Non-domination and constituent power: Socialist republicanism versus radical democracy

Abstract

Two of the dominant frameworks for criticizing capitalism and liberal democracy in contemporary political theory is Socialist republicanism, on the one hand, and radical democracy, on other hand. Whereas radical democratic thinkers have for decades criticized liberal democracy for being elitist, hierarchical and outright anti-popular, socialist republicans have for the last 10 years developed critiques of capitalism centred on the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination and proposed various arguments for workplace democracy and cooperative forms of ownership. Despite the common ambition of uncovering hierarchical relations of economic, political and social power, and creating new egalitarian and participatory modes of political organization, no systematic comparison of socialist republicanism and radical democracy exists. This paper fills this gap by comparing the different understandings of (a) institutions and (b) political action and (c) their diverging historical and political relations to socialism.

Keywords

socialist republicanism radical democracy non-domination constituent power socialism

Introduction

There is no shortage of critiques of contemporary liberal democracy and the way in which liberal understandings of politics have helped pave the way for right-wing populism, Trumpism and elitist technocracy (Mouffe 2018; Brown 2019; Connolly 2017). Nor is there any scarcity of critical engagements with global capitalism, its inequality-creating consequences, and its erosion of democratic decision-making (Piketty 2014; Slobodian 2018; Milanovic 2019). In contemporary political theory, two of the dominant frameworks for criticizing capitalism and liberal democracy is socialist republicanism, on the one hand, and radical democracy, on other hand. Whereas radical democratic thinkers have for decades criticized liberal democracy for being elitist, statist, hierarchical and outright anti-popular, socialist republicans have for the last 10 years developed critiques of capitalism centred on the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination and proposed various arguments for workplace democracy and cooperative forms of ownership in the economic sphere and forms of radical constitutionalism in the political sphere. As part of the ongoing radicalization of the neo-republican revival – that is, the extension of the neo-republican principle of freedom as non-domination excavated by Philip Pettit and Quintin Skinner (Pettit 1997; Skinner 1998) to the economic domain as well as to radical forms of constitutionalism, what I call socialist republicanism in this paper – a number of intellectual historians and political theorists have reconstructed the historical and political relations between republicanism and socialism (Muldoon 2019; O’Shea 2019), between republicanism, Karl Marx and Marxisms (Leipold 2020; Gourevitch 2014, Thompson 2019), between republicanism and ‘the left’ (White 2007; Kouris 2020), between republicanism and popular constitutionalism (Vergara 2020; Thompson 2020) and between republicanism and the tradition of council democracy (Thompson 2018; Muldoon 2020) as well as pointed to the various ways in which the language of republicanism can articulate critiques of contemporary corporate power and capitalism as well as counter-strategies involving workplace democracy and new forms of cooperative ownership (Anderson 2017; Breen 2015; Hsieh 2008; González-Ricoy 2014). Whereas these manifold analyses of socialist republicanism are successful in demonstrating an intellectual affinity between the republican and the socialist tradition, however broadly construed, as well as in developing concrete mechanisms of democratizing contemporary spheres of domination both economically and politically, radical democratic thinkers like Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Hannah Arendt, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Miguel Abensour and Sheldon Wolin are almost entirely absent from the discussion. In short, the intellectual archives from which contemporary socialist republicans draw their sources do seldom include so-called radical democratic thinkers. In a similar manner do radical democratic thinkers, such as those listed above, seldom utilize the language of republicanism or the idea of freedom as non-domination. Central, instead, to radical democratic thinking is the idea of constituent power; that is, the creative, formative power of the people to constitute their own forms of political co-existence, as well as to alter and abolish the already constituted forms of political power once these begin to become oppressive and alienate themselves from their constituting origin (see for example Kalyvas 2005; Negri 1999). Despite the common ambitions of uncovering hierarchical relations of economic, political and social power, and creating new egalitarian and participatory modes of political organization shared by socialist republicanism and radical democracy, surprisingly, no systematic comparison of socialist republicanism and radical democracy exists. This paper fills this gap by comparing the different understandings of (a) institutions, (b) political action as well as (c) socialist republicanism and radical democracy’s diverging historical and political relations to socialism. These three parameters are chosen as objects of comparison, as I shall argue below, due to the differences in the central animating concepts of socialist republicanism and radical democracy.

