Excerpt from They Can't Represent Us! - Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy by Marina Sitrin, Dario Azzellini
It Is About Democracy
NO NOS REPRESENTAN! NO TO REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY!
Almost every country in the world claims to be democratic. Democracy is used to argue for everything from wars, repression, control, and spying to the right of people to carry weapons, shoot home intruders, evict families, and deforest the land. Democracy, while a seemingly broad term, is generally used with a very specific meaning—generally as a synonym for liberal democracy. But liberal democracy is far from being the only possible form of democracy.
They don’t represent us
Among broad sectors of the world population, the multiple crises that began in 2008 have caused and strengthened the feeling that they have no influence over decisions made regarding their lives, that they are not heard or taken into account in any way by those making the decisions, and that these “representatives” do not act in the people’s interest. “The general feeling is that, here is this whirlwind that now is called crisis just to name it, and then this crisis goes on, making decisions over your life, things about which you have no control at all,”1 explains Ana Méndez from Madrid. “Democracy has lost its initial meaning,” says Fani from Thessaloniki, Greece. “It is said that we have democracy right now in Greece. This is not democracy. We have no real power. We don’t make decisions. So democracy is a concept that has been destroyed to such a degree that, if we’re about to use it again, we should completely reinvent it.”
It is no coincidence that “They don’t represent us” has emerged as a powerful slogan in mobilizations all over the world. We hear it in the US, Italy, Spain, Greece, Brazil, Turkey, Slovenia, and even Russia, where (vy nas dazhe ne predstavlyayete!) means not only “You don’t represent us” but also “You cannot even imagine us.” The slogans are not phrased as rejections of specific political representatives, but as expressions of a general rejection of the logic of representation. The “representation of interests” does not work. It is perceived as undemocratic; people mobilizing do not feel “represented,” and they no longer believe that “representation” by those in power is possible.
Pablo García, a 15-M activist from Madrid who also studied in Thessaloniki, says, “This democracy does not represent us, nor facilitate or help in the expression of citizens, for them to be consulted or taken into account beyond the elections. The system created after the Franco regime only permits us to elect representatives, and they then have the power to make whatever decisions they want during four years. That’s it! There’s no more control by the citizens, only that.”2
In liberal or representative democracy, the “representatives” do not have to comply with what they or their party promised during elections, or what their party program says. Once they are elected, they do whatever they want (or the economic elites want), and do not have to justify themselves to the people who voted for them. There is no accountability for decisions, even not if they do the exact opposite of what they promised while campaigning. Supporters of liberal democracy try to hide these circumstances by saying that the elected representatives should act “according to their conscience” regardless of the stance of their electorate or their party. This not only turns the supposed “representation” into a joke, but obviously also transforms the campaigns into fairytale contests. And, worst of all, until more recently with the new movements, most people in society acknowledge this fact, and might simply shrug and say, Well, what can we do? And so it continues.
Liberal and representative democracy were never meant to be democratic
The logic of representation has always been at the foundation of modern democracy—but not of classical democracy. In liberal democracy, “the economic,” “the political,” and “the social” are constructed as three separate spheres. The economic and social spheres are excluded from democracy. Stanley Moore wrote that, “when exploitation takes the form of exchange, dictatorship tends to take the form of democracy.”3 Today this separation of spheres is simply taken for granted in public discourse. But if we do not accept the whole idea of the autonomy of economy, the difference between those who govern and those who are governed, the autonomy of the political sphere, and so on, the whole edifice simply collapses like a house of cards. The rationale for wielding power over others, and for making decisions against the will and interests of the majority without consulting them, lies in the construction of a separated political sphere that follows its own logic. The separation of spheres is grounded on the idea of representation.4 While abstraction is often important in the construction of collective decisions, representation is simply not possible, since it is based on homogenization and the necessary negation of diversity. The crisis of representation is a crisis of liberal democracy.
French philosopher Jacques Rancière stresses that
representation was never a system invented to compensate for the growth of populations. It is not a form in which democracy has been adapted to modern times and vast spaces. It is, by rights, an oligarchic form, a representation of minorities who are entitled to take charge of public affairs … Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people makes its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy.5
In fact, a look at the “founding fathers” of modern liberal democracy shows that fundamental democratic values, such as participation and popular sovereignty, have never been on its official agenda.6 Liberalism and democracy have been fierce enemies for hundreds of years. It was the exclusion of the social question from democratic decision-making that made the liberals accept democracy and create liberal democracy as the new form of governance of the emerging production model. As Karl Marx noted
The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory on which the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and Orleanists, large landed property and industry, could dwell side by side with equality of rights. It was the unavoidable condition of their common rule, the sole form of state in which their general class interest subjected to itself at the same time both the claims of their particular factions and all the remaining classes of society.7
Nevertheless, the idea of democracy, as Marx argued, is a constant threat to the rule of the bourgeoisie, since it might be used by critics of the existing order against the ruling interests. That is the reason why the bourgeoisie, especially in times of crisis such as we are witnessing now in Greece, Turkey, the US, and elsewhere, tend toward authoritarian rule and the suspension of civil and democratic rules and rights. It is therefore important to take a closer look at the origins of the critique of liberal or parliamentary democracy, and at its potential goals. During the last few years, the crisis of liberal democracy has become so evident that even bourgeois intellectuals cannot deny or ignore it anymore. But their goal in criticizing liberal democracy is to pave the way for authoritarian and less democratic forms of decision-making, for the sake of efficiency.
