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Title: “Gotovo je!” Author: CrimethInc. Date: May 11, 2016 Language: en Topics: Slovenia, Direct Democracy Source: https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/11/feature-gotovo-je-reflections-on-direct-democracy-in-slovenia
Cold winter night. The smells of smoke and pepper spray are mixing in
the air. From behind our backs, we hear the roaring of thousands and
thousands of throats: “They [the politicians] are all finished! We will
carry them all out!” In front of us, a burning fence, lines of riot
police, and—in the foggy distance—the ultimate symbol of democracy, a
parliamentary building. On our faces the cold breeze, beside us the
shoulders of our comrades, and in our veins—electricity. Several months
into the uprising, streets are still ours. What started as a protest
against a few “bad seeds” of democracy has opened up a massive
opportunity to think beyond the existent. For a brief moment, we have
gained control over our lives, we allow ourselves to dream the
impossible, we experiment with creating spaces of togetherness beyond
hierarchies. In every second in which we discover our weakness, we also
dare to regain our strength.
If only we knew then that it would not be (just) state violence, the
natural cycle of the movement, or the court dates, but (mostly)
democracy, that would drag us back into reality.
In winter 2012–13, a massive wave of protests swept Slovenia, a small
country in the northern Balkans. It started in the second largest city,
Maribor, a de-industrialized husk that was once the center of Slovenia’s
vanished automobile industry. The corrupt mayor had installed
speed-checking radar at every major crossroads, resulting in hundreds of
already impoverished people being charged with penalties they could not
afford to pay, for the profit of a private company. In a series of
clandestine attacks and public demonstrations, people burned the
speed-checking devices one by one, then gathered on the squares and
streets to inform the mayor by means of Molotov cocktails, rocks, and
everything else they could get hold of that he was no longer welcome in
their town. In response to the initial police repression, solidarity
protests spread around the country in a matter of a few days. They
lasted for six months.
On one hand, these protests were a reaction to the disastrous effects of
the transition from socialism to free market capitalism, which left many
people poor and humiliated. On the other hand, from the beginning, they
were clearly aimed against those who held institutional political power.
This was the biggest self-organized struggle in Slovenia since the
breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. It brought down the mayor of Maribor and
the national government—but more importantly, it opened up a space in
which it became possible to invent new forms of autonomous action and to
question representative democracy.
“Gotovo je!”
“It is finished!” A slogan from the uprising of 2012–2013, directed at
the representatives of democratic order.
Although the effects of this period cannot be reduced to the fact of
defeat, it is interesting to note how rapidly much of the radical energy
was channeled back into the existing order, and the central role that
the language of democracy played in this. The fall of the government and
the promise of a new election was the first nail in the coffin of the
struggle, as it satisfied a lot of people who then began to withdraw
from the streets. Meanwhile, a new political party on the left did its
best to monopolize the articulation of the uprising; eventually, it
emerged as a shining star in the new political order by promising more
direct democracy in the parliament—the same parliament that had been the
object of so much rage and disillusionment only weeks earlier. Finally,
in Maribor, where the rebellion started, the next mayor who was elected
came from the ranks of the uprising, from a civil society group. He
promised to revitalize democracy in Maribor and carry out economic
development, but the people who elected him were swiftly disappointed.
By 2015, he was being invested for corruption, with the City Council
calling for his resignation.
So has direct democracy contributed to the continued radicalization of
Slovenian society?
As intense as the experience of the uprising was, it was just one stage
in a long line of struggles in Slovenia that continue to this day—from
the squatting movement in the early 1990s and 2000s, through the
anti-war and anti-NATO campaigns, to student occupations, self-organized
wildcat strikes, anti-fascist struggles, and most recently, the opening
of Fortress Europe to migration along the Balkan route. Throughout all
of these struggles, many anarchists and other radicals believed that
spreading directly democratic methods was one of the key elements that
we could contribute to radicalize movements and keep them at odds with
representative democracy, hierarchical structures, and reformist
politics. It took years to realize that investing our energy in making
assemblies the organizational crux of those movements might have been a
step away from what we wanted to achieve. Today, some of us are
beginning to think about how we might redefine this tool, shifting from
the concept of direct democracy towards another framework.
