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DOI: 10.1177/030981680408300107
2004 28: 167 Capital & Class
Werner Bonefeld
Farewell Johannes

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167
Farewell Johannes
Farewell Johannes
Johannes Agnolis death in deprived us of one of
the most important thinkers of the categorical
imperative of human emancipation.
J
ohannes Agnoli is dead. He died on the (th of May in
San Quirico di Moriano, Tuscany. He was ;8 years old.
Since his retirement from the Free University of Berlin
in 11, he had lived in his native Italy in a house that he
had bought when the West-German backlash against the
radical movements of the 1;os had reached its peakthe
German Autumn of 1;;. One has to wonder whether he
thought then that he would actually be able to ever live in
his new home. This not because he favoured the Siberian
Winters in Berlin but because of the backlash itself. His
comrade and friend Toni Negri, and many other Italian
comrades, were moved from teaching the categorical
imperative of human emancipation to prison. His comrade
Peter Brckner, with whom he had co-authored The
Transformation of Democracy in 168, each contributing a
book-length chapter, had been expelled from his teaching
post at the University of Hanover. After a long and prolonged
battle over the right of a professor to hold and express
independent thoughts, Brckner was re-instated in 181. He
died shortly afterwards.
Agnoli was one of the categorical imperatives most
important thinkers, in Germany and beyond. His experience
of the German Autumn of 1;; brought to the fore, if indeed
that was needed, the important dierence between scholarly
work and loyalty to the Constitution of political power, two
dierent and conicting endeavors.
Agnoli argued that scholarly work was not to serve existing
powers, but that its determination entailed the critique of
all forms of constituted power (Macht). Its task was, invoking
Kants response to the request for a declaration of loyalty to
the constitution from the Prussian King, to reveal the deceitful
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Capital & Class #83 168
publicity of a constituted order and not to contribute to its
mystication.
He was the practical theoretician of West-Germanys 168
and his The Transformation of Democracy gave theoretical
expression to the then extra-parliamentary opposition and
to numerous generations who took Marxs insight seriously:
that all those who live from their labour and the sale of their
labour power nd themselves directly opposed to the form
in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists,
have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State;
in order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they
must overthrow the State (The German Ideology). Agnolis
work focused on the critique of the political, of the constituted
power of capitalist social relations. This critique was not
one of academic fashion dictated, as it were, by conditions
of extra-parliamentary movements. Conditions change and
many extra-parliamentarians became parliamentarians.
Agnolis work was that of the categorical imperative of
human emancipation whatever the time and whatever the
demands of power (Macht). His was the endeavour of reason
this weapon of critique which thinks the organised nega-
tion of all those relations where Man exists as a miserable,
exploited and dominated being.
Agnoli was the thinker of human dignity. He thought not
with his head down, bowing to existing forms of domination
and seeking respectability through critical criticism where
everything that is criticised is also endorsed as the best of
all worlds. His head breathed the clear air of reason: that is,
the society of the free and equal. Nor did he think while
kneeling before the altar of relativism, where the critique of
existing relations goes forward alongside the critical realist
conviction that miserable human conditions need not to be
changed, but only interpreted more favourably. His was the
critique of constructive thought.
He was an honest and sincere thinker. Conict, he argued,
was conducive to the stability of bourgeois social relations,
as long as it is handled constructively. Constructively handled
conicts do not challenge existing social relations of
domination. Such conicts work within the forms of a
bourgeois world, arming rather than negating the forms
of capitalist domination such as the form of the state, as
potentially useful instruments of revolutionary change from
within. Against the notion of conict as a means of achieving
institutional recognition, acceptance and power, he argued
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Farewell Johannes
that the incorporation of negative power into those same
bourgeois institutions that it ostensibly seeks to abolish from
within, or much less based on revolutionary rhetoric, to
transform through honest and committed reform work,
renders negative power powerlessit disarms itself. Instead,
then, of the revolutionising of institutions, negative power
is institutionalized and thus made responsible for the
reproduction of capitalist social relations. And the seizure
of the state and its use as an instrument of emancipation?
