The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

The Obsolescence of Political Definitions V. E. McHale Defense I am not qualified to translate German, much less technical philosophical texts. However, Kondylis’ insights are criminally underappreciated and of interest to many today as they grapple with the dissolution of liberalism that Kondylis predicted in 1991–1992. Hopefully, his work will be translated with due care as its centrality is appreciated. The below is from Planetarische Politik Nach Dem Kalten Krieg, pp. 91–104 The Obsolescence of Political Definitions In the early days of the failed Moscow coup, one was bombarded by writing wherein the “conservatives” from the KGB and communist party wanted to block the path to a market economy and parliamentarianism. Many outlets that were once marked “Stalinist” or “orthodox communist” were attacked as “conservative,” blithely referred to as such often on the same page that political figures such as Reagan or Thatcher, Bush or Kohl. Thus the naïve reader, who wants to take the printed word at its nominal value, logically infers a common attitude and purpose among the previously named Western politicians and the soviet enemies of perestroika. Common sense could protect the sane man from such an absurdity, but this runs out of answers in the face of the schizophrenia of political vocabulary, proving insufficiently idiosyncratic; he seems to have resigned himself without grumbling. The common retort is that conservatives are defenders of the status quo, whatever that may look like in the particular case, so conservatives living in very different societies, unsurprisingly, advocate very different and even contradictory programs. But if political classifications are not backed by political substance, then these classifications must be grounded in psychological or anthropological factors, common attitudes towards life. Should one, in good conscience, impute the commonalities between Helmut Kohl and the Russian putschists, this interpretational hypothesis brings little light to the concrete situations—because in such situations it is always about the implementation of particular matters or goals thereby defined, in view of the makeup of a national or international collective, wherein the friend-foe groupings are determined by the positions of each agent with respect to these matters and goals. The legitimation of political struggle often takes place by appeal to anthropological presumptions; political analysis, on the other hand, can infer no concrete substance from formal and inherently abstract anthropological constants without falling into bad metaphysics. The above applies not only to the definition of conservatism—the journalistic and even scientific parlance is no less confused when we turn to the other foundational definitions, where the political vocabulary of the last hundred-fifty years has been contorted. The ambiguity accompanies political—though not only political—ground definitions from the very beginning. This is hardly avoidable, by virtue of the polemical usage of these definitions, though it is different from the lack of reference or amorphism that indicates historical downfall. So long as definitions are living and afforded gravity in the social sphere, they can be positive or negative, narrowly or widely interpreted, varied according to particular strategic or tactical necessities, ultimately, however they refer explicitly or implicitly to an identifiable bearer. “Conservatism” in the 19th century meant primarily the sociopolitical interests of the antiliberal aristocrats and the patriarchal estates who felt threatened by the progress of industrial capitalism. The purveyors of what is called “conservatism” today are advocates for planned economies and dictators in the East, supporters of market economies and parliamentarianism in the West, ecologically motivated guardians of untouched nature, religious opponents of miniskirts… to mention a few. “Liberal” originally referred to a politics that articulated the economic or constitutional agenda of the bourgeoisie, not a petitioner for abortion freedom or the unrestricted right to asylum. That this vocabulary does not bind testifies to its obsolescence. Indeed, politics in the 20th century was largely played out in symbolic definitions that had lost their original historical meaning. This might appear plainly to the impartial observer, but the actors needed the vocabulary of the 19th century for polemical purposes—the long struggle between the Western system and communism contributed significantly to the dissemination of language that had no real parallel in either camp. This is why the emptiness of political language reveals itself just at the end of the Cold War. The three fundamental definitions in the political vocabulary of the last hundred-fifty years, namely, “conservatism,” “liberalism,” and “socialism,” (or social democracy), embodied three real and unambiguous options for society only at the time of their (incidentally almost parallel) development. Only around 1848 did the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat face one another on a single playing field. The triptych dwindled over the 19th century into a diptych, when the already weakened aristocracy largely merged with the bourgeoisie, giving up their patriarchal landownership nolens volens and participating in the capitalist economy and parliament in various degrees and ways. Once the stasis of societas civilis had given way to the dynamism of capitalism, conservatism could no longer discuss the preservation of a God-given and eternal hierarchical order on Earth in a genuine sense. If the notion of conservatism nevertheless remained alive, it was less by to the vitality of its natural social vectors and more the polemical force of