This Congress is organized by the association Peace with Dignity - Bakea Duintasunarekin linked to social movements and transformative dynamics, and by the research group in Social Sciences Parte Hartuz of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), which combines social and academic research of democratic transformation processes. The Congress seeks to analyze, both from theory and practice, processes and experiences where community, popular power, self-management, self-government, common values ​​and collective participation are the basis for transformation. For this reason, it wants to be a process-space for reflection, debate and analysis for people and popular movements that work on communal and community social transformation.

We intend to carry out preliminary activities that will generate networks, analysis, contacts and debates as part of this process of collective reflection.

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PRESENTATION

Since the end of the 20th century, we have been immersed in an unprecedented civilizational crisis in which various systemic processes are combined: the structural crisis of capitalism, an economic and ecological, food, energy, climate, migration and demographic crisis; a crisis of care, health and values; a major political crisis and a crisis of institutional credibility.

In this situation, conflictive, violent, sometimes dramatic and catastrophic situations have been generated, which will worsen in the coming decades. It is from this social emergency that we are challenged to think of strategies for self-government and resistance to address the difficulties and challenges that arise.

The crisis of liberal democracy model, both representative and participatory management systems, is expressed in processes of concentration of political power in supra-state and supra-governmental instances that increasingly distance the centers of political decision from the people affected by their performances. It also implies the fusion of political and economic powers, since the interests of multinational corporations and the most powerful families drive political decisions, converting elected leaders into mere managers at the service of private interests.  

Given the lack of trust in political parties, public institutions and representative model, and in the face of the impossibility of life itself, collective and community dynamics emerge that strengthen, generate and project other ways of understanding and inhabiting the world. This type of situated practices, of great diversity, are developing a different political logic, from which influence and seek to transform the current model of democracy. Within these experiences –whether they are historical or ancestral practices, creative reinventions or novel initiatives­–, community subjects and political subjectivities that confront individualism and vindicate the idea of ​​community to build society are conformed. In this sense, the concept of popular power also appears transversally in different practices, as an idea-force to define the transforming political subject.

OBJECTIVES

At this historical moment, it is of vital importance to study, analyze and make known this type of collective practices and experiences, among other things, to build a shared common sense about the ways of doing and exercising democracy. The purpose of this International Congress is to gather all these practices and experiences in order to create a meeting place and collective reflection, with the double objective of giving them visibility and strengthening them, and, on the other hand, building solidarity alliances and relationships of mutual support.

The Communal Democracy Congress seeks to facilitate the articulation of networks, processes and dynamics of joint work between different agents (social activists, political activists, researchers, academics, groups, institutional agents), and at different scales (local, regional, state, international). Direct contributions from movements that generate these community practices, as well as from researchers, social agents and people engaged in the issue, will be welcome. Combining local experiences from the Basque Country and countless initiatives and projects from the five continents, this Congress is intended as a space-time to share knowledge to promote social transformation processes. In addition to other contributions, we will have at least research on experiences from Venezuela, Italy, Brazil, Kurdistan, Chile, South Africa, Argentina, Catalonia, Paraguay, the United States, Colombia and the Basque Country.

LINES OF WORK

The Congress will be organized around various thematic and work lines, with the aim of giving rise to different contributions from a multidisciplinary point of view. In each thematic line, both theoretical analysis of communal democracy and popular power (historical processes, proposals, ideological aspects, etc.), as well as concrete community self-organization and self-management experiences or processes will be accepted (from the most widespread and settled practices, to the smallest and incipient experiences).

The following thematic lines are proposed:

• The construction of emancipatory popular subjects: diversity and articulation.
• Feminist contributions to popular power.
• The production of the common for the reproduction of life.
• The territory as a space of popular power: the common and the community.
• Decolonial thinking for popular power.
• Social and cultural hegemony for a new power.
• Antagonisms, resistance and popular self-defense.
• Popular power and its relationship with the State, institutions and agencies.
• Communal democracy: collective control against the crisis of liberal democracy.