This is not intended as a rejection of the assembly as an organizational
model. The assemblies often helped to bring people onto the streets and
into the struggle; they were an important tool for organizing. However,
the ultimate results were often disappointing. It was easy to blame the
way assemblies were organized and our lack of energy for participating
in them on the hostile forces preventing the movement from spreading
throughout the society. But after mastering the game of consensus,
facilitation, and all the accompanying hand signals, maybe it’s finally
time to question the concept of direct democracy itself. Maybe we could
understand those assemblies as opportunities for some other kind of
togetherness—not as a space of rule and government, but sites in which
to disperse power into our communities.
We have no universal truths to offer. These are simply the reflections
of a few people on a few years of struggle. Here is what we think we
have learned so far.
“I am a part of this because I think direct democracy is better than the
order we know now. With direct democracy, if you want something, you say
it, find friends to help you, and you do it.”
In 2011, new, localized movements of occupation were seizing the squares
all across the world. In Spain, people came out to the streets in the
movement later known as 15M; in the US, it was known as Occupy. In
Slovenia, as in many other parts of Europe, the first occupation started
out as a protest against financial capitalism on October 15, 2011.
Consequently, in Ljubljana, the movement came to be known as 15O. The
occupation of the square in front of the stock exchange lasted for six
months.
This occupation brought out into the open all the divisions in society
that are otherwise hidden. Poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, mental
health problems, the misery of everyday life under capitalism—all of
these became visible to everyone, so they could not be ignored as a
matter of personal failure any longer. Unlike in some other places,
where the central question of the Occupy movement was a demand for real
democracy, 15O was not centered (merely) on that; rather, it attacked
financialization, capitalism, precarity, austerity, total institutions,
and representational politics. No topic was too small to discuss; for
many, the camp and the assemblies became a platform to discuss if not
organize for every political activity in the city. Particularly in the
first weeks of the occupation, the camping was just one of many playful
direct actions taking place all around the city.
The assembly was the center of the occupied camp. In response to the
burden of being talked at about what ought to be done, a problem that
correlated with a lack of responsibility, participants in the movement
developed the concept of “democracy of direct action” (DDA). DDA
basically meant that whoever proposed something should also participate
in it. In that sense, DDA also contributed to an increase in autonomous
action rather than focusing on democratic decision-making processes
within the assembly. As a result, the culture that developed in the
movement was oriented towards action, mostly in the form of efforts to
communicate with the general public through various kinds of
performance.
DDA had disadvantages as well. As often happens in a variety of
structures, it (unreflectively) favored those who were articulate enough
to attract more people to their initiatives. The multiplicity of actions
carried out by a relatively small number of participants in the movement
also meant that energy was widely dispersed, efforts were often not
interlinked, and overextended comrades often struggled with burnout.
Along with the distribution of political projects among a variety of
working groups, DDA helped to create several different sites of
decision-making; yet it did not generate a space of encounter in which
people came together for mutual learning to create a meaningful force
beyond direct democracy.
The daily assemblies became focused on camp issues, and there were fewer
and fewer participants, while the monthly assemblies focused more on the
political content of the movement. Those who were involved in the
working groups but not sleeping in the camp eventually felt alienated by
it. In the end, 15O ended in exhaustion and frustration. Many were
driven into isolation and depression.
However, 15O taught us several important lessons. First, despite all the
talk about direct democracy as a positive aspect of the Occupy
movements, some participants in 15O realized very soon—from practical
experience—that the concentration of legitimacy in a single site of
decision-making was not productive. Does it make sense to understand
what was happening in the occupation in front of the stock exchange as a
directly democratic movement, when all the groundbreaking and exciting
things developed outside of consensus-based directly democratic
procedures? Perhaps if we had set out to make the question of
decentralized action central to our thinking, we could have circumvented
all the problems that resulted from focusing on the assembly as the
central space for coming together. If we hadn’t informally
institutionalized the practice of assemblies, perhaps people would have
been more capable of identifying the moment when the movement had the
potential to make a big impact, and, later, identifying that it had been
successfully marginalized. Perhaps we would have been more capable of
asking ourselves which tactics were advancing our radical agendas, and
which were contributing to self-neutralization because we were
maintaining them when we should have already shifted to another
approach.
