A Review Article on Johannes Agnoli’s Die Transformation der Demokratie und andere Schriften zur Kritik der Politik (The Transformation of Democracy and other writings on the Critique of Politics) written by Werner Bonefeld in 1992.
The book became the bible of the German extra-parliamentary opposition yet is still not available in English. This review is the best we can for now.
Constitutional Norm versus Constitutional Reality in Germany
Werner Bonefeld
A Review Article on Johannes Agnoli’s Die Transformation der Demokratie und andere Schriften zur Kritik der Politik (The Transformation of Democracy and other writings on the Critique of Politics)*
Johannes Agnoli has influenced numerous student generations in Germany since the first publication of his Die Transformation der Demokratie (The Transformation of Democracy) in 1967. The article was published in a book of the same title. The book was jointly authored with Peter Brückner and included also a paper by Brückner on the ‘Transformation of Democratic Consciousness’. It would be no exaggeration to say that the book became the bible of the German extra-parliamentary opposition (APO). Agnoli’s publication reviewed here includes his article of 1967, an article in commemoration of his Transformation of Democracy (1986), and papers on critical political science and the critique of politics (1987); on election campaigns and social conflict (1977); and a speech delivered in 1984 to a symposium on ‘Conflict and Consensus: 35 years of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law)’ which was first published in 1987. Agnoli’s work has been translated into many languages. The remarkable exception is the English language. The only article published in English is on the parliamentary system in the Federal Republic of Germany, published in the International Socialist Journal in 1965.
In his still untranslated book Agnoli discusses the development of the parliamentary system in the Federal Republic of Germany. His analysis of the role of parliamentarianism is connected with scholarly analysis of the struggle for social emancipation. Understanding the role of parliamentarianism is linked up with the study of the form of the state. The focus is on the state’s pre-emptive counter-revolution. By this, Agnoli understands the political integration, and thus reformulation, of social struggles for social emancipation as being bound up with a merely political emancipation which characterises the constitution of power in bourgeois societies. His analysis of the former West-German state shows that the legalisation of human relations and their penetration by social administration, as well as the integration of the reformist left (for example trade unions, social-democratic parties and the Greens) into the institutional strategy of the state entails a progressive statification of the social relations concerned.
However, in qualification to Agnoli’s view ‘statification’ does not indicate something fundamentally new in the character of the state (Bonefeld, 1991). Rather, the ‘statification of society’ is presupposed in the state’s social role in maintaining freedom and equality within capitalist social relations. This freedom and equality is safeguarded by the state through money and law. The state enforces the norm of social interaction between property owners in a way which underpins the formal recognition of (property) rights to which each individual is subject. The enforcement of property rights entails, at the same time, a pre-emptive counter-revolution because the law, and its enforcement, involves decomposition of class relations in favour of the abstract individual endowed with standardised rights. The enforcement of the law of property inverts into a substantive guarantee of exploitation and defines the state as the concentrated force of bourgeois society. The law treats everybody as equal, as all proprietors are equal before money, an equality that characterises the right of property as the paradigmatic form of exploitation. The legalisation of social relations involves their statification insofar as the politically supervised enactment of law, that is, the recognition of the right of property, presupposes the enforcement of the law or in other words the imposition of political order. The state is a state of law and order. The historical tendency to legalisation presupposes, and has as its result, the statification of human relations. The mode of existence of the state inheres in the historical tendency towards expanded social organisation of social reproduction in terms of law, so permitting an attempt to eliminate social conflict through the instantiation of rights, i.e. control by law and order. The norms of freedom and equality are norms of private property and, as norms of private property, the norms of exploitation are freedom and equality.
Agnoli’s rich and many sided interrogation raises questions of many kinds. For reasons of space I shall confine myself to considerations of Agnoli’s notion of a ‘critique of politics’.
For Agnoli, the determination of scholarly social science is destruction (Agnoli, 1990). ‘Critique’ is understood as negation. Negation and destruction go hand-in-hand as moments of one theoretico-practical process, that is, of the revolutionary project of social emancipation. Agnoli’s project is that of revealing the internal relation between political norms and political power. His critique of the form of the state does not seek a critical comparison between the good norms of political domination and a bad political reality, but, rather, an understanding of the character of normative rights as a moment of political domination. The critique of politics is necessarily practically reflective. The goal of critique is not critique itself but the transformation of capitalist relations into an ‘association which will exclude classes and their antagonism’ (Marx, 1976, p.212). There is no place for the form of the state in a communist society or in a revolutionary movement because the role of the state is that of a peacemaker, domesticating social conflict on the basis of the norms of freedom and equality. According to Agnoli, only fundamental opposition is interested in revealing the political and social constitution of power and its movement. He insists that only fundamental opposition which is anti-institutional and which understands itself, politically, as autonomous is able to transform, and thereby to abolish, the form of the state.
