They Can't Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

by David Harvey (Foreword), Marina Sitrin (Author), Dario Azzellini (Author)

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Paperback
2014
$11.79

Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agenda - to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today. Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, as well as an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

Synopsis

Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agenda - to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today. Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, as well as an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 16 Jun 2014
ISBN 10: 1781680973
ISBN 13: 9781781680971

Media Reviews

This book is riveting, moving, and profoundly important for those who want to know what revolution in our time might look like. - Rebecca Solnit, on Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism The most substantial and comprehensive work on workers' control and self-management today. - Gary Younge, on Dario Azzellini's Ours to Master and to Own The movements documented in this volume succeeded in shutting cities down through tremendous shows of force. And when you shut down a city, you can actually stop capital accumulation - Until we start building a truly democratic society, we will continue to see our good ideas co-opted by capital. - from the foreword by David Harvey

Author Bio

DARIO AZZELLINI is a lecturer at the Institute for Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University in Austria. He has published several books, among them The Business of War, about the privatization of military services. He edited, with Immanuel Ness, Ours to Master and to Own. His recent film documentary Comuna Under Construction examines worker councils in Venezuela. MARINA SITRIN was a key member of the Occupy Wall Street movement and is a postdoctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center's Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, as well as editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and coeditor of the forthcoming Insurgent Democracies: Latin America's New Powers.