternate channels of expression and participation. The boycotts against Nike, for instance, which called attention to the sweatshop conditions of its factories, not only pointed to the absence of democratic input in the decisions a corporation makes; they sought to trump those decision from outside corporate autocracy. The existence of movements for community participation in education, self-policing, control of health facilities (to replace the corporatization of health care) are all movements for democracy, at the same time that they point to where it does not exist. In effect, they are attempts by people to reconstitute themselves as historical subjects, to cease to be spoken for politically or socially, and to open a space for real participation.
A third meaning, attendant upon these two, is that the absence of
democracy, represented by institutional injustice, is not simply an
institutional oversight; it is structural. It trasncends the
willfulness of individuals, which is in turn made possible by
undemocratic social structures. In actuality, individual acts of
injustice (such as the torture of prisoners by prison guards) require a
structural context that valorize them.
The Principle of Movement Sovereignty
If movements necessarily emerge outside the system they contest, then their pro-democratic activities remain outside the system they seek to democratize, however much they demand participation within it. They already do more than make a presence for themselves to a system that refuses to listen. (see note 2)
Against a structural institutional autocracy, a movement valorizes being outside the institution, as a voice for justice from that place. And it abandons that self-valorization and its pro-democracy character to the extent to re-integrates itself in the institutionality it contests. This was what the anti-war movement did not understand in the election of 2004. If an essential role of social justice movements is to give people who have been silenced a voice, in providing a space in which people can speak for themselves as an alternate center of social being and political decision, then to leave that behind by rejoining the institution is to participate in that institutional act of silencing.
Yet the space a movement opens for itself is a contradictory space. It is outside the system, in order to be a place where voice can be autonomous, and people can speak for themselves. Yet when it makes demands on the system, those demands are harbingers for inclusion, as well as presenting the reasons for being outside that system. In that sense, the movement relies on a connection to the domain (and often on resources) controlled by institutionality, at the moment it opposes it. There is thus an interweaving of autonomy (from its exclusion), pro-democracy (in its existence), and a contradictory demand for re-inclusion in institutionality (in its demands).
What brings these separate yet inseparable elements together is the question of movement sovereignty.
A social justice movement forms to pose an alternate sense of democracy against institutional autocracy and injustice, regardless of whether the institution calls itself democratic or not. The movement forms to provide a political space in which people can make decisions for themselves with respect to their own political goals and destiny in a cooperative manner and to express themselves. This space and their collective autonomous actions within it constitute the movement's sovereignty. Sovereignty does not symbolize being outside the institutionality contested; it names the interior condition in which a movement lives its alternative to the non-democracy it contests. It is the inside for which the institution is outside. If alternate democratic structures are built in which people not only speak but enact decisions with respect to their social lives and destiny, sovereignty is their foundation.
Movement sovereignty refers to people, not to territory or control (like a "king"); it is the social "place" where democracy occurs, where institutional autocracy is refused.<4> That is, sovereignty constitutes the necessary condition for democracy. If democracy means that a people or group determine their own destiny, they have to be sovereign in that destiny in order to determine and control it. Any foreign or state intervention (such as the US invasion of Iraq, or federal nullification of a union election -- as the government did to Carey's election in the Teamster's union) necessarily corrupts that sovereignty, and destroys the ability of people to establish democracy for themselves. An organization, like a trade union, can be sovereign only if it can determine its own policy, its own tactics, and thus its own strength as an organization. Legal regulation of labor unions severely reduces the possibility of union democracy.
In the Vietnam anti-war movement, the ability of local groups to arrive at different tactics to slow down or derail the war machine reflected the inherently sovereign nature of the movement. It had no hierarchy that could enforce uniform tactics across the country, and thus constitute a formal political institutionality. It went to the draft boards and spoke to draftees rather than to the government. In focusing on how people themselves could end war, it recaptured sovereignty for the people from the government. When it supported the McGovern campaign in 1972, it abandoned that sovereignty by relegitimizing that of the government, and almost put an end to itself.
