The Autonomous Roots of the Real Democracy Movement

From Tahrir to Wall Street, the year 2011 witnessed an unprecedented wave of protest wash across the world. While differences between local contexts remain plentiful, many of these movements appear to share two key elements in common: a sense of indignation with the subversion of democratic processes by unresponsive representatives and powerful market forces; and an emphasis on autonomous self-organization and direct-democratic decision-making. We refer to this emerging transnational movement as the Real Democracy Movement (RDM). What are the ideological roots of the RDM? Do its core ideas and practices have any historical antecedents? In this paper, we look at the RDM's ideational and organizational origins, particularly its rejection of representative institutions and its embrace of direct democracy. Building on extensive participant observation and informal semi-structured interviews with activists in Athens, Madrid, Chiapas and Buenos Aires, we observe notable similarities between the aims and organizational models of the RDM and those of the Zapatista and Piquetero movements that preceded them -- as well as the Global Justice Movement more generally. In turn, we trace the ideas and practices of this broader movement family back to the autonomist and anarchist traditions. Finally, we argue that the focus on autonomy of the RDM is a self-conscious and deliberate response to the crisis of representation wrought by the the process of neoliberal globalization. As the fiscal and monetary policy autonomy of nation states has become ever-more constrained -- boosting the structural power of market forces and limiting elected representatives in their willingness and ability to guarantee social goals -- disenchanted electorates increasingly reject state-oriented modes of engagement in favor of autonomous self-organization. By prefiguratively counterposing their own model of democracy to the subverted system of representation, participants have come to define the RDM as a "lesson in democracy" to activists and authorities alike.