The metaphysics of knowledge and why we need to take sortition and other paths to democracy seriously

“All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”
– Antonio Gramsci¹

“Historiography has been content to deal with the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion.”
– Ranajit Guha²

One of the big debates that has animated the Left in Britain this year is that of sortition versus elected delegates when it comes to selecting socialist leadership³. On this, I am clear: sortition is an under-utilised weapon in the democratic arsenal, and we should, as a movement, be using it more. Used correctly, sortition raises and directs the collective will towards political action. This is based on a theoretical distinction between mechanical socialism and socialist alchemy; the former views strategic action in political parties as a game for elites, with both individuals and the knowledge they possess existing as atomised and hyper-individualised particles with unfortunate effects on education and strategy. The latter, socialist alchemy, recognises how shifting relationships create the potential for transformation, of both individuals and knowledge, with the result a collective will more forceful than the sum of its parts. This is an essay greater than a debate over a sorting mechanism, but of the very way we see reality.

Mechanical Socialism

“the mechanical theory of human consciousness is wrong: the theory that historical science “can become as precise a science as, let us say, biology,” the subordination of the imaginative and moral faculties to political and administrative authority is wrong: the elimination of moral criteria from political judgment is wrong: the fear of independent thought, the deliberate encouragement of anti intellectual trends amongst the people is wrong: the mechanical personification of unconscious class forces, the belittling of the conscious processes of intellectual and spiritual conflict, all this is wrong”
-E.P. Thompson.⁴

Mechanical socialism⁵ sees reality as a collection of individuals and knowledge as a particle to be transferred from one person to another, much like value is for capitalist economists or energy was for Newtonian physics⁶. Mechanical socialism may not go as far as Thatcher in claiming that society does not exist, but it tends to perceive social forces as the aggregate of atomised individuals and thus may as well believe that society is pure clockwork. For socialists who see society as this collection of atomised and discrete individuals, there is a distinct impact on strategy within parties and devastating effects on democratic organising.

Let us first consider what it means to use knowledge mechanically. If your car breaks down, you take it to the garage for an expert to look at. The mechanic must fix the car with both certainty and precision. If a screw is missing, only a screw that matches the missing one exactly will suffice. The same may be true of a medical professional, one tasked with identifying the ailment and prescribing the medicine to cure it. The knowledge involved in both of these endeavours is a specialist one. If there is a hole in the car engine that is leaking fluid, the mechanic has no time to debate whether such holes are social constructs, or ask the owner for his interpretation. No, this is knowledge that is for the most part discrete, certain and hierarchical. Humans, in relation to this type of knowledge can be seen as containers, to be filled with knowledge, which is imagined as an objective particle existing in the world.

This conception of knowledge sits well with functionalist accounts of society, which undergraduate sociology students will recognise as the theoretical lens that sees society like a well-oiled machine, or a human body. Functionalism sees different institutions, structures and people as playing different roles within the whole. It is the world of Mr Bun the Baker and Mrs Chalk the Teacher, each with different parts to play and thus, it is assumed, different intellects. It is no different for the mechanical socialist, who sees party strategy in much the same way, with different people assigned to different tasks within the party, creating a division of labour.

This division of labour in mechanical parties is a division of knowledge, and as such, a division of political education⁷. Some comrades are just containers, others are creative intellectuals, according to the mechanics. Have you ever, comrades, seen anyone so gleeful as a Marxist tasked with making a reading list? Mechanical socialists love reading lists because they appear to make revolution an easy task: fill enough people with this knowledge and we build a critical mass of educated Marxists that will…create reading lists of their own! We end up fetishising concepts. And so, this drive for truth becomes its opposite: a ‘mechanical idealism’ in which ideas come first: ideas about class, about capitalism, about oppression. Newcomers to the movement are thus made to conform to the ideas. There is little room here for the knowledge or wisdom of lives lived under capitalism or for morality and idealism, the engines of passion that so enlivened our sense in the first place⁸.

This is the mindset that has borne a dozen micro-sects of paper sellers in Britain. To be clear, some of these papers, websites and journals have insightful analysis and publish the work of supremely talented writers. But they are just that. They may even stand for elections, humiliation rituals where 1% of the vote is seen as progress. These are not parties nor movements, but subcultures, movements that re-interpret the world, and deploy in-group symbols that are at odds with the mainstream. However, the ruling classes have long been able to cope and govern with indifference at what is largely an aesthetic commitment to communist politics⁹¹⁰.