The focus of a critique of politics is rejection of the principle of political power, of the idea that political power is a natural law and that it can, at best, only be kept in check, for example through some scheme of rights. All forms of political power have to be negated, according to Agnoli, whatever the form of the state. The role of political science is not merely to compare, however critically, the gap between the constitutional guarantee of freedom and equality and the reality of political domination. The roles of critical political science and of the critique of politics have to be distinguished. According to Agnoli, critical political science accepts the normative values of bourgeois society and seeks to reform political reality in accordance with the norms of freedom and liberty. The critique of politics investigates the character of social constitution in relation to the politically guaranteed and supervised norms of exploitation. Norms and political reality are criticised as complementary moments of exploitative social relations. The political integration of labour into the capital relation through money and the law entails the form of the state as a state of equality, equity and rights. To make sense of this contention, I shall move beyond a direct discussion of Agnoli to whom I will return below.
The capitalist form of the state is the first one to have no direct access to the material product of labour of its citizens (see Gerstenberger, 1978). The constitution of individual subjects as citizens is mediated through money. The state appropriates a portion of social labour through taxation. This form of appropriation has consequences for the social form of political power in capitalist societies. The power of the capitalist state is not constituted in terms of a complete personal subordination of its people to the power of a king or a monarch. The subordination of social relations to the capitalist state is, rather, characterised by impersonal or abstract forms of dependency in terms of law and money. In capitalism, social relations are subordinated to the state through the compliance of citizens with the rule of law. Within the framework of bourgeois freedom, the possibilities of individual freedom are limited by the freedom of other individuals. Contractual relations represent a form in which, according to law, freedom obtains in the form of a legally bound recognition of private individuals in their relation to
one another. The contract is the juridical form of freedom. However, the limitation of the freedom of individuals by the freedom of other members of society means that the freedom of individuals is not limited by their needs. This concept of freedom does not entail a form of social relations characterised by the satisfaction of needs but by the pursuance of one’s own ends. This, however, entails a form of social relations in which concrete needs do not figure as such. Instead, it implies a form of social relations characterised by formal relations of atomised market individuals, i.e. the freedom to sell one’s property whatever the concrete form of this property. Freedom obtains thus as a form of social relations between individuals who are responsible for and in possession of themselves, of their work and their labour power.1 These norms of freedom include the obligation of individuals to sustain themselves through work, whatever the concrete labour and whatever the particular employer. The political subordination of social relations to the abstract form of the law entails the political enforcement of the norms of social interaction between property owners in a way which safeguards the formal recognition of property rights to which each individual is subject. This relation of the state to society implies that private individuals exist as abstract citizens endowed with standardised rights. This subordination of social relations to law characterises the form of the state as an ‘illusory community’ (Marx and Engels, 1976) subsuming particular interest to universal interest. This subsumption equates the safeguarding and legal regulation of the republic of the market with human rights.
The aims of the capitalist state and forms of social control employed by it focus on the abstract citizen. This characterisation of the state is a result of the historical development of political power from concrete personal relations of dependence to compliance with abstract and impersonal norms. These norms treat each individual as equal in law. Instead of despotism, the state imposes coercion through law and order; instead of relations of conflict, the state administers contractual relations of social interaction; instead of privileges, the state imposes upon social relations free and equal market-relations, that is, the political organisation of the working class in the form of wage labour. The form of the state entails – or, rather, it just is – the coercive suppression of social emancipation in favour of a legal standardisation of abstract equality.
Exploitative relations are, thus, displaced and constituted politically in the form of the safeguarding of rights, equality and freedom upon which capitalist relations of exploitation rest.
Returning to Agnoli’s critique of politics, he understands the left project of social reform after World War II as a modernisation of the political power of the state. This modernisation responded to the political power of labour, and integrated the working class into the capital relation through the provision of, what Agnoli calls, integration costs like welfare and employment guarantees. The decomposition of social conflict through the normalising impact of a state-sponsored imposition of the wage relation was understood as both a response to the class struggle and as an inherently repressive measure designed to undermine any possibility of social autonomy, that is, social emancipation. Reformist modernisation of political power acknowledges the presence of labour in and against capital and seeks to integrate labour into capitalist reproduction through some scheme of equal rights. By implication, Agnoli saw the Keynesianism of the left as being founded on the acceptance of capitalist social relations. The left idea of ‘equal rights’ is in principle a bourgeois right. In its content, it is a right of inequality (Marx, 1968, p.320).
