Constitutional democracies have allowed for patterns of accumulation of wealth at the top, leading to acute inequality and dangerous oligarchization of power. Moreover, the theoretical tools that liberal constitutionalism offers are inadequate to recognize systemic corruption and structural forms of domination that are enabled by law or its absence. As an alternative, the article proposes a material methodological approach to the study of constitutions. In the first section, it offers a critical analysis of the intellectual foundations of liberal constitutionalism, engaging with the right to property, political representation, and separation of powers. In the second section, it presents the intellectual foundations of plebeian constitutionalism in the works of Machiavelli, Condorcet, and Marx. Finally, it proposes a material approach to assessing constitutions, identifying the shortcomings of contemporary legal frameworks to materialize social rights, as well as new avenues for institutional anti-oligarchic innovation.

The article presents a plebeian strand of republican constitu-tional thought that recognises the influence of inequality on political power, embraces conflict as the effective cause of free government, and channels its anti-oligarchic energy through the constitutional structure. First it engages with two modern plebeian thinkers– Niccolò Machia-velli and Nicolas de Condorcet– focusing on the institutional role of the common people to resist oppression through ordinary and extraor-dinary political action. Then it discusses the work of two contemporary republican thinkers– Philip Pettit and John McCormick– and contrasts their models of ‘contestatory’ and ‘tribunician’ democracy. Finally, I incorporate a political economy lens and propose as part of republican constitutionalism not only contestatory and tribunician institutions but also anti-oligarchic basic rules to keep inequality and corruption under control.

Facing a divided Congress and an empowered far right, the delegates drafting a new constitution must champion grassroots demands.

Mainstream definitions of populism have detached the concept from the historical and material conditions in which it arises. Perhaps the most pernicious of these abstractions is the conception of the people. According to most definitions, any politics appealing to “the people” against “the elites” is populist, regardless of their different conceptions of the people, platforms, and relations to liberal democracy, which has led to the conflation of populism with ethnonationalism. Through a radical republican approach, in this article I give theoretical ground to effectively separate the people of populism from conceptions of the people based on ethnicity. Relying on Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics as disagreement and Jeffrey Green’s theory of the plebeian subject as second-class citizen, I argue that, seen from a historical and material perspective, the people of populism is constructed from a plebeian identity based on class that is egalitarian and inclusive, constructed from a position of no-rule, in resistance to the oppressive oligarchic order.

One of the most challenging aspects of the mainstream definitions of populism is that they do not help us distinguish between populist and supremacist politics. This article critically engages with the latest rebranding of populism as an anti-pluralist, exclusionary form of politics, and offers an alternative interpretation that conceives of populism through the lens of radical republican thought. After critically engaging with the recent theories that have contributed to a “totalitarian turn” in the conception of populism, the paper presents populism as a form of plebeian politics that springs from the politicization of inequality. Finally, it analyzes this republican interpretation of populism in opposition to Hannah Arendt’s conception of totalitarianism to point to the differences that set apart populism from supremacist politics such as ethnonationalism.

By offering an analysis of different conceptions of corruption connected to the political regime and contingency in which they developed, the article retrieves a systemic meaning of political corruption. Through the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Machiavelli, it reconstructs a dimension of political corruption particular to popular governments and also engages with recent neo-republican and institutionalist attempts at redefining political corruption. The article concludes that we still lack a proper conception of systemic corruption comparable to the one of the Ancients because we are yet unable to account for the role procedures and institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning and what this means for liberal democratic regimes.

This provocative book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. Systemic Corruption argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems. Camila Vergara provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority. Unable to contain the unrelenting force of oligarchy, especially after experimenting with neoliberal policies, most democracies have been corrupted into oligarchic democracies. Vergara explains how to reverse this corrupting trajectory by establishing a new counterpower strong enough to control the ruling elites. Building on the anti-oligarchic institutional innovations proposed by plebeian philosophers, she rethinks the republic as a mixed order in which popular power is institutionalized to check the power of oligarchy. Vergara demonstrates how a plebeian republic would establish a network of local assemblies with the power to push for reform from the grassroots, independent of political parties and representative government. Drawing on neglected insights from Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, Systemic Corruption proposes to reverse the decay of democracy with the establishment of anti-oligarchic institutions through which common people can collectively resist the domination of the few.

