The Ecology of Citizenship: Pathways Toward Participatory Democracy Eleanor Finley

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1 What constitutes the authentic basis of political life? What manner of social belonging and decision-making characterizes a free and just society? What does it mean to participate in a real democracy? The intricacies of political subjectivity have fascinated philosophers, revolutionaries, and utopic thinkers since the age of ancient Greece. Indeed, from roughly the 5 th century BC to the 3 rd century BC, the city-state of Athens itself was governed through face-to-face civic assemblies (Bookchin 1982). All enslaved men were entitled- by virtue of their residence in the city- not their ethnicity, trade, or tribal status- to participate in the management of the city as citizens. Many hundreds of years later, with the rediscovery of ancient classical texts and the development of Christian humanism, enlightenment thinkers in Europe revived and developed upon classical notions of civic life and democracy. Within the dominant monarchic social order, the state regarded the public not as politically active citizens, but as subjects of aristocratic patronage and rule. The subsequent liberal revolutions of 18 th and 19 th century Europe and the Americas brought a secularized and universalized notion of civic identity to bear at a global scale. As we well know, the forms of citizenship realized after the modern revolutions were tightly bound to the nation-state. As the new ruling classes sought to consolidate and solidify their power over large national territories, social engineering projects in language, education, law, became important means by which the state produced, categorized, remade, and controlled the body politic (Rose 2003; Scott 1998; Weber 1976). In effect, these modernizing initiatives were projects of social and cultural homogenization. Thus modern citizenship was invented at the expense of cultural diversity and autonomy in the service of new configurations of state power. 1

2 Today, in a neoliberal and post-industrial Global North, the citizenship concept continues to be l 1 everaged as a tool of exclusion. Perhaps the most striking example in the United States is that of the immigration debate. Due to a confluence of factors involving extremely difficult and expensive federal immigration processes, social upheaval and poverty in Central and South America, a culture of US racism, and the history of US labor policy, an estimated 11.5 to 12 million foreign-born individuals live in the United States without the status of full legal citizenship. 2 These undocumented populations are continuously subjected to a wide range of appalling abuses, including police terror, labor exploitation, detention, and deportation. Similar dynamics replicate themselves throughout the Global North, where racist, classist notions of citizenship are formalized and deployed by powerful state institutions to reduce immigrants, refugees, and migrant laborers from the Global South into vulnerable and pliable populations. Yet the latent revolutionary potential of the citizen concept has not been erased by its instrumentalization toward the interests of the nation-state. Citizenship still points to our human capacity for reason, cooperation, and self-governance. Transcending particular ties of religion, ethnicity, or gender and sexuality, citizenship also points to the ethical and mutualistic bonds between individuals and the local communities of which they are a part. A truly participatory, post-capitalist democracy would invoke, elaborate, and indeed be dependent upon, these humanistic, non-authoritarian meanings of civic identity. Applying Murray Bookchin s notion of face-to-face participatory democracy as well as his analytic methodology of dialectical naturalism, I attempt in this article to bring a social 1 Problems which themselves were often caused by US-sponsored political interventions and economic policies. 2 Pew Hispanic Research Center. Fact Sheet: Estimates of the Unauthorized Migrant Population for the States. Published April 26, Accessed 8/31/

3 ecological understanding of citizenship into conversations with other salient understandings of political subjectivity. More specifically, I d like to discuss the contributions of a utopic, directly-democratic notion citizenship to intersectional theories of identity. A dialectical and radicalized notion of citizenship can, I submit, help us bridge gaps in our thinking as we strive to support the liberatory struggles of many different social groups; giving substance to our own calls for political solidarity. Second, I d like to explore a small section of the existing anthropological and sociological scholarship on citizenship. Studies of biological citizenship provide a historical and theoretical map for analyzing the already-existing political subjectivities of ordinary people. On this terrain, social scientists have examined emergent civic struggles as they make novel contestations against the state. This paper represents a very preliminary attempt to bridge radical scholarship, political philosophy and social science analysis. My perspective is explicitly anti-hierarchal, normative, and utopic. While normative aspirations to real authentic and free are often taken as red flags in a post-structuralist academic environment, social movements across the world are seeking new institutional forms capable of replacing capitalism and the state. It is the role of Leftist scholarship to develop not only analysis, but also reconstructive theories which support the work of contemporary social movements. Politics, Citizenship and Intersectionality Intersectionality is a concept developed by black, working-class lesbian feminists in the 1980 s. The term itself was coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberley Crenshaw. While there is no monolithic, universally agreed-upon theory of intersectionality, in Mapping the Margins, Krenshaw outlays the guiding principles of the perspective. First, intersectionality concerns itself chiefly with the experience of oppression and social 3

