On Critical Discourse1

Bolívar Echeverría

The ideas that human beings made about themselves, about their world and history do not really exist,
if not in the midst of the controversy, in the struggle with each other; a fight, besides, which each one
gives, not only to overcome the other, but to get itself to state on what it is that consist its own truth.

It is a controversy that unfolds on the stage of what we know as "public opinion", ie, in that sphere of
social life where matters concerning the community are discussed and where possible policy measures
between which it will decide the state power of society are formulated.The predominance of one way or
another at stake as options to guide present social life and its future depends largely on the effect of
persuasion higher or lower that have on the citizens the words or ideas through which those political
and historical options are expressed.

However, the best opinions, the best grounded ideas and most coherent arguments, are not precisely
the ones which are more persuasive. Do not prevail over the other ideas the ideas that are proven
capable of winning on the rational struggle, but rather those that are backed from outside the field of
public opinion by extra or rational discourse forces, especially those economic and social realities that
surround it and that gravitate determinedly around it.

Modern society works until now thanks to a discursive rationality that characterize at the same time the
commercial business as well as the technical processes of production. It is a society that would like to
see move this primacy of the rational to the sphere of the social and political matters, and because of
that, takes in account that, also inside this sphere, the power of the words or the rational ideas are both
superior to the "power of thing", the power of impulsive actions, thoughtless, in brute, or induced by
immediate or programmatic interests. It is about, nevertheless, as history demonstrates and we prove in
our lives-, a completely illusory assumption. Inside capitalist modernity, as in any long history or market
societies, the "force of the things", of the pragmatical automatism that moves things, it is still inexorably
imposed over life and the historical decisions, above the rational will of the human being.

Named in contemporary terms, this power of things is nothing else than the power of capital, of money
in process of being accumulated or in process of self-valorization. The power of capital is a reality in
principle external to the scenario of the rational public opinion, exterior to the sphere of discourse,
away from the field in which ideas measure amongst themselves its corresponding truths; nevertheless,
it is a reality that penetrates in this scenario, it is introduced in itself and is altered decisively. A non
discursive reality that, in order to be present in the scenario of the public opinion, "translates" itself in
discursive terms, adopting the form of certain ideas that result specially functional for its own will to
impose.

The scenario or the sphere of the public opinion is of utmost importance for capital, without being
available because of that to say it is indispensable for it to impose its "will"- as it was demonstrated in
the first half of the XX century through the effect of the totalitarian states-. Serving itself from the public
opinion- deforming it, still formally respecting the freedom of expression that is so vital, indispensable-.
Capital may abandon all the incoherent and irrational stuttering to which it is condemned, and that
would be its proper and spontaneous expression of its blind impulses of accumulation for accumulation

1
Reception discourse of Premio Libertador Simón Bolívar al Pensamiento Crítico, Caracas, Venezuela, july, 24,
2007. We omit in this translation the first few paragraphs in which Echeverría refer to the context of his award.
itself. Giving a human articulation to this unarticulated impulses, capital is in conditions to convert their
own voraciousness in an apparently articulated and rational project.

This apparently discursive rational with whom it presents the irrational will of capital is in reality nothing
else than the reflection that the rationality of the public opinion have in it, reflection that capital knows
how to take an advantage from.

It is, moreover, about an appearance of discourse which authorship is dispute by the different fractions
of the party of the exploitative classes. All of this fractions maintain a close competition with each
others in order to become the authorized spokesperson of capital`s will, in order to see which one it
may delimit and compose in its better way that appearance of discourse that needs to provide itself
with.

The sphere of the public opinion is important for capital because, serving from it, it may distort the
workers resistance against the capitalist mode of production, convincing themselves that everything
that in reality comes from a dictatorship of things, of its own dictatorship, is instead the result of their
own will, that would have been condensed in a discursive polemic, rational, human. Thanks to the
existence of that sphere and to the possibility for its deformation, masses do not need to be obliged or
to be captivated in order to support the dominant order: they may act convinced that what they do as
an imposition, they really do motivated by their own will.

It is the irrational force of the capitalist things, transvestited as a rational discourse, and no the force of
the human reason, the one that decides the result of the war of ideas in the sphere of the modern
public opinion, with all and its own pretension to be a rational mechanism.

Ideas that confront amongst themselves inside the public opinion, tend to group or take party obeying
to its affinities, and they do it mostly referring to two opposing citizens: there, the party of those
interested in the permanence of the established. Here the party of those who seek to substitute that
form of life for another, probably better.

If we consider what is underlying in this bipartition of citizenship in our modern times, we may observe
that, ultimately, that which is defended by the citizens on the side for the continuity is the capitalist
mode of economical life. They defend a way of life that from its own nature devotes itself to
automatism and the despotism in social life, since disregards the human political will facing the most
essential matters of the community and accepts the imposition of anonymous decisions, “superhuman”,
or extra-political in substitution of that human will. On the other extreme, the proposed goal by the
citizens of the anti-continuity or revolutionary position is the radical change of that way of life for other
that is an alternative; they are citizens that affirm that it is possible to live a human life that is free and
democratic - called socialist or communist-, that is to say, an emancipated life of that destiny that
humankind would have condemned forever to the political impotence and to social disgrace.

