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How Social Movements Can Save Democracy. Donatella della PortaЧитать онлайн книгу.

How Social Movements Can Save Democracy - Donatella della Porta


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internal democracy. Self-reflexive actors, they experiment with new ideas of democracy, which are then the basis of proposed changes in democratic governance.

      Triggered by dissatisfaction with centralized and bureaucratic representative democracy, since the 1970s so-called new social movements have pushed for various forms of participation in decision-making, spreading through a sort of ‘contagion from below’ (Rohrschneider 1993). Emerging trends within social movements that mobilized in the wave of protest against the financial crisis and for democratization illustrate this form of democratic innovation. Recently, the Global Justice Movement as well as anti-austerity protests have produced knowledge about direct democratic processes (Cox 2014, 965). In the beginning of the new millennium, with their reflexive practices inspired by Zapatistas and the building of deliberative spaces, the Global Justice Movement paid specific attention to knowledge production. More recently in the 2010s, those who protested in Tahrir, Porta del Sol, Syntagma Square or Zuccotti Park, and later in Gezi Park or Place de la République, have both criticized existing representative democracy as deeply corrupted and experimented with different models of democracy, stressing especially participatory and deliberative qualities. As a protest repertoire and organizational form, the acampadas – long-term camps in squatted public spaces – have been seen as the incarnation of a democratic experiment that has been adopted and adapted in different contexts. Aiming at participation and deliberation, the acampadas developed from previous practices of internal democracy, such as social forums, in the attempt to learn from their limits and try to address them (della Porta 2015b). In these activities, conceptions of participation from below, cherished by progressive social movements, have in fact been combined with a special attention to the creation of egalitarian and inclusive public spheres (della Porta 2013). With their emphasis on consensus, the acampadas privileged the participation of lay persons – the citizens, the members of the community – mobilized as individuals rather than members of associations of various types (Juris 2012), building on their personal experience and knowledge.

      In all these activities, there were attempts at balancing the principle of direct democracy with a search for consensus. In the camps, consensual decision-making was built upon the practices devised by the horizontal wing in the Global Justice Movement (della Porta 2009), as collective thought was expected to emerge through inclusivity and respect for the opinions of all, even in large assemblies involving often hundreds of thousands of people. A consensual, horizontal decision-making process was based on the continuous formation of small groups, which then reconvened in the larger assemblies. Deliberation through consensus was in general seen as an instrument against bureaucratization, but also against the routinization of the assembly, and a way to construct a community (Graeber 2012, 23). So, the acampadas have been sites of contention, but also of exchange of information, reciprocal learning, individual socialization and knowledge building. Their ultimate goal was building a community through the personal knowledge of the participants and their direct experiences, including the expression of strong emotions. So, the occupied free spaces had to develop ‘possible utopias’, by attracting the attention of the media and inspiring participation, but also by ‘providing a space for grassroots participatory democracy; ritual and community building, strategizing and action planning, public education and prefiguring alternative worlds that embody movement visions’, as well as networking and coordinating (Juris 2012, 268). Camps were thus considered as places not only for talking and listening, but also for the building of collective identities, happening through the development of strong emotions and longer-lasting relations. Open public spaces were to create intense ties and sharing of a common belonging through encounters among diverse people. Camps therefore had to show opposition but also to prefigure new relations, experimenting with another form of democracy.


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