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Westend Films present
The Negative Potential - talks with Johannes Agnoli
PART ONE Eva, Prometheus and the others
I won't start with Adam and Eve, but with Eve. Adam was not a subversive element;
Eve was the actual subversive. First of all one has to clarify the concept,
because in German "subversion" is always linked to destruction and something negative.
What's interesting is that in the ltalian language "subversion" is linked to innovation, renewal.
Destruction too, but in order to renew.
There is also another concept in ltalian, that you don't have in German unfortunately: "eversion".
Eversion is the actual destruction of an order considered to be right.
In German, "subversion" is always destruction of an order considered to be right.
I have another understanding of "subversion":
subversion is the attempt to inverse conditions in which people suffer,
in which people - Marx! - are enslaved.
Therefore I start with Eve:
Eve has been forbidden by god to know what's good and bad.
Then came the snake, - a symbol for an early christian sect, the Ophits.-
In the Ophits view, the snake was not an incarnation of the devil,
but the anticipation of Christ,
because Christ showed us what's good and what's bad.
And the snake said to Eve:
"Eat the apple, then you'll know what is good and what is bad"
which God had forbidden. Therefore I start with Eve.
The second hero of subversion is Prometheus.
And from there on subversion is, in my point of view,
nothing else but any attempt, practical or theoretical,
to change something which lacks freedom.
Subversion is therefore an act of liberation.
It is symptomatic that in ltalian fascism
all those that were against fascism
- socialists, communists, even Catholics - were called subversive elements.
That is a sign that subversion is not to be linked with destruction
but with innovation and freedom.
That's why I not only start with Eve and Prometheus
but I start also with the theory of the pre-Socratics.
No one looked upon the pre-Socratics as subversive,
but it was subversion.
Because instead of gods they installed elements of nature
and that was, indeed, in theory, the first subversion:
Not the gods are responsible for the reality of the world,
but water and fire and the natural elements.
For me that is subversion.
Subversion is to be linked to liberation and not to destruction.
The heretics of the Middle Ages were indeed subversive,
they were against official church doctrine and they made use of violence.
They used violence, but it was a sensible violence
in the sense that they were against the authority, against another violence.
The problem is to say it was only 'violence against authority',
because violence is always violence.
But in those times there was no other choice against the power of church
than to become violent.
By the way, they were all destroyed.
Even though they were destroyed I consider this act of subversion
as a step of liberation of the people from authority.
Also from nature, by the way, not only from authority:
from any form of suppression.
I was only once in Munster and I saw that Munster has a stain.
Because at the church they still have those cages
in which they used to lock up subversive elements, the leaders.
And that is for me - while it is a cause of pride for the people of Munster -
it is for me a sign of disgrace for the city.
I said in Munster: I will only come back here for a conference or a congress,
if this mark of shame is removed from the church.
It is interesting: Just like the word "subversive" has a negative connotation in Germany,
the 19th century is considered as the century of German unity.
My son went to school here in ltaly.
The book that deals with this period of the 19th century
is called "L'epoca della Rivoluzione", the epoque of revolutions.
Because during the 19th century there was one revolution after the other.
The question now is in what respect the revolutionary times are over?
It is always said that revolutions have become impossible - that might be.
It is nonsense to call what happened in the G.D.R. in 1989/90 a revolution.
In reality it was a counter-revolution.
It was a people's movement that was turned into a counter-revolution.
One could say that the epoque of revolutions has come to an end.
We don't know for how long, and so the work of subversion starts again;
the silent, underground work against an order one believes to be wrong
and which one cannot attack frontally anymore
and therefore one has to work subversively, in theory but also in practice.
Of course one asks who will do that?
The next answer could be: the anarchists.
The anarchists, especially the so called autonomous from Berlin-Kreuzberg,
are a contradiction in themselves.
They do everything wrong, but they are the right ones.
Freedom of consumption is a very nice ideology of late capitalism.
The freedom of the consumer consists in choosing between 2 or 3 products
which he himself does not determine.
It is therefore an illusionary freedom.
It corresponds with the freedom of free elections.
The fact that free elections are an important principle,
an achievement of civilization, is unquestionable.
What's important is what became of it.
In free elections people do not as sovereigns decide what to do,
but choose those who will decide what to do.
So free elections are also a kind of consumer-attitude.
One can choose freely between Volvo and Fiat,
between beer X and beer Y,
and I can chose between Social Democrats and Christian Democrats.
People are not entitled to take decisions.
I don't know if Kant was right when he called the constitution a deceitful publicity,
but there is something deceitful about the constitution.
Let's take the sentence "all executlve powerorlglnates from the people"
- but it is implemented by specific institutions.