We are taught that there are certain generally shared assumptions and rights that we have as a fundamental part of liberal democracy—things such as limitations on the government’s ability to restrict citizens’ movements and ideas, on the government’s ability to exercise arbitrary power; the holding of fair and free elections, and respect for civil liberties such as freedom of speech, thought, religion, assembly, and so on. We are taught that these things exist and are grounded in the very nature of this democracy. But it is important to make clear that those civil liberties and rights we do have are not at all an inherent part of liberal democracy. In fact, they were won in long, hard struggles going back to the nineteenth century and earlier, and took effect only after the enforcement of the new model of production. Upon closer examination, one can see that, just as soon as almost all of these “rights” or “liberties” were won, governments set to work trying to dismantle them—from the right to an eight-hour work day to the right to be free from unlawful search and seizure. Volumes have been written about the encroachment on rights in modern democracies, and while many are outraged, and should be, the fact remains that these rights were never a fundamental part of the conception of liberal democracy.
As Beth, an activist in the San Francisco anti-foreclosure mobilization Occupy Homes Bernal put it, “The metaphor of democracy and the story that’s woven around it is I think a very beautiful thing, but it never has been put in effect. It’s really been used as a kind of decoy to keep people’s attention and their fury away from the injustices that happen around democracy.”8
The neoliberal turn: back to the roots of modern liberal democracy
The form of political organization corresponds to the form of economic organization, as Karl Marx wrote in the third volume of Capital. The bourgeois democratic republic is the ideal type of capitalist state for economies that rely primarily on trade in free markets and capitalist commodity-production. Modern liberal democracy as a space of conquest and the extension of rights, always limited by its compatibility with capital, can be considered the political form of the Keynesian national welfare state. Globalization undermined the conditions for the Keynesian national welfare state and for liberal democracy. And neoliberalism undermined those conditions even further, since its attendant financialization and supranational institutions threaten the core of both the nation-state and liberal democracy.
The increasingly deteriorating work conditions under neoliberalism also undermine democracy. Precarization means the generalization of insecurity and fear—and fear is not a good basis for democracy. It reduces the possibilities to speak up, complain, get organized, and express solidarity. Those who are subject to these precarious work relations often also lack energy for democratic participation. At the same time, the ongoing precarization of work, and the fear it inspires even in those not currently subject to it, has had a disciplining effect on workers with supposedly stable jobs.
The increasing transfer of decisions to supranational and international institutions has further deepened the “crisis of representation.” This is due on the one hand to the undemocratic nature of these actors (none of which—the UN, European Union, European Central Bank, IMF, G8, and so on—have been elected), and on the other hand to the fact that the ability to represent decreases with the distance (geographic and scale) from the represented. It was therefore no accident that the precursor movements to the current movements for real democracy—the global justice or anti-globalization movements—came about in the mid-1990s, precisely against the undemocratic nature of these very institutions.
Much has been published on the general incompatibility between democracy and capitalism, especially in the 1970s and 1980s.9 These positions have gained greater popularity in the current global crisis, in the context of nearly three decades of increasingly rapid dismantling of rights and social security mechanisms. Alex Demirović notes that it is difficult to believe that the structural deficiencies we experience “are not systematically connected with the known form of political democracy,” but just contingent phenomena that will be corrected over time.10 A look at the development of liberal democracy since the golden era of Keynesianism confirms this doubt. The fundamental historical contradiction within liberal democracy—the mediation between the rights of capital and the rights of human beings—has definitely shifted to the advantage of capital, and the social achievements won over the last 160 years are being steadily dismantled.
