Where does democracy begin?

Founded on work

In Italia, this intuition does not sound foreign. It can be found, in different forms, in the tradition of the most enlightened confederal trade unionism and in that part of the constitutional culture that has always seen work not merely as a means of sustenance, but as the place where the person fully participates in the life of the Republic. Yet despite tirelessly repeating that the Republic is founded on work, we often treat this formula as a solemn ornament, almost a lexical remnant of another era. Honneth's reflection pushes us, almost obliges us, to take that article of our Constitution truly literally. If democracy is founded on work, then the democratic quality of a society is also measured in logistics warehouses, as in hospital wards, in schools, as on digital platforms, in restaurant kitchens and in offices where autonomy is celebrated and simultaneously hollowed out by metrics, assessments and opaque chains of command.

The focus of this discourse is not so much a vague and unnecessary moralisation of work, nor its transformation into a new civil religion. Honneth does not fall into the illusion that all work activity must become a place of full self-realisation. His position is more sober and, precisely for this reason, more radical. A democratic society cannot allow work to systematically make citizens less capable of being citizens. It cannot tolerate that drudgery becomes stultification, that low wages become a cause of exclusion from public life, that organisational subordination becomes daily education to silence. A job cannot be so tiring that it prevents the worker from thinking about the surrounding reality. It cannot be paid so little as to deny intervention in political life. It cannot require total subordination to one's superiors. Economic independence, intellectual and physical autonomy, reduced tensions and routines, free time, self-respect and confidence in one's own voice are all decisive opportunities to access the exercise of political sovereignty. This is not a trade union claim in philosophical form. It is a theory of democratic citizenship seen from below.

Political liberalism has often thought of freedom as protecting the individual from external interference. Constitutional democracies have since translated this insight into rights and guarantees. But Honneth shows that the problem is not only to prevent the state from arbitrarily invading the citizen's space. It is to prevent society from organising everyday life in such a way that it slowly empties the subjective ability to exercise those rights. The right to vote remains formally intact even for those who lack time, energy, tools or have lost faith in participation. The right is there, in theory, but in practice it is totally emptied of its deepest meaning.

This is where poor, precarious or invisible work takes on a political significance that we often underestimate. It is not just a matter of insufficient remuneration or contractual instability. It is a condition that can produce a specific public anthropology made up of subjects who learn to think of themselves as replaceable and blackmailable, whose voice and choices do not count. Thus democracy dies of starvation.

This is perhaps the most radical thesis Honneth proposes. It is not enough,' says the philosopher, 'to democratise political institutions, if the social institutions in which the ability to participate is formed remain undemocratic. The Fordist factory made the problem visible through discipline and hierarchy. Contemporary capitalism makes it more elusive but no less urgent and profound. Multitudes of workers trapped in activities that are meaningless or even harmful to society. Where what we call autonomy is often just individual exposure to risk. Merit is competitive loneliness. Collaboration masks only dependence. Subordination does not disappear. We have only softened the vocabulary.

This is why care, educational and welfare work, paid and unpaid, is a particularly revealing test case. Honneth insists on the need to broaden the concept of social work beyond the perimeter of traditional wage labour. By 'socially necessary work' we should mean, he writes, 'all the activities that, at a given moment, the majority of a population considers absolutely indispensable for the preservation of its considered good form of life' (p. 16). This definition brings to light a contradiction that contemporary societies prefer not to recognise and that concerns the fact that many of the activities indispensable to the reproduction of common life are among the least recognised, least paid, least represented. Care of the elderly, care, education, domestic work, essential services. During crises we call them necessary jobs. Once the emergency is over, they often return to being marginal, marginalising, segregating and stigmatising jobs.

The Half Recognition

Here, the ethics of recognition shows its material structure. It is not enough to symbolically praise those who care, assist, educate, deliver, clean, accompany. If that praise does not translate into organisation, wages, time and representation, it remains a form of half-hearted, perhaps even ideological, recognition. Contemporary capitalism has become adept at producing façade recognition without this guaranteeing a true redistribution of power. It knows how to call essential workers heroes and then leave them in humiliating labour relations. It knows how to turn public gratitude into an ephemeral ceremony, without any change in social status flowing from it.

