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Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, all published by Oxford University Press. Her academic work has been recognised with the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and a Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement.

Ypi’s latest book, Free (Penguin, 2021), departs from her academic philosophy to trace her childhood experience of Albania’s transition to capitalism. Free, now translated into more than twenty-five languages, won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.

For The Internationalist’s issue # 24, philosopher Srećko Horvat sits down with Ypi to discuss, among other things, Albania's complicated relationship with the United States, the definition of the term "revolutionary”, the possibility of “radical” movements of the West, and why Ypi calls herself a Kantian Marxist.

Srećko: What explains Albania's allegiance to the United States?

Lea: A combination of historical and political reasons. Albania declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 but struggled to be recognised by the Great Powers, which supported its territorial fragmentation. Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination played an important role in domestic political discourse, and in general, the US was perceived as more impartial compared to other European states, given their competition for influence in the Balkans. In the early years of the new state, there was a large diaspora in the US, especially Boston, which played a key role in helping develop Albanian institutions. 

During the communist period, the US was considered an archenemy in official discourse. But the harsh isolationism and the high degree of censorship and repression that characterised the Albanian state contributed to creating an idealised image of the American way of life. Because of this basic mistrust, even when Albanians were told the truth about inequality or racial segregation in the US, they thought it was mere propaganda and ended up with a rather uncritical, Hollywood-like view of American politics and society. 

In the post-communist period, there was a new, large wave of emigration to the USA. Many Albanian-Americans vote for the Republican party and are now fervent Trump supporters. Albania has been a key ally of the United States in the Balkans and is one of its strongest partners in NATO. There is a broad consensus around this – at least, I have never seen a political party challenge it. And I have never seen any US American project (military or otherwise) contested in Albania. One occasionally hears criticisms (from select actors on the right) of Soros or the Open Society Foundation, but usually with great care to distinguish this from a critique of the United States. 

Srećko: Why is it so hard for the "West" to acknowledge that it has oligarchs, too?

Lea: In the ancient Greek sense of the term – democracy (rule by the many) is the opposite of oligarchy (rule by the few). The West thinks of itself as liberal and democratic, so to apply the category of oligarchy to itself would threaten that idealised self-identification. But the problem is also deeper. The term “oligarch” is nowadays often used as a synonym for someone who has accumulated wealth too quickly, often through obscure, possibly morally objectionable ways, and who uses that wealth to influence political outcomes. 

In Western discourse, oligarchs only exist in Eastern Europe or the Balkans, wherever “liberal democracy” is perceived as young, fragile and flawed. It is the term deployed to explain why capitalism, which substituted state socialism, did not quite go as planned: to distinguish the failure from the ideal model. If we acknowledged that oligarchs are everywhere, we would effectively say that democracy and capitalism are incompatible. Reserving the application of the term to countries outside the core liberal West enables a moralising discourse that tries to “save” these allegedly “flawed”, “backward”, or “morally bankrupt” states. It’s a narrative invoked to explain why they still don’t have functioning democratic institutions where political liberalism and capitalist markets go hand in hand. To say that oligarchies are everywhere would be to admit that economic power conditions political outcomes as a structural background force. It would be to admit that capitalism – as such – threatens the core ideal of equality, and of representation of the many, which is what real democracy is about. 

A discourse that individualises failure and that blames those failures of the system on a few outlier states and their corrupt elites or the absence of “the rule of law”, “transparency”, or whatever the jargon of the day says, is helpful to turn the attention away from the performance of capitalism to the performance of single states and a handful of individuals within them.

Srećko: Do you think we live in “revolutionary” times? If not, why?

Lea: It depends on what we mean by revolutionary. I have always thought that a revolution is when the fundamental legal categories that help maintain a particular economic and political configuration are replaced by new ones, which profoundly modify or replace that framework. For me, a revolutionary change is a legal change in the basic structure of the legal order, both domestic and international. How that transition happens, whether slow or fast, violent or peaceful, depends on the context: what institutions are in place and which particular forces contend with each other for access to power. 

So if by “revolutionary” times we mean that we live in times of persistent crises of our global economic and political system, where current institutions cannot adequately respond to the claims of different subjects and constantly invoke emergency measures to restore a semblance of normality – yes. If by “revolutionary” we mean that there are agents reflecting on that crisis and driving forward the necessary change, and that those agents promote visions that can take care of the failures of the previous framework while preserving their benefits, then I am not so optimistic. 

