The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street 1 of 3 http www foreignaffairs com print 98542 October 11 2011 SNAPSHOT The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street The Encampment in Lower Manhattan Speaks to a Failure of Representation Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri MICHAEL HARDT is Professor of Literature at Duke University ANTONIO NEGRI is former Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua and the University of Paris 8 They are the authors of Empire Multitude and Commonwealth 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 10 14 2011 8 16 AM The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street 2 of 3 http www foreignaffairs com print 98542 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 10 14 2011 8 16 AM The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street 3 of 3 http www foreignaffairs com print 98542 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