PAPER DELIVERED AT 7TH ANNUAL ECPR GENERAL CONFERENCE:

‘Comparative Perspectives on the New Politics of Dissent’Democracy of the Squares: Visions and Practices of Democracy from Egypt to the US

Sciences Po Bordeaux, September 4-7, 2013

We Are Everywhere!The Autonomous Roots of the

Real Democracy Movement

Jérôme E. RoosLeonidas Oikonomakis

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE1

FIRST DRAFT: PLEASE CONTACT BEFORE CITING

ABSTRACT:

The years since 2011 have witnessed the (re-)birth of a global cycle of struggles aroundthe issue of democracy. With the representative institutions of liberal democracy incrisis, social movements appear to be increasingly moving away from claims-based andstate-oriented contention towards a global project of autonomy. In this article, we focuson those movements that have articulated a critique of representation and expressed adesire to radically transform democratic processes from below. Referring to theensemble of these struggles as the Real Democracy Movement (RDM), we set out totrace its autonomous roots in the Global Justice Movement, the Zapatista uprising andthe long-standing traditions of anarchism, autonomism and anti-authoritarianism moregenerally. We identify five specific elements that characterize the RDM: (1) its autonomyfrom the state; (2) its commitment to horizontalism and direct democracy; (3) its emphasison direct action; (4) its method of occupation; and (5) its embrace of prefigurative politics. Weconclude that the analytical framework of contentious politics may not be able to fullyappreciate the nature and significance of the RDM as an autonomous movement andprefer instead to speak of a “politics of resistance and prefiguration”. Far from being amere call for attention, the RDM may be the harbinger of a new era of radical demo-cratic aspirations in which autonomous movements could come to play a central role.

Introduction: It’s About Democracy!

“This is not just about a couple of trees,” a friend in Istanbul wrote to one of us in June

2013, as a local resistance movement against the planned destruction of Gezi Park spiraled into a

nationwide uprising against the increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism of Erdogan’s Islamist

1 Comments very welcome. Please contact us before citing: jerome.roos@eui.eu and leonidas.oikonomakis@eui.eu.

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government: “it’s about democracy.” Just a few weeks later, a surprisingly similar cry resounded

from the streets of Athens after conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras – in an attempt to

placate Greece’s Troika of foreign lenders – brusquely bypassed his coalition partners to shut

down the country’s public broadcaster (ERT), triggering mass protests and leading the station’s

employees to occupy its headquarters and continue broadcasting under worker self-management.

“This is not about our broadcaster,” the influential investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis later

lamented in an interview: “it’s about our democracy.” Meanwhile, as the streets of Brazil erupted

in a blaze of indignation over a raise in public transportation fees, the issue at hand once again

seemed to be only the tip of the iceberg. “No, this is not about 20 cents,” a Brazilian activist

wrote in a widely disseminated open letter. “If, at the end of these protests, the political class …

and its army of capitalist crétins … are removed from power and forced to recognize that an era

of real democracy has arrived, then I will be very happy to pay 20 cents more for my bus rides.”2

Liberal democracy now finds itself in crisis almost everywhere (Della Porta 2013). From

the mass protests in Europe’s heavily indebted periphery to the worldwide Occupy movement

and on to the popular uprisings in rapidly emerging countries like Turkey and Brazil, indignant

multitudes are spilling over into the streets and squares of the world, contesting the very

legitimacy of their elected representatives and expressing a radical desire for real democracy and

meaningful self-determination. The new politics of dissent that kicked off with the Tunisian and

Egyptian revolutions of 2011 mark the resumption of what Hardt & Negri (2011) have identified

as an emerging “cycle of struggles”: a budding wave of popular indignation resonating across the

globe and unleashing strikingly similar patterns of leaderless democratic revolt in a great variety

of contexts. Needless to say, each of these struggles remains particular to its own context – and

yet the movements share a number of key elements in common. To the extent that the struggles

offer a critique of representation and express a desire to radically transform democratic processes

from below, we therefore refer to them as part of the Real Democracy Movement (RDM).

The precipitous rise of the RDM has left many journalists, commentators and academics

scratching their heads in confusion. ‘Why are they not making any demands?’ the mainstream

media pundits immediately began to wonder when the Occupy movement first hit the headlines

in the United States. ‘Has anyone else noticed the relative lack of Che Guevara invocations?’ a

puzzled social movement scholar asked during the recent Brazilian protests. ‘Without leadership

or a clear program, these movements are doomed to fail!’ the dumbfounded critics on the

2 The quote on Turkey is from personal correspondence with one of the authors on June 1, 2013; the Vaxevanisquote is from an interview with Beugel (2013); the quote on Brazil is from Franco A. (2013).

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institutional left continue to agitate. With such a confused discourse permeating the academic and

public debate it is perhaps no surprise that a leading scholar like Sydney Tarrow (2011) would end

up defining Occupy as little more than a “we are here” movement, clamoring for attention amid

an economic system that has lost its way. By making the state central to its analysis and limiting its

empirical investigations to the claims that movements make “on public authorities, other holders

of power, competitors, enemies, and objects of popular disapproval” (Tilly 2004:ix), the analytical

framework of contentious politics seems unable to fully appreciate the nature and significance of

the RDM. As a result, many commentators still struggle to identify the reasons why the anti-

capitalist left is increasingly moving away from claims-based forms of contention by stressing its

radical autonomy from the traditional triad of political representation: party, state, and vanguard.

In this paper, we aim to take away some of this confusion by situating the present cycle

of struggles in its proper historical and theoretical context. In doing so, we hope to elucidate the

nature of the RDM as an autonomous movement, one that – consciously or unconsciously – draws

heavily on its roots in the Global Justice Movement (GJM), the Zapatista uprising, and the long-

standing traditions of anarchism, autonomism and anti-authoritarianism more generally. Seen in

this light, the wholesale rejection of representation and the refusal to aim for state power or to

make specific political demands are not so much a puzzle, but a logical consequence of the

RDM’s ideological commitment to a project of autonomy and horizontalism. We develop this

argument in two parts. First we trace some of the organizational forms of the RDM back to the

direct democratic processes of the GJM and the Zapatistas, while simultaneously noting how the

project of autonomy itself is increasingly animating anti-capitalist struggles across Latin America.

