The Transformation of the Left



The Long March from the critique of the political to the belief in the state. An attempt at third ways, the world market and the actuality of utopia



By Johannes Agnoli

Politicians are criticized. This is part of the public's normal everyday business and is legitimised by the numerous mistakes made by the government and public administration, by Italian and French cases of corruption, and more recently German ones. This criticism, however necessary it may be, obscures the essence of politics: politics as a system of conquering, maintaining and exercising power. The following text starts from this real meaning, i.e. from the institutional, partly constitutional form of statehood, into which social and economic rule is translated.

Challenged to "continue" my critique of politics, which I began years ago and which has not yet come to an end, that is, to continue the critical business from the critique of political economy and the capitalist mode of production to the critique of the coercive character of social reproduction and its "summary" in the form state (Marx), I find myself confronted with an opposite tendency in the present situation. It is particularly effective in the social movements, groups, and partly also organizations, which formerly strove for radical changes and emancipation: The former emancipatory left obviously lets all hope run away in the hopelessness of its own entanglement with the changed reality. But there is no general resignation, nor is the left retreating into privatized niches. Rather, it remains active, only changing its position, bidding farewell to its former standpoint, pushing for institutional power, making itself a state and becoming - social democratic.

In this way, the left, regardless of global reality, orients itself to the existing state, bound by its surroundings. It should no longer be abolished, but rather expanded in its best parts. In this properly constituted state, together with the established leadership groups, it wants to take a socio-economic "third way".

First a memory, without any sinister ulterior motives. The Third Way first appeared in Italy in the early thirties, proclaimed by a well-known, not very pleasant historical figure.

When Mussolini called fascism the Third Way between capitalism and communism, it sounded innovative. In substance, it was a pure flatus vocis, a word fetish. But the slogan had a socio-political meaning. The aim was to integrate an industrial workforce that was not exactly capital-friendly and an equally latifundient-unfriendly rural workforce into the "new" order - and not least to counteract the dragon sown by the Hegelian Ugo Spirito, who was opposed to private ownership of means of production and enjoyed popularity among young students: that fascism should by no means take a third way, but rather its historical task would lie in the project to "abolish" Bolshevism - quite in the Hegelian understanding of the word.

Today, however, when the traditional opposition of capitalism-communism has become obsolete, the Third Way takes on a completely different meaning, because the question is what is supposed to stand in the present as the opposite of the released capital and liberal-democratic euphoria. Is the antithesis the constitutional state of the Federal Republic of Germany and what is known in Europe as Rhenish capitalism? The matter does not seem to be right, because one would not know why the reality of the Federal Republic should be diametrically opposed to - its own reality. No, in the face of neo-liberal reality I can only think of a utopian, yet correct, though seemingly impossible theory of emancipation: the association of the free and the equal. The Third Way, however, runs somewhere between that reality and this dream.

The left does not fully accept reality and at the same time denies the truthfulness of the dream. It joins the existing, the pleasant, the efficient: in the constitutionally prescribed order. In it, together with all other responsible persons, it seeks the solution. But what should it consist of? In the taming of wild capitalism, in a legal or otherwise realized mitigation of the borderless, all-dominant market? Here and there one even hears talk of a "humanization" of capitalism, which unintentionally reveals its barbarism. The third way would therefore lie in a constitutionally regulated, not entirely ruthless liberal-democratic policy and in limiting the return to Manchester capitalism. A policy of the factually possible and a capitalism with a social democratic face. In this sense, the formerly emancipatory left is oriented towards the form called state, or more precisely: towards the special form of the bourgeois constitutional state, and in Germany increasingly towards the reality of constitutional and power structures.

One should not forget that constitutions of a bourgeois state are, so to speak, on two levels: the heavenly level of values and value systems, of declarations of fundamental rights and of ideal affirmations - for example, popular sovereignty and representation of the people; and the ground floor, the level of regulation and control of state power, the so-called rules of the game. Idea or ideology on the one hand, the real side of the state on the other: it is not entirely clear to which floor the left has recently moved.

