Defend Democracy: Literacy and Citizenship

               What basic conditions does democracy require? If democracy requires elections, then reading might be one fundamental condition.  Reading makes it possible to review candidate statements, follow news reports about the impacts of candidate policies, write letters or emails to let their elected representatives know where they stand, and draft proposals for elected leaders to consider.

Yet literacy is not widely held to be a condition for democracy, and many democracies have surprisingly large numbers of illiterate citizens as voters. UNESCO estimates range from 800 million to one billion people globally are without the ability to read or count at a level that allows for full social participation as citizens.

Those who are without these skills often abandon the notion that they are full participants in their government, leaving the business of governing to educated classes and experts. Their normal lives do not include the assumption that they can participate in public discussion and in managing their own affairs, what some call subalternity. 

This abandonment of citizenship is a blow to democracy. Yet subalterns can transform their assumption that the governments of the territories where they live will never serve their interests.

Many citizens cannot read, including those in wealthy countries like the United States. Recent data shows that 19% of the U.S. adult population does not have basic reading skills, and 29% do not have basic number skills, a slight increase in illiteracy over the past quarter century. In countries widely accepted as democratic yet struggling with profound inequality, like Mexico and India, very large numbers of their citizens are not literate: over 4 million adults in Mexico and over 250 million adults in India. Other countries may hold elections but many doubt that democracy is possible when large social sectors remain unable to read, as in Egypt  where some 20 miillion are illiterate, and Brazil, where over 10 million are unable to read a ballot. Other countries claim to be democracies when large percentages of their population are not literate: including some of those least successful at democratizing wealth and social equity, like Bangladesh (25%) and Haiti (40%). 

Should citizens be able to read? The answer to that question is not settled in policy and judicial arenas. A landmark court decision was just issued by a Federal Court of Appeals in the United States stating the literacy is foundation for citizens, for example, but that decision may be appealed. The judge in the case noted that white people have repeatedly withheld education as a way to deny political power to African Americans and members of other groups. The United States Supreme Court has not been supportive of educational equality, so if the recent decision is appealed it may not have long-term traction. Even when court decisions force states to increase school funding, as in a California February, 2020  court decision, the courts may not mandate enough funding to correct the many problems causing poor school performance. The specific problems in Detroit included adequate physical facilities, qualified teachers consistently present in classrooms, and relevant textbooks (Detroit students were given biology textbooks for physics classes).

Work with subalterns can take literacy and other citizenship skills as its goal. This work would need to include the interruption of subaltern notions of their normal lives as cut off from public participation, what Gayatri Spivak calls the “uncoercive rearrangement of the desires” for subalterns. This work requires building an infrastructure that can recognize subaltern desires operating in terms that differ from those of European-derived education and liberal humanism, so that what subaltern communities are always already saying can be heard and recognized as political speech.

Rather than attempting to better the subaltern conditions along Eurocentric avenues of development, this infrastructural work will have to change what education means to begin to recognize subalterns and literate rural communities in the global south as agents of production.  This work may produce democratic mechanisms and forms of social justice that can accommodate rather than block subalterns from access to mobility and citizenship.

Rather than working for the narrow interests of the educated and wealthy, this infrastructural building project requires that we rethink the interests we serve and consider serving those with whom we have been taught to not identify, our Others.  

If those reading this blogpost are literate, then subalterns are you Others. If you have voted in an election, then your Others are those who never vote. If you have been served by your elected representatives, then subalterns are your Others.

This transformation of political work can become an entry into democracy for all, rather than for the few. It begins with illiteracy, with those who have long been shut out of democracy, the unrepresentable, the others of democracy.

Misnaming Democracy: Collective Freedom

The assumption that democracy is driven and even founded by social movements is widespread. Some initial enthusiasm for the developments of the Arab Spring, for example, was grounded in the hope that social movements can overthrow autocratic governments and even those that masqueraded as electoral democracies in Tunisia and Egypt. Social movements are often the engine for large structural changes in democratic societies.

Yet many associate democracy not with social movements but with political parties. How do social movements diverge from political parties in democracies? When do social movements become democratic? When are they anti-democratic and even attacked as illegal and dangerous? When do social movements practice collective freedom?

Social movements are widely recognized as important actors in democratic nation-states, but their enactment of collective freedom is not. Individual freedom is paramount in much modern political thinking. Yet collective freedom as exercised in social movements is more important when looking at how structural change historically takes place. Democratic freedom may be best located not in individual elected leaders and their decisions, the topics of constant commentary by pundits and historians, but in collective groups beyond political parties.

An important area where social movements impact democracy is when groups marginalized by electoral politics reshape electoral systems. Large-scale changes in the franchise are important examples in many democracies of these impacts, such as women winning the vote. Legislation and other changes from race-based social movements in South Africa and the U.S. are others, such as the end of apartheid, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965, and even the U.S. Civil War itself. Certainly some political parties responded to the pressure of these social movements, but each movement that produced major social change early on was not accepted widely by electoral leaders and other policy experts.

All of these changes are the outcomes of social movements and none were initiated by political parties, unless outlawed political parties like the ANC in South Africa or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are somehow considered full participants. Indeed, these movements all found themselves under surveillance and attack by government bodies, as is well-known. These attacks at times involved the killing of participants and even war itself.

Moments when social movements are attacked by governments are important events when tracking the effectiveness of democratic practice. Whether looking at the ANC being outlawed or the jailing of suffragettes, we can see that electoral parties and governments often attack those movements advocating for structural changes and for solutions to major social problems.