its triumphant adversaries. Above all, the left was now ideologically interested in putting down their bourgeois liberal opponents as apostates fleeing their own “progressive” past and heirs to “obscurantist” or “reactionary” positions and practices that allegedly marked the doings of the “feudal party.” “Conservative” was defined as an opponent of the left; “conservatism” was defined by the extent to which something contradicted the left’s objectives, whether or not it actually altered society. Because the left possessed a monopoly on progress by definition, changing society in a direction contrary to the left’s wishes could not be recognized as “real” change. This way of thinking was in force for decades not only in international affairs curricula; the established “progressive” political science and sociology in Germany also helped establish the notion that conservatism is not a historically bound term, but rather a stance that redefines itself in every context. Especially in a time in which philistine discipleship (that is, when all back doors were left open) was intellectually chic, it was emphasized that that the political scientists of the Eastern bloc shared in this belief. The liberals, for their part, had to appropriate the concept of conservatism when they saw that the original bourgeois sense of liberalism had been eclipsed as its reinterpretation for anti-bourgeois democratic-egalitarian purposes was steadily gaining ground. “Conservative” now referred to the thought and sociopolitical practice of classical liberalism that wanted to explicitly distinguish itself from egalitarian socialist-democratic efforts, which often came with the claim to administer the “real” legacy of liberalism and to bring “genuine” liberal thought to its logical conclusion, in which material equality followed from formal rights and social equality from equal rights. Under these circumstances and in light of this reinterpretation, liberalism would have appeared suspicious to the classical liberals themselves, who thought in bourgeois categories. The great slogans of freedom and equality being propagated by the 17th century in fact allowed extensive interpretation with some goodwill, but it was only in the 19th century that these possibilities were fully appreciated. The originators of the aforementioned slogans thought only of the elimination of the old feudal barriers and hierarchies, while the social inequality that would be the point of contention for later democrats was fully natural in their eyes. They could hardly have imagined that full recognition of natural rights would entail that lords would not be lords and peasants would not be peasants; recall the debates of the 19th century on suffrage to clarify this point. In any case, it came to approve dirigiste tendencies and tendencies toward a social welfare state, drawing on an ethically charged concept of liberalism, bearing in mind the significance of the individual in the liberal framework of thought. Thus it was now of chief importance that the individual should have the protection of the state through state intercession and by this be guaranteed his free and general development. This, of course, was a drastic reinterpretation of classical liberalism’s conception of individualism, but we are not interested in legitimacy here but the fact that it was undertaken and did influence politics in practice. The more mass society shaped by the bourgeoisie converged to modern mass democracy, the closer the association between the concept of liberalism and the partly ethical-dirigiste, partly radical individualist and culture revolutionary tendencies. For apparent socio-historical reasons this linguistic usage only does justice to the situation in the United States, while in Europe the ambiguity remained. Thus, in the 20th century the notion of conservatism was harnessed for liberal purposes and the notion of liberalism for overall anti-bourgeois politics. Over the course of time the concept of socialism or social democracy became just as ambiguous and chameleonic. The Bolshevik ascent to power was not capable of unifying the already extant socialisms under a single banner, nor giving the idea of socialism canonical and unambiguous contents. To the contrary, it brought about the decisive split of the socialist movement into reformist and revolutionary wings. The unfolding of communism in many regions of the third world came in the form of regimes decorating themselves with the “socialist” label though they were nothing more than nationalist dictatorships despite the ideological mask. The reformist socialism coined in the West, for its part, was tied into the aforementioned ethical reinterpretation of liberal-individualist platitudes, while apostate Marxists (or Marxist-Leninists) sought to remove “Stalinism” as theory and practice and summon “unsullied” socialism, a game with ever more variations, which long since has become confusing—and boring. We are already at the question of the checkered history of political vocabulary. The Cold War not only at times caused the ambiguity and hollowness of the concept of socialism, it at other times promoted it. Similar effects took place on the semantic content of liberalism and conservatism. In its new function as counter to “totalitarianism,” liberalism meant additionally liberal capitalism and thereby private ownership of the means of production. The focus was not put on this prosaic fact, which incidentally was denigrated by opponents as mere “capitalist rule,” but rather on the opportunities for the development of society and the individual bound up in liberal capitalism. Liberalism consisted in principle of unbounded renewal and openness, tolerance and human dignity—in short, freedom writ large. This same freedom came to mean the notion of democracy