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Four concepts of democracy1

[1981]

In the absolute bewilderment of the cosmic malaise that produces the multiplication
of the world's objects, men are alone in the middle of the things that expand
without ceasing. Is it not true that this is already the loneliness of the time, the
general fallacy of its identity and, in the end, what can we call the second loss of
the yo?2 The set
of these ontological events leads to the question of democracy , which is the
measure of the presence of the man as an active entity facing life, in a time whose
essence is his totalization.
Well, in this work we are interested in describing four movements of the
concept of democracy in the interpretation of our time.

I. Democracy considered as a general movement of the time

Let us consider, in the first place, the problem of democracy as a general

movement of the time:

The experience -says Marx- teaches that for all these forms (the
special forms of money) to exist, it is enough with a little circulation of goods

1 [In: Rev. Bases. Expressions of Bolivian Marxist Thought (Mexico), no. 1, (1981): 101-124.
Reproduced in: Dialéctica (Mexico), year 7, núm. 12, (Sept. 1982): 11-30.
We have added references to missing pages, marking them with brackets].
two
[This first paragraph is also the first of “El mundo del Temible Willka”, chapter ii of Lo nacional-
popular en Bolivia. See this volume, pp. 221-292].

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unrolled. It doesn't happen like that with capital. The historical conditions of this
period do not occur, not much less, with the circulation of goods and money.
Capital only arises there where the owner of means of production and life finds
himself in the market as a free worker as a seller of strength and work and this
historical condition envelops all universal history.3

Here Marx is referring to the construction of the state of separation or the

release of time, or sea, the advent of yo in the sense that the existence of the
individual before capitalism is not recognized or that only in capitalism the
rudiment of the old individual concludes your act. In other words, the continuum
is proposed here, ranging from the general acquisition of individuality that
precedes the formal subsumption (its “element”) and the particular loss of
individuality that occurs in the formal subsumption.
Que el hombre libre se el requisite de la sueditación real is already quite
decisive. It is something, however, that will not obtain its true elocuence until
when it is resolved that even the real subsumption itself is possible sin el sine
qua non that is el hombre libre. It is for such a concept that it can be written that
the primary productive strength of this moment of civilization that is capitalism is
the free man. It is an infallible inference hacia el espacio de lo colectivo: the
hecho mismo de la liberad, like a mysterious and previously unknown compulsion,
is a reference to the other. As a result, one is not free among free men and,
ultimately, one is only relatively free if freedom is not a thing that understands all
men on the stage to which one refers to its existence.

Plusvalía itself is not a historical form of surplus that promotes the fusion
between committed freedom and productive socialization.
The spiritual consequences of surrendering one's independence for the agreed
time will be global. Such is the assumption that it is “a historical condition that
involves all of universal history” because from where there is no freedom, there
will be no publicity; the same valuation is the productive parallel of the legal
expansion of individual equality. El hombre ha puesto so su measure, que es el
valor, al ensemble de las unes de la materia.
It is so much so that democracy is the requirement for the existence of the
bourgeoisie, although it is clear that it itself, the bourgeoisie, in promoting the
original accumulation (because the bourgeoisie is the subject of the original
accumulation and not only its result ) , is engendering its own condition or
requirement. This is an episode the dilemma that, however, must be linked with
the ideological problems that derive from the logic of the factory and the
magnitude of value. Why is it said, in effect, that value is a historical-moral measure? because y

3 [Karl Marx, El capital, vol. 1, trans. Wenceslao Roces, Mexico, fce, 1946, p. 123].

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a given thing is a result, the sea, a movement. While history is the separation of
the moment with respect to becoming not discriminated against, morality is
already the insertion of the human into discriminated time.
With that in mind, we do not want to say that the magnitude of value is the
last ratio of the degree to which the primary productive strength of capitalism
exists, which is the freedom obtained and given to the already separated
individual. Instead, it cannot be discussed as a result of the extent to which men
are free and the way in which their freedom is exchanged on the scale of social productivity.
Habla también ello, como está a vista, de los gradas de la liberad, es decir,
a measure en que el hombre es el amo de las cosas. Nadie is free infinitely and
does not even feel it is in its limited measure in an unpunished way, because self-
interest, independence, are inputs to the erosion of the social vortex. But the
degree of their freedom is not constant, but something that is won, disputed and
lost, a measure in motion, something that is always disputed if it is not conquered
again as for the first time. It is from these prodromes that it is legitimate to signal
democracy as an indicator of the contractions and extensions of variable capital.
Esto mismo, however, is something that must be justified.

