Joaquin Torres Garcia, Constructivo con calle y gran pez (1946).

Issue 192, February 2026

Democracy and the Empire

Articles

Democracy in Karl Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism

Thomas Furse

In the early twentieth century, Karl Kautsky argued that explanations for world disorder stemmed from what bourgeois politics avoided – harmonizing class relations and making states more democratic. He characterized the capitalist bourgeois approach to politics and the world order as a form of exploitation through international cartels and monopolies. He theorized an ultra-imperialist world order where the great powers would work together to deepen their exploitation of the world’s resources and working-class labour. In situating Kautsky in the context of the tumult of German politics, this article connects his ultra-imperialist theory with socialist republicanism, the avoidance of revolution, and aspirations for a Society of Nations. It argues that ultra-imperialism was a useful theory since it gave Kautsky a way to theorize how capitalism survives war and a strategy for the SPD to continue pursuing democracy and not revolution.

Democracy as symbol and as ideology: Lefort, Althusser, Poulantzas

Lorenzo Buti

This article develops an account of the ideological function of the democratic political scene in contemporary liberal democracies. It does so by confronting Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy with a structuralist Marxist perspective. According to Lefort, democracies institutionalise a political scene that symbolically acknowledges that a society’s future perpetually remains undecided. Despite this key insight, Lefort exclusive emphasis on the symbolic acknowledgement of contingency blocks us from distinguishing between meaningful conflict with tangible stakes and a limited, managed or market-conforming democracy. In contrast, Althusser and Poulantzas foreground the state’s structural imperative to reproduce capitalist social relations. By taking into account both democracy’s ‘show’ and its ‘machinery’, I argue that the meanings generated by the construction of the political scene are also always ideological: the symbolic acknowledgement of an open-ended future can serve as an ideological cover that dissimulates the reality of the reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Narrative democracy: notes on (the failure of) Chile’s constituent process

Rodrigo Cordero

Democracies today face intensifying political polarization over the principles and values that should structure social life. Amid interconnected global crises, public discourse is saturated with narratives which depict democracy as rapidly degenerating or nearing collapse. This article proposes to shift the focus away from the dominant narratives of democratic crisis to a less visible yet equally urgent phenomenon: the crisis of the democratic narrative itself. What is the value of narratives in democracy? Which stories can become shared accounts of collective life and which deepen fragmentation? What happens when the democratic narrative loses its audience, cannot be heard, or is weaponized against the very ideals of democratic life? To explore these questions, this article examines the puzzling experience of the failed Chilean constituent process and the stories that circulated about its democratic worth and purpose. Drawing on this case, it invites a reconsideration of democracy as a narrative achievement whose vitality depends on our ability to tell, hear, and confront diverse stories. The failure of Chile’s constitutional project underscores a broader challenge: contesting the narratives that threaten democracy’s existence but also making room for those that can repair the damaged fabric of our shared social worlds.

Rethinking revolution in the Andes: Contrasting logics of social transformation in Bolivia

Aaron Augsburger

Indigenous movements throughout the Andes have put forward the idea of plurinationalism as a theoretical concept of social transformation. Plurinationalism demands a complete overturning of the existing state structure and a rethinking of the idea of the national collective and social formation undergirding a given nation state. In essence, plurinationalism, through a variety of both ideological and material programs and processes, recognizes and incorporates the various distinct indigenous nationalities that comprise a social formation into a unified state apparatus while maintaining and expanding those communities’ powers of autonomy, self-governance, and cultural and economic reproduction. Plurinationality, therefore, can be understood to represent the most fundamental and critical endeavor put forward by Bolivia’s largely indigenous popular classes over the past two decades. Not only does the concept challenge our understanding of the modern socio-political formations of the nation state, but it also offers a distinct perspective on the notion of revolution.

Empire’s role in the global diffusion of nationalism and nation-states

Luyang Zhou

Recent scholarship has pointed out that the diffusion of nationalism is a global transformation steered by empires to consolidate and camouflage their power. This essay argues that empires strategically foster nationalism, but struggle to overcome the intrinsic tensions between maintaining imperial structure and building nation-states. Thus, empires’ behaviors associated with their fostering of nationalism lapsed into multiple levels that demanded different commitment and resources. Empires were eager to weaponize nationalist movements to weaken their geopolitical rivals, but were less interested in creating nation-states, and in general lacked motivation to sponsor nation-building for formerly oppressed nations. The tensions between maintaining imperial structures and fostering nationalism also bred empires’ internal reforms and competition among empires. Conservative empires were more reluctant and incapable of engaging with nationalism. The inter-empire competition caused the conventional formal empires to lose power to new hegemons that openly negated the political format of empire. Fostering nationalism also yielded consequences empires had not anticipated, which facilitated the global proliferation and empowerment of nationalism.

