Johannes Agnoli's death in 2003 deprived us of one of the most important thinkers of the categorical imperative of human emancipation.
Werner Bonefeld, a former student of Agnoli's, outlines Agnoli's life and works.
This article also collects his much too few English publications below.
English Language Publications:
(1966), ‘Political Parties and Parliament in West Germany’, International Socialist Journal, vol. 3, no. 15.
(1992/2003), ‘Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times’, Common Sense, no. 12; revised translation reprinted in Bonefeld, W. (ed.) Revolutionary Writing, Autonomedia, New York.
(2000), ‘The Market, The State and the End of History, in Bonefeld, W. and K. Psychopedis (eds.) The Politics of Change, Palgrave, London.
(2002), ‘Emancipation: Paths and Goals’, in Bonefeld, W. and S. Tischler (eds.) What is to be Done?, Aldershot, Ashgate.
English Language Commentary:
(1992), 'Constitutional Norm versus Constitutional Reality in Germany' by Werner Bonefeld, in Capital & Class, vol. 16, no. 1.
(1999), 'On Fascism: A Note on Johannes Agnoli's Contribution' by Werner Bonefeld, in Common Sense, no. 24.
Farewell Johannes
Johannes Agnoli’s death in 2003 deprived us of one of the most important thinkers of the categorical imperative of human emancipation.
Johannes Agnoli is dead. He died on the 20th of May in San Quirico di Moriano, Tuscany. He was 78 years old. Since his retirement from the Free University of Berlin in 1991, he had lived in his native Italy in a house that he had bought when the West-German backlash against the radical movements of the 1970s had reached its peak—the German Autumn of 1977. One has to wonder whether he thought then that he would actually be able to ever live in his new home. This not because he favoured the Siberian Winters in Berlin but because of the backlash itself. His comrade and friend Toni Negri, and many other Italian comrades, were moved from teaching the categorical imperative of human emancipation to prison. His comrade Peter Brückner, with whom he had co-authored The Transformation of Democracy in 1968, each contributing a book-length chapter, had been expelled from his teaching post at the University of Hanover. After a long and prolonged battle over the right of a professor to hold and express independent thoughts, Brückner was re-instated in 1981. He died shortly afterwards.
Agnoli was one of the categorical imperative’s most important thinkers, in Germany and beyond. His experience of the German Autumn of 1977 brought to the fore, if indeed that was needed, the important difference between scholarly work and loyalty to the Constitution of political power, two different and conflicting endeavors.
Agnoli argued that scholarly work was not to serve existing powers, but that its determination entailed the critique of all forms of constituted power (Macht). Its task was, invoking Kant’s response to the request for a declaration of loyalty to the constitution from the Prussian King, to reveal the deceitful publicity of a constituted order and not to contribute to its mystification.
He was the practical theoretician of West-Germany’s 1968 and his The Transformation of Democracy gave theoretical expression to the then extra-parliamentary opposition and to numerous generations who took Marx’s insight seriously: that all those who live from their labour and the sale of their labour power ‘find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State; in order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State’ (The German Ideology). Agnoli’s work focused on the critique of the political, of the constituted power of capitalist social relations. This critique was not one of academic fashion dictated, as it were, by conditions of extra-parliamentary movements. Conditions change and many extra-parliamentarians became parliamentarians. Agnoli’s work was that of the categorical imperative of human emancipation whatever the time and whatever the demands of power (Macht). His was the endeavour of reason —this weapon of critique which thinks the organised negation of all those relations where Man exists as a miserable, exploited and dominated being.
Agnoli was the thinker of human dignity. He thought not with his head down, bowing to existing forms of domination and seeking respectability through critical criticism where everything that is criticised is also endorsed as the best of all worlds. His head breathed the clear air of reason: that is, the society of the free and equal. Nor did he think while kneeling before the altar of relativism, where the critique of existing relations goes forward alongside the critical realist conviction that miserable human conditions need not to be changed, but only interpreted more favourably. His was the critique of constructive thought.
