This primer is intended as a reference document for the participants of the course and to make it a more pleasurable and meaningful experience which attempts to provide basic working definitions or explanations for the less-familiar ideas and concepts that would be mentioned in the course; and also for the many often very important ideas and concepts that we refer to all the time but that most of us do not really always know the full meaning of. By no means it is a comprehensive reference source and we would request participants to look for various online and offline sources.
Most of the entries in this glossary are sourced from the cultural-political glossaries developed by CACIM (www.cacim.net) for their book series “Are Other Worlds Possible ?” and “Samrajayon Se Sangharsh”, both invaluable reference sources. We acknowledge their support in this endeavour for the benefit of participants, for more details write to them @ cacim@cacim.net
Alter-globalisation (or ‘alter-mondialisation’ from the French altermondialisation): The name given to a widespread way of thinking that supports international / global integration but demands that values of direct democracy, economic justice, environmental protection, and human rights be put ahead of purely economic concerns. The term, implying ‘another globalisation’ or an alternative globalisation, is a positive spin on the more widely used and somewhat pejorative word ‘anti-globalisation’. People believing in alter-globalisation oppose the way international institutions (such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank) work towards promoting First World economic interests. Alter-globalisation approaches and is sometimes confused with ‘internationalism’, as put forth by communists, since both oppose any globalisation that prioritises capitalists over ordinary people.
Anti-globalisation movement: Also referred to as the Global JusticeorFair Trade movement, the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement (GJ&SM), the ‘Movement of Movements’ or simply‘The Movement’. It uses, and is known for, slogans such as ‘Globalise justice!’. The movement is heterogeneous and includes diverse, sometimes opposing, understandings of this process, alternative visions, strategies and tactics. Some parts of the movement reject globalisation as such, but the overwhelming majority of its participants are aligned with movements of indigenous people, human rights NGOs, anarchism, green movements, and to a minor extent communism. Some sections of the movement object not to capitalism or international markets as such but rather to what they claim are non-transparent and undemocratic mechanisms of the market and of capitalism, and the negative consequences of unregulated globalisation.
Anti-immigrant (or ‘anti-immigration’): Labels that are often considered inaccurate or prejudicial by those to whom they are applied. The distinction is that the term ‘anti-immigrant’ implies xenophobia, nativism, and/or racism; though not all who oppose immigration hold these views. Some feel that ‘anti-immigration’ is also inaccurate because many who wish to reduce immigration do not want to eliminate it entirely. The main reasons behind the opposition to immigration and immigrants' rights include unemployment, crime, harm to the environment, and deteriorating public education. However, the critics often argue that while the problems are real, blaming immigrants is only a form of scapegoating.
Authoritarianism: Term used to describe an organisation or state that enforces strong and sometimes oppressive measures against people. Authoritarianism generally presumes to know Truth, with a capital ‘T’, and has almost no tolerance of disagreement. It is characterised by moral and philosophical certainty coupled with a taste for the use of force by the State. It is distinguished from ‘totalitarianism’ both by degree and scope, authoritarian administration or governance being less intrusive and in the case of groups, not necessarily backed by the use of force. In an authoritarian state, citizens are subject to state authority in many aspects of their lives, including many that other political philosophies would see as matters of personal choice.
Bhopal Declaration: Released at a conference held in Bhopal, India on January 12-13 2002 organised by the government of Madhya Pradesh when headed by Digvijay Singh, to focus on the theme 'Transforming India Through a Dalit Paradigm'.
The Bhopal Declaration declared its belief in Ambedkar's ideal of Social Democracy and his prophecy that "A democratic form of government presupposes a democratic form of society. The formal framework of democracy is of no value and would indeed be a misfit if there was no social democracy".
