Abstract
Building on recent developments in radical democratic theory, in this article we articulate and explore a fresh perspective for theorists and activists of radical democracy: a ‘living critique of domination’. Characterized by a two-fold analytical effort, a ‘living critique of domination’ calls for a radical critique of contemporary forms of power and control coupled with a reappraisal of emancipatory political experiences created by the political action of the Many. We demonstrate that this project responds to the theoretical and practical challenges faced by a politics of emancipation today. Our article offers a first articulation of this living critique through a discussion of three recent political experiences, namely, the 2016 French uprising, Nuit Debout, as well as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements.
On March 40, 2016, French sociologist Monique Pinçon-Charlot spoke to the thousands of protesters assembled on the 40th day of Nuit Debout, the radical democratic experience that unfolded at the fabled Place de la République in Paris (Cazalis and Bernard 2016; Holmes 2016). 1 Pinçon-Charlot, a prominent public intellectual whose work shaped the sociology of the French bourgeoisie (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2013), explained to the crowd that the current crisis of representative government could be understood as a ‘class struggle’. She reminded them that some on the winning side of the struggle – such as Warren Buffet – had explicitly acknowledged this fact. In a rhetorical flourish, Pinçon-Charlot then asked: ‘What is to be done?’, to which she forcefully answered: ‘Imitate them!’ (Otero 2017 3 m, 18 s).
The idea that the Many should ‘imitate’ the ruling Few is a trope of over 100 years of radical thought and praxis. If the Few have political parties or recourse to the ballot box, so should the Many. If they seek state power, let us also seek power, if only to ‘smash it’. Against this position, which still irrigates the fields of radical action and thought (Dean 2016, 164), this article explores the need for radical democrats to tap into the social-historical imaginary in order to avoid imitating the Few. We advocate for the dissemination of a ‘living critique of domination’, understood as an assessment of political institutions combined with an analysis of the lived exemplars of emancipatory political action that contest the status quo. If the critique of domination is a well-known undertaking (from the different waves of the Frankfurt School to the Hermeneutics of suspicion), we argue that a fresh dimension needs to be added to this endeavour: namely, to understand the contribution of contemporary, lived experiences of emancipatory politics. Such experiences are pregnant with political possibilities that articulate an approach to politics that deepens freedom, enacts equality and thrives on solidarity.
Following the work of Abensour (2009), we conceive of our task as two-fold: as scholars and activists, we are compelled to pursue a ‘ruthless’ analysis of all forms of domination and of their intersections; at the same time, we must undertake a ‘charitable’ exploration of the cracks and gaps in the current order that have allowed the Many to experience freedom, equality and solidarity. Taken together, the two tasks constitute the program of a ‘living critique of domination’. We offer here a preliminary sketch of the conceptual apparatus of the program and a first articulation of it through a discussion of the 2016 French uprising, Nuit Debout, as well as the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. The program of a living critique of domination is in direct continuity with a tradition of political thought which posits non-domination and freedom as key elements of emancipatory politics. For thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx, the critique of the status quo opens to the possibility of alternative political organizations that refuse domination and embrace freedom. More contemporary thinkers, such as Arendt (2005), Castoriadis (1986), Lefort (2007), Rancière (2005) and Coles (2016) have also articulated a critique of domination with a view to clearing a path toward a politics of emancipation inspired by radical politics. Within this theoretical landscape, our contribution is to explicitly articulate, at very outset, the stakes involved in this approach to political theory, and especially the necessity to overcome domination while remaining attentive to the potentialities opened by the lived experiences of the dominated. Our turn to lived experience also aims at questioning political programs or utopian ‘blueprints’ that plan a world beyond domination without considering the lived experiences of emancipation hic et nunc. By refusing to imitate the politics of the programming and planning Few, ‘a living critique of domination’ holds on to a crucial insight of Marx’s approach (1971): the need to remain attentive to the specificities of the social movements that struggle for emancipation in the contemporary moment.
Before proceeding, we wish to clarify our epistemological self-positioning, namely, regarding the asymmetrical treatment of domination and emancipation in the article: as mentioned above, we wish to be ‘ruthless’ with forms of domination yet ‘charitable’ with the lived exemplars of emancipatory politics. One of the major biases in the evaluation of emancipatory political experiences is that our criteria are inevitably fashioned by ideas and categories stemming from the tradition of Western political thought. Take, for example, the categories of ‘stability and instability’. The tradition of Western political thought, just as the instituted order, values stability and rejects political instability as the bane of political regimes and a danger for society. The same axiological preference values victory over defeat, unity over division, and so forth (Tassin 2012). In order to fairly assess emancipatory political experience, the first step is freeing ourselves from these inherited biases, which automatically place the messiness and experimental character of emancipatory politics on the side of ‘failed politics’. From a radical democratic perspective, ‘instability’, ‘disorder’ and ‘conflict’ are precisely the signs of a vibrant and thriving political community. We therefore need to overcome the conceptual apparatus that reinforces the instituted order that we are ruthlessly criticizing. A ‘charitable’ disposition is thus necessary when analyzing emancipatory political experiences to avoid being blinded by domination and its effects on perception, desire and understanding.
A clarification of terms is also warranted. Firstly, this article contributes to the scholarship on radical democracy. As Marx (1970, 137) points out: ‘to be radical is to grasp matters at the root.’ We define radical democracy as a return to the root of democracy. In Ancient Athens, the term democracy was used interchangeably with that of isonomy understood as equality before the law and equal participation in the creation of the law (Vidal-Naquet and Lévêque 1996, 22). The root of democracy is isonomy, more specifically the second aspect of the definition: the equal participation of the Many in the creation of the law. To identify instances of radical democracy, it is essential to establish whether or not there were attempts to self-legislate undertaken by the Many. The reactivation of isonomy is the basic marker of radical democratic experiences.
Secondly, in order to identify forms of domination under neoliberalism, we must clarify what is meant by domination. As Pettit (1997, 5) argues, in classical Roman republican terms domination was understood as the antithesis of freedom, meaning to live at the arbitrary will or control of another, along the lines of free citizens and slaves. For him, the republican tradition acquires more analytic clarity when freedom is seen as non-domination. Pettit (2008, 102) argues that a framing of non-domination prevents an individual from ‘being subject to the alien control of others’ and also, as a means to rectify a blind spot in the liberal position, removes the possibility of an individual experiencing domination without actually facing interference but simply from a capacity to arbitrarily interfere (Petit 1997, 23–32).
