Our extended feature is Leo Zimmerman’s article, which unearths contradictions at the heart of Occupy Baltimore and examines them in light of the Occupations in general. Leo lived in Occupy Baltimore from its founding to its dissolution. From his unique perspective he suggests difficulties Occupy faced as well as new ways of coming together.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan examines how Occupy is regrouping. Turning from the tactic of occupying public space, Prashanth argues the 99% can find a common tie in debt resistance, which exposes the inequality at the heart of our current system.

Nate Gorelick turns to Canada to find a recent example of a massively successful Occupy style protest against tuition hikes. The protest ballooned into a people’s referendum on austerity measures and saw solidarity triumph over the 1%, as government officials resigned in disgrace.

My own article examines participatory budgeting, a horizontally democratic method for allocating government funds that is beginning to catch on in the United States. I argue that participatory budgeting offers a unique way for activists to engage the state productively while retaining a critical distance, offering the possibility for more systemic changes in the future.

We hope you find this issue engaging, and thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

Occupy Baltimore began with a similar narrative. About two hundred people, inspired by the Wall Street occupiers, arranged on short notice to meet in a church and create a plan. Since organizing had taken place through the internet, the great majority were computer literate. Most were young and college-educated. Many were relatively new to Baltimore city. These people—I among them—felt that they intuitively understood the reasons to reproduce the “Occupy” movement in Baltimore. We were so confident in our shared purpose that we decided to discuss where to occupy before we considered why. We charged through the meeting, not questioning the majority vote system that allowed us to move so quickly.

A few days later we had established “Occupy Baltimore” in McKeldin plaza, on the corner of Pratt & Light Streets in downtown Baltimore. The location was perfect. To the north, menacing skyscrapers with bank logos. To the east, the Inner Harbor: a tourist attraction that screams classism through its contrast with the rest of the city. Behind us, a boxy concrete structure served as a flexible backdrop. Although we had trouble listing our “goals”, we did craft a statement of purpose:

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE, 10/22/2011:

Through the transformation of this public space Occupy Baltimore is expressing solidarity with other Occupy Movements throughout the nation and the world who are forcing attention to the issues of political and economic injustice.

Our purpose is to open for all people a lasting, transparent, and honest Democracy organized in a consensus model. Our goals will be defined by that consensus of our General Assembly. We offer to the people what corporate privilege and political complacency in our nation has taken from them.

Now “We” had occupied a space dominated by the forces of evil, and we were ready to make a stand for Truth, Justice, and the People. We would offer what the corporations had taken away. But we soon found that we didn’t know who “We” were, let alone what we wanted to accomplish. Our struggle against injustice soon became complicated by a struggle over our own identity.

A little solidarity

What does it mean to protest Wall Street in the sort of city that would sue Wall Street for manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR)?

Where the mayor is not particularly a beloved populist, but also probably not a member of the one percent?

On Wall Street, the police were aligned clearly with the interests of the banks and could be appropriately hated as part of a system of local and global oppression. People recognized that the police were economically ‘part of the 99%’, but everyone knew whose team they were on.

On Pratt Street, thing were a little different. First of all, the police weren’t handing out beatings or arrests. After recent legal controversies, McKeldin plaza has been designated a ‘free speech zone’, where protest is supposedly protected. The greatest police involvement in Occupy Baltimore came when residents of the camp called 911 themselves.

Baltimore’s police force has a unique history, which includes at least one serious experiment in working class solidarity.

Those who expected automatic friction with police were surprised when Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #3, joined with other labor unions to endorse Occupy Baltimore in an open letter to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

Some cops gave us the thumbs-up every now and then.

When the chips were down, the police did follow instructions to evict the camp. They arrived at 3:30AM dressed in riot gear and made sure that no people were left in the “free speech zone.” The legal status of the space and potential solidarity from the police lost out to orders—from local business executives as well as from a nationally coordinated action.

These police were not willing to risk full-scale disobedience. Neither were we: no one stuck around to get arrested. Perhaps a crucial moment was delayed that night. Unfortunately, it is telling and undeniable that Baltimore Police continue to support and perpetrate systemic violence against the city’s Black population, with a number of police killings in 2012 attracting media attention and direct responses from local activists.