The Declaration put forward and demanded a 21-Point action agenda for the 21st century that mainly demanded increased participation by Dalits in social, political, and economic activity in India and to ensure this, proposed that government needs to take proactive approaches by enacting necessary legislations and by ensuring equal access to rural and urban common property resources. It also demanded mandatory reservation in the private and corporate sector in the same proportion as in the public sector and government institutions and develop the capacities and skills of Dalits to help them cope up with the demands of these different sectors.
Biodiversity: Also ‘Biological diversity’. A measure of the relative diversity among organisms present in different ecosystems. ‘Diversity’ here includes diversity within species, among species, and comparative diversity among ecosystems. It also stands for the totality of genes, species, and ecosystems of a region.
Bonded labour: Bonded labour, or debt bondage, is probably the least known form of slavery today, and yet it is the most widely used method of enslaving people. A person becomes a bonded labourer when his or her labour is demanded as a means of repayment for a loan. The United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery estimated that in 1999, some 20 million people were held in bonded labour around the world. The system has existed for thousands of years and in South Asia it took root in the caste system and continues to flourish in feudal agricultural relationships. Bonded labour are routinely threatened with and subjected to physical and sexual violence. They are kept under various forms of surveillance, in some cases by armed guards.
Typically, bonded labour in India and south Asia are Dalits. There are many different variants, and many paths on the basis of which a person, or family, becomes bonded.
Bourgeois / Bourgeoisie: In common modern usage, the term ‘bourgeoisie’ refers to the wealthy or propertied social class in a capitalist society, and the term ‘bourgeois’ to refer to someone with materialistic, consumerist values.
These are originally words in French. The early Anglicisation ‘burgess’ is derived from the old French burgeis (cf also middle English: burgeis, burges, borges, and also old Dutch: burgher = the inhabitant of a borough, or burgh). In the French feudal order, ‘bourgeois’ was formally a legal category in society, defined by conditions such as length of residence and source of income.
The French term in turn seems to have derived from the Italian borghesia (from borgo = village), which in turn derives from the Greek pyrgos). A borghese was a freeman dwelling in a burgh or township.
The word evolved to mean merchants and traders, and until the 19th century was mostly synonymous with the middle class (persons in the broad socioeconomic spectrum between nobility and serfs or proletarians). Then, as the power and wealth of the nobility faded in the second half of the 19th century, the bourgeoisie emerged as the new ruling class.
Perhaps because the term is a little difficult for a native English speaker to spell or pronounce, it is not used as often in politics in English-speaking countries as in other Western ones.
From the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression in the 1930s, the pronunciation ‘bushwah’ was used in political satire in the US to portray radical leftists.
Bretton Woods: A small town in the state of New Hampshire, US, where World War II allies agreed in 1944 on the shape of the post-war world economic order. The term ‘Bretton Woods’ now refers particularly to two multilateral organisations founded there, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which together were designed to promote exchange rate stability and economic development within a free market system. There is also a third, less-prominent arm of the Bretton Woods institutions, the IFC (International Finance Corporation).
Capital: In classical economics, capital is one of three factors of production, the others being land and labour. Goods with the following features are capital: Used in the production of other goods; human-made, in contrast to, say, ‘land’; and - not used up immediately in the process of production, unlike raw materials or intermediate goods. The third part of the definition was not always used by classical economists. The classical economist David Ricardo would use the above definition for the term ‘fixed capital’ while including raw materials and intermediate products are part of his circulating capital. For him, both were kinds of capital. Karl Marx, who also wrote Das Kapital, made the distinction that variable capital refers to a capitalist's investment in labour-power, seen as the only source of surplus-value. It is called ‘variable’ since the amount of value it can produce varies from the amount it consumes, ie it creates new value. On the other hand, constant capital refers to investment in non-human factors of production, such as plant and machinery, which Marx takes to contribute only its own replacement value to the commodities it is used to produce. It is constant, in that the amount of value committed in the original investment, and the amount retrieved in the form of commodities produced, remains constant.
