Radical Democracy

What is legitimate and what is illegitimate 'knowledge'?  Who says so?  And for what purposes?  If research is to make a difference in the lives of people, then what counts as knowledge and its legitimacy is vital.  The chapter explores what is at stake for researchers, research design and methodologies.

The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse’s concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis’s understanding of psychic socialization. It will be suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis’s appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory.

This paper will undertake a critical analysis of the political ontology of Hannah Arendt in light of the philosophical anthropology of Karl Marx.  In particular, it will argue that Arendt’s concept of political beginning is potentially capable of affirming the model of human essence that Marx most fully develops in the 1844 Manuscripts.  To this degree, Arendt provides us with a means for overcoming what I identify as the central contradiction of the Marxian critical theory:  that between this concept of essence and Marx’s too-often bureaucratic and instrumental understanding of politics.  The critical juxtaposition of Arendt and Marx will be seen to allow for the emergence of a new and more comprehensive model of democratic being.  The paper concludes by arguing that this model is relevant to the analysis of certain contemporary forms of political practice, looking in particular at how it can be applied to understanding the 2000 Water War in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The year 2011 finally saw the appearance, after a long wait, of an English translation of Miguel Abensour’s groundbreaking interpretation of Marxian political theory in Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment.  This short essay will provide a brief critical analysis of the main elements of Abensour’s contribution.  Through reading Marx in light of a radical democratic interpretation of Machiavelli, Abensour locates in the former a model of insurgent democratic practice considered in terms of the non-synthetic struggle of the demos against the forces of the State, made for the sake of the multiplication of their liberty.  Despite raising certain concerns regarding Abensour’s articulation of the relation between democracy and the State and between democracy and the institution, I argue that his work remains not only a genuinely innovative reinterpretation of the political thought of Marx, but an essential contribution to that contemporary radical democratic literature which seeks to affirm the creative, inventive, and non-exhaustible power of the demos

Long considered a republican thinker concerned with the actualization of a historically contextual common good, recent interpretations of the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli have attempted to locate in his work a specifically democratic content, a concern with the concrete participatory empowerment of all citizens.  This paper will attempt to locate this concern in a specific philosophical anthropology, suggesting that Machiavelli develops a hierarchy of regime types that are differentiated by their ability to give a popular expression to what he characterizes as a vital, dynamic, and creative human desire.  Machiavelli provides us with a means to think about a specifically political externalization of desire, the possibility of a political form of the psycho-social process of sublimation.  Specifically, he will map a distinction between forms of psychic expulsion onto the distinction between public and private, differentiating between modes of political activity on the basis of their ability to express creative human energies in repressive or non-repressive ways.  What is more, Machiavelli’s recognition of the universality of the capacity for creative expression will serve as the ground for an ethical commitment to the generalization of the faculty of political creation via a project of radically democratic institutionalization.  The paper will provide not only an original reading of the political thought of Machiavelli, but also, through the construction of a political ontology rooted in the capacity for psychic discharge, a new way to conceptualize democratic practice.

This paper will reconsider the contemporary relevance of the long-ignored political thought of Herbert Marcuse, implicitly in light of certain contemporary trends in radical democratic theory which affirm the productive and generative capacities of social division and difference.  Rejecting those readings of Marcuse which interpret the latter as a prophet of identity, desiring the actualization of a terminal historical state which permanently reconciles human conflict, it will nevertheless be suggested that Marcuse's politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for radical creation in all of those spheres within which the human being is active. Specifically, Marcuse far too often posits a model of politics marked by instrumentalism and managerialism.  Although it is this political model which most often reveals itself in Marcuse's work, this paper will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain counter-tendency in his philosophy, a counter-tendency demonstrating the extent to which he can be seen as affirming a negative and non-identitarian politics of overcoming which looks always towards creation, towards the transcendence of never conclusive social actualities.

The British Columbia and Ontario Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform have justifiably generated much discussion on the part of political theorists, who see in these phenomena the actualization of certain deliberative democratic principles that have traditionally not been able to be affirmed within increasingly corporatized political orders.  These phenomena, it is argued, give a form to a relatively new model of representation which emphasizes not the reproduction of an already existent popular will, but rather the critical construction of a potential political will under institutional conditions allowing for adequate knowledge acquisition.  I will argue, however, that such readings are in the final instance limited from a democratic standpoint to the degree that politics is still primarily considered in terms of political competency and rationality.  Rather than interpret Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) as manifestations of a new mode of representation, I will attempt to read them through the radical democratic prism articulated by Cornelius Castoriadis, emphasizing the CAs’ possible deployment in a germinal project of autonomy which gives an expression to the non-determinate drives of social-historical individuals and communities.  The possibility of the CAs contributing to a rejuvenation of the democratic experience is to be located in their shifting of the terms of democracy away from issues of representation and rationality, and towards those of creativity and imagination.

How can we conceive of these times, after the Arab Spring and the protests that engulfed the world since 2011? The answer, I propose here, should be sought not in ‘the search for an essence hidden behind human activities’, but rather ‘the surface aspects that give them meaning and significance’ (Tully 1999: 163). In other words, the meaning of the Social Protest – encompassing the events of the ‘Arab Spring’, the encampments of 15M in Spain and the Tents Protest in Israel, and the Occupy Movements in democratic capitalistic regimes – needs to be construed not from explanatory frameworks that left us misinformed on the possibility of a protest of this magnitude until the very moment of its eruption. Instead, it is perhaps timely to focus on the actors themselves, to explore their vocabulary and to listen to the words they weave into their actions (Emmerich 2011).

"Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India.
           
Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world. "