Critical Mass New Orleans: Bringing Democracy to the Streets

Democracy must extend beyond the ballot box.

The modern era has revealed the limits of representative politics, where electoral campaigns are bankrolled by billionaires that dominate our bipartisan system.

True democracy must be built from the ground up. We must cultivate grassroots power to transform two of the most undemocratic spaces where we spend the majority of our lives: the workplace and the daily commute.

In the workplace, we witness a grotesque undemocratic distribution of wealth. Consider this: a full year of labor by a Starbucks barista is equivalent to just over an hour of compensation for Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol.

When workers from @sbwuneworleans seek to organize and have a voice in the conditions of their labor, they are met not with dialogue but with intimidation and retaliation.

Our streets are no more democratic. Designed to privilege the interests of the auto and oil industries, they marginalize the needs of communities, degrade the environment, and erode public life. What we are left with is a landscape engineered for profit, not people.

Critical Mass seeks to intervene in this imbalance. We are a grassroots movement dedicated to reclaiming public space. We envision streets where pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit are prioritized over a violent, extractive system that commodifies mobility and externalizes its harm.

Let us organize-not from the top down, but from the grassroots. Let us build a deeper, more participatory democracy that serves the many, rather than the few.

Join Critical Mass on the last Friday of every month as we build grassroots power and raise our collective voice to steer infrastructure policy in a more democratic direction.

—Eric Gabourel