By Lucy Taylor

Read full article at Bulletin of Latin American Research

(…) Despite such critiques, many people in many ways are becoming more like citizens. They are more certain of their value as individuals in relation to others who are richer and more powerful, and they are better aware of their rights (because the struggle for democracy and the practice of democratisation has made them so) (Taylor, 2003). They are more likely to think in terms of rights, both because international organisations are promoting a discourse of rights, and because neo-liberalism sees the recourse to rights as being the chief protection mechanism for sovereign consumers. The biggest growth area in social organisation is consumer groups (closely followed by neighbourhood improvement schemes) and NGOs flourish in the privatised world of social policy (Jelin and Herschberg, 1996). Yet this trend towards a strengthening of citizenship has not resulted in the Latin American democracies, states and citizens becoming deeper, more coherent or more equal. Indeed, the key trend of the last 10 years has been the resurgence of populism and the return of the familiar political messiah. This seems to present a conundrum – how can people feel more like citizens but act more like clients?

Having considered the nature of the relationship between political leader and people, three key reasons why citizenship is failing strike me. Firstly, neo-liberalism has changed both abstract thinking and government policies regarding poverty. The concept of ‘privatisation’ is central to neo-liberal citizenship, whereby power (and indeed freedom) is equated with personal, individualised agency articulated through private, social and voluntary interactions (with friends, neighbours, charities for example) or through legal or economic transactions (exercising one’s civil rights or buying and selling in the market). Privatisation is a policy which seeks to shift tasks and power from the realm of the state into the ‘private’ realm of individual and market. Within this schema, both populist social justice and citizenship welfare rights are dismissed by the neo-liberal philosophy because their deliberate redistribution of wealth punishes those who (by dint of their talents) have accumulated wealth, as well as interfering with market forces. Social justice is misguided because it is determined by political considerations, not the market, and welfare rights are judged to be not rights at all because they require purposeful intervention, unlike negative rights (civil and political) which merely establish mechanisms. Of course, pure neo-liberalism has not been enacted in Latin America, but the consequences of freeing market forces and cutting public services have been impoverishment, unemployment, worse social indicators (malnutrition, infant deaths, disease) and insecurity. In tune with privatisation, NGOs – by definition private entities – have stepped into the social service breech but their assistance is based on specific projects which cover a certain time and place (Gideon, 1998). They do not contemplate universal coverage nor is their continuation guaranteed and so in no sense do they sustain social rights, despite their genuine commitment to improving people’s lives. Citizenship has changed dramatically, then, because it has lost welfare rights, a key component which sought to redress inequalities in the exercise of civil and political rights. With impoverishment and without welfare rights, people’s capacity to exercise their remaining rights has therefore been severely curbed.

Secondly, while it is undoubtedly preferable to operate under conditions of liberal democracy, the liberal historicist understanding of inequality, with its blindness to structures of discrimination and disdain, has been heightened by its more extreme characterisation as neo-liberalism. Public discourse sustains the myth of equal rights through recourse to privatisation which places responsiblity for social and class inequalities in the hands of the individual, in the private, social sphere and outside the realm of politics. Yet the ‘level playing field’ which exists on paper is distorted by the very uneven terrain of familiar assumptions about civilisation and degeneracy, about progress and backwardness, about rationality and perception, and about who should follow whom, who should adopt whose lifestyles, who is right and who must learn. The fact that this heightened inequality is part of lived experience also means that the sham of equal citizenship is similarly blatant and it makes a constant mockery of democratic ideals.

Thirdly, the primary vehicles of democratic political participation – parties – persist in maintaining intellectual hierarchies of disdain, whether they reflect biological or historicist explanations of inequality (Taylor, 2003). They continue to act as vanguards even though people have largely ceased to follow them and to take themselves, rather than citizens, very seriously. Parties generally discourage the kind of active participation which they achieved in the past by simultaneously misinterpreting, over-ruling and underestimating their potential supporters. There are some notable exceptions, including the Partido dos Trabalhadores in Brazil and the Partido por la Democracia in Chile, both of which have strong links to civil society and were formed during, not before, the transitions to democracy. Yet more generally, parties are no longer the sole means of political communication and action, and those people in society who wish to change the world or think new thoughts now join social organisations instead which often lead public debate and leave the parties to play catch-up behind. This leaves parties both outmoded and without the kind of internal dissent which challenges policy and holds dominant factions to account, which in turn undermines pluralism within these central
agencies of democratic life. The paradox is that despite their decreasing relevance to people’s lives and their lack of representativity, they continue to hold power in government and actually continue to wield immense power, despite globalisation. This presents a crisis of political citizenship because the official channels are both unresponsive and mistrusted, whilst the channels of civil society are ultimately very limited in their capacity to change macro-political projects such as structural adjustment or social policy.

