They Can't Represent Us!

Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

Marina Sitrin, Dario Azzellini

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781680971
• eBook ISBN: 9781781685426
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda-to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.

Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is both one of the most expansive portraits of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

CHAPTER ONE

Grounding the “New” Globally

Walter Benjamin wrote of memory and history as a “secret rendezvous between past generations and our own.”¹ The secret is not something known but not told; rather, it is a reflection of its newness to us, as lived experience. Our history and memory are “secrets” kept from us. Many of the “new” practices we describe in these pages in fact have long histories, especially in Latin America. This does not mean that they copied Latin American movements, only that their needs and desires are similar. We see the new global movements since 2010 as a second wave of anti-representational movements, following the first wave of Latin American movements of the 1990s and early 2000s.

We can see this “secret rendezvous” in many of the concepts and terms the movements use to describe themselves. These include: territory, assembly, rupture, popular power, horizontalism, autogestión (“self-administration”), and protagonism. Examples of each term may be drawn from various Latin American communities of struggle, from the spreading of horizontalidad with the popular rebellion in Argentina, and the concept of “territory” having currency in Bolivia and Mexico, to the construction of “popular power” in the Consejos Comunales in Venezuela, and the vision of interconnected human diversity articulated in the call for “one world in which many worlds fit” by the indigenous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.

This linguistic rediscovery is a part of the process of the people finding their own voices in the new usages of direct democracy. As people recuperate the voices they did not have under representational forms of democracy, they also rediscover themselves. The movements recognize this new agency and protagonism, and name it. This claim to voice and language is part of the claim to real democracy. Today’s movements are finding or creating places where the new meets the old, offering spaces of encuentro—encounter and meeting—where new and emerging social relationships mix creatively with many hundreds, if not thousands, of years of collective experimentation with the various forms of relating, rebellion, and struggle.

RUPTURE

Imagine this scene. Families sitting at home before their television sets, on an evening that began the way so many others had: what to watch, what to make for dinner, the regular nightly questions. Then a TV newscaster appears on every channel and announces that, from that moment on, all bank accounts are frozen. The economic crisis has fully arrived. People sit in silence, staring at the TV. They wait. Suddenly, outside the window: tac!—tac tac!—tac tac tac! Families run to their windows and balconies. The sound comes from people banging spoons and spatulas on pans—the sound of the cacerolazo.² The sound becomes a wave, and the wave begins to flood the streets.

The government does not know what to do. It declares a state of emergency in the morning, falling back on what has always been done: law and order. But the people break with the past, no longer staying at home in fear but filling the streets with even more bodies and sounds. The tac tac tac turns into a song—one of both rejection and affirmation. ¡Que se vayan todos! (“They all must go!”). It is a rupture with obedience, with not being together, with not knowing one another. It is a rupture that cracks open history, whereupon vast new histories are created.

A rupture is a break that can come from many places, always shifting both the ways people organize, including power relationships, and the ways people see things. Sometimes the detonator is external, like an earthquake or economic collapse, which can inspire thousands, even hundreds of thousands, to come together and help one another—especially when formal institutions of power also collapse. At other times, the rupture is facilitated by movements, such as the Zapatistas or Occupy. Whichever is the case, people look to one another and begin to try and find solutions together, often doing so in ways that are more effective and definitely more empowering—affective—than if the rupture had come from an external source.

In the movements that we describe, which arose in 2010 and 2011, rupture came upon us seemingly as a surprise, though in many places around the world there was some organization in advance. This included the New York City General Assembly organizing throughout the summer in response to the Adbusters call, and ¡Democracia real ya! in Spain meeting and gathering others for the first assemblies, before the occupation of Puerta del Sol—yet not imagining that there would be such a lasting and massive occupation. Many movement participants around the world in 2012 used the same language to describe what took place with the Plaza and Park occupations—the same word, even, translated everywhere as “rupture.” From ruptura in Spanish (literally “rupture”) to kefaya (“enough”) in Arabic.

HORIZONTALIDAD, HORIZONTALISM, HORIZONTAL

A bonfire is burning at the intersection of Corrientes and Federico Lacroze in the city of Buenos Aires. More than one hundred people of all ages are gathered around it, some still in work clothes, others in housecoats, T-shirts, and flip-flops. The noise of the city hums in the background, but around the bonfire it is quiet.

An older woman is discussing how to organize the upcoming weeks’ free medical service, which will be offered by a doctor from another neighborhood assembly. Where will the medical services take place, and how will they get the necessary supplies? The health of the neighborhood children is at stake.

People take turns speaking. Some talk over others, and the facilitator is often ignored. Yet all manage to speak and to be heard. This is the quiet insurgent noise of horizontalidad. Eventually the group reaches a consensus and the quiet is overtaken with song—the same song sung on the first days of the popular rebellion. Oh, que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo (they all must go, not one should remain). This is horizontalidad in Argentina.

Participating in any of the assemblies taking place throughout the world generally involves standing or sitting in a circle, with a handful of facilitators, and speaking and listening in turn, observing general guidelines and principles of unity, and then discussing whatever issue has been raised until a consensus is reached. If one were to ask a participant about this process, they would most likely explain the need to listen to one another, feeling that in society they are excluded from meaningful participation, and perhaps they might use the language of direct or participatory democracy. In these conversations, some version of the horizontal often will arise, whether as the description or desired goal.

