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Occupiers' Style a Useful Lesson in Participatory Democracy

As published in the Ottawa Citizen: November 13, 2011.

While the Occupiers may not form the next government, their open and consultative organizational style offers us a useful lesson in genuine participatory democracy; sometimes called anarcho-syndicalism. Most detractors condemn the Occupiers’ ostensible failure to provide “solutions” and fault them for rejecting the formal mechanisms of governance. Why should they embrace our mainly symbolic parliament when most of the important decisions are made outside the visible structures of government? Besides, the Occupiers are the first ripple of a coming wave of social activism dedicated not to stealing money from “successful” people but to ending corporate and/or union domination of the political process.

It has been posited that the Occupiers are a vocal minority who ignore the wishes of the silent majority who seem content with the complacency of consumerism and allow themselves to be governed by people who prefer that working people vote every few years, pay their taxes, fight useless wars and otherwise bow their heads in meek submission to co-opted politicians and backroom lobbyists like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Now there is a vocal minority in action.