Populist logic, populism, and fascism: A contribution to conceptual discrimination via post-Marxism

Udeepta Chakravarty

‘Fascism’ and ‘populism’ are two political concepts with radical indeterminacy and considerable conceptual overlap. Many scholars have attempted to differentiate between the two concepts, but these attempts are embroiled in confusion. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist theorization of populism, in particular, stands accused of making all politics equivalent to populism and as such makes meaningful distinctions between populism and fascism impossible. This paper argues otherwise. It provides a synthetic reconstruction of post-Marxism to show how it is the most theoretically robust avenue through which one can begin to conceptually discriminate between ‘populism’ and ‘fascism.’

The issue and its publics: Latour, Durkheim and object-oriented politics

Bjørn Schiermer

Drawing loosely upon observations made during the COVID-19 crisis, the paper discusses how democratic publics form and collide around political issues in Western democracies. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s political philosophy, I demonstrate the advantages of an object-oriented perspective on democratic practice. Then, I endeavour to show the deficits of this perspective, with support from an unexpected source: Émile Durkheim’s late works. Reinterpreting Durkheim’s ideas of ritual, I suggest that we might usefully complement the object-oriented perspective on the formation of publics with a more traditional notion of collectivity. In the first part of the paper, I examine Latour’s popular work during the initial stages of the pandemic. I then dig into his object-oriented concept of the political, and I criticize the one-sidedness of his approach to the collective aspects of democratic life. In the second part of the paper, I show how Durkheim’s concept of ritual may complement the Latourian conception.

The importance of practices of collective care: Exploring directions for an alternative productive paradigm fitting our times’ social, economic and ecological requirements

Ioannis Rigkos-Zitthen and Nikos Kapitsinis

The Anthropocene is characterized by multiple crises associated with the infinite accumulation of growth on a planet of finite resources. Productive labour and the 8-h working model contribute to this contradiction. We argue for the reduction of productive labour in favour of reproductive labour accumulated through practices of collective care. The latter can heal the damage capital accumulation produces. Collective care brings into light various social practices often invisible to production, allows for a new understanding of nonhuman agency, and challenges the dominant ethical disposition around work. We advocate for a new power equilibrium between productive and reproductive labour.

Critique and consolation: Countering ‘activist fatigue’ in a non-therapeutic way

Domonkos Sik

Contemporary emancipatory praxis is undermined by ‘activist fatigue’ related to the uncertain efficiency of collective action. The article investigates the phenomenon from a critical theoretical perspective. The crisis of praxis is inseparable from the crisis of theory: to resolve them, critical theory’s relation to suffering needs to be revised. To provide an alternative framework, the perspective of consolation is proposed as a counter to activist fatigue. Consolation does not aim at eradicating the activists’ existential suffering; instead, it provides tools to live with the uncertainties of activism. To elaborate a version of consolation capable of resolving the crisis of emancipatory praxis, four questions are analysed: what is the relationship between critique and consolation; how can the phenomenological space of consolation be described; what are the contemporary constraints surrounding consolation; how can consolation be consistent with both the demands of critique and the constraints of late modernity, while avoiding activist fatigue?

Asset classes? Some reflections on the ‘new class realities’ of rentier capitalism

Roger Burrows

In their recent work, Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings challenge traditional employment-based class models, arguing that asset ownership, particularly housing, is now central to understanding class dynamics in the present conjuncture, which some critics characterize as rentier capitalism. This paper examines the historical antecedents of their analysis, especially its relationship to the work of Peter Saunders in the 1990s. It also provides commentary on some of the criticisms of their approach and reflects on the analytic utility, or otherwise, of their asset-based class schema considering these criticisms.

Critical theory for crypto art: Exploring the impact of non-fungible tokens on the commodification of art in the digital age

Zoran Poposki

The article explores non-fungible token (NFT) art as the ultimate form of commodification of art, thus positioning it as a potential ideal art form for capitalism. The article synthesizes theories from fields outside of art history, including critical theory, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology, to provide a comprehensive explanation for the rise of NFTs and their impact on the art world. By utilizing critical theory, power dynamics and hierarchies within a given context are analyzed, while new materialism and object-oriented ontology expand the scope of analysis to include non-human entities and their agency. These theoretical frameworks also provide insights into the material and ontological aspects of the NFT art phenomenon. The study’s findings reveal the entanglement of digital assets with the social, economic, and technological dimensions of capitalism. This study aims to contribute to the ongoing debates surrounding the intersections of art and capitalism, while providing a theoretical foundation.