Political strategy too is infected. In parties where election is the dominant mode of selecting leaders, it becomes impossible for socialists not to start calculating, and with calculation comes sacrifice. Elections fit well with the above model of knowledge-as-particle, as they too reduce reality to the movement of discrete particles (in this case, individual humans) through space. As in the conservation principle of bourgeois science and economics, where value or energy is simply transferred through abstract space, the electoral ideal is that you move your delegate upwards through the party to the top, where they can lead and finally put your faction’s ideas into practice. What this fails to take into account is that the spaces through which these particles move are not neutral and come to shape the individual. Humans are not tanks to be loaded with socialist shells and moved into a firing position. 

However, in the mechanical world of individuals tasked with particular roles and a calculated electoral strategy, there is another field where a different type of intellectual engagement happens.  This is happening in backrooms and private drinks, in living rooms and private phone calls. It is within the elite and activist class, who are learning every day to lead, organise, write policy, take meaningful decisions, and yes, govern¹¹. These leading activists and movers and shakers are not a natural caste, but one born of pragmatism, for many are themselves humble , principled and anti-elitist. They may not even believe they are more intelligent than regular members but within electoral systems, there is a pressing incentive to act like you do.

This worldview and allied modes of organising: to see some humans as receptacles for discrete particles of knowledge and others to engage as creative intellectuals, creates a separation between the rank and file and the elites, who have decided that to win power in an electoral system you don’t need to really convince everyone, just the most important. This in turn becomes the socialist movement’s own myth: that its history is a ‘genealogy of radical elites’ and their followers¹². It is a tale that has long slowed down the creation of a truly mass political party.

Towards Socialist Alchemy

In contrast to mechanical socialism, education and strategy must be renewed under the banner of Socialist Alchemy, aiming to harness the transformative potential of human society and its collective will. It is a thoroughly humanising sense of the world, but also one that requires giving up some of the certainties we as socialists cling to, in both our vision of the world and our strategies. It is anti-elitist, affirming and celebrating the ‘the creative [hu]man at the heart of labour, from whom all instruments of production, all politics, all institutions flow’¹³. But unlike the mechanics, who fetishise the working and unwaged class, while in their practices infantilising them, socialist alchemists actively seek to create the conditions for empowerment.

The fundamental principle is that all of us are creative intellectuals, or at least have the potential to be so. This is a different kind of knowledge from the technical, the knowledge that pilots, car mechanics, and doctors have. To be a creative intellectual is to have the ability to reason, deliberate, judge, recall, argue, compromise, reflect and synthesise. If you don’t believe these abilities are shared by all of humanity, then you will not follow the arguments of this article. You’ll also probably not understand the concept of the jury, one of the most uncontroversial and longstanding systems we have for answering some of society’s most serious questions¹⁴.

In his prison letters, translated into English, Antonio Gramsci talks of intellectuals in various distinct ways. Intellectuals, tasked with providing coherence and self-awareness to a class, are a stratum of any project seeking or maintaining hegemony. Socialist parties representing the working class are no different. At his most elitist, Gramsci speaks of the need for parties to be formed through the mass element ‘whose participation takes the form of discipline and loyalty rather than any creative spirit or organisational ability’ to be subordinated to the leadership strata responsible for innovation¹⁵. 

Gramsci’s assumption that the multitude was ill-disciplined and needed national leadership is questionable and could build into the autobiographical mythos of socialist elites. Following in Gramsci’s theoretical footsteps but also making a decisive break with this myth, Ranajit Guha pointed out quite logically that peasant rebellions, because they risked everything, could hardly have been anything other than actions stemming from deliberate and reasoned judgement once all other more peaceful methods of resistance failed¹⁶. In a similar vein, E.P. Thompson’s history of 18th-century worker uprisings in Britain rescued them from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ by showing how movements like the Luddites were intelligently planned guerrilla forces who deployed multiple tactics in pursuit of their goals¹⁷. There is creative intellect in all movements, not just those led by societal elites.

