Rethinking the Revolutionary Agent

Ringing the alarm bell over the forthcoming disasters - be it political, environmental, or social - seems to have become a trend within scholarly works. Quite a number of texts include rather pessimistic perspectives of what is very likely in front of us. Scholars like Frederic Lordon or Pierre Dardot with Christian Laval invoke the imminent climatic disaster if we do not turn away from our current model of organizing our society, namely capitalism. At the same time, the well known phrase about it being ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ might not appear very encouraging. Other authors are more wary about the uncertain future regarding our political system, namely the liberal parliamentary democracy. Whether using the labels of ‘post-democracy’ or ‘counter-democracy’, these works ‘try to grasp the changing reality of liberal-democratic regimes challenged by political crises that are characterised by citizens’ disaffection with politics and the subsequent drop in voter turnout, political apathy and increased detachment between representatives and their constituents.’ In relation to this, there are academics who eagerly warn us about the dangers posed by the ever intensifying populist forces, with the reactionary regression away from the social rights that have been won so far being one of them. And of course, these populists are also portrayed as a ‘potential threat to democracy.’ We are living, it truly seems, in very turbulent times.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute this pessimism only to our contemporary historical moment. For example, Adorno has long ago considered that ‘humanity’s survival is threatened by the forms of its own global social constitution, unless humanity’s own global subject becomes sufficiently self-aware to come to its rescue after all.’ In any case, this text is a reaction to all these pessimistic evaluations. Whereas the environmental challenges are well-documented and indeed constitute a burning issue, this essay rejects the paradigms of social evolution that underlie such pessimism. This rejection is based upon the rehabilitation of dialectical materialism as the key scientific tool for the analysis of social development. While here the orthodox class-centric Marxist approach will be dismissed, the idea that this social evolution is directly bound up with the progress of material reproduction will be upheld. This theoretical basis also discards any supremacy of human agency within this historical evolution.

Of course, the dialectical materialism that informs this essay should not be identified with any teleological conception of humanity, that has been so vehemently rejected by Adorno. Yet, it finds untenable the proposition that the society is the way it is - rather than the way the radical left would like it to be - because this radical left has failed. Rather, this work defends the stance that society moves and progresses alongside its material development in a somewhat linear fashion. Arguably, our society is as it is because it is the only form of society that is compatible with contemporary economic productivity and with its corresponding social relations. Such an approach makes it imperative to re-think the whole question of revolutionary social change.

The first part of this article will address the basic issue of historical social change. It will be proposed that all of this historical progress is based upon the evolution of the general social consciousness. At the same time, it will be argued that the orthodox Marxist utilisation of dialectical materialism is untenable. In the second segment of this work the question of the current crisis of representative democracy will be treated. It will be suggested that our current historical conjuncture is a transitional period towards a new political model, whose central feature will most likely be direct democracy. The third part will focus upon the material foundations of the social changes that modernisation has brought during the last two centuries. The correspondence between the rising levels of economic productivity and the successive periods of classical liberalism, Keynesian corporatism and neo-liberalism will be demonstrated. Finally, the conclusion will provide closing remarks in relation to the question of social revolutions.

I part

The starting point for this analysis is the placing of our seemingly difficult historical moment within a much wider historical perspective. If one looked at the social evolution within a greater historical span, one could arguably only notice positive social development. For example, we no longer sacrifice humans or animals to gods, no longer burn women alive for witchcraft, no longer find incest acceptable and no longer excommunicate people for their religious stances. Would the academics of today be also worried about the possibility of social regression all the way back to these bygone times? And yet, there is an extremely important point to make here. All our critical judgements of the social norms and social truths of the past ages are the reflections of our current social consciousness. It is only from our perspective that we find them irrational, oppressive, or unjust. It would be an extremely naive argument to claim that women have always wanted autonomy over their bodies, or that they have been eager since the dawn of history to be liberated from the patriarchal norms of the society, and yet they had been suffering throughout the ages until roughly the 1970s when finally, for one reason or another, they have managed to turn the tables. Rather, all these progressive social changes have begun precisely because the former social norms were no longer considered adequate by the society as a whole. That is, the social position of women during the previous centuries - no matter how horrible and unjustifiable from our current perspective - was held up via its acceptance by both men and women.