The above argument expands the insights of Agnoli’s work, and shows why it is important. Agnoli discusses the ideas mentioned in relation, especially, to the German political arena. However, his points can be generalised. A translation of Agnoli’s book is thus not just a linguistic matter but relates in intimate fashion to the movements of contradiction and class struggle in the nations where he is to be read.
I shall now contextualise Agnoli’s notion of a critique of politics. In the former West-Germany, critical political science was, after World War II, largely connected with the so-called Marburg school of which Wolfgang Abendroth was the most influential and best representative. The focus of this school’s critique was the gap between constitutional norms and political reality. The yardstick for this distinction was a socialist interpretation of the normative values of the (West-) German constitution. The normative system of the German constitution was seen as a model with which to evaluate political reality. The Marburg school did not focus on the state in abstract as the guarantor of normative rights. Instead, it focused on the political, economic and ideological conditions through which the normative values of the constitution and, concomitantly, constitutional value decisions materialise. The focus was on class struggle. Abendroth insisted that the German constitution entails the real possibility of achieving a transformation of capitalist social relations into a socialist form (see Abendroth, 1981). Abendroth’s socialist interpretation of the (West-) German constitution concentrated on Article 15, basic law. This Article proclaims the possibility of socialising the means of production. Article 14, section 1, provides the right of parliament to redefine the concept of property. Further, Article 20 which, according to Article 79, section 3, cannot be changed, places the state under social obligation. Article 20, section 1 (see also Article 28,1) contains the formula of a social and democratic federal state. The Marburg school interpreted this formula to mean that the basic law guarantees a specific minimum of social justice. The formula was seen as making it possible in principle for the democratic state to change the economic and social order in the direction of the democratic idea of a substantial, that is, socialist equality (see Abendroth, 1967, p.137, see also Abendroth, 1966). Abendroth predicated the realisation of the socialist potential of the constitution on the class consciousness of the working class. Without such class consciousness, the democratic constitution of the state cannot be secured nor, after the years of capitalist reconstruction, can it be restored. Abendroth acknowledged that the successful reconstruction of capitalist reproduction has made the fight for a socialist transformation of the (West-) German state a difficult task. This was because of the lack of a truly socialist party, the diminishing difference between the SPD and the CDU, a politics of consensus and of compromise, the integration of the trade union leadership into a politics of consensus and a reasonably successful substitution of class interest by consumer interest. Capitalist reconstruction in Germany was seen as having undermined the democratic character of the German state. As a consequence, the socialist transformation of the former West-Germany was a remote task. More urgent was the defence of democracy. Abendroth insisted that the task was to defend democratic constitutional rights against the state’s incursion into constitutionally guaranteed rights. The fight for a democratic socialist Germany entailed, first of all, the defence of normative values so as to fend off further attack on constitutionally enshrined rights and to further the condition of the working class. Defending the political potential of normative values was seen as a matter of urgency and as a matter of a constitutionally guaranteed peaceful realisation of a good politics, that is, a politics devoted to social emancipation. Only the democratic substantiation of political reality in terms of the normative values of the constitution could further the goal of a socialist society. Socialism was to be achieved through the best possible realisation of political emancipation.
Agnoli shows that the critical dimension of this approach was that of an oppositional protest which merely deplores the gap between the normative values of the (West-) German constitution and the reality of constitutional politics or, in other words, between the idea of formally guaranteed rights and the reality of a law-and-order state rooted in the tradition of pre-1945. The only political dimension of critical political science was the denunciation of political reality in favour of the good norms of the constitution. Class struggle assumed the form of a constitutional struggle over the question of the political substantiation of value decisions. Working class politics, understood in this way, was to effect a socialist substantiation of the system of norms. The limitation of this approach was that it saw the system of values as existing independently from capitalist social relations and that it accepted, however critically, the normative values of the bourgeois state. In qualification to Agnoli’s view, acceptance of normative values includes the acceptance of supervising the normative guarantee of rights. Supervising has as its presupposition the instantiation of political emancipation and, thus, the imposition of law and order. The political dimension of critical political science entails the disciplining of social relations in favour of a political substantiation of rights, so permitting a pre-emptive counter-revolution against social emancipation. Returning to Agnoli, critical political science cannot comprehend that the normative system of values is, in fact, not separate from political reality. Normative values describe the coercive rules with which the state enforces law and order. By implication, critical political science distinguishes between good and bad sites of political reality. This critical differentiation involves moralising. This is because the critical comparison between constitutional norms and political practice involves the weighing up of good and bad legislative and governmental activities. In the end, and as the logical conclusion of this comparison, a politics which fits the constitutional norms depends on good and faithful politicians who are devoted to the normative values of the constitution. In sum, the critical rejection of bad political practice coincides with the claim for politics with a human face.