“Ten minutes for race stuff”

I spoke to Francine, the dynamo behind our Anti-Oppression Committee, about some of the major fractures within Occupy Baltimore. Francine is a 41-year-old Black lesbian feminist woman who was excited to discover, in October, that Baltimore had created its own Occupy space. When she arrived operations were in full swing, and she did a lot of listening and thinking before jumping in. She connected with the Safer Spaces working group, which formed amidst concerns that women were being sexually harassed on site. The more she listened and observed the camp, the more she “heard folks saying ‘we are the 99%’ but doing a hell of a lot of marginalizing of the 99% within this structure.”

The “sexual harassment” question came to an impasse at several general assemblies. Not because the group could not agree how to address the problem, but because the group could not agree to address the problem at all. “I feel like, again, what I witnessed was what always happens: that the dominant voices, the dominant opinions in the group, around trying to make Occupy work, made decisions about what they felt were the important issues. And women’s issues and safety issues of women were not deemed important. And women had to fight, as always, to be heard about their valid anger and concern.” Although the group officially used a consensus process, the wishes of many members were not respected. The “sexual harassment issue” was dropped and the GA moved on, alienating many people who wanted to participate in the movement.

Francine saw that people were working on issues of inequality within the group, but increasingly found these efforts ineffective and even misguided:

I’m just going to be honest about what I saw. I saw this flier for a race and gender equity rally, something like that, with no agenda on it. And I’m thinking to myself: ‘Why would I want to go to that? What does that mean? There’s no compelling reason for me to even look at this piece of paper, it says nothing to me.’ I was also at a general assembly meeting around that same time where a young white women, at the announcements portion, said, well, we want to have ten minutes to talk about… I think it was… ‘race stuff’…yeah… and I was like, ‘ten minutes?’

Working through an online forum, Francine transformed the Safer Spaces group into the Anti-Oppression Committee, which held autonomous meetings at McKeldin on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Anti-Oppression Committee launched a number of workshops and created guidelines for facilitation friendly to people with disabilities. Francine’s workshop, “Missing Voices in the Occupy Movement”, was well attended. The problem, she says, was that attendees were all people from outside the camp who were interested in anti-oppression. Regulars at the camp and in the general assemblies still seemed to be ignoring issues that, in her view, had to be addressed before the movement could consider challenging inequality on a larger scale.

ADAPT ignored

For Francine, “the straw that broke the camel’s back was around accommodation, accessibility for people with disabilities. Folks that were from this bad-ass, kick-ass social justice organization called ADAPT—it’s been around for decades—were part of both the committee and the general assemblies.”

ADAPT was a model for what Occupy could become: “Here’s an organization that’s been going for decades, literally in the streets blocking buses that aren’t accommodating to their wheelchairs—So if I can’t get on that bus and go somewhere, you’re not going anywhere at all—And getting arrested!” Yet Occupy Baltimore treated ambassadors from ADAPT like they were invisible. Soon after McKeldin plaza was evacuated, a General Assembly was held in an inaccessible church. Francine split from the organization.

“We are not a homeless shelter”

Perhaps the greatest identity crisis facing Occupy Baltimore involved people without homes: mostly Black people, living on the streets of Baltimore, who gravitated towards the Occupy camp in McKeldin. “The homeless” quickly became a large part of the camp, creating a major challenge to the group identity that had coalesced over email. Indeed, the digital divide became so pronounced so quickly that there seemed to be two versions of Occupy Baltimore. One was the chaotic—sometimes wonderful, sometimes dangerous, always fascinating—reality on the bricks near Pratt Street; the other was an online forum filled with some of Baltimore’s most brilliant and caring people. These groups operated independently, except when they met during General Assembly to annoy and confuse each other.

