Plebeian Rights: Theory and Praxis

Project Information

PLEBRIGHTS

Grant agreement ID: 101023197

DOI

10.3030/101023197

Project closed

EC signature date 19 April 2021

Start date 2 August 2021

End date 31 August 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 224 933,76

EU contribution

€ 224 933,76

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PLEBRIGHTS (Plebeian Rights: Theory and Praxis)

Reporting period: 2021-08-02 to 2023-08-01

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Political power is today de facto oligarchic. In almost all representative democracies, the people who get to decide on policy, law, and the degree of protection of individual rights are part of the richest 10%, and therefore tend to have the same interests and worldview of the powerful few who benefit most from the status quo. Even in Europe, where there is a robust middle class, the richest 10% concentrates about 58% of the wealth while the bottom 50% only 4%. At the other extreme is Latin America, where the richest 10% controls 77% of the wealth and the bottom 50% less than 1%.

Because patterns of accumulation of wealth at the top are enabled by existing rules and institutions, it is necessary to question not only our political regimes as experiments that have led to acute inequality and a dangerous oligarchisation of power, but also our methodological approach to the study of constitutions —as the juridical framework that ultimately allows for inequality to be validated and reproduced. As a response to this political diagnosis, in which the crisis of democracy is due to an overgrowth of oligarchic power allowed and enabled by the juridical order, in my book Systemic Corruption (Princeton University Press 2020) I proposed adopting a material constitutional lens to rethink the republic from a structural perspective.

Material constitutionalism aims at going beyond the constraints imposed by formal equality and the anti-majoritarian organisation of power that has yielded societies with billionaires, opulence, and waste alongside growing ranks of oppressed groups living in precarity, by proposing to intervene the basic structure to incorporate new socioeconomic rights and institutions. To further develop this framework and enhance our understanding of systemic corruption and its effects on the freedom of individuals, my research project had as a general objective to develop a plebeian theory of rights, in which rights do not originate in natural law but in power relations and the juridical protections resulting from the conflict between the powerful few and the many.

The project had three specific goals: 1) to break new theoretical ground in the study of rights; 2) to influence the making of constitutional law and constitutional amendments to incorporate socioeconomic rights as well as new institutions to guarantee them; and 3) to socialise this new material way of thinking about the constitution and basic rights amongst the general public. I am happy to report that I have achieved all of them to a satisfactory degree.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the past 24 months I published two peer-reviewed articles and one book chapter related to different aspects of the project in leading international outlets. I also gave talks and delivered papers in 15 countries (England, Scotland, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, the U.S. Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Palestine, Tibet in Exile, and South Africa), and delivered keynote speeches at three international conferences and at the Latin American Popular Congress that brought together more than 100 grassroots organisations working towards social justice. In addition to public speaking events, I was invited to give Guest Lectures on systemic corruption, material constitutionalism, and plebeian rights in universities in the U.S. Italy, Mexico, Chile, and New Zealand.

Alongside my academic work, I became an advisor to international and grassroots organisations on civil and political rights, and on procedures and institutions for direct deliberative democracy. I was called to give expert testimony five times on rights and democratic mechanisms at the Constitutional Convention in Chile. Several of my ideas and proposals, as well as the specific constitutional articles I helped develop during the constituent process, were incorporated into the 2022 constitutional draft. Also, invited by grassroots organisations in Chile, I taught a weekly open access class to grassroots organisers on YouTube on constitutional rights, direct democracy mechanisms, and the process of constitution making.

In addition I built relations with civil society organisations in the UK and with European international organisations dedicated to deliberative democracy. I was a speaker in ‘The Future of Democracy Hub’ at the Sheffield Festival of Debate and in the ‘Making Liverpool Better Together’ series organised by Engage Liverpool, and was one of the “incubator intellectuals” in the newly launched NGO, Democracy Next, dedicated to setting up citizen assemblies to reform representative democracy from within. I also began collaboration with civil society anti-corruption institutions in Colombia and Mexico, the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund to develop rights of nature and grassroots democracy in the U.S. and with the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in its assessment of free speech in the region.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

My work on material constitutionalism and plebeian rights had real-time impact on the constituent process in Chile (June 2021- May 2022). My ideas and proposals reached elected officials in the Constitutional Convention as well as grassroots organisers and local councils. I worked remotely from the UK giving advice and proposals on constitutional rights and direct democracy to the most progressive leaders in the Convention, as well as to the social organisations that wanted to use participatory mechanisms to propose their own articles for the new constitution. My most important contributions to the constitutional draft were: 1) the alternative material framework I proposed, which put the emphasis on the codification of socioeconomic rights and the institutions and mechanisms necessary to enforce them. In this line, I proposed a Human Rights Ombudsman to monitor, promote, and guarantee the enjoyment of rights; 2) the right of communities to have decisionmaking power at the local level; and 3) popular mechanisms of direct democracy to repeal law, amend the constitution, and initiate a new constituent process.

In collaboration with community-based organisations, I also proposed a set of rules and procedures to guarantee equality and free speech within the internal operation of these organisations, and a deliberative process to elaborate articles collectively from the ground up. I socialised this model in my YouTube class and in meetings with organisers on the ground. A few of the articles elaborated in this manner made it into the text. Perhaps the most noteworthy was the right to housing. Several housing committees made up of families with precarious housing or without a home came to the capital, Santiago, to meet and elaborate together a right to housing that would truly convey the needs of the common people. I designed an ad hoc process for that meeting that included working groups selected at random, free association of qualifying concepts, collective construction of simple sentences, and ranked voting to decide among alternatives. The result of this deliberative action was the most robust constitutional right to housing every written, and it went almost intact into the constitutional draft. Even if the 2022 draft wasn't approved, these organisations kept implementing the horizontal and anti-discriminatory mechanisms and rules that they learned from my classes.

Regarding my career, I now have a permanent position as Senior Lecturer at University of Essex.

Plebeian people as a network of political judgment and resistance to domination