Critical political science is, following Agnoli, restricted by the horizon of a given reality which it seeks to transform in terms of a more ‘human’ use of power. Agnoli insists that this position is deeply paradoxical. First, it presupposes that the norms are in themselves good and that they are misused for reasons of capitalist reproduction and because of wayward politicians. However, the norms do not possess any ideal character but, rather, they manifest the norms of capitalist reproduction. As Agnoli maintains, the interpretation of the normative system does not fall into the confines of an ethical court but into that of the law or, rather, the Constitutional Court. Second, critical political science presupposes an inhuman social constitution of the power of the capitalist state. It seeks to reform its inhuman character without attacking its inhuman constitution. However, the humanisation of political power presupposes the end of an inhuman state of affairs. The attempt to reform, rather than to abolish, an inhuman constitution of political power entails the acceptance of the form of the capitalist state as eternal. If one cannot escape the capitalist form of the state, then there is nothing left but to reform and to humanise. By restricting its horizon to existing reality, critical political science remains blinkered to the political economy of reforms, that is, the safeguarding of political power against social emancipation. By implication, critical political science performs a constructive role. It not only accepts existing ‘structures’ of political domination but, also, makes these structures the project of its bid for political power. Critical political science is, in fact, an affirmative critique of the status quo. For Agnoli, the political dimension of critical political science is that of eternal protest without revolt.
In the mid 1960s, Agnoli’s intervention involved not only an immanent critique of critical political science but, also, the reformulation of a Marxist critique of the form of the state. Agnoli’s analysis of the West-German state and of the internal relationship between normative values and political reality had directly practical consequences. In the place of a politics seeking to protect the normative values of the constitution, critique was now devoted to the revolutionary testing and transformation of reality.
Agnoli’s critique of politics meant and means a refusal to provide constructive critique. Instead it reclaims the notion of critique as a negative task. The critique of politics is not interested in the question as to whether political institutions can be reformed or not. Instead, it asks about the character of the reforms. Reforms are understood as a technique of social peace, that is, the pacification of class conflict by the state (see also Agnoli, 1975). The state is characterised as a peace-maker between two opposing classes. The only viable opposition to the power of the capitalist state is that which reclaims social emancipation in opposition to the political emancipation of capitalist social relations. The political power of the state, as Agnoli showed in his ‘Transformation’ of 1967, stabilises when the opposition begins to water down its fundamental character and starts to institutionalise and, thereby, to constitutionalise itself. By doing so it dismisses the project of social emancipation, in its form of an extra-institutional movement and favours, instead, the rule of the play of a parliamentary democracy. For Agnoli, any fundamental opposition which seeks to use parliament as a means of transforming the political and social status quo has to achieve parliamentary credibility. The attempt to achieve this entails acceptance of the rules of parliament, so permitting, as Agnoli puts it, an assimilation with political domination. The acceptance of parliamentary responsibility entails the renunciation of fundamental opposition in favour of a radical acceptance of the normative values of political power. Opposition degenerates to a parliamentary activity. Agnoli showed that the parliamentarianism of the organised left had, by the 1960s, become a means of stabilising capitalism.
The character of the state as a peace-maker is, in qualification to Agnoli, expressed in the German basic law. The idea of an unrestricted right to associate in political parties is constrained by constitutional norms. Article 21 of the basic law declares that parties have to be committed to the constitution. This Article outlaws the organisation of dissent whose purpose is understood to be to question, or to put into disrepute, the normative values of the basic law. Critique of the norms is in opposition to the constitution and can thus be prosecuted if the critique transforms into practice and gives itself an organisational form. Further, the constitution demands the mystification of the social character of the constitution through Article 5, section 3, basic law. Loyalty to the constitution is demanded of scholarly science. Thus, scholarly science which is understood to challenge the free and equal constitution of exploitative relations, is not protected by the constitution even if it operates within the legal framework of the constitution. Unless scholarly science accepts the constitutional order, it would otherwise place itself in legal jeopardy and subject to police surveillance and persecution. In Germany, the legalisation of politics, and conversely, the politicisation of the law is characterised by a constitutionally guaranteed repression seeking to reproduce social relations within the limits of their capitalist form. How can one understand, in constitutional terms, the juxtaposition of liberal rights with the outlawing of those rights whose purpose it is, or whose purpose is understood to be, the critique of constitutional norms?
