On seeing Astra Taylor’s What is Democracy?

I went to see occasional Timberite Astra Taylor’s remarkable film *What is Democracy?* last night. It takes us from Siena, Italy to Florida to Athens and from Ancient Athenian democracy through the renaissance and the beginning of capitalism to the Greek debt crisis, occupy and the limbo life of people who have fled Syria and now find themselves stuck. It combines the voices of Plato and Rousseau with those of ordinary voters from left and right, Greek nationalists and cosmopolitans, ex-prisoners, with trauma surgeons in Miami, Guatemalan migrants in the US, with lawmakers and academics, and with refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. All the while it poses the questions of whether democracy is compatible with inequality and global financial systems and the boundaries of inclusion.

Some of the testimonies are arresting: the ex-prisoner turned barber who tells us of his nine years in a US prison of a hunger strike when the authorities tried to take the library away and of his problems adjusting to life of the outside, to being around women, and the fact that he’s denied the vote. And all the time he’s telling you this with attention and passion he’s clipping a customers beard, which adds a note of tension. We hear from trauma surgeons who tell us of the levels of violence in Miami – so much blood that the city is used for training by medics from the US military – and the shock of cycling from one neighbourhood to the next and experiencing swift transitions from opulence to utter destitution. We hear from a young Syrian woman who relates how she had to leave Aleppo after her mother was wounded by a stray bullet in her own home and whose idea of democracy is a country where she can lie safely in her bed.

There are experts in the movie in the shape of (among others) Cornel West and Wendy Brown but they provide us with context without dominating. Brown poses the central and unresolved question of the film: does democracy need boundaries and to have at its heart a constitutive “we”? And if so, who gets inccluded and who gets left out. Brown’s own view is somewhat “Lexity””: particular democracy rejecting capitalist globalization but Astra pushes back a little toward ideals of global citizenship. Whatever the boundaries of democratic units should be, there is no doubting the conviction of the film that migrants, refugees and ex-prisoners belong on the inside as participants.

The renaissance frescoes of The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena form the bookends to the picture. Sylvia Federici talks us through the symbolism of the paintings noticing the contrasts of wealth and poverty, the scenes of exclusion and cruelty and the absence of domesticity and childhood in this imaginary of government, inter alia, she tells us that the idea of governing together as free and equal persons is not so much native to the European traditions as an import from the peoples of North America after 1492, a claim I’ve heard from others (such as in Charles Mann’s 1491).

It is hard to make a film about an abstract idea such as democracy and it is hard to make one with so much philosophy at its heart. But this film succeeds through letting people speak. The selection of people is important too: the voices of women and the marginalized take precedence over the wealthy and the males for whom citizenship was once an exclusive privilege. Do make some time to get to see it, I’m told you can get it on Amazon.

(Full disclosure: Astra is a member of the CT collective and we met and discussed following a panel on the film in Bristol last night. I also make a cameo appearance, in the form of my Penguin edition of Rousseau’s *Social Contract*, to which the camera pans in Wendy Brown’s office. The film was shown as the Watershed in association with Bristol Festival of Ideas.)