The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  Third, the political question of power, and the balance of forces I’ve been describing, is best considered as one of how to create a space where such creative nonviolent action is possible. Here another recent Mexican example is telling: the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. This was an area where, for centuries, it was impossible for indigenous people to mobilize politically without seeing their organizers arrested, tortured, or assassinated. In January 1994, largely indigenous rebels seized the provincial capital and engaged in a twelve-day shooting war against the Mexican army; a war that ended with a truce, whereon the rebels hid their weapons in the jungle and embarked on a campaign of organizing autonomous, self-governing communities and have been engaging in direct action tactics against the Mexican state and local elites ever since. In other words, they used precisely as much outright violence as they had to in order to put themselves in a position not to have to use violence anymore. Aside from its more obvious disadvantages, violence is boring and predictable. Hollywood movies and similar forms of entertainment are determined to convince us otherwise, but actually it’s true. This is why historically it has always been the preferred tactic of the stupid. Violence is basically a form of active stupidity, a way of clapping one’s hands over one’s ears and refusing to be reasonable. For this very reason, it is the state’s preferred arena for dealing with any sort of real challenge to its legitimacy. But the moment one changes the lines of force so the actual conflict is not simply one of violence, we have tilted the field in our favor.

  The space for nonviolent political action in contemporary North America is much wider than 1990s Chiapas, but it has been narrowing steadily since the 1960s. When the president of Columbia University invited police onto campus to retake student-occupied buildings in 1968, this was considered a shocking breach of the tacit understanding that universities do not call in military-style force against their own students. When, as I described earlier, a handful of students attempted occupations at the New School and NYU in 2009, they were almost immediately overwhelmed by special police antiterrorism squads with high-tech weapons and equipment. Even more important, there was no outcry on the part of the media. In fact, the national media made no mention of the events at all. They weren’t even newsworthy. The use of overwhelming military force against nonviolent students inside their own university had, by that time, come to be considered perfectly normal.

  The key political question, then, has to be: how to reopen this space. This is actually one reason why the language of occupation is so important. Many have objected to the apparent military origins of the term “occupation.” True, in Europe, it’s commonplace to talk about squatters “occupying” an apartment building, or workers “occupying” a factory, but in the United States we’re much more used to hearing about “occupied France” in World War II, the “occupied territories” of the West Bank, or of U.S. forces occupying Baghdad. None are particularly inspiring examples. But in fact what we are doing is an occupation. The military analogy is appropriate. It’s not even really an analogy. We are seizing space and defending it by means of various lines of force: moral, psychological, and physical. The key is that once we do liberate this space, we always, immediately, transform it into a space of love and caring. Indeed, the power of that image of love and caring was our primary weapon: as evidenced by the fact that it took a sustained campaign on the part of the mainstream media to replace images of democracy, community, and feeding the hungry with largely concocted images of violence and sexual assault, in order to be able to justify the coordinated police attacks that were eventually able to dislodge them.

  Now let’s turn from questions of tactics to questions of strategy. Of course, as I emphasized at the beginning, the two can never really be divorced. Questions of tactics are always questions of strategy.

  But this also means one cannot rule definitively on such matters because at the moment there is no absolute consensus within the movement about what the strategic horizon ultimately is. We have on board everyone from liberals interested in driving the Democratic Party to the left so as to return to something more like New Deal–style capitalism, to anarchists who ultimately wish to dismantle the state and capitalism entirely. The very fact that they have been able to work so well together at all has been a minor miracle. At some point, difficult decisions will have to be made.

  One thing I have written about tactics makes clear that the Occupy movement is ultimately based on what in revolutionary theory is often called a dual power strategy: we are trying to create liberated territories outside of the existing political, legal, and economic order, on the principle that that order is irredeemably corrupt. It is a space that operates to what extent it is possible, outside the apparatus of government and its claims of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. But in contemporary North America, we are hardly yet in a position of declaring liberated neighborhoods or territories in which we can solve our own problems through purely democratic means. How, then, can we pursue this strategy in a way that will bring concrete benefits to the kind of people who posted their stories to “We Are the 99 Percent”?