Horizontalidad, horizontality, and horizontalism are words that encapsulate the ideas upon which many of the social relationships in the new global movements are grounded. The idea that they express is based on affective and trust-based politics. It is a dynamic social relationship that represents a break with the logic of representation and vertical ways of organizing. This does not mean that structures do not emerge, as they do with mass assemblies and autonomous governance, but the structures that emerge are non-representational and non-hierarchical. (Spokescouncils, the Zapatista form of self-governance, and the communes in Venezuela are three examples of this.) But because social relationships are still deeply marked by capitalism and hierarchy—especially in terms of how people relate to one another over economic resources, gender, race, and access to information—horizontalidad has to be understood as an open-ended social process, a positive act of seeking, rather than a final end. It would be an illusion to think that a “happy island of horizontalism” could be created in the middle of the sea of capitalism.

The word horizontalidad was first heard in December 2001, in the days after the popular rebellion in Argentina. No one recalls where it came from or who might have used it first. It was a new word, and emerged from a new practice of people coming together and solving their problems without anyone being in charge or asserting power over one another. Significantly, the experience of horizontalidad has remained prevalent among the middle classes organized into neighborhood assemblies, the unemployed organizing in neighborhoods, and workers taking over their workplaces. Horizontalidad, with its rejection of hierarchy and political parties, became the norm. In 2012, the assumption that people often began with in organizing is that any new movement or struggle will be horizontal. This can be seen today in the hundreds of assemblies up and down the Andes fighting against international mining companies, and the thousands of bachilleratos—alternative high school diploma programs organized by former assembly participants, housed in recuperated workplaces.

But this process is not without challenges, as new movements aspiring to horizontal forms of organization have begun to discover. In Spain, Greece, the UK, and the United States, participants have noted that simply naming the practice is not enough to conjure the behavior; treating it as an identity—“I am horizontal” or “We are horizontal”—obfuscates the fact that horizontalidad is only made real in practice, and that any competition that develops between groups over who is more horizontal necessarily reproduces a hierarchical structure. But this is part of the learning process—we make the road by walking.

PODER POPULAR—POPULAR POWER

Sala de Batalla Alicia Benítez is the community center of the Eje de MACA commune under construction in the Greater Caracas area. The neighborhood is Petare, which is one of Latin America’s largest poor neighborhoods, and thirty communities organized in communal councils have united to create a commune; all decide from below, in their local assemblies, what to do in their neighborhoods. The barrios—the informal and marginalized neighborhoods—make up about 70 percent of Caracas. Infrastructure in the barrios is precarious; they lack basic services, there is little to no public space, and most of the dwellings are built into the hillside and connected to one another through unevenly built narrow staircases and walkways.

A government employee has arrived, offering to build a place to store and sell food at far below market price by eliminating intermediaries and speculation.

“Look,” says Petare resident Pablo, “one thing has to be clear, we decided in the community that we will administer this place.”³

Yusmeli also chimes in. “We also have to be able to sell other food, for example by connecting directly with producers.”⁴

The government official agrees. He will bring maps to discuss the construction with the community. The commune already has two enterprises of social communal property: a passenger transport system with six four-wheel-drive jeeps, and a center for the distribution of liquid gas for cooking. Most of the communal councils have small community enterprises such as bakeries, cobblers, and even small agricultural production. To set up the communal enterprises, first all the communal councils held assemblies and discussed what they needed most. Then they held workshops with a facilitator from the Ministry of Communes and discussed the project in detail, including the organizational and decision-making structure for the enterprises. The result was approved by the neighborhood assemblies of the communal councils.

Popular power is the capacity of the marginalized and oppressed to organize and coordinate structures to govern their own lives, parallel to capitalist or state-run institutions and services such as schools, hospitals, and decision-making bodies, but in ways that do not reflect the logic of capital. Unlike historical revolutionary socialist movements, these groups—first in Latin American and then beyond—see these autonomous structures, not as transitional phenomena on the way to the “takeover” of the state and the consolidation of the revolutionary party. Understood as both a path and a goal, popular power is the central element in building a new society in the shadow of the old structures.

The forms that popular power can take differ radically. Anything that enables the people to administer aspects of their lives on their own, and gives them the power to make their own decisions and improve their own autonomous processes for constructing new social relations, can be seen as part of popular power. It can be expressed through the creation of a community soup kitchen, the recuperation of a workplace, or the formation of a network of community-controlled radio stations. It can also been seen in new forms of local self-administration—a local assembly of people debating their own needs, or an assembly discussing public initiatives and taking a collective position on them.

In Venezuela, the Communal Councils are the most advanced mechanism of local self-organization and popular power. They are non-representative bodies with direct democratic participation, parallel to the elected representative institutions. In 2005, the Communal Councils began forming from below. In January 2006, President Chávez adopted the initiative and began to help it spread. A law of Communal Councils followed in April 2006. The Communal Councils encompass between 150 and 400 families in urban areas, twenty families in rural zones, and ten families in indigenous regions. In 2013 there were approximately 44,000 Communal Councils in Venezuela.

Given the exceptional situation in Venezuela, with a government partly engaged in supporting forms of popular power, popular organizations have a different and stronger relationship with the state than in most other countries. A central question is whether structures of popular power can maintain their own spaces for debate, decision, and construction, or whether they will become co-opted by the state and lose their own agency and agenda. This is an ongoing tension in the process of construction of a new society in Venezuela. The government and its institutions are simultaneously both supportive and an obstacle. And the relationship between institutions and self-organization is characterized by cooperation and conflict. Institutions tend to consolidate and expand their power; by institutional logic, the development and growth of parallel powers and structures is seen as a threat to their existence. In Venezuela this contradiction is especially sharp, with large segments of the institutions of power supporting the autonomous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by David Harvey
• Introduction
• 1: Grounding the “New” Globally
• 2: It Is About Democracy
• 3: Greece
• 4: Spain
• 5: Occupy! (US)
• 6: Argentina
• 7: Venezuela