While Pettit’s work is helpful it relies heavily on a distinction between public and private forms of domination. Feminist discourses have complicated these strict categories effectively showing how permutations of domination occur within and across the public/private binary, often in ways that intersect with race, class and sex (Elshtain 1993; Brown 1995; Saenz 2006; Collins 2000). The public/private distinction becomes further complicated when evaluated from the work of Michel Foucault. As Foucault shows, mechanisms of social control extend beyond specialized disciplinary institutions amplifying a diffusion of repressive and normalized forms of power, that permeates in a capillary manner to the level of the individual. From this position, an understanding of domination under neoliberalism must more fully grapple with how the pervasive scope of power brings with it the possibility of domination across diverse life-worlds. Our present task, then, is to assess sites of domination beyond the Marxist paradigm of class struggle to spaces of racism, patriarchy, economic austerity and state surveillance inter alia.
The article is divided into three sections. First, we survey the relevant literature in radical democratic theory regarding three of its key claims, namely: (i) that politics is constituted by a series of eruptive and interruptive actions undertaken by the Many, (ii) that politics is the locus of social division, contestation and conflict and (iii) that emancipatory political agency does not depend upon a single-axis identity, such as the ‘working class’, but rests upon the human fact of plurality and difference. As we will see, the project of a living critique of domination partakes in, and extends, each of these claims. Second, we articulate the initial component of our program, focused on identifying, assessing and critiquing forms of domination. Finally, we argue that there are cracks in the neoliberal edifice rendered visible – and further widened – by the political force of the Many. To expose these fissures, we discuss three exemplars of radical action that renew democratic projects from an intersectional and intergenerational perspective: Nuit Debout, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and #MeToo. Each notably offers an evaluative plank for our project: (i) embracing indeterminacy, (ii) living with division and conflict and (iii) championing emancipatory political subjects. We will further explain the emancipatory effects of each exemplar on the political imaginaries and on the political institutions of the status quo. In conclusion, we argue that the significance of a living critique of domination rests in its promise as a method to highlight the challenges of emancipatory politics while illuminating commonalities across ‘movements of resistance’ (Newman 2010, 176).
Radical democratic theory
Democracy is a contested term engendering disputes concerning its historical origins as well as its theoretical and operational limits. Within these debates, radical democracy seeks to counter a tendency to identify democracy with formalized institutions by embracing the historical experiences of democratic action as well as by resuscitating Marx’s belief in the transformative capacity of philosophy to critique and change the world. Radical democracy resists a final destination point for the democratic energies unleashed by the principle of isonomy. Tønder and Thomassen (2005, 4) stress this central feature of radical democracy: ‘democracy is a never-ending process, always to come, and not simply an end-goal or the promise of a perfect democratic society.’
In this section, we engage with a series of key theorists who have shaped contemporary radical democratic thought. While not exhaustive, this survey is illuminative of the central themes, issues and tensions inherent within radical democracy. We seek to provide a backdrop of vital affinities that span across different interpretations of radical democracy from the Anglo-American and European traditions. Uncharacteristically, we include agonistic considerations within our analysis to highlight that radical democracy and agonistic models of democracy maintain more commonalities than differences (Little and Lloyd 2009).
Politics as irruption/interruption
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of radical democracy is the distinction made between ordinary and extraordinary politics. As Kalyvas (2008, 6) argues, in liberal democracies, ordinary politics is monopolized by elites who wield power within official political institutions, such as political parties, bureaucracies, political lobbies and the elected representative system. Ordinary politics follows the rigid procedures and legal frameworks that govern the institutions within which they operate. Extraordinary political moments, however, rest upon the collective action of the Many, occur within ‘irregular and informal public spaces’, and represent a direct challenge to status quo of ordinary politics. Kalyvas’ description of extraordinary politics encapsulates current theoretical trends in radical democratic theory which argue that democracy is enacted when the Many irrupt in the public realm and interrupt the work of ordinary politics.
Indeed, for Wolin (1994), democracy is ‘fugitive’ and ‘polymorphous’. By this, he means that democracy is episodic, rare and can assume many different forms. Democracy emerges against the major impediments to democratic energies erected by the practice of liberal democracy in the late 20th century: the wedding of democracy to a constitutional form, the expansion and encroachment of corporate interests into government affairs, and the disappearance of power via the ‘circuitry of the “social system”’ and that reemerges as a display of input/output, or mere feedback (Wolin 1985, 220). The ‘common and the shared’ of democratic life (Wolin 2017, 287) is thus suppressed and replaced by the complex and exclusive language of expertise and technocratic management. Against this ‘managed democracy’ of today’s ‘ordinary’ politics, Wolin sees the possibility of fugitive moments of democracy whereby the ‘demos’ or the ‘Many’ constitutes itself as a political force capable of ‘challenging the structure of power’ (Wolin 2017, 554). The political becomes visible in the space where ordinary people create ‘new cultural patterns of commonality’ (Wolin 1994. 43). While fleeting, the eruption of moments of extraordinary mobilization nevertheless disrupts the status quo and, hence, deepens our political imaginaries by demonstrating in situ that another politics is possible.
Wolin’s conception of fugitive democracy has drawn comparisons to Jacques Rancière’s conception of the political (Vick 2015). For Rancière, the political is constituted by the encounter between two opposing orders: that of the ‘police’ and that of politics (also called the order of emancipation). The ‘police’ order corresponds to what Kalyvas describes as ‘ordinary’ politics and Wolin as ‘managed democracy’. It involves the hierarchical distribution of places and functions in society (Rancière 1992). The police order ensures a ‘distribution of the sensible’ understood as the ‘self-evident’ perception of that which is ‘common’, and of the ‘delimitations’ of places and functions ‘within it’ (Rancière 2004, 12). Inspired by Michel Foucault’s analysis of power in contemporary society, Rancière (1999, 28–29) argues that the police order rests upon the rejection of a part of society deemed unfit to partake in the institutions of the status quo. It thrives on a ‘miscount’ whereby some are counted and included, while others are miscounted and excluded. Rancière calls this a ‘wrong’ which is the proper of all police orders, whether it be a brutal order, like in North Korea, or a gentle one, like in Canada. Against this configuration, the order of politics opposes the principle of the equality of all people. More specifically, it seeks to verify equality through processes that interrupt the police order, demonstrating that the ‘wrong’ and the ‘miscount’ are contingent and arbitrary (Ruby 2009). The political, defined as the encounter between the order of the police and the order of politics, allows for a public staging of equality through the irruption of the political action of the Many that interrupts the institutions of the police order.
Politics, social division and conflict
The idea that politics is constituted by the irruption/interruption of the Many opens to a vision of the political as the locus of social division and conflict. Indeed, Kalyvas (2019) sees democracy as the only political form through which the poor can assert themselves in their never-ending conflict with the wealthy Few. Wolin (2017) also perceives democracy as the realm of the social division and conflict between entrenched interests and the demos. Along similar lines, Rancière (2005, 96) argues that democracy ‘is the action that constantly wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth’.
