新作坊

Grass-roots participation and bureaucratic interfaces: the case of Mexico--introduction

摘要：

The fuzziness of the line comes out in many of these articles, perhaps most clearly in Hilary Cunningham's examination of the intertwined discourses of the US state as it makes manifest its policies on the Mexican border, and those of the Borderlinks activists. In this case the talk is not so much of "participation" but certainly involves activists in trying to think out the extent of their agency versus the extent of their potential cooptation. And on the other side of that border, in Mexico, cooptation is, unsurprisingly given the long history of pervasive corporatist politics, an issue that arises time and again in these papers. Marie-France Labrecque gives us a clear picture of the political setting that makes participation especially a tool of what Manon Boulianne calls vertical (as opposed to horizontal) relations of power. Originally stimulated by the priorities set by the international aid community, programs geared to economic "participation" in rural areas in and around Yucatan's maquiladoras have been modified as a result of their interface with a delocalized bureaucracy controlled by the corporatist political regime. In the article that follows, Manon Boulianne pursues a highly sensitive path which goes a long way to helping us discover the lines we need, to navigate through this political minefield. She notes not just that different participant-activists (in Communal Base Organizations) or participant-recipients (of Non-Governmental Organizations) likely hold (usually unvoiced) quite different notions of what is meant by "participation"; she notes too that in doing so they might well be drawing on what I would call different "discursive conjunctures." One such discourse, for example might have to do with a more welfare-type paternalist state in which much of the discourse of participants revolves around a revindicative language directed toward the state as the source of good. Another, newer discourse, "Abandoning revindications seeking collective services for all citizens, participates now in the offer of locally structured services subsidized by international financial institutions..." which are geared toward participation in micro-enterprises. As a result the actual goal of "participating" itself can become very confused: is it, qua the new social movement hegemonic alternative, to engender a newly constituted, empowered and self-conscious social subject tout court? Or is it to increase individual and collective worker productivity, so as to generate a surplus? In which case how would such a surplus best be used to "improve the quality of life?" Today "participation" is almost as closely associated with issues of "development" as modernization once was. Just as modernization was obviously "a good thing" then, so participation is obviously "a good thing" now. Yet, despite the fact that we would all no doubt note that it is a term with many meanings, it is for all that a much more slippery notion than the easily dispensed with "modernization." Indeed the power relations obscured by its usage are rather like that lecture-hall question: "Can you hear at the back?" Like the lecturer, the people who are talking about participation are already participating; the people who are not, are the problem and they can't hear the question anyway--regrettably in much the same way as "the traditional sector" was a "problem" for those who wished to modernize: traditional today, modernized tomorrow; marginalized today, participating tomorrow. What has mostly changed is the organizational features of capitalist production and circulation and the regulatory mechanisms necessary for their reproduction.