The first aspect of the logic of the factory deals with the productive
consumption of individual freedom, or sea, its productive abolition. Here the men
do not feel their freedom because the practice is not because they pierden (loss
of freedom in the aspects agreed upon and for the time agreed). Such is the
aspect of alienation or loss, but there is also another, which is the paradigmatic.
It is indisputable that the logic of the factory is also the place for the
metamorphosis of the free worker of the first circulation in the collective worker of
the productive moment. Pues bien, es el obrero colectivo la key de la ciencia de
la mundo concise como lo social. It is the horizon of visibility granted by the
collective worker, the final cause of the existence of social science as self-
awareness of the capitalist mode of production.
The conscience of freedom (because real freedom is the combination of
availability and conscience, and the salvage is available but not conscience) is at
the same time the consummation of freedom and its expansion. However, what
has been lost as an individual cannot be recovered here (returned) as a
conscience, but from the totalization to which it also concurs as a whole (as part
of the total worker). The mass concept acquires its own meaning at this point: the
freedom as pertinacy of the masses gives as a result a global freedom more
amplified than the sum of the freedoms of the individuals, whose individuality for
the rest is not possible now in the locus of it in the individual.

The recognition is, perhaps, the second function of the logic of the factory,
although it is also the most transcendental. At the margin of concentration, which is

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a symbol of the concentration of historical time by capitalism (which is the

“capacity” of the era, its nature and its seal) one can be free and never know that
it is. It is gathered from ello that the mechanism of the act that we call “being free”
consists immediately in the recognition of the freedom of
hombre siguiente (but not as a take of account, but as an imperative that occurs
within one, aunque provoked by el hombre siguiente). In this plot, class
consciousness is not democracy for us. At that moment, stop being part and
object of the democracy of others to assume the moment of self-reference.

The logic of the factory or, if you like, what Weber calls “social democracy
democracy” is, by another concept, what demonstrates the character of bourgeois
democracy. The sea: you are free to the extent that you respect (and perhaps
sacred) the logic of the factory. In other words, in both acceptances and a petition
of principle the ideological consequence of the corporeal nucleus that is the real
subjection. It could not be explained for any reason, without having this in mind,
why men do not impose in an exhaustive and sensible way the fact of their
greatest number. It's because the majority by themselves are incapable of themselves.
On the contrary, it's not just that power is not the immediate law of power or that
not all power produces power, but that it is in the logic of the factory, where many
obey very few by their own consent, where they are responsible. addiction
learning. It is, then, a school of subordination.
To put it in other terms, democracy (the state of detachment) is contained in the
dictatorship (the logic of the factory). The historical condition of the mode of
production consists in that the logic of the factory has never been based on the
logic of detachment. In this way, the dictatorship is illogical for capitalism when it
does not contain and reveals democracy, since democracy exists only because of
the nature of the dictatorship for which it exists. Such is the classical character of
the first totalization.
What does Marx want to say, for that matter, when he says that the bourgeois
and the proletarian face each other as “private owners” of different commodities?
No, since then, this has been conceived or originated by the flesh and blood
bourgeois, who claim to be more insignificant people than the universe they
symbolize. It is a fact, however, that at the objective moment of the appearance
of this social cosmos there was a sector with the best conditions of placement, of
avidity and of informational heritage for the exploitation of your homeland (including
in your specific territorial homeland, the West ) of efforts that had come without
embargo of the pain of the eternal history. With him, we don't want to sustain that
at the moment of the advent of the future, the future worker is practicing a
bourgeois act , by saying so, what is it here, because he has no other remedy to
base his act of constitution on capitalism

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the recognition, the relationship of belonging with the relationship to capitalism

or the practice of the spirit of internity is generated. All political discussions that
have something to do with popular movements or with the working class will
inevitably come to this point. Internidad, however, does not mean incapacity for
externality. Quite the contrary. He is the one who fully belongs to capitalism and
the one who built his negation, of course that without knowing it already
sometimes without wanting it. The spirit of the internity is then a requirement of
the strategic practice of the externity. It is clear that we will come back to this
when we refer to democracy as representative democracy.
As a conclusion of this deliberation on democracy as per the dictation of
the time, we will say that the sequence consists of: advent of the yo, compulsion
or anxiety for the productive delivery of the yo, collective reconstitution of the yo
from the classist praxis of the yo logic of the factory or of the factory-union-theory-
party-power pursuit. This is how, finally, we must explain the relationship
between the law of value and the construction of the modern State. In other
words, the freedom of social democratization contains at the same time the
greatness of capitalism, capable of generating masses of national and identified
individuals and the destruction of capitalism, because the socialization of
production is the preparation for the socialization of power. The very fetishism
of merchandise is a necessity because men are equal.
Son equals, but still don't know. Putting everything here means two things, there
is a doblez that is in the nature of the productive way.