William Connolly writes extensively on democracy as the balancing between systems of mutual adjustment within a field of contested space and a normative orientation that affirms an ethos of ‘reciprocal appreciation of the element of partisanship’ (Connolly 2004, 169). He situates identity, which is always relational and collective, and difference within the parameters of political conflict. Connolly (2008, 142) refers to this as ‘agonistic respect’, a civic virtue that permits people to respect difference and to ‘negotiate larger assemblages’. He broadens the idea of a contested field of ethical negotiations into the formulation of an ‘ethos of politics’, which assumes an ontology of discordance, understood as the inevitable result of a social life that strives to afford otherness its rightful place (Connolly 2004, 168). Drawing from Deleuze, Connolly sees conflict as giving rise to a rhizomatic political assemblage that intersects with points of connection drawn from a multiplicity of participants who are centred on varying commitments (economic, social and religious). This is diametrically opposed to a Leninist-type of politics that consolidates around a central political idea propagated by a hierarchical organization (Connolly 2004). Connolly (1999, 175–176) takes his cue on rhizomatic politics from the functioning of the human brain network (as does Deleuze), which, decentralized and non-hierarchical, assembles and mixes from a multiplicity of layers of feelings and intensities, allowing for their ‘conceptual […] translation’. A rhizomatic political assemblage consist of individuals practicing ‘arts of the self’ and ‘working together in resonance’ (Gallant 2007, 123). Like Foucault, Connolly believes that ‘techniques of the self’ allow for the detachment from the status quo and its contestation. Moreover, contestation must dive below the surface to challenge instincts at every level of being, including the threshold of consciousness, affect and intellectual thought. Politics descends from the realm of the audible and visible to a plane of micropolitics which operates below ‘large legislative acts and executive initiatives’ and renders the necessary conditions for establishing new forms of difference (Connolly 2002, 20). In later works, Connolly (2013, 182) calls for a ‘renegotiation’ of democratic activism that begins with ‘the positive possibilities of micro-experimentation’ and that also considers the middle-range scale of political action such as the ‘farm-to-table movement’ to create ‘several contending sites’ (191) allowing for the ‘nonviolent disruptions of business as usual on several fronts’ (192). The multiplicity of such micro- and meso-experimentations can set the groundwork for the constitution of a large-scale social movement able to intervene at the highest levels of political life. Hence Connolly’s agonistic theory of radical democracy rests upon the idea that contestation and conflict at the micro-, meso- and marco-levels are key to the advancement of a politics of emancipation spanning from the local to the global.
While Claude Lefort agrees with Connolly on division and conflict, his reasoning follows another path. Rather than turning to French Theory or to the neurosciences, Lefort finds in Machiavelli’s thought the affirmation of an ‘originary division of the social’. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, he further locates the emergence of modern democracy, understood as indeterminacy and practiced through conflict. For Lefort (1986a, 304), Machiavelli discovers a division in society that cannot be overcome by institutions. In chapter 9 of The Prince, Machiavelli (2003b) claims that ‘in every city’, two opposing humours or desires can be found: that of the Few who wish to dominate and the Many who wish to remain free. In chapter 4, book 1 of The Discourses, Machiavelli (2003a) even argues that the ‘tumults’ resulting from the clash of Few and the Many are the very source of freedom in a political community. It is thus division and conflict that allow for an extension of freedom in the political realm. For Machiavelli, the republican form of government is best equipped to allow for the expression of this conflict. Other types of regimes, such as the monarchy, tend to obscure this division by emphasizing unity rather than allowing for division. Lefort argues that the Old Regime and the Revolution in France is the paradigmatic case study of such an occurrence. Drawing from Kantorowitz’ (1997) work on the doctrine of the King’s two bodies, Lefort (1988, 16) sees in the public regicide of Louis Capet during the Revolution the destruction of the divine body of the King, whose main political function was to embody and unify France via the theological-political nexus, and the beginning of the democratic experience. By exposing the ‘human, all too human’ character of the King, the French revolutionaries ruined the possibility of endowing the nation with substantive unity, that is, unity that allows for a clear understanding of the meaning of society and of individual existence. The social and existential sense afforded by ‘Church and King’ is therefore lost and replaced by a general sense of indeterminacy. Democracy is thus ‘instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty’ (Lefort 1988, 19). As a regime, it thrives on the endless debates surrounding its meaning and its ends. In other words, democracy allows a public ‘staging’ of division through the play of conflict and the recognition that tumults are, as Machiavelli argued, the living source of freedom.
Miguel Abensour assumes many of Lefort’s basic postulates only to fully flesh out their consequences for democratic theory. If, as Lefort contends, there is an ‘originary division of the social’, and that democracy thrives on indeterminacy and conflict, then we require a bolder understanding of democracy. Abensour (2011, xxiii) proposes the concept of ‘insurgent democracy’ which has the merit of liberating democracy from its ‘neutralization and trivialization’ by regimes who seek to export it to the world while practicing torture and waging ‘bloody wars’ in its name. Insurgent democracy is characterized by two ideas: (1) that democracy is a form of action whereby the demos irrupt onto the stage of politics against the Few with a view to creating a state of non-domination; (2) that insurgent democracy is not limited to a specific temporal moment but that it appears continuously whenever domination re-appears. For Abensour, insurgent democracy allows for the creation of a social bond of fraternity. By this, he means that the collective experience of conflict and division carries with it an egalitarian and fraternal sense of being with others. Akin to Loraux’s (2006, 93) concept of a ‘bond of division’ generated by the conflict that existed in the ‘divided city’ of Ancient Athens, this non-hierarchical social bond is created by and through the common struggle for emancipation against domination. Abensour, like Connolly and Lefort, conceives the political as the locus of division and conflict.
Political agency and plurality
This recognition of the centrality of division and conflict also coincides with the call for a conception of emancipatory political agency that goes beyond a single-axis identity, such as the proletariat. Connolly (2013, 188) argues that any ‘significant change must today be mobilized by a large, pluralist assemblage rather than by a single class or other core constituency’. Lefort (2010) draws our attention to the effervescent nature of democracy where, under the conditions of indeterminacy, the ‘people’ are to remain active, even combative, in the struggle against oppression. Abensour (2014), using concepts found in La Boétie, contrasts the domination of the ‘All One’, whereby the Tyrant subsumes plurality and difference, with a politics of the ‘All Ones’ that rests upon the concerted action of the Many within which plurality and difference is preserved.
