Zuccotti Park and Participatory Democracy

By Raanan Geberer Originally Publshed in Brooklyn Daily Eagle NEW YORK — The other day, I took a short trip to Zuccotti Park, the headquarters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has so many people up in arms. One of the first things that strikes one is how small the demonstration really is. The area it occupies, if one were to compare it to Brooklyn, is comparable to the area of Cadman Plaza Park north of the War Memorial — not even the entire park. But within the park, there were lots of people, mainly young people. Some were camping, some were giving out material, some were merely curiosity seekers. Being a veteran of many mass demonstrations during the 1970s, one difference is how democratic the current protest is. Major decisions among the group members are resolved by a “general assembly.” In contrast, during the ’70s, decisions were made from the top down by “steering committees.” Also, during the ’60s and ’70s, highly organized, ideological (and I would say elitist) Leninist groups like the Socialist Workers Party and the Progressive Labor Party, who were admirers of totalitarian societies, put all their energy into dominating and manipulating any protest groups that formed spontaneously. Here, in contrast, most of the demonstrators did not have any kind of an “agenda.” Indeed, many of today’s far-left groups, like international A.N.S.W.E.R., were nowhere to be seen at Zuccotti Park (although others, like the Industrial Workers of the World, were there). All the protesters know is that something is wrong with this country, and that the deck is stacked against them. The majority of them are college graduates who have been unable to find jobs or housing. If anything, the gathering was oriented toward what used to be called participatory democracy. One young man whom I spoke to told me that the members didn’t know enough to make any “demands” on the larger society. Rather, he said, the demonstrators would spend their time talking to each other, debating issues and trying to discover any common ground. Only after this would they formulate a platform. It was a true marketplace of ideas, with anyone and everyone represented, from prisoners’ rights groups to a young lady who protested the use of temps as “permanent workers,” but without the benefits. Side by side were a member of the Green Party, some evangelical Christians, a few Hasidim and even a representative of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. There were some who praised Obama and others who felt that there was no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. All of them co-existed without the bitter, back-and-forth insults that were typical of the 1960s and ’70s movements. No one called the police “fascist pigs” — instead, they called on the cops to join them. And in the process, many underlying assumptions of American life were questioned, at last. One young man held up a placard saying, “Corporations are not democracies.” When I asked him about yearly shareholders’ meetings, he compared them to the “legislative bodies” of the former Soviet Union, which basically acted as a rubber stamp for high party officials. I had to agree. Another table served as the “people’s library,” where people donated books and others borrowed them. Curiously, one saw few artifacts of the electronic age — smart phones, iPads, etc. What one saw in Zuccotti Park was participatory democracy, the type that Tom Hayden and company wrote about in the Port Huron Statement in 1960. There have been brief times when this type of democracy has flourished — during the Paris Commune in 1871, during the early days of the soviets in Russia before they were compromised by the Bolshevik bureaucrats, during the sit-down strikes in the U.S. during the 1930s, during the brief rule of the anarchists in Barcelona in the 1930s — and, now, in Zuccotti Park.