In Part III we focus on making participatory ideology real. Chapter 6 moves on from individual involvement to how we can learn to work together to take collective action that maximises our power to bring about change. It continues to explore this from the perspective of disabled people and their movement because of the particular barriers and disempowerment they have successfully challenged and the broader insights this offers. We look at the pressures and circumstances that can operate to make people want to get involved and how we can take the first crucial steps to do this inclusively together, challenging individualisation and the limitations of traditional approaches to collective action.
Chapter 7 develops the discussion about working together by exploring how to have a real say – how we can develop our own organisations, as a basis for self-organisation, rather than merely serving other people’s causes. We look beyond identity politics and the limitations associated with them, to focus on organising on the basis of shared experience, particularly of discrimination and exclusion. This provides a basis for self-organising around common understandings and strongly internalised goals arising from the desire to challenge oppression. We return to the self-organising of disabled people, which has highlighted the difference between traditional processes where non-disabled people controlled the agenda and one where disabled people seek to speak and act on their own behalf, setting up and controlling their own organisations. We see this also through the case study of such a ‘user-led organisation’, Shaping Our Lives, in which the author has been actively involved. Like other self-run organisations, it has done things differently to achieve different objectives, offering helpful insights for advancing participatory ideology in practice.
In order to take forward participatory ideology, we have already had to explore other key concepts, including power and difference. In Chapter 8 we focus on three further ideas and issues that are key for advancing participatory ideology. These are empowerment, language and knowledge, and in this chapter we examine each in more detail. First, though, we focus on theoretical discussion of making social and political change, as this is at the heart of this book’s project.
Then we examine the concept of empowerment, a unique two-part idea for making change, which highlights the need for personal change as a prerequisite for participation in political change. We trace the idea’s origins, its conceptualisation, different meanings, and what works to make it possible. We then look at language and its importance for ideology; how it is used to reinforce inequalities, impose power and manipulate people and how this has been and can be challenged. Finally we investigate knowledge; the role it has long been given to legitimate ruling ideologies, and how revolutionary and new social movements have highlighted and challenged this. We explore the emergence of experiential knowledge as an important part of this challenge and the important role it serves in helping to democratise knowledge and political ideology.
In the concluding Chapter 9, we pull together the arguments and the issues for democratising ideology. Having raised and explored the hypothesis that exclusionary ideology is unlikely to achieve emancipatory goals, we highlight the centrality of people working to achieve more say in society to work for more liberatory societies and a more sustainable planet.
Why ideology should be important to us
Of course, it may be suggested that we can all get along quite well without concerning ourselves with ideology. There are enough things to worry about, without adding to the list! On the other hand, being subject to something that can have massive consequences for your life, that you don’t know much about and have little say in, does not seem a very safe place to be.
We also seem to be living at a time of increasing ideological conflict and extremism. That seems to be happening in terms of the day-to-day ideological threats facing people, as we have seen with large-scale resistance from the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. But we are also seeing this globally, with more economic and military sabre rattling between the West, Russia and China. In the West, there was significant national and international ideological consensus after the Second World War with, for example, the creation of welfare states and the absence of major local conflicts. More recently we have moved far from that situation. Countries like the UK and the US seem to be politically polarised, with a populist Right still powerful but with some strong left of centre parties regaining traction too. There are many sites of war, enormous displacements of populations, and a prevailing neoliberalism that both impoverishes the Global South and exacerbates poverty and inequality in the Global North. Faith-based, tribal and post-colonial conflicts abound. Shifts in power from the colonial West to expansionist China, for example, are reflected in new struggles for rights and resistance like that of the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong. The ending of Soviet dominance in central and eastern Europe has been followed by renewed attacks on Roma, rising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia encouraged by aggressively racist Right-wing groups and administrations.
We can hardly ignore all these threatening signs, linked with large-scale death, destruction, disease and planetary damage. Ideology truly is all our business. Once we begin to think about ideological perspectives, a host of interesting questions come to mind. What does it all mean for us? Where do ideologies come from? Can they be helpful? Each of us is likely to have some personal ideology of our own. But to what extent it is truly ours, or instead something others have given or imposed on us, is another story. Are we the masters and mistresses of ideologies or merely their servants? Our heavily ideological times are undoubtedly damaging for many people. If ideologies are out of control, how might that change? Can we be part of changing it?
These are the kind of issues which this book is concerned with and on which we hope to throw at least some light. Underpinning it is the fear that many millions have already died on the altar of ideological perspectives, and many more might do so. If we are to prevent this continuing to happen, then we must at least try and get a better understanding of such an enormous idea as ideology. A key aim of this publication is to examine the relation between ourselves and ideologies, to help us understand them, particularly political ideologies, as a basis for rethinking and perhaps even changing our response to them. In doing so, it is hoped that it will help us be more aware of the impact ideologies may have on us and how we act and think.
Only then are we really likely to make sense of their influence on us and be in a position to challenge this – if we want to. Here the argument is that ideologies are much too important to be left to ideologues and those who hire and control them. If we don’t give ideologies our attention, others will and already are – and quite probably at our expense.
Ideology: an exclusionary idea?
ideology
ˌʌɪdɪˈɒlədʒi,ɪd-/noun
noun: ideology; plural noun: ideologies
1. a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
Google/OxfordLanguages
Defining ideology
The aim of this book is to encourage fresh debate about ideology in relation to participation. But it is important as a starting point to examine existing discussions of ideology. We are unlikely to make much progress if we don’t learn from what’s already been done and is already known. But this is no simple task. Not only is the aim to get beyond existing discussions, in this non-expert author’s view, such discussions are also often complex and opaque. Nonetheless, they demand investigation, if we want to take either discussion or action on ideology forward in any helpful way. So the aim of this first part of the book is to introduce the reader to the subject through a short, but hopefully not simplistic, discussion of ideology drawing on the existing literature. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in attempting this task, it is that while ideology may impact