Political Alienation and Our Undemocratic Constitution

By Luke Pickrell

Karl Marx famously described the alienation of workers from the product of their labor. His gripping description of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 first attracted me to socialism as a college student.

According to Marx, within a capitalist economic system with a clear division of labor, the worker “sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities… the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production.” Labor “appears as a loss of realization for the workers; objectification as the loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.” The worker has no control over the terms of the working day or what happens to what she makes. She’s not free because her boss calls the shots, and the need for money compels her to comply. The boss is also not free (though her discomfort is reduced) because the market compels her to make a profit by exploiting her workforce.

Contemporary thinkers, including Alexander Gourevitch and William Clare Roberts, have picked up on Marx’s description of alienation and unfreedom. In his highly regarded book, Marx’s Inferno, Roberts describes three forms of modern domination: “The political domination of the workers affected by the state, the objective domination or despotism to which workers are subjected in production, and the impersonal domination experienced by all commodity producers." In “Freedom Now,” co-written with Corey Robin, Gourevitch argues, “The promise of freedom begins with the fact of unfreedom. The source or locus of that unfreedom changes over time, but unfreedom today is most widely experienced in and because of the economy. The unfreedom of the economy has two dimensions: domination in the workplace and the extension of market discipline to all areas of social life.”

I first heard Gourevitch speak during an interview with Douglas Lain in 2022 and was struck by his ideas. Around the same time, I read Marx’s Inferno and cited Roberts approvingly in my first Cosmonaut article, “Marxism and the Democratic Republic, " written in early 2023. I still find Gourevitch and Roberts’ work compelling, just as I consider Marx’s description of alienation in the Manuscripts a masterpiece of analysis and rhetoric.

However, I also think Roberts and Gourevitch, as well as most discussions of unfreedom and alienation on the Left, either downplay or outright overlook something crucial: The United States is not a democracy because of its Constitution, and alienation from political decisions must also be overcome.

Many have noted the centrality of political participation. In his Dissertations on the First Principles of Government, Tom Paine wrote, “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of Rights. Every man has a right to one vote and no more in the choice of representatives.” Paine continued: “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to a state of slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”

In his famous “Give Us the Ballot” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the third anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.”

William Cobbertt, an opponent of England’s rotten boroughs (a comparison between 1820s England and the U.S. Senate is appropriate) wrote, “Our rights in society are numerous; the right of enjoying life and property; the right of exerting our mental and physical power in an innocent manner; but the great right of all, and without which, there is in fact no right, is the right of taking part in the making of the laws by which we are governed.” As Richard Albert notes, Cobbertt’s ideas obviously had their roots in the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen states that “[l]aw is the expression of the general will” and that “[e]very citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation.”

Contemporary observers have noted how the Constitution denies political participation and places us in a state of political unfreedom and alienation. In “Abolish the Senate,” Thomas Geohegan argued, “The very structure of the U.S. Senate makes it difficult for us to know who ‘We the People’ are. If North Dakota has the same power as New York to determine the will of the country as a whole, it is impossible for the chamber to act on behalf of the population as a whole — the people that we really are. And it makes it impossible for the country to be free. A country is free only to the extent its government is subject to the will of the people as a whole, and if the country is not free, we are not free as individuals, either.”

In “The World’s Hardest Constitution to Amend?,” Albert argues alongside Paine, King, and Cobbertt that “the right to political participation is the democratic right to chart one’s own future as an individual and also as part of a mature society.” Albert concludes that the unusability of Article V violates the right to political participation by hamstringing us with a Constitution we cannot change.

Expanding the language of unfreedom to the political realm and criticizing the Constitution is crucial. The Constitution’s “hardwired” features — the bicameral legislature and malapportioned upper house, the indirectly elected and veto-wielding president, and the unelected federal judiciary — ensure that the government is not “subject to the will of the people as a whole.” The working class might have won universal suffrage (still somewhat limited), but the battle for equal suffrage continues. Our government isn’t equally representative. We can’t live as “democratic citizens” because our Constitution isn’t democratic.

But expressing the problem isn’t enough. Overcoming political alienation requires positive proposals about the structure of political institutions. In the United States, this means winning a democratic republic based on a single legislative assembly elected by universal and equal suffrage. The demand for a democratic constitution concentrates and focuses the critique on political structures in a way that discussions of domination and unfreedom at the workplace or within the market, while accurate, don’t.

I don’t think anyone involved in these discussions, including Gourevitch and Roberts, would confidently call the United States a democracy. The debate is over strategy and tactics. Where should we concentrate our critique? What should we talk and write about? What’s most important? Roberts notes the “political domination of the workers affected by the state" but doesn’t mention the undemocratic Constitution. He places political domination on the same level as “objective domination” and “impersonal domination,” thereby avoiding any clear strategic direction.

Meanwhile, one reads Gourevitch’s “Freedom Now” and thinks the workplace should be the focus of agitation. Again, the Constitution isn’t mentioned. Yes, freedom is an inspiring idea that the Left should embrace. But political structures can’t be ignored.

The Constitution is the foundation of the contemporary political order. Therefore, our primary focus should be establishing a democracy and overcoming our alienation from political decisions. Our political agitation should reflect this focus (YDSA, Cleveland DSA, San Diego DSA, and this blog are good examples). A democratic republic would empower the working class and make other changes possible.