Structural Change Through ‘Collective Action as Democratic Practice’: Linking Grassroots Democracy With Social Justice

Abstract

Iris Marion Young argued that tackling structural injustices that arise from complex interactions requires collective, political action. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what kind of collective action leads to social justice and how. This article aims to fill this gap by developing the idea of ‘collective action as democratic practice’ that emphasises crafting democratic institutions from the bottom-up to re-orient structural processes in ways that resist oppression and domination. This departs from Young’s own account of collective action as engaging in communicative action to pressure powerful agents. It also departs from previous attempts to conceptualise structural change through the cumulative, rather than collective, actions of individuals changing their behaviours independently of one another. I argue that my approach is a more promising way to theorise collective action from a structural perspective. This approach has wider implications for understanding the outward-looking political potential of self-organised projects by citizens.