II. Democracy as representation

The same reasoning above presumes that the democratic meaning has a type
of validity in terms of civil society and the other in terms of the political State,
although both will tend to have their own form of superposition or matrix.
Here something similar to value happens in terms of form: if the problems of its
successive symbolization and its manner of appearance are so important, it is
because value exists in advance as the ancestral core of society.
Where the hueso/value does not exist, we do not dispute in forms. Mutatis
mutandis, if democracy did not exist as a historical and epochal condition,
neither would we be interested in its revelation, it is to say, the representative
democratic form. One thing, however, is giving numen and context to the other.
There is, for sure, a limited degree to which the political State can receive civil
society. In general, it would be said that you can never receive it at all. The
problems of the eruption of the civil status over society and the determination of
this over that deserve special consideration. Notwithstanding this, we can at
least say that, no matter how harmonious and translucent the political State apparatus may be,

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civil society will not be able to inform it bell as far as its own democratic self-
determination.
Esto seems very simple but it is not by force. No system, capitalist or socialist,
can avoid in an absolute proportion the idea of representative democracy in such a
way that neither can avoid the character of dictatorship that is the concreteness of the
State. What interests us, therefore, is the form of the discovery or revelation of power
and, above all, in this part, the imputation of the origin of power.

It is a problem that cannot be raised in relation to the economic and social

formation in question. It does not mean at all that the quantitative implementation of
representation, its ability to express the number of men's voice in proportion to the
corresponding power, requires universality in the practice of political choice. It is a
tendency typical of the capitalist mode of production. Tiende éste, as is known, to unity.
The unit is a structural trend and the acceleration of the rotation around the unit, its
continuation. The fact of the nation in the sense that we understand it now is the
consequence of that and that is why there is a continuity between the internal market,
the national State and democracy.

A process tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie is not, however, the work of the
bourgeoisie. No one social is, in reality, the work of someone but they are all, in
exchange, of someone on the line of a determination. It is true, for example, that the
bourgeoisie needed some degree of democracy to prevail over the aristocracy. It is
much more imperative that representative democracy declared the so-called market
and that, between the two, the internal market and representative democracy compose
the framework of nationalization.
In the case of unified formations, by calling them in some way, there is no greater
structural problem than if it is properly political and phenomenal.
Esto es, the nationalization or if the internal market completes the homogeneity and
the aparejamiento of the men that, on the other hand, would not have been possible
without the palm cancellation of their particularity in the previous one; the descampesi
nizadora sea is accompanied by the sparcimiento of the hegemonic patron and obliges the

4 This is a very delicate problem. Aunque the properly state character of the State (let's say the
ratio or irresistibility) is not given by sovereignty or political power and not by the population
and the territory, which are its other elements, is to say, even though the State is not in itself
material in a relationship, with all, there are certain symptoms or bodily supports without which
the state is unheard of. The bureaucracy and the agents in general are the corporeity of the
State.
By the opposition, although by civil society it has always been defined by the social classes
and the set of the material aspects of the structure when they still have not been inflamed by
the state flow, there is no doubt that in the mediations they are like enclaves of power political
in an area that, in principle, is defined as one of political power, that is to say, something state
in partibus in a non-state space.

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men to be one identical to others around this liturgy that is the ideological core
of nationalization. In such a case, the unification or nucleation favors step by
step the democratic-bourgeois generalization, and not only because, going
back to the diffusion of material democratization, it can have as its decisive
core a moment of essential democracy, that is to say, of self-determination
popular. The enemies of the so-called bourgeois democracy tend to forget
that their starting point is perhaps the most brilliantly popular (the bourgeois-
democratic revolution).
The egalitarian process naturally refers more to the sectors that call
themselves national-popular in civil society than the bourgeoisie. In a way,
although distorted many times by a hegemony that is not the result of self-
determination, the national-popular is closer to civil society and the bourgeoisie
of the State, which is its unity, the form of unity that has achieved get. The
State, on the other hand, is never the form of the unity of society, but the
expression of its internal differentiation, it is decir, the way of dominating the
dominant side of differentiation.
It is clear that other factors had to be taken into account, such as the
pattern of deployment of plusvalía (because the State is a natural recipient of
plusvalía and the state sector of plusvalía is the measure of the existence of
the collective capitalist), of the speed of the cycle of the rotation (because this
is the rhythm of the nationalization once concluded at the level of the
infrastructure) and the biggest reconduction of the plusvalía towards the
mediations (because it is the measure of the presence of the State in the
society and of the society in the state finalism). What matters in the immediate
future is the imputation of representation in large societies, which are the
opposite case to those described above. We have to consider at least three
points: first, the non-unification of society, at least the different value of the
penetration of the unit in its sectors, which is what the abigarramiento refers
to. At its extreme, a degree of disconnection or lack of articulation between
the factors can be captured here, and then there is talk of an apparent state
because civil society is not an enumeration, it is not linked to each other in
the organic. Second, there is no national or classist unification of the ruling
class itself, which presumes a modality of circulation of plusvalía that aspires to retain it as in
Thirdly, the appearance of diachronic plans of determination, is to say, that
the nucleus of intensity of the determination is located in an erratic way
according to the state time. Here the society moves in an occasional way as
it was totalized, but around occasional calls or structural moments. It lacks,
therefore, the continuity as it becomes that is the complement of the current
unification in the countries with unification.
The very basis of the structure of this number of countries is corrupted
by the logic of the representation that says that the same electoral candidacy