The central dilemma for a movement lies between maintaining its autonomy and sovereignty or accepting the system's demand to cease being an alternative and re-enter its structure. The movement faces a choice between making demands from a position that refuses to compromise sovereignty, or making demands that, by binding the movement to institutionality, relegitimize its anti-democractic character. The first understands the non-democratic nature of governing structures; the second pretends, against the meaning of its own existence, that those structures are really democratic. If the primary character of a movement is to open a political space in which to construct democratic structures of participation, against the exclusion and injustice they suffer institutionally, then it must take the sovereignty it already has existentially very seriously. This is an ethical question, not a political one, because the movement provides a space in which people can speak for themselves, instead of being silenced by being spoken for; its ethical relation to itself lies in its sense of responsibility to those voices.
Of course, nothing obviates the possibility that a leadership might
close down the political space within a movement through is own
autocratic actions. The democratic nature of a movement is only a
possibility created by the movement's opening of political space, by
its inherent sovereignty. Power closes political space; when movement
leadership begins to think in terms of power, that is one of the things
that happens.<5>
Power concedes nothing without a demand
Frederick Douglass has said, "power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will." But there are two kinds of demands, and Douglass did not distinguish between them. There are those demands to which power can concede within the purview of its institutionality through a change of policy, a granting of benefit, or an altered comportment ("greivance demands"). And there are demands that require institutions to concede some power ("democratic demands"). A rent control law is a concession to tenants that landlords and city real estate interests can make without disrupting the structure of their power. A rent control law only limits the degree of oppression represented by rent (oppressive because housing is a necessity of life). Rent strikes and mass neighborhood actions to prevent evictions demand a concession of power to the neighborhood, insofar as they transform housing from a commodity into a right. Wage raises and benefits are concessions that factory employers can make that do not diminish their power, while a union hiring hall is a concession of power. Movement sovereignty is the foundation for both kinds of demands, and thus for their difference.
Power negotiates grievance demands; it concedes power only to an alternate sovereignty, that is, to democratic demands. The difference lies not solely in the nature of the demand; it also lies in the movement's understanding of the relation of its sovereignty to the institutions it confronts.
In other words, there is no clear separation between the two types of demands. Mass demonstrations, for instance, present themselves both as expressions of a movement's demands and as a concomitant demand for a political space in which to exist. Power may seek to regulate that space (even as a constitutional right), but the demonstration's inherent expansion of a movement's political space implies a concession of power. The degree of concession can be measured by the degree of repressive force used against demonstrations (which can be anything from requiring permits and route restrictions to mass arrests or shootings). The funeral demonstration for Patrick Dorismund in Brooklyn was attacked by the police, and many people were hospitalized, to criminalize the community's awareness that he had been shot gratuitously by a plain clothes detective.
Every anti-racist demonstration has been a demand made on white society (governance and people) to cease segregating, to end its demonization of and war on black and brown people, and to open the avenues of democracy. The voter registration drives by the civil rights movements of the 1960s were both demands to end discrimination, and to cede legitimate power to black people through the vote.
The anti-corporate demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999 understood the WTO to be an international treaty organization that can make decisions on labor, environmental, and investment conditions for its signatory nations, overriding local legislation in the name of multinational corporate profit. That is, the WTO countermaded local democracy, to the extent it existed. The demonstrations in Seattle were contests between alternate sovereignties, with police repression (massive teargas use and beatings) representing the threat the demonstrations constituted for the corporations.<6>
The issue of sovereignty raises the question of movement consciousness, because it provides the ability of the movement to follow many different paths, depending on its collective understanding not only of what it seeks to gain, and of the institutions it confronts, but of the meaning of its sovereignty itself. Let us look at this question a moment.
Because a movement operates from outside the institution or political system it confronts, it always faces two directions at once, toward the institution it seeks to change, and toward the people to whom it poses an alternative social condition. From this foundation, two mindsets emerge: one which understands movement sovereignty as a demand for democracy, and the other that focuses on winning institutional concessions. The first demands recognition for itself as an alternative sites of participation, while the other exchanges the possibilities of building on its sovereignty for the possibility of gaining immediate institutional concessions. Though these are incommensurable attitudes toward movement sovereignty, they both arise from that sovereignty itself.
If a movement only makes grievance demands for a change in policy, service, or employment conditions, without insisting on its sovereignty as a movement, then it grants credence to institutional legitimacy. To that extent, it acts against itself and its responsibility to those to whom it gave a voice, rejecting being spoken for by the institutions. If it only considers the democracy that sovereignty makes possible, without grievance demands, then it acts against itself in ignoring the institutionality against which it formed.