4 marginalization. Second, intersectionality holds that experiences of oppression change in predicable ways across different axis of oppression. That is, the oppression on the basis of sex creates an essentially different psycho-social experience than oppression on the basis of race, and so forth. Lastly, multiple layers or intersections of oppression can overlap within the experiences of a single individual. This aspect has been elaborated on by bell hooks, who asks us to conceive of individual identity as a three-dimensional prism. INTERVIEW with bell hooks? where we can view one form of oppression in the foreground, as the other is in the background. Thus, intersectionality sets out as a theory multiple identities. Young people concerned with social justice are rightly suspicious of universalist political ideologies which claim to resolve hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality. And yet, the current thinking around particular struggles makes it difficult to imagine bonds of real political solidarity, let alone a new political order. Without a utopic and transformational perspective, we are always on the defensive never seizing power from social, political and economic systems of oppression. *popular invocations of identity politics only get half the picture right. Intersectionality both in its popular and theoretical forms does not take its notion of identity to the political sphere. Such a move would be dialectical, from the particular to the universal. A social ecological understanding of citizenship is dialectical. Thus, citizenship within a socially-just participatory democracy would not eclipse or negate more particular forms of social identity. Grounded in social ecological principles of differentiation, agency, 4

5 mutualism, and freedom, real citizenship would allow us to retain our multiple identities within a greater, political whole. nor the individual, nor the individual s multiple identities. Rather, it would retain and incorporate these more particular forms of social identity constituting what social ecologists and many other thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt call the political sphere. For Bookchin, this sense of civic identity could only be realized within a political realm. This political realm in turn is inherently part of the social evolution of the human species and the natural world: Humanity would now be able to rise to the universal state of consciousness and rationality that the great utopians of the nineteenth century and the Marxists hoped their efforts would create, opening the way to humanity s fulfillment as a species that embodies reason rather than material interest. (Bookchin 2007) By material interest, Bookchin is referring to the traditional Left s historic preoccupation with work and labor. For Bookchin and other social ecologists, the Left s recognition of politic realm would mark a fundamental transition in Leftist politics. The emergence of the new citizen would mark a transcendence of the particularistic class being of traditional socialism and the formation of the new man which the Russian revolutionaries hoped they could eventually achieve. What might a revolutionary concept of citizenship, where all adult community members have the right to freely participate in public decision-making processes, have to contribute to the struggles of immigrant communities and their allies? 5

6 So what exactly do I mean by radical citizenship? I mean people moving out of the social realm into the political realm. Retaining their social and individual selves, rather than being subsumed by a category. A civic and political sense of identity must be added to our social identities. In this way, the kind of citizenship proposed by social ecologists is a dialectical one. In The Ecology of Everyday Life, social ecologist Chaia Heller emphasizes the importance of mutual recognition in propelling individual development. The book lays out a dialectical understanding of social desire and development. First, we have X desire, then Y, then Z. Retention, integration, degree. -incorporates previous stages. P 98. Allowing dimensions of social identity to be incorporated and integrated into a cumulative and non-linear whole A developmental conception of the self thus does not negate previous forms. Differentiative desire, is the desire to distinguish ourselves within a group, to be acknowledged and appreciated, to be known. Her conception of associative desire is very useful. In order to move beyond social movements and develop institutions which can contest power, we must apply a very similar kind of logic to cultural groups and ethnic identities. -Distinction. Regionally and ecologically. Scale. The polis. the social level, among cultural and ethnic identities and civil society groups. 6