The state, he argued, is not a neutral form that can be used
for dierent, antagonistic social interests. It is not a state in
capitalist society but a capitalist state. Its seizure does not
lead to human emancipation but to the employment of its
form-determined role as a coercive power in relation, especi-
ally, to those who were ostensibly seen as the objects of
emancipation. Objects they remain; what changes is the mode
of domination. Against revolutionary conceptions that
operate on the terrain or within the forms of bourgeois
society, he argued in favour of social autonomy: that is, the
self-determination and self-emancipation of the social indivi-
dual in organisational forms of resistance that anticipate the
goal of revolution in their means of resistance: human ema-
ncipation.
His critique of the political was thus a critique in favour
of anti-institutional forms of struggle, in favour of
organisational forms of human social self-determination, of
the social autonomy of the dependent masses in and against
capitalist forms of domination. Agnolis stance was hardly
original. He merely agreed with Marxs argument that the
coercion of bourgeois society is concentrated in the form of
the state. What made his stance original was that he analysed
this insight in contemporary society. Agnolis originality lies
in his understanding of Marxs work as a judgment on
existence, as a conceptualised social practice. Like Marx,
he rejected forms of anti-capitalism that do not oppose, but
rather derive their rationale from constituted capitalist forms.
This, then, accounts for his focus on social autonomy. The
enunciation of social autonomy is all too often treated as
some sort romantic abdication of working-class politics, a
refusal to pose the hard question of socialism as the seizure
of power on behalf of the working class. Yet, again, Agnolis
categorical imperative of human emancipation as the
movement of social autonomy was not original. His
originality was its disputation in the context of
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contemporaneous class struggles. This is the classical
enunciation of autonomy as a negative power: Every
emancipation is a return of the human world and human
relationships to humans themselves. Political emancipation
is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of
bourgeois society, an egoistic and independent individual,
on the other hand, to a citizen of the state, a moral person.
Not until the real individual man has taken the abstract citizen
back into himself and, as an individual man, has become a
species-being in his empirical life, in his individual work
and individual relationships, not until man recognises and
organises his forces propres as social forces and thus no
longer separates social forces from himself in the form of
political forces, not until then will human emancipation be
completed (The Jewish Question). Some might object because
the quotation is from the early Marx; and since Marx is said
to have matured with age, a quotation from the mature Marx
is called for. The mastery of capital over man has to be
abolished so that Mans social reproduction is controlled
by him. And the state? Its purpose is the perpetuation of
the labourerthe sine qua non of the existence of capital
(Capital, vol. I).
His critique of the political and his critique of constructive
conict belong together. Unlike his orthodox Marxist
adversaries, who reveled in the dogmatisation of critical
thought and therewith its transformation into ritualised
thinking of a quasi religious sort, Agnoli, with relish, posed
revolution as a question. Orthodox endeavours, in contrast,
detest destructive critique and are suspicious of any mistrust
in their stance since it, like a mole digging underfoot, under-
mines the belief in the correctness of conditions and revolu-
tionary conceptions. Agnolis was a theory of heresy, of
sensuous critical activity, of subversion and revolution. He
had no time for dogmatic certainties or orthodox ideas of
the seizure of state power. He held on to Marxs dictum that
for the social individuals to be free to self-determine their
own conditions, the state had to be abolished.
Marxs dictum that the emancipation of the working class
can only be achieved by the working class itself was his
dictum. His stance was that of the society of the free and
equal, of social autonomy in, against, and beyond capitalist
social relations.
Unlike many of his comrades of 168, he saw no virtue
in the long march through the institutions, and his critique
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Farewell Johannes
of the transformation of the social movements of the 1;os
into the form of the Party, the German Greens, was of truly
outstanding quality and foresight. It showed a professor who
takes himself seriously. He professed. Those who seriously
want freedom but battle all destablising activity contradict
themselves.
Agnoli did not write pamphlets, nor did he engage in
agitation and propaganda. His was the business of enlighten-
ment, so that poverty and misery achieves consciousness of
themselves: enlightenment as subversive consciousness and
revolutionary practice.
In his critique of orthodox Marxism; in his analysis of
fascism, of technocracy, of the recomposition of the state,
especially during the 1;os; in his critique of the form of
the party as a means of emancipation, and of the form of the
state as an instrument of revolution; in his critique of the
deceitful publicity of liberal democracy and its transforma-
tions; in his contributions to socialist thought and practice,
or his work on the history of subversive thought and the
critical tradition of the Enlightenment: in all his work he
remainedwith charm, revolutionary patience and irony
a professor of antagonism and revolution.