Francine has the story: I’d say it was 15 or 20, Black and White, women and men—more men—we sat down and had this open-ended conversation, which was going really well, just talking—until one white man, who was an overnight activist, said that thing, that thing: “we are not a homeless shelter.” To his right, to his left, sitting as close as we are, were folks who were homeless. And Black. And White. And homeless. One Black man who was homeless stood up and started having issues with very loud, angry, objections, in his face, about this. So they’re standing up now. I also stood up, in between the two of them—don’t know what I was thinking!—and I said to the White man: “you cannot say that again. You cannot say that. ‘We are not a homeless shelter’… there is this tent, and there are people staying in it, and it’s a shelter. We are doing this.”

The exclusion of homeless people from human society is painful enough when it is performed continually, day in, day out, in the center of every American society. When it is done during the forum of a group organized to resist the excesses of capitalism—the irony is heartbreaking.

But Occupy did contain the seeds of transformation. A young occupier named Marcus said: “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and see a bunch of homeless people taking our shit. But then I thought—who is them and who is us? How do you define who needs what? Who’s homeless, who’s for the movement, and who’s just here?”

These questions really did provoke people to question their assumptions about homeless people, and to honestly explore new visions for how we might all live together. While there were many conflicts like the one Francine experienced, there were also many beautiful moments of learning and sharing.

Facing privilege and contradiction

After the eviction, the departure of Francine, and the end of the Anti-Oppression Committee, “Occupy Baltimore” went digital once again. The General Assembly was held at different locations across town. Even web users had trouble following along. Gradually enthusiasm for these meetings dwindled.

Francine says she’s not surprised by what happened at the camp. Indeed, she criticizes utopian delusions of a perfect campsite, fully egalitarian on the inside and needing only to bring down those big banks on the outside. This attitude actually stalled the difficult dialogues and encounters necessary for social transformation. Instead, she says, we can see Occupy as a beautiful but contradictory manifestation of humanity in America, year 2011.

If the folks involved in what it was were not capable of making it better, there’s nothing that can be done. It just was what it was. If we were to start it up again and try to do it, there might be some shifts. But I know, because this is human nature—well, it’s not human nature. That’s a lie, I misspoke. That is privilege. Unless you do this work on yourself, your privilege seeks to preserve itself.

We live in a society that is violent and cruel on many levels. This violence happens everyday even and especially when it feels like nothing is happening. Occupy sought to provoke and destabilize the existing economic order, and it may have done so. But even as it fails, falls apart, starts fights with itself—it succeeds in provoking and destabilizing those comfortable barriers that separate us from each other. The worst way for us to respond is to pretend, in the name of some massive fictitious left-wing coalition, that these barriers do not exist.

Who “We” Are, 2012

On September 11, 2012, a four-person General Assembly approved, by consensus, the following revised statement of purpose:

Through the transformation of public spaces, Occupy Baltimore is expressing solidarity with other Occupy Movements throughout the nation and the world who are forcing attention to the issues of economic, political and social injustice.

Our purpose is to open for all people a lasting, transparent, and honest democracy organized in a consensus model. Our goals will be defined by that consensus of our General Assembly. We want back what corporate privilege and political complacency in our nation has taken from us.

Leo stayed at Occupy Baltimore from open (October 4) to close (December 13), sleeping in a lovely shelter constructed by a homeless man. He has also been active with the group since eviction. He is proud of helping to prepare food, MC-ing a “people’s soapbox” before general assemblies, and marching with Ethiopian demonstrators at the G8.

Occupy Wall Street captured the world’s imagination last year by uniting the left under the common tactic of occupation. Yet, with the fading of many of the original encampments, a new organizing principle is needed. Debt is a common problem that unites us collectively, providing an altogether promising and transformative opportunity for the Occupy movement to advance.

This year, the height of Occupy’s first summer months saw one of the year-old movement’s most promising developments to date beginning to take shape and blossom — a broad debt resistance movement under the simple banner: “Strike Debt.”

It is an idea first articulated as a question: what is debt? Debt is a social relation naturalized as fact, unequally applied to structure and limit debtors’ future life chances. It is, as Occupy organizer Yates McKee writes, “the tie that binds the 99 percent.” Debt cloaks itself in the language of morality (“refusing to repay is wrong”) while making its presence felt through threats and coercion.

