James Muldoon

Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future. Platform Socialism sets out an alternative vision and concrete proposals for a digital economy that expands our freedom.

Powerful tech companies now own the digital infrastructure of twenty-first century social life. Masquerading as global community builders, these companies have developed sophisticated new techniques for extracting wealth from their users.

James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas from the local to the international for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.

This chapter demonstrates the pivotal importance of the German Revolution on the development of council communist thought. It claims that differences between the Bolsehviks and “left” or “council” communists occurred initially over the questions of revolutionary strategies for Europe and only later over a critique of the centralisation and bureaucratisation of the Russian Revolution. This chapter also traces a shift in theorists’ understanding of the workers’ councils during and after the German Revolution. It argues that while participants in the revolution such as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards were more inclined to view the councils as the initial structures of a post-capitalist society, this shifted in the later council communist ideology towards a more open principle of workers’ self-emancipation. The outlines of council communism did not emerge immediately during the experience of workers' councils in the Germany Revolution. Rather, they emerged gradually through theoretical debates within the Communist International.

The return to public assemblies and direct democratic methods in the wave of the global "squares movements" since 2011 has rejuvenated interest in forms of council organisation and action. The European council movements, which developed in the immediate post-WWI era, were the first and most impressive of a number of attempts to develop workers' councils throughout the twentieth century. However, in spite of the recent challenges to liberal democracy, the question of council democracy has so far been neglected within democratic theory. This book seeks to interrogate contemporary democratic institutions from the perspective of the resources that can be drawn from a revival and re-evaluation of the forgotten ideal of council democracy. This collection brings together democratic theorists, socialists and labour historians on the question of the relevance of council democracy for contemporary democratic practices. Historical reflection on the councils opens our political imagination to an expanded scope of the possibilities for political transformation by drawing from debates and events at an important historical juncture before the dominance of current forms of liberal democracy. It offers a critical perspective on the limits of current democratic regimes for enabling widespread political participation and holding elites accountable. This timely read provides students and scholars with innovative analyses of the councils on the hundredth anniversary of their development. It offers new analytic frameworks for conceptualising the relationship between politics and the economy and contributes to emerging debates within political theory on workplace, economic and council democracy.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Drives demonstrates the importance and centrality of the concept of the drives to Hegel’s thought and reveals the ways in which a focus on this concept transforms our understanding of the Hegelian project. It examines the drives as they are developed throughout Hegel’s writing, exploring the dynamic and affective dimensions of human existence. Hegel shows that drives are not merely pathological distractions from the moral law or natural and fixed determinations of an inert human nature. Human drives are themselves plastic, malleable and susceptible to transformation through a process of education and cultural development.  Hegel connects the actualisation of freedom in concrete social institutions to the transformation of individuals’ immediate and natural drives into fully mediated cultural ones. The Hegel that emerges in this book is neither an antiquated thinker of the past nor a visionary of a future to come. He is a critical thinker of the present – both his and our own. The book is also an excellent introduction to the development of Hegel’s thinking and provides an overview of the major points of his ethical and political thought.

Impact sourcing is the practice of employing socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals at business process outsourcing centres to reduce poverty and create secure jobs. One of the pioneers of impact sourcing is Sama, a training-data company that focuses on annotating data for artificial intelligence (AI) systems and claims to support an ethical AI supply chain through its business operations. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at three of Sama's East African delivery centres in Kenya and Uganda and follow-up online interviews, this article interrogates Sama's claims regarding the benefits of its impact sourcing model. Our analysis reveals alarming accounts of low wages, insecure work, a tightly disciplined labour management process, gender-based exploitation and harassment and a system designed to extract value from low-paid workers to produce profits for investors. We argue that competitive market-based dynamics generate a powerful force that pushes such companies towards limiting the actual social impact of their business model in favour of ensuring higher profit margins. This force can be resisted, but only through countervailing measures such as pressure from organised workers, civil society, or regulation. These findings have broad implications related to working conditions for low-wage data annotators across the sector and cast doubt on the ethical nature of AI products that rely on this form of AI data work.