The aim of this section is not so much to establish a linear relation between these struggles, or to

argue that the RDM somehow ‘diffused’ from Seattle, Buenos Aires or the Lacandon Jungle, but

rather to uncover the underlying resonances and mutual sources of inspiration between them.

The second part of the paper looks at the philosophical roots of the RDM and seeks to

connect its most salient characteristics to a number of concepts developed by leading autonomist

and anarchist thinkers. Specifically, we identify five interconnected and partly overlapping ideas

that characterize the RDM: (1) its radical autonomy from the state, which resonates closely with

Holloway’s ideas about “changing the world without taking power”; (2) its rejection of

representation in favor of assembly-based horizontalism and direct democracy, leading to a networked

organizational form that invokes Hardt and Negri’s multitude; (3) its refusal to make demands

and its embrace of anarchist-inspired direct action, defined by Graeber as “acting as if one is

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already free”; (4) its method of the occupation and its creation of what Hakim Bey has called

“temporary autonomous zones”, functioning as liberated sites of experimentation with other-

doings, or “cracks in capitalism”; and (5) its deliberate conflation of means and ends as a strategy

of prefiguration, defined as “building the new world in the shell of the old.” We conclude on the

basis of this discussion that the analytical framework of contentious politics may not be able to

fully appreciate the nature and significance of the RDM as an autonomous movement and

propose instead to speak of a “politics of resistance and prefiguration”.

PART I: PRACTICAL ROOTS

A Global Struggle for Real Democracy

Ever since Mohamed Bouazizi’s dramatic self-immolation set the Arab world ablaze in

early 2011, an impressive cycle of struggles has been unfolding across the globe. In the wake of

the Egyptian revolution, anti-austerity protesters began to occupy public squares in Spain and

Greece, demanding real democracy and inspiring solidarity protests across Europe, while Israel

witnessed the birth of the biggest protest movement in its history – the #J14 tent protests

against neoliberalism and the rising costs of living – and Chile was rocked by a wave of student

demonstrations and school occupations against the country’s neoliberal educational system. By

October 15, 2011, the global resonance of Occupy Wall Street had inspired further occupations

in hundreds of cities around the world, placing the critique of haute finance at the heart of the

struggle for real democracy. In 2012, Québec was shaken by a powerful student movement

against tuition fee hikes and the #YoSoy132 student movement challenged the role of the

corporate media in undermining democracy in Mexico. By mid-2013, just when it seemed that the

mobilizations had begun to wane, a number of single issue protests unexpectedly sparked mass

demonstrations in emerging countries as diverse as Turkey, Brazil and Bulgaria.

Needless to say, lumping all of these various protest movements together under one

common header risks overlooking important differences between them. At the same time,

studying each in isolation would blind us to a number of crucial commonalities. In our previous

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work3, we have argued that at the heart of the global cycle of struggles of 2011-’13 lies a

deepening crisis of representation – a crisis that affects developed countries as well as emerging ones;

crisis-ridden economies as well as booming ones; new democracies as well as mature ones;

conservative governments as well as progressive ones; and religious regimes as well as secular

ones. Given the remarkable incidence of mass protest across such a wide variety of contexts, we

have proposed the hypothesis that structural factors may be at play, focusing in particular on the

anti-democratic pressures generated by neoliberal market discipline and the long-term tension

arising from the increasing inability of nation states to exert their control over globalized capital;

a systemic contradiction that has recently come to the fore as a result of the global financial

crisis. As Zygmunt Bauman (2013) has argued, the crux of the problem lies in the divorce of

power from politics. If politics is about deciding what is to be done and power is the ability to

actually do it, then the nation state and representative democracy are still full of politics but

increasingly devoid of power – which has all but evaporated into a deterritorialized realm of

global financial flows and transnational production networks (Hardt & Negri 2000).

The revolutionary stirrings of the multitude from Tahrir to Taksim seem to be a direct

response to these structural contradictions. The Brazilian political scientist Arthur Ituassu (2013),

for instance, has connected the protests in his country to the “crisis of representation”, pointing

in particular to the protesters’ rejection of political parties, exemplified by such slogans as “no

party represents me!” and “the people united do not need parties!” Turkish sociologist Ali Bulaç

(2011) already observed a “crisis in representation” in Turkey two years ago, while political

scientist John O’Brennan (2013) recently noted that “the spirit of protest in Brazil and Turkey

has now swept into Bulgaria, [which] is undergoing a profound crisis of representation.” A

similar theme animated the struggles of the European anti-austerity protesters and the global

Occupy movement. As #OWS got underway in the US, its unofficial website (OccupyWallSt.org)

declared the movement to be “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and

multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an

economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.” As a result, Hardt and

Negri observed that “the encampment in Lower Manhattan speaks to a failure of

representation,” arguing that the Occupy movement is at its heart “a fight for real democracy”:

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, becausethey express political grievances and aspirations ... [T]hey have made clear that indignation against

3 See: Oikonomakis and Roos 2013; Roos 2013a; Roos 2013b.

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corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protestagainst the lack – or failure – of political representation. It is not so much a question of whether this orthat politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether therepresentational political system more generally is inadequate. (Hardt & Negri 2011)

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the question of democracy has featured prominently

the recent wave of mobilizations (Della Porta 2013). “We just have the right of voting in

elections. We just vote for our dictators. [We] want a real democracy,” a Turkish activist at Taksim

Square was quoted as saying during the mass protests there (cited in Millington 2013). His words

could have been taken from any of a number of squares around the world over the past two-and-

a-half years. On May 19, 2011, for instance, two student organizers in Spain wrote a piece about

the emerging 15-M movement in which they affirmed that the indignados, who had just occupied

the squares of 65 cities across the country, wanted “real democracy, a democracy no longer

tailored to the greed of the few, but to the needs of the people,” (Rodríguez & Herrero 2011).

Marina Sitrin, a social movement scholar and activist who has been actively involved in the

Occupy Wall Street protests, has similarly noted that the various Occupy-type movements reject

representative politics altogether, “focusing instead on people taking control of their own lives

and expanding the democratic spaces in which they live and work.” According to Sitrin,

“democracy is the crux of Occupy politics, and democracy practiced in such a way so as to upend

vertical political relationships and expand horizontal ones,” (Sitrin 2012a).