In their opus Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2014), Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argue that social objectivity is inherently political, precisely because power relations constitute it. Accordingly, the converging point between power and objectivity is ‘hegemony’. Alluding to the idea of politics-as-hegemony, they write: ‘These conditions arise originally in the field of what we have termed the “democratic revolution”, […] or, in other words, in a form of politics which is founded […] on affirmation of the contingency and ambiguity of every “essence”, and on the constitutive character of social division and antagonism’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 176–177). Laclau and Mouffe (1987, 80) highlight the value of the concept of hegemony as a tool to critically analyze liberal democratic societies as well as ‘in the countries of so-called “actually existing socialism”’. This claim is significant as it is directly linked to the emergence of new forms of domination as a result of a purported ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 80). It redraws the avenues of social protest in a wider and more theoretically rich manner. Abandoning the Marxist axiom of class as the primary engine for human emancipation, Laclau and Mouffe’s arguments accentuate a diversity of resistance emergent across and within various spatial, cultural and political terrains. As new forms of domination emerge, Laclau and Mouffe suggest that discourses of emancipation must be created by a ‘polyphony of voices’, without prioritizing a particular sphere of struggle or sociological category (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 175). The insights developed by Laclau and Mouffe are crucial for the development of radical democratic theory and remain theoretical watersheds in post-Marxist thought (Deleixe 2019).
In a similar fashion, Breaugh (2013) argues that the struggle against domination is undertaken by ‘anybody and everybody’ (Rancière 2010, 82) who experiences this exclusion. Breaugh argues that specific socio-economic categories or a fixed identity do not necessarily lead to the entry into political agency. His recourse to the figure of the ‘pleb’, which is deliberately taken from the tumultuous world of Ancient Roman politics, aims at describing an ultimately indeterminable political actor. Breaugh (2013, vi) points out that the Roman plebeians were plural political subjects: indigenous and foreign to Rome, wealthy and destitute, old and young, men and women, etc. The only commonality of the plebs was their experience of political exclusion. The emphasis that Breaugh puts on the notion of ‘experience’ also points to the impossibility of reducing the plebs to a social category. While the initial plebeian experience in Rome – the first Plebeian Secession in 494 BCE – was triggered by economic and military pressures insofar as plebeians were forced to defend Rome’s liberty abroad yet were dominated domestically, Breaugh (2019, 584) argues that ‘the type of exclusion that generates a plebeian experience can take a variety of forms, such as an exclusion from material resources, legal status, citizenship, or, as is often the case, a combination of different types of exclusion; in other words, an intersection of exclusions’. The presence of plurality and difference amongst the Many in their struggles for political agency can be seen throughout the different ‘plebeian experiences’, from Ancient Rome to the Occupy Wall Street and beyond (Breaugh 2019).
This survey of three central ideas of radical democracy offers a fruitful tableau for assessing and challenging practices of domination. The aim of radical democratic politics is to contest efforts that seek to render the people ‘missing’, as Deleuze (1997, 216) suggests, in the name of unity, wholeness and oneness. The scene of radical democratic action is thus ubiquitous, yet ever changing, from Standing Rock to the streets of Hong Kong to the Sunrise Movement sit-ins (Estes 2019; Fulda 2019; Hirji and Cramer 2019). Building on the insights provide above, we offer a path for mounting challenges against domination under neoliberalism. By doing so, we develop the first phase of ‘a living critique of domination’ that relies upon a scrutiny of socio-political realities and a reappraisal of the fissures of the neoliberal order that have been made visible by the political actions of the Many.
A radical critique of domination
A radical critique of domination must renew with a fundamental task of political theory: the analysis of regimes that relies on a historical comparative approach. In an incisive essay published online, for instance, Classics scholar Frank (2017) argued that the experience of the Ancient Greek world can help us understand the political rise of Donald J. Trump. For her, Plato’s Republic warns that ‘oligarchy breeds tyranny’ inasmuch as oligarchy rests upon an insurmountable divide between the Few and the Many that allows for the former to rule by excluding the latter from political power. For Frank, such extreme social stratification obliges the Many to seek redress through the power of the One. The tyrant is perceived as being capable of rectifying the situation for the Many by reducing the power of the Few, or to put it in more colloquial terms, by ‘draining the swamp’. As it is now clear in the specific instance of the United States, the Tyrant can also accommodate himself with the Few since the Tyrant is, by definition, unconstrained by political norms or democratic pressures and thus cannot be obliged to ‘drain the swamp’ (Bolton 2020). Frank’s overall point is nevertheless very suggestive for radical democratic theorists: tyranny is not born of democracy or from an excess of democracy, as certain observers have tried to argue (Sullivan 2016). Rather, it is born of oligarchy, as Teegarden (2014) convincingly demonstrates in his study of ancient tyranny, Death to Tyrants! In fact, Teegarden offers a solid historical grounding to Frank’s theoretical argument by showing that the sequence of regime change in the Ancient Greek world from the 7th to the 4th century is that of Monarchy and Oligarchy to Tyranny, and from Tyranny to Democracy. The proper appreciation of regimes, and their transformations, remains essential for understanding politics today.
One of the steps towards a radical analysis of all forms of domination is to undertake a fresh analysis of the regimes we live in and that we refer to as ‘liberal democracies’. Contemporary radical democratic thinkers have challenged this definition. For Castoriadis (1986, 133), we live in ‘liberal oligarchies,’ whereas Wolin (2017, 138–158) speaks of ‘managed democracies’. For Rancière (2005), our police order is that of an oligarchy limited by the double recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties, whereas Abensour (2014) has pleaded for a renewal with the analysis of authoritarianism in order to assess the current state of affairs in Western liberal democracies.
More specifically, a radical analysis of domination should offer a detailed examination of the central components of our political regimes with a view to their contribution to democracy, understood as isonomy, in contemporary society. If we take, for example, representative government, the political party system and the large bureaucracies of the modern State, we can see that, in their theoretical genesis and in their historical functioning, they are exclusive of the Many. As Manin (1997, 94) argues, theorists and practitioners of representative government were fundamentally anti-democratic and chose, in full knowledge of the facts, to implement a system that would reserve public office to the same types of people. The recourse to elections rather than sortition, as the method for designating public office holders, is exemplary: whereas sortition allows for the selection of anyone and everyone, elections favour the Few, those who are ‘distinguished’ by wealth and notoriety or a combination of both.
The first analysis of the functioning of political parties revealed their very real limits in terms of democracy for the Many. In his 1902 study, Moisey Ostrogorski (1902) argued that the political party system ruins the possibility of spontaneous political action, limits the scope of political action and reserves political power to the Few who run the Party machines. This results in a channelling or a neutralization of the democratic political energies liberated by the progressive extension of the right to vote. Ostrogorski’s conclusions have yet to be refuted by the functioning of mainstream political parties in the Western world (Bartels 2016; Cole 2018; Conti 2020). As for the on-going and serious attempts to theorize, create and operationalize a new kind of political party that would be more responsive to its members and to the needs of society, parties such as the Partido dos Trabalhodores (PT) in Brazil and Syriza in Greece, they remain wedded to the framework of the modern State and its oligarchical functioning (Castoriadis 2010, 119). Indeed, they consider that the Many should necessarily imitate the Few inasmuch as the competition for State power remains their ultimate goal. From a radical democratic viewpoint, emancipatory political organizations should avoid reproducing the organizational forms that reinforce the status quo.