This article examines the experience of microworkers living in the United Kingdom. Based on a survey of 1189 microworkers and 17 in-depth interviews, the article explores the experiences of UK-based microworkers on three digital platforms: Prolific, Clickworker and Amazon Mechanical Turk. The article draws on the theoretical framework of selfdetermination theory to analyse workers' motivations for performing microwork. It reveals that workers' relatively high satisfaction with otherwise low-paying and lowstatus work was possible because workers conceptualised their activity as occupying an ambiguous space and time in their lives, blurring traditional distinctions between work and leisure. These findings contribute to our understanding of how microworkers experience their relationship to work in the United Kingdom.

This article contrasts two reform proposals articulated in recent debates about how to democratize the digital economy: data-owning democracy and digital socialism. A data-owning democracy is a political-economic regime character-ized by the widespread distribution of data as capital among citizens, whereas digital socialism entails the social ownership of productive assets in the digital economy and popular control over digital services. The article argues that while a degree of complementarity exists between the two, there are important limitations to theories of data-owning democracy that have not yet received significant attention within the literature. The bulk of the article highlights three ways in which digital socialists would consider a data-owning democracy to fall short of achieving a more just digital economy: a lack of workplace democracy, limitations in terms of scope, and a lack of democratic control over long-term investment decisions in new technology. The article thus contributes to deter-mining what is at stake in recent debates about how to democratize the digital economy.

Digital platforms and application software have changed how people work in a range of industries. Empirical studies of the gig economy have raised concerns about new systems of algorithmic management exercised over workers and how these alter the structural conditions of their work. Drawing on the republican literature, we offer a theoretical account of algorithmic domination and a framework for understanding how it can be applied to ride hail and food delivery services in the on-demand economy. We argue that certain algorithms can facilitate new relationships of domination by sustaining a socio-technical system in which the owners and managers of a company dominate workers. This analysis has implications for the growing use of algorithms throughout the gig economy and broader labor market.

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg's writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a plural multi-party electoral system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg's conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens' property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system.

This article proposes a reorientation of the radical democracy research programs toward a greater attentiveness to the institutional realization of its principles. It does so by bringing the radical democratic tradition into conversation with socialist republicanism.

This article contributes to scholarship on the relationship between political parties and social movements by proposing the concept of 'party-driven movements' to understand the formation of a new hybrid model within existing political parties in majoritarian systems. In our two case studies-Momentum's relationship with the UK Labour Party and the Bernie Sanders-inspired 'Our Revolution' with the US Democratic Party-we highlight the conditions under which they emerge and their key characteristics. We analyse how party-driven movements express an ambivalence in terms of strategy (working inside and outside the party), political aims (aiming to transform the party and society) and organisation (in the desire to maintain autonomy while participating within party structures). Our analysis suggests that such party-driven movements provide a potential answer to political parties' alienation from civil society and may thus be a more enduring feature of Anglo-American majoritarian party systems than the current literature suggests.

In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of 'radical,' 'labour' and 'workplace' republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit's account of freedom and government. This article proposes that the missing link in these debates is the relationship between republicanism and socialism. Seeking to bring this connection back into view in historical and theoretical terms, the article draws from contemporary radical republicans and the writings of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to propose a socialist republican theory of freedom and government. This consists of a conception of freedom as collective autonomy and a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment and a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness. This theory of socialist republicanism seeks to overcome the weaknesses and limitations of each respective independent theory and should appeal to republicans and socialists alike.

This article addresses the crucial role political principles play in Arendt's account of political action and judgment. It proposes a new interpretive framework for understanding their political logic and the varied contexts within which they appear in Arendt's work. Principles can be understood according to three distinct perspectives from which they inspire, guide and organise political action. Reading Montesquieu alongside Kant, Arendt claims that principles operate according to a logic of exemplarity. Political action carries within itself and exemplifies a more general principle, which nevertheless cannot be determined as a rule. It does not establish a universal law according to which future action could be determined, but it does attempt to embody and exemplify a more general standard against which future action could be judged. Arendt argues that attending to the importance of principles in politics offers new possibilities for returning to the past and transforming contemporary practices.