One of the other reasons why conventional citizenship politics is in crisis is because such parties do not guarantee anything in return for the people’s vote – client-ship on the other hand, offers a great deal more and this perhaps explains why neo-populism has proved to be popular (for a time and in certain places). In particular, it proffers two comforts (familiarity and the hope of tangible improvement in one’s personal life) and one bonus (the possible pleasure of exercising a little power). Client-ship is one of the familiar pathways of Latin American political culture. It locks into a sense of belonging and identity which reaches deep into the struggles of daily life; it is about personalities and families, favours and favourites, admiration, emotion and a business deal (Auyero, 2001). As such, it treats people seriously and touches people’s emotional and material lives more closely and effectively than a more distanced, citizenship-style politics does. Secondly, support for a patronage-style party via its local representative increases the chance that some small improvement will occur in people’s lives – this, after all, is the nature of the political relationship which couples charisma with the votes-for-goods deal. Indeed, the poverty of structural adjustment and collapse of state services makes this mechanism even more vital as people seek protection in the ‘private’ world of NGOs, churches and political patronage (Gideon, 1998; Auyero, 2001). A party that does not operate patronage, in contrast, can more easily ignore its individual constituents because it gives no personal guarantees to citizens who have serious needs. Finally, just like citizenship, client-ship also appeals to people’s desire for agency because it encourages and even demands participation in the circus of mobilisations and fiestas that accompany elections. People recognise the limitations of the performance but they enjoy exercising their limited power and look forward to the possible rewards which this political ‘work’ might yield (Lazar, 2003). Political work in citizen-style politics is equally exciting, of course, but given that people are short on time and very short on money, only the most dedicated militantes will turn out to wave a flag in the plaza ‘for nothing’.

We should not rejoice in the flourishing of patronage politics and client-ship, though. Neo-populism is, of course, characterised by autocracy, corruption and violence. It cares little for the plight of the poor, merely throwing them scraps of hope – children’s milk, subsidised seeds, a clinic here, some school chairs there. It tramples over rights, ignores representation and makes arbitrary decisions, and it allows favoured cronies to become very rich by privatising and syphoning off what little the impoverished state has (O’Donnell, 1994). Neo-populism and its attendant client-ship is not a solution to problems of representation, participation and accountability, but for many people it appears to be a better short term strategy than voting for a ‘conventional’ politician who seems neither to understand nor to respect them but who performs a disingenuous pantomime six months before the election.

Unless and until citizenship can provide meaningful participation it will continue to be over-shadowed by client-ship, because the fact that inequality is built-into the patron/client relationship matters little in a social world where the equality of citizenship is a laughable myth. (…)

By Simon Crhichley

“(…) is politics conceivable without religion? The answer is obviously affirmative as the evidence of various secular political theories testifies. But is politics practicable without religion? That is the question. And that is the question that Rousseau’s thinking of politics faces. Can politics become effective as a way of shaping, motivating and mobilizing a people or peoples without some sort of dimension—if not foundation—that is religious, that is without some sort of appeal to transcendence, however substantive or otherwise that appeal might be? I do not think so. Or rather, I no longer think so. Thus, the exemplarity of Rousseau to my mind consists in the fact that he gives us the definitive expression of the modern conception of politics: that is, politics is the break with any conception of nature and natural law and has to be based in the concepts of popular sovereignty, association, rigorous equality and collective autonomy understood as the self-determination of a people. And yet, in order for this modern conception of politics to become effective it has to have a religious dimension, a moment of what the Romans used to call theologia civilis, civil theology. That is, the secularization that seems to define modern politics has to acknowledge a moment of what Emilio Gentile calls sacralization, the transformation of a political entity like a state, nation, class or party into a sacred entity, which means that it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable and intangible. So, can a political collectivity maintain itself in existence, that is, maintain its unity and identity, without a moment of the sacred, that is, without religion, rituals and something that we can only call belief? Once again, I do not think so. Might we not at least conceive of the possibility of redefining the secularization that is believed to be definitive of modernity with the idea of modern politics as a metamorphosis of sacralization, where modern forms of politics, whether liberal democracy, fascism, soviet communism, national socialism and the rest have to be grasped as new articulations and, indeed, mutations of the sacred? Before continuing, it should be noted that I have come to this conclusion with no particular joy, as someone with little enthusiasm (in the literal sense of the term) for religion, whether organized or disorganized. And I say this not simply in response to the chronic re-theologization of politics through which we are living, which makes this time certainly the darkest period in my lifetime, and arguably for much longer. At the heart of the horror of the present is the intrication of politics and religion, an intrication defined by violence, and this is what I would like to begin to think through. I want to do this not in order to break the connection between politics and religion, but to acknowledge the limitations of any completely secular leftist politics. It seems to me that the left has all too easily ceded the religious ground to the right and it is this ground that needs to be regained in a coherent, long-term and tenacious political war of position. As Gramsci famously wrote, ‘socialism is the religion that is needed to kill off Christianity’. As we will see presently, the relation of politics to religion and their intrication raises for me the question of the necessity of fiction, of both the seeming necessity for a divine fiction at the basis of politics and the possibility of what Wallace Stevens would call a supreme fiction in politics.”