As a result, one feature that has been ubiquitous in the current wave of mobilizations has

been the popular assembly. Of course there are important differences: in Spain, Greece and the

global Occupy movement the assemblies constituted the beating heart of the occupations, while

in Israel they only developed at a later stage after the initial wave of mobilizations had begun to

subside. In Turkey, neighborhood forums began to emerge after Taksim Square and Gezi Park

had been cleared of protesters, while in Brazil the assembly was the preferred organizing

platform of the autonomous Movimento Passe Livre that sparked the protests and later popped

up on a much larger scale right when the massive street demonstrations were at risk of being

hijacked by the opposition of the right. In Chile, individual school and faculty occupations

organized themselves through assemblies but the national student movement remained under the

vanguardist spell of the communist youth and only adopted the assembly at a later stage. In

Greece, the workers of Vio.Me and employees of ERT occupied their factory and TV studios,

respectively, and resumed production and broadcasting under an assembly-based form of worker

self-management. In Egypt and Tunisia, for a variety of reasons probably connected to the

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countries’ legacy of dictatorial rule, the assemblies never really took off outside of immediate

activist circles. Still, what is evident is that – in one way or another – most of these struggles have

begun to experiment with alternative democratic models. As Graeber put it in reference to the

New York General Assembly, the idea behind the NYGA was that, “like its European cousins, [it]

could act as a model of genuine direct democracy to counterpoise to the corrupt charade

presented to us as ‘democracy’ by the US government,” (Graeber 2013:24).

But while the sight of hundreds of even thousands of people sitting in a park or square

and organizing themselves through popular assemblies may have been new to most, the RDM’s

emphasis on autonomy and its commitment to horizontalism certainly did not arise ex nihilio. In

recent decades there has been a concerted move on the anti-capitalist left towards ideas, practices

and organizational forms stressing precisely the type of direct democratic self-organization we

find in the RDM today; a tendency that has become particularly pronounced in Latin America. In

this respect, the roots of the RDM stretch out into time and space, passing through the Global

Justice Movement and the Argentine revolt of December 2001 and extending all the way back to

the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and the long-standing anarchist, autonomist and anti-authoritarian

traditions that preceded all of them. When we refer to the RDM’s “autonomous roots”,

therefore, we do not aim to establish some linear relationship between the movements, or to

somehow isolate the RDM’s ultimate cause. Rather than building a genealogical tree, our much

more modest aim is to uncover some of the underlying resonances within the rhizome of revolt4.

The Democracy Project of the Global Justice Movement

A number of scholars and social movement participants have already remarked on the

striking continuities between the ideas, practices and organizational forms of the Real Democracy

Movement and those of the Global Justice Movement that preceded it (e.g., Klein 2011; Della

Porta 2012; Razsa & Kurnik 2012). In her ethnographic work on the acampada and neighborhood

assemblies of Barcelona, for instance, Marianne Maeckelbergh notes that the direct democratic

procedures of the inter-barrio assembly at Plaça Catalunya were “remarkably similar to the

procedures practiced by the alterglobalization movement over the past ten years,” (2012:208). The

4 As we have argued before, the different local manifestations of the RDM are not branches of a single tree, whichwould imply a hierarchical relationship between the source of the movement and its various offshoots, betweenthe transmitter of an idea or set of practices and its adopters. The RDM rather assumed the form of a web ofintertwined subterranean roots – a decentralized multiplicity that “ceaselessly established connections between …organizations of power and circumstances relative to … social struggles” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980:7).

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occupied square itself “mimicked almost exactly the infrastructure that is usually set up during

the temporary camps that accompany large-scale mobilizations against the G8/G20,” (2012:212).

In our own empirical research on the occupations of Puerta del Sol, Syntagma Square and

Zuccotti Park, we showed that active participants in GJM networks played a very important role

in facilitating the early assemblies at the RDM occupations (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013). The

most well-known example of such participant continuity is probably David Graeber, the

anarchist and anthropologist who played an active role both in the People’s Global Action (PGA),

the loose activist network that organized the big anti-summit protests of the GJM, and in setting

up the New York General Assembly (NYGA), which went on to become the horizontal

organizing platform for Occupy Wall Street. But Graeber has confirmed that he was far from the

only GJM veteran to participate in the early NYGA sessions, at which he actually encountered “a

smattering of activists who had been connected to the Global Justice Movement” (2011a).

In this respect, some of the most important legacies that the GJM bequeathed the RDM

with were its assemblies, spokes councils and working groups, as well as a number of procedural

innovations like the use of facilitators, the circular seating pattern, the report-back structure, the

types of consensus used in decision-making, and the use of hand signals to facilitate discussion

(Maeckelbergh 2012:212). Moreover, just like many of today’s indignados, occupiers and çapulcu, the

activists in the alter-globalization movement also tended to stress their desire for (personal and

collective) autonomy from political parties and formal movement organizations. As Geoffrey

Pleyers recounts about the GJM, “wishing to avoid all forms of delegation and to remain in

control of their own activist experience, many participate[d] actively in the movement without

belonging to any organization,” (2011:48). The result of the GJM’s emphasis on autonomy was a

decentralized multiplicity of activist groups which, as a result of the dispersed nature of the

movement, defied outright representation by any form of leadership of vanguard. Just like the

RDM, the GJM took the shape of a horizontal network (Castells 2012). As Jeffrey Juris put it:

[N]etworks are increasingly associated with values related to grassroots participatory democracy, self-management, horizontal connectedness, and decentralized coordination based on autonomy and diversity.The network has thus become a powerful cultural ideal, particularly among more radical global justiceactivists, a guiding logic that provides both a model of and a model for emerging forms of directlydemocratic politics on local, regional, and global scales. (2004:342)

The call for real democracy that animates today’s cycle of struggles was therefore already

(explicitly or implicitly) present within the GJM that preceded it. In the immediate wake of the

events at Seattle and Genova, for instance, Hardt & Negri observed that “the most productive

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resistance movements of today … are driven at base not only by the struggle against misery and

poverty but also by a profound desire for democracy – a real democracy of the rule of all by all

based on relationships of equality and freedom,” (2004:67). Graeber has also identified the quest

for real democracy at the heart of the GJM, and traces the roots of this “democracy project”

back to the anarchist tradition. In an article for the New Left Review entitled ‘The New Anarchists’,