He was an honest and sincere thinker. Conflict, he argued, was conducive to the stability of bourgeois social relations, as long as it is handled constructively. Constructively handled conflicts do not challenge existing social relations of domination. Such conflicts work within the forms of a bourgeois world, affirming rather than negating the forms of capitalist domination such as the form of the state, as potentially useful instruments of ‘revolutionary’ change from ‘within’. Against the notion of conflict as a means of achieving institutional recognition, acceptance and power, he argued that the incorporation of negative power into those same bourgeois institutions that it ostensibly seeks to abolish from within, or much less based on revolutionary rhetoric, to transform through honest and committed reform work, renders negative power powerless—it disarms itself. Instead, then, of the revolutionising of institutions, negative power is institutionalized and thus made responsible for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. And the seizure of the state and its use as an instrument of emancipation? The state, he argued, is not a neutral form that can be used for different, antagonistic social interests. It is not a state in capitalist society but a capitalist state. Its seizure does not lead to human emancipation but to the employment of its form-determined role as a coercive power in relation, especially, to those who were ostensibly seen as the objects of emancipation. Objects they remain; what changes is the mode of domination. Against revolutionary conceptions that operate on the terrain or within the forms of bourgeois society, he argued in favour of social autonomy: that is, the self-determination and self-emancipation of the social individual in organisational forms of resistance that anticipate the goal of revolution in their means of resistance: human emancipation.
His critique of the political was thus a critique in favour of anti-institutional forms of struggle, in favour of organisational forms of human social self-determination, of the social autonomy of the dependent masses in and against capitalist forms of domination. Agnoli’s stance was hardly original. He merely agreed with Marx’s argument that the coercion of bourgeois society is concentrated in the form of the state. What made his stance original was that he analysed this insight in contemporary society. Agnoli’s originality lies in his understanding of Marx’s work as a judgment on existence, as a conceptualised social practice. Like Marx, he rejected forms of anti-capitalism that do not oppose, but rather derive their rationale from constituted capitalist forms. This, then, accounts for his focus on social autonomy. The enunciation of ‘social autonomy’ is all too often treated as some sort romantic abdication of working-class politics, a refusal to pose the hard question of socialism as the seizure of power on behalf of the working class. Yet, again, Agnoli’s categorical imperative of human emancipation as the movement of social autonomy was not original. His originality was its disputation in the context of contemporaneous class struggles. This is the classical enunciation of autonomy as a negative power: ‘Every emancipation is a return of the human world and human relationships to humans themselves. Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of bourgeois society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand, to a citizen of the state, a moral person. Not until the real individual man has taken the abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man, has become a species-being in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships, not until man recognises and organises his “forces propres” as social forces and thus no longer separates social forces from himself in the form of political forces, not until then will human emancipation be completed’ (The Jewish Question). Some might object because the quotation is from the early Marx; and since Marx is said to have matured with age, a quotation from the mature Marx is called for. The ‘mastery of capital over man’ has to be abolished so that Man’s social reproduction is ‘controlled by him’. And the state? Its purpose is the ‘perpetuation of the labourer’—the ‘sine qua non of the existence of capital’ (Capital, vol. I).
His critique of the political and his critique of constructive conflict belong together. Unlike his orthodox Marxist adversaries, who reveled in the dogmatisation of critical thought and therewith its transformation into ritualised thinking of a quasi religious sort, Agnoli, with relish, posed revolution as a question. Orthodox endeavours, in contrast, detest destructive critique and are suspicious of any mistrust in their stance since it, like a mole digging underfoot, undermines the belief in the correctness of conditions and revolutionary conceptions. Agnoli’s was a theory of heresy, of sensuous critical activity, of subversion and revolution. He had no time for dogmatic certainties or orthodox ideas of the seizure of state power. He held on to Marx’s dictum that for the social individuals to be free to self-determine their own conditions, the state had to be abolished.
Marx’s dictum that the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself was his dictum. His stance was that of the society of the free and equal, of social autonomy in, against, and beyond capitalist social relations.