‘The Federal Republic of Germany is, in contrast to the Weimar Republic, a democracy which does not tolerate the misuse of basic rights for an attack on a constitution which is based on the idea of liberty. It is expected that the people of the Federal Republic of Germany defend the liberal order’ (Constitutional Court 28, p.48). Further, the Federal Republic of Germany ‘does not tolerate the enemies of its basic order, even if they move formally within the framework of legality’ (Constitutional Court, 30, p.119).2 The German Federal Republic understands itself to be a Rechtsstaat. Its democracy is understood to be a militant democracy (wehrhafte Demokratie). Rechtsstaat is defined as a state whose power is determined and constrained by a set of binding rules for the state and its people alike. In contradistinction to systems where a monarch sets binding rules which are binding for himself and the bureaucracy, in a Rechtsstaat these rules emanate from the decision of a representative council – or parliament – which has been elected by the people. A Rechtsstaat emanates from the will of the people who are seen as sovereign. From the point of view of political power, the problem involved is that of shifting majorities in parliament and thus of changing constitutional rule. In Germany, this problem had, at the beginning of this century, given rise to debates on the distinctive difference between legality and legitimacy (Legalität and Legitimität).3 Legality comprises a set of rules which describe the legal order which is determined by the development of individual rights and majority decisions in parliament. Legality connotes the idea of a pluralist society. The utilisation and interpretation of legal norms is constrained by the ‘superlegality’ of legitimacy. The level of legitimacy defines the ground order (Grundordnung) to which legality is subordinated. The level of legitimacy defines the framework within which individual rights might develop. The following example might help to clarify the point just made. The normative right to free speech and free expression of opinion is restricted if the expression of opinion is in opposition to the liberal democratic ground order. The legally protected right to express the opinion that there is no freedom of opinion in the Federal Republic of Germany casts doubt on the validity of the constitutional value of the liberal democratic ground order. Because of this, the opinion that there is no freedom of opinion in Germany is not protected by the basic right of free opinion.4
The German basic law is often seen as having two competing constitutions. There is, on the one hand, the catalogue of liberal rights (Freiheitsrechte) and, on the other, the constitutionally defined task for the state of promoting a social unity in terms of a socially just state and in terms of achieving a social balance (gesamtgesellschaftliches Gleichgewicht).5 Whereas the former, i.e. the catalogue of individual rights, comprises a set of norms regulating the individual rights of atomised property owners as discussed in classical liberalism, the latter, i.e. the political task of intervening for the good of society as a whole, comprises a set of values which constrain the private use of freedom. The contradiction is resolved through the differentiation between legality and legitimacy. For example, Article 2, section 1 of the basic law declares that everybody has the right of the free development of his/her individuality insofar as he/she does not infringe the right of others and insofar as he/she does not violate the constitutional order (verfassungsmäßige Ordnung). Thus the limits of one’s freedom are not only constrained by the rights of others but, also, by the constitutional order. This constraint means, in fact, that the constitutional order is not identical with the basic law. The constitutional order divides itself into basic law and ground order. The ground order is identical with legitimacy.
According to the Constitutional Court, the constitutional order is defined as the ‘liberal democratic ground order’. This term is used in Article 18 (which deals with the loss of basic rights), Article 21, section 2 (outlawing of parties) and Article 91 (emergency authority of the federal state). The basic law does not give a clear definition of the various elements of the term ‘liberal democratic ground order’. The term is, however, a substantial concept which contains a binding value decision that defines the framework of rights and the scope of legality. The ground order provides the state with a superlegality which gives legitimacy to the political infringement of liberal rights so as to protect social relations. The normative system of liberal rights describes the scope of possible or actual social ‘behaviour’. The social unity of these norms contains the concrete social pattern of social relations. This unity pertains in the value decision of the constitution to which parliament is accountable and which subordinates the normative behaviour of individuals. The loose definition of the term ‘liberal democratic ground order’ endorses the value decision of the German constitution in favour of a militant democracy. It’s loose character renders it open to political substantiation through parliament and the Constitutional Court. This political substantiation confirms the idea of a Rechtsstaat. The Rechtsstaat is no longer legally bound by a catalogue of liberal norms and rules but, rather, by the liberal democratic ground order. The ground order provides a constitutionally guaranteed repression of oppositional activities and constitutional directives for the pacification of social conflict. These directives outlaw ‘unconstitutional’ uses of liberal rights and affirm a welfare state (Sozialstaatsklausel). Within the context of the constitutional order single constitutional norms are subordinate to the political substance of the higher order of the ground order or, in other words, any single norm is defined by the superlegality of the ground order. Intolerance of the enemies of freedom means that freedom cannot apply in those circumstances in which political power seeks to secure the institutional conditions of capitalist reproduction. The notion of freedom transforms from a guaranteed norm of social interaction to a means of legitimating political power. Individual norms transform into combative norms protecting the constitutional order against those who make an oppositional claim for particular norms. There is thus a dualist system of norms. On the one hand, we find the constitutional guarantee of liberal rights and, on the other, the subordination of this guarantee to the militant character of the liberal democratic ground order. Laws which might be legally protected by the basic law have to gain a stamp of approval from the superlegality of the ground order. In Germany, the tendency to a legalisation of political power, and conversely, to a politicisation of the Constitutional Court, is bound up with the distinction of legality and legitimacy.
