Occupy Democracy

At 11 p.m. on Day 1 of Occupons Montreal, the camp already looked like a little village. There were about 100 tents and 400 or so campers. Above our heads was a patchwork of tarps that protected the campers from the rains that were driving down. The village already had its institutions: there was a kitchen, a free store, a library and an information booth.
Some people were playing bongos, djembes and other percussion instruments. Others yelled for the drummers to stop. "It's 11 p.m.," they said. "The police said we could stay here, but only if we stopped making noise at 11 p.m." This got some of the drummers riled up. "Are we going to just go along with what the police says? Aren't we here to protest all that shit?" The argument started to escalate, and it seemed for a minute that this single, unified camp would already split into two.
One protester grabbed the megaphone and addressed the crowd. "We can't just separate into two camps. If even one person makes noise, everyone may get kicked out and not be able to come back. We have to come to a consensus on what to do."
There were scattered nods and cheers in the crowd. A speaker then proposed that they stop making noise everyday at 11 p.m., and invited people to speak for and against the proposal. One by one, the megaphone was passed to different speakers, who expressed diverse arguments, but there was one speaker who made a statement that almost no one could contest: "We want to stay here. What's more important, making noise after 11, or being able to stay here for awhile and get the message out?"
Instead of clapping and cheering, the people lifted up their palms and wiggled them back and forth, a gesture that signifies assent. After that, the crowd hushed, the bongoes stopped playing, and people quietly went to bed. The 11 p.m. quiet time rule was one of the first of many decisions that Occupons Montreal made through what is called "direct democracy", the decision-making model of choice for Occupy camps world-wide.
The typical, now cliché, criticism of the Occupy movement is that the occupiers cannot agree on what their demands are. It is a little-known fact that when the movement was conceived, by Adbusters magazine, there was "one simple demand" – that Obama hire "a presidential commission to separate money from politics" (Adbusters).
Somehow, that "one simple demand" multiplied on the march to Wall Street. Protesters held aloft picket signs calling for everything from closing down central banks to funding social programs to ending foreign wars. Although this flurry of issues certainly dilutes the message, the issues we currently face have become so intertwined that it is almost impossible to talk about them independently. As it stands now, it is difficult, if not impossible, to use politics to get money out of politics, because politicians rely on money from the very people and institutions who have corrupted the system.
While the Occupiers do not have a clear, unitary demand, they do share core values and those values can easily be named – equitable distribution of wealth, accountability for financial institutions, and care for the planet. When it comes to ideals, there clearly is wide agreement.
But do the occupiers have a practical system in mind that will redress the world's ills? Well, does anyone? Even if anyone did, it is problematic to establish a system from the top down. Many top-down attempts at system change have failed catastrophically: Take the rise and fall of of the USSR as a case in point. The occupiers may be more idealistic than practical, but that is not necessarily a disadvantage. After all, if a society focuses on shared ideals, rather than a specific system it adopts to serve those ideals, then the society becomes less susceptible to rigid dogmatism that prevents systems from adapting, changing and breathing.
If we ever do create a society that lives up to the Occupier's ideals, I don't think it will be based on a single, unitary system, but a "system of systems," each developed by trial and error and fine-tuned to fill specific niches, whether they be at the local, national or global level. There would be redundancy, certainly, but in such a network, no system would be "too big to fail" and no system so small that it could not rise to the rescue if failure did occur. Such a network of systems would look a lot like – well – life.
If we are to build an equitable society that is sustainable, both economically and ecologically, this can only begin, as life did, with small-scale experiments. In the end, any concrete demands that the Occupy Movement comes up with may not be nearly so significant as the process by which they arrive at those demands. The message is in the medium. Whether deciding to ditch central banks or stop making noise at 11 p.m., the occupiers know they must decide together. They are sharing a finite piece of grass together, and if they are to stay there for the long haul, then they have come to an agreement that works for everyone.