Capitalism: In common usage, the term ‘capitalism’ means an economic system in which all or most of the means of production are privately owned and operated, and in which the investment of capital and the production, distribution, and prices of commodities (goods and services) are determined mainly in a so-called ‘free market’, rather than by the state. In capitalism, the means of production are generally operated for profit.
Capitalism is contrasted with feudalism, where land is / was owned by feudal lords who collect rent from private operators; with socialism, where the means of production are owned and used by the state; and with communism, where the means of production are owned and used by the community collectively.
Some emphasise the private ownership of capital as being the essence of capitalism, or emphasise of the importance of a free market as a mechanism for the movement and accumulation of capital, while others measure capitalism through class analysis (ie, the class structure of society and the relations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie). Some emphasise the growth of a global market system.
Others focus on the application of the market to human labour. Still others, such as Hayek, note the self-organising character of economies that are not centrally planned by government. Many, such as Adam Smith, point – in relation to the characteristics of capitalism - to what is believed to be the value of individuals pursuing their self-interest as opposed to altruistically working to serve the ‘public good’.
Many of these theories call attention to various economic practices that became institutionalised in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries, especially involving the right of individuals and groups of individuals acting as ‘legal persons’ (or corporations) to buy and sell capital goods, as well as land, labour, and money, in a free market, and relying on the state for the enforcement of private property rights rather than on a system of feudal protection and obligations.
Caste/Casteism: In ancient India, the ruling sections developed a social system in which people were divided into separate closed communities where the position of individuals in society was decided by descent. These communities are known in English as castes. The caste system in the religious form is a simple division of society made up of four castes arranged in a rigid hierarchy (Brahmins, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra); and below them the outcastes or the Dalits, earlier referred to (by the upper castes) as ‘untouchables’, who have historically suffered and continue today to often suffer extreme discrimination and violence. But socially the caste system is far more complicated than this, with many castes, sub-castes, and other divisions. The origin of the caste system is in Hinduism, but has affected the whole of Indian society. Because they include and suggest definite economic stratification, both the term ‘caste’ and the system of casteism lend themselves to a functional explanation in terms of economic roles, but they are also deeply social and defy definition only in economic terms.
Child Rights Convention: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international convention setting out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children. It is monitored by the Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Most member nation states (countries) of the United Nations have ratified the Convention, either partly or completely; the US is a major exception. The United Nations General Assembly agreed to adopt the Convention into international law on November 20 1989; it came into force in September 1990, after it was ratified by the required number of nations.
The Convention generally defines a child as any person under the age of 18 years, unless an earlier age of majority is recognised by a country's law, and acknowledges that every child has certain basic rights, including the right to life, their own name and identity, to be raised by their parents within a family or cultural grouping and have a relationship with both of their parents even if separated.
The Convention obliges states to allow parents to exercise their parental responsibilities. The Convention also acknowledges that the child has the right to express its own opinions and to have those opinions heard and acted upon when appropriate, to be protected from abuse or exploitation, to have their privacy protected and requires that their lives not be subject to excessive interference.
The Convention also obliges signatory states to provide separate legal representation for a child in any judicial dispute concerning their care and asks that the child's viewpoint be heard in such cases. The Convention forbids capital punishment for children.
The Convention is child-centric and places the child's needs and rights first – ahead of the parents or others. It requires that states act in the best interests of the child. This approach is different to the common law approach found in many countries that had previously treated children and wives as possessions or chattels, ownership of which was often argued over in family disputes. In many jurisdictions, properly implementing the Convention requires an overhaul of child custody and guardianship laws, or, at the very least, a creative approach within the existing laws.
The Convention also has two Optional Protocols, adopted by the General Assembly in May 2000 and applicable to those states that have signed and ratified them: The Optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the Optional protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.