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it should always produce a type of state quality. Where men are not equal or not
communicated, the results that their elective voluntad produces are not the
same. Indeed, there are sectors articulated with the market of power and sectors
exiled from representative democracy. The very topography of politics is
heterogeneous. In the fight for power, people aspire more to capturing the nuclei
of determination than to democratic candidacy.
Under these circumstances, what would be the platform of representative
democracy? As we said, it can be a moment of unusual determination (the
circumstances make it decisive, but it is not structural) or it can be included as a
majoritarian principle, but incapable of accumulating the elements of power. The
typical case is the victorious class in the insurrection that loses power because it
does not know the ceremony in which it consists.5 What is known as the political
instability of backward countries has these referents.
The nomination of the men of power can be no other thing than the election
between different members (but not different in their adscription to the nature of
the class of power) of the ruling class. In any form, the inability to self-represent
is characteristic of people who have not been converted into nations.

III. Democracy as a problem of theory

knowledge

We see, on the other hand, a verticalist description of democracy that is, in a

sense, the application of representative democracy to democracy as a requirement
of the time or the universal historical condition of capitalism. This is something
linked with the problem of the cognoscibility of the time or, at least, with the
aspect of its superstructural verifiability. In other terms, here we are going to
consider the question of democracy as a problem of the theory of knowledge.

To a considerable extent, it is legitimate to maintain that democracy fulfills

this order of things, in relation to the computation or bourgeois count of society,
a function comparable to that which holds the law of value in relation to historical
materialism. It's not that it's something connected in fine to each one of the
classes, but the classes have respect to a point of exposure or the other their
preferences, their difficulties or impossibilities. The situation of power, the
dominant being, has consequences in terms of knowledge of society.
In terms of social science itself, its value is universal as in

5 This is the case of Bolivia in 1952. See René Zavaleta Mercado, El Poder Dual, [Mexico, Siglo
xxi, 1974].

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any other science, but its starting point is a placement within a class horizon,
and its only usefulness or subsumption in the possible reality is also one of
class monopoly. After the darkening of bourgeois conscience, social science
could not be anything other than the development of the total perspective
(Goethe) considered as an act of the proletariat. This is what is seen as rare
as the analysis of society from the point of view of plusvalía.
Let's say then that Marxism itself in what it has to do with science is not like the
confirmation of a Weltanschauung from the cognitive nuez that is the plusvalía.

Esto, in what refers to prelación or proletariat centrality. All in all, the joint
measurement of politics seems to be something very different and, in any case,
from what we can see, it's just a privilege of the bourgeoisie, a final gift. Maybe
this is once again expressing the infinite productivity of contradictory and
interacting notions that are so typical of this mode of production that is disguised
with self-sarcasm.
It is said, in effect, that the fundamental character of the mode of production
is being expressed in the mode of its reproduction. Because it is based on a
particular type of surplus6 that is the plusvalía, from it follows the collective
existence, subrogable and factual (not legal) of the social classes that integrate
it; because the bourgeoisie's permanent destruction is the way of bourgeois
unity and here we are not speaking the bell that the classist and categorical
logic of the total worker, the continuity of the expansion of the productive forces
and the constant fear of the incorporated material must also cause a permanent
reorganization of the roles, placement of classes and perspectives of the
subjects that are vectors of the transfers of their compulsion as an economic
cycle. All this is not what is called reproduction on an enlarged scale as a basic
law of the capitalist mode of production. The eternal turmoil of the economic
base or its value consolidation, which is the invincible impulse, is constituted in
an antinomic determination but at the same time impositive in relation to the superstructure.
Allow yourself a digression here. The concept of reproduction on an
enlarged scale does not only designate the quantitative item that is, without a
doubt, existing. However, it is more good in the quality of the accumulation, in
its internal inter-replacement, in the replacement of one individual by another
within the general class and in the composition itself or cadence of the journey
of plusvalía or its level of efficiency of the instants of circulation, all the way to
the end, where this type of reproduction is constituted, the foundation of the
totalization process because there where things do not multiply, things do not
totalize. The Romans, as is evident, built many paths and both slavery