It is not important from whom state-power originates, but who executes it.
Some members of parliament from Bavaria had suggested that the constitution
should begin with the words: "all executive power originates from god".
If 'god' or the 'people' doesn't make a difference,
they mightjust have written in accordance with modern feminism:
"all executive power originates from women". It doesn't make any difference.
What's important is who executes it.
And it is not implemented by the people. In that way, Kant was right.
We could say "all executlve power 'emlgrates' from the people"
and passes to specific institutions.
So that is what we call the truth of the constitution.
If we look at Hegel, Fichte or Kant, at German ldealism:
Are there any subversive elements?
It depends on how you deal with it.
I held a lecture about German ldealism in ltaly,
about Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling,
and I tried to find these subversive elements.
Kant, of course, was a bourgeois philosopher,
but he was an enthusiastic admirer of the French revolution.
"The revolutlon ofthe lngenuous people", he wrote,
"that had the courage to proclalm the republlc."
With Hegel this subject is a bit more complicated, also with Fichte:
Fichte had a very peculiar concept of freedom:
one would have to force human beings to their freedom.
That's nonsense of course.
But his idea was that the state and the government should fade away.
It is the government's task to make itself superfluous.
There is something subversive in that: an element of liberation.
Fichte's question is very peculiar indeed:
Can the state see to liberation?
I listened once to a radio feature about women's liberation.
A woman, who was sympathizing with the GDR, said:
"In the GDR the problem ofwomen's llberatlon does not exlst,
because the state liberates the women".
I asked myself: How can a state realize a liberation?
That's impossible.
The state is an institution of social constraint, nothing else.
You may call it "useful", "important", "without it societies cannot survive",
whatever you want, but it is not an institution that sees to liberation.
It sees to law and order, partly to prosperity,
to the proper reproduction of society,
but not to liberation.
The state is not requested to do that.
Politicians only think in terms of power.
They use these slogans in order to get the people's consensus,
in order to get to power.
This idea of politics does not derive from the Aristotelian-Domestic tradition.
Politicians only pretend to aim at the "bonum comune", the public welfare.
But in reality the aim of politics is to exercise the power,
which is translated from social structures of power into state structures.
That is political power.
Of course we have to ask: What is behind that?
For the politicians power may be an aim in itself
but they are as well instruments of other interests
and here one has to research which interests they represent.
It is society itself that provokes subversion.
Subversion against the state is a modern idea.
We mustn't forget that the modern state hasn't always been there.
During the Middle Ages there was no state. The authority was the church.
And maybe the German emperor who came to ltaly once in a while.
But the state had no power, no authority.
Then, since Hobbes, since the enlightenment,
the state began to realize itself as an organisation of power.
And that's why subversion has to be indeed hostile to the state.
That's dangerous!
When you say "hostlle to the state" or "the state ls my enemy',
you will be subject to legal persecution.
Dolf Sternberger once said something nice about me in a discussion:
"Agnoll...", he said, and then he didn't say "...ls an enemy ofthe state"
but he said: "...ls no frlend ofthe state".
That was a very nice way to put it. It didn't hurt me, didn't hurt anyone,
but everybody knew what was meant by that.
So back to the state: ls there any 'good' state? As Fichte understood it?
Hegel, too, believed ingood states as advocates of morality,
but I have some doubts about that.
For me the state is linked with politics of power.
As I already said, that's not a normal tradition,
because people use to link 'state' to 'public welfare' and so on,
but that's a concept of state which I don't accept.
For me, politics are politics of power, and nothing else.
Is a society possible without a state?
That's an old question which always served
to separate Anarchy and Marxism.
Not the Marxism from Marx,
He once wrote in a letter to Engels:
"We are betteranarchlsts than Bakunln",
They also wanted to abolish the state.
But the state we refer to is something else.
That's the one from the Marxist-Leninists, the U.S.S.R:
the Soviet Union was a superstate.
If we remember what Marx had said in his criticism of the Gothaer Program:
"The beglnnlng ofsoclallsm starts wlth the abollshment ofthe state";
But in the Soviet Union and the GDR iit was the state that created socialism,
and that is a contradiction.
And everybody saw how it ended.
Even in a welfare state like Sweden,
which cares about the well-being of its citizen,
one should not confuse well-being with freedom.
Freedom is something else, something out-of-the-state.
If anti-globalisation supporters insist on the state,
they not only make a historic mistake,
they also make another mistake,
because globalisation shows
that the nation-state is running out of time.
And it is interesting
that especially anti-globalisation supporters
insist on the nation-state, on something that loses importance.
We see it in Europe:
it is no longer the ltalian or German or French state
that deals with agricultural policies, it is Brussels.
