1918: An Insurgent Constitution

The fourth chapter analyzes the alternative routes of modernization that were encapsulated in the Russian revolutionary streams of 1917–18. From the perspective of modern Western constitutionalism, the first Russian Constitution contained numerous anomalies that, strictly speaking, make it difficult to define the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic as a state in the modern sense of the term. Among these anomalies was the dismantling of the national state through a universal distribution of power by the local soviets; the anticolonial and antinational pronouncement for a new conception of citizenship, which in the first Russian constitution could be conferred upon foreign workers by any local soviets; and an alternative practice of property relations, which was rooted in the traditional communal possession of land—different from both private and collective state property. This chapter analyzes these anomalies as innovative political institutions, which are part of the legacy of insurgent universality.

1994: Zapatistas and the Dispossessed of History

The fifth chapter investigates the Zapatista Insurgency from the perspective of its declarations, documents, and challenges to the Mexico Constitution. The Zapatista insurgency is a field of experimentation and practice for new institutions that have been created in the intersection of different traditions, resuming indigenous practices of consensus and decision-making. The chapter highlights the conceptual incompatibility between indigenous conceptions of land and Western conceptions of private property in order to show that there are alternative theoretical and political trajectories, which need not be considered backward or residual. Instead, these ways can offer an opportunity to radically question the singularity of the Western political and juridical framework. In this chapter the practices of the commons and indigenous rights are considered as part of an alternative legacy of modernity and the tradition of insurgent universality.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

The final chapter investigates to what extent democracy and private property are compatible with each other—and to what extent they are incompatible. This chapter shows how numerous insurgencies of modernity have created, reconfigured, and, through traditions, reactivated preexisting institutions of local self-government and communal management of property which challenge the normative trajectory of modernity based on the state, private property, and the capitalist mode of production.

Introduction

The first chapter outlines the need for a new historiographical paradigm that supersedes the modern conception of universal history by rearticulating history as a plurality of historical temporalities interwoven and in friction with each other. This pluralization of historical temporalities responds to the present need to understand and intervene in a globalized world, a need that involves, beside provincializing Europe, overcoming the provincialism of time, which imposes the linear trajectory of European history as normative for the rest of the world. Moreover, in this chapter I distinguish between juridical universalism and political universality. The universality that I call insurgent has to do with the democratic excess that disorders an existing order and gives rise to a new institutional fabric. The democratic excess is such that it goes beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state and calls into play a plurality of powers which citizens have access to in everyday political practice.

1871: The Institutions of Insurgent Universality

The third chapter discusses the Paris Commune and the way it prompts us to think about politics beyond a horizon that often assumes to be immutable representative democracy and the principle of private property. It analyzes the Declarations by members of the Commune that claimed the need to “universalize politics and property” via the new institutions of the Universal Republic. In the Commune, the rupture in the state machinery came about not with the seizure of power but through new political institutions that reclaimed other traditions of politics, channeling them into a new trajectory of modernity. The Communards were changing their present order by recombining alternative temporalities and traditions of modernity. Far from being a legal-political model to be realized, the Commune was a political practice that sought to define a new institutional fabric and a new subjectivity. This chapter shows how the Commune reconfigured the entire system of political and legal relations by reactivating intermediate authorities and integrating individual rights with those of groups and associations.

1793: The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality

Comparing the 1789 and 1793 declarations in their respective contexts, the second chapter clarifies the limits of rights declarations as juridical texts and presents a critique of their universal aspirations. In contrast to the juridical universalism of 1789, the insurgent universality of 1793 finds its own background in the insurgencies of women, the poor, and slaves, which questioned the presumed abstract character of the citizen. This chapter outlines an alternative conception of universality that the 1793 Declaration brings into view by examining the insurgencies that directly and indirectly took part in its drafting. These insurgencies, rather than asking for pure inclusion, challenged the social and political order and opened up the political form of the state, thus introducing possibilities for radical social and political change. The 1793 Declaration articulates a new form of agency, while also making a claim to universality that is not rooted in the idea of abstract humanity but, rather, in the particular and concrete struggles of women, slaves, and the poor. Likewise, a different, expansive conception of sovereignty can be found in the insurrectional practices of these diverse sets of actors.