Graeber wrote that, “in North America especially, this is a movement about reinventing

democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is

not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology,” (2002:70). The GJM’s

anarchist practices were “about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down

structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized non-

hierarchical consensus democracy,” (idem). For anarchists, the traditional aim of revolutionary

movements to take over the state is not a solution but part of the problem, as the state

“concentrates power in the hands of the few at the apex of its hierarchy, and defends the system

that benefits a ruling class of capitalists, landlords, and state managers. It cannot be used for

revolution, since it only creates ruling elites,” (Van Der Walt & Schmidt 2009:6). For anarchists,

the new society is egalitarian, participatory, horizontal, leaderless and directly democratic. It is

also classless, stateless, anti-authoritarian and therefore in a profound sense autonomously self-

governed. It is no surprise, then, that anarchist ideas and practices continue to resonate strongly

in the RDM today (Graeber 2011b; 2011c). Williams (2012), for instance, has argued that “the

most immediate inspiration for Occupy is anarchism,” while Kazin (2011) has written about

Occupy’s “anarchist vision of a future in which autonomous, self-governing communities would

link up with one another.” In our own empirical work, we have similarly identified an important

anarchist influence on the movements in Spain and Greece (Oikonomakis and Roos 2013).

Zapatismo as a Voice of the Same Thoughts and Desires

It is well known that the Global Justice Movement was itself profoundly inspired by –

and to some extent even directly originated in – the Zapatista experiment with autonomy. In

1996, two years after the armed EZLN insurrection rocked the still waters of the neoliberal post-

Cold War consensus, the Zapatistas hosted 3.000 activists from around the world at La Realidad

in Chiapas for the first Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. At

this gathering, the decision was taken to start laying the basis for an international network of

resistance and communication. At the second Encuentro in Spain in 1997, organized by the Ya

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Basta! network, and at a follow-up gathering in Geneva in 1998, the People’s Global Action was

founded as an informal global anti-capitalist coordinating network that would go on to facilitate

numerous Global Action Days, including the ones that disrupted the WTO meeting at Seattle in

1999 and the Genova G8 meeting of 2001. According to the Second Declaration of La Realidad:

This intercontinental network of resistance, recognizing differences and acknowledging similarities, willsearch to find itself with other resistances around the world. This intercontinental network of resistancewill be the medium in which distinct resistances may support one another. This intercontinental networkof resistance is not an organizing structure; it doesn’t have a central head or decision-maker; it has nocentral command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.

The influence of the Zapatistas is particularly explicit in the PGA’s fifth organizational

hallmark, which pledges allegiance to “an organizational philosophy based on decentralization

and autonomy.” According to one of the PGA’s founding members, Frederike Haberman, “this is

the hallmark on horizontality and this is particular to what the Zapatistas are saying,”

(Khasnabish 2008:237; cited in Nail 2013:27). For this reason Maeckelberg is right to note that,

“if there is a birth place at all for ‘horizontal decision-making’ as a key international social

movement practice, then it might be in the Encuentros of the Zapatistas,” (2012:222). The

renowned Mexican intellectual and former UNAM rector Pablo González Casanova has similarly

observed that “the mobilization of the indignados and the Occupy movement … began in the

jungles of Chiapas with the principles of inclusion and dialogue,” (2012).

But the imprint that Zapatismo has left on the RDM is not just the result of some

indirect ‘diffusion’ via the GJM; it is affected just as importantly through a more direct affective

pattern of resonance and mutual inspiration (Holloway 2005). As González Casanova poetically

put it, “the Zapatista movement walks through the whole world, not as an echo, but as the voice

of the same thoughts and desires.” Organizers with the autonomist Movimento Passe Livre

(MPL) in Brazil, for instance, whose direct actions against the rise in public transportation fees in

São Paulo sparked a wave of mass mobilizations, told reporters that they took major inspiration

from the direct democracy of the indigenous Zapatista communities. As one MPL organizer put

it, “the Zapatistas have greatly influenced the alter-globalization movement. They are part of a

historical process of which we are the fruit,” (Farah 2013) In fact, despite the important role

played by the centrally-organized and traditionally vanguardist youth wing of Chile’s Communist

Party, even the student movement there was profoundly influenced by the horizontalism of the

Zapatistas. In the words of Daniela Carrasco of the Tendencia Estudiantil Revolucionaria:

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The great example that we have taken from the Zapatista movement is the assembly as a form oforganization. For many years the Chilean movement was characterized as very bureaucratic andpersonalist, it was focused on certain presidents that ended up negotiating with the government and oftenbetraying the movement. This year this logic was broken, the right-wing that formed part of theConfederation of Students was kicked out, and the assembly was adopted as the method of validating alldecisions we make. (cited in Casani 2012)

Various observers and movement participants have made an explicit connection between

Zapatismo and Occupy (e.g., Continetti 2011; Nail 2013; Graeber 2013:99). Marlina, an activist

with the Movimiento por la Justicia en el Barrio, a Latino collective in New York that actively

participated in Occupy Wall Street, reports that “there are many people who have been strongly

influenced by the Zapatista struggle … The Zapatista resistance encourages us to keep up the

struggle to build a better world,” (cited in Casani 2012). Thomas Nail, who has published a book

on the resonances between the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and the practice of

Zapatismo, identifies the Zapatista uprising as one of the “global origins” of the Occupy

movement, noting that “Zapatismo is one of the first and most sustained non-representational

revolutionary efforts to diagnose political power from the perspective that ‘there is no single

front of struggle’,” (2012:75). In this sense, the appeal of Zapatismo lies precisely in its rejection

of representative parliamentary politics. “They taught us another way of seeing the world,”

Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos said during an international seminar

celebrating the 18th anniversary of the uprising in 2012. Or, as Paulina Fernandez, Professor of

Political Science at UNAM, put it: “the Zapatistas are building a real alternative process on a daily

basis. They are proof that this country can function in a different way,” (cited in Casani 2012).