The great bureaucracies of the modern State are organized on the basis of technical expertise and following strict hierarchical lines of command. They employ experts legitimized by specific types of knowledge that are, by definition, exclusive. They are also designed to expand the scope of their influence as well as extend their realm of application thereby increasing their power and their presence in society over time (Lefort 1986b, 114). Because of the permanent nature of bureaucratic structures, and the fact that they are more or less immune to elections or changes in government, they constitute a stable and stabilizing component of our political regime that is structurally resistant to transformative radical politics, as well as being exclusive of the Many. As political scientist Gourges (2018) shows in his study of local democracy in France, when participatory instances are added to public policy decision-making processes, State apparatuses manage to neutralize and evacuate proposals that could undermine its ultimate control over policy.
In short, the case can be made that the central components of liberal democracies function like oligarchies that restrict the competition for State power to different types of oligarchs who monopolize access to political life. To this analysis, we must also add a radical democratic examination of executive power (from the presidency to the prison industrial complex to the militarization of police forces) and of the judiciary with a view to understanding how they rest upon – and perpetrate – gendered and racial forms of domination – in step with Robinson’s (2000) analysis of racial capitalism – while excluding the participation of the Many. This call for a critical study of our political regimes does not, of course, exhaust the task of a radical analysis of domination today.
Further research could examine issues pertaining to the economy and the major trends that characterize the rule of neoliberal capitalism today. For example, a focus on what Elizabeth Anderson calls ‘private government’ (2017). Anderson describes the role played by employers in the constitution of a ‘private’ form of government that is devoid of any accountability to those they ‘govern’. The firm’s rule over its employees is, in the North American context, especially arbitrary and unequal in terms of strength and power. What is commonly known as ‘labor relations’ is actually a skewed struggle in which the Many are forced to acquiesce to the dictates and whims of the Few. The daily denial of the autonomy of employees, who remain without any real recourse against most employers, allows for an experience of domination that, in the particular case of Wal-Mart – the largest private sector employer in the US – has been compared to living ‘inside the Leviathan’ (Head 2004). Again, this is but an example of the type of problem that needs further research from an emancipatory and radical democratic perspective. A long list of issues that perpetuate forms of domination and hinder the deepening of democracy can easily be detailed: the recourse to tax havens (Zucman 2015), the ethics and politics of algorithms (Bucher 2018), the development of artificial intelligence (Boyte 2017), the destruction of the environment and global warming (Klein 2016), the treatment of economic and political refugees (Tassin 2017b), to name only a few of the very serious problems that renew the struggles for freedom, equality and solidarity today.
Exploring the cracks and gaps in the current order
While a critical appreciation of contemporary society is necessary, it remains insufficient. To articulate a ‘living critique of domination’, we must also examine the cracks and gaps in the current order created by emancipatory political experiences, however fleeting they may be and notwithstanding their limits. In his book on the discontinuous history of political freedom, Breaugh (2013) conceptualizes such emancipatory moments as ‘plebeian experiences’ by which he seeks to emphasize the exemplary nature of the secession the Roman plebs on Aventine Hill. This little known and under-theorized configuration of political strategies unfolded following three distinct moments: the interruption of the political status quo by way of a secession from Rome; the creation of a new political order on Aventine Hill; and the return to a Rome that is politically transformed by the plebeian withdrawal. At each moment, Breaugh observes the political subjectivization of the Many, hitherto considered to be a subpolitical entity, and whose entry into political agency leads to a deepening of freedom in the public realm. As he shows in his work, the threefold strategy put forth by the plebs is recurrent throughout the political history of the Western world. Although this framework does not exhaust the richness and the multiplicity of the politics of the Many today, the discontinuous history of the plebeian experience helps identify key features that are the proper of radical democratic politics and that merit further analysis and theorization. To explore the ‘cracks and gaps’ of the current order – defined as the moments, events or experiences which allow for emancipatory political action – we now turn to three characteristics identified by Breaugh (2019) and illustrate them using some recent emancipatory political experiences: Nuit Debout in Paris, Black Lives Matter, as well as the #MeToo movement. These features, which overlap with the insights found in the review of the literature are: (1) embracing indeterminacy, (2) living with division and conflict and (3) championing emancipatory political subjects. As we will argue, these characteristics open to alternative political possibilities by unleashing the emancipatory potential of democracy leading to an extension of freedom, equality and solidarity today. For each of the case studies, we will also discuss the impacts that they had on the political imaginaries and institutions of the status quo.
Embracing indeterminacy
If we turn for a moment to the history of political thought, and more specifically to its relationship to democracy, we can see that the adversaries of democracy (Plato, Madison, Schumpeter, for example) are in agreement with the advocates of democracy (such as Lefort, Castoriadis, Rancière) on two crucial points: (a) that democracy is a form of ‘disorder’ and (b) that the bearer of this ‘disorder’ is the Many. While the adversaries of democracy wish to rid the political realm of disorder by either neutralizing or, at the very least, containing the politics of the Many, the advocates of democracy consider disorder to be the vital source of freedom and autonomy. For radical democratic theorists, the presence of disorder testifies to the impossibility of a metaphysical foundation of the Law and Power. Hence, disorder is caused by the fact of ‘indeterminacy’ (Lefort 2007, 563) or ‘chaos’ (Castoriadis 1991, 103), or even contingency (Rancière 2005, 51). These terms point to the fact that political foundations are born of temporary agreements and they cannot be ‘naturalized’ and regarded as the definitive solution to the problems of political life (Breaugh 2019, 587–588).
Embracing indeterminacy entails accepting that the tension between disorder and order, between the instituting and the instituted, cannot be resolved. Acknowledging this allows radical democratic theorists to justify the political action of the Many, which carries with it a refusal of the status quo allowing for an extension of freedom in the political realm. The never-ending creation of political forms – fugitive (Wolin 1994) or more lasting (Dubigeon 2017) – through the action of the Many is precisely the type of effervescent political life that radical democratic theorists identify during emancipatory political experiences. Because of the demands it puts on political subjects, the temporality of the instituting process is ‘exhausting’, as Abensour (2011, xxxv) contends. It remains nevertheless the preeminent bulwark against the centripetal movement that governs political institutions and transforms them into ‘self-sufficient totalities’, thus restricting the scope of political action by reducing it to the functioning of a particular organizational form (Abensour 2011, 29).