Unlike many of his comrades of 1968, he saw no virtue in the long march through the institutions, and his critique of the transformation of the social movements of the 1970s into the form of the Party, the German Greens, was of truly outstanding quality and foresight. It showed a professor who takes himself seriously. He professed. Those who seriously want freedom but battle all destablising activity contradict themselves.
Agnoli did not write pamphlets, nor did he engage in agitation and propaganda. His was the business of enlightenment, so that poverty and misery achieves consciousness of themselves: enlightenment as subversive consciousness and revolutionary practice.
In his critique of orthodox Marxism; in his analysis of fascism, of technocracy, of the recomposition of the state, especially during the 1970s; in his critique of the form of the party as a means of emancipation, and of the form of the state as an instrument of revolution; in his critique of the deceitful publicity of liberal democracy and its transformations; in his contributions to socialist thought and practice, or his work on the history of subversive thought and the critical tradition of the Enlightenment: in all his work he remained—with charm, revolutionary patience and irony— a professor of antagonism and revolution.
He was not an administrator of thought. He thought. Agnoli was the thinker of the organised negation of inhuman conditions. He did not graft his subversive cunning onto capitalist society and its state, as if it were possible to criticise the things without being within them. He stood within the things themselves, posing the categorical imperative of emancipation, analysing the class antagonism, and engaging in the class struggle.
Nor was he interested in the academic industry of conceptional innovation, which pretends that only that thought is true which sells on the market. Thought, for him, was not a trend-setting commodity that finds its means and ends—its market—in the Zeitgeist. He thought subversion whatever the Zeitgeist.
His ad hominem critique of capital and its state espoused human emancipation as the sine qua non of thought that takes itself seriously and, because of this, uncovers and focuses on the root of human existence. But for Man, the root is Man himself and Man is the highest being for Man1 . Agnoli took the categorical imperative seriously: all relations in which Man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being have to be overthrown so that Man is in control of his own affair, as emancipated social individuals who relate to each other as equals in freedom. The society of the free and equal where each receives according to their needs constituted for Agnoli the categorical imperative of the critique of capital and its state.
His ‘Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times’ (1992/2003) argued with biting irony against the constructive endeavors of the Zeitgeist. He returned to this issue in his last publications: ‘The Hardening of the Political Form: Post-fascism within Globalisation’ (2003); The Negative Potential (2002), ‘Emancipation: Paths and Goals’ (2002), and ‘The Transformation of the Left’ (2000). The last title offers an intriguing twist. His Transformation of Democracy of 1968 showed the necessity of extra-institutional politics, as the only reliable safeguard against the dead-end of institutional politics and its constructive endeavours to humanise inhuman conditions. Such politics, he argued, are premised on constructively-handled conflicts, affirming but not negating bourgeois society and its institutions. It thus seeks to square the circle: the humanisation of inhuman conditions presupposes these same conditions and thus accepts them as eternal. We all live in bourgeois society. It can, however, not be left behind by merely living within it. The negation of bourgeois society moves in and against its constituted forms. This is the site of class antagonism and class struggle. Only organised negation is able to transform the existence of class struggle in and against bourgeois social relations into the beyond of human history. His ‘Transformation of the Left’ (2000) analysed the idea of national self-determination as a form of socialist opposition to globalisation. What is anti-capitalistic in anti-capitalism when it seeks to regulate capital without touching the relations of exploitation; when it poses the national state as the sovereign power that places controls on capital to secure the common national good? What is the common national good? The function and role of the state is to achieve homogeneity of national conditions. In its liberal conception, this means the equality of all before the law. In its Leninist conception, it means the equality of labour. In its nationalist version it means equality as a nation, as a Volk.
