Grassroots movement

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The term grassroots movement is a metaphor for initiatives that primarily come from private individuals and, so to speak, arise “from below”.

Grassroots movement ( english grass roots movement ), also based movement is a political or social initiative ( movement ), which from the base of the population arises ( grassroots democracy ).

Linguistic origin

There is consensus that the term comes from the Anglo-American language area. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary refers to McClure's Magazine from July 1912, where the grassroots (grassroot) said to have been first used to refer to a campaign or organization. Several sources suggest that the term comes from Theodore Roosevelt's environment and his presidential campaign at the time.

The time of the first use of the term in German is unclear. The anarchism researcher Günter Bartsch traces it back to a concept of a grassroots movement inspired by the American poet Walt Whitman . Others attribute the literal adoption from English to the peace researcher Theodor Ebert or to people from the population.

At the beginning of the 1970s, a loose network of various grassroots initiatives appeared in Germany in the context of the New Left , which called itself the grassroots movement. Grassroots movement was later also used as a generalizing term for a movement influenced by anarcho-pacifism . In 1994 the term was used in Howard Rheingold's book Virtual Community to characterize the emergence of virtual communities through the Internet . Sometimes, in a general and overarching sense, citizens 'initiatives or citizens' movements are also summarized under the term grassroots movement. In addition, the term is now used metaphorically for any kind of bottom-up approach in politics and society.

character

Grassroots movements typically have grassroots democratic and consensus-oriented structures, as they want to bypass the usual lobbyist or party-political opinion- forming process . The change should be achieved through the committed articulation of citizens' interests in relation to government organizations that are perceived as rigid. The Internet is of great importance for the grassroots organization of interests, as it offers a platform for ideas outside the mainstream , for example in the form of social software or discussion platforms such as those brought into being through social networks (such as Facebook ) .

Ideological-political orientation

The aim of some grassroots initiatives is to build social alternatives to the existing, up to and including the revolutionary claim to bring about fundamental system changes. The focus is on the long-term development of networks as well as on spectacular individual actions that are primarily intended to create publicity. It is not uncommon for one to use the methods of civil disobedience . Some representatives of this direction have given themselves a common roof in the form of a network, which, following the pars-per-toto principle, is also called the grassroots movement. The magazine Graswurzelrevolution , which has been published since 1972, is an important mouthpiece of this movement, which has a grassroots and anarcho-pacifist claim .

Specific orientation

Other grassroots movements reject a comprehensive approach and instead want primarily to do practical work on a specific topic. In this light, for example, private aid organizations or the European protest by software developers against the penetration of the patent system into their field ( software patents ) can be viewed .

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd Drücke : Between desk and street fight. Klemm & Oelschläger, Ulm 1998, ISBN 3-932577-05-1 .