And it’s easy to see all around us. Our society is debt-ridden to the core. Student loans alone have cumulatively topped $1 trillion in the U.S., burdening a record one-in-five households. The math is harsher for poor and young households, whose student loan payments consume roughly a quarter of their income.

Defaults on these loans have risen for the fifth straight year, with 218 American colleges now boasting default rates over thirty percent. Sixty-four percent of all bankruptcies are caused by medical loans, while credit card debt, also creeping toward the $1 trillion mark, generates an average of 16.24% interest that large banks borrow at a Federal Reserve prime loan rate of 3.25%. And we can’t forget the millions of Americans in varying stages of home foreclosure, a sad accompaniment to our decaying cities and states, themselves swindled by Wall Street interest rate swaps that leave them struggling to finance schools, hospitals, and basic public infrastructure.

Amid these mounting tensions, perhaps it was unsurprising that debt resistance bloomed as a central organizing principle during this summer’s thematic Occupy assemblies, each focused on distinct core issues.

Called by Occupy Theory, publishers of the free, radical magazine Tidal, these meetings brought activists together in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, where attendees sat in the shadows of New York University, the college with the nation’s most highly indebted students. They met to discuss what could be learned from the student protesters in Quebec, Canada, who were also protesting financial barriers to educational access.

The marchers in Montreal, they reflected, emphasized their opposition not only to tuition hikes but also more broadly toward the overarching neoliberal ideology that made such cuts to public education appear necessary. Organizers from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign (OSDC)have long been thinking along the same lines: debt as a way of life, an indentured servitude, foisted upon members of the 99% by the 1%, abducting agency and the ability to imagination a fulfilling personal future outside of financial constraints. For indebted students the situation is painfully clear. In the words of Occupy organizer Amy O., “our future is owned by them, as we are forced to make decisions about our existence in light of our debt.”

Entire life paths are made unthinkable by the single fact of crushing debt obligations.

At the same time as many Americans literally reorient their lives in light of their debt, the private debt of Wall Street speculators has been diffused and distributed to the general population. As the popular slogan goes, “the banks got bailed out; we got sold out,” our future lives tied up into odious debt held by financial institutions. What does it mean that banks can be “too big to fail”? Why do we pay when the banks gamble and lose, and yet we get nothing when they return a profit?

The same institutions playing “heads I win, tails you lose” with our money own us twice: once with their debt that has taken the country’s budget hostage, and again with our personal burdens. Is it not the height of injustice that sovereign countries have their debts “restructured” and passed along to their citizens in terms of brutal austerity regimes as people are concomitantly obligated to debt-finance medicine and education? In this odious world structured by the 1%, basic social goods — healthcare, education, housing, retirement — are barred from the public, attainable to so many only through inexorable private debt that pads financiers’ bonuses.

Strike Debt is not concerned with debt “forgiveness,” which would imply the blameworthiness of the debtor and the generosity of the creditor. Instead it transforms the morality of debt itself. Its members argue that democracy can only be salvaged by refusing to honor immoral debts that impoverish and enslave the multitudes while a few financial elites profit. Our society — not the banks — is “too big to fail.”

We can’t afford to ignore the multiplying symptoms of our system’s failure: the staggering default rates of bankrupt students, the masses for whom further education remains a financial impossibility, those dissuaded (and punished) from receiving proper healthcare by pure cost; and those predatory vultures, the debt collection agencies, circling above them all.

Profit-centered debt urgently needs to be reformed toward more socially productive forms of credit, and Strike Debt has begun to lay the first foundations of resistance that could set us on this path. Andrew Ross, a Strike Debt organizer and sociologist at NYU, predicts that “if the struggle over wages was a defining feature of the industrial era, the struggle over debt will be the battlefield of our times.”

The idea doesn’t seem farfetched in our atomized neoliberal age, where few expect to ever become workers in a unionized labor force but virtually everyone — as individuals as well as members of political communities — is ensnared in debt.