Through the worldwide implementation of neoliberalism since the 1980s and the enshrining of “efficiency” at the core of neoliberal thought, democracy experienced a roll-back to the form it had immediately after World War II in the core countries of liberal democracy. The main theorists of that model, Joseph A. Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 1942) and Karl Mannheim (Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning, 1951), placed their focus on results—on creating efficient bodies of leadership legitimated through elections. As Schumpeter explains, “Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political—legislative and administrative—decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.”11 In order to achieve that, modern liberal democracy concentrated on eliminating any element of direct democracy or participation from “representative” democracy. Even for critics of liberal democracy, it is difficult to be clearer than Schumpeter himself.
First of all, according to the view we have taken, democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms “people” and “rule.” Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them … [by means of] free competition among would-be leaders for the vote of the electorate. Democracy is the rule of the politician … The voters outside of parliament must respect the division of labor between themselves and the politicians they have elected … they must understand that, once they have elected an individual, political action is his business and not theirs.12
In terms of its theoretical definitions, institutional assets, and practices, liberal democracy has little or nothing to do with what is usually understood as democracy. One might be surprised how simplified even many academic definitions of liberal democracy are. Mainstream political science has eliminated one of the central pillars of the original idea of democracy: people’s sovereignty. “Popular sovereignty—the idea that a government should do what most citizens want it to do—is the oldest and most literal definition of democracy, although not necessarily the best one. Contemporary theorists now consider popular sovereignty neither sufficient nor strictly necessary for democracy.”13
Giovanni Sartori, also considered one of the main modern theorists of liberal democracy, claims that democratic stability and quality increase as the level of competition between parties, and therefore the extent of their ideological differences declines.14 The idea that fewer choices provide a higher quality of democracy needs little in the way of explanation to show how absurd it is. And yet, it is one of the main characteristics of the reigning liberal democracies—a characteristic that is increasingly being rejected worldwide. In the US, for example, many people came into the Occupy movement having worked for “Hope and Change” with the Obama campaign, only then to realize that in fact there was no real difference between the two parties in policy terms. Similarly, the largest non-parliamentary protest movements in Europe and Latin America under representative democracy took place while broad government coalitions were in power, or parties sharing the same politics alternated in office.
How liberal democracy can see political parties as a central pillar of democracy is something of a mystery. Belarusian political scientist Moisey Ostrogorsky (1854–1921), who lived and worked in Paris, the US, Great Britain, and Russia, and is considered to have founded the sociology of political parties after decades of comparative party-system analysis, came to the conclusion that democratic parties carry an almost pathological tendency to transform into bureaucratic and oligarchic organizations. The concept of “party democracy” thus becomes an oxymoron. As Rancière notes,
what we call democracy is a statist and governmental functioning that is exactly the contrary: eternally elected members holding concurrent or alternating municipal, regional, legislative, and/or ministerial functions and whose essential link to the people is that of the representation of regional interests; governments which make laws themselves; representatives of the people that largely come from one administrative school; ministers or their collaborators who are also given posts in public or semipublic companies; fraudulent financing of parties through public works contracts; business-people who invest colossal sums in trying to win electoral mandates; owners of private media empires that use their public functions to monopolize the empire of the public media. In a word: the monopolizing of la chose publique by a solid alliance of State oligarchy and economic oligarchy.15
In most liberal democracies the main parties have usually alternated in power or shared power for half a century or more (even if they have undergone a few name changes, as in Italy), providing some kind of “political stability,” albeit at the expense of democratic content. While the creation of a certain social consensus necessary to sustain the system has been the main pillar of stability in liberal democracies, we should not forget that selective as well as massive repression, structural violence, and wars have always been recourses of liberal democracies.
In most countries, there is little or no difference between the political positions and practices of the main parties. Since all governments respond increasingly to the dictates of economic actors, most parties in most countries agree on all fundamentals. Tariq Ali fittingly named this the “extreme center.” Anestis, from Athens, tells us that the center-right and center-left parties of Greece, along with the fascists, are called the “united party of the markets.” Amador Fernández Savater, a 15-M activist from Madrid, describes the common perception of party politics in Spain as follows:
It’s not any more just a truth for the more radical political groups or leftists … politics of politicians are increasingly a simple management oriented to the necessities of the global economy.
Management, not politics, not decision, nor direction, but just a management of a power that surpasses, and overpasses the political power: that of the market—the financial market first of all. A widespread perception is: we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a “market’s dictatorship,” although that dictatorship still respects some liberal rights and liberties. Power is concentrated in political and economic elites, but not as a dictatorial power, but rather one that allows some liberties that are often put forward and promoted spite of that power.16
PRACTICING NEW FORMS OF DEMOCRACY
The most obvious shared characteristic of the various popular mobilizations around the globe in recent years is their deeply egalitarian and democratic character. But there is no single model of people’s democracy that can be applied indiscriminately in the various contexts of mobilization as a counter to liberal democracy. The movements do not have a detailed proposal to institutionalize. And in fact, as Amador from Madrid comments in relation to the 15-M, neither do they want one:
What does the movement propose? That’s unclear. We do not know exactly what “Real Democracy Now!” means. Everyone has their own version of what “Real Democracy Now!” means. That opens a space for a lot of people. A lot of people share a discomfort regarding the idea that what we have is supposed to be democracy. But if we start asking ourselves what a “Real Democracy” would look like, it is not very clear.
