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organization over large distances for the contemporary social movements, direct democracy is
the sin qua non of decision-making when actors share a common space. Such a tendency is not
only evident in the recent
occupation movements, but more broadly as well. National Indigenous
Congress, associated with the well-known and influential Zapatista Movement in Chiapas,
Mexico, for example, has made a similar type of distinction. They have suggested the following
maxim: “Act in assembly when together, act in network when apart” (Notes from Nowhere 2003,
64). There is, no doubt, much that is desirable about a directly democratic assembly in which
people deliberate and decide.
My argument is
not
that there is no role for assemblies. A radical
democratic politics will always, and should always, include people sitting down together and
talking. I argue that it is possible to apply the logic of networks not only to organizations across
large geographic spaces, but even to the relatively small and shared space of the individual
occupation. Networks can function as a desirable supplement to assemblies and as a desirable
alternative to
the model of a single, general assembly. Thus, I position “network democracy” as
an alternative to “direct democracy.”
From both direct participation and observation, I think that one of the lessons that came
out of the Occupy and
Indignados
movements was about the limits of the general assembly, the
traditional model of direct democracy. I focus on two key problems that emerged: size and
consensus. First, the general assembly quickly became insufficiently democratic because they
became too large for most people to truly be participants in them. This was a realization that
came, perhaps surprisingly, as a result of the movement’s very success and broad appeal: many
people wanted to be part of it. Once the
assembly gets big enough, it becomes a quite
cumbersome process and, more importantly, doesn’t actually enable meaningful participation in
power. Representation becomes inevitable. Consider Barber’s (1984, 307) proposal for “strong
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democracy,” built on a national system of neighborhood assemblies consisting of between one
and five thousand citizens each. Plotke (1997, 25) engages in a thought-experiment of carrying
out Barber’s proposal for neighborhood assemblies in order to show how quickly,
and inevitably,
direct democracy becomes representative democracy.
Two problems immediately arise, probably with enough force to stop the project
as direct democracy. One is the problem of attendance. In the deliberative stage,
consider that most people prefer to attend. But circumstances make a number of
people unable to do so: illness, work schedules, responsibility for children. Others
are ambivalent – students who prefer to study, artists who want to complete their
day’s
work in the evening, and so forth. In direct democracy, everyone needs to
attend. Could this be done without coercion for a sequence of meetings?
The second problem arises if time scarcity were somehow managed and sufficient
resources were expended to allow everyone to attend. At this meeting of (say) one
thousand people, who gets to talk first? And last? Imagine an open floor at one of
the first meetings, when an agenda for deliberation is shaped. Presume a long
evening meeting of 2.5 hours. Interventions average three minutes,
including
applause and pauses between speakers. Fifty speakers get the floor. (The meeting
has conversational elements, so there are forty separate speakers and ten people
speak twice.)
Are the other 960 members of the assembly participants or highly interested
spectators at a political event? If “direct” means more than being physically
present, in what sense would this 96% of the assembly be engaged in strong or
direct democracy? Barber’s critique of representation would surely apply to the
relation between the 4% of the room with a voice and the 96% with eyes and ears
only (
ibid
. 25-26)
I witnessed this process occur in the admittedly less formal
assemblies of Occupy Denver, and I
am certainly not alone in this sentiment. “By the fourth or fifth day of the occupation in
Barcelona [as part of the
Indignados
movement], it became apparent in practice what we [and
Plotke] had already argued in theory: that direct democracy recreates representative democracy”
(Crimethinc 2011). Direct democracy, given even moderate participation in a city-wide general
assembly, becomes representative democracy anew. There is quickly a division between
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