6 We do not use this term in its broad, convenient sense as it refers to each case. What
exceeds is referred to what is considered necessary, historical and local portion.

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how feudalism moved the agricultural frontier but nothing detracts from the
simple character of its reproduction, reproduction that is proper for the rest
of all precapitalist modes of production. The simplicity of the productive
force, which is the equation between the man in his situation and the work
environment, then led to automatic reproduction; but this does not occur nor
could it occur with capitalism where the reposition must be prepared
(Althusser). This is why the crisis of those systems cannot be explained by
the shortfall in productive expansion. Such is the comment that we can
make to the asseveration so carefully that society “moves forever”, as they
say in the bad manuals of historical materialism. In reality, what does not
change in its quality and does not support its identity has not moved (in a
sociological sense). It is to say, that the movement in its ordinary
understanding does not reach to define the meaning of the crosshairs,
always replaced, of capitalist civilization. That's what we're referring to when
we talk about the multiplication of the world. It is the systematic expansion
of production, but above all the constant unprecedented nature of historical
time as the law of repercussions for capitalism and its apex, that is the
revolutionary crisis or superstructural debacle.
The appearance of bureaucracy in its modern sense is the classic
outcome of the perplexity of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in the face
of expanded reproduction and the cyclical crisis. Meanwhile, the fervor
before this series of cementing events, which demonstrate that subalternity
is not a fate, is revealed in the other extreme, the self-reliance of the working
class (tropical result of the industrial reserve army) with the ideation that We
call it class consciousness. The modern State and social science are the
acquisitions of these ambushes or difficulties of the central classes. The
organic composition of the capital or the relative overpopulation are,
therefore, non-transferable crossroads in the face of which society (in its two
phases, as a society that forms it and as a society that receives it) must
perform an act of organic adaptation. The crucial point for the externalization
of this essential tropism impelled by the economic base movement itself is
its superstructural influence. Here, in “paradise”, democracy is the practical
expression of reproduction on a large scale.
The chronic aspect of the reproductive movement, in effect, has its
enemy in the superstructural construction. It is there, in the superstructure,
where the agony of the capitalist social syllogism manifests itself. This is
where democracy acts as a collective method. In democracy, this is where
the proposition or hypothesis of the mass finds its consecutive and immediate
confirmation. The reiterable point is therefore set in its own real hypothesis.
The quantitative techniques can reveal the modifications in the mode of
production but only in the range of the prognosis, as average verisimilitudes

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or, in any case, as an ex post certainty. The politics in change or in the face of
democracy, which here has an absolutely identical meaning, immediately retains
the palpitations of the places of society. The mediators convert these contracts
into state matters. To put it another way, democracy hears the noise of the social
corpus.
It's clear where we're going in this third sense the nature of the democratic
or, at least, where we wanted to go. Here democracy is insinuated as an act of the
State. It is then the conscience of the State calculating the reverberations of civil
society. Civil society in this gnoseological phase is only the object of democracy;
but the democratic subject (it is a decision) is the ruling class or its personification
in the rational State, which is the bureaucrat. Democracy works, therefore, like a
dictator's cunning. This is the non-democratic moment of democracy. Sólo un
ciego puede no ver esta valencia del concepto.

Well, legitimacy is the mediation between the reposition of value and the
distribution of plusvalía. This is why the coincidence between the legal phase (the
enshrined norm) and the general representation phase (the legitimation) must
conclude in the formation of the State of law or in the rational form of domination.
Let us maintain, therefore, that the separation between the political State and civil
society is the equivalent, in politics, to the fetishism of merchandise. Within the
commodity, equality is the advantage or inequality, and within the autonomy of the
State-democracy is the bourgeois dictatorship.
We are not going to write here about the degrees of apartamiento and fusion that
are possible in the capitalist State, rather than its most necessary formal
appearance for the exhibition.
En otra parte7 we have seen the problem of the inermidity and the despotism
of the superstructure. It, it is true, contains in the greater part of itself a cause
salidad that is not the own of the laws of the economic base. In any case, the
superstructure is the guardian of social conservation, in terms of its ideological
instinct; in any case, its character does not belong to the necessary or legal phase
of the society, but to its contingent formation. It is in her where the chance of
history is expressed, it is to say, the combinable for the autonomy of the politician.
In other words, the regularity model of capitalism comprises the entire economic
base, but not the entire superstructure, but a single part of it.
This moment that is hurt in the contingent manner of the superstructure is what is
seen in the free man as a superstructural event (we have already seen its
productive valence). The performance of the free man on the economic basis is
the plusvalía. The action of the self in the superstructure is democracy