The Zapatistas themselves seem to be aware of the inspiring role they play in the global

anti-capitalist struggle. After the Encuentros of the GJM years, today, in the era of the RDM, the

Zapatistas have formed a new initiative: the little Zapatista school, which took place in August

2013 in Chiapas and will continue in December ‘13 and January ‘14. As part of the Escuelita, the

Zapatistas invited 1.700 activists from all over the world to Chiapas, allowing them to experience

first-hand what it is like to live and work inside a self-governing Zapatista community – and, of

course, indirectly making a proposal to the contemporary movements: to embrace autonomy as a

way forward (Oikonomakis 2013). “They have always been ahead of their times, and always at the

epicenter of global struggles,” Gaizca, a Basque syndicalist who came to Chiapas for the Escuelita

told one of us. “We have come here to learn!” Another participant in the Escuelita, Toño, of the

Movimento Passe Livre in Brazil, agrees: “we have to learn how to be more autonomous, and

therefore we will be more free,” (cited in Molina 2013).

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Latin America: A Laboratory for Autonomy?

Yet the project of autonomy is by no means the exclusive prerogative of the Zapatistas.

In recent decades, a great variety of movements has emerged in Latin America stressing their

autonomy from the state and their intention to organize differently through horizontal forms of

direct democratic self-governance. Marina Sitrin (2006) notes how the term horizontalidad – widely

used in today’s anti-capitalist struggles – was directly appropriated by the massive autonomous

movements that emerged in Argentina during the crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The

unemployed workers’ movement, the so-called piqueteros, for instance, “adopted as their modality

of work and decision-making the permanent state of assembly,” (Colectivo Situaciones 2011:96).

When the country’s devastating financial crisis struck with full force in 2001, the piqueteros were

soon joined by a wave of factory occupations, with workers recovering their closed-down

working places (including factories as well as hotels, clinics, printing presses and other enterprises

employing a total of 15.000 people throughout the country) and resuming production under

worker self-management. On December 19th and 20th, the country finally exploded in riotous

fury, and a spontaneous popular uprising that left over thirty people dead eventually forced

President De la Rua to escape from the Presidential Palace by helicopter (Dangl 2010; Zibechi

2012). As the militant researchers of the Colectivo Situaciones put it, “the revolt was violent”:

Not only did it topple a government and confront the repressive forces for hours. There was somethingmore: it tore down the prevailing political representations without proposing others. The mark of thisinsurrection on the social body is a major one. It cannot be inscribed in the tradition of classicalinsurrections: there was no leadership; nor was there a proposal to take over state power.” (2011:6)

Instead of taking up their seat in the Casa Rosada, the people returned to their

neighborhoods and working places where they began to organize themselves into assemblies and

worker-run cooperatives. As one participant remarked: “it is not that there was a decision to be

horizontal, it was not that there was a decision to use direct democracy … We simply came

together with a powerful rejection of all that we knew … and with a specific decision that ‘we are

going to do things for ourselves’,” (cited in Sitrin 2012b:66). A similar theme animated the more

radical elements of the unemployed workers’ movement: “the piquetero struggle was born outside

traditional political and social institutions. Its autonomy and novelty relates to the disrepute of

traditional political organizations,” (Colectivo Situaciones 2011:95). Recently a direct pattern of

resonance has emerged between the Argentine movements and the RDM. For instance, when the

workers of Vio.Me in Greece occupied their factory near Thessaloniki and resumed production

under workers’ control in early 2013, Theodoros Karyotis, spokesman of the Vio.Me Solidarity

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Initiative, told an Argentine newspaper that they had been directly inspired by the struggle of

Argentina’s Recovered Factories Movement: “the truth is that the workers themselves say there is

resonance between what the [Argentine] FatSinPat workers say and write, and what the Vio.Me

workers believe in and struggle against. There is a strong identification,” (Chausis 2013).

In the sectarian debates between the institutional and the anti-authoritarian left, the

autonomous struggles of Mexico and Argentina are often contrasted to the experiences of the

left-wing leaders of countries like Venezuela and Bolivia who were swept into power as part of

the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ (e.g., Jardim, Gindin & Ali 2004). But while outside observers of these

two countries have often focused on the actions of the leaders themselves, they have been much

less attentive to the massive autonomous movements that actually animate the grassroots

struggles against neoliberalism in both of these contexts. Bolivia’s anti-neoliberal “water and gas

wars” of 2000-’05, in which the country’s indigenous poor rose up in rebellion against the

privatization of water and the exploitation of gas, displayed a strong element of autonomy. As

Zibechi has observed, the Bolivian uprisings “share some traits with other struggles on the

continent, like, for example, the lack of vanguards and leadership structures, or the ability to

launch victorious insurgencies without any institution (workers, or farmers, union, or political

party) – without those on top and those at the bottom. The struggles were won without the

traditional division between the leaders and the led,” (2010:2). According to Guttiérez (2009),

Bolivia’s movements divide into two currents: a national-popular project that took over state

power, and a communal-popular project that still maintains its autonomy from the state and seeks

to build new forms of self-determination from below. While outside observers generally tend to

focus on the former, it is the latter – the Aymara experience of the Altiplano in particular – that

“adds something substantial” to the continent’s movements, namely “the construction of non-

state powers,” (Zibechi 2010:2). Not unlike the communities of Chiapas, the neighborhoods of

El Alto have established a vast autonomous space (in this case an urban one), where the people

themselves take care of the provision and organization of municipal works like roads, electricity,

water and sewage, as well as the maintenance of schools, clinics, parks, radio stations and even

communal justice systems – all through assembly-based self-governance (Paley 2011).

A similar story hides behind the personality cult of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

As George Ciccariello-Maher writes in his recent book, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the

Venezuelan Revolution (2013), the real impulse behind Chavismo came not from above – from the

“constituted” power of the state – but from below, from the autonomous “constituent” impulse

13

of the Venezuelan people. Ever since the state cracked down on a spontaneous popular uprising

against IMF-imposed austerity – the infamous Caracazo of 1989 in which up to 2.000 were killed

– many Venezuelan movements began to take an increasingly antagonistic stance towards the

state. This antagonism, which has continued in contradictory form under Chavismo, is powerfully

expressed in the rise of countless direct democratic initiatives, from the country’s many

autonomous neighborhoods and its 40.000 communal councils to its spectacular network of over

180.000 worker-run cooperatives (Azzellini 2013). Tellingly, at the entrance to the armed and self-

governed neighborhood of La Piedrita in Carácas, for instance, hangs the same sign one

encounters at the entrance to the Zapatista communities of Chiapas: “here La Piedrita gives the

orders and the government obeys.” As Ciccariello-Maher puts it, in La Piedrita “the reality is one

of radical autonomy from the state. This autonomy is not limited to the revolutionary context of

contemporary Venezuela; La Piedrita has been fighting for more than 25 years,” (2013:2-3). We

can conclude, then, that the RDM’s refusal to get involved in the affairs of the state or to make

specific political demands is by no means isolated to the present cycle of struggles. Rather, it is

part of a global tendency in anti-capitalist struggles towards ever-increasing autonomy.

