The Age of Democracy

I recently recorded the voice over for a video called The Age of Democracy produced by AntiMidia from Brasil. It's a great take on voting and elections emphasizing that for real change we need to organise horizontally. Over the last 15 years, several social movements and anti-capitalist groups have answered the call of the Zapatista National Liberation Army and the entire Zapatista Movement for a campaign "from below and to the left" for radical changes. Since the first march that traveled through 32 Mexican states in 2006, Zapatists have proposed listening to communities and promoting values such as anti-capitalism, horizontalism, and equality. Our proposal, like the original Otra Campaña, is to offer a vision of politics beyond the parties and the institutional left that, financed by the rich and the state itself, flood the streets and the media with their propaganda and the notion that only through the state institutions can we promote profound changes. Many of the major movements and revolutions underway in our times share the idea that it is better to change the system in a direct, popular, self-organized way and without the instruments of state management and repression. Only practice and debate that considers these experiences can show people that politics exists beyond voting and bourgeois representative democracy. For this reason, Antimídia and Facção Fictícia present "The Age of Democracy," a video and an article designed to stimulate debate on the origins of democratic voting, its limits and proposals for overcoming it and building a truly egalitarian and free world - a world where many worlds fit! We echo the words of Sub-Commander Moses, who reminds us that "we don't tell you to vote, nor do we tell you not to vote. We simply tell you to organize".