Ruth Kinna

Rose Pessotta’s anarchist critique of representative government revisited

This paper uses the conflict at the Republic Steel Works in 1937, remembered as the Memorial Day Massacre, as an entry point to examine an interwar anarchist critique of representative government. In the hands of Rose Pesotta, a leading figure in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, it promoted ‘human’ over ‘property’ rights, anchoring their defence in industrial unionism. Framed by anxieties about the rise of fascism, the critique affirmed an older idea of self-government to address the inherent injustices and evident flakiness of republicanism in America. Rather than dismiss the critique as a by-gone expression of reductive class politics, I suggest that this interwar analysis of republican collapse is still playing out in post-war liberal democracy.

Stuart White

To win the battle of democracy: republican politics and democratic Marxism

What is a republican politics? In contemporary academic political theory there is much discussion of republican values and of what an ideal republican polity should look like (Pettit 2012). There is less discussion of how to think about the practice of republican politics in contemporary societies under non-ideal social and political conditions. This paper addresses this topic by bringing republicanism into a dialogue with Marxism and, more specifically, with the perspective I term democratic Marxism (exemplified by some thinkers associated with 1970s/80s ‘Eurocommunism’). I explore links between democratic Marxist ideas about the state and revolution and a way of conceptualising republican politics that I term republican struggle. I draw out affinities between the democratic Marxist conception of revolution as process and one central objective of republican struggle – to defend the democratic elements, and to extend them so as to diminish the oligarchic elements, of the mixed constitution of capitalist democracy. I argue that the two perspectives, while having much in common, nevertheless have differences and distinctive strengths and limitations. The democratic Marxist perspective helpfully highlights the ‘ruptural’ or revolutionary quality implicit in republican politics while the perspective of republican struggle arguably has its own advantages, such as a greater openness to organisational pluralism. This makes it sensible to see them as complementary perspectives.

Clementina Gentile Fusillo

Seeing like a representative: the hidden demands of liberal democracy

This paper offers a rarely seen picture: representative democracy as it appears from the "representative standpoint" (Fusillo 2023), that is, as a system of relationships and related spaces in which representatives engage in the fulfilment of their function. Against the common assumption that the representative–represented relationship is the primary or only analytically relevant relation in democratic representation, we argue that democratic representation rests on a three-fold minimal conceptual structure. Beside the 1) relationship between the representative and the represented, unfolding in “the square”, this also includes two further, equally necessary relationships, that 2) of the representative with other representatives in “the circle”, and that 3) of the representative with themselves in “the self”: each relation and space attending respectively to the partisan, the unifying and the reflective-transformative function or representation.  Together, these form the core conceptual architecture without which democratic representation cannot be said to occur. Yet the complexity of contemporary liberal democracy exceeds this core. Historical developments in parliamentary government, party organisation, bureaucratic expansion, and media transformation have layered onto this minimal structure a historically emergent infrastructure of representation. Today’s representative must also navigate structured relations to 4) the state bureaucracy, 5) the political party, 6) the media. The representative system thus appears as an increasingly dense web of justificatory spaces in which representatives are simultaneously agents and subjects of power.

            Recasting liberal democracy from this standpoint allows us to reconsider what is “wrong” with it. Rather than locating the democratic deficit solely in a loss of popular control, this analysis suggests that contemporary crises may stem from a mismatch between the escalating structural demands placed on representatives and the normative expectations we continue to impose upon them. Seeing like a representative, in this sense, reveals liberal democracy not simply as failing, but as operating under under-theorised conditions of systemic strain. At the same time, the recursive movement between squares, circles, and the self, reveals an underexploited democratic resource. The experience of representing others cultivates judgement, mediates plurality, and exposes representatives to ongoing ethical formation. “Seeing like a representative” therefore is not only a diagnostic perspective but a civic capacity. Liberal democracy may be failing in part because we have not fully recognised — or institutionalised — what is already structurally right about it. By popularising, multiplying and fostering the experience of representing others, we may have a chance to affect a breakthrough in the quality of our democratic education and, in turn, in our capacity to make democracy work.