Core animating ideas: Non-domination and constituent power

A first concern when comparing socialist republicanism and radical democracy is how to delineate the two strains of political thought. Who counts as a socialist republican and who counts as a radical democrat? This problem of constructing the archive from which the analysis is to be undertaken reveals a first significant difference between the two influential strains of political thought. The thinkers ascribed to radical democratic thinking (thinkers like Castoriadis, Lefort, Arendt, Negri, Rancière, Abensour and Wolin) do seldom call themselves radical democrats, but are rather interpreted as such by other political theorists¹ on the premise that these thinkers do not equate democracy with a specific institutional set-up like parliamentarianism for example, but instead understand democracy as a transformative praxis that creates new forms of political subjectivities and institutions in conflict with established forms of political power such as the state form, political parties and the bureaucracy. As such, the radical democratic thinkers under scrutiny in this paper do not see themselves as part of a radically turn in democratic theory. In contrast, contemporary political thinkers associated with the extension of the neo-republican concept of freedom as non-domination into the economic sphere as well as a way of radicalizing constitutionalism are very aware of the strategic and political intervention they perform and do in most instances describe themselves as socialist republicans or least as promoting the ideas of a distinct socialist republicanism. In this way, the radical democratic position, which I compare with socialist republicanism throughout the article, needs a more thorough reconstruction, since it does speak for itself, so to say. In the following, I will present the key animating ideas of radical democracy and socialist republicanism, insofar as their conceptual differences and diverging political strategies to a large degree, I argue, originate from these key animating ideas.

The key animating idea of socialist republicanism is non-domination. The idea of freedom as non-domination has been absolutely pivotal for the entire neo-republican revival spearheaded by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit’s (among others) ground-breaking work the last 30 years. By reconstructing the republican tradition from Roman antiquity to early modernity, Skinner argued that besides the two concepts of liberty famously pitted against each other by Isaiah Berlin (Berlin 1958), that is, negative liberty as non-interference and positive liberty as self-actualisation, a third, distinctively republican concept of liberty could be excavated from the legal codes of ancient republics and republican writers (Skinner 1998, see also Pettit 1997). Whereas the liberal idea of freedom as non-interference holds that a person is only unfree to the extent that someone (the state or a monarch for example) directly interferes with his actions, the republican concept of freedom as non-domination holds that citizens are only free when not subject to the arbitrary will and uncontrolled power of a master. The crucial difference between interference and domination is often explained with reference to slavery: On the liberal account of freedom, a slave can be considered free to the extent that he has a benevolent slaveowner, who never directly interferes with his actions. In this way, the liberal concept of freedom has separated the question of freedom from the question of the form of government. Citizens can potentially enjoy the same degree of freedom in a tyranny as in a democracy – it depends on the concrete degree of interference from the state or the tyrant. On the republican account of freedom as non-domination, the slave would never be free, even living under the most benevolent of slaveowners, insofar as the slaveowner could always potentially intervene arbitrarily in the slave’s life at any moment in time. The mere possibility of doing so would render the slave unfree on the republican account. As argued by Skinner (Skinner 2008, 86) ‘the master’s power is said to be arbitrary in the sense that it is always be open to him to govern his slaves, with impunity, according to his mere arbitrium, his own will, and desires’. In this way, neo-republicans have effectively tied together freedom and form of government, insofar as the citizen can only be free in a free state, when the citizenry has some mechanisms of participation, influence and representation, hereby making the domination and interference, which exists in every polity, unarbitrary (Pettit 2013, 187-238).

This republican idea of freedom as non-domination has been successful in pointing to various domains of political and social life, where arbitrary domination exists, and which could thus be understood as domains of unfreedom. Socialist republicanism, in turn, emerges as an extension of republican freedom into the economic realm, to relations in the workplace and to capitalism itself. As phrased in the introduction to a newly published edited volume on the subject, ‘here, we seek to extend the concept’s [i.e. freedom as non-domination] application from political domination (historically the main focus of republicanism) to social and private forms of domination’ (Leipold, Nabulsi and White 2020, 2). The socialist republican position is nicely captured in the idea of wage-labour under capitalism is a form of wage slavery. In capitalist firms, workers are subject to the arbitrary domination of their bosses without right to participation or appeal (Hsieh 2005), and this domination is structural insofar as workers without their own productive assets might leave one particular workplace but cannot stop selling their labour if they hope to sustain their livelihood (Anderson 2017). Capitalism, from a socialist republican point of view, is thus a form of slavery, insofar as workers, in order to survive, live under the arbitrary will of their bosses. This insight was nicely captured already in 1892 by the American trade unionist Georg E. McNiell, who argued that ‘there is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labour and the republican system of government’, and that is was therefore necessary ‘to engraft republican principles into our industrial system’ (McNiell in Gourevitch 2014, 6, 116). Different ways to ‘engraft republican principles into our industrial system’ have been explored by contemporary socialist republicans stemming from ‘workplace constitutionalism’ (i.e. state-regulation) over ‘workplace democracy’ (i.e. giving employees formal influence in businesses) to forms of cooperative ownership (i.e. workers co-ownership and co-direction of the business) (for an overview, see Leipold, Nabulsi and White 2020, 10-14). Moreover, the socialist republican position is not only captured by an extension of freedom as non-domination into the economic sphere but also by proposing a form of radical constitutionalism, which places high demands on anti-oligarchic instruments (Vergara 2020) and popular participation (Thompson 2019) in order to safe-guard republican liberty.