He was not an administrator of thought. He thought.
Agnoli was the thinker of the organised negation of inhuman
conditions. He did not graft his subversive cunning onto
capitalist society and its state, as if it were possible to criticise
the things without being within them. He stood within the
things themselves, posing the categorical imperative of
emancipation, analysing the class antagonism, and engaging
in the class struggle.
Nor was he interested in the academic industry of
conceptional innovation, which pretends that only that
thought is true which sells on the market. Thought, for him,
was not a trend-setting commodity that nds its means and
endsits marketin the Zeitgeist. He thought subversion
whatever the Zeitgeist.
His ad hominem critique of capital and its state espoused
human emancipation as the sine qua non of thought that
takes itself seriously and, because of this, uncovers and
focuses on the root of human existence. But for Man, the
root is Man himself and Man is the highest being for Man
1
.
Agnoli took the categorical imperative seriously: all relations
in which Man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable
being have to be overthrown so that Man is in control of his
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Capital & Class #83 172
own aair, as emancipated social individuals who relate to
each other as equals in freedom. The society of the free and
equal where each receives according to their needs constituted
for Agnoli the categorical imperative of the critique of capital
and its state.
His Destruction as the Determination of the Scholar in
Miserable Times (1z/zoo) argued with biting irony
against the constructive endeavors of the Zeitgeist. He
returned to this issue in his last publications: The Hardening
of the Political Form: Post-fascism within Globalisation
(zoo); The Negative Potential (zooz), Emancipation: Paths
and Goals (zooz), and The Transformation of the Left
(zooo). The last title oers an intriguing twist. His
Transformation of Democracy of 168 showed the necessity
of extra-institutional politics, as the only reliable safeguard
against the dead-end of institutional politics and its
constructive endeavours to humanise inhuman conditions.
Such politics, he argued, are premised on constructively-
handled conicts, arming but not negating bourgeois
society and its institutions. It thus seeks to square the circle:
the humanisation of inhuman conditions presupposes these
same conditions and thus accepts them as eternal. We all
live in bourgeois society. It can, however, not be left behind
by merely living within it. The negation of bourgeois society
moves in and against its constituted forms. This is the site of
class antagonism and class struggle. Only organised negation
is able to transform the existence of class struggle in and
against bourgeois social relations into the beyond of human
history. His Transformation of the Left (zooo) analysed
the idea of national self-determination as a form of socialist
opposition to globalisation. What is anti-capitalistic in anti-
capitalism when it seeks to regulate capital without touching
the relations of exploitation; when it poses the national state
as the sovereign power that places controls on capital to
secure the common national good? What is the common
national good? The function and role of the state is to achieve
homogeneity of national conditions. In its liberal conception,
this means the equality of all before the law. In its Leninist
conception, it means the equality of labour. In its nationalist
version it means equality as a nation, as a Volk.
In its essence, the Leninist conception of equality amounts
to an economy of labour; the liberal conception of equality
to the much praised democracy of demand and supply; and
the national conception of equality in terms of Volk entails
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Farewell Johannes
the projection of a classless national community whose
existence is threatened by the external enemy within. The
armation of the national state, instead of criticising
globalisation through organisational forms of resistance that
anticipate, in their means, the ends of the society of the free
and equal, sacrices reason in favour of abstractand, indeed,
regressiveforms of equality, seeking salvation through the
strengthening of the national state as an instrument of anti-
globalisation. The purpose, Agnoli argued, of capital is to
make prot, not to create employment. The political
existence of this purpose is the state. By contrast, the proje-
ction of the national state as an instrument of anti-globali-
sation arms the state as if it were an independent being
which possesses its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian
bases (Critique of the Gothaer Programme). It thus amounts
to a mere rebellion for a virtuous statea state, that is, which
secures the communal interests of bourgeois society.
Regardless, as Agnoli argued, of its historically changing
forms, the role and function of the bourgeois state has always
been to secure the communal interests of a capitalistically-
organised form of social reproduction: capitalist accumu-
lation.