Nation-states do have some tasks still.
The reason why many left-wingers stick to the nation-state
is an ideological one: the state is their favourite enemy.
And when the nation-state ceases to exist
they'll have lost their favourite enemy.
And they'll be confronted with a reality
which they do not yet control: supra-states.
We have to realize: the abolition of the nation state,
was supposed to be done by proletarian revolution.
And now we see, astonished,
that it is capitalism that abolishes the nation-state,
and not the proletarian revolution.
And that is something of course which the left-wing can't digest easily.
How can you take a child's favourite toy away from him?
Today the problem of economy is that it defies all control.
And just like in the 19th century
the state had to intervene facing a wild capitalism
in order - as Marx said "to save capltallsm" -
many people today think that this economy out-of-control
has to be somehow politically organized, controlled again.
The nation-state is not capable of doing that,
and so there is the demand of a supra-state.
The supra-state perhaps to come has a peculiarity:
All those forms of popular participation in state life,
the so called democracy, will no longer function.
Because: How can world population elect such political authorities?
There is one thing we mustn't forget: when we talk about supra-state
we don't talk about the entire population.
We think about the so-called industrial world only.
That is about 1/5 of the world's population
And if the industrial world alone determines
what the world-government should look like
the problem isn't solved at all.
Because today's problem is not the wealth of industrial societies,
today's problem is the misery, poverty and the starving of millions of people
We mustn't forget that those who benefit
from wealth and so-called democracy today
are not even a 1/5 of the world's population.
All others are left out, those are the outsiders, the superfluous.
They are so superfluous that capitalism can exist without them
and it does exist without them.
No one can claim that in North America or Europe or Japan
capitalism cares for those 4 billion people, no, it doesn't even think about it.
What's important for capitalism is the wealth in it's own country.
That this wealth is not to be linked to freedom is another question.
People believe to be free, of course, it is a wonderful feeling
to believe yourself to be free.
The question is if this freedom is really concrete,
if it is a true liberation of the individual.
Is freedom of consumption really the realization of the individual?
Or is it something imposed on us, for some strange reason?
Because we are forced to choose between different products,
but this is called freedom.
Happy people!
One could say that already the use of the word "subversion" is subversive,
because state reality which we live in and the society we live in
fight any form of inversion of the order that is believed to be good.
In that respect subversion is something that has to take upon itself
the risk of persecution.
Let's face it: we live in a society that cannot accept subversion.
But that makes it even more necessary.
One has to see the necessity of a praxis or a theory
not according to a handed-down order, but in contrast to the handed-down order.
The same thing that dissidents and heretics did in the Middle Ages against the church.
Handed-down order is always regarded as a good in itself,
and we have to consider if that's true.
That s the point where reflection starts:
in the consideration if this is right or could it be wrong.
The decisive parameters are always in the question:
Does a theory, does a political praxis
serve to law and order, morality, wealth,
or does it serve to liberation?.
Of course liberation is something very problematic in this case,
because how can you convince a mass of consumers
that they have to liberate themselves from compulsory consumerism?
I also believe that all of us are subject to this compulsion to consume.
It is very difficult to do that.
Emancipation is the famous simple thing that is so difficult to do.
I've written a number of times on how failure is looked upon in a wrong way.
We know that we'll fail.
During the movement of '68 I often said to Dutschke:
"We'll fall, but we'll change somethlng".
And that is the main point.
Emancipation as a general movement is always doomed to fail,
but it will always change something.
Let's take the French Revolution.
It also failed in its Jacobinian form.
But it abolished monarchy and feudalism
and that was quite something, wasn't it?
Even though it failed as a Jacobinian revolution.
So we have to consider if we do not have to accept the failure,
not only accept it, but take it into account from the beginning.
We have to think if it is worth to do something
even though we know that we won't have immediate success.
I must remind that this ideology of success
is a consequence of capitalist society:
Everyone has to be successful in our society.
Whoever is not successful - i.e. USA - is no worthy citizen of this society.
But we must consider if this ideology of success
is really the appropriate perspective for our praxis.
That is: not success, not the immediate success is what counts,
but the possibility to influence social reality.
Even if it doesn't seem to be successful.
What did the movement of '68 bring about?
Some say: "Only the modernlsatlon ofcapltallsm"!
But that was quite something, wasn't it?
It led to a change in university life. All little successes.
But one has to say, too, that this was not a Berlin invention,
but a European and also American movement and it changed a lot.
Think about what "Le Monde" wrote during the French May of '68:
"What the students are dolng ls ofno lmportance, slnce It ls not even notlced by the workers".
And then, shortly after, the longest general in France's history broke out.
Same in ltaly: it was the students who started, in Milan and Rome,
but soon the factories joined them.