This article reconsiders Arendt’s frequently ignored proposal of a federal council system. While Arendt’s references to a council system are usually dismissed as utopian, I re-examine Arendt’s political writings in order to demonstrate the centrality of the councils to her thought. The development of the council system is traced back to two primary sources: a council communist tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, and Arendt’s Jewish writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The analysis reveals that Arendt’s republicanism undertakes an anarcho-communist inflection, which has not yet been fully appreciated.

This article offers a novel interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s constitutional thought that provides new insights into debates on constituent power. I argue that Arendt proposes a unique blending of constituent power and constitutional form that seeks to avoid the pitfalls of the dissipation of political action within a liberal constitutional order and the loss of a stable realm of freedom to a permanent revolution. She argues that the “revolutionary spirit” of political action should be maintained in a constitutional regime in a demobilised form through both a participatory council system and the continual interpretation and amendment of a constitutional document. Arendt opposes Emmanuel Sieyès’ conception of constituent power as a unified will in a state of nature with an interpretation of the nascent political acts and institutions of an organised yet plural multitude. She offers a radically open form of constitutionalism in which both ordinary laws and the constitution itself are continually evolving through the interruption and intrusion of democratic politics.

Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution offers a critique of modern representative democracy combined with a manifesto-like treatise on council systems as they have arisen over the course of revolutions and uprisings. However, Arendt’s contribution to democratic theory has been obscured by her commentators who argue that her reflections on democracy are either an aberration in her work or easily reconcilable within a liberal democratic framework. This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive outline  of Arendt’s writing on the council system and a clarification of her work outside the milieu of the post-Cold War return to Arendt. Her analyses bring to light a political system that guarantees civil and political rights while allowing all willing citizens direct participation in government. Framing her discussion within the language of the current renewed interest in constituent power, her council system could be described as a blending together of constituent power and constitutional form. Arendt resists the complete dominance and superiority of either element and argues that the foundation of a free state requires nothing less than the stabilization and persistence of constituent power within an open and fluid institution that would resist either the bureaucratization of politics or its dispersal into a revolutionary flux. Although one may conclude that her institutional suggestions are far from flawless, her political principles allow a conceptualization of democracy in more substantial ways than current liberal political philosophy.

Drawing from the writings of Deleuze and Foucault, various forms of political vitalism have emerged as one of the most dominant approaches to radical politics today. However, there has been considerable disagreement over the terms on which a debate over vitalism’s perceived utility should be carried out. This has allowed for a great confusion over what is at stake in the vitalist controversy. This article argues that an analysis of the most recent works of Maurizio Lazzarato, one of the most prominent contemporary political vitalists, assists in clarifying the terms of the debate and provides a rebuttal of several of the most common criticisms of political vitalist thought. Through his engagement with the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, Lazzarato has developed a distinct variety of neo-monadology that analyses the world in terms of micro-psychic forces. On the basis of this ontology, Lazzarato constructs a politics of multiplicity consisting of open strategies of experimentation and creation, which he argues offers the best form of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. It is argued that Lazzarato is able to provide an answer to the three common charges that vitalism is a mysticism, suffers from a lack of normative foundations, and has an incoherent political programme. The article concludes with a reflection on the extent to which political vitalism is still haunted by a failure to give an account of and come to terms with the role of negativity in politics.

Foucault and Hegel are often taken to be diametrically opposed thinkers. Contrary to this position, this article claims that Foucault can in fact be located within a Hegelian tradition of thought, as one of its most interesting variants, rather than as an anti- or non-Hegelian thinker. Both thinkers believe that the historical task of philosophy is to introduce mediation into the immediacy of the present in order to further the project of human autonomy. I point to two main similarities in their work. First, they both view human autonomy as the end point of political and philosophical analysis. Second, their philosophical methodologies – that of genealogy and phenomenology – are both analyses of the present through the traces and remnants of the past, or what Foucault would call “histories of the present.” This article places these two thinkers in conversation through the forgotten mediating figure of Jean Hyppolite in order to reorient the way in which we conceive of Foucault’s relationship to critical theory today.