100 years of Johannes Agnoli – the right questions

Johannes Agnoli didn’t write much. A and unfinished edition of his writings – which has grown to at least six volumes – she has long been out of circulation after a dispute between the family and the publisher. Much of the texts gathered there goes back to lectures and lectures. Despite writing, you can tell the oral character.

One may speculate about this supposed laziness and on biographical supports: Maybe as a pleasure person, he was very reluctant to submit to the constraints of his academic subject. Or it was due to the difficulty of moving between two language and culture circles- the German and the Italian- (if Agnoli published, then often bilingual). And especially in the years after 1968, he was drawn to practice, he preferred to discuss the perspectives of wild strikes with Italian “guest workers” in the FRG than to operate political ideas at the desk.

State as a class rule

However, the fact can be better educated, based on the questions of his texts. This is not a philological puzzle, but Agnolis had an urgency that has remained of great relevance for every socialist movement. The problems that he marks as centrally can only be clarified in practice-the socialist-revolutionary-. Agnoli gives answers. But these are short and aphoristic because they are a handout for practice.

In Media’s Res: In 1966 Agnoli in the lecture “The Civil Society and its State” – a key text – the not suggestive question: “Does not change – does not change – from the state – the character of bourgeois society in 1966 the say in the order of the rule that does not belong to the company of the owners and whose representatives may be the state as an instrument of overthrow and the Consider expropriation? ”So how can it be that society continues to be under the rule of private property and capital if the political instance of the community – the modern state – not only does not only recognize any privilege the possibility of wining majorities?

The state is guardian and guarantee through the private property of mediated social conditions. It is completely dependent on capital.

Agnoli shows that the bourgeois state has already had its revolution behind it. He sees itself as a result of a revolution – the first economic, then social, political and cultural enforcement of the bourgeoisie – and institutionalizes: the revolution dissolves in the state. After decades and centuries-long struggles for the right to vote and freedom of coalition, finally the proletarians and have in turn achieved the right to representation- but not that on revolution.

From the beginning, the bourgeois state is guardian of an order, the laws of which will make profit maximization outside of the state. “From Locke to Röpke, from the girondists to Erhard, the basic principle of bourgeois society and thus the good to protect the bourgeois state (…) – ownership remains,” says Agnoli. “And that means that – even for the Jacobiner – the state of bourgeois society can only be a class state, to secure the class structure. Protection of private property and class rule are synonyms. “

Against the nobility and worker

Nevertheless, it could be that the revolutionary party of the proletariat is on election and achieved the majority. At least from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, said that such situations in recent history – for example in Chile under Salvador Allende – existed. Then what is? In his famous Scripture “The Transformation of Democracy” from 1967, Agnoli investigates why this case will not occur – and if he entered, it would be too late for the revolutionary party and it would be confronted with its soon disempowerment.

Agnoli are considered central moments of prevented emancipation: “The blurring of the political differences, the” objectification “of politics in the two -party state, the” social partnership “, exchange of function and position (” We are all sitting in one boat “, although it does not matter should, whether at the helm or as a helmsman) and individual mobility, which neutralizes the collective ascent impulses and the Old -liberal ideology from the Free Railway of the efficient dignity helps. “With the result that” the conflict of power of the classes has become a leadership conflict of the oligarchies after the workers’ management groups have been built into the system of bourgeois rule “. The awareness of being citizens now extends into the lowest layers of society. This is successful integration! The bourgeois state becomes a national state and constructs in double front position: against the nobility and against the pressure of the plebejers from below.

Agnoli insists that the state also as a popular state – or better: straight as a popular state – only a derived size. As I said, he is guardian and guarantee through private property mediated social conditions that are outside the state. It is completely dependent on capital. This simple statement proves to be highly involved in social reality.

In his studies of the 1970s, Agnoli is now concerned with the “contradictory facts (…) that on the one hand the state is not anything that is all; that, on the other hand, in the highly developed capitalist countries, the radical overheating of inhumane production is less due to the power of power of capital than the counter -revolutionary mechanisms and techniques of capitalist state fails. « This is his review of the uprisings of 1968/69, which – even in the FRG! – essentially shaped by wild strikes: »The individual capital can be beaten; Behind it remains the (…) political power system, which can practically save the capital that has already been defeated. Fiat was over in the fall of 1969, the Italian state was far from. “

Analysis instead of wishful thinking

It is not enough to “only” see the transformation of democracy (integration of former rebellious proletons into the system through the political atomization of class antagonism), it is about Agnoli to understand the logic of the state. Because it was only then the “logic of the class struggle”, which he actually wants to be able to be negative: as a complete decoupling of state-democratic forms of traffic and attempts at mediation.

Because state and capital act in separate spheres, the state can embody the claim to represent the entire order, to maintain it, to adapt to new conditions, even to reform. No capital, even if it is so monopolistically powerful, that can be done on his own. Therefore, the appearance of political autonomy towards capital: an appearance that can turn into reality if the state defines a minimum wage, i.e. interferes directly with the capital relationship – to confirm it. Agnoli concluded from the fact that the class struggle must be directly politically managed. This is not a requirement for him, but an insight. He saw himself confirmed by the class struggles after 1968 that they even came across the analyzes to the “state of capital”.

And today? One reads the Agnoli of the 60s and 1970s as a classic anarchist-marxist state criticism. He hadn’t intended, and it would have been bitterly opened to him that in 2025 we were still working on his questions that were 50, 60 years earlier. Specifically, the distance between his theses and our situation is great – an alliance like that between Trump and Musk could not have imagined that he would have seemed to be vulgar. But in the supposed confusion of our political situation, it helps to start again with the simple questions of Agnoli and her bluntly radical consequences.