PART II: PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS

1. Autonomy: Changing the World Without Taking Power

Radical autonomy from the state is therefore the first and most important characteristic

of the RDM. As John Holloway, the Marxist sociologist who is widely known as the “philosopher

of the Zapatistas”, argued in Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), the capitalist state has

never been – and never will be – the appropriate locus or object of radical emancipatory action 5.

After all, “the state is integrated into a web of capitalist social relations, which it cannot escape

5 Of course Holloway was by no means the first to make this argument. It has been made, under various guises, bythe philosopher-protagonists of Mai 68 in Paris (including Guy Debord and the Situationists, CorneliusCastoriadis and the Socialisme ou Barbarie collective, and anti-authoritarian post-Marxists like Gilles Deleuze andFélix Guattari); by the Italian autonomists of Potere Operaio (including Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, Franco“Bifo” Berardi, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna and Mario Tronti); by the German Autonomen, whose theoreticalwork in the so-called state derivation debate was an immediate source of inspiration for Holloway; by councilcommunists like Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst; and, of course, by the many thinkers in the long-standing anarchist tradition going back to Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Goldman.

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from,” (2002:15). Both the social-democratic objective of winning elections and reforming the

state from within, and the traditional Marxist-Leninist objective of seizing state power through

the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class, were doomed to failure from their very outset.

“The struggle is lost from the beginning,” Holloway writes, “long before the victorious party or

army conquers state power and ‘betrays’ its promises. It is lost once power itself seeps into the

struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the

negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building,” (2002). The historical

record, littered as it is with failed revolutions, tells us that “you cannot build a society of non-

power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against

power is already lost,” (2002:17). In a word, “to struggle through the state is to become involved

in the active process of defeating yourself,” (2002:214). As Zibechi concludes, “the state cannot

be used to transform the world. The role that we attribute to it should be revised,” (2003:202)

If all of this was true in the 1970s, when Holloway and Picciotto (1979) first made their

seminal contributions to the Marxist debate on the nature of the capitalist state, it must be even

more so today. After three decades of globalization, financialization and neoliberal reform, and

after years of revolutionary change in the sphere of information and communication technology

and the nature of capitalist production, the modern form of national sovereignty is increasingly

being hollowed out by the shift in structural power relations in favor of global capital (Hardt &

Negri 2000). As Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN has poetically put it, “in the cabaret of

globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with

only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force,” (Marcos 2004). The ongoing

crisis of global capitalism has made the relevance and significance of this observation all the

more acute. As Holloway remarked in a recent interview with one of us for ROAR Magazine6:

[O]ne thing that’s become clear in the crisis to more and more people is the distance of the state fromsociety, and the degree to which the state is integrated into the movement of money, so that the state evenloses the appearance of being pulled in two directions … [T]he power of attraction of state-centeredpolitics and protests really depends upon the state having some sort of room for negotiation … If thestate feels there is no longer any room for negotiation, or simply gets into the habit of saying ‘we willabsolutely not negotiate’, then that closes down the margin for state-centered left politics and pushes peoplemore towards the idea that, really, trying to do things through the state is absolutely hopeless.

So far, we have merely identified autonomy negatively, as a refusal of Mao’s despairing

dictum to “get involved in the affairs of the state!” In its positive sense, however, autonomy

stands for a fundamentally creative project. Cornelius Castoriadis, whose work with the left-

6 See: Roos 2013c

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libertarian Socialisme ou Barbarie collective earned him a worldwide reputation as “the philosopher

of autonomy”, defines autonomy as a revolutionary project whereby human beings become the

conscious agents of their own self-determination (Castoriadis 1987:71-79). In this sense,

autonomy is both an aim and a praxis; both an end and the means to achieve it. It can be applied

both to the individual subject and to society as a whole. And, in the final analysis, it is closely

connected to the question of democracy. As Klooger writes, “for Castoriadis, the current system

in the so-called democratic countries is not democracy at all, but ‘liberal oligarchy’. Choosing

one’s rulers is not democracy. Democracy is ruling oneself, not being ruled by another, however

that other may be chosen,” (2012:13). Real democracy, then, is autonomy: conscious self-rule.

2. Horizontalism: The Direct Democracy of the Multitude

The second characteristic of the RDM, closely related to the first, is its commitment to

horizontalism and direct democracy. Marina Sitrin notes that horizontalism “implies democratic

communication on a level plane and involves – or at least strives toward – non-hierarchical and

anti-authoritarian creation rather than reaction. It is a break with vertical ways of organizing and

relating,” (2006:3). In this sense, horizontalism is the flip-side of autonomy, as it complements

the refusal of hierarchical state power with an alternative form of non-hierarchical organization

to replace it with: the direct democracy of the multitude. To the defunct party-form of liberal

democracy and state socialism, the autonomous movements of the multitude counterpoise their

own non-instrumental forms of self-organization: commune, council and assembly. As Holloway

notes, these horizontal forms of autogestión are “quite different from the party, which is a form of

organisation conceived as a means to an end, the end of winning state power. In the council,

what is important is the effective articulation of collective self-determination,” (2010:40).