Recognizing debt as a common condition holds the potential for solidarity on a massive scale. As a central issue, debt has the potential to build bridges of solidarity between Occupiers and anti-austerity activists worldwide. A popular chant among marchers in Europe is “We won’t pay for your crisis!” The red squares Quebec protesters wore showed that tuition hikes would place students “squarely in the red.” A historical connection can also be drawn to the largely successful global justice movement of the 1990s, when enormous anti-austerity movements effectively kicked neoliberal IMF technocrats out of power in East Asia and Latin America.

Anthropologist David Graeber reminds us in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years that debt absolution (cancellation of debt), moreover, has been an institutionalized practice and oftentimes a political necessity throughout human history. Just last year, the King of Saudi Arabia proclaimed a broad cancellation of debts in a bid to maintain power as the Arab Spring destabilized regimes in neighboring countries.

Strike Debt is still at an infant stage, but already its accomplishments are heartening. Working with established OSDC activists, Strike Debtors have provided a framework for systemic analysis and long-term direct action, which they hope will underpin the movement for decades.

Organizers have researched and compiled “The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual,” combining educational material with guides for replicable direct actions.

Studying the Savings & Loans crisis of the 1980s, organizers learned that debt can be bought on secondary markets for pennies on the dollar and eventually abolished. This knowledge has led to plans for a “Rolling Jubilee” beginning this November, where debt in default will be bought and abolished through mutual aid and a “People’s Bailout” for which community-based “pay-it-forward” funding mechanisms are being rigorously sketched and tested.

While the dream of a sweeping, global debt strike and an alternative, socially equitable credit system may seem distant, the building begins now. It has already begun. Occupy united the left under a common tactic of public occupation, and now Strike Debt offers unity around a common problem. In our day, debt has widely become the slavery of most to the profligacy of a few. A shining injustice illuminating the arduous path forward.

Strike Debt has a website (strikedebt.org) with ways to get involved and learn more.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. He has been published for extensively writing about the effects of globalization on labor forces in the Global South and is more broadly interested in the intersection of political economy, global ecology, and democracy. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.

The local campaign involved both students and faculty from post-secondary schools across the Canadian province of Quebec, and exploded into the most widespread, sustained act of civil disobedience in the province’s history earlier this year. The provincial government’s plan to increase university tuition rates sparked months of collective action, culminating in a major victory as the movement defeated provincial premier Jean Charest in Quebec’s September elections.

Charest’s ousting from office ended the longest currently serving premiership in Canada. The newly-elected premier, Pauline Marois of Parti Québec, canceled the tuition hike immediately upon taking office.

This was not the first serious political victory for the students. In May, Quebec’s Minister of Education, Line Beauchamp, resigned after weeks of pressure from student leaders. Their principled commitment to universal education, coupled with the immense size of the protests, denied Beauchamp the political leverage to sustain the Charest government’s hard-line approach.

As in the United States and around the globe, wealth in Canada continues to grow for what Occupy calls the 1%, largely thanks to imbalanced federal and provincial economic policies. Average wages in Canada have stagnated for more than 30 years, while in that same time the wealthiest one percent increased its share of the national income from 8.1% to 13.3%.

Despite this imbalance – or perhaps at its source – the rest of Canada’s population is expected to subsidize the 1%, both with its labor and by paying more for social services like health care and education.

In Quebec, student leaders placed education at the heart of this growing income inequality and the social injustice it perpetuates. The government’s attempts to defuse popular unrest, for example, by offering to spread the tuition increase over seven years, thereby lowering the yearly hike to $219, failed. Protestors demanded a more fundamental change, insisting that education is a right that should be free and accessible to everyone.

At the core of the movement’s success was the persistence and scope of its demands. Protestors refused to allow either politicians or corporate media to reduce their position merely to a reaction against the tuition hike. Instead, they focused on the underlying motives behind the government’s plan: a growing commitment to economic austerity, privatization, and deregulation among Quebecois and Canadian politicians.

The strike began at Université Laval in the provincial capital of Quebec City on Feburary 13. It transformed into widespread indignation when the Cabinet imposed patently anti-democratic restrictions on the students’ freedom of assembly, most explicitly with the May, 2012 passage of “Bill 78,” surreptitiously titled “An Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend.”

