Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

479--- ----- --,.---------- ------Popular Sovereignty as ProcedureThe holistic notion of a politicized society of workers remainedcentral. The early socialists were still confident that the convivialforms of life of freely associated workers would emerge spontaneouslyfrom properly organized production processes. Faced withthe complexity of developed, functionally differentiated societies,this idea ofworkers' self-governance had to fail-and fail even if theworkers' social utopia was imagined, with Marx, as a realm offreedom to be established on the basis of an ongoing, systemicallyregulated realm of necessity. Even Lenin's strategy, the seizure ofpower by professional revolutionaries, could not make up for thelack of political theory. The practical effects of this deficit areevident in those aporias that to this day still grip bureaucraticsocialism, with its political avant-garde frozen into nomenklatura.3.2On the other hand, achieving the social-welfare compromise hasbeen a disappointing experience for the reformist unions andparties that operate within the framework of constitutional democracy.That is, they had to be content with an adjusted version ofbourgeois liberalism and forego the redemption of radical democraticpromises. The intellectual kinship between reformism andleft liberalism (between Eduard Bernstein and Friedrich Naumann,still the godsons of the social-liberal coalition) rests on the sharedgoal of universalizing basic rights from a social-welfare perspective.20Normalizing the status of dependent wage labor throughparticipatory political and social rights is supposed to provide themass of the population with the opportunity to live in security,social justice, and growing prosperity. On the basis of a capitalistgrowth that is both domesticated and nurtured, the parties inpower are supposed to operate the levers of administrative powerso as to implement these goals via interventions. According toorthodox Marxism, social emancipation was to be achieved througha political revolution that took possession of the state apparatusonly to smash it to pieces. Reformism can bring about socialpacification solely by way of social-welfare interventions, but indoing so parties are absorbed into an expanding state apparatus. Asparties become arms of the state, political will-formation shifts into