Read if full at Continental Philosophy Review

By Margaret Somers

“We have seen the enemy and it is us. No longer should we blame neoliberalism’s starvation of the public sector and its privatizing restructuring of the economy for escalating rates of poverty, skyrocketing inequality, or the constriction of democracy. No, it is the fault of your and my delinquency in our bowling league attendance, our neglect of neighborhood barbeques, and in our lapsed faith-based church activities. Along with the privatization of citizenship has come the privatization of responsibility – yours and mine, that is – and we are shamed by our loss of moral fortitude.

Clearly, the appeal of the social capital concept for the neoliberal imagination is its dismissal of the usual sociological and institutional suspects as responsible for the current problems of poverty and politics – the decline of the welfare state and its ancillary social supports on the one hand, and the privatizing restructuring of the economy on the other. But what makes the concept so resonant, timely, and appealing to a world-wide audience less interested in pointing fingers at America’s bowling leagues and church barbeques, and more in exploring the dramatic reorganization of global markets and politics, is its apparent convergence with that celebrated source of Eastern Europe’s democratic revolutions, namely civil society – that sphere of social organization made most famous by its pragmatic, explanatory and normative revival in Eastern Europe’s revolutionary era of the 1980s. In that context, civil society was idealized as a space of democratic participatory empowerment, horizontal social ties and rights-oriented social movements. Its most notable feature, indeed its constitutive meaning, was its identity as a ‘third sphere’, independent of both the power of the administrative and coercive state as well as the competitive individualism of capitalist market societies.

In its glorious heydays of the Gdansk-based Solidarity movement, civil society was the nurturing ground for democratic associations of rightsclaiming citizens. More than a decade after the fact, however, and in the larger context of global privatizations, the civil society concept has come to represent less rights-oriented democratic politics than merely an anti-statist appendage for the ‘compassionate’ side of market society. And piggybacking on much-heralded shoulders, the social capital concept has taken the same path. Militant anti-statism, appropriate for Eastern Europe’s repressed trade unions and social movements fighting heroically against Communist Party tyranny, cannot be justified in the case of social capital. The exclusion of power and rights from the social capital agenda should alarm us. Like the golden glitter of the Trojan horse, we have been dazzled by the social in social capital to collude with a tragicomedy of social science: Neoliberalism has turned Gdansk into a Bowling Alley.”

Read it full at Thesis Eleven

By Francis Cody

“But for the women who had come to the office that day from Katrampatti, my sense is that they would only have been satisfied that they had performed the act of petitioning at grievance day if they had been able to see the collector and plead with him orally using generic conventions compelling superiors to act on behalf of the weak, not unlike those found in the praise language that had been erased from their petition. Their ambivalence is a product of having been denied the chance to make an affective claim through eye contact, ensuring that the collector would feel with their suffering. Karuppiah and I had tried to make it up to the petitioners by taking them all out to lunch after submitting the petition, but the bus ride home was certainly marked by disappointment and uncertainty about what had just taken place at the collector’s office. They all knew that it would be very difficult to collectively take yet another day off of work and come back to town.

Any governmental claims to rationalized and disenchanted Weberian bureaucracy remain particularly vexed in this context, because the collector does in fact sit in the erstwhile king’s seat, in his palace. In fact, he collects petitions in the old darbar hall where the king of Pudukkottai would have met with the court and those who had come to plead before royalty. Such a dense semiotic environment does not lend itself easily to a bureaucratic ideology of directness, or “reduced,” “logical” communication in the eyes of petitioners or even petition writers. The collector does appear to act like a king. It took so much pedagogical work just to get the group from Katrampatti to come to the collector’s office and it seemed somehow incomplete, in part because after such effort they simply turned in the sheet of paper at a small office without being able to see and talk to the collector at grievance day. The petitioners’ idea of seeing the collector directly (neratiyaka), a face-to-face encounter with a powerful patron, conflicts with the ideals of directness as the simple transmission of a communication in written form in which a petitioner has no face. Beyond this sense disappointment at not connecting visually or orally with their addressee, these petitioners have repeatedly been deceived or disappointed by the state, as by other higher powers. They know they are dealing with a realm of power that is in some sense beyond their control. This was, after all, an act of faith (oru nampikkaitan) as much as it was an exercise in citizenship.”

Read it at Cutural Anthropology