This Op-Ed by Joshua Stephens was published in Truth-Out on June 26, 2013. Joshua is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and has been active in anti-capitalist and international solidarity movements across the last two decades. He writes on antiauthoritarian social movements for various outlets.
A little over a year ago, I found myself sitting in a newly-opened kitchen-café space in the Petralona area of Athens, sharing reflections on Occupy Wall Street with Greeks from the neighborhood’s Popular Assembly. Popular Assemblies sprang up all across the city during the 2008 uprising sparked by the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos. As the country’s economy spiraled, with international financial institutions pouring gas on the proverbial fire (a fact to which said institutions have owned up in recent weeks), the Assemblies took on functions in almost direct competition with the State, serving as a sort community self-organized triage. Social needs were administered, barter economies established, local electricians dispatched to restore power to homes that had gone dark after tax increases pegged to electricity bills made utilities unaffordable. Today, these assemblies operate medical and eye clinics, youth arts programs, low-scale agriculture, and popular education.
In recent days, people taking to the streets in various parts of Turkey have issued reports, photos, and videos of democratic assemblies staged in parks, city centers, and the like. It’s indicative of a somewhat intuitive and utterly timely shift. Protests across the country have badly damaged the State’s credibility, and by all accounts tanked the country’s financial markets, capturing the global imagination in the process. Experiments in direct democracy come, not merely as a rejection of the neoliberal democracy embodied by Erdogan, but as a prefigurative gesture; the uprising’s expansion from oppositional modes of conducting politics (protests, occupations, street clashes with arms of the State), to the construction of new modes of social organization and administration – crucibles for the cultivation of new people, even. …
To read the entire Op-Ed, click HERE.