Clearly, the two mindsets (focus on sovereignty and focus on institutionality) interweave inseparably. Yet, despite their inseparability, they traditionally conflict, generating separate movement consenses around their particular strategies. The negotiation between them, and the strategies that emerge from a movement as these negotiations procede, can be called "movement consciousness" (by analogy to "class consciousness," a class or group politically aware of itself).
In the civil rights movement, black power attacked integrationism for seeking traditional participation in a socio-cultural structure that was anti-black, and which could be accomplished only by becoming anti-black, selling out the community consciousness of black people. The integrationists attacked black power for seeking separation, and thus abandoning what US society owed black people for their role in building it as a society, thus selling out the black communities as well. Yet neither would have had the strength or weight that they had without the other. In the anti-war movement, the direct actionists, disrupting draft boards and stopping troop trains, attacked those more interested in lobbying congress as selling them out and splitting the movement, while the lobbyists accused the direct actionists of antagonizing people who were middle of the road, and weakening their own efforts.
Movement consciousness is a collective awareness of the extent to which it is an alternate political structure, as sovereign, and the extent to which it might or must grant legitimacy to existing political institutionality in making grievance demands. The difference between a demand being a grievance demand and a democratic demand lies in movement consciousness, its existential consciousness of having sovereignty as a sense of justice, and the dangers of relegitimizing institutional sovereignty in trying to obtain justice. (I am not speaking of organizational forms here.) Movement consciousness is the collective consciousness conjoining those who think that the institutions they confront are democratic with others who understand that systematic oppression means that injustice is structural. The systematic racism of judicial procedures, of prisons, of death row, of war, is more than enough to convince many people that the injustice is institutional, and the institutions are anti-democratic. Yet the racism of these procedures is enacted, one act at a time, as a reflection of policy; and policy can be changed politically -- meaning that the institution can be democratized. Both approaches think that justice is possible; they differ on where to obtain it. In looking to each other for answers, and reflecting on each other, they are building movement consciousness.
Traditionally, people have characterized movements as reformist or revolutionary according to whether they consider the government democratic (to whatever degree), or requiring radical transformation. But this is a superficial ideological distinction that misses the point. Reformists grant legitimacy to government sovereignty, and seek to alter its form. Revolutionists seek to seize power to transform it as power, but thus reaffirm the legitimacy of power as such. To believe that power can be democratized after a seizure of power is to think that power can be democratized in principle, meaning the seizure of power is merely tactical. Thus, the revolutionary assault on injustice makes demands on institutionality that grant the same sovereignty to power that reformist do. Both ignore the fact that the movement for justice is already a democratization, and thus necessarily the alternative to institutional power itself. It is the ability of the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela to transform its consciousness from the electoral sphere to the autonomy of its constituent circles, and thus to build alternate structures outside and alongside the government that marks its genius as a movement. The fact that some of what it does is provided in the new constitution is incidental; putting the constitution into practice requires autonomous thinking.
The real difference between movements is not reformism or
revolutionism, but the degree of sovereignty they reserve for
themselves, their self-awareness of what their very existence means as
an embodiment of social justice and alternative. To recognize the
centrality of alternate political structures in their confrontation to
the anti-democratic injustices of power is to understand that the real
issue of movement consciousness is its own sovereignty.
The Question of the Hegemonic Mind
In this context, lets address one more issue briefly. Two poles exist that mark out the spectrum of movement consciousness: first, there is its understanding that it is an historical subject making history through its autonomy and alternate political structures; second, there is its understanding that it must seek, in its exteriority, to influence social institutions to win concessions for people. But as noted above, movements are already attempts by people to reconstitute themselves as historical subjects, and to cease being silenced by being spoken for. To become an unsilenced social subject, to transcend having been objectified by institutionality, and made an object for others, means fighting two battles at once, externally against the injustice of oppression, and internally against one's own acceptance of society's imposed identities and objectifications. A social justice movement makes possible the ability to discern the institutionally identities imposed by which one is beset, to see one's interiorization of objectification, so that they can be refused or transformed. And conversely, becoming a social subject means making society an object for oneself in collective critical thought, to think critically about one's situation and social relationships, and to imagine political relationships beyond given social institutionalities.