as a synonym for liberalism and the contrast between “communist tyrants” and “Western democracy.” “Liberalism” and “democracy” were conceived more as values and norms than defined by concrete social relations and forms of government. On the other hand, the communist use of “conservatism” or “reaction” to describe the system of “state-monopoly capitalism,” that, in their view, was not capable of material progress and instead condemned to perpetual crisis and sacrificed the development of society and the individual to blind striving for profits for the ruling cadre. Interestingly those who otherwise called themselves anticommunist “liberals” or “democrats” declared themselves “conservative” to convey the defense of eternal truth and eternal values that communism threatened. The anticommunist declaration of “conservatism” became more concrete in the matter of defending against those inside the Western nations pursuing the aforementioned democratic reinterpretation of liberalism and thereby rightly or wrongly accused of being followers of the communists. After the end of the Cold War everyone must now know that the communist and leftist diagnosis of “conservatism” or even “reactionary” nature of the Western system in the large industrialized developed nations after the Second World War is not only indefensible but downright empty. One can and must reject this system on many different aesthetic or ethical grounds—but not because it is “conservative” i.e. that it curbs technological progress and thereby the concomitant reconfiguration of society. Judging impartially and taking technological progress, opportunities for consumption, and freedom as values, one cannot deny the superiority of the West in these areas. The accusation of “conservatism” was nonsensically directed at a system that revolutionized the progress in production to an extent never before seen in history and made material and ideal opportunities that we also wondrous world-historical firsts available to the individual. When many bearers or supporters of this system still want to call themselves “conservative,” the reason lies partly in the previously mentioned polemical requirements, but also partly in their ethical-ideological self-understanding that does not wish to face the realization that this system has long been living off steadily decaying old values—it lives on what was called “hubris” in conservative times. But regardless of what such “conservatives” will be called in the future, the victory of the West in the Cold War will reduce “progressives” of all colors to silence or at least jumble the vocabulary, as it now seems hardly plausible to connect the most vital or in any case victorious system with sluggish conservatism. The activity of “progressive” intellectuals consists above all of incessant discourse, so for them the sudden revolution in familiar vocabulary is particularly hard to bear. Even so, over the last few years in Germany, “conservatism” has been used less and less in a pejorative sense and more and more halfheartedly. We have thus arrived at a point where a very important terminological and factual question must be touched upon. While it is incorrect to understand the end of the Cold War is a victory of the conservative West over the revolutionary East, it is similarly an optical illusion to celebrate the collapse of communism as the crowning of liberalism. This can only be said when one understands “liberalism” as the counter to “totalitarianism” as was customary during the Cold War. We foreshadowed already that this comparison did not do justice to the specifically bourgeois meaning of liberalism. This was in no way an accident. Over the course of the previously discussed democratic reinterpretation of the concept of liberalism has considerably diluted the bourgeois content of classical liberalism following the Second World War, without a doubt the related gradual social decline of the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois mass society found itself already on the way to modern mass democracy, as the mechanization of the everyday set in and the worker-as-consumer came on the scene. This decisive turn came only after the Second World War and to a massive breakthrough under the influence of the Cold War. Thus, despite the long acting socio-historical tendencies, the reinterpretation of bourgeois liberal mass society in modern mass democracy was (also) promoted and accelerated by the attempt to prevent the danger of a communist seizure of power through rapidly rising the standards of living for the masses. These events occurred with a large-scale democratization in all areas and with the emergence of new elites in both industry and politics who largely displaced or took over; their own composition, by the way, changes much more quickly than earlier ruling groups as a result of generally increased social mobility. Managers, technocrats, and yuppies are something essentially different as sociological types and in sociological function compared to the bourgeoisie; bourgeois lifestyle today, if one appreciates the full picture, fulfills the same picturesque-mundane duties that many remnants of the historical aristocracy once handled. Permissiveness bound with the parallel leveling of hierarchies and authority and democratization paints a picture that could only be described as a bourgeois-liberal society by misapprehension of central sociological and intellectual historical factors. The modern mass democracy is indeed born from bourgeois society, but it constitutes a structurally new societal formation. For this reason, the political vocabulary that formed in the bourgeois era has lost its real contents and meaning. Despite this, competing elites still need to use it for lack of another, in order to ideologize their practical