If Hegel meant that reality can no longer stand it when consciousness changes, we can see a reversal today. Left consciousness has not been able to stand the change that has occurred in reality, from the market to the political form.

Now the possibility of an ideological way out has recently emerged to justify the turn towards the constitutional state. In the search for a higher legitimation of the mutated consciousness, "constitutional patriotism" has been found or invented. As far as I can remember, the term was coined by Dolf Sternberger, at first a good, yet mere notion, i.e. something not further specified. In the meantime, attempts have been made to conceptualize the idea and give it philosophical dignity. In the past, the patriot was the one who protected and defended the patria. In the course of time, the defence of the fatherland has faded into the background and has been replaced by the defence and protection of a new, certainly more meaningful good: the constitutional state order, constituted in this form. After all, this new norm provided a federal authority with its ideal basis. At the same time, for the left, which had otherwise always oriented itself towards social emancipation, the philosophical proved to be a viable pons asini that bridged the gap between the ratio emancipationis and the irrational logic of power endowed with its own purposeful rules. But from the point of view of the conformist left, the perspective is different, since the constitutional state is what remains positive in the absence of the possibility of radical change: It guarantees a form of political power that is tamed by right-wing claws, is thoroughly philanthropic, and perhaps even somehow alternatively usable.

Over this bridge, the transition from the rejection of capital and its state to reconciliation with the one, to agreement with the other; from the theory and consciousness of a social task to ideology and the false consciousness of a false reality is successful. Wrong, because the patriots are now running away from the written patria, the internal market the world market, the nation state the "wild" capital that has become global. And even the criticism of politics is losing its traditional object.

The situation today is no different than it was when the capitalist mode of production was imposed and the bourgeoisie rose to power. This rise is one of the most amazing political achievements in history. With the at least ideologically given breakthrough of popular sovereignty, it was necessary to counteract a possible anarchization of political conditions. Thus, the institutional means were invented, on the one hand to take into account the increasing presence of dependent masses, i.e. the people (extension of the right to vote to women's suffrage at last), but at the same time to keep these masses out of the political decision-making processes. In the representative system, the people provide for the change of personnel (parties and persons) among those in power, deputizing them for the power of decision. All this is done in the feedback of power to clear, concise rules. In contrast to the past, in this system the respective changing oligarchies are bound by law and order. So the achievement was and is the constitutionality to which all political powerholders remain bound: in a constitutional oligarchy which we have become accustomed to calling democracy, just as we called the USSR Soviet system, although everyone knew that the Soviets had sunk to fiction.

The new problem, however, is the changed relationship between political power and society. For global capital also requires the regulation of social reproduction, which is all the more difficult because we have a world market but no world society. The direction, however, is likely to remain constant: A regulation must be found because, despite all the talk of deregulation, the globalised economy cannot do without institutionally ordered social conditions. As in the days of Manchester capitalism, only such a regulation can prevent the self-destruction of the borderless market and guarantee the continued existence of society. The "invisible hand" of the free market is just as inadequate for this as the old-style internal market could not cope without state order.

But how is world politics possible in the unleashed world market - without a world society existing? In this situation, how will rule cast itself into an institutional power that takes into account all the old philanthropic right-wing cautions and does not declare the principle of sovereignty of the people obsolete, even though a world people does not exist? This is only one side of the problem. There is another side that political reflection is afraid of - and which leads every emancipation movement into a serious dilemma. We are not only dealing with the global economy, with the difficulties of the so-called industrial nations, but also with the rest of the world, with the redundant population.