Mariana, from Rio de Janeiro, tells us: “There is a crisis of representation. Some sectors discuss participatory democracy. People talk about a lot of different things. It is very pluralistic.”19 The experiences are similar around the world, as a statement by Debbie from the Solidarity Health Clinic in Thessaloniki explains:
We are very used to delegating responsibility to somebody else and giving them the power to make decisions over what is happening. We don’t think of that as democratic. We don’t want to have representatives, we want to represent ourselves. Of course, this raises several problems … how do you structure or organize decision-making? As a process of decision-making it’s much more democratic and much more useful to have all voices heard. It is interesting that when people gather they automatically, instinctively adhere to the principles of direct democracy. This is because, essentially, when something is very important to you, you want to make the decision for yourself and not have somebody else decide for you.
Vassilis, from Athens, says, “They cannot represent us anymore. It’s impossible. So it’s like recuperating a factory, the factory here is democracy. It’s like the bosses left the factory and you have to make the factory work because you have to make decisions, because you have to be recognized, you have needs and want to cover them, you have desires.”20 All over the world people are finding one another and together engaging in building democratic processes, and under many different names. “I don’t know what this process should be called,” says Sandy from OWS, “it’s just like, my voice is heard, everyone’s voice is heard, and we come together and we decide what to do with that. I don’t even know what that actually is termed. It just is something that’s powerful. If it’s direct democracy, localized democracy, or localized direct democracy, I’m not really sure.”21
Radical, direct, participatory, or real democracy?
Although the idea of direct, radical, participatory democracy (or whatever one wants to call these forms of non-representative democracy) is much older than many other widely theorized concepts, it is generally not linked to prominent theorists, at least nowhere near as intimately as liberal democracy. Some support for complete democracy can be found from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Karl Marx,22 and Rosa Luxemburg. But the topic of unlimited democracy has generally been avoided by theorists. This is certainly one of the reasons why we do not find extensive academic debates or widely discussed and shared models of a form of democracy other than liberal democracy.
Several scholars have theorized ideas and concepts using the term “radical democracy.” German critical theorist Alex Demirović classifies modern conceptions of radical democracy as deliberative (Habermas, Benhabib, Bohman), associative (Hirst, Cohen, Rogers), civil society–based (Arago/Cohen, Frankenberg, Rödel), hegemonic (Laclau, Mouffe), or “coming democracy” (Derrida).23 A closer look at the various theoretical approaches shows that their concepts are either not very radical or still so abstract that they are not helpful in the construction of an alternative. Despite their names, the first three categories are not radical at all, and “view democratic institutions as a long-term revolution.”24 Derrida describes democracy as “coming,” placing the normative dimension of its promise at the center; he considers its open character to be constitutive of democracy itself.25 But he refuses to define democracy because, he claims, any definition would impose a meaning.26 So the basic problem with most theories of radical democracy starts to become clear: “the lack of consideration of concrete day-to-day experiences and the failure to connect with common practices.”27
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are among the internationally better-known theoreticians of radical democracy.28 Laclau and Mouffe argue for a radical and pluralistic democracy. The former term refers to the radicalization of the democratic revolution by expanding political spaces through the extension of the ideals of liberty and equality to more of the social spaces where relations of domination exist.29 They see their poststructuralist approach as a non-economistic, post-Marxist extension and an updating of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. At the same time, they view democracy as perpetually incomplete: “Incompleteness and preliminarity are part of the essence of democracy.”30 The inclusion of many traditional socialist assumptions within the normative orientation of liberal democracy (human rights, equality, and so on) created a new point of departure for left criticism, which largely transformed from a plea to introduce democratic principles into a plea to deepen them.31 Beyond the frequently expressed critique that Mouffe and Laclau omit the questions of the democratization of property and the administration of means of production, and that their concept of considering all voices democratically does not distinguish between people defending their privileges and people fighting for equality, Mouffe and Laclau’s radical democracy lacks concrete proposals for how to deepen democracy, make democratic decisions, and build a radical-democratic society.
In light of the possibility of plebiscites and referenda that has been introduced into the constitutions of various Latin American countries over the past two decades, a number of scholars have dealt with alleged direct democracy in the region.32 Their analyses generally refer exclusively to elections and referenda beyond the basic structure of liberal democracies—in other words, beyond the election of representatives. From that perspective, direct democracy only complements representative democracy, and is not a possible form of organizing unto itself.