This position is different from Claus Offe’s claim that ‘it becomes possible to conceive of the subordination of “feminist” visions of work and identity only after considerable progress towards “liberation” has been made as an unintended by-product of modernizing developments.’ Firstly, because the previous social progress named by Offe, such as liberalizing legislation concerning birth control, divorce or easier access to higher education, is itself the product of the evolution of the social consciousness. No woman will be allowed to divorce her husband if the society considers such an act as beyond normality. And secondly, just because two issues, for instance the women’s right to vote and women’s right to control their reproduction, are both placed under the same headline of feminism, they can have very different material triggers behind the society’s back. Women voting rights are related to the ever greater presence of women on the labour market, whereby this concerns the equalisation of political rights between the sexes. In contrast, the feminist wave that started in the 1960s is enmeshed within the thrust of individual autonomy that also encompasses the LGBT rights or the identities of racial minorities. This emergence of the so-called identity politics has as its basis the changing relations between the entire society and the means of material reproduction in the shape of the market.

To return to the issue of the societies of the past, their individual members themselves would not have considered their contemporary social norms as appalling, oppressive or unjust. So when Inglehart and Welzel claim that ‘individualism, autonomy, and self-expression values … reflect a common underlying orientation toward human emancipation’, they merely portray the subjective judgment of our contemporary social consciousness. Every society at any particular epoch would have criticised their predecessors. This social perspective is always subjective, and there are no universal intrinsic social values that are supposed to be established at the ‘end of history’. And as this general social consciousness is in constant evolution, it always pits the supporters of the new emergent social norms against the defenders of the old ‘truths’. This explains why today heterosexuals are fighting side by side with homosexuals for the LGBT rights, why men also support abortion rights, or why white people would also be present in ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests. Moreover, this equally explains why there are women fighting against abortion rights, why there are homosexual politicians fighting against LBGT rights, as well as why the family females would also condone the honour killings of the family daughters.

It is also this social consciousness that determines the political superstructure of our societies. Whatever institution there has ever been in existence - whether it is the medieval inquisition, the aristocratic estate, feudal dues or slavery - these would not have even come into existence had the society as a whole not regarded them during a certain period of time as acceptable and rational. As proposed by Adorno, ‘society is subjective because it refers back to the human beings who create it, and its organisational principles too refer back to subjective consciousness.’ And the same holds good for the institutions of our days, whether we are dealing with the nation-state, the parliamentary elections, or simply wage-labour. None of these would exist today were they not considered necessary and adequate by the contemporary populations. This approach provides the immediate solution to Adorno’s problem of the missed revolutionary opportunities. To answer the question of how could the proletariat or humanity as a whole have remained in servitude, one might pose another question: what if neither this proletariat nor humanity as a whole consider themselves to be in servitude? It is clear at this point that the theoretical framework employed in this text runs into conflict with the orthodox Marxist notion of class-consciousness. In order to proceed with our analysis, it is imperative at this moment to settle these divergences.

Therborn states in his work on ideology that the ‘problem to be explained, however, is how members of different classes come to define the world and their situation and possibilities in it in a particular way.’ But what if this is also a false problem, and they all come to define the world at each particular historical moment in the same way? While both the workers and their employers might well be aware of the fact that they are all in a zero-sum economic relationship, this does not mean that this division should produce within the former the revolutionary impulse towards creating a new society. They are both confronted with the same social relations, even if from different angles. Moreover, it is very problematic to induce, as Goran Therborn apparently does, that class ideologies are to be ‘analytically defined on the basis of the relations of production.’ This appears to imply a method whereby, first of all, one comes up - as a result of his scholarly work - with certain characteristics of social consciousness that are supposed to circulate within a particular social class. Secondly, if these characteristics are not present, then it is assumed that the members of this class need to be coached into their class-consciousness. Or, as is also the case with Adorno, one tries to explain this absence via mass culture, media, propaganda, etc. And instead of reconsidering the issue of class consciousness, Therborn seems to hold on to the idea that the working-class would be doomed without the input of the intellectuals in nurturing their revolutionary ideology. In contrast, according to the dialectical materialism as it is employed here, even if John Locke, to take an example, would have died in his infancy and nobody would have stepped in to enumerate his ideas about government, we would still be living today in the liberal society as it stands.