  In part, this is a question of alliances. It is one thing to say one will not engage in an inherently corrupt system. It is quite another to say one will not even engage with those who do. The latter would mean limiting ourselves to creating tiny utopian enclaves that could have no immediate effect on anyone else’s lives. However, the moment one begins to engage with institutionally powerful supporters—unions, NGOs, political parties or party-affiliated groups, even celebrities—one runs the danger of compromising one’s own internal democracy. It started as soon as people like Roseanne Barr, Joseph Stiglitz, and Michael Moore began appearing in Zuccotti Park to offer their support. Everyone was glad to see them, but they obviously weren’t about to limit their participation to collective discussions via the People’s Microphone. Their mode was to make speeches. It was very difficult, at first, to prevent the speechifying from becoming infectious. This was a little thing, but gives a sense of the problems. This tension intensified when liberal groups like MoveOn.org, with paid, experienced, full-time employees, vertical habits, and often political and legislative agendas about which they were not always entirely forthcoming, decided to throw in their support. Again, one does not wish to refuse support when it’s critical to help expand and create tools to coordinate the movement, but there were endless challenges in ensuring that those structures of coordination remain horizontal, especially when dealing with well-meaning organizers who have never even heard of “horizontality” and may consider any meticulous concern with internal democracy a peculiar self-indulgence. Even money can be a problem. In the first month or two of the Wall Street occupation, about a half a million dollars’ worth of contributions flowed in. This money caused so many disputes and problems that many activists wished they could simply get rid of it somehow: many proposed the whole wad should be somehow spent on one giant project (an Occupy blimp?); eventually, after the evictions, almost all of it ended up being used to pay churches to put up hundreds of evictees until they could find other places to stay. The fact that the effects of money were so corrosive does not reflect an intrinsic problem with democratic process, I think, so much as the fact that activists’ every experience of dealing with money and organizations whose lifeblood is money have been suffused with completely different habits and imperatives. Yet again, it’s not as if one can avoid the world of money entirely.

  Most of these problems can be dealt with, and eventually will, by the creation of various sorts of firewalls: mental and organizational. Larger strategic questions are much stickier, but it might be helpful to throw out some examples of approaches that have been attempted elsewhere in recent years, and have proved relatively effective, so as to get a sense of what kind of directions there are to take.

  Let us imagine that a movement like Occupy does succeed in creating a network of liberated spaces: either by reestablishing the camps that were so systematically dismantled in
2011 (though it’s pretty clear that in the current situation, the government would never allow this) or by starting from a different sort of space, public buildings, for example. In either case the ultimate aim would be to create local assemblies in every town and neighborhood, as well as networks of occupied dwellings, occupied workplaces, and occupied farms that can become the foundations of an alternative economic and political system. How then could that network of liberated spaces and alternative institutions relate to the existing legal and political system?

  There are a number of potential models. None corresponds exactly to anything that is likely to happen in the United States, but they provide a way to think about the problem.

  • The Sadr City Strategy: One obvious question is how to defend these spaces, since one must expect there will be a systematic attempt to wipe them out. In the Middle East the solution is to create armed militias. While this is hardly likely to happen anytime soon in the contemporary United States (at least on the part of left-wing groups), the experience of groups like the Sadrists in Iraq is nonetheless instructive. The Sadrists are a populist Islamist movement with a mass working-class base that, even during the years of U.S. military occupation, proved remarkably successful in creating zones of self-governance in Iraqi cities and towns. One reason they were so effective is that they understood that the key to any such dual-power strategy was to begin by creating institutions that no one could possibly object to—in their case, a network of free clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers—and then gradually building up a security apparatus, and larger social infrastructure, to protect it. The next step is to try to negotiate clear, and scrupulously respected, borders between zones under one’s own control, and zones still under the control of the ostensible government.

  While brilliantly successful in creating autonomous institutions in the very teeth of foreign military occupation, the example of the Sadrists, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, which pursued a broadly similar approach, also shows that any such dual-power approach quickly encounters limits. For one thing, if one is engaging in armed resistance, even if one’s strategy is basically defensive, one’s followers will pretty much inevitably end up using violence in all sorts of other ways—and violence takes on a logic of its own. Military discipline is required, which of course limits any possibility of democratic experiment, and puts the focus on charismatic leaders, and any such movement has a tendency, as the course of least resistance, to become the political voice of some specific fairly culturally uniform group. All of these factors, along with the endless problems that follow from governing neighborhoods, make the temptation to enter formal politics eventually irresistible. After all, if one does not eschew organized violence or operate on horizontal principles, there’s no particular reason not to enter into state institutions. As a result, just about every example of such an approach in the Middle East has ultimately led to the creation of a political party.

  Obviously I’m not suggesting that any of this could be a model for a movement like Occupy, but it’s an excellent example to start from, partly because the original strategy (starting from the women’s health clinics) was really quite ingenious, but mainly because it shows that it’s always precisely the groups that do not eschew the use of guns and bombs that seem to find it easiest to end up absorbed into structures of government.