His The Negative Potential consists of a series of interviews
held in zooo and zoo1. The focus is on human self-
emancipation, the means and ends of revolution, the purpose
of scholarly work, negation and subversion, the critique of
capital and its state, and the critique of an anti-capitalism
without anti-capitalism, that is, an anti-capitalism that merely
seeks to reform the institutional regulation of the exploitation
of labour.
The Negative Potential: that was his work, an endeavour
that cannot be commodied nor commercialised. The
Frankfurter Allgemeine argued after the republication of his
Transformation of Democracy in 1o, that his writings do
not meet the demands of the market. The newspaper got it
right. One wonders, though, whether it understood its own
assessment. Subversive thinking is that which the market
society of demand and supply fails to commercialize and
absorb.
His teaching and writing was a passionate aair of
disputation. Marxs motto, doubt everything, was Agnolis.
To doubt is to reveal: that is, theoretical mysteries nd their
rational explanation in the understanding and comprehension
of human social practice.
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He had little time for the demands of academia: publish
in refereed journals; get research funding; nd respectability
as a recognised member of the profession; invent a new
concept and corner the market by setting the research agenda
and achieve fame at least for a brief moment; voice criticism,
but do not engage in critique, etc.
In contrast to the power-point thinking and delivering
lecturer, Agnoli was an orator. Critical thinking, he insisted,
consists in the question posednot in the answers to
questions not asked. Why do human social relations take the
form of relations between things, and what needs to be done
to achieve human emancipation from the perverted existence
of human social practice as a personication of things?
He pursued his questions with charming irony, espousing
the self-contradictory endeavour of thought that, ostensibly
critical, seeks respectability by oering positive proposals
to eect the humanisation of a capitalist world. Such
humanisation is in itself to be welcomed. Yet, only radical
opposition to capital and its state, he argued, is able to obtain
humanising concessionspacication eected through what
Marx called, in his analysis of the struggle over the reduction
of the working day, the golden chain of legal regulation.
He never tired to demand democracynot as some sort
of democracy that abstracts from the social individual, but
the democracy of the society of the free and equal. Social
autonomy and democracy belong together. Democratisation
without human emancipation presupposes the exploitation
of Man by Man as eternal. Humanisation of inhuman
conditions, he argued time and time again, presupposes
inhuman conditions and it these that require democratic
transformation, so that Man is in possession of himself as a
subject. His negation of contemporary conditions invoked
the democratic self-determination of the social individual
who, through the realm of freedom, regulates the realm of
necessity in freedom from coercion: that is, through demo-
cratic means of social self-organization, through human-
social cooperation. Human emancipation and the idea of
the humanisation of bourgeois institutions belong to dierent
worlds. For Agnoli, human emancipation meant a classless
society, a society where domination of Man over Man is
abolished.
In his last published work in English, he again discussed
the categorical imperative of human emancipation, insisting
that the means of resistance have to anticipate the ends of
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175
Farewell Johannes
human emancipation in their organisational forms. Should
the left put up candidates for elections, create cosmopolitan
democratic structures far removed and abstracting from the
real human subject, or should democracy be sought where,
according to the advocates of liberal-democracy, it does not
belong: the democratic self-organisation of Mans
relationships to himself (Grundrisse), of the associated
producers who, through the realm of freedom, organise the
realm of necessity according to individual human needs?
His scholarly work of negation will surely be missed.
Agnoli was one of the few veritable thinkers of human eman-
cipation. We have lost a friend, a comrade, a teacher, and we
will have to do without his charm and irony. Above all, we
will have to do without his delightful and always challenging
formulation of the categorical imperative of negation, of
human emancipation. Farewell!
Werner Bonefeld
Footnote
1. One referee objected to the term ad hominem and found
the sentence but for Man, the root is Man himself clumsy.
The referee thought that ad hominem means to attack a
line of thought by association, that is, by impugning the
characters of its supporters, and that I was therefore
defending socialism on the basis that all socialists are
really nice and all non-socialists not nice. In fact, I was
quoting in both cases from Marxs Critique of Hegels
Philosophy of Right. (CW, , p. 18z). Furthermore, Marx
dened the meaning of his critique of political economy
in similar terms, arguing that the purpose of his critique
was to return economic relations to relations between Man.