An embracing of indeterminacy could be observed during the events of Nuit Debout (Rise Up at Night) that began on March 31, 2016 and lasted until the end of June. This broad and inclusive occupation of a public square in Paris, the Place de la République, originated as a protest against a bill designed to reform the labor code in France (referred to as the El-Khomri Law, named after the minister who sponsored the bill). Nuit Debout rapidly became the locus of a wide-ranging critique of the status quo in France and experience of autonomous self-institution. Leaderless, the occupation was organized along radical democratic principles, with a general assembly and a myriad of smaller committees established to examine specific problems and organizational issues and then report back to the Assembly (Lorriaux 2016). The participants and the facilitators of the Assembly fully and openly assumed the experimental quality of the occupation. As one moderator explained to the Assembly: ‘we are all learning together, on this side of the assembly and on the other, this democracy that we want to invent’ (Otero 2017, 18 min 16 s).
For some observers, the indeterminacy of Nuit Debout testified to its weakness as a political movement. Because it did not have strong leadership or clear political objectives, it was unable to create a ‘mass hegemonic process’ that would have allowed the event to last and thus avoid defeat as Maniglier (2016, 257) argued in a special issue of Les Temps Modernes. Against this position, Tassin (2017a) invites us to think about political action in general, and Nuit Debout in particular, beyond the categories of victory and defeat. For Tassin, the events of Nuit Debout were first and foremost transformative for those who participated inasmuch as they left traces by redefining the possible. Following Hannah Arendt, Tassin calls this transformative experience and its remainder, the ‘lost treasure of revolution.’ As such, it is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Instead of conceding to ‘a type of ethnocentrism […] [that can only conceive] political action in terms of new political forces capable of substituting themselves to decaying political parties’, we can see that, in the heart of an over-gentrified Paris, Nuit Debout allowed for an experience of isonomy as well as the creation of a new social bond amongst strangers, that the categories of victory and defeat do not allow us to appreciate (Sudda and Guinnet 2021, 214).
Nuit Debout partakes in a robust tradition of ‘extraordinary politics’ (Kalyvas 2008) in France: the legacy of ‘French Rebellion’ (Nicolas 2002) can be located as early as 1661 and it has resurfaced since Nuit Debout. Indeed, the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement emerged, in late 2018 and early 2019, to protest the inequitable effects of a climate change policy of higher fuel prices on citizens living in areas without easy access to public transit. Like for Nuit Debout, the protesters occupied spaces, notably roundabouts, and they openly challenged the legitimacy of French ruling elites ensconced in the palaces of the Republic and detached from the reality of life outside of Paris (Guichoux 2019). The continuity of purpose and protest, if not always of people, between the two movements has been highlighted by sociologists, such as Sudda and Guinnet (2021), who argue that we can understand the Yellow Vest movement as an extension of the field of the struggle of Nuit Debout. The combined effects of both movements forced President Emmanuel Macron in April 2019 to convene a Citizens Convention for Climate, the first of its kind in France. This assembly of citizens was randomly chosen to mirror the demographic makeup of France. For democratic theorists like Landemore (2021), this experience marks an important attempt to rein in the influence of lobbyists and vested interests in French politics, thus allowing for a limiting of the ‘excessive responsiveness to interest groups’ that characterizes the institutions of ordinary politics in France. Notwithstanding the limits of this experience (Landemore 2021), this citizen-centric approach to policymaking marks a deepening of political imaginaries and a fresh addition to the working of the political institutions of the status quo. It therefore remains one of the most significant effects of the democratic effervescence born of the political sequence initiated by Nuit Debout and pursued by the Yellow Vest movement.
Acceptance of division and conflict
Nuit Debout, as well as the Yellow Vest movement, was criticized for being riddled by conflict and weakened by division. The presence of conflict and division has often been considered a major obstacle for emancipatory politics: it is repeatedly said that struggles are too fragmentary, that political subjects are not unified enough, and that the objectives pursued are inconsistent. Against this trope of radical thought, we invoke a counter-tradition of Western political thought that sees conflict and division as inescapable, and even beneficial, for a political community inasmuch as conflict and division are the result of the condition of plurality and can be politically productive. While this tradition is well represented in contemporary political thought, as we saw in the first part of the article, it is also present in early modern thinkers. As a heterodox reading of Machiavelli suggests, the Florentine Secretary is not a teacher of political evil or the author of bedtime reading for tyrants. Rather, Machiavelli can be considered a ‘political educator’ (Abensour 2008). The substance of his teachings deals with the political consequences of the conflict generated by the division between the ‘two different dispositions [that] are found in every city’: the people who ‘are everywhere anxious not to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles [who] are out to dominate and oppress the people’ (Machiavelli 2003b, 32). When a political community allows for the manifestation of the conflict between the Few and the Many, its ultimate effect is the creation of ‘laws and institutions whereby the liberties of the public benefited’ (Machiavelli 2003a, 114). Closer to us, Abensour (2014, 111) considers that one of the great political problems was correctly identified by Étienne de La Boétie as the enchantment and the charm of the ‘name of One’. Indeed, the establishment of unity based on the identification with a leader (Hitler, Mao, Stalin) seen as a saviour-protector, opens to the destruction of plurality and the creation of new forms of domination. For Abensour, we must refuse the ‘name of One’ and jettison the desire for an eschatological resolution to politics that seeks to create a community freed from division and conflict. Such a community could only constitute itself beyond politics.
Black Lives Matter is an example of a political movement that accepts conflict and division. BLM began as a Twitter hashtag used by African-American community organizers who were outraged by the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin in Florida in February 2012. By 2013, the persistence of extrajudicial killings of African-American citizens, notably that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, led to the transformation of the hashtag into a diverse social movement. Since its inception, BLM has recognized the intersectionality of the African-American experience of domination, from slavery to today’s ‘New Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2010). The movement is horizontally organized as an association of local chapters across the US and elsewhere. The different chapters are required only to adhere to a set of common principles; each individual division preserves the right to decide the type of action they deem necessary in order to advance the cause. There is no hierarchy or centralized leadership and the membership remains the driving force of each chapter. In fact, Alicia Garza, one the three community organizers at the forefront of the movement, insists on the non-centrality of her own participation in BLM (Cobb 2016). Garza also contends that BLM is not leaderless; rather, it is ‘leaderfull’ (McClain 2017) because each individual member partakes in the leadership of the movement. Detailing the organizational autonomy of local chapters embedded within a larger decentralized movement, Taylor (2016, 174–177) draws parallels between the structure of BLM and Occupy Wall Street, highlighting the hostility levied against them both for the lack of formal structures and leadership. While such criticism is a common tactic to delegitimize the action of the Many, Taylor argues that BLM’s grassroots and intersectional approach stands in stark contrast to previous examples, including the Civil Rights Movement, by enabling the Many to articulate the struggle. In terms of the diversity of action, some chapters emphasize the consolidation of the bonds between African-American parents and their children (Denver Chapter) while others stress the need to cultivate historical memory in order to help create community (Vancouver-Washington Chapter). 2 However, in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, an important conflict emerged regarding the ultimate ends of the movement. For some activists, BLM needed to be policy oriented, for others it had to engage in local politics, while for others still, it had to remain the locus of protests and demonstrations against the status quo (Sands 2017).
