A political economy for social movements and revolution: popular media access, power and cultural hegemony (original) (raw)

One key marker of mass social movements transitioning to participatory democratic governance is popular media access. This essay argues that democratic media access by public constituencies becomes a site for constructing social revolution and simultaneously a manifest empirical measure of the extent of democratic participation in the production, distribution, and use of communication with new cultural possibilities. The participatory production practices (with citizens producing and hosting their own programs) and the democratic content (of oral histories, local issues, critiques of government and business, and everyday vernacular) reflect the hegemony of emerging 'Bolivarian' twenty-first century socialism expressed as popular participation in media production. Bolstered by constitutional changes and public funding, popular social movements of civil society, indigenous, women, and working class organizations have gained revolutionary ground by securing in practice the right of media production. Findings indicate that public and community media (that move beyond alternative sites of local expression and concerns) provide a startling revolutionary contrast to the commercial media operations in every nation. Popular media constructions suggest a new radically democratic cultural hegemony based on human solidarity with collective, participatory decision-making and cooperation offering real possibilities and experiences for increased equality and social justice. Social movements and political power in Latin America In the midst of continent-wide turmoil and conflict at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sudden increase in the number of governments espousing varieties of socialism and social democracy and enacting programmes to benefit labour, the urban poor and indigenous groups (with an occasional veneer of anti-US intervention rhetoric) became widely known as the 'pink tide'. Pink tide ('Onda Rosa' in Spanish) seems to concisely, albeit insufficiently, characterise the appearance of a generally left political trajectory in Latin American. This was 'pink' rather than 'red' , as Larry Rohter of the New York Times first opined, pink indicating a lighter tone-not the 'red' of communism, not socialism, but a softer shade of progressive politics. While 'pink tide' cogently labels the leftward trend, more is needed ARTICLE HISTORY