The bill suspended university classes across Quebec and singled out student protests as targets for police action.

By mid-March more than 165,000 students were on strike, and on March 22 at least 300,000 people attended a demonstration in Montreal.

The massive opposition also included months of nightly marches in cities throughout the province, where protestors gathered to decry declining access to higher education.

Thousands chose solidarity with the protestors in the face of the government’s attempts to criminalize them. Protest participants or sympathizers could be spotted by the small red squares pinned to their clothes and backpacks. Another signature of the shared outrage, the sound of clanging pots and pans, or “les casseroles,” echoed throughout city streets as protestors gathered every evening before sundown.

As with the Latin-American cacerolazo protests that inspired the clamor, residents banged on empty pots from their windows and rooftops, shop-keepers from their front steps, and protestors as they marched through the streets. The increasingly widespread sound of popular discontent has also become the center of the “Global Noise” campaign, a consortium of international networks including Occupy, Spain’s Indignados movement, Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, and other groups in hundreds of cities around the globe.

Prior to each nightly march, the crowd assembled to discuss the evening’s itinerary and other tactical concerns. Anyone wishing to speak was granted a turn at the megaphone, and decisions were reached by a public show of hands. The atmosphere at these general assemblies was both festive and serious, signaling wide enthusiasm among the participants even as they embraced the significance of their struggle.

Mainstream news coverage in the United States was almost non-existent, and the Canadian popular press consistently trivialized and dismissed the students’ demands as impractical or even irresponsible. All the same, the movement has achieved global recognition.

Peter Hallward, a philosophy professor at Kingston University London and advocate of similar efforts to resist tuition increases in the United Kingdom, called the Quebec movement “one of the most powerful and inventive anti-austerity campaigns anywhere in the world.”

Alain Badiou, one of France’s most radical public intellectuals, claimed that “this point of resistance is now mobilizing a large-scale debate which concerns us all” and that we would do well to “always keep an eye on Quebec.”

The largest and most outspoken student group, the Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante – or CLASSE – led the effort to situate higher education at the base of an expansive vision for progressive social change. According to the CLASSE Manifesto, “Our concept of democracy places the people in permanent charge of politics, and by ‘the people’ we mean those of us at the base of the pyramid – the foundation of political legitimacy.”

No such empowerment is possible, the manifesto argues, unless a whole society has equal access to public services like education, and the only way to ensure such equality is by making education free and open to everyone.

CLASSE has also embraced the “We Are Many Youth, but With One Struggle” Manifesto, which has been adopted by student organizations worldwide.

“It is imperative,” according to this shared manifesto, “to defend high quality, public, free education as a right of every single person. We demand more funding for education, because this is the only way to make the democratization of access to education possible and to guarantee student financial aid, university dining halls, housing for students, child care centers, in addition to struggling for democratization of the internal decision-making processes.”

For these reasons, CLASSE has sought ties with labor movementsand continues to pressure Quebec’s provincial government despite the cancellation of this year’s projected tuition hike. With more than 100,000 student members – or roughly one third of the province’s total student population – freedom of education promises to remain at the center of struggles for social and economic justice in Canada, and perhaps to fuel similar uprisings around the globe.

Nate Gorelick is a frequent visitor to Quebec City, where he attends an annual training seminar in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In June, 2012, he marched with protestors and spoke to several activists (when their voices could be heard over the ringing of les casseroles) in anticipation of this report.

This somewhat romantic picture of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil underlies many assumptions we have about social justice struggles. Often discussions about social change become impossible. One is either “with us, or against us.” American or terrorist. Revolutionary or pig.

In addition to the obvious communication challenges such a rubric presents, there are consequences for what we understand as effective activism. Some imagine that social change must come from a mythical outside to be truly transformative. Others immediately discount ideas that seem external, either with an appeal to pragmatism or an outright fear of the outside as dangerous.

