Organizing Equity Toward a Democratic Economy: Movement Organizations as Discourse Actors in the Open Laboratory Society

• In Event: The Armageddon Club: Educating for the Future of Humanity – Educating Toward Equitable Futures 2

Abstract

The multiple crises of the Anthropocene as well as the structural deficits of democracy itself are marked in many voices: 1.) it is considered structurally exclusionary in that it follows a patriarchal autonomous subject model, is Eurocentric in design, and structurally disregards and exploits other species (Lorey 2020). 2.) it realizes a linear model of progress that is exclusively oriented towards economic growth 3.) it is based on an 'imperial way of life' (Brand & Wissen 2017), which contributes to the further aggravation of socio-ecological-economic problems and calls into question the rights of the earth and future generations. Designs and approaches of radical democratization, on the other hand, call for the transition to a post-industrial age (Görgen & Wendt 2020). They refer to the radicalization of democracy with regard to its dimensioning of time (linear vs. cyclical time), of centered vs. decentered subject, of subjectivity and collectivity (individuality vs. connectedness), of representation and participation, of linear development and cyclical regeneration - and thus altogether of the connection between democracy, culture and economy. The imaginaries, strategies, and shaping practices of movement organizations (Schröder 2018) formulate political claims for alternative futures. Their design practices are often oriented toward the ideational program of egalitarian self-organization (Paslack 1990: 289) and the grassroots vision and practice of a "presentist democracy" (Lorey 2020; Hardt & Negri 2017). Movement organizations act as collective discourse actors, which with Foucault (1998: 26) can be conceived as heterotopian 'counter-spaces', imagining alternative visions, formulating 'counter-strategies' to the existing (Weber 2018a), and pursuing them in design practice (Adler & Weber 2019).
The recently emerged economic-democratic 'Network Economic Change' (NOW) forms itself as a network and establishes a 'Council' as a temporally limited appointed council. It fights for an economy oriented towards the common good and thus for a post-capitalist society. What heterotopic potentials does this "new politics beyond market and state" (Helfrich & Heinrich Böll Stiftung 2012) unfold? Which ethical-political imaginaries also mobilize others and lead to new forms of solidarity without becoming homogenizing and/or moralizing? (Hülagü, 2005). From an organizational education perspective (Göhlich et al 2018) we examine this movement organization as discourse actor, which ties in with the rationality of the experimental practice of the 'open social laboratory'.
From a genealogical perspective, this suggests Dewey's figure of the 'laboratory school' (Weber 2018a; Zenke 2020), in which democracy is designed as experience (Jörke 2003; Göhlich et al 2009). This idea of a democracy-learning 'embryonic society' has become institutionalized as a 'blueprint' of a collectively experimenting, researching, and democratizing learning not only in school contexts, but also generalized in the extended organizational pedagogical model of an organizational learning (Weber 2020b) and established as a radical theory of democracy itself (Jörke 2003). It cultivates itself in the collective design practice of movement organizations as discourse and transformation actors. Süß (2019: 259), speaks of Dewey's potential for the design of an "experimental horizontality" in local design contexts. Democracy here becomes not only a way of life (Weber 2006) and a democracy-building

Authors

• Funda Hülagü Demirbilek

• Susanne Maria Weber, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany