OWS and the Recovery of Democracy

Like a whole lot of other people, I am trying to get a handle on Occupy Wall Street. It’s obvious that this is a very special movement, but I am trying to figure out what makes it so special. The one-month-old movement is being accused of being unclear, directionless, fragmented, vague, fuzzy. Indeed, it is not made up of disciplined cadres marching with mass-produced banners. It does not have a Central Committee, and though it is an expression of what one Zuccotti Park woman veteran calls an Economic Civil Rights Movement, it stays away from specific demands. These are there, too, but not easy to list or prioritize. It is not just about jobs, not only about mounting poverty, or student debts that now total more than all our credit-card debts; it is not only about corruptibility of the political system, and not only about accountability of the banks and bankers. It is – not unlike the Civil Rights Movement – about something much more fundamental. And I think it has something to do with the way we are locked in to rigid ways of thinking and talking about democracy.

There is nothing new in the observation that we are often imprisoned by language. Language is a conventional system of signs, and if we want to communicate we have to rely on its conventional usage. But there are dimensions and usages of language that, when tweaked a bit, have the capacity either to keep us captive, or to bring in some fresh air, helping us breathe. That we are captives of language, confined within a language that does not serve us any more, is conveyed vividly by Susan George when she says that “cost recovery” is the polite way of saying “make families pay to educate their children.” Indeed, we hear it all the time: education is a very good investment. On the other hand, a pleasantly surprising example of a more refreshing linguistic game comes from Occupy Wall Street: “Yes we camp!”

Something has happened to our thinking and talking about democracy, and we academics are not without guilt here. We have put too much trust in the kind of formal democracy, procedural democracy, that our political science has tended to prefer, as it brackets sentiments and makes it easier to operationalize and easier to build a “legitimate” academic discipline around. And, indeed, one ought to be wary of what overly emotional politics may lead to. But one has to see that there are vital dimensions of democracy that in the process have been overlooked by social scientists and thus also by policy makers, a situation that can lead to inaccurate policy guidelines and often to disastrous policy decisions.

With their focus on various aspects of formal democracy, academics have facilitated the easy prescriptions for democracy that are handy for the policy experts. And American policy experts are known for peddling an easy, “one size fits all” prescription for young or aspiring democracies: you just have to fulfill 3 conditions: have free elections, a free-market economy, and civil society.

Well, these requirements may very well bring about parodies of democracy, as when democratic elections result in anti-democratic regimes like those of Putin or Chavez; or when globalized free markets bring about staggering impoverishment, unashamed, blatant economic exploitation, or bloody civil wars over resources; or when civil society is a masquerade of so-called non-governmental organizations that in practice serve as a facade for the government or are  maintained by capricious foreign donors and carry out projects that fit their ever-changing guidelines.

And what if in old democracies like ours, our political rights, the right to elect our representatives to Congress, are hostage to forces we actually have little control over, such as campaign funding? I hate to think it’s true, but I recently read that the cost of electing our next president will be over one billion dollars for each candidate! So is democracy failing us?

OWS, with its emphasis on consensual decision-making, has raised many hopes and expectations. I realize there are many ways of understanding it. I see it as a movement to recover the meaning of democracy by searching beyond the models that delineate the procedural mechanics of it, which often collapse into a minimalist view of democracy as an institutional arrangement for competing interest groups with their eye on the people’s votes. Their return to consensus is the return — at least in part — to the original meaning of the word consensus, “feeling with.” Even “participatory democracy” does not seem to grasp it for me anymore. The civic exercise of direct democracy through the “General Assembly” taking place in Zuccotti Park, and spreading to other places, arises from a strong sense of indeed being born free and equal in dignity and rights and of acting towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood — that sense which is so well captured in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Again, this movement is not about serving different interests groups. It is about something else, and it is unprecedented. It is not about a change of government or even of the system. It is about 99% of the people losing trust in the workings of democracy, and therefore losing hope in the sense of their lives, and in the sense of the lives of their children. A not easily measurable goal, and yes, we do not have a language for it. We do not know how to name it. But I do think that it is asking for a fundamental change on a grand scale that would make possible the recovery of our lost capacity for the enacting of democracy.

Certain lost dimensions of democracy– described variously as deliberative, agonistic, or performative — represent a kind of political engagement — critical for any democracy — in which the key identity of its actors is that of citizens, and in which the good of society at large, and not that of a narrow interest group, is at stake. And the OWS movement gets it! Democracy, after all, is also about equality of opportunity and the promise of a better life.

The goals of Occupy Wall Street inevitably appear fuzzy because the protesters are trying to expose the many ways in which something as intangible and subtle as human dignity is being damaged, and the way humiliation is going unnoticed. The assemblies are a cry against the kind of language and the kind of politics — with its political formulas, processes, and mechanisms — that in effect disregard the citizens and their personhood, along with the related notions of agency, equality and liberty. This remarkable movement can help us to recover democracy’s lost treasures.