In Germany it was different:
Even though there were strikes in some factories,
researchers from the university of Hanover found out
that it didn't have anything to do with the students' movement,
with the so called youth-rise-up revolt.
They had asked the workers and they said: "That was ourdeclslon."
"We have nothlng to do wlth the movement'.
But that is already a stupid question in itself.
Of course a worker would say: that was my idea!
In reality there was some sort of 'initial spark' that had some certain consequences.
And that is what we should think:
we cannotcontribute more then initial sparks.
And we should get away from this ideology that something fails when it is not successful.
Because something fails only if it doesn't have any influence on social reality
To me it seems to be important that one understands
this form of subversion also in daily life.
I always say: That's not a question of big politics.
But also of daily life.
In school, in family, in relation to other people
we have to see to what extent we are able
to practice this famous freedom and equality - a very difficult business.
Not only in big theory, but really in daily life.
Emancipation, regarded as an aim of human development,
this emancipation starts in everyday life.
It is therefore not a great idea - it is a great idea, too -
but one should bring this great idea down to earth
in a way, to where we live everyday.
Am I as a father capable of being really emancipated towards my children?
Is the teacher in school emancipated towards his pupils?
Was I emancipated as a university professor?
As of utopia, big utopia. I rather believe that a simple utopia is necessary.
An utopia that came up again and again:
the famous society of the free and equal.
As I said, we have to consider in what respect this utopia has a real content.
If it is a concrete utopia, as Ernst Bloch put it.
In my opinion it is a concrete utopia, because it can be realized any time
- not in its absolute form, but that isn't necessary.
The great utopia is in fact a small utopia:
The society of the free and equal.
Maybe we cannot imagine that so easily,
because we live in a society that declares to be free and equal.
But we know that that isn't true.
It is a freedom, an equality, that lies completely beyond bourgeois society.
Absolutely beyond this capitalistic freedom of the market
and this capitalistic equality of consumers,
who are equal amongst each other,
- some are even more equal than others, as we all know. -
Because this is a freedom and an equality
that is only reserved for a small part of the world's population,
and within this part reserved for specific groups.
Capitals amongst each other are free and equal. In competition.
The principle of competition is the symbol of freedom in our society.
And it is the same with people amongst each other.
We all look at each other as competitors:
in ourjobs, in everyday life, in love. we are all competitors,
and we have to oppose that.
We do not want to be competitors, we want to be autonomous subjects.
How that is possible I don't know, but it is worth trying.
PART TWO Those beautiful ideas
Two concepts linked with each other:
'neo-liberalism' and 'globalisation'.
One can say about neo-liberalism
- by the way, I prefer the ltalian version:
'neo-liberism' -
because in ltaly they distinguish between 'liberism' in economy
and 'liberalism', which means (with Wilhelm von Humboldt)
freedom of opinion, free teaching and research
and maybe it would be good to introduce
the concept of 'neo-liberism' in German, too.
But first of all back to 'globalisation' and 'neo-liberalism'.
They are at the same time words of fashion, ideology and reality.
The fashion aspect is especially obvious in the case of globalisation.
A while ago in a programme on ltalian TV
about an exhibition of ltalian art in Tokyo
they said that also art had been globalized.
As if there had never been touring exhibitions.
It's the same with globalisation:
Multinationals have existed for decades, they are nothing new.
What's new is something else, something in the ideology itself,
concerning neo-liberalism as much as globalisation.
An ideology with two sides:
a social policy side and an objective side.
The social policy aspect lies, - in my understanding -
in the attempt to convince the European working class
that they should manage with as little as the Chinese and the Japanese etc..
It's a fact. When Siemens abolishes 2000 jobs in Germany
and builds a factory for 20.000 Chinese,
who are much cheaper than 2000 Germans,
we face this ideological side:
how can one convince European working class
that they should manage with less if they want to last?
The other side of ideology is worse:
One talks about neo-liberalism and globalisation
as some sort of salvation for humanity.
All people would profit from it.
It is even said that the so called less developed world,
the third and fourth world would become wealthy
in the course of globalisation, and that is wrong of course.
Because globalisation, neo-liberalism only means a very limited industrialized zone.
That's one thing. Another one is: ln reality.
The reality of globalisation consists in the fact
that we talk about an economy that has overcome
the borders or the home market.
The home market has by now really lost its importance.
Even though we do not live in a world society we do live in a world market.
We have a world market that repeats in itself the same things
that the home market did, too, especially in one point:
world market produces - as Ricardo put it -
what capitalism has always produced.
World market does not only produce prosperity.
But, as Hegel added:
Poverty, misery and superfluous population.