Civil society: Civil society can be defined to be “a sphere of association in society in distinction to the state, involving a network of institutions through which society and groups within it represent themselves in cultural, ideological, and political senses”, but where in a Gramscian sense, “the institutions of civil society [also form] … the ‘outer earthworks’ of the state, through which the ruling classes [maintain] their ‘hegemony’ or dominance in society”. In terms of power, civil society and the state are therefore dialectically interlinked. But since civil society is a value-based, ideological construct, membership of civil society takes place through acceptance to civil institutions (with ‘institutions’ used in the broadest sense, including customs) by those who already belong, not in the sense of membership in a club but rather acceptance on account of an acceptance and sharing of values, and loyalty to those values. This in turn means that ‘civil society’ is a self-defined and hegemonic concept by those who consider themselves to be ‘civil’, and where through civil society and its institutions, they practise a project in history of excluding and keeping out large sections of society and then periodically subjugating, taming, and selectively including – ‘civilising’ – sections of the excluded, including in certain circumstances when the excluded contest power. The term ‘civil society’ does not, therefore, refer to all sections of society outside the state.
Given structural segmentation in all societies, whether on the basis of caste, race or colour, sexual preference, and also class, civil society in the first instance excludes all those who are considered ‘incivil’ by those leading institutions of civil society that define the norms of civility (whether at local, national, or transnational levels), such as religious institutions, educational and research institutions, the media, etc, as well as other more voluntary associations of civil society such as clubs. The incivil would therefore typically in today’s conditions include working class refugees, migrants, and displaced peoples, the labouring poor in general in all contexts, followers of fundamentalist religious sects, so-called ‘indigenous peoples’ and first nations in most parts of the world, ‘people of colour’ in most Caucasian-dominated societies, and in the Indian / South Asian context, the mass of Dalits (the earlier so-called ‘untouchable’ outcastes) and Adivasis (literally, ‘original dwellers’, or indigenous peoples), who till date have through the institution of caste been excluded from participation in this definitional process and therefore, by definition, from membership; and in general, all those considered deviants by the civil. Similarly, their equivalents in different parts of the world. These boundaries are however constantly changing, as different subordinate sections mobilise and assert themselves and their own values and come, in time, to contest power (both cultural and political), such as is today happening in India in terms of caste, and in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America, by indigenous peoples.
The condition of women in civil society, and their relation to the norms and requirements of civility, is a special one. Under the patriarchal structures that still prevail widely in most societies, to greater or lesser degree and in both open and covert forms, women are disenfranchised and/or excluded to greater or lesser extent degrees, in both overt and/or covert, subtle ways. This is normally not considered within the dynamics of civility, but if civil society is considered in structural terms as suggested here, these processes could also be considered directly related to, if not actually part of, the dialectics of ‘civility’.
Colonialism. Permanent rule of one country or region by another, usually based on conquest. Feature of European expansion since sixteenth century, as Western powers took control of people and territory across much of globe. Last wave in Africa, late-nineteenth century. South American colonies gained independence in nineteenth century, African and Asian after WW II.
Communalism: In most of the world, ‘communalism’ is a modern term that describes a broad range of social movements and social theories which are in some way centred upon the community and is associated with various branches of socialism. ‘Communalism’ can take the form of communal living or communal property, among others.
However, the term has a very specialised and different – opposite - usage in South Asia, in the sense of sectarianism as a force separating different communities based on some form of social or sectarian discrimination and to stimulate violence between those groups. In contemporary India, the word ‘communalism’ has taken the sense of ‘undue favour towards one religious community’, with most politicians labelling their opponents as ‘communal’ and their party a as ‘communal party’. For example, the so-called Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is always labelled by its opponents, such as the Congress Party and the Communist Parties (who label themselves as ‘secular’) as being ‘communal’, meaning giving undue favour to the majority Hindus, whereas the BJP counter-labels the Congress and the Communists as communal in the sense that they give undue favour to the minority religions at the expense of the majority.
Communist (Communism): Generally defined as a believer in communism, which in its original meaning is a social theory and political movement for the direct and communal control of society towards the common benefits of all members. The theory of communism, one of the first comprehensive revolutionary philosophies, was first formulated and espoused in the 19th century by Karl Marx, along with his collaborator Friedrich Engels.