The above criticism notwithstanding, Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals remains a wellspring of inspiration for socialist organisers. In successful revolutions, the relationship between leaders and the rank and file was not a rigid caste system but one that was continuously refreshed. Organic intellectuals were those who had not become separated from their original class. Gramsci uses the phrase ‘sack of potatoes’ to refer to how intellectuals of non-organic movements perceive their rank and file, i.e. ones in which leadership simply treat members and classes as inanimate objects to be added to a balance sheet¹⁸. 

How do organic intellectuals and, indeed, organic revolutions operate? Because everyone claimsto authentically represent their class, what would it mean in practice? For the new left party, such a question is essential. As Ewan Tilley states, ‘The programme provides orientation, but deliberative mechanisms ensure that lived struggles reshape the programme.’¹⁹ We thus cannot just leave strategy to abstract sloganeering. 

For Paulo Freire, it is necessary that the leaders of the revolution ‘trust in the oppressed and their ability to reason’²⁰ while being open to adapting and changing their own prior assumptions. This appears to be a reasonable depiction of how counter-hegemonic struggles may create an ’organic unity between theory and practice, between intellectual strata and popular masses’²¹ or in Freirian terms, the ‘teacher-student with students-teachers’²². Here then are the outlines of praxis, of transforming abstract rhetoric into concrete practice. The Freirian approach points to education, not in the container mode²³ but in a way that allows for the educated to apply their own reason, knowledge as a process of collective cognition. For socialist parties the growth of this mode becomes a challenge of both constitution and culture.

Sortition and other Alchemical formulas

This article was written in the context of the founding process for a new left party in Britain. For many, this has represented a chance to try things differently and break with organisational orthodoxy. In short, it’s time to do things differently. The incompetence and secrecy of the national leaders in this respect²⁴ has actually been a boon. Local groups, eager to get things started, have been forming unofficial proto-branches and hosting meetings in their communities. Noticeably, many of these meetings have eschewed the orthodoxy of electing chairs and taking minutes, but instead have been operating on assembly models, with participation and conversation not just prioritised but actively baked into the structures. There’s a sense among many that if this party is to succeed, it can’t just be business as usual when it comes to meetings.  

Yet at the national level of the founding conference, things are not so clear. When the plan for a conference with delegates chosen by sortition was mooted, there was celebration in some quarters and outrage in others. Sortitioned members seemed to solve the problem of there being no official branches to send delegates, but the devil was in the details. With little time to spare till the conference and with plans for a large number of delegates, the valid worry was that the founding conference would not have enough time to properly deliberate on things. Not to mention the huge number of delegates proposed is so unwieldy that real deliberation seems impossible.

The problem was not sortition, but the haphazard way it was being applied. Many of its opponents, however, reacted with arguments that missed the point or revealed perhaps too much of their own elitism. A project within Your Party, the Democratic Bloc, perhaps gave away a little too much when they compared sortition to a lottery, with an illustration of numbered balls representing the process. It was perhaps a projection of their own view of the rank and file members (aka the ones not connected to national factions or have mates in high places) as interchangeable objects. 

The idea that sortition is a game of chance, a roll of the dice, is common. But I see that a system where our representatives—at Conference, in national leadership roles—are solely elected by votes is much more a game of chance. When voting is supreme, your local party organisation is playing roulette: will you get a competent organic intellectual? A nepo baby? A person who has friends in high places? The one who speaks the loudest? A member of a faction that is pulling strings behind the scenes? Someone owed a favour?²⁵ If you want organic intellectuals in leadership, then the odds are stacked against them if you favour an elected delegate system alone. 

Sortition has become a topic of fierce debate in the current milieu of the Left in Britain, as the creation of a new mass left party has given the floor to new voices. Many of its advocates come from the climate justice movement, which has long been unburdened by the creaking structures of Labourism. With the goal of mass movements, assembly-style meetings and sortition go hand in hand as a new form of democratic organising. Organisations such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have certainly made more of an impact than the tired old paper sellers of the Marxist left, and this is certainly down to new forms of organising that put action first above debate on programme, but sortitioned assemblies of a mass scale have yet to be fully tested. Still there is a passionate movement coalescing around the idea that with ‘one single revolutionary step, you remove the hundred and one ways that elections are manipulated by those with money, connections, knowledge, and commitment’²⁶. For Roger Hallam, the choice for this new party is between ‘self-selecting dominatory power’ or a party that ‘directly reflects the wider social space’²⁷.