Due to the differences between the archives of radical democracy and socialist republicanism, the core animating idea of radical democracy is more difficult to determine compared to socialist republicanism. One could maybe argue that the core animating idea of radical democracy is democracy itself – the broadening and widening of practices of self-government to increasingly more spheres of social life and to more diverse groups. This is what is famously proposed by Laclau & Mouffe in one of the earliest formulations of radical democracy in their influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy from 1985. In their understanding, radical democrats ‘cannot renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of a radical and plural democracy’ (1985, 176, italics added). According to Marx (1992, 247), ‘to be radical is to grasp matters at the root’; hence, radical democracy would be to return to the roots of the democratic experience in ancient Athens. In this regard, radical democracy refers to the active self-rule of the people founded upon isonomia, that is, the equality of every citizen before law and as an equal participant in formulating the law. While the broadening, deepening and pluralization of democratic power is certainly part of many theories of radical democracy, I will argue that the core animating idea of radical democracy is that of constituent power.² Constituent power could be understood as the creative and productive power of the people to constitute their own forms of political life (Del Lucchese 2016; Kalyvas 2005). Many radical democrats have established historical, conceptual and political links between constituent power and democracy. Negri, for instance, claims that ‘to speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy’ (Negri 1999, 1), and Andreas Kalyvas contends that ‘constituent power is the truth of democracy’ (Kalyvas 2013).³ Wolin and Rancière argue that democracy is a practice that cannot be contained within an institutional (police) order (Rancière) or a constitution (Wolin), but which creates constitutions and their institutional logics (Rancière 2010, 32-33; Wolin 1994). According to Arendt, politics itself is equivalent to new beginnings; to the collective co-institution of new constitutional orders (Arendt 2006; see also Kalyvas 2008, 200-210). In the conceptual vocabulary to Castoriadis, democracy is an instituting power, the power of the people to institute their own collective forms, as democracy ‘will be a society that self-institutes itself explicitly, not once and for all, but continuously’ (Castoriadis 1988, 31). In the understanding of Lefort, democracy is savage, without singular, determinate form, as democracy ‘is constantly on the quest for foundations, in search of its own legitimacy’ (Lefort 1979, 10-11); and for Abensour ‘democracy is conceived and practiced as an ongoing institution of the social’ (Abensour 2011, 96, my italics). These formulations of democracy as constituent power by radical democrats all aim to differentiate between the democratic ideal and its present liberal-representative institutionalization. To be involved in self-government, radical democrats argue, is to participate in constituting the forms of political life, not just participating in them as already constituted. Representative democracy has excluded the possibility of popular constitutional reformulation, which generates the need, radical democrats claim, for a novel conceptualization of democracy moulded on the constituent power and its extralegal legitimacy and extraconstitutional freedom. For radical democrats, it is not barely a question of replacing one constituted order for another, more democratic order, but of appreciating that every institutionalized form of politics unavoidably necessitates a division between rulers and ruled, hereby confirming the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. It is for this reason that democracy appears to be ‘fugitive’ to Wolin or ‘an-archic’ in Rancière’s view.

Having provided a short introduction to what I regard as the core animating ideas of socialist republicanism and radical democracy – non-domination and constituent power – I proceed to compare these two strains of thought in regard to their conceptualization of institutions and political action as well as their relation to socialism.

