Maureen H. Turnbull Specificity and Difference Matters For Democracy: A Movement-Relevant Participatory Democratic Theory in Dialogue with Participatory Democratic Social Movement Praxis

Social movements rarely start out by posing radical challenges to dominant social warrants. They generally focus on modest and melioristic reforms, on immediate obstacles rather than abstract enemies. But the practical activities of struggle produce new possibilities and prohibitions that compel activists to change themselves in the process of changing societies. Rebels need revolutions, argues Karl Marx, not just to overthrow their oppressors, but also to rid themselves ‘of the murk of the ages and become fitted to found society anew . . . For centuries, emancipatory projects have revolved around concepts like universality, equivalence, interchangeability, and equality. From this perspective, difference is a problem to be overcome. But contemporary capital does not do its work by making people more and more alike, as Marx sometimes predicted. Instead, contemporary capital exercises hegemony by creating endless new forms of difference, inequality, and incommensurability. In addition, the very system that produces so much difference and fragmentation confines us to a political language built on simple binary oppositions and appeals to interchangeability and equivalence as the only possible forms of justice . . . Effective oppositional movements under these conditions can neither evade nor embrace ostensibly ‘essentialist’ identities. They cannot confine themselves to purely local, national, or global terrains, but must move strategically in and out of each level to produce new and perhaps unexpected affiliations, alliances, and identifications. The renegotiation of relations between individuals and groups must at some point also aspire to radical transformations in existing social structures and power relations. The challenge is great, but as Stan Weir’s meaningful memoir proves, it is not new (Lispsitz 2003, pp. 33, 39, 40).