Ricardo called it "redundant population",
and Marx overtook his thought only partially, by saying
that capitalism produces superfluous population only during times of crisis,
and that this population would be absorbed by the market again later.
Today we know that this isn't possible any more.
Globalized economy produces redundant population
which is no longer absorbable by the market.
And not only in the third or fourth world, but also here in Europe.
When I read about these attempts to overcome unemployment.
No one is brave enough to say:
this is structural unemployment, it can't be overcome.
When Berlusconi says in ltaly:
"We'll create one mIIllon newjobs wlthln fouryears",
but there are 9 million unemployed, what does that mean?
1 million newjobs, so 8 million left unemployed.
This superfluous population is a consequence of globalisation
and neo-liberalism.
As for neo-liberalism, first of all, as I already said:
I don't understand why it is called neo-liberalism.
That is the old liberalism of Manchester-capitalism,
it used to be called 'Manchester-capitalism'.
A capitalism beyond any control and does whatever it wants.
and accomplished something which political movements have not accomplished.
Yesterday we talked about freedom, today maybe about equality.
Capitalism turned international makes everyone equal.
And globalisation has the effect that all areas of life
are subsumed under the laws of accumulation of capital.
That is really the most important thing about neo-liberalism:
Accumulation of capital becomes more and more
the essential factor in our societies and lives.
Production of goods understood as the freedom of market
has also become pure ideology by now.
Financial markets are not concerned with stuff like that.
This is something we are not capable of realizing yet:
The fact that capital today is not concerned with
its immediate market and the production of goods.
The element of profit has become so dominant
that entrepreneurs do not care about competition any more.
They only care about maximization of profits.
And since the market is open to anyone,
they strive to reduce the costs of production.
While maybe a 100 years ago competition was taking place on the market,
it is today taking place in the production sites.
How can one reduce the costs of production?
Probably on the expense of the workers.
And though I am not that familiar with Germany any more,
I have the impression that
all this talk about the "Standort Deutschland" is connected to that.
The question about "Standort Deutschland" does not mean:
How to reduce prices on the market?
but: how to reduce the costs of production?
All this talking about the "Standort Deutschland" means exactly that:
How can we reduce the costs of production?
That means that the price on the market stays the same.
But it is interesting, that on the actual market
competition does not happen any more.
It is symptomatic that when Volvo puts up its prices for cars,
VW and Fiat put up their prices, too.
That is against the principle of competition as it was figured out by Marx, too.
In other words: the increase of prices on the market
does not mean an automatic increase of profits of each company.
What is important instead are the costs of production.
And therefore you have the shift of many companies
into the third and fourth world.
I do not know if that will turn out well in the end,
and I hope of course that it will not turn out well,
but that is something else.
Is it possible to have a state that sees to freedom?
I have some doubts about that.
The state can indeed see to the freedom of economy,
but that's exactly the freedom of economy wanted by capitalism.
In that respect the French suggestions
are not capable of dealing with the main problem.
Those are beautiful ideas, wonderful.
Let's make everything free! Let capital work for each single person!
A good idea, but as far as I know, capital has always worked for its own profits,
not for each single person, for people, for society.
Let's take a capitalists like Agnelli.
He produces cars not in order to help people of course,
he produces cars in order to sell them, to make profit.
For no other reason.
To think therefore that capitalism is reformable,
that it can be put at the service of people, of society
thats an idea of capitalism that is simply romantic.
There's only one possibility to overcome this situation.
How, I don't know, but we have to overcome capitalist economy.
How we can do that I do not know, I only know this:
The experience made with that in the Eastern block countries did fail
did not only fail as a political and social experience,
but also economically.
Because they simply invented state-capitalism
and that was just like private capitalism.
You only have to read Lenin's writings from after the revolution.
He says that production should be organized as in an American trust.
While the aim was just to the contrary: to change production
and not to transform production in a capitalist way.
And we know what it turned into.
In ltaly there used to be many state-companies
that have been privatised by now, and ltalians define the distinction
between private companies and state companies exactly:
'padrone di privati' and 'padrone di stato',
meaning 'private factory bosses' and 'state factory bosses'.
A change in production, in the organisation of work
- for Marx the essential point of the transformation towards socialism -
did not happen.
Production remained the same.
And what the French suggestions refer to is not the production.
Production is supposed to remain the same.
And if the process of production, stays the same,
then the question of emancipation is passe, is put aside.
What we have now is indeed a result of struggles,
not only of the workers' movement, also of the French revolution.
It is the result of struggle.
Question is what became of it.
Question is if we do not need to struggle any more.
Because that would be the conclusion:
since we've reached everything, free elections, a free government,
elected by the people, we don't need to fight any more.