The term ‘liberal democratic ground order’ is an ‘aggressive concept’ (Kampfbegriff) which connotes the character of a militant democracy. The Rechtsstaat is a militant democracy subordinated to the repressive principles of the liberal democratic ground order. The aggressive concept of the Rechtsstaat entails, fundamentally, the concept of ‘state-security’ and the obligation of parliament, political parties and other organisations such as the trade unions, to articulate social interests and to represent the sovereign people in accordance with the value decision of a liberal democratic ground order. The term connotes the concept of ‘state-security’ because of the constitutional directive that there is no freedom for the enemies of freedom. The militant character of the constitution entails that no individual who intends to undermine the constitutional order with the help of the basic law can claim protection from the basic law.6 To sum up, the German constitution makes a distinctive difference between a legal order and a value order. The value order predominates over the legal order. The legal order describes the freedom and equality of social relations which are embedded in the framework of a ‘superlegality’, i.e. the value order of the liberal democratic ground order. The repressive character of the constitution appears in a ‘superlegality’ whose purpose it is to fend off any legally protected activity which might be interpreted as an attack on the ground order.
Agnoli understands the political substantiation of the term ‘liberal democratic ground order’ as comprising a tendency to involution. Involution is understood as a term which stands directly opposite to the term evolution. The term involution connotes complex regressive political, social, and ideological processes which characterise the development of democratic states, parties, and theories into pre-democratic, if not anti-democratic, forms. The tendency to involution entails the development of the state into an authoritarian Rechtsstaat. Agnoli’s analysis of the authoritarian transformation of democracy takes the former West-German state as an example. He insists, however, that different states undergo similar developments which are different only in terms of their historically specific formation. In Germany, important elements of the tendency to involution are the transformation of political parties into peoples parties, the transformation of parliament into a representative and legislative body of state power, the integration of the organised opposition into the framework of the liberal democratic ground order and the attempt to displace class antagonism into a pluralist distribution struggle. The authoritarian Rechtsstaat of the liberal democratic ground order is characterised by an identification of the organised opposition, like the SPD and later the Greens, with the values of the constitution. This identification is expressed, for example, in the formula of the unity of democratic responsibility of the major parties. This notion of a politics of ‘social partnership’ entails, at the same time, a contest of loyalty between the parties as to the best representation of the ground order. Parties transform thus into agencies of social peace, closing rather than opening-up political debate. The notion of a ‘liberal pluralism’ degenerates into a politics of conformity. Indeed, parties no longer represent their electorate but, rather, represent the liberal democratic ground order to the electorate. Members of parliament do not, according to the basic law, represent their electorate but the people as a whole. The supreme will of the people is enshrined in the ground order. The representation of the ground order by the parties entails the representation of the people’s supreme advocate, i.e. the constitution. Any party which violates the aims and the values of the ground order violates the supreme will of the people, their liberty and freedom. The transformation of parties into parties of the liberal democratic ground order entails a form of social pacification integrating social relations into the nexus of the constitutional order and domesticating social conflict on the basis of social and political responsibility. The integration of social relations into the constitutional order characterises the parties as parties of the status quo, that is, as parties of a militant democracy. The acceptance of the ground order entails the social obligation to secure the ground order against subversive activities of the enemies of freedom. As Agnoli puts it, parties become agents of conservation. Defence of the status quo becomes a pre-emptive counter-revolution aiming at undermining oppositional activities in favour of the stability of political power. Parliamentary debate and controversy assumes the form of a circus in which the party-political-protagonists unite under the roof of the liberal democratic ground order. Loyalty to the normative values of capitalist reproduction structures the aims and programmes of parties. The ground order becomes the yardstick of parliamentary debate.
For Agnoli, another element of the transformation of democracy is the integration of a ‘market economy’ with a policy of social responsibility. This integration is expressed in ideological form in the term a ‘social market economy’. This concept connotes the role of the state as a peace-maker. The attempt to displace, or rather eliminate, class conflict through a politically supervised competition between pluralist redistribution interests need not be discussed here in detail. The political economy of the Keynesian welfare state has been widely analysed. With regard to the tendency to involution, Agnoli saw the integration of capitalist relations of exploitation with welfare policies as a modernisation of political domination. The welfare state secured the material survival of its members and entailed their adjustment to the limits of capitalist reproduction through monetary pacification. The welfare state entailed also the social conditioning and surveillance of its members through bureaucratic control. Inherent in the ‘welfare’ state is the enormous extension of central bureaucratic networks of social regulation, supervision, and control. With the help of these controlling agencies the state extends into the social organism, seeking to undermine, pre-emptively, oppositional activities in favour of social emancipation. In contradistinction to the Marburg school, Agnoli saw the constitutional provision of a ‘socially just state’, and its implementation in practice, as legitimating political power. This provision, rather than making possible a socialist transformation of political reality, implied a synthesis of political domination with a legitimating discourse of ‘equal rights’, seeking to decompose class relations on the basis of money and law. The political economy of social reform entails – or, rather, it just is – the conservation of political power, that is, the coercive suppression of social emancipation in favour of a political stabilisation of the status quo.