First and foremost to the classics. That capitalism creates the wealth of nations was considered certain by Adam Smith. Hegel certainly agreed with this, but added something in the Rechtsphilosophie that neither Smith nor Ricardo had seen: that the accumulation of wealth increases, but at the same time this leads to the "isolation and limitation of special work and thus the dependence and need of the class bound to this work" (§ 243). Hegel developed the problem further and concluded that the bourgeois society is not in a position to "control the excess of poverty and the production of the mob" (§ 245). What Hegel called Pöbel were the masses, already marginalized at that time. Here Ricardo had the right insight: capitalism creates wealth, but also r edundant population. In the first volume of Capital, Marx dealt with this, praising Ricardo as he deserved, but saying that this was a cyclical phenomenon. When the accumulation of capital rebounds, the surplus population would be reabsorbed by the production process. All four classics, Smith, Ricardo, Hegel and Marx, understandably had Europe in mind. The rest of the world - not a scandal, but understandably - was simply out of the question for them.

Today we can say that Ricardo was right. There are billions of people in the rest of the world who are superfluous. It falls out of the amenities of the world market, but nevertheless comes under the consequences of the total subsumption of economic and social processes, under the "laws of the market" and the requirements of accumulation. The rest of the world poses a problem which we probably cannot solve with even the most extensive collections of bread for the world.

The question is whether these superfluous items can be a negation of the system that leaves them outside. In any case, even if they remain in a state of passivity, resignation and powerless patience, they are neither integrated nor can they be integrated. They stand at the gates of economically secure and socially distributed prosperity. The world market needs them at most as suppliers of resources, but not as subjects of social and economic activities.

If the redundant population were only to be found in the rest of the world, the power resources of the North could overcome the difficulties. But in the meantime, the rest of the world, the "South", has caught up with the industrialized North. In the Ricardian sense of the word, redundant population is also found in our homes in the country-specific type of unemployed. Unemployment - one hears from time to time - is "structurally conditioned" by technical processes and changes in industrial production and the service sector, and that means nothing other than: not a cyclical phenomenon, but a permanent state. Ricardo, not Marx.

The political form of the bourgeois state with its symbiosis of social, economic and professional leadership groups was based on the stable coupling of the internal market and the nation state. When this link is broken, the reality of the global market moves towards new organizational forms. A change of personnel in the political class would not be necessary, because the personnel would remain available for every change of form.

A "New Order" will - once again - establish itself, equipped with even more orderly power structures. A hardening of the objective coercive character of society is thus in prospect. This does not exclude the possibility that a new, regulated constitution will take the place of arbitrary rule - again with the edifyingly heavenly side of declarations and the earthly side of rules. The achievements of bourgeois revolutions need not be lost. In this possible new constitution they will have their secure place, as a blue flower on the buttonhole of the straitjacket.

Not only the market is expanding, but also the aporia: in thinking, in doing, in living together. Emancipation is facing hard conditions and hard times. And the arduous work of the mole. In aporia, the moles must have an opposite point of orientation. Here it is necessary to liberate the utopia, the much-maligned, from the association of the free and equal from the prohibition zone, into which interested ideologists of lack of ideas, the representatives of purpose-rational irrationality have pushed it.

The mole work will remain underground and laborious. It can hope for the superfluous in the country, where clarity can certainly be achieved about the connection between freedom and equality and their immediate interests. For the world's superfluous, freedom and equality are a material goal: freedom as liberation from hunger and need, equality as equal access to the offers of the world market. In this goal lies for them the meaning of emancipation. As Hegel already said cryptomaterialistically: If people have enough food and clothing, the Kingdom of God comes of its own accord.

The orientation towards utopia and the principle of hope is complemented by another principle that characterizes every new beginning and from which all life arises: the principle of negation. It would be bad to understand the radical form of negation without a utopian background as a withdrawal from society, as a retreat into the security of the individual conscience, which calms down in lamenting. Rather, refusal should enter into social reality, act there as the clear, conscious, but always effective No against the wrong development. Molework is the exact opposite of the privatization of protest.

What is utopia in aporia? The orientation towards utopia is the only real way out of the inhumanity in which the world society finds itself.