And Marx himself is not beyond criticism. For instance, his own notion of the lumpen-proletariat seems to fall into the same error. Namely, first of all one comes up with the supposedly correct class consciousness, and then follows up the disqualification of all those who do not conform - even if that means that you are left with a minority within this social class. Today there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate how wrong Marx was, for example, in his evaluation of the June events of 1848 in Paris. According to Mark Traugott, here ‘Marx applies the term “proletariat” to a Parisian lower class in which the process of proletarianisation had made only limited progress.’ Henri Sée would also testify that Paris at that time was not characterised by large proletarianised industry. Therefore, without even going into the debates over what exactly the concept of class consciousness could imply, here it will suffice to postulate that we can only talk about the general social consciousness that permeates the entire society. And there is little use in denouncing this public consciousness as ‘false consciousness’ which supposedly is nothing but a ‘mask of bourgeois class interests’, as Habermas suggests that Marx does. Hence, contrary to Lukács’ argument, there is nothing for the workers to become self-aware of, nor can they ‘conceive themselves outside the framework of reification as the living human basis of the system.’

The acceptance of Marx’s framework of historical social development and his notions regarding the revolutionary working class can have lasting theoretical consequences. Once one accepts the postulate that the wage labourers should possess a particular revolutionary consciousness, the subsequent disappointment due to the empirical absence of this revolutionary mindset should not be too surprising. The following quote regarding the post-World War II period is extremely telling:

‘Most radical students readily accepted the arguments of writers like Marcuse and Fanon that the working class was no longer capable of acting as a revolutionary subject, being co-opted and ideologically blinkered by commodity consumption. They looked instead to “non-commodified” alternative revolutionary subjects: to students themselves as a “revolutionary class”, to outsiders like prisoners and the chronically unemployed, and to third world peasants and “lumpen-proletarians”.’

This falls in line with Adorno’s pessimism regarding the proletariat's integration into the capitalist system which blunts its revolutionary potential, and which also entails workers’ integration ‘in terms of their consciousness.’ Again, instead of critically rethinking Marx’s framework of social analysis, Adorno stubbornly holds fast to it and is forced to lament the missed opportunities in the early 20th century, when supposedly ‘the proletariat still had a class consciousness.’ Finally, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy would even find themselves in such a desperate situation as to consider the liberal intellectuals - aside from the anti-colonial revolutions in the so-called Third World - as the last hope for any radical social change. Indeed, it appears as a paradox that our social world has been constantly changing while we were busy trying to identify the particular agents responsible for this evolution. This text proposes to discard the notion of a revolutionary subject and to follow the trajectory of the general social consciousness. Arguably, it is from this angle that our current historical predicament should be analysed.

II part

This part of the article is dedicated to the notion that the current parliamentary democratic model of governance is in a crisis. Here we may have a simple ‘crisis of democracy’, ‘crisis of legitimacy’, ‘crisis of the representative model’, or the ‘crisis of liberalism’. Appadurai, for example, describes the ‘fatigue with democracy’ as the core issue with today’s politics. As stated by Gianolla, all these different authors ‘try to grasp the changing reality of liberal-democratic regimes challenged by political crises that are characterised by citizens’ disaffection with politics and the subsequent drop in voter turnout, political apathy and increased detachment between representatives and their constituents.’ However, the term ‘crisis’ itself might be misleading for it could imply that something was functioning normally until some kind of an error began blocking the way. Hans Kundnani, for instance, talks about a ‘state of dysfunction in democracy in Europe.’ It is proposed here, nevertheless, that it is as a result of the evolving social consciousness that we are now experiencing our contemporary political model as being in a crisis. To use an example of a simple passenger car, it is not that this car has broken down, but merely the road has constantly been widening until it had reached the point from wherein this old vehicle no longer appears as adequate for its users. Hence, there is no ‘dysfunctioning’ in the proper sense.

Of course, this is not to claim that there have not been any noticeable changes in the way our political system functions. Peter Mair has correctly noted the ‘hollowing out’ of our democracies, whereby even though ‘the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.’ Kundnani himself notes the proposition - when referring to Colin Crouch’s definition of ‘post-democracy’ - that ‘democracy continues to function in formal terms’ despite its inner void. Also, the political establishment has become one where the voters ‘could change governments but could not change policies.’ But one can notice an academic not being able to grasp the essence of the issue when he or she attempts to propose remedies to fix the political institutions in crisis, as Gianolla does. Rosvallon could be another example, for he also seems to be searching for ways to overcome the ‘current political disillusionment.’ Rather, Blühdorn and Butzlaff get it right when they state that the ‘crisis of democracy should rather be theorised as a profound and lasting, modernisation-induced transformation of democracy.’ Miszlivetz is another author who, despite not representing dialectical materialism, is also open to the idea that ‘an entire set of institutional structures might disappear or get lost in the labyrinths of the global transformation.’ Finally, Krastev claims that we are dealing here not with a ‘pathology but a profound transformation in the nature of Europe’s liberal democracies.’