But this raises the question of how people become objects for others in the first place. People do not choose to be objectified; it is imposed on them. Objectification is something that one group of people does to another. The social categorizations created by race, for instance, is something imposed on people of color by whites through the coloniality of power, the way white people make themselves white by first racializing others as non-white. Race, as a form of social imposition, is more properly understood, then, as a verb ("to racialize") rather than a noun. Similarly, minoritization is something a majoritarian group does to exclude other groups with less voting strength as groups, designating them "minorities" in advance, before any vote is taken to show their actual voting strength, in order to institute its hegemony as a majority. The racialization of people of color by whites, the minoritization of racialized or ethnicized groups, the discrimination against working class people by the upper classes, are all forms of objectification. As an imposed social designation, objectification is an appearance of inclusion (for instance, the term "minority" is taken from a rhetoric of democracy), while actually excluding those objectified from participation as social subjects. That is, the terms of objectification are designed to "naturalize" the artificial process of domination that social exclusion represents.
Social objecthood is a mode of oppression that occurs at the hands of individuals who belong to institutions of hegemony, and who acquire their social subjectivity through identification with those institutions. Thus, whiteness is a social institution insofar as it constitutes the matrix or arena in which the acts of racialization of others occurs. Such institutions do not have buildings or offices; they reside within social spectacles, group activities, scripts of comportment, and norms of behavior toward those they objectify. Together, these comportments constitute a person's membership in the particular group subjectivity (such as national chauvinism with respect to immigrants, white supremacy with respect to whiteness, masculinism with respect to women, etc.).
The ability to impose objecthood on others, gaining thereby a sense of subjetivity that has the appearance of being "natural" behavior, is the mark of the "hegemonic mind." The hegemonic mind expresses and represents a culture's forms of domination as everyday comportment in the person of those who dominate. In form, it is a cultural structure, the identity of subjects acquired through identification with objectifying institutionality. Social identity is thus enacted with respect to an exclusive socius of those who likewise belong to that institutionality.
But it is a tenuous subjectivity because its essential condition is its ability to impose objecthood on others, for which it is dependent on social institutionality. Whites think of themselves as social subjects because the structures of racialization in the US give them the ability to objectify people of color, and treat them as objects. But they only function thereby as pre-scripted proxies for the institutionality of whiteness.<7>
The three predominant forms of hegemonic mind in the US are the white mind, the male mind, and the ethic of property rights. Property rights are different from the right to own property. The right to own property is a condition granted individuals by jurisprudence. The ethic of property rights means prioritizing property over people, arrogating to oneself the power to use property to oppress, commodify, or enslave people.
The hegemonic mind sees others as human objects with subordinate voice or thoughts for whom it can speak. It fills its social landscape with people as props, puppets, simulacra, representations, things to be moved around at will as the expression of its identity. And the hardest thing for it to do is listen to others; it is already speaking for them by placing them in that landscape as objects. Its acts of self-superiorization appear to it as simply a normal way to be.
The hegemonic mind appears within social justice movements. It is not excluded by movement opposition to the institutions that the hegemonic mind represents. Yet even within a movement it cannot see itself as performing its hegemonism. For instance, in many of the 1960s movements against war and racism, men sought to dominate the leadership, and disparaged women's participation. The Vietnam anti-war movement's white leadership could not grasp the colonialism to which black and Latino people in the US were subjected, even though many saw racism in those terms; thus, they were unable to listen to those other voices, the effect of which was to eventually render the anti-war movement a white movement. The anti-war activists who today seek to priorize lobbying, to win Congresspeople over to voting against war appropriations, are people who cannot see the institutionality of contemporary legislatures as part of the war machine; it is part of their nationalism.
Ultimately, the central contradiction within a social justice movement is between the movement's sovereignty and the hegemonic mind. The hegemonic mind has difficulty seeing itself as furthering the given structures of silencing. Thus it downplays the need for autonomous space from which to speak. Despite the sense of justice that leads the hegemonic mind to participate in a movement, its sense of hegemony conducts its participation toward an institutional focus, ignoring the injustices of the institution.
Movements constitute situations in which people struggle to produce new identities out of refusals of prior social objecthood become possible. The hegemonic (white male property-rights) mind argues (often as movement leadership or activist) that the movement must make its demands realistic, and thus take its demands to the institutions against which it arose. This is because those institutions constitute the "real" for the hegemonic mind. On the contrary, demands become realistic when they include the transformation of the hegemonic mind, along with those made on the institutions of hegemony. That is, demands are actually unrealistic when they return sovereignty to social institutionality, and require no concession of power.
