Peer2Politics

By shifting from top-down structures to bottom-up organizations, progressives can help populist political candidates to succeed in elections.

Early conceptions of digital democracy as a virtual public sphere or civic commons have been replaced by a new technological optimism for democratic renewal based upon the open and collaborative networking characteristics of social media. This article provides an introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication & Society which attempts to present a grounded analysis on these claims drawing upon evidence-based research and analysis. A more cautious approach is suggested for the potential of social media to facilitate more participative democracy whilst acknowledging its disruptive value for challenging traditional interests and modes of communicative power.

To participate in the drafting is a way to diffuse political consciousness and pro-activism, to boost ongoing social conflicts, to lift the veil on latent ones and at the same time to make them connect.

The Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) recently launched an initiative for developing a new capitalism to replace the failed Anglo-American neo-liberal model, which the Coalition Government clings to despite the model’s fiscal and moral bankruptcy. This new civic capitalism would emphasise people as citizens within a democratic polity, seeking sustainable and socially just economic growth, rather than the unsustainable consumerism of selfish individualism, socially destructive levels of inequality, and increasing precarity for the majority of people created by the neo-liberal model of capitalism.

 

As governments in economic difficulties increasingly turn to environmentally damaging extraction industries for quick cash citizens of those countries are responding with increasingly louder cries of protest.

This conversation started in Prague, the Czech Republic, during a panel moderated by Irena Reifová at the symposium ‘On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’. The event was organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. The text contains a series of discussions. First, there is a conversation about the nature of the participatory democratic utopia and participatory culture and how groups take (or do not take) advantage of the affordances of new and emerging media. It also emphasizes the political nature and potential of popular culture and touches upon its connection to institutionalized politics.

This essay, written by Carole Pateman and translated to Persian by Tavaana, considers the participatory theory of democracy, which holds that for a democracy to exist, a participatory society must exist, including not only politics but all spheres of society, such as industry. Pateman, a British feminist and political theorist, critiques contemporary theories built on assumptions that increased political participation could upset the stability of the democratic system.

Participatory democracy, poverty and inequalities reduction. Final Issues Paper. Communitas Coalition.

It appears to me that in majority of discussions about life after capitalism and possible social-economic alternatives, a very familiar anxiety tends to surface and resurface. This anxiety, I argue, is both existential and social in nature. It is the result of what I describe as one of the most fundamental philosophical problems of the 21st Century: namely that if capitalism, as a system of in-direct domination, emerged in history as an alternative to systems of direct domination; how might we then formulate, in the present, a truly progressive and emancipatory alternative without reproducing direct or in-direct systems of domination?