7 See “The apparent formations in Marx”, [en: Historia y Sociedad. Revista Latinoamericana de
Pensamiento Marxista (Mexico), no. 18, (1978): 3-27. In this volume, pp. 425-457].

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bourgeois. But there is not a man for the base and another for the superstructure.
He is the same man in two circumstances that are only distinguished by the lack
of analysis. Ahora bien, the free man is, at the same time, the movement of
valorization and his own measure, his own mensural unit.
La Libertad, of course, exists for the man. However, having expropriated
nature and human accumulation itself, capital here comes to expropriate human
freedom itself. Freedom, therefore, is transformed into a sort of confidential agent
of capital and the free man into something like a spy of himself. The logic of this
expropriation is as follows. With free men, there is no way to keep them in the
productive moment.
The concentration both of space and time, of an economic or ideological nature,
and only for personal and extra-economic exception, of coercion in capitalism,
the fight for the historical-moral module of the substance of society that is the
value (the social substance by antonomasia) it will launch early or late to practice
the same ideal condition of the productive act in the plan of politics, will constitute
it in a democratic subject in the scene of the construction of the ideology. Such is
the role raised by the classical productive worker in the course of the historical-
ideological course. He is a man who will be eternally free until freedom torments
him like a nightmare. It's too late to decide if you want to be it or not.

We are in politics ex intrinsic principle. It says that politics will always exist,
with legality (in the representative democratic sense) or without it.
Politics within it, without embargo, is already democracy freely revealed, it is
decir, society is already decoded, not cryptic. In other words, the visibility of the
environment, which is the first interest of bourgeois domination, is conditioned
to the separation of society and the State, an aspect that we are now mentioning
in another connotation. The reading or reconnaissance, the detection, the recount
and the confutación of the persevering, never-completed recomposition of civil
society under capitalism, are jobs that are in charge of the state caucus, which
only in this way is suited to its nature or cause end of class. Therefore, although
it is not entirely false to say that in the reproduction of capitalism, the State has a
condition without embargo in the capitalist (Altvater) (because it is true that the
capitalist State has precapitalist reminiscences or memories such as repression
or violence as physical coercion, at least in its crisis, in its accumulation and its
delay), however, it cannot be derived from it the non-capitalist character of the
capitalist State: its essential function is the condensation of the anxiety of the
base in state terms usable for reproduction.

Let's go back without embargo, for a moment, to the value of democracy for
the “separate” State. From where civil society moves, the political state is ratified.
The superstructure in general, we are skilled in its ideal aspects such as

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The right (telic activity) and the ideology, the supports (the army, the employees,
etc.) are for the conservation, the traditionality and the ratification of things and not
for their deployment, less for their investment. Without the ideology of the State (the
ideology as issued) and without the conscience of the State (sovereignty) there is
no separation. Subjective arguments of this type are una previedad. Without
separation, the reading of the material delivered by civil society is conjecturable.
Finally, el Estado es ciego. Instead of knowing and becoming internalized in society,
becoming a part of it as in love, it leans towards the secular pomp of its appearance,
which is legitimate violence. Against this struggle, with a kind of moral impatience or
formalism, bureaucracy, is to decide, the carnalization of detachment from the State
or collective capitalist. It produces the contradiction that, without belonging to it, it
is, however, the historical conscience of the ruling class. This fallacy of imbuing the
essence of a class without being a member of it was only possible from the
separation between the State and society.

This is where the argument of mediation appears, which consists of the ability
to convert the reactions or messages to a very fragile menu that are produced on
the face of society into a political language assimilable to the classical state screen .
Here we avoid the situation already mentioned in which a State, with a strict
foundation and a minimum surplus, is so incomplete as a state formulation even
though its role does not consist in being the structural interlocutor of society, rather
that it is exteriorized as a particular element within it, it is decir, as part of the parties .
the state hubris , which is abundant. The State cannot believe in
anything above itself because that is the irresistibility that is its character; but
that's not worth it with the same intensity for the mediator. The mediator does not
need to have such a perfect faith in the state dogma and must even contradict it,
even though it is clear that it is only enough to perfect it in its domination. He is,
then, the agent of the community and something like a political leader of the
movement; the mediator is a mix between the employee and the social jefe. If civil
society nationalizes the mediators, it is that they have arrived at the time of the
general national crisis because they now no longer believe in the State and have
begun to believe in themselves or in the revolutionary myth. It is correct to say,
therefore, that every leader is a mediator until he does not become a mutineer.

