Plebeian Solutions for Oligarchic Democracy and Ecocidal Extractivism

Abstract

This article offers modern and contemporary resources to rethink democracy from the viewpoint of popular power and the need to prevent ecological disaster. First, it provides a diagnosis of the current state of affairs of representative democracy as a type of regime that has been corrupted into oligarchic democracy, and then explores some institutional innovations offered by Florentine secretary Niccolò Machiavelli and by French revolutionary Nicolas de Condorcet to deal with the systemic corruption. Focusing on the overlapping of oligarchic power and environmental destruction, second, the article highlights the new mechanisms and institutions that have attempted to empower people and protect the planet in Canada, the United States, Ecuador, and France. Finally, it concludes by arguing that the only effective way to stop climate breakdown is to rethink democracy and give people, at the local level, the necessary political-legal tools to defend the ecosystems they inhabit.