However, when we talk about the critical discourse we may refer to a discourse that is proper to this
revolutionary citizenship tendency; discourse that, inside capitalist modernity, it is definitive the
discourse of the denigrated and exploited humans through what Marx called the “waged slavery”. It is
this discourse of the undermined and exploited that resist and rebel against the dictatorship of capital
which can not exist but as a discourse of a critical nature. The necessity of this characterization is based
upon the real fact that it is about a discourse that can not be said or expose in a direct and natural way
in the scenario of the public opinion, rather, doing it and while doing it, it is obliged to go through the
dense layer of domination that is thrown over it by the discourse of the exploitative class. Their
affirmations may only be expressed if this expression proper to them takes place under a mode of an
incessant and systematic refutation of the discourse that prevails thanks to its spontaneous service to
capital.

We must add that to put into practice this critical nature of the exploited and humiliated discourse
presents a particularity: to be effective it needs to achieve or realize in a double fashion, in two levels of
activity or employing two different strategies. Its realization must be double in reason that it is also
double the way in which Power represented by the dominant class intrudes into the sphere of the public
opinion, interfering in the polemic between ideas.

It is two modes, indeed, and through two levels of intervention -which difference is very important to
recognize and distinguish- that power of the capitalist society gravitates over the world of discourse and
deforms it in favor of the ideological domination of the citizens committed with capital.

It is done, firstly, in the terrain of the production and consumption of words that are said and the images
that are painted. In the level of the effective speech, the use of the language; in the level of the use that
are given to the technical instruments in disposition of society for the communication amongst its
members. It is about the most evident and shameless intervention of this power in the life of the ideas,
whether they are ideas in words or ideas in images. It is the oligarchic kidnap of the shrine of public
opinion; a violent and discriminatory occupation of the place and moment that the citizens have to
express, listen and discuss the expression of all. It is the private appropriation and the monopolistic
control - this one truly totalitarian- of the public means of communication.

It is the systematic omnipresent mini-bombing, the same supraliminal than subliminal, sifting into the
minds of the reading public, the radio auditorium, the tv spectator and the internet user, overwhelming
them with its eulogistic ideological messages filled with virtues of “whiteness” and the benefits of the
capitalist way of life. A openly monopoly of the capitalist oligarchy over society's mass media, not only
accepted but fanatically defended by a clientele base created ex professo, promoted and demagogic
cultivated by its “mayor concessionaires” . Clientele or “family” of the consumerism lineage that is lead
to self-identificate, by means of a “language” and a particular gestuality, around an ensemble of
fashions and preferences, which reproduce cultivating love and empathy for a painterly constellation of
“myths”, “stars” and “icons”, being it from the spectacle of enjoyment, sports-spectacles, soap operas,
politics and journalism.

It is evident, that the critical discourse requires an exhibition strategy that takes into account and
confronts in and adequate way this first mode of domination of the ideas of the exploited class of our
times. It may choose to insert in the productions of the mass media in order to invert from the insides
and sporadically, like a discursive guerilla, the meanings of the mass media imposed in its products, that
make them vehicles of the self- apology of capitalist power. But it may also likewise take advantage of
the marginal zones of those mass media, undervalued by the monopoly or out of its reach, for, from
within, from the periphery, to participate with its trues in the general dynamics of the public opinion.

Nevertheless, and as strange as it may seem, this shameless mode- the monopolic kidnap of the mass
media- is not the most decisive one that takes place in the intervention and interference of capital's
power from the public opinion in favor of a discourse or the ideas of its represented social class.

Under these scenario of the formulated ideas, the pronounced discourse, of effective speech, this
intervention and interference takes place in a more profound level, that is language itself or the code
that the human speech uses to realize. It takes place on the level of the production and technical means
with whom we work, meaning those through we print forms to the objects and with whom we
formulate ideas. It takes place through a subtle message in the making or an unexpressed “proto-
message”, that is implicit, “diluted” and incorporated to the functioning of the same means of
production and the means of discourse. It is a diffuse “proto-message” that makes a permanent apology
of the established order, that sings non-stop high praises to capital and that impregnates or infects the
proto-capitalist sense to all the objects and to all the words that come out through those means of
production and discourse. It is like if there was someone or something that enters into action along with
the movement of our own hands, distorting the form of what we do; someone or something talking with
our own breath, twisting the meaning of what we say. Like it is understandable, what makes specially
difficult the exercise or the practice of the critical discourse is precisely this second mode, the most
radical, of the intervention of capital disturbing the sphere of public opinion. Indeed, the critical
discourse must in this case to confront not only an enemy susceptible of localizing and identifying; not
only it must escape from the mechanisms of these intervention and revert the effects that it has in the
persuasion of the masses. What we are dealing with now is to face discursively an enemy that does not
require to crystallize in any distinguishable figure of speech, that does not need to shown in any
recognizable corpus of pro-capitalist ideologies and therefore attackable. Critical discourse has to face
an elusive enemy, that is found filtrated on the very weapons with which it intended to attack: in the
language with which it formulates its ideas, in the conceptual repertoire that is at its disposal, in the
categorial apparatus from which serves for its own arguments.