Gianolla also shows still another way to misread contemporary transformations. According to him, this democratic deficiency has already existed for a long period - as if lurking in the dark while being masked by the welfare state - and only with the rise of neoliberalism the ‘massive critical reading of the lack of democracy’ was set free. This is the same kind of misconception as to imagine that the modern nations have always existed, yet for whatever reasons were dormant throughout the ages until they ‘woke up’ in the nineteenth century. It is very problematic to assume that had the welfare state regime never been put in place, this contemporary feeling of lack of democratic representation would have emerged earlier, for instance in the 1950s. We are living through this democratic deficit at this particular moment simply due to the fact that the evolution of our social relations has shifted our conception of what democracy should look like. Therefore, Miszlivetz equally misses the point when he suggests that the ‘public attention has shifted its focus increasingly to the quality of democracy’ as a result of the ‘disappearance of bipolar logic, the collapse of the ideological, political and the military “threat of Communism”.’ This again assumes the contemporary democratic deficit to have existed beforehand, which was merely being blocked within the social consciousness by supposedly more urgent matters. We may compare this with Inglehart and Welzel’s approach to social value changes. According to them, ‘the extent to which self-expression values (or individualism) prevail over survival values (or collectivism) reflects a society’s level of socioeconomic development: as external constraints on human choice recede, people (and societies) place increasing emphasis on self-expression values or individualism.’ Arguably, there was no need for any external constraints in the past, for neither the self-expression values nor this post-modern individualism existed at that time.

What is more, it can not be overemphasised that ‘this “withdrawal of the elites” has been paralleled by citizen disengagement.’ This illustrates well that both of these processes are merely two sides of the same coin, with this coin being the evolution of social consciousness. Hence, it is wrong to blame the left for having abandoned its ‘traditional’ economic issues and the concerns of the labouring classes in the second half of the twentieth century. This ‘traditional left’ is as much a historical victim of the changing social consciousness as the liberal representative democracy. Equally, one misses the point by claiming that ‘much of the responsibility for the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the U.S. must be placed squarely at the feet of the Democratic, Labour, Social Democratic and Socialist parties that have failed in this regard.’ We have before us the constant transformation of social relations with the corresponding shifts within the whole societal ideological framework. And all activity by any political organisation must also always be placed within this framework.

So, after having established the essence of the contemporary crisis of democracy, where is this trajectory of social change taking us? Arguably, the symptoms are by now quite visible. Kundnani notes that ‘citizens no longer simply want to elect their leaders every four or five years and do as they are told in the period in between’ and that ‘there seems to be growing demand from citizens to be more involved in the ongoing process of deliberation and decision-making.’ The author even provides examples from Ireland and Iceland where elements of the potential future political model emerge. These new aspects are even taken into consideration by European donors - with the focus on furthering the democratic reach across the globe - who are witnessing an emerging generation that seeks more direct democracy and ‘tend to reject standard forms of leadership.’ Gianolla himself refers to ‘initiatives as they are emerging in Italy, characterised by their being informal, autonomous, oriented to policies and not politics (nor elections), and for the primacy of making as opposed to demanding.’ Another very interesting study has found that ‘the most prevalent demand of protesters around the world in the period 2006–2020 was for “real democracy”.’ Therefore, while the idea of a democratic society has hardly ever been more entrenched than it is today, it is its application that is no longer adequate within our consciousness. To borrow from Offe, at stake here is ‘not the values but the mode of implementation of values.’ This explains why Krastev describes the contemporary social movements as ‘flatly uninterested in taking power’ and revolting ‘not against the government, but against being governed.’ Finally, we seem to be also moving towards a society with much greater horizontalism and with less weight and importance given to leadership.

