From Protest to Popular Power.

• Author: Milstein, Cindy
• Position: Moving from demonstrations to gaining true democratic power

"Direct action gets the goods," proclaimed the Industrial Workers of the World nearly a century ago. And in the short time since Seattle, this has certainly proven to be the case. Indeed, "the goods" reaped by the new direct action movement here in North America have included creating doubt as to the scope and nature of globalization, shedding light on the nearly unknown workings of international trade and finance bodies, and making anarchism and anticapitalism almost household words. As if that weren't enough, we find ourselves on the streets of twenty-first-century metropolises demonstrating our power to resist in a way that models the good society we envision: a truly democratic one.

But is this really what democracy looks like?

Attempts to "reclaim the streets" do provide momentary spaces in which to school ourselves in direct democracy. Through affinity group and spokescouncil structures, we can in the best of cases proactively set the agenda, carefully deliberate together over questions, and come to decisions that strive to take everyone's needs and desires into account. Substantive discussion replaces checking boxes on a ballot; face-to-face participation replaces handing over our lives to so-called representatives; nuanced and reasoned solutions replace lesser-of-two-(or-three-) evils' thinking.

Yet direct actions leave power for power's sake, like the very pavement beneath our feet, unchanged. And the critical question underlying episodic "street democracy" lingers: How can everyone--not just a counterculture or this protest movement-- come together to make decisions that affect society as a whole in participatory, mutualistic, and ethical ways?

This is, in essence, a question of power: who has it, how it is used, and to what ends. To varying degrees, we all know the answer in relation to current institutions and systems. We can generally explain what we are against. We often can't express, especially in any coherent and utopian manner, what we are for. Even as we prefigure a way of making power horizontal, equitable, and an essential part of a freer society, we ignore the reconstructive vision that a directly democratic process holds up right in front of our noses.

What the movement forgets is the promise implicit in its own structure: that power not only needs to be contested; it must also be constituted anew in liberatory and egalitarian forms. This entails taking the movement's directly democratic process seriously--not simply...