They Can’t Represent Us!:
Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

They Can’t Represent Us! describes how the new global movements are puttingforward a radical conception of democracy, often using the voices of the movement participants themselves. Mass movements in disparate places such as Greece, Spain, Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.

Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Greece, Venezuela, Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, as well as an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

About the Authors

Marina Sitrin is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She holds a PhD in Global Sociology and JD in International Women’s Human Rights. She is the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (AK Press, 2006) Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed Books: 2012). Her work focuses on social movements and justice, specifically looking at new forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics and new affective social relationships.

Dario Azzelini is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University (Linz, Austria), a writer and documentary film director. He holds PhDs in political science and sociology. His research and writing focuses on social transformation, migration and racism, self administration, workers control and extensive case studies in Latin America. He serves as Associate Editor for WorkingUSA and for Cuadernos de Marte (University of Buenos Aires).
 He has published several books, essays and documentaries about social movements, privatization of military services, migration and racism, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela.

This event is sponsored by the Committee on Globalization and Social Change and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, Graduate Center, CUNY