All of what has just been enumerated above could be transposed into Offe’s concept of the society’s emancipation from the state. Inglehart and Welzel also note the priority of ‘civic autonomy over state authority.’ And among all the different protest impulses over the last decade or so, perhaps the most outstanding and characteristic event was the Occupy movement. Unsurprisingly, the evaluations differed widely among the numerous observers. Khanna, for instance, defines it directly as ‘a challenge to the very logics of capitalism and representative democracy.’ Others, like Krastev, had less appreciation:

‘Revolutions are driven by ideologies and seek desperately to capture governing power - real revolutionaries have ideas and want to win at virtually any cost. Neither of these things was true of recent protests and protesters. With their lack of ideology and concrete demands, they were literally rebels without a cause.’

One may raise the question whether such a conception of revolution is not too narrow. Dardot and Laval seem to be much more capable of considering the revolution of our historical moment not as simply taking of the power, but rather as the moment when the society manages to establish itself as the direct organiser of its internal life. Therefore, in contrast to Krastev, these French writers manage to contemplate a world without great political leaders, as well as a self-governing society without any rulers above it. Furthermore, for Krastev, the fact that the Occupy-type social explosions did not fit in within the traditional framework of political action shows that these have ‘not marked the return of revolutionary politics.’ Akshay Khanna, on the other hand, would disagree:

‘The relevance of these events, in other words, cannot be assessed simply in terms of “results” or structural changes that they instigate. They are about realising the possibility of acting in a way one feels is right, regardless of law and authority.’

According to Krastev’s criteria, the student revolts of the late 1960s would also seem to fall into the category of failures. However, as noted by Barker, even though they were ‘often brief and spasmodic, they altered the balance of ideas and values in advanced capitalist society.’ And most importantly, today our Western societies are much closer to what these students were fighting for than to the type of society they were fighting against. Namely, our social world is now much less autocratic, less paternalistic, with greater individual autonomy and with greater equality between the sexes. To use a banal example, even if the Great French Revolution would have failed at the end of the eighteenth century, the feudal regime would still not have survived till our days. Hence, if history teaches us anything here, it is that there is a very high probability that these novel types of political engagement are harbingers of the new emerging society. Unfortunately, Krastev does not find anything of this sort even when he himself explains that the ‘people who occupied the squares got a sense of power that was absent in the voting booth.’

But Krastev is not the only one to ignore the significance of the changing social consciousness at work here. Colin Crouch likewise appears to not be capable of seeing beyond the world of political parties and state institutions. He finds it essential to stem ‘the slide into post-democratic elite domination of the political agenda’, instead of preparing oneself for a world without any political elite at all. In addition, Blühdorn and Butzlaff claim that the obsolescence of the ‘traditional notions of identity’ would ‘render social organisation, consensual decision-making and collective action ever more difficult.’ But if the Occupy movements, the Indignados in Spain, or the so-called Arab Spring uprisings were not collective action and perfect examples of social organisation, then what were they? Society which organises its life on the basis of direct democracy needs neither the political parties, nor any specific political programmes, nor strong political leaders. All of these had specific purposes to serve up till now, but the growth of material productivity is now rendering these purposes obsolete.

To conclude this part, there is no reason why our future society could not be run along the lines proposed by Dardot and Laval. But if it will, this will not be because we had the chance to have two creative intellectuals who came up with ‘the kinds of rules that may not only overturn historical customs but may also grow to become customs themselves over time.’ Rather, their work should be considered merely as a potential symptom of the fact that we are moving towards a new model of society. Whatever this society will look like, it will be as a result of the underlying social relations within its material reproduction. Offe stated that the new social movements largely believed that the course of social history ‘can be created and changed by people and social forces determined to do so.’ The point, however, is to explain why these social forces have set out to make the particular social changes. The third part of this text will discuss the causes that push us towards a more autonomous and less hierarchical society with direct democracy as its political model. In other words, what are the material foundations that could save all of these propositions from becoming a teleological narrative?

III Part

We now turn to the historical processes whereby the increasing productivity of the means of material reproduction brings changes upon the social relations, and this in turn has an impact upon society’s ideological superstructure. While this social development is embodied in a constant progression, for our purposes here it will be useful to arbitrarily create and isolate fixed representative historical periods. Three such arbitrary historical intervals within the last two centuries are proposed: the era of the so-called classical liberalism, the subsequent corporatist Keynesian period and, finally, the latest decades which are commonly described as the neo-liberal era. At the end, an attempt will be made to explain the basis for the apparent obsolescence of this latest historical period and the potential transition towards a Communist society.

