Abstract
Chapter 5, The Ethical Dimension of Politics, articulates the subsumption of the ethical principles into norms of critical political rationality. When constituted power of the state and other institutions become corrupt and are no longer obedient to constituents, constituents face the challenge of recuperating their sovereignty and restoring democratic governance. The chapter examines in detail Dussel’s account of how a politics of liberation justifies the struggle to transform corrupt forms of governance into ones that answer obediently to democratic expressions of constituent power.
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Notes
- 1.
For Dussel, national liberation without popular liberation likely gives way to new neocolonial forms of exploitation and therefore yet another stage of struggle for liberation: “The oppressed classes, workers, peasants, marginalized, are the people of our nations. Latin American liberation is impossible if it does not attain national liberation, and all national liberation is definitively in play if it is popular liberation, that is to say, [liberation] of the workers, peasants, and marginalized. If these last do not come to exercise power, the political Totality of the States of the ‘center’ will recolonize our nations and there will be no liberation. The poor, the Other, the people (pueblo) is the only [actor] who has sufficient reality, exteriority and life to bring to fruition the construction of a new order” (1979, 78).
- 2.
- 3.
For Spinoza, the individual human life is a finite expression or mode of substance. The human mind is the idea or consciousness of this effort to persevere in existence, and this effort seeks to increase its power for existence.
- 4.
“Human life has as an intrinsic constitutive rationality (because it is ‘human’), and the intersubjective and truthful exercise of rationality is an exigency of life itself: it is the ‘cunning’ of life. Human life is never the ‘other’ of reason; rather it is the absolute intrinsic material condition of rationality” (Dussel 1998/2013, 434, Thesis 3).
- 5.
For the ethics of liberation, when is coercion by constituted power legitimate? Dussel argues “legitimate coercion is ethical, insofar as it is exerted fulfilling the demands of the material, discursive, formal principles of ethical feasibility: to guarantee the life of all those affected, who symmetrically participate in the decisions of ethically feasible mediations” (1998/2013, 400 [375]; see also 1979, 113–120).
- 6.
Redundant labor by definition cannot be instrumentalized and would therefore have no value for the Same.
- 7.
This can take the form of a constituent assembly, which ideally returns political power to potentia. We have seen such refounding of nations with new constitutions in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008), and Bolivia (2009). These new constitutions were only the scaffolding of new beginnings; transformation requires sustained use of participatory democratic procedures and continued obedience of constituted power to constituent power.
- 8.
An example of such deference of public power to popular power, in theory, is expressed in the Laws of Popular Power promulgated in Venezuela. For a detailed discussion, see Ulises Daal (2013).
- 9.
See Raúl Zibechi’s (2012) insightful discussion of the potential political co-opting of social movements by left leaning political parties (152–158).
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Mills, F.B. (2018). The Ethical Dimension of Politics. In: Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94550-7_5
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