concerns, to differentiate themselves from one another symbolically and thereby make themselves more interesting. Thus the West defeated the East only when the bourgeois class society lost ground to mass democracy, at which point the communist critique of capitalism became obsolete and unattractive. Framed as a paradox: the farewell to utopia in the East followed the development of utopia in the West. In fact, Western mass democracy overcame the scarcity of goods for the first time in history and achieved a structuring of society by criteria of achievement. Thus, equality was generally achieved resting on extreme atomization, while at the same time the self-realization of the individual was declared to be of chief importance to the state. Gaps and seedy underbellies in this picture are well known, but they do not change the fact that this—twisted, grotesque, burlesque, what have you—realization of utopia ultimately took the wind out of the sails of critics of liberalism and capitalism. Modern mass democracy made the notions “conservatism,” “liberalism,” and “socialism” irrelevant all in one fell swoop. Through the extreme atomization of society and unbounded mobility, which it requires by nature to function, the large collective subjects bound to each definition were dissolved, as they possessed no concrete referent. The fate of these communities was rooted in their common pedigree and career path. They originated during the historical transformation from societas civilis to mass society or from agrarian to industrialized civilization, and they gave answers to the big questions for different socio-political standpoints and worldviews. The process that we speak of here began with the devout submission of man under God and ended with his proud mastery of nature; he arranged the cardinal classification of individuals in a state and ended up with the atomization of society; he went from solidly hierarchical heavenly and earthly substance and was discharged into any desired combination of roles. These key words contain the central questions of modern times, as they have been specified in the particular problems of philosophy and social theory. In this respect, conservatism, liberalism, and socialism fit within the modern era in a particular way, and therefore the appraisal of the growing meaninglessness and irreality of these definitions during our century must raise that question of whether the modern era has arrived at its end. In this vein, the dissolution of Marxism cannot be interpreted simply as the victory of liberal ideas. Marxism took its fundamental premises from liberalism: the endeavor to synthesize economics and humanism, wanting to understand the history of the world in terms of progress. From this point of view, the defeat of Marxism means the elimination of the last systematically organized remnant of liberal humanism and the final victory of a way of thinking that one can provisionally call postmodern, with regards towards its mass democratic roots and functions. The understanding of the obsolescence of political vocabulary following the victory of Western mass democracy over communism is not just indispensable for academic purposes—planetary politics in the future will be fashioned by the background fact that participants will take mass democratic values and goals to heart, from the quantitative steadily rising standard of living to the qualitative equalization of opportunity and consumption, not only interior to the particular nations but also in the relations of nations with one another. This means that economic questions and disputes will be given more political weight, that the political will be increasingly understood and implemented with consideration of the economic, while the traditional foremost questions about the best state and best constitution will move to the background. Remarkably, nearly worldwide agreement on these questions has set in following the Cold War; there is a willingness to imitate the political institutions of the West in this or that variation. This goes with the economization of the political, insofar as these institutions are assumed to foster economic progress. At the same time, important problems, such as ecological problems or the problem of overpopulation, appearing on the horizon of a planet that has become constricted, cannot be grasped nor handled within the categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Survival has been a question of organization for a long time now; freedom in mass societies can easily lead to disintegration or explosions, while rigorous planning can bear ills that it cannot heal from. It would therefore be wishful thinking to suggest the inevitable dissolution of the traditional political definitions via the economization of the political would eliminate conflict between interest groups or even temper it. Without a doubt politics will be largely de-ideologized, that is, the influence of those ideologies that legitimized political acts since the French revolution will be diminished or rolled back. It is shortsighted to attribute the political struggle of the past two hundred years to ideological fanaticism and to ex contrario prophesize the end of conflict following the “end of ideology.” De-ideologized conflicts might be even more violent, should some particular goods prove to be in short supply, if overcoming the scarcity of goods is deemed to be of chief importance to humankind. De-ideologization and the economization of the political ultimately mean that material goods will be fought for without any important ideology as mediator. One must then recognize de-ideologization as a partial reversion to animality. Admittedly it remains a matter of taste whether it is beautiful and preferable that the farewell to utopia goes so far. (Kondylis 1992, 91–104)