  • The San Andrés strategy: A very different approach was taken by the Zapatistas in the years immediately following their twelve-day insurrection in December 1994. As noted above, the uprising was quickly ended by a truce, and whatever its original aims, mainly served to open up a space for rebel communities to create their own autonomous institutions, and to engage in various forms of nonviolent direct action (the Zapatistas soon became famous for organizing events like “invasions” of Mexican army camps by thousands of unarmed indigenous women carrying babies).

  The Zapatistas made a decision not to enter the formal political process in Mexico, but to begin creating a different kind of political system entirely. The question remained how to formally engage with existing structures of power. The solution was to engage in formal negotiations for a peace treaty—they came to be known as the San Andrés Accords—which would, rather than compromise the newly created structures of local-level democracy, instead provide a reason to legitimate, develop, and expand them, since Zapatista negotiators (who were selected as recallable delegates by their communities) insisted that every stage of negotiations was subject to comprehensive democratic consultation, approval, and review. The negotiation process itself became, in other words, the perfect firewall. The fact that everyone knew the government was almost certainly negotiating in bad faith, without the slightest intention of enforcing the treaty, was a secondary consideration.

  It’s interesting to think about what a parallel strategy might look like for Occupy Wall Street: that is, a mode of engagement with the existing political structure that rather than compromising its directly democratic process would actually help foster and develop it. One obvious approach might be an attempt to promote one or more constitutional amendments, which has already been proposed in some quarters: for example, for eliminating money from political campaigns, or an abolition of corporate personhood. There are parallels to that, too: in Ecuador, for example, indigenous groups that mobilized to put a moderate left-of-center economist named Rafael Correa in power insisted, as their expected payback, that they play a major role in writing a new constitution. One could anticipate a lot of problems here, particularly since one is working within the confines of a constitutional structure that was, as noted in the last chapter, largely designed to prevent direct democracy, but if nothing else, it would be far easier to create firewalls in this sort of process than if one was dealing directly with elected officials.

  • The El Alto strategy: The case of Bolivia is one of the few examples I know of where the two approaches to dual power—using autonomous institutions as the base to win a role in government, and maintaining them as a directly democratic alternative completely separate from government—have been effectively combined. I call it the “El Alto strategy” after the largely indigenous city outside the capital, famous for its directly democratic institutions and traditions of direct action (popular assemblies in El Alto had, for instance, taken control of and were administering the city’s water system, among other utilities), and which is also the current home of the country’s first indigenous president, former farmers’ union leader Evo Morales. The same social movements that are largely responsible for putting Morales in power, having led a series of largely nonviolent insurrections against various predecessors, and mobilized for his election, nonetheless insist on maintaining the ability to rise up against, and similarly overthrow, him at any time. The logic is quite explicit, and often echoed by elected officials from Morales’s own party: government is not, and cannot be, a truly democratic institution. It has its own top-down logic, stretching from the demands of international capital and trade organizations from above, or the very nature of bureaucracies backed up by the power of police. Elected officials will therefore almost inevitably end up, at least in some circumstances, under enormous pressure to do the exact opposite of what their constituents elected them to do. Maintaining dual-power institutions provides a check on this, and even puts politicians like Morales in a stronger negotiating position when dealing with, say, foreign governments and corporations, or his own bureaucracy, since he can honestly claim that in certain areas his hands are tied—he has no choice but to answer to his constituents.

  Needless to say in the United States we are nowhere near this point, but it’s useful to bear in mind as one future horizon of possibility. If there is a lesson here, I think it is that it would be unwise to even consider making forays into electoral politics until we have established the principle that militant forms of direct action are legitimate and acceptable forms of political expression.

  • The Buenos Aires strategy: Another approach is not to engage directly with the political establish
ment at all, but rather, to try to strip it of all legitimacy. This might be called the Argentina model, or delegitimation approach, and it seems to be more or less what’s happening at the time of writing in Greece. It’s important to stress that this does not mean abandoning any hope of ameliorating conditions through the apparatus of the state. To the contrary: it serves as a challenge to the political class to demonstrate their relevance, and is often successful in inspiring them to make radical measures to ameliorate conditions they would never have otherwise considered.

  Essentially, the strategy is to create alternative institutions, based on horizontal principles, that have nothing to do with the government, and declare the entire political system to be absolutely corrupt, idiotic, and irrelevant to people’s actual lives, a clown show that fails even as a form of entertainment, and try to render politicians a pariah class. Hence after the economic collapse in Argentina in 2001, a popular uprising that ousted three different governments in a matter of months settled into a strategy of creating alternative institutions based on the principle of what they themselves called “horizontality”: popular assemblies to govern urban neighborhoods, recuperated factories and other workplaces (whose bosses had abandoned them), self-organized unemployed associations engaged in almost constant direct action, even, for a while, an alternative currency system.