Social Redarchy and Democratic Regeneration

“Elites and dominant structures will be overwhelmed by new social movements, which base their legitimacy on transparency and trust.” Manuel Castells 2002

The latest Report on Democracy in Spain by the Fundación Alternativas puts on the table an analysis and diagnosis, in my opinion quite accurate, on the impact of the economic and financial crisis on the state of health of our Democracy. It points to the “progressive rupture between the citizenry and the elite” as one of the most visible consequences of an economic crisis that is leaving deep scars in our society, and that calls into question our political system, our key institutions and the social advances achieved in recent decades.

A Wounded Democracy

The report, which has been prepared with the collaboration of a dozen experts including sociologists, journalists, political scientists and economists, diagnoses three “unhealed wounds” of Spanish democracy, which are not exactly superficial wounds, but deep wounds that seriously affect various tissues of our society, and that will need radical and undoubtedly prolonged treatment to heal:

1. An economic crisis that is having devastating effects on an increasingly unequal, impoverished and disaffected society, although not passive, but quite the opposite, that is mobilizing in the search for a new balance between the extractive elites that have taken over our economy and the economic realities in the day-to-day lives of citizens.
2. A political crisis in which citizens no longer feel represented by a delegitimized democratic system. Many citizens link the consequences of the current crisis to corruption and clientelism in political parties. It is becoming increasingly evident that our democracy has deteriorated and there is a growing rift between the citizenry and what is known as the political elite, or in the terms of the new political party Podemos as the “caste”.
3. An institutional crisis. When political parties do not fulfill their promises, become corrupt or hide the truth from citizens, society not only ends up losing faith in its political parties, but also stops believing in the effectiveness of public institutions to defend its interests. The new generations of digitally native citizens do not understand the closed and opaque structures of today’s political parties.

All three crises are equally serious and endanger our coexistence and the democratic values on which we have built our welfare state over the past decades. Just as in the most difficult moments of the transition we were able to find the collective will to overcome differences, in these moments we need to regenerate our democracy again, and connect with the collective will of a society that requires efficiency, solidarity, transparency, and ethics in its institutions. Then the collective dream was the transition from dictatorship to democracy, now the collective dream is the regeneration of our democracy through the action and political participation of citizens.

New parties for new citizens

What is becoming more and more evident is that in the Network Society we will need new parties, for the new citizens. As Felipe Gonzalez says very well, in his latest book In Search of Answers, we don’t need to reform political parties, we need a true reinvention of politics with capital letters. A real rescue of our political system, just as we have done with the financial system.

The last European elections, with the emergence of new political parties such as Podemos, are evidence of this new political era and the decline of the two-party system. The great paradox is that we do not yet have an alternative model and that a large part of the structural solutions to the challenges of globalization are not at the country level, even though this is the area where participatory democracy materializes.

What we do know is that the new global world presents us with particularly complex challenges; challenges that traditional political parties are unable to solve. And this is so, to a large extent, because its structures and models of government are based on a hierarchical model that ignores both the demands and the current possibilities of participation, collaboration and involvement of citizens in politics. From their fundamental point of view – as machines of power – the apparatuses of political parties tend to overvalue legacy and previous experiences at the expense of innovation and the adaptability of their structures to new challenges.

It is not true that there are no real alternatives to our political system. The problem is that there is no political will to do what needs to be done, which is not a few small “reforms” in the political parties or minor changes in their governing bodies, but a true reinvention of our institutions as a whole based on new values such as transparency, openness and citizen participation. necessary to regain lost credibility and reconnect with real society.

Reality shows us every day that the current hierarchical structures have a very high cost in terms of transparency, initiative, creativity and commitment. Every day it is more evident that we need to rescue our political parties from their current “apparatuses” to make them more open, participatory and transparent; to transform them into new parties capable of connecting with the new social reality and providing a collective response – the only possible one – to the new challenges.

In order to make the new parties a reality, we will still have to reconcile two different structures: the one we already know, the hierarchical one where the interests of the party prevail and give it its capacity for planning and control, and new redarchic structures, more open, that make possible the participation and collaboration of citizens and where the interests of society prevail. transparency and the added value of people. We necessarily have to rethink what we want our political parties to look like in the future, and everything points to the fact that the current hierarchical and highly bureaucratized structures will not be able to adapt.

Words are important, and obviously we need new words to represent the new reality. That is why I have coined in my recent book “Redarchy – Beyond Hierarchy” the concept of redarchy, to better understand how the new Age of Collaboration affects our organizations. Redarchy, as a complementary structure to hierarchy, makes possible new frameworks of contribution in organizations, not necessarily linked to occupying positions of power and authority in the organizational chart, but to the credibility and added value of people.

Redarchy gives our organizations a new social dimension, it is not a question of technology, but of ethics, values, culture and leadership. Redarchy, as an engine of the necessary changes in political parties, allows us not only to open the parties to society, but also to create new frameworks of contribution for militants, to promote the emergence of true activists who defend changes that oppose the current status quo, to reduce the fear of change and to increase confidence. the collaboration and collective innovation needed to meet the challenges of their transformation.

The social network. Citizens are in charge

When a politician hides the truth or breaks an election promise, trust in him or her decreases. It also, by extension, decreases trust in the system until it reaches its very root. Over time, society not only ends up losing faith in its leaders, but also stops believing in the effectiveness of public institutions to defend its interests. The transparency provided by the internet and social media has contributed significantly to the distance between citizens and political parties that have been overwhelmed by circumstances, powerless in the face of change and, at the same time, seriously damaged by cases of corruption, clientelism and institutional deterioration.

On the other hand, the new generations of digital natives live connected, learn, process information, innovate, collaborate, mobilize and do things in a substantially different way than previous generations. That is why they do not understand the closed and opaque structures of today’s political parties; They wonder, not without reason, why they don’t coordinate collective effort based on structures that are more open to participation, such as those they themselves use on the social web.

The 15M movement is a clear example of an emerging social network, a new cultural and technological paradigm and an innovative way of organizing in community without a specific ideological approach that, however, spread at an accelerated pace, driven by the transparency of global networks, which have left the gap that separates the expectations of citizens and the vested interests of the dominant political elites in plain sight to the whole world. Likewise, the success of Podemos in the recent European elections has shown that new ways of doing politics, decentralised and participatory, are the model of the future.

These newly emerging social movements adopt different forms, values, and beliefs according to the specific needs of the cause that gave them their reason for existing. They are, in other words, real black swans who, regardless of whether they show outrage at political corruption, defend a fairer world, demand decent work, reject global banking or propose new alternative ways of life, have a clear point in common: they constitute a social counter-power.

What each of these new movements does show us is that the social redarchy is incompatible with the arbitrary and personalistic use of power, and with the use that many people have made of the apparatus and bureaucracy for their own benefit. These abuses destroy value, create unjust organizations, and demotivate people. In fact, most of the conflicts between redarchy and hierarchy will arise along the line that separates those who want to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those of us who aspire to build a less power-oriented, more just, equitable and sustainable world. This is the true boundary between redarchy and hierarchy. Which side are you on?