Comrades from the Marxist left too are championing the cause of sortition at this conjuncture. Edmund Griffiths makes the point that we already have sortition in this country, deliberating on matters of the highest importance in juries. We would be horrified if such an arrangement were replaced by people who campaigned to be on a jury, so why does sortition in our own parties scare us so much?²⁸ However, Griffiths argues that a conference should not be a fully sortitioned affair and that political representatives of various factions should also be present to give delegates a real sense of choice rather than just stamping through the as-of-now unelected leadership’s schemes. For me this shows a commitment by both to working with context rather than sticking to rigid dogmas.

A second mechanism of alchemy whose time has come and that would generate vital upheaval is that of term limits for elected officials. Term limits operate on the assumption that the more leaders, the better. The longer individual incumbents stay in power, the more opportunities they are given to build their own personal fiefdoms of social capital, which lead to electoral contests always favouring the incumbent. Rotating leadership on the other hand, opens up the opportunity for talented individuals to unleash their own potential rather than waiting in the wings for years, even decades for their opportunity. For those who would argue that we’ve had some very good left-wing politicians who have benefitted from decades-long terms in parliament or chairing their local branches, I wouldn’t disagree, but with term limits, where such individuals were mandated to step down and would be able to stand again in the future, we’d have more than just one flower blooming through the concrete, but fields of organic intellectuals, elected by their local parties. Term limits also decrease negative campaigning; when the incumbent is stepping down, the new challengers can focus primarily on the policies, not the person²⁹.

Sortition and term limits are not just preferable because they are more just and representative. The point of political alchemy is to support norms and cultures that create chemical reactions: changes that have transformative effects on the power of the wider collective. As C. L. R. James notes in his classic essay Every Cook Can Govern, the Athenian model of sortition for city councils rotated leadership so that after a number of years, every man³⁰ had the chance to know intimately the way that government worked, and so raised the level of public debate and deliberation. 

Sortition and term limits thus incentivise broad and meaningful political education. The pure electoral model favoured by mechanical socialists means that genuine education is reserved for the leadership caste, with the rank and file required only to passively consume knowledge. When leaders can and will come from the general population of members, well now you need to treat them ALL as potential organic intellectuals. They can no longer rely on horse trading to ensure ‘their people’ get a seat at the table. They must instead impart genuine mass education: not treating people like containers, but persuade, engage, debate, argue, compromise, and maybe change their own certainties a little along the way. 

The current moment

I’ve been careful here not to say that sortition should replace everything. Elections have a function in setting political direction and when you elect leaders, you can hold them directly accountable to the decisions they make. So, I’m certainly not saying we should get rid of elections. Elections can be alchemical too, particularly if we adopt the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system so as to better represent the diversity within our collective. 

But there is a role for sortition in a party. Those with memories of the Labour Party under Corbyn will likely have negative memories of the way that disciplinary measures such as expulsion became highly politicised. I have campaigned and so far, found support for a sortition-derived body of members to act as an independent ombudsman for the purposes of reviewing such decisions where they are made by an executive body. This is now a campaign prong of the Democratic Socialists faction³¹. In cases where judgement and reason are valued, then sortition plays a vital role in reflecting the knowledge will of the collective. 

The most healthy mix for a member-led party is one that combines elected and sortition, a combination of those who have clear strategic platforms and those who are representative of the party as a whole. The ideal situation is an elected body being the ones who curate the sortition process, not just giving delegates a list of options, but meaningful choices and time to deliberate them. We should have space for both; the elected are individuals accountable to the party, while the sortitioned are the party’s accountability to itself and its ability to conduct real political education.

Hope also lies in the proto-branches that rescued us from an autumn of inertia. In Edinburgh, I was part of an organising team that drew over a hundred strangers to hall on for three hours of their Saturday. We had no mandate and leadership was a case of giving space to those who were willing to do the work. I am sure it has been the case across the country. The lack of a standardised set of rules has meant each locality has become an experiment in alchemy. Rules, they will come, but if the Spirit of September is to prevail, then it is up to the branches to continue taking the lead, to consider each and every time that power must be elaborated and to decide themselves how they represent this. 