In my opinion, the best strategy the critical discourse can take to confront this radical mode of capitalist
ideological dominance is still that which was tested with Karl Marx in his critique of political economy, in
that exposition of the science of political economy that is simultaneously its deconstruction. This is way
of criticizing that prefigure the model of behavior of the modern revolutionary when, as happened in
the early years of the October Revolution, they can freely realize the pursuing goal, that is, the
substitution of the capitalist mode of production and living for a different mode which allows the
subject of social life to reverse its alienation and regain their autarchy.

if we observe the behavior of modern revolutionaries seizing the means of production, such as the
soviets of that Revolution, we can recognize that is does not characterized only by employing those
means differently, directing them to achieve human wellness and not the profit of the capitalists.
Beyond that, what it does is to re-functionalize those means of production in order to reverse the pro
capitalist sense they bring embedded in the very structure of its instrumental composition; what it does
is to free technique from the imposition of that particular design that keeps bound to be a technique for
exploitation of workers.

The critical discourse proposed by Marx behaves similarly: re-condition the code or the language
marked by capitalist civilization, inverts the sense of the "good sense" or spontaneous thinking in
capitalist modernity; functionalize that use of language, the choice of concepts, that categorial
apparatus of science, that already when describing the social and historical world introduce
surreptitiously and pro-capitalist interpretation.

When exercised as such re-functionalization of the means of discursive production, critical discourse
liberatingly counteracts the effects of the intervention of capital in the field of public opinion,
emancipate the essence of it, which is purely discursive controversy, in the struggle between ideas. His
practice connects thus closely with the social and political movement that tends to liberate the
productive process and its technique from the subordination to capital accumulation, in which is located
within establish modernity.

The ultimate target of the critique of the critical discourse is always the capitalist mode of production
and life; while critiquing it, it treats it like what it is, the culminating figure of a long durée history: the
history of a civilization based upon the necessity that one part of the social body sacrifices itself for the
benefit of another part. It has to do, in that sense, with a radical discourse: it is the expression of a
project of historical transformation perceiving that what is presently in the order of the day, in that
moment of inflexion that match with the turn of the century, is a reality where issues of a broader
range, much more decisive that the one that the politics of capitalist modernity may cover, reduce by it
into mere political economy: matters that have to do with the same basics of civilized life, with the basic
features of the relationship of the human with the natural and of the human with itself.

Critical discourse that I have tried to describe in this text not only has not losing the actuality that once
have, but in our days has become even more present than ever. Indeed, the value of money-capital in its
process of accumulation or self-valorization accomplishes in capitalist modernity the same function that
the christian God had in pre modern eras: it is the almighty superhuman force that unquestionable and
inscrutable directs -even though it heading to catastrophe- the destiny of humankind. The dogma of
faith of modern religion- practiced today by all the obeying citizens in the nations that compete amongst
themselves to be ranked inside “the first world” or to arrive there- affirms that it can not exist a
modernity or a civilization without capitalism; that there is no possibility of producing goods, of
reproducing social wealth, if it is not in the mode or the capitalist mode. Against the restored and
fundamentalist validity of this “secular religion”, in this faith in capital, the critical discourse has without
doubt an immense task to accomplish.

Intimately connected with the movement of social and political liberation ongoing, the critical discourse
may nevertheless, to the eyes of it, seem rather exaggerated in its skepticism, maniac in its discontent,
and even in occasions may result as inopportune, hateful “party pooper”. This is due we are dealing with
a discourse that persists exercising as such even in the middle of processes that itself accepts as
realizations of emancipatory projects. The critical discourse cannot dismiss the subtile recurrences of the
old, ie the capitalist, even inside the new or anti-capitalist. It cannot be something else than relentless
with the weakness that overcome to the new and that tempt to stop and to contemporize the old, giving
it a chance to reproduce. It is because critical discourse, that is nothing else than the expression of the
will of change of the exploited and humiliated, it cannot lose sight of the degree of radicality that
humiliation and exploitation have reached in this crepuscular moment of modern capitalist history; fact
that implies that the goal of social justice that is persecuted by the current emancipatory movements
may only be achieved if the social revolution radicalizes itself too. It must understand itself as a
transformation of civilizational approaches: only if revolutionaries are convinced that it is not enough to
seek for the generalization of this same form of wealth that has been explored by daily life in capitalist
modernity, rather that it is necessary to move forward to the generalization of an inedit form of wealth,
that is to be invented and that must be invented over the march itself in the emancipatory process.