To begin with, classical liberalism and its ideology of laissez-faire corresponded to the relatively nascent capitalist economy at the time when the individual units of the means of production had a relatively limited range of productivity. They were equally multiple and individually no match for the power of the society in the form of the state. As a result, this liberalism was based upon the notion that the state should not intervene in the economy. Moreover, one of the key characteristics of this period was the preoccupation with the protection of contemporary individual rights from the encroachment of the state. However, due to the constant technological innovation and progress in material productivity, social relations were bound to evolve. How were they evolving? Well, having four large factories with each producing a million of a particular article of consumption constitutes radically altered social relations from when there were 400 smaller factories with each producing only 10 000.

This new social world of more productive and less numerous units of production created the social consciousness wherein the individual had lost his primacy. This reflected the new power balance of the means of production vis-à-vis the society. As explained by Couperus, from now on ‘the individual was replaced by functional groups as the basic cells of the body politic, individual elections were not perceived as a sine qua non for democratic politics and socio-economic (group) interests fostered the production of a common good.’ We have entered here the so-called Keynesian consensus of state involvement and oversight of the national economies, ‘that remained unchallenged by any significant forces on either the political Right or Left.’ Again, it must be stressed that had Keynes never lived, we would still have had the ‘Keynesian period’ - even if under a different name. Furthermore, this historical moment has also been described by Habermas as the ‘process of “societal-isation” of the state and “state-ification” of society’, whereby ‘the mutual reliance and interdependence of state and organised social interests became widely accepted in political, economic and social thought and practice.’ The range of productivity of the units of production made it imperative for the society to collectively supervise their activities, and this had the effect of an ideological split into two opposing interests, namely the owners against the rest of the public. This division constituted the foundation of the political environment that was dominated by the mass parties, serving the purpose of representing these two political camps. It is also within such a context that organised labour would find itself playing a central political role.

Equally to classical liberalism, the Keynesian consensus was likewise bound to dissipate. Undoubtedly, this process would have run its course without any political input from Thatcher or Reagan. Further growth of productivity resulted in the units of production outgrowing the reach of the society. Whereas beforehand the society had split itself into two general camps that fought over the economic interests stemming from the means of production still within its reach, now these two camps would simply disappear. This is, arguably, at the core of the ‘death of the grand ideological narratives’, whereby the elections would ‘no longer offer a grand choice between competing worldviews.’ Here begins the consensus where ‘both centre-left and centre-right mainstream parties embraced the neo-liberal policies that became hegemonic in the 1980s and 1990s.’ Moreover, as this formerly internal conflict was displaced from within the society, from now on its members would have to confront the power of capital - hanging above them - on a much more individualised basis. Therefore, this novel relationship between the society and the means of production instigated the often-denounced individualism and the so-called ‘identity politics’. It is equally responsible for the ‘shift from industrial to postindustrial values’ within Inglehart and Welzel’s framework. Finally, this moment also closes the historical movement behind Crouch’s ‘parabola of working-class politics’, and opens up the space for Offe’s ‘new paradigm’ with its ‘new politics’ and ‘new protest movements’.

Whereas during the neo-liberal period we already witness the decline of the ideological justification for the mass parties and general elections, this era of ‘there is no alternative’ did not halt the technological advances. And this progress has even further negative consequences for the dominant political model. Once we reach a stage where one factory, for instance, employing merely 200 workers supplies certain articles of consumption for half a continent, this plausibly shifts the social consciousness to regard the private ownership of the means of production as no longer compatible with their range of productivity. Direct social control over the means of production implies that all remaining divergent economic interests cease to exist. And it is only natural that the institutions that once mediated between them, such as the parliamentary representative democracy, would be left with no further purposes to serve. Hence, this also implies that the transition to Communism encompasses the transition to direct democracy.

Even though not basing himself on dialectical materialism, Crouch nonetheless connects relatively correctly the growth of the global firm with his ‘post-democracy’. Also, Miszlivetz is not far behind, since for him the ‘roots of the present crisis of democracy can be found in the increasingly unequal and imbalanced relationship between representatives of markets, governments and societies.’ This is the material foundation, it is argued here, underneath society’s ever growing desire for direct action, direct participation and direct democracy. Therefore, Blühdorn and Butzlaff are looking in the wrong direction when they place ‘the conditions of advanced modern societies (differentiation, complexity, acceleration, etc.)’ as the grave digger of the ‘traditional-style representative democracy.’