The transformation of democracy comprises, thus, three interrelated aspects. First, there is the transformation of parties into peoples parties. This transformation is characterised, amongst other things, by the replacement of social interest-representation by the political imposition upon social relations of the limits of the authoritarian Rechtsstaat. Second, the transformation of democracy is characterised by pacification of social conflict through a policy of social reform, so legitimating the disciplining of social conflict through policies of ‘equal rights’. Lastly, the functioning of parliament as a platform for shadow-boxing parties entails the adjusting of public opinion in line with the liberal democratic ground order, permitting the erosion of the liberal idea of democracy in favour of an institutional and procedural legitimation of political domination. The transformation of democracy excludes social relations from political power and, at the same time, contains them within the limits of the liberal democratic ground order by means of social administration and surveillance. In sum, the term involution connotes the political erosion of the classical ideas of liberty and democracy in favour of a surveillance state seeking to protect the liberal democratic ground order against any political substantiation of ‘liberty’ which might upset the status quo. For Agnoli, this development obtains in different form in different countries. The development, he insists, is irreversible.
Some might want to object to Agnoli’s analysis on the grounds that it has been discredited by the attack on the ‘nanny’ state and, particularly in Germany, the success of the ‘Greens’. Let us look briefly at his response to both of these objections. Has the abdication of collective responsibility for public services in favour of ‘self-help’ and individual responsibility expanded and enriched social autonomy? Does the abdication of collective responsibility entail the ‘empowerment’ of responsible individuals? It seems self-evident, as Agnoli suggests, that the ‘statification’ of society is synthesised with the ideological appeal of a ‘withdrawal’ of the state. The devolution of responsibility has nothing to do with an expansion of social autonomy but, rather, with a privatisation of responsibility which is controlled by the legal and monetary authority of the state. Rather than being an indicator of the reversal of the transformation of democracy, in terms of Agnoli’s concept of involution, the monetarist articulation of the limits of state intervention connotes precisely the regressive development of political domination to pre-democratic, if not anti-democratic, forms. Rather than simply relying on a repressive protection of the established form of the state through the suppression and criminalisation of extra-institutional movements and a rigid surveillance of all kinds of social and political ‘deviants’ as well as through the Berufsverbote (which means the systematic and legalised keeping of ‘radical’ persons out of the civil service), the abdication of collective responsibility involves an attempt to integrate extra-institutional movements into the form of the state. In the 1970s and early 1980s there had been conflicts between a corporatist, unified form of political domination and extra-institutional, anti-statist, social movements which tried to articulate and satisfy neglected needs and interests. The integration of these movements into the form of the state through policies of ‘self-help’ does not entail forms of ‘social autonomy’ but, rather, the pacification of social conflict on the basis of a devolution of political responsibility. Agnoli shows that the tendency to involution has not been reversed but that it has further progressed through the ‘statification’ of citizens’ initiatives (see also Hirsch, 1980; 1983; 1991).
Regarding the Greens, Agnoli asks if they have put parliament into the centre of politics and if they have made it the decision-taking body of the people? Agnoli’s answer to these questions is no (see his commemoration of 1986). His argument is that the Greens have undoubtedly enriched parliament. However, their critique of the abuses of parliamentary power by the established parties has not changed the character of parliamentary democracy but worked within its terms. Instead of criticising the norms of the form of the state, a critique which, as discussed above, is unconstitutional, the Greens assumed political responsibility. This implied, following Agnoli, the accommodation of political programmes and strategies to the rules of parliamentary democracy. The aim of the Greens is that of achieving a politics with a human and, to be sure, ecological face. Like the Marburg school, the Greens sought to reclaim the values of the normative system in opposition to the bad politics of the old parties. Political reality had to be changed in accordance with the normative values. The focus on the good norms of the constitution denies the correspondence between political domination and the normative value system and involves a defence of the value system of the constitution. As Agnoli puts it, the obeisance of the Greens to the state and their embracing of parliament entails the acceptance of the state’s monopoly of violence or, in other words, the liberal conception of political emancipation. The Greens’ espousing of the state involved their institutionalisation as a party of the liberal democratic ground order. Rather than the Greens taking over the state, the state has taken over the Greens. Their integration into the state of the liberal democratic order has made political life a bit more exciting. But, as Agnoli asks, have the Greens made the Federal Republic a ‘freer’ state, a state of the people, a state such as, according to the Constitutional Court, the Federal Republic has always been? If the Greens have indeed achieved an even ‘freer state’, is this achievement identical with a much freer society or even freer people?