For the rest, it is only a matter of the fact that the superstructure tends not to
understand the permanent suddenness of the social magma. In your other extreme, is

8 [See note 4].

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I am also sure that the State does not encompass more than the scope in which
it existed at the constitutive moment or if it is exceptional that the political State
has the same extension as its spatial scope. In the end, this depends (the
effective validity) on the degree to which one has freed oneself from the ancestral
custom that consists in el acatamiento por el miedo alo no resistible, even
without belonging. “Obedéceme aunque no creas en lo mismo que yo”: such is
the typical precapitalist apothegm. Democracy, therefore, becomes a permanent
element for the dictatorship of the class or reason of State, but this last one is
also the limit of democracy. What is unappealable is that, when the dictatorship
or the sovereignty or the reason of State cannot prevent the discovery or
appearance from also being dictatorial, then we are facing a radical mengua del
Optimo. This is the case of backward capitalist states.

IV. Democracy as self-determination of the masses

Democracy understood as the self-determination of the masses comes to be the

desideratum of this discourse. The history of the masses is always a story that
is made against the state of fate that we are talking about here of structures of
rebellion and not of forms of belonging. Every State ultimately denies the mass,
even though it expresses or wants to express it, because it wants to insist on its
being that it is the State, it is declaring, the substantial form of social matter.
Consequently, we have here a meaning of the democratic question that is placed
on the opposite side of democracy in its gnoseological function. It can be said
that democracy is being replaced here for the ruling class by democracy for itself.

To start with the principle, it is necessary to respond to the demand on the

mass criterion. We do not understand by this, by masa, a synonym of majority
that could lead us immediately to the representative democratic concept. The
appellative de masa is actually addressed to the quality of the mass (the way in
which Marx described the “strength of the mass” as productive strength) and not
to a mere aggregation.
By mass it will tend to be a polarization suerte. The mass is civil society in
action or sea, a pathetic, sentimental and epic state of unity. But what part of
society? A Marxist will immediately say that he has his reasons for choosing the
self-determination of the proletariat in the sine of the self-determination of the
mass. This is true, however, for certain societies, already proletarianized, and
for certain proletariats. What matters is that, even a not too large number of
men, with a sense of concentration and some degree of practical fear, can
express tendencies that are hidden in the “sueño” of society. I'm sure that's why,

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for many concepts, la masa represents a la masa. Una parte de ella quiere (“to
want”, is equivalent to wanting in a state way, the will to power) in the name of
another or, in some way, manifests what the other holds and does not know aún.
Want to decide with that the act of self-determination is a revolutionary act and
not a legal act, by no means something preceded by a scrutiny, rather by what
is called “majority of state effect”, which can come from the number of but either
of its more neuralgic placement or of the acute effectiveness of the determination
that it produces. What matters is that your act contains the general inclination.
It is deduced from it that it is a concept located above all in the tactic phase.
Aun would say, the mass is the tactic what the class is the strategy. On the
other hand, whatever the extent of the dough, what matters is the reception of
your call of dough. Even if your pronouncement is composed of conscious acts,
the truth of self-determination must always be given by an important degree of
spontaneity and mass creativity. This is the true pathos of history and without a
doubt it is not something that is exclusively linked to capitalism. The self-
determination of the mass, to put it more succinctly, is the only one that can
seal the definition of the fluidity moment of the superstructure. If democracy as
knowledge is a method of the bourgeoisie, here we have a method of civil
society.

We wish to propose some variables in order to exemplify this position.

ability. Let us distinguish, for example, the following conspicuous moments:

1. Moment of the State-society fusion due to the delay of the optimum or if here
the sovereign is at the same time the man of meat and the husband of the
ruling class. It dominates once in civil society and the second, it is the same
in person, in the State.
2. Classical relative separation of capitalism that obeys the logic of valorization.
The State serves the strategic purposes of the class as a whole, but none
in its particularity.
3. False detachment between State and society as it occurs in the apparent
State where in reality it is called State, by nominalism, a una fraction; in
reality, the state germen is still lost in civil society.