See my contribution to Capital & Class no. ;, for an
exposition of Marxs ad hominem critique of economic
categories. Man with a capital M is used here and
throughout to mean Mensch.
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Capital & Class #83 176
Bibliography
Principal German publications
Agnoli, J. (1o), Die Transformation der Demokratie und andere
Schriften zur Kritik der Politik , a ira, Freiburg, 1o. Agnoli,
J. (1), Der Staat des Kapitals und weitere Schriften zur Kritik
der Politik, a ira, Freiburg. Agnoli, J. (16), Subversive
Theorie. Die Sache Selbst und ihre Geschichte, a ira, Freiburg.
Agnoli, J. (1;), Faschismus ohne Revision, a Ira, Freiburg.
Agnoli, J. 18), und die Folgen, a ira, Freiburg. Agnoli,
(zoo1), Politik und Geschichte, a ira, Freiburg. Burgmer,
Ch. (zooz), Das Negative Potential. Gesprche mit Johannes
Agnoli, a ira, Freiburg.
Other selected German language publications
Agnoli, J., C. Brendel and I. Mett (1;1), Die revolutionren
Aktionen der russischen Arbeiter und Bauern. Die Kommune von
Kronstadt (Karin Kramer) Verlag, Berlin.
Agnoli, J. (1;(), Rosa Luxemburg heute, in C. Pozzoli (ed.)
Rosa Luxemburg oder the Bestimmung des Sozialismus
(Suhrkamp) Frankfurt.
Agnoli, J. (1;), Gesprch mit Fiat Arbeitern ber Klasse
und Staat in Deutschland, in ibid., berlegungen zum
brogerlichen Staat (Wagenbach) Berlin.
______ (1;8), Jesuiten, Kommunisten und Indianer, in
Zwei Kulturen? Tunix, Mescalero und die Folgen (sthetik und
Kommunikation) Berlin.
______ (1;), Versuch, Strafkammer und Staatsan-
waltschft ber Faschistoides and Form Staat aufzuklren,
in Da ist nur freizusprechen. Die Verteidigungsreden im Berliner
Mescalero-Proze (Rowohlt) Reinbeck.
______ Gesprch mit Johannes Agnoli, Sozialistisches
Jahrbuch, ed. by W. Dreen (iva) Tbingen, 1;.
Mandel, E. and J. Agnoli (18o), Oener Marxismus. Ein Gesprch
ber Dogmen, Orthodoxie und die Hresie der Realitt (Campus)
Frankfurt.
Agnoli, J. (18), Zwischen Bewegung und Institution, TAZ,
18.z.8.
______ (18), Lockerungen fr ein neues linkes Denken,
TAZ, 1.1.8.
______ (zooo), Die Transformation der Linken, Die Zeit,
1;.z.oo.
Agnoli, J. (zoo), Die Verhrtung der politischen Form. Post-
faschismus in der Globalisierung, in Grigat, S. (ed.)
Transformation des Postnazismus, a ira, Freiburg, zoo.
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177
Farewell Johannes
Festschriften
Bruhn, J., M. Dahlmann and C. Nachtmann (eds.) (1),
Geduld und Ironie. Johannes Agnoli zum . Geburtstag, a ira,
Freiburg.
______ (zooo), Kritik der Politik. Johannes Agnoli zum .
Geburtstag, a ira, Freiburg.
English Language Publications
Agnoli, J. (166), Political Parties and Parliament in West
Germany, International Socialist Journal, vol. , no. 1.
______ (1zzoo), Destruction as the Determination of
the Scholar in Miserable Times, Common Sense, no. 1z;
revised translation reprinted in Bonefeld, W. (ed.)
Revolutionary Writing, Autonomedia, New York.
______ (zooo), The Market, The State and the End of
History, in Bonefeld, W. and K. Psychopedis (eds.) The
Politics of Change, Palgrave, London.
______ (zooz), Emancipation: Paths and Goals, in
Bonefeld, W. and S. Tischler (eds.) What is to be Done?,
Aldershot, Ashgate.
For a bibliography, including other-language publications, of
Agnolis writings up to 1, see Geduld und Ironie.
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