Honneth's is not nostalgia for the 20th century labour movement. He is well aware that the social division of labour today is more fragmented and dispersed. His proposal does not merely call for greater protection of labour within the market, but questions the entire social organisation of labour. The division of labour as we have conceived and implemented it today is not a technical fate. It is not simply the result of the optimal search for economic efficiency. It is, on the contrary, the sediment of struggles, powers, hierarchies and exclusions. Honneth states this clearly - "All the delimitations and connections that exist today in this division of labour are (...) ultimately political, and must therefore be regarded as transformable and reformable" (p. 17). What appears to be a natural consequence is often only the result of a history that is no longer remembered. What appears inevitable is often politics that has ceased to be visible and shared.

Hence the question of how much of the current democratic crisis depends on the way labour has been depoliticised? We discuss a lot, and rightly so, about populism, disinformation, polarisation and party crisis. Less often we have wondered whether the impoverishment of the work experience has not contributed to generating citizens more resentful than participatory, more prone to anger than cohesion, more inclined to seek recognition in authoritarian identities and leaders than in common and shared practices. Not because labour explains everything, of course. But because it is still one of the decisive places where we learn whether others are interlocutors or threats, whether cooperation is possible or a naive aspiration, whether our voice counts or not. And it is difficult to imagine a viable democracy when, for much of the day, we learn mostly to keep quiet, obey and compete.

Democracy needs social experiences that make participation plausible. It needs places where people are not educated daily to irrelevance. Of contracts that do not turn formal freedom into substantial dependence. Of organisations in which efficiency does not coincide with silencing the voice. Of a labour policy that does not limit itself to creating employment, but begins to ask sincerely and courageously what kind of social subject that employment helps to form.

Before the polls

In this sense, The Sovereign Worker ideally closes the path we have followed in Mind the Economy in recent weeks in which we analysed Axel Honneth's perspective on justice. The experience of injustice stems from misrecognition. Social conflict shows its moral grammar. Social freedom shows that no one can become truly free on their own. Now Honneth takes us to the place where these three dimensions are condensed on a daily basis, the universe of work. For it is here that recognition can become concrete or be lacking to the point of turning into silent contempt. It is here that conflict can formulate questions and find answers or remain a sum of private frustrations. It is here that social freedom can take the form of cooperation, or fail by turning into pure organisational rhetoric.

The figure of the sovereign worker has something deliberately paradoxical about it. The worker, in the modern tradition, has often been thought of and not only called an 'employee'. To call him 'sovereign' is, on the contrary, to attribute dignity and decision-making power to him. Honneth juxtaposes these two figures - the employee and the sovereign - because democracy lives precisely in the tension between dependence and autonomy. One does not want to promise a life without (inter)dependence. A path is proposed whereby the dependencies in which we are inevitably involved do not become opportunities for domination and sources of degradation.

Perhaps, then, the question to start with is not how much democracy the labour market can bear, but how much the labour market can bear a democracy without running the risk of deforming itself. Because a society - we have already won it with Elizabeth Anderson and her Private Government - can also continue to celebrate the sovereign citizen and, at the same time, organise the life of the worker in such a way as to make him invisible. It can preserve the vocabulary of freedom and, at the same time, eliminate the conditions of its experience.

Democracy does not begin in the ballot box. It begins in the time that remains after work, in the voice that work has not extinguished and in the trust that has not been eroded. It begins, more modestly and more profoundly, where those who work can still think of themselves as more than a cog, an economic cost or a human 'resource', but as an indispensable part of a great cooperative and common project. The people cannot be sovereign if the workers are not sovereign. And workers will truly become sovereign when those dependencies stop being considered a natural fact, an inevitable economic consequence, and become what they really are: a public, debatable, adjustable, fully political issue.