4. Second merger or dissolution of the state factum in civil society.

If we consider these equations, which could be bad, the combination

between the concepts of democracy presents us with some aporias. Let's look
at some.
For example, a balance between an advanced civil state and a weak
instinct for self-determination in society. This is the typical decalage of one

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illustrated political class. Here the political State is willing to take the
representative democratic principle to the last. You can, however, find
yourself with two obstacles. For example: if social democratization does not
exist. Second, if it exists, however, it is not uniform. Here the knowledge
function cannot be exercised because the number of votes does not express
its quality. We then have an antithetical relationship between moments that
are nevertheless both democratic. If you notice with clarity until what point a
phase of democracy grants or negates the conditions of the other. In this
example, the egalitarian idea is not organic in the masses because one must
distinguish between freedom as a right, freedom as an assumed fact and
freedom as a practice. In other words, the right must become a prejudice and
the prejudice becomes an act and if you want, the act becomes a habit.
The poverty of the democratic habit makes even the very existence of
representative democracy useless. Rousseau referred to that when he wrote
that “the English people are free only at the time of depositing the vote”.
It is clear that the representative use itself is a convenient school for the
institution of the way of being of the free man. The true school of the free
man, however, is the act of mass and the principle of self-determination
defines the way in which all other concepts of democracy take place.
With this perhaps we could reach a certain conclusion of this tour. It derives
from it that representative democracy is not only desirable, but that it is the
necessary form of all rational integration of power. It is, in addition, the natural
habitat of democratic self-determination, even though the precautions are
well-known in the sense that representative democracy is not, in all cases,
the only path to self-determination in its existence, which can make a
difference to the problem of social democratization. We have also seen under
what conditions democracy can operate as a state technique or as a
gnoseological core of society. As much as it is an elan proper to all times, the
self-determination of the mass, without embargo, is the principle of the history
of the world. We therefore consider it to be the center of democratic questioning.
It is a job of the man to argue about the propositions of the world. La
autodeterminación en cambio es ya la aplicación de ese ademán por la masa.
It is in that sense that what the man has of human is what he has of
democracy, because everything that exists is in dispute.
This aspect of the nobility of the mass has, however, its own side of
misfortune. Maybe that's why Marx wrote some time that history advances on
his bad side. A pueblo, for deciding a case, always refers to the moment of
its constitution, and to decide, of its original moment, which must not be
confused with the constitutive moment of the State. In this sense, every
founding act has a mass requirement . Notwithstanding it: why are there
people who found their myth in the order and people who found it in

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but and your self-determination? Is it not true that there is a certain temperament
of the peoples here?
The principle of self-determination of the mass is speaking about the aspect
of the greatness of the species. There is no need to repeat it. The man does not
accept the proposition from the outside or his inertia when he has intervened in it.
But the act of self-determination as a constitutive moment takes at least two tasks
in its sine. There is, in effect, a foundation of power, which is irresistibility converted
into incorporated dread ; there is, on the other hand, the foundation of freedom,
it is to say, the implantation of self-determination as an everyday habit. This is
where the mass learns the critical aspect of its own greatness.

It can occur, to refer to something more concrete, if we speak of the national-

popular, that it is popular not yet the national or the sea, that the nationalization
has not been fulfilled. Here, the importance of social democratization comes to
the fore. However, on the other hand, nationalization always takes place under a
sign. It is very different a nationalization that occurs under the so-called popular
democratic, as in France, or one that occurs under the call of the ruling class in
the previous, as in Germany. Germany seems the flagrant example of a reactionary
nationalization. Germany itself demonstrates to us that there can be great
reactionary acts by the masses.
This does not mean but that the self-determination of the mass is what gives
meaning to the rest of the meanings of democracy. However, it does not bring a
progressive trend by itself. In reality, civil society competes at the decisive moment
with all that it is. It is in the struggle between the aspects of what it leads to where
it is defined what is what it will be. Civil society, therefore, is the bearer of both
democratic and non-democratic traditions, and sometimes it is the bearer of non-
democratic traditions, including an act of self-determination, that is to say, in a
democratic instant. In its “load” is the rationale of its habit and its irrationalities, its
judgment and its prejudice.
How could, for example, a pueblo like the Peruvian or the Bolivian reach their self-
determination without considering that servidumbre is in the middle of the popular
tradition? Antisemitism, on the other hand, was an authentic German popular
tradition. In the crisis of the 1930s, the German people determined themselves by
choosing their reactionary side. Es, pues, the political struggle, because politics is
the place where the theoretical hypotheses and the factuality of the determination
of the mass merge, what defines the form of exploitation of the constitutive moment.

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