Representative governments are structurally corrupt: their juridico-political frameworks have enabled a small, powerful minority to benefit disproportionately and systematically from collectively produced wealth. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, wealth inequality is staggering. In countries in Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, the richest 10% of the population controls 77% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% controld only 1%. Even in Europe, where there is a robust middle class, the richest 10% concentrates about 58% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 50% has only 4%. This accumulation of property at the top would not be possible without legal structures that protect private property and safeguard profits even against the general welfare.

Landemore is unconvinced about my proposal to conceive of this process of oligarchization of society within the rule of law as “systemic corruption” because I do not identify a causal mechanism. However, like other structural forms of domination such as systemic racism, which are embedded in laws, policies, and entrenched practices that reproduce unfair treatment, systemic corruption defies causal models. However, following Machiavelli, I identify socioeconomic inequality both as an enabler of systemic corruption and its product; accumulation of wealth in a few hands enables undue influence on law and policy making to the benefit of oligarchs and the detriment of the common people.

Historically, the “remedy” for oligarchic overgrowth has been people’s power. Therefore, my aim in Systemic Corruption is not only to offer a structural critique of representative orders but also to advance democracy as people’s power—as Landemore herself defines it. I do not seek to reform representative government to make it more democratic, but rather to incorporate new popular institutions through which the people themselves, independently from political parties and elected representatives, can deliberate and have binding decision-making power to direct law, policy, justice, and constitutional innovation whenever they deem necessary. Even if this mixed constitution—the cohabitation of representation and deliberative direct democracy, in which the people themselves have the final word—can seem an extremely difficult goal to achieve, it has been done multiple times in history, albeit for relatively short periods of time.

The alternative to the mixed constitution—Landemore’s ideal of “replacing” representative government with “assemblies based on civic lotteries”—would be, to my mind, even more difficult to achieve; representatives would need to agree on constitutional amendments to abolish elections (which have become synonymous with democracy) and eliminate their own elected posts. Such a procedurally difficult and altruistic political decision is certainly not impossible, but it would still be a decision made by governing elites. The second-best option—“supplementing” elected parliaments with nonbinding lottery-based citizen assemblies—can certainly be attained; this approach cannot, however, revert the patterns of oligarchization because such assemblies are still subordinated to representative institutions that tend to protect oligarchic interests. Conversely, in a mixed constitution, the common people would not only be able to resist oligarchic domination but also, following Rosa Luxemburg, cease “to be a dominated mass” and start giving “conscious, free, and autonomous direction” to the life in common, one deliberated decision at a time.