So we can either fall into resignation
in case you have some ideas of change,
or into being contented.
We are all fine. So what do you want?
In that respect I think it is right to say
that this is the result of fights.
But what matters is to analyse those results.
Not how they were intended of those who wanted them,
but what became of them today.
Let's take such a good principle as the free elections.
What did they turn into?
People's sovereignty.
People's sovereignty was in the centre of thinking
from Marsilius of Padua to the French Revolution.
Is the people sovereign?
The people is sovereign every 4 years for 1 day.
Because on one day every four years
the people can -not decide itself- but choose who will decide.
As soon as the elections are over, the people has nothing say at all.
"Being excluded" is something that does not only apply to
opponents of neo-liberalism
"Being excluded" is something that applies to all those people
- in the course of history -
that were responsible for innovation and subversion.
We have to accept that.
'Neo-liberalism' is pure ideology
while 'Market' and 'Capital', those are realities.
The fact that people believe in Neo-liberalism,
is, I guess, a result of media-effectiveness.
On the other hand I have to say:
Are we so sure that neo-liberalism as an ideology is so widespread?
Or is it only a press appearance?
When I talk to people down there at the bar
and I say 'neo-liberalism' they don't even know what that is.
So one has to consider if this is an ideology
that is spread by the media and accepted by intellectuals,
but if the population, the mass of people takes notice of it
I am not sure.
They take notice that all is fine at home,
also there with some limits:
who's unemployed is not that well off any more.
But I don't think that they take part in this ideology
Talk to the people in the supermarket
if they think that they are infected by Darwinism.
They don't even know what it is.
To an extent that is a lack of political education.
What we see today, in today's society,
is a catastrophic decline of political education.
People are not aware any more what they have to do with certain concepts.
They do not understand it.
To them democracy means to go to elections every 4 years.
To them democracy is to have a free press
which they don't even read.
Who reads newspapers today?
One cannot assume that 80 Million people in German read the newspaper every day.
They watch TV.
And on TV they are in some aspect indoctrinized.
On TV they are informed that Habermas was right:
The German state is the most free state in the world,
and a perfect democracy,
and the people believe it.
They also believe it because the critical voices
basically do not have the chance to speak.
That doesn't mean that we should give up.
We should keep trying to get a turn.
Everyone in his position.
That's difficult, but it has to be done.
PART THREE Negation as a way to freedom
When Hegel says that history is progress in consciousness of freedom,
then history moves - according to Hegel - from negation to negation.
But we have to specify negation.
What kind of negation is meant here?
Generally talking: negation of conditions of oppression.
That doesn't only apply to society,
but also to nature.
We do not notice that we do not live by the laws of nature anymore.
We fly for instance.
But we forgot again that nature condemned us not to fly
- also a condition of coercion.
But to fly is an old longing of humanity.
What we call natural products are products of culture:
agri-culture.
In other words, negation means first of all:
negation of nature.
All metabolism with nature is a negation of nature,
because everything we consume from nature
is something that has not been provided by nature.
We eat grapes, they are provided by nature,
but not the wine.
Olives are provided by nature, but not olive oil. That means:
what we call products of nature are in fact products of culture.
It is therefore a negation of nature.
However, nature put a limit: death.
We know that it is also a desire to overcome death.
Fortunately that will not happen.
Negation itself is the potential looking for a subject.
Negation therefore towards freedom,
negation of all conditions of coercion.
Therefore, the theory of the abolishment of the state
is not a romantic idea, but a drive to overcome
this obvious coercive character of society, of reproduction.
If it will succeed we don't know.
But it is important as an aim or utopia,
as a point of reference.
But what then is the negative potential?
One could say - I say it again:
"Negation is the potential that is looking for a subject."
And here things are starting to be more complicated.
There have always been movements that represented this subject.
Let's take the peasants' wars in Germany.
The rebellious farmers were the negative potential
against feudal society.
Same goes for the French Revolution.
In Germany things are a bit more complicated.
The peasants' wars were the only real revolution,
that happened in Germany.
What about the 'Negative Potential' today?
First of all, we have to say that is has to be a potential
that recognizes as a subject what it is about then
I've already said it a couple of times:
it is not about humanisation of capitalism, it is about overcoming capitalism.
Negation of capital and its state is the immediate aim
of any emancipative movement today.
But who could be the subject?
We know that it is not the workers' movement any more.
There are many mass movements, and we should ask:
Are they really a negative subject?
Let's take a big mass movement in Germany,
the peace movement.
What did the peace movement want?
Did it want to change society? Did it want to change economy? - No.
The peace movement was a partly emotive reaction
to the threat of war, to arms race, to weapons etc.
It therefore had its own right.