Something similar happens with the concept of participation, which has had a wide range of interpretations. It may be linked to representation, but it arises from a principle that is diametrically opposed: actions that anyone can perform and are not delegated combine in political participation. Anyone can participate in assemblies, elections, demonstrations, and so on, but the logic of the principle indicates that not just anyone can represent others politically. The issue becomes controversial when we try to define the limits of participation, and in particular the limits of direct political participation in decision-making. From a liberal-democratic perspective, there is no place for civic, individual, or collective participation in the (separately constructed) political sphere; these are intentionally confined to the “civil society sphere,” and reduced to the periodic act of electing representatives so as not to hinder the efficiency of the democratic processes, and so that democracy is not overloaded with social demands that might endanger the pride of place granted to the accumulation of capital, as against the social distribution of wealth and labor.33
During the 1960s and 1970s, concepts of political participation were given greater social importance in liberal democracies and in the social sciences.34 This did not happen because liberal-democratic regimes or academia suddenly recognized that liberal democracy excludes popular participation. Participation became a concern of governments and states because huge movements were questioning their legitimacy and demanding profound changes. Participatory mechanisms that were introduced thus never questioned the liberal-democratic model or the logic of representation (they never questioned the separation of spheres—the ascription of “politics” to a “political sphere” separate from the “social sphere”), but were seen as attachments to them, aimed at gaining greater legitimacy for representative politics. Participatory mechanisms were mostly situated within the framework of electoral politics,35 regarding the activities that accompany elections or electoral campaigns, individual and personal dialogue with political representatives, or organizing with others to influence government action.36 In some liberal democracies the possibility of a popular referendum has been introduced, usually either without any obligation on governments to respect the result or imposing formidable obstacles to achieving meaningful participation in the referendum. A minimum participation rate of 50 percent of the electorate has often been established as a condition for recognition of the referendum result, while no such condition applies to any election of political representatives.
While outside the mainstream debate, either in scholarship or in society, a number of social movements—beginning in the late 1950s, and in some cases still in existence— both practice more alternative and participatory forms of democracy and reflect upon that practice. In the US these forms are referred to as participatory democracy.37 While it is not peculiar to the US—for example, Latin American popular movements over the past few decades, especially those based in indigenous regions and movements, have also practiced alternative and participatory forms of democracy—we focus here on the US case. Many of these scholars themselves emerged from the feminist, civil rights, anti-war, and anti-nuclear movements. Most of the best-known writers on the practice of participatory democracy during this period were women, while the theorists of liberal democracy have tended to be men. Beginning with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, attempts were made to create a more participatory atmosphere both in decision-making and in day-to-day relationships. For example, the idea of beloved community emerged in the SNCC as a way of talking about the importance of participation based in affect and trust. The beloved community was intended to prefigure the society being fought for, one without hierarchy or difference based on race, and organized using radical forms of participatory democracy. The anti-war movement, and particularly Students for a Democratic Society, also spoke a great deal about the need for participatory democracy—though whether it in fact took place within the movement is a different question. It was from there that the radical feminist movement in the US emerged. It is this movement that has most often been credited with experimenting with forms of radical and direct democracy, which in turn had an affinity with forms and practices of the anti-nuke movement, known especially on the west coast of the US for its direct-democratic structure and mass-consensus decision-making.
While there are numerous books and articles describing the forms of organizing within movements, including portrayals of participatory and direct democracy, these are not works specifically studying democracy, but rather addressing movements that use other democratic forms. Francesca Polletta is an exception to this, though even though she pays some specific attention to participatory democracy as a form itself, as in her book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (2002), it is still a book tracing the history and uses of participatory democracy, not an exploration of its meanings.38
Since the 1980s, the hegemonic discourse has usurped the concept of participation and used it in a neoliberal bid to outsource the state’s collective responsibilities to individual citizens and strengthen the power of markets. But it is definitely not “participation” if you have to choose between different private health insurance companies because the public health system has been dismantled, or if parents have to take over various tasks in schools or neighborhoods because the state does not perform them anymore. The decentralization of services to a local level without the necessary financial resources has also been presented by neoliberal politics as “local participation.” It is obviously neither participatory nor democratic if, for example, social services are handed over to communities while the resources to finance them are cut to a level that no longer guarantees a fundamental level of quality.