“If they don’t meet our demands, we can always be more radical and
occupy more space in the university later. For now, let’s just show our
strength.”
Ljubljana, November 2011. On one side of town, tents have occupied the
square in front of the stock exchange for a month and a half. On the
other side of town, students are packed into one of the biggest lecture
rooms in the Faculty of Arts. The assembly has only one item on the
agenda: whether to occupy the faculty to prevent the privatization of
higher education.
Some of us arrived ready to block the production of knowledge in the
entire building, in hopes that such a radical act would open up the
space and shake up the power relations in the university. We thought it
would be better for the movement to be evicted after three days, still
ready to keep fighting, than to exhaust itself in a limited occupation
that did not disrupt the status quo of the university, let alone society
at large. Others assumed that it would be enough to occupy a few
classrooms and open negotiations with the authorities. After hours of
discussion, a few professors and student leaders persuaded the majority
of people to vote against a full blockade.
For those of us who were left in the minority—whether or not we wanted
to vote in first place—the choice was tough. We thought about whether to
go against the decision of the assembly and occupy the entire building
on our own, at the risk of alienating ourselves from the others. In the
end, we went along with the decision of the assembly. Looking back, we
should probably have acted differently.
The partial occupation lasted for a few months. At first, the university
administration was still trying to negotiate, not knowing how far the
protests might go. But they soon realized they did not need to comply
with any of the demands. The occupiers even gave up some of the
classrooms themselves, feeling that they were not capable of filling
them with their own self-organized study projects. Instead of the end of
the occupation opening a wider conflict in society or drawing more
people into the struggle, it left the student movement exhausted and
scattered, limited to negotiating with the school authorities through
the existing system of representation. There has not been any occupation
in any university in Slovenia since.
And anarchists? We tried to participate in a self-organized study
process, but mostly it felt like we were talking to ourselves. It took
months of frustration to realize that in accepting the norms of
democratic decision-making, we had failed to push the moment further,
missing the chance to open up productive conflicts—within the movement,
inside the university, and in society as a whole. At the least, we could
have started a much-needed discussion about which tactics the movement
should be using, and how to decide which tactics were legitimate. But
instead of setting our own agenda, we had accepted others’ priorities
and lost ourselves in the process. The problem was not the assembly
itself, but rather that this body was understood as the only place of
decision-making, so no action outside of it seemed legitimate—even to
us.
“By organizing assemblies, we wish to open new spaces of articulation of
common power, that will be growing as we exchange experiences,
knowledge, and opinions in order to build a common space of equality,
freedom, and solidarity.” -invitation to the first “Open Uprising
Assembly” in Ljubljana, late December 2012.
A few months after the end of 15O, the uprising started. But no one
hurried to convene assemblies. The first few weeks of activity in
Ljubljana saw a variety of decentralized actions, protests, discussions,
and meetings. When it became clear that certain organized groups within
the uprising were trying to determine and represent the movement’s
demands in order to steer the movement in a centralized and predictable
direction, other participants introduced assemblies as a tool to prevent
centralization and unification, rather than as a method for being
“directly democratic.” By gathering many different participants into one
place, the assembly created an infrastructure in which every attempt to
establish hierarchies would be visible to everyone and therefore
questioned and rejected.
From the beginning, the “Uprising Open Assembly” was positioned as only
one of several different ways of coordinating, communicating, and
building common power by exchanging experience and knowledge. The aim
was to create a space of convergence and encounter, but never to let it
become the sole place for making decisions for the uprising as a whole.
This was a space for people who wanted to do similar things to find each
other, and to discuss problematic occurrences—for instance, it was the
platform in which people attacked nationalism.
One of the biggest achievements of those assemblies was that they served
to communicate radical approaches to people who were not yet using them.
The value of a diversity of tactics gained recognition in the
assemblies; as a result of the discussions, many participants committed
themselves to solidarity with all forms of protest. During the first few
protests, some people had actively turned over demonstrators dressed in
black to the police; towards the end of the uprising, when a few
protesters were arrested, hundreds of people ran to the police station
and blocked it until they were released.
Although the uprising maintained its intensity for half a year, only a
few assemblies took place in Ljubljana during that period. Based on our
negative experiences from the two preceding movements, we felt that if
the idea was for the assembly to be a tool for the movement rather than
an end in itself, it was important to know when to drop it. When fewer
people were showing up on the streets, it became obvious that we needed
to move on, not to try to recreate a situation that had already passed.