Take the case of Albania. It’s obviously affected by the crisis of capitalism, but it also has had a terrible experience with socialism. We need a new model that can guarantee robust liberal freedoms – the freedom of speech, vote, association, travel – while also guaranteeing material conditions and giving everyone the social power to exercise those freedoms effectively and to be democratically represented as equals. But we cannot do this in one country alone. We need a coherent discourse of social change, coordinated but context-specific. We need to rethink representation beyond the nation-state, engage left-wing social movements and political parties on an explicitly anti-capitalist platform, and develop a genuinely inclusive project which can learn from the failures of socialist states in Eastern Europe, from the crisis of liberalism in the West, and the experiences of social movements in both. That’s a tough call, and I don’t see any revolutionary agents prepared to take this on.

Srećko: Why do "radical" movements in the West often take a social democratic character rather than an outwardly anti-capitalist one? 

Lea: If only they did! Nowadays, we don’t have social democracy anywhere, even the Scandinavian welfare state has been significantly eroded and continues to be threatened by far-right, anti-immigrant, populist projects. It is important to remember that social democracy was, at its origins, an anti-capitalist project. It was a revolutionary project (in a sense specified in the previous answer) which in Western liberal democracies coincided with an expansion of the franchise, trying to modify property relations and to give parliamentary representation to previously excluded subjects. That project died when the effort to overcome capitalism was wedded to the project of transforming citizenship within the nation-state, roughly around World War I. From then on, social democrats were only interested in winning elections. Knowing how to beat their political adversaries became more important than knowing why. 

The substance of the anti-capitalist message was increasingly lost, sacrificed to the form. The content was replaced by packaging, politicians became technocrats, parties became cartels, and civic participation was increasingly irrelevant, except in the form of isolated protests by social movements that took an anti-system form. But the moment these social movements obtained a significant electoral presence, they were co-opted too. The left gave up on trade unions, mass mobilisation, international coordination, and reimagining democratic institutions because it put all its eggs in the election basket. It was driven by an overly optimistic assessment of the degree to which the state can tame the market, which might have made sense given the concessions made to workers in Cold War geopolitics. Yet, as many early critics of social democracy pointed out, it was (and is) a mistake to think that democracy and capitalism were inherently, rather than contingently, compatible.

Srećko: You're often described as a Kantian Marxist. Can you tell us what is Kantian Marxism and what progressives and internationalists can still learn from Kant? 

Lea: In my work, I try to emphasize the moral question at the heart of the socialist tradition (which, by the way, is the same as the moral question at the heart of the liberal tradition): what is freedom and how can an institutional system secure freedom in a robust way. 

In Kant, you have a persuasive metaphysical answer to the first part of the question and a more limited answer to the second. Freedom is the awareness of moral responsibility, it is what makes us see each other, not simply as means to ends, but as beings with reason who respect humanity in a person and treat each other also as ends in themselves. In the Marxist tradition, the emphasis is on the second part of the question, on the empirical limitations to realising that moral ideal, given our historical circumstances. Under capitalism, Marxists claim the imperative to accumulate capital trumps all other values. We all live in a persistent state of alienation, of a separation between what we ought to do as a matter of practical reason and what we end up doing constrained by circumstances. 

Under capitalism, you have deep asymmetries of wealth and power, which in turn prevent the realization of freedom in our social relations. We have a global order, for example, where the agency of smaller, poorer countries is constantly thwarted by a highly asymmetric system of global power relations. This happens for several reasons: the legacy of colonialism, an international order that benefits the more powerful states, the relationship between the defence of property and the contractual justification of the nation-state, and so on. Domestically, we have unequal representation and a system where the few people who control the capital, also control political opportunities, undermining democratic equality. Kant gives you an ideal of moral relations between human beings, while Marx and others explain why that ideal is undermined by capitalism. I call the theory that focuses on both these dimensions moral socialism. Historically, there are some precursors among the neo-Kantians in Austria and Germany in the early Twentieth century, but I think one can also find echoes of it in some of the works of Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School, in John Rawls’s critique of laissez-faire markets and his defence of property-owning democracy, and so on. I think it’s a tradition worth reviving.

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