Participation as understood and practiced by movements all over the world does not mean participation in a system that someone else established and which is regulated by someone else, but participation in defining the goals and rules. The goal is democracy, not integration (which means inclusion into something existing). As the Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel puts it, “Excluded persons should not be included (which would be like introducing the Other into the Same) in the old system. Rather they should participate as equals in a new institutional moment (the new political order). The goal is not inclusion but transformation.”39
Ayelen, from Madrid, comments that collective thinking “is not that everybody is thinking different things and we just join it all together. It must be something built together from the start, something that previously did not exist which has to be created. It doesn’t consist in convincing, but building.”40 This description could easily have emerged from many of the other square movements around the world.
A common element in many processes of liberation and democratization in the Global South is participation by diverse social actors in the decision-making processes that make change possible,41 and popular participation cannot be reduced to certain sectors or predetermined structures. “The scorched-earth policy that neoliberalism brought about generated ‘integrated social antibodies’ in such a way that the responses to it have occurred in every field and regarding various aspects (economics, politics, normativity and identity, and culture). The main characteristic of the political changes in Latin America is related to that renewed participation.”42 As C. Douglas Lummis notes, “ ‘Democracy’ was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back, to restore to it its radical power. Democracy is not everything, but something.”43
For many movement participants in Europe, the occupied squares resembled the Greek agora—literally “gathering place” or “assembly”—the central place of ancient Athens, the center of urban life, where the citizens’ assemblies were held.44 The Agora in Athens is considered the birthplace of democracy.45 For Ayelen, from Madrid, “Sol turned into an agora. I understood that day and could imagine what a Greek agora was like.”
Since the term and concept “democracy” comes from ancient Athens, and since even liberal democracies, especially in Europe, insist on presenting themselves in a democratic philosophical tradition going back to ancient Greece, it is worth taking a closer look at the Athenian democracy. Before looking at some of the central aspects of Athenian democracy however, it is important to make some general clarifications. Ancient Greece, as well as the following history of democracy, clearly demonstrates the absurdity of the idea that democracy is brought by governments or states. In Athens, “democracy” had to be imposed by the masses against fierce resistance from noble and rich families. Moreover, even if Athenian democracy is the best documented among the ancient Greek democracies, the inconvenient fact remains that most of what we know about Athenian democracy today is based on Aristotle and Plato, who both rejected democracy in favor of an elitist ideology.46 The people developing and practicing democracy in Athens, as far is known, did not theorize it. And, for reasons that are generally apparent, we do not propose Athenian democracy is a model to follow. It included only the native, white, male citizens of Athens. The majority of the population—women, freed slaves, slaves, and “metics” (foreigners residing in the city doing business), making up some 80 percent of the inhabitants—were excluded from democratic participation of any kind, since they were not considered citizens.47 All in all, some 43,000 men out of approximately 315,000 inhabitants were allowed to participate in the citizens’ assembly. The number of men assisting at the monthly assemblies is estimated at 6,000.48
Nevertheless, it is worth examining some of the basic concepts of Athenian democracy.49 To begin with, ancient democracy explicitly rejected the principle of representation. All citizens could attend the highest political body, the assembly, held once a month (the year had ten months). The principle of representation and the idea that elected representatives could make decisions—concepts at the heart of liberal democracy—were considered incompatible with the idea of democracy, since they would only disconnect politicians from common citizens, nourishing corruption and patronage networks. Since representation did not exist, and the citizens’ assembly was the highest authority, there was also no such thing as a government in the liberal-democratic sense. Nor did anything like parties exist, which in representative democracies came to assume the function of structuring representation through packages of interests and opinions. In ancient Athens, the process of structuring interests and opinions took place in the Assembly around speakers defending different positions. These people, with better communication skills, were called “demagogues”—a term that did not then carry any negative charge, but came to acquire a pejorative character in the writings of Aristotle and Plato because of their rejection of democracy.
The Citizens’ Assembly enjoyed complete sovereignty. It would only follow its own rules, decided by itself, and it had neither a constitution nor laws that could override the political process—nor did it create a separate professional justice system. Justice was managed by the Assembly itself. Jurors chosen by lottery from among the participants of the Citizens’ Assembly functioned as judges. To avoid corruption, Athens had a complex scheme for assigning jurors to cases. No public prosecutors or lawyers existed. The parties would present their case on their own, though they could ask for support, and the “people,” in the form of a popular jury, would decide how to handle the case.
