Representative Democracy Movements

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Representative democracy has been the backbone of The United States since it was founded as a country in 1776. Many other countries used or adopted the ways of governing that coincide with representative democracy such as Spain, Argentina, Greece and Venezuela. Hierarchy is also another believed fundamental aspect on how a country should be run. Movements have begun around the world to resist representative democracy and hierarchy, which established a movement of creation among individuals. The movements discuss themes such as horizontalism, recuperated workplaces, auto-gestion, self-organization and autonomy. In the book, They Can’t Represent Us, by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini, they do an exceptional job explaining the movements within …show more content…
Representative democracy has never worked, it has only been an illusion. There is no way for predominately white, wealthy group of males to represent a country when they have never lived like 99% of the country. The movements discussed stemmed from the realization of this fact. Most people that participated in these movements were not previously politically active. The first theme discussed is horizontalism, which is “an open-ended social process, a positive act of seeking, rather than a final end” (Sitrin and Azzellini, 17). An example of horizontalism would be the general assemblies because everyone had the equal right to speak and come to a conclusion for a topic. The next themes are recuperation and auto-gestion, which basically means individuals believe that self-organization, self-management and equality in the workplace should be equal to abolish workplace hierarchies. Argentina’s Recuperated Workplace Movement has intertwined with other recuperation movements around the world. Their movement inspired Greece to take over their workplace and self-organize. The Occupy! (US) movement members even stated, “What we were seeing happening in Greece and Spain and …show more content…
If they knew the individual well, they could have already known what response the anthropologist was looking for when conducting their research. Other than that aspect, I do believe they tied each of the countries movements’ together well because they quoted individuals on how Greece and Spain inspired them or how Argentina inspired Greece. Movements adopted ideas from other movements that worked well, for example, the “People’s Mic”. The People’s Mic reminds me of an extreme version of the game telephone. It is a large scale human chain of communication where each person repeats the message to the following person. I believe this is good in theory and it seemed to have worked well according to the information provided, but information could be misconstrued in a large mass of people repeating the message multiple
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