Desde el 18 de octubre de 2019, diversas asambleas y cabildos en distintos territorios buscan reanimar ese tronco seco que es un sistema de gobierno estructuralmente corrupto. Pero una raíz no es un árbol, igual que una reunión contra un gobierno por sí sola no puede ejercer soberanía. En este ensayo práctico para una organización popular directa, Camila Vergara propone que Chile, como el primer invernadero neoliberal, debe atreverse a ser un laboratorio decisivo donde el pueblo participará por primera vez en elegir las reglas básicas para la vida en común. Desde los antecedentes teorizados por Maquiavello, Condorcet, Luxemburgo o Arendt, la revisión crítica de la naturaleza del proceso democrático confluye en un manual para una nueva constitución híbrida, justa, solidaria y participativa. Esta inédita República plebeya, en la cual el pueblo se organiza en un sistema de cabildos comunales autoconvocados, y no en una institucionalidad elitista, tendría la última palabra dentro del orden constitucional. Como el canelo, el alerce y la araucaria que deciden en qué dirección desplegar sus raíces y hojas después de compilar reacciones al ambiente desde sus partes sensibles, el pueblo chileno integraría una red deliberativa para iniciar u oponerse a acciones políticas según sus respuestas locales a la dominación.

As a theorist of extraordinary politics, Machiavelli was concerned primarily with the mutation of the constitutional order.2 Before the Discourses there is no consistent attempt to theorize political foundings beyond a mythical lawgiver.3As his preface to book 1 makes clear, Machiavelli seeks to unveil new ‘ways and methods’ that could serve to guide someone wishing to imitate ancient leaders in the most difficult and glorious task: to remodel a corrupt republic by bringing it back to its beginnings. Despite Machiavelli’s novel insights on radical change and constituent renewal – a ‘path not yet trodden by anyone’ (D I.Pref.190) – his ideas did not have much traction in the history of politi-cal thought. His account of refoundings has been mostly omitted or acknowl-edged without much analysis of its theoretical and practical implications,4 or pushed beyond its limits,5 leaving Machiavelli’s proposals for remodelling corrupt republics mostly unexamined. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by ana-lyzing the contributions of the Discourses to our understanding of constituent politics within the republican tradition of the mixed constitution in which the nobles and the people share in the control of the state.

This chapter aims to fill the gap in scholarship on Lenin’s legal theory by presenting an analysis of his critique of law in his early, prerevolutionary writings. From a materialist legal perspective that takes into account power struggles as well as patterns of domination and resistance in the making and application of the law,3 it will primarily analyze two essays in which Lenin engages with the problem of law: Explanation of the Law on Fines Imposed on Factory Workers (1895) and The New Factory Law (1897). These two essays are significant not only because they are Lenin’s first essays dealing directly with law, but also because they contend specifically with labor laws—the most pro-proletarian of all laws as they explicitly regulate labor relations to protect workers against the arbitrary power of employers. At the moment when labor relations were being codified in Russia, Lenin’s insights exposed labor law as the legalization of exploitation that deepens the dependence of workers not only on individual employers but also on the system of production as a whole. The legal codification of labor relations that rest on unequal bargaining power brings about a new form of public exploitation, in which domination is exerted not only through the power of the employer, but also by the police and the administrative and juridical branches of the state that act as enforcers of the law. Lenin argues that the law, even allegedly “proletarian law” designed to protect workers, “will always be partial to the capitalist employers, because the latter will always succeed in devising ruses for evading the law.”4 And even if pro-worker laws were to be free from loopholes and find adequate enforcement, the formal equality guaranteed by the law ends up benefiting the powerful, who have the resources to cleverly use the law to assert their power. Even if rights belong “alike to the factory owner and the worker,” the protection of workers, concludes Lenin, “is merely a paper one.”

In this chapter I analyze Luxemburg’s ideas on the foundational character of political action, the role of the revolutionary party in enabling the workers’ council system, and the necessary conditions to transition from a capitalist to a socialist society. I argue Luxemburg presents us with a constitutional scheme in which democratic rights such as free speech and association have strong protections, and there is a dual structure of power, in which two sources of authority – the liberal democratic order and its proceduralist justifications, and the proletarian order based on the collective activity of the councils – compete for power. This hybrid model of representative government and workers’ councils, moreover, seems to be temporal and short-lived since; according to Luxemburg, oligarchs are not likely to give up their power and be ruled over by proletarian law without bloodshed. Through Luxemburg’s materialist approach to the organization of power, the establishment and development of proletarian organs of power, far from being an idealist position, appears as the necessary material ground from which the new socialist society can begin to be collectively conceived. The politics of collective power, organized and deliberative, comes into focus through the lens of Luxemburg’s thought as the only one able to guarantee emancipation, being able not only to break with the current legal expression of society but to create a new socialist one, based on the political activity of workers’ councils.