As an organizational locus of collective self-determination, the popular assembly is one

of the purest expressions of the power of the multitude. From the assemblies of the American

and French revolutions to the Soviets of the Russian revolution; from the self-managed

cooperatives and democratic militias of anarchist Catalonia to the autonomous municipalities and

Juntas de Buen Gobierno of Chiapas; and from the autonomous neighborhoods of Carácas and the

self-governing communities of El Alto to the neighborhood forums in Buenos Aires, Barcelona

and Istanbul, these direct democratic practices powerfully express the capacities of conscious

self-rule that already lie embedded as pure potentiality within the multitude as such. In his book

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Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, Toni Negri observes how this self-organizing

potential or constituent power of the multitude differs drastically from the fixed or constituted power

of formal legal systems and centralized authority. “The paradigm of constituent power,” Negri

writes, “is that of a force that bursts apart, breaks, interrupts, unhinges any preexisting

equilibrium and any possible continuity,” (1999:11). The paradigm of constituted power, by

contrast, implies a movement towards closure, an attempt to contain the constituent impulses of

the multitude by closing down the revolution and returning a degree of order. As such, while

constituted power represents the very negation of democracy, “constituent power is tied to the

notion of democracy as absolute power,” (idem). As Hardt & Negri note in Multitude, “we get a

first hint of this democratic tendency when we look at the genealogy of modern resistances,

revolt, and revolution, which demonstrates a tendency toward increasingly democratic

organization, from centralized forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command to network

organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships,” (Hardt & Negri 2004:xv-xvi).

Nevertheless, in the wake of each major revolutionary episode or mass mobilization, the

institutional left still tends to urge the multitude to submit itself to the dictates of a left-wing

party in order to oust the ruling class, take state power, and realize the aims of the initial uprising

(the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece, or SYRIZA, is a case in point). But as Negri

rhetorically asks, “isn’t closing constituent power within representation … nothing but the

negation of the reality of constituent power, its congealment in a static system, the restoration of

traditional sovereignty against democratic innovation?” (1999:3). Many years ago, Max Weber

already recognized party-based representation to be a structure of domination that has very little

to do with conscious self-rule or the absolute democratic impulse of the multitude. “Immediate

democracy and government by notables,” Weber wrote, “exist in their genuine forms, free from

domination, only so long as parties which contend with each other and attempt to appropriate

office do not develop on a permanent basis. If they do, the leader of the contending and

victorious party and his staff constitute a structure of domination, regardless of how they attain

power,” (cited in Zibechi 2010:15). The practice of horizontalism explicitly recognizes the

fundamentally undemocratic nature of representation and the party-form and therefore rejects

leadership in favor of direct participation and a continuous struggle against the concentration of

power in the hands of the few. Real democracy, then, is direct democracy.

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3. Direct Action: Acting as if One Is Already Free

As David Graeber has noted, however, “the original inspiration of Occupy Wall Street

was the tradition not just of direct democracy, but of direct action.” This third characteristic of

the RDM is closely related to the movement’s refusal to make specific demands upon the political

class. As Graeber confirms, “the refusal to make demands was, quite self-consciously, a refusal to

recognize the legitimacy of the existing political order on which such demands would have to be

made,” (2013:144). For anarchists, this is the key difference between direct action and protest:

“protest, however militant, is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action … is

a matter of proceeding as one would if the existing structure of power did not exist,” ( idem). A

further distinction can be made between direct action and civil disobedience: while the latter

deliberately breaks a specific law in order to reveal it to be unconstitutional or unjust, the former

rejects the present legal system altogether. While civil disobedience emerged largely out of the

liberal tradition, direct action is, in Emma Goldman’s words, “the logical, consistent method of

anarchism,” a method that considers the legal system to be primarily concerned with the defense

of power and privilege and not with freedom or justice. In the final analysis, therefore, “direct

action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free,” (Graeber 2013:144).

The Gandhian-inspired and fundamentally anarchist tradition of nonviolent direct action

pursued by the indignados and Occupy Wall Street has a very specific aim of its own: to force the

state into the embarrassing position of having to publicly expose its own violent nature, thereby

rendering visible to all what had hitherto only been seen by a few. For anarchists, the violence of

the state is always-already latent. Direct action, then, is a matter of making that latent violence

visible by building up such tension as to trigger a response. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it “we

who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the

surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” In a recent interview on direct action in the

Occupy movement – reflecting on the effectiveness of direct actions trying to prevent home

foreclosures – Noam Chomsky commented on the tactic’s revolutionary potential:

Direct action carries the message forward in a very dramatic fashion … [R]esisting foreclosures sometimesdoes help people get into their homes, but it also dramatizes the issue in a way in which words don’t … Infact, direct action has often been the preliminary to really major changes. Revolutionary changes, in fact.In the United States the sit-down strikes of the 1930s were a major impetus for passing significant NewDeal legislation. The reason is that manufacturers could perceive that a sit-down strike was just one stepbefore taking over the enterprise, kicking out the owners and managers, and saying ‘we’ll run it ourselves.’(interview with Chomsky 2013)

18

4. Occupation: The Creation of Temporary Autonomous Zones

But perhaps the most obvious form of direct action of the RDM – one that actually

deserves a section of its own and which we identify as the movement’s fourth key characteristic –

has been the global wave of occupations of public spaces and their transformation into liberated

zones for the experimentation with alternative social relations and “other-doings”. The occupied

squares, parks, schools, universities, hospitals, homes, hotels, factories and TV stations of the

current cycle of struggles closely resemble what anarchist thinker Hakim Bey (1991) famously

called “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZ). In Bey’s analysis, the so-called “big-R Revolution”

has failed to change the world or transform the consciousness of people in a permanent fashion:

“the vision comes to life in the moment of uprising – but as soon as ’the Revolution’ triumphs

and the state returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.” Therefore, Bey suggests that

the best strategy for those who are truly committed to changing the world is to create temporary

autonomous zones, “like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla

operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to

re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it.” That way, while the state often moves

rapidly to destroy or ‘normalize’ the TAZ, as in the case of the protest camps in Greece, Turkey

and the US, their brief burst of existence already succeeded in the immediate aim of raising

popular awareness about such diverse problems as debt, democracy and inequality, as well as the

immanent potential of horizontal modes of direct democracy and self-organization.

