By JAMES MILLER ( professor of politics at the New School for Social Research, is the author of “Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.” )

THE activists of Occupy Wall Street have already scored a stunning — and I think welcome — success.
A motley group of anarchists, avowed revolutionaries and young people dedicated to pragmatic liberal reform has already transformed the political conversation. They have compelled the media to pay fresh attention to voices on the left. And despite a lack of explicit demands, the movement obviously embodies an alternative vision of a new world that is, in the words of one participant, “participatory and democratic to the core.”
In the process, the activists have resurrected a defining aspect of the New Left of the 1960s: an overriding commitment to participatory democracy, to making decisions by deliberation and consensus and not through elected representatives. Sooner or later, Occupy Wall Street will have to grapple with the practical problems and limits of that ideal.
The first and perhaps most obvious problem is scale. It is one thing to create a participatory community of 500 or even 1,000 — or even a democracy of 40,000 direct participants, as Athenians did in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. But it is quite another thing to sustain direct, participatory interaction in large and complex societies on the scale of the United States. Even worse, many of the concerns the protesters have highlighted — about unemployment and global warming, for instance — arise from factors that can be tackled only by new forms of international cooperation.
Formulating institutions and policies may seem boring and dull in comparison with the carnivalesque intensity of marches, protests and occupations. After the “whole world is watching” showdown between police officers and protesters in Chicago in August 1968, advocates of participatory democracy inside the New Left heaped scorn on the dreary compromises involved in electoral politics — and thus inadvertently helped Richard M. Nixon defeat Hubert H. Humphrey in that fall’s presidential election.
But in some ways the most insidious and intractable paradox of participatory democracy is generated by the unrelenting demand for consensus that pursues its aims through polarizing protest.
The paradox unfolds as follows. The success of a polarizing movement hinges on obtaining publicity and attention from outsiders. The surest way to obtain such publicity is through demonstrations that prompt a disproportionate and unjust response from the authorities. Violent confrontations can be intoxicating, on both sides of the barricades; so, a taste for street fighting takes hold among a small number of protesters.
Meanwhile, back in the general assemblies that are one hallmark of a radical democratic movement like Occupy Wall Street, the demand for consensus willy-nilly puts the most uncompromising militants in a position where they can veto the tactics and strategy proposed by the vast majority of their comrades. The moderates are inclined to compromise. So they silence their reservations about the tactics of the revolutionaries for the sake of preserving consensus and unity.
Disagreements disappear, at least for public consumption. And although everyone on the inside knows who the most articulate leaders of different groups are, none of these de facto leaders can be held accountable, since, according to the group’s utopian vision, there are no leaders.
By 1969, a version of this sort of perverse logic had led the New Left to a frank embrace of violence, and then terrorism — and the Weathermen reaped the whirlwind. And today, one has only to read “The Coming Insurrection,” a manifesto that is one touchstone for the anarchists in Occupy Wall Street, to worry about this movement’s potential for nihilism.
Still, these are early days. It is too soon to know how this new American movement will unfold. One can only hope that the partisans of Occupy Wall Street can learn from the mistakes of their precursors in the ’60s. If they can avoid fetishizing the demand for consensus, they may be able to forge a broader coalition that includes friends and allies within the Democratic Party and the union movement. It is not too late to confront the perils of participatory democracy from within — before another promising democratic movement for social change is hijacked by hooligans on the left.

Source: Will Extremists Hijack Occupy Wall Street?