But it only denied war, maybe also the military,
but that is not real emancipation,
that is not a potential of emancipation.
With other movements it is a bit more complicated.
The anti-globalisation movement for example.
It's justifiable: It is right to point out that
the big ones of this world are also the masters of this world
And want to stay masters.
But is it a 'Negative Potential' ? ln a way: yes.
In a way this anti-globalisation movement
faces one of the most important questions,
or most important problems of negative potential:
that is the use of violence.
We cannot separate the two.
We cannot pretend that negation is a non-violent movement,
a peaceful movement.
It is dealing with a society that is not peaceful.
We mustn't forget that our society is not a peaceful one
but a violent one.
This problem cannot be solved by a singular person.
It has to be done in some sort of collective conversation.
There we have to find ways of how to deal
with the problem of violence.
But the fact that negation is the potential
to change bad conditions and conditions of coercion,
this fact is unalterable.
You cannot act only positively in a society that you want to change.
You cannot act positively in an economical system,
that is about to ruin the world.
In this sense the only way to freedom is negation.
I know ltalian anarchy, as I said:
It's home is not far from here, in Carrara.
And I have to say, in favour of the ltalian anarchists:
They do not know resignation.
And they don't know withdrawal into privacy either,
which is actually the greater danger.
What many people do - also in Germany -
is to withdraw from society.
You have to stay inside society. That is right.
This anarchic-syndicalism was very successful in Spain,
and also in ltaly, but unfortunately - I have to say unfortunately -
it has been run over by those big union-organizations,
which are again structured in a hierarchy.
And then there was an error - especially true for Spanish history -
which was a fundamental error for emancipation itself,
and for any kind of movement:
Workers' movement, green movement or whatever.
For emancipation itself there was a fundamental error:
That was the argument between Marxism and Anarchy.
Marx said in a letter to Engels
that he himself was the better anarchist.
There is an anarchist in France, Maximilian Rubel,
who also thinks that Marx is the better anarchist than Bakunin,
because at least Marx had a theoretical foundation of anarchy.
Bakunin was very emotive.
Emancipation's error was that this private argument
between Marx and Bakunin
- and both were authoritarian wretches -
this private argument was transformed into an organisational dispute,
into a conflict between communists on the one hand
and anarchists on the other.
I will talk about that in Lisbon
- about Communism and Anarchy -
and I've always been trying in my lectures about this subject
to show that this contradiction simply has to be overcome.
You can call it "anarchic communism" or "communist anarchy",
- I don't care-, but in any case this is a way that we have to take.
If we fall back into arguing about that again,
emancipation is already over.
It would be a mistake to see ourselves as vanguard,
because then coercive conditions would not be abolished.
That is important in the question of organisation,
and I admit it's a fix idea of mine:
In my opinion the existing political movements and parties failed
- concerning emancipation -
because they suddenly turned into a positive potential.
Also the workers' movement began as negation
but turned into, even converted itself into the state.
You have to realize that:
it turned itself into the bearer of coercive conditions.
My idea is, that an organisation
that really wants to be emancipative,
has to anticipate emancipation in itself.
That was Lenin's mistake:
It was a fatal error to think that the workers' movement,
- the social democracy and later the communist party in Russia -
had to be organized in the same way
as the enemy they were fighting, as czarism.
That was a mistake. We have to think about,
- and social fantasy is maybe necessary here -,
how it is possible to create an emancipative organisation
without hierarchy, without oligarchy, without commanders.
That isn't simple, but if we don't solve this problem,
then negative potential will, sooner or later, turn into positive.
The idea that Fascism was against the capital,
was present in some fascist circles.
In Germany they talked about "anti-capitalist desire"
that was personified in the Strasser brothers.
In ltaly leftwing-fascism was a more serious subject.
When I was a young fascist I was a leftwing-fascist
and our model of orientation was Ugo Spririto, a philosopher
who's idea was, that private property
of means of production should be abolished.
Instead the "cooperation", - a fusion between workers'
and entrepreneurs' syndicates - should become the owner.
Then there was another form of leftwing-fascism of Fontanelli,
that went rather in direction of technocracy.
The idea was, that the ruling class
shouldn't be capitalist, bourgeois any more,
but technology: "Ia technica como caste dirigente",
"technology as the ruling class", as Fontanelli put it.
But that was something very much on the edge.
National-socialists got rid of the problem
by involving anti-Semitism and then distinguishing
between productive capital and hoarding capital:
The 'hoarding capital' that were the Jews, of course.
The 'Productive capital' that was "the good" German capital.
And you know that Hitler as well as Mussolini were financed by industry.
So: it's basically a legend that fascism was anti-capitalist
The question is if fascism may be has a negative potential.