Against the idea that BLM ‘is beset by debilitating internal rifts […] preventing the movement from doing much at all to accomplish its aims’, (Sands 2017), we argue that the conflicts and divisions speak to its strength and vibrancy as a movement. The pursuit of different objectives such as developing policy, engaging in local politics and protesting the status quo are neither contradictory nor problematic. In fact, the aforementioned challenges (policy, local involvement and protesting) need to be met in a radically democratic political community. Indeed, radical democracy rests upon the idea that issues of policy must be dealt with by the Many, since policymaking would be the object of self-legislation. As for the question of local political engagement, radical democracy’s first terrain is local, even the neighbourhood. To the bromide that modern political communities are too large to accommodate radical democratic institutions, we can echo the words of Parisian writer Romain Gary: ‘I am a citizen of rue du Bac’, (Grenier 2007, 18) he proclaimed, that is to say the street he lived on in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. Local political action remains a crucial dimension of radical democratic politics. At the same time, BLM can also be at the forefront of the protests against police brutality and violence, as we recently witnessed in the aftermath of the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd in May 2020 (Cobb 2020). In short, the fact that the movement is divided on what should be done is not a problem from a radical democratic perspective since the mobilization of the Many unleashes democratic energies that can focus on a myriad of issues blocking the extension of freedom, equality and solidarity today.
Because the movement is ongoing, the medium and long-term consequences of the BLM movement remain unclear. A preliminary assessment could, however, underscore the fact that its ideas and practices are utopian. By this, we are not referring to a commonsensical understanding of utopia as a blueprint for the construction of a ‘perfect’ or ‘better’ world. Rather, following the work of Abensour (1999) and Levitas (2013, xvii), utopias are designed to facilitate the ‘education of desire’ for emancipation. As a ‘method’, utopias allow for the ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’ in three dimensions: ‘archeological’, whereby past utopian experiences are mined for elements to motivate action; ‘ontological’ where the subjectivity required for utopian change is explored; and ‘architectural’ ‘involv[ing] the institutional design and delineation of the good society – and, in the case of intentional communities or prefigurative practices, its partial concrete instantiation’ (Levitas 2013, xvii). Elements of each of the three modes are present in the BLM movement. At the archeological level, as Taylor (2016) points out, BLM sought to distinguish itself from the Civil Rights Movement by remaining acephalic thus allowing the Many to partake in the deliberation and action of each chapter. As for the ontological dimension, the BLM movement focused on the black experience in America as a fertile site for the emergence of a utopian political subject. Finally, the chapters of the BLM movement, as ‘intentional communities’, have delineated institutional frameworks which allow for a diversity of action, the respect of the autonomy of local political instances and the creation of spaces for the concerted action of the Many. As testified by the massive and sustained demonstrations which occurred during the summer of 2020, BLM’s most significant effect has been the sharpening of a desire for emancipation. This education of desire was not limited to Black Americans but extended to ‘anybody and everybody’, as we can establish by the heterogeneous character of the demonstrations which brought together racialized minorities and Caucasians of all ages and genders.
Championing emancipatory political subjects
The BLM movement is also exemplary insofar as it focused on an emancipatory political subject that was historically excluded from political life and who remains, to a large extent, excluded from political participation. As Alexander (2010, 1) points out, it is all too easy to identify African Americans who, for five generations, have been denied basic political rights: their ancestors suffered under slavery, the brutal racism of the KKK, Jim Crow Laws and they are today subjected to a policy of mass incarceration explicitly devised to control them, the ‘new Jim Crow’. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Alexander (2020) makes clear that collective liberation requires a commitment to a politics of solidarity which aims to confront racism of the past and present while reimaging both juridical and economic justice. For radical democratic theorists and activists, the emergence of emancipatory political subjects is a central preoccupation: it reveals the presence of forms of domination that need to be addressed and it points to a possible deepening of freedom, equality and solidarity. The fact that such political subjects expose domination and suggest a deepening of democracy speaks to the emancipatory content of their struggles. Of course, we have to rigorously distinguish between emancipatory political subjects and non-emancipatory ones. The ‘alt-right’, to take but one glaring example of the latter, cannot be considered an emancipatory political subject since it seeks to destroy plurality in order to restore a racist and misogynist ‘white’ political order that would only deepen inequalities and expand forms of domination of the Few over the Many. 3 By contrast, emancipatory political subjects demonstrate the arbitrary character of domination and foster the conflict necessary for an extension of freedom. By embodying plurality, they also further equality.
In the current context, we can witness the appearance of emancipatory subjects, powered by new technologies and social media, and who operate outside of the traditional confines of political life. The #MeToo movement illustrates the effects of the emergence of such emancipatory political subjects. The hashtag was devised in 2006 by African-American activist Tarana Burke who sought to encourage solidarity among victims of sexual harassment, assault and violence. In 2017, the actress Alyssa Milano used the hashtag to reveal that she was a victim of sexual violence and she encouraged other women to follow suit. The response to this call for empowerment transformed #MeToo into a global social movement, with the creation of culturally specific hashtags such as #BalanceTonPorc (Expose Your Pig) in France and the establishment of alliances with other feminist movements such as Ni Una Menos (Not One [Women] Less) in Latin America and NonUnadiMeno in Italy. #MeToo has led to the downfall of powerful men, who enjoyed the prerogatives of the Few, such as Harvey Weinstein (Miramax) and Les Moonves (CBS).
#MeToo has focused public attention on predatory sexual practices in the workplace, the classroom and elsewhere. The movement has also revealed the limits of a patriarchal judiciary system that is unable to properly adjudicate, and administer, justice in cases of sexual abuse. The possibility of bringing together and empowering strangers victimized by predatory sexual behaviour has initiated a process whereby power structures are forced to change because what was once ‘thinkable’ or ‘possible’ for people in positions of power is no longer so. By reaching out to the Many via social media, the #MeToo movement has multiplied the sites of struggle for justice, equality and solidarity in contemporary society, transforming the sexual privileges of entitled men, their ‘liberté d’importuner’ as the signatories of a French petition against the #MeToo movement argued (Le Monde 2018), into yet another example of the violence inherent to the ‘sexual social contract’ identified by Carole Pateman (1988) in her groundbreaking book.
