Chapter Eight - “Networked Politics: A New Grammar of Democracy”
In this chapter Judy explores a new way of doing politics on line and off. Her analysis is that the old left (of her generation) never really broke with hierarchical ways of functioning, a major reason for its failure. Here she looks at networks online, in the United States and in Europe where movements are probably most advanced in using technology, horizontal organizing and networks and the inter-relationship between online networks and off line organizing with a special focus on the Obama nomination and election campaigns.
“Thomas Paine, a father of the American Revolution and an important democratic theorist, pointed out in his 1792 essay The Rights of Man:
It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There exists in man [sic], a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be able as such to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.
Perhaps the young activists across Europe and North America are practicing a form of democracy, which, while short of revolution, does manage to liberate the genius and talents in ordinary people by using open space, horizontal structures, and self-organization. The question is how does this liberation of human potential interact with existing power structures to transform them?”
Related Links:
Relevant Blog Entries:
http://transformingpower.ca/en/category/book-chapters/chapter-eight
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)
http://www.aflcio.org/
Avaaz
http://www.avaaz.org/
Black Bloc
http://activism.ca/wiki/Black_bloc
Communications Workers
http://www.cwa-union.org/
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
http://www.ftaa-alca.org/
Genoa G8 Summit Protest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27th_G8_summit
Greenpeace
http://www.greenpeace.org/
Hirsch, Jesse
http://jessehirsh.com/
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)
http://www.ienearth.org/
Jobs with Justice
http://www.jwj.org/
Juris, Jeff
http://www.jeffreyjuris.com/
MAS (Movement Towards Socialism)
http://www.masbolivia.org/, http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/
Move On
www.moveon.org
Mueller, Clayton, Thomas
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1458
Networked Politics
http://www.networked-politics.info/
Obama, Barack
www.barackobama.com
Open Source Movement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
Quebec City Anti-Globalization Protest
http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/quebecreports.cfm#ZNet%20Update
Red Pepper (Wainwright)
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/
Rockwood Leadership Program
http://www.rockwoodleadership.org/
Sierra Youth Club
http://www.syc-cjs.org/
Sud étudiants [South Students]
http://www.sud-etudiant.org/
Transform! Italia
http://www.transform.it/
United Nations Climate Change conference
http://unfccc.int
Wainwright, Hilary
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/
World Social Forum (WSF)
http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/,
http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/?set_language=en
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