We are the octopus party now, one that produces knowledge from the limbs as well as the head.³² And yet, many in local branches will snap back into assuming that every position and every meeting needs minutes and elected officers. Local parties that act as thinking organs rather than containers for the national party should instead evaluate each delegation of power. Does this position need to be elected, or can we trust in the collective spirit and keep things fresh? Similarly, are we making sure that those in power are mandated to step down and let others develop as leaders not just in the party, but in their communities? So, when you have your meetings in your branches, why not suggest, as Organising for Popular Power collective have, that branch organising committees use sortition in order to prevent takeovers from pre-existing groups³³. At my local proto-branch I have advocated for a steering committee composed of 75/25 split representing elected and sortitioned members respectively. You may find that many people in your local branch react positively to the idea of term limits and sortition done correctly.

Even if you are still unconvinced by sortition and term limits, there are many other ways to transmute your base into gold. The Democratic Socialist faction of Your Party has also put forward a constitutional demand that local party organisations receive a statutory fund of 50% of their local membership fees. Of course many others will demand funding for local branches, but when we make this a percentage of member fees, we incentivise those local parties to grow even bigger. This is the kind of thinking we need when we consider party rules. Not just what is fair or just, but what does it encourage and maximise.

Conclusion

The current moment is one of opportunity, and we sit precariously between mechanics and alchemy. We have to organise at a variety of locations: our local proto branches, the national conference, the national executive, towards our public officials and leaders of social movements. At each of these levels of power, our decisions on whether we opt for election, sortition, term limits or reselection must not be taken lightly, but be subject to rigorous debate and evaluation

Mechanics and alchemists are ideal types of socialists; they don’t exist in the real world, but they are useful in identifying tendencies among us as we organise. What alchemists are aiming for is transformation and genuine mass political education, not just of teachers and containers, but one that sees the creative intellectual in all of us. It is alchemy, not chemistry, because we cannot reduce this to the sum of its parts, nor can we predict exactly where it will go. But in the forging of a collective will, we can create something close to magic.

We have long thought of organic intellectuals as special individuals who have gained leadership positions while remaining true to their roots. This concept keeps us chained to a socialism of individuals, moving through abstract space, building up their knowledge as if it were a finite resource only available to them. I want us to think of organic intellectuals as a position that any of us could potentially occupy. When we think this way, we take responsibility for our movement, and the movement takes responsibility for us. There are so many who talk about the benefits of socialist political education, who long to be the teachers of the masses. Well, if you’re ready to teach but not ready to trust your graduates to take the lead, then what kind of a teacher are you?