Without disrupting the cultural structures that have produced both an unjust situation and a hegemonic mind, even victory will be momentary. Integrated education in a white supremacist society remains education contextualized by society's white supremacy. The transformation of the cultural structures underlying unjust institutionality (the foundation of the hegemonic mind) is the other side of transforming education, or undoing segregation, or electing real representation. The underlying cultural structures will not be dispelled by integration, nor by winning concessions. Without such a transformation, the hegemonic mind will only revalorize institutional control.
Thus, a central question of movement consciousness becomes how to stand in opposition to the hegemonic mind. And in that problem, we confront the question of how to transform cultural structures. This is a different question than transforming property relations. First of all, it is more difficult because we do not have a theory for how to transform cultural structures. It cannot be done by seizing power, because those who think in terms of power, and not democracy, cannot see their own thinking as hegemonic. For instance, those who think the US is a democracy cannot see the white supremacist sense of silencing attendant upon representationism; in thinking in terms of using representationism for their own ends, they end up defending the special interests of white people.
What is at stake is the extent to which a movement is willing to
contest the fundamental cultural ground of the political structures it
confronts, namely, its underlying white male supremacist
property-oriented institutions. It is not the difference between
revolution and reform that is critical, but the struggle that occurs
between democracy and the hegemonic mind.
Notes
1- A war has never been declared by referendum. By regimentation and intervention, it makes democracy impossible on both sides, its own and the other. War is also an artificial situation of unmitigated enormity; people are placed in an artificial situation in which they must try to kill people they have nothing against because there are people who have nothing against them who are trying to kill them. Once it starts, there is no way out of the stupidity of this cycle for the soldier, who must wait for autocrats elsewhere to make their own greedy, arrogant decisions.
2- Indeed, whole books have been written addressing this contradictory situation, without ever mentioning that it exists. Bill Moyer's book, "Doing Democracy," like Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," is a manual for activists, explaining how to build a movement around important issues and demands that government is not addressing. The main thrust of the book is how to organize struggles that will counteract and outflank the routine rejections and exclusions. Yet even in the face of exclusion, Moyer sees the system as really democratic, and ultimately willing to accede to people's demands if they fight hard enough for it. The purpose of movements, Moyer proclaims, is to bring about democratic social change; yet he never once intimates that the political environment may not be a democracy.
3- In general, the isolation imposed by representationism has brought about a form of legislative culture. It is mainly characterized by representatives endlessly trading support for their respective projects, well insulated from the people. They invent projects that can be used as currency with other representatives, while promulgating some projects designed to attract their constituency's attention in the interests of re-election. Only a system of multi-delegate districts, and proportional representation, in all legislative and executive functions, could rectify this inherent corruption in the representationist system.
4- The question of sovereignty has become a central issue globally because of neo-liberalism and corporate globalization. What is called "corporate globalization" is not only the economic hegemony of the multinational corporations, but the formation of a transnational political structure (composed of international bodies such as the WTO, the IMF and World Bank, the OECD, and a number of thinktanks) for which the corporations are the citizens, and real humans are politically irrelevant. Because nation states are reduced to administrative units for this transnational structure, the question of national sovereignty has taken on a different meaning than it had after World War II for the national liberation revolutions.
5- See Piven and Cloward, "Poor People's Movements": their account of the Welfare Rights movement of the late 60s and early 70s.
6- Demonstrations that simply recur without going beyond making grievance demands become exercises in futility. But this rarely happens. The massive demonstrations demanding an end to the war in Iraq have provoked organizations of soldiers, veterans, and the parents of soldiers, marking an independence of action that already weakens the government's war effort. Cindy Sheehan, walking down a road in Texas to confront Bush in the name of her son, and being forced to walk in a ditch rather than on the road by the police, transformed herself and that road into an event around which the movement's sovereignty became aware of itself. Similarly, a union organizing campaign that demands recognition for itself and its right to organize operates out of a sense of self-conscious sovereignty. When it contents itself with recognition, and takes its negotiations into a closed room, to which workers from the shop floor have no input, it loses its sovereignty, and becomes part of the institutionality of the factory.
7- It is an intuition of this structure that leads many whites to seek out an ethnicity for themselves from their European origin. They discern the subjectivity that a movement provides those in resistance to their own (white) hegemony as something which they (as white) do not really have.