To recap, the capitalist world of multiple units of production constitutes a society with internal conflicting material interests. In order for them to be managed, capitalist society needs a representative political model wherein these interests can be defended. This necessity of representation is also closely related to the need of having political leaders and formal organisational structure. The outgrowing of the society by the economic forces has already turned this model into a void and merely formal institution. Its sole remaining function today is the containment of society's general common interest against these productive actors that now operate beyond the reach of the society. Inevitably, this shift also impacted the state-society relationship, with the latter considering itself as being ever more constrained by the former. Finally, it is hypothesised here that the continuous growth of material productivity will eventually leave the society with no choice but to take over these forces of production into direct social control. While this would give the raison d'être of representative democracy the ultimate blow, we are already witnessing the signs of its demise.

Conclusion

It was noted in the introduction that this text could be seen as a reaction to the numerous pessimistic accounts within the scholarly world. So how much optimism could one find within the approach taken here? The answer depends on one’s expectations. As noted by Krastev, given the contemporary conjuncture, it is ‘almost impossible to avoid drawing parallels between the current political turmoil in Central Europe and the crisis of democracy in Europe between the world wars.’ But is there any risk of a repeat of the interwar Fascist historical moment? Here we may remain optimistic, since the contents of these two historical environments vary significantly. In contrast to the interwar years, today the problem is not too much democracy, but rather too little democracy. Couperus explains that the interwar critique of the political model had focused upon ‘the lack of efficacy (and efficiency) of parliamentary decision-making, the perceived dangers of mass democracy and party politics, or the inability of the democratic state to legislate and govern according to a clearly articulated common good.’ Essentially, interwar authoritarianism was merely one face of the corporatist consensus, so well reflected in the primacy given to ‘societal group interests’. It is clear that today’s crisis of democracy - with the prevailing preoccupation over the lack of political representation - is completely different in terms of its content.

For this reason, despite all the contemporary reactionary rhetorics, academics do find ‘something democratic about the energy that propels “populist” parties.’ Wiebke Keim concludes, in relation to the populists’ claims of representation, ‘that while the current far right can no longer be considered fascist, we have to consider it post-fascist.’ The pessimistic nuance, of course, is that these ‘post-fascist’ are equally capable of committing horrible acts. And yet, overall, if dialectical materialism is accepted as the basis of understanding historical social change, the future might not look that bleak. Krastev himself accepts the fact that today’s ‘populism is antiliberal but it is not antidemocratic.’ Moreover, when comparing it to populism of the interwar years, it is not sufficient to merely denote the much more democratic character of the former. One must also never lose sight of the circumstance that the interwar democracies themselves were much more autocratic than ours today. And the only way to reverse all this social change is to regress technologically back to the previous levels of economic productivity.

Of course, if one is not working on the basis of dialectical materialism, the current reactionary surge might indeed raise doubts over ‘the idea of a steady progression towards an ever more liberal, pluralistic, tolerant and democratic society.’ Very likely, Blühdorn and Butzlaff would have also doubted in 1815 over the progression away from feudal social norms. Hence, they are arguably on the wrong side of the debate against Inglehart and Norris, whereby this text agrees that the contemporary reactionary movements ‘ought to be read as “an angry and resentful counter-revolution” to “the silent revolution of the 1970s”.’

However, for the same reasons that it is impossible to permanently reverse social progress, it is also impossible to fast forward it. Essentially, we have been living under capitalist mode of social organisation because it corresponds to the levels of material productivity achieved by humanity so far.

But this by no means implies a defeatist stance. Rather, it remains essential to go after every potential opportunity of making social progress, since it only becomes possible to evaluate any political action retrospectively. But above all, there is no need to search for the revolutionary agent, for there is none and neither there has ever been one. As put by Freyenhagen in his work on Adorno, ‘if the transformation of the world failed, its interpretation also requires rethinking.’ In fact, this transformation that the radical left is hoping for has not failed, it merely has not arrived yet. But in order to understand why one would consider it to have failed, its interpretation indeed requires rethinking.

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