“Excuse us if we don’t give a fuck”: The (Anti-)Political Career of Participation

“Participatory democracy must become a way of life.” —Philip Haid, “Marketing Voter Participation to the MuchMusic Generation”

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Participation was present at the origins (at least in the Western context) of thinking about citizenship. For Aristotle, the citizen was strictly defined as one who participates—one who “takes part”—in the offices of the city, a definition that extended its career more or less intact from the ancient Greek city states to the Roman Republic, was negatively affirmed by the absolutist monarchies of the Middle Ages via their denial of extensive participatory opportunities and citizenship to most subjects, and was confirmed decisively in the early modern European republics and later modern European and American liberal revolutions that established the rights of citizens and a variety of representative institutions in which they could exercise their citizenship by participating, by taking part. Participation is also central to notions of citizenship in modern republican and liberal political thought. More recently, the idea of citizenship as participation has been revived in democratic political critiques that point to the participatory deficiencies of increasingly bureaucratic and sporadic representative processes and institutions, and that call for increased opportunities for more inclusive and routine, deliberative, democratic engagement by citizens. These have been met in some cases by attention on the part of liberal democratic governments to provide better and greater opportunities for citizen engagement and consultation between elections. Beyond government, the goal of enhancing civic experience through more extensive and robust participation has also animated a range of scholars, policy-makers, activists, and organizations that have cohered around the problem of declining social capital due to a deficit of participation in the sort of community organizations and groups that bind and stabilize civil societies.

Participation, it would seem, is what citizenship is about. The prospect I would like to raise is that citizenship-as-participation is something altogether different from politics: that if participation, or taking part, is what citizenship is about, the possibility looms that neither citizenship nor participation necessarily conduces to politics. Indeed, as I suggest below, it may be the case that citizenship-as-participation is our best security against the possibility of politics.

Just as it has been central to mainstream republican and liberal democratic conceptions of citizenship, participation has also had a career on the left, in the form of something called “participatory democracy.” In his outstanding little book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C. B. Macpherson describes the genesis of “participatory democracy” as follows:

It began as a slogan of the New Left student movements of the 1960s. It spread into the working class in the 1960s and 70s, no doubt as an offshoot of the growing job dissatisfaction among both blueand white-collar workers and the more widespread feeling of alienation, which then became such fashionable subjects for sociologists, management experts, government commissions of inquiry and popular journalists. One manifestation of this new spirit was the rise of movements for workers’ control in industry. In the same decades, the idea that there should be substantial citizen participation in government decision-making spread so widely that national governments began enrolling themselves, at least verbally, under the participatory banner, and some even initiated programmes embodying extensive citizen participation. It appears the hope of a more participatory society and system of government has come to stay.

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Macpherson’s account alludes to the migration of participatory democracy from the marginal left to the mainstream, but there is even more to say about the work participation did on, for, and to the left itself. “Participatory democracy” was a crucial element in the shift in the organized Anglo-American left in the twentieth century from a posture of “democratic socialism” to one of “social democracy.” For democratic socialists, fundamental transformation of the capitalist economy and state along socialist lines is the goal, but revolutionary violence and authoritarianism are eschewed as means for reaching this goal in favour of competing for power in established democratic institutions. For the social democrat, the goal is not so much a socialist transformation achieved by democratic means as...