Democracy in ancient Greece meant direct democracy, and nothing else. The citizens gathering for the Assembly decided on laws, institutional employees, military leaders, war and peace, religious questions, and everything else they chose to bring within their authority. The most important questions were usually treated in the first assemblies of the year, after which every citizen had the opportunity to suggest their own issues to the assembly. Obviously, an assembly of such magnitude had to be prepared, which was managed by the Council of 500. It would prepare the sessions of the assembly, set up an agenda proposal, and draft the bills to be discussed by the assembly. The members of the Council of 500 were selected by lot, served a maximum of two one-year terms, and were subordinated to the Citizens’ Assembly. Every proposal issued by the Council of 500 had to be ratified by the Citizens’ Assembly, which had the power to dismiss anything presented by the Council of 500. Apart from military leaders—whose functions were reduced to leading troops in wars, while decisions on troops and military objectives were taken by the Assembly—some financial experts, and the head of the water system, which were elected by the Citizens’ Assembly, all public officers were chosen by lottery. This was a corollary of democratic principle that Athenians clung to so firmly: since democracy was the rule of the people (citizens, in this case), every citizen was able to fulfill the tasks assigned in the interest of society.
The similarities between many principles of ancient Athenian democracy and the democratic practices of the new global movements are evident. We are not arguing that this is a consequence of the movements’ knowledge of Athenian democracy. We can find direct-democratic and egalitarian practices and principles throughout history in various geographic and cultural settings, and they do not depend on any knowledge of previous democratic practices or councils. These practices and principles are the expression of a search for a truly democratic society of equals. Humans are social beings who evolve collectively through cooperation. Nevertheless, as Walter Benjamin emphasizes, historical consciousness of the role of past generations is a crucial element in building emancipatory paths.
We have encountered very little in the way of direct references to the practices of the Assemblies in ancient Greece, aside from those to the agora and the loose grounding of the idea of direct democracy. But there is one exception to this: Greece. On several occasions, people did refer to specific aspects of the Assemblies in Athens, used some of the ancient Greek words for things like direct democracy, and even sometimes borrowed their tactics. For example, when there were thousands of people in Syntagma Square who all wanted to speak, and it would have been impossible to hold an assembly with so many on the speaker’s list, the facilitators proposed using a lottery system, which was met with broad support. It was subsequently one of the reasons many decided to organize in the neighborhoods, so that more could speak and for longer periods of time; but the fact remains that ancient Greece exerted a powerful hold on the imaginations of many in the Square.
Beyond the example of ancient democracy in Athens, many more references can be found to historical experiences in the movements. In many cases these historical references became stronger over time. In Spain, at the beginning of the 15-M movement, many participants and activists took their distance from all historic experiences, insisting on the uniqueness of the 15-M. This was true even though, for external observers, the strong link to the Spanish revolution of 1936–39 seemed more than obvious, and the activists with long political histories would share the ideals of the Spanish revolution. With time, more and more Republican flags of the Second Spanish Republic, 1931–39—which was overthrown by the fascists—appeared on demonstrations, and at the same time the reference was so powerful that the ruling right-wing party, the Partido Popular, asked the social-democratic PSOE to ban their party members from displaying the Republican flag.
Tradition and myth have a persistent function in Latin American popular struggles.50 Thus, throughout the centuries, embodiments of past struggles against the established order have been fashioned into banners for current struggles.51 This is not a matter of nostalgia or folklore, because it requires in each case an adaptation to the present, but more like a “secret rendezvous between past generations and our own.”52 Moreover, every such adaptation “contributes to a collective, historically grounded composition of the utopia which thus consists of superimposed layers and strata.”53
Latin America also has a long tradition of practices of direct democracy, self-government, and collective organization, with which contemporary debates and practices in the region reconnect. Various degrees and models of direct democracy, or even of some sort of communal egalitarian socialism, can be found in historical, popular, indigenous, and African-American experiences throughout Latin American history, as well as traditional forms of indigenous collectivism and communitarianism. This can be seen in the historical experiences of the Maroons, former African-American slaves who escaped to remote regions and built self-administered communities, as well as settlements called Cumbes in Venezuela and Palenques or Quilombos in various Latin American countries. In some countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Colombia, for example—the practices of self-organization, self-administration, and direct democracy are rooted especially in indigenous communities.
Current movement democratic practices
The new global movements continue to experiment with a wide range of mechanisms, trying to build a democratic process in which everyone can participate in decision-making. We witnessed democratic mass assemblies emerging all over the world, from the US to Spain, and most recently in Turkey and Brazil. As many participants in movements all over the world noted, the assembly model developed intuitively. Marianna, from Athens, told us, “The assembly is something many of us knew from the university. It’s something that we do, something close to us—even with all its problems. So it came up naturally: we discuss now and decide what we want to do.”54 Gülsah Pilpil, an activist in Istanbul’s Gezi Park movement reflected that, “Since Gezi Park was evicted, people gather in other parks to talk, share and to produce new ideas. In the universities, forums and assemblies have been set up by academics, students, and workers.”55 And Marianna Bruce wrote to us from Rio de Janeiro, “Here in the eastern part of the city we do popular youth assemblies in the plazas.”56 And, as Amador from Madrid notes, “Democracy will start to include something like this, an open space for everyone, not a privatized space for those who have economic or political power, and certainly not a privatized space for professional politicians or activists, but a space open to everyone. Democracy would be to ensure that that space stays constantly open to everyone.”57
In the plazas, people have adopted and developed numerous mechanisms and practices to ensure broad and vibrant democratic participation. The examples we have encountered include the famous hand signals, which have spread throughout the world’s various movements. They help enormously to capture tendencies of opinion during debates involving huge numbers of people. The sign for liking or not liking something, often called “twinkling” or “jazz hands,” is based on the sign in American Sign Language for applause. Assemblies have also introduced various mechanisms to ensure that discussions are not dominated by individuals, and to encourage better gender, race, or other identity equality in participation, such as alternating speakers based on their self-identification, or asking people quite specifically to wait to speak—to “step back” in Occupy language. Facilitators are often empowered to shuffle the “stack”—the list of those who are in line to speak—so as to balance the list. The handling of disruptive behavior, and other mechanisms to achieve more open participation—avoiding the “tyranny of the eccentric,” as Gopal from Occupy Farms in Berkeley refers to it—is one of the larger challenges movements have faced, and each has dealt with it differently. In Berkeley, speaking was governed by predetermined agreements on active participation. In Spain, many of the squares included teams of people—often called “peace makers,” from the group “Respect”—who went directly to the disruptive individuals, and tried to support them without letting them dominate the space. None of the movements we encountered made decisions by simple majority; rather, they aimed for some sort of consensus. This was defined in different ways from one location to another. Madrid used a model of absolute consensus, and New York struggled with a consensus-minus-one rule, meaning one person could block and a consensus could still be reached. New York did also have a fall back plan of a vote needing 90 percent to pass, but this was so unpopular it was only used in one general assembly. As far as the meaning of consensus, many people who observed the process in the squares assumed that democracy was a series of hand signals, or that decisions were only ever made with a 100 percent consensus. This was not true: each location in these movements, as with similar preceding movements, decided in their specific location what form of direct decision-making worked best for them. In general principle, this kind of consensus is outlined clearly by Rafael, from Caracas: “Consensual democracy, not the majority rule. Not the type of democracy that smothers, where there is a loser and a winner, but a consensual democracy that enables us all to see ourselves in the decisions that are made.”58 Amador, from Madrid, provides an example of two different models adopted in Sol, in Madrid:
In the beginning, organization in Sol had a lot in common with the chain model, which means several collective assemblies function like a chain and are advancing all together, when all have achieved consensus. That model has its virtues, but it is very slow. [There is] another model: network, based on connection and disconnection, and the ability of some part of the people to create something without waiting for the consensus of the rest. We do this and don’t pretend to represent. Many decisions were taken this way toward the end: blocking foreclosures or occupying a hotel, or rallies, including the one held on June 27. Many times a singular autonomous node said we are going to do this, and then suddenly if that node’s proposal allied with the common spirit, everyone supported it. Consensus doesn’t mean everyone must vote and approve what you want to do, but that we share the general sense of what [we] are doing.
The chain model has that beauty of togetherness. But with the chain model the problem is that the kinds of lives we lead are complex, and therefore it is difficult to spend six hours in an assembly meeting and then having drinks, partying—you almost have to put your real life in parentheses. It was a miracle that scenario occurred for three weeks, but people have now returned to their normal lives … The political forms that we have are not connecting well with people’s ways of living. You have to become an activist to do politics. That way spaces turn into “activist spaces” and the 99 percent is lost.
The network model is more connected to the reality we live. It’s flexible but at the same time it is pretty fragile. It does not require you to participate in seventeen meetings every week—you can connect, disconnect, come and go, contribute, while a nucleus exists. That’s what happened at Sol.
One feature that all historic and contemporary experiences have in common is that the starting point for participation and democracy is rooted in the local. That is not surprising, as Douglas Lummis states: “Democracy generally depends on localism: the local areas are where the people live. Democracy means not putting power any place other than where the people are.”59 This can be seen in the movements in terms of how they have related internally, with a focus on horizontal relationships, as well as in the shifts from organizing in the large central squares and plazas to the move to the neighborhoods. This is reflected by Anestis, along with many others:
People thought that this is a natural way to organize if I want to do something for my neighborhood. For example, Kesariani was controlled by the Communist Party for many years. The party told people all you have to do is elect our mayor, our representatives, and we will support you, and support you against the central state. But over the last ten or fifteen years people experienced that this did not happen. So a lot of people in the neighborhood thought it is better to have a direct relationship between us, and to self-organize. They know that the model of representative democracy in regions is ineffective.60