The institutionalisation of the Greens has, once again, provoked the urgent and fundamental question of the relation of the left to the form of the state. For Agnoli, the Greens perform the role of a domesticated opposition which is as important to the stability of the German state, as was the stabilisation of political power through policies of social reform in the 1960s. Once again, fundamental opposition has been trapped in the contradiction between a radical rejection of the system of political domination and participation in the functioning of political domination. The critique of politics or, in other words, the scholarly work of negation, has not been made redundant by the ‘greening’ of German politics. Rather, the critique of politics is much more urgent because of the integration, and thus assimilation, of a fundamental opposition into the liberal democratic ground order. Agnoli’s book documents the ‘enormous gap between ecological realism and social-revolutionary necessity’ (see Bruhn, 1990).
Let us return to Agnoli’s notion of a critique of politics. The critique of politics is, in itself, not enough. It is not enough because it lacks consciousness. It is not sufficient to complain about the miserable conditions of political reality and to be satisfied with the statement that the form of the state can no longer be conceived of as a means of revolutionary politics. Every critique of politics, if it wants to be more than a political stand-point or mere political conviction, has to include the criteria of political practice. The critique of politics makes sense only when it sees itself not as a means in itself but as a means of achieving the goal of critique: the transformation of capitalist social relations. The critique of politics minus practical reflexivity entails the acceptance of existing reality. This is so because apathy and/or unreflective spontaneity are the overt faces of a critique of politics which does not include, as its presupposition and premise, the practical dimension of critique. Agnoli’s critique of politics is predicated on an emphatic conception of the unity between theory and practice.7 For Agnoli, the notion of a unity between theory and practice implies not that Marxist categories are merely given, as in those approaches in which history is used for empirical and pragmatic testing of pre-formed categories. His approach reclaims the incompleteness of categories insofar as the capital-labour relation appears in various forms and within changing empirical circumstances. For Agnoli, the ‘heresy of reality’ (Agnoli, 1980) always challenges its abstract conceptualisation, forcing a permanent reconsideration of the validity of the meaning of concepts.
In qualification to Agnoli, the difficulty of conceptualising the heresy of reality necessitates, firstly, the openness of the categories themselves and, secondly, an understanding of class struggle as being unpredictable. These two elements exist in a contradictory way in that the binding values of theory have to be constantly reasserted through the movement of the class struggle whose unpredictability involves a possible crisis of theory.8 For theory, the unpredictability of class struggle necessitates a generalisation through abstraction so as to avoid the closure pertaining in a fixed and given social reality. The contradiction between abstract conceptualisation and the heresy of reality asserts, in theoretical terms, the contradictory existence of a perverted world.9 This contradiction connotes the unpredictability of the movement of class struggle itself.
The link between conceptualisation and unpredictability is a critique which opens theory to practice and practice to theory. Agnoli’s approach is that of a Marxist heretic swimming against the stream of the orthodox practice of subordinating history to pre-formed categories.
Following Agnoli, the critique of politics refuses to engage in a normative-moralist complaint about the gap between the normative values of bourgeois societies and the repressive character of political domination. This normative-moralist complaint is associated with critical political science. The critique of politics accepts the repressive and oppressive character of capital and its state. But it accepts it, unlike critical political science, not as something eternal and external. The acceptance of the horizon of a given world as its own theoretical horizon amounts to acceptance of its inescapability. Against this view of critical political science, the critique of politics accepts the horizon of a given political reality as a reality to be transformed. To speak today of the project of social emancipation seems to be out-dated. However, as Agnoli puts it, a critique of politics minus the project of social emancipation amounts precisely to accepting capitalist reproduction and its form of the state. Agnoli insists that those who see the project of social emancipation as a utopian idea should accept the logical consequences of their argument by either declaring their support courageously for the capitalist system or by following the example of R. Michels whose disappointment in left revolutionary practice led him to join the fascist forces in Italy.
Agnoli’s lucid analysis has lost none of its vigour after more than 20 years. The book is excellent and provides a comprehensive review of Agnoli’s scholarly work. It is to be hoped that recent debates in Britain on the ‘Bill of Rights’ and ‘Citizenship’ will be enriched by a translation of Agnoli’s book into English.
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