In a way, a TAZ can be any form of space or territory: from a recovered factory in

Argentina or Greece to an occupied lecture room in Mexico or Chile; from a community of

immigrant squatters outside of Barcelona to a self-managed autonomous clinic in Athens; and

from the massive protest camps at Tahrir, Sol and Zuccotti to the even more massive liberated

territories of Chiapas. The idea behind the occupation, then, closely resembles the method of the

crack, defined by Holloway as “the perfectly ordinary creation of a space or moment in which we

assert a different type of doing … The cracks are revolts of one type of doing against another

type of doing,” (2010:84). In this sense, the global Occupy movement is all about creating

temporary autonomous zones – or cracks – inside the structure of capitalist domination. Not

only did the protesters in Gezi Park recover public space that was slanted for destruction, but

they also set out to create soup kitchens, a public library and an incredibly diverse community of

people from all walks of life who joined in the collective creation of the common. In the TAZ,

these people engaged in an other-doing that immediately went beyond the capitalist exigencies of

19

abstract labor. “Like a flash of lightning,” Holloway writes, these brief experiences “illuminate a

different world, a world created perhaps for a few short hours, but the impression which remains

on our brain and in our senses is that of an image of the world we can (and we did) create. The

world that does not yet exist displays itself as a world that exists not-yet,” (2010:31).

5. Prefiguration: Creating the New World in the Shell of the Old

The fifth and final characteristic of the RDM – and the one that binds all the previous

ones together – is its strategic commitment to prefiguration. Prefigurative politics is the idea that

the mode of organization adopted by a certain movement should reflect the type of society being

pursued by that movement; in other words, the movement itself should try to become a

microcosmic image of the world it wants to create. In this sense, prefigurative politics is, to use

Gandhi’s words, about “being the change we want to see in this world.” Activists committed to

prefigurative politics tend to be less interested in making claims on existing authorities than in

creating – in the here and now – the type of social relations in which they actually wish to live

and work. Movements committed to prefiguration thus refuse to make a distinction between

means and ends; between the ultimate objectives and the way in which the movement hopes to

realize them. As Graeber puts it, “it’s not just that the ends do not justify the means (though they

don’t), you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the

world you wish to create,” (2011c). Or, in the words of Subcomandante Marcos, “the end is the

means,” (quoted in Zibechi 2010:6). In her initial definition of the concept in relation to the New

Left movements of the 1960s, Wini Breines notes that the idea of prefiguration is closely related

to “the attempt to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values in politics,” noting that

“participatory democracy [is] central to prefigurative politics,” (1989:6).

Just like the concepts of autonomy, horizontalism, direct action and the TAZ, the notion

of prefiguration lies at the very core of anarchist praxis. In their anarchist historiography, Van der

Walt and Schmidt write that “at the heart of the mass anarchist tradition is the view that it is

necessary to build a popular revolutionary movement [that] ultimately must aim to constitute the

basis of a new society within the shell of the old, an incipient new social order that would finally

explode and supersede the old one,” (2009:21). With the spread of anarchist-inspired practices

through the GJM and RDM, this prefigurative method has been gaining in traction over the past

decade. “After the Global Justice Movement,” Graeber writes, “the old days of steering

20

committees and the like were basically over. Pretty much everyone in the activist community had

come around to the idea of prefigurative politics: the idea that the organizational form that an

activist group takes should embody the kind of society we wish to create,” (2013:24).

Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Resistance and Prefiguration

Taken together, these key characteristics and broad tendencies differentiate the RDM

from many of the more traditional protest movements that journalists, scholars and policymakers

are familiar with. For most commentators, the RDM’s project of autonomy is therefore a

profoundly troubling experience: apparently the autonomous movements simply refuse to

conform to standard ideas about how social actors should behave in order to be taken seriously

and have some tangible political impact. So far, social movement scholars – at least in the Anglo-

Saxon world – appear to have been hampered in their appreciation of the RDM’s immense

historical significance as a result of the conceptual limits imposed by the dominant analytical

framework of claims-based contentious politics. In the classical definition, contentious politics

refers to the “episodic, public, collective interactions among makers of claims and their objects

when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and

(b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants,” (McAdam,

Tarrow and Tilly 2001:5). But what if a movement’s significance lies not in the claims it makes

upon government, but precisely in its resolute rejection of the political system as a whole? What

if a movement’s significance lies not so much in the birth pains of its own organizational forms

as in the death throes of the defunct party-form against which it arose? What if the significance

of a movement lies not in the realization of its demands but in the prefiguration of its futures?

Would we be able to recognize such a movement for what it really is? Would we see it?

According to Sydney Tarrow (2011), the Real Democracy Movement – or at least its

North American manifestation as Occupy Wall Street – is little more than a desperate cry for

attention amid an economic system that has lost its way. Since it has no clear constituency, does

not make any specific policy proposals and refuses to get bogged down in the quagmire of

electoral politics, Tarrow claims that this is “a movement of a completely new type” – a “we are

here movement”. In this paper we have shown this interpretation to be unconvincing. Far from a

completely new type of movement, Occupy emerged as an integral part of a global cycle of

struggles for real democracy – a struggle whose autonomous roots run far and deep, extending

21

back to the Global Justice Movement, the Zapatista revolt, the Argentine uprising, and the many

grassroots rebellions pulsing through the open veins of Latin America, ultimately touching base

with the long-standing traditions of anarchism, autonomism and anti-authoritarianism. The fact

that the RDM has by and large refused to make demands on the political class and does not

appear to be very interested in designating a formal leadership, organizing itself into a party,

conjuring up a political program, participating in elections, or otherwise getting involved in the

affairs of the state, actually forces us to move beyond the contentious politics framework and situate

the recent wave of mobilizations in its proper context as a politics of resistance and prefiguration.

Of course not all the recent mobilizations are explicitly (or even implicitly) concerned

with the quest for real democracy that we outlined above, but to the extent that they are, their

critique of representation has tended to go hand-in-hand with (1) an insistence on autonomy

from the state; (2) a commitment to horizontalism and direct democracy; (3) an emphasis on

direct action; (4) the occupation of public space and the creation of liberated zones; (5) the

embrace of prefigurative politics. We believe that the common elements, converging tendencies

and profound resonances between the various struggles that animate today’s anti-capitalist left are

not just a powerful indication of the deepening crisis of global capitalism and liberal democracy,

but – much more than that – actually point us in the direction of what might lie ahead. Far from

being a mere call for attention, the Real Democracy Movement may yet be the harbinger of a

new era of radical democratic aspirations in which autonomous movements could come to play a

central role. To the lone cynics of the ancien régime who in this epochal cry hear little more than

“we are here”, the assembled multitudes of the world now roar back in a million different voices:

WE ARE EVERYWHERE!

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