7 -Cannot be so broad as to be meaningless. As Benedict Anderson suggests in his discussion of the nationalism, at the scale of the nation, national identity must be intensively cultivated and maintained by cultural practices, national holidays, which display and reinscribe national culture (Anderson, XXXX). This is because the state is an artificial entity. -Not parochial, because these political groups are related within the confederation. Biological citizenship and the ongoing contributions of anthropology The shared roots of anarchism and anthropology run deep. In his historical account of the relationship between anarchism and anthropology, David Graeber talks about the founders of anthropology and their relationships with anarchist thinkers, anarchic sensibility and intellectual movements. It s not so much that anthropologists embraced anarchism, or even, were consciously espousing anarchist ideas; it s more that they moved in the same circles, their ideas tended to bounce off one another, that there was something about anthropological thought in particular its keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities that gave it an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning. -Graeber, 13. Leftist theory must continue the conversation with anthropologists and social scientists. Anthropology is particularly apt to understand human beings in dialectical terms as it is already concerned with the particularities and the universals of being human. Indeed, many of social ecology s most important insights were derived using concepts from anthropology. 7

8 Bookchin in particular drew heavily from the ideas and analysis of Dorothy Lee and Paul Radin. The field of anthropology sits at a privileged historical position as the social science dedicated to small-scale, self-governing communities salvage anthropology.anthropology has been really destructive and horrible and racist.nonetheless, Below, I pay particular attention to the anthropological concept of biological citizenship, which offers new ways for thinking about the relationship between civic claims and their relationship with the state. As discussed in the introduction of this article, the citizenship concept can be approached from multiple analytic angles. Biological citizenship is a concept developed out of the study of the modern state and its unique interests in the maintenance, monitoring and control of civic bodies. In the age of biomedicine, biotechnology, and genomics, theorizations on biological citizenship examine the specific means by which modern states have actively built their citizenry. These citizenship projects began in the 18 th and 19 th century, (Rose 2003). And we make a more general claim: specific biological presuppositions, explicitly or imp licitly, have underlain many citizenship projects, shaped conceptions of what it means to be a citizen, and underpinned distinctions between actual, potential, troublesome and impossible citizen. (Rose, 2006.) Anthropologist Adryana? Petrenya explores biological citizenship is actor within dynamics of social change and political legitimacy. In her landmark ethnography of workers and community members made sick by the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath, Petrenya explores how these actors used specifically biological events to gain concessions from the state. A new civic category was created to define those effected to money, healthcare, and 8

9 other forms of social support. The legitimacy of the newly-independent Ukrainian government depended upon its care for these individuals. Toward an ecological citizenship I believe it is possible to make the same theoretical move over the terrain of ecology. That membership to an ecological community can be used both as an analytic tool and a device of contestation. We are in a state of global climate crisis. Natural evolution itself is being unwound by capitalism and hierarchical society. These troubling social issues are also political opportunities. As global climate crisis deepens, activists in local struggles are already drawing out the connections between ecological community and political communities. In Cantabria, Spain, for instance, a citizens network called the Cantabrian Antifracking Assembly (Asamblea anti-fracking Cantabria) leads the fight against the implementation of hydraulic fracturing and natural gas extraction in the region. Conclusion Citizenship, like freedom and other enlightenment concepts that have been appropriated by modern statecraft, is caught in dynamic tension between its oppressive and liberatory invocations. In order to participate within a social movement with revolutionary potential, we must develop clear understandings of what citizenship could be within a yet un-founded political realm. 9

10 Works Cited Bookchin, Murray The Ecology of Freedom. Cheshire Books. Palo Alto, CA. Bookchin, Murray The Communalist Project. In Social Ecology and Communalism. AK Press. Edinburgh, Scotland. Graeber, David Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm Press. Chicago, IL. Harvey, David Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso Books. London & Brooklyn, NY. Heller, Chaia The Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature. Black Rose Books. Montreal. Heller, Chaia Food, Farms and Solidarity. Duke University Press. Durham & London. Scott, James C Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press. NY, NY. Tucker, Robert The Marxian Revolutionary Idea. Norton & Company. NY, NY. Weber, Eugene Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Petrenya, Adryana?. Biological Citizenship. Rose, Nicholas