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References

1. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London. Lawrence and Wishart. ↩︎
2. Guha, R. (1983) The Prose of Counter-Insurgency. Guha, R. (ed) Subaltern Studies II. Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
3. I am currently an organiser and convener of the Democratic Socialists, but this article is written entirely in a personal capacity and readers should be clear that many of my fellow DemSocs would disagree with some of the conclusions I draw here, while agreeing with others and this is reflected in our organisation’s principles. We do not currently support sortition-derived conferences for example.  ↩︎
4. E.P. Thompson, Through the Smoke of Budapest, Reasoner: A Journal of Discussion, November 1956 ↩︎
5. In this article the negativity towards ‘Mechanical Socialism’ should not be confused with an anti-materialist stance. The concept of mechanical and alchemical refer mostly to organising praxis. ↩︎
6.  Mirowski, P. (1989) More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge.  Cambridge University Press. “If one is intent on portraying trade as motion, it is of paramount importance that the value substance in motion be identified by constants that are themselves not influenced by said motion; the parallels to the history of physics are evident.” (p.159) Mirowski’s argument is that the disciplines of economics and physics developed concurrently and thus shared a paradigmatic conservation principle when it came to the concepts of value and energy. What I do here is to argue that for mechanical pedagogues, knowledge has been conceptualised in much the same way, as a stable constant that can be transferred from one person to another. ↩︎
7.  Cameron, E. (2022) The Elephant in the Room: Political Education on the UK Left. Cosmonaut. https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/07/the-elephant-in-the-room-political-education-on-the-uk-left/ ↩︎
8. Thompson, E. P. (1956). Through the Smoke of Budapest. Reasoner, November. ↩︎
9. Thornton, S. (1997). The Social Logic of Subcultural Capita. In The Subcultures Reader. Routledge. https://hiphopandscreens.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/thornton-subcultural-capital-200-209.pdf ↩︎
10. To quote Gramsci, Socialist ‘leaders’ in the contemporary West are ‘Generals without an army’.  ↩︎
11. Holmes, H. (2025) Revenge of the Network Left. Prometheus. https://prometheusjournal.org/2024/09/19/revenge-of-the-network-left/ ↩︎
12. Robinson, C. (2019) An Anthropology of Marxism. 2nd Edition. The University of North Carolina Press. ↩︎
13. E.P. Thompson (1957) Socialist Humanism. An Epistle to the Philistines. The New Reasoner. Volume 1. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm ↩︎
14. Juries, like libraries and the shipping forecast feel like relics of a bygone era, because they reflect logics, of the collective good and the protection of minority welfare, that are no longer fashionable. ↩︎
15. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London. Lawrence and Wishart. p.152 ↩︎
16. Guha, R. (1983) The Prose of Counter-Insurgency. Guha, R. (ed) Subaltern Studies II. Writings on South Asian History and Society. Delhi. Oxford University Press.  Guha follows in the tradition of Gramsci, but his essay is a good example of how the Subaltern Studies group have been able to utilise European thinking without letting it become orthodoxy and in turn developing their own unique contribution. Guha’s essay offers a criticism of Gramsci’s idea that ‘spontaneity’ from the most marginal lacked true class consciousness and thus needed to be educated.  ↩︎
17. Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London. Victor Gollancz ltd. ↩︎
18. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London. Lawrence and Wishart. p.189 ↩︎
19. Tilley, E. (2025) On the Organisation of a New Left Party (Part 2). https://stateandconfusion.substack.com/p/on-the-organisation-of-a-new-left-bb1 ↩︎
20. Freire, P (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Middlesex. Penguin Books p.41;54 ↩︎
21. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London. Lawrence and Wishart. p.189 ↩︎
22. Freire, P (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Middlesex. Penguin Books p.56 ↩︎
23.  Freire calls the container mode of education ‘banking system’. ↩︎
24. “the ‘the closed, anti-democratic and secretive processes’ of the elites running New Left Party” Woodrow, A. (2025) Whose party is it anyway? Prometheus. ↩︎
25. Or in Edmund Griffith’s characterisation: ‘the most popular, or the best educated, or the richest, or the mouthiest”. Griffiths, E. (2025) New left party: on getting it sorted. https://www.edmundgriffiths.com/newpargetsor.html ↩︎
26. Hallam, R. (2025) Grasping the Enormity of the Moment. Key to Hallam’s argument for sortition is his archetypal character of ‘Mrs Jones, on a housing estate in Bolton with three grandkids to look after’ as someone that a new socialist party should be happy to have in a position of power, with methods like sortition providing the impetus.  ↩︎
27. ibid ↩︎
28. Griffiths, E. (2025) New left party: on getting it sorted. https://www.edmundgriffiths.com/newpargetsor.html ↩︎
29. Minchuk, Y., & Raveh, O. (2025). Can term limits reduce political sabotage? Evidence from negative campaigning in gubernatorial races. European Journal of Political Economy, 102724. ↩︎
30. Of course this system’s exclusion of women and the fact that this system operated as part of a wider political economy of slavery made it so the entire thing was undemocratic, but then so too were elected representatives at this time.  ↩︎
31. “In cases involving allegations of member misconduct that contravene the rules of the party, the NPC will deliberate, judge and rule on outcomes. All outcomes will be reviewed by a unique Discipline and Grievance Commission (DGC), which serves an ombudsman function. ↩︎
32. Bradford, N. (2023) How Octopus Arms Bypass the Brain. Scientific American“Each arm gathers sensory information to drive its own movements—and even those of other arms—without consulting major brain regions.”  ↩︎
33. Organising for Popular Power (2025) An Anticapitalist Basebuilding tendency within Your Party. ↩︎

Ewan Cameron