Skip to content or view screen version

The End of Traditional Anti-Systemic Movements...

Takis Fotopoulos | 27.11.2001 02:09

and the Need for a New Type of Anti-systemic Movement Today.

Abstract The aim of this article is to examine the systemic parameters which gave rise to the flourishing of antisystemic movements in the 19th and 20th centuries and their subsequent decline in the era of neoliberal modernity. It is shown that their recent decline is not irrelevant to the nature of the traditional antisystemic movement which challenged a particular form of power rather than power itself, as a result of the one-dimensional conception about the ‘system’ adopted by these movements which typically saw one form of power as the basis of all other forms of power. Today, the issue is not anymore to challenge one form of power or another but to challenge power itself, which constitutes the basis of heteronomy. In other words, what is needed today is a new type of antisystemic movement that should challenge heteronomy itself, rather than simply various forms of heteronomy. The antiglobalisation ‘movement’, which is seen as a continuation of the democratic movement that began in the 1960s, has the potential to develop into such a movement provided that it starts building bases at the local level with the aim to create a new democratic globalisation based on local inclusive democracies that would reintegrate society with the economy, polity and Nature, in an institutional framework of equal distribution of power in all its forms.

 http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol7/takis_movements.htm

www.inclusivedemocracy.org

Takis Fotopoulos
- Homepage: www.inclusivedemocracy.org