In its essence, the Leninist conception of equality amounts to an economy of labour; the liberal conception of equality to the much praised democracy of demand and supply; and the national conception of equality in terms of Volk entails the projection of a classless ‘national community’ whose existence is threatened by the ‘external enemy within’. The affirmation of the national state, instead of criticising globalisation through organisational forms of resistance that anticipate, in their means, the ends of the society of the free and equal, sacrifices reason in favour of abstract—and, indeed, regressive—forms of equality, seeking salvation through the strengthening of the national state as an instrument of anti-globalisation. The purpose, Agnoli argued, of capital is to make profit, not to create employment. The political existence of this purpose is the state. By contrast, the projection of the national state as an instrument of anti-globalisation affirms the state as if it were an ‘independent being which possesses its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases’ (Critique of the Gothaer Programme). It thus amounts to a mere rebellion for a virtuous state—a state, that is, which secures the ‘communal interests’ of bourgeois society. Regardless, as Agnoli argued, of its historically changing forms, the role and function of the bourgeois state has always been to secure the ‘communal interests’ of a capitalistically-organised form of social reproduction: capitalist accumulation.
His The Negative Potential consists of a series of interviews held in 2000 and 2001. The focus is on human self-emancipation, the means and ends of revolution, the purpose of scholarly work, negation and subversion, the critique of capital and its state, and the critique of an anti-capitalism without anti-capitalism, that is, an anti-capitalism that merely seeks to reform the institutional regulation of the exploitation of labour.
The Negative Potential: that was his work, an endeavour that cannot be commodified nor commercialised. The Frankfurter Allgemeine argued after the republication of his Transformation of Democracy in 1990, that his writings do not meet the demands of the market. The newspaper got it right. One wonders, though, whether it understood its own assessment. Subversive thinking is that which the market society of demand and supply fails to commercialize and absorb.
His teaching and writing was a passionate affair of disputation. Marx’s motto, ‘doubt everything’, was Agnoli’s. To doubt is to reveal: that is, theoretical mysteries find their rational explanation in the understanding and comprehension of human social practice.
He had little time for the demands of academia: publish in refereed journals; get research funding; find respectability as a recognised member of the profession; invent a new concept and corner the market by setting the research agenda and achieve fame at least for a brief moment; voice criticism, but do not engage in critique, etc.
In contrast to the power-point thinking and delivering lecturer, Agnoli was an orator. Critical thinking, he insisted, consists in the question posed—not in the answers to questions not asked. Why do human social relations take the form of relations between things, and what needs to be done to achieve human emancipation from the perverted existence of human social practice as a personification of things?
He pursued his questions with charming irony, espousing the self-contradictory endeavour of thought that, ostensibly critical, seeks respectability by offering positive proposals to effect the humanisation of a capitalist world. Such humanisation is in itself to be welcomed. Yet, only radical opposition to capital and its state, he argued, is able to obtain humanising concessions—pacification effected through what Marx called, in his analysis of the struggle over the reduction of the working day, the golden chain of legal regulation.
He never tired to demand democracy—not as some sort of democracy that abstracts from the social individual, but the democracy of the society of the free and equal. Social autonomy and democracy belong together. Democratisation without human emancipation presupposes the exploitation of Man by Man as eternal. Humanisation of inhuman conditions, he argued time and time again, presupposes inhuman conditions and it these that require democratic transformation, so that Man is in possession of himself as a subject. His negation of contemporary conditions invoked the democratic self-determination of the social individual who, through the realm of freedom, regulates the realm of necessity in freedom from coercion: that is, through democratic means of social self-organization, through human-social cooperation. Human emancipation and the idea of the humanisation of bourgeois institutions belong to different worlds. For Agnoli, human emancipation meant a classless society, a society where domination of Man over Man is abolished.
In his last published work in English, he again discussed the categorical imperative of human emancipation, insisting that the means of resistance have to anticipate the ends of human emancipation in their organisational forms. Should the left put up candidates for elections, create cosmopolitan democratic structures far removed and abstracting from the real human subject, or should democracy be sought where, according to the advocates of liberal-democracy, it does not belong: the democratic self-organisation of ‘Man’s relationships to himself’ (Grundrisse), of the associated producers who, through the realm of freedom, organise the realm of necessity according to individual human needs?
His scholarly work of negation will surely be missed. Agnoli was one of the few veritable thinkers of human emancipation. We have lost a friend, a comrade, a teacher, and we will have to do without his charm and irony. Above all, we will have to do without his delightful and always challenging formulation of the categorical imperative of negation, of human emancipation. Farewell!
Werner Bonefeld
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