Institutions

Although socialist republicans and radical democrats share an ambition of empowering the citizenry and enhancing modes of egalitarian participation, they have different views on the question of political institutions. For radical democrats, institutions as such – however egalitarian and participatory – are inherently elitist, hierarchical, bureaucratic and oppressive. This evaluation flows directly from their conceptualization of democracy as constituent power, insofar as they understand the distinction between constituent power and constituted power (institutional politics) as fundamental and unbridgeable. Whereas constituent politics entails freedom, action, creativity, self-determination and novelty, constituted politics entails hierarchy, apathy and bureaucracy. For Negri, for instance, constituent power opposes any attempt of constitutionalization and exists as an external, force to every constitutional order (Negri 1999, 1); for Rancière, politics as transformative is excluded by every specific institutional (police) order (Rancière 2010, 32–33, 35, 36–37). Rancière recognizes ‘the part that has no part’ as the true subject of democratic agency; democratic agency for Rancière can only be realized in relation to the transformation of an already established (police) order (Rancière 2010, 33). In Wolin’s account, the conceptual opposition between ‘democratic constitutionalism’ and ‘constitutional democracy’ describes, on the one hand, the power of the demos over its constitution and hence its externality to it, and, on the other hand, the constitution’s power over the demos and. From the first term, Wolin develops an idea of a formless democracy: ‘I propose accepting the familiar charges that democracy is inherently unstable, inclined toward anarchy, and identified with revolution and using these traits as the basis for a different, aconstitutional conception of democracy’ (Wolin 1994, 37). By proposing a concept of democracy in opposition to any institutionalizable ideal, radical democrats point to the inescapably inegalitarian form of social organization that institutions seem to necessitate. For radical democrats, it is not only the question of replacing an inegalitarian form of government or constituted order with another, more egalitarian and free form of government. Instead, by pointing to the intimate relation between constituent power and democracy, radical democrats distinguish between any institutionalized notion of democracy and the democratic ideal of popular self-government itself. One consequence of radical democrats’ association of democracy with constituent power, that is, the antagonistic relation between constituent power and institutions, is that democracy becomes momentary, unable to ever institutionalize itself. As Wolin himself admits, democracy becomes an exceptional moment, ‘revolutionary and excessive, irregular and spasmodic’ (Wolin 1994, 48), which essentially makes it a ‘bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily’ (Wolin 1996, 43).

Socialist republicans have a different understanding of institutions. Although they certainly criticize a host of political and economic institutions such as capitalist businesses and present-day constitutional democracies as dominating, oppressive and hierarchical, their solution is not to go beyond any institutional of understanding of politics. Instead, a specific set of institutions in political and economic life can secure or at least advance freedom as non-domination. This positive evaluation of specific institutional complexes can be seen both when contemporary socialist republicans reconstruct historical thinkers or historical movements, and when contemporary socialist republicans analyze how to approximate freedom as non-domination in contemporary capitalist society. Exemplary of the first approach is for example Leipold (2020, 172) reconstruction of the ‘radical republicanism and the political institutions of socialism’ [my italics] in Marx’ famous writing on the Paris Commune. Leipold highlights institutions such as imperative mandate, instant recall, working bodies both legislative and executive, a civic militia and bureaucrats on working men’s wages and under popular control as radical republican innovations, which ‘supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions’, as Marx himself argues in his analysis of Paris Commune (Marx 1996, 187, my italics). In Alex Gourevitch’ republican reinterpretation of the American Knights of Labour, the central way ‘to engraft Republican Principles into Our Industrial System’, as trade unionist McNeill argued above, was through institutional forms of co-operatism and shared ownership of the means of production. These institutional changes would end wage-slavery, transform property relations and extend freedom as non-domination to the economic sphere (Gourevitch 2014, 97-137). In her reconstruction of ‘anti-oligarchic republicanism’ and ‘plebeian constitutional thought’, Vergara (2020, 123-216) reconstructs a host of republican institutional models (through the political thought of Machiavelli, Condorcet, Luxemburg and Arendt), with the ambition of preventing oligarchy and safe-guarding freedom as non-domination through participatory institutional design. In his reconstruction of the socialist republicanism of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Muldoon (2019, 11-12) argues that ‘in contrast to the communist aim of dissolving or withering away of the state, socialist republicans argue that the institutions of the state should be submitted to the will of a democratic citizenry’ [my italics]. This means that the constitutional architecture of the modern state including parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, constitutionalism and a central administrative apparatus is a vital part of socialist republicanism (Muldoon 2019, 12, see also Thompson 2019). Here, the contrast to radical democrats and their unequivocally critique of the state, however democratized, is obvious to see. According to Arendt, every form of sovereignty, popular sovereignty included, is haunted by homogeneity, sameness and violence, which is why a democratization of the state form itself will essentially be futile (Arendt 1998, 27-28; 2006, 186). For Abensour, the modern state (however captured by popular forces) and democracy express oppositional political imaginaries to the extent that ‘a struggle here develops between the becoming independent of the State as form, and the people’s life as action. In this struggle, democracy has everything to gain by knowing its permanent adversary is the State-form’. (Abensour 2011, 94). As such, the old distinction on the left between abolishing the state and democratizing the state is still operative in these debates today. Moreover, one the fiercest attack by a socialist republican on radical democracy, although it is not framed as such, could be Michael J. Thompson’s reconstruction of council republicanism. The experiences of the Russian and German workers’ councils are central for radical democratic thinking, and have been analyzed by Castoriadis, Lefort, Arendt and Negri among others (Popp-Madsen 2021). What unites the radical democratic interpretations of council democracy is their appraisal of the spontaneity of the councils’ emergence, their transgression of the established boundaries of political life and their direct democratic reliance on the power of ordinary people.⁴ In short, radical democrats are attracted to the council tradition, because of the workers’ councils’ resemblance to their core animating idea of constituent power. Thompson calls this theory of council democracy, in his article exemplified by Hannah Arendt and the German council communist Anton Pannekoek, ‘utopian’ and essentially ‘anti-political’, as it aims at transforming the social being of the citizenry itself (2018, 110, 111), and, because it seeks ‘to overcome the state’ and ‘supplant it with a more direct form of participatory activity that would serve as framework for self-governance and self-expression’ (Thompson 2018, 111). Such an anti-institutional analysis of council democracy overlooks, according to Thompson, that the workers’ councils, at least in a republican key, are not about changing the ‘being’ of the citizenry or their continual self-expression in a permanent revolution, but instead the councils were ‘institutional forms that can broaden the capacities of democratic life and, more importantly, extend democracy into economic institutions and decision-making’ (Thompson 2018, 114, my italics). As argued by Thompson (2020, 19-20) elsewhere, republican radical constitutionalism is aimed at combatting ‘power relations; but to remain democratic, it [socialist republicanism] also insists on the establishment of a constitutional form of republic rather than an anarchic visions of communitarian self-rule’.