This choice between being a militant and being a citizen is a false one. Participatory budgeting offers a different model for social justice claims to be addressed. In a participatory budgeting model, citizens direct how a portion of a city budget is to be spent. The Participatory Budgeting Project notes that while “each experience is different, most follow a similar basic process: residents brainstorm spending ideas, volunteer budget delegates develop proposals based on these ideas, residents vote on proposals, and the government implements the top projects.”

Originating in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting was introduced at a time when one third of the city’s residents lived in slums, without access to basic needs like “clean water, sanitation, medical facilities, and schools.” In three years, public housing increased from 1,700 residents to 27,000 more. After nine years, sewer and water services reached 98% of residents, as opposed to a previous 75%, and the number of schools quadrupled.

Significantly, participants are almost overwhelmingly from the poorest and most marginalized sectors of society. According to Giapaolo Baiocchi, “participants at all levels are poorer, less educated, and more likely to be black than the city averages.” In addition, each year “a substantial proportion of participants are first-timers, without any prior participation in civil society.” Instead of a regime of professional politicians deciding how to spend money, participatory budgeting offers a means for society’s most marginalized to operate power themselves. As a result their living conditions improve, and social inequality decreases.

In stark contrast, the current American model favors the election of representatives to spend our tax dollars for us. The poorest and most marginalized are completely ignored, with neither Presidential candidate directly addressing the working classes in any of the debates this election. As Jonathan Neale notes,

“There are 206 million adult American citizens who can vote. Of them, 62 million voted for Obama, 60 million voted for Romney. But 84 million eligible voters did not vote…

The non voters are a majority of people under 50. They are a majority of  people who have not graduated from college. They are a majority of  people in households making less than $50,000 (£32,000) a year. They are a majority of Hispanics. They are a majority of the working class…

The reason they don’t vote is not that they are stupid or apathetic. It is that they are not allowed to, or that they think none of the politicians will help them.”

The group of non-voters dwarfs the group of Americans who do vote, exceeding the totals for Romney and Obama by over 20 million.

Neale identifies this massive civic disengagement as a result of protracted voter suppression campaigns as well as disenchantment with the American political apparatus. Disenchantment should come as no surprise, as foreclosures sweep the nation and the U.S. census finds that 48% of Americans are poor or low-income, with the majority of low-income families spending over one-third of their income on housing, and an additional fifth on daycare when the mother works. Homelessness in turn reveals an awful contradiction at the center of our current iteration of the American dream. There are approximately 5 to 25 times as many empty homes as there are homeless Americans, depending on which figures are used.

While participatory budgeting will not solve all our problems, it offers a way for excluded citizens to realize their demands for social justice. Indeed, Chicago’s 49^thward and New York City already have participatory budgeting structures in place, and Vallejo, California has become the first city in America to adopt citywide participatory budgeting. Worldwide, over 1,500 cities employ participatory budgeting, allocating as much as 20% of their municipal budgets.

Crucially, participatory budget structures alone are insufficient to guarantee a just society. Some socially controversial spending, like sexual and reproductive rights related expenditures, may not be sufficiently protected. It is also unclear how participatory budgeting could restrain American militarism abroad or address structural unemployment. Major economies like the military and prison-industrial complexes, as well as global trade imbalances, seem at first glance to escape the democratic oversight provided by participatory budgeting structures.

On the other hand, participatory budgeting may provide a crucial training ground for communities to self-organize and build civic power.  As a democratic model based on participation from the bottom up, it neither pushes activists outside the system nor fully captures them within it. As Baiocchi notes, social movements “can force the state into democratic innovations that in some cases shape the polity itself, in ways that blur distinctions between movement and state.”

Perhaps a widespread deployment of participatory budgeting in America could provide a fertile training ground for even larger, more systemic attacks on social injustice. Citizens could learn to deliberate and reach agreement across differences, and also build political investments in their communities. This solidarity, which as we saw in Brazil is particularly attractive for the poor and the workers, could be the basis of a powerful series of reforms to restructure our society for the better.

The Participatory Budgeting Project has information and opportunities to bring participatory budgeting to your community on their website. Many cities already have citizens organizing for participatory budgeting.

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.