A Democratic Turn within Democratic Socialism? State-Centric and Anti-Statist Visions of Socialism and the Challenge of Democratic Mirroring

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we theorize the democratic aspect of democratic socialism through some of its recent, theoretical articulations and several of its historical, fugitive appearances. To illustrate a potential democratic turn, we highlight how these moments reflect a paradox of democratic spirit: the necessity of cultivating collective consciousness of popular power, while also acknowledging the limits of this power through a lingering attachment to the liberal democratic state as the means of achieving or supporting a democratic socialist vision. We call this democratic mirroring, which exceeds a concept of representation centered on the constitutional state. Although the state should be an important site of struggle, we maintain the spirit of democratic socialism is animated by quotidian struggles for a decent existence and those struggles must be mirrored in a way that supports the political education, political psychology, and the political self-respect of the “demos” implied within democratic socialism.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We acknowledge the work of Romand Coles, who bridges research on mirror neurons with grassroots democratic organizing. Yet we focus here not on the intersubjective or neurological dimensions of mirroring and instead on specific practices that enable ordinary citizens to see themselves as democratic actors. Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Our work aligns more closely with the recently published study of grassroots organizing by Han et al., which uses the metaphor of a “prism” to capture the idea that democratic organizing both reflects and refracts popular power. Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa, Prisms of the People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

² Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 347.

³ Ibid., 11.

⁴ Ibid., 274.

⁵ Ibid., 360.

⁶ Ibid., 26.

⁷ Ibid., 309.

⁸ Ibid., 300.

⁹ Ibid., 371.

¹⁰ Ibid., 270.

¹¹ Ibid., 237.

¹² Ibid., 232.

¹³ Ibid., 234.

¹⁴ Ibid., 309.

¹⁵ Erik Olin Wright, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-first Century (London: Verso, 2019), 119.

¹⁶ To be fair, Wright says much more about the means of what we’re calling democratic paideia in his other work, including Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010).

¹⁷ Wright, How to Be an Anticapitalist, 119.

¹⁸ Ibid., 64.

¹⁹ This also highlights a shortcoming of the account of recognition that is largely implicit within Hägglund’s writings – namely, the idea of a coherent collective subject implied within his idea of a “form of life.” To these assumptions we bring a radical democratic edge that shows not merely the contested nature of collective subjecthood (a well-known argument), but the ways in which contestation takes place, ideally, through repeated attempts of the demos to express itself, which implies a need for mirroring that the state cannot provide. The state can “recognize” the demands of social movements only through a sacrifice of the latter’s source of genesis: the desire and demand for democratic self-expression. Hence the state is a dangerous – if perhaps necessary – mirror.

²⁰ Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism: Toward a Renewal (London: Polity, 2017), viii.

²¹ Ibid., 28.

²² Ibid., 12.

²³ Ibid., 93. For instance, although the interpersonal sphere cannot be legislated into existence, patterns of misrecognition within the interpersonal sphere can become political issues through democratic processes of will-formation and publicization.

²⁴ Ibid., 20 and 26.

²⁵ Ibid., 47.

²⁶ Ibid., 60.

²⁷ Ibid., 61.

²⁸ Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right (New York: Columbia, 2015), 256.

²⁹ Ibid., 329.

³⁰ Ibid., 330.

³¹ Ibid., 329.

³² Ibid., 334.

³³ Ibid., 304.

³⁴ Sheldon Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, Voice,” in Dêmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

³⁵ Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

³⁶ Cedric Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017).

³⁷ For a critical overview of Marx’s treatment of “so-called primitive accumulation” see Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Social Text 19, no. 3 (September 2016): 27–50.

³⁸ See Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004).

³⁹ Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxxi.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 310.

⁴¹ Ibid., 312; Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 101–102.

⁴² Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx.

⁴³ Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 7.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 23, 1.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 2–3.

⁴⁶ Robinson, Black Marxism, xxxiv.

⁴⁷ Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), ix.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 158.

⁴⁹ Robinson, Terms of Order, 197–8.

⁵⁰ Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 28, 39, 40, and 47.

⁵¹ Ibid., 116.

⁵² Moten is explicit about his debts to Robinson, to whom he refers repeatedly across all of his works. In the Break, his first book, alludes to Robinson with its subtitle, “The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.” Writing in The Universal Machine that “consent not to be a single being” – the title of his trilogy of which The Universal Machine is third – “turns the history of racial capitalism … inside out.”

⁵³ Hartman is less explicit about her connection to Robinson, but her observation that “I too live in a time of slavery, because I am living in the future created by it” suggests a continuity made evident with deeper engagement of her texts. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 133.

⁵⁴ Robinson, Black Marxism, 310.

⁵⁵ Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2017), 20.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 139.

⁵⁷ Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 349.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 20–21.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 349.

⁶⁰ Raekstad and Gradin provide a recent and useful guide to prefigurative politics while also exemplifying the disconnect between radical, experimental politics, and democratic theory. They argue that social movement organizations should “prefigure participatory democratic decision-making structures,” but say little about the democratic institutions that are being worked toward or anticipated. Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, Prefigurative Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 157.

For more on how prefigurative organizations focus on process rather than institutions, see Francesca Polletta, Freedom is An Endless Meeting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

⁶¹ This anticipates one of Cedric Robinson’s central concerns, namely how this kind of accomodationism drained Black movements of their radicalism and left undisturbed the underlying systems of oppression and exploitation. See, for example, the progression Robinson traces from DuBois to Richard Wright in Black Marxism.

⁶² Erin Pineda, Seeing Like an Activist (New York: Oxford, 2020), 12.

⁶³ Robinson, Black Movements, 47.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 49.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 51.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 61.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 106.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 108.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 108.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 134.

⁷¹ Ibid., 128.

⁷² Ibid., 139.

⁷³ Ibid., 140.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 144.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 150. Televised news, which beamed the dramatic events of Little Rock, bus boycotts, sit ins, the March on Washington, into American homes, played a role, too. It set ideological divisions and leaders within the movement against one another, focused on its male leaders and their opposing personalities (King vs Malcolm X), pushed into the shadows the efforts of Black women (Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks) and communists like Bayard Rustin, and simplified the movement’s demands down to fit within the terms of the American nation-state.

⁷⁶ Cedric Robinson, “Race, Capitalism, and Anti-democracy,” in Cedric Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H.L.T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 337.

⁷⁷ On fugitive democracy, see Ali Aslam, David McIvor, and Joel Alden Schlosser, “Democratic Theory When Democracy is Fugitive,” Democratic Theory 6, no. 2 (2019): 27–40.

⁷⁸ Wright, How to Be an Anticapitalist, 119.

⁷⁹ Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? (New York: Verso, 2003).

⁸⁰ Looking at the history of the Cooperation Jackson movement, for example, one could fruitfully explore the possible arc from its Black nationalist origins to its embrace of political power (including success in city-wide elections in Jackson, MS). Institutions such as People’s Assemblies as well as cooperatively owned structures could provide examples of democratic mirroring put into practice.

⁸¹ Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist (New York: All Points Book, 2019), 18–19.