As Mason-Deese (2018, 235) points out in the Verso Report on the #MeToo movement, Where Freedom Starts, the ‘spread of the hashtag and the narratives accompanying it were powerful […] as an action through which women could find a collective voice, to intervene in public debate, and to also create new conversations and therefore new subjectivities among women.’ For Mason-Deese (2018, 243), if we reduce the movement to ‘individual denunciations made by famous women’ we are considering it only from its weakest dimension. At its most powerful, #MeToo has opened a space to discuss how sexual violence partakes in a larger ‘constellation’ of violence and domination embedded within the very fabric of contemporary society. Mason-Deese further argues that the example of Latin American feminist movements could indicate a possible pathway for #MeToo that would take it from the denunciation of sexual violence to the deepening of equality through the creation of a community which respects plurality and difference. In Argentina notably, Mason-Desse (2018, 243) argues that the Ni Una Menos movement has a ‘practice of assemblies, where women share stories’ and ‘where the differences between experiences are not erased nor ignored, nor [considered] insurmountable. Through the assembly, through the process of working out common language, and though taking the street together, a new collective subject is born’. But such assemblies are not restricted to women only. Ni Una Menos also organized common assemblies with Indigenous Mapuche activists under the theme of ‘our bodies, our territories’, so as to connect ‘the commodification of land and natural resources’ with the ‘the exploitation of women’ (Mason-Desse 2018, 243) Moreover, Judith Butler notes that the movement, which has assumed an ethical and political nature along the lines of ‘Nunca Mas!’ (Never Again!) that emerged at the end of the military dictatorship in 1983, moves beyond feminist discourses centred on liberty and rights for the individual subject. ‘The movement is not based on a narrow idea of identity’, Butler insists, ‘but is a strong and intensifying coalition that draws support from women and trans people who are workers, who belong to unions and churches, who may or may not have any relation to universities’. (Yancy 2019). Butler (2020, 190) further elaborates this point in The Force of Nonviolence, stating, ‘If sexual terror is related not only to domination, but to extermination, then sexual violence constitutes a dense site for complex histories of oppression as well as of resistance struggles’.
The creation of a follow-up movement to #MeToo in Québec, #EtMaintenant (#AndNow), which seeks to open an inclusive dialogue between women and men regarding the actions to be taken to put an end to sexual violence, testifies to the possibility of transforming social relations using a radical democratic approach (Boulianne 2019). It has also led to one of the most significant consequences of the #MeToo movement: the creation of a new judicial institution designed exclusively to adjudicate cases of sexual violence. In Québec, the #EtMaintenant movement focused not only on the prevalence of predatory sexual practices but also on the procedural obstacles encountered by victims of sexual crimes in the legal system. In the wake of this widespread campaign on traditional and social media, the government of Québec established a trans-partisan committee of ‘experts’, with women constituting more than 70% of its members, to find practical solutions to these problems. The ‘experts’ designated by the government were not techno-bureaucratic professionals but scholars, legal actors and victims of sexual violence who suffered under the institutions of the status quo (Corte and Desrosiers 2020). The final report of the committee recommended the creation of a special tribunal for sexual violence that ensures that victims are better accompanied during the process with specially trained police officers, prosecutors and judges. The Québec government translated this recommendation into a law (Bill 92) adopted by the National Assembly on November 25, 2021. Tellingly, this legal innovation was not welcomed by the judicial establishment in Québec. For the defenders of the institutions of the status quo, like the Chief Justice of the Court of Québec, this type of change defies the fundamental principles of the judiciary, such as the presumption of innocence (Richer 2021). This critique of change in the face of a widely acknowledged failure of the courts in Québec is in line with the stasis and resistance to change that characterizes the institutions of the status quo. In particular, the judiciary seems unable to accept extra-institutional change, that is, change that does not stem from within the institution per se. It also speaks to how such institutions remain woefully disconnected from the general movement of society as articulated, in this instance, by the radical democratic call for change by #EtMaintenant.
Conclusion: A living critique of domination in the age of Trumpism
On May 30, 2020, SpaceX, a private company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, launched a rocket from US soil enthralling spectators around the globe. As the rocket ascended to earth’s orbit, streets across America were occupied by thousands of protestors amidst a global pandemic demanding an end to institutionalized-state violence and racism. As the intensity of protests swelled in Minneapolis – the site where yet another Black life ‘did not matter’ – as well as in other major urban centres, State forces were being mobilized through extreme displays of militarization. Stoking the flames of hatred and violence, not to mention the common tactic of discrediting the demands of the Many on grounds of inciting anarchy, President Donald J. Trump ferociously condemned them while calling for further domination (Tan et al. 2020). Face-to-face with state militia and National Guard forces, and, in the nation’s capital, military police, protestors persevered against barrages of rubber bullets, tear gas and swinging-batons.
The juxtaposition between the triumph of corporate technological ingenuity and democratic eruptions harkens to Arendt’s recounting in The Human Condition of the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 by the USSR. Such an achievement was overshadowed by the ‘uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it’ (Arendt 1998, 1). While the parallels are revealing, much has changed since Arendt’s account. The dominance of corporate power enjoined with the US government’s neoliberal austerity cuts on education, social services and welfare should not be ignored. For while the protests coalesced against systemic racism, the backdrop of decades-long assault on the redistribution of wealth and hollowing out of democratic institutions loomed heavily. The voices and bodies that emerged during the weeks of protests following the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor assumed the symbolic moniker of BLM. The democratic scenes of the protests asserted issues at the very heart of the BLM movement, while simultaneously announcing the suffering of those oppressed by the status quo.
These events illustrate what we have argued in this article: the multiple sites of radical political action observed point to a possible re-configuration of politics, one that considers the importance of eruptive political events; accepts conflict and division as conditions for political action; and welcomes the emergence of new political subjectivities. A living critique of domination calls for an expanded understanding of the dynamics of political life that allows for the involvement of the Many, as well as its valorization. Indeed, the series of political action explored in this article – from Nuit Debout to Black Lives Matter to #MeToo – testify to the transformative potential of radical democratic politics.
The project of a living critique of domination must continue to challenge the ‘dark times’ of neoliberalism while remaining cognizant of the possibilities opened up by the perilous situation of liberal democracy in the Western world. The on-going political crisis brings much despair, yet it also offers some invigorating examples of emancipatory change that open to other political possibilities thus indicating a path towards a deepening of freedom, equality and solidarity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
A preliminary version of this article was presented by Martin Breaugh as a keynote at the 7th Annual Radical Democracy Conference, on the theme “What is to be Done?”, held at The New School for Social Research on April 27, 2018. He would like to thank the organizers for the invitation and the participants for their helpful questions and comments. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer, as well as to Chiara Piazzesi and Stephen Newman for their advice on previous drafts of the manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