At the point when the assemblies could have become just a space of
nostalgic behavior, we refused to call for another; instead, we started
thinking about where a new point of conflict might emerge, and how to
organize around it.
Maribor had a different experience. Neighborhood assemblies covering
roughly half of the city are still happening there today, in 2016, more
than three years after the end of uprising. They mostly focus on
self-organizing daily life in different city neighborhoods. Some
speculate that the assemblies continued in Maribor but not in Ljubljana
because there was a greater need for practical self-organization in a
city laid waste by de-industrialization. Others have argued that the
assemblies have continued in Maribor because one of the groups there
made it a priority to maintain them as their primary project. The open
question here is whether such assemblies can produce radical content—or
is it enough that they are using a supposedly radical form? What if the
people participating in the neighborhood assemblies use them to pursue
reactionary goals? Does it make sense to promote radical values along
with the tactic of assembly? Is it enough to open up space?
In the uprising, despite going against and beyond the concepts of direct
democracy in our practices, we were still using that term to describe
many of our actions. This became a problem—not so much in the assemblies
themselves, but in connection with other outcomes of the uprising. While
it seemed that anarchists and anti-authoritarian ideas were at the
forefront of the diverse actions on the ground, the representation of
the uprising to the public fell to people who later formed a political
party along the lines of Syriza, promising more direct democracy in the
parliament and a productive relationship with social movements. Would
they have been able to pull this off if we had not helped promote the
language of direct democracy?
When the uprising was dying, people wondered how to transmit the
connections we’d built in the streets into our everyday lives. In one of
the assemblies in Ljubljana, people formed a working group to organize
in the neighborhoods, hoping to radicalize people there by setting up a
structure in which people could self-organize.
We never wanted to be the professional organizers of the resistance, so
we only organized in the neighborhoods where we lived; likewise, we
intended to rotate roles as much as possible. During the peak of the
uprising, when the frequency of actions was so overwhelming that it was
hard to keep track of them all, it had been easy enough to utilize the
assembly as a tool without it becoming an end in itself. This became
much harder when there was no one on the streets and the assemblies were
the only form of action in the neighborhoods. Despite good turnouts at
the neighborhood assemblies, we soon realized that people were relying
on us to organize and facilitate the meetings. All of the working groups
wanted us to be involved, to such an extent that we felt that it was no
longer a self-organized process. We realized that it was better not to
have assemblies at all than to have them organized by a few. We didn’t
want to accept a position of authority in this way.
For the city government, however, this was not an obstacle. When we
heard that a neighborhood where we were not organizing had also started
to hold assemblies, at first we thought that we were finally seeing
authentic self-organization. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an
intervention orchestrated by the city government through an NGO. They
were financing people to work on the project of “self-organization.” The
city government had coopted the framework of direct democracy, using it
as a tool to neutralize any potential for dissent that might emerge from
that neighborhood.
When the state is sponsoring direct democracy, we have to ask ourselves
how we could prevent this kind of cooptation. Is it a good idea to make
movements depend on a tool that is so easily turned against them? What
if the problem is not that our assemblies need to be improved, but that
there is nothing inherent in direct democracy that differentiates it
from the state? When people began to succeed in overthrowing monarchies,
the state persisted through the introduction of representative
democracy. All its institutions and functions remain intact, with the
sole difference that now they are administered by elected
representatives rather than hereditary sovereigns. Could direct
democracy be a new version of this compromise, once again preserving the
uneven distribution of power while giving us the illusion of
self-determination?
And in this situation, where we still need to create spaces of
encounter, opportunities to engage in open discussion and realize our
full potential through our intersections with one another—will the
assembly continue to play a part in this process? Probably. But we may
have to approach it differently, not understanding it as a tool of
direct democracy but rather as a platform for connecting and
coordinating autonomous actions and groups. The most recent example of
this as of mid–2016 is the Anti-Racist Front, a space for individuals
and groups active in migrant struggles.
This is our conclusion coming out of several years of experimentation
with direct democracy in Slovenia: we are tentatively retaining the
forms, but we need to ditch the discourse.