Occupy Wall Street as a fight for "real democracy"

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
10 October 2011

Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many
people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic
injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political
grievances and aspirations.

As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the
country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and
economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the
protest against the lack---or failure---of political representation.

It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or
that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether
the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This
protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic
constituent process.

The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we
situate it alongside the other "encampments" of the past year. Together, they
form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are
explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central
squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's
Tahrir Square earlier last spring.

To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel
events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the
occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for
economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of
course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather
each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into
their own situation.

                                     * * *

In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the
protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was
obvious. The demand that "Mubarak must go" proved powerful enough to encompass
all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid's Puerta del Sol and