When socialist republicans seek to provide models for enhancing freedom as non-domination under conditions of contemporary capitalism, these solutions are also highly institutional. Whether socialist republicans suggest state regulation, hereby constraining the power of managers over employees (Hsieh 2005), workplace democracy through various representative mechanisms inside the workplace (Dahl 1986; González-Ricoy 2014; Anderson 2017), the right to basic income (Pettit 2007; Casassas 2007) or cooperative, shared ownership among workers (Gourevitch 2014, 118-121) as ways of approaching freedom as non-domination, they do so firmly within the boundaries of political institutions.

As such, we can identify two different understandings of institutions and institutional politics in radical democracy and socialist republicanism. For radical democrats, on the one hand, institutions are oppressive and elitist, as they fix existing relations of power into ‘frozen’ hierarchical relations between governors and governed. Institutional politics, radical democrats would argue, always equals a loss of constituent power. Socialist republicans, on the other hand, certainly criticize specific institutional complexes for maintaining the arbitrary will of masters or bosses over the citizenry or the workforce, but their solutions for establishing freedom as non-domination in both political and economic terms are always highly institutional.

Political action

Another crucial parameter on which radical democrats and socialist republicans have different views is on the nature and value of political action. By this, I mean the degree to which political action is necessary to realize and uphold the key animating principles of constituent power and non-domination. Emphasizing the question of action will echo some of arguments provided in the section above, but from a different perspective.

For many radical democrats, action is indeed another word for constituent power. The case in point is of course the political thinking of Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, action, in contrast to labour and work, has the same phenomenological capabilities as many radical democrats ascribe to constituent power. Action in the Arendtian vocabulary brings something new into the world, it creates new forms of political subjectivities and new constitutional structures, it is disruptive and transgressive, productive and creative (Arendt 1998, 2006, see also Kalyvas 2008, 200-210). Moreover, many radical democrats understand political action along the lines of what Arendt has called the space of appearance; that is, the public space that appears only whenever human beings speak and act together (Arendt 1998, 199). This means that democracy for radical democrats exist only as action; it ‘cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization’ (Arendt 1998, 200). As such, without direct political action, democracy is dissolved and becomes a mere formality. According to Castoriadis,

‘every set of institutions, once established, necessarily tends to become autonomous and to enslave society anew to its underlying imaginary significations. The content of the revolutionary project can only be the aim of a society that has become capable of perpetual renewal of its institutions. Postrevolutionary society will not simply be a self-managed society; it will be a society that self-institutes itself explicitly, not once and for all, but continuously’ (Castoriadis 1988, 31).