In times of crisis it is necessary to revisit the theorization of radical change and the mechanisms through which it can be realized in a peaceful and orderly manner. Joel Colón-Ríos’s Constituent Power and the Law is a timely book that promotes our understanding of the concept of constituent power as well as of its juridical application. Despite its contributions, in this critical review I claim that, because the book is thought through an elitist democratic theory framework that presupposes the unitary nation-state, it excludes the republican theory tradition that is premised on the socio-ontological division between the powerful few and the many, and that conceives the periodic exercise of constituent power by the people as necessary to keep a republic uncorrupted. In addition, I take issue with Colón-Ríos’s interpretation of Rousseau as a supporter of the direct exercise of foundational constituent power by the people in (silent) primary assemblies, and the resulting reduction of the people’s exercise of constituent power to mere authorization and ratification—to the detriment of processes involving popular deliberative decisionmaking that lead to a mandate. Finally, I critically engage with his conceptualization of the ‘material constitution,’ arguing that the definition he applies is too broad to be useful. Including formal and substantive ordering rules and principles as part of the strictly material interpretation of the constitution, which emerges from power relations, conceals the specific contributions that the material framework brings to the study of constitutions and the law.

It is clear that we have entered a moment in history in which the contradictions of the economic and political systems have increased to the point of rupture, opening a possibility for radical reform, for ‘unsettling and unseating capitalism’. In Capitalism on Edge Albena Azmanova argues we can subvert capitalism without the need for revolution or utopia. Further developing a critical methodology ‘committed to a nonideal, negativistic conception of emancipation from oppression’ (p. 26), Azmanova focuses on the renewed consolidation of capitalism in the midst of crisis, in order to unveil the new forms of oppression engendered by the current modality of the system, what she calls ‘precarity capitalism’. She diagnoses the current crisis as grounded on a long-time brewing legitimacy crisis, in which the ‘proliferation of almost achievements (prosperity, but not for all) and incomplete failures (environmental near-catastrophe)’ have broken the ‘legitimacy deal’ between citizens and public authorities that hinges on the correlation between risks and rewards (pp. xi, 44, 94). The present state of things is thus ripe for revolutionary change, and Azmanova argues that we can achieve necessary radical alterations without uprisings or blueprints – an ‘emancipation without utopia’ – through the enactment of ‘radical practices’ which target the effective cause of the capitalist logic: the competitive production of profit (p. xii).

Attempts to tackle corruption have tended to work with a narrow, legalistic definition of the phenomenon, which leaves much that should concern us either out of focus or altogether invisible. Here, Camila Vergara draws on a long-neglected strand in the history of political thought to provide an account of corruption that is equal to needs of democratic reformers.

The ongoing popular upheaval in Chile is the product of thirty years of neoliberal oligarchy and half-hearted democratization. To uproot the existing power structure, the country needs a new constitution. Chile, Latin America’s “oasis” of stability, has been in flames for a week, fueled by an underlying current of socioeconomic oppression. The rapacity of the “Latin American tiger” that accomplished the neoliberal “miracle” of high economic growth from the ashes of socialism, has been revealed in street clashes in which protestors threatening the neoliberal order have become enemies of the state — stripped of their rights in a de facto, and therefore illegal, state of siege. The aggressive, zero-tolerance response of the police to peaceful civil disobedience, and the government’s resort to the use of the military to quell political dissent, is partly the result of three decades of denial vis-à-vis Chile’s growing oligarchization of power. The oppressive conditions facing the working class and the precarious position of an indebted middle class in a system in which all basic necessities have been privatized to make a profit, have been ignored, justified, and normalized during the last three decades of democratic governance in which left- and right-wing governments have alternated power. Chile is neoliberalism’s ground zero, a testing ground for neoliberal economic policies as well as neoliberal forms of legality. The Constitution of 1980, which has been amended almost forty times and is still in place, was mostly designed by Jaime Guzmán, an ultraconservative jurist and member of the fundamentalist Catholic Opus Dei, with the intention of stabilizing and protecting the newly implemented neoliberal economic model — together with a patriarchal social framework — against popular pushback. Article 8 —repealed in 1989 just few months before the return to democracy — outlawed any doctrines based on “class struggle” or aimed at “attacking the family.” The brutal costs of the “neoliberal adjustment” came shortly after, and the population was forced to endure economic hardship and domination at gunpoint.