Guarantees of collective freedom may be found in some democratic constitutions, such as the right to assembly, but limits on those freedoms are commonplace. With tactics ranging from attacks on Communist Party members in the Cold War to anti-socialist slurs today in the U.S. and recent arrests in India of opposition party supporters, and including the surveillance and infiltration in many countries of anarchist or immigrant or Muslim community organizations, governments and citizens worldwide are often quick to limit collective freedoms.

Some who have grown impatient with electoral leaders and policy experts who often fail to produce equality have even established collective mechanisms parallel to electoral systems. Some of these parallel mechanisms decentralize decision-making beyond elected officials to include those impacted by the decisions, such as participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil and many cities in other countries. The city of Jackson, Mississippi has recently been experimenting with a People’s Assembly to provide the community a formal mechanism beyond letters to the editor to critique and inform their elected officials. Much like the early town hall meetings in New England, collective decision-making in people’s assemblies is just one among many powerful ways to have a collective voice and govern affairs.

Sometimes major legal changes are needed for social movements to even be recognized as actors in political systems. When local indigenous communities attempted to reclaim their governance systems from corporate actors in Cochabamba, Peru in the years 2000-2001, they had to change the laws to reclaim and exercise political sovereignty in their historical territory. When political scientists call for changes in the U.S. constitution to make it more democratic, will political parties respond to their demands?

The failure of political parties to hold governments accountable to all citizens and to significantly transform democratic systems are major problems for democracy. One of the keystones of democracy is its ability to make major changes and improvements in its own governance system in response to major shortcomings. These changes are what might be called collective freedom: the freedom to transform structurally and respond to major weaknesses, to increase accountability to the general good, and to problem- solve in the general interest.

Social movements and not political parties have often been the major engines for significant transformations and improved accountability in democracy governance systems. Yet not all social movements are the same. Some social movements represent the interests of powerful social sectors: anti-immigrant organizations advocate in the interests of those with citizenship; Hindu nationalism in India and the Tea Party in the U.S. advocate for religious values of the majority religion; Nazi and neo-Nazi movements strengthen white, Christian, and often homophobic interest groups.

Strengthening democracy takes the courage to stand up for collective freedoms that are not practiced already. This often means advocating for social sectors and interests that are being ignored or attacked by powerful social groups. That is why grassroots organizations and movements often bring attention to areas where electoral parties are not representing general interests. These areas betray weaknesses in the accountability not to narrow interests but to all of democratic systems.

Grassroots organizations often are not actively regulated by governments, and frequently have more freedom to pursue interests that national governments may not readily recognize as legitimate. At the level of transnational advocacy, narrow corporate and national interests often dominate what look like global initiatives, so grassroots organizations must take the lead in developing social movements that address desires deriving from other social sectors. Grassroots organizations respond much more readily to local concerns and to criticisms from marginalized groups, unlike large organizations in what is sometimes called civil society, like non-profit organizations (like Amnesty International or OXFAM) or U.N. bodies (like United Nations Human Rights delegations) and movements coming from U.N. special meetings (like those who carry out the Beijing Platform for Action). In this sense we can say that grassroots social movements may achieve collective freedom in a manner not possible for civil society organizations funded and implicitly controlled by wealthy donors, large corporations, or national governments.

Collective freedom then can break out of already established historical practices and rhetoric. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, freedom takes place at the complex meeting place of established reason and the ways that reason is insufficient to meet moral obligations. In this way freedom is obliged to produce the unrecognizable, a supplement to what is already reasonable and knowable. (21-22) Freedom is another name for the encounter with the radical other of known efforts for social justice, that which is outside of histories of democratic institutions and which meets the desires of those who democracy has failed to recognize. (327-331)

Given its need to depart from established practices, training for democracy is needed to strengthen collective practices that remain open to new directions and unimagined possible futures. As one observer noted, activists on the radical right have worked to “weaponize the word ‘freedom’ so that people think the only way they have freedom is to do something alone, that the solidarity and unity of doing something together…is not ‘freedom.’” How can collective freedom replace freedom alone?

The modern fetish of individualism has been an important factor in fragmenting collective identities, so that many modern societies have come to be characterized more by television viewing and online shopping than by collective events and meetings.

Training for collective freedom has been done in the past. The civil rights movement put in place a little-known “major training program” that instructed participants in citizenship rights, black history, economic strategies, and even the organization of credit unions. Many social movements routinely train participants in meeting facilitation skills and counter strategies to respond to difficult behaviors. Some movements have even built their own schools to strengthen their community members skills at collective work or at building women’s leadership rather than endorse the individualism instilled in young people by many government- and private-run schools. These forms of community education affirm collective work and collective freedom in ways that competitive scrabbling for individual victory and wealth or individual votes in a private election booth do not.

Collective freedoms as put into action through grassroots social movements are critical if democracies want to remain responsive to needed changes. Collective freedom requires both hard work and a willingness to leave established pathways to morality, to gendered practices, and to political accountability. Collective freedom is often found in ground-breaking collective action that builds new pathways to democracy and social justice.

Justice Under the Law?

Two debates over justice that threaten to destabilize the neoliberal state have broken out in recent days. In the United States, legislators have objected to the threatened federal government use of drones to kill U.S. citizens while on U.S. territory. In Egypt, a court verdict contested by various participants in the Arab Spring revolution was issued in the midst of a police strike.  For both debates a central question remains: whether legislative and court systems will be able to limit the reach of the President, a time-honored defense against abuse of power by sovereign authorities and strategy promoting justice in the exercise of government power.