Entailed in the radical democratic understanding of action is thus also a theory of alienation. Every form of action, be it a revolution, an uprising, a protest or a general strike, that ends in some kind of institutionalization, will eventually produce alienation and new hierarchy. That is, every constituent power that is not performed continually will become a constituted power, hereby enslaving its constituent origin to routinization, hierarchy and bureaucratization. In an analysis of the Paris Commune, the German communist Karl Korsch claimed that ‘every historical form turns at a certain point of its development from a developing form [a constituent power] of revolutionary forces of production, revolutionary action, and developing consciousness into the shackles of that developing form [a constituted form]’ (Korsck 1929).⁵ Hence, if unaltered, political institutions, though created for progressive development, will turn into shackles of that development. ‘Democracy’, Abensour argues (Abensour 2011, 96), ‘is permanently on its guard to prevent the moment when the revolution swerves’. The basic distinction between constituent power and constituted power, which animate the work of many radical democrats, could be supplemented by a distinction between action and institution, insofar that – in phrasing of Rancière – ‘democracy is not a political regime in the sense that it forms one of possible constitutions which define the ways in which people assemble under a common authority. Democracy is the very institution of politics itself’ (Rancière 2010, 32). Political action, for radical democrats, is thus not only an indispensable necessity of constituent power; action is constituent power, and without action there can be no democracy.

Socialist republicans have a different understanding of action, insofar as action is not an indispensable requirement for upholding freedom as non-domination. This argument should be provided with great care. Historical republican movements have certainly engaged in revolutionary activity, and the aim of establishing freedom as non-domination has been achieved through intense struggle against absolute monarchs, colonial overlords, tyrannic rulers, oligarchic elites, patriarchal despots and capitalist bosses (Leipold, Nabulsi and White 2020, 5). Moreover, active citizenship, vigilant mistrust of elites and ‘ferocious populism’, to use the McCormick’s (2001) words, are integral elements to the republican tradition (Pettit 2013, 5; Muldoon 2019, 6-7). But what happens to political action once freedom as non-domination is established; once the cooperative commonwealth is in place? Crucially, neo-republicanism both for Skinner and Pettit, but also in the contemporary socialist republican extension, understands freedom as non-domination as a legal status rather than a political practice. That is, once the specific institutional structure that secures non-domination is established – be it in the political or the economic sphere – the citizenry or the workers are legally and formally free. In Leipold’s beforementioned reconstruction of the ‘political institutions of socialism’ in Marx’ analysis of the Paris Commune, non-domination is secured by institutions such as imperative mandate, instant recall, working bodies both legislative and executive, and a people’s militia (Leipold 2020, 193). In McCormick’s ‘Machiavellian Democracy’, the ‘ferocious populism’ through which the elites are to be hold accountable is a fixed institutional complex insofar as it consists of public trials, plebeian assemblies with veto powers and sortition and lottery (McCormick 2011). In Thompson’s theory of council republicanism, in which he dismisses the radical democratic understanding of action in relation to the workers’ councils, non-domination is achieved by a host of institutional structures on the local, regional and national level, by mechanisms of political accountability and economic popular control (Thompson 2018, 118-122). In the socialist republican debate on workplace democracy and cooperativism, shared ownership, workers’ representation and/or basic income are institutional structures that establish freedom as non-domination (see, for example, González-Ricoy 2014; Breen 2015; Anderson 2017). Cooperative shared ownership as a form of freedom as non-domination is a good case in point: Ownership, essentially, is a status, not a practice. Whether ownership of the means of production is private, public or in the hands of workers’ cooperatives is not a matter of how power is actually exercised within the given company or association; that is, it is not matter of actual political action or participation, but of legal, constitutional status. A quick look at the Danish cooperative sector, which is the one I know best, provides ample evidence for this argument. Large companies such as COOP (a consumer-owned supermarket chain), Arla (a producer-owed dairy) GF Forsikring (a membership-owned insurance company), Lån og Spar Bank (a customer-owned bank), Danish Crown (a producer-owned butchery) as well as several customer-owned energy companies are based on cooperative principles; they are member/consumer/producer/customer-owned and there exist internal mechanisms of representation and bottom-up influence (such as the yearly general assembly with one member one vote). But would it not be grossly misleading to view these companies as egalitarian and de facto controlled by their members? Instead, these cooperatives are highly professionalized and hierarchical, sometimes also operating on a global, multi-national basis, but in the socialist republican perspective, they secure for their members freedom as non-domination de jure on the ‘constitutional’ level. The distinction between status and action goes to the very heart of the neo-republican concept of freedom as non-domination. Take once again the example of the freedom of the slave and benevolent slaveowner: On the liberal account, the slave is free insofar as he is not actively interfered with; that is, freedom is conditioned by action – or to be precise, by the absence of action from an external actor. On the republican account, freedom is largely unrelated to any concrete action, as even though the slaveowner never acts in relation to his slaves, they are still unfree because freedom is the status of not being dependent on the arbitrary will of another person. Republican freedom is about ownership – whether this is ownership to oneself (lack of a master), ownership to public things (res publica) or ownership to the means of production (the cooperative commonwealth). As argued by Pettit, for republicanism ‘enslavement and subjection are great ills, and independence and status the supreme goods’ (Pettit 1997, 132, my italics).

