October 11, 2011SNAPSHOTThe Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heartof Occupy Wall StreetThe Encampment in Lower Manhattan Speaks to a Failure of RepresentationMichael Hardt and Antonio NegriMICHAEL HARDT is Professor of Literature at Duke University. ANTONIO NEGRI is former Professor ofPolitical 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 becausethey 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 Manhattanto cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed andeconomic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack -- orfailure -- of political representation. It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or thisor that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representationalpolitical system more generally is inadequate. This protest movement could, and perhaps must, transforminto a genuine, democratic constituent process.The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside theother "encampments" of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In manycases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments ofcentral squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Squareearlier last spring. To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel events, suchas the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, andthe Israeli tent encampments for economic justice. The context of these various protests are verydifferent, of course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather each of thesemovements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation.The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Streethttp://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/985421 of 3 10/14/2011 8:16 AMIn Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not berepresented 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'sPuerta del Sol and Barcelona's Plaça 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 onidentified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing theseissues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protestersposed 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 politicaldemands. One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and financeindustries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (orthe world). A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians andpolitical parties charged with representing the people's interests but in fact more clearly represent thebanks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy notsupposed 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 merelyin terms of the quarrels between Republicans and Democrats, or the fortunes of the Obamaadministration. If the movement does continue and grow, of course, it may force the White House orCongress to take new action, and it may even become a significant point of contention during the nextpresidential election cycle. But the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations are both authors ofthe bank bailouts; the lack of representation highlighted by the protests applies to both parties. In thiscontext, 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, thenwhat 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 theencampments experiment with new democratic practices. These movements have all developed accordingto what we call a "multitude form" and are characterized by frequent assemblies and participatorydecision-making structures. (And it is worth recognizing in this regard that Occupy Wall Street and manyof these other demonstrations also have deep roots in the globalization protest movements that stretchedat 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 theseencampments. Such network instruments do not create the movements, of course, but they areconvenient tools, because they correspond in some sense to the horizontal network structure anddemocratic experiments of the movements themselves. Twitter, in other words, is useful not only forannouncing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific decision in real time. The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Streethttp://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/985422 of 3 10/14/2011 8:16 AMDo not wait for the encampments, then, to develop leaders or political representatives. No Martin LutherKing, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of Wall Street and beyond. For better or worse -- and we arecertainly among those who find this a promising development -- this emerging cycle of movements