Mobilizing democracy

Tuesday morning’s news of police evicting people from Zuccotti Park did not surprise me. It was inevitable. No assembly movement anywhere in the world this last year managed to evade police action. The Police Department’s action, similar to others in American cities, demonstrates that OWS is a real movement across the country. It’s real because the problems it addresses are real, because real people, independent of established political bodies, have decided to confront the inequities of established power on the most tangible reality the public sphere offers: the street.

Much can be learned from this movement, which is now of international character. OWS was inspired by similar actions in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, and Greece. Occupied public sites of varied size and capacity now number over 2,600 worldwide. Whatever their specific differences, all assembly movements are characterized by the coming together of people representing themselves, without any specific demands tied to political self-interest except to declare their withdrawal of consent to established power.

Their logic is simple, which is why it’s so brutally real: Established power is in the hands of the very rich who are also very few—against them stand the poor, and they are many. The sheer numbers of the powerless poor constitute a potential power whose actuality is unimaginable to those in control. Unimaginable but not altogether unreal, which is why the rich and few unleash very real police forces against the many daring to protest lest their numbers grow more.

However, history teaches us that violent coercion against enraged people is rarely victorious when the people are already on their way toward withdrawing their consent to existing power structures.

That’s why the power of states is always proportional to the degree to which they can continue to manufacture consent, and modern regimes, especially under the sign of democracy, have become exceedingly efficient in that respect.

Capitalism and democracy, however, contrary to what passes for common sense, are quintessentially incompatible. And when the economic system of extracting wealth is unable to sustain itself—and this is where the debt-driven economy in most “Western democracies” today has gone—real democratic mobilization of people demanding due justice exposes this intrinsic contradiction, and the presumed alliance between capitalism and democracy collapses.

Today’s assembly movements are a tangible demonstration of people’s profound democratic desire, not only in what they stand for but in how they stand—they stand together, united by their condition, demanding what seems impossible—the alteration of an entire system of conducting politics and economics, government and legislation, law and justice. What is consistently remarkable in all assembly movement occasions, regardless of social-historical specifics, is that people come to realize that together they learn anew what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be free, what it means to stand together with another person you would not otherwise know—what it means to act together, even if the final goal is yet unclear, even if the demand is non-instrumental.

Assembly movements have shown themselves to be extraordinary schools in the making—the vicious destruction of the Zuccotti Park library is a case in point—where people educate themselves on how to move democracy beyond the electoral ritual. Elections may signal democracy’s essence but are degraded and incapacitated when elected representatives are driven and paid for by the economic interests of the powerful few. Whatever happens to OWS as a group of citizens occupying a site, it is very unlikely that the movement can be turned back as long as the system continues on its unsustainable ways. Wall Street will never be the same. Its symbolic content has been altered, and in its name a new political reality is now open, even if its trajectory and outcome remain unknown.

The author is a professor of classics and director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.