Hence, radical democrats and socialist republicans differ on whether political action is a requirement of realizing their core animating principles. Whereas radical democrats ascribe supreme value to action as constituent power, insofar as freedom, democracy and politics itself can only be practiced and experienced through action, for socialist republicans, action might be a practical-historical precondition of establishing freedom as non-domination (like historical examples of revolutions, uprisings, protests and strikes undertaken by republican movements), but action is not integral to the idea of freedom as non-domination, which instead evolves around constitutional status and legal ownership.

Relation to socialism

Whereas the prior parameters of comparison were conceptual, this last parameter pertains to the two traditions’ intellectual history. I have included this intellectual historical relation to socialism, as it allows us to see the differences between radical democracy and socialist republicanism in yet another light. As such, beyond having different understandings of key concepts such as institutions and political action, the two strains of political theorizing also have different historical and political relations to socialism. Whereas radical democracy emerged as a successor to socialism after the eclipse of Soviet communism, contemporary socialist republicanism functions as a re-interpreter and re-energizer of socialism.

Radical democratic thinkers are – apart from Arendt – part of the post-Marxist movement in political theory from the 1960s and onwards, and Castoriadis, Lefort and Negri were among the first initiators of the critique of Marxism’s theoretical foundations through the conceptual tools of post-structuralism (Breckman 2013). Hence, for radical democrats, democracy replaces socialism as the key concept as well as the politico-utopian horizon. Revolution in the Marxist discourse becomes constituent power for radical democrats; the proletariat becomes the people; class becomes a plurality of subjectivities. As Castoriadis states, ‘what was intended by the term “socialist society” we henceforth call autonomous society’ (Castoriadis 1993, 317). Similarly, for Laclau & Mouffe, radical democracy becomes the political goal to strive for once the insights of post-structuralism have demolished the deterministic and materialist foundations of Marxism, as well as when the failures of ‘actually existing socialism’ have discredited the socialist project (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Radical democracy as an independent theoretical position within contemporary democratic theory could thus be said to be a product of the historical developments, which discredited Marxism and communism and made liberal democracy the only game in town. Although most of the main thinkers of radical democracy were or are lefties, in this understanding, radical democracy emerges as an independent theoretical position in democratic theory in 1990s as the successor to a discredited socialist tradition, and as a distinctively a-socialist (although not non-socialist) alternative to liberal democracy. This uneasy and abrupt relation to socialism might be a cause to the often times missing critique of capitalism in radical democratic theory – what Lois McNay in an influential critique has called the ‘social weightlessness’ of radical democracy (2014, 28-66). It could be argued that the question of capitalism – to use psychoanalytical terms – is repressed by radical democracy due to its status as the successor of socialism, emerging at a time when liberal capitalism was triumphant. The core animating principle of constituent power has been vital for radical democratic critiques of the state (Abensour, Negri), parliamentarianism and the party system (Arendt, Castoriadis), sovereignty (Arendt), homogenous and embodied forms of political subjectivity (Lefort) as well as others forms of hierarchies both politically and ontologically (Rancière), but capitalism has received scarce attention.⁶

Contemporary socialist republicans, instead, do not understand themselves as successors to socialism, but rather as a re-interpreters and re-energizers of the socialist tradition. Whereas radical democracy could be said to be influenced by the fall of communism, so is contemporary socialist republicanism influenced by the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the rising inequality and the enormous instability created by globalized financial capitalism. In that historical conjuncture, capitalism easily becomes the main object of critique. Instead of repressing the question of socialism, through the critique of capitalism and economic domination, socialist republicanism re-energizes the socialist tradition by pointing to the structural similarities between slavery and arbitrary dependence in political sphere and wage-labour under capitalism in the economic sphere. Hence, socialist republicans affirm and elaborate what already Robert Dahl, who was definitively not a socialist, already argued decades ago, namely, that ‘if democracy is justified in governing the state, then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises’ (1986, 111, italics in the original). If the language of freedom as non-domination is viable in the political sphere (which most of us take for granted, as this language is the basic argument against monarchs, tyrants and dictators), socialist republicans argue, it is also applicable to the economic sphere, which was exactly what the 19^th century tradition of socialism was arguing. Socialism, socialist republicans argue, can be reinvigorated through key republican insights, namely, that the critique of capitalism and economic domination, and the creation of a cooperative commonwealth, is conditioned on ‘the rehabilitation of a lost language of freedom’ (Gourevitch 2014, 10).