Conflict: In political terms, "conflict" refers to an ongoing state of hostility between two groups of people or defined as "when two or more parties, with perceived incompatible goals, seek to undermine each other's goal-seeking capability". One should not confuse the distinction between the presence and absence of conflict with the difference between competition and co-operation. In competitive situations, the two or more parties each have mutually inconsistent goals, so that when either party tries to reach their goal it will undermine the attempts of the other to reach theirs. Therefore, competitive situations will by their nature cause conflict. However, conflict can also occur in cooperative situations, in which two or more parties have consistent goals, because the manner in which one party tries to reach their goal can still undermine the other's attempt. Conflict can exist at a variety of levels of analysis: intrapersonal conflict, interpersonal conflict, group conflict, organizational conflict, community conflict, intra-state conflict (for example: civil wars, election campaigns), international conflict
Consumerism: The tendency of people to identify strongly with products or services they consume, especially those with commercial brand names and obvious status-enhancing appeal, eg an expensive automobile, or rich jewellery. It is a pejorative term which most people deny, having some more specific excuse or rationalisation for consumption other than the idea that they are ‘compelled to consume’. ‘Overcoming Consumerism’ is a growing philosophy that embodies the active resistance to consumerism. It is being used by several universities in the North as a term for course material and as an introduction to the study of marketing from a non-traditional approach. Consumerism has been attacked by anti-globalisation / alter-globalisation movements because of its ability to reduce healthy human relationships to that of production, consumption, and profit.
Dalits: The so-called achuta, or ‘untouchables’, are a group of castes outside the four main categories in India’s caste system. They include people such as leather-workers, sweepers (bhangis), etc. Mahatma Gandhi called them Harijan, a term meaning ‘Children of God’ (Hari is another name for Vishnu, a Hindu God). Untouchables generally consider this term to be condescending and prefer the name Dalit, variously translated as ‘crushed’, ‘stepped on’ or ‘oppressed’. Based on a British colonial system of categorisation, the term ‘Scheduled Caste’ is still used in the Indian legal system to refer to this group, along with other non-caste ‘tribes’ (‘SC&ST‘ – Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes).
Empire: In conventional usage, an empire (also known technically, abstractly, or disparagingly as an imperium) comprises a set of regions locally ruled by governors, viceroys, or client kings in the name of an emperor. By extension, one could classify as an empire any large multi-ethnic state ruled from a single centre. Like other states, an empire maintains its political structure at least partly by coercion. Land-based empires (such as the Russian Empire in the 19th century, or Achaemenid Persia) tend to extend in a contiguous area; sea-borne empires, also known as thalassocracies (the Athenian and British empires are examples), may feature looser structures and more scattered territories. One can also compare these kinds of physical and political-economic empires with more abstract or less formally structured hegemonies, such as patriarchy, caste systems, racism, etc, which add cultural influences to their power repertory within their spheres of influence.
Femininity: The physical and mental attributes thought to be associated with the female sex, and therefore culturally determined. Some of these attributes can be traced to the female reproductive role. Others are rooted in the socialisation of a girl's early development and adjusted throughout adulthood by picking up or reacting to societal cues. Feminine characteristics are sometimes expressed through female gender roles, which can vary between societies and eras. Roles which are thought of as feminine change from culture to culture and generation to generation, the only constant being the role of mother.
Traits that are considered feminine can be categorised into the physical (such as breasts, narrower hips in relation to shoulders, softer facial features without facial hair, etc) or into the realm of the soul, manifested in such things as a concern for relationships (sympathy, sensitivity, high language skills, receptivity) and aesthetics (decoration and ornamentation of home and person).
Distinctly feminine attributes are hard to pin down, as are the masculine, because each attribute can be manifested in either gender.
Femininity, like masculinity, is a gender identity constructed socially, historically, and politically.