Counter-hegemonic leadership for democratic alter-politics in our times

Abstract

This article sets out to grapple with strategic challenges facing democratic alter-politics in our times, dwelling on the question of leadership to explore ways of overcoming the frailties and risks that beset grassroots collective agency for democratic renewal. Discussion begins thus by fleshing out the notion of contemporary democratic alter-politics which breaks both with top-down statist rule and conventional activism, fostering openness, diversity, assembly-based democracy, attention to process, egalitarianism, prefiguration, work in everyday life along with mass mobilization, and engagement with institutions to effect change. In a second step, the argument brings out the strategic limitations of this alter-politics by engaging with relevant theories and reflections on strategy. The following key part of the article sketches the outlines of a strategy of counter-hegemony that could tackle some of these limitations by reconfiguring democratic leadership. Drawing on recent social movements and organizational studies, critical analysis will seek to indicate how the pursuit of effective leadership can be aligned with the alter-politics of egalitarian collective self-direction to boost and expand it in the political circumstances of the present. The nub of the argument is that ‘another leadership’ that is assembly-based, technopolitical, reflective, distributed, ‘servant’, and feminized can further democratic alter-politics.

Outcomes of Democratic Innovations: Horizontalism as Inclusive Participation Spillover, but Fragile under Hierarchical Attacks

“…Contestatory actions were joined by tech activists endorsing a political perspective rooted in movements for hacking, free and open source programming, where commons based economies and communities were most pragmatically envisioned and experientially produced. As meeting contexts for various post-and anti-hegemonic social groups (Kioupkiolis, 2021;Kioupkiolis, 2018), anti-austerity protests became the first consistent spillovers of horizontal models of organization and collective decision making (Ancelovici, 2016).…”

“…Significantly, even though corruption was the trigger that enabled the wide waves of street action, the underlying general claim resembled the social disappointment with representative democracy (Kioupkiolis, 2021(Kioupkiolis, , 2018. There were no calls for more powerful institutions of force, to come strong and clean the perceived vicious political ecosystem, as it happened, for instance, in Romania, during the anti-corruption protests of 2017-2019 (Dumitrica, 2022).…”

Інтеграція Прекарних Груп В Суспільно-Політичні Процеси В Умовах Сучасних Демократій

“…After all, on the one hand, the existing political institutions are products of the old political system of the industrial age, so the possibility of articulating the demands of the precariat through them is limited. On the other hand, it is rather difficult for alternative types of policies, according to the opinion of some scientists (Kioupkiolis, 2021), to compete with the established system. Additional difficulties in their spread have a whole set of restraining factors, either internal or external, in particular, the preservation of stable positions of the neoliberal tradition on the level of state management and in politics.…”

“…The alter-politics under consideration, according to the conclusion of a well-known researcher on issues of radical democracy, public welfare, social movements and philosophy of freedom (Kioupkiolis, 2021), is the desire to find powerful democratic response to political crises and impasses of real "exhaustion" of liberal democracy and the rise of oligarchy, as well as climate crisis, patriarchal violence, rising nationalism and xenophobia, restrictions and growing inequality.…”