Conclusion: Conceptual divergences and political alliances

Radical democracy and socialist republicanism are the most influential critiques of, respectively, liberal democracy and capitalism in contemporary political theory. Both strains of theory are dedicated to unmasking hierarchical relations of political, social and economic power, and are equally committed to participatory, popular and egalitarian forms of politics. In that sense, radical democrats and socialist republicans are obvious political allies. At a closer conceptual comparison, though, radical democracy and socialist republicanism are different, maybe even oppositional, on key parameters such as their understanding of institutions and political action as well as their relation to socialism. Whereas radical democrats view political institutions as inherently hierarchical and oppressive, and the state form as the apex of concentration of power, compulsory homogeneity and illegitimate but legalized violence, which in turn necessitates a politics beyond the state – or against it – as Abensour would have it – socialist republicans hope to democratize the economy through cooperative institutions as well as popularize the state by bringing it thoroughly under popular control. In this regard, radical democracy and socialist republicanism play out the 19^th and 20^th century debate between revolution and reform, communism and social democracy, on novel, 21^st century premises. In addition, whereas radical democrats view freedom, democracy and politics as a space of appearance; that is, as forms of interaction only realizable in action, socialist republicans see freedom as non-domination as secured through legal and constitutional status. Socialist republicanism is not about abandoning the institutions of the state in search of radical alternatives, but democratizing the state and the economy and bringing these domains of power under popular control. A way to exemplify the differences between the politics of the two theoretical strands could be to briefly contrast two of the most promising reinvigorations of contemporary American politics, namely, the Occupy Movement with Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism. The Occupy Movement is exemplary for radical democrats’ understanding of politics as constituent power: The occupations of public spaces were spontaneous, brought together a plurality of different groups, functioned through direct democracy as well as developed novel mechanisms of delegation and deliberation. The occupations were transgressive and revolutionary, if not in results, then definitively in aspiration, as they sought to constitute a new, prefigurative form of political life and a new hybrid political subjectivity against the state, against capitalism, against representative democracy (Newman 2016; Harcourt 2012; Kets and Popp-Madsen 2021). In contrast, Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism could be taken as a concrete example of socialist republicanism on one of the biggest stages of politics. Sanders’ political program involves a proposal for a Second Bill of Rights, originally proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, which would add economic rights to the already existing political rights in the Bill of Rights, and Sanders have argued for worker-owner cooperatives as well as for workplace democracy as viable ways of reducing inequality and increasing the quality of life for the average American (Hamm 2020; Maisano 2021; McChesney 2020). Moreover, inherent in Sanders’ program is increased governmental intervention in labour marked (i.e. workplace constitutionalism), and a strengthening of the trade unions (i.e. workplace democracy). As such, from a socialist republican perspective, Sanders’ democratic socialism could be viewed as an attempt to establish conditions of non-domination in the economic sphere by heightening workers’ protection, workers’ influence and workers’ self-management. Contrary to the occupiers’ ambition of creating (constituting) novel forms of political life, Sanders’ program is about democratizing relations power hereby heightening popular control.

Does that mean that radical democrats and socialist republicans are not political allies after all? As a way of conclusion, I shall provide two conceptual insights that each strain of thought might learn from one another. Radical democrats might take inspiration from socialist republicans and seek to develop a radical democratic understanding of institutions. If radical democrats seek real social change, some institutional anchoring of their principles of creativity and constituent freedom, however ephemeral and transitory, might be required. The fact that despite its enormous activity, creativity and public attention, the Occupy Movement has had little impact on social change could be case in point. Socialist republican insights on how to build institutions that secure freedom as non-domination could be a viable starting point. Socialist republicans, on other hand, could productively take the radical democratic theory of action and alienation into account. The fact that cooperatives are formally owned by employees, that the individual workplace have formal mechanisms of representation or that the state formally limits the arbitrary power of bosses might not be enough to combat arbitrary dependence or sufficient to establish actual freedom as non-domination in the economy. If there is one thing that 20^th century European, social democracy has made obvious, then it is that the aim of socializing and democratizing the state via reform can easily create new elites, new hierarchies, and new status quos. A political movement that incorporates the insights of both radical democracy and socialist republicanism might be a good foundation for what Wright (2010, 6) has called ‘real utopias: utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions of social change’.

ORCID iD

Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3511-1750

Footnotes

Notes

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