And here we have to distinguish: there is a negation that is not
directed against an existing order, a negation that does not want
to abolish coercive conditions but rather wants to increase
these coercive conditions even. Those were the fascists,
the national-socialists. They didn't want an emancipated society.
Also in their form of organisation they were very rigid.
So it is actually the negation of negative potential.
You cannot say that the fascists are part of the 'Negative Potential'.
Same goes for lslamic fundamentalists today.
They don't want freedom. On the contrary:
Their wishful dream is to convert the whole world to lslam,
and not to liberate it.
We have to see:
in case of such movements we always have to ask:
What is their real goal? Do they want emancipation?
Or do they only want a tougher, in their eyes, a better order?
They want to confirm and even aggravate coercive conditions!
Then they cannot be seen as part of the negative potential.
We have to define what the middle is.
What is ideological middle? What is social middle?
The middle of society is basically the petite bourgeoisie.
And this petite bourgeoisie tried again and again
to constitute itself as a class but it never succeeded.
It is stuck between two classes and is therefore endangered as such.
There are many petit bourgeois who do really think in an emancipative way.
But as an "intermediate class", as a group, they are moderate,
and you can notice it in all left parties that give proceed to the middle:
hey turn into a people's party, like all the others.
They lose their own content.
I once mentioned an American sociologist,
Seymour Lipset, who says
that fascism is basically an extremism of the middle
and not of the rightwing.
Then, when Axel Springer - may his soul rest in peace, by the way -
said that he was a radical of the middle,
I thought, with Lipset, that he basically says that he's a fascist.
But also with Lipset it isn't very clear.
Because, as I said, fascist ideology
isn't necessarily an ideology of the middle.
They are more conservative than the conservatives.
But the middle is decisive for fascism.
And I do have doubts that there could develop
an emancipative movement from the middle
- from single people yes, also from single groups,
but not from the middle as such.
When this slogan came up: "march through the lnstltutlons"
I was one of the few who warned of it.
Institutions are a palace - I am talking about state institutions now,
not schools or kindergartens - the state is a palace you enter
but which doesn't have a back door.
One can only move upwards in this palace.
That's the experience the Green party made:
they entered the palace as alternatives
and now Joschka Fischer is minister.
In other words: the march through the institution forgets about one thing:
- another word by Marx -
Institutions are stronger than the will of a single individual.
You can enter an institution, but you stay in there
and you feel happy.
I only know two statements by the 'Green' in parliament.
One of them is: "The old house grew dear to me"
and the other one is: "It is quite a thing to be
sitting beside the chancellor".
That's the fascination with social bourgeois power distribution.
A fascination that all of us suffer from, because it is indeed nice
to have free elections, and of course it is something
to be sitting beside the chancellor, it's wonderful.
In former times, the kings used to be somewhere up there,
and now Schroder goes into some normal pub in Berlin
and eats together with the people.
But through that we will not change the distribution of power.
And the institutions are confirmed.
That thing about invisible power, isn't that an invention of sociology?
Because power is absolutely visible. How come that I see it?
It isn't only visible, you can also experience it every day.
That is not the politicians. The obvious coercive character
of the society of reproduction
does not have to do with politician's will for power.
It is a question of society's condition itself: economic conditions,
historical conditions, and cultural conditions - think about churches.
But to say that power is invisible, that it is an attempt, that is an attempt
an ideological attempt
to spread a veil over conditions
that are very clearly recognizable.
When it is said that power has become invisible? Why?
Where it is invisible? ls Agnelli invisible? ls the Bosch company invisible maybe?
Is Siemens invisible?
Siemens which fires 2000 workers in Germany
because it is more profitable to hire 20,000 Chinese.
Is that invisible? Why so?
In other words: We should be aware of those sociological terms.
Because, as I said, they veil reality.
They do not have any informative value.
They pretend to be great cognitions,
but they do not have any informative value.
Same goes for other fashionable sayings:
"The end ofutoplas", "The end ofldeologles"
"The end ofldeologles" is the actual ideology of our times.
That's why I believe that patience and irony
are the weapons to get through the winter
Because it is some sort of overwinter...
There have always been winter times in history.
I don't know if you're too young to remember the Adenauer-era.
During the Adenauer-era we had to overwinter.
And then came, let's say, the break finally.
So we have to prepare - I am talking about myself now -
whoever wants emancipation has to prepare
to live in winter for a long period of time.
But we have to keep up the principle of hope.
Because the principle of hope is linked to the nature of the cause:
We know that after winter, spring will finally arrive.
Johannes Agnoli taught political sciences from 1962 to 1990.
subtitles: Anna Mussener Subtitle editing: Kornerstrasse Film