Occupy Wall Street as a fight for "real democracy"
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
10 October 2011
Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many
people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic
injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political
grievances and aspirations.
As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the
country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and
economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the
protest against the lack---or failure---of political representation.
It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or
that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether
the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This
protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic
constituent process.
The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we
situate it alongside the other "encampments" of the past year. Together, they
form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are
explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central
squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's
Tahrir Square earlier last spring.
To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel
events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the
occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for
economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of
course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather
each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into
their own situation.
* * *
In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the
protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was
obvious. The demand that "Mubarak must go" proved powerful enough to encompass
all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid's Puerta del Sol and
Barcelona's Pla�a Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more
complex.
The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic
complaints---regarding debt, housing, and education, among others---but their
"indignation," which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining
affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing
these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current
representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans,
"Democracia real ya," or "Real democracy now."
Occupy Wall Street should be understood, then, as a further development or
permutation of these political demands. One obvious and clear message of the
protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way
represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the
country (or the world).
* * *
A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the
politicians and political parties charged with representing the people's
interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such
a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not
supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis---that is, the entirety of
social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become
subservient to economic and financial interests.
By insisting on the political nature of the Occupy Wall Street protests we do
not mean to cast them merely in terms of the quarrels between Republicans and
Democrats, or the fortunes of the Obama administration. If the movement does
continue and grow, of course, it may force the White House or Congress to take
new action, and it may even become a significant point of contention during the
next presidential election cycle. But the Obama and the George W. Bush
administrations are both authors of the bank bailouts; the lack of
representation highlighted by the protests applies to both parties. In this
context, the Spanish call for "real democracy now" sounds both urgent and
challenging.
If together these different protest encampments---from Cairo and Tel Aviv to
Athens, Madison, Madrid, and now New York---express a dissatisfaction with the
existing structures of political representation, then what do they offer as an
alternative? What is the "real democracy" they propose?
* * *
The clearest clues lie in the internal organization of the movements themselves
- specifically, the way the encampments experiment with new democratic
practices. These movements have all developed according to what we call a
"multitude form" and are characterized by frequent assemblies and participatory
decision-making structures. (And it is worth recognizing in this regard that
Occupy Wall Street and many of these other demonstrations also have deep roots
in the globalization protest movements that stretched at least from Seattle in
1999 to Genoa in 2001.)
Much has been made of the way social media such as Facebook and Twitter have
been employed in these encampments. Such network instruments do not create the
movements, of course, but they are convenient tools, because they correspond in
some sense to the horizontal network structure and democratic experiments of
the movements themselves. Twitter, in other words, is useful not only for
announcing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific
decision in real time.
Do not wait for the encampments, then, to develop leaders or political
representatives. No Martin Luther King, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of
Wall Street and beyond. For better or worse---and we are certainly among those
who find this a promising development---this emerging cycle of movements will
express itself through horizontal participatory structures, without
representatives. Such small-scale experiments in democratic organizing would
have to be developed much further, of course, before they could articulate
effective models for a social alternative, but they are already powerfully
expressing the aspiration for a "real democracy."
* * *
Confronting the crisis and seeing clearly the way it is being managed by the
current political system, young people populating the various encampments are,
with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question: If
democracy---that is, the democracy we have been given---is staggering under the
blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests
of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of
democracy obsolete?
If the forces of wealth and finance have come to dominate supposedly democratic
constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution, is it not possible and even
necessary today to propose and construct new constitutional figures that can
open avenues to again take up the project of the pursuit of collective
happiness? With such reasoning and such demands, which were already very alive